Posts in the "Strengths and Weaknesses" Category

• How I Found My Strengths as a Writer

  Strengths and Weaknesses

  I’m far from convinced there’s any such profession as “writer” anymore; we’re all multi-taskers, by definition.

  But there is this thing called “writing,” yes, and occasionally I get to do it.

  When it comes to writing itself, I like to believe that my strengths are far more numerous than my weaknesses.

  But it’s quite possible that I’m kidding myself.

  What I do find is that the more I write, the less my strengths matter and the more my weaknesses do. That’s because writing a lot of fiction puts me face-to-face with every possible roadblock in my creative process, and every roadblock is a potential “debunking” of my strengths. It doesn’t matter how great I can write X type of scene, if Y type of scene keeps me from ever finishing my novel.

  As a result, all that my strengths do is allow me to get past the weaknesses, or manage them effectively. That’s great news, yeah, but if I take the time to celebrate my strengths, it only slows me down.

  Here’s an example. (more…)

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• Indulging in Fantasy

  Strengths and Weaknesses

  One of the reasons I write fiction is to indulge my fantasies.  Fantasies in which the main character always says the perfect thing and never has anyone ask her if maybe she forgot to take her medication this morning because she just said something bonehead stupid or batshit crazy.  Daydreams in which the main character is effortlessly fantastic at racing cars, fighting duels or beating up bad guys and who does not gain five pounds just thinking about chocolate or break out in zits even though she is way too old for that nonsense.

  Yet, as a reader, I yearn for more realistic, more relatable characters who do get wrinkles and heartburn and who have the sames kinds of problems real people have – no money for emergencies, cars that break down, in-laws that drive them bonkers.  I think it’s the eternal give and take between readers and writers.  A writer wants to indulge in fantasies of being an independent, successful, super lucky queen of all space ninjas.  Readers want to know that they can still be space ninjas if they have scoliosis or bacne and they want a love interest in the book to be like the love interests in their lives whether they be shy or spacey or prone to irritable bowels and migraines.  Some of the best stories involve characters who find ways to use their unique strengths to save the day.

  For example, the Mrs. Polifax series by Dorothy Gilman features an elderly housewife who becomes a spy.   It’s an older series, but very fun.  Although it would seem that Mrs. Polifax is the exact wrong person to enter the suave, action-packed world of espionage, her experiences as a mother in the suburbs help her succeed and survive in instances that would have destroyed younger, more able men.   It satisfies both the relatable and fantasy elements by finding ways to make a weak character into a valuable asset.  Another book that plays with the situational value of strengths and weaknesses is Enchantment by Orson Scott Card.  In it, the intellectual main character keeps magically traveling back and forth in time with a Russian princess of fairy tale days.  In her world, he is useless because he cannot wield a sword so she is the hero.  In his world, she doesn’t even speak the language ad he speaks four, so the roles are reversed.  They both find a way to be successful in each others world without wielding swords or learning English.   It plays with the idea of finding ways to exploit what you can do in any situation. (more…)

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• Writing a lot, poorly, makes you a fast, poor writer

  Strengths and Weaknesses

  

  One of my Clarion instructors back in 2006 was Chip Delaney (Samuel R. Delaney). Chip came in during our first week, and I’m glad he did. He imparted plenty of good wisdom to the collection of noobs who’d gathered in sweltering East Lansing that summer, but one bit of advice comes to mind when I think about strengths and weaknesses. He said it isn’t sufficient to simply write. Writing with no forethought will only serve to reinforce bad habits. One must recognize his weaknesses and work actively to strengthen those weak writing muscles in order to make them stronger. Consider golf swings, or pitching motions, or gymnastical dismounts from the parallel bars. They’re (in varying degrees) easy to understand, and it seems as though, given enough time, you could learn to do what the pros do. But you can’t simply do it over and over again and hope pig-headed repetition is going to make you really, truly good at it.

