Author asks? 5) character you were most surprised to end up writing and 11) what aspect of your writing do you think has most improved since you started writing?
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5) For me, Kalp (from Triptych) was the character I expected and understood the least. The first third of Triptych was originally a novella titled (Back), and I hadn’t intended on expanding it. But a friend and member of our writing group in Fukuoka, Japan - Liz Aitken - had written a few paragraphs as a follow up to the tale for the fun of it. (I think we’d done an exercise where we wrote for a bit in one another’s worlds.) Well, what she created was stunning, and I said, “Can I use this? This concept? This characterization? Can I write this?” She said yes, and eventually I refined the voice and changed the POV, and solidified who Kalp was, but in the beginning it was thrilling and strange and new because the alien she wrote wasn’t at all what I had in my head when I wrote (Back).
In The Accidental Turn Series, Bevel ended up being my biggest surprise. The trope with the Kin/Bevel (#Binky) romance in the book came about really naturally and really organically, really, because I found myself falling into it before I had even really decided to hang a hat on it.
Traditional western/Euro-centric fantasy stories with a Hero and a Sidekick (Batman and Robin, Xena and Gabrielle, Frodo and Sam, Holmes and Watson, etc,) have mostly been influenced by classic stories of Heroes and Sidekicks like Achilles and Patrocles, or The Odyssey, etc. And in those Classic stories, the relationship between the Hero and Sidekick is often sexual or romantic, and sometimes explicitly so. There’s the Greek mentor/mentee mentality where the older man was not only the teacher and protector of a younger man, but often the person who initiates him into sex and teaches him about pleasure and bedsport, too. There’s the martial shield-mate relationship, where fighting pairs were encouraged to be lovers in order to strengthen their bond and make them more likely to fight harder for one another.
And whether explicitly or not, whether consciously on the part of the author or not, some of that UST has leaked into the stories based on those classical myths and legends.
And it totally happened to me. Kin and Bevel were inspired by what I thought Sherlock and John from Sherlock might look like from Mycroft’s perspective (too loud, too jolly, too self-congratulatory, too visible), and also on Hercules and Iolus from the 90s TV show Hercules: the Legendary Journeys, and Duncan MacLeod and Richie from HIghlander: The Series, and a bit of Tony Stark and Captain America in The Avengers. All of which, of course, have mad slashy UST going on.
So when Bevel started crushing hard on Kin I was like, “Wait, what? This is… okay… so this is happening? Why? Oh, that’s why? Hmmm. I wonder, can I use this? Can I hang a hat on it, make it one of the subverted tropes? Can I actually explicitly say that the slash-goggle wearing fans of The Tales of Kintyre Turn were right?”
(And then of course, 90% of the bonus material for the series is all about #Binky, so I guess it worked out, eh?)
Oh, and Pip too, because I didn’t expect her to be quite as narrow-minded as she is. She was written to be the Perfect Feminist ™, but I found her saying and reacting to things in ways that I personally, as a Feminist, wouldn’t have. She’s got a real thing against “girly stuff” and Performative Femininity - she hates makeup and fashion - and she’s not as Intersectional as she thinks she is. I know that stems from her background - being a woman in academia is hard no matter your gender/sex/orientation, but as we know women have to fight harder to be heard. To be taken seriously in the academy a lot of female academics I know take on very masculine-coded modes of dress, modes of communicating, and body language. Pip deliberately eschews traditional feminine-coded things because of this, and what surprises me is that it’s turned her into a bit of a bigot about it.
(But don’t worry, she’s getting a bit of a slap about that in book #3.)
11) I’ve definitely become a faster writer. I don’t mean just in terms of how many WPM I can pump out (65 wpm last time I tested myself, or about 1200 words per hour if I’m really into it.) but that has improved too. But I can do a lot more of it in my head now. Some of that is switching from MicrosoftWord to Scrivener for my writing software, which eliminates the wasted time scrolling through a document, or amalgamating or splitting up documents to get chapters sorted.
But mostly it’s the ability to be more self-aware. To skip steps that I would otherwise have laboriously worked through before, because I know what I’m doing, I know how I prefer to tell and plot stories, and I have experience and practice.
For example, I don’t need to spend a day hashing out the narrative split between the three acts (I like to write novels paced like screenplays) and writing copious notes about it. In the past, I wasn’t even self aware enough to know that I prefer to write a three-act book. Now, before ever putting fingers to keys, I know the plot structure, where the climax will be, and how it needs to progress, saving myself countless weeks of outlining, or restructuring.
These are things I do in my head automatically, learned habits, just like some people can do math in their head without needing to count on their fingers or write it down.
But with improvements also come finding more weaknesses. My agent has made a huge point of highlighting (marquees, spotlights, the whole shebang) that my work is starting to veer into the dangerously self-indulgent and flabby lately. Way too many words, way too much sitting around and thinking on the part of the characters, too much description. I’ve started turning in books that are 130 000 words when they should probably be 100k or less. And that extra 30k worth of stuff is just… usually not necessary.Some of this is because my method is usually to write big - write it all, get it all on the page - and then edit it down, polish it, slim it and tighten it up over the course of a year or so. But with the tight deadlines that doing a trilogy produces, I haven’t had the opportunity to do that year’s worth of polish/edit/trim/tighten. I only had a month or two or three to sit with the book once it was done, and some of that was spent waiting for crit partners/beta readers/agent to read it and get back to me with notes.
Some of this is also because I’m generally a pantser - I don’t outline or plot very closely. I prefer playing and seeing where it goes, which often means I have whole plot points or substories that should be left out.
But some of it is, yeah, because I am just too damn wordy. :s
And Forsyth is too damn wordy, too! He’s such a thinker. Bad trait for a narrator POV sometimes!
My next book should be about 90k and already I’m dreading it because there’s more plot planned than my last few books, but I have to do it in fewer words.
