The Confabulator Cafe

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  • Too Many D*cks on the Dance Floor: Doing More with Less

    In my own writing, I don’t usually work with a large cast of characters. I like simple stories that are more or less stripped down to their bare essentials. Whenever I write a scene that has more than two characters, I tend to get worried about whether or not everyone is getting equal billing.

    Has the third wheel gotten enough lines? Do they even have anything to add at this point? Will the reader wonder where they’ve gone if I don’t mention them soon? It’s a point of stress for me that I try to avoid whenever I can.

    That being said, I see absolutely no reason I can’t offer you advice on the topic. Just think about it like someone with agoraphobia giving you tips on how to enjoy the great outdoors. At the very least, it could be entertaining. And, really, what else do you have to do for the next five minutes?

    (Most likely the answer is a lot of other things, but for now let’s pretend your schedule’s wide open.) So buckle up. Here we go.

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  • The Han Solo Effect

    I’m not a very social person. I try to be nice to people, but overall, I have a very small group of friends. It’s hard to maintain a large number of friends and give them all the attention they deserve.

    The same applies to your cast of characters in a work of fiction. Keep them under control. It may seem like a lot of fun to sit and make up characters, but in the end, you risk losing the focus of your story and confusing your reader.

    There is a story about The Stand that I came across in which Stephen King realized his cast of characters had gotten out of hand. His solution was to immediately kill several off. This resulted in the closet bomb scene that you may remember, if you are a fan of the book.

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  • Crowd Control (Week Ending September 15)

    The next time you’re at a party or in a crowded restaurant, try listening to the conversations around you. Usually it all becomes an auditory blur, that can be mimicked by saying “watermelon, cantaloupe, watermelon, cantaloupe” over and over. Now imagine trying to write that dialogue.

    For writers, large casts of characters present some unique problems. Not only is there the very real possibility of over-lapping conversations, there is also what is known in theatre as “blocking” — the movement and positioning of characters on a stage. A writer must know where each character is and what he or she is doing at any particular moment.

    So we’ve asked our writers in the Cafe to share with us their tips. What’s the best way to write dialogue for a crowded room? When is it a good time to give secondary characters a chance to shine? How does one keep crowds of characters from spiraling into chaos?

    We hope you’ll find the advice from our writers helpful. Be sure to leave comments with them if you have any questions or if you’d like to share your own tips.

    Until Next Week,

    The Cafe Management

  • Which is more embarrassing to write: sex or violence?

    Over the past week, the Confabulators talked about how we get past judgment in order to write what we want. So, now that you know that we do, for the most part, write whatever we want, and we’ve talked previously about where we draw lines as writers, you’ve gotten a pretty good idea of what we’re comfortable writing, and what makes us squirm a bit. So, we’ve asked them the big question for this week’s Ephemera. Which makes us squirm more: writing sex or writing violence?

    Paul Swearingen

    Since my chosen genre is YA, I haven’t had to write about teenage sex. Yet. However, I’ve had to tackle some descriptions of violence, and since these are always from a teenager’s POV I try to remember what it might have been like for either a boy or girl to get smacked, sometimes for the first time and simply describe the action from their point of view. The only embarrassment might come from the teenager’s dealing with a slightly-altered appearance and having to explain it to a parent.

    Jason Arnett

    I can’t tell you that I’ve ever been embarrassed to write sex or violence, per se, but I’ve been reticent to include too much of one or the other because what appeals to me may not appeal to others. I’m very aware of – or at least I try to be – the fact that my tastes are probably a little different than others. A hot scene between two people who are having sex is only good if it’s well-written and I’ve read a lot of scenes that aren’t well-written. Same goes with violence. I think there needs to be a level of craft and artistry to pull detailed passages off in either case. I often wonder if I’m good enough to do it and so in that wondering I tend to write around those things. That said, lately, I’m trying my hand at both in newer works. We’ll see what people think.

    Ashley M. Poland

    I’m actually more embarrassed to admit that for me, it’s sex. For whatever reason, I can get downright verbally vulgar and generally be alright, but the second it comes time to write things down, it gets very difficult. Part of it is that it’s very easy to write bad sex, especially of the IKEA variety; there’s an art to writing a good erotic scene. Also, I get very flustered at the idea of accidentally writing my own sexual preferences/interests into a story. It may not be a logic worry, but it’s something that gets me all the same.

