The Muses - revisiting a post from 2010

The ancient Greeks believed that artists were guided by a group of beautiful spirits called the Muses. They led the poet and the singer down the path of creativity toward their creations. I think there’s something to that. After all where do these ideas come from that end up giving us stories and songs and poetry?

I believe I have two muses.

One has silky long black hair and a smile that sparkles brighter than the morning star. She whispers in my ear. Her breath sends shivers of pleasure through my entire body. She holds my hand and sings quietly, sometimes murmuring sounds of love and tenderness that words cannot easily express. We walk together, smiling and she points to things of beauty that I otherwise may not have noticed. But she has inner strength that encourages her to dive through the clouds, opening her parachute at only the last minute. She is able to run with wolves as if they were her family, to swim with sharks without showing fear. I don't know how she does it, I think she has them all hypnotised.

Her rival is quite the opposite. A rather gabby individual and seldom soft or quiet. Her hair is also black and shiny but is tied back tight and ends in a pony tail that bounces and snaps like a whip when she moves her head. She doesn't sparkle, she pops. Sitting still for a photo might catch her in what seems like a moment of motionlessness, but only if the shutter speed is set to very fast. She vibrates with energy, constantly talking and jabbering and tossing ideas into my brain pot at such a rate that I can barely digest one before the next comes barreling in. Perky is a word that might describe her…. or caffeinated. If you want a wild night...or an exhausting weekend ... of creating, touching, travelling through and tasting the forest, seeing the music, grasping the stars, exploding with sensory overload, all the pain, all the pleasure of an orgasm of fully lived life...she's the one to go with. But don't expect to be many steps beyond the grave at the end of the weekend. Only the strong and brave need apply.

Those two are my muses. Equal in beauty, power, and strength but mostly not compatible.

Mercifully the two seldom appear at the same time.

They are, as it happens, rather abrasive toward one another when they are together.

The poetess starts making vulgar rhymes and the perky one ends up slapping her.

But they are both very hot.

They are sultry and sexy and drive me crazy.

And I quite enjoy both of their company.

So here I am. Living dangerously in psychological polygamy.

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The Muses

The ancient Greeks believed that artists were guided by a group of beautiful spirits called the Muses. They led the poet and the singer down the path of creativity toward their creations. I think there’s something to that. After all where do these ideas come from that end up giving us stories and songs and poetry?

I believe I have two muses. One with silky long black hair and a smile that sparkles brighter than the morning star whispers in my ear. Her breath sends shivers of pleasure through my entire body. She holds my hand and sings quietly, sometimes murmurs sounds of love and tenderness that words cannot easily express. We walk together, smiling and she points to things of beauty that I otherwise may not have noticed. But she has inner strength that encourages her to dive through the clouds, opening her parachute at only the last minute. She is able to run with wolves as if they were her family, to swim with sharks without showing fear. I don't know how she does it, I think she has them all hypnotised.

Her rival is quite the opposite. A rather gabby individual and seldom soft or quiet. Her hair is also black and shiny but is tied back tight and ends in a pony tail that bounces and snaps like a whip when she moves her head. She doesn't sparkle, she pops. Sitting still for a photo might catch her in what seems like a moment of motionlessness, but only if the shutter speed is set to very fast. She vibrates with energy, constantly talking and jabbering and tossing ideas into my brain pot at such a rate that I can barely digest one before the next comes barreling in. Perky is a word that might describe her…. or caffeinated. If you want a wild night...or an exhausting weekend ... of creating, touching, travelling through and tasting the forest, seeing the music, grasping the stars, exploding with sensory overload, all the pain, all the pleasure an orgasm of fully lived life...she's the one to go with. But don't expect to be many steps beyond the grave at the end of the weekend. Only the strong and brave need apply.

Those two are my muses. Equal in beauty, power, and strength but mostly not compatible.

Mercifully the two seldom appear at the same time.

They are, as it happens, rather abrasive toward one another when they are together.

The poetess starts making vulgar rhymes and the perky one ends up slapping her.

But they are both very hot.

