Category: writing

editing, Life Talk, philosophy, publishing, stories, writing

Finished! (Well, Sorta)

elouisebates

Monday evening right before dinner, I typed the last words to my final short story planned for this summer. I still have plenty (PLENTY) of editing to do on all five stories and the novella, but the actual creating part is done.

So weird this morning not to open up a document on my computer as soon as I got up.

I’m not going to write anything (except blog posts and Twitter/FB updates, naturally) for the rest of this week. Give it all a chance to simmer. Clean my poor neglected house. Make bread. Finish organizing the school supplies for this fall.

I’m making a good start on cleaning up other projects already – I have the main body of Grace’s sunshine quilt all sewn and almost all the borders on. After that, it’s a simple matter of assembling, tying, and binding (which will still take a long time, but not as long as the putting together of the quilt top itself).

I was nervous about setting myself such a definite goal and project for this summer – a collection of short stories and/or a novella to indie publish this fall. And it’s definitely stretched me, and I definitely will never again set myself such a tight time frame for a relatively major project while my kids are still little, but it’s also been great. I’ve proven to myself that I CAN do this, I can accomplish something when I set my mind to it, I don’t always have to be the person who loses heart partway through.

Granted, there’s still a great deal to do. I have a copy-editor, but I still need to figure out cover design and formatting, along with the aforementioned edits.

But the end is in sight. I see the light at the end of the tunnel. I have confidence that I’m going to get there, and confidence is half the battle, right?

The other tremendously important thing I’ve learned this summer is that, while making writing my career is so vital to me, it’s not worth family. Honestly, that’s said so often that it’s completely cliche, but I’ve never been entirely certain of its veracity before. Not until I actually had to make the choice every day: kids/husband or writing? The times I chose the family I do not regret at all, and the times I chose writing … well, sometimes taking a break from my family WAS needful for my sanity (hey, just trying to be completely transparent here), but mostly, I have learned that spending time with my family over my writing will always be the choice that leaves me the most satisfied. And it was good to have the opportunity to learn that for myself, instead of wistfully looking at my piles of unfinished writing projects and suspecting that all those writers that talk about family over writing are just blowing hot air.

My next writing project, after I’ve published these stories, will be to polish up Magic & Mayhem (I have GOT to think of a better title) over the fall and winter, with the loosely-held goal of indie publishing that in Spring 2013. And maybe a few other sneaky side projects along the way – I’ve discovered that short stories can be rather fun.

I’m sure I’ll have plenty other thoughts throughout the rest of the summer on what I’ve learned from this particular writing project, so stay tuned.

If I’m very diligent, I’ll even be able to post pictures of the sunshine quilt before fall, too.

We’ll see!

Joy’s quilt – we’re using the same nine-patch pattern for Grace’s, but with yellows instead of pinks. They are going to look SO ADORABLE side-by-side in the littles’ room once it’s all finished!

writing

I Am a Writer

elouisebates

I got brave yesterday.

We were at a cookout after church, chatting with friends we’ve only known for a short while. I was asking the wife what she did, and then she asked me if I stayed home with the girls or if I worked outside the home. I gathered up all my courage and said,

“Yeah, I’m a writer, so I can stay home with the girls and work my schedule around them.”

I always feel like such a fraud saying that. I’m not published! I’m not earning any money off my writing! How can I claim that for myself?

But it’s the truth. I am a writer, no matter what, and it’s about time I stopped selling myself short.

And the really neat thing? She got all excited and told me that her husband is a writer, too, only he hardly ever has time to write anything anymore, and he hasn’t had anyone really to talk to about writing since leaving college, and it was so great to actually meet another writer.

So then I laughed and confessed how hard it was for me to say that about myself, and her husband (who had joined us by this point) laughed too and said he totally understood.

Turns out it didn’t really require that much courage after all.

How about that?

