Go inside. Find forest.
ERIC STENER CARLSON
Finding Your Spirit in Speculative Writing
ERIC STENER CARLSON is the author of three books including supernatural mystery The Saint Perpetuus Club of Buenos Aires (Tartarus Press, 2009). He is also a human rights advocate, having investigated the mass graves in Argentina as well as human rights violations in the former Yugoslavia.
Writing is not like dancing on a stage along with other dancers, more or less in solidarity with you, and in front of a clearly defined jury. It is not a competition where the best writer wins, based upon some uniform criteria.
Writing is like dancing in the woods, alone. It is like dancing until your toes bleed and your joints ache. It is performing when there is only the hope that God sees your performance. It is performing in the hope that there is, indeed, a God, and that, publish your novel or not, He is pleased by it.
And after years of performing this ritual of writing in the hope that, someday, someone will want to share in it, years of sleepless nights, years of broken social engagements, you finally have a 400-page manuscript in hand, you pop it in the mail along with a SASE, and you wait for a response.
That’s when the writing stops. Writing, as opposed to publishing. The older I get, in fact, the less connection I see between the quality of writing and the success in publishing.
Writing is a supreme act of faith, a grasping for the universal. Publishing is a roulette wheel.
So, it makes me believe that we need to rescue the spiritual aspects of writing, the act of writing itself, if we’re going to have any satisfaction in the finished product.
Of course, because we live in a material world, and we all dream of making a living out of writing, we want to publish our work. And, therefore, as any good writing teacher says, we have to bear in mind our audience. Writing is not just a private conversation with ourselves, but a public conversation, albeit with someone else who doesn’t arrive until several years after we’ve finished speaking.
But, in the interim, between the years we spend writing our speculative novel and the moment when the first reader cracks open the book, we have to find some way to bear the solitude. I am sure other writers will recommend “workshopping” or “blogging” or “sharing with your peers.”
And, yes, other people outside the woods can help you in certain technical aspects of the ritual.
But that’s not writing. My view of writing is like my view of religion—there is just you in a direct relationship with God, and no “blogging,” just as no priest, can intercede for you.
As John writes, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” Writing, therefore, is not just talking to God. Writing actually is God.
Writing is suffering, yes. Just as I believe that, to some extent, religion is about suffering. But writing is also about finding infinite beauty. It is about discovering that clearing in the woods where something astounding is taking place, a gathering of fantastic creatures no one else has ever witnessed. It is the clear result of human feeling made manifest. It is the sublime expression of your soul.
As such, writing is more important than taking that lunch break with your colleague from Accounting. It’s more important than those two hours of watching some “reality” television show you’re never going to remember, or wasting your life in increasing your number of illusory friends in your “social network.”
That’s why I like the Greek word eudemonia to express how I feel about writing: It’s often translated as “happiness,” but it means, actually, “having a good guardian spirit” or, which I prefer, “finding your spirit” (or demon, but in a positive sense).
That’s why, when you write about a character, for example, who wants to sell his soul to the Devil or contact a loved one from the spirit world, we shouldn’t divorce ourselves from our own experience of writing. That is, our soul is so important to us that it should be equally important to our characters.
Every time you scratch a pen against paper or sit down in front of your computer, every noun, every verb you write, should be a prayer. It should be dedicated to finding your spirit. (It should not be geared toward publishing—toward imagining what other people want—which, as I’ve said, seems to have almost no relation to the writing process.)
This is not to say that, every time you write, you’re going to channel the spirit of Marcel Proust. Some prayers are angry and full of profanity and incomplete and quickly crumpled up and thrown in the garbage can. Some of the best prayers, I think, are like that, because we pray hardest in moments of supreme desperation. But that doesn’t make them less worthy.
And although I’ve made a number of Christian references, please don’t think I’m trying to sell one interpretation of writing or one interpretation of God. Like the path to God, there are many paths to finding your spirit through writing.
You may belong to an organized religion. You may have your own personal religion. You may not have a religion at all. You may not even believe in God.
But the reason you feel a burning desire to carve out at least half an hour to write every day, out of the humdrum of your routine of calculating spreadsheets or writing code or waiting tables or plastering posters on telephone poles, is because there is something very spiritual, very deep, and very beautiful inside of you that you are driven to express. I call it God. You may call it something entirely different. But there it is, nonetheless.
Therefore, you do not need to go outside yourself to imagine a struggle between angels and demons. As a writer, you’re already involved in that struggle. You just have to tap into it.
To access this spirit, especially when we are talking about fantastic literature, where I feel belief is much more important than structure, I suggest three simple exercises below. Take the good. Leave the bad. And don’t let anyone tell you how you are supposed to write. Especially not me.
