Character notes

Hmm. I'm getting back into writing pretty well and have a few stories bubbling up. But, sigh, most of the rejections I have been getting have to do with character. Either the characters are not well enough drawn for people to sympathise with or there are too many of them or

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yadda yadda. It's all about the character. This worries me.

In some senses I don't think it should. Part of that is because I know that often the editors of many of the magazines I am submitting to are looking for reasons to say "no". They will seize on any deficiency so they can reject a story and clear a space in the slush pile. I've realised that it is not the best stories that get published but the ones that the editors like the most.

Plus I am not getting rejections on the basis of character from the pro-mags. Perhaps those smaller mags have higher standards. Perhaps.

Now that I have extracted the upside from this I need the downside. What I also worry about is that there is something that needs fixing. What?

Well, it has to be said that the last few stories I've written have been done in a more ad hoc fashion. I've avoided doing all that thinking and note making and just plunged in. The results have not been great. I realised today that the story I've written has almost no conflict, no resolution and almost no peril for the main characters. Not good. Maybe that is what needs fixing. The story I am about to write feels better already because I've done lots of thinking beforehand.

What I might try to do for the next story after this one is make sure that it is a character piece. Explicitly ensure that I know the main character and do all the things the book says to do.

Though this is tempered by the thought that if I do fix this lack then it may not lead to more acceptances from those mags.

Red and dead

Mars. Martians. Martian invaders. HG Wells. I re-read War of the Worlds for the story I am working on to refresh my memory about some details I wanted to use.

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I was surprised at how much I'd forgotten. In particular I had no memory of the black smoke the martians used to clear towns and cities nor of the red weed that they used to choke the landscape. That was good to know because I want to make the destruction they wrought far more widespread. I think I can stretch things enough to make that work. Plus there's nothing to say that the Martians didn't come back. Chances are that, if they did, they'd be much better prepared. Or just really annoyed.

Can life survive without the microbes that the Martians lack? They do good things for us humans. In fact, I'm pretty sure that all life got started via the medium of such things. I guess Wells didn't know about that though. The classic Miller-Urey experiment on primordial soup wasn't done until 1953 and a lot of subsequent work has been done on the evolution of unicellular and multi-cellular organisms. The shift from uni (prokaryotes) to multi (eukaryotes) is a pretty pivotal moment in the history of life on Earth. Here's a thought - a good one for a story. What if in travelling to Mars we find no evidence of them evolving there. So they came from somewhere else.

Re-reading the book, which took about 3.5 commutes, also made me realise how faithful the Spielberg movie was. I was expecting that to be a story of plucky-humans-beating-the-martians-by-dint-of-their-unquenchable-spirit with Tom in the role of hero. But it was pretty bleak and Tom Cruise's character was not very likeable. I suspect part of the reason for the reviews saying it was mediocre were because it didn't submit to that Hollywood idealisation of struggle against the alien oppressors. Ooh, hark at him.

What struck me when I was looking into WotW was how many people have used it as a starting point for more stories. Lots of anthologies have been produced taking the invasion as their starting point. What is also interesting is what they did not consider. Well, almost all of them. Superstition forbids me from saying more.

Words, words, words

I paraphrased the first line of Neuromancer for a story I'm working on and, when I looked it up to ensure I'd got it right, I got a surprise. I thought it read: "The sky o

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ver the port..." but it actually is: "The sky above the port..." I was knocked out by that. Using 'above' makes a reader, unknowingly, think about places with roofs. The sky is over everything but a roof is above you. I guess it also makes people think about 2D scenes too - simulations and virtual spaces being one of the subjects of the story. It also made me think how carefully the word was chosen.

I thought more about while reading some Dennis Lehane and Michael Chabon too. Both write very dense texts - if that makes any sense. The words seem thick on the page and the sentences are flooded with details. This is from "Mystic River".

"Sean sat up on the old red bar stool and fingered the inside of the thick black vise, felt the oil and sawdust mixed in there..."

In that fragment what catches my eye is "sat up" which he uses rather than just sat. Sean is being told off by his father and it is reminiscient of parents telling kids to sit up straight. But also there is an echo in it that reminds the reader Sean is still a kid. Sitting up rather than just sitting, sprawling or any other way he could be on the stool. Then for the other elements in the scene both get two qualifiers - "old red" and "thick black".

The effect is more apparent in Michael Chabon who revels in detailed description. This from "House Hunting"

"The profusion of hats on the hatstand - three berets in the colors of sherberts, a tweedy homburg, a new-looking Stetson with a snakeskin band, several billed golf caps..."

Admittedly this is done to a different end in a story about a couple finding their place but there is a lot of detail there. Leaving aside the many different ways it uses to describe headgear, it made me think about how I use words. The story I am working on at the moment is just close to the end of its first draft. I'm going back now and adding in the bits I feel to be missing. Doubtless I'll oversteer but a lot of that will be caught when I turn it over to OWW and get so

Cover of The Yiddish Policemen's Union

me other eyes on it. There's no doubt though that my prose does look a bit thin in comparison to Lehane and Chabon. Though too much of the fatty adjectival froth and a story can get hard to read. Yeah, that's right. Make yourself feel better by belittling the best-selling authors.

