Get Real

Get Real

One essential part of making better magic systems is giving real imagery to the reader without telling them what to see. Very often I will read stories where the author describes a magic spell like this: “As soon as he entered the room, Kyla felt the powerful magic. She reached out with her senses, seeking the source, and found it was Naylam, standing above the bloody altar.”

Pardon me for writing two such embarrassingly weak sentences, but I’ve read them so many times, in so many manuscripts, I have to show you what it is like. When you read it, it’s sort of like being splashed in the face with pig slop. You know it’s garbage, but you can’t quite figure out what kind.

Do you see the problem? There is no actual imagery here. You as a reader have no idea what magic “feels” like. Does it feel like a kitten purring as it nuzzles against your cheek? Or does it feel more like a dagger piercing your kidney? Or does it feel like a bad case of the flu is making you want to barf?

The imagery is so vague, the reader isn’t led to imagine anything it all. The author is simply “telling” us what the mage experiences without creating any real imagery. But as an author you’ve heard it over and over again, “Show, don’t tell.” So you have to come up with precise imagery in order to fix the problem.

Before we address precise imagery, there are a couple of clichés that we need to deal with here. Why is it that so many mages “feel” magic power? I’ve seen people “sense” magic in books hundreds of times. Much in the same way, in film anything that is magic glows. So when we describe something magic, authors often refer to these two senses without thought.

But sight and feeling are not the only senses we have. Indeed, relying upon any one sense alone is too damned weak to bring your magic to life. We need to involve all of the senses—all the ones that your teacher taught you about in school—and more!

So instead of harking back to the old clichés, when you create magic, I want you to ask yourself, “How does the viewpoint character know that someone or something is magic?”

Come up with an answer. For example, if a character sees someone with a magic sword, you might imagine that the sword is glowing. Why? Because in Hollywood, everything that is magic glows. It’s a visual medium, after all.

If you do default to that image, throw your answer away, and ask yourself, “How does my hero really know?” Come up with a better answer.

Then maybe throw that second answer away and ask, “How does he really know?” Repeat this as often as needed, until after maybe ten or fifty tries, you get an answer that your gut tells you is right. If you’re familiar with acting techniques, you’ll probably recognize this exercise, but it works in storytelling as you consider things like character’s motives, possible plot twists, and … what does magic look like?

So you make a list.

Now that you know what magic looks like, ask yourself what does the magic sound like? When a mage casts a spell, for example, what does the audience hear? Does he hear a scream from the netherworld, or a crackling of static electricity, or the voice of a god in his mind shouting in fear, “No!” Consider a dozen possibilities.

Once you have got the visual and audio down, go deeper. What physical sensations does the magic carry—things like hot, cold, wet, dry, rough, smooth, soft, unyielding.

What smells are associated with the spell, if any?

Go deeper. What emotions are aroused by magic? Does the mage feel triumph, horror, regret?

When a magical spell is cast or an implement is used, how long does it take? Does it happen faster than thought, or does time dilate, the way that it will in a fight, so that the mage really is aware of what is going on in minute detail?

What is your viewpoint character thinking during the process? Go into his or her direct thoughts.

And finally, what are the magic’s effects? How does it act in ways that surprise the viewpoint character, or arouse powerful emotions?

In other words, when you are trying to create an impression that magic is taking place, you need to involve all of the senses. Sight, sound, smell, touch, taste, emotions, time—and you should even go deeper, into your POV character’s direct thoughts.

This is the only way to make magic feel real. If you would like to see some examples of how it is done, I’d invite you to look at Brandon Sanderson’s work, particularly in his Mistorborn series. Carlos Castenada does it well in his book, The Teachings of Don Juan. I do it in The Runelords, too.

But I need to emphasize this: In writing, all failures are tied to a failure of imagination. If your magic system feels weak or cliché, or if the consequences of your magic system aren’t rigorously examined, then you need to go back, exercise more and more imagination until you fix it. If you would like a more in depth course on imaginative writing, look here, but do not forget about the Super Writers Bundle!

-David Farland

https://mystorydoctor.com/writing-blog/

Right now, I’m sifting through 50+ applications for a new entry-level position. Here’s some advice from the person who will actually be looking at your CV/resume and cover letter:

‘You must include a cover letter’ does not mean ‘write a single line about why you want this position’. If you can’t be bothered to write at least one actual paragraphs about why you want this job, I can’t be bothered to read your CV.