Stories are everywhere, if you just know where to look …

Speaking of being a writer, I did recently start a Facebook page for my writing. If following through FB is up your alley, check it out and let me know what you think! https://www.facebook.com/elbateswriter

(Interestingly enough, I also told someone else about the writing yesterday afternoon. She asked how my week had been, I said full, she wanted to know with what, so I told her that I’ve been working every spare moment on putting together a collection of short stories to independently publish this fall. She wasn’t quite as enthusiastic as the other, but she didn’t stand up and scream “FAKE” or anything, and even seemed fairly interested, so all in all, points for bravery and honesty.)

favorites, goals, influences, philosophy, stories, writing

The Why Behind the Word

elouisebates

Life has been weighing heavily on my shoulders this week. You know how it is sometimes? It seems like everywhere you turn there’s more tragedy, more brokenness, more need, more heartache, and it’s all so much you don’t even know where to begin.

And it’s not just the sad stuff. You read stories of people triumphing against the odds to rescue a street boy from an impossible life in Africa. Firefighters doing ridiculous things to save people’s homes in Colorado. People advocating for those who have no voice. All over, people doing their part to bring healing to this broken world.

And this is what always gets me – the need is so big, and so widespread, and others seem to know what to do to meet at least some of the need, but I get so overwhelmed and feel so feeble. What can I offer? Where do I begin? How do I take care of what’s already been entrusted to me and still have something left to give to the world?

Tuesday night, I heard that my hometown was shredded by a micro burst. Literally. Several downtown building were horrifically damaged, including the local hardware store where I worked from when I was a young teenager right up to a week before I got married. The store my dad has worked at for over 30 years. The roof was lifted completely off and flung into the river, and the sub roof couldn’t hold out the rain, and the water just flooded in. At one point they weren’t even sure they could salvage the building.

I was sick. Just sick, thinking about it. And Wednesday morning, when I heard about the community coming in and pulling together to help bring the store back from the brink, to the point where it could re-open for business this afternoon and start giving back to the rest of the community, it killed me that I couldn’t rush right home and join in.

But Grace woke up puking that morning, and I had to take care of her. No home-rushing heroics for me. At one point during the morning I looked at the short spy story document open on my computer and put my head right down on the table and said “WHY? Why do I write? What good does this possibly do in the long run? Why am I spending my time on this earth writing instead of doing … something?”

(And then I had to go hold the puke bucket for Grace again. Truth.)

The more I thought (and prayed) about it, though, the more certain things started to come clear. Would I even be the type of person who wants to do something if it weren’t for the books I grew up reading? Would I be the Louise I am today if I hadn’t grown up with Lucy and Edmund, Anne and Diana, Randy and Rush, Taran and Eilonwy, Will and Bran, and all the rest? In my “Influences” posts, the common thread is that not only did these books shape me as a writer, they shaped me as a person.

It’s an odd circle – if it weren’t for people doing great things, writers wouldn’t be able to imagine such deeds to write about. If it weren’t for writers creating great heroes and deeply compassionate characters, real people might never be inspired to do great things themselves. We need books to show us the people we want to be.

That’s why I write. I write to bring hope, to inspire courage, to give comfort and encouragement. Even in real life, my role has always, since childhood, been that of an encourager. Writing is my way of spreading that beyond my circle of immediate family and friends. It doesn’t excuse me from acting in real life, too (and I pray that I will always be ready, in season and out, to act where I am needed and able), but it helps to give me a purpose, to remind me that my writing is not just for escapism or amusement. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, either (and certainly my spy stories are mostly sheer indulgent fun), but that can’t be all. Not for me.

This all sounds kind of pompous, looking it over now. “See me, how noble my goals are for my writing!” I don’t mean it that way. Rather, it makes me humble, seeing how very far I have to go before I can live up to my own hopes. And it helps to keep me grounded – when I have a day that I can’t write because my poor baby is retching on the couch, I can let that go more easily, because this is the real life that the writing is supposed to help inspire me toward.

My very favorite sort of stories are those of ordinary people doing extraordinary things. And I hope that’s the life I can live, and the stories I can write to encourage others along the same path.

philosophy, writing

Unconventional Wisdom

elouisebates

This is one of those Monday morning where I hunch glassy-eyed over my computer, hands wrapped around my favorite Stars on Ice coffee mug, blearily wishing I had written a post last night like I had originally planned instead of blithely assuming my brain would be working better in the morning.

