Petra closed her eyes so that the tears would stop blurring her vision. Geraldine put a knobby hand on Petra’s cheek, palm over the tears. “There, there,” she said. “I would have eaten you, Petra, my love.”
Petra sniffed, but the tears kept making her nose run anyway. “You would have?”
“I knew after the Dickinson,” Geraldine said. “You would have been delicious, I could tell.”
Petra’s heart was at once swelling and collapsing. She was an explosion under water. “Why didn’t you?”
Geraldine traced Petra’s cheekbone. “Because if I ate you up, I wouldn’t have you anymore.”
Petra opened her mouth, but she didn’t have any words to say. Geraldine already knew her thoughts, anyway.
“Don’t let Daniel stay here forever,” Geraldine whispered. “He has to leave the jungle eventually, when he’s less young and savage. And take the Dickinson with you.”
Three character arcs with three different endings—how to make them all end neatly within a few pages of each other? The answer is: not in the first draft. Don’t get discouraged if you get to the end and it’s terrible. Take it from me; I have thirteen published novels behind me, and all of them are terrible when they’re first done. The beginnings are wrong, the ends are wrong, and probably the middles as well. That’s what revision is for.
This story had all kinds of endings. Some of them involved eggs, if you can believe it, and some involved coffins, and some of them just involved really nice furniture. I like this one the best. That’s why it’s the end. Because I buried the others in a place where no one else will ever find them.
Petra wiped her face with the back of her hand.
Geraldine smiled then. “And read me just one more.”
“Which?” Petra whispered.
“You choose,” Geraldine replied. “Something with a satisfying context.”
Petra thought for just a moment and then said, “Daniel, would you get me the Dickinson?”
Daniel scuffled to fetch it. He’d also brought Petra a handkerchief for her face, which Petra used. Shuffling through the pages of the little green book, she found the poem she was looking for.
Then she said, grand and oratory and tearful, “I’m going to read you a poem by Emily Dickinson. You’re the context.”
Petra read,
I died for beauty, but was scarce
Adjusted in the tomb,
When one who died for truth was lain
In an adjoining room.
He questioned softly why I failed?
“For beauty,” I replied.
“And I for truth,—the two are one;
We brethren are,” he said.
And so, as kinsmen met a night,
We talked between the rooms,
Until the moss had reached our lips,
And covered up our names.
/fin
CRITIQUE PARTNERS
Tessa
This is about audience. You need one. Writers write for or toward something, and that something is a reader. As the writer you can only imagine being in the place of the reader, but the space you occupy is the dangerous space of performance. You need a stage manager. You need a spotter. You need a reader stand-in.
Critique partners aren’t readers, though—like the name says, they’re partners. They’re in this with you. Like the midwife to your literary labor, a critique partner should be familiar with the writing process and understand genre, intentions, and the relationship between book and reader. They should know the rules and be able to witness your writing pains from a slight distance in order to keep the level head you can’t.
You are in it; your critique partner is sitting next to you, checking the gas gauge and watching for cops. (A critique partner will say, “Gratton, that is a lot of metaphors up there.”)
Brenna
Critique partners are people you can count on to be your objectivity when you’ve worked on something for long enough that yours is broken. They want your story to be the best version of itself, which is not the same as telling you what you should do or how they would write it. Once you’ve known each other for a while, they begin to learn how you write and what you’re capable of, and then when you get discouraged or burned out or just plain lazy, they say, “Hey, do better! Because I know you can.”
Maggie
Okay, great. You’re convinced. So, where do you get one of these critique partner people? Not all readers are created equal, and not all readers are on the same page (pun, pun, pun) as you. I went through many writing groups and critique partners when I first began putting my writing out there, and even though I was happy to get feedback, it never felt exactly right. I always felt as if the other person was asking me to write a slightly different book than the one I had in my head. It wasn’t until I realized I needed to find a critique partner who enjoyed reading the same kinds of books that I enjoyed writing that I began to really have success. Tessa and Brenna are not my clones, but their reading and writing tastes are similar enough to mine that they enjoy my writing for what it is. Plus, they know that a good critique partner helps you to craft the best version of the book you want to write, not the best version of a book that they would write.
There are places to find critique partners online—that’s how I found Tessa and Brenna—but you can also look for them in local book clubs, in writing groups, and in your classroom. But be leery of picking someone who will take it easy on you, like your mother or best friend. Critique partners can become great friends, but it’s a little harder for friends to become great critique partners.
INTRODUCTION
This story began with bombs.
IEDs, to be exact. Improvised explosive devices found in every pothole, burned-out car, and pile of rubble in Iraq. Reading about them in news, nonfiction, poetry, and novels from and about the Iraq War has been an uncomfortable obsession of mine in the past few years, and I tend to work through my emotions about the world I live in by writing stories about it. I make up stories to process my political and cultural hopes and fears, and doing so calms the angry, desperate part of me that wants to understand the world, that needs the world to be a better place than I’m afraid it is.
