How I Manage Large Casts of Characters

One of the most consistent pieces of praise I've received for the Eli books over their run is for my adept handling of a very large cast of characters. This might seem like an odd detail to single out, but hearing people say it still makes me happier than anything, because I worked SO FREAKING HARD on it.

To give you an example of what I'm talking about, my 4th Eli Monpress book, The Spirit War had 33 named characters (and spirits) the reader had to remember for the plot to make sense. Thirty freaking three! That's a stupid amount of people! And keep in mind, all these characters also had their own little plots spinning and intrigues and motivations that the reader was also expected to keep straight. That's a lot of brainpower for something that's supposed to be escape reading (especially since this book was coming out over a year after the third one).

When I sat down to write Spirit War, it didn't take long for me to realize I was looking down the barrel of a shotgun of my own making. This book could so easily have been a disaster, and no one knew that better than I did. So, since I couldn't cut characters or plot points I'd played up in previous books, my only way out was to figure out a way to keep my reader on top of this army I called a cast without ever letting them feel lost or overwhelmed by the crowd. To achieve this, I pulled out every trick I could think of (and invented ones I couldn't) to make sure my reader always knew who was who and what was up in any scene without resorting to telling. It wasn't easy, but in the end I pulled it off with flying colors. I also learned an enormous amount about the art of handling characters in a large world setting, and sense we're all about sharing the knowledge here at Casa de Aaron, I decided it was high time I made a blog post about what I learned.

Below, you'll find a list of the tricks and methods I worked out to make sure my readers remember who's important in my novel without making them feel like they're having to memorize a list. The key here is subtly and respect for both your book and your reader. I use all of these methods in every one of my own novels post Spirit War, and I hope you find them as helpful as I have. 

Ready? Here we go! 

0) Write Interesting Characters

I wanted to get this out of the way right off the bat. This is a post about making sure your reader remembers your characters, including all the minor ones, all the way through the novel, but the hands down easiest way to achieve this is to have a cast worth remembering. I am a huge fan of tricks of the trade, but if your people are boring, flat, tensionless, uninteresting, unmotivated, empty dolls, no amount of fancy handling is going to make them memorable. 

Readers want cool, flawed, interesting people of all kinds--people to hate, people to hang out with, people to fall in love with, people to admire, people who make them laugh. Novelists who can routinely meet these demands are invariably successful. So, before you do anything else, make sure your people are the sort of characters who deserve to be in novels. Otherwise, none of the following is really going to help. 

That settled? Okay, let's move on to the real post.

1) It's Not About Names

Are you bad at remembering names? I am. In my experience, most people in the world are bad with names to some extent, yet we can remember other, seemingly far less important details just fine--what someone was wearing, how a stranger's hair looks, if a store clerk was funny, etc.

Our brains passively remember an enormous range of bits and tidbits about the world around us, and a good writer can harness this to their advantage. When I introduce a character I want my reader to remember, especially a non-major character who will only appear in a few scenes that I don't want to waste time developing, I always make sure to introduce them with a telling detail along with their name. Maybe they have a scar or a weird hairstyle, or maybe their voice is oddly high. Anything memorable will do. 

Now, I don't harp on the detail, but I always mention it at least twice, because this detail has now become a label. Later, when I need the character to come back and do their job in the plot, I use this label in addition to their name to help jog the reader's memory. They might not remember Hans the Lumberjack, but they probably do remember that dude with the huge beard from back at the start of the book. This one recollection triggers others as the scene progresses, allowing you to deftly weave secondary, or even tertiary characters in and out of your narrative without having to resort to clunky "oh, remember Hans? He helped us back in..." type dialogue. Or, even worse, a character list! This might be personal bias, but nothing says "this is going to be a lame ass book" to me like finding a Dramatis Personae list at the front. It's like the author knew you wouldn't care about their characters enough to remember everyone, so they just caved and gave you a cheat sheet at the start.

Ahem, anyway, the point I'm trying to make here is that names are not how we remember people. Names are, in fact, your least helpful tool to make readers remember whom you're talking about. Readers are busy and impatient, which means if you want them to do work, like remembering someone, you need to make it easy. Give them something to grab on to, a label their brain can slap on and forget about until it needs that person again, and they'll generally play along.

For example, my character Slorn from the Eli Monpress series had a bear's head. Like, he was human from the neck down, but his head was that of a black bear. I reinforced this detail by calling him "the bear headed man" in my references to him within the text. His bear head ended up being very important for the larger meta plot, but let me tell you, NO ONE forgot who Slorn was (even though he made only brief appearances in the first few novels), and that was not by accident.

2) Give Them a (Social) Reason to Care

I'll put the obligatory "make sure your character actually needs to be in the story" line here, but come on. We all know that if a character doesn't serve the story, they need to go. Don't fill your book with meaningless garbage is, like, lesson 1 of writing. So we're just going to assume that all the people in your book need to be there for reasons you can easily explain (and if you can't explain exactly why a character needs to be in your book, see the previous sentence) and move on to ways to make sure your reader understands this as well.

