Kids have this question thrown at them all the time, all the way through school and even after. We tell them they can be anything they want to be, and then present it like it’s a single choice, like you can pick your career out of a catalogue and once that choice is made, your life is set out for you.
If you’ve ever read through a university calendar or website, you know what I mean. If you choose to study physics… you’re on your way to becoming a physicist. If you choose medicine… you get to be a doctor. If you don’t study anything beyond high school (and take on the debt that comes with it)… you’ll be working menial jobs for the rest of your life.
An education is not a career. When you finish your high school education, the choices that you make aren’t necessarily choices about a career. You choose an educational direction. And of course that’s going to influence your career options. But your education is simply laying a foundation. It can be critically important, but it doesn’t determine what the final house is going to look like.
Anecdotally, I remember a survey of members of the Physics Forums, several years ago that asked whether people ended up where they thought they would be when they entered university. Only a very, very low number found this was true. More than one person mentioned they were working in a field that didn’t even exist when they started! I for one had no idea what medical physics was when I first started my undergraduate studies. I mean… why would anyone want to study how radiation interacts with people when you can study black holes?
So many people feel guilty when the path they’re on isn’t working out. They feel like they’ve failed because they took a wrong turn. And while it’s true, you can’t go back to being 18 again and make different decisions, it’s important to be aware of, and fight against sunken cost effects. If you’re on a career path that’s not working, you can change directions.
And often the sunken cost isn’t quite as sunk as you might think.
As you build your career, the knowledge that you pick up and the skills that you develop are rarely exclusive to a single vocation. My grandfather loved telling a story about how, when he was in high school, he took all these typing classes and then once he got out into the workforce he went for years never using that skill. But then in the late 70s or so, the company he worked for went digital. Everything went computerized and the employees were laid off left right and center. Except… those who could type (and figure out the computer system).
A career is build brick by brick, based on the opportunities one has at the time. It’s the result of a gradual accumulations of many choices over time. And some serendipity.
Nothing in life is to be feared, it is only to be understood. Now is the time to understand more, so that we may fear less.
– Marie Curie
Marie Curie was the first woman to win a Nobel Prize, the first person to with the Nobel Prize twice, and the first person to win in two different fields. She was a true pioneer of modern physics and chemistry.
I find this particular quote inspiring because it underscores the relationship between ignorance and fear. Said another way, people tend to fear what they don’t understand. But it’s not left at that. I find it inspirational because it’s also a call toward learning and education. We are not doomed to live in fear, particularly now, because we live in a time with unprecedented access to information.
I was never fast as a kid. I liked sports like judo, where the outcome of a match wasn’t entirely based on one’s physical prowess. Strategy, technique, the ability to think quickly all played a part in the sport. But running was competitive and almost always a foregone conclusion… the fastest kid would win the race… and it was the same guys all the time.
This is a random picture of a guy (not me) running. Photo by Pixabay on Pexels.com
I once trained hard for a 1600 m (1 mile) race. I was about eight on nine years old. I got up early in the morning and mapped out a route around the block and figured out how many laps I needed for the full 1600 m. I ran that route religiously. It seemed like I did it for months (although to be fair, it was probably every morning for a week–minus Saturday–you know… cartoons). When it came time for the race I came in last. And the same kid who won every other race won that one too.
Fast forward to later in life. My wife started running with her friends at work. She entered a half marathon. Like a loving husband, I watched from the comfort of my camp chair. She and her friends passed and did awesome. But then, I watched as other came in… people that were older than me, heavier, struggling to make it to the finish line. And there I was sitting with a large Slurpee in hand. The point, I realized as we all cheered them in, wasn’t to win, but to do it.
The best exercise is the exercise you do, and even better the exercise you do consistently. And of the biggest keys to consistency is making sure you enjoy it.
When I was focused on the outcome, it was almost impossible to enjoy. If you have ten people in a race, and you’re all or roughly equal physical fitness, the chances of winning are only one in ten, much less so if you’re not the fittest.
But in the words of Baz Luhrmann, the race is long, and in the end it’s only with yourself.
