Month: June 2020

Posted on By jessmeats
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    • Hide Away

    This is a difficult time for everyone, but I wanted to share this beautiful song. It attempts to do for our current situation what Ring Around the Roses did for the Black Death.

    I first saw the idea of having a song like this in a Tumblr post. A few different people shared ideas and proposed potential lyrics, which Alice Dillon here then polished up and placed to music.

    As well as being a nice way to find something beautiful in a dark time, I also think a song like this, born out of a collaborative discussion, it a nice way of showing what can be created by pooling ideas.

    Posted on By jessmeats
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    • Writing Game

    This was a piece written for a writing game. It was written in about 15 minutes and hasn’t been edited, but I was quite pleased with the end result. The prompt was the very first sentence of the story, that’s said by the master.

    —-

    “Now you see the difference between the two paths,” the master said.

    He pulled down the sheet to reveal the body, the face pale and strangely shiny, the eyes staring unseeing up at the vaulted ceiling, the bleached-white roots of the hair. Prittan wanted to look away, to turn aside and empty his stomach in revulsion, but the master was staring each of the boys down. If Prittan ran from the room as he wanted, would the master take that as a sign of guilt? Would he know that Carcy hadn’t been the only one to stray down the path of easy power.

    “Every year, we explain the dangers of impatience,” the master said. “We worn each class of the risks involved in snatching for power beyond what you are ready for, but far too often we have examples like this. This boy wasn’t content to follow the path of caution, to study the craft as he was advised at the pace set by his teachers. He delved into the rituals of power exchange, grasping for magic he was not ready for, trying to get stronger the easy way, instead of through the gradual development of careful skill, and he paid the price for it.”

    Prittan remembered the way it had felt, that ritual cast behind the library building, drawing in the power of the flame from their small candle. He remembered the rush of heat, the exhilaration of ability as the power filled him. He remembered the way that spells came easier over the following days, classes that had been impossibly difficult passing with ease as he used his new-found strength. He remembered how hard the lessons had been once that influx of foreign power had worn off.

    It had been sorely tempting to try the ritual again, to find another source of power to enhance his gift. He could understand why Carcy had delved into these rituals.

    Magic was difficult and draining, the simplest spells exhausting. To use power from elsewhere made them so much easier, enabled the caster to perform feats they would never be able to achieve otherwise. Some of the greatest acts of magic in history had been performed in such a manner.

    But this was the risk of the situation. This was the danger. When a student pulled in external powers, they didn’t build up their own endurance. Their own abilities remained weak, propped up by ritual tools instead of standing on their own. Then there came a moment when they were asked to do something harder than they could manage, when they drew in too much power and it overwhelmed them. Carcy had tried to manipulate power far beyond his own and he had been burned out from the inside because of it.

    And Prittan could so easily have done the same.

    “I hope,” the master continued, “that you will remember what you’ve seen here today. I hope that you will tell next year’s students of it. Perhaps they will listen to your warnings as your classmate did not listen to ours. There is the path of easy power and it leads to death. There is the path of patient effort and that will lead to life. Choose the latter path.”

    He raised the sheet to cover the body once again. He looked each of the boys in the eye and added simply, “Please.”

    Posted on By jessmeats
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    • Good Enough for a First Draft

    You’ll often see writing advice about good first lines. It’s important to hook your readers right off the bat, to make them want to keep reading and find out what happens next. It’s important for finding a publisher too. A lot of publishers get hundreds of submissions and they have to sort through them very quickly to figure out which ones they’re going to reject, so you want to have a really strong opening that grabs your reader’s interest and makes them want to know more.

    You need an engaging and interesting opening sentence and opening paragraph.

    But the problem is that if you spend ages and ages trying to make the first sentence absolutely perfect, you might never write the second one. For me, because of my approach to planning, I often end up having to rewrite the opening to my books. For example, in Shadows of Tomorrow, I initially thought that the main character would be the one who became Cassie, so I started the book there, but I later realised that Gareth was the one making all the important plot decisions. Gareth turned into the real protagonist, so I went back and rewrote the opening to start with him. I could have spent ages and ages making that first scene with Cassie have the perfect opening line only to find that it didn’t need to be the opening line anymore.

    Knowing this about my writing style, I generally don’t fuss too much about the opening sentence until the end, until I know exactly how the story is going to end so I can write an opener that ties in with that. When I’m writing my first draft, I will just write whatever fits with the first scene as my opening sentence, knowing I can come back to it later. What I write is good enough for a first draft.

    And that’s the point. A lot of the time, you can write something knowing you can come back and fix it later. If you’re not sure how to get a piece of information to a character, you can write a clunky bit of exposition for the first draft, knowing you can come back and fix it in a second draft. I’ve seen someone advise just summarising what needs to happen next in square brackets: [and now the hero does something clever to escape]. There’s a large chunk of a scene that’s summed up by that one sentence, but you don’t have to figure out the perfect escape plan right now. You can keep writing and figure out the details later. I tend not to use this square bracket summary approach – I prefer to just write a clunky version of the scene I can fix later – but I can see why other writers might like it.

    The thing I do use though is ??? in place of details. I might want to think of the perfect name for a location, but I haven’t figured it out yet, so I’ll put ??? in every time the name would come up and I can easily find these parts and insert the name in a second draft. I do the same with details I need to research. ??? basically means little detail (usually a word or a name but sometimes a sentence) that I need to add later. It stops me losing my flow of writing to go and look something up there and then. Using the same set of punctuation every time I reach one of these points makes it easy to search through the document later to find the bits I missed.

    My first drafts tend to be pretty rough as I’m generally figuring out the plot as I go. I know I will have to come back and rewrite chunks later, so I don’t sweat the details. I can fix these little detail gaps later. I can find the perfect first line when I know the overall shape and themes of my story. I can fix the awkward dialogue exchange.

    If you fret about having every sentence perfect before you can proceed to the next one, you’ll never get the first draft finished. So write something that’s good enough for now and worry about making it perfect later. This means writing a second or third draft is critically important, but you can always improve a thing that exists more easily than you can make a perfect creation out of nothing on the first go.