EXERCISE
1. On finding the spirit: I keep a book of prayers on my bedside table written by the Armenian St. Gregory of Narek, Speaking with God from the Depths of the Heart. Written more than a thousand years ago, I find his lamentations so inspiring, that I take great comfort in them. When I become overcome with thoughts about deadlines and recognition and (oh, yes) the possibility of royalties, I read one of St. Gregory’s prayers, to remind me that writing is essentially a spiritual exercise. Whatever book is important to you, whether it’s religious or profane—perhaps it was the first book that inspired you to become a writer of the fantastic (by Poe or Le Fanu or Machen)—keep it close to you. Reread fragments now and then to remind you that you are engaged in a dialogue that goes far beyond any you’re ever going to have with your publisher.
2. On the nature of the soul: I don’t believe the most important part of a “ghost” story is the shock value or the gore. Rather, it is the fundamental question of the human soul. If there are spirits trapped on this earth, what does that imply about God? What does that imply about justice? Again, if your character is considering selling his eternal soul for something immediate—either gaining worldly possessions or saving his child—for there to be something terrible about that transaction, there has to be something incredibly precious about the soul. And if the soul is not just a poker chip to be cashed in for something more convenient, but something our character lives and breathes, then I suggest we first ask ourselves what our soul means to us. Do you believe in a soul? Where does it go when we die? And would we sell it just to get published?
3. On describing evil: I remember quite clearly a moment in the Caribbean one night, when I woke up with the distinct feeling there was an evil presence in my room. Not a hypothetical, read-it-in-a-book sort of evil, but Evil, right there, crouching next to me. I turned on all the lights, and I searched through my room, until I found a prayer for protection. And I read that prayer, over and over again, until the dawn. If the evil we de
scribe in our books is to have any resonance, then we should recognize the role it plays in our own lives. For me, that night in the Caribbean, as well as my work in the mass graves in Argentina and my investigation of war crimes in the former Yugoslavia, remind me that evil—whether from the devil or the person sitting next to you—is real. If we examine our own lives (or even just turn on the nightly news), we can find enough evil on which to build believable characters. But for our own piece of mind, once we’ve finished writing about evil, the comforting thing is this—if the Devil exists, then so does God.
MEMORABLE HEROES, VILLAINS, AND MONSTERS
“Two hours of writing fiction leaves this writer completely drained. For those two hours he has been in a different place with totally different people.”
—ROALD DAHL
DIANA PETERFREUND
Start with the Name
DIANA PETERFREUND is the author of nine novels, including the Secret Society Girl series, the killer unicorn novels Rampant and Ascendant, and the post-apocalyptic For Darkness Shows the Stars. Her short stories have appeared in Locus’s Best of the Year list and included in The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year, Volume Five.
I’m a bit of a name nerd. I can’t get a handle on a character until I’ve chosen the perfect name, and don’t get my husband started on how long I fretted over the name of our firstborn.
Character names are one of the more useful tools in the writer’s toolbox, a fact that has long been exploited by genre fiction’s brightest stars. Want an on-the-nose depiction of the character’s personality? Look to naming masters like Charles Dickens (Ebenezer Scrooge is an unbeatable classic) or J. K. Rowling (Draco Malfoy is a personal fave). Want to play with the reader’s prejudices and expectations? There’s a reason Joss Whedon named his cheerleader-turned-vampire-slayer the valley girl classic Buffy Summers. Want to indicate right off the bat that your story takes place in a world very different than our own? Jasper Fforde’s Tuesday Next or Neal Stephenson’s Hiro Protagonist drives the point home like nothing else.
What’s in a name?
• Personality: From the name alone, you get an idea that a man named Albus Dumbledore is going to be goofy and whimsical, and one named Uriah Heep is going to be noxious. This can work especially well for minor characters and walk-ons.
• Background: After all, the name was ostensibly picked by the character’s parents. I used this trick in Rampant, where reluctant teen unicorn hunter Astrid Llewelyn resents the Valkyrie warrior name chosen by her heritage-obsessed mother.
• World building: You know from the start that a man named Bilbo Baggins and one named Thorin Oakenshield grew up in very different societies, with different expectations and values for their citizens. And the marriage of a familiar name with a more unusual one will signal to the reader that your fantasy characters are human (Lord Eddard “Ned” Stark in Game of Thrones) or that your futuristic spacefarers have Earthly roots (like Frank Herbert’s Lady Jessica Atreides, from Dune).
Rumplestiltskin (another awesome handle!) was right: Names have power, and properly tweaked, names can fix all kinds of important details in the reader’s mind with one or two words. The writer’s rule of “show, don’t tell” shines clarion bright in a well-chosen moniker.
Don’t discount the additional power that can be derived from a name the character chooses himself. Though Orson Scott Card’s Andrew Wiggin picks up “Ender” through childish mispronunciation, it becomes a darkly appropriate nickname as his devastating talent in military strategy destroys an entire race of aliens. Even the title of the book, Ender’s Game, plays on the phrase “endgame.”
Paul Atreides, the exiled nobleman of Dune, knows exactly what he’s doing when he chooses the tribal name of Muad’Dib—which is a Fremen word for both the highly adaptable and tough mouse who silently thrives in the desert and the name of the mouse-shaped shadow that dominates the planet’s moon. As Muad’Dib, Paul secretly consolidates power in the desert, and uses it to wrest control of not only the entire planet, but also the universe.
