Tag Archives: writing

So what the hell is Urban Fantasy, anyway?

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Here’s a confession: I usually have to be told what my books are.

Well, not what they are. I know that they’re squarish piles of paper with writing on them that have been bound together in a great big factory somewhere. But I still remember the day when I was told that my second novel, The Company Man, was not, in fact, science fiction, but was instead “dieselpunk,” a subgenre I was totally ignorant of. And just the other day, I happened to mention to someone that my third novel, The Troupe, was Urban Fantasy. And the response I got was a cringe, a slow shake of the head, and: “Nnnnnnoooot really.”

I’ll be honest: Urban Fantasy has always confounded me a little, and I think this is mostly because I’ve always chosen to define it quite broadly:

Urban Fantasy: a speculative fiction story with fantastical elements in an urban setting of what is very recognizably the real world.

I asked about this on Twitter the other day, assuming my definition was more or less correct.

I then received, at last count, 132 responses.

Some of them were part of an ongoing conversation I was just copied on. But the opinions about exactly what the hell Urban Fantasy is varied so wildly that I started taking notes, like I was caught in a storm of butterflies with especially outrageous colors.

For starts, some define Urban Fantasy as having a definite style, akin, I think, to noir. Justin Landon of “Staffer’s Musings” made this point, saying Urban Fantasy must have a “thriller” structure to it, and Kristin of “My Bookish Ways” supported it by saying that in Urban Fantasy, the singular city itself – Chicago, New York, San Francisco – must have a very distinct character of its own. All very much like a noir novel with fantasy elements.

This crossed over a bit to the repeated assertion that Urban Fantasy must take place in modern times – a fantasy story set in 1870’s Chicago was not Urban Fantasy. If Urban Fantasy is a cross of Fantasy with another genre – noir, thriller, and so on – Historical Fiction is not an ingredient in that cocktail.

So far, it sounded an awful lot like modern noir with magic. Which is a lot more specific than my definition.

Stina Leicht, however, made the point that Urban Fantasy has elements of the punk music scene, and contains much of the same underground, gritty, artistic style, specifically referencing Charles de Lint and Emma Bull. She also very clearly said that Urban Fantasy is not Paranormal Romance, and many agreed that these two often get confused, when they’re actually quite distinct.

I can’t possibly go over the full conversation here (and I thank everyone who contributed), but I started to feel a little confused about some of the definitions I was hearing. Because nearly everyone had a very, very specific idea of what Urban Fantasy was, and had books and stories to reference and back up that idea. And when I checked them out, those books and stories claimed to be Urban Fantasy, even if this put them in loud disagreement with one another.

The feeling I got from all of this was that a specific appeal is now more commonly found, and more prized, than a broad one. Urban Fantasy is itself a subgenre, but within that broad definition there are hundreds of little mini-sub-genres, Balkanized little genre city-states that are, to some degree, quietly at war with one another, each claiming to be different from the next – even though, to the uninitiated, they all look more or less the same. A reader unfamiliar with SFF will simply look at it, and say, “Oh, there’s magic in it? Then it’s fantasy.” Though this might incur a long expository argument from the initiated.

Our entertainment is now created with a set of very specific reference points in mind, and our love of that entertainment is increasingly impenetrable to outsiders. In today’s time of constant information flow, we expect our fiction to be informed by that same amount of information. You must know the background of several pop culture and literary touchstones in order to begin to understand the work.

So, we don’t want a broad following – we want a cult following, an intimate, intense, historied relationship with the work. And for some, you can’t just love a book : you have to create a whole new category for it, and a history of that category, and you must compare and contrast it against the others. It’s like literary criticism on methamphetamines, only now you aren’t comparing literary movements that take place over decades, but genre trends that emerge and dissipate within months.

Book awareness is now viral – but don’t forget that viruses tend to exhaust themselves fairly quickly.

Is this a bad thing? I’m not sure. I definitely think that the internet, whose feed is so huge that people will find themselves restricted to narrow avenues of information, is going to increasingly Balkanize nearly every form of entertainment. We’re going to start a lot more conversations with, “Oh, you don’t know about _______? Really?” Soon, we’ll all be the record store clerks from High Fidelity on some subject or another.

While this does build a close bond with your entertainment, it’s obstructive to nearly everyone else. A work’s following will grow much more slowly, if it grows at all. And it’s going to get increasingly hard to figure out the lasting power of a work: do you think that audiences in twenty years will be able to look back and decipher the reasons why we laud the work we do today, untangling the history and genre qualifications that make us categorize it as we do? Is a work that is considered great within the genre system capable of lasting outside of that system? I find myself doubting it.

And writers, who probably don’t fashion a story with a specific subgenre in mind – and how could you, since they’re often so narrow, and change so much – will flounder more and more when it comes to the question of, “What genre is it?”

