The Mark of Good Governance

When talking about governance, and by that I mean the provision of public goods (aka stop signs, libraries, schools, bridges, etc...) by a figure of authority, generally a hallmark of good governance in a developed country is a lack of potholes and cracks in the roads.

If this there aren't potholes and cracks, it means that a) power distribution between different levels of government is effective b) the bureaucracy is efficient c) money is being allocated effectively, and d)the people's needs are being met. Harvey Milk, the legendary district supervisor of San Francisco, prioritized the filling in of potholes and the placement of stop signs in his term, because he understood that that was people wanted, and what people needed.

I have driven a car through the equivalent of a tank trench. It was an extremely unpleasant experience, which I would have preferred to avoid.

What does this have to do with writing? I think you can guess. Plot holes. Oh yes, I'm looking at you, plot holes. Those nasty little buggers that leave you perplexed, that smack you in the face, that are the easy way out.

Good writing is very similar to good governance, in that a writer needs to govern their plot. The characters need to develop, deal with their conflict (internal or external), and find some resolution or die. The setting needs to be appropriate to the story, be thought out well enough that there aren't any jarring discrepancies (what, I thought you said the house had two bedrooms and was painted blue?!?), and be rich enough to support the characters and the plot. The plot needs to follow some sort of logic: obviously many writers break the mold, but generally there should be a rise and fall of action. There should be tension, and relief, and an avoidance of deus ex machina solutions. The writing has to be clear, eloquent, vivid, and whatever other adjective you can think of, and have good flow and great timing.

Plot holes are when one of these things falls apart, or is left untended. Ignored too long, they get bigger as they are driven over, until the entire section of road needs to be replaced. A sign of good writing is the ability to identify plot holes and patch them, or repave the road, or construct the road in such a way that there are no plot holes to begin with.

A challenge, if I've ever seen one.

Teasing the Audience

This post is a lot less flirtatious than the title suggests. It is also less of a lesson, than a description of what this post is trying to accomplish.

Oh yes. That means, I'm teasing you! Have a letter written by a side-character to the main characters, as his final goodbye.

* * *

Dear Riley and Kael,

This letter will be the last you know of me. I am dying. I have been dying for a long time. Finally, my fear of death without knowing who I am has overcome my fear of knowing who I am. I spent decades here, and there are volumes of text that I dedicated my time too, that no one will know I wrote, or painstakingly transcribed. I'm afraid of dying as a nobody. It's been so long that I don't know if my memories will even come back. I never tried to get them back, because I'd come here out of fear to make a deal, and so I never wanted to know what I was afraid of.

You may be wondering why I am writing this to you. I don't know. Maybe I want to know that at least two people will remember me, even if they don't know me. Or maybe I want to be a lesson to you both. Don't ever become complacent. Fight for your memories back. If Delia is correct, and Riley is one of the last remnants of the Pelagian Empire, then I have to believe you both must have some purpose that needs to be fulfilled. When your contract is up, please, leave. I may never see either of you again, but it will kill me some comfort in my final hours to think that you will not give into the fear as I did. Leave if you can.

Your friend,

Emil

* * *

Want to know what in the seven hells is going on? Well, you are just going to have to stick around and wait until The Brightest Night is finished.

Peculiarities of Music and Writing

I'm one of those people who actually concentrates better with music. It allows me to ignore ambient sounds, and focus entirely on what is in front of me. The effect is amplified when I have ear buds or headphones on, because I exist in my own sound bubble. I've had some people be confused this, because they get distracted by the music. I groove with it.

Now, the most obvious explanation is to use music to emphasize the tone of the piece I'm working on. If I'm working on something serious, perhaps Mozart's Jupiter Symphony might be appropriate. If I'm working on something melancholic, some Fleet Foxes, or if something happy and cheerful is needed, Katrina and the Waves "Walking on Sunshine".

I am an oddity. I don't listen to music that is necessarily the same tone of what I'm working on. Sure, sometimes I will align my music with my writing, but most of the time, if the music gets me into a groove, it can be the exact opposite in tone and still work.

I wrote several academic papers last December, listening to German Christmas Carols and Auld Lang Syne ad nauseum (to the point where you might believe that I should know the lyrics to the latter. I don't). If I tried to listen to something else, the farthest I was able to venture was other traditional Christmas Carols. I'm not even particularly fond of Christmas Carols, but they were the only thing that kept me focused enough to slog through my papers. I wrote a paper last month listening to one single song: Bastille ft. Ella -No Angels. Was it at all relevant to my topic? Not in the least.

Working on The Brightest Night, I've listened to club music, boogie/funk/disco, atmospheric, folk, rock, pop, and everything and anything in between. While I still get distracted as much as the next person, it's not the extent that I would be if I didn't have my jams playing.

