Category Archives: writing advice

I’ve got a lot of partially-completed works, both long and short, and I’m starting to find that the sheer volume of things I have in the pipeline is problematic for a number of reasons.

First, the jarring whiplash between genres can be tough. When I’m working on very realistic works, this isn’t usually a problem, but if I’m going back and forth between literary fiction and, say, horror or medieval fantasy, that’s tough. I need a moment to fully inhabit my world, my characters, get inside their heads, their voices, and the more different those pieces are, the more difficult it is to get going.

The other problem is simply an inability to get anything done. If you chip away for an hour a day on three different pieces, it’s going to take longer to get each piece done than if you devote all three of those hours to a single piece.

I’ve made a lot of writing resolutions for 2012, but my biggest one is going to be to start keeping an idea log instead of starting in on new works as soon as inspiration strikes. Writing with the aim of publication is rather a bit more regimented than creative people like to pretend it is, and it takes a fair amount of discipline to say, “No, I’m not going to write that new story right now, not until I finish this one.”

That isn’t to say that working on many projects simultaneously doesn’t work for some people. It just doesn’t work for me right now, at least not to the level that I’ve been doing it lately.

Not everything I write takes place in the same universe, where the same rules apply, the same creatures roam. But a lot of my stuff does, and in fact I’ve been doing vague crossovers more and more. I’ve written three stories about Wyrmen, winged humans that may be the source of myths about angels who were once connected to the Arthurian legends (“The Wyrmen,” Aoife’s Kiss, March 2011; “Le Bel Homme Sans Confiance,” Iron Bound, June 2011; and “But I Love Her,” The Fringe, January 2011). Though they haven’t been published yet, I’ve also written two novels about a team of parapsychologically gifted private investigators (Blood Makes Noise and The Wraithmaker). A character who only appears in the former has his backstory told in “Christmas Wrapping” (Curiosities and Creatures, 2012). The city in which all three of these pieces is set is also the same setting as The Red Eye, my novel about a dragon slayer, though none of the characters from Blood Makes Noise and The Wraithmaker appear in Red Eye and vice versa.

This is an approach many other writers take. It’s easier to think of most of your body of work as being vaguely held together by a unifying theme, even if you don’t necessarily assume that a character from one work could ostensibly bump into a character from another work. Still, I do drop little hints and Easter eggs here and there, much like how Oceanic Airlines shows up in several different J.J. Abrams properties.

The benefit of being even more integrated in one’s universe is that rules are consistent. If there is magic in one story and you want it to be set in the same world as another story, then you don’t need to reinvent the wheel. The downside of that approach is that then you don’t get to reinvent the wheel. It really depends how much you want to put into worldbuilding every time you set out.

It’s very important to me in my work that female characters are human, fully-developed, and have just as many quirks, flaws, and moments of strength as the male characters. I make sure, too, that my male characters have moments of vulnerability and–the good ones, anyway–do not subscribe to traditionally “masculinist” ideologies. That’s one way I mark a villain, in fact. If he’s sexist, he’s probably not someone I want the reader cheering for. I am not compelled to read or write work that fails to meet these basic criteria. I disagree with undermining characters’ objectives, success, and autonomy based on their gender, and in order to avoid appearance of such, I try very hard to make sure this doesn’t happen accidentally, even if the plot might dictate it.

Do I fail at times, even as an avowedly feminist writer? I’m sure I do. Patriarchy gets its mitts in society all over the place, so deeply entrenched that we don’t always notice it. But I think I’m getting better at portraying the kinds of women I want to read about, and I hope readers appreciate that I’m making the concerted effort, especially in genre fiction where (woman warrior tropes aside) female characters are still not always treated with the same level of respect as male characters.

For most of my long fiction, I spend months creating an outline before I ever put pen to paper on the novel itself. Usually for short fiction, however, I simply fly by the seat of my pants, letting inspiration take me where it will. The problem with this disparity is that of the outlined novels I’ve created this way, I’ve completed a grand total of zero of them. And yet the freeform stories I’ve just written on the fly? Over half of them have been published already, and the sheer word count of all my short prose alone would equal a novel or two.

So there’s the rub. Outlining might lead to more complex storytelling, more expansive and intricately designed worlds, built with attention to the minutest detail, but they will take you so long to do you might never finish them. One book series, I’ve been editing and re-editing for nine years now! It’ll get done, I’m confident, but I keep having to update the technological references and pop culture jokes every time I revisit it.

I’ve written my fair share of reimagined fairy tales. “Sparkling Teeth and Sacrifices” is essentially Snow White with vampires. In the pipeline, I have modern takes on Tristan and Iseult (“The Lovers,” soon to be appearing in Daily Love) and a Breton myth about a ghostly fisherman who kills people by a lighthouse (“Iannic-ann-ôd,” set for a January edition of Dark Fire Fiction). With a lot of my work, I try to invent my own mythology, but there’s something so deeply appealing about turning existing fables on their heads.

And I’m not the only writer with this fascination. Magazines and anthologies devoted to reworked fairy tales pop up all the time. Two of my favorite authors–Angela Carter and Joyce Carol Oates–both released entire collections of essentially feminist readings of monomyths. Anne Rice took it another step further with her Sleeping Beauty books.

So why do we do this? What’s the appeal? Is it a desire to drag your favorite childhood stories kicking and screaming into adulthood, to lay bare the essential weirdness of so many of them? To examine the source and remove the Disneyfication, leaving the gritty underbelly exposed?

I think it’s mostly about the appeal of speculative fiction overall. I write non-realistic work because I keep asking myself “what if…?” And sometimes that question comes when I’m feeling ornery and wondering just why Snow White was so pale or why the big bad wolf could talk. The whimsy of the fairy tale world? Or did vampires and werewolves lurk just at the corners of the imagination of the Brothers Grimm?