Are there things you shouldn’t blog about as a writer?

Posted by The Hyperteller on

Some of you regular readers may have noticed a tendency for cynicism and critical over-analysis. If I find silly things, I often comment on them on Twitter, or Facebook, and often on here as well, as can be seen in the previous blog post, only serious applications considered.

But considering anyone can read this blog, and it is a place that, as most writers would their blog, I direct people to when sending out covering letters, are there certain things we need to be careful when talking about?

Agents

This is the main point. I’m not talking politics, or social or ethical issues. If an agent does look at your blog (I can’t imagine they would, as they’re far too busy), and they find a comment about agents, presumably that isn’t going to impress them. But are they going to be that shallow? I’ve seen jokes about Atheists, and it hasn’t bothered me (some of them were pretty damn funny, for example ‘Saying that thinking there is no God is a belief is like saying not playing scrabble is a hobby’).

Flashback time (*wibbly wibbly*)

This all came about because as a fantasy writer, I’m used to reading one thing in the Writers’ & Artists’ yearbook. No science fiction. Now, there is an entire post the length of the internet in why it is annoying that they just say either ‘no science fiction’, or ‘no fantasy’, but you know damn well if you sent a fantasy novel to an agent who said ‘no science fiction’ on their website (but didn’t mention anything about fantasy), you’d probably get an angry letter saying ‘did you even read our website? It clearly says no science fiction.’

As a fantasy writer, it’s quite a crushing feeling to read those words in the listings of most agents. It makes you feel like you’re doing something wrong, like you’re some kind of disgusting pervert trying to poison literature. (Writers of literary fiction probably thinking exactly this. Who cares? Their books are boring *cheeky grin*). It feels like I’ve gone into a feminist convention and said ‘Right, which of you girls is cooking dinner?’ To be honest, considering how huge the market for fantasy is, I was amazed at the lack of agents who cater for fantasy writers.

Back to the future, in which I have made the point

I digress slightly. The reason I started wondering exactly where to draw the line on what I said was because I found several agents in the Writers’ & Artists’ yearbook who said this: ‘All fiction. No fantasy.’ Whilst my first thought was to write a sarcastic Tweet (“All fiction. No fantasy?” What’s fantasy then, a fruit?), or deconstruct that logic on a post here on The Hyperteller, I realised that over the coming months I am likely to have dozens of agents knowing about(if not looking) at this blog. As much as I think my comment regarding the previous quote is quite acceptable, it might create the impression that I have a problem with agents.

What else are we going to talk about, though?

But what is an aspiring author meant to talk about on their blog (which, according to some agents and publishers, shows you have a platform on which to market yourself, so it’s a good thing that you are blogging), if not the trials and tribulations of being an author. Every writer with a blog will talk about the difficulty of getting published. Would an agent read comments about agents and take it personally, even if the comments were grounded in logic and weren’t openly hostile, or would they think ‘well that agent is obviously doing it wrong’?

What’s your approach? Are you careful to make sure your posts about the journey towards success are kept free of anything that might irk those who you will need on your side? Or do you feel that you should say what you think, regardless of how it might damage your chances?

Follow me on Twitter @RewanTremethick.

Got a question? Want to request a post? Got a topic you’d like my take on? thehypertellerATgmailDOTcom.

“Only serious applications will be considered”

Posted by The Hyperteller on

The title is a genuine quote I found (along with others along the same lines) whilst perusing the internet for a little freelance work. Being something of a smart-ass, this phrase struck me as kind of odd. Only serious applications? What other kind of applications for jobs are there? It’s like saying “No ludicrous applications will be considered.” So, as I am in a creative mood, I’ve come up with the very thing I assume the posters of these job advertisements must be trying to avoid.

Not a very sensible job application

Dear sir,

I am replying to your advertisement on Craigslist for a freelance writer. I say on Craigslist, although in truth that is not where I discovered this vacancy. I was sleeping off a particularly large supper of Peruvian Singing Cheese, when a purple unicorn visited me in my dreams. Not one to be impolite, I naturally offered him a seat and a biscuit. After seventeen custard creams, he revealed to me that he had come bearing news. Whilst grazing in the magic forest, he had stumbled upon a laptop, open on the ground. Naturally, he gazed at the screen, upon which was sitting your advertisement. Although the unicorn and I had never met, he felt compelled to come and tell me about it.

I understand this is all getting rather confusing, as how could a unicorn created by my mind have visited me in my sleep to inform me of a job advertisement in the real world I hadn’t got around to reading yet? As I say, it was a lot of cheese, and we all know Peruvian Singing Cheese is known for its metaphysical properties.

A little about myself. I learned to hold a pencil at a very early age, although it would be several years before I utilised it for its intended purpose. I spent most of my childhood mounted atop a badger, using my pencil as a makeshift lance, charging down friends, rodents, and once, a man who looked entirely like Tom Cruise, except different in every aspect. When I learned what a pencil was really for, I began crafting stories on an unprecedented scale. This is not to say that they were Tolkien-esque novels of epic proportion, but simply that, as I had spent my childhood jousting with badgers rather than learning to write, each letter of each word took up an entire sheet of A4 paper. I made the mistake of writing on both sides of the paper, meaning a lot of flipping and neck craning was involved in reading my earlier works. The only person to have read the entire novel I first created was a giraffe that had, thanks to a childhood accident, replaced all the bones in his neck with a giant Slinky toy.