It leads me to wonder, if music helps set the tone in film, what role does it play during the writing process?

Step One: Complete

As a fun fact, this blog has reached 100 pageviews! Yay!

So, after getting in a few hours of editing, I have done a complete read-through of my draft, and done the first round of edits. After nine days, it stands at 120 pages, with significant plot holes sketched in with bullet points, approximately 56,000 words of fantasy goodness. For a first draft, I'm pretty happy with it. I will be starting on filling in the plot holes in the next few days, and when that's done, I want to go back and address issues that came up when I was editing.

One of the main things I want to do is re-write the first chapter, because it makes no sense in a lot of ways, and I don't manage to introduce the concepts that I want to introduce. I also realize that the romance in the story line appears in all of five paragraphs, which does not do justice to the tension and relationship between Riley and Kael, and needs to be significantly expanded. This will also help me flesh out the magic system better, because it has rules in my mind.

There's a few details I need to solidify, like sigils and flags and rank structure for armed forces. I also need to unify the plot in terms of equivalent historical period. Currently it is floating in a semi-Victorian setting, except without the coming of industrialization. This is bothering me, so I will figure something else out. I have also realized that at no point do I ever describe anyone as wearing armor, despite the fact that army encampments feature prominently.

I'm feeling good about the process so far, and hoping that my willingness to work continues!

The Makings of Literary Greatness

I have a confession to make. In my English (and French) classes in high school, the second my teachers started talking about themes in novels, I rolled my eyes. I didn't care about deeper meanings or the way that an author had set up character interactions and used symbolism to make a point. All I cared about was the story, the plot, the narrative. I read voraciously, but I read shallowly. It explains why I have never been a rabid fan of classic literature, and why I didn't think too much into what I wrote. I think I have finally grown enough to appreciate the importance of theme and symbolism.

I think, on some unconscious level, I began to absorb the idea of themes being important in university. Mostly, I have to thank Dracula. Once my prof pushed us to think about the interaction of technology and superstition, about the symbolism of blood, I got so excited that any paper I have written on the book have received stellar grades, because I was invested. But, my professor didn't explain it quite as a "theme" in the sense that literature normally talks about it; Instead, it was approached from a multiplicity of ways, from philosophy to history and ethics. We got context.

Some other professors managed to pull that off in literature classes. Not all of them. I still distinctly dislike a lot of French lit I've encountered. If you say Honoré de Balzac, I say blech. If you say Madame Bovary, I tell you that I wanted to slap the titular character silly. If I was forced to analyze themes devoid of some other context, I hated it. I needed the psychology, the history, the philosophy, the cultural context. Because if it doesn't resonate with me, I don't care. If I don't know anything about the time period the writer is referring to, or is writing in, or the major issues the author would have encountered, I didn't care.

I think, something changed with the first novel I attempted for NaNoWriMo. Because even though I was primarily concerned with plot and characters and narrative, I also wanted it to make the novel about choice. Making choices when options are constrained, having no choices. It was also about having choice taken away from you. It's asking a question. It's...dark. The context was essentially modern, although fantastical. I don't know where to begin in describing how many things I dislike about the novel, but if I do ever go back to it, I know I will continue to emphasize the theme of choice.

For The Brightest Night, I don't have anything that clear-cut. It wrestles with religion, with destiny, with inevitability, with making the best of the situation, and with love. I won't call it cheerful. But it has hope. I'm not writing/editing with a theme in mind, but I know that they are there, lurking, waiting to be teased out.

Because a good novel has great character, an amazing plot, tight dialogue, and intriguing conflict. A great novel has all of the above, and something more. It wrestles with itself, with the time it has been written in, and with all the great philosophical, ethical, moral, social, economic, psychological questions out there. A great novel tells us something about ourselves and the world we live in. A great novel teaches us.

The Duty of a Writer

I once read an article (that I sadly do not have the link to anymore) that commented on how in George R.R. Martin's Game of Thrones, there's this whole dynamic of "who makes the best king/queen/ruler?"This whole question of leadership and what not is examined, but, no one questions the fact that there had to be a ruling monarch in Westeros. The characters don't question it, and the readers don't question it either. We assume that since it is in a quasi-Medieval setting, that there is supposed to a king or queen.

I was linked to this fabulous read, "We Have Always Fought:Challenging the Women, Cattle, and Slaves Narrative", about the standard tropes that female characters slot into. It led me to this article: PSA: Your default narrative is not apolitical, which is also an excellent read, again dealing with the unspoken accomplishments of historical women, or even contemporary women. I then read a response to this, The underserved population of readers where the author essentially challenges writers to do better than ethnic/racial/religious/gender/sexuality stereotypes, and speak to the underserved (not undeserved!) population, the ones who aren't white middle-class males.

