Wordplay

In the 2005 blockbuster hit Batman Begins, Bruce Wayne (Christian Bale) returns to Gotham City (ostensibly as an irresponsible playboy loser, and secretly as the unorthodox crime fighter known to the press and the public as Batman) and reencounters his old flame Assistant District Attorney Rachel Dawes (Katie Holmes). Rachel, who’s not yet in the know about Bruce’s alter ego, is unimpressed with his apparent apathy and superficiality. He attempts a cryptic explanation, which doesn’t go over too well: “Inside, I am more.” And Rachel responds, “It’s not who you are underneath. It’s what you do that defines you.”


What rings true for Batman also rings true for fictional characters everywhere. If we expect readers to take our characters seriously, if expect them to be impressed by them, if we expect them to remember them long after the back cover has been closed—we can’t rely on the characters’ good intentions or impressive speeches. Just like Bruce Wayne, characters need to do something to prove themselves worth defining.


As writers, it’s often very easy for us to talk on and on about our characters’ intentions. If we’re not careful, we often let our characters’ mouths run away with them, as they spend chapter upon chapter sitting around discussing and planning their next move. But guess what? Most readers don’t care about what your characters are planning to do. They only care when they actually do it.


This is so for a couple of reasons. Reason #1 is easily the most obvious, since it doesn’t take a trigonometry professor to figure out that watching soldiers fighting in a battle is far more interesting than watching the politicians sit around in a boardroom discussing the battle. Action is always more attention grabbing than inaction. This isn’t to say that scenes in the boardroom or periods of inaction are unacceptable—only that they need to be recognized for what they are and appropriately rationed.


The second reason is probably even more important. When we show our characters in action, we move beyond simply telling our readers who these people are (“Joe was a nice guy”), to the much more powerful plane of exhibiting the characters’ actions and allowing readers to draw their own conclusions (“Joe emptied his wallet into the hand of the beggar on the corner”).


Readers find it affirming when what they’ve been told about a character is proven by that character’s actions. When we give our hero the opportunity to exhibit his bravery (or his cowardice), his empathy (or his selfishness), his brilliance (or his stupidity), we are doing more than just imparting the facts. We’re bringing this character to life on the page. We’re making him a living, breathing personality, who acts and reacts in a palpable way, just the same as the rest of us.


Seek out opportunities to let your character define himself by his actions. Don’t let him stand around for pages, doing little more than talking or thinking. Shove him into the mayhem of life and force him to get his hands dirty. Create situations and scenes that will prove his strengths and his weaknesses, instead of forcing the reader to simply take your word for it. 
If you do, you’ll emerge with a character—and a story—that’s vibrant, visible, and memorable.


Who knew you could learn so much from the movies?


Related Posts: The Movie Factor

Show and Tell

Carpe Diem! by Jason Black
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As those of you who follow me on Twitter or listen to my podcast probably already know, I’ve been busy this week supervising the production of the official trailer for my upcoming historical novel Behold the Dawn. Today, I’m very pleased to share it with you all!


(Note: Click on the video twice, to view it in its customary YouTube size and format.)

This week’s Winning Wednesday winner is Jacob Glenn. In order to win the double prize of the Behold the Dawn keychain and the Wordplay pen, he answered the question “At the time of the Third Crusade (1189-1192), was the use of plate armor prevalent?”


Plate armor was not developed until the 14th century and did not become widely used until the 15th. At the time of the Third Crusade, chain mail was still the order of the day. Mail was crafted by wrapping wire (usually made of iron) around a cylindrical object and then cutting along one side to create rings, which were then threaded into other rings to create mail. The individual links were either welded or riveted shut. When completed, a mail coat could weigh as much as fifty pounds. Its flexibility allowed a knight greater freedom of movement in a battle, but it could not prevent a heavy blow from bruising or even breaking bones. Mail became increasingly popular in the 12th century, with mail leggings appearing in addition to shirts. Sleeves often extended into mittens, which featured leather palms for gripping strength. In the Holy Land, mail was cleaned in a mixture of oil, camel dung, and sand.


Congratulations, Jacob! Your prize is in the mail! Please feel free to enter again.


This week’s prize: A Behold the Dawn T-shirt (with a choice of sizes for the winner).


This week’s question: “The Crusaders shortened the name of their opponent, the famed Turkish sultan, to Saladin. What was his full name?” (Hint: Google!)



