Submissions for this charity anthology in honour of Sir Terry Pratchett close 31 May. You don’t have to have the story completely written yet – they want a short synopsis and a sample of your writing in the first instance.
Monthly Archives: May 2015
Since I got my first Kindle, I’ve made nearly 7000 notes on 250 books.
Since I got my first Kindle, I’ve made nearly 7000 notes on 250 books.
I’ve been going through them finding patterns in the errors (they’re mostly errors) for my Well-Presented Manuscript book. I’ve reached the 1700s. Damn, it’s tedious.
If you’re subscribed to my Commonly Confused Words email list, there’ll be a big email tonight. I’ve now passed 80 items in total (you can see them, and subscribe, at the link).
http://csidemedia.com/gryphonclerks/commonly-confused-words/
Come for the non-whitewashed, non-sexualised woman on the cover; stay for good writing, a well-told story with…
Come for the non-whitewashed, non-sexualised woman on the cover; stay for good writing, a well-told story with interesting characters, and an excellent high concept (the protagonist is a kind of commercial lawyer/necromancer/mage, investigating the murder of a god).
Common Ridiculous Research Fails
Common Ridiculous Research Fails
I’m writing a chapter on research for my Well-Presented Manuscript book, and looking for things that writers often get wrong through ignorance.
At the moment I have:
Phases of the moon (multiple moons in the same part of the sky will have the same phase; not everyone knows this, apparently, because they don’t know how moon phases work).
Guns. A revolver is not an automatic, and a rifle is not a shotgun, and they differ in ways that can be important to the story.
Any other examples of things that you see frequently in books that make you roll your eyes?
(Hollywood physics and Hollywood human biology kind of get a genre pass.)
(Sigh) we can now modify yeasts easily to make thousands upon thousands of marvels and wonders.
Originally shared by Laston Kirkland
(Sigh) we can now modify yeasts easily to make thousands upon thousands of marvels and wonders. From new sources of fuel, to bioplastics, to a food with every protein and carbohydrate we require to be healthy.
So what’s one of the first things we do with this amazing scientific advance?
http://www.nature.com/news/engineered-yeast-paves-way-for-home-brew-heroin-1.17566
This book stands out among guides to writing craft.
This book stands out among guides to writing craft. Neither your standard dull writing guide that rehearses the same paint-by-numbers “winning formula” you’ve heard many times before, nor a fuzzy, pointless navel-gazing exercise ending in the conclusion that writing can’t be taught, it is, instead, a combination of analysis and inspiration that goes beyond the standard advice to a new level of insight.
From Jeff Vandermeer’s Wonderbook, some ideas for deepening character.
From Jeff Vandermeer’s Wonderbook, some ideas for deepening character.
1. Consistent inconsistency. Real people don’t act rationally all the time. We have contradictions within ourselves, and stress often brings them out. Show this.
2. Action versus thought. You can show the reader the character’s thoughts, but the other characters only see their actions. Set up a gap between the two. (This is the reason we excuse our own actions even when they’re like those of others we condemn: we know the thoughts that led up to doing those things, but we have to guess at other people’s motivations.)
3. Need versus want (this one comes via Tobias Buckell). Characters should want things, but sometimes the things they want are not the things they need. There’s gold in that gap. (Or – my own observation here, from Saladin Ahmed’s Throne of the Crescent Moon – the thing they want may not be compatible with the thing they must do.)
4. Transfer of energy. Have you ever come in from a day in which someone annoyed you, and taken it out on your housemates? What if the person who annoyed you was themselves reacting to something elsewhere in their life?
It can happen across time too, when we react to a person or event not for what that person or event actually is, but for what they remind us of. This is:
5. People as symbols or ideas. To ourselves, we’re people. To other people, we may represent something more, less, or other than ourselves.
6. The secret life of objects. Objects can be important to us because of what they represent too, and so we may value them beyond their monetary worth. This can transfer energy, it can be a source of interpersonal conflict, or it can be an occasion of threat or loss for a character. (I’m thinking of Jim Butcher’s Changes here. Harry Dresden had a crappy basement apartment filled with worn paperbacks and a beaten-up old car, but they were his, and when he loses them, we feel it.)
#wonderbook
3.
“You know who breaks this rule?
“You know who breaks this rule? Neil Gaiman. One of the few living writers who’s both a commercial and critical success, a man who must just about need a second house by now in order to store his awards.
“On the other hand, you know who isn’t Neil Gaiman? You.”
– For the book version of The Well-Presented Manuscript.
