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D.R. Ranshaw

D.R. RANSHAW

The Tempests of Time

7/25/2015

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There’s never enough time. Or is there?

Earlier today, I was sitting at the kitchen table on a lazy Saturday afternoon towards the end of a warm July --- after a leisurely lunch so different from the hurriedly inhaled affairs I routinely experience at work (with the muted sounds of adolescent bedlam in the background) --- gazing at the large wall calendar we keep to track the multiple comings and goings of our large family, and it suddenly occurred to me with a feeling rather akin to horror that next Tuesday will mark the halfway point of my summer holiday.  And I have accomplished only a fraction of the things I want to accomplish during this time.

(Yes, yes, I know, he said wearily... spare me the hoary old jokes and the thinly disguised bitter remonstrances about how much time those darn teachers have off in the summer, please. I’ve had 30 years of hearing them, and I can come back with either false jollity/humourous zingers like “well, teachers do 12 months of work in ten, you know” or earnest explanations that essentially boil down to variations of the statement my kids invariably used to make when I pointed out some glaring lapse of logic/judgement in their teenage sensibilities: “Dad, you just don’t understand.” Having heard it enough times --- hell, way more than enough --- I can even, if you’d like, accompany the statement with appropriate eye rolling and associated body language that eloquently suggests the listener is the stupidest person on the planet.)

I know I should have viewed my little discovery with a glass-is-half-full mentality (“Wow! Half my summer vacation still to come!”), but it seems the common human reaction to such situations is more along the glass-is-half-empty one, and I’m afraid I am no exception. But I’m feeling a tad philosophical today, so if you’ve read this far, bear with me and we can briefly examine the issue of time together (spend some time on time, one might cheekily say).

We’re all aware --- intellectually, anyway, although on a more everyday level we rather quaintly often try and deny it, or at the very least, submerge it --- that our time is all too finite. (In the film Star Trek: Generations, the villain intones theatrically at one point that ‘time is the fire in which we burn.’) But for much of our lives, we behave as though it’s infinite, and that frequently leads us to use time carelessly and not very productively. In that, ‘twas ever thus, alas. For example, a couple of thousand years or so ago, a man named Paul made the frustrated observation succinctly for all of us when he said, in effect, “I don’t get it. I spend my time doing the things I hate, and don’t do the things I want/need to do.” Yeah, you and me both, man.

As a writer, one thing (among many) that deeply concerns me --- especially now I’ve published the beginning of a story that has the potential to be both long and complex --- is the possibility I might ‘shuffle off this mortal coil’ before I have a chance to finish it. And no, the concern is not because I would be depriving legions of readers the opportunity to savour my deathless prose. I’m not that vain, thank you very much. (At least, I don’t think I am.) But, you know, I want to see how this story unfolds, too. I know how it’s supposed to end --- at least, at the moment, I naively think so --- but as I’ve written in another entry, I haven’t a clue exactly how we’re going to get there. (Yet. Don’t despair. I’m working on it.) And like a few others, I really want to find out, because I happen to like my Rhissan very much and want to see his tale told. And the joy is in the journey as much as the destination. In fact, sometimes, perhaps more so.

So... why don’t I spend every waking minute feverishly committing his story to paper? After all, perhaps I should be telling myself, as the character named Q tells the dauntless Captain Picard in the brilliant Star Trek: The Next Generation episode Tapestry: “...That Picard never realized how fragile life is or how important each moment must be.  So his life never came into focus.  He drifted for much of his career with no plan or agenda… going from one assignment to the next, never seizing the opportunities that presented themselves…” (You may have noticed by now I have a certain fondness/interest in the various incarnations of Star Trek, but besides being hugely entertaining, it often presents its viewers with real philosophical gems. No, really. I swear.)

But I think there’s another side to the coin, one a little less driven. Ecclesiastes discusses the fact that “To everything there is a season, and a time to every purpose” (although it’s easy to take that passage out of context, if you’re not careful). And back in the 1960s and ‘70s, there was a little poem called Desiderata that rather typified the times --- although it was eventually over quoted to the point of parody. But one line is relevant here: ‘beyond a wholesome discipline, be gentle with yourself.’

