Blog Tour + Giveaways!

Hi there! Just a quick reminder that while I've been off busy spawning a minion:


...the giveaways are still active, regardless of what they might say in-post. See here and here, and please! Encourage people to enter! Share and spread the word!

Also, belatedly, I am part of a blog tour! Random Writing Rants is a week-ish long blog hop that we are actually nearly at the end of (sigh), but it's never too late to join the fun! My post, called "When Less is More", will be up HERE TOMORROW.

Check out the rest of the contributors, starting here with Chrystalla Thoma's rant about hopping :)

9 Febr: A. Merc Rustad – On Voice

10 Febr: Marie Dees – Building a Novel from Nothing

11 Febr: Krista D. Ball – Avoiding the Heroine Stupid Juice

12 Febr: Marion Sipe – Rant on Stereotypes, Cliches and Tropes

13 Febr: Ada Hoffmann – On Blundering

14 Febr: Amy Laurens – When Less is More

Writerly Advice #4: Be A Reader

In my previous 'Writerly Advice' posts I've mostly concentrated on advice that is often handed out without thought, and needs debunking. Today, by contrast, I'm going to focus on the positives: advice that is useful, positive, and warranted. Which is:

If you want to be a writer, you'd better be a reader.

Or any variation with similar intent.

I hope that most of you will find this piece of advice pretty self explanatory; in any business, to succeed, you have to know the business, and for a writer that means not only knowing how to market your book and find and agent and so on and so forth, it means knowing how to write, and knowing what's been written. We read to learn as well as to enjoy, to absorb the rhythm of Story.

Lots of people read; we'd hope so, or all us writers would be out of a job. But, to borrow a phrase from Holly Lisle, as writers, we read the opposite way around to most people.

Most people read fiction for fun, and if they want to learn something, they turn to non-fiction. As writers, we can, of course, read like 'normal' people; you'd hope we could find fiction fun, otherwise why the heck are we writing? And of course we learn things from non-fiction, too.

But here's the thing: we also read backwards. We read fiction with our writer brains engaged, observing the methods of the author. We examine the way the plot hangs together, the way the characters are developed, the particular phrases and rhythms that are employed, and how they're employed, and what effect that has on us. Maybe we don't do this all the time, but I have noticed one thing - writers are often a lot more specific about why they don't like a book than non-writers :D Whether you admit it or not, you're paying attention to this stuff when you read fiction.

In contrast, many writers read non-fiction for 'fun'. Sure, some of the stuff we read is pretty dry and can hardly be classed as exciting or thrilling stuff, but ultimately the reason why we read so much of it is to fill up our ideas tanks, to spark off things in our brains that will thrill us, to find those serendipitous phrases and ideas that connect with something in a current or future work and create flares of excitement and joy.

If you don't read non-fiction, and you plan to be serious about this whole writing thing, you need to ask yourself why not. Non-fiction is an insanely broad category, and if your protest is that you 'don't like' non-fiction, then I thumb my nose at you. All you mean is that you haven't read widely enough to find out what you're interested in. And if you're not reading non-fiction, where is the depth in your writing coming from? Where are your ideas coming from? Sure, from life, and also from the fiction you read - but why not add non-fic to the mix as well? Those of us that write spec fic particularly can find non-fiction to be a veritable mine-field of ideas and inspiration for world building, plot twists, concepts, characters...

My fav non-fic books are the DK series that include Earth, Ocean, Human and Animal (the four I have). The full-colour, glossy illustrations are the epitome of shiny :D I also love books on animal psychology, on human relationships (so useful for figuring out what makes characters really tick, and also aiding in writing realistic characters of the opposite genre), and on anything to do with food :D

So tell me: Do you read non-fic? How often? Do you find it a source of inspiration or do you just find it dull? Do you have favourite topics? Tell me, tell me! :D

Writerly Advice #3: Write What You Know

Raise your hand if you've ever heard this piece of advice.

Raise your hand if you've ever been bludgeoned by this piece of advice.

I have.

I write fantasy, right, which pretty much means I don't write about stuff I've experienced. All my worldbuilding, my characters, my magic systems... It's all created out of my head.

But how can you write it if you haven't experienced it? I don't know about you, but I've certainly never been to another world, or disarmed someone by magic (or by non-magical means, come to think about it), or ridden a unicorn, or been a secret assassin.

So how do I write about these things?

I used to resent my creative writing professor at university for saying this about my shorts. I didn't want to write what I knew. If I knew it already, why would I want to write it? Writing is about discovery and invention, after all.

