writing partners

There is nothing as valuable as a good writing partner.  I've had a few stand outs and a lot of mediocre mistakes.  Being a great critiquer is, of course, a valuable asset in any writing partner.

However, I find what is more valuable, as I talked about a couple of blogs ago, is the idea of being able to feed off each others' ideas.  The writing partners who have truly inspired me, gotten me through the rough spots and the discouraged points, have been those who had the kind of imagination that allowed them to enter my world as I entered their world.

It is a particular skill.  It doesn't mean that we have to be each other's audience.  It may be that we would never read each other's books if we weren't working together.  But a partner that can see what you are trying to do with a book, rather than what they would do with your book, is invaluable.

Michael, my current writing partner, and I have seen little to nothing of each other's work.  What we do do is talk about our books together.  I will start in on what is going on in my book or what I am stuck on in my book, and Michael will go off the top of his head on his impressions.  Once instance, working on this current book, Will-o-the-wisps Warp, I was stuck on a scene between Laurel and Jamie--my vampire work partners who own the organization Death Watch.

In Death Watch, they have made a pact that if they must damage humans, they will do it where it does the most good.  They started out freeing slaves in Africa, sinking slave ships, and killing off slavers.  In this current scene, they are going after the New Orleans mob, which was one of the oldest mobs in the country.  It was eventually hounded out of existence, supposedly, but rumors persist it has gone underground.  I use that in my book to show the mob as still functioning, mostly off drug sales.

This is all slightly beside the point.  What matters in the scene is that Jamie is angry with Laurel.  Originally, I had them arguing as they pulled the job.  They are so used to their positions in their partnership and their work that they do talk through jobs.  However, in this case it just wasn't working.  The job and the conversation clashed and clunked together in an ungainly mess.  All Michael suggested was that Jamie be a little more of a guy and refuse to talk about his anger until he explodes after the job.  I was dubious as Jamie has lived a long time and pretty much gotten over himself, but I rewrote the scene the way Michael suggested, and it ran smoothly.

With both my old writing partner RoseAnna and with Michael, one of the most valuable assets was to keep inspiration fired up.  I can describe a scene I am currently working on and how it fits into the series, and Michael will question me and go off on his own thoughts on things that don't happen for books ahead of what I am doing now, and the course of my series will take on a slight shift.

For instance he has helped me work a lot with the character Other that comes into the fourth book.  Other is a vampire wolf.  When his mother was in heat a male vampire taking the form of a wolf got a little distracted.  Usually this would come to nothing as vampires are sterile.  But the trickster pookah Charlie, who runs through all of the books, changes the game a little so that Other is conceived.  His name comes from the fact that wolves know that he is not of them, but do not know what he is, so they simply call him Other.

Charlie twists Other's fate even more as he describes my band of good guys to Other, and suggests it is his mission in life to join them.

Originally, I hadn't thought much beyond the fact Other would be a more cognizant character than the wolves generally were.  He would be able to communicate thoughts and ideas to the vampires.  But Michael became fascinated with the idea and dug.  His digging made my mind go a thousand different places as to where I could take Other, and what kind of arc Other himself would have.  Without Michael's interest, Other would have gone on being a severely underdeveloped character for a much longer time.

RoseAnna and my book styles didn't always mesh, but our imaginations did.  We could spend hours on one or another of our books.  One comment on how I might write Alex, the protagonist in Sheep that Stray, as the popular girl who was nice, which was her original character, would lead to hours of spewed imagination as we took every avenue on how to build Alex into a deeper character.  This is what RoseAnna and I spent our junior high and high school years doing together, and many years since.

Essentially, the good writing partner asks the essential question of speculative fiction:  "What if?"  What makes speculative fiction speculative fiction is that speculation of "what if?"  Fantasy, horror, science fiction--the genres all bleed into each other in a way that makes these sub classes almost meaningless, but they all ask the essential question.  "What if all the myths of the world were real, and they formed a society underground to our own, now exploding in a rebellion to no longer hide, and teach the humans where they really stood in the pyramid of species success?", for instance, is the question of my current series.

What a good writing partner does, is ask you over and over again the question, "what if", while you develop and write the book.  This is what has made the stand out partners to me.  The fellow writers who looked at my writing, looked at what I was working on and what I was going to make the book into farther along the line, and ask me "what if?"  What if I changed Alex's character to start off not quite so nice?  What does the difference in Other mean to Laurel in their relationship?  What if I took a character in another direction?  If I have created the Recess in Sheep that Stray, a place where teens congregate in an old school that Robin, the secondary protagonist in the book, created when he was younger, how does that change the course of his life up until that point?  How does it change the way the other characters view him from there on out?  What if?

Of course, the other part of being a good writing partner is knowing when to praise.  We all need a little ego stroking, and the ability to get excited about how a character is developing with you helps you stay invested in that character's development.  Michael's excitement about Other helped me get excited enough to spend that extra energy on him.  RoseAnna's fascination with the Recess shaped Robin's character and that section of the book for drafts to come.  Comments like this let me know I am going in the right direction.

These two qualities, knowing when to praise what someone has created in their lives so far, and knowing how to ask "what if?" in any given situation are not segregated to the writing world.  These qualities create a supportive and challenging relationship in area of life.