Because I’m me, I was thinking about what IEDs made with magic might look like. IEDs are hidden bombs meant to ambush, meant to be secretive up until the shocking moment they are not. And they’re desperate bombs, planted outside your house to keep the enemy away, even at risk to your own safety. Who would make magical IEDs and how? Would they still be surprise bombs—the kind that take you unawares even if your job is hunting for them? Could you hunt them if you weren’t a wizard? How might they affect the body and air and land? I love the dissonance in pairing death and beauty, so I imagined magical IEDs to be beautiful, deadly bombs that explode in glorious colors, ripping through anything in their way.
I wondered what sort of world and context could lead to magical IEDs that were just as lovely and elegant as they were bloody and deadly.
I have six thousand words of notes to myself asking and answering that question over and over again. I thought about landscape and religion, family groups, refugees, rebels, and occupying armies. The thing about IEDs that scares and fascinates me is that for the most part they are made and laid by the people who are home. IEDs are a desperate resort used by people willing to destroy their own safety in order to drive an enemy away. That couldn’t change just because I was making my IEDs magical.
Magical IEDs came with some suggested themes: secrets, occupation, imperialism, refugees, postwar devastation. My own feelings about the larger real-world context of IEDs in Iraq are angry, sorrowful ones, tinged by a sick understanding that your own country can betray you and its own ideals. So that was floating around in my imagination, too.
It wasn’t difficult to invent a world for my magical bombs—only time-consuming. I knew I would have at least one occupying force, I knew the landscape I chose would be devastated. I knew magic needed to be part of the
land, because the key to IEDs is the improvised part—they’re made out of material on hand.
This is where I say, Research research research research. You have to know everything you can know about a few things before you can even begin to layer in all the complexities of a world. Of course making things up is the goal, but you need to build the meat of your world on a skeleton of true information so people will understand and believe it.
But all of this above only tells you about where the world came from and hints at how I slowly spiraled out from that central idea: the magical IED. How did I get to the story itself? That didn’t start until I turned my attention to characters, because the only thing that brings a world to life are the characters who literally live in it. If the basic elements of story are a pyramid, then world is the thick base, character is the middle, and the tiny tip is plot, because characters are created within and grow out of a world, and plot is only the action rising from the conflict between what your characters want and what they cannot have.
(Of course, you can reverse engineer that pyramid if you begin with a plot/conflict idea. Work your way back to character and world, but in the end it should feel like your plot is a natural progression from your characters’ desires, and those desires are dictated by how characters fit or don’t fit into the world itself. I just happen to begin with world and work upwards from there.)
When inventing my characters, I made a list of things I wanted from the magical bomb story:
kissing
inherent political/cultural tension
secrets and secret motivations
Kissing is there because it is always there. Sorry not sorry. I like romance of every kind and rarely conceive of a story without some element of it. But this gave me the initial information about my characters, other than that I would have at least two main ones and I would need sexual attraction between them. Beyond that, I didn’t immediately assume gender or sexuality or very much else at all—though I knew because of the war-zone setting that there would be ample opportunity for trouble and forbidden love.
Political and cultural tension had to be an important aspect of the characters because it was the basis for why there would be magical bombs in the first place: war between two (at least) nations. My characters needed to personify that tension in some way. I knew they would be on opposite sides of something. Possibly the war itself, possibly just on opposite political sides within the same culture.
Secrets and secret motivations occurred to me very early on as a major theme because IEDs are usually (always) disguised in some way. I wanted at least one character to Have A Secret that could “go off” like a bomb at the right/wrong moment.
I brainstormed more about the war zone I was creating. The money, politics, religion, and what sort of people would be necessary: a soldier and a wizard seemed obvious, and sometimes I’m happy with the obvious characters if they fit the world right. I could use them to explore the military and magical systems that are the two most important aspects of magical bombs. Weaponized magic requires the militarization of magic. This was the point where all the possibilities opened up. Is my soldier from the occupying nation or an insurgent planting bombs? When does the story take place? During the war, after the war? Is my wizard an expert in making magical bombs, or did she just stumble onto the key to defusing them? Is she a rebel or an expat or an occupier? I could have chosen any of those possibilities and made a story out of them. Like we’ve all said in this book: you can make any idea into a good one. You just have to choose.
What I needed next in order to choose was the core emotional conflict.
Because of the world I’d begun to create, I knew it involved secrets and cultural misunderstandings, and there was a niggling sense that I needed to make the conflict about rebuilding connections. Connections? my brain said. Kissing is connections. OH HEY HOW ABOUT THAT FORBIDDEN KISSING.
Sometimes a kiss is like a magical bomb.
