Category Archives: fiction

fiction, Writing

Why Do So Many Write Fantasy?

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I can’t remember if I’ve written about this before, but will plunge ahead without checking my archives.

At Rachelle Gardner’s blog, she has been posting a workshop on verbal pitches. One type of verbal pitch is called the “elevator” pitch. You want to be ready with that, the saying goes, in case you board an elevator at a conference at the same time as an agent or editor, who then asks, “Are you a writer? What are you working on? I get off at the tenth floor.” You have 30 seconds to tell about your book in so compelling a way that the agent or editor hands you a business card and says, “Send me your proposal.”

Talk about stressful! It’s never happened quite like that for me, but other occasions have arisen where a short, verbal pitch was called for. So I’m interested in what Rachelle has to say about this. Today she invited people to post their elevator pitch in a comment. She’s now up to 68 comments, of which 47 are the requested pitch (one of them mine). Of those 47, at least 3/4 are for some type of fantasy or science fiction book. Rachelle doesn’t represent authors of those books. This is the second or third time where people in long threads on her blogs have identified their genre, and each time it’s this many or more who write science fiction. If she doesn’t represent it, why are so many people following her blog?

And why are so many people writing fantasy? and, to a lesser extent, science fiction? Is the market so large that we need that many books? I don’t read much of it (a little science fiction from time to time but not recent time, and a little fantasy). I have a theory on this; don’t know if I’m correct.

Besides that fact that a lot of people do enjoy fantasy and sci-fi, I think a lot of authors choose it because they believe they do not therefore have to do any research. In fantasy just create your world and go to it. In sci-fi, determine your future time and the technology needed and go to it. No research required.

I’m not saying no research required, but I suspect that is a huge inducement to writers. It would make those books seem easier to write than, say, a historical romance. Or even a contemporary novel, which requires accuracy as to settings and circumstances. In a fantasy, who’s to say what accuracy is? Create your world and run with it.

I’m sure, however, that the greater amount of time spent creating the fantasy world (i.e. the equivalent of research) the better the novel will be. So if a budding novelist really wants to be published in these genres, they still have to do the “research” in order to write the best book possible.

So says me. Waiting to hear from others.

Doctor Luke's Assistant, fiction, Fifty Thousand Screaming People, Writing

Literary Villains: Is the Conventional Wisdom Right?

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Attend any class on writing fiction and before long you will hear this mantra: Your heroes must have some faults and your villains must have some good traits. You can’t make your heroes so ooey-gooey nice and perfect that they are unbelievable. And you can’t make your villains so absolutely awful that there is nothing redeemable in them. Well, you can, but your novel will be the worse for your doing so.

This was news to me when I first heard this in a fiction writing class at a writers conference, but it kind of makes sense. Fictional characters ought to reflect real life to some extent. Few people in real life are totally good or totally bad. Actually, I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say no one is totally good or totally bad. Even if a novel is fantasy, and doesn’t include humans at all, we human readers judge the novel by our human experience, and the non-human characters must be believable and real based on our human experiences.

But in literature, is this true? Do successful writers always give their heroes faults and their villains virtues? For heroes, I think this is probably true. A big part of any heroes’ quest is to overcome obstacles, both those that the world throws at them and those that are within them. But for villains, is this so?

I’m thinking of the Harry Potter series, and of Harry and Voldemort. Now, I must preface this by saying I’ve not read the books! I intend to, and will be doing so within a year, I think. I’m basing this on the movies. I’ve seen all seven, and those who have both read the books and seen the movies indicate the movies are fairly faithful to the books. Harry has his faults. We easily see this in his movie portrayal. But does Voldemort have any virtues?

I looked hard for Voldemort virtues in the movies, and haven’t found any. I suppose you might say he has a virtue of making an accurate assessment of his chances in a fight against Harry. He says he could not overcome Harry’s wand and that Harry has a type of wizardry, provided by Lily Potter, that he, Voldemort, needs something more to overcome. He doesn’t pump himself up by ascribing his failure to kill Harry to bad luck. But that’s a pretty small virtue, I think.

We might be able to have some sympathy for Voldemort based on the circumstances of his birth and parentage. But sympathy and virtue are not the same.

So, as I write my fiction and flesh out characters, I wonder just how much virtue I should add to the antagonists, the villains. What good characteristics should I give to Tony Mancuso, the Mafia Don who wants to prevent the success of phenom pitcher Ronny Thompson, the hero of my In Front of Fifty Thousand Screaming People? Should I add a couple of good characteristics to Claudius Aurelius, the corrupt government official who want to stop Luke from writing a biography of Jesus in Doctor Luke’s Assistant? I’ve worked hard to give these villains some redeeming qualities, but I’m wondering if it’s a waste of time. Perhaps readers like their villains to be really, really bad—to hate them thoroughly, not to feel a smidgen of sympathy for them. Certainly, if Voldemort’s abject villainy contributes to the success of the Harry Potter books, one would think that is the case.

