Here in this penultimate week of 2025, thoughts turn to the next year, and dare I say New Years Resolutions? I’ve worked past that idea myself, but then this is a moment we can take to think about what worked for us in the past year, what didn’t work for us—as authors and as readers and as… people.
I made it a rule to forbear all direct contradiction to the sentiments of others, and all positive assertion of my own. I even forbid myself, agreeably to the old laws of our Junto, the use of every word or expression in the language that imported a fix’d opinion, such as certainly, undoubtedly, etc., and I adopted, instead of them, I conceive, I apprehend, or I imagine a thing to be so or so; or it so appears to me at present. When another asserted something that I thought an error, I deny’d myself the pleasure of contradicting him abruptly, and of showing immediately some absurdity in his proposition; and in answering I began by observing that in certain cases or circumstances his opinion would be right, but in the present case there appear’d or seem’d to me some difference, etc. I soon found the advantage of this change in my manner; the conversations I engag’d in went on more pleasantly. The modest way in which I propos’d my opinions procur’d them a readier reception and less contradiction; I had less mortification when I was found to be in the wrong, and I more easily prevail’d with others to give up their mistakes and join with me when I happened to be in the right.
And this mode, which I at first put on with some violence to natural inclination, became at length so easy, and so habitual to me, that perhaps for these fifty years past no one has ever heard a dogmatical expression escape me.
Wouldn’t this be a nice change to the National Discourse?
What if we started with what we love the most: books. In 2026 can we give ourselves a moment’s pause before declaring that audiobooks don’t count, no one reads prologues, all romantasy books are “fairy porn,” men don’t read, or whatever nonsense comes along? Can we just read books and like them or not without declaring some version of a minor border skirmish over whether or not sprayed edges are a good thing?
I’d bet that if we put this idea on with some violence to natural inclination, seeing first and foremost the positives in the community of readers and authors may just become at length so easy, and so habitual to us, that perhaps for the next fifty years no one will ever hear a dogmatical expression escape us?
What if that’s the new algorithm for the 21st Century?
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Editor and author Philip Athans offers hands on advice for authors of fantasy, science fiction, horror, and fiction in general in this collection of 58 revised and expanded essays from the first five years of his long-running weekly blog, Fantasy Author’s Handbook.
Okay, the first step in recovery is to admit you have a problem…
Hi, I’m Phil, and I’m addicted to BookTube.
You know what that is, right? It’s the loose collection of YouTube channels in which people talk about books—their favorite and least favorite books, the books they just read or are planning to read, the books they just bought, and all that surrounds the act of reading: do you drink tea or coffee? One channel I’ve watched seems more concerned with the preparation of matcha than with the books read while drinking it. Others obsess over how to take notes while reading, whether or not to directly annotate the book itself and if so then how. Do we use sticky tabs or colored highlighters? What is their color coding system? Is this book book part of a personal curriculum…?
And all the while we suffer over the necessity of not just reading a book, but close reading a book.
Because if you don’t close read a book, how can you have an opinion about that book? How can that book make you smarter/better than people who either haven’t read that book or haven’t read it close enough—haven’t made as many annotations or taken as many notes? And then what brand of notebook are you taking those notes in, exactly—and why? It better goddamn well have a leather cover, because serious people have serious notebooks, and serious notebooks have leather covers.
All of this, according to BookTube (and I assume the adjacent spaces on TikTok and Instagram—two platforms I’m far too old to engage with) matters, and matters more so—or so it would seem—than the actual content of the book itself.
Oh, but no matter what, for God’s sake, do not be seen close reading that book in public lest you be accused of “performative reading,” which is, somehow, worse than maintaining a public YouTube channel in which you perform the act of reading—excuse me, close reading, annotating, notetaking, and reviewing the same book some guy was photographed without his knowledge reading on a New York City fire escape, or wherever this guy was—that classic performative reader he is.
For years, of course, I’ve been advising authors to read books—and so has Stephen King and lots of other people who know what they’re talking about. Writing books while not reading books is exactly like writing songs without listening to music. It’s absurd. You will, absolutely, learn more about the art and craft of writing (in any category or genre) by reading well-written and professionally edited and published examples of same than you will in the most expensive (aka “prestigious”) MFA programs.
And by all means, talk about those books! I do—here, on GoodReads, and even on YouTube, Heaven help us all.
I “close read” books for a living, and as stated above, I believe authors should have a version of a “personal curriculum” around writing, too. And if you want to study anything else, terrific. I’ve done—and continue to to do the same thing. I was curious, for instance, about Carl Jung, so I spent a month reading his work and work about and around him. I found him fascinating, but yeah… way too metaphysical for me to take too seriously. I’m a Greek American and have been studying the history of Ancient Greece out of that tenuous connection and my own intellectual curiosity. Am I outlining some kind of work of historical fiction set in Ancient Greece? No. I’m just curious.
Absolutely be curious—always be curious—and satisfy that curiosity by reading.
I don’t think reading should ever be akin to taking your medicine—we get indoctrinated into this idea that reading is something we should do, that it’s good for us. The truth is that we connect with stories not because we should but because we want to. They are a force of nature. They are healing, and they are enjoyable. We don’t need to get all puritan about it.
And do that on your fire escape or in your carefully decorated home YouTube studio designed to evoke that perfect Dark Academia vibe.
Drink that matcha, damn it.
And say what you will of the book—any book—wherever you want to, however you want to.
But don’t let anyone tell you you’re reading wrong.
Unless you skip the prologue, in which case you’re reading wrong.
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“Contrary to what many of you might imagine,” wrote Fran Lebowitz, “a career in letters is not without its drawbacks—chief among them the unpleasant fact that one is frequently called upon to actually sit down and write.”
But how you manage to do that—to make words appear in one form or another—is as varied as the various authors themselves. And understanding what Haruki Murakami taught us in Novelist as a Vocation…
Writing novels is, to my way of thinking, basically a very uncool enterprise. I see hardly anything chic or stylish about it. Novelists sit cloistered in their rooms, intently fiddling with words, batting around one possibility after another. They may scratch their heads an entire day to improve the quality of a single line by a tiny bit. No one applauds, or says “Well done,” or pats them on the back. Sitting there alone, they look over what they’ve accomplished and quietly nod to themselves. It may be that later, when the novel comes out, not a single reader will notice the improvement they made that day. That is what novel writing is really all about. It is time-consuming, tedious work.
…there’s really no expensive anything that will effectively glamorize the work of writing, so welcome to the cheapest business startup in America.
Here we are creeping up on the end of another year, and another reckoning in the form of taxes. This business—editing and writing—is what I do for a living as a full-time freelancer. That means I have to run my little business as a… well, a little business, not to put too fine a point on it. I’ve been running this little business for a decade and a half now and all that time the biggest struggle I’ve had when it comes to taxes is finding anything I can deduct.
