You Are Coming, Aren't You?

I am super psyched. Thrilled. Doing the proverbial happy dance. Why, you ask? Because, along with a truly impressive roster of awesome people, I’ve been named a 2012 GenCon Industry Insider Guest of Honor!

Fancy title, but what does this mean, you ask? This means I get to participate in a bunch of featured panels and seminars, which I don’t know the details of yet, but which I hope will all be focusing on my favorite topics from Writers Don’t Cry, because my last Writers Don’t Cry panel, Sympathy for the Devil: Creating Killer Villains for Games and Books, hosted by Emerald City Comicon, was a total blast.

Also, this is totally silly, but I can’t wait to design ribbons. VILLAIN ribbon anyone? How awesome will that be! Somebody stop me before I start designing dice…

See you in Indianapolis!

So, to make sure I’m properly prepared next time, I wrote up a helpful survey that covers my bases. Next time, I will be totally, absolutely, and completely prepared! And just in case you also want to be totally, absolutely, and completely prepared, here they are, in all their glory, for all perpetuity (questions are not edition specific):

The Devil DM’s in the Details

1. Horses:
     A) Will run away and get eaten.
     B) Are medieval cars.
2. Running out of food & water:
     A) Will be your doom! Mwahahaha!
     B) Oh, I threw that stuff out ages ago: more room for more treasure!
3. Carrying capacity and item location are:
     A) Moot: I am a Human Trapper Keeper! (Sewing profession FTW!)
     B) … You mean, like where I wrote them down on my sheet?
4. Dying from “exposure” means:
     A) Heheheh. What do YOU think it means?
     B) &@#%*$!!! (“Winter Is Coming” my ass!)
5. Dressing well and bathing are:
     A) Hey, what are you trying to say? I always bathe before playing! /sniff
     B) Many a barbarian’s downfall when drinking tea with the king of Cormyr.
6. Time-sensitive quests:
     A) Wait for their hero! (Who ever heard of letting evil win?)
     B) Are a bitch.

Get Your GAME FACE On

7. Get “In Character” means:
     A) Stop joshing around and play!
     B) Costumes required, accents recommended
8. Out-of-character jokes receive:
     A) Laughs!
     B) Death Threats
9. Thieving from the party is:
     A) Hey, you knew what I was when you invited me in!
     B) Grounds for expulsion
10. Character vs. Player knowledge is:
     A) Strictly enforced!
     B) (Wait—there’s a difference?)
11. Unoptimized characters are:
     A) Doing it wrong!
     B) Quirky!
12. Suboptimal character-based decisions are:
     A) Jerky, especially in combat!
     B) Fun, especially in combat!

Death Is Always an Option

13. You see a beholder:
     A) Wave and say hello. (It could be a GOOD beholder!)
     B) Kill, loot, win XP!
14. The odds in this fight are overwhelming:
     A) Run away! He’s going for a TPK!
     B) He’d never give us a fight we couldn’t win…
15. Straying from the beaten path is:
     A) Asking for punishment.
     B) Sometimes the most fun!
16. Missing a game or PC death means:
     A) Your character will suck now, hahah!
     B) You miss some of the awesome adventure
17. Traps are:
     A) Inescapable killing fields of infinite woe!
     B) Fun for the whole family!

Thems the Rulez

18. Creative skill & spell interpretation is:
     A) Twinking!
     B) What this game is all about!
19. Playing a mindflayer is:
     A) Always a problem in towns!
     B) Overpowered awesomesauce.
20. Note taking is:
     A) Absolutely essential.
     B) Of what, all the different kinds of monsters I kill?

DMnation

21. DMs are rewarded with:
     A) Crushed soda cans
     B) Cookies

To browse my columns by subject, check out the Writers Don’t Cry index.

Click through to Apex Book Company to see the flowchart!

(I had so much fun designing this flowchart for Apex–I hope you enjoy it!)

But I’m not really talking about just push-ups here. I’m talking about writing. And running. And all of life, really.

