Tag: writing

Writing Soundtracks

Jon ChaissonLeave a comment

Most of you out there know that, aside from being a writer, I’m an incurable music fan.  Not a day goes by where I’m not listening to some radio station or some new album I downloaded that week.  I laugh at polls that ask if I listen to music more than a few hours a day–it’s more like all day long.

This includes my writing time.  I’m one of those writers who prefers to have some sort of music going while I’m writing.  What I listen to actually boils down to whatever project I happen to be working on.  I’m currently working on Walk in Silence, so the music of choice has been strictly 80s alternative.  For the most part I’ve been listening to the 1st Wave channel on our Sirius XM setup, where Swedish Egil and Dave Kendall have been providing me with tasty retro goodness for the last few months.  This is perfect for this first draft, as I’m not focusing too much on specific albums and songs at this time.  The second draft will focus more on that, so my soundtrack will focus more on my own mp3 collection.

The evening writing sessions down in the Belfry that produced The Phoenix Effect from 1997 to 1999 and the Bridgetown Trilogy from 2000 to 2004 had their own expanding soundtrack; the former contained a high amount of the free cds I got when I worked at HMV, and the later contained many of the titles I bought during my weekly journeys to Newbury Comics back when it was in Amherst.

Was the writing influenced by the music I bought?  Well, yes and no.  I didn’t go out of my way to look for the perfect song that would fit a specific scene, nor was I writing and editing a scene to a specific song in a Miami Vice-like manner.  I’d grown out of that habit a long time ago.  I merely found myself gravitating towards the moods the music created when I listened to them, and used that as a mental anchor when I needed it.

When I was writing a number of scenes that needed personal and emotional tension, I would often throw on Dishwalla’s And You Think You Know What Life’s About.  If it was an epic action scene, it would be Failure’s Fantastic Planet.  Global Communication’s two albums 76:14 and Pentamerous Metamorphosis fit the bill perfectly when I was writing about the world of Trisanda.  Trip-hop like Massive Attack and Sneaker Pimps worked good when I was writing about the seedier areas of Bridgetown.  I also had certain go-to bands whose entire discography worked, like Porcupine Tree.

I always made a conscious effort never to let the music interfere with the story; I tried not to write scenes that lost their energy when the music wasn’t playing.  If anything, the music served as an anchor, giving  me something to focus on, something to aim for.  Failure’s epic album closer “Daylight” served as the audio anchor for the final scene in A Division of Souls–I needed something desperate and angry and with a hint of fear that would mirror what was going on during those final pages, and I think that it paid off.

Now that I’m working on a project that’s specifically about music, I have every reason to listen to whatever I like.  Whatever my next writing project is, will I have the same listening habits during my writing sessions?  Who knows, but I’m pretty sure something will be playing.

On Conlangs in Science Fiction: When Should a Writer Use It?

Jon ChaissonLeave a comment

As you have seen here and here, the Mendaihu Universe has its own constructed language, or conlang. which I’ve chosen to use for the alien Meraladhza race.  Creating this ersatz language was not just a hella nerdy thing to do, but it was a lot of nerdy fun as well.  As noted in that previous blog post, there were two reasons for doing so:

1. To give the aliens their own language, pure and simple.  Once you read Douglas Adams’ The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, as a writer you can’t help but feel super-conscious about aliens being able to speak your native tongue so easily, and sometimes fluently to the point of using localisms, without thinking it’s a cop-out.  It’s a silly worry, as it’s widely accepted in the genre, expected even, for aliens from other worlds to be able to speak your language, or at least to have some sort of translating device.  Thus Adams’ brilliant sendup using the babel fish–it’s a brilliant satire of the old-school science fiction stories where the aliens somehow knew the Queen’s English upon first contact.

2. What if I wanted them to use their language?  In a way, I wanted to play around with the idea that our languages have permeated Anjshé, just as it has permeated ours–which is how a lot of real languages have evolved on Earth, anyway.  This is another reason I chose the aliens to have been among us for at least a few hundred years before the trilogy’s timeline; this would have given time for a bit of cultural bleedover to take place, including language.  The Meraladh would have picked up on various languages, and the Earth humans would have picked up on Anjshé, and both sides would have appropriated a few phrases into their own language at that point.

So if you’ve created a conlang for your novel or your created world, you may need to ask yourself: when is it needed?   In my opinion: when it’s needed within the context of the story.  Think about why you want to use the alien language–I mean, aside from “because it’s cool”, of course.  Give the language a reason for being there.

Say your main character is meeting up with your aliens for the first time, and he or she doesn’t know the language, or doesn’t have a translating device on them.  You could play up the tense moments by having them attempt to converse, never quite sure if they’re being friendly or aggressive.  Some writers have used this as an ongoing plot device, such as CJ Cherryh whenever she has the alien kif speak in her Chanur books.  Even Adams used this idea to amusing effect, having Arthur Dent hear a few moments of the Vogon language before Ford Prefect slams a babel fish into his ear; in the process, we find that the Vogons are not just horrible amoral aliens in general, but their language is so hard on the ears that it has literally caused other aliens to kill themselves rather than listen any further.