I used to see writing by hand as an unnecessary affectation. Now I rip through cheap spiral notebooks (because I see no reason to buy expensive notebooks) like crazy. I bought a bunch of notebooks when they were on sale at the beginning of this school year at my local supermarket for 29¢ each. Here they are, stacked up in my closet…
This, and a pen you can pick up for less than a dollar—or even free here and there—is all you need to write the Great American Novel. In our November 2025 GoodReads group read, Writing Down the Bones, poet Natalie Goldberg said of notebooks:
This is your equipment, like hammer and nails to a carpenter. (Feel fortunate—for very little money you are in business!) Sometimes people buy expensive hardcover journals. They are bulky and heavy, and because they are fancy, you are compelled to write something good. Instead you should feel that you have permission to write the worst junk in the world and it would be okay. Give yourself a lot of space in which to explore writing. A cheap spiral notebook lets you feel that you can fill it quickly and afford another. Also, it is easy to carry. (I often buy notebook-size purses.)
You may be surprised how many authors are out there, pen and notebook in hand. Like, for instance, Stephen King:
I’ve still got a little bit of that scholar’s bump on my finger from doing all that longhand. But it made the rewriting process a lot more felicitous. It seemed to me that my first draft was more polished, just because it wasn’t possible to go so fast. You can only drive your hand along at a certain speed. It felt like the difference between, say, rolling along in a powered scooter and actually hiking the countryside.
The notebook is also where I write stories. Every story I write begins in the notebook and in fact is usually written entirely in the notebook. There is a good reason for that, though it took me a while to realize it: in the notebook nothing has to be permanent or good. Here I have complete freedom and so I am not afraid. You can’t write well—you can’t do anything well—if you feel cornered. I am not afraid because what I write in here doesn’t have to become a story, but if it wants to, it will.
You may well have a different process, and indeed I don’t write everything by hand. This blog post you’re reading right now is being typed into a Word document. Like Philip Roth…
I don’t ask writers about their work habits. I really don’t care. Joyce Carol Oates says somewhere that when writers ask each other what time they start working and when they finish and how much time they take for lunch, they’re actually trying to find out “Is he as crazy as I am?” I don’t need that question answered.
Hell, maybe you’re in with the retro typewriter crowd. Those tactile miracles worked for an awful lot of talented authors for an awful long time. Here’s how Allen Ginsberg described writing Howl:
I had a secondhand typewriter, some cheap scratch paper. I began typing, not with the idea of writing a formal poem, but stating my imaginative sympathies, whatever they were worth. As my loves were impractical and my thoughts relatively unworldly, I had nothing to gain, only the pleasure of enjoying on paper those sympathies most intimate to myself and most awkward in the great world of family, formal education, business and current literature.
Likewise, how much you spend on your writing is up to you, from way more than I’m sure I would ever recommend to effectively nothing at all. This is where your mileage may vary, or as Rick Rubin wrote in The Creative Act: A Way of Being:
When there are no material, time, and budget constraints, you have unlimited options. When you accept limitations, your range of choices is reduced. Whether imposed by design or by necessity, it’s helpful to see limitations as opportunities.
And for writing, there are so few limitations, it’s essentially all opportunities. This business—the business of writing, though not so much self-publishing—is so cheap to start and run it’s confounded my CPA this whole time. What can I write off to reduce my income? I don’t have any inventory because I have nothing physical to store, sell, or ship. I do not have separate office space because all I need is a desk and a computer (and okay, a few other things, but…). Having some kind of office that I can drive to and sit in, all by myself, just makes no sense. Still, “If you want a room to write in, just get a room,” Natalie Goldberg wrote. “Don’t make a big production out of it.” Though Murakami made it clear that, “Wherever a person is when he writes a novel, it’s a closed room, a portable study.”
And is writing done better at home anyway? In Essays, Wallace Shawn wrote:
To lie in bed and watch words bump together until they become sentences is a form of hedonism, whether the words and sentences glorify society and the status quo or denounce them. It’s very agreeable to live like that, even if people don’t like your work, criticize you, whatever.
In any case, I know I would be sitting in my rented office all by myself because I have no employees. I have no work for an employee to do. I’m writing this all by myself, and if you hire me to edit your book, I will do that all by myself, too. I don’t and will not ever employ any sort of AI agent, either. Anyone who knows me even a little will know that that goes without saying.
The ongoing costs of my business are few and not terribly expensive. I think my $30/month to PublishersMarketplace ($360 a year) is my biggest expense. I pay $2.99 a month for some extra iCloud space. And I think it’s somewhere around six dollars a year for the dictionary app I have on my phone. And $60 a year (plus high Washington state sales tax) for the entire Microsoft Office suite. And that’s more or less it in terms of ongoing expenses.
This year I did buy a few things. I needed a new printer (which 99% of the time is a scanner), and my tiny little desk finally drove me to the point of buying a bigger one.
This is good news for anyone thinking of writing—or already writing. You do not need investors, unless you don’t have the initial hit for a computer, I guess. Even then you won’t be going hat in hand to the likes of Peter Thiel.
And yes, you can even save the $60 or so a year on Word (sans the hated AI, which would bring that up to $100) by using some free things like Google Docs. This will work just fine until you actually finish the thing and want to start getting it in front of other professionals, so here’s where I’m going to challenge you to spend that money, at least.
Word, whether anyone anywhere likes it or not, is the professional tool. It doesn’t do everything perfectly, but it does everything necessary better than anything else. It really just does. And though you may be a Scrivner devotee you will eventually have to send your work to a professional of some kind—an editor, a designer/typesetter, etc.—and that’s where Scrivner ends.
It’s a never-ending source of confusion to me where authors I work with tell me they write their novel in Google Docs or even the Notes app on their iPhone because Word (at $60 a year) is too expensive. And this I discover after they’ve made the first of two payments of $1500 each for my services.
I’m not kidding. please tell me you see how weird that is.
Someone like me is actually by far your biggest expense, but someone like me who knows what they’re doing isn’t just running through your book and making a few notes and suggestions, moving a few commas around. What we’re doing is teaching you to write in a way that’s precise, detailed, and completely focused on you and your work. And I only come in after you have finished writing the complete novel from beginning to end, and have brought it as far as you feel you can on your own. For some authors I’ve worked with that’s as much as ten years of spending almost nothing.
What I bring to the table is worth it—I honestly would not be doing this if I didn’t know that for sure. And consider the cost of 3¢ a word against the probably $70,000 for a creative writing MFA.
Look, I get why we don’t want to give any more money to any of the tech giants, so who wants Microsoft to get $60 a year richer? But instead, you’re going with Google? Because you think you’re actually getting anything for free from… Google?
You don’t have to pay me, but please at least cross Microsoft’s palm with silver so the rest of the world can work with you—after you’ve spent as long as you need to spending maybe a hundred bucks a year..
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Absolutely not one word of this post was in any way generated by any version of an “AI” or Large Language Model, and no permission is granted for the use of any of the contents of this blog in the training of AI, LLM, or other generative systems.
I’ll start this with my 100-Book Challenge video on the annotated edition of Howl by Allen Ginsberg, in which I found the list to follow. Watch that for greater context…
According to Howl:
This list was tacked on wall above author’s bedstead in North Beach hotel a year before “Howl” was written. See Robert Duncan’s comments apropos in Allen Verbatim, ed. Gordon Ball (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1974), pp. 143-47.
I’d like to leave it here, sans comment from me (at least for now), because I’m much more curious as to what other authors make of it than what I do.