Don’t bother including a list of your interests if all you can think of is ‘socialising with friends’ and ‘listening to music’. Everyone likes those things. Unless you can explain why the stuff you do enriches you as a person and a candidate (e.g. playing an instrument or a sport shows dedication and discipline) then I honestly don’t care how you spend your time. I won’t be looking at your CV thinking ‘huh, they haven’t included their interests, they must have none’, I’m just looking for what you have included.

Even if you apply online, I can see the filename you used for your CV. Filenames that don’t include YOUR name are annoying. Filenames like ‘CV - media’ tell me that you’ve got several CVs you send off depending on the kind of job advertised and that you probably didn’t tailor it for this position. ‘[Full name] CV’ is best.

USE. A. PDF. All the meta information, including how long you worked on it, when you created it, times, etc, is right there in a Word doc. PDFs are far more professional looking and clean and mean that I can’t make any (unconscious or not) decisions about you based on information about the file.

I don’t care what the duties in your previous unrelated jobs were unless you can tell me why they’re useful to this job. If you worked in a shop, and you’re applying for an office job which involves talking to lots of people, don’t give me a list of stuff you did, write a sentence about how much you enjoyed working in a team to help everyone you interacted with and did your best to make them leave the shop with a smile. I want to know what makes you happy in a job, because I want you to be happy within the job I’m advertising.

Does the application pack say who you’ll be reporting to? Can you find their name on the company website? Address your application to them. It’s super easy and shows that you give enough of a shit to google something. 95% of people don’t do this.

Tell me who you are. Tell me what makes you want to get up in the morning and go to work and feel fulfilled. Tell me what you’re looking for, not just what you think I’m looking for.

I will skim your CV. If you have a bunch of bullet points, make every one of them count. Make the first one the best one. If it’s not interesting to you, it’s probably not interesting to me. I’m overworked and tired. Make my job easy.

“I work well in a team or individually” okay cool, you and everyone else. If the job means you’ll be part of a big team, talk about how much you love teamwork and how collaborating with people is the best way to solve problems. If the job requires lots of independence, talk about how you are great at taking direction and running with it, and how you have the confidence to follow your own ideas and seek out the insight of others when necessary. I am profoundly uninterested in cookie-cutter statements. I want to know how you actually work, not how a teacher once told you you should work.

For an entry-level role, tell me how you’re looking forward to growing and developing and learning as much as you can. I will hire genuine enthusiasm and drive over cherry-picked skills any day. You can teach someone to use Excel, but you can’t teach someone to give a shit. It makes a real difference.

This is my advice for small, independent orgs like charities, etc. We usually don’t go through agencies, and the person reading through the applications is usually the person who will manage you, so it helps if you can give them a real sense of who you are and how you’ll grab hold of that entry level position and give it all you’ve got. This stuff might not apply to big companies with actual HR departments - it’s up to you to figure out the culture and what they’re looking for and mirror it. Do they use buzzwords? Use the same buzzwords! Do they write in a friendly, informal way? Do the same! And remember, 95% of job hunting (beyond who you know and flat-out nepotism, ugh) is luck. If you keep getting rejected, it’s not because you suck. You might just need a different approach, or it might just take the right pair of eyes landing on your CV.

And if you get rejected, it’s worthwhile asking why. You’ve already been rejected, the worst has already happened, there’s really nothing bad that can come out of you asking them for some constructive feedback (politely, informally, “if it isn’t too much trouble”). Pretty much all of us have been hopeless jobseekers at one point or another. We know it’s shitty and hard and soul-crushing. Friendliness goes a long way. Even if it’s just one line like “your cover letter wasn’t inspiring" at least you know where to start.

And seriously, if you have any friends that do any kind of hiring or have any involvement with that side of things, ask them to look at your CV with a big red pen and brutal honesty. I do this all the time, and the most important thing I do is making it so their CV doesn’t read exactly like that of every other person who took the same ‘how-to-get-a-job’ class in school. If your CV has a paragraph that starts with something like ‘I am a highly motivated and punctual individual who–’ then oh my god I AM ALREADY ASLEEP.

Idaho Senate Approves Bill to Kill 90 Percent of State’s Wolves

The bill would allow the state to hire contractors to kill the wolves, which supporters say are threatening the livelihoods of Idaho’s ranchers.

