Category Archives: Professional

career, outward projection of you and your works

Stress, Real Life, and Professionalism

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Sometimes life throws you a curve ball and it’s all you can do to not strike out. And sometimes that curve ball shows up in the middle of a deadline, when you’re in the home stretch of editing your book, when everything is so close yet so far and your capacity for higher-order thinking skills are being put to the test. At this point, you have two options: you can push through and get that deadline handled despite the chaos, or you can set aside the work to handle life.

I’ve always been the kind of person to take the first option. In college, dealing with personal crisis, I pushed through my courses as hard as I could, eventually driving myself into a five-month case of bronchitis that to this day will flare up whenever I get stressed or exhausted.

Since then, however, I’ve slowly been learning that sometimes you don’t push through. You just don’t.

Recently, a part of my life that was once-stable has flipped, and a lot of changes have happened in the past week. It’s been emotionally and physically draining, and the lack-of-sick I’ve blessedly had all winter long has started to waver, and there’s a constant press in my chest and a nagging cough. All little signs that are saying “Hey, we might be pushing things a bit here.”

I made a tough personal call to let people know that I would not be meeting certain deadlines I’d set, because of this nonsense. Really hard conversations to initiate, really hard emails to write. I take it as a point of personal pride that I make deadlines when I say I will. But sometimes, it’s just not possible. And sometimes when it is possible, it’s just not responsible.

I’ve been really surprised, to the point of tears, the kindness that people have shown me in dealing with my professional life, both in writing and in my dayjob as an engineer. I’ve always believed the world to be fairly unforgiving of failure and of personal problems, but not everybody is like that, and it’s comforting to work with such wonderful people.

And let’s be real, folks: when your head is somewhere else entirely, you’re just not going to be able to put together a good book. So if you’re dealing with personal crisis, take your time, handle your shit, and come back to the work when you’re able to make it the best. If you’re a perfectionist like me who has to push through everything to meet your deadlines, take a step back and give yourself space. You might be surprised by how understanding people are.

Creating the Future with Language

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Carrie Cuinn is a Author, editor, bibliophile, modernist, and geek. You can find her work online at carriecuinn.com and follow her on Twitter @carriecuinn.

When writing a story set in the present or the past, you already know what your options for language
are. You can write in the language of your expected readers, ignoring historical dialects so we can
clearly understand your meaning, or you can use words common to your characters’ time period to help
create a realistic atmosphere. Whether your story features an Old West gunfighter, a medieval farmer,
or a Roman poet, you can research the names of popular objects or slang terms the people might have
used.

When you’re writing the future, you have to make more choices. You need to balance realistically
portraying the time period with showing its difference from our time as well as making sure that the
story is still coherent to people reading it now. You need to think about who your speaker is, not just the people talking in the story but the person telling the story to your readers. You need to decide if you’re going to mix languages, create new words, adapt words we’re already using to make them sound futuristic… but how do you decide any of that?

The simplest solution to writing the future is to not do anything special at all. If you assume that your story is translated for modern readers even by some of the best E-word translation services, somehow taken from the your character’s language (whatever that may be) and put into 21st century English* then you don’t need to fake up your language. But there is a reason you may not want to take the simplest path: language can add to the setting of your story in a variety of ways, giving you a richer, more complex look at your invented future.

You can show the merger of two large cultures by including words from a non-English language mixed
in with your dialogue or even description, but – and I mean BUT – you have to be cautious. It’s terribly easy to slap on a few “exotic”** words and think you’re creating accessible multi-cultural characters but if you don’t know what the words mean or how language evolves over time, it sounds slapped on. It shows very quickly that you don’t know what you’re talking about. Mixing languages gives you a more honest feel, but that means you’ll either have phrases your readers don’t understand or you have to find a way to explain everything in context.

Firefly mixed Mandarin into the otherwise English dialogue. Joss Whedon didn’t give us subtitles (I should say I hoped subtitle translations would help me), and didn’t explain what was said, for the simple reason that the characters should have understood what was being said. There was no “outsider” to explain it to. It worked because they largely used Mandarin for swearing. So you didn’t need to know the exact translation, you just knew someone was angry. On the other hand, the first American version of Gojira, 1956’s Godzilla, King of the Monsters, mixed dubbed dialogue with the original Japanese, and added in a new character played by Raymond Burr, whose job was to be the outsider. He would yell, “What did he say?” and someone would repeat what had originally been said in Japanese.***

Firefly worked. Godzilla, King of the Monsters was a bit silly.