I moved on to freelancing when my landlady decided that dancing around her kitchen table three times a day was no longer enough to cover the rent. In my quest to earn money, I decided to use my remarkable writing abilities (believe me, they are remarkable; my university written exams had to be re-marked several dozen times each).

What experience do I have? Well, I would say I have the experience of being locked in a small velvet drum kit and played at Led Zeppelin concerts.

I have had several things published, including carving my initials into the sides of park benches, writing my stories in pen in the crossword sections of national newspapers, and reciting my work loudly whilst listening to audiobooks.

Thank you for your time. I look forward to your response.

Sincerely,

The Hyperteller

In conclusion

That’s what they mean when they say they only want serious applications, right?


Follow me on Twitter @RewanTremethick.

Got a question? Want to request a post? Got a topic you’d like my take on? thehypertellerATgmailDOTcom.

With CGI this good, are the days of live-action movies numbered?

Posted by The Hyperteller on

I watched The Adventures of Tintin: The Secret of the Unicorn, last night. Great film, yadda yadda yadda. What really struck me was how incredible the animation was. It was so good it was, at times, almost photorealistic, which got me thinking, if it gets any better, are we going to need live-action movies at all?

Enhanced scope

Whilst many directors may not like, and even actively avoid it, CGI has made a lot of things possible that weren’t before, and a lot of things better than they used to be. Whilst the most recent trilogy of Star Wars films is a good example of how to wreck a great story just because you can do whatever the hell you want with a computer, they are a brilliant case study into what can be done now with CGI that couldn’t be done with miniatures and other special effects several decades ago. Compare the space battle at the beginning of Revenge of the Sith (terrible film), with the one at the end of Return of the Jedi(incredible film). I’m not saying the former is better (I actually quite like the look of physical models), simply that there was a lot of intricate camera work and greater scope that wasn’t available in the original trilogy.

Incidentally, we really need to clear up how to refer to the Star Wars films. I, like everyone else over the age of about 15, probably thinks of Episodes 4, 5 and 6 as ‘the first Star Wars films’, but technically, Episodes 1,2 and 3 are the ‘first’ ones. Let’s just make things easier for everybody and forget Clones, Wars, and Sithever happened, and go back to thinking how great it would be if someone were to make some more.

Cinematography in Tintin

Tintin was a visual feast, and not just in terms of the action set-pieces and money-shots. With total control over the environment, lighting, character positioning and ambient details, the animators had the chance to turn each frame into a work of art. I am pretty sure some of the things they did were just because they could, like the first person shot of Tintin walking through the old manor, complete with dust particles twinkling in the air. The fact that there was no physical cameraman to worry about, not to mention gravity, meant that the camera could get right into the thick of the action. It wasn’t just a great movie, Tintinwas a sophisticated education into the art of cinematography.

You can’t even tell anymore

Of course, the one thing live-action always had over CGI was that you could tell what was CGI, because the quality wasn’t as good. CGI used to be for doing things you just couldn’t do in real life, like dinosaurs, or the T1000. But with CGI now, most of the time the only reason you can tell when something has been computer generated is because you know it must have been. If you see a shot with a CGI building, you probably wouldn’t guess that it wasn’t real, unless you know for a fact that in that specific location there isn’t a building. The CGI in Tranformers was so good that if it were possible for giant robots to walk around kicking the crap out of each other whilst Megan Fox has sex with a motorbike, we probably wouldn’t have been able to tell that they weren’t real. There’s a great example of this on the Batman Beginsspecial features. The visual effects team created a CGI batman for one of the scenes just to show how good they could make it, and it is almost impossible to tell the difference.

There will always be actors

Of course, someone will always need to do the voice, and the reason Tintin’s animation was so good was that it had realistic movement thanks to Mo-Cap (if you don’t know, Mo-Cap stands for Motion Capture, and involves putting a lot of light-reflecting dots on a person’s joints. Cameras then watched for those dots and tell the computer model where each one is moving to). Motion capture allows you to record someone’s movements, which will always looks better than an entirely animated walk, run, jump etc. We’ll still need people to wear these suits, to do the motions, and as acting is a great deal about body language, it makes sense to still use actors, rather than suiting-up the work experience kid and making him do it all.

Will the tables turn?

An entirely CGI movie that isn’t for kids is considered somewhat artistic. It’s a very creative thing, whilst live action is more mainstream. Could it be, that with the increased scope and flexibility offered to directors by CGI, that one day most films will be CGI? In twenty years’ time, could filming a live action film be the equivalent of filming in monochrome now? We know from the way that art forms evolve that the usurper never truly replaces the usurped. We’re now three generations down from vinyl, yet it is still easy to find and even the latest singles and albums are still printed in that format. Television hasn’t killed the radio, the internet hasn’t killed…well, everything (yet). Kindle won’t make the book a thing of the past.

