Dealing with Cliches in Fantasy Fiction - Ross Kitson

The Writers' Blog welcomes its second UK author in a row. I personally enjoy the different spellings of such words as favorite. Ross brings us a thoughtful blog about cliches. He writes fantasy fiction and his novel, Darkness Rising, is recently published. I hope you will comment on your own thoughts about use of cliches below.

The Cliche Cracks.

First of all thanks to Gary for the opportunity to ramble on his excellent blog and hopefully share some useful aspects of my own experience in writing.

I’ve created for most of my life but only taken to formal writing in the last three or four years. As a teen I was an unashamed nerd, wallowing in role-playing games of every genre and it was this that drove me to read everything in fantasy and sci-fi and horror that I could get my spotty mitts on. As writers we are first and foremost readers.

After years of drawing maps on graph paper, poring through monster manuals and creating traps that would make the dude out of Saw pack his bags and retire to Alaska, one of my mates challenged me to write a book. I’d toyed with the idea for years but career had sort of got in the way (I work as a doctor specialising in critical care).

So I set about creating my book. I approached it with the analogy of building a house in mind—well perhaps a scuzzy trailer badly positioned next to an algae choked lake. So the foundations were the thoughts, the ideas, the notes jotted on any blank surface (my palm-top = my hand). I planned epic vistas in my head on the commute to work each day. The foundations were laid with maps, history, cultures, characters and, of course, plot. Then the frame went up- a bare metal skeleton of where the story would go, from start to end. Then the writing, the filling in the gaps—the detail, the dialogue, verbose prose and drama. And when it was built? The decoration came with the self-editing—making it personal, readable, attractive to others.

What a great analogy, I thought. And I looked at my new build and thought—right, time to get in on the market. But then a creeping sense of dread—like Chthulu itself was tickling my bits with his squid chin. Was that a crack I saw, running down the newly plastered wall? I followed it down, deeper and deeper. Crom’s halitosis, I cursed, it runs into the foundations.

It was the crack of cliché.

It permeates every genre—the cliché—but perhaps the fantasy genre is one of the most affected. It began with a casual comment from a friend who read the MS along the lines of ‘disadvantaged hero gains great ability and embarks on epic quest.’ It struck me like a soggy halibut. Everything about my book was cliché. I had a main character as a slave, who then gains powers and escapes. Does she escape to lead a fruitful life gambolling in the fields? Hell, no. She embarks upon an epic quest (groan), with a group of companions (agreeably not a wizard in a pointy grey hat, a dwarf, elf and four hobbits), to find an ancient artifact (noooo.....), from an undead sorcerer (groan...). My heart sank as I saw my 170k MS dissolving before me... why hadn’t it occurred to me that this was cliché city? And it was the first book in a trilogy...OMG, a trilogy...fantasy cliché.

So I found myself self-flagellating in an Opus Dei –like fashion. I trawled the internet looking for lists of fantasy clichés and ticking down them. ‘Oh, God, I’ve got dreams...’, ‘A tavern...’, ‘A common tongue...’

Then someone said to me—who gives a monkeys... is it a good book? Well, I think so, I said. I’m proud of what I’ve written, although the clichés...

Enough about the clichés, they said. Has it got good characters, good dialogue, drama, tension? Well, I replied modestly, it’s not bad, but the clichés...

Are they there for a reason? You see writing anything within a genre will involve some cliché. They are there by virtue of previous popular work. They are there because that was what people want to read. And agreeably some have been done again and again, but if we take those and try twist them a bit, make them (and I’m aware this is oxymoronic) re-freshed cliché, then we can still have work that feels vital and original.

So my hero is actually a heroine. She’s not a slave—she’s ‘trapped’ in servitude. Her abilities aren’t so wonderful. The magic she uses makes her mentally ill. Her mentors are an obsessive-compulsive mage from a nation that throws sorcerers on the fire to brown their toast with, and a thief who learned to fight from a wandering ronin. The undead sorcerer is actually quite charmingly evil and we almost empathise with his grand scheme, which will ultimately make all folk in the world equal. There are ancient artifacts, but they are not quite what we expect. There are vampyrs—but they ain’t twinkly. The common tongue has a very good reason for being there.

As writers we can’t avoid some clichés. Work saturated with them will be dull, re-cycled, derivative—but even in cliché ridden genres we can put our own spin on them, use them to our advantage. They will draw in fans of the genre and even make the genre more appealing to ‘outsiders.’ I say embrace them, but mess ‘em up a bit.

I think of my favourite fantasy book of the last ten years—the Lies of Locke Lamora by Scott Lynch—and even that’s not immune to them. It’s an incredible book that at its core has a likable thief with a hard-as-nails sidekick. So not far off Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser or Robin Hood and Little John. Yet Lynch takes the well worn premise and injects such style into it that I was left shell-shocked by the book.

