In discussing writing and character, I’ve often mentioned that when things are going well with my books, my characters begin to do things that surprise me.  They take conversations and events in directions I hadn’t anticipated.  They bend the plot to their will, and as a result they actually change my books, sometimes subtly, other times in hugely significant ways.  It’s one of those things about writing that people don’t get unless they’ve written themselves.  “She’s your character,” people will tell me.  “She’s a creation of your imagination.  She exists only in your mind.  How can you not be in control of everything she does?”

Good points all.  She (or he) is my character, and she did come into existence as a product of my imagination.  But I would argue with the idea that she exists only in my mind.  She exists in a world that I’ve created, which might seem like a fine distinction, but it’s really not.  That world isn’t static and it’s so huge that I can’t claim to have control over it.  It’s as fluid as . . . well, as fluid as thought, as unpredictable as imagination, as real as love and anger and sadness and joy and every other emotion that has its origin in my mind.  And to that end, I’m not certain that any one of us has complete control over his or her mind.  We constantly do and say things that we didn’t intend, and then wonder “Where the hell did that come from?”  Is it any wonder that our characters should take us by surprise now and then?

I bring this up because I’ve been thinking about character a lot recently.  A couple of weeks ago, on consecutive days, I posted about character here and at sfnovelists.com.  Those posts focused on the process by which I create characters and begin to fill in their life stories.  In other words, they dealt with the way I go about drawing up a blueprint for my characters, giving them backstory, and the kind of depth they’ll need to become those free agents who surprise and delight me as I write.

But there is a gap between creating the characters on paper and having them come to life.  That’s the quickening.  I’m there right now with my shiny new toy, my new project.  I did some of the worldbuilding before and have a good deal of information about my lead character.  I’ve even written and sold a short story about him.  But he has yet to come to life.  I’m in that gap; I sense that I’m very close to that spark that will animate him, and thus breathe life into the world around him.  It can’t be forced; like the quickening of a child, it will happen when he is ready.  All I can do is make certain he has what he needs to make that leap.  I nourish him with backstory and make his surroundings as rich and full as possible.  And I wait.

What’s a page proof? It’s a big stack of papers that look like someone took a book to a copier, laid it open on the glass and made copies of the pages (except nicer quality, and none of the squiggled words or wierd black lines in the middle that you’d get if you really did try something like that.) It’s my chance to fix anything that needs fixing, and make sure all the words are spelled correctly. Yep, it’s a bit tedious, but it’s all part of the package.

Publishing, like any other industry, has its own language and habits, most of which are a complete mystery to those on the outside. I don’t expect anyone to know the intricacies of publishing any more than I understand what my sister, the engineer, does every day. It’s enough for me to know that she builds roads; I don’t really care how she gets it done. I’m occasionally faced with comments from so far out of left field that I can’t think of a thing to say. For example, yesterday I was trying to explain page proofs to a non-writer, and not succeeding at all. After a while, she looked at me quizzically and said, “So if you don’t get it right this time, do they do a recall and take all the books back from people who bought them?”

Goodness, I sure hope not.

Anyway, I know it has to happen to people in all industries, not just publishing. So entertain me…tell me something someone has said to you that made your head spin right off your neck or made you laugh so hard your belly hurt later.

David talked about authors’ and characters’ time-conscious voice this week, and it got me to thinking about the way I revise in terms of macro revisions and micro revisions. A macro rewrite, also called a textual rewrite, is a big heavy duty revision of major proportions where the plot line, character development, and other big stuff gets needed attention and revision. I do one of these for a book at about the ¾ mark, or page 250 in a 114,000 word mscpt.

When working out a book (or building a book) things change. A character may have suddenly revealed something about himself that needs to be added into the plot. A subplot line that looked good in outline may have fizzled, and another one may have found strength and taken over. Or I may have gotten irritated and killed off a character who was annoying me. BTW – it’s okay to kill off a character, and in fact, it’s my favorite thing to do when I am stuck on a plot point. At any rate, to keep the big picture fresh and clear, at about the ¾ point in a novel, I need to interweave the new and unexpected into the planned and programmed.  Not that this is the only macro revision… Oh no.  More on that later.

