Inspiration can be everywhere: in music, in movies, in books… This month, we’re spotlighting inspiration in its many forms. Today, Tanya, nine-year Wrimo and author of White Noise, shares what stories she wishes she’d gotten to earlier:
I shouldn’t have avoided On Writing by Stephen King for as long as I did. The rest of his writing is hit-or-miss for me, but On Writing is a fantastic book that helped me figure out how writing worked as a process beyond the initial point of getting words on the page. It definitely helped shape my own writing process, and it would have been an enormous help if I’d gotten to it earlier.
Comics would have been great to get to earlier, too. Comics taught me more about narrative structure than most books did. On top of helping me get rid of my own stigma against indie works, they taught me a lot about tightening up a narrative, cutting out unnecessary elements, and pacing in general. Comics often appeal to very individual tastes, so I would recommend three:
The Sandmanif you want something more literary, and like non-linear narratives,
Transmetropolitan if you are in the mood for something a bit more political and vulgar,
Pretty Deadly for the way in integrates myth and stories into its universe.
On a more personal note, I wish I’d read Sword of Shannara at a younger age, because that ignited my love of genre fiction. It was also the book that made me immediately take up a pencil and paper to start writing my own story as soon as I put the book down.
So, here I am. I finally got back home. It’s a really strange feeling, honestly. It means that all exams are finished, that school is over, and my only worry is now doing book stuff. And surviving home life. That too. I’m not sure how to handle this. I have all the time in the world, outside of work, and I just don’t know how to handle it. I want to be with my family, too, but I really want to…
So, here I am. I finally got back home. It’s a really strange feeling, honestly. It means that all exams are finished, that school is over, and my only worry is now doing book stuff. And surviving home life. That too. I’m not sure how to handle this. I have all the time in the world, outside of work, and I just don’t know how to handle it. I want to be with my family, too, but I really want to get this book done. I want to get it done so bad I can taste it!
But doing more writing means less time with the family. I don’t tell them as often as I should, but I love my family a lot. How does one balance the two? I balanced schoolwork and writing once. But this, this is very different. It shouldn’t be as hard to balance as it is. I think I’ll manage.
I’ve basically figured out how I want the second draft to go. The truly hard part will be making a language without a linguistics friend right there to help out. Of course, things will be different.
I also must find an official agent. And a publishing company. All this should be done at some point soon, and for a college kid who doesn’t have much money on him, this is going to be rather difficult.
It’s crunch time – a map needs making, a trailer needs shooting, pages need writing and art needs drawing. It’s going to be a hard time, but fun also, I imagine. Let’s see how it goes.
Note: These musings are open to debate and not necessarily set in stone, as I have yet to publish a book, although I am working towards that end. Please enjoy regardless.
Metaphors. You see them everywhere, especially in poetry. Poetry uses it as often as it does because poetry forces our mind to work outside of conventional bounds. If we are working outside of conventional bounds, why think so…
Note: These musings are open to debate and not necessarily set in stone, as I have yet to publish a book, although I am working towards that end. Please enjoy regardless.
Metaphors. You see them everywhere, especially in poetry. Poetry uses it as often as it does because poetry forces our mind to work outside of conventional bounds. If we are working outside of conventional bounds, why think so literally? So we don’t. Things represent other things or are like other things, or something along those lines. But prose uses it as well, although not always so blatantly.
I’m a prose writer. That’s just where my talent lies. I try poetry, as you’ll see occasionally on here, but rhyming and saying things are like other things is harder to me. I prefer a more subtle approach to metaphor. My old English teacher used to tell me, metaphor is the one of the most important parts of literature, but it’s more powerful in subtlety. It means that the reader can enjoy it on a literal and spiritual level. It means the reader can read it once, love it, then read it again and find new things that make them love it even more.
As for writing metaphor, I suppose it depends on the style you’re going for. If you want direct allegory, you can be as blatant as you want. For anime fans, think of “Hetalia”. There’s no question who represents what in that one. Their names are literally “America”, “France”, “Japan”, “Italy”, etc. For less direct allegory, see books like “The Hunger Games”. The Capitol represents big government as a whole, and the series warns of the dangers of such a government through that metaphor.
I’m not saying everything in your book needs to represent something else. But if you want to make your book remembered, there has to be something deeper than the plot, than the characters, than the world itself. There has to be a meaning, other than just writing a good story. Your book must become like an onion, layered, with more to be shown with each peel of the layer.
Are you ready to take that (metaphorical) step into the unknown?
This is a continuing thought from something I reblogged recently on Tumblr, but I didn’t want to spam the post with a giant paragraph of stuff. I may have written something similar before, but I’m upset about it all over again.
I think we need to be far more aware of our use of race in novels. From what I am told, it has been determined that Aragorn from Lord of the Rings is neither white nor fully human. But that is never made clear in the books. Because of that, Tolkien lost an excellent chance to have slightly more ethnic representation in a movie series that’s criticized for having so little. He didn’t think about it at the time, I’m sure. But what if he had? The legacy of Lord of the Rings could have been very different. Tolkien could have paved the way for ethnically diverse fantasy novels everywhere.