So, as with every part of a novel, characters, even little ones, need to have purpose if they're going to earn their page time. But while it may serve you as the writer to have random Character A return at the climax to help the seemingly doomed heroes at a dramatically appropriate time, if you don't play up Character A's importance and give the reader a reason to think "hey, Character A is probably going to be important, I should keep them in mind" early on, then your ending is going to look slapdash at best. 

But how do you play up a minor but plot vital character without putting the novel equivalent of a giant, blinking "THIS GUY IS IMPORTANT LATER" arrow over his head and giving the whole game away? Simple, you just have to make them important in other ways that red herring the reader away from the character's real purpose as plot device. My favorite way to do this is to harness the universal human need to gossip.

Humans are social creatures. We always want to know about relationships, especially juicy, scandalous ones. Using this  nosy fascination is a very easy way to tempt readers into latching on to a character you're either not willing to, or don't have time to, develop at the moment. 

For example, in my Eli novels, I have a scene were two vital but (at the time) relatively minor characters hint through a bit of side dialogue that they are actually secretly the parents of my main character. GASP! This detail, less than 15 words all together, made a huge impact on my readership and elevated an otherwise minor sub-villain to major character status. The sudden elevation meant I was able to use her as the key character in a scene in the next book, turning an otherwise dull plot conversation between minor characters into a tense interchange between power players, which was a definite improvement. (More on key characters in a moment).

Harnessing our natural human need to be all up in other people's business is one of the most powerful ways to get your readers interested and invested in your characters, major or minor. The range of what you can use to hook people in is enormous: romantic entanglements, potential romantic entanglements, old scandals, secrets, feuds, all that reality TV stuff. There's a reason people watch those shows religiously, it's because they push our social buttons, and we as authors can use that same addictive power to make even our minor characters instantly rank as important in a reader's mind without being obvious about it, killing tension with explanation, or wasting words better spent on plot.

J. K. Rowling did an amazing job of this with Harry Potter. Think about how many HP characters you can name. I'll bet you dollars to donuts it's more than the main cast, probably a lot more. This is because J. K. Rowling is a freaking master of making us care about her secondary characters by showing us their places in the enormous social web she wove around her wizarding world. Because of this, when it came time to march out the armies of good and evil for the final battle, an enormous multi-character undertaking that could very well have been a train wreck of names and hex flinging, it all worked out, because Rowling made us care about all those minor characters well in advance, and so we as readers remembered every single one when the time came for them to do their job in (or die for) the plot. 

And this is why making your reader care about the characters is so important. If they care enough to remember who's who, then all you have to do is be clear about who and where everyone is at any given point and the reader will take care of the rest on their own, leaving you free to focus on plot.

3) Single File Introduction and Key Characters

Last year, I wrote a blog post about the art of revealing information in novels called "Teaching Your Reader Magic." The central idea was that a large and unsung part of writing, especially genre writing, is actually teaching. When you reveal your world to a reader who has never experienced it before, you are, in a sense, teaching them the rules you will be playing by for the duration of the novel. Like all teaching, whether you do this well or poorly determines your student/reader's experience with the subject matter. Just as a bad teacher can ruin your interest in a subject for life, bad/clumsy/poorly thought out writing can destroy the coolest of concepts. It doesn't matter how awesome your magic system or world is, if you can't explain it, ain't no one gonna care.

This also applies to characters. Think about when you go to a party and your host introduces you to a large circle of people, rattling off names as they go. Chances are, you will not remember a single one of those people by the time the introductions are done and you're left alone standing awkwardly in front of a bunch of staring strangers. Not good times.

Now, imagine if you go to that same party and instead of throwing you instantly into the crowd, your host introduces you to only one person, but that person has an amazingly interesting job or is doing something incredibly cool. They're also witty and charming, and they want to get to know you, too. You're gonna remember that person. Hell, you might even develop an instant crush on that person. 

This is the interaction I want between my readers and my characters. When I introduce a character, I try to show them being as interesting as possible, and I always give the spotlight to only one person at a time. I don't throw in distractions or other names or even other people (though I will use unnamed throwaway characters/archetypes to provide dialogue or tension, like a faceless guard or, in Eli's case, a door). Basically, I'm angling to recreate that one on one introduction and instant sense of connection/fascination of meeting an amazing person at a party, because once I've got my reader thinking of this fictional character as someone they want to know more about and spend more time with, I've got them hooked and I can safely move on to other characters or plot elements.

This very focused, single file method of introduction works best with main characters, but it can easily be used in a speed up version on minor characters as well by using the main, already introduced character as a bridge, or, as I like to call them, the key character. If we got back to our party analogy, your key character is like the host, they're the person the reader already knows who introduces them to the people they don't. A very good key character can introduce a reader to several minor characters all at once, but of course you have to keep numbers reasonable, stagger the introductions, and make sure everyone has a telling detail to aid in memory if you want to avoid the "oh my god who are these people? NOT GOOD TIMES!" reaction I mentioned above.

A good example of the key character in action is when Gandalf brings Thorin and his dwarves into Bilbo's house in The Hobbit. In this scene, Gandalf and Bilbo, both established characters the reader already cares about, act as key characters to provide context and relevance to what would otherwise be a crazy mess of 13 singing dwarves we don't care about. However, since Tolkein has been kind enough to provide us with hosts for his dwarf party, people we like who can rapidly establish why all this mountain song is important, disaster is averted and the book can move on with relatively little fuss even though I still couldn't name all the dwarves by the end.

