Posts made in October, 2012

• How to Make a Nathan Long Cocktail

  Influences

  This week’s Night Bazaar topic is “Your Greatest Influence,” and I’m going to be lazy and recycle a previous post about my favorite writers, since the list for both topics is the exactly same. What and who I liked to read was an indelible influence on what and how I like to write. I would not be the writer I am today – for better of for worse – without having read these men. So, here we go….

  On my blog, Sabrepunk, I define what I mean by the term thusly:

  Sabrepunk is swashbuckling, street-wise sword and sorcery that draws from low fantasy, hard-boiled pulp, cloak-and-dagger thrillers, and old-fashioned romantic adventure. It is visceral and immediate. It is crude and sly. It is red and black and break-neck. The doings of sorcerers and kings may spark the action, but rarely are they the story themselves. Instead, the tales are of hard men and dangerous women whose lives are mauled by the whims of the powerful, and who must therefore draw swords and fight in order to survive. There are heroes here, but no saints.

  My influences are many, and make for a strange gumbo – Robert E. Howard, Fritz Leiber, Alexander Dumas, Raphael Sabatini, Dorothy Sayers, Raymond Chandler, George MacDonald Fraser and Michael Moorcock, as well as William Gibson, Damon Runyon, Sarah Waters and, just to be perverse, P. G. Wodehouse.

  Hmmm. That’s too many different influences to profile in an easily digestible blog post, so, out of that gumbo, who are my top four greatest influences? I’m glad you asked. Here they are in no particular order. (more…)

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• The Influence of Excellence

  Influences

  This week we’re talking about our greatest influence.  I always find that a difficult question, because I feel like my writing doesn’t have just a few influences; rather, that it comes from a gestalt of the thousands of books that I’ve read, not to mention the life experiences that I’ve had.  How do you untangle it all?  Though maybe it’s a situation where I’m too close to my writing to see what’s obvious to everyone else.

  That said, anybody who’s read my blog posts can probably guess which author I’d single out as having taught me the most craft-wise: historical fiction author Dorothy Dunnett.  I balk at saying “influenced me the most” because I don’t think I write like her.  For one thing, I don’t have anywhere near her erudition and poetry of prose, and I doubt I ever will.  My higher-level education and training focused on engineering and mathematics, not classics and languages and history, and I don’t think you can so easily replace a lifetime steeped in the arts.  (Dunnett was a painter as well as an author.)

  Yet even if I never achieve her level of excellence, I can still analyze and learn from Dunnett’s authorial techniques: how to structure a complex plot, how to convey depth in characters, how to layer meaning into every line and scene.  As I said last week, I’m all about learning by example, so this time I’ll even provide one: a scene from the fourth novel in the Lymond Chronicles, Pawn in Frankincense. (more…)

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• Rules for a Mostly Sane Writing Experience

  The Life

  Like Courtney I’ve never had a light bulb moment, except when I discovered how much I could delete without ruining the story. For example it’s nice to talk about the engraving on an ivory brush, but in the second half of the second book, people already have a sense of the world and the things in it. Or sometimes a friend can help you see that a character twisting his lips for the fortieth time doesn’t really get the point across – it’s just annoying. So as far as deleting, I’ve had these moments when I realize how pointless so many of my lines and paragraphs are. But other than that? Not really. I do however have some rules.

  1. Take a walk. Or a shower. Or a bike ride. I find that continuing to write when I’m just stuck does not work. I end up with pages that don’t go anywhere that I later have to delete (see above). If I remove myself from the situation, a better solution will come to me. (more…)

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• Dim Bulb

  The Life

  Why do I always end up writing these posts at 1:00 on the morning of the day they’re supposed to be published? Shouldn’t have doing exactly the same thing last week been a light bulb moment? Shouldn’t I have come to the staggering conclusion that I should write the thing at least a few days – even a few hours – in advance?

  Guess not.

  This week’s subject is “Light Bulb Moments: Watershed Learning Moments,” and last week not withstanding, I suppose I’ve had a few… hopefully enough for a post. (more…)

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• Inching or Leaping, You’ll Get There In The End

  Uncategorized

  This week’s topic is “Lightbulb moments: watershed learning moments.”  I know exactly how a lightbulb flash of realization feels; I have them all the time when working on algorithms at the day job, or even solving plot problems while writing.  But do other writers have lightbulb moments about the actual craft of writing?  I’m terribly curious, because I never have.

  I learned much of my craft through a long process of osmosis: by reading thousands (literally!) of SFF and other books.  I firmly believe all those years of reading a book a day gave me a huge leg up when I decided to get serious about writing a novel.  Of course, mere reading isn’t enough.  At some point, you’ve gotta sit down at that keyboard and start writing.  And then analyzing, and re-writing, and writing some more.  Through that practice, you get better; you start to see flaws in your writing, and figure out how to avoid or address them.  But for me, the process is slow – more like inching higher on a mountain than leaping over a chasm.