Micro revisions take place all along and at specific times.  When I start my day of writing, the very first thing I do – after emails and such – is a micro rewrite on the pages from the previous day’s writing. By going over it again, I can re-familiarize myself with the character’s voice, my author’s voice, and get on track for a day’s work. I may also add in a couple pages as I see things that were missed in the down dirty rough writing. (Yeah. This is a small-scale macro rewrite. *grins*) Then, after the big ¾-of-the-way-through macro rewrite, I follow up with a cover-to-(so far)-cover micro rewrite. This is where I catch (I hope) the language errors, time and setting errors, voice errors, and clarify characters’ voices.

I missed something in my last Gwen Hunter novel (suspense novel set on whitewater  rivers of Tennessee.)  It was a small but vital part of the voice clarity. In the novel, there are 5 secondary characters who flow through the entire novel – river-rats, rafting guides, kayaking paddlers. Because they were secondary characters, whom I thought of as a group rather than individuals, I failed to give each character an individual voice or dialogue cant. My editor called me on it, in her macro revision letter to me. (This is the rewrite letter that a writer might shed a few tears over, maybe cuss a bit – the big five page [or so] single spaced, rewrite letter.)

My editor liked the characters. She wanted each of them to have his own voice, history, and identity. The rewrite was actually fun. I took the time to more fully explore each character, allowing them all to grow and change and develop. The novel improved because of my editor’s great eye and the trust she had in me. She knew I could do what she was asking, though it meant having a more sizeable cast, more characters to follow around, and more…um…umph. No, it isn’t a writing term, but it kinda says what I want to say.

There were three more micro rewrites after that.

The book is grand (IMHO *laughing*). The novel drove my editor to say, “I want to take up whitewater kayaking!” Even though she is pregnant and too busy take the time.

Faith

About five and a half years ago, Marvel Comics announced it was beginning a creator-owned line and invited writers and artists to submit their material. It happened that at the time I was about to start on a comic book project to work on my own sequential art (ie, comic book) art skills. Instead, I wrote a script, got artist Ursula Vernon to draw the first five pages, and submitted it. After about five months, Marvel gave up on their idea, but I didn’t.

The result is that my first comic book, “Take A Chance”, a superhero comic about an ordinary woman who turns vigilante after her son is killed in the crossfire of gang warfare, is launching this December. I’m incredibly proud and excited about this, and I’m going to discuss behind the cut, in great detail, how it came to be.

Above the cut, though, I’m going to add that the first issue is a fundraiser for the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund, and that 50% of any profit I make on the issue will go to them, as will 10% of the proceeds from the graphic novel it’ll eventually be in. I’d therefore like to encourage people to dash out and pre-order the comic. If you don’t have a pull list at your comic shop already, you can use this order form to order it.

There are a lot of ways to go about creating a comic book. The most common, particularly for a writer, is to look for an artist by way of saying, “Hey! I’ll split the profits with you when we’re rich and famous!” Sometimes this works.

It was not, however, the approach I took. I figured–and still do–that if you want professional-quality artwork (and you’d better have it, because it takes exactly .03 seconds to reject art as insufficiently professional), you’d better be prepared to pay for it. I went to digitalwebbing.com (a site I cannot recommend highly enough for comic book creation connections) and posted an ad for an artist, in which I told the truth: it was work for hire, I could pay a pittance, and I had no guarantee of publication.

I had more than seventy responses, a handful of which were very bad, a handful of which were very good, and the vast majority of which were okay. Out of them, literally the last person to submit art to me, Ardian Syaf, and I knew from the moment I saw his samples that he was the artist I wanted to work with. The test pages he did for me only confirmed it.

