As I make my way through Mage You Look while also pondering side and future projects, and chat with all kinds of writers in various places about our respective processes, a thing I think about is seeing how people approach… I’ll call it rigidity vs. malleability.

For some writers, specific characters or world elements or plot points are fixed, immutable, and everything else must be built up around those things. They’re the foundations of the story house; they’re the seeds that grow into the story tree, or bush, or flower. Even if the furniture in the house moves around, or the bush gets trimmed into a topiary, those essential starter components don’t change, no matter how big or small they are.

For me, most things are negotiable. When I’m planning, I brainstorm and feel my way around, looking for shiny stuff like a corvid. And that stuff can be surprisingly vague: traits or themes rather than specific details. Archetypes or aesthetics. Vague plot shapes. I research and iterate. I fiddle and test. I make notes. I accrete. I roll around a katamari and see what sticks to it.

There comes a point for me where things do solidify, like I’ve finished my clay sculpture and I’ve fired it and now its form is set. Eventually the katamari is large enough to get yeeted into space and become a star. Except even then I may still make fundamental changes, beyond playing with the colors or extra decorations or whatever. There’s always room for that: the play, the tweaking and revision.

I think sometimes writers forget we control all the variables in a story. If something doesn’t make sense, we can rework it until it does. A character who wouldn’t make a choice in one scenario may do so if the conditions change, or if something in their back story shifts. A setting detail that doesn’t fit can be taken out or made to make sense. One plot point can be substituted for another.

Character, setting, plot, theme… they’re all up to the writer. They’re all the result of a series of choices. How you make those choices is up to you! But you have the power to control them, to set the parameters. And that power can be exercised at any time in the process.

Even after a thing is published and set in stone, there is still room to play. Things have to be internally consistent, logical, believable within the confines of what’s established. But within that framework, there are often ways to retcon, to reveal new layers that recontextualize the existing ones, to create ambiguity and uncertainty, add unreliable narration… There are many available tools to reshape or repaint or refine.

So I guess my bottom line is: embrace your process, but also internalize that you control your story. You can always add a room onto your house regardless of its foundation, or plant a vine to wrap around your tree. Take the reins! Embrace your agency! Revel in the act of creation! You’re the deity in this universe you’re crafting, and you can do anything you want with it.

Where Peace Is Lost comes out tomorrow! As with most books, this one has had a long and winding journey to publication. I wanted to talk a bit about one of the things that led me to write this particular book, out of all the other possible ideas racketing around in my head. Here we go.

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People with ADHD often have an overdeveloped sense of fairness, of right and wrong. It’s called justice sensitivity, and it makes us more likely to have strong reactions to little things like people leaving garbage on a picnic table, or big things like racism and social inequity. We get angry when people are victimized; we worry about wronging someone, and feel intense shame and guilt when we think we’ve done so; we retreat into hopelessness when huge problems seem unsolvable, like trying to climb a mountain wearing lead boots. We obsess. We doomscroll. We overthink.

Where Peace Is Lost tells the story of Kel, a former knight whose order was disbanded, as a condition of the treaty that ended the war they lost. To protect her people and preserve the integrity of that treaty, she’s gone into hiding on a planet far from the galaxy’s population centers. If she were a Dungeons & Dragons character, she would be a lawful good paladin, and she’s a product of my justice sensitivity.

I love paladins! My power fantasy is helping people, and paladins are magically empowered to do this–in role-playing games, anyway. But I didn’t want to rely on the rulings of coastal mages to construct my hero and the order she represented, so I looked at different historical and fictional examples of knights. Unfortunately, a lot of them are, to use the vernacular, heckin gross.

The term “paladin” comes from the legendary knights who served Charlemagne, who himself is one of the Nine Worthies we should all aspire to emulate… except he was pretty much constantly at war, and let’s just say my dude, ahem, made a lot of babies with a lot of ladies, including his underage second wife. The Matter of France positions the paladins as brave Christian defenders against Saracen invaders, so hey, religiously-motivated violence. Awesome! (Author’s note: it was not awesome.)

