Lucky Seven

Coming late to a meme. And actually, no one tagged me on it, but who cares, I'll play anyway.

The idea is to go to page 77 of your current WIP, count down seven lines, then post the next seven.

Being me, I made this more complicated than it is. First I had to decide whether page 77 meant page 77 single-spaced or page 77 double-spaced. I write single-spaced, so I went with that. And I didn't want to have to do actual math to figure out what page it would land on if it was double-spaced.

Then I had to figure out exactly what "current WIP" meant to me, because what I'm currently working on is the final section of what will likely be the third volume of a trilogy, even though I persist in thinking of the thing as one manuscript. Besides, if I use what will be Vol. I, the seven-line thing straddles a scene break, which is awkward. And do I count the white space as lines?

OK, so maybe it's better to count from the beginning of Vol. III, though it's not been settled exactly where Vol. III will begin. I suppose I could count in from the beginning of the final section...

What the heck. I'll do both.

From Vol. III (untitled)

The Elder lowered the whip. Yakoba tried not to flinch from her eyes, which were knife-bright, slicing into his very soul.

"I made you," she said between clenched teeth. "I forged you, honed you. And now you are a tool broken and fit for nothing. Why have you done this?"

 A formless panic began to coalesce, closing in. He groped through the wool in his mind, hunting for something solid to grasp, something that would help him make sense of the situation, which had deteriorated into the inexplicable with the swift madness of an evil dream.


From Vol. III, final section:

Snowflakes landed in the fire with soft hisses, a sound that pleased her, as did the crackling and popping, and the quiet percussion of flames beating at the air. The smell was a feast of burning pitch and wood; she even welcomed the biting, acrid smoke that made her eyes water whenever a stray draft wafted it her way. Best of all was the heat. It was a miracle. Ecstasy. She crowded as close as she dared, until her skin grew hot and rosy, and warmth at last seeped into her bones.

The one drawback to the fire was the way it illuminated dark corners, and in particular the dark corner that harbored the ugliness that was Yosi's head.

So at this point I'm supposed to name seven others bloggists to take up the challenge, but I need to get busy and write, so if you're reading this, consider yourself tagged!

Why I Write Slowly

So I breezed past agent Janet Reid's blog today and found this post. (She quotes from a speech by William Deresiewicz, given at West Point.)

The part that concerns me are the two paragraphs of this speech that Janet posted:

I find for myself that my first thought is never my best thought. My first thought is always someone else's; it's always what I've already heard about the subject, always the conventional wisdom. It's only by concentrating, sticking to the question, being patient, letting all the parts of my mind come into play, that I arrive at an original idea. By giving my brain a chance to make associations, draw connections, take me by surprise. And often even that idea doesn’t turn out to be very good. I need time to think about it, too, to make mistakes and recognize them, to make false starts and correct them, to outlast my impulses, to defeat my desire to declare the job done and move on to the next thing. [bolding mine]

I used to have students who bragged to me about how fast they wrote their papers. I would tell them that the great German novelist Thomas Mann said that a writer is someone for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people. The best writers write much more slowly than everyone else, and the better they are, the slower they write. James Joyce wrote Ulysses, the greatest novel of the 20th century, at the rate of about a hundred words a day—half the length of the selection I read you earlier from Heart of Darkness—for seven years. T. S. Eliot, one of the greatest poets our country has ever produced, wrote about 150 pages of poetry over the course of his entire 25-year career. That’s half a page a month. So it is with any other form of thought. You do your best thinking by slowing down and concentrating.


Note the part in bold above. That's me. That's what I have to do to produce good work. My first ideas (and often my second, third, and fourth ideas) are usually sloppy and shopworn. Riddled with flaws. I need time to work my way into a scene, to blow out the chaff, find the valuable kernels in the midst of the fluff. And if there aren't any, then I start again.

I don't rush through scenes, chapters, first drafts, and then go back to rewrite. Writing and rewriting are inseparable for me. If I have a first draft, it's at the sentence level, and frequently I start revising a sentence before I reach the end of it. This is how I find the story: by constant, slow fiddling. By story, I mean not just plot, but all the layers and connections and emotional sub-text that give scenes texture and dimensionality. And not least, the language with which to tell it.

Without this process, I probably would not write anything worth reading.

So I accept the process as what works for me. It gets results. What bothers me--has always bothered me--is that it's such a slow process. I used to think something was wrong with me that I wrote so slowly.

