Month: October 2022

Reblog: Why Plots Fail — Tiffany Yates Martin

Today’s reblog comes from Tiffany Yates Martin over at Jane Friedman’s blog. She discusses some reasons why plots can fail, because the important components aren’t working in harmony.

Many authors embark on a new manuscript with one of two common inspirations: a great idea for a plot, or a fascinating character and situation.

Both can be good springboards for story, yet without more development, each may result in stories that peter out, dead end, or get lost in rabbit holes (especially during the breakneck pace of NaNo).

Plots most commonly fail when:

  • they’re approached as an isolated element of story, a series of interesting events for authors to plug their characters into, or
  • when interesting characters are randomly loosed into an intriguing situation with no specific destination or purpose.

Read the rest on Jane Friedman’s blog…

Three Things I Learned From Sundiver

In my recent post on dissecting influences, I mentioned the Uplift double-trilogy by David Brin. At the time I wrote that, I was looking for another book to read with my kids at bedtime, and decided that this would be a good time to revisit the series.

Now we’ve finished the first book, Sundiver, and the kids enjoyed it enough to want to keep going. It had been more than a decade since I last read the book, so my memory of it was vague and tinged with nostalgia. It’s a good book, but maybe not quite as good as I remembered. The world-building is solid and the diverse alien species are a highlight (although that all gets much further developed as the series goes on). The dialogue and characterization are sometimes a little clumsy. The main character is honestly a bit of a weirdo. But weak characterization is nothing new in plot-driven sci-fi, and I think Brin still does a better job than someone like Asimov.

The book is structured as a mystery, centered around the discovery of two new species of aliens living in the upper layers of Earth’s sun. This mystery turns out to be the focus of conspiracies and alien politics. The main character, Jacob Demwa, is a Sherlock-esque genius who is dealing with the psychological fallout of his traumatic past, and it falls to him to figure out what’s really going on.

1 – Great Clues Are Memorable, Not Obvious

As the story progresses, we see more and more of the behavior of the aliens on the Sundiver ship. Some things come off as strange, but most of it is fairly mundane. Some of the human characters parse these actions much as they would for other humans. The more savvy among them understand that an action doesn’t necessarily correlate to the same emotions or motives in aliens that it might among humans.

This serves as worldbuilding, but these alien actions are also clues. To the reader, the aliens are already a little mysterious, so it’s easy to chalk up any of their behavior as “alienness” unless it’s really clearly suspicious. Focusing on their actions, and even describing the same things repeatedly, ensures that the reader will remember these incidents. However, the significance will only become clear later in the story, as Jacob begins to understand what’s going on and as more is revealed about the alien species.

For some veteran mystery readers, this may be irritating. If you are trying to solve the mystery before the answers are all revealed by the book, it’s going to be frustrating to discover that you didn’t have all of the context and information about these aliens that would allow you to fully understand what their behavior meant.

I think speculative fiction readers may be more open to this kind of storyline, because they’re used to the exercise of discovering the details of the world as the story progresses. However, I’m more of a sci-fi enthusiast than a mystery reader, so I may be biased.

2 – Clues Should Point to Multiple Possibilities

This may seem obvious to readers and writers who have thought a lot about mysteries, but it’s an important lesson on effective mystery structure. A clue that points to multiple possibilities broadens the scope of the mystery, while a clue that only has one explanation narrows the scope.

Many of the clues laid down in Sundiver could be explained by several different characters acting with different motives.  There are at least two humans and two aliens who seem somewhat suspicious, and many of the clues could point to each of them.

The initial mystery of Sundiver is set up fairly early on, although it morphs and changes a few times before the end. At the same time, the suspicious characters are all introduced early on as well. Some of them have more obvious motives, but some of them are suspicious simply because of their interactions with the other characters. Some are just irritating, causing trouble for the nicer main characters, and that’s enough to seed at least a little suspicion in the reader’s mind.

This cast of potential scoundrels is already nicely established when problems appear and things begin to go wrong.

3 – The Detective Can Be Wrong…For a While

The main mystery of Sundiver is solved about 2/3 of the way through the book. There is a classic reveal scene where Jacob Demwa gathers the characters and spells it all out. The villain is taken into custody. At this point, my son asked if we were almost done, and he was shocked when I told him that we still had over a hundred pages left.

This is a dangerous play. Brin purposely defuses the main source of tension in the story, with a lot of the story still to be told. He only keeps a few loose threads dangling: the personal problems of the main character (which has been a B-plot for most of the book) and some concerns around those freshly discovered aliens living on the outskirts of the sun.

The book then has to reveal the true villain and lead into a suspenseful finale. This knocks the “detective” character down a peg: he was wrong about the most critical thing in the story. It also pays off all that work into clues that point to multiple possibilities, and ideally even clears up one or two things that a clever reader may have noticed not fitting neatly with the first, false resolution.

An Interesting Crossover

Sci-fi/Mystery strikes me as a challenging mix of genres to write. The difficulties of creating a believable future world and the difficulties of crafting an intricate puzzle only seem to further complicate each other. I appreciate Brin’s offering, even if there were one or two places where it didn’t quite work for me.

This is also one of his earliest works. I’m partway through the second book in the series now, and it manages to be cleaner and more tightly written, despite a much larger cast of characters. So, we’ll keep reading, and may be pulling more lessons from the rest of the series.