HA HA. Merriment! (as Eeyore would say.)

For the last few weeks, I started getting up half an hour earlier than my usual time. Yesterday and today, I managed to bump that back by another half hour. This has been fantastic, because I used to get up about five minutes before my kids (who are ridiculously early risers, and will probably be the teens who bounce out of bed smiling at six in the morning – wait, do those sorts of teenagers even exist? If they do, my girls will definitely be among their ranks), and the day started with “Mommy I need this” and just kept going from there.

Now I get time in the morning to start my day with a large glass of water I can drink straight down without interruption. I open my Bible and get a chapter or two read. I brew my coffee, talk quietly (so as not to wake the littles up early) with my husband before he heads off to work, make my breakfast, check my blogs, and if I am very good (or there are very few blogs that morning), even get in a few moments of writing time before thump, thump, thump “MOMMY!” is heard and my daily duties begin.

I know conventional wisdom says I should use all that time to write. Honestly, though, I’ve never been much for conventional wisdom. I am a better person, and therefore a better writer, by spending my morning routine this way. I am hoping at some point to push this getting-up business back by another half hour, which ought to give me all the time I need to do all this AND write in the morning.

I’ll be going to bed every night at 9:00 by that point in time, but who cares? I’m thirty years old, married eight years (tomorrow), with kids out of the toddler stage and into the kid stage – I’M OLD. I can go to bed at 8:30 if I want!

My writing has not been suffering for my new morning routine. It has improved, as fact. Nor are my kids suffering from neglect – I’ve been spending more time throughout the day interacting with them, too. My house is generally a wreck, but out of all the things I can let go, that’s top of the list. I do still manage to get meals on the table, even though they might not be as fancy as sometimes since I’m not wanting to spend as much time in the kitchen.

I have three short stories and one novella in the editing stages. One short story ready for the second draft. One partway through the outlining process, two partway through the first draft. And all this since June. That is shockingly prolific for me.

So I guess what I’m getting to here is, sometimes conventional wisdom has to be thrown out the window. Preferably a second- or third-story window for a more satisfying crash at the landing. Find what works best for you, what helps you become the best person you can be, and the writing will follow. Conventional wisdom doesn’t know you; only you know that, and so only you can decide what your best life and writing path will look like.

And above all, find joy in it!

Books, critiquing, writing

Collaboration and Community

elouisebates

I’ve been spending most of my time this weekend (and Monday) getting my short stories ready to send to the lovely, lovely people who volunteered to critique them for me (and attempting to clean my house, burning out the belt on my vacuum, deciding to forget housecleaning and making baked doughnuts with the kids instead), but I did scratch out enough time to read through The Floating Admiral.

Have you heard of it? It’s a joint effort by the Detection Club (some notable members: Agatha Christie, GK Chesterton, Dorothy Sayers, Anthony Berkeley, Freeman Wills Croft … etc) to see if they could detect a mystery without knowing the end. Each person wrote one chapter, and then handed it off to the next without any hints. Anthony Berkeley had the unenviable task as the end of trying to make sense of the preceding tangle of clues and evidence, and wrapping it up in a tidy solution (which he did BRILLIANTLY), and then in an appendix at the back, each author revealed his or her own solution.

It was fascinating. I loved it. Both as a mystery fan and a writer. As a mystery fan, it was delightful to see each writer try to guess where the previous writer had been pointing, and to contrast the different styles of writing and detection. As a writer, I loved seeing the way they played off each other and used each other to make their own writing stronger. My favorite part, honestly, was the appendix where they all revealed their solutions, because it showed so plainly the way each of them crafted their stories (Agatha Christie’s solution, by the way, was the most preposterous, and yet you KNOW that if she had written the entire thing, we would have swallowed it without hesitation). From Sayers’ complex and tidy backstory and timetable to Clemence Dane’s frank admittance that it was all a muddle to him and he just tried to leave it open so that Berkeley could finish it off in any way he pleased, it was great.