List of Essentials
Scribbled secret notebooks, and wild typewritten pages, for yr own joy
Submissive to everything, open, listening
Try never get drunk outside yr own house
Be in love with yr life
Something that you feel will find its own form
Be crazy dumbsaint of the mind
Blow as deep as you want to blow
Write what you want bottomless from bottom of the mind
The unspeakable visions of the individual
No time for poetry but exactly what is
Visionary tics shivering in the chest
In tranced fixation dreaming upon object before
Remove literary, grammatical and syntactical inhibition
Like Proust be an old teahead of time
Telling the true story of the world in interior monolog
The jewel center of interest is the eye within the eye
Write in recollection and amazement for yourself
Work from pithy middle eye out, swimming in language sea
Accept loss forever
Believe in the holy contour of life
Struggle to sketch the flow that already exists intact in mind
Don’t think of words when you stop but to see the picture better
Keep track of every day the date emblazoned in yr morning
No fear or shame in the dignity of yr experience, language & knowledge
Write for the world to read and see yr exact pictures of it
Bookmovie is the movie in words, the visual American form
In praise of Character in the Bleak inhuman Loneliness
Composing wild, undisciplined, pure, coming in from under, crazier the better
You’re a Genius all the time
Writer-Director of Earthly movies Sponsored & Angeled in Heaven
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Absolutely not one word of this post was in any way generated by any version of an “AI” or Large Language Model, and no permission is granted for the use of any of the contents of this blog in the training of AI, LLM, or other generative systems.
From time to time I’ll recommend—not review, mind you, but recommend, and yes, there is a difference—books that I think authors should have on their shelves. Some may be new and still in print, some may be difficult to find, but all will be, at least in my humble opinion, essential texts for any author, so worth looking for.
We read Steering the Craft by Ursula K. Le Guin for our September group read at the Fantasy Author’s Handbook GoodReads group and for the last ten weeks I’ve been sharing favorite bits of advice from the book as well as my attempts at the writing exercises, which are the real strength of this book. This will be another long one for the final installment, with Chapter 10: Crowding and Leaping:
What Ursula K. Le Guin means by…
Crowding:
Crowding is what Keats meant when he told poets to “load every rift with ore.” It’s what we mean when we exhort ourselves to avoid flabby language and clichés, never to use ten vague words where two exact words will do, always to seek the vivid phrase, the exact word. By crowding I mean also keeping the story full, always full of what’s happening in it; keeping it moving, not slacking and wandering into irrelevancies; keeping it interconnected with itself, rich with echoes forward and backward. Vivid, exact, concrete, accurate, dense, rich: these adjectives describe a prose that is crowded with sensations, meanings, and implications.
…and Leaping:
What you leap over is what you leave out. And what you leave out is infinitely more than what you leave in. There’s got to be white space around the word, silence around the voice. Listing is not describing. Only the relevant belongs. Some say God is in the details; some say the Devil is in the details. Both are correct.
Tactically speaking, I’d say go ahead and crowd in the first draft—tell it all, blab, babble, put everything in. Then in revising consider what merely pads or repeats or slows or impedes your story, and cut it. Decide what counts, what tells, and cut and recombine till what’s left is what counts. Leap boldly.
And I like Ms. Le Guin’s succinct definitions of…
Story:
I define story as a narrative of events (external or psychological) that moves through time or implies the passage of time and that involves change.
…and Plot:
I define plot as a form of story that uses action as its mode, usually in the form of conflict, and that closely and intricately connects one act to another, usually through a causal chain, ending in a climax.
I’ve felt as though I’m out here all alone in warning authors against the proliferation of writing advice overly or even solely focused on story structure. For Le Guin it’s not structure, it’s change that matters…
Story is something moving, something happening, something or somebody changing.
We don’t have to have the rigid structure of a plot to tell a story, but we do need a focus. What is it about? Who is it about? This focus, explicit or implicit, is the center to which all the events, characters, sayings, doings of the story originally or finally refer. It may be or may not be a simple or a single thing or person or idea. We may not be able to define it. If it’s a complex subject, it probably can’t be expressed in any words at all except all the words of the story. But it is there.
Yes—thank you!
And now on to the last batch of exercises, and a reminder that if you read this book—and you really should read this book—also do the exercises as you go along. These have been eye-opening to me, and I’ve been doing this for… a long time!
EXERCISE 10: A Terrible Thing to Do
Cut one of the previous exercises of 400+ words in half. Make it half as many words.
Well, then, at 690 words, and attempting to make it still make sense at 345 words, I’m going back to:
Lala in the Basement (690 words)
The scream hit Maria like a wave of boiling water, washing over her face, burning her—then she realized she was the source of the sound.
It was the way it walked that ripped the sound out of her. Skin crawling around the sound, twitching at each echo pinging off the close-in concrete walls. Even in the privacy of her own thoughts she couldn’t call it a teddy bear. Teddy bears were cute, cuddly, innocent, harmless, infantile, and inanimate. This creature hadn’t been any of those things in a while.
Maria screamed again when it turned to look at her. Its eyes, just blank black buttons, glassy and cold, fell in on themselves. The buttons gave out onto an endless darkness. Opened onto the black pits of Hell itself.
A hand on her elbow—skin hot and rough—and she spun so fast she lost her footing and dropped to the damp concrete floor.
“Is it here?” the professor asked, his normally deep voice shrill. “Did you see it?”
Maria wanted to hit him for touching her like that—kill him, even, like she had with her husband when he tried to leave her. But she let him help her back to her feet.
“It’s—” she started, forcing herself to turn back to the hideous thing.
Nothing.
Dark. Empty. The smell of stagnant water on old concrete. The echoing drip of water from somewhere within and a metallic clank from the steam pipes that covered the ceiling.
“Did you see it?” the professor asked again, more calm now, his voice closer to its normal register, then, “Behind you!”
Maria spun again and fell again and it was there. A scream lodged in her throat when the creature bit deeply into Professor Karel’s inner thigh. The tear of his scrubs accompanied by the pop of teeth penetrating skin. The blood spread into the fabric fast. Maria pushed away with one foot and sobbed and her throat tightened again.
The professor screamed—Maria had never heard a man scream like that. He reached down with both hands and pushed back on the creature’s blood-drenched fur. The little half-circle ears gave no resistance.
It came off him and Maria screamed again, this time managing to call, “Lala!” Her own voice as shrill as the professor’s.
Professor Karel fell back, eyes wide and wet and seeming about to explode. Maria whimpered, knowing he was looking into the thing’s eyes—its dead black eyes that led to the Pits. And she screamed again at the blood.
It came out of him in waves, absorbing into his clothes, draining out of him so he bathed in it. He already seemed pale.
“No,” Maria coughed out then rolled onto her stomach to push at the floor with both hands to try to get away—get on her feet and run.
“It killed him,” she whimpered, though she didn’t know if that was quite true yet. Still, if it killed the professor—the man who’d created it—maybe that would be enough for it. Maybe then it would stop, go back to sleep, go back to being a toy.
Lala hadn’t said as much.
Lala seemed to know.
Lala, who Maria used to call “creepy” and even “Little Miss Satanist” when she first came to the institution.