Within the trilogy, I use the Anjshé language only where it’s truly needed, specifically when a character is having an extremely emotional or spiritual moment.  It could be passive, such as when Alec Poe spits out the word pashyo (a general exclamation of surprise or frustration) whenever he’s annoyed with the situation.  Or it could be when Caren Johnson humbly apologizes to a Meraladian character with nyhnd’aladh…I am sorry, when she speaks out of turn and inadvertently says something hurtful.  I also use it whenever a character is performing some kind of spiritual action; just before a major ritual begins, I have Denni Johnson speak an entire introduction completely in Anjshé before she repeats it in English.  All these moments not just utilize the conlang to give the moment realism, but I’ve also given it a reason for being there:  as the Meraladians are a very spiritual people, so is their language, which they deem just as important as their actions.

*

As always, one major thing to remember about creating a conlang is to make it pronounceable to the reader.  Unless you’re creating a language that’s deliberately hard on the tongue and/or ears, such as Adams for his Vogons or Cherryh for her kif, you’ll want to voice them out as you create them.  If you can’t pronounce it without tripping over your tongue or your throat seizing on you, chances are good that your reader will have the same problem.

A few other hints to think about:

–Make some ground rules to keep it consistent.  As stated in a previous entry, the most common sounds in Anjshé are “mmh” and “aah”, as they are the sounds of the spirit at rest.  Creating these kinds of rules will show that you put effort into this conlang, that you’re not just making it up as you go along.

–Study up on real foreign languages–or even your own native tongue–as a way to see how and why that culture created its vocabulary.  Anjshé is partly inspired by real languages that create new words through existing shorter words, like some Japanese and German; it’s also partly inspired by the aural flow of Gaelic.  In this process, keep in mind how these new words will affect your characters:  how would they deliver them, and is there a specific reason why they are saying them?

–Create a primer or a glossary that you can always refer to while writing to help you remain consistent in usage as well as in spelling.  You may even want to add these words to your word processor’s dictionary to avoid the auto-correct kicking in.  Additionally, you can use this glossary as part of your novel’s endnotes so the reader can refer to it when necessary.

–Have fun with it and see where it leads you!  Don’t think of it as your boring homework from high school–you’re creating not just new words here, but a new created culture, which you can then integrate into the novel itself.  This  will give your story more depth in the process, even if it’s just a short passage.  Readers will pick up on this and enjoy the reaction it causes.

 

Creating a conlang can be as detailed or as vague as you want and need it to be.  On the whole I believe I only have about seventy or so Anjshé words I created and added to the Bridgetown Trilogy, and used them only when necessary.  I left the door wide open for expansion, of course, and if that is part of your long-term goal, then by all means, go for it!

On Dialogue: Realism, Conversation and How to Get It

Jon ChaissonLeave a comment

I admit, I love writing dialogue.  To me, that’s where the characters really blossom and show their true colors, even if they’re speaking evasively.  They can’t help but reveal parts of themselves.  I actually enjoy passages in books where there’s a heavy conversation going on.  If it’s done well, it’s like the story has just decided to shift gears and rev the engine a little, show off a bit, and lets us see how characters interact.  And if it’s done really well, the writer can even get away with a bit of exposition while they’re at it.

It does take practice to write good dialogue, though.  You have to be a good listener of course, but you also need to be able to know what you’re listening for.  For example:

1.  You don’t want them to sound like you.

I fell prey to this quite often when I was starting out.  All my characters sounded like townies from central Massachusetts, quick with a smartass remark or a localism, generally friendly to everyone, and so on.  I grew out of that when I learned how to create unique characters.  I kind of cheated on this while writing True Faith, basing many characters off of real actors and actresses of the time.  One character was based on Denis Leary, so he was often abrasive and unafraid to say questionable things; another on Christian Slater’s Heathers character so he often sounded slimy and untrustworthy. That was the only project where I went out of my way to create a cast list like that, but it definitely made me listen closer to actual conversation.

2. Don’t just listen to the words.

That was also in 1995, the year I worked at a theater chain, so I was able to watch pretty much all the blockbusters that year for free, and that’s where I really started focusing on dialogue.  Movies can often be a great study guide.  You don’t always need to watch the classics repeatedly like I did in college; pick out your favorite movies and study them.  And don’t just listen to the words; listen to the pacing, the delivery, the intent.  Listen to the way someone evades answering a question, or the reason why they’ve raised their voice.  They’re not just throwing words at us, there’s meaning behind them.  Dialogue can help drive the story just as well as prose can; find out how your characters can do that for you.