By introducing important characters one at a time and then using these characters as anchors for the introduction of other characters, you ensure that your reader never overwhelmed by an onslaught of new information. Just like you teach your reader magic by introducing them to your world step by logical step, so do you have them learn your cast by introducing people either one at a time, or in very specific context to a character they already know. 

Pulling this off in your text can be tricky and requires a deft hand with the story's tension and pacing to make sure things don't get boring, but it's so worth it. By introducing people single file and using established characters to introduce new ones, just as you yourself would introduce your friends to someone new in the real world, you can ease your reader into an enormous cast with almost no strain, or forgotten names, on their part. Trust me, this is a very useful tool.

4) Be Smart With Your Names

I know I said waaaaay back up in #1 that names aren't how people remember characters initially, but that doesn't mean they aren't important. Once you've gotten your characters established, name becomes enormously important, because in a medium largely without pictures, that name is how your reader sees the character. 

Now, I am as guilty as any author of spending far too much time on Behind The Name and Fantasy name generators searching for that perfect name, especially when it comes to name meanings. But unless my reader is also on the web looking up the historical meanings of your character's, most of this fiddling is purely for myself. And that's fine, but when it comes to making sure readers pick up and remember the names of your characters, the criteria of what makes a good name is a little different.

First (and this is vital in genre fiction), the name has to be pronounceable. Most people hear the words they read in their heads as they're reading. This sounding out is vital to memory, and if they can't figure out what a character's name sounds like name, they're going to skip it. This is bad. You don't ever want your reader skipping anything, especially not a name you need them to remember for the story to work. Also, unpronounceable/unspellable names make it really difficult to talk up a book to your friends, and that's never a good thing. So no matter how much I may personally like a name, if my husband can't pronounce it off a sheet of paper, I pick something else. It's just not worth the risk.

Another thing to consider is how your cast's names work together. A big part of this is making sure people from the same culture have believably related names (none of this: "I'm Aiden and this is my brother, Wazakiki!") and just making sure your names fit into your world building in general. This is not to say you can't have someone with a radically different name, or even that you have to provide an explanation for it, but you do need other characters to at least comment on this oddity in the reader's stead to acknowledge the oddity. I didn't do this as much as I should have in the Eli Books and man, did I get flack for it.

In addition to making sure your cast's names fit within the context of the story, it's also good to think about making sure everyone's first letters don't overlap too much. Again, there's no law that says you have to do this, but a book where the main characters were Elton, Eliza, and Ella would get kind of confusing (unless, of course, it's a middle grade novel featuring three plucky siblings where the E names are a joke, in which case it's charming). 

Really, though, repeating first letters isn't a big deal so long as you don't have two characters sharing a first and last letter. For the reason why, see the example below.

Ain't the brain neat? Anyway, because of this phenomenon, character names that share a first and last letter, such as Eliza and Estella, are extremely easy to confuse. These days, my rule is that if I'm transposing the names myself while I'm writing the book, then someone's name needs to change. Because if I'm messing it up, the reader definitely will, and no name is worth that hassle to me.

Wow, this got a lot longer than I expected. I hope you enjoyed this Seven Years In Tibet of a blog post about making sure your reader keeps up with the cast of your book. As always, feel free to leave me a comment with your thoughts on the subject, and if you like my writing posts, I hope you'll follow me here on the blog or on Twitter! Thank you for reading and I hope you find this helpful!

Yours etc.,

Rachel

Thoughts on Fantasy Empires

This afternoon, in a fit of reader upset, I tweeted a general complaint about Fantasy Empires. You know the sort: the utopic paradises that rule for thousands of years in perfect peace until Something Happens, usually addressed by the plot of the book in question. Maybe these paradises of perfect rule fell ages ago, taking all learning with them and plunging humanity back into the Stone Age. Or maybe they're still hanging around in the twilight of their decline, just waiting for the right missing heir or new enlightened ruler of the people.

Whatever their fate, Empires are as much a part of classic fantasy as swords or sorcery, and they bug the hell out of me. Not because I have problem with organized government, but because many fantasy empires also come along with absurdly long timelines that are, frankly, far less believable than any magic portal or mythical creature. Maybe an empire lasted a thousand years before it fell. Maybe two thousand. I actually just finished a (not to be named) novel that featured a long fallen empire that had enjoyed a jaw dropping four thousand years of peace and prosperity before being overthrown by some uppity corpses and their establishment hating necromancer turned king. For reference, 4000 years ago Earth time, most human populations were still in the Bronze Age. 

When I mentioned this on Twitter, I got an overwhelming, and very well thought out response. So much so that I was inspired to write a blog post about the issue. Have I mentioned how much I love you guys? 'Cause I do!

It's not that I have anything against the idea of a long dead empire filled with the promise of a better life and new ideas for people of this time. That's great trope, and one that's well grounded in our own history. It was, after all, the rediscovery of Roman and Greek culture and knowledge that kicked off the Renaissance. My problem is with the crazy timelines author pull out when they want to impress people. As one of my awesome Tweeples (@franklinnoble) points out, the Warcraft Lore has a shocking ten thousand years where basically nothing happens. Ten thousand years! That's pretty much all of human history as we know it reduced to a "meh, some stuff, whatevs."