If environmental activists, both soft and hard line, had any courage, they would promote an effort to discourage any tourism to Idaho. This action is insane.

Excerpt from this New York Times story:

The Idaho Senate approved a bill this week that would permit the state to hire contractors to kill up to 90 percent of Idaho’s wolves with the goal, supporters said, of protecting cattle and other agricultural interests.

“These wolves, there’s too many in the state of Idaho,” State Senator Mark Harris, a Republican, said on the Senate floor before the vote on Wednesday, after telling a story about a “gentleman rancher” whose livelihood was jeopardized when a pack of wolves scared off his cattle.

Idaho’s Wolf Conservation and Management plan calls for the state to maintain a wolf population of at least 150 wolves. At last count, Mr. Harris said, 1,556 wolves were roaming the state.

“They’re destroying ranchers; they’re destroying wildlife,” he said.

The bill would give the state’s Wolf Control Fund an additional $190,000 to hire contractors to kill wolves — on top of $400,000 previously allocated toward killing wolves in Idaho. The bill also would remove a limit on the number of wolves a hunter is permitted to kill.

The Senate approved the bill in a 26-7 vote on Wednesday. The measure now goes to the State House of Representatives. The office of Governor Brad Little, a Republican, declined to say whether he planned to sign the bill. Last year Mr. Little signed another bill boosting funds for the killing of wolves.

Backers of the bill said that wolves also reduce the numbers of deer and elk available to hunters, taking an additional economic toll on the state. Some lawmakers disputed that hiring contractors would drive the wolf population down to just 150, while others referenced the 150 figure as if were the goal.

Apparently a lot of people get dialogue punctuation wrong despite having an otherwise solid grasp of grammar, possibly because they’re used to writing essays rather than prose. I don’t wanna be the asshole who complains about writing errors and then doesn’t offer to help, so here are the basics summarized as simply as I could manage on my phone (“dialogue tag” just refers to phrases like “he said,” “she whispered,” “they asked”):

“For most dialogue, use a comma after the sentence and don’t capitalize the next word after the quotation mark,” she said.

“But what if you’re using a question mark rather than a period?” they asked.

“When using a dialogue tag, you never capitalize the word after the quotation mark unless it’s a proper noun!” she snapped.

“When breaking up a single sentence with a dialogue tag,” she said, “use commas.”

“This is a single sentence,” she said. “Now, this is a second stand-alone sentence, so there’s no comma after ‘she said.’”

“There’s no dialogue tag after this sentence, so end it with a period rather than a comma.” She frowned, suddenly concerned that the entire post was as unasked for as it was sanctimonious.

#196: The Shiny Object Syndrome

You’re working on a story, minding your own business, and out of nowhere, an idea appears in your head. Not just an ordinary idea — a brilliant idea.

The story you’re working on right now has been a real pain. It’s taking forever to write. There’s a plot hole that you don’t know how to fix yet. Merely re-reading a passage from it makes you feel physically ill.

This new idea, though! This one definitely wouldn’t have any of the problems that you’re dealing with right now. You could probably write it a lot faster as well. Why waste time on an inferior story that’s clearly not going anywhere? Maybe you should start working on the new one instead…

It’s a Trap!

When working on a project, the middle is always the worst. You’re finding all sorts of issues that you don’t know how to resolve yet. You look at what you wrote and are absolutely terrified by how much revision you’ll need to do. It’s not fun.

Starting a new project is loads of fun. You’re excited about the idea. Things are moving fast. And most importantly, you haven’t found any issues with it yet.

Fast forward a few weeks into the new story, things have slowed down considerably. You either ran into the same problems or different ones that are just as annoying. But then you get another idea that just blows this one out of the water…

The More You Write, the More Ideas You’ll Have

This happens to me all the time. I get my best ideas when I’m working on something else. It makes sense — the brain is creatively engaged. All sorts of things come out of it.

The trick is to stay calm, write these ideas down, and don’t act on them until you finish the current project. It’s an unfair comparison — a brand new idea always seems better than the one you currently have. The current idea probably seemed just as brilliant before you started working on it. The only way to find out if an idea is worth anything is to see it through.

Imagine that this happens at work. You come up with an idea and pitch it to your boss. Your boss likes it too, and she trusts you, so she lets you work on it.

