I did a guest blog recently about writing for kids, and I found it hard to stop adding more and more reasons why it’s so much fun.

First, there’s the shorter word count. My adult novels run to 80,000 words or more, whereas my junior novels are under 30k. I can read a draft in a single sitting, no sweat.

Next is complexity. My adult books feature at least two subplots in addition to the main plot, and I love to intertwine them so that characters come this close to running into each other. Over the course of a whole novel that can be finicky and exhausting, and a huge mental challenge. With my junior books? One plot, no subplots.

Point of view: I like 3rd person limited for novels, while most of my short fiction employs 1st person. I always get into the character’s head and live their experience as I write it, seeing and hearing what they do. (This is why I don’t write erotica or horror. Too intense.) In an adult book I hop from one character to the next, and my real life mood often changes depending on which one I’m writing. With the junior book I only have the one POV, and it’s the protagonist. Plus my wife says I have the sense of humor of a ten-year-old, so it’s not much of a stretch to write from that perspective.

The other challenge is the language: sentence structure and word choices. I’ve done a lot of school visits and I never talk down to kids. It sets my teeth on edge when I hear adults talking loudly and slowly to, say, nine-year-olds. Kids are sharp at that age. They miss nothing. Sure, they all develop at different rates, and you can’t pick up a book and say ‘all nine year olds will love this’. You just have to pick a target and aim for it consistently, which means you don’t have baby talk one chapter and scientific theory in the next.

Okay, that’s the technical side. What about the benefits?

First, making kids laugh is very special. They love it when adults take time out from their busy (yet incredibly boring-seeming) lives to share a joke or draw a cartoon or tell a story. Hold their interest with your novel for a few hours, make them laugh, and you’re sure to gain a fan.

Second, in most households it’s not the parent(s) who wield(s) the power, it’s the kids. What you eat, where you go on holiday, who you ask round, which books they read … your children may give you a bit of leeway from time to time, maintaining the illusion, but mostly you’re tethered by an invisible leash. So, if you write a book which makes them laugh, parents will be suckered into buying everything you write, into queueing up at signings, into buying the stuffed toys and the DVD boxed set.

Finally, there are the long-suffering teachers and librarians. Would you rather have four hundred kids running around at recess with home-made weapons, or total silence as they sit in little groups reading and laughing to themselves? Absolutely. I tell you, if you write something that will keep kids quiet for a few hours you’re a demi-god to these overworked and underpaid professionals. They’ll buy truckloads of your books in return for some nice peace ‘n’ quiet.

I’m not suggesting you chuck your novel-writing career and start over by writing junior fiction. But if you have an empathy with kids, or maybe even remember some of your childhood, it might be worth a shot. Who knows, you might enjoy it more than writing long, complicated novels for adults

Hal Junior: The Secret Signal
Paperback (186pp, illus., $6.99) Amazon US, Barnes & Noble
Ebook ($4.99) Amazon Kindle (also UK/DE, Smashwords and epub/rtf/pdf

Let me start by saying that I approach the creation of a magic system with a fair amount of rigor.  I think that slipshod magic can doom a fantasy novel or series faster than just about anything else.  I believe that one of the reasons so many people look down their noses at fantasy and science fiction (and all of their associated sub-genres) is that they assume the speculative aspect of the narrative — the magic or the underlying scientific assumption — is an excuse for “anything-goes” plotting and a replacement for careful development of character and setting.  Nothing could be further from the truth.  Magic systems, when done well, will follow certain rules and remain consistent throughout the story.  (And the same is true of the science elements of SF, but I’m going to focus my post on magic and fantasy, since that’s what I do.)  Magic may make possible occurences and plot twists that couldn’t occur otherwise, but it does not replace plotting or character work or ambiance.  It enhances them.

Over the years, when I have created magic systems, I have followed three basic rules.  First, I have tried to make my magic as internally consistent as possible.  Just as the physical phenomena in our “real” world have laws that explain how they work (think gravity, inertia, etc.), so magic should be similarly governed.  As a writer, I don’t want my magic conforming to my narrative needs, as convenient as that may sound.  That leads to contrived stories and ticked off readers.  There are times when I’m writing and figuring out plot points and I run straight into walls created by the rules governing my magic system.  And that’s just too bad for me.  If I can’t get past the rules, then I have to reconfigure my plot.  But I will not sacrifice the internal logic and consistency of my magic system.  Second, I try to place limits on the power of my magic.  This is related, obviously, to that first point.  But I believe it’s crucial from a storytelling standpoint.  A magic system that can do anything, that is limitless in its power, is fated to take over the world in which it’s located, and thus any story about that world.  There are exceptions to this, of course.  I’m sure a fine story could be written about magic that conquers everything.  Once.  But after that one time, that story is going to get pretty boring.  Better that magic should be a tool, but one that, in the end, is no replacement for wit, perseverance, and strength of will.  And finally (and also related to these first two rules of making magic) I want my magic to exact a price from those who use it.  Clearly, this ties into the limited nature of my magic.  But again, magic without cost is, to me, too easy, and thus boring.  I have written magic that weakens and shortens the lives of those who use it.  I’ve written magic that is sourced in a familiar who stays with the sorcerer (and weakens that familiar if overused).  I’ve written magic that is powerful, but that slowly drives the user insane.  Consistency, limits, cost:  Not everyone takes these steps when building magic, but I always have, and I think they make my magic systems more interesting than they would otherwise be.

