{"id":943,"date":"2012-02-01T06:00:10","date_gmt":"2012-02-01T12:00:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.confabulatorcafe.com\/?p=943"},"modified":"2012-02-01T06:00:10","modified_gmt":"2012-02-01T12:00:10","slug":"how-to-waste-twenty-years-on-one-story","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.confabulatorcafe.com\/?p=943","title":{"rendered":"How to Waste Twenty Years on One Story"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>
The Forgotten Beasts of Eld by Patricia McKillip<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

When I first started writing, I mean really writing, I was in love with a book called The Forgotten Beasts of Eld<\/em> by Patricia McKillip. It was high fantasy, poetic, and beautiful. I still have my original dog-eared copy, bent and torn with pages falling out.<\/p>\n

In youthful admiration of that story, I began to create a character, then a cast of characters, problems for them to overcome, a world for them to inhabit, and yes, even a ragged, poorly drawn map of the land.<\/p>\n

And I wrote. I wrote in poetic, archaic language tinged with magic and pomposity. It was self-important, overly wordy, and bogged down in descriptions of every tiny weed and pebble.<\/p>\n

It was catastrophically bad. But I persevered. Over the course of some fifteen or more years, that story continued to haunt me. It changed, it grew, and I scrapped it and started over countless times.<\/p>\n

Somewhere in my mid-twenties, something shifted. My main character started speaking differently, a little less archaic, a little more sarcastic, a lot more interesting. I realized I was on to something.<\/p>\n

I never finished that book past perhaps four chapters or so. But the day my character started bitching that her ass hurt from riding a horse so many days on the road, that was the day I realized I had to let Patricia McKillip go so I could find my own voice.<\/p>\n

That was also the day I let go of the idea that I could write epic fantasy. I believe writing that sort of story requires at least a pinch of the poet inside the writer. I am not a poet. I write mostly urban fantasy because, while I love magic and monsters and enchanted creatures, I write in a straightforward, less descriptive style. I can get away with that style placing my story on the streets of Sausalito or a nondescript winter forest. A magical world, far removed from ours, requires more finesse \u2013 finesse I don\u2019t possess.<\/p>\n

I write the way I talk, mostly. My descriptions aren\u2019t very wordy, and they tend to focus on the things I would notice, not the things that describe a room or other setting. My main character is not going to note the colors of the lone maple leaf quivering on a branch in late fall. My characters are far more likely to focus on a single nose hair growing out of the antagonist\u2019s left nostril, all the while wondering if it\u2019s an anomaly or if he recently trimmed up there and missed one.<\/p>\n

And yeah, she\u2019ll probably miss his evil monologue while she\u2019s meditating on this.<\/p>\n

Honest answer, then. Since the day Princess Amberlyn decided to inform her audience of her saddle sores and described the road grit wedged inside her laced-up bodice, I started writing in my own voice. For better or worse, I\u2019m stuck with it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

When I first started writing, I mean really writing, I was in love with a book called The Forgotten Beasts of Eld by Patricia McKillip. It was high fantasy, poetic, and beautiful. I still have my original dog-eared copy, bent and torn with pages falling out. In youthful admiration of that story, I began to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[355,817,1211,1226],"class_list":["post-943","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-influence","tag-epic-fantasy","tag-patricia-mckillip","tag-urban-fantasy","tag-voice"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.confabulatorcafe.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/943","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.confabulatorcafe.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.confabulatorcafe.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.confabulatorcafe.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.confabulatorcafe.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=943"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.confabulatorcafe.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/943\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.confabulatorcafe.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=943"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.confabulatorcafe.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=943"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.confabulatorcafe.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=943"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}