Social commentary on toast.

During a drunken conversation with a very nice chap named Sigurd during a party on Saturday night, he asked me a very interesting question (As a side note, the Norwegian word for having pre-club drinks is forspill, which literally translates as ‘foreplay’. Which makes it hilarious every time someone invites me over to their place for some. Childish, but what are you going to do?).

We’d discussed what life is like in Essex and how it compares to living in Hamar. I explained the weekend culture of booze, drugs, fights and one-night stands which Essex has become somewhat famous for. Shows like The Only Way Is Essex didn’t really help that one. We agreed that such a culture isn’t really prevalent in Norway; at least that I’ve seen. Things here seem a little more laid back. People drink to have fun, not to pass out in a toilet somewhere. (And trust me: they do drink.)

The two of us went out for a cigarette. Sigurd was interested in my writing since he also had aspirations to one day write a story. During our chatter he asked with complete sincerity “So why do you write fantasy, given your background?”

I couldn’t really answer, so I just said it was what I enjoyed reading. I’ve touched on how I started to become a writer in these two posts. But the question stuck with me over the last few days. Why fantasy? I believe the answer is fairly intriguing, so here is the best way I can summarise it.

On the first page of Queen of the World, there is a line which simply says ‘The world wants heroes.’ I think this is true in most cases. Almost everyone has a role model, or someone they look up to. We idolise people from all aspects of human culture.

Let’s start with celebrities. As much as you may personally dislike the fact, people do make the likes of Paris Hilton, Russell Brand and Lindsay Lohan their inspirations, whether it’s for fashion, lifestyle or glamour. I don’t agree at all, but I understand. It’s a mindset. ‘They seem to live such an exciting life, and I want to do the same.’ Even through the flaws – homemade sex tapes, drug abuse, jail time – it doesn’t matter. I think we forgive celebrities for a lot of things. Look at Chris Brown. Puts a woman in the hospital after repeatedly hitting her, and then comes back to win at the Grammys. On Twitter, a sizeable number of female fans responded with comments such as ‘Chris Brown can beat me up any time’. Really?

Of course, there are a huge number of outlets for fame and talent which actually involve skill. Lady Gaga and Justin Beiber for immediate pop culture. They have a fair share of detractors, but at least they create and give something to the word. For more ‘classic’ heroes in the music industry, you have characters such as Kurt Cobain, Jimi Hendrix, Aretha Franklin and Elvis Presley. People worshiped and aspired to follow in their footsteps. But it’s all subjective. You may not like them because of the music they played or the lifestyle they lived. And that’s fine.

So how about sport? Pelé. Babe Ruth. Babe Zaharias (Google that last one. She was pretty amazing). Sports require physical skill and excellence for the most part. Unless you’re playing darts or bowls or something. But they train hard, compete at the highest level and win the admiration of the fans of the sport. There’s something good, something kids can look up to, when they see Lionel Messi or Tiger Woods. Tiger is an interesting one. For years he was the man. The perfect package. Dominated his sport, clean cut, handsome and wildly successful. That’s probably why when his infidelity came to light he was so truly massacred by the press. Everyone felt betrayed. We’d trusted him to be better than the rest of us, and it turned out he had the same faults as regular people.

Nelson Mandela, Rosa Parks and Winston Churchill were / are heroes, and rightly so. But they excelled in political and sociological circles. Mandela is certainly an inspiration. What he’s been through in his life takes a fairly strong man to withstand and remain an advocate for freedom and equality. Churchill stood up to Hitler and acted as a beacon for the British during World War II. Parks was a catalyst for the Civil Rights movement. All of them helped to change the world in their own way, and they shall correctly be remembered as heroes to many. But they're not the heroes I want. I'm after the larger than life, hands-on, save the day heroes.

During the aforementioned war, there was a Finnish sniper named Simo Häyhä. During one hundred days of conflict, in temperatures falling as low as -40°C and with few daylight hours, he personally killed over 705 Soviets who were invading his homeland. He has the highest confirmed number of sniper kills of any war ever. When asked later if he regretted killing so many people, Simo replied “I did what I was told to as well as I could.” The Soviets nicknamed him simply ‘White Death’.

For me, that is a hero. King Leonidas (Spartaaaaa!) was a hero, along with Joan of Arc and Richard the Lionheart. I’m not saying heroes must be violent or good at killing people, but they were people who now seem mythical in their reputation. I mean, Jesus defintely counts. It doesn’t matter if you celebrate or disregard religion. If Jesus the man existed then he unquestionably made a huge difference to the future of humanity.

