The Secret History of Cinco de Mayo

It started out so well. All over the world, people were tweeting, “Screw #kings. Let’s rule ourselves. #99%!”

Pros and Cons of Perfectionism

I have an interesting book called Brain Lock about how to overcome Obsessive Compulsive Disorder with meditation techniques.

The way that OCD works is that the part of the brain normally reserved to signal DANGER is overactive. That’s why a person can know, intellectually, that they turned off the stove, but still feel, at a “gut” level that something is wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong…. It’s not the gut but the brain that is flooded with those feelings of danger.

The interesting thing is that the more someone with OCD gives in to the temptation to appease that sense of danger–be it check the stove, count the numbers, reorder the shelves or wash hands one more time–the worse the sense of danger grows, and the more the person “has” to do in order to try to make it right. It’s a loop.

I don’t have OCD, except when it comes to writing.

When I’m writing the DANGER zone of my brain can definitely get caught in a loop. One scene is wrong, so I need to change it. That scene now works, but another scene now makes no sense, because of the changes. I have to change that scene now. But now another scene is disturbed….

You know that scene in Fatal Attraction, where the crazy woman sits up late at night, just flicking the light switch on and off, obsessed with her lover? I am that crazy woman. Just replace a lover with a book. It gets to the point where I am so in love with the book that I begin to hate, I pick fights with it, I go for a long time refusing to speak to it, and then, when that doesn’t work, throw things at it.

Like I said. Crazy woman.

On the desk around me are dozen little notebooks filled with successive outlines. There’s another batch of hypothetical outlines on Excel files on my hard drive. I have been working on Wing (book 5) and Blood (book 6) later books simultaneously. They all have to hang together. But there is a danger, I realize, in endlessly seeking a perfection which doesn’t exist.

Because it has to be right. It has to be perfect. And what drives me mad is that I know it won’t be, it can’t be. I can never truly do the story justice.

I am going to try to take a page from the advice for those with OCD. Relax. Let go. Get on with it.

Just as soon as I rewrite this scene.

How to Tell Everyone About Your Book Without Dying

When I was just out of college, my mother used to proudly tell people I was a writer, unless I first managed to stop her. I tried to stop her because I knew what would come next, the dread question, “So what has she published?”

The answer at that time was one humiliating word: “Nothing.”

The conversation would then wither up in shame.

I lived a double life. Inwardly, I considered myself professional writer, who would one day be published. Outwardly, I hid this identity from all but close friends and family. It’s perhaps not surprising that the heroine of my fantasy series, Dindi, leads a similar double life, practicing her magic art in secret.

However, I became so adept at concealing my passion that once my novels were actually published, I found it difficult to switch from secrecy to publicity.

I belonged to several writing communities online, that helped me bridge my shyness. After all, it’s okay to tell friends who are sharing my journey toward publication that my books are out there–yay! And from there, I learned to spread into the whole Social Networking Stuff. Facebook. Twitter. This blog. You know the drill.

But even after I had hundreds of followers on Twitter and Facebook, in Real Life, I was like a different person. Or rather, the same old person…shy, introverted, not likely to tell a stranger I’d published a book in a thousand years.

If someone who met me face to face found out, it was usually not thanks to me. For instance, my banker found out, because she was helping me with my account.

“So what kind of business is it?” she asked me in that polite-but-brusk Banker Voice.

“I’m a writer.”

“A tech writer?”

Ha. Doesn’t my husband wish.  “No, I write novels.”

Her eyes lit up. “REALLY? You write NOVELS? Oh, WOW! That’s so exciting! I’ve never met anyone famous before! So what have you published?”

So there it was, the Dread Question, but I no longer had to dread it. I had an answer. I told her that I write fantasy, epic but with strong romantic elements, and the name of the series and where she could buy it.

And then she went and told the entire bank that I was a famous novelist (“I’m really not famous,” I kept saying, but they didn’t care) and they should all buy my books. I was blushing like crazy, but also totally loving it.

I had read advice that one should get in the habit of simply letting everyone you met know that you’re a writer and what your book is. Not in an obnoxious way, not pinning them against the wall and giving a two-hour summery of your plot and the fishing trip with your step-uncle that inspired it, but just a line or a business card.

Today, for the first time, I took that advice. The plumber came over to fix the bathtub. After he finished everything, I handed him my business card and said, “I’m a writer. If you or anyone in your family likes fantasy, and if you don’t mind ebooks, email me and I’ll send you or them free books.”

“Thanks!” He looked at the card. “My stepdaughter really likes books about vampires. She reads constantly. I think she’d like this.”

My gosh. That was so simple and painless. No one was offended, no one was humiliated. I didn’t die on the spot from embarrassment. Maybe I could even do it again.

Killing Off Characters

I should know better than to watch Chinese movies, but I do anyway. Tragedy, comedy, romance, it doesn’t matter. They always end with someone face first in the dust. What is with that?

It used to be that only Red Shirts would have to worry on Away Missions. In epic fantasy, they were known as the “spear holders.” The bit players meant to die tragically, so the heroes could press stolidly onward. Now it’s all the rage in fantasy to kill off major characters. Joss Whedon and George R.R. Martin and Joe Abercrombie whack major characters right and left, just to prove they can.

