BREAKING THE RULES – AND GETTING AWAY WITH IT
There is one thriller writer out there that writes a decent story yet it is marred by his lousy technique. Either his editors are asleep at the wheel or they don’t think writing properly is important. I won’t mention this guy’s name but I slam him in every Amazon review I do. Yeah, that sounds a bit hypocritical because I buy all his books. Yet I have never given him a five star review and never will because he’ll never reach that plateau of perfection. I’m just thankful he writes in third person or I’d stop reading him altogether.
His stories come from a great premise, a team of experts with a catchy name and their headquarters lie buried in a secret location in the desert. They go on various missions around the world to save the day. He puts a lot of time researching his subject material, but apparently not enough because he’s been slammed before by other reviewers for not checking all his facts. I have a feeling he just uses the internet? Sounds like me for a lot of stuff. I can’t complain much about that. I rely on the Internet a lot yet I also use the phone, personal experience, phone calls and e-mails to get what I need, or else I just go fuzzy on details. I hate to get something wrong but I don’t come down too hard on him for that as no matter how careful you are, it can happen. As I’ve preached enough times before, do your research! However, that doesn’t mean you aren’t going to get something wrong. In this author’s case, he seems to have more than his share. Maybe his bad writing technique brings it out more from his detractors?
My beef’s with him are the way he completely abandons most writing rules and gets away with it. He has from his first book, which was so horribly line edited it looked like a first draft. His subsequent books have been vast improvements at least with typos. I don’t know how he ever got past an agent except from pure dumb luck because that book wasn’t that great of a story. It intrigued me enough to seek out his next one so it had merit or maybe morbid curiosity?
Getting to the main point, what do I mean about lousy writing technique?
POV (that’s Point Of View for you newbies):
His point of view is all over the place. He head hops with abandon. I’m not talking an occasional switch back and forth from one character to another, I’m talking a constant shift within each scene. His scenes are structured so that one may have a character dominating a particular scene, but that’s about it. POV shifts from paragraph to paragraph, sometimes three or four times within a paragraph. My head spins trying to figure out who’s head is who from sentence to sentence! Somehow, the story flows but it’s an effort to keep up with things.
What’s worse is author intrusion. He’s a bit clue dropper. “They would soon find out what so in so would do to them…” So far in seventy some pages he’s done that twice, maybe more.
Passivity:
He writes so passively I can count at least four to ten “started to’s” or “began to’s” on each page. He uses “just” at least twice per page and “was” is so liberally sprinkled throughout its more like an article than a verb.
Telling
Telling versus showing is one thing but when even I notice it, and you know I’m not the best at figuring that one out, it has to be bad. Enough said about that.
Who does this guy know? How did he get so lucky? Why doesn’t his editor slap him up the side of the head and make him do it right?
I don’t know the answers but he’ll never be a thriller writer up there with the best like James Rollins or Preston & Child or Clive Cussler or even Dan Brown (who has his own issues) or any of the others that at least have good editors and some kind of technique.
The guy can write a decent story but it’s marred by poor writing that frankly it’s polluting the marketplace, in my opinion and doesn’t set a very good example. Yet here I am supporting him by buying and reading his books. I know, hypocritical. I should boycott them but I still see something redeemable about his stories. I’ll voice my opinions in my review on Amazon though they’ve done no good in the past and probably won’t now. He has his fans and apparently enough sales to keep putting out hardbacks and paperbacks. Yet I’m pretty sure he’ll never be a best seller unless he cleans up his act and if he hasn’t by now, I don’t think he ever will.
I still find enough story buried in those disjointed words worth reading.
Oh well…
POV – A DIFFERENT WAY TO LOOK AT IT
A couple of writer’s group meetings ago, a discussion came up about author intrusion. Our own Gregory Kompes came up with an article that he posted on the Henderson Writer’s Group Facebook page that explains it very well. I don’t want to go over that again. However, it inspired me to beat this dead horse a bit more since I’m thinking of developing a presentation on POV. I was trying to think of a way to visualize POV for the audience rather than just give the explanations I’ve already gone over in several past articles.