Would you rather meet Liberace or William Wallace? John Lennon or Alexander the Great? Everyone I’ve mentioned is the pinnacle of excellence in someone’s eyes. But my interest is with people who went out and changed the world with a battle-cry, a sword in hand and a flag flapping in the wind overhead. People who forged nations, destroyed empires and literally changed the world in their lifetime.

My world needs heroes. And so I write about them. Characters that are able to use their skills, talents and code to make a difference. I like the romantic idea of skill with a blade or a bow over one’s talent with a gun or a bomb. I like people who don’t have the media or the Internet or advertisement to shape their opinions. My heroes have honour, passion and the will to succeed. Fantasy is the strongest breeding ground for such people, and it’s why I write about it. Besides, I don’t think any of the characters in my book would be better off with an iPhone or a pair of Reeboks. -grins-

Feel free to comment, share or otherwise print this out and staple it to someone.

Mumble.

My current manuscript for the sequel to Queen of the World is at 51,000 words. I’ve been writing pretty much every day. I’m proud of the amount of work I’ve done – the writing began about four weeks ago – but I still sometimes wonder if I could do more. Being honest I probably could, but even now my brain is fried and my imagination comes in dribs and drabs. Writing is still fantastic, of course. There’s still that kick of falling into a scene and letting the words spill out. I guess as time goes on it’ll be easier and I’ll fall into a rhythm without as much effort. But that 51,000 seems like it should be another five figures on top. Which is nuts, really. I have some people on my Twitter page who are able to write ten thousand words a day. I managed that once. To finish the first draft of Queen of the World I wrote 12,000 words from 10am to 2am. When I’d finished I felt like I was drunk.

Stress is a factor for me, more than I perhaps realised early on. I’m trying to juggle various things in my life – I want to move back to Norway instead of sitting in my old bedroom in Essex, I want to get a job which allows me to live with my fiancée, I want to have a plan so that I can actually feel stable for once instead of living from a month-by-month basis – and it all impacts on my work. If I’m in a good mood I can hammer out four thousand words in an afternoon and then happily spend the rest of it watching films and playing games. Sometimes if I’m tired, or worrying about something, then it’s a crawl to even make a few hundred. It sounds a bit lame, like the struggling artist perception of needing to be in the zone, and I’m aware of that. If I was working as a plumber or in a warehouse I couldn’t phone in sick on the basis that I had things on my mind. I’d get laughed into unemployment. But since writing is technically a self-employed job, sometimes you have to kick your own arse and say ‘C’mon. Just get to work and stop being a dick.’

Thankfully, I find editing much easier. I received another section of revision from my editor, Sara, which I read in one sitting and applied the basics of into the Queen of the World draft. The comments and suggestions were just as helpful as before, and I’m starting to get a clear picture of my strengths and flaws as a fiction writer. One section involving a supporting character was absolutely mauled, but instead of upsetting me I actually got inspired and sat up in my chair thinking ‘Ok, so how can I fix this? Do I need to edit or rewrite? Is it even necessary?’

To my delight, when I sent out the final(ish) draft to some friends and peers, all of the critiques were very positive in their praise and any suggestions for change were pretty minor. Character names, uses of words, descriptions and the like. It was a hell of a morale boost and I did get a lot of useful information about the story, but I’d never experienced what it was like to having something directly pointed out as not being as good as it could be. So for my editor to pull out a part and say ‘This really isn’t as strong as the preceding chapters’ was like a jolt to the system, and one I really enjoyed. Getting my arse kicked is going to help much more than it’ll harm. (Though please don’t savage the rest of the book, Sara!)

That’s about it for now, really. I’m paying a visit to Norway on Friday which with a bit of luck will become permanent, so I’m passing the time with writing, drinking coffee and listening to Pearl Jam. I’ll update again in a few days with an article-thing I’ve been toying with.

Stick this in your pipe and -delete-

While I’m unemployed, I’m writing full time.

I’ve got it down to an actually shift, now. I sit down around three in the afternoon with a fresh coffee and my headphones, switch off the Internet and just write. My aim is at least three thousand words a day. Sometimes it’s easy, and the words hammer across the page like the Road Runner. Other days I crawl along with a line here and a paragraph there, staring at the screen thinking to myself ‘What the bloody hell is the point of this scene?’

