Zills and Zebu

Whiles words like zill, zebu, bo, panabas—they're all perfectly acceptable words and have perfectly useful meanings, but how many people actually know what they are? Not a whole lot, would be the answer. They're actually very specific things (For those dying of curiosity: zills are finger cymbals used during belly dancing, zebu are a small species of yak, a bo is a six-foot long staff used in combat, and a panabas is a variety of long-handled sword from the Phillipines.) and it's great to know them, but that doesn't mean that your reader will know what they are, and most dictionaries won't have them all.

There's a bit of a tendency, when you put research into something, to pick up specific words—and you should. However, among less experienced writers, there's also a tendency to use those terms, and that can be far more dangerous than you might think. When a reader sees a whole lot of terms that they don't know, two things happen. A: they feel stupid and B: they feel like the author is showing off. Neither of those things is desirable, I'd like to add.

If you use the term and explain it, that's better, but you could most likely still avoid the word all together. You can call a bo a staff or call zills finger cymbals and even the people that know the proper term probably aren't going to care, and if they do then don't you think they're just a wee bit stuck up?

I've done it too—my very first manuscript (which was never completed, as I was only in seventh grade) was full of those kinds of things, because I was very proud of my intellect and...I try not to remember that story too often.

Of course, this applies to writing fiction. In non-fiction, the idea is to instruct, so go ahead and use those technical terms in non-fiction—I'll gladly read it. But, for once, mixing the chocolate and the peanut butter of fiction and non-fiction isn't so good (But if you want to talk creative non-fiction with me, I'll pour you a cup of coffee and we can dish.).

Goodbye all,
Voss
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I'd like to say, also, that I've had a blast on this blog challenge. I've met some awesome people, written my way over one-hundred posts, and generally just had a good freaking time. Hopefully it wasn't too boring for y'all, either.

Young Adult VS Adult Fiction

When I pick up a book, I normally don't pay much attention to which audience it's intended for. Sure, I don't really go for, say, straight up romances, or historicals, or westerns, or even horror, but it doesn't matter to me whether it's young adult or straight-up adult. I'll read it and I'll either like it or I won't.

So, of course, I got to thinking (I do that a lot, don't I?) what the real differences are between young adult and other fiction. The obvious one occurred to me, of course. The intended audience is different. But what does that really entail for the author? I mean, read some more modern YA, you'll find things that I never expected to see in books for teens. Not that I have a problem with it—I think it's about time people present more adult themes in a format for teens—but it never occurred to me that it would be all right to put gruesome death, actual drug use, rape, or sociopolitical meltdown in YA. It might just be my conservative town, where we didn't get to read those things, but it blurs the line a little, if you ask me.

Well, I think I've pinned down, if not the entire equation, at least a few of factors. I could be wrong but, should I ever decide I want to write YA, I figure it can't hurt to try and apply them to the writing.

Most obvious, and easiest to apply, is toning down. An occasional, full-blown issue can work in YA, but you pretty much want to keep things a little sedate. Nothing terribly graphic, as a rule. Not necessarily because of the audience—today's teens and young adults are some pretty twisted little souls, and those that aren't pretend to be—but for the publisher, and the parent. If they find out there's a graphic murder or some other such thing they deem appropriate, you're not going to see the same number of readers as if you straddle that line between too much and not enough.

How? Put in teenage and young adult issues. No matter who your intended audience may be, they want to see relevant issues to them. That's why YA books are so often set in a school setting, since that's familiar to the audience. Deal with grades, teachers, parents, budding romance, drinking, drugs—all the things you remember worrying about and having to deal with as a teenager, those are fair game for YA books.

The third one is a little more intangible. People want to be able to reread a book for years and years. If you look at all the really great YA books out there, they grow, they have layers of conflict that unwind themselves the older the reader grows. The best YA books hold their appeal through the years, because they grow as the reader does. It can be tricky to pin that ingredient down, but when you've got it, you've got the reader.

That's just my insight. I'm less a YA writer than an avid reader, but let's just call that research.

I'm off and away for now,
Voss

X-Raying Your Manuscript

You don't have to be from the planet Krypton to have X-ray vision. I mean, it probably can't hurt if you are, either, but it's not a necessity.

In fact, as readers, we writers have very well-developed X-ray vision, when it comes to others' manuscripts. You can read someone's work and go “Hey, you're kind of a misogynist, aren't you?” or “You must be from Stony Brook, since every single book you write is set there.” and you're probably correct.

