To Boldly Go

Writing, and art in general, is supposed to be one thing and one thing alone--a means by which to push the boundaries of what is deemed socially normal.

Okay, that might be taking things a little bit far. Writing is about a lot of other things, but it's such a good vessel to explore beyond the confines of normalcy because it reaches people that, in general, tend to be more open. This is especially true of speculative fiction (See? We're totally awesome!). Spec fic readers are more willing to accept those things that aren't mainstream, because speculative fiction isn't "real" literature anyway (That was sarcastic, by the by.).

So, I'm going to touch on a subject that's still largely ignored in speculative fiction, for some reason.

Alternate sexuality.

Okay, I hate that term. I mean gay, lesbian, and bisexual characters in fantasy and science fiction. Now, unless I'm just totally oblivious, that isn't represented outside of speculative fiction erotica. Am I just oblivious? I'd like to think not.

I don't know why this has been ignored to this point. Statistically, one in every ten people is gay/lesbian, and that number rockets up when you include bisexuality. Doesn't it make sense that somewhere there must be someone in fantasy and sci-fi. To me, it seems like some kind of twisted, puritan morality leaking in and that shouldn't be allowed. The puritans aren't in control here for a reason--I won't start a religious debate here, but suffice it to say there's a reason they aren't supposed to be in control anymore.

Why, then, is it still so taboo to have GLBT characters in speculative fiction? I'm making a public appeal to publishers--get over it. We're here and we're queer--you might as well start dealing with it. LGBT shouldn't be confined to thinly veiled literary porn and supermarket romance side-characters.

I've said my piece,
Happy writing,
Voss

Write What You Know

Yes, I can already feel the disturbance in the force. It happens every time a writer gives out the advice "Write what you know."

Especially spec fic writers.

We've all felt some animosity, at least, for that piece of advice. But I had a lovely epiphany about this, even though I never thought I would ever give that piece of damn advice to anyone.

Are you ready for it? I mean, this is pretty ground-breaking *snicker snicker*.

Write what you know.

*cricket cricket*

Okay, let me explain. It doesn't mean you can only write things if you're an expert on the subject. In fact, those are the last people you want writing fiction 99% of the time. You need to write with what you know and not give a rat's ass about anything else, really. That's what lends real authenticity to a work of fiction.

For example: I don't know who the manuscript belonged to, but he let a dear friend of mine look it over. She did the standard editing things, I'm sure, but she also saw that his main conflict came from giant spiders--avicularia giganticus or horribilis or something like that. It was an avicularia.

Those that have seen an avicularia or know anything about them are probably laughing or shaking your heads right now. Those that aren't, I'll let you in on the joke:

Avicularia are the least threatening, frightening species of tarantula, like, ever. They're generally docile, good as pets, and they have pink feet. I don't mean pinkish like you'd expect a spider to look, but freaking PINK.

See? Now, I know this isn't about spiders, but the point is they're cute. Not many people would have been wise to that, but those that were would have been annoyed as hell. It's like a giant cocker spaniel coming after you. They're too cute to be really frightening. The most they'll do is lick you to death.

That's writing what you know, to one extent. You can't force that information, but if you know something that can add more logc and more realism to your story, use it. I know classical music and concert instruments inside and out. I can use some of that to my advantage in my books. Another friend of mine knows puppets better than anyone I've ever met. Another one knows all about Portland, Oregon, and another friend of mine is a little self-publishing encyclopedia/dictionary. All of these things can be used to their advantage, and we all have something like that. If my father ever tried a book, I know for a fact he could do something brilliant with modern mechanics or old cars--that's the kind of thing I've had to research.

And that's the other part. Somewhere in the recent past on Frances Pauli's Blog, she has a post on following tangents. She got an entire book series out of her last one (red cross dogs) and she also knows all about this wide variety of things, all from doing the research on a subject.

You need to research things that you enjoy learning about, because something in there will stick in you little writerly brain and pop up one day. Now, I'm not the best person to be saying this, but I'l make the resolution if you all will.

