“Here’s my current dirty secret. I’m afraid to tackle a novel.”

That’s the first line of a post I wrote on my K Stoddard Hayes blog, over 4 years ago. I’m reposting it now, because the writing approach below is the roadmap I’m using to write the first New Colorado novel during the coming year.

I started serious planning and outlining late in the fall. This requires not only the detailed breakdown of Book 1, but overall story arcs for the whole series of 4 or 5 novels. It’s so absorbing, so exciting, so much fun, that I didn’t notice until a couple of days ago that I have forgotten to be afraid.

So, for others who are ready to fly, here’s that post:

(July 23, 2013) Here’s my current dirty secret: I’m afraid to tackle a novel. I haven’t written a novel draft in a couple of decades — though between my worldbuilding blog and my published articles, I’ve probably written the equivalent of at least ten non-fiction books.

But a novel is different. You can put together a non-fiction book by doing the research then organizing the material in any of half a dozen ways. A novel, though, can’t be organized that way. It has to grow, organically, and what you’re growing is not a potted plant nor even a patch of flowers, but a very big tree.

This is Part 2 of my write-up of a panel from Boskone 2015:

“Writers on Writing: Talking Plot with Stonecoast MFA Faculty” – a discussion featuring faculty members from University of Southern Maine’s MFA program. The panelists were David Anthony Durham, Theodora Goss, James Patrick Kelly, and moderator Allison Hartman Adams.

[Note: I’m writing this from hand-scribbled notes from almost 3 years ago. If I have made any errors in quoting the panelists or in who made a particular comment, I apologize. My own additions and comments to what was actually said are in brackets like this.]

In Part 1, the panelists discussed their own different approaches to plot, and the problem of making a plot or a plot event believable, especially in spec fiction. Part 2 continues:

Kelly said that the typical writer lists of “10 Magic Plot Tricks” don’t always work for all situations. If you are going to attend a writing workshop, the contract you make as a writer is that the story you bring must be malleable, not yet completed.  Durham said that Mary Robinette Kowal had a formula for teaching people to write stories, but that formula is only a starting point, [writing stories] is too individual to reduce to a formula.

Michael Fry’s “Over the Hedge”* gang provides more plotting tips.

Because I’m working on the basic plot outlines of the New Colorado novels right now, it seems a good time to revisit and share my notes on an excellent panel from Boskone 2015:

“Writers on Writing: Talking Plot with Stonecoast MFA Faculty” – a discussion featuring faculty members from University of Southern Maine’s MFA program. The panelists were David Anthony Durham, Theodora Goss, James Patrick Kelly, and moderator Allison Hartman Adams.

[Note: I’m writing this from hand-scribbled notes from almost 3 years ago. If I have made any errors in quoting the panelists or in who made a particular comment, I apologize. My own additions and comments to what was actually said are in brackets like this.]

The panelists began by talking about their own plotting processes. Kelly said his stories start with either a character or an idea, which leads him into a story. He described himself as a “headlight writer” – someone who can only see a little way ahead as he writes his way through a story.

Goss, noting that she grew up reading Agatha Christie, said “I plot like a mystery writer, I like a tightly plotted story” – which she defined as a story where all the pieces are connected, though the reader may not be able to see the connections until the end.

General Leia Organa, The Force Awakens (photo: Disney/Lucasfilms)

The original Star Wars trilogy was a benchmark of my college years. After the overblown fiasco that was the prequel trilogy, I was thrilled when The Force Awakens brought back so much of what I loved in those first movies.

I love all of the new heroes of the younger generation, and I can’t wait to see their stories unfold. But the character I had waited for ever since I saw the very first stills from The Force Awakens, the character who holds me spellbound every moment she’s on screen, is Leia.

In 1977, Leia amazed me. In the middle of this macho adventure universe, she did all the things a princess and leading lady of the 70’s was not expected to do.

Note: Writer, editor and friend Melanie R Meadors just mentioned that she sent a rejection and the writer immediately blocked her on Facebook. Seems like a good day to repost this article from my K Stoddard Hayes blog, first posted October 7, 2012.

All of the following quotes are either real editorial correspondence I have received, or real questions from novice writers on various writing forums (details changed in some cases for anonymity).

I’ve written 17,000 words of a YA romance novel. How much more do I have to write for this genre?

If I tell you that a YA romance is 50,000 words, are you going to write exactly that many words then stop, even if you’re in the middle of a scene? Write and revise the story until you think it’s finished and as good as you can make it. Only then should you worry about which publishers accept novels in your genre, at the length you’ve written.