At that point I decided that no matter what happened in the long run, I was going to produce the whole first issue of Chance. I wanted to see at least one comic of mine completely finished, inks, colors, letters and all. This was an outlay of about $3000 (which my amzing husband agreed to), and somewhere in there I got the idea that, since I was spending the money anyway, if I ever *did* find a publisher, I should do something cool with the first issue. (That’s where the CBLDF fundraiser idea came from. I’m not going to make any money on that issue; anything that doesn’t go to my team or the CBLDF is being turned back over into the comic.)

Anyway, so over the course of the next year, I also found an inker and a colorist (Jason Embury) through digitalwebbing, and around two years ago had a complete comic which I then started shopping around. About a year ago Jennifer Jackson, my agent, placed the comic with Dabel Brothers Publishing, which was a first for all of us–her first creator-owned comic book sale, their first creator-owned production deal, my first comic-book deal period.

I’ve literally worked longer on this project than on anything else I’ve ever done: it’s been fascinating, frustrating, exciting, and exhausting in equal parts. Writing novels is not a career for the faint-hearted, and I’m coming to think writing comics is even less so.

I feel like I’ve skipped over a million things here, so if people have questions, please ask them and I’ll do my best to answer!

I’m currently reading Ysabel, by Guy Gavriel Kay.  Kay is one of my favorite authors, and Ysabel may be his finest work yet.  One aspect of the story that makes it so effective is the constant tension between ancient and modern, past and present.  The story itself is an anachronism in its modern setting.  This is a difficult thing to do, and, of course, Kay does it brilliantly.

Reading the book got me thinking about how we as fantasy authors blend setting and character and plot:  a delicate balance that is so elemental in our genre.  Specifically, it reminded me that while Kay uses anachronism as a storytelling tool, most authors need to avoid anachronism in all its forms.

What is anachronism?  It’s defined as “a chronological misplacing of persons, events, objects, or customs in regard to each other.” Basically, for the purposes of this discussion, it’s anything in a story that does not belong, that jars your reader out of setting and narrative and character.

How does it manifest itself in fantasy writing?  For the sake of simplicity, I’ll say that the anachronistic mistakes I’ve seen made by beginning writers fall into one of three categories:  worldbuilding, language, and dialogue, both internal and external.

In terms of worldbuilding, authors need to be careful that they don’t establish a level of technology for one aspect of their story, and then undermine that decision by establishing a different level of technology for another.  For instance, I’ve read stories (excellent in most other ways) that have characters using medieval weaponry, but then taking hot showers.  I’ve seen authors write about preindustrial societies that have electricity or steam power.  Sorry, folks, but you just can’t do that.  Or rather, if you’re really determined to do it, you’d better have a REALLY good explanation for why it makes sense.  These types of problems are simple to avoid, but they require some research and some logical thought.  One book I’ve found useful is called Ancient Inventions.  It’s by Peter James and Nick Thorpe, and it offers some basic discussion of when a wide variety of technological innovations came into use.

Anachronistic language is a bit trickier to deal with, but again care and research can help.  The issue here is that most of our writing is done from a certain character’s point of view.  This is true even if you’re writing in third person.  You are still letting your readers view the world and the story through one person’s eyes (or, if you’re like me, many people’s eyes).  These people are limited in what they can know by their experiences and by their cultures.  So a medieval knight shouldn’t say that something is “as big as a bus” since he doesn’t know what a bus is.  He shouldn’t say that someone is being “paranoid,” because paranoia is a nineteenth century psychological term that he couldn’t possibly know.  And unless his world has the same Judeo-Christian traditions and cultural touchstones as ours, he shouldn’t curse by saying, “Oh Hell!” or using the name of Christ.  A couple of other sources:  for the sake of straight chronology — knowing when words entered the lexicon — I use Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary (Eleventh Edition, hardcover) which gives a date for every word, and another book called English Through the Ages, by William Brohaugh.  Technically for my books, I shouldn’t use any word that entered the language after, say, 1400.  But that gets VERY tricky.  I limit myself to words that entered the language before 1600, and even that can be tough.  But it keeps my worlds feeling real.

