How (not) to write a series - a pantser's guide

How not to plan

Definitely, at all costs, avoid the planning. With this one simple tip, a writer can avoid months or even years of worry, save themselves from the dreaded note cascade whenever the cat crosses the desk, and, best of all, begin writing sooner.

As award-winning authors Claire Buss and J C Steel can attest, it is hard to over-emphasise the savings in time spent not writing your next masterpiece this one piece of advice can provide. Please note, when we say ‘don’t plan’, we do indeed mean no series arc, no tedious deciding in advance whether your protagonist should have a mole somewhere interesting, and most certainly no poring over a map trying to figure out why cities that famous people are born in exist at the top of mountain plateaux with no nearby water.

Complicated things like these tend to take care of themselves. You had no plan for book one and everything worked out just fine. Repeat this method when writing subsequent books and in no time at all you'll have a multi-book series and maybe even a box set. Planning takes up valuable time when you could be inventing twenty new characters who bear no relation whatsoever to the main characters in your first book. It's important to keep things fresh and interesting.

Planning is one of the secret tools of procrastination. Authors who swear by it are really admitting to be closet-procrastinators and they probably don't even like cake.

 

How not to world-build

J C Steel maintains that it’s possible to learn everything you need to know about your characters and your world-building by climbing a mast, wedging yourself comfortably above the radar, and chatting with the voices in your head. Not only does it pass the time when the yacht isn’t going anywhere, but when you do this regularly, the character, the secondary characters, and the world they live in become so internalised that the entire setting and cast is ready for you when you reach deck level and reach for your pen (or keyboard, or magic wand, or inscription instrument of choice). Better yet, again, no notes required.

Health and safety tip: Of course, for the younger writer, it is important not to confess to anyone that you are, in fact, chatting with the voices in your head until you reach the local age of indiscretion. Otherwise adults (defined as those who have been doing it wrong longer) have a tendency to over-react.

There is no need to re-read your previous book(s) and re-familiarise yourself with the existing world you built. After all you wrote it in the first place and you never forget salient details, ever. By continuing to have regular chats with your characters you will have an in-depth understanding of their personality and why they react to things the way they do. Seeing as you have all this information at your fingertips it will become obvious to the reader as well, this is down to secret osmosis of thought. That elusive yet unique connection authors have with their readers which allows them, the reader, to understand every nuance, every subtlety and every hidden meaning. That connection is so strong there is no need to describe buildings, cities, infrastructure or even what your characters look like. All those world-building aspects come under planning and as stated previously, there is no need to get bogged down by any of that.

 

How to not delay the writing bits

So how does one get from chatting with the voices in your head to successfully writing a series? You may well ask. We feel that the key ingredient for this harks back to our very first piece of advice - don't plan - freeing up more time for actual writing. Bum on seat and fingers on writing implements is how the words are made to go. A pantser is, therefore, always at a near-infinite advantage. While the plotter is still working out whether using shell pink Post-It notes for the kinky scenes is too precious, the pantser has already powered through that all-important opening scene and is trying busily to get their characters to slow that duck down so they can write down the awesome one-liner someone yelled halfway through the last chase.

There is no need to worry about subsequent books making sense with regards to the entire series or indeed as stand-alone novels. Readers will, of course, read each book in the series in the correct order and will have already established their psychic link with your inner monologue and completely understand all the back story you've thought about and not yet written down. This means, again, the pantser wins at writing as they do not have to delay getting on with the actual writing.

Health and safety tip: We refer you to the great Oscar Wilde on the importance of making time for what is most important to you -“Work is the curse of the drinking classes.”

 

How not to get buried in the details

Detailed descriptions are so last century. Your enlightened reader just wants the juicy bits, never mind sixteen pages detailing the lavish surroundings your average planner has constructed. Which by the way, took them two weeks to thrash out while you, the pantser, released four novellas.

