The two articles I found most helpful are the ones by Knight and Witchey, in boldface below (Knight & Witchey – sounds like a storefront in Diagon Alley, doesn’t it?). Knight’s is short and sweet, Witchey’s is more in-depth, and both offer practice exercises to help you get the hang of the techniques they suggest. Both articles are a couple of years old, but you can dig them up at your local library.

• Card, Orson Scott. Characters and Viewpoint. 1st ed, The Elements of Fiction Writing. Cincinnati, Ohio: Writer’s Digest Books, 1988.
• DeMuth, Mary E. “Deepen Your Stories Today: Tips on Creating More Powerful Fiction by Writing ‘From the Inside Out.’” Writer 122, no. 2 (2009): 28-29.
• Franco, Marjorie. “Follow an Actor’s Approach in Your Writing.” Writer 121, no. 9 (2008): 9-9.
• Goudge, Eileen. “Focus on Emotions When Writing Love Scenes.” Writer 120, no. 9 (2007): 13-13.
• Knight, Michael. “Get Real Emotion onto the Page.” Writer 121, no. 10 (2008): 38-38.
• Kress, Nancy. Characters, Emotion & Viewpoint : Techniques and Exercises for Crafting Dynamic Characters and Effective Viewpoints. 1st ed, Write Great Fiction. Cincinnati, Ohio: Writer’s Digest Books, 2005.
• Lowenkopf, Shelly. “Good Dialogue Betrays Emotion.” Writer 121, no. 10 (2008): 12-12.
• Witchey, Eric M. “Get the Emotion into Your Fiction.” Writer 120, no. 9 (2007): 28-32.

I haven’t had a chance to read either of the books yet (by Card and Kress), but I’ll try to report back on those when I get a chance.

If I’m feeling brave, I may also post some before and after bits from the work in progress as I revise for emotional heft — or at least the “after” (!).

Anybody have any other books or articles (or web resources) to recommend? Add ‘em to the comments!

I just read Black Blade Blues, the debut urban fantasy novel by J. A. Pitts and first of a series of three from Tor, and it was a LOT of fun. The the book features left-handed lesbian blacksmith and martial arts expert Sarah Beauhall, who

• inadvertently reforges a magic sword,
• befriends a six-foot tall dwarf (the supernatural kind, not one of the Little People),
• works out some issues of internalized homophobia with the help of her equally kick-ass girlfriend Kate, and
• fights dragons, ogres and trolls to saves the world (naturlich) with the help of various friends from the Society for Creative Anachronism (SCA).

Not necessarily in that order. Also, at one point she gets hit on by a Valkyrie (squee!).

It’s an imaginative story, the pacing and plotting are good,  and the main character is flawed enough to be interesting while still sympathetic (and not overly hard-boiled and wise-cracking, which seems to be the default first-person voice these days). Kudos are also due to Pitts for showing Sarah’s struggle with her religious fundamentalist upbringing in a realistic light, and showing some growth in her character on that front. There’s a lot more going on here than just broad-shouldered wimmin swinging swords and pounding steel with a big hammer.

The one criticism I would level is that the transitions between scenes told from Sarah’s point of view (in first person), and the other scenes (told in third person) were jarring for me. Maybe that’s because there wasn’t enough contrast between the two voices (the main character’s voice and the voice of the third person narrator), or maybe it’s just a challenge inherent in switching from first to third person, but I’ve read other books that were able to pull it off. (Anybody else care to weigh in on that?)

Regardless, I thought it was worth reading and enjoyed it a lot. I’m especially happy to read a book based on Norse mythology (though in modern setting) that has substantial queer content. In the old stories, Odin was queer in the broad sense and a gender outlaw in many ways (Loki too), so the stories that “straighten up” everything, even if they are really good (Diana Paxson’s books, for instance), are on some level unsatisfying. I mean, take Valkyries: unmarried, childless women warriors. Wouldn’t you expect at least some of them to be lesbians?

The book is just out in hardback, so I’m afraid I’m in for a long wait for the next installment of Sarah Beauhall’s (mis)adventures. O-well.

In the meantime, you can learn more from this guest posting from the J. A. Pitts on John Scalzi’s Whatever blog, and the author’s own web site.

Up this week is The Tough Guide to Fantasyland by Diana Wynne Jones. This book has been around since 1996 (first publised in the UK, now available from Penguin the US through their Firebird imprint) and has been justly lauded and reviewed LOTS of places, so I’ll be brief.

The Guide is arranged as an A-Z listing of anything and everything a Tourist (i.e., a reader of fantasy fiction) will likely encounter on their Tour of Fantasyland (i.e., reading any fantasy book). Also included are many editorial asides about things one might logically expect to find in Fantasyland but won’t, notably chilblains, the common cold, vast swathes of flora and fauna in the natural world, a viable economy, and any food except stew and on occasion yogurt.