That’s what I aspire to as a writer- clichés and all.

Darkness Rising is available as an e-book on Amazon at http://amzn.to/DarknessRising or http://amzn.to/DarknessRisingUK

It is soon to be released as a print edition via Fantasy Island Book Publishing.

My blogs are http://rossmkitson.blogspot.co.uk and http://mouseroar.blogspot.co.uk

Thanks again for this opportunity

Regards

Ross

Piecing Together A Novel - Ethan Spier

UK Author Ethan Spier shares his thoughts about piecing together his first science fiction novel, KINESIS. Please share your thoughts about constructing your novel in comments.

Firstly, thank you for reading this far. I’m certain you haven’t heard of me before and this blog is my first attempt at trying to impart any kind of advice to fellow writers. My name is Ethan Spier and I have been writing stories for many years, but still feel extremely new to this game. I’ve written short stories since I was a child but I have recently delved into the world of novel writing.

Secondly, thank you Mr. Gary Starta for providing this platform, on which I hope to provide some thoughts on the process of writing, and in particular writing in a way that might evoke emotions in our readers.

Thirdly, writing is hard! I don’t care what people say, the actual task of sitting down and creating something on a blank piece of paper (or computer monitor these days I suppose) is a difficult task. Well… at least I think so.

But I’m pretty sure that any writer - no matter how creative, prolific, talented or confident - all think the same thing at least once in their career.

When I wrote my debut novel, ‘Kinesis’, I thought about it several times a day and that was after planning the novel for a good six months before I actually began the first chapter.

I suppose the hard part isn’t the actual process of forming sentences out of words, but more the process of choosing the right words for any given sentence.

As a writer of fiction, I want to evoke emotional resp

onses from my readers and this is something that is much more difficult that I first suspected. When I write a scene, I know what I want the reader to feel; I know the emotional responses I want the reader to experience. But the actual task of choosing the correct words and sentence structure is something that can take a lot out of you!

Occasionally I’ll re-read one of my scenes and I’ll know that I’ve missed the target by some way and this can be extremely frustrating, but eventually the time comes when you just have to say ‘it’s as good as I can make it’.

Evoking the desired emotional response from a reader can be an extremely difficult task. Indeed, evoking any emotional response can be hard enough. After all these are just words on a piece of paper (or computer monitor these days I suppose… sigh).

I think something that can help in this task is making sure that you, as the writer, are absolutely certain where you are coming from in any given scene. I wrote ‘Kinesis’ a good year or two after coming up with the original idea. I didn’t feel like I could write it to begin with. I just had the flicker of an idea that I mulled over for a long time. Eventually I reached the point where I simply couldn’t not write it anymore. I was excited by the idea and as I thought about how the story would progress, I became more excited. I could envisage certain scenes in my head and I knew how I wanted the reader to feel during these scenes.

When I think about it, these are the scenes in the novel that were the easiest to write because I could feel the emotion as I wrote them. In my opinion, they are also the better pieces of writing in my novel. There were other scenes that were simply there to tell the part of the story that needed to be told. I had no particular emotion about them one way or the other, they simply needed to be produced in order to progress the narrative. But others – the ones I am most proud of – are the ones that were the clearest in my mind.

I suppose the point that I’m trying to get across (if anything) is, I think the best writing comes from the place where the author can see and feel the scene around them as they compose the piece. This might sound obvious, and to be honest… it is! But it’s also something that can’t really be over emphasized… at least in my own and humble opinion.

Basically, If you feel the emotion of what you write, as you write it, then you have a better chance of translating that to the reader.

And fourthly(?) - If nothing else, translating something to the reader is surely what writing is truly about.

Ethan Spier

Debut novel ‘Kinesis’ available for kindle: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Kinesis-ebook/dp/B006ZDPVM8/ref=pd_rhf_gw_p_t_1

Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/pages/Ethan-Spier/342671139086236?skip_nax_wizard=true

Blog: http://fleetingtales.blogspot.com/

Twitter: @ethanspier

Heidi Ruby Miller's 'thriller-romance' Sci Fi Novels

I am proud to host Heidi Ruby Miller who writes her own brand of sci fi, mixing it with healthy doses of romance and suspense. She has a brand new release and you can win it - please keep reading - simply by leaving a comment below. Heidi also hosts her own blog with the really cool title: "Just a Girl."
But read on and you'll see she is anything but.

I started out writing Science Fiction—that was my intent at least when I entered Seton Hill University's Writing Popular Fiction graduate program. So imagine my surprise when, during my first residency, I'm sitting anxiously waiting for the critique group to tell me what they thought of the first chapter of Ambasadora and several people ask if this was meant to be a futuristic romance.

I thought they were joking.

Not so.