I realize that fast writers are going to take exception to Deresiewicz's opinion that "the best writers write much more slowly than everyone else, and the better they are, the slower they write."

I'm willing to admit that writers exist who can write both quickly and well. I try not to be envious of them. Some days I even succeed in that.

But I also think there are n number of writers who simply don't take the time necessary to mine their own potential and produce their best possible work.  I see statements like this all the time on writers' boards:  "I wrote the first draft of my 150K novel in two months, and then took three months to revise it. Now I'm querying agents."

Six months later they wonder why they keep getting rejected.

So whatever your process--a constant, fiddly rewriter like myself, or a get-down-the-first-draft-then-fix-it like so many others--ask yourself, when you reach the end, "Did I slow down enough to think, to make the right connections, to find the treasure, to mine for gold? Did I miss the motherlode entirely? Could I make this better by giving myself more time?"

Chances are, you can.

As for me, now I don't feel stupid or handicapped anymore. I feel vindicated. I'm in good company. This is remarkably freeing.

Except now I'm worried about whether it's a good thing or a bad thing that even I write faster than James Joyce....

Swimming with the fishes

So if you're a swimmer (I'm not)(which won't stop me from using a swimming analogy)(after all, it's not "write what you know"; it's "write what you can imagine") (where was I? Oh yeah...)

So if you're a swimmer, you'll know that when your head is under water you have to hold your breath. You'll also know that with practice and fitness, you can increase your lung capacity, but even so, there's a limit on how long a human being can hold his breath. (That limit is around nine minutes, I'm told. The average person in good health can maybe manage two minutes or so. Maybe.)

Eventually, you gotta come back up for air.

So what's this got to do with writing, you ask? (Or maybe you don't ask, but I'll assume you did.)

The other day, a writer friend of mine, Lori Benton, in a casual online conversation about writing, offered an analogy on what it's like for her to write a first draft. She said:  "I can only sustain it for a few minutes at a time, then have to rest my brain, regroup, think things through, listen... then I dive again and swim with the fishes for a few more minutes."

And I thought, "Aha! That's exactly what it's like!" Putting new words on the page feels like holding my breath underwater. I can only do it for so long, and then I have to pop back up for air. At that point I tread water, float, splash around, climb out for a towel and a cold Coke...in other words, I stare out the window or channel Winnie the Pooh ("Think, think, think") or fix a snack or (heaven help me) check email (which is usually the death knell of actual productiviy). If I manage to resist the lure of email and internet, I can suck in another lungful of oxygen and plunge back underwater.

On an average day, I'll end up with maybe mmphmm* new words (though I will have done a lot of rewriting and editing of words both old and new throughout the process). On a brilliant day when everything's flowing, I might get double or triple that amount. Writing lots of new words is both draining and exhilarating, as if I'd just swum the English channel or something.

Once the words are down and assuming I don't jettison the whole bunch the next day (that's been known to happen), then, as Lori says: "There's a much deeper submersion in the story that happens once something's on the page already." And she's right. Something marvelous occurs. I can breathe under water. I can swim in the story for a long time. Suddenly I have gills. It's deep sea exploration time. Treasure hunting. Diving for pearls. This is when real story development takes place.

Not every writer works this way. Sometimes I've fervently and profoundly wished I could be one of those writers for whom the new words flow** like the Mississippi in a spring flood. But except in rare instances, it's never been like that for me. More like the trickle of a high mountain spring.

Or holding my breath underwater.

But once the words are there... lookout, fishies. Here comes the mermaid.

*Represents a modest number

**Some writers whose first drafts come easily and/or quickly embrace revision with the same enthusiasm as someone might embrace the idea of skinny-dipping in the crushing black depths of the Mariana Trench. This is the cosmos' way of balancing things, I suppose. As for the writers who write fast and revise easily and brilliantly, well...they're a myth, right? Please tell me they're a myth. After all, do you actually know anyone like that? I thought not.
###

