The Confabulator Cafe

Author: rlnaquin

  • Character vs. Plot: The Chicken or the Egg?

    The simple answer to whether plot or character is more important is that it depends on what genre you’re talking about. If you write literary fiction, character is king. The plot is secondary.

    But I don’t write literary fiction. In genre fiction, specifically urban fantasy for me, both are of equal importance. A great plot with lousy characters is just as bad as great characters walking around with nothing to do.

    Characters drive the story. And the story herds the characters into becoming richer and more fully formed.

    So, the question becomes, which comes first?

    Usually, a “what if” strikes me first. A premise hits out of nowhere, asking a question or giving me a weird scenario. Looking at it that way, you might say plot comes first.

    You’d be mistaken.

    For Monster in My Closet, it began as a vision of a closet monster sitting at someone’s kitchen table, reading the newspaper. From there, I knew that monsters came to the kitchen owner’s house for help. Hijinks and danger would ensue.

    That’s not a plot. That’s a premise. The plot came later. Much later.

    The most important thing for me from that point on was to find out who these things would happen to. I didn’t care about the what until the characters were in place. I could see the monster at the table. Who was standing there in shock, looking at him with me?

    I knew all about Zoey and her back story long before I’d mapped out what was going to happen to her. Her personality and her reactions informed the plot. If I don’t know who my main characters are before I write the actual story, it’s going to veer off in the wrong direction and dead end.

    I know this because it happened last year.

    I’m working on a second series about a djinn. Kam is completely different from Zoey, but I started writing her story before I’d really nailed down who Kam is. The first 3000 words or so went really well. The next 20,000 words went so off course, I have to start from scratch. That first scene can stay, but the rest is complete nonsense. She was too nice. She was too helpful.

    She was too Zoey.

    So, which is more important, plot or character? I guess I’ll have to change my original answer and say character. In genre fiction, if the character isn’t good, the plot’s going to suck. But if the character shines, she’ll take the plot right where it needs to go.

  • Who Moved My Book?

    It bothers me that the year is now 2012 and book-banning is still a topic of conversation. Shouldn’t we, as a society, have moved past this by now? We have not. And as long as we have individual thinkers, censorship will exist. There will never be a time when everyone agrees on everything.

    For most people the term “book banning” causes a knee-jerk reaction of outrage. And it should. But maybe the term is over-used. “Censorship” is probably more accurate. To my knowledge, there’s no big government agency out there insisting that all copies of an “offensive” book be destroyed and that no one is allowed to read it. Most of the reports of book banning are in regards to schools across the country. Parents and/or school boards find something inappropriate for the kids under their protection, and they insist on having it removed from the curriculum and/or the school library. (more…)

  • Show and Tell on a Dark and Stormy Night

    There’s a reason we hear “show, don’t tell” all the way back to elementary school. It’s sound advice. It’s the bedrock of a good story. It’s not just a good idea—it’s the law.

    Despite being repeated forever, the advice isn’t entirely clear, especially to early writers. In fact, the advice is very “telly” and not at all “showy.”

    Let’s see if I can clarify the difference between the two.

     

    Telling:

    It was a dark and stormy night. Mortimer drove his yellow and green Ford pickup truck up the winding road toward the haunted castle. He was dressed in jeans and a red striped shirt with three buttons.

    He saw lightning flash in a jagged spike that hit the topmost turret built of ghostly gray stones. The road was muddy and filled with potholes, making it difficult to drive. A second flash of lightning struck the road in front of him, revealing the pale form of a woman dressed in a white gown with billowing sleeves and a bodice laced up the front. Her golden hair was dry and didn’t flutter in the wind.

    She lifted her arm and pointed at Mortimer. The woman’s face contorted and aged, and she gave a high pitched wail that terrified Mortimer.

    He lost control of the truck and ran off the road into the darkness below.

     

    Showing:

    Mortimer squinted through the windshield, trying to make out the dark road through the rain and sleet speckling the glass. The cracked steering wheel bit at his fingers, but he didn’t dare ease his grip. Twice he’d lost traction in the mud, and the truck had nearly gone over the side of the mountain.

    Lightning hit the turret of the castle up ahead, and Mortimer winced. He dared to take one hand off the wheel long enough to wipe a trickle of sweat from his temple. The fisherman in the village had told him it was haunted, but that was ridiculous. Wasn’t it? He wiped away another bead of sweat and doubled his grip on the wheel.

