Stacia Kane » crack that whip

For those wondering

Stace — Tue, 08 Jun 2010 19:14:10 +0000

John Scalzi is traveling, or rather, is about to stop traveling. So he emailed me this morning to see if it was okay to delay my Big Idea post by a day. So look for that tomorrow!

Also, an interesting comment came in the other day on my Boy Books and Girl Books? post. The commenter pointed out that perhaps one reason why men eschew urban fantasy is because the covers seem to portray women who don’t need men, who even actively put down men.

The commenter also mention how James Bond covers, for example, show Bond in active poses with women in them, and posited that if UF covers showed women in active poses with men around them they might appeal more to men.

Which I think is an interesting comment, certainly. I still think it’s sad; it still makes me angry that books marketed toward women or with female MCs are automatically dismissed by men. And I still find it kind of hard to understand; as I said in that post, it can’t be that men don’t like to read books with women in them. It can’t be that men dislike sex. And I have a hard time believing that men just plain don’t like to read about love stories; not only do I know men who read romance–and I think that’s awesome–most men I know do genuinely want to find love, or are married or in committed relationships and are very happy. So I wonder if the commenter is right. Does the way UF is marketed automatically drive men away? Does it almost present a sort of no-men-allowed kind of look?

It’s a real shame, if so. Men already miss out on some great stories in genre romance, simply because they don’t think to pick one up and give it a try. It would be sad to see them missing out on great stories in other genres as well.

My point here isn’t to say men and their opinions are the most important. It’s just that I do get tired of seeing UF dismissed and put down, often by people who’ve never tried it, or who tried one and decided they’re all exactly like that one, when in fact there’s a lot of variety in the genre (and in genre romance, as well). I do think it’s shameful that “girl books” is a put-down. As I said in my previous post, so what if it’s about women, or marketed toward women? So what if it has a love story in it, or sex? Why does that mean it’s okay to insult it? It isn’t, and it shouldn’t be.

A woman who refuses to read books marketed mainly toward men, or see films marketed mainly toward men, or consume media aimed mainly toward men, is going to have a hard time finding books to read (outside of those genres) or films to see, or media to consume. (It actually reminds me of the “News for Women” segment that a news station in Miami used to run, and how it infuriated me, not only by implying that regular news wasn’t something for women, but that women were only interested in diets and cooking, and that men had no interest in such things at all.) I remember reading an article somewhere once about why women’s magazines are as successful as they are, and part of it was because those magazines are some of the few media outlets aimed at and coming from a woman’s viewpoint.

I’m not sure our viewpoints are so different, really. I think we’re all individuals. And I’m tired of stereotypes. I’m tired of women’s writing being dismissed as “just a chick book,” as if that automatically makes it inferior. If you don’t like a genre, that’s fine, but to say you dislike it because it’s a gender thing is just kind of lazy and offensive. I’m tired of books aimed at women, like romance or like many UFs, being dismissed.

And you know, I think men in general are better than that. Don’t you? Give it a try, men! Read something different, for fun. See how you like it, and what you learn from it. Decide for yourself what you think. Try a couple of them. Get some recommendations from people. You might find you enjoy it a lot more than you thought you would, and you might realize that just because something is marketed toward women, or has a romance story in it or sex or whatever, doesn’t actually mean it isn’t worthwhile and good.

Because it doesn’t.

It’s YOUR damn story

Stace — Wed, 13 Jan 2010 00:01:22 +0000

I could have sworn that I’ve blogged about this before, but I just did a search and nothing turned up, so I guess I haven’t. Or maybe I’m searching wrong. Anyway. (No, I did sort of discuss this before, in this 2007 post, but not with the same focus, so I don’t feel as though I’m repeating myself.)

Here’s the thing. Writing involves making up stories. Perhaps you’re a plotter, one of those bizarre creatures who knows exactly what’s going to happen in the story before you open a shiny new Document and follows your path as tidily as a ballerina with months of rehearsal. (In which case I seriously envy you, despite my snottiness. It’s fond, admiring snottiness, I promise.)

Or maybe you’re a pantser like me, and start with a character or two and a premise, and toss them into the document and see what happens. Maybe like me you have a few vague ideas of where the story will go; I tend to have some sort of idea of what the climactic battle will be like, and maybe a scene or two sort of lurking in the back of my mind waiting to be used.

But either way, you need to make up the story. It’s down to YOU; it’s your responsibility. Quite frankly, a fiction writer who cannot make up a story is not a fiction writer. If writing fiction is what you want to do, you need to learn and absorb the skill of Making Shit Up. Period.

Which is why it drives me insane when I see writers–or those who want to be or claim to be writers–asking people what they should do with their story. Should the hero and heroine get together now? Should the villain do this or that? How old should the characters be? Should the villain die at the end? Should the father be the bad guy?