It doesn't matter what kind of story you're writing, or what kind of Empire you create, they all have one thing in common in that they're full of people. Oh maybe not humans in the technical sense, but they are full of characters written as humans by humans who generally share human traits like bravery, ingenuity, greed, laziness, etc. The point is that generations of thinking mortals do not pass time idly. They invent, they innovate, they get angry and riot, they fall under the sway of charismatic leaders and revolt, they change the world. That's what people do, they change their environment, and unless an outside force (immortal Godking, magically enforced happiness and placidity, widespread institutionalized immortality, etc.) is forcing them to be still, they're going to be moving and shaking their world. 

This isn't to say you can't have a long lived empire. But, as many people on Twitter pointed out, all the great, long lived empires of our world (Egypt, Rome, Byzantium, etc.) went through enormous shifts, changes and upheavals. They survived yes, but not as unified wholes. They changes along with the people in them.

To me, enormously long blocks of time in books where things stayed basically the same are the epitome of lazy world building. Want to make something sound impressive? Add a big number to it! But unless there's a reason for such a long period of stillness, this sort of lazy zero adding does more harm than good. At best, it stretches disbelief, at worst, it paints a picture of a lazy, stagnant world.

Now, I'm pretty sure this bothers me A LOT MORE than it bothers other readers, but it's still something I'd really appreciate more authors thinking about, especially those in my beloved Epic Fantasy field. I'm not saying you need a detailed history of every year, especially if they're not important, but a little thought and effort to put your history on a human scale would be, by this reader at least, very appreciated.

Hearts and kisses, 

Reader Rachel

Writing it Fast vs Writing it Right

Last night I got a tweet that beautifully encapsulated an insecurity I've had for a while now. 

@rachel_aaron After all your blog posts about planning and improving writing speed, still rewritting in the middle of a book? XD
— Sofia(@BG_Sofia) May 9, 2013

I swear, Sofia, I'm not posting this to pick on you! This is actually a very legitimate question that does not have a clean, easy, 140 character answer, and so here I am in the long form.

Since figuring out how to write 10k a day, I've maintained a steady 7-8k daily writing average, sometimes dipping down to 5k, sometimes going up to 12k depending on a number of factors like stress, personal life, where I am in the story, etc. I also plan my books carefully, even more so now than I used to, and yet for the past several novels I've had to stop in the middle of the book and go back, often multiple times. Not because I wasn't following the plan, but because I'd realized mid-writing that the plan was wrong.

The problem with becoming known for writing quickly is that an internal pressure starts to build. Once I wrote a book in twelve days, suddenly I felt like I had to write everything at maximum speed. If I didn't, people would think I was a fraud and a failure. I was failing people who believed in me, failing myself, DOOOOOOOM!

This is, of course, complete bumpkiss. Books are not widgets or standardized puzzles you solve. Target Word Count / Words Per Hour =/= Total Hours Spent on a novel. All the planning and methods in the world can't stop things from going off track. Grand plans fall through, better ideas appear, shine wears off, mistakes are made. Hell, sometimes I'm just flat out wrong about how a novel needs to go, and discovering just how wrong I am can be a multi-week process that ends with me stopping the book mid-draft and going back to fix things because I simply can't keep going forward on such a faulty structure.

Setbacks like these can be very frustrating. They are also a totally natural part of writing. There is no efficiency hack for having all the right ideas at the right time. Things that look easy during plotting turn out to be wrong in amazingly subtle ways once you get into the actual text. This doesn't mean my time planning them was wasted. Quite the contrary, if I hadn't planned what I was going to do, I wouldn't have been able to see that it wasn't working until the book was finished, or failed utterly.

As my books get more complex and my ability to self edit improves, I find myself stopped and going back to re-write more and more. As a result, it's actually started taking me longer to finish each book than a year ago, and while I'm not happy about that, I don't feel I've been wasting my time. Is this the most efficient way to work? Almost certainly not, and I'm actively looking for a way to make it more so, because EFFICIENCY!

But while I hope one day to figure out a brilliant breakthrough process that will eliminate this backtracking, but I'm not holding my breath. The truth is, no matter how good my methods get or how much experience I accrue, I'm going to make keep making mistakes in my books. Because I am human, and (despite my love of best practices and repeatable results) this is an art, not a science. I'm okay with that, though, because what really matters is getting the story right.

When all is said and done, no one will remember how fast I wrote a book. No one will care how few or many drafts it took. These things are purely for me. But at the end of the day, all readers care about, and therefore all I really care about, is the story itself. Did I give them a tale well told? Did I deliver on the promise I made them when they took a gamble on my book? This is what really matters in writing, not speed or efficiency or any of the other things I can get so obsessed with. And this is why, despite my grousing and moaning, I never truly begrudge rewrites. What feels like a a knock backwards is a actually necessary step in the right direction, even if I was only figuring out that I was headed in the wrong one. The point is that I'm still moving, and when I am finished, I will have the best book possible, which is the goal of the entire operation.