It’s absolutely true, the Devil’s in the details. In case no one has ever imparted to you the key to lying successfully (and what is fiction writing, if not the art of lying to better convey meaning?), it is Keep It Simple, Stupid – also known in professional circles as the KISS and tell principle. By avoiding the wall covered in sticky notes, and the ensuing panic whenever the air, the cat, the offspring, or the summoned entity moves through the room, we have also successfully avoided not one, but two story-killers; the smothering alive of the story pacing in irrelevant detail, and the trapping yourself in a plot web of such intricacy that the temptation to disprove the old adage that the pen is mightier than the sword is put to extreme test.

 

How not to listen to advice on how to write

Last but not least (by far not least) it is vitally important to ignore other people telling you how you should write. What works for them is highly unlikely to work for you, and as we’re looking at not just a flash fiction piece, a novella, or a single book, but the writing of an entire series...it is extremely important to settle on a method that works for you over weeks, months, years, and even more importantly, a method that doesn’t get in the way of your writing, but which facilitates it. So planners - plan to your little heart’s content and pantsers - blag it all the way!

The related ability to ignore people, no matter what the topic, is another that we highly recommend to aspiring series authors. In fact, it is a skill that will generally make your life better all around. Most great artists became famous long after they were dead, so it stands to reason if they’d listened to the people telling them how bad they were while they were alive, they would never have persevered until the very end.

 

Meet the authors

Claire Buss: 'Books and cake.'

Claire Buss is a science fiction, fantasy & contemporary writer based in the UK. She wanted to be Lois Lane when she grew up but work experience at her local paper was eye-opening. Instead, Claire went on to work in a variety of admin roles for over a decade but never felt quite at home. An avid reader, baker and Pinterest addict Claire won second place in the Barking and Dagenham Pen to Print writing competition in 2015 setting her writing career in motion.

You can follow her on Twitter @grasshopper2407 and visit her website www.cbvisions.weebly.com for more information about Claire and her writing.

J C Steel: ‘Knives, spaceships, and dirty fighting – who says a mercenary cult can’t be fun?’

Born in Gibraltar and raised on a yacht around the coasts of the Atlantic, I’m a writer, martial artist and introvert. In between the necessary making of money to allow the writing of more books, I can usually be found stowing away on a spaceship, halfway to the further galaxy.

Find out more about the author and the series at jcsteelauthor.com.

Etymology Excavation: quixotic

First seen on the Space Trash Blog.

What is etymology, and why are you excavating it?

Etymology is like the archeology of a language (definition: the study of the origin of words and the way in which their meanings have changed throughout history).

In this series of posts, we're going to look at some of the English phrases, like 'at full tilt', 'toe the line', 'when push comes to shove' that are commonly used, and have an interesting history - and that people often get wrong.

Seems as if once you start a good thing, the ideas just keep rolling. Today's excavation concerns the word 'quixotic'.

It's a fun dig. Let's start off with the dictionary definition as used today, courtesy of the Cambridge English Dictionary: 'having or showing ideas that are different and unusual but not practical or likely to succeed'.

The origin of the term dates back to 1605, and the work of fiction written by Don Miguel de Cervantes, El Ingenioso Hidalgo Don Quijote de la Mancha. It's more commonly known in English as Don Quixote. It's a pretty lengthy story, but the basic idea concerns a nobleman (you guessed it, Don Quixote) whose brain has slipped a few vital gears and who thinks he's a knight in the chivalric tradition. Amongst his antics are included tilting at windmills, which he mistook for giants.

As a point of general trivia, he names his long-suffering horse 'Rocinante', also the name given to the Mars ship used by James Holden and his crew in the TV series 'The Expanse'.

Quixotic, and quixotically, are words which I feel deserve more use than they get. They also have a wide range of definitions; I used the Cambridge one as it sums it up well, but the word can be applied for anything from 'odd' to 'quirky' to 'flaky' (in the sense of someone not to be relied on).

Colonisation fleets: Successful, semi-successful, and completely unsuccessful

First seen on the Space Trash Blog.

Colonisation and the Cortii

Given the generally cold and occasionally fissionable-hot relationship between most of the humanoid governments and the Cortii, it may not be immediately obvious that there were Cortiian units on a lot of the early colony ships. And then, if you think about it a bit more...humanoid governments had been hiring Cortii to do their dirty work since long before the colonisation waves, and dealing with new things is inherently risky. Having some heavily-armed, survival-trained, and cynically-minded mercenaries aboard to drop out of the airlock first can pre-empt so many problems.