How to do that?
Since we recently talked about the fantasy genre, it reminded me of a brainstorm I had during the last Las Vegas Writer’s Conference. The gist of it was that a good way to visualize POV would be with computer gaming. I know some of you out there have never seen a computer game. I won’t mention any names here, but even you might have grandchildren and have glanced over their shoulders. If not, ask them after reading this and you’ll figure it out.
The vast majority of computer games come in two styles. They are first person and third person. Sound familiar? Can you apply that to POV?
In a first person computer game, the camera shows everything through the eyes of the character you’re playing in the game. It’s as if you’re standing there. If a monster is behind a rock, you can’t see it. If there’s a room behind a door, or a cave or a deep chasm, you won’t know until you open that door.
You’re seeing everything through the eyes of the character. There’s a big difference though. In a computer game, there’s no feeling. All of that feeling is still within you, the player. Therefore, even though the perspective of what’s seen is first person, the thoughts can still be either first person (i.e. I see, I saw, etc.) or third person (i.e. he saw, he looked, etc.).
Now how about third person games? For some reason, which I don’t understand, they’re far more popular than first person games. In a third person game, the camera view is omniscient. The camera is above and behind the character, looking down over the character’s shoulder. Often, the player (you) can see ahead well before the character can actually see the dangers or treasures. The player can see that monster hiding behind a rock long before the character, they can often see what’s behind that door, or guess long before the character (depending on the style of game). The player can anticipate things that a first person player cannot.
Does this compare to a third person narrative in writing? It turns out, not at all. A third person game compares to a limited omniscient POV at best (since the player can only know so much since they didn’t design the game), or at worst, massive author intrusion! Yeah, that’s right, the author, or God, knows all ahead of time and can spoil things for the reader by dropping clues and spoiling the fun. Like a first person game, it’s third person perspective only and not thought, which is what’s needed for first or third person narrative in a story. Big difference.
When people hear me ranting about how much I hate first person fiction yet I love first person computer games, they wonder why. Now you have the explanation. As you can see, there is no comparison. There’s a big difference between these apples and oranges!
After thinking about this more carefully, I realized the visualization for my POV presentation was flawed and wouldn’t work. However, I can still use it to demonstrate what’s missing.
Good thing I thought it through! What are your thoughts? What am I missing here? I welcome your feedback.
WHEN IT ALL COMES TOGETHER
There’s no better feeling than finally getting it right. You’ve written a chapter or scene, gone over it a thousand times, thought it was good, but haven’t presented it to others yet. Once you do, uh oh… Houston, we have a problem!
Your beautiful piece of prose isn’t quite what you imagined. That slam bang scene is full of holes you never saw because you’re too close to it, too embedded within the words to see past your nose.
Your friends come to your rescue… sort of. Whether you like it or not, they enlighten you with the ugly truth. Your character can’t possibly do this or that in that amount of time. The gun the bad guy is using can’t do that because it’s a so-and-so and that model doesn’t have that. During that time frame, the building didn’t exist. Which character is talking to whom?
“I wrote that? No, it can’t be! That’s not what I meant to say at all. That’s not what was in my head.”
Aloud you say, “Aha, thanks for pointing that out.” Being the mature writer you are, you’re anxious to take in all the different points of view. Some of their ideas might be way off base, but many of them are dead on. You, my friend, are temporarily blinded and need a guide to steer you out of the fog.
Back to the laboratory amid the beakers, test tubes, scales you go to re-conjure your creation. A week later, you return, ready to amaze your writers group (yeah, that’s what I’ve been alluding to) with your revised masterpiece. Torture them with the edited result of all their advice (well some of them anyway).
Try two goes better than the last time. Your audience likes it better yet there are still problems. Somehow you still have a problem with too much dialogue going on during a certain scene because there isn’t enough time for it to take place. Then there is the noise level and a cell phone incident that couldn’t work the way you wrote it, even in the second draft. Dreams shattered, it’s back to the drawing board again. Better, but no cigar.