In life, there is a difference between learning and performing. When learning, you play. You take risks. You try new things. You do things you would never do in front of an audience or for a finished product. Otherwise, you’re never going to reach your full potential—you’ll be stunted at what you could do before you started taking everything so seriously. We should always be willing to learn—and to support others when they’re learning. We’ve all been there. And besides, you never know when someone you’ve helped will turn around and show you something brilliant and new, something you never thought of before.

Performing, on the other hand, is doing something practiced to produce a finished product which is as perfect and as flawless as possible—and here, you take fewer risks. You use those skills you built when learning. Because performing is all about working thoughtfully and intentionally. Performing, of course, also takes practice to get good at.

I don’t think anyone believes NaNoWriMo is about performing. It’s about learning. And I will always support learning, and playing, and taking risks in order to grow.

Respect what other people are working on, even if it’s not for you. There’s no reason not to.

Even though it’s meant for sculpting, this is how I see editing. The writer produces a beautiful block of marble with a rough figure emerging from it, and it is the editor’s job to help the writer refine that figure, marking where more stone needs to be carved away and helping them see the lines more clearly. And then, once the writer has fully freed the figure from the marble, it is the editor’s job to polish it to a fine shine, and set it out for display.

Writers are visionaries and storytellers. Wizards with words. They pull forth whole worlds from their imaginations. As an editor, I need to be able to share in the vision of different authors, to see each dream as clearly as they do, and to be able to draw it into even sharper focus. I shouldn’t be carving the statue myself, or making every statue adhere to my standards of beauty. I shouldn’t be making them carve in the manner of my school of carving. I need to be flexible, adaptable, and clear-sighted enough to be able to fully immerse myself in different styles, with different authors, and help each of them realize their wholly unique visions.

It’s an incredibly rewarding process. Being chosen to share a vision with an author, when it’s still so young and raw, is an honor. But it’s so much more and so much less than it’s made out to be. It’s not about being a capricious judge any more than it’s about fiddling with commas. It’s about having a five-year-old’s honesty and a muse’s love of art.

When you are a kid is not the time to worry about being critical about your own writing. You will go through many stages—messy, beautiful, terrible, necessary stages. Stages in which you will use too many adjectives, or write everything in the second person, or have a thesaurus addiction, or write everything from a candlestick’s perspective. Your writing will win praises from teachers, and a year later, you will hide it in embarrassment. And that’s okay—that’s good. That’s learning. Anyone who tries to make you more critical about your own writing during these stages is missing the point. This is the time to try all your crazy ideas—to take risks, to fail. And yes, to recognize when you fail, but to try again. Because you have that luxury, and because that’s how you will learn. Being a writer has never been about taking the safe, easy route.

Then, you will likely enter a hypercritical phase, in which the blank page goes from muse to brick wall. You apply the critical eye you’ve used on books all your life–dissecting their techniques, figuring out what words they use in what order to elicit the correct emotional responses, and what emotions they play in what order to give satisfaction—and turn it on your own writing. And suddenly, you notice that you’ve been mostly just banging on the piano, not making any music at all, and all the joy and love you experienced writing fades into horrified embarrassment.

In this stage, you tighten up on the rules, refusing to break them at all. You will go from having too weak boundaries to having too stern boundaries. Scoffing at those who overuse adjectives, laughing at the gall of those who use second person, and sniffing at those who bother to use a complicated word where a simple word will do. And this stage, frankly, sucks.

But it does end. Eventually, you will find the right flexible, strong boundaries for your writing. You will take the good from each stage you passed through as a writer—adjectives, sesquipedalian words, and all—and wrap them into your own unique voice. And that’s when the writing becomes fun again. When you can recapture the joy and freedom of youthful writing, with the restraint and precision of experience.

So don’t give up. Keep reading. Keep trying. And know that it’s an adventure, every bit as perilous and joyful as those you write about.

To this end, I have left Amazon to return to editing and writing full time—freelance this time—and to spend a bit more time teaching kids about writing as well. I will, of course, continue to write my writing advice column for Amazon’s blog, Omnivoracious, among other freelance projects.