Whatever answer a writer might have to that question, I think they’ll be told more frequently that it is the wrong one.

The Writer’s Toolkit: Almost Everything You Need to get the Story Started

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It’s long gone now, lost to some damnable garage sale or other, but my father once had a wooden shoeshine box that sat at the back of the bedroom closet beneath a rack full of awful ties. The box was a real showpiece: furniture-quality American poplar with dovetailed joints and an elevated footrest. As a kid who liked to dig through his parent’s stuff, I’d get the box out from time to time, flip open the brass latch at the front, and play around with the contents.

The shoeshine box held two horsehair shining brushes, a dauber brush, a bottle of cleaning cream, tins of Kiwi brand shoe polish (black and brown), and a soft shining cloth. There was no polishing glove. In all the times I watched my father shine his shoes before going off to work, he’d first pull an old sweat sock over his hand to prevent the dark polish from staining his fingers.

I mention the shoeshine box because I’m a big fan of toolkits. I’m fascinated by the things professionals collect to do their jobs – the stranger the better. Ever see a professional piano builder’s kit? It’s a sexy assortment of lathes, chisels, and auger bits. Have you ever heard of a tobacco smoke enema kit? Oh, they’re very real, I assure you. In the 1800s, they were the indispensable piece of medical equipment for assisting drowning victims – until they were debunked. Once, on a research trip to a medical history library, I got my hands on a Civil War-era surgeon’s battlefield kit. Although most of the implements were of the cutting and sawing variety, everything was stainless steel – still gleaming – and very lightweight. Nasty little cutters. Take an arm here, take a leg there…

Every professional has their toolkit. As writers, we’re no different from the rest. It can be easily assumed that anyone reading the BookLifeNow.com site on a regular basis has stacks of books on every flat surface in their home. But there’s always room for more, eh?

Recently, I was at a conference during which a panel attempted to come up with a list of essential books for any writer to devour before picking up the pen. The panel moderator called it a “writer’s toolkit.” I listened, made notes. I didn’t agree on a number of the titles mentioned – some were irrelevant to my chosen genre, others didn’t interest me. But the mention of the toolkit held my interest. When I returned home to the paperback-and-empty-whiskey-bottle nest I call an office, I walked the stacks and hunted down every title that had been helpful to me in all my efforts. My writer’s toolkit (abridged):

Dialog gives definition to your characters, reveals motivations, aids in setting, and propels the story forward. No two characters should speak alike.

Dialogue (Write Great Fiction Series) by Gloria Kempton

Writing Dialogue by Tom Chiarella

Characters in fiction should be treated like real, live human beings. With history, motives, and reputation – they are believable and worth caring about to the last page.

Characters and Viewpoint by Orson Scott Card

Writer’s Guide to Character Traits by Linda Edelstein

Save the Cat by Blake Snyder

Writing Your First Novel is damn difficult work. Ask any professional and they’ll tell you the same. It’s hours and hours of dedication to the craft, but it beats working.

Your First Novel by Rittenberg and Whitcomb

How NOT to Write a Novel by Mittelmark and Newman

The Elements of Style by Strunk and White

Writing Great Horror is a topic near and dear to my heart. Horror has its own language and rules and pitfalls. Whether a slasher or a morality tale, horror stories are part of a genre that is continually reinventing itself.

On Writing Horror by the Horror Writers Association, Ed. by Mort Castle

The Philosophy of Horror by Noel Carroll

Writers Workshop of Horror by Michael Knost

Psychology for Screenwriters by William Indick

Story is the realities, not the mysteries of writing. Story is the essential element to any successful product of the craft. A bad story does not excite readers and turn pages.

Story: Substance, Structure, Style, and the Principles of Screenwriting by Robert McKee

The Hero With 1000 Faces by Joseph Campbell

20 Master Plots and How to Build Them by Ronald Tobias

I’ve always thought that books on writing are invaluable, due to the fact that they are a resource available at any time of day or night. I can’t count how many times I’ve left the bed at three in the morning and picked up one of these books to sit at the kitchen table until I’d worked out some plot turn or character aspect. If nothing more, a writer’s toolkit is a preparation – waiting for that moment when you’re struggling to hammer something together.

In the title, I suggested that this toolkit was almost everything you need to get the story started. Every toolkit is personal. None is ever complete. What is your essential writer’s resource? What books do you lean on in times of trouble? Let us know in the comments section below.

Cheers!

What You Need to Know about Shared Worlds

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 Erik Scott de Bie is a speculative fiction author and game designer who has been working in shared worlds since he started publishing in 2005. His latest Forgotten Realms novel is Shadowbane, about a vigilante paladin in a city of thieves, and the sequel, Eye of Justice, comes out this fall. He can be found at his website erikscottdebie.com or on Twitter @erikscottdebie.

