Casey vs The Janitors Chapter 4: St Crispin, a chuck fanfic - FanFiction.Net

Casey vs The Janitors Chapter 4: St Crispin, a chuck fanfic - FanFiction.Net

This one was pretty difficult, for a variety of reasons. Mainly because I have little experience writing fight scenes. I don't like them much, mainly because I don't have any interest in following individual swordstrokes, or punches, or whatever. That sort of stuff belongs in the 'descriptive prose' section of the stuff that I don't like.
In a similar vein, I don't want to write stuff that I don't know much about. Since I have no training in any of the martial arts and no desire to research them just so I can fake it, I'd rather not write about them. Which makes writing a scene primarily about combat rather difficult.
What I'm much more interested in is the character's reaction to the combat, his feelings about it. Which, since most combat training is intended to make these actions as reflexive and thought-free as possible, is rather difficult.
Then came the Shakespeare. I had no intention to make a Casey a Shakespeare-o-phile, but it seems perfectly natural to me that he be so, especially of the St. Crispin's Day speech. But is that any reason to use that speech as the motif of a story that I already couldn't write, thus ramping up the difficulty level a few more notches?
Well, yes. I like to challenge myself. Most of my fanfic writing is a challenge to myself, a challenge to write in different forms and modes than I would normally use, such as the purely narrative chapters of Not This Time. I enjoy writing contests for the same reason. Some of my best stories come from a simple request, a challenge to write a story that combines elements I would never have combined on my own. And if you want a motif to pattern your story on, you can certainly do worse than Shakespeare. Some people learn by reading. I learn by doing.
This is me doing.

Chuck vs the Epilog, a chuck fanfic - FanFiction.Net

Chuck vs the Epilog, a chuck fanfic - FanFiction.Net

Why fantasy?

In my stories, some characters are gods, others are monsters. Some use swords, others slings and staves, and a few cast magic spells as fast as they can sing. They travel between worlds, righting wrongs simply because they are wrongs. But I really don’t think of myself as a fantasy novelist.

In my latest novel the hero is a former operative in the Space service, currently hunting werewolves. But I don’t really count myself a futuristic paranormal or scifi writer either.

It’s easy to pigeonhole a book based on such elements. “Oh, it’s got magic, must be fantasy.” Yet how many threads have we all read where people debate where the distinction lies between SF and fantasy, and whether Star Trek is one, or Star Wars the other, and what the hell do we do about Space Opera? Swords and spaceships are just trappings, however. Clarke’s Law can be stood on its head easily enough, and Heinlein has cast more than a few spells in his day, calling it the highest of tech. Some of the best fantasy novels feature the introduction of technologies, and not a few scifi novels open doors to magical realms. The secret is not in the trappings but what they represent: Order v. Chaos. A device that breaks the rules is fantasy, a spell crafted according to a procedure is scifi. Men who transcend the powers of nature are fantasy heroes, gods who fail when men fail belong to a scifi universe.

I don’t write fantasy or SF, though, because my books don’t really care about the trappings. I write characters and their purposes. In the very first review of my work that I ever received, it was compared to a famous work of mythology, of which I had never heard to that point. Shortly after reading up on the Chinese Monkey God, I came across a movie featuring him as a character. Small world. Maybe. More recently I combined several mythologies on purpose to explain vampires, and my current novel is centered around Jasec, teller of tales and keeper of lore. My stories are about people making lemonade, as we all do, but with fantasy lemons.

Which, to my mind, makes them fables, and there’s no publishing category for that.

Stop trying to write me and write me!

Writer's block is not something I usually suffer from. Sorry. 'From which I usually suffer.' It's my internal editor/critic who causes most of my problems.

As a pantser I usually just follow my characters around and see what they do, with only an idea of a plot which is usually embedded in the situation. Joseph Marquand is a werewolf hunter investigating a werewolf attack on a lunar base populated by two different types of werewolves. What happens next? Well, it depends on which character you're following. My storyteller Jasec is telling tales to a variety of listeners. What he tells and how he tells it varies with his audience and his purpose, a larger context that has a life of its own.

Sometimes the story I try to tell is not the story I thought I was telling. I try to find the logic of the characters, figure out what they'll do in a given situation. But characters, if they're created right to begin with, aren't necessarily logical, any more than any other person. If they were perfectly logical they'd be computers or Vulcans, both of whom make boring lead characters. In order to make them interesting we have to give them human characteristics, at the risk of having them act OOC or completely upset the internal dynamic of the universe we write in. If Vulcans start acting like us, only with their greater strength, intelligence, and lifespans, why are humans the dominant power in the Federation? If vampires are just super-sexy, bloodsucking people, why wouldn't everyone on Earth want to be one? Where's the downside?

All of which is just my way of saying that I'm straying from the point. A properly made character does what he wants to do, and trying to force him to do the logical thing, or the plot-advancing thing, just ain't gonna work. Men usually don't know what the plot of their lives is, and they wouldn't necessarily go out of their way to advance it if they did. A character who only did that sort of thing would be a cardboard cutout, and no one would care.