As soon as I thought that, I realized how I could weave in culture, politics, secrets, and kissing. (SPOILER ALERT: I’d tell you but it would spoil the explosion.)
I had an emotional plot.
All I needed now was a hero for point of view, and a way into my hero’s narrative.
The choices I made at this point were mostly just about what I wanted personally, and that is maybe the most legitimate way to make a choice as a writer. What do you want to talk about? I wanted to write about magical bomb disposal in a postwar landscape with kissing and identity angst. So I made my hero a young man in the occupying force who returns to the place of his war to clean up the mess his country helped make, who thinks he knows who he is and what his country did and what he wants, who was formed in wartime and unapologetically a soldier and very good at his work. I made the wizard (and love interest) a native of the war-torn land, connected to its spirituality, magic, and traditions in a way that would be challenging and controversial to the hero and his imperialist notions.
I hope you enjoy “Desert Canticle.”
—Tessa
DESERT CANTICLE
The desert is all the colors of fire.
That’s the thing I said when they asked the first time I came home—What was it like, over there?—in hushed, or jovial, or unconcerned tones, like the desert was a different world, not merely a war zone.
It was better when I was with Aunt Lusha, because she’d answer for me: The Sweet is a seeping wound, a bloody gash in the earth that we put there! Her violence, her insistence, her politics—everyone immediately dismissed me and listened to her. Glad to have a woman to hear out instead of only a second son.
Usually world building is just choosing what details to focus on and when. Here you already learn that not only is the narrator a boy, but he’s also not important compared to his aunts, and that’s reflected in the greater world: women matter more than sons. A lot can be extrapolated from that.
The truth is, the desert is beautiful. It hums.
That’s why I went back.
• • •
I thought I understood hypocrisy.
It was this line, “I thought I understood hypocrisy,” that gave me my first real window into Rafel’s emotional worldview. It made me realize the third-person point of view I was using focused too much on world, politics, and setting and not enough on Rafel’s heart. The story is about magic bombs, but the core of the story is about setting off the hidden bomb in Rafel’s heart, so to speak.
NOTE: When world building in first person, you can only reveal information your narrator knows, cares about, and believes is relevant.
After all, I signed up to serve in a war we could not win and had no intention of winning. An Riel and the Eruse Confederacy have fought over mineral rights or minor insults every few generations for as long as we’ve both existed, and the Sweet has always been between us. Our battleground. Our game board. Our collateral damage.
I volunteered despite being a few months too young. My great-aunt signed papers forcing my commission because I’m not only a son, but a second one at that, and what better way for me to distinguish myself? Everyone expected there would be no more than a half year of combat left before our Queen Mother and the Eruse Chancellor signed a new treaty. I expected a few months of difficult work, of miserable heat and raw skin, bad sleep, crap food, scorpions, and heat exhaustion. I expected the thankless task of rooting out the star clan rebels who did not flee the desert when our war machines rolled in, who did not join their expat families or become refugees in Eruse.
I never expected to be so good at it.
Good at being a soldier, or good at hypocrisy? OR BOTH? #theme
It’s important to remember that every word should be doing multiple jobs. This entire section is both characterization and world building. It’s a lot of info, but it’s tinged with how Rafel sees it, experiences it, and thinks about it.
• • •
Aniv haunts me. Those striped, jewel-toned robes she wore, green-blue-ivory, sliding along the orange
adobe cobblestones of the fortress city. Her sheer veil, marking her a star clan mage, distorting her image so I could barely see her dark eyes, the long end of her nose pushing against the veil, her always-painful smile. I think about her too often. I think about him too often.
Once she said, “I know you cannot understand, but you will not tell me I am wrong.”
When one of the curtains here in my mother’s seaside manor flutters, or an aunt turns a corner quickly enough to make her pant cuffs flap, my entire body tightens with hope that it’s Aniv.
• • •
I’m writing it down, all of it, everything I can remember and some things I only think I remember. Because I’m losing her the longer I’m away. I feel her draining out of my memory so there are only these impressions on my heart. I have to retain as much as I can so I can be honest about it. All I want is some honesty, and I must begin with myself.
This section used to be more informative, but Maggie and Brenna both thought Rafel lacked emotion in the first half of the story—he was telling it too coldly, as if he had PTSD or was trying to distance. That is not what I wanted. This was the first place I started to layer in his relationship to his emotional state.
• • •
Many military names and nicknames are incongruous to their meaning for humorous or ironic reasons, and I wanted to highlight that desert magic is meant to be beautiful and spiritual, and so here is this beautiful thing being used to do terrible things. Therefore, the bombs are named after flowers.
And the flower mines.
Invented near the end of the war by a mad star mage whose entire family, they say, was massacred by one side or the other. To the star clans it’s sacrilege, using magic to kill, against the laws of their gods. That’s why they say she was mad to do it.
The Anatomy of Curiosity Page 9
