Tag Archives: character

Blogging, D.B. Jackson, David B. Coe, LonTobyn Chronicle, Tor Books, Writing

Professional Wednesday: My Best Mistakes, Part I

A new month, a new blog series. Not that I’m committing to doing a series every month. Really, I’m not . . . .

[Sigh] What have I done . . . ?

Over the course of my career, which has spanned more than twenty-five years, I have managed to accomplish a lot of things. But it has occurred to me that I have also made some pretty interesting mistakes. And maybe readers would learn something from hearing about a few of them. Certainly they might be entertained. And so, with this week’s post I kick off my “My Best Mistakes” series. I hope you enjoy it.

I’m going to start with a story a number of you might already know from one context or another. If you have seen me on panels or at readings, you might well have heard me tell it. If not, here you go. (And a note pertaining to this post and others to come — I will be telling stories that almost invariably include other people and/or published works of mine that I am still seeking to market. In the interest of discretion, some details of these mistake-stories will be kept purposefully vague. I hope you understand. If you don’t understand . . . well, I really don’t care.)

Children of Amarid, by David B. Coe (jacket art by Romas Kukalis)Very early in my career — like, one book in — I attended a very large convention as a guest. It was by far the largest, best-attended con I’d been, too, and at first I was a bit star-struck by the whole thing. Unfortunately, that didn’t last. Read on.

One of my panels was on character-building. Or at least I think it was. Maybe it was on things that happen to us when we write. Or things we can talk about that will allow an impulsive, full-of-himself-young-writer-with-one-lonely-book-to-his-name to do stupid things. I was on the panel with three other authors. Two of them I didn’t know, though they seemed to be solid mid-list authors, each with several publishing credits. The third was a giant in the field. This writer also published with Tor, my publisher, and might well have been one of their three biggest names. I was nothing compared to this person. I was lint.

Somehow, the discussion turned to that wonderful creative moment when our characters begin to do things that we don’t expect, that we don’t necessarily plan. I have written and spoken about this quite a bit. To my mind, it is the moment when we discover that all the work we’ve done to create realistic characters has paid off. They are acting of their own volition in a sense, though of course we are still creating them. The creation is just happening deep in our hind-brains, making it SEEM that they are independent, sentient beings. That, at least is how I felt — and still feel — about it.

The big-name writer disagreed. This person responded to what I had said about this by telling me, in no uncertain terms, in front of a roomful of people, that if my characters were not doing exactly what I expected, I was doing it wrong. And be “it” this person meant “writing.”

“You are the god of your world,” this person said. “You control everything.” End of story. As it were.

The other two writers quickly dropped out of the conversation. They sat at the panel table, staring at their hands, keeping silent, and allowing this other idiot — ie. Me — to keep on arguing the point. Because they were very smart. Much smarter than me. I. Whatever.

Me? I just kept on arguing with the big name, the person who could crush me and my career like a bug if they chose to. Because I was right and this person was wrong. That’s what I thought. (Still do, honestly, but that’s beside the point.) Finally, in my growing frustration, I said (at volume, with heat) “If you write them like puppets, they’ll read like puppets!”

And then I realized what I’d done. Big name. Room full of people. Me saying, essentially, that this person wrote flat, boring, lifeless characters. Holy fuck.

As I have said before in other venues, in that instant the entirety of my tiny little career flashed across my eyes. I figured I was totally screwed. Worse, I had screwed myself.

Now, as it turned out, I was fine. The conversation shifted to another topic. I kept my voice down and my opinions blandly neutral for the rest of the panel. And afterward, I apologized profusely. The big name author was gracious, kind, generous, and forgiving.

I was fortunate. I also learned a valuable lesson. Panel discussions can grow heated; the best ones sometimes do. But even when they do, we must remain polite, and we must always refrain from making any of our statements sound personal or targeted. Because that’s the courteous thing to do. But also because we are always going to be on panels with a mix of people, some of them less experienced than we are (or at least equally lacking in experience) and some of them more experienced, with greater reach and a greater capacity to hinder our career advancement.

I got lucky that day. The person at whom I directed my statement understood I was speaking without thinking, in the heat of the moment. Other authors might not have been so understanding. I could have done real damage to my career.

So that is this week’s mistake. In future weeks, I will focus on different sorts of missteps — bad business decisions, bad reactions to reviews, etc. I hope you find the stories helpful.

In the meantime, as always, keep writing.