 

Shared worlds are everywhere. From serial fantasy novels to decades-long comic book franchises to long-running TV shows and wildly successful movie dynasties, there are certain characters and worlds that people just love to experience. Fans love to see new spins on iconic characters that honor the old continuity. And yes, fans love to hate shared world writing that diverges from the established canon or takes a beloved character in a strange and unexpected direction.

 

 

Why do authors write in Shared Worlds?

 

For one thing, it’s awesome, particularly if you’re a fan. I’ve been reading and gaming in the Forgotten Realms since grade school, so I jumped at the chance to write novels and sourcebooks in it when I grew up. If you’re a particular fan of Buffy, or Star Wars, etc, writing for the IP is a major win.

Second, if you don’t have the time or energy to build your own world/setting, or if world-building just isn’t your thing, a shared world gives you a proven framework in which to set your story. The flip-side of that is that it’s easy to dismiss your work as derivative or unoriginal, because it’s based on a pre-existing setting.

Third, there’s the money to consider. Shared Worlds usually have their own built-in fanbase, and when you publish a novel in one of those settings, you already have an audience. For this reason, shared world pieces tend to bring in more money than the majority of non-shared world pieces. On the flipside, your audience is also somewhat limited, as shared world fans tend to follow in-world writing. If and when you want to craft original fiction, you’ll probably have a limited fanbase that follows you.

 

How does one write Good Shared World fiction?

Every piece of shared world fiction is sculpted by two distinct and opposite forces: the drive to create and the drive to incorporate. When writing in a shared world, you as an author find yourself constantly walking a fairly tight line between the two impulses, and hitting the proper balance is how you get the best stuff.

‘Creating’ implies making up your own story with your own characters that just happens to occur in a shared world. This usually requires distance from the rest of the world, so as not to cross canon. R.A. Salvatore is famous for setting his iconic Icewind Dale series as far as possible from anything else in the Forgotten Realms to avoid stepping on toes. Star Wars: The Old Republic takes place long before the popular series so as to go whatever way it wants. The downside to this impulse is that established fans of the setting aren’t necessarily going to achieve the setting recognition you’re looking for, and you’re susceptible to the “this doesn’t feel like the IP” criticism.

‘Incorporating’ implies that you are taking as much established lore about the setting as possible to tell a story that is shaped by the story of the IP. Ed Greenwood’s classic novel Spellfire was written specifically to showcase the Forgotten Realms, crafting a story that incorporates as many villainous organizations, intrigues, and NPCs as feasible for the book. The movie Watchmen stuck really close to the source material (Alan Moore’s classic graphic novel), refusing to take much license with the characters. The downside to this impulse is threefold:

1) It’s often a LOT of research (the Forgotten Realms, Star Wars, Star Trek, etc., have literally hundreds of novels/TV shows full of canon), 2) You open yourself to the criticism of “not being creative enough,” and 3) If you get it wrong, fans are going to eviscerate you on the internet and in reviews. Also, if your story is too idiosyncratic, and you need to be a hardcore lore wonk to understand it, it’s not going to have popular appeal.

 

So what’s a writer to do?

Find a good balance. Tell a story that stands on its own, but stays true to the canon. The lore should be there for hardcore fans to pick up, but also subtle enough that newbies can ignore it and roll with the narrative. Honor and embrace what else is going on in the setting, and let your story grow organically from the established lore without shoehorning your own story in.

Generally, respect the shared world, do your research, tell a damn good story, and you’re golden.

Why Is Writing a Memoir So Hard?

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A former editor and reporter for the Chicago Sun-Times, San Antonio Express-News and St. Petersburg Times, John Jeter is the author of the novel The Plunder Room (St. Martin’s Press/Thomas Dunne, 2009) and the forthcoming memoir Rockin’ a Hard Place (Hub City Press, 2012). He lives in Greenville, South Carolina.

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I’ve been writing a long time–since I was six, and I’m old as hell now–but it’s only recently that I learned about the brutality of writing a memoir. Writing about anything so close, personally, emotionally, spiritually, even geographically, is about as much fun as working in a morgue every day, only the body you’re working on is still breathing, and the body happens to be you.

What could be so hard about exhuming a dead body and making it interesting and attractive?

Why start one then?

More than a year and a half ago, I was toying with the idea of a book about the concert hall that my wife, Kathy, my brother, Stephen, and I opened in 1994 in Greenville, SC, a venue called The Handlebar. While thinking about what a cool story that might be, I got to wondering how I would go about pitching it to literary agents. One night, though, I was pondering the project aloud when, fortunately or otherwise, the director, editor, publisher, founder and all-around dynamo behind Hub City Press in nearbySpartanburgoverheard me.