In Behold the Dawn, Marcus Annan arrives in the Holy Land, after a skirmish with a Saracen blockade, to catch his first view of the besieged port city of Acre:

Dead and wounded strewed the decks, and already the sailors were pitching the Moslem corpses into the sea, lest they curse their ship. The captain shouted orders, sending his surgeon and Knight Hospitaler passengers to tend the wounded. The surviving Christians knelt, hands propped on the crossguards of their swords, heads bowed. One by one, their heads rose from their prayers, and their eyes flitted to the ship’s prow and to Annan.
He frowned and turned away. If he had harbored any hope of hiding his identity, it was lost now. Most of Europe had heard tales, both true and false, of the giant tourneyer and his skill on the battlefield. As soon as the Bonfilia reached land, word of his arrival would gallop ahead of him, and all men—his enemies chief among them—would know he had arrived in the Holy Land.
He rested the point of his sword in the deck, a hand on either side of the hilt, and stared across the water. Spread on the shore in front of him were the finest armies of Christendom, waiting to crush beneath their feet these rebellious Turks who dared defile the sand that had borne the feet of the Christ—but only if they could first defeat their own squabbling and inertia. Lurking in the hills beyond, harrying the besiegers, waiting only for the opportunity to scatter English and French alike with one well-aimed blow, was the mighty Saladin.

To enter this week’s contest, use the form at the bottom of the left-hand column to email your best guess. Deadline is Tuesday, September 1, 6:00 p.m. MST. One name will be selected from the correct entries and announced next Wednesday.

The title of this week’s post is easily a very controversial, debatable, and in some respects downright wrong statement. After all, we have only to look at the latest copy of the New York Times to see that the fiction categories in its best-seller lists are inevitably headed by established genre writers. Very obviously, genre writing did not kill their careers. So what in tarnation am I getting at with this statement of mine that genre writing might be a terrible career choice?

Genres originated as a marketing tool to help consumers more easily find literature that would fit their tastes. Over the years, these categories have developed into very specific classifications of sub-genres within sub-genres. And this is a good thing, since it allows marketers to more easily target interested readers and gives readers the ease of immediately accessing their preferred subject matter. Everybody wins, right?

I would argue, no.

Genres too often lead to clichéd storylines, sub-par writing, and, in the long run, a less discerning and demanding reading public. Too often, genre fiction relies on the tried and true archetypes to present a story that’s been told a thousand times before, instead of digging deeper into uncharted territory and challenging both the writer and the reader. Certainly, this isn’t always the case, but, nine times out of ten, when I pick up a genre book, I inevitably find myself less than satisfied, at best, and downright disappointed, at worst.

In a conversation on Twitter this week, Michael Maren (@mmaren) made the cutting observation that although “some authors transcend genre: Highsmith, Lehane, Denise Mina… others use genre as a crutch. To me the distinction is whether the author challenges the readers’ perceptions or exploits them for stock drama and emotion.”

As both a reader and a writer, I prefer eclecticism. I don’t like pigeonholes, and I don’t like thinking inside the box. I don’t appreciate limitations imposed by others upon either my writing or my reading, and I have little interest in reading or writing the same material, with a slightly different spin, over and over again. It’s regrettable that art and commercialism—two completely opposite and often antithetical classifications—must so often coexist, especially since commercialism frequently triumphs at art’s expense. In the September 2009 issue of Writer’s Digest, notoriously successful iconoclast Corey Doctorow pointed out that:

Genres are useful for marketing; they are a great way to help readers find the material they might want to consume or acquire. But they don’t have clean lines you can use to distinguish one type of literature from another.

Art isn’t something that thrives within set parameters. By its very nature, creativity must be free to grow beyond even its creator’s initial concepts. When we sign up as genre writers—led on perhaps by our own love of certain types of literature, perhaps by the lure of the money and fame that attaches itself to successful genre writers—we may be making the best possible commercial decision a writer can make in his career. But, as artists, do we honestly want to put the money before the art? Is a career as a best-selling author worth surrendering the opportunity for deeper and broader artistic license?

In no way am I arguing that those of us who write and succeed in the realm of genre fiction are selling out. Nor am I suggesting that genre authors are incapable of deeper and broader art. But I would encourage all of us—myself included—to never settle for the accepted parameters of popular fiction. Why conform, when we can create? Why further our commercial careers at the expense of our infinitely more important artistic careers?