Lala, who had warned Professor Karel, told him not to read any more of the book the dying patient, the man with the seventeen people inside him, gave him—warned him not to say the words out loud, not to follow its alchemical recipes or to bleed on it or sleep with it in his arms, cradled in bed with him.
Lala, who had warned them all then watched them die, one by one.
Lala, the patient.
Lala, the schizophrenic.
Lala, the inmate.
Lala, host for the spirit of a child murderer.
“Lala,” Maria begged when she felt the teddy bear touch her. “Lala—”
“Enough,” Lala said from above her. She sounded tired.
Maria sobbed and closed her eyes.
“This one is mine,” Lala said, and Maria screamed as Lala, the witch, started to eat her.
My first pass got it down to 469. I then had to find another 124 words in there somewhere…
The second attempt got me to 409 words, so I had to go back in for 64 more. This is hard!
Third attempt was 346 words, so I looked for one more and ended up adding one! Back in and… I finally did it!
Lala in the Basement (final attempt, 345 words)
The way it walked ripped a scream out of her. Her skin crawled. The scream echoed off the concrete walls.
She couldn’t call the thing a teddy bear. Teddy bears were cuddly, innocent, harmless…
It turned to look at her and Maria screamed again. Its blank button eyes gave out onto an endless darkness, the black pits of Hell.
Someone touched her elbow. She spun, lost her footing, and dropped to the damp concrete floor.
“Is it here?” the professor squeaked.
Maria wanted to kill him for touching her but let him help her up. She forced herself to turn back to—
Nothing.
The smell of stagnant water on concrete, the drip of water from somewhere, a clank from the steam pipes on the ceiling.
“Did you—?” he started. “Behind—!”
Maria spun and fell again.
The creature bit into the professor’s inner thigh. The tear of his scrubs, the pop of teeth penetrating skin. Blood spreading fast.
The professor screamed and pushed back on the creature’s blood-drenched fur. It came off him.
Maria screamed, “Lala!”
The professor fell back, eyes wide, wet, about to explode. He was looking into the thing’s dead black eyes. Maria screamed again.
Blood came out in waves, draining out of him so he bathed in it.
Maria tried to crawl away.
Lala appeared.
“It killed him,” she whimpered.
If it killed the professor—the man who’d created it—maybe it would stop, go back to being a toy.
Lala warned him not to read the book the patient with seventeen people inside him gave him. She warned him not to say the words out loud, or bleed on it, or sleep with it in his arms.
Lala warned them all then watched them die, one by one.
Lala, the schizophrenic.
Lala, host for the spirit of a child murderer.
“Lala,” Maria begged when she felt the teddy bear touch her. “Lala—”
“Enough,” Lala said.
Maria sobbed, closed her eyes.
“This one’s mine,” Lala said.
Maria screamed when Lala started eating her.
Is it bad that I like the original better? That the extra words made it extra scary? Did it? Am I not able to see the bloat in my own writing? Can any of us? Either way, I love that Ms. Le Guin said: “You are allowed to cry or moan softly while you cut them.”
And finally, from the epilogue WAVING GOODBYE FROM THE PIER…
Some people see art as a matter of control. I see it mostly as a matter of self-control. It’s like this: in me there’s a story that wants to be told. It is my end; I am its means. If I can keep myself, my ego, my wishes and opinions, my mental junk, out of the way and find the focus of the story, and follow the movement of the story, the story will tell itself.
Everything I’ve talked about in this book has to do with being ready to let a story tell itself: having the skills, knowing the craft, so that when the magic boat comes by, you can step into it and guide it where it wants to go, where it ought to go.
As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.
Absolutely not one word of this post was in any way generated by any version of an “AI” or Large Language Model, and no permission is granted for the use of any of the contents of this blog in the training of AI, LLM, or other generative systems.
Science fiction and fantasy is one of the most challenging—and rewarding!—genres in the bookstore. But withbest selling author and editor Philip Athans at your side, you’ll create worlds that draw your readers in—and keep them reading—with
From time to time I’ll recommend—not review, mind you, but recommend, and yes, there is a difference—books that I think authors should have on their shelves. Some may be new and still in print, some may be difficult to find, but all will be, at least in my humble opinion, essential texts for any author, so worth looking for.
We read Steering the Craft by Ursula K. Le Guin for our September group read at the Fantasy Author’s Handbook GoodReads group and every week since I’ve been sharing favorite bits and my attempts at the writing exercises, which are the real strength of this book. This will be a long one, mostly the exercises, for Chapter 9: Indirect Narration, or What Tells:
First of all, I adore her dismissal of formula in this chapter:
The world is full of stories, you just reach out.
I say this in an attempt to unhook people from the idea that they have to make an elaborate plan of a tight plot before they’re allowed to write a story. If that’s the way you like to write, write that way, of course. But if it isn’t, if you aren’t a planner or a plotter, don’t worry. The world’s full of stories… All you need may be a character or two, or a conversation, or a situation, or a place, and you’ll find the story there. You think about it, you work it out at least partly before you start writing, so that you know in a general way where you’re going, but the rest works itself out in the telling. I like my image of “steering the craft,” but in fact the story boat is a magic one. It knows its course. The job of the person at the helm is to help it find its own way to wherever it’s going.
And her assault on the info dump (what she calls an Expository Lump)…? Precisely!
If the information is poured out as a lecture, barely concealed by some stupid device—”Oh, Captain, do tell me how the antimatter dissimulator works!” and then he does, endlessly—we have what science fiction writers call an Expository Lump. Crafty writers (in any genre) don’t allow Exposition to form Lumps. They break up the information, grind it fine, and make it into bricks to build the story with.Almost all narrative carries some load of explaining and describing. This expository freight can be as much a problem in memoir as it is in science fiction. Making the information part of the story is a learnable skill. As always, a good part of the solution consists simply in being aware that there is a problem
In this one, the exercises were plentiful, and long, so buckle up…
EXERCISE 9: Telling It Slant
In which we’re directed to write the dialog only, a conversation between A and B:
A: I don’t think we’ll ever really know who killed him.
B: Why not? There’s evidence—hair and fluids…
A: That’s all been tested and there were no matches. No one we brought in, none of his immediate family…
B: Co-workers?
A: He’s a long haul trucker. Mostly it’s just him in a truck for literally days on end.
B: So, then, stops along the way.
A: You want to collect DNA from every gas station attendant, diner waitress, and lot lizard from here to Connecticut?
B: Okay, then, the coroner says the knife was… how did he put it…?
A: “Unusual.”
B: Yeah, so can we get more detail from him on that? Like, “unusual” how?
A: He said he thought it might have been made of ice.
B: Fuck off.
A: Seriously.
B: This guy… six-two, three hundred pounds, was killed with an icicle.
A: Fuck do I know.
B: It’s August.
A: As previously stated… fuck do I know.
B: And then he lit the whole thing on fire—
A: In a perfect circle.
B: In a perfect circle—
A: Using no accelerant.
B: There were dead leaves and… sticks… and shit.
A: And it burned the ground but not the body.B: …not the body…
I could go on, but I feel like I’ve got the gist of it. Also, I feel like I’m doing “as you know” dialog—two guys working from the same set of facts. See how easy it it to fall into an info dump?
