Category: Reblogging Project

Voice is the difference between fiction and a sort of journalism of events that never happened. Strong voice is “Now is the winter of our discontent made glorious summer by this our sun of York,” instead of “My brother’s victory made me feel good.” Strong voice is “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times,” instead of “things were mixed.”

The single most important element of fiction is storytelling. And that can be broken into having a good story to tell and telling it in a compelling way, i.e. strong voice. It is one of the more difficult aspects of craft to master, and the vast majority of writers begin by copying someone else’s voice. To have a strong consistent voice that is distinctly yours is a significant achievement.

There are series of steps where it comes to voice which most professional writers must pass through on their way to mastery:

1. Recognizing and understanding the idea of voice.
2. Writing with any voice at all (usually imitated).
3. Finding a voice of one’s own.
4. Using that voice.
5. Doing so with consistancy.

There is a 6th step as well, but it’s essentially optional. It is creating voices that are distinctive and personal and that also suit the tone of the written piece perfectly, so that each story is both completely yours and completely its own. That last one is very difficult, and I don’t know anyone who does it with real consistency. But 6 isn’t necessary to a long and fruitful career or to excellent writing. There are any number of writers whose work I love and respect who only ever go as far as step 5. Whether they could master 6 if they wanted to is, of course, an open question since it has to be exhibited to be judged.

(Originally published on the Wyrdsmiths blog December 8th 2006, and original comments may be found there. Reposted as part of the reblogging project)

Or: if I want my reader to believe in the fantastical…

Willing suspension of disbelief is a key part of the interface between the writer and reader of fiction. If your reader doesn’t believe in your story on some emotional level, there’s really not much point. Likewise, most speculative fiction starts off with a believability deficit since it’s A, fiction. B, fantastic in some way. The one possible exception to this is true hard science fiction where the idea is to create a fantastic element that is potentially real, or even likely, in the future.

The setting component of this is world building. It is at root, both very simple and terribly hard. The basic thing you have to do is create a magical what if with internally consistent answers. Nothing loses a reader more thoroughly than a world that’s clearly self-contradictory. Yes there exceptions. Alice in Wonderland, other dream-logic books. There are always exceptions in writing, but it’s a good general rule.

A what if example might go something like “What if spells are real and performed by computer code?” You the author have to think the what if through and figure out all of the possible repercussions, both immediate and secondary. Then, once you’ve constructed a logical structure for your magic, you need to set out to game the rules, by which I mean find every possible loophole, or make sure there’s no wishing for more wishes.

This is for two reasons: First, your reader is going to be doing it and you need to find any obvious flaws before they do and fix them. Second, and more importantly, as you construct your story, you’re going to need to put in surprises and reversals, and one of the best ways to do this is to “break” the rules in such a way that your reader is surprised and yet feels that they should have seen it coming and that the rule breaking is actually an outflow of the rules and not a mistake in their construction. Breaking the rules is a huge part of fiction in general, not just world building, and worth its own post a bit later on.

The basic process I use for world building is to come up with a broad general what if. WebMage: What if spells are done by computer code? Then I figure out some broad ramifications and frame them as sub what ifs. What if all sorcerers were hackers? What if computers then became magical creatures and familiars? What if the universe were organized like the web and multiple worlds could be visited by means of a magical internet? Each of these generates a chain of consequences and further questions. As I’m plotting, I frame the what ifs mentally and then write out my answers to create a basic narrative. There’s much more to it than that, but this gets at the basic process.

(Originally published on the Wyrdsmiths blog November 30th 2006. and comments can be found there—Reposted as part of the reblogging project, and edited for clarity)

I have mentioned elsewhere that I am not a natural character writer. I think I’ve gotten fairly good at character development, but it really is something I’ve had to work very hard at and will continue to work at because I know that it requires major processing for me, unlike say plot or world building. Which of course means that I spend considerable time thinking about the subject. This post was part of a discussion I’d been having on another blog which I thought worth sharing here.

