Writing methods

May 22, 2013 – 6:09 am

One of the questions everybody seems to ask writers – right after “Where do you get your ideas?” – is “Do you have a time of day when you write?” I can’t figure out whether they want me to say “yes,” hoping that writing is the same as any other nine-to-five job so maybe they can do it, or whether they want me to say “no,” confirming that writing is a mysterious and unpredictable process that they can give up on.

What I say, of course, is “It depends on the writer.”

Most would-be writers these days are familiar with the “planners vs. pantsers” work methods – the planners who do lots of prewriting, plotting, character sketches, outlining, etc. and the seat-of-the-pants writers who just wing it, but the variation in working method is wider than that. There’s a second axis, for starters: the time vs. task writers, and each of those has a couple of subgroups. And a third axis, the burst writers vs. the sloggers.  And a fourth, linear vs. nonlinear.

Time-sensitive writers are the ones who work to a schedule. Some know they’re particularly productive at certain times of the day (or night), often 2-4 a.m. (for night owls) or first thing in the morning, so they’re careful to set that time aside for writing. Others find that it doesn’t matter what time of day they pick as long as they stick to it – they’re the ones who say things like “It’s important to always be at your desk at the same time every day, so the Muse will know where to find you.” Still others set themselves a quota in terms of minutes spent working per day, and don’t care whether they’ve produced 50 words in half an hour or 500 words, so long as they got that half-hour of work in.

Task-focused writers, on the other hand, are less concerned with when or how long they write, and more fixated on what or how much. If they set themselves a daily quota, it’s often in terms of word count, and some days they leap right to it, while other days they have to prop their eyelids open with toothpicks in order to finish their required word count before bedtime. Other task-focused writers work by chunks – until they finish a conversation, or a scene, or a chapter, or some other easily identifiable chunk of story.

Sloggers work for a while every day, or at least on some regular schedule, week in and week out. Burst writers get a large chunk of story down very fast, usually working many hours a day, then write nothing at all for a while. (Sometimes “a large chunk of story” is an entire novel produced in two or three weeks; other times, it’s a chapter or a section of story from wherever they last stopped up to the next big revelation or cliffhanger.)

Linear writers start writing at the beginning of the novel and continue on in order through to the end, even if the novel itself is structured non-linearly. That means they write Chapter one first, then Chapter Two, Three, and Four, in that order, even if Chapter One is set in 2010, Chapter Two skips back to the main character’s ancestors in 1753, Chapter Three happens one month before Chapter Two, and Chapter Four goes back to 1754, and so on. The writer may or may not have done a lot of advance thinking and planning about their non-linear structure, but it comes out his/her fingers in the same order that the reader reads it.

Non-linear writers write scenes, conversations, chapters, etc. in whatever order they happen to feel like writing them, even if the novel happens in strict chronological order. A non-linear writer can write the last chapter first, then write Chapter One, then Chapters Twelve and Thirteen, then a scene from Chapter Six, and so on. Some don’t even know what order their scenes will go in; they just write a whole heap of bits and pieces, then somehow assemble them into a novel by moving them around like jigsaw puzzle pieces until they fall into place and make a picture.

What makes this even more complicated is that each axis is independent of the others. That is, some writers are non-linear, time-sensitive pantser-sloggers; others are linear time-sensitive planner-burst writers; still others are task-focused linear pantser-burst writers; etc. There are even more complicated blends of subgroups: the writer who works in scenes (task-focused), but who also finds he’s vastly more productive at 1-4 a.m., who slogs through the first half of his novel at a steady 300 words-per-day but always finishes the last 50,000 words in a three-day sprint, and who does meticulous character sketches in advance but who can’t write a thing if he’s put down more than three words of plot outline.

All this makes recommending a writing method to anyone else a rather fraught proposition. Slogging away on a regular basis works for a lot of writers, and even the most bursty writer I know has occasionally had to slog along for a month or two from time to time, so it’s a pretty safe bet as a place to start…but that still leaves time-vs-task and plan-vs-pants. And it’s not totally clear-cut even then; one can easily be a task-focused writer who prefers to work in chunks…but who is nevertheless most productive in the evening after dinner. (Note that I’m talking here about productivity rate before any additional factors, like the presence of toddlers, is taken into consideration. Anyone who’s responsible for toddlers is an exogenous time-sensitive writer whose best writing time is whenever the kids are napping, regardless of what kind of writer they’d be if the toddler wasn’t around.)

The only way I know to figure out which sort of writer one is, is to experiment with different methods and see how they work. Most people have some idea which way they lean – I, for instance, never had any doubt that I was a linear task-focused slogger-planner. I have a physical biorhythm that has a lot to do with when I prefer to write (a.m. or evening, but not late night or mid-afternoon), but I’ve never noticed any difference in the quantity or quality of the words I produce when, for some reason, I end up working during one of my less-favorite writing times.

I do keep experimenting with alternative working methods, though, even after thirty years at this. I keep hoping that something will turn out to be ever so much easier than what I’m doing…

By pcwrede | Posted in Writing | Tagged | Comments (7)

Action

May 19, 2013 – 6:37 am

A lot of my friends have trouble writing action scenes. Not on the sentence-by-sentence level – they know all the tricks and tips – but on a more general level. They know that their first-person viewpoint character is only going to have a close-up, confused picture of the battle, and they don’t know how to get the bigger picture across, or they have a bunch of mini-scenes in mind that would have to come from all sorts of viewpoints that haven’t ever been part of the story. They know exactly what happens to their viewpoint character, but they have such a tight focus on him/her that they’ve never bothered to work out what everyone else is doing, how other people get into position to do what the POV sees them doing, or how the battle gets won or lost in the end.

Over the years, I have noticed that most of these folks have one thing in common: they’re starting with the small picture, with what their viewpoint character sees and experiences. This is not necessarily a bad thing (for a character-centered writer, it is the obvious, logical, most comfortable way to do it), but the folks who have the most difficulty seem to me to be the ones who really don’t want to consider the larger picture at all. They’re so focused on what happens to Jane or John and how it affects them physically and emotionally that they don’t want to think about practical aspects like the choreography of a fight scene or the strategy and tactics of a battle.

And choreography is exactly what it is. Action scenes in a story are among the least random scenes one can write. They have to be, precisely because they often involve a larger-than-usual cast of characters, a bigger-than-normal amount of space, and a lot of confusion and many possible outcomes.

When you have six characters sitting around a table in a bar and talking, the rest of the bar and the patrons and bartender are background – they’re present, but they’re a sort of shadowy backdrop to what’s important in the scene. The minute one of those six characters throws a punch and knocks one of the other characters over the next table, all the rest of the space in the bar and the other people in it become important, because their actions and reactions are going to have as much impact on the way the rest of the scene develops as the actions of the six characters you started with. You can’t have a character jump off a balcony if you don’t know the balcony is there to begin with.

There are a lot of things one needs to know in order to choreograph an action scene, some of which won’t actually get into the story at all. The first thing that comes to mind is where the scene takes place, and under what conditions. If your main character is on a broad plain on a clear day, the action will play out very differently that it would if she’s in the dank network of caves under the city, whether the action is a chase, a fight, a battle, or an attempt to sneak past a sentry.

The writer also probably needs to have some idea what the action scene is about, how many other people are involved, and how many of the people involved are actually going to interact with the main character. If Janet is running through a string of deserted back alleys, being chased by two city guards, what the action is and how it’s presented will be very different from a scene where George is one of two thousand archers defending the city walls against the invaders’ army.

This is one of the spots where people go wrong. They think that they don’t need to know any more about what’s going on than their viewpoint character does. The trouble is that if the author wants the dragon to come swooping unexpectedly out of the mist in front of the viewpoint character, he/she has to have some idea how that dragon found and followed that character in all that fog, and whether it’s plausible that a large, reasonably intelligent flying creature would go swooping around in a forest or city when it can’t see where obstacles or the ground is. (If the dragon has the kind of sonar bats do, fine…but if the author doesn’t think about it, there are likely to be inconsistencies over the course of the story that undermine the author’s credibility with the reader.)

Planning and choreographing an action scene doesn’t have to be done in a lot of detail, except for the bits that directly affect the viewpoint character. You want more than “The invaders attack and are beaten back,” but you don’t necessarily need every detail of the fire-fight that takes place around the main city gates if George is stationed on the opposite side of the city.

It’s especially important for writers who are deeply character-centered and seriously focused on their characters’ interior experiences to figure out what the exterior, physical environment is like and what the actual physical moves are that the character makes, and then make sure that enough of that gets into the scene. It is far too easy to write something like “George looked on in anguish as the king died” without bothering to mention that the king has just had his head cut off by the ogre that George’s arrow missed a few seconds earlier (hence George’s extra anguish and guilt about it).

Once you have a good idea how things go and what’s happening overall, you have the problem of presenting it to the reader. For big, sweeping, complicated things like battles, one common method is for the author to drop into an omniscient narrative summary, especially if the viewpoint character is an officer or commander who’d presumably have to be aware of the overall sweep of events. The obvious alternative is to stick to the confusing man-in-the-front-lines viewpoint for the main fight, and fill in the Big Picture stuff after everything is over, as the viewpoint character finds out from other people that the reason the reinforcements were late was because of the explosion that took out a section of the eastern wall. In a novel, especially if there are multiple viewpoints, authors often cut back and forth between various viewpoint character moments and an omniscient overview of the way the whole battle is going.

The fewer characters who are involved in an action scene and the smaller the space in which it takes place, the less useful the omniscient narrative summary technique becomes, because the fewer the characters and the smaller the space, the easier it is for the viewpoint character (and the reader) to comprehend all of the action at once. A scene in which two sailors struggle to keep a small boat from capsizing in a violent storm can be as gripping an action scene as a major battle, but the boat scene is more likely to be clear and comprehensible to the reader without the writer having to back off and explain the Big Picture.

By pcwrede | Posted in Writing | Tagged , | Comments (10)

Changing infrastructure

May 15, 2013 – 8:19 am

Infrastructure is all that everyday stuff we take for granted, from roads and bridges to garbage collection and cell phones. It’s one of the things that allows societies to function smoothly, if they want to. It’s vitally important…and it’s also vastly boring. Consequently, writers tend not to pay a lot of attention to it.

If one is writing in the modern world, this isn’t so much of a problem. One can presume one’s readers will be familiar with the real-life infrastructure that exists, so one can pretty much ignore it unless or until one needs a convenient pothole to blow out a tire during a chase scene, or a critical call to be dropped in the middle.

If one is writing historical fiction – even fairly near-past, like twenty years ago – one needs to pay a lot more attention. A lot more, because infrastructure is something we almost all take for granted…and that makes it a prime place where authorial blind spots come back to bite them.

I was reminded of this recently when reading a student manuscript set in the late 80s, in which the student cheerfully assumed the existence of pocket cell phones and text messaging because he’d never, ever lived in a world without them.

One can, occasionally get away with this sort of thing by establishing that one’s characters are early adopters and very happy with the changes all this cool new technology has brought to their lives, but this, too, requires that the author notice that certain things simply weren’t available at certain points in the past. It also requires that the author think about (or research) how fast new technologies and infrastructure spread. The real world doesn’t work like the old John W. Campbell SF stories, where the heroes would invent a cool new gadget, and within two weeks they’d have produced and distributed enough of them for everyone in the world to have one.

But that’s all near-term stuff. What I wanted to talk about is the infrastructure of your average medieval fantasy novel. Which tends to be skeletal, if it’s there at all.

For example, consider the healing professions in the modern world. We have doctors, pharmacists, dentists, nurses, LPNs, chiropractors, acupuncturists, nurses’ aides, surgeons, med techs…and that’s even before you start in on specializations like cardiologists, pediatricians, anesthesiologists, radiologists…the list goes on and on. In most medieval fantasy novels, there are Healers and maybe midwives, and that’s it. Granted, real life medieval Europe didn’t have as wide a variety of medical practitioners as we do today, but they had more than “doctor” and “midwife.”

Physical infrastructure, such as transportation, is likewise frequently taken for granted in fantasy. When the rare wine that only the king drinks is poisoned, the author will likely spend a lot of time researching the poison, but often very little thinking about just why the wine is rare, and exactly how it got from the vineyard several countries over to the king’s table. Is there water transport, or really good roads, or are dragons common enough (and tamed enough) to haul freight like barrels of wine from city to city? Where did those roads or ships or dragons come from? How long have they been around?

Lots of medieval European cities have walls; lots of medieval fantasy novels therefore give their cities walls without thinking much about why the walls are there. Walled cities imply war, and not just one, but enough battles and seiges and attacks to make it worthwile putting up a wall. Also, if it’s been there for a while and the city is a living one, the city is likely to expand beyond the wall. If the wars and so on are still going on, that means the town will need, first, somewhere for all those folks outside the wall to stay during an attack, and, eventually, a second wall. And of course there’s the question of maintenance – somebody has to repair the wall after every attack, and check for various sorts of weather damage. It’s a lot of work, and expensive and time-consuming, and the town is likely to keep it up only if it really needs the protection.

A lot of the time, it won’t be necessary for the story to say much about the roads or ships or walls, or to go into the whole chain of people (grape pickers, vintners, coopers, carters, glass-blowers, bottlers, etc.) who have to exist behind the scenes in order for the king to have a bottle of wine on his table. Every once in a while, though, paying a little attention to this stuff can keep a writer from accidentally creating a tremendous plot hole. Alternatively, thinking about ways the wine can cover the thousand miles from vineyard to king’s table can lead to the invention of the dragon freight haulers, which could go a long way toward making a run-of-the-mill medieval fantasy into something with an interesting and unique feel.

By pcwrede | Posted in General, Writing | Tagged , | Comments (9)

Landscape vs. setting

May 12, 2013 – 11:13 am

Earlier this week, Minnesota Public Radio replayed  an interview with novelist Richard Ford, and some of his comments (around 23 minutes into the broadcast) got me thinking about landscape.

First off, landscape isn’t the same as setting. They overlap, of course, but one can tell an urban tale set in Denver, a rural tale set at a dude ranch twenty or forty miles west, or a story of aspiring ski stars set at a Canadian ski resort, and they’ll all have similar landscape, in the form of the Rocky Mountains.

Landscape, for my purposes, is a combination of the underlying geology – the rivers, hills, plains, lakes, mountains, etc. – and the way the land looks at the moment. Cultivated fields, lush forests, trees blackened by a recent wildfire or blown flat by a storm, a wasteland of stumps left by someone cutting acres of trees…all those are part of the landscape.

Setting includes landscape, but it also includes a lot more of what people have done on the landscape (as opposed to what they have done to the landscape, like digging canals or cutting trees). When you say a book is set in Paris, you’re including a lot more in that simple phrase than just the fact that the book is set in a city built on a broad river with some islands in it. You’re including political things – the country, the government at whatever time period you’ve chosen (and all the tensions with other governments that happen to be current), the language, the ethnic mix of people you’d expect to find. You’re including history, from the World Wars to Napoleon to the French Revolution and on back to Julius Ceasar’s Gallic wars. You’re including cultural stuff, from the food to the Louvre to the Moulin Rouge to customs to clothes.

From a writer’s perspective, landscape is a lot easier to make convincing adjustments to than setting, especially if we’re talking a fantasy or SF world that isn’t like Earth at all. I’ve solved several plot problems by inventing an impassable landscape feature (mountains, a river gorge, a swamp) and plunking it right where my characters were trying to go to avoid a difficulty (instead of facing it the way I wanted them to). Presto, they’re stuck doing what I want.

If I’d tried to do the same thing with setting, the ripple effect would mean changing all sorts of other things – at best, a heavy-duty rewrite; at worst, a completely different book. Of course, there’s a ripple effect from changing landscape, too, but it usually ripples out away from the story, into the Terra Incognita that the characters haven’t been to (so no rewriting) and aren’t going to go to ever (which was the point of inventing impassable mountains in the first place).

Landscape is something that different people react to in different ways. A lot of early settlers to the “big sky” country in Montana and the Great Plains went home after a few years because they couldn’t stand all that space; others found it gave them the sense of infinite possibility that Ford talks about in his interview. I have friends raised in cities who are acutely uncomfortable in rural areas, or going camping…and others who love it and who wouldn’t miss their annual trek to the Boundary Waters wilderness area.

That may seem obvious, but a writer has to think about it on three levels: the writer, the readers, and the characters.

Writers first need to be aware of their reaction to whatever landscape they’re using, and that others may not feel the same way, because without that awareness, it’s almost impossible to tweak what one is doing in the story, even if one knows that other people may not react the same way.

Next, the writer needs to think about whether their characters are similar or different – whether the wilderness the writer loves is something that his fussy scholar character would find untidy or even threatening, for instance. It’s also good to have different characters in a book have different reactions and comfort levels, even if those never quite come to the surface in obvious ways. The author may never explain why the London street-thief is wide awake in the woods all night while his companions, who’re used to camping out, snore away, but it’ll add to the characterization even if only on a subconscious level.

Finally, the writer needs to be aware that not all readers will react to a particular landscape the way the writer does. This means that the writer who sees “big sky” country as a land of infinite possibility may want to throw in a line or two somewhere to indicate this for readers who find that landscape agoraphobia-inducing, instead of just assuming that everybody who reads the story will get it because it is SO obvious. It’s obvious to the writer, but not necessarily to everyone else.

By pcwrede | Posted in Writing | Tagged , | Comments (9)

Sharjah

May 8, 2013 – 6:33 am

So I’m back from five days at the Sharjah Children’s Reading Festival in the United Arab Emirates and beginning to recover from the hideous jet lag and nearly 24 hours of travel (each way, counting layovers and plane delays) that it took to get there. Since I’m still not quite mentally ready to tackle a regular blog post, you get a trip report today.

When I was first invited to the Sharjah Children’s Reading Festival, I knew nothing whatever about it. My agent, however, did, and strongly recommended that I attend. The Children’s Reading Festival is one of the two book festivals held annually in Sharjah, and according to my agent, they are fast becoming the Bologna Book Fair and Frankfurt Book Fair of the Middle East. (For those of you who’ve never heard of any of this, those two are the premier places that agents and publishers’ reps go every year in order to sell translation rights. The Bologna fair focuses on children’s and YA; the Frankfurt fair covers everything.)

So I was excited. Also nervous – I haven’t done any of the international book fairs before, though there are quite a lot of them and some authors book a lot of Frequent Flyer miles making appearances at them. But definitely excited, both by the opportunity to visit a part of the world I hadn’t been to before and also, let’s be honest here, by the opportunity to get away from the SNOW we’ve still been having here. (I had to shovel my walk the Tuesday before I left; my flight home was delayed because there was a blizzard in Minneapolis and the plane that was supposed to go round-trip from Minneapolis to New York and back had deicing problems and got in to NY two hours late…but that’s a whole ‘nother story.)

Anyway, after a brief false start (I realized one block from the house that I’d forgotten to pack any copies of my books; fortunately, we had time to turn around and collect them), I was off. I left for the airport at 9:30 on Saturday morning and arrived at the hotel at 8:30 Sunday evening. Even with a 9-hour time difference and a five-hour layover in Dallas, it was a very long trip. Luckily for me, Emirates Air Lines is extremely comfortable.

The weather, on the other hand, was a bit of a shock. It was in the upper 80’s every day, with a nighttime low of 72 – that was about 60 degrees warmer than Minnesota (snow, remember? In April! Aaargh!), and it took some adjusting. Then I discovered that the day before I arrived, one of the other writers had had his school visit canceled on account of rain. Like a snow day, only…different. It makes sense when you consider that the streets aren’t designed for drainage, so an inch or two of rain ends up causing two-foot-deep puddles that stall cars, but it certainly drove home that I wasn’t in Kansas anymore. Or Minnesota.

Sharjah and Dubai impressed me as probably the most cosmopolitan place I have ever been, and that includes New York, London, and Paris. I shouldn’t have been surprised – after all, the Middle East has been the crossroads of the world for thousands of years. The main reason, I think, is that in Sharjah nearly everything operated on the assumption that there would be people of multiple cultures and languages to deal with. Nearly all the signs and billboards were in both English and Arabic; several also included Japanese. The buffet meals always had at least one Western-style entrée and one Indian, Thai, or Japanese entrée, as well as the Middle Eastern dishes (plus the salads, the sandwich fixings, and the deserts from around the world…I’m amazed I didn’t gain fifty pounds).

The Children’s Reading Festival was similarly international. OK, about 80-90% of the book dealers were Arabic publishers, but many had books in English (I picked up one on local history), and there were several who clearly act as distributors for American, British, or Japanese publishers (possibly others as well; I didn’t manage to examine all the booths as thoroughly as I’d have liked). The art display included children’s book illustrators from Mexico, Sweden, Canada, Germany, and Japan, as well as Jordan, Lebanon, Iraq, and Egypt (which I’d expected).

Monday I was part of a panel on “Great Stories Around the World” with a British writer, a writer and scholar from one of the U.A.E.’s universities, and a well-known Arabic children’s writer. The panel was both the same and different from those I’ve been on before. The similarity was most noticeable in the way nothing anyone said had much to do with the supposed topic. The panel followed the academic model, where each panelist gives a five or ten-minute presentation, rather than the SF-convention model, where the moderator asks questions and everyone answers them. As is fairly common with such panels, the university scholar’s presentation ran at least twice as long as any of the writers’ speeches; what was much less common was that it was thoroughly fascinating, and the gentleman’s passion for his subject (designing books to appeal to as many senses as possible, so as to involve children more fully in reading, especially kids who have trouble with the traditional ways they’re taught to read) came across even in translation.

I had a little difficulty with the translation earphones, which I hadn’t used before. (I found it extremely distracting and disorienting to be listening to someone speaking in Arabic while I was trying to think of what to say next.) I finally took the headphones off when anyone was speaking in English, and put them back on when someone was talking in Arabic and I needed the translation. I found out later that there was an on/off switch I could have used, which would have been much less intrusive.

I did one thing right, and that was to remember to speak slowly enough for the translator to keep up. It was a bit tricky, as I tend to talk faster and faster when I’m nervous. I was glad I’d been warned about that in advance; one of the other presenters went so quickly that the translator kept getting lost, and I missed about 25% of what he said.

The school visit I did later in the week was much like any school visit. I’d worried about needing a translator for that, too, but evidently many of the schools teach English by immersion, and I was sent to one of those. The students were very bright and eager and asked lots of good questions, and I was able to present their library with some of those books I’d nearly forgotten to bring.

The rest of the trip, I split between napping (I never did adjust to the time change), doing touristy stuff, and hanging around the Festival. I signed an enormous amount of stock for the dealer who had copies of my books, sat in on a couple of other panels, watched some of the demos and presentations (the storyteller sounded amazing, even if I couldn’t understand a thing he said, and he must have been good because the kids in the audience were absolutely enthralled).

The other foreign authors who, like me, had been invited to present at the festival were from all over – Sweden, Germany, England, Wales, Egypt, Jordan … and those were just the ones who were there at the same time I was. It was both fun and frustrating to meet them, as we were all on different schedules, so half the people I met Monday were leaving Tuesday morning, and new writers arrived every day. After a while, I lost track of who was coming and who was going.

And then, just when I was finally starting to adjust to the time change, I had to get up at 4:30 a.m. to catch the flight home. If I ever go again, I want to stay longer (and start adjusting to the time change in advance, so it’s not so much of a shock).

By pcwrede | Posted in General, Writing | Tagged | Comments (13)

Tin Ear

May 1, 2013 – 6:38 am

One of the worst criticisms that can be leveled at an author is “He has a tin ear for dialog.” In short form, it means the writer in question doesn’t do dialog well; in the longer version, it means the writer has no sense of the rhythms of speech, of variation in voice, or of the difference between narrative and dialog. Their characters sound stilted and formal, and not just when they’re supposed to be feeling awkward. In extreme cases, the writer’s dialog sounds exactly like their narrative; the only difference is that it has quotation marks around it.

Interestingly, one of the first things I noticed when I poked around looking at writing advice for dialog was that practically everyone spends a lot of time focusing on the part of the scene that’s not dialog – that is, on the speech tags and stage business. Those things are really important parts of the way you present your dialog, but you can do them to perfection and still have a tin ear for the speaking part.

Dialog is imitation speech. That means that above all else, it has to sound like something a person might actually say, which is why the one piece of advice you see over and over is this: if you’re having trouble with your dialog, read it out loud. It’s good advice, but if you have a truly tin ear, it may not be the place to start.

The other really common piece of advice is to listen to real people talk. Eavesdrop on the bus, in restaurants, at the mall, even take notes if you can get away with it. This sounds like reasonable advice, and it does seem to work for some people; the trouble is that dialog is an imitation of the way people speak, not a transcription of it. It’s a slightly-idealized, simplified model, not word-for-word and um-for-um dictation.

Listening to real people talking can help one get a notion of the differences in syntax and vocabulary and rhythm that make up the elusive thing called “the character’s voice.” I’ve never found eavesdropping to be terribly useful as a way into the writing part, though, because real conversations were never much help when it came to extracting that idealized, simplified model that I needed for my stories. Not even if I went through and cut the ums and ers and digressions and cleaned up half or more of the sentence fragments.

What did and does work, for me, was studying plays, screenplays, and movies. This ought to be obvious, but it wasn’t for me and it doesn’t seem to be for many, many other folks. Shakespeare is particularly useful, because you have not only the scripts, but also multiple films of many of them, which means you can study the dialog on the page and several different ways that different actors delivered the lines. Listening to radio plays, or movies where the picture is turned off so that all you get is the dialog, is also really informative.

Mostly, though, I read plays. All kinds of plays by all sorts of playwrights. I read them out loud with the play-reading group, out loud in my office, silently in my living room.

The thing about plays and screenplays is that the scenes are nearly all dialog. They’re also in a format that means the non-dialog parts – the speech tags and stage business – drop out of the way. A scriptwriter doesn’t have to worry about whether to use adjectives or where to put the speech tags, because the format is going to be “MARIA (angrily): That’s my hat.” So the writer isn’t as likely to be distracted by things that aren’t dialog.

The other thing about plays and movies is that they are already written in that idealized, somewhat simplified imitation-of-real-speech that you want for dialog in a story. This means that you don’t have to sort out which bits of vocabulary and syntax and so on are things that need to be cut (because they make things run on too long) and which bits are part of the specific character’s voice and therefore absolutely necessary.

Once you have a feel for the rhythm and syntax of speech in plays, then you start reading your own dialog out loud. If that doesn’t seem quite enough, try recording yourself saying it and then listen to it, or have someone else read it out loud while you listen. Start with just the dialog – no speech tags or stage business – because that’s the part that has to sound like speech. The tags and stage business and description that goes around the dialog is presentation, and it’s not the part people are talking about when they say someone has a tin ear for dialog. (It is the part they mean when they say someone has a tin ear for syntax or rhythm or narrative or just in general, but that’s not what I’m talking about here.)

The other thing that leads a lot of folks to say “he/she has a tin ear for dialog” is actually not so much about the dialog itself as it is about the characters who speak it.  I have quite a bit to say about it, so I’ll leave that part for next post.

By pcwrede | Posted in Writing | Tagged | Comments (3)

Rifles and fishing rods

April 28, 2013 – 6:11 am

“If you say in the first chapter that there is a rifle hanging on the wall, in the second or third chapter it absolutely must go off. If it’s not going to be fired, it shouldn’t be hanging there.”  – Anton Chekhov, quoted in Shchukin’s Memoirs

 At some point in their career, most writers have heard that quote, or one of the several variations on it. The idea is supposed to be that one shouldn’t introduce unnecessary elements into a story or play. It’s supposed to be about the importance of simplicity and not doing foreshadowing that you aren’t going to make use of.

In fact, what it’s about is audience expectations and the ways that authors manipulate them. You can tell by changing the supposed dramatic element in the quotation: “If you say in the first chapter that there is a fishing rod hanging on the wall, in the second or third chapter, someone absolutely must go fishing” does not make me nod and agree almost automatically, the way “If you hang a rifle on the wall…” does.

Why? Because rifles are dangerous; rifles are dramatic; rifles sound as if they ought to be important, and if they turn out not to be, the audience is going to be disappointed.  Fishing rods, on the other hand, are not inherently dramatic, dangerous, or important, so the reader or audience is unlikely to take one look at a fishing rod and go “Ohmygosh, what’s he going to catch?” More usually, the fishing rod will just be part of the décor, something that hardly even registers.

That is, unless there’s something about the fishing rod that strikes the reader as unusual or out of place. A fishing rod made of solid gold, for instance, or an ordinary one hanging on the wall in a space station. Either one raises questions, because a solid gold fishing rod is impractical and there’s nowhere to go fishing on a space station (probably) – and the reader expects the writer to answer those questions before the end of the story.

The notions that a rifle is dangerous and interesting but a normal fishing rod isn’t, that a gold fishing rod is a peculiar thing, and that there’s not likely to be anywhere to fish on a space station all come from the reader’s experience outside the story. If you present something you know the reader will think of as dangerous or unusual, it raises questions: why is this here? Why is it so unusual? Is there an explanation? Will it be used somehow later? And as soon as you start raising questions, the reader starts expecting answers…maybe not right away, but at some point before the story ends.

Context also has a lot to do with the reader’s expectations. If there’s something unusual on the living room mantelpiece, the reader is going to expect the story to do something with it, whether the something is a rifle or a frying pan. If, however, the frying pan is on the kitchen stove and the rifle is in the gun room at the hunting lodge, readers are much more likely to just blip past them as part of the normal landscape. Similarly, if the mantel is occupied by a rifle, a frying pan, three slices of bread, a dirty sock, a 1911 edition of the Field Guide to Insects of the Amazon Rain Forest, a postcard from Paris, a machete, two fake diamond rings, and a trombone, the reader is not as likely to register either the rifle or the frying pan as particularly significant; instead, it’s the oddness of the collection of things that commands attention.

There are lots of ways writers can make use of this. For instance, the really important item in that miscellaneous list might be the postcard from Paris (which contains the clue to the murder), but burying it in the middle of a list of much more peculiar items makes the reader less likely to notice it. Conversely, if the writer wants the reader to notice and remember something ordinary, they can put it somewhere that’s not its usual context, or make it an unusual color or material. It depends on the kinds of questions and expectations the writer wants to raise.

But there’s one more thing, and that’s the spaghetti method (as in, “throw a handful of spaghetti at the wall and see what sticks”). When you don’t know where your story is going – or sometimes, even if you think you do – you throw in some cool description or a character bit or a little razzle-dazzle that doesn’t seem to have much to do with anything. It’s just there because it was a fun bit. And then one of three things happens:

1) You get to the end of the story, and it was just a fun bit and doesn’t add anything really. It didn’t stick to the wall. So you cut it out when you do the revisions.

2) You get stuck a chapter or two down the road, so you go back and look at what you’ve already written, and there’s your cool bit, and it’s just what you need to get the characters moving, or get them out of the hole they’re in. Presto, you have just become a genius of foreshadowing. (Don’t tell anyone it was an accident.)

3) The little bit about the music box or the character’s fondness for pistachios crops up again a few scenes later, and then again, and then suddenly it’s become a recurring theme, or a setup for a key plot point, or a poignant memory for someone else, or the clue that proves the character guilty/innocent. You didn’t plan it, but once the pattern started to form, it was irresistible and useful. Sometimes, when this happens, you realize that you need to go back and mention the pistachios in Chapter One for just that last little bit of necessary backfill, and sometimes everything ends up in the perfect place because that’s just where it happened. You’re still a genius of foreshadowing, just don’t mention that you made it up as you went along.

Most of the non-writing folks who talk about that Chekhov quote only look at point #1, and argue that it would be easier not to put the “unnecessary” bits in in the first place. They don’t realize that the writer doesn’t always know what is or isn’t necessary until later on in the process. And that they don’t have to.

By pcwrede | Posted in Writing | Tagged , | Comments (4)

Beats and games and instinct

April 24, 2013 – 6:32 am

Beats and plot points aren’t the same thing, though they sometimes sound as if they ought to be. Basically, plot points are about content; beats are about rhythm. Beats make a pattern; plot points make a causal chain. They support and depend on each other, but they’re not the same.

In acting, where the term comes from, beats refer to the natural pauses that occur when something in the scene changes direction. If a character is making coffee and then answers the phone, that’s at least two beats; if the phone conversation starts off funny and then suddenly turns serious, that would add another beat…as I understand it, anyway.

Try to translate that to writing and you get another one of those ways of analyzing scenes that sounds great on paper, but isn’t much use for actually creating the scenes. Not directly, anyway.

What got me going on this was a little book called “Hamlet’s Hit Points,” written by Robin Laws for the stated purpose of helping gamesmasters do better storytelling. The book begins by describing a rather overly-complicated system of classifying story beats into different types and sub-types, and then proceeds to analyze of Hamlet, Dr. No, and Casablanca according to the author’s system.

He does not, however, advocate applying the system directly to one’s game. When you’re gamesmastering, you can’t do that, because your gamers never, ever follow whatever script you had in mind. They’ll take your serious dramatic scenario and turn it into low comedy in about ten minutes; they’ll refuse to follow the lures you lay out for them and head to the bar to consult instead of rushing off to rescue their buddy from the dungeon; they’ll decide to go shopping to kill time while their new super-weapon is being built, instead of heading off for another adventure; they’ll find a political solution to what you’d planned as an action problem and knock all the diplomats through the wall when you’d planned a nice frustrating round of political negotiating. Much the way many of one’s characters work when one is writing.

Running a role-playing game is about three parts careful planning (two of which will be useless, but you don’t know which two, so you have to do all of it), two parts method acting, and four parts improv (with a hefty dose of stand-up comedy, though if you’re lucky, one of the gamers will be the comedian and you’ll only have to be the straight man). A lot of what happens, you make up in the moment, changing plans on the fly as you react to what the gamers have decided to try and to the random dice rolls. You don’t have time to stop and think about whether you’re working with the A plotline or the B plotline, or whether what’s going on is action or reaction. You certainly don’t have time to think “Now, we just had a nice action bit, so next should come the reaction,” and even if you did, the players would probably ignore you if you tried to make them follow that kind of script.

What you can do is hone your instincts, so that when you are riding the chaos that is an intense gaming session with fifteen people all clamoring for attention at once (or worse yet, plotting something quietly at the far end of the table where you can’t hear them and start working out a counter), you will make the right decision in the moment.

And that – honing the storytelling instinct – is what the author of “Hamlet’s Hit Points” is trying to do with his system of beats and resolutions. His idea is not that people will build scenes and stories consciously and deliberately in this way; it’s that people will analyze already-existing stories until the rhythm sinks into their subconscious, so that when they’re making things up in a white-hot frenzy, they’ll have a better rhythm.

Which is, of course, why the whole thing appeals so much to me. (Well, that and the fact that I love that kind of analysis, and it makes such a good distraction from, you know, actually writing something.) Because for me, and for most of the writers I know, writing the first draft of a scene is a lot like riding the chaos of a gaming session. You don’t need a system; you need good instincts. The main difference is that with writing, you can patch some of it up in revision; with a gaming session, if you want to “fix” something, your only hope is that all your gamers will have really bad memories (and that trick never works…)

Most of the writers I know have been training their storytelling instincts since forever…by reading everything they can get their hands on. Still, the idea of working at it a little more deliberately, a little more consciously, appeals to me (certainly a whole lot more than a lot of the rules and directions and systems for writing fiction that I’ve ever run across).

Which brings me back to beats, and analyzing writing according to a system originally invented for actors. It is, as I said, not directly useful for constructing scenes (or at least, it isn’t for anyone I know. There’s probably somebody out there that it works for, though. If you’re that person, ignore that last sentence). As a way of training one’s instincts, or even just spotting places to improve in the second draft, though it might just be worth trying.

By pcwrede | Posted in Writing | Tagged , | Comments (5)

Hooks

April 21, 2013 – 6:16 am

Every story needs to open with a hook, or so says conventional writing wisdom. Conventional writing wisdom, unfortunately, seldom goes on to address the obvious question:

Just what is a hook, anyway? And how do you write one?

There are three things everybody seems to agree upon when it comes to hooks: 1) They come at the beginning of the story; 2) They catch the reader/editor’s attention so they’ll want to keep reading; 3) They’re really, really important.

After that, everybody goes in a different direction. Starting with length: the most common definition seems to be “the first sentence of the story,” but you can find places that define the hook as the first paragraph, the first page, the first scene, or the first chapter of a story.

Once someone has defined how long they think a hook can or should be, they usually jump right in with recommendations. “Start with a question.” “Start in the middle of something.” “Start with dialog.” “Start with conflict.” “Start with a dilemma.” “Start with a simile or metaphor.”

None of these are particularly bad advice, but none of them really address the fact that a hook has to fit the story. Any fisherman knows that if you bait your hook with worms, you won’t catch the same fish that you would if you used minnows, or a lure that imitates flying bugs. And you don’t use the same bait in the ocean as you’d use in a fresh-water stream or in a lake, because the fish are different.

Similarly, if your story is slam-bang action-adventure, then a bomb explosion in the first paragraph is likely to hook the right readers (i.e., the ones that will enjoy your book). If your story focuses on relationships, the explosion likely won’t work very well. Fooling readers into reading further because they’re expecting one sort of story will not make them suddenly like the kind you’ve actually written. Also, the wrong bait is likely to drive off the readers who would like what you’ve written. Bad idea.

So Principle #1 for writing a hook is: It has to suit the story.

Principle #2 is that the hook has to be intriguing. That is, it has to have bait on it, something that will interest the kind of readers who’ll like the story. The theory is that once you get somebody interested, they’ll stay interested…but this only works if you paid attention to Principle #1 – the hook has to suit the story.

This is why all those recommendations aren’t worth the pixels they’re displayed in. Any one of them might suit your story, but also might not. It depends on the story, and on the readers. You have to ask “Is starting with a question/conflict/a dilemma/dialog/etc. right for this story? Can I come up with a first line based on any of those things that will intrigue the readers who’ll enjoy the book?” Quite often, you can’t answer those questions until you know what the story is, which brings us to the third point.

And the third point is that a hook does not have to be the very first part of the story you write. Yes, the hook is the first bit of the story, where “bit” obviously ranges from one sentence to one chapter, depending on who you talk to. But it doesn’t have to be hook-y until the story is finished. (This is where most of the how-to advice places miss the boat; they assume that, since the hook comes first, it must and will be written first, and if it’s the first thing you write, then they don’t have to mention Principle #1, because of course the writer will write a story that suits the opening line.)

Some writers do start by coming up with a killer opening. Other times, ideas just arrive as a hook; “Mother taught me to be polite to dragons” hooked me into writing the rest of the story. But quite a few writers start writing with “scaffolding” – anywhere from a paragraph to a couple of chapters of “getting into” the story, all of which will have to be dismantled/deleted when the story is finished. And doing something just to get going (and then revising it later when one has a better idea what’s going on) works very well for quite a lot of writers, even when it’s not actual scaffolding.

If generating a killer first line is what gets you started, by all means sit down and write a list of twenty opening lines that intrigue you. But if not, don’t worry about it. Just treat it as a revision problem.

Which brings me, finally, to the actual question of writing hooks.

If you have a cool idea that came with an opening line, or an opening line that is just begging for a story to go with it, you already have your hook. Write it down and keep going. If generating one is the first step in your process, then Principle #2 is the most important thing to remember: the hook must be intriguing. Unless you already have a very specific audience in mind, start by intriguing yourself. You’re the one who’s going to have to write the story that flows from the hook, after all.

That means, if you love reading/writing action, start with action. If what gets you interested in a story is a question or a mystery, start with presenting the reader with a puzzle. If it’s characters, start with the most interesting thing about the most interesting character in your head. If you hate not knowing where the story is happening or what’s going on, don’t begin with a paragraph that hides these things from the reader; instead, think of the most interesting and intriguing way you can present them. And then write the rest of the story.

If you’re treating the hook as a revision problem, you do this in reverse. An analytical sort of writer or reviser will look at the story they’ve already written and think about it, about what kinds of things are at the heart of it (characters, relationships, adventure, etc.), and about what kinds of readers are likely to enjoy that kind of story. They ask themselves what those readers will like best about the story, and try to work out how to get as much of that thing into the coolest possible first few lines. (You can run down those lists of recommended ways of writing hooks as a sort of brain teaser, a way to jog your mind into coming up with some possibilities, but you don’t have to use any of them.)

A more intuitive writer will also look at the story they’ve written, but instead of thinking about all that, they’ll probably read it over a couple of times until something catches their attention, and then they work whatever-it-is into the perfect opening, even if they can’t explain why it’s perfect. They just know it feels right.

Either way, ultimately it’s the writer who gets to decide what makes the perfect opening line for a particular story. There aren’t rules or a limited list that you have to choose from. If all your betareaders stop reading before they get to the end of the first paragraph, then whatever you did isn’t working and you need to fix it somehow. That may just mean working on it, not changing it to someone else’s idea of “what makes a good hook.”

Note that although nearly every advice-giver looks at the punchy, first-line hooks when they give examples, the main reason they do this is because punchy, first-line hooks are short. Books that take a paragraph or a page as their opening hook rarely get quoted as examples, because that means there’s less room for the advice-giver to explain why they’re a perfectly good method of starting the sort of book that ought to start that way.

By pcwrede | Posted in Writing | Tagged , | Comments (7)

Boston

April 17, 2013 – 6:07 am

The first I heard about the Boston Marathon bombing was when my father called Monday evening to tell me my nephew was uninjured. My nephew goes to school in Boston, and had been watching the race, but not at the finish line. I’d been driving home from out of town, listening to CDs instead of the radio, so I hadn’t known a thing about it. Sometimes, having a weird schedule is useful.

The slight time lag in finding out about it didn’t make the event any easier to process. In fact, it brought up a whole lot of unpleasant memories of hearing about earlier disasters of one sort or another, from Sandy Hook and Columbine to 9/11, from the tsunamis in Japan and the Indian Ocean to Columbia and Challenger, all the way back to Kennedy’s assassination. Some of those horrors were man-made and deliberate; some were the result of terrible mistakes or accidents; some were just nature being nature.  Apart from the fact that people died every time, there’s no connection between them except for the personal one: I remember the same sinking feeling combined with shock as I heard about each of them.

There are a whole lot of known psychological reactions to unexpected tragedy, starting with shock, disbelief, and feeling helpless, but I think the psychologists miss something when they look only at the emotions people have. They miss what people do.

People didn’t panic (which could have caused a lot more injuries, given the crowd). Some of them ran towards the explosion, and not only the police and firefighters and medical personnel who were on the job. A lot of people who were there as spectators did, too, and worked to help the injured. Some of them we know about, and some we don’t.

People who live in Boston signed on to web sites to offer their spare rooms to strangers who were stranded, or who suddenly needed a place to stay while a friend or family member was in the hospital. Others turned up with bottles of juice, water, and sweaters for the bewildered slower runners who weren’t allowed to finish because of the explosions. People who don’t live in Boston coordinated “random acts of pizza,” sending food to the police, firefighters, EMTs, anyone who needed it.

And people talked about what happened, and their reactions to it.  Some of us aren’t in a place where we can do anything but talk…and watch the news, and hope that the death toll doesn’t rise and that they catch whoever planted the bombs. But even that little is doing something, of a sort.

And as far as I’m concerned, doing what one can is important, whether that’s running toward an explosion in order to help, walking calmly away from it so that the EMTs will be able to get in and do their job, or donating $10 worth of pizza to feed the people who are in the thick of things.

By pcwrede | Posted in General | Comments (9)

Best and worst advice

April 14, 2013 – 1:49 pm

The other day, somebody asked me what the best and worst writing advice I’d ever gotten was.

The best was easy: “Learn to type.”

My mother was the first to give me that particular bit of writing advice, though I’ve seen it since coming from a variety of authors, including Ursula le Guin and Isaac Asimov. But Mom was the one who made me take the secretarial typing class in high school (which you had to type 55 words per minute to pass) instead of the college student class (which you only had to be able to type 20 words per minute to pass). Mom, I owe you.

There are a bunch of reasons that still make this good advice, though there are writers who prefer a pen or pencil and paper for their first drafts. If it really is part of your process to slow things down and handwrite, stick to it. For the rest of us, though, there are two advantages, the first being the obvious speed of production gained by being able to touch-type at 55+ words per minute (after 40 years of practice, I think I’m a lot faster than 55 wpm, but I haven’t done a typing test in a very long time).