Should you just tweak it and let it go or dig in and rethink everything and make it truly work the way it should? Back to the laboratory (pronounced, la-bore-a-torry). Finally, after going over it again, you figure out what’s really wrong, do a bit more research, get some helpful advice from an expert and fix those nagging little bugs that’ve plagued this scene from the beginning, those little problems that have kept things from truly kicking butt.
In an unprecedented effort, you read it for a third time to the group. The words, though altered a bit are familiar and flow easier than the last two times. They’re trimmed, rearranged a bit, and sequenced more logically. The group picks up on it and you can feel the approval.
When you’re done, the vibe is completely different than the last two readings. This is when you’ve finally nailed it. This is when it finally comes together.
Though you don’t take every bit of advice from every person, you at least listen to what they have to say. Some of them were dead on. If they were an editor, even more so!
I just went through that process with a chapter from my icky bug novel, The Factory. I had a chapter I wasn’t happy with and neither were they. I listened and I learned. No ego, no I am right and they are wrong. I listened, I considered, and I took into account much of what my friends said. Their advice helped a lot. After reading that third run-through, I could tell I had something magical and a scene much better than what I started with. I didn’t alter the story one bit. I only changed the way I presented it.
Writing it all down is only the start of any story. Finishing it, as in editing, is where the real work begins and it’s a collaborative effort. If you cannot work with others to do this, you’ll never get anywhere. Word will soon get around that you’re difficult or impossible to work with and your name will be crap. Don’t let that happen to you!
MY MAGICK SYSTEM
When I created my fantasy world for Meleena’s Adventures, to tell the truth, I did it bass-ackwards. I had to follow my muse, so I just wrote the story. As I ran across things I needed, I made them up. My world evolved as the story did. I didn’t sit down beforehand and create my encyclopedia or plan everything out beforehand. As I’ve mentioned over and over again in my previous articles, with the first Meleena’s Adventures, which wasn’t even titled that, I knew where I wanted to start and where I wanted to end. That was it.
I’m not embarrassed to admit it was inspired by a D&D module I created in Turkey in the 80’s. Let me emphasize, inspired. The last thing I wanted to do was have the reader see the dice rolling in their heads. At the same time, I wanted lots of monsters and mayhem. I’d read a fair sampling of fantasy, thanks to my wife, and wasn’t happy with any of them. They were all too wordy and full of intrigue where I wanted adventure as much as the fantasy world. Meleena’s Adventures was the result.
As things developed, I became deeply involved in creating my world. The story arc led me on a free-form journey where I created new characters, creatures, spells, plants, cities, you-name-it on the spur of the moment. All of this fell into place, moving the plot along. For a good chunk of the story, I didn’t have any problems, but toward the last third, I had to refer to things I’d used before. That’s when I realized I needed that encyclopedia I talked about in my previous articles.
During the writing of this novel, I was fortunate to have a long lunch with James Rollins, the second time he attended one of our writer’s conferences, and picked his brain about magick. He also writes fantasy under the pseudonym James Clemens. I asked him about magic, as he spells it. He is the one that told me that magic has to have consequences. This was in 2006 and I took his words to heart. I already had magick at this point in the story but wanted to do more with it, to make it more real. His words gave me the inspiration to develop it into what it is now.
Magick in Meleena’s world is obviously grounded in my experience with D&D and all the computer games I’ve played. It can be performed by most races. However, it takes quite a bit of mental acuity to be done well. All spells drain a person or creature’s intellect to some degree. That being said, there are certain creatures and races that can’t do it at all while to others it comes naturally. Elves are at the top of the food chain along with a few other races while Snorgs are near the bottom. Minor spells don’t take as much effort and can be accomplished by most races with lesser acuity and almost automatically by those with high acuity. These spells temporarily drain one’s intellect less severely than more powerful spells.
The higher powered spells are another matter. Even the most skilled and racially attuned magick users can only do them in limited numbers before they go crazy. The results can be disastrous for anyone around them.