     "Moriana, there's something I want to say to you."
      She realized he was holding both her hands, and that they were the only warm part of her. She tried to pull away, but he tightened his grip. "Not just yet," he said. "Please."
     "What do you want?"
     "I want you to come with me."
     "Riordan can guide you now. You don't need me anymore."
     "No, I mean come over the Wall with me—and Riordan, too. You don't need to stay here. Where can you hide that the Shirin will not find you?"
     She was frozen clear through, but his words struck a spark in her heart. For the first time since running away, she felt a tiny, warming flare of hope. Despite what she'd told him last night, she had no clear plan, no place to hide for long. "I don't know. Where would I live?"
     "I have a sister, about the same age as you. You could stay with her." He released her hands at last. "What could possibly keep you here, after what has happened?"
     "My father—"
     "If your father could save you from the Shirin, you would not be here now."
     That was undeniably true.
     "Think on it," he said.
     As they climbed down and trudged through the snow and lengthening shadows back to the cave, she found she could think of little else. The notion of leaving forever her family and clan—once it would have been a bitter thought. To follow Riordan into exile would be both pain and joy. To live free of fear, free of the Shirin—it made her giddy.
     But it meant placing her trust in a Keldian, an untouchable barbaric outlander…
     …and a man the kyr had favored with a sunfeather.
     She doubted even the Shirin could explain that.
     "Do you know what yesterday was?" she asked. "The day when summer dies in autumn's arms. We sometimes call it the day of change. And much changed." For a moment, the desire to change it all back was overwhelming.
     "For me it was more like a day of wasted effort, I'm afraid."
     "No. I think your coming here was like a great boulder falling into a river. But will you change its course, I wonder, or merely sink to the bottom?" She glanced sideways at him, found him watching her in that unnervingly direct way he had.
     "Perhaps," he said with a faint smile, "I will grow gills and swim like a fish."


(from The Knife-Giver, Book One)

Review: The Desert of Souls

It started with a dead parrot.

Asim, captain of Jafar's guard, was fond of Jafar's parrot, a talented bird who "could mimic the master and his chief eunuch, and even sometimes answered the call to prayer by bowing thrice. He did this only when it pleased him to do so, which, as my nephew Mahmoud once noted, was far too much like many men he knew."

But Pago the parrot turns up dead one day, and so Asim, in an effort to distract Jafar from his grief, suggests an outing into the market.

Thus it is that Asim, his master Jafar, and Dabir, the scholar engaged as tutor to Jafar's intellectually precocious niece, Sabirah, set out for a little harmless fun in the noisy, perilous environs of eighth-century Baghdad. There they encounter a fortune teller, a band of thieves, and, of course, that moment of destiny when life takes a decidedly strange and treacherous turn.

The Desert of Souls is an elegantly written, deftly plotted, scimitar-and-sorcery tale, as colorful and romantic as a Persian carpet, woven with bright, daring exploits, frequent glints of humor, and the darker threads of heartbreak, pathos, and knotty moral quandries. It is a buddy story dressed in turbans and wearing daggers, exploring the burgeoning but sorely tested friendship between the narrator, Asim, a pious, loyal warrior with an unexpected flair for story-telling, and Dabir, the clever problem-solver who cannot resist a puzzle--or the flashing eyes and fine mind of a certain young woman.

Toss in some undead monkeys, a jaded djinn, a feathered serpent who hoards treasure of a most unusual kind, a fortune teller who may--or may not--have mixed up her clients' fortunes, an evil sorcerer corrupted by a lust for revenge, a lost city, a stowaway virgin, magical artifacts, forbidden love, and enough sword-play and suspense to satisfy the most ardent lover of action....drop it into the harsh, fantastical landscape of old Arabia... and you have the critically acclaimed, thoroughly delightful and moving debut novel of Howard Andrew Jones.

Check it out.

May I introduce...

...my agent.

Bob Mecoy of Creative Book Services (New York, NY) has offered representation.

Bob spent twenty years as editor, senior editor, executive editor and editor-in-chief at various publishers:  Crown Books, Simon & Schuster, Morrow/Avon, NAL, and Dell/Delacorte. As editor he worked with Robert Parker, Sara Paretsky, Patricia Cornwell, Johanna Lindsey, Kathleen Woodiwiss, and many more. He hopped the desk to become an agent in 2003, and currently represents an eclectic stable of authors who write literary and mainstream fiction, as well as mystery, suspense, women's fiction, science fiction and fantasy, and graphic novels. He also represents a wide range of non-fiction writers.


I was introduced to Bob through one of his clients, a long-time friend and fellow fantasy writer, Howard Andrew Jones.
Needless to say, I am thrilled to be working with Bob. The plan is for me to finish the final section of the manuscript, and then it's shopping time.
 
Do you think I sound awfully calm about this? Jaded? Ho-hum?
 