Happy writing/rewriting!
- Rachel (now in the middle of her third, and hopefully final, rewrite of the middle of this book)

Forever is a very long time

If you'd oblige me a bit of a long winded rant, I'd like to take a moment to talk about immortals. Not any particular immortals, (though my love of the After Dark variety is well documented). I mean immortals in general as they appear in a genre fiction, and my beef with them.

Don't get me wrong, I'm all for immortal characters. The ideas and implications of immortality in all its myriad forms are absolutely fascinating to me (and apparently most of the world). You could even say that immortals never get old (HARHARHAR). But over my years of reading through the hundreds of varieties of immortals currently available, there's always this nagging annoyance. Namely, I hate how none of these immortal folks actually seem to act their age.

Paranormal Romance (hitherto referred to as PRN) is by far the worst offender with this. It's actually kind of hard to find a PRN series that doesn't involved immortals in some way, but unless these immortals are the villains, it can be difficult to tell the difference between the warrior who's fought for a thousand years and the thirty five year old man he looks like on the surface, and that's always struck me as wrong.

Years and years ago, I watched a surprisingly good anime called Scrapped Princess (seriously, if you ever get a chance and can get past the initial immaturity and ridiculous proportions of the female characters, this series is totally worth your time.). There are several immortal characters in the show, and at one point, two of these immortal characters, one who's been on Team Bad Guy for a while and one who is seemingly waffling toward Good, have an argument that seems to the viewer and the other characters to be needlessly antagonistic. 

When the other characters ask why this is, the waffling-good immortal replies "We have been together for two thousand years. You can not begin to imagine the depth of hate and love between us."

This line has stuck with me long after the rest of the show fell away, and as I became a story teller in my own right, this idea of the weight of time between characters, the intensely complex layering (both and good and bad) that would happen to any relationship if it was strung out for that long, came to form the core of how I approach immortal characters.

You see, forever is a very long time. Think about yourself ten years ago. You were a totally different person. Ten years from now, you'll probably think the same thing. This process of change slows as we get older, but unless we're experiencing arrested development (the psychological phenomenon, not the awesome show), we will keep changing and maturing until we die. So when you have a character who is 500 or 1000 or 2000 years old, you have a someone who has gone through 50/100/200 of these changes, and I think it's safe to say by that point that they have evolved completely off the deep end of what we mortals can comprehend.

Needless to say, this is usually not how immortals are written. Such an individual would appear crazy to the rest of us, and actually crazy heroes are very difficult to write. Because of this, most immortals seem to be eternally stuck in early middle age, especially hot immortal dudes who head up PRN books, many of whom seem to live together in what Smart Bitches call "Frat Houses of the Damned" until the right mortal lady appears to show them what they've been missing over the last dozen centuries.

I understand why this trope exists--immortal men swearing eternal love are hot and sell books like crazy--but it still bugs me because I can't help thinking that if there were a race of vampires or whatever, the thought processes of their immortal members would be utterly incomprehensible to a modern love interest.

Perhaps the only example of an immortal who actually acts like an immortal I've read was Michael from Nalini Singh's Angels' Blood, because Michael? Dude is messed up. And weird, and very very intense. I actually really liked him for that, but at the same time it made him a very weird and difficult hero, especially at the end of the book when he realized he was in love. This discovery of love felt very rushed to me, not because it wasn't played up, but because dude had so far to go to get back to the level of humanity where romantic love could exist that I don't actually think it could be realistically covered in one novel.

I try to keep all of this in mind when writing my own immortals, because it's a very delicate balancing act to create a believable immortal who isn't so far gone as to be completely unrelatable. Of course, I'm not sure how much this matters since there are dozens of series with "immortals" who are little more than 35-year-olds with ancient war PTSD issues and some zeroes added to their age, but it matters to me. I'm not even saying immortals have to be mature (I'd never say that seeing how my favorite immortal of all time is Regin the Radiant), just that I appreciate some kind of reasoning to explain why they're not. Some sign that an author put thought into "why is this dude still going clubbing/living alone with no hobbies at 3000 years old?" It doesn't even have to be a good reason, just give me something.

And on another note, has anyone ever thought about how sucky having one fated mate forever would be in reality? I mean, sure you're eventually going to find one true love, but until then you can't even date because you know any relationship you enter is doomed. I mean, you could find a dude, fall in love normally, live with him for 800 years, which is 16 times longer than a 50-year "till death do us part" life long marriage between mortals, and yet your relationship would never be anything but a fling because you both know that the moment one of you finds your fated mate, it's over. That is REALLY FREAKING SAD, YA'LL. Just sayin'.

Some thoughts for a Monday. Thanks for reading!

- R

The real reason I write every day

When I was a kid I played the violin, and I hated it. Looking back, it was actually a terrible instrumental choice for me. Unlike the rest of my family, I'm not very musical. I have a very bad ear for tune, and the violin gives you enough rope to hang yourself twice over in this since you can literally put your fingers anywhere. I probably would have done much better with piano, where you hit a key and get a note, but by the time I started piano I was 5 years into violin and I'd already learned to hate anything that resembled practice.