One of the funny things about my difficulties with characer is that I’m actually a people person and an extrovert. I enjoy and am energized by social situations. I tend to make friends easily and to be pretty good with empathy and with understanding how the people around me are going to react to my actions and words. So, it’s not human results that I have trouble with in character building, it’s human motivations. And that’s where another of the funny things comes in. I didn’t realize that I had a problem with motivations until I left acting for writing and ended up with a lot of first readers telling me that what I was writing wasn’t how real people think.

I discovered that there all sorts of things that any number of people do or believe for reasons that I simply can’t figure out by starting from my own base assumptions and understanding of how the world works, things that only make sense to me if I consciously create a thought experiment in which I alter the foundations of what I think of as personal logic. Instead of true sense-making I just try to figure out an internal emotional consistency for a character and then work backward to find a belief structure that would support their actions.

Whether I’m actually anywhere close to creating a good model for what’s going on in real people’s heads is on open question, but the method allows for fairly successful character modeling, and I’m now more likely to get complimented on character than roasted.

(Originally published on the Wyrdsmiths blog November 15 2006 and comments can be found there—Reposted as part of the reblogging project, and edited for clarity)

As writers of fiction, and particularly of the fiction of the fantastic, we encounter a constant tension between writing things in a way that feels real and a way that is real. It’s a complex dance and one that involves different steps for different writers. Some will prefer to come closer to the actions of a real person, like you or I as we would imagine ourselves to be, acting in a given situation. Some of us see it as an opportunity to create people who make better decisions than we would or worse, more extreme in any case.

I tend to fall into the latter camp. I write fantastic fiction in part because it gives me the chance to write heroes and villains who are larger than life, more noble and more villainous. They’re wittier, nastier, and smarter, but also generally less complex and less ambiguous than real people. They’re surer of their motives and, most importantly, more fun to read about (at least in my opinion).

Fun is an element that doesn’t get talked about enough in writing. I’m a strong believer that reading should be an act that brings joy to the reader, and part of that is fun. Real life can get pretty dismal at times and part of the reason that fiction exists is as an escape and inspiration for those times, a way to transcend the mundane. Escapism isn’t something to be ashamed of, it’s a high virtue of fiction.

So, give yourself permission to make the choice that should be real instead of the one that is real from time to time. Not only is it more satisfying, it often makes for better stories. Not more real, better.

Ironically, choosing what should be real over what is real may also make a story more believable, because what people want to believe has a huge effect on what they do believe.

(Originally published on the Wyrdsmiths blog November 5th 2006. Reposted as part of the reblogging project)

Part I

The other day I taught a 3 hour workshop on writing combat scenes for fantasy. This is a meet-the-weapons deal where I bring in swords and knives and things so that my students can get some real idea of how these things look and feel. As part of this kind of workshop I always do a big Q&A component to tailor the content toward what the people who attend are actually writing.
I love doing these both because I did a variety of western and eastern martial arts when I was younger and because I invariably learn things. I’m a good generalist on muscle powered combat, rather than a tightly focused specialist, so at least one of my students always has a more in-depth take on some of the esoterica than I do. For example, at this session I had a couple who’d been doing research on traditional Native American missile weapons. They were able to to share that the Native Americans they’d been studying used a string grip style much more like the Asian thumb ring model than the European three finger grip, a fact which I did not know. Cool stuff.

But perhaps of more interest is what the questions tell me about what’s important to my students as writers and readers. I always get a lot of questions about what to emphasize in a fight scene, how much detail to go into, level of gore, things like that. My answer on all of those btw: is that it’s a mix of two things

1—giving the reader an accurate picture of what they’re looking at.
2—Showing the reader what’s important to the character.

My main point though is always this: Story is king. Accuracy and reality are important because some subset of people will know when you make mistakes and that costs you in the willing suspension of disbelief area that is so critical for keeping your readers in the story. But reality is less important than story. It’s important that you know the rules not because you must never break them, but because you need to know when you’re breaking them and decide whether doing so does something important enough for the story to make it worth the break.