The other advantage of touch typing is less obvious and has to do with ergonomics and the long run. I have a good friend who essentially wore her neck out by spending thirty years looking from fingers/keyboard up at the computer screen and back down to keyboard, over and over, every few minutes. The doctor said it was like bending a spoon back and forth, over and over – eventually, the metal weakens and gives. Not something I ever want to have to worry about on such a personal basis.

(One can, of course, use dictation software to avoid the whole problem…but I also know someone who, having blown out her wrists typing 16 hours a day on a non-ergonomic keyboard, proceeded to blow out her vocal chords, i.e., gave herself semi-permanent laryngitis, by overusing dictation software. Possible the second bit of Really Good Writing advice should be “Don’t work 16 hour days on a regular basis.”)

The worst advice was a lot harder to pin down. The first thing that came to mind was “Learn your craft by writing short stories; don’t even think of trying a novel until you’re selling reliably as a short fiction writer.” The second one was “Get up half an hour earlier to write.”

The first one was demonstrably bad advice for me: I am a natural novelist, who wrote and sold five entire novels before finally managing to sell a short story. There are natural short fiction writers for whom the opposite is true.

Of course, when that advice was given to me, there was still a lively short story market in the SF/F field, and there were even still places you could sell literary/mainstream fiction for actual money (as opposed to being paid in copies of the magazine). Then the short fiction market pretty much vanished. The Internet is bringing it back a bit, but since I do very few short stories, I’m not that conversant with what markets are available for short story writers.

Still, whatever market is or isn’t out there, it remains true that a good X will sell sooner than a lousy Y, where X is whatever length comes naturally and Y is whatever doesn’t. And you are much more likely to do a better job on what comes naturally than on something that’s hard. Of course, if you are a genius brimming with talent, you may write a brilliant X, while your Y is merely good; the brilliant X is still likely to sell faster than the merely good Y, but the good Y is going to be far enough beyond the usual slush pile content that you’ll have a decent shot at selling it. Being a genius is, however, something that few of us can judge for ourselves, so it’s best not to count on it.

Getting up half an hour early to “squeeze in” writing time is something that sounds good in theory, but I don’t know anyone it actually works for. Staying up half an hour longer never seems to be recommended, but it does work for some folks I know…provided they have time to catch up on their missing sleep periodically.

Because the big problem with taking half an hour out of your sleep time is that if you short yourself on sleep for very long, your brain starts to crinkle up and shut down. And the first thing to go seems to be one’s creative juice.

All of the folks I know who make “stay up half an hour longer” work are people who do not have to get up and go to work in the morning, so they can sleep in an extra half hour or hour (and sleeping in is a lot more attractive than going to bed early, for most of us). To make “Get up half an hour early” work in the long run, one would also have to go to bed half an hour earlier, so as not to incur a growing sleep deficit, and nobody I know wants to do that.

You may have noticed that both my best and worst advice don’t have much to do with choosing the words one puts on paper. Anyone who’s been reading this blog for a while knows how I feel about all the writing “rules” that are out there (hint: not positive), but in my experience, the absolute worst advice is aimed at the process itself. Because once you get the words down on paper (or in pixels), you can fix them if you’ve messed something up, but if you mess up the process, you may very well never get the words down in the first place.

By pcwrede | Posted in Writing | Tagged , , | Comments (10)

Plot points

April 10, 2013 – 6:00 am

The other day somebody asked me what a plot point was, and I had to stop and think about it. As usual, when I have to stop and think about anything writing-related, I end up doing a blog post to clarify my thinking.

“Plot points” are one of those writing terms with no standard definition. I was a bit surprised to discover that some people use the term to refer very specifically to the events that mark the theoretical boundary between “acts” of a story. That is, if you’re using a three-act structure, your story has two plot points, one between acts one and two, and one between acts two and three. If you’re using a five-act structure, the story would have four plot points.

At the other end of the range, I found a definition that boils down to “anything significant.” That’s a little broad, but when you get down to cases, I find it a lot more useful than the extremely limited version above.

And then there are the folks in the middle, who define “plot point” as synonymous with “turning point” – a life-changing decision or event that opens some new paths for the characters and closes others. In Lord of the Rings, the hobbits’ meeting with Strider in Bree is one such event; Frodo’s decision to volunteer to be ring-bearer is another. This definition is in the middle of the range because it’s generally accepted that there’s a major turning point at the end of each act, but there can be lots of lesser ones along the way.

After looking at a bunch of different definitions and examples, the best one I can come up with is this: plot points are the information the reader must have in order for the story to make sense. That’s why general examples of plot points tend to include the word “significant” a lot: The characters perform a significant action, or make a significant decision, or discover significant information or clues; a significant character or place or question is introduced; something significant is set up or paid off or answered, etc.

In other words, plot points are things that move the story forward. They can be large and obvious (finding out that Bilbo’s ring is the One Ring, hiding from Ringwraiths on the road to Buckleberry Ferry), or they can be seemingly inconsequential things that set up a scene or situation or key bit of information for later (Sam remarking, very early, that he’d like to see elves one day). They’re not limited to life-changing events or decision, but they certainly include them (a life-changing event or decision is nearly certain to be “significant” to the story-in-progress, after all).

So what are the things the reader needs to know to make sense of the story? Who the central characters are, for one; what the key strengths and weaknesses and relationships are that will cause them to take or not take important plot-relevant actions. What information the characters need to have at any given point in order to move forward. How they get that information (and if it seems to come out of nowhere, all too conveniently, then the writer may need to add a plot point earlier to set things up so it’s not such a coincidence). What choices they have and what decisions they can make. What actions they take as a result of the information and choices they have and the decisions they’ve made. What things need to be set up, and what the payoff of each setup is.

Looking at plot points this way is useful from a couple of different directions. The first is that if plot points are things that move the story forward, that means they are the source of narrative drive, and a writer can theoretically control the pace and drive of the story by controlling how many plot points are included in a scene or on each page. If readers are complaining about a scene or story moving too slowly, maybe it’s because there aren’t enough plot points per scene to maintain the narrative drive.

The second interesting thing is that you can examine and create plot points from either direction. That is, you can write a story or plot outline and then make a list of what plot points are missing (what things need to be set up or introduced or clarified for the reader), so you know what to add/fix in revision, or you can start with an idea and a blank sheet of paper, make a list of possible plot points, and construct the outline from there. Or you can work from both ends toward the middle: start by making a list of key plot points, and add to it or rearrange it as you write and realize that things are happening in a different order or going in a different direction.

The last interesting thing about this definition (and most of the others) is that “plot points” are not necessarily strictly about plot. Bringing an important new character onstage is a plot point (Gollum, for instance); so is introducing the reader to a major new setting (Rivendell, the Mines of Moria, Edoras, Mount Doom). One could color-code one’s list of “plot points” in a variety of ways (blue for characters; red for actions/decisions; yellow for settings/information; or perhaps using lighter shades or secondary colors like green, orange, and purple for subplots…)

My point here is not to encourage people to waste time (though if you find it useful to your writing, it’s not a waste of time). It’s more to remind folks that the reader needs to know more than just “what happens next;” they need to know who and how and why and where, as well as what. So if you’re going to try analyzing your writing for plot points (it’s not required, and it won’t be useful to everyone), don’t limit your “plot points” strictly to the action.

By pcwrede | Posted in Writing | Tagged , | Comments (5)

Prewriting

April 7, 2013 – 6:00 am

As near as I can tell, “prewriting” is a trendy catch-all term for “everything a writer does before they actually sit down and start writing the story.” Even that definition is a little dicey, given how many writers go through a stage where they’re writing down bits and snippets and scenelets and even whole scenes, which they pile up and later assemble into “the story.” It can be hard to tell where the line is between “getting ready to write the story” and “actually writing the story.”

That said, nearly every writer does some prewriting, even the serious seat-of-the-pants types, even if it’s mainly in their heads. There are basic decisions to be made about intended length, starting point, viewpoint character, place and time, even “I am writing a novel” vs. “I am writing a screenplay.” How much prewriting any given writer does … well, that depends.

And what it depends on is the purpose the prewriting serves for that particular author.

Prewriting can serve to clarify a story in the writer’s mind. It can prime the pump, increasing the writer’s interest, enthusiasm, and general idea-pressure so that the story will start off with a rush of writing. It can clear away the false starts. It can help determine a direction or a theme or a structure for the story. It can improve the writing flow for the rest of the book. It can help avoid wrong turns and “stuck” places and problems, making both the writing and the revision process easier and smoother.

But prewriting will do none of these things automatically. There are a million-plus websites that talk about prewriting, and most of them talk about techniques like brainstorming, mind-mapping, character and setting creation, choosing a theme, etc. What they don’t talk about is why bother…and/or why not to bother, and that makes all the difference.

One of the websites I looked at broke down the prewriting process into steps. Steps #2, 3, and 4 were, respectively, “pick an audience,” “decide on a theme,” and “draw a map.” There’s nothing wrong with doing any of those things as a part of prewriting…if they happen to serve the writer’s purpose in doing prewriting.

I expect my prewriting to clarify the story, and then to improve my writing flow and help me avoid wrong turns. Picking an audience does nothing to help me with that (or perhaps it is more correct to say that I have no need to pick any audience other than myself). Deciding on a theme is, I have found, monumentally counter-productive for me; far from improving my writing flow, it tends to impede it.

Maps – OK, I do maps…but not always. It depends on whether I think I’m going to need one in order to keep straight where everything is and what all the place-names I’m throwing off go with. I find it a lot easier to glance at a map to see where Puerto del Oeste or Dangil is than to look up a description on a list, especially since the map tells me at a glance where it is compared to everything else, while the description is likely to only mention a couple of key locations that it’s north or east or south of. And I won’t necessarily need a map if I’m telling a story set entirely on one farm, or even in a city. I might want a floor plan showing which bedrooms each of my sixteen characters is in, but then again, it might not be important.

The point is that this sort of checklist doesn’t address my real question, which is “What do I need to know now, in order to make this story easier to write later?” If my main purpose in prewriting were to increase my enthusiasm and idea-pressure, what I’d need to do in those early stages would be different, depending on what sorts of things I thought were likely to get me pumped up about writing this particular story. (And even then, different things work for different writers. I get pumped up by talking about the story to lots of people; some of my friends get pumped up by not talking about it, so that the urge to get the story out is dammed up and gets stronger and stronger until they have to start writing.)

What I do for prewriting varies from book to book, and experience indicates that what is effective as prewriting varies from writer to writer. Among the things that can be helpful, depending, are: Drawing maps and floor plans. Making lists of characters, what they do for a living, and how they relate to other characters. Making a list of possible names of characters (so that when you suddenly need a name for the palace guard or cabby, you have a bunch of pre-generated names to pick from that all “sound right” for whatever world/country/culture you’re setting things in). Plot outlines, ranging in detail from the two-paragraph cover-letter summary to the thirty-to-fifty-page treatment. Brainstorming. Mind-mapping. Writing down bits and pieces of scenes. Drawing up a timeline. Research reading (especially if you’re doing a historical or semi-historical setting, but often useful even if you’re making everything up from scratch).

Some writers experiment a lot as part of their prewriting – trying out different viewpoints and viewpoint characters, or different possible openings, or different styles or voices. Basic decisions can also happen at this point, like whether it’s going to be a short story, novella, or novel; coming up with a theme; deciding on a structure or form; or deciding where the story begins and whether that’s also where the writing opens (or whether the writing opens somewhere else, and the beginning of the story comes later or as a flashback). You can decide whether there’s a McGuffin and what it is, or what level the main plot is going to be on (action, emotion, mental, spiritual).

Some of these things can be left to be determined when the need for them crops up during the actual writing; some will be inherent in whatever story idea the writer is starting with. For instance, Talking to Dragons started with the sentence “Mother taught me to be polite to dragons.” I didn’t have to decide what point of view to use or who the viewpoint character would be; I knew from that sentence that it was first person, and while I still had a lot of things to find out about the viewpoint character, I had his voice and a few key facts right there.

Nothing that is decided during prewriting is irrevokable. This puts a lot of people off the whole idea – why bother doing all that work, if you’re not going to stick to it? It depends, again, on why you’re doing it. For me, if I try out six wrong decisions during the prewriting stage, I’ve just saved myself months of going down blind alleys during the writing phase later on, so it’s worth it.

By pcwrede | Posted in Writing | Tagged , , | Comments (11)

My view of viewpoint

April 3, 2013 – 6:00 am

It’s been a while since I’ve talked about viewpoint, so I think I’ll devote this post to it, and maybe a few more if people seem interested.

Viewpoint is one of those areas of writing where there seems to be a tremendous amount of confusion. A lot of the confusion stems, I think, from the imprecision and lack of standardization in the terminology, so I’ll start with that.

The term “viewpoint” itself can mean several things:

1. “The position or vantage point from which the events of a story seem to be observed and presented” – Concise Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms

2. The type of viewpoint

3. The viewpoint character

The first meaning is the broad overview sort that’s supposed to encompass everything, but often ends up just confusing people. I think of it as the angle from which the author chooses to tell the story – from inside the story or from the outside looking in? After the fact or as it happens?

The type of viewpoint is basically whether the narrative is in first-person (“I hit him”), second person (“you hit him”), or third person (“she hit him”). Second-person is rare; usually, the choice is between first person or third person. Plural viewpoints (“We hit him,” “They hit him”) are even rarer than second-person, but they do get used on occasion. The examples I know of are short stories.

The viewpoint character is the character through whose eyes the reader sees the story. The viewpoint character can be the protagonist, or he/she can be a major secondary character or sidekick (like Dr. Watson in the Sherlock Holmes stories), or she/he can be a minor character who’s in a position to observe most of the key plot moments. He can even be an omniscient narrator who doesn’t appear in the story, as with Steven Brust’s Paarfi novels.

Thus the answer to the question “What’s the viewpoint in this story?” could be:

1. The story is told “from inside,” as it happens

2. Third-person subjective

3. Jane Smith, identical twin of Judy Smith

Most of the time, people don’t stop to clarify which answer they’re looking for when they ask the question, which leads to lots of misunderstanding. This is especially true when people are talking about type of viewpoint (first, second, third), because viewpoint types can be broken down into finer and finer detail…and there doesn’t seem to be much agreement about what those sub-types ought to be, much less what they are called.

For instance, that viewpoint type I listed up there, “third person subjective,” is also called tight third person, third person personal, intimate third person, limited third person, and limited omniscient, depending on what source you’re looking at. And each of those terms breaks third person viewpoint down in slightly different ways, some of which map to each other (as “third person subjective” = “third person personal” and “third person objective” = “camera eye”) and some of which don’t.

One of the most useful ways of looking at all these different ways of breaking down point of view, for me, came when somebody pointed out that all these categories are trying to sort out different combinations of three different factors. The first one is the easiest and most obvious: whether the narrative is in first, second, or third person.

The second one is where the narrative falls along a range from subjective to objective. The more of the characters’ personal thoughts, feelings, opinions, etc. make it directly into the story, the more subjective it is; the more everything is conveyed by describing strictly what anyone and everyone could see/hear/touch/etc., the more objective it is.

The third factor is how limited/omniscient the narrator’s knowledge is or is not. This is especially relevant in third person, where an omniscient narrator can stop and tell the reader about the prehistoric geology of the landscape the characters are walking over (which none of them know anything about), or give a quick two-page summary of the entire future life of the cab driver who’s taking the protagonist from the airport to her hotel.

I would be remiss if I didn’t mention multiple viewpoint in here somewhere, even though it isn’t really a viewpoint at all. Multiple viewpoint is a structure, in which different scenes are told through the eyes of different viewpoint characters and/or using different types of viewpoint. The most common multiple viewpoint uses tight third-person throughout, and shifts from one character’s point of view to another’s between scene breaks.

There are, however, books written in multiple first-person, and books that have both multiple viewpoint characters and multiple types of viewpoint (i.e., when George is the viewpoint, the scenes are in tight-third person, but when Jane is the viewpoint, they’re in first person, and when Kitty is the viewpoint, they’re in camera-eye). All of these are just as much “multiple viewpoint” as the more common ensemble-tight-third type, which is why I say it’s a structure and not a type of viewpoint at all.

Being an analytical sort of writer, I find it useful to look at and try to comprehend all these different ways of looking at point of view. Not everyone will. The good news is that you don’t have to worry too much if you don’t find the terminology or the various divisions helpful in your writing. The terminology really matters only when you’re talking about writing and books to other readers and writers. Since most writers do talk quite a lot about books and writing, however, it’s usually a good idea to have at least a passing acquaintance with the different terms, and an awareness of all the differences, so that one doesn’t end up having a three-hour discussion only to find out that you were using different terms for the same thing, or talking about two completely different aspects of viewpoint.

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Weak and Strong?

March 31, 2013 – 6:06 am

One of the bits of advice that is often given to would-be writers is “Use strong verbs.” Apart from my usual allergy to rules and generalizations, one of the things that bothers me about this is that I’ve seldom seen anyone try to explain what it means, and on the rare occasions when someone does, the explanation usually boils down to “don’t use ‘is’.” Which is really just…wrong.

I’ve already done the rant on passive voice, so today I’m going to talk about verbs in general, and why there’s so much confusion about “passive verbs,” “weak verbs,” and so on.

First off, there’s no such thing as a passive verb. There’s passive voice, but that’s a construction that can be used with nearly any verb. Saying “He was hit by a truck” does not somehow make “to hit” less of an action.

What there are, are verbs that are a state of being and verbs that are actions. To hit, to stand, to jump, to buy, to taste are all action verbs. To want, to need, to owe, to hate are all states of being.

You can watch somebody running, or buying something, or hitting a baseball, and you can usually tell what he is doing. If you were asked, you could say “He ran across the street” or “She stood there and looked at the clouds.” States of being, however, are not necessarily visible or obvious. That woman who’s standing there looking at clouds – is she thinking? Wishing for something? Worrying? Feeling ill? You can’t tell from observing her behavior; all you can see her doing is standing there.

When writers are advised to dramatize scenes – to “show, don’t tell” – they’re usually advised to get rid of all the verbs except the action verbs, on the grounds that “showing” means describing what the reader would see if the reader were somehow able to hide in a corner or up a tree and actually watch the scene unfold. This works fine in a fight scene or a chase, when what’s going on is action. It gets a lot more problematic when most of the “action” is internal to various characters, and can only be “shown” through facial expression and body language.

The other big difficulty is, I think, a misunderstanding of some older terms of grammar that have mostly been superseded. When I was in grade school, what are now called “regular verbs” (that form the past tense by adding –ed or –d, such as owe/owed, hate/hated, burn/burned, jump/jumped) were known as “weak verbs,” while irregular verbs (that have a different past tense, such as run/ran, write/wrote, tell/told, feel/felt,) were known as “strong verbs.”  

This obviously had nothing to do with the effect the verb in a sentence, or with whether the verb was an action or a state-of-being (there are both sorts on each list). It certainly had nothing to do with how desirable it might be to use one sort over the other. But “weak verb” sounds as if it ought to be a bad thing, and “strong verb” sounds as if it’ll make your sentences more effective, and both phrases are short and punchy. Over time, as regular/irregular replaced weak/strong in grammar terminology, I think people ran across or half-remembered the older terms and started misapplying them.

Another major mistake is in identifying “to be” as passive, weak, and undesirable, especially when it’s part of the verb form. I recently saw a paragraph written in present progressive tense (“They are now running along main street; the office workers are gaping as the race is going by…”) which someone had marked as being “too passive” while circling every “are” and “is” in the paragraph. The critique was half right; a whole paragraph in present continuous made for awkward reading.

But the problem was a tense problem, not a problem with overusing “to be,” and I nearly went ballistic when I saw the critic patting himself on the back for “changing weak verbs into strong ones” and “eliminating passive verbs” when not one verb changed. Only the tense did (“Now they run along main street; the office workers gape as the race goes by…”) Yes, the revised paragraph is much more readable and flows much better, but not for the reasons the critic gave. And in my experience, showing people a good fix and then giving them a bunch of incorrect information about what was done and why only ends up confusing them, at best. At worst, the writers fixate on the wrong things and end up making their own prose far worse than it was when they began.

What it all comes down to is that authors can’t simply apply a bunch of rules. They have to think – think about what they’re doing, what effect it has, and what effect they want it to have. Is this a chase scene? Then lots of action verbs are probably appropriate. Is it an internal monolog by the viewpoint character? Then there’ll probably be a few more state-of-being verbs. Is it the dialog of the radio announcer, commenting on a race? Then “Now they are running along main street…” probably is the right tense to use, and the author will have to find some other way of eliminating the awkwardness of too much present-progressive in a row.

 

By pcwrede | Posted in Writing | Tagged , | Comments (10)

Composing a query

March 27, 2013 – 6:13 am

For some reason, I feel like talking about query letters again, possibly because I’ve recently been the recipient of a couple of queries that can only be described as dreadful. I begin with a couple of definitions:

A query letter is a one-page business letter that presents the author’s novel to an editor or agent in hopes they’ll ask to see more.

“One page business letter” means just that: one page, single sided. If you’re emailing your query, stick to one screen (less if you have a double-wide monitor, because many editors don’t). This means you don’t have much room, which is a Really Key Point.

Publishers’ submission guidelines trump everything else. Read them. Believe them. If they say they want to see three sentences scribbled on a Post-It-Note, send them that (but for heaven’s sake, don’t send it to anyone else!)

Query letters are mainly for novels. Short fiction doesn’t need to be queried, because it’s short; it takes the editor less time to read it than it takes him/her to read and respond to a query and then read the story. I understand that some markets want queries for nonfiction articles, but they should say that in their guidelines. I’ve done maybe three nonfiction pieces in thirty years, all by specific request, so I wouldn’t know.

Now let’s take apart a disguised mash-up version of the less-than-stellar queries I got sent recently. Here’s more or less what I received:

“This book is my attempt to write a story that justifies the longest and most detailed description of a forest in English Literature, which I hope is also enlightening and entertaining. It follows the development of an lumberman-turned-eco-activist in a world of magical realism, through his revelations and enlightenment over a lifetime, as he reflects on his mistakes and triumphs from youth to old age while he prepares to move out of the home he has lived in for over eighty years.”

This story may, possibly, have been a great one, though I have my doubts. I can, however, assure her (and everyone else) that “this book contains the longest description of a forest ever” is not going to be a big selling point for editors. Also, every author hopes their book will be enlightening and entertaining, so you really don’t need to tell the editor that.

There’s nothing wrong with wanting to write the longest, coolest description of a forest ever, and taking that as the starting point for a novel. Editors, however, are not interested in what inspired the writer to write the book, nor in learning which aspects of writing the story were the most fun for the writer. Editors want to know why a reader – preferably a whole lot of readers – would want to read this book so badly that they will pay money for it. They want to know what came out of the inspiration or challenge or whatever. They want specifics. They want the story.

The “plot summary” above doesn’t even tell us the main character’s name, much less where the story takes place. (Is this forest in northern Canada, or a South American jungle, or perhaps Russia?) There’s some indication of change on the part of the main character, but nothing about the whys, the hows, the obstacles he faces, or the events that precipitate the change.

The things you need in a query letter plot summary are:

-The protagonist’s name, or the two (or three) most important characters’ names, if it’s an ensemble cast

-An explanation of the central story problem or goal

-One or two key obstacles the protagonist has to overcome

-How the problem is resolved (or the goal achieved)

Once you have these things, you then arrange them into two or three paragraphs, being as specific as possible (“his mistakes and triumphs” is not specific. “His success in the lumber industry” and “the suicide of his youngest son” are specific) and adding just enough detail to connect things together. There isn’t likely to be room for subplots or a lot of backstory, but if you have room, you can add a few more key details, like where the story is located and how the main character got into the mess he’s in. 

For this particular query, I’d have to make up pretty much all of the above. So I will:

1. Protagonist’s name: George Landin

2. Story problem: George feels his life has been pointless

3. Obstacles: Moving out of the home he’s lived in for 80 years makes George feel more depressed. In sorting through his stuff, he keeps running across reminders of his mistakes and failures, ditto. And since this is magical realism, every time he picks up an object, he gets to re-live a vision/scene/memory, which gradually become more vivid and begin showing him alternate lives as he goes on. George begins to be swamped by his possible pasts.

4. Resolution: George lets go of his stuff and all the possible alternate lives, and makes his peace with himself and his past.

Those are still pretty general, but this is supposed to be the guideline that I’m going to use to write the plot summary, not the plot summary itself. As long as the specifics get into the actual summary, I’m OK.

So I took the above key points and string them together, and this is what I came up with:

As George Landin prepares to move out of the home in which he has lived for nearly eighty years, he is troubled by the feeling that his life has been pointless. Each object he must discard or pack away recalls a memory: of his lonely childhood in the north woods of Oregon, of his marriage, of his early success in the lumber industry, of the tragic suicide of his second son, the subsequent failure of his business, and his attempt to reinvent himself as an environmental activist. The memories grow more vivid and develop into visions of the life he might have had, had he made different choices. George is nearly overwhelmed by all his possible pasts, until he finds a wooden statue of a meadowlark that was carved by his grandfather. The statue anchors him enough to let go of the alternative realities along with all his mementoes and make his peace with himself and the life he has actually lived. As he leaves the house for the last time, he gives the statue to his son.

This is just an illustration of how to go about coming up with a query-letter-sized plot summary; I very much doubt that this one is anything like the story the author of the original query actually wrote.

By pcwrede | Posted in Writing | Tagged , | Comments (8)

The Parent Problem

March 24, 2013 – 6:17 am

Young adult fiction almost always features a protagonist who is a teenager or young adult for most of the story or series. This means that one of the largest problems YA authors face is the “Parent Problem,” that is, the problem of how to get their protagonists to have adventures without the adults of the community stepping in to protect them, the way actual responsible adults are supposed to.

Logically, there are really only four options: 1) The adults behave like responsible grown-ups who take on appropriate parts of the adventure and/or plot; 2) The adults behave like responsible adults, but the story problems revolve around things that most reasonable adults would expect a teenager to solve for themselves; 3) There are no adults around; or 4) The adults are irresponsible, incapable, incompetent, or outright evil.

Many story problems revolve around things that are too large for anyone, adult or not, to handle alone. There are plenty of books in which the dam breaks or a hurricane inundates the town; while the adults are busy coping with rebuilding, the teens and younger children cope in their own way with their parts of the problem. The problem is large enough that everybody has an appropriate piece to handle, so the young protagonist has plenty to do even though there are lots of adults around.

The second option is the method of choice for an enormous amount of present-day-setting YA. Adults cannot actually be on the high school basketball team; they can only coach. So if the story-problem is about winning the state basketball tournament, it’s fairly easy to keep the adults out of it (or make them part of the problem, see #4) Young adult and teen romances usually deal with high school dating problems; while an adult might reasonably give advice, one wouldn’t expect an authority figure to dictate who a teen could date or follow a pair of teens around to tell them when they should hold hands (and even if they did, there’d still be plenty of room for “but does he/she really like me?” angst). There’s a vast array of so-called “problem novels” that deal with teens coping with difficulties ranging from abuse to the death of a family member to their parents’ divorce. Sometimes, the protagonist gets adult help, sometimes not, but the thing all these stories have in common is that ultimately, the protagonist is the one who has to deal with the emotions involved, because nobody else can actually do it for them.

As for #3, there are two basic ways of having no adults around in a story: first, the young protagonist can be separated from the adults by accident or design (that is, he/she can be the lone survivor of a shipwreck or plane crash in the wilderness, or she/he can run away). In Hatchet by Gary Paulsen, the teen protagonist is the only survivor when a small plane crashes in the Canadian wilderness; Jean Craighead’s classic My Side of the Mountain is the story of a runaway trying to live in the woods on his own, and while adults occasionally pass through, the protagonist always has to consider whether they’re likely to drag him home before he decides to interact with them, and never lets them take over the responsibility that he has seized for himself.

The second way of having no adults around is, of course, to kill them off or have them mysteriously disappear. Killing off the parents early on is a time-honored way of forcing a young protagonist to be responsible for him/herself; just look at all the fairy tales that start with the main character being orphaned. Mysterious disappearance is another good way of getting rid of the adults who’re supposed to be looking after things (and can do double-duty by giving the protagonist someone to go out looking for). The two are often combined, as when one parent goes off somewhere and vanishes, and then the remaining parent dies or is incapacitated. In modern stories, divorce is sometimes used as a less extreme way of disposing of at least one parent; like mysterious disappearance, it gets one adult out of the way while leaving open the possibility that the missing parent will return.

The trouble with killing off the parents, especially in a modern-day story, is that it doesn’t get rid of all the other adults who could or should take responsibility for a child or teenager. Families seldom exist in isolation, and most communities expect some adult to step in and take care of an orphaned child. This is particularly true if the parents are killed off when the protagonist is very young; somebody has to take care of a two-year-old, or the toddler won’t survive. Once the protagonist is old enough to get by on his/her own, the author can sometimes arrange to have the main character’s entire village wiped out by bandits, an invading army, plague, or a dragon, leaving the teenaged hero or heroine with no one to depend on but themselves, but this kind of wholesale slaughter doesn’t always fit the story the author wants to tell.

This brings us to option #4, the adults being irresponsible, incapable, incompetent, or outright evil.

This one can be used alone – in comedies, in particular, the bumbling, incompetent adults who have to be rescued by the kids are a perennial favorite – or in combination with killing off the parents, as with all those other fairy tales full of evil stepmothers and wicked uncles who’re after their ward’s fortune or title. Often, the supposedly responsible adults who take the orphan in turn out to be resentful, neglectful, or incompetent (or all three at once), like Harry Potter’s aunt and uncle, or Jane Eyre’s aunt and most of the adults in the boarding school she attends. Corrupt, venal, or abusive masters are a staple of fiction in which the protagonist is working as an apprentice, rather than living with family. There are also stories in which the “somebody” who takes responsibility for the orphaned child is unexpected or unconventional, and that’s the source of the story, as when Mowgli is adopted by wolves and raised by the animals in the jungle.

And then there are the stories where only the protagonist is capable of achieving the story-solution, because he or she has some power or ability that the adults lack. In a realistic modern-day story, this might be a talent for something like chess or music; in fantasy, the protagonist may be the subject of a prophecy or have some rare magic power; occasionally, one finds a story in which children have a power or ability that is lost at puberty or when they become adult or reach some other major life-milestone. The adults can be as competent and responsible as they like, but only the protagonist can win the game/pull the sword from the stone/kill the evil wizard/etc.

Historical fiction, science fiction, and fantasy allow for a final option: finding or inventing a culture in which teenagers are allowed and expected to do things that modern society reserves for adults. This can solve most of the Parent Problem quite handily; if a society considers people more or less adult at sixteen, then the sixteen-year-old hero can go off and have adventures like every other adult. Lots of fantasy takes this way out, either by basing the story on a real-life time and place where adulthood arrived much sooner than it does in the modern world, or by inventing an entirely new society that works the way the author needs it to. The Hunger Games postulates a future dystopia in which teens are deliberately put at risk as a way of enforcing the government’s control. And SF/F allows for all sorts of new ways to implement the four basic solutions, from spaceship crashes to teleportation accidents.

I have to finish by pointing out that the Harry Potter books makes use of nearly all of these methods at once: the hero is an orphan, the subject of a prophecy; the aunt and uncle who take him in are neglectful/incompetent; the other adults in his life cover the range from obviously incompetent (Minister Fudge) to supposedly-responsible but busy dealing with the Big Picture (Dumbledore) and thus leaving the kids largely to their own devices; he and his friends spend much of the final book as, essentially, runaways; etc.

By pcwrede | Posted in Writing | Tagged | Comments (11)

The World in the Story

March 20, 2013 – 6:13 am

There are other kinds of worldbuilding besides the deep-background variety I was talking about last post, to wit, the immediate-background sort and the in-story sort. The immediate-background worldbuilding, like deep worldbuilding, is stuff that not everyone needs to do in advance. It’s very similar to the deep-worldbuilding in that it’s about making decisions, but most of the decisions are about how things are in the story-world right now. Do they drink coffee? Have public/private schools? Are there police, city guards, local security gangs, or do citizens just have to protect themselves if they’re out on the streets after dark? What do the locals eat? How do they dress? How do they greet each other?

Since the immediate-background stuff usually comes up in the story, a lot of writers can just make it up on the fly. I find that I’m better off at least thinking about some of it in advance, because if I wait until two of my characters are introduced to each other in Chapter Three, I’ll probably have them bow or shake hands just because that’s my default and I want to get on with the scene. If I make it up ahead of time, I’m more likely to take a few minutes to come up with a formal greeting that reflects the culture I’ve invented.

Which brings me to the other other kind of worldbuilding, the kind that every writer does to some extent, and that’s the kind that’s done in the story itself. It’s not about inventing the cool details and clever twists on history; it’s about conveying a sense of place and culture and background to the reader.

There are three things to look at when thinking about this sort of worldbuilding:

  1. How familiar is the place/time/culture to your expected readers?
  2. How much does your story depend on unique features of the place/time/culture in which it is set?
  3. How much would your story be enriched by including unique features of the place/time/culture in which it is set?

1. A lot of present-day fiction is set in Generic City or Generic Town, Writer’s Home Country, because the writer quite reasonably expects the story to be published in his country, and they’ll all know how things work there. Also, if you set a story in a place, time, or culture that you have no experience of, you will have to do research to get it right, and let’s face it, generic is easier.

The farther you get from the place, time, and culture your readers live in, the more worldbuilding your story has to offer them if you want it to feel as if it really is in a different place, time, or culture. Chicago is not L.A. is not New Orleans is not New York is not Miami…and those are all major cities in the same country. The farther out you branch, the greater the differences; Paris is a lot more not-Moscow and not-Beijing than New York is not-Chicago, and Paris in 2013 is not Paris in 1968 or 1798 or 52 BCE.

2. This ought to be a no-brainer; after all, anything that the story depends on needs to be in the book, right? When a story is based in a real place, time, or culture, though, some writers forget that they can’t leave out a critical bit of information just because their readers can google on the meaning of cranes in Japanese culture. Worse are the folks who presume that if they can rattle off a list of every type of hobgoblin in the British Isles, all of their readers will know all about them as well.

3. The first two points aim the writer at things that really need to be in the story; this one is for looking at the things that are optional. Every place has things about it that are unique, or groups of non-unique things that add together into a unique “feel.” A story may not need to be set anywhere more specific than Generic Metropolitan Area, but speaking as a Chicago ex-pat, there’s something special about books set in Chicago that capture the feel of the place. It may not matter to the story that the El (elevated train, for non-Chicagoans) is really, really noisy, but I get a warm fuzzy feeling when the characters in a Chicago story have to stop talking in mid-conversation every so often while the El rattles by.

And that brings me to the how part of the post. A lot of writers seem to think of worldbuilding as description: what things are there, what they look and feel and sound like. But places, times, and cultures are – or should be – a lot more than a painted backdrop that you can unroll behind your characters as they move through the story. Good description is certainly part of worldbuilding, but if you really want your readers to get into your world, you have to give them more than a handful of local placenames and a vivid description of the harbor/town square/other big tourist attraction.

Every aspect of the story is part of the worldbuilding on some level, from what the characters have for lunch to the style and type of clothing they (and others) wear to their manners when they’re greeting someone to things like having to stop in mid-conversation to let a noisy train go past. The particular piece of the world we live in affects every aspect of our lives, all the time, but we take it so much for granted that we don’t often think about how. My sister in Alabama does not have the January Reflex where you automatically take your shoes off just inside someone’s door, because where she lives, she a) does not have to wear snow boots in January, and b) does not come in with shoes covered in ice-melter and dirty snow that will track over two rooms, minimum, if you forget to take them off.

Worldbuilding in a story is remembering to include all those little things, from the vitally important social aspects (whether that means remembering to curtsey to the king and bow to the queen, never vice versa, or whether it means always stirring your tea clockwise) to the everyday things like swapping your shoes for an “indoor pair,” or opening/closing all the windows at particular times of day because of the temperature.

It’s the way living in a place affects the everyday lives of the characters down in the details. How many details are too many is a matter of taste; some authors go for lots of lush description of everything, even making breakfast, while others go for bare-bones Hemingway-esque sketches. One way or another, though, the world is always there in the story…because stories need a place to happen in as much as they need a problem to be about.

By pcwrede | Posted in Writing | Tagged , | Comments (7)

Deep worldbuilding

March 17, 2013 – 10:13 am

A couple of weeks ago, I finally figured out one of the several reasons I’ve been having so much difficulty booting up The New Thing. It’s because for my last eight to ten books, I haven’t had to do any deep worldbuilding, because all of them came with that part ready-made. The Frontier Magic books, the Star Wars middle-grade trilogy, the Regency books – all of them had either plenty of actual or well-developed imaginary history to work from. I had plenty of decisions to make, but the foundation was already there. So I’ve been trying to do what I “always” do, which is to skip straight to the plot and the immediately necessary specifics of the background.

This is complicated by the fact that one of my best friends and story-noodlers is highly character-centered and dislikes having to make up much/any deep background in advance of the story. So her noodling questions have all been focused on the characters and plot (because she knows I do plot), which sometimes hits the “deep worldbuilding” button, but mostly doesn’t.

What I mean by “deep worldbuilding” is all the background, from geography to cultural history, that shapes the place and time the characters are living in. When I’m writing alternate history, I have many libraries’ worth of information to use or choose not to use. I can look up where the rivers and active volcanoes are, or where certain crops originated; I have the Han Dynasty, the Egyptian Pharaohs, and the Greco-Roman Empire that can be assumed with all their real-life consequences, or tinkered with, or eliminated with all those consequences (what if the rulers of the Indian subcontinent had chased Alexander back home and conquered Greece? Or Cleopatra had managed to annex Rome, instead of Rome getting Egypt?). Even if I made the world unrecognizable save for the geography (because, oh, aliens messed around with life on Earth at the end of the Mesozoic Era, so we have civilized dinosaurs instead of us), I’d know where the mountains and rivers were, and what the climate was like in various places, and so on.

But the New Thing isn’t alternate history in any way, shape, or form. Bits of it are modeled on Real Life History, but it’s more like visiting a museum exhibit of Michelangelo’s work and then coming home and trying to build a Cubist version of the Pieta out of cardboard boxes than it is like a mash-up of actual places and events.

Doing a lot of deep worldbuilding in advance is not for every writer, but it helps me. In fact, as has become quite clearly obvious, I need to know a fair amount of it, or I can’t get things to hang together properly at the immediate-backstory stage. That doesn’t mean I do all the deep worldbuilding at once; on the contrary, it develops in fits and starts, forwards and backwards. That is, sometimes I know something (like “this is a coastal city”) that implies a bunch of other things (a harbor, trade, seafood dishes). Other times, I know something (there are three distinct and mutually exclusive types of magic) and it begs a question (how were they discovered, and why do they have more-or-less equal status and emphasis?). The answer to that (three major empires back in their early history, each with a different attitude/philosophy toward What Man Is Allowed To Tamper With) implies some more things (my city must be somewhere that was either not directly influenced by any of the empires, or influenced equally by all of them, there are going to be at least some people who still have very strong opinions about whether each type of magic is good/bad).

I like the idea of a trade crossroads at some point in the middle of my three empires, which fits with the harbor-and-trade part I established earlier, but it might be inconvenient. I’ve already got a three-way magical conflict; do I really want a three-way philosophical and political conflict as well? Even if it ends up being just the historical remnants of the empires that my present-day people have to deal with? On the other hand, can I really avoid it, given what I have so far for background, even if I stick the city far away?

If I make the location somewhere well away from the ancient empires, then it’ll need to have some local resource that’s valuable enough to stimulate trade with all three, but not so valuable that any of the empires would come all the way out there and conquer the place to get it. So not iron or gold, but maybe silk or purple dye or porcelain. That will probably also affect their trade and lifestyle during the period of the story, and possibly the prosperity of the city, depending on whether said trade item is still in demand or has been made obsolete by some new invention or discovery.

There’s also the question of when and how those empires collapsed. Rot from within and barbarians from without, like Rome? War, leading to mutual exhaustion? Plague? Is any of that still a danger? And what’s left of them – a handful of more-or-less equal countries, or some small new places trying to expand into the decaying core of the original empire? I don’t plan on getting into lots of geopolitics in this story, but if my city is a trade center, what’s going on in it will be of interest to the rest of the world, and vice versa. Also, at least one of my characters is from away, so I’ll need to have her place-of-origin developed more than just “up north.”

Then there’s the city government (is it a charter city, like London, with a mayor and aldermen, but still answerable to the king? Or a city-state run by its own prince or council?), what the local factions are (besides my three kinds of mages), and a bunch of cultural stuff, especially cultural stuff revolving around clothes (because my main character is a seamstress).

Which brings in the question of what fabrics and decorations are available, and whether they’re produced locally (they don’t have to be; it’s a trade center, after all), which ones are expensive luxuries and which are the working-class wear, whether or not there are sumptuary laws. I know that unicorn leather is banned, but do they feel the same way about anything else?

I know there are at least some magical creatures in this world – fairies of the small-butterfly sort and unicorns, at minimum – so I need to know whether or not they’re intelligent and/or have their own magic, how different cultures treat them, and how the inevitable conflicts in attitude will get handled in this particular place. Possibly also how they’ll be handled in other places, if I end up with more characters who are From Away or who have traveled widely.

Many of these things, when I get them fully developed, won’t get into the story directly, but they’ll affect it profoundly because the historical and cultural cross-currents affect almost everything in the story. This is particularly frustrating for my story-noodler, because every time another bit of background clunks solidly into place, part of the plot changes, and she’s not used to it because I haven’t done this for the last eight or ten books. Also, because she doesn’t need to do as much of it, or not in advance anyway.

By pcwrede | Posted in Writing | Tagged , , | Comments (13)

The perils of a better idea

March 13, 2013 – 6:09 am

“A writer should always reserve the right to have a better idea.” – Lois McMaster Bujold

This is an excellent philosophy and makes a great one-line quote, but the other day I ran across a story that showed the perils of applying even such an excellent piece of advice too literally. The story started off as an adventure, with the main character discovering the huge central story-problem (invasion imminent! Must prepare to defeat aliens!), convincing some key people, and doing a bunch of sensible things to prepare for the invasion that was drawing ever-closer.

Then the aliens arrived, and were defeated completely by accident (making all those carefully set up preparations pointless), and the whole story turned into a slapstick, screwball comedy-of-bureaucracy. The second half didn’t match the front half, not in tone, not in content, not in anything except the presence of some of the same characters in both parts.

Mind you, both parts of this particular story were more than competently written, and each was, taken on its own, very enjoyable. They just didn’t match. It was as if two different books had each been split in half at Chapter 15, and the front half of one glued to the back half of the other.

When a reader has spent ten or eleven chapters following the preparations for the alien invasion and getting worked up about which characters are likely to die and whether they’ll get all the ships built in time, having the story suddenly turn into bureaucratic farce is a bait-and-switch. Furthermore, it’s a lousy bait-and-switch, because the readers who really like bureaucratic farce will have gone away long before they got to the middle of the book, and the ones who really like military fiction are not going to be happy with bureaucratic farce. Even the ones who, like me, occasionally like both will probably be going “Huh?” at some point, and will finish the story scratching their heads in confusion.

Possibly the author was trying to do something really clever and sophisticated by taking the mid-book “turning point” and using it to make the whole book into a completely different story. If so, for my money they didn’t pull it off. What I actually think happened (based on no evidence whatsoever, you understand) is that the author had a great new idea in mid-book, and went with it. So far, so good. The trouble was, the new idea didn’t fit what the author was currently writing.

At that point, the author had three choices if s/he wanted to keep working on that book: save the brilliant new idea for some other book and keep on as planned, go with the brilliant new idea and revise the front end to fit, or charge on ahead without ever looking back and let the chips fall where they may.

The author chose Door Number Three, and the chips fell on the floor and rolled down a knothole, never to be seen again.

This class of thing – a mismatch between two parts of a story – happens to everybody once in a while. You have your whole plot laid out and you’re writing along and suddenly you realize that your comedy has turned serious, your war has turned into a romance, your mystery has become vampire chick-lit, or your characters have turned out not to be the sort of people who would do whatever you have planned.

What most of us do, in my experience, is to go with the characters. If they won’t do what you have planned, you let them do what they want to do. If they’re turning the war into an unplanned romance, you let it be a romance…but you go back and tone down the war parts in the front half, and punch up the budding-romance parts, so it’s not so much of a surprise. Sometimes, the war turns into a romance in Chapter Sixteen and the only thing to do is cut the first twelve chapters and write a new Chapter One, because there isn’t any way to tone down the war setup enough to make it work.