Recently, I have come to recognize one more component of a successful magic system.  Magic, I believe, should fit in seamlessly with the time and setting in which the story takes place.  This seems like a no-brainer, right?  Certainly, I always took this one for granted when I was writing alternate world fantasy.  Magic systems were inextricably bound to my worldbuilding, and so there always seemed to be an organic connection between the setting and the magic.  But as I have turned to historical fantasy and contemporary fantasy — in other words, as I have brought magic into our own world — I have come to see that this organic relationship isn’t always easy to maintain.  Grafting a magic system onto a real world setting, without making that magic feel anachronistic or like something that was, in fact, simply grafted on, has been one of the greatest challenges I’ve faced as I shift to new subgenres.

For my contemporary fantasies, I have tried to create magic systems that draw upon existing elements of our world.  My most recent book (as yet uncontracted and unpublished) uses Celtic mythology as the basis for its magic system, but those who are rooted in myth have adapted to modernity, turned technology and popular culture to their purposes.  This way, the magic system can be consistent and limited, it can feel like it “belongs” in the modern world, but it can also seem plausible to my reader that many in the world don’t know or believe that the magic exists.  In my historical fantasy, the magic is tied to seventeenth century witch-scares in ways that blend with the mechanics of the system, but that again give those who don’t have magic a way of understanding phenomena they couldn’t otherwise explain.  I realize that these descriptions are a bit vague — the historical fantasy isn’t out yet, the contemporary fantasy isn’t under contract.  I don’t want to give away too much about either.  The essential point, though is that regardless of where your book is set, the magic you create for it should feel as much a part of the world as the food, the politics, the history, the landscape, etc.

Those are the things I’ve been thinking about recently when creating magic.  What about you?  What elements of building a magic system do you think are most important?  Which ones do you struggle with in your own work?

I’ll be away from my computer much of this week, but feel free to discuss this in my absence and I’ll check in when I can.

I linked to Curtis’s post on my Facebook page, under a heading that read something like “Google Declares War on Publishers and Writers.” Many of the comments to my post expressed outrage at Schmidt’s declaration. But a sizable number of them did not. On the contrary, they said that Google was justified in refusing to do this and a few went on to argue that in fact e-piracy really didn’t hurt authors at all.

I was floored.

And so I thought I would bring the issue up here. I know that I’m going to tick people off with some of what I’m going to say. I don’t really care.

Piracy hurts artists. I say this as someone who is old enough to have made cassette tapes of my friends’ albums (Grateful Dead — Europe ‘72, Allman Brothers — Beginnings, The Who — Who’s Next, and a bunch of others that don’t make me sound nearly as cool . . .) in violation of copyright laws. I was wrong to have done it. I apologize. Because piracy really does hurt artists.

How? Well, let’s start with the obvious. If you illegally download a book or a song or a movie, or if you buy downloads from sites that you assume are legal (because some well-known search engine took you there, and well, doesn’t it follow that it must therefore be a legal site?) you are denying the artist a royalty on that sale. You are, in effect, taking money out of the artist’s pocket.

“But wait!” some will say. “You can’t assume that every illegal sale correlates with a lost legal sale. Some people, if they can’t buy something on the cheap from an illegal site, won’t buy it at all.” That may be true. There may not be a one-to-one correlation between illegal sales and sales lost. Doesn’t matter. Even if the correlation is three-to-one or seven-to-one or even ten-to-one, it is still money taken out of the artist’s pocket.

But more than that, illegal downloads and the like also have a negative impact on an artist’s numbers. (And here I will focus on the publishing industry, because that’s what I know best.) Again, it doesn’t matter what the ratio of sales lost might be. Lower sales numbers make it more difficult for writers to keep their books in print and to secure contracts for future work. We live in an age where the bottom line is everything to publishers. A writer’s future is only as secure as his or her most recent sales figures. When our numbers go down, our career prospects grow ever more tenuous. Decisions about whether or not to tender contracts for future books, be it in the same series or not, are based on the number of sales reported on recent books. So are decisions about the size of advances, how much money will be put into packaging and publicizing the books, how widely they will be distributed, the size of print runs, where and how books are shelved in a bookstore. In short, every single decision that will impact the success or failure of future volumes is tied to previous sales numbers. Only the most naïve observer could possibly think that piracy doesn’t hurt an author’s prospects for success.

Piracy-deniers will say, “But even if you don’t get the sale, you’ll have more people aware of your work. Name recognition helps authors; word of mouth is the best form of advertising.” Name recognition does help; word of mouth is crucial to our careers. But only so far as those things lead to legitimate, measurable sales. If my books don’t sell in a way that profits my publisher, I won’t get another contract. I can say, “Well, but lots of people know who I am! They might not be buying the books legally, but they are buying them. My name recognition is off the charts!” But that’s really not going to help me at all.

