Jonathan Sherwood

New Website

2009-11-30T20:47:00.002-05:00

I'm starting a new website. It'll still be located here at JonathanSherwood.com, but it will be more useful to a reader and easier to maintain for me. The only thing that will change is the RSS feed address. You'll have to sign up for a new feed, but the good news is that you'll be able to sign up just for new stories, or news, or writing advice, or even new audio, all independently. You'll also be able to read the stories online in PDF form, even without a PDF reader. It'll look better and will load faster. That means it's easier for me to get more fiction online.

The new site will kick off within the next month, and I'll have some good news to share with you then.

Making your characters ignore themselves

2006-11-16T05:14:00.002-05:00

Someone wrote me a note asking me to expand on something I said at one of the Astronomicon panels, and it made sense to post the quickie response here.

If you get a chance, I'm interested in a summary of your ideas on writing character and staying in character. You talked about liking to write a character that has inner resources s/he doesn't know s/he has that s/he is able to access later in the story. How do you set that up for the reader (while keeping the character in the dark) and make the act, when it comes, seem "in character" when the person has been shown as weak and perceives his/her self as weak?

The first thing that pops to mind about how to make a character reveal something new that still seems in character is: Make the character ignore that trait on purpose. If Jane is faced with the choice of throwing Grandma off a roof to save humanity, make her refuse to consider the Grandma question altogether. Make her fight to save humanity every other way, but let her avoid considering the Grandma issue every time it ought to come up. I've found I can make my characters more realistic by making them not say things. After a while, I think, the reader understands that Jane really is considering tossing Grandma, but hates herself for even thinking it. I think that helps make the conflict something so deep that the character herself isn't even fully aware of it. When you hit the climax that forces Jane to make her choice and she turns around and looks at Grandma for the first time, the reader yells, "Oh shit!"

So maybe the concise way of saying the above, is: One way to reveal a new side of a character is to make the character suppress that side (consciously or unconsciously), and the story forces the character to dig deep and re-evaluate that decision. The result is an about-face that was really there all along, but was brought out by the travails of the story.

To Use the Muse

2006-08-20T13:37:00.001-04:00

If you don't already know the old joke about where writers get their ideas, the standard reaction to the question is "a newsletter from Poughkeepsie."

I've heard of people actually taking the response seriously, like asking for the address. The reason it's an inside joke is because we rarely know where ideas come from. Or rather, we might know, but the process is a such a convolution of inspiration and perspiration that it's often impossible to retrace the steps to origin of the idea.

I once got into a fierce argument with a writer friend who insisted that her ideas (and all the artistic expression that goes into every sentence) came from "outside" of her. She attributed all her inspiration to a muse that existed separately from her, which she merely channeled. That drove me nuts. Frankly, she was an overly artsy-fartsy writer who liked thinking of herself as a mystical artist more than actually writing.

But... every now and then I get hit with an idea I can't trace to anything no matter how hard I try. Writing (I believe) is about doing on a conscious and unconscious level something that we humans are particularly good at all around; pattern identification. It's why we see faces in clouds and why wind in trees sometimes sounds like a moaning person and creeps us out. It's the root of two cornerstones of fiction; metaphor and meaning derived from events that seem meaningless in other light.

When we write, we show readers patterns they're familiar with in situations they wouldn't have expected to feel any kind of connection to. Nobody has the experience of living as a giant ape on Skull Island and falling in love with some skinny white chick from New York, but we all relate to feeling like we belong nowhere, like we just want one person to be nice to us, and that we're the victims of powers beyond our control. The art is in finding the connections between the two. Sometimes those connections are the result of deliberate work, and sometimes they're the result of your subconscious finding the patterns automatically.

As writers, we learn to listen hard to our subconscious pattern-machine.

And sometimes it comes from who-the-hell-knows-where. I'm writing this post because this morning I woke up with my brain screaming this sentence: "If a character in your dream says something and you don't hear him, does he make a sound?"

Wide awake, I'm lying there, staring at the ceiling as my brain goes nuts with this sentence. In seconds, 90% of a story fell together right there. As I got out of bed to start hammering the keys, my two-year old woke up and demanded attention, and the morning was lost. Fortunately, I managed to write down the entire idea, but I can't help but marvel that some part of my brain that I'm barely connected to was cranking away even in my sleep. I don't believe in the mystical Muse, but man, sometimes you've gotta wonder what is going on in your head when you're not paying attention.

Distant Summer Nights

2006-08-09T04:13:00.001-04:00

This morning I had to wake my wife up at the ungodly hour of 3am so she could go to work early. I couldn't get back to sleep afterward, and lay there in the brilliant light of a full moon, listening to crickets.

My daughter had knocked her ear pretty badly on the playground yesterday, and asked me to sleep with her so she wouldn't roll over on it in the night. How can you say no? And why would you anyway? Her bed is pushed up to her window in such a way that when you lie there, your head is right next to the sill and the breeze can just glide over you.

So at 3am I'm lying there, listening to crickets I rarely hear anymore these days because I'm usually head-bent busy on whatever the day is demanding of me, right up until bedtime when I fall asleep in about ten minutes flat. No time for crickets and moonlit breezes.

When I was a kid, I was fascinated by the moon. Not just in the "gee that's a purty light" kind of way, but in that way that us science fiction geeks loved it. It was another planet, sort of. You'd forget that when you'd look at the cool covers of science fiction novels with their giant moons setting over hazy horizons, but we SF kids knew that with only a quick push of the will, we could dismiss the moon of poetry and remember that right there was this giant honker of a celestial orb hanging right there! No other planet has such a huge moon relative to it's own size - okay, Pluto and Charon, but they don't count for a bunch of reasons. Right there was an entire world so big and so close that with binoculars you could pick out individual craters, and yet you could still see the entire thing, edge-to-edge, and get a feel for how small and alone it is hanging there in the big void. It's a completely separate world, and it's right there.