  Now, sure, there are those savants that seem to be able to pick things up quickly and learn to do it very well. And there are those that work at it for a very long time and eventually become decent at it. To those arguments I would say this: the people that succeed because of innate talent are few and far between, and the others often succeed despite their poor form, not because of it. I can’t help but think of Tim Tebow from the Denver Broncos. He’s on a bit of a tear, but no one would claim that he’s a good quarterback. He’s succeeding with grittiness, his scrambling ability, and perhaps by catching his opponents a bit off-guard by the very fact that he isn’t a prototypical quarterback.

  I’m not claiming that repetition isn’t important. It is. You’ll certainly learn a number of things by stubbing your toe on them. Still, I would very much recommend taking Chip’s words to heart. In order to do that though—to really work on your writing—you have to know what your strengths and weaknesses are. This, to me, is the biggest reason to join peer-to-peer critique groups (whether virtual or in-person). It’s also a good reason to go to professional writing workshops. In either case, you’ll receive critiques of your own work, and this is good to a degree. It helps to identify your strengths and weaknesses. I would argue, though, that you’ll find out more about yourself as a writer by critiquing work that others have also critiqued. Assuming that the others critiquers know their stuff (and you’ll get a sense of this over time) you will find others commenting on something you completely missed. Be very aware of those things, my friends, because those are your blind spots. Now, don’t worry if it’s only one other person that brings up some issue of plotting or tone or dialogue. But if three people bring up basically the same issue and you missed it? Take note. (more…)

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• Write Fast. Fail Hard.

  Strengths and Weaknesses

  I can’t plot my way out of a paper bag. I think I have mentioned this before.

  This was less obvious to me before I went to Clarion. I was pretty good at stuff like creating engaging characters and crazy settings, and often, because those things were so compelling, it was difficult for me to see what wasn’t working. All I ever saw was the awesome characters running around in cool worlds. It didn’t occur to me that they needed something to do besides be awesome and maybe save the world. What I didn’t realize was that “save the world” isn’t a plot. It’s an endpoint. The “plot” is all the stuff inbetween. And generally not something I concerned myself with.

  In fact, plot was so secondary to my initial dabblings in fiction that my greatest plotting “device” when I was a teen was to take out a deck of index cards with plot points/action scenes in them like, “Somebody falls off a cliff,” “somebody dies,” “somebody finds out a terrible truth,” “somebody accidently kills a dog” and just pull one out at random whenever I hit a lull in the story.

  When you’re writing quickly, like a short story a week the way we did at Clarion (or 20k a month like I’m doing now on deadline), it’s harder to use your strengths to cover up your weaknesses. It becomes really clear what you’re good at and what really effing sucks.

  At some point, you have to make a choice. You can continue to focus on your strengths, and create the most epic worldbuilding/character wandering novel ever that you can never sell, or you can tuck those talents into your hindbrain and put them on autopilot while you actively concentrate on what you’re bad at. (more…)

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• Making Your Weaknesses Your Strengths

  Strengths and Weaknesses

  Fair warning, I’m recoverng from flu at the moment and am not the most clear-headed I’ve ever been. But I’ll give this a shot.

  I once got a fortune cookie that said, “Mistakes bring experience. Experience brings wisdom.” I found myself adding a little something to that message and tacking it up on my corkboard. “Make as many different mistakes as you can.”  It dovetails nicely with another belief of mine: education is never cheap. Either you pay in cash or you pay in blood. (They don’t call it the school of hard knocks for nothing.) You ask me which school is better? Hard knocks, hands down. Life is a better, faster teacher, if harsher. Plus? No interest.

  I agree with Courtney’s philosophy regarding making your weaknesses your strengths. A big part of it is that, knowing a weakness as a weakness makes you work harder at it. But in order to make a strength a weakness, one has to own it first. You can’t improve by blaming others or outside factors. It doesn’t work like that. That’s the first cost of education, see. Accepting the pain and embarrassment of responsibility. Once you’ve done that, you’re free to learn everything you can. Writing groups are a living and breathing part of that eduation process. When someone points out that the story has a problem it isn’t until the writer can be open to accepting that there is a problem that education can take place. It hurts. You’ll look foolish. But that’s the price of education.

