How To Write Magical Words: A Writer's Companion

by Unknown

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  Beatriz

  Fabulous post, Faith! It’s comforting to know that even pros get that feeling of not knowing what’s next—the limitless possibilities can be scary.

  David B. Coe

  Yeah, every new shiny does this to me, but I have to admit that I relish this part of the process. That new creative energy is like single malt, chocolate, and sex all rolled into one. So, yeah, I know what you’re talking about and I remember a wave of new excitement for my Winds of the Forelands series carrying me literally through a book and half of my first trilogy. I struggled with those second and third books and at times wanted to throw up my hands. But the promise of being able to work on the new story once I was done pulled me through.

  Faith Hunter

  David said, "That new creative energy is like single malt, chocolate, and sex all rolled into one."

  David, I wish it was lovely like that for me, all the way through the process. I only start to feel that the moment I have an idea and a direction. In the Big Bang concept, that lovely sensation you are describing is (for me) the millisecond after the bang starts. That is when the idea takes its first focus, and grows from painful to fabulous. But when I have the about-to-explode atom in my hand, and nothing is happening at all, except pressure is building, it is not so much fun. I can’t sleep. Can’t rest or have fun or relax. Give me a week though! Then the fun starts.

  Storytelling Tropes: Belief

  C.E. Murphy

  I recently caught a few minutes of one of my favorite early-season Smallville episodes, the one where Lex is split into Evil Lex and Good Lex, and Evil Lex utters the line, "You were right all along, Mr. Kent. I am the villain of the story."

  It got me thinking about storytelling tropes and tragic characters—because in Smallville Lex is a tragic character, and it is without question his story in the first four or five seasons that makes the show worth watching. We all know how Clark Kent becomes Superman, but in Smallville, the story of how Lex Luthor becomes the villain of the piece is wonderfully tragic. He simply never stood a chance.

  But there’s one way he might have.

  (The remainder of this essay contains some spoilers for early-season Smallville, as well as spoilers for Buffy with regard to the character Spike.)

  A year or two ago (this is tangential, but does come back to the point) I read a great role-playing game write-up done by a father who was running the new D&D4 introduction campaign for his six-year-old son (who played the whole RPG group himself, with Dad as the GM). During the course of the game, the kid’s group fought with kobolds, a couple of whom were captured to be pumped for information.

  Once the kid had learned what he needed to know, Dad expected the kobolds to be axed. That is, after all, what one does to the bad guys in a role play campaign.

  The kid, though, said, "No, Dad, we have to take them with us." Dad spluttered, "But they’re bad guys," and the kid said, "I know. But I have to give them the chance to become good guys."

  The Dad said, "They’re kobolds! They’re EVIL!"

  The kid said, "But I believe in them, Dad. They can be good."

  Dad capitulated. The kobolds got a chance to redeem themselves, and did so. (And apparently in the last encounter of the game, which had obliterated adult gaming groups left and right, the kid sailed through because he’d carefully hoarded all his magic uses and special items throughout the whole campaign and was totally prepared.)

  But the point is, the kid had picked up on (from his television cartoons, apparently), and made clear to his father, the integral trope that could have saved Lex Luthor: the good guy believes you can be better. If, early on, Clark had chosen to trust Lex and reveal his secret—that he’s superhuman—that might have cleared the only path Lex ever had to becoming a good man. (Of course, given that it’s Superman, ultimately Lex would have to betray Clark anyway. Though, if he had indeed become a good man he would be doing it to save Clark and at his own personal sacrifice, and the betrayal would be agonizingly poignant. I would love to see a one-shot episode of that story.)

  This is a trope that was used in the last few seasons of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, as well. Spike the vampire, somewhere in season four, gets a chip stuck in his head that prevents him from attacking humans. At some point, Buffy makes the decision to trust Spike, and orders the chip removed.

  In the Buffy universe there are some great long-term ramifications of this, but where it ends up being most important is in the last few episodes of the series, when all of Buffy’s longtime friends have essentially abandoned her . . . and only Spike remains on her side.

  By television storytelling tropes, he has to remain on her side. She’s his redemption; she’s the one who has believed in him, and without her faith, he’s left with nothing for himself. Without her belief, all he is is a monster, so he has to stand with her against every last odd, in order to be better than he was.

  In novels, I think this trope often manifests as "the love of a good woman," but it doesn’t have to stop there. The truth is that people, fictional or not, will frequently rise to the occasion. If you believe they can do better, or more, and say as much to them, they’ll often try.

  The flip side, of course, is sometimes, or in some way, they’ll fail. Lex, ultimately, is always going to be the villain of the piece. Buffy will never fall in love with Spike, no matter how much better he becomes. The good woman may turn out to be a back-stabbing bitch. But then you have all the wonderful juicy material that goes along with the failure—the betrayal, the heartbreak, the excuses, the revenge—and so as a storytelling element, win or lose, it’s a trope you can get terrific stories out of.