Blogging, D.B. Jackson, David B. Coe, Writing

Professional Wednesday: “Hidden Brain,” Perception, and Fiction

On a recent drive I began listening to the Hidden Brain podcast, with the brilliant Shankar Vedantam. I had listened to scattered episodes before, but never in a systematic way. But this was a long drive and I wound up listening to more than half a dozen episodes, each one fascinating, engaging, and informative. If you’re not familiar with the podcast, which focuses on topics related to psychology, neurobiology, and human behavior, you should check it out. It’s pretty amazing

During my drive, though, one episode in particular lodged in my thoughts, because it threatens to undermine a lot of what I do every day as a writer.

The episode, which first aired only a couple of weeks ago, is called “How to Really Know Another Person.” And the upshot of the discussion was that we can’t really know another person, that when it comes to sussing out the reactions and emotions of other people, we are, as a species, kind of inept.

When we write fiction, we present our stories from the viewpoint of our narrating or point of view characters. Sometimes we use just one point of view character. Sometimes we use several. But when we use more than one, we only switch point of view with a new scene or chapter. At any given moment in a story, we are limited to our narrating character’s perspective. We can know what they are thinking and feeling and remembering, but that’s all. The moment we start to give our readers access to the thoughts and emotions of several characters at once, we are violating point of view and falling into omniscient voice, which is out of favor in today’s literary market. The term used for this — not kindly, I might add — is “head-hopping.” It’s something we don’t want to do.

And so, in order to give our readers insights into the emotions and thoughts of actors other than our point of view characters, we have to rely on the observations and insights of the narrating character. Those characters might pick up on facial expressions, gestures, tone of voice, subtleties of spoken conversation, and any number of other clues to keep readers in the know about the feelings, motivations, thoughts, and loyalties of the people the POV characters encounter. The narrators are our readers’ guides to all elements of our stories, and so their interpretations of these interactions are crucial to furthering our plots.

But now let’s return to the Hidden Brain podcast I heard. As Vedantam points out at the beginning of the episode, recent studies have shown that “many of the clues we use to read the minds of others, are suspect.” In other words, all those things I have my point of view characters picking up on, are, in reality, less than accurate. According to his guest on the program,Tessa West, an associate professor of psychology at New York University, the best way for us to find out what others are thinking and how they are feeling is — surprise! — to ask them, and to make our questions as specific and focused as possible.

The problem with this, of course is that while this may make for better relationships in the real world, it makes for truly lousy fiction. If all the misunderstandings and intrigue and misdirection among our many characters were simply cleared up by heart-to-heart conversations, our novels would all be thirty pages long and boring as hell. More to the point, the solution offered by Doctor West — which, again, is probably really good advice for improving interactions in the real world — doesn’t account for the fact that many of our fictional relationships are adversarial. A character who asks forthright questions of a potential enemy probably isn’t going to get honest answers, at least not without making the exchanges seem incredibly contrived and unconvincing.

So what are we to do? The tools our POV characters rely on don’t really work. Should we have them habitually draw the wrong conclusions from their interactions with other characters? That is likely to tick off our readers before too long. An unreliable narrator is one thing. A buffoon is quite another.

Or do we assume that most of our readers don’t listen to the Hidden Brain, and that even if they do, what they want from us is a good story, rather than an accurate portrayal of the latest in psychological research?

It probably won’t surprise you to learn that this is the approach I recommend for others and also the one I intend to stick to myself. Let’s be honest: fiction is always an imperfect reflection of reality, and not just because of the magic systems and invented worlds we find in fantasy. As an example, our characters tend to be far more articulate than we are. If we wrote dialogue the way it sounds in the real world, it would be full of “um”s and “you know”s and “like”s and such. We would have a ton of spoken sentences that never quite get to the point or follow rules of grammar. Instead, the conversations we write for our characters sound the way we wish our real-world conversations sounded — witty, snappy, clear, natural.

In the same way, I will continue to allow my point of view characters to pick up on visual and aural clues as indicators of what others are thinking and feeling. Yes, after listening to the podcast, I may choose to have them get things wrong slightly more often. But my characters are not going to start asking questions of one another that are too frank to maintain suspense.

Sure, I want my stories to be believable. But I also want them to entertain.

Keep writing.

Blogging, D.B. Jackson, David B. Coe, teaching, Writing

Professional Wednesday: It’s All Connected

One more post about my teaching weekend at the Hampton Roads Writers Conference . . . .

As I believe I mentioned last week, I taught four classes at the event. The topics were: point of view, character development, world building, and pacing/narrative arc. And something I noticed as I spoke at the event — something that had kind of escaped me during my preparation of the talks, probably because I worked on them over several weeks, rather than in a single compressed weekend — was the tremendous amount of overlap among the different subjects.

It makes sense that talks on character and point of view would have a lot in common. In fact, usually I combine the two, especially if I have more time or am teaching over the course of several sessions. But world building? Pacing? As it turns out, yep.

