Four things you can learn about writing from Soulless:
- Regency/Victorian stylings. If you want the feel of 19th century England, it’s obvious where to go: Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, and other authors who lived in that period. Sometimes, though, it’s refreshing to look at someone taking that period and messing around with it, allowing you to see what’s essential and what isn’t. If inserting vampires, werewolves, and ghosts into everyday Victorian society isn’t “messing around with it,” I don’t know what is.
- Sexual humor without vulgarity. It’s a fine line between joking about sex and being crude. There is a lot of sexual humor in this book, but it is funniest when couched in Victorian speech patterns and indirect phrasing. See what you find funniest, and ask yourself why.
- Floating perspective. There’s a reason why floating perspective is frowned on in modern fiction: it can get hard to keep track of which person you’re supposed to identify with. It works in Soulless mainly because the literature of the real-life period did it; but to make it work, you have to avoid getting too deep into one character’s perspective before shifting into another’s. Pay attention to where the POV shifts in the middle of a scene, and why Carriger keeps it from being jarring.
- Avoid infodumping. Read the first chapter and identify the information that is just placed there before it’s truly needed. Compare this to other parts of the book where information is not given so quickly. How would you rewrite the first chapter to give a steadier, more gentle flow for information?
Novel Ninja 
Space Marine! Or, the Perils of Fighting “Fair Use”
In a bit of irony, one of the first things I did this morning was explain the “fair use” element of US copyright law to an author friend of mine. The same explanation got forwarded to another author friend who wanted more information on the same subject. That will probably get put into a future blog post as well.
For now, though, the irony: in the same day, we’ve had a sudden trend in people posting about “space marines.” It’s trending on Twitter, splashed on Facebook, and circled on Google Plus. But what’s going on? View full article »
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