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JWTroemner.com

Tag: Writers Resources

  • Writer Woes: An abundance of details

    jwtroemner
    Sorry, needlessly complicated subplot. We're gonna have to let you go.
    Sorry, needlessly complicated subplot. We’re gonna have to let you go. (creative commons, source: wikipedia)

    This is the second part of my response to this blog post, asking about writing woes.

    I write fantasy. And because it isn’t rooted in our world, that means I have spent a whole lot of time worldbuilding.

    My current WIP deals with the interaction of three separate countries, as well as the influence of a fourth country that’s only mentioned in passing. Each of those countries has a dominant religion (or in Tarlam’s case, several dozen religions vying for dominance), creation myths, geography, technology, primary imports and exports, unique social structures, languages, taboos, dominant attitudes toward gender and sexuality, histories, virtues, vices, etc, etc, etc.

    Each of the characters has their own backstory which shapes his or her attitudes and behaviors– and these actions have consequences. Some of those backstories overlap and influence other characters.

    What’s frustrating is that many of these details will never see the light of day. I’ll know them, but they’re not relevant to the plot, so often they will sink beneath the surface, becoming little more than currents and subtexts. Sometimes one of the biggest writer woes is the struggle to know what to cut, especially when you really liked it.

    Here’s an example from DREAMKEEPER:

    Twenty years ago, one of the major characters helped send a ship full of refugees to a neutral country. While some of those refugees went into hiding, others banded together to form a resistance against the forces that drove them from their homes. The son of one of those resistance fighters grew up to become a spy, and planted himself as a footman in the same house as Aren, the protagonist. For years now, Aren’s been mistaking his attention for a crush, when in reality he’s been doing surveillance on her.

    He’s still in her household, keeping watch– but in more than 100k words, he gets mentioned maybe twice. He doesn’t even have any lines. Because while he and the resistance are effective elsewhere, they don’t actually influence Aren’s story. And that means they got the ax.

    Me, I like to think his story was interesting. But that’s what they’re talking about when they say to murder your darlings.

    What about you? Have you had to cut any characters or subplots like these? Here’s a chance to share the darlings that might not get to see the light of day!

  • Changing the background

    jwtroemner

    If you look at the majority of non-modern fantasy, be it medieval, pseudo-victorian, what have you, you’ll notice a pattern: everybody’s white and straight. If genderqueer or homosexuality is brought up, it’s with a heaping helping of homophobia and transphobia; if people of color are included, you can expect to see racism that would make the KKK hang their hoods in shame. And if a woman has a “non-traditional” role, it’s because she’s a spunky, norms-defying rebel.

    Guys, it’s getting old.

    “But we’re just being historically accurate!” you may say.

    Historically accurate for some times and places, sure. But remember, there are plenty of other houses to rob.

    Yesterday I talked about borrowing story elements from more than the few overtapped sources that have donated to most of our mainstream media. But when I say we should look at other cultures and sources, I wasn’t just talking about mythological animals and pantheons.

    From the Library of Congress: TITLE: Thos. W. ...
    (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

    Let the spectrum in

    William Shakespeare gave us what I consider a compelling Primary Source Document on the presence of POCs in European society when he wrote Othello.

    The movie Arabian Nights did a great job of portraying the way international interaction happened in a lot of the ancient world: we have an African wizard venturing out to China to make deals with Aladdin; we have Englishmen and Chinese men and locals alike living within a few blocks of one another in a bustling metropolis.

    And that’s the thing– any major urban area is going to attract people from all over the world, especially traders selling rare exotic goods to the social elites. Often enough those traders will be foreign themselves, or have non-locals in their caravan/on their ship/etc. Unless there’s some major isolationist movement going on, there should be a healthy population of out-of-towners.

    Homophobia is so 1950…

    Keep in mind that

    • Gay male relationships were considered the purest form of love in ancient Greece, and Plato believed that only barbarians would condemn such a love
    • Historical records suggest that bisexuality was considered the norm in China before the Tang Dynasty
    • In New Guinea it’s believed that sharing semen through male/male sex promoted growth, while excessive heterosexual sex led to “decay and death”
    • Several cultures have a third gender (or more than that!)
    • There are entire websites dedicated to this sort of thing. I recommend you check them out.

    Women wearing the pants

    Several cultures are matrilinial in their leadership and inheritance. Even among cultures that weren’t, women were often encouraged to know how to fight.

