Over at Shawn Speakman’s blog (check it out, it rules.) there was a good amount of discussion about the titles of the novels he and I are separately working on. I have great respect for Shawn, his knowledge of the industry and his abilities as a writer, so it’s always a invigorating to get his thoughts on a subject, especially when it concerns something I’m working on.

The problem? He’s not really a fan of Through Bended Grass!

It’s turning into an interesting conversation and I’d love to hear the thoughts of some of you guys who read my blog (though most of you also read Shawn’s). Here’s the exchange:

Shawn:

Aidan: I don’t know if I like Through Bended Grass. I’m not sure what it means, to be exact which I guess is okay, but it doesn’t seem fantasy-ish enough. I like the phrase a lot though; you know me, I like literary titles!The overall series title is The Dark Thorn Cycle:Book One: The Dark Thorn
Book Two: The Kingdom’s Keys
Book Three: The Splintered King

Book Four has no title. It barely has a plot, thankfully! Otherwise I’d probably already be thinking of it.

I respond:

I’ve always been a fan of your titles, Shawn. They always strike a nice balance between poetic and literal. They don’t overwhelm, but they still intrigue.I’m more a fan of The Dark Thorn rather than The Dagda King. I know who The Dagda is, but most people won’t, to them it will just sound like another generic fantasy name.Through Bended Grass is pretty poetic and esoteric, but that’s also how I like my titles! It’s somewhat intentional that it doesn’t sound entirely like a regular fantasy title, which tend to be much more literal, because I’m drawn to titles like The Blade Itself, The Darkness that Comes Before, etc…. Unlike those, however, Through Bended Grass has a direct connection to the plot of the story and will become very clear to the reader as they read on. I like that sort of reward. It helps balance things out.

Of course, I understand that no matter what I name my novel, it will be up to the publisher in the end and I may not have a say. I’d rather have a published novel under another name, but I’d put up the good fight to keep Through Bended Grass.

I’ve got a few threads of my next novel percolating in my head at the moment. It’ll be mostly unrelated to Through Bended Grass, though set in the same universe and will probably have a few overlapping characters, but I try not to let it get too much or else I’ll start neglecting Through Bended Grass for it. It’s nice that you’ll be able to keep using the same characters/world/themes as you move along because it allows you to think so far in the future. I don’t have that luxury, however, as Through Bended Grass is a standalone.

Shawn brings up a good point:

What I like about the titles you posted is their fantasy-ishness (I love making up new words). The words “blade” and “darkness” still have a fantasy quality about them. But your main noun, “grass,” doesn’t. That’s my only grip about the title. Now, if in the novel, one of your characters is talking about a scythe through bending grass as it relates to a retreating army or something, that’d be awesome. Just be readu when a marketing or publicity department points out the noun issue and be prepared with your certain rebuttal! Gotta fight for what we want, ya know?And personally, I don’t think my newer titles have any literary merit whatsoever, just by looking at them anyway. Once the books have been read you’ll see how each title has a double meaning. I wish I could make them more literary but it just isn’t going to happen. All of my energy is going into the book. *sighs*As for your next book, it’ll be nice for you to not have to create a new universe. You’ve already made it with Bended Grass. At least that part will be over with. All of my novels in this cycle will be stand alone, but each does build on the last one as the themes get darker and darker. The great thing about it is I’ve already built the universe, how magic works, the history behind it all, so now I can just sit back and play and have fun.

My response:

That’s a really good point about the non-fantasyness of the noun “grass.” I suppose, however, that that’s what I’m trying to go for in a lot of ways. Through Bended Grass is a fantasy, of course, but it isn’t a fantasy in the same way that The Blade Itself, The Darkness That Comes Before, Lord Foul’s Bane or even The Dark Thorn is (if my assumptions about your melding epic fantasy and urban fantasy are correct.) There are no epic battles, not even close; there is no end of the world at hand, though the antagonist likes to believe otherwise. It’s more a story about people, relationships, family and overcoming struggles – with an interesting urban fantasy setting – more akin to White Apples and The Wooden Sea by Jonathan Carroll, Across the Nightingale Floor by Lian Hearn or The Summer Tree by Guy Gavriel Kay, than The Sword of Shannara by Terry Brooks, The Dragon Reborn by Robert Jordan or A Storm of Swords by George R.R. Martin.From what I’ve read/know of your novels, the titles you’ve picked out worked perfectly for your novels, the story you’re trying to tell and the style of your writing. I’m not sure that a more typical fantasy-like title, littered with fantasy heavy words like “Fey”, “Faerie”, “Sword”, “Hound”, “Spear”, etc… would necessarily fit what I’m writing.

