Additionally, I'm writing a multi-POV, ensemble story as my first book. I think most people would have advised me to start with a single MC. But again, this story requires multiple POVs and MCs.
A few months ago, I'd have added that I'm starting with a full novel, when there's lots of (good!) advice to write shorter things first. But I've recently realized that's what my vignettes are for. So, yay, I'm at least doing one thing that's not utterly foolish! 😄 3/3
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[#]WritersCoffeeClub Day 23: How do you capture a character's unique voice in dialogue?
For the most part, things like word choice and tone. That tone might occasionally be indicated by dialogue tags, though I'm of the opinion that roughly 90% of dialogue tags should just be "said" (or "asked" if that's the case). The time to use variant ones is when it will give the reader extra information — such as a character's unique voice!
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[#]WritersCoffeeClub Day 24: Do you criticize other writers? Who and in what way?
I mostly criticize things writers say, not the writers themselves. Like Stephen King's thing about not using adverbs, or Raymond Chandler's advice on having someone come through the door with a gun if you're not sure what to do next, which can easily result in a very tangled plotline full of threads with no clear antecedents. (In essence, a forest of diaboli ex machini.) 1/3
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A major exception is JK Rowling. Not only do I criticize her world-building (which falls apart the moment you give it more than a passing glance, and is a perfect example of the kind of shoddy world-building I'm determined to avoid), I also criticize her as a person. Calling her a TERF would be a misnomer, since the F stands for "feminist", and she doesn't stand up for women — not even herself, as exemplified by her bowing to pressure to use initials instead of her feminine given name. 2/3
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This piece is an insightful (and honestly kind of heartbreaking) study in what she might have done and written if she had been a feminist: https://globalcomment.com/in-praise-of-hermione-granger-series/ I wish I could read that series; it sounds pretty damn good. 3/3
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[#]WritersCoffeeClub Day 25: How long is the shortest story you've ever written? Can you link to it?
I guess I can consider my vignettes to be stories. The shortest one is the one where Jessie Nakamura comes out to her older brother, George; it's 956 words.
I haven't put it up anywhere public. (Yet. Maybe someday. After the actual book is published.)
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[#]WritersCoffeeClub Day 26: Have you entered any contests? Which would you recommend?
I haven't, and I don't know nearly enough about any to recommend any.
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[#]WritersCoffeeClub Day 27: What's been a key non-fiction book for researching your current/recent writing project?
I can't think of any non-fiction books that I've used for research on this project. Lots of non-fiction online sources, but no books.
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[#]WritersCoffeeClub Day 28: Do you make any of your work available for free? Would you?
Not yet, but once I get the book into print and set up a website for my writing (as opposed to my web development), I do plan to make some supplemental material available on that site. That will probably include some of the vignettes I've been writing for practice — some of them may get elevated to "canon" status. (As alluded to in https://wandering.shop/@kagan/113368727324413693.)
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[#]WritersCoffeeClub Day 29: What is your editing process? How do you know it is done?
First, let something sit for at least a week or two. Maybe more. Then, either open it up in my text editor, or actually print it out. Either way, start reading through it and seeing what feels awkward. What snags, or catches badly on my mind.
If I'm working with a soft copy, I'll generally edit that immediately, on the spot. But... 1/3
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...I'm getting more attracted to the printed-out, hard-copy editing, where I'll write my notes on it with one of those four-color ballpoint pens. Red for things that need to go. Blue for things I'm not sure about, or that could maybe stand a little improvement, or that just make me go, "Hmmm." Green for things that I actually like. (And no black, because that's the color that the existing, printed draft is in.) 2/3
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The only way I can think of it as "done" is when I do an editing pass and I don't change anything. I've done that with a couple of vignettes and sent them to my alpha reader, and they came back with a bunch of notes about things I hadn't even seen.
With the colored pens, it'll probably be "when there's no more red ink on it", and maybe no blue, either. 3/3
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[#]WritersCoffeeClub Day 30: How much world-building do you do before starting your first draft (if any)?
Hahahahaha 💀
Even people who have simply seen my answers on this hashtag, never mind ones who actually follow me, have probably noticed that I did huge amounts of world-building... and I haven't started that first draft yet!
(And this is for a work set in San Francisco in 2024. Imagine how much I'll do for a multi-species, parsecs-spanning space opera someday...)
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[#]WritersCoffeeClub Day 31: What's your tip for getting into a writing groove?
