Rachel Starr Thomson

In the ongoing discussion on becoming objective about your own writing (Part 1 is here; Part 2 is here), I’ve mentioned that it’s important to gain a working knowledge of technique. In other words, you need to become a student of your own craft. Most of us have seen thousands (if not millions) of automobiles in our lifetimes, yet I wouldn’t consider myself able to put together a Dodge Caravan. Yet, countless would-be writers believe they can write a book because they’ve read books, and surely, it can’t be that hard.

Now, you can probably write a book with far less training than it would take to put a minivan together. But in writing, there ARE rules, techniques, structures, approaches, and conventions, and if you want to be a writer, you should learn about them.

Fiction writers: What is POV? What are the different approaches to using it, with their strengths and weaknesses? What is a scene, and what is a summary? What scene structures tend to work best? Can you describe traditional three-act structure? What divides good dialogue from bad? How should you handle accents and dialects? What about flashbacks? Flash-forwards? Passive voice? Is your timeline linear or out-of-the-box?

Nonfiction writers: Can you write an outline? What’s your hook? Do you know how to research a topic? Have you thought through structure? Can you name other books on your subject? What tone is best for this project? Why? How much do you plan to explain concepts, and how much will you trust your readers to know? Is a heavily anecdotal approach best, or should you lean more on evidence?

If you don’t even know what I am talking about in the above two paragraphs, you need an education :). (Also, if you ever use the term “fiction novel.”) This is not hard to obtain, nor is it expensive. Most libraries have a section for writers. Writer’s Digest publishes hundreds of titles on everything from research to world-building to dialogue to plot. There are probably thousands of blogs by and for writers, including many by agents, editors, and working authors. Start reading.

If you have a bit more money and ability to travel, try attending a writer’s conference or two. These can be hugely educational.

Once you’re armed with some knowledge of technique, you’ll start recognizing various techniques when they’re used in books you’re reading. And then you can start to see how they do (or don’t) work, to understand what you do (or don’t) want to do.

(This isn’t about becoming slavish. In writing, you just have to learn the rules so you know how to break them well.)

And once you’ve started to recognize technique in the writing of other people, you’ll start to recognize it in yourself, too. You’ll know, to a much greater degree, when your dialogue is bad, your scenes are summaries, and your head-hopping is making people dizzy. You’ll be able to spot problems in structure, tone, or competition.

Weigh in, readers! I’m enjoying the discussion :).

This is Part 2 of a discussion on how you can know when your writing is good enough to unleash upon the world. Part 1 is here.

As you could probably tell from my brief overview of ways I go about evaluating my own writing, I don’t believe there’s a quick and easy way to become objective. But one thing does hold true: if you can tell the difference between good and bad writing in general, you’ll be better equipped to tell the difference in your own writing.

If you want to write, then, and especially if you plan to be published, you simply must familiarize yourself with really good writing. Read it. Listen to it. Read it out loud. Read it in lots of genres. Read poetry; read song lyrics. Read classics. Read nonfiction. Read things that stretch you. Pick up, through exposure, vocabulary, technique, structure, rhythm. Pick up the flow of an effective story, the way it builds and climaxes and falls.

(Since I know many of my readers are homeschoolers/homeschool grads, I want to add one thing to this: don’t just read fiction that is more than a century old. I love Austen and Dickens and the Brontes and Shakespeare as much as anyone else. Without question, much of the greatest literature in the English language came out of the Victorian era and earlier. But writing, as an art form, has come a long way since then. Readers have changed; the “rules” have changed. I see a lot of writing from homeschoolers that is, frankly, overwritten–and in its lines floats a distinctly Victorian perfume :). It’s true that many of the “modern classics” are books you won’t necessarily want to read, and that’s fine. But make sure you’re reading enough modern writing to become very familiar with the way literature has evolved.)

The goal in all of this is to train your own writerly ear. You want to become so familiar with great writing that bad writing grates on your ear, even if it’s your own. You want to be able to recognize cliches, hear bad rhythm, and know when you’re overwriting.