Another way to influence the setting with language is to create new brand names. We use brand names
as generic terms all of the time, once the object has become so common and has so many imitators that
the trademark can no longer be protected. We call that a generic trademark or a proprietary eponym.

It’s the reason you can ask someone to hand you a Kleenex or Band-Aid or a Thermos and they’ll know
what you’re talking about, even if what you’re asking for is actually produced by another company.

Inventing a proprietary eponym can be a way to show that changes have been made to technology
or commerce long enough ago that they were generalized into popular speech. Be careful that you’re
not creating a phrase you don’t need – I recently read a novel that used “Reefmail” instead of “email” because they lived on an artificial island. It was still mail, delivered electronically. The author described it as a fish swimming onto the computer screen, opening its mouth, and an envelope popping out. An envelope. So you know what it is. Then why call it something else?

Explore your options. Read over your work again. Out loud. Take out anything that feels unnecessary
or was inserted to sound exotic. Ask yourself, as many times as you need to, “why did I say it that
way?”

This is a just a beginning to the conversation about the possibilities of language in fiction. I hope that it gives you something to think about when you’re sitting down to write, or edit, your next great futuristic story.

* English is used as an example because that’s the language this post is written in. Of course, you
should use the language of your expected readers.

** If you’re hoping to create “exotic” characters you need to take a step back and consider a lot more than language. Simply put, something is only exotic because it is different than you, and different isn’t negative. A person isn’t more interesting or more sexual or more attractive or less anything just because they come from a different culture or the color of their skin is different. But you knew that already, right?

** While technically not set in the future, it is an alternate-Earth science fiction story, and illustrates
the example well.

Carrie Cuinn has written a follow up post here.

Using Meyers-Briggs to Keep Your Characters in Character

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Troy D. Smith is from Sparta, Tennessee. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Illinois, and teaches U.S. and American Indian history at Tennessee Tech. In addition to history, he writes short stories of all stripes, has written for several magazines, published poetry (but not lately), and writes western and mystery novels.

I’ve seen several articles lately that claim experience with role-playing games, such as Dungeons & Dragons, can make one a better author — giving future writers experience with plot and exposition, and especially characterization. I have remarked more than once that my job as series editor for Western Fictioneers’ Wolf Creek series makes me feel like a dungeon master (in a good way.) As I have been thinking about the RPG connection, though, I have concluded that something else helped (and continues to help) me far more.

The Myers Briggs personality sorter.

Many of you are no doubt familiar with the concept, modeled in part on the theories of pioneering psychiatrist Carl Jung. There are four basic personality “types,” each of them having four “subtypes,” for a total of sixteen. Each person is either E or I (extrovert or introvert), N or S (guided by intuition or senses), T or F (thinking or feeling), and J or P (judging or perceiving, which has a lot to do with how organized one is).

For over twenty years, I have used this basic guide to construct personalities for my principal characters. Following the formula (though not slavishly) helps me make sure my invented people “stay in character.” At some point you’ve probably read a book and encountered an action by the protagonist that left you saying “Wait a minute, that doesn’t sound like something fill-in-the- blank would say/do!” The Myers-Briggs method is too complicated to explain at length in this space, yet is easily mastered and understood. I have found it remarkably helpful.

I have two Wolf Creek characters: Charley Blackfeather, the Black Seminole army scout, and Sam Gardner, the town marshal. They are very different from one another, not only in background but in temperament.

Charley is an INFP, sometimes called The Healer or The Questor. INFPs are spiritual seekers, on a never-ending mission to search for the meaning of life and their place in it. They have deep wellsprings of emotion, but have trouble expressing them, and can therefore seem quite reserved. They are generally very easy to get along with, but are implacable when someone challenges their deeply-held principles. Their intuition can be uncanny. One of my favorite characters of those I’ve created, Alfred Mann from Bound for the Promise-Land, was an INFP; that novel was ultimately about his search for meaning.