I started running after watching that half-marathon, and I’ve been a runner ever since. I’m still not that fast, but what changed was a mental shift. Running became like a personal meditation… get outside, get the heart rate up, and for the time that I’m out there nothing else really matters… I just keep putting one foot in front of the other.
In a lot of ways, writing is like that too. Just keep putting words down. Eventually you get to the finish line, and in the end, that’s what really matters.
Cassi Requin is back in my latest novel: Fractured Command. When her space cruiser is catastrophically damaged in orbit around a black hole, Cassi, must improvise, adapt, and use every engineering skill she’s learned to hold both her spacecraft and her team together.
I write for an hour each morning. Or at least, I try.
In my house, that’s the quiet time. The kids are still asleep. I have a chance to focus. I slip downstairs, open up a document and get some words down.
Okay, admittedly there’s some distractions there to fight off… checking email, my website, some social media. But when I’m really focusing on my writing, like during NaNoWriMo, I have a simple rule: write 100 words first.
It’s amazing how often that works. The words don’t have to be good. They don’t even really have to make sense. But I find getting about 100 words into a story is often enough to climb over that intellectual hurdle, that action potential that I need to clear in order to reach that immersive writing state sometimes referred to as flow.
The other major part of my morning routine? Honey Bunches of Oats (with Almonds).
Last night I officially launched my second novel, Fractured Command, the second book in the Cassi Requin series. We had a meet and greet, a reading, author Q&A, and of course… time book signing! The event had a great turn out… standing room only for the reading! I’m so grateful for everyone who came out and who has supported me. The event was a great success.
Author Charles James and the book Fractured Command (or First Command) at Analog Books.Hugo, the bookstore cat, offered a “two paws up” endorsement just as I was about to start my reading. I have a feline fan!
The author Question and Answer session was particularly fun for me. Here are a few responses from memory.
What Were the Challenges of Writing a Second Book?
Fractured Command was more challenging to write than First Command. As I understand it, second novels usually are. The series’ protagonist, Cassi Requin, starts out as a cadet in the first book, but now, the cadets have graduated. They are out working in the Alliance Expeditionary Fleet. Cassi has become an engineering officer. When the first book ended, the core characters scattered, and so in the second book we see them re-uniting.
So How Did You Bring Your Characters Back Together?
The book open with a pirate attack on a freighter on which Cassi’s best friend Emica is serving as a flight control officer. When Emica is taken prisoner, Cassi must get her back. To do that, she brings together her team, the survivors from that time on the alien planet.
Why the Black Hole on the Cover?
One of the prominent features of the Fractured Command setting is a black hole, one of the great enigmas of space, an object with gravity so strong, not even light can escape it. While Cassi and her crew don’t actually cross over the event horizon, they get trapped in accretion disk (an asteroid field of old planets grinding each other into pieces) around it. Their spacecraft is horribly damaged, which sets the scene for Cassi to solve ever-escalating problems as one of the surviving engineers.
You Recently Gave a Talk on ChatGPT and AI. Did You Use AI to Write Fractured Command?
No. Not at all.
For what it’s worth, I’m not personally against authors using AI as a tool, any more than I am against using writing prompts or name generators. I think it’s totally acceptable to use AI to help with brainstorming, developing a coherent storyline or character arc, overcome writer’s block, general inspiration, etc. Where I draw the line is using the AI for complete production of a story. There’s still an element of human experience in stories that, while it may be emulated well at some point, won’t ever be true. The human experience is a big part of what we read stories for.
When Can We Expect The Next Book?
These books are about 80,000 words long and I have about 50,000 words of a first draft, with a working title of Lost Command (thanks NaNoWriMo). They’re going to a need a lot of editing though, but I hope to release the third book in the series next year.
I’ve had a lot of great teachers in my life, and I owe a great deal to all of them.
