I'm for easy till I'm not

On the surface, the question "do you prefer to write easy scenes or hard scenes?" seems like a gimme. Who doesn't like easy? I mean, really? And dude, when I'm in the zone and the words are flowing like the titian tresses on a historical heroine, I'm right there with Team Easy. But hold up, gotta couple of caveats.

1. Science thinks I'm wrong. Apparently, tackling the hard scenes in bite sizes would be better for me than flying blithely through the easy scenes and putting off the ickier, sloggier work. (Or so say some researcher folks at Northwestern University.) Typically, I ain't one to argue with science.
   
   
2. You know how there are all those people who are like, "Well, some day when I have a lot of time, I'm going to sit down and write a novel because how hard can it be?" Yeah, those people. If writing every scene was easy, writing a novel would therefore be easy, and those people would be right. They could totally just faff out a novel whenever they wanted. No work necessary. And that, my long-suffering, craft-book-reading, working-on-the-seventy-sixth-draft-right-now friends, would suck mightily. So, to make it harder for those people, I happily embrace the difficult scenes, the agonizing revisions, the doubt, and all the rest of this messy, glorious, brain-melting life of being a writer.

So maybe I'm only sort of for easy. When it's, you know, easy to be. 

Easy Scenes = Total Immersion

 

Easiest scene I ever wrote and why...

Let's start by defining "easy." For me, "easy" is not about how quickly words come to me. "Easy" is if the movie playing in my head flows smoothly, clearly, and in great detail. Great detail. I need to see the dust motes in the moonbeam and hear the white noise from the speakers set six feet apart in the acoustic-tiled ceiling. I need to know if that funk in the air is from mold, cold tobacco ash, or a broken perfume bottle. Is that creaking from leather or a tree branch? The level of detail that goes beyond the conversations and broad-stroke setting. The mood. The small actions the characters perform. I need all that excessive detail to feel immersed in the scene.

Total immersion is critical...and so is total control.

How many times can I rewind, pause, and play that exact scene without losing clarity or changing anything? The more I can do it, the more I can live and relive each moment while the camera pans left, right, and 360, the more I exist in the scene.

All that is what makes writing a scene "easy" for me.

Now, of all the scenes I've written, which scene was the easiest? The one before the one I just wrote, of course! 

Which scenes are better? The Easy Ones or the Hard Ones?

 That's a fruit that can be cut a hundred different ways. 

Easy scenes are better, because writing them was EASY. I mean, come on, people, easy is always preferred.

Hard Scenes are better, because, damn it, you draw emotional blood and use that to pen your words and heartfelt emotions. 

See? entirely different slices and different answers, but at the end of the day, I have to agree with Jeffe. I can't tell the difference four months later. I can't look back and KNOW for certain if a scene was easy or difficult. There are a few exceptions, but only a few. 

It's about discipline for me. I write every day. (Excusing illnesses like that annoying bout of cancer that knocked me off my writing horse for half a year and left me crawling in the dirt for another four months.)

It's rather like being a runner. After a while, you build up mental muscles and it all SEEMS easier because you've learned to muscle through the hard stuff. That's why I write EVERY DAY. Its how I build up the muscles. I may not be able to run a marathon, but, kids, even after that cancer thing, when I got back on my feet, I was writing faster than most writers I know.

So I'm afraid I can't really answer this question for y9u. It's all about the same for me. 

The Season of the Witch is on the way, and I'm in a Halloween mood. So here are

the covers for my Halloween collection of stories, and for my Halloween Novel. Both by the amazing Dan Brereton. 

Which Are Better - the Easy Scenes or the Hard Ones?

 

This is a band of smoke from the California fires streaming into New Mexico. It's fascinating what an obvious demarcation it makes in the sky. Compare this to where I am (the blue dot) on the smoke map. So happy to be in the blue sky section today!

Our topic at the SFF Seven this week is the easiest scene we ever wrote and why. 

I have no idea what the answer would be for me - but I can tell you exactly why that's the case.

Easy writing or hard writing: doesn't matter and isn't worth thinking about. 

It's tempting to assign value to hard work. We grow up learning to focus effort and that hard work will be rewarded. We also celebrate talent and marvel at those people who accomplish amazing things when they're very young, challenged, or with brilliant ease.

So, we think: that was really difficult, so it must be valuable!

Or, we think: that writing poured out like clear spring water so it must be really good!

I'll tell you what I've learned. 

1. The hard-to-write scenes are exhausting and make me want to pull my hair out and give up being a writer. 
2. Those scenes that pour out are a sheer joy and making being a writer totally worth it.
3.  When I go back over the writing later, I have no idea which was which. I can't tell the difference.

