Seeing a ghost

It can be quite a shock, when you see a ghost.
 I was standing at my window, peering out through the lace of first frost. Moonlight dappled the streets. I could get glimpses of the Other World, and the shadows of people moving like a silent river below me. Watching them flow, I noticed one young woman, translucent. She turned one way, hesitated, turned around, stumbled a few steps, stopped, looked up. I imagined I could see her tears; a trick of the moonlight. It felt as if she were looking at me, but of course she wasn't; my window was dark and she couldn't see through it. I wished I could go out and do something to help her--but what? I could offer guidance or comfort, but she wouldn't be able to hear me. So, unable to help, I simply watched. Eventually she was carried away on the tide of moving souls, and I lost track of her.
 There were others out there, with the passions of their life showing strongly, that I could pick them out of the masses. Raging or pained or staggering drunk or bouncing giddy with excitement or grieving. This woman having loveless sex with strangers out of desperate loneliness. That man, worn and lined by care, but forgetting it as he cheered for his team. The teenage girl glowing with first love. The warrior, eyes dark and wary. The new pilot, exultant with first flight. The pretty, unhappy woman in a slave collar. The single mother too proud to ask for help. All of them beyond my ability to touch, to hear, to reach.
 In a flash of realization, I understood that the people I saw were living; that I was the one who was silent and distant. I looked at my reflection, and saw.
It can be quite a shock, when you see a ghost.

Niven's Fifth Law

"If you've nothing to say, say it any way you like. Stylistic innovations, contorted story lines or none, exotic or genderless pronouns, internal inconsistencies, the recipe for preparing your lover as a cannibal banquet: feel free. 
If what you have to say is important and/or difficult to follow, use the simplest language possible. If the reader doesn't get it then, let it not be your fault."

Writing plan

After reading innumerable books on plot, character, how to put together a story, and all that, I've come up with this plan:

• Determine the general setting--"space opera", "sword and sorcery"
• Determine the "Hell Yeah" moment--the moment at which, if your novel becomes a movie, everyone in the theater will cheer. Example: the outmatched hero suddenly turns out to have powerful allies
• Decide why this needs to happen right now, rather than when we're in a better position. 
• Work out who does this to whom. Examples: a lone smuggler to the police fleet; a dispossessed king to an orcish army. NOTE: the do-er has to be the hero, not some deus ex machina or other third party.
• Work out the details of why the bad guy was trying to do this. Example: stop the smuggler from getting news out; capture the city where he thinks the McGuffin is.
• Work out how the hero gets to be in a position to pull off this stunt. Examples: he's found the barbarian fleet himself; he's the king who inherited an oath from the ghosts.
• And you end up with Serenity leading the Reavers into the Alliance fleet, or the Galaxyquest ship drags the mines into the Big Bad ship, or Aragorn leaps out of the corsair ship and the ghost army materializes before the orcs

Examples of "hell yeah" moments:

• Lone hero with bomb gets close and destroys monster. Star Wars, Monster Hunter International, A Hymn Before Battle
• Types of Hell Yes moments
• More examples from TV Tropes

Frank Chadwick: On Villains

From the Space 1889 blog. The summary is:

• What does the villain want?
• What does he have to do to get what he wants?
• Why are the villain's actions so catastrophic that the hero must stop him at all costs?

"This is a tough one, but it becomes the heart of the story. It is the essence of the story's conflict and ultimately separates the hero from the villain. Since it's the heart of the novel, how big the conflict is determines the scope of the novel itself. If what's at stake is the hero's life, okay. We understand a person wants to survive in the face of a deadly threat, but that doesn't make them a hero, does it? That's not that big a story. Does the villain threaten other folks we care about? Bigger story. Does the villain threaten a way of life? Bigger story still. Is justice on the line? Is truth on the line? Will something of value to mankind be lost forever? These are bigger issues, and make the story itself bigger."

• It has to make sense (no "I want to destroy ze World!" unless you have somewhere else to go)

Ringo's Rules

Three pieces of writing advice.

1. All characters should have a character trait.
2. There should be a sensory word on every page.
3. In an adventure/thriller story, there should be a crisis every thousand words.

If you actually manage all three, you're a cross between Lois Bujold, Poul Anderson and David Drake.

Vonnegut's rules for writing

From Thought Capital (hat tip: TomB), here are Vonnegut's rules:

1. Use the time of a total stranger in such a way that he or she will not feel the time was wasted.
2. Give the reader at least one character he or she can root for.
3. Every character should want something, even if it is only a glass of water.
4. Every sentence must do one of two things — reveal character or advance the action.
5. Start as close to the end as possible.
6. Be a sadist. Now matter how sweet and innocent your leading characters, make awful things happen to them — in order that the reader may see what they are made of.
7. Write to please just one person. If you open a window and make love to the world, so to speak, your story will get pneumonia.
8. Give your readers as much information as possible as soon as possible. To heck with suspense. Readers should have such complete understanding of what is going on, where and why, that they could finish the story themselves, should cockroaches eat the last few pages.