EXERCISE 9: Part 2: Being the Stranger
A bit of story from the POV of a character you hate.
Harold sat on his front porch, in the rocker that used to belong to his grandmother, finishing his fifth beer of the afternoon. For who cares how long he’d been sitting there, drinking, staring across the street at his neighbor’s house. The house that used to be painted white but was now a bright yellow. The house where Jim and Karen Wilson used to live—good people. Church people. Friends of his. Now it was the seedy little lair of that goddamn libtard bitch and her long-haired son Harold thought was a girl for the first year they lived there. Bad enough the goddamn Kamala Harris posters now an American flag hung upside down.
Where the hell does this bitch get the balls—the balls—to hang our nation’s flag upside down like there’s some kind of crisis going on, like this country is in danger? Harold wondered for at least the fiftieth time that day. In danger from her, maybe.
A shadow passed the front window—by the height of it it was her, not the kid. Harold considered going inside, getting his deer rifle, and getting this over with next time she stopped in front of that window. Sure they’d know it was him. The rifle was bought legally—and why wouldn’t it be legal? Nothing wrong with owning a rifle or two. Hell, Harold had ten of them all together, and six handguns. His constitutional right to have them.
And his constitutional right to use them too, wasn’t it?
Isn’t it? he asked himself.
When he went in it was to get his sixth beer. Maybe one or two more and he’d know for sure it was his constitutional right to kill that libtard bitch and put her tranny “son” out of his misery.
Okay? The idea of this is to write “the other” but to suspend your judgement. Here I thought, here’s a guy who’s been indoctrinated into what can only be described as a cult. He’s also struggling with alcoholism. Is he a victim of political indoctrination, lack of access to mental healthcare and addiction counselling? The question I left unanswered: is he actually going to murder the woman across the street? Or is Harold doomed to spend the rest of his life killing himself with beer while sitting on his porch under the weight of misdirected hate?
EXERCISE 9: Part 3: Implication
With no POV character, first describe that character by describing a place that character interacts with:
A ring of rocks and a little dug out circle formed the fire pit just outside the cave mouth. The smoke from the fire mostly went up and out into the trees that grew close to the cliff wall. Not much went into the cave itself. A cache of weapons—a crossbow; a collection of knives, most of them not too rusty; the axe; and the bent sword—was lined up a few feet behind the fire. Deeper in the cave but not so far in that the darkness took over completely was a neatly folded stack of blankets in various stages of decomposition. A version of a bed. The basket against the wall across from the bed had holes in it, but none too big that the apples rolled out. There were eight of them left, and some blueberries wrapped in a dirty handkerchief that were probably moldy by now. And then deeper in, where the wind made strange noises and the darkness was near absolute, the chest.
Then, “the untold event,” in which we’re asked to describe a place where something has happened or will happen, but don’t show that happening.
Anyone passing by who didn’t know better would thiank a construction crew hand finished the foundation for a modest single family home, but hadn’t come back yet to start framing. But everyone in Eavesdale knew that just yesterday there was a house on that foundation, and it had stood there for twenty years.
This morning they woke up and the house was gone. No one heard anything—even the neighbors right next door—less than ten feet on either side—or right across the street. There was no storm, no wind. There was no explosion—no smell of gas beforehand.
The people who lived there? Their car was still in the driveway, and there wasn’t a scratch on it. A couple of the neighbors had a cell number for the lady who lived there with her husband and little girl. When they tried it it just rang a few times then went to voice mail. The police tried the number, too, and got the same thing.
The cops and some of the neighbors walked all over the neighborhood looking for wreckage—Sheetrock, roof shingles, personal belongings—but there was nothing to find. Not one thing, besides the foundation, to make anyone think there was ever a house there at all.
Well, now I want to know what happened to these people, anyway. But did I succeed in doing what Ms. Le Guin bade me do?
Remember, this is a narrative device, part of a story. Everything you describe is there in order to further that story. Give us evidences that build up into a consistent, coherent mood or atmosphere, from which we can infer, or glimpse, or intuit, the absent person or the untold act. A mere inventory of articles won’t do it, and will bore the reader. Every detail must tell.
Did I fail as soon as I brought in the neighbors and the police?
Then there’s the optional exercise, which is to write an info dump—what she calls an “expository lump,” based on this:
The kingdom of Harath used to be ruled by queens, but for a century men have ruled and women are not permitted to. Twenty years ago, young King Pell disappeared in a battle on the border of the kingdom with the Ennedi, who are magicians. The people of Harath have never practiced magic, as their religion declares it to be against the will of the Nine Goddesses.
What became of King Pell is not known. He left a wife but no known heir. Claimants to his throne have all been defeated by Lord Jussa, the queen’s guardian, but the struggles of these factions have left the kingdom impoverished and unhappy.
At the time of our story, the Ennedi are threatening to invade on the eastern border. Lord Jussa is keeping the queen, a woman of forty, imprisoned in a remote tower under the pretext of keeping her safe. In fact he is afraid of her and alarmed by rumors of a mysterious person who managed to visit her secretly while she was in the palace. This person might be the leader of a rebel faction who is said to be the queen’s illegitimate child, or it might be King Pell, or it might be an Ennedi magician, or…
Ah, now I confront my deep loathing of the info dump. But thinking about it, actually, this is easy. Ms. Le Guin has provided us with worldbuilding notes, which are the wellspring of the info dump, so let’s see if this can be accomplished just by breaking this up into boring dialog. The “walk and talk” might be the most pernicious form of the info dump because it may feel to the author as though his characters are doing something. They’re waking from here to there, and while walking one character teaches the other about the world. That’s not an info dump, it’s a conversation! Right?
You tell me…
“What did that lady mean?” Young Galen asked Old Khedron as they made their way slowly on the road through the no-man’s-land between the kingdoms of Harath and Ennedi.
“Ah,” Old Khedron replied around a puff of pipeweed, “well, that’s a good question, Young Galen. The kingdom of Harath used to be ruled by queens, which is just like a king but a woman instead of a man.”
“Like the difference between an editor and an editrix?” Young Galen asked.
“Precisely,” said Old Khedron with a proud smile. Indeed, Young Galen would make a fine addition to the Guild of Editors!
“Are there still queens?” asked Young Galen.
“Alas, no,” Old Khedron explained. “There used to be, that is known, but for a century men have ruled and women are not permitted to. Twenty years ago, young King Pell disappeared in a battle on the border of the kingdom with the Ennedi, who are magicians. The people of Harath have never practiced magic, as our religion declares it to be against the will of the Nine Goddesses.”
“What became of King Pell?” Young Galen asked.
“It is not known,” explained Old Khedron. “He left a wife but no known heir. Claimants to his throne have all been defeated by Lord Jussa, the Lady Pell’s guardian, but the struggles of these factions have left the kingdom impoverished and unhappy.”
“What else can you tell me about the kings and queens of Ennedi and Harath?” asked Young Galen.
“Well, Young Galen,” Old Khedron began, “The Ennedi are threatening to invade on the eastern border. Lord Jussa is keeping the queen, a woman of forty, imprisoned in a remote tower under the pretext of keeping her safe. In fact he is afraid of her and alarmed by rumors of a mysterious person who managed to visit her secretly while she was in the palace. This person might be the leader of a rebel faction who is said to be the queen’s illegitimate child, or it might be King Pell, or it might be an Ennedi magician, or—”
“What does ‘pretext’ mean?” Young Galen interrupted.