When I wrote Queen of the World, I had a break between the first six chapters and the final fourteen. I was on a motorbike travelling south through Vietnam, staying in cheap hotels and getting drunk with strangers in hostels. It wasn’t exactly conducive to writing, so I left the manuscript alone for about two months. During that time I would think about it often. The doubt would sometimes kick in. Was it any good? Was it boring? Was the pace too slow? Were the characters interesting? I didn’t let myself read what I had. I just kept churning ideas over my head, so when the time came to carry on with it I just blurted everything on the page in a mental purge. Three months later and the first draft was complete. I left it alone for about four weeks, until I watched the Game of Thrones series and was inspired to go back and read it all and begin the editing process.

It turned out I quite enjoyed what I had. The pace was steady, but I didn’t feel like it was boring. I enjoyed the exploration of the characters and how they found themselves in the situation they’d been handed. Queen of the World was never going to be an action-packed thriller. The film isn’t going to star Jason Statham. (Yeah, there’s going to be a film. Somewhere around the time I build my towered castle out of Red Bull tins and hire Morgan Freeman to read the newspaper to me in the mornings. IT COULD HAPPEN.)

Now with the sequel I’m working on, I’m having those same doubts. I feel like I just have scenes at the moment, and that they’re not very good. I also feel like I’m flailing around too much in the early scenes and that there isn’t a unified story happening yet. That’s to be expected, since the first draft isn’t meant to be spot on. It’s meant to give the structure you need to make it good. Some may argue this, of course, and more power to you. If you can pull a finished story out on the first draft then I give my complete admiration.

I think the issue here is that I’m a pantser, and I write things as they pop out of the ether.

Quick definition for people who aren’t aware of the term: A pantser is someone who has an idea for a story and then writes it down, mainly from memory. They write by the seat of their pants, hence the term. A plotter is someone who outlines a story in advance; they work out the scenes they need to write and then follows the plan. The latter tends to result in a stronger first draft but can impede the spontaneous development of a story, since the writer already wants to get from point A to B. The former, which is my camp, has a much broader canvas to work with but can sometimes get stuck, left with nowhere to go.

Since I’m working from nothing each time I write, I sometimes end up with an empty thousand words where not much happens. They might begin travelling to a place they need to be, or they might reveal a little about themselves, but it’s just scratchwords. (I call anything which is fun to read but adds no weight to the story a bunch of scratchwords- i.e stuff which can be deleted if I need to trim the word count.) I have scenes in my head, of course. I have quite a few fun things I’m going to include in the current manuscript. I think I have a good book in my head. But if I can’t make it a good book on paper then I might as well just go to people’s houses and tell them what would have happened. At least that way I might get the occasional cup of tea out of it.

Another issue is that this is my first real sequel. With Queen of the World I had the time to let things develop naturally – introduce the characters, the setting, a little here and there about the world’s history. Things unfolded with no real urgency. With this manuscript, though, I’m working with the assumption that the readers at least have some idea what’s going on. They enjoyed the first book and now want more. (Unless the first book sucks, but we’ll talk about that another time.) But I also need the sequel to be a standalone story, which people can read without being confused by what they missed in the first book. I’m struggling with how much back-story to use and how much to leave to the occasional reference. I don’t think I’ve done too badly – there isn’t a prologue, at least, and characters don’t say things like ‘As you know, this is all because blah blah blah...’ – but it’s still new ground to me.

Ugh. Anyway, the edits on Queen of the World have been slightly delayed due to unavoidable publisher workload, but everything is still on schedule. That, added with my employment status, is why I’m writing so much at the moment. And also why I’m basically emptying my brain into this blog. I don’t think this is a great blog post, but I feel a bit better. So thanks. –grins-

And please feel free to comment if you have any ideas of experience with this kind of bewilderment.

You Don't Need Dice: Pt.2

(Read 'Part One' here.)

Eventually I plucked up the courage to join in. I used the best typewriting I had, which mainly consisted of the correct capitalisation and an occasional comma. I made KurtCocaine walk over to one of the tougher looking characters and stare him right in the eye. And it had to be STARE HIM RIGHT IN THE EYE because, like my name, it made me sound cool and rebellious.

This other person, typing somewhere else in the world, wrote a brilliant descriptive paragraph about meeting Kurt’s gaze, giving a wry smirk and then punching him square in the face.

I wish I’d saved that paragraph somewhere because the effect it had on me was profound. To my credit, I typed back a hastily worded response about being punched in the face and falling over. I had enough sense to not try and make out I was all-powerful and untouchable. But I sat there dwelling over that response. This person, who’d never met me before and had no reason to acknowledge my ignorant intrusion on his game, had taken the time to respond to me. And it wasn’t just a ‘go away’ response. It was six or seven lines of good writing, crafted just for me to react to. I eventually sent the person a private message, asking a bunch of questions about the chat room I’d found myself in and thanking them for punching me in the face. The person responded by introducing himself as Frank, laughing about my excitement at being chinned and spent about thirty minutes explaining the general rules of the room. He also directed me to a forum which had been set up to support the game, introducing me to dozens more players.