Make a list of things you want to know more about--at least ten things--and go through them, looking them over and up until you know them for sure. If that means you go take a Latin dancing class, then I'll probably be right there with you, because it's something I've always been interested in. I have next to no rhythm or dancing talent, but that won't stop me from learning about it.

The last thing I can tell you is specific to speculative fiction. You know your world and its laws, so you have to write them. You have to know your world,a nd I can't stress that enough: YOU HAVE TO KNOW YOUR WORLD!!! You have to be able, at a moment's notice, to cross-reference the uses of various things in your main character's supplies as an anti-venom for a dragon bite, or understand that dimension-bending engines have to have a particular and large fuel supply that may or may not always be present. That's also writing what you know.

Off to research...something...
Voss

Homemade Marshmallows

Yes, the campfires will soon be lit, the hot chocolate mixed, and the marshmallows roasted--the inaugural run of Camp NaNoWriMo is nearing its end. Around here, that means a camp party amongst our writing group--and that means s'mores--and that means I finally got to break out my recipe for marshmallows. I know, not writing related in an inherent matter, but I had to brag a little...

Also, let's take a small moment of silence. As of today, Chris Baty has announced that he's stepping down as the Executive of the Office of Letters and Light. The group that runs NaNoWriMo, Camp NaNoWriMo, and ScriptFrenzy is going to have a change of leadership come next NaNo season. He was quite a brilliant man and none of those events will be the same without him.

Back to writing--I finished yet another manuscript--and this one's actually science fiction. Yes, I finished it! It's sci-fi and I finished it without magic, so haha! To those that don't know, it's a real shocker for me to finish a full-length science fiction manuscript, especially in a month.

Now, I can't spill this last secret all the way, at least not in public, but I'll tell you that I'm working on something in the near future with Hall Bros. Entertainment--and not just a two sentence story. I can't say any more about it in good conscience--sorry =D

Peace out, ladies and sub-species,
Voss

Battle Mechanics

I watched the second half of “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows” today (yesterday). In the theater, with all the bells and whistles and the like. Aside from me crying through the whole thing (can you blame me? That’s the end of an investment that took up the majority of my twenty years of life, between the books and movies.), I found myself crying especially a lot when they brought the battle of Hogwarts to life. Needless to say it was awesome. I would love to throw out some details, but I know for a fact that some of my readers haven’t seen it, so I’ll keep my mouth shut.

But I’m rambling, here. I saw the battle of Hogwarts come to life in full glory. Flying spells, charms, and hexes abounded, and it got me thinking: this is the single greatest fantasy battle I’ve ever read and/or seen. That doesn’t mean it’s really the best one, but it’s the best I’ve been exposed to. I was in total awe at it, but on the drive home, I began to consider something else: why is this battle so incredible? What really makes this drive home so well? Why do I still think about it even though I haven’t touched the book in months and am now miles (and hours at the time of writing this) away from the movie and the theater?

I actually can’t really sum it up quickly, but I decided to dissect some of the best battle scenes thrown into fantasy. Sadly, as much as it may disappoint you all to know, I still haven’t been able to force myself to read “The Lord of the Rings” trilogy, so those battles won’t be mentioned. I’m also not talking about one-on-one skirmishes and duels. As much as I enjoy reading the battle between Bobby and Saint Dane in book six of the “Pendragon” series, it’s not what I mean. That’s not to say that any of that stuff isn’t fantastic, or that this information isn’t applicable to one-on-one skirmishes, but that’s not what I’m focusing on. I’m talking big, nameless hordes colliding in mass struggled of death. I’m talking battles in a war.

I know, I’m blathering and blithering all over the place. Let’s get down to it.

