Tag: The Art of Writing

Murdering Fantasy REPRINT

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From April 27, 2016

Y’know, I’m beginning to think ill of publicists. They’ll take anybody’s money.

Today a publicist invited me to read a great new fantasy novel “about a female warrior with a kind heart.” When the Sarmatians went culturally extinct almost 2,000 years ago, that was the end of the only nation that actually produced female warriors on purpose. Look it up in Herodotus if you don’t believe me.

Since then, The Invincible Female Warrior has become the most commonplace–and the most annoying–cliche in half-baked fantasy literature. Along with crusty but benign old wizards and know-it-all elves: but really, Ms. Gorgeous with the unbeatable kung-fu moves is the worst of them all–except for maybe little kids with fantastic martial arts skills that enable them to wipe out full-grown male villains.

The book seems to be self-published. This is what gets me about self-publishing: no quality control. The publicist ought to be ashamed for taking this author’s money and trying to hoodwink people like me into reviewing it. I won’t give the author’s name because it just wouldn’t be humane. By the way, though, she wants a pretty hefty chunk of money for this book.

If you are an aspiring writer, this author commits a literary stumble that I’ve told you about before ( http://leeduigon.com/2015/10/21/a-silly-name-can-ruin-your-fantasy-novel/ ).

Do not name the principle characters in your story after familiar household products. Trust me, it doesn’t work. Here we have an Invincible Female Warrior named “Aleave.” Does that at all bring to mind the brand name of a popular headache medicine?

If you conscientiously avoid all the cliches that make fantasy so prone to low expectations on the readers’ part, and write a great story populated by memorable characters, and yet succumb to the temptation to give those characters names like Drano, Tylenol, Pennzoil, or Fancy Feast–well, you might as well not have written it at all.

My Fantasy Tool Kit (7): Dreams REPRINT

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From January 17, 2015

The other night, I dreamed I was in a Wagon Train episode–in black-and-white, no less. I always dream in color, so the B&W was a nice touch of authenticity.

In this episode, there were two women with the wagon train, twin sisters, who seemed to know much better and easier routes than the train had ever used before, and everyone was happy to go where the sisters directed. But then along came the scout, Flint McCullough (Robert Horton–same as in the TV show), with horrifying news: the sisters were leading us into a trap.

As he denounced them, they lost their temper–and lost the power to keep up a facade of being human. The illusion dissipated, and they stood revealed as non-human creatures with faces like the faces carved on totem poles. Their plan was to lead the train to a place where a mob of their kind waited to ambush the train and kill and eat the people.

At that point my wife said something and I jumped a foot into the air, and of course woke up.

Anyway, pilgrims, if you want to write fantasy, learn to use your dreams. Sometimes the sleeping mind comes up with much wilder stuff than the waking mind. I know I’m going to use this Wagon Train dream somewhere in my writing. I mean, it’s just gotta mean something when trusted guides turn out to be carnivorous monsters.

Famous fantasy writers like H.P. Lovecraft and Frank Belknap Long used their dreams in their writing. In fact, Long used one of Lovecraft’s dreams as the basis for his gloriously scary short novel, The Horror From the Hills. As for me, dreams gave me the opening scenes in Bell Mountain, when Jack hears the mountain singing, and The Last Banquet–that dream gave me Gurun as a character and showed me how she came to Obann.

You, too, can use this dynamic technique of fantasy-writing. Just send $5.50 to–uh, I mean, learn to pay attention to your dreams: especially the funky ones. Someday a dream might give you the start of a pretty good book.

Literary Crimes: Anachronisms REPRINT

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From January 13, 2016

Let’s say you’re writing an epic novel of the events leading up to Noah’s Flood, thousands of years ago.

Can you envision any circumstances which would induce you to employ the phrase, “strike zone”?

Well, yeah, if you want to remind the reader that he’s not really visiting the ancient world, but just reading a stupid book about it.

My friend “Abner,” in his amazingly successful novelizations of Biblical events, resorts to every anachronism he can think of. Here are a few that light up the second book in his series.

“It depends on what ‘is’ is.”