Razor Mountain Development Journal — Chapter 18

This is part of an ongoing series where I’m documenting the development of my serial novel, Razor Mountain.

You can find my spoiler-free journals for each chapter, my spoiler-heavy pre-production journals, and the book itself over at the Razor Mountain landing page.

The Great Act II Chapter Consolidation

In my previous journal, I talked about consolidating two chapters (as defined in the outline) into one: what is now posted as Chapter 17. It made sense because they were consecutive chapters, contiguous in the narrative, and both were shorter than I expected when I finally wrote them out. Also, because of the way I had laid out the surrounding chapters, it was easy to shuffle them around and avoid having to change the structure too much.

With this fresh in my mind, I started working on Chapter 18 and quickly determined that I should do the same thing once again. In fact, several of the chapters from Christopher’s point of view in Act II are going to be short, even in the outline. I think I was trying a little too hard to keep the 2:1 ratio of Christopher and God-Speaker chapters when it really doesn’t serve the story so much as give me the satisfaction of a mathematically precise outline.

There’s nothing wrong with short chapters, but the chapter breaks need to serve a narrative purpose, and some of these just weren’t doing that.  After combining two more chapters to form the new Chapter 18, I decided to spend some time re-evaluating the rest of Act II for more consolidation. I had also trimmed enough that I could no longer keep my 2:1 ratio, so I needed to figure out how to correctly order the remaining chapters.

Reordering

Reordering different narratives within a book can be a real pain, especially when you have multiple points of view or time periods to keep track of. As Lemony Snicket told us, stories are a series of unfortunate events, and you’ve got to make sure your causes and effects happen in the right order (unless you’re doing some really crazy time-travel shenanigans).

Luckily, Razor Mountain only has two points of view, each in a very different time. Different parts of those narratives fit together to reveal bits and pieces of the larger story together, but in many cases the ordering of the actual chapters is not that critical.

However, there is a single major “connection point” where the two timelines and points of view come together. This is where several major mysteries are resolved (although a reader who is paying attention will probably know what’s coming). This big moment in the narrative is situated neatly at the end of Act II, and the structure and point of view will change once again going into Act III. So my main concern with rearranging chapters is to ensure that the secrets aren’t given away before the end of the act, and that this section of the story still builds up to the final two or three impactful scenes.

I’ve now done my rearranging and I’m fairly happy with it. I’m still considering some changes right at the end, but I’ll look at that more seriously when I get to those chapters.

Next Time

Chapter 19 will finally get us back to God-Speaker. With the combined chapters, it feels like it has been even longer than usual since we last spent time with him. His narrative is still time-jumping, so it’s been an even longer wait for him. God-Speaker has already been through a lot, but in these next few chapters I’ll be working doubly hard to show how events come to shape God-Speaker’s personality and who he eventually becomes.

Razor Mountain — Chapter 18.2

Razor Mountain is a serial novel, with new parts published every week or two. For more info, visit the Razor Mountain landing page.

Time was difficult to judge in the cell. There was no window to observe the cycles of the sun and moon. The bright lights set into the high ceiling were unrelentingly bright. Every cough, sniffle and movement echoed back at him from a room full of hard surfaces.

At first, he sat quietly, assuming that someone would eventually come to interrogate him. He tried not to think about what they might do to him, but was mostly unsuccessful. He thought about what he ought to say, how he might word his story so that they would believe him. There would be evidence of his stay in the bunker. The ruins of the crashed plane would still be scattered across some nearby mountainside. The airlines would have records of his ticket. His company could vouch for him. Unfortunately, day jobs and plausible excuses were probably the sort of thing a real spy would also have.

There was also a long list of unlikely events that he could not explain. Why had the plane gone down in the first place, and where had the other passengers gone? How had Christopher managed to survive the fall? How could he have guessed the code to the bunker while almost delirious and verging on hypothermia?

Could someone have set him up? Maybe he was a distraction to turn eyes away from something or someone else. Maybe he was a contestant on the world’s most sadistic game show. So far he hadn’t liked any of the prizes behind the doors.

He wondered if there was something he should have done differently. Even now, he couldn’t say it would have been any better to stay in the bunker indefinitely. If he had been found there, it was just as likely that it would be the Razor Mountain people doing the finding. Staying there, completely passive, might look slightly less suspicious. Or it might look odd. After all, who would simply accept their fate and decide to stay in a place like the bunker without making any effort to be rescued.

Instead, he had gone out questing, a sad little knight-errant in strange lands. He had let himself be guided by Amaranth. He had accepted imprisonment by her people. He had gone along with Harold and Garrett in their doomed scheme to curry favor with their superiors. Was there anywhere he could have gotten off that path once he had followed Amaranth through the frozen doors to the ruined underground office building? Could he have tried to escape? All along he had felt a deep unease, like he was a train headed for disaster, but unable to jump the tracks and turn away.

Christopher stood and paced in slow rectangles, walking the perimeter of his cell. He took deep breaths, trying to fight down the rising panic in his chest. He studied his surroundings. The slight dents in the stainless steel toilet. The metal shelf: a bench or a bed. The table in the center of the room, the brackets welded to the top hinting at darker purposes than facilitating friendly conversation.

When he had entered the mountain, the air had been warm compared to the outside. Now, a clammy chill gripped him. He rubbed his arms with his hands. His skin certainly felt cold.

