Thinklings Books: Publishing Quality Fantasy and Sci-Fi

Well, here it is: big announcement time.

I'm the new CEO of Thinklings Books, LLC, a publishing company dedicated to publishing quality fantasy and sci-fi.  And by "quality," I mean that, unlike traditional publishing companies, we publish books based on how good they are, not on the social media platforms of their authors.  That means great reads every time, guaranteed.

Speaking of social media . . .

facebook.com/ThinklingsBooks

We're working on boosting Thinklings Books' own social media platform, because we want to reach out to readers and writers worldwide.  My part of this is running our YouTube channel.  Our first video is up:

And future videos will come out at least every two weeks, with interesting and informative videos for readers and writers.  Please subscribe and join us in promoting really amazing writing and writers. :)

(But don't worry; I'll keep posting here, too.)

Where to Get Ideas

The old cliché of a question from fans and reporters to authors is, “Where do you get your ideas?”  Most authors find this a very difficult question to answer, simply because there isn’t one specific place they get their ideas.  “Ideas just come to me,” they say, or “out of my head” or “from anywhere.”

Yes, these things are true.  But what many of these questioners are actually asking is, “How can I get ideas for writing?”—for which none of those answers is helpful.  I would therefore like to give some actually useful advice for coming up with ideas and brainstorming when you feel stuck.

What ideas you get “out of your head” depends on what you put into your head.

One of the greatest dangers for a writer, when it comes to coming up with new ideas, is stagnation.  If you only read the same things, go to the same places, talk with the same people—it’s easy to dry up.  Diversity is the key here.  Choose to randomly go somewhere new.  Make sure you keep learning new things.  Occasionally read National Geographic or some other magazine of your choice from which you can learn things you not only never knew, but never knew you wanted to know.

Now consider: what do you spend a lot of time thinking about?  Are you thinking about a variety of topics, or just the same three to five things over and over again?  Do you think continuously about (from my own life), 1) your dog, 2) what you’re going to make for your next meal, 3) your current goal . . . and not much else?  If so, you are constraining your own brain.  Go find something different to think about.

Not sure what to think about?  Go to https://randomwordgenerator.com/.  Take the FIRST word it generates, and then go read the Wikipedia article on that word and learn something.

(Excuse me for a moment, I need to go read about “mouse.”)

Most really clever ideas are in fact the combination of two or more seemingly unconnected items.

The second random word I generated was “election,” so I have mouse + election.  So let’s write something.

The first mouse President of the United States was not, despite all expectations, named “Mickey.”

or

This is the tale of how a theme park/movie company came to rule the world.

or

We shuddered, terrified in our homes.  We’d thought the aliens had been bad, but then the mice had stepped up to protect us, and we found ourselves under far worse dictators.

or

Jimmy would never have elected to transform in a mouse, but he hadn’t had much say in the matter.

or . . . or  . . . or . . .

You see what I mean?  It took me all of two minutes to write those ideas, and I could’ve kept going for a very long time.  If I started to get stuck, all I had to do was a) learn more about mice and/or elections (don’t assume you know!  There may be interesting little facts you never guessed with hiding within articles), or b) grab a third random word (“tooth”).

The position of tooth fairy was, naturally, always held by the elected head of the mice.

This technique isn't only for new stories, by the way.  If you’re in the middle of a novel and come to a road block, this is one way to get through it: introduce a new, unexpected mouse (or other random factor).

Don’t starve your brain.  Read your genre.

This ties into the first factor, but from a specific angle.  I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: read more than you write.  Devour novels you adore that are in the same genre as you write.  Don’t read garbage; read what you love.  Remember that when you’re reading, you’re feeding your brain.  You can feed it nutritious food (quality prose with depth of story) or you can feed it junk food.  And the quality of your writing and of your brain refreshment will reflect that.

Earning Your Happy Ending

There is a thriller movie starring a famous actor based on a novella by a famous writer.  The main character is also a writer, and a major plot point in the movie is the importance of having the right ending.  It is not enough to slap an ending on; if it’s not the right ending, it’s not good enough.  It must be fixed.