I can't tell you what was the easiest scene I ever wrote, much less why. There's no rhyme or reason to it. Some writing comes easy, some resists so hard that every word is like pulling a tooth. The only effect is on my attitude, so I do my best to remind myself of this:

Easy, hard, fast, slow - it's all progress and that's the only thing that matters. 

Why we need characters with mental and physical disabilities.

 Every character you write should have a weakness. You want believable characters and real people have faults, even the superhero and supervillain. 

Writing lesson for the day, done.

What’s that? You wanted an example? I guess the topic of the week is which tic/tell/weakness have you given a character that they’d rather foist on their worst enemy. 

Well, that's complicated. Or maybe not. I do have a character in my fantasy novel, The Dark Queen’s Daughter, who has a tic. Why did I give him a tic? A very specific, chin-jerk, throat-clearing tic? Why bother to give a character a flaw caused by a medical issue? 

Because I'm the mother of a child with PANDAS, Pediatric Autoimmune Neuropsychiatric Disorders Associated with Streptococcal infections. And because I want my child to see a character that has to deal with the same mental and physical challenges, but also see that character make a difference in their world.

If you’re not familiar with PANDAS, it’s basically a strep infection gone wild. Strep is exceptional at hiding from our immune systems and eventually confuses it enough that it starts attacking our bodies. It messes up parts of the brain, like the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous system. To sum up, your brain gets stuck with the gas on and it can’t stop. There are so many symptoms to this but for some it comes out as OCD tendencies and for some it’s a tic—motor, verbal, or both. 

Figuring out unsolvable health issues is definitely not fun. It’s emotionally draining. But it’s worse as a parent and you feel helpless to provide for and take care of your kid. Trying to explain why they can’t have certain things that all the other kids are having or can’t do things that everyone else gets to do is difficult. And then there’s the constant fear that their peers will turn on your child and ridicule them for something they can’t control. 

If you're a parent struggling to find a diagnosis for your child, or if you yourself are fighting to figure out what's happening with your health, my heart goes out to you. 

Mental disabilities and physical limitations are so difficult and so varied and leave you feeling so alone. That's why I believe it’s incredibly important to have characters that reflect what challenges us in real life. We need to see ourselves and those we love reflected in the characters we read and write. We need the emotional release of something finally working in their favor. And we need to see those flawed characters have a happy ending.

I’ll continue to write characters with mental disabilities and health problems. And I hope that my stories find at least one person that can relate, that can see themselves in a character, and cheer them on to the triumphant end. 

#NeverGiveUp

Tics and Tells: Gettin' Gassy

Tics and Tells, what's the worst I inflicted on a character that the character wishes they could foist on their enemy?

This is a harder question than it seems. It's the "unconscious behavior or verbal habit" part that's tricksy. Uhm. Hmm.

That's not to say I have flawless characters because that'd be hecka boring. I've given my protags plenty of personal challenges to help with that whole "internal conflict" character-building requirement. Physical limitations abound with secondary characters, but those aren't tics or tells. Then there's the foisting on the enemy bit, which, some things in the hands of good people are inconvenient yet in the hands of bad people are disastrous for others.

See? Harder question than it seems. I think the winner of this one goes to:

Gurp the goblin from The Immortal Spy series has a flatulence problem, particularly when he's scared. It doesn't bother him, but those around him gift him with charcoal undies fairly frequently. While he's not the sort to wish ill upon most folk, he'd probably find it funny if an archangel developed a bad case of the flying farts.

Tic and Tell

 Tics and Tells: What tic/tell/weakness have you given a character that they'd rather foist on their worst enemy?

That's this week's subject matter. And I'm going to keep this one short and sweet, because I have serious deadlines.

Are you ready?

Jonathan Crowley is one of my recurring characters. How recurring? I have tales with him in Victorian England, the Old West, World War One and World War Two, the seventies, the eighties and all the way through to today.

He gets around. check out the illustrations at the bottom to see a FEW of the places where he ahs shown.

He has a MAJOR tic, and if he were real and had the chance, the odds are good he'd beat me to death for giving it to him

You ready? He is a completely normal person until he is invited to help someone. No special powers, no added perceptions, none of the things that keep him alive. But once he's asked to help and agrees, he is as powerful as the foe he is fighting.

You bet your butt he'd throw that flaw at his enemies if he could. I don't let him, though, because EVERY HERO SHOULD HAVE A FLAW. Without that, he has the potential to become a "Mary Sue."

It's his weakness and he's stuck with it.