Still a way to go

Tintin was almost photorealistic, and therein lies the key as to why live-action films are not doomed. Will it ever be possible to create a truly realistic person, object or landscape? And if it relies on motion capture, if you have the actors there, and a camera, why not just shoot it live action?

I guess the real question is not ‘If you can make CGI look 100% realistic, why not make all films using CGI?’ In fact, if CGI can be made to look 100% realistic, there is no need for films to be entirely one thing or the other. If you can switch between an entirely computer animated version of an actor and the person themselves (think Neo vs. Agent Smiths in The Matrix Reloaded ((which, as a fan of The Matrix, didn’t happen, by the way)), what’s the need in doing something entirely on a computer, when you have the best of both worlds?

The future is looking good

I think what we’ve seen from the scope of Tintin and the CGI/live-action blend of notorious Eye Porn film Avatar (yes, it was visually incredible, but had about as much substance as an anorexic skeleton), the truth about CGI is that it is when you combine it with live-action that things start to get interesting. What it has shown us is that if you have writers with enough imagination, and directors who can keep up, take control, and have vision, films are going to get a lot more interesting in the next few years.

Follow me on Twitter @RewanTremethick.

Got a question? Want to request a post? Got a topic you’d like my take on?thehypertellerATgmailDOTcom.

Fantasy and the Curse of The Capitals of Deemed Importance

Posted by The Hyperteller on

I was reading a book recently (coz, y’know, I’m a maverick like that), and put it down by the second page of chapter two. That, in itself, was being generous, as I had to force myself to finish the first chapter. One of the reasons, after being terribly written and terrible dialogue, was that old fantasy convention of making something seem more important by capitalising it.

The Idea is kind of rubbish

What I’m talking about is things such as referring to a dark episode in the world’s past as The Event, or something bad prophesised in the future as The Coming. Like any cliché, it’s more about how often you use it than what it is. Very few people would begrudge the odd ‘ran as fast as his legs would carry him’, or ‘she couldn’t believe the horse had turned out to be her husband back from the dead’, or any of the old classics like that. But when I read a paragraph that ran like the one below, I had to resist the urge to get out my red pen and start copyediting the whole book. It went something like this:

The Beginning had come, as The Book had said it would. But after The Beginning, in a time known simply as The Time, it seemed as though The End was close too. The People, who so desperately feared The End, turned to The Book, for what they called The Answer. The Answer, which was given by The Celestial Body, came to The People on the back of what The People would grow to call The Donkey. The Donkey, in return, was fed Some Hay, from The Stables, which The People didn’t mind, as Some Hay was the least they could do. So ends, The Chapter.

Yet without the clichés…

Fantasy is an odd genre, as half the point seems to be to demand clichés. A lot of people want the same thing, rehashed slightly, repackaged, then sold again. Fantasy books are often like the various themed Xboxes you can get. Sure, the novel you’ve picked off the shelf might have the trappings of something shiny and new, but often what you get is exactly the same underneath. Old wizard trains young village boy whose home was destroyed by evil king who feared the prophecy about a young boy wizard coming after him, except that the young boy wouldn’t have had to come after him if the silly sod hadn’t gone and killed his parents because he was worried about the young boy coming after him for – I seem to have fallen into a paradox. Sh…

Untangling the web of broken causality for just a second, in order to return to, let’s face it, the minor problem of the liberally deployed shift key, it’s not a yes or no problem. As I was saying before the intricacies of knowing the future somewhat hijacked my keyboard, fantasy is not just rife with clichés, but built upon them. Hell, even the word cliché is a cliché. Using capitalisation to make Your Point, isn’t necessarily a bad thing. It’s like absolutely everything else in writing; the hardest thing is keeping it basic. Think of it like adverbs. They aren’t evil, they’re just overused.

Have too much and you don’t want any more

Now, I love the song Still Life, by The Horrors. It’s beautiful. And whilst I can easily listen to it a couple of times a day (I listened to it about 8 times in a row when I first heard it), I am aware that having it on loop all day would make me sick of the sound of it. It’d end up like that bit in A Clockwork Orange, where every time I heard it subsequently I’d go all mad and start screaming at the stereo. Which is why capitalising something, say The Event, can be quite effective once or twice, using it as per the example above kills any effect it may have had.

It can be used to add drama and a sense of importance to A Thing, but if you Do It too often, you and anyone else who sees it will become bored. I shouldn’t have capitalised ‘do it’ in the context of that sentence, should I? Now we’re all giggling.

Follow me on Twitter @RewanTremethick.

Got a question? Want to request a post? Got a topic you’d like my take on? thehypertellerATgmailDOTcom.

Can blogging help you write a novel?

Posted by The Hyperteller on

According to my dashboard, this is my 48thpost (the one on WordPress, not some kind of car. Blogmobile?). What with my posts averaging around 1,000 words (some are longer, but the first few were a lot shorter, so I think we can safely round it off at 1,000 per post), in two post’s time I will have written 50,000 words on this blog.