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  David B. Coe

  I always loved Spike’s character. And I didn’t watch Smallville much, but every time I did, it was Lex who brought me back to the show. Tropes are powerful writing tools; working with them, bending them, turning them upside-down. There will always be new stories to write, because there will always be new ways to play with familiar story elements.

  Knowing What You Write

  Misty Massey

  When I was in high school, I wrote a short story about a catlike alien soldier whose ship crash-landed on a planet under the control of her enemies. She reported her position, but her people ordered her to make her way to a less dangerous spot for retrieval. Along the way, she found a wounded enemy soldier, and together they helped each other survive. (Give me a break, I was fifteen.) The teacher graded it and gave it back, with the suggestion that I should write what I knew, and "steer clear of all that daydreamy stuff" (her words). This advice, admittedly, floored me. I wanted to write about magic and space and creatures that couldn’t possibly exist. I was at a loss as to how I was supposed to learn such things. Other people were writing about unicorns and time travel and telekinetic aliens, so why couldn’t I? It took me years to realize the teacher had been right, though not in the way she thought she was. It’s not that we should write what we know—we should know what we write.

  We’ve all run into a situation in which the author clearly had no idea what she was writing about. The questing novel, for example, in which the party stops for the night and eats stew for dinner. Have you ever made stew? Takes ages. A party travelling a long distance would more likely have packed dry meat and bread. If they happen to hunt and catch meat, they won’t waste time stewing it when roasting is so much quicker. I have a pet peeve about the way CPR is portrayed in movies and on television, because I’ve had to be certified in it for the past twenty years. The people on screen are almost always doing it wrong, so wrong that it’s a miracle it ever works. Not knowing what you’re writing about is a sure way to lose your reader. Luckily there are ways to keep that from happening.

  When I was writing the original draft of Mad Kestrel, I depended on my writing group to tell me when something didn’t sound authentic. I did the same for them. Now and then, though, one or another of us wouldn’t listen. Me, for example. I had written a scene
in which Kestrel injured her shoulder, and in the beginning, I decided she’d popped it out of joint. Immediately after this happened, she had to fight with two bad guys. Upon hearing these pages, Faith shook her head and said that a dislocated shoulder would have been too painful for Kestrel to do much more than walk to the nearest help. I knew she was right, but I didn’t listen. I liked the way the scene played out, and I didn’t want to rewrite it. (They call it "killing your darlings" but we’ll talk about that another time.)

  Several months later, my family and I went to the mountains for the week-end with my best friend. She, my husband, and my son all hit the bunny slopes to try skiing, while I relaxed in the hot tub. (I know my limitations, and strap-ping long boards on my feet has never sounded appealing!) Suddenly the phone rang. My husband had fallen and dislocated his shoulder. I had to pick him up from the first aid office, and drive, in the dark, on swervy mountain roads, in the snow, to take him to the nearest hospital. My husband has a pretty high pain threshold, but he was in agony. Every bump, every curve of the road made him groan. We reached the hospital, got him settled in with the doctor, and then it hit me. This was exactly what Kestrel would have been feeling. She couldn’t have managed to fight anyone. When I got home, I sat down and rewrote the whole scene, making it just a banged-up shoulder instead. Because now I knew what I was writing.

  Can you write something without ever seeing or feeling it? Sure. But if you want the authenticity that makes readers connect to your work, you really should dig deep from what you know. If you’ve suffered loss, or grief, or pain, draw from those feelings to make your characters’ behavior honest. If you’re sending your adventurers on a long horseback trip, go take a couple of riding lessons so you’ll know how it feels to be in the saddle for a while (not to mention getting a handle on how mischievous some horses can be.) You don’t have to be a fifteenth level wizard to write about magic. Read what other people have done, and pay close attention to why their magic systems work.

  And for goodness’ sake, if you have a friend with experience, listen when she tells you to rewrite a scene.

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  Beatriz

  It’s the small details, done wrong, that can yank a reader out of the story. Why should I trust an author who is creating some elaborate magical world if they can’t even get "normal" details right?

  My ex hated most medical dramas because so much of the medicine was wrong. He couldn’t just follow the plot because the glaring medical mistakes kept getting in the way of the story.

  I’ve been known to toss a book across the room in frustration because the mundane details were inaccurately portrayed without any reason.

  David B. Coe

  Yeah, Beatriz, I know exactly what you mean. For more than twenty years now, I’ve been watching TV shows and movies with a Stanford-trained scientist. It’s no picnic. . . .

  Great post, Misty. It’s amazing how a dose of emotional reality, well-drawn characters, and some well-placed research on background things like smith-work, wheelwrighting, and other medieval crafts can make magic seem perfectly authentic. Knowing what we write. Lovely phrase, that.

  On Research

  C.E. Murphy

  I don’t typically do my research—

  Hmm. I’d better start this again. :-)

  I’d been about to say, "I don’t typically do my research until after the fact," except that’s wildly untrue. Before I started the Walker Papers, I read every book about shamanism I could get my hands on (and I’m really looking forward to an excuse to buy a few more when I start that series up again in a few weeks! hahaha!). I’ve been an Elizabethan-era buff since I was a little kid, though I’ve got nothing on many of my friends when it comes to enthusiasm for the topic. So I do groundwork research before I start, but when I get down to the details . . .