To put it another way, if the characters put a tremendous amount of effort into doing something (whether that’s building a fleet to stop the invaders or trying to discover why the third floor corridor is off-limits), the author should not normally render that effort completely pointless (no matter how nice it is that the invading fleet came out of warp drive too close to that black hole, or how reasonable it is to find out that the third floor corridor is having the floor tile redone). Not unless the point of the story is supposed to be the futility or ridiculousness of the protagonist’s efforts (as in Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey.)

And if you’re writing parody or a life-is-futile story, it really ought to be clear to the reader from the start (or soon after) that this is what you’re doing. Otherwise, you’ll get accused of bait-and-switch even if that’s not what you intended.

It is, perhaps, possible to make a story work, even though the two ends are out of step, by doing a gradual, stunningly smooth transition in mid-book. I can’t think of one that does it, though, and I confess to grave doubts about the matter. It’s the old Chekovian principle at work: If you hang a loaded gun over the mantelpiece, someone should really use it before the end of the story. Better ideas are all very well, but if they don’t fit the book you have, you should almost certainly either save them for later, or revise the book you have until they fit.

By pcwrede | Posted in Writing | Tagged , | Comments (7)

Keeping records

March 10, 2013 – 6:23 am

It’s tax season again, which means loads of published writers out there are cursing their lack of record-keeping and vowing to do better next year. Fortunately, early March is usually not so late in the year that the very idea of going back over all the business receipts is an overwhelming task (for most writers, anyway). Especially since if you’re in this position, you’re probably facing an entire year’s worth of stuff from last year to sort and categorize, so what’s another two months?

The basic system is actually pretty simple: you find Schedule C (or whatever its equivalent is for your country, if you aren’t in the U.S.), mark all the line-items that you’re going to have writing expenses or income in, sort all your writing income and expenses into those categories, and add them up. Then you enter those numbers on the tax schedule and move on to filling out the rest of your forms.

The two questions that exercise most writers are 1) Which line-items are relevant? And 2) How the heck do I keep track of them all during the year?

#1 depends to some extent on what point in your career you’re at and on how you choose to run your writing business. If you’re filling out this form at all, it’s probably because you had some writing income; what isn’t always clear is that that “Gross receipts or sales” line is where ALL your writing-related income goes – advances, royalties, speaking fees, money from copies of your books that you sold to your neighbors, Amazon associate payments, etc.

The expenses, though, are where it can really get tricky. They’ll vary depending on how you handle your business. If, for instance, you rent an office for your writing, you will have entries under Utilities and either Rent or Mortgage; if you write in your living room or on your laptop at the local Starbucks, you won’t have those items (but you may be able to deduct your coffee on those days under “meals and entertainment”). If you have an agent, you’ll have an entry under Commissions; if not, not. If you have an accountant do your taxes, you’ll have something under “Legal and Professional Fees,” if not, not. Pretty much everybody will have something under “Office expense” and “Supplies,” even if it’s just the occasional notepad and pen. If you’ve been doing this for a while, look at your last year’s tax forms and see which lines you put entries in then.

So you look at Schedule C and make your list of which areas you expect expenses in. Mine includes Advertising, Car and Truck, Commissions and Fees, Office Expenses, Office supplies, Travel-Meals-Entertainment, and the home office deduction. Then you decide what kind of system suits you and your lifestyle best.

For beginners and many part-time writers, a manual system will be all they need. For this, you start with a stack of regular, letter-sized envelopes. You label each one with one of the categories, and then as you spend money on that during the year, you put the receipt (or a note, if it was paid in cash or direct-deposited) into the envelope. You can do this however works best for you: every day when you come in, every Friday, once a month as part of your bill-paying day. If you let it go for more than a month, it gets to feeling burdensome and you tend to slack off and next thing you know, it’s early March and you have a stack of empty envelopes and a bunch of unsorted receipts.

The manual method saw me through the first eight years or so of my writing career. As I got busier and had more expenses, I took to writing the amount of each receipt on the outside of the envelope when I filed it, so that I had an already-written column of numbers that I could total up easily, but at the beginning, there weren’t enough of them to make it necessary. If I were still doing it this way, I’d get one of those letter-racks and set it on the kitchen counter, so I could empty my pockets and purse straight into the envelopes the minute I hit the house every day.

The second possibility is what I call the semi-manual method. This is similar to the manual method, except that instead of sorting everything into envelopes, you set up a spreadsheet in Excel with columns for each category, and you put in each receipt as it arrives, entering the amount in the appropriate column. Then you throw the receipt into a file folder and forget about it. At the end of the year, Excel adds them all up for you. I did this for a couple of years with varying degrees of success. The success got more frequent when I started carrying around a PDA so I could make the entry right away as I spent things (these days, I’d use a smartphone).

Then came the Internet and online banking, and keeping track became ever so much simpler. These days, Quicken will download all your check and credit card transactions straight from the bank (so no data entry, yay!). Once you have matched your list of tax categories to Quicken’s tags (yes, they have a list of tax-categories pre-set, so you can use those if you want, but I prefer mine), all you have to do is review the entries every so often to make sure everything got put into the right category. I’ve heard from some writers who use Quickbooks, but that’s really overkill unless you’re doing something like running your own sales table at conventions.

Some folks don’t understand why they should bother with anything more than a shoebox to throw receipts in. If you’re one of those folks who really likes that panicked scramble on April 15 (and who doesn’t mind maybe missing a few deductions. I prefer the gradual approach (plus I was raised to think that paying Uncle Sam one dime more or less than he was entitled to was a crime worthy of life imprisonment, and you can’t do that if you aren’t really careful.

I, for instance, eat out a lot. When I have dinner with Lois at Pizza Lucci and we talk books and publishing the whole time, the charge gets tagged as tax-deductible “Meals and Entertainment.” When I have dinner with my sister and we talk about Dad’s plans to go to Tanzania and whether one of us should really go with him, the charge goes in non-deductible “Eating Out.” Just to make sure I keep them straight, I sign the charge slip at the restaurant, then flip my copy over and write “Dinner w/Lois – Ch. 3 problem” on the back for extra documentation.

And this is why you really, really want to track this stuff regularly throughout the year – I doubt that many people remember, come March 2013, whether that dinner a year earlier was the one with the writers where they heard about that anthology they submitted a story to (clearly a writing expense), or whether it was the one with their next-door neighbor where they talked about taking the kids to the Winter Carnival together.

If you are at all tech-literate, I’d recommend using Quicken, simply because it significantly lowers the possibility of data entry errors. If you don’t have very much in the way of writing income/expense yet, and you find that Quicken is way more than you need for your other personal financial tracking, go with the manual or semi-manual system, whichever suits your temperament.

Or you could just keep a shoebox…but really, even having a token system that you only manage to keep up to date for the first three or four months of the year before reverting to the shoebox will make tax time easier.

By pcwrede | Posted in Writing | Tagged , | Comments (10)

Epics, part 2

March 6, 2013 – 6:29 am

So the topic is epic fantasy and the way so many of them get bogged down in an endless proliferation of characters and branching subplots, as described by Marie Brennan. Having spent last post talking about why authors fall into these traps, I’m going to talk more today about ways of avoiding them.

The most obvious and least practical method is to write the entire epic before allowing any of it to be published. This has the advantage of treating the multi-volume series the exact same way as one would treat a story complete in one volume: you write the whole thing, you edit and revise the whole thing, you review the whole thing for consistency and pacing, and then you finally publish it. Unfortunately, very few writers are in a position to do this with even a short series or trilogy (not to mention that most of us lack the patience necessary to do without readers for so long), which means that some of the books will probably be in print and un-revisable before the end of the series is even in first draft.

That leaves the would-be epic novelist with one option: prevention. It’s not foolproof, but it’s better than ignoring the whole issue.

The first thing to do is to understand the pitfalls. Really understand them, not just as a check-off list, but as things you can recognize almost as soon as you see them. If you don’t recognize something as problematic, it’s almost impossible to fix even after the fact; preventing it from happening in the first place will likely be a matter of luck, no more. Also, there is no writing technique that is always a bad idea. If you understand the potential problems, then you’re also more likely to understand when they aren’t problems, and when adding another viewpoint or subplot or volume is a plus for your story, rather than a minus.

The next thing to remember is that prevention involves a certain amount of planning ahead. This can be tricky for the sort of writer for whom outlining or telling the story kills it dead, but it’s usually not completely impossible if they avoid the particular areas (usually plot) that do the story-killing, and focus instead on more abstract aspects of the story.

For the rest of us, planning ahead usually begins with some kind of shape or structure. The Harry Potter series is shaped by the British school system; each book covers one school year until Harry reaches what should be his graduation year. That shape or structure is more or less inherent to the story Rowling was telling, but many stories don’t have such a tidy shape embedded in them from the beginning. For those, the author has to find or choose or invent the framework that will support the story: the seven deadly sins or cardinal virtues, one per book for seven books, for instance, or an invented set of tasks to be covered, events to happen, places to go, or people to meet.

While this kind of shape or structure, or even an arbitrary limit on the number of volumes, can do a lot to help an author keep a story under control, it isn’t absolutely necessary. The important thing is the control, not the specific mechanism by which it is achieved. The longer the journey, the more necessary it is to have a road map and compass, and to check them frequently to make sure one is still on track. (Sadly, they have not yet invented a GPS for writers that will break in while you’re typing to say “This scene is off track; your characters will never get across the mountains this way. To get back on track, delete the snow-elves, mystic polar bears, and cloud-fairies and have your characters go down Caradhras and head south to the Mines of Moria instead.”)

Then comes the outline, which is only for people who actually do outlines. People who can’t outline or who go by instinct still need something, but it’s usually not specific incidents or a plot line; it’s more of a feel for “what this story is.” Whatever you do, you will probably need it to be clearer and more detailed than you think, because the basics of prevention involve regular checking of what you write against your outline or feeling. It’s not a matter of rigidly following the plan; you’re allowed to decide that I-70 from Denver is closed, so you’ll have to swing south through Utah to get to L.A. What you’re trying to do is make sure that you don’t end up in Mexico City while you’re still promising everyone that you’re going to get to Los Angeles one of these days, yes, indeed you are.

To do this, you establish a routine of checking back with your road map/outline every ten chapters, or every 25,000 words, or every third-of-a-book, to make sure that what you’re doing is still heading in the right direction. If it isn’t, you then need to decide whether you can keep your shiny new characters/subplot/background and get back on track without too much of a detour. If it isn’t possible, you grit your teeth and take it out. The idea is to set your check-in so that it’s frequent enough that you won’t end up trashing half a book or more, but not so frequent that you start feeling like it’s a straightjacket that takes all the fun out of it.

Checking in at the end of the first draft of each book is not optional. This is where the prevention part really kicks into gear, because whether you’re following an outline or writing an epic by the seat of your pants, you are going to be stuck with whatever you’ve written for the rest of the series, so you need to make sure you can live with it. If you are particularly methodical, you can, at the end of each book, make a list of all the viewpoint characters and how many scenes they each have, or do a chart of all your subplots and where they are and where you expect them to go. The idea being, of course, to see if they’ve started proliferating madly on you, so you can catch them while you can still do something about it.

At this point – the end of the first draft for Volume-Whatever in the series – you have a choice: you can either revise backward, or revise forward. That is, you have your middle-of-series draft, which has started developing in unexpected directions. You can either trim it back ruthlessly so as to keep to your original vision (backward revision, i.e., revising the book you have just written), or you can change your vision of the story (forward revision, i.e., revising your outline or concept or whatever you’ve been using to keep things on track).

Be aware that revising your outline/concept is a lot of work. If you’re still early in your epic series, say book 1-2, you can rip up and rearrange major plot threads without it being too noticeable, but this will mean essentially redeveloping the entire rest of the series plot outline. The farther you’ve gotten in your epic, the harder it is to change course. This is possibly one of the reasons for Epic Bloat – if the writer has a Cool New Idea halfway through Book 3 of a six-volume epic, it looks like being easier to add another three or four volumes to the series (thus making the change barely 1/3 of the way through, rather than halfway through). Don’t. Really. It will not end well.

To sum up: preventing Epic Bloat is mostly a matter of paying attention and being ruthlessly honest about what is and isn’t necessary to the story. To do this, you have to know what your overall story is and how your subplots fit into it, and you have to keep checking as you write and finish various volumes to see if you are still writing the story you set out to write.

By pcwrede | Posted in Writing | Tagged , | Comments (6)

Epics, part 1

March 3, 2013 – 6:53 am

Yesterday, a friend of mine forwarded a link to this post on the pitfalls of writing a long fantasy epic, defined as “four or more books that tell an ongoing story.” It’s a fabulous analysis, and the author, Marie Brennan, hits a bunch of really good points to watch out for to keep an epic story from bloating into unreadability. Since Ms. Brennan has done such a good job of covering the what, I thought I might address some of the reasons why authors get tempted into these particular swamps and how to avoid them.

Her first and biggest point is: Pick a structure (a specific number of books) and stick to it. The difficulty here is that for a lot of epic series, this is essentially an arbitrary decision…and the author knows it is arbitrary. It’s one thing when the story itself falls into obvious, well-defined chunks (as with the Harry Potter series, where each book covers one school year). It’s another thing entirely when one sets out to write an epic of, say, half a million words that doesn’t fall naturally into neat one-to-two-hundred-thousand-word segments.

You can, of course, pick a number and figure you’ll cover the story in that many books, period. That can cause other problems down the line, though. If you’ve guessed right, it’s not a problem, but if you’ve over- or under-estimated the amount of story you have, and don’t discover this until mid-series, it can be impossible to stick to your resolve without harming the story.

It’s fairly common for authors to mis-estimate the length of a novel by ten to thirty percent, sometimes more. When you’re looking at a single, hundred-thousand-word novel, that’s an extra 30,000 words, which is often OK with the publisher (and if it isn’t, it’s usually possible to edit the book down to within shouting distance of the publisher’s limits). When you’re looking at a 500,000-word, four-to-five-book series, that’s a swing of 50,000 to 150,000 words, or up to one entire additional novel…and by the time one realizes that, the first two books are usually already on the shelves and cannot be edited. Making all the length adjustments in the last two books of the story can be next to impossible; adding one more book is a lot simpler, especially if it’s a popular series.

And once the author has added one book, it’s easier to do it again. Absent an obvious natural structure like the number of school years, there’s no real reason not to add one more book…and that opens the door for a lot of the other problems Ms. Brennan identifies in her post, the next of which is control your points of view.

Modern epic fantasy seems to be written mainly in tight-third-person with multiple viewpoints. One of the reasons for this is an extreme addiction to “showing” things rather than “telling” them. This manifests not merely as a reluctance to cover offstage plot points in narrative summary, but as a reluctance to allow the characters within the story to tell each other anything. If the messenger or dying villager isn’t allowed to tell your POV character about the burning of the village, your only alternative is to “show” it by presenting the scene in its fully dramatized glory…which generally means adding a POV character, because none of the main characters or existing POVs were around.

I blame this addiction to dramatizing scenes (and the consequent multiplying of POV characters) squarely on movies and TV. There’s good reason for it on screen; time is limited, and it’s a lot more efficient and dramatic to show a five-second shot of a hotel blowing up than to spend thirty seconds on the scene where the messenger describes it. On-screen, you also don’t have the same viewpoint problem – the camera is the viewpoint, whichever character it chooses to follow. In a novel, it works the other way: narrative is usually more compact than dramatization, and you do have the viewpoint problems.

Adding a viewpoint can also be an easy way to get offstage information to the reader; it can also the reader know more about what is going on (if they can keep track of it) than the main characters do, which supposedly makes the readers feel clever. Sometimes there are Really Cool Bits that the writer simply can’t put in unless somebody is actually viewing the scene (“murder your darlings” anyone?). Early in the series, the writer may want to foreshadow something or establish characters for later, and by the time they turn out to be unnecessary, the first book is in print and it’s too late to cut the scene. And finally, POV characters proliferate on occasion because the writer likes them and really, really wants to write their POV.

This leads directly to Ms. Brennan’s next points, which are control your subplots and centralize. The trouble with introducing a new POV character is that every person is the hero and central focus of his or her own story. The minute you give a character a tight-third viewpoint scene, that character starts reconceiving the whole story on their terms, and brings in all their personal concerns about their gambling debts or their son’s education. And unless they’re a throwaway viewpoint, like the villager who gets killed in the raid just so the writer can “show” the raid onstage, the writer is very likely to have to deal with some of those concerns, which means more scenes for that character, as well as a whole new branching tree of subplots.

The second reason for proliferating subplots is the problem of balance. If you have two viewpoint characters who are both supposed to be central to the story, you really want to give them almost-equal time on stage. This means that if you have one character who is sitting in town having several chapters-worth of adventures in a couple of days, you don’t want your other viewpoint character to be having a boring two-week voyage from point A to point B. So you either have to stretch the timing of the in-town adventures (which can be tough to make plausible), or you have to have your traveling character run into some interesting trouble so as to keep the timing and emphasis the same, or you do what Tolkien did and spend several months and many chapters on one character, and then abandon them and spend an equal number of time and chapters on the other character(s).

The other big reason writers fall into this kind of trap is that a multi-volume story feels, initially, as if it has loads of room for all this stuff. The whole point of an epic is to be able to spread out and dig down into the detail, isn’t it? So it’s easy to throw in lots of subplots at the start, without quite realizing just what it’s going to take to develop them and then bring them all to a satisfactory conclusion.

The crowning problem is the one I mentioned earlier: the problem of publishing. Most of the errors don’t show up as problematic right away, and if the book is in print, it can be difficult or impossible for the writer to really recover. If you realize while writing Book 5 that you don’t need a subplot that you introduced in Book 2, and the first three volumes are already in print, you’re probably stuck. Even trying to revise Book 4 to downplay it may be difficult, depending where that book is in the production process.

Since very, very few writers are in a position to write four or more books entirely on spec (i.e., without a contract and without allowing any of them to be published until they’re all finished), this leaves prevention as the only option. Since this post is already a bit long, I’ll work on that on Wednesday.

By pcwrede | Posted in Writing | Tagged | Comments (8)

What you like

February 27, 2013 – 6:57 am

 When all your friends are bookaholics, one of the things that inevitably happens is that they recommend books to you and to their other friends, frequently in glowing terms. Quite often, other members of your social group will read those books before you do, will also love them, and will second, third, and fourth the recommendations in equally glowing terms.

It is always a bit awkward when you finally get around to reading this much-ballyhooed book and discover that as far as you are concerned, it is at best OK. It’s much worse when you read it and decide it’s awful.

I’ve had that happen a number of times over the years, and my first reaction is always “Ohmigosh, what am I going to say to all those friends who love it so much?” After a small delay, my second reaction is usually “What the heck do they see in this, anyway?” and my third is “I’m really tired of hearing about how great this is when I disagree.”

That’s the point at which I generally pull up my big girl pants and admit to everybody that no, I didn’t think the couple were absolutely adorable, I thought they were idiots and spent most of the book wanting to smack them upside the head, or that the style was so wooden that the characters never came alive for me, or that no, I didn’t think that plot was particularly clever and original, I thought it had long gray whiskers back when Homer was looking for subplots for the Odyssey.

Fortunately, most of my friends react to this with long, productive discussions about what each of us likes in a book and why, rather than with tar and feathers. One of the first things that becomes obvious when you do this is that every reader seems to have a particular itch or two. If a story doesn’t scratch that itch, it doesn’t matter what else it does right; the reader won’t like it.

For instance, a while back one of my friends highly recommended a story that she’s read many times; I thought it was fairly decent, but I’ll never go back to it. The difference is that for her, plot is paramount, and this story had it in spades; it was a convoluted spy thriller that never dropped a thread or faltered in pace or atmosphere. I could appreciate that, but I didn’t actually like any of the characters, which dropped it from good to decent for me. More characterization might have helped, but the author seemed to be relying on characterization tropes that anyone who regularly reads that sort of spy thriller would be able to fill in, and since I read them by fits and starts, I couldn’t.

The first and most obvious conclusion to reach from all this is that the writer can’t please everybody. Some things are incompatible: you can’t do a book that’s both sweet, light, and fluffy and bitter, dark, and edgy. You also can’t write a story that has both a simple, spare, transparent style and a convoluted, lush, dense style at the same time, nor can you write simultaneously in first person and third person.

You could, theoretically, write a book that is neither one thing nor the other; that has light bits and dark bits, that’s fluffy in some spots and edgy in others, that has passages that are simple and spare and passages that are convoluted and lush, that alternates between scenes in first person and scenes in third. What usually happens when somebody tries that, though, is that they don’t get a story that appeals to everybody; they get a mish-mosh that doesn’t appeal to anybody.

Trying to give equal time to every possible thing that some reader might like ends up not giving enough time to anything to scratch any reader’s particular itch. It also tends to pull the writer’s attention away from the story and on to matters of technique, which is fine if the writer is trying for a technical tour de force or if he/she is trying to learn as much as possible as fast as possible by juggling as many things as possible. Focusing on technique to the exclusion of story is, however, not usually the best way to end up with a story that other people actually want to read. This is why writing exercises are called “exercises” and not “recipes for stories you can send out and sell.”

On the other hand, a story that is particularly strong in one area – one that does a really, really good job at scratching one particular, and particularly common, itch – will often find a large audience even if it does a lousy job with a lot of other things. It’s not always obvious just what itch the story is scratching, especially if one happens to be one of the folks who doesn’t care about it. This is the kind of book where people start off “Well, the characters are kind of cardboard, and the basic premise is pretty stupid, but…” and then they tell you why they love it anyway.

Ideally, of course, one wants to write something that is strong in as many compatible areas as possible. One may not be able to write a story that’s simultaneously slow-paced and fast-paced, or that has both a straightforward, linear plot and a convoluted one, or that uses a simple style and a dense, lush one at the same time, but one can certainly write a fast-paced, convoluted plot using a simple style, or a straightforward plot using a dense, lush style.

This is obvious once somebody says it, but too often it gets taken for granted, especially when writers of a particular genre – say, action-adventure – have realized that a particular combination of elements – say, fast-pacing, simple style, linear plot – works particularly well for whatever they’re writing. If enough writers adopt it (and they will, if it’s effective), that combination of elements becomes a standard for the particular genre, so much so that writers and readers don’t even notice what’s going on any more, until somebody does something different. It’s good to at least think about, though, because mixing things up can be a lot of fun – and can attract new readers.

By pcwrede | Posted in Reading, Writing | Tagged , , | Comments (7)

Losing interest

February 24, 2013 – 6:24 am

Sooner or later, every writer hits a point where they lose interest in continuing to write a story that isn’t finished yet. This isn’t the same as getting stuck; when a writer is stuck, they want to continue and intend to continue, but can’t seem to do so for one of a variety of reasons. A writer who’s lost interest doesn’t particularly want to continue.

For a writer who’s under contract, there’s no help for it but to slog on and hope the juice comes back before the deadline arrives. A writer who isn’t under contract can dump the story and move on to something else, which may or may not be the right decision, but which is always a hard decision.

Abandoning a story halfway through – truly abandoning it, without mumbling about coming back to it someday – is not an easy thing, even when the writer knows for certain that the story has gone totally cold and isn’t likely to warm up any time in the next couple of centuries. And a lot of the time “losing interest” isn’t really about the story going cold.

So what is it about, then? Well, what kinds of things make one reluctant to sit down and work on a story?

1) The plot and/or characters have gotten predictable, pedestrian, and boring…at least as far as the writer is concerned. Sometimes, this is because the writer has more experience as a reader; the idea that seemed fresh and exciting when she started writing turns out to have been fresh only because the writer hadn’t run across the multitude of similar stories doesn’t look so cool when she’s reading the forty-leventh story of the same type. Sometimes, the predictability is simply because the writer has been reviewing the plot too often and too much, and she’s gotten to know it too well. Some writers are more sensitive to this kind of thing than others; the extreme case is the writer who gets bored with the story if she knows anything about what comes next.

2) The story is technically more than a little too stretchy, and the writer is tired of not being able to get it down properly and sees no prospect of ever getting it the way he wants it. A writer who feels as if he is making progress is usually willing to hang in there, but banging your head against a stone wall is not something anyone wants to keep doing if they have a choice.

3) The writer has taken so long to write the story that they have outgrown their interest in the premise, the plot, or the characters. The novel I started writing in 7th grade never really even reached the mid-point of the story; by the time I’d gotten thirty or so pages into it, I wanted to write better-conceived, more consistent, more grown-up stories. So I left it and never looked back. The same thing can happen to adult writers; the plots and worlds and characters and problems I was deeply interested in when I was in college don’t draw me any more.

4) The writer finds she has said everything she had to say about those characters or subject. This one usually affects writers who’ve been writing a series, often a popular, long-running one. After a while, you get to the point where you’re just done with those people or that place.

5) The writer has taken so long to write the story that the real world has overtaken his premise. This one is a problem for people who do modern, real-world, or near-future stories; the classic example is the way the sudden collapse of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s affected all the writers who were in the middle of writing spy thrillers involving the U.S.S.R. when the collapse happened. Any real or near-future story that involves technology in a central way is extremely vulnerable to this kind of thing – what looks like a cutting-edge computer when you’re writing it may very well look like it dates from the last century when the story actually comes out.

6) The story may be moving inexorably in a direction the writer simply doesn’t want to go for some reason. The intricate murder-mystery is turning into a drawing-room comedy, and the writer hates drawing room comedy and is just not going to write it, that’s all. Or perhaps the fast-paced action-adventure is insisting on becoming a psychological drama within a couple of chapters, and that particular psychological drama cuts a little too close to home for the writer to want to write about it now (or, maybe, ever).

Some of these problems are fixable; others aren’t. If the world overtakes your near-future plot, there’s not much you can do; they’re not going to roll back the Arab Spring just so your novel will still work. If, however, you’re just bored and finding the plot predictable, you can often change things up to rekindle your interest (this is the origin of the well-known advice about having ninjas jump in through the window if you’re stuck). Outgrowing your story or your series is a good thing, at least in a personal sense (though if one has been making one’s living from a series one can no longer stand to write, it seldom seems so at the time).

The main thing, though, is to be quite, quite certain that one really has lost interest, and is not simply avoiding writing a tricky or unpleasant bit that’s coming next. Because one cannot avoid the tricky and unpleasant bits completely or forever, and while it probably doesn’t hurt to abandon one novel or story in the middle every so often, abandoning a whole string of them sets up a pattern of bad habits that can be really hard to break.

By pcwrede | Posted in Writing | Tagged , , | Comments (8)

This little piggy stayed home

February 20, 2013 – 6:09 am

I’ve always been fascinated with process and with what it takes to get that initial story-seed-idea developed enough to actually start writing it. One of the things I’ve noticed for years is the differences in what writers say they need in order to actually sit down and start writing, especially as regards the background and backstory – not just “what has happened to the character so far to get him/her to this point,” but “what is the history and the culture and the politics and the society like that shaped both the character and the problem to be faced?”

It doesn’t take much thought to realize that anyone who is writing a story set in a time/place/culture that they actually live in (and are therefore very familiar with) is not going to have to make up nearly as much as a writer who’s setting a story in a totally imaginary secondary world. There’s always some necessary research (it’s not what you don’t know that trips you up; it’s what you think you know that ain’t so), but mostly, the contemporary-real-world writer has to make up the specific circumstances and details of their characters’ lives and history. If they need an important historical figure to be a character’s influence or role model, they have an encyclopedia’s worth of folks to draw on, from thousands of years, countries, and cultures.

What I hadn’t thought about much until this weekend (when I was complaining to one of my exceedingly patient friends about the amount of backstory I feel it necessary to invent for The New Thing before I can actually sit down and start writing it) was that how much backstory one needs, in how much detail, is also a function of the type of story one is telling.

There’s an old saying that there are only two stories: a person leaves home, or a stranger comes to town. Regardless of how useful this is to think about as far as plots are concerned, it turns out to be a very important distinction (for me, anyway) when it comes to how much background/culture/backstory I have to know (and, if I’m not using a real or close-to-historical setting, make up) before I start writing.

Here’s why: A character who’s at home when a stranger comes to town is familiar with the status quo; the character has a life that’s steeped in the customs, culture, and history of the place they live. They usually take it all for granted, which means they don’t think directly about it much, yet this affects nearly everything they do, the way they think, the attitudes they have toward themselves and other people, and so on.

A character who leaves home is not moving through familiar territory. They’re off balance. Anything and everything, from social skills to architecture to fashion, can be different from what they’re used to. The character has to find out about customs, culture, history, etc. as they go along, and so does the reader…and the writer. Which means that the writer has more room to make up background as things go along and the character tries to make sense of this strange new world by connecting it with his/her familiar past.

In thinking about it, four of my first five novels have protagonists who are, one way or another, on a journey away from home. The fifth is dual-viewpoint, and one of the two POV characters is out running around away from everyone else. I didn’t start writing about people who stayed home until I started writing books based more closely on real history (specifically Snow White and Rose Red, which is set very firmly in Elizabethan England in 1582-3).

Looking at a number of my favorite long-running series, a lot of them begin with characters who are away from home – on a mission to another planet, stationed at a faraway outpost, discovered to have a talent and swept away from wherever they’ve lived so far. Once the writer has a few books under his/her belt – and has built up a lot of background in the process – they start showing the characters “at home,” writing prequels, or “historical” background novels, or finally allowing their main character to settle down and start having local adventures. In the few exceptions I can think of, either a) the series is strongly based in real-life history in some way, b) the characters think they understand their world but very quickly turn out to be wrong, or c) the author spent years working up background and backstory information before ever sitting down to write.

All of this is particularly relevant because the currently planned Work-in-Development involves a main character who is, so far as I’ve currently planned, not going anywhere. I’ve been complaining for months about how I keep trying to start writing and end up discovering that I need to make up more background before I can…and now I have some glimmer of understanding why.

The coming-of-age journey has been a staple of SF/F since its very early days. I’ve always more or less just accepted it – long before TV and Star Trek, science fiction was supposed to be about exploring strange new worlds, seeking out new life and new civilizations, and boldly going where no man has gone before. It still is; I’d just never before thought about the advantages that gives to the writer in quite these terms.

By pcwrede | Posted in Writing | Tagged , | Comments (4)

Middles

February 17, 2013 – 6:27 am

Every story has a beginning, a middle, and an ending.

That seems like a pretty obvious statement, until you start looking at all the different ways of analyzing stories: the three-act structure, the four-act structure, the five-act structure, the four-acts-plus-teaser structure, linear, nonlinear, parallel running scenes, reverse parallel scenes…the list goes on and on, and people are constantly inventing new ways of telling stories and of looking at and analyzing those stories once they’ve been told.

Nevertheless, that basic beginning, middle, end lies behind even the most complicated story, once you untangle the chronology and the ups and downs of the various ways of presenting or structuring it. And every writer I know has trouble with at least one of those three basic areas. Which area is problematic varies from writer to writer and book to book, but for a whole lot of us, it’s the middle of the story that’s the slog, and it doesn’t seem to matter whether the story is a hundred-thousand-word novel or a two-page short story.

The middle is where things veer off course, and where seemingly minor oversights, missteps, and detours can ruin what should have and could have been a dramatic and moving endgame. Because the middle is where the characters grow and change; it’s where the plot twists; it’s where the characters (and often the writer) struggle to get somewhere, figure something out, make a plan or a decision.

Middles are vitally important to any story. In one sense, they are the story; going straight from setup (beginning) to wrap-up (ending) is rarely satisfying. How interesting would The Lord of the Rings have been if Tolkien had begun with the first few chapters in the Shire and then said “So Frodo left, carrying the ring. Nearly a year later, he and Sam approached Mount Doom…” and went on to the destruction of the ring? Not very; indeed, the ending would hardly make any sense at all without knowing some of the things that have happened along the way, like how he lost track of Merry and Pippin, who Gollum is and what he’s doing there, etc. The best opening hook won’t keep readers reading if the middle of the book bogs down, and the most amazing ending won’t salvage a dreadful middle because the readers won’t ever get to the ending.

Yet middles get short shrift in a lot of how-to-write books. Most of them spend a chapter or two on the standard plot skeleton (problem-complications-crisis-resolution), and then spend most of their time on particular elements like dialog, characterization, description, theme, style, viewpoint, etc. This strikes me as explaining to someone how to make lovely bricks without ever telling them how to put them together to make a sturdy wall.

To my way of thinking, what the middle part of a story needs is the sense that we’re getting somewhere. That doesn’t necessarily mean there’s a physical journey involved; “getting somewhere” can just as easily mean slowly whittling down the list of suspects in a murder mystery, or the deepening relationship between the main characters of a Romance novel, or any number of other things that make the reader feel as if something important is coming closer and closer.

(The somewhere the middle is getting to will, eventually, be the end of the story. This ought to go without saying, but it’s amazing the number of writers who find themselves heading in some completely unanticipated direction. When this happens, it is usually best to adjust the ending and pretend that is what you meant to do all along.)

Most often, the sense of progress in the middle of the story is expressed as an increase in tension – as time and the story go on, the situation keeps getting worse despite all the main characters’ efforts – but there are other ways to keep the middle moving. Increasing apprehension (where the actual physical situation is not any worse, but the characters are finding out more and more reasons to be worried) is one; increasing urgency is another (where there’s some sort of time limit: the cure must be found before the patient deteriorates past a certain point, the bomb must be disarmed before the countdown timer reaches zero, the dress must be finished by the afternoon before prom night). The main character’s emotional involvement with the problem, or with some other character, can increase over the middle of the story; his/her self-knowledge can grow; the amount of information the character (and thus the reader) has about the central story problem and/or its solution can grow.

Managing the middle of the story usually means paying attention to several levels at once, because everything affects everything else. The emotional level (how much the main character cares) affects the reader’s perception of the physical level (how dire the physical threat is). If the physical threat or the urgency keeps rising, but the main character cares less and less about whatever is being threatened, the middle will probably bog down. If the main character cares, but doesn’t appear to be learning anything despite repeated encounters, the middle will probably bog down. It’s like adjusting the sliders to balance the speakers on your car sound system; it’s not enough to get the treble perfectly right if the bass is way off.

By pcwrede | Posted in Writing | Tagged , , | Comments (6)

People who aren’t like you

February 13, 2013 – 6:06 am

Every writer ends up writing about someone who isn’t exactly like them sooner or later – and it’s nearly always sooner, given the number of characters in the average novel. The minor characters, walk-ons, and even the important secondary characters can usually be fudged, but the main viewpoint character is another story.

As a slight aside, this is one of the main reasons why beginning writers are so often urged NOT to write in first person: because many find it extra-difficult to get into someone else’s head when they’re writing “I” and for so many years “I” has meant them, the author, and not some totally different character. More on this in a minute.

Characters can be unlike their authors in a whole variety of ways, from relatively minor aspects of physical appearance (height, hair length, eye color), to their personality, to the moral and political views they hold, to more substantial things like race, ethnicity, age, gender, sexual orientation, cultural background, etc. And the first step toward writing somebody different is to notice that they are.

This may sound obvious, but it always surprises me how often people attribute their own life experience to characters without thinking. I ran across a twenty-something writer whose sixty-ish hero made a comment that as a teenager, he’d gotten an eyebrow piercing to freak out his parents. I could only shake my head. Any guy who grew up in 1960s suburbia did not get an eyebrow piercing or a tattoo; if he wanted to rebel, all he did was grow his hair to chin length. Shoulder length or longer, if he really wanted to freak out the grownups.

Even the little things like height and hair length affect your character’s actions. The greater the differences between the writer and the character, the more aware the writer has to be of how the differences affect everything else in the character’s life. Really big differences (like race or a significant difference in age or ability) often require research, even if the writer is working in a completely imaginary world with a made-up history and culture.

What with all those problems, it almost seems as if it would be easier for authors to write about people who are exactly like themselves. Unfortunately, most of us find it far more interesting to write about folks who are different from us (and besides, most of the authors I know have fairly ordinary lives, no matter what all those intriguing author bios say, which means that writing about somebody different makes for a much more interesting story).

So how do you write about somebody different?

It starts by thinking about him/her, and noticing the differences. All the differences, not just the large ones, because not only do all of the differences make a difference, they all interact and affect one another. A 6’7” teenaged boy is probably going to attract interest from the school basketball coach, whether he’s into sports or not; a 6’7” senior citizen is not (though basketball may have been his sport when he was young).

Then you think hard about all the ways in which those differences, and the interaction of those differences, might affect that character’s life experiences and about how they would react to both their past experiences and to the ones they’re going to have in your story. Not how you would react, because for you, suddenly being a different height, age, sex, race, etc. would be a change. For your character, it’s how things are in their life, and the difference that makes in their life experience ripples through everything else. 

From the character’s goals, motivations, and aspirations, to their reactions to other characters, to their speech patterns, anything can be different from your personal baseline, and all of those will be affected by their life experiences, which in turn will be affected by their physical, mental, and personality differences from the writer, so all of it has to be at least looked at and decided about. Even small things make for differences in behavior. The character who’s shorter than I am will have a step-stool handy for getting to the top shelf and use it without thinking; the one who’s a lot taller than me will see things on the top shelf and reach them easily, but might miss important clues that are lower down, and may have trouble banging into low doorways, slanted ceilings, etc.

 

It’s also important, especially with secondary and minor characters, to think at least briefly about your own reaction to them, where and how that reaction relies on stereotypes, and how you can change things up. Perhaps your first impulse is to make that minor bartender character a middle-aged, beer-bellied, balding dispenser of wise advice; if you stop to think about it, you can instead make the bartender a young woman working her way through college or a middle-aged character actor doing research for a part. It can help to remember that everyone has his or her own story…or it can be a distraction, depending on the writer.

 

Integrating all this into actually writing the character is another matter. For me, writing characters is a kind of cross between method acting and playing “let’s pretend” from when I was five. There’s always a little part of my brain that’s trying to pretend to be the character, warts and all. There’s another, more analytical part that’s always checking the character’s actions and dialog and reminding myself “This isn’t me here, is it? This is Jennie, or George, or Herman.” It can feel more than a little odd because in some scenes I have to stop every couple of lines to check on a different character’s actions/reactions. And then I do it all again during the revisions.

Some writers find it easiest to learn how to write different characters by writing someone who is very different from themselves right off the bat, because it’s easier for them to spot the places where they get off track. The big difference between them and the character makes it obvious when they slip and start writing their own reactions and opinions, rather than the character’s. For other writers, it’s easier to keep their characters consistent if they start with something closer to autobiographical and work up to the seriously-different characters in small steps. Some writers have to lay everything out in advance; others immerse themselves in research and reading and then wing it.

The exact process by which you get into your characters’ heads isn’t terribly important; as usual, every writer does it a bit differently, and whatever works for you is what you should do (though be aware that it may take a few tries to figure out what that is).

By pcwrede | Posted in Writing | Tagged , , | Comments (6)

Too Much Talent

February 10, 2013 – 6:00 am

For years and years, I’ve been pointing out to people that talent is one of the least important things a writer needs – because you don’t actually need very much to go on with, and it’s actually pretty common to have that much. In fact, “talent” is as common as mud; what’s rare is the motivation to sit down and actually do something with one’s talent, the discipline to do it regularly, and the persistence to stick with it until it’s finished.

What isn’t quite so obvious is that having too much talent can be a drawback. I’ve seen far too many new and would-be writers who’ve written amazing first novels or parts of novels…and then died on the vine when writing suddenly got hard. They were used to being able to produce words easily, words that were better – a lot better – than the words being produced by their fellow first-novelists. What they didn’t know was what to do when the words stopped coming, or when they stopped improving.

Basically, these writers were coasting before they even got started. Their first book (or a significant part of it) came easily to them, without a lot of the flaws that are usual in a first novel, and they expected that to keep on happening. They never had to work at getting better, so they don’t try (some of them appear not to know how). When writing starts to get hard, they either wait for the solution to come to them, or they give up. Either way, their competition starts out-producing them pretty quickly…and since those other writers are used to working at getting better (because they’ve had to do so all along), they get better faster, and go on getting better while Mr. Talented Writer stagnates.

The prose and the techniques that look so great in that first novel (because Mr. Talent was doing things no other first-novelist was doing) don’t look nearly so impressive in the fifth novel. Editors and readers expect writers to improve, regardless of where the writer started, and if the writer doesn’t, folks start to lose interest.

And then, of course, there’s the fact that nobody, not even Mr. Talent, is good at everything that goes into a story…which means that even those early, surprising books that were so much better than the other first novels still had some flaws. Maybe even serious flaws. People will overlook that in a first novel, but they start getting impatient if a writer is still having the same problems with plotting or characters or whatever in their fifth book.

All too often, though, the writers who’ve been admired early on for their talent do not recognize any flaws in their work, and thus see no reason to try to get better…at least until they’ve been whopped upside the head by reality a couple of times. I recall one young gentleman whom I met on a visit to a high school; his English teachers raved to me about how great his writing was, how imaginative, how creative. They’d obviously been raving to him along the same lines, because he clearly expected me to refer his short story to the nearest professional editor I knew, and he was quite put out by the amount of red ink on the manuscript when I handed him back his great, imaginative, creative…and ungrammatical, plotless, poorly thought-out…story.

In my experience, people like that make one of three choices. 1) Most of them quit writing fairly quickly when their stuff starts coming back from the professional markets, because what got them to try for publication was the fact that so many other people thought they’d be good at it. Faced with the evidence that they’re not going to be able to just toss a manuscript on an editor’s desk and listen to the praise roll in, they give up (often with some grumbles about the Big Bad Publishing Industry and how it isn’t open to great, imaginative, creative work like theirs.

2) The next-largest group submits their story a couple of times, then decides that since the Evil Publishing Industry obviously doesn’t appreciate their work, they’ll self-publish. This used to be a fairly small group, because pre-Internet, most of this category went to vanity presses that required up-front payments of several thousand dollars, so you had to have quite a bit of money to go this route. These days, Amazon and the Internet and print-on-demand have made it easy, so this group is growing rapidly.

And 3) one way or another, the author realizes that he or she still has a lot to learn, talent or not, decides they really do want to learn it, and buckles down to the learning part. The realization can come in a variety of ways: sometimes, it’s getting a couple of stories ripped apart in a good workshop or class; sometimes, it’s a series of rejection letters; sometimes, it’s an uncomplimentary review of their self-published masterpiece that hits home. Whatever it is, it provides them with the motivation to really start working on the discipline and persistence parts. They’re the ones who eventually make themselves careers in writing.

Mind you, every writer needs to have a certain amount of confidence and belief in his/her work, or we’d never send anything out. There’s a difference, however, between thinking that a particular story is as good as one can presently make it, and thinking that anything and everything one writes is brilliant and not to be improved upon.

By pcwrede | Posted in Writing | Tagged , | Comments (6)

Where your time is

February 6, 2013 – 12:50 pm

I have met a great many people who claim they want to be writers, but who don’t act like it. I have also met more than one professional writer who claims to want to quit his/her day job and go full-time as a writer, but who doesn’t act like it. And I’ve even met a couple of folks who claim they want to stop writing, but who don’t act like it.

What it all boils down to is the decisions people make, most especially the decisions they make about how they spend their time and, to a lesser extent, their money.

For instance, the first category includes a gentleman who complained of not having enough time to write. “What do you do in the evenings after work?” I asked. He said he either watched TV or went to the bar with his friends, and no, he couldn’t possibly cut an hour out of either thing. “What do you do on Saturday morning, then?” He said he was an avid body-builder and that was his time at the gym. “OK, how about the afternoon?” That was for catching up on the TV he’d missed when he was out at the bar with his buddies; he had everything set up to tape his favorite shows. Saturday evening was late night at the bar (no wonder he needed all that time at the gym!) and Sunday was for more TV and the occasional catchup with family. It boiled down to about thirty hours of TV every week, and he absolutely, positively could not give up any of it, and he had a Netflicks queue about 300 movies long for if he ever ran out of TV to watch.

That man doesn’t want to be a writer; he wants to be a professional TV watcher.

The first category also includes a young woman with an equally crowded schedule, except hers was taken up with voice lessons on Monday, art class on Tuesday, photography Wednesday, community theater group Thursday, Friday, and Saturday evenings (when there was a performance; other days when something was in rehearsal); outdoor photography sessions during the day on Saturday, and a desperate round of weekly life maintenance (laundry, shopping, housekeeping, prepping for all those other activities) on Sunday. And another whose week was similarly crowded with volunteer activities, and another with a social schedule that simply would not quit, and even one person who’d gone to great lengths to “balance” everything – photography class Monday, gym on Tuesdays and Thursdays, volunteer at the food shelf on Wednesdays, dinner with friends on Friday, one of four monthly meetings or events on Saturday (church committee, investment club, knitting group, family outing), life maintenance Sunday.