But here's the thing: the teacher was actually right. (shock, horror) He just didn't articulate it in a way that I could understand at the time. There's a challenge implicit in the phrase 'Write what you know", and we'll get to that, but even more simply, my work at the time wasn't what I knew and so it was melodramatic and unreal. I think this also has a bit to do with my 'life stage' at the time; teenagers do tend towards the melodramatic, after all ;)

Anyway, this is what he meant to say:

"It isn't about writing only in the here-and-now, because that's all you've experienced; it isn't about never writing about a married character if you're single, or only writing about your own gender, or never writing fantasy and science fiction (heaven forbid!!!); it's about letting your experiences form the basis of what you write, of writing from your own pain, your own suffering, extrapolating from things you've actually felt and translating them into similar situations, even if the characters are inhuman or the setting isn't Earth.

It's what you know, stretched further, deeper, broader, applied to the whole range of human experience. It's about knowing which bits of what you've experienced are part of the human condition, which bits resonate; it's about making sure your work rings true."

It's honesty.

And that implicit challenge? Well, this is how the phrase really ought to go:

Write what you know - and know more.

Writerly Advice #2: Show, Don't Tell - or, Passive Writing

So, this is what I get when a) I'm no good at sticking to a rigorous blogging schedule, b) my schedule is interrupted by exams, and c) I try to write more than one series of articles at a time: there ends up being a looooong gap between articles in the series. Hopefully this doesn't drive anyone other than myself insane, and since I'm pretty much used to being insane, All Shall Be Well. B-)

If, like me, you're just a little bit compulsive and would like to recollect what I had to say in the first Writerly Advice article, click here. If not, keep reading. Of course, the third alternative is 'run away and do something Productive', but let's ignore that one for now...

'Show, don't tell.'

I don't know about you, but this has to just about top the charts for Most Common Piece of Advice Spouted Without Ever Being Defined. I'm going to work on that today - in a bit. Bear with me while I meander my way to my point ;)

So, I see this advice given to beginner writers more than just about anything else. Does this make it the most common mistake, if people feel such an overwhelming need to point it out? I have no evidence either way, but honestly - at least in the early stages of a writer's career -
I suspect so. Why is that?

Quite randomly, and without recalling how I managed to do it, I've been subscribed to this cheery little newsletter for some months now. Every now and than it pops up in my inbox, I skim it, and delete it without too much ado. It's called Seven Steps (...), and it's basically advertising for a program by the same name that's sold as a resource for teachers teaching creative writing to primary school students.

Why am I telling you this? Because it highlights one important factor for me: Telling is what beginner writers (of all ages, but especially young children) do. The newsletter focusses on ways to get children to move beyond simple telling, and move into the realms of showing - the realms of storytelling.

Let's take a look at my own first stories, which I posted yesterday for your amusement :) Aside from the myriad other problems with this story, the main thing to notice is its brevity - and it's brief because it's 99% tell.

Here's a little secret, and I believe from personal experience that it's why most children tell their stories rather than showing them: showing takes longer.

And here's another little secret, based on personal experience: people are lazy.

At 2am, when you're struggling with that awful little story that you swore black and blue you'd finish tonight before you went to bed, when you sense that the end is very nearly in sight and you just want it to be over and finished and have the satisfaction of slamming shut the notebook or throwing down the keyboard and screaming 'It's done!', it can get very tempting to resort to telling. Because it's quicker, remember? You get to the same destination in far less words, and therefore less time. (It's also tempting to do this at less extreme times than 2am, but for now I'll fantasise that we're all Good Little Writers who only resort to extreme measures like telling in the most dire of circumstances.)

So why is this such a bad thing? It gets the draft done, right?

Right. So long as you remember in editing that telling is often the kiss of death for the reader's attention span. Telliness can kill an otherwise excellent story and make it die a long and boring death while the reader writhes on the ground in pain.... Er, no, whoops. That's zombies O:)

(By the way, if you're beginning to get the impression from my posts that a lot of things can kill stories - sorry, you're absolutely correct. Why else do you think everyone who ever dreamed of writing a book - and every book that was ever written - haven't succeeded?)

Okay, we know telling is Evil and is to be Avoided At All Costs. We know it's okay in first drafts, because let's face it, it gets the dang thing done, but that it must be Hunted Down and Destroyed in edits. But... uh, what is it?

What does showing look like, if it isn't telling? Merc has a great article on this exact topic right here, but I'm going to treat you all with my own explanation ;) Oh stop groaning, I can hear you from here \:|

Let's take this fabulous little paragraph from my Elnac story:

At last they were off and travelling to the falls. They had to go around the Beaver’s pond, then to the big pond which the waterfall ran into. There, under the waterfall in the cavern were their friends.

This paragraph is almost entirely tell, because instead of letting us as the reader experience the events of the story, it just summarises them for us. It reads like an outline, not like a story. That's characteristic of telling: if it feels like the story is just skimming over things and not letting you actually envisage them, it's a pretty big clue that it might be telling. So, let's try a quick rewrite, keeping it short for the sake of space and trying to preserve the childlike tone.

