How To Write Magical Words: A Writer's Companion

by Unknown

  Joanne Walker is a Seattle cop with no use for the mystical. When she sees a woman running for her life, she has to get involved—even when the woman, Marie, claims to be hunted by Cernunnos, an ancient Celtic god who leads the Wild Hunt.

  Jo’s solid, real world explodes when Cernunnos tramples through a local diner and calls her out. The fight ends with Jo’s near-death, and in a hazy experience between life and death, she’s greeted by the Native-American trickster Coyote. He gives her a choice: death, or life as a shaman. Jo chooses the healer’s path, forced to acknowledged an aspect of the universe she’s never seen before.

  Marie is murdered a few hours later. Jo, stunned, throws caution to the wind and seeks out guidance on a psychic plane. Half a dozen shamans, all of them dead in an apparently unconnected series of recent murders, respond. They charge her with finding the man who murdered them, unable to give her a greater clue than "he seeks the child."

  The next morning Jo wakes up to news that four children have been murdered at a local high school. She arrives at the school to discover a ritualized death scene. She speaks with the class teacher and, through a healing trance, learns the killer’s identity—Herne the Hunter, Cernunnos’ son.

  Jo begins tracking Herne; Cernunnos, in turn, hunts Jo. Her newborn shamanic powers are the key to his ability to stay on Earth rather than be pulled back into shadow with the turn of the seasons. Their final confrontation takes place on an astral level, a very physical battle that leaves them both worn and battered, and binds Cernunnos to the cycle of time once more.

  Another fight still remains, though: Jo tracks down Herne and with him, his daughter, whom Herne intends to sacrifice in a blood ritual that will permit him to take Cernunnos’ place as leader of the Hunt.

  As she battles Herne, Jo comes to better understand the path she’s chosen, finally accepting her fate as a warrior and a healer in a world full of ignored mysticism. With her new understanding, she finds herself able to guide Herne to his own place in that mystical world, righting an error made centuries earlier.

  When do you write a synopsis (before, during, after the novel)?

  Well, that synopsis I wrote after the book was written. I wrote the original synopses for Thunderbird Falls and Heart of Stone while the books were in progress. These days I sell on proposal, so I write the synopsis before I write the book.

  Then I ignore it.

  How do you go about doing it?

  With a great deal of pain and agony, usually.

  Actually, I’ve found the best way to write a synopsis is to log onto a chat room, seize someone, and tell them what happens in the book. Then I take the log of the file and convert it into a synopsis. For some reason I get a huge mental block about having to Figure It Out in a formal fashion, but it’s a lot easier to just say, "Oh, yeah, and, crap, I forgot that back toward the beginning Jo did this which sets this up, okay?" and then keep going.

  The problem with doing this, of course, is it means whomever I’ve seized gets spoiled for the book I’m writing, at least in the general sense. I don’t write a lot of details into my synopses, so they remain a mystery until the book’s written (to me as well as to whomever I’ve blurted at).

  I still haven’t learned to get enough emotional content into synopses, particularly in the form of motivation. I tend to focus on the plot, the whole plot, and nothing but the plot, which, to me, is the story, and leave out emotional ramifications and "er, why exactly did she do that?" "Because I NEEDED HER TO" sorts of things. I’m more aware of it than I used to be, and I’m better than I was, but that’s still an area I fall down in.

  Does this change depending on circumstances (genre, adult/YA, publisher, time of year, whether it’s raining, etc.)?

  Not really. Everything I’ve done a synopsis for has been the same amount of agony, except one synopsis that flowed in its creation and which I was proud of and liked a lot and which the publisher responded to with, "Well, okay, but what about these problems?" and made me have to reconsider the whole book. She was right, too, dammit. They usually are.

  Did your approach, or the final product (the synopsis), change as you got publishing experience? Does your agent or editor want something different from you now than when they were pulling you out of the slush?

  My agent pretty much always says the same thing when I turn in a proposal: "Not bad, I think maybe you’ve put too much information in the first few chapters, a little too front-loaded maybe," and I always have. One of my editors responds to the proposal with ideas for changing things around, for improving the story, etc; the other one does not, unless the synopsis I’ve turned in is absolute crap, in which case she says, in much nicer words, "This is crap. Do it again." (That’s only happened once. And she was right. I knew it was crap when I turned it in, but I sort of hoped she wouldn’t notice. She did.)

  As for myself . . . I’m trying to learn to incorporate the things I’m not good at, and eventually they’ll become second nature. I hope. I’m better at them than I used to be; I’m better at considering long-term ramifications and I’m better at seeing when I, for example, have forgotten to put a plot point in. But it’s still incredibly, incredibly helpful to have an editor respond, because even though it makes me sulk, the truth is that all writers have blind spots. Having someone else illuminate those areas is critical.

  We’ve been debating the eternal question of how much to include or leave out. When you write a synopsis, how closely does the synopsis match the book?

  Oh, God. Well, the Urban Shaman synopsis is practically just High Concept, because it was written after the book. I really just took all the high ideas and wrote them down.