The best part about the game was that there were very few rules at all. You couldn’t affect people without their permission, you couldn’t take the piss and create a character who was essentially God, and you couldn’t rip people off and imitate them. There was a combat system in place which did have quite a few stringent rules for the turn-based nature of it, but that was all. Anything else went. If you wanted a fire-breathing Jedi who rode a vampiric badger around, you could have one. If you wanted an undead mail-room clerk who occasionally ate a baby, you could have one. My imagination was limited so I initially made a barbarian-type character with a big sword and an even bigger beard. I remember typing the words rippling muscles a lot. I ran up that £300 pound phone bill I mentioned, but nobody ever questioned what I was doing with it.

I played and wrote in this game for about seven years.

Now think about that for a minute. Seven years. I reckon I accessed the rooms for around twenty hours a week from the ages of fourteen to sixteen, at which point I was allowed to bring the computer into my own room. Then my weekly access increased to about fifty hours. And also consider that everything was based in text. Character description. Narration. Dialogue. World building. Structure. The rules, the backgrounds and the accompanying prose. Every single thing about the game was written down and created through a keyboard. The players behind the characters became friends. Close friends. Two of them met up in real life, got married and had kids. I still know a few of the people from those days now, and have met several of them in real life. That was just in England; in America, where the majority of the players lived, people would travel hundreds of miles to meet up for lunch or hang out at each other’s places. I imagine quite a lot of us ‘roleplayed’ with each other for real... We were all teenagers, after all. I had two social lives, and I considered them equally important for a time. Those I went to school, worked and partied with – and those I knew solely through their writing.

It’s important to make a distinction there – this wasn’t a place to ‘escape reality’ or anything like that. I wrote about characters I enjoyed writing about in stories which interested me, but when I spoke to the other players I was still me. I was still Ben (Referred to as English Ben, since there were quite a few Bens involved). I purposely made sure I was truthful about what I was like in real life, so I didn’t make up a fake persona or present myself differently. I simply had to rely on my writing, which improved dramatically over those years.

So when it comes to ‘Read a lot and write a lot’, I used to believe I hadn’t written or read enough to qualify as an author. It held me back in attempting to write Queen of the World. I’d always written, but mainly in short stories or poems and the like. I’d always read, but within the genres I liked. I read fantasy by Gemmel, Eddings and Pratchett. I enjoyed horror by King, Herbert and Barker. I read a bit more here and there, but never ‘broadened my horizons’. I never read Chaucer, Austin or Hemmingway.

But then I realised that I had written and read HUGE amounts of text during those seven years. Maybe none of them were published or critically famous, but they were my age and they were of my level of competence at least. Many were better, especially in the beginning until I found my own style. Between twenty and fifty hours a week of writing for seven years to create worlds and stories with people from all across the world? I couldn’t begin to imagine how many hundreds of thousands of words I put down. We created together, became better writers together and learned from each other’s strengths and faults. We saw what was good and slipped it into our own input. We saw what looked pretty terrible or what jarred us out of our little bubbles of immersion, and we cut it from our posts.

In a nutshell: I learnt to write through applying my imagination to the ideas of others. That sounds like some kind of tagline I want to try and put into quotes, but it is a good for any self-help enthusiasts who need something inspiring. I don’t reckon anyone will look to me to teach them how to write, and my work probably won’t win any awards for technical application of the English language. But I did learn to tell a story. The only difference is that with Queen of the World I told it by myself instead of with others to guide me, but without those brilliant writers who welcomed me into that online world of text – now sadly defunct, since Yahoo decided that everyone who uses internet chatrooms is either a child or a sexual predator and closed all user created content – then I don’t think it would have ever been written.

So to anyone who ever heard of Tenaria: Thanks.

And remember that reading and writing comes from a large number of different places. Don’t limit yourself, and don’t be afraid to try something new.

You Don't Need Dice: Pt.1

Sometimes we take advice too literally.

(I was going to put a ‘literally/literary’ pun in there. -sniggers-).

One of the most regularly repeated tips when it comes to writing is ‘Read a lot and write a lot.’

This is, of course, excellent advice to any writer regardless of experience, background and raw talent. If you don’t read plenty of authors who use a range of different styles then you won’t be exposed to what’s possible. If you don’t read something that takes your breath away then it’s difficult to know when your work could do the same to others; you’ll have nothing to aspire to. Likewise, if you don’t read something that just plain sucks, then how will you understand what to avoid in your own prose?