“The publishing industry is stuck in the dark ages. It has to adjust to the new realities of a digital marketplace. That’s what the music industry did a few years ago. Now it’s publishing’s turn. Until the industry changes, piracy is going to continue to take its toll.”

Yeah, I can’t argue with that one. And frankly it wasn’t my intention to. Because here is the bottom line. The industry might need to change, but it hasn’t yet, and in the meantime, piracy is illegal. Selling copies of my books that have been stolen or acquired through illegitimate means, is illegal. Buying pirated copies of my books is illegal. By making it possible for people to buy and sell those pirated copies, Google is abetting an illegal industry. And no matter how it is justified or marginalized or forgiven, nothing can change that. Piracy is against the law. And everything else is crap.

This isn’t a particularly original topic — I’m sure that writers here at SFNovelists have tackled the issue before, and I’m sure that I’ve written about it in other venues over the years.  But each of us has his or her own take on the matter, and my thinking about villains and what makes them work has changed over the course of my career.

Let me start with villain archetypes:  Obviously there are lots of them.  There’s the all powerful manifestation of evil — Sauron, Lord Foul, Rakoth Maugrim (from Guy Gavriel Kay’s Fionivar Tapestry).  There is the twisted evil genius (Khan, Baron Harkonnen, Mr. Wednesday in American Gods), the faceless institutional evil (the military complex in Ender’s Game), and a few others that I’m sure I’m forgetting.  But if you’re like me, while you are willing to admit that your villain might fall under one of these broad headings, you would like to think that he or she is utterly original — a unique addition to the pantheon of literary antagonists.  Good for you; I’m right there with you.

I like to begin with the following assumptions:  First, no one, not even the worst villain you can imagine, is really going to think of him/herself as “evil” or “a villain.”  As others have said, everyone is the hero of her own story (I say her because the villain in my upcoming Thieftaker series, published under the name D.B. Jackson, is a woman), and a villain is no different.  In other words, having a character be evil for evil’s sake is not always the best way to go.  On the other hand, though, if a character is evil, her motivations are going to be at odds with whatever the “good” or “normal” characters in your book want.  And so my second assumption is that there should be something in the villain’s personal history and personality to explain the things she wants and does.  When I build a character, good or evil, I spend a good deal of time on what I refer to as the ABCs of character (A — attributes; B — backstory; C — circumstance) and in this case backstory and circumstance (the current situations that provide the basis for plot) are particularly important.

The key point is this:  I like to write my characters, good and bad, in shades of gray rather than in black and white.  With very few exceptions, I don’t believe that any effective character can be completely evil or completely good without becoming completely boring.  The villains in my books all tend to be at least somewhat sympathetic and to have very clear reasons for the things that they do.  And, of course, my work is in no way unique in this regard.

It seems to me that the all-powerful, uber-evil villain like Sauron is, in many ways, a thing of the past.  Most authors these days are drawn to complexity, even ambiguity, in their character work — a blurring of the lines between good and evil.  This is one of the reasons why we see so many more “anti-heroes” among today’s protagonists.  Just as the all-evil villain is less common than she used to be, so is the perfect hero.  And thank goodness.  With heroes growing more complex, it only makes sense that anti-heroes would go in the same direction.

All of which opens up tremendous possibilities for those of us who spend our days developing characters and narratives.  Our flawed heroes must overcome their shortcomings in order to prevail in their struggles.  And our complex villains can often have at least a chance at redemption that, for one reason or another they shun or embrace, depending on how we want our plots to twist and turn.

I find it particularly fun and helpful in my plotting if the flaws of my hero and the redeeming qualities of my villain are tied to each other in some way.  For instance, in my Winds of the Forelands series, one of my heroes, Lord Tavis of Curgh, starts out as a spoiled brat who is very difficult for my readers to like.  He is selfish, rude, egotistical, impulsive.  His main nemesis is an assassin named Cadel, who was also once an alienated noble.  He dealt with his alienation by leaving his home and eventually turning to life as a hired blade.  But despite his violent profession, he is generous, charming, urbane, thoughtful — qualities that help him in his work, but that also make him likable to my readers.  The two men have similar backgrounds and opposing traits; and throughout the first several books of the series, they are on a collision course made all the more compelling by all that links them to each other.  In the same series, the two sorcerers who will battle for the fate of the Forelands, Grinsa and Dusaan, could be brothers they are so similar.  But where one of them chose a life path that led to conciliation and compassion, the other followed his ambitions and prejudices down a darker path.  Again, their similarities make their rivalry all the more interesting for my readers.

Building a villain for your books — like building any other character or setting or plot line — does not happen in a vacuum.  Your villain needs to be the product of her own background and life story.  She needs to be a creature of the world and magic system you have created.  And she should also be the perfect foil for your protagonist.  This last point may seem contrived, and if written with too heavy a hand it could turn out that way.  But fiction is an imperfect reflection of reality, and if the complementary qualities of your hero and anti-hero are handled delicately, subtly, they can add dimension and richness to the struggle between good and evil.

Tim responded to my first response with the following:

“I’ve been thinking the past day or so about what you said regarding worldbuilding/research and outlining. When I first considered the topic, I was coming to the question for myself, looking for input and trying to render some consistent methodology. And not the question of one over the other (wb vs. outlining), but of the interplay between the two, and where that balance should be.