In other words, there are times we should be busy with various tasks, and times we should be relaxing, whatever that looks like. Sometimes it doesn’t resemble much of anything. Other times, to other people, the relaxing might look an awful lot like work. So let’s leave the last word to one of these two eminent deep thinkers (your choice):

“Be aware of wonder. Live a balanced life --- learn some and think some and draw and paint and sing and dance and play and work every day some”

                - Robert Fulghum, philosopher extraordinaire

“This is no time to talk about time! We don’t have the time!” (pause) “What was I saying?”

                - Counselor Deanna Troi, of the good starship Enterprise

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Rules of Writing

7/19/2015

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Recently, a friend asked, “Do you have a list of rules for writing?”

I was momentarily unsure what to say (a rare occurrence, as those who know me --- especially my students --- will attest). I’ve seen many such lists, some better than others. But to deflect her, I suggested she look up several by famous authors.

She wouldn’t be distracted. “Okay,” she nodded amiably. “But I was asking for your list. Don’t you have one?”

Well, I do. Having taught English for 30 years, yeah, I have a thought or six on the issue. But the question made me a tad uncomfortable, because first, having one seems a little presumptuous, and second, I’m not sure how useful such lists really are. You see, I believe the ability to write well is like the ability to teach well: it’s a gift, and you either have it or you don’t. You can either spin a tale convincingly and spellbindingly, or you can’t. (You can also either naturally command the attention and respect of a group of hormonal adolescents, or you can’t.) Now, you can work and improve at both; I also believe that. However, fundamentally --- and this applies to many things besides teaching and writing --- as I said, you either have a gift, or you don’t. If not, you can be competent. But you will never be brilliant.

However, my friend was persistent, so I marshaled my thoughts and trotted them out. This is probably not the last time I’ll discuss the subject, because I’m sure my thoughts on it will change (the gentle term is ‘mature’) as time goes by. But here’s the current draft:

Write the best damn story you can. The first and greatest commandment. Everything else, really, is lumped into it. It’s there partly because I get irritated with authors who include nitpicky stuff in their writing rules, like admonitions never to use adverbs to modify ‘said.’  The problem is, even famous authors break such rules --- their own rules --- all the time. (Never say never, guys.) So let’s look at more relevant criteria, shall we, such as... does the story flow like fine wine? Is it drinkable like same? (I once chastised a colleague trying to dictate teaching methodology. I said I ask three questions of my teaching practices: are kids learning? Are they engaged? Are they enjoying the experience? If I can answer yes to all three, don’t tell me how to do this. The same, I think, can be said about writing, at least with the latter two questions --- and maybe the first, come to that.)

Don’t worry about originality; just tell the truth. C.S. Lewis said it best: “Even in literature and art, no man who bothers about originality will ever be original: whereas if you simply try to tell the truth (without caring twopence how often it has been told before) you will, nine times out of ten, become original without ever having noticed it.” After several thousand years of recorded human history, I’m willing to bet most story situations have already been covered... at least several thousand times. But tell the story truthfully and genuinely, and people will still respond enthusiastically.

Don’t be boring. (‘Well, duh,’ you say.) Yes, I know it seems obvious, but make that narrative sing, keep it rollicking along, especially in an era of spectacular attention deficits; otherwise, people won’t be engaged, and that’s it, the kiss of death.

Give us texture. You can --- and, I think, should --- include material that doesn’t directly advance the plot, as long as it’s absorbing. Don’t overdo it. But give us detail and texture. (Stephen King calls it ‘chrome.’)

Make sure there’s logical consistency within the story. Want to write about fictional, fantastic creatures and worlds? Fine. (After all, I did!) But make sure everything makes sense within the framework of that world, and don’t alter details just to force-fit the narrative. In other words, don’t change immutable facts for the sake of convenience. That’s cheating, folks. It’s a sin, and readers will see it for such.