Finally, dialogue.  Some of the same points that apply to prose apply to dialogue as well.  You don’t want your lead character in a medieval fantasy calling his best friend “Dude” or “Dawg”.  But here I tend to fudge a bit, because you also don’t want your characters talking to each other in stilted or obscure language, even if that language is entirely appropriate for a thirteenth century setting.  So I have my characters speak using contractions and somewhat colloquial language.  I love Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, but I find the dialogue tiresome because it is so authentic.  In the end, I’ve decided that in the interest of keeping my books flowing and easy to read, I’ll sacrifice this small bit of authenticity.

The issue of anachronism in books is one that I could write about at greater length, but this is at least the beginning of a discussion.  As I indicated at the outset in regard to Kay’s book, anachronism can be used as a literary device.  But you’d better know what you’re doing before you try it.  Otherwise, if you’re trying to build a coherent fantasy world and set your story in it, anachronistic writing is something to be avoided.  You’ve worked hard to submerge your reader in your world; the last thing you want to do is jar him or her out of it.

When I was a child, I used to write letters to authors whose work impressed me, people like E L Konigsberg, Elizabeth Enright (and was broken-hearted to learn she had died some years before my letter arrived), and Marguerite Henry. Most of the time the only response was a form letter of some kind from the publisher, thanking me for my interest. When I was 10 or 11, I wrote a letter to my favorite author (at the time), Alexander Key. I’d just finished his fantastic novel Flight to the Lonesome Place, and I had a question about one of the characters. Everyone told me not to expect a personal response, since he was a famous author and I was just a kid who read his book. Imagine my excitement when a letter arrived a few weeks later, with “A. Key” in the return address corner. I read his charming, thoughtful, personal response to my question at least one hundred times. My favorite author had taken the time to write to me, a mere reader. How amazing was that?

These days I’m the one getting correspondence from readers. It’s a good deal easier here in the 21st century, what with email and blog lines. No one has to search very diligently before they find a way to contact me, which is nice for both of us. Yesterday, for example, I opened my email and found a delightful note from a young woman who had just finished reading Mad Kestrel, and wanted to tell me how she felt about it. As I read her gushing email, I began to cry, because I realized that I’d done what I wanted to do. I had given at least one person a story that became real, a cast of characters she could care about, and a world she didn’t want to leave behind. As writers, we all hope for award nominations and bestseller status and seven figure advances, but honestly, when it all comes down, what we really want is to touch someone else’s soul with our work. That’s what being an artist is all about.

Her letter…

Ok, so here’s the thing. I THINK I just finished my book. Does that
make sense?
I had planned on writing a few more scenes, but it feels like this is
the end. I’ve got the tears (mine and hopefully the readers’), the
emotion, the hope for survival. Will another scene ruin that? I think it will.
OK, I think I just convinced myself, but feel free to respond with
your thoughts.
So … I finished it! Now I really am crying!
Anonymous Writer

My reply…

OMG!
Yes! Cry and whoop and jump and dance!
You have now become a writer.
A *real* writer. You finished a project. A whole book!
Might you eventually add another scene?
Maybe. Who knows. But savor this now. The first time only happens once.

Me

So, why am I choosing to write about this today? Simple. It is a huge milestone. *Really huge.*

General numbers (made up but oft quoted) about writers go:

One in a 100 people want to write a book.

For every 100 people who want to write a book, one will start.

For every 100 who start, one will finish.

For every 100 who finish, one will be commercially published.

Anonymous just became one of a very small percentage of people on this earth. She should celebrate – dance, laugh, go out to dinner, run in circles barking. No, wait. That’s my dog. *grins*

But then I felt like running in circles when I finished my first book. And barking and wagging my tail too. I felt lighter than air, full of joy, as if angel wings were beating all around me. I sat on the couch for a moment, taking it all in. And I celebrated by, well, working some more. Which pattern of behavior became my reaction to milestones ever after.

As it turns out, that was really dumb, and the result of the stress I put myself under was dangerous to my health. It is long-lasting and very negative. So every time you pass a milestone, celebrate. Rest. Enjoy the moment. There are so few moments of true accomplishment in life. Remember to savor each.