As a caveat, this particularly applies to white, anglophone writers. I will try not to get sidetracked into a discussion of world literature, but I want to point out that not all narratives fall into the trap of lazy stereotypes.Writers of La Francophonie, aka former French colonies, offer diverse narratives and complex characters, even when they're talking about stereotypes like working on a sugar-cane plantation in the Caribbean or being a child soldier in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (don't believe me? Watch Rebelle/War Witch). There's also what I suppose you can call immigrant literature ( though I feel really uncomfortable with that label because it's a box that sets up parameters that aren't justified), such as by author Khaled Hosseini, the writer of The Kite Runner and A Thousand Splendid Suns. These are obviously just some examples of the multitudes. If you want to find it, it's out there.

So, there are a diversity of narratives out there that don't fall into in tired traps of stereotypes of non-white male individuals. This doesn't negate the point made previously, that the dominant mainstream narratives feature white, middle-class males who are able-bodied and probably not gay. So here's where my point comes in, about the duty of a writer.

A writer is meant to tell a story, hopefully with a good plot, great characters, fantastic dialogue, with excellent structure and pacing. It might bring you into reality, it might bring you out of reality, it may make you so angry you want to burn every single copy ever published (I'm looking at you, Waiting for Godot). I think that in general, mainstream writers of fiction fancy themselves to be outside of politics, to be behind some magic curtain that protects them from the dirty, nasty world outside. The truth is, we're not.

There was shock to some moviegoers when Rue from The Hunger Games turned out to be a little black girl. Apparently, when said moviegoers had been reading, they had glossed over the description of Rue and assumed that since she was innocent and cute and a little bit spunky, and since they became attached to her character, that Rue must be white, preferably blue-eyed and blonde-haired. Without getting carried away with this point, even if a writer is writing fantasy fiction that is set in someplace else, there are expectations about the characters.

If we write about white 20-something male going on adventures and getting the girl, we're buying into a majority narrative. We're valuing a particular kind of story, from a certain perspective. We're saying that it's okay that this is the mainstream that we know and trust. It's easy, so easy, to use tired stereotypes, and I'm as guilty as anyone else of it.

We can do so much better. If we consider how we are approaching characters of different genders, of different cultures, of different ethnic groups, of different abilities and ages, even if they're just minor characters, and ask ourselves if maybe we're playing into stereotypes, and if we are, change it.

I don't think that all writers should suddenly become political activists and only write characters who belong to a visible minority, who are living with only one leg and a speech impediment, who are transgender and living in poverty. That narrative is important, don't get me wrong, and it should be celebrated as a good story and character and embraced in the mainstream. Instead, I'm saying we should give equal weight to all characters, to our stories, and push outside boundaries of what does/does not make a good character, and a good story in the mainstream.

The Drive to Write

If you're waiting with eager anticipation for a plot summary of what the heck The Brightest Night is all about, you're still not getting one. Sorry to disappoint folks, but I have something else on my mind. I want to talk about what is driving me to pursue my project of editing and writing today (and also stroke my ego a little bit, because who doesn't like stroking their ego?).

The easiest way to do this, I think, is to tell a story. The story of my life as an amateur author.

All children tell stories when they're engaging in imaginative play, even if the stories are as simple as Barbie and Ken are going shopping at the mall, and Ken is going to buy a pretty pink skirt to wear to his friend Nancy's birthday party, but Barbie's wearing a blue dress, leading to an argument over colors.  There's character, there's plot, there's conflict. As we grow up, a lot of people stop using that part of themselves, that inner storyteller, and lose that ability.

I didn't. Somewhere, buried away so that no one will ever see them, are notebooks of half-finished stories I wrote as a child, the characters all being wolves or other animals, because it was easy to understand their motivations. Food, shelter, family. I'm pretty sure if I ever read any of them again I will want to burn them all.  Then my horizons expanded, and I started to create human character, that had some magical ability or went on grand fantastical adventures. Escapism has always been my standard writing and reading fare.

Somewhere in my teenage years I got into roleplaying. Creating characters, having them interact with other character, having them grow and change and even die, changed the way I wrote for myself. Stories became more complex, and I will freely admit, more dark. I think the time I spent roleplaying taught me how to be a better writer, and I am glad for all the wonderful people I encountered. Somewhere in these teenage years, though, I made the decision that I would not pursue writing as a professional career, because the idea was too scary to contemplate, and so I found a back-up plan.