He's survived despite his flaw, and that, too is a weakness. Jonathan Crowley is immortal. Should a supernatural threat be around, he will, inevitably, regenerate, whether he likes it or not. He has lost families, loved ones, friends, over the centuries and still he prevails.

He's a wee bit bitter about that, too, believe me.

Without a flaw, without a goal, a character is too powerful. That's why Superman needs the radiation of a yellow sun, and why Kryptonite will weaken or kill him. People always say "Superman is too powerful." He's supposed to be, but that doesn't make him limitless. That merely means he has more power than most, and he's tempered by his morals. He does not kill (Though one writer made him kill and I ignore that story) He does not break the rules. He has a strong moral compass, and believe me, Crowley would consider that another limitation.

Purple Striped Alien Mutant Plot Bunnies for Me

DepositPhoto

Our topic at the SFF Seven this week is all about those Plot Bunnies: How/where do you corral them? How much room do you give them to grow?

I have what I refer to as “author brain” and no, it’s not an affliction. It’s the way I view the world and everything in it as possible points for a story. So I’m very good at recognizing the infamous plot bunnies, which for me anyway are the little factoids I run across in my daily life, especially when reading nonfiction articles and novels. Our own world can be a strange and awe inspiring place. Those quirky-but-true items set my author brain off on a flight of fancy – usually science fictional in nature – and I start to envision a story around the core idea. Like pearls build up around a grain of sand.

The rabbit analogy works because there are a zillion plot bunnies, an author can really “go down a rabbit hole” chasing one as they try to find out more about it and/or start working out a plot featuring it and often one plot bunny leads to more. Plot bunnies can be a real problem if they cause an author to keep abandoning whatever story they’re in the middle of writing (aren’t we always in the middle of writing something?!) to chase the newer, shinier idea.

Although occasionally an idea is so compelling an author can’t let go of it and then yes, I support switching gears and writing what’s really got the creative juices bubbling. Go for it!

As an author, I’m never very tempted to go chase those rabbits right away. Although I’m renowned as an impatient person, I have infinite patience for plot bunnies. I’ve been known to sit on them for years before one might make its way into a novel. In the old old days, I’d rip the article or the inspirational photograph out of the magazine – the Wall Street Journal and Vogue used to be two of the places I found the most bunnies, oddly enough, with Business Week close on their heels – and stuff it into one of the many bulging folders I kept in boxes, lugged around through various household moves and…usually never looked at again. Eventually I leveled up to merely writing down one or two sentence fragments for myself that encapsulated what it was I found so interesting and stuck those scraps of paper into newer, still bulging folders. Which again, I don’t look at very often, if ever.

Only when I’m moving and trying to cut down on the number of boxes…

No matter how many bunnies I capture by scribbling down the nub of a flicker of an idea, I’ve found the ones that really intrigue me stay with me. No need for paper or clippings. Not that they’re constantly running or hopping through my brain – perish the thought! – but my Muse will bring them forward when I’m at a point where they can be useful. Maybe I need a new Pets In Space® story (hint: PISA® 5 will be releasing on October 6^th) and since I write those at a certain times of the year to meet the deadline, they don’t arise organically in my head, as in “Ooh, next I’m going to write that empath-in-love-with-a-Special-Forces-guy because it’s SHINY and I can’t wait to pound the keyboard and tell the story.” It’s more of a process that starts with “Okay, time to write my next annual PISA® story, what cool elements do I have that I could blend into a good adventure with romance, set aboard my interstellar cruise liner?

Some of the larger plot bunnies stay with me for years and do become the central theme of a novel, like taking the story of the Titanic’s sinking and setting in in interstellar space. More often though, the bunnies become small elements of an overall book. It’s really important for me to stress, these ideas aren’t the pure Angora plot bunny that first tickled my interest when I read the WSJ article or saw the arresting photograph. The idea, whatever it was, has gone through a lot of processing and revising and adjusting and sometimes the link to whatever prompted the particular plot point is visible to only me and I could never explain it to someone else. So by then I guess it’s a purple striped alien mutant plot bunny?

I’ve shared a few plot bunnies here with this post that played a part in inspiring story elements for a few of my books on these graphics…but there’s a lot more to each novel than the bullet points (or bunnies) mentioned here.

Happy reading!

PETS IN SPACE® 5 ANTHOLOGY BLURB:

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Amazon AU: https://www.amazon.com.au/Pets-Space-5-SE-Smith-ebook/dp/B08F2XF73Q/

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Nook: https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/pets-in-space-5-s-e-smith/1137421518?ean=2940162669395

GooglePlay: https://play.google.com/store/books/details/SE_Smith_Pets_in_Space_5?id=AGH0DwAAQBAJ&hl=en