No one is a writer until they finish a work, be it short story, article, or novel, just like no one is a bricklayer until they cap off that first wall. It takes accomplishment to don the cap and robe and cross the stage. Anonymous did it. She finished a book. She should celebrate.

Cheers, girl!

My question to the other writers here (are there any folk here who are not writers?)

How did you celebrate on that first big milestone? And any other memorable ones thereafter?

Faith

I’d cleared off my desk of the last set of manuscript papers so I could spread the new ones around. For about two seconds everything was tidy, and then I put a 717 page manuscript on the left side of the keyboard tray, fifty pages of editorial cuts on the right side, and the revision letter on the desk itself.

And I thought something very much like, “This is gonna be great.”

Some time ago I ran a “What would people like to hear about writing?” poll on my LJ. One of the choices was the nuts and bolts of line edits, copy edits, and revisions. As a result of that combined with my extraordinary good cheer about tackling these revisions today, I’m going to subject you to running commentary of the first few chapters/several pages/however long my attention span holds of edits.

I’ll be nice, though, and put it behind the cut.

Prologue

Paragraph one: one extremely moderate editorial suggestion results in an almost complete rewrite which ends up saying the same things, only better.

Page two: My own read-through observes the use of the same word four times in one paragraph. Doh.

Page three: oh no! Two paragraphs I adore, struck down by the editor! Curse her! Curse her! …except, yeah, ok, not *actually* necessary. But my pretty words! Woe is me! Woe!

*agglty* Part of the point of this series is the more complex sentence structure and storytelling style, but oi, sometimes I do even my own head in. *edits*

Page five: Agh! Ack! Augh! More cuts! My lovely woooords! Fine, fine, fine…

Ooh! A whole page cut! Woot!

My expectation is that I’m going to re-print the whole manuscript after I’ve done this edit pass, and try to read it with fresh eyes.

page 10: mammalian assistance is causing my butt to go numb because I can’t shift without disturbing the cat. Help!

page 8: Hah! 2 pages cut! You know, if I can take 2 pages out of every chapter…well. Not enough, actually, because the heavy cuts need to come in the first third. Hsm. Well. We shall see.

Chapter One

page one: Oi. If I spend this much time on each page I’ll be here til judgment day.

more of page one: oh dear. Added a page, and took an hour of editing to do it. OTOH, have now put in several necessary threads for later, clarified stuff, shored things up, etc. Let’s hope the next, say, forty pages, go faster.

page 18: I’ve dropped down a page again somehow. This is very alchemical and weird, editing at this level.

page 34: well, I cut one page. To cut more I’d have to drop another ten lines, and I don’t think I can do it. I may need to go back and emphasize a death: this will serve as a note to look at that later.

Chapter Two

page 42: ooh! ooh! another page bites the dust! And the great news is, this is in stuff I’m cutting, and has thus far been different (except for one sentence) from what Betsy’s chosen. So I might get somewhere with this! Woot!

page 56: ok, I didn’t cut much from this chapter, but I strengthened it tremendously. Got more structural support for a bunch of stuff later in the book, so that’s a win.

Chapter Three

…oh look. There is no chapter three. This book goes from Chapter Two directly to Chapter Four. O.O

And oh look, again. There are two chapter fours!

*fixes*

p 60-66: *whack* I like this scene. It’s sexy and does something for the story. However, I can replace its more important thrust with a few lines somewhere else, and I don’t think the sexy outweighs the first third of the book being so slow. So, *whack*.

For a rarity, though, removing it doesn’t mean it no longer fits within the context of the book (usually when I cut scenes they no longer make contextual sense *at all*.). I may even post it on cemurphy.net as a DVD extra when the book comes out.

p 80: ok, not bad. I’ve cut about 9 pages so far, 5 in a big chunk and the rest in dribs and drabs. I think if I can get to page 100 on the new version of the manuscript, I might call it a day. My butt is numb.

