15. Midway question! Tell us about a writer you admire, whether professional or not!
I have a kind of holy trinity of writers who I would like to grow up to be. They are, in no particular order, JRR Tolkien – the master of world-building, setting, plotting and invented history. He’s also (IMO) not given enough credit for the amazing way that he can establish atmosphere and convey things that other people fail to even get close to – the numinous, the terrible, evil and elvishness.
Ursula LeGuin can do those things too. I love the elegance of her prose, and the way she too can show the magical quality that underlies reality. Like Tolkien, she seems to be able to grasp the ungraspable, and they both talk eloquently about the realm of … well, Tolkien would call it “Faerie” and UKL would probably call it “the Night” – the place out of which stories come, imagination comes, the place of archetypes and truth breathed through silver. Unfortunately I’m not eloquent enough to talk about either of them sensibly, except to say that for me they are both on the cutting edge of subcreation, touching something so real that there are no words for it.
Patrick O’Brian doesn’t really go in for all that mystical stuff, but you can feel it powering his books. He surfs along the breaking edge of it, and his writing is full of joy in writing itself – in the sparkle of interesting words. But you can tell he’s plugged into reality underneath because you can taste and smell his world, and the people are so real they could walk off the page. He’s the best at characterisation of the three of them, but they beat him on plotting 🙂
Completely immersive world building, I guess, is what they all have in common. Their books are fuller of juice and taste and light and wonder than the everyday world. That’s what I want to be able to do too. (It’s also not a quality that features highly on most writing advice, which wants you to focus on plot and characterisation and sees setting as practically dispensable.)
16. Do you write romantic relationships? How do you do with those, and how “far” are you willing to go in your writing? 😉
Yes, I write romantic relationships. I enjoy writing m/m romance and find I have more of a mental barrier towards m/f romance, although I’ve written a fair amount of Celeborn/Galadriel fanfic in my time. I’m willing to write explicit sex scenes, but find them very difficult to do and don’t particularly enjoy either writing or reading them. I would probably rather have lots of UST and an eventual consummation which hovers somewhere around the R rating than always be having to go into details.
I went to see “How to Tame Your Dragon” yesterday and was absolutely charmed. I think if you like dragons and heroes who don’t quite fit in because they’re too clever and too wimpy/compassionate for their culture then this one is for you. Toothless the dragon completely steals the show, and I wish I could find a clip of the bit where he draws a kind of maze around Hiccup (Hiccup the Viking, that is) which the boy has to negotiate before the dragon decides to allow the human to touch him.
It struck me as one of the best love scenes I’d seen in a long time, this literal dance of trust and learning to accept each other’s boundaries, and it’s amazing to see how much emotion and communication can be done without any words at all. (Not, I hasten to say, that I’m thinking of slashing boy/reptile, but just that there is no doubt whatsoever that the quality of the friendship between the two of them is the kind of deep link that Anne McCaffrey’s books try to establish between her dragons and their riders and she never quite achieves in such an obvious way.)
Anyway – funny film. Comedy Vikings who nevertheless have a touch of grandeur, a surprisingly likable hero, and one of the coolest movie dragons ever. Actually all of the dragons in this film were great, but Toothless was definitely the star.
Blue fire, and that jet intake sound just beforehand? Awesome! 😀
13. What’s your favorite culture to write, fictional or not?
I love the 18th Century in England (tell me something I don’t know!) It’s boisterous, loud, rude, self-confident, quintessentially English in a kind of lager-lout way, and yet at the same time it’s delicate, refined, intellectual, curious, self-controlled and full of groundbreaking new ideas about the rights of Man (and woman). It’s a spinning bundle of contradictions, generating energy like a dynamo, an age full of hope and enthusiasm and change, where the ancient meets the modern (and they beat each other up before slinging an arm around each other’s shoulder and going off to the pub to get horrendously drunk together.)
14. How do you map out locations, if needed? Do you have any to show us?
If I can find a map (even if it’s an approximate map) I will do so.For “Blessed Isle” I found a great map of Rio de Janeiro in 1769, which seems to have unfortunately been taken down since – my bookmarks now point to a “Page not Found”. But I also used Google Earth to have a good look at Ducie Island, where my heroes are shipwrecked.