In the story, wizards are not magick users. Wizards are phonies, charlatans. Kind of like what warlocks are to real Wiccans. If someone calls themselves a Wizard, they are either extremely evil or they don’t have a clue. I don’t use the word mage in the story at all.
When a character performs a spell, they don’t just do it. The take out components, rub them together, mix them, say words, or do whatever crazy things I decide for that particular spell. I make it real. I learned later on, that I had to write these elaborate setups down in my encyclopedia because I wanted to repeat a few of the spells later in the story. It turns out I deleted the repeats in a subsequent edit but plan to use some of them in the sequels. If I ever get any fans, they might remember and call me on them. It can happen!
All of my spells have flaws, though for expediency, sometimes they work as advertised. However, they can go wrong for dramatic effect, comic relief, or even as a plot device.
Having all these ingredients and incantations can make for some interesting side quests that may play a part in future stories. Keep that in mind when you plan your story out.
My magick system is an integral part of Meleena’s Adventures like everything else, but it is not a panacea.
The most important thing to remember about the rules of magick. Whatever you do, keep them off the page! There’s no bigger story killer than for the reader to see D&D or computer game rules leaking through to the story! The story is about the plot and the characters, not the rules of your world. They should be the backbone of your story and should be invisible to the reader. There’s nothing wrong with alluding to a character not being able to or smart enough to do a spell, but don’t make it sound like it’s a game rule!
How is your magick system built? How do you use it in your story?
USING MAGICK IN FANTASY
For those of you new to my web site and new to this discussion, I’ll get something straight right away. In my fantasy world, I spell magick this way because to me, magic as it is classically spelled, is what illusionists do on a stage. That is magic. Magick is what a magick user does with spells and potions, wands etc (sometimes called wizards, etc.). That may rub some of you wrong. Get over it. If you’re cool with it, read on.
In my last article, Why Fantasy, which was published on Mat Greenings wonderful web site in an exchange last week, I alluded to using magick the right way in your fantasy story. This week, I want to elaborate a bit more on how to use magick so it enhances the story and doesn’t drag it down and ruin things.
Magick is an essential part of many fantasy genres, but not all. Just because you write fantasy doesn’t mean it’s mandatory you must use magick, monsters and mayhem. If you read my article on the various fantasy sub-genres, not all of them would include magick. However, in the majority of these sub-genres, there is at least some magick. In your story, magick could be key to the plot or it might be window dressing.
Though magick might be driving the story, it cannot be a panacea. In other words, it can’t cure everything. Remember that despite all the trappings, the story is still about people, whether these people are humans, icky bugs (creatures) or gods. As people, we’re imperfect and therefore whatever tools (magick) we used to get from point A to point B are going to be imperfect. Therefore, if your magick system and spells are the be-all-end-all, end of story! There’s no point going on.
No matter what the struggle entails to find the ultimate spell that cures whatever the problem might be, once you find it, it shouldn’t work as advertised. Nothing every does! On the other hand, if that big Kahuna spell or cure is not the main goal, you can let it work as advertised because that won’t ruin the main conflict. See the difference?
In a real fantasy world scenario, your protagonist seeks out an ultimate fireball to destroy an ice dragon harassing a village. If she doesn’t kill this dragon, the world is lost. Okay, I’m generalizing. Sue me.
The problem is she sucks at magick because she never studied. However, she’s the only one that can do the spell because female Elves (okay, I used a standard trope) are the only ones with the mental capacity to handle such powerful spells.
First problem is that she has to practice the spell. To practice it, she has to destroy something. Unfortunately, she can’t do that because it will be noticed and the magick user controlling the dragon. He has wraiths patrolling the region looking for her. Second, the more she tries the spell, the stupider she gets which means, the wilder she gets. She’ll throw the spell around flinging it at everything she sees. Unless someone can get close enough to stop her, she could destroy a large area before she collapses, a raving lunatic.
