GENREALITY

Last year I wrote, sold and published my very first dangerous book; this year I’m going to write one just for me and a small circle of friends who are not writers. I’m not submitting it anywhere; my agent will never see it, and the only people who will be able to read it are those non-writer friends of mine.

Why would I do that when I could instead spend my time writing something that would earn me another nice pile of money? For the joy of it.

It sounds selfish, and in some ways it is, but there is more to writing than publishing, and more to this writer than selling everything I create. Although I occasionally write blog posts about my restoration work or a new addition to my collection, the fifteen years I’ve been working on it simply isn’t for sale or public consumption.

I’ve written a couple of quilt-making books (glorified chapbooks with pictures demonstrating techniques, to be honest) for my guild friends, but aside from some hand-written notes in my quilt diaries I’ve never written a book about my quilt collection, and I think it’s time I did before I drop dead and no one knows or remembers why the heck I owned fifty of the same pattern quilts. 

Along with being a serious quilt maker and conservator, I’ve also been a dedicated collector of double wedding ring quilts for about fifteen years.  Each of the quilts in my collection is a bit like one of my novel characters: it has a name, a personality and a backstory. Despite the fact that they’re all made with the same pattern, they’re all unique and very different from each other.  

I fell in love with the double wedding ring because my grandmother used that pattern to make the quilt I slept with every winter when I was little.  Yes, it was my security blanket, my very first wubbie, and I adored it. I would stretch out on that quilt and look all the little colorful patches and wonder what sort of clothes they had come from (Grandma never threw out any old garment she could cut up and use in a quilt.)

That first, wonderful double wedding ring quilt got very ragged over the years, and while I was off in the military, my mom threw it away (she’s not a quilt person.) And it broke my heart, so from that day on I searched for a double wedding ring quilt with a soft blue background made in the thirties. I also started making quilts myself around that time. Eventually I found one that is probably as close to my grandmother’s quilt as I’ll ever find:

It’s a bit too old to use on my bed now, but wherever I live, this quilt is always hanging on display somewhere in the house.

I know the stories involved with the wedding rings quilts that I’ve found, restored and collected aren’t going to set the world on fire. I imagine that unless you’re a quilter they’re pretty boring.  But I’ve always wanted to photograph my collection and put down on paper the stories that go with the quilts — not because my collection is important, but because it is important to me. 

Not all of my quilts are beautiful. I have a half-dozen in the collection that I take to shows and conferences to demonstrate just how much ugly you can make with this pattern:

There’s the rare antique wedding ring quilt with 72 small rings that I spent six months restoring, and that our dog chewed a hole through in fifteen minutes; that taught me that nothing is sacred to teething puppies.  I also have a great story about a rather homely-looking old gray and yellow quilt that my sixteen year old fell in love with and has me patch now about every six months so he doesn’t have to give it up.  In another five years I think it’ll be a completely new quilt.

Writing a book for the joy of it means telling stories and documenting things that have made life on this planet a little more bearable for you during your time here. Although some writers have no problem publishing that kind of personal book, to me it’s not something I can slap a price tag on and toss out to the world. I don’t believe everything we are has to be sacrificed on publishing’s altar.

Quilting is an old art, and traditional patterns and techniques will gradually be lost as the craft of making them inevitably fades from popularity.  You can buy beautiful quilts in any department store now, not that you should — the imported ones are made in sweatshops for pennies — and with the convenience of longarm quilting machines, hardly anyone hand quilts anymore.  In another fifty years quilt-making will likely be viewed something quaint but silly, like handmaking smocked dresses and tatting lace. 

I don’t think this book I’m going to write will exist much longer than my collection will, but you never know.  Maybe one of my great-great-grandkids will discover, as I did, a great love of quilts and their patterns and wonder about the people who used to make them.  Maybe they’ll dig through some old computer files and find the last e-copy of this book, and chuckle over the cheeky title I gave it:

And then I will have a chance to tell them all about the day I found our puppy under my sewing table, quietly chewing a hole through the binding I’d just hand-stitched on . . .

(This is part of an old lecture I used to give on branding through characterization, updated a bit — Lynn)

Most people don’t remember Lois McMaster Bujold’s titles, (including me, although I think one of them should have been titled “Cordelia’s Sucky Taste in Men”) but if you say “Miles Vorkosigan” people know the books and the author you’re talking about.