My mother made my practice my violin every morning before school. EVERY MORNING. I understand now why she did it, she was trying to show me how practice makes perfect and that by sticking to something through the hard parts, they would stop being hard and I'd be happy with my progress. Unfortunately, none of these lessons took at the time, mostly because 1) I hated the violin, and so 2) I didn't pay attention in practice, just went through the motions so my mom would get off my back, and therefore 3) I never actually got any better.

I quit violin the second I got to High School and never touched another instrument. Way I saw things, I'd toiled in the violin mines for 5 years with nothing to show for it. Therefore, clearly, violins were stupid, unplayable instruments that only freakish naturally talented people could ever hope to master.

I didn't realize it until years later, but I took many of the lessons from my battle with the violin with me to writing. You see, back when I was first getting serious about the idea of actually creating a story for other people to read, people said (as they say now and have always and will always say) that I needed to write every day. I had to stick with it, to push past the hard parts and get my words, and bit by bit, all those 500 word sessions would stack up into a novel.

Now, don't get me wrong, this is a true point and an excellent sentiment. If you write so many words every day, eventually you will have a novel. Many, many novels are written this way. I've written novels this way. But there's a difference between writing every day and forcing yourself to write.

I harp on the idea that writing should be fun a lot. It's one of my core beliefs. If I'm not enjoying what I'm writing, then I stop and figure out why. Sometimes, I don't write it at all (notice how I didn't say "I don't write" just that I don't write the thing I didn't like). I believe that an author's love and passion for their own work can't help but shine through the prose. That energy that consumes you when you're writing something you love gets transferred to your reader and becomes infectious. Also, it is phenomenally easier to find the time to write daily when you're looking forward to the exercise.

This is why, when I hear people talking about daily writing practice, I get a little tic in my jaw, because it makes me think of that damn violin. Not to willfully misunderstand the usage of the word "practice" here (meaning both "the act of" as well as "doing some to get better" in this instance) but the connotation is not a pleasant one for me, because that trial I endured every morning through elementary school and middle school is something that I never, ever, ever want anywhere near the joyful, wonderful event that is writing.

I'd almost rather you not write at all than force yourself to write when you hate it. You see, resentment is like grime. It builds up slowly and poisons everything around it. I know. I did this to myself a few times in the early days, forcing myself to get up every morning and write words I didn't care about. It was just like the violin. I resented the work, resented how it didn't get any easier or better. I resented my writing, and that is a horrible, horrible feeling for someone whose great ambition and driving force in life was to be a writer. I felt I was betraying myself, betraying my dream and all my work. I felt like a failure.

It was fear of this feeling, fear of losing my stories to my resentment, that taught me to stop treating writing like the violin. The only way you become a better writer is through practice and observation, writing stories and figuring out why they work and why they don't. But if you're just writing because you have to, to meet a quota, then you're like me with that violin, and you're not getting any better, which kind of defeats the whole point, doesn't it?

One of my greatest triumphs over nine years of writing seriously was learning to love my writing instead of just practicing it. I still write every weekday (I'd write weekends, too, but I have a toddler who wants my attention for some reason. Something about being a mother? I also have a house that doesn't clean itself. Jerk.) only now I refuse to write things I don't like. These days, though, I take daily writing even more seriously than I did when I was writing to a quota, but for a new and much better reason.

One of my absolute favorite sayings is that "writing begets writing." The more you write on a story you enjoy, the easier, better, and more exciting the next day's writing becomes. When I write every day, I build up momentum, like running down hill with a hang glider. Get going fast enough, and the story will lift you up all on its own and take you flying, which is every bit as awesome as it sounds. This is my goal in every book, to reach that lift off point, and the only way I get there is by writing regularly on projects I love. And let me tell you, my word counts on the flying days? Breathtaking.

Today's going to be a flying day for me. I hope you have the same.

Happy writing!
- R

The Art of Story Velcro

I apologize for the extended blackout. Our house has been beset by a green plague (also known as pollen), and fallout has not been pretty. I'm not sure what cruel and whimsical force gave humans sinuses, but I think I hate it right now.

But while all of this sneezing and general miserableness didn't leave much space for writing/tweeting/blogging/cleaning/being a functional human being, it did allow for a great deal of thinking. Specifically, I've been thinking about what makes a story un-put-downable, and how I can get more of it.

You know how sometimes you'll have a book that you're enjoying, but it takes you forever to finish? Like, it's good and you want to know how the story ends, but life conspires and you just keep putting it down. Now, you know those books that take you over? The books that keep you up until all hours of the night when you desperately need to sleep but you simply can not put the sucker down? Yeah, those books.

The difference between these two types of books can be difficult to pin down. After all, they're both good, it's just that one was addictive and one wasn't. Why? What creates that special MUST READ brand of story crack?

I'm sad to say I haven't figured out the entire recipe for book crack yet (but man, once I do, watch out world! None of you are ever getting anything done again ever!), but I do believe I've figured out a major ingredient: reader engagement.

