I hate to do this to MGC, particularly since Amanda was stricken yesterday, but I woke up with dizziness and nausea joining upper respiratory symptoms, and frankly if I do the next lecture of my mini-course, I’ll botch it.
So, instead I’m going to ask the regulars to suggest mini-courses. Things you think we’ll take ten posts or so to explain. I’ll do them, and then take them, make ebooks and sell them. It’s win win. You get my lectures for free, and I get to make money off the more polished versions.
Sorry, sorry, sorry — but I’m really ick and not functioning.
Please do post suggestions. They will be appreciated.
Mad Genius Club 
33 responses to “ICK”
Every writer has techniques she uses.
As long as you don’t label them “the only way to write” – which is never true, and is annoying – I think you could cull some old stuff, write some new stuff, and make an entertaining series which could end in “Sarah Hoyt – this is how I write and maybe you could, too.”
I have learned from every writing post I’ve ever read – and so do many writers. Why shouldn’t you have your share of the pie?
I intend to do the same when the novel is up (and if it is doing well at some point). I have a quirky (sound familiar?) way of looking at writing tasks/craft, and I share it on my blog. Eventually it may make a book.
You are already published – trad AND indie – you’d be a natural. Or have I missed your book on writing already?
Alicia
PS Hope the nasty viruses go away soon.
Have you seen this: http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/may-you-write-interesting-books-sarah-a-gt-hoyt/1108861361?ean=2940013942769 ?
Thanks – shall do so immediately.
Got it – on B&N – ick!
I positively hate their user interface. I use the Nook mostly to play Bee Cells because the whole thing is so horribly awkward compared to the iPad and to Amazon.
They won’t let me check orders, or see how I’ve paid for things and whether there is a balance on a gift card I got for Christmas without finding the dang thing (I’ve used it there before) and giving them the number.
All I wanted was to get OFF their website.
And they don’t do instant – you have to wait up to 30 minutes!
I’m also on Amazon!
Right over here!
And on Smashwords, too!
http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/132993
You know there was a Mike being an ass on my blog last night, and I was very tired and at first thought it was you, and my heart about broke. Then I realized it was a repeat-idiot, not you. 😉 Which is good. If you had misunderstood me so far and were that mad at me, I’d be very upset. 🙂
Sorry about the confusion. Mike or Michael is something like the 3rd or 4th most popular name for males in the US, or at least in the top ten, since almost forever. Which mostly means that there’s a bunch of us around.
There’s another list where I changed my name to tink about 20 years ago because of the confusion in the middle of a flamefest — I was reading someone lambasting me, or at least a Mike, and getting furious, when I realized it was the Other Mike!
Thanks for understanding that it isn’t necessarily me, just because of identical names. Sometimes it’s just another Mike.
The one and only, true ‘nother Mike
(I’d tell you to check the Union label, but I don’t have one. Guess Mom was a scab or something?)
LOL. No. I just found it weird how oddly wounded I felt, until I realized “oh, it’s not ‘nother Mike, thank heavens.” 🙂
Take care.
Possible topic: Creating characters. How do you find the level between “background filler,” aka “generic dude in a red shirt” and “main character with full personality?” And how do you give a character a tick (mannerism, not disease vector) without making it annoying if you don’t intend for it to be annoying for the reader?
Genre stuff. What they are, why it matters, for marketing and so forth, and how to figure out which genre your masterpiece is and whether you need to tweak it a bit to get it more in line with one or the other genres?
Pacing. I don’t get pacing at all. I don’t even see it, or changes in it, until a beta reader comments on it. How do you do it on purpose?
I second this one.
Voices. I often feel that I could switch character names in dialog tags and it would be unnoticeable.
Similar to Red’s suggestion: how to describe a character that gives both a physical description and a character introduction in the fewest words without relying on stereotypes. eg, “she had the lean muscle and hungry, tense look of a fitness fanatic”
Making something you don’t know anything about, or which may not exist at all, sound knowledgeable, and, well, right when a character talks about it, or does it. Especially when it’s something like future tech which doesn’t exist, and may very likely never exist, and even if it some day will it’s going to be something completely else than what is perhaps now speculated by drunken physicists.
Faster than light engines in a starship, matter transmitters and artificial gravity, that kind of stuff – yes, most of the time just taking them for granted is undoubtedly the best course, but what if the FTL drive needs to develop a malfunction, or the artificial gravity thingie needs to get used as a murder weapon (yes, as you can see he was pinned to the floor of his cabin when the murderer changed the settings…must have been at least 15 gravs, I’d say…)?
Easier for movie makers, they can just show Han Solo or whoever fiddling with something that looks like an engine with grease on his hands, and maybe changing some parts, but how would you describe that when Han Solo is the viewpoint character?
One idea is to read people who take something they know, and extend it. Like I mentioned before about E. E. Smith. Kimball had grease soap, still used by machinists* in our time, because Smith made his machines similar enough to what he knew that people still got oily messing around with them.
Another is to look at some people who successfully portray ignorance. Now, I am not the most knowledgeable about firearms, so I may be very wrong about this. The Ashley Dugan videos on youtube are apparently a deliberate attempt at being ignorant and impossible. I suspect that a) these are a parody of specific sorts of ignorant people b) that it requires some knowledge to pull this off c) something related to your question might be learned from these or similar.
In short someone who uses knowledge to display ignorance might be a guide for appearing knowledgeable of something one is ignorant of.
Or maybe I am full of it.
*A machinist is someone who uses machine tools, such as lathe and mill, to fabricate items, often metal parts. These days there are a lot of CNC machine tools.