'A testing environment solves many problems.'~Training of a Cortiian

Initially, there were the interstellar drives - sub-lightspeed, because lightspeed, increase in mass to infinity, etc., etc. From whichever of the Central Worlds was the original homeworld (no one really wants to solve that argument), exploration ships took the long trip at somewhere between half and two-thirds of light-speed to other rocky planets in the original solar system, and set up bases, experimented with air scrubbing, water recycling, and food production until they got good at it, and finally took the sideways step into terraforming - with more and less successful results.

From there, with a lot of the basic experimentation done, colony ships were sent to nearby solar systems. Since absolutely no one really wants to settle once and for all which of the four Central Worlds was 'the' Central World, stick a finger in the hologram on whichever you like. Those ships also had Cortiians aboard.

At some point after that, researchers stopped banging their heads on trying to solve infinite mass versus propulsion, and had a breakthrough that resulted in point-to-point travel, or as it's more commonly known, deepspace drive.

This resulted in the First Colonisation Fleet, which would fall firmly into the 'unsuccessful' category of colonisation attempts.

'In the hands of a fool are all things foolish.'~Sayings of the Wise

The First Colonisation Fleet

Given primitive humanoids and their tendency to breed indiscriminately, it shouldn't be a surprise to hear that a lot of the incentive behind the development of the original deepspace drive was to solve a massive overpopulation problem. Population-wide contraception actually preceded it by a few generations, but by that point all the Central Worlds were pretty much teetering on the point of not being able to support their populations.

With the advent of the deepspace drive came another massive incentive: hail conquering heroes, go forth and be granted as much surface space as you can possibly manage. The governments of the time didn't need to resort to deportations - they had more volunteers than they could build hulls and suspension tanks for. Private initiatives sprang up across Central space, building deepspace ships and offering space aboard.

Records of the time, given the sheer numbers of parties involved, are contradictory, but somewhere between six hundred and thirteen hundred experimental ships vanished into deepspace over a period of a hundred years, each carrying several hundred to several thousand aboard.

Even some of these had Cortii aboard, due largely to hazard bonuses and pre-payment contracts. Even the healthiest culture of cynicism is soluble in enough credit.

However, given experimental drives and the fact that the numbers of ships leaving Central Space in every direction vastly exceeded the number of planets about which long-distance research and exploratory probes had more to say then 'we're pretty sure there is something there', only a fraction of that First Colonial Fleet actually resulted in stable, high-tech colonies.

Miners and scout ships in remote locations still occasionally trip over drifting wrecks, and first contact teams have discovered several humanoid populations on outer-system planets with some interesting gaps in their fossil records, a really big impact crater, or stories of ships that carried wisdom from a distant land.

'Coincidence is the crutch of optimism.'~Training of a Cortiian

The Second Colonial Expansion

...might fall into the semi-successful category. Much better controlled, with destinations that at least rated a definite maybe on being terraformable, or stable enough to support a station habitat, twenty systems were selected for the initial wave, reconnoitred on a detail level, and finally approved for colonisation.

Not to mention, the deepspace drive had had a couple more centuries of fine-tuning. All twenty ships made it, one got blown away by defences the probes had missed, two turned out to be station prospects rather than terraforming prospects, but overall it worked. Most of those twenty ships carried one or more Cortii aboard.

In the interest of accuracy, it should be noted that the defences the probes had missed were in fact Base Zero; the Cortii had a sizeable fleet of their own and substantially less bureaucracy. The Central Worlds government declined to believe that there was a Cortiian base already in the system, but their ship went in heavily armed nonetheless. In the event, not nearly heavily enough.

Those colonies, in turn, spread, and split over time into the various political factions that form the basis of current Cortiian employment - pardon me, today's civilisation.

New urban fantasy WIP!

First seen on the Space Trash Blog.

Death is for the Living - Prologue:

Everything was dark, but this time, she was sure she was awake. There was a damp breeze on her cheek, and a soft surface under her. By contrast, her body was burning. The air smelled of earth and rot and wet leaves, and it was silent except for her own raucous breathing.