Reader engagement is just a fancy term for how into your book a reader is. When you can't put down a book, you are highly engaged, and engagement is a facet of reader interest. Specifically, if I want a reader to keep reading, I have to keep them interested on as many levels as possible. Interested in the plot, in the romance, in the world, in the outcomes of my character's lives, etc. And the more interest I can build, the more engaged (and addicted) my reader will be. As a story teller, I am competing against the reader's busy life for attention and time. To win this battle, my story needs to be almost impossible to rip yourself away and incredibly easy to get locked back in to if you do manage to pull free. In short, I need to story Velcro.

If you look at Velcro up close, you can see that one side is covered in thousands of tiny hooks which snag on the soft strap and hold the two together. Once stuck, the two sides require force, sometimes massive force, to pull them apart again. This is exactly what I want in my stories, to snag my reader so tightly they'll need to exert massive force to pull away, and every time the force stops, they fall right back and get hooked again. This sort of broad, inescapable engagement is essential to creating an un-put-downable book, and to achieve it, I take my cue from Velcro. I make hooks.

Putting hooks in your story is hardly a new concept, but I'm not talking about the big hooks that convince someone to pick up your story in the first place. If the reader's already reading, those hooks have done their job. We're in subtler territory now, which means smaller hooks, sometimes tiny ones, spread all throughout the story for the purpose of keeping your reader locked at that same level of interest that made them pick up the book in the first place.

To see this in action, let's take my favorite go-to example: Harry Potter. Most people picked up the series initially because a boy magician going to a secret wizard school is pretty great hook, but they stayed because J. K. Rowling is a freaking master of story velcro. Practically every paragraph of Harry Potter is filled with interesting tidbits, things you want to know more about. First there's the mystery of a baby left on the doorstep, and then empathy with Harry's terrible home life. This is followed by the wonder of obviously magical happenings and overall giddy excitement that is the world of Harry Potter itself and then finished by intense character drama and an exciting climax.

Rowling doesn't hit you with all of this at once. Instead, she picks at you, revealing one tidbit after another, hook hook hook hook, snagging you and pulling you into her story until you can no longer (and have no desire to) get free. Even when her hooks never really panned out (like all that stuff about the dragons in Norway), they kept me reading. I take several issues with the plots of the Harry Potter series, but I read each new HP book at midnight on release day just like everyone else. And that, my friends, is the power of amazing story velcro.

On a practical writing level, I believe that creating this sort of deep engagement is more of an exercise in attention than talent. You need to remember to think like a reader. When you look at your story, you have to put aside what you want it to be and see the text for what it is. You might know your main character is going to transform from a spineless wimp into an amazing person over the course of eight chapters, but your reader has no idea, and it's the writer's job to keep that reader hooked long enough to allow the transformation to occur. To do this, in every scene, in every paragraph, you have to ask yourself, "how can this be more interesting?" and then be ready to find that answer in all sorts of different places.

The best story velcro happens on multiple levels through out the story. It's not enough to just cram your paragraphs full of amazing ideas and prose (though that can take you pretty far if your ideas are cool enough, just look at China Mieville). But this sort of shot gun approach can overwhelm readers unless done amazingly well. A far safer (and easier) approach is to try to think vertically through all the threads of the book and apply your hooks on multiple levels. For example, if you've just done a lot of talking about world building, throw in some snappy character dialogue that reveals interesting facets about your cast. If it's a low point in the plot tension, create character tension to fill the gap. Have an argument, hint that someone might be lying. My personal favorite is to have something vaguely sinister happen just on the edge of the scene to make a reader gasp and go "WHAT'S THAT?!"

Wherever you see an empty spot or a place where reader attention might be flagging, work in a hook, even if you're not sure what to do with it yet. Not only will this keep your reader engaged at every turn, it also deepens the book and gives you something cool to pull up later in the plot, sometimes entire books later, and come out looking like you planned it all along.

I realize this probably sounds overwhelming. I mean, working in hooks when you're also supposed to be thinking about tension and character development and, oh yeah, just getting the freaking story down and making sense? That's a lot to think about. But as I said two paragraphs up, this isn't a matter of talent or genius or inspiration, it's an exercise in attention. The most important thing a writer can be is attentive to their own work. Having care, paying attention, adding detail, these are how you create depth, and the more you deepen, the easier it becomes to add nuance and flourishes to every part of your work.

Fortunately, writing is neither a spectator sport nor a timed event. Creating the dense network of hooks required to make excellent story velcro is a multi-pass project that goes on for as long as you're working on a story. For my part, I keep shoving in hooks all the way up to the final copy edit. But so long as you are actively thinking about reader engagement, even if it's nothing more than rejecting boring sentences in favor of more interesting ones, you are actively making your story better, and that's always a step in the right direction.

Update on the ACTUAL real novels I have coming out soon!

So I might not have actually written a venerable tome of letters and pages that got reviewed by the New York Times, but I did write a 3 book SciFi series for Orbit that comes out at the end of this year!

While I don't have a formal cover or blurb to show ya'll yet (we're working on it, I swear. This project is a little cursed, please bear with us!), I can tell you the general details.

Fortune's Pawn (November 5th, 2013) introduces Devi Morris, a powered armor mercenary in way over her head. There's a lot of awesome powered armor combat, snappy dialogue, and of course Things Are Not What They Seem (TM). There's also a pretty strong romance and some language, so if the Eli books were PG, this is definitely an R rated book. 