Miles is a pretty unforgettable character – screwed up before he was born, brilliant, privileged, tragic, stubborn and, like most cripples, inventive and resourceful. Why? Bujold paid as much if not more attention to building her character as she did her armies, worlds and political intrigues.

If a story is a vehicle, then characters are your drivers, passengers, mechanics, demolition experts and hit-and-run victims. They decide whether your story vehicle races or stalls. How well they’re written determines if anyone wants to come along on the ride.

When you start building characters, think of movies and TV for a minute, and how the icons of SF, Fantasy and horror are synonymous with their shows: Captain Kirk, Luke Skywalker, Buffy. Say those names and 99.9% of the time, people are going to know who you’re talking about.

Readers are people. Characters (usually) are people. The connections between readers and characters can be like real relationships. Many of my readers talk to me about my characters as if they’re real people that I have to take care of, instead of printed words on some paper. Why? Because when they’re reading my books (and sometimes even when they’re not) my characters are real to them.

You want to connect with your reader this way. You want them to care about what happens in your books. To do this, you have to give them characters they can identify with, which means no flat, two-dimensional narrative puppets, but characters who come off the paper and become real in their imaginations.

Your characters are your spokespeople. There is no better way to get a message, theme or idea across than to have them do it for you. But when you play it safe and create nice, PC, acceptable characters then you can’t expect them to relay any message to the reader other than “you should be nice, PC and acceptable.” You end up with mannequins instead of characters — and you end up being branded by a stiff.

One important thing to remember is that no one is perfect. If he/she is, we generally want to see them suffer extensively and die horrible deaths. At the same time, there’s a tendency among beginning writers to make their protagonists wonderful and perfect people who never ever do anything wrong – aka Mary Sues. So while you’re character building, be sure to balance each protagonist positive attributes with at least a few negative ones. Same goes for villains – you want a few positive attributes in with all those negatives.

Let’s take a look at some of the characters we have to play with in our novels, and the standard story placements for each:

The Protagonist or Hero/Heroine – commonly referred to as the Main Character (MC). The MC can be many things, but he or she in some way should be in the center of things for most of the book. Some writers believe the MC is the “good guy” but I tend to think of MCs as “The Gal/Guy who Just Might Learn Something”

Of all the characters we create, the MC is the one I can vote Most Likely to Brand an Author — which is also the reason most writers spend so much time with them, and with crafting them.

The danger of being permanently branded by one MC is a hazard series writers have to wrestle with most frequently. If you only write one series forever, you’re fine, but if you’d like to branch out and do more you can find yourself trapped by the brand created by your first series MC.

The Antagonist or Villain – the traditional opposition or foe of the MC, aka the character Most Likely to Make Trouble for everyone. I admit, I do think of the antagonist as the “bad guy” but they’re not always bad or evil at all. Sometimes they’re just the guy on the other side. But in most stories, the MC is matter, and the antagonist is anti-matter.

Less popular than the hero, the antagonist that has the most potential to brand an author is the one who also plays the MC (or the anti-hero); I’ll come back to this a little further on.

The Sidekick and the Igor – Just as The Lone Ranger needed Tonto to keep his butt out of a sling, so the protagonist and the antagonist often need a buddy to do the same thing. Sidekicks are the characters who support the MC, while Igors are the ones who are helping the antagonist mix things up.

These are wonderful characters to write but generally not branding material. I think it’s a matter of logistics; they simply don’t spend enough time on stage.

The Dark Horse and the Turncoat – my favorite characters to write, and are basically Sidekicks, Igors and other supporting characters whose motivations and/or allegiances turn around during the course of the story. This can be a bad or good turn, but they have to turn.

A couple of authors have been branded by the unique qualities of their dark horse or turncoat characters — Linda Howard is pretty famous for hers.

The Unknown – Occasionally you’ll have characters who defy categorizing. They’re mysterious, subtle, possibly offstage for much of the novel but they have a direct affect on everything that happens. You also never really know what the deal is with them.

If you read my StarDoc books, Reever was an unknown character until I finally showed his true colors at the end of book three. And in some ways he’s branded me just as much as the protagonist, Cherijo.

