by Tim Dedopulos

Arid landscapes with little or no vegetation, deserts are hard places to survive in. Although the stereotype is a rolling sea of sand, deserts can be cold as well as hot, rocks or bare earth as well as sand. Both visually and symbolically, the desert is free of confusion; there is no doubt. Because they are wide, open vistas without covering vegetation, they represent brutal honesty, impersonal struggle and the harsh realities of survival. Mankind is poorly tolerated in these areas, an occasional visitor who stands out clearly.

There are no distractions, giving deserts an association with clarity, revelation and purity. Because it is such a difficult, threatening terrain type, it represents barriers, obstacles and challenges. There are strong overtones of spirituality and religion bound up symbolically with desert landscapes. These areas are brutal, but they call upon the deepest reserves of a traveller’s will. In these struggles, there is no barrier to the heavens, no distractions or comforts to distract the soul from its communion.

Accordingly, the desert can be a source of wisdom and enlightenment, of trial but also of reward. It is so far outside of normal existence that only the spiritual and divine can touch and influence it. We assume a fundamental antagonism between the physical and the spiritual, feeling that gluttony and excess obscure the divine – the desert, the ultimate source of physical scourging, thus becomes the holiest territory available. It is no accident that prophets, visionaries, writers, and hermits throughout history have been strongly associated with these barren lands.

by Tim Dedopulos

Technically the absence of light, rather than a colour itself, black is a complex symbol. In the western world, it carries a lot of negative connotations, many of them centred around fear and the unknown. This is not necessarily the case in other regions, although almost all cultures recognise the duality and opposition between black and white.

One common theory regarding black’s sinister associations is the obvious link to darkness and night-time. People are afraid of what the darkness hides; it is the time of thieves, nocturnal predators, malefactors and witches. If this is the main reason for black’s negative connotations, then perhaps the western world’s particularly strong negative feelings towards black can be explained in terms of European weather. Unlike the arid regions in the Middle East, Africa and large parts of Russia and China, European skies are commonly cloudy. Night time would have been genuinely pitch black, and therefore particularly intimidating. In countries where cloud cover was much less common, even moonless starlight provides a surprising amount of illumination, and night would have been much less blind. In other words, night just isn’t as dark in the tropics and equatorial regions as it is in cloudy temperate zones.

Another possibility commonly put forth is that in any given area, people with the power and wealth to not have to work outdoors at menial tasks are going to be paler in skin-tone than those who are exposed to the sun all day. That’s an inevitable biological fact. The implication then becomes that the rulers and aristocrats are going to be paler than their poorest subjects. Taken to its extremes, these differences become symbolised as an antagonism between black and white, with black indicating meniality and inferiority.

In the west though, black’s strongest associations are linked to the theme of evil. While these meanings may be retained to a certain outside the west, they tend to be significantly weaker. Backed up by religious imagery, black now symbolises tragedy, sadness, loss, despair, fear, discord, lies, bad things, malevolence, sin, satanic works and rituals, the netherworld and, by extension of the theme of loss, mourning and bereavement. For the Chinese, by contrast, black is the colour of the element of water, and conveys stillness and passivity rather than badness.

Western popular culture’s use of the colour has led to it being reclaimed, to an extent, by younger generations wishing to defy the orthodoxy, thumb their nose at authority, and generally irritate their parents. Accordingly, black now also symbolises a whole swathe of interpretations on the theme of defiance and freedom, such as rebellion, independence, mystery, occult power, sexuality, anonymity, acceptance and anger. Politically, it is generally associated with anarchism.

Even before its uptake by youth culture however, black retained a degree of respectability. It is a perennially fashionable colour for clothing – not only is it the most flattering and slimming colour to wear, it can also convey a degree of sophistication, elegance, seriousness and power. Authority figures have often used black to add weight to their influence – priests, judges, elite and/or secret police and so on – particularly where blue’s reassuring air of safety is not required. The difference between establishment and rebel, in this case, lies mainly in the style of clothing – but then, this year’s rebels tend to become next year’s authority anyway.

by Salome Jones

When two editors who are also writers work together, they get into a lot conversations about writing. One of the perennial conversations we have here at Flourish is about ideas we get for novels. Having had these conversations for a couple of years now, I've come to realize that each of us has a distinctive way of coming up with ideas that matches the kind of writers we are.

Tim thinks of plot ideas first. He outlines in fairly great detail. He writes everything in order. His characters develop as he outlines.