Trying to read it as one cohesive detective story would be fairly exhausting, and judging by some of the negative reviews I’ve read of this, that’s where many people go wrong. Reading it for the enjoyment of seeing all these authors work together and blend their many different styles (the main detective in the story, Inspector Rudge, ends up being a character of so many layers and great depth, simply because he is written by so many different people – just watching his character develop was half the fun for me) is the way to go with this story.

I’ve been plotting a joint fanfiction story with two of my good friends (Adrienne and Cathy, we really need to get moving on this!), consisting of letters and journal entries between three cousins. It’s not the same premise as The Floating Admiral, but much of the idea is the same – we each have our own idea of our character’s story, and the fun and challenge will be weaving them together into something cohesive.

This is one of those aspects of writing that thrills me. As much as I love crafting stories and bringing characters to life on my own, I also love the thought of being part of a community of writers. The very idea of the Detection Club makes me happy, much like the Inklings (if given the option of going back in time and sitting in on only one meeting of those two groups, I’d be hard-pressed to pick between them). Can you imagine if the Inklings had written a joint-effort fantasy like the Detection Club did with The Floating Admiral? It would have been amazing and hysterical, all at once.

Twitter and blogs are a wonderful way to build writers’ communities; one of the reasons I’m thrilled to have critique partners for my short stories is because it is yet another way to build that same sense of community. Ultimately, though, nothing quite beats in-person meetings of a regular sort, to discuss and laugh and help each other become better writers.

Maybe someday – for now, I’m thankful, so very thankful, for these internet communities I can call my own.

stories, writing

Louise’s Short Story Lessons

elouisebates

After finishing my most recent edit of Magic and Mayhem, I decided it was time to stretch my writing comfort zone a little, and try my hand at some short stories. You know, because I’m such a terse writer, so good at brevity and clarity, using a minimum of words to convey a maximum of ideas.

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA.

It’s been a learning experience, to say the least. One short story has turned into a novelette. One just managed to squeak in under 7,000 words, but I did have a stroke of brilliance the other day about some editing I can do in order to pare it down by a thousand words or so. One has had two or three incarnations, and is currently mocking me in its still-unfinished state. One seems promising right now, but I have to keep going back and deleting half of it, because my characters go and get all wordy and rambly and off-track.

However! Along with this frustration (I was estimating how long most of Agatha Christie’s short stories were the other evening, and tossed aside the book with a wail of despair. HOW did she pack so much into so few words?), I’m actually learning some useful tips for writing short stories, and thought I’d share them here. So,

  1. Outline. Letting your characters and plot meander about while you figure out what’s happening one step ahead of them may work well enough in a novel, but short stories need outlines. detailed outlines. Outlines that are practically a story in and of themselves.
  2. Eliminate irrelevancies. This one is both hard and painful for me. I adore irrelevancies! Just look at how many parenthesis I use in any given blog post! Irrelevancies are my life’s blood! Only not in a short story.
  3. Pare down the cast. Casts of thousands might work well in fantasy epics; not so much in short stories.
  4. Have a point, and stick to it. See #2.
  5. Be ruthless. I know this is a general rule for writing novels, as well, but even more so with short stories. I don’t care how brilliantly written the heroine’s walk through the woods is, it is taking up 1,000 words to advance her somewhere that could be achieved with 10. Cut it. If you love it that much, save it to use in a novel someday.
  6. Keep scrap paper nearby for jotting down issues and problems as they arise, or interesting potential plot bunnies, or anything that is going to interfere with the tight flow of the story. You might need them later, or find you can use them in something else (see #5), but visually, you don’t want them with the story itself.
  7. Study how the greats do short stories. Chances are, you might see a pattern. Besides, it will give you something worthwhile to read while your own stories are dancing circles around you.
  8. Keep the words and sentences themselves brief. It will help your brevity overall. Hard to stick with 7,000 words when you use 500 of those words in the very first sentence.
  9. When you get too frustrated, take a break. Write poetry. Draw something. Sew. Cook. Clean. Write long, rambling blog posts to get the need for MANY WORDS out of your system. If you get too, too frustrated, go back to novels. It’s ok if short stories never become your thing.
  10. I don’t really have a tenth point. I just didn’t want to end this with nine.
Obviously, some of these points only apply to me (#6, especially, is just personal preference), but I hope anyone can glean some wisdom from them. What about you? Do you have any tips for writing good short stories?
1920s, Books, heroines, influences

Influences: Agatha Christie

elouisebates

As a kid, I had pretty bad problems with nightmares. The tabloid pictures of the infamous “Bat-Boy” scared me so badly I couldn’t walk through the checkout line at the grocery store for years. Years.