But the fact is that nowadays unless it is distinctly explained that a character is not white, it’s assumed that he/she is white in a fantasy novel. If it’s set in Ancient Western Europe, this makes some sense. There were a lot of white people in Ancient Western Europe. But most modern fantasy stories are not in Western Europe. A lot of the time, it’s in an alternate Earth universe of some sort (ex: Middle Earth, Alagaesia, Narnia, etc.). So why are we automatically assuming everyone’s white in this a.u.? Why even assume that white skin is the dominant group? Why assume there’s white skin at all? Why can’t these humanoids have blue skin? I have no idea. Perhaps it would make people think of it as a Sci-Fi novel if we went that far.
Because of this, I made sure in the novel that I’m writing, The Dark Soldier, that there is plenty of ethnic diversities. The main character is not white, not because I have anything against white people. I’m white. But we have too many white male protagonists. That’s boring, cliché even. So yes, while nations like Africa, Europe, Asia and Latin America do not exist in this fantasy world, ethnicities similar to theirs do. There are characters distinctly pointed out to be black, white, golden, olive skinned or in-between shades. There are many mentions of racism in the series. And not one piece of this bothers any of my friends or my illustrator. She’s made sure to paint people with the skin colors that I described them, for which I am very grateful.
Maybe it’s about time we stop being scared to talk about race in novels. It’s the best way we can stop being racist ourselves.
NOTE: It has occurred to me that I might need to explain something. I do not write this in some feeble attempt to make up for white people being racist throughout the centuries. Literally everyone’s a little bit racist, as the song goes. I don’t know why we as a culture have decided to focus on white people doing so. If I was doing that, I would be writing a book without any white people at all and making sure everyone knew it so that I “didn’t appear racist”. What silliness. I’m writing this book for every tribe, culture, nation and human that has any prejudice towards any group of humans at all. I hope that maybe people who were racist against a certain group before will think to themselves, “You know what? I know this character is [certain race they are racist against], but they’re cool. I like them. Why am I even racist against their group in the first place?” That’s the idea. I hope it works.
This is a continuing thought from something I re-blogged recently, but I didn’t want to spam the post with a giant paragraph of stuff. I think we need to be far more aware of our use of race in novels.
From what I am told, it has been determined that Aragorn from Lord of the Rings is neither white nor fully human. But that is never made clear in the books. Because of that, Tolkien lost an excellent chance to have slightly more ethnic representation in a movie series that’s criticized for having so little. He didn’t think about it at the time, I’m sure. But what if he had? The legacy of Lord of the Rings could have been very different. Tolkien could have paved the way for ethnically diverse fantasy novels everywhere.
But the fact is that nowadays unless it is distinctly explained that a character is not white, it’s assumed that he/she is white in a fantasy novel. If it’s set in Ancient Western Europe, this makes some sense. There were a lot of white people in Ancient Western Europe. But most modern fantasy stories are not in Western Europe. A lot of the time, it’s in an alternate Earth universe of some sort (ex: Middle Earth, Alagaesia, Narnia, etc.). So why are we automatically assuming everyone’s white in this a.u.? Why even assume that white skin is the dominant group? Why assume there’s white skin at all? Why can’t these humanoids have blue skin? I have no idea. Perhaps it would make people think of it as a Sci-Fi novel if we went that far.
Because of this, I made sure in the novel that I’m writing, The Dark Soldier, that there is plenty of ethnic diversity. The main character is not white, not because I have anything against white people. I’m white. But we have too many white male protagonists. That’s boring, cliché even. So yes, while nations like Africa, Europe, Asia and Latin America do not exist in this fantasy world, ethnicities similar to theirs do. There are characters distinctly pointed out to be black, white, olive skinned or in-between shades. There are many mentions of racism in the series. And not one piece of this bothers any of my friends or my illustrator. She’s made sure to paint people with the skin colors that I described them, for which I am very grateful.
Maybe it’s about time we stop being scared to talk about race in novels. It’s the best way we can stop being racist ourselves.
I have no legitimate image for this, so it’s going without one. New planned quote from the second draft of Dark Soldier. Would like to hear some thoughts. I won’t say who says it or under what circumstance.
“When a man becomes so powerful that men’s hearts fail from his footsteps and mountains tremble in his presence, does he not become a leader of men? There were those who called me ‘monster’ once, and they will soon regret it – for I have become more than a monster. I have become a god, and all of you will bow.”
If it gets good publicity, I’m considering putting it up on the Facebook page. If not… eh. I’m a writer. I can take criticism.
I don’t have a whole of time to do this blog, but I’m going to try to do as much as I possibly can. I’m going to elaborate on the situation with the I owl/cat thing that I was talking about earlier. If you’re one of my fans on Facebook, you already saw the status of this possibly. The appearance of this creature is directly linked to one of the witch sisters in the book.
Gabriel to Earth 