  I’ve got the basic shape of the book in my head, and it usually does come out more or less like what I wrote in the synopsis, although never exactly. But what I find them useful for is when I get slowed down or stuck and don’t know what I should be doing next. I go look at the synopsis and go, "Oh! What a cool idea that is! Now how can I get my characters to that point so I can do it?" which certainly unsticks me.

  The problem with doing that is that in re-reading the synopsis I sometimes find that I forgot something REALLY COOL that would now require rewriting half the book to work in. So I’ve begun keeping a copy of the synopsis open along with the other doc files I’m working on so I can take a peek now and then and see if I’ve forgotten any cool ideas.

  Ideally my synopses cover the action thread, the emotional thread, hit a few scene highlights that I know or expect to be seeing, and resolve the book. This is easier with the Walker Papers, say, which have one POV character, than with the Inheritors’ Cycle, which has . . . one main POV character, but six or something minor ones. On a high story level the books almost always do what the synopses say they will. It’s just that my details frequently change, and that, I don’t worry very much about.

  And how do you introduce/explain an SF/F setting in the short space of a synopsis?

  Looking at a synopsis I wrote for an unfinished SF novel, I took about a page (as described above with formatting) to set up the world. It’s a four page synopsis (I think it had to be four pages for some contest or something I submitted it to), so that’s a lot of space dedicated to the setup, but it was also the bare minimum I thought I could get away with.

  Is writing a synopsis a difficult process for you? Enjoyable/detestable? Any tips for making it easier?

  The only person I know who likes writing synopses is Judith Tarr, who says something like, "But it’s so easy, that’s just how it all has to go in order to make the story work!" This is probably why she can write books that leave me staggering around in awe of her skill, and wide-eyed with moments of, oh, *that’s* how you do that . . .

  For those of us who are merely mortal, writing synopses generally seems to be a teeth-grinding, hair-pulling kind of experience. As I said above, the best way I’ve found to do it is to sit down and tell someone in a chat room how the story goes. (It doesn’t work out loud, because I need the text to build t
he actual synopsis from.) I don’t know if that would work for anybody else, but it helps me.

  But here’s something I haven’t mentioned: having the damned things helps. It does give me something to refer back to and say, "Uh, what next?" and it gives me ideas of, well, what next. I’ve been writing . . . a lot, these last few years. My first book came out in June 2005; my eighth is out this month, my ninth will be out in May, and my 10th in September, with two more coming out in the first half of next year. Out of those, one (Urban Shaman) was fully written before 2005. (Heart of Stone was as well, but underwent such massive revisions that it may as well have been from scratch.)

  There is no way I could have written ten books in three years without synopses. They help guide me away from false starts, they help get me back on track, they give me a structure. It might not be exactly right, but it’s something to at least lean on. Writing them forces me to consider where the story is going and how it’s going to get to the end scene I have in mind. Doing what I’ve done the last three years, that’s critical. Much as I hate writing them, I seriously doubt I’ll ever write another book without writing a synopsis: they are, in the end, too useful.

  How To Title Your Story — Or Not

  Edmund R. Schubert

  As Misty Massey once said, "Despite the old adage ‘You can’t judge a book by its cover,’ we happily judge just the same." She’s absolutely correct. The title of your book or short story is your opportunity to make a good first impression on a reader; it will either establish a promising tone—or not. Writing fantasy (or SF) opens up additional worlds of creative possibility, but "creative possibility" is a double-edged sword and you have to wield it carefully.

  As an editor, a bad title has never (consciously) caused me not to buy a story, nor have I ever heard any editor say they failed to buy a book or story specifically because of the title. However, it does set certain expectations regarding what I’m likely to encounter once I start reading, and obviously it’s in your best interests to have an editor start reading with the best possible impressions.

  If a title doesn’t work and I want to buy the story, I won’t unilaterally decide to change it; I’ll point out what I consider the specific flaws in the current title and suggest some alternatives. At that point the author and I will discuss it, come to an agreement, and we’re set. However, I do know that many book publishers will (and frequently do) tell their authors what the title of their novel is going to be when it’s published, and it’s not just first-time authors that this happens to. I once had a conversation with Orson Scott Card about one of the books in his Ender’s Game series, and even he had one of his titles changed. It was early in his career, but well after his huge success with the original Ender book. The point is, it can happen to anyone, and you should be neither surprised nor insulted if it happens to you.

  The reason why book titles are so important to publishers is they know that titles are one of the top three factors in a customer’s decision to pick up a book off the shelf and look at it—or not. (The other two factors are the cover art and the reader’s familiarity with the author’s name.) The title may not make a reader decide to actually buy the book, but they can’t possibly buy it if they don’t pick it up, can they?

  With short stories you have a little more room for fun, creativity, and, quite simply, words. But with a novel, titles needs to be catchy, punchy, and short enough to fit on the spine of the book (and still be readable). Are there exceptions? Always. But consider these excellent titles: A Game of Thrones, The Sorcerers Plague, Enders Game, Skinwalker, Fahrenheit 451, Mad Kestrel, Act of Will. All are generally one to three words long, and all contain either uncommon words or uncommon combinations of words.