Those sorts of stories are common and fairly obvious, at least from the outside (the folks who overschedule themselves like this never seem to realize that they can’t get more time without stopping something). But there are also a few older writers who “want to retire,” but who keep cranking out stories and articles as if it’s a habit they can’t break. And one who claims in one breath to want to retire, and then in the next complains that he/she has no ideas for the next story and feels twitchy for not writing. If you’re retired, the whole point is that you’re not writing…at least, that’s what I always thought (which is why I’ve never felt much inclination to worry about retirement in the traditional sense; my “retirement fund” is basically there for late-life medical conditions that would actively prevent me from continuing to write, because that’s what it’s going to take to stop me).

But there’s another level of anti-writing decision-making that’s one up from the folks who can’t give up their TV or who’ve overscheduled. It’s the level of major life decisions that end up making it easier or harder to do other things (like write), and it’s a lot less obvious and a lot more complex than just overscheduling.

For instance, you have the folks who’ve embarked on a career path doing something they hate because it pays well, and then discovered that it pays well because you have to put in 80-hour weeks. Between time on the job and hating what they do, they’re too physically and emotionally exhausted to do much of anything else with what little “free time” they have. Or you have the first-time homeowners who didn’t realize in advance how much time and money they have to put in on maintenance and yard work.

When a person decides to do anything that takes time, the time has to come from somewhere else. “Somewhere else” means “something that you’re doing now that is less important than the new thing you’re adding to your schedule.” If one thinks about it in advance, one can make reasoned decisions based on what one is willing to give up in order to have the new thing. If one doesn’t think about it, one ends up with more to do than one has time for, and something has to go. Quite often, it’s the writing time that gets cut “temporarily” (as if there’s ever going to be more than 24 hours in a day). Which, logically, says that writing time is less important than whatever you’re doing instead.

Actions, they say, speak louder than words…but quite often, if one doesn’t think about the consequences, one ends up saying something completely different from what one intended.

By pcwrede | Posted in Writing | Tagged , | Comments (12)

A Stake Through the Heart

February 3, 2013 – 6:24 am

(No, this post is not about vampires.)

The question “what’s at stake for the characters?” has been much on my mind lately, as it’s been at the root of some of the difficulties I’ve been having developing a plot for my current work-soon-to-be-in-process-I-hope. I have what I think is an interesting world, and a set of characters I like. I have some cool incidents and events. I even have quite a lot of plot-like stuff waving about in the breeze, looking for somewhere it can anchor.

The trouble is that the plot-stuff won’t anchor, because my characters don’t have enough of a stake in what’s going on.

What anchors a central plot-problem to the characters is a stake through the heart: something that makes the central plot-problem matter to the character in a deep and personal way, because that problem affects something that the character cares deeply about. Sometimes, the stake connects straight to the central problem itself; sometimes the connection takes a couple of steps to get from character to central problem. Ultimately, though, if there’s no connection – if the main character has no reason to care about the pirates or the murder or the Evil Overlord – there’s no reason for that character to get involved in the first place.

Years ago, I heard somebody on a panel say that there were two ways of getting a character moving: either find something really important that she doesn’t have and dangle it in front of her, so that she struggles to get it, or else take something really important away from him, so that he has to struggle to get it back.

The “something really important” doesn’t have to be an object; it can be something like “peace of mind” or “becoming a doctor” or “keeping my family/friends/country safe.” It can even be something that, from the outside, looks enormously trivial, like “getting my rubber duckie back,” as long as it’s a) really important to the character and b) seriously at risk due to whatever the central plot-problem is.

The first trick is finding that really important something. Because an awful lot of things that are Really Important on the grand scale that we like to read and write about turn out not to be important enough to a particular character to get him/her to work at achieving them or fixing them or finding them or getting rid of them. It took Tolkien seventy-five pages (in my edition of The Lord of the Rings) and the appearance of the Black Riders just to get Frodo to leave home, despite what Gandalf had already told him of the One Ring and the importance of getting it to Rivendell.

Whatever the important thing is, it is going to vary from character to character. It’s easy to fall into the trap of thinking that some things are universal – that anybody would want to rescue their child, or be rich and famous, or be king/president/CEO. But in real life, those things are not always true, not even that first one…and any writer who wants to write realistic, memorable individuals needs to at least consider whether their central characters need to be the mythical average “everyman,” or whether something unusual and different might be at the center of their heart (at least for this particular story).

Of course, the more unusual the Thing That Matters is, the clearer the writer has to be about the fact that it does matter, and why it matters. It isn’t too difficult to get a reader to believe that a parent would leap into a flooding river to rescue a child. On the face of it, it’s a lot harder to convince a reader that a character would jump into a flooding river in order to grab a soggy McDonald’s Happy Meal that’s floating by. (And my backbrain immediately responds “The Happy Meal is the crucial piece of evidence in a murder investigation, of course; the character needs it to keep an innocent man from getting the death penalty” which just goes to show that it can be done if it’s set up properly.)

Some plot-problems are easier to give your characters a stake in than others, depending on context. If the dragon or the Evil Overlord’s minions or the plague strikes directly at Our Heroine, her family, or her friends, it’s easy to believe she’ll buckle down and do something about it. If the dragon is ravaging and destroying down at the other end of the country, it’s a little harder to come up with a reason why she’d pick up and go off to defeat it. If the dragon is several kingdoms or an ocean away, one starts to wonder why it should be up to Our Heroine – don’t those folks have their own dragon-slaying heroes?

Implicit in all this is the idea that the Thing That Matters is in some way at risk – that the character may lose it or fail to gain it – or that the character will have to risk other important things to end up with it. What the character is willing to risk ties back to just how important the Thing That Matters is to that character, and how much risk that Thing is itself in.

Putting one’s life in jeopardy is usually viewed as the ultimate risk, something that one does to protect equally important things (people, honor, country, freedom, truth…). Risking one’s life is, therefore, generally not common in sitcoms, domestic comedies, or comedy-of-manners, where what’s at stake is the characters’ social status, interpersonal relationships, or general happiness. (Which insight I credit to Beth, my walking buddy.)

All this is, at bottom, why stories about happy people happily being happy are generally unsatisfying. Nothing is at stake; the characters have nothing to lose, nothing to gain, and no reason (except perhaps insanity) to risk so much as a hangnail.

By pcwrede | Posted in Writing | Tagged , | Comments (8)

Advice you want vs. advice you need

January 30, 2013 – 6:11 am

For a variety of reasons, I thought today I’d do a rant on writing rules. OK, mostly it was because I haven’t done one for a while and I was in the mood for ranting. I started off by googling “fiction writing rules,” just to see what a few other people had to say on the subject.

I got over six hundred million hits.

That’s one heck of a lot of articles about the rules for writing fiction, and I’ll probably get to posting about that next time. This time, though, I’m going to talk about something else. Specifically, when I started looking at some of the “rules,” I found useful stuff like this:

Take a pencil to write with on aeroplanes. Pens leak. But if the pencil breaks, you can’t sharpen it on the plane, because you can’t take knives with you. Therefore: take two pencils.

Do back exercises. Pain is distracting.

–Margaret Atwood

This is the kind of writing advice I’ve loved ever since I read Ursula le Guin’s advice to would-be writers (“Learn to type”) back when I was a wannabe. (Fortunately for me, my mother made me take the secretarial typing class for one of my electives in high school; I doubt that I’d ever have taught myself to touch-type on my own. But Mom was a writer herself, and she made sure I had the tools I was going to need, even if I wasn’t really interested in learning to type when I was sixteen.)

It’s also the kind of writing advice that is a) unexpected and/or unwanted by a lot of folks (judging from the tone of some of the web sites I buzzed through) and b) undervalued by even more folks.

The undervalued part comes, I think, because of the unexpected/unwanted part. Looking at the interviews and FAQs and questions in general, it’s pretty obvious that when most people ask a published writer for advice, they want advice either about creativity or about craft. Not just any old advice, either: the Secrets of the Craft. Preferably in a list of five to ten pithy statements that can be applied cookbook fashion, like “never use adverbs” or “never use a dialog tag other than ‘said’” or “don’t use more than three exclamation points per book.”

Some writers, faced with the obvious expectations of the interviewer, give in and provide their personal list of pet peeves or bad habits, usually without appearing to realize that the peeves are a matter of opinion or that other folks have different “bad habits.”

Other writers try to fulfill the interviewer’s expectations while still telling the truth about what writing is like. So you get a few true-but-not-specific recommendations, like “Read a lot and write a lot” (Stephen King for that specific phrasing; the sentiment is common), and various contradictory and not-very-useful comments about the particular writer’s process, like the one writer who recommends going to cafés with a notebook and the other one who claims writing should only ever be done in total privacy.

(My non-favorite example of that last was the gentleman who stated very firmly that every writer should always have at least two stories in the first-draft stage at all times, so as to be able to switch from one to the other whenever the writer became stuck. It obviously works for him, but I’ve tried it, and for me it is beyond counter-productive except during the very, very early thrashing-around-in-search-of-a-plot stage. Past that point, having a second story in the works is, for me, like trying to make forward progress while towing a black hole. It generally ends in disaster for all concerned.)

And then there are the folks who, like le Guin and Atwood, confound the interviewer and the would-be writer’s expectations by telling them what they need to know, rather than what they think they want to know. Things like “Get an accountant” (Hilary Mantel), “Don’t wait for inspiration” (Esther Freud), “Create your own (rules), suitable for what you want to say” (Michael Moorcock), “Don’t let Google tempt you away (from your writing)” (A.M. Harte), “Don’t drink and write at the same time” (Richard Ford). And the things that nearly everyone says: Read. Write. Revise. Carry a writing implement and something to write on. Practice. Write. Make time, don’t wait for it. Work hard. Edit. Discipline. Write. Read. Learn to type. Write.

By pcwrede | Posted in Writing | Tagged , | Comments (15)

Thinking about “The Hobbit”

January 27, 2013 – 6:18 am

Do people actually need spoiler alerts for The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit? If so, consider yourselves alerted.

 So my sister decided she wanted to see “The Hobbit” before she goes off on vacation with my Dad, and we rounded up the usual suspects and made arrangements for Friday, two days ago. After much discussion we all decided to meet in the middle (geographically speaking), which had the significant benefit of allowing us to go have Indian food at the good spot four blocks away from the movie theater.

 Lois and I had seen the movie the week before (and our reaction was to immediately come home and watch “The Fellowship of the Ring” on Lois’s TV). Setting aside technical questions about frame rates and the desirability (or not) of 3D filming, the discussion brought up a lot of interesting things about working with a series in both literary and visual formats, and the difficulties inherent in translating from one to the other.

 The first interesting point is that Tolkien wrote The Hobbit first, and at the time it was first published he did not know the significance the ring – and Gollum – would have in the later books. The movies were made in reverse order: The Lord of the Rings came first, and now we’re getting The Hobbit.

 This difference creates some interesting storytelling problems. The first is in tone. The Hobbit was written as a children’s book; it became an introduction to the epic trilogy that followed, but that was later. Moving from the tone of a children’s book to that of the adult fantasy is a little tricky, but only a little. It does, after all, follow the natural chronological flow, from child to adult, from children’s story to adult sequel.

 You don’t get the same effect, obviously, when you go the other way (from adult epic fantasy to children’s story), as the films do. The movie-makers chose not to try: the movie The Hobbit is filmed in much the same tone as The Lord of the Rings, and I can’t really see it working any other way.

 The question of tone blends into the question of continuity. The makers of the movies opted for continuity of tone and presentation movie-to-movie, rather than for consistency of book-to-movie tone and presentation.

 I’ve heard people grumble about this, but do bear in mind: the movie-makers had the choice. They had all four books right there in front of them before they ever started working on the first movie. Tolkien did not have that choice, because when he wrote The Hobbit he hadn’t yet made up all the things that came up later in The Lord of the Rings. Yes, he made some continuity changes to later editions of The Hobbit, but he could not have chosen to change the tone without doing a complete, massive rewrite of the book.

 It is, of course, possible that even if Tolkien had known the story was leading to The Lord of the Rings and the end of the age, he would still have chosen to write The Hobbit as a lighter children’s book. I take leave to doubt it, but authors have done stranger things. That choice, however, remains firmly in the realm of speculation, because Tolkien did not know. And I personally do not think that it would be right for a modern movie-maker to pretend that he is in the same position as Tolkien – that he’s making a children’s movie that those other books and movies don’t inform.

 Series continuity, whether in film or in print, is always a tricky business. Whether you write in chronological order, as Tolkien did with The Hobbit and then The Lord of the Rings, or whether you tell one story and then back up and write a prequel, as Tolkien did later with The Silmarillion, there will be people who encounter the story out of order. I read The Two Towers first, because it was the only fantasy on the airport book rack when my family was heading out on vacation (I knew perfectly well it was the middle book of a trilogy; I simply didn’t care). I then galloped through The Return of the King, followed up with The Fellowship of the Ring, and only then discovered that there was an earlier book called The Hobbit.

 Similarly, one very-much-not-a-fantasy-fan acquaintance heard that The Return of the King had been nominated for Best Picture Oscar, so he went blithely off to see it without having seen (or read) The Fellowship of the Ring or The Two Towers. Needless to say, he was deeply puzzled by the experience.

There is nothing whatever that a writer or a movie-maker can do to prevent this. You don’t have a choice in the matter. The only choices you have relate to how you tell the story: whether you try to make it accessible to people who may not have all the background, or whether you don’t.

By pcwrede | Posted in General, Reading | Tagged , | Comments (7)

Plot or not

January 23, 2013 – 6:13 am

I got in a discussion the other day with a writer friend who’s having difficulty moving forward with her story. I’m having similar problems, so we sat down to compare notes. “So what’s the plot?” I said, because I’m a plotty kind of writer.

“Well, there’s this goddess, and she takes a vacation to the mortal world as a cat and meets this girl and…and…and they have adventures!”

“Um, right,” I said. “What adventures?”

“I don’t know; I haven’t made them up.”

“That would be why you’re having trouble writing them. That, and the fact that you don’t have a plot.”

Now, I don’t have a plot, either, but I at least know that I don’t have one. My friend, on the other hand, was so enamored of her vacationing goddess-cat and heroine that she hadn’t noticed that she didn’t. She had two characters (whom she loved), and a situation with plenty of potential, and maybe even an incident or two (she could describe the scene where the goddess left the Etherial Realm for the mortal world, and she knew exactly what happened when the goddess-cat met the heroine), but that was it. She had no central problem to be solved; she didn’t even have minor character problems to be solved. Nothing was at stake for either of her characters, and there wasn’t any urgency to the situation. Most of all, there was no big “why” – when asked, she couldn’t tell me why the goddess needed a vacation, nor could she tell me why the heroine decided to adopt the goddess-cat, let alone why she would get involved with whatever adventures were supposedly going to happen next.

Part of the problem was, she couldn’t decide which character to use as her viewpoint (and which one was the “main character,” and whether they’d be the same or not). There were points and possibilities on both sides, but which character she chose was going to make a huge difference in what kind of plot she could look for. A goddess, even one who is temporarily masquerading as a cat, is likely to have rather different problems than a more-or-less normal girl.

The other part of the problem was, she didn’t have a setting. It makes a huge difference whether the girl and the goddess-cat are operating in a near-accurate or totally alternate historical setting (be that Ancient Greece, warring-states China, pre-Columbus South America, Elizabethan England, revolutionary France, or modern-day Canada), or in a completely invented world (past, present, or future). The kinds of problems that could occur, which would eventually come together for a plot, are significantly different in each place and time.

In short, she had a whole lot of decisions to make before she could really begin to start writing even though she knew what the first couple of scenes were. She’d run into difficulty because knowing those two scenes (the goddess leaving the Etherial Realm in a snit and the mortal girl meeting the goddess-cat and taking her home) were so clear in her head that it felt like she knew enough to start writing.

And she did know enough…to write those two scenes. For some writers, that would be plenty; by the time she finished writing those scenes, she’d know enough more to write the next one, and the next, and eventually there’d be a book at the end of it. Unfortunately, she doesn’t normally work that way, and she had the brains to know that she couldn’t write those “perfectly clear” scenes without a bunch more work on the setting and viewpoint.

Lots of stories start life as a couple of characters in an interesting situation, and for “surprise me” writers (the sort who can’t do any planning, even in their own heads, without killing the story), that’s enough for them to take off running. Most writers, though, need a bit more than that (how much more, as I said, varies writer to writer). Half the trick is realizing when one still needs more – recognizing that the lovely idea is a situation or an incident or a couple of related events, but not really a complete plot yet. The other half the trick is developing the idea, incident, or events until one has enough (whatever “enough” means to the particular writer).

There’s also always the possibility that the story one has hold of is something picaresque – a “marvelous journey” story that really doesn’t need much of a plot except maybe “eventually, we need to get home or settle down somewhere.” That doesn’t mean the initial idea/characters/situation doesn’t need developing; it just means the kind of development will be a little different. A marvelous journey story has to be marvelous; the place the characters journey through and the sub-stories and other characters they encounter on the way have to be fascinating enough to keep the reader going even when the characters don’t have a central plot problem and/or steadily increasing urgency and tension to drive the story forward.

By pcwrede | Posted in Writing | Tagged , | Comments (12)

That was then, this is now

January 20, 2013 – 6:56 am

Some while back, I was talking with long-time writer friends about the good old days, and I had an epiphany. I was complaining about how The New Thing is refusing to go anywhere and various of my usual tricks and techniques weren’t working, and I realized that a whole lot of the things I spent years training myself to do and not do, back at the beginning of my career, have become counter-productive now that I’m thirty-plus years into it.

I’m not talking about writing specifics like dialog or characterization or syntax. I’m talking about process.

Let me explain.

Back when, I learned very quickly that if I took the attitude “I’ll fix it in the rewrite,” and simply plowed ahead as fast as I could without paying attention to the quality of my writing, my writing got sloppier and sloppier, until I wasn’t writing a first draft or even a zeroth draft, I was writing some semi-coherent notes that were hardly worth the time and energy spent on them. So I spent a lot of time learning not to get too far ahead of myself, and making it a habit to pay as much attention to how I was writing at any given moment as I paid to what I was writing.

Not that I give my Internal Editor free rein; far from it. But I found that some things were a lot easier to get right the first time than to hunt through the manuscript and fix later – things like unnecessary dialog tags, wordy or unclear sentences, descriptions that didn’t quite say what I wanted them to say.

Somewhere in the intervening thirty years, this way of working has…stopped working so well. Looking at it carefully, the problem appears to be that I got better at writing.

That sounds very odd, so let me unpack it a bit. The kinds of things I had to pay attention to, early on, were early-stage mistakes. As I got better at writing, getting those things right became a habit, and eventually almost automatic. Oh, my crit group still has to whop me upside the head every once in a while to remind me not to over/under-write, but it usually only takes one whop because it’s so obvious that all some has to do is say, “now, in this conversation here – ” and I interrupt with “Oh, rats, I did that thing again, didn’t I?” I also got enormously better at revising unsatisfactory stuff.

The combination means that slowly the kinds of things I need to pay attention to while writing changed. They got tinier and pickier on the sentence-by-sentence level, and larger and more sweeping on the structure level. A whole batch of new, not-possible-to-consider-until-a-draft-is-finished things cropped up in terms of plot flow and pacing and complications and balance, and I was still trying to get them right on the very first try.

The upshot is that, for quite a while now, there hasn’t been nearly as much payoff in paying attention to how I’m writing while I’m doing the writing. The things I most need to pay attention to have changed. I’m more interested in complicated plots and structures that require a lot of tinkering with after the first draft is done, because it’s impossible to tell on the first time through the manuscript what sorts of backfill will be needed and which scenes need to be added or deleted.

The other rather annoying change is that, due to the aforementioned complicated plots and structures, I need more pre-planning. My outlines are still all wrong, but they’re wrong in different ways from the way they used to be wrong. The characters are more likely to do what I thought they were going to do, but their reasons for doing it aren’t what I thought they would be, and this leads to needing more scenes on one side of the plot and fewer scenes on the other.

I’ve known since very early on that every book was at least slightly different in terms of the process it needed. Talking to Dragons and Sorcery and Cecelia were totally unplanned, sit-down-and-make-it-up stories; Snow White and Rose Red was much more constrained than usual both by the actual history I was playing off and by the fairy tale I was retelling; Mairelon the Magician had all sorts of charts of different characters’ relationships and position in the plot. Even so, I didn’t expect the particular change in process that’s crept up on me, especially since it’s a general change that appears to apply on a fundamental level to everything I write.

At least, it does right now. Ask me again in thirty years, and we’ll see how much else has changed.

By pcwrede | Posted in Writing | Tagged , | Comments (5)

Cooking vs. writing

January 16, 2013 – 2:53 am

One of the things writers get asked about a lot is how we do it, either specifically (“How do you plan an action scene?”) or in general (“Where do you get your ideas?”). A lot of the time, it’s fairly evident that the person asking the question thinks there’s a clear-cut answer. They’re looking for a series of steps to follow, a recipe for writing romances or mysteries or literary fiction or just plain old stories. And there are plenty of books and classes and blogs and software out there that try to provide just that.

Which leads me to the rather obvious conclusion that most people aren’t great cooks.

Because following recipes will get you a decent meal if you’re not trying anything too complicated, but it won’t get you a great meal except by pure luck. Fancy or complicated recipes, in my experience, often take several tries to get right even when you think you’re following the directions perfectly (my first try at puff pastry came out as quarter-inch-high hockey pucks).

Furthermore, you won’t get the best possible results by following a recipe exactly, because there are too many variables: how fresh the ingredients are, for instance, or how dry or humid the day is, or whether your oven temperature is accurate. A great cook has to adjust everything on the fly, from cooking time and temperature to whether to add an extra pinch of spice (or an extra tablespoon).

Old recipes assume the cook knows this (and really old recipes assumed that nobody had standardized measuring tools anyway), so they call for “butter the size of an egg” and “a pinch of salt.” These days, though, a lot of us have learned to follow modern recipes that specify everything from three cups of flour down to an eighth of a teaspoon of ginger, and we’re not comfortable unless we have something exact to follow.

Which is fine if all one wants to do is have a decent meal, but not the best idea if one wants a great one. All the really good cooks I know use recipes – if they use them at all – as a sort of starting guideline, adding and subtracting ingredients according to their own taste, experience, and inspiration.

Writing is like that.

There are certainly formulas for different sorts of fiction, and if one has a reasonably good grasp of grammar and syntax, one can produce a fairly readable story by following them. If that is all one does, though, it shows. (Although these days “fairly readable” is really not enough, if publication is your goal.) Great writers – if they bother with a formula at all – adjust it on the fly, adding and subtracting things until the end result is something beyond formulaic. Hamlet is more than a revenge tragedy; Henry V is more than a docudrama.

How you get to that point…well, different people use different routes. You can learn to cook by starting with recipes and trying a lot of similar ones, paying close attention to the similarities and differences and how they affect the outcome, or you can take a class, or you can hunt up some of the historical cookbooks and try out the recipes that aren’t so exact, or you can just throw different things in a pot every night and see what happens. You can learn to write by closely imitating your favorite writers, or by trying out several different plotting and development systems, or by taking a class, or by just sitting down and trying different things until they begin to come together.

Both cooks and writers need certain basic skills – chopping and dicing and mixing and so on for cooks, plotting and dialog and characterization and so on for writers – but again, how and when one learns them is up to the individual cook or writer. You may want to practice one specific thing for a couple of hours and then file the pages of dialog or freeze the chopped carrots; or you may do your practicing on the pay copy.

The one thing that isn’t optional in either case, though, is practice. You can learn a lot about cooking and ingredients and so on by reading cookbooks and watching cooking shows, but if that’s all you do, you aren’t a cook…and you won’t ever become one until you put on the apron and get in the kitchen and spend some time chopping and dicing and sautéing and baking. And there will be disasters (see hockey puck reference above).

You can learn a lot about writing by reading how-to books and blogs and analyzing other people’s work, but if that’s all you do, you’re not a writer. You need actual, on-the-ground experience to get good at it, and getting that experience takes time and effort, and there will be disasters. Some of the things you try won’t work the first time, or the second, or the eighth. Some of the things you are quite sure will never work turn out to be brilliant. You will hardly ever be able to tell in advance which is going to be which.

Cooks have to actually cook; writers have to actually write. Thinking, reading, or talking about it isn’t enough.

By pcwrede | Posted in Writing | Tagged , | Comments (7)

Dragons and Gender Bias…huh?

January 13, 2013 – 6:11 am

Back in the mid 1990s, shortly after Dealing with Dragons came out, I was asked to join a panel of folks to talk about dragons, and the topic I was handed to talk about was “Dragons and Gender Bias.” After blinking several times, I asked the moderator just what he expected me to talk about with a title like that, since I didn’t think he’d be too happy if I stood up and said “Dragons don’t have any gender bias. Thank you very much.” and sat down again.

He laughed and said blithely something along the lines of, “Oh, I thought you would talk about why you decided to use a strong female heroine (sic) in your first book Dealing with Dragons, and how you went about creating such a wonderful strong female-” for some reason, people who ask about this (and he’s not the only one by a long shot) always refer to Cimorene as a “strong female” and never as a woman or girl “-such a wonderful strong female. And if there’s time, maybe you could talk about the reasons you made her become the princess of a female dragon, and why you decided to make ‘King of the Dragons’ a title that has no connection with gender. That sort of thing.”

“I see,” I said. “All right.” And I hung up the phone. I was somewhat taken aback, partly because “female heroine” is redundant, but partly because I was in the rather rare position of being able to answer every one of the questions he brought up.

The problem was that every last one of his basic assumptions was wrong.

Dealing with Dragons was not only not my first book, it wasn’t even the first book I’d written in the Enchanted Forest chronicles. Talking to Dragons was published in 1985; Dealing came later, in 1990. And it is in Talking to Dragons that Cimorene and Kazul appear for the first time, as relatively minor characters. In that first appearance, Cimorene is not a “strong female heroine” – she is the main character’s mother, and she is exactly like all the mothers (mine and my friends’) that I remember having to deal with when I was sixteen. Well, maybe not exactly like them…

But in any case, the character who appeared later, in Dealing with Dragons, had to be someone who could reasonably be expected to grow up into the character in Talking to Dragons. Most of the things the moderator was asking about were my attempts to explain why Cimorene had turned out the way she did, not attempts to write about “a strong female heroine.”

It is also in Talking to Dragons that I first mentioned that “King of the Dragons” is a genderless job title (so far as dragons are concerned, anyway). I happen to remember very clearly writing the particular scene, because I was looking for a way to demonstrate that dragons were, in essence, aliens, not just very large human beings in lizard suits. I wanted a shortcut to show that they thought differently from humans, and I was very pleased when I came up with the idea of making the King of the Dragons a female. Similarly, Cimorene having been Kazul’s princess was an off-the-cuff invention that was intended to be a shock to the main character, the way it often is a bit shocking to a teenager to discover that his/her parents were once rowdy teenagers themselves.

In other words, pretty much all of the things the moderator wanted to know about were dictated by the needs of the first story and the personalities of the characters, not by the author’s desire to make a point in the second book.

This is something I think too many readers and would-be writers forget: most stories are not allegories, and the vast majority of characters in a non-allegorical, realistic piece of fiction are not going to work if they are portrayed first as a member of a group (“a typical ___”), and only second as an individual with whatever strengths and weaknesses, quirks and phobias, that particular individual happens to have.

And I would argue that regardless of what traits or attributes a character has – race, size, ethnicity, sex, age, hair color, etc. – what shapes them most is the interaction between their own personality and the attitude of the culture they grow up in toward their particular traits, because that pretty much determines both the way the characters think of themselves (and others) and the ways they expect other people to think and behave.

Dragon culture, as it developed in the Enchanted Forest books, pretty much ignores gender because dragons get to choose which sex they’re going to be. It’s important, but it’s important to a dragon in the same way as choosing the right hairstyle is important to human beings. They wouldn’t judge another dragon’s intelligence, competence, or abilities based on what gender that dragon was. Kazul is a fairly normal, mainstream member of that culture, so she doesn’t think twice about being king, and she’s perfectly happy having her princess learn magic and carry a sword.

Cimorene, on the other hand, grew up in the fairy-tale-kingdom culture…and rebelled against it. That’s what I mean when I say it’s the interaction between the character and the culture that really makes them who they are in the story. If I had written Dealing with Dragons first, and I’d reversed the personalities and made Cimorene a normal, mainstream princess and Kazul a rebel against dragon culture, they’d have been very different characters…and I could have chosen to do that. Which would, of course, have led to a very different story, but that’s another matter.

By pcwrede | Posted in Writing | Tagged , | Comments (12)

…And When It Isn’t

January 9, 2013 – 6:08 am

I spent last time talking about a manuscript full of stupid mistakes that didn’t work. This time, I’m going to talk about some where it does. Because in real life, people forget critical information, give in to impulses that turn out to be a Really Bad Idea, and generally do things that, if they’d stopped to consider, are clearly likely to have a less-than-good outcome. If characters never did this kind of thing, they’d be unrealistically perfect (and quite possibly boring as well).

On the other hand, characters who make mistake after mistake, or whose mistakes conveniently occur whenever the plot needs a boost or twist, are equally unrealistic, and seldom work except in the sort of parody where the whole point is that they can never do anything right. Similarly, if the characters never face any consequences from their mistakes, or never appear to learn anything from those consequences, the story is unlikely to feel real or be satisfying.

So how do authors strike a balance between too-perfect characters who never make a mistake and unrealistically stupid characters?

First off, mistakes in a story work like coincidences, meaning that the bigger the mistake or coincidence, the fewer of them are likely to work in a story. A tale that opens with an enormous, life-changing mistake implicitly promises the reader that the rest of the story is going to deal mainly with the consequences of that mistake. That means that the author can’t use a second enormous life-changing act of stupidity in mid-book in order to change course; whatever happens has to flow in some way from that original giant error. If other characters make mistakes, it’s most likely to work if a) they’re small mistakes, b) they’re very different from the original giant error, and c) they don’t result in a major plot event or twist, but just push the story along in whatever direction it’s currently going.

If, however, the story doesn’t include one single, enormous mistake, the author can often get away with having two large-but-not-enormous mistakes, or three or four small errors of judgement, etc. One ought not to get too carried away by this, of course; there’s a point where one hits “too many” even if they’re all eensy-weensy errors.

Back to the large mistake thing. Once I started thinking about it, I could think of three or four novels that open with a ginormous mistake on the part of the major character, and they generally follow the same pattern. First off, the big mistake doesn’t occur on page 1; it’s usually near the end of the first or second chapter. This gives the author plenty of time to lead up to it…and they do.

In every case I could think of, the events leading up to the mistake are shown carefully and in sufficient detail to make it clear to the reader why the character made the mistake…and each of them has several points at which they could have backed out and changed direction. The characters hesitate briefly, but pride or inertia or drunken bloody-mindedness keeps them on track for the inevitable train wreck at the end of the first chapter.

As a result, the reader can see that the characters are being stupid, but they can also see and understand why they’re being stupid. For this one, it was a combination of being angry, drunk, and too proud to back down once he realized he’d dug himself into a hole; for that one, it was a combination of hubris and fear; for the other one, it was midlife insecurity combined with temptation and needing to prove something to himself. The reader can see and sympathize with the character, maybe even think “There but for the grace of God go I,” even as she’s shaking her head about the dumb decision itself. Yes, the decision is still dumb, but we believe that this character, under these circumstances, really would do it.

It is, admittedly, extremely difficult to do this kind of thing for mistakes that various characters made before the story even began. One can, however, show that they regret the mistake, and that they’ve learned something from having messed up so badly five or ten or twenty years before…and one can certainly arrange for them not to repeat the same mistake. A character doing the exact same stupid thing for a second time tends to really put readers off, even if the first time happened twenty years pre-story and we didn’t get to watch it.

If the pre-story mistake really is vital to the current plot, one can use flashback to show the circumstances and motivation, or one can have some really understanding other character explain it to everyone in the present story who doesn’t know.

In every case, though, it all keeps coming back around to making sure the reader understands the reasons the character made the mistake…and the bigger the mistake is, the more time the writer probably needs to spend setting it up. “Um, sorry, officer, I left my driver’s license at home” needs maybe half a line earlier about how fast she flew out of the house; “Er, I sort of told the Evil Overlord where our Sekrit Base is” needs a lot more advance justification.

About the only time this isn’t true is when one has a central character who is supposed to be an idiot – Bertie Wooster, say – and the whole point of the story is watching him bumble into trouble and watch Jeeves pull him out again. Which works in comedy, but seldom in drama.

By pcwrede | Posted in Writing | Tagged , , | Comments (7)

When it’s stupid…

January 6, 2013 – 3:41 pm

As some of you already know, I’ve been listening to a series of lectures on literature and theory and basically all the college-level English stuff I didn’t take in college. One of the recent lectures examined two books that, in the words of the lecturer, each began with “an example of monumentally bad judgment.” It intersected interestingly with a manuscript I was also reading in which the characters made one bad decision after another until I wanted to scream at their stupidity. So I thought I’d talk a bit about why this worked in one case and not in the other.

I’ll start with what didn’t work and why, and the first thing I want to say is that I’m not talking here about the standard idiot plot.

For those of you unfamiliar with the term, an idiot plot is one that cannot work unless all the main characters are idiots – if they acted or reacted like a normal sensible five-year-old, they’d solve the story problem on page two.

What I’m talking about is a bit more subtle than that, though it’s closely enough related that it could perhaps be considered a subcategory. In the case of the manuscript I mentioned, nearly every plot point and twist in the manuscript was the result of some character’s monumental bad judgment, either in the “now” of the story or years earlier. At least half of the bad decisions were due to impulsive stupidity on the part of the characters: “I think I’ll dump this bucket of fish slime over that assassin guy’s head and see what happens.” It’s obvious that the character is being stupid, but it’s not obvious why.

I can buy arrant stupidity on the part of one character, provided he’s been established as being, well, the kind of guy that would dump a bucket over an assassin’s head just for the heck of it. When every character in the story, including the putatively-wise old scholar, the supposedly-clever spy, and the kid who’s seen all the horror movies and who knows and says that it’s stupid to split up and explore, all make one thoughtless, impulsive mistake after another, I get cross.

I get even more cross when each and every mistake leads to another tense showdown and/or plot twist. I mean, if the author wanted a big fight with the assassin at that particular point in the story, couldn’t he have come up with a way of starting it that didn’t require one of the characters to do something perfectly idiotic? Or couldn’t he at least have shown some sort of chain of events that made his readers believe that the character really would make this particular mistake under these circumstances? Even a half-paragraph about how drunk he was, or how he never could resist a bet, would have done the job. The character would still be doing something insanely stupid, but I’d have at least understood, and maybe accepted, why he did it.

What really got to me in this particular case, however, was that in nearly every instance, the Giant Mistake scene looked initially like a mildly dumb but not unreasonable choice to make. That is, the mistakes didn’t appear to be on the order of deliberately annoying an assassin, but more on the order of pulling a stupid joke on someone’s obnoxious older brother. The trouble was that every time this happened, the author showed the incident, then showed the horrific and sometimes fatal consequences…and then, three or four chapters later, finally revealed to the reader not only that the obnoxious older brother was a highly trained assassin, but that the guy dumping the bucket of slime had known this all along.

In short, the author was trying to hide his characters’ stupidity from the reader by holding back information that the characters knew. In one instance, a character does the equivalent of deciding to explore the basement alone, when she and all four of the other characters present know perfectly well that the escaped serial killer is hiding somewhere on this block (but the reader hasn’t been clued in that there’s a killer on the loose). The closest any of the characters get to objecting is one of them saying, “OK, if you’re not back in an hour, I’ll call 911.”

There are several possible excuses the author might have made for withholding this kind of information from the reader, but that’s just what they are – excuses. If the viewpoint character and/or narrator has reason to think that the serial killer might be hiding in the basement, the reader ought to know. If all the characters have this knowledge, then one of them ought to bring it up. Hiding the information from the reader until the action is all over does not make the decision to go down into the basement less stupid, and it does not make the reader less likely to notice that it was stupid.

The one place where this kind of thing is sometimes (not always, but sometimes) justified is when a character has made a ginormous, plot-affecting mistake at some point in the distant past. In this case, the mistake is part of the character’s backstory (and the character is frequently ashamed of it and trying to keep the information from affecting his/her present-day life), so it’s frequently reasonable for the readers and other characters not to know about it until the mistake comes back to bite them all. Even so, it’s almost always most effective if the author at least hints at the fact that there is some mystery about the character’s past before it starts strongly affecting the current story. Once the critical incident happens – the plot twist or event that wouldn’t have happened if not for the character’s long-hidden mistake – the reader and the other characters usually need to get the explanation/justification as soon as possible.

That’s a good bit of what doesn’t work. But characters need to make the occasional mistake, even the occasional huge one, so next, I’m going to talk about how to make that work in a story without having all the characters look stupid.

By pcwrede | Posted in Writing | Tagged , , | Comments (6)

The Question of Theme

January 2, 2013 – 6:38 am

Theme is one of the most difficult aspects of fiction to discuss. This is partly because there are so many different ways of looking at it…and because there is no one clear, simple definition that everybody agrees on. “The definition of theme” ranges from the simple and straightforward “The subject or topic of the piece” to the more obscure “the understanding that the author seeks to communicate through the work” or “a salient abstract idea that emerges from a literary work’s treatment of its subject matter” to the broad “theme is what the story means.”

Several of the web sites I looked at didn’t even try to come up with a definition; they just gave paragraph after paragraph of examples of things the writer thought were and were not themes. One had a list of “themes in the science fiction genre” that included things like “alternate history” and “generation ships” and “virtual reality,” none of which are anything like what I understand theme to be.

Not that I understand the concept of theme particularly well. It isn’t something I’ve ever needed to understand in order to write fiction; in fact, thinking too hard about theme during my writing process gets in my way. This isn’t true of every writer, by any means, but for me, it’s a subject that’s a lot safer to consider when I’m between books.

Still, I’ve always had a suspicion that if I could ever really get my arms around it, theme would be one more exceedingly useful way of looking at my work. So I keep poking at it periodically, in hopes of seeing how other people work with it and how I might adapt their methods to my own process.

Part of the problem is that the vast majority of writing about theme comes from literary analysts who aren’t themselves writers. This has always made me suspect that theme is one of those tools that is great for dissecting a story after it is written, but that may not be much help in getting the writing done. Nevertheless, there are writers who do start with theme (whatever they understand it to be), and who do find it a useful tool, so I keep looking at it.

The main thing I’ve taken away from all the various reading I’ve done on the subject is that theme is generally abstract to some significant degree. That means that “generation ships” and “faster-than-light space travel” aren’t themes, but “the future evolution of society” might be, and “loyalty and hatred” almost certainly is.

Most of the time, the versions of theme that make most sense to me are expressed one of three ways: as a one-sentence argument, as a one-word idea, or as a question. The one-sentence argument variety has always seemed to me the least useful to a writer, as it tends to be couched as a proposition to be demonstrated: “Pets should be treated nicely” or “Testing honesty builds character.” Laying out one’s theme this way seems to me to invite the author to “prove” it in the story, which in turn is just asking to turn the story into a sermon – and in the process, miss out on interesting characters and plot twists because they don’t prove the theme as stated.

The one-word idea – “loyalty” or “honor” or “integrity” – seems to me more useful because it invites the author to look at the theme from different angles: how one character demonstrates loyalty or honor, compared to another, or how different characters acquire or lose their honor or integrity. For me, though, the one-word theme is seldom obvious, even after I’ve written the entire book. This makes it of extremely limited use to me so far as writing is concerned.

That leaves the theme-as-question. I like this because it seems more open-ended than the other versions. “What question am I asking/examining in this story?” can be answered with something as abstract as “Which is more important, loyalty or personal integrity?” or with something as pointed as “What makes a family break down?” The temptation, though, is to make the question into something a little too specific, like “How does the hero defeat the dragon?” which gets right back to plot and away from theme.

Ultimately, though, I doubt that thinking about theme will ever do me much good up, because the concrete has more appeal for me than the abstract, at least when it comes to stories. The themes in my work arise from the stories themselves – from these particular characters and the exact obstacles they face and the various choices they make, which have everything to do with who they are and very little to do with the author trying to demonstrate or examine anything other than the characters.

By pcwrede | Posted in Writing | Tagged | Comments (12)

Prophecies

December 30, 2012 – 6:25 am

Some while back, I had a conversation with a reader. It went on for quite a while, but I can sum it up pretty quickly:

Him: “That book is terrible. I shouldn’t have been surprised. It has a prophecy in it. Stories with prophecies in them are always horrible; they’re pretty much a sign of bad writing.”

Me: “Um, no. Really, really, no.”

If having a prophecy in a story were a sign of bad writing, Homer’s Illiad and Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex would not still be read, watched, studied, and enjoyed over 2500 years after they were written. Yes, there are plenty of perfectly terrible modern fantasies that contain prophecies, but as with so many things in writing, the problem is not with the device or technique, it’s with the way the technique is employed.

What too many writers fail to realize, I think, is that from a story-structure viewpoint, a prophecy is a point of intersection between characters and plot. A plot-centered story can easily founder on a prophecy that makes the rest of the plot inevitable; a character-centered story can similarly founder on a prophecy that makes the characters’ actions appear pointless or turns them into puppets. Characters and the rest of the plot have to balance on the point of the prophecy, or the story goes lopsided and fails to work.

In most of the old Greek stories, the characters are usually struggling to avoid an unfavorable prophecy, but sometimes, they seem to see it as a deadline. Laius tries to avoid his prophesied death by disposing of his infant son (which naturally sets the prophecy in motion); Achilles, having decided to take the “die young and covered in glory” part of his prophecy rather than the “die old and unremarkable” part, seems to be cramming as much living as he can into whatever days he has. In both cases, this puts the characters in tension with the prophecy, pulling against it in some way, and that keeps things in balance.

Many modern fantasies, by contrast, have the characters struggling to fulfill a prophecy. This puts the characters and the prophecy on the same side, both pulling in the same direction. For this to work, something has to be pulling equally hard in the opposite direction, or the plot takes on an air of inevitability no matter how difficult the heroes’ tasks are.

There are several ways to make a story work anyway. One is to have an ambiguous prophecy: “If you cross the river, a great kingdom will fall.” Which kingdom? Maybe not the one you’re hoping for… Another method is to have competing prophecies, only one of which can be true, or a prophecy that predicts a confrontation, but not the outcome (or at least, not a clear outcome: “The armies of East and West will clash, and the victor will rule for a thousand years” leaves out one obvious and important fact – who the victor will be). Or have one like the one about Achilles that gives two mutually exclusive outcomes to choose between.

A prophecy that lends itself to misinterpretation, or to multiple interpretations, can provide all sorts of interesting plot twists. “The Red Dragon and the White shall battle, and at first the White shall seem victorious, but the Red shall conquer when the Boar comes out of the South” is the sort of thing that can be made either blindingly obvious or nearly impossible to interpret, depending on how the author sets things up.

What all these alternatives do is to lessen the obviousness of the “pull” of the prophecy on the plot and characters. If the prophecy says “whoso pulleth this sword from out this stone is rightwise born king of Britain,” the next step is obvious: line everybody up and have them tug on the sword. If it says “The rightful king shall be revealed under the sign of the dragon,” the next step isn’t nearly so clear…and the characters’ actions are less likely to feel scripted and inevitable.

In modern fantasy, prophecies are usually central to the story. There’s plenty of precedent for this, but it isn’t strictly necessary. It is perfectly possible to write a story set during the Trojan War that deals with the struggles of a merchant family trying to survive in a city that’s been under siege for ten years, in which none of the characters have much of anything to do with the prophecies about Achilles dying young or Paris bringing about the city’s downfall. One can also do what the Arthurian legends do: pulling the sword out of the stone is the start of the poor kid’s problems – now that he’s king, he has to chase the Saxons out of the kingdom and then figure out how to get a war-ravaged land back on its feet again, while also dealing with cutthroat court politics. Fulfilling the prophecy was the easy part.

One last key thing for any author to remember when including a prophecy in a story: the exact wording of the prophecy is the sort of thing that fans of the story will pick apart endlessly, given the slightest cause. It pays to be very careful about it, and to solicit advice and alternate interpretations from as many other people as possible, so as to catch and eliminate (or better yet, incorporate into the story) as many of the potential objections/alternatives as one can.

