One Piece of Advice for Aspiring Authors

       

Just in case anyone missed the news: ROGUE FAMILIAR is now out and available in ebook and print from all of your favorite retailers! The audiobook is coming, but probably won't be out for a few weeks. Because I ran late on this book, I lost my time slot with my narrator, the fabulous Deborah Balm. She has the manuscript, but has not yet started recording. I'll keep you all updated on that! 

This week at the SFF Seven, we're offering one piece of advice for aspiring writers.

It's funny because we were just discussing my favorite piece of advice for ALL writers on my mentoring and coaching Discord. This is shaping up to be a really fun community of authors at all levels. You can get there by joining my Patreon. At any rate, in the General Writing Advice channel of the most basic Patreon level - Community Member - one of the gals said that this piece of advice is "one of my favorite Jeffe Mantras." I love that! We may even make a special emoji to denote this mantra, as it's a recurring point of discussion.

So, what is it? 

Figure out what your process is and own it.

 

See, the point is that every single creator has the0ir own creative process. It's as individual as retinal patterns. While it can be helpful to take classes on writing processes and techniques, to learn from other authors, in the end we all find that our process is unique to us. I've seen SO MANY writers struggle to change their process and try to "make it be" something or other, to no avail. The whole point of learning various techniques is to triangulate on what works for you. It can be a long and iterative process, but that's the "magic formula." Figure out what your process is and own it. Don't try to make your process be something other than what it is, even if you are occasionally frustrated by it. (I often am by mine!)

Like learning to love yourself, learn to embrace your process. Own it. It's yours. 

 

Do You Knit... or WEAVE?

Our topic at the SFF Seven this week is... knitting? Did our calendar guru pick this for Mother's Day week, or is it a coincidence?

Anyway, it's not the knitting you think. (Or not the knitting *I* thought.) We're asking each other if we write scenes piece by piece and knit them together, or if we have ever had to knit-in scenes?

I am not a knitter. If I go for a textile metaphor, I'd say I'm a weaver. I line up all the threads, begin at one end with nothing but a lot of colors and textures, and then I weave them gradually into a tapestry. That said, I've occasionally had to weave scenes, themes, and clues into the finished story - which is probably what the topic poser is getting at here.

It just doesn't feel like knitting to me.

For example, for developmental edits on THE FIERY CROWN (out in only two weeks!! preorder now!! Eeee!!!), my editor Jennie Conway asked me to add in some scenes early in the book. She wanted to see some of the secondary characters sooner. She also wanted discussion of a later issue to happen sooner. So I ended up adding two scenes and fleshing out a couple of others.

The thing is, this isn't like patching a tire or splicing a soundbite into a podcast (which I've learned to do!). Nor is it like reworking some part of a painting. That's why I think of it as weaving. In order to add scenes and characters to an earlier point in the tapestry, I have to adjust the warp and weft before that to accommodate them. Then I have to alter the pattern of the threads thereafter, to keep the texture even and the pattern tight.

It was all for good reasons - and made for a better book - but yeah... I don't knit. Either in my writing or in real life!

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Worldbuilding - Foundation Process or Procrastination?

Our topic this week at the SFF Seven - one entirely appropriate for science fiction and fantasy authors - is "spending time on worldbuilding vs. actual drafting – what’s your balance?"

I've included a map here that first appeared in THE MARK OF THE TALA, the first book in the original Twelve Kingdoms trilogy. (For those who don't know - I didn't before I drew the map - the split down the middle is to accommodate the book binding.) Quite notably, I didn't draw this map until after the book had been written, the next books sketched out (very sketchily), and a couple of levels of editing completed with my publisher. At that point my editor asked me for a map of the world in the story. He thought it might make it easier for readers to follow the travels of the heroine, Andromeda, the middle princess.

So, I drew a map. Before that, the world had existed only in my head. But I'd envisioned it in vivid detail, so the task of drawing it out ended up being fairly straightforward. I spent most of my time figuring out how fantasy world maps should be drawn, and fixing logistical details like putting the split down the middle.