Sneaks up on you

Which is actually quite a lot, considering it only takes about an hour every other day. An hour every other day has, at the end of six months, resulted in me having a body of work that is the same length as about half a novel, give or take ten thousand words. Even for my limited brain (the rest of which I sold to raise money for awesome rock star boots), that means that if I wrote a thousand words every day (except Sundays, or Wednesday; insert your favourite day of rest *here*), I’d have a whole book done.

Funny you should say that

Actually, I do write every day, but I know that a lot of the people I talk to who want to write novels fall down at the first ten thousand words or so because the challenge seems too massive. If you are in a big group of people who all do NaNoWriMo together, you’ll probably notice that a lot of people will drop out before it even starts. The idea of having to write that many words overcomes them straight away.

But when you think about how often you contribute to your blog, and how much you say, you’ll probably be surprised. You have (or could have, if you don’t have a blog yet), typed an entire novel or more in the space of a few months in terms of words, without ever realising it. Yes, we get days occasionally when we know we have to post something, but we can’t be bothered. Sometimes we leave it a couple of weeks. What eventually forces us to sit at that keyboard and bang out another post is that we know there are people waiting, that we are losing traffic and visitors (who could become followers and friends), and overall, because we feel we have to.

I would think up a good title here, but I can’t be bothered…

Let’s face it, most of the reason we give up on the novel(s) that we try to write is because we lack the motivation. I’m terrible for this, but somehow I’ve managed to make up for what I lack in self-motivation with almost galactic-sized ambition (if I was a more confident, less morally grounded person, I’d probably be wanting world domination). But the bottom line is, when we look at the blank screen, or the word count at 20,000 and realise we’re only a quarter, or a fifth of the way through the first draft, most of us will start thinking ‘Y’know, I don’t haveto write this novel…’

Supply and demand

Why blogging is great is because it generates a need. An empty blog looks bad, so you’d better keep filling it up. And once you get followers, you want to keep them happy. And imagine if an agent or publisher was looking you up and saw the barren wasteland of your blog, digital tumbleweed bouncing across the front of your last post, dated several weeks ago. Blogging is a great prompt to get writing; I’ve never gone ‘damn, I need to write a thousand words on my blog’. I’ve thought ‘damn, I should really write another post’, but it’s never been about the word count. And somehow, all my posts seem to round themselves off nicely circa 1,000 words. By the end, whatever my new post is about, I have accidentally written 1,000 words.

Get your novel writing working the same way

Now, I’m the kind of person who likes to keep my writing very close to my chest until it’s ready to be sent out into the world, but you might find that writing a novel as a blog is a good idea. Each post can be a scene/chapter/whatever. The good thing about this is that as the writing process gets harder and the temptation to give up rises, your amount of followers and hits will be rising at the same time. The more you feel like abandoning the project, the more you know you have people who want you to keep going.

After a while, it may even merge into the point where it becomes exactly the same as blogging – you stop thinking, ‘I need to write X many words on the novel today’ and start thinking ‘I need to write another blog post today’. Before you know it, you’ve written several thousand words. And, of course, with each chapter being a post, you can get comments and feedback on it, helping you shape and revise the book as you go.

If that’s a little extreme…

However, if, like me, the idea of sharing your precious idea with the world in this manner is a bit too extreme (and you’ll have to be aware that publishers may be turned off from publishing a book considering that in one form it is already on the internet in its entirety for free), then there are other ways you can tie your writing to your blog. There are loads of widgets all over the place that you can use to update your word count. Make your targets for each week/month/5000 year planetary alignment public, so people coming to your blog can instantly check where you intended to be, and where you are up to. If you get followers, they will probably encourage you to meet your targets, and more importantly berate you if you fall short.

It doesn’t have to be online

One of the main reasons we can write so much on our blogs without it feeling like a novel-length, gargantuan task, is because we feel like we have to. There is a sense that we will be letting ourselves and other people down if we don’t. So, if you don’t want to talk about your novel writing online, all you need is to have some people know that you have targets and who will regularly pester you about your progress. If you feel there are people out there who will know if you fall short or fail, this could be the motivation you need to keep going.

If you can’t find the motivation to keep writing within yourself, then finding some external motivation in the form of family support, nagging friends or some light torture could be what you need to keep you going. If you have a blog, work out an approximate word count, and see how close to an entire novel/trilogy/epic series you are, probably without even realising it.

Do you have motivation problems? Tell me about them, if you can be bothered…


Follow me on Twitter @RewanTremethick.

Got a question? Want to request a post? Got a topic you’d like my take on? thehypertellerATgmailDOTcom.

Are you a linear writer?

Posted by The Hyperteller on

Do you have several projects on the go right now, or just one? The idea for this blog post came from me having a good old think about the way in which I write. I have several projects on the go, but only one in each form; whilst I’m working on a novel, a short story and a script simultaneously, I’m not working on two novels, two short stories, or two scripts.