I was born barely a year before men walked on the moon, so as I grew up in the post-Apollo era I was convinced, like most boys, that I was going to be an astronaut and would at least visit, if not live on, the moon. In late summer, when the weather was warm but the sun set early, I would as likely as not be outside exploring the woods around my house, surrounded by crickets and moonlight. They were long years of magical boyhood that Bradbury and Wells could depict and cater to so well.

And lying there this morning, watching the moon in the empty sky, listening to the rustle of tree leaves hissing in the occasional sigh of air, I realized how far I've fallen from that life of wonder and mystery. Summer is deliniated by calendar grids. Evening is the time to get the children to sleep and get to sleep yourself in the hopes of not being dog-tired in the morning. Books are for information or occasional entertainment.

But so much of the moment is gone.

Those days when you had so much time alone with your thoughts that you could think well through all the things you need to think of, and could dwell on the moment you were in, and the weird twists your imagination was taking you, and unconsciously revel in things as simple and common as moonlight, hissing leaves and crickets - those things get pressed out of you when you "grow up." I often think of our ancestors a mere 30,000 years ago, who were completely like us and yet had so few responsibilities beyond providing for their basic needs. There are estimates that they may have spent only 20 hours a week "working." And the rest? Not watching TV. Not driving to soccer practice. Not worrying about tomorrow's spreadsheet errors. They'd be sitting under the stars, being with their families, their friends, perhaps around a fire - they'd exist in their moments the way kids do.

In some ways it seems we've grown up as a society in the way we grow up into adults. I thought about my own daughter, lying there with her swollen ear, and wondering if she were imagining the same things about the other white world that spun overhead each night. What would she remember of these days?

You might be wondering where this is headed. Not really anywhere. I lay there for an hour until my alarm rang at 4:00, and got up to leave Luna and her chorus to my daughter's window. I have things to do before I go to work, and it may be months, or years, before I get some glimpse of my boyhood crouched in long, dark grasses again. But I know this is why I write. I want to recapture the wonder of the world I had when I was a kid. In some ways it works. And just possibly, one of my stories will be read by another boy or girl, twenty years from now, and it'll fire their imagination into the dark hours of a long summer.

Spits Day

2006-06-29T14:07:00.000-04:00

I can't believe I missed Spits Day. June 28th has become sort of my "writing birthday," and I take a few moments to jot down my thoughts in my journal about another year of writing.

About 15 years ago, on June 28th, I rode my motorcycle down a stretch of road out in the countryside, found a nice roadside hill, parked the bike and went up the hill with a notebook in hand. After a childhood full of writing, I hadn't written anything in about five years. It was partially due to the distractions of late-teen/early-twenties angst, but it was also because a number of writing setbacks, including a narrow-minded professor, had sucked the wind out of my sails.

On that June 28th, I was in the death throes of a relationship that was comically dramatic in that young-twenties way, but it yeilded one good thing. She was a writer, and she rekindled my love of writing.

So on that day I parked my motorcycle, climbed up the hill, and opened a fresh new notebook and started writing.

I was writing flash fiction, which wasn't called flash fiction back then. It didn't have a name. Fiction didn't come in 500-word bits back then (or rather, it wasn't cool to do it back then). Some of the pieces weren't fiction, but more journalesque, and most were lacking in plot but heavy on emotion. I still remember the shortest piece I wrote. One whole page was taken up for the story, "Headaches." The piece read, "Headaches float."

I didn't know what I was doing with this notebook, but I wrote flash fiction bits into it nearly every day. I knew this notebook and what I was doing was important (to me), but it was also blessedly aimless. I came to call the things I was writing, "spits," because they were just my brain spitting things out onto the page. It wasn't journalling, and it wasn't structured fiction, and since the moniker of flash fiction wasn't coined yet, I didn't know what to call it. So I called them spits, and wrote them into my spits notebook.

The notebook lasted exactly a year, and on June 28th of the following year, I wrote on the last page. I realized it had been a watershed year for me. I realized that for some reason writing was part of who I was, like a limp or a bad liver, and I just had to deal with it. So every June 28th, I celebrate the revolution and reflect on what it means to be writer.

That said, I can definitely say that last year's Spits Day was a lot better than this year's. Last year, I'd just sold my first piece of fiction to a professional market. A year later, despite having written several pieces that I believe are superior, I haven't sold a damn thing. I've organized a faboo writing group, am in the midst of starting a genuine writers organization in Rochester, NY, and I've been writing quite consistently, and though none of that has resulted in a single sale, I really can't complain. I'm changing my writing a bit to be more commerically acceptable - not because all I care about is getting published, but because getting established will allow me more freedom to write the good stuff later.

As for the coming year? I will publish. I will qualify for SFWA. I will organize the writers of my city into an undead army to shake the foundations of God's own home (or at least get some respect for spec fic writers), and as always, keep chin up and learn to accept the affliction of having to turn every conversation, every bit of interesting info, every emotional response, and every conceptual idea into the basis of a story. That's just the way it is. Pahtooey!

The seed of a new writers organization

2006-06-23T09:00:00.000-04:00

Well, it's been a week since my last post. So what's been keeping my busy hands busy? Well, not much writing, unfortunately, though I have been working hard on my one science-heavy story in my head.

But there have been some serious writing projects going on - just not involving actual writing. First off, I've completely migrated to Google. For the reasons I mentioned in my earlier post, I'm way happier now than when I used Microsoft's garbage. Also, the latest word is that Writely may reopen in just a few weeks. I'll keep you posted when that happens, and what I think of it.

There are some bigger writer issues going on, though. As I've mentioned before, I manage a pretty large writing group. A few days ago, the local Barnes & Noble caught wind of it, and has asked to "adopt" us. They want us to hold our meetings there because we bring attention and customers to B&N, and in return they give us publicity. It's good all around, but it also means the group must be public, whereas it's been private up until now.