The issue comes when we have to do it to ourselves. It's kind of like psychoanalyzing yourself—it's not easy, and all that denial is going to make it even harder. And you will deny unpleasant things, when you find them, but if your reader feels like you're preaching at them about something, even if you do get published, no one will like your book, and that's not good.

So you sit down with your manuscript and you realize, in shock, that you've been subtly hinting at the stupidity of menial labor from word one—of course, it doesn't seem quite so subtle now that you've had it thrust in your face. But what the hell are you supposed to do? Dissect your entire manuscript and fix this previously invisible preaching?

Yes.

You, the narrator, has a duty to be a bit—just a bit—impartial about your world. Now, if you have a character that thinks menial labor, Christianity, quantum physics, or the cell phone is stupid, that's fine, maybe even two characters (although that's kind of pushing it, in my opinion), but all of your characters can't possibly hate the exact same things—that's preachy, annoying, and thoroughly unbelievable.

How the hell are you supposed to fix all of that? Luckily, it's not terribly difficult, usually, just time-consuming. See, this kind of thing isn't really hidden, it's just hard for the writer to see. It's actually, more often than not, a kind of superficial fix, kind of like a snake shedding skin. You remove the offending surface from the entire body, possibly leaving a few little bits—they don' really hurt if they're diluted—and voila!

Will it make your manuscript better? I think so. Of course, if the entire point in writing the book was to preach about one thing or another, then I guess you maybe shouldn't take all of that out of the manuscript, but barring that it kind of needs to be fixed, otherwise you have an issue.

So now I scurry away to write something...not sure what, but here I go.

Tchüss,
Voss

Wiping Out the VIN

I'm a little late to jump on this bandwagon, but I've had time to stew on it a little bit.

'50 Shades of Gray.' If that doesn't strike some kind of chord, you probably don't understand this whole rigmarole. I'll give you a summary. '50 Shades of Gray' is an ebook that's really hot right now, and it's making a lot of buzz right now. Why? It started out as 'Twilight' fan fiction, and then the author cleaned out any legal reference to 'Twilight', mainly the names, kind of like replacing the VIN number on a car. The author put it out and *bam* it's a success.

A lot of authors out there might be cringing right now. Fan fiction? For sale? Without the explicit consent of the copyright holder? Preposterous! Surely this heinous excuse for an author will be hunted down and persecuted!

Why? Legally, no one has been wronged. There are no references to 'Twilight' left in the book, making it have nothing but an eerily similar world. As far as I can find, Stephenie Meyer takes no issue with it. Yet people are so incredibly polarized on the subject. Some people really hate it, say that it's not real writing. Others, myself included, rise to their feet and say 'Brava!'

The way I see it, fan fiction or not, '50 Shades of Gray' has to have literary merit. There's got to be some kind of something working with it. If no laws have been broken and the original author doesn't care...what is this huge issue?

Okay, I'm not that ignorant—people are calling into question the skill of this author because the world and characters weren't actually put together from the ground up—they were both borrowed. But that's the same thing, basically, as saying that Timothy Zahn isn't a good author because he wrote his 'Star Wars' books, or that Douglas Niles isn't good because he jumped into the 'Dragonlance' world. It's utter crap—they're, if anything, better authors. Fan fiction (or, if it's got the official seal of approval, 'companion novels') is hard to do properly. You don't get to have the same level of familiarity with world and characters as the original author, meaning you're working a lot on inference, but you're still expected to match the same level of 'reality' as the original author—in fact, you're kind of held to a higher standard.

I do prefer to make my own worlds and characters—but that's kind of just because I like to stay in control. When I make my own world and characters, I can change things as I see fit, and I only have myself to answer to (until it goes to print, of course). But, as far as '50 Shades of Gray' is concerned, let it happen. You don't have to like it, but you really do have to accept it—there's not a lot anyone can do about it anyway.

Voss

Variety--Not Just a Magazine

I almost put “Variety: the Spice of Life,” but that wouldn't really bring any variety, and then you'd all abandon me...or that might just be my paranoia kicking in...

Any who, let's take a little trip back in time. Past 'The Hunger Games', past 'Harry Potter', past 'Earthsea'...we're going back to the era of budding sci-fi and fantasy, more importantly looking at the characters in these early works, at least in the United States.

I'd like you all to notice something: they're pretty much all straight white alpha-males.

Now jump back to our time and take a look at our modern fiction. While not as severe of a domination, the issue is kind of the same: our speculative fiction characters are predominantly straight white alpha-males.