It’s all connected. Storytelling doesn’t care for siloing or creating artificial boundaries among various topics. Our writing is most effective when we accomplish several aims at once, when our character work reinforces our world building, which furthers our narratives, which strengthens our pacing, which ups the tension and sense of conflict, which helps us deepen our characters. And so the cycle goes on.

There is a theory about writing — an old editor of mine referred to it as Vernor’s Rule, because he first heard it from award-winning science fiction author Vernor Vinge (who he also edited). Vernor’s Rule says the following: As writers, what we do can be categorized broadly in three ways — we develop character, we advance our plots, and we fill in background information. Yes, those are broad headings, but he’s essentially right. And according to Vernor’s Rule, at any given moment in our novels, in any given scene, we should be doing at least two, and preferably all three of those things simultaneously. If we’re only doing one, or, God forbid, none of those things, our manuscripts have stalled, and we need to fix the scene in question.

It’s a simple rule, and it fits in with the realization I had at the writers conference. We should strive to do many things at once with our writing, in part because we can do many things at once. Character arc and narrative arc (plotting) work together to build tension in our stories, and ideally we want them to peak at the same time, with our protagonists coming into their “power” (in whatever sense we care to have this happen) at the same time our plots are reaching their zeniths. Keeping our readers apprised of relevant background information is actually quite helpful in tracing character development AND in deepening our world building, which should bear directly on our narratives.

And really, that is the extent of what I had on my mind today. Writing conferences and convention panels and the like function best when we can break down writing into its component parts. Handling the subjects that way simplifies and clarifies. There is absolutely value in concentrating on individual topics — on character and setting and point of view and the rest. The danger is that we will come to think of these things as operating independently of one another. Because they don’t. Yes, by all means, study each one in turn. Learn all there is to learn about them. But then apply all you can learn in such a way as to blend them together, allowing your various story elements to coalesce into something that is far, far greater than the sum of its parts. That’s where the magic happens. That’s where words on a page turn into living breathing people, into places that feel as real as our own world, and into stories that keep us turning the pages deep into the night.

Keep writing.

Blogging, D.B. Jackson, David B. Coe, teaching, Writing

Professional Wednesday: Hampton Roads Writers Conference, and the Hardest Writing Topic to Teach (For Me)

This week I head to the Hampton Roads Writers Conference in Virginia Beach. I’ll be teaching several workshops over the three days I’m there — a two-hour master class on “Point of View and Voice,” a ninety-minute class on “Character and Character Arc,” and two one-hour classes, one on “World Building” and one on “Pacing and Narrative Arc.” I always look forward to conferences like this one, in large part because I love to teach, and I love to talk about the craft of story telling.

Recently, some of you may recall, I wrote about the difficulties inherent in encouraging aspiring writers given the state of today’s literary market. I don’t believe teaching at the workshop contradicts or undermines what I wrote in that post. If students ask me about the business side of writing, I will be brutally honest with them. And even if they don’t ask the questions, I will not misrepresent the publishing industry or in any way downplay the difficulties currently faced by new writers.

Teaching writing, though, is always a service, always a worthwhile thing to do. Whether someone wishes to write professionally (despite the odds) or write as a hobby — or something in between — it can never hurt to hone those skills. I don’t ever intend to be a professional photographer or musician, but I am always looking to improve at both and would gladly attend photography workshops to learn new techniques. (Provided I can find the time and the money to do so — those workshops are spendy!) Put another way, if I can help any writer improve their skills and get more enjoyment out of their literary projects, I believe I have done a good thing.

I have taught on previous occasions all the topics I’ll be covering this weekend, and I can safely say that pacing and narrative arc are far and away the toughest to teach. Why? Because, they are somewhat amorphous topics. Point of view has definite categories and approaches. It has “rules” most writers tend to follow and most editors tend to look for. I have developed techniques and mechanisms for character development that I am more than happy share. And world building is a process with which I am very familiar and which can be broken down into component parts as a way of rationalizing a complex, sprawling endeavor.

Pacing, though, is all about feel, about instinct. I can talk about things I try to do myself, in my own work, but even those discussions tend to stray into the realm of analogies and metaphors, ways of describing something that defies description. A lot of what I have learned over the years about pacing and shaping narrative arc, has come out of trial and error, mistakes I made in one book or series and corrected in the next, or the one after that.

So why try to teach it? Because, quite honestly, despite the difficulties inherent in talking about a subject that is so hard to pin down — or perhaps because of those challenges — some of the best teaching sessions I’ve ever had focused on this subject. As the topic grows harder to discuss, I find, the classes on the topic grow increasingly interactive, until all in the room are working on ways to conceptualize and contextualize the conversation. In other words, it becomes a team effort, and that helps everyone in the room.