Avoid deus ex machina.  Also cheating. Miracles do happen... but not all the time, to the same character. Now, protagonists tend to be protagonists because they survive rather than get killed off, which implies they do get ‘lucky’ breaks, but even so... don’t abuse it. When your hero gets into a hopeless situation, think long and hard before you have choirs of angels suddenly descend and rescue him/her from the monstrous Jabberwock. At least on a regular basis.

Dialogue has to be believable. If it isn’t, you’ll kill any sense of realism. It’s strange how many people seem to find it difficult to write realistic dialogue, but when two or more persons hold a conversation, it shouldn’t read like a game of 20 Questions. Dialogue must sound spontaneous and unforced, because in normal conversation, it is. Someone says something, someone else responds, and so on. Most of us don’t sit and contemplate our responses for 30 seconds, or appear we’re reading a prepared text.

Listen to your characters’ voices. If the story is genuine, they’re there. I’m not literally referring to vocalization, but different characters will have different takes on any situation, because we all do. Each of us regards a given scenario through the lens of our cumulative experiences, good and bad, and the “baggage” each of us carries colours our outlooks, responses, and actions to every situation. Pay attention to those voices, and be faithful to them.

Throw rocks at your protagonist My editor gave this excellent advice. Bad things should overwhelm your protagonist from time to time, really bad things, potentially lethal things, so readers can identify with him/her and legitimately fear it really might be curtains. Yes, we know your protagonist leads a charmed life, but you don’t have to rub our noses in it.

Mechanics! I’ve left this to the last, but it’s vitally important. Proper punctuation, grammar, spelling, syntax. You may have the most brilliant ideas on the planet, but if you can’t express them well, they’re useless (and you look stupid into the bargain). Don’t counter by saying that’s what proofreaders are for; that’s the mark of a slob.

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Glorious Gallumphing Gryphons

7/11/2015

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“Why a gryphon, especially?” That’s been asked recently, along with other related questions.

I mentioned a while ago that Gryphon’s Heir began with a single incident: a desperate man going through a door that shouldn’t exist. It wasn’t a novel at that point, obviously. In fact, I had no particular aim to write a novel. I was just responding to an extremely unhappy period in my life in a way I had done many times before: writing about it as a means of dealing with it. (Yes, I suppose that qualifies as my nerd confession this week. But before you raise your eyebrow too much, remember that as coping strategies go, it’s a pretty benign/inexpensive/non-destructive strategy. And occasionally quite creative.)

There was no gryphon then, just one solitary man. But then he went through a door (I must regretfully confess that, at this point, my situation and the man’s diverged) and met Someone on the door’s other side, and they talked, and that Someone answered a few questions while simultaneously raising all sorts of others. The man wound up going through the door. In retrospect, he didn’t really ask all --- even most --- of the right questions, or kick the tires very much before agreeing to go through, which I suppose was a reflection certainly of his desperation and perhaps his subconscious willingness to do something completely different with his life. But I don’t want to be too hard on him, because I think many of us have been at that point, haven’t we? (Remember what Thoreau said about most men living lives of quiet desperation.)

I wasn’t really sure what he was going to encounter on the door’s other side, and played around with several ideas before settling on the one I ultimately used. (At one point, I recall thinking the door might exit into an inn, and the man might be met by a couple of other people, abilities and roles unknown. But the setting I employed was, I think, far more romantic and allowed the introduction of raw, elemental conflict much sooner, to much greater effect.) Right, then; we needed a couple of creatures for that conflict.

Wait a minute, I hear you objecting: just how long was this writing-as-therapy thing going to continue? Well, one of the interesting observations we can make at this point is that therapy took a back seat before disappearing entirely, because the story just wouldn’t leave or conveniently end. I had an incident, yes. I had a response to that incident, yes. But then, all of a sudden, before I knew what was happening, we were off into another world, quite literally, and things were happening to the man --- all kinds of wonderful, terrible, fantastic, interesting kinds of things. Where was all this going? Just as it says at one point in the book in relation to Aquilea, my gryphon, I intensely desired to find out. And the rest, as they say, is history.

