Tag: literature

Reading Discworld

What book could you read over and over again?

Any entry from Sir Terry Pratchett’s Discworld series.

Pratchett had a rare talent for molding words into the most fascinating and enticing sentences and using them as the building blocks for a fun world and enjoyable, interesting and likeable characters.

It’s a hard thing to precisely describe the style of certain authors. The truly gifted have a fully developed voice that is recognizable as their own and no one else’s.

I read through the whole series over the course of several years. I could very well do it again, and love every minute of it.

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Many thanks for visiting my blog. I post updates on my writing career, I muse over storytelling and fiction, and I reflect on the curious and wonderful things in life.

“Hermes is not having the best time. He walks a fine line, and his duty as messenger of Olympus weighs heavily on him. Being a god in the modern age means living in a world that no longer believes in gods. How much can one deity accomplish when no one respects him anymore? And why do his instincts tell him that he, the son of Zeus, is losing favor with his own family?

Tensions abound. The upstart Young Gods play dangerous games using entire cities as their boards. Formless monsters strike from the nighttime shadows, terrorizing hapless mortals. Agents of rival pantheons scheme to thwart Olympus’ designs. In the thick of it all, Hermes does what he does best: trick, lie, and cheat his way to victory.“

Professionals on Writing

Living is easy. Writing is hard. Let’s hear what the experts have to say:

“The scariest moment is always just before you start.”

Stephen King

“The difference between the almost right word and the right word is really a large matter — it’s the difference between the lightning bug and the lightning.”

Mark Twain

“The best time for planning a book is while you’re doing the dishes.”

Agatha Christie

“Cut out all these exclamation points. An exclamation point is like laughing at your own joke.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald

“I write for the same reason I breathe — because if I didn’t, I would die.”

Isaac Asimov

“You fail only if you stop writing.”

Ray Bradbury

My Best School Teacher

Who was your most influential teacher? Why?

Our best teachers are the ones who push us to our limits. For me, that was Mrs. Wall, 9th grade English.

A summer reading assignment of The Once and Future King by T. H. White. Weekly essays. In-depth dissections of grammatical structure in complex sentences. Reading plays out loud in class. And never, ever letting up on improving our writing skills. It was a hard, hard class for everyone in it. I felt exhausted at the end of every week. Heck, the weekends, too.

And it was the best thing that ever happened to me in school. I had always loved reading, and I was already toying with the idea of becoming a writer, but Mrs. Wall’s class was what made me into a writer. She instilled the modicum of discipline and grit in me that is needed to write a book; to write every day, revise, and take criticism to heart.

I don’t know where she is now, or if she is even still alive, but my thanks to Mrs. Wall and the misery she subjected me to, because her lessons got me through the rest of high school, through college, and are still with me now.

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Many thanks for visiting my blog. I post updates on my writing career, I muse over storytelling and fiction, and I reflect on the curious and wonderful things in life.


“Hermes is not having the best time. He walks a fine line, and his duty as messenger of Olympus weighs heavily on him. Being a god in the modern age means living in a world that no longer believes in gods. How much can one deity accomplish when no one respects him anymore? And why do his instincts tell him that he, the son of Zeus, is losing favor with his own family?

Tensions abound. The upstart Young Gods play dangerous games using entire cities as their boards. Formless monsters strike from the nighttime shadows, terrorizing hapless mortals. Agents of rival pantheons scheme to thwart Olympus’ designs. In the thick of it all, Hermes does what he does best: trick, lie, and cheat his way to victory.“

Don’t Do It

If you could delete one word from being used, what would it be?

Do.

A two-letter word that has gotten far too big for its britches. A little verb that has become far too self-important. A word that has been fed and fed until it’s grown so fat that it’s smothered the rest of the English vocabulary.

What do we use “do” for? To accomplish, to finish, to work, to perform, to act, to emphasize, to partake, to accept, to think, to engage, to pursue, to execute, to carry out, to give, to pay, to produce, to decorate, to cheat, to travel, to behave, to arrange, to cook, to serve, to mimic, to kill, to suffice, to put, to use, to treat, to get along, to behave, to happen, to function, to fit, to satisfy, to fulfill, to make. And more.

And what is wrong with that, you might ask? Look at that list. Aren’t those words just there for the taking? Why replace a rich tapestry with a boring blank sheet? Why kick out all those words and saddle their many definitions on a single one? In the end, if a word is burdened with so many meanings, then it comes to mean nothing at all.