They are sultry and sexy and drive me crazy.

And I quite enjoy both of their company.

So here I am. Living dangerous in psychological polygamy.

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The Muses

The ancient Greeks believed that artists were guided by a group of beautiful spirits called the Muses. They led the poet and the singer down the path of creativity toward their creations. I think there’s something to that. After all where do these ideas come from that end up giving us stories and songs and poetry?
I believe I have two muses. One with silky long black hair and a smile that sparkles brighter than the morning star whispers in my ear. Her breath sends shivers of pleasure through my entire body. She sings and points to things of beauty that I otherwise may not have noticed.

Her rival is a rather gabby individual. Her hair is also black and shiny but is tied back tight and ends in a pony tail that bounces and snaps like a whip when she moves her head. She doesn't sparkle, she pops. Constantly talking and jabbering and tossing ideas into my brain pot at such a rate that I can barely digest one before the next comes barreling in. Perky is a word that might describe her…. or caffeinated.

Mercifully the two seldom appear at the same time. They are rather abrasive toward one another when they are together. The poetess starts making vulgar rhymes and the perky one ends up slapping her.

But they are both very hot. They are sultry and sexy and drive me crazy. And I quite enjoy both of their company.

Does that make me a polygamist?

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In the Midst of the Middle: The part that makes the story a story

Okay, so after last week’s post on starting with a bang on that first line you carried on and your first few pages are done right? If not, you need to get going. While the story juice is flowing keep that momentum. That is one of the keys to writing a novel, momentum. Once the story starts the reader needs to be kept interested throughout the rest of the book. Many writers start off with a strong picture of the beginning and the ending of their book, but have no clue about what to do with the other two or three hundred pages between that first and last chapter.

It doesn’t matter if you have a great beginning and a spectacular ending, if you don’t have a middle that people want to travel all the way through, you don’t have a story. So just how do you go about building the middle of the story without muddling through a wasteland of description and unnecessary fluff?

Some writer’s guides extol the virtues of a three-act play, some prefer a five-act set up. Either are basically the same thing done in different manners. Chiefly you need the following elements in your story:

1.       The setup or Act 1

This is the part we talked about last week, those first lines and that first chapter that gets your audience interested in the characters and wanting to find out what is going to happening to them next. This part of the story includes those first lines and the first chapter or two in which you take the reader out of their everyday world and make them see some cool new world in which they can live in their imaginations for twelve to twenty hours or more of reading. Once you’ve hooked them on this part of the story and they delve deeper you need to make sure it stays interesting.

2.       The Middle, aka Act 2 thru however many acts you use before the end

Keep the action going like a rollercoaster. A key to keeping your readers interested as you develop your characters is to build tension throughout the story. Whether you are building a taut psychological thriller, an action packed anti-terrorist thriller, a dark crime noir novel, a sci-fi / fantasy epic or a cozy mystery you need to keep some level of tension moving through each and every chapter. And all of that tension must lead toward the ending you as the writer can already see.

3.       The Ending, Final Acts

This is your wrap up. This is where you pull it all together, make the big fight scene / discovery moment / nabbing the bad guys. This is where it all comes together. And this is another blog post, because we’ve got to get that middle built first.

On the Middle

There’s a lot of debate on how to get from 1 to 3. Do you build an outline that details out the steps you need to take to get from the beginning through the middle to the end? Do you just write by the seat of your pants and hope it all comes together in the end? To be honest there are a lot of big name authors on both sides of the debate. The choice you make as to how you will get from Point A to Point C all depends on your personal style.

My first four novels were all written via the “seat of my pants” method. In this style of writing you start off with a premise and just go forward with little or no pre-planning and let the story unfold on the page as it happens in your head. This can be a very exciting way to write, because even as the author you don’t know what’s happening next. Characters suddenly pop into the story out of nowhere, and events unfold before your very eyes surprising you, even though they’re coming out of your own head. The plus side of ‘seat of your pants’ writing is that the story is fresh and exciting as you put it on the paper. Basically, the story tells itself. Most new writers start with this method and quickly discover the down side to being a ‘pantser’. If you are not a naturally image centric person with a very sharp sense of improvisational imagination that can change directions on a dime without losing the focus on the end goal you will likely get lost in the story and find yourself unable to wrap up the ending in any form that makes sense.