I’m quite certain now that it isn’t a matter of “should be,” beyond that for each writer the balance “should be” wherever it needs to be for them to produce their best stories… So, gathering my thoughts and drawing on what you wrote, let me throw some things your way to see if you would agree.

First, worldbuilding, even for pantsers, is indispensable. When you say (rightly, it seems to me) that worldbuilding and research are interchangeable, I think this is the next logical step.  And second, worldbuilding has two goals that would apply to any genre:  Completeness and consistency  …and, for something like your historical novel, Thieftaker, you could add a third:  Correctness.

Would you add anything to those listed goals? . . . Reading what you wrote about your process on Thieftaker, it did strike me as a little ironic that when your worldbuilding must be more rigorous (striving to be “correct”), you are actually outlining less. I know you mentioned the single-POV and the mystery format as the primary reasons for not needing as much outlining work, but does the added rigor in your worldbuilding/research have anything to do with it as well? . . . And could you talk a little about the relationship between worldbuilding and outlining with regard to sub-plots and how that works for you?”

And my reply:

“I think that you’re right that consistency and completeness have to be goals of worldbuilding (I would, for the purposes of simplification, put “correctness” in historical worldbuilding/research under the rubric of “consistency” since the consistency of a fictional world and the accuracy of a historical setting are, to my mind, rough equivalents).  But I think there is a risk in looking at it in this way.  The goal of all of this, beyond the mechanics, has to be “making it cool and fun” so that your readers want to read it, and, perhaps more important, so that you want to write it.  I’m not trying to be cute here.  I’m dead serious.  What made the Forelands [the world I created for my Winds of the Forelands quintet] work for me — what makes the Thieftaker world [pre-Revolutionary Boston, the setting for my new series Chronicles of the Thieftaker, written under the name D. B. Jackson] work for me now — is that I WANTED to go there.  It was work, but it was also play.  I love those worlds, and that has to be the fundamental element of whatever you do.  Make it complete, keep it consistent, but for God’s sake make it so freakin’ cool that you WANT to do the work to accomplish those other goals.  Does that make sense?

To your questions:  I guess I’m not convinced that the amount of outlining I’m doing relates back to the worldbuilding in a direct way.  I suppose you could say that they’re connected at some level.  As I said above, the extensive worldbuilding I’ve done is a direct result of the fact that I simply love these worlds and want to know as much about them as possible.  And I think you can also say that because I’m so into these stories, I have them more firmly in mind and therefore need less formal outlining to know where they’re going.  But there’s nothing causal there; rather, they are symptoms of a third phenomenon, ie my enthusiasm for the projects.

Your second question:  hmmm.  Let me digress briefly.  Have you ever tried to teach a person to swing a baseball bat or a golf club.  I have, and I find it incredibly hard to do, because I find myself trying to break down an inherently integrated action into its component parts; I’m taking something smooth and seamless, and trying to make it into a step by step process.  I feel a little bit like that when talking about writing issues of the type you bring up here.  I do think that some of my subplots come out of my worldbuilding, and in working on the historical stuff for Thieftaker, I was able to find historical threads that fit very nicely with the various levels of plotting I was doing as I worked out my story.  But they also grow out of character work, out of unexpected plot twists (unexpected for me as writer — times when my characters take my narrative in directions I hadn’t anticipated).  I come back to a word I used in my last email:  Synergy.  There is nothing compartmentalized in my creative process.  It all blends together, and so telling you whether a particular subplot grew out of worldbuilding, or character background, or a plot idea is nearly impossible.  They all feed on each other.  Quite often I only recognize a promising sub-plot after the fact.  I’ve already started writing it and I have a “Oh, look what I did” moment.

Now you, being observant and intelligent, probably noticed that I pretty much contradicted myself in that last graph.  On the one hand I’m talking about the planning I’ve done for Thieftaker as I did research (this in a series of emails that began because I claim to be doing less planning than I used to) and on the other hand I’m also saying that I don’t know where any of this stuff comes from or how it works together.  Forgive me for slipping into metaphysics here, but the fact is that everything I’ve written here is true, even if it is inherently contradictory.  I am plotting less, and yet I’m still plotting.  I know that some of my ideas come from my research, but I also know that I have been able to find stuff in my research to support my ideas.  It’s all fluid and, forgive me, magical.  Yes, I really believe that.  I believe that the creative process is the most profound kind of alchemy.  We take piles of ideas and plot fragments and characters, and we spin them into narrative gold.

I knew that I wanted the first Thieftaker book to coincide with the Stamp Act riots.  And as I developed the mystery that I blended with that real world event, I had to come up with other elements of the villain’s plan to make his crime logical and part of a larger pattern.  Well, it turned out two other events in Boston’s history fit very nicely with what I was trying to do.  Did the subplot come out of my narrative work and find resonance in the history?  Or did the history present me with opportunities which I used to deepen my plot?  I really couldn’t tell you.  Both, I guess.  I don’t remember which came first.  I just know that they worked together perfectly.  To me, that’s magical.