    Keep in mind that females have held pretty much every conceivable male role. History is full of powerful female rulers, such as Hatsheput of Egypt, Empress Wu Zeitian of China, and Queen Elizabeth I of England. Hell, the world’s first novel was written by a woman (The Tale of Genji, by Murasaki Shikibu of Japan). There are plenty of websites to explore on that topic as well.

  • Picking the brain of the collective

    jwtroemner
    Comment 2
    The results of one of my crowdsourcing endeavors

    Some days you just need some opinions.

    Maybe you’re torn between names for your protagonist. Maybe you’re having trouble coming up with a minor character’s motivations, or the right job for the love interest. Maybe you’re just interested in finding out what people think makes a good protagonist.

    Sometimes, the best way to find new ideas is by crowdsourcing: asking a whole group of people for their input and ideas. I’ve tried a whole variety of methods: I’ve asked the same question of a whole lot of people in person, I’ve asked around on Twitter, I’ve posted questions and polls on Facebook.

    In my experience, the best results I’ve gotten have been from active writing groups on Facebook– I prefer ones like Nanowrimo, Writer Unboxed, and the New Writers Help Group. If you’ve got questions that are specific to one genre or topic, try going to a group specific to that topic, like this Steampunk group over here. Often members of Facebook groups are excited to help, and are willing to cast a vote or give a quick comment. You might even get in contact with experts in the field, whom you could interview for more in-depth information.

    If you don’t get results right away, don’t get discouraged. Try sourcing from a different crowd.

    Have you tried crowdsourcing? What’s worked for you, and what hasn’t? Let us know in the comments!

  • Nitpicking Narrators – Part I: My name is Jake

    jwtroemner

    While I’m busy with grad school, I’ll be replaying some of the most-read posts from my old blog.1st person

    Some people instantly gravitate to one particular narrative style. The story they’re writing just naturally lends itself to one Point of View (POV) in particular. After all, who would want to read “That guy over there? His name is Jake,” as the intro to one of the Animorphs books? The same goes with Terry Pratchett’s stories– they just don’t work if you were to squeeze the whole story into a single person’s head.

    Other stories, though, get a bit fuzzier, and we writers can get iffy on what POV works best for what stories. Hopefully, though, I can clear up a bit of that fuzziness. 

    First Person

    This is commonly known as I. I did things, I think things, I feel things. The reader feels like they’re in a conversation with the First Person. A lot of the times stories told in the First Person read like a diary, or a story being told by a friend. (more…)

  • DIY Editing: A comma conundrum

    jwtroemner

    Behold the comma: it’s the most dreaded of punctuation marks, and one of the most misused and abused.

    And for good reason. In the English language, most punctuation marks have no more than two or three uses. A period will always either end a sentence or abbreviate a word. An exclamation point indicates excitement.

    Commas, on the other hand, are the Hufflepuff of grammar. They do some of everything.

    They divide points in a list, they separate phrases in a sentence, they offset names and dates and states, they act as periods within interrupted dialogue.

    In fact, it seems the one thing they don’t do is create an arbitrary pause. For example:

    “My name, is Doctor Incredible!” just looks tacky. If you’re trying to pause for dramatic effect, you’re looking for an ellipse. It should really look like this: “My name… is Doctor Incredible!”

    I started this post intending to write out all of the rules for properly placing a comma, but 1) I’d be here all day, and 2) the people below have said the same far more eloquently than I.

    Purdue University’s Writing Lab site lists fifteen distinct rules for working with this slippery punctuation. Wikipedia has thirteen subsections on correct usage. Grammarbook.com has twenty-one. And even then, there’s more ways to make mistakes: The Opinion Page of the New York Times has a nice discussion of some common comma mistakes, as well as a Fanfare for the Comma Man— which discusses my next point:

    The rules can change depending on who you ask. People will argue over these forever, so rather than giving you the rules, here’s some  spots where you can throw them out and go with your gut.

    • The infamous Oxford comma (the comma that precedes ‘and’ in a list), as in “bacon, milk, and cheese”)
    • Modifying phrases at the beginning of a sentence, such as “Last night Boxy and I saw a movie”

    If the use/omission of the comma doesn’t change the meaning of the sentence, then it can go either way. However, in some cases the comma can lead to confusion. Remember: clarity trumps all else.