One of the most influential was a teacher that not too many other students liked. He was a curmudgeon of a man with a short grey brush cut and muscular forearms that looked like they were built for strangling students. I’ll call him Mr. Z. The other students in my classes had other names for him… mostly inappropriate. Now that I’m older, I can see that the guy was a hangover from the sixties. Not the Singing Sixties either. (We had other teachers like that.) It was more like the sixties of NASA director Gene Krantz during the Apollo 13 mission… “failure is not an option.”
At the time, my high school has three streams for kids. Basic, General, and Advanced. Advanced was for those kids who were most likely to go on to university, and somehow I ended up in that advanced stream. At the time I had no idea I was going to go on to become a physicist. Going into grade nine I was a relatively average kid in terms of intellectual horsepower. Sure space was cool, but I also wanted to be a private investigator. My parents subtly nudged me, suggesting I try the advanced route and if it was too challenging, I could always drop down.
Mr. Z dropped a challenge on day one.
Science wasn’t just another subject to him. It was the subject. Science was how the world worked. And if we wanted to really make big contributions to the world… become engineers, doctors, scientists, leaders… we had a responsibility to understand the world the best way that we could.
Nothing ever came easy in his class. He took off marks for seemingly trivial things. He assigned (what felt like) mountains of homework. And there were frequent quizzes. I had to come to class prepared… every day.
There were times when I would rather have had a different teacher, someone easier, nicer, someone who might let us slack off just a little.
A lot of people found the guy intimidating. But he laid out the world as he honestly saw it. Not everyone was going to become a movie star. The best way to do anything was to understand as much about it as you possibly could. And as challenging as he could be, for some reason his teaching style resonated with me.
Forty years ago, I stepped onto the mat at my local judo club for the first time. Judo has been a part of my life ever since. I have been fortunate to have had many great teachers (sensei) over the years, and many more peers to practice with (judoka), and I am extremely grateful for all of that time on the mat, the friends I have made and the lessons I’ve learned. While I never became the champion I’d hoped to be as a kid, through judo, I have learned many valuable lessons that have made me successful so many dimensions of my life… as a father, as a scientist and clinician, as a professor, in my relationships with friends, in my time as a solider, and as a writer. I can’t describe all of this in a single blog post, but today I can share a little about how judo has helped me as a writer.
There’s an old Japanese proverb that says: fall down seven times, stand up eight. If I had to reduced all of judo’s life lessons into a single statement, this would be a top contender.
This first thing you learn as a student in judo is how to fall. It should be easy, right? I mean, gravity does most of the work. But the point is to fall in such a way that you can stand back up again. You learn to spread your body out, and use our arms to transfer your kinetic energy to the mat in a directed manner that doesn’t involve breaking bones. You learn how to fall backward, forward and sideways. You learn how to roll out of a fall, protect your head, and come back up on your feet.
I have had a number of massive wipeouts in my life. Once, hiking in the mountains with the girl who would later become my wife, I tried to impress her by jumping down a rocky trail… and ended up in an ass over tea kettle fall. When I landed she had thought I snapped a femur! And I easily could have, but I managed to roll with the fall because my body knew what to do. I bounce back up, a little sore, but otherwise okay. Had I broken a leg, it would have meant a helicopter rescue, and given the remoteness of where we were, that would not have been fast coming. The thing is, even if that had been the only time judo saved me, it would have been worth it.
The point of course isn’t even so much the physical safety. Training your body to get back up after a fall also trains your brain. You learn that there are aspects of even the most chaotic situation that you can control. And you learn that you can get back up and keep going. When you do this on a regular basis on a mat, you can apply it to school, professional work, and even writing. When your manuscript is rejected, you take what feedback you can collect, improve it and move on.
The first fundamental principle of judo is Seiryoko-Zenyo — 精力善用 (kanji from Wikipedia). It means to make maximum efficient use of energy.
In a competitive combative situation, each opponent has a fixed amount of energy they can expend. The physical techniques in judo (and many other martial arts) are focused on the strategic application of force in such a way as to achieve your goal (i.e. throwing your opponent on their back) while expending as little energy as possible. A fight or match is ultimately an optimization problem! No wonder it’s appealing to a physicist.