Self editing

From Five Secrets to Freelance Success:

It’s almost impossible to proofread your own work, but you also want to submit the best copy or article (or report to your boss) that you can.

Here’s how I get around that:

If I have an assignment due Tuesday morning, I take one last look at it Monday night, then sleep on it.

On Tuesday morning, I open the Word doc and immediately change the size and type of the font.

If I wrote the article in Verdana, I change it to a serif font like Times, then bump it up two sizes.

I may even switch the text to blue, green, or red.

This tricks my brain into reading the piece as if for the first time.

Faces of Fantasy

An essay by Neil Gaiman

THESE ARE NOT OUR FACES.

This is not what we look like.

You think Gene Wolfe looks like his photograph in this book? Or Jane Yolen? Or Peter Straub? Or Diana Wynne Jones? Not so. They are wearing play-faces to fool you. But the play-faces come off when the writing begins.

Frozen in black and silver for you now, these are simply masks. We who lie for a living are wearing our liar-faces, false-faces made to deceive the unwary. We must be- for, if you believe these photographs, we look just like everyone else.

Protective coloration, that's all it is.

Read the books: sometimes you can catch sight of us in there. We look like gods and fools and bards and queens, singing worlds into existence, conjuring something from nothing, juggling words into all the patterns of night.

Read the books. That's when you see us properly: naked priestesses and priests of forgotten religions, our skins glistening with scented oils, scarlet blood dripping down from our hands, bright birds flying out from our open mouths. Perfect, we are, and beautiful in the fire's golden light...

There was a story I was told as a child, about a little girl who peeked in through a writer's window one night, and saw him writing. He had taken his false-face off to write and had hung it behind the door, for he wrote with his real face on. And she saw him; and he saw her. And, from that day to this, nobody has ever seen the little girl again.

Since then, writers have looked like other people even when they write (though sometimes their lips move, and sometimes they stare into space longer, and more intently, than anything that isn't a cat); but their words describe their real faces: the ones they wear underneath. This is why people who encounter writers of fantasy are rarely satisfied by the wholly inferior person that they meet.

"I thought you'd be taller, or older, or younger, or prettier, or wiser," they tell us, in words or wordlessly.

"This is not what I look like," I tell them. "This is not my face."

Subplots

Howard "Schlock Mercenary" Taylor, on Subplots

Garden pool

The hill was wooded, but the woods had been cleared of brush and made into parklands. It was open and airy, which looked pretty but was worrisome; he dared not be seen here. He wouldn't have to rustle through thickets, or keep his bow from catching on brambles, which was good; but if there were guards and foresters here, they could be equally quiet, which could be very bad. Nothing he could do about that, though; he couldn't even be as careful as he'd like, because going slowly was just as likely to get him trapped as going noisily. Down the slope from the crest he found a spring, a good sign. A little rivulet flowed from it; he followed it down, stepping from stone to stone, hoping the noise of the water would mask his steps. Within a hundred yards, two other streams had joined it. Past floods had carved the banks waist high; if he kept low and avoided loose rocks, he could stay hidden.

He stepped carefully, testing each stone to see whether it would slither out from under his weight. The banks were moss and roots and raw red earth; the stream ran over quartz sand and smooth stones. The woods thinned out as he went farther down. There was a line of white flowered trees ahead, at the edge of a cliff, and the rush of a waterfall plunging into water. He crept into the shadow of the broad limbed white trees and looked down. The rock face was only ten or twelve feet high. At the base was a paved pool, set in a meadow; and in the pool was an unclothed woman.

He settled his back against the tree trunk, and looked away from her long enough to search for other watchers. The pool was a circle cut by the cliff, twenty yards wide and walled with pink stone blocks. The area surrounding was a manicured lawn, edged with rose bushes. No one else in sight except the woman.

He let his eyes rest on her. Her hair and eyes were dark, her skin was the color of a fawn. The water was waist deep on her. She glided smoothly back and around, her fingertips trailing through the water and the white petals. He watched her for a long time.

Writing a character

Don't put yourself into your character's situation. Put your character into your character's situation, and let him do what he would do.

If the character goes into the basement of the deserted house and finds it full of rats, I would leave. But the character might get a crowbar and wade in. Or he might get a shotgun out of the back of his car. Or he might burn the house down. Or hire someone else to go open the door at at the bottom of the basement. Might get a 55 gallon drum full of cats and roll it down the stairs. But if you write what you would do, and you aren't the protagonist, then you're going down the wrong path and wasting your typing.

Advanced Writing Workshop: Plotting

Notes from the workshop given at MarsCon by Allen Wold.

