Even Heroes Die

This will be a short post. I may do a more in depth, and more thought out blog in a few days. I just wanted to take a moment to remember one of my heroes.

This author made me fall in love with fantasy after not having read a fantasy novel in 9 years.

This writer made me fall in love with words, and made we want to write my own stories.

This man left behind a legacy that will never be forgotten.

On this day of September in 2007 James Olive Rigney, Jr., otherwise known as Robert Jordan, passed away.

Rest in peace, Mr. Jordan.

The Wheel of Time turns, and Ages come and pass, leaving memories that become legend. Legend fades to myth, and even myth is long forgotten when the Age that gave it birth comes again.

-Excerpt from chapter one of The Eye of the World

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Words For Writers: Shock Factor

Ursula K. Le Guin must be one of the most brilliant women to ever live. I admire her so much. Not only is she brilliant but she is a prolific writer, whose stories are mind bending and intelligent, and are beautifully written. I don't believe there is a better writer of prose.

At 81 she doesn't publish as much as she once did. She recently released a book of poems. Her last novel was released in 2008. A book by the title of Lavinia. Stephen King included her novel The Lathe of Heaven in his list of 100 Greatest Horror Novels. You can find that list in his book Danse Macabre. Thankfully she regularly updates her blog. It is always an entertaining and enlightening read. Today she posted a blog titled Dangerous Writing, Dangerous Cover Copy. 


She opened the blog by talking about the word "edgy" is the fashionable word to praise books. Another word to go along with edgy is "gritty." Every time I read a review or check out a blurb or listen to someone talk about a newly published book - especially in the fantasy genre - the word gritty and other such words are heaped upon the novel. This is done to appeal to the readers of George R.R. Martin. Dude has built a gigantic fanbase because his books are edgy and gritty. What folks don't understand is that his books are to the fantasy genre that Alan Moore's Watchmen is to comic books. They are a commentary of fantasy, a look or a reflection of the genre.

The last few paragraphs of Ursula's blog killed me. I'm going to copy/past them here. However you should read the entire blog. Click here.

This excerpt from Le Guin's blog is going to knock your socks off. Enjoy!


    But I don’t think Aeschylus, Shakespeare, Bronte, Melville, or Steinbeck were writing to horrify, to shock or frighten or sicken, to sear eyeballs or to wrench guts. They were aware of audience, oh yes indeed, but their intentions were not violent. They were not in assault mode. A writer whose intention is to frighten and distress the reader has a very aggressive program and a very limited goal. Serious writers want to do something beyond asserting power over their audience, beyond self-satisfaction, beyond personal gain — even though they may want all those things very much.


    I think the mystery of art lies in this, that artists’ relationship is essentially with their work — not with power, not with profit, not with themselves, not even with their audience.


    If this is true, a writer’s relationship with readers has no need to be aggressive, exploitive, coercive, or collusive. To writers whose essential relationship is with their work, the shock, distress, and fear their work may cause their readers to feel are means to an end, their only way of saying what they have to say. They will use these dangerous means carefully, sparingly, at need. The effect can be immediate, long-lasting, and profound. It can last several thousand years.

    Writers whose work is not an end in itself but a means to gain fame, power, money, etc., may find that causing shock, fear, digust, etc. are a direct means to that end and can be hugely effective. They use them as a pusher uses drugs. The effect is immediate, brief, and trivial. It lasts until the next best-seller.


    Readers who want no more than to get their jollies from the latest exploitation of the latest shock fad are praised by the blurbs for their courage in daring to read dangerous revelations, but I suspect that they’re just as complacent as the readers of “cozy” fiction — risk-free, knowing exactly to expect.


    Good writers ask for our consent, in fact our participation in their work, our collaboration in its recreation on the stage as we watch it or on the page as we read it. I guess the reason they’re “good” writers is that they’re so good at winning consent and participation from us, persuading us to give them our trust, and rewarding it with something we did not expect.


    That’s quite different from asking us to sit there guzzling another jolt of starbug caffeine while reading a novel in order to have our panic buttons pushed again.


    Trust somebody who’s going to give us something we didn’t expect? But that could be dangerous!


    Never fear. You’re safe. Just trust the cover copy folks. They’re all out there, ready to wrench your guts and serve them up in a presentation of fried eyeballs and fugu in complacency sauce. Bon appétit!


** I can't figure out why the formatting of the blog is turning out so weird. I apologize. I'm not tech savvy enough to fix it. I hope you enjoyed the blog anyway.

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Words for Writers: Writing Goals

Every writer who puts pen to paper, or fingers to keyboard, wants to be great. I don't believe people are born great writers. I believe people can become great. Sure some folks are born with more of a knack for composing, but they must fine tune their craft. If they do not they'll have talent that'll become dull like a knife.

Before I sat down to work on this blog I wondered what makes a great writer . . .

Here are a few things that popped into my mind:

~ Creativity

~ A knack for words

~ Desire

~ Discipline

Those are by no means definitive answers. They are necessary to every writer's quest. He should keep those as handy as a carpenter would his hammer. This blog is going to focus on one aspect that makes a writer great.

Goals.