    Christie Holland

    While sex and violence are both incredibly difficult to write (in my experience), I think sex is more embarrassing. Mostly because I’m terrified of someone reading over my shoulder and going, OH MY GOD LOOK AT WHAT SHE’S WRITING! YOU’RE NOT SUPPOSED TO KNOW WHAT THAT IS YET! But maybe that’s my paranoia talking.

    Kevin Wohler

    I’ve encountered plenty of sex and violence in my reading, but it’s not easy for me to write either. I don’t mind gruesome or scary, but torture (as I’ve mentioned elsewhere) is nearly impossible for me to write. I don’t like pain and suffering. I haven’t written a lot of sex, but that’s because my stories are meant for a more general audience. However, I think if it were necessary to the story, I could craft some steamy sex scenes. Only under an assumed name, though.

    Ted Boone

    I think you can get away with alluding to sex without the reader getting too upset with you as an author. Violence, on the other hand, is harder to shy away from. That said, extreme cases of either sex or violence always pose a challenge for me to write, but sex is probably harder. It feels more personal.

  • With Friends Like These, Who Has Energy for Shame?

    This is probably one thing that doesn’t bother me about writing — there is at not point where I’ve been ashamed to admit what I write.

    Okay, that’s actually a little bit of a lie, but I didn’t want to talk about fanfiction for, what, the sixth week in a row? I can’t help it; the bulk of my experience in writing fanfiction. It’s just what I did do.

    I’ve never been, precisely, ashamed or worried about what I’ve written. I went through a phase in college where I deleted accounts that hosted the most pornographic of the stuff I’d written, worried that it would hurt my chances of becoming a “real” writer. (If only I could have known that 2012 would make a fad out of porn written by emotionally-immature women, I’d’ve kept it up!) And I sometimes sort of hedge around the topic of fandom, though less and less as I realize that I don’t want to fragment my experiences like that.

    But when I was 17? Oh man, I was mortified of the very thought of people finding out what I was writing during classes. I used to hedge around it with phrases like “alternative fiction” and “character-building stuff.”

    I think this might have even continued, if I hadn’t moved to Madison right out of high school to live/work with a good friend of mine. She’s a poet and very bohemian and all that stuff, so filters were things for other people. She knew I was shy and horrible around new people, and thus introduced me to her friends (and people we had just met) with, “Hi, this is Ashes — she writes gay anime porn!” And I mean ALL THE TIME. A friend of hers from her hometown (who is now published, so, hooray for him!) brought her his manuscript one afternoon, and she’s like, “Ashes wants to be a writer too — she’s writing anime porn right now!” And he’s like, “Cool, fan fiction is pretty rad.”

    Or something like that. I was 18 and literally terrified.

    But you know what? I realized quickly that no one gave a shit what I was writing. (And in the right hippie circles, it was actually interesting.)
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  • College Dictionaries and Slow Death Comix

    Jaxon’s great cover over great underground comix including Richard Corben. Had to have it. Image attribution.

    When I sit down to write I really only consider one audience: me.

    I know that’s probably audacious considering I’m in a field where everyone is concerned with What Sells and What Doesn’t Sell. I don’t really care.

    See, the thing is if I worry about or research What Sells I’m going to be behind the curve. I can’t afford to be behind the curve because I’m not anywhere near the road that curves one way or the other. I pay more attention to What Doesn’t Sell than anything else but only to know if I’m going to have trouble selling a story if I get brave enough again to send it out.

    Like Modern Day SF. I like to write stories that aren’t necessarily set in today’s world, but maybe they’re only a few years ahead of us. I grew up a couple of favorite stories that were obviously set on Earth, just a few years ahead of the time I was reading them. They still hold up as being a few years ahead of Now though they were written in the 50s and 60s. So that’s the model I sometimes go for. Trouble is, I’ve run into a couple of publishers who don’t even want to look at that stuff and those had been places I’d wanted to send stuff. I suppose I should have sent it anyway, but I’m digressing from my topic. (more…)

  • I Have Nothing To Fear From Maternal Attention

    My mom taught me to be a technical writer.