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• Watch Out For What Comes Easy

  Strengths and Weaknesses

  Years ago in a skating lesson when I was struggling with my single loop jump, my coach told me, “The jump you find the hardest to learn will end up as your best and most consistent.” I thought she was on crack. Obviously my best jump would be the flip jump, the one I landed after only a few practice sessions and thought felt most natural. But damn if she didn’t prove to be right: not only did my single loop end up being higher and more powerful than my other single jumps, but the double loop was the first double jump I landed.

  Of course, the reason for it is simple: I spent more time practicing that loop jump than I did all my other jumps combined. It’s easy to get lazy with things that come naturally. You think, hey, I’m doing this just fine, no need to work on making it better. Later, that often comes back to bite you in the ass. (In skating, the ass-biting comes in when you learn your doubles. You can muscle your way through all kinds of poor technique in your single jumps and still land them. Not so, with doubles. The timing and precision required is an order of magnitude higher; in the end, you’ve got to go back and fix every little sloppiness and flaw in the single, and do the jump a million times to reset your muscle memory. I STILL haven’t yet landed my double flip.)

  I suspect writing’s not far different. I remember when I put the initial draft of The Whitefire Crossing through my critique group, there was a constant refrain of “Where is the tension? It’s a smooth read, but nothing is happening.” At first I rationalized to myself that they just didn’t see I was doing a slow build, setting the scene, all that stuff. But after about the fourth chapter or so, I started to realize they were right. And oh boy, were they right. (I cringe when I think of that initial draft now.) After a few false starts, I buckled down, and I ended up working my ass off to improve pace and tension throughout the novel. (more…)

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• Aliette de Bodard: Playing to Your Strengths, Playing to Your Weaknesses

  Guest Post

  Aliette de Bodard has won the BSFA Award for Best Short Fiction, as well as Writers of the Future. She has also been nominated for the Hugo, Nebula and Campbell Award.  Her Aztec mystery-fantasies, Servant of the Underworld, Harbinger of the Storm, and the forthcoming Master of the House of Darts, are published by Angry Robot, worldwide.  Her short fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in a number of venues, such as Interzone, Realms of Fantasy, Asimov’s, and The Year’s Best Science Fiction.

  Everyone has strengths and weaknesses–not only characters but writers, too. We have natural abilities, as well as things we are less good at: when I started out, I could effortlessly plot–the rhythm of a story was something I could understand instinctively, and I had very little trouble with pacing my stories. I had, however, very little eye for a smaller kind of rhythm, the one found in sentences; and it took me several years of reading Ursula Le Guin, Patricia McKillip and various English poets before I could understand the basic musicality of the language.

  Strengths and weaknesses do not remain static: I used to have lots of trouble with exposition, struggling to remove infodumps from my narration, and to offer up information to the reader at a point where they needed it. Writing story after story, and being critiqued, led me to becoming better and better at exposition. It is very clear to me when I pull out early stories such as the very first Obsidian and Blood ones: “Obsidian Shards” has a very complex background, but exposition is delivered in large chunks, at a time in the narration when the reader needs it. This ensures that the relevant information is present, but it’s a clumsy technique. By contrast, when I wrote the last Obsidian and Blood book, Master of the House of Darts (more than four years after writing “Obsidian Shards”), I handled exposition in more subtle and fluid ways: I inserted worldbuilding into the way my characters breathed and thought, touched up my dialogue with typical expressions from the Aztec culture, and broke up descriptions into smaller chunks that brought atmosphere to a scene without overwhelming it. It’s evident, looking at both pieces of writing side by side, that in four years I have progressed immeasurably as a writer, by adding to my strengths. (more…)

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