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lkh_lashouts2009-12-28 09:50 am
naeko.livejournal.com) wrote in lkh_lashouts2009-12-28 09:50 am
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A mid-90s interview with Hamilton
I've been going through the old Lashouts entries and tagging blogflogs and fixing links (you may delete any comment notification emails you get titled "Link fix" as it's only me!). In the course of fixing links, I found this very old interview with Hamilton that brings to light just how long she's been saying the same stuff. Does the 70/30 rule sound familiar? It should! Hamilton's been telling us how it goes since at least '97!
Thrill of the hunt
By Corey Stulce, Lifestyle Editor
July 23, 1997
Some people are unaware that a license is required for vampire hunting in Laurel Hamilton's world.
It's true, though, vampire hunters must be licensed through the state, just as doctors and teachers are. They must also have a court order of execution, otherwise it's considered murder. It's really the only way to be civilized in her world.
"The Killing Dance" is the sixth novel author Laurel Hamilton has released starring her heroine ( and possible alter ego) Anita Blake. Blake is a vampire hunter, and in "Dance" she is dating both a master vampire and a werewolf. Confused? Well, it's all just a part of the vast world Hamilton has created for her characters, and it just happens to be smack dab in the middle of St. Louis.
Hamilton has taken a very original stab at the world of vampires taking away some of their mystery and making her main character a human.
"To my knowledge, I'm the only one who has a world where everyone knows that vampires and werewolves and zombies are real and you just have to deal with that," Hamilton said.
Anita Blake is mortal, but she also uses necromancy, which Hamilton describes as someone who has the power to raise the dead. "For Anita, though, it goes back to the old legend, that they [necromancers] have all power over the dead," Hamilton said. Since Hamilton writes her Anita Blake books in the first person, it is easy to assume that some of Hamilton might be in Anita and vice-versa.
"We were more alike when I started the series. Anita's voice is very much like mine. Her mannerisms and speech are very close to mine," Hamilton said.
"I get more like Anita as I write. I don't cuss [but she does], and after a book it takes me about six weeks to stop. And I have a two and-a-half year old, so I really have to work on that because she can pick it up," she said.
Hamilton started writing when she was very young, and was lucky enough to sell the first book she ever wrote. With "Dance" she recently made the USA Today's bestseller list.
This has opened up many new doors for Hamilton, but she's taking the whole thing in stride. "The readership has grown, so I'm getting to play with more people now, which is nice. I recently had a signing and there were actually people waiting in line...[Success] lets me know that I'll be able to write Anita for as long as I want," she said.
Hamilton has finished the seventh Anita Blake novel and is working on the eighth, so she has gotten her writing process down to a science.
When she finishes a novel, she either makes notes for the next or even writes the first chapter. "When I start a new book, I don't have a blank screen staring back at me," Hamilton said.
Hamilton has done tons of research for her novels in the past so now she only has to do minimal research when starting a new book. She has always written her books the same way and she advises new authors to try it.
"When I wrote my first book...[I learned] the biggest thing to do is don't rewrite as you go, just do it. It can be the biggest pile of crap you saw, and after you're done you can fix it. If it's not real, you can't fix it," Hamilton said.
"The Hamilton rule of first draft is, 70 percent of any first draft is garbage, and 30 percent is keeper. But, you'll never get that 30 percent without the garbage," she said.
Hamilton writes with a lot of physical detail and paints the reader a very vivid picture of what characters and locations look like.
"I'm very visually and character oriented," said Hamilton. "It really bugs me in books if I don't know what a character looks like. I start with a name, I'm very name oriented. Once I have the physical description and the name, I can tell a lot about them. A good main character attracts good secondary characters and attracts good plot. I'm a character-oriented writer. Everything comes from characters," she said.
With horror novels, fear and gore are going to come naturally, but Hamilton does not want gore to overshadow her stories.
"It has to be necessary gore, but it is in there. The best clue is the body at a murder scene, and they're pretty gory. It has to be necessary to the plot and necessary to the characters. Gore has to earn its place just like everything else in the book," Hamilton said.
She also discovered, doing research, that the things she was writing were not nearly as disturbing as some of the real things she was reading about.
"I could tell you some true crime stories that would scare you," Hamilton said. "Anytime I think what I'm doing is out there, and then I read what people are really doing, I'll think, 'I'll never top this.'"
With her new-found success, Hamilton is considering many things for the future. She has pondered about movies (her fans have even given her casting ideas) and comic books starring Anita Blake, but nothing is certain yet.
The only real certainty is that books starring Anita Blake will continue to surface.
"I have 15 more plots and each new book gives me ideas for more things," said Hamilton.
Apparently vampire hunting has become a very lucrative business.