He rubbed his eyes. Had the lights gotten brighter as well? The white walls and glaring stainless steel suddenly felt blinding. He sat on the “bed” and pressed his back to the wall, eyes closed. He breathed, feeling his heart thumping.

The room wasn’t actually silent. Though the small noises he made still seemed abnormally loud, there was some ubiquitous noise, an almost imperceptible whine. As soon as he noticed it, it grated on him. He felt a headache coming on.

As he breathed deep, he felt his panic subsiding. It was overcome by a wave of misery and self-pity. How long had it been since he had last been able to actually relax? How long since he had been free of the nagging knowledge that the universe had turned against him, that he had to fight to stay safe, or even alive?

It felt somehow childish to be so miserable. Hadn’t he led a perfectly mundane life before this? He had been comfortable. He was hardly the first person in the world to be subjected to such hardship. How many people lived through wars? How many refugees were left to fend for themselves and their families for months or years? How many lived their entire lives in abject poverty? It seemed only fair that he take his turn.

He felt petulant. He didn’t want to do this anymore. He wanted to throw a tantrum. He wanted to go home.

Even the bare comforts of the bunker would be luxurious compared to this place. The barely-discernible whine pierced his brain like a dentist’s drill.

Christopher held his breath. In all of his misery, there was one thought he hadn’t let himself think. There was another way out, an exit that he had been studiously looking away from. The ultimate exit. The idea filled his guts with lead. No, he wasn’t ready for that.

And yet, he felt the strange realization that the idea of death no longer terrified him quite as much as it once had. Out in the woods, when the snow had fallen and he knew he didn’t have the supplies to make the trip back to the bunker, he had been forced to look death in the face. Christopher knew death, at least a little. They were old friends, even if they hadn’t seen each other in quite some time.

He thought back to that moment in the woods when he made the choice to keep going. It was terrifying, but also oddly freeing. He wasn’t sure if it was fatalism or nihilism or something else, but it was a peaceful feeling. For the moment, he gave up his expectations for the future, his desperate belief that the universe owed him something.

He didn’t realize that he was slipping into sleep until he was jerked awake by a violent banging outside his cell.

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Razor Mountain — Chapter 18.1

Razor Mountain is a serial novel, with new parts published every week or two. For more info, visit the Razor Mountain landing page.

The entire group marched without speaking. Boots crunched in the thin layer of snow. One of the soldiers’ radios squawked to life momentarily, issuing a series of staccato beeps familiar to Christopher from his time manning the radio in the bunker. The soldiers weren’t particularly rough, but Christopher felt corralled, like cattle, and if he stumbled in the wrong direction, there was instantly a gloved hand on his arm, shoving him back into the center of the formation.

He glanced at his ersatz companions. Harold’s face was as impassive as ever, revealing nothing about what he might be feeling. Garrett’s brow was creased and his narrowed eyes flicked back and forth, but Christopher could see that he was focused on his own scattered thoughts rather than his surroundings. Christopher suspected a battle raging inside the man’s head: would his risk be rewarded, or had he voluntarily ruined himself and his brother?

The soldiers marched them up a shallow ravine between hills, then into a deeper gorge where the ground was rocky and steep on either side. Now they were coming to the base of the mountain itself. The gorge led to a dead end, a broad stone face that had sheared cleanly from the mountain. Christopher could see the worn path where the water would run over the rocks above and into the gorge where they stood, but for the moment it was dry.

One of the soldiers walked up to the rock face and did something, his body blocking Christopher from seeing. A rectangular seam appeared as the man pulled at a section of the stone. It turned on concealed hinges, silent and perfectly camouflaged. Behind the stone facade was a heavy metal hatch, similar to the one on the bunker that was so familiar to Christopher. A lever was set within a little alcove in the door, and the adjacent keypad was also set flush with the surrounding stone, so the facade could close tightly against it.

The soldier took a step so he was between the keypad and the prisoners and punched in a code. Christopher listened to the sound, trying to guess the number of keystrokes, though he realized such little scraps of knowledge were unlikely to do him any good. He suddenly felt like his brain was buzzing, taking in everything around him.

Another one of the soldiers took out his radio and punched in another code in the keypad on its face. The soldier at the door watched him, waiting for a few beats afterward before he pulled the lever. The lever’s action was smooth and silent until it hit the far end of its arc with a satisfying clunk. The door swung open, and the soldiers immediately pushed the prisoners forward.

The entrance was too small for more than one person to enter at a time, so they had to go single-file. One soldier went through, then a second grabbed Harold by the arm and pushed him in before going through himself. Garrett went next, and Christopher was ready when the soldier next to him sent him through.

Even though it hadn’t been bright outside, it was dark beyond the door, and it took some time for Christopher’s eyes to adjust. The air was warm and carried a faintly mechanical smell, like oil and metal.

They navigated a series of long, branching hallways. Christopher couldn’t tell if the paint on the walls was a light green or a dull gray. It might have even been the naked rock, polished smooth. He wasn’t given time to stop and investigate.

He wasn’t typically prone to claustrophobia, and they couldn’t possibly be that deep underground, but he physically felt the weight of the mountain above him. It was as though the air got thicker as they went, syrupy and hard to breathe. Christopher felt dizzy, then nauseous. Sparks flashed across his vision. When it passed, his eyes were better adjusted and he no longer felt ill, but he still felt jittery and too-aware of his surroundings. He felt like he had downed too much coffee. He could differentiate the rustle of each piece of clothing as the soldiers moved around him. He could hear the tread of their boots on the smooth floor. He wondered if it was the lack of food and water over the past day catching up with him. Or just the shock of everything that had happened.