If I can’t find a map and it’s a fantasy location, I will draw one myself. This is a map of the elf Queen’s city under the hill in the aptly named “Under the Hill.”
I haven’t filled everything in, as it’s only to give me an idea of what sorts of districts George will have to run through in order to escape. As a matter of fact, I learned from drawing it that his best bet is to get down into the system of pipes carrying the underwater river to various districts. The “one single road to everywhere and it’s guarded at every quarter turn” thing proved to be more of a difficulty to get around than I’d hoped.
12. In what story did you feel you did the best job of worldbuilding? Any side-notes on it you’d like to share?
I have to assume that this doesn’t mean world building in the traditional SF sense, in which you literally do build the world from the type of sun , the orbit, the geology and the history upwards. If it does mean that, then The Witch’s Boy is the only one I did anything of that sort, and that was very pseudo 11th Century England with added Holy Roman Empire with wizards.
Taking “worldbuilding” to mean “establishing a convincing setting”, I’d say it was a toss up between False Colors and The Wages of Sin. With both of those, I took special care to add lots of detail so that you could smell and taste the setting, and I had characters react in ways which were there specifically to convince the reader that we were not in the modern day any more. (George patronizing the sister he loves, simply because she’s a woman. Charles suggesting that Jasper should wear more make-up. Alfie reflecting that John was too much of a gentleman to ever forgive someone who hit him. That sort of thing.)
This blog post really resonated with me today. I think that my recent writer’s block is less a failure of inspiration than a failure of courage. After all, if you don’t say anything, people can’t hate you – except of course how they can and will, whether you speak or don’t speak, act or don’t act. Anyway, this spoke to me today:
Whoever told you that courage wasn’t necessary to write was either lying, or…well—no, they were simply lying….
Every word we write, every world we craft, every essay we conjure the courage to post, everything that we allow to cross over from that tenuous, indescribable place and into the real world, leaves us vulnerable….
It’s personal in that we’re letting loose a little bit of our madness.
11. Who is your favorite character to write? Least favorite?
That‘s really hard. I think it must be a fanfiction question, because it would be a lot easier to answer if I was still in fanfiction. With my own characters I tend to love best the character I haven’t written for a while. IE, I’ll write a chapter in one character’s POV and at the beginning of the chapter I’ll be really enjoying his outlook and voice, but by the end I’ll be fed up of him and eager to start a new chapter from someone else’s POV. Having said that, I loved writing Garnet Littleton in Blessed Isle because he is completely different from me – he loves the sound of his own voice, he’s arrogant, he thinks he’s God’s gift to mankind, he’s a flippant, funny, charismatic, confident extrovert, and totally a holiday for me from my own neurotic state of self doubt.
I hated writing Tancred in The Witch’s Boy, Captain Edwards in Captain’s Surrender, and Mr. Stokes (Darren’s father) in Shining in the Sun. My villains all have in common that they are mean – in the sense of small-minded as well as in the sense of malicious. They’re closed in around themselves and their own obsessions, and they feel claustrophobic and toxic to write. I don’t like writing villains.
I managed to miss out posting on #9 yesterday, so I’ll just do it today and pretend I always intended to do it that way 😉
9. How do you get ideas for your characters? Describe the process of creating them.
It’s a process of accretion, very much like building up a stalactite or a pearl. I start off with an idea for a story: for example “I want to write something about Aztecs in Space.” OK, I think, what about the Aztecs in space? They need to have some kind of problem to solve, otherwise there’s no story. Maybe they’ve just met an alien race and they have to find out if the aliens are friendly, or if the gods want them to offer the alien’s hearts to them in order for the gods to be able to keep making new suns.
So I’ve got a setting and a problem, now I’ve got to have a hero. And he has to be in a job where the problem will be his problem, which he will have to go and solve. Now I’ll think about what would make for more complication in the plot – how about a hero who didn’t quite fit in with his superiors, had strange ideas and was likely to act in a way that no one expected? That could be fun. In the case of our Aztecs, I would make him a young priest with heretical leanings.
