What is Love?

The question of the nature of love is something of significant importance to many writers. Even those of us who do not write books where romance is central, usually cannot help but include a little of it in our stories. We have romance subplots or love interests or something of the kind. Love is too much a part of being human to avoid altogether when writing stories about people.

But what is love? Various answers are always being give in various media. Some talk about hearts skipping beats and butterflies in stomachs and call that love. Some talk about the joy of being with a certain person and call that love. Some mention loss of appetite and weak knees. Some maintain that love is not love unless there is physical passion to accompany it.

In almost every circumstance, I find the definitions of love given by books and movies and such to fall far short of what love should be. So I would offer a definition myself:

Love is putting the welfare of another person above your own. 

All those other things I listed above are either symptoms or side effects of true love. They are not the thing its self, and yet they are continually mistaken for love. And because of this, real love has largely been lost to this modern age. No one is willing to place another person's well being entirely above their own anymore. Most people don't even seem to understand the concept. 

We are all too concerned with our own pleasure and our own happiness to truly love another the way we are meant to. And we don't even realize that to do so, to love another before yourself, is the only way that lasting happiness can be achieved.

Today is Valentine's Day and popularly it is a day for making expensive and romantic gestures based around cards, candy and flowers. It is a glorification of everything superficial in romance. It is an insult to the Saint which it is named after.

You see, Saint Valentine, or Valentinus, was a Christian martyr. There is not much known about his life, but tradition says that he was a Roman priest who was condemned to death by Emperor Claudius II for aiding Christians under persecution. You see, he put the welfare of others before himself. In my opinion, that is the only kind of love worth celebrating. 

(Aside: I'm very sorry for signing up for two blogfests on Saturday and Monday and not participating. I seriously over-committed myself and ended up being too busy to post. I'll try not to do that again!)

Thoughts on... Prologues

I wrote a prologue for my book this week. It kind of changes the focus of the book in general so now I'm going to need to lightly edit the 3 1/2 other scenes I had finished to match the tone. I don't really mind that. I felt they were missing something anyway. I'm hoping that my prologue will give the main story context and more driving force. I like stories that are clearly going somewhere, not stories that meander or that I can only guess what the point of them is.

But here's the gamble I'm making: the prologue (and the epilogue that will accompany it) make the "main story" essentially one long, complex flashback. The prologue/epilogue are thousands of years later than the main story. This is a format I intend to employ with a least a few books in a series. Each book's "main story" will be a stand alone story, but the prologue/epilogue from book to book will be connected.

Now, every time I see prologues discussed on blogs and forums and such the advice is "Better safe than sorry." In other words, steer clear of them. But I think that part of being a good writer is knowing your target audience and that means knowing the genre that you're writing in. As often as not, the general advice about writing that you find here and there isn't aimed at any particular genre and yet the tropes and expectations from genre to genre are so varied. I think you need to think about when such advice may not necessarily apply to you because of what you write and who your audience is.

I write epic fantasy. And while I haven't read everything the genre has to offer, it seems to me that prologues are an accepted and welcome trope of the genre. And many prologues in epic fantasy will involve some sort of inciting incident from the distant past that set the events of the main story in motion. Large passages of time are usually not an obstacle for epic fantasy readers.

Of course, what I'm doing is sort of the opposite of that. It's entirely possible that essentially making the plot of my book one huge chunk of backstory to the prologue and epilogue will be an unpopular move. I'm one of those weird people who can never get enough of backstory. I just want to know everything and anything that ever happened related in anyway to what is going on now. I fear that I'm an anomaly and that the vast majority of people aren't as obsessed with the history of fictional worlds as I am. Ah well, I can only write the kind of story I would like to read.

Alas, the prologue of 1957 words was my only progress this past week. But it's better than nothing, right? I'm going to try really hard to make more progress during the coming week.

How about you? Do you enjoy prologues? What do you think is the greatest danger of including a prologue?

Thoughts on... "Muscular Prose"

The other day I was reading a blog post where someone was listing their goals for their query. One of the goals on her check list was "muscular prose" with the addendum "tightness at the sentence level". When I read that, something clicked in my mind and I began to contemplate the phenomenon of muscular prose.

The idea of "muscular prose" or "lean prose" as it is sometimes called became popular with Hemingway. According to this article, Hemingway was given four rules to follow during his time as a reporter for the Kansas City Star:

1. Use short sentences.
2. Use short first paragraphs.
3. Use vigorous English.
4. Be positive, not negative.

The article quotes Hemingway as saying of this writing method:

"Those were the best rules I ever learned for the business of writing. I’ve never forgotten them. No man with any talent, who feels and writes truly about the thing he is trying to say, can fail to write well if he abides by them."

 ...not quite what I meant by muscular prose.

 And now I'm going to explain why I think it's a BAD THING that the idea of muscular prose has become so entrenched in the publishing industry as the "right way" to write everything.