Does all this make some sort of sense?

Like I mentioned earlier, Through Bended Grass has a direct connection to the plot of the novel, first appearing in Chapter Nine, Bended Grass and Four Leaf Clovers, so that’s obviously a benefit for readers, though I’m not sure if that would be enough to convince the marketing department!

When I say universe, I literally mean universe. The next novel I have planned doesn’t take place in Ireland and involves very little of the same themes and plot devices, in fact it’s essentially a standalone novel. I just want to leave things open so that I could connect the two in subtle ways, similar to what Stephen King has done with so many of his novels.

The rules will change as other legends and myths come into play, moving away from the Irish/Celtic mythology and into another area of the world. So in many ways I’ll be back to the drawing board! I’m impressed you’ve already got so much planned for down the road, I can’t wait to get a gander at some of it.

So, thoughts? And don’t feel restricted to just the title of my novels, or Shawn’s, but rather just any thoughts on titles in general. I’m always looking for ways to improve my own writing and a titles is one of the most important things when it comes to convincing someone pick up a novel in the first place.

 A recipe for an epiphany of epic proportions:

Start with a slow day at work.
Add a dash of wandering mind.
Sprinkle with a large helping of a story just rearing to get to the page.

Voila! You’ve got yourself not only a sizable epiphany, but also a title for the upcoming masterpiece you’re slowly pulling together during any free moment. No longer will I have to think of the work as “my untitled contemporary fantasy” or “that novel I’m working on” or “my pipe dream”. Instead I can now call it by its new title:

Through Bended Grass

Usually I leave the title of a project to the near the end, and this one could very well change over the course of the project, but something about this title stuck with me, even over the course of a couple of days. The more I thought about it, the more I realised that it was the title of the novel, it just took me some time to discover it.

Those familiar with Irish/Celtic/Fey mythology – or those willing to do a little bit of research – will undoubtedly see the relevance the title right away. The rest of you, well… you’ll just have to read Through Bended Grass and find out!

So, what d’ya think?

So, I figure a good way to get me motivated to get as much work done as possible on the novel – which would equal getting it done sooner – is to start a weekly progress report, where I can sum up the work I’ve done the previous week. Pretty simple concept, eh? Ever thursday(ish) (Yeah, yeah. The first one’s already late. Figures, eh?). you’ll get a glimpse of just how much Rowan’s story has moved forward.

Since this is the first time around, though, I think it probably makes the most sense to start at the beginning and fill you all in on the progress I’ve made since first starting to conceptualize the story back in August of ‘07.

Currently I’ve finish The short prologue, 6 chapters and a short interlude, all of which together equal roughly 19k words. I expect the novel will clock in at around 30-40 chapters, as long as things move ahead as I think they will (yeah right…) which, if we do the math:

6 Chapters / 19,000 words = 3167 words/chapter
35 (average) chapters * 3167 words = 110,845 words

So, 110k words or, assuming 250 words/page, 443 pages. A modest total, falling smack into the middle of the 90-120k range that publishers seem to be attracted to these days. Of course this number’s a bit of a shot in the dark, things change and not every chapter is going to fall into the 3167 ballpark. Even now, only a few chapters in, the length of those varies broadly.