Sam is an ESTP, sometimes called The Promoter. An ESTP is a person of action, not introspection. They make decisions quickly, and hate to be bored. They live in the moment and love to take risks. They hate having rules imposed upon them from above, but have a powerful set of internal values that they rarely violate, and which might make little sense to someone else. They tend to be flashy, and poor managers of resources. They are often charming, and can talk people into anything. Another of my own favorite characters, Champ Ferguson of Good Rebel Soil, is a very similar type: ESFP. He differs from Sam in that, as an F instead of a T, he is more sentimental and also more prone to anger. That novel was the story of how his passions, and penchant for living in the moment, carried him down a path to tragedy.

There is plenty of information on the web about Myers-Briggs; I also highly recommend Please Understand Me by David Kiersey, who makes the whole thing very accessible to laypeople. I swear by it — it can make your characters come to life in whole new ways.

What personality is your current protagonist?

Finding Your Audience and Branching Out

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Troy D. Smith is from Sparta, Tennessee. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Illinois, and teaches U.S. and American Indian history at Tennessee Tech. In addition to history, he writes short stories of all stripes, has written for several magazines, published poetry (but not lately), and writes western and mystery novels.

Over at Western Fictioneers — a professional writers’ organization that has been making tentative steps toward becoming a small publisher as well — we hit on an idea that I think is pretty innovative. In addition to our other publishing projects, which so far have involved short story anthologies, this year we have introduced a series of westerns, under the umbrella title Wolf Creek. They are collaborative novels — each participating writer has created a unique character that he or she writes for. Any give volume features six of those characters interacting in the same story, with the authors writing their assigned chapters from their guy’s (or gal’s) point of view. I think we’ve done a good job getting the series off the ground, and come up with some pretty good yarns. The nineteen writers involved include some of the most talented, and honored, authors working in the genre today.

The question is, how do we get the word out?

We’ve made great use of “social media” — touting twittery tweets, posting Facebook links, talking the series up with western fans on Facebook groups. Several of our members have posted on their own blogs about the series, and quite a few sites that specialize in reviewing westerns have given us some positive attention.

But I have been (pleasantly) surprised by the venues that have proven the most helpful, the most successful, and the most fun. Several blogs devoted to western romance fiction have given us free rein, usually for a full week at a time. In each case, they have devoted space to several members of our group — and with other Wolf Creek writers jumping in via the comments sections, readers could really get a sense that we are, in fact, a team, and one that has cohered very well. We have been so honored at Sweethearts of the West, Petticoats & Pistols, Romancing the West, and others. I was especially intrigued by the format of our appearance at Nighthawk Talks — over there they interview, not the writers, but their characters. Clay More (a practicing physician) introduced his creation, Wolf Creek’s town doctor Logan Munro. Interacting with readers, Dr. Munro answered several questions about frontier medicine. My character, the Black Seminole army scout Charley Blackfeather, ended up explaining aspects of Seminole spirituality and philosophy. It was enormous fun.

I have become increasingly aware in recent years that there is great potential for audience crossover between the traditional western and romance genres — after all, as Waylon Jennings so aptly sang, “Ladies Love Outlaws” — so in retrospect I should not have been surprised that our series’ promotion efforts would be so successful with fans of that genre. Western Fictioneers is fortunate to have several members who write in both categories and thus had the necessary connections to get us a forum, for which I am quite grateful.

A few years ago I was teaching history at a high school in Illinois, and — out of curiosity — asked all my classes how many of them had actually watched a western movie. I was saddened, but not surprised, to learn that only a handful of students had. I was shocked, however, to discover that almost all of that small number of kids were female. Each of the young ladies said that they watched westerns with their dads, and it was a bonding experience. A lot of women who have posted replies on my Facebook timeline about my various publications have said something similar — they don’t just like romance novels with western settings, they like traditional westerns in general. More than one has pointed to the classic Louis L’Amour novel Connagher, and the movie version with Sam Eliot and Katherine Ross, as a perfect example of a story that covers both genres.

So when you are thinking about ways to market your work, go outside the box. Look for connections with other genres and fields, and ways you can weave them together in the narrative you construct about your narrative — you will often find unexpected cases of your fiction being a perfect fit for audiences you never considered, with no advance planning. You could find a lot of new opportunities, and new readers.