Part II

Some questions from my workshop and thoughts on why they matter.

How can you tell someone is a sword fighter? This one was phrased in the Sherlockian sense. What would give away a swordsman to an informed observer. My answer involved looking for the muscles in the forearm and wrist that have to be developed to control the sword, physical stance and confidence, visible awareness of surroundings. There are lots of other good answers and other avocations that will share many of the same traits, dancers for example. My fencing improved significantly in the window when I was both unofficially TA-ing a stage combat course and taking modern dance because there was a lot of overlap in skill sets.

In the workshop description you mention the physics of swordplay and that a rapier is always going to beat a broadsword—why is that? So I talked about the time-to-target issues of a weapon that is already extended in front of you and very close to your strike point vs. one that need to have a good swing for full effectiveness and is thus several feet at least from the strike point. A thrusting weapon is simply faster than a swinging weapon. Then we discussed the history of weapons as a history of technological innovation and development and how advances in weapons drove advances in armor and vice-versa. And also how things like improved steel making technology and the introduction of gunpowder or the long bow changed things.

Updating to add: The rapier/broadsword thing assumes light or no armor and comparable skill. The armor assumption comes from the technological innovations that help to drive the invention of light swords like the rapier—i.e. that something like the longbow, crossbow, or gunpowder has driven people out of heavy armor. Can I construct an entirely plausible duel where the broadsword wins? Sure. Is it technologically likely? Hell no.

Who owns swords and other weapons? I was particularly pleased with this one. Weapons are often expensive and, depending on where you are in history, they can be very expensive. The socioeconomics of weapon ownership is something any fantasy or science fiction writer should take into account. If, for example, a sword costs a year’s earnings for a peasant, and the owner is not a rich noble, how did they get the sword? How does its cost affect the way they treat the blade?

At root these and other questions are all about making your writing believable, and I’ll talk a bit more about that in my next section.

Part III

In any work of fiction you must bring your reader with you. You must convince them to believe in the reality of the unreal parts of your story, the term most commonly used for this is “willing suspension of disbelief.” If your audience doesn’t believe in your story, you’ve lost them.

Speculative fiction has a double charge against willing suspension of disbelief in that it is both unreal in the particulars of your characters’ stories (i.e. fiction), and in the setting (the world of the fantastic). So the spec fic reader has to work doubly hard to suspend their disbelief, which means the spec fic writer has to work doubly hard to earn that suspension.

Because of this, the spec fic writer has to be even more careful with details than the general fiction writer and ground the non-fantastical and fictional details very firmly in reality. Understanding and writing believable combat is very much a part of that since combat is so often an important aspect of the literature of the fantastic. So is making sure that your fantastical details are internally consistent. And getting your science right.

(Originally published on the Wyrdsmiths blog in three parts in October of 2006 and comments can be found there—possibly worth a look as discussion was useful and lively. One. Two. Three. Reposted as part of the reblogging project, and edited for clarity)

 

Sean said something in the comments on this post that completely blew my mind and I just had to pull it out and unpack it where others can comment. “I, too, see the revision process as a form of “editing”, whereas I think Kelly would think of it as just “writing”” and then Sean talked a little bit about authorial vs. critical modes in writing.

This is so alien to how I see the book process that I just boggled. For me, the whole thing is writing the book. There is no line between my inner editor and my inner author. I write, edit, and even read all from the same part of my psyche, and I don’t think it’s ever occurred to me that there was any other way to do it. The same voice that writes the sentence assesses it before and after and then rewrites and even copyedits.

(Originally published on the Wyrdsmiths blog October 6th 2006. Reposted as part of the reblogging project)

The original post also included these questions, but, as I’ve elected not to enable comments at kellymccullough.com, I’m separating them out below and people’s answers can be found at the Wyrdsmiths version:

Quick survey: Do you compartmentalize your writing processes? Creative and Analytical? Or is it a sort of continuum? Or is it all just in one big box? Or something completely different?