Arthuriana is all about powerful people helping the less fortunate, though, right? Well, mostly, but it depends on what you mean by “helping” and which sources you’re reading. Arthur conquered most of northern Europe, skipped off to Gaul to declare himself emperor, then got backstabbed by his wife and… Mordred? Lancelot? You decide! Either way, if this were an Am I the Asshole post, everyone sucks here. Kay is a stubborn hothead. Galahad is a judgmental jerk. Even my beloved himbo Gawain needs to get better at puns, reading the fine print, and managing his polycule. Bedivere is… you know, he made that wooden rabbit, we’ll let him slide.

Knights Templar? Holy corporate malfeasance, Batman! Teutonic Knights? Kept trying to conquer Prussia. Order of the Garter? I mean, you don’t want your armor falling off mid-battle, I guess. The Jedi? A monastic mishmash that stole kids from their moms. Pobody’s nerfect!

My justice sensitivity is snarling at this point. I grew up reading books and watching movies about these honorable, chivalrous characters who protected the weak and defended the defenseless. But revisiting the depths beneath the surface of these paragons of virtue was disheartening, to say the least. And what did it say about me that I kept fixating on people who solved problems with violence? There had to be a better way.

I didn’t have an Anakin Skywalker moment where I dramatically declared that paladins were evil and started on my path to the dark side. Instead, I decided to engage in a little might makes right using the power of my pen, which as we all know is mightier than the sword.

I sifted through my research for something to build on and settled on the Knights Hospitaller. Their order started, as the name implies, with a hospital. They provided medical care and lodging for the unwashed barbarians–I mean, the pilgrims visiting Jerusalem, and eventually expanded to include military protection for those travellers. (And briefly, weirdly, the Italian air force after World War II, sort of.) That origin in healing rather than harming appealed to me immensely, and I built on that foundation for Kel’s order, focusing on principles of medical care, teaching, mutual aid and protection.

For the character of Kel as a specific member of this order, I wanted someone strong, loyal, brave, and honorable in ways that would be tested by allies and taken advantage of by unscrupulous enemies. But justice sensitivity is a double-edged sword, so I leaned into her feelings of hopelessness about her situation. At the start of the book, Kel has intentionally withdrawn from society, living alone in a swamp and rarely engaging with her neighbors. She tells herself it’s necessary, to keep her enemies from finding her and using her as an excuse to shut down the sole remaining charitable arm of her order–or worse, to reignite war. She’s not wrong, but it’s not her whole truth; her former life of service was shattered by injustice, and she never recovered. She wallows in shame and guilt, subconsciously choosing to protect her wounded heart by avoiding exposure to circumstances that could remind her of her inability to defeat a massive, powerful empire.

If you’re really dedicated to justice, though–if you’re going to live that proverbial paladin life, better than the ugly mess scattered across the historical and fictional record–then hiding isn’t going to work. Avoiding exposure to injustice doesn’t make it disappear, it simply removes it from your field of vision. Kel learns this the hard way, and has to decide what she’s going to do when she can no longer look away.

Justice sensitivity can make us feel hopeless, helpless, powerless–but it can also galvanize us to make things right. Instead of hiding, we can show up. Instead of giving in, we can push back. Instead of surrendering, we can fight for justice. Empathy can weigh us down like lead boots as we climb those endless cliffs of inequity, but it can also give us wings to fly beyond them, all the way up to the stars.

I read an article a while back aimed primarily at fantasy writers starting to learn the craft, about how magic must have a price OR ELSE! With “or else” basically meaning “your story sucks and you have made bad choices,” I guess.

Almost every time I read an article like this, the examples of “prices” are things like “magic drains your life force” or “it makes you lose your mind” or “it requires blood sacrifice” and I find it interesting that this is where notions of “price” tend to go. I think “price” is typically used to mean downside or drawback, which are certainly definitions of the word. While penalties or negative consequences are kinds of prices, they’re not the only kinds.

They’re not even strictly necessary! I’ve chatted with people from cultures that see magic in everyday life, and they almost uniformly found the concept of magical price jarring, as it’s described above. Magic just is! You do an egg cleanse ritual, and it gets rid of negative energy. Boom. Done. Why would it have a downside? What penalty? Did you try to curse someone? Is a ghost angry at you? Let me get you a prayer candle…

Price can be a good source of drama and angst. It can be one of the story’s conflict engines. I think, though, the way I keep seeing it discussed, price primarily functions as a limitation, a reason why magic isn’t the solution to all of life’s problems and may in fact cause its own. Price is typically an attempt to control magic use in stories so there’s no deus ex machina running rampant all over the place like a kaiju, breaking the suspension bridge of disbelief and stomping plot holes in the roads and otherwise destroying internal consistency.