3. Be realistic, but not too realistic.

One of the most irritating things I’ve seen over the last decade or so is the literal quote in news stories.  Say you’re reading coverage about a congressman explaining why they voted as they did; what we’d like to see is an easy-to-read quote: “We deliberated long and hard on this issue, and to tell the truth, we almost couldn’t make it pass…but we were relieved when it did.”

But what we’ll sometimes get in the coverage is this:  “We, uh. We deliberated long and hard, you know, on this, the issue.  We–to tell the truth, I’ll say this, we almost couldn’t–it nearly didn’t pass.  But we were relieved when it, when it did.”

Sure, if you want to quote a person exactly and without edits, by all means, go right ahead.  I understand that you may be doing so to avoid any possible misquotation.  But as you can see from the previous paragraph, it’s hard as hell to read.  Your brain gets impatient because you already know what they’re going to say before they said it, and you lose interest before you’re even done.

Some writers can get away with that kind of dialogue, especially in film, and depending on your tastes, it works or it doesn’t.  It really does depend on the story, because the dialogue needs to flow just as smoothly as the prose does.

Let’s highlight that: the dialogue needs to flow just as smoothly as the prose does.

The reason for this is that, more than anything else, you’re telling a story, and nothing takes you out of a story quicker than a passage that feels desperately out of place, yes?  It can be tricky sometimes, especially if you’re writing jerky dialogue on purpose (say, the character has a stutter or is too nervous around others), but at the same time, it needs to be able to sustain the interest.

Of course, there’s always the caveat: if the dialogue is being used as a plot device–say, the character says something shocking and unexpected–if you can pull it off, go for it.

That said, dialogue can be just as tricky as prose, but at the same time, it can be a lot of fun.  Experiment with it, figure out how it best works for you and your stories.

*    *    *

Here’s a few of my personal exercises on learning how to write dialogue:

1.  Watch movies and certain television shows.  I’ve already talked about movies, but some tv shows work too.  I’m talking about mysteries, dramas, finite series; shows that not just tell a half-hour or hour long story, but have an arc that ties the whole season or series together.  Listen to how the characters speak to each other over the course of the series.  Does their friendship deteriorate or grow stronger?  Why are they growing nervous around them when they speak?

2. Try writing a short story with nothing but dialogue–no dialogue tags, no description, nothing, just the characters speaking.  Trust me, it can work.  I tried it a few times for my daily words exercise some time ago and posted an example at my LiveJournal, and I had a hell of a fun time writing it.  By limiting the extremities, I forced myself to tell the story through what the two characters were saying.  A few hints at the setting, who they were, what kind of society they lived in, just by having them talk to each other.  It’s not nearly as hard as you think–in fact, it was a hell of a lot of fun to do, and well worth trying.

3. Real life listening.  My wife and I do a lot of walking and taking the bus around our city, and we both have a habit of catching snippets of other peoples’ conversations.  We’re not spying or being rude; we’re simply catching some of what they say to their friends as they pass by.  We’ve heard all sorts of great gems from tourists and locals alike, especially if they’re heard out of context.  Not only are they great for story prompts, they may influence how you see the characters speaking such things.

Fly-By: Coming Soon

Jon Chaisson1 Comment

Hey there!  Sorry to keep you all waiting for new entries here at Welcome to Bridgetown…I’ve been busy with a number of things both personal and otherwise, so I haven’t had the time to sit down and do some serious writing about the Mendaihu Universe, or about writing in general.

That said, after the Easter holiday, I plan on getting back on the high horse and posting new entries here and at Walk in Silence as well.  Here’s a few offerings I have in store:

–On Spiritualism: the One of All Sacred and other deities in the Mendaihu Universe

–On Language in the Mendaihu Universe:  speaking and innerspeak

–On Faith in the Mendaihu Universe: the Personal and the Religious

–On Dialogue:  Realism versus conversation

–On Conlangs in Fiction: When should a writer use it?

 

Stay tuned! 🙂

On Writing: Letting Ideas Percolate

Jon ChaissonLeave a comment

I’ll be truthful–the Mendaihu Universe has been percolating in my brain for at least twenty years this past winter.

Twenty years. Isn’t that a bit long for me to be sitting on these novels? Shouldn’t they have all been written, published and made into movies by now? Shouldn’t I already be working on the next trilogy in the universe? Well, in a perfect world–yes, of course! And with that, I’d have some nice cash in the bank as well. This, however, is not that perfect world. There are reasons it’s taken me so long to get those beginning scraps of ideas into the shape they’re in now. For one, back in winter 1993-94, I only had the gung-ho to write them but the barest of plots. For another, I had to do more homework in the genre, learn what makes a good SF/F novel that people would enjoy.

But a very large portion of it was the fact that I had to learn how to write in the first place.