That is the broad background for knowing when your own work is good enough. Coming soon: nitty-grittier thoughts. In the meantime, I’d love to hear what you think about this.

Back when I posted “Mystory,” fellow self-published author Natalie Wickham asked a fantastic question in response. Here’s her comment:

Here is a question that might make for an interesting discussion. How do *you* know when your writing is good? I have received so many articles for editing that I look at and think, “Really? Do you really think this is well-written?” I suppose that’s why they have whole courses on how to become a good writer, but I just wonder if there are some key things that a writer could ask himself to objectively evaluate the quality of his writing. Do you have any specific questions you ask yourself? Or is it more intuitive for you?

As a writing coach, I’ve often found myself stepping in for parents who just aren’t confident in marking their children’s writing. The reason for that is that unlike math or even history or science, writing isn’t just a study; it’s an art and a craft. That means that any assessment of writing is going to rely on a certain amount of subjectivity–that is, we like some writing because we like it and dislike other writing because we dislike it. And you can’t get much more scientific than that!

With that being understood, it’s nevertheless true that some writing is objectively–well, if not “bad,” at least not very good. Almost anyone with the exception of the writer’s mother would agree. This usually means that the writer just doesn’t have the grasp of language or of basic writing techniques needed to craft good writing.

The tricky thing is that it’s almost impossible for us to be objective about our own writing, at least for the first good while after we’ve written it. And yes, this is true for me too.

Natalie asked, then, how I know when my own writing is good. The simple answer is that (a) I train my ear and (b) I use several objective yardsticks, including knowledge of technique, the opinions of other readers, and most importantly, the willingness of third parties to publish what I write :).

I can go into a lot more detail on that, so I think I will. Stick around for follow-up posts! And keep the questions coming.

Recently, Stephen Burnett wrote a post on SpecFaith about how we depict God in our fantasy. Entitled “Fighting man-centered monsters in fiction,” it used the recent Voyage of the Dawn Treader film as a jumping-off point to address man-centeredness in our fiction:

I won’t say names here — partly because, sorry to say, the titles and authors can be forgettable! — but I’ve read a few fantasy books whose authors are trying to Imitate Lewis. But there’s a catch: their Christ-figures, a la Aslan, aren’t much like Aslan, much less so the Biblical Christ. Sure, they have all the loving-humble-helpful parts, but few to none of the sovereign-holy-kill-his-enemies parts. And these Christ-equivalents exist, not with their own missions, but mainly as sidekicks for the real hero of the story, the Self-Doubtful Often-Angsty Gifted protagonist, who is on a Quest.

Well, parts of the above description fit The Wolf of Tebron to a tee (even though Stephen hadn’t read Wolf and wasn’t referring to it, so not surprisingly, Susanne Lakin was one of the commenters. She wrote,

I cringed a bit at your attack on writers (like myself) who write fantasy books where many of the qualities and character of Christ is embodied in a character or animal (like Aslan) to accompany a hero on his journey, or whatever. In my case, I am not trying to make the wolf in The Wolf of Tebron BE Christ. Like Lewis said, he was not trying to teach Christianity, only help others experience it. For me, portraying a wolf with qualities of loyalty, faithfulness, encouragement, fierce protectiveness, kindness was where I could explore some of the facets of God’s nature. Books like this are not meant to belittle or cheapen God, his power, or sovereignty but I believe they are very important in helping a reader be drawn to God.

The whole discussion is well worth reading, and both writers make some fantastic points. These are questions I’ve also wrestled with. How do we depict Christ in our fiction — especially in fantasy fiction, where we are not actually depicting the real world? My own faith has drawn me to two extremes: trying to write any Christ figure in such a way that he becomes an exact representation, doctrinally accurate and characteristically exact, or (once I’ve failed at the first extreme) avoiding writing Christ figures at all. Who could possibly ever depict everything that Jesus is? I’m not even sure the Bible does that!