Later, however, I discover that most people thought I was crazy to do it this way. In fact, many SFF authors spend considerable time, even years, detailing their world maps and building out the details of the society, before they start writing.

Some of this approach, I think, comes from storytellers emerging from role-playing game experiences. In those, a great deal of effort goes into creating the world and rules before the game can be played. This is not me.

I also think that worldbuilding can be a form of pre-plotting. By creating the world and the details, the writer creates a kind of framework or outline for the story to evolve in. This is also not me.

So, it could be that I worldbuild the way I do - which is discovering what it's like by riding around in my characters' heads and observing it - because I write for discovery. That's how my process works on all levels, and faithful readers know I always say the most important thing is to own your process.

There's another reason, however, that I don't do worldbuilding before I write. I decided long ago that the only way I'd get a book written was to put down words. That sounds self-evident, but the decision is a profound one. I made a choice that NOTHING mattered more than putting down words - which includes things like drawing maps and other worldbuilding exercises.

When aspiring writers ask me about worldbuilding, when they tell me what they're doing to create their worlds, I'll say those things are great but they don't count as writing.

Only writing counts as writing.

Writer brain: the perpetual machine

“Even when you’re not writing, you’re writing.” That’s our topic this week.

Thing is, I’m not always writing. But I am always writer-braining (totally is a verb).

Example: This morning over coffee, hubs and I were talking about the new Stephen Hawking book and how in it the (sadly, late) professor laments the current glut of published research. Fifty years ago, you could read everything that had been published on a slice of science. Now, though, even if you narrow your field strictly, it is impossible to consume every scientific paper published on the topic. There simply aren’t enough hours in the day… for a human person.

And just that easy, I slip into writer-brain/questions mode: For a computer, though, what if it was possible to process every bit of information, to hold it all in sacred data storage and constantly analyze it? How long would it take the computer to realize it knows more than the humans? I mean, if it was doing deep learning, I’d give us, what, ten years? Twenty? Maybe not even that long.

Would the (omniscient, if not omnipotent) computer, knowing also everything of human psychology research, be kind to us? Or would it judge us? Or would it just let us run on our little hamster wheels while it—the real intelligent species now—went on and took over the world and colonized space because clearly we are too limited a creation to participate in the Big Projects.

What if there is already a computer right now doing the Big Projects while we run furiously on our political WTFery and social media and vapid entertainment hamster wheels?

And poof, there’s a story seed. Right there in my brain.

I will never write that story. There are literally hundreds of similar “what if…?” files on my computer and in my Things Of Coolness spreadsheet. They might inform pieces of the stories I write someday, but mostly they are the cogworks that make up the squeaky, rusty, slow-moving machinery of my writer brain.

I bet you have those, too. Yours may be shinier.

The point is that you can take a writer’s fingers off the keyboard, but you can’t really stop a stop her brain from iterating. So let it.

Why my new obsession is and must be a secret. (Hint at the end.)

The thing I like most about my work-in-progress is that you know nothing about it.

It's not that I don't like you or trust you [I love  you to bits, and you should know that]. It's not that I'm scared of rejection [except I so am] or even that I don't do well with criticism [oh God, what if it sucks? what if my baby grows up to be a super villain?!].

See, the thing is, this new series is nascent, gestating, passing through gleaming android milk over and over again like the monsters on Westworld, slowly becoming something better than it was in my brain.

But it's not there yet.

Right now, it's a lattice with little sprout vines reaching up, latching on. I think they will make flowers someday, and I think they will be beautiful. But I don't know for certain, and my hands are still dirty, and the no-you-can't voice is still really, really loud in my garden.

Last night, this unformed android alien plant baby transmorgified into complete synopses of all four books.

Tomorrow I will send those synopses in all their slimy, gross, hope-laden still-growningness to my agent. And I will be terrified.