A few weeks later, you come back to her.

‘Actually, I don’t like working on this anymore. I’m not sure if it’ll work. It’s weird,’ you say. ‘But you won’t believe this other idea I had. IT WILL BLOW YOUR MIND.’

Making a mistake is one thing. When something doesn’t work out, you learn your lessons and move on. In that case, your boss would look at the work you did and give you credit for trying. Not everything works out. But giving up mid-way through a project for a random reason?

When to Quit?

It’s hard to tell when to stay the course and when to quit. The answer always depends on the situation.

As a writer, you’ll grow the most when you finish a story. Then you’ll see how each of your ideas worked out. You can ask others for feedback. When you abandon your stories too early you miss out on many important lessons.

Should you finish every project that you start? I don’t think so. When you’re 3,000 words into a 150,000-word novel, getting cold feet already — that’s a sign.

But before you decide to abandon ship, take an honest look back. How many stories have you finished recently? How many have you abandoned? Maybe this should be the one that you drag over the finish line. You don’t have to publish it. But give the story a chance. It might surprise you.

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Past Editions

#195: Where Do You Get Your Ideas From?, May 2021

#194: Your Inner Critic is Wrong, May 2021

#193: Overnight Success… 10 Years in the Making, May 20201

#192: Why Write?, April 2021

#191: The Best Writing Quotes From the Past Year, April 2021

So, United States public education, we need to have a talk about the truly terrible job you do teaching about the Holocaust...

Holocaust education in the US is...not good. The US public school system does a genuinely bad job at teaching US students about the Holocaust and, as we are now seeing in polls and surveys of millennials and Gen Z, it is leading to the slow decline of American understanding of what a horrific event the Holocaust truly was. And if we don’t teach about the Holocaust well, how do we aim at preventing another one?

So where are we going wrong? In looking back at my K-12 public school experience, and my religious school experience, I found a few issues that I think are contributing:

1) We Universalize the Holocaust

A lot of classrooms in America spend maybe a week or so teaching about the Holocaust, and devote that time almost entirely to humanizing it’s victims by participating in exercises, such reading the diary of Anne Frank, that intentionally or not make the student take the perspective of the victim.

The message that gets sent is “this could have been any of you.” But that’s just not true. The truth of the matter is that the Holocaust, or a genocide like it, couldn’t, now or then, have happened to most of them and those it could have happened to already know.

The Holocaust was the result of unique prejudices in the western world against Jews and the Romani. Hatred of those groups, and institutionalized oppression and even murder of those groups, had been the norm in Europe for over 1000 years by the time the Holocaust began. When I say institutionalized oppression and murder, I’m not talking about one-offs where one local antisemite grabbed some buds and attacked some Jews and got away with it. I’m talking about governments intentionally forbidding Jews from owning land, requiring they only live in certain areas, prohibiting participation in the vast majority of jobs, and periodically expelling or killing us.

This is necessary context, and teaching students that “this could have been you,” erases that context entirely. Because it wasn’t them, and it couldn’t have been. The Holocaust was the culmination of centuries of oppression and prejudice.

Humanize the victims of the Holocaust, yes, because we were and are human beings deserving of humane treatment, but universalizing what happened to very specific groups of people I think is more harmful than helpful on balance.

“You could’ve been the victim” takes focus away from the more likely reality: “You would have likely not been targeted this way, and been in the complicit silent majority that didn’t speak up or take action to help vulnerable people.” Why is the latter lesson so important? Because non-marginalized groups need to learn how Easy it was, and is, for the average person in the majority to brush off an ongoing atrocity against a marginalized minority. They need to learn how to spot when their silence will support oppression against their vulnerable neighbors. And when they see themselves vulnerable to being made the victims and NOT vulnerable to being made the oppressors those lessons are lost.

2) We Don’t Tackle the Silent and Complicit Majority

The dominant narrative of teaching the Holocaust in the US is: “A small number of very bad people murdered the Jews and the Romani and then the allies liberated them.” There might be some one-off stories about Hans and Sophie Scholl or a righteous gentile.

But what about everyone else? What were average people doing during the industrialized mass murder of millions of people?