Then university happened. I think the biggest change that happened was that I stopped reading for pleasure as much, because I was suddenly confronted with massive amounts of required reading. I learned a lot about theories, literature, history and politics, and while I began to draw more than write, I feel like all this soaked up knowledge began to flesh out my writing with details that added complexity, and I began to think about themes and meanings to my work. In the two final years of my undergraduate degree, I completed two NaNoWriMo novels, one which is so twisty I don't want to touch it, and the other one is The Brightest Night, the novel I am currently editing and expanding.

There's one moment that I will remember for many years to come, in the last semester of my undergrad. I was taking a course on ethics in international relations (which is actually fabulous and fascinating), and had gone to see my prof to run my final paper idea past him. He was really excited about my topic, and ended up giving me an impromptu pep-talk. I don't know why, but I will be eternally grateful for it. The sentence that sticks out most to me was when he said, "You have something important to say, so say it."

Since then, I have graduated with a shiny piece of paper, moved across the country, and gone through my first year of a Master's program. I moved to writing poetry, because it was quick and easy and I wanted to expand my writing horizons away from essays without having much time to invest. I attempted a third go at NaNoWriMo, but unfortunately found that I couldn't complete it and keep up with my demanding school work. I quit.

This brings us to the present. I applied for co-op positions, a lot of them, pouring time and energy into my job hunt. I got five interviews. None of them hired me. I was feeling pretty dejected, contemplating the fact that I had no job for the summer, when one of the people who interviewed me called me up to give me feedback. She did the usual feedback structure of good-to improve-good, and one of the things that struck me was that she told me, "I'm sure you've been told this before, but you write beautifully."

I found that hilarious, as the only writing sample she had from me was a cover letter  and a two-paragraph biography and explanation as to why I wanted to work for them including such lovely sentiments as 'wanting to make a difference'. I ruminated on this for a long time, and realized two things: if I could impress a stranger with my prose while writing on the most mundane subject ever, I could impress a stranger while writing fiction, and I owed it to myself to not take this jobless summer as a bad thing. It was an opportunity. I haven't had a free summer since I was sixteen, working summers to the point where I had no energy for anything else. My sudden free time, I realized, is a gift.

So my inspiration, my drive, is to make the most of this gift of time (and maybe rub it into the face of all the people who didn't want to hire me). That's why I'm editing and writing. It's why I'm doing it now.

What drives you?

On the Bravery of Writing

This post was going to be a plot summary, perhaps a tidbit of what it is that I'm writing. Instead, this post is going to be about bravery, and writing. You can thank my friend/landlady for that.

I was happily preparing dinner and having a conversation with my friend/landlady about my plans for the summer, and casually mentioned that I was working on a novel. Her reaction to this was not one that I was expecting. She told me she thought that writers were brave.

I found this idea odd. I normally associate bravery with firefighters running into burning buildings, kids standing up for a bullied peer, facing a terminal diagnosis with determination and the willingness to leave a legacy behind that will maybe stop future people from having that same terminal diagnosis. To me, bravery is action in situations where most people would rather runaway and hide, and I suppose, a state of mind.

I thought about it some more, and decided that yes, there were definitely brave writers out there. War correspondents,  investigative journalists, people who actively seek out darkness to illuminate it, to drag it kicking and screaming into the light so that hopefully, something will be done about it. The writers who risk their lives and careers to find truth, and bring change.

I continued thinking about it, stretching the definition of bravery to small every day acts. Saying hello to a stranger. Asking a man taking pictures of underage girls on the bus whether or not he had permission to do so. Accepting the consequences of your own actions.

When I framed it that way, I began to understand. Writing, for anyone, is an act of love. I'm sure there are a lot more eloquent people out there who have talked about what writing is, using birth metaphors and everything else...but I firmly believe that anyone serious about what they are writing, is writing it out of love. Love of the story, love of the characters, love of the truth, love of the crafting of sentences, love of words, love of sounds and images and expression. Above all, love of self. Writing is the most personal expression of self there is, even if you're not talking about yourself. Because if you're writing a journal article, an essay, a novel, a poem, a song, and you need to write it so much that it hurts, it's because what you're writing about is important to you.

Taking this personal, private, thing that you have created and showcasing it, means that you are opening yourself, and what you think is important, up for critique, for ridicule, or worse, for indifference. Every time someone publishes a piece of their writing, they are risking the fact that people may not like what they wrote, or may not read what they wrote. That's kind of scary. So people shuffle their scribbles and stories and put them in a cabinet, in a folder on their computer, and let it sit there, because it's easy, and safe. To step beyond that comfort zone, that takes bravery.

I would like to think I have that bravery, that ability to offer up my stories, and myself to the world and listen to the answer, whether good or bad. I don't know yet, and I won't know for awhile, until I have finished editing and writing and start looking for an agent and publisher. For now, the courage to keep going is all I need.