I wrote a big-name author when I was first starting out, mostly as a fan. I had a complaint about a particular novel that I didn't like, though I loved her others. She told me that she felt she could only write one spectacular book a year and that the others tended to be more pedestrian, but in order to stay on readers' minds, she wrote it anyway and surprisingly found that some readers preferred those kinds of books.

Another thing she told me was that she felt that she had already published her best book ever. It wasn't a book that had been her best-selling, though it won a few awards. She poured into it a lot of herself, in code, from a difficult personal time in her life that she hoped never to go through again. Anyway, she said she felt it was hard as a writer to keep going, knowing that you'll never write a book that good again.

When I read this, I was devastated, looking forward in my life and thinking that I would reach a point in my career where I would know that my best work was in the past. Only now I think that's a bunch of hooey. Every writer thinks that one of their previous books was better than the one they're working on now. Every writer gets too sucked into the fabulous critical reviews of one particular book. But--it isn't true.

You would never tell someone you loved one of your children better because that child happened to make more money, would you? I don't think it's fair to do it with your books, either. Which isn't to say that you can't be critical of yourself. You can. (Though I don't recommend saying it out loud to readers.) You can feel like you worked harder on a certain book and it came out better. But the solution to this? Work hard on every book. Give it everything you can.

As a reader, I loved the book the author thought of as her best, but I think she wrote a better one the following year (her off year) and I think she has written several better ones since.

One thing I do think would be difficult is getting a lot of critical acclaim on your first book, maybe before you started your second, and not feeling able to keep going and getting better. But you will get better. Or if you don't like that, you will write new things just as well. You will write them as they are meant to be written, and how can you ask of yourself any more than that?

I know, everyone does these character studies, but I have never done one. Never, on any book. I have actually prided myself on not doing this kind of prewriting, and always winging it. But the book I am working on is making me think about how much my writing sucks, and maybe this is just an excuse to not do the writing and maybe it really is going to help me towards understanding a character who is rather elusive, but here they are:

What happened to his mother?
Does he have siblings or extended family?
What is life like in his village?
Does he have any crushes?
What hurts him?
Who has he hurt?
What does he want?
What does he hate?
What are his skills?
What can he do that no one else can?
How well does he know himself?
What objects does he value?
How much does he care about appearance?
Who is his hero?
Who cares for him that he does not notice?
What lessons in life has he learned that are the most important?
What does he think it means to be human?
What is his trophy or talisman?
What games does he play?
What does he dream of?
What can he make with his hands?
What is the most beautiful thing he has ever seen?
When does he weep? Where? What does it sound like?
What old scars does he wear?
What has he lost?
What safe place does he go to (even if only in his mind)?
What does he think of himself? What value does he see in his own life?
What frightens him?
What are his handicaps?
What can he never do?
Where was he born and how does he celebrate his birthday?
What/who would he die to protect?
What smells good to him?
What legends or myths have shaped his life?

I think these are rather different than the standard list of questions like height, weight, eye color, most embarrassing moment, and so on. Maybe these only apply to this particular story, but maybe not. Use as you will.

I read an article recently about a study done on people who were in the lowest twenty percent of the bell curve and how they saw themselves. It turns out that most of them think they are above average. The study went on to say that the reason for this is that they lacked the very skills necessary for them to see the reality of their ignorance. As they were tutored in these skills, they became more accurate in their self-assessment. They still weren't above average; they just saw truly that they were below average. To them, it might seem in some way as if they were getting stupider as they got smarter.

This relates to my point yesterday, I think. There's the old saying, the more you know, the more you realize you don't know, but people always say it in a flip way. It's actually pretty painful that the goal you set for yourself (getting published, for example), seems to get further and further out of your reach the more you work towards it, because you have this stupid optimism to begin with and an inability to assess how bad your work is. Then you get better and see how crappy you are and your improvement in ability doesn't keep pace with your newfound critical eye.

It's one of the reasons that almost all of slush pile queries are bad. The good writers are ones who see their work more clearly and are less likely to think that it will just get picked up because of their brilliance. They tend to ask friends to look at it, go to conferences to get it critiqued, get an agent's viewpoint, before sending it to an editor. It's not just about the connections; it's about the fact that the better a writer is, the more cautious s/he is about letting other people see a manuscript. They are so hard on themselves, they don't need someone else to be hard on them.

