Tag Archives: How to write

Closing the Dictionary on the Definition of “Writing”

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(Or, How to Write When You Can’t, Aren’t, or Don’t Want to be Writing)

A Distractions & Subtractions post for P.A. Wilson

I “wrote” this blog post during a three-day, writing-free recovery weekend after having worked eight days straight plus overtime.

When it comes to long-distance, solo driving, there are two things I know for certain:

  1. It’s a great opportunity to practice your singing, and
  2. It’s the mental equivalent to running a marathon.

This latter point is particularly true when it comes to treacherous, northern mountain highways with a high risk of sudden slides, snow, and wildlife, where night time comes quickly, and the route is more winding than a century’s old river bed.  Yes, I’m looking at you, Coquihalla Highway (BC Highway #5).

Years ago when I still worked in the natural resource conservation field, I had a job in a government-run park in rural southern Ontario located about four hours away from Toronto – a distance most of my colleagues and considered too long to drive on any weekends that weren’t long ones, no matter how much we yearned for bustle of the big city and to visit family and friends.

Vancouver-based thriller/mystery/fantasy author P.A. (Perry) Wilson might beg to disagree that such a distance being too long for weekly travel.  Once a week, for her work, she is forced to drive 10 hours round trip in a single day, part of said journey taking place on the above-lamented Highway#5.

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Always On My Mind (Time Permitting)

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Okay, picture it: it’s 7am, and you have to leave for the day within the next half an hour.

Willie would be so disappointed in me.

Willie would be so disappointed in me.

What essentials do you bring with you to get you through the day?

A bag lunch?  Your phone?  Your mp3 player if that’s separate from your phone?  Something to read?  Any of the other following useful items:

  • A pocket knife
  • An extra pair of socks
  • Sunglasses
  • Legwarmers
  • Rain gear
  • Ibuprofen
  • Water
  • Eyeglass cleaner solution
  • A handkerchief
  • Lip balm
  • A USB drive?

Almost all of the above-mentioned are things I carry with me on a daily basis.  Even sunglasses, which I wear all year round, and legwarmers, which are a must in Vancouver, for once the sun goes down, the temperature plummets with it, even in the summer.

But perhaps the very most important thing I pack for a day away from home – something that’s not on the above list due to its lack of material form – is a piece of a story (usually my novel-in-progress, but not necessarily) to think about over the course of the day.

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Writing Distractions, Writing Subtractions … and (hopefully!) Blog Reader Participation

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Sometimes, I think I’m optimized to be a writer.

Not that I believe there’s some magical blueprint out there on How To Build an Ideal Writer (“follow these steps ten easy steps and water twice a day”), nor do I believe that an ideal writer is made in only one way, for the world is full of writers, and all of them possess their own particular way of doing what they do best.

Yet, I definitely believe that certain aspects of my personality, temperament, and behaviour contribute positively to my writing endeavours, at least the way I endeavour to do so:

  • I have a very long attention span
  • I can physically sit still for long periods of time
  • My brain naturally amuses itself by telling stories
  • I’m an unrepentant daydreamer
  • I’m curious about people’s inner lives
  • I have a strong vocabulary
  • I believe the best way to explain something is through a story
  • I’m all about delayed gratification

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How to Write a Sex Scene

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That got your attention, didn’t it?

(A/N: For the purposes of this post, I am defining a sex scene as one in which sexual activity is explicitly described, rather than those of the fade-to-black, implied sex variety.)

I was too scared to type the words “sex scene” into a Google Image search, afraid it’d result in a reaction similar to this.

Sex scenes are among the most difficult scenes to write.  Part of this is because doing so in one way or the other reveals to the world what you find sexually appealing, either through what happens in a sexy sex scene or what doesn’t happen in an intentionally unsexy one.

In North American culture, sharing your sexual turn-ons with people you haven’t even met (in this case, readers) isn’t something people tend to do, at least not using their real name or one by which they can otherwise be traced.

Furthermore, sex scenes have a far greater potential than other types of scenes to read as unintentionally humourous, repulsive, or cringe-worthy embarrassing.  Not to mention they require some pretty exact choreography.

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…But Fear Itself

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Why do so many people who want to write – people who love writing, love words, love stories, and claim writing is their passion –  not actually do so?

I found myself pondering this question this week while running on the treadmill at the gym, and came to the conclusion that writing and physical exercise have much in common.

I made a similar comparison in my very first post on this blog, when I wrote that my creative muscles were out of shape, and that a mere 126 new words had strained them near to the breaking point.  But now I’m making a literal comparison.  Exercise is another thing that many people want to do – that everyone intuitively knows they should do – yet not everyone does.

I know why.  It’s not because of laziness.  With writing or with exercise.

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Building a History – Redux: Where the Streets Have No Name

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(A/N: Post title is a play on the song Building a Mystery by Sarah McLachlan and taken from the song Where the Streets Have No Name by U2.)

I am a victim of my own writing predilections, and also a beneficiary of them.

I write historical fiction, but at my core, I treasure the freedom to make and break the rules of the factual and natural world offered by the fantasy genre.

I love learning and writing about how people lived in the distant past, but am less intrigued by stories of real personages out of history, who tend to from the upper classes of society, and instead prefer the historical equivalents to people more like myself.

I’m dedicated to creating a strong sense of place for the reader, for whom distant past settings are likely very alien and divergent from modern life and sensibilities.  Yet not even historians know for 100% certain what in the past was like, thus reference books, Google Maps, and even visiting specific locations in their present-day incarnations can only offer so much insight.

These three writing preferences converge upon a common point, that being the point where there is a gap in recorded history.

I experienced such a gap in my novel-in-progress: in one of the English towns where much of the story takes place, there is no recorded history that I’ve been able to find between the years of 1086 and 1316.  There isn’t conclusive evidence that a castle existed there, but I’ve gone and created one all the same, designing and describing its layout and lifestyle to suit the needs of my story’s plot.