I really hate that.

The rationalization is that if you know the major characters won’t die, this sucks the tension from the narrative. If the hero dangles from a cliff over a toxic ocean with a wyvern attacking from above and a kraken’s tentacle grabbing at him from below, the reader is only going to believe he’s really in danger if the author has proven I’m Really Serious This Time, This F#$^#r Could Die!!! 


Frankly, I don’t buy it. Or rather, I’m just not interested in that kind of tension. Yes, there’s always the possibility that the author could take a good story and ruin it by killing off my favorite character, but that’s not the kind of story tension I find enjoyable. It’s a matter of taste. Some readers want to trust that the author won’t lead them to an ending that is unsurprising and unearned. Other readers want to trust that the author can deliver an ending that is, if not a complete Happily Ever After, at least deeply satisfactory. I’m firmly in the HEA department.

All of this may seem slightly hypocritical when I admit (being careful of spoilers) that one major character in The Unfinished Song does, ahem, die. Maybe two. Probably not more than two. A few readers have written to me, worried about some of the developments in Root, and asked point blank: “Does this story have a happy ending?” 

It does. And I don’t mind saying that, because I’m not interested in keeping readers on tenderhooks on that point. The peril to the characters in the story is not whether they will die by the end of the book, but whether they will be true to themselves and to each other by the end of the book. To me that is a more interesting question, and the answer is more ambiguous.


The Lord of the Rings has a happy ending, and yet, at the same time, one of the saddest endings I have ever read. I never shed a tear for Romeo and Juliet, but after finishing Lord of the Rings (even though I’ve read it before), I feel moody and melancholy for days, as if the Elves have just departed in their ships and Middle Earth has newly died. Perhaps that’s because a major character does die in Lord of the Rings: Middle Earth itself. Frodo succeeds and fails at the same time, and because of that, he can never be the same. It is even questionable whether he “lives” at the end of the story. It could be argued that the Elves are sailing for heaven–a euphemism for death. Frodo, like the Elves is going on to a “far, far better place.” If that’s not a bittersweet ending I don’t know what is. Yet that works, whereas if Tolkien had decided to give the story a Chinese ending, and have Frodo kill himself at the end, or get shot full of arrows just as he threw the ring in the volcano, that would have been super duper lame.


I can’t stand Faux Tragique. Where an author suddenly has a character die of cancer or commit suicide to make a story seem elevated and literary. There are well done tragedies, and well done stories about cancer, but what makes them well done is that they speak a truth about human experience, not that they prove their ruthlessness. Since not all human experiences involve cancer or suicide, it is indeed possible to speak a truth about human experience without killing characters.

There’s a funny bit in The Kite Runner where the main character, while still a boy, reads his first short story to his friend. The story tells of a man who is promised riches if he can weep enough. So he kills his wife and weeps on a mountain of gold. His friend asked, “But why didn’t he just cut onions?”

Ambuguity vs Completion in Endings

That brings me to the question of whether you can have a happy ending and an ambiguous one at the same time. I think you can. I don’t mean the stupid form of ambiguousity, in which the Hero turns to the Heroine and says, “Shall we marry? Or will you take the ship and begin your life as a pirate?” and she laughs and says, “I’ll decide tomorrow.” That’s only any good if your Tomorrow begins Book 2. I don’t mean the kind of ending that leaves plot questions dangling like unraveling threads in a cheap shirt. I mean the kind of ambiguity that arises because the joy is so inexplicably intertwined with sorrow, the kind of ending that acts like an ouroboros worm, tying the end to the beginning in a shocking way that changes how you see the entire story.

In the Lord of the Rings, the Ring is destroyed at the end, and Sauron thrown down, and the great battle won. The main story question of whether Frodo would succumb to Ring was also answered, in a shocking way, but with no room for doubt. So it doesn’t meet Scott Bailey’s rules for endings, which are as follows:

1. Avoid summing up, or grand statements of theme.
2. Avoid tying up plot threads. I am bored by denouements that tell you how every character in the book’s life will turn out beyond the last pages of the book. (I shake my fist at you, Mr. Tolkien and your Scouring of the Shire!)
3. Avoid cliches and pats on the reader’s head.
4. Avoid an ending the reader will expect.
5. Avoid a complete sense of closure.

I disagree with several of these, not for all forms of literature, but for my story. I think an epic fantasy which doesn’t tie up plot threads is annoying (of course, I loved the Scouring of the Shire, so there); and I suspect I am favorably inclined toward grand statements of theme. I tend to be obvious that way, even when I try to be sly and subtle. Of course, I want to avoid an ending the reader expects, yet for me that ought to be done will still allowing a sense of closure.