But you can establish limitations that don’t default to some grim or grisly sacrifice, or enormous risk to those involved and possibly innocent bystanders. The “rules” for magic in a given fictional world can be rigid or flexible, clearly explicated or deliberately obfuscated, and you can still keep readers from asking the dreaded question: why didn’t they just…?

One alternate way to think of price is cost. Literally. Sometimes the price of magic is straight up money or access to materials. You can’t do magic if you can’t get the components. Simple comparison: plenty of people live in food deserts. Why can’t magic’s price be, “Oh no, the bodega downstairs is out of snake blood, and I can’t pay $10 for their dried frog skin anyway, guess this spell isn’t happening until my next paycheck or my cousin can drive me to Aldi”? Not a downside, but certainly a limitation.

Depending on the nature of magic in your story, you could also explore the ways in which people with limited money or access have to deal with substitutions as a matter of course. Maybe freshly harvested licorice root is ideal for a spell, but store-bought will work–with less potent results. Maybe a high-quality emerald will hold an enchantment best, but a cheaper peridot will get the job done–with occasional glitches. Maybe someone attempts a swap of thyme with something else in the mint family for a potion, hoping it’s close enough–and the effects are wildly different.

What if the expense of magic is similar to taking out a college loan, with equivalent social pressures? Maybe a debt collector isn’t going to literally eat your soul like a conjured demon might, but it’s close enough. (Or maybe there’s a cool soul-eating debt collector story waiting to be written…) If you think about it, magic loans might incentivize risky behavior if difficult-to-harvest reagents are more expensive. And imagine the secondary market for that stuff, like the used textbook market but backwards? “If I can get a claw scraping off that sleeping dragon, that takes care of two months of payments!”

There are, of course, many other ways to build limits into your magic systems. But don’t feel like you need to engage in literary contortion in an attempt to comply with a rule that isn’t actually set in stone. Ultimately, you should go with what works best for your story’s world and characters and plot and theme. Be thoughtful, be intentional, and keep a bottle of peroxide on hand if you do end up engaging in blood sacrifices. Don’t want to end up with stains on your good ritual robes.

I think a lot about antagonists.

Depending on the protagonist’s goals, it can be difficult to find believable or relatable reasons why someone would be working against them, without resorting to mustache-twirling levels of villainy. It’s also true that not every story needs an explicit antagonist, but it’s often helpful to create a character or two or ten who represent the antagonistic forces in a story.

And so, in the interests of making writing easier and making antagonists better, I offer some thoughts on possible avenues of interrogation that might lead to useful options.

• Who would be harmed by the protagonist’s success and how?
• Who would be helped by the protagonist’s failure and how?
• Whose enemy would be helped by the protagonist’s success?
• Whose ally would be helped by the protagonist’s failure?
• Who would benefit from the protagonist failing in a specific way?
• How would failing in a specific way prevent a larger potential harm caused by the protagonist’s success, or by a different form of failure?
• Who would believe the protagonist’s failure would serve the greater good, or be the lesser of two evils?
• Who would believe the protagonist’s immediate failure would be beneficial in the long run, even if it caused a short-term harm?
• Who would believe failure is in the protagonist’s best interests?
• Who has a compelling reason to defeat the protagonist at any cost?
• Who has the same underlying motivation as the protagonist and how are their goals mutually exclusive?
• Who might be opposing the protagonist based on incomplete information or outright lies?

All of these questions can work in reverse if you have a better idea of who your villain is and need to hone your protagonist instead. You can also expand them to cover potential allies and enemies more broadly, and to build factions as well as individuals. And, as with any list like this, feel free to only ponder the ones that help you, and ignore the rest!

Are there any variations on these kinds of questions that you use to figure out who your story’s antagonists are?

Blades in the Dark is a really cool tabletop RPG with a mechanic I love: progress clocks. I’ve been thinking for a while about how something like this can be used to outline a novel, and so I present to you: the Clock Outline.