She lay there until she began to wonder if it wasn’t another fever dream, and then flinched as a voice broke the silence a little way away.

“And she was the only one, you sure of that?” It was a woman’s voice, with an Islands accent, slow and unhurried; not one she had heard before.

There was a pause, one that reeked of reluctance, and a male voice replied. “Alone and unbound, and several kilometres from the house. I thought she must be a fledgling, but...” his voice trailed off, a faint French accent evocative enough that she could almost feel the shrug.

“Not yet,” the woman’s voice agreed, and her tone was darker, grimmer. “You think she has the strength for this fight, boy, or are we just saving trouble for later?”

“I think she will stop fighting when she is dead, this one,” the man’s voice said. There was rock-solid certainty under his tone, such utter surety that she wished, briefly, that she were that sure. Absent memories, vision shut down, and fever tearing through her, fighting seemed about as impossible as levering her eyelids open.

Her throat was bone-dry, and she longed for liquid even through her throat and neck felt as though they had been savaged. She couldn’t remember why that might be.

She was suddenly aware that there was a presence beside her, blocking the flow of air, and a hand clamped onto her shoulder. It triggered a flash of rage and thirst combined, and it was enough to let her move, to flinch away, swing her arm. She had almost bitten him, and couldn’t remember why that would be a bad idea.

He was long gone by the time her retaliation completely failed to connect, the cooling breeze again moving over her face. It made the thirst worse.

Through the pounding in her ears she heard his voice: “Tu vois. She fought; she did not bite.”

There was a rustle of cloth. “Indeed I see. Make sure it her struggle you see and not your own. If she survives she may not thank you for it.”

There was a longer pause, as her heartbeat slowed and the lancing pains from the movement quieted with it, and she wondered absently why he didn’t just walk out. His desire to do so was almost as thick in the room as the smell of the jungle.

“Then let her choose,” he said at last. “She has earnt that much, at least, non?”

Etymology Excavation: fascinating

First seen on the Space Trash Blog.

What is etymology, and why are you excavating it?

Etymology is like the archeology of a language (definition: the study of the origin of words and the way in which their meanings have changed throughout history).

In this series of posts, we're going to look at some of the English phrases, like 'at full tilt', 'toe the line', 'when push comes to shove' that are commonly used, and have an interesting history - and that people often get wrong.

Well, I haven't done an etymology excavation in quite some time, and it occurred to me that now would be a good time, because I recently found out where the word 'fascinating' comes from...or at least, I think I have, and it's epic.

So why 'fascinating'? Usually I look at phrases, where they come from, how they could be adapted to fiction, how they often get misused...well, I reckon actually that you may be misusing 'fascinating' without even knowing it.

Fascinate is originally from the Latin half of the English language, from fascinare. Feel free to run that through a few web searches, but originally to bewitch (or to hex, curse), to irresistibly attract, and also to deceive or to obfuscate (hide). You can see how that set of meanings vaguely relate to each other.

So that's what the origin word meant, and how it got used down through today, when it's used pretty much interchangeably with 'interesting'.

However, I put it to you that fascinate shouldn't actually be used as a conversation-stopper when whats-his-face will not STFU about whatever...fascinate deserves much better than that, and here's why: I feel there is a solid argument to be made that fascinate, and fascinare, come from the name of an ancient Roman deity, Fascinus.

If you're thinking that a fascinum amulet looks startlingly akin to a donger with wings on, well, you aren't wrong. Ancient Romans, eh. Very similar to modern culture in so, so many ways...

But long story short, unless whatever you're saying is fascinating is at least as good as a flying penis that wards off the evil eye, you're probably using it wrong and blaspheming to boot.

How do I get started writing?

First seen on the Space Trash Blog.

Get started writing - how?

Every writers' forum I've spent time in has had someone, sometime, show up asking 'how do I get started writing?' At this point I always find myself needing to take my hands off my keys and wrestle down a sarcastic response like 'Start typing'.

After a few months of feeling vaguely guilty every time the situation occurred, it came to me that while the question that kept triggering my sarcasm reflex was a dumb one, there were possibly a few underlying questions more worth offering time to.