Next thing I know, she told me she wanted the book.

Then things got pretty damned hard, real fast.

A year before that, see,St. Martin’s Press had published my first novel.

The novel was a walk through the park. That process started one day when I was in the shower, where I do most of my best thinking and a lot of my best writing. The story for that book simply exploded into my brain, the entire manuscript complete right before my naked eye(s). Feverishly, I typed out the story that God had just written for me, and the whole thing was done in about three months. All told, I have written seven or eight novels like that, all of them in about ninety days. (I say “seven or eight” because at least four of them are painfully crappy and happily forgettable.) The stories just tell themselves, and I just type them.

But as soon as Hub City’s editor got her hooks in me and started creating things like deadlines, I found myself facing the impossible: a story that refused to tell itself because, for one thing, the story was still ongoing and, secondly, the story was about a character who was simply too close to me: me.

I remember once interviewing Russell Baker, the great New York Times columnist and Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Growing Up. Mr. Baker’s writing resonates with the gentleness of Thurber, the poetry of Rilke and the quiet wit of later Mark Twain. His countenance fairly resembles a beagle’s, so he gives off a sadness that’s somehow adorably optimistic.

I asked him about Growing Up, about how he wrote it and how he managed to pull off such a grand piece of work about things so intense and intimate: his boyhood and his relationship with his mother. After telling me that he had rewritten portions of the book fifty times (no small surprise there), he then added: “That boy I wrote about, that boy is dead.”

So I tried to follow my editor’s advice and, to some extent, Mr. Baker’s: Write about yourself as a character in a story that started 18 years ago, as if that “person” doesn’t exist anymore

The only trouble is that that person not only exists, but turning him into a character—that is, a distinct, separate being that you as a writer can look at the way a scientist studies a bug under a bell jar–is about as easy as studying a bug under a bell jar.

Not only that, but the entire “memoir” exercise runs contrary to all my journalism training. I learned a lot about nonfiction in journalism, which is sort of like saying that doctors learn a lot about medicine at medical school. The trouble is that when I left newspapering to write novels, I found that the switch was much like a divorce: ugly, painful, endless, with continuing demands from the Ex (Journalism) along with even more claims from my much needier trade-in spouse (Fiction). In “creative-nonfiction memoir” you find yourself mediating between the two. Both want to know: “Okay, big guy, what’s really true here?” Journalism asks: “What kind of bug is that?” And Wife No. 2 asks: “Did that bell jar ever belong to Sylvia Plath? Any way you could you write it so that it might have?”

With so much internecine internal warfare, it’s nigh impossible to get any work done. I spent the next fifteen months flapping like hell, mostly getting nowhere in futile exhaustion. I delayed, I scrambled, I crunched, I did everything I could to avoid peeling back the curtain of memories, some of them painful, some of them funny, some of them both.

As things turned out, the chapters that I wrote in the first year were so bad and so messy, for lots of reasons, that when deadline got frighteningly close, I stopped, took a deep breath and started from the beginning. I wound up pushing the entire thing out in six weeks.

Why is writing a memoir so hard?

Because it requires you to open your veins and tell your life story and intimate secrets to complete strangers in ways that fiction simply doesn’t (always) demand. On top of that, the whole self-absorbed, narcissistic feeling that flows from writing about yourself becomes more tedious than working in a Chinese gizmo factory.

It all comes down to details: What to leave in, what to leave out? What words to use, what language to avoid? What makes sense, what doesn’t? What’s the reader going to care about—or not? How much is really true and how much is almost true and what difference might any of that make? And what kind of structure should you use, though that should be patently obvious: life is linear, so a story about a slice of it should be, too. But stories about slices of life aren’t told with such linear ease. Stuff happens here, then here, but not always in the order that the memoir needs them to happen.

These are issues that fiction doesn’t have to worry about. You have a story. It has a beginning, middle and end—a plot. It has a theme. If the story’s good, it writes itself, and if you type fast, it writes itself quickly–at least, it does for me when God’s got my back and I’m just anxious to Get The Damn Thing Done.

So memoir? I’d just as soon talk about a recent crash on my bicycle or the car wreck that broke my ankle. As my friend points out, talking about writing a memoir is just another form of memoir, and writing a memoir is about as pleasant and safe and entertaining as climbing up a circus trapeze and flying with both hands tied behind your back with no net underneath. Fun for everyone else to watch, maybe . . .

All that said, I think this piece may be the last memoir I’ll write—unless I’m in the shower one day and a story about a slice of my life knocks me over the head. Only next time, if there is a next time, I’m going to make damn sure that the character I write about has been dead for so long that making him interesting and attractive would be almost easy as simply making him up from scratch.