“Hope and change”

“Fundamental transformation of society”

God accused of “colonialism, imperialism, sexism, speciesism” and also described as “macho”

“I feel your pain”

“You didn’t build that”

“The 99 percent”

“We”–the speaker is an archangel–“saved your rear ends”

All right, let’s be fair: he has stopped short of equipping Adam and Eve, in the Garden of Eden, with cell phones. Well, who would they call? And a cell phone might be a nuisance if pockets haven’t been invented yet.

Strike zone? Macho?

Please, whoever is out there thinking about writing a novel–if you’re writing fantasy or historical fiction, please do not riddle it with stupid and inane anachronisms that won’t make a lick of sense to a reader ten years from now but which surely will, for the time being, remind the current reader that all he’s doing is reading a mutton-headed comic book without pictures.

I must point out that I am paid to read these books. Otherwise I could not endure it.

Oops! REPRINT

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So I’m reading The Temptation today, so I can remember the story that I told… and imagine my confusion when suddenly there’s a brand-new character in it, talking and interacting with the other characters–and no indication how she got there.

Well, okay, I know who she is and why she’s there, but no one else will. At first I thought I had somehow dropped a scene. Uh, no–more like a whole chapter. Chapter VII, to wit. Like what is this–Oy, Rodney? But yeah, Chapter VII’s missing.

I cannot explain why the chapter isn’t there. Just saying I forgot to type it in doesn’t really answer the question. And nobody caught it, first time around.

Happily the chapter is still on my hand-written legal pad, so I can type it up and plug it in. Now that I’ve done that, the book makes sense again.

But suddenly a thought: “Hey, wouldn’t that make a cool premise for a story? A writer finds a character in his book that he never thought of before–and he’s sure he didn’t put her in…”

Work Wanted: Wizard/Sage/Ninny

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From February 26, 2017

I have a couple of fictional characters on hand who weren’t able to find jobs in any of my books. So I am advertising them here, for employment by any aspiring fantasy writers who may wish to give them work.

Gombo the Magnificent is a wizard whose magic mostly produces unintended, and unappreciated, consequences. His love potion grows hair on your furniture. His hex makes his enemies stronger. And don’t even think about asking him to cast a spell to make you lose weight. The last customer who tried that wound up with two left feet and a bottomless ashtray.

Dr. Fretorius, an unemployed sage, is the world’s foremost expert on the philosophical writings of Wing Chow Foon, who was executed by his emperor for turning his students into useless idiots. Dr. Fretorius became unemployed when this began happening to his students at the university. Obviously a fantasy character: in real life, he would have been promoted to department head.

Beetrice Blotter rebelled against her parents’ plan for her to follow in their footsteps as professional beekeepers and turned instead to keeping wasps. It’s actually rather dangerous to approach her property. Her pride and joy is a wasps’ nest the size of a medicine ball, inhabited by a multitude of the most aggressive wasps anyone has ever seen. Her inability to get her wasps to produce marketable honey has left her with an obsession to achieve this goal no matter what.

All three have expressed the desire to appear in a fantasy novel and a willingness to do it without being paid. So if you mean to write such a novel, and have an opening suitable for any of these three characters, please feel free to give them a chance to show what they can do.

Shunning Movies Made by Immoral People

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People who know me know I love the works of J.R.R. Tolkien, and they’re always surprised to find out I’ve never seen the Lord of the Rings movies. Well, I don’t want to give any of my time or any of my money to Ian MacKellan, an unrepentant homosexual who brags about defacing Bibles. He plays Gandalf. That’s something I like to forget when I read the books.

So I can appreciate what some of you are saying when you say you don’t want to watch movies made by immoral people. We all have a suspicion, though, that that would rule out most movies. If you’re looking for virtue, Hollywood is probably not the place to start.

I do try to avoid movies that I know have been made by really sleazy people. But it’s not always so simple. In fact, God sometimes uses really sleazy people to do His will on earth. Can good things be done by bad people? I think we must admit they can.

Here at Chez Leester, we have a Thanksgiving tradition of watching two movies in particular: on Friday, Godzilla vs. Megalon, and on Saturday, Miracle on 34th Street. The one movie completely takes my mind off the dreary and disturbing news that I’ve been covering all year. The second never fails to remind me that there are truths that don’t–ahem!–lend themselves to factual analysis.

I watch lots of movies, including ones in which grossly immoral people may have had a hand in making. My calling in this life is to tell stories. To do it well, I must consume stories–lots and lots of stories. There are readers who say that reading one of my books is like watching a movie. Well, you can’t even guess at the number of hours I’ve put into achieving that effect. And I couldn’t do it if I didn’t watch as many movies as I can.