By pcwrede | Posted in Writing | Tagged , | Comments (11)

Alexandria and the Terrible Horrible Parody Piece

December 23, 2012 – 6:53 am

I’m going to be taking Wednesday off, as I have things to do on Christmas other than compose a blog post; therefore here is a slightly-early Christmas present for everybody.

Alexandria and the Terrible, Horrible, No-good Very Bad Slush Pile

(With apologies to Judith Viorst)

I wake up with a hangover and miss the train and get to the office late even though I don’t take time to stop at Starbucks for coffee, and when I arrive the coffeemaker is already empty and the last little bit has dried out on the bottom of the pot and the editor-in-chief shows up while I am clearing it up and says she put the slush pile on my desk because it’s my turn to read it even though I have eighteen messages on my voice mail and a sales conference tomorrow.

The stack of manuscripts is two feet tall and even from here I can see that there’s a pile of pink pages in the middle and a smear down the side where somebody spilled coffee down it and I just know it is going to be a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad slush pile.

George, the other assistant editor, says he doesn’t know why I’m making faces, it’s just slush. I hate George

The top manuscript has a three-page cover letter. The first page is a diatribe about the Evil Publishing Conspiracy that won’t look at the author’s brilliant work, which we are all too stupid to appreciate anyway. I just love being insulted before I’ve had my coffee. The second page is a list of the author’s requirements for the book’s layout and cover, along with all the subrights that he is explicitly not offering us. The third page has his lawyer’s address and says that he’ll call on Thursday to negotiate the terms of the contract. Today is Thursday.

Maybe I can get a job selling life insurance.

The second manuscript is addressed very clearly to the editor-in-chief of the hard science fiction line, which is where I work. It is not hard science fiction; it is not soft science fiction; it is not any kind of science fiction at all. It is a Western. Why does the author think a hard science fiction line will buy a Western?

It is a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad slush pile.

I get some coffee from the office coffee pot because at the rate I’m going, I won’t finish the slush pile until midnight and I can’t take the time to run down to Starbuck’s. The coffee tastes like soap. Burned soap. George has a Starbuck’s Grande Mocha sitting on his desk. I hate George.

I bet people in insurance offices get to have Starbucks coffee whenever they want.

The next manuscript is three inches thick, and printed on pink paper. I hate pink. I glance at it anyway. It’s in a script font, too. And it looks like the author has replaced all the o’s with a graphic of a little heart. And here I thought the assistant editor over in Romance was exaggerating. I’m not even going to try to read it. I value my eyes.

What’s next? Looks like someone has typed up the pilot episode of the original Star Trek series, with the names changed. I even recognize most of the dialog. Did he think we wouldn’t notice?

The slush pile doesn’t seem to be getting any shorter. I’m going to have to have lunch at my desk.  I bet life insurance salespeople don’t have to eat at their desks. George is having lunch with a Big Name Author at the trendy café down the block. On the expense account. I hate George.

At least the next author actually read our submission guidelines and sent three chapters and an outline, instead of the whole book. Unfortunately, the outline is incomprehensible. What are kneebles? Why is the hero looking for them on Jupiter when the villain appears to be mining them on Rigel VI? Or is it the villain who’s looking and the hero who’s mining? The cover letter assures me that everything is much clearer in the novel, but I don’t think I believe it.

Here’s a submission…no, two submissions…no, four submissions from the same author. At least he’s prolific. Wait, they’re all versions of the same book. Apparently he’s rewritten his novel three times in the two months since he first sent it in; the cover letter says the current version is much better than any of the earlier ones. On a hunch, I check the incoming mail. Yup, here’s version number five.  I wonder if I can start a betting pool on when version six will arrive?

I’m putting my resume together tonight, I swear I am.

The next manuscript looks like science fiction, all right, but that may be just because the author didn’t bother to run the spelling checker. Or possibly he really is still in third grade and hasn’t learned about grammar or spelling yet; it’s hard to say. Also, the villain is Thrad Redav, and the hero is Kuel Cloudrunner, and the plot is…more than familiar. No.

This is really a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad slush pile.

This one looks like the author typed it with his fingers off by one key. There’s a legible note at the top – oh, it’s in a language that the author invented. Have to give him points for obsessiveness, writing a whole novel in an imaginary language. I wonder who he expects to read it? At least the cover letter is in English… I see, we’re supposed to write him for a translation if we’re interested. I don’t think so.

Ah, a pizza box. Somebody’s read all the stupid suggestions for how to get your manuscript read faster. I don’t suppose it occurred to her that opening a pizza box expecting nice, hot pizza and finding only another slush pile manuscript is likely to get the manuscript off to a really bad start – assuming, of course, that the editor (me) has never run across the pizza box trick before. I had three of them my first week on the job.

Nobody sends fake pizza boxes to insurance salespeople.

Here’s the last one. It is a history of the Roman Empire, with zombies. What is it with zombies? And why does the author think a hard science fiction line is the place for historical zombies? Or should that be hysterical zombies? I check the cover letter. The author appears to think her book is nonfiction. Hysterical zombies it is. I write her a note pointing out that we do not publish nonfiction.

That was definitely a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad slush pile.

At least now I can go home and work on my resume.

And tomorrow, it’s George’s turn to read the slush.

By pcwrede | Posted in Writing | Tagged , , | Comments (11)

Ladders

December 19, 2012 – 6:57 am

One of the first things most people realize after they’ve sold their first novel is that, contrary to expectation, they haven’t reached the top of the tree. Instead, they’re now on the bottom rung of a whole new ladder.

This comes as a great shock to some people, though anyone who’s actually thought much about it can surely see that there are plenty of achievements beyond “I can write well enough to get professionally published.” Still, even if you know intellectually that publishing your first novel isn’t the end of working hard, it’s usually a goal that the writer has been working toward for a long time, and one would really like to bask in the glory of reaching the top of the first ladder for a bit before taking that deep breath and starting to climb the next one.

Some folks, though, never seem to switch ladders. This is fine if you’re perfectly happy sitting at the top of the fan-and-unpublished-writers ladder while ignoring the professionally-published-writing-career ladder, but if you actually want a professional-publication-career, you have to work just as hard at climbing that ladder as you worked at climbing the first one.

Climbing that professional-career ladder takes more work, and different kinds of work, than the first. Most ambitious new professionals realize they’re going to need to do publicity work, and that in this day and age, that will mean having some sort of Internet presence (whether that’s heavily weighted toward social media like Facebook, Twitter, Livejournal, and the like, or whether it involves lots of guest blogging and activity on other people’s sites). There are lots of other things that the Internet makes easier, from ordering publicity bookmarks and postcards to doing specialized “pump up the buzz” contests and promotions. Lots of other things.

Unfortunately, there’s no reliable way of telling what things will actually have an impact on sales, and it’s far too easy to get so caught up in planning and executing one’s publicity campaign that one forgets (or can’t squeeze out the time for) writing the next book. (I’ve seen more than one instance where someone has spent so much time promoting their great new novel online that they haven’t had time to finish the thing. Do not make this mistake.)

The other difficulty is that having produced one publishable novel does not mean that the writer can stop worrying about the skill and craft part of writing and concentrate on their production-and-publicity responsibilities. No, it means that one has to do all the publicity and administration and production stuff (like revisions and copyedit and page proofs) while also writing the next book and trying to get better as a writer.

And it turns out that improving one’s craft does not just happen. You don’t improve your tennis backhand or your golf swing by whacking a huge bunch of balls at random for an hour a day. You improve by deciding to aim for a certain spot or location, hitting one ball, checking to see how you did, and then making an adjustment before you hit the next ball…and hitting a huge bunch of balls that way. Or by having an expert watch you hit one ball and then tell you how to correct your stance and your swing before you hit the next.

In other words, you get better by consciously and deliberately working at getting better. There are various ways to do this – working at exercises or prompts allows some writers to concentrate on specific problem areas, while other folks prefer to shoot for incremental overall improvement in their pay copy. Reading how-to-write books and blogs, or playing writing games with friends, or taking classes works for others. Critique groups are popular and helpful for a lot of folks. Studying other people’s work comes highly recommended (some advocate studying the classics, or the acknowledged “top hundred” works in one’s chosen genre; others advocate just as strongly studying the worst writing, because it’s often much easier to see what the writer is doing wrong).

I get a fair amount of mileage out of figuring out which areas and skills I need to improve, and then working out some way to improve them on my own – the figuring out and working out are important parts of my improvement process, just as much as actually doing whatever work I’ve decided to do. Other people like a more formal or more structured approach. The main thing is to do it – to work deliberately and consciously on improving one’s writing skills.

Because you never run out of room for improvement.

By pcwrede | Posted in Writing | Tagged | Comments (5)

Worksheets

December 16, 2012 – 6:52 am

So for some reason or other I was poking around on the web last week and I ran across somebody’s “character worksheet” – basically a fill-in-the-blanks page that started with “name” “age” and “physical description” and then had half a dozen things like “career goals” and “religion” and “deepest fears.” I thought it was both fairly useless and over-the-top, until I found a similar one that was six pages long, with details like “is/isn’t a good kisser” and “favorite breakfast cereal.” By comparison, the first one looked positively restrained.

Looking at them more closely, I get the strong feeling that a few of them were designed by authors who needed a mental reminder of all the aspects of their characters that they could use – not so much a “fill in all these blanks and you’ll have a great character” sort of list, but more of a “do you need to think about this for this character?” list. The rest look as if they were designed by professors who analyzed a bunch of stories and novels and worked backward from what they thought they found there, under the assumption that the writers made it all up before they ever started writing.

I do things that could possibly be called “character sketches,” but they don’t look anything like any of the worksheets or assignments I’ve seen. Mine have the character’s name, who they are, and a couple of paragraphs of background information explaining what they’ve been doing lately and what they’re up to, and that’s about it. No list of “personality quirks” or goals or psychology; no childhood traumas; no physical description, even.

Emilie is an older relative – aunt? – of Everard, the head of the merchant guild. She teaches guild apprentices basic skills like reading and math, and has been doing so for at least two decades. She came up with the system and pushed it through (it was considered very radical when she started it), and is now highly respected for putting it into practice. She never married, but nobody has ever dared connect a scandal with her name; if she has lovers, she’s incredibly discreet about them.

That’s the actual notes about one of the minor characters who may or may not make it into the next book. For a major character, or someone I already know is going to be plot-important, I’ll have three or four paragraphs like that, detailing who they are, where they came from, what they’re up to, why they’re important to the plot, and perhaps what their connection to my protagonist is (or will be). If the character is one of the ones who just walked into my head, and I know a lot of other stuff, I may make a few brief notes about it, but usually that sort of character is memorable enough that I don’t need to write down those details.

As I get into the first draft, and various characters arrive on stage, I make up what they look like and add it to the character notes in an attempt to keep myself from writing that George has blue eyes in Chapter One, and then having George blink his brown eyes at someone in Chapter Ten. Similarly, I add any new background information that I discover and that I am afraid of forgetting.

OK, sometimes I add that kind of thing to my notes. More often, I mention something on the fly, like the antique tea set the heroine’s great-aunt always uses, and then eight or nine chapters later, when I’m working up to the grand finale, I suddenly realize that it would be the perfect way for the villain to try to poison the heroine, and I go scrambling back through all the earlier chapters, looking for the scene where I mentioned the tea set so I can be sure it’s actually in the story and not just something I thought about putting in and then changed my mind about.

But the most important aspects of my characters show up as I am writing about them. Right now, I don’t need to know whether Emilie is still the passionately dedicated teacher she was as a radical young woman, or whether she’s looking for a new challenge now that she’s reached mid-life and her tutoring program is well established; whether she’s devoted mainly to the guild or mainly to her students; whether she’ll side with her nephew or with my heroine if she’s faced with that choice. I’ll find that out when she walks on stage and starts interacting with my other characters, and most especially when she’s faced with a decision.

This is why my plot outlines never last more than a chapter: because until I write the characters, I don’t know them well enough to make an accurate prediction of what they’ll think and how they’ll act, and whenever I’m wrong, it changes the whole direction of the plot.

Which brings me back around to those character worksheets. For me, they’re pretty much useless; I need to know my characters, not just know things about them, and in order to know them, I have to write them. For other writers, worksheets may well be a lot more useful, especially if one views them as a memory-jogging tool rather than a form to fill out.

By pcwrede | Posted in Writing | Tagged | Comments (11)

An elf, a dwarf, and an Irishman walk into a bar…

December 12, 2012 – 6:17 am

OK, first the news: Sorcery and Cecelia is the Sizzling Book Club pick this month and Caroline and I will be joining their Live Chat on Wednesday, December 19 (that’s Wednesday, one week from today). The live chat starts at 9 pm EST and runs for an hour and a half; Caroline and I will be showing up for the last half-hour, starting at 10 pm EST.

Which makes this a reasonably good time to talk about humor, I think.

Humor is a lot harder to write than most people think (unless they’ve tried stand-up comedy themselves). In spite of this, humor also tends to get less respect than most other sorts of fiction. Making people laugh requires a clear eye, a clever mind, and an impeccable sense of timing, among other things, yet a lot of people seem to think it’s easier and less deserving of respect than serious, dramatic fiction (as if one can’t be serious about being funny).

Yet a leavening of humor can add a lot to nearly any book, even the most serious of them. A touch of comedy can give the reader a much-needed break from the story’s relentless march toward doom and destruction. Even Shakespeare’s greatest tragedies have occasional comic scenes and comic characters.

There are a whole bag of techniques for writing humor, most of which Connie Willis discusses in her article on “Learning to Write Comedy: Why it’s impossible and how to do it.”  Unfortunately, the web version has most of the formatting stripped out, including the capital letters, but it’s still a really excellent article on the topic. I am now going to repeat some of what she said, only from a different angle.

Specifically, I’m going to start by talking about different categories of humor, beginning with physical humor and slapstick. This is just what it sounds like – exaggerated fake violence and bodily harm used for comic effect – and it’s more often seen on stage or in movies than done in writing. It covers everything from the Three Stooges slipping on a banana peel to Wile E. Coyote blowing himself up with his own bomb. In novels, the best examples I can think of are in Terry Pratchett’s early Discworld books, especially The Color of Magic and The Light Fantastic. Or the scene in the second Harry Potter book in which the inept wizard, Lockhart, causes the bones in Harry’s arm to vanish.

The techniques used most often in physical humor are exaggeration, understatement, and surprise. The fake violence or harm is exaggerated, unexpected, over-the-top – nobody would really react to a nosy neighbor by going after them with a bazooka – while any realistic consequences are minimized (Wile E. Coyote would be dead within the first thirty seconds of the cartoon if he were suffering anything close to the actual effect of the bombs, falls, pianos, etc.).

Farce and screwball comedy also make use of surprise, understatement, and exaggeration, but this time, it’s not harmful actions that are blown up out of shape, it’s everything else: the setting, the characters, the social interactions, even the norms that the readers expect a story to follow (coincidences are normally considered something to avoid in a novel, but they’re a staple in farce and screwball comedy). The Marx Brothers movies fall into this category, and yes, they also use a lot of physical comedy as well.

Word play is important here, and so are unexpected contrasts and lateral or divergent thinking (taking things literally that everyone would normally understand as metaphor or idiom, putting lots of emphasis on things that would normally be considered unimportant while ignoring the real or important stuff, etc.). Gracie Allen was the all-time mistress of lateral thinking.

Parody, satire, and irony mock individuals, aspects of society, organizations, genres, events…pretty much anything, actually. It isn’t necessarily mean-spirited mockery – Pratchett’s later Discworld books fall somewhere in this spectrum, and I don’t see how anyone could reasonably call them mean-spirited. They’re all about word play and language, while still making use of all the other tools in the comedy toolbox

Two more techniques that occur in pretty much every form of comedy are contrast and comic patterns. Contrast is, perhaps, a variation on surprise or defeated expectations, but I think it’s important enough to rate its own position on the list – one of the reasons the absent-minded professor is a stock comic character is the contrast between his presumed intelligence and his absent-minded behavior. Comic patterns are another important tool, whether they’re things we’ve all absorbed from our culture (the way the title of this post leads you to expect a joke), or whether they’re something that the writer has set up through repetition over the course of the story, like the over-full closet that always drops a pile of junk on top of whoever opens the door.

The thing about all these categories is that, as you can guess from the kinds of examples I was using, they mostly have their origin in classifying plays and movies. You can, therefore, move from purely physical, non-verbal humor to comedy that relies more and more on word play for its effect.

In a novel, however, the elements of language are an inevitable part of every single kind of humor the writer wants to do. Novels and short stories are language, and nothing but; even physical humor must, in a novel, be conveyed to the reader through words. And the tools and techniques of comedy and humor work on both levels – that is, the action and characters and so on need to be funny (exaggerated, understated, unexpected, etc.), but the sentences the writer uses can also employ the same techniques, just on a smaller and more constrained level.

Unexpected word choices or comparisons, emphasizing the “wrong” thing, delivering over-the-top silliness in a deadpan, matter-of-fact style (or using wildly exaggerated purple prose to describe someone’s bacon-and-egg breakfast) can all add a lot to a series of funny events. Above all, there’s the comic tone – the presentation that tells the reader that nothing that happens in this scene or story is to be taken perfectly seriously, even if it appears that very serious things are happening.

Of course, any of these things can also detract from the humor of a piece if they’re done in the wrong spot at the wrong time – the equivalent of a stand-up comic blowing his/her timing. As with stand-up comedy, the only ways I know of to avoid this are a) to read and watch a lot of the best comedy you can, learning as much as possible by osmosis and then studying it to try to wring even more out of it, and b) to practice a lot.

By pcwrede | Posted in Writing | Tagged , | Comments (4)

No battle plan…

December 9, 2012 – 6:10 am

“No battle plan survives contact with the enemy.” – Helmuth von Moltke

“A writer should always reserve the right to have a better idea.” – Lois McMaster Bujold

Prewriting notes – whether they’re about plot, background, or characters – are the writer’s battle plan, and therefore exceedingly important. Lots has been written about this aspect of writing, but there are really only two things that are absolutely vital to remember:

  1. Every writer handles prewriting differently, and
  2. Nothing is ever written in stone until the book is actually in print.

If you look at those two things long enough, you start asking yourself “Well, then, why bother planning at all, if there’s no right way to do it and if it’s not going to stay the same anyway?” All I can say is that, of all the authors I know well enough to have some idea of their work processes, only one or two do no pre-planning at all, and even they at least think about their stories a little before they sit down and write. Empirical evidence indicates that for most writers, planning works.

There are actually a bunch of other things that you may find useful to remember about planning, but they’re not things that everybody needs to remember. I really need to remember to spend enough time on the background and worldbuilding; I don’t seem to be able to get started until I have a solid feel for the world and its culture and history, as well as the more immediate background of the characters (i.e., how they heck did they get into the situation they’re in at the start of the story, and where do they think they’re going from here?). It’s a bit like looking at a chess problem – you know that there have been a bunch of moves made to get the pieces into this position, and before you decide what the next move is, you want to understand how they all got to this point.

But that’s me. I know writers who really need most of those pre-book moves to be unknown or undecided. They tend to be folks who have trouble changing their minds about “what happened” once they’ve made it up, and they need to leave lots of room for the pre-book events to change, in case they get to the middle of the story and discover that they need the bad guy to have stolen the crown jewels ten years ago, instead of having kidnapped the diplomat’s daughter (or vice versa, or in addition to).

Exactly what you have to do for prewriting, and how much, depends on how you think and how you write. Some people can figure this out by thinking about what works for them with other things, like cooking or learning to ski or building/making a new house or a new dress. For the rest of us, there’s trial and error.

You might need to work out who the characters are (or could be), and what their agendas and plans are, while leaving the plot strictly alone. Or you might need to work out the worldbuilding first, or a lot of the key events in the plot. Or you might need to do a massive plot tree, where you sketch out as many different ways the plot could go as you can think of, starting with “hero runs away to sea; gets berth as cabin boy, or doesn’t get berth, or is taken on as assistant by cook/sailmaker/?, or is mugged before he ever reaches docks…”

A couple of my friends do “zeroth drafts,” or what one of them refers to as “pseudocode” – a 100 to 150 page “draft” of what will eventually become a 400-page novel, which they later revise into a real first draft by adding scenes and incidents to explain plot twists or change the level of tension when it’s been too high or too low for too long. Often, adding these scenes alters the whole course of the rest of the book, which brings me to that second point.

However carefully you plan during your prewriting, it is never sacred and unchangeable. This is obvious, if you think about it a little. When you’re prewriting, you’re making stuff up – collecting materials (characters, plot turns, background), some of which you’ll use in the actual story draft. When you’re writing a zeroth or first draft, you’re making stuff up – only this time, it’s the specifics of exactly what was said, by whom, in what tone of voice, or exactly what was done, by whom, in what manner, and with what consequences. In other words, your brain is in making-stuff-up mode in both cases. So it’s not surprising for a writer to suddenly have a cool new idea in the middle of the draft that unfortunately means you have to change the plot, characters, or background in major ways. In fact, it’s more than unsurprising; it’s downright common.

Unfortunately, there seem to be a fair few writers out there who were scarred by their middle-school writing classes, and who think that once they have written an outline, they must stick to it. But if you’ve just had a really cool new idea that is going to make the story you’re writing even more interesting…why not use it? A more interesting, more effective, more surprising story is usually more desirable than the less interesting, etc., one.

Whatever the writer decides during any stage of the writing process, including prewriting, is subject to change without notice at any subsequent stage, right up until the book is published. Of course, it gets harder and more expensive to make major changes when the book is in production, but it’s still possible right up through the page proofs. If there’s a particularly egregious error, you can sometimes even talk the publisher into fixing it for the paperback version (e-books, of course, are a whole lot easier to fix at pretty much every stage of the game).

This does not mean things have to change in mid-story in order for it to be any good, nor does it mean that what changes must be large and significant. It depends on the writer. If you’re the sort who puts a lot of thought into your battle plan…er, outline and prewriting, the new ideas that you have while working on the first draft or revisions may be small tweaks that leave the main plot/characters/etc. mostly intact. If you’re the sort whose prewriting consists entirely of something like “I think I’ll write a book about a pirate,” and then you make it up as you go along, well, it’s much less likely that you’ll come up with something that changes your prewriting (though it’s possible, as when the book turns out to be about the pirate’s robot servant, or the noblewoman he captured, instead of about the pirate you started with).

By pcwrede | Posted in Writing | Tagged , , , | Comments (8)

Plot AND Characters

December 5, 2012 – 12:58 pm

Plot and characters go together like green eggs and ham; one without the other just isn’t as interesting. Yet a lot of writers consistently have trouble making them work together. Either they’re so focused on their characters that they forget to make the plot work, or they’re so focused on the plot that the characters become little cardboard puppets just going through the motions.

Whichever way the problem runs, the keys to getting out of it are balance, flexibility, and occasionally reminding oneself that what you’re after isn’t green eggs or ham; it’s both together.

Balance means that you don’t spend three weeks twisting and polishing your plot to a high gloss and then you start writing. It means you spend a couple of days thinking about the plot, and then a couple of days thinking about the characters, and then a couple of days thinking about how putting those people into your original plot idea will change it, and then a couple of days thinking about how your people will react and change if your current plot events happen to them, and so on. Back and forth.

Flexibility means that you aren’t wedded to any particular idea – plot or characters – at all times. When you’re developing the story, especially, you have to keep trying out new notions and alternate possibilities even if they completely change everything you thought you were sure of so far.

If you are somebody who likes to talk about your stories in development, this will drive your friends absolutely crazy.

“Wait, I thought the purple mage was the bad guy,” they say.

“Oh, I decided it’d be more interesting if he was spying for the good guys.”

“But then why does he kidnap the heroine’s son?”

“Oh, he doesn’t; he got caught spying and she finds him when she goes to let all the kids out of the dungeon.”

“Kids? Dungeon?”

“I decided to make her a school teacher, so instead of one son she has a whole classroom of kids to rescue along with the spy. Or wait, maybe it’d be better if the villain kidnapped her, and the kids have to rescue both of them…wait, no, she’s the spy, and he’s the teacher! Yeah, that’ll work…”

“I’m confused…”

“It’s OK; it’ll make sense after I’ve written it.”

When a writer gets too focused on one thing, be it characters or plot, they tend to forget to think about the interaction between the two, and they end up with something like chocolate-covered-garlic or sour-cream-and-onion ice cream: mixing two things that would be fine on their own, but that really don’t work together very well.

Plot and characters are inextricably intertwined in any effective story. Plot is stuff that happens to the characters because of who they are and what they do, and living through the events of the plot changes the characters (as any life experience changes the person who experiences it). Separating the two is often useful in order to examine and talk about particular aspects of each, but in practice, it’s a lot like trying to separate an egg yolk from the egg white after the egg has been scrambled.

If you have a character who Just Wouldn’t Do That at a critical point in your plot, you have only two choices if you want your story to continue to work: you can jettison the plot, or you can jettison the character. Forcing the character to sneak into the dungeon when he’s more of a let’s-negotiate-a-ransom type isn’t going to work without some kind of change.

This sort of problem generally crops up in mid-book somewhere, and if the writer isn’t paying attention – if she’s focused too narrowly on Following The Plan – she may just steamroller on past it and end up wondering why the story’s gone flat. (This happens to character-centered writers just as often as plot-centered ones; the character-centered ones really, really don’t want to have to come up with a different plot when they sweat blood getting this one done, so they stick to the outline, while the plot-centered ones really, really like the whole rescue-from-the-dungeon sequence and don’t want to change it.)

This is where flexibility and balance and keeping both plot and characters in mind at once come into play. Once you see that the dungeon scene isn’t going to work as planned, you can decide whether you’re going to rewrite the character so he’s more of a jump-in-and-do-it guy and the sneaking becomes plausible, or whether you’re going to rewrite the plot so far so that your negotiator-guy has some really excellent and believable reasons for not negotiating this time, or whether you’re going to throw away your plot from here on out and let him go ahead and negotiate instead of sneaking, and then see what happens.

By pcwrede | Posted in Writing | Tagged , | Comments (11)

Blind spots

December 2, 2012 – 6:58 am

Every once in a while, I come across someone who has a blind spot for a particular major part of writing: description, emotions, action, internal monologue, or whatever. A lot of these folks think they can’t write because, without whatever it is they’re missing, their stuff doesn’t work…and they assume that if what’s missing doesn’t come naturally to at least some degree, they’ll never figure out how to do it.

This happens not to be the case. Every writer has some kind of blind spot; it’s just that for most of us, it’s something that’s not quite as obvious up front, something more minor than “action” or “dialog,” and we learn to dance around it or compensate for it fairly quickly. It’s more difficult when the blind spot is something central, like description or action, but it’s still possible.

The biggest difficulty, in my experience, is usually figuring out that one has a problem and exactly what the problem is, because of course the salient feature of blind spots is that one can’t see them. Often, the stuff one writes looks perfectly fine to the writer, and it’s only when the crit group or beta readers get at it that the writer begins to suspect there’s something wrong.

Unfortunately, at this point many writers decide that what’s wrong is the readers, not the writing. It always astonishes me when a writer’s first response to “I didn’t understand this bit” is “But it’s right there, see?” If somebody didn’t get it, then they didn’t get it; the question at that point is to figure out why and do something about it.

And yes, sometimes the problem is with the particular reader – but for a writer, that really needs to be the last possible conclusion, and never a final one. Because if you start from the assumption that the problem is always with the reader, you will never find and fix anything that you didn’t notice on your own, and there’s really no point in being in a crit group or having beta readers at all.

Even when you’re pretty sure that this particular reader has a bee in her bonnet about dialog or description or whatever, it’s worth reconsidering her comments from time to time, because as one’s writing improves, one generally gets better at spotting real problems, so it’s possible that in six months or a year or five years, one will look at the story and smack one’s head and think That’s what she meant! Why didn’t I see this before? And then one can proceed to actually fix the problem.

Because the very first thing to remember about fixing anything is that if you can’t see the problem yourself, it is practically impossible to fix it without mucking up everything else. This is what makes dealing with blind spots so extraordinarily difficult; by their very nature, one can’t see them, so how can one fix them?

Reader and crit group comments can alert one to the fact that one has a blind spot – that one always seems to start the story a chapter ahead of where it needs to start, or carry on three chapters past the actual end, or never say what the main characters look like, or never describe anyone’s thoughts/emotions, or whatever.

The next step is to learn to see the problem for oneself…and decide whether it’s a charming stylistic eccentricity, or a serious problem that needs to be fixed. A character who constantly “sings out” instead of calling or shouting may be fine for one book, though it can become a really noticeable and tiresome tick over a multi-volume series. On the other hand, if there are no action scenes at all (because the kidnapping, rescue, barroom brawl, chase through the ravine, and final shootout all take place offstage), that’s probably a very large problem unless you’re doing something meta and literary and know exactly what you’re doing.

Teaching yourself to see a problem happens in two main ways: by reading other people’s stuff and paying conscious and deliberate attention to seeing what they’re doing that you aren’t, and by going over your own stuff in revision and doing the same thing. This can be extremely difficult to do alone, though it’s not impossible. Sometimes, though, what’s needed is for you to go over the passage in someone else’s book, looking for the action (or description, or dialog tags, or whatever), and then have someone else go through the same passage and highlight it so you can’t miss it.

Once you learn to see when something’s there and when it really isn’t, and have decided that the book you’re writing will be improved by including it, you go to your own stuff and look. This is even harder, especially if whatever-it-is is something that’s missing (like action or description), rather than something that you’re doing too often. It’s relatively easy to go through a manuscript and highlight every spot where someone blinks or rolls their eyes; it’s a lot harder to mark places where there could be action or description or emotions, only there isn’t.

For most writers, especially if they’re still in the early stages of learning to write, this is second-draft and revision stuff. My personal experience has been that going through a manuscript and carefully deleting all the eye-rolls or overused “verys” and “reallys” and “managed tos” is painful enough that after doing it once, I remember and avoid doing that particular thing during subsequent first drafts…but that hasn’t stopped me from making new and different mistakes, which then need to be discovered and corrected. It’s a never-ending journey, but it’s the only way I know to keep improving.

By pcwrede | Posted in Writing | Tagged , , | Comments (14)

The structure of the end

November 28, 2012 – 6:22 am

Most novels have three parts: beginning, middle, and end. At least, that’s what Aristotle said, and who am I to argue with a guy whose writing advice has been taken seriously by folks for the last 2000+ years? Today I want to talk about the end.

First off, let me point out that the end part is a whole section of a story or novel, not just the Big Story Climax or the final confrontation scene. The Big Climax or Grande Finale is the thing that gets the most attention in most how-to-write books, because it’s clearly critical to the whole book – mess up the scene where the main problem gets solved, and everything else falls apart. But really, there’s a lot more to it than that.

The first bit of the ending section is the transition from the middle part to the end part. Often, it’s a gradual transition, like heading for a mountain and not really being able to pinpoint the spot where the foothills end and the mountain range begins. Other times, there’s a sharp demarcation – a character suddenly sits up straight and says “I know how to steal the sword!” and we’re clearly off into the endgame. Sometimes, it’s even sharper, with the author dividing the story into sections or parts or books in a way that makes it obvious that the characters have reached the point of no return, and one way or another are about to take their final swing at solving the central story problem.

The second part of the ending section is the specific setup for the Big Climax. The general setup, where the reader works out what the central story problem is and why it matters, usually takes place in the middle of the book; the specific setup is the point where they settle their affairs the night before the battle, or the hero agrees to marry the villainess as the last possible way of saving the family farm, or the prince announces he’s going to be coming around tomorrow with this glass slipper for all the unmarried girls to try on.

Right before the Big Climax, the characters hit bottom in as many ways as the writer can make work at once. The heroine’s True Love appears to have abandoned her just before the battle in which the army is outnumbered five to one; the villainess locks the church doors as the wedding march starts; Cinderella is locked in her room while the stepsisters try on the shoe.

And then comes the climax – the big scene in which the heroine’s True Love shows up with reinforcements just in the nick of time; the organist reveals herself as the hero’s mother who’s brought the paid-off mortgage so her son won’t have to marry the villainess after all; Cinderella escapes in the nick of time and not only can wear the shoe, but has the other half of the pair.

In a straightforward story, the author has been promising and building up this particular conflict for chapters and chapters. The climax is the payoff – the point where the central story problem gets faced and solved once and for all…or where the problem overwhelms the characters for good. It’s very difficult to pull a bait-and-switch in the climax scene – to have an entire novel in which the problem appears to be returning the rightful king to the throne, for instance, and then have the climax be the establishment of a parliamentary democracy. It can be done, but only by a) carefully planting clues in the beginning and middle, and b) having the “switch” (the unexpected solution) be a more satisfying solution to the problem than the one the readers thought they were going to get. Not a better solution: a more satisfying one, in the context of the story.

Finally, there’s the denouement or validation, where any remaining loose ends get tied up, awards and weddings and funerals take place, and the characters are poised to move off into the sunset and the rest of their lives, for good or ill. There are three common, closely related mistakes that writers make here: 1) trying to tie up every single subplot and loose end, 2) running on for too long, and 3) overwriting the ending in a desperate attempt to find a killer last sentence.

Mind you, a killer last sentence is an excellent thing, if you can in fact find one. It is not, however, a necessity. (Given a choice, you’re much better off spending all that time looking for a killer opening sentence…but that’d be a different post.) Also, sometimes things that don’t look like killer ending lines, like “He walked out and closed the door gently behind him” or “Well, I’m home,” he said,” can become killer ending lines in context.

That whole last-sentence thing is a lot harder to recognize than you’d think. When you’ve been immersed in a novel for months, it’s hard to let go. Sometimes, even with a short story. When I was writing “Stronger Than Time,” an editor friend asked to see it. I sent a rough draft, with the comment “I know it needs about another half page, but this is what I got,” to which the editor wrote back “Don’t you dare add anything. It’s perfect right where it is.” And it is, and I can see that…now. Then, I was quite taken aback, as at the time I was really sure I needed to get my remaining characters actually out of the castle, instead of just talking about it.

Really abrupt endings, where the validation or denouement is cut to a sentence or two, are not my favorite things, but on the whole I’d say they’re better than the ones that go on and on even after the main problem has been solved. There’s a balance point that feels right – the longer the story, the longer the validation sequence. A short story may be fine with a few sentences or a paragraph; a novel may need anywhere from a paragraph to a chapter or so; a multi-book series may need several chapters of wrap-up to really feel finished.

By pcwrede | Posted in Writing | Tagged , | Comments (5)

Three kinds of research

November 25, 2012 – 6:43 am

Every so often, somebody asks me if I do research for my stories. I suspect this is because I write fantasy, and there is a perception among non-fantasy writers and readers that fantasy can simply be made up straight out of one’s head, without regard to tedious things like facts. This is, of course, nonsense, but you’d be surprised how many otherwise intelligent people hold to this view.

There are three basic kinds of story-research: specific, general, and accidental. I don’t know any writers who don’t do all of them, though I don’t think anyone else breaks it down quite this way (or if they do, I haven’t heard of them).

Accidental research is the kind of thing every writer does all the time, in the course of living. Some of it is common everyday life experience; some of it is stuff you stumble across when you’re watching TV or talking to a friend; some of it is uncommon, unsought events that a writer stores up for later. It’s the reason my writer friend who got caught in Hurricane Sandy spent her spare minutes scribbling notes (and when she didn’t have a pen and paper, focusing on things and mentally chanting “I have to remember this, I have to remember this). It’s the reason another friend, after crawling on hands and knees through a smoke-filled hallway to escape from a burning apartment, spent the next ten minutes cursing the fact that she hadn’t grabbed her glasses before she left, because without them she couldn’t get a really clear view of the progress of the fire and, later, what the firefighters were doing, so that she could remember it for later.

It’s also the way the sky looks on a clear autumn day, the annoying jingly Christmas Muzak that’s everywhere in December, the way the air smells near a freeway, the sounds the pots and pans make when someone’s cooking in the kitchen, the way bare trees develop a green haze for a day or two in spring when the buds break just before the leaves come fully out. It’s the way your best friend wrinkles his forehead when he’s thinking, or your sister flaps her hands (you can’t call it waving) when she gets excited. It’s all the little details that everyone glances at, but writers work at storing up and remembering for when they have to write that scene in the spring woods or on the summer beach or at the Grand Harvest Festival.

Accidental research is about paying attention to whatever is going on around you, because everything is material, and you never know what you’re going to need one of these days. It’s not about going out hunting for experiences to have; that comes under general or specific research…and really, if you aren’t paying attention to what’s already happening around you, going out to experience something new isn’t likely to be a lot of help.

General research, on the other hand, is about going looking for things you don’t know that you need to know. When I decide to write a book set in another place or time, the first thing I do is read a bunch of books that I hope will give me a feel for that place and time – biographies, historical overviews, social histories, books about daily life. When I’m between books, I read random things that catch my eye – books about pirates, women mine owners, castle building, Roman engineering, British diplomacy in the 1800s.

Writers are intellectual pack-rats; we store up interesting facts and curious stories from every source we can find, from Uncle Joe’s terrible jokes to scholarly works on obscure subjects. Sooner or later, it all comes back out in the work.

Specific research is what you do in order to find out the things you know you need to know. If I’m writing a book set in London in 1816, I go looking for street maps of London in 1816 (or as near to then as I can get). If I have a character who speaks thieves cant, I reach for my copy of The 1811 Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue. If my characters are mixing up a potion, I look through my various herbals in search of ingredients a) that people of whatever time I’m writing about thought were associated with the things I want the potion to do and b) that my modern herbals agree are harmless (I don’t add mercury to anything, for instance, even though according to some of my sources, it was considered a good remedy for quite a few things in the 1600s).

Accidental research is continuous. General research is usually a pre-writing activity – it happens between books, or when one has settled on a type of book that hasn’t been fleshed out yet and needs more real-life background before the writer can pick a direction to go. Several writers of my acquaintance allot particular amounts of time for pre-book research – two months, six months, a year or more, depending on the project and the particular writer’s temperament.

General research shifts into specific research gradually, sometimes imperceptibly. By the time I’m through the opening chapters of a book, I’m usually not reading general background any longer; I’m looking for specific bits of information. When and where was the first railroad built in New England? How much did a pair of stockings cost in London in 1822? How much of a load can a donkey carry, for how long, and how much of it has to be feed if there’s nowhere to get any along the route? When did armies start using drum signals, and how old were drummers when they were recruited and trained?

Those sorts of questions go on all through writing a book, right up to the end and on into revisions. They start to taper off during the copy-edit, which is when I go back to reading about typhus and geology and the history of coffee, until the next book comes along and the whole cycle starts over again.

By pcwrede | Posted in Writing | Tagged | Comments (8)

Talking about it

November 21, 2012 – 9:19 am

One of the persistent pieces of advice given to new and would-be writers is “Don’t talk about your work until it’s finished!” Some folks get incredibly passionate about it, running on for pages in their how-to-write manuals and blogs, or shouting and waving their arms if they’re talking to you face-to-face.

There are a lot of reasons for both the advice and the passion. Quite often, the advice-giver is one of those writers who found out the hard way that if they talk about anything they haven’t written yet (whether that’s a novel idea, a plot outline, an upcoming scene, a bit of dialog or character development), they lose all interest in writing it. If they force themselves to write anyway, what comes out is flat and lifeless, and eventually they have to abandon it.

Obviously, anyone who’s had this happen becomes quite rightly paranoid about never, ever letting that happen again. Where they go wrong is in the assumption that this is the way everyone’s creative process works, and that therefore it is a Very Good Thing to warn incoming writers most strictly against doing themselves.

I happen to be one of those writers over on the other side of things. Talking about my work energizes me and helps me work through sticky bits (though it is often extremely disconcerting to the friends who hear me babble through what looks to them like a novel outline, whole and complete, and then find me next day, babbling with equal enthusiasm about a new plot twist that will fix some problem I hadn’t even hinted at the day before). It took me a while to figure out that one of my best friends is a can’t-talk-about-it type, and that my cheerful inquiries about her plot problems ran a serious risk of giving her a bad case of writer’s block.

There are, however, other kinds of bad experiences that make some writers advise against talking about works-in-progress, or, in extreme cases, against revealing that one is a writer at all. If the person one is talking to has a negative reaction to one’s plot or characters, it can have a crushing effect on one’s desire to write. Sometimes even a reaction that’s merely unenthusiastic can be profoundly dampening, especially when an idea is in its very early stages.

Also, different people react negatively to different things. I tend to get very grumpy and dig in my heels when well-intentioned relatives and the occasional acquaintance try to be supportive of my writing as a job – that is, they ask questions about my production (and I don’t mean “Have you written your page today?”) and if they aren’t happy with my answers, they trot out all sorts of anti-writer’s-block exercises and techniques they think I may not have heard of over the past thirty years. I hate nearly all possible writing exercises, and I’m quite capable of managing my production and output myself, thanks much.

All this means, though, is that I am selective about who I talk about my writing with. I want listeners who’ll get me revved up about the fun parts – making stuff up and coming up with plot twists and so on – not folks who spend half an hour reminding me that I’m in the miserable middle and I just have to grind my way on through (I can figure that out just by sitting down and grinding for a bit). If it’s not fun, what’s the point?

In addition to the negatives, there’s a positive reason for not discussing ones WIP. For some people, keeping it a secret is like lighting the fuse on a rocket, or shaking up an unopened can of Coke – it creates an internal pressure that helps keep them writing. In other words, they react exactly the opposite of the way I do: what gets them revved up is wanting to talk, but having to wait until the story’s finished before they do.

I come down, once more, solidly in the “whatever works for you” corner, with a couple of caveats. If you know or suspect that talking about your work-in-process will end up with you not producing anything at all, don’t talk about it. If you know or suspect that keeping your WIP a deep, dark secret will get you to write more, or faster, don’t let your beta readers see it until you’re all the way through the first draft. If, however, you know that you are energized by telling stories in a way that makes you go home and write them down, find some trustworthy friends and talk yourself blue in the face. Just be sure you have objective evidence – that is, more pages getting produced. It’s not at all uncommon for someone to think they’re energized and encouraged to write by talking, when in fact they merely enjoy telling the story a whole lot and the talk does not lead to actual pages produced.

If you’re going to talk, however, there are two classes of people for whom I advise extreme caution in discussing one’s writing at all. First, there’s one’s boss, if one has a day job (as most would-be and new writers do). I’ve known several people who, for one reason or another, explained to a supervisor that they were doing this writing thing, and in roughly three out of four cases, the reaction was negative (ranging from not getting that raise or promotion to forbidding the would-be author from working on the manuscript at the office on breaks or lunch hours). In at least two cases, the author in question fully expected the supervisor to be supportive, and was totally blind-sided by the negative impact it had on their second career. I’m not saying don’t do it, I’m just saying that you should be aware there’s a down side, and think carefully before you do.

The second class of people not to talk about writing with are those who are … “unsupportive” doesn’t begin to describe it. I’ve known writers whose families or friends have done everything from burning the would-be writer’s notebooks in an attempt to discourage them, to guilt-tripping (“Is it really fair to your children to spend so much time on this hobby of yours? You’re already away at the office all day…”) to deadly and destructive criticism to outright mocking. The only way to deal with such people is not to tell them you’re a writer at all. At least in this instance, it’s generally pretty obvious in advance that these folks are going to be toxic to one’s writing.

By pcwrede | Posted in Writing | Tagged , | Comments (14)

Foreshadowing

November 18, 2012 – 6:08 am

Foreshadowing is the subtle art of suggesting or hinting at developments in plot, characterization, or setting that will happen later in the story. It’s a promise to the reader that the gun on the mantelpiece will go off eventually, that the main character will be forced to face his/her inner demons, that the seemingly-happy surface of the family or the town is either a sham or due to be disrupted in short order. It can range from the blatantly obvious (“Little did he know that he had less than an hour to live”) to the traditional (“It was a dark and stormy night…”) to the barely-visible (when the heroine scans the passers-by, is it the woman in the brown cloak who’s going to be significant later, or the man in the red vest? Or are they both just descriptive detail, adding artistic verisimilitude to an otherwise bald and unconvincing narrative, and not hinting at a reappearance at all?).

Dropping hints can be a tricky business; if the “hints” are too obvious, they telegraph future developments, which can remove both the suspense and the surprise (and often, the reader’s interest in continuing as well). If the hints are too obscure, the reader may not catch on at all, and then complain that things “come out of left field” and/or aren’t believable.