Don’t do it.

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Many thanks for visiting my blog. I post updates on my writing career, I muse over storytelling and fiction, and I reflect on the curious and wonderful things in life.

“Hermes is not having the best time. He walks a fine line, and his duty as messenger of Olympus weighs heavily on him. Being a god in the modern age means living in a world that no longer believes in gods. How much can one deity accomplish when no one respects him anymore? And why do his instincts tell him that he, the son of Zeus, is losing favor with his own family?

Tensions abound. The upstart Young Gods play dangerous games using entire cities as their boards. Formless monsters strike from the nighttime shadows, terrorizing hapless mortals. Agents of rival pantheons scheme to thwart Olympus’ designs. In the thick of it all, Hermes does what he does best: trick, lie, and cheat his way to victory.“

A Literary Sleight of Hand: Writing Characters Who Aren’t Good People

Work on my third book is, as they say, “proceeding apace.” Third draft is halfway done, and I’m actually somewhat happy with it.

It’s an interesting subject I’ve chosen. My two published works, A God Walks Up to the Bar and The Trickster’s Lament, are urban fantasy following the Greek god Hermes in our modern world. Writing gods is fun and fascinating. When you’re writing a guy like Hermes, and you look at what him and his ilk get up to in mythology, you realize that you can’t really start out the story with him being too likeable.

Hermes is a funny guy, and he’s smart, perceptive and entertaining to write and read about. But he’s not necessarily a good guy. He’s egotistical, vain, manipulative and more than a little callous. Which begs the question: How do you make readers want to keep reading about such a person?

The first step, I find, is character development. Hermes is not a static character. He grows and changes over time, and hopefully he’ll change for the better. The second is the time-honored strategy of comparing and contrasting. Does your story have an awful person as your protagonist? Make their opponents even worse.

Michael Corleone was godfather of a murderous Mafia family, but at least he wasn’t a drug dealer. Darth Vader killed children and endorsed the destruction of entire planets, but at least he wasn’t as sadistic as his emperor and still held love for his son. Peter Pan is a selfish child who never matures and is a nasty little brat, but his nemesis Captain Hook is a bloodthirsty pirate who, you know, wants to kill children.

Maybe it’s a cheap trick. Make somebody bad look good by standing them up alongside people who do worse things. A part of writing is getting inside people’s heads and figuring them out. When writing any protagonist, whether hero or villain or in-between, you have to figure out how to stoke the desire in audiences to keep reading about them. And if they do things that the audience finds … distasteful … then you may want to consider the good old strategy of compare and contrast. Give them lines they won’t cross. Give them a code. It doesn’t have to measure up to the reader’s own personal morals, but give them standards. And then pit them against antagonists who violate those standards.

It is, in many ways, a literary sleight of hand.

But Hermes, at least, isn’t a villain per se. He’s not nice, but he does have standards, fairly strong ones, and he is aware of some of his own vices. And he may even change for the better if he survives this upcoming book.

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Many thanks for visiting my blog. I post updates on my writing career, I muse over storytelling and fiction, and I reflect on the curious and wonderful things in life.

“Hermes is not having the best time. He walks a fine line, and his duty as messenger of Olympus weighs heavily on him. Being a god in the modern age means living in a world that no longer believes in gods. How much can one deity accomplish when no one respects him anymore? And why do his instincts tell him that he, the son of Zeus, is losing favor with his own family?

Tensions abound. The upstart Young Gods play dangerous games using entire cities as their boards. Formless monsters strike from the nighttime shadows, terrorizing hapless mortals. Agents of rival pantheons scheme to thwart Olympus’ designs. In the thick of it all, Hermes does what he does best: trick, lie, and cheat his way to victory.“

Stephen King on Writing

I came across this quote today by Stephen King. It struck a chord with me.

“Description begins in the writer’s imagination, but should finish in the reader’s.”

This is a trap I am still learning how to avoid. The temptation to describe absolutely everything in meticulous and inane detail is something that, while appealing to the writer, can do extensive damage to the story. We as writers should not be tyrants over our reader’s minds. Describe enough to convey the point, but leave some left over for the readers to fill in the blanks.

After all, we all had our fill of obsession with details in high school literature class.

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Many thanks for visiting my blog. I post updates on my writing career, I muse over storytelling and fiction, and I reflect on the curious and wonderful things in life.