Juggling

I think learning to manage multiple projects is a key skill for a writer, as they all feed into each other. If you want to get a novel published, getting a load of short stories published is going to improve your chances dramatically (i.e. from microscopic to miniscule), unless your novel is entitled, Why I Will Never Write a Short Story, that is.

If you can’t write short stories at the same time as working on your novel, it means that one of them has to give. There’s no point completing the short stories and then having to wait several months – years, even – until the novel is finished to try and capitalise on your success. The other way around works better. You can send the finished novel off to agents and publishers whilst writing short stories. Given the slow turnaround of the publishing world, you could, if you had the time to devote to it, have added to the length of your writing CV by the time each agent has rejected you and you need to send it off to the next one. But you could never be sure that a few credits on your writers’ CV wouldn’t have made all the difference between a rejection and an acceptance.

You have been placed in a queue. Please hold

Writing things one at a time would become tedious, if I were to try it. I think of each writing project as an iron in the fire. The more projects I have on the go, the more chances something will be successful and improve my chances of getting Politics in Blood published. Writing may be an art form, but that’s no reason not to adopt a ‘throw enough at the wall until some of it sticks’ approach. And things are paying off. I can’t imagine what position I’d be in now if I hadn’t written the short stories that have been published in Word Gumbo, Splendid Fred and Indigo Rising.

It’s not about how far I’ve got, but the fact that I’ve started moving

I know this isn’t a stellar writing CV, but it’s a start, and that’s what matters. It’s a start I wouldn’t have had unless I worked on multiple projects side-by-side. Politics in Bloodis only just being sent to another agent (after a long break/rethink), so I would only just now be sitting down to pen those particular stories. I’d probably be quite depressed at my lack of publishing credits.

What about you? Do you work on multiple things at once, or do you have to wait until each piece is finished, polished and sent off before you can start the next one?


Follow me on Twitter @RewanTremethick.

Got a question? Want to request a post? Got a topic you’d like my take on? thehypertellerATgmailDOTcom.

That Bittersweet Phrase; ‘Strong Female Character’

Posted by The Hyperteller on

I’m quite interested in how gender is portrayed and defined in literature and in films and television. However, being somewhat of a pansy, I have refrained from writing about it before now, through a fear of ‘getting it wrong’. The last thing I want to happen is to be misinterpreted and  labelled a massive sexist (or even a small sexist – quality over quantity, right?).

Then I realised that actually, that fear of getting it wrong is one of the problems we have today when it comes to gender. Which is where the title comes in. You might be thinking, ‘Well Rewan, you little/large/supersize sexist, what’s what with strong female characters, eh?’ To which my reply is, absolutely nothing, I love them. Hopefully written one myself. My problem is not with the idea that the phrase describes, but more what it’s attributed to.

This is getting confusing, right?

Put simply, I don’t believe that what is often described as a ‘strong female character’, actually is one. The problem is the word ‘strong’. People take it too literally. We have this interesting problem now that male authors/scriptwriters/directors are aware that it’s definitely not ok to have only one woman in the cast, whose role is to cry uncontrollably and get saved by one of the men, whom she then repays in sex (I mean, come on, he saved her life right? We all know prostitution is wrong, and that you can’t put a price on a woman’s body, but he saved her life. Surely that’s enough, yeah?) They know that their female characters have to have depth and purpose.

The second half of the problem comes from the misunderstanding that, whilst it is true that women can do everything men can do, the fact is they probably wouldn’t. Because men and women are different. Feminists often like to suggest that the world would be a better place if run by women. It wouldn’t, it’d just be screwed up in a completely different way. What’s wrong with the world today isn’t men, it’s people. Back to the point, male writers (I expect) often feel as though they cannot create boundaries for their female characters in the same way they would with their male ones. They worry that, as there are all these people out there talking about how women are equal to men, they’d better make their female characters do exactly what their male counterparts would have done, otherwise they’re a sexist.

Man with tits

Which is why you get this horrible class of female heroines who never feel any emotion whatsoever, who can calmly watch their parents dissolve in acid without even the inclination to even think about the possibility of crying, who strut around and have a left hook that could knock a bison over, who carries a gun twice as big as any of the male characters, and spends most of the book/film topless, because they’re a woman and they’re comfortable with their bodies and their sexuality, no matter what society might try and say.

These characters are so awful to read. Mostly because they’re prats. Female or male, I can’t stand this type of stunted, emotionally crippled, trigger happy idiot, because they have no depth. That’s what any character needs, depth. And, to be honest, what is this kind of character anyway, apart from your typical male action hero with breasts?

Let women be women

That’s the problem. Writers have become too worried about being called sexist that they feel their female characters have to measure up to their male characters. A lot of problems in society come from this idea of having to compare women to men. What would a woman have done in that situation? Bet he only did that because he was a man. Writers spend too much time judging their female characters from the perspective of their male characters. Which means that if a male character is physically strong, and a female character isn’t – you’re a sexist. Which is rubbish. But I think a lot of writers operate like this, thinking the way to empower women in their novels or films is to take them one step further than their male counterparts. Leading man got a pistol? Better give the leading woman a machine gun. Leading man got a sword? Claymore it is then.