I utilized this trick in For Darkness Shows the Stars. In that novel, the underclass slaves are given a single, one-syllable name, which makes them easily distinguishable from their multi-syllabic and surname-bearing masters. When freed, they adopt long names to honor their past, their family members, or qualities they wish to embrace. An explorer named Kai by his slave father Mal becomes Malakai Wentforth when he has the freedom to choose for himself.
Though fantasy novels are often the brunt of jokes when it comes to their more ornate naming conventions (i.e., letter salad with too many Zs, Ks, and apostrophes), you don’t need to give your characters a weird or overly long name to make a statement. (Think of Tiny Tim, Jonathan Strange, or the aforementioned Ender Wiggin.) Often, giving a character a prosaic name can ground him as the everyman thrust into a world beyond his imagining (like Harry Potter or THE TERMINATOR’s Sarah Connor).
And one of my favorite tricks when I have a character who isn’t quite gelling is to shake things up by changing his name. Once, a “Victor” I’d been struggling with for several chapters became “Vincent” mid-sentence, and thereafter clicked into place as the smoother, more charismatic leader I’d wanted from the start. Try it.
EXERCISE
Look at the names you’ve chosen (or may choose). Are they doing the work you want them to?
Make a list of your main characters and next to each name, ask yourself: What does this name say about the society this person came from? The people who gave the character this name (and probably had an impact on his or her upbringing)? Is the name one the character likes? Tolerates? Hates? Would the character ditch it in favor of a nickname of his own choosing (or, if a nickname, is he trying to get people to call him by his real name instead)?
Pay attention to the name the character is actually called in the text. Is it a last name? First name? Nickname? Title? It’s all very well that you named your character Nobility von Trueheart Smith, but if everyone calls him Mr. Smith or “Red,” your message isn’t necessarily getting across. I once wrote a character named Jamie Orcutt, but his dour, sinister personality was wrapped up in his nickname: Poe.
Similarly, don’t rely on the meanings often listed next to names in baby name books. Few readers know that Leslie means garden of holly. And connotation is as important as definition. After all, Adolf means noble wolf, but think twice before bestowing it on your heroic werewolf prince, since most readers would tag it deeply sinister.
Now look at your minor characters. Can you cut a lot of tiresome description of their personality by giving them a name that does the work for you? Instead of telling us that the walk-on in chapter four is a spoiled trust-fund baby, can you call him Alistair Winston Carlisle IV? Can the down-home farmer be Buddy-Ray instead of Mike?
Don’t be afraid to change a character’s name for a few chapters and see what becomes of them. After all, “find and replace” is only a few clicks away if you decide you want to go back, and you may discover the new, secret name holds a power all its own.
KAREN MCCOY
How Characters Drive Plot
KAREN MCCOY is a librarian who’s been writing full-time since 2008, including reviews for Children’s Literature and Library Journal and a feature in School Library Journal “What Teens Are Really Reading.” She writes YA sci-fi/fantasy novels and is seeking representation.
“The story . . . must be a conflict, and specifically, a conflict between the forces of good and evil within a single person.”
—Maxwell Anderson
Characters, whether they are protagonists, antagonists, minor or secondary, should be as multi-dimensional as possible. This is especially true for sci-fi, fantasy, and horror stories.
J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter books have intricate plots, sophisticated world building, and a great sense of humor. While these are all great elements to include, what makes th
e Harry Potter books most memorable are the complex, layered characters. If Harry was flat and one-dimensional, it probably wouldn’t matter if he lived in a world where pictures move and owls carry the mail.
Take the multi-dimensional Severus Snape. While his true motivation isn’t revealed until the final book, his actions always keep readers guessing. His bitter nature and moral ambiguity set him apart, allowing his character to stand independent of the plot and remain interesting.
As agent Vickie Motter stated on her blog, “Often at conferences, I’ll ask a writer to describe the main character. They will then proceed to tell me what happens to them in the plot. No, no, no. I asked about the character. Who is your character? Why should we care? What makes them tick? What will draw readers to them?”
These are all necessary questions to ask while shaping multi-dimensional characters. Here are some other important elements to consider:
Characters must have a voice—don’t make them speak; let them speak. When I first started writing, my dialogue was terrible. Part of this had to do with my unwillingness to let go of formal language, but the other problem was I was trying to make the characters speak, instead of letting them speak.
Now, when I go through revisions, I’ll study the dialogue and ask, Would so-and-so really say this? If the answer is no, I let the character tell me what they want to say instead.
It’s also important to make sure your character’s dialogue is distinctive, especially if you’re writing a first-person story with multiple POVs. If someone sounds just like everyone else, his or her diatribes won’t be unique enough to keep a reader’s attention.
But be careful of thick dialects. A common inclination is to change entire sentences to make a character sound different. Changing one or two words here and there (like yer for “your” or an’ for “and”) will do the trick.
Now Write! Page 20