I remember in grad school, we had a meeting with all the post-comprehensives students and the professors. This was mainly to give us all a good kick into starting to actually write our dissertations. Not talk about them. Not write notes for them. Not do research. Not hide from them. Actually sit down and type out some words that had something to do with our topic.

One professor got up and told us about how hard he found it to write. He got sick every day when it was time to go into his office and close the door, but he did it anyway. Because that was his job. And it was our job, too, was his point. If we ever wanted a job, that is.

I thought this professor was insane. Why would you become a professor and hate writing? Why would you continue to do something that made you sick every day? Why not do something that you enjoyed?

I was smug because I wrote easily. I never had a fear of it. I might be afraid of turning a paper into a professor for a grade, but the actual writing was easy. I didn't have an editor on my shoulder who told me my writing was crap. I wrote whatever popped into my head. I let my professors be my editors. (They did not like this, by the way. I was frequently asked if I ever looked over my papers before I turned them in. But I still got good grades, because I was so brilliant--that's what I thought. I felt no need to develop an editor in my head.)

Now I am me. I do not get sick, but I do not find writing relaxing in the way that it used to me. I don't just sit down and type as fast as I can. That editor in my head is really loud. I tell myself this just means that I am a better writer now and I hope, hope, hope it is true.

I think that writing may be like yoga. When I first started doing yoga, I also found it very easy to do. I didn't try to push myself into doing difficult poses. I breathed deeply, but I can't say I was really meditating. I felt good afterwards, but not like I had really accomplished something. I wasn't a professional, in a sense. I was just there trying it out, not even an amateur. I was experimenting.

I find yoga more difficult now because I try to go more deeply into it, physically and mentally. It is hard work. Afterwards, when it works, I feel ecstatic and light as air. But it happens less often, and I am less satisfied with the more surface level state I find when it is not a good day. I am not a yoga professional, but I am serious about it. It matters to me, and I suppose when anything matters, you feel more pressure.

Boy, these rejection letters keep coming in. This time, I got a form letter saying simply "your story does not meet our needs." Five years ago, when I got letters like this, they drove me crazy. I wanted an essay on why my story wasn't good enough. I poured over the form letter, counted the time since I sent in my manuscript, and tried to figure out if I thought it had been read or not at all.

But sometimes, I think it just means what it says. Not your story had a bad beginning and we never read past page one. Not you have a lousy sense of humor and you should only write dark fantasy. Not you should give up writing. Not you missed a comma on page four, and after that I assumed you did not know any grammar rules. It just means your story didn't fit their needs and there wasn't anything else to say.

Maybe it was because your name isn't big enough to draw readers in. Maybe it wasn't the right genre because they already bought five stories in that genre for the next issue and they're not looking for more. They were courteous enough to send it back and let you send it elsewhere instead of keeping it for ten months and deciding then. Those are all valid reasons for saying no, thank you.

No just means send it on to someone else. That's all.

When I was in college, with dreams of becoming a best-selling romance writer, I wrote the first few chapters of a romance novel that is so hysterically bad that some of you might read it and not believe that I was completely serious when writing it (some of it is posted at my
website, along with many other horrible things.)

I had no intention of writing the whole novel until I actually had a contract for it. Yes, I was that mercenary. And that deluded. So I poured all my effort into writing a stellar letter to publishers. This included a paragraph on my interests as a PhD student and another paragraph on why I found romance interesting as a literary model for Bildungsroman, its roots in Jane Austen's works, and other academic speak.

I had the presence of mind to send the letter out to a sister and a brother-in-law, both of whom had some actual experience writing. The brother-in-law told me it was "too long." Ah, brevity is the soul of keeping your sister-in-law happy. My sister called me up and laughed at me over the phone. She tried to explain why no editor cared about my academic credentials or if I thought the genre they were selling was "legitimate literature."

"They just want a book that will sell," she said. "And you make yourself sound like an idiot."

Ouch. Did I take her advice and write a new letter? No, I did not. I sent that letter out, and I forgot about that particular dream and moved on to writing things that I actually cared about. Maybe one day I'll post the letter itself. If I figure I need some more embarrassing moments as an adult to share around.