Old Khedron grimaced and thought to himself, Maybe Young Galen won’t make such a fine addition to the Guild of Editors after all.
And you have to believe me that I have indeed worked on manuscripts where characters do this—and do this a lot, and even ask that question: “What else can you tell me about…?”
Please never do this, and if you have, time to revise that out.
As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.
Absolutely not one word of this post was in any way generated by any version of an “AI” or Large Language Model, and no permission is granted for the use of any of the contents of this blog in the training of AI, LLM, or other generative systems.
From time to time I’ll recommend—not review, mind you, but recommend, and yes, there is a difference—books that I think authors should have on their shelves. Some may be new and still in print, some may be difficult to find, but all will be, at least in my humble opinion, essential texts for any author, so worth looking for.
We finished reading Steering the Craft by Ursula K. Le Guin for our September group read at the Fantasy Author’s Handbook GoodReads group over a month ago and every week since I’ve struggled to conjure creative new ways to rewrite this introductory paragraph. Yes, I studiously worked through the book and I recommend it to everyone, especially for anyone just beginning their writing journey. This will be a short one, really just the exercises for Chapter 8: Changing Point of View:
Can’t say I have any complaints about this, though I think she’s missed the power of the scene break to clearly indicate a change in POV. What I like most about that device is it’s a visual cue for the author and might occasionally summon the question: Am I doing this too much and/or too quickly?
EXERSICE 8: Changing Voices
Part One: Quick shifts in limited third.
(Emily)
It was hard for Emily to watch Jim bet that much. Five dollars a spin on a slot machine was an insane gamble, even a dangerous extravagance. Sure, he always said they never bring any money into a casino they can’t afford to lose, but that doesn’t mean he had to blow the whole four hundred dollars in the first ten minutes—or less—betting so much. She knew she should say something but didn’t.
(Jim)
“Okay,” he said, touching the screen and making little stars shoot out, “bonus!”
Knowing he had no magic powers over a millisecond random number generator he hit the SPIN button and watched as the video “reels” fell into place—bang! Free Games then nothing on the second reel that matched the first then the third—bang! Free Games, then two of the money balls on the fourth—pointless—and the fifth reel started spinning faster and the machine made that whirring sound and he said, “Come on, man, why not me?” and the third Free Games went bang and he felt Emily wilt with relief next to him.
He knew she hated when he bet so much, but now look. He was a genius for doing it.
(Carrie)
Carrie, sitting at the machine next to them, on her tenth cigarette and her fifth hundred wanted to kill this guy who just sat down and, what? Three spins later and bang—Free Games bonus. And on these machines, that was hard to get. She knew that all too well after so far seventy-eight dollars a dollar spin at a time and nothing—line hits of, like, forty cents, occasionally two Free Games balls and no more than three of the money balls… and this asshole and his nervous little wifey-poo?
Assholes.
Part Two: Thin Ice
Paying no attention to POV feels like an impossibility. Again, could my brain actually do this thing I spend my work days helping authors learn notto do? She said not to use the same writing as above, maybe even a different narrative, so here goes nuthin’…
Conan waded through the undead pirates like a farmer threshing wheat. As decayed as they were, the Cimmerian felt little resistance as his blade trimmed off arms, ears, heads, legs. It was the stench of it Conan found the most difficult. When his heavy broadsword took the sword arm off the lanky cabin boy Jonny the animate corpse didn’t feel it at all. He hadn’t been in command of his body since he woke up, three fathoms under water. The third mate likewise didn’t feel the giant barbarian’s sword enter one side of his neck and exit the other, nor did it hurt when his disembodied head hit the rocky ground. Maybe it was a mercy he landed face down and couldn’t see his headless body continuing to fight on. The Captain wanted to let the blue-eyed man kill him, but his cutlass waved in front of him, his arm working all on its own. He tried to ask, to beg the marauder to kill him but he couldn’t make his throat work—even before the point of the barbarian’s broadsword severed his numb and useless windpipe. His cutlass still slashed, though, and gave the man a decent cut on his left shoulder. The wrenching sound then the wild swing up and over—the sky flashing grey over him and then more of his men, his motley but loyal crew, shambling up the rocky beach like grim grey-green puppets. Upside down.
As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.
Absolutely not one word of this post was in any way generated by any version of an “AI” or Large Language Model, and no permission is granted for the use of any of the contents of this blog in the training of AI, LLM, or other generative systems.
Editor and author Philip Athans offers hands on advice for authors of fantasy, science fiction, horror, and fiction in general in this collection of 58 revised and expanded essays from the first five years of his long-running weekly blog, Fantasy Author’s Handbook.
From time to time I’ll recommend—not review, mind you, but recommend, and yes, there is a difference—books that I think authors should have on their shelves. Some may be new and still in print, some may be difficult to find, but all will be, at least in my humble opinion, essential texts for any author, so worth looking for.
We finished reading Steering the Craft by Ursula K. Le Guin for our September group read at the Fantasy Author’s Handbook GoodReads group over a month ago now and every week since I’ve come up with creative new ways to rewrite this introductory paragraph. But it always says that I studiously worked through the book and I recommend it to everyone, especially for anyone just beginning their writing journey. So then without further ado let’s get to my thoughts on and exercises for Chapter 7: Point of View and Voice:
I pulled out this paragraph on the benefits of an unreliable narrator, as difficult to accomplish as it may be:
Fictional narrators who suppress or distort facts or make mistakes in relating or interpreting the events are almost always telling us something about themselves (and perhaps about us). The author lets us see or guess what “really” happened, and using this as a touchstone, we readers are led to understand how other people see the world, and why they (and we?) see it that way.
I have to disagree with her in regards to third person omniscient, which she says…
…cannot be dismissed as old-fashioned or uncool. It’s not only the oldest and the most widely used storytelling voice, it’s also the most versatile, flexible, and complex of the points of view—and probably, at this point, the most difficult for the writer.
It’s not that it’s “uncool” it’s that it’s less effective, less personal, and not more difficult but considerably less difficult for the writer, which is why I refer to it not as third person omniscient but “third person lazy.”
As an editor, POV is the most common issue I see from less experienced authors, but also the biggest “ah ha! moment,” too, once their eyes are opened to it.
“Editors are likely to put thoughts into italics if you don’t stop them,” Ms. Le Guin said. But there’s no reason to stop us—unless there is. Our style at TSR/WotC was to leave thoughts in roman and reserve italics for magical/psychic communication. More often than not you will see thoughts in italics. But think about what works, what’s necessary for your story. If you do have a preferred style, communicate that to your editor.
And then, some difficult exercises…
EXERCISE 7: Points of View
We are to write a narrative sketch of several people doing something, then approach it from different angles.
Part One: Two Voices—limited third person from one character’s POV, then the same scene from a different character’s POV. I thought, for me, How about a dungeon crawl moment? First from Galen’s POV:
Galen had no idea what he was actually looking for—a secret door…? Bronwyn and Skibley were both convinced there was another way out of the sealed chamber Galen was sure they were going to die in. What did she think, whoever dug this maze full of undead and the even scarier things that fed on them was that merciful?
