Matthew P. Mayo has a keen eye for the absurd. Sure, his Westerns are steeped in authenticity and boiled in action, but it is Mayo’s skewed vision of the world that lingers long after the final page. He shows us the mythic West with the sharp, clear eye of a realist looking through rippled glass.
Mayo is the author of the novels Winters’ War, Wrong Town, and Hot Lead, Cold Heart, and the editor of Where Legends Ride: New tales of the Old West. At his finest, Mayo captures the surreal and very human quality of everyday life in the 19th century West. His protagonists meet whatever comes their way with nonchalance; they struggle in a world of misperceptions and uncertain realities, come what may. Time and again they must sort out the mythic from the mundane, the weak from the strong, the bizarre from the necessary. Yet, even deep within the most tangled cases of mistaken identity and the darkest of back alley nights, Mayo is always in control of his craft. (more…)
Colin Moulder-McComb writes Now, the Twist,a regular column for Kobold Quarterly. He recently contributed an essay on the game Hive to James Lowder’s Family Games: The 100 Best. Moulder-McComb is also the founding CEO of 3lb Games. I’ve been thinking a lot about 3lb Games’ mission statement this holiday season as my family and I spend many glorious hours playing games, writing, drawing, and reading. The first paragraph reads as follows:
When learning is fun–and learning should be fun–it awakens in us our natural curiosity. With computers at our fingertips and our daily pace moving faster all the time, we have a unique opportunity to transform learning into a lifelong journey of joy and wonder.
The writers from Altered Fluid are back! Below, five of them tackle a question at the very heart of what they do as writers.
Brief bios of the authors appear after the interview.
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Why is speculative fiction important?
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PAUL M. BERGER: Because asking “What if?” is the best way to examine where we’re going and where we are. And not just in terms of shiny things that light up, either.
DEVIN POORE: I recently read an interview with Dr. Robert Ballard, the archaeologist of Titanic fame, and he said that he became interested in sea exploration after reading 20,000 Leagues under the Sea. I think someone being inspired to go outside of himself by a story, to follow a path he might never have otherwise, is where the importance lies.
MATTHEW KRESSEL: Speculative fiction can often comment on the world in ways that other fiction can’t. For example, Ursula K. LeGuin often comments on feminism and gender issues in her writing. China Miéville comments about social structures and governance. Science fiction considers the future and all its nasty and beautiful ramifications before it comes to pass. Science fiction in some ways has invented the future. The creator of the cell phone took his idea directly from the Star Trek communicators. We view the world through the window of stories. (more…)
Russ Pitts is a little funny about his dice. To read the opening pages of his essay “The Dice They Carried” in Will Hindmarch’sThe Bones: Us and Our Dice, you’d think he’s more than a little funny about his dice bags, too. The essay opens with Pitts describing, lovingly, the bag he used to carry his dice in as a young man and ends many years later with a different bag resting next to the computer he uses as the Editor-in-Chief of The Escapist magazine.
Pitts has his dice and dice bags. And I have my office supplies. I have boxes and boxes full of pens, pencils, paper-clips, tape, and notepads – especially notepads. Pads of blank paper drive me nearly mad with possibilities! Every now and then I delve into the piles and see what I can find, see what I can do. See what I can make.
I’m not crazy, I remind myself, I’m just… prepared. These are the tools I need to do my jobs – teaching and writing. Yet, one of the most important tools we, as writers, have is the willingness to try new things, to take risks, to roll the dice every now and then. Below, Pitts talks about the pros and cons of taking risks in writing.
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What is the importance of taking risks, of rollin’ them bones, in writing?
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Russ Pitts: Well, that’s the difference between good work and potentially great work, isn’t it? The work I have done that has been most rewarding (and usually best received) has been uncomfortable for me in some way–creating it. Sharing it. How much do I have to give? How much of my soul am I willing to share on the off chance my feelings about a certain thing will ignite a spark in someone else’s soul and have them say: “Someone else who gets it!”
For me it comes down to a choice: How much am I willing to risk to succeed? Am I willing to take the chance that someone somewhere will think less of me for what I have done–or thought about what I have done–just so that that same person may appreciate me for doing so?
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Can you tell us about a time when you rolled the dice in your career and won? Lost? Were utterly baffled by the results?
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Russ Pitts: I’ve had several careers at this point, and most of them have involved some measure of chance. One of my previous careers involved the production of live television–a dice-roller’s wet dream. I rolled the dice on my way out of that job and lost–big time. I behaved badly. I took out my frustration with myself on other people, betting that the things I said and did would not come back to haunt me but they have. The hardest part about that episode was that I was gambling with something that belonged to other people: their trust and faith in me. I’ve won some of it back, but it’s been a hard road. I cherish it more now. That’s the silver lining.
My current career began when I decided to throw everything I owned into a van, drive for 14 hours to a state I’d never been to, to live in an apartment I’d never seen and work for people I’d never met. This was not the first time I’d done something like that. Most people can’t bring themselves to do it once, but I live for those moments.
When I was younger I made most of my major life decisions based on whether or not I could imagine the most likely outcomes. If I could, I would do something else, something less predictable. I’m falling out of love with that idea of “fun,” but being able to take that kind of risk has given me a lot to write about. Now if only I had the time…
Award-winning fiction writer Brian Evenson has written more than a dozen books. Recent titles include Baby Leg, Fugue State, Last Days, and the forthcoming The Open Curtain. Evenson’s fiction has a way of slipping past your defenses, getting in your head and staying there long after you’re done reading. (more…)
A few short pages into Kenneth Hites’Cthulhu 101, I thought, “This guy must’ve gone to University of Chicago.” (Hite, not Cthulhu.) They train the mind in wondrous ways at U of C, and Hites’ work bears the tell-tale stamp. Whether writing non-fiction or gaming supplements or children’s books, Hite layers his work with humor, literary allusion, and incisive analysis. You get the sense that he has read everything and understood it. (more…)
Very real issues of craft and narrative mean it’s important to think carefully about all of your major and minor characters: it results in further complication and believability. Sometimes, too, the inability to imagine a character as fully human can derail everything–in addition to alienating your audience.