I’d been toying with writing science fiction during most of fall 1993, just after I’d graduated college. There were a few pieces of inspiration: Akira, the Gall Force OVAs, other SF/F-themed anime, Orson Scott Card’s How to Write Science Fiction & Fantasy and Ray Bradbury’s Zen in the Art of Writing. And there was my music collection as well, to inspire me and keep me company.

The first few ideas popped up most likely that December–I’d finally given up on trying to resurrect one of my earlier novel ideas, and scrapped nearly everything except a single idea: an underground gang who broke the all the rules, but for the right reasons. From there I played around with a few tropes: a multi-planetary setting (created while doing laundry one afternoon on Charles Street), a giant sprawling city (part of my lifelong compulsive habit of map drawing), cyberterrorism (Hi, CompuServe and AOL! Glad to have you around!), politics (Clinton had just entered office) and so on. I hadn’t quite latched onto cyberpunk yet, though I had read a bit of Gibson by then, and within a few years we’d get a short but interesting wave of internet-themed movies (The Net, Hackers, Strange Days, and Johnny Mnemonic for example) that would add fuel to this idea. I was pretty much open to anything at that point.

A number of months later I was writing the first attempt, True Faith. [To spare you the story some of you already know, here’s the short version: TF was an extension of the “Vigil” underground gang idea with all the other inspirations I noted above, plus a twist: I added a bit of spiritual enlightenment, inspired by my then-recent foray into Wicca. It was co-written with my then-girlfriend Diana; it was mostly my idea and my writing, but she came up with a few of the character backgrounds, plot twists and wrote a few passages as well.] This version lasted from summer 1994 to probably late 1996 and was never completed, for various reasons. One of the most important being I just was not happy with the prose.

What was wrong with it, anyway? Well, for one, I think I was focused too much on inner dialogue.  The characters did a lot of thinking and contemplating and not much doing anything afterwards. For another, I’d written a lot of scenes starting something but never quite completing them. And worse, I had a habit of writing what I call “stage directions”: the character did this, he went over there, he got up and tapped a code, he did that, he went there. The end result was that I’d come up with a lot of interesting ideas and scenes, but the execution lacked any kind of oomph.

Come 1997, I chose to start again, almost completely from scratch. This was The Phoenix Effect; it retained the spiritual bent, the underground gang and the cyberpunk ideas, but the focus was now on two new characters, investigators hired to figure out why certain AI units were now becoming more human. That last idea was inspired by my 1996-8 foray into New Age spirituality, infusing the idea that the soul came from elsewhere other than Earth. This novel did get finished, and I even attempted to submit it to a few places, but I was still unhappy with it.

I toned down the stage directions, I followed through on the action, and I had the characters doing things instead of just thinking about them. What was wrong this time?

Two further problems: quantity and delivery. The description of scenes and characters was slim to nil, as I’d focused too much on getting the story out on paper. Who were these people in my novel, anyway? Why were they there? Where were they? In my head, to be honest. I had them up here in my cranium–I knew exactly what they looked like, where they were, what they sounded like…but I’d put none of that on paper. I realized part of this was due to having written this longhand–I was focusing on keeping the story moving that pausing for a few seconds to describe something felt like I’d tripped up. I’d expand on these things a little when I transferred it computer, but there was still a lot missing.

Cue the third attempt, right around 2000-1, with A Division of Souls. This would be the first novel I’d write completely on the PC. Fully-expanded, complete scenes? Check. Expanded description of characters and scenery? Check. Expansion of the characters’ backstories? BIG check. Expansion of plot? BIG check. Scenes and plot points were completely rewritten and others totally new. I even plotted ahead a few chapters before writing them, something I rarely did before then. The outcome worked so well that I ended up with not one but three novels, which I wrote well into 2004. I was quite proud of this trilogy. And yet…

What was the problem this time? Well, aside from burning out in late 2004 and never finishing Book 3, I still didn’t quite get what I was doing wrong. I had a great story idea, an extended universe to play in, well-crafted characters, and description galore. So why was I still not quite there yet?

Again: the writing. It took me a long time to figure this part out, and only recently, in the last year or so, did I finally get it. You could see the choppy edits, the “screw it, I’ll fix it later” passages, the subplots that went nowhere. In other words, I had an extremely rough draft, and I’d said “good enough”, and that was the killer. I had the finished product, but I just hadn’t bothered to polish it at all. You see, I wasn’t quite there yet. I still had that final hurdle.

This meant some major review and revision. And I mean major review. So how did I go about it this time? Well, this time out I took all three books (I’d finally finished Book 3 in January of 2010) and put them on my Nook, and proceeded to read them. And read them. And read them. AND READ THEM.

