E. C. Ambrose was a 2023 guest lecturer for Your Personal Odyssey Writing Workshop. She writes knowledge-inspired adventure fiction including the five-volume Dark Apostle series about medieval surgery, The Singer’s Legacy fantasy series as Elaine Isaak, and the Bone Guard international thrillers as E. Chris Ambrose. The Dark Apostle started with Elisha Barber (DAW, 2013), described in a starred Library Journal review as, “beautifully told, painfully elegant.” Her latest releases are Bone Guard Two: The Nazi Skull, The Singer’s Crown: The Author’s Cut, and historical fantasy novella The King of Next Week (Guardbridge, April 2020). Her short stories have appeared in Fireside, Warrior Women and Fantasy for the Throne, among many others, and she has edited several volumes of New Hampshire Pulp Fiction.
In this excerpt transcribed from a question and answer session, Elaine talks about the importance of finishing stories in order to develop plot and character and how to describe physical settings.
QUESTION: What do you think is the most important advice that you can give to developing writers?
ECA: The most important thing about a story, especially if you’re early in your writing life, is finishing it. People will often go back and keep polishing the beginning, keep polishing the first couple chapters, show up to their writing group every month with the same scene. You can’t learn how to create a plot, how to develop a character, until you have gotten to the end of that arc.
And it’s probably not going to be perfect the first time through, or even the second time through, but if you’ve never completed that journey, you won’t really know the parts that you need to work on. You won’t be able to successfully convey to a reader the impact that you want the story to have and then receive feedback on how to improve the parts that you have. So [at] some point you gotta do the beginning, middle, and end in order to learn how that works. And if you keep doing that, that’s how you work on character arcs. That’s how you work on plots. Not in individual scenes, but in seeing how those scenes add up to create a whole.
I usually try and draft very quickly because I’m trying to create that complete experience, which I can then invest more in. And, as I work through revisions, I can add more detail if I need to, or I can pull back on things. But until I have the complete story, I don’t really know the beginning. I don’t really know what I need from the characters so that they can have their moment at the end.
QUESTION: My question is about describing physical buildings in a compelling way. I feel like that’s something I struggle very much with because nature’s very dynamic. I have a very specific vision of a building in mind, but I don’t know how to weave that into my story. I either end up with a list of descriptions or, [when] trying to see through the eyes of a character, a lot of filter words. I’m wondering if you have any thoughts or suggestions in that area.
ECA: Two things. One is to have in mind what you need the reader to know about the building. And that could be the physical scale of it. It’s really big or it’s really small. It could contain thousands of people or hundreds of people or ten people. Is it a place that has particular spiritual or religious significance or political significance?
So have your notes to the side, especially if there’s anything that is going to become plot relevant later. I need the reader to know that there are three doors in this room because later on the character is going to run away through one of them—so make a note of that off to the side. And then focus on: what is the impact of the building on the person who is revealing it to the reader? If it’s the place where somebody works and they hate their job, they have a particular perspective on that.
The key is to think about the word choices that you use in description, and then remove all of those filtering terms. So if you want to say, “She felt the building was really ugly because she’d been working there every day for the last twenty-seven years, and she was never going to be able to retire”—that expresses a character perspective, and it suggests that the building is ugly. But instead of actually putting that in the manuscript, say, “Well, let’s see which features of the building I can show that would reveal how ugly it is.” And then you would use the choices around the character. So, “She trudged up the concrete steps and shoved open the broken door. They had never fixed the hinges in twenty-seven years, and they never would.” You can use specific details like that coupled with the character’s attitude toward the place instead of trying to make it either more general or filtered through those terms: she felt, she saw, she heard, she looked around the building. Instead of having “She looked around the building,” show me what’s important about what she sees.
NOTE: This transcript has been edited for clarity.
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