Posted on by Eileen Young

Analysis

An author I admire recently went on a rant on his blog about the way literature classes are taught and how in-depth analysis ruins reading, and the best way to write was to write without thought of theme or subtext – just to get the story out.

There’s some merit to his points: over-analysis can make a lot of people tune out, and spending all day on one comma is an utterly ridiculous waste of time. But it’s fun to insert layers of meaning deliberately. Writers can’t help putting in a lot of their world view in their writing, which is part of what makes books like Lullabies For Little Criminals fascinating to read.
If a writer is used to reading analytically and approaches writing similarly, then they can insert the ideas they want into the piece, deciding themes and motifs actively as opposed to letting them rise naturally from the story if they arise at all. Neither technique is superior, but having the training in literary analysis necessary for it to be a deliberate process is not a bad thing.
Posted on by Eileen Young

By The Time You See This, It Will Be Out Of Date

But it’s a fascinating speech, so you should read it anyway. Ben Hammersley spoke to the IAAC a couple weeks ago about, among other things, how we’re becoming increasingly comfortable trading personal information for personal service.

I was going to post about that, but already had my blog for that week finished, and wanted to sleep rather than double-post and not have anything lined up for the next week. Which got me thinking about the length of time it takes to get a book from concept to reader.
Aside from the time it takes to actually write a book, it takes a while to produce. If it’s a first book, there’s finding a publisher and that whole process, but even if you have a publisher and a deal, there is the editing process, the design, the cover, any pre-launch marketing and the arranging of launches and signings, and the printing time itself. So even if a reader picks up a book as soon as it is available, there’s still a lag time of, usually, several months.
This can lead to a bit of a disconnect. I find myself slightly confused when I pick up ostensibly modern mainstream fiction and characters aren’t visibly using cell phones, or all their phones do is call people: and this is as someone who does not own a cell phone. That’s just on the narrowest scale, though. The television show Combat Hospital is explicitly dated 2006, which gives the writers plenty of time to research what exactly is going on before trying to translate it to an audience, but also keeps the audience reminded that this is not supposed to be real-time, so there’s no subconscious expectation of the things we see about the Middle East on the news to be reflected in developments on the show.
The second part of that is most relevant to what I’m trying to get at: in 2001, all the books that came out that fall that were set in New York had major discrepancies. It’s a problem that authors will continue to face as the world insists on changing, and there aren’t any really neat solutions. Dating everything gets tedious, and never lets the reader feel they’re reading anything truly modern, and trying to push through faster publishing turnaround leads almost inevitably to more mistakes in production. Narrow scope works well, but leaves one with, well, narrowed scope. Jim Butcher’s Dresden Files gets around rapidly evolving technology by having a main character who destroys technology by his mere presence, which leaves a narrative vaguely disconnected from the present. It works, as the world is full of magic and vampires and things that go bump in the night, but I think it says a lot about either technology and society or my particular technological addiction that the lack of cell phone stands out more than the rampaging werewolves.
Posted on by Eileen Young

A Study of Scarlet

I recently found the 2010 BBC series Sherlock and was captivated. Mysteries! Explosions! Literary references!

Oh, right, I hadn’t read the books. Should probably remedy that.
And that is how I found http://readsherlock.com/, which has all of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories, including year of release, for free.
Reading A Study In Scarlet was fascinating. I am accustomed, with classic works, to having to slip into a peculiar mindset where the odd paragraph breaks and turns of speech don’t make me want to claw my own eyes out (when I do manage it, I tend to really enjoy them, but it took me three tries to get past the first chapter of Jane Eyre, and then I read it all in one fell swoop). But Sir Doyle wrote late enough in the nineteenth century that a lot of the literary customs that drive me up the wall had passed out of style, so there were no stylistic barriers between me and his fantastic storytelling.
The abrupt shift in the middle to telling a completely different story confused me at first, but amused me when reframed as the sepia-toned recreations common on crime-solving shows. His opinions of the geography of the central US aside, it was a fantastic read, and I am going to continue to enjoy the originals as I wait for season two of BBC’s Sherlock.
Posted on by Eileen Young · 5 Comments

Guest Post: Patrick Thunstrom

While I’m on vacation, my friend Patrick Thunstrom of A Digital Magician has generously provided a guest post.