It’s self-explanatory how this concept applies to real life. Work smarter, not harder. Always seek to improve your skill set. Judo makes you do this on the mat and so it becomes habit to translate it to real life.
The second principle is Jita-Kyoei — 自他共栄 (kanji from Wikipedia). It means for mutual welfare and benefit.
The point of practicing judo is that all who do will benefit. This is why you can see fighters who can literally be trying to strangle each other in one moment, and then shaking hands and congratulating each other the next.
For me, this principle tends to make judo stand out as a martial art as well. Because of the mutual benefit rule, judo was designed so that it can be practiced at full speed with minimal risk of injury to the players. There are no (competitive) striking techniques. Other techniques that carry too much risk of injury are also omitted (or practiced only in kata).
This principle also has self-explanatory applications in the real world. Though a judo match itself is a zero sum game, both parties derive benefit from the match. Even when you get the wind knocked out of you, you get up and now you’ve identified a flaw in your technique.
Having spent so much time on the mat, I know what it’s like to fight competitively. I know how to apply armlocks and strangulation techniques. I know how to break someone’s balance and throw them to the ground. I know what it feels like to be choked out, how quickly one can physically tire, how anxiety, excitement, anger and fear can influence a person. Judo has given me a vast array of experiences to draw on when describing a character in danger or locked in a physical confrontation.
Training, study, experience, physical fitness, size, speed, stamina, injury, and psychological motivation can all influence the outcome of a match in one direction or another. But there are no guarantees. These things simply make one outcome more probable than another. But I’ve seen a white belt (beginner) at his first tournament throw a black belt. Experienced fighters all know this. So no matter how good a character is, there are always elements that character cannot control.
As a writer you can take advantage of this so that you can move a story along as you need to.
The Difference Between Theory and Skill
I can show someone how to perform a throwing technique. I can break it down into its core elements of kuzushi (the breaking of your opponent’s balance), tsukuri (proper positioning to apply the technique), and kake (the final, forceful application of the technique). I can explain where the opponent’s (uke‘s) centre of gravity should be, and where that of the person applying the technique (tori) should be. I can review variations, setups, and combinations. I can show all of that and the student can understand it conceptually… meaning they understand the theory.
But almost always, the first time you try a new technique in free practice (randori) against someone who is not willing to let you apply it, it doesn’t work.
Skill is the ability to successfully apply the technique. It comes with years of training and development. You learn the subtle details about where to grab, how to move your feet. You develop muscle memory so you can capitalize on a split-second opening, without consciously recognizing it and needing to make the decision to attack. You work it into a larger strategy, using other techniques to set it up.
This applies to writing in general as well. You can learn and understand the “rules” – show don’t tell, avoid the info dumps, active voice, etc. but you need to work with them, practice with them and get critical feedback from audiences (editors, beta readers, critiquers, agents, people in your writing group, etc.) to develop your skills.
Should Writers Try Judo?
As a writer it’s important to try lots of things.
As a far as martial arts go, judo is quite accessible. It is designed to be practiced at full speed, so you get a full combative experience minus the head trauma or broken bones. But it doesn’t have to be practiced at full speed or even competitively. I’ve seen people practicing kata into their late eighties.
According to the International Judo Federation, roughly 20 million people in 199 countries around the world practice judo. It is well-established as an Olympic sport, and so it should be relatively easy to find a club or dojo near you, wherever you are. In my experience, it is relatively inexpensive for a martial art (certainly compared to a lot of other sports).
That said, you can get knocked around a lot. The risk of injury is certainly not zero. So it’s important that you go in understanding the risks.
For me the study and the practice of judo is certainly worth it, not just for what I can apply to my writing, but for the life lessons I’ve learned, the friendships I’ve made, and the life balance that comes along with it.
If you’re in the Lethbridge area, join us for an in-person book launch. Date: Friday, March 31, 2023 Time: 07:00 – 08:30 pm Place: Analog Books 322 6 St S, Lethbridge, AB T1J 2C8 (local independent bookstore, in downtown Lethbridge, in Festival Square)
Join us for a reading, ask the author, light refreshments, book browsing, and more.