. . . I think maybe the larger point of this entire email is pretty simple:  Don’t overthink this stuff.  Creative process is not easily explained.  It is as seamless as Paul Molitor’s swing (or George Brett’s, or whoever).  Is there value in breaking it down and trying to understand its component parts?  Absolutely.  To a point.  But after a while we have to go back to the swing itself and simply try to grasp it in its complexity and totality.  My swing works well for me.  And there may be things that I do that could help you hone yours (just as there are things in your swing that will help me).  But ultimately your swing is going to look unique, and it’s going to serve you very well, just as mine serves me.”

Here are some of the questions in Tim’s words: “How much world-building you do before you put pen to paper? Or before you outline?  Where do your outlining and your world-building intersect? And to what extent is it sequential? Do those sequences overlap? How much of your world-building would we see in a finished novel? How much detail did you leave in the file because the prose never called for it?”

And my answer:

There is no quick answer to any of this, so let me riff on the subject(s) for a while and see if I come close to addressing your questions.  If not, we can always try again.

First let me say that the pantser/outliner thing is probably not quite as clear cut as my previous comments implied.  I don’t see it as an either/or choice, but rather as two extremes on a continuum, if that makes any sense.  Lately, I’ve been doing less outlining, relying more on my creative flow in the moment.  I still have some general sense of where I’m headed when I begin a book, and usually somewhere in the middle, as the plot point ideas are coming fast and furious, I’ll jot down what might generously be called “an outline” — a list of remaining mile posts that I have to hit before the story ends.

To be honest, though, until I read your email, I hadn’t connected my outlining habits to worldbuilding/research issues, though as soon as you mentioned it, the connections made all kinds of sense to me.  But having said that, I don’t think that I’m doing any more work on setting now than I was earlier in my career, when my outlines had more meat on them. Rather, as I said, it’s more a matter of trusting my creative process.  Even when I outlined “a lot,” my outlines were incredibly vague — maybe two sentences for a chapter.  They allowed me to keep track of switches in point of view [POV] character, and the flow of my various narrative threads.  But even then, most of what I wrote — description, action, dialogue — happened in the moment.  I saw things and “said” things as my characters did.  I was transcribing more than writing.  And I still do that.  But now I’m writing single point of view books that are mysteries instead of multi-POV castle intrigues, so I have less that I need to track. That, I think, is why I’m outlining less.

My worldbuilding for the Forelands books might well have been the most detailed I did for any series.  I had information about all the major dukedoms, I had royal genealogies for several countries, I had historical timelines, detailed maps, deity pantheons, myths and legends that I wrote and posted on my website.  I knew that world inside out.  And I think that the books benefitted from that.  A lot of it carried over to the Southlands, since the lands are connected and share some common heritage.  I had felt that my first series was not as well planned out as it ought to have been — I was so green when I started it — and I didn’t want to make that mistake a second time.  And yet for all that work, and for all that you see as you read the books, most of what I came up with in my worldbuilding never found its way into the books. That, I think, is as it should be.  I believe in the iceberg approach — as a writer, I want to know EVERYTHING about my world (or as close to everything as possible).  There is no way to give all that information to readers without resorting to data dumps, so I don’t even try.  But what winds up happening is that the small details I do give manage to convey the weight of all that unseen work.  There is enough behind each descriptive passage, that the details manage to add depth, dimension, texture, etc. without detracting from narrative flow….

So, how much is “enough” and how much is too much?  I have no idea. It’s different for every book.  I began the worldbuilding process for the Forelands by reading Greek, Celtic, Norse, and even Basque mythology, and by thumbing through old European history textbooks, looking at royal blood lines and historical timelines, trying to get a feel for the ebb and flow of “real” history.  (My history Ph.D. is in U.S. — not a lot of royalty here, so I was treading on less familiar ground.)  Once I had looked through that stuff I began working on my own maps and histories etc.  I intended to do even more than I did — I only did timelines and lines of kings for some countries; I had planned to do them all.  But at some point I began to realize that, a) I had the important stuff for all the important settings; and b) I had reached a point where I didn’t think that the stuff I was coming up with would do me any good at all, even as deep, deep background.

That’s when I started to write.

Except that the process is not this cut and dry.  And now we reach the crux of your questions.  The fact is that while I was worldbuilding I was also plotting and developing character and starting to envision scenes in my head.  And even after I was well into the book, I occasionally found that I needed a bit of information about my world that I hadn’t come up with yet.  So worldbuilding fed the writing, and at times writing fed worldbuilding.  I talk a lot about synergy in writing:  about how, when things are really cooking, when the mojo is really right, there are no boundaries.  Character work feeds narrative, which reinforces worldbuilding, which deepens description, which strengthens voice and point of view, which enriches character, which feeds narrative, which reinforces worldbuilding… Rinse, lather, repeat.  I felt that a bit with my first series, but I really felt it with the Forelands books and everything I’ve done since.  The fact is that all these things happen simultaneously, which brings us back to the earlier point:  Worldbuilding can’t help but strengthen the outlining I try to do as I begin a book, and it also can’t help but make my “pantsing” easier and more coherent.