Every major battle has to start somewhere, has to have an inciting event. Often times, especially in high fantasy, it will be either somebody yelling “Charge!” or some other such thing to set the forces a-running, or you’ll just have the protagonists side of the battle get attacked. Whatever it is, that one thing will start it. Now, this isn’t the reason that they’re fighting. If that’s not established way before you start battling, then in what sense is this battle going to be an epic struggle? I could get into a whole discussion on that, but suffice it to say that the inciting event for your battle should NOT be the reason you’re fighting. This is the first act of combat for the scene. During the battle of Hogwarts, it’s when Harry shows up. It’s that simple. Harry shows up and, blah, blah, blah, we have a battle erupting.

After the inciting event comes the action. Does this sound familiar yet? Yes, it’s the same as a plot arc. A battle has to follow that same pattern. That means that we have action. This is where writing a battle kicks a lot of people’s asses, pun absolutely intended. Up until now, it’s just writing something else for your story, but when you get to the battling action it’s almost a different craft. You have to slip into a different frame of mind for this. You have swords clanging off of one another, spells being cast and thwarted, dragons spewing fireballs into oncoming swarms—it’s so blissful to write once you get into it.

There are a lot of things to consider when you’re writing the action, too, so I’ve tried to cover them all. The first and most obvious is the actual action. I know, the action of the action—live with it. This is what actually happens. Stripped down to the barest bits of your battle, this is all you really need to tell people what’s happening. This is the slashes, tears, screams, runs, rampages—what the characters do, or what their spells or mounts do. This is what really happens, and it screw up a lot of battle scenes. People don’t know how to go into the battle, because so many of your main characters are down there at once. Most writers know enough to stay out of the heads of the faceless masses, so I won’t touch on that any more, but the rest can get tricky. As fun as it is to write it, we don’t care about every character’s every movement in a battle scene. You should treat this the same way as anything else you write, from that respect. If the character is doing nothing to move along the story line or the plot arc of the battle scene, I don’t need to know if that character exists. I’d much rather see the dweeby little guy get his ass kicked while the heroine is setting up the booby trap for the enemy general. That’s much more important to know than the fact that your favorite character just slashed across three demon mercenaries. Of course, as I write this, there’s a nagging little voice that says: I want to know who’s alive. It’s true, you do eventually have to say who survived and who didn’t—but not during the battle. Hold it off until I pivotal moment or the end of the battle, but it’s actually a good idea to show just the event that might have killed Joe over there. You can’t do it every time—sometimes your character has to die when he has to die—but keeping the reader in suspense is GOOD. It makes them want to finish.

More on action. When it comes to actually saying what happened, please make it make sense. Now, during this battle scene, is the easiest time to make a slip. Not only do you have to remember what’s going on with your characters (does he have a club foot? Really? Then how the hell did he do that?), but you have to realize the limits of what can happen. Your one-armed character isn’t going to be able to slash this guy with an axe and reach down to pick up a sword. I’m sorry, it won’t fly, and those are the things readers love to eat you over. Now, it’s not always so drastic, and in magical situations you can really go crazy and bend the rules—but you can’t break the rules of anything you laid out. If instant death magic is against your magical laws, don’t do that without a really, really good explanation. If you’re going into a battle magic free, then you really have to pay close attention. If your characters do something beyond what has been previously allowed to them, you’re going to catch some major flack. That’s why you need to be precise with your words. You have to make it so easy to track that anyone can get the picture you get, or else you have to fix it.