They reached the end of a hallway and moved into what looked like a separate section of the compound. The walls were brighter here, off-white. More halls branched off in three directions, but they were shorter and lined with wooden doors. At the intersection, the group split without warning or any apparent signal. One of the soldiers continued straight, fast-walking on his own. A pair of them took Christopher to the right, and the rest took Harold and Garrett to the left.

Christopher turned to look back at the brothers as they were marched around the corner. He thought he heard Garrett’s voice saying something about “bringing in an enemy spy” before the soldier behind him gave him a firm push to turn him around and keep him walking.

“I’m sure it doesn’t do me any good,” Christopher said, “but I’m just someone who got lost out here in the wilderness. That guy is determined to try to use me to help himself, and he’s going to say whatever he thinks will help him. I’m really not anyone special.”

The soldier ahead of him barely glanced back. “Please be quiet, sir.”

“Yeah. Sure.”

Eventually, they stopped in front of a doorway and ushered him inside. On the other side of the door was a big, high-ceilinged room. In each corner of the room was a jail cell made of bright metal bars. Each cell contained nothing but a metal toilet on one wall and a narrow metal bench on the other. The four cells left an open, cross-shaped central space. In the center was a metal table. On either side of this was a metal chair. All of them were bolted to the floor. The desk had four brackets welded to the otherwise smooth surface.

The soldiers brought him to one of the cells and opened the door with a small key. He felt them cut the zip tie around his wrists, before shoving him into the cell. The door closed before he could turn around. The soldier turned the key and tested the door, then the pair turned and went back out the way they had come.

Christopher grasped the bars and took a moment to study the room. Then he sat on the bare metal bench that was apparently supposed to serve as a bed. He stared at the lines on his hands, then up at the ceiling.

He had never been in jail before. He had certainly never had an experience like this. Even so, he felt a jarring sense of familiarity. He closed his eyes and pressed his head back against the wall.

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Meditation on Death

Among Buddhists, there is a type of meditation focused specifically on death. My understanding is that it is a reminder that our lives are transitory and temporary, and that we should accept and embrace that rather than fighting against it, clinging to what we have, and fearing the unknown.

This idea got me thinking, and eventually writing. I don’t know if what came out was exactly in the spirit of the meditation, but it did feel like it exposed some of my own personal truths. If you’ve ever wondered why this blog is called Words Deferred, this might serve as an explanation.

I don’t claim to be much of a poet, so I’ll apologize for the free verse, but it felt like the correct choice for this.

Sometimes, when I’ve stayed up too late again, 
and I’m climbing the stairs to bed,
exhausted,
the night’s darkness creeps in.

When I was in college, 
adults (real adults) would ask me what I was doing
with my life. 
I would tell them that I wanted to be a writer, 
but it’s hard to make a living, writing. 
I love computers too, 
so I got a degree in computer science.

I think I believed myself. 
And it was true.
It’s hard to sell stories, 
and it easy to get a job 
writing code. 
It pays well. 
It’s in high demand. 
It’s the sort of thing your career counselor would tell you to do.

I have no right to complain. 
I’m comfortable. 
I have a wife and children and I love them. 
We have a house in the suburbs and food to eat. 
We buy whatever books and games we want, 
and when I stay up too late, 
it’s not because I’m worried about money.

I find satisfaction in my job.
Sometimes. 
But not as much as in my writing. 
I don’t write as much as I feel I ought. 
When I go to bed late at night, 
I imagine myself dead, 
having written nothing of value.

Sometimes I want to shout to my children, 
“Don’t make back-up plans! 
Don’t have escape hatches! 
Burn the ships on the shores of your dreams, 
so you have no choice but to conquer them.”

There’s danger in having too much, 
in being too comfortable. 
That’s an easy thing to say 
when you’re not wondering how you’ll make rent this month. 
But that’s how I feel, 
late at night, 
when the darkness creeps in 
and I think about myself, 
dead, 
and the words I haven’t written.

Three Things I Learned From City of Saints and Madmen

I bought City of Saints and Madmen on a whim, many years ago. I suspect I was too young to properly appreciate it back then. In fact, I don’t clearly remember if I even finished it. Regardless, it left a strong impression on me and it has influenced my own work.

The book was my introduction to the New Weird, a genre that is even more difficult to define than most genres. These stories of the city of Ambergris are like fantasy in that they create a secondary world, but there are no wizards, no magic, no elves. There are elements of steampunk in the presence of post-industrial technologies, but they are props, not the focus. There are certainly elements of horror, as these stories are often dark and bleak, unsettling and violent. There is more than  a touch of the literary, the savoriness of phrasings and narrative in unusual, twisted  forms.

Recently, an even larger Ambergris anthology was printed, and I had to buy it. It is a massive tome, combining three books—City of Saints and Madmen, Shriek: An Afterword, and Finch.

Unfortunately, I discovered that this new version is missing almost everything from the appendix of the original book of City of Saints and Madmen. Even more unfortunately, this so-called appendix is almost half of the book, and it adds far more than just ancillary information. So despite having bought the new edition, I have to keep the old book for the huge chunk they cut out.