Ironically, the movie has a different ending from the novella—and, in my opinion, a much better ending.  You see, the novella ends with a slapped-on happy ending: a minor cop character from a hundred pages earlier reappears at exactly the right moment, having figured everything out, and saves the day.  (See my last month’s post, Stop Cheating Your Reader.)  By contrast, the film ends with . . . no one coming to save the day.  The person in danger has to fight for life herself and win or—as in this case—lose on her own merits.

I like happy endings, personally.  I like my media to have the possibility of hope throughout the narrative, and to end happily.  But more important to me than something ending happily is it ending appropriately: no deus ex machina.

I once saw something write that a deus ex machina never works except in Diana Wynne Jones’s Dark Lord of Derkholm, but I would argue that that book doesn't have an ex machina: it clearly establishes at multiple points in the narrative that the gods in the world could take action under certain circumstances.  (On a side note, Dark Lord of Derkholm is one of my very favorite books by my absolute favorite author; 100% recommended.)  My point here is: having powerful characters come in at the last moment to lend aid isn’t cheating your ending or a deus ex machina if those powerful characters aren’t coming in out of nowhere—if they’re established throughout the book and then called upon.  The only time I think a deus ex machina isn’t horrifying is when done in a comedy or parody . . . but even then, presumably the rules of the universe have been established to show the audience that sharp turns and randomness can come out of nowhere, so it’s sticking with its premise.

And, for the record, I’ve always hated the ending to Monty Python and the Holy Grail.

But I’m digressing.  Let’s go back to right endings.  In this case, to one of my own books: The Fifth Tunnel.  Many authors have a book they wanted to write before they died.  For me, it was The Fifth Tunnel (which I always called Waste Pit).  I was originally inspired by a dream when I was 12. Knowing I needed to write it, I figured I’d better get it over with soon in case I died early, so I wrote the first draft at 17.

The Fifth Tunnel does not have a traditionally happy ending.  In fact, it has by far the most tragic ending of all of my books.  It is full of melancholy and loneliness.  Although I did not understand this while writing it, in many ways, the book is about depression: about the downward, reinforcing spiral of depression and its inevitable end, if it is not stopped. 

When I told my mother, while I was writing it, the ending, she said she couldn’t believe any story could realistically end like that and she was sure it wouldn’t be right.  When she finally read the book, she was forced to concede that it was the perfect ending for the book—although she hated the ending and wished it were happy.  But I got her to agree that a "happy" ending wouldn't have been appropriate.

I wish the ending were happy, too.  I wish it could have been both right and happy, but it couldn’t—and, when given the opportunity, I will always choose right over happy.  In life and in books.

. . . and now I am feeling rather melancholy, although I didn’t mean to go down this path.  So I’ll just leave you, fair reader—and you, who may be a writer:

Let your ending be the right one.  Let it be the inevitable, truthful one.  Let it be the deserved one, the one that does not cheat or ex machina.  Let it fit your tone and your message and your characters.  Let it fit.  Please.  I would rather shed tears over honest sorrow than be left cold by false joy.

Although, mind, if the truthful ending is a happy one—I’d like that even better.

Treating Characters with Dignity (or not)

I mentioned in an earlier post that I was watching the anime Bleach.  This post is not about the show; it's just that it made me think about the idea of treating characters with dignity—or not treating them with dignity.  Anime makes this concept easy to see (if your character makes a crazy silly cartoon face because they’re upset, you’re not treating them with dignity), but the concept holds true throughout all stories.

I’ll try to break it down a bit.

Treating a character with dignity means never making fun of him or inviting your reader to laugh at him.

Now, the interesting thing about this is that you aren’t changing what the characters are doing or feeling, only how you are presenting their actions and thoughts.  It’s irrelevant whether your character is dignified or not.  It’s entirely possible to treat an undignified character with dignity or vice versa.  Indeed, in real life, treating yourself with dignity generally doesn’t mean being rigid and proper all the time—it means being okay with looking stupid. 

Think about acting.  If an actor is embarrassed and acting like he thinks he looks ridiculous, then he will look ridiculous.  If he instead totally gets into his role, he’ll look awesome—even if his acting isn’t all that great.  In real life, if you get up to give a speech and rub your hands awkwardly and say, “Ah, this is awkward; I haven’t prepared” you’ll look pathetic.  If you get up and give the crowd a big cheesy grin and announce that you haven’t prepared, you’ll look great.