Then, of course,![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
dwg and I were talking about vampire hunting licenses and wondering exactly what's involved in getting one. Do you have to renew? Do you have to go have your eyesight checked periodically like with a driver license? Imagine if your eyes started to fail and you hammered a stake into the wrong corpse in the morgue? Or into the right corpse, but in the wrong place. You could be letting a vampire limp away with oak in his shin!
Thrill of the hunt
By Corey Stulce, Lifestyle Editor
July 23, 1997
Some people are unaware that a license is required for vampire hunting in Laurel Hamilton's world.
It's true, though, vampire hunters must be licensed through the state, just as doctors and teachers are. They must also have a court order of execution, otherwise it's considered murder. It's really the only way to be civilized in her world.
"The Killing Dance" is the sixth novel author Laurel Hamilton has released starring her heroine ( and possible alter ego) Anita Blake. Blake is a vampire hunter, and in "Dance" she is dating both a master vampire and a werewolf. Confused? Well, it's all just a part of the vast world Hamilton has created for her characters, and it just happens to be smack dab in the middle of St. Louis.
Hamilton has taken a very original stab at the world of vampires taking away some of their mystery and making her main character a human.
"To my knowledge, I'm the only one who has a world where everyone knows that vampires and werewolves and zombies are real and you just have to deal with that," Hamilton said.
Anita Blake is mortal, but she also uses necromancy, which Hamilton describes as someone who has the power to raise the dead. "For Anita, though, it goes back to the old legend, that they [necromancers] have all power over the dead," Hamilton said. Since Hamilton writes her Anita Blake books in the first person, it is easy to assume that some of Hamilton might be in Anita and vice-versa.
"We were more alike when I started the series. Anita's voice is very much like mine. Her mannerisms and speech are very close to mine," Hamilton said.
"I get more like Anita as I write. I don't cuss [but she does], and after a book it takes me about six weeks to stop. And I have a two and-a-half year old, so I really have to work on that because she can pick it up," she said.
Hamilton started writing when she was very young, and was lucky enough to sell the first book she ever wrote. With "Dance" she recently made the USA Today's bestseller list.
This has opened up many new doors for Hamilton, but she's taking the whole thing in stride. "The readership has grown, so I'm getting to play with more people now, which is nice. I recently had a signing and there were actually people waiting in line...[Success] lets me know that I'll be able to write Anita for as long as I want," she said.
Hamilton has finished the seventh Anita Blake novel and is working on the eighth, so she has gotten her writing process down to a science.
When she finishes a novel, she either makes notes for the next or even writes the first chapter. "When I start a new book, I don't have a blank screen staring back at me," Hamilton said.
Hamilton has done tons of research for her novels in the past so now she only has to do minimal research when starting a new book. She has always written her books the same way and she advises new authors to try it.
"When I wrote my first book...[I learned] the biggest thing to do is don't rewrite as you go, just do it. It can be the biggest pile of crap you saw, and after you're done you can fix it. If it's not real, you can't fix it," Hamilton said.
"The Hamilton rule of first draft is, 70 percent of any first draft is garbage, and 30 percent is keeper. But, you'll never get that 30 percent without the garbage," she said.
Hamilton writes with a lot of physical detail and paints the reader a very vivid picture of what characters and locations look like.
"I'm very visually and character oriented," said Hamilton. "It really bugs me in books if I don't know what a character looks like. I start with a name, I'm very name oriented. Once I have the physical description and the name, I can tell a lot about them. A good main character attracts good secondary characters and attracts good plot. I'm a character-oriented writer. Everything comes from characters," she said.
With horror novels, fear and gore are going to come naturally, but Hamilton does not want gore to overshadow her stories.
"It has to be necessary gore, but it is in there. The best clue is the body at a murder scene, and they're pretty gory. It has to be necessary to the plot and necessary to the characters. Gore has to earn its place just like everything else in the book," Hamilton said.
She also discovered, doing research, that the things she was writing were not nearly as disturbing as some of the real things she was reading about.
"I could tell you some true crime stories that would scare you," Hamilton said. "Anytime I think what I'm doing is out there, and then I read what people are really doing, I'll think, 'I'll never top this.'"
With her new-found success, Hamilton is considering many things for the future. She has pondered about movies (her fans have even given her casting ideas) and comic books starring Anita Blake, but nothing is certain yet.
The only real certainty is that books starring Anita Blake will continue to surface.
"I have 15 more plots and each new book gives me ideas for more things," said Hamilton.
Apparently vampire hunting has become a very lucrative business.
Then, of course,
dwg and I were talking about vampire hunting licenses and wondering exactly what's involved in getting one. Do you have to renew? Do you have to go have your eyesight checked periodically like with a driver license? Imagine if your eyes started to fail and you hammered a stake into the wrong corpse in the morgue? Or into the right corpse, but in the wrong place. You could be letting a vampire limp away with oak in his shin!