  That said, if we leave out the “lightbulb” part of it, I can say I’ve had a watershed moment in terms of writing craft: joining my critique group.  The feedback I got from them on my initial version of The Whitefire Crossing opened my eyes to problems I hadn’t realized were there, and gave me the tools I needed to rewrite the book to publishable quality.  Yet even that was a process of long weeks, not a sudden moment of realization.  Our group meets in person twice a month and critiques a chapter per person per time – and I think I put at least five chapters through the group with everyone giving me a similar type of feedback before I really understood the huge gaping flaw in the original draft of the book. (more…)

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• Singular First Person

  Tips

  I love first person. I love the conceit of someone telling you a story, directly, like you were sitting in a bar with a loquacious stranger. I love it for the intimacy and immediacy, for the personality and the limited point of view.

  Some of my favorite writers have worked best when they worked in first person – George MacDonald Fraser with Flashman, P. G. Wodehouse with Bertie Wooster, Kazuo Ishiguro with Stevens in The Remains of the Day, Emma Bull with Orient in her novel, Finder, and I have always found it a very comfortable to write that way myself.

  So, how do you write first person well? I’ll give it to you in one word – voice. (more…)

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• Go Deep Or Go Home

  Uncategorized

  This week we’re talking about the art of writing a good first person narrative – something I’ve certainly tried hard to do in the Shattered Sigil series, since I use first person POV for one of my two protagonists.   Personally, I think there’s only one secret to writing a compelling and realistic first person: you’ve got to put yourself completely into that character’s head.  What do they notice (and on the flip side, what *don’t* they notice)? What do they care about? What are their prejudices, their blind spots? What are their gut reactions to the world around them, and the people in it?  What experiences have they had, and what comparisons and metaphors would they naturally use?  The deeper you can get into the character’s head (as opposed to your own), the more unique and interesting and real their voice will be on the page.

  First person provides a depth of intimacy that other POVs don’t, but it’s also limiting. You can’t use words your POV character wouldn’t.  You can’t describe things the character wouldn’t notice or would be physically unable to see (e.g. something happening behind them).  You can’t have your character be perfectly able to understand and interpret the reasons for other characters’ reactions (unless they’re telepathic!).    And you can’t drift out of POV by forgetting to include your POV character’s emotions/reactions during overheard dialogue – in other words, don’t let them suddenly become a neutral camera, observing without interpreting.  (You don’t need reams of analysis for this – careful word choice will let your character’s feelings and reactions shine through without the need to belabor the point for the reader.) (more…)

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• Hm, What’s the Difference?

  Uncategorized

  The given topic is “Lightspeed vs. Landlock – Intergalactic Travel vs Mundane Fantasy.” I’ve been puzzling over that all week, to be honest. I’m not sure what “mundane fantasy” might be.

  My go-to definition for science fiction is about our relationship to technology – how we deal with its advances, and how it in turn changes us. This can lead into class, politics, and government as found in Dune, 1984, and Brave New World; but such studies are not unique to science fiction. Fantasy offers a wide variety of futures and alternate timelines that offer views of human (or elvish, or orcish, etc.) rule, for example Mark Lawrence’s Broken Empire or Bradley Beaulieu’s The Lays of Anuskaya series. (more…)

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• Intergalactic Travel VS. Mundane Fiction? It’s About Relativity.

  Uncategorized

  I wrote the title just knowing there’s an Einstein joke to be had there.  I hope I think of it soon! 

  Intergalactic travel is about the future and fiction involving it is really stories about where the human race is going and trying to anticipate the future and our role in it.  That’s the joy of it all.  Mundane fiction tends to incorporate fantastical elements into modern life, showing the impacts of change on a small scale, giving the audience a chance to think about how they would deal with sudden strange changes in the way the world works i.e. an insight on how to deal with the wild ride that is changing technology in the twenty-first century.  Or at least that’s what I want it to do.  That’s why I keep reading it and watching it.  Doesn’t always happen that way.  (OMG, Alphas. Excellent example.  You guys really should watch that.)  (more…)

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• Angels and Pins

  Who

  This week’s Night Bazaar topic is “Lightspeed vs. Landlock – Intergalactic Travel vs Mundane Fantasy.” I’m not honestly sure if I’m supposed to contrast these two things, pick one over the other, or what, so I’m just gonna run with my first impression and make some shit up.

  The first thing it calls to mind is my time writing tie-in fiction for the Warhammer table-top battle games. Now, I don’t know if you’re familiar with the license, but Warhammer comes in exactly two flavors. You have Warhammer Fantasy, which is basically humans, elves, dwarfs, orcs and gribbly chaos beasties all running around in a fantasy version of early renaissance Germany, or you have Warhammer 40,000, which is basically humans, elves, orcs and gribbly chaos beasties (no dwarfs – for some reason they never made it off planet) all running around in a gothic, Imperial Rome meets the thousand-year-reich version of space opera.

  I always wrote on the fantasy side of the Warhammer coin. I’m just more at home with swords and spells than with bolt guns and spaceships, but I loved the lore of 40k (as they call it) just as much as I did Warhammer Fantasy. The fans, however, were constantly arguing in the forums over which setting was better. This is fairly standard forum behavior, and I generally paid it no mind, but one of the arguments the 40k guys wielded against the Fantasy guys struck me as sillier than average. (more…)

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