At last William was ready.
"Finally," said Danny.
William ignored him and strode outside. Danny grabbed his scarf and raced to keep up - William's legs were a lot longer than his and he had to practically run.
The path sloped gently up to the pond made by the Beaver's dam, and Danny didn't mind too much that he had to run. The air was fresh and clean, just like after rain, and the sun shone warm and bright. Birds twittered in the trees, and before long his nose was twitching at the smell of woodsmoke.

I'm going to leave it there, but you see the point. I've just turned one and half sentences into four paragraphs - and I could keep going. Actually, I could keep going, and going, and going, and going...

Which brings up another important point: you can't - and shouldn't - show everything. This relates both to pace and significance. I've covered pace in the last story elements article, but as a quick refresher in faster paced sections you want to be moving quicker, so you can afford to leave out a bit of that description, and by contrast you can slow the pace down by expanding the amount of detail that you show. Significance is about which details need to be told in order for the story to advance and feel real, and which you can leave to the reader's imagination. More on that another time.

As one final note (yes, breath a sigh of relief, we're nearly done), I'll draw your attention back to my first Writerly Advice article. I left you with a promise to discuss passive writing - and in a round about way, I've done just that. 'Was', that poor little auxiliary that cops so much flak, may not always indicate passive voice, but it sure as heck indicates passive writing with a fair degree of accuracy.

Hang on, wait a moment! I hear you cry. We're talking about showing, here, not passive writing!

I smile.

My dears, what is telling if not passive writing, and showing if not active? And here's another little clue about how this all fits together - it's pretty difficult to 'show' and use 'was'.

My First Stories

Today's post is a bit of preparation for tomorrow's post. I want to discuss that old writer's axiom, 'show, don't tell', and needed an example. I didn't want to clog up the main post with the example, so here it is, a whole day early, ready for your perusal ;) :)


I wrote these in year 3, two of them in the ‘series’. Unfortunately I've lost the first 3 pages of the first. William & Danny are a pair of dogs from an illustrated book of short animal stories that was in the school library. No prizes for guessing what the inspiration for the plot is ;)
The exact spelling and idiosyncratic conventions regarding spacing, commas and the like are preserved. I apologise for that in advance ;)


'Book' 1: Danny and William

It had sort of looked like a horse, only it had a horn on it’s forehead and much to it’s tail and mane were much too long.
Here,” replyed the Unicorn.
“Hmmmm…” thought Danny and then added aloud, “I’ve never seen a unicorn before. What’s your name?”
“Sky Dancer,” said the Unicorn.
“That’s a nice name,” said William who hadn’t been involved in the conversation for ages.
“Our names aren’t nearly as nice!” put in Danny.
“What are your names? You know mine and I would like to know yours please,” said Sky Dancer.
“Mine is William and this is Danny,” answered William, “Will and Dan for short.”

As time passed, Danny and William got to know the quite well. In fact, it soon seemed as if they had been in Eldnac since they were born!

Once they came back to our world (by accident in London) and found, that, however long they were in Eldnac for no time had gone passed in London (or the rest of the world too, for that matter).


'Book' 2: Eldnac

Once there was a little dog who lived in Eldnac.His name was Danny and he was a Dachshund.
As you know from the last book, his best friend was William the Great Dane.
By now they had been in Eldnac for a long time andhad made lots of friends.
This particular day they had arranged to go and explore the area above the waterfalls. They were to go with Glenstorm the Centaur, Mr. Tummunus the Faun, Trufflehunter the Badger and quite a number of others. They were to meet each other at the waterfalls.
“Come on William ,” pleaded Danny for the tenth time. “I’m coming, I’m coming,”replied William again for the tenth time.
At last they were off and travelling to the falls. They had to go around the Beaver’s pond, then to the big pond which the waterfall ran into. There, under the waterfall in the cavern were their friends.
Finally they were off exploring above the falls.
First they went through a forest. It was dense and green and there were lots of strange animals, that they had never seen before ( or in Danny’s and William’s case, thought they had never seen before).
Some of the animals included:
Scarlet Mawcaw
Panther
Monkey
Suddenly they were out of the jungle and on a sandy beach. There was a big oat on the beach. Danny climbed on board, followed by the others.
After about 2 hours of sailing, they spotted land. After about 10 minutes, landed on the beach of the land.
They had explored everything on the island except for the middle of the island. Suddenly Danny yelled out, “hey you guys, some and see what I’ve found!” “A meadow!” “It’s beautiful!” someone else yelled.
After that, when they were in Eldnac for a long time after that, they (the two dogs) were known as Danny the Discoverer and William the Adventurous.