All writers are different.

With all due respect to Hemingway, his statement above is naive. He got lucky. He was given a set of rules and for some reason they worked for him and he was successful. But that's the exception that tests the rule.

All writers are skilled in different ways, see things in different ways, think in different ways. And as a result of being different people  with different gifts, all writers choose different words, different sentence lengths and structure, different ways of communicating based on what feels natural to them. This is called "voice". Each writer has their own voice, which simply means "how a particular author writes".

There is no one way to do anything that works for all writers. There is only the way that comes naturally to you, the way that works for you. And the more you try to write like someone else instead of yourself, the more you will fail. That's why all those people who promote fool proof methods for writing great books are scam artists.

For instance, the author of the article I linked to above attempts to compose two examples demonstrating "muscular prose" versus more wordy prose. The results are interesting to say the least. Here's his "positive" example of muscular prose:

The sun rose over the sea. It was a crisp, breezy dawn. I harbored my hangover near the pigpen.

 Now, I don't know about you, but my impression of these three sentences is less than stellar. "I harbored my hangover near the pigpen" is pretty good. It's clear, to the point and even has alliteration. (Everything is more awesome with alliteration.) However, "The sun rose over the sea" and "it was a crisp, breezy dawn" are sentences that have no life in them. They fall completely flat. In fact, they're so forgettable that by the time I got to "I harbored my hangover near the pigpen" I'd already forgotten what the setting is and I actually had to read it a few times before I realized how clever the use of the verb "harbor" was since he's near the sea. Overall, this writer is really trying to provide a good example of Hemingway's style and utterly fails. Because it's obviously not coming naturally to him.

Onto the second example, of "verbose" prose.

The late summer sun peeped over the liquid horizon, decided the coast was clear and stretched into the morning sky. I watched it emerge and glaze the rippling sea with jaundiced quicksilver. It was a crisp clear morning, the dewy grass soft underfoot, providing pleasing moisture to counter my desiccated innards. A brisk sea breeze brushed foam from choppy wavelets, blowing salt-scented air overland to season the stench from a nearby swine-pen and thus compound my gastrointestinal in-brawling.

First, the writer is clearly trying too hard and ends up making this an obviously far too extreme example.(ANY writing style taken to an extreme is bad, unless you're writing comedy.) That said, the author can't help, even in his attempt to write badly, coming up with some really lively metaphors and imagery. I LOVE the sentence "The late summer sun peeped over the liquid horizon, decided the coast was clear and stretched into the morning sky." It's so vivid and the words are strong. Here I can really see what he's describing instead of my mind just glazing over it in boredom. "Dessicated innards" and "gastrointestinal in-brawling" are fantastic little descriptions as well. The writer clearly has a gift for it and I hate the thought of him being convinced that he needs to write the way he did in the first example to be good.

The point is that how you write depends on who you are and you should never write the way someone else does if it doesn't fit your talents. A writer who attempts to use Hemingway's style against his own nature will aim for prose that looks like this:

Rawr.

but end up with prose that looks like this:

Ew.

You don't want that do you?

Thoughts on... Titles

Titles have always given me trouble which is why I tend to just refer to the stuff I write by such vague terms as "my WIP", "my story", or "my other story". Part of me spends the whole time desperately hoping that by the time I'm done writing I'll be able to find a good title. Because titles are pretty important, you know?

The title is often the first impression one gets for a given book. And as much as we tell ourselves not to make judgements based on first impressions, we just can't help it. And gosh darnit, I want to have a good title!

Recently my husband pointed me in the direction of a couple of blog posts about titles written by sci fi author Mike Flynn. Entitlement Part I Entitlement Part II In these posts not only does he give his thoughts on titles, but also the thoughts and favorites of several of his author friends. He lists a few properties that he thinks a title should have:

1.  Arresting

A title should catch your eye, causing you to pause and wonder.


2. Suggestive

A title should give some idea of where the narrative is heading or at least indicate that something interesting will be happening. Playing on metaphor and symbolism or invoking atmosphere are a good way to hint at what is to come without revealing too much.

3. Challenging

You can also catch a reader's attention with a title that challenges him. Perhaps a title that works on multiple levels or one where the meaning only becomes apparent after reading the story. Though be careful not to tip over into pretentiousness.

4. Rhythm

A title can also attract readers by having a good beat or flow. Alliteration is often a fun way of accomplishing this.

I read those posts about two weeks ago and I guess subliminally they must have been working on me all this time since yesterday I managed to come up with a title for my current WIP. And I really like it. I'm calling it a working title for now, but I think it will probably end up as the finished title. Here it is:

The First Day

So what do you think? Does my title fulfill any of the above criteria? Does it sound intriguing to you? How do you find your titles? Is it difficult or easy for you?