I keep putting off the project I am supposed to be working on. There's a story I want to work on instead. Or I have errands I can't put off any longer. Or a stack of books I really need to read. Or marketing things to do. Or a blog entry to write for the day.

I know pretty much all writers do this. We feel guilty about it. The doctor doesn't get to put off a surgery because he would rather do a project that is more fun. The lawyer can't tell her client she was busy "thinking" about the case instead of going to court. They just have to get it done.

But writers' work isn't quite the same. Although our job is to eventually produce something, there is a lot of time that is spent producing it that doesn't look like it's producing anything. In fact, it looks like we're doing nothing. Maybe we are doing nothing, because being relaxed is necessary for creativity to work.

At the event I was at this weekend, I was asked several times where my ideas come from. I laughed because I can't stop the ideas from coming to me. Some of the other authors said that they wrote down ideas and worked on stuff all the time, consciously. I said I don't ever write an idea down because if it goes away, hey, there's one more I don't have bugging me in my head, demanding attention as I try to tell it there's another project ahead of it in line.

But where do the ideas come from, really? They come from nothing. That time you spend not getting done whatever it is you're supposed to get done, procrastinating, telling yourself that you should really be working. You are working, especially when you're not doing it consciously. Your ideas are being made. It takes a lot of effort, a lot of unconscious brain power. You're gestating, only you're giving birth to a spiritual child, and it doesn't take only nine months.

A writing friend recently asked me this, as she prepared for a talk. I thought it would be useful to other writers.

I think my best advice for writing emotion is to think of a metaphor that is unique to your character. I learned this from science fiction and fantasy, actually, where metaphors have to make sense in a completely different world. But every character is in a different world, one in
their own body. So not every character is going to feel "a tickle running down her spine" when afraid or a "sick feeling in her stomach" when she's done the wrong thing.

A girl who has been abused will go numb when she gets embarrassed. She might have a flash of memory that has nothing to do with now, or at least seems like it doesn't. She might feel hot when she should feel cold. She might feel like laughing when everyone else is crying.

The important thing for the writer to remember is that it's not just that she should have a
surprising experience of emotion, but that her emotion should feel sharply defined for her. Any page of the book about her that someone opens should feel utterly different from all the other books in the world.

An editor friend of mine told me a story about an author who wrote a story and submitted it. The editor was interested enough to send back a detailed letter of revision. In response, the author sent back a ten-page refutation of the editor's suggestions for revision. The story made me laugh and I told it to my husband. He didn't get why it was so funny. He asked why an author couldn't have an exchange with an editor about requested revisions.

To me, an editorial letter isn't a list of requested revisions. It's a reader response. Now, the editor may think it's a list of requested revisions, but I've found the better ones know it's not. The trick for the author is to figure out what is really wrong and how they want to fix it, based on the editor's comments. This is a lot like mind-reading. I'm utterly serious! Which is why an editor-author match that is successful isn't just finding someone you can work with. It's like a marriage. You have to find someone that thinks like you--as much as possible.

So, you take out the letter and you read it and you see that the editor had a problem with the ending. And you think for a while about why this is so. You realize eventually that you think the real problem is with the beginning, and that is what is making the ending fall flat. So you fix the beginning. Have you found the absolutely one way to fix the problem? No, of course not. Will your editor like your solution? See above. You're going to be happier with an editor who "feels" that your fixed version is right, just like you felt it was.

Unlike my husband's world, where you can just run a program and see if it works, a manuscript "works" subjectively. If you don't agree with the editor's editorial suggestions, there is no point in writing a long letter about why. You just don't share the same vision. Time to move on, find someone who does share that vision. Also, it's a bit unprofessional to whine.

Some people like predictable stories. A lot of people like them. I'm not talking about stories without originality. Or without character. Just stories where the plot isn't twisty and weird.

You know the kind, where you start the book and it turns out to be a story about a boy who hates his father and the point of the story is for him to come to understand his father and there's a poignant scene at exactly page 185 where the father weeps and tells about his life, and the way his father treated him, and the boy and the father have a bonding moment. And then that's the end. A little denouement, something light involving friends (because that's what friends are for, in a book. You can have conflict with them, but not the main conflict. Because well, they're just friends.)

