Category Archives: Writing

Every story can be a wonderful opportunity for the writer to learn. I have learned a lot in the course of writing—and rewriting—"Dowse and Bleed." When I first shipped the 7600 word monster to my beta, she came back with tons of helpful advice, which happened to include this snippet here:

Have you ever read the book Perfume by Patrick Suskind? I don't mean seen the movie, but read the book? It's a murder mystery told from the POV of someone with an amazing sense of smell. That sense of smell absolutely permeates the story. Everything is described with such attention to scent, because that's the predominant sense for the narrator.

I haven't read the book, but I got the point. Immersing inside the character meant taking on the way that character perceived the world. And I finally understand the reflexive reaction my main character, Rachelle aka the Database, has to her world. She holds everything and everyone at bay as much as she can. Why? Because everything in her world is steeped in connections, in unavoidable knowledge of others and her environment, and in pain. It hurts her when she senses too much. In this story, she almost always senses too much.

"Thank you," Killinger said as they stepped through the door onto threadbare carpet in a small square of a studio apartment.

It was crawling with black coats, Core law enforcement officers in traditional garb. The team wasn't one Rachelle recognized: a clean-cut early-thirties detective in the middle of the apartment looking up with a surprised frown at the pair of them and surrounded by five or six male officers and a forensic tech, also male. Killinger's computer tech, Jarod, hunched over his portable on the tiny rectangle of kitchen counter, oblivious to their arrival.

Rachelle handed her coffee to Killinger, who took it, then pulled off her denim jacket to hand that over as well and unbuttoned her overshirt. She curled her lip at how thick the air was with pathogens—influenzas, autoimmune viruses, sewer's plague, and a host of lesser infections.

"Killinger. Who is she?" the detective demanded, his white rank star almost glowing in the meager light of the one naked lightbulb overhead.

Killinger had a badge; Rachelle had a history. She let Killinger walk over to explain in hushed tones the way things worked.

Rachelle went to circle the apartment, sticking close to the walls. Leftways ran the tiny kitchen, all appliances and appliance tops and bottoms for laundry and cooking, sanitizing and incinerating, then that tiny bit of counter. Food and food-related bacteria seemed to stick to her skin where it hit her. "It's a wonder he's not sick and retching," she muttered. Incredible how immune systems in the Squares could be so hardy.

Past the kitchen, the corner and back wall of the apartment were packed with the sorts of necessities that closets and pantries were designed to hold, neatly stacked but overflowing. She imagined thumbprints over all those papers and clothes and bottles of food and dishes and almost curled up on herself at all the human traffic that had marked them with genetic material. Animal entries could have been meat, strays, or pets—no telling.

She moved on in the direction of the bed and a knot of three black coats. One glanced over his shoulder and frowned before hunching his shoulders against her. She almost brushed past the other forensic tech, avoiding him by centimeters and absorbing another smattering of entries with distaste.

Writing the world through genetic material is... strange. I had to stop and research melanin-producing genes to figure out how she worked with that. I have to think about the terms of what she knows about people. She observes as frequently with her eyes closed as open, registering what people could be—and nurture's room for variation—before evaluating what they are. There is no off-switch, only things that help her move through the data faster or seclusion, which reduces the number of new things she encounters.

What happens to a character when simply experiencing the world around them causes pain? It's never explicitly stated in this story—at least not in no uncertain terms—but Rachelle's body is essentially a storage device that's running out of space. What used to be a temporary predicament for her, a need to archive and compress data, is now entering a permanent downward spiral. She flinches from physical contact with anyone new but registers everything that much faster, that much more intently, in an effort to get rid of it as soon as she can.

I've never written a story from inside a sense I didn't have before, but it means that every moment I write a new sequence of paragraphs, I have to stop, think, query her body for what it's up to and what she's feeling. I understand now why she numbs herself out to it when she can, backburners it, reacts by lashing out when she can't. Too bad for Jarod he makes a really good target.

Have you ever had a character with another sense besides the usual five or one who viewed the world through a different sensory lens than yours? Anything you had to keep in mind to make it work?

Sometimes I have to completely stop working on a story and get my head on straight because some characters should never be allowed to come within swinging distance of each other's POV. That isn't to say I can't write them together, even in the same scene; that is to say that I cannot get under both of their skins without expecting some seriously inappropriate meshing.

Today, I got under Shift's skin. I wasn't intending to, but her story's next in the Kingdoms and Thorn universe and she owns Justus and she's serious business and headed up the entire rebellion and just about owns the city she lives in. She also happens to be Rachelle's leader and heavily invested in the future of all of her team members. So naturally, writing about Rachelle and Justus requires a bit of awareness of Shift. After all, their relationship is a literal side effect of his relationship with Shift.

