Posted on by Eileen Young

Rationalists Ruin Romance

One of the key ingredients, the glue that holds the genre together, is that tension between people in love before they admit it to each other. Forlornly wondering “but does (s)he love me?” is very nearly a staple of every romance novel I read, and that’s if the character currently narrating even knows they’re in love themselves.

Which is why rationalist main characters make for poor romance novels. In striving to behave rationally, it is imperative to assess one’s own emotional state, which would eradicate those doubts about whether one is really in love oneself. From there, if one is indeed in love, that which would most increase happiness longterm is discovering that ones beloved is in love in return, so it only makes sense to ask.
If the answer is positive, the book is over by chapter five. If negative, then it’s hardly a romance at all, and the sensible thing for the main character to do is to try to forget that they were ever in love. If the answer is uncertain flailing and ignorance on the beloved’s part of their own feelings, then, well, ask again in a week.
There. Happily ever after approached and seized sensibly within a very short time span. But there’s no catharsis in this, no sweeping moment of passion where all misunderstandings are forgotten. No encounter in the woods with Mr Darcy, because their engagement would have been announced shortly after Jane and Bingley’s wedding, which in turn would have been only shortly after that of Charlotte Lucas and Mr Collins.
It is one of the more interesting disconnects between literature and life that the most desirable outcome for real people is the least engaging in the genre of romance novels.
This examination was inspired by the Twilight retelling Luminosity and its sequel Radiance by writer and rationality blogger Alicorn. The major departure in Luminosity is that Bella is a rationalist. As you might imagine, it changes the story significantly. One of the ways I’ve noticed (in hindshight: the two books are now over) is in genre: Meyer’s novels are romance, with fantasy elements. The focus is on Edward and Bella’s relationship, and when will they finally be fully together? In Alicorn’s, while Edward and Bella are still totally and completely in love, it is a fantasy novel with strong relationships in it. The focus is on Bella and Edward’s adventures in changing the world.
Posted on by Eileen Young

Soundtracks

Stephanie Meyer is the first author I know of who let people know on a wide scale the sort of music that inspired her to write; I remember going up to the music section of Borders a couple of years ago and seeing a large central display with the Twilight covers plastered over it, advertising that the selection of Muse below was what had accompanied the writing of Twilight.

The role of music in writing comes up frequently on various of my writing forums, too: the validity of inspiration by music, stories written specifically to accompany certain songs (referred to as songfics), whether background music is distracting or beneficial, the genres of music best conducive to certain kinds of writing, theme songs for certain characters or stories and whether that extra dimensionality helps hold the characters in the writers head.
The answers to all those questions vary from writer to writer: some can only work in utter quiet, and consider using music to set a mood frivolous, others listen to classical to stimulate the creative portions of their brain, still others have a hard time writing unless they have a specific playlist whose lyrics exactly reflect the mood of the piece.
Like every other aspect of writing, there is no one true way, none that is inherently superior to others. As long as a good story is coming out of it, the tools and environment that foster it are little more than interesting side notes.
Music can definitely be a tool. Like lighting or temperature or having other people in the room, it can set the mood for writing. I know I would have trouble writing most parent-child affection moments to an accompaniment of death metal. With collaborations, I’ve found jointly putting together a soundtrack helps us gel the tone of the world: if we’re both suggesting 90s punk, we have roughly the same idea of the tone, if one of us is suggesting disco and the other bluegrass, we obviously have more discussion to do to make sure we’re on the same page for the story. I’ve found this focus on tone useful for my solo writing projects as well, though to a lesser degree, as, well, I’m the only one working on the world.
It’s possible to take enjoyment of it as background and use for mood setting too far, of course: if you find that you’re unable to write unless listening to a particular song, that’s probably not conducive to better writing in general.
Beyond the writing end, music can be a good way to engage readers: the Twilight soundtracks were intensely popular, and people liked listening to them as they read the books. It creates a more immersive experience to have the ears engaged as well as the eyes, and can help the reader be more fully transported to the author’s world.
It can also help the author engage the readers, as almost any peripheral to the story itself can: asking for music recommendations from readers creates a community atmosphere and can foster a feeling of being invested in the story. And who doesn’t want readers who feel personally engaged?
If you’re interested in what I listen to as I write this, you can find it here. I’m always happy to take recommendations.
Posted on by Eileen Young

Books As Personal Identifiers

What we read says a lot about who we are, or at least about who we want people to think we are. I read Wired and BBC Breaking News’ Twitter feed and Silicon Valley Insider’s Twitter feed (bit of a trend, there — headline-surfing is much easier when everyone’s limited to 140 characters) and romantic suspense and paranormal romance and science fiction and fantasy written by rationalists and webcomics. Those say a lot about who I am as a person – I like up-to-the-minute technology and thought, and I’m an old-fashioned romantic at heart.