I plan to approach the class in three ways — one is conceptual, relying on those analogies I mentioned earlier; one is visual, using drawings to show how narrative arc ought to progress in a book and in a series; and one is pragmatic, focusing on those narrative mechanics that help us with pacing and that are easiest to discuss in concrete terms.

As I say, my past experiences with teaching pacing and narrative arc have generally been pretty good (and I just jinxed myself) so I am hoping this one will be, too.

The other thing I love about teaching at conferences like Hampton Roads is the opportunity to hang out with other industry professionals, and I believe the coming weekend will be especially fun, since two of my favorite people in the world, Edmund Schubert and John Hartness, will be there as well. In fact, Edmund is one of the conference’s keynote speakers.

So that’s what I have on tap for my end-of-week/weekend. I hope yours is great.

Keep writing!

Blogging, D.B. Jackson, David B. Coe, Islevale Cycle, Time's Assassin, Time's Children, Time's Demon, Writing

Professional Wednesday: Once More Unto The Breach — To Outline or Not, Redux

After attending DragonCon and speaking on panels about various aspects of writing, I have found myself thinking—yet again—about the age-old debate between those who outline their books and those who don’t. Or, between planners and pantsers, in the parlance of the discussion. And yes, I know those who write without an outline object to the term “pantsing.” (For those unfamiliar with the term, it comes from the phrase “Flying [or in this case ‘writing’] by the seat of one’s pants.”)

I actually understand and sympathize with these objections to the term. As one who sometimes writes with an outline and sometimes without, I can say with confidence that I am no less a writer when in the midst of those projects that defy my efforts to outline ahead of time.

As I have said before, my creative process reinvents itself with each project I take on, often with each book. Some projects lend themselves to outlining and are better suited to a systematic approach to plotting. The Thieftaker books in particular are easy to outline. Indeed, when writing in the Thieftaker universe I feel outlining is absolutely essential. With each book and story, I seek to blend historical events with fictional ones, and keeping the two timelines—the imagined and the real—in sync, demands that I have plan things out with care.

Time’s Children, by D.B. Jackson © Angry Robot. Art by Jan Weßbecher.TIME'S DEMON, by D.B. Jackson (Art by Jan Weßbecher)Time's Assassin, book III of The Islevale Cycle, by D.B. Jackson (jacket art by Robyne Pomroy)

On the other hand, I have written books that I could not outline at all, despite making every attempt to do so. Most notably, the three volumes of my Islevale Cycle (Time’s Children, Time’s Demon, and Time’s Assassin) simply would not submit themselves to any sort of advanced planning. They were like children, refusing to sit still long enough to be photographed.

I have also said before that to me the outlining thing is not so much a binary choice—outline in detail or write the books without any planning at all—as it is a continuum. Even the most dedicated “pantsers” I know have a good idea of where their books are headed. They just don’t like to be tied to a formal outline. In the same way, the most diligent outliners I know leave a great many details out of their outlines, allowing themselves to create in the moment, to preserve the energy that comes from writing organically. Each of us is a little bit planner, a little bit pantser, a little bit country, a little bit rock ‘n roll . . . .

(That is my first, and will be my only, Osmond reference EVER in this blog . . . .)

So why am I revisiting the outlining question this week? Because I am in the process of finishing the third volume in my upcoming Celtic urban fantasy series (which STILL needs a series name!!) and in the final weeks of writing the book, I have been outlining—perhaps it’s more accurate to say RE-outlining—the last ten chapters or so of the story.

And I’ve realized this is something I do a lot. Yes, I try to outline most books, but I almost never outline all the way to the end of the novel. Why? Because things change along the way. I can set out plot points for the first fifteen or twenty chapters of a book before I begin writing Chapter 1, but I know my story is going to shift along the way. Characters will do things that surprise me, that upset my best-laid plans. It’s inevitable. And, in fact, I welcome those kinds of narrative disruptions. When my characters start surprising me, it means they have become fully realized personalities in my head, which is always a good thing.

So, I might outline twenty chapters initially, but I almost always need to adjust my outlines starting at around chapter ten. And then I need to do it again at around chapter seventeen or eighteen. And then I need to do it yet again for the final five or ten chapters of the book.

Put another way, outlining is not simply a task I complete early on, before I start to write my book, and I never think of my outline as a static document. Rather outlining is a process, something I have to revisit several times along the way in order to keep up with the constant creative evolution of my narrative vision.

Because, like so many writers, I am a hybrid. I plan my stories and I also write organically. I adhere to an overarching concept and I adapt to an ever-changing plot line. I take comfort in having a roadmap for my novel and I draw energy from all the story ideas I discover along the way. As I say, my process changes with each project, but these things remain the same.