    A second bolt of lightning struck, and the road before him lit up like a flare. Mortimer swallowed a yelp of panic. A woman stood out in the cold and wet. Her hair and white dress were still and dry in the storm. Mortimer rubbed his eyes with a white-knuckled fist. It had to be an illusion.

    As he crept the truck closer, Mortimer’s headlights illuminated the woman. His hair rose from his arms and scalp. The woman lifted her arm and pointed, and her face morphed into a haggish, ugly scowl. She opened her mouth and the scream she let out shot cold fear through his spine.

    Mortimer swerved to avoid coming close to her. The truck’s bald tires slid across the mud and hit a pothole. In panic, Mortimer spun the wheel into the slide, but it did no good. The vehicle jounced against the embankment, slamming Mortimer’s head into the driver’s window, and the truck went over the side into the ravine.

    As he fell, the woman’s wail followed him, drowning out the screams from his own throat.

    So, what’s the difference? One is certainly longer, though that happened by accident. The change has more to do with focusing on the main character. He doesn’t care about the color of his truck. He’s not thinking about that. He doesn’t have reason to think about what he’s wearing, either. And the billowing sleeves and laced bodice of the woman in white aren’t likely to cross his mind unless he happens to be a clothes designer.

    The details are confined to what he sees and what he’s experiencing. It’s not enough to tell us that Mortimer is afraid. Show us the sweat trickling from his hairline. Don’t tell us the road is slick. Show us Mortimer white-knuckling the steering wheel while he fights to keep control of the vehicle.

    There will always be some telling in everything. But where you can, show it.

    Is it clearer, or did I muddy it up even worse?

  • You Influence Me, You Really Influence Me

    Everything I see, everything I do, eat, touch, and hear influences my writing in some way.

    Television gives me an idea of what works and what doesn’t in character reactions and motivations. Sometimes If I can figure out within the first five minutes of a show who the murderer is, maybe something went wrong in the telling. Sometimes it’s more about recognizing patterns in a particular show. The same writers, the same characters, the same circumstances—in some shows that pattern gives away the murderer to someone who’s spent several seasons analyzing each episode. It doesn’t mean it’s a mistake, necessarily. But it is something for a writer to take away to either use or avoid in her own work.

    Movies, like TV, are for learning what works and doesn’t work. In this longer form, I can learn about the effective (and ineffective) use of tension and how it rises and falls to carry the story forward. I believe you can learn as much, if not more, from a bad movie as you can a good one.

    Food has to come into play, too. In my series, I have a closet monster who’s a gourmet chef. I am not a gourmet chef. This means I have to pay attention when we go out for a really good meal. A special New Year’s Eve menu we had at a local restaurant two years ago made its way into book two. The scene required a very fancy menu, and I still had the menu from New Year’s. I ate that meal myself. It was phenomenal. So I reused it on a dinner-cruise scene.

    Music is not so much about learning for me as it is about mood.

    I don’t think there’s a quicker way to influence a person’s mood than with music. Songs tend to be short, maybe three minutes long, and yet in the space of that time I can have all my worries lifted off my shoulders or be reduced to tears. It’s a kind of magic all on its own. When I write, I only play music without lyrics, since I need my own words to go on the page. But mood is everything. When I’m writing about Zoey, I often to listen to the Final Fantasy station on iTunes radio. When I write my djinn stories, I listen to music that sounds more like it’s for belly dancing.

    Art is for inspiration more than any other medium. I can stand in front of a painting of a woman in a chair for a half hour, wondering about her life, whether she was happy, if she had any pets or children or bad habits. After a day spent at the Nelson Atkins Museum of Art, my fingers itch. My eyes are unfocused and my thoughts are far away. All those paintings and sculptures swirl around in my head and form characters and scenes in faraway places.

    For a writer, everything is influential. It’s all or nothing. If we closed ourselves off from our surroundings, we wouldn’t have anything to write about.

  • Characters Grow in Fertile Soil

    Stories are built, but characters are grown. That’s the best way I can explain it. A story, to me, is a series of events which can be shuffled around to achieve the greatest impact and the most effective rise and fall of tension.

    Characters, especially the main characters, must be nurtured and coaxed into revealing themselves a little at a time. If you met someone at a party, and the first thing they did was tell you their entire life story, their likes and dislikes, and their motivation for being at the party, you’d make a beeline for the exit. Thanks for the martini and the canapés, love what you’ve done with the place, see you at work on Monday.

