Back in the 1990s there was a spate of little aphorism books stuffed full of one-line insights (supposedly) about how we could get our shit together, live our best lives, etc. One of which offered this advice: work on your weaknesses until they become your strengths. As a writer, I don’t think that’s completely good advice (maybe not in other realms either).
It’s important to fix weaknesses if they’re serious ones doing us harm. A good friend of mine, for instance, was horrible at meeting deadlines. They’d dawdle until it was almost too late, then engage in an all-out, no-holds-barred rush to get it done. And usually miss the deadline. Their books were good enough the publisher didn’t drop them but they burned out on the tight squeeze. Working on that weakness would have kept them writing (don’t worry, they’re happy with their post-writing life).
On the other hand, as novelist Lawrence Block once put it, it’s easy for even a successful writer to decide good writing is whatever they can’t do. Sure, they’re successful sword-and-sorcery writers but their characterization, it’s not deep and complex! Sure they’re characterization is complex but they’re world-building isn’t good enough! Then they obsess over the things they can’t do and try turning them into strengths. If the weakness doesn’t hurt your career, that’s a waste of energy.
For example, reading Alex Bledsoe’s The Hum and the Shiver and Lucy Blue’s The Devil Makes Three made me realize I almost never write a-hole characters unless they’re the villains. Both books include a supporting character who’s a complete dick: bullying, racist (the Blue book), utterly unpleasant to be around. Well executed and written in both cases.
I hate characters like that. It’s hard for me to read about them. I have no wish to write them into a book. I might if the book called for it but it’s not my preference.
Is that a weakness? Maybe. It is a part of reality I’m making a conscious choice to avoid. Does that mean I should work on it until writing horrible, bullying characters is one of my strengths? Probably not. It wouldn’t be fun for me. I don’t think my books suffer from the lack of them. And I don’t think I’d transform my admittedly modest career into a blockbuster sensation if I did. Better to concentrate on the stuff I do well.
On the other hand, a weakness I do work on is crowd scenes. My mind doesn’t like to write groups of people as faceless crowds of extras. In the opening of Southern Discomfort, for instance, Maria’s on a Greyhound bus, worried the cops are closing in on her and compulsively checking out the other passengers. The one-handed black guy across the aisle from her, reading The Real Cool Killers. A white woman chain-smoking. A white teenage girl restlessly chewing bubble gum. A black teen reading a comic book Maria assumes is about the Black Panthers.
I don’t think this is a weakness in itself but my writing group has said several times that the details get overwhelming, and sometimes create the impression these people are all important. In that opening scene I’ve trimmed the number of individuals I describe down. I wouldn’t say that turns a weakness into a strength necessarily but I’ll trust my beta-readers that it does improve things.
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Working on my Doc Savage history, Savage Adventures, I’ve been more aware of how strange the past gets after a few decades. As I discuss in Chapter Three, the 1930s were an era when the British Empire still dominated the world; the Depression dominated America; Jim Crow was the law of much of the land; radio was a dominant mass medium and still cutting edge tech; strong men performing on stage and barnstorming pilots were cool entertainment; nobody was certain space travel would ever be attainable; and antibiotics didn’t exist.
I’ll also keep it in mind working on the rewrite of Let No Man Put Asunder. I think it’s more a matter there of overloading on the pop culture references but I did get feedback complaints some of them needed context. Not as much — a reference to Ingrid Bergman kissing Cary Grant in 
If she has any flaw it’s that she can be very stoic when she’s in pain and sometimes we miss it. Plushie’s a cry-baby when he’s hurt but that makes it easier to know there’s a problem.
Work this week went well. At Atomic Junk Shop, I look back at the moment Roy Thomas began indulging his two obsessions, the 
At The Local Reporter I wrote about 
February, however, has started off pretty well. I was determined to get some creative work done this week so I focused on rereading my first draft of Let No Man Put Asunder. It’s pretty good for one of my first drafts, with character arcs and story arc moving along well. I got about 30,000 words in; if I’m write, it’s after this chapter that things run a lot less smoothly. Still, I’m satisfied I haven’t been wasting my time. I also reread the feedback from my writing group and noted where I agreed with their criticisms, which I usually do. Fortunately there’s nothing they said that isn’t fixable, like a sense in one chapter the stakes aren’t high enough.
Plushie’s still in his cage all of next week but I’m determined to get things done. Wish me luck, and have a great weekend.
“In this type of story,” Blessingame said, “some person or thing hangs a veil of horror over the characters in this story; we never know when this menace will strike but we do know it will continue to commit depredations until the hero does his stuff and overcomes it in the final climax.” An editor Murray quotes says the figure can be a mystery until the climax or, as in Dracula or Fu Manchu, the heroes know who he is but still can’t stop him from striking.
Dent applied this approach in a number of Doc Savage yarns. in 
Clearly it’s a trope that still works. Which brings me to its presence in my own work. 
Snowdrop has been coming in for longer stretches in the evening. It turns out he’s quite happy to snuggle on the couch as long as the door is open, sometimes as much as 30 or 45 minutes. To ensure he’s not troubled, that means putting Wisp upstairs (she’s gotten out twice through that door) and me taking the dogs into the kitchen while TYG pets him (she loves that cat). That cuts into my relaxing time too. I can’t say I object — I pet him plenty too —
— but I think it leaves me more stressed than I had slightly more time to myself.
I reread Will Murray’s Writings in Bronze and added more information to some of my own entries. I’m on schedule for publication sometime next summer so yay me!
I finished the section of Savage Adventures I wanted done for this month, including double-checking details I wasn’t clear about in The Pharaoh’s Ghost.
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— but she hadn’t made much effort to resist when the door was open and I even lightly restrained her. But there she was, on the deck, refusing to come in, even when we offered food. She showed up again later, same result, then vanished most of the day. This left me pretty miserable: sure, she made it five years between when we first saw her and when we finally brought her in this summer, but it’s still a risky life to be an outdoor cat. Plus she’s still limping from her leg injury; what if she thought she still had her old speed and ended up in a coyote or hit by a car?
I didn’t get anything done on Let No Man Put Asunder but overall I’m pleased.
Part of the problem is that I still feel “off” due to Wisp now being our inside cat. As I’ve mentioned before, I no longer get the mornings to myself to clear my head and Wisp is more prone to wake me in the early morning than when she slept inside occasionally. What often happens is that I wind up switching my email or planning time to earlier in the week because I’m tired and then I wind up on Friday, still tired, and thinking I should be doing dull, mundane tasks, not anything creative. I will have to fix this … but not today.
