Clarion Blog Week 1

They posted a writing challenge over at the Clarion Blog. Writers need to answer the following questions about the novel they're working on.

1. Who is the character whose actions and decisions most drive your novel? (We will call this person the hero.)
2. Describe your hero in five words or less.
3. What has to happen for your audience to know that the novel is over? (We will call this the goal.)
4. Describe this goal in ten words or less.
5. What is the one most profound or pervasive reason that your hero cannot accomplish the goal right away? (We will call this the primary obstacle.)
6. Describe the primary obstacle in ten words or less.
7. What person most clearly drives, creates, or causes the primary obstacle? (We will call this person the antagonist.)
8. Describe your antagonist in five words or less.
9. Look at the answer to question 2, and find three other sf&f novels whose hero could also be described in these exact or very similar words.
10. Look at the answer to question 4, and find three other sf&f novels whose conflict could be described thus.
11. Look at the answer to question 6, and find three other sf&f novels with the same basic primary obstacle.
12. Look at the answer to question 8, and find three other sf&f novels whose antagonist meets this description.
13. Which novels appear more than once in your answers to questions 9-12? List them here by name.
14. List the ways in which your novel stands in stark contrast to each of the novels listed in question 13.

Even though for this Write-a-Thon I chose to rewrite a short story in English, I’m also working on a novel in Hungarian, set in the same world as the short story. I’ll do the exercise for both.

Golden Apples (short story)

1. Arany, a tengeri, a fairy whose job is to guide mortals
   
2. powerful, dedicated, gentle, wise, overconfident
3. We know the story ends when Princess Sage, Arany’s new charge gets a husband.
4. Arany has to find the perfect husband for Princess Sage
5. The first candidate is not good enough, that is, Arany is backing the wrong horse.
6. Arany failed to find out who the right candidate was.
7. Bibor, Arany’s elder brother
8. Invisible, clever, capricious
9. Practically all of Guy Gavriel Kay’s books have a similar character, but stretch it a little and it fits even the mighty Ned Stark.
10. 90% of all folk tales, anything by Jane Austen (I know she wasn’t a sff writer, but still).
11. Happens in almost all historically driven epic fantasy stories, though it’s usually just a side story.
12. Intriguing nobles in several historically driven epic fantasy stories, another Guy Gavriel Kay favourite, it’d be Shinzu in his last book, Under Heaven.
13. Huh, novels by Guy Gavriel Kay?
14. The setting is a contrast stark enough, also the fact that it’s just a short story.
    

Sparrow and Oriole (novel)

1. Cinke, a young girl.
2. Capricious, driven, clever, brave, immature
3. When she finds out what happened to her twin brother and finds her way home.
4. Find her brother and her home.
5. There’s an awful lot of ground to cover if you want to go to the end of the world to find out what happened to your twin brother.
6. The road itself. And travel is always self-discovery.
   
   
7. There’s no real antagonist, this is a story about a girl growing into a woman. The only real antagonist would be herself, but if you look through the answers, this seems to be the case with several stories. I think it’s because in these “coming into their own” or “growing up” stories, the hero has to defeat themselves. It’s completely different from those stories with a clear cut villain. Last evening I spent hours looking for similar sff stories, and couldn’t come up with too many, though the Bildungsroman is a legitimate category.
   
   It’s also interesting how sometimes the conflict with the antagonist is not what’s driving the story. Consider for example the Twilight series, where Victoria with her cabal of man-eater vampires looks like the perfect antagonist, but the conflict that makes the readers read on is that Bella’s upset with Edward for refusing to make her a proper member of his family. But even if you put Twilight aside (as it’s not a really good piece of writing from any aspect except the commercial), there are plenty of other stories where the apparent “antagonist” is an extra and does little else than spike the real conflict.
   
   
8. Capricious, driven, clever, brave, immature
9. YA books with a heroine.
10. I can’t recall anything else but folk tales and legends right now but I’m sure looking for a lost relative has been done before...
11. Stories about travel and growing up, the thing that’d spring to mind right now is Shai’s part in Kate Elliott’s Crossroads series.
12. YA books. Funny how adult sff seems to be antagonist-centered...
13. YA books and fairy tales in general? No big genre hits that I remember I’m afraid...
14. The setting itself is exotic enough, but there are also some twists in the story.