Also in the action is reader desire and expectation. Your reader is going to expect things to be a certain way—you can either honor that or deny it. Your reader might expect that Joe is the biggest bad-ass out there and is absolutely unbelievably unbeatable. That means that you’ve set up the character that way. You can either go with it and have that continue, or you can pull up someone that beats the snot out of poor Joe and throw your reader off. Both are good options, it just depends on when you have to do it. If you’re still building a character up to be awesome, don’t let him be a failure, but if it’s pretty much set in stone that he’s awesome—drop it down on him. Whether it be a bad wound or death, it doesn’t matter—drop it. The key to any of that is knowing what you’ve made the reader expect. As for the desire, you really don’t have a choice. Your job as a writer is to give the readers what they want, even if they don’t know they want it. That doesn’t mean give them what they expect, but what they want. In the battle of Hogwarts (I’m telling you, I’m dissecting this battle.), we get what we want. Molly, after six books, kicks ass against Bellatrix Lestrange. Finally! We know why she’s in the damn Order of the Phoenix! That’s what we want. We wanted to see why almost everyone was in the Order of the Phoenix, and by the end of that battle we knew. We saw Flitwick get his dueling magic on, Mcgonagall gets to be absolutely incredible, and even Trelawney proves that she deserves respect by throwing her crystal balls at Death Eaters. We want to see all of this, whether we know it or not.

The final piece of the action section is the dialogue. You can take it or leave it, but you’d do better to take it. People actually talk in combat, whether it be to the opponent, their allies, and themselves. They talk. Now, try to avoid any of those really cheesy sounding lines that pop up in bad action movies. If they’re taking the time to talk in battle it must be powerful. At the risk of sounding repetitive, let’s go back to Molly and Bellatrix. Bellatrix attacks Ginny and there’s Mrs. Weasley with one of my favorite lines in that whole series, “Not my daughter, you bitch!” It’s character defining, powerful, memorable, and short. Short is good, unless you can fit some rug-chewing in there effectively (for those of you wondering, rug-chewing is not related to carpet-munching. It’s more commonly called “monologuing”, but I use rug-chewing.). If you can get that rug-chewing in, make it work. If you can get that mix right between actions, expectation, desire, and dialogue, then the battle’s half over. I think that was another pun. Sweet.

If you’ve been following along, you know that the climax of the battle comes next. This can be the game-changing move or the confrontation between the king of death and Joe. The important thing is that this needs to be what everything led up to from that inciting event of this battle. In “Darkenheight”, the climax of the battle of Faerine is when the drackans come down to fight with the humans and the Faerine. In the battle of Hogwarts, the climax is, of course, the showdown between Harry and Voldy. In “A Breach in the Watershed”, the climax of the battle of Taywick Pass is the murder of Prince Garamis. It’s always going to be one event. You can have something really powerful leading to the climax, but the climax is one event. That’s it, so make sure you hit it hard and fast.

After the climax comes something much more familiar to write. When you’re winding down, your battle writing lulls into fodder you can probably deal with—we all can. We have the wrap-up. People are on cots, we see the dead in totality, people wash the blood off in the river. It’s a definite battle aftermath, but it’s aftermath. Take some time, breathe, and let your characters breathe—they deserve it. This is the falling action. Don’t introduce any assassins or anything—let it fall until the time comes that it has to level back out to the rest of the book. Otherwise, you write depressing, morbid things and everyone will hate you except for depressing, morbid people. If that’s your key audience, then whatever.

Now, this is an afterthought because it’s not a major part. It really can be left out of a battle to really pump up the drama, but throwing humor in can help increase the drama around it. It only needs to be one line (I’ve always wanted to use that spell.) or a situation that simply is funny. Of course, you have to know how to use this. If you use too much humor, it’ll kill your battle scene. Use it wisely, padawan.

Voss

Camp NaNoWriMo Update--Mid-Month

For those that don't know, I'm taking part in the inaugural run of Camp NaNoWriMo this month. What that means is that, yes, I'm writing another novel. Okay, technically you write a novella in NaNo events, but I digress.

Any who, for those that have never taken part in this fest of festiness, this won't mean much at first--for those that have:

It's the first day of Week Three.

Okay, I'm being arcane now. Let me cut to the chase.

Week two is the test of whether you can do this or not. Week two is HELL. Week two is that awkward transitional phase between exposition and real, solid plot, story, and character--and we all knwo how much transitions suck.

Now it's over, though, and it has a strange efect. Sometime soon, you see, the magical curse of week two is going to lift--just going to up and leave--any of the worthy that survived week two. The dog is going to suddenly become house-trained, the washer will magically fix, your mother-in-law will misplace your phone number, and that shipment of writing fairies will come in with extra thrown in to make up for late delivery.