I'll be talking it over with the group next week, but I'm inclined to think that what I will really do is start a new, public, spectulative fiction organization for any writer of spec fic in the city. It's been something I've wanted to do for a long time, and I find myself surprisingly well positioned to make it happen. On the Asimov's web forum, there was talk a while back about what people can do to raise the appreciation of SF in the public, and this kind of organization is exactly the thing to do it. It'll take time, perhaps a year to get up to full speed; effort, because I'll be managing a professional, fee-based organization, in addition to my current writing group (though I expect and pray that there will be enough overlap that it will not be a true doubling of my current workload); and god knows what else it will take.

It's daunting, but it's what I want to happen. Of course, part of me is scared that I'll have even less time to write than I do now, but my group is a great motivator, and they won't let me slack.

And as if all that wasn't enough (along with all the usual strain of American suburban living), I'm teaching myself Dreamweaver, Fireworks, and Bryce. I have limited web skills, picked up purely by the seat of my pants over the years, and now for the first time, I'm really concentrating on learning web development. One, because it's another creative thing that I just love doing, but two, because I'm redesigning my writing group's web site so it's a more interactive beast that will free me up from a lot of the annoying chores necessary to keeping a writing group going. The redesign of this blog is part of my learning efforts, and expect my main page to change before the end of summer as well.

So all of this is keeping me terribly busy. But that's no excuse for not writing (never!).

The Value of Writers' Groups

2006-06-05T15:58:00.001-04:00

I'm very fortunate to be a member and de facto organizer of a terrific writing group with more than thirty members. But for about ten years, I clung to the image of the writer working alone in feverish passion, skin whitening in a dark room and genius sprouting from the constant internal focus.

That got me nada.

Yes, writing is a solitary act, but unless you really are a literary genius, the interaction with other writers will prove invaluable. Henry Miller once said, "Write during the day. Live at night." He was pretty much as close to genius as a writer can get (in my humble opinion anyway), and he was anything but a wallflower. A member of my group mentioned that some study was done recently that found that writers who socialize with other writers, produce more than writers who shun interaction for the sake of putting more words on the page.

I joined a literary writing group, which worked well enough for me for about a year, until I realized I wanted to explore more outlandish topics than most of them did. I formed another group, just two writer friends and me, but that died after just a couple of months. But with those two groups I realized that talking to someone about writing fired up my desire to write more. Knowing I would have an audience for whatever I wrote gave me a great incentive to get writing, and having readers who were expecting me to improve forced me to improve.

My break came two years ago when I was wrapping up my masters in English. The professor for one of my classes was Sally Caves, who wrote science fiction and was the creator of Reginald Barclay on Star Trek: The Next Generation. At the end of class, I asked her if she knew of any local, serious science fiction writing groups around. She knew of one, but it had just disbanded. She connected me with the person who ran it, Therese Piecynski, who writes reviews for Tangent, and who has published in Asimov's, among other places. Through Therese, I met other local writers, and discovered many of them were taking a class the next semester, taught by Nancy Kress. I'm fortunate to have Writers & Books, a hub of writing, in my home city, and doubly lucky that a science fiction giant like Nancy teaches there.

Nancy's class was terrific, and several of my classmates were pro-grade writers. I became friends with them, and after the class ended, six of us restarted Therese's old writing group, called "D309" after the room number in which the group used to meet. Along with writers from the earlier incarnation of the group, we gathered eight members and scheduled our first meeting.

It was pretty much a disaster.

We had novice writers like me, and professional writers in the same group. Some wanted workshops. Some wanted to socialize. Some wanted to just keep connected with other writers. After a lot of discussion, we figured out a way to please everybody; we split the group.

We met twice a month, once as a workshop, and once as a social night. Anyone could attend whatever they wanted. Stories or novel chapters were circulated via email two weeks before a meeting, and we would meet at someone's house. Authors to be critiqued were responsible for bringing some munchies for everyone else, so if nothing else, you got free food out of it. We went around the circle, each person talking for about three or four minutes about points they wanted to make about the manuscript, and then it was a free-for-all, where most of the really good ideas were aired. Most people would write up comments to give the author, and the result was a wonderful time of talking, laughing, and getting amazing insights into fiction from points of view you'd never thought of before. We usually did two stories per meeting, with a break in the middle for talking and eating.

Nancy continued her classes at Writers & Books twice a year, and a number of us from the group would usually attend. By the end of each semester, we would agree on "recruiting" a few more writers into the group from Nancy's class. Others come in from recommendations.

The group almost suffered from its own success. At the beginning of 2006, we had 28 members, and at one meeting, where 14 members showed up, the critiques took ridiculously long. We decided to split again, this time into a social night and two workshops, one for short story writers and one for novel writers. The novel writers themselves have divided in half in order to give better feedback and to read more chapters each month. Each month we now meet once for a social night, once for a story workshop, and once, in two locations, for a novel workshop.

The group, from my perspective, is fantastic. Everyone in it is serious. We're friends, but we're also comrades, looking to help each other write better and get published. There are times when I sit back from a discussion and watch all these people passionately pulling apart a story to see how it works and how to make it better. Some people look at stories from a market perspective, and some from an artistic one. Some people look for originality above all else and some people focus on the language. We have both fantasy writers and science fiction writers. Some writing for adult audiences and some for children. Some writing novels and some short stories. And to have all these personalities digging into a piece of fiction, especially when it's yours, has taught me more about writing than all the books I've ever read on the subject.

One of the surprises I've had while organizing the group, is how much effort the organization takes. Figure out dates to hold each meeting, watch out for holidays, make sure we have submissions for each meeting, make sure everyone knows about changes, and the biggest issue, make sure everyone feels interested and included. I used to send around emails in a haphazard way to keep everything in line, but I've resorted to a regular newsletter so people at least get the feeling that this beast is organized. I've also started a web site. On it I post news about meetings or successes of our writers. We keep everyone's submissions on file there for members to download and critique. Addresses, driving directions, phone numbers, and email addresses are all there. We've even started a discussion forum to continue critiques, or just to chat between meetings. The site helps that all-important feeling of inclusion for all the writers, whether they attend every meeting or just stay on the email fringe.