Again, I'll have the official cover and blurb up as soon as I get the OK from Orbit, but I wanted to reassure people that yes, there are more books. They're even all done! All 3! Complete series! Also, remember when I talked about having a series with no villain? That was this one. I'm very proud of the work I've done here and I think you folks are really really going to like it. 

Fortune's Pawn is followed by Honor's Knight (Spring 2014) and Heaven's Queen (Fall 2014) to complete the set (collectively called the Paradox Novels). I'll be doing give aways and putting up big chunks of sample chapters closer to the release date. Again, I wish like hell I had something more to show you, and THE MOMENT I get final approval I will bury you in Devi info.

"Hey! Wait a minute! If you've already written all 3 books, why do we have to wait until Fall 2014 to get the last one?"

This is actually a very fair question. All I can say to this is that publishing in a big machine with a lot of small pieces that all have to work together. I am only the beginning of a very long chain that takes about a year to work through. As someone who ABSOLUTELY HATES waiting for books, I really do wish things could move faster, but it is what it is, ya know? 

Meanwhile, I'll try to make the waiting less terrible by posting free short stories and tidbits as the books come out. Thank you all for your patience and even if Space Opera isn't usually your thing, I hope you'll give Fortune's Pawn a try.

Thank you!

- R

Rachel Aaron presents: A NOVEL

So, at long last, I'm able to announce my newest book! It's a bit of a depature from my Eli series, but I think we'll all agree I'm headed in the right direction!

And so, without further ado, may I present: A NOVEL!

Presenting Rachel Aaron's newest work of fiction: A NOVEL.

Jane is a woman with a motivation. To get what she wants, she'll have to take action... but can she? When complications arise, she'll have to team up with other named characters to finish the plot and maintain the narrative tension, or it's happily never after for everyone!

"If you enjoy the physical act of reading, get ready to work out your eyeballs over five hundred pages absolutely filled with letters, number, and the occasionally ASCI symbol for that extra treat!" - Civilian Reader

"There were parts of this book that came as a total surprise and parts that didn't. There were female character and male characters interacting. It was like looking at life in another world, only through words on paper, and without the ability to turn your head to look at other stuff." - The Book Smugglers

"You have to use your imagination because there are no pictures, but that's what reading is all about!" - Far Beyond Reality

I know it's been a long time, folks, but I swear A NOVEL is worth the wait! Look for it in bookstores everywhere at some date in the future which may or may not occur!

Thank you for reading!

- Rachel

The Art of Asking... people to buy my books

Sorry for the extended blogging absence. I fell down a writing hole... of the very best kind! Most of my conversations over the last 2 weeks have gone like this:

Husband/child/dog: *expresses need for food and/or attention*

Rachel: CAN NOT LEAVE THE PRECIOUSSSSssssssss...... (clutches laptop)

I did manage to poke my head up to watch a very good TED talk, though. It doesn't specifically deal with writing per se, but I still found it very relevant.

I've been on the fringe of the Amanda Palmer storm for years now, but this talk convinced me to drink the Kool Aid. The whole video is totally worth watching, but the gist is about how difficult it is to ask for help and compensation vs. how much others want to give it. "Asking [as an artist] makes you vulnerable," Palmer says. "There's always that voice in the back of your head: get a job."

This talk REALLY hit the nail on the head for me, because the single hardest thing I've had to learn as a writer is how to ask people to buy my books without feeling like a huckster or a fraud. It's not that I'm shy. I'm the opposite of shy. I am the biggest extrovert you will ever meet. But asking someone to pay money and read my work is harrowing in a way I have trouble putting words to.

I constantly joke to my friends that someday this writer thing is going to dry up and I'll have to go get a "real job." But the kicker here is that writing is a real job, and not just in the "you should treat your writing as a job if you want to be a professional" kind of way. I mean that writers are entertainers who provide a service, a book, and that is worthy of compensation.

When I ask people "buy my book?" I feel this overwhelming sense of shame and guilt. Who am I, after all, to ask these people to put forth their hard earned cash to take a trip through my imaginary world? But it's all in my head, a product, ironically, of my own pride. In asking someone to buy my book, to like my story, to invest in me, I have to open myself up to the fact that might say no. I have to make myself vulnerable. But as Palmer says, when you trust in people, most of the time, they trust back. If you give them an honest experience, a good story, then don't begrudge you the asking, or the money.

The point here is that writing, singing, entertainment, these are real jobs that provide real benefits. We've all read books that we would have paid twice as much for. There's no shame in asking people to buy my book, it doesn't make me a fraud or a huckster. It doesn't make me a sell out. It makes me a working writer, and that, I gotta say, is the best job ever.

It's my birthday, so have some free stuff!

My 31st birthday is coming up this week! Hooray for surviving to my 3rd decade!

To celebrate my transition from the 21-30 demographic to the 31-40 demographic, I've decided to make my writing e-book, 2k to 10k: Writing Faster, Writing Better, and Writing More of What You Love free until Friday!

IT'S FREE!

If you've already bought the book, thank you a million times. If you haven't, I hope you'll give it a try now. Whatever you decide, though, thank you all so much for reading this blog and my work! I could not do what I do without you.

Thank you for everything!
- Rachel