Then there are the secondary questions, what I refer to as the “unfamiliar” questions. I call them that because the questioner is seemingly unfamiliar with either the genre in which they are writing, or with books in general. (They could also be called the “Is it okay” questions, since they tend to start that way. These are questions like, “Is it okay if the hero cusses? Is it okay if the heroine isn’t a virgin? Is it okay if the heroine kills the bad guy? Is it okay if the hero gets drunk? Is it okay if the hero has a kid?” etc. etc.

I’d say the latter annoy me more, but honestly, they both annoy me equally.

Now, I’m not saying we don’t all have questions from time to time, because of course we do. We all need some brainstorming help from time to time; it’s the nature of the beast. We have a cool character and set-up and plot but we need, say, a scene to get one character to give a specific piece of information, and we want a really dramatic way to do it, so we ask some pals. Or we’re trying to create a world and ask a friend what they think or if they have any ideas how to accomplish X.

What bugs me about the “Shoulds” and the “unfamiliars” is that there’s a sense behind those questions that a story is only written ONE way, or that ONE formula must be followed, or that there are specific rules which must not be broken. It’s not writing as creative outlet; it’s not writing as art and/or craft; it’s not truthtelling.

It’s calculated.

It implies that there’s nothing to this writing thing except following the formula to the letter, and if you do that you’ll Get Published. It removes the joy of creation, the flight of fancy, and replaces them with Following Directions and Fitting In. It encourages blandness.

I don’t like it. It bothers me. If you want to be a writer of fiction–a storyteller–you need to tell YOUR story. You need to let yourself go and let the story happen. All other things aside, nine times out of ten I’ll bet that the story written by the Shoulder or the Unfamiliar is heavily plot-driven, to the point where the characters do not behave like actual human beings but go through endless mental gymnastics, wild character changes, and silly emotional contortions in order to serve whatever plot contrivances the writer has been Shoulded or Unfamiliared into creating.

Writing requires a certain kind of bravery. It requires a certain amount of limb-stepping. It requires creativity. It requires an understanding of stories and a love of them, and the kind of wide reading experience which those two things bestow.

What it does not require is a set of very safe and careful decisions made because the writer in question thinks someone, somewhere, might not like it if her heroine says “Shit.” And more importantly, is afraid of that.

Do we all want our stories to sell? Of course. Do we want our stories to be liked, enjoyed, even loved? You bet your ass we do. Nobody ever published a book thinking gleefully, “Everyone is going to HATE this shit!” (Okay, sure, maybe somebody did, but I submit that’s rather an odd attitude to have unless you’re Lou Reed making Metal Machine Music in order to get out of a contract you no longer wish to be bound by.) But the vast, vast majority of us don’t write and publish in hopes people will loathe our work and feel sick and shamed after reading it.

But you cannot write effectively if you let that fear make your decisions. And that’s what those questions are, those Shoulds and Unfamiliars. They’re fear. (Well, some of them are ignorance of the genre, which also pisses me off, because why are you writing a book you don’t want to read? There’s a cynicism there that makes me ill, and there’s an arrogance, too; the idea that you’re so much better than the morons who read this sort of shit that of course you can churn some of it out. It’ll be good enough for the likes of them.)

If you want to write fiction–and write it well, and effectively, and have people buy it, read it, and like it–you need to lose those things, whichever you may have, in whatever amounts you have them.

Quit asking other people to do your work for you; writing isn’t something you can delegate. YOU need to do it. You need to think. Come up with your own solutions. Let your characters be the people they want to be. Let the story go where it wants and needs to go. Stop worrying that it won’t work or it won’t be good; writing is a learning process, and there’s always another story, so you need to treat it as a learning process and actually, y’know, LEARN how to create things on your own. Nobody else can do it for you and really, do you want them to?

Stand on your own feet. Lose the fear, and write your own damn story.

Summer Series: On Critiques 2

Stace — Thu, 23 Jul 2009 18:27:02 +0000

Be gentle with me today, everyone. I spent an hour this morning with the Hair Butcher of Alpharetta, and am feeling a mite traumatized. I should have realized something was wrong when I saw her Laura Ashley-esque dress and little wedge heels; this woman would not understand what it means to want to look like a whorish punk rock Barbie. And no, she did not. The good news is, apparently I’m a better hairstylist than I thought, as all she really did (at first) was to trim–barely–the layers I myself cut. It was when I explained I wanted MORE layers that the trouble started. But oh well. It’s only hair. It grows. And I can put enough gunk in it to fix it in the end.

Anyway. Enough about me.

As I said the other day, I have plenty of crit submissions; six or seven, I believe. I am going to try to do them all, interspersed throughout instead of at the end. Thanks so much to all who submitted.

So. Last time I gave you all a bit of background on my fantastic crit partners. Today I’m going to talk about finding partners, a bit, and next week we’ll start doing the crits and talking about how what we need from crits changes as our skills develop. Next week we start getting into the nitty-gritty, in other words.

Kait Nolan left a link in comments on Monday that I want to post here. It’s Crit Partner Match and it looks pretty good to me.