    Main characters start as a picture in my head, a piece of dialogue, or part of a scene already in progress. From there, I start asking questions. Who is this person stripping naked in a bar and hurling her clothes at a round little man in glasses? Why are there flames in her eyes, and why was she dressed like a pirate before she threw her eye patch at him?

    I’m not much for filling out character sheets. Yes, I have an obsession for writing out scenes and events on note cards. Yes, I outline before I start writing. But characters have to grow organically.

    Sometimes I know far more about my characters than I will ever have the need to share. Other times, I’m flying by the seat of my pants and don’t realize until many chapters later that I have an entire cast of unrelated, hostile characters who are extremely short in stature.

    Every last one of them.

    But physical characteristics are easy. They’re scene dressing. If they don’t work, I can change them out. Short and fat becomes tall and lean with a few keystrokes. But the hostility of the character, that’s a permanent fixture. The why of the hostility, however, is what may stop me in my tracks to go for a long drive. I will mutter and wave my arms behind the wheel, questioning the motives and back story, until wham. Oh my God. That’s what happened? No wonder he’s so pissed off at her.

    In the end, the reader only needs to know what’s important. And most of that should come from observing how the character acts, speaks, and interacts with other characters.

    Build the scene with a box of Lego. Grow a character like a hothouse orchid. Nobody wants a description of the flower or how the orchid was grown. People want to hold it in their hands. Smell it.

    They want to see it for themselves and form their own opinions.

  • Self-Publishing Is Not a Shortcut

    Many roads will get you there, but they're all up hill. Both ways. In the snow. Wear a coat and boots. Also pants.

    The publishing landscape has changed. The path to publication isn’t as clear as it used to be. In the past, there were two choices: traditional or vanity.

    Traditional publishing is every bit as difficult to break into as it used to be, possibly more so. Vanity publishing isn’t called that anymore, and has taken on a legitimacy that didn’t previously exist.

    But wait—a wealth of boutique publishers has cropped up, giving a more accessible option to authors. And e-publishing, whether through a digital publisher or as a DIY offers options that didn’t exist a few years ago.

    After a brief, frustrating trip down the agent-querying path, I took matters into my own hands. I submitted my novel to a digital-first publisher. They didn’t require an agent to submit to them. Now, you have to understand, I researched the hell out of them first. Their authors were publicly happy. Their marketing department was top notch, and their editors were highly qualified. They made me an offer, and every step so far has reinforced that I made the correct decision. It doesn’t hurt that Carina Press is an imprint of Harlequin. I got a boutique publisher feel with the backing of a traditional publisher.

    But we’re talking about self-publishing, not the other options out there.

    A lot of people are making a decent living by cutting out all the middlemen and putting their work out themselves for reasonable prices. A few have made themselves rich. But many more put their work out there and make few, if any, sales.

    I’ve read some self-published books. Some were good. Some were so poorly thought out and/or so badly edited that my eyes bled and my Kindle was in mortal danger of hitting the wall across the room.

    I think we all know what went wrong with those. I’m not going to lecture on quality here today. Even traditional publishers can put out poor quality from time to time. All I’m going to say is that if you’ve written a novel and you publish it yourself, for the love of the Red Pen of God, please get somebody qualified to at least look over it before you throw it out to the world.

    For me, the issue is more than the need to garner the approval of the “gatekeepers.” I am a writer. I want to write. I am not a cover artist. I am not an editor. I am not a marketer. I don’t want to spend time making a crappy cover, formatting my novel for a gazillion different platforms, and I don’t want to spam the entire Internet to get my name out there. While I’m happy to do what I can to market my work, I want a marketing department behind me.

    Self-publishing is not a shortcut. In fact, if it’s done properly, it’s more work than going a traditional route. So, no, I can’t bring myself to condemn it outright.

    But to the people out there half-assing it as a way to feed their own egos instead of giving people good stories:

    Quit trying to cheat the system. You’re making it difficult for the people who are doing it right.

  • Start in the Middle, Fill in the Gaps Later

    It's a sunset. Everybody already knows what it looks like.

    Sometimes a scene springs from me fully formed, like Athena from Zeus’s forehead. And sometimes, every word has to be squeezed from my neurons like the last bit of toothpaste at the bottom of the tube.

    What’s the difference?