What say you, my few readers? Do you want the villains in the novels you read to have a virtue or two? Do you want to feel some sympathy for the antagonist, and think, “Oh, if only his parents had treated him better he wouldn’t have turned out so bad.”? Or do you just want to hate the villain and love the hero?

An inquiring novelist wants to know.

career, fiction, Fifty Thousand Screaming People, non-fiction, Screwtape's Good Advice

Shifting Gears

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The month of June, what time I could spend on writing, was mostly on miscellaneous tasks that had fallen by the wayside for a while, and on pulling together the proposal for Screwtape’s Good Advice. With that in the mail last Wednesday, I turned my attention to the proposal for In Front of Fifty-Thousand Screaming People, my baseball thriller. I first started on the proposal, and tidied up the synopsis and wrote the sell sheet. Actually, I did some of this overlapping the SGA proposal, while waiting on my beta readers to respond. I did some market research, and figured out what books out now would be reasonably like mine.

Then I turned to, or rather returned to, writing the book. I began FTSP in June 2004, after pitching the idea to an editor at a conference. At that time all I had was a concept with some plot outline. He liked the idea, and said to send him a few chapters. So I quickly pounded out a prologue an two chapters and sent them. He still liked the concept, but wasn’t as thrilled with the writing as I would have liked. I set the book aside, partly not knowing what to do, and partly from the busyness of life.

Over the next three years I pulled it out and worked on it from time to time. I ditched the prologue, as the editor suggested, and polished the writing of the first two chapters. I added a third and polished it. I began a fourth. An idea came to me for a scene well into the book, which I thought would be about 2/3 the way through, and I wrote that. I worked on a plot outline and character development, writing page-long essays in the words of the four main characters, stating in their own words what their motivations were for the events in the book. But I did not do any serious writing, continuous writing for days in a row, as I had done with Doctor Luke’s Assistant.

Friday night I decided I’d better get back to this. The agent wants the first thirty pages with the proposal, and when I merged chapters 1, 2, 3, and the partial 4 I had only twenty pages. I figured out what to do with Chapter 4, and finished it as a short chapter. The plot analysis I had done as part of writing the synopsis told me I had to move the scene I thought would be 2/3 the way through to become the first plot point, meaning it needs to be 1/4 to 1/3 the way through. I did that, and made a couple of related changes. Then I sat down on Friday, Independence Day, to write the fifth chapter, intending to do serious writing.

Lo and behold, I couldn’t write it! I wrote “Chapter 5” at the top of a re-use page, then sat there, not sure what to do. My plotting did not get down to the level where I had to plan what the next chapter would be about. Yesterday (Saturday), I went back to it and managed to write about half a page. That was a start, but not the type of progress I needed to make. Was this a case of writer’s block, my first? I have had times when I was not motivated to write for various reasons, usually the whirlwind of life causing my brain to shut down for a while, but never have the words not come to me when I wanted them to.

After a while the reason for this inability to add this chapter became clear. For the last seven months I have been concentrating on non-fiction as a probable easier way to break into publishing, and purposely laid fiction aside. I brainstormed the SGA book and began it. I turned my Elijah and Elisha study into a potential book and brainstormed it. I thought about ten other Bible/small group studies I could write as follow-ups. A fruitful career as a writer of Bible and small group studies danced before my eyes in waking moments, and through the subconscious in sleeping moments. I had done no fiction writing at all, until after the Blue Ridge conference, with the interest of an agent staring me in the face, I at least read my manuscript and made some edits. I shared chapters 1 and 2 with my new critique group, and received feedback. Now that I’m ready to return to fiction, I can’t get my mind around it.

It’s hard to change gears between fiction and non-fiction–at least it is for me, this first time to do so. What will the future hold? If my career goes the way I want it to (at this stage of my “career”), I will be switching regularly between fiction and non-fiction. I’d better learn to shift those gears effortlessly, on a day to day basis if necessary. This will be especially true if I follow-through with plans to market and publish the Documenting America newspaper column.

Help! I’m a prisoner of a career that hasn’t even started yet.

The good news is that, as I fell asleep Saturday night, a scene late in the book came to me. I wrote it mentally lying in bed, then wrote it on paper Saturday morning. Today, while eating lunch, the way to write chapter 5 came to me, and I’ll be hitting the keys for that after I finish this post. So maybe the gears shifted over the last couple of days. May it be so.