I like to say there is no single right way to do any of this. Don’t let anyone tell you that you have to plot or you have to write organically. Find the balance that fits best with your creative style.

And, of course, keep writing.

Blogging, D.B. Jackson, David B. Coe, Writing

Professional Wednesday: One Hot-Mess of a Writing Post

Dispensing writing advice when one is struggling a bit with one’s own work can be somewhat strange. Just ask . . . well, me.

I am more than 50,000 words into my current work-in-progress, the third book in my Celtic urban fantasy. (No, you haven’t missed any releases. Book I is in production and should be out later this year or early in 2023.) Some days, the writing comes smoothly and other days it’s a struggle. And, of course, I am closing in on the dreaded 60% mark, so at that point all bets will be off.

Over the past few years, I’ve offered advice on dealing with a whole host of problems. Stuck at 60%? Distracted? Unable to get started? Unsure of how to finish? Check the archives of this blog. Chances are, I’ve got some post somewhere that tells you how I have addressed the issue. All the posts are well-meaning. Some of them might even have helped someone somewhere at some point.

Sometimes, though, there is no cure. Sometimes the only way past the struggle is through the struggle.

I am not at my best right now, for any number of reasons. And I am doing all I can to write despite distractions small and large, personal and national, serious and foolish. Writing, though, is messy. Writing is not one smooth, free-flowing creative process that starts when we type “Chapter One” and completes itself when we type “The end.” (And just an aside here: Writers shouldn’t have to type “The end.” If we need to tell our readers when the story has ended, we haven’t done a very good job ending it. Just saying.)

Writing, as I have said too many times before, is really hard. Writing is fits and starts. It’s three steps forward and two steps back. It’s write, revise, delete, write some more, delete some more, write some more, revise some more, etc., etc., etc.

And here’s the thing. Or here are the two things. First, anyone who has ever devoted any meaningful portion of their life to writing knows this already. And second, everyone who has ever known this, has promptly forgotten it the moment they start their next book.

Because we want it to be free-flowing, smooth, easy, linear. We want it to be painless. And why wouldn’t we? Who in their right mind says, “I’m going to write a book and I hope it comes within a hair’s breadth of killing me?” Then again, who in their right mind says, “I’m going to write a book…?”

But I digress.

In all seriousness, we want the process to be simple, and so we forget what it’s like to be in the throes of creating. Every book I have written has been a struggle at one point or another. Some are worse than others, but every one has its moments. I’ll struggle with plot points, argue with my characters, second-guess my world building. I’ll doubt that the book is any good, I’ll question whether I can even finish it, I’ll go through periods, sometimes weeks long, when I have to force myself just to sit down in front of my computer. Because I. Don’t. Want. To. Write.

Until I do again. And then all is well with the world, and the book seems pretty good. Better than that. It’s very good. Hell it’s one of my best — maybe even THE best thing I’ve ever done. And it will only ever be eclipsed by the next one.

Put another way, writers are head-cases. I know I am. And there’s a reason my writer friends are my writer friends, if you know what I mean.

You may be surprised to learn that there really is advice embedded in this hot-mess of a post. It’s simply this: Keep working. Writing is a battle, like any creative endeavor, like any endeavor at all that is worth pursuing. It frustrates us and exhausts us. It challenges us by striking at those places where we’re most vulnerable — our confidence, our sense of self-worth, our ability to stare failure in the eye and say, “Not today, motherfucker.” But that’s also the beauty of it. If it was easy, finishing a book wouldn’t feel so damn good. And it will feel good. Because you will finish your book.

Wishing you smooth-flowing prose, fast-moving plots, and characters who surprise and delight you.

Blogging, D.B. Jackson, David B. Coe, Writing

Professional Wednesday: Why Fantasy, Why Magic?

My oldest brother, Bill, who we lost several years ago, was an avid reader. He loved books of all sorts. Every year, he made a list of the National Book Award nominees — finalists and books on the long list — and read them all. He read fiction and non-fiction, his interests as reflected in the latter ranging from baseball to natural history to military history. He was a poet in his own right, and he revered literature of every stripe.

And yet . . .

He was always quite proud of my career, and he had a shelf among his many book cases that he reserved for my novels. But he felt on some level that I was wasting my ability by writing fantasy. Many times over the years, he suggested I try my hand at writing so-called literary fiction. Every time he did, I cringed just a little.