Related Posts: The Importance of Pleasing Ourselves in Our Writing

A Word on Genre by Randolph Lalonde
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I’m pleased today to be a stop on the blog tour of historical author Lynnette Bonner, whose first book Rocky Mountain Oasis was released earlier this month. Lynnette, the daughter of missionaries, was born and raised in Malawi, Africa. She now lives in Idaho with her husband and four children and is hard at work on the next installment in her Shepherd’s Heart series. And, incidentally, she’s also one of my partners over at the AuthorCulture blog. Below, you can read about Lynnette’s journey to publication with Rocky Mountain Oasis. Scroll down and click on the book image for a synopsis and purchasing information.

KMW: When did you start writing?
LB: I dabbled in writing for many years. But didn’t seriously start writing until probably 1999.

KMW: What inspired Rocky Mountain Oasis?
LB: Pierce, Idaho, a small town where we used to live, is a town rich in history. The first courthouse in the Idaho Territory still stands in Pierce to this day. It has now been converted into a museum. (It was originally part of Shoshone County in the Washington Territory, but in 1863 when the Idaho Territory was established, Shoshone County became part of Idaho’s territory.) In 1885, a merchant in Pierce, named David Fraser, was brutally murdered and his killer was never found.

While my story isn’t a mystery, but a historical romance, the murder of David Fraser does make it into the book. So, I guess in answer to your question, my study into Pierce’s history is what led to me writing the book.

KMW: How long did it take to write it?
LB: You know, I’m a notoriously bad record keeper. And I honestly don’t know the answer to that question. I think I started it a couple times before 1999 and then seriously started writing on it in 1999. By the end of 2000 I was submitting it. And of course a book is never finished until it is printed. So from 1999 to 2009 is ten years. Wow, I hope all my books don’t take that many years!

KMW: Any major lessons you learned writing it?
LB: You know, I wrote Rocky Mountain Oasis during a time in my life when there was a lot of stress. At first I submitted it to every publisher in Sally Stuart’s Christian Writer’s Market Guide who even hinted that they might be interested in historical romance. And then the rejection letters started rolling in. Discouraging, to say the least.

I remember the day I was driving down the road and the thought hit me, “What if God gave you that story just to get you through those tough years?” I started crying, because I was so thankful that God had allowed me that little bit of escape from the stresses of that time, and because I was finally able to let go of my dream of getting published. It was at that time I told the Lord, “If you want me to get published You are going to have to make it happen.” And I gave it to Him.

So I think the biggest lesson I learned during that time was to let go and let God run things.


KMW: Who is your favorite character?
LB: Hmmm… I don’t know that I have a favorite character. I do have to admit that I tend to fall in love with my secondary characters. Jed in Rocky Mountain Oasis is a wise ol’ codger that worked his way into my heart. Janice the chatterbox in High Desert Haven quickly captured my interest. And in my current work there is Hannah, a widow who runs an orphanage and isn’t afraid to state what’s on her mind.

KMW: What was your greatest challenge in writing this book?
LB: I’d have to say that for all of my books my biggest challenge is simply finding time to write that is uninterrupted. With four kids and a home business, alone free time is hard to come by.

KMW: What’s next?
LB: High Desert Haven is due out in early 2010. I’m currently working on the third installment of The Shepherd’s Heart series, Fair Valley Refuge. I’m also working on two contemporary romances, a romantic fantasy, and another historical romance set in Africa. Now if I can just find some time to write….
I’d like to say a big thank you for allowing me this time on your blog today. I had a good time. I’d also like to offer a free download of Rocky Mountain Oasis to one lucky commenter on this post. The e-copy is the full book, and you’ll get instant gratification because you won’t have to wait for it to come in the mail! I’ll email the winner on Saturday the twenty-ninth—so be sure to leave your email addy in your comment if it isn’t available on your profile.

This week’s Winning Wednesday winner is Adrie Ashford. In order to win the prize of the Behold the Dawn mouse pad, she answered the multiple choice question “Which of the following was not a common medical practice in the Middle Ages?” The correct answer is D “Anesthetics.”