    It took me awhile to figure it out, but descriptions bore the living hell out of me. Some scenes require more narrative than others. You can’t tell a story at a constant breakneck speed. The characters need to breathe. The reader needs to breathe. The writer needs to breathe. So, sometimes the pace does require something to slow it down. Still, I find those scenes difficult to write.

    The best scenes for me, the ones that are easiest to write, start in the middle of something already in progress. This is especially true with first scenes in a novel. My first book starts with my main character hovering around a corner, clutching a toilet brush as a weapon, and about to jump out at an intruder at her kitchen table. The second in the series starts in her swimming pool. She’s covered in blood and mucous and has both arms shoved up inside the birth canal of a sea serpent. Book one of my new djinn series starts off with my main character dressed as a pirate waitress, getting ready to set a customer on fire because his hand is on her ass.

    I suppose all of those things require some description to set everything up, but when something really interesting is going on, nobody cares what every character is wearing or what the wall sconces look like. I prefer to spatter description in between other things rather than lose momentum by taking up several paragraphs as an aside.

    But this is coming from somebody who tends to under-write and fill in the gaps later, rather than write extra to be deleted later.

    In the slower scenes, I get bored. I meander. I let my characters ruminate on the color of their coffee mugs. I let them contemplate their navels, discussing the pros and cons of innies versus outies.

    So, how do I know what to describe and what to leave out? I look for the holes later and fill them in. What gets told and what gets shown? In a great scene full of action, show it all. If a description is necessary to fill in the scene, character interaction with the environment or dialogue does a better job than straight description.

    But what do I know? I have a main character who’s known for her quirky style and bizarre outfits. Number of descriptions of these outfits in book two? Zero. Completely forgot to describe them.

    Guess I know where to start editing.

  • How to Waste Twenty Years on One Story

    The Forgotten Beasts of Eld by Patricia McKillip

    When I first started writing, I mean really writing, I was in love with a book called The Forgotten Beasts of Eld by Patricia McKillip. It was high fantasy, poetic, and beautiful. I still have my original dog-eared copy, bent and torn with pages falling out.

    In youthful admiration of that story, I began to create a character, then a cast of characters, problems for them to overcome, a world for them to inhabit, and yes, even a ragged, poorly drawn map of the land.

    And I wrote. I wrote in poetic, archaic language tinged with magic and pomposity. It was self-important, overly wordy, and bogged down in descriptions of every tiny weed and pebble.

    It was catastrophically bad. But I persevered. Over the course of some fifteen or more years, that story continued to haunt me. It changed, it grew, and I scrapped it and started over countless times.

    Somewhere in my mid-twenties, something shifted. My main character started speaking differently, a little less archaic, a little more sarcastic, a lot more interesting. I realized I was on to something.

    I never finished that book past perhaps four chapters or so. But the day my character started bitching that her ass hurt from riding a horse so many days on the road, that was the day I realized I had to let Patricia McKillip go so I could find my own voice.

    That was also the day I let go of the idea that I could write epic fantasy. I believe writing that sort of story requires at least a pinch of the poet inside the writer. I am not a poet. I write mostly urban fantasy because, while I love magic and monsters and enchanted creatures, I write in a straightforward, less descriptive style. I can get away with that style placing my story on the streets of Sausalito or a nondescript winter forest. A magical world, far removed from ours, requires more finesse – finesse I don’t possess.

    I write the way I talk, mostly. My descriptions aren’t very wordy, and they tend to focus on the things I would notice, not the things that describe a room or other setting. My main character is not going to note the colors of the lone maple leaf quivering on a branch in late fall. My characters are far more likely to focus on a single nose hair growing out of the antagonist’s left nostril, all the while wondering if it’s an anomaly or if he recently trimmed up there and missed one.

    And yeah, she’ll probably miss his evil monologue while she’s meditating on this.

    Honest answer, then. Since the day Princess Amberlyn decided to inform her audience of her saddle sores and described the road grit wedged inside her laced-up bodice, I started writing in my own voice. For better or worse, I’m stuck with it.

  • To Catch a Wild Idea

    An idea is like a wild animal. At first, I hear it scratching and chittering in the attic. I can poke my head up there to see what it is, but if it’s not ready to be seen, it’ll scurry away into the shadows. The best I can do is let it nest up there and wait for it to come out of hiding.

    If I don’t poke at the wild idea, it’ll get comfortable. It might grow. Maybe I’ll leave some food out for it, coax it out into the light. If it’s a healthy idea, and I don’t force the issue, it’ll come out into the garden in its own time.