Okay, then. Back to practicalities. I needed creatures for a conflict. I already had a bad creature in mind. Now I needed a good creature, one that would be intelligent and form a close relationship with the man. And I wanted it to be able to fly. But what? A dragon? Nope. Tolkien’s Smaug and Paolini’s Saphira immediately came to mind, and I didn’t want such an obvious similarity. Hmm. An eagle? Nope, Tolkien again. Hmm. Flying mythological animals, I thought, mentally running through the catalogue. What about some sort of hybrid? And the gryphon just came to me in a flash. I wasn’t aware of any as famous as Smaug, which was an important consideration --- that was then, of course; since my book’s publication, I have belatedly discovered the gryphon is evidently used much more often by fantasy authors than I was aware of at the time. However and oh well, he said, shrugging pragmatically. I’m very attached to Aquilea, whose name I thought of, using the Latin words for eagle and lion. Like my protagonist, I’m sure there could be some linguist out there to quibble with the proper construction of the name, but frankly, Scarlet, I don’t give a damn. I like it.

And so there she was, in one fell swoop, if you’ll pardon the pun. Why a female? I really don’t know. She just was. Had to be. Always had been. I can’t say rationally beyond that, because I don’t know. Some things in life, you just know with utter certainty. You don’t know how or why you know what you know, but by gosh, you do. And I can tell you that Aquilea had to be a girl. Ah QUILL leah. Three syllables, emphasis on the middle one, and don’t ask why, because again, That’s Just The Way It Had To Be.

On a final connected note, a post-script, if you will... the cover painting of Aquilea. It’s really quite lovely, isn’t it? It was done for me by my father several years ago, at my request. He was an enormously talented commercial artist --- started off as a lithographic artist back in the 1930s --- and his technique and ability in both commercial and fine art were absolutely breathtaking. For example, I still have samples of his work where some of the lettering he did, completely by hand, is so small, it’s readable only with a magnifying glass. Amazing.

And as far as the cover of Gryphon’s Heir is concerned, I guess only fitting, too: when I was a boy in school, I always used to ask him to do title pages for my reports and essays, and he crafted some that were truly works of art. (What my teachers thought of them, I have no idea.) I wasn’t originally sure I would use his gryphon painting, but now, I’m very glad I did, because we could look on the cover for my first novel as the penultimate, final title page he did for me... and a tribute to him.

Thanks, dad.

 

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The Hero's Heart

7/4/2015

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Ever given any thought to the hero? I mean real thought, not just casually nodding at the concept.

Heroes are everywhere in stories. Swashbuckling or timid, larger than life or ordinary, they diligently work to save the day. Without a hero, we don’t have a story. But if you seek a quick and simple definition, it’s not easy to find; dictionaries are frequently not a great help. Definitions like "admired for achievements and qualities," "mythological or legendary figures endowed with great strength and ability," "one with great courage" or "the principal character in a literary work" all hint at parts of the whole, but fail to convey the true nature of the hero. Looking under "heroic" is even less informative: "having the qualities of a hero." That's no help at all. (I hate it when reference works do that, don’t you? I’m always telling my students you can’t use a term to define itself, and then the local dictionary smugly throws my edict in my face. A pox on you, unimaginative editor. You Can Do Better.)

To be fair, perhaps such difficulties stem from the fact that hero characteristics range so widely. After all, as the saying goes, "heroes come in many guises." Although they do, it is possible to list some common characteristics, so let's start by dividing heroes into "traditional" and "non-traditional."

The traditional hero is the person we automatically associate with the words: strong, capable of great feats and attractive (not always in terms of great beauty, but definitely possessing a wholesome air, an aura of "good"). They’re intelligent and wise (there is a difference). Spiritually, they’re often close to God and possess what we would call necessary hero characteristics: courage, daring, kindness, imagination, mercy, justice, insight into human nature, the capacity to lead and instill confidence in others, and in general, a chivalrous nature.