I think of characters first. Plot develops as I write. I outline very sketchily at first, waiting for the idea to take hold. Later in the writing process, as the pieces have fallen into place in my head, I do a loose outline, about four ideas per chapter. This is evolution, inspired by Tim who has tried to teach me to outline.

We're two distinctive types which are referred to as planners or plotters, and pantsers. (Pantsers meaning people who come up with stories by the seat of their pants, or as they go along.)

There are many famous pantsers in the world, although they probably don't think of themselves by that term. William Gibson comes to mind as someone who sits down and writes his book from scratch without an outline. My guess is that others, like Molly Gloss, Ursula LeGuin, and a host of literary writers are all pantsers.

There are also a lot of famous people who outline, including J.K. Rowling, Henry Miller, William Faulkner, and many others.

When I started writing I was a pure pantser, but in the past couple of years, I've benefited by using a small amount of outlining. The thing about outlining is that you have to figure out in advance what's going to happen. If you attend a literary writing based MFA program, you'll be encouraged to write character driven stories and told that plot driven stories are formulaic. I was, anyway.  But as long as I was writing purely character driven stories where the plot was undefined, I found it very difficult to finish anything. I even found it difficult to write longer pieces in order. I didn't know what happened everywhere, so I'd skip around filling in sections that were clear to me. This is a technique that can work but it can also fail. The failure to finish a long piece of fiction can be demoralizing to a writer.

But the real reason I tried to learn to outline was as a way of understanding what stories do. There are some very specific things that need to happen for a piece of fiction to be a story. The easiest way to see this is to look at your life. Your life is not a story. There are many events in your life that don't really relate to each other except that they all involve you.

If you wanted to tell a story from your life, you would pick a series of events that are connected. There's a destination these events are leading to. Usually there are surprises, unexpected twists or turns. And then there is 'what happened.' The big event. The end. The point. The story leads us to the point. It builds our interest. It makes us like or hate the characters. It creates a bond between reader and character, whether good or bad, or it fascinates us with the unfolding of events. Or both. The story gives the ending meaning and vice versa.

What happens if your book doesn't do what stories do? Well, think about someone who talks about themselves all the time, reporting on mundane events. Most likely you get bored. You tolerate them or you avoid them. Writing that doesn't pull the reader along in the form of a story is most likely going to lose the readers right away.

You can also lose your readers if the story doesn't fulfill its promises. It's very intriguing at first, but then it never seems to get anywhere. The things you allude to are never resolved. We call this 'cheating the reader.' Readers don't like to be cheated. They'll let you get away with it at first, if your writing is good, but eventually they'll get angry or bored.

It's absolutely possible to be a great writer as either a pantser or a plotter. But if you're having trouble, as one, consider what you might learn from the other style of writing. You can use a combination of techniques. Writing is, after all, an art, not a science.

by Tim Dedopulos

A Mary-Sue is an over-idealised fictional character that exists as an extension of the writer’s wish-fulfilment and ego drives. Despite all the talents and powers of the rest of the cast, Mary-Sue still somehow manages to be the crucial lynchpin in every situation, solving all the problems, directing the action, and totally overshadowing every other character. Ultra-competence on a character’s part is a symptom of possible Mary-Sue contamination, but it is not a definitive mark. S/he has no real flaws, is adored by all characters, frequently makes flagrant use of deus ex machina, and may share physical traits, tastes or names with the author. Generally, the presence of Mary-Sue will pretty much destroy the story.

A Mary-Sue character is usually the mark of a naive or inexperienced writer. The term originates from fan-fiction, in which enthusiasts write amateur stories based in the worlds they love. There’s plenty of great fan-fiction of course, but many Mary-Sue characters literally are the author as she dreams of being, dropped into the pre-existing cast of a story setting. The name comes from Paula Smith’s cutting 1973 parody of bad Star-Trek fan fiction, “A Trekkie’s Tale”.

Note that despite the origins, some professional original fiction characters have been criticised as being Mary-Sues. The most notable in fantasy are widely held to be Laurell K. Hamilton’s Anita Blake of the “Anita Blake: Vampire Hunter” series, particularly as she appears in later books, and Eragon, from Christopher Paolini’s “Inheritance” trilogy. Outside the genre, Wesley Crusher from “Star Trek: The Next Generation” (Wesley was even creator Gene Roddenberry’s middle name) and Dagny Taggart from Ayn Rand’s “Atlas Shrugged” are often considered two of the most egregious examples.