The thing I’d welcome help on seems a poor fit to this topic, as well as currently being only significantly critical on a very back burnered project.
That is, made up or obscure words, created or used for the purpose of setting flavor.
The capsule setting description might be ‘mall ninjas transcribed to a scale of young adults playing with magic’. I’m trying to find the setting’s cognates to words like ‘operator’ and ‘tactical’.
My first options would usually be a thesaurus or a Latin-English dictionary. Thesaurus might not be ideal, as identical meanings wouldn’t fit. As for the dictionary, it feels like it would be very easy to get too obnoxious that way.
As far as my front burner projects go, I’m having fun. ‘Seat in chair’ and ‘get your exercise’ seem to be a very productive combination for me.
Quick thought — short stories and stand-alone novels used to be popular. Now? Trilogies (that often turn out to be more than 3 volumes!) seem to be the shortest thing people are doing, and unending series often dominate. Do you really need to write a goat-gagger? What happened to all those shorter formats?
I like stand-alones. Although my preference, as a reader, have always been for series, but series where each novel also works as a stand-alone. If I like the characters and the world it will be fun to meet them again and know what happens to them next, but I want the ending to be an ending, I lose patience when the resolution of the story keeps on being something dangled in front of me, but never really delivered. Also, when each story really does stand alone it doesn’t matter so much if I miss something, or don’t read them in sequence. The Vorkosigan saga is a good example of something like that. Different types of stories in it too. And the antagonists keep on changing. I tend to lose patience when the villain is always the same one, no matter how many novels get written in a series. Yep, good villains can be enjoyable, but even the best can wear out their welcome if they just keep on hanging on no matter what happens.
I don’t know if any of these will tickle your fancy, but I had fun making up the list.
1. World building one pebble at a time
2. Main characters, named characters, bit parts – how do you decide what role a character plays in your story?
3. Genres: it used to be science fiction and fantasy, and then there was space opera. And urban fantasy. And… Sticking to a genre, mix-and-match genres, genre bending…
4. The stories that wouldn’t die – should they? Breathing new life into old tropes.
5. 20 master plots, 31 dramatic situations, the big guide to RPG plots, the hero’s journey: using and abusing plot frameworks
6. Keeping fans amused for fun and profit: what should you ask or encourage them to do, and what should you avoid letting them get into?
7. Merchandising your stories: T-shirts, stuffed animals, how about a line of cat food, RPG games… Do you really want to get into this?
8. When the end of the story isn’t: how to write a sequel or three.
9. Subplots, intriguing hobbies, fascinating work or friends, and other ornaments to decorate a basic story.
10. You got your rights back – or did you? What do you do next?
‘nother Mike
Conflict and character growth. In amateur drama and improv, new actors and writers often think that the only way to show conflict or tension is to have people screaming at each other/fighting. In new authors, I’ve read plenty of books where the heroine is “shown to be strong and kickass” by being a complete ass and yelling/screaming at people, while completely deriding any offers of help. (Urban Fantasy, I’m looking at you.)
On the other side of the same coin, new authors that don’t put in any character conflict at all have the golden-child syndrome of everything always going well, or the cardboard-protagonist who never grows, never changes, never learns.
And then there’s the grey goo stuff, which is full of internal character conflict and belly-button gazing, where everyone’s examining their motivations and shown to be horrible little people who never accomplish anything and are at the mercy of all external events because they never actually accept responsibility and try to change their world. Ick!
How do you walk the middle path and create characters with internal motivations and conflicts with their world, that grow and change for the better in character arcs to complement the larger action plot arc?
Seeing your post — before I read it — reminded me I should have the guys do a series on “growing up with a writer” and “Care and feeding of a writer.” Probably not till next semester, but I think there’s a market for that…
Yes! And the importance of respecting an author’s space even though she’s working at the kitchen table and it’s just a hobby anyway, nothing important, and besides, she’s a mom and always has to answer, even if she’s muttering “She needs a weapon. Freaking mutant cockroaches.”
YES. Respecting my personal space is something NONE OF THEM GETS. And this is not a hobby. At times, I have all three men in here, chatting about nothing in particular right next to my desk, because — ATTENTION!
Does the pomodoro penguin keep them away any better, or do they tune it out?
Hmm, pomodoro penguin as a ward against family like a cross against vampires…
Or, from the other point of view: “The final five hundred pages: when your spouse becomes the drama-filled do-nothing roommate instead of a spouse.” or “Writing spouses: No, they’ll never tackle the garage again. There’s always another book.” and “Laundry? Oh, I meant to, but I got distracted by the fantasy, see I’ve figured out a plot point…”
Thbbbbbbbt. 😛
Sigh. I haven’t ever finished unpacking this house, because that’s when writing took off, in terms of work. I need to do my share if we’re to move/sell. And we NEED to move/sell both for financial and housekeeping reasons (Well, honestly, in three years it should be just the two of us, and this is WAY too much house.)
The older I get, the more I understand the wisdom of my mother’s law: “If you haven’t unpacked it in two moves, it’s getting thrown out unopened.”
Well, there’s tons of clothes that should be donated, and such.
We were going through that this morning, as we broke out the winter clothes and put in bags to donate all the “Ah, I haven’t worn this in over a year” clothes. The cat was spazzing out with boxes, bags, and clothes being folded and unfolded to choose from.
Yes, I live thousands of miles closer to the equator than I used to, what with doing this in mid-November.
On the thread topic: the business considerations that accompany posting first drafts free on blogs.
M