Tag Archives: Lightborn

Lessons learned along the way

In an exchange on a listserver I am on, the question of writing lessons learned along the way came up. This was my list . . .

  • Published novels are the finished product: one never sees the messes, failures and train-wrecks on the way, so one is completely misled as to how easy certain things are to execute. The downside of a diet of the best is that the emerging writer can become inadvertently overambitious and try things that are too difficult for them.
  • I did two dumb things and two smart thing in my first novel. Dumb things (ie, things I wasn’t developed enough to do): writing a quest novel, and using that past-present structure that Ursula Le Guin made work so beautifully in Dispossessed. I didn’t realize until a year or so after Legacies came out where I’d got it from, and why I was so wedded to it. The sort-of-quest structure is difficult to pull off because it doesn’t innately have a strong narrative drive behind it. Smart things I did: having a single viewpoint, and having a character I had deliberately written as attentive and extremely perceptive. Sometimes, wrestling with the need to convey something essential via a viewpoint character for whom it’s not in character to notice that, I miss Lian.
  • Certain plots are more bomb-proof than others – they carry their own structure and drive with them. [cref Blueheart]’s initial plot is a mystery, and once I’d got that – the dead body in the ocean – it found its shape quite quickly, carried along by the central question of who and how. By midway through the book the reader actually knew everything, and it turned into a political novel, but by then the central conflict was established and on its way to the climax. I did myself an inadvertent favour, there.
  • Quest plots – frequently the first plot an SF&F writer tries – are not as easy as they look: certain choices have to be made to ensure the quest plot gets and keeps its narrative drive and doesn’t become picaresque (a right-on editorial comment about an early draft of Legacies). If I were writing a quest, even now, I’d make sure that what was being sought and who was seeking it were established in the first chapter, and not lose sight of that for a moment. I’m still not sure enough in my plotting to do the young man/woman goes off all unknowing and find his/her destiny on the way. I was unwittingly smart enough to have the quest front and center in the beginning of Legacies’ frontstory, interspersing it with the interleaved backstory in which Lian had to find his mission.
  • Passive, reflective characters fall under the heading of Advanced Work. Again, writers have pulled off the reluctant hero wonderfully, but life is much easier if a character wants something and goes after it. Lian climbing over the wall, throwing himself into the path of Lara and Rathla and the story itself, was a wonderfully liberating moment for me.
  • Sometimes the writer just has to give up and do what’s obvious – usually because they’ve set themselves up that way. In one of my unpublished novels I was resisting a particular idea because it seemed too obvious. When I finally accepted that it had to be that way, a whole lot of other problems were suddenly solved, because my characters’ repugnance (they didn’t like the idea any more than I did) prompted them to actions that led directly to the showdown. Moral: It’s a bad idea for the writer to argue with their own story.
  • Even after (almost) 9.5 novels, I still don’t get control of the plot until my second draft (or later). I’ve just had to do a massive overhaul to keep two of my main characters on the scene for a major action setpiece (this was [cref Shadowborn]). I also had difficulties setting up a crucial event in that conflict, because I needed not to surprise the reader, but I knew that if one of the characters knew about it, it would be out of character for him to leave. So overhaul. And it works. So. Much. Better. Moral of the story: keep the viewpoints where the action is. As long as the action is essential to the plot.
  • If I reach the end of my first draft, and it isn’t right (usual metaphor: large plate of spaghetti, stands slithering over the sides), I start cutting. I usually have a fixed idea of the endpoint from fairly early on in the novel, and I reshape the novel to line up with the end. I cut out everything that that isn’t related to the end. Then I put in everything that’s missing.
  • On the other hand, all the scenes that end up on the cutting-room floor mean that by the time I get the scene I need, it practically writes itself because all the decisions are made and I have the characters rounded out. Ibsen described his growing familiarity with his characters through successive drafts. In the first draft he knew them as if he had met them on a train (‘One has chattered about this and that’). By the second draft he might have spent a month at a spa with them (‘I have discovered the fundamentals’). By the third draft, he knew them thoroughly (‘as I see them now, I shall always see them’).
  • I try to obey Chekov’s Law (‘One must not put a loaded rifle on the stage if no one is thinking of firing it.’), which usually means I have to round up a certain amount of unused artillery during revisions. One of the downsides of writing a trilogy is that once [cref Darkborn] was committed to press, I was committed to firing off the guns lying around. Twelve of them, when I did the inventory in my notebook. I was delighted when I found a way to get four to pop off at once in the archduke’s breakfast.