But even in a contemporary novel, I want something to happen that I don't expect. And I want to be satisfied by the ending. I know this is asking a lot. But I still want it. I think I'm even less forgiving than I once was because I have less time to read than I once did. Yes, I am an adult. I know that. I expect more from a book than a kid does. Probably. But does that mean that an author should just let him or herself off the hook? Well, you decide.

In a fantasy or a science fiction story, I also expect to be surprised. I don't think more so. Just the same. I want the writer to think, what does the reader expect to happen next? And then do something completely different. Only something that makes absolute sense considering the circumstances and the characters. I want a story that feels old and new at the same time. I want to be on a roller coaster where the car jumps off the tracks and I am terrified about what happens next, and thrilled all at once. (Note: this is a metaphor. I don't actually think that would be fun.)

And then again, sometimes what I expect to happen happens, only it's the results that are unexpected. That works, too. Where you start with an old story, and then roll off into new territory after that.

I think of this little letter that Joss Whedon put in the Angel collection I have where he talks about the difference between Buffy and Angel. Buffy is the super hero story. It knows what it is. It stretches the boundaries of that story, but it stays within it, too. And then there's Angel. In some ways, Angel is a much less successful series because every episode, you feel like you're watching a new show and you have no idea where it's going to go next (after Season 1, anyway). I think there are some serious coherence problems in Angel, and the last season is a disaster. But I'll tell you, I will watch Angel's worst episode four or five times anyway, because it's so different. It's so original. There's a writer willing to take risks.

I hope I am that kind of writer.

This is a common phrase bandied about by authors, at least in part to protect themselves from the people around them shoving ideas at them and asking them to share profits on the published manuscript which the author now writes. It's also a way of defusing the tension over the oft-asked question "Where do ideas come from?" The truth is that authors don't know where ideas come from. Or, at least, they don't know why some ideas matter to them enough to write a book about them and others don't at all.

I think ideas matter a lot. There are some books that just don't have any ideas in them. Or if they do, they are so hidden under cliche that they don't matter. I get bored with these books.

On the other hand, I've read entire books that were not written in what seemed to me the best style, simply because the idea was so captivating. I had to find out what happened. The whole plot of a book or even a series can be based on a single idea brought to conclusion. I wonder sometimes if the idea popped into the author's head full-grown or if he wrote ten different drafts before he crystalized it into the perfect idea. But once that idea is set, the whole book revolves around it. It almost writes itself.

Of course, my favorite books have an incredible idea and then twine characters around that idea until the two are inextricable, there is great plotting, a great new world and magic (or science) set up around it.

So, ideas matter. The best ideas are incredibly valuable. But they can be improved on. And even the perfect idea still has to be made into a book, by someone who knows how to do it. A perfect idea, however, is actually pretty hard to find.

I recently read a book where the phrase "with X and I" was used over and over again. I guess I am just a Grammar General about this, but it annoyed me to no end. I kept thinking, where it the copy editor here? (Because I know that lots of authors make grammar mistakes and that is no big deal to me). But then I wondered if the author had stetted the copy editor's corrections, and then it would be the author's mistake. Not only a mistake of ignorance, but of arrogance.

To be technical, this is a hyper correction mistake, where someone is trying to sound correct by putting "I" instead of "me" in every position, even when it should be "me" because it is the object of the preposition "with."

And then I tell myself to calm down. I am truly more of a descriptivist than a prescriptivist when it comes to grammar and often enjoy listening to the "bad grammar" of people around me because it is interesting to hear the differences of what works in a particular setting, but not in another.

Also, it is not as if I make no grammar mistakes. I just don't make that particular one, unless I let a character make it on purpose. But it was a good lesson, nonetheless. What it taught me was that sometimes a reader can get kicked out of the enjoyment of a story based on some trivial thing that really shouldn't matter. And some of those readers are critics who then rip a book because they didn't enjoy it, when 99% of the population would.

My husband asked me last week if I thought I am a better writer now than I was five years ago. In some ways, it's obvious to me that I am. I understand the business of publishing better and this makes it so that I see problems in my writing immediately, editorially or conceputally. I am more objective about my own writing than I once was. I let myself hit my head against the wall when necessary to get to the next place, instead of giving up for now and hoping to get back to the right answer later.

