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I’ve got voices in my head.

We all do, really. The speak to us silently as we try to understand the world around us. When I meet people, I always try to figure out what makes them tick. What their motivations are, what goals they’ve set, and what they are willing to do to reach them. Why do they love what they love, or hate what they hate? What is their everyday life like, and how is that different from mine? What can I LEARN from this person, and thus enrich my own life?

It’s not a mercenary thing; I still have genuine feelings for or against all those people like any normal person, but I remain as driven try to grok people I don’t like and tend to avoid as people I love so much I can’t imagine living without. It’s just how my brain works.

The few things I manage to learn in the brief chances I get to interact with a person  become voices in my head, little whispers of a louder personality. They’re just fragments of being with no overall driving anima, but each is a clue to the human condition as seen by one person. Frequently they have no immediate pertinent use, but I don’t mind. They’ll remain, part of the background chatter in my head, until they are needed. Sooner or later, most of them will be. The whispers are always talking to me, helping me make sense of the world around me.

Sometimes, just sometimes, those little whispers combine, like the T1000 in Terminator 2, into a larger whole. These whispers become a voice, longing to speak aloud; a finished person, with their own unique personality and life outlook, who lives in my head.  They take over sometimes, when I am in a debate and suddenly switch sides out of some weird kinship one of my internal voices has with the topic. It makes me seem as if I’m just arguing for the sake of arguing, which annoys people, but it’s really not that at all. I’m just letting one of the voices speak for a minute. A lot of times, I’m as interested to hear what it will say as anyone. Those voices, and the data they mine from others, create whispers of their own.

But for the loudest voices, momentary use of my vocal cords is not enough. They need to speak and speak freely, in proper context and with their opinions attributed to them and not to Peter v. Brett, who probably disagrees with them, anyway.

I don’t just sit down and create characters for stories out of thin air. Major or minor, heroine or scullery maid, hero or stableboy, I just pull out a voice, or a handful of whispers, and let them breathe life into the character. Sometimes those characters become so fully formed that they are as real to me as people I meet on the street, and about as likely to behave the way I want them to.

I’ve got voices in my head.

Writing stories just lets them speak aloud.

Posted on May 19, 2008 at 12:40 pm by PeatB
Filed under Craft, Musings, Writing
1 Comment »

I don’t really have anything to blog about, but I feel like posting anyway and I’m tired of working. So this will be kind of a free-flowing stream of thought.

I only wrote 1381 words today, but that small word count required a considerable amount of work, as I finally tunneled my way out of a literary corner I had painted myself into. This happens a lot.

In SF (technically “Speculative Fiction, which refers mainly to science fiction and fantasy) writing, you have one thing that is different from other genres; it’s something called worldbuilding. Worldbuilding is the practice of creating an entirely fictional setting in which your story occurs; a setting where you, as Creator, have godlike powers to control everything from geography and societal structures to the very laws of physics themselves. Tolkien created Middle Earth. George Lucas created the Galactic Empire. Gene Roddenberry created the United Federation of Planets and the Klingon Empire. Bob Kane created Gotham City.

Worldbuilding is both a SF writer’s greatest luxury, and greatest burden. Phenomenal cosmic powers; itty-bitty living space.

On one hand, you can do anything you want, without apology. If I want to make a world where demons rise up out of the ground every night, and can only be held at bay by magic symbols, you, the reader, have no choice but to accept that it is so and move on from there. It’s also great if you are a lazy researcher. You don’t have to make sure your characters are in proper period dress, or know real geography or science. Need your character to cure ED, but don’t want to research sildenafil citrate and find a way for your characters to create such a thing with medieval lab equipment? No problem! She’s got some boneroot (which I just made up) in her bag, and that will fix the poor guy right up.

On the other hand, you have to create EVERYTHING. In order to convince your reader, who has dutifully accepted demons, magic symbols, and boneroot, that they are reading about a REAL world that has depth and anima, you need to figure out how all those laws of nature you so casually changed affect everything else in the world. You need to invent cities and towns and hamlets. You need to imagine what the leadership and culture of these fictional places is like, especially in light of your changes to physics. How their economies work. How the people talk. How they settle conflicts with their neighbors. What their hopes and dreams are. Their religious beliefs and observances. You need to know if there is a real deity listening to their prayers and perhaps acting on them, or if it’s all just bullshit told to them by Holy Men and they’re just praying in the dark to an uncaring universe.

In the long run, it’s probably easier to do the damn research and write a period story.

Sometimes, the story is moving along fine, and then you suddenly run right off the map. Even the best worldbuilder leaves gaps, places just sketched like a matte painted background on a movie set to give the appearance of a larger world. When you stumble onto one of these gaps, it is both a problem and an opportunity. You have to switch gears and draw the ground underneath your characters, and then expand out, creating flora and fauna and people and places and things for your characters to interact with. It’s a pain in the ass, but it’s fun, too. It’s a chance to make this new place the COOLEST PLACE EVER.