But therein lies the problem. They have a similar worldview, similar chip on their shoulder, similar morals, and rather similar way of relating to Justus. Different, but similar. Rachelle wasn't sounding quite right when I wrote her, not because she and Shift don't talk similarly to outsiders, but because they don't talk the same. The outside makes it easy to forget that the inside is totally and completely different.

Portraying these girls is a dissection of their coping mechanisms and their walls, and in that, they are opposites.

Shift is so passionate and self-sacrificing that she's willing to do literally anything for those she loves and protects. Which means she's an extremely dangerous woman because that leaves a lot of atrocities she doesn't flinch at. She keeps people from getting too close or too deep by being friendly, sociable, and perfectly whatever makes them comfortable. When she's just being herself though, she's got a razor edge of all that dangerousness showing through the sociability.

Rachelle coped by turning off. She's cynical and fatalistic and survivalist. She gets along by not caring. If she does care about you, she's let you in pretty deep, I'll tell you that. Her wall is a razor edge, but when she's really just being herself, she's light and easy and usually not too intense unless she's depressed, which is rare.

They both don't care enough about themselves to not be self-sacrificing, but for totally different reasons. So I haven't been able to write Rachelle today. I'm still flushing Shift from my system.

Do you ever get characters meshing when they're not supposed to? How do you deal with it?

The truth is I love the music of language and a prose story ended up as a narrative poem of 124 lines ("Queen of Heaven"), even though I knew perfectly well that I wanted to write out a piece of fiction.

And suddenly, I'm knuckling my way through sheets and sheets of this stuff that's just been rejected so free to post or never got finished or has simply been hiding out on my hard drive while I figured out which of my pen names got to claim it. It seems I always do my poetry in sprees and here I am spreeing away when I've got novelettes to write and finish.

A lot of it is when I need to sketch and have that sketch be a finished piece. Weird, huh? I've written a lot of story sketches. They are patently unsharable. And these poems, some of them I can't even label lyric or narrative 'cause they're telling a story but that story is a whole lot of a bigger picture than what I can cram into those narrow 13, 16, 18 lines or what have you.

And sometimes it makes me wonder how much of these stories that I'm capturing, grappling with are just like all those other poems we read from poets talking about their own lives, their own stories. The poem strips away the standard narrative to that vital part that's part of the poet. It teases the reader with the universal aspects of a tale and hides the detail in its carefully crafted words, revealing and disguising in equal amounts.

I can dig into the worlds this way, and it's surprisingly high level. I can hit the broad points and the infinitely, intimately personal and show in just a line, a half a line how they interrelate. It's freeing and awesome and bewildering at once. But I'm having fun.

Do you write poetry? Have you ever used it to tell a story?

So I was a little surprised to discover... myself in this 365 Challenge. My writing self anyway.

Somewhere back in time, I realized I was a post-fandom writer, that there would always be a fangirl lurking in my heart. I suppose it's because I love words, love literature, love taking it in and absorbing it and resonating with it and letting my response flow back into my own creative expression. I weave favorite poems into my prose. I reference material others have written. I write fanfic from the same impulse.

But I hadn't truly suspected that fandom was key to my writing process. Some writers work in a vacuum, solely to please themselves. I wrote within the community, inhaling feedback and prodding and an outside audience wanting more to motivate myself to produce and answer questions and clarify, and that's why I wrote more than 200,000 words the year I got back into fandom. That didn't happen with original fiction.

I thought it was the structure that I needed to replicate and so I started—and temporarily abandoned—two serial novels. Initially there was enough feedback to keep me pushing, but as it lessened to lurking, so did my motivation. Weird, but true. I finally realized 20 days into the 365 Challenge that it wasn't the structure that drove my writing at all. It was the community.

Knowing someone is waiting on my fiction motivates me to produce it. That's why I can write a story in whatever amount of time required to have it done for the family on Christmas. That's why I'm motivated and inspired and have almost a dozen pieces percolating in my head and item 20 out of 365 posted on my Challenge page. It's why I'm writing every day and disciplining myself and growing and still being creative. I'm not just pushing words through my teeth. They're flowing out of me.

Suddenly, it doesn't matter what I read 'cause there's a story somewhere in the mess that feeds it. Suddenly, comments and prompts anchor my ideas until I have time to scribble them down. Suddenly, I've written more than 14,000 words of fiction and 180 lines of poetry in the last twenty days. That's amazing for me. And the momentum is only building.

The creative life takes me off guard sometimes. I always thought I loved writing simply for the sake of writing, but that's apparently not true. I love stories for their own sake and writing for the sake of sharing them.

Has your writing process surprised you lately? Are you a lone writer or community inspired or both?