So this is my bit of writing advice for June: Get away from your computer and find fellow writers. Find out where they lurk in your city, and find out how to socialize with them. Start a group if you can't find one, and advertise for members. That interaction function much like reading does to fire up your brain into directions you never would have explored otherwise.

To close with an example of the group working to perfection: One night we were critiquing a story by one of our members, and in the discussion, we all agreed that his ending wasn't working. We probably hacked away at why it didn't seem to resolve properly, looking at everything from additional action to cutting action, to figuring out what the underlying themes were and whether they were being properly explored. The writer went home and rewrote the ending based on that conversation, and a month later, Craig Delancey had sold "Openshot"* to Analog. It felt like a group victory.

If you've got any questions about forming or running a writing group, or have tips you want to share, please feel free to comment on the blog or drop me an email. Go write!

*(Keep an eye out for the story. I'll post when I know what issue it'll appear in.)

Presence of Character

2006-04-28T07:58:00.000-04:00

One of my "10 Ps" is Presence. Ray Bradbury once said that if you can put your reader into your character's skin, they'll believe anything. He meant that if you can make a reader see, hear, smell, feel, and taste the setting of your story, they will react to your story the same way your character would. That is what you want to accomplish. You want your reader to identify with your characters so well that they become them in a small way. And one of the pivotal ingredients in creating that identification is by turning on all of the reader's senses – and no, I'm not just talking about the usual five.

When you walk into a room, an awful lot happens that most people are completely ignorant of, but you as a writer better be picking up on every little thing that's going on. Let's say you walk into the foyer of an old house from its front porch. A poor writer would just say, "Ella walked into the foyer." But if you are going to put your reader into your character's skin, you have to include the pertinent info from the senses. First, if it's a bright afternoon, that foyer is going to be dark because old houses didn't have the large windows of today's houses. Why is that important to note? The character is going to have an emotional reaction to that difference. If you go from a bright day into a dark foyer, you're going to be blinking as your eyes adjust. You're going to be at a disadvantage because you'll be partially blind. If your story is about Ella the twelve-year old sneaking into someone's house, you bet that darkness will have an emotional impact on her. If Ella is a business woman who's come home to her parents' house for the first time in twenty years, again, that darkness will have meaning to her because she's entering a world that's insulated from her world. The symbolism can run amok here, but the important thing is that you are giving the reader that feeling of momentary blindness, and if you've been doing your job, the reader will have roughly the same emotional reaction that your character will have.

While getting the emotional reaction from your character, the darkness also gives crucial setting detail. It's an old house, and old houses didn't have the big windows of today's homes, so without even saying "it was an old house" or "it was a house with small windows," you've put the impression of an old house into the reader's head. Again, if you've been doing this all along in your story, you might never have to mention that the house is old because the reader will understand it from the myriad of similar details you've mentioned before, such as the feel of the dirt road that led to the house, the fact that the house's porch bends down on either side like a frown, etc. This is all part of my cardinal rule: Make everything do more than one thing. Pick the setting details that describe not only the environment, but also the character's emotions.

What else happens when you walk into that foyer? You smell it. Are you just going to describe the smell, or are you going to do dual-duty and make the description mean something? A recent classmate of mine described an old house's smell as one "before electricity and plastics and modern cleansers, even though it now had all those things." It worked wonderfully for me. I could smell the old wood and plaster of the house as well as the newer things that were now in it. And there was an emotional context of a lost age that was a theme in the story. There are the sounds of squeaky floorboards and the feel of the screen of the porch door moving under your palm, but you don't have to include every sense – just the ones that illustrate both the setting and the character. Too often writers will get carried away with their descriptions, which may be wonderful in themselves, but may be only taking up valuable space when the salient points have already been delivered.

The second part of putting your reader inside your character's skin has nothing to do with the physical senses, but with the character's attention. One of the fastest ways to yank your reader out of your character and out of the story is to force your character to look at something that the reader would not, at that time, be paying attention to. A novice writer several years back wrote about a man entering a room. The writer described the room in detail – certainly too much detail, but that wasn't the problem. The first thing he described was the eagle-head bust over the door. Think about it. You are walking into a new room for the first time; what is the first thing you take note of? Would it be something that is on the doorway behind you and above you? Do you usually walk into a room and quickly check the top of the door? The writer here was forcing his reader to turn around to do just that when the reader was really wondering, what and who is in this room?

This is ADD – Attention Direction Disorder. It happens all the time, and not just with scene descriptions. "Frank watched as Elissa took off her shirt and dropped it on the floor. It was one of those baggy, sweater things the color of a light rose. His neighbor had a whole hedge of roses that color, and Frank had always liked them." Um, excuse me, isn't there a topless woman standing in front of Frank? Unless that's part of the story, why is Frank's attention on the shirt and not on the nudity in front of him? If you were Frank, how much attention would you be giving that shirt? Unless your story is about how Frank is always a little disconnected from the world, you can't describe something that your character's attention is not going to be naturally on. If the woman strips out of her shirt, Frank's attention, and thus your reader's attention, and thus your attention, is going to be on the naked woman and what her nakedness means to your character. You have to write your descriptions in the same order they would demand the attention of your character.

If I were to be so bold, I'm going to modify Bradbury's adage. Give your reader the presence of your character. By that I mean put them in the skin of your character so that they see, hear, smell, and feel everything the character does, but go beyond the senses. Go beyond the skin of the character and into the character's state of presence. What does he see, hear, smell, and touch, but also let his emotional state, and his natural attention determine what he sees, hears, smells, and touches. The human brain takes in info from every one of your senses constantly, but it filters it down to the salient points so it's understandable to you. As an author, you are doing the same thing. You could describe every sensory perception in your world, but you have to filter out what to pass on to the reader (what is emotionally relevant to your character?), and in what order to pass it on (what is your character going to pay attention to next?).

Doing this gives your reader the feeling of presence that your character has, and as Bradbury says, once you've got your reader connected that deeply to your character, they'll believe (almost) anything.