On Fairy Stories

No, I’m not really following in the footsteps of J. R. R. Tolkien. For one thing, he was a fair bit wiser and more knowledgeable than me, and for another, his works would be somewhat oversized for a blog. But I do love tales as much as he did, and enjoy reading them to this very day.

Tales are usually about trials the hero (or, less frequently, the heroine) has to pass to come into his powers and/or be whole (again). He usually also wins a kingdom and a lady as well because he proved himself worthy of these things. There seems to be a rather limited set of trials, and no matter where you go, you see very similar stories (which only shows that human beings are really not that different at all) (yes I know it has a million complex reasons but let's not go into them just right now).

This story is set in a world where a certain order of fairies (the tengeri) are charged with maintaining a dynamic balance, and that includes testing future kings and queens to see if they’re worthy of the throne. The tengeri are powerful creatures, beautiful monsters, magicians and shape-shifters who come up with cruel trials, but only to make sure that the kingdoms of the World Tree don’t fall into the wrong hands. The people in their tales often have a hard time and sometimes fail, but at least they don’t take entire kingdoms down with them (most of the time, that is).

The tengeri themselves don’t have it that much better. They have to do really horrible things to those on trial, and they’re not cruel by nature. That's important: they’re supposed to test the mortals, not maim them, and they can’t do that if they find too much pleasure in their suffering (of course, some tengeri do go rogue, but after a while they end up as monsters and are hunted down... usually by mortals: defeating a wayward tengeri is the greatest trial of all). Also, though the tengeri are powerful creatures, they’re not infallible: they make mistakes, have quirks, and are continuously tested by their own trials.

The story is about one of them, a tengeri who has to find a suitable husband for a young princess, and also see if the princess herself is fit to become a queen. He did the same for the princess’s parents, and while he almost became friends with her father, King Grim, Queen Blossom was one of his worst charges, and he needed to be really harsh with her to tame her arrogance.

The best practice in such cases is to abduct the princess and weave a thread of tales that can draw in heroes to save her. But what seems to be a routine task becomes tangled already at the very beginning, when the girl’s father, instead of trying to stop the tengeri, greets him as a friend.

Writer looking for Sponsors

My friend Csilla Kleinheincz also decided to participate in the Write-a-Thon as a writer. This is her page, please consider sponsoring her.

Csilla is a very talented writer. You can read two of her short stories online in English: “A Drop of Raspberry” (first published in English in Interfictions anthology (USA, 2007)) at SFmag, a non-profit Hungarian e-zine for speculative fiction we both support with our work, and “Rabbits” (Expanded Horizons, 2010 November). She is devoted to speculative fiction and spends immense time and energy on crusading it in Hungary. By sponsoring her, you sponsor the entire SF scene of this small country isolated by its own language.

(And of course, you can also sponsor me! If you want to.)

Golden apples (not of the Sun)

So what I plan to do during this Write-a-Thon is rewrite an old story of mine in English. It is based on Hungarian folk tales so it needs a bit of rewriting, I suppose, to make sense to non-Hungarian readers.

It is a story about apples, dragons and princesses. And one man's quest to find a wife and a kingdom, as is often the case in fairy tales. It is a relaxed story, I think, one to entertain and maybe make the reader smile.

I know most people prefer short stories that cut to the bone and make the heart bleed, but I just don't have what it takes to write such stories. I am a coward, I guess. Also, deep down inside I am a relaxed person who enjoys simple things and who thinks that in the long run, enjoying simple things is just as good and useful as cutting one's own heart open to see how much it bleeds. It bleeds a lot. Hearts just do that. And there's a lesson in that, but there are other lessons in life, too. And one of these lessons is simply enjoying it.

So this story is not going to be one that makes you cry, except if it turns out that badly. Which I hope it won't.

Clarion UCSD Write-a-Thon

Okay. So I decided to participate in this one, and I'm certain at times I will curse myself for it, because it's not like I don't have anything to do this summer. Quite the opposite. I already have too many things to do this summer and I just keep staring at my to-do list in frightened disbelief. But it's times like this I think that signing up for one more thing can't hurt (that much).

We'll see, we'll see.