Now you can try to claim that it's because we're the epicenter of speculative fiction. What about Europe? Poland, Spain, Ireland, Great Britain, France, Norway—they all have famous, storied, brilliant pasts in speculative fiction. What about Asia? Russia, China, Japan, Korea, India, Cambodia—the same thing. And look at all the great female authors out there: CJ Cherryh, Ursula K. LeGuin, J.K. Rowling, Alma Alexander, Miyuki Miyabe, Stephenie Meyer. While I can't really scout out any open and out GLBTQ authors from my mind right now, look at it this way: ten percent of the population is gay, so logic would hold that ten percent of authors are gay too.

Why, then, do we have little to no variety, even nowadays? Is there some codex I haven't received that says we all have to write speculative fiction like Puritans?

I've kind of said it before, but it stands repeating until the whole world gets it: we're different, so make characters different. There are some characters that vary, I know, but not enough, and not a wide enough splay of characters. I know it seems kind of superficial but, let's face facts here—until we get to know the characters, we base our opinions on these superficial factors, and those early opinions also stick even after you get more familiar with the characters.

So where are they? Why is it that all of our characters seem to be white and straight? I admit very joyously that heroines are finally on the rise, but they still tend to be white and straight...why? Are those the only stories we have in us at this point? I don't buy that we're all so streamlined and devoid of any ability to stray from the societal norm.

Apply the change! Viva la Revolution!
Voss

Unexpected Elements

You're at your computer, right? Have the internet open and all that jazz? Go ahead and open a new tab—it won't offend me. Go to your search engine of choice and type in something you have absolutely no bloody interest in, or very little. Something like seagull physiology or sperm whales or—just something you don't really want to know about. Trust me, it's heading somewhere. Now go on ahead and go through the results until you find something that does pique your interest.

This is where we start link chasing. If you go through enough links from there, you can find a lovely element or two to include. I found things to use on a crochet site the other day—crochet. I don't crochet—I can hardly recognize it when I see someone doing it—but it brought something to the table that interested me, so I stored it in my brain.

That's how you spice up your writing, both for your readers and for yourself. I always talk about following tangents, and this is really no different—if you latch onto a tangent you like, throw it in. Maybe you saw an African fertility chair and really liked it—I bet you can get it into your next project, or the one after that. I have a whole list of them saved up—Zulu spears and shields, ancient Egyptian battery pots, French death clocks, exotic firearms, the Bouncing Betty, Quan Yu, French buccin—and hope to use them all at some point (Although Quan Yu might wait...she can be a little frightening...).

The point is to throw in something you maybe don't expect, something you have to research a little, because research will set your little heart aflutter and fill you with a sort of raucous joy. Plus, your readers will see something out of the ordinary from you—surprising your readers is a good thing. And if that's not enough, you can draw in new readers with new elements. By broadening your horizons, you can broaden your fan base, and then get your work out to more eyes.

And isn't that kind of the point?

So, who knows what could come up next? The characters in your post-apocalyptic world might start rinsing their mouth with urine—it worked for the ancient Romans, right? They were pretty successful...

Peace out, y'all,
Voss

Taming the Inner Self

There's something they never tell you about writers. Never ever ever, not until you finally experience it. You see, there's this little demon that lives inside all of us, and this little demon wants nothing more than to see you fail. That little demon is the fear of success demon or, rather, the fear of change demon.

Now, you might say, “Why would I be afraid of success? I want to be the next Stephenie Meyer!” It's very true that you might well want that for yourself. However, there's something else to it—we don't want things to be upset. We're used to our lives pretty much the way they are, and that's sort of what we want to maintain—familiarity. Sure, if someone could ensure us the same level of success as Meyer, I think most of us would take it. But the problem is that there is no guarantee in this business, so we fear and despair, and every rejection, nasty beta, or hard edit we have just compacts that fear into a little ball of rocky terror in our souls.

But I'd like to share a quote with you:

“Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure.”
~Nelson Mandela

And it's true. We worry so much about our inadequacies, but that's just a front for the real terror—that we are too much for ourselves to handle, that we cannot be controlled, even by our own will. You know what—lose control. That power is the gift given to us to help guide us through life and help us through the rough patches. As a writer, it's your greatest tool, because it lets you do the seemingly impossible—finish on time, edit this, submit that, write this character, format this book, rise to the top, movie deal, merchandising, franchising, buying Skywalker Ranch right from under George Lucas' well-paid ass. With this power unleashed, we can truly start taking charge.

So don't try and tame the demon inside of you—let it frolic and bask in the glorious release of power.

Feeling a little wild,
Voss