INVASIVES, by David B. Coe (Jacket art courtesy of Belle Books)The bias against genre fiction (fantasy, science fiction, mystery, Westerns, romance, etc.) among those who consider themselves devotees of “true” literature, is something I have encountered again and again throughout my career. Not surprisingly, I don’t believe it has any basis in reality. Fantasy (to address my speciality) like literary fiction, runs the gamut in terms of quality. One can find in all literary fields examples of brilliance and also of mediocrity. No genre has a monopoly on either. I write fantasy because I enjoy it, because I love to imbue my stories with magic, with phenomena I don’t encounter in my everyday life. I wasn’t shunted to this genre because I wasn’t good enough to write the other stuff. I don’t hide in my genre because I fear I can’t cut it in the world of “real” literature.

I said before that I cringed whenever my brother raised the issue with me. I also told him in no uncertain terms that I was writing what I enjoyed, and enjoying what I wrote, which remains true to this day. Writing fantasy demands that I create coherent, convincing magic systems. Often it requires the creation of entire alternate worlds, complete with their own histories and cultures, politics and religions, economies and social structures. These are not distractions from the fundamental elements of narrative — character development, plotting, pacing, clear and flowing prose, etc. Quite the contrary. These fantastical elements enhance those fundamentals and present unique and rewarding challenges.

Time’s Children, by D.B. Jackson © Angry Robot. Art by Jan Weßbecher.It’s not enough to create my worlds and magic systems. I have to explain them to my readers in a manner that is entirely natural and unobtrusive. And — my own preference — I also have to complete my stories and my character arcs in ways that utilize my fantasy elements without allowing them to take over my story telling. My heroes may possess magic, but in the end, I will always choose to have them prevail by drawing upon their native human qualities — their courage and resolve, their intelligence and creativity, their devotion to the people and places they love. Magic sets them apart and makes them interesting. It is often the hook the draws readers to my books. But those human attributes — those are the ones my real-world readers relate to. They form the bond between my readers and my characters. And so if those are the qualities that allow my characters to prevail in the end, then their triumphs will feel more personal and rewarding to my readers. It is the simplest sort of literary math.

I believe part of the bias against genre fiction is based in the erroneous belief that the trappings of these literary types — magic, imagined technology, romantic tension and conflict, the ticking clock of a murder investigation — somehow serve as substitutes for character development and good writing fundamentals. In truth, they are complements to solid narrative work. Genre fiction, when well done, has all that extra stuff we love AND great story telling.

I expect I am preaching to the choir a bit with this post. That’s okay. It’s not just those of us who write genre fiction who have to put up with the biases of others. Readers of our genres deal with the same sort of prejudices all the time. Fine. Those other people don’t know what they’re missing.

Plus, their book jackets aren’t nearly as cool as ours.

Keep writing. Keep reading.

Angry Robot Books, Blogging, D.B. Jackson, David B. Coe, editing, Falstaff Books, Islevale Cycle, Thieftaker Chronicles, Writing

Professional Wednesday: Punctuating Our Stories (Not the Way You Think I Mean It)

“Louis, I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship.”

We all know the line. Even people who haven’t seen Casablanca know the line. (And please, don’t get me started about not seeing Casablanca. I mean, sure, it’s dated, But it remains one of the greatest movies of all time. Humphrey Bogart, Ingrid Bergman, Claude Rains, Peter Lorre, Dooley Wilson, Paul Henreid, Conrad Veidt, and so many others. It has romance, intrigue, action, and it keeps you guessing right up to the stunning ending. See? This is why you shouldn’t get me started . . .) Anyway, the line. It is one of the great bits of closing dialogue in any movie ever made.

But it’s more than just clever. It is the perfect punctuation point for the film’s narrative. From that line, and those that come directly before it in the last minute or so of the film, we know everything we need to about what is next for our hero, Richard Blaine. We know that he’ll survive letting Ilsa go (yeah, I know: spoiler. Get over it. The movie was made, like, three centuries ago. If you haven’t seen it yet, that’s on you, not me). He’ll go on to join the French Resistance and fight the Nazis with Louis Renault by his side. And, very likely, he and Louis will be heroes in that effort.

What’s my point?

Simply this: Every story — certainly every novel — needs its own version of “Louis, I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship.”

I’m doing a lot of editing these days, and I have seen several manuscripts that reach endings of a sort, but that fail to tie things up in a satisfying way. To be clear, I am not saying that every book needs a pat conclusion. We can leave some questions unanswered. We can hint at futures to come. My favorite fantasy novel of all time, Guy Gavriel Kay’s Tigana, ends with a prophesy that suggests fates for three men, but we are left to wonder which future is tied to which character. It works.

I am also not talking about the climax of your novel. That is something different — also important, obviously, but different.

What I am suggesting here, rather, is that we need to have some closure for our lead characters, AFTER the final battle/confrontation/major plot point. We need to see those characters in the aftermath of all to which we have subjected them, and we need to see them moving on (or not), healing (or not), finding peace or contentment or new purpose (or not). Yes, the details are vague. I would never think to tell any writer how content-wise to end their book. We each have a vision of what awaits our characters and that is intensely private.