There are some questions that every story must answer. If you lack one of these elements, you may have a piece of literature but you do not have a story. Answer each one before going on to the next.

• Who is your protagonist?
• What is the opening setting--the place where the character starts?
• What is happening at the start? (Always start from "your character's normal situation". You may start telling the story from some point after this but you need to know what his "normal" is).
• What does he really want?
• What is the starting event? (the beginning of the tale is some decision which has inevitable consequences)
• What ending do you the writer want?
• What strength does your character not know he has?
• What is his weakness?
• Who helps him along the way?
• What are the obstacles standing in his path?
• What significant change happens to the world as a result of this? What has been done that can't be undone?

When you have all this, you have enough for a story. You may change some of it as you go along, but this will get you started. Plot is what happens between the hero's beginning and the author's ending.

Example: Star Wars

• Who is your protagonist? Luke Skywalker
• What is the opening setting--the place where the character starts? He's a farmer in a desert.
• What is happening at the start? (Always start from "your character's normal situation". You may start telling the story from some point after this but you need to know what his "normal" is). He's picking out new droids.
• What does he really want? To become an Imperial fighter pilot.
• What is the starting event? (the beginning of the tale is some decision which has inevitable consequences) He picks a droid who has a message from a princess.
• What ending do you the writer want? Death Star go BOOM.
• What strength does your character not know he has? The Force is strong with that one.
• What is his weakness? He doesn't know about the Force, the Jedi, the Rebellion, the...
• Who helps him along the way? R2, Obi-Wan, Han "I shot first" Solo, and Leia.
• What are the obstacles standing in his path? The Empire and particularly Vader.
• What significant change happens to the world as a result of this? What has been done that can't be undone? Luke is a hero of the Rebellion.

Cowladin the Paladin: Slave Pens

(a bit of World of Warcraft fiction)

On the other side of the teleportal, it was dark. Cowladin hefted his war maul and waited for his eyes to adjust from the harsh sun of Thrallmar. He could hear dainty footsteps, and the sound of someone brushing his clothes. Or her clothes. With elves, you couldn't really tell. There were three elves in fancy dress, plus a silent, nondescript troll in nondescript leather armor with a pair of nondescript knives at his belt. The elves all had complicated religious or magic symbols embroidered on their brocade robes, and they were probably all named Tirralirralalirrasirra, or something of that sort. Well, he didn't really have to keep track of which one was which; as long as the healer spells landed on the good guys, and the mage spells landed on the bad guys, that would be good enough.

“Moo,” he said by way of greeting, and added, “Where are we?”

“Thangarmarth, darling,” lisped one of the elves.

“Zangarmarsh, as in mud, flies, mosquitoes, gnats, and nagas?”

“No, darling. Well, yes, nagas, but there are no nasty bugs here,” piped another elf. Or maybe the first one. “We are in a cavern under the great lake. The water is kept out by magic, inferior to the elvish sort of magic of course, but effective enough. There’s no way for insects to get in.”

“Specifically we’re at the slave pens,” added the third elf, or maybe the second one. They all looked alike, as far as Cowladin could tell. “We’re going to kill the slave masters and release the slaves. Unless they’re particularly yummy slaves, in which case we might keep them for ourselves!”

Cowladin scratched his mane. “So…we’re under thousands of tons of water?”

“Yeth, darling.”

“Said water being held up only by the magic of the naga lords?” He muttered the ritual to bless his fellow adventurers.

“Yes, of course.”

“The naga lords we’re here to kill?”

“Yes!”

Another elf put in "Speaking of yummy, you look pretty yummy yourself, big boy. What are you doing after we finish here?"

Cowladin ignored the elf’s flirting. “So…we’re going to kill the naga lords whose magic is the only thing keeping the water from flooding this cavern and drowning us all?”

“Exactly!”

“And we’re not anticipating any problems from this?”

The elves looked at each other and shrugged in a beautiful, elegant, and uncomprehending way.

Cowladin sighed. “As soon as we kill the last naga lord, the magic stops, the place floods. Right?”

One of them said, “Well, I suppose it might. Why? Oh, yes, I see what you’re worried about! Tons of water thundering in, picking up huge boulders and knocking things about, drowning any non-yummy slaves, sloshing swirls of black mud and silt all around and covering everything with yucky stuff. But don’t worry about it. The décor here was all done by nagas. If it all gets destroyed, it’s probably just as well. Although the nagas do have some quite exotic leather gear, and I'd loooove to pick up some of that."

The troll perked up at that, drew his knives and glided silently down the path to scout ahead.

Cowladin shrugged. “I was more concerned about the ‘us not getting drowned’ part, but I suppose I can bubble hearth if I have to.” He slung his maul over his back, hefted his shield into place, and drew his cutlass. "For the Herd!"