Chapter four

p 82: ooh yay! another one bites the dust! Unexpectedly, too, because I’m revising and it seemed more likely the story would expand, not compress. But it’s getting more solid–a thread I didn’t like is gaining strength, and will eventually work out much more solidly than it does now.

page 99: End of day one: 2 pages, the dedication and acknowledgements, added to the manuscript straight off, for a total of 719 pages. 100 pages revised, with evidently eleven pages stricken, as I’m down to 708 manuscript pages now. I’d guess I’ve written/rewritten about…a thousand words today.

I shall run a contest. Guess how many pages this manuscript will be in its revised draft. I’ll send a signed copy of THE PRETENDER’S CROWN to the person who’s closest, when I get my author copies sometime next year.

For those of you who somehow missed it in the news this weekend, actor and activist Paul Newman died on Friday at the age of eighty-three.  Newman has always been one of my favorite actors, and even knowing that he had been sick, I was saddened by the news of his death.  Over the last few days, I’ve been trying to think of what made him so good at what he did, what it was I loved about his work and admired about him as an artist.

The realization I’ve come to is both simply and profound:  Paul Newman was the kind of artist I’d like to be.

My favorite Paul Newman movies include Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, The Sting, The Verdict, Absence of Malice, The Hustler, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, The Color of Money, The Road to Perdition.  I could go on — I’ve enjoyed so much of his work.  But that’s probably a good enough list for now.  So, what do these movies have in common aside from Newman’s involvement?  Well, all of them were great movies, but all of them were also accessible.  Newman didn’t do high cinema; he didn’t do movies that were longer on symbolism and art than they were on plot and character.

What else do we know about Newman?  He was a humanitarian who donated in the neighborhood of a $100 million from the sales of his organic food products to various charities, without taking a penny for himself.  He sponsored a camp designed for child cancer patients.  He was also deeply political, and made no effort to hide his progressive leanings from the public.  Indeed, he was proud of his political work.  He was a devoted family man, who remained married to Joanne Woodward for fifty years despite living and working in Hollywood, a place not known for being kind to celebrity marriages.  And finally, he liked to have fun — his idea of having fun happened to involve racing cars, but hey, he enjoyed it and that’s what mattered.

From an artistic perspective, I also strive for that balance between excellence and accessibility.  Every time I begin a new project I set out to write the best book I can.  I want it to be as great as possible in every way, naturally.  I also look to address important issues — race, ethnic identity, prejudice, environmental degradation, among others.  But mostly I try to remember that what I write is entertainment.  I want people to think when they read my books, but first and foremost, I want them to have fun.

I try to give back to my community and my country through volunteer work and charitable contributions (though I don’t have the resources at my disposal to do very much).  And no one who has read my personal blog will be surprised to learn that I’m an active progressive.

Finally, I have always tried to find a balance in my life between my work on the one hand and my family and happiness on the other.  I love what I do, but I love my wife and daughters more.  And I have many hobbies — photography and birdwatching, to name just two — that I enjoy and pursue whenever I have the chance.

Look, I’m not trying to compare myself to Paul Newman.  Far from it.  Nancy will be the first person to tell you that I’m not nearly that good-looking.  I haven’t been nearly as successful, the quality of my work can’t compare to the quality of his, and my impact on the world is tiny by comparison.  But I think that Newman set a terrific example for artists everywhere, and as I contemplate his life and his achievements, I see that he gave those of us who are pursuing our passions as he pursued his, much for which to strive.  This isn’t to say that an artist has to emulate Newman.  Not at all.  But for me he was, and will continue to be, a wonderful role model.

I’m sure you’ve all heard writers say that they had a perfectly clear idea of what would happen in their novels, until the characters got going and changed everything.  It’s true, at least for me.  Once the characters are created and the story gets going, they will cry and get drunk and spend too much money and dance like fools in front of the Duke of Burgundy, all the things real people do.  And sometimes when they take that sudden left turn, it may drive the author nuts, but it makes for a more brilliant story.

So here’s your homework, kids.  Tell me about a character you’ve written that turned your story upside-down.  (Readers, you can play, too - tell me about a character you read that you think might have done something like that to his author.)