Bleeding, visits to sacred relics, and herbs were all common responses to illness. Although herbs and alcohol were used to deaden pain to some extent, anesthetics weren’t at all prevalent. Most patients had to suffer through their ailments without the aid of any kind of painkiller.


A few interesting facts about health and medicine in the Middle Ages:

• People—ignorant and educated alike—believed physical diseases stemmed from spiritual causes. Because illness was supposedly brought on by sin, they were convinced that penitence at the shrine of a saint would erase not only the sin but the illness as well.

• The Church looked upon any practitioners of the medical profession who attempted to cure the physical symptoms without addressing the spiritual origins of the illness, as little less than heretics.

• Superstition often led people to believe their ailments were the result of witchery, which they then attempted to fend off with charms and amulets.

• Whelk shells, cuttlefish, and oyster shells were ground into a powder for cleaning teeth, but were available only to the wealthy, who used the application more for cosmetic purposes than hygiene.

• Leprosy was legislated against in much the same manner as common crimes, such as theft. A confirmed leper was condemned as an outcast in society, with no civil rights whatsoever. In the eyes of the law, a leper was a nonentity, no matter his former station.

• Wounds might be rubbed with snow, where available, before bandaging.

Congratulations, Adrie! Your prize is in the mail! Please feel free to enter again.


This week’s prize: A Behold the Dawn keychain and a Wordplay pen.


This week’s question: At the time of the Third Crusade (1189-1192), was the use of plate armor prevalent?


In Behold the Dawn, Marcus Annan talks with Marek, his indentured servant, as he begins to remove his armor after competing in a tourney:

“That Count Heladio—or whate’er his name is—you know the bucko in charge of this here tourney thing. Well, appears his nephew got himself killed out there today.” Marek squinted. “In the last hour or so, they say.”
“They can’t know that,” Annan said. “The bodies won’t be collected ‘til morning light.”
“Well, all I know is this Count person seemed to know what he knew. And he’s none too rejoiced over it, neither. He’s got him about half a score o’ men-at-arms, and he’s riding out to find the man what did the deed.”
“It’s a tourney. Men are killed all the time.” Annan looked down at the dirt and blood crusted on the back of his armored gauntlets, and he flexed the stiffness in his sword hand. “Matters not to us, anyway. Unsaddle the horse and rub him down before he binds up.”
Marek made a face. “How many’d you kill today?”
“A few.” He tugged the glove from his hand. “One for certain.”
Marek lifted both eyebrows, and Annan knew what the lad was thinking before he could give it voice. “Master—”
“Crusade. I know.” He yanked the glove from his left hand. The leather underside had ripped earlier that day, and a dark bruise filled his palm. As if a Crusade could ransom him.

To enter this week’s contest, use the form at the bottom of the left-hand column to email your best guess. Deadline is Tuesday, August 25, 6:00 p.m. MST. One name will be selected from the correct entries and announced next Wednesday.

Over the next couple days, my reviews of two of my favorite writing books will be available on Mary DeMuth’s blog So You Want to Be Published. Please click here to check out my thoughts on Elizabeth George’s stellar Write Away: One Novelist’s Approach to Fiction and the Writing Life.

When Ernest Hemingway spoke about the dignity of an iceberg being “due to only one-eighth of it being above water,” he was speaking about the importance of the part of the story that isn’t told. Those seven-eighths underwater are the ballast for the tiny bit that juts up to glisten in the sun. And, more often than not, those seven-eighths are almost entirely composed of one of the most important—and yet sometimes overlooked—facets of any tale. Backstory.

Backstory, of course, is basically self-explanatory. It’s the story that goes in back of the real story. The story before the story. The unseen history that informs all of your characters’ decisions and actions. As such, it’s understandably vital to the progression and consistency of your tale. Particularly during this modern trend of beginning stories in medias res (in the middle of things), a deep and full-bodied backstory is every whit as important as the story itself.

When I sit down to write a new story, I generally have a basic idea of the major plot points. I know who my heroes are, I know what they’re after, I know some of things they’re going to have to accomplish to reach their goals. But my concept of who they are and what, in their individual pasts, has shaped them into the people I need them to be, is often foggy at best.

Before I can tell others my story, I have to tell myself its prequel. I begin writing my characters’ backstories with no other intention than that of figuring out where my story proper needs to go. But the exhilarating part of all this is that usually the backstory takes on a life of its own and transforms my previously shallow concept of my story into something much bigger. The little chunk of ice floating around in my imagination morphs into a looming iceberg.