  That brings me to one of the biggest problems I see in titles: incredibly overused words and/or painfully common words used in isolation. The word "game" is a common one, yet there are two hugely successful books with that word in the title (just in the list I gave you; I’ll bet there are others). The difference is that in both cases the word is closely paired with another word that it normally has nothing to do with.

  On the other side of the coin, look at these titles from my pile of submissions at IGMS: "The Long Fall," "Human Child," "The Chorus," "Rationalized," "It’s Not You, It’s Me."

  What do these titles tell you? Nothing. What questions do they raise? None. This is the essence of a bad title. Common and overused words (and expressions) used in isolation.

  On the other end of the spectrum, you can also easily over-do it. "ORANGE AGBADA JACQUARD," "Photon-Card from Delteron-9," and "Gray as a Moth, Scarlet as Sumac" are all real titles that were submitted to IGMS. And in my opinion (with apologies to the authors), they are all trying way too hard.

  Yet another thing to avoid is titles that are only clever, or only make sense, after you’ve read the story. If you need the context of the story to understand the title, you have a bad title. If the title takes on additional meaning after the story has been read, that’s great. But it has to work beforehand, too.

  I mentioned earlier that I occasionally work with authors to change the title of a story I want to publish. Let me give you a few examples, so you can see my logic:

  "An Early Ford Mustang" by Eric James Stone was originally titled "Brad Decides To Be Early." The story is about a guy named Brad who inherits a Ford Mustang from his uncle. This car has the ability to influence the flow of time, but that ability comes with a price. The original title only made sense after you’d read the story (strike one), but even then, it is incredibly bland (strike two). Not that the new title is stellar, but it’s a big step up from "Brad."

  "Judgment of Swords and Souls" by Saladin Ahmed was originally titled "Red Silk In The Lodge of God." "Red Silk" isn’t necessarily a bad title, but the climax of the story centers around a ceremonial battle called—you guessed it—the Judgment of Swords and Souls. As a title, it’s tighter, has more drama to it, and brings the added benefit of taking on additional meaning with the reading of the story. Bonus.

  "The End-of-the-World Pool" by Scott Roberts is actually just a trimmed-down version of the original title, but I think the difference is an important one. I thought the original title, "Horseplay at The End-of-the-World Pool" set the reader up with expectations of something with a lighthearted tone. And though the story does open with two boys fooling around at the edge of a swimming pool, it quickly takes on a much darker tone that it maintains throughout the story. The tale reads like something Bradbury would have written in his early days and is a favorite of mine, but it required a title that didn’t mislead the reader.

  "Horus Ascending" by Aliette de Bodard was originally titled "Aten’s Fall." This is another example of a title that had the right basic idea, but this one needed to be turned around one-hundred eighty degrees. The story is about an interstellar ship called the Horus, which is run by an artificial intelligence named Aten. The problem as I saw it was two-fold. First, the story is about the ship after it crash-lands, is separated from the AI, and learns to survive on its own, so it’s not even about the entity named in the original title. And second, although both names come from Egyptian mythology, a lot more people have heard of Horus than Aten. My concern was that "Aten" was going to leave a lot of readers scratching their heads in bewilderment.

  So there you have it: a crash course on what makes one title effective and another not, along with some specific example of titles that were changed and why.

  §§§

  A.J. Hartley

  Great, specific examples, Ed. Thanks. I happened to look over my contract from Razorbill the other day. I sold them the first of a new YA series a few months ago. The book was then called The Olde Mirror Shoppe. When they first expressed interest in the book they said they would want a different title, something less Dickensian which conveyed a sense of mystery and intrigue in terms suitable for a kids’ book. I offered lots of titles, and though we had several close calls, they eventually opted to go with something that emerged from th
eir own meetings: Darwen Arkwright and the Peregrine Pact. I was okay with it, but the contract language made it clear: the title is "Subject to author’s consultation. However it is understood that this is a right of consultation, not approval, and in the event of a disagreement, the Publisher shall prevail."

  Great Expectations — No, Not Dickens

  Edmund R. Schubert

  Earlier I wrote about the importance of having the characters in your stories want something, and about how "wanting" gives shape and direction and a sense of purpose to your story. I’d like to expand on that idea and say that in an even more sweeping sense, the difference between good, publishable fiction, and pretty, wandering words that no one cares about is determined by whether or not the writer can create a sense of expectations in the reader and then meet those expectations. "Wanting" is just the simplest way of setting that sense of expectation in motion.

  To be blunt, a lack of expectations is the most common reasons that I reject a lot of otherwise serviceable fiction. Most of the submissions I read for InterGalactic Medicine Show have already gone through the hands of at least two, and sometimes up to as many as four assistant editors, so there are no painfully terrible stories left by time the pile reaches me. But time after time what I do find is wonderful prose with no sense of purpose. Without that sense of purpose, fiction is just words wandering aimlessly around the page. No matter how beautifully composed the words may be, if there’s no purpose, there’s no story.

  A sense of purpose helps the reader to know where to focus, what to pay attention to, what’s important and what’s not. It makes them susceptible to red-herrings. Without it, the reader is drifting through your story aimlessly, hoping for the best. Or more likely, getting bored and losing interest. And that is the kiss of death.