Sometimes, though, I’ll cave to boredom or a weakness for shiny advertising and pick up a book that’s ‘in’ right now. The other night before a meeting in the Starbucks in Chapters, I was seduced by the New and Hot shelf near the door and looked at The Sentimentalists. A Giller Prize winner, it is also the product of small press: the initial print run was 800. It’s a testament to the power of literary awards in Canada, to the fact that story still trumps all the gimmicks in the world, that I was able to find the Nova Scotia-printed small-press novel in Chapters in Victoria less than a year later.
The win for The Sentimentalists also says a lot about who we are collectively as readers. Introspective and focused on the past, it also tries to make sense of war and human relationships: current, universal issues more easily approached through veils of fiction and historical context. It says that we as readers want to know more about how everything works in our own psyches.
Posted on by Eileen Young

Keitai Shousetsu

The word literally means ‘cell phone novel,’ and it’s a particularly Japanese phenomenon that’s spread west slower than the Japanese trends Gwen Stefani espouses.

The first one on record came from Tokyo in 2003, but probably the most notable early work was Koizora (Love Sky), published in 2005. A semi-autobiographical romance, it spawned a film, a television drama, and a manga series, as well as being picked up by a traditional publisher to be put out as a two-part paperback and earning a long article in that most prestigious of cultural bastions, The New Yorker.
Like most of its genre, Koizora was originally published to a website that aggregates them, posted from the author’s cell phone, received by readers in SMS messages. Chapters were generally 70-100 words, to fit within character limits.
It was also free, as are most. Keitai Shousetsu are about sharing your story and getting it read – connecting with fans, which is one of the motivating factors behind Creative Commons. Using free media to connect to readers worked well for a lot of Japanese authors of cell phone novels: in 2007, 5 of the 10 bestselling novels in Japan started life as cell phone novels.
Part of the reason for the popularity of them is that the authors knew how to connect to their audience: their target readers are cell phone-savvy teenagers interested in upcoming trends and romance. There was also a shared culture of anonymity: most authors of Japanese cell phone novels go by handles and are never known by their real names.
The mobile culture in Japan and other parts of East Asia is one of the reasons cell phone novels have taken off there. In contrast, the highest-viewed cell phone novel in the US has had a mere 30000 views.
Part of the difference is that we’re used to longer chunks in Western culture: fans of George R. R. Martin were utterly outraged when his latest novel was delayed. Some of the serial stories I read publish only in several-thousand-word chapters. Cell phone novels or Twitter novels require a shift in thinking, a willingness to let things unfold at precisely the author’s pace.
But RSS feeds for continuing stories and places like Wattpad are making serial fiction more viable in the Western world, or at least to Western writers: polylingual East Asian readers are still a huge portion of the audience on Wattpad.
The literary and cultural scene continues to evolve rapidly, making this an exciting time to be in writing and publishing.
Posted on by Eileen Young