A brush with fantasy (Darkborn, Lightborn, and Shadowborn)

When, back in the winter of 1999/2000, I received the letter telling me that my publisher was declining the option of my next novel, I set it down on the kitchen table and headed off for another 28 or so hours in ICU. The devouring intensity of my daily work immured me against any sense of disappointment or panic. I certainly didn’t imagine it would be nearly a decade before I would publish another solo novel. But to my delight, last month Anne Sowards at ROC took on my first fantasy novel, Darkborn, and its sequels, Lightborn and Shadowborn (see SF Canada news).

Getting a novel (a trilogy!) accepted is as much a kick as it was the first time around, when Deborah Beale bought Legacies and the as yet unconceived and unnamed Blueheart. When I think about it, even after 6.5 SF novels, I shouldn’t be surprised to be writing fantasy, given that I’ve been reading it as long as I’ve been reading SF. Possibly longer: though I’m not sure it counts being assigned to read The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe in Grade V, thereby successfully immunizing me against any interest in the series until, as a teenage skeptic, I greeted the ending with a resounding ‘ick!’. Around the time I was rejecting Narnia, I was loving Le Guin’s classic Wizard of Earthsea trilogy, full of lucid language and many-levelled subtleties, and Patricia McKillip’s wonderful The Riddle-Master of Hed. McKillip’s characters were the kind to walk around in one’s mind, not just Morgan and Raederle and Deth, but all the supporting characters: Mathin, Reed, the Morgol, Lyra,  … even those whose names I can’t remember. The year I read it, too, I was intensely homesick; Morgan’s loss of the land-rule of Hed, the sense of every root, twig and farmer, was more than a plot point to me.

Then there was Tolkein. My local bookshop in Edinburgh – I think it was Munroes of Morningside – had a copy of The Hobbit, puffin edition, with a sepia wash line drawing of a dragon on the cover. I am now enlightened enough to know the drawing was the author’s own, but then I mentally catalogued it as one of ‘their books’ – dull, worthy books that adults thought children ought to read. It was Ursula Le Guin’s essay "The Staring Eye" that hooked me on the Lord of the Rings in my last year in undergrad. I recall meeting Faramir over a venerable NMR machine with a taped sign "Wipe sample before inserting"; I was a less than diligent chemistry student that week. The ‘looks dull’ stigma also attached itself to Robin McKinley’s The Blue Sword – it was a Newbury winner, after all – and delayed my finding my way into the fascinating land of Damar. One of the attractions that fantasy has always had for me is the importance of place; the setting, the land, as a character in the story.

Some years later, I couldn’t pass by a book that started, "The worst thing about knowing Gary Fairchild had been dead for a month was seeing him every day at work." Thus I discovered Barbara Hambly. I found myself in Philadelphia and Darwath at the same time, and Gil’s deductive reasoning to the heart of the mystery around the Dark delights the scientist in me. But my favourite Hambly bit still has to be this piece of build-up-and-twist, from Dog Wizard:

A thing loomed suddenly from the darkness, a huge shape stooping under the seven-foot arch of the ceiling. Even the pallid light shed by the nodule that dangled, like a third eye, from the front of the platycephalic skull threw no more than a firefly sheen on the stretched, squamous green of its hide. Spider, dragon, and eldritch nightmare; chisel teeth glistened on the lipless muzzle; four long arms, four massive hands thick with claws between which writhed clusters of wriggling tentacles. Those hands, Antryg knew well, could crush a man’s skull. It raised one as it stepped forward.    

"Do you have any idea," Antryg gasped, leaning against the wall for support, "what the hell is going on?"   

"Not the slightest," the monster replied.   

There are more books, many more books; I could reminisce for at least another two or three hours, but shouldn’t, not at this hour. First thing tomorrow I have a date with some imaginary people expecting me to get them out of the various fixes I’ve landed them in.