As I listened to suggestions from the SF crowd to make it more SF and suggestions from the Romance contingency to make it more Romance, I was left wondering what in the hell did I write? Okay, so maybe some of my characters, or - all - of my characters thought about their attraction to other characters much more than in a typical SF novel. And maybe the multiple POVs and interweaving plotlines were more reminiscent of a thriller than a typical Romance novel, but this was exactly the kind of book I wanted to read.

In fact, my reading influences were all over. I'm a diverse reader, therefore it would stand to reason that I'm also a diverse storyteller. A list of my favorite books says it all: Madeleine L'Engle's A Wrinkle in Time, Preston and Child's Relic, Sara Creasy's Children of Scarabaeus, Wouk's Don’t Stop the Carnival, Max Brooks' World War Z. The list of the eclectic goes on and on.

All writers take their personal schema with them into their writing world, including everything they've read, watched, or experienced. And, I believe that's part of what drives the creative process. We play upon derivatives and weave them into our own unique story. And we often cross barriers, whether in something as complex as ideology or as simple as my blending of genres.

But as that first critique session taught me, we should be open to the possibilities, to see our words from others' perspectives while maintaining our own vision. Sometimes readers can show you aspects of your story that you never considered. I find that delightful, and it's one of the reasons I keep writing.
-- Heidi Ruby Miller has been putting too much sex in her Science Fiction since 2005 because the relationship is as important as the adventure. She loves high-heeled shoes, action movies, Chanel, intense music, and video games. And she has a column called Geek Girl Underground on IMJ. Heidi also teaches creative writing at Seton Hill University, where she graduated from their renowned Writing Popular Fiction graduate program. The writing guide Many Genres, One Craft, which she co-edited with Michael A. Arnzen, is based on the Seton Hill program and her novel Ambasadora was her thesis there. Her second novel in the Ambasadora-verse is Greenshift.
She is a member of The Authors Guild, Pennwriters, Broad Universe, SFR Brigade, and SFPA.

Greenshift is a novel set in the Ambasadora-verse one month before Ambasadora begins.

DESCRIPTION: David Anlow, a fleet captain forced into early retirement and jaded by an ex-lover, now spends his lonely days shuttling around a group of scientists for hire.

Boston Maribu, Mari to her friends, is one of his passengers, a young botanist who is as beautiful as she is naïve and innocent.

When Mari asks David to teach her about more than just piloting the Bard, nights on their ship heat up and their feelings for each other mature into a relationship neither expects. But a suspicious new client shows up with wicked plans for Mari, and the soldier inside David comes alive, ready to fight for the young woman who stole his heart.

To be in the drawing to win your choice of an e-bundle of AMBASADORA/GREENSHIFT or just GREENSHIFT, please leave a comment letting us know what you're reading now or have read recently and if you'd like the single book or the bundle, please post your email address disguised something like this heidirubymiller AT gmail. The contest ends on Thursday, March 1, 2012. Winner will be notified on Friday, March 2, 2012.

Cutting her Fangs...Author G.L. GILES BLOGS...

First, I’d like to say thanks to Gary for having me as his guest blogger. I’ve been fortunate enough to have read several of his books and enjoyed each one!

The Stuff of Dreams...Story Ideas

Author G.R. Holton joins our blog and tells us his inspiration for writing and a how a story was birthed. A multi-genre author with a focus on science fiction, G.R. has received several honors. By the way, G.R. and I share the same first initial, same birth state and year as well as a love for science fiction. Guess this connection was meant to be...

Bio:

On a warm summer morning in 1962, G. R. Holton was born in a small town in Massachusetts and is the second eldest in a family of eight children. He is happily married and living in eastern Tennessee. He has two daughters, a son, a step-daughter and a step-son and is also the proud grandfather of four beautiful girls. G. R. is a disabled veteran who took an interest in computer games to pass the time, and then one day he made a friend on one of those online games with chat that turned out her husband was a screenwriter and movie director. They became great friends and after a few weeks of talking, he met her husband online and hit it off quickly. He gave him a couple of his screenplays to read and he was hooked. He knew at that point he wanted to try writing.

One night, after days of not being able to come up with a story to write, he had a dream of three teens on another planet and in a cave. This was it; he knew what had to be done. He sat down at the computer and over the course of three months he had written his first science fiction novella, “Soleri”. He knew he couldn’t stop there, so he continued writing and “Guardians Alliance” was born. He has also published a children’s picture book called, “Squazles” about not judging others and did the book design for Cameron Titus’s “A to Z book: A Habitat for Humanity Project”. His latest novel, “Deep Screams”, is a science fiction/horror/paranormal thriller that has become the Books and Authors.net’s Best Science Fiction for 2011. G. R. has also won The Author’s Shows “50 Best Writers You Should be Reading for 2011”. All of G. R. Holton’s work can be found at all the internet book sale sites or on his website at www.grholton.com.