Sex Scenes with EC Sheedy

“The two most powerful words in our vocabulary are love and hate. The most loaded word is sex.”
Tonight Edna “E.C.” Sheedy spoke to the Victoria Writers’ Society about ‘the warmer side of romance.’ An author of romantic suspense, Edna had sharp and funny insights to share about the adventure of writing sex scenes.
One of the first things Edna addressed was the difference between sex scenes and love scenes: many writers in her genre prefer to call them love scenes, as they’re stops on the path to two people falling in love. Sex scenes can happen in any kind of writing, and the Victoria Writers society has creative non-fiction and short fiction and novel and speculative fiction writers amongst it, who might not necessarily be writing about love when they write sex.
Audience is one of the primary things to keep in mind when writing a sex scene. Harlequin publishes 30 different lines a month, each appealing to a slightly different demographic, so “it’s worth knowing that even with the diehard romance fans . . . warm, warmer, and warmest are always still in play.”
In fabulous fashion, Edna broke down an approach to writing romance into simple steps. First, the rules:
Rule 1 – You never. ever, ever have to write a sex scene.
Rule 2 – If you do write a sex scene, never ever ever go beyond your personal level of comfort. It’ll be hard to write, and awkward, and it’ll be awkward to your readers.
Rule 3 – It is a far better thing you do not to write a love scene than to write an egregiously bad one.
She talked about Rowan Somerville’s adventures after getting the award for ‘worst sex scene in fiction,’ and read the offending line. It was quite, quite deserving of the award, though I was too busy horrifiedly picturing it to capture the quote accurately.
Then, if you do decide to write a sex scene, it’s time to ask yourself some questions;
1. What do you want the scene to show the reader other than sex?
If a sex scene doesn’t contribute to the book, moving the story ahead in some way, ask yourself if you really need to do it. Sex shows character. It’s about as intimate as two people get. Sex can be a powerful plot device in almost any genre. This gives the sex scene, the love scene, a purpose.
2. What kind of sex scene does the tone of your book require?
“Tone sets up expectations, so if you jump from light and frothy to dark and dirty like a kangaroo on steroids, it’s going to jar the reader.”
3. What kind of sex scene fits your characters?
4. Have you strewn enough rose petals and have you thrown enough curves? Have you built enough sexual tension?
Sexual tension is the compelling force in fictional romantic relationships.
“What keeps your characters apart is more important than what brings them together.”
The group had fun listing off pairs with great sexual tension – the iconic Mr Darcy and Elizabeth Bennett, Booth and Bones, even Edward and Bella.
Edna’s tips:
1. Watch your words – language matters.
2. Watch your body parts – remember so far that no limb or appendage can be in two places at one time.
3. Use sensory writing. Avoid clinical description. Engage any and all of the five senses.
This is sometimes where comfort level comes into play.
4. Set the scene. Show enough detail so your reader is in that scene.
5. Choosing your point of view with some degree of care. Choose the character that has the most to get out of the love scene or the most to lose. Point of view is hard for a lot of writers; Nora Roberts, the queen of romance, slides rather sloppily from one character to another in the middle of a scene in some of her earlier works. Jacqueline Carey, on the other hand, has excellently consistent point of view throughout.
6. Don’t forget the dialog.
Near the end of her talk, Edna mentioned something that’s been coming up consistently for the last year and a bit in the circles I frequent: that publishers don’t want to fix anything these days. You want your manuscript as perfect as possible before sending it in. She addressed this in part by taking classes in grammar.
Overall, a very informative talk, and hugely engaging. I need to go find some of her books, now.
Posted on by Eileen Young

Writing in the new year

On December 4th, I published a collaborative novella that I’d done with my friend Mason on Feedbooks.com under a Creative Commons license. I had no expectations about readership: I thought it’d be really cool if we got a hundred downloads by the end of the year.

We got that in two days, and currently have 1392 downloads. It’s very neat, to have that many people have read my – well, our, but this blog is all about me, so the pronoun stands – writing, and it’s a fantastic impetus to write more.
Earlier this week, the Victoria Writers’ Society had its Annual General Meeting, and managed to elect most of a new executive: I’m still in charge of the website, our wonderful treasurer Laura is still in charge of all the money, and Edeana is still managing all of our critique groups and the summer writing contest. The presidency is sadly vacant, though, leading to lists of candidates for us to approach.
Our new executive is a different landscape and tone than the last one, and will prove interesting to work with. The writing community in Victoria is a huge part of how I approach writing, and takes up a large portion of the time I can allot to writing. It’s fun, and an adventure.
Posted on by Eileen Young

Science Fiction Future

It probably says a lot about my social group that “how should we end the world?” is not a question that even makes me blink anymore.