Still, if there is a way out of here…
Galen thought maybe he should be looking for a crack…? There was one—but it ran about five inches in a jagged, curving line. He knocked on the wall there, just in case, but it didn’t sound the slightest bit hollow. For all Galen knew there was nothing behind that wall but stone for a thousand miles until the next random cave.
Then Bronwyn’s POV:
There’s either another way out of here, Bronwyn reminded herself, or we die here.
And based on all the traps Galen or Sorlon—or both—had sprung, or Skibley had spotted and managed to disable, a secret door felt like a real possibility.
Galen was obviously trying to look like he was trying to look. She had to give him that at least. Well, she had to understand that at least.
Sorlon leaned against the far wall, his armored back against the rough stone, his massive arms folded in front of him. Who said brains and brawn didn’t mix? Whoever that was was right, going just by Sorlon.
Skibley was at least trying as hard as she was, but he was only two feet tall, so that left a lot of wall he couldn’t reach.
She looked at the little gnome, then at the towering Sorlon, and an idea started to form.
Okay. This is a simple action—they’re looking for a secret door—but here are two distinct experiences of that. I get it!
Part Two: The same story from a “detached narrator.” I wasn’t sure my brain would allow me to do this, but for completion’s sake at least, I gave it the old college try!
Galen halfheartedly knocked on the stone wall next to an insignificant stress fracture, and tried not to say aloud just how little faith he had in their survival. This futile task was based on hope alone—in a place that had made them all hopeless.
Skibley thought maybe there was something there, but it went up taller than the gnome could reach, a little higher than he could even see really well, but he started thinking maybe this was it. That somehow, against all reason, Bronwyn was actually right and there was a secret door here. He moved to the right a little. If he found another seam a door’s width later he’d say something.
Sorlon, for his part, was working through which if these idiots he’d eat first when it came to it. Which, he figured, would be about an hour or so.
Okay, that was kinda fun, but I also felt like I was making a list. I could see how this exercise can help you figure out who the POV character in a scene should be. Which of these viewpoints is the most interesting?
Part Three: Observer-Narrator. Now write the scene from the third or first person POV of a non-participant character…
Skibley will be easiest to kill, but I have to admit I kinda like the little gnome. He’s the first gnome I’ve ever gotten to know and it’s strange that all the things my daddy used to say about gnomes have turned out to be bullshit. Though maybe Skibley is some kind of special gnome. Maybe his body was taken over by a normal person somehow. My grandma used to tell stories about that kind of thing. Of course, she was about as full of shit as Galen is, so maybe him first? But then Bronwyn, who any idiot can see has a thing for him, will be a problem if I go after her little boyfriend. I’ve seen her fight and yeah, she can be a serious problem. She’s stronger than Galen, faster, smarter…
Yeah, she’s gonna have to go first.
Did I do that right? That’s just first person. I think I’m not getting the difference.
Part Four: Involved Author. This one… I don’t see why anyone would attempt this in fiction, but again I’ll try…
Only three of the four of them actually started looking for a way out of the room. Sorlon stood watching them, his arms folded, all the grim cheerlessness of the veteran spearman evident in the way he sized them up. He was thinking about how long he could survive trapped in there. Bronwyn was sure there was a way out, but that was her nature. For her, there was always another way, always a chance. Galen loved that about her, but had no reason to hope it would be anything like that easy, so he at least tried. He had no idea what he was supposed be looking for and if Bronwyn could be honest with herself, she didn’t really, either. A seam, a crack, the sudden appearance of a magical gateway back to the city…? Any of those would do. They didn’t have to go through the motions, or consider cannibalism, for too long, though. Skibley thought he might have actually found a secret door. And he had. He just didn’t want to say so until he was sure.
As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.
Absolutely not one word of this post was in any way generated by any version of an “AI” or Large Language Model, and no permission is granted for the use of any of the contents of this blog in the training of AI, LLM, or other generative systems.
From time to time I’ll recommend—not review, mind you, but recommend, and yes, there is a difference—books that I think authors should have on their shelves. Some may be new and still in print, some may be difficult to find, but all will be, at least in my humble opinion, essential texts for any author, so worth looking for.
We finished reading Steering the Craft by Ursula K. Le Guin for our September group read at the Fantasy Author’s Handbook GoodReads group kind of a long time ago now—or so it seems. And by now you might even be sick of hearing that I studiously worked through it and I believe this book is an absolute must read—especially for anyone just beginning their writing journey. I now continue posting my thoughts on it here, chapter-by-chapter, exercise-by-exercise. This week we’re up to Chapter 6: Verbs: Person and Tense
First of all, I love her even-handed and correct view of present tense.
For the past thirty years or so, many writers have been using only the present tense for narratives, fictional and nonfictional. By now the present tense is so omnipresent that young writers may think it’s obligatory. A very young one said to me, “The old dead writers lived in the past, so they couldn’t write in the present, but we can.” Evidently the mere name, “present tense,” leads people to assume that it’s about now and that the past tense is about long ago. This is awfully naive. Verb tenses have so little connotation of actual presentness or pastness that they are in most respects interchangeable.
Thank you! Oh, and as for second person…?
Every so often somebody writes a story or novel in second person under the impression that it hasn’t been done before.
If you want to see that done well, read: A Song of Stone by Iain Banks and Last Dragon by J.M. McDermott. These are rare creatures indeed.
Also in this chapter, Ms. Le Guin goes after a popular misconception in terms of present vs. past tense…
Present-tense narration persuades people that it’s “more real” because it sounds like eyewitness narration. And the reason most writers give for using it is that it’s “more immediate.” Some justify it aggressively: “We live in the present, not the past.”
Well, to live in the present only would be to live in the world of newborn infants or of people who have lost their long-term memory. Living in the present isn’t all that easy for most of us. Being present in the present, really living in it, is one of the goals of awareness meditation, which people practice for years. Being human, we spend most of the time with our head full of what is not right here right now—thinking about this, wondering about that, remembering something, planning to do something else, talking to somebody somewhere on a cell phone, texting somebody else—and only occasionally trying to put it all together to become aware of, to make sense of, the present moment.
These are personal choices—your choices—to make as the only author of this one-of-a-kind piece of writing. Make those, and all other creative decisions wisely and recklessly, as you feel is right.
And now, the dreaded exercise in which Ms. Le Guin gives us a basic set up then asks us to play with present tense, past tense, first person, third person…?
EXERCISE 6: The Old Woman
Version One: My hand is shaking a little more than they usually do when I put the plate in the dishwasher. The plate makes it in okay and I pull my hand back, rubbing it with the other one, but the other one is shaking too. I look over at the counter. The letter is there, folded and put back in the envelope.
Who writes letters anymore? She sat down with a pen and paper and wrote that. I can’t blame an AI or whatever people use to conjure up emails anymore—or text messages. She wrote this. She sat down and chose this word then that word then the next.
I only just finished reading it, or no. It’s been, what…? Fifteen minutes?
I look at the clock on the microwave and no, it’s been closer to an hour.