    It was my first job out of college. Her company needed to hire an hourly “contract” worker (temp, no benefits) to read 20,000 lines of Fortran code and describe them in English. My degree was in the sciences, and I had taken exactly one programming course and no writing courses whatsoever. I had no idea what I was getting into.

    The pay was just OK and it was an hour commute each way, and despite the fact that our workspace was five people crammed into a 30 by 40 foot offsite “office” I was still expected to wear pantyhose. It was the early 1990s and we were working on, I think, two Macintosh LCs [0] with these nifty 8.5 by 11 inch monitors that you could rotate on the fly to either portrait or landscape orientation. Adobe was the undisputed king of desktop publishing in those days and we produced seven books in Pagemaker, ginning up flowcharts and other line-drawings in Freehand. I thought our setup was the neatest thing in the world, going as I was from typing term papers in WordPerfect 5.1 [1] and sneaking into an unused lab in the biology building to run off free printouts on a University dot matrix printer [2] to WYSIWYG layout design and laser printing. (more…)

  • Judgment Day

    “I don’t know the key to success, but the key to failure is trying to please everybody.” ~ Bill Cosby

    The Stand and Left Behind
    Two very different books about the Apocalypse. My mom read one of them. I’ll let you guess which.

    More than a decade ago, I thought I had what it takes to be a writer. I had studied English, with an emphasis on creative writing, at a liberal arts university in the Heartland. I went on to hone my craft for several years, writing — but never publishing — several short stories. And after starting and stopping a couple of novel-length manuscripts, I decided it was time to take the plunge.

    If you’re a frequent visitor to the Confabulator Cafe or my blog, The Creativity Well, you’ve probably heard me mention my not-so-great first novel, and how I never found someone to publish it. Today, you’re going to understand why it remains unpublished.

    You see, back in 1997 — when I decided to write my magnum opus — I fancied myself to be the next Stephen King. And the novel I wanted to write was not dissimilar to King’s great doorstop-of-a-novel, The Stand. My manuscript, tentatively titled Devotion, had a huge cast of characters from all walks of life, coming together to confront a great evil in a small town in rural Kansas. (more…)

  • Write Like Your Mom’s Not Watching

    John Stewart can’t believe you just wrote that.

    Let’s be clear from the outset. My mom is the last person I fear judgment from in my work.

    But I think every writer second guesses their decisions about how far to go in sex scenes. In Monster in My Closet, I wrestled a great deal with writing the incubus plotline. Not because it was filled with sex, but because it was, essentially, rape—even if, in some cases, all he did was brush his hand against his victim’s arm.

    I expected some backlash over it. I worried I’d chosen a sensitive subject. And I did choose something difficult. But in my head, I had imagined the ickiest, scariest scenario I could, and that’s what came out. It felt right. I wrote it. And I waited for people to yell at me.

    It hasn’t come. A few reviews have said they didn’t feel the nastiness of the incubus fit with the quirky, lighter feel of the rest of the book. But many more said they liked the mix of light and dark.

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  • My Parents are Reading What??

    My mom is typically one of the first people I send my stories to for feedback. She received a draft of my novel even before I went back and did the first pass of editing. She’ll continue to receive each draft after I’ve finished editing them. But let me let you in on a little secret; most of what I write is geared toward young adults, and the things that aren’t are usually short vignettes that don’t have the page length to develop into something racy or never see the light of day. I’m not going to put anything into my young adult novel that I wouldn’t feel comfortable with my mom reading, because then it wouldn’t be appropriate for the intended audience.

    I think part of my decision to write young adult literature stems from the sheer terror of writing about adult topics and letting other people read what I’ve written. Sharing it with a few friends is one thing, but I’m not comfortable enough with some topics to share them with the whole world… especially not when that world contains my parents… and my grandparents. I freely admit to anyone who asks that my ultimate goal is to be a published author, which invariably leads them to question if I’ve written anything they might have read. I don’t think I could admit to a stranger that I wrote erotica without turning crimson, and I definitely don’t want to have that conversation with my parents. So I’ve fallen into the comfortable safety net of writing young adult literature. (more…)