As usual, I don’t like to write ordinary reviews (and I’d be hard-pressed to review this strange book, anyway). Instead, I want to talk about what I’ve learned from it.

1 – Don’t be Bound by Traditional Narrative Forms

Vandermeer didn’t just write an anthology of ordinary stories. Instead, he presents the city of Ambergris through various narrative lenses. There are ordinary stories, but there are also pamphlets of civil history and family history, notes from psychiatrists, and a slightly deranged monograph on a fantastical type of giant squid. Hell, the squid monograph even has a ridiculously long bibliography of completely made-up sources.

Presenting fiction in some of these forms might seem like a bad idea, but Vandermeer makes it work. “Dradin in Love,” the first story, pulls you into the book with a strong narrative, providing an introduction to the city and piquing your interest. Then he expands the setting through a guidebook essay, “The Hoegbotton Guide to the Early History of Ambergris.” He keeps it light with snarky footnotes from the author, an irritable historian who considers himself above writing a cheap guide, but still does it for the easy money.

“The Transformation of Martin Lake” follows Lake, an artist who will become famous in Ambergris for his oil paintings, through the most formative period of his life.  Inserted between these scenes are the speculations and interpretations of his work by a famed art critic. As the story eventually reveals the dark secrets of his success, we see that the critic’s analysis is wildly inaccurate.

In “The Strange Case of X,” we witness an interview between a psychiatrist and his patient. The story flits from third person to first person, to the raw transcript of the interview and back again. The patient, X, turns out to be a stand-in for Vandermeer himself, institutionalized because he has become so obsessed with the fictional city that he can no longer differentiate between the real world and his own creations.

Then (at least in the original printing) we reach the purposely mis-capitalized AppendiX, itself presented as a collection of items found in X’s room at the asylum after he mysteriously disappears. Within this frame are more stories and tidbits, letters and codes. The sheer variety of forms keeps you wondering what you’ll encounter next, and in a subtle way they help to build the verisimilitude of Ambergris. This is a city with a history, with surrounding geography, with politics and art and beauty and danger, as well as hundreds of thousands of people going about their business.

Many of these forms involve multiple characters with differing opinions and interpretations. There is Lake and the critic. There is the dry history of Ambergris, and historian’s irritated footnotes. There is the interview with X, and the psychiatrist’s interpretations. Just as real people often come at reality from different angles, the characters in Vandermeer’s stories are constantly vying for narrative control.

2 – A Web of References is a Puzzle to Solve

“Dradin in Love” opens the book with a gripping story, but it also sets up much more of the book than the reader will realize at first. It introduces the Religious Quarter, Albumuth Boulevard, the river Moth, the distant city of Morrow, Borges Bookstore and the Hoegbotton and Sons mercantile empire. It introduces the delights and horrors of the Festival. Dradin and his former teacher, Cadimon, and the ubiquitous musical genius of Voss Bender.

In every single section of the book, every story and essay and letter, there are scattered little references to the people, places and things of Ambergris. Some are large and glaringly obvious. Others are extremely subtle, and sometimes even inserted into what seems to be purposely dull writing (a bibliography and glossary, for example) in order to obscure them. Characters and places that seem to be little more than decoration in one story reappear in unexpected places later on.

Once again, this makes the random selection of literary bits and bobs slowly congeal into a much more unified whole as you read deeper into it. It also encourages the reader to pay attention to all the details. The kind of reader who loves to solve mysteries and riddles will begin to see the book as a puzzle, and each subtle reference clicks into place like another piece, forming a larger picture.

Of course, the danger with this style of writing is that the reader may not want a difficult book that they have to “solve” to find satisfying. They may not want to wade through bibliographies and glossaries to find some small connection between Martin Lake and Dradin Kashmir. They may not be tantalized by the coded section at the end of the psychiatrist’s letter. They may simply be irritated. But the readers who like that sort of thing will feel rewarded by what they have found, and there is magic in the idea that you may not have caught all the secrets on the first read-through.

3 – Setting is an Engine of Story

Something I find myself often referencing is Lincoln Michael’s post “On the Many Different Engines That Power a Short Story.” Writers talk constantly about character- and plot-driven fiction, but there are really an astonishing number of ways to make a story work.

I think City of Saints and Madmen is definitive proof that setting can power a story. This ramshackle collection of elements should not feel unified. There are characters, yes, and there is plot, here and there. But it is the city of Ambergris that ties it all together. All of the other elements are in service of that. Even the author of Ambergris, X, finds himself in thrall to it, the city seemingly dictating its own creation.

I have to confess that I find this heartening. I’ve had a fictional city of my own that I’ve been slowly building for a few years, but I’ve struggled to find characters and plots that I find satisfying. I’ve considered short stories, a novel, and even a TTRPG setting. Maybe I should just follow the lesson of Ambergris. Maybe the city itself is the story.

Get Uncomfortable

I live in the suburbs, but we are within spitting distance of the city proper. Thanks to an intersection of nearby highways, most of the streets in our neighborhood don’t go through, so it’s nice and quiet, but also close to busier areas. Now, my kids range from early grade school to middle school, and this summer they’ve been eager to go out and play with their friends around the neighborhood. They want to go places and do things unsupervised.