Within backstory, we find the key motivating factors in our characters’ lives: the inability to measure up to his younger brother, which fuels Peter Wiggin’s anger and ambition (the Ender’s Shadow series by Orson Scott Card); the long-harbored guilt for brutal war crimes, which impels Benjamin Martin to avoid war (the movie The Patriot); the long years of loneliness which influenced John Barratt to accept the compulsory swapping of roles with his French lookalike (The Scapegoat by Daphne du Maurier). And, in some lucky instances, the backstory takes over completely, as in Milena McGraw’s After Dunkirk and Audrey Niffenegger’s The Time Traveler’s Wife.

The key to crafting stories with many layers—stories with depth and ballast—is to never ignore the blank spaces in your characters. Don’t let them get away with telling you only what they must to make the story work. Search out the shadows in their pasts, discover their parents, their childhood friends, their catalysts. Don’t just accept that your main character is a cop; find out why he became a cop. Don’t just slap a scar on your heroine; discover where the scar came from.

At the same time, don’t forget that there’s a time and a place where backstory belongs—and a time and place where it doesn’t. Sometimes the only person who needs to know the backstory is the author. Vital as this information may be, don’t inflict it unnecessarily on your readers. The best backstories are those that influence without obstructing. Just like an iceberg, stories work best when the greater part of them remains submerged.

Related Posts: The Benefits of Outlining

Subtext: The Art of Iceberging
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This week’s Winning Wednesday winner is Guy Wade. In order to win the prize of the book The Age of Pilgrimage by Jonathan Sumption, he correctly answered the question “What was a jongleur?” A jongleur was a wandering minstrel who sang the compositions of troubadours or recited epic poems in noble households or royal courts.


Circa the ninth century, jongleurs emerged as a class of travelling performer, a combination of musician, poet, actor, and mountebank. Held in contempt by the church but embraced wholeheartedly by the noble classes to whom they catered, jongleurs were romanticized throughout the Middle Ages. They did everything from writing sonnets (sometimes commissioned by the noblemen and women who patronized them) to juggling and fire acts to training bears. Even women were occasionally seen among the jongleur ranks, although they were primarily dancers, acrobats, and juggling assistants. Eventually, the various types of performers split into distinct categories—most famously poets and minstrels—with jongleur being more of a catch-all term. By the fourteenth century, medieval performers began forming their own guilds.


Congratulations, Guy! Your prize is in the mail! Please feel free to enter again.


This week’s prize: A Behold the Dawn mouse pad.


This week’s question: “Which of the following was not a common medical practice in the middle ages?”


A) Bleeding.
B) Visiting sacred relics.
C) Herbs.
D) Anesthetics.


In Behold the Dawn, Lady Mairead, the Countess of Keaton, and her husband Lord William are prisoners in a Saracen camp when the survivors of the Battle of Acre are dragged in:

She started forward, but trudged only a few paces before the sight of another knight arrested her. He lay on his back in the trampled sand, while two brethren of the Hospital struggled to remove his blood-crusted armor.
He was a giant of a man, easily head and shoulders above most in the camp, and the breadth and depth of his chest and arms bespoke a terrible strength. He had a strong, square chin, barely cleft, and a set to his mouth, even in sleep, that revealed an iron will. A white scar rived his right cheekbone and disappeared into the fair hair above his ear.
The blood-blackened hole in the mail above his left breast showed what it had taken to bring him down. The bodkin that had inflicted the wound was gone, pulled from his flesh by his Moslem captor or perhaps by his own hand. His face was pale, his breathing shallow, his body still.
She drew nearer and stopped at his feet. “He lives?”
The Knights Hospitalers turned to look at her. The one on the left inclined his head. “He lives, Lady.” His accent was unfamiliar, possibly from the southern regions of France.
The other, undoubtedly English, laid a knife to the knight’s tunic and slit it up the middle. “For now, he lives. He’s lost much blood.”

To enter this week’s contest, use the form at the bottom of the left-hand column to email your best guess. Deadline is Tuesday, August 18, 6:00 p.m. MST. One name will be selected from the correct entries and announced next Wednesday.