It’s this kind of comparison that really hampers the creation of strong female characters. Surely the whole point of feminism is that women are their own people? If we continue to define our female characters by looking at what our male characters are doing, that’s just another form of marginalisation. You don’t create a strong character by making the others around them weak. If your character is not strong on their own, then they are not a strong character.

It seems obvious, but…

These terrible heroines come from several assumptions, that run like this:

1.If women have been forced by society into the role of care-giver, so their whole lives revolve around looking after other people, then making my female character not care about anything or anybody but herself is inspired. Liberation, baby!

2.Women used to be referred to as ‘the fair sex’, and were always thought of as weak. My heroine always carries a warhammer, which she can lift with one hand. This character is shaping up to be amazing! Perhaps I should get posters made of her, seeing as so many women are obviously going to look up to her as a role model, they’ll probably want her on their bedroom walls…

3.Crying is supposedly a sign of weakness, and another stereotype of women is that they are too emotional, so my character won’t have feelings at all. My god, I’m a literary genius and the most epic feminist there’s ever been!

It’s all bollocks. A character like that is just a hideous anti-stereotype, and the problem with creating characters that directly oppose a stereotype is that you are still shaping your characters by using stereotypes. Your characters are still defined by gender stereotypes, even if you use them as things to avoid.

At the end of the day, the key is just to find the right balance between gender and character. To say ‘forget about the gender of your character’ would be wrong, as it will affect what they do. Men and women are different, and that’s an important thing to remember. Neither is inferior to the other, but we will react differently to situations based upon our gender. Are your female friends indistinguishable from your male friends? Of course not, and although personality is most of that reason, personality is built upon a foundation of gender. It’s inescapable, but that doesn’t mean it has to govern everything.

Political points don’t make it right

When writing my female characters, I tend to keep in mind one question, and that is ‘Is she doing this because she’s a woman, or because it’s what her character would do in that situation?’ Saying ‘she’s a woman, so she would do this’ is making things a lot more political than they need to be. At the end of the day, it’s not about what your female characters do, but whythat can make them strong, weak, empowering, or sexist.

It’s the difference between crying because the scary monster has attacked, and crying because the scary monster just ate the man/woman you love. It’s ok to have a woman cleaning the house, if the story demands it. What wouldn’t be right, is if in The Hunger Games, Katniss entered the arena, looked around, and thought ‘bloody hell, this could do with a sweep’.

Male is not a blueprint

The bad kinds of ‘strong female characters’ come from people pausing when writing and asking themselves, ‘what would a man do in this situation?’ Be loyal to the character, because that is the key. The character and the situation defines what should happen, not gender. It is ok to have a character cry at the big scary monster, if that’s what the story demands.

Having a crying woman, or a woman who cleans, or looks after a family, or gets overly emotional, or whatever, doesn’t make you a sexist, if the story demands it. But if your story is a science fiction piece, in which robots do everything for humans, does the wife really have to walk around with a tray of drinks for the husband’s male guests?


Follow me on Twitter @RewanTremethick.

Got a question? Want to request a post? Got a topic you’d like my take on? thehypertellerATgmailDOTcom.

Don’t write your fantasy novel as though it is an RPG

Posted by The Hyperteller on

RPGs are great. Sometimes I wish real life was like a Role Playing Game, i.e. you could go into the woods and train all day and by the end of you’d get level up points which you could use to improve your strength or speed. How great would it be if we could all walk around with health and mana bars above our heads, where magic wells hidden across the landscape healed our injuries and recharged our powers. And who wouldn’t love to break up a hard day’s work by earning some gold pieces for clearing a nest of Kobolds from an elderly couple’s basement?

From RPGs to writing. Bring the inspiration suitcases

It’s no surprise that people who play RPGs often go on to write, and write fantasy or science fiction at that. Most people like RPGs because of the control they have over the game world. Us creative types usually don’t like being restrained, spending hours trying to get into a sealed building instead of finishing the level, shouting ‘I wanna get in there’. Soon, customising a character’s appearance and abilities, doing random quests and completing the game’s story as and when we like becomes not enough.

I think we’d all say that when we first started writing, we copied something. For me it was the style of Terry Pratchett. The first things we write tend to be more copies of what inspired us to write than our own work, as we naturally draw from what we know, like and admire. Which means if you started writing after falling in love with the Godlike powers of an role playing game, you might accidentally bring aspects of that across into your writing.

Long explanations are only fun if you get to kill trolls by pressing ‘X’ afterwards

Fantasy has a lot of explaining to do, and I don’t mean for the Twilight saga. Everything is a new and foreign idea that needs to be spelled out to your reader; history, politics, society, culture, bread (Lembas, people). One of the most important parts of this is how magic works. Who has it (Only one gender? Only the rich?), where it comes from, how powerful it can become, how you train it; all of these may need to be explained if magic features in your story heavily.