It was another great fantasy writer, George MacDonald, who helped me find a balance — ironically, not in his fantasy. He also wrote novels about Christians in England and Scotland in his day, but they were exemplary Christians. In their own way, every one was a Christ figure. Michael Phillips, who has edited many of MacDonald’s novels for modern audiences, wrote in a preface that MacDonald’s characters show different facets of Jesus’s character, and if you were to put them all together, you would get a composite of Christ.

Aha, I thought. That’s it.

As a writer, I can’t possibly embody him “in whom are hid all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge,” he “who is the brightness of [God's] glory, and the express image of his person” in words and an artificial plot. But I can, like Susanne said, explore facets of who Jesus is. I can take parts of his character and see how they would be expressed in another world, or how another person who possessed them might act. I can take the yearning he provokes in me and transfer it to my characters (that is why yearning is such a major theme in my Seventh World books — almost the first thing Maggie and Virginia learn to do is to long for the King’s presence).

I can sometimes show how the world centers on him. And at other times, I can show he helps others on their quests, not as a sidekick, but as a servant — like Ruyah the Wolf or the Holy Spirit himself.

In the end, the whole argument makes me realize anew that God both invites and defies description. He is holy, entirely “other,” and worth spending all of our talent, strength, and time getting to know.

(This post is reposted from August 12. Before you read it, go back to yesterday’s post and look at that gorgeous cover art again. Just because it’s amazing.)

In the village of Tebron, surrounded by forests and peaceful mountains, Joran works as an apprentice blacksmith because his unusually sharp ability to mindspeak with animals has made forestry, hunting, and fishing too painful an occupation. He is painfully aware of his difference from his brothers, whom he loves but is unlike. Joran is slender, gentle, contemplative, and quietly desperate, wishing above all things to feel true happiness with his beautiful wife Charris, to feel that he belongs.

When Charris betrays Joran, he sends her away in a fit of passionate anger. But then come the dreams, tormenting him night after night: dreams in which he climbs to a sandcastle above the sea where Charris is trapped in ice, and he struggles to free her while sweeping blackness clutches at the back of his neck and the lunatic moon looks on and laughs. And then come the encounters: the great wolf watching him from the fringes of the wood, the crazy old goose woman with her riddles, and finally the most frightening encounter of all — the discovery that Charris, sent home to her relatives, has disappeared into thin air.

Unable to live any longer with himself and without answers, Joran sets off on a journey, joined by the giant wolf Ruyah, that will take him to the ends of the earth — to the Hovel of the Moon, the Palace of the Sun, the Cave of the Wind, and finally the Unimaginable Sea — and to the depths of his own dreams. His is a search for his wife, for the truth, for answers, and for peace. The way is made bearable by Ruyah’s wise, playful, and always caring presence, a presence that means far more than Joran can imagine.

The Wolf of Tebron by C.S. Lakin is being hailed as a modern-day fairy tale, which it certainly is at heart, though its characterization is richer than a typical fairy tale’s. Joran’s struggles with himself are intensely human. In an irony that struck me as particularly true to the Christian life, Joran does not want to be a hero and in fact would not be one were it not for Ruyah pushing, leading, and saving him at every step. Every spark of heroism in him rises in response to the heroism of another. At the same time, he is a likable hero, with pain and struggles that are poignant and relatable.

Not a simple allegory, The Wolf of Tebron nonetheless employs allegory and symbol in great measure, and Ruyah’s wise sayings — “It is said among wolves . . .” — come from sources as varied as C.S. Lewis, G.K. Chesterton, and Carl Jung. (Chesterton, I think, would have enjoyed being a wolf.) It’s a book meant to inspire thought. Its story of redemption is thoroughly Christian at heart, though some of the allusions to life as a dream, reality as a matter of the will, and looking inside yourself could be just as easily interpreted through a non-Christian lens. It’s also a thoroughly enjoyable adventure story, with exotic settings, unpredictable turns, a terrifying enemy, and unexpected humour.