But it occurs to me that with the exception of Anna, none of my critique partners were found specifically to be critique partners. Not that there’s anything wrong with the Crit Partner Match service–I think it’s incredibly clever, actually–or any of the other services about which I’ve heard good things, like CritiqueCircle.com.

My suggestion? Join Absolute Write. Or any other writer’s forum that has beginning and professional writers as members; that has a good mix. Romance Divas is another, if you write romance. As with any forum, AW or Divas are not for everyone. Hang out for a while. Join some conversations. Get to know people a bit.

For the love of all that’s holy, do some research before you join such a forum. Don’t join a forum called (to pull a name out of my mullet) “Professional Writers” or some such faff without checking the members out. Are they actually pros, or are they all self-published? Are they PA “authors”? Do they actually know what it means to be professional, in other words? What kinds of people do they seem to be? This may be simply a quirk of mine, but I avoid any forum where I see more than one member discussing their own God-given talent. Or offering to trade Amazon reviews. Or discussing promo ideas like slipping bookmarks into their utility bills so “the person opening the envelope sees it.” (Those are all opened by machine, AFAIK, anyway.) Do you know what I mean? You want a cp who knows what the hell they’re talking about.

Become active on writer blogs, in comments. Several of my dearest online pals are people I “met” at Miss Snark or Evil Editor. I think Nathan Bransford has a pretty big following, as does the awesome Janet Reid. See someone whose comments you like? Write their name down. Keep track. Visit their blogs and comment there. Get to know them.

Livejournal has quite a few groups for critiques. I don’t know much about those, but I do know there are groups for readers of specific genres; I’m a member of a couple of urban fantasy groups there. Fangs, Fur, & Fey only allows published members, but anyone can watch and comment, and it’s another way to get to know people. For example, if someone’s post or comment at any of these places reads:

im lookin for somone to read my stuff n tell me if its good or not i dont know but i think it is i want to get pulbised for my birthday

they are probably not going to be very helpful to you.

I understand a lot of people find critique partners through RWA, but you all know I regard that organization to be about as useful as a single ball bearing in the middle of the desert, so I’m certainly not going to recommend you spend the outrageously expensive fee to join RWA National, and then another fee to join a chapter (because you have to join a chapter to actually accomplish anything, I believe.) If you want to do it, then by all means go ahead, but I think it’s a big fat waste of money.

I think, re the RWA, what I have always thought: if a group situation is what you want (it’s not for me, which I will explain below), you’d be just as well served to put up a notice at your local bookstore, or something, that you’re starting a [genre] writing group, and give your email address so you can set up a meeting. But again, you may feel differently.

My point is, it’s not easy to find a good crit partner, as I’m sure you know. I lucked out big time with Anna. I was also lucky enough to trade some crits with the fabulously talented Janet Mullany early on (and Janet, if you see this, sorry I never emailed back! I still think you’re amazing!).

Because your crit partner has to get you. They have to know not just how to critique, and enough about writing to be around your level, they have to know what you’re going for. It’s similar to dating. It’s actually similar as well to agent-hunting (remember my “People not fish” post, where I compared it to dating? It is.) This is someone you need to click with. It’s important.

I trust my critique partners implicitly. I may not always take their advice but I always seriously consider it. You need that. And yes, it doesn’t happen instantly, but it should happen rather quickly. This is why I do think it’s better to know someone at least a little before you start critting each other. Not necessary. But good.

And just like dating, don’t commit right away. Anna and I exchanged our first three chapters, with the agreement that if we didn’t like each others’ work or critiques there would be no hard feelings. Like I said Monday, luckily we loved each others’ work and comments. But that won’t always be the case (and we will cover at some point how to end a crit arrangement or whatever; I have a lot of thoughts on it so want it to be its own post.)

And what about groups, like those ones you hear about where it’s four or five or ten or fifteen people meeting up to read out loud and comment or whatever? I dunno. I’ve never been a part of one. I’m not by nature a joiner. For some people that sort of arrangement may work, but not for me. (If it does for you, tell me why in comments. I’d be interested to hear.)

Here’s my problem with groups. Groups become cliques. I like to keep my cps one-on-one. While Cori, Anna, and Caitlin might all get the first three chapters of a new project, I seriously doubt they’re discussing it with each other before they get back to me. And that’s the way I like it. Mark gets my finished mss but I seriously doubt any of the others email him to say “Did she fix the lame ending of Chapter Fourteen? Because it blows.” And again, that’s the way I like it. The group dynamic, IMO, leaves too much room for hurt feelings or feeling ganged up upon. If something doesn’t work out with a single CP it’s a lot easier to deal with. I know some people like the social aspects or it spurs them on, but I think the risks outweigh the benefits.

And frankly…this won’t make me popular, I know, but if you need a group around you to actually force you to put words on paper, maybe writing isn’t for you.

So. I realize this post was a bit all-over-the-place. But to sum up: Look for critique partners in lots of places, not just specific critique groups, and take your time. Get to know people. It’s always better to work with people you like.

Next week we’ll really get into it. As always, please ask questions! On this topic or any other. I want to address whatever you want me to address, okay?