Writing DIfferences

Somewhere, someone once said, Write what you know. I hate that phrase. For many years, I took that to mean Write things that you’ve personally experienced. No one wanted to read about my life – teacher, software engineer, student, wife, mom. Quite ordinary and boring to those looking for adventure. I kept reading.

Jump ahead a few decades. I’d read a few thousand books by now and internalized that not every author had experienced everything in his or her stories, not when someone could make me believe hobbits existed, or that this world was only a shadow of an idealized place called Amber. These writers were fiction writers. It was their job to make me believe in the reality – and yes, the underlying truth of their story. When I took up fiction writing as a hobby, I wasn’t sure I could instill that same sense of belief in other people. But the more I worked at it, the more I learned that I could - by thinking hard, by working hard to know what I was talking about, by considering what it might be like to live in a culture or situation or a profession far from my own experience.

Yet I still heard people saying don’t. Don’t try to write people of a different gender. I got past this one, too. I was not only writing from the point of view of two characters who were warriors, but they both happened to be men. I had certainly observed plenty of men! I thought hard about how their feelings or reactions might be their own, not mine. I worked hard to make their voices, concerns, and behavior right for their characters and the story. And male readers told me I did just fine.

And then I wrote from the point of view of a ten-year-old boy (later sixteen-year-old) and that worked, as well. (It helped that I lived in a house with one - male - spouse and three sons!)

Still, of course, there were other nay-saying voices out there in the aether: Don’t try to write people of a different color or sexual orientation or a disability you don’t live with. How could you possibly know? How could you possibly understand? How could you possibly get it right when you are an American, heterosexual woman of Irish heritage who grew up in the southwest US in the 20th century without anything one would label a disability (except maybe painful shyness)?

But I decided that if I could write men convincingly, and if I could write two very different warriors convincingly when I had no combat training or experience, then I ought to be able to write these things too. I am fiction writer, and I use knowledge, imagination, logic, and reason to make my characters’ behavior and experiences true to the human experience as it exists in the fictional worlds I create, and close enough to the human experience in this world that my readers find them believable and identifiable.

But when the tides of the storyline in one of my series swept my brooding, violent sorcerer hero into blindness, I did feel trepidation. This was new territory. I very, very much wanted to get it right, to avoid TV/film/fictional cliches, to avoid any hint of paternalism or pandering or any other thing that might ruin the story for any reader. And yet I didn’t hesitate. It was the right thing for the story, which was about all about seeing – seeing the truth of magic in a world where it was dying, seeing the truth of a wicked conspiracy, seeing the truth of oneself and of those you could not believe might find you worthy of love or compassion. It was only fitting that this man face the loss of the thing that he valued above all things – the sight that enabled him to work the most complex forms of magic. So how was I going to do this right?

Part of my challenge was physical – how does a man cope with blindness in a society comparable to the early 17th century? Part was emotional – how does a man of a passionate, volatile nature react to an abrupt change that he can only view as devastating? Note that this is his view, not my own—a critical distinction when dealing with such topics. My aim was not to preach about how loss of sight is not a “disability” but just another way of dealing with the world, but to relate this man’s feelings about and reactions to what had happened to him. And part of my challenge was authorial – how do I communicate a vivid sense of a world without using visual images?

So how did I approach it?
 

First: Research
The internet is our friend. I read medical information about the mechanisms of sight and its loss. More importantly, I found forums and blogs by the newly blind giving personal perspectives – emotional, physical, and how those affected day-to-day life. It didn’t matter that it was 21st century information. I was accustomed to translating human experiences to a less techno-savy century.

Second: Write
I never research too much before I begin writing. Knowing how the story unfolds tells me what I need to focus on in research. As I wrote, I considered every word, phrase, scene, and situation from this perspective.

Third: Network
I was fortunate to know a fellow writer who has been losing her sight for many years. I asked if she would read my early chapters and give me her opinion, as I was trying to get it right. She was pleased to be asked. Not only did she give me a few pointers, but gave me a most invaluable reference – a man who had lost his sight profoundly and abruptly at very near the same age as my sorcerer. He was delighted to help and, as it happened, had done so for other writers. Not only did he vet my chapters (and say I’d done a decent job!!) but answered my every question and offered me some wholly unexpected insights. I wish I could have used everything he gave me! But, as always, one can’t burden the story with all the delicious research.

Hard thinking. First-hand information. Respect. Focusing on the story. I think these things got me through. The result is found in my novel, The Daemon Prism, the third (and final) novel of the Collegia Magica.


I wrote this originally for a series on Bookworm Blues. Check it out. Read more of this post!

Good news!

There are many kinds of good news an author can receive: good reviews, positive reader comments, new contracts, new translation agreements, award news, and so forth. But on Friday, I heard two of the best lines an author can hear.

News the first. We've had to go back to press on the new book. That is, the print version of The Daemon Prism has outsold expectations in the first two weeks.


News the second. We're taking Transformation back to press. Copies should be available by the end of the month.



This is a tough publishing environment. No one can really predict the impact of electronic publishing on a new release. The percentage of a new release bought in electronic form is increasing dramatically with every year that goes by. I'll bet thousands of readers are sporting new Kindles or Nooks since the holidays. Yes, authors get paid - in my case fairly equally - for both print and electronic books. But I still hold that new readers are more likely to find my books by running across them in bookstores. Either the cover art or the back cover blurb might attract them, or they will recall mention of my work by reviewers or my wonderful readers on Facebook or book blogs or at parties or writers events. It is always nice to exceed expectations.

As for backlist... Many of you notices that my very first published book Transformation has been pretty scarce for most of the last year. It is awful when the last two books in a series are available and the first one is not. Certainly an author's nightmare! But warehousing books is a huge expense for publishers and everyone is waiting to see if e-books really do replace the mass market paperback, especially for older works. Evidently my publisher has decided that the demand for Transformation is such that they can't wait and see any more. Hooray for that! Transformation holds a special place in my list. It's where many of my readers started out on a journey that's taken us all to some deeper and darker places.

So anyway, thanks to all of you out there for encouraging my publisher to this point of view! Now back to work on something new.


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Where is Transformation?

Got a question today about why Transformation is not currently available new on Amazon.com. I asked my publisher the same thing just a few days ago. No, it is not out of print! It is just running low. Roc is watching how the release of the new trade paper version of Song of the Beast goes in October, before deciding whether to reprint Transformation in trade or mass market. Transformation is now in its 14th printing, which is pretty cool indeed.

Happily there are other places you can find new print copies!

It is still available new through barnesandnoble.com and at various stores through indiebound. Or you could call my dear friends Ron and Nina Else at Who Else Books at 303-744-BOOK (2665)and order one. They keep a good supply of my books and might even have one that's signed.

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