I think one of the worst things an author can do to their readers, especially a first time Fantasy writer, is to greet them with massive prologues/first chapters just chock-a-block full of exposition setting up the story. So I’ve attempted to ease the reader into the story, exploring and introducing the characters and the concepts in an increasingly more in depth manner. I don’t expect the chapters to get much longer than Chapter 6 and in many cases, just taking a look at the outline, some should be even be shorter than that 3000 average

Here’s a little breakdown of the chapters thus far:

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Prologue

This is a short, snappy introduction to the protagonist, Rowan Hayes, and sets up what is a crucial plot element for the story: Rowan’s Child. I’ve spent a fair amount of time working on the prologue (I workshopped it in a college course, so it has gone through several revisions) and, though one of my readers didn’t care for the chapter, I’m still debating on whether or not I should really open the novel with it, or whether it should just come later on in the narrative to fill in some blanks.

Chapter 1

This chapter starts with a bang and introduces the reader right away to the main conflict in the story: Rowan’s missing son, Lewis. The first ticklings of the Fey world and magic appear in this chapter, though it lingers in the background of the main action. I tried to stuff a lot of emotion into this chapter, and I’m hoping there’s also enough mystery and conflict to intrigue the reader right off the bat.

Chapter 2

This is very much a character building and set up chapter. We see Rowan struggling with the loss of her son (and the police’s mysterious/incompetent lack of help in finding him) and it starts to become clear that Rowan is a fiery and reckless young woman, not always necessarily thinking through all the decisions she makes in her life, relying more on her heart than her head. We learn a lot about Rowan’s early life (the death of her mother and the fallout it caused between her and the rest of her family) and I think it sets the stage for not only who Rowan is. One of those family members, her sister Allie, features strongly in this chapter, and acts as a foil to Rowan (levelheaded, tidy and complacent) and helps bring out and define Rowan’s flaws in a way that will attract the reader to her. Hopefully.

Chapter 3

This was a fun chapter to write, but also easily the most time consuming and difficult yet. The main reason for this is that it’s the first time where I really have to convince the reader that I know what I’m talking about when it comes to real world Ireland. Many parts of my novel, including this entire chapter, take place in real locations, and I have to get the facts straight, otherwise (my no doubt astute) readers will catch me. I spent nearly an hour online trying to figure out if a particular DART station (Dublin Area Rapid Transit, a train that carries commuters from one end of Dublin to the other) was on one side of a particular mountain tunnel or another. A small factor in the story, but one that has to be accurate, just in case someone decides to check up on it.

Robin Hobb once said something along the lines of, “If you want people to believe in your dragons, you have to make them believe in your Rabbits first.” This is something that I try to hold true to as much as possible. You have to give your reader a reason to trust what you have to say. If they don’t believe me when I’m telling them about Dublin, there’s no way they’ll believe me when I’m telling them about the Fey World.

The Devil’s in the details, as they say.

Chapter 4

This chapter’s special to me for a few reasons. Back in ’05 I spent a few months in Europe, travelling around with nothing more than my backpack and my girlfriend. We were young, and grew more in those few months than we had in years before. It’s safe to say that that trip shaped a lot of who I would become in the next few years. It really taught me to take a step back and look at life in a more relaxed, contemplative manner. It calmed me down and showed me how to truly appreciate the little things in life. It helped me appreciate home, family and the small things in a way I wasn’t aware of before. It opened my eyes to the world.

Chapter Four brings Rowan to Bray, a small town on the outskirts of County Dublin, and a place that I hold dear. I spent a month in Ireland during my travels, much of which used Bray as a home base (my uncle lived there at the time) and during my tenure it really started to feel like home. It seemed a no-brainer to start Rowan’s Ireland adventure (and later the Fey world) in Bray, there’s just so much history around the area that it’s just ripe for telling the story I’m looking to tell.

Of course the novel moves away from Bray pretty quickly (by the end of the next chapter, for that matter), but there wasn’t a chance I was going to leave out my Irish home from the telling of Rowan’s story.

Interlude

This is a fun little psuedo-chapter (just a few hundred words) switching things up and telling the story through the eyes of one of the other major secondary characters, a grumpy Leprechaun named Fitheal. He’s a riot to write about and I’m sure my readers will love him when they get to chance to meet him.