A Child's Eyes

First thing I would like to say is that I am back and rolling. The neck problems continue to plague me, however I am making you a mitigated promise that a new blog should show up every week.

So what do I mean by a child's eyes? I have friends and relatives who are not fantasy readers, but love me and read my books anyway. At first when this started happening I was floored and discouraged to see that some of them had absolutely no idea what was happening in the book or what it was about. They drowned.

So I thought, maybe it is me. Am I really that unclear? Have my writing workshop buddies and other people I know been lying to me over whether or not I am coherent? So I continued conversations with the confused and discovered two things. The first, and I believe I've mentioned it before, is the importance of personae and glossaries, especially for those out of their element.

I take it for granted there are certain conventions we all know and love to create a world, and that if people find themselves lost in it, I have done something wrong. In fact, they are a handy guide for the fantasy literate, who either put down and pick up the book sporadically, or those who just love to have all the facts of the matter.

For those who don't read fantasy that much, it gives them a stable ground to walk on as they wade and then swim into unconventional waters. More importantly, however, is this: speculative readers still have a child's eyes.

My epiphany occurred over the course of hanging out with my friend Marci

and her extremely bright and creative kids. They were at my house, and despite the fact I do not have a video game to my name, having fun due to the fact I still play with toys and therefore have a collection in the house. Nothing high tech. Plastic figurines, plush animals, a mad collection of My Little Ponies (and I know you know why) and lots of grown up toys such as crystal balls I inherited from my great grandmother and Native American carvings, which I also let them play with.

Now of course one of the reasons for the visit is that Marci just moved closer to me, and we had a lot of catching up to do, and where she went, so went the kids. But I love kids. I find them fascinating, if at times vicious, creatures. In this case I watched them echo the kind of pretend games I played with my brother as a kid. The dragon kept all the My Little Ponies captive. And the children were separated and taught things like reading was bad so they wouldn't learn and rebel. Could they use the crystal ball that the ponies were hiding because the dragon would become that much more powerful if he ever found the crystal ball? I never did figure out how the plastic and furry insect puppet fit in, other than it was evil too.

Not only did these kids turn a mismatched collection of toys into something that sounded like a fantasy plot in the making, but they did it together. Of course the oldest had ultimate power, but they accepted everything the others said. If Milo grabbed the big insect and inserted it into the game, the girls altered their universe to make that insect
not only at home, but without question.

It reminded me of a developmental psychologyuiop study I read as an undergrad. Children were watched as they worked almost as if one unit. They made up words. Not only did the other children not object to or question these words, they appeared to automatically have a working knowledge of the meaning. The example was "stocks" A child in knee highs referred to her knee highs as "stocks".

If you asked, you learned that they were stocks because they were half way between socks and stockings. The adults had to ask. The children already knew and soon all used the word stocks when referring to knee highs. At some developmental marker, psychologists claimed that our brains became more left brain wired, and we lost this brain plasticity. But here's the thing. Speculative fiction readers and writers don't.

Sure, we get really pissed if someone breaks the rules they have set up for their world, but as long as they feed us information we need when we need it, not all at once and not obtrusively, we go with the flow. Unicorns have all but herded into the sea by a gigantic red bull. Okay, break it down, we've heard of unicorns before. But Peter S. Beagle makes up his own set of rules for how a unicorn acts, thinks, feels, and looks--very different from the hundreds of other fantasy novel's unicorns, and we roll with it. So there is this gigantic red bull. That's fine. We may expect some kind of explanation of the bull eventually, but right now this one unicorn is going to find other unicorns who have been chased down by a red bull. That's what we know and we're going with it. It is the "stocks" of the adult world.

People who don't, as a rule, read speculative fiction, get tripped up (okay, maybe not in my example. Everyone loves that book so much they steal it and put it in "literary fiction". Bastard thieves.) immediately. They flip back and forth looking for the explanations they don't have yet or may never know. What the hell is this red bull doing in here? Is it a mythological concept they missed while reading Joseph Campbell? They don't get why it is chasing unicorns. Did they miss that paragraph? Why didn't the unicorn know and why didn't the red bull get her too? Everything you set in front of them, they immediately question.

They need answers. They need a flow chart. They need a scholarly article about unicorns and all the implications of them in this book before they can start reading. But like I said, some fantasy books transcend and the grown ups are willing to play. Look at Harry Potter.

However, speculative fiction readers are always willing to play. We trust. We take what is given us, and we may question, but we know to read more and the author will spin us a new born world. A world where dragons guard My Little Ponies ans crystals can mean the power of life or death. If someone says the equivalent of "stocks", rather than questioning them, looking it up in the dictionary, or challenging the word's existence, speculative fiction readers simply incorporate "stocks" into their worlds. We know. We don't need proof.

Cars possessed by a dead girlfriend? Okay. After the atomic bombs go off the healers wander around with three snakes to heal people, but everyone must steer clear of the contaminated areas. Okay. Angels were constructs of people who wanted to hide that a space ship controlled their new technologically backwards world. Sure, and kudos for crossing spec. fiction lines. The farther an author can get away from the well established concepts, the more excited we get. Our brains still stretch like silly putty. In the words of Alice Walker, we "always try to keep faith with the child [we] have been."