So it may come as a surprise that I adore mysteries. However, I don’t read the really gruesome stuff. I mostly love the mystery writers from the Golden Age – Dorothy L Sayers (LORD PETER FTW!!!!!); Anthony Berkeley; Margery Allingham (Campion may start out as a pale imitation of Lord Peter, but quickly develops into his own charming self); Josephine Tey; Ngaio Marsh; and I’ve been trying to read Freeman Wills Croft for years but only just recently found ONE of his books free for Kindle so I’ll finally be able to give him a chance …

And of course, the queen of them all, Agatha Christie.

The first Agatha Christie I ever read was The A.B.C. Murders. I know, an odd pick for someone prone to nightmares! I should have started with Tommy and Tuppence. Still, it was better to start with that one than with And Then There Were None, which was my other choice at the time. And amazingly enough, though I didn’t dare put it down before finishing it (for fear the serial killer would come after me before I learned his/her identity, duh), I didn’t get any nightmares from it. Just extreme fascination.

David Suchet IS Hercule Poirot. No one else comes close.

I quickly fell in love with the fussy little Belgian detective Poirot, and with the masterful way Christie wove her stories and her characters so intricately with each other. It wasn’t long before I’d read every Christie book that my mother owned, and had moved on to the library, and then onto buying them for myself. At this point in my life, my Agatha Christie collection has spilled off my bookshelves, and I am now stacking the books on top of each other because I’ve run out of room for them anywhere else.

Some are less brilliant than others; some recycle the same plot under a different guise (as Dame Agatha herself slyly informs us in the person of Mrs Oliver, the most beautiful self-insert ever created); some are implausible; some frankly impossible; all of them are a delight to read. I started out a die-hard fan of Poirot, grew into a Tommy and Tuppence fangirl, and at this point in my life am firmly Team Marple. Murder at the Vicarage is one of my favorite stories of all time, and who can help but love the opening to The Body in the Library?

“But the worst is so often true.”

(While on the topic of Mrs Oliver, her indignation at the assumption she bases all of her characters on real people, as well as her description of how she does come up with her characters (in, I believe, Hallowe’en Party), is so exactly along the lines of how I feel and the way I work that it never ceases to astonish and gratify me, every time I read it. And whenever I read now about authors who DO blatantly base characters off of real people, I wonder how on earth they can do so and still feel that the character belongs to them.)
Much of Maia, the MC of my 1920s adventure fantasy, is inspired by Virginia Revel of The Secret of Chimneys, as well as Bundle Brent, Anne Beddingfeld, Frankie Derwent, Tuppence herself, and others of Christie’s “plucky girl sleuths.” I think I love Virginia especially because she is older and has already HAD adventures, and yet is eager for more (“Oh Anthony! How perfectly screaming!” she says upon revelation of the hero’s Dark Secret), and Anne for her impulsive yet essentially practical outlook on life (the way she cheeks Lord Nasby into giving her a job is priceless). “Let’s have an adventure” is pretty much what my outlook on life has always been, and it’s mostly thanks to Christie (well, CS Lewis shares some responsibility for that).
This image of Tommy and Tuppence is sheer delight
Agatha Christie truly is one of the greatest writers of all time, and while I’ve come a long way from that young girl delightfully shivering as she read about Poirot and Hastings tracking down an alphabetical maniac, I will never outgrow my pure enjoyment of her books. What better tribute can I give?
Books, children, fantasy, writing

To Parent or Not

elouisebates

It’s one of the most common topic of discussion for YA and MG fantasy – what to do about the parents?

The orphaned hero is become so cliched that people do tend to roll their eyes automatically when they see it, but writers seem to be left with little choice – either create some elaborate scheme to have the parents out of the picture, or just kill them off, because if the parents are around, much of the tension for the young protagonist is removed.

