Brandon Sanderson, Howard Tayler, and Dan Wells are doing a series of podcasts on writing called Writing Excuses.

The have two podcasts on magic:

http://www.writingexcuses.com/2008/05/12/writing-excuses-episode-14-magic-systems-and-their-rules/

http://www.writingexcuses.com/2008/05/18/writing-excuses-episode-15-costs-and-ramifications-of-magic/

I found these two interesting, and, as always, entertaining to listen to. However, while their focus on limitations and ramifications is excellent, I’ve found asking “what does the magic cost” to be counterproductive. Here’s why: “cost” leads people to think ONLY of magics where you trade x thing for y power. Blood, memories, vitality, years of life, your children, etc. The problem with this is that while magics that use fuel (cost something) can be great, it isn’t necessary to do it that way. There are many stories with wondrous magics that don’t cost a thing.

For example, Heroes shows a lot of magic without cost. What does it cost Hiro to time travel? Nothing. It’s free. What about the painter? He can do it at will. Same with the guy who goes invisible, the cheerleader who regenerates–all the other characters there. What about the magic in Elantris? It costs nothing to draw the runes. What was consumed? Nothing. What about Orson Card’s Hatrack world? Alvin can doodlebug until doomsday. There’s no fuel required.

Some may say it’s semantics, but it’s not. It affects the paths taken in the invention of the magic. I’ve seen it in my invention sessions and those of groups I’ve been in. Don’t trust me, do a group magic brainstorm session where you ask the cost of magic question and then another where you ask about limitations instead.

I’ve found that it’s MUCH more helpful to ask these questions but NOT necessarily in the order below.

• What is a cool power?
• What are the limitations to it?
• What are the ramifications and conflicts of using it?

Costs are simply ONE type of limitation. In magic, limitation and ramification are the key things. By opening up the question, we can use costs or MANY other types of limitations like genetics/bloodlines, intelligence, scope of power, duration of effect, sources, scarcity of ability, morals, geography, times when it’s effective, mysteries, etc.

Listen to the wonderful podcasts and then focus on powers, limitations, and ramifications, and use costs only if they are limitations that jazz you. 

I voiced my opinions on the TC Boyle message board. Needless to say, I’m probably too aggressive in my stance. But a guy over there said: “(easy,chewable,harmless pages) shouldn’t be the goal of any writer with even the tiniest self-respect.”

Here’s my response.

—-

I don’t know any of these successful authors who don’t have self-respect because I don’t know any of them who try to write based on what they think will sell. Everyone of them that I know writes from passion. And I know some NY Times Bestsellers. They might look at 10 projects they have passion for and choose one that might be more marketable. But the passion comes first.

I don’t know how anyone could spend the amazing number of hours it takes to finish a novel unless they have passion for the project. In fact, I wonder if it’s possible to create something that’s actually sellable without it. Everyone’s always talking about these hacks out there with metal brains writing for money. But after all the writers I’ve met, I’ve yet to find one. In my experience they’re as scarce as the yeti.

So my intent wasn’t to say you can write for love or money, but not both. My intent was to say that I believe most MFA programs have made themselves irrelevant to the greater stream of literacy in the country. The teachers have passion for fringe genre and teach their students how to entertain that fringe reader. And if they DO have passion for the types of fiction most readers want, such enjoyment is always talked about as some form of slumming. There’s an apology or at least a statement making it clear they know such fiction is not something you bring to the table where serious writers work.

But this isn’t true. Serious writers, passionate writers work in those genres. And they deliver excellent work. By that I do NOT mean they deliver the tropes of literary fiction in drag. What they deliver doesn’t appeal to the fringe markets. But it’s excellent, nevertheless, because it delivers exactly what the people go to those stories for.

T.C. Boyle is one of my favorite writers. He saved me in my undergraduate program. I was buying the The Best American Short Story, Pushcart, and O’Henry anthologies. I was reading for my coursework. And so much of it bored me to death. And then one day I began reading “The Ape Lady in Retirement” and my eyes hung out because finally the text was interesting. Finally someone wrote a story I could read start to finish.

I immediately bought his anthologies–Greasy Lake, If The River Was Whiskey, Descent of Man. I was in heaven. Now, not all of his stories worked magic on me. But when I was having a hard time finding one story in a whole anthology, his books seemed like a treasure trove.

He didn’t do as well in his novels. Oh, the writing was just as good. The characters and descriptions just as odd and stunning. But he didn’t keep my interest. The problems never built into anything. Nevertheless, I loved him.

I’ve been having a brief conversation with him and the fan boy in me is delighted to finally talk to this guy. And after reading an interview with him, I realize why he probably spoke to me. While the other literary fiction authors were following the tastes of the fringe group, Boyle at least wanted to entertain.