The problem lies when your newly created coolest place ever, crafted so lovingly, no longer fits the plot you wrote before it was created. Suddenly, you are at point C, and the characters need to get to point E, but point D is suddenly a K.

What follows is a desperate scramble to juggle all your sub-plots and character development plans and long term goals to make the story run again. Sometimes it results in a brief stall, and other times, you really need to take a long break and step back, looking at the story, spanning several books, as a whole, and make MASSIVE adjustments.

I just spent the last few weeks doing that, and I gotta say, it is mentally exhausting, even if I am (very) pleased with the results. The story grows with the telling.

No wonder so many people choose to write nonfiction or historical fiction.

Posted on May 18, 2008 at 10:55 pm by PeatB
Filed under Craft, Musings, Writing
6 Comments »

I sometimes get obsessive about looking at my web traffic statistics. It’s fun to see how many hits your site gets, and what states and countries they are from.

Recently, my agent and UK publisher talked up The Painted Man at London Book Fair, which got us some international attention. Not long after, we sent out a batch of .pdfs of the manuscript to international publishers, which sparked a lot of web traffic throughout the world.

So I was looking at the world map, which shows where visitors come from in familiar google maps style, and I realized something.

If this was a RISK game, I would be kicking ass. Check it out:

Note how I not only have armies in Australia, but also bases in the gateway countries in Asia. You can see a path up from there to Europe, where I have a pretty firm grip, not to mention the US and Canada, which pretty much locks up North America. That means I would be pulling 2 armies each turn for Australia, 5 for Europe, and soon another 5 for North America. And that’s not even counting the armies for countries and turning in cards.If only my real RISK games went this well…

Posted on May 16, 2008 at 1:54 pm by PeatB
Filed under Musings
3 Comments »

A couple of months ago, I posted a question to the site of my good friend and copyeditor extraordinaire, Deanna Hoak. The question was about interrobangs, which is the practice of using a combination of exclamation point and question mark in order to denote a question that is shouted, or otherwise intensified. Some people hate the practice, saying it is cutesy IM speak, and unworthy of use in “real” novels. I tend to disagree.

Anyway, in her response, Deanna linked to my website, particularly my post on Subway Writing, where I describe how most of my current novel was written on my cellphone with my thumbs while I was commuting to and from work, saying it was an inspiration to anyone who claims they don’t have time to write. There was a brief spike in my internet traffic as many of Deanna’s readers clicked the link for a look. And then, for a while, all was quiet.

But then, a funny thing started to happen.

I started getting pingbacks, which are notices that show people have linked to my blog. Apparently a lot of aspiring writers were inspired enough by my story to not only take it to heart, but to pass it on to others as well by linking to it on their own blogs. For instance, Stacy King had a post on it on April 17, followed by Talitha Kalago on her journal, She Writes! on April 29. Then, on May 13, there was another pingback from a writing forum called Inkstains. A lot of commenters also mentioned reading it and feeling inspired.

Apparently, this is a subject of some interest. If I’ve inspired anyone to use their traditionally unproductive time to write more, I’m honored. The story is one that is near and dear to me, as I owe much of my current career to it.

I’ll have to post more on the topic…

Posted on May 14, 2008 at 9:53 am by PeatB
Filed under Craft, Musings, Writing
8 Comments »

I’ve been thinking about my “rap” about The Painted Man. This is something I need to practice quite a bit as my publication date nears, and I need to become something of a salesman in addition to an author.

I’ve never been good at sales. Or summaries. I’m a long story kind of guy, and concision isn’t my strong point. So when people ask me what my novel is about, I usually stammer for a few minutes, and then I tell them how it’s about demons and magic tattoos and I watch their eyes glaze over as they mentally check out of the conversation and just start nodding politely. Then they make some offhand comment about how that’s not their cup of tea, but it sure sounds interesting.

Another potential reader lost.

But when I think about it, those things aren’t really what the book is ABOUT at all. Like all good books, it is about people, and how they deal with challenges in their life. Whether the challenges are their friends and family, Nazis, demons, or what have you is irrelevant. I need to alter my description to focus on that, which is more inclusive. Whether or not someone normally reads fantasy shouldn’t matter so long as the characters are compelling and the fantasy parts are not confusing to the uninitiated (and I’ve worked very hard to insure that they are not). The stories are less about the actual monsters that come out at night than they are about the changes people must make during the day to survive, and how it alters the way they relate to one another.

I’ve worked hard to create characters who are flawed in ways that readers can relate to, and who are driven forward by those flaws as much as held back. I think characters who have a lot of past emotional baggage to haul around while they try to deal with their current challenges are more interesting and compelling than heroes who are perfect all the time. THEY are the focus of the stories.

So why do I keep telling people the book is about demons?

Posted on May 11, 2008 at 7:38 am by PeatB
Filed under Craft, Musings, Writing
7 Comments »