Oddly enough, I’m not a huge fan of that whole “remove the parents” idea, though. I know that it’s mostly because I am a parent now. But it’s also because while it makes it trickier for the protagonist to be the one driving the story, it also adds another level of tension – how does one go about having magical adventures when one’s mother is right there reminding one to keep safe and be smart? And what does a mother (or father) do when adventure finds one’s child – go with the natural instinct to protect one’s kid, or stay in the background and allow the kid to learn through experience?

These are the sorts of themes I really do enjoy seeing played out in books.

DSC_0009Edward Eager and E. Nesbit both handle parental presence well in their books. Usually, the parents are completely unaware of magic, and that unawareness becomes in itself another obstacle – the mother in Half Magic thinks she’s going mad because of all the magic she’s witnessing; Anthea has to go to extreme measures to hide from her mother that the magic carpet took the baby away in The Phoenix and the Carpet; Granny gets her hands on the magic book in Seven-Day Magic and leads the children on a madcap adventure they can’t escape until they get the book back, because she thinks she’s just dreaming … and so on and so forth. My favorite Eager parents, though, are Martha and Katharine, both of whom had magical adventures when they were children, and aren’t afraid to set their children straight when it comes to magic. And in The Time Garden, when the children travel back in time and end up in one of their parents’ magical adventures, and have to rescue them, it gets thoroughly delightful (side note: I wonder at what point in time did Martha, Katharine, Jane and Mark look at each other and realize, “OH! Those strange children from our desert island adventure that time – those were OUR KIDS”?) and mayhem-y.

I read a duology recently where the daughter was kidnapped to a magical realm to help free her father from a spell there, and the mother went back voluntarily to rescue the daughter. I thought the concept was fabulous, except in execution, the mother spent most of her time as a prisoner in the palace, dithering about what was best to do, while the daughter escaped her kidnappers and had wild piratical adventures while on her way to rescue her father. It was a bit of a disappointment, because I really, really wanted to see a YA book that had an equally strong mother and daughter – in the same place but separated, both having awesome adventures.

I guess maybe someday I’ll just have to write that story myself.

What are some good example you can think of for parental inclusion in YA or MG adventures? Do you prefer to read stories where the children have to work with or around the parents, or where the parents just aren’t there at all? Would you want to read a story that features both kids AND adults being awesome?

critiquing, writing

Objective

elouisebates

I promise, this is my last navel-gazing post for a while. Really.

It’s just, I think I’ve had a breakthrough in figuring out some of my frustrations with where I’m at with my writing (and a lot of other areas of life) right now.

It isn’t so much that publication is my goal. But I DO want to be read by others, and this is a major reason why:

When I love something, I want to do it as well as I possibly can. I don’t have to be the absolute best at something, but I want to do it as best as I can. I love to write stories, and I want to write good stories. And the problem is that for so long, only people who love (or at least like) me have been reading my writing and commenting on it. And they’re nice to me. Not since college have I had someone completely objective reading my work and commenting on it (I’m assuming that the objective readers on ff.net are the ones who simply don’t comment), and so I no longer know from someone else’s perspective what my strengths and weaknesses are as a writer (aside from the grammatical weaknesses Laura pointed out on my last piece she critiqued. I do know my technical writing issues, just not the creative aspect so much).

I’m the same way with music. When I was taking voice lessons, my awesome teacher never hesitated to tell me when something was good and when it needed work. Occasionally by banging her head on the piano keys, but hey, it got the message across (there was also the threat of  “if you sing like you’ve swallowed your tongue ONE MORE TIME I’m reaching in your mouth myself and pulling your tongue,” which was remarkably effective). Since stopping lessons, I’m kind of adrift – not sure anymore of my strengths as a singer and my weaknesses.

I don’t need to be the next JK Rowling. Nor do I need to be a concert vocalist or the next American Idol (or whatever current singing-related show is popular now – I can’t keep up). What I do need is to be the very best Louise I can be at whatever it is I do. Somehow.