Lakin’s work is stylistically beautiful. The exotic locales are vivid, from dark north to burning desert to misty jungle: I found myself looking forward to each leg of Joran’s journey just so I could experience another part of her story world. The Wolf of Tebron is the first in The Gates of Heaven series from Living Ink Books (AMG Publishers). I’m looking forward to The Map Across Time, Book 2 in the series.

After taking December off, I am back in the blog tour! This month, we’re touring C.S. Lakin’s The Wolf of Tebron, Book 1 in The Gates of Heaven series. (that link is my Amazon affiliate link, so thanks for clicking!). I reviewed the book several months back when I first got a chance to read it, so I’m looking forward to revisiting what I thought was an excellent read — and hopefully tackling a semi-controversial topic (that is, the nature of Christ figures in fiction) as well :).

For today, the links:

Susanne Lakin’s website, showing off what an incredibly versatile writer she is, can be found here: http://www.cslakin.com/

She blogs here, on topics ranging from fairy tales to WIPs to writerly advice: http://cslakin.blogspot.com/

And the rest of the blog tour can be found at the links below.

Noah Arsenault
Amy Bissell
Red Bissell
Justin Boyer
Keanan Brand
Grace Bridges
Beckie Burnham
Jeff Chapman
Christian Fiction Book Reviews
Carol Bruce Collett
Valerie Comer
CSFF Blog Tour
D. G. D. Davidson
April Erwin
Andrea Graham
Nikole Hahn
Katie Hart
Ryan Heart
Bruce Hennigan
Becky Jesse
Cris Jesse
Becca Johnson
Jason Joyner
Julie
Carol Keen
Dawn King
Shannon McDermott
Matt Mikalatos
Rebecca LuElla Miller
Joan Nienhuis
Nissa
John W. Otte
Chawna Schroeder
Tammy Shelnut
Kathleen Smith
James Somers
Rachel Starr Thomson
Robert Treskillard
Fred Warren
Phyllis Wheeler

Note: I received a gratis copy of this book from the publisher for the purpose of review. End note.

The day has come! After 10 years, the Seventh World Trilogy is finished with the release of Coming Day!

The Story

After rescuing the Gypsies from destruction at the hands of the emperor, the warrior farmers of Pravik have returned home to dwell above ground. But peace is proving to be as dangerous as war, as their food stores run out and they find themselves unable to go beyond the city to grow crops. Neighbouring towns, afraid of the rumours they’ve heard about Pravik, are unwilling to trade with them.

When emissaries arrive from the emperor, inviting the Ploughman to form an alliance with him, he has no choice but to go. Along with Professor Huss, the Darkworld prince Harutek, and an unwilling Maggie, he rides for Athrom. But in doing so, he ignores the vision of the blind seer Virginia Ramsey, who has seen deadly consequences at the end of the Ploughman’s journey.

Desperate for help from another source, Virginia sets out on a journey of her own, accompanied by the Darkworld priestess Rehtse — a journey to find the King and bring him to Pravik’s aid.
Their parallel journeys will at last open the way to the worlds unseen, bringing in powers, terrors, beauties, and a final confrontation no one could imagine. Central to the fate of their world are the Gifted: the Singer, Seer, Healer, Listener, Warrior, and Voice.

Buy the Book—or Get a Special Deal on the Trilogy!

You can purchase a copy of Coming Day now at http://www.worldsunseen.com/home/buy-the-books/ – or pick up the whole series for $50, a savings of $10.

All three covers feature original paintings by Deborah Thomson.

Shopping at Amazon?

Coming Day is also available from Amazon (with all normal shipping discounts applicable). If you use this link, I’ll get a tiny affiliate payment as an extra bonus. So thanks!

Or Get An Autographed Copy

If you’d like a specially autographed copy, e-mail me at thomson.rachel@gmail.com. Special shipping charges may apply, so I will bill you directly.

Thanks for reading—and for coming on this journey with me!
Rachel