Info-dumping

2006-04-06T07:37:00.000-04:00

What a difference a day makes. I just wrote about 1,200 words this morning - unfortunately it was nearly all synopsis. But that's fine. I need to know exactly what I want the next few scenes to do so I can set my brain to fleshing them out. The story is moving along wonderfully, even if the actual writing of it is behind schedule.

Since I'm behind on my Writing Notes column for this month, I'll add a mini one here as a hold-over. It's about info-dumping, and one way to get away with it.

In my current story, I've opened with an action sequence. That's fine, and it should draw the reader into the story far enough to hook them for the duration. Immediatly after the action, I have "earned" a pause in which I need to give lots of info the reader. Now, there are three ways to do this. One is good, one works, and one should be avoided at all costs.

The one to avoid is the easiest - just blurt out all the info the reader needs. In my story the reader needs to know how humanity bumped into the Evil Aliens, how the war began, what the aliens are like, how they and we fight, and what the expectations are for humanity's future. Sure, I could just go through the whole thing like a history lesson: First this happened, then this, then this, etc. This can work, but rarely, because there is no personality involved in such a pure info-dump, which is why the term has become a dirty word. It's just a bunch of facts thrown at the reader.

The second method is the same as the first, only you restrain yourself as a writer and give only what absolutely needs to be present. And you write it as tightly and concisely as you can. "After the Battle of Waterloo, Napoleon's forces were decimated, and his dream for conquest evaporated." You don't have to go into all the troop movements, the reasons for the war, how close Napoleon almost came to winning, how the English felt about the defeat, or anything else but the facts the reader absolutely needs. Doing this usually means you have to give more info later in the story, but that's fine as long as the reader gets what he needs when he needs it.

The third is hiding the info-dump in a scene. Ideally, you want to spread the dissemination of information throughout the whole piece in little bits that the reader never notices. That's not always possible because you often need to give the reader a good deal of info, usually in the beginning, that is necessary for them to know in order to continue in the story. So you need to info-dump. In my story I need to info-dump a good amount of stuff on the reader, but rather than bore the reader, I'm creating a scene (actually, two) that will dramatize the info I need to get across. This doesn't mean I have to show the actual space battles to get the info about them to the reader, because I need some characterization-dumping at this point as well. So, we put the two together.

In Under the Graying Sea, I used flashbacks to show not only the history behind building the wormhole, but the main character's connection to it. Each flashback did three things - showed the relationship between the protagonist and her father, showed her relationship to the wormhole project, and dumped info about the history and function of the wormhole project.

I'm doing it again now, having my main character think about where he was when humanity first encountered the aliens. He's with his two sisters, who are the other main characters, and the reader will get to see how they react to the event, and the reader will learn more about their relationships. In this way, I've got a scene that is interesting drama as we watch the characters interact, but at the same time I'm sprinkling in my info-dump, and the reader will care because it directly relates to the characters. Readers like to pick up a book for its ideas, but they like to keep reading for the characters.

Hope that's helpful. Just look at what info you need to give the reader, then think of a way your characters can relate and react to that info and create a scene out of it. You end up using more words than a regular info-dump, but you will keep your readers' interest, and develop your characters at the same time.

De-Was/Were

2006-03-01T06:51:00.000-05:00

Fiction is about things happening, and there is only one kind of word that is devoted to things happening; verbs.

"Put the power of the sentence into the verbs."

This is one of the most basic rules of writing, but it's worth discussing for that reason alone. The most eloquent sentence can be undone by a dull verb, and there are no verbs more dull than the state-of-being verbs—is, are, was, and were. They mean what their name implies. They denote existence and nothing else.

One of the first things I do when I finish a first draft is to "de-was/were" it. I try not to write them in the first place, but if I catch a lame sentence like, "He was by the road," I cringe and then go to work to see if I can make that all-important verb do some real work. There are times, of course, when a good "was" just works, so leave it, but make sure you at least question it before leaving it in.

What does "He was by the road" actually say? A male existed near a road. We could spice it up with some extra verbs, a la, "He was standing by the road," and get some more info, but it's still pretty boring. But how about, "He stood by the road?" It says nearly the same thing in fewer words, and now we've got the action attributed a little more closely to the man. So we've eliminated the state-of-being verb, but we're still left with a dull verb: stood. Now is the time to get creative and put the power of the sentence into the verb.

There are 50 different ways to stand. You can slouch, stand erect, hang, droop, wobble, ready yourself to jump, lean, shake, and sway. If your character needs to be unmoving by the side of the road, think about what kind of pseudo-synonym for "stand" might convey more information to your reader. "He wavered by the road." Here we see the guy swaying by the side of the road, perhaps from fatigue or from the narrator's impaired eyesight. Who knows, but it's more than what was just there.

And less. In one of my future columns, I'll talk about spreading out information across sentences and across whole stories, but a pinch of it shows up here. "He wavered…" does not connote very much about standing. It sort of half-suggests standing, as if you'd lost some of the meaning of the original sentence. If you were to just replace "standing" in your sentence with "wavering," you'd likely find that the reader no longer has a clear idea if the person is on his feet at all. That's when you have to take a good look at the surrounding sentences to see if you can inject the other half of the meaning of "being on one's feet" into them. "He stumbled across the bright desert sand and stopped. He wavered by the roadside." The preceding sentence fed the reader the first half of the standing information, and the "wavered" gave them the second half—and you never had to use the bland word "standing." Don't be afraid to alter other sentences if it helps you remove a boring "was." *(Again, in a future column I'll talk about breaking up and spreading ideas, plot, characterizations, meanings, etc., across a story, and why you'd want to do it.)

De-was/wereing can also help you to eliminate passive sentences. "The ball was caught by her," is passive because the subject, the ball, isn't doing the action of catching. "She caught the ball" gets the same info across in fewer words, and more closely links the woman to the action. But don't believe the hype that all passive sentences are evil. They're perfect in certain spots. Just don't overuse them.