Character profiling is taking your initial idea for a character and fleshing it out until the idea becomes more three-dimensional. This is done by mapping out your character by making decisions about what his or her physical, mental, historical and philosophical realities are. When you profile, it’s also good to think about character branding, too. How does this character make you stand out among the crowd? If all you’re offering is a clone of every other starship trooper, hardboiled PI, vampire brotherhood or kickass heroine out there, what does that say about you? Aside from the fact that you’re good at aping someone else’s work or playing it safe?

We all have ideas about good and evil, which translate into boundaries for our characters. Generally we want our protagonists to be mainly heroic, because heroes are admired in pretty much every culture on the planet. Why wouldn’t a writer want to be branded by a hero, especially when there’s a very good chance of that happening?

Some of us want to challenge the boundaries, so the typical heroic brand MC doesn’t work. The last thing I want as an MC in my books is a buffed and shiny hero. I want a real person I can relate to — even when I don’t agree with 90% of what they do, say or think — because when I relate to them on some level then I can get inside their head and figure out what, exactly, they would do, say or think. I can write the damaged outcast as much as the gorgeous supermodel (and have) but they definitely need to be flawed and they absolutely need to struggle with those flaws on a daily basis.

Getting back to the idea of the antagonist/anti-hero as a brand, it worked very well for Stephen R. Donaldson. Donaldson created a character named Thomas Covenant who is probably the best example of pushing all character boundaries. Covenant is a leper, deserted by his wife and child after being diagnosed with the disease, and is thoroughly unlikeable and unsympathetic. His survival depends on constant paranoia about injury to his nerve-damaged body, and he avoids all unnecessary risks. When he is magically transported to an alternate reality and miraculously healed, he refuses to accept that reality, act as if it is real, or even consider saving it. He even commits rape, which thoroughly vilified him in the eyes of most readers.

The Thomas Covenant books were a huge hit with teenagers, who naturally gravitate toward anyone who refuses to respond to authority or moral reason. Also, Covenant is an outsider, rejected by and rejecting the world at the same time. The moral issue of rape has been dissected many times, and I read one paper where it was explained as an analogy for the loss of physical control many kids feel over the abrupt and often frightening changes during puberty. But in the final analysis, Thomas Covenant had enormous appeal to adolescents, and Donaldson became a bestselling author because of it — and will forever be branded by his leper anti-hero, too.

I know it’s Friday the 13th again, but I did the bad luck post last month. This month we’ll just pretend it’s the 14th.

Now that we’ve taken care of that problem, I have a question for you: would you pay $2500.00 to spend a week in workshops on literary journalism and fiction writing? How about $6500.00 for a week of filmmaking workshops? According to this month’s issue of Poets & Writers, that’s how much you’ll have to fork over to attend them in 2009 at The Norman Mailer Writers Colony (travel cost not included.)

Poets & Writers also has some other interesting conference listings. For example, if you’d love to attend the four-day Colrain Poetry Manuscript Conference, expect to hand over $995.00 to $1295.00 after you pay for your travel expenses. And if you can’t live without attending the two-day New York Roundtable Writers Conference, make out a check for $250.00 for one day or $350.00 for both (after you pay for your lodging, travel and meals, of course.)

If you go for the high-end ticket to all three of these events, you’ve just dropped over eight thousand dollars on writing instruction. And for that money you get room and board (sometimes), the privilege of hanging out with some Name authors, poets, agents and editors, and space to sit and listen to their speeches and workshops, and . . . well, that’s about all you get for your eight grand. Oh, and toss in another two grand for the expenses that aren’t covered, and you’re looking at spending ten thousand dollars.

I know writers who spend twice that much — more than twenty thousand dollars a year — all to attend writing conferences, weekends, workshops and retreats. They are spoken to and lectured and advised by the best in the business. These events allow them to hang with their writer friends, wallow in nonstop writer wisdom, and then they go home. They describe these experiences as inspirational and renewing and marvelous, and then they start planning to go to the next one.

What’s wrong with this picture? Nothing. It’s your ten thousand dollars, and if you want to spend it hanging out in hotels and colleges talking about writing with your pals and listening to people who are being paid a portion of your ten grand to show up and talk, it’s your money, and your business.

But what if you don’t have ten thousand dollars? What if you don’t have ten bucks to splurge on writing conferences and retreats right now? Does that mean you have to miss out on all that wonderful knowledge, instruction and writerly inspiration?

Nope. You can have it for free.