    Assuming I haven’t startled it by shouting or trying to trap it in a cage, the wild idea will step out into the sun blinking, as curious about me as I am about it. I can see what it is at last. I can estimate its weight, the sharpness of its teeth, the velvet of its fur.

    This is the tricky part. I have to figure out the approach.

    I circle, examining it from every side. I step forward, change my mind, and step back.

    Maybe I’ll come in from the left, say, going with a third person approach. I croon to the wild idea in a soft voice, let it eat from my hand, then slip a leash over its head. Sometimes this works well and it walks by my side, docile, yet still exotic.

    That doesn’t always work, though. Maybe the left was a poor choice. The wild idea is blind in that eye and startles when I appear out of nowhere. It might dash off, but more likely, I’ll grab it by the scruff of the neck and wrestle the leash over its head.

    You can’t force a wild idea into submission. It’ll get sluggish. It’ll choke on its tether. It’ll wander around in circles making pathetic wheezing noises. The only thing to do is release it, start over, and come at it from another angle until I get it right.

    From the right this time as an omniscient narrator? Maybe straight on, first person? I must go softly. The idea is skittish.

    Sometimes an idea is too wild, too prickly, or even too domesticated. No angle feels right. The idea flops over on its back, sides heaving. I try to drag it where I want it to go. It snuffles and goes silent.

    It’s not dead, but it might as well be. I can do nothing with it.

    Let it go, Rach. Just let it go.

    There’s always some new creature skittering in the attic, waiting for me to offer it table scraps. If I can find the right approach, it’ll follow me to the end of the story.

  • I’m a Leaf on the Wind

    So that's where the smell is coming from. The milk is expired.

    Here’s a secret: I have no routine. I have no fixed place and no scheduled time. I’m a decent wife. I get up with my husband in the morning, make coffee, feed the furry people, throw together lunch for Mr. Miracle to take to work. At eight, he’s out the door, and my routine for the day ends.

    If I have a deadline, I write in short, efficient spurts or long, drawn-out sessions that leave me exhausted. If I don’t have a deadline, I write for a bit, wander around thinking I should do some laundry, get distracted by the mystery of what’s smelling up the fridge, and come back to write some more, leaving the mystery unsolved.

    The writing could occur on the sofa, at the kitchen table, up in my office, or at any number of local coffee shops and restaurants.

    I do not shower, brush my teeth, or even remember to eat at the same time each day. Those things tend to happen in between other things. I may unconsciously do the pee-pee dance for an hour before I become aware of the need to run, not walk, to the bathroom.

    I am oblivious to the world, and I have no fixed pattern. When I have something to write, most everything stops except for the voices.

    Once upon a time, I couldn’t write in public. Hell, I couldn’t even write if someone was in the same house with me. Even alone in a closed room, if I thought someone might be listening to my fingers clacking (or worse, not clacking) on the keyboard, I froze. (True story.)

    This is why it took me so long to learn how to finish anything.

    I’ve grown up. Not only can I write in a crowded restaurant, thanks to the amazing people on this website, I can write with an entire room of other writers sitting right next to me. On both sides. I don’t even care that they can see my screen. This shy little flower is now a big, fat writing exhibitionist.

    Come see me write in the middle of the grocery store. I’ll totally do it. Set up a table for me in the middle of the dairy aisle. We’ll call it performance art. Tack up a sign that says “Will Write for Cheese.”

    But I digress.

    I know I make it sound like I’m all “leaf on the wind” about writing. But seriously, don’t expect me to be functional in the morning – and by morning, I mean before ten, despite having been up for hours.

    Don’t ask me to write by hand. I can’t do it. My hand cramps up. I can’t read my writing. I get fidgety in my chair. I think faster than I can write, so I get frustrated. (I type far faster.) Most of all, I hate seeing something so permanent as words on paper. How can I take it back if it’s already written down?

    I can’t write without knowing ahead of time where the story is going. I have to have a drink near me. I need my mouse because I hate the touch thingy on my laptop. If there’s music playing it can’t have any words because I’ll get distracted and start singing.

    So, no, I’m not as easy going as I’d have you believe. One thing at a time. At least I’m not shy about writing anymore. And I can finish what I start now, so there’s that. The other things, well, I’ll get around to fixing them eventually.

    For now, I’ll just be happy if I can figure out what’s going on at the back of the fridge.