The Human Limitations of Arms and Armor

When I was a child, about 11 or 12, I was unfortunately subjected to a purported film known by the alias Brother Sun, Sister Moon, which claims to be a retelling of the life of St. Francis of Assisi. I’ve encountered more historical accuracy from 20-minute children’s cartoons, and I knew hardly anything about the history of the medieval Catholic Church at the time, so that’s saying something. (Though I should add that I was living in Italy at the time, not that far from Assisi, and St. Francis was and probably still is very popular there.)

The film was pretty much a retelling with a focus on a message more appropriate to the 1960s than the 13th century. Seriously, there are so many details it got wrong, and I doubt by sincere error, that any time I’m reminded of it I get a migraine. But today I shall embrace that pain, because one error in particular stands out as an example of today’s topic.

As a young man, St. Francis participated in a battle where he was captured and had a life-altering spiritual awakening. This is depicted in the film in such a way that I suspect the director intended the audience to be on drugs, but it’s accurate in broad strokes . . . very broad strokes. Yet even as a pre-teen, the armor the young Francesco wore drove me to distraction. It’s not just that it’s not accurate 12th-century Italian armor; at that age, I couldn’t have told you what was accurate, after all. It was that I immediately saw it was inaccurate because of the human factor.

Interview with Steve Diamond

This blog gives my perspective as an editor, but for once I had the chance to get someone else’s perspective. This week, I was able to ask Steve Diamond, author of Residue and Parasite (among others I haven’t yet reviewed) about his writing career, the nature of horror, and some advice on rewrites.

For those who don’t know him as the popular writing podcast the WriterDojo, Steve Diamond is an accountant, a former professional reviewer and bookseller, publisher of special editions, brisket connoisseur, and sworn enemy of the eldritch selachimorphs that have lurked in the depths of the oceans for millions of years. In fact, he goes into the latter in the excellent early episode of the above-mentioned podcast, Season One, Episode Twelve, “Horror” — an episode quite relevant to today’s post! If you’ve never listened to it, go ahead. This post will still be here when you get back.

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Novel Ninja: How would you describe yourself as an author?

Steve Diamond: Man, that’s a tough one. I think I try to be an entertainer. I’m not that guy that agonizes over every sentence. I don’t think I’ll ever be the guy that people call “literary,” and that’s fine by me. My only goal is to entertain… to have loftier goals than that feels hyper selfish and prideful to me.

Now after the entertainment factor, I’d say I’m rather mercenary. I’ll write whatever I’m paid to write. Maybe that’s straight-up Lovecraftian fiction, a Winnie the Pooh story (thanks public domain!), giant robots, or even a spy-thriller. I’ll write whatever I’m asked (and paid) to write. The great thing about this method is that I get to write all sorts of different things, and that keeps my stories fresh. It also helps me practice, which I think shows in my fiction.

Review of Parasite, by Steve Diamond

Parasite is the sequel to Residue, which I reviewed previously. After the events of the last book, Jack Bishop has been relocated to Sacramento as part of an elaborate game of evil-mastermind chess between two genetic research firms, one of which is holding his father prisoner, and both are attempting to control Jack.

I wasn’t entirely sure what to expect from the sequel. Obviously, I expected more of the same blend of urban fantasy, urban sci-fi, and Diamond’s brand of action-horror; but the back-cover description showed things escalating far beyond what I thought the series was going for. Turns out that was deliberate. The first novel was effectively a stand-alone, almost entirely self-contained, with just a few loose threads intended to lead into a sequel. Another mystery, another secret investigation, another delightful Thin Man-esque back-and-forth between Jack and his mind-reading, gun-toting girlfriend Alex.

Near-Future Sci-Fi Just Got Easier

There’s a joke in science fiction writing communities that the advancement of science and technology makes science fiction harder. It’s a joke because SF is a genre that depends on the advancement of science and technology; but it’s also a joke because it’s kinda true. When your job is to describe the future, advancements can make it harder when fantastic things become more commonplace or turn out to be completely disproven. This can be glossed over sometimes — and in fact, many great science fiction stories depend on things both the authors and the audience know to be impossible — but for the most part good SF depends on staying both ahead of and within scientific understanding.

Sometimes, though, there’s an advancement that makes a big splash that makes it easier, not harder. Sometimes you don’t have to be more creative than the real world in order to stay ahead of it, simply because it opens up so many more possibilities than you’d had before. Creativity doesn’t lie in being completely new, but rather in recombining things in the real world.

Weekly Time Management

In Sandman by Neil Gaiman, Death reminds someone that “You lived what anybody else gets. You got a lifetime.”

Everyone has an equal amount of time each day. How you use it matters. And when you’re not already a full-time author, you necessarily have other things you need to work on first. Maximizing your time doesn’t mean squeezing in every possible moment of work; it means getting things done as efficiently as possible. That sometimes means your writing takes low priority, and that might not be a bad thing. For most people, writing shouldn’t be the most important thing in their lives.