But in other ways, I wonder if I am better. I think that the very things that make me a better writer may also make me worse. I am more likely to cut and to tell myself that something isn't "marketable" than I was before. I have the editor sitting on my shoulder kibutzing almost constantly, instead of enjoying the process of writing so much that I didn't care what the product was. I think the patience is good, though.

And the problem is, every book you write is its own book. Did writing the other books you wrote make you better at this one you're working on now? I don't know. There is a kind of courage required in embarking on a new book that I don't know how to describe to non-writers. To believe that you can write this book, no matter how much success you had with that one--I think you just have to need to write the new book enough to get over it, for whatever reason.

It's a tricky thing with children, too, actually. A lot of the same good parenting skills will work on a lot of kids. But each child is different, too, and needs entirely different skills. But what if you don't have them? What if you can't see how to help a particular child? Somehow you have to get them. Invent them, mostly. And get it wrong a lot. And be willing to get it wrong.

My oldest daughter (14) has been helping read my WIP and giving me comments. Last night, she even gave me a couple of pages fully edited, with lines circled, a bunch crossed out, and a couple added in or with comments and question marks. I swear, it looked just like pages I got from my actual editor.

And then she told me things like, "it feels like you put that chapter in because you were trying to stick your two versions together. It doesn't really make sense there anymore." Is that intelligent or what? And also, "if you want people to care about the danger in the climax, you need to show better how those two characters are so close. Right now they don't feel very connected."

I asked her this morning what she thought of the ending. She tilted her head and said, "Hmm, what was the ending again?" I reminded her. She said, "That's kind of lame." Yeah, well working on it. Asked how she thought about it over all, if it was better than the last version, she said, "Well, it's on a better curve, but it's still at the beginning." I definitely need to pay her.

There are three kinds of professional jealousy that I deal with on a regular basis.

#1 They don't deserve that!
This is what I feel when someone writes a book I think isn't that great, and it wins awards, or sells a million copies. I usually alleviate the pain by reminding myself that the author must have done something right, and if I can figure out what it is, I can use it in my books and get all those readers to make me rich. Or sometimes there are just flukes and that writer was the lottery winner. Shrug. I can live with that.

#2 I can't believe how incredible this book is!
This is when I read a book I think is great, completely different from anything I would ever write, and wins awards and sells a million copies. There's a little jealousy because I wish it would happen to me, but it's not as intense because it's not my field, not my shtick. To make myself feel better, I tell myself that it will happen to me someday and I'm all right with that.

#3 That was my book!
This is what happens when you read that book you might have written and everyone else is reading it, too. It is the perfect book, with deep themes, characters with flaws and great hearts, a twisty plot, and rules of magic that are ingeniously true to life. A book that takes its time, but not too long, and that leaves me wanting more at the end. But also wondering if there's hope for my writing, because I can't do this. I may never be able to do this.

Is it enough for me to do what I can do, even if it's never as good as that? That's the question that haunts me on rare occasions. Rare because I don't come across a book like that except maybe once in ten years.

Maybe the best to hope for is that the writer is actually a very nasty person in real life.

I'm working through a revision and have found that I (embarrassingly) use certain words over and over again. This coincided with my son coming home last night and telling me about his teacher's advice on writing, which included not using the word "blue," but rather "aquamarine" or "cerulean" instead. Yes, in fifth grade. Also a repeat of the "don't use said, use these instead" lecture."

*pauses to choke*

Nonetheless, there are words that seem to be useless, that we use in real speech and would be appropriate if sparingly used in dialogue to create a certain voice, but are to be taken out in general in other places. Here's a quick list:

at all
somehow
a little
barely
hardly
somewhat
some
which
it was
there was
not much
so much
such
as well
briefly
so many
even
very
perhaps
maybe
sort of

Which isn't to say you shouldn't ever use those words. You should. I should, too. But perhaps not in such abundance as there was in my recent ms.

I went to a writer's retreat this weekend and a woman read a picture book that focused on the dreams of the central character. Rick Walton, fabulous picture book writer said that he thought there was a problem with dream sequences in stories because a story is already making the reader leap from reality to fantasy with a suspension of disbelief, but a story within a story requires a double effort to do the same thing. So he suggested that whatever was in the dream just be the story, outrageous and silly as it was. After all, a story is fiction. It doesn't have to be possible. That is the beauty of it.