In the 1998 movie Ever After, the character Prince Henry (played by Dougray Scott) complains that “to be so defined by your position, to only be seen as what you are. You don’t know how insufferable that is!” To which Drew Barrymore’s character responds, “You might be surprised. A gypsy, for example, is rarely painted as anything else. They’re defined by their status, as you are.”


Like it or not, that’s the truth. We’re defined by what we do, by our jobs and our career choices. Mention a profession (mechanic, stock broker, bull rider) and definite images and presuppositions pop to mind. As writers, we can hardly afford not to take advantage of those presuppositions when crafting our characters. In the September 2009 issue of The Writer, Andre Dubus III pointed out:

I once heard a writer say that the last thing he does in the creation of a novel is to give his character jobs. How, I wondered, can he ever begin to know them in their downtime if he doesn’t know what they do all day (or night) first? …our jobs say an awful lot about us on so many levels. They also influence what kinds of lives we end up living, what kind of people we’re around, how we feel and think about ourselves in the world, etc.

Choosing your character’s career should never be a slapdash decision, made on the fly and based on little more than impulse. What your character does for a living, even if it doesn’t feature prominently in your story, will profoundly affect who he is and how he responds to the world around him. When writing my fantasy Dreamers Come, I struggled for months with my main character Chris Redston. As a simple beat reporter, he just never seemed to have the guts and the panache that I needed from him. But as soon as I tweaked his profession to make him a foreign war correspondent, his entire personality was instantly beefed up—even though he is never shown on the job in the book.


Sometimes, a career choice is so inherent to the plot that it’s immediately obvious. In A Man Called Outlaw, my characters couldn’t have been anything but ranchers. In Behold the Dawn, the story would have been entirely different had it focused on anyone but a competitor in the tourneys. However, there’s no doubt that sometimes your character’s career won’t be central to your tale. In such instances, how do you go about selecting a career that will both define him and add to his character?


Best-selling mystery writer Elizabeth George, in her fantastic book Write Away: One Novelist’s Approach to Fiction and the Writing Life, explains that she tries “…to give my characters either a job or a sideline that gives the reader a hint as to who they are.” She encourages authors to look beyond the obvious (and often stereotyped) occupations. Instead of a doctor, why not a prosthetics manufacturer? Instead of a stock broker, why not a debt collector? Browse the Yellow Pages for possible job matches for your character; keep your eyes open for interesting business signs as you drive through town; make a list of the careers of people whom you run across.


Choosing your character’s career is a fun process that can often open up subplots and facets of personality that you may never have thought of otherwise. Force yourself to look beyond the obvious, and don’t always settle for the first notion that pops to mind. Just as you choose your own career with care, put the same amount of attention into choosing your characters’ professions.


Related posts: Describing Characters

Naming Characters

The All-Important Link Between Theme and Character Progression

Interviewing Your Characters
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This week’s Winning Wednesday winner is Michael Colwill. In order to win the prize of an autographed poster of Behold the Dawn’s cover, he answered the question “What color was the official uniform of the Knights Templars?” The Knights Templars, the infamous protectors of Jerusalem’s Temple, traditionally wore a white tabard emblazoned with a red cross.


The Templars were a Christian military order founded in Jerusalem in 1119 to protect pilgrims after the First Crusade. The sworn defenders of Jerusalem’s temple had a murky fame, sometimes hailed for their fatalistic bravery, sometimes shunned for their intractable defiance to any authority save their own. The Templars—along with their brothers the Knights Hospitallers—were easily the most important non-feudal military force in Christendom. The Order recruited men from all over western Europe. In the early years, a man needed only to be free in order to become a Templar. But, as time went by, the regulations were altered to exclude anyone who wasn’t a knight, although lower-ranking members were still sometimes peasants, but never serfs. Recruits were required to be “spiritually clean,” financially secure, and free from membership in any other Order.


Congratulations, Michael! Your prize is in the mail! Please feel free to enter again.


This week’s prize: The 576-page book The Age of Pilgrimage: The Medieval Journey to God by Jonathan Sumption. (This is one of the best books I stumbled upon in researching Behold the Dawn. Fascinating to say the least!)


This week’s question: What was a jongleur? (Hint: Look it up in a dictionary!)