Objectivity. It’s a beautiful thing. And it can be so hard to gain when you don’t have someone outside of yourself assisting you. My husband is always happy to help me where he can, but he’s my husband, he has to be nice to me. I’m pretty sure that was in our vows.

Naturally, realizing all this doesn’t help me actually gain that needed objectivity to my own skills, but it does at least help me from feeling generally “I suck”-ish about said skills. Which is good.

So. Knowledge gained. Good thing. Next step, finding those objective observers. Which will take more work, but hey. I’m never scared of lofty goals so long as they are defined. It’s the vague ones that scare me.

Books, fantasy, heroes, influences, world-building

Influences: Terry Brooks

elouisebates

I’ve always liked the name Will. William seems stodgy to me, and Bill boring (or, as one William I know once put it, “a bill is a duck’s mouth, NOT a person’s name”), but I do like Will.

I put the responsibility for that squarely on the shoulders of two authors: Susan Cooper, for her fantastic Will Stanton; and Terry Brooks, for Wil Ohmsford of The Elfstones of Shannara.

I still vividly remember finding this book for the first time. It was at our old library, the one we’d been going to since before I was born. I had looked through the entire children’s section and realized that I had read, if not all the books, almost all of them, and certainly all the ones that interested me (the Goosebumps books were completely safe from ever being borrowed by me). So, for the first time ever, I crossed the middle of the library into the adult section. I have no idea how old I was.

The above cover was the first thing I saw in the adult section. The very word “elfstones” caught my interest, followed very quickly by the Robin Hood-esque characters pictured. I added it to my pile, brought it home, started reading, and was instantly immersed.

The second Brooks book I read was The Druid of Shannara, which confused me horribly until I realized we were talking two separate Ohmsford generations, here. I didn’t care so much about Walker, but I loved all the tidbits about Wren, and, not having Wikipedia at my fingertips back in those days, went back to the library and found all the Shannara books they had and began skimming them, trying to find the one that would tell me more about Wren. I finally found The Elf Queen of Shannara, and as you might have guessed, loved every word. I think I named a character “Wren” in every story I wrote for ages after that. She was awesome.

Over time, I’ve read all of the Shannara books except the short stories and graphic novels (and finally got them all in the right order), and most of the Landover series, too. I also read Sometimes the Magic Works, which is still probably my favorite book on writing, from a writer, ever (I also really love Madeleine L’Engle’s A Circle of Quiet, but that’s more of a book on life, from a writer, than just a book on writing).
As I’ve grown and broadened my fantasy horizons, I can see a lot more of the flaws in Brooks’ writing than before. He certainly has no shame in utilizing tropes, or in using the same ideas and themes over and over (and over and over). His best books are, I think, his Word & Void books, which are gritty and dark, magic mixing with modern reality in a completely believable (and terrifying) way. The fantasy ones get repetitive after a bit, and I think the ones set in the more “modern” fantasy times (The Voyage of the Jerle Shannara books, and the High Druid books) are his weakest. My personal favorite is still Elfstones, both because it is the first I ever read, and for its characters – Wil, Amberle, Eretria, and Prince Ander.
Brooks is one of those rare writers who combines brilliant world-building with unique and dimensional characters (for the most part. Like I said, the later books get repetitive). And while someone today might dismiss him as following too many tropes, you have to remember that he is directly responsible for some of those things becoming tropes – other writers have copied off of him, turning his originality into tropes.
Sacrifice on a personal level for a greater, impersonal good is a continuing theme woven throughout his works. So is familial love, stronger than any spell. So is the seductive lies of evil contrasted with the harsh reality of good. So is the idea of one person, no matter how seemingly insignificant, refusing to give in to hatred and darkness, and turning the tide of the battle.
Cliches? Maybe. Truths that are important for people to be reminded of, even in fantasy version? Absolutely.
Not all evils can be fought with a sword (or elfstones). But evil can and must be fought every day, in all its various forms, by those who love peace, love goodness, love love itself. And I for one always appreciate the reminder of that I always get in Brooks’ works, and try to incorporate some of those truths in all my own works, whether it be the obvious point of the story or simply the truth hidden behind my writing.
Heroes don’t always look heroic, but the world needs them just the same.