She finally overcomes those obstacles and attempts to save the village. Her one opportunity comes but alas, the magick user strapped all the village women and children to the roofs of the buildings and directed the ice dragon to hover above them. Now our Elven protagonist has to try and destroy the dragon with a fireball spell she’s still no good at. She has to do it while the dragon hovers above all the exposed women and children without destroying them and without her losing control and going insane.
On the other hand, if she just learns the fireball spell, confronts the dragon and destroys it, so what? That’s no story, no real conflict, no challenge.
In your world, no matter how complex or simple your magick is, you have to make sure it is realistic, as laughable as that might sound. It can’t be a panacea. It’s a means to move the plot along and is an intricate part of the story. However, remember that your story is still about people and as such, it’s about imperfection. What can go wrong will, and magick is no exception.
2 CRITICAL SKILLS FOR PROFESSIONAL WRITERS
Hello everyone. It is my great pleasure to introduce you to my friend Martin Greening. This week we’ve exchanged posts and below is his excellent article.
I’m not the smartest guy in the world. I used to be, when I was a teenager, but as I’ve grown older I have forgotten most of what I learned back then (which isn’t unusual). So when I am trying to learn a new thing, like writing for example, I need to distill it down to its essence. The old K.I.S.S. adage holds very true for me.
My bookshelves are stacked with writing books full of all sorts of information, from writing prompts to character trait lists. I have read or at the very least perused all of them. But the knowledge they contain is vast and can be difficult to get a handle on so I have boiled everything they say down into two critical skills a fledgling writer like myself needs to master:
RELEASE and REVISE.
That’s pretty much it when it comes to writing. Everything else is secondary. The rules of writing I mentioned in this previous post take things a little further, but really, when you’re learning to write you just need to concentrate on these two skills. The others can wait.
So what the heck do Release and Revise mean?
Release
Release is the process of getting words on paper. That’s it. Sounds easy right? For some it is, but for most of us it can be an arduous task. Most people want to be or feel connected to others, but we fear judgement and rejection. These fears poke their heads over our shoulders when we sit down to write and prevent us from getting the words out of our heads and onto the page. We need to find a way to let the thoughts flow from our heads and onto words on the page. How do we do that?
There are as many ideas on how to get words onto the paper as there are writers. Everyone seems to have their own system. The trick is finding what works for you. Some writers get up early each morning and write for a certain period of time or towards a goal of so many words. Other writers try to put themselves into a meditative state before even attempting to put any words on the page. Still other writers start with word clusters for several minutes before transitioning their thought process into actual prose. The methods are endless.
I can tell you what works for me, so far. I get up an hour earlier than I need to and I park myself at my laptop and type until I have reached at least 750 words. Sometimes that takes 10 minutes, many times longer, but I don’t leave that chair until those words are done.
Give it a try. Schedule time to put yourself in the chair to write, do it everyday if you can, give yourself a goal (either time or word count). Soon you will find Release and your words will end up on the page.
Don’t quit writing on a bad day.
– Jerry Cleaver
The Release process:
- Is Emotional
- Should be Non-Judgemental
Revise
Revise is the process of taking the jumbled mass of emotion that we released onto the page and forming it into a coherent story. This is also called editing and is a must for professional writing (hopefully I’ve edited all the mistakes out of this article so I’m not a hypocrite). Revise means you need to understand how a story works along with proper spelling, grammar, and punctuation. You don’t need to be an expert, but you do need a solid understanding.
The best places to learn how to revise your work are books on the editing process (two I highly recommend are Techniques of the Selling Writer by Dwight Swain and Revising Fiction by Kirt Hickman) and critique groups (like the Henderson Writer’s Group). You could also have your work edited by a professional editor, but keep in mind editors like to get paid so you may want to start with the books and groups and work your way into professional editors.
It doesn’t have to be perfect, but it does have to be finished.
– Kevin J. Anderson
The Revise process:
- Is Analytical
- Should be Judgemental
So there you have it. Release, get the words on the page, then Revise, mold them into a structured story. If you want to be professional writer, you must master those two skills.
I’m still working on it.
How about you?