In his interview he says.

 Everybody has forgotten that literature, like all art, is, at root, entertainment. It is supposed to entertain you. It’s not supposed to be some conundrum to be resolved by some professors in the university. It’s not a game. It’s not masturbation. It’s art. And I think great art is great on all levels. But the first level on which it must be great is that it must be entertaining.

Amen, brother Boyle. Amen!

Here the full Boyle AWP interview.

However, I still think he misses the mark. In it he says about bestsellers:

But it’s mainly vampire books and Tom Clancy and all the rest of it. I don’t understand why we can’t make our books more available to everybody-not by compromising what we do, but by popularizing them, getting them out to the public.

I think that now we don’t have great editors. We have editors who are basically trying to hold on to their jobs and who publish good books once in a while. They’re basically cheerleaders for the books. They’re not editors, really. They’re incapable of being editors; they don’t need to be. Because editing is done-self-editing is done-through the apprenticeship in the writing programs. Nearly everyone from my generation on to your generation and beyond will have been through an MFA program. It’s just the way it is now. It’s a different world. It’s essential.

I’d like to suggest that Boyle, despite his love of entertainment, still misses the mark in his interview because you cannot popularize something that only appeals to a small market. The reason why Stephenie Meyer, Patterson, et al sell exponential circles around folks like Don DeLillo or Louise Erdrich is because Meyer and gang are very good at delivering what the largest portions of the reading public want. They deliver types of entertainment that DeLillo and Erdrich do not. (And I mean “entertainment” in a very broad sense.)

We could point at the Oprah effect (whether you like it or not, Mr. Cold Mountain) and say that’s not true. It’s all PR and marketing. But that assumes publisers are idiots. And while some of them may be, I think it’s an extreme assumption. Publishers are in it for the love AND money. And you can be sure that the board of directors is looking for smart, money people to lead the companies. You don’t make money, you’re fired.

Which means that IF the publishers found literary fiction sold like hotcakes they’d promote it like hotcakes. But literary fiction too often fails to entertain anybody but a handful of fringe readers. And so trying to popularize it can only have a limited effect. When people are thirsty, not many are going to pass up tall glasses of ice water for the pickled jalapenos at the end of the line.

Meyer, Clancy, Grisham, Roberts etc are masters of entertainment. And, like it or not, that’s the main reason the small portion of the public who actually read go to fiction.

I think it’s fine to cater to the fringe audience if that’s your pleasure. But I think it’s ridiculous to think such fare is better than what most people enjoy. Or that it deserves any special veneration. The MFA programs I’m familiar with seem, by and large, to miss the point. Instead of teaching the meat of fiction (entertainment) they focus on teaching students to serve up the parsley with great pomp. And when the customers go elsewhere to get the meat they crave (or the salad for you vegans), they respond by saying the customers are simply too dumb to get it or have no taste.

Now, I’m not saying the folks I work with in the MFA program are idiots. Or jerks. Almost everyone I’ve met has been extremely nice and smart. They have great insights. But there is a strong pressure in that culture, amost a moral pressure, to think about fiction this way. And it’s based on their tastes.

I think we all do this. 90% of what’s out there is crap. But it isn’t, really. The truth is that 90% of what’s out there simply doesn’t appeal to us. And so because it doesn’t deliver the goods, it’s crap to us. The problem is when we don’t realize the difference and begin to think that because we don’t have the taste for something that it’s garbage.

It’s not.

And that’s one thing the gentle and smart people in my program have shown me. I’m just as liable to make this mistake as anyone.

So what MFA programs need to do is teach fiction. The meat. As well as the parsley. They need to teach all the genres, not just one. Alas, for the meat you have to go to communications departments to even talk about it. And then hope you find someone like Dolf Zillman, Bryant Jennings, Jenefer Robinson, or Peter Vorderer.

Which leads me to the next point. Boyle is wrong about editors and writers. The majority of the authors that actually sell never set foot in an MFA program. MFA’s teach students to write for a small fringe market. And so they’ll dominate that fringe market, but not the big markets. Not what most people actually read.

Since I haven’t worked with any editors in that so-called golden age of editing, I cannot comment on the difference. But I do know that the editors I and other authors have worked with do many edits on the projects they oversee. They are thorough. They want it to be the best story it can be. It’s true they won’t take something that’s a complete mess and work on it. But why should they? There are so many better manuscripts out there it only makes sense.

Anyway, I love Boyle. Probably becasue he loves plot and story as much as language. His shorts saved me in my undergrad program. They were one of the few interesting things I read. I just am dismayed that these writing programs are so far off in the weeds.

I’ve posted two new writer’s lessons that discuss how emotion works and the essential parts of story.

