Author: Liz Busby

Liz Busby is a writer of creative non-fiction, technical writing, and speculative fiction. She loves reading science fiction, fantasy, history, science writing, and self help, as well as pretty much anything that holds still for long enough.

Turning Darkness into Light: What genre is this and how do I get more of it?

In some ways, I think that my love of Marie Brennan grows out of my love of Brandon Sanderson. The magic in Sanderson’s books is famously logical and scientific. In Mistborn, there are 16 metals and they all have a specific power which is bounded in its possibilities. Warbreaker has a particularly economic magic system where each person has a set amount of magic (“breath”) and in order to get more, you have to literally take someone else’s. In these worlds, you as a reader understand what is possible, the inputs and outputs. The “magic” of the book comes from the clever manipulation of these given tools to solve problems.

Marie Brennan’s series The Memoirs of Lady Trent takes this a step further. Dragons are simply an animal, a creature like any other, and that’s it. There’s no magic, no wizards, only a question of what would it look like if early Enlightenment natural philosophers were studying dragons instead of, well, whatever less cool animals they studied. In spite of the dragons on the covers, the plot of each of the five books is much less about fantastical elements or accomplishing some unknown feat than it is about travelling to an area, doing careful research and observations, perhaps some experiments, and then drawing conclusions from that about the biology and history of the world.

Cover for Turning Darkness into Light

Her new book Turning Darkness into Light is the next logical step. Not only is there no magic or saving the world, but there are hardly any dragons at all, except in the myth that the main scholars are translating. That’s actually the main action of the novel: three people in a room trying to decipher an ancient text and understand the impact it will have on the world. Granted, one of them is a draconean, but his exotic nature matters mostly in his relationship to the text and what he has at stake because of it.

And yet Brennan manages to make this fascinating. Some ways that I think this works:

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Winter 2020 Writer Goals & Habits

I’m a huge New Year’s resolution maker. Actually, scratch that. I’m a huge all-the-time resolution maker. I absolutely love self-improvement and making plans for change. Following through on them, I’m not always as good at, but by aiming for the moon, I’ve often grabbed a few stars.

I’m pulling ideas from a couple different places to set my writing goals for the next few months. Digital Minimalism by Cal Newport suggested setting your goals on a roughly semester basis, which appeals to the school geek in me, so these Winter 2020 goals extend to May when I’ll select some summer semester projects. Atomic Habits by James Clear encouraged me to focus on the smallest possible unit of action: going small often makes a bigger difference than going big, which is always a temptation for a planner and goal setter like me. And I stole the three areas of my goals from DIY MFA, which suggested them as the benefits provided by an MFA program which you can replicate yourself without the expense of tuition.

So without further ado, my Winter 2020 writing plan:

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5 Thoughts from Winning NaNoWriMo for the First Time, and What’s Next

I did it! I started this month with zero words in my novel Alchemist of Heroes, and on Saturday, I finished with 50,076 words in my novel. A few notes from my NaNoWriMo experience:

1. Don’t quit, even if the book you are writing is terrible. I spent the second weekend of NaNoWriMo worrying about what to do about my novel. My plot was stuck, I had no idea where to go from here or how to make it believeable. I didn’t like my main character because she was too passive. I thought about just starting my book over again with a different angle. But I didn’t. On Monday, I just did a five year time jump and kept going. And I started to like my book again. But I got plot-blocked at least two more times during the month, where I had no idea how to write what my outline said I was supposed to write next. One of the most valuable things I learned from NaNo was to keep writing and not worry about how it would turn out and if the writing would be worth it. I ignored self-doubt and kept going, and it turned out better than I thought. By writing through to the end, I found that it is normal and expected to feel like whatever you are currently working on is terrible. Finish it first, then decide if it’s terrible.

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NaNoWriMo Week 2 Debrief

Been feeling pretty good this week. Got tired by Friday but a break all day Saturday has me fired up to go again. About 1000 words behind my personal timeline, but ahead of the NaNoWriMo website goal, so I’ll call it even. Notes from this week:

  • The details of my magic system are finally coming to me as I’m writing situations in which my characters have to use it. I guess discovery writing does work. I’m really happy with the way it’s coming together, as one of my biggest fears about fiction writing is not having any ideas.
  • Though I love my favorite writing podcasts, I found that listening to good fiction right before writing made it easier to start. I’ve been listening to Howl’s Moving Castle this week and I’ve been much more productive. (Also, incidentally, Dianna Wynne Jones is clearly a discovery writer with a meandering plot and she doesn’t explain tons about the magic and yet it works so well. Very heartening.)
  • For writing scenes with lots of dialogue, I have found it easier to spew out a lot of lines of discussion and ideas I want to include and then go back and add in the stage directions and who says what. As I do, the dialogue also gets refined.
  • Everyone has crappy first drafts. Even Brandon Sanderson. Keep going so you’ll at least have something to fix.

NaNoWriMo Week 1 Debrief

Well, I ended the first week of NaNoWriMo with exactly 10,000 words, only 400-ish words behind my personal timeline. Doing my first NaNo has been both easier and more terrifying than I thought it would be. Easier in that laying down a specific scene hasn’t been too bad, but harder in that making up the details of the world building is still really difficult for me. More short lessons from the first week.

  • It’s true that you can do anything for 15 minutes. Sprints force me to stop thinking about things and just put some words on the paper. I’m always surprised what ideas come up when I just press forward. Then 5-10 minutes of planning in between sprints let me recover and reincorporate those new ideas towards the original outline.
  • Writing with peer pressure makes a difference. The sprints channel in our Seattle NaNo discord has been a lifesaver for me for instant competition any time of day to push me to actually get to work.
  • I broke the outline again. And again. I’m becoming more and more of a pantser every day of this NaNo. We’ll see where this leads.
  • Listening to history can give you great ideas. I pulled a Great Courses lecture series on French Revolution to listen to during NaNo, since I wanted to base some of the overall historical narrative on it. The little details, though, are proving ridiculously helpful in sparking new scenes.
  • I should have spent more outlining time defining some settings. My story didn’t have a tight enough focus to be set in one place as originally planned. I should have spent more time on inventing locations rather than world-building countries. Visualizing things in my head is not a strong suit so the locations have definitely been a struggle.