Early on in my career I would get together with anywhere from five to fifteen local area writers for an afternoon or evening. We’d have a meal or snacks, and then sit at a table and help each other plot out novel ideas. Cost: nothing but whatever I agreed to contribute to the meal or snacks. These were an offshoot of my Novel Plotting workshop, and we held them at each other’s homes.

There are online writing courses you can take that will help you with everything from preparing a synopsis to structuring a story. I wrote about some of them on my author blog here. Cost: nothing. They’re all free to whoever wants to take them.

One week every year I pack up my family and send them on a writing vacation. My writing vacation. I stow their stuff in the truck, hand the keys to their dad, and wave goodbye. They spend a week having a blast in the islands or the mountains, and I have seven days of wonderful, blissful, absolute solitude in which to write as much and as often as I like. Cost to me: nothing. My guy and the kids go off on vacation every year; I simply choose not to go with them.

There is a great writing center in our town, and I go there frequently. There are rooms where I can sit in total silence and read, research or write. There are free-access computers I’m able to use whenever I want, and thousands of books and magazines on every topic under the sun that I can take home with me. There are also audio tapes and DVDs I can borrow, too; and every couple of weeks an author comes to give a free talk about their books, writing, or their writing life. Cost to me: nothing. It’s the public library.

Every summer I attend a couple dozen writing workshops. I can go to them in my birthday suit if I want, and learn about what other writers are doing, how they do it and where I can find the resources they use. I can ask questions and get direct answers and even enter to win some giveaways. All of this is free of charge, and I happen to run it, too — they’re my annual Left Behind & Loving It virtual workshops.

Much fun is made of writers who work in coffeeshops — I’ve done it myself — but when you consider for the price of a cup of coffee or a can of soda you can sit and work uninterrupted for three or four hours in those coffeeshops, that’s a pretty cheap personal retreat.

Having local writer friends can mean more opportunities for mini no-cost retreats. A couple of stay at home mom writers could take turns watching each other’s kids for an afternoon, allowing the other mom a couple of hours to write. Writer friends with spare rooms can swap weekends staying at each other’s homes (the host writer can cook for and pamper the guest writer.) Troubleshooting writing problems or discussing career strategies during a shared lunch hour or while car pooling to work also cost nothing but the price of a burger or a couple gallons of gas.

While you may be skeptical as to how valuable any of this free stuff is, consider how much you’d expect a NYT bestselling novelist with over forty novels in print to have paid for their writing education. In my case? Nothing. I never went to a single conference, retreat or workshop before I signed my first publishing contract. Everything valuable I’ve learned about writing came from borrowing and reading free books from that amazing writing resource center. You know, the public library.

This week I was supposed to spend two days at a county quilt show that I faithfully attend every year (this is what I promised my quilter friends, anyway.) Then my daughter got the flu, my guy got stuck working late every night, my puppy sitter bailed on me, and NY decided to send me a RUSH!!-marked copy job. I was able to make it to the show for about an hour today, and I might get an hour tomorrow. Maybe. If no one throws up or works overtime or needs me to think up new and exciting ways to convince a casual browser that they simply must buy this freaking book.

Wouldn’t it be so much easier if we could just put that on the back of novels? HEY, BUY MY FREAKING BOOK.

But onto talking about writing them instead of selling them. Since I can’t be with my quilter friends today, you guys can fill in. While I write, I’ll show you some of the photos I took at the quilt show while I was running through it this morning.

Most writers don’t quilt, so they don’t realize that writing stories is just like making quilts. (Go ahead, laugh. My quilter friends do, too.)

Consider the similarities:

A quilt is made one piece at a time, just as a story is written one page at a time. Like stories, all quilts have a beginning (preparing and cutting the fabric), middle (piecing, batting and binding) and end (quilting it all together.)

Quilts are usually made according to an established pattern or technique (just as stories are written in some type of category or genre.) Sometimes quilts are combinations of patterns (like cross-genre stories) or are made with a newly-designed original pattern (like ground-breaker stories.) Sometimes quilts are so, um, unusual that we don’t know what the heck to call them — and who hasn’t run into a story like that?

Making a quilt can be an extremely time-intensive project for which the maker gets little or no respect until they sell their quilts, win awards for them, or become known as a famous quilt maker. If you don’t and your finished quilts start piling up around the house, your family starts asking why you keep making them. Sound familiar?