We can subdivide the traditional hero further into "flawed" and "unflawed." The unflawed hero is just that, so you’ve got to be careful not to make them so saccharinely perfect, no one can stand them because of their perfection. The flawed hero possesses many of those attributes, but is more like an ordinary person, with some of the faults we all have.  This makes the flawed hero easier to identify with, because we can relate to their bad habits, having (ahem) one or two ourselves.

Take it back to The Lord of the Rings a moment. Aragorn and Boromir are traditional heroes. Boromir, captain of Gondor, eldest son of the Steward (therefore in line to become de facto king), is definitely a flawed traditional hero: he covets the Ring, doesn’t understand its evil nature --- and eventually commits the cardinal sin of trying to take it from Frodo. Tsk, tsk, Boromir. That’s bad. In fact, dramatically speaking, it’s so bad, he has to die. (But here’s an interesting thing: notice that Tolkien gives Boromir a chance to redeem himself before he dies --- which he does, trying to save Merry and Pippin.) Aragorn is a traditional hero too, although you can debate whether he’s flawed or unflawed. Jackson makes Aragorn far more unsure of himself than I ever recall Tolkien doing.

The non-traditional hero is more an ordinary person. It’s in the spiritual category that the non-traditional hero most resembles the traditional hero. They may or may not have most of those requisite characteristics listed above, but definitely will have at least one: willingness to accept circumstances and do whatever is required to complete the great deeds demanded. In that regard, the non-traditional hero is often, I think, more worthy of respect and admiration than the traditional hero, because non-traditional heroes are thrust into circumstances not of their own making and certainly not of their own choosing. Traditional heroes go out and do what they are already suited by ability and temperament to do; non-traditional heroes have to rise up and go beyond that which they are normally capable of and/or comfortable doing.

Frodo is the perfect non-traditional hero. He doesn’t want to take down Dark Lords or save empires; he just wants to quietly live his life. And he screws up from time to time. But he is prepared to take the Ring to Mordor when he must. Jackson makes Frodo’s moment of decision about taking on the Ring rather more dramatic than Tolkien. You can almost see Frodo’s line of thought --- “Crap! I don’t want to do this! I’m not sure I can. But---” (long sigh) “---okay… give me the damned thing back and I’ll do my best.” Atta boy! We applaud, because Frodo acknowledges the reality and what must happen. And secretly, we nourish the hope that in the same situation, we’d do that, too. Now, this is important because not every hero makes that acknowledgement and accepts their role with good grace, and I don’t know about you, but that attitude drives me up the wall when I encounter it. For example, I enjoyed the Hunger Games trilogy, but I didn’t really like Katniss Everdeen very much. “Katniss,” I wanted to tell her, “I get it: you don’t want to be the hero. I don’t really care. You’re drafted, ‘cause strange as it may seem, you are the Katalyst.” (Sorry. Awful pun.) “So suck it up, sweetheart, and stop being sulkily reluctant about it. You’re the hero. Deal with it. I’m not saying you have to behave like you’re having the time of your life, but I want a little more can-do mentality and a little less moody teen angst from you. ”

What about the hero of Gryphon’s Heir, you ask? Well, given what I’ve discussed, it shouldn’t come as a surprise when I say he’s a non-traditional hero. Self-confidence is a huge issue for him, which I think most of us can relate to. And he makes mistakes --- sometimes rather major ones. But when push comes to shove, he too is prepared to say, “I really don’t know whether I’m the right person for this. In fact, I don’t think I am. But---” (long sigh) “---I’ll give it my best shot.”

And, you know, ultimately, that’s really all that can be asked of any of us, isn’t it?

 

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    D.R. Ranshaw's Blog

    Author of The Annals of Arrinor series.  Lover of great literature, fine wine, and chocolate. Not necessarily in that order.

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