All inall, things start to line up and you can write--even if you're way behind, you can get it written still. For me, it all came in yesterday--the final day of week two. I pulled 3,000 words that day and got totally caught up (and ahead) for the next day. And it just didn't seem that hard. I won't say I know my entire plot yet, but the most important thing is to be up on your words.

There's a sort of magic in the air with week three, and if my fellow campers aren't feeling it--you will.

Looking towards 25,000,
Voss

Romance Writer's Handbook

Everyone that writes loves to find resources of some kind--and a lot of times that's a book on writing. Anyone that finds and read these books usually has a favorite, too. A lot of people swear by "The Elements of Style" by Strunk and White. My favorite is "Writing Science Fiction and Fantasy" by Orson Scott Card (I might have the title a little off, but by God I know where to find it in my library!).

Everyone also has a real favorite. It's that one that you may or may not ever share with anyone, either because you want to hog the glory of the book all to yourself, or you're slightly embarrassed to admit that it is your favorite. Either way, I'm coming clean about it here and now.

Just let me stand up.

*Ahem* Hello, my name's Voss Foster, and I'm in love with "The Romance Writer's Handbook" by Rebecca Vinyard.

You're surprised, right? You should be. Okay, so I have romance threads in everything...every time...almost without fail...but that doesn't mean anything!

In honesty, the reason I love Vinyard's book is the fact that it's not just for romance. It has a bit for everything. From brilliant plotting advice to publishing tips and, yes, romance specific bits--what do you expect, it's a book on how to write romance novels for Christ's sake.

Now, I can't actually post any of her brilliance here for copyright purposes, but I can send you this lovely link to the site she started for romance writer's back when the internet was still run on brontosaurus oil and slave labor. I don't think it's quite as brilliant as "The Romance Writer's Handbook", but then again I don't really think anything is--at least nothing in the writing aid vein of books, articles, websites, and magazines out there.

Okay, I'll share a bit of wisdom I got from it...but just a few words.

"You can fix it."

I agree with the book--writer's need that phrase places across their homes. Painted on murals above their computers. Tattooed on their inner eyelids in glow-in-the-dark ink so they can read it every night before they go to bed. As an emergency fixer to pull out when writing starts to overwhelm.

"You can fix it."

I'll let you discover the rest of this fabulosity on your own--and give you a Purchase Link to get it from Amazon.com. Right now, you can get it for under three bucks a copy, so what's stopping you, really? Not that I have any room to talk...I haven't bought my own copy yet either...bad writer, bad!

Sadly I have to go.

"Parting is such sweet sorrow that I shall say goodnight 'til it be 'morrow."

Peace,
Voss

Crippled

When you're writing, you'll end up finding yourself, at some point, in the midst of a storm of crippling. While that sounds like a D & D spell, it's not. It's that point when things start to pile on. You feel cut off fromt he world. You start over-analyzing things. You realize that no one is paying you money for your writing, that you live in the middle of a cultural wasteland, that your social life is dying becuase you need to write...but you aren't writing.

You eventually find things to do besides writing. It's not the same as really needing that break--which you sometimes do--it's just a matter of not wanting to. You feel like you've wasted all this time, so you hold a party, you get on and write a blog post, you take a little spray bottle of chemicals to combat the baby roaches encroaching on your home and watch them explode. Anythng but writing!

I don't have a solution for it. I wish I could give you some awesome secret about handling it so you can keep writing, but I can't because I don't know one. You have to find your own way. I blog about it, whine, complain, et cetera until I just have to write. Some people I know oil down hairless dogs and belly dance--probably other things to, but doesn't that just sound better?--or go out and kr@zioke (her word) while she dances with her gay guy. You just have to do something to get it going.

Hoping to push out the last little bit of nasty not writing-ness,
Voss