I am aware of other possibilities, which I find interesting, though I’m not sure it is something I can use at the moment. There’s a lovely interview of RB at the end of my kindle edition of If I Loved You, I Would Tell You This. She said had this to say about endings:

…more and more, I have the sense that the endings that work most powerfully on me are passages that might as well be beginnings, that seem to open up more than they close down. And I think this has to do with the way those types of endings allow for the reader to keep a story alive in her imagination, her thoughts, even after the final words. I envision the ending of a story as the point at which I complete the process of handing the story over to the reader. It belongs to her by then. It’s common for people to recommend starting stories mid-action or in media res, but there’s at least as good an argument for ending them that way too. There’s a kind of generosity to not closing a story down entirely, a way that includes the reader, and I aspire to that. Of course, like so much else, it’s a tough balance to get right. Leave the wrong ends loose and it can feel like the exact opposite, ungenerous.

I love that idea, of ending the story in media res. Not in the sense of leaving a cliff-hanger (I’ve quite a few of those, but at some point there needs to be a sense of completion!) but as though the reader has joined the character on the road, walked alongside him for a while, and then causally parted ways. It’s something I think works better for short stories than novels, and almost by definition, it is more fitted to Character Based Fiction than to Plot Based Fiction. A story about a bank heist might end with the characters riding off into the sunset to rob more banks, but the heist itself is done–if it were not, that would feel “ungenerous.”

I intend to mull it over. Perhaps I shall try to do something along those lines in another work.

What is Story Space?

Occasionally, I refer to “story space” and it occurred to me I ought to explain what I mean. I call it “space” for lack of a better term. It’s not spatial, but I find it helpful to envision it as though it were to organize my creating process. (Insert Usual Caveat That Your Creating Process Will Differ).

A simple, although false, way to think about it is as word count. This is a good shortcut, as long as you understand it’s a shortcut. Take a hypothetical novel from The Unfinished Song series. I’m weird in that I like to pre-determine how many chapters a book will have. Most authors don’t do this. But I do, and in the case of this series, every book has seven “chapters.” I’m aiming at 70,000 words for each book. That works out to 10,000 word chapters, which are on the long side–the length of a novelette. (Which works out for me, since I package them that way for the Serial.) However, it also means that there’s a distinction between my Chapters and my Scenes. Each Chapter has ten to twelve scenes, often jumping around PoV from character to character. My word count is looser than my chapter count. If the book has only 50,000 words (like Initiate, the first book) then the chapters are shorter; if the book has 80,000 words (like Sacrifice, the third book), then the chapters are longer.

I think of the story spatially as a series of nested boxes into which I pour the story. (Again: weird. I know.) There are seven Chapter Boxes, and each is filled with 10-12 Scene Boxes in a neat little row. This doesn’t mean the story itself is linear, since my stories are notoriously nonlinear, interweaving scenes from the past with scenes from the present. The story has to be read in linear order, however, and there are a limited number of chapters, scenes, and words that can “fit” into each story.

These boxes, these containers. This is story space.

But, Tara. Really. Neither chapter count nor even word count are set in stone. (Unless you’re writing haiku or Category Romance.) True. And that’s why I said that wordcount is only a shortcut to think about it. But one mustn’t get hung up on wordcount. Wordcount exists only to serve the story. Wordcount is just another empty container.  It’s an arbitrary limit, and it’s important to keep in mind that it’s arbitrary, but it’s also important to acknowledge that stories need limits. No story can be everything to everyone one. Reluctantly, I’ve faced the cruel fact that I’m never going to have that Ultimate Blockbuster that all 6 billion people on the planet agree is the BESTEST NOVEL EVAH. Not until I perfect my mind control device. Until then, the next best thing is to made each story speak to it’s own purpose.

Purpose, goals, themes. This is story space.

The story should include everything that move it toward its goal, unfolds its theme, deepens its purpose for being. It shouldn’t have anything extraneous or irrelevant. Even if, pickles forbid, you are writing one of those meandering postmodern literary words that deliberately meanders, or worse, a satire with numerous inside jokes and snide asides, or worst of all, an epic fantasy that forces characters to traipse all over the map as a pretext to show off a variety of imagined nose-piercing ceremonies, each of those meanders is secretly on track to one’s goal. There shouldn’t be a sudden lurch into political rant in a sweet Amish Romance or a boring, dry-as-bone history of the Boxer Rebellion in a novel meant to be funny, or a long angst-filled chapter about middle-aged woman worried her husband is cheating on her in a thriller that is supposed to be moving at a faster pace than an Olympic sprinter. (And because we are writers we can all think of examples where, “Yes, if…” which is fine as long as you’re not doing it just to be a smart alec.

Your story space is limited. You story space is precious. You only want to fill it with treasures worthy of your story. Whenever I start thinking about Character Based Fiction vs Plot Based Fiction or Idea Based Fiction, I begin to power-trip on overcoming all those bourgeois restrictions by writing a novel that will be superlative in every category. The BESTEST NOVEL EVAH. And I want to stuff that story space full of character building and world building and car race scenes even though my culture is neolithic…. and that’s not the way to go. It’s just not. I have to take a deep breath and remind myself that what I owe to each story is what makes that story grow, not what impresses me with my own cleverness. That seeming imperfection is actually what makes the story work. I can live with that.

At least until I finish my mind control device.