I do a lot of collaborative writing; I currently have three on the go, though one I’ve taken over most of the writing portion while my collaborator gives me ideas. They all tend to be post-apocalyptic science fiction, as is a fair amount of what we read and pass around to each other. But the focus isn’t on the end of the world, it’s on what happens after, in the days-weeks-months after everything changes. The way it ends isn’t usually important, either; the most recent collaboration the end of the world was decided based on an article I’d read in the paper that morning, with no real emotional investment in it or plan to explore how we got to that point in the story.
A concept bandied about in science circles nearly as much as science fiction is that of a singularity, an idea or instant or tipping point beyond which the future is unrecognizable and can’t be accurately predicted. With the rapid rate of change in technology, my friends and I tend to take for granted that we’ll live through at least one more singularity.
But, given the very nature of a singularity, it’s difficult to write past one. So we write not singularities, but the kind of disaster that comes from attempts gone wrong; anarchy, oppressive regimes, and accidental genocides. It’s half adventure and half thought experiment as to how radical a shift we the writers could survive.
And it’s a lot of fun to write.
All of it, if we ever finish, will be available free online under Creative Commons, because a communist approach to intellectual property is something else we four share. As one succinctly put it, it’s better to have it out there for free and have people read it than to charge and sell one copy. In an ideal world, of course, we’d be able to exist on our writing and other people would be able to read it whenever they liked, but we don’t have one yet.
Posted on by Eileen Young · 1 Comment

Know Your Audience

Having recently quit my office job, I am devoting most of my time to applying for jobs and my most recent copyediting client.

And obsessively checking my stats on here. Not many of them, but they’re there, and the statistics I get are fascinating: I wasn’t even aware that there was a browser called Flock. Nor do I have any idea how someone from Israel would have found my blog. Most of the statistics are as expected, but it’s the outliers that are fascinating. For instance, 3% of my pageviews are from China? That’s an interesting statistic.

It’s a bit reminiscent of the resume process; you have this collection of information, of stuff, and you put it out there and hope for hits. And, unless you get the job, or someone commenting, you will never have any idea as to why.

But the outliers, while the most fascinating, aren’t the primary audience. My primary audience is people local to the Victoria writing community and people from the online forums where I discuss writing. Predictably, the sites my target audience uses are the top referring links to come here. That means I’m doing a decent job of being visible. I’d be extremely worried if I was getting most of my referrals from my Facebook page, considering that Facebook is more social and familial and I hardly discuss writing or the writing community there. It would mean I was making some kind of mistake on the other places I post links to this blog.

So, thanks for clicking over, wherever you came from.

Posted on by Eileen Young

True Stories

Lynne Van Luven came to speak to the Victoria Writers’ Society last night about Creative Non-fiction and how it’s thriving on the Island. She mentioned how many people are branching into it; Patrick Lane and Lorna Crozier, both noted local poets, have written creative non-fiction now, and more and more fiction writers are adding creative non-fiction to their repertoire as well.

True stories have become more compelling to us as a culture. It’s taken a long time for In Cold Blood to seep into our collective consciousness, and many more solid works have come along, with that strange panache of the fantastical actually happening. It’s leaked into movies, as well – 21 followed the dated adventures of the MIT blackjack team, Middlemen followed turn-of-the millenium pornographers, The Social Network follows Mark Zuckerberg’s still-expanding supernova.

In that way, creative non-fiction is becoming more immediate; there’s less of a time lapse between doing something and writing about it. The plethora of information and stories of every kind available now means we have to write it down, quickly, to remember any of it, need to tell the story to ourselves to make it true.

As terrifying as the comparison is, the rise of creative non-fiction is parallel to scripted reality television. Subjectivevtrue stories allow for a more developed voice than we sometimes have access to in our immediate lives. We can relive, and mock, our own esprit de staircase.

Creative non-fiction is an interesting world, spanning everything from travel writing to memoir, and it was a fascinating talk by Lynne Van Luven.

Posted on by Eileen Young · 1 Comment

The Fourth Wall

I’m in a contest where the latest prompt is breaking the fourth wall.

Conveniently, in the anthology Stories which I read on my recent trip, there are several examples of fourth-wall-breaking stories. But, without exception, they broke it internally; a woman asking her boyfriend to stop writing her into stories as she was losing bits of herself in them, a man who was offered the choice between staying in his adventure story or living as a peasant in the real world. It worked really well, and is the way I’ve seen it work. Breaking the fourth wall and talking directly to the audience is never something I’ve seen work all that well in a static medium like books and comics.

It’s somehow much less jarring if the layers of reality are internal to the story, so that’s the route I’m going to try to go.