Authors use foreshadowing in order to increase tension or suspense, to set up later developments in character or plot so that they will be more believable, or to prepare the reader for future events in the story. Sometimes, the “foreshadowing” isn’t a conscious or deliberate choice on the part of the author at all; other times, it’s carefully planned from the get-go, or backfilled just as deliberately during revisions. It doesn’t matter when or how it gets in there, as long as it does the job.

What the job is, is a whole ‘nother question. There are so many possible things one can do with foreshadowing that it’s easy to get confused and try to do all of them at once. But foreshadowing is, above all, a promise to the reader that something interesting is going to come of this. If the writer doesn’t deliver on that promise, the reader loses trust.

For instance, the basic uses of foreshadowing are a) to make a future event or plot twist more plausible and believable, or b) to increase reader suspense, tension, or anticipation by pointing at important stuff that’s coming up. If an author heavily foreshadows an event that the reader already sees as plausible – say, the main character is going to stop at McDonalds on her way home from work – the reader will assume that the writer has a good reason for making a point of such an ordinary event. Consequently, the reader figures something interesting and plot-relevant is going to happen at that McDonalds (that is, since the foreshadowing is obviously not the “a” kind, it must be the “b” kind, pointing up something important).

If all that happens is that the character orders her burger and fries (no armed robbery in progress, no serial killer hiding behind the trash bins, no cheating spouse caught with their main squeeze), the reader is going to be disappointed. In the worst case – if the author has done a really good job of foreshadowing – the reader will spend the rest of the book wondering what the heck was so important about that visit to McDonalds, and when nothing ever comes of it, they’ll get cranky.

By the same token, the author can’t reasonably foreshadow every single thing that happens. For one thing, the novel would bloat up to an unreadable size. For another, plot twists and events are not equally important. If the author tries to give everything equal attention, the story flattens out into a tangle of subplots, with no one thread identifiable as the main plot, and the reader is likely to give up in confusion.

There are four basic techniques that are used to foreshadow upcoming events. The first is verbal, meaning, in dialog or internal monolog: the sensible character saying “We should stick together!” just before everyone splits up, the ranger warning the campers that there are snakes or bears in the area, the radio weather report suggesting storms. Next comes action, which covers everything from body language (a character whose hands shake and who breaks out in a sweat when his buddy suggests stopping at McDonalds, for instance) to screaming and running from a tiny spider.

Third is description – the proverbial gun on the mantelpiece, the three full bottles of aspirin in the medicine cabinet, the falling-apart jalopy that the reader can see is just ripe for a flat tire or breakdown. Last is a hard-to-describe category I call “authorial intervention,” meaning everything from direct statements by the narrator (“She didn’t suspect this would be the worst day of her life” “I shoulda known better than to trust a dame”) to things like prophecies and omens (because in most cases the black cat and the oracular pronouncement don’t arise from the cause-and-effect actions within the story; the author is the one who decided to have a prophecy or omen or symbolic storm at just exactly that right moment in the story).

A lot of people seem to consider authorial intervention to be “cheating,” so if you’re planning to use it in a story, you need to set it up with care and handle it delicately. Besides that caveat, there’s no reason to prefer one technique over another – which one to use depends on which one will get the job done smoothly in that particular story, without being either too subtle to see or hitting the reader over the head.

By pcwrede | Posted in Writing | Tagged , | Comments (8)

Movies vs. Novels

November 14, 2012 – 6:10 am

Let me start by pointing out that I’ve never written a screenplay myself. I’ve read some, and I’ve worked with some doing novelizations, but that’s a bit different from writing them myself.

I feel the need to point this out because I keep running into folks who think that because I write novels, I can advise them about their screenplays, either generally (“How should I write a screenplay? Who do I send it to?”) or specifically (“Could you critique this screenplay for me? There’s something wrong with this scene…”). There is, of course, a certain amount of overlap in the storytelling and structural aspects of both disciplines, so I can occasionally be helpful. But these kinds of questions always worry me just a little, because the people asking them are ignoring two really fundamental and vitally important differences between the two crafts…and as a result, they often make mistakes that can seriously muck up what they’re trying to do.

First off, movies are primarily visual, while novels are verbal.

Movies tell stories mainly with images. Have you ever been on a long-distance flight and not bothered to buy the headphones for the movie? I do it all the time, usually because I want to get some work done, and then I get distracted by the images…and son of a gun if I can’t tell at least 90% of what’s going on just from watching the pictures, no sound. Of course, they’re not meant to be watched that way, and I miss all the good lines and the ominous music and the creaking noise that alerts the hero just in time. Still, that seems to me to underline my point: movies tell the story with images, sounds, and dialog, and of those three, most of what the scriptwriter writes is the dialog part. (More of that in a moment.)

Novels have, for the most part, one tool and one tool only: language. Picture books include images as well as text, but the older the intended audience, the fewer illustrations tend to appear. By the time you get to YA novels, there’s hardly a picture in sight, and teen and adult novels limit illustrations to the dust jacket or cover (and even those are frequently abstract, rather than illustrative). In a novel, everything has to be done with words, which are processed in a linear fashion as the reader reads, right to left, one word at a time.

What this means is that a movie can make a huge impact with a single image. I still remember the first time I saw “The Wizard of Oz.” When the door swings open and the screen switches from black and white to color, and Dorothy (and you) get that first stunning glimpse of Oz…I don’t think anyone could duplicate that effect in prose. It would need a detailed description, and the more detailed it was, the longer it would be and the more time it would take…and the more time it took, the less you get that immediate stunning impact. On the other hand, the movie can’t give you Dorothy’s thoughts and feelings without an awkward voiceover, while a novel has little difficulty in providing a different sort of impact by going into her emotions when she realizes that she’s somewhere strange and far from hom.

The second fundamental difference between movies and novels is that all movies are massive collaborations, while most novels are solo efforts.

A movie is, at minimum, a collaboration between the writers, the actors, the director, the producer, the prop and costume people, the camera operators, the sound folks…all those people who get listed in the five minutes of credits that roll past at the end of the film. And note that I said “writers” – very, very often, a screenplay ends up being rewritten by a second or third writer, or worked on by a team from the very start. Novelists nearly always work alone. A scriptwriter is just the start of the process, and has little or no influence on what happens after the “final” script leaves his/her hands unless he/she is also directing or producing the movie. A novelist (or a team of collaborators) has ultimate veto power on whatever goes out in the final book unless it’s a work-for-hire.

Not being clear about these two differences causes problems for both types of writers.

I’ve seen screenplays where the writer kept inserting stage directions and notes to tell the actors how to say the lines or what the character is thinking at a particular time. Once in a while, this is necessary [GEORGE (sarcastically): That's a good idea!], but all too often, these directions betray the fact that the writer doesn’t really want to collaborate – he/she wants the actors, the director, the camera operators, etc. to make the exact movie the writer is picturing in his/her head. Furthermore, in concentrating on telling the actors and the director how to do their jobs, the writer often seriously neglects his/her own – writing dialog that tells the story without needing all those explanations of what the characters are thinking. Because, as I mentioned before, movies are notoriously bad at telling the viewer exactly what the character is thinking at any given moment. The camera can’t get inside the characters’ heads.

The scriptwriter also doesn’t necessarily know what is or isn’t available visually – what locations the director will be able to shoot at, what the budget will be for CGI, etc. Thus, the kind of detailed description of action scenes that you’d find in a novel are at best superfluous; at worst, counter-productive.  Shakespeare does not say “A bear enters stage left, and lumbers threateningly forward. Antigonus sees it and flaps his coat to distract the bear from the baby. The bear turns toward him…” No, the stage direction is “Exit, pursued by a bear,” and that’s all.

This can seem very foreign to a novelist. I was horrified when I was given the script for Star Wars Episode I and found the Big Fight Scene at the end, which I knew was going to be at least five minutes of spectacular lightsaber fighting on-screen. The script said, in its entirety, “The Jedi fight.” That’s all it needed. (I, on the other hand, had to come up with several pages of description, because it was, after all, the Big Fight Scene At The End, and there was absolutely no way I could get away with “The Jedi fought.”)

By the same token, I see a lot of young would-be novelists struggling to duplicate in prose the kind of dramatic visual revelations, zoom-ins, close-ups, and other dramatic visual techniques that the camera in movies perform effortlessly. Sometimes, one can do something similar, or find a prose technique that has a parallel function. More often, the result is awkward at best, impenetrably awful at worst.

There are things that transfer from books to movies and vice versa, but if one is going to try, one really needs to begin by asking “Will this technique actually work in this other medium?”

By pcwrede | Posted in Writing | Tagged , | Comments (7)

Meddling or editing?

November 7, 2012 – 6:11 am

Patricia, what is the dividing line between editing and meddling? The retitling of one of the Harry Potter books comes to mind.- Gene Wirchenko

There are a lot of flip answers I could give to this question, because it’s based on a fundamental misconception about the publishing process:  the idea that editors and publishers commonly make changes to an author’s work for which the author has no input and no recourse.

The reason for this misconception is that the editor’s work is invisible to everyone outside the process. The final book does not contain labels stating that this phrase or paragraph came from the editor, or that this scene or that was added or deleted due to editorial demand. So anyone who does not actually have an “in” to the business is guessing about just what parts came about as a result of editorial intervention, and what parts didn’t.

And what does the average reader or critic base these guesses on? Generally, it is the complaints they’ve heard authors make about the horrible things editors have done or have made them do. And the reason for this is that it is considered deeply unprofessional for editors to complain publicly about the work they put in for their authors, so they mostly don’t, resulting in an extremely one-sided picture.

On top of that, you have the situation with movie and TV scripts, where it is very rare, from what I’ve seen, for a script to have only one author, and it’s unheard of for any of the authors to have absolute veto power over the input of any of the other artists involved in what is, after all, a gigantic collaboration. Stories and complaints from this venue get folded into the realm of novel publishing – it’s all writing, isn’t it? – and it seldom occurs to people that the processes and basic assumptions for writing a screenplay are very different from those for writing and publishing a novel.

So, getting back to the original question: I would say that meddling is when an editor deliberately makes changes to an author’s work that the author does not have the chance to review and refuse.

In the case of the first Harry Potter book, 1) it is exceedingly common for foreign editions to be completely retitled; changing one word is really pretty minimal. (“Dealing with Dragons” was published in the U.K. as “Dragonsbane,” a much more significant change, and nobody, including me, thought anything of it. Some of the titles on the translations are even farther off, though that’s often as much a language problem as a marketing one); 2) changing the title is nearly always a marketing decision, not an editorial one, meaning that the editor frequently has nothing to do with it (aside from conveying the news to the author), because it’s the marketing gurus who make the decision; and 3) Rowling was consulted at the time; I believe she later said she regretted allowing it, but hindsight is always 20-20 and at least she had the opportunity to argue about it if she wanted to. (Admittedly, many first-time authors do not feel confident about arguing with a publisher over something so minor, especially when said publisher is paying them large sums for foreign rights.)

By my definition – changes to the work made without my input and with no recourse – I would say that I’ve never once had this happen to me in over thirty years of being published. That “Dragonsbane” thing? Hazard of selling foreign rights, and no big deal; certainly not meddling with my words (since “Dealing with Dragons” was the publisher’s suggestion in the first place).

Most of the stories of truly egregious editorial meddling that I’ve ever heard date back to the early-to-mid-twentieth-century (Horace L. Gold had quite a reputation for it, I’m told). The very few more modern instances I know of (and they are very few) are all, to the best of my knowledge, either instances where something slipped through the cracks (a particularly unfortunate last-minute change by a copyeditor that they forgot to run past the author before the book went to press, for instance – i.e., a failure of procedures, not deliberate meddling) or else are cases involving miniscule amateur presses, of the sort where everything from acquisition to production is handled by one person who has never actually worked in the publishing industry and who is therefore operating on the same misconceptions about “what editors do” as your average reader.

Note, please, that I said “the few stories” of editorial meddling – meaning that even among small, miniscule, and fan presses, it is highly unusual for an editor to change an author’s work without the author having the means and opportunity to change it back, should they desire to do so.

It is not meddling when an editor covers a page in little red circles and writes at the bottom: “You have seventeen semi-colons on this page, and that seems to be about average. Does your husband know about this love affair?”  It is not meddling when an editor changes “we went out” to “we left” and notes “You said ‘the candle went out’ just above; change to avoid echo and confusion.” Nor is it meddling when the editor says “You have this great action scene that your POV character is only told about. You need to have her be present for it” and then you have to write 10,000 new words in order to put the scene in. (And yes, those are actual examples.) It is especially not meddling when the author gets to see these (and all the other editorial changes and comments) before the book goes to the typesetter…and then gets another chance to go over everything when the page proofs come.

It is also not meddling when my editor and I disagree about a particular change, or set of changes, and I lose the argument. And that does happen, now and again. Yes, I could be one of those my-every-comma-is-golden authors who insists on winning every time…but the point isn’t to win all the arguments. The point is to make the book as good as it can possibly be.

If an editor suggests a change that I think is wrong-headed, or that I think will fundamentally change what I want the book to be, I object. Strenuously, sometimes. But I have to recognize that I am not always right, even about my own story. Being edited is a learned process. It is seldom comfortable, but the right editor can teach a writer a lot about humility and objectivity and taking the story to the next level.

By pcwrede | Posted in Writing | Tagged , , , | Comments (7)

Character motivation

November 4, 2012 – 6:02 am

I’ve been getting a lot of good questions lately, and I really appreciate it. However, even though Gene’s question about editing and meddling came first, I’m going to save it for next week, on the grounds that it’s about the business end, and I’ve been talking a fair bit about that lately and feel it’s time to get back to some craft stuff. I will get to it, though!

Meanwhile, I’m going to go with Emily’s request for a post about characters and their motivations. That’s pretty open-ended, but motivation is one of those basic character things where there’s plenty enough to talk about without further direction.

People (and therefore characters) have reasons for everything they do. Sometimes, those reasons are simple and obvious (the clerk at the Walgreens counter rings up your purchase because that’s his job); other times, the reasons are complicated and unclear, with roots that reach far back into a person’s past. One way or another, though, there’s always a “because” in there somewhere – because she promised, because he likes working with his hands, because they enjoy a challenge, because he’s afraid of pain/spiders/dogs/the dark, because she had a bad experience when she was eight, because, because, because.

The reasons people do things can be simple – because it’s the only way to survive – or they can be complex – partly because she’s ambitious, but partly because she likes the challenge, and partly because she really does want to help. They can be external – because that squeaky door hinge is going to drive her crazy if she doesn’t oil it – or they can be internal – because he can’t stand the thought of being betrayed again. They can be a desire to get or achieve something – because he wants that position, that ship, that girl; because she wants to become the best magician ever – or they can be a desire to avoid something – because she doesn’t want to go to jail, because he doesn’t want to feel pain, because they don’t want the kingdom overrun. Motivations can be obvious – because the dragon is right there; run away! – or they can be obscure – because he reminds her of a second-cousin she hasn’t seen in thirty years and has never mentioned to her traveling companions.

It is, however, very important to remember that  “because the plot says they have to” is not a motivation.

The plot is what the story looks like from the outside. The characters are inside the story; the plot may say they have to do X, but in order for that action to look and feel believable to readers, the characters have to have their own reasons for doing what they do. And those reasons have to be consistent with what the reader knows (or will learn) about the characters in the course of the book, or the reader very likely won’t believe in the character (and by extension, the plot).

Not all reasons have to be spelled out extensively, any more than every action the character takes has to be described in grim detail. Yes, George got up, showered and shaved, combed his hair, dressed, and had breakfast; 99.9% of the time, the author doesn’t need to mention that, much less go into detail about the position of the bed, the temperature of the shower, the type of soap, etc. About the same percentage of the time, the author doesn’t need to mention why George does these things – habit, fastidiousness, childhood training, etc. – because neither the actions nor the reason behind them is particularly important to the story, the character, or the reader.

Generally speaking, the spear-carriers and walk-ons, the grocery store bagger, cab driver, palace guard, maid, messenger, etc., who appear just long enough to bag the groceries, ferry the character from A to B, deliver the message – those characters don’t need motives for their actions beyond “it’s their job.” Even the charmingly chatty cab driver seldom needs more than “because he likes talking to people” as his reason for going on for a couple of pages.

The more important a character is to the story, the more carefully the writer needs to look at his/her motivation to make sure it holds up – that it’s believable emotionally and strong enough to explain why the character takes the actions he/she takes.

That doesn’t mean the motivation always has to be complicated and deep. “Because I don’t want the bad guys to kill me” is pretty simple and straightforward, for instance, and as long as the reader believes it, it can work well for everything from a straightforward action-adventure to a complex psychological thriller where nothing is quite what it seems and “the bad guys” keep changing from page to page. The reverse is also true – having a straightforward adventure plot doesn’t mean that the characters’ motives can’t be complex,

What motivation does have to be is plausible. That means the reader has to believe that this particular character would do whatever-it-is in this particular situation, for this particular reason. Not that “a girl” or “an alien” or “an Australian” or “a soldier” or “a redneck” or any other generic type or category of person would do this – what has to be believable is that Blytzmi, the Rigelian pipefitter who was raised in an isolated space colony, would do this for these reasons. Or that Indria, the runaway princess-turned-mercenary who’s spent three books now looking for revenge and who has no sense of humor whatever, would do it.

Because one of the other really important things to remember about motivation is that it is personal and individual. What works for one character won’t necessarily work for another, no matter how similar they are or seem to be. Also, people change over time, and so do their reasons for doing things…even if what they’re doing are the same things they’ve been doing for the last 200 pages. What started off as just a job may become a patriotic duty, or something done out of friendship rather than merely for money.

Finally, I want to add that as with many, many things in the writing process, figuring out the motivation of the characters is something that some writers do consciously, but other writers do intuitively. You may need to lay everything out clearly in your notes so that you can keep it obscure-but-consistent in your writing, or you may write by feel and only realize what your characters’ real reasons are when you get to the climax, or after. It really doesn’t matter, as long as the end product is a bunch of characters whom the readers will believe have their own individual reasons for whatever they’re doing…whether the readers ever actually find out what they are, or not.

By pcwrede | Posted in Writing | Tagged , , , | Comments (12)

Motivation

October 31, 2012 – 6:03 am

Motivation, according to my trusty Oxford American Dictionary, is “that which induces a person to act a certain way.” I like that definition a lot better than some of the others I ran across, including “inspiration,” “the desire to do something,” and “enthusiasm,” among others.

The reason I like that definition better is because it puts the emphasis on getting someone to act. You can be inspired, enthusiastic, and really want to do something…and still manage not to do it, as many, many writers can attest. Motivation is what gets people off their duff and actually doing something, rather than just talking about it.

Mind you, it’s pretty hard to get motivated to do something you don’t actually want to do (as the state of my kitchen sink will attest). Nevertheless, the sink gets cleaned periodically – perhaps not as often as my mother would have thought proper, but well before it starts growing blue fuzz. (OK, there was that one time…but it was an accident, really, I had to go out of town on short notice and…)

So when people ask me how to “get motivated” to write, I start with a couple of basic questions.

First, have you ever had a day job?

For most adults (and quite a few high school and college students), the answer is “yes.”

And did you always feel like getting up and going to work in the morning?

I don’t think anyone has ever said “yes” to this one, though a few folks have said “Almost always.” I think they’re balanced by the folks who don’t really wake up until they’re in the office and downing their second cup of coffee – sleepwalking your way to work does not count as “motivation,” in my book.

So what motivated you to go to work at your day job every single day?

This usually gets me some narrow-eyed looks, because people can see where I’m going. But if I can get people to answer honestly, it’s usually one of the following:

  1. They have to eat, pay the mortgage/rent, etc.
  2. Other people are depending on them for support/income.
  3. They were afraid they’d get fired if they didn’t show up and work.
  4. They have a responsibility (to the boss or the people they work with) to show up.
  5. They find the work challenging/satisfying/meaningful overall.

Motivation, in other words, is not always a positive, happy, upbeat thing that makes you like the work. Motivation isn’t about liking. It’s about doing.

There is no motivation in the world that is going to make writing quick and easy and painless, each and every day. If that’s what you’re looking for, you’re pretty much doomed to disappointment. Motivation is what makes you sit down and work on the book even when it isn’t fun, when the prose is horrible and draggy and every comma looks wrong, when the characters won’t behave and the plot looks trite, and when you have the dismal feeling that something went off-track four chapters ago that means you’ll have to throw away 25,000 words or thereabouts.

Motivation comes in two basic varieties: external and internal. Having a boss or other authority figure who says you have to work is external; so is wanting to win a Pulitzer, or just wanting to get published. Wanting a challenge is internal; so is the desire to create, or just have fun. Most people find one sort more effective for them than the other (though really, for most writers it’s nearly always a mix. Everyone has bills to pay, and writing isn’t a field many folks get into if they don’t find it satisfying in some way).

Thus the first challenge for anyone who is trying to “get motivated” is to figure out what makes that particular writer willing to sit down and work. External or internal? Once that’s settled, figure out how to make that happen for you.

Every writer has his/her own tricks. Among the ones I’ve seen used successfully: Having one’s partner dole out one’s favorite cookies in return for word count (anywhere from one cookie per chapter to one cookie per paragraph, depending on how stuck the writer was). Taking a writing class in order to have a deadline. Participating in NaNoWriMo, ditto ditto. Having a partner/friend nag on a regular (daily, weekly, monthly) basis. Going to a coffee shop or library to write.

Making a “writing date” with a fellow writer, where you get together with your laptops and work for an hour or two before you have tea and scones (or Coke and a hamburger, or whatever rings your chimes). Joining a writing group (for crit, for support, for socializing – again, whichever supplies what you need).

Finding a “writing buddy” to check in with daily or weekly to compare progress. Taping pictures around one’s monitor that inspire or remind. Keeping a progress log (page count, word count, time…whatever works for that particular writer). Selecting a music “sound track” that suits the story. Getting “instant feedback” from dedicated first-readers who camp on their email.

Talking about the story to anyone who will listen. Not talking about the story to anyone at all until it’s completely finished. Getting up early/staying up late to write. Making a daily page/half-hour a habit first thing in the morning, like showering or brushing your teeth.

Reading bad fiction (“I can do better than this!”). Reading good fiction (“Oh, wow, I have to try that!”). Reminding oneself that “if I don’t write this story, it will never be told.” Telling oneself “it doesn’t have to be good, it just has to be finished” or “I can always put a pseudonym on it” or “This is just practice.” Telling oneself “This is the best thing I’ve ever done; it’d be a crime not to finish” or “I can’t waste all this effort by not finishing!” or “This will change someone’s life, but only if I get it done!” Telling oneself these things regularly (like, every morning and evening, and before, during, and after writing sessions, and as often as one thinks of it at other times).

Basically, you have to figure out what works to get you to sit down and put words on the page, and then arrange to get it. And you have to be honest with yourself. You may like reading great books, but if you end up spending all your writing time head down in Jane Austen, it isn’t really getting you to write, now, is it?

So…have you written your page today?

By pcwrede | Posted in Writing | Tagged , , | Comments (10)

Plot lists

October 28, 2012 – 6:42 am

I’m still listening to that 12-hour series of lectures on literature, and today’s talk was about plot. Practically the first thing the lecturer did was to quote the thing about there being only two plots: the hero takes a journey, and a stranger comes to town.

I’ve heard that before, but this time I got to thinking about how that fits with Heinlein’s three basic plots (Boy Meets Girl, The Little Tailor, and Man Learns Lesson), the five or six “man vs.” plots (vs. nature, man, society, etc.), and the various other lists of plots and plot patterns I’ve run across in writing books over the years. And the first thing I noticed is that most of the things on these lists aren’t actually plots, by my definition.

This was kind of a shock, as I’ve gone alone merrily for many years without particularly questioning the fundamental premise of most of these plot lists. But “The hero takes a journey” and “a stranger comes to town” are both precipitating incidents – they’re where the plot starts, but they’re not the plot. You can take any of the other lists of “types of plot” and map all of them to either opening – a stranger comes to town and meets a girl, faces a gigantic obstacle, or learns a lesson; the hero goes on a journey and ditto ditto ditto. “Man vs. nature/man/himself/society/etc.” is a list of types of conflict; again, not strictly plots. The hero can go on a journey and meet a girl whilst struggling against nature, another man, his own insecurities, social obstacles… Even in Heinlein’s three basic stories, the first two are technically the set-up for a plot, and the third is the ultimate resolution of the plot.

In other words, none of these lists of “the types of plot” match up the way they ought to if they were actually distillations of plots. Looking at it a little closer, I can see that many of these lists are in shorthand: for instance, “The Little Tailor” evokes the whole fairy tale reflected by the title, and “A stranger comes to town” implies that this arrival causes a whole lot of other things to happen. And if you start combining the lists, as I did above, you do get even closer to what I think of as plot. Even so, I find it kind of disturbing to realize that all these supposedly-helpful ways of looking at plot aren’t actually looking directly at plot.

The reason for this is fairly obvious, when I think about it. Plots – even plot skeletons that have been stripped down to the barest minimum – are tough to convey in only a few words. “Boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy gets girl” is probably the most concise, and for listing purposes, this nearly always gets shortened still more, down to the first three words.

This can be very confusing and unhelpful, especially if one doesn’t have the sort of brain that automatically extends the shorthand description of conflict or situation or characters’ problems into the whole rest of the plot that the description is supposed to be shorthand for. If you think “A stranger comes to town” is all the plot there needs to be, then you will be very puzzled when people look at your description of someone arriving at the airport and say it has no plot.

Plots are about change – external or internal. It’s about the difficulties of the journey, not the starting or ending point.

The hero who takes a journey may be a Genghis Khan who drastically alters the world around him without apparently changing much himself, or she may be an ordinary person displaced by the sweeping armies who is profoundly altered by her trek to a new home without apparently having a large impact on the world, or he may be a Ghandi whose life-changing journeys to England and South Africa changed him into the man who could and did change India. The stranger who comes to town may change herself as a result, or call into question things that the town has taken for granted (causing them to change), or disrupt external things in ways ranging from opening a new store to murdering the mayor.

And change is a process, and what’s interesting about it is usually the how and why, not what. Change is also often difficult and uncomfortable, whether the characters are changing their opinions or trying to cope with massive disruptions in the world they’ve lived in until the start of the story. Change also generally involves causality – something that sets things moving, tipping over that first domino that knocks over the next, and the next.

All of this makes plot – the process of change – hard to sum up in a short, snappy entry on a list. This is, I think, part of why people always, always ask for sequels, even if the story ends “and they lived happily ever after” – because we know that change has consequences, and even good changes like winning one’s True Love or defeating the Evil Overlord are going to mean things work differently from now on, and we want to know what those new changes will be, and how and how the characters will cope with them.

I also think this is where my lecturer goes ever-so-slightly wrong, at least from the point of view of someone who is trying to write a story rather than read one. Because classifying plots according to any of these lists may be a useful way of looking at things from the reader’s perspective, but it’s the wrong focus for most writers, because it’s static. Classifying something assumes it’s going to stay classified, but you can’t ever guarantee that about a story until it’s finished. Writing is a dynamic process, not a static one.

By pcwrede | Posted in Writing | Tagged | Comments (16)

Deadlines

October 24, 2012 – 6:40 am

So MaKayla asked about deadlines, specifically whether they’re good or bad, interfere with the process or enrich it, etc.

The answer is “It depends on the writer.” I know writers who freeze up at the mere thought of a deadline, and writers who can’t seem to write anything without one.

It also depends on what else is going on in the writer’s life at the time. A writer who is under a lot of pressure in other areas of her life (unexpected illness, serious financial problems, a death in the family, etc.) may suddenly find that having a deadline is one thing too many to handle, even though it’s never been a problem in the past. I’ve also known writers for whom the existence of a deadline was the only thing that kept them going during times of illness, financial crisis, etc. Mileage varies.

So first comes the old “know thyself” part. Which sort of writer are you?

If you can’t write (or can’t write much or steadily) without a deadline, and you don’t yet have one, you’ll have to figure out some way to persuade your backbrain that you have to get Chapter Three finished by next Saturday. Some folks take writing classes because it gives them a time and place at which they have to have some amount written. Others join writing groups for the same reason (though for this to work, the writer has to really take it seriously, and I’ve seen too many crit groups where 80 to 90% of the participants just didn’t have anything at all for any given session, which makes it hard to take it seriously as a deadline). Still others make a solemn promise to someone that they’ll see pages every Sunday, with the recipient given the right to impose penalties. (I know one writer who missed this sort of deadline and was forced to buy the recipient a hot fudge sundae…and watch her eat it.)

The more common problem, though, seems to be people who freeze in the face of a deadline.

If you’re this kind of person, the first thing I recommend is that you stop for a few minutes and think about why this happens to you. And be brutally honest. At least half the people I meet who have this “problem” only have it with their writing…they don’t freeze up when faced with a deadline at the office, and when they had papers due in college, they just buckled down and did them (OK, sometimes at 4 a.m. the day they were due, but still).

For folks like this, the problem is not so much the deadline as it is the fact that it’s a fiction writing deadline, which says to me that a good part of the difficulty is in the way they think about writing fiction – as something scary and special and not subject to the normal rules of work. Fixing this is a matter of attitude adjustment, which is never easy and which may involve lots of poking around in your childhood and your backbrain in order to figure out what you really think, why you have these reactions, and how to change them to something more productive.

But that still leaves the other half of people who have problems meeting deadlines. There’s still a lot of variation in this group: some people are convinced that no one can be creative writing to deadline (this is not true; many people can. The question is whether this particular writer is one of them or not); some chronically underestimate how long it’s going to take them to write ten pages (or how many pages it will take to cover X amount of material); some simply have bad time management skills; some procrastinate out of habit; and some go into such a panic at the thought of missing a deadline that it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy – their brains start running around in circles and screaming about the deadline instead of making up the stuff that will allow them to actually meet the deadline.

Again, diagnosis is key. If you’re having trouble meeting the deadline because it is One Thing Too Many on top of your child’s cancer, dealing with your soon-to-be-ex-husband’s lawyer, taking care of your elderly parent, and worrying about layoffs at your job, what you do will be very different from what you’d choose if the problem is habitual procrastination or underestimating how long it’ll take to get ten pages done.

Once you know why you’re having problems meeting deadlines, most of the solutions are common sense. There are a gazillion books on time management and beating procrastination out there; if one of those is your problem, it’s fairly easy to figure out what to do. (Actually doing it is another story, but no one can really help you with that part.) If it’s lack of discipline (or butt-in-chair time), the solution is likewise both obvious and not something anyone else can help with.

If you’re one of the folks who panics and/or freezes…well, if your brain and/or your backbrain is busy worrying or panicking about when something is due, it doesn’t have a lot of room left for actual work. Basically, you have to find some way to take the pressure off. In extreme cases, this may mean writing everything on spec (you aren’t required to sell on portion-and-outline after you’ve started publishing professionally, and of course if you haven’t sold anything yet, you pretty much have to work this way, as I don’t know any publishers who buy uncompleted first novels).

In less extreme cases, negotiating a deadline that’s much longer than you need can help; so can an understanding editor, agent, and/or spouse/partner. The main thing that seems to work, though, is forgetting about the deadline and refocusing on getting the writing done. For some, this means putting the deadline out of their minds and logging lots of concentrated time writing on a regular basis. Having a writing buddy to check in with (or to go for a “writing date” with – one of my friends and I have taken to hauling our laptops to a café once a week to spend an hour or two working) can help. If you’re of a more methodical/analytical mind, figuring out how many words-per-day you have to write to meet deadline and then making sure you meet that minimum every single day can work, as long as you only think about today’s word count and not that looming, panic-inducing deadline.

And of course, asking other writers for their methods of beating deadline-anxiety can be useful, as long as you don’t take any of them for the One True Method. Every writer develops his/her own tricks as they need them. These are some of mine; do, please, contribute your own in the comments, if you like.

By pcwrede | Posted in Writing | Tagged , , | Comments (4)

Series backstory, part 2

October 21, 2012 – 6:12 am

Last time, I talked about ways to get series backstory (the stuff that has happened in the previous books of a series) into the sort of series that’s really a three- or five- or seven-volume novel split into parts. Today I’m talking about the backstory for the other sort of series, the kind that’s a collection of stand-alone novels, usually (but not always) about the same set of characters having different adventures or problems. Most detective series are good examples of this kind of thing.

As I said before, there are a lot of really good reasons for a multi-volume-novel type series to need a bit of review or reminder in the first couple of chapters (ideally in Chapter One, but you can’t always swing that).

None of those reasons apply to the stand-alone type series.

If what you’re writing is a collection of stand-alone novels, then each one ought to stand alone. That means that the writer doesn’t put in lots of extraneous-but-interesting information to get new readers up to speed, any more than the writer of a non-series stand-alone novel puts in a huge infodump recalling the protagonist’s life history to that point in his/her life. Everything that happened before Page 1 of the current novel is history, and the fact that some of your readers already know it doesn’t mean you have to treat it any differently from the background/backstory you made up prior to Book 1.

Yes, knowing the background and relationships that have developed over the past nine or ninety books ought to make the reader’s experience of the current book richer, but new readers don’t need to know all that in order to enjoy the current book. Book seventeen will be a different experience for people who come to it with sixteen books worth of backstory than it will for readers who haven’t read anything else in the series, but different does not mean bad or boring or unenjoyable. And it certainly does not mean incomprehensible – in fact, the amount of background a new reader requires in order to understand what’s going on is usually a lot less than the writer fears.

(This is, in fact, one of the potential advantages of writing a collection-type series. If the first two books of a five-volume novel are out of print when the last book hits the shelves for the first time, it’s a major problem. Very few readers want to read only the last half or the last third of a novel. If the first twelve books of a nineteen-book set of detective novels are OOP, it’s an annoyance for new readers who grab the latest one, love it, and want to go back and fill in, but it’s not the same kind of catastrophe.)

So, what goes into the book is however much background, backstory, or history needs to be there for that story, whether we’re talking about politics, the history of ancient China, the protagonist’s confused relationship with his/her childhood sweetheart, or the slowly growing friendship between the sidekick and the alien from Rigel VII. And rather than dumping it all in Ch. 1, you put the information in when the reader needs to know it – some in the first chapter, some in the third, some in the tenth…wherever it makes sense.

Note that “the amount of backstory that needs to be there” a) is nearly always less than the writer and faithful readers think; b) is not going to be the same for every novel in the series; c) is not related to where in the series a novel falls (Book 19, in which the heroine has been kidnapped by pirates and spends the entire novel dealing with them, may need very little of the background that’s been established in the 18 prior books, while Book 7, in which she’s dealing with a complicated plot to assassinate her best friend’s father-in-law [who’s also Chief Justice of the Interstellar Tribunal] may need to refer to nearly everything in the previous six books, one way or another); d) can vary if there’s a two- or three-book story arc mid-series, and e) often varies depending on stylistic and thematic considerations. In other words, like “it works,” how much backstory one needs is a judgment call.

Most writers have a fairly good handle on this when it comes to their characters’ history. You don’t see detective novels that start with a run-down of every murder the detective has solved in the past six books. What seems to trip people up most frequently are the character relationships. I’ve seen more than one great stand-alone series bog down around book six with what I call “check-in syndrome” – the writer spends more and more time at the front end of the book “checking in” on all the recurring characters the readers love, even if those characters have no particular part in the current story. Then the book either bloats up to twice the length it needs to be, or else the actual plot is crammed into the remaining few chapters, greatly to the detriment of the story.

What all this boils down to is that in a collection-type series, I’d recommend erring on the side of too little backstory rather than too much, unless you already know that you under-explain or unless you have solid stylistic or thematic reasons for running on and on about what’s already happened (for example, a garrulous first-person narrator…)

By pcwrede | Posted in Writing | Tagged , | Comments (6)

Series backstory, part 1

October 17, 2012 – 6:38 am

Every so often I get an email request from one of the readers of this blog, asking me to address a particular writing question. This week’s inquiry boils down to “When you’re writing a series, and you’re on book three (or five or nineteen), how much backstory do you put in and where and how do you include it?”

This one seems to give a lot of people fits, because there’s a lot of conflicting advice out there. And the reason there’s a lot of conflicting advice is, in part, because what you do with series backstory depends on what sort of series you are writing.

There are two basic kinds of series: 1) the sort that’s really a multi-volume novel, where plots and subplots carry over from one book to the next, and 2) the sort that’s a collection of different stories about the same set of people, with each book being a relatively independent adventure. A lot of the confusion about series backstory derives from mixing up the two types, because they have very different backstory requirements.

When you’re writing the first type of series, each book after the first one necessarily starts in medias res, because you’re really only telling one story that’s been broken up into parts. New readers coming in at book 2 or 3 will very likely be hopelessly confused if they don’t get some sort of summary of events to-date, and even fans of the series from way back may need a few reminders of what’s been going on, because it’s normal for the books to come out a year or more apart. Ideally, one wants this reminder as early in the book as possible, to minimize reader confusion and settle the story back into place.

The difficulty here is one of pacing. One doesn’t really want Chapter One of a book to be slow, no matter how many complex plots and subplots one needs to remind the reader of. One especially doesn’t want a too-detailed reminder of plots and subplots that will annoy people who come to the series after all the books are out and they can gulp them down one after another over a long weekend or vacation.

There are three basic methods for getting the necessary updates in anyway: one can treat the story as a more normal in medias res opening; one can set up the reminder in the previous book; or one can begin with a what-has-gone-before prologue, which readers can skip if they’ve recently read earlier books (or if they’re on their eighth re-read and know the plot by heart already).

The first method, writing as if the story is a stand-alone that just happens to start in the middle of the action, tends to work very well for a lot of stories. The writer doesn’t have to dump a huge mass of information into Chapter One; everything comes along just as the reader actually needs to know it, which for certain facts may not be until Chapter Ten. That means one can avoid a potential slow opening and get on with the story. Readers who dislike in medias res openings won’t care for it if they get hold of it first, but that’s why the publisher should put “Book 2 of…” in some clear and obvious spot on the cover.

The second method, setting up the summary in advance, requires careful planning, because the set-up usually goes at the end of the previous book – someone promises to write and explain, or demands a report, or talks about the upcoming conference, or mentions a new character who’ll need to be brought up to speed on what’s going on. The next book opens with writing the letter or the report or with the conference or the arrival of the new character, so the overall story flows along seamlessly.

When handled clumsily, this looks like the device it is – a compromise between working things in in bits and doing a prologue – and it’s not something you’d want to use book after book in a long-running series, because it gets really obvious if you do it more than once even if you’re clever. It can, however, work well if one is fairly far into a longer multi-volume novel with a complicated plot that even readers who have all the books ready to hand may be glad to see laid out clearly.

The third method, the what-has-gone-before prologue, is pretty self-explanatory; the main thing to remember here is not to get too attached to it, because people will undoubtedly skip it when they re-read it. It’s a practical solution if one has a convoluted plot, lots of subplots, and lots of characters, all of which the reader needs to be up to speed on before the opening scene.

The biggest problem most writers seem to have with all of these methods is a tendency to put in far more information than the reader actually needs to know in order to pick up where the story left off. (There are, as always, a rare few who put in too little information and end up making the reader’s potential confusion worse than ever, but as I said, they’re rare, and a good editor, beta reader, or crit group will call them on it.)

On the other hand, a multi-volume novel is still one story; it’s published in multiple books for reasons of production, or to give the reader a break (a million-plus words is somehow a lot more intimidating in a single volume than it is broken up into five or six more normal-looking books, even though nothing else about it changes). Deciding that one is not going to make any concessions to the publishing process (i.e., completely ignoring all of the above and putting in no what-has-gone-before stuff, nothing to remind a reader of what happened two books and three real-life years ago) is not a totally unreasonable position to take. One simply has to be very, very sure that one’s story is strong enough to hold up without extra artificial linkages between the parts, and willing to argue with or ignore all the editors, beta readers, etc. who tell you that you have to have something to fill in the reader on what has gone before.

As this is getting rather long, I’m going to stop here and do part 2, on handling the collection-of-stand-alones type series, on Sunday.

By pcwrede | Posted in Writing | Tagged , | Comments (8)

Conjecture, trip report, and some other stuff

October 14, 2012 – 6:54 am

I’m back home at last, after a solid week without a decent internet connection (hence the lack of a post last Wednesday. My apologies).

Conjecture was great fun; I recommend it to the attention of anyone in the San Diego area around this time next year. The hotel was a big of a maze, and their internet was “undergoing upgrading” and therefore wildly unreliable, but the staff was very nice and the convention space worked really well, I thought.

Among the standout moments were the Chowder Hour in the consuite, the joint Star Wars Reading (in which voice actor Mark Biagi and I, with some helpful volunteers from the audience, did a joint reading from the Star Wars novelizations, with Mark doing the voices and me reading the narration), the Iron Hack event (in which four of us composed a story on the fly, incorporating various people, places, and objects suggested by the audience, including Conan the Librarian, the Ark of the Covenant, William Gladstone, and Captain Nemo’s Hideout, among other things), and the Enchanted Tea, to which everyone was encouraged to come in Regency costume (I really must get around to making myself something more suitable to wear to such an event).

Following the convention, we had a long and very wiggly drive home, with stops at White Sands National Monument (where I was pleased to discover Green Glass Sea, Ellen Klages’ excellent YA about Los Alamos and the development of the first atomic bomb, on sale in the gift shop) and Carlsbad Caverns, where we got to walk around the cave and then stayed to watch the bats come out. Dad allowed as how White Sands was a lot more interesting now than it was when he was 18 and thought it was just a lot of sand and kind of boring.

One of the things I did during part of the drive was listen to the first part of a batch of recorded lectures I purchased recently. As many of you know, I never took any English, Literature, or Creative Writing classes after I got out of high school. I was a Biology major, and while my college required a certain number of distribution credits, English was in the same group as History, so I filled mine in with classes in the history of places that my high school didn’t cover, like China and India. I figured that reading books was something I’d do anyway, but I’d have a lot harder time figuring out what the best history texts were without a bit more background.

On the whole, I’ve never been sorry I made that choice, though I have often wished I hadn’t needed to make it. It would have been so much nicer to have had enough time to take both sets of courses… Anyway, after years of complaining about what I missed, I finally decided to take advantage of the availability of lectures on tape and the internet to fill in a bit of what I missed.

So I’m now about halfway through a lecture series that’s about twelve hours of what I’d call an overview of English Literature and the way college-level classes look at it. It’s been enlightening on a number of accounts, mostly in understanding how academics, who are by and large not themselves creative writers, view fiction, and how it is and isn’t helpful to people who actually want to write the stuff.

For starters, the first three lectures are mainly about authors and their relationship with readers. It’s very clear from the references and terminology that the lecturer is throwing around that this is considered a normal, maybe even fundamental, aspect of thinking about literature. He even poses (but does not answer) the question: How much does the reader need to know about an author in order to appreciate their work properly?

Now, I can see that sometimes it is useful to know things about an author, specifically when a) the author makes a habit of including in-jokes and references in his/her work that no one unfamiliar with his/her life can get, and b) when the book was written far enough in the past that it takes a certain amount of historical knowledge to understand it because things that were common knowledge at the time no longer are.

But does knowing stuff about the author really make a difference to a reader’s enjoyment of a book? If so, why don’t all books come with an authorial biography before or after, in order to enhance every reader’s experience? Oh, a lot of folks are interested in what their favorite authors are like, and want to meet them or read their blogs or send fanmail/email to express their appreciation, but that’s not quite the same thing. The “favorite author” part – reading and liking the books – comes first, and the interest in the author derives from that. Also, there are far more people who just read the books and don’t much worry about what the author is like.

It’s a tricky question, because I have noticed that for a lot of folks, knowing the author does change their judgement of a work…but not predictably. For some, knowing the actual author makes them less critical and more tolerant of flaws that would have them tossing a stranger’s book in the discard pile; for others, knowing the author makes them pickier and more inclined to object to minor problems they’d never notice in a random library book.

For myself, I don’t write novels in order to “create a relationship with my readers.” I write to tell stories, and it’s the stories that matter, not me. Thinking too hard about “the audience” is absolutely deadly when I’m writing. It’s a distraction I don’t need.

Actually meeting people at conventions and autographings and so on is fun and I certainly do enjoy it. Talking to people through this blog is also fun. But it’s not the reason I write novels, and the relationship that I have with the fans I meet here or at cons has nothing to do with how and why and what I write.