You must not be able to see the big, silly grin on my face. {g}

In my room

There used to be a TV series called Boy Meets World, which was wonderful in many respects, not the least of which was the way it would occasionally break the fourth wall and make some meta-comment about itself. One of those instances was when main character Cory's little sister, a fairly constant if background presence, disappeared from the show for a long time. No one mentioned her. If was as if she had never existed. A season or two later she shows up again (older, and played by a different young actress) and someone remarks, "Haven't seen you lately. Where have you been?" She answers, straight-faced, "I was in my room a long time."

I've been in my room for a long time, too.

This year, I lost both my parents, my mother last May and my father last week. As a grown woman, with a husband and children of my own, I find myself orphaned. I am, in a word, shellshocked and I'm sure only beginning to feel the repercussions. Prior to my father's passing, I and my sisters were deeply involved in his daily care. He had, along with other illnesses, Alzheimer's.

Today I am sticking my nose out of from under the rock and testing the air. I heard from an old friend yesterday, Howard Andrew Jones, whom I met many years ago in a critique group. He was one of my first fans, if an unpublished writer can be said to have fans. He's also the person who introduced me to the editor who published my story "Dragon's Eye."

Howard's first novel will be published next February.

Mine is yet to be finished. I will remedy that. Time is a gift meant to be used, because--as I was so starkly reminded this year--it does have an expiration date.

New photo blog

I've started a new blog called A Thousand Words, as in "A picture paints..." It's a photo blog so you get the idea. (OK, I'll come up with a better title eventually.)

I'm not a professional photographer or even a very good amateur. I'm a newb, but learning. I like to take pictures and occasionally I do something right, or at least get lucky.

Link here.

Equinox

Riordan exhaled sharply. It was the cusp of dawn on the cusp of autumn, a hallowed interval when summer and autumn poised motionless on the point of a knife, when the future hung suspended and irresolute. Through the ebb and flow of tension rose a light, excited feeling of anticipation, like the heartbeat of stilled breath before an arrow is released. In that moment, time always slowed, as though pondering a new course.

And today, of all days—the day for remembering his birth and celebrating his marriage—he wondered where the arrow would fall, and what it would change.

Long live long sentences!

A piece of conventional wisdom that gets frequently passed around among writers is if a sentence is so long that it can't be read out loud without taking a breath, then it's too long. Of course, most times we don't curl up in our favorite chair with a novel and proceed to recite the thing aloud, but the idea seems to be that if sentences stretch on for too long, our mental gasps for breath can cause us to faint along the way. Too many in a row and we're ready to be shoveled into an ambulance.

There's a corollary to this "rule" that states that action scenes are best written in short sentences. After all, "action" happens fast, sometimes at blurred speeds, and the choppier the sentences, the more realistically they illustrate the feel of one event merging at lightspeed into the next...

Er, well, no. I propose to turn both of these gnomes on their pointy little heads.

Let's take those long sentences first.

Reading prose is both an aural and a visual experience. We see the words, puncuation, sentences, and paragraphs all laid out on the page, and if there is scant white space, then we can find it tiring to read, even if most of the sentences are of average to short length. If the sentences tend toward long and complicated, one after another, then this can worsen the effect (though I would argue that if they're properly punctuated and balanced, they are no more tiring to read than huge blocks of medium-sized, predictably structured sentences. Certainly they're less monotonous).

The trick is, of course, to write sentences of varying lengths. A wise writer I know once said told me (paraphrased from memory): "The problem with long sentences is not the sentences themselves; it's the company they keep."

So, suppose you have a long sentence with five commas, a semi-colon, and three dependent clauses, running to about sixty or seventy words. Break it up? Not necessarily. Not if the sentences around it are short. In fact, a hundred-word sentence can be balanced very nicely if followed by three-word sentence. Even better if the three-word sentence is in its own paragraph. When it comes to making a page visually attractive and easy to read, it's not the length of individual sentences so much as it is how you mix you them up. Likewise with paragraphs. And while not all stories or writing styles lend themselves to pages that are more white than black, if you have a variety of sentence and paragraph lengths, the eye is kept refreshed and interested.

However, it's not just about how the text looks on the page. It's also about how it sounds in the ear.

