When the set piece has to be UNBELIEVABLY AWESOME...

A couple of days ago, I got to a point in the scene of my latest story, and had to stop. Why? Because I knew I was on the verge of writing the climactic set piece of the story, and whatever I wrote had to be unbelievably awesome.

Living up to my own expectations can be enough to shut me down for days (I suppose it's a variety of writer's block).

Just in case this has ever happened to you, I thought I'd share a few of the things I do when I get blocked by my own expectations.

1. Review your plans.
I look back at what I've sketched out. Usually I have a basic sense of the events required by the plot. "She kills him," for example. Of course, it's important to keep in mind that events alone are not enough. Even the most exciting-sounding events can fall flat if done badly.

2. Back up and look for clues to how you should approach the next piece.
If you work with themes or consistent imagery, see if there's a way to incorporate the theme or the ongoing imagery into the piece that's coming up. In my case, I realized I should try to work typhoons into the scene as it progressed. Even if you don't typically work with themes, you may be able to find little hints that your subconscious has seeded throughout the early sections of your story - places where an image or a connection can be repeated or enhanced.

3. Try getting as close to the ground as possible.
Immerse yourself in your events, your characters, your text. Get as deep into the point of view as you can so that you can be inside your main character's impressions and reactions, and forget everything else. After all, what's looming ahead (the set piece) is primarily looming for you, the author/drafter/editor. For the characters, it typically won't loom as much. Your character may be aware that they have to kill the bad guy - but even if they are, they may not realize it's about to happen now. If you do happen to be in a Percy Jackson situation where you know your time is short, you know the big bad guy's coming right now, etc., then see if you can rely on the supporting characters.

4. Forget about the magnitude of the task, and about trying to make it awesome.
The strength of set pieces comes from two different sources. You might expect that the words you use in a set piece are key to its success. This is true - but those words by themselves aren't what's going to lift this piece into the realm of true awesomeness. If you work too hard to make the words of your set piece awesome, they won't be awesome - they'll be strenuous. The other place you'll be able to build strength for your set pieces is in the material that leads up to them. For example, if the action of the set piece is going to have a huge impact on your point of view character, set up the needs and sensitivities of your character early on and let readers know that certain things will have particular impact for him/her. That way, when you get there, the words you use will gain the additional resonance of all the places where you placed supporting material.

To use a wacky metaphor, imagine that your main character's plot arc is like a boulder rolling down a hill. To make it more exciting, you can decorate the boulder, or you can stick something in the place where it's supposed to land - but how much more exciting would it be to have a whole bunch of boulders (of different sizes?) rolling in from different directions to converge on that one spot? The impact would be much bigger, and its consequences would be much trickier to anticipate.

So after a couple of days and after talking all these elements through with my best writing buddy, I managed to sit down last night and write the piece. Of course it needs work - but it's out there now. The fear is gone.

I hope these suggestions can help you with your set pieces too.

Announcements

Sorry to have to do this to my wonderful commenters, but I've just enabled comments moderation, because I've been targeted by spammers. I guess any mention of shoes invites the attention of the shoe-hawking community! Imagine.

It ends up being somewhat appropriate, though, because I have a big trip coming up. I'm taking my family to France, and rather than stress myself out trying to blog, I'm going to take a short hiatus from August 4th until September 1st. I'm trying to arrange some guest posts to appear during that time, and I hope I can find someone to moderate comments for me, because I certainly don't want to be comment-spammed when I'm traveling and not able to clean it up. In any case, I'll be keeping the comments moderation on until September 1st.

I do have a couple more posts to share with you before my departure, and and while I'm here I'll try to approve comments as quickly as possible. For those of you who may have been wondering, I don't sell shoes!

I hope you like my pretty Analog covers that I just added to the left bar, showing the magazines in which I've appeared.

Thank you for your patience.


Juliette

The language you speak influences how you think!

I'd been looking for a good way to introduce the work of Stanford Psychology professor Lera Boroditsky to my readers, and today I found it in this fantastic article that appeared in the Wall Street Journal.

Yes, the language you speak does influence how you think.