Ignoring the fact that some people really do show up on forums and ask stupid questions simply for attention, writing a book can be overwhelming. Here are some thinking points to make it more overwhelming.

 

Hubble, bubble, boil and trouble

If I were to write a 101 Guide to Getting Started Writing, some twenty years of fiction writing later, I'd have to say that there are a few vital ingredients that need to be tossed in the pot if you hope to make the magic happen.

• A dash of crazy.
• No sane person decides to write a book, spends a year or so of their lives writing, editing, and formatting it, and does all this knowing full well that they'll never get paid for their time.
• A heaping teaspoon of inspiration.
• You're crazier than I am if you'll waste months or a year of time for no remuneration and without something to write about that gets your blood pumping, whether it's space battles or how to come up with the perfect hall decor.
• A solid dose of grammatical understanding (substitute a silly amount of money here if you have it).
• If you can't be bothered to learn or look up basic grammar and punctuation rules for your language of choice, or don't want to pay someone who does to edit your work, stop writing now and back away from the manuscript slowly. There's a difference between idiot savant and idiot.

 

What genre should I write?

Doesn't matter, it's not catching.

If you have a good story to tell, it doesn't matter if it's about terraforming Mars or a half-siren 'acquisitions specialist' being paid to acquire the Peaches of Immortality. Good story-telling never goes out of style. On the topic of trying to follow writing 'fads', check out 'Writing Myths: slay the dragon'.

I know someone who manages to mix sci-fi, steampunk, and fantasy and I can't put their books down. I also know someone who invented the entire genre of elfrotica.

If you want to know more about genres of writing, I suggest you pull up a search engine and dig in. Wikipedia is always a good place to start. If someone's harassing you to come out of the writing closet as a certain genre, I suggest smiling sweetly and telling them that you aspire to be original.

 

But which writing house will the Sorting Hat put me in?

Writers tend to gravitate to one end or other of a spectrum that ranges from 'pantser' at one end to 'plotter' at the other. Read on to discover which school of writing wizardry best suits you.

To avoid any embarrassing misconceptions, it may be important to note at this point that 'pantser' in this context refers to one who flies by the seat of their pants. It does not necessarily relate to their state of dress or undress whilst engaged in the practice of writing.

You may be a pantser if you have voices in your head, a setting, and no idea in the world how it's all going to end, but you can't stop thinking about it and you've already had detention for drawing spaceships in class.

You may be a plotter if you have a ton of post-it notes arranged in careful patterns on your wall, detailing the main idea, the sub-ideas, the plot arc, the chapter beats, the sub-arcs (with the kinky bits inserted on the hot pink notes) and have a file on your protagonist detailed down to their first word and the exact position of the mole on their arse.

Which is best? That's the great thing - there is no 'best'. There's the approach that works for you, and the others, which don't. Most people fall somewhere in between.

 

Give me facts! I cannot make bricks without clay!

The fact is that the amount of actual money to be made from writing hit rock bottom about a decade ago and then started burrowing. Think I'm kidding? These guys did the math: The Authors' Guild - The Wages of Writing.

Additionally, traditional publishing houses are taking on fewer and fewer new authors, while trumpeting ever louder that independent authors, or 'indies' are the leeches on the underbelly of professional writing. Therefore, starting to write books with the idea that fame and fortune await is delusional, so you'd better have another reason for doing it (see the heaping teaspoon requirement).

If those facts haven't put you off, then at least you've got the dash of crazy. Congratulations (...I think).

 

So how will I know if I'm doing it right?

Assassin: "Where other men blindly follow the truth, remember..."

Initiate: "Nothing is true."

Assassin: "Where other men are limited by morality or law, remember..."

Initiate: "Everything is permitted."

This quote is particularly applicable to writing. The way I do it won't be the way you do it. The way J. K. Rowling does it will be different from both of us. None of the three of us is 'wrong'. Some people use a pencil, others touch-type at 100 WPM, others again dictate to voice conversion software.

Write whatever way blows your skirt up. There is no set of commandments. The only restrictions are your imagination and your writing ability.