In stories, a villain who tries to make the beautiful princess marry him can certainly look ridiculous, pathetic, and laughable—or he can look tragic, pitiable, and romantic (a la Phantom of the Opera).  Likewise, if the villain loses his temper and starts screaming threats, the author can make him look silly or she can make him look terrifying, but—and note this—she cannot do both simultaneously.

Denying a villain dignity will rob him of his power to scare the reader.

Which may be what you want.  Indeed, this is a very powerful tool in real life: if you can make your opponent look ridiculous, then 99% of the time, you have won the psychological battle—and the rest follows quickly.

For some stories, a villain treated without dignity for laughs is great fun, but I’ve also seen it done in a way that totally undermined the story simply because the author didn't understand.  I once edited a book in which the protagonist was strong and perfect and the villain was weak and cowardly.  I tried to explain to the author that this made me want to root for the villain, because the villain was the underdog and I couldn't identify with the protagonist . . . and the author responded by making the villain even more weak and cowardly and thus even more of an underdog.  By treating his villain without dignity and asking the reader to laugh at  how weak he was (and doing the opposite with his hero), what author accomplished was that he evoked sympathy for the villain and got the reader to side with the villain.

Sigh.  But on the plus side, this leads us to my next point:

Treating a character with dignity creates a barrier between character and reader; treating a character without dignity brings character and reader closer together.

Have you ever tried to be close buddies with someone who’s distant and aloof?  Do you even want to be friends with such people?  Aloofness creates a do-not-mess-with-me barrier.  (This may or may not be intentional; the trick, in books and real life, is to recognize what you’re doing and use it appropriately.)  I’ve used proper politeness in real life as a means of defense—and of forcing a dangerous party to act properly toward me.  It doesn’t always work, but I believe it has several times kept me safe. Now, in a story, it's whether you treat the character with dignity (not whether the character is dignified) that creates the barrier.  So ask yourself: Do I want to create a barrier?

It depends on your aim.  I’d say that 99.99% of the time, you do not want to create a barrier around your protagonist, because you want your reader to identify with him.  But beyond that, it depends on what you’re aiming for with each character.

Which characters should you treat with dignity?  It’s up to you.  Just make sure you’re making the choice purposefully and that you know the consequences of it.

Stop Cheating Your Reader

As a writer, reader, and editor, I believe very strongly in not cheating.  This can take several forms, but what it comes down to is this:

Cheating means taking the easy way out instead of giving the reader satisfaction.

Every writer has things they’re good at writing and things they’re bad at—and every writer has things that come easily and things that are hard.  To give an extreme example: I once edited an action thriller novel . . . that had no action in it.  The entire thing was dialogue scenes about the action.  So in one scene, the characters would be talking about this terrifically difficult and dangerous heist they were going to pull, and in the next scene, they were talking about how, yes, the heist went off just fine.

Are you kidding me?  Where’s my heist?  You can’t dangle that in front of us and not show it!  That’s cheating!

But I get it: cheating is awfully tempting.  My guess is that that particular author found action sequences difficult to write, and so just wrote around them.  I don’t find action difficult to write—my struggles come with interpersonal-relationship-growth sequences.  They’re really, really tough for me, but they need to be done in order to achieve a satisfying story.  So I write them even though they're really hard for me.

But I didn’t actually write this post to talk about cheating by avoiding writing particular scenes but about cheat endings.  I once saw these called “weasel-y ways out,” and that’s a pretty good description.

Cheat endings are endings that use convenience to avoid consequences and to reset the circumstances to what they were at the beginning of the story.

Here are some common ones:

·       It was all a dream!

·       Then all the people not in-the-know lost their memories

·       Then the protagonist lost his memory and went back to life as usual

·       Once the bad guy was defeated, the protagonist lost his powers

With very, very few exceptions, these are horrible endings.  They’re vastly unsatisfying—and they’re generally completely unnecessary.  Why did it have to all be a dream?  Why couldn’t it have just been real?  Why couldn’t the entirety of New York have seen the aliens/magic and this spiked a new age?  Why couldn’t our protagonist have remained awesome and kept moving forward instead of regressing—thus completely undoing all the growth we spent the entire book on?

For a book to be satisfying, actions need to have consequences.