I thought that this was as good an explanation for why it is that I feel generally uncomfortable with dreams inside stories. There are various ways to get around this, like making it not really a dream at all, but real communication in some magical way, but it can be overdone. I think that the best answer for when you can use this is that you have to pay the price. I think that you can break almost any rule you want in storytelling, so long as you pay the price. Slow the action down with a flashback--if you are willing to pay the price. Use first person, so long as you are willing to pay the price, which is that you have a very limited one-person pov. Start slowly, so long as you make your words so irresistible and your voice so fascinating that they'll read your character's grocery list. Start at the end and have each chapter tell the story in reverse sequence, so long as you are willing to pay the price of losing a certain kind of narrative tension. Use dialect, so long as you are willing to pay the price of making the reader slow down to figure out what you are saying.

I've read a couple of reviews of THE PRINCESS AND THE HOUND that liked that I did a romance from the male pov and some others that hated it, that didn't think I got it right (or even that any woman can get a male pov right).

Well, in the case of THE PRINCESS AND THE HOUND, in order for the suspense in the story to work, it had to be from George's pov. Whether I did it well or not, or whether George is a "wuss" may depend on what you like in a man. I remember when I was a teenager, reading some romance novels, that I got tired of the ones where the man was always named "Thane" or "Rock" or something well, manly. I really liked this one where the male lead was a babysitter. In fact, I put it on my list of fifty greatest novels ever written (partly to tweak some noses, but that's another story).

I tried to think of some male writers who have tried to do female pov and failed, and to be honest, I really couldn't. I tend to like female sf/f writers better than male ones, but this may not have anything to do with the character pov they use. I think it is partly because they treat topics that I find interesting more, and partly because I look for other women to look up to, even still, as a writer.

I love Robin Hobb's Fitz pov and think it's dead on. Just as much as I love Jim Butcher's Harry Dresden. I think Lois McMaster Bujold does a great job with Miles Vorkosigan (although I heard someone say once that Miles is really a woman with his disability--what does that say about our society?). I think George R. R. Martin does women well. Scott Westerfled does teenage girls like no one else. I love Elizabeth Moon's story of an autistic man in THE SPEED OF DARK. Guy Gavriel Kay, in THE LIONS OF AL-RASSAN. Jo Walton in FARTHING. Ellen Kushner in SWORDSPOINT. Stephen King, many books.

I think this is just a non-issue for me, as a reader. If the writer draws me, I am completely willing to believe the character. Just because a character isn't exactly like me, that doesn't mean that they aren't an authentic female.

On the other hand, I will say that I have read some fantasy books where the women are not povs and read as puppets of some kind, not real people. That is annoying in particular. I may not notice it as much if the puppets are male, but I think I do.

I will admit that I purposely set a formal challenge to myself to write a novel from the pov of a male, and to write it in 3rd person very close. I tend to write in first person as a habit, probably because I like that intensity and don't mind the limitations that come from it. They seem more of a game to me, and end up making the book more interesting and textured. Yes, I tend to have a formal challenge for every book I write. For MIRA, MIRROR, it's obvious. THE MONSTER IN ME was invisible present tense. Wait and see with THE PRINCESS AND THE BEAR. I have a novel written as a series of short stories, all in a different first person with their own story arcs. That was tricky.

It's like writing's not hard enough, I have to make it harder. Or maybe it's that I focus on something else so intensely that I hardly notice how painful the rest is. Like when you're distracted from getting your tooth pulled out with a stab with a pin?

This is the last one, I promise!

I've said this before about dialog, but I wanted to go back to it as a plot device: other character's wants. Every character is the hero of their own story, in their head. You don't have time as a writer to show their whole story (unless you're writing 10,000 pages), but you can give hints about it, and in more than just dialog. Sometimes, a character who is not the main character will drive the plot off-kilter in interesting ways.

For example, I remember when I was writing MIRA, MIRROR, the character of Talia didn't want (read: my subconscious didn't want) to wake up and be horrified that she had been changed. That would be too obvious, too cliche. So what does she do? She wakes up and is actually glad about it. I had to figure out a reason why for that, and for a woman in this time period to take on a new face gladly, there are a bunch of different possibilities. I chose an arranged marriage, and that made for an interesting plot for Ivana, who then is pressed into it.