To say that a sentence can be no longer than what can be easily spoken in one breath is like saying a song must be sung in one sustained note. The singer breathes while singing. So can the reader breathe while reading, even if he hasn't yet reached the end of a sentence. At least, he can if it's correctly punctuated, balanced, and coherent.*

Which brings me to the idea that action scenes must be written in bite-sized chunks. Terse sentences have their place: they provide a break from more intricate sentences, and can be extremely effective in both focusing attention and delivering punch. But consistently short sentences can be a problem. Instead of allowing me to breathe, what they lead to is a kind of mental hyperventilation: stop. start. stop. start. inhale. exhale. inhale. exhale. pant. pant. pant. I begin to feel twitchy. The eye may be skipping down the page with mad abandon, but the ear feels jolted and irritated. It begs for legato, not incessant staccato.

I posit that action--fast-paced, breathless, intense, one-crazy-thing-after-another action-- can be very effectively written in long, flowing sentences. Because action doesn't stop and start. It starts and like a boulder rolling downhill, it keeps going without a pause.

You doubt me?

Read the following passage, from Bernard Cornwell's The Last Kingdom:

"Bail!" I shouted desperately. "Bail!" And then, with a noise like thunder, the great sail split into tatters that whipped off the yard, and the ship came slowly upright, but she was low in the water, and I was using all my strength to keep her coming around, creeping around, reversing our course so that I could put her bows into that turmoil of sea and wind, and the men were praying, making the sign of the cross, bailing water, and the remnants of the sail and the broken lines were mad things, ragged demons, and the sudden gale was howling like the furies in the rigging and I thought how futile it would be to die at sea so soon after Ragnar had saved my life.



Yes, it's a run-on sentence. A very long run-on sentence. But oh, so beautifully constructed, so musically flowing, so masterfully depicting events spinning out of control, all while immersing the reader in the primal fury of the storm. Had he broken this up into several shorter sentences--per conventional advice today--that effect of fast-moving chaos would have been subdued, if not lost altogether. It certainly would have been more jarring to the ear.

I'm not suggesting that everyone take up writing 122-word sentences (or longer; this is common for him**) when penning battle or disaster scenes, but it does seem obvious to me that connected, flowing sentences like this put the lie to the idea that short sentences are the only proper medium for writing action. Long sentences have their (deeply misunderstood) place.

*There are some readers who resist long sentences no matter how gracefully they're written. I blame modern education and to some extent modern writing, but in the end, this is very much a matter of personal taste and I respect that. Those readers can certainly avoid works that tend toward longer sentences.

**Though it's worth noting that Cornwell does tend to bracket long sentences with shorter ones, something most good writers do instinctively. (He does not, unfortunately, do the same with paragraphs--they could definitely use more white space--but no one's perfect.)

Silver Phoenix review

I met Cindy Pon some years ago on the discussion forum at SFReader, shortly after my novelette "Dragon's Eye" was published. Some of my fellow contributors to the anthology hung out there, and one day Cindy showed up (as "Cyn") and started posting interesting, thoughtful, and uncapitalized messages. I could see right away that, besides her aversion to the shift key, Cindy was smart, fascinating, and a darn good writer. Like many of us, she had a work-in-progress, a fantasy set in a China-like empire. Like most of us, she wondered if she would ever be published.

Well, she finished that book, found an agent, and got an offer, all in record time.

Silver Phoenix is the story of Ai Ling, a young woman who embarks on a fateful trip to escape an unwanted marriage and to find her father, who left one day on a mysterious errand to the emperor's palace and never returned. Her own journey to the Palace of Fragrant Dreams is part physical, part spiritual, and entirely magical. The danger is great, for someone or something wants Ai Ling dead, and creatures of legend come to life in pursuit of her. But Ai Ling is not alone; she meets friends along the way who help her through both tragedy and triumph.

The prose is spare and understated, in the deceptive way that a Chinese brush painting is spare and understated: only at first glance, until one sees the elegance and lyricism of line and color. Cindy Pon is a master of the written word, and not incidentally, of the brush as well. I deeply enjoyed Silver Phoenix and look forward to the sequel with enthusiasm.

Cindy is holding a contest on her blog, with great prizes (one of her gorgeous paintings, framed! A $100 gift card to the bookstore of your choice!). Those who post reviews of Silver Phoenix are eligible for raffle tickets. Details here.

Silver Phoenix book trailer here. (I would embed it, but I don't know how.)

While I admit I am motivated to win one of those marvelous prizes, I would have reviewed this book here anyway and said the exact same things about it. :)

Yay, Cindy.