Do You Smell A Wulff?

I try to steer away from books on writing. My time is limited and I should actually be writing rather than reading about writing. I do break my fast occasionally, and Stephen King's "On Writing" is my favorite in the genre.

I happened on a book called "Writing Magic" by Gail Carson Levine, the author of "Ella Enchanted" and a myriad of other young adult fantasy books. I made a literal translation of the title and thought it was a "how to" manual about working magic into your sci-fi/fantasy story. (Mea culpa, I'm sleep deprived). It was actually a book of the lessons she usually teaches in her creative writing courses for children.

Despite my misunderstanding, I enjoyed the book. Three pieces of her advice stood out:

She wrote about the difference between telling and showing: "What you want is a writer's telescope, so you can increase or decrease the magnification: increase to show, decrease to tell."

Levine also spoke about making your reader care what happens next. "Be cruel! Make your hero suffer! Be doubly cruel. Make your reader like your heroine, so the reader suffers when she does."

She also wrote about the importance of establishing your world:

"Suppose you're writing a science fiction story. You're in the middle of the story. Your main character, Jeff has to jump on his atomic sled and deliver medicine to an outpost on the dark side of the planet, where it's always winter. You want things to be as difficult as possible for him, so you make his sled break down. He's trying to fix it when he hears the howl of a dreaded wulff, a distant relative of the wolf on Earth, only wulffs are as big as horses and almost as cunning as humans.

"Pretty exciting, right? The only problem is that so far there's been no mention of wulffs. If you bring one in now, your reader is going to smell a rat, not a wulff.

"The solution is to go back to the beginning and find a way to drop something in about wulffs."

This makes me think of the little row of books I have on my bookshelf. They are really poorly written books that commit all the sins of writing and more. Wulffs abound. But, they were published, I paid good money for them and I read them. Or mostly read them. This row of books is more inspirational than the Pulitzer Prize winners. 'Cuz if these silly people can get published, then it's entirely possible that I can!!