The interesting thing about this Interlude is that it’s told in 3rd-person narrative as opposed to 1st-person narrative, as the rest of the story is told. This is the first of a few little Interludes like this that I expect to pop up throughout the book.

I’m playing with the idea of giving this Interlude a good edit and releasing it here as a sample of my work sometime down the road. That’s of course if people want to read it!

Chapter 5

This was a fun chapter to work on, but also one that ended up being much longer than I had anticipated. It sees Rowan having to flee Bray, in the middle of a dark, stormy night (yay clichés!) and led by a very unreliable creature that, to her mind, really shouldn’t even exist.

The important thing for me was to inject a lot of tension into the this chapter; it’s the first time that Rowan (and the reader) realize just what type of trouble she’s in. It’s also the first chapter where the Fey world plays a strong, direct role and I’m hoping that I’ve done enough to intrigue the reader about the world into which Rowan’s about to throw herself. Her perception of myth and reality is really thrown into question with this chapter and I hope the reader’s will be, too.

Chapter 6

This is mostly a continuation of Chapter 5, but this time around I get to play around with a lot of real world locations, concepts and historical figures, throwing in my own little spin on them, and making them suddenly much more viable in a Contemporary Fantasy. Rowan meets several figures from that all reader’s will be very familiar with through the story, and use them in ways that will make the reader excited to meet them again.

I think the reader will begin to get a good sense of how Rowan deals with conflict. Rowan’s got a lot of problems, she’s gone through a lot in her life and has developed certain ways of dealing with conflict that I’m not sure everyone will agree with. It’s interesting, even for me as the author, to watch her develop and react as her life tumbles more and more out of control.

Rowan’s relationship with the irascible little leprechaun, Fitheal, really starts to develop here and I think it’ll be an interesting one to watch. Rowan can never really be sure what to think of the little guy and where his intentions may lie. Regardless of this, though, she has little choice (due to events in Chapter 4) but to follow the little bugger and hope he won’t lead her astray.

This chapter ends with Rowan setting foot for the first (but definitely not the last!) time in the Fey world and ends on a strong note with Rowan face to face with a very real, very lethal, creature of Faerie.

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Phew! *wipes forehead*I applaud anyone who actually made it through all of that! Hopefully you’ve got a better idea of where I’m going with the story and what Rowan has ahead of her. I’m actually about halfway through Chapter 8 (which is the last chapter in what amounts to, essentially, the first act of the novel), but I’ll save a write up about Chapter 7 for next time. Each of these little write ups were obviously pretty brief and you can expect a more indepth, thoughtful dissection of the writing of future chapters as they come up.

Over at Shawn Speakman’s blog (doesn’t it always seem like I’m finding my blogging inspiration there?), one of his readers asked his opinion on the use of contractions outside of dialogue. This is a topic I’ve struggled with a lot as a writer, so I jumped in with my own theories/learnings. It occurred to me (rather obviously) that this is a subject worth expanding upon here at my writing blog.

In the past I’ve often worked on writing epic fantasies (they were what I grew up reading), but I always struggled with the writing of these, finding that everything was taking a very long time to just write, regardless of how well the outlining was coming along. This was a stark contrast, however, to the short fiction I was writing (such as Ferry Traffic, which has received a bit of attention lately, and can be found as a free download on my main web site ), which flowed much more naturally and a hell of a lot faster.

The main difference? I was writing with contemporary narrators.

The freedom this afforded me made all the difference in the world. I’ve often written with an easygoing, casual tone which fits a contemporary narrator but feels out of place in the stiff, formal world of a medieval/epic fantasy. It was this aspect that made me first consider the idea of writing a fantasy set in our world, with a protagonist who is no less ordinary than your or I.

Rowan affords me the ability to show my reader this magical, marvelous world through terms they can they can relate to. I can spend time showing the readers what’s really important to the story, instead of having to describe to them what might be fascinating to the protagonist/narrator but dull and ordinary to the reader, I can instead glaze over those things (we all know what a sidewalk is) and instead spend time on aspects of the story that are marvelous and extraordinary to both the reader and Rowan alike (ghosts and big F’in snakes, for instance).

