Homeward Bound

My Dad is having major surgery on Friday, so I made the drive home once again.

Heading north on route 11, I rolled my windows down and breathed in the fresh, clean, Valley air.  I wound my way through cow fields, and past farms and old civil war homes and always the mountains rose to my right, great and crisp and blue.  Once in a while the mountains to my left would peak out through a dip in the hills.

I love my home, and I love coming home.  When you’re home, you know it.  There’s a certain familiar scent in the air, or you just get that feeling.  That comforting feeling that your journey is over, and you are back into the loving arms of a place.

The concept of home and writing is interlinked and important.  How many stories end with a character coming home?  Or how many stories are built around a character trying to get to a place called home?  What about characters who don’t have a home and so they have a certain restlessness to their nature, or a need that drives them?

Home is something that all readers can relate to, in some form or another.  The concept of home (not necessarily your actual home but the idea of ‘home’) conjures a feeling of warmth or coziness or a place where you belong, a place where you can live.  A place called home is a place where everything is going to be okay.  Perhaps this is why we end stories with characters going home.  Not only is home a journey’s end, but we’re leaving our characters in a good place.

Understanding the concept of home can bring a good connection or reaction from the reader, especially in the absence of ‘home.’  Many people have experienced home sickness, or,  wishing you were home instead of at a meeting or at school, or even understanding it’s like to have nowhere to rest your feet.   Bringing the concept of home into a plot or character, brings a certain realness and connection to a character, and empathy as well. For if there is something we all understand, it’s what is like to come home, or at least want to find a place to call home.


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The awesome pictures of home sweet home in this blog post today were taken by Miss Mackenzie Grimes.  Check out the rest of her pics HERE.  She's really good.  And not just because she's one of my best friends.  I promise.

A Character Study

When we write characters, we want to write people.  We want to write believable, fascinating, interesting people.  And people, like characters, don’t always fit certain molds or always react the way you would expect them to.

I knew a young man when I was in undergrad.  Everyone in the school knew him.  He was friendly, sociable, and involved in a lot of the different activities on campus.  He was a Peace and Conflict studies major and always dealt with problems and issues with a smile on his face, always looking for a peacable solution.  Once, when my friend was having a grumpy day, she was chatting with him outside the cafeteria.  She explained her problems and he asked:

“Do you have food and clothing?”

“Yes.”

“Shelter?”

“Yes.”

“No one is sick or dying?”

“No.”

“Then I think it is a pretty good day.”

With everything he did, and how he went about it, with his cheerful, kind, friendly demeanor, it came as a surprise to me to learn he was a survivor of the Rwandan genocide.

After experiencing the things he did, he didn’t choose the path of anger, or revenge, or hatred.  He chose a path of peace and kindness.  Although revenge is a good driver for many characters, it isn’t necessarily the only answer for characters.  Remember characters are people, and people come in all shapes and sizes.

How Writing a Thesis is like Writing a Novel

What is 32 pages of text, 3 ½ pages of references, 8 pages of (beastie) maps, 20 pages of figures, and another 5 or so pages of table of contents, figure lists, etc?

That would be the first draft of my thesis.

What file is too big to actually email to my committee members so they can go through it?

That would be the first draft of my thesis.

RAWR!!

Who had to go back and compress all the figures and reformat them?

*mutter mutter grumble grumble*

The whole process of writing a thesis is extremely stressful, full of surprise turns, and many things that are simply out of your control. As I finished up my first draft last night, I reflected on how I couldn’t wait to go back to working on my creative work. My mind usually goes to how different writing for the sciences is from writing creatively, but then I realized that there was a lot to be learned about novel writing from the thesis process.


The query letter: Science calls it a proposal.
The biggest difference between a proposal and a query letter is that a proposal is needed before you start research whereas the query letter comes after you’ve written your work. At first glance it seems as if they’re really not related but they have a lot in common. Both are written works that say, “Hey I’ve got this great idea/book/story for you. It’s worth your time I swear. Fund me!” For a proposal, one of the most important things is demonstrating why we care. What will this contribute to the world of science? What influence will it have? Why is it important that we do this research? A query letter is really trying to do the same thing. You’re trying to demonstrate to an agent that they should care about your novel. Not only the novel, but the characters, the story, the plot. You are trying to demonstrate that other people will read it and so they should fund you because it will be an important addition to the literary world. And their time and money can help it succeed!

It takes a village to write a thesis….and a novel!
When you tackle a thesis you are independent---to some degree. Yes I did the research on my own, the writing is all mine, and the figures are all mine as well. But I couldn’t have accomplished all the writing, the research, and the figures without help from my committee. They helped me outline my thesis, they got data for me that I needed, they looked to see if I was on the right track with my introduction, they showed me how to use certain programs and gave valuable advice for setting up my figures. In other words, even though I wrote the thesis, there were many other people who have had their hands on it behind the scenes. And without those people, the thesis would be in much worse shape.  They’re not writing your novel, but little bits of their advice and help goes into it that (hopefully) makes it better. You don’t really write a novel completely and utterly by yourself, it really takes a village.

