WRITING ADVICE: Julie Czerneda’s Writing Workshop! #6 – “How do you FEEL?”

In 2005, whilst perusing the shelves at the Hennepin County Public Library, I stumbled across CHANGING VISION by Julie Czerneda (say it: chur-nay-dah), an author I'd never heard of, and was intrigued by the aliens on the cover by artist Luis Royo. It didn’t matter that the book was the second in a series, the cover entranced me and so I read. The book was spectacular, I read others, and fell entirely in love with another series of hers called SPECIES IMPERATIVE for its fascinating aliens and superior characterization. A teacher deeply at heart, Julie Czerneda shares ideas and methodology wherever she goes. On her website, http://www.czerneda.com/classroom/classroom.html she shares ideas for writers. I want to share what kind of impact her ideas have had on my own writing.  They are used with the author’s permission.

“TONE: As a starting point, choose what you wish readers to feel after reading this story.”

Oh! Oh! Oh! Pick me! Pick me!

This is one I love; one I’ve struggled with; and one I feel I have moderately accomplished.

When I wrote “Teaching Women to Fly”, I was trying hard to make the story conform to what I’d read in every literary story I’d ever tried to read or forced myself to read. My definition of literary fiction I wrote in 2009: “…about powerless people living their lives in excruciating detail. The main character is the author in disguise making educated, satirical, wise, obscure, or erudite commentary in a way that no real person in that life could possibly be able to duplicate.”

It was NOT a “normal” science fiction story in that I wasn’t trying to be spectacularly hopeful nor was I trying to be spectacularly grim. I wanted to see what a woman who felt trapped on an alien world, among neighbors and not horribly oppressed or not under constant alien attack…rather, I wanted her to have lost sight of the wonder that she LIVED in.

I wanted people to feel her desperation.

A couple of newer stories – ones I can’t post because that constitutes publication in this new electronic world we live in – are also “tone” pieces in which I want a reader to feel a very particular way.

In “Extreme Contact”, I have a couple of teens who don’t know exactly what they’re supposed to be doing and who find out only after they’ve been chased around the surface of an alien world by aliens speaking a language they can’t understand…then they discover that they may have a DIFFERENT language they share. A language beyond words and one of emotion and joy. I want my readers to feel the same sense of surprise I did when I saw “Darmok” for the first time (episode 102 of STAR TREK: THE NEXT GENERATION). In it, Captain Picard is kidnapped and meets another alien captain of a ship that is moderately more powerful that the USS Enterprise. They both speak English via Universal Translators, but Tamarian’s speak using metaphor rather than Human-style linear description.

They figure it out, but not until the Tamarian dies from wounds inflicted by a savage, animal-like (and invisible) alien.

The revelation at the end of the episode that I could “speak Tamarian” filled me with wonder.

It is that sense that the tone of a book or story should build. I didn’t notice this methodology so much in Julie Czerneda’s science fiction, but she was in absolute top form in crafting the tone of A TURN OF LIGHT, her newest novel – and the first real fantasy book she’s ever done.

I intend to keep on working on this skill – maybe to the point where I can write set such an incredible tone that I might be compared to Susanna Clarke’s JONATHAN STRANGE AND MR. NORRELL.

Image: http://lcars.frontierfleet.net/images/e/e2/Ad50f2c6564a03d64d1de6bd052a4c3a.jpg