Tag Archives: writing

30 Days of Writing #15: Writer You Admire?

Posted by Gary W. Olson on

15) Midway question! Tell us about a writer you admire, whether professional or not!

There are a lot of possible answers to this questions, such as writers I’ve grown up reading (Isaac Asimov, Frank Herbert), writers I read much of now (Terry Pratchett, Philip K. Dick, Michael Connelly), and writers who are friends of mine (Greg Fishbone, Eric A. Burns-White). In fact, once I’m through with these 30 questions, I think a regular feature here will be a writer I admire, and how his or her works have influenced me. But for this time around, let me go on about Avram Davidson.

I did not discover Davidson until well after his passing, but have spent much of the past ten to twelve years reading and re-reading a good portion of his bibliography. He is a writer with a definite voice — curmudgeonly, erudite, cantankerous, obscure, cynical, and of good humor, sometimes all within a single sentence. His erudition, particularly in areas of mythology and history, is something I admire, and am likely never to equal. His stories break many so-called rules of good prose, such as that of pushing plots forward, or having nice, trim, Strunk-White approved stylings, and ofttimes can seem to go on for pages and pages without anything seeming to happen. But things are always happening, beneath the surface, and if you can relax the part of your brain that insists that everything you read has to make sense right away, you may find much that is rewarding in his stories. In fact, maybe forget about worrying that it makes sense at all, and just submerge into the rhythms of the story, and the rhythms of his rich and generous storytelling.

I sometimes catch myself looking back over something I’ve written, and thinking ‘Davidson might have tweaked that like so.’ Not often do I let these darlings stay unkilled, because, enjoy Davidson though I do, his style is not mine and never will be. But I admire his craft and his cunning, and would have greatly liked to know him when he was alive. Until then, I do still have a few more of his works to track down and enjoy.

30 Days of Writing #14: Map Out Locations?

Posted by Gary W. Olson on

14) How do you map out locations, if needed? Do you have any to show us?

If it’s an interior space, such as an apartment or a house, I visualize a place I’m familiar with, such as my residence or that of a friend’s–altering details as necessary. If it’s a larger or more fantastic space, I’ll sketch out a map if I don’t have something visual in mind. For exterior spaces, it depends on the story. Brutal Light has Detroit and its suburbs in mind. In a previous iteration of the novel, it was set in Chicago. I had a map on the wall with particular locations marked out, with the idea that I would eventually go to the city and make more detailed notes on what was around. (If that sounds unlikely, well, that’s why I changed the setting to Detroit, near where I live.) For the jungle-setting short story sequence I’m coming up with, I’m going to sketch the exterior locations out, very loosely based on real locations. None to show you just yet, so sorry.

30 Days of Writing #13: Favorite Culture to Write?

Posted by Gary W. Olson on

13) What’s your favorite culture to write, fictional or not?

I think what is meant by this poorly worded question is ‘what is your favorite culture to have your characters interact with, or relate to, or somesuch.’ To which I answer… um. I don’t think I have one, per se, and I’m not going to make one up to answer the question. I’ve enjoyed spoofing aspects of ‘superhero culture’ and ‘fan culture’ in Superguy and SfStory. I’ve enjoyed having characters discover hidden cultures based on mythic beings in stories like Fabulous Beasts. But… favorite culture? I just don’t have an answer for that one right now.

30 Days of Writing #12: Best Job of Worldbuilding?

Posted by Gary W. Olson on

12) In what story did you feel you did the best job of worldbuilding? Any side-notes on it you’d like to share?

I’ve in the past not been a disciplined worldbuilder, preferring to feel my way along as I write and see what falls out of my head over nailing things down ahead of time. This has sometimes worked well–in Brutal Light, my answer to this question–but oftentimes it has come back around to bite me, forcing significant additional revision time. I’m working on changing that in my upcoming projects–the short story sequence set in a remote jungle location on what may or may not be another world, for instance, is something I’m very aware I have to put a lot of extra pre-writing worldbuilding effort into. My next novel project, Minions, will also require some considerable forethought, though more of it will be left to ‘discovery.’