Now I’ve decided on his job and the problem he’ll have to handle, I give him a name. The name immediately starts to make me think of him as a real individual, as opposed to a cloud of possibilities. At this point I’ll probably look through a bunch of stock photos to find a face for him too, and once I’ve got one, that will act like the name and begin to make him coalesce. After that, I have to write him for a bit and let him react to things, figure out why he’s reacting in the way he does, and base his personality on that.
Short answer – the characters grow out of the story. Somewhere, about five chapters in, they stop growing out of the story, shake themselves separate from it, come alive and start telling me what they want to happen now. When that happens I smile, step back, and let them take over the problems they were made to solve.
10. What are some really weird situations your characters have been in? Everything from serious canon scenes to meme questions counts!
I don’t know! Calling something “weird” assumes we’re all agreed on what the definition of normal is. Ben in Under the Hill certainly thinks it’s weird to go hunting ghosts armed only with a super soaker full of holy water. But since I know he’s actually a reincarnation of a supernatural entity himself, and will soon be rescuing his sister, and his lover’s 150 year old ex from a time-stasis prison in another dimension, I kind of lose track of what’s weird and what isn’t.
I don’t honestly know. I’ve very much enjoyed writing historical, but I also love contemporary magic realism, or historical/paranormal/mystery. I enjoy reading Age of Sail, mystery, romance, fantasy, science fiction. I don’t think I’d normally seek out a Western, but I very much enjoyed Calico by Dorien Grey when I read that. It’s easier to say what I don’t like, which is “literary fiction”, and even there I have enjoyed some of that. At least, I very much liked Hawksmoor by Peter Ackroyd, which I’m given to believe was “literary”.
I like crossovers – historical mystery, historical fantasy with a mystery plot, paranormal mysteries, science fiction romance with a dash of the paranormal. I don’t like anything too likely to actually happen.
~
Oh, and speaking of horror/mystery/romance, if you pop over to Rick. R Reed’s blog, he’s talking about the many stages he and I went through during the cover art creation process. I’m very proud of the cover I did for his “A Demon Inside”, but as you can see if you click the link, the process of finally deciding on that cover was not exactly simple 🙂
7. Do you listen to music while you write? What kind? Are there any songs you like to relate/apply to your characters?
I find music too distracting to listen to it while I write. I prefer silence. I’m one of those people who can’t help but stop and give the majority of my concentration to whatever music is playing, so I have to have none if I’m going to concentrate on anything else.
I do find that music is excellent for giving me story ideas. I listen to it all the time when I’m not writing, and I like to make up playlists to accompany my novels – but that’s more in the light of “stuff I do to keep up my enthusiasm for the project” and goes alongside making icons, making book trailers and picking photos of actors to represent my heroes. A playlist goes in the “making up a fun scrapbook” part of the process, but not with the actual writing.
Excitingly enough, there is a m/m romance in the final round of Dear Author’s DABWAHA competition this year. It’s not False Colors, but it is the book that False Colors lost to. I’m thinking “wouldn’t it be brilliant if – out of all the different categories, and against all the m/f romances of this year, a m/m romance won?” Yes, it would be fabulous news for all of us.
And I reckon that if it beat False Colors in a fair fight, then it must be a good book 😉 So I’ve been over there and voted for Zero at the Bone http://dabwaha.com/blog/
and if anyone else in the m/m world fancies giving our representative a helpful nudge, I think that would be a great thing 🙂
6. Where are you most comfortable writing? At what time of day? Computer or good ol’ pen and paper?
I’m most comfortable writing at my desk, using my computer. Afternoons are best, but time is less important than solitude. I prefer if there is no one else in the house. I can write if other people are there, but it’s an extra layer of effort.
I do the actual writing and revision fine on the computer, but I still have to plot in long hand first. So every story has an attached notebook with the plot plan written in it in longhand. If there need to be maps and building layouts, those get drawn in the notebook too.
The Boat of Small Mysteries - A cozy mystery aboard a narrowboat, in which a murder and a disappearance keep our aroace detective from fully relaxing into the idyll of country life.