Here are 5 story ideas. Please tell me which one you like best so I can submit it to your anthology.

An idea is not a story. It’s just an idea, and 20 different writers will turn it into 20 different stories. I can’t tell whether I’m going to like your story on that idea until you write it and I read it.

I know you asked for a 2,000 word article, but I’ve given you 4,000 words because I have a lot of good material on this subject. I will bill you accordingly.

Mowgli the man-cub (Neel Sethi) and his animal family. (©2016 Disney Enterprises, Inc. All Rights Reserved.)

I never liked Disney’s animated version of The Jungle Book. Since I grew up reading Kipling’s stories, I felt the Disney version just borrowed the characters and the premise and dropped them into an entirely different, “Disneyfied” story, with juvenile cartoon comedy and a couple of catchy tunes.

So one of the great improvements I found in last year’s remake was director Jon Favreau’s commitment to draw as much from the books as he could. Those literary elements pull this version well away from the childish tone and characters of the animated movie, and also pull its storyline in some new directions.

The result is a stronger story, with a character-driven plot that creates more satisfying drama, humor and suspense.

Note: This is a repost of “How Much Description is Enough” posted on K. Stoddard Hayes.com on 9-16-2012. I’m streamlining to a single blog on worldbuilding and writing, so I will be moving the few how-to posts from that site over to this blog.

There are two kinds of writers: those who describe too much, and those who don’t describe enough. I’m of the former variety, though I’ve learned (and I’m still learning) to curb my inclination to spout pages of beautiful descriptive prose instead of getting on with the story- which is, of course, the usual problem with long passages of beautiful, descriptive prose.

Yes, many excellent writers do flood their narratives with long descriptive passages, among them Tolkien, Bradbury, and Michael Chabon. Unless you’re one of them, pipe down and keep reading. (Besides, I know plenty of Tolkien fans who skim right past those long blocks of description, anyway.)

Description is especially tricky in speculative fiction.

The moment when spectacle turns to story in Star Wars. (image: Lucasfilms)

When I was a college senior, my friends and I walked into a movie theater near campus and sat down and had our brains blown open by the first 3 minutes of Star Wars. I will never forget the impact of that genius opening: first, the Twentieth Century Fox fanfare, then, in silence, those now iconic words, “A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away…” As a reader of fairy and folktales, those words alone were enough to arrest my attention. But next – you know what comes next  – the title card and John Williams’ triumphant opening chords over the long crawl sliding into the distance. Then finally, gloriously, the slow pan down the star field to a moon, another moon, and a planet’s vast limb filling the bottom of the screen. Then a small ship shoots overhead, pursued by a larger ship that keeps growing large and larger and impossibly larger – until it fills the screen. And the story begins.

Seeing those astonishing 3 minutes on a big screen is still unique in my movie-going experience, even after 40 years.

Williams, Jane and Tarzan try to figure out if the village they’re in is real or green screen. (All images: Warner Bros)

Assuming you like action adventure movies to begin with, whether or not you enjoy The Legend of Tarzan depends at least partly on how much history you want in your historical period adventures. Tarzan adventures are usually set in an entirely mythical Africa, so the advance detail about The Legend of Tarzan that intrigued me the most was that it is set during King Leopold of Belgium’s genocidal colonial occupation of the Congo. (If you want just one reason why Africans in particular and people of color in general really dislike European and American colonialism, look up the history of the Congo Free State some time. It will make you sick.) Even better, one of the main characters is a fictional version of a real black American historian, George Washington Williams, who went to Africa and Europe in the 1880’s specifically to expose the Belgian atrocities.

Taken just as a period adventure and an addition to the Tarzan mythos, Legend is far more entertaining than I expected it to be (admittedly, my expectations were not especially high). Alexander Skarsgard is taciturn and intense as the resocialized “ape man,” and his co-stars hold their own: Margot Robbie’s strong-willed Jane, working almost successfully against her character’s inevitable damseling; Christoph Waltz’s creepily ambitious mastermind of the Congo exploitation; and Samuel L Jackson playing Williams as his most popular screen persona, by turns smartass, kickass, and deeply humane.

While following a Facebook thread on women in Hollywood, I came across this excellent post on the blog Black Girl Nerds. In it, guest blogger Jahkotta Lewis talks about the evolution of women in screen SF and gives a great list of her favorite badass SF females. Here’s a taste:

I grew up watching television in the 80s, an era that portrayed women on the big screen as damsels in distress, sexy vamps, or alpha bitches that needed a good screw to chill them out. Women weren’t showcased for their brains, but were glorified for their bodies or their ability to elevate their male counterparts to stardom…