But I remember some of the words.
She wrote: cheated, pregnant, promises.
Left.
She wrote: Dead.
I have to sit down so I slip into one of the dinette chairs in the kitchen—the chairs I picked out and he paid for. I’ve been sitting on these chairs for thirty years and now they seem cold and hard and alien to me.
Maybe I should write those words in a letter to him: cold, hard, alien.
Dead.
And bury it next to his headstone.
Version Two: Her hand was shaking more than usual when she put the plate in the dishwasher. Once the plate was secure she pulled her hand back and rubbed it with her other hand. She stepped back and looked at the letter sitting on the counter next to her.
She’d read it once, folded it, put it back in the envelope, and set it there. Was she waiting to decide what to do with it?
When she read the letter it had struck out at her—stabbed her so it felt as though the words were still stuck in her.
She remembered the word cheated. She remembered pregnant. She remembered promises.
And she remembered left.
And dead.
And she didn’t cry when she read it, or when she put it back in its envelope. She didn’t cry when she made herself dinner—another dinner for one—and still didn’t cry when she ate it, all by herself.
She felt she had to sit down, so she did. She’d never liked the chairs in the kitchen. He bought them—because they were on sale, he said. But over the years she’d gotten used to them, now they felt like the letter: cold, hard, alien.
And dead.
She thought about maybe writing a letter of her own, a letter in which those words—cold, hard, alien, dead—would stand out to him if he read it.
She thought maybe she’d fold that letter up and put it in the envelope with the one that had just come today, and bury the both of them next to the headstone she’d never again visit after that.
Not ever again.
Hmm… I was immediately surprised by how different these came out, having followed Ms. Le Guin’s instructions and not just rewritten the first one but started off fresh. I will puzzle over the different choices for some time, I’m sure.
As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.
Absolutely not one word of this post was in any way generated by any version of an “AI” or Large Language Model, and no permission is granted for the use of any of the contents of this blog in the training of AI, LLM, or other generative systems.
From time to time I’ll recommend—not review, mind you, but recommend, and yes, there is a difference—books that I think authors should have on their shelves. Some may be new and still in print, some may be difficult to find, but all will be, at least in my humble opinion, essential texts for any author, so worth looking for.
We’ve finished reading Steering the Craft by Ursula K. Le Guin for our September group read at the Fantasy Author’s Handbook GoodReads group. Of course I studiously worked through it, I believe this book is an absolute must read—especially for anyone just beginning their writing journey—and I’ve been posting my thoughts on it here, chapter-by-chapter, exercise-by-exercise. This week we’re up to Chapter 5: Adjectives and Adverbs…
Here are some words of wisdom from Ursula K. Le Guin on that subject…
When the quality that the adverb indicates can be put in the verb itself (they ran quickly = they raced) or the quality the adjective indicates can be put in the noun itself a growling voice = a growl), the prose will be cleaner, more intense, more vivid.
I see this sort of thing all the time in terms of the word very: very big, very loud, etc. and am forced to ask: is there a word that means “very big” or “very loud”? Enormous? Deafening?
This isn’t long enough to be an opinion piece, and you must pardon my language, but it needs saying at this time: the adjective or qualifier fucking is a really big tick. People who use it constantly in speaking and electronic messaging may not realize that in writing fiction it’s about as useful as umm. In dialogue and interior monologue, sentences such as “The sunset was so fucking beautiful” or “It’s so easy even a fucking child could understand it” are tolerable, however grotesque when read literally. But used in narrative to lend emphasis and colloquial vigor, the word does just the opposite. In fact its power to weaken, trivialize, and invalidate is stunning.
Well… fuck. So much for my last exercise!
But, umm… moving on to…
EXERCISE 5—Chastity.
Ms. Le Guin said: You might want to try “chastening” a passage you’ve already written. It can be interesting. That means try to remove the adjectives and adverbs, which I proceeded to do with the same flash horror story, “Lala in the Basement.”
The scream washed over Maria—then she realized she was the source of the sound.
It was the way it walked that ripped the sound out of her. Skin crawling from the sound, twitching at the echoes pinging off the concrete walls. In the privacy of her own thoughts she couldn’t call it a teddy bear.
Maria screamed when it turned to look at her. Its eyes, just buttons, fell in on themselves. The buttons gave out onto darkness. Opened onto the pits of Hell itself.
A hand on her elbow—and she spun, lost her footing, and dropped to the concrete floor.
“Is it here?” the professor shrilled. “Did you see it?”
Maria wanted to hit him for touching her like that—kill him, even, like she had with her husband when he tried to leave her. But she let him help her back to her feet.
“It’s—” she started, forcing herself to turn back to the thing.
Nothing.
The smell of water on concrete. The drip of water and a clank from the steam pipes that covered the ceiling.
“Did you see it?” the professor asked, more calm now, then, “Behind you!”
Maria spun and fell and it was there. A scream lodged in her throat when the creature bit into Professor Karel’s inner thigh. The tear of his scrubs accompanied by the sound of teeth into skin. The blood spread into the fabric. Maria pushed away with one foot and sobbed and her throat tightened.
The professor screamed—Maria had never heard a man scream like that. He reached down with both hands and pushed back on the creature’s blood-drenched fur. The half-circle ears gave no resistance.
It came off him and Maria screamed, this time managing to call, “Lala!”
Professor Karel fell back, eyes about to explode. Maria whimpered. He was looking into the thing’s eyes—eyes that led to the Pits. And she screamed at the blood.
It came out of him in waves, absorbing into his clothes, draining out of him so he bathed in it. He seemed pale.
“No,” Maria coughed out then rolled onto her stomach to push at the floor with both hands to try to get away—get on her feet and run.
“It killed him,” she whimpered, though she didn’t know that yet. If it killed the professor—the man who’d created it—maybe that would be enough for it. Maybe then it would stop, go back to sleep, go back to being a toy.
Lala hadn’t said as much.
Lala seemed to know.
Lala, who Maria used to call “Miss Satanist” when she first came to the institution.
Lala, who had warned Professor Karel, told him not to read any more of the book given to him by the man with seventeen people inside him—warned him not to say the words out loud, not to follow its recipes or to bleed on it or sleep with it in his arms, in bed with him.
Lala, who had warned them all then watched them die, one by one.
Lala, the patient.
Lala, the schizophrenic.
Lala, the inmate.
Lala, host for the spirit of a child murderer.
“Lala,” Maria begged when she felt the teddy bear touch her. “Lala—”
“Enough,” Lala said from above her. She sounded tired.
Maria sobbed and closed her eyes.
“This one is mine,” Lala said, and Maria screamed as Lala, the witch, started to eat her.
That was 573 words. the original was 687. That means I cut out 114 words, about 16%? At first I liked it better with the adjectives and adverbs in it, but reading it again this morning…
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Absolutely not one word of this post was in any way generated by any version of an “AI” or Large Language Model, and no permission is granted for the use of any of the contents of this blog in the training of AI, LLM, or other generative systems.
In Writing Monsters, best-selling author Philip Athans uses classic examples from books, films, and the world around us to explore what makes monsters memorable—and terrifying.
You’ll learn what monsters can (and should) represent in your story and how to create monsters from the ground up.
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