I’ll probably have more to say about this series of lectures as I work my way through the course. There are some on plot and subtext coming up that look interesting…

By pcwrede | Posted in Family, General, Writing | Tagged , , , | Comments (9)

Frames

October 7, 2012 – 6:02 am

Today I decided to talk about frame stories. “Frame story” is a bit of a misnomer; it’s actually short for “story with a frame,” and it’s a very specific story structure in which the opening (whether that’s the prologue, Chapter One, or the first scene) and closing (whether that’s the epilog, last chapter, or last scene) form a separate-but-related story or incident that “frames” the main story. Some stories have a double-frame – the story-within-a-story-within-a-frame – and you can theoretically take it down as many levels as you want, as long as you can keep it all clear for the reader.

Frame stories used to be a lot more popular than they are now. The as-told-to frame, where two characters are talking (often in a bar) and one starts telling the other the story that is the main story, got used quite a bit – supposedly, having an authority figure within the story tell a tall tale made it more believable or acceptable to the reader.

Personally, I think that the reason frame stories fell out of fashion is that it’s difficult to come up with a framing incident that is interesting enough to get the reader involved, memorable enough that when the reader gets to the end they’ll recall what’s supposed to be happening, but not such a tense cliff-hanger that the reader will scream in frustration and flip straight to the end to find out what happens.

There are, however, two kinds of frame stories that you still see every so often. The first is the prologue-epilogue frame, in which the prologue and epilogue form a separate-but-related story or incident that brackets the main story. The prologue presents a character who is going to read, write, tell, be told, or set in motion the main story, and the epilog returns to the character to give his/her reaction once the story is finished.

A frame prologue-epilog usually takes place later in time than the main story, making the bulk of the novel a sort of mega-flashback. Generally the prologue/first frame scene ends with someone leaning back and saying or thinking “So why shouldn’t I hang/courtmartial/fire/exile you?” and the person in front of him saying “Well, sir, it’s like this…” and we’re on to the start of the real story, only coming back at the end to find out if sir really did hang/courtmartial/fire/exile the tale-teller.

The main trouble with this one is that the main story needs to be very strong to compensate for the fact that we know the characters who’ve appeared in the prologue are going to survive. I’ve also seen a few of these in which the author appeared to think he/she needed an excuse to write in first-person. If that’s all the frame is, it’s probably scaffolding that can be taken down and dispensed with once the rest of the story is finished, as most of the readers I know don’t need that kind of justification for a first-person story. (And I should probably add that a story within a frame does not have to be in first-person, even when the first frame scene ends “Well, sir, it happened like this…”)

The second sort of frame story you see around a fair bit is more like one of those shadow-box frames that has multiple compartments, each containing a different picture. It’s usually used to string together a bunch of closely related short stories. If the frame story is strong enough, and does a good enough job of stitching the short stories into a coherent whole, you get what’s commonly referred to as a “fix-up novel;” if it’s not, you get something more like a short story collection with a series of introductions by the characters, like Poul Anderson’s Tales of the Flying Mountains.

A good writer can use a frame structure to reinforce or undercut the events or the theme of the main story. You can give things an unexpected or humorous twist in the final segment of the frame, revealing information about motivations or manipulations or behind-the-scenes players that nobody in the main story had. Also, the frame story does not actually have to include the protagonist of the main story; maybe the frame is the sidekick or one of the villain’s minions explaining what happened to his/her mother.

The main question to ask when considering whether to use a frame is: does it add anything significant to the story besides word count? Does it make the overall story even cooler? If it doesn’t pass the coolness test, you should probably pass on including it. On the other hand, if all the story coolness is in the frame, maybe the frame should be a story of its own. Frames are, after all, supposed to enhance what they surround, not draw all the attention to themselves.

By pcwrede | Posted in Writing | Tagged | Comments (12)

Hollywood science

October 3, 2012 – 6:15 am

The trip continues; we have reached LA after a stop in Las Vegas (neither of us did any gambling, but we ate some great food and saw Cirque du Soleil’s Mystere). And in justice to my father, I have to point out that when he ran off the road in the mountains, a) he was eighteen and b) the steering wheel had just come off in his hands (he was driving a “junkyard jalopy” that he and my uncle had built themselves out of spare parts). So it really wasn’t his fault (unless he was the one who’d tightened the bolt on the steering wheel, and at this date, I don’t think he remembers. It’s been 74 years…)

Anyway, since I’m now in the vicinity of Hollywood, I thought I’d talk a bit about “Hollywood science” and its uses and abuses.

Hollywood science is the term many folks use to refer to the improbable, outlandish, and just-plain-wrong “science” that appears in a lot of Hollywood films and TV. The attitude often appears to be that it’s only a movie (or worse yet, only a science-fiction movie) and therefore things don’t have to be accurate. This annoys those of us who feel that even if it is only a something, it’s still science, and ought to be as accurate as possible (and, at the least, ought not to be significantly INaccurate).

Unfortunately, this is one of those areas where opinions differ as to how accurate things need to be, and how accurate they can be, given the constraints of whatever medium the writer is working with and the type of story the writer is telling. There are also differences of opinion when it comes to projecting the possibilities, which is always some aspect of science fiction. Nearly every science fiction writer I know has at some point been approached by someone who’s said “I don’t think X thing you have in your book is possible,” and then, on being told what science the author based it on and why, has said “I still don’t believe it.”

Such differences of opinion about what is and isn’t possible often lead to accusations of Hollywood science, and it’s impossible to say who is right or wrong. I choose to think that if the author did his/her homework and has a logical chain of arguments in favor of his/her projected science, then even if I don’t think it works, it doesn’t qualify as Hollywood science. But that’s me.

Where I think the line goes is when an author gets the easy stuff wrong. Confusing star systems with galaxies (or vice versa), using “lightyear” or “parsec” as a measure of time, rather than distance…those sorts of things are Hollywood science at its worst, and there’s no excuse for them. They’re pure laziness on somebody’s part.

And getting the easy stuff wrong to no purpose weakens the story. It gives the reader a reason to disbelieve, and at least some of them will take advantage of that (and then quit reading). Which is why ignoring reality, and especially ignoring real things that can be easily checked via Google, is not the best idea for most authors.

Sometimes, however, sticking to real science (and real reality) is detrimental to the story, and when that is true, the story comes first. This is, after all, fiction; by definition, it ignores reality on some basic level. There are two obvious ways I can think of for sticking too closely to real science to be detrimental to the story: 1) when doing so requires more skill in explaining than the writer possesses or the medium can bear, and 2) when the basic premise of the story is contrary to what we currently know of reality, as with fantasy or faster-than-light travel.

#1 is to some extent a judgment call, I admit. It also varies by media; what is an acceptable one-page explanation in a novel can be impossible to translate to a movie screen without slowing the story to a crawl and/or boring the audience to tears. This, I think, is one of the reasons hard SF (which SF practically requires all the whizzy science-fictional gadgets to have some solid foundation in physics-as-we-know-it-to-date) is so difficult to turn into movies or TV without warping totally out of shape. Space opera usually fares much better.

It is, however, also true that the ability to write an interesting infodump is a learned skill, and learning to do it can take a while. A writer who hasn’t yet developed that skill, and who knows he hasn’t developed it yet may be better off using handwavium that does exactly what the story requires, rather than embarking on a two-page infodump detailing why cesium, when subject to the proper pressures, behaves in exactly the same way.

#2 is also to some extent a judgment call, though it seems more obvious than #1. A lot of fantasy is intended to mimic reality in many ways except for the existence of magic or magical creatures. Where it’s supposed to seem real, the author has to stick with reality or start losing readers. Horses have to act like horses, not bicycles or motorcycles. But there are also totally surreal fantasies where the whole point is that anything is possible: flowers talk, china dolls move, monkeys can have wings and fly, woodland streams taste of lemons, etc. For those, sticking too closely to reality can ruin the fun.

What it comes down to is, as usual, not to make careless mistakes. If one is going to break the “rules” of reality, one ought to have a good idea what they are and why the particular story needs those rules to be broken. It is also a good idea to have a backup explanation for use when cornered by a fan who objects to whatever liberties one has taken with the laws of science.

By pcwrede | Posted in Family, Writing | Tagged , | Comments (10)

Interlude: On the road

September 30, 2012 – 6:34 am

As my regular readers know, I’m currently on a three-week (roughly) road trip with my father, from Chicago to San Diego for Conjecture and then back. I let my Dad plan the route. If I ever do that again, I will double-check it a week in advance and find out whether there is anything going on that might necessitate actual room reservations at various planned stopping points along the way (we’ve already had one town nearly full-up with a state-wide convention and another full because of a free music festival). Dad tends not to worry about stuff like that.

Some things I expected to hear on this trip:

“Nebraska is very flat.”

“Didn’t we already cross the Platte River? Twice?”

“Did you remember the charger for the iPad? I forgot mine.”

Some things I didn’t expect to hear:

Dad: “This isn’t the right place! There’s a lake here, I don’t remember a lake!”

Me: “Dad, when was the last time you were here?”

Dad: “1938.”

Me: “So that would probably be BEFORE they built that nice new-looking dam over there?”

Also, while I’m driving on a twisty mountain road with a sheer drop on one side:

Dad: “I can drive if you want.”

Me: “Not now, there’s nowhere to pull over. Why do you want to drive?”

Dad: “I like this road. It looks just like the spot where your Uncle Richard and I ran over the edge when our steering went out.”

Me: “Why are you still alive?”

Dad: “Oh, there were some pine trees that caught us about twenty feet down and some guy came by in a truck and pulled us out.”

Me (with some trepidation): “Who was driving when you went over the edge?”

Dad: “Oh, I was! But it wasn’t my fault.”

Me: “I think I’ll just keep driving for a while.”

So far, we’ve been to Estes Park and driven the high road through Rocky Mountain National Park, then spent a couple of hours at Bryce Canyon before we got to Zion National Park this afternoon. Which seems like a lot to me, but apparently Dad and my uncle hit 32 national parks in a 2-month driving trip in 1938 that should, from the sound of it, have killed both of them several times over. So he’s showing me the high spots. Literally, in some cases; according to the signage, we were 2 miles above sea level at a couple of points on the trip. He’s currently peeved because he bought a lifetime National Parks membership about 30 years ago when he turned 62, and didn’t remember to bring it (that’s assuming he could FIND it, which I doubt, but it’s really kind of a moot point).

If the hotel internet connection I’m currently using were more reliable, I’d probably try to twist this into some sort of writing point, but I’m afraid of losing it (again), so that’ll have to wait. With luck, I will be able to return you to your regularly scheduled blog post by Wednesday, by which time we should be in LA or San Diego, which I trust will be a bit more reliable as far as connection goes.

By pcwrede | Posted in Family, General | Tagged | Comments (13)

Imperfect telepathy

September 26, 2012 – 6:42 am

Writing is not a visual medium, not in the way that photographs, paintings, or movies are visual. Yet there are readers and writers who think of it this way. It’s quite common for writers to describe “the movie in my head” or “seeing the scene and just writing it down.”

There are two potential problems with this approach, from a writing perspective. The first is that the visually oriented writer often doesn’t realize that not all readers work the way she does, resulting in bewilderment when their work is criticized for things like grammar, style, or syntax. For an extremely visual writer, the sentences are not important. Sentences are a means to an end, the vehicle that creates mental pictures, like the pigments in a painting or the tints on a strip of film. Unfortunately, neglecting sentences in favor of the mental movie often means neglecting all those readers who do not “see a movie” when they read.

The other, more insidious problem is that writing is not telepathy. No matter how clearly the writer visualizes a scene and how minutely he describes it, his readers are not going to construct exactly the same scene in their own heads. Many, if not most, of them will come close, but even those who read visually will not construct exactly the same mental picture from the same set of words.

This is because words are more than their meanings. Words have personal resonances that depend on the life experiences of individuals. For instance: I grew up in Chicago. My idea of a river is the Chicago River or the Mississippi. When I read the word “river” in a story, I picture something that can handle steamboats and barge traffic. I’ve been to places, however, where the local waterway was five feet wide and maybe three feet deep, barely able to handle a string of canoes traveling single file…and they still name it a river, and I have to believe that that narrow channel is what they picture when they read the word “river” in the same story I read. Which is more than enough to result in major differences in the mental pictures each of us construct of the landscape, even if we (and the author) agree on the images that are evoked by every other description and phrase in the story.

There is no possible way for a writer to control this. A visual author who gets hung up on the reader getting exactly the same “mental movie” as the one he has in his own head is courting madness. Even if you get a group of intelligent, articulate beta-readers, you won’t hear the same things from each one, because they’ll each bes interpreting your words according to slightly (or majorly) different mental biases. 

This is especially true because a lot of readers these days don’t have the patience for the long descriptive passages that are necessary if a writer wants every detail of a scene clear in the reader’s mind. It may matter to you that there is a pencil sketch of Abraham Lincoln on the wall, a decorative porcelain egg in the middle of the table (just slightly off-center under the brass chandelier), etc., but unless the sketch and the egg tell the reader something useful about the characters or the plot, a lot of them will tire of such details very rapidly. Hence the emphasis, in writing advice, on the “telling detail” – the one thing about this person or place that’s unusual, that packs a whole lot of information and “feel” into a very small amount of description.

Writers have to accept (or at least learn to ignore) the fact that their readers are not going to produce exactly the same image from the words-on-the-page that the writer has (or wants them to have). We try, certainly, but it’s never going to be perfect.

You can’t give a reader the experience in your head unless you really are a telepath and can somehow broadcast your thoughts every time someone reads what you’ve written. What you are doing, as a writer, is giving the reader a whole bunch of building blocks and telling them to build a house or a skyscraper or a castle. They won’t build the exact same house or skyscraper or castle that you were picturing in your head, but as long as what they build pleases them, they’ll be happy. If that’s not good enough for you – if it’s really that critically important for your visually-inclined readers to “see” exactly what you “see” – you’re in the wrong field; you need to be making movies instead.

Readers are, in a sense, collaborating with writers in creating the story experience. Neil Gaiman has several times told the story of a particularly memorable scene from a childhood favorite book, in which the protagonist rode through the night, unable to see far in the dark, with the wind whipping his cape and the snow swirling about and his fingers slowly growing cold and stiff on the reins. And then he finally found the book and turned to his favorite scene and read “They rode all night in a snow storm.”

You can’t predict when a simple sentence like this will strike that kind of chord in a reader, evoking a vivid mental picture of an dramatic multi-page scene that never existed. You can only be pleased when it happens, and glad that you have such excellent collaborators.

 

By pcwrede | Posted in Writing | Tagged , | Comments (9)

Body language

September 23, 2012 – 6:30 am

Body language is one of those things that has to some extent become a code. “He shrugged” “She sighed” “I smiled” and so on have become almost like punctuation – nearly meaningless things inserted into a paragraph or a line of dialog to let the reader know that there’s a pause here, or a small change in the level of the action, or something that needs just a little more emphasis.

As a result, some writers find it difficult to move beyond the code. They don’t stop to think about all the little things real people really do when they’re listening or fidgeting or concentrating or bored, because they have these basic code phrases already occupying that slot in their minds. And they especially don’t think about how body language can reflect characterization, because really, how much characterization do you get out of a shrug or a sigh or a smile?

But if you stop to think for a minute, body language is about the whole body. It’s not just a couple of gestures; it’s about how individuals move and stand and use every single part of themselves, from hair to toes. People slouch and slump and stiffen; they cough and swallow visibly and sneeze; they tense up, relax, turn red, go pale. Sometimes, the body language is under their control (as with raising her chin or crossing his legs); other times, it isn’t (few people can control their blush reflex). But no matter what else is happening, every single person in the scene is doing something with his or her body (unless they’re dead, and sometimes, even then).

So how do you get at all that stuff, if you’re not used to thinking about it this way?

Well, I suggest beginning with what you have to work with, i.e., what are all the various parts of a body, and what can be done with or to them?

Starting with the head, there’s hair, eyes, eyebrows, ears, nose, cheeks, forehead, mouth, teeth, tongue, lips…and then there are things that go on the head: hats and scarves, eyeglasses and monocles, earrings, nose rings, tiaras, necklaces. And that’s just the head, and I didn’t even try for a total and complete inventory.

So what can a person do with all these bits and pieces? Hair: comb one’s fingers through it, twist it (if it’s long enough), scratch at it (front, back, top, or sides), pull at it (or even pull out a bit of it), braid it (again, if it’s long enough), stroke or smooth it into place, toss it, shake it, hide behind it. Eyes: widen, narrow, squint, flick in one direction or another, close, blink, wink, rub at, tear up, roll, stare intently, glaze over. Eyebrows: raise one or both, bring or draw together, lower, wiggle. Hat: take off, tip, raise, put on, push back/forward, scratch under, use as fan…

You get the point. Each and every part of the body has multiple motions that it can make, and multiple things that can be done to or with it in combination with other parts. Every one of those movements can be used to indicate a feeling, a reaction, or a thought. You can add even more information by describing the way in which those motions are made; “slowly winding a lock of hair around a finger” gives a different impression from “madly winding and unwinding a lock of hair around a finger.”

Some bits of body language are involuntary, like blushing or shivering, but most of them are habits or expressions of an individual’s personality. So the next question is, what is each of the characters like? Who they are affects how they act and react on multiple levels. The guy who reacts aggressively to any criticism may consciously be making a fist, but narrowing his eyes and tightening his lips out of habit, and turning red because of his involuntary physical reaction to becoming angry. The more thoughtful character next to him, who’s a bit more controlled but just as angry, may do the same narrowing of his eyes, but without the red face, and his conscious physical response may be to tap a finger against his lips instead of making a fist.

Habits, in particular, can tell the reader something about both the character’s personality and the character’s past (the habit had to come from somewhere). Whether it’s the little dip and swing of the character’s head whenever she turns it (obviously, she used to wear her hair long and loose, and hasn’t yet lost the habitual motion she needed to toss it over her shoulder as she turns), or the way he half-reaches for his breast pocket every few minutes but stops midway (gave up smoking recently, didn’t he?), little non-standard habitual movements can make the characters feel more like real individuals than like standard roles (The Hero, The Ingénue, The Sidekick, The Comic Relief). Even characters who make a point of not showing emotional reactions can have habits that betray them in small, unconscious ways.

Obviously, the writer does not need or want to describe every twitch and wiggle that every character makes. And there’s certainly a place for simplified body-language-as-punctuation code like “he smiled” or “she shrugged.” But if all you’re using are the compressed code phrases, you might want to take another look for places where you can take things one step deeper by describing the narrow eyes, tight lips, and slowly tapping finger instead of saying “he looked angry.”

By pcwrede | Posted in Writing | Tagged , , | Comments (14)

Writing on the road

September 19, 2012 – 6:47 am

Next week, I’m leaving on a 2-1/2 week road trip with my father. It’s not really a vacation – I’m guest of honor at Conjecture in San Diego Oct 5-7 – but Dad and I decided to take the extra time to drive out from Chicago and stop to see things and maybe visit some family along the way. (I don’t expect any interruption in the blog, but one can’t ever be completely sure. So if there’s a sudden interruption, that’s why.)

There’s rather a lot of family scattered around; my Dad’s family has been keeping track since umpty-great-grandpa James decided to quit being a British spy after the Revolutionary War and stick around the new U.S.A. instead (I’ve always thought that maybe umpty-great-grandma had something to do with that, but there’s no family lore to back it up).

Be that as it may, I’m not in a position to lose two and a half weeks of writing time right now, especially since I’m still in the development phase. If I take that much time off now, dire experience tells me that I’m likely to find the whole project not merely cold, but encased in a three-foot layer of ice when I get back to it…which is another way of saying I really, really had better not do that. So I’m going to be writing on the road.

Writing on the road means planning ahead. It’s not enough to haul the electronics along, though the laptop is essential and the iPad is convenient for reading in the car (I thank my stars that I am capable of doing that; lots of folks can’t). I know from more experience that the Internet is not always reliably available when one is driving cross-country, no matter what they claim…and anyway, roaming charges are expensive. So I also have to consider what I want to make certain is on the electronics in the way of software and reference materials, as well as what sorts of non-electronic things (hard copy books and notes, CDs) I also want to haul along.

Since there’ll be a lot of driving on this trip no matter how many stops we make, I’m planning on bringing a fair lot of reference materials. This weekend, I’ll be combing Project Gutenberg for free primary-source downloads that look interesting, as well as ripping a couple of CDs I just bought of lectures about writing and literary criticism. I already have the gadget that plugs into the cigarette lighter socket (do they even still call it that?) that you can plug your laptop or iPad into to extend the battery. And I have a number of gadgets, from the wireless mouse to the portable external hard drive, all of which fit handily into the giant laptop bag. (The bag is really for all the externals; the laptop itself is small enough to fit in my handbag. OK, it’s a big handbag, but it’s not that big…)

No matter how much preparation I do, though, writing on the road is never easy. When I drive alone, I obviously can’t read or type, and I’m no good at dictating. I do carry a recorder to grab ideas on the fly, but it’s a pain to transcribe when I’m done driving (and I know from experience that if I don’t type them onto my laptop that night at the hotel, they’ll probably never get transcribed at all…or by the time I do get around to it, they won’t make any sense to me). I can, however, listen to whatever I want (usually audiobooks or podcasts). Driving with somebody is different. I still don’t have much luck typing in a moving vehicle, though I can read if we’re not talking. On the other hand, I have to negotiate what we’re going to listen to.

Destinations are just as difficult as the driving part – there’s a reason why I’m in Texas or New England or California or Washington, and it’s not to spend my days laboring over a hot laptop. If that’s all I was going to do, I could just as well have stayed home. There are things to see, people to meet up with, dinners to have out…

What it all boils down to is that “writing on the road” nearly always ends up meaning writing in a hotel room, either early in the morning before everyone else is up and about, or late in the evening when one is exhausted and only wants to get to bed. Either way, it takes even more discipline than usual to forego that extra hour or so of sleep and put the time into writing instead. If one is setting one’s own schedule (or if one is traveling with people who have the opposite biological rhythm – they sleep in while you like getting up early, or they go to bed early while you like to stay up), one can sometimes carve the writing time out of one’s daytime schedule, rather than from one’s sleep, but it still has to be carved.

Usually I can keep a rhythm going on a trip by using the trip itself as material – writing descriptions of what I saw or did that day, or bits of ideas, or overheard conversations that work as idea-triggers can keep the habit going even if I’m not seriously working on pay copy for a few days or a week. Sometimes, though, the book is at a critical stage, or there’s a deadline, or an editor has a last-minute request, or there’s some white-hot scene or short story that has to be grabbed right now, and there’s nothing for it but to squeeze in some serious work regardless of time, place, and general convenience.

And the way you do that is…you just do it. You get up early and crack open the laptop (or stay up an extra hour or three, if it’s the white-hot thing), and you sit at it and write. Sometimes, you’re lucky and being in a different place shakes things loose in a good way; sometimes, it’s harder than ever. You do it anyway.

Really, it’s not so different from writing at home, whether you feel like it or not…

By pcwrede | Posted in Family, Writing | Tagged , , | Comments (9)

It’s not the same

September 16, 2012 – 6:30 am

There are a number of bits of wisdom that nonwriters frequently impart to writers, usually with the best of intentions. Some of them are useful and very true, like “You need to send that out, you know.” Other times…not so much.

One of the not-so-much categories comes in the form “If you (the writer) do X, the reader will also do X.” For instance, if the writer likes/dislikes the characters, the reader will dislike the characters. If the writer loses track of the plot, the reader will lose track of the plot. If the writer is having fun, the reader will have fun.

The trouble with this kind of pronouncement is that it confuses product with process. On the most basic level, there’s the matter of time. Most writers spend months or years producing a manuscript; most readers buzz through the same manuscript in days or hours. It’s relatively easy to remember the key hint or the bit of foreshadowing in Chapter Two if you read it within the last day; it’s not so simply if you wrote that bit two or three months ago. It’s even worse if you wrote it four months ago in Chapter Ten, moved it to Chapter Eight a month later, deleted it entirely when the front end of the story got reshuffled a week after that, then changed your mind and decided it needed to go in somewhere and tried it in three or four places before settling on Chapter Two as the right spot (for now) a month ago.

By the same token, the writer has to live with the characters – and their quirks – a lot longer than the readers do. The protagonist who was charming and fascinating at the start of the series can start to feel old and stale after the writer has lived with him/her for four or five years…but the readers, who’ve only had four or five weeks of the character over those same four or five years, frequently still find the character fresh and appealing.

In other words, what works in fiction that is read over a relatively short period – say a week – does not necessarily have the same effect when it is spread over months or years. What works for the reader may well not work in the same way for the writer.

Conversely, what works for the writer (or what the writer thinks is working) may not work for a reader who hasn’t been steeped in the story for weeks and months. Things a writer thinks are blindingly obvious (because he/she has been pondering the character’s motivation or the series of plot twists) may be totally opaque to most readers because the writer forgot (or didn’t think it necessary) to put it on the page. Things a writer thinks are just the right level of incluing may strike the reader as being beaten about the head and shoulders with hints (because the hints that the writer put in weeks apart, the reader is running across within minutes of each other).

Which brings me to the second part of the product-process confusion: the writer and the reader are not looking at the same thing. The reader has a finished product; the writer is working with an unfinished product, right up to the very end.

A story that’s in process is frequently very different from the final version. Not only does it change, it keeps on changing. As a result, the writer’s relationship to the story is very different from even the most dedicated and fanatical reader’s relationship to the story. The reader is looking at a porcelain teacup, finished and glazed. The writer is looking, at various times, at a lump of clay, a lopsided bowl that has to be squished down and reshaped, a mug-like cylinder that’s closer but still too tall, an unfinished cup that still needs to be fired and painted and glazed but that’s at least the right shape, and, eventually, the finished teacup…which may be a lovely and pleasing teacup, but which is nothing at all like the water pitcher the writer had in mind when she sat down with that lump of clay at the beginning of the process.

For writers, it’s as much about the journey as it is about the end result.

By pcwrede | Posted in Writing | Tagged , | Comments (10)

Election year writing

September 12, 2012 – 6:42 am

It’s election year in the U.S. and there’s almost no getting away from it anywhere. One of the things I hear over and over is people complaining about the polarization, how nasty the ads are, and so on. All the drama is, of course, a gold mine of material for writers, but stepping back a pace and considering it all in the abstract is equally worth doing. Because American politics provide textbook example after textbook example of something most writers absolutely should not be encouraged to do.

As near as I can tell, no one on either side of any issue in this election wants to admit that the other side even has a point of view, let alone actually consider it for a few seconds. And while this may be effective in politics, it tends to make for pedestrian writing, at the very best. At worst, ignoring “the other side” (whatever side that may be) results in fiction that’s didactic, preachy, and only enjoyable by people who already agree with the writer’s position.

Even if the number of people who agree with a particular stance is large (and thus the presumed audience and sales will be equally large), not considering the other side of the argument – and treating it, and the people who hold it, seriously – is nearly always a prescription for a second-rate book.

The reason is that obstacles that are too easy for the protagonist to overcome are almost always boring to read about (unless they’re a deliberate parody, e.g., the hero’s dreadful battle wound turning out to be a paper cut). Too-easy victories imply that the problem wasn’t really that bad to begin with. A protagonist who spends an entire book slaughtering paper tigers isn’t going to qualify as a hero for the reader, no matter how many medals the folks in the book pin on him.

And all that applies just as much to political, intellectual, and moral arguments in fiction as it does to physical obstacles. If Sleeping Beauty’s prince was faced with a neatly trimmed, foot-high “hedge” that he could step over instead of with an impenetrable forest of briars, it wouldn’t be nearly as memorable a story. If the protagonist of the story never doubts her purpose or her moral position, and always has an irrefutable answer for the weak and flimsy objections and challenges raised by her misguided and/or evil-and-corrupt opponents, it starts to look as if she’s in the proverbial battle of wits with an unarmed opponent – obviously, nobody even halfway rational, smart, or sane would ever take that other position.

Yet “everyone is the hero of their own story” – and that applies as much to the corrupt, evil, stupid antagonist as it does to your favorite main character. I know a number of writers who pay lip service to this idea, but who can’t seem to deliver when it comes to really understanding the antagonist’s view and portraying it without a secret sneer (which never seems to be quite as secret as the writer ought to have wished). I’m not really surprised by this. Putting oneself on the other side of an argument is hard, especially if one is passionately involved with one’s actual beliefs on the subject.

I don’t know any easy way to learn to do this. One has to make a deliberate, conscious choice to look at things from an unfamiliar (and usually extremely uncomfortable) angle…and one has to keep making that choice, noticing whenever one starts slipping back into thinking that no reasonable person would ever think that way or do that thing. Sometimes, it is easier to start with something that one isn’t quite so passionate about, something that doesn’t hit one’s personal hot buttons quite so hard. Other times, one simply has to change one’s plot (and/or the character of the antagonist) so that he doesn’t do that thing, think that way, believe that nonsense. Still other times, what works is to take the “opposite” viewpoint and give it to the hero (and not just to convert him to the “right” side at the end!), or do an ensemble cast story in which every one of the “good guys” has a different, not-altogether-palatable slant on whatever the question is.

In the long run, seeing the other side clearly, and being able to see (and, ideally, understand, and maybe even to some extent sympathise with) the reasons why the antagonists might think that or behave that way, is vitally important for anyone who wants to write realistic antagonists. And if it has a little real-world application as well, so much the better, I say.

By pcwrede | Posted in General, Writing | Tagged , | Comments (6)

Idioms and catchphrases

September 9, 2012 – 6:18 am

One of the many areas that some writers find problematic about dialog is the use of idioms. This is especially tricky for SF and fantasy writers who are trying to create a realistic-sounding but still-comprehensible imaginary world.

The first common mistake, especially for science fiction writers, is to go to one extreme or the other – either the writer unthinkingly uses nothing but current real-life idioms and catchphrases, like “once in a blue moon,” or the writer uses nothing but their own made-up idioms.

If you look at common, ordinary American speech in 2012, you will find common phrases and idioms that arose long ago, like “keep it under tight rein” or “give it free rein”…but you will also find ones of much more recent vintage, like “I don’t have the bandwidth to do that today.” A future society that uses only those idioms and catchphrases that are currently in use in English implies that nobody has invented a catchy new turn of phrase in the intervening time, that none of the catchphrases or idioms in use in other cultures will migrate into the English language, and that none of the current idioms will shift in meaning. This is unlikely, to say the least.

The second problem is that while people occasionally use clichés, idioms, and other such turns of phrase in their conversations, most of us don’t use them constantly. And a novel gives the impression of things happening very quickly. It is very likely that in real life someone would say “time flies” to one person and then, a couple of days later, “add his two cents” to another conversation. In a novel, those two conversations, days apart, can quite easily take place on consecutive pages. This gives the illusion that the characters are talking in clichés all the time, even when they aren’t. And a conversation like the following would be ridiculous: “Harry! Haven’t seen you in a blue moon.” “It has been a coon’s age, hasn’t it? How’s your aunt?” “Fit as a fiddle. Her son is always in trouble though, and keeps leaving her holding the bag.” “And him born with a silver spoon in his mouth! What’s the world coming to?” “You hadn’t heard? I thought it was the talk of the town.”

The third problem is that realistic dialog in a novel is not a transcript of the way people actually talk. If you were to tape-record a conversation on a bus, or over dinner, and then transcribe it exactly, you would have a lot of boring, unrealistic-reading stuff like “Well, you know, it was, um, that other one – yeah, the pink, and the thing, er, went…I dunno, it, um, went. So I said, like, um, wow, I mean really. But, um, then it stopped.”

Dialog in novels is a model of the way people speak in real life. It leaves out all the “ums” and “ers” and “likes” and “I means” and the rest of the verbal static that people use in real-life conversations. Dialog also tends to be a lot more coherent – you don’t see as many sentence fragments or dangling bits as you do in real-life conversations. And you don’t see as many idioms.

There are several ways of getting around these problems. One author had a modern-day character moving around in time; the people he talked to expressed amazement at his cleverness and wit every time he used a phrase like “time flies when you’re having fun,” because they’d never heard it before. Several books have postulated a future in which different social groups were based on different past eras, and tried to use the language, dress, and social customs of the time period they were re-creating (rather like the Society for Creative Anachronism, or some of the Civil War re-creation groups).

A more common solution is for the writer to invent his/her own idioms, ones that would arise out of the kind of society (different from ours) that the characters live in. In our society, “too many cooks spoil the broth;” in a seafaring or spacefaring culture it might be “you can’t have two captains on a ship;” in a culture of traveling merchants, it could be “the more people involved in bargaining, the worse the deal.” An excellent idea-generator for this sort of thing is IDIOM’S DELIGHT, by Suzanne Brock, which lists a whole bunch of Spanish, French, Italian, and Latin phrases that are just as commonplace and “clichéd” in those languages as ours are in English. (My favorite is Italian – instead of “I see you once in a blue moon,” they say “I see you once every death of a pope.”)

By pcwrede | Posted in Writing | Tagged | Comments (8)

Plotting and planning

September 5, 2012 – 6:45 am

Plotting a story is one of those writing things where not only does every writer work differently, every book works differently. Oh, there are patterns – I’ve talked before about my write-a-plan-and-then-toss-it method – but they never seem to work one hundred percent consistently for even one writer, let alone a sizeable number of them.

A lot of people have particular trouble with plot. I think there are a variety of reasons for that, but most of them start with the notion that there is One True Way to come up with and develop one. There also seems to be a serious lack of understanding of what a plot is, at least in some cases.

A setting is not a plot. An idea is not a plot, nor is a character (or set of characters). Matching up a character and a setting does not automatically produce a plot, though for some writers getting the match-up right is a first and necessary step that can trigger a cascade of useful ideas.

Yet time after time, when I ask a would-be writer what the plot is, I get a description of a character or a situation. These things can lead to plots, but that’s not what they are.

A plot, by my definition, is a sequence of events, nearly always tied together by causality, that involve characters and take place in a setting. I prefer the sort that have a problem to solve and some sort of resolution or closure at the end.

This is why so many writing-advice types claim that in order to write a satisfactory plot, the writer must know how the story is going to end. But actually, one doesn’t always need to know exactly how the characters will solve the central story-problem; for many writers, it is often enough just to know what the problem is, at least during the early chapters. However, if one doesn’t have a resolution in mind, one does have to keep alert so as to avoid writing oneself into a corner.

How a particular writer goes about plotting a book depends on two things: first, what bits of story-idea they’re starting with, and second, the writer’s personal preferences – whether she is usually most interested in the spiritual journey of the characters, or in displaying their competence at puzzle-solving, for instance.

Stories can and do start with any of the usual story-bits – plot, theme, idea, setting, character, even bits of description or dialog. Some of these require more development and decision-making than others; if the writer begins with a situation involving a couple of characters, it’s usually easier to figure out what problems these people will be having than it is if one begins with a general theme. If one begins with an idea and setting, but no characters, it can take a while to figure out who the players will be, what they want and need, and how their wants and needs will drive the idea to a conclusion. And so on.

This is where the writer’s personal preferences come in. Some writers like to surprise themselves, and for them, too much planning can kill a story stone dead. In extreme cases, all they can have to begin with are characters and a setting; they have to develop everything else as they write, including the central story-problem and especially the eventual resolution. (This working method sounds terribly, terribly tempting to those of us who need to do a certain amount of work before we ever sit down to type “Chapter One.” Going straight to the fun stuff and letting the characters develop it all sounds SO much nicer than working up a plot outline. If it’s not your method, though, it seldom is as easy as that.)

At the other extreme are the writers who need a detailed, step-by-step plan to follow – something that gives them a clear framework within which they can let their backbrain loose to be as wildly creative as it can within those strict limits. And strung out between those two extremes are the rest of us.

Personal preferences also influence where a writer goes to look for a plot. One of the most common ways is to examine the characters, looking at what each of them wants and needs, and at the internal and external obstacles preventing them from getting those things. Some writers make a list of things they want in the story, which can range from “bandit raid” to “heroine jilts hero at ball” to “use vines as metaphor” to “include family – little sister?” to “giant explosions!” Some look at what’s going on in their story-world – the politics, the natural disasters, the culture clashes – find something they’re interested in examining, and put together a plot by looking at ways of examining it.

All this sounds very general…and it is. There’s really no way I can think of to explain plot-construction that isn’t either very general principles, or else so tied to a specific story that it isn’t likely to be helpful to anyone but the author of that story. It’s always a balance between what the author finds interesting to write about and what is available from the story elements the author has. It’s kind of hard to write a comedy-of-manners if your idea is to have your character cast away alone on a desert island for 90% of the story.

By pcwrede | Posted in Writing | Tagged , | Comments (6)

So the house guests just left…

September 2, 2012 – 2:50 pm

I’ve had house guests for the past five days (my cousin stayed with me; my Dad stayed with my sister), and in the process of doing all the show-the-out-of-town-family-around stuff, doing the blog got kind of behind. Which is why I’m late and a bit disconnected with this.

Yesterday, we went to the State Fair. Minnesota has a really, really amazing state fair, and it was actually cool enough in the morning that my cousin who had knee surgery last year and my father who is 92 and sensitive to high temperatures could both walk around all morning (and into the afternoon) without any real problems. We saw the butter heads and got milkshakes at the dairy barn, then went looking for the bacon ice cream (didn’t find it), had honey ice cream at the agricultural building in the section devote to bees (if you’re seeing a pattern here, I’m not surprised; yes, my Dad is very fond of ice cream). We saw the crop art, (which is made by gluing different seeds to a board…and it is amazing the fine detail some people can get that way), went through the Arts & Crafts building admiring the knitting (me), the quilting (my cousin), and the woodwork (my Dad, with my sister going “…and you can make me one of those, Dad, and one of those, and…”

We all admired the pirate ship done in folded paper, but agreed that it was too fragile to survive in any of our respective abodes. We went through the Fine Arts building, where the piece de resistance was a marble bust of a Native American in full feather headdress carved and polished with amazing care and attention to detail. Lunch at the Lutheran Evangelical kitchen (because you could sit down) and then we took the sky tram back to the bus. Yes, that wasn’t even half of what was available, and it took us about five hours and by then we were all bushed.

It did get me thinking, though. I’ve lived in Midwestern farm states all my life, and even though I’ve always lived in suburbs and my stomping grounds of choice have been urban, I’ve always been aware of the vast acreage of corn and soybeans and wheat outside the small area in which I circulate. When I was growing up in suburban Chicago, if you woke up too early and turned the radio on, you got the farm report, even if the rest of the day it was a music channel playing rock and roll, and even though they don’t do that any more, there’s still that awareness – you can’t listen to a weather report (even in a normal year when there’s no drought) without hearing a reference to soil moisture and how the rain or sun is going to affect the crops.

One of my sisters now lives on the coast of Maine. When I visit her, there’s a similar awareness, but it’s about the fishermen, how the fish and lobsters are doing, and how the weather and other trends will affect them. In Alabama, my sister and nieces there hear about hurricanes and the tornadoes they spawn, as well as regular updates on the condition of the Gulf of Mexico.

All of this stuff is almost subliminal, but it’s part of what gives each area of the country its own unique feel, even in major cities. It’s not just that the weather is different; it’s a sense that what people do for a living, the things that feed the city both literally and symbolically, are different. Even in metropolitan areas that are so enormous that some of that sense of being in touch with more rural areas seems to have been lost, there’s still a difference in the feel of the city. New York has Wall Street and Broadway, and Los Angeles has Disneyland and the film industry; you can’t tell me that doesn’t make any difference.

But I don’t see a lot of this in fantasy or science fiction, unless it’s in a story that’s set in a real-world city that the writer happens to love and have a feel for. Even with a real venue like Chicago or New York or L.A., a lot of writers seem to slap the name on a generic urban setting (it’s a big city; you can tell because it’s got skyscrapers, freeways, lots of traffic, lots of people living in generic apartment buildings, and maybe a couple of ethnic restaurants). There often isn’t much attention paid to major-but-strictly-local events like the Minnesota State Fair (heck, half the time there isn’t much attention paid to planet-wide events like elections or their version of Christmas or Independence Day. Lois Bujold’s Vorkosigan books have their Midwinter Festival and the Emperor’s birthday, but I’m drawing a blank for other examples).

And there especially isn’t a lot of attention paid to that subliminal awareness of the stuff that ought to make every planet, and a wide variety of specific areas of each planet, unique. When I visit my sister in Maine, she goes down to the docks and we have fresh lobster for dinner; when I visit my sister in Alabama, she makes southern shrimp boil; when I visit my friends in New York they take me to dozens of tiny, phenomenal restaurants (ethnic, fusion, traditional…world cuisine, sort of). In Chicago, the first place we stop is for the hot dogs at Hot Doug’s. I took my cousin and my Dad to the State Fair for honey ice cream and cheese curds and food-on-a-stick, and if it hadn’t been so hot during the early part of their visit, I’d have taken them to see Minnehaha Falls and the Minnesota zoo.

Where do your characters take their visiting friends to show off their town/planet? And what do they eat that can’t be had anywhere else?

By pcwrede | Posted in Family, General, Writing | Tagged , , , , | Comments (11)

Eight million or so

August 29, 2012 – 6:11 am

“There are eight million stories in the naked city. This has been one of them.” –The Naked City by Malvin Wald

The thing about those eight million stories is, they’re all different from each other. And trying to make them be the same is a mistake.

This is something that a lot of people – readers, writers, and editors alike – tend to forget a lot. In online blogs and forums, in writing workshops, in how-to-write books, in reviews and reader discussions and recommendation lists, you find comments that boil down to the same thing: do it this way, not that way; do this kind of thing, not that kind.

These recommendations are particularly insidious – and confusing – when they focus on one specific aspect of storytelling to the exclusion of everything else. Because while characterization, plot, and worldbuilding are important to all stories, the balance among them does not need to be the same for all stories.

What set me off on this was a rant I read recently from a reader who disliked science fiction because it was “too technical” and didn’t pay enough attention to characterization to suit that particular reader. There were some good points made, but by the end of the rant I was left wondering why on earth this person wanted to read SF at all; it seemed to me that his/her taste would be better suited by mainstream or literary fiction.

The gadget story and the idea story have been staples of science fiction from the very beginning, and yes, in many (though not all) cases, doing justice to the worldbuilding, the idea, and the extrapolation may not leave enough room for the author to do detailed, nuanced, in-depth characterization (especially in a short story). Obviously, if you demand detailed, nuanced, in-depth characterization in your stories, you won’t find these stories as satisfying as less idea-heavy stories that use the extra space for characterization.

But there are plenty of readers for whom the in-depth characterization that the ranting reader loved is something that gets in the way of the stuff they love – the ideas and extrapolation and worldbuilding. Or the slam-bang action plot.

What I don’t get is why the plot-lovers and the action-lovers and the idea- and gadget-lovers can’t happily read the action-plot books and the idea-centered books, while the character-loving readers read the character-centered books. Instead, you see people ranting at each other because “science fiction needs to return to its roots in hard-science-based stories because science is what real science fiction is about” or “science fiction needs to pay more attention to character arcs because characters are what makes a story satisfying.”

From where I sit, these statements are equally nonsensical. What makes a story satisfying to that second reader is the character arc, but quite obviously, what makes the story satisfying to the first reader are the ideas and the scientific extrapolation, the “gosh-wow” factor. Or, to restate a writing truism, you can’t please everyone.

This debate has been going on for decades, but I think it’s entering a new phase. The advent of the Internet and the growth of ebooks makes it possible (not easy; possible) for work to find an audience even if it is not “commercially viable” (i.e., that won’t make enough money to be worth the time of a major publishing house). That’s the good news. The bad news is that the Internet also makes it possible for a small number of readers with decided opinions about what constitutes “good” books or “real” science fiction to browbeat authors and especially would-be authors into believing that whatever standard they’ve set is the One True Way, and that they can’t write without doing X (whether X is hard-sf developed ideas, character arcs, action-centered plots, or whatever).

Ideally, of course, one would have it all: ideas and worldbuilding and plot and character growth and a hero’s journey and chocolate cake with ice cream and sprinkles. But sometimes, that’s not the story you’re telling, and something has to be left at the bare minimum standard. Or to put it another way, every story has to have as much plot, as much background, as much characterization, as much symbolism, as much dialog, as much action, as much description, and as much of every other possible story element as that story needs. And sometime, a story doesn’t need much of one element at all.

Putting in things – even really basic story elements – that a story doesn’t need is a good way of ending up with a jumbled mess that nobody will enjoy reading. Figuring out exactly what things a particular story needs and doesn’t need is, of course, not easy. A lot of it is a matter of practice and taste, and chipping away every part of the stone block that isn’t an elephant (or a duck, or whatever it is one is carving).