Every writer should have them. I don't think you can write a short story, let alone a novel, without having certain goals in mind. Since July 24th I've been working on a story called Thronebreaker. It's unlikely this story will been seen by the eyes of another reader. Part of Thronebreaker is being written to give me the thrill of writing. Part of Thronebreaker is being written to give me practice. Part of Thronebreaker is to establish the mythology of this fantasy world, and the Otherverse (a dimension that will tie all of my stories together). Since the 24th of July I've written 33,142 words. I've filled 135 pages. Thronebreaker started out as a short story. I had planned for it to be around 25,000 words, and I wanted to submit it to a magazine. It has outgrown that goal, and there is no end in sight. You have to understand, I am no outliner. I hate it. It kills my creativity. I'm a discovery writer. I sit down, start writing, and discover the story along the away. I take a lot of rabbit trails, I write a bunch of boring pages, but I stumble upon things, and they turn into beautiful moments of story. Editing will be a bitch, but will be worth it when I'm reading the final product.

I said all that to get to this . . . Before I made goals for myself I was undisciplined and started four novels that I've never finished. One of them is on my computer still and hadn't been thought about in a year's time. Writing Thronebreaker reminded me of this novel. I opened the document to check and see how many words I had written before I stopped. It was somewhere around 30k words. I vowed to myself that I would not stop writing Thronebreaker at that point. I then vowed that I would finish Thronebreaker. I'm close to finishing the fourth chapter of Thronebreaker, and have seven chapters, plus an epilogue, left to write.

Goals.

The kind of goals you make are up to you. I'll share with you the goals I've made for myself.

4. Word Count

Some writers are adamant about having no word count. They claim that the count gets in the way of the quality of words. There's a little truth to that, but I think it's a stupid belief. You can always go back and improve the quality of the words you've written. One of the most important things for me is getting words on a page. One of the ways I do that is having a specific number of words I want to get on the page that day. Back in July I started out with a goal of 500 words. I hadn't written in a while, because as I've said before I'm a lazy guy, and 500 words didn't intimidate me. Some days I slapped the words on the page in twenty minutes. Other days it took me nearly an hour. After two weeks I upped the count to 700. Two weeks later I raised my goal to 900. I'm now writing 1000 words every morning. On a good day I meet the goal in about thirty minutes. I'll keep writing until 9 a.m., and then go about my day. Other days it's a slug fest and it takes me until 9 a.m. to meet my goal. I usually start writing around 7:30 in the morning. Eventually I would like to stretch myself so that I am writing two thousand words a day.

3. Words

Some of you are seeing where words rank in, and are turning your nose up at my goals. Words are important. You can't tell a story without them. The problem is that sometimes words get in the way of a story. If you want to understand what I'm talking about read nearly anything by Ursula K. Le Guin. That's no slight against her. There is no finer writer of prose. I believe she is overlooked. One, because she's a woman. Two, because she unashamedly writes Science Fiction and Fantasy (unlike Margaret Atwood). Reading The Wizard of Earthsea is always a chore for me. It's so beautifully written I read passages two, three, four times. I'm admiring her prose and have forgotten what's going on with the story. I don't shy away from writing prose that is beautiful to read, but at the same time I do my best not to let it take away from the story I'm writing.

2. Write Everyday

Just before I started working on Thronebreaker I was listening to one of my favorite podcasts The Nerdist. The special guest was Neil Gaiman. Mr. Gaiman is one of my absolute favorite writers. The first book I ever read by him was Anansi Boys. To this day it's one my favorite books I read. I was then led to read American Gods which I enjoyed in an entirely different manner. If you're a writer you must read Neil Gaiman. The man is so brilliant, and such a phenomenal story teller, it pisses me off just a little bit. You should do yourself a favor and download the episode of The Nerdist he was a guest of. He made a comment that scared the day lights out of me, and is the reason I do not fail to write everyday:

If you don't writer everyday you'll never write a novel.

That was a hard pill to swallow. I'm naturally a pretty lazy guy. If I don't have to do something I won't do it. And if there is something that I must do I'll put it off until the last minute, and get it accomplished with haste. That's just the way I am. The above comment lit a fire under me and I wake up every single morning at 7 a.m., and I am writing by 7:30 or 8 o'clock because I'm determined to write and finish a novel.

1. Story

Of the goals I've listed Story is the most important goal of them all. You can't write everyday, put words on paper, or meet a certain count unless you have a compelling story to tell. Stories are why readers read. It's seldom for the words. The fact that Twilight has been guzzled by millions of readers is testimony to the fact that readers read for story. Whether or not Twilight is good story I cannot say, but people - millions of people - picked up a book and read. Kids around the word followed Harry Potter from beginning to end because of a great story. Charles Dickens, Mark Twain, C.S. Lewis, Homer, Dante Alighieri, J.R.R. Tolkien, etc. etc. have been read for years and years because they all told wonderful stories. All other goals pale in the light of telling a great story. Making the story the most important goal gives you the desire to write everyday. Words force themselves on the paper when you have a great story to tell. If the words you write aren't so beautiful at first the great thing is that you can go back and edit. Forget about the words you're writing and tell a story that will make someone pick up a book and read.

These are my goals. Each of these things motivate me to write when I don't feel like it. Over the past month I've wanted to stop working on Thronebreaker, but I've written no matter what. Except Sundays. I take that day off from writing so my mind can rest and refuel. If you have no goals when writing you should take some time, between now and the next time you write, and make some. Who knows what may happen.

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