Martin Greening recently resumed writing after a long hiatus. He is honing his craft while he puts his information technology expertise to use by helping other writers convert their books into electronic versions. Martin is currently working on several short stories along with his first novel, an epic fantasy. To track his progress and learn how he might be able to help you with your book, please visit MartinGreening.com.
WHAT IS FANTASY?
Fantasy would seem to be an easy genre to define, right? Elves, Orcs and Dwarves, swords and sorcery. However, that only covers one particular sub-genre of what has become a sometimes confusing and blurred genre that is now categorized in bookstores and many publishing houses as fantasy/sci-fi.
Why lump those two seemingly different genres together? They both use elements of the fantastic and the unreal. Uh, wait a minute. What is it we write? We write fiction! Duh! What we write is already fantastic and unreal. We basically lie for fun and profit. The difference is that most other genres are based on reality where fantasy and science fiction are based on, how should I define this… unreality?
Science fiction revolves around the future, outer space, aliens, advanced technology, at least in most cases. Whereas, fantasy tends to be based on something past, medieval with swords, sorcery, and creatures. In my opinion, the reason these two genres are lumped together is that they are both so far from reality, they’re lumped together in unreality. Also, the artwork is pretty bitchin’.
Where science fiction tends to use technology based on science, fantasy uses technology based on magic, or as I spell it, magick. To me, magic is what magicians or illusionists do on a stage. Magick is what wizards and magick users do in a fantasy world.
Within the fantasy realm are many sub-genres including, but not exclusive to sword and sorcery, urban, dark, epic/high, mythic, and heroic.
Dark fantasy usually has some kind of horror element to it. For instance, an icky bug story in a fantasy setting would be one example.
Sword and sorcery fantasy focuses on the heroes fighting with swords and magick in epic battles against foes and usually contains a romantic element. The focus is on the battles and the hero overcoming some obstacle.
Urban fantasy is a fantasy setting that takes place or starts in the modern world and shifts to the fantasy world. It may go back and forth between the two and an element of time or dimension travel may play a part. This is a genre that potentially blurs the lines between science fiction.
Epic/high fantasy is exemplified in the works of J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis. These are epic save-the-world settings that involve all the stereotypical trappings and span a world or worlds.
Mythic fantasy is inspired by folklore and a good modern example that blurs the lines between urban and mythic fantasy is the TV show Grimm. It takes Grimm fairy tales and puts them into a modern cop show setting.
Heroic fantasy tells the tales of heroes in mythical lands. Unlike sword and sorcery, the plots tend to be more complex and set with more intrigue, rather than just swordplay.
Whatever brand of fantasy you decided to call your story, it’s your world. Just make sure to create your rules and stick with them. Remember, it’s your world so you can do what you want, but whatever that is, don’t break your own rules or your readers will notice and call you on it. Take notes, create an encyclopedia of your world. I’m not talking about outlining the story, but an encyclopedia of names, places, things and rules of your world. Refer to it often as you write!
WHAT IS ADVENTURE/THRILLER?
Since I’m on a defining genre kick, I’ll dive right into my next, and more prolific genre, what I used to call action/adventure. Back in the day, in the mid-nineties, I loved Clive Cussler’s Dirk Pitt adventures. What was to become my Gold series was inspired by them. Lusitania Gold became my first action/adventure novel, as it was defined by all the agents and publishers of the time.
An action/adventure story is where a character goes on an adventure and is plunged into danger involving various scrapes with bad guys. The adventure comes from the story going to various worldwide locales, usually, while the plots can be as simple as a treasure hunt or a mystery.
I tackled the genre with relish. As a matter of fact, that’s where the original Gold title came from. However, I decided early on to make that almost a side issue to a much bigger quest. Because of changing times, it was a good thing because as the new millennium came along, action/adventure fell out of fashion in the publishing world.