I immersed myself in these three books to the point that I had the entire trilogy arc in my head. Over the course of six months or so, I must have read all three books from start to finish through at least three or four cycles, and each time I made a mental note of what needed fixing, from big things like story arcs to miniscule things like dialogue tags. And starting in 2012, I started the biggest revision I’d ever gone through in my life. I painstakingly went through each chapter and worked the hell out of each one. Some chapters were relatively quick to work through, but those first six or seven chapters in Book 1 were almost completely rewritten from scratch–a lot of those passages hadn’t been properly revised since their 2001 inception.

As of today, I’m on Chapter 10 of Book 3. It’s been one hell of a long trip, but it’s been worth it. I learned a hell of a lot in these past few months, possibly more than I’ve ever done in the last ten years combined, about what makes a decent manuscript and what doesn’t. And most important, I finally learned how to write.

*

Now, should this have taken twenty years?  Who knows. I’ve got other interests aside from writing science fiction, and I’ve had day jobs that took precedence. I’ve had personal events intervene. And yes, just like any other writer, I get distracted easily. Am I fine that it’s taken two decades to get where I am, and I still haven’t gotten these things published? Yes, I am. I’d rather have a complete and professional product out there that I’m proud of, rather than release a half-assed, phoned-in book that I wouldn’t be able to resell, at least not to any publisher. I’ve learned other things on the way too, come up with new ideas for the Mendaihu Universe. I’m not about to write this world off just yet, not when I have more to say about it. As soon as I’m done with this major revision of the first trilogy, I’m going to start working on the next one.

So yes, sometimes it’s a good idea to let ideas percolate. Sometimes the end result is worth the wait.

On Writing: Originality vs. Trope

Jon Chaisson2 Comments

As writers, we’ve had these conversations with our friends, family, readers, even other writers:

(1) Schenectady *
Me: “I’ve got an idea! I’ll write about werewolves.”
Them: “Yeah! That sounds cool! I love werewolf stories!”
Me: “Cool, I’ve got a potential reader!” (runs to office and starts typing away)
Me: (thinking) Hmm. I like this story…but I can’t help but feel it’s been done before…

(2) Bandwagonesque ***
Me: (thinking) Hmm. Wolf Children^ was a really cool anime. It’s given me some inspiration…
Me: (aloud) “I’d like to write a story like that.”
Them: “You mean fanfic?”
Me: “No, my own story. I’ve got a few ideas milling about.”
Me: (later, while writing) “Oh dear. This is a fanfic, isn’t it…?”

(3) I’m a Loner, Dottie, a Rebel ****
Me: “I want to write about werewolves.”
Them: “Oh GOD not another one. They’ve been done to death.”
Me: “They’re a trope, and they still sell. They’ve been written since…well, when was the first werewolf story, anyway?” **
Them: “Yes, but you’re not going to get it published. There’s a glut.”
Me: “There’s always been a glut. I have a few ideas–”
Them: “It’s never going to sell. Agents don’t want it, they have enough of them.”
Me: “Are you an agent?”
Them: “…”
Me: “Then shut up.” (hides in office to scribble in notebook–that’ll show ’em!)
Me: (later, while writing) “Shit. They’re right. Damn it.”

(4) Sell Out *****
Me: “I’m going to write a werewolf story!”
Them: “YES!”
Me: “It’ll be about love, about loving the enemy, about realizing who you really are despite everyone’s expectations.”
Them: “I’LL BUY IT!”
Me: “Hollywood will LOVE this.”
Them: “WE’LL GO SEE IT!”
Me: (wakes up from dream) “Well, hell.”

So yes…my point being, sometimes you come up with an idea where you just can’t win. You can come up with something you think is original, but there’s always something or someone in the background reminding you of those four dreaded words: it’s been done before. Of course, it’s already been proven time and again that your supposed original idea has been written by someone somewhere, either past or present. I’ve done it myself–I wrote my vampire novel Love Like Blood some years back. I didn’t consciously decide to write my own Twilight pastiche, far from it. My novel was taking the idea that the goth music genre really was infested by vampires, and riffing off that. Granted, the end result was far from perfect, and I’m sure it’s going to remain trunked, but the point is that I wrote it despite the dissenting voices.

Recently for my morning words I’ve been toying with a few characters that came to me just last week. I don’t know too much about them just yet, so I’ve been playing around with them, trying to get them to tell me their secrets. They’re being pretty stubborn about it, let me tell you. They definitely have a dark secret, and they’ve repeatedly come out and said they wouldn’t tell me what it was. Not just yet. All I know is that they’re hiding something, partly for their own safety, but possibly for everyone else’s as well. I’ve been building up who they are, little by little, throwing a lot of false hints in there. Were they related to my Mendaihu Universe? Were they something completely new? Were they inspired by the the fact that I’m reading Ransom Rigg’s second Peculiar Children book at the moment? Were they inspired by the fact that I’d just bought (but not yet watched) Wolf Children?

Then, last night, I came up with an image: a black bird, possibly a crow, tussling in the fallen autumn leaves with a black cat. It looks like they’re playfighting, taunting each other.