So I don't suffer from writer's block, but I do suffer from character-block. Sometimes they just don't want to do what I want them to do, and the story won't let me write it until I stop trying to write some other story.

Hasn't this ever happened to you?

My word

I’m writing Scripture today. It feels strange, me being an adherent of no religion.

But that doesn’t mean I have no faith. All men have faith, they must, too much of the world is beyond our direct experience, and even that assumes that our senses are accurate and reliable, as Descartes pointed out long ago. We believe, we have faith, that our senses are veridical. We believe that others are telling us the truth (i.e., beliefs that they hold to be true), perhaps not so much lately. We believe that while others may not all mean us well, neither do they mean us harm. These beliefs may not be true but we have to believe that they or some beliefs like them are true, otherwise there is no trust and the systems that make our society function break down. Law is no substitute for trust and faith. Neither is religion or government. These ‘shared faiths’, mere instruments, unify and strengthen that society, but they do not make it. Mistaking the substitute for the source can even have pernicious effects in the end.

My writing is set in worlds where common action is much more necessary than it is in our own. Religious and political structures are therefore much more important, but since I also do not write in this world I cannot and do not use our religions. Religions serve a purpose, and creating one deliberately is difficult work. I model my religions on some of the religions we have created for ourselves, trying to do justice to the spirit of the enterprise.

There are people for whom this is not good enough. The light in their eyes goes out, their faces fall, the instant I use the word ‘gods’ rather than ‘God’. I consider this unfortunate. Equally unfortunate is the tendency I see in many fantasy and science fiction novels to either have no religion at all (substituting something else for the substitute) or treating it as automatically pernicious. This is not helpful. Priests are not merely power-hungry tyrants manipulating the fears of the peasantry and aristocracy alike in order to…well,whatever, but usually to stamp out the wizards. Which always struck me as odd, since clearly in worlds where magic worked, any monarch would want to have it in his arsenal, but I digress. Off the top of my head I can only recall Katherine Kurtz’ Deryni books and C. Dale Brittain’s books as portraying established religion in a more tolerant light. I would be interested to learn of others.

Joy of Pantsing

One of the benefits of being a pantser is the joy of discovery, that occasional event when you turn around and find something you never thought of but realize you can’t do without. A character waiting to be noticed, or a bit of history that you the author never knew about. I’ve had both happen to me. I remember when I was writing Off the Map, I was up half the night with all the ideas floating around, even the title, but that was a real woman I was writing about, a real life full of raw material.

When I was writing St. Martin’s Moon I discovered many of my characters (actually, I discovered all of them, that’s what I do), but one stands out, the Communications Officer, Candace. I discovered her when Marquand, the hero, just turned around and there she was, shining red hair and alpha as hell. I had no idea what I was supposed to do with her, but that was OK, because she and Marquand both knew what they wanted.

Just yesterday another character, in my WIP Tales of Uncle, also revealed himself to be a member of a religious sect called Upwellers. Further, he brought news that the city of Querd, introduced in my previous novel A Warrior Made, had pretty much self-destructed, while the Upweller sect was in disarray and many believed that the end of the world was near. And it was all the fault of my heroes. Now I have to figure out what they’ll do about it, if they do anything about it.

Then today, as I’m driving down the road, I had some further insights into where the story wants to go. The whole ending scenario was revealed to me, not only the Upweller’s destiny, but the golden throne, the Stone King, the Barren Birth. It’s just the most wonderful feeling in the world when so many little parts suddenly make sense like that.

Back to Backstory

Today’s topic is dream-sequences. It was going to be backstory but I’ve seen a lot of blog posts about backstory lately. Dream-sequences are a great way of handling backstory issues, perhaps my favorite way, which is why I thought of them.

The problem with backstory, of course, is that it’s inert, which is why it’s back and not frontstory. Frontstory is ert. We the authors have two choices, either leave backstory in some little lump somewhere, where it will be a great weight that slows our story down (Boo! Hiss!), or we can throw our backstory ruthlessly and without compunction into the hopper of our imagination and grind it into little tiny bits, so we can mix it in with our front story and no one will notice, but you get extra flavor and nutrition anyway. Yay, flavor and nutrition!

Dream-sequences are the Vita-Mixers of backstory, although Vita-Mixers don’t have hoppers. Mixed (get it? Mixed?) metaphors aside, dream sequences are great ways to include the backstory element, i.e., the content of the dream, into a front-story element, e.g., the dream itself, in such a way that it contributes to the development of the character and thus propels the story. If it’s done right. If not, it’s just dreck.

So, how do I do dream sequences? Since I believe in general that people mostly think in pictures, it follows that in a dream sequence, pictures will be almost the entirety of the content, if not all. If I do put in words, that will almost always be dialog, most likely a memory of something someone already said, and very short. Possibly musical. In St. Martin’s Moon, for example, Joseph Marquand has a dream in which, at one point, he hears someone calling his name down a stairwell, “Jo-ey. Jo-ey.” That sort of thing. The stairwell was current context, but the name was the name his girlfriend who died used to call him, thus bringing the girlfriend (whose name–don’t laugh–is Bing-Bang) and the horrific manner of her death into the present context, where…

I have an idea. Next post will be about flashbacks.