It's not something I can always force to occur, but: find something that hooks your interest. It might be writing a new scene; it might be editing an existing scene; it might be doing revisions or just one of those things you left yourself a note about, weeks ago, saying "do this sometime."
Just get started. Then try to build momentum.
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[#]WritersCoffeeClub Day 1: Introduce yourself in the third person, as if you're a world-famous author.
And now I'd like to introduce a man whose books have thrilled, entranced, and inspired millions of people around the globe. 1/2
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From his start in urban fantasy, writing about city wizards, to his more recent hopepunk sci-fi, and his space opera exploring different minds and different languages, his works of imagination are only exceeded by their heart and compassion. Of course, I'm talking about the inimitable, the incredible Kagan MacTane. Please give him a warm round of applause! 2/2
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[#]WritersCoffeeClub Day 2: Do you write to music? If so, do you feel it influences your story?
I have two types of music I write to:
First, my general writing playlist, which is a mix of stuff that varies in atmosphere, but is generally mid-tempo. It's intended to keep me going, keep my mind in a focused-but-loose state where I can play with possibilities, write stuff down, etc. 1/3
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Anytime it doesn't mesh with what I'm doing, I bump it to the next track (on shuffle, natch). I can do that with a single keystroke-chord, so it doesn't even interrupt my flow.
So if that one influences my story, something's wrong. It's really not supposed to. 2/3
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But second is the whole bunch of playlists I've put together for various characters. There are even a couple that are for specific scenes! And those very much are intended to influence the writing. They're to get me specifically in the mood of that character. That's their job. 3/3
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[#]WritersCoffeeClub Day 3: What's the best money you ever spent as a writer?
I can't think of a single thing. I can't recall anything I've spent money on specifically as a writer or for writing, except for the four-color ballpoint pen I got a few weeks back for hard-copy editing. That was something like $3.99. Can I really count something like that? 🤷🏻 Really, I got nothin', here.
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[#]WritersCoffeeClub Day 4: Do you find your writing skills or writer's instinct useful in other walks of life?
Not that I've noticed.
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[#]WritersCoffeeClub Day 5: Share a snippet of what you've most recently written.
It's not what I'd normally choose to share, but what the hell. Here's the opening of my latest vignette. It's just setting the scene and giving me some practice at things like descriptions (and it also forced me to figure out some side characters and background stuff), but it's not something that'll go into the book itself. Also it's 1st-draft (a natural consequence of asking for "most recently written" material).
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[#]WritersCoffeeClub Day 6: Do you ever move characters between stories (if, for example, they don't fit into one plot), or are they intrinsic to their story?
They're intrinsic to their stories.
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[#]WritersCoffeeClub Day 7: Is there one genre or subgenre you would never write?
I find Westerns boring and annoying. I'm not much into military SF, either, and I wouldn't be very good at it, having a generally anti-military mindset. I wouldn't write either of those (sub-)genres.
[Edit: Oh that's right, I keep forgetting "Christian" is also a genre. That's one I'd seriously never write, and I can't imagine any of that genre's fans would enjoy what I'd produce if I did.]
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[#]WritersCoffeeClub Day 8: Where do you get your books?
These days, largely from the Brooklyn Public Library.
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[#]WritersCoffeeClub Day 9: Do you ever use particular punctuation characters like [, ], {, }, <, >, #, _, *? How do you use them?
I haven't yet had cause to use those in my writing (as opposed to my day job of coding...), with 2 exceptions that only apply in drafts, not the finished product: 1/5
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Example, from Jessie's POV:
< Hey Jessie, what's up?
>> Not much, David. How are you?
< Doing good! Wanna hang out?
>> Cool! Meet me at Molotov's
3/5
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But, like the ALL_CAPS_NOTES, those are only in the draft version. Even when I simply format them for myself to print out and do hard-copy edits (cf. https://wandering.shop/@kagan/113391383318970874), that script already reformats stuff to have indents and text alignment, but no more angle brackets.
Someone will doubtless use a hashtag in their text messages at some point, though. That's something that would result in # making it unchanged onto the printed page. 4/5
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Addendum: I just noticed _ is in that list. I write my drafts in Markdown, so I do use _ for italics. But again, that's draft-only. 5/5
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[#]WritersCoffeeClub Day 10: Do any of your characters have pets? Tell us about them.