But what about Talia? Now she is free. What does she want? Well, it turned out she wanted to pick her own man. So she did. And he was everything she wanted. It wasn't until nearly the final revision that I realized this was also rather cliched and boring. What if she chose her own man and then it turned out he wasn't what she wanted, either? What if she wanted something completely different? What if she wanted to be a merchant woman? After all, her father has been dragging her along on his trips for years. She's got to have learned quite a bit.

Of course, everyone has read the novel where a minor character appears to have hijacked the plot and you can't figure out how the beginning and end are connected. As a writer, you have to make a choice and decide if you want to let that character do that, then go back and fix the beginning. If not, rein the character in and let her have just part of what she wants. Or have another character wrest the plot back in some dazzling, interesting way.

Sometimes, there are novels that try to show why the villain has become the way that she is. And that can be interesting. Other times, it's just a story about a victimized child. Yeah, we feel some sympathy, but is there another way to do this? Yes, there is. Make a list of ten other stories of why the villain became the villain. I'm not a fan of the Snidely Whiplash villain, who just wants to do eeev-il because he loves it. But maybe there is something else he wants, and he just doesn't care about whether it's evil or not. He loves someone and he'll do anything to get her. He wants to be famous. He wants to be rich.

Don't get me wrong. I am not suggesting you spend days writing up life stories for everyone in your book before you do writing. You can do that if you want, but it's not the same as writing, and you may find it all goes weird when you try to write it anyway. It's in the story itself that you want to think about why people do what they do, and who they are. I think the TV show LOST has been a great lesson to be on this, how they show flashbacks at just the right moment. They get pacing right, and they get character.

Just one last thought. My daughter went to a writing workshop the other day and the writer said that she tended to prefer character-based stories rather than plot-based stories. I have always believed this was true of me, but as I reconsidered it, I realized it wasn't true. I want a story where the character and the plot cannot be separated. The character is the plot and the plot is the character. That's what I'm trying to get at here.

This is a post about plots I don't like.

You probably already know I am not a fan of classic epic fantasy. I have problems with my viewpoint being jerked around too much. When I read a book, I want to feel deeply involved with one character's life and point of view. That's one problem. There are others. I end up feeling like epic fantasy (especially quest fantasy) is too formulaic. I feel like I know that oh--what a surprise--he meets a new friend in the next chapter. And oh my goodness--that new friend happens to know exactly what is necessary to get past the evil one-eyed ogre in chapter seven. And wow--if he hadn't happened to pick up that strange-looking hammer on page 65, he wouldn't have been able to unlock the doomsday box.

Another pet peeve of mine in plots of this sort is that there are way too many red shirt characters. It's not just all the dying going on, although sometimes that turns my stomach to hear about all the dead bodies the main character has to pick through on her way back to the castle for the last stand. It's also the uncanny coincidence that any named characters happen to survive even the worst falls, while those jerks that you hate tend to die horribly, appropriately (unless they are the evil super villain who must survive to make the next book interesting). I think George R. R. Martin does a great job of making his readers surprised when you see who dies in this book. And who turns out to be the new hero. I love to be surprised as a reader, and as a writer. I also like there to be real consequences, to feel like this is a real war, and that there are real losses.

Another kind of fantasy that I find annoying is what I think of as morality fantasy. This is the kind of story where the fantasy is really just trappings for a morality tale in a very old-fashioned style. The fantasy is set way back when, but the characters act a lot like teenagers in America. Girls do stuff they do now. They talk back to men in authority above them. They are super strong and can use a sword in a battle against a man, despite the fact that women don't have the upper body strength to do that. The point of the story turns out to be a moral that is for our times only. Like, people should treat everyone nicely or else they might find out that the cipher has magical powers.

Again, I know there are counter examples to this. Buffy is a kind of extended morality tale. It only works because it makes fun of itself in a fairly sophisticated postmodern way. It's the straight morality tales that don't draw me into a serious, rich fantasy world that I'm talking about here. I don't believe in lots of rules to fantasy, but if it's fantasy it should be fantasy and not a thinly veiled story about us all loving each other in the end.

On the other hand, maybe I'm just cranky today.