It takes work
Honestly, I have to say that writing a novel is more fun than writing a thesis. It’s just way more interesting and exciting ro play with characters than describe a chart/graph/model. But, fun or not, both take a lot of work. I mean, yes, no duh it takes work, but while writing my thesis I really understood. For my thesis I spent six hour days for two weeks working on making charts and graphs. After those were finished, I wrote for three hours every morning from 9 to 12, sometimes longer. Toward the end I was writing in the evenings too. It was draining. It stole all my words, but without the work it wouldn’t have gotten done. The same with a novel. You can dream about it, but if you don’t sit down and work on it it just won’t get done. And you’ve gotta work. And as a result…

You have to sacrifice.
This was hard for me. While writing my thesis I couldn’t turn my full attention on my longer works, the ‘other stuff’ I was dying to write. Yes, I would turn my attention to it some afternoons to take a break, or distract myself, but my primary focus had to be on my thesis. It was a sacrifice. Entries on my blog also suffered. While writing a novel, you’ll have to make sacrifices too. It may not be in writing, but it may be in other areas. Sometimes you just have to suck it up and make a sacrifice.

Revision, revision, revision
When you finish your thesis it’s not finished. Oh yes, you’ve written a document but you know the process is only just beginning. You have to send that document to a committee, wait at least two weeks, and then it comes back with alllll the corrections. For the most part, it’s making your document better in ways you didn’t know or couldn’t see. Other times it makes you want to set things on fire. And still other times it makes you feel like an idiot. But it’s an essential part of the process. With a novel, while you may write and write and write and edit and edit, another set of eyes is still essential. And, if and when your manuscript does get accepted somewhere, it has to go through yet another round of editing. Invariably it may come back with comments that make you doubt yourself as a writer. I know I’ve had many of those moments in my graduate school career. But you’ve just got to…

Push on
It may be hard. You may want to just throw your hands in the air and give up, especially when it seems like you’re so close yet so far. But if you want to do this thing, finish this thing whatever it may be. You’ve got to push through, don’t slow down. Don’t give up.

My mind isn't working

I really want to update this thing before the weekend.  I have all sorts of cool topics I want to talk about, like cats in literature, and absent/non living characters, and some inspiring people, but I'm having an utter mind FAIL. 

I've been working on finishing the first draft of my thesis so all my words seem to be going there.  Not anywhere fun.  Stupid...thesis...*mutter mutter grumble grumble*

So instead of having an interesting writing related post, I'm just going to post some fun pictures I've taken here and there that jolt my inspiration or are just fun.

Why yes, this is a yetti driving a little truck with a giant boot on the roof. 

View from a castle in the Alps.  Killer.

Neuschwanstein castle

Wooden pants in Venice...hangin' out (snap!)

 

 

 

 Wild horses at the base of a volcano in Ecuador

 

 

 

'Work Makes Free.' Entrance to Dachau Concentration camp.

Best. Sign. EVER.

That's all for now!  Hopefully the first draft of my thesis will be done by this weekend and I'll find my words again :)

Blinding You with Science: Give me a Climate Please

When it  comes to science in fantasy, I think you have to strike a balance, otherwise something ceases to be ‘fantastic.’  However, science most certainly has its place and understanding some basics can massively improve what you write. Subtly speaks volumes. 

 In my last post, I quoted this section from The Crimson Sword and asked what was wrong with it:

All was embraced and sheltered by the trees of the forest—cone bearing evergreens such as fir, pine, spruce, and larch, alongside colorful hardwoods such as maple, oak, birch, and magnolia.

So what’s wrong with it?

Can someone please tell me what the climate of this place is?

Foliage can be one of the biggest indications of the climate of a location, and allows the reader to get a feel for the place without specifically stating something like: it was a cold tundra, it was a tropical rain forest.  When Eldon Thompson started to describe the forest, at first I automatically assumed it was in a deciduous forest, maybe found in the northern parts of the United States.  I immediately got a sense and a feeling just from the ‘spruce, maple, pine’ combination. 

Why?  Just from personal experience, just from simply living.  When I think of spruce I think somewhere cold.  When I think maple, I don’t think hot places and I think of lush forests because that’s what I have seen and known.  That is why writers don’t have to spell everything out for readers: people intuitively know things through passive observation.

This only works, though, if the writer can give the reader the proper clues.  And in this case a bit of scientific accuracy.  Larch, spruce, and maple make sense.  They’re associated with cold climates. But…magnolia?? Seriously?  The most common species that people will thing of is the one that’s associated with the hot humid south?  Not only that. but its range doesn’t even overlap with that of larch!  We won’t even mention the fact that magnolia isn’t a hardwood.  So what is the climate of this place?  Do they have no weather?

A writer may not always be a scientist but it doesn’t take a scientist to use google. 

It may seem simply and petty but not accurately associating foliage to climate, you mess with your setting and don’t allow your reader to get an accurate picture.  Instead, it just sounds as if you’re throwing out random descriptors to fill space, as if you as the writer don’t have an accurate picture of your setting and that cheapens a story.