Think of your novel as a series of clocks with different numbers of segments: four, six, twelve, you decide. Big clocks, little clocks. Fast and slow clocks. Obvious and secret clocks. Literal countdowns and figurative ones.

Actions your characters take either succeed, or succeed but cause some extra undesirable consequence to happen, or fail and cause harm and new problems (that may create a new clock). Each success or failure will cause a clock segment to be filled in on one or more of the clocks, and the hand of that clock will move closer to midnight.

You have one big clock for each large chunk of plot in the whole book, between 2 and 5 clocks, about 6-12 segments each. These could correspond with acts or sections. You also have many smaller clocks, 4-6 segments each. These could correspond with scenes or chapters, though some clocks will resolve across multiple chapters.

Every clock has a specific label delineating what will happen when it’s completely filled, for example: The Doomsday Weapon Will Be Complete, or Character A Falls In Love With Character B, or Character C Is Murdered. Clocks can involve external or internal consequences, main plots or subplots or side quests, individuals or factions, even character relationships over the course of the story.

Based on what will happen when each clock is filled, consider what kinds of actions might cause this outcome to become more likely. Also consider the ramifications of filling each individual clock segment.

Plotting then becomes a series of questions:

• What is the situation/setup/problem?
• What will your characters do?
• How do antagonistic forces react?
• What happens as a result?
• Which/how many clock segments are filled by this?

You don’t have to decide everything in advance; this method also works if you’re improvising! Create the clocks as you go based on how your story progresses. Fill them in when it feels right. Use them to track rather than plan.

You can physically draw clocks on a paper or whiteboard or similar to track this, and note what happens to fill each clock segment. Big clocks at the top, smaller clocks underneath, or work horizontally if your brain likes it better.

If drawing clocks is too visual, you could think of it as nested lists, or even lay the “clocks” out in spreadsheet columns, or treat it like filling out a planner—year, month, week and day segments breaking down the bigger and smaller plot points.

For those who like to think in tentpoles, these clocks can basically serve as countdowns to when those tentpoles happen. They’re a series of actions, choices, scenes and sequences, that lead inexorably to the next tentpole.

Caveat: as with all writing stuff, this method may not work for you, or for your current project, and that’s okay! Everyone is different and has different needs and preferences. Also: adapt it however you see fit! Use it for some parts and not others, make your own clocks, etc.

To learn more about Blades in the Dark and get your own copy of the rules, visit https://bladesinthedark.com.

And if you want to watch or listen to me and the rest of the Strange Friends crew play Blades in the Dark, head over to speculatesf.com.

If this looks familiar, it’s because I’m continuing to pull useful artifacts from certain deteriorating social media sites to preserve them in my own internet museum. Hope this one helps!

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I often write the pitch or blurb for my novels before anything else. I may scribble some notes here and there, spitball a few ideas, but that pitch helps me crystallize essential stuff that I can then expand into a synopsis, then an outline. It’s not quite the Snowflake Method, but it’s close.

So after writing so many pitches, I thought: how do I write them? What stuff do I include? How much coffee do I drink first and what does chartreuse smell like once the caffeine hits?

1. Magic.
2. Magic.
3. Magic.

But seriously, here’s what I do; maybe it will help you.

To write a pitch, I need three things. Three P’s, in fact. And sometimes an O. Hah, Threepio. Anyway. The three P’s: Protagonist(s), Place, Problem. Who is the main character? Where does the story take place? And what problem are they facing?

For the protagonist, I try to focus on what’s most relevant to the story. Whatever the reader needs to know for problem to make sense, to matter, and to suggest why THIS person is the one doing the stuff and why they’re worth following around.

For the place, I want to show how the world of the story is different from ours. Again, ideally I focus on things that are relevant to the character and problem. Think of every “in a world” setup you’ve heard in a movie trailer, and how it establishes the status quo.

For the problem, I try to tie it into character. Here is the thing that has gone wrong and needs fixing, the secret that forces the character to make a choice, the event or situation that sets them on the path to Hijinks. I establish the win condition and price of failure, aka the stakes.

What about the O in Threepio? That’s for Opposition. If you’ve got it, you can include something about people or forces trying to prevent your character from solving the problem. Sometimes (often) the opposition includes the character themself, getting in their own way.