The Loyalist Witch, by D.B. Jackson (Jacket art by Chris McGrath)But at the very least, we need to see our main heroes grappling with what they have endured and setting their sights on what is next for them. We don’t need this for every character but we need it for the key ones. Ask yourself, “whose book is this?” For me, this is sometimes quite clear. With the Thieftaker books, every story is Ethan’s. And so I let my readers see Ethan settling back into life with Kannice and making a new, fragile peace with Sephira, or something like that. With other projects, though, “Whose book is this?” can be more complicated. In the Islevale books — my time travel/epic fantasy trilogy — I needed to tie off the loose ends of several plot threads: Tobias and Mara, Droë, and a few others. Each had their “Louis” moment at the end of the last book, and also some sense of closure at the ends of the first two volumes.

TIME'S DEMON, by D.B. Jackson (Art by Jan Weßbecher)Why do I do this? Why am I suggesting you do it, too? Because while we are telling stories, our books are about more than plot, more than action and intrigue and suspense. Our books are about people. Not humans, necessarily, but people certainly. If we do our jobs as writers, our readers will be absorbed by our narratives, but more importantly, they will become attached to our characters. And they will want to see more than just the big moment when those characters prevail (or not). They will want to see a bit of what comes after.

So, I am suggesting that you decide which characters matter most to your story and therefore to your readers, and then give those characters (and your readers!!) a satisfying conclusion to their narrative and personal arcs. Let us see them post-conflict, post-finale. Give us a glimpse of what life has in store for them next. They have been our friends and companions for hundreds of pages. Maybe thousands. And while we can reread the story you’re finishing, the fact is we’re saying goodbye to them. We may never encounter them again. Or maybe we will, in which case you can hint at that. But we need . . . something.

J.R.R. Tolkien did not end The Lord of the Rings with the battle in front of the gates of Mordor. He didn’t end it with the scouring of the Shire, or even with Frodo and Bilbo sailing to the Grey Havens. He ended it with Sam returning home after bidding farewell to Frodo and saying, “Well, I’m back.” Because that is the point of the story: Our heroes may be leaving these shores, Aragorn may be king far, far away and Legolas and Gimli may be back with their people, but the Shire and Middle Earth endure and go on. And Sam is the best character to make that point.

Mastering the use of that sort of story punctuation is a key element of effective storytelling. I recommend you work on it.

Keep writing!

Blogging, D.B. Jackson, David B. Coe, editing, LonTobyn Chronicle, Tor Books, Winds of the Forelands, Writing

Professional Wednesday: Most Important Lessons — Trust Yourself, Trust Your Reader

Today, I’m introducing a new feature for my Professional Wednesday posts: “Most Important Lessons.”

We are coming up on the 28th anniversary of the start of my career (which I trace to the offer I received from Tor Books on Children of Amarid, my first novel). To mark the occasion, I thought about doing a “lessons I’ve learned” post. I quickly realized, though, that I could write 20,000 words on that and still not exhaust the topic. Better then, to begin this series of essays, which I will return to periodically, as I think of key lessons that I’ve learned about the business and craft of writing.

I’ve chosen to start with today’s lesson — “Trust Yourself, Trust Your Reader” — because it’s one I’ve found myself repeating to writers a lot as I edit short stories for the Noir anthology and novel length projects that come to me through my freelance editing business.

Jacket art for Bonds of Vengeance, book III in Winds of the Forelands, by David B. Coe (Jacket art by Romas Kukalis)Honestly, I think “trust yourself” is good advice for life in general, but for me, with respect to writing, it has a specific implication. It’s something I heard a lot from my first editor when I was working on my earliest series — the LonTobyn Chronicle and Winds of the Forelands.

Writers, and in particular less experienced writers, have a tendency to tell readers too much. Sometimes this manifests in data dumps, where we give way more information about our worlds or our characters than is necessary. And yes, that can be a problem. I have no doubt that in future “Most Important Lessons” posts, I will cover world building, character, and ways to avoid data dumps.

For today’s purposes, though, I refer to a different sort of writing problem that can be solved simply by trusting our readers and trusting ourselves. As I said, writers often tell readers too much. We explain things — plot points, narrative situations, personality traits. And then we tell them again. And again. And as we build to our key narrative moments, we give that information yet again, wanting to make certain that our readers are set up for the resolutions we’re about to provide.