Quilts are sewn together with continuous threads that have the same purpose as running threads of stories and, like a plot, follow a specific design. Some of these quilting patterns can be amazingly intricate, and some are beautifully simple. Some quilts are just loosely tied together with strategically-placed knotted threads. But no matter how it’s quilted, if there’s a break in the thread, or you leave some part of the quilt unsewn, you end up with a visible bulge or sag in the material.

The middle of a story is often the most challenging to write because often it’s not as exciting as the beginning or the end. The batting, which is the middle of a quilt, is definitely not as beautiful as the top or the backing. However, if it’s made of poor quality material, or it’s lumpy, or it shrinks, or it doesn’t support the piece, it can ruin the entire quilt. Just as a lousy middle can collapse a story.

The best quilters stay on top of what the latest trends are in their art. They can also recognize a knock-off quilt a mile away, and are just as hostile as writers when their patterns and styles are lifted by other quilters. You think RWA members get nasty with each other? Try watching two quilters square off over a copycat quilt. These women are armed with tote bags filled with razor-sharp scissors, razor-sharp rotary cutters, or they carry at least a packet of sharp needles in their pocket. We know how to use them, too, so never mess with a quilter.

Like story structure, quilt binding is very straightforward: a continuous strip of bias fabric that is sewn around the entire piece, and holds all the parts of the quilt together as well as gives it a cohesive, completed look. Although some trendy quilters disdain binding, to me no binding = unfinished. A story that has no structure = bunch of words thrown together.

Quilters play with color, texture and composition in the same way writers play with setting, characters and plot — and quilters are just as obsessive about quality, values, originality and every other little nit-picky detail that writers are. If we really don’t like something, we have been known to throw out an entire piece and start over from scratch (okay, we save the fabric. But still.)

If you make an error with your quilt’s seams (like any element of a story), you have to undo them and start over. You can try to cover up your mistakes with some quick repair work, but it usually shows.

Some quilts are made to be hung on the wall and admired from a distance, but to me the best quilts — like great stories — are the kind you can snuggle up with on a cold night.

One of the ladies in my neighborhood has recently started selling Avon, and dropped off a couple of catalogs for me to look through. I haven’t used Avon products in years, but while we were talking my neighbor must have noticed how chapped my face and hands are, because she gave me some samples of skin cream.

The stuff I always use hasn’t been working very well this winter, so I tried them out. Both were so great I promptly put in an order for full-size versions, plus a couple of things I found while browsing through the catalog to see what else was in the product line.

Would I have ordered the products if I hadn’t tried them first? Probably not. For one thing, I’m cheap, and I don’t like spending money on something that may or may not work for me. The pictures in the catalog are pretty, but I can’t rub them on my dry skin to see what they’ll do.

I also liked the samples of the cologne from the Mark catalog (Avon’s line of products for youngsters) my neighbor gave me for my daughter to test. My girl is a young teen, and while I don’t mind her wearing a little makeup or cologne, I don’t want her walking around looking like a hooker or smelling like an opium den. Having access to the samples allowed her to see if she liked them and me a little parental preview (and we also ordered a bottle of one of the sample colognes we both liked.)

I’ve been an advocate of giving free books and stories to readers for a long time, and it really works the same way the Avon lady’s free samples do. If a reader gets a free read and loves it, they’re going to buy more by that author. If they don’t, there’s no sale, but no resentment, either. Now that we’re all tightening up our budgets and trying not to overspend, the opportunity to try out something for free before we buy is more important than ever.

Giving people something to read for free is one of the greatest pleasures I have as a professional writer. To me every book is someone’s gift to the world, so each time I have a giveaway, it’s like holding my own holiday and playing Publishing Santa.

Today I have a book tote filled with six books to give away; one unsigned novel from every member of Genreality plus a signed copy of my latest release:

A Long, Hard Ride by Alison Kent
Heretic: The Templar Chronicles by Joe Nassise
The Stolen by Jason Pinter
Kitty and the Dead Man’s Hand by Carrie Vaughn
Stay the Night by Lynn Viehl
Primal Male by Sasha White

If you’d like the chance to win this bag of Genreality free samples, in comments to this post name the last free story or novel that you enjoyed (or if you can’t think of one, just toss your name in the hat) by midnight EST on Saturday, February 28, 2009. I’ll draw one name at random from everyone who participates, and send the winner the bag, the books, and a surprise. Btw, this giveaway is open to everyone on the planet, so our friends overseas, please join in.