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You know, it's funny to make fun of her...but it's also kinda sad. I really adored Anita when she was super awesome Anita (and I'm sure most of us did, otherwise we wouldn't be here)
anyway, blah blah. original. blah blah. first one. blah blah. I think Kim Harrison has done an amazing job of taking that idea of "everything out in the open" and putting her own spin on it.
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Oh no, I totally dig. I've been here for a few years now (having wandered over from anita_blake_fans confused and frustrated that so many people were OMFG ILU LKH/ANITA! even after all the new shenanigans)
it's just always disappointing to remember how much it didn't all used to suck :(
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I can't read the Harry Potter books, now either, because I feel the last two were so terrible and mostly unnecessary. It barely even has anything to do with the authors for me.
But, yes, it's hard to not want to tear your hair out at LKH because of how her success has made her even more obnoxious. Obviously there's always been a few grains of wtf in her attitude, but it's gotten worse since she's gotten so famous.
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I sit there and throw my hands up in frustration and try to refrain from answering tweets, because if I can find these things out for myself, then so can they.
So I want to believe that if people stopped asking the same things, maybe she'd stop replying with the same thing.
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On the other hand, when people ask her logical questions, hard questions, or those that require her to remember things from the books, she just ignores them. A good example of this is the recent q&A she did for B&N on Facebook.
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Yeah, that Q&A is what I'm working on to pull up blogs where she says the exact same things that anyone with half a would have already read. That chat is basically where my sneering disdain for fans really hit a new high.
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This is either an indication of mendacity, or an indication of a lack of interest in reading, neither of which reflect well on a writer.
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Honestly, the only books anyone ever really recommended to me, back in the early ABVH days, were Anne Rice (couldn't get through any of her stuff except The Witching Hour, and she wasn't what I was looking for), Tanya Huff, (eh, similar, but not quite; still great, though), Mercedes Lackey (dear god, no) and some young adult stuff that I had already read, but that still wasn't really in the same realm. Back in the day, I would have been happy with the glut of paranormal romance (I was 16, though, so make your own assumptions about taste ;), but it just didn't exist as it does now. I wasn't able to find anything similar enough to her to satisfy my searches, back then.
She did clarify her statement with 'to my knowledge;' perhaps, gasp!, she really hasn't heard of books that let vampires be out in the open as she had written, and she's just trying to cover her ass. If she had just flat out announced that nothing else like that exists, without being careful in her speech, people would jump down her throat just as hard. This is one of those times where it looks like she can't win with anyone determined to bitch about her.
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Not everyone agrees, but that's what I think. Not just about LKH, but about every writer, including myself.
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Well, since so little time has gone by in Anita-land, she could be okay with the old stuff - IF she made the conscious effort to stay grounded in the time period. But that would require actually making the effort to stay in the time period.
DV
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(Note: This is not intended as a bashing on her looks, it's just that she's a real person and the comic book Anita, who I'm comparing her to and who she, from what I know, had a strong hand in designing, is not, and is hyper-idealized like all comic book females.)
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(How embarrassing--I almost typed Jean-Luc. Had to correct it. Been on a Star Trek binge lately.)
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In all seriousness, I think it's rather an amateur approach to the idea of writing in general, because there is no automatic percentage going on. I think we do all have days where we feel like everything we wrote was golden or the reverse, but writer's don't routinely scrap seventy percent of the things they've written. I mean they could scrap seventy percent of imperfect words and phrases, but I doubt they scrap that much of the idea (assuming they decide to stick with said original idea and don't write to a place where they find they have to rework the plot entirely).
Writing is like archaeology ("I made no promises. Archeology is not an exact science. I only said conditions were favorable." Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark), it's a process of discovery. Sometimes a scientist knows precisely what he needs and the tools he needs to get there, and other times you are scraping around helplessly in the dirt until you get a clue and then move on from there.
I don't think it's so easily boiled down to numbers. Sometimes you have to write until you get to the place where you need to be, but I don't think that's always going to be seventy percent needed to there. There are so many things that writer's do that aren't even included in the conception of a novel in the way of pre-writing exercises to get to know characters. Is that part of the seventy percent? I just don't see how you can put a number to it.
John Gardener said for example that if he wanted to get to know two characters he'd put them in bed together even if that wasn't going to be part of the book, some writers have character sketches or lengthy character sheets, some have short stories that spurred on longer things (such is my case), and etc.
Anyway, I've rambled on now, but I just keep seeing this 70/30 thing and I think it's a load of crap. Even when you scrap something sometimes it shows up somewhere else later on. Just because it's not working for the story at hand doesn't mean it doesn't work at all. Writing is far more complex than simple percentages, and I don't think it's something that should be generalized like that. Otherwise people get caught up in well "seventy percent of this is going to be crap anyway so I shouldn't worry about trying too hard". You should never aim for the sub par.
Right, well... now that I've really rambled, I'll be shutting up now.