The impression I get about children growing up in the 70s and earlier is that parenting mostly consisted of making sure that your children had a reasonable number of meals per day and did chores to build character. Other than that, children just went where they pleased. However, today’s parents have been drowned in stories of kidnappers, serial murderers and razor blades in Halloween candy all of their lives. “Helicopter parenting” is a phrase spoken with derision, and yet there is an awful lot of media focused on all of the terrible things that can happen to a child, if only you take your eyes off them for a moment.

My children want to run around the neighborhood with various other children. They are not particularly good at telling me where they’re going or keeping track of time. But I’ve forced myself to give them a little more space than I’m comfortable with. This is one of the things that I’ve had to come to grips with as a parent. Parenting is a compromise: the kids probably get less freedom than they want, and I get less control and less reassurance. As the kids get older (and they keep on getting older!) the boundaries will keep shifting.

Comfort is Stagnation

My own complete comfort as a parent is not necessarily what is best for my kids to grow and become self-sufficient and responsible. And my own comfort as a writer is not necessarily what is best for my stories to grow and improve. That’s right, you just walked into a metaphor!

Discomfort is the natural human reaction to shifting boundaries and new ideas. To challenge your limitations and grow, you have to work on something you’re not entirely sure you can do. Sometimes these experiments lead to success, and sometimes they fail. But whenever I try some new and difficult writing project, I end up taking away valuable new ideas, experience and skills.

Being a good parent also requires admitting that you don’t always know what you’re doing, and you don’t know how exactly you’ll end up affecting your children. After all, the world is full of well-meaning parents whose parenting styles have contributed to their children’s hang-up and neuroses. We are all, to some extent, the products of our upbringing.

Stories, like children, are a product of their parents. My thoughts, my dreams, my ideas all come out in my writing, either directly or in subtext. My unspoken assumptions may be on the page even when I don’t realize it. However, it’s easy to self-censor.

We all have secrets and darker thoughts. Things we’re not proud of. Shame or embarrassment, enviousness, and worry. We don’t talk about these things with our co-workers. We don’t bring them up at parties. We may not even dare whisper them to our husbands and wives, our trusted relatives or closest friends.

Letting those things creep into our writing is hard. It’s like opening up your soul and letting strangers look inside. We fear being judged. Now, perhaps more than ever before, judging strangers is a popular pastime. But this kind of vulnerability is powerful.

Embrace Vulnerability

Mike Birbiglia has a show called The New One, about becoming a father, and the changes that it wrought on his life. It’s comedy, but it has serious elements too. In one of the darkest parts, he admits that he “understood why some dads leave.” He didn’t leave, but he understands it. That’s vulnerability. It’s the sort of statement that could ruin relationships. But it’s honest, and it’s one of the most powerful parts of the show.

Mike has stated that many people judge him for those statements. He gets messages about it on social media. But he also gets messages from people who connected with it, and his process of working through and accepting parenthood made them feel understood and helped them work through similar feelings.

That kind of brutal honesty, that acceptance of the truth of the situation, no matter how uncomfortable or upsetting, is a hallmark of good writing. Those are the things that audiences connect to, because your secret shame or fear or sadness or loathing feels like less of a burden when you discover that you’re not alone.

Plumb the Depths

Achieving this kind of honesty is difficult. The first hurdle is being honest with yourself. People don’t typically like to evaluate themselves with complete honesty. Luckily, we’re all complex individuals, and we don’t have to dig up all the skeletons at once.

One of the easiest ways to get started is to simply think about negative emotions. What are your fears? Are you jealous of others? What feelings do you have that you wouldn’t want to tell to others? You don’t have to write a biography of all of your problems, but sometimes, thinking through these darker aspects of the self will shed light on a topic that could be a powerful inclusion in a story.

Sometimes, taking an honest look at the unpleasant parts of ourselves can be cathartic. It’s a common-enough trope that the writer who writes about their deepest issues can use fiction as a mode of healing. Hiding from problems rarely helps fix them.

On the other hand, I’m definitely not a mental health professional. If going down these roads makes things worse, it’s possible that you need more than fiction to get to a better place. Don’t embrace the old “romantic” notions of writers who actively hurt their health for their work.

It’s also worth noting that some of the difficult truths in our lives may involve relationships with friends or family. If you’re going to put your loved ones into your fiction in a way where they will recognize themselves (or others will recognize them), talk to those people first. Don’t destroy relationships for a story.

Writer, Know Thyself

It’s difficult to infuse a story with the hard truths from our own lives, but this uncomfortable honesty can take fiction to new levels and really help us connect with readers. If your stories never make you feel exposed, consider whether you’re skirting around these areas of discomfort. It may sometimes be painful, but it’s one of the most effective ways to grow as a writer.

Razor Mountain — Chapter 17.3

Razor Mountain is a serial novel, with new parts published every week or two. For more info, visit the Razor Mountain landing page.

When the sun was above the horizon, they continued walking. Harold took some jerky from his pack and gave a piece to Christopher and another to Garrett. They walked in silence.

Christopher noticed that Garrett seemed to be scanning the ground as they went, and he finally stopped and picked up a straight stick about three feet long, with all the bark missing. He paused to take a plain white tee-shirt from his pack, and using his pocket knife he cut a square of fabric from the torso with two extra strips hanging off. Then he used the strips to tie the fabric to the stick. Finally, he tied the flag to his backpack so that it stuck up just above his head, hanging like a dead thing in the still air.

He also unloaded the rifle and slotted it onto the opposite side of the pack, through a series of straps that seemed to be designed for it. He pointed to Christopher and looked at Harold.