De-was/wereing a manuscript also tends to highlight adverb abuse. Adverbs should only be used when you can't find a verb that will do all the work by itself. And state-of-being verbs are doing zero work. "He was running quickly" can be de-was/wered to "He ran quickly," but take the cue and realize that this is an opportunity to put the power of the sentence into the verb, not the adverb! Find a verb that means "ran quickly," and specifically one that has connotations you're trying to instill in the reader's head. "He tore past…" sounds like desperation; "He drove on through…" sounds like a powerful motion; "He jogged…" sounds like he's in no huge hurry and has been running a while; "He sprinted…" has the ring of levity and fleet-footedness.

Put the power of the sentence into the verb. A good verb will replace your state-of-being verb and your adverb and will give you nuances your sentence and story didn't have before. When you're done with your first draft, do a search for "was" and get to work.

Promise and Perspective and Puzzle Box Tops

2006-02-24T13:29:00.000-05:00

My file of writing notes to myself starts with a list I call, for lack of imagination, "The 10 P's." For a reason I can't remember, each bullet starts with a "P," so there you go. I never said I was sophisticated. The list is a checklist of sorts to keep myself in line when writing. I'll no doubt address it several times in future columns, but here it is, with the P's in no particular order: Plot, People, Place, Prose, Presence, Promise, Perspective, Pace, Point, Poetic Truth.

I'm going to look at the middle two: Promise and Perspective. I know it sounds like a Jane Austen novel, but the reader's perspective of the story arises from the promise the author makes in the beginning. They're linked.

A few years ago I saw the movie "Magnolia." The final scene has all the characters listening to the same radio station at the same time and hearing a lovely Amy Mann song. It was the movie's most powerful moment, and while I didn't really enjoy the movie, it did end on a strong note and will have me thinking about how that scene pulled the rest of the movie together. The scene faded to black and silence.

And then faded back in and the story kept going.

It turned out that we weren't even halfway through the film yet. Why then did I, and several others in the audience, assume it was the end? Because the film did not give its viewers a sense of perspective – a sense of the scope the film encompassed. What was it trying to achieve? Where was it going?

In the beginning of a story, you make your reader a promise. You are telling the reader that you have something worth telling them, and asking them to give you their time. You are promising them a reward of a certain sort. Let's take Star Wars as an example, since it's nice and formulaic and everybody's seen it.

We start off with ships shooting at each other. This says to us viewers [war, struggle]. Next, we've got mean-looking guys shooting nicer-looking guys [the bad guys are stronger]. We have a princess sending a desperate message for help in a 'droid [we need you to win].

That's it. The promise has been made. We know who's side we're identifying with, and what the number one conflict is, and what is needed for "our" side to win this struggle. It's about as simple a promise as you can make. And note, none of it has anything to do with Luke Skywalker, who ends up being the hero of the story. Doesn't matter. Even before the opening scene has ended, we have a perspective on what the entire movie is about. We have a strong sense of what we'd like to see in this movie and a strong belief that the movie is going to deliver it for us. As the story moves along, we can see how each scene and everyone's actions play into this overall perspective. It's like working a puzzle – if you've got the box-top picture, you know where each piece you're handed goes. If you don't have the picture, you're handed these pieces and have no idea what you're supposed to make of them.

Now, one of my pet peeves is reading a story in which I can tell the author didn't have the box top either.

Many authors write by starting with an interesting scene or situation and watching as the idea and characters develop. I've done it. Everybody does it. There's nothing wrong with writing that way. But when the author starts without a sense of perspective – without the fore-knowledge of where the story is going and what it's going to do for the reader – the author is wandering around with the reader. Too often I can spot exactly where the original idea lost steam for the author and the author figured out he had to put an end on the story. How often have you read a story that started out with a really interesting premise, developed it well, and then seemed to come to a weak and unsatisfying end? Part of that problem is that the author set up a promise in the beginning that he didn't pull off in the end. Especially in science fiction, an idea can seem to have incredible opportunities and it's exciting to read along and see how the characters deal with that idea, but promising that you have a unique insight into a new idea, and delivering it, are two very different things.

In a recent issue of Asimov's Science Fiction, was a story about a young woman who essentially gets a personality transplant. She and her parents struggled with the issues raised by a new personality in an otherwise familiar body. The idea was engrossing and the story was very well told. How would it be resolved? The girl wanted to be recognized for her newness. Her parents wanted her to be their old daughter. Society seemed not to know what to do with her. I thought the writing was very well done, and the idea quite fresh. But, as one reader said, I was ready to pencil it in for a Nebula nomination, but by the end of the story I put my pencil down. Why? Because I could see the exact moment when the author was confronted with the promise he'd made the reader, and he realized he couldn't deliver. The story ended without resolution. Sure, that's more like real life. Since when do all loose ends get tied up in real life? But this isn't real life; it's fiction. That doesn't mean anybody has to "win," but that the conflict has to be addressed and resolved (note, I did not say "overcome." Characters can win, lose, or even change the rules to nullify the conflict, but don't let them all but dismiss it).

I should note that I really enjoyed the story, and still see it as one of the best of the year. If it had delivered on its promise, I would say it ranked as the best I'd read in 2005.

I said I do this same kind of writing as often as not. So how do I deal with it? I write what I call a proto-draft. It's not even a first draft. It's not worthy of being called a first draft because it's still too exploratory. As I write along, exploring the topic and the characters, I reach that same moment when I realize how I want the story to end. At that point, I stop, essentially chuck the proto-draft, and then begin again. This time, in the real first draft, I know from the first word what the last one will be. I suddenly have the box-picture in my mind. I know what I can promise the reader because I know what I'm going to deliver at the end.