Watch an interesting Borders interview with Meyer about Host and Twilight. The thing I keep seeing in her interviews is that this woman follows her passion. She follows the story that wows her. It’s nice, of course, that millions of fans want to share that wow with her. But I don’t know that a writer can be successful doing anything else.

Here’s Orson Card’s blurb about Meyer in Time’s list of the 100 Most Influential People

Nobody was looking for Twilight. A Mormon housewife writes a young-adult novel about a love affair between a teenage girl and a vampire?

Is this Anne Rice lite? Not in the eyes of the teenagers—and their mothers—who have embraced the book.

But Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight does raise some questions, and I’ve asked them. “You really want your teenage daughter to live inside the story of a girl who lies to her parents, invites a boy to sleep in her bed and trusts him not to take advantage of her?”

These women look at me as if I’m insane. “But she can trust him. He really loves her. He’s…perfect.”

In an era when much of the romance genre has been given over to soft porn, and dark fantasy is peopled with one-dimensional characters bent on grim violence, many readers have become hungry for pure romantic fantasy—lots of sexual tension, but as decorous as Jane Austen.

Meyer, 34, did not calculatedly reach for that audience. Instead, she wrote the story she believed in and cared about. She writes with luminous clarity, never standing between the reader and the dream they share. She’s the real thing. Still, who’d have thought it? Today Mr. Darcy is a vampire.

Card is author of Ender’s Game, Empire and Women of Genesis

Where: Salt Lake City at CONduit 

Date: Saturday, May 24, 2008

Time: 2 PM - 4 PM

I had tons of great feedback from the last workshop. It seemed to be helpful to quite a few people. There are a number of other good workshops for writers going on before and after mine that you’ll want to look into as well.

For more information go to the CONduit website.

I’ve experienced yet again the miracle of manure, of starting from scratch, and following the zing.

This last week I’ve been rewriting a beginning to a novel. It’s a bit tricky because I can’t just rewrite it without constraint. Such a rewrite would cause massive changes to everything else in the book. In fact, a complete, unfettered rewrite of a beginning might end up requiring a totally different book. But Tor bought the book in hand. Besides, I don’t have time for a total rewrite even if they did want one. So the new beginning had to fit into the rest of the current story.

At three different spots where this beginning needed significant changes I have had to write a pile of cow crap because it’s all I had in me at the time. I knew I couldn’t use those plops when I finished them. But there they were.

The problem was compounded by my reading the recent Time article about Stephenie Meyer and starting to listen to Empire by Card. I have a weakness for comparing myself to others, and this time the comparison yeilded some depressing results.

Then I asked myself what wasn’t working and how I might meet the goals of those scenes a bit better. I followed my heart. But in all three cases I had to stop trying to use the brilliant words I had written originally. Not the cow crap revision, but the original stuff.

I’m not talking about the general prescription that we writers need to “murder our darlings” because the darlings are usually bad writing. I find general prescriptions to be wrong much of the time and that one in particular to make no sense at all.

In this case one of the things I had to jettison was a beginning segment that had compelled 90% of the readers who glanced at it to read more. A beginning page that snagged agents and editors. A beginning page I still loved, even after reading it as many times as I had.

But it just wouldn’t fit, couldn’t fit with the new structure. When I tried to hang onto it, I wrote crap. Which was fine. There was some good stuff in the crap. But I eventually had to trust myself and come up with something else completely.

And while I don’t know if it’s going to suck readers in like the original, I think it’s pretty dang good. Back before Card’s boot camp I would have never made it to this point. I would have given up. But this is just the process for me now. It took some time to learn and trust it. But now I know that while sometimes I can write hot. There’s no reason to despair if I don’t. Sometimes it takes a few tries before I get to the good stuff.

As for Meyer and Card, well, it’s not my goal to be a one-trick pony, now, is it.

If were smart and didn’t compare myself to other writers, then I wouldn’t care that Meyer is a true overnight success, I wouldn’t be green with envy, I certainly wouldn’t be thinking that I should write YA romance.

His eyes were smoldering…

She couldn’t look away from his smoldering eyes…

His yellow smoldering eyes were upon her…

Alas, imperfect man that I am.

Time has written an interesting article about the Meyer phenom. Of the many fine tidbits, I wanted to highlight one comparing Meyer with Rowling.

But as artists, they couldn’t be more different. Rowling pieces her books together meticulously, detail by detail. Meyer floods the page like a severed artery. She never uses a sentence when she can use a whole paragraph. Her books are big (500-plus pages) but not dense–they have a pillowy quality distinctly reminiscent of Internet fan fiction. (Which she’ll readily grant: “I don’t think I’m a writer; I think I’m a storyteller,” Meyer says. “The words aren’t always perfect.”)

I’m not a writer, she says.