Could this image be related to the possible dark secret my new characters have been keeping from me?

And it dawns on me–I could very easily turn this into an animorph^^ story. Humans who turn into animals…or the other way around, animals who take on human form. It’s a trope that’s been used in multiple genres, from anime to horror to romance and back again. As they say, “it’s already been done.”

So how to make it original, then? The quick and simple answer, as always, is “make it your own story”. But what does that mean, really? Does that mean I’m using my own words and making up my own plot as I go, therefore it’s my own story? That certainly runs the risk of borrowing already-used (and often overused) ideas, especially if I don’t make myself aware that I’m doing so. No, there’s more to it than that. Could it mean that I took a well-told story and put it in a new setting, like all those fairy tale retellings we often see in Hollywood movies? That’s all well and good, but that runs the risk of being derivative and unoriginal.

So where does that leave us?

Character.

Many writers, agents and publishers will often say “make it your own” when talking about writing a new story in an old trope, but I’d like to think that what they’re really trying to say is to make the characters original, and the originality of the plot and the setting will follow. Create an original character and find out how he or she (or it) fits into your potential story universe. Come up with a character that fascinates you, build on their background, find out what makes them tick, and at the same time, think about their place in your created universe. Why do they feel out of place? Why do they think they’re better than others? Who or what is threatening them?  Why are they threatening others?

My new characters are definitely hiding something, and if my vision from the other night is anything to go by, then I’ve created two further ideas: they’re hiding their animorphism for a good reason, and they’re possibly hiding it from people (or things!) that could cause them harm if others knew about it. But I’ve also created further depth apart from these two points by building character–I’ve created a few individuals who, in their everyday human lives, are deeply creative, have close ties with their community, and upon first glance would be considered your typical townies in a small New England town. They fit in with their surroundings rather than being the weird outsiders, and no one’s the wiser. It’s not until an as-yet-unplanned outside influence potentially threatens their lives. Thus: I have possibly decided to write a story about animorphic people–itself a trope as old as the hills–but I’ve made it my own because I’m focusing on the characters with animorphism, not the ability itself.

Lastly, I rarely think about trying to avoid or follow tropes while I’m writing the story, because that really isn’t something I should be focusing on at that point. Sure, I have it in the back of my mind, but I only consciously think about it when I’m venturing too close to predictability. Otherwise, I’m quite aware that I’m writing in trope. The trick is to see how my characters react within this trope. Therein lies the originality.

– – –


Notes:
* – Reference to Harlan Ellison’s famous answer to questions about where he gets his ideas.
** – Werewolf lore popped up sometime in Europe around the 15th century.
*** – Teenage Fanclub album, 1991. Infamously known for being Spin magazine’s best album of 1991 over Nirvana’s Nevermind.
**** – Song from the Get Up Kids off their 1999 album Something to Write Home About.
***** – Song from Reel Big Fish off their 1996 album Turn the Radio Off.
^ – Really, it’s a lovely-looking anime. We haven’t watched it yet, but it’s won all sorts of awards and just recently came out on dvd. Check out the trailer here.
^^ – That’s animorph–humans with the ability to change to a different animal. Anamorphic deals with widescreen film ratio and how it’s shot.

[Request] On Writing: The Long Haul

Jon Chaisson1 Comment

From Amy, a friend and fellow writer in Houston:

[Talk to me about] developing a writing practice that lets you complete a large work.

The short answers? Give up watching TV and hole yourself up at your writing nook for a few hours every night. Immerse yourself into the created world as often as you can–this includes thinking about it while you’re at work, and writing down notes on scraps of paper during down times. Stay up way too late on the weekends so you can write for hours at a time. And above all, write EVERY NIGHT for at least two hours. In other words, dedicate way too much of your time to it. It’ll drive you nuts, you’ll want to give up and erase the damn thing from your memory, but if you persevere, the payoff will trump all that. Oh–and don’t think too seriously about publication until it’s done and revised. [I made an error in that last part and sent it out well before it was ready a few times.]

But more seriously…

The Bridgetown Trilogy was started around 2000 or so, after a number of months trying to rewrite and revise its predecessor, The Phoenix Effect. That novel was to be the first in a trilogy as well, and about thirty or so pages were started on its sequel, before I realized I was going in the wrong direction and would need to seriously revise and rewrite the whole thing. There were just too many problems with it: too many holes in the plot, too many tropes that wouldn’t age well, and background that was shoehorned in where it didn’t belong. And worst of all, the prose was weak. Really weak. I’m talking barebones description, hokey dialogue, and subplots that led nowhere. Frustrated and annoyed but full of New Englander stubbornness, I chose to start from the beginning again. Yes–start the whole damn thing over from scratch.

I say this, because this is when I created the writing practice that I still employ today.