As I mentioned in a previous post within this series, historical fiction and fantasy share a need for detailed world-building, yet differ in that with historical fiction, you have to look all those details up whereas in fantasy, you have to make them all up.

Well, when it comes to places and situations for which there is little recorded history, the historical fiction writer gets to make up stuff as well, thus revealing another meaning to the title of this post series: building a history.

But just how much history does one need to build?

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Making a Write Turn (of Phrase)

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I have a good friend from Australia.

(I swear, this isn’t the start of a limerick.)

My Aussie friend – let’s call her NR – became a friend having been my roommate here in Vancouver for almost two years.  During those years, we spend a tremendous amount of time together, talking about everything under the sun, singing songs, making jokes, arguing, and telling each other how much we love each other.

Needless to say, I’ve come to know her Aussie accent really well.

I’ve already confessed in a previous post to having a penchant for trying to mimic accents and foreign turns of phrase.  Indeed, NR says that having me around is sometimes like an annoying little echo aping her alternate pronunciations –

  • “AH-mund” (“almond”)
  • “ah-loo-MIN-nium” (“aluminium”)
  • “MAS-sage” (“massage” made to sound really kinky)
  • “Douglas FAAH” (“Douglas Fir” – one of the most common tree types found along the coast of British Columbia)

– not to mention her non-North American expressions, such as “reckon” (to perceive or imagine something), “crook” (ill or unwell), “capsicum” (a bell pepper), and my personal favourite, “rear-vision mirror” (the rear-view mirror in a car, which, when spoken in the typical Aussie cadence actually comes out sounding more like “revision mirror”.)

This is all fun and games for me, and NR as well I’m fairly certain, for it’s practically a national pastime among the Australians to “take the piss out of” (tease or make fun of) friends and likewise be a good sport when others take the piss out of you.

However, beyond mere amusement, my interactions with NR have led to think a lot about dialects in general, and how that effects my writing.  For not only do numerous ones tend to exist within a given language, these dialects also vary across time as well geographical space.

In other words, how do I create effective historical dialogue?

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Places That Don’t Exist (Anymore)

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(A/N: Post title is a play on the song Places That Don’t Exist by Conjure One.)

Two of the first things people want to know upon learning I’m writing is historical fiction novel is where and when it takes place.

The answers, for the record, is England in the early 1200s, but there’s so much more involved in creating a story setting in any genre than just choosing an era and location on a map.  There’s even more to it than just descriptions of what the building and scenery look like.

In his book Characters & Viewpoint, science fiction author Orson Scott Card refers to the setting of a story as the milieu, which he defines as the following:

The milieu is the world surrounding characters – the landscape, the interior spaces, the surrounding cultures[,] … everything from weather to traffic laws.  [It] includes all the physical locations that are used … with all the sights, smells, and sounds that come with the territory.  The milieu also includes the culture – the customs, laws, social roles and public expectations that limit and illuminate all that a character things and feels and says and does. (pp. 48-49).

Readers love to feel as though they’ve been transported into the world of the story.  A large part of that is achieved by creating an authentic setting.  One thing a writer can do to better capture both the structure and mood of where his/her story takes place is to visit the site in real life.  Reference books and Google Maps, after all, can only take you so far.

I indeed visited that part of England where my novel-in-progress is set, however, my novel-in-progress is historical fiction, which means the locale I toured through last summer is a much different place now than it was eight hundred years ago. The specific era of my story setting is long bygone, and very little in its modern incarnation can be back-cast to the past.

This thus leads me to wonder: when it comes to the task of creating a sense of place out of places that don’t exist anymore, is my job as a historical fiction writer easier or more difficult than that of writers of other genres?

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There were no “Likes” in 2006… (Versatile Blogger Award)

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Blogging has changed since the last time I did it during the dark ages of the internet in 2006.

Today we have the integrated blog stats that WordPress so thoughtfully provides us all, informing me at a glance how many clicks I’ve received per day and what the clickers were clicking on and where the clickers came from, both geographically and via the internet.

We have “Likes”, which on all but the most popular blogs have replaced the standard comments of yesteryear.  There were no such thing as Likes in 2006.  If you liked something someone wrote, you would tell them by leaving a comment and let them know what exactly you liked about it.

(Not that I’m at all complaining: the world is a much busier place than it was in 2006, and comments take time to compose while Likes are quick and dirty.  I’m grateful to know at all when stuff I write resonates with people.)

We also now have blog subscribers, which I love love love, both having them and to be one.  There was nothing more annoying back in 2006 than to have to constantly check your favourite blogs for updates, especially for writers who posted multiple times a day.

And yet, despite all these innovations for tracking one’s visitors, I still have no idea who is reading my blog, and perhaps more importantly, how they’re doing so.

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Tell It Like It Was

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(A/N: Post title is a play on the song Tell It Like It Is by Tracy Chapman.  I don’t know what it is about this series of topics that lends itself well to making post titles out of modified song titles, but I plan to keep rolling with it as far as it will go.)

Every writer has to conduct some manner of research to inform his/her story.

Even when writing a memoir or a tale otherwise drawn completely from personal experience, I’m willing to bet the writer will need to look up or into something, whether it’s the layout of a city or the history of a particular landmark, or the number one single on Billboard at the time.

In historical fiction, however, the research needs are as astronomical as they are minute.  Not only must one research the plans of cities (that may or may not still exist), you also need to know what the roads were paved with.  Information about a landmark might be coupled with that about what was fed to the slaves that built it.  The names of popular songs might be accompanied (no pun intended) by details on what the stringed instruments of the time period were strung with.

And that’s not all; not by a long shot.

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