You find this RPG seepage a lot on writing forums, in the work of younger writers or people who haven’t been writing for very long. You end up with pages and pages of complex descriptions of magic, almost as if you are reading the instruction booklet that comes with Skyrim. RPGs are fantasy, yes, but they are games, which makes them a different format. I’ve read a lot of scenes in work-in-progresses that almost run like this:

Rargarr kicked the lid off the chest and peered inside.

“Dammit.”

Cortho, his bow slung over his shoulder, stepped up next to him.

“What?” he asked.

“Heavy armour,” Rargarr sighed. “I really need to upgrade my padded leather to boiled leather at the least, but I’m a wizard so I can’t wear heavy armour. My class prevents it.”

Cortho tutted.

“You could always switch abilities,” he suggested. “True, you’d lose 100 mana points, but you’d still have all your basic heal spells, as well as fireballs and lightening.”

“What about summon werewolves?” Rargarr whined.

“The last time you used that you gave Gressor a heart-attack,” Cortho said.

“Did not,” a voice from nearby muttered.

The mage and the ranger looked around.

“Gressor, why can’t we see you?” Rargarr asked.

“’I’m an assassin,” the voice replied. “I’ve got 99 stealth points.”

“But it’s broad daylight and all your clothes are black!” Cortho protested.

“99 stealth.”

Magic systems are boring

It’s worth asking yourself if you actually need to explain how your magic works. Note that the Harry Potter series ran to seven volumes, yet it was never really explained where magic came from. If it’s a common fact of life in your world, is there really any need for exposition?

Where things get a little tricky, and where people tend to very closely walk the line between writing and RPG is when a young character has to be taught how to use their magic by an older man/woman/owl. They are usually mysterious, and at some point in the story will feature a dramatic ‘twist’ that runs like this:

“I have often told you of the great mage, Arborrafful”, Noname said. “Well, I have something to tell you, now that you are old and wise enough to know it.”

He stood up and flung off his cloak. His white tunic seemed to glow in the sunlight, the insignia of the Mages Tower in gold twinkling upon his tunic.

“I am Arborrafful,” he declared.

“Oh my god,” Young Protagonist said.

“I know, it’s an unforeseen twist in the story,” Arborrafful said.

“Not that. It’s just you’re not wearing any pants…”

At some point in their relationship, the teacher will sit the pupil down and explain how magic works. It often ends up being defined in ways that very closely mimic your standard RPG magic class system:

“Listen here. There are three kinds of magic; offensive magic, defensive magic, and inoffensive magic-”

“Inoffensive? Isn’t that the same as defensive?”

“Not, it’s magic that no one will complain about. Have you ever seen someone use mana to write a rude word in the sky? Well that’s offensive magic. Now, stop interrupting. As well as the three types, you have levels of each; Grand master, master, mage, magi, apprentice, assistant.”

“Assistant?”

“Yeah, y’know, someone who hands the wizard his staff, picks volunteers from the audience, does the padlocks on the water tank for the submerging trick, etc. Anyway, then there are the genres of magic. Fire, ice, wind-”

“Haha, wind.”

“Tornadoes and that. Grow up. Where were we? Oh yeah, ground magic, water, diet.”

“Diet?”

“Look, this example has already gone on way too long. This is only making it longer.”

“Sorry.”

“Exactly, now – bugger, we’ve overrun into chapter two…”

Is it really necessary?

The important thing to ask when reading back your 4,000 word explanation of magic is; is it vital to the story. If the plot doesn’t hinge around the fact that your character must become a Grand Master, then it’s likely there is no need to even include ranks. Even a story in which a character becomes magically powerful does not necessarily have to feature some kind of grading system. If they need to be able to boil an egg with their mind, then we know they’ve got there when their mind boils an egg. It doesn’t need to be that egg-boiling is a Class II attribute, so that character has to reach Class II.

At the end of the day, all that matters in writing is ‘does this matter’? If you can remove your pages of explanation regarding magic, politics or society, without affecting the story at all, then it doesn’t need to be there.


Follow me on Twitter @RewanTremethick.

Got a question? Want to request a post? Got a topic you’d like my take on? thehypertellerATgmailDOTcom.

The importance of character flaws

Posted by The Hyperteller on

Ergh. Those people

We all knew those people in school. You know the ones. The ones that were perfect at everything. The ones who had learned everything there possibly was to know about every musical instrument by the time they were twelve, got themselves A grades in 100 exams, yet were also amazing at football, basketball, tennis and bareknuckle fighting. Teachers loved them, parents loved them. They were perfect.

And everyone you knew hated them, right?

Your DNA says ‘I hate you’

It’s weird, but we seem to be biologically engineered to hate people more successful than ourselves. I suppose it’s a survival trait. A cavemen who was happy to kill one bison/tiger/wild bowl of noodles and sit down to celebrate his achievement would soon run out of food for his family. A bison would have only gone so far, and instead of hunting for another one, he was sitting there going ‘oh yeah, I’ve done pretty well. I’m a good caveman.’ But if he saw another caveman who had three dead bison in his cave, and was jealous of him, he would go out and continue hunting and try to best him. He wouldn’t die of starvation, and by being competitive, he was reducing the risk of his family running out of food.