I was incredibly lucky in that I could create time for this…one of the most irritating parts of dedicating time for writing is finding that time, which can be incredibly tough when one is working eight hours a day, even more so when a commute is involved. I was lucky in that my warehouse job was purely physical with very little need for heavy duty problem solving, so I could actually think about my writing while I stacked boxes on pallets. I was also lucky in that I had super early hours, 6am to 2pm, which gave me the entire afternoon and evening to do what I wanted. Once I restarted the trilogy, I chose to set up a strict writing time of 7pm to 9pm every night, no exceptions (this included weekends as well) and would do nothing except working on the trilogy project. As my family had dinner around 5pm, more often than not I’d start at 6 instead, giving me a good three-hour block. [Okay, I would often spend twenty minutes at the start goofing off, deciding what music I’d listen to (often the new releases I’d bought that week), and playing a few rounds of FreeCell, but I’d get there soon enough.] Things have obviously changed since then, but I still try to utilize my time the best I can. I can’t stress enough how important it is to dedicate time solely to your writing projects.

The other goal I had was that I would write at least a thousand new words every night. Sometimes I did more, sometimes less, but that was the goal I aimed for. This did a few things for me…first, it forced me to be more detailed in my prose. My previous works tended to be rather thin, lacking in detail and oomph; this goal forced me to look at how I described things, and how to make the scene glow. Second, it forced me to be prepared–I started sketching out quick outlines and notes a few scenes and chapters ahead that would come to me while I was at work, which I would use later on as a guide. Third, the more I hit this goal, the easier it felt. It may not have been perfect prose, but it was good, beefy prose that I could work with and revise later on. By the third or fourth month, I was consistently going over the word count, hitting 1200 to 1500 a day. I still kept the goal at a thousand words, however–as long as I hit that thousand, everything else was gravy.

All this writing time was focused solely on the trilogy, and this is one of the most important parts of the process: I’d fully immersed myself into the world on purpose. I continually expanded the created world, studying the lives of the characters and their actions and thoughts, and putting a sharp focus on how each plot arc unfolded. I thought of events that might not show up in the finished product. I did short writing exercises of writing from a character’s POV so I could understand them better. I drew maps of Bridgetown and various neighborhoods, and made notes about the surrounding megacities, and even touched a little on future sociology. I created backgrounds for the characters that had little to do with the trilogy (though in a few cases, I used the information as off-the-cuff description just to give them more life). In short: this was going to be an epic story, so I’d better be a supernerd about its background so I wouldn’t leave anything out or go in the wrong direction!

I did this for four years straight, almost without fail. I did have the occasional sick day or prior plans, of course. I felt a brief pang of guilt when I missed a day, but it wasn’t the end of the world. My writing nook was down in my parents’ basement at the time, and sometimes I’d have to work upstairs instead when it was too cold downstairs in the winter (that didn’t always stop me, however). And there were some days when I just wanted to be lazy or needed to give my brain a rest. It was exhausting at times, but it was also a hell of a lot of fun, and it made me enjoy the writing craft all that much more. I stopped around 2004 for a few reasons, both personal and writing-related. I won’t go into detail here, but suffice it to say, it was a great run, and I wrote two and three-quarters novels–the first two in the trilogy, and most of the third–during that time.

*

So…that was my previous writing practice. How is it now?

After a few dry years, I finally returned to the nightly work, and I’ve been doing it ever since. It’s changed a bit, obviously: instead of writing new words, I’ve been focusing on the completion and revision of the trilogy. I’ve had some professional critiquing done on it, which has helped immensely. For now, I merely focus at least an hour or so in the evening to work on my projects, and if I can squeeze in extra work here and there during the day, I will of course do so. I’ve also expanded on my writing environs: I work in the back room of our apartment, but I also work on the laptop in the living room, and have been known to work on a tablet on vacation, especially when flying cross country. I’ve always been able to write anywhere, given time and space and minimal interruption, and it’s a good habit to get away from your home base now and again to get used to different environments. The focus here is not where you write, but that you write.

Am I ever going to go back to the previous schedule? I sure hope so…it was hard and exhausting work, but it was fun and fulfilling as well. Once I’m caught up with this revision, I hope to start on new projects again. It won’t be exactly the same, considering I have a different work schedule and other personal non-writing things going on, but I do plan on ramping up the volume this year once the major revision project is done. I find I work best and enjoy writing the most when I’m running at top speed, losing myself in the craft (so to speak), even if it’s only for a few hours a day. And if I can expand that even more in the future, maybe to the point of paying full-time writing, so much the better. That’s a far goal, though…but one I’d like to eventually reach.

*

All that said…in answer to your question? There’s no ultimate answer, but the above is what worked for me. Find out what systems and habits work best, and continually improve and upgrade them as necessary. If you’re working on a large work, be prepared to go the distance with it, because it’ll certainly show either way. Immerse yourself in the world as much as possible (but don’t get hopelessly lost in it!). Pay attention to your world’s restrictions, but figure out how to break them when you need to. And keep tabs on everything, even the small stuff, because it may come in handy later on. Be a compulsive note-taker.