Not content to focus on just the present, Patrick Thunstrom is always thinking about the past and dreaming of the future. He writes speculative fiction to examine ways to fix the problems he sees around him. When he’s not lost in his dreams, he explores games with friends and family, occasionally turning his creative skills to game design.

You can follow him at his blog, or on Google+ and Twitter.

One of the most useful tools available to a writer is the writing group. They might be critique partners, dedicated beta readers, or just cheer leaders. The key point is the writing group is positive peer pressure to keep up your work.

As the world became more and more connected, writing groups have changed. Locally, I’ve had a lot of trouble finding a writing group whose goals and outlooks were similar enough to mine to be able to help me reach them. Thanks to the Internet, though, I’ve found a number of good groups that I’ve stuck with for a time and moved on when we were no longer compatible.

This evolution is great for writers, since these virtual writers groups aren’t bound by locality, they can take many different forms, and base their organization on other things.

Google+ has produced a new evolution in the concept of the ‘write in.’ Instead of meeting at a coffee shop or library, a group of writers can use the Hangouts feature to meet via video conference to chat and write.

I’ve been a participant in such a Hangout, led by Jason Sanford. The meeting is three days a week, and the writers interested log in to the Hangout and we chat for ten to twenty minutes, then it’s a collective writing session for the rest of the hour.

It’s a brilliant use of time, as it incorporates a natural task batching with breaks built in. The other thing about it, that really seems to drive everyone’s productivity, is that because it’s a video conference, you can see everyone working, and hear the sound of others keyboards flying.

In my experience, these chats have almost doubled my minute to minute productivity, which is absolutely wonderful for me!

I’d encourage everyone to try a Hangout write in sometime, whether it’s a NaNoWriMo, Camp NaNo, or just a bunch of like-minded writers doing their thing. I promise, you’ll enjoy it.

Posted on by Eileen Young

The Practicality of Ebooks

Having recently moved house, I find myself again and even more enamored of ebooks. In whittling away my belongings (I swear, they self-propagate when I’m not looking), I got rid of a banker’s box and more worth of books – and this had been over the course of two years where I was specifically trying not to collect books, after two recent purges (one to a bookstore, one to the free books shelf in our laundry room), and taking a big stack of them to my new place.

Some of the ones I kept I’ve read already, some I don’t know if I ever will, but I held on to them because they were gifts or signed or both.
If they’d all been ebooks (there’s nothing wrong with electronic signatures and dedications), it would have been much easier to keep them all. Just disconnect my ereader, move some files to the cloud if I’m running out of storage, and never delete anything I like ever again.
My mom has a rather impressive and oppressive collection of cookbooks, too. She’s been slowly going through them and whittling them away, but likes to have them around for reference. Ebooks would be perfect: available to leaf through when uninspired and searchable when locating that half-remembered recipe. And then they wouldn’t be littering every flat surface when I come over for dinner!
There’s nothing quite as nice as delicately poring over a hardcover with color inserts from the 1930s, but for condo living or frequent moving, ebooks are the only practical way to go.
An additional note: next week, I’ll be vacationing in Florida, so my friend Patrick Thunstrom has agreed to provide a guest post.
Posted on by Eileen Young

Thoughts on YA

YA is in some ways an easy genre, as there are some universal experiences and themes: Life is hard and no one understands and everything is so confusing.

I’ve recognized it as a truth in genre for a while, having watched friends dither about majors and colleges and coming out, but it’s been coming home rather unpleasantly recently. It is deeply embarrassing to find oneself whining like a sitcom teen about how the world is so complicated, especially when one has been part of the working world for a few years.
But there’s no dire pressure to grow up: I’m unattached and unfettered by debt or partner or children, so there’s not much to do but dither. There’s starting to be more fiction aimed particularly at my age group of aimless 20-somethings, things like Jeph Jacques Questionable Content, about us only in a more interesting world, things like the Machine of Death anthologies, people in general, but given at least one certainty: the method of their death.
Not new themes, but new vehicles and voices, which makes them a lot of fun.
Posted on by Eileen Young

Therapy Writing

It’s a hugely extolled field, from what I’ve encountered, lauded as a way to recapture lost power and to work through issues. The general theory is that we lay bare our pain on page, purging ourselves of it.