So if you’re a publisher, author, or agent who wants a second pair of eyes on a manuscript, I’d love to see what I can do to help you turn your manuscript into the book you’ve always dreamed it would be.

The question to me has always been why do heroes do what they do, if not for glory or gold? Modern society features many heroes by necessity–those who can do no other than be heroic or face death, which we assume most people aren’t fond of. But there is that other kind of hero–the hero who is driven to heroism by some internal need. By their own conviction about right and wrong.

In the wake of Japan’s tsunami and the radiation leaking, I was fascinated by the will of those who went in to try to mitigate the radiation–knowing they would likely die or encounter radiation poisoning. That degree of self-sacrifice for a cause greater than oneself–what were their stories? I’m sure every person on those teams has their own reasons. But it’s such an uncommon phenomenon.

In my latest Writers Don’t Cry column, I dissect the different kinds of heroes by why they fight, how they fight, and how they win, and an attempt to better analyze the hero phenomenon, and found that my own views on the matter were fairly strong, if not necessarily mainstream.

Personally, I am drawn to the kinds of heroes that I want to believe, in a just and perfect world, would be rewarded. I want to believe that idealism and fighting for what is right is rewarded because I have strong beliefs and I want to fight for what is right. I want to believe that intelligence is more important than brute strength or unthinking will–that if I study hard, if I work hard, that I can learn enough to achieve whatever goals I have in life. And I want to believe that the will to continue on when it seems like all is lost, when you’ve been beaten down too many times to count, and when a lesser person would have given up–is rewarded. Because that is the speech I will give myself to make myself go the extra mile. That it is worth it. That the last mile is what makes all the difference.

What are you drawn to? What kind of heroism do you want to be rewarded?

Check out my Amazon article on how to create compelling characters here: So, You Want to Be a Hero

Check out all of my Writers Don’t Cry columns for Amazon.

I wasn’t very good at making people special. I thought that the only way to make someone special was to make them both perfect and the last of whatever they were—the ultimate Mary Sue (because really, everyone was talented and beautiful in my books). This was something that went back to my less serious writing days in elementary school, writing plays about the Last of the Xanthans. Whatever a Xanthan is. That never really did become apparent. (It was a name taken from an ingredient in my lunchtime chocolate milk.)

Then, at some point, I realized that that was what everyone did. That all stories involved heroes with icy blue or sparkling violet or emerald green eyes… That all heroes were all beautiful and talented, dangerous to their enemies and loyal to their friends. That a lot of them were even elves! That all heroes were special. Not  one of them was like me.

So I scrapped my by-this-point 600-page epic and started a new story about a girl with normal brown eyes and normal brown hair and nothing particularly remarkable about her… and got bored and never got past twenty-seven pages or so.

It took me two more tries before I realized that it wasn’t happening, and finally came to accept that it was okay to write about people who were other than perfectly ordinary. Also, that sixteen was a dumb age to wish to be. You couldn’t really do anything interesting until you were eighteen.

As I continued to write and read and eventually edit, I spent a lot of time analyzing what makes characters compelling, and I realized that while it certainly wasn’t blandness, it also wasn’t perfection. What made characters interesting were their fears, desires, loves, hates, flaws, merits, and everything else that made them special—as in unique. But also everything that made them spark when other plot elements hit them.

What made my first “serious” character so interesting wasn’t her beauty, talent, or specialness—it was her fiery personality, her loyalty to her friends, and her idealism that sometimes blinded her to the truths of those around her. Likewise, my favorite characters of my favorite authors are almost never their main characters, but are the side characters, filled to the brim with flavor and bereft of the heavy expectations of hero protagonists. Free to be a little dumb, a little selfish, a little lusty, a little obsessive, a little interesting.

Check out my Amazon article on how to create compelling characters here: She’s No Mary Sue: Creating Characters People Care About

Check out all of my Writers Don’t Cry columns for Amazon.