Migration to Wordpress

 I am suspending posting to this blog, having created a personal WordPress-based site at davidalexlamb.com. I copied over all my old posts, and will slowly be adding categorization that I rarely did here.  If you were subscribing to this blog using an RSS aggregator like Feedly, you should update it to point to the new site instead, since I don’t expect to post here again.

Unifying Three Story Structures

 I’ve been reading about writing for years, and am often puzzled by the differences in what different people tell you are essential, approaches to various aspects of writing. I am usually skeptical of “essentiallism” and “only one way” approaches; one of my teachers, Mary Robinette Kowal, once said in one of her Patreon classes that “all writing advice, even mine, is what worked for that writer.” So I focus on what seems useful to me in my current state as an aspiring writer.

At the moment, what I’m working on is character development for my protagonist and secondary characters. I’ve been mostly plot-driven in the past, and my characters have to a large extent been “cardboard” plot tokens. So I’ve been studying sources on creating character arcs; this is a summary of what I’ve learned.

Settlers 6 Custom Scenarios, Part 1

 I’ve said before that city-builders are one of my two favourite forms of video game. Unfortunately, sometimes they have “gotchas” that make you start over from the beginning (or from a many-turns-ago save file) that lead me to wish for walkthroughs that don’t give away too much but at least give me a chance to prepare for whatever the problem might be. Lately I’ve been playing The Settlers®: Rise of an Empire – Gold Edition (released April 18, 2008 by Blue Byte Studio / Ubisoft). There is a nice walkthrough for the campaign scenarios, but I haven’t found one for the custom ones. If anybody out there is still playing this almost-13-year-old game, here are a few warnings. If you want to try to reduce exposure to spoilers, just read the list immediately after the break gives the key idea of the gotcha.

Reflections on January 6, 2021

 As part of learning how to write, I have been reading Kate Wilhelm’s Storyteller, her reflections on 27 years of the Clarion Writers’ Workshops. One section talks about how she works “from images, to scenes, to incidents, then situations and finally plot” in contrast with either pantsing or the usual kind of plotting. The images often arose from her subconscious, her “Silent Partner;” plotting is essentially knitting together the scenes and incidents into a coherent order, adding new material to connect the old. Diana Gabaldon describes a somewhat similar process, and in a brief conversation with Nalo Hopkinson on the 2015 Writing Excuses Retreat cruise she told me she writes this way, too.

All of my NaNoWriMo novels started with images or very brief scenes. So after the riots on January 6, my reactions crystalized around a small number of images.

First Acts, Chapters, Pages, and Lines

At this point in my growth as a writer I’m a plot-oriented “plantser,” combining some planning with some discovery writing. At the moment I’m working on improving my planning skills, preparing for a rewrite of my 2018 NaNoWriMo science fiction mystery novelette, expanding it into a full novel. I’ve read advice that mysteries require more planning than some other genres. So I’m working on those skills, and this year I’m primarily working on developing more interesting characters. I’ve researched how to develop engaging characters, including developing character arcs based on the character’s negative core belief (“Lie” the character tells themselves). Based on advice that it can take time to build up reader interest in a character, I looked into how to write bridging conflicts to maintain reader interest while developing the main plot. Now it’s time to start rewriting the first chapter, and I didn’t like my first attempt of a few weeks ago, so I did even more research. Here are the results.

Character Wounds and Lies

While I was researching my post on “writing engaging characters” I happened to skim my old post on “articulating your character’s greatest desire” and found a mention of K.M. Weiland’s post about the character’s “lie” as something critical to a character arc. I’m not entirely convinced that character-above-all is the only approach, but my specific learning objective in the current novel is to explore character development. I decided that as I was working out my speculative fiction mystery’s main character, I needed to understand better what “lie” meant in the context of character definitions – and fell down a rabbit hole of several dozens of posts about the subject and the related one of “wounds” or “ghosts” behind the “lies.” Here’s what I found.

Writing Engaging Characters

Since mid-March I’ve been doing a lot of planning for rewriting my 2018 NaNoWriMo speculative fiction mystery novelette; my previous research suggested that mysteries required more planning than other kinds of story. I had hoped to start writing for the April 2020 Camp NaNoWriMo, but there was still a huge amount of planning to do. About two and a half weeks in, I got frustrated about not writing and drafted the first scene – the start of a bridging conflict – meant to introduce the characters and setting before getting to the first plot point (the murder). I finished a draft, about 1,000 words, and realized I hadn’t done enough of what such conflicts are supposed to do: make the main character engaging. So like a good little scholar I did a bunch of research on how to do that.

What is a Bridging Conflict?

For NaNoWriMo 2018 I wrote a murder mystery set on a starliner. With all the freewriting and deleted words stripped away, it turned out to be a little over 22k words, a novelette by SFWA standards. Its main contribution to my development as a writer was that it contained a complete albeit sketchy plot – my first NaNo project I could consider finished in some reasonable sense. For this month’s Camp NaNoWriMo I intended to start turning it into a full novel, but I didn’t have enough prep time to do all the planning my research on writing mysteries showed was necessary. So I’ve been slogging through more research, world-building, plot outlining, figuring out what the various antagonists are doing – all of which is reasonably fun, but over the weekend I got frustrated with not having actually started the story. So I drafted the first chapter.