“Keep an eye on him.”

It didn’t seem to matter much whether Harold kept an eye on Christopher or not, because Garrett also made Christopher take the lead while the brothers walked behind. That meant Christopher would be the the first thing any sharp-eyed resident of the mountain would see, and the first thing they’d be likely to shoot at. Christopher thought about asking if he could wear the flag, but he already knew what Garrett’s answer would be.

“It won’t be long now,” Garrett said to Christopher. “We’ll either run into a patrol or be seen by a spotter. If you want to stay alive, don’t do anything that could be construed as remotely threatening.”

“That’s actually my standard operating procedure,” Christopher replied.

“Cute. If you’ve got any info that we could use to negotiate, now’s the time.”

Christopher shrugged. “Even if I did, wouldn’t it be better for me to hold onto it? Why would you do anything to help me? All you’ve done so far is kidnap and insult me.”

“What helps us helps you,” Garrett replied. “If they have reason to believe you’ve been cooperative, it might make you look a little better.”

“You think they’ll be lenient on the supposed spy who collaborated with the traitorous deserters?”

Christopher glanced back in time to see Garrett’s irritated frown. Harold looked oddly unperturbed for a man who had very recently suggested they might all be murdered before they had a chance to realize what was happening.

Christopher sighed.

“You want real truth? The truth is that, as far as I can tell, all of you have been wildly misinformed about what the outside world is like. Nobody has been very eager to share much with me, but it seems like you think it’s a lot worse out there than it really is. You’re all worried about Russia and I can’t tell if you think the Cold War is still going. I suppose it makes sense, being right next door to them, but you all still seem way too concerned.

“I realize it doesn’t really matter what I say. I’m an outsider, and everyone here has a lot of trust issues. I don’t know whether that’s justified or not, but the fact that your people are on the run from the military and might just go to prison or get shot makes me think at least some of the fear is reasonable. Meanwhile, I’m stuck out here, having been dropped down the shittiest rabbit hole this side of wonderland, and I’m more and more of the belief that I’m going to end up dead because of you. So thanks for that.”

“Just walk.”

“Sure thing, boss.”

They kept walking, a thin, hard layer of snow crunching beneath their feet. Despite the talk of being shot, Christopher couldn’t stop his mind from wandering. The human brain could only keep up the tension for so long in the face of sheer boredom.

“So what’s it like up there?” Christopher asked, pointing at the mountain that now dominated the sky in front of them.

“More like down there,” Harold said.

“What, underground, like that office where your friends were?”

“They’re not our friends,” Garrett said, “and we’re not here to play tour guide.”

“I was friends with a couple of them,” Harold muttered.

“What’s the point of all the secrecy anyway?” Christopher said. “Your people already told me that there’s this base here, and there are certainly enough other buildings littered around here to make even someone as clueless as me start to wonder what’s going on. Other countries must have satellite cameras. These places must be visible in infra-red or something.

“Knowing there’s something is a lot different from knowing what that something is,” Harold said. “You’ve heard of Area 51, right? Everyone has.”

“Sure.”

“What exactly do they do there?”

“Okay, that’s a pretty good point.”

Christopher gave up his questioning and marched in silence for a while.

The trees began to thin out. The land rose in fits and starts, hills piled upon hills, with unexpected little dips and gullies hidden by scrub bushes. They had to find narrow places to jump across or scrabble down and up. A few of these low places had ice at the bottom, and one had a thin trickle of dirty water. Christopher imagined them flooding with snow melt in the summer, the water carving up the land into little puzzle pieces, the inexorable pull of gravity doing its work over hundreds of years. Once again he was captivated by the beauty of this lonely landscape. It felt like a place outside of time, like he could walk these paths a thousand years before or after and see the same things in only slightly different arrangements.

They came up a slope and found themselves on the edge of a wide open, treeless expanse with a clear view of Razor Mountain. Perception was tricky: the roots of the mountain might only be a few hundred meters away, or still miles distant. For the first time, Christopher could see the entire vast mass of rock in all of its glorious crenulations and textures. The sunlight glinted here and there on facets of the rock and gilded the deeper ridges with liquid gold. There was very little foliage visible among the shattered boulders and jutting rock, and the nearly vertical faces made the mountain look almost as though it had burst from the ground in a single violent incident. It was a mingling of dull reds, grays and blacks. The broken twin peak was dusted with snow, but even in the bright sunlight the dull black rock looked as though it had been scorched from above by heavenly fire or some unruly dragon.

Garrett stopped and adjusted his makeshift flag. Christopher saw a meaningful look pass between the brothers before Garrett looked to him and motioned him forward. They stepped out into the open space, completely devoid of cover.

A stiff breeze blew through, whipping and cracking the flag dramatically, then everything went quiet. Christopher felt the tension hang between them. He stepped carefully; his footsteps in the gravel seemed loud. Off to the side, somewhere in the low brush, unseen birds chirped and chattered at one another. The breeze blew over the rough grass in uneven waves.

Christopher felt certain that something was coming, the crack of a gunshot or a shout from some hidden spy. His muscles were tight, vibrating with nervous anticipation. He glanced back and saw the fear in Garrett’s eyes. Harold studied the landscape around them, but he still looked calm. Whatever he thought would happen, he appeared to have made peace with it. Christopher felt a faint pang of envy.

