Writing Advice: Words Of Your Heart
Before I start today’s Writing Advice post, I want to announce that The Price of Thorns, my huge fantasy novel (published under author name Tim Susman), will be published on November 14th, but FurPlanet will have a limited number of pre-release copies available at their table at AnthroCon! You can’t get it online; it will be only at conventions until November. I’m super excited for people to read this book and I’ve given you many previews of it in this space and it’s finally here!
Okay, with that out of the way, let’s talk about the words of your heart.
Dave Barry, in an early column which I have in his book Dave Barry’s Bad Habits, wrote:
Our literature professor told us that Dostoyevsky wrote The Brothers Karamazov to raise the question of whether there is a God. So what I want to know is, why didn’t Dostoyevsky just come right out and ask? Why didn’t he write:
Dear Reader:
Is there a God? It sure beats the heck out of me.
Sincerely,
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
I think about that often when I think about why we write books (this is going to be mostly about novels but also applies to short stories). We write them to ask questions or to make assertions. A lot of my books come down to the message “believe in yourself” or “trust yourself” or “accept yourself,” stuff like that. We put a lot of dressing around that message, because building worlds is fun and making up characters is fun and torturing them and then saving them is, well, rewarding, anyway, but also because if I just said: “Dear Reader, Trust yourself. Sincerely, Kyell Gold,” it wouldn’t have the same impact as if I introduce you to a character you have some things in common with, get you to like them and sympathize with them, and then put them in a situation where they have to learn that lesson.
Often, those fun details can overtake and obscure the message. Your setting becomes wide and sprawling, colorful and active; your characters gain lives of their own and are just too much fun to play with. But the heart of a story that will stay with the reader is some kind of question or assertion, some decision the main character has to make, some lesson they have to learn.
Early in my writing life, I don’t know that I had that much to say. I lived a fairly coddled middle-class childhood that didn’t require me to be curious about much of life, viewed college as a large multiple-choice test at the end of which I would get a job, and figured that life would just happen at the end of it. There was more to my childhood than that, for sure, lessons about emotional connection and grief and our responsibility to others, but I wasn’t equipped to process them or talk about them until much later. So I wrote stories that I thought were fun, and gravitated toward the ones that gave me the feelings I liked (romance and melancholy, always reliable standbys).
As I grew older and started realizing that there were parts of my identity that didn’t fit into mainstream society as neatly as I’d hoped I would (I’m gay and a fox), my writing turned to those lessons I talked about above. Volle, in my first novel, has to hide his identity, and the romance that sweeps him away is dangerous and forbidden. As the series concludes, he manages to save that romance, and in the end is allowed ownership over his identity and his family. It’s not quite Waterways or Out of Position in the field of “coming to terms with being gay,” but the themes are there.
I’m not unique in this regard by any means. Questions of identity and reconciling your identity with expectations dominate fiction; superhero stories are more often about that than anything else, which is why so many of them feel queer-coded (the recent and excellent Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse is more explicitly queer-coded in some places; Gwen’s father has a trans pride patch on his jacket, for example). But my stories resonate with furries, sometimes with other queer people, because I have framed my messages and questions in that context.
It’s okay to write even if you don’t know what you’re trying to say. Sometimes the message works itself out as you write. Sometimes you may not even realize you’ve written a message into your work until someone else points it out. I remember Anne McCaffrey (RIP) chuckling about a paper some grad student had written about “the Cinderella theme in Anne McCaffrey’s work” and saying, “I wrote the damn books and I didn’t put that in there!” Nevertheless, even a brief review of her books will turn up heroine after heroine in distressed circumstances who raises herself up to success. The theme is there, even if the author didn’t “put” it in.
If you know what your message is, though, that can make the books even more powerful. The Calatians series is about growing up, I knew before I started it, and so that theme can be mirrored multiple times over: in Kip’s literal adolescence; in Kip and his friends moving from apprenticeship to mastery (Kip’s transition to Master is particularly moving for me to think about); in the Calatian race moving from being treated like children to being treated as equals; in the American colonies breaking free of their parents. And what’s more, knowing the theme gave me an ending to the last book that I’m quite proud of.
Find the words of your heart and build your story around them, or write your story and then search for the words of your heart in them once you’ve drafted. Those are the words that will connect with other hearts. If you don’t think you have anything to say, that’s okay too. Write for the joy of it, and go live your life. The more you live, the more you’ll find things you want to say.