I don’t like to use movies as examples, but what the heck. I’ll make an exception because it’s such a good example: the script for The Town, a movie by Ben Affleck (script by him and Peter Craig and Aaron Stockard), fails miserably to flesh out the character of Claire Kessey, played by Rebecca Hall. The movie is supposed to be about long-time friends who are part of a bank robbing gang. Claire Kessey is a bank employee taken as a hostage and later let go. Affleck’s character (Doug MacRay), who Claire never saw, then falls for her, while his fellow bank robbers want her killed so she can’t identify them.
You could say the main thrust of the movie is on the bank robbers, their relationships, and what happens to them. But the crux of the film is Doug’s relationship with Claire, in part because it makes him do things that undermine his relationship with his friends and thus creates one of the central conflicts in the movie.
The problem is, Claire’s a cipher.
1–We don’t know anything about her friends.
2–We don’t know anything about her family.
3–We know very little about her past.
4–We have very little evidence about her personality, likes and dislikes, etc.
Even worse, Affleck et al have decided that Claire is so unimportant to the story that, after her kidnapping and release, she’s largely moved around the board simply to advance the plot. Several unlikely things happen, including…
1–Claire, despite being frightened out of her mind by the experience, seems to behave much as she did before being kidnapped, in terms of her day-to-day movements and activities.
2–Worse, she has no problem talking to a man she does not know, in a public laundromat.
3–And she has no problem going out on a date with said stranger.
Now, most reasonable people, myself included, if they’d been kidnapped recently, might feel the need to be more cautious. In such a context, I might not even want to go to the laundromat for awhile (except, Claire has no friends to speak of, and thus no one to ask for help). I sure as heck wouldn’t be fond of talking to strangers.
Is it possible Claire might be the kind of person who would deal with the situation differently than I would? The kind of person who would decide that a kind of confrontation with life, a dogged sticking to her normal routine, was the key to recovery? Absolutely! But to know that, we would have to have a much better idea of:
But we get none of that, apparently because Affleck thinks that the crux of the story lies elsewhere.
But the entire time I was watching the last two-thirds of the film, I could not get out of my head the fact that the foundation, the groundwork, had been so thoroughly botched that if the film had been re-contextualized as a house, it would’ve been leaning heavily to one side, with the bricks falling to the ground and the roof sliding half-off.
I was also getting angry, because in robbing Claire of her individuality, Affleck had trivialized the trauma that occurs when one’s personal space and freedom are violated in the way Claire’s were in the movie. Even worse, Claire’s actions at the end of the film betray any vestiges of self-respect the script has left her with…but that’s okay, the script seems to be telling us, because Claire’s mostly there so MacRay will seem somewhat noble and tragic…unless, like me, you’re by this point finding MacRay utterly unbearable because of his interactions with Claire. (The power dynamics of that relationship don’t bear scrutiny.)
The point here is that getting characters right is also about doing what’s right for the story, and when you get that backwards or you ignore a character or rob them of the normal human reactions that occur in the real world, you run the risk of having someone like me think what you wrote sucked.
Grizzly Wrestling: Matthew P. Mayo on the Writing Life
Matthew P. Mayo is a master of starting as irresistibly close to the action as possible. In his fiction and his non-fiction, he opens with just enough that the reader cares and then he hits the character (and the reader) hard. Mayo’s sentences are lean, tough and graceful. His writing has a powerful sense of moment and of scene, of gesture and of other human subtleties.
Mayo is a freelance writer living in Maine. His recent books, Cowboys, Mountain Men, & Grizzly Bears: Fifty of the Grittiest Moments in the History of the Wild West and Bootleggers, Lobstermen & Lumberjacks: Fifty of the Grittiest Moments in the History of Hardscrabble New England, tell fifty tales each of some of the most harrowing moments in their respective regions. These aren’t dry recountings or glossy propaganda.
These are gritty stories – stories, as he says in the introduction of Bootleggers, of “showing courage, resolve, and pluck in one’s daily life, of being tough and uncompromising in the face of adversity.” Indeed, both of Mayo’s Grittiest Moments books read like Loren D. Estleman and Jim Thompson got together to re-write a Stephen Ambrose history book.
It’s now been a year since my writing strategy book Booklife came out, and it’s received lots of praise, leading to an interview on National NPR, among other opportunities like speaking at MIT and the Library of Congress. I’ve even had artists and musicians tell me they picked it up and found that the advice in it worked for them as well.
I know there are more of you out there, so if you’ve enjoyed Booklife and/or reading new content on this website, it would be wonderful if you’d be willing to blog about it this week, recommending the book as a holiday gift. (Or tweet or facebook if that’s more your style. Or even re-post something you wrote when the book came out.) Monies from sales will be directly reflected in my next couple of royalty statements and help off-set the cost of a couple of important projects my wife Ann and I are taking on gratis.
If you do decide to blog, here are a few possible links to include:
As importantly, I’m interested to know how Booklife was of use to you (or, even, where you wished it would’ve been of more help), and will write a follow-up post here and on Booklifenow that links your post. If you tweet or facebook post, consider echoing into the comments thread here.
Finally, thanks for considering Booklife as a holiday gift for the creatives in your life!
A unique writing guide to sustainable careers and sustainable creativity, the first to fully integrate discussion of the role of new media into topics that have always been of interest to writers.
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