Treat writing as a guilty pleasure, like you’re getting away with it. Have fun with it, because if it ceases being fun, it’ll show. And if it gets that far, it’s not the end of the world–take some time off, distance yourself from it (even if that means working on something completely unrelated), and come back to it when you’re good and ready. You will, of course, need to look at it professionally for revision and submission purposes, and it’s fine to think about that, but don’t let that get in the way of creating the story in the first place.

And repeat and adjust as necessary. 🙂

On Spirituality in the Mendaihu Universe: alien and human relations

Jon ChaissonLeave a comment

Many of you have already heard versions of the story as to how I came up with the spiritual setting in the Mendaihu Universe–short version, I was inspired by my own attempts at spiritual enlightenment in the mid- to late-90s, specifically when I started focusing on New Age philosophies. Some of these ideas raised the question as to where souls came from, such as other realities or other planets. I not only found this an interesting twist on spiritualism, but I felt this would be an interesting idea for the basis of a belief system in a novel or a series. That was sometime around 1996-1997, and it evolved over the years between writing the original story The Phoenix Effect (more on that book in a future post) and the finished product. Most of the connections to the original inspiration have gone away, though the general idea remains:

What if the souls of Earth humans really did come from elsewhere?

Which led to many related questions: What is the connection to Earth? Why did these souls choose this planet out of any of the habitable ones in the universe? What is the physical relationship between Earth and this “homeworld” planet? How would it relate to physical, tactile, logical reality?

And lastly, what would happen when we re-established contact with that homeworld?

It took me a good number of years and novel drafts to figure that out.

In the timeline for A Division of Souls, we’ve already been in contact with the Meraladhza for at least three centuries.  First Contact took place in somewhat mundane situations, via long distance communication only. It took nearly a full century before these very humanlike aliens worked with us to facilitate a First Landing. By that time, a few things took place: firstly, the human race on Earth had time to come to terms with The Other Being Out There in the Cosmos to some extent. The cold and true fact that there really are others out there, not to mention that we’d been given proof that we really are all but an infinitely small percentage of all life in the universe, had humbled us deeply. Secondly, these human aliens were just like us in almost every way except for when it came to the inner Self–their inherent spiritualism taught us new ways to overcome (or at least assuage) our Fears of the Other. This was another surprising point in history, considering our own haunted pasts; to put it bluntly, we’d finally had a grown-up put us in our place. [This isn’t to say we finally got rid of wars and extremism and what have you; it’s more that we gradually learned to better chose our fights, and fight them for smarter reasons, with less destruction and fallout.]

The third and the most important point is that, sometime about twenty to thirty years after the First Contact, the Meraladhza explained just who they were: our distant ancestors. [Part of the delayed revelation was rightly and understandably to soften the blow.] There was, of course, a lot of argument and theorizing here: how could the Meraladzha, even when they were so biologically, physically and mentally just the same as us, be our ancestors when we’ve had centuries of Darwinian evolutionary theory to (sort of) prove our own existence? The answer was twofold: physical and spiritual evolution. Physical: the Meraladhza “seeded” our planet quite far back in our history–itself full of holes due to the ravages of time and erosion of known histories–far enough that we had no knowledge nor proof or idea of it. [Yes, that’s a bit vague, but it’s worth focusing on in a later post.] Spiritual: the Meraladhza also instilled a spiritual presence, the human soul, here on the planet. To the Meraladhza, they felt it more important that we be cognizant of our spirit, even if it was the simple “who am I?” question. The remaining seventy or so years before First Landing were spent with alien and human in constant communication, learning about each other like long-separated siblings finally reunited. By the time they arrived, we were all more or less back on the same page.

In the Mendaihu Universe, this spiritualism is one of the strongest traits for both the Meraladhza and the Earth human. By ‘spiritualism’ I mean a deep understanding and reverence for the soul within; it is a Zen of sorts, a highly dedicated and conscious understanding of who we are and our effect on others. Over the years since First Contact and especially after First Landing, many were willingly ‘awakened’ to our ancient Meraladian memories, and with such awakenings came heightening of the senses. To our vision came Veilsight, the ability to view spiritual activity on a heightened level; to our hearing came innerspeak, the ability to hear and subvocalize communication; to our sense of touch came soulsensing, the ability to reach out and “touch” other spirits with our own. Some come into this heightened awareness on their own; others need training and/or awakening ritual; it is a highly regulated and monitored process. Regardless, over the past three centuries it has become an accepted and well-regarded state of being.

More to come:
–On Spiritualism: Mendaihu, Shenaihu, and cho-nyhndah
–On Spiritualism: Levels of belief and practice
–On Spiritualism: the Goddess, the One of All Sacred, and other deities