“Hermes is not having the best time. He walks a fine line, and his duty as messenger of Olympus weighs heavily on him. Being a god in the modern age means living in a world that no longer believes in gods. How much can one deity accomplish when no one respects him anymore? And why do his instincts tell him that he, the son of Zeus, is losing favor with his own family?

Tensions abound. The upstart Young Gods play dangerous games using entire cities as their boards. Formless monsters strike from the nighttime shadows, terrorizing hapless mortals. Agents of rival pantheons scheme to thwart Olympus’ designs. In the thick of it all, Hermes does what he does best: trick, lie, and cheat his way to victory.“

Literature Adds to Reality …

Literature adds to reality, it does not simply describe it. It enriches the necessary competencies that daily life requires and provides; and in this respect, it irrigates the deserts that our lives have already become.

C . S. Lewis

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Many thanks for visiting my blog. I post updates on my writing career, I muse over storytelling and fiction, and I sometimes post cool quotes by writers.

Open a Book

Open a book, go on an adventure. You don’t leave home, you don’t walk a road. But you go on a journey just the same, to places near and far, betwixt and between.

The past and future, earth and space, ruins and utopias, worlds both alien and familiar. The lives of great kings and scientists and heroes stretch out before you. Hear their words, see inside their minds.

Indeed, you go everywhere, do everything, see everyone. A universe of words is revealed to you. Travel here and there, hither and thither, as much as you can stand.

And at the end of the journey, you come back home, and realize you never left your chair.

Such is the wonder of opening a book.

Many thanks for visiting my blog. I post updates on my writing career, I muse over storytelling and fiction, and I reflect on the curious and wonderful things in life.

Deep Questions about Deep Literature

Do you remember literature classes in high school? How you would spend hours every day discussing the symbolic value of the billboard in The Great Gatsby and analyzing what each character represented in The Lord of the Flies? A spade is never just a spade in lit class. There is always a deeper meaning.

So can anyone explain to me why all the books students have to read are so dang depressing?

Looking back, this is what I feel that we were doing: Taking a beautiful flower and plucking its petals and cutting the stem and digging up the roots to see why it was a beautiful flower. And we very scientifically removed everything beautiful about it.

But darn it, we got educated about great literature. We knew what metaphor was. And allegory. And the subtle social critiques and genre deconstructions that mark all literary classics. We obtained knowledge! We justified our tuition!

There are people who make their living by reading stories and telling other people whether they are good or not. And their word is law, because there is no such thing as an opinion they understand the rules that govern quality writing. Where they obtain this arcane knowledge is unknown. Presumably, they dissected enough flowers.

Good stories seem to be a case of majority rules. If enough people say it’s good, it must be good. Maybe. But I didn’t like The Great Gatsby, so does that mean it’s not a good book or I’m not a good writer? Or perhaps if I had read it on my own time instead of being forced to analyze that darn stupid billboard I would have liked it.

What does it matter what color the curtains are or what suit the one character is wearing in each scene? It matters because somebody important says it matters, but what if it’s not the author saying it? Are we seeing what the writer put there, or what we think is there? Are we seeing meaning where there is none, or is the meaning not what we think it means? Does it mean what people say it means, or does it mean something else, which means that what I want it to mean means that it means the wrong thing from what everyone else thinks it means? Because that’s just mean.

Or maybe we’re just really good at gaslighting ourselves into thinking a book somebody wrote to pay their bills is a magnum opus. The writer wings it, hears what critics say, nods sagely and says, “Yes, that’s exactly what it means.”

Many thanks for visiting my blog. I post updates on my writing career, I muse over storytelling and fiction, and I reflect on the curious and wonderful things in life.

Quotes Courtesy of Charles Dickens

In honor of of one of the greatest writers of our, and any time, here are some choice quotes from the works of Charles Dickens. Some advice, some funny observations, maybe even a little wisdom.

The most important thing in life is to stop saying, ‘I wish’ and start saying, ‘I will’. Consider nothing impossible, then treat possibilities as probabilities.”

David Copperfield

“There are books of which the backs and covers are by far the best parts.”

Oliver Twist

“Trifles make the sum of life.”

Great Expectations

“There are very few moments in a man’s existence when he experiences so much ludicrous distress, or meets with so little charitable commiseration, as when he is in pursuit of his own hat.”

The Pickwick Papers

 “Love, though said to be afflicted with blindness, is a vigilant watchman.”

Our Mutual Friend

Many thanks for visiting my blog. I post updates on my writing career, I muse over storytelling and fiction, and I reflect on the curious and wonderful things in life.