This is the first time I've ever written a synopsis before I finished the book, and, in case you couldn't tell by the disturbing metaphors, doing the process this way is extremely weird. In the past, when I've synopsized, either the book was done and ready to roll or ... the magic bled out in the summary as I wrote it and the exsanguinated story gasped and died. Crisp vine, no flowers. Limp, fetid puddle of android alien goo. And then I hopped along to the next shiny.

Except, this time, I'm trying really hard not to do that, to kill my plant. I sort of have to send this early idea-let to my agent because that's how the next phase of my writing adventure progresses. I should be able to do this. I'm a professional, damn it.

So tomorrow I'll drop the chubby li'l info packet off at preschool [write email to agent; attach prehensile thing; tap Send], maybe have a little cry, and then go drink a lot of vodka and hope it learns how to play nice with others.

[Though, like all nurturers of super-villains, I do dream of it taking over the world someday.]

Wish us luck.

Hint: There are dragons.

What Blender Setting Do You Go For?

We've been on a long road trip this last week, seeing all kinds of family. And leaving the cats behind, like the monsters we are. Here is Jackson showing off his best Pitiful Abandoned Kitty face.

Thus, I'm late posting today. But so it goes!

I've shared this news elsewhere, but I'm happy to share again here! Many of you have asked what I'm up to with various writing projects, including a few delayed ones. (Yes, the next Sorcerous Moons books are coming - I promise!) Basically what happened is that I changed agents back in February/March. And then I worked up something entirely fresh for New Agent Sarah Younger. Basically I gave her a list of ideas, we debated them, and I wrote 100 pages of one of her top three choices - the one I loved best. We went back and forth on it with several revisions. That's a great benefit of working with an agent as sharp as Sarah. She gave me great feedback on the book, tightening it up and making it the best it could be. Basically we spent three months working on this.

Which meant I kept setting aside other writing projects to work on the next round of THRONE OF FLOWERS, THRONE OF ASH. Thus my entire schedule getting delayed and shuffled. The beautiful part is, when Sarah took this out on submission, we had tons of interest, multiple offers, and a sale two weeks later. And here it is!!

These books won't start coming out until 2019, so now I can go back to a regular schedule. Which absolutely means finishing both the Sorcerous Moons and Missed Connections series. The other thing that happened is that Kensington, who published my Twelve Kingdoms and Uncharted Realms books, started up a new SFF (Science Fiction and Fantasy) imprint called Rebel Base Books. They wanted to publish THE SHIFT OF THE TIDE, but that would have delayed its release until March of 2018 and I knew you all would have fits. (See? I do love you and want you to be happy. I really do!)

So, we said no on that, but they really wanted me to be part of this new imprint, so we settled on me writing a trilogy for them set in the Twelve Kingdoms world. It will be high fantasy, which means less of a romance arc. BUT, I'm pretty sure it will be Jenna's story. For those of you who know what that means! We finished talking about that right before the other submission, so that got announced at the same time.








All that taken care of, our topic this week is Scrapbooking—taking stories from real life as the springboard for your stories and subplots. I'm going to keep this short, mostly to kick off the topic. I love Amanda Palmer and Neil Gaiman's thoughts on "blender settings." Basically they say that all creative types take our real life experiences and metaphorically put them in a blender which produces the smoothie of our art. The big difference is what "setting" we put the blender on.

They've had to figure this out in their marriage, because they have such different blender settings. Amanda, a singer/songwriter and performance artist, has a very low blender setting. What she experiences, she turns around and shares in big chunks that are recognizably her art. Neil, as a writer of fantasy, has a very high setting - you almost can't recognize his real life in the final stories.

Neither is right or wrong - both of them are accomplished artists - but it took some doing for them to come to terms with how they each processed experiences. Especially for him with her putting so much of her - now their - personal life out there as part of her art.

What's most important is to find what works for you. My standard advice: discover your process and own it!