Outlining on the other hand is a much more scientific path to take, and while it may seem like a lot of work…okay…it is a lot of work…it can make the story very strong and coherent. It is easy to feel overwhelmed at the thought of outlining the entire novel in advance. But as I have gained experience in writing I can honestly say it is a much better way if you can do it. Sadly not all of us can do a straight outline before writing the parts of the story that are popping out to us. If like me you are easily distracted by shiny things and your muses are a constant source of brain chatter (click here learn what I mean about my muses), trying to get the whole book outlined before writing the cool parts is daunting indeed. Therefore I mix it up a bit.

My latest novella, Blade of Hearts, and my current work in progress (aka WIP), working title “ICE HAMMER”, I used a combined outline / seat of the pants styles. In other words, after agreeing on the beginning and end points of the story I did an outline of the first fifty percent of the story before writing anything else. Then as it got going I put any changes I saw coming into the outline before I reached that point. Kind of like that 80s episode of the Twilight Zone ‘Matter of Minutes’ where a couple discovers that all the events of time are set up by a bunch of blue men just an hour or so ahead of them actually occurring.

In doing a running outline ahead of time you can keep track of where your characters need to be heading from one scene to the next and keep them moving to the fixed end point. You don’t have to outline every detail of every scene. The outline can be as simple as a general path toward the end. On the other hand, it can be as complex as you like if you are a more detail oriented planner. The key is not to get muddled in the middle of the story, to keep flowing, and keep the tension ratcheting up gradually so as to hold the reader in the story until the big ending.

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An Ancient Book, A Dream - A True Genealogy put to Story

Ma - Horse

As a writer I see the world around me in the form of stories.  Each person has a past, a present and a future. A beginning and an end. The line of time between birth and death, those latter two being like well-wrought book covers, constitutes the story of each individual that sets foot in this mortal domain. The creation of these stories forms the ever shifting web of what we call life, each strand intersecting other strands, crossing, connecting, joining, consuming. After the death of each protagonist the vast majority of those stories are quickly forgotten like a cob wed swept from the corner of a ceiling. There are some that are preserved for much longer. Those are the stories that become the history of the world as we know it. We are often told that these who are remembered were the greater beings of their particular generation, but this is not necessarily so.

Those whose tales have made their way into history were not necessarily the greater peoples who shaped history, they were merely the ones whose stories were repeated, and remembered by later generations because they were written down. Whether in words, in art or in some other type of representation, their tales were kept and remembered long beyond the point where the protagonist’s lives, loves, and struggles have ceased along this mortal strand. Not only were their stories written down, but they were repeated, translated and kept up to date to ensure future audiences would hear the story of the ones whose stories we have.

First Page from the
History of the Ma Family in Korea

I happen to own a similar tale.  I doubt anyone reading this blog has heard of this historical character, unless of course you happen to be a member of a small family in South Korea descended from a man named Ma Chun Mok. My wife, Ma Mi Kyong, happens to be a direct descendent of said famous ancestor. We know this because we are in possession of the genealogy and eulogy of Ma Chun Mok himself that has been passed down from generation to generation for nearly 700 years.  There were other parts of the family history dating back even farther, to nearly 500 AD, but those were apparently lost during the Korean War in 1951 when my wife’s father, then an eight year old boy, was running for his life from the invading North Korean and Chinese armies with a load of books entrusted to him by his grandfather. He ended up losing many of the priceless ancient books, some falling out of his pack, others traded for food to survive, the child being unaware of their real value. They may well still exist somewhere in Korea but we don’t know where. The first page of the oldest book we have is pictured on the left, the Chinese character for their name is on the right. 