Also, your brain says ‘I hate you’

It’s not just our biology that makes it hard for us to identify with characters who have it all. At a dead basic, selfish level, what’s the point? If everything is going well for someone, why do they need us to care about them? It’s why none of us ever sit down and think, ‘God, I really hope Bill Gates is ok at the moment.’ It’s a waste of time to give compassion to someone who has no need of it (Yes, Bill Gates probably has problems too. Don’t dig too deep into the example). To be cruelly honest, if Mr or Miss perfect has a bad time, we’re probably going to think they deserved it.

The thing is, we identify with the characters we read about as though they are real people. If their marriage breaks down, we are sad for them, if they die, sometimes we go as far as to weep, and we are happy when they succeed. But because we think of them as real people, if they’re too good, our biology kicks in and the hate appears. And it’s very hard to care about someone you hate (although if I was a 1950’s comedian I would probably make a marriage joke right now).

Being in a story doesn’t count as a flaw

Which is why your characters need to have things wrong with them. You might think that the story, which practically by necessity must have bad things happening in it, will be enough to win our compassion. We’re a bit more fickle than that. Deep down, most readers know that the chances are, the main character of any novel will get what they want and will be fine at the end. We open a book knowing this, even if we know it at such a deep level that consciously this knowledge doesn’t register.

Is it a bird? Is it a plane? No, it’s a cliché. Please shut up

A brilliant example of this is superheroes. By rights, they should be on the list of people we don’t care about. They are so much better than us, either physically or mentally. Why do we care? Because they still have problems. If you want to create a superhero, the easiest and most effective formula to use is to give them a superpower that requires the one thing that they don’t have. When Thor gets banished to Earth for his arrogance, it is only in becoming humble and willing to die that he gets his hammer back. A superhero is usually someone we can identify with because their power is the polar opposite of their normal character. Peter Parker becomes a loved and celebrated person, despite being a college nerd who people look down upon. What’s more, it is the struggle to cope with the responsibility they now have that gives them a weakness we can identify with.

Perfection = Dullness

As I said in We read stories because, without hard work, success is bland, it is the conquering of obstacles that makes us want to stick with a character until the end. But if that character has no flaws, the obstacles will seem very dull. In The Matrix, Neo’s flaw is that he is new and untrusting, and unable to live up to everyone’s expectations. In The Lord of the Rings, Frodo is the weakest, most unsuited person to the task of taking the ring to Mordor. He is surrounded by powerful warriors; the first time he sees the Ringwraiths, he drops his sword and runs away.

It’s all about balance

Flaws give characters more problems to deal with, and because we all like to see people overcome their problems, that makes them more appealing to us. But be careful not to go too far the other way; your characters still have to be likeable. A struggling alcoholic, addicted to prescription medicine, coping with the death of their parents by turning to crime, becoming arrogant, patronising and not listening is going to be a hard pill for us all to swallow. It is worth noticing in that list, that flaws can be huge (such as alcoholism or drug addiction), or they can be smaller character traits (such as not listening or being arrogant). As long as it gets in the way of characters forming perfect relationships with everyone they meet, and complicates the story, then you are on to a winner. Generally, a character’s flaws are what makes the story possible. In my book (which had better get published one day. Please?), Politics in Blood, the whole plot is based upon the fact that the antagonist plays on my protagonist’s arrogance. What should be an easy thing to walk away from is something she can’t resist, because of her pride.

Flaws make characters. They are more important than hair or eye colour or many other physical descriptions you may spend hours getting right, as they actually impact the story, unlike ‘My blue hair means I’m going to piss off the wrong people.’ Having said that, if a person’s hair colour is a focal point because they are vain, there’s your character flaw. Be careful not to overburden your character with flaws, or else they will become impossible for your reader to care about. Also, make sure that their flaws are ‘flaws’, not nasty traits. You probably want your MC to be likeable. Eating puppies isn’t a flaw, it’s an evil act. Paul ‘Fido Chomper’ Smith is not a character whose flaws will draw you into caring about him…


Follow me on Twitter @RewanTremethick.

Got a question? Want to request a post? Got a topic you’d like my take on? thehypertellerATgmailDOTcom.

New article on Hot Wild Free

Posted by The Hyperteller on

I have a new article up on the Hot Wild Free website. This week, in a departure from talking about graduate-related things, I talk about something that is totally unrelated to students. Facebook (*cough*). You can read Has liking culture robbed us of our ability to express ourselves? now on the Hot Wild Free website. Go on, it’s good…

Oh, and don’t worry. I’m perfectly happy with people ‘liking’ my blog posts, even if you want to be clever and ‘like’ ironically after reading the article.


Follow me on Twitter @RewanTremethick.

Got a question? Want to request a post? Got a topic you’d like my take on? thehypertellerATgmailDOTcom.