As an example, I'm struggling with this issue right now. I'm writing an old fashioned space battle story. Aliens vs. humans. Space ships, exotic weapons, and ruthless bad guys. I'm just letting my inner child go nuts. But the setup is over this alien-human clash. The implied promise is that this clash will be resolved. But guess what? I don't know how to truly resolve an interstellar war with just a few characters. If I can't figure out a way to do it, then I'm going to have to change that promise in the beginning. If the real conflict is about a certain character in this war instead, then I'm going to have to rewrite the beginning so I'm not promising something I can't deliver. I'm in the proto-draft stage now. I'm nearing the point where I'll either figure out how to logically and satisfactorily address the conflict of the war, or I'll rework the story to be about the conflicts of people in the war. Either way, I have to fulfill my promise to the reader.

Deliver what you promise. Promise only what you can deliver. Give the reader the perspective, the box top, and then give them the story one dazzling puzzle piece at a time.

Forget the Audience, Who Are You Writing For?

2006-02-24T13:24:00.000-05:00

In a writing class of mine was one writer whose story was actually painful to read. It was so overwrought with lurid, convoluted language that often his sentences made no sense at all. All of his characters were martial-arts supermen. All of his characters were philosophers. All of his characters were the strong, silent, mysterious type. As I slogged my way through his story, I wondered how he could read his own writing and not see what was blindingly clear to everyone else.

And then he started discussing his story and the answer was obvious.

He was speaking just like his characters. He was laboring to use Latinate phrases and obscure words that didn’t quite mean what he was trying to make them mean. He was young, and a little nervous, and he was trying to project an image of a learned, confident, mysterious philosopher. If he’d had an opportunity to demonstrate some martial arts, he probably would have done that as well.

He was trying to project an image of himself to the reader the same way he was trying to project an image to those of us in the room. And that got me thinking about who or what we are writing our stories for. I think it breaks down to three reasons that I think most of us have to work through:

1) You’re writing so readers will say, “You’re cool.”

2) You’re writing so readers will say, “This story is cool.”

3) You’re writing so readers will say, “Life is cool.”

The earlier writer was writing at stage one. He was writing with himself in mind. “What will the reader think of me when they read that part?” Maybe it’s possible to write something good this way, but I can’t do it and I can’t see how to do it. A reader is giving you some of their precious time, and what they want is something in return. You’d better deliver it, because writing a story with yourself in mind is the equivalent of cornering someone at a party and grilling them on what they think about you. Nobody wants to be in that position. More often than not, you want the reader to forget there is even an author involved. This is how people can love stories by authors they hate personally; the author disappeared in the reading. If you find yourself thinking about what the reader will think of you as you write each word, it might be time to stop and consider why you’re writing the piece to begin with.

“This story is cool.” Hey, that’s about the best praise any writer is going to get. This is when you’re confident enough to not care what the reader thinks of you, and competent enough to hide yourself from view. When you choose the next word, you’re thinking, “What will this do to the reader’s opinion of the story?” You’re seeing the story as a work of art, and you’re creating it to be admired like a sculpture in a museum; lots of people standing around and saying, “Wow. That’s cool.” You get the pride of being its creator, but you’re a separate entity—it’s not about you.

For what it’s worth, I think most stories I read fall into this category. I like to read story-centric pieces and I write a lot of story-centric pieces, but it does have one main drawback in that it’s somewhat meaningless. To stretch the museum analogy further, it’s like people admiring your sculpture, only to forget about it when they leave the museum. The art, the impact, of your work stays sitting in the museum. What you want is for that impact to infect everyone who sees it, and to leave the museum in the hearts of all of them.

That’s the last stage: “Life is cool.” I think the stories that resonate with people, that become classics, that leave the museum with people, are the ones in which the author is not concentrating on impressing the reader with himself, and is not concentrating on creating a stand-alone work of art, but rather is concentrating fully on the reader. This is when you are choosing the word and thinking, “What will this do to the reader’s opinion of herself? Of her outlook on life?” If you write with that in mind, I believe you write a piece that has real meaning. This is where not only the author disappears, but the story itself disappears. The reader is no longer thinking along the lines of a story, but along the lines of how they are feeling and responding. You probably love when you close a book or short story and have to stare out the window for a few minutes because you’re seeing the world a little differently. You’ve taken the art’s impact out of the museum with you, and will probably carry it around now for life.

Give your readers that same gift.

Surprising Inevitability and the Slight of Hand

2006-02-24T11:46:00.000-05:00

I have a mantra I keep in my head as I write: Make every word, every sentence, and every scene do more than one thing. I'll write a column on this someday, but essentially I try to make a sentence tell the reader something about the characters involved, advance the plot, set the mood, and anything else I can cram into it. It's rare that this cramming goes overboard - it's much more likely that my sentence will be too light.

When writing the first draft of Fathom, I got stuck in a scene and had to stop and backtrack. I realized I was force-feeding the reader story elements that were needed to advance the plot, and the force-feeding was obvious because nothing else was going on in that passage. The characters were discussing philosophy, which was necessary for the reader to understand in order for the climax to work, but the sentences involved weren't doing anything else. It was obvious that I was trying to shove this philosophy at the reader. I sat down to try to rethink how to stick to my mantra of "do more than one thing," when the link between "do more than one thing" and "surprising inevitability" jumped out at me.

"Surprising inevitability" is a concept in fiction that has its roots in the twist ending, but works pretty well when used subtly in nearly any ending. In the twist ending, you are expecting one thing to happen, but then you are surprised by a twist. If the story is good you then realize that the twist was actually inevitable the whole time, but you weren't looking at the story in the right context. Humor and fiction both play off this re-contexting notion. Take the Mary Poppins joke: "I met this man with a wooden leg named Smith." "Oh really? What was his other leg named?" The change of context is the only thing that makes that joke work. You don't have to have a surprising-yet-inevitable-in-retrospect ending to a story, but its a technique that works.

So I discovered, while puzzling out why that scene wasn't working, how I use "do more than one thing" to achieve "surprising inevitability."

I think of it as slight of hand. A magician keeps you watching his right hand while his left is setting up the trick. In the same way I try to write "foreground text" which is up front and dominates the reader's attention. At the same time I am writing "background text" which is the stuff I want the reader to pick up, but not utilize yet. And I have a third text, which I call "relationship text" that I try to infuse into most sentences.