Earlier I mentioned the stuff I’m writing now [Chronicles of the Thieftaker, under the name D.B. Jackson].  It’s historical urban fantasy. The urban fantasy label means that the mystery element is strong and that I have only one point of view character.  That has made my outlining less intensive.  The historical element has forced me to reexamine my approach to worldbuilding.  Research and worldbuilding are really interchangeable in my view.  There is very little difference between the stuff I did for the Forelands books and the research I’ve been doing on 1760s Boston for the Thieftaker books.  Once more, I’ve been trying to figure out how much is enough, but this time I’m not just worried about keeping things consistent, I’m also worried about getting stuff right, because now there really is right and wrong.  But that’s a matter for another discussion.

But she showed up again the next day.  This time she had a friend.  I took notes on this second character, too.

Which didn’t prevent them both from coming back once again the next morning, with a few more of their kind, as well as a magic system, a setting, and the beginnings of a storyline.

I have a book in production, another with my editor.  I have two more books in the same series that I want to pitch, an urban fantasy that needs one last rewrite, a middle reader book that’s half done, and several short pieces I want to write.  I really don’t have time for another book, much less a series.  But at this point I have about as much control over these new characters and their story as I do over the storm system sweeping across the Southeast this morning.

God, I love being a writer.

“Where do you get your ideas?”  It’s one of those questions that writers dread, and that we get constantly.  Our dread, and the questioners’ curiosity is born of the same thing:  it’s impossible to explain.  I don’t know where this woman I imagined came from.  Maybe she’s been in my head all this time, and only made herself known to me now.  Maybe she is a composite of a bunch of people I met right before she came to me.  I honestly don’t know.

I do know that I can’t make new book or story ideas appear on demand.  It’s not a process over which I have conscious control.  But I also know that this isn’t entirely true.  I’ve been teaching a writing class for the past few weeks and have been asking my students to write character sketches and scenes in class as exercises.  I’ve been doing the exercises with them, and have found that I can, in fact, come up with story ideas on the spur of the moment, without waiting for them to bubble up inside me.

I’ve heard writers say that they get their ideas by asking “What if?”  I’ve said as much myself, and I know that at least one of my series grew out of a string of “what ifs.”  But that’s a bit misleading.  The “what ifs” came after the initial spark.  The idea came to me in the form of a scene — I imagined a festival, and in particular one tent where a young man was having his future revealed to him.  I wound up with a five book series.  My new series, Chronicles of the Thieftaker (which I’ll be writing as D.B. Jackson) began with a footnote I read in a history book, Robert Hughes’ The Fatal Shore.  I once had an editor ask me if I wanted to submit a story to a Dragon-themed anthology she was putting together (Dragon’s Lure, edited by Danielle Ackley-McPhail).  I had never written a dragon story before, and told her as much.  But as we were speaking, an idea came to me, and by the time we had finished our conversation, I knew exactly what I would write.  Best story I’ve ever written.

I guess my point is this:  creativity is completely unpredictable, at least it is for me.  I would love to be able to control it all the time, to come up with a perfect story idea every time I need one.  I can’t.  And as frustrating as that sometimes is, it’s also what makes every new idea so thrilling, so precious.  I actually think that if I could bottle the Idea Genie, and get my ideas whenever I needed them, it would take quite a bit of the fun out of being a writer.  Creativity is an act of discovery, or many acts of discovery linked to one another.  The initial idea feeds new concepts — additional characters, secondary and tertiary plot threads, nuances of a magic system or a created world.  And watching that first notion develop into something deeper, broader, watching it expand and take on a life of its own — that for me is the greatest joy in my professional life.

So I don’t know where this new woman in my life came from.  I don’t really care.  She’s here now, and I find her fascinating.

How about you?  Is there someone new in your life?  Have you started writing his/her story yet?  If so, how is is going?  If not, what are you waiting for?

Writing a “How-To” about any artistic endeavor is challenging, to say the least.  I have been writing professionally for fifteen years and have published a dozen books and many short stories.  But I am still growing as a writer, still learning my craft.  Writing about writing, and reading through the essays of my co-authors, proved to be incredibly instructive.  And so I thought I would share with you today a few things that I learned while working on the Writer’s Companion.

1.  I have a whole lot more to learn about writing:  That may seem obvious, particularly if you’ve read my books [Rimshot...], but it’s easy to forget.  I often am struck at conventions by the confidence with which authors with only a single publication credit to their name, sit on a panel and all but declare themselves experts on writing and publishing.  I remember doing the same thing myself, when I first broke into the business.  I don’t do it anymore.   The more experienced the author in such situations, the more nuanced their comments, and the more humble their demeanor.  I think that the more we learn about writing, the more we see all that we have yet to master.  The day I stop learning about what it means to write will be the day I stop writing.

2.  There is no single right way to do any of this:  Our book includes essays from seven of us, and while certain themes wend their way through the entire collection, the variety of opinions, approaches, and methods is incredible.  Even the most important elements of my process might be utterly foreign and nonsensical to my colleagues, and vise versa.  And that’s okay.  Creative process should be as idiosyncratic as the art it produces.  Just as I wouldn’t want my books to be like anyone else’s, so I shouldn’t expect my approach to writing to mirror that of my friends.

