DECEMBER 4, 2008

So at last, over a year from its completion, THE CROWN is officially published and in stores.  I wrote it while feeling tired and discouraged about writing, yet I wrote it from love of my characters Lea and Shadrael.  I think now that my state of mind was perfect at the time – not pleasant, but perfect – for dealing with Shadrael’s weary cynicism and disillusionment.  Everything does work for a reason, folks.

There was so much about Shadrael that I wanted to deal with in the book, yet had to remove because of length limitations.  (My natural tendency is to write long, and it’s always a struggle for me to pull my stories down into a narrow slice of events.)  Even so, I compressed him into the chapters he was allotted and tried to redeem him in a credible way, given those restrictions.  And Lea … did she grow as a character?  Did she stay likable or did she become a contrived character?  I don’t know yet.  After a year away from her, I still lack enough distance to be able to judge.

Already readers are asking if there will be more books about these characters.  I am heartened by that, even if I can’t answer the question at present.

We’ll see.

Years ago, when I wrote REIGN OF SHADOWS, SHADOW WAR, and REALM OF LIGHT, I thought Lea was finished.  Yet a reader named Christi Schemm pleaded with me to bring her back and write a story about her.  And I did.  In the writing business you never know what might happen.

NOVEMBER 11, 2008

There are days when a writer just procrastinates.  You can pretend that you really are going to be a professional by planting your derriere in your Aeron chair and hitting that keyboard at 90 wpm proficiency … but it doesn’t happen.  Why?

Author Steven Pressfield calls it Resistance.  My writing teacher, Jack Bickham, called it lazy unprofessionalism.  I call it the muse blahs.  You know, you don’t feel inspired … you don’t feel professional … you no longer like your characters or your plot or your setting … you wonder why you ever signed a contract … your deadline looms overhead, bigger than ever.  So you check the Internet, check your emails and your eBay auctions, and Google things you don’t really want to know.  Anything but writing.

Being a professional novelist, I know how to get around the muse blahs and not let them keep me from meeting my daily page quota. 

1. 1. You don’t give in.
2. 2. You look at the scene you’re supposed to be writing and figure out why it’s boring, because chances are it is.
3. 3. You play the “what if” plotting game and pick something wild and crazy that will really upset what your protagonist is trying to do at this point in the story.
4. 4. You throw it in and see if doing so makes you laugh or sit up straight in your chair and start typing.
5. 5. Is your character in big trouble now?  Really big trouble?  As in a near-cataclysmic mess that will have dire consequences in several chapters to come?

GOOD!

Muse blahs beaten back for another day.

NOVEMBER 6, 2008

I run a bit behind sometimes when it comes to news.  So this morning when I discovered that novelist Michael Crichton has died from cancer, I was shocked and saddened.

I never met Mr. Crichton except through his books and films.  Even so, I admired his ability to cook up high-concept ideas.  I envied his success and income.  I aspired to his willingness to run creative risks through the course of a career.

Age 66 is too young for a writer to die, a writer who started out studying the hard sciences yet had the courage to spin those interests around and make a creative life for himself.  Who do we look to now to think up those amazing, enormous scenarios for us?  Who will give us something more eye popping and jaw dropping than JURASSIC PARK?  Who will make us think about the warnings of science gone wrong while throwing dangerous adventure our way?

We’ve lost out, people.  Yet let’s be grateful for the day he decided to become a writer instead of a doctor.  He gave us a lot of fun, didn’t he?

NOVEMBER 5, 2008

Exciting stuff happening in November.  My fantasy novel THE CROWN is due out just after Thanksgiving. The book video for THE CROWN just went live this week on my Web site.  The result is a bit ecclesiastical because of all the stained-glass images, but I think it suits the story’s redemptive theme, even if I didn’t have any kind of secret religious agenda when I wrote the book.

Creating slideshows for book trailers is a fairly new world for me, a new media that I first entered last year for my book, THE PEARLS.  This time, I wanted to branch out a bit and try something slightly different than before.  I wanted people in the shots instead of simple landscapes, but everything we found was too “realistic” to fit the fantasy element I wanted to evoke.  Until we hit on the stained glass idea.

While my designer was digging up the images – and she had to sort through a lot of them before I was satisfied – I worked on choosing the music and writing the captions.  It’s not easy boiling a 100,000-word novel down to a few sentences that are going to somehow capture the plot.  Shrinking an exciting arrangement of story events, a cast of dynamic characters, and an empire teetering on the edge of civil war down to a handful of captions runs the risk of flattening it too much.  But that’s the new world of technology.  We’ll see whether I’ve intrigued people enough to look at the book, or not. 

NOVEMBER 4, 2008

When I was learning how to write dialogue, I dug around for all the advice I could find.  One suggestion that I came across again and again was go listen to or record conversations of real people.  I suppose the idea behind this was to train me to write dialogue the way real people actually hold conversations.

So I carried my old tape recorder around and afterward listened to hissing tape filled with grunts, aimless chatter, people interrupting and talking over each other, social chitchat, rambling, patches of silence, or an occasional individual hogging the entire conversation so that no one else got a word in at all.

And I was baffled, because I couldn’t see how to make any of that fit into my stories.  (Plus I couldn’t begin to figure out how to punctuate it.)  After a while, I ditched the tape recorder and tried something else.

Years and many words later, I figured out what the point of that exercise was.

We eavesdrop on real conversations in order to learn the rhythm and quickness of how people speak.  Real people don’t talk to each other in perfect oratory, and neither should my characters.  Real people do interrupt each other, despite what their mothers taught them.  They do get excited and break into each other’s sentences.  They do hesitate or grunt or ramble.

And when I write fiction, my characters need to get into arguments or have passionate opinions that provoke them into interrupting.  My characters should have distinct ways of speaking, so that readers can recognize them when they’re on the page.  (And remember them when they aren’t.)  And occasionally my characters – at least one, anyway – should grunt with a huh or un huh.  It’s even okay if my characters sometimes hesitate with uh or er or well now.

With writing fiction, it’s always simple … once you know how.

NOVEMBER 1, 2008

Welcome to my blog on writing. I hope to share some of my knowledge of the writing craft with you, in the hope that you'll find suggestions or tips that will open new doors of creativity inside your imagination. If you're drawn to write stories, it's because you have innate talent. You have to believe in that talent, that gift, in whatever measure it's given to you, and you have to trust it.

Depending on how much talent we possess, we can either sail right on to completing stories and getting them to readers, or we may have to struggle along, stuck with problematic plots, wooden characters, hokey dialogue, uncontrolled viewpoint, and plots that just won't pull together for a rousing finish.

So here we go ... I haven't decided whether I'm going to be organized and orderly with this or just throw topics at you at random. If you don't find something that's useful the first time you drop by, please check back from time to time.

Deborah

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