Margot and her family have a pet cat, Pixie. She's a grey tabby, about 5yo.
Carmen Lockhart has a 13yo cat named Random, and a 12yo dog named Shaggy. I still need to figure out their breeds, but I think Shaggy is part English sheepdog and part "some other stuff", leading to his appearance and name.
Hew Morrison has a cat and a dog, both of whom are 12yo; I haven't determined their names or breeds yet.
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[#]WritersCoffeeClub Day 11: Do you agree with Samuel Johnson, who said, "What is written without effort is generally read without pleasure"?
I'm not touching that one without knowing more about the context. I can think of ways in which it could make sense, but I'm not going out on that limb.
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[#]WritersCoffeeClub Day 12: How many times do you usually edit?
To be determined.
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[#]WritersCoffeeClub Day 13: Is there a message that runs through all of your work?
We can make the world a better place. And we should.
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[#]WritersCoffeeClub Day 14: What's the most challenging thing about writing characters of a different sex/gender from your own?
I don't honestly find it all that challenging. I just write them like people, but people who have had different experiences than me.
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[#]WritersCoffeeClub Day 15: What do you owe the real people you base your characters on?
I'm not sure just what this means. I certainly don't have any character who's just based on one single real-world person; I grab bits and pieces and mix them all around. And I also create a lot on my own. (And some of the bits and pieces I grab are from myself!)
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[#]WritersCoffeeClub Day 16: When did you reach the point when you thought: wow, I'm a writer? Are you still waiting?
I still label myself as "an aspiring writer"; I'll take the qualifying adjective off the front sometime between finishing a first draft and getting something out there on the shelves.
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[#]WritersCoffeeClub Day 17: Have you ever written anything where the POV shifts partway through to a new MC? Would you?
My WIP is intended to shift among POVs, generally at chapter breaks.
(Though not always; it's looking very much like the end of chapter 2, which will mostly have been told in close 3rd from Kevin Wingard's POV, will shift to Margot Chu's for the last few pages when she and Angel Castillo tell Kevin good-night and get on a streetcar going elsewhere.) 1/2
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It should be pretty smooth, though, because the action supports it.
Later on, the book may get more into switching at scene breaks instead of chapters. I'm not sure yet.
Anyway, if the question means, "would I start off a story in one character's POV and then switch to a second character midway through?", only if it seemed best for the story. But I think my stories tend to be multi-POV, not single. 2/2
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[#]WritersCoffeeClub Day 18: What have you written most different from your usual work?
I only have written one thing so far, so:
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[#]WritersCoffeeClub Day 19: Have still images ever inspired your writing?
I can't think of any that have (so far), no.
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[#]WritersCoffeeClub Day 20: Are novel genres helpful or constraining? A bit of both?
They're definitely helpful as a marketing aid/technique — and (unusually for me) I don't even mean "marketing" in any derogatory sense at all. As a reader, I like having some sense of what a book will give me before I spend my money and start investing my even-more-precious time on it. So they're definitely helpful in that way. 1/3
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They can even be helpful for the writer, guiding them in places where they're unsure. Can.
But when a story doesn't fit neatly into an existing genre, that's when a writer needs to say, "Okay, too bad for genres. I'm writing a cross-genre story, or a story-that-doesn't-any-genre, and that's okay." When a genre becomes constraining, that's the time to jettison it and have no qualms about doing so.
Or maybe I'd say, "If genre is constraining you, then you're using it wrong." 2/3
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Addendum: Also, Charlie Stross's advice that "a book's genre is a diagnosis, it should never be a prescription" is 💯🎯; succinct and well-put.
https://wandering.shop/@cstross/113514854998079522
3/3
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[#]WritersCoffeeClub Day 21: Do you have a day job? What is it? Do you wish you could write full-time?
I do, I'm a front-end web developer.
If my writing ever started making me more money than coding does, I'd drop the coding and become a full-time writer, sure. But I have no expectation of that happening.
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[#]WritersCoffeeClub Day 22: How did you develop the idea for your first book?
I'm still developing it, TBH. At first, it was a lot of world-building: figuring out how City shaman society has developed over the years, what groups and cliques there are, what spells there are, how training is done, etc. 1/3
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Next came the vignettes I've been working on for ~7 months. Those get me into the minds of various characters, and have helped me fill in various aspects of recent history. Many of them have led me to ask myself questions that looped back into the world-building, so it's been kind of iterative. 2/3
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Along the way, I've also been making notes about things that I want to happen in the plot. Most of those have been in the first 5 chapters, though there are definitely some later ones. More recently, those vague plot notes have been coming together into an outline for the first 5 chapters. 3/3
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[#]WritersCoffeeClub Day 23: Do you write under a pseudonym? Would you?