Every story is different, so stuff won’t always fit neatly into the three P’s I’ve outlined. But it’s somewhere to start, and it can help focus you whether you’re planning a book or you’ve already written it and are trying to distill its essence for querying purposes. Good luck!

Continuing our chocolate fixation this month… This is from way back in May 2020. Still applicable, though my cake baking skills have improved! Which maybe proves my point?

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Here’s an allegory for writing. This morning, I wanted to bake something for my husband for his birthday. I’m not an experienced baker, by any means. Also, he’s vegan, so that means no eggs, no milk, no butter.

I started looking for recipes online. Breakfast stuff first: muffins, scones, etc. Do you know how to make a flax egg? Haha, me neither. Also we’re out of flax.

So I shifted to chocolate stuff. Brownies! Except I’ve made vegan brownies before. They didn’t go well. Basically, they were a bunch of loosely clumped crumbs that had to be eaten with a spoon. One brownie recipe advised you to stick the brownies in the fridge so they would firm up, and I know I’m being pissy, but that defeats the purpose of brownies for me. Also, I don’t have a square cake pan, which most of the recipes required. So I gave up on brownies.

By this point, the baby was wild and cranky, getting into fights with my son, who was complaining about wanting lunch. Already so late! I was sad, and tired. I’m not even a baker. Why was I wasting my time trying to do this? It would suck anyway. I should give up.

My mama didn’t raise quitters. I whined to friends and gave myself a few minutes to mope, then I kept looking for recipes. Okay, so I wouldn’t try to make a two-layer chocolate cake, but maybe cupcakes? And I finally found a recipe I had all the ingredients for.

I started making the cupcake recipe and realized, right after I mixed the wet ingredients, that I had already messed up. Put in WAY too much vinegar. That sure would have been something to taste test. I dumped it out and started over after another self-indulgent groanfest.

It finally came together. I put the cupcakes in the oven and got bold. Chocolate buttercream frosting. I’ve never made frosting in my life, but I was gonna do it. I used the wrong mixer attachment and then kept having to scrape the sides of the bowl but eventually… FROSTING.

And then, omg… CUPCAKES. They didn’t fall down in the middle! They didn’t explode over the edge! They were just cake in cups! Success was mine.

So I went from giving up on ever baking anything because I suck and I can’t do it, to this. POOPCAKES! I think the frosting looks like little emoji poops. I have a simple mind.

What does this have to do with writing? I mean, you probably connected those dots already, but… So many days, I feel like giving up. Like I can’t do it. Like writing is too hard and I’m a loser and how dare I even bother trying?

And then I do it anyway. Because yeah, maybe I’ll mess up. Maybe it’ll be the vegan brownie fiasco all over again. But. BUT. What if it isn’t?! What if it works this time? And you won’t know until you do it. And the more you do it, the better you get at it, even if it doesn’t feel that way.

Thanks for enjoying my poopcakes and my allegory. If you get discouraged, it’s okay and normal. You can take a break and feel your feels and then maybe, maybe, do the thing anyway?

The cupcakes were great by the way. And the frosting was effing sinful. FIN.

Cupcake recipe: https://chocolatecoveredkatie.com/vegan-chocolate-cupcakes-recipe/ Frosting recipe: https://lovingitvegan.com/vegan-chocolate-buttercream-frosting/

Given the impending holiday, it seemed appropriate to rescue this particular topic from the flames of social media hell before it melts. Enjoy!

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Having read through a few novel pitches for other people, and because I am always turning things into similes and metaphors, I have come up with yet another theory for How to Pitch. I call this one: What flavor is your chocolate?

Say your novel is chocolate, and you’re trying to sell it to other people. On the one hand, yum, chocolate! What more do you need to know? And yet, there are many kinds of chocolate. You want your potential chocolate enthusiast to know which kind they’re getting from your book.

As you’re writing the pitch, consider what makes this chocolate unique. What flavor is your character? What filling does your world contain? What fruits and nuts of plot give your chocolate texture? What shapes and sprinkles and decorative swirls of theme adorn the exterior?

What other chocolates might this one remind people of? What parts of those chocolates do you have in yours? You can potentially pique interest more easily if you know audience tastes and can convince them you’re giving them more of what they already like.

You don’t have to be verbose, but you do have to be clear and descriptive in a way that teases, tantalizes, creates expectations, makes your chocolate-craving audience reach for the delightful bonbon you’re offering them. Seduce them with your words.