I specified earlier dream/lose memory/lose powers endings were cheating because they relied on author convenience.  If you’re writing a series, it’s really tough to have your whole world change, so you may come up with a convenient way to avoid this.  If your focus really, really isn’t on the change, then you might want to come up with a way around it—but:

Unless you fully integrate a reset ability in your universe (a la Men in Black), then resetting is cheating. 

If you’re wondering how this rant came about, it’s because I spent countless hours with a series, only for the protagonist to lose all his powers and get sent back to square one.  It was so frustrating.  It was a lazy way to get him a slightly different power set when he got his power back—but we’d already seen him gain power; we didn’t need to see it again.  Besides, the powers he'd had before were far from fully explored, and if he kept them, there would be some difficult consequences; so robbing him of his powers was a lazy way for the author to avoid dealing with the consequences of him having them.

To add insult to injury, the protagonist’s friends had just witnessed his immense powers for the first time—and we didn’t even get to see their reactions or what happened the next time he (sheepishly) came up to them.  What an amazing scene that would be!  Awkwardly explaining that, heh, yes, he was one of the most powerful people in the universe . . . funny how these things happen.

It would have been amazing to see that protagonist go forward, now that his powers were too great to be easily controlled.  It would have been incredible to see him interact with his friends after they saw him as he was.  And instead, he became a normal boy again, the end.

I just felt so . . . cheated.

I called 911 yesterday . . .

I was walking my dog Flora around my parents’ neighborhood and talking on the phone with a friend.  

Suddenly, I hear a gunning engine and squealing tires.  I turn, and see a black Ford car turning wildly on top of the raised median in the middle of the street.  The car turns my way and accelerates at me.  I calculate which way to go and run up hill away from it, putting more fence between us and pulling Flora along.

The car crashes through the wooden fence and hits more fence, shattering its windshield.  The car screeches to a stop and then hurls backwards, accelerating back off the sidewalk, across the street, and up onto the median again—and taking a huge chunk of wood-and-wire fence with it, which it deposits on the median.

The car turns crazily and then slams on the acceleration again, bulleting through a different section of fence, across a dipped patch of grass.  I’m already dialing 911.  The car stops, rams backwards, destroying more fence.  I’m on the phone with the operator, spitting out the license plate number, the make and color, and the cross streets.  The car accelerates forward again at yet more fence and hits it at speed.  But it also hits pots full of concrete and gets wedged on them.  Two wooden fence posts impale the windshield.  The driver tries to keep driving but can’t. 

Three passersby come up to the driver and try to talk with her.  I stay down the street, unwilling to get closer to this lunatic and still on the phone with the 911 operator, who is telling me to breathe.  I am nice to her, and don’t explain that although I’m hyped up on adrenaline and speaking quickly, I’m neither afraid nor panicking.  It was just too weird, too fast, too dissociating to be traumatic.  What are we in, a B movie?  

The driver finally gets out of her car.  She’s white with brown hair, wearing (I tell the 911 operator), neutral gray-brown slacks and a matching patterned shirt.  She’s an adult of indeterminate age, and having trouble standing.  She is now attempting to get back into her car and not doing a great job of it.  She finally manages it, and pushes a wooden fence post out her shattered windscreen with her bare hand.  I know she’s going to attempt to start driving again, but that’s when the police cars arrive, sirens blaring and lights flashing.

It’s been not even two minutes.

The driver gets out of the car and talks to the police officers.  One asks her to walk in a straight line, but she can’t; she can barely stand.  She shows him her hands, which are covered in blood.  I can hear only part of what is said, I’m so far away.  But she says her name she doesn’t remember the accident.

The police interview another witness, a lady who lives nearby and only saw part of it, and was one of the three who came up to ask if the driver was all right.  I’m left to wait for now; I think the police aren’t sure if I’m just a rubbernecker, but the 911 lady told me to wait.  It’s mildly hot, and Flora is upset.  My friend calls me and asks what happened—I said “oh my gosh,” there was a clatter (had I dropped my phone?  No, it was the fence) and then the call ended.  I’d forgotten I’d been on the phone with her, and I briefly explained.

The police officer asked the driver her name.  It was Debbie, of all things . . .