Same goes for writing. You need the tools to write. You need to practice, just like you need to practice drawing, playing an instrument or kicking a football. You need to write to find out your vocabulary level, your ability to use tenses and the best way to apply grammar. (For the record, I really suck at grammar terms. I know the rules and the application for the most part, but I couldn’t tell you exactly what a Predicative Adjective or a Reciprocal Pronoun is precisely. Let’s just say I won’t be teaching creative writing at Oxford anytime soon.) You need to know if you can get the idea in your head down onto the page without losing any of the spark which got you excited in the first place. You must learn how much dialogue, description and introspection makes the best mix for you. All this comes from writing as much as you can.

But the endless supply of writing advice which is available on the internet and in magazines rarely specifies where you should practice these main two rules. Is it exclusively books? Fiction? How about websites? Do newspapers count? Blogs? Text messages?

How about games?

How about roleplaying games?

Ooh, got ya. See, here’s the bit where at least one person reading will say ‘Oh, Christ. This is where Ben confesses that his book is based on a Dungeons and Dragons campaign and it’s going to be terrible.’

But it isn’t. Queen of the World is an original idea in a world I created. Some of the character ideas I’ve used through the years have been put through a grinder and find themselves sprinkled amongst the manuscript, though. Bear with me while I tell you a little story.

Years ago, maybe around 1997-ish, my family got its first home computer. It was a gift for me, under the pretence of ‘a good idea for doing schoolwork’ which is probably what every young teenager tells their parents before getting one. However, I wasn’t allowed to have it in my room, so it went into the landing and became the family computer. I shared it with two elder brothers. Mainly we played games on it. Commandos, Championship Manager and Half-Life are the games which stick in my mind. But the main novelty was having access to the internet. This was before the days of having broadband attached to your phone line – remember kids, you’re lucky these days – and we had to use a 56k dial up which made a buzzing sound as it typed in the phone number to connect every time you turned it on. It was also before pre-pay packages, so internet time was limited. There was no Facebook or Twitter. No Reddit or Imgur. Livejournal hadn’t exploded yet, and neither had MySpace. Mainly there was Hotmail, ICQ and chat rooms. One of the biggest ones was Yahoo Chat.

Now Yahoo Chat, like many other chat rooms in those early days of the mainstream internet explosion, gave users the ability to create their own rooms. These could be public or private, and weren’t policed very heavily. Some of the names were pretty grim. In the Teen section – and I was a fourteen year old boy so I qualified – there were a lot of rooms dedicated to sex. Now despite what a lot of my friends reading this will immediately presume, I never went into these sex rooms. Mainly because I was terrified it was somehow traceable, and my parents would get an email from the phone company about how I’d racked up a £300 pound phone bill in HOT TEEN SEX CHAT 16-19s, a room created by b1gd1ckst3ve.

I also wasn’t interested in rooms about Anime / Manga, Premier League Football or Take That. I couldn’t care less about rooms dedicated to people from California, Melbourne or Glasgow (Although when I did visit the Glasgow room one time to see if they typed in their accent, I was confronted with an incredible number of uses of the word ‘Fuck’). But what I was interested in was a few rooms dedicated to roleplaying. I clicked in and had a look, using the entirely roleplay appropriate name of ‘TheRealKurtCocaine’. Yeah, I was a Nirvana fan and I thought the surname pun made me sound cool and rebellious. Nevermind.

What I found was a room of about twenty people roleplaying. When I say that, I mean using an entirely text-based platform to create their game. Roleplaying existed on forums but it was too slow, having to wait for people to come on and post huge reams of description and exposition just to say ‘My character waves and leaves the room’ because they weren’t going to be able to get back online for a week. But in this chat room it was reactive. A group of people were creating a story on the fly depending on the actions of others. There was a loose ‘Type something then wait for others to have their turn’ but it wasn’t rigid. Some wrote several times while others hung back, waiting to contribute when the time was right.

I sat there and watched for about an hour, captivated. I sipped my can of Sprite and didn’t dare ruin it. I’d never taken part in anything like this before so I was worried there would be a huge set of rules I’d have to follow, and trying to join in would get me hounded out of there and banned for life. My brothers had dabbled with roleplaying – we had a couple of D&D books and a Call of Cthulhu game manual in our house, as well as some Warhammer miniature and a big foamy sword for LARPing as evidence – but I’d never taken part personally. Besides, the internet had only been filtering into people’s homes for the last year or two, discounting corporate, enthusiast or government use. This was new. This was for me.

(Read 'Part Two' here.)