3.  A corollary to number 2 — There is no set career path that guarantees success:  I sold my first novel on five chapters and an outline, having never previously sold a single piece of fiction, long or short.  This is not because I was better than anyone else, but rather because I was lucky, and because I got my start fifteen years ago when the market wasn’t so tight and such things were possible.  Faith sold her first novel from a slush pile and went on to become a bestseller.  Stuart got his start selling short stories.  Tons of them.  Really good ones.  He’s working on his first novel now.  Just as creative process varies from person to person, so does the business path.  Don’t let anyone tell you that you CAN’T succeed a certain way.  That’s not to say that there aren’t some paths that are safer and more likely to lead to success than others.  And we make plenty of business related recommendations in the book.  But none of it is etched in stone; none of it carries the weight of absolute certainty.

4.  The people who succeed at writing work hard at it:  Another point that might seem obvious at first, but actually isn’t.  We all want to be inspired, to follow our muse, to be carried off on the power of a story or character idea, to jump into that magical book that “writes itself.”  But really, it all comes down to putting our butts in the chair and doing the work.  Writing books is hard.  Really hard.  Anyone who tells you otherwise probably has never written one.  This is one of the reasons why I object to the term “writer’s block.”  The very idea of writer’s block presupposes that writing should come easily, that a book should constantly flow.  Those who have written understand that in fact writing is about fits and starts, false paths and revisions.  What some people call “writer’s block” I call “writing.”  It’s not supposed to be easy.  If it was, everyone would do it.

5.  The people who are happiest with their writing careers write for the love of it:  Don’t get me wrong:  I want to be successful.  I want my books to sell, to win awards, to make money.  Lots of money, if possible.  But while I try my hardest to market what I write, I don’t write for the market and I don’t write to make money.  I write because I love it.  I write because I have stories and characters and settings percolating inside my head all the time, and because if I didn’t write already I’d have to start.  I write even though the business drives me nuts, even though I earn far less as an author than I would doing just about anything else I might have tried.  I write even though those fits and starts I mentioned earlier make me want to tear out my hair (which is already thinning, thank you very much).  In fact, you might say that I write because as much as I am frustrated by the process, I am also challenged by it, and revel in that challenge.  And this, I know, is something I share with my colleagues at Magical Words, and, I would imagine, my colleagues here at SFNovelists, too.

So, those are a few of the things I learned from working on the book.  If you’ll pardon the shameless self-promotion, I hope that you’ll pick up a copy of How To Write Magical Words.  Maybe you’ll find something helpful in its pages, too.

During the course of our discussions, we wound up spending a good deal of time talking about story and book titles, and I thought it might helpful for me to follow up with a post on the topic here at SFNovelists.  As with so many things in writing, there is no one right way to choose a title for our stories or novels.  For some people, the right title just seems to happen.  No struggle, no agonizing over what to call their latest work.  Just — Boom! — they have a title.  I hate these people.  Because for many of us, coming up with a suitable title is incredibly difficult.  I have no magic elixirs for making it happen faster.  I can only tell you what I aim for in choosing a title and work from there.

I want my titles to accomplish three basic things:  First, I want them to sound intriguing, to pique the interest of potential readers by combining words in new and unusual ways, or by turning common phrases into something that suddenly sounds odd or perhaps even sinister.  (Examples forthcoming.)  Second, I want my titles to tell those same potential readers something about the piece in question.  Not a lot — we’re talking about three or four words here.  We can only convey so much information in that space.  But we can help readers identify what kind of story or book they might be buying, and that can be helpful in marketing the work.  And finally, I want my titles to be memorable enough and easy enough to spell and pronounce so that potential readers can easily find the piece with a Google or Amazon search, or in a conversation with the employees at their local bookstores.

I should note here that with the title of my very first novel, I accomplished none of these things.  Yay, me.  I called the book Children of Amarid, because that was an important phrase in the story.  The problem is, the title is not really all that intriguing; it convinced many people who knew nothing about my work or me that I was writing a book for kids, which I wasn’t, while doing little to indicate that the book was an epic fantasy; and it used a word — “Amarid” — that few people could pronounce correctly, much less spell.  (It’s pronounced AM-are-id, by the way.)  It didn’t kill my career or anything like that.  The book did pretty well, actually.  But it was a weak title; the book might well have done better had I found a better one.

So, what are some good titles?  Well, I mentioned before that I like titles that put together words in unusual ways.  Lynn Flewelling’s The Bone Doll’s Twin, is, in my opinion, a terrific title.  Haunting, strange, intriguing.  Wonderful stuff.  A few others — The Wandering Fire, by Guy Gavriel Kay; Mad Kestrel, by Misty Massey; The Left Hand of Darkness, by Ursula K. LeGuin; Dark Water’s Embrace, by Stephen Leigh; The Queen’s Bastard, by C.E. Murphy.  All terrific titles, in my opinion.  They are unusual turns of phrase, they give some sense of magic or intrigue, they tell you something about the book within the cover, but they are easy to remember and pronounce and spell.  (I’d add that all of these books happen to be fun reads, too, but that’s another matter…) As for those titles that turn common phrases into something alluring or menacing, I would point to a couple of Tim Powers’ books:  Expiration Date and Earthquake Weather.  And just to prove that I did learn something, I would also say that a couple of my recent titles, The Sorcerers’ Plague and The Horsemen’s Gambit, accomplish all that I wanted them to.