Have people commented on your breathless (rather than deathless) prose? Do you under-comma?
Have people commented on your breathless (rather than deathless) prose? Do you under-comma?
Here’s a guide for the perplexed. With bonus advice on participle dangling*.
*The advice is “don’t”. But I also explain what that is, and why it matters.
http://csidemedia.com/wellpresentedms/comma-calmer-2-commas-to-put-in/
How to be Period Authentic
Originally shared by Mike Reeves-McMillan
How to be Period Authentic
Some resources. (Long post.)
I don’t know about you, but I’ve more than once had the experience of reading a novel set in a particular time period and getting no authentic sense of that period from the text.
I’m not just talking about the Middle Ages here, either (though that too), but about the 1950s, or the 1930s, or the 1890s. And once I start to analyse the reasons for the lack of that sense of authenticity, it comes down to this: the text tells me a lot more about the time in which the author grew up than it does about the time period it’s supposedly set in.
What I mean is that the slang, the cultural references, the attitudes of the characters, and even the characters’ names come from, say, the 1970s or 1980s rather than from the setting. To me, this is just as bad as making errors in conveying a sense of place. It reduces the richness of the reading experience.
A lot of people don’t care, of course, because they don’t know, any more than the author does. But I care, and so do enough other people that I think it’s worth getting right – and getting it right is easier now than at any previous time in history.
Here are some resources to use if you agree with me.
1. For getting words, phrases and slang right:
Google Ngram Viewer: http://books.google.com/ngrams. This draws from a large corpus of texts and shows you on a graph when a word or phrase first came into (written) use. So, for example, if you used the word “hallucinogen” in your book, and it was set before about 1955, you might want to find another way of saying the same thing.
And if you want to say “freaked out” (1960s) but your story takes place in 1939, you might find this resource useful:
There’s also the Historical Dictionary of American Slang at: http://www.alphadictionary.com/slang/
2. Getting Names Right
Names go in and out of fashion. Most of us have had elderly relatives with “old-fashioned” names that at one time were the newest hot trend. I myself have the most popular boy’s name from the year of my birth, but in 1930 it was relatively uncommon.
Some names only became popular relatively recently, and even if you’ve grown up knowing several people with these names, it doesn’t mean that your grandfather would have. For example, Samantha is now a common girl’s name, but its popularity dates back to Bewitched in the 1960s. Before that, it was very rare.
(I am certain that even now there is a member of Generation Y writing a steampunk story set in 1855 with protagonists called Kyle and Madison. Don’t be that person.)
There are plenty of resources for getting these things right. My favourite is Behind the Name (http://www.behindthename.com). Not only will it tell you, for a specific name, when it began to be popular and show a popularity graph for each country where it’s used, but it has charts of the top 100 and top 1000 names going back to the 1890s for the US (less far for other countries, but a bit of time with Google will quickly pay off there).
3. Getting the Facts Right
Google is your friend. For example, I recently read a book in which a female superhero’s costume was described as having a “cheerleader-style skirt”. Now, in 1939, when the book was set, cheerleaders didn’t wear short skirts (which is what the author meant, based on a character illustration). Those didn’t come in until the 1970s.
How do I know? I took 30 seconds to type “history of cheerleading uniforms” into Google and scan through one of the top results.
4. Getting the Money Right
The value of money, and the names of currencies, have also changed over time. How much did a nickel buy in 1930?
If you need to know, you can probably find out using some of the resources here: http://projects.exeter.ac.uk/RDavies/arian/current/howmuch.html
5. Getting Cultural Attitudes Right
Cultural attitudes are a lot harder to research than the things I mention above. For one thing, they’re fuzzier and harder to Google, and for another thing, not everyone in a culture at a given time period thinks identically. If you don’t want all your characters displaying 21st-century attitudes all the time, take some time to immerse yourself in primary texts from the period, including ordinary people’s journals and memoirs (you can probably find some on Project Gutenberg and similar sites, especially for older times). That’ll also give you an idea of how they wrote – though remember, that’s not necessarily how they spoke.
Better still, if it’s within living memory, talk to someone who grew up in that time. I’m now old enough to remember how different some cultural attitudes were 35 years ago, and trust me, things have changed a lot.
I hope those resources are helpful to you. You don’t have to obsess about getting every detail right (Mary Robinette Kowal famously has a spellcheck dictionary which contains only words from Jane Austen, which may be taking it a bit far), but on the other hand, making no effort at all leaves you with a book that carries no sense of authenticity – and will itself date rapidly.