There is a point there, though. The Dennis Lehane book does suffer towards the end because it is so dense and layered and detailed. Sometimes I just wanted him to get on with the story and action rather that launch yet another detour into the history of the Plains and the Flats. Even towards the end when the story was winding up he couldn't stop.

The only story I've read of Michael Chabon's where it really worked well was the Yiddish Policemen's Union which was full of brilliant descriptions rather than just scene dressing. No way to belittle that, just sit at its feet and be impressed.

This way please

Planning again. Because that's where I am with my current story. I feel like I'm rediscovering how to do this after those few months off though the one constant has been my dithering over whether to just sit down and write or do the planning thing so I know in which dir

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ection the words should point. The missus keeps saying that I am very quiet at the moment, more so than usual, and that's because I'm processing all the ways the current story can play out.

Re-reading, for the umpteenth time, Stephen King's On Writing I was struck by his belief that a story is a found object. A fossil, he says, that has to be uncovered piece by piece. For him plotting and planning are jackhammers that destroy the fine detail at the expense of the gross structure. Far better, for him, is to set the situation up and then work/write through it. Those are far finer tools that can preserve the eyelashes and scales. An idea of the ending is needed but he has little sense of what he will uncover on the way. Often, he says, he is surprised by how the characters act/react in the situation. I suspect he is being a bit disingenuous and that some of this is down to his vast experience and native talent. For others, such as Tobias Buckell, the same is likely to be true.

For myself I don't find it that easy to just turn it over to Trev and let him drive. Last year I did and it produced some great stuff. Certainly judging by sales and reader reaction I'm doing better but it took time to get in to that mindset. I've got to get it back, if I can, and I think the rest will follow.

Take the story I'm working on right now. Thinking about the setting has got me enthused about it and I know how it will, kind of, fall out. I am split between doing the planning and letting it all flow leaving me in a tricky neither/nor limbo when I do a bit of both. The stories that is producing do not have that breezy feel some of the others have though the story itself is fine. Or so I think.

What Mr S does think about is character. Annie Wilkes, for instance, he first describes as having an "absence of hiatus". No, I don't know either. And that's not something I've been doing a lot of. Partly because this latest story is kind of about me and a lost friend and I know those folks well enough to wing it.

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I guess part of my reluctance to hand it to Trev is because I do not want to get in to a situation where whatever success I have is based on a method resistant to understanding, change and improvement. And that brings me to another of Mr King's beliefs; that talent is a finite quantity. Whatever you have, that's all you get. If you don't have it then you'll only ever be a hack. If you have some you can improve via technique but if you are talented then lucky you. I have no idea where I fit on that scale and my lack of confidence makes me eye the hack end more than the other. It's not for me to say. What I have realised is that that perception of talent will not be universal. For every person that likes a story there will be as many, probably more, that are utterly indifferent. As many will hate it as love it. Now there's a recipe for misery if ever I heard one.

Another one bites the dust

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I'm going to abandon the story I've been writing for the last couple of weeks. The decision will dent my chances of hitting my target for the number of stories I want to write this year. But I can live with that.

I learned to my cost with a previous story that it is not a good idea to take a break while in the middle of writing. This time that derailed me again but, looking to the positive, it stopped me persevering with a tale that now looks unworkable.

It's all part of learning how I go about writing which, if I'm honest, it is a pretty chaotic process.

That may not be a bad thing. I've read a lot of books about how to do the writing thing and the advice they offer is very different. It has struck me that what all those authors of those books are laying out is how they go about writing.

There's no single process that everyone should follow to success - though there are tricks of the trade that are worth knowing.

I'm becoming increasingly convinced that it is important to discover how you work rather than do what works for others. Though it might be worth trying what they say if only to eliminate what doesn't work and get a sense of all the ways it can be done.

However, it might be just success that convinces me I've found my way to work. The last two stories I've written have felt a lot better than almost anything I've done and I wrote both of them in a pretty chaotic way. Instead of working it all out and sticking to that plan I'm setting off and adjusting as I go along.

Other writers have said that you never get the trick of writing a novel. While writing one you only discover how to write that novel. There might be something of that for the different way people approach short stories. As always though I'm wary of routine. Feeling like I'm on top of a subject is usually the moment when I faceplant and show the world what an arse I am. And as I am often heard to declare: I'm not disorganised, I'm spontaneous.

By contrast, many of the other stories have been pretty mechanical and I was getting a bit tired of going through those motions just to turn out a story that wasn't great. And didn't enthuse me. I needed a change because I could see that writing was going to be a grind if I kept up with that method. And this is supposed to be fun, right?

Which brings me to the story I've abandoned. One of the many tricks that is supposed to turn those ideas into workable stories is find out who has most to lose in the cast of characters you have assembled and then make all the action revolve around them.

I did that and the story sucked. All the life in it, and my enthusiasm for it,

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died on its arse. In working out what should happen the original impetus drained away. I ended up with a story that had no tension or conflict in it and was for far away from my original conceit that it felt like someone else's work. So, I gave up on it. Which is a pity because I've spent a long time trying to put it together. Like, months.

The story I have picked to get working on has instantly enthused me and got me thinking about how it can all work out. During my commute this morning I got it into a pretty good shape and know what is going to happen. All I need to do now is pick the main character and get on with it.