I’m a storyteller.

There are volumes in that one paragraph. Meyer knows exactly why the vast majority of us fiction readers read. And it ain’t for style.

Here’s an even more interesting video clip of Meyer talking about how she came up with her novel. Notice how this woman follows the zing. Notice how she makes time (novel completed in three months). And look at her success. A lesson to all of us wanting to tell great stories.

…His red eyes were smoldering, and her brown eyes were smoldering, and together they were all smoldering…

The Sequel to Spiderman, Peter Parker, & The Gift of Writer’s Block.

The Writer’s Trance & The Four Trance Breakers

There are 3 steps in the creative process. The first has to do with keeping your imagination alive. Your imagination is a beast. Feed it, and it will get up and terrorize the neighborhood on its own accord. Starve it, and it will lie there like a gigantic dust mop and gather flies.

Step 1 of The Creative Process: Capture the Zing

A new writer’s lesson has been posted

I don’t have time to watch, but I found myself getting sucked in this week. And here’s something I realized as I watched Simon, Paula, Randy, Ryan, & the contenstants–the show is using story principles.

Duh, I know: of course, it is. But it does it so well. It reminds me of a research article I read about sportscasters and audience enjoyment of sports competitions. They found that if they could inject story elements–suspense, rivalry, etc.–people enjoyed the games more. Next time you watch a college football game, notice what the color commentators say to make it a contest. It’s not just about reporting what #45 did out in the flat.

Anyway, back to Idol. Look at these elements.

What draws us to characters?

Beauty, threats, quirkiness, larger-than-life situation or skills, source of viewer wish-fulfillment.

Humm, let’s look at the cast of performers. Don’t we see all of that? How many of us wouldn’t love to be able to sing like they do? Have a shot at becoming a recording artist? Or just goggle at someone getting this chance?

What factors generate suspense?

Threats to characters we like or marvelous opportunities for them, turns in the situation, a prolonged resolution.

Humm. Our sympathy is engaged because these folks are normal folks, many of them underdogs. Many viewers identify strongly with one or two because of the contestant’s various social groups and because, heck, the auditions are for people like you and me. It could be us up there in front of the world! You’ve got the threat of peformance fright, but also the overriding opportunity to make a dream real. You’ve got a wonderful career, if not millions of dollars, on the line. You’ve got Simon who is honest, but also plays his part. Isn’t that the moment of most suspense with each performance? You’ve even got a little subplot going on between Simon and Seacrest. There’s no villain here. But there are plenty of obstacles. Weekly threats.

What does Idol give us that Survivor never could?

It’s all REAL, even if the producers let their selection of performers be influenced by things other than vocal talent. And because it’s real, we believe it. Which means we can more easily feel sympathy and root for the various performers.

It’s a simple but brilliant concept. And I just wasted 4 hours watching it. And I’m likely to do it again.

Zing, Baby. Zing!

Writing rules are upstart clerks with guns. This new lesson in the Writers section tells you why and what you should do with them.

I was expecting 30 people to attend the 3 Things You Must Learn to Write Killer Stories workshop. I mean, heck, who wants to listen to me when you could, on the very day designated for it, be pitching woo? But  about 60 brave souls came out. So here’s the handout for all of you who didn’t get one.

Killer Story Workshop Notes

Had a wonderful time at LTUE. I simply love Utah Valley–it’s full of so very many good memories for me. And this will simply add to that.

Capture the zing!

This is the first “mystery.” It is the grand unifying theory that unlocks everything that follows.

The key to this mystery can be discovered in the answer to this question: which of the two pictures below most accurately defines lipstick?

Picture A

Picture B

Learn more in the writer’s section (okay, so the page is there, but where in the fricken ricken frack can you find it? I’m still learning this dang Wordpress thing, so just go here)

If you want to learn how to write stories that move and entertain, you will do whatever it takes–crawl across broken glass, mortgage your dog, eat brown bananas–to get into Card’s week-long, literary boot camp. 

This is the workshop that changed everything for me. And while Card will say it had nothing to do with him, he’s just trying to keep his head from bloating and making it so he can’t walk straight. I’ve spent almost the last 20 years in some form of teaching. Card’s workshop employs all the key principles that make it a killer environment for learning complex cognitive skills, i.e. writing fiction. And this  year it’s in San Diego.

Apply! Do not delay! 

Where do you get your ideas? How do you turn them into story?

Those are fabulous questions. The answer is a bit longer than I have time for today. But I have posted my list of idea generation methods, structured ways of performing creative Q&A.

These have been collected over the years from a number of sources and are now passed on to you, faithful reader. Use them, cherish them, and, if you wish, start an order of crazed monks to preserve the fabulous secrets.

John Browns’s Idea Generation Method List

Enjoy!