Nothing out of the ordinary, it turns out, and it’s important to teach that. Your average German didn’t work in a KZ during the Holocaust, but your average German was complicit in the government that created and operated them if they didn’t speak out. We know about the Scholls because what they did was rare, not because it was common. If average people had spoken up in Germany, something could have been done. And, before people claim I’m full of shit, the Aktion T4, the Nazis’ systematic murder of the physically and intellectually disabled, WAS protested by average Germans and German institutions (like churches) and that DID force the end of the centralized program.

When we focus on heroes and victims, minimize the villains to the few who pulled the trigger, and ignore the culpability of the average person who just quietly went on with his own life and let it happen? We are teaching our kids that being silent is okay. It’s not.

3) We Conveniently Leave Out America’s Role in the Holocaust

Most American gentiles I know are ignorant as to our country’s complicity in the Holocaust. That is a problem. First, because there can be no accountability for the lives we tacitly helped end without knowing we did so. Second, because it leads to American voters not understanding the destruction we have wrought through policies that pop up cyclically in our country. Our repressive and xenophobic immigration laws contributed to the deaths of millions of people. We need to own that.

America, Britain, and nearly every other nation in the world refused to allow Jewish refugees in EVEN WHEN HITLER OFFERED TO LET THEM LEAVE GERMANY IF OTHERS WOULD TAKE THEM. None of those countries would help them.

And, don’t let our convenient silence fool you, the Allies knew that the Holocaust was going on. They knew about the ghettos. The KZs. The death camps. They could show you Auschwitz on a map and explain what it’s purpose was. And with that information they did...just about nothing, other than suppressing news reports of the atrocities happening in Europe. Our inaction during the Holocaust was so egregious that the US Department of Treasury at the time issued a memo titled

The Allies may have ultimately liberated many of the KZs and death camps, but let’s not forget that was more “bonus good deed” than their actual intent.

4) We Undersell the Scope of the Destruction

6 million Jews, 1.5 million of them five years old or younger. 1.5 million Romani. Most schools teach those top line numbers, at least the 6 million figure. But they don’t explain what it means. Those are big numbers, sure, but they lack context.

So let’s recontextualize those numbers and explain what they mean.

The Nazis murdered a full two-thirds of all the Jews in Europe. They murdered one-third of all Jews in the world. In 1939 there were 3,250,000 Jews in Poland. In 1946 there were 100,000. Nazis murdered 97% of Polish Jews. (There are around 3,200 today, which is a discussion for another time.)

To put all this in perspective, there are still fewer Jews alive today than there were alive in 1933.

That is the scope of the industrialized genocide we are talking about.

And those numbers don’t account for the lingering impacts on those that weren’t murdered. Studies since have shown that the trauma altered the DNA of survivors and their direct descendants, making us prone to all manner of negative health outcomes. The Nazis’ harm to Europe’s Jews didn’t end at murder, it is also generational harm with real health consequences for direct descendants and is a lingering generational trauma for Jews writ large.

5) We Teach the Holocaust Like It Happened a Long Time Ago to Long-Lost Groups of People

It stunned my classmates in public school to learn my grandmother - who lived with us and who drove me to school - was a survivor of the Holocaust. They were equally shocked to learn that the Romani are still around. They exist. I have met people who didn’t realize the Jews were still alive either.

We focus on black and white photographs of old-timey transports of people in clothes that look straight out of the Old Country without any thought as to how that translates to young students. That presentation makes the event seem longer ago than it was. It distances them and their ancestors from it. My grandmother died in 2019. My eight year-old knew her. Two of my grandmothers’ older sisters, one a KZ survivor, are still alive today.

The Holocaust did not happen in some ancient time when people didn’t know better. It happened during the dawn of the atomic age, when the average American owned at least one vehicle, when phones were ubiquitous in offices and homes, less than 20 years before DARPA created the predecessor to the internet. Antisemitism’s adherents weren’t backwards and superstitious idiots. They thought themselves scientists, and it was the language of “race science” (language they got from us Americans) rather than religion that they used to justify their crimes against humanity.

When we teach the Holocaust like it happened “so long ago” we make it seem like modern people would never be susceptible to such hatred in modern times. It’s not true. And we do minorities a disservice when we act like it is. Baseless racial, ethnic, and religious hatred still exist; we haven’t evolved that much since the Holocaust and that isn’t surprising given how recent it was.

This list isn’t exhaustive. I’ve got more. But I think these issues loom largest over the state of Holocaust education in the US and it’s time we talk about them.