  Well, my manuscripts have a lot of notes in them. Literally. When I’m writing and I can’t, for example, remember what the proper word for the back of a ship is, my manuscript reads, "toward the NOTE: NAME FOR THE BACK OF THE BOAT they went." Injured a character in a modern-world story? NOTE: LOOK UP HARLEM HOSPITALS. Can’t remember a character’s name? NOTE: FIND OUT HIS NAME AND FOR GOD’S SAKE, CATIE, YOU SHOULD WRITE THIS $#!7 DOWN! I only stop to go find out that it’s called the stern if there’s some reason I can’t continue forward without actually knowing that. There usually isn’t.

  I have a friend who—when I’m not working quite as close to the wire as I am now—plays unpaid research assistant. She’ll read my rough drafts and I get emails back full of answers to my NOTES. I’m desperately grateful to her for this and have dreams that someday I’ll be rich enough to make her a paid research assistant. But with my last few books I’ve been tapping into another research resource, which I like to call Livejournal knows all.

  It’s amazing what you can ask the internet and get back instantaneous answers on. For House of Cards, I needed, oh, a handful of legal terms that I just didn’t even know enough words about to know where to start looking, much less get the right ones. Turned out there were lawyers and legal aides on my friend’s list. I needed a high-end fountain pen, the kind that runs to silly expensive. Lots of pen buffs on my friend’s list. I just now needed a couple of translations to Italian and French, and a Latin declamation, and look at that, one of my friends has a Ph.D in Latin, which I had no idea about until now.

  I swear it feels like cheating. I don’t know why (probably because I’m part of the last generation to grow up using libraries for research instead of Google). I mean, it is not in fact cheating to go to people and say, "Hey, you know more than I do about this, can you tell me about it?" That’s precisely what research is. But somehow flinging it out on Livejournal to five hundred people to see if any of them happen to know seems like a shortcut.

  Usually what I get back is a barrage of information that I sift through and . . . gosh, use what’s appropriate. Just like real research.

  So today I’ve been running back and forth from my work computer to my ’net computer, asking questions and getting answers while I’ve been doing re-visions on my manuscript. It’s not the most efficient way to do this—usually I don’t address the NOTES until the very last thing before the spell check—but I’m in the revision stages and have been looking things up anyway, so why not. It’s all part of the process. :-)

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  Faith Hunter

  I LOVE it when you do the same things I do. It makes me feel a lot less alone and a lot more normal. I type ZZZ when I have something that needs to be fixed later. And I do XXX if it is something I need to check back on fairly quickly. My own personal NOTE code.

  I have also left notes to my mystery editor. Like this:

  (((((Miranda, Please note that this scene needs a few post mor-tem details from my forensic guy, who is in France on vacation for three more weeks. Please ignore the spaces and xxxs.)))))

  She sends me back smiley faces on them.

  David B. Coe

  I guess I’m the outlier on this one. I can’t leave that one word for later or skip over the details of, say, the wheelwright’s shop where the action takes place for one scene. I’d love to, but I can’t seem to get myself to do it. Too compulsive, I guess. It makes it harder for me to write subsequent scenes. Too bad. It would probably make my life a bit easier.

  I do my research much the same way: lots of books, lots of web searches, and some calling of friends with expertise in a given area. I haven’t tried throwing a question out to LJ or WordPress, but I’m sure I will one of these days. It’s a great idea.

  Metaphors, Similes, and Analogies, Oh My . . .

  Edmund R. Schubert

  I was reading an article once in National Geographic about the intelligence of swarms. It talked about how any large group—everything from bugs to birds to a herd of water-buffalo—can take on an intelligence much greater than that of the individual components of the group, and how scientists were applying some of the principals of swarms to solve human problems. I
ncluded in that story was an example of a trucking company that had developed a computer model for routing its trucks based on algorithms inspired by the foraging behavior of Argentine ants, a species of ant known for laying trails by depositing pheromones.

  Everybody get that? Let me repeat it: A trucking company developed a computer model for routing trucks based on algorithms inspired by the foraging behavior of Argentine ants, a species known for laying trails by depositing pheromones.

  Okay, I like to pretend I’m a reasonably intelligent guy, but my first reaction was, "What . . . ?"

  But here’s the thing: in the next paragraph, the writer of that article gave me something I could sink my teeth into. He gave me an analogy. He said that what the ants (and therefore the trucking company) were doing was like when someone goes into the forest to collect berries. Over time a path is worn in the ground to the best places to find berries.

  Now that I understood.

  Algorithms and ant pheromones? Not so much. Berries in the woods? Now you’re talking my language. And that’s kind of ironic, really, because the language we’re talking about is pictures. Word pictures.

  Writers are all trying to communicate a message, and to do so as clearly and effectively as possible. So what I want to talk about today is the power of metaphors, similes, and analogies. I’m not going to bore you with dictionary definitions of these terms; what you need to know is that the essence of all three is that they describe one thing by comparing it to something else.