A police van, a policeman on motorcycle, a fire truck, and an ambulance join the scene.  Debbie is strapped into the ambulance and taken away.  I wonder if I can leave.  A police officer finally comes up to me and asks if I’m a witness.  I tell him that yes, in fact, I saw the whole thing—she nearly ran me over, and I called 911. . . .

He explains that Debbie is not a DUI but severely diabetic and having a low blood sugar blackout.  On top of that, she’s hearing impaired—hence why she wasn’t communicating well with the passersby.  She will be held responsible, of course, and will have to take better care of herself if she wants to keep driving.  He’s glad I’m not hurt.

Later that day, I take my mom to show her the spot so she can visualize it, and we meet the owner of the fence.  He apparently came home to a bafflingly ruined fence and a note on his door from the police.  The smashed car is gone, and the bits of fence scattered on the sidewalk and median have been tidied up.  I explain to him what happened.  He says he’s diabetic and has family members with severe diabetes, and that you can feel problems coming on and deal with them before they get back (instead of getting behind the wheel).  He always keeps candy bars with him.

So that was fun.

(On a side note: my first cousin once removed, who's English (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jasper_Griffin), once remarked that he rather enjoys the American way of telling stories in present tense.  I almost always think about that when I tell stories like this because, yes, I pretty much always do so in present.)

Understanding Magic

A couple of years ago, I read a book that went something like this:

Villain creates a doppelganger of a girl.  In order to survive, the doppelganger must devour the girl’s possessions: this restores the doppelganger’s power and likeness.  The villain tells the doppelganger that in order to live a full life, the doppelganger must devour the girl.  Instead, the doppelganger teams up with someone who has a convenient magical watch who can extend her life.  It works, the villain has a Disney death, the end.

I was appalled by this solution.  In addition to being unsatisfying and full of plot holes, I said to myself: This author doesn’t understand magic!

Oh?  Then what should the solution have been?

The doppelganger should have eaten the villain!  We know she restores her power by eating, and the villain was the ultimate source of the magic that kept her going—and that would have satisfyingly defeated the villain in a way that made sense and wasn’t simply convenient.

Now, from a storytelling perspective, I stand by this.  But what a strange thing to think: “This author doesn’t understand magic!”  Understand magic?  Magic isn’t real!  Why am I treating it as a universal?

Contrast this to a book I just finished rereading for the first time in years: Clive Barker’s The Thief of Always.  I don’t usually do this, but while reading it, which approaching the climax, I thought: This author understands magic.

Again, what a peculiar thing to think!  Why do I feel that I (or anyone else) can understand magic in the same way I understand weather or seasons or food?  Magic isn’t real! 

And yet I do find that I have a very solid and stubborn understanding of what magic is and is not.  The rules change, but there the essence, the ultimate base underlying principal, does not:

Magic is a raw, wild thing, though it may sometimes seem tame.  It works by primeval laws.  The deeper and older the magic, the more this is true, and the more it demands blood and sacrifice—and not necessarily the kind you expect.

Where do I get this idea?  Because although my understanding is not uncommon, it’s also not universal.  Have I gotten it from the books I’ve consumed, especially those I consumed in my formative years?  The Narnia books have magic like this; so does Diana Wynne Jones.  So do so many other authors.  So do many of the books I had read to me when I was very small—Lawrence Yep’s Dragon Quartet, for example.  But I don’t get my idea of magic only from words of the past century; it’s much older than that:

This is the sort of magic one finds in fairytales.

I’m not just talking about the Brothers Grimm here.  As a child, as today, I love reading fairytales from around the world.  The details change, but underlying them, the rawness is there: it is there in Chinese, Japanese, Russian, German, Romanian, Norwegian, and Celtic folklore—and a great many other places besides, whose stories I have read less recently.  It is in the folklore of countries divided by time and culture and distance, individually developing their own versions of vampires, ghosts, tricksters, and child-snatchers—of the monsters that live in the forest and in the lake and under the bed; of the things that only come out at night. 

Magic is the power of fear given manifestation—and stories are the manifestation of hope and the human spirit given to defeat that power (and, sometimes, to harness it; and it often allows itself to be harnessed, though deep in its heart, it never fully forgets that it was once a wild thing).

So now I have put into words, however clumsy, my understanding of magic.  No wonder I write so many monsters in my books.