General Ma Chun Mok
(c. 1400AD)

An interesting fact about their name is that there are at least eight different characters pronounced “Ma” in Chinese. Each different character has a very different meaning. 磨 means ‘mill’ or ‘grind’, a worker’s name like the English ‘Miller’. 碼 means ‘code’ or ‘counting’ and may have been a family of accountants or tax collectors. Another ‘Ma’ has a much darker meaning. 魔literally means ‘Magic’, but in a very negative sense, like black magic, evil like a dark sorcerer. My wife’s name symbol is 馬 which means ‘Horse’ and would’ve been used for royalty or high ranking military families. Ma Chun Mok was born in the city of Yangcheng, Shanxi province China in 1358. Something I have yet to discover (Mongolian invaders? War with neighboring states?) caused his family to move to Korea, then called Koguryeo, where he joined the army Taejo, the man who would bring the end of the Koguryeo Dynasty and ushered in the Joseon Dynasty that would last over five hundred years from 1392-1897. Ma Chun Mok became the supreme commander of Taejo’s army.

During General Ma’s lifetime he got to witness the introduction by the Great King Sejong of the Korean Alphabet, the first alphabet of any Asian nation designed to be easily learned by every level of society, from peasant to emperor, propelling Korea into an era of great social impact and technical advancement. This is the same Great King Sejong who still appears on Korean money and is revered throughout their culture.

A Faithful
telling
of the
Ma Family
History

The title of one of the books we have is “The Faithfully Told Family History of General Ma Chun Mok”. In it there is a record of General Ma serving the first four kings of the Joseon dynasty.  Of what we’ve been able to translate, there are several specific lines that really caught my eye. In one King Taejon makes General Ma a Duke over a region of the country. In another line Great King Sejong, 4^th in line after Taejon, gives him a special title of Most Honorable, True and Faithful General Ma. In the way Korean linguistics works, this is an amazingly honorific title. It signifies that as a man Ma Chun Mok was beyond reproach. He accepted no bribes, could not be swayed from his loyalty and lived an honorable life even in the face of death. His impact was so great that even today, nearly seven hundred years after his birth, a group of his descendants still holds a memorial service for him. My wife had no idea of the depth of her own past until we started researching these books.

Way back in 1988, shortly after we were married, I had a dream. The dream involved a happy little kingdom in China that was invaded by five neighboring states that drove it off the continent. They escaped the slaughter by hiding in a ring of mountains in Korea until their enemies stopped the pursuit. When I told my wife about my dream she was speechless at first. Eventually she told me about her family’s history as far as she knew, which was very little at the time. She grew up in a busy town called Dong Du Chon about an hour east of Seoul, just outside Camp Casey US Army base. Two uncles and her father and mother owned a string of shops that peddled wares to the soldiers ranging from R&B records, to 60’s & 70’s Mod-Squad clothes, to transistor radios and other trinkets and technologies any US soldier would pay cash for. One day her Harabujee (grandfather) took her on a trip to meet some other relatives. The trip involved a long train ride, followed by several hours on a bus, then a five mile hike off the road system into a mountainous area. Upon passing through a narrow valley into a place surrounded on all sides by tall jagged mountains they came to a large village. Painted on the outer walls of the vast majority of households was the name 馬or its Korean rendering ‘마‘, both of which are pronounced ‘Ma’.  At home her family were the only Ma among tens of thousands, and yet here was an entire village, over a thousand people, that shared her name. 

Map of Ma Chun Mok's tomb

Decades later, on a trip to visit her family in Korea for the first time since marrying me, my wife’s father gave her a keepsake: his copy of the family book. As I browsed through it I saw something that captured my imagination and sparked a time distant memory, the hiding place of my dream. The picture to the right is a page from the book showing the burial place of General Ma Chun Mok. Is this the location of the village where my wife’s relatives lived forty years ago? Is the place I saw in my dream a real place, and not a mere fantasy of dream webs conjured in my imagination while sleeping next to an Asian beauty I have always pictured as a Korean Princess. Were my muses awakening my mind to a memory not my own, but one which I am destined to write about. There is a story here, one which I intend to glean from these ancient texts. This is my life’s work, the story I live to write.

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