The Guide is very, very funny; Jones has a dry, breezy, highly irreverent style that makes reading an A-Z listing, a task usually as exciting as watching paint dry, highly entertaining. The cross-references in particular are often a hoot.

Many writers swear by this book as a means of gently mocking all the clichés of the genre, thereby, we hope, discouraging them in future works, including our own. I suspect it’s most useful as a reminder about the importance of world-building (see especially the entries on ECOLOGY and ECONOMY).

In this summer’s novel-writing workshop, (World Fantasy Award-winning writer) Kij Johnson talked about the technique of “borrowed landscape,” a term she used for writing that alludes to some other cultural referent to help flesh out setting. “Chick lit” writers sometimes do this by name-dropping various products or designer’s names (The Devil Wears Prada); just about everybody writing in a contemporary setting uses this to some extent or the other by using pop culture references.

In fantasy fiction, the borrowed landscape might use elements of other fantasy works (Tolkien?) or folklore. The danger is in over-reliance on borrowed landscape, and on everybody picking the same few details to evoke the rest of the world they describe (which is why the animal and plant kingdoms in Fantasyland are greatly reduced compared to real life). In this way, the Guide serves as a reminder to choose those evocative details carefully. Plus it’s a lot of fun.

On a related note, I picked up my copy of the Tough Guide at a wonderful kid’s bookstore in Kansas City, The Reading Reptile, which has an amazing selection, from board books through young adult, in a kid-friendly environment. It was my first visit, but I’ll be back. They also sponsor a big children’s lit fest every year. Their lineup for 2010 (March 26-27)  includes Adam Rex, who wrote the wonderful and super-fun book The True Meaning of Smekday.

Oh, and another thing: special thanks to Rob and Lane for reciting the entire entry on STEW nearly verbatim from memory last Wednesday, reminding me that I really really needed to get this book.

I wish I could think of the author who did this, but I was reading about someone (whose writing I respect and whose invented names generally went well with her characters – that much I can remember) who looked around at her bookshelves and took random syllables from the names of the authors on the spines and mashed them together. (Maybe it was Laurie J. Marks of the Earth Logic series?)

If you know, Dear Reader, please aid my recollection. (And if you have any other wonderful tricks for naming characters, please share them!)

What struck me is that the story’s author tried to disguise the fact that the “peddlers” were inspired by the Roma people (it comes out in the comments) — changing names, accents, appearance, et cetera, but didn’t seem to think about overturning the stereotype itself. I believe this would be possible to do with a minimum of disruption to the story, while still doing all the things artistically and creatively that the author seemed to want to do in it.

The story proper begins, “It was the right sort of day to sell a child to the peddlers.” The mother of a truly horrible child finds some peddlers and trades the kid for various goods. The story continues with the wicked child doing horrible things to the peddler and his wife, until they leave her hanging in a bush to trouble the next person to come along.

But what if the peddler didn’t just simply agree to buy the child? What if the peddler had sorta-kinda gone along with the suggestion, then gone back to his wife and said, “Holy sh-t! This lady wants to SELL us her kid! Where do these landspeople get this stupid idea?” They discuss the matter and decide a woman who would sell her child is surely not a fit mother, and it would be best to go along with the scheme and raise the child as their own.

Suddenly this fictional story takes place in a world where one group has a bias against another group that perhaps doesn’t match reality, thus calling into question the stereotype. Without this tweak, it’s assumed that yes, it’s perfectly sane to expect to be able to sell a child to a peddler, so the stereotype stands as reality.

The best stories, the ones I aspire to read and write, can really mess with our heads in wonderful ways, undermining our stereotypes and assumptions and generally rearranging our mental furniture (with or without our leave). This can happen for the writer as well as the reader – if the writer is paying attention as she writes.

My favorite example of this is Ursula le Guin’s Earthsea trilogy, in which the barbaric people have light-colored skin, hair and eyes, and the civilized, sophisticated people are the people of the Archipelago, who have dark skin and kinky-curly hair. Reading it as a kid, I didn’t quite realize what was going on until a few dozen pages in, at which point I had an A Ha! moment. In that moment, I realized that I had a (previously) unconscious bias: I had assumed the main character and his people were like me, and they were, they were fully realized characters with hopes and dreams and flaws and messy lives – but they also weren’t. They looked different from me. They weren’t white.

That was a powerful moment for me, and it has kept me on the lookout for my own unconscious bias since then. Sometimes I fail, and sometimes I manage to bring my bias to light, where I can examine it critically and maybe chip away at it for next time. I hope not to fail publicly, but that’s part of the risk of publishing your writing – you can neither bury your mistakes like a doctor or plant trees and shrubs around them like an architect, you just have to hope they go out of print.