Which is all very well for what it is, and can be helpful on a personal level. But then we encounter therapy writing pushed as literature: not necessarily because of the literary merit, but because it is ‘raw’ or ‘honest.’
Therapy writing doesn’t necessarily make for good literature, which is a point often overlooked. This is our rawest self, so of course it should be wonderful. Because we are so attached, it can be difficult to get the perspective necessary for editing, which means the end product will often be less than sparkling. No amount of emotional honesty makes up for dull writing, when it’s being presented to an audience expected to read out of enjoyment (which is everyone).
Posted on by Eileen Young

Factors in World-Building

I grew up in the Cariboo, a region of central British Columbia whose economy centers around forestry, ranching, and tourism. These are important things to know about the Cariboo, as they shape life there. As a member of the community there, I planted trees, owned cowboy boots with real cow-shit on them, and was in the Billy Barker Days parade more years than I wasn’t (and, going to their site to link it here, saw that my kindergarten teacher won first prize).

With my mom involved in several facets of the community and my dad involved in cycling, the dog sled races, the local paper, and the local news station while he was there, I grew up enmeshed in a small town, even though Quesnel has all of thirty thousand people.
For me, this led to several important facts, in no particular order:
-I have ridden a draft horse.
-I have been outside in -52 degrees Celsius
-I never want to be outside in -52 degrees Celsius ever again
-I can name five types of salmon off the top of my head
-I pay attention, in stories, to how sensibly a city is brought about.
This is especially important in speculative fiction and fantasy, where the worlds are more likely to be completely separate from our own, but also in literary or mainstream fiction. If your city is in the middle of a desert, with no obvious water supply, it will ruin the whole story for me. If your small town is surrounded by impassable mountains and no one could get in until a tunnel was blasted through and there is no apparent wealth (mineral or vegetable or animal) there, why does anyone live there in the first place?
Similarly, how does the town run? In large cities, this can be mostly excused, as they find ways to perpetuate long after the original reason is gone. In small towns, though, where a single industry can be the beating heart of the town, what is the industry? Does it have one? Having also spent time in the Midwest, I’ll accept farming as an answer, now, though grudgingly.
Posted on by Eileen Young

Voice

Finding one’s voice is made much of all over. We want our writing to speak from us as people, but us made sparkling and witty and insightful, with a thin veneer of fiction if that’s what we write. Some writers I know retreat to cabins at the beach to be isolated and more easily themselves, some take Hemingway’s approach and drink, some outline from their dreams as closest to their concepts and isolate themselves with orchestras to hammer them into shape.

For me, it’s in large part a matter of balancing the things I want to say with the way I want to portray my characters, as I largely write fiction. I try to consider the ways in which their thinking would differ from mine.
Most of my characters, for example, do not read quite as much non-fiction as I do, or at least not for fun, so they don’t have the wide general knowledge I do. Or they don’t value reading at all. But a voice that disdains reading isn’t quite the voice I want to write with, thus the careful balance.
I’ve mentioned other points of consideration before, relating to gender and the construction of a character’s world. But having writing sound like mine is another point, and one that changes as I do and becomes more or less important in certain kinds of writing.
Posted on by Eileen Young

Write 1 Sub 1

I didn’t get the dictionary. I was too torn on whether I really needed more books, and then it was gone.

The possibility of missed opportunity seems to be a huge motivator for people in general, but most observably for me in writers. Despite accepting submissions year round, the three days before the deadline on both of the magazines I work on have more volume of submissions than any three weeks the rest of the year.
Such violent fear is easily circumvented by planning, but it’s easier to plan the writing than what comes after. That’s why Write 1 Sub 1 seemed like such a fantastic thing when I heard about it in January. Deadlines for magazines are less of an issue when you have personal deadlines at much more frequent intervals.