I think the first people to put forward the idea that a link existed between culture and language were the anthropologists Franz Boas, Edward Sapir, and Benjamin Lee Whorf. The last two of those are associated with the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, which holds that differences in the way language encodes categories etc. affect the way speakers of that language think. There's been a lot of argument about this idea since it came out, and certainly one can argue against a strong form that says language restricts thought. However, Professor Boroditsky has been exploring exactly what the consequences of certain languages are for thought - and in fact, she's finding there is a huge influence between the two. Russian speakers who have more words for blue than English speakers are in fact better able to distinguish between colors of blue. Speakers of different languages conceptualize the "direction" of time differently: left to right vs. right to left vs. below to above. And those who use absolute direction instead of relative direction (N/S/E/W instead of Left/Right) use those directions to organize things chronologically as well as to think about spatial positioning.

I encourage you not only to read this article, but to think about how this affects your writing. What kind of society have you created? What language do they speak, and how does it frame its categories? Once you've figured that out, ask yourself how that categorization system might be further generalized into the society, its beliefs and its behavior. Language does affect thought - so something that shows up in the language should be evident in basic concepts of reality like how many different colors of blue there are, or whether something hanging on a wall is actually "on" it or "up" it. What kinds of distinctions might your people draw that we might not be familiar with?

When I create my societies, I like to see how far I can push these categories and the judgments surrounding them. In doing so, I hope not only to tell a great story, but to show my readers a new way of imagining and conceptualizing the reality that we all share.

I hope you find this article as inspiring as I did.

Feet and Shoes across cultures

What do you know about feet?

I suppose the most recent thing I've heard about feet comes from runner friends who have been talking about a book, Born to Run, that advocates running without shoes. The argument basically goes, "You've been taught all your life to wear shoes, and have probably shelled out a lot for those specially designed running shoes, but they might actually cause you more injuries."

Well, it's interesting. I haven't researched the science behind the book, but it does go to show that science can always learn something new, and attitudes change, even about something as constantly present as our feet. There are also a lot of different attitudes about feet across cultures, and across history.

One poignant example of this was brought to my attention when I visited the Field Museum in Chicago, where they had a display of shoes from different countries and eras. The collection included beautiful embroidered shoes about two inches long, intended for Chinese women's bound feet. The very sight of them gives me the shivers, yet before the revolution in China they were seen as necessary for the refined beauty of women in the aristocracy. I remember reading Spring Moon by Bette Bao Lord in high school and being fascinated by the way she portrayed changing attitudes surrounding bound feet - in particular the way the older generation regarded the younger generation whose feet had not been bound.

I could spend a lot of time trying to list all the things we saw in the display, but I'll just do a few here. Fishing boots from Hokkaido made out of fish skin - with scales! Sandals from Hungary that looked like little tables - they had two wooden supports underneath and were inlaid with mother of pearl. Moccasins from American Indian nations. It even included modern shoes from Chicago.

One of the things I particularly remarked on in the display was a pair of snow boots from Japan, made out of rice straw. They dated from the 1970's - a lot later than I expected. Historically, sandals, rain/snow coats and boots were made of rice straw in Japan (if you have a lot of it, it makes sense to put it to use!). Then there were the construction shoes from Japan and the dockwork shoes from the US, both of which had a big toe that was separated from the smaller toes (almost as if it could wear a flip-flop over it). I've actually seen Japanese workers climbing around on scaffolding wearing these shoes - they look like blue canvas boots with rubber soles and the separated big toe. The wooden sandal-clogs from Japan called geta usually have two wooden "teeth" underneath on which you walk, but we saw a pair in the display that were made for wearing in the rain. These had very very tall wooden teeth and a leather cover to go over and protect the wearer's toes.

So here's a question: how different from each other are the shoes we wear now, and how does their form reflect their function? Sports shoes take all kinds of forms, high ankles or low, with all kinds of decorative patterns. Women's shoes come in all kinds of heel heights (though men in the era of Louis XIV in France were the first to wear high heels). When I shopped for shoes recently, I noticed that the sleek look I like in a shoe tends to come with a high heel, and not with a flat. Tough for me, because I can't wear high heels without hurting myself. The other thing I always have to look out for when shopping is the sole of the shoe. Women's shoes in particular tend to have very flimsy soles and not stand up to much walking.