The story just didn’t work.

More on writing mysteries

My 2018 NaNoWriMo novel was a murder mystery set on a starliner. In April 2019 I was contemplating revising it, so I wrote a summary of some Internet research about writing mysteries, mostly from Writing Excuses. I wound up going a different direction, but now I am coming back to that novel. So I’ve read a wider variety of internet sources, listed at the end of this post, and have synthesized what I learned into a summary of my own. I strongly advise that you read the original sources, too.

Worldcon: Monday August 19

On this last day of Worldcon the sessions I attended were

• Bigotry is not allegorical: strategies for writing and reading
  
• Well-meaning vs ‘plain dealing’ villains
  
• Keeping the show on the road: low Earth orbit and beyond
  
• Martian landers
  

Unfortunately I have no notes on the Martian landers talk, because the lights were down for the presentation and it was so fascinating I didn’t want to risk missing anything while note-taking.

Worldcon: Sunday August 18

On Sunday, as on Saturday, there were often several sessions I wanted to attend scheduled at the same time; this hadn't happened as much on Thursday and Friday. The ones I chose were

• The lack of technological progress in fantasy
  
• What writers need to know: physics and space travel
  
• Gods, religion and atheism in the genre
  
• Using science in fantasy writing
  
• Ensembles in YA
  
• Invented mythologies in SF
  

With even further distance from the convention (I am writing this on September 2-7) I am increasingly finding that some of my notes no longer remind me of what was said, so these notes are less complete than they might have been had I written them up earlier.

Worldcon: Saturday August 17

By this point I had decided that the best way to get into the panels I cared about most was to stay in the conference centre, and skip the sessions right before the ones I most cared about so I could queue early. Today’s panels were

• How astronomy might break physics
• Invisible work: mothers and caregivers in SFF
• Young adults versus… the world!
• Urban fantasy from the margins
• Send in the crones: older women in SFF

WorldCon: Thursday August 16

On this second day of regular sessions, the convention was better organized about queue management in Conference Centre Dublin, but there were still some glitches. Today I attended sessions on

• Writing beyond king and colony
  
• Done to death: the art of killing characters
  
• Is epic fantasy conservative?
  
• Unwritable stories
  
• Craft is not a dirty word
  

Unlike yesterday I managed to get into all the sessions I wanted.

Worldcon: Thursday August 15

Worldcon 2019 was the reason for my being in Ireland this year. If you don’t know about Worldcon, here is a teeny capsule summary: the World Science Fiction Convention is a combination of panels on a wide variety of topics of interest to fans and creators of science fiction, fantasy, and horror (collectively known as speculative fiction, or sometimes SFF to people who downplay the horror element), plus events relevant to the hosting location, cosplay, and shopping (largely books, which you can sometimes get a chance to have autographed). Plus, the big item that’s relevant to fans who don’t go: attendees and associate members vote on the Hugo awards, which are presented in a big ceremony (on Sunday night this time).

Today I went to four panels:

• Crime and Punishment in the Age of Superheroes
• How to Build an Evil Empire
• Creating wonderful new worlds
• Making the asexual textual.

Vacation 2019: Derry to Dublin

Tuesday August 13 involved a lot of driving. We started in Derry, visited the Giant’s Causeway in the far northeast, then the Titanic Museum in Belfast, then returned to Dublin.

Vacation 2019: Galway to Derry

Monday August 12 took in Galway, Mayo, Sligo, Leitrim, Donegal, and Derry. We visited a holy site in Knock, a sheep farm in northern Sligo, and took a tour of a small part of Derry.

Vacation 2019: Clare and Galway

Sunday August 11: we set off from Killarney, north across County Kerry, and took a ferry to County Clare – avoding the long drive around County Limmerick. The three main items of the day were the Cliffs of Moher, the Burren, and the medieval part of the city of Galway. The day started off moderately rainy, but cleared up for us as the day progressed.

Vacation 2019: The Ring of Kerry

Our Saturday Aug 10 tour was the Ring of Kerry (An Mhór Chuaird), a loop around the high hills of County Kerry. It was a somewhat shorter touring day than most of the others, leaving Killarney at 8am and returning close to 4pm. We found out that busses are required to circle counterclockwise around the loop, lest two of them meet going in opposite directions. The roads in Ireland are very narrow by North American standards and typically have no shoulders, with hedgerows of 3-4 metre high “hedges” (more like trees!) growing right at the edge. At least in most of the country; we later found that western Ireland has drystone walls instead. Occasionally there is a 1-lane bridge. Even if driving weren’t on the unfamiliar left, I don’t think I could manage.

Vacation 2019: Cork

Friday August 9 we left Waterford and entered County Cork, visiting the towns of Cobh (pronounced “cove”) and An Bhlarna (Blarney). Road signage in Ireland has both the Irish and English place names. We learned several town name prefixes: An (the), Baile (village of), Cill (church), Dun (fort), and Glen (valley).

Vacation 2019: Wicklow and Waterford

Thursday August 8: Our tour is proceeding clockwise around the coast of Ireland. We started this morning in Dublin, County Dublin, and headed south into County Wicklow and later County Waterford.