With the MTV thirty-second attention span and the higher stakes in action movies, publishers considered the action/adventure genre to be too slow, to not have enough of a bang for readers. To put it bluntly, they’re too slow and boring. The stakes are not high enough. I need to digress a moment to our last article on horror. One thing I forgot to mention about marketing horror. It’s politically incorrect to market a story as horror to many publishers or agents. The politically correct term now is supernatural thriller. Horror doesn’t sell like it used to and is considered a dirty word among many in the publishing world so if you do write it, be careful who you submit to!
Action/adventure is in a similar case. Therefore, your standard action/adventure cannot just be about a search for gold or a simple mystery anymore. The stakes have to be higher. You have to have a world crisis of some kind thrown in. Sure, you can still have the treasure hunt, but it now has to ride on the coattails of a bigger crisis to fit into what is now the thriller category.
My buddy James Rollins, who writes very successful best-selling thrillers once told me there’s nothing wrong with mixing things up. He’ll mix genres to make things interesting and it’s obvious in his thrillers. He especially mixes science fiction with his thrillers. Whatever works.
What happened to all of my Gold series is that what started as plain old action/adventure stories evolved into adventure thrillers as the series progressed. Now I can market them as either adventure thrillers or just plain thrillers and get away with it. It worked for my publisher.
What you have to do is look at what you’re writing and ask yourself these questions. Maybe you already know but if you don’t, step back and rethink what you’re doing. Have you done it right? Is your genre vague? Are you writing something you can’t place? If you can’t even say, how are you going to convince an agent or publisher?
Food for thought.
WHAT IS HORROR?
As most of you that have been following my articles for a while know by now, I call horror icky bug. Horror is the genre I picked for my second and first serious novel after I honed my chops on that science fiction attempt, The Cave. The result was The Greenhouse. I still have high hopes of publishing it one day. Even though I also write fantasy and adventure/thrillers, I consider myself as much an icky bug writer.
A site I visit regularly and participate in is called the Absolute Write Water Cooler. It’s a forum for writers. There are sections for just about every genre of writer. Even though I’ll be publishing a fantasy at the end of this year and my adventure thriller will be coming out in 2015, the only forum I participate in is the horror forum. Why is that? It’s the only one that draws my interest. For various reasons, the others go way out on limbs I just don’t care to follow. Horror is one of my first loves and even though it’s the genre least likely to make me any decent money, even if I successfully publish, it’s the one genre where I can write no-holds-barred, where I’m free to say what I want and create whatever scenario I want unrestricted or unfettered by audience sensitivities. My audience is not likely to be very large anyway, so I’m not really shooting myself in the foot by graphic language, sex or violence.
I’ve talked in a previous post about knowing your genre and the past week I’ve been involved in a discussion on what are the elements of horror. What is horror, how, as authors, do we define our genre? Henceforth, even though most of you don’t or never will write horror, you may be able to apply these thoughts to your own genre to help you define yourself and your audience.
My style of horror has always been B-movie horror. I joke about it by saying that the monster eats half the characters, they curse a lot and there’s gratuitous sex that has nothing to do with the plot. I’m only being half-facetious here. My style has a monster of some kind, there is a high body count, the language is graphic, there’s a lot of humor, and there may be a love interest, but nothing gratuitous. It’s always in the spirit of the old B-movies of the 50’s and 60’s, but with hopefully a bit better science!
As for the definition of horror, the forum discussion went all over the place, spanning more than just the thread that inspired this article. I’ve come to my own conclusions, whether right or wrong. At our writer’s group meeting Monday evening, during member’s introductions, a person tried to describe their genre and couldn’t. It was a little bit of this and a little bit of that. I’m going to give you my take on icky bug (horror), whether right or wrong, as I think it should be. Then you can see my predicament at the end. I sincerely hope you don’t have the same troubles with your genre, though regardless of what I think icky bug should be, I still know what shelf my book will be on (well, I would if there were more than one store left).
To me, horror has to have some unnatural or supernatural element to it. Whether it be a monster, a ghost or just an unnatural, undefined threat, that element is essential. There has to be an element of threat to the main character, something scary, horrifying. The threat doesn’t have to be overt and doesn’t have to be seen in the end or even defined, but it has to drive the story. Finally, there has to be a payoff. The hero has to triumph over it in the end. If the hero dies or the bad guy (or evil entity/monster) wins, that’s no payoff, that’s letting down the reader.