But most of us — or, perhaps, most of those who stick with it — are writing because we have to. Because the stories are going through our heads and we feel like we’ll explode if we don’t find a way to get them out. If other people like the stories, so much the better. If other people will pay for the same stories . . . well, that’s just plain awesome. If other people pay for it to the extent that we can do it full time? For most of us, that’s the dream.

Getting there means developing habits and treating writing like a responsibility. That includes figuring out how much time per week you really have to devote to writing. I say per week because while a daily writing habit is all well and good, our routine is rarely identical from one day to the next. A month, on the other hand, is too long to plan out very well. A week, on the gripping hand, is just right. In fact, society already does it that way, to the point that the rhythms of one week usually mirror those of the weeks preceding and following it. Lean into that by creating a weekly time budget to plan out your writing goals.

The Emotional Thesaurus: A Must-Have for Any Fiction Author

Lately, I’ve been running into authors who don’t know about this book, much less its ‘sequels,’ and it’s more than worth doing a quick post on the topic. I can state without any reservation that if you do not have a copy of The Emotional Thesaurus, you are cheating yourself. There is no other single book that you can buy that will help your writing more; and yes, that includes that other book you were just thinking of, whatever it was.

The Emotional Thesaurus is a book that does exactly what it sounds like, only more so. It gives you synonyms for different emotional states, which by itself is extraordinarily useful. How many times have you had to stop to figure out how to describe what a character was feeling? But it goes far, far deeper, giving you body language, internal effects, and behavior associated with each emotion.

Writing Maxim #2: Fiction Has to Make Sense

As I mentioned before, I have a few phrases of advice regarding creative writing that I repeat often enough to dub them maxims. This time, I want to look at the concept that real life has an advantage over fiction: fiction has to make sense.

This is hardly an original observation of mine, of course; Mark Twain wrote the first known version of this line (“Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; Truth isn’t”), though I’m rather more fond of G. K. Chesterton’s version (“Truth must of necessity be stranger than fiction […] For fiction is the creation of the human mind, and therefore is congenial to it”).

The principle here is that reality can be random, but fiction has to have structure. We strive to make fiction as realistic as we can, but the human mind tends to rebel at a story with too much chaos. Perhaps it’s as simple as a recognition that if humans build something, it should be built with purpose and design, and so something that feels too realistic in this way feels as though the writer was careless.

The Four Aspects of a Good Prologue

One of the most common questions I get from new authors is whether using a prologue is a good choice for a particular novel. The short answer is that it depends, but probably not.

That’s not to say that prologues can’t be good; actually, some of my favorite books have prologues, and some even benefit from them. However, I usually steer authors — especially new and upcoming authors — away from using prologues, because generally they don’t add anything to the story that the reader will appreciate. I suspect the main reason why prologues are so attractive is that many of the best books out there, the ones that shaped our perception of good stories, use prologues. Some of them even benefited from it.

Unfortunately, prologues have a reputation as extended infodumps, and because of that most readers will normally skip over a prologue. Thanks to that, a prologue typically serves as a bad introduction to your story. There are, however, some ways to judge whether your prologue can stand on its own.

Review of Residue, by Steve Diamond

I do not typically enjoy horror stories.

It’s been that way for a long time. Movies and novels alike; I just haven’t enjoyed horror. I don’t edit it either, because I don’t understand it well enough as a genre to give someone an acceptable return on their money. To edit something properly, you have to understand its context and audience; and to do that, you have to enjoy stories like it. Never go to someone who doesn’t enjoy your kind of story.

Oh, I’ve enjoyed an occasional entry in the genre, most notably Dan Wells’ I Am Not a Serial Killer (which was made into a very good low-budget movie, which can be enjoyed on its own even though the book is better); and I greatly appreciated the explanation of horror that Steve Diamond gave way back at the start of the WriterDojo podcast (in their thirteenth episode, appropriately enough). But overall the genre just didn’t speak to me.

Which means, despite getting to know Steve Diamond (online and for a brief meeting in person), I have had absolutely no interest in reading his debut novel, Residue, because it’s primarily supernatural horror. Now, though, after many years, I finally felt like I owed it to him to at least try the book. So when the book was re-released with an audio edition, I bought it and started listening.

YouTube Educators Who are Better than Hollywood Movies

Unless you’re so far under a rock that you’re not even reading this blog in the first place, you’ve heard that a double strike of writers and actors has resulted in the effective shutdown of the movie and TV industry in the United States. This of course affects more than just writers and actors, as well as more than just US citizens; lots of people other than actors and writers work in these industries, and a staggering number of people will be indirectly affected by the lack of production in the meantime. (For an idea of how interconnected everything is, I suggest reading the famous essay, “I, Pencil.”)