When I come up with an idea for a title, I usually search the Amazon database to if it’s been used before.  That’s not to say that I absolutely won’t keep a title that has been used.  If I really like my title, and if the book published under the same title is old or outside the genre, or (best-case scenario) both, I’ll go ahead with it.  Titles cannot be copyrighted or trademarked.  That’s why you will find books (and songs and albums and movies) with the same titles.  That said, I prefer a title that has never been used, and will search for one whenever possible.  Just as you want people to be able to search for your book online, you don’t want them to be confused by “impostors” when they finally find it.

Other factors that I consider when coming up with titles include length (I usually try for four words or fewer, although that’s just a matter of personal preference), alliteration (or not — it can work, but it can also sound really hokey and forced), and that intangible — how they sound.  But these are all far more subjective than the three criteria I mention above.  Yes, there are those who will tell you that you want your title to fit easily on the spine of a book.  And that’s true.  But which is a better title:  A Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy or Dune?  Strictly speaking, one is way too long; the other is so brief as to be enigmatic.  And yet, I would argue that both are effective in representing the books they seek to market.

Because ultimately, that is the test.  What title is going to sell your book or story?  When it comes right down to it, nothing else matters as much as that.  You can go against every accepted guideline in choosing your title if you believe that doing so will help you market the story.  Just be prepared to defend your choice to skeptical editors and production departments.

So, what titles do you like?  Which ones have grabbed your attention in a bookstore or library?  And which ones haven’t worked for you at all?

As an author, I like to think that my latest book is my best book. I look back on my first couple of novels, and while I still feel a certain pride in that early work, I also cringe at some passages. I believe that I have been steadily improving my craft over the past decade plus and at this point, with fourteen books written (twelve of them in print, one in the the pipeline, one waiting to be sold) spanning five different series, I feel that I’ve come a long way from those first efforts.

So when I’m asked, “What’s your best book?” I usually name my most recent publication. When I’m asked, “Which book of yours should I read first?” I’ll usually recommend the first book of my current series. But occasionally I’m asked, “What’s your favorite of all your books?” That’s another matter entirely.

Certain books of mine are dearer to me than others. This has nothing to do with how good or how flawed I might think they are. It has everything to do with the emotions I drew upon when I wrote them, with the characters I encountered as I developed them, and with what milestones they might represent in my career. My favorites of those books I’ve published so far are The Outlanders, the middle book of my first trilogy, and Weavers of War, the final book of my Forelands series.

The Outlanders is one of those books that I mentioned in the first paragraph. Yeah, there are parts of the novel that make me cringe and cover my face and say “No! Tell me I didn’t actually write that! How did that get past my editor?” (Always easiest to blame the editor. I mean, I’m just the writer. It couldn’t be my fault, right?) But the book is special for me in a couple of ways. I’d known that I had one book in me. I’d been writing Children of Amarid in my head for the better part of a decade before I actually sat down to write it. But I wasn’t convinced that I could write a second book, or that I could make it as good as the first. Turns out I made it better. The Outlanders convinced me that I could make a career of writing.

It also introduced me to characters who remain to this day some of the best I’ve ever written. They were complex and conflicted, and they surprised me again and again. I had more fun writing The Outlanders than I’ve had with any other book. I challenged myself, I did things with character and plot that I hadn’t known I could do. I learned a tremendous amount. All of which was good, because I lost both my parents while writing that book. I wrote it during the most difficult emotional time of my life. And that book, along with my wife and first child (the second hadn’t been born yet), were all that kept me sane. So yeah, it’s my favorite. Not my best, but the one I love most.

Weavers of War, on the other hand, is absolutely one of my best. But I love it for a slightly different reason. The final book of the LonTobyn series, Eagle-Sage, received a lot of criticism from people who thought that it didn’t do a good enough job of completing the series. It offered resolution, but I think some people felt that the book didn’t peak quite as high as it should have. And though I think it was the best I could do at the time, I have also wondered if I just wasn’t very good at ending a series. With Weavers of War, I proved to myself that I could write a kick-ass series conclusion. That probably sounds self-serving and full of myself, but that’s okay. We all have our insecurities in whatever profession we pursue, and authors are no different. This was my biggest insecurity, and Weavers helped me get over it.

One of the books I’ve yet to publish, or even sell — the first book in my contemporary urban fantasy — is my other favorite. It represents a huge departure for me: a new subgenre, a different stylistic approach, personal innovations in terms of voice and point of view and pacing. Again, as with The Outlanders, I love this book because it challenged me, forced me to grow as an artist, introduced me to characters who are unlike any I’ve written before, and ultimately showed me that I could do more as a writer than I had ever believed. I guess that’s what makes me fall in love with a book: that struggle to become more than I am, to stretch myself, to step out of my creative comfort zone.

So, fellow writers, never mind which book is your best or the one I should read first. Which of the books you’ve written is your favorite?