I couldn't help asking myself whether this reflected the low value Americans appear to put on walking from place to place. Why walk when we could take our cars? Why walk when it would take so long (though it probably would take far less long than you'd think)? Why would we need strong soles for our shoes if we're not doing sports and we're not "rugged"?

The last thing I'd like to mention is the question of whether feet are inherently "dirty." Yes, certainly we know to be concerned with tracking mud in the house, and we don't want to put dirty feet in a clean bed. But running around barefoot in America is romanticized as a sign of freedom and maybe being in touch with one's inner child. Running around barefoot in Japan isn't done. If I were ever to step outside my door in bare feet when I lived there, people would look at me in complete shock. Shoes are worn outside, and then taken off in the entry hall (genkan) so they will not bring dirt into the house. Still, inside people wear slippers - and there's a special pair of slippers that must only be worn while in the bathroom (actually I should specify: the slippers are to be worn in the toilet room, not the room with the bathtub). Also, it's seen as inappropriate to use your feet to open or close doors or accomplish anything that is rightly done with the hands.

The point of this entire discussion is to bring attention to the way that different cultures perceive feet, shoes, how they are used, and what is beautiful or ugly about them. When you're putting together a fantasy or science fictional society, be aware that you can include differences in the value of common things, like feet and shoes, to add interest to your alien or fantasy culture. So long as the value of feet and shoes is consistent with other beliefs in the culture, it won't even necessarily stand out as bizarre, but will give a new level of depth to the culture you're trying to portray.

It's something to think about.

Why read your work aloud?

It's always a good idea to read your stories aloud. I know many people who do it. For years, I read every word I wrote to my husband (bless him!) on a nightly basis. I still read aloud to him occasionally (though kids and life make a nightly session impossible), and I've practiced for readings with him, too.

To my mind, reading aloud is an important test for any story - and it works on several levels.

The first thing that reading aloud can do is give you some distance on what you've written. Sometimes you spend so much time going over and over the words on the screen that you know them by heart, and you stop being able to see problems that might be there. Reading aloud is one way to push that text away, and put it into a context where you can be more aware of what's actually there, rather than what you think/know is there from the million times you've run your eyes over it. Printing out the story and looking at it that way can have a similar effect, but does require more paper and ink!

The second thing that reading aloud can do for you is give you a sense of the rhythmic feel of your prose. As you go through, awkward spots will give you pause, or even cause your tongue to stumble. When this happens, it's a good idea to change what you've written - because if it makes you pause or stumble, chances are your readers will have the same problem.

Those two aspects of reading aloud are helpful from the very beginning of the writing process. Once you've gotten a bit further in, you may be interested in designing character voices - and reading aloud can help you here, too.

If you've never had the experience of "reading in voices," I encourage you to try it - either with your own work or with the stories of others. You don't need to alter your voice in any extreme way; nobody needs to morph into Frank Oz to experience how this can help. Put yourself into the character's mindset as you do when writing his/her point of view, and see how your voice comes out. A strong character voice will give a distinct feel to the sound of your reading.

This can help you in two ways. First, if your writing is falling out of the voice into a more generic mode, you'll hear it. The sensation of that voice will change and you'll start sounding more like a generic narrator. Second, you should notice that your voice needs to change when you change points of view. If this doesn't happen, it's a red flag that maybe the voices aren't distinct enough. I actually surprised myself when I practiced reading The Eminence's Match aloud, and I stumbled when I first changed scenes. Suddenly I wasn't in Nekantor's voice any more, I was in Household Director Samira's - and I had to stop and think through what she should sound like when I read. That prepared me for how I might have to change my reading voice again when I hit another character point of view. Fortunately, the voice differences were already present in the manuscript (I just hadn't read it aloud in quite a while!). It was really fun to think about what to do with my reading tone in the various scenes, and the reading at BayCon turned out to be gleeful fun for me.

In any case, it's always a good idea to read your work aloud. You can learn a lot about it (and about reading it to others, a useful skill), and even help to push your work to the next level in revisions.

It's something to think about.