Deep Screams – In the year 2145, Earth had finally gotten past its differences, and the Earth Coalition was formed. They launched a ship and crew into deep space to find a new Earth. It was a 20 year mission to find other planets outside of their solar system that could be inhabited. Six years later all the signals from the Omega Space Station suddenly stopped. Not knowing what might have happened, the Coalition called for a new crew to intercept the space station and ascertain what had happened. The new crew found the Omega, but it was not the space station that was dead and to their horror, they were not alone…

In GOD we TRUST!

New author Jeffrey Kosh and Feeding the Urge

The Writers' Blog is pleased to have Jeffrey Kosh blog on his upcoming debut novel. As you'll see, Jeffrey has a great sense of humor which is a must for any author of any genre.

Hello, I’m Jeffrey Kosh. You surely recognized me as the author of the novel ‘Feeding the Urge’. No? You do not even know what I’m garbling about? Well, you’re right. Feeding the Urge is my first published novel and will be widely available on the general market within two months, or later. Mr. Gary Starta was so kind to invite me on spreading my senseless blurb on his blog. I must admit feeling uneasy staying shoulder-to-shoulder with such giants as Rebecca Besser and Jennifer Chase; it’s just like being invited to a party where everyone is an accomplished professional and you feel you should be serving cocktails to these people, not having conversations. Unfortunately, I’m a talker, and once you start me it is difficult to shut me up. However, for your eyes’ delight I’m going to restrain myself. Feeding the Urge is about ancient spiritual beliefs seen under a modern point of view. Axel, the main character, is an unusual kind of serial killer – or more likely, a serial vigilante, if such a thing ever existed – experiencing a need to kill those he feels responsible for our society’s ill. People who feed on other’s fear. The novel tells his exploits from the age of ten, when he was abused by a pedophile, and rescued by … something else. It is also the story of Cheri Ridge, a Cherokee dancer who should be dead, and maybe she is, somehow. Raised by a White Shaman, she has grown up immersed in her people’s folklore and belief system, and this is going to ‘feed her urge’. The paths of these two weird individuals are going to merge, yet with an unexpected ending. Well, I’m not going to spoil the rest of the novel; I hate when authors do that. David Brin said that he feels like a shaman, creating images and alternate realities in other minds. That fits my way of writing; I summon stories from another place, they’re already there ready to be told. The matter rests in the author’s skill to convey it. I figure that had Jennifer Chase or Gary Starta encroached on Axel’s story before me, they would surely weave it in different ways. My specialty involves inner feelings and how they affect the individual. To learn more about me visit my website, Jeffrey Kosh’s Prosperity Glades: http://jeffreykosh.webstarts.com/index.html?r=20120102190037 Or contact me directly on Facebook, Twitter, or Google +. As a compulsive chatterer you’ll find me everywhere.

Meet Author Rebecca Besser

For this first blog of 2012, I would like to introduce author Rebecca Besser. She has penned some apocalyptic stories involving zombies I'm sure you will want to check out.

Hi, I'm Rebecca Besser, author of the zombie novella, Undead Drive-Thru. I write fiction, nonfiction and poetry for a wide range of age groups and genres. I've been published over 140 times in various publications.

To learn more about me feel free to visit my website: http://www.rebeccabesser.com or my blog: http://blog.rebeccabesser.com

You can also find me on Facebook under: Rebecca Besser or Author/Editor Rebecca Besser

I'm also on Twitter under: @BeccaBesser

Earth's End, a Scifi Apocalyptic anthology, is being released by Wicked East Press in Jan 2012!

My story, “The Olden Gears,” is included in Earth's End. Here's an excerpt:

“...Overnight the world has been bombarded with attacks by the elderly. On every continent, in almost every country, they’ve taken lives at will, showing no mercy...”

Looking out around him, he tried to decide how he was going to make it home. Almost every street was blocked off by accidents, and everywhere he looked, someone was being slaughtered; his attention focused back on the radio as they continued.

“...Medical experts are saying the cause of the outbreak and behavior in their elderly patients is linked to the chemical compound used in the ‘lubrication’ of the ReGen ‘parts’ surgically implanted; the chemical was supposed to act as synthetic blood. Once it leaks into the real blood system, it targets certain parts of the brain and triggers uncontrollable, aggressive behavior...”" ~ The Olden Gears by Rebecca Besser - Earth's EndWould you like to win a free copy of Earth's End?

On March 1st I'll be having a drawing to give away a copy of Earth's End signed by me (I'm also the editor). Everyone who comments on my Earth's End post at one of the stops on my tour will be enter into the drawing (one entry per person, per blog), so you have a chance to win at every stop along the way. The very last post of the tour will be on my blog and will announce the winner (on March 1st). So, stop by as many blogs as you possibly can to increase your chances to win a copy of the book!