THE END

PS If you realised that Eldnac is Candle spelled backwards, congratulations and fifty points for you ;) You can blame my Dad for that one :D

Writerly Advice #1: Passivity and 'Was'

One of the most common pieces of critism I see more advanced writers offering newer writers is 'This writing is passive', or equivalents thereof. And one of the commonest phrasings of said critism is: This is passive voice.

STOP. RIGHT. THERE.

This is something I see often, coming from newbies and more experienced writers - and 9 times out of 10, it's WRONG.

Why?

Because 'passive voice' is a grammatical construction, with an actual, concrete definition. It's not a label you can randomly stick on any passage that doesn't grip you.

So what exactly is it? Prepare yourself for a quick grammar lesson. Prepared? Good.

In any language you have two primary categories of words, nouns and verbs. If you're reading this and you're a writer, I jolly well hope you know what those are. But just in case...

Nouns are 'things', though languages like English (the slut of the language world) are a bit hazy on the exact amount of 'thingness' necessary; witness our category of 'abstract nouns', 'things' like love, hate, freedom, happiness...

Verbs are 'doing words'. Actions. Words like jump, run, swim, sashay...

Now, each of these categories (nouns and verbs) can be inflected for a variety of different things, and the things you can inflect them for depends on the language you're speaking. For today, I'll keep it simple and stick to English and, because we're theoretically talking about passivity, to verbs :)

Verbs can be inflected for tense (past, present, future), aspect (perfect, imperfect, progressive) and voice (active, passive). It's been a while since I did this at uni, so if I've missed something that English verbs can inflect for, don't shoot me ;) (Oh, number and person!)

So. Verbs can inflect amongst other things for passive voice. What does this actually mean?

It means this. In every sentence (in English, in simple terms, bear with me here... O:)) you have at the very least a subject (which is a noun) and a verb (which, oddly, is a verb). Eg:

Sarah runs. --> 'Sarah' is the subject noun, and 'runs' is the verb.

You can also have slightly more complex sentences with a subject noun (S), a verb (V), and an object noun (O). Eg:

Sarah eats food. --> 'Sarah' is the S, 'eats' is the V and 'food' is the O.

These sentences are in active voice. Why? Because the subject noun is the one performing the verb - they are the agent. That's important. Memorise that. Because that's what changes with passive voice.

In passive voice the subject noun doesn't perform the verb; it's the thing the verb is done to - the patient. Example:

The food was eaten by Sarah. --> 'food' is still the patient, the thing being eaten. 'Sarah' is still the agent, the thing doing the eating. BUT 'food' is now the S, and 'Sarah' is now the O. Why? Because I said so.

If that's not a good enough reason, then check out the word order. English is what's known as an SVO language - meaning the sentence structure will always be Subject-Verb-Object. We do that so when we hear or read it, we know who the subject is. Other languages use inflections to show that, so can afford to be free and easy with their word order.

So, that's passive voice. Good clues for its existence are those little helper words in there - 'by' and 'was'.

HOWEVER. And this is a big 'however', because this is where most of the confusion stems from. 'Was' is an indicator of passive voice. Yes? Yes. But not always.

"Avoid all 'was's." "'Was' is passive." Etc. This is something I see a lot. And it's not true. Not all 'was's are indicative of passive voice. There's an easy test for this: if you can stick a 'by Fred' on the end, then it's passive. If you can't, it isn't. Eg:

I was hot. --> I was hot by Fred. Uh, no. Thank you.

The dog was hit. --> The dog was hit by Fred. Sure, if he's nasty enough.

I was told passive voice was something to avoid. --> This one's tricky, because there are two of the little suckers. I was told by Fred? Yep, no problemo. Passive voice was something to avoid by Fred? Nope, sorry. Not today.

So where's all this confusion coming from?

'Was' and its affiliates (be, am, are, is, were etc) may not always be indicative of the passive voice, but it sure as heck can be indicative of passive writing.

What's passive writing? Weeelll... That's a question that is unfortunately much harder to answer. And mostly, it relates to that old axiom, 'Show, don't tell.' So I'm going to be evil and leave discussion of passive writing for another time %-)

The Results Are In...

It appears that majority favour a once-a-week approach. 5-a-week nearly made it there, but not quite.

Honestly, I'd prefer to do more than 1 per week, else all the pipeline articles will take months to see the light of day. But also honestly, I think 5 is going to be too many with all my other commitments, much as I'd like to.

So, from now on, each week you'll get the following from me:

* One article from either Story Elements, Fantasy Elements, Writerly Advice, or any other 'series' I have on the go.
* One Welcome to My Sidebar post, for as long as it takes to get through all my shiny links B-)
* Half a progress report - ie, I'll give you a progress update once every two weeks
* Other miscellania as it occurs to me :)

Which means 2.5 articles per week, plus miscellania. I hope that's amenable to you all :)

Thanks to everyone who voted - I look forward to hearing from you in the comments :)