Christopher didn’t see where the soldiers came from. He only saw the sudden change in the brothers’ expressions. He turned, and found himself facing six men in gray-green camouflage, helmets and body armor. They shouted orders as they surrounded Christopher and the brothers, though Christopher didn’t process exactly what they were saying. Something about not moving and getting on the ground, he supposed, because they immediately pressed their captives face-down to the earth. Christopher heard a thud near his head as Garrett’s backpack was removed and tossed aside. The tee-shirt flag lay on the ground nearby.

More voices and footsteps joined the others. Christopher kept his face in the rough, sharp grass, adjusting his position only to avoid getting jabbed in the eyes. He half-expected to hear the sound of gunfire or Garrett making some desperate excuses. But the guns and the brothers remained silent.

After a quick, whispered conversation among the captors, Christopher felt hands firmly grasp his arms and haul him upright. The soldiers weren’t rough or cruel; they exuded an aura of professionalism. This was what they did, and they’d do it efficiently and with a minimum of fuss. Christopher saw that Garrett and Harold now had their hands behind their backs as well, bound with black zip-ties. Two soldiers held their backpacks.

The soldiers gathered in a loose formation around the captives, weapons held ready, and they began to march, once again, toward the mountain.

Though he still had a tight knot of fear and worry lodged just below his heart, Christopher couldn’t help a slight smirk at his situation. He had swapped captors three times in as many days, but he was still headed toward the mountain. In opposition to the seasonal flow of water, pulled by gravity toward distant lakes and oceans, Razor Mountain had its own gravity, and no matter what he did, Christopher couldn’t escape its pull.

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Razor Mountain — Bonus Development Journal

This is part of an ongoing series where I’m documenting the development of my serial novel, Razor Mountain.

You can find my spoiler-free journals for each chapter, my spoiler-heavy pre-production journals, and the book itself over at the Razor Mountain landing page.

But Wait…There’s More!

I write and edit each chapter of Razor Mountain as a single cohesive unit, but I’ve been splitting each chapter into multiple parts, usually between 1,000 and 1,500 words. For blog posts, this is supposedly the sweet spot for keeping readers’ attention, and it lets me draw out each bit of the story over a couple of days, to mitigate the fact that I usually only produce a new chapter every two weeks.

I sometimes take little notes as I’m writing, and once I’m done with a chapter I write the development journal for it. Usually this means I post the parts of the chapter early in the week, and the dev journal on a Friday.

A week ago, I released Chapter 17 in two parts and thought I was done with it. I posted the development journal. I did get feedback from my wife that this chapter felt a little short and ended abruptly, but I thought that was perfectly fine, and I moved on to working on Chapter 18.

As I wrote Chapter 18, I realized that it was going to be a short one, probably not even long enough to split into two parts. And then I realized that Chapter 17 flowed directly into it, with no significant shift in time or location. I reread the part of the chapter I had finished, and I had to admit, it was really a continuation of Chapter 17.

So, I decided to merge this into the previous chapter. This week I’ll post it as Chapter 17.3, and I’m posting this “mini” development journal to explain why.

Outlining and Flexibility

I am the kind of writer who likes to outline. For Razor Mountain, I knew I was going to be posting chapters as I wrote them. That’s a scary prospect, so I spent more time outlining in detail than I ever have for any other project before.

I know there’s supposedly this great schism among writers who outline or don’t outline, but I think it’s a false dichotomy. There’s a spectrum of more or less preparation, and more or less tweaking the story as you write it.

We outliners are a little smug about knowing exactly what’s going to happen in the story, but that can be dangerous. You can miss the opportunities for improvement that present themselves during the writing process, because they don’t “fit into the plan.”

The outline is an invaluable resource for me. I can’t imagine embarking on a project like Razor Mountain and not knowing exactly how I want the plot to flow or not knowing how it will all end. I’m not that kind of writer, and I’ve seen too many serialized stories crash and burn. But I also refuse to be beholden to the outline. I consolidated several chapters in the first act, and I’m happy to do it again. I’ve changed and adjusted a few minor plot points. The outline is a tool, a safety net, to be used only as long as it’s helpful.

The Upshot

The downside of making changes as you go, and the reason some writers are loathe to deviate from the outline, is that any significant changes mean the outline has to change too. Razor Mountain is a story of two different timelines, Christopher and God-Speaker, and thanks to my particular mental proclivities I have arranged it so that we get two Christopher chapters followed by a single God-Speaker chapter. Combining or eliminating chapters throws that off.

While that kind of consistent formula appeals to me, I don’t feel the need to force it when it doesn’t serve the story. Conveniently, the two timelines are fairly independent. The characters exist thousands of years apart, so while adjacent chapters may relate to one another indirectly or share similar themes, most of the book is fairly amenable to small re-orderings of individual chapters. I can probably pull chapters back to fill in the “gap” left by combining these two chapters. I just need to make sure the pacing feels good.

As evidenced by this post, this unexpected change also throws off my posting schedule. This sort of thing would have worried me back when I first started posting Razor Mountain. However, I’m now a year into the project (holy shit, yes, it really has been a year), and I’m slowly becoming less precious about the blog and how I present my fiction to the universe at large. As a small-time blogger, I now work under the assumption that none of my readership cares about my posting schedule as much as I do.

Besides, the whole point of this project was to provide a radically open view into my writing process, and I think this is a great example of that. Look for Chapter 17.3 this week, and then a return to the usual schedule.