No. I suppose I might, if there were some good reason to do so, but I don't currently have one.
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[#]WritersCoffeeClub Day 24: What's the most challenging part of the writing process for you?
I haven't yet been through the whole writing process. So far, the most challenging part has been maintaining my motivation over such a long time, and especially after the election.
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[#]WritersCoffeeClub Day 25: How do you decide on character names?
A combination of sound/feel, meaning, and what was popular at the time the character was born.
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[#]WritersCoffeeClub Day 26: What's the best feedback you've ever received on your writing?
Given that "best" doesn't always mean "most joyfully received", I think the best feedback I've gotten may well have been when my partner let me know that a couple of moments in vignettes, where I intended one character to be sincerely comforting another, did not land the way I'd hoped, and actually made the efforts at comfort look really awkward and feigned. 1/2
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I'm still trying to fix those situations, but I'm glad to at least know about the problem. 2/2
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[#]WritersCoffeeClub Day 27: If Hollywood wanted to adapt one of your books but change almost everything, would you do it?
Fuck no.
If they want to change everything, then they don't want my book at all. They want their own thing. They can damned well do that without me.
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[#]WritersCoffeeClub Day 28: Do you try to give readers what they want or strive for originality? A balance?
Well, some readers say, truthfully, that they want to read things that are original...
Really, I don't see them as in opposition. I'm really just trying to write what I feel moved to, and I trust that there will be people out there who want to read that.
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[#]WritersCoffeeClub Day 29: What did you edit out of your most recent book?
I gather this intends something bigger than a couple of words here and there, and is more along the lines of chapters, plotlines, or characters who had to be removed. So, I'm not yet at the point where I'm making big edits like that; all I've done is minor edits on vignettes.
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[#]WritersCoffeeClub Day 30: As of now, how many stories have you written? How many more do you have planned?
So far? Something like 0.01.
Taking the loosest possible interpretation of "planned"... 5 for sure (well, 4.99), and some of those might grow into more, and also I might get more ideas somewhere along the way.
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[#]WritersCoffeeClub Day 1: Does your work make you laugh when you read it back?
Only the funny bits.
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[#]WritersCoffeeClub Day 2: From all your work, who's your favourite character?
I don't really "do" single favorite things.
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[#]WritersCoffeeClub Day 3: Do you agree with Tolstoy, who said, "The best stories come not from the conflict between good and evil, but from the conflict between good and good."
I've learned to be very wary of these quotes, but this one seems straightforward enough, regardless of context.
Anyway, I disagree with it regardless. 1/4
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Sure, Casablanca had an element of good-vs-good (although it sure as hell also had good-vs-evil, and that was the underpinning of one of its most powerful and iconic scenes — the Marseillaise overcoming the Nazis' singing).
But how about some other timeless and highly-regarded tales?
No matter what you think of the rest of the series, Star Wars episodes 4 and 5 are epic and excellent, and they're both straightforward good-vs-evil stories. 2/4
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@kagan That last part is important for me! Like, why are there so few women born in the 1970s named Jennifer in novels? It's like they take place in an AU where it was never the most popular name for baby girls for a decade running. People tend to give their protagonists "different" names, and I contrast that with Jane Austen or the Brontës, who named their characters what people were actually named in the real world.
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@JenniferdeGuzman Oddly enough, my MC Jessie Nakamura was originally a Jenny in my mind, until I checked the popularity stats for that name and saw that it took a real plunge before she was born (in 1994), so if I gave her that name, it'd make her sound a couple of decades older than she actually is.
And the fact that she's about to turn 30 is kind of A Thing in her mind and her storyline, so...
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@JenniferdeGuzman @kagan I love that Jane Austen had characters named Jane in her books.
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@ericawrites @JenniferdeGuzman And I bet she didn't even get accused of them being self-inserts! 😄
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@kagan Whenever I see one of these quotes by hoary old authors, I mentally substitute “the best” or “the only” with “I like”
Makes a lot more sense, and is a lot more useful to read these as statements of personal preference, TBH
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