You don’t have to tell them everything–sometimes there’s pleasure in the surprise. But they’ll never know if you don’t convince them to try it in the first place. If you’re too vague, too imprecise, they might reach for a different chocolate instead.

And maybe that’s good! You don’t want someone who’s allergic to dairy to grab your cream-filled milk chocolate truffle. Giving a clear indication of what to expect can help people make choices that are better for them, their tastes, their mood, whatever.

But you want the reader/eater to make the choice because of what they know about your book, and not because they don’t know enough. You don’t want them to pass yours by because it didn’t stand out from the many other apparently identical candy options.

Also, be honest! You don’t want someone to pick up your chocolate because you misled them into expecting one thing, only to hand them something else entirely. Sure, they might still like it, but they might also spit it back in your face and never trust you again.

So there you have it, friends. When you pitch, make sure you tell the agent, editor, prospective reader, whoever, exactly what flavor your chocolate is. Make their mouth water, and they’ll be happy to take a bite.

In preparation for NaNoWriMo a while back, a friend of mine asked about how to come up with subplots in novels. Here are some ideas, with a little discussion of TV writing as one way to think about structure.

The way I learned it back in college, in a typical TV show, there are at least three plots in every episode, called the A, B and C plots because simple is good. The A plot is the main story, the overarching drama or mystery or conflict that takes up most of the screen time and involves your main characters.

The B plot may somehow relate to the A plot, or it may be a separate thing. It may involve your main characters, or focus on secondary characters. It can relate to an ongoing season plot instead of just the episode plot. It gets second-most screen time.

The C plot fills the cracks in time between the other two plots. It’s usually lower-stakes interpersonal drama or comic relief, good for exploring relationships between secondary characters who need more fleshing out. It can also be a series plot, something that is teased here and there and eventually becomes a B plot, then the A plot.

So a novel subplot can be a B or C plot, either related to the main plot or tangential to it. The stakes are often not as high, but they can lead to good character development or world building opportunities. And if your C plot is a series plot, it can lurk in the background and surprise the characters at inconvenient times, creeping forward slowly or leaping in sudden bursts.

In terms of how much time is devoted to each plot, that’s up to you. Usually most time is spent on the A plot, maybe half that on the B plot, then half again on the C plot, but ratios can vary depending on stuff like having multiple character POVs or intertwined plots or themes. You might have multiple A, B or C plots, or start working your way down the alphabet until it’s not so much a plot as a running gag.

Subplots are especially useful in the Great Swampy Middle of a novel, as some call it. They can function as side quests, or nested goals to complete along the path of the main quest, or as big set pieces that are like mini-novels within a novel.

But Valerie, how do I come up with these magical forays into feels and factions and so on? Here are some questions you could ask yourself to generate ideas for these B or C plots.

What’s happening with the secondary characters? What goals are they pursuing? What are their character arcs and how are you going to show them? They’re people, too! They have wants and needs that may work with or against your protagonist. Potentially a good source of conflict.

Related to the previous questions: what interpersonal stuff is happening between your primary and secondary characters? Relationships can be romantic or platonic, friendly or fraught, and can grow and change along multiple axes in different ways.

What character baggage can you force them to deal with? Problems from their past, people they left behind, situations that went unresolved… Pull a few skeletons out of their closet and rattle them. Reopen old wounds; re-break bones that didn’t set properly so they can heal better. This goes for main or secondary characters.

What factions are operating in your larger world? What are their goals and how are they planning to accomplish them? How do those plans run parallel to, intersect with or even disrupt your main plot? Who might owe whom favors and why? Cash them in! Think of allies and adversaries for your protagonist here.

What world elements feed into the plot but are themselves separate and need to be dealt with? This could be a lot of things: bureaucratic red tape, legal hoops to jump through, physical or cultural challenges, disputes to settle before the main quest can continue… You can play with analogues to real-life problems here, but beware of the ripple effects and ramifications.

What secondary themes do you want to explore? This can be tricky to nail down in the planning stages, but having general ideas can be useful. Usually theme will suggest other stuff already mentioned, like character trajectory or faction interests or possible world complications.

Are there any other subplot generation methods that work for you? Drop a comment!