Wordsmith & Worldweaver
This is an area where I'll post thoughts on writing, tropes analyses, books I've read recently, etc. It's mostly just my writing toolbox!
Plot Armour
What is plot armour? When talking about stories, plot armour is generally used pejoratively, to indicate a character who should have died, but survived for narrative convenience. In short, the story spared them because it still needed them.
“Should have died” is interesting to unpack. All stories require suspension of incredulity. Everyday rules don’t apply. We never say of a character that they have plot armour because they didn’t randomly get run over by a car or die of a heart attack. Plot armour, in a lot of cases, is about the reader’s expectations. Read the full post on Substack.
Frustration & Creativity
I was talking with a colleague at work about how it’s impossible to recommend books to yourself, yet the best person to recommend a book you’d love is yourself. I was imagining what it’d be like to have my reading list dictated by a Rebecca who had already read everything she could read in a lifetime – she could recommend only the good books. Skip all the dross, go straight to the stuff that makes my heart sing.
My colleague then pointed out that, if I didn’t ever read books I disliked, I might never have the impetus to write myself – and everything I write would feel mediocre in comparison. Read the full post on Substack.
Subverting Gender Expectations
I recently finished reading Ammonite by Nicola Griffith and Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie. Reading these two close together was an interesting experience, because I think both books attempt something similar, or at least inhabit the same space.
They’re both, for want of a better description, worlds inhabited mostly by women – female-driven stories. But they both use women-only casts (or pronouns, we’ll get back to this) as a way to be genderless. Read the full post on Substack.
Right Ingredients, Wrong Recipe
Structuring a series
On paper, I should love the samurai Netflix series Blue Eye Samurai. All the ingredients appear tailored to my personal tastes: there’s a mixed-heritage protagonist, swordfights, a feminist bend to the traditional shonen adventure of seeking revenge, and beautiful combat animations. And yet.
As I was watching it, I wondered why I didn’t love this story that clearly had all the ingredients to make me love it. It was like watching mayonnaise refusing to take as you mixed it – for some reason, the ingredients, as tasty as they were, never coalesced into something I found palatable. Read the full post on Substack.
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How to structure a book series? In some cases, a series is a collection of standalones, like The Wayfarer series by Becky Chambers – I read A Closed and Common Orbit well before The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet, and didn’t feel that changed my enjoyment at all.
One way to structure a series is simply to have each story serve to enrich a living, breathing world, without needing to engage with it in any given order. Part of the pleasure, as readers, is in the exploration, without any map to guide us. Read the full post on Substack.
First Draft to Published Novel
How do you get from a first draft to a published trilogy? Having now published all three volumes of Tales of the Edge, I felt it was a good time to reflect on the manuscripts before they could even be called that, when they were messy first drafts hidden in word documents, not intended for anyone to see.
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Today, let’s do something a bit different from usual: I will paste excerpts from the very first draft of The Collarbound, written in 2018, and compare it with the excerpts from the first volume as it was published in 2022. Read the full post on Substack.
Asking the Tough Questions
When asked to pitch Tales of the Edge recently, this was the best I could do: How do you get rid of the Evil Empire without violence? Alternatively: can you be a pacifist character in an epic fantasy setting?
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You’re in a second-world fantasy. You’re living, whether you realise it or not – and you’re going to get clued in as to how bad things are pretty soon – in, if not The Evil Empire, then at least an evil-ish, grimy, gritty, not-quite-an-empire but at least a castle that rules over the lands around it. As you go about the city, the tavern, the Nest where the mages live, you get to see the everyday, mundane exploitation of people less fortunate than you. Read the full post on Substack.
Cute Horror
Recently, I discovered I enjoy a genre we could loosely call ‘cute horror’ or, as it is called on its trope page, the ‘disguised horror story'. The genre is one where traditionally ‘cute’ elements are blended with a horror story.
Generally it’s psychological horror, although there is sometimes a touch of gore, and it is embedded in a story which presents as a romance, a slice-of-life, or another innocuous genre where nothing bad can happen. Expect children or childish characters alongside existential angst. Read the full post on Substack.
Cancel Culture in The Dispossessed
In The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia by Ursula K. LeGuin, there is a playwright called Tirin. It seems to me that Tirin was cancelled – this happens, similarly to cancel culture today, through disapprobation of a large part of the audience. The audience then ignores and isolates the playwright, Tirin, and publicly shames him, until he finally gives up on writing.
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What can we learn of LeGuin’s treatment of controversial art in her fiction? Read the full post on Substack.