I think I can only show this by example: I have two people talking. I need the reader to understand certain aspects of philosophy involving memory, but I can't just have them talk about it because it feels forced and obvious. The philosophy needs to be part of the background text that the reader will take in like a wooden horse, and which I can utilize unexpectedly later. But I have to make the reader believe this passage exists for a completely different and legitimate purpose. The best way to do this is... to give the passage another, legitimate, purpose. The tension in the scene is created with the foreground text. One of the people in the scene will be going to war, but neither knows who it will be yet. The topic of war atrocities comes up, and how people in battle deal with the horrors of war by blocking it out of their minds. This raises the topic of memory and how it functions in people as a defense mechanism. The more they talk about the way war can destroy your mind, the more tense they become, since they still don't know who will have to go. While the reader is (hopefully) absorbed in the rising tension, he or she is also taking in those philosophical points about memory.

The result was that I had a scene that worked - two people getting tense and trying to understand their situation - completely on the foreground level. In the meantime, the philosophy they were discussing and its implications were laid down in the reader's mind in the background.

The relationship text is slightly different, but similar. Especially in dialogue, chose your words to illustrate the relationship between characters. You greet your business partner much differently than you greet your lover, so don't use "Hi. How are you?" for either. Show their relationship in their word choice ("You look well today" - "Well, don't you look delicious."), their pauses, their gestures, their eye contact, and especially what they don't say. Think about the relationships involved in every sentence you write.

In the end, the foreground text that moves the reader from scene to scene leads the reader to the end of the story, and at that end, the culmination of the background text is revealed and the reader's sense of context shifts. Again, this is not necessarily a twist ending; it's understanding what you've read in a new light. With luck, the reader will see the story and its topics in a new light he didn't even know he was absorbing. He might see that a woman he thought was struggling against physics was actually struggling against her own morality. Or that a man who seemed to fear imprisonment actually feared the responsibilities of freedom. I enjoy reading this kind of story, and it's the kind I try to write.

You may be thinking that all this is obvious, and it is. My "epiphany" wasn't about the idea itself, but in understanding the machinations of it. I now have a tool I didn't have a few months ago. When I lay out a scene, I do most of this work subconsciously, but I now have a way to check that a scene is going to do what I need it to before I start writing it. I can now easily ask myself, What will the foreground text say? What will the background text say? What will the relationship text say? If I can answer these questions, I write much stronger scenes, characters, and stories.

Reviews

2006-02-14T13:14:00.000-05:00

Below are all the reviews I know of for "Under the Graying Sea." If you happen to know of one I missed, please let me know. Thanks.
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Internet Review of Science Fiction – Lois Tilton, 1/10/06

Ignition.

Tessa’s head snapped back in its cradle and her lips slid away from her teeth. The shock slapped the fog off the inside of her helmet and misted her face.

This is science fiction. Hard science fiction — the Real Stuff, not the so-called “hard SF” that’s nothing more than galactic adventures and thrilling space battles, in which a futuristic veneer overlays the fantastic core. Here, the wormhole is the only concession to unreality. Very rarely do we see this kind of fiction these days, and more rarely still do we see it done this well.

The story is not a complex one. Tessa’s destination is the remote ring of a star bridge in transit, a wormhole portal that, once in place, will enable travel from Earth to another world. She has piloted many of these missions, but this time she discovers that a nearby singularity has pulled the ring off-course, with potentially disastrous consequences. Now she must work against time to solve the problem by doing math. I am not the reviewer to check the author’s calculations, but Sherwood writes his physics with such authority that I feel no tremor of doubt threatening my suspended disbelief. Nor does he neglect the human element. As time inexorably runs out, the tension rises; readers can feel the sense of urgency driving Tessa’s desperate efforts.

According to the editorial blurb, this is Sherwood’s first fiction sale. Science fiction now seems a bit less moribund.

Tangent Short Fiction Review – Suzanne Church, 12/10/05

The hard Science Fiction offering in the issue is Jonathan Sherwood’s "Under the Graying Sea." Right from the first sentence, Tessa is in danger, thrusting through massive gees in her Concussion Vehicle (CV) with her partner, Loránd, slingshotting around the moon to enter a man-made wormhole. The two pilots' bodies have been reinforced to withstand up to twenty-four gees, but the CV malfunctions and they pull thirty-two-point-eight, causing life-threatening injuries to Loránd. Stuck over two light years from Earth and forced to wait over four hours for their return window, Tessa busies herself checking "Betty," the wormhole anchor, and discovers the multiple course adjustments that Betty has made since the last human inspection: a gravity well. Sherwood intertwines flashbacks about Tessa's relationship with her father, her first exposure to the wormhole project, and her fear of the gray sea of space. As she fights to save her partner's life and solve the problem of Betty's decaying flight path, Sherwood packs the prose with scientific details. Filled with suspense, passion, and cleverness, "Under the Graying Sea" stands above the other stories as the strongest contribution to the issue.

SF Revu - Sam Tomaino, January 2006

"Under the Graying Sea" by Jonathan Sherwood is a nice little story and a great debut for this new author. It is the story of Tessa, an astronaut with a very important job. She is part of a team that must regularly journey to the end of a wormhole to monitor the progress of the "ring" on the other side. This has been done many times and is part of a long ongoing process. But this trip is anything but routine. Sherwood gives us a notable story of heroism and sacrifice. Watch for more from him in the future.

Locus – Nick Gevers, January 2006

“Under the Graying Sea” by Jonathan Sherwood gushes forth scientific jargon like an Analog story on speed, only to reverse the formula at the very end.

Grumpy Alien Reviews - Susan Urbanek Linville, January 2006

"Under the Graying Sea," Jonathan Sherwood: Even though this seemed more like a story you'd see in Analog, the scientific jargon didn't interrupt the character story. Good show. ***+ Beef stew for all.