There are several problems with doing this. First, it tends to make our writing repetitive, wordy, and slow. Nobody wants to read the same information over and over. It’s boring; worse, it’s annoying. Second, it forces us to hit the brakes at those moments when we should be most eager to keep things moving. If we’re explaining stuff as we approach the climactic scenes in our stories, we are undermining our pacing, weakening our storytelling, robbing our stories of tension and suspense. And third, we are denying our readers the pleasure of making connections on their own. We are, in a way, being like that guy in the movie theater revealing key moments in the film right before they happen on screen. And everyone hates that guy.

We have to trust that our readers have retained the things we’ve told them. We have to trust that they are following along as we fill in backstory, set up our key plot points, and build our character arcs and narrative arcs. We have to trust that they are right there with us as we move through our plots.

In other words, we have to trust that we have done our jobs as writers.

Trusting our readers means trusting ourselves. Readers are smart. They pay attention. They read our stories and books because they want to. Sure, sometimes they miss things. Sometimes they skim when they ought to be paying attention. As a reader myself, I know that I am not always as attentive as I ought to be. But I also know that when I sense I’ve missed something important, I go back and reread the sections in question. Your readers will do the same.

Trust that you have engaged them with your plot lines and characters. Trust that you have given them the information they need to follow along, and have built your stories the way you ought to. Trust that they are following the path you’ve blazed for them.

“But,” you say, “what if I haven’t done those things? Isn’t it better to be certain, to tell them more than they need to know, so that I can be absolutely sure they get it?”

It would seem that way, wouldn’t it? But that’s where trust comes in. Sure, there is a balance to be found. We don’t want to give our readers too much, but we don’t want them to have too little, either. And the vast majority of us fear the latter far more than the former. We shouldn’t. Again, readers are pretty smart. If the information is in the book, they’ll make use of it. Better, then, to trust, to say, “It’s in there. I’ve done what I could, what I had to. I am going to trust that I did enough.”

Yes, the first time or two, we might need to revise and give another hint here or there. But generally speaking, when we trust our readers — when we trust ourselves — we avoid far more problems than we create.

Trust me.

Keep writing.

Belle Books, Blogging, D.B. Jackson, David B. Coe, Invasives, Radiants, Writing

Professional Wednesday: Top Ten Reasons You Need INVASIVES!!

INVASIVES, by David B. Coe (Jacket art courtesy of Belle Books)

In case the daily teasers and cover art reveals and previous blog posts all failed to tip you off, this is release week for Invasives, the second Radiants novel. It comes out on Friday, February 18! Yay!!

Release weeks are a big deal and we authors depend on early sales of new books to maintain series momentum and to get the new book front and center in the attention of the reading public.

And so, here are my top ten reasons why you need to buy INVASIVES!

10. I’m a good guy, and you want to help out my career!

9. Have you seen the jacket art?? I mean I know: book, cover, ixnay on the udgementjay. But this is a seriously cool cover, and, I have to say, it is quite representative of the story contained within.

RADIANTS, by David B. Coe (Jacket art by Belle Books)8. You read Radiants, right? Right? And so you know how good that book was. Why wouldn’t you want to read this one, too?

7. Along similar lines, I love this series, and I think if you give the books a chance, you’re going to love the series, too. And if the second book doesn’t sell, there won’t be a third. That is simple publishing industry arithmetic. Good sales mean a series continues. Bad sales not so much.

6. My lead characters are homeless teens living in the New York City subway tunnels. I’ve written about an entire underground culture and society — the Below — invisible to those of us in the Above. That alone should be pretty intriguing.

5. You’ve seen the teasers I’ve been putting up daily on social media. Tell me those haven’t whet your appetite for the story.

4. All kidding and promotional enthusiasm aside, this is the book I wrote during the time when I was first dealing with the news of my older daughter’s cancer diagnosis. Without this story, I’m not sure how I would have made it through those dark, difficult days. All my books mean a lot to me in one way or another. But this book in particular is one that I cherish and love, in part because the emotions of my journey as I wrote it come through in the narrative, the prose, the character arcs. This is, to my mind, a very special book.

3. As I mentioned in a recent post, the three lead characters came to me long, long ago — a decade ago, or more — and they have haunted me ever since. Their backstories are complex, as are their conflicted interactions with one another. This is some of the most intricate character work I’ve done — I’m quite proud of it actually.

2. My agent, the fabulous Lucienne Diver, told me when she first read the manuscript that this might well be her favorite of all the books I’ve written. Don’t you want to know why?

And my number one reason why you should buy this new book . . .

1. It really is a fun read, a moving read, an exciting read. The story includes characters with cool Radiant powers, assassins who will chill you to the core, and heroes who will make you stand up and cheer. The narrative will grab you on page one, and it won’t let go. Trust me on this.

You can order Invasives from:

Amazon | Barnes and Noble | Kobo | Google Books