On top of this, I can call a spade a spade. Rowan’s also able to describe things to the reader in a way that doesn’t have to beat around the bush. If a giant bird flies over her head, she’s able to describe as being the size of a small aircraft, putting a firm image in the mind of the reader without having to endlessly spew abstract terms to get the idea across. It fits my writing style and it fits the story I’m telling through Rowan.

Of course this wouldn’t work for every story (The Lord of the Rings would have been pretty awkward with a modern vernacular) but when used in the right circumstance (Harry Potter, for instance), I feel it can really help the reader connect to the story in a strong way.

One author who uses casual vs. strict language to great affect is Joe Abercrombie, author of The First Law Trilogy (which kicks all sorts of ass, by the way). He uses language, even outside of dialogue, to differentiate the way his characters view the world. From the pragmatic, and simple language used during the POV of The Dogman (a barbarian-like mercenary) to the strict, frustrated clip of Collem West (apeasent-born Army Officer) to the casual, cultured arrogance of Jezal dan Luthar (a pain-in-the-ass noble’s son), Abercrombie manages to show his reader the same world – the same events, even – in a new light with each new POV character.

Being able to write in this more casual, contemporary tone has increased my efficiency when writing by magnitudes. When I sit down I can simply tell the story, instead of struggling to find the language necessary to tell the story. Choosing to write in the first-person perspective also helped make this transition much easier. Rowan herself narrates the novel and so her character and verve seeped into the actual telling of the story. She isn’t just a character in the novel, she is the novel.

I’ve found that through Rowan’s language I’ve been able to look at the world, at the story itself, in a way that I wouldn’t necessarily have done if I had been more confined in the language I had to use. Maybe one day I’ll get back to Epic/Medieval Fantasy (I’ve got a good story brewing in my head, actually), but for now Rowan’s story (and the way she tells it) is just too compelling and right for me not to tell it now.

The other day I was in the bookstore, as I often am, taking part in, I think, a pasttime of many aspiring writers. Mainly, picking up random books from the shelves, flipping through them for a few minutes, throwing my hands up in the air in frustration and yelling “Why is this schlock published and I’m not?! I’m a way better writer!”

I repeat this process several times and then, in frustration, pick up a book (which generally is better than anything I can write. Hello Joe Abercrombie!) and storm off to the till to pay, eager to get home and wallow in the sorrows of my unpublished life.

But the most recent time I took part in my favourite past-time, I was hit with a rather large, sweaty epiphany. In fact, I now understand, quite clearly, why these authors are published and I am not; I understand what they’ve done to get a foot up.

They’ve finished their novel.

Seriously, it’s the single most important thing an author can do to get themselves on the road to being a published and (hopefully) successful author. A finished, mediocre novel has a hell of a lot of a better chance of getting published than a half-finished, albeit brilliant, manuscript. Now, the fun is in combining to two and coming up with a manuscript which is not only finished… but also brilliant. I’ll let you know when I succeed.

Any writer knows it’s easy to start a project, ideas in your head just bursting at the seams, screaming for a chance to be put to paper. Your pen flows freely for the first paragraph, the first page, the first act… but then, it all dries up. Maybe you haven’t spent enough time preplanning and you’ve written yourself into a corner; maybe your idea just wasn’t very good in the first place; maybe you’ve come up with an even better idea and that’s now getting all of your attention. Whatever the reason, that manuscript gets regulated to the back of the closet and any chance of it being published goes from slim (if we’re being honest with ourselves, no matter the quality of the work) to basically none.

A sad fate indeed for an idea which once spurred on such excitement in the author. It’s happened to me… hell, it’s happened to everyone, I’m sure.

So, with this in mind, I’m gonna try my damnedest to make sure I finish Rowan’s story, to tell it as it needs to be told and to make sure I stay interested in it by being innovative and creative with my writing, and, most importantly, having fun telling her story. And well, who knows, by finishing it… I might just walk into my favourite book store, two years from now and watch some other aspiring writer, my novel in their hands, cursing the dreck lining the shelves.