What is not horror, to me, is slasher, serial killer, rape, torture, general mayhem stories. Sure, they are horrible, horrifying things. However, they’re just amped-up crime, not horror. They’re just regular terrible people being horrible to other people. That’s crime, not horror.
Ahem… vampires. Most vampire stories nowadays are bloody romances. They’re in a category by themselves. Though at one time they were considered horror, to me they no longer are unless the vampire really is a horrible threat with no redeeming qualities such as the vampires in They Hunger by Scott Nicholson. Now that’s a horror story!
The problem is that I’m almost alone in this definition. Just go to the now-defunct Borders (ha ha) and look at their horror section (maybe Hastings?). Or more to the point, go to the video store. What do you find in the horror section? Saw, Texas Chain Saw Massacre. Those movies are not horror! There isn’t a thing supernatural in them at all! They’re terrifying and scary movies, but they’re not horror! Then look at the monster movies. Where do you find them? Yup. In the science fiction section! Aaagh!
THE MEMOIR
Though most people pronounce it mem-waw, I like to play around with it and call it, mem-o-ear. However you want to say it, for a lot of writers, the memoir is da bomb. I can’t tell you how many times new members of the Henderson Writer’s Group will introduce themselves and when asked what genre they write, they’ll say “I’m writing (or just wrote) a memoir.”
While quite a popular genre, it’s also a very hard one to sell. That’s why the memoir is often relegated to the self-publishing market, distributed mostly to family and friends. Sometimes, that’s the intention of the author. When the purpose is family legacy/family history, one can pretty much write whatever they want. However, if you’re out to sell books, you need to up your game a bit.
The question you need to ask yourself is why would anyone care to read about your life? What have you done that’s so interesting? If you don’t already have a built-in fan base from being a celebrity, in which you could copy the phone book and sell a million copies, you’d better come up with something that’s going to compel readers to ante up the bucks to buy your story.
Your life, just like a fictional story, has to have some kind of hook to draw in readers. What is it about yourself that will make readers care enough to stick with it for a couple of hundred pages? No matter how interesting you many think your life is, will others? That’s the question you have to answer before you consider going through all that effort. On the other hand, if you’re going to follow your muse and do it anyway, finish it and worry about marketing it later. Your life story could surprise you either way, just don’t be too shocked or disappointed if it doesn’t sell.
As much as I rail about how I hate first person in fiction, a memoir is not fiction. Therefore, it must be in first person. It’s about you, not someone else, so it must be told through your eyes. The best format for the memoir, though not the only one, is chronological order. Start from the past and go forward, addressing whatever time period you’ve decided to cover.
The Achilles heel of all memoirs is rambling. I’ve seen it too many times where the author will go off on tangents, talk endlessly about minutiae and ramble about things that drag the narrative down to a standstill. Don’t let yourself get caught in that trap. To make your story interesting to others, it has to move. Each a scene should be a short story or chapter (just like a novel), that progresses toward the end. The last thing you want to do is lay down a bunch of random memories without form or fashion. Though you want to give the reader a sense of place, describe the atmosphere and environment of the era you’re coming from, you can’t let things drag or your readers will start skipping pages. If you keep it up, they’ll start skipping chapters and eventually may put the book down and never finish it.
Be careful dropping names. This can be a really tough call, especially if you’re drawing people in less than glowing terms. You can open yourself up to lawsuits, especially in this litigious world. This includes privately owned places.
When pitching your memoir, the key is the hook. I alluded to it earlier. An agent or publisher will want to know the same thing. Why would anyone want to buy your story? You need to know that up front if you plan to sell it to anyone. If you’re writing it just for family and friends, well…
Don’t forget the cool photos. Just make sure they’re good quality and if they show other people, have due permissions.
Happy writing.
The Worlds Of Fred Rayworth 