That said, I don’t think Brutal Light would have been as strong a novel if I’d tried to get things lined up right at the start. Some projects are just like that. In this case, it was the end result of years of thinking about stories like it, and iterations of working on previous attempts at novels and even some of my Superguy material. It had spent so much time incubating that, had I tried anything like formal worldbuilding, I might never have stopped, and might never have gotten around to writing the actual book.

30 Days of Writing #9: How Do You Create Characters?

Posted by Gary W. Olson on

9) How do you get ideas for your characters? Describe the process of creating them.

Ah, the dreaded ‘where do you get your ideas for such-and-such’ question! For it, I have the no-doubt equally-dreaded answer: ‘they just sort of come to me.’ I don’t know that any writer has all that satisfactory an answer for questions like these. Generally, of course, it starts with the story. Now, the story idea can come to me in a flash, as in I see something on TV, or a friend talks about something odd, or I read something that intrigues me, and a ‘what if’ occurs to me. More often, I won’t be able to point to anything specific as a trigger, save a number of thoughts that have been fermenting in the back of my mind for who knows how long. (This is, of course, why people who want to be writers should be voracious readers — the more you pour down into that murky hole, the more you have down there that can connect and gel and transmute until they jump out of the hole and stomp around in your forebrain until you are forced to get them out through your fingers into a story.

Once I have the story, the characters tend to follow. Frequently, the story I want to tell will be central to at least one character, so that’s where I start. I generally sketch out some ‘facts’ about the main character, who they are as the story begins, and who I see them being at the story’s end. If interactions with other characters are important to the story, these other characters will get sketched out as well. I don’t load on the detail too much, just enough to gain a starting point.

More details of the characters emerge as I write the first draft. I try to note specifics (such as appearance, background, relations with other characters, etc.) as I progress, but in the main, the personality of the characters emerge through the telling of the story, and these get refined through rethinking and redrafting. Doesn’t sound pretty, I know, but in the end, it gets me there.

30 Days of Writing #8: Favorite Genre to Write and/or Read?

Posted by Gary W. Olson on

8. What’s your favorite genre to write? To read?

Historically it has been, for reading, science fiction. I cut my teeth on Asimov, Clarke, and Herbert (but not Heinlein or Tolkien, strangely enough — at least not until I was past my teen years and less prone to, shall we say, ‘exuberant overidentification’ with the worlds they created), plus rather more Star Wars and V tie-in novels than I would care to admit. And while SF is still a reading staple of mine, it has been eclipsed in my later years by fantasy and horror.

When I say ‘fantasy,’ I generally mean what I guess you’d call ‘urban’ fantasy – Simon R. Green’s Nightside series and Jim Butcher’s Dresden Files series being examples. Also some works from the more eccentric wings of fantasy, such as the books of Avram Davidson and Hal Duncan. Plus, of course, Terry Pratchett’s wonderful and expansive works, both Discworld-based and not. Horror has drawn me in as well, including works by Clive Barker and Stephen King.

I think what draws me to such material in reading is the visceral nature of dark fantasy and horror – the way a good writer can draw you into the moment, despite (or because of) the sheer weirdness of the situation. It’s also why I don’t read all that much of traditional ‘high’ fantasy – there’s nothing in it that really calls to me. Viscerality is also a key component of works I enjoy outside SF and fantasy, such as the mystery/crime works of Michael Connelly (the Harry Bosch series) and Jeff Lindsay (whose Dexter series is a concept I dearly wish I’d come up with).

So it should be no surprise that my favorite genre to write, these days, is ‘dark/urban/fantasy/horror.’ Insofar as I might be expected to shoehorn Brutal Light into a category, that is where it would go. Visceral (and sometimes bloody) action, philosophical and metaphysical weirdness, and characters that (hopefully) show depth and some degree of realism as they try to deal with it all.