In Behold the Dawn, the tourneyer Marcus Annan is summoned for a meeting with the English King Richard, who is ill:

Richard lifted a broad hand from the purple coverlet and waved it in a conciliatory gesture. “Spoken like a man of the sword. And as for the tourneys, I enjoy them greatly myself.” He leaned forward. “I should very much have liked to engage an arm as stout as Master Annan’s.” The torchlight flickered in his blue eyes. “Mayhap when I am well and the infidels are crushed beneath my destrier’s feet, we shall have such a contest, eh, Sir Knight?”
“Your Majesty.” Father Roderic’s lips drew tight, as though with a purse string. “A vehement Scot, apathetic to our holy mission, may use such an opportunity to do you great harm.” He straightened his shoulders, sliding his hands in their opposite sleeves. He glanced at Annan, eyebrows cocked.
Beneath his pointed beard, Richard’s mouth hardened. “Do not seek to control my actions, Bishop.”
“Of course not, Majesty.” Roderic’s gaze did not leave Annan’s face. “But perhaps we are mistaken in thinking this knight has any interest in plying his sword for a living?”
Annan frowned. Something in the way Roderic was asking the question… so unstudied as to be pointed… It was as if Roderic were here tonight just to ask it.
He frowned. If Roderic hoped to recruit him for his Holy War, he miscalculated.
“Indeed, I have an interest, Bishop.” The reckless smile that always exasperated Marek rose on his face. He looked back at Richard. “The Holy Father speaks the truth, Sire. Any contest between us could end no better than my meetings with Norman jongleurs posing as tourneymen.” He flicked his gaze in Hugh’s direction.

To enter this week’s contest, use the form at the bottom of the left-hand column to email your best guess. Deadline is Tuesday, August 11, 6:00 p.m. MST. One name will be selected from the correct entries and announced next Wednesday.

There you are, staring at the computer, fighting the very nearly overwhelming urges to alternately smash your forehead against the keyboard, tear your hair out, and, eventually, weep inconsolably. The problem? You’re 30,000 words into your latest novel, and nothing is going right. The dialogue is as flat as week-old roadkill, the characters are either staring at you with lifeless eyes or laughing maniacally in their refusal to cooperate, and the plot that seemed so fresh and exciting only a few weeks ago is now stalled deader than an old jalopy.


Obviously, you made a big mistake in ever starting this story. Obviously, the best thing you could do would be to put a merciful end to its life, delete the file, and move on to the brighter future.


Obvious, yes. But not necessarily true.


If I had stopped every time a story became difficult (or even downright impossible), I wouldn’t have a finished piece to my name. Every story has at least one moment where my eyes start to glaze and feelings of frustration and futility roil my stomach into nausea. I have yet to write a piece that hasn’t, at one point or another (usually within the first fifty pages), made me feel like an utter phony. After all, if I were any good at this writing gig, I would know better than to run into these stone walls of stagnation, right?


Shortly thereafter follows the head-banging, hair-tearing, and inconsolable weeping—and then the rationalizations that, since I’m obviously wasting my time on this story, I’d best move on as fast as I can get my cursor up to that little red X in the corner.
All I can say is thank God I didn’t punch the little red X.


Naturally a tad compulsive by nature, I have a hard time quitting anything once I’ve begun it. I’m one of those people who’d probably still be bailing out the Titanic with a bucket as it took a nosedive. As a result, I’ve stuck by stories even through the worst of blocks, even when they seemed impossibly hopeless. I’ve gritted my teeth and kept writing. And you know what? In almost every instance, I eventually wrote my way out of the rut. The story that seemed a goner was suddenly breathing again thanks to my persistent CPR.


I can’t emphasize enough the importance of sticking with a story, even when it seems beyond hope. It’s true that not every story will be worth continuing, but every story is worth a second chance. Feel free to give yourself a rest. Throw the clunker into the back of the closet for a while and concentrate on another project. But don’t give up. Don’t pull the plug. Sometimes the most difficult and seemingly worthless stories are the ones that will explode into brilliance if only you grit it out and keep hacking away at them.


Allowing our impatience, frustration, and artistic insecurities to convince us we’re wasting our time is far too tempting an escape. But don’t give in. Don’t abandon a story just because it isn’t working. Stories never work in the first draft. But if we’re willing to stick with it and resist the urge to let go when the going gets tough, we’re likely to discover that we possess one of the most important traits of any artist: perseverance.


Related posts: Knowing When a Story Is Ready
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