When a mysterious spacecraft with alien technology takes her best friend prisoner, junior engineer Cassiopeia Requin will stop at nothing to get her back.
In a few days I’ll be a panelist for the Live Action Slush Pile at the Wordbridge writer’s conference. If you’ve never seen an LASP, brave writers submit the first page of their manuscript to be read… out loud, in front out an audience. Panelists (usually editors, agents, or other writers) sit at the front and as the story is read, they put up their hands if they come across a point where they would put the story down. If the audience sees three hands go up they scream out “DIE!” (Or something more encouraging… depending on the conference.)
The panel proceeds to dissect what they’ve heard. Sometimes it can get heated. But it’s always educational.
With that in mind, I thought I might offer some of my best tips on opening a novel.
The goal of your opening page is simple: get the reader to page two.
That’s it.
Draw the reader in, orient them to your world, acquaint them with a character and a problem, but if page one doesn’t get the reader to page two, nothing else really matters.
Avoid Cliché Openings
Stated another way… never, under any circumstances, open with a dream.
Agents and editors complain about dream opening ad nauseam, simply because they see it so frequently. For whatever reason, dreams are a common way for beginning writers to open a story. Even if you happen to have the best novel in history of novels, starting with a cliché immediately puts you on shaky ground because 99 of 100 other stories that have opened like this have been duds.
Think of it like a spam email. Sure, there’s a small chance the guy who sent it may actually be a foreign prince willing to share his wealth with a complete stranger for the shelter of an offshore bank account. But are you going to take that risk?
Other major cliché openings to avoid include: – a character waking up – a character looking out over their land – a character looking in a mirror – the main character’s birth – characters sparring – a character going about their daily routine without a significant (to them) problem – the weather.
Key Information Only
Avoid the info dump.
One of the biggest triggers in the LASP occurs when you have a great hook… an opening that totally grabs the reader… only to stop the momentum with a mountain of backstory that leaves the opening action in the dust.
This said, one of the biggest challenges writers face is that in order to tell the story, the reader needs key information, sometimes a lot of it. But it doesn’t have to come all at once.
When you first write a story, sometimes the only way to get it down, is to dump the information onto the page. And that’s okay. When I say avoid the info dump, I mean avoid it in any draft that’s meant for an audience. Once it’s down, your litmus test for whether it needs to be on page one is simple. Is this information needed to get to page two?
Avoid Too Many Unfamiliar Names, Places or Concepts
Similar to avoiding the information dump, it’s also important to avoid throwing too many unfamiliar terms at a reader. Each new term uses up active working memory. On the first page, the reader isn’t deep enough to know which terms are critical and which ones can slide into the background, so they give all unfamiliar terms equal weight, but each one requires work. Once this reaches a critical level, reading becomes too much work and they move on to another activity.
In writing science fiction that involves ensemble casts of astronauts working together to fly spacecraft, I struggle with this one immensely, because I have to introduce the team, their hierarchy and a problem they’re facing all at once. My best tip for managing this is to focus on a single, central point of view character. All problems and relationships are then viewed through that character’s lens. And while there may be other, bigger things going on, the reader can focus on what is most important to that single character at that single moment in time.
Clear Point of View
Head hopping is another deal breaker in the LASP.
If you don’t know, head hopping is when you describe a scene from more than one character’s point of view without any clear and obvious break for the reader to figure that out.
For the record, it can be done well. But more often than not, when it happens on the first page of a story, it can be disorienting for a reader. They lose track of who they’re following, the immersive experience diminishes, and they put the book down.
Sometimes this can be challenging for a writer to identify, because as the writer, you know what’s happening in your scene. This is where editors and beta readers help immensely.
Polish the Draft
This one should be obvious.
While it can be tempting to throw your amazing idea into the pile to see how it will fair, taking the time to do some self edits and having another person read it over privately will help immensely. The last thing you want in an LASP is a reader stumbling over awkward wording, or a typo in front of the audience.