Don’t get me wrong. There is sleaze that I will walk a mile to avoid. And I’ll walk at least half a mile to dodge chick flicks, Serious Mainstream Dramas About Sophisticated People With Painful Personal Problems That They Can’t Solve Because They’re Pinheads, crime movies in which every character is rotten to the core, and several other kinds.

Anyway, I think we can all be thankful that God doesn’t require us to be absolutely perfect before He can make use of us. Serving Him in any way we can is both a glory and a privilege, and even sinners get a crack at it. Who knows? It might be habit-forming.

A Writer’s Nightmare

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Man Sinking In Quicksand In Movie Scene by Bettmann

“Eeyaaagh….!”

Just to give you a little glimpse into what I’m up against, these days–

Last night I dreamed I was desperately trying to get back to work on my novels. First I couldn’t find the manuscript. When I did, all the pages were out of order and had to be sorted. And then I finally found the title page:

THE MORASS

By Lee Duigon

Holy cow! What is this? I never wrote anything about a morass. The only morass I know is the one I’m stuck in. I can’t remember the story line. I don’t know where the rest of the novel is.

I am glad it was only a dream.

The working title of this novel is Ozias, Prince Enthroned; and I have it all scrawled down in longhand.

It’ll be ready when I am.

 

 

How Do I Do It? (Part 2)

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The Thunder King

I have 15 Bell Mountain books in print, with three more planned, one of which is written and is currently being edited (Ozias, Prince in Peril).

I don’t know how many characters I had to make up to populate these books. At a guess, say three or four hundred. Some come back in book after book. Some appear only for a walk-on. But as they say, you can’t tell a story without characters.

Where do they come from, all these characters?

Some I create to carry out certain jobs demanded by the plot. Having done so, they either remain in the story to do more, or quietly fade away.

A few start out as just a cool name. I borrow a lot of names from various sources–Greek and Roman history, ancient Welsh stories, Norse folklore. And then, often, a character takes form around the name. You can’t let a handle like “Abombalbap” go to waste.

Even fictional characters, of course, have to live somewhere. I had to invent a bunch of countries to house my characters. Obann, Wallekki Land, Abnak country, Arachosia–oh, all sorts of countries! And cities, too.

To invent all this stuff, nothing will prove more valuable than years and years of reading. It’s fun hanging out with Herodotus or Sir Thomas Malory; but you can also learn from them. The more you read, the better. And it’s okay to concentrate on reading the kind of stories you would like to write someday.. I have no time for Serious Mainstream Literature. Give me The Lord of the Rings or The Worm Ouroburos any day.

And that’s enough of this for now.

Finished!

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Hallelujah! Finished! Ozias, Prince Enthroned–I was stuck, I asked the Lord to show me where to stop… and He has. A perfect place to stop. But as Bill White used to say on double-header days, “Plenty of baseball left, folks!”

The next book, Ozias, King Betrayed, is already generating notes. Lots and lots to think about! But I pray I now have several months available for that.

I had to level the karma of the bad guys, but there will always be more of them waiting to come on stage.

Of course, I still have to type it up and send it to my editors, and that’ll take a good while. That gives me another chance to make sure everything in the story is as it should be. There’s always a letdown when a book is finished, but at least I have another book waiting for me.

Progress on My Book (I Hope)

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Physical therapy this morning, and waiting for various doctors to schedule me for chemotherapy (not looking forward to that!).

But at least it’s a sunny day, and I took advantage of it to set up outside and crank our four more pages of Ozias, Prince Enthroned. A major battle is shaping up, but I think Maressa’s lost her nerve. She wants a parley; her allies are infuriated.

In case you were wondering where I get this material, I can tell you that I’ve patterned this looming battle after Hannibal’s fight at Lake Trasimene. I’ve even named the terrain “Lake Trasm.”

I’m fast approaching the climax of the book and don’t know what I’ll do with myself once it’s finished. Well, I do have to type it all. And I have to finish editing Ozias, Prince in Peril. It feels like an age since I wrote it.

And Ocean of Time will be coming out any day now–so dream up some gang-busting names for as yet uncreated new characters. Contest winner gets an autographed book.