Karavansara

East of Constantinople, West of Shanghai

Category Archives: Writing


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‘La Mesnée d’Hellequin’

I’m reading two books, as one does. One is a mystery set here in the place where I live, and I’ll talk about that another time. The other is Claude Lecouteux’ Phantom Armies of the Night: The Wild Hunt and the Ghostly Processions of the Undead, a very thorough coverage of the legends and folklore connected with the Wild Hunt, a medieval European legend with its roots in a much deeper past and with echoes that reach us today.

And apparently the Mesnée d’Hellequin, as it was called in Old French has acquired some recent popularity due to a bestselling series of fantasy novels and an equally popular video-game franchise – but I don’t care. I’m doing some research for a story (or five) and I want to go back as close as possible to the original sources.
So, what’s this Wild Hunt all about?

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The dark side of the writer’s lifestyle

There’s a lot of people that wants the lifestyle and not the job of writing. Not the long hours at the keyboard, the rejection slips and the plots that ramble and get nowhere, but rather the interviews, the presentations and the signing sessions, the mingling with the beautiful people in exotic locales, the fast cars and the gourmet food.

Some of these would probably envy how I spent the night of last Saturday, sitting around a table in a pizza place with a bunch of writers, talking (among other things) about deranged Russian aristos, weird Portuguese exchange students and the cover art of romance novels.
These are great opportunities, for fun and education, and good food.
So, yes, envy me.
But there’s a downside.

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Pay What You Want and other urban legends

There’s a discussion going, on a friend’s Facebook profile, about how Pay What You Want (PWYW) offers don’t work in Italy. The punters will simply get the stuff for free, because that is what everybody wants to pay.
Someone comments that PWYW never worked anyway, and brings the example of that Stephen King novel that was released in 2000, and was a total failure.

I am not a Stephen King fan, but I remembered the thing from 2000, the ill-fated serial novel The Plant, so I went and checked a few numbers – and indeed, Stephen King’s PWYW experiment made him a meager 470.000 dollars.
Total failure, right?
The novel was never completed, and that is indeed a failure for a novelist (the rule is “thou shalt finish what thou start”) but the reader response was good: 70/75% of the people that downloaded the installments paid the suggested price of 1 buck or more.
The Pay What You Want model worked.

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Books about writing

I collect books about writing. I have at this point over 120 different titles on the subject, many in digital form, many in hard copy. Some of them are more useful than others, some of them are more entertaining than others, some of them I like better than others, each and everyone contains at least a little nugget of something that (I hope) helped me get better at the craft.
I don’t think you can learn everything from a handbook, but maybe from a few dozens of them you’ll get enough tools to put together your own toolbox.

This morning I learned about the Humble Book Bundle “Write like a Writer”, and I happily shelled out 80 eurocents for the basic tier of the offer. The basic level includes a book I already own and that I highly recommend, The Tao of Writing, by Ralph L. Wahlstrom. This title alone is worth the expense. The rest is a selection of interesting How To books covering a few topics I am not very familiar with (like screenwriting) and a few I am familiar with (like writing non-fiction) that might still improve with the addition of new information.

Anyone willing to pay the full 15 bucks for the complete set will end up with 26 writing handbooks, and at that point they’ll have to chose whether to read or to write, but that’s always the problem, isn’t it?

Part of the money spent on the bundle goes to the National Coalition Against Censorship, and I think that’s a good thing, too.

The offer lasts two weeks. Check it out.


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Original Ideas

I usually say originality is overestimated. I even write a series of articles in an Italian webzine that use that bit as a catchphrase. Being original is important, but you can’t copyright ideas – in the end what counts is not what ideas you rub together to spark a story, but how you use those sparks. What you do with the ideas, where you go with them, where you drag the reader and how. That’s what’s got to be original – the execution.

I just posted an article – in the Nuts & Bolts series – on my Patreon about ideas and themes – where to find them, how to use them. I’ll have to expand that piece, but it’s a start.
And what happens when you don’t have original ideas?
You use what’s at hand.
You steal, borrow, recycle.
It’s allowed – there’s a book in the best-seller list, quite good, called Steal Like an Artist. It’s quite good.

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Fighting as narrative (or vice-versa)

I have just watched Seven Strike as One, the final episode of the third and last season of Into the Badlands, to me still the best fantasy series on the telly these last few years, and one I will miss a lot now that’s gone. The finale was fast but highly satisfactory, and ended with two colossal hooks for a possible sequel that, alas, seems unlikely.

Sherman Augustus as Moon, Eugenia Yuan as Kannin, Nick Frost as Bajie, Daniel Wu as Sunny, Emily Beecham as The Widow, Lewis Tan as Gaius, Ally Ioannides as Tilda – Into the Badlands _ Season 3, Episode 16 – Photo Credit: Aidan Monaghan/AMC

I admit I am a fan of the series – I love the characters, the setting, the fighting choreography, the small scale of the story that makes this more sword & sorcery than epic fantasy, the retro-futuristic elements.
I will try and get the DVDs sooner or later.
And there’s another reason why I want to re-watch the whole series – Into the Badlands is absolutely great at making the fight scenes part of the narrative.

(spoiler alert: I’ll be using clips from the first season of the show, so they should be pretty safe, but if you’d rather watch the episodes first, just don’t start the videos)

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