Think about the efficiency of the wording. Have you picked out all of those pesky modifiers like “almost” and “nearly” and “began to?” Are you using active voice?
So What Works?
A lot of this advice is about stuff to avoid. But in the end, what makes it through to the end without triggering the audience death call?
Start with a hook.
That’s easy to say, I know. It can take a long time to come up with a knockout first line, and sometimes one never comes. Just remember you don’t have to come up with one immediately though. Sometimes the best opening won’t be obvious until you’ve finished the story and understand what it’s really about.
That saidKeys to a good hook include: (i) a unique or abnormal situation, (ii) it’s explained concisely in a sentence or two, (iii) it’s on target with the genre and/or theme of the story, and (iv) it leads the reader into the next paragraph.
Focus on a single character, with a single problem.
There can be other characters around them of course, but this character is going to lead the reader into your fictional world. They are the lens through which information is filtered and experienced. The first character does not have to be the main character. Sometimes it’s the antagonist. But the reader is going to invest time in the first character, and breaking away from them will provide a natural break point in the story and an opportunity to put the book down. So make a conscious, intentional decision about the character you open with.
The first problem does not have to be the core problem in the book. It could be something as simple as being late for a job interview. But it should drive the first character to make a decision and take action. And ultimately, you need it to drive your reader deeper into your story.
Establish Genre, Time and Place
When a science fiction reader picks up a science fiction book, they want to know that’s what they’re getting. Not every science fiction book has to open with a space battle, but there should be something on that first page that will indicate the kind of story they are in for… aliens, spaceships, artificial intelligences, that kind of thing. Because if it’s not there, that’s cause for the reader to put the book down and move on to something else.
A clear sense of time and place also helps. Orient the reader to the fictional setting. Incidentally this is why staring with dialogue is such a challenge. Because without any other information dialogue is two characters on a blackened stage.
Know Your Audience
My last tip is that your first page is ultimately yours. This advice is based on my own experience, and a part of that experience is that editors, agents, writers and readers don’t always agree. People have vastly differing opinions and what may glue some readers to a story will turn others off. There’s no single formula for a first page that’s going to satisfy everyone.
Feedback helps.
That’s one of the great things about the LASP. You get to see audience reactions. It’s similar if you get a chance to read your work with a local writing group, or take a creative writing class, or join a critique group. A single person’s opinion is just that. But when you have a whole bunch of opinions, and better yet objective reactions, you can identify patterns in the feedback. And that is what help you to improve as a writer.
Astronaut and junior engineering officer Cassi Requin is back for another gripping space adventure.
Fractured Command is a new novel from Charles K James. Available now.
Spacecraft engineers have one job… make it fly.
When a mysterious spacecraft with alien technology takes her best friend prisoner, junior engineer Cassiopeia Requin will stop at nothing to get her back.
Reassigned to a state-of-the-art deep space cruiser, Cassi and her crew jump on a chance that might be their only opportunity to capture the alien spacecraft. But when they end up in orbit around a black hole, their cruiser is catastrophically damaged, and their chain of command is fractured.
Predators become prey as alien drones close in and cut through the remains of their hull in a desperate fight for working technology. Cassi must improvise, adapt, and use every engineering skill she’s learned to hold both her spacecraft and her team together as they spiral toward the event horizon and make a desperate attempt to escape the crushing gravity of a black hole.
About the Book and Thanks
Thanks to all my readers who have been so supportive.
First Command was so successful, it was tough to come up with a worthy sequel. When the previous book left off, the characters were scattered, all embarking on careers in the Alliance Expeditionary Fleet. Bringing them back together for another adventure was a hurdle. But it’s been cleared.
This book was drafted multiple times, with many false starts. But now it’s been painstakingly forged and edited more times than I can count. When I (thought I) was done with it, it went off to my editor (shout out to Adria Laycraft), for multiple rounds of edits and fixes and finally a bunch more polishing passes. It has seen detailed edits from my advance reader team too – thanks so much.
Charles James SF Author 