There are hundreds of SF novels published every year; why insist that all of them do the same things in the same way? I don’t see any value in trying to turn the eight million stories into eight million versions of the same story. It kind of defeats the purpose of having eight million stories in the first place.

By pcwrede | Posted in Writing | Tagged , | Comments (8)

Critique vs. Collaboration

August 26, 2012 – 6:46 am

One of the questions I’ve been fielding for years, usually from knowledgeable non-writers, has to do with the similarity between being in a critique group and doing a collaboration. Sometimes it’s buried in the assumptions behind the question (“In what ways do your critique group members influence your work?”) and sometimes it’s right there out in front (“How is collaboration like working with a writer’s group?”), but there’s always this feeling that there’s some kind of similarity between collaborating with a writer and being in a crit group with that writer.

Well, I’ve been in several critique groups, and I’ve worked on a number of collaborations, some of which were written with writers I was in a crit group with and some of which weren’t (and only one of which has seen publication for various reasons, the most common of which is that most of the others never got finished, but that’s another story). And I’m here to tell you that being in a writing group is nothing like collaborating with another writer. Not in any way, not at all.
In a writing group, you’re essentially getting extremely articulate, well-informed, critical reader-reactions. You can take them into account, or not, as you see fit, because it’s your book. You always have the last word, and you don’t have to explain why if you don’t want to.

In a collaboration, it’s not just your book. Somebody else’s name is going to be on the cover, too, and they have a stake in it. If they make a totally ridiculous and inappropriate suggestion, you have to take it seriously and talk them out of it; you can’t just ignore it.  

A writing group has neither ability, nor power, nor right, to rewrite your words. A collaborator does, to some extent. A writing group can object loudly and long to whatever you want to do, but at the end of the day, you can just say “Too bad, I’m doing it my way,” and there’s nothing they can do about it. A collaborator can, if they feel strongly enough, pull the plug on the entire project.
A writing group is: you make a cake, and you bring it in, and give everyone a piece of it, and they tell you that it needs more vanilla or nuts or something. You can decide for yourself whether Jack is really on to something with his suggestion, or whether he just always wants more nuts in everything, even cocktail sauce, so you can safely ignore that comment.

A collaboration is two cooks making the same cake. If it’s a good collaboration, one of you sifts the flour and baking powder together while the other one creams the butter and sugar, and you get done twice as fast; if it’s not so good, you get in each other’s way because you’re both trying to do the same thing at the same time, or you end up with a cake that has no sugar because you each thought the other one put it in. It’s a whole different thing from critiquing.

The one place I do see some overlap between collaborating and crit groups is this: in order for either to work, the author has to have a certain level of both trust and detachment.

Crit group members have to trust each other’s critical judgment and motivations, or at best it won’t be useful (because the writers will rightly ignore any advice they don’t trust). At worst, the group is likely to rip itself apart being competitive. Collaborators have to have an even deeper level of trust in each other’s judgment and abilities, because they need to be able to thrash things out without worrying that the other is going to pull the plug on the project if they disagree about a plot twist or the necessity for a particular incident or character.

A writer in a crit group has to be detached enough to realize that one isn’t required to rewrite one’s book according to the guidance of a committee, while also being detached enough from the work to realize that maybe it does need to have Chapter 6 deleted and some tweaking done to the characterization. Similarly, collaborators have to be detached enough from the work that they don’t see every change the other collaborator makes as a threat or an insult.

Collaboration, however, requires more flexibility than a crit group. If all six members of your crit group agree that the cake needs nuts, you can nod politely and ignore them without a second thought. If your collaborator insists on adding nuts, you have to either think about it seriously or have a cast-iron reason for not adding them (like “I have a nut allergy that will put me in the hospital with anaphylactic shock if I have them anywhere in my kitchen.”)

By pcwrede | Posted in Writing | Tagged , | Comments (4)

An Illusion of Reality

August 21, 2012 – 6:26 am

Fiction is an illusion. It’s a made-up tale of something that never happened…and it’s the author’s job to get the reader to accept that illusion for the length of the story, however long the story is.

This basic unifying principle tends to get lost a lot, because so much fiction is mimetic – meant to imitate real life on some level. The more closely a piece of fiction imitates real life, the easier it is for the author to lose track of the fact that it’s still an illusion created with words, and moreover, that the illusion is a key aspect of every single component of the story.

Every time a writer breaks the illusion they’ve created, they give the reader a chance to break out of the story. It doesn’t matter what the break is – an inconsistent bit of characterization, an illogical-but-plot-necessary action, an inadequate bit of setup, wooden dialog, or even a line of narrative that sticks out because it’s clunkier (or smoother!) than all the prose surrounding it. Breaking the illusion gives the reader a chance to escape it.

Not every reader will take the chance when it is offered, of course. Some are less sensitive to certain types of illusion-breaks than others; some will ignore or not even notice illusion-breaks in one specific story-component. I have one friend who can happily remain immersed in a story that has gigantic plot-holes, so long as the prose is lovely and the characters charming, and another who will ignore the clunkiest prose as long as the plot hangs together.

That, however, is readers. Writers are another story. While it is a truism that no piece of writing will ever please everyone, most writers would really like to hang on to the maximum possible number of interested readers. (Note that I said interested readers. A writer may be very well aware that his or her stuff appeals only to a very small slice of the total reading public…but even so, they’d really like to grab and hang on to every single reader in that very small slice.)

One of the ways to hang on to readers is to give them very few places to escape the story, and that means maintaining the story-illusion on every level as much as one is capable of. Ideally, one would want to avoid both the clunky prose that would put off my first friend, and the giant plot-holes that would alienate my second. One doesn’t want to provide a really convincing and consistent illusion of a far-future war between the insectoid aliens and genetically-engineered humans, only to have a reader give up on the book because the dialog is wooden or the characterization inconsistent.

An that’s the first mistake a lot of writers make in this regard: they focus on one type of illusion-consistency (usually the worldbuilding or characterization) and forget that the plot, the prose, the dialog, the descriptions, the ways the characters interact, etc. also have to foster the overall story-illusion and be consistent with it (and, perforce, with each other). Writers will throw in really cool, well-worked-out worldbuilding details without stopping to think about how their characters would/could make use of them or what the effect would be on the plot if they did. They’ll work out an intricate and consistent political plot that doesn’t work because the characters they’ve created just wouldn’t do that (or rather, too many readers believe the characters-as-portrayed wouldn’t do it).

The second major error a lot of folks make is that they don’t have a feel or a plan for just what the story-illusion they’re creating is, so when they get to a tricky bit of dialog or plot or worldbuilding, they fall back on reality, even when reality is at odds with the illusion they’re trying to create. But not all fiction is mimetic, not even fiction that’s “present day” (or that was when it was written. Bertie Wooster and Jeeves wouldn’t be nearly as much fun if they weren’t comic exaggerations.)

Unfortunately for writers, reality is where we live. This means that it’s a whole lot easier to spot places where a flaw in the story-illusion also doesn’t match everyday real life than it is to spot places where imitating real life too closely is at odds with the story-illusion the author is trying to create. For instance: I read an SF story once in which the characters had really useful hand-held anti-gravity gadgets that they used for lots of plot-important stuff…but when they walked by the spaceport, the ships were being unloaded by workers using fork lift trucks. There are five or six really easy ways this could have been fixed…if the writer had noticed and/or thought about how a hand-held anti-gravity gadget would logically be used. But she didn’t notice, and I did, and it threw me out of the story.

Training oneself to notice this stuff is not easy. I learned a lot of it from being in a critique group with a bunch of very good writers who differed a lot in the types of illusion-breaking flaws they were sensitive to. Reading a lot of books of different types and differing quality with an eye toward noticing what does and doesn’t work also helps, but in my experience, it’s a lot easier if you have other folks to point insistently at the stuff you yourself don’t notice, until you get to the point where you do start noticing.

By pcwrede | Posted in Writing | Tagged , | Comments (5)

Characters, Plot, and Process

August 19, 2012 – 6:52 am

Writing processes are interesting things, not least because there are so many different kinds. Mine is particularly odd, in that I am neither a sit-down-and-wing-it writer, nor am I a plan-in-advance-and-stick-to-the-plan writer. I’m smack in the middle of the range, a plan-in-advance-and-then-periodically-throw-away-the-plan writer.

The reason why I periodically have to throw away the plan has to do with my characters at least 80% of the time. I’ll get to a scene that should be perfectly straightforward, one that I have a fairly clear idea about what happens, and in the middle of writing down the detailed version, one or more of my characters will refuse to follow the script in some way that throws the entire plan completely off the rails.

The best example comes from THE RAVEN RING. The original plot outline needed Eleret (my main character) and Daner (a young nobleman) to hook up with another character, a thief, just prior to their leaving the city at the end of Chapter 7. The part of the submission outline that describes the scene reads: “Next morning, Daner and Eleret start to leave the city. On their way to the gate, a thief named Karvonen tries to swipe Daner’s purse and is caught in the act by Eleret. Karvonen is chagrinned to realize that he has tried to rob a Cilhar, and offers to make amends. While they are still discussing it, a group of Syaski attack them. Karvonen helps fight them off and guides Eleret and Daner through some back streets to safety. The three leave the city together…”

The scene worked just fine, right up to the end of the Syaski attack, when Karvonen said “This way…” and pointed down an alley. At that point, Daner refused to follow him. He wanted to question the one attacker who’d survived the fight, and he didn’t like or trust Karvonen one little bit. The argument lasted just long enough for the city cops to show up and start demanding answers.

So Karvonen ran off alone, and I spent two chapters on Daner and Eleret dealing with the city cops instead of leaving town. By the time they had finished, they’d figured out a whole bunch of stuff they weren’t supposed to know yet, and run across a minor villain’s machination that they would have completely missed if they’d gone straight to the city gates.

Once they were finally free to leave, Eleret refused to go, on the very sensible grounds that it was silly to leave town with an unknown enemy after her, when if she stayed in town, she had the city guard and several other important and useful folks at hand for backup. So the entire rest of the plot outline was toast, because it depended on everybody leaving the city, and nobody did. Furthermore, since they stayed in the city, a whole lot of new characters cropped up, and the interactions with them changed everything again. Several times.

But it all stemmed from the way Daner reacted to Karvonen and to the fight and having a prisoner, and the resulting delay that kept them on the scene just a little longer. And I did not realize until I actually went to write the scene that he would react that way; it was only when I got all the way down into the details of who-said-what that it became obvious that he wasn’t going to behave the way I’d planned.

In one sense, yes, I could have forced the scene to work out according to the outline…but I promise you that if I’d done that, I’d have stalled dead three chapters later and not been able to progress any further. Because that scene would have been wrong.

And the reason it would have been wrong was because it would have contradicted and been inconsistent with a whole lot of background and personality stuff that I already knew about the place and the characters. Some of that stuff was already in the story (I’d already written seven chapters), and some of it was in my head, but what it boiled down to was that in order for Daner not to argue, he would have had to be a different person; in order for the cops not to show up, they would have had to be less competent than they were supposed to be; and so on.

Sticking to the plan would have required rewriting the entire previous seven chapters to make the characters into different people. And doing that would have thrown off the plan as well, just in a different direction, so it wouldn’t really have gained me anything. Either way, I would have had to re-envision the rest of the book. So I chose the way that meant I didn’t have to rip up seven chapters.

This is the reason why I rarely, if ever, write scenes out of order, even when I’m so positive something is going to happen that I can practically hear the dialog and smell the wood smoke as they chat around the campfire. Because nine times out of ten, if I write that scene, some earlier scene will change things so much that the “future” scene won’t happen at all.

Once in a great while, a scene does play out exactly as I’d hoped – the housebreaking scene in MAIRELON THE MAGICIAN was one I’d been thinking about for months, and when I got to it, it just rolled on wheels. But I’ve learned not to depend on that happening, not at all.

I’ve thought about this for a long time, and what I finally decided is that for some writers “what would really happen” is the plot – the specific series of events that bring the characters to whatever the final confrontation scene is. For me, “what would really happen” is whatever these particular characters would do, based on the background and personalities I’ve written for them so far.

This is particularly interesting because I’ve always thought of myself as a plot-centered writer. But it’s not the exact sequence of events that I want to hang on to – it’s the fundamental problem that is going to follow the characters around until they solve it. So it doesn’t really matter whether the characters follow the exact path I initially envisioned (though it is frustrating when they don’t). They still have to find a way to deal with the problem, and the story will still end up being a book.

Also, it will probably be a much better book, because if I didn’t realize the characters were going to do X until they did it, my readers are probably not going to complain about my plot being too predictable, either. Though I’m still a little jealous of writers who can stick to a plot outline…it looks so much easier than what I do (greener grass, I know).

By pcwrede | Posted in Writing | Tagged , , | Comments (10)

Formal and informal

August 15, 2012 – 6:11 am

First off, it has been brought to my attention (thanks, John!) that I need to tell my regular readers that The Far West is now out and available in hardcover. The e-book will be out in October, they tell me. On to the post.

Back in the day, one of my earliest beta-readers took me to task, at some length, for using the sentence “It was going to take her twice as long as usual” on the first page of Daughter of Witches. (“What was?” said the beta reader. “This pronoun has no antecedent!”) As you may guess from the fact that, thirty years later, I still remember this so clearly, I was not amused (and that person didn’t remain a beta reader for long).

At the time, I was quite clear that the comment was wrong-headed, but I couldn’t explain why, or figure out why the beta-reader got something so obvious so very wrong. Now, I can. That particular beta-reader had taken a basic college-level composition course, designed to pound the fundamental rules of formal standard English into the heads of freshmen, and internalized all of them without really understanding them. She’d also never heard of the expletive pronoun usage “when a clause or sentence lacks a plausible subject.” (Thank you, Karen Elizabeth Gordon.)

Basically, that particular beta-reader was applying rules and advice for formal writing to what was, at most, semi-formal. It was a bit like making a big fuss about using the proper fork at a barbecue.

Formal English is the standard we learn in school – all the rules of usage and syntax and grammar, and some of the less hard-and-fast rules for good style. The grammar-and-syntax rules are things like “The subject of the sentence must agree with the verb” (“He am” is incorrect, as is “I is”) and verb conjugations (“had went” is wrong, no matter how many words intervene between the two parts of the verb form). The stylistic rules are things like “Do not use contractions in writing” and “Sentences always have to be complete.”

These are the rules of basic English; these are the rules for writing an A-grade essay or college paper; these are the rules that most people in the adult world, from business to science to politics, are expected to have at least some grasp of (though judging from some of the business memos I’ve seen, there are an awful lot of people who don’t have a clue about apostrophes, much less proper sentence construction).

These are also the rules that people mean when they say “You have to know the rules before you can break them.” (And all that training in importance of those basic rules of English, I think, is what gives so many of us such enormous respect for and fear of Da Rulez of Writting, as promulgated by so many workshops, web sites, and wannabes. But that’s another rant for another day.)

The thing about all these rules is, there is a continuum for applying them. Different kinds of writing require different spots on the continuum from formal to informal. If you are writing a legal document, a science article, or a paper for your English class, the Chicago Manual of Style, current edition, is your best friend. If you are texting your sister about that movie you both want to see tonight, you can let proper sentence structure, punctuation, and even spelling go hang, as long as you’re sure your sister will understand the message.

I bet a lot of you are waiting for me to say that fiction falls more toward the informal end of the continuum, and therefore fiction writers can get away with not paying attention to a lot of those rules. Not quite.

Fiction does not fall on a point on the continuum at all. Fiction makes use of the whole range, depending on exactly what it is the writer is doing.

An analogy: English and all the various rules for using it, from “Keep it simple” to “Never open a book with the weather,” are tools in the writer’s toolbox. If you wish to build a wooden deck, you use a saw and a hammer and nails; if you wish to build a concrete block wall, you use a trowel and a mason’s hammer and chisel; if you wish to make a ladder-back chair, you need a lathe and a wood chisel and some sandpaper. The trowel won’t help you build the deck or the chair; the saw and the sandpaper won’t be much good for building the concrete block wall.

Most fiction is, indeed, somewhere in the middle of the formal-to-informal range. Dialog is usually less formal than narration (unless the book is in first person or the character who’s speaking is intended to be a prolix stuffed shirt). But every novelist gets to decide, at the start of every book, exactly where on the continuum that story needs to be…and the decision will be different from writer to writer and book to book.

This is where knowing the rules comes in. If you don’t know the rules for formal English, your writing is perforce limited to the more informal end of the range. It’s not so much a matter of “when to break the rules” as it is knowing what tools you want to apply – knowing whether you need a hammer and saw or a trowel and chisel.

 

By pcwrede | Posted in Writing | Tagged , | Comments (13)

Why This Is Not A Proper Blog Post

August 12, 2012 – 10:26 am

So this week has been crazy, yes, but it’s the last two days in particular that really did me in. Saturday in particular. It went something like this:

 

Wednesday

 

Me: Cazaril, that’s about six too many hairballs. I’m calling the carpet cleaners.

Cazaril: Hmmm? Did you know there’s a bird outside this window? I bet if you let me out I could catch him.

Nimue: <bored sniff> You have no claws and almost no teeth. You’d never survive. <thinks a minute> Yes, slave human, let him out.

Me: No. He has no claws and almost no teeth and there are raccoons and foxes around. I’ve seen them.

Nimue: Whatever. I have more important things to do. <naps>

Me: Right. Now I get to move the office furniture around and make sure all the computer cords are out of the way.

Cazaril: Yay! Cords! Can I play with the mouse?

 

Friday

Me: Cazaril, that is my knitting. It is not a cat toy.

Cazaril: What? You didn’t get out the fishing pole toy the very instant you came into the room. <looks pathetic> Without a fishing pole toy, I have to make my own fun.

Me: <sighs> <retrieves fishing pole toy from library, where it has mysteriously relocated><plays with cat>

Cazaril: You know, I really like it with all the furniture pushed out to the edges of the room like this.

Me: Enjoy it while you can. It’s only still like that because the carpet is still damp.

Nimue: Speaking of damp carpet, my favorite sun spot is still wet. Make a lap, slave human, so I have somewhere warm to sit.

Me: You’ve taken over the couch. Isn’t that big enough for one small cat?

Nimue: Lap. Now.

Me:…

Nimue: <naps>

 

Saturday noon

Me: Well, that’s the dishes and three loads of laundry and some work on the book done. I’m going to sit down for a minute with the iPad.

Cazaril: Weren’t you going to move the furniture back and write that blog post?

Me: I have a couple of hours yet before I have to leave for the concert. I can take a few min… Hey!

Nimue: You have made a fine lap, slave human. I will deign to sleep on it.

Me: I thought you settled on the couch.

Nimue: I am tired of the couch cushion.

Me: There are three of them.

Nimue: I am tired of all of the couch cushions. I have shed on all of them. Now I will shed on you.

Me: Don’t settle in. I’m getting up in a minute.

Nimue: That’s what you think.

Me: I’m bigger than you are.

Nimue: <stretches, unsheathing long, sharp, curved claws> Nice slacks you have, slave human. And nice furless skin under them. Be a shame if anything were to happen to them.

Me:…

Nimue: <naps>

Cazaril: Oooo, laps! Well, a lap. Can I share?

Nimue: <opens one eye> Try it and die. I have claws and you don’t.

Cazaril: Um, yeah. How about if I sit on the top half of the slave human?

Nimue: I suppose. <naps>

Me: Wait a minute, what… Mmmpf! Cazmpgh…furry mplbf…wah! Phew!

Cazaril: You don’t like me being a neck warmer?

Me: Neck warmers are supposed to wrap around the back of the neck, not the front. They are also and especially not supposed to interfere with breathing.

Caz: Oh, all right, I’ll move down a bit, but you have to shift your arm so I won’t slide onto the Nimmie-cat. She’s scary.

Me: Now look…

Caz: <purrs>

Me: Well, at least I have a hand free for the iPad.

Cazaril: You know, you could scratch my ears any time now.

 

 

Saturday, several hours later

Me: Aack! I have to leave for the concert! Move it, cats!

 

Saturday, midnight

Cazaril: You’re back! Finally! I’ve been sitting here for hours.

Me: I am fatootsed.

Nimue: Fatootsed enough to forget my medication?

Me: Not quite. Open up.

Nimue: <does imitation of furry eel and slides into miniscule opening under couch>

Me: Come back here!

Me: <several hectic minutes later> Gotcha! <pills cat> Now for bed.

Cazaril: Yes, come and make a warm spot for me to sleep on. I’ve been waiting days.

Nimue: Weren’t you going to write that blog post?

Me: Aaack!

Cazaril: It’s one in the morning and I want my sleeping spot. Do it tomorrow.

 

And that, folks, is why I have no proper writing blog post this morning.

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Accessibility in Fiction

August 8, 2012 – 6:04 am

First, a happy dance: NPR just put out a list of 100 Best Ever Teen Reads, and guess what ended up at #84? I’m scunnered. Happy, but scunnered. It’s a fabulous reading list; check it out. And thanks to anybody out there who nominated or voted for my books.

Accessibility is one of those aspects of fiction that lots of people talk about (especially in the SF field), but nobody ever seems to define adequately. (I hope it’s obvious that I’m not talking about physical accessibility here, that is, whether or not someone can get their hands on a book.) Furthermore, in some circles the term “accessibility” carries considerable baggage, usually because “accessible” is equated with “commercial” (as opposed to “literary”) writing, and is therefore automatically assumed to be undesireable, lowest-common-denominator writing.

I’ll do the rant about commercial vs. literary some other time; for now, let’s just mention that I don’t think accessibility has a lot to do with that particular argument. I also don’t think accessibility means a story can’t also be complex, layered, or nuanced.

On an individual level, accessibility seems relatively easy to recognize: any book that a particular individual can pick up and sail on through without wanting/needing some kind of outside explanation or pause for thought is accessible to them. Or, to put it another way, any book that contains barriers that block a particular individual’s understanding of the story is less accessible to them, and the more barriers there are, the less accessible the book is.

Expanding this definition at first looks easy: you just judge a book by the number of readers who find the book accessible on an individual level, and the more of them there are, the more accessible the book must be. Unfortunately, looking at it this way can lead to a number of problems, the first and most obvious of which is the “accessible equals popular/commercial equals bad/lowest-common-denominator” equation mentioned above.

This equation is a problem because hardly any writer I know aspires to write lowest-common-denominator fiction, especially if you phrase it that way, and no writer I know wants to write badly.

The second problem with the expanded definition is that it doesn’t recognize that a book can be highly accessible to one group of readers, while being virtually incomprehensible to everyone else. Advanced mathematics textbooks come to mind. (OK, they’re not fiction, but all of you got the point right away, didn’t you?)

The definition also doesn’t recognize that a book can be accessible (or not) on multiple levels. Take children’s books. Alice in Wonderland is, on one level, a splendid adventure for a 13-15 year old; on other levels, it’s an acid trip full of sophisticated word play, parody, mathematics, and political satire, or a parable about losing the wonders of childhood. Many, if not most, of the best and most lasting children’s books have multiple levels, some of which are not fully accessible to their most likely readers…at least, not on their first read-through at age eight or ten or fifteen. One of the reasons such books last is that they stick in the memory, and when one comes around, as an adult, to read them again (for oneself, or as a read-aloud to a child), one finds new levels have become accessible by virtue of one’s adult knowledge and experience.

So the definition is flawed, but it’s the best I could come up with. And it does allow for a way of looking at accessibility that can be useful to writers. One can examine the kinds of things that can be barriers to different individual readers, and try to take out (or leave out) as many of them as possible.

Most of the barriers I can think of – vocabulary, syntax, lack of the background knowledge or personal experience that the author is assuming his/her readers have – can be summed up as a level of unfamiliarity with something in the story that is uncomfortable to the reader.

This is a really tricky thing to judge, because one of the reasons readers read stories is to encounter new things – new characters, new plot twists, new places. Furthermore, every reader has a different point at which he or she gets uncomfortable with the “newness” of the story. The writer is left to balance between imitating “real life” so closely that the readers get bored (because they’ve seen it all before) and scaring off half his/her possible audience by throwing too much unfamiliar stuff at them, too fast.

The classic way around this problem, for fantasy, is the one used by both Alice in Wonderland and the first Harry Potter book. Both Alice and Harry begin the book as, to all appearances, perfectly ordinary children in the real, familiar world; as they move from the familiar to the fantastically unfamiliar, so does the reader. They don’t understand the new places in which they find themselves any better than the reader. The writer can then explain things gradually to the reader as the main character begins to explore and understand…or if the main character is floundering, at least the reader has some company in a frustrating situation.

Making use of multiple levels of accessibility is a little trickier. This isn’t like a plot-braid, where the writer can have a scene from Plotline A and then one from Plotline B and then go back to A. Doing that with different accessibility levels means that the reader who only gets Level A will be completely lost for an entire scene as soon as he/she gets to the Level B part. What one needs to do is mange both levels at the same time, in such a way that the reader who doesn’t get Level B will not even notice that he/she is missing anything unless someone else calls it to his/her attention.

An example: I did a reading of Calling on Dragons once to a mixed audience of adults and children, some of whom were quite young. I got to the point in Chapter 2 where the enormous white rabbit is explaining why he is late for something: “It runs in the family; my brother even got himself a big gold pocket watch, and he still can’t get anywhere on time.”

All of the adults and older children laughed. A six-year-old in the front row immediately looked around suspiciously and demanded in a piercing voice, “Why is that funny?” She obviously hadn’t seen or read Alice yet, so the joke wasn’t accessible for her…but the reference goes by quickly and looks like just the sort of throw-away line that somebody in this situation might say (even if the somebody is a giant rabbit), so if she’d been reading it alone, she wouldn’t have realized that there was a joke she wasn’t getting.

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Show and tell redux

August 5, 2012 – 6:30 am

“There are three rules for writing a novel. Unfortunately, no one knows what they are.”

-W. Somerset Maugham

I’ve had at least four questions from people in the last week or two about that hoary old piece of advice “show, don’t tell.” So even though I just did a post on it a few weeks ago, I decided to do another, somewhat different one.

Most of the questions boil down to “Where is the line between showing something and telling it? Does this or that count?”

To which I can only sigh, and shake my head, and respond, “IT DOES NOT MATTER.”

Neither readers nor editors keep a running mental checklist of how much an author “shows” versus how much she “tells.” Even if they did, their results wouldn’t be the same because a) people have different taste, b) there is no standard definition of “showing” vs. “telling” that everybody accepts, and c) the whole thing is something of a false dichotomy anyway, since on the most basic level everything in every story is being told to the reader by the author.

Most of all, though, whether something is “showing” or “telling” does not matter, because it is the wrong question. Labeling a sentence, paragraph, or scene “showing” does not make it an effective way of getting that information across to the reader in the context of the particular story the author is telling, any more than labeling it “telling” makes it ineffective.

Or to put it another way: the line between “showing” and “telling,” and the “best ratio of showing to telling,” are not matters of empirically defined, unchangeable fact like, oh, the speed of light or Planck’s constant; they are matters of art which (to the extent they can be pinned down at all) change from author to author and book to book. What matters is not whether an author can write some pre-defined Golden Ratio of showing to telling; what matters is whether whatever the author did works in the particular book she has written.

The answer to the question “How much telling (or showing) am I allowed to put in my book?” is like the answer to “How long should a person’s legs be?” That is, “Long enough to reach the ground” in the case of the legs, and “As much as it needs to make the book work” in the case of the writing.

Microwriting advice of the show-vs.-tell sort is, I think, meant to be of use at the revision stage, when one has a completed first draft that one knows has an as-yet-unidentified problem. One can then, in an attempt to identify the problem, go down the list of common, known problem areas asking “Is this that problem I can’t figure out?” Most of the time, the answer will be “no; I do it, but it’s not why Chapter 3 drags or why my readers lose interest in Chapter 7,” but occasionally one will smack one’s forehead and think “Doh! Why didn’t I see that?” And then one can fix it.

Unfortunately, what too many would-be writers do is turn this on its head. They go looking for problems that aren’t there. They don’t ask “Does this scene work? Does it feel right?” They ask “What’s wrong with this scene?”

Nitpicking what kinds of things constitute “showing” versus “telling” does not get one any closer to answering the real question, which is “Does this sentence (paragraph, scene, chapter) work in this book?” Of course, “Does this work here?” is a question that can only be answered one manuscript at a time; it is specific, not general, and no one can answer it without knowing where “here” is, i.e., without having read that specific manuscript. “Does this work?” is also, to a large extent, a subjective judgment; what works for one reader or editor will not work for another.

The things that work change from book to book and author to author…and from reader to reader. You have to develop your own feel for it, which is generally done by reading a ton of different books and noticing, on some level, what actually works or doesn’t work, and then by writing a ton of different things and noticing what works or doesn’t work.

Analytical writers may benefit from breaking down passages that work into pieces and figuring out why they work. I’m not quite sure how intuitive writers train their intuitions, but I’m pretty sure it involves the same amount of reading (and possibly even more).

I suspect this is why people keep asking me about where the line is and ratios and so on – because they want some objective (easy) way of measuring their writing skill. I’d be a lot more sympathetic if I didn’t think that a fair number of the folks who ask are looking for some way to game the system – if there were one specific, desirable ratio or a hard line between showing and telling, then they could twist this sentence a little bit, or use that technique, so that the sentence or paragraph falls on the “right” side of the line and their absolute ratio is correct, and this will magically make their manuscript saleable without actually changing it.

Sorry, folks; this won’t work. There is no system to game, and you can’t please everyone. Deal with it.

By pcwrede | Posted in Writing | Tagged , , | Comments (7)

Dialog in general

August 1, 2012 – 6:25 am

…“and what is the use of a book,” thought Alice, “without pictures or conversations?”

-Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland

Dialog occupies an odd place on the list of fundamental fiction-writing skills. It’s a component of nearly all fiction, but it’s not absolutely necessary (Hatchet and My Side of the Mountain, for instance, both have only one character present for most of the book; there is thus almost no dialog). Many people, like Alice, prefer dialog-heavy stories; others warn sternly about “talking heads” or sneer at dialog-heavy books as being “too easy” or a cop-out of some kind.

Yet dialog is one of the more flexible – and therefore complex – aspects of writing. Dialog can be used to describe people, places, and things, to convey the speaker’s personality and background, to advance or explain the plot, to provide background and backstory – anything that narrative does, in fact. The writer has to pay attention to all the normal concerns, like pacing, in addition to some things like keeping it clear who the speaker is, which is only a problem with dialog. And there are some things, like voice, that become more important in dialog because the writer is dealing with, potentially, as many different voices as there are characters.

In fact, the way characters talk inevitably tells the reader a lot about them. Consider the following untagged talking heads:

“I ain’t doin’ it, and that’s flat.”

“Have I requested any such thing of you?”

“Um, well, I don’t like saying this, but it certainly sounded to me as if you did. Ask, I mean. Though of course I may be mistaken; still, somebody will have to water the roses while you’re away – it’s such a lovely garden, it would be a shame to let it go – and I do think – “

“I ain’t watering no damned flowers. Sissy job.”

“No, no, there are ever so many men who are florists. It’s just like farming, really. Sort of. Isn’t it? Don’t you think?”

“Your defense of my position leaves a great deal to be desired. In the first place, garden maintenance has very little to do with being a florist, and in the second, I have still not requested that he perform any.”

“Good. You got some sense, anyways.”

Now consider what you know or can guess about these people just from their dialog…starting with how many of them are present in the conversation. If I did my job right, it should be pretty clear that there are three people talking, and it should also be clear whether A, B, or C is saying each line. The reader can, I think, make at least tentative assumptions about the relative social class and education level of each speaker, the fact that they aren’t complete strangers, how well they get along, and the general personality type of each. Also, one ends up with a pretty good idea of their various opinions of gardening.

That’s quite a bit to get out of seven dialog exchanges, and there may be some other things in there as well that I’m not noticing because I put it in unintentionally. Theoretically, one could tell many stories using only dialog (and I don’t mean just plays). Normally, though, untagged dialog is a technique that’s used only briefly, for reasons of variation or emphasis or pacing.

The point I wanted to make here, though, is twofold: first, that the most effective dialog is frequently the sort that could work without any speech tags at all (whether or not it has any) because each character has a unique voice that is obviously or subtly different from that of every other character in the book; and second, that the most effective speech tags, description, and stage business are the sort that add something more to that already-effective dialog.

If I’m over-simplifying, I’d say that there are two kinds of things that fall into that second category: stuff that’s already there in the dialog, and stuff that isn’t and can’t be in the dialog. In other words, you can take the personality or emotions or whatever that’s already implied by the way the dialog is phrased, and emphasize it with stage business or a speech tag: “I don’t – I can’t – oh, dear, oh, dear.” Her fingers twisted and untwisted the curtain cord in time with her stammering. This can be perilously easy to overdo, though, and overdoing it often weakens the impression the author wants to make, rather than strengthening it.

Stuff that can’t be in the dialog is, in part, fairly obvious. It’s possible to have one character describing a room or a landscape in detail in his/her dialog, but it’s difficult to justify doing more than once (and if one does do it more than once, it starts looking obvious and overdone pretty quickly). The same goes for commenting on another character’s actions.

Less obvious are things like contrasting tone of voice. “You are a rotten, scheming bastard!” seldom needs a speech tag of “he shouted,” but if the speech tag is “she said admiringly” it is absolutely required.

By pcwrede | Posted in Writing | Tagged , , | Comments (3)

Subplots

July 29, 2012 – 6:42 am

“subplot – a secondary sequence of actions in a dramatic or narrative work, usually involving characters of lesser importance (and often of lower social status).” – The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms

Subplots are one of the largest and most obvious differences between short stories and novels. There is rarely enough room in a short story, or even a novelette, for even one subplot, let alone several, while a novel often needs multiple subplots just to keep from feeling flat. Consequently, subplots are one of the things that a lot of short story writers have trouble with when they start writing longer work.

The first mistake a lot of these folks make is in looking at subplots as something they have to graft onto their main storyline, consciously and deliberately. They treat their subplots as a bunch of independent semi-stories that have to be brought together like different threads being tied up in a knot, all of which remain discrete and separate strands.

But subplots are more like the leaves on a long-stemmed rose – they’re part of the same plant, and they feed the stem and the flower. They can illuminate different aspects of the main characters or the central plotline; reinforce or reinterpret the theme of the story; expand the scope of the world beyond the a narrowly focused storyline or put human faces and feelings on a broad, sweeping storyline; or provide the reader with insight and information that they otherwise wouldn’t get. Subplots are part of what makes novels rich and gives them more depth.

The second mistake a lot of folks make is in thinking that they have to know exactly what the reason is for the presence of each subplot, what purpose it serves, and what it adds to the story, before they’re allowed to put it in. “This looks fun and interesting” isn’t good enough for them.

Fiction is supposed to be fun and interesting. Oh, some writers do create their subplots very consciously and mechanically: “Let’s see, the main story is an action-adventure plot focussed on bringing back the magical doohicky from the End of the World.  I want the hero to get married at the end, so I’ll need a romantic interest and a romantic subplot; stick that into chapters 3, 7, 11-12, 15, and of course the final resolution.  And I think I want a little more emotional depth; better come up with something internal that he can search for  — like courage or a brain  — at the same time he’s hunting up the magical doohicky…” There’s nothing wrong with working that way, if it works for you. By the same token, though, “fun and interesting” is plenty enough justification for throwing something into the first draft. You can always take it out or make adjustments when it comes to the revisions phase.

And for most of the writers I know, subplots grow organically out of the events in the story, like the leaves growing out of the stem of the rose. That is, the writer doesn’t think “Ah, Chapter Three; time to introduce a subplot” and then deliberately insert a scene that adds a potential love interest or a political complication. What the writer does is more like, “Well, here’s my heroine, racing down Main Street to escape from the Evil Assassin Wizard, and she runs into this guy and fast talks him into hiding her…hey, he looks interesting, and they seem to be hitting it off. Maybe I’ll keep him around. I wonder what he does…oh, he works for the EPA. I bet they have regulations for magic pollution…” And next thing you know, the writer is juggling the ramifications of romance and politics as related to magic, in addition to the original plot.

I’m one of the latter sort. My subplots usually come about because I’m looking at everyone in the book, not just the main characters and the main storyline.  Everybody has a story, including all the supporting characters.  Some of their stories are necessarily tangled up with whatever my main storyline is, and their lives will be affected by whatever is going on (though, presumably, not so dramatically affected as my main characters, or else they’d be the main characters instead). 

And I look at levels:  there’s the action plot, the events that are happening; and then there’s the emotional plot, what those events mean to the main character.  There’s what’s happening in the “big picture” (“Hey, we got a major riot down by the docks.  Send out the City Guard and put a couple magicians on the alert…”) and there’s what’s happening up-close-and-personal (“Ye gods, that maniac just tried to brain me with a dead fish!  Where do I find a safe spot until this riot is over?”).  There’s what everyone thinks is going on (“Someone is trying to assassinate the King!”) and there’s what is really going on (it’s actually a convoluted plot to get the Royal Guard beefed up at the palace, so that somebody can steal a pair of seven-league boots from the hunting lodge more easily).

And I look at relationships:  there’s what the heroine is doing under orders for her king; there’s all the stuff she’s been trying to prove to her father since forever; there’s her mixed feelings about her kid brother the lame wizard; there’s the bratty obnoxious witch she has to work with even though they hate each other; and so on.

A lot of this stuff just ends up being background, or not getting into the book at all.  But sooner or later, some of it ties into whatever the main thrust of the book is, or I decide I really like one of the minor characters and want to see more of him/her, and presto, there’s a subplot.  Though by that point, I don’t think of them as separate subplots.  They’re just part of the story, like leaves on a rose.

By pcwrede | Posted in Writing | Tagged , | Comments (8)

Micro and Macro

July 25, 2012 – 9:55 am

I apologize for being a bit late with this today.

Revising a first draft is one of those things that sounds as if it’s easy to talk about until you try…and then once you start digging into it, you start wondering how it’s even possible to do, let alone define well enough to talk about.

The first problem is that “first draft” means different things to different writers. Among the professional writers I know, first drafts range from something that looks more like a collection of notes and dialog bits (which needs massive work just to get to the point where someone else can read and understand it), to a “talking heads” thing that reads a good deal like a screenplay, to an almost-clean manuscript that needs only a little polishing.

And just as there is a range in what the first draft looks like, there’s a range in what’s wrong with it. Some writers are brilliant at the word-by-word, sentence-by-sentence level – the microwriting stuff – but have serious problems at the macro level – pacing, plot, structure, all the big picture things that affect the story as a whole.

These two things don’t necessarily match up. That is, the writer with the extremely clean and nearly-polished first draft may actually be the one whose microwriting needs more work, while the writer whose first draft looks more like an extensive plot outline than a manuscript draft may be the one with the structural or plotting flaws that need attention. Or in other words, the stuff that looks and feels as if it comes easily may be the places that need the most work.

Or they may not. This is where it helps for writers to be able to back up and take a clear, objective look at themselves and the work they’ve done…and if one can’t manage that, one needs to have critiquers whose judgment one trusts, who are able to point out that yes, the sentences are clunky again or that no, the plot doesn’t make sense. But a good critiquer also has to be able to roll her eyes and remind the writer that he always gets paranoid about the plot being senseless when really, it’s just fine and it’s the microwriting he should worry about (or vice versa).

This alone can drive a writer crazy. You need to have confidence in your work, but you also need to see its problems; you need to believe in your critiquers, but you also need to know when not to follow their advice. It’s a constant balancing act.

But then we come to the second problem, which has to do with keeping the revision balanced. The writer has to stay aware of both the micro and macro levels at once (or at least remember to look rapidly from one to the other). Because it is remarkably easy to focus so much on one half of the revision process that, in the course of fixing something, you mess up something on a different level that was working just fine before.

What I mean is the sort of thing that can happen when one or two words in a sentence get fixed: that’s enough to wreck the rhythm of the sentence, but one doesn’t always notice that it has unless one rereads the whole sentence with conscious attention. And even if the revised sentence works as a stand-alone, the new rhythm may throw the paragraph off. The fastest method I know of for finding this stuff is fairly time-consuming: read it aloud.

The other, related thing to look at (besides sentence rhythm) is the flow of the story. This can be difficult — the writer already knows what the sequencing is supposed to be and how all the pieces are supposed to fit, so it’s harder to see where there are missing or overlapping bits than it would be for someone who is not so immersed in the story. Rereading helps; reading aloud helps; practice helps; being aware of the problem helps; “cooling off” periods help.

Developing this kind of awareness is especially important when one is moving paragraphs or scenes or chapters around. It is perilously easy to develop continuity problems at the macro level because one added a phrase to a clunky sentence to make it flow better without realizing that one had already said almost the same thing three paragraphs earlier…or worse yet, one cuts or moves something without realizing that it established some information that’s used later, and now it doesn’t make any sense when Character A refers to it on the next page, because whatever-it-is hasn’t happened yet.

Awareness is the main thing. You can’t fix a problem that you can’t see, and you are unlikely to see it if you don’t look for it at all.

By pcwrede | Posted in Writing | Tagged , , | Comments (6)

Planning battle scenes

July 22, 2012 – 6:13 am

Back when I was writing my first novel, I got somewhere in the middle and realized I needed to write a battle scene. Not just a bar brawl or a fight between six of the good guys and ten or twelve bad guys; an actual clash of armies. Furthermore, the battle plan had to make sense. I immediately panicked for a couple of weeks; when that didn’t help, I eventually had to sit down and figure out how to do it.

I was reminded of this last week when a good friend started panicking over her first battle scene. So I thought I’d do a post on How To Write Battles When You Don’t Know Anything About Battles.

The first thing you do is to learn something about strategy and tactics. This means hitting the library; there are tons of good books on the subject. However, when I hit the library, back when, I read several books on strategy and tactics and emerged no wiser than before, because even the basic ones were too advanced for my meager level of knowledge on the subject.

So I hit the children’s section.

Seriously, if you really, truly don’t understand basics terminology (which was at least half my problem with the adult-level “beginner” books), the children’s section is the place to go. I think I worked my way down to middle-grade books before I found something comprehensible, and then started working my way back up the age groups. It was exceedingly useful.

The second thing I did, which I also highly recommend if you can manage it, is to find someone who actually knows something about military strategy – a wargamer, a military history buff, someone who’s actually been in the army or navy. Then you ask them to help you plan the battle, and take copious notes on what sorts of questions they ask you, because those are all the things you need to know in order to figure out what the battle is going to look like.

The very first thing my military consultant asked was “What kind of terrain are they going to be fighting in?” And he didn’t mean “plains” or “hills” or other general descriptors; he wanted a map showing the rivers, woods, hills, city walls, etc. in the immediate vicinity of the battle, along with basics like what the weather had been like and where the sun would rise and set.

The next thing he asked was “What kind of forces does each side have?” This included numbers, equipment, and capabilities for every segment of the armies from cavalry and infantry to archers and magicians. This is moderately complex even if the armies are all “regular” troops of the sort you’d find in real life, because you have to decide whether the army is balanced between infantry, ranged attackers, and cavalry, or whether it’s predominately one kind of troops with few or none of the others. When you have multiple species involved – aliens, elves, dwarves, etc. – or futuristic technologies, it goes from moderately complex to insane.

Which is why most writers, especially those of us for whom the military stuff is not a major interest (to put it mildly), have to plan things out in advance.

For writers, the next thing you want to know is how you want the battle to come out. Is it a clear win for one side or the other? A win, but with major casualties to some portion (or all) of the winner’s army? Indecisive? You also want to know where you want your heroes/protagonists to end up, plot-wise, at the end of the battle, so that you can design the fight to put them where they need to be.

As regards that last, battles are usually a lot easier to manipulate than bar fights, because, as the author, you have a lot more ways to make things go the way you want them to. You can manipulate the size of the armies, their composition, the supplies and training each side has, the communications they have, how well each side knows the terrain they’ll be fighting on, whether it’s been raining or not. You can turn the battlefield into a sea of mud that will bog down the attackers’ cavalry or provide strong, gusty winds that play hob with the defenders’ archers. You can arrange for reinforcements to arrive early, late, or not at all. And so on.

Once you know what you have to work with and where you want to go, you get to sit down and design two battle plans, one that makes sense for the attackers and one that makes sense for the defenders, given the kinds of forces each of them has and what they know about the terrain and the troops that are facing them. The thing to bear in mind here is that neither commander is going to have any idea what the other intends to do unless there are spies of some sort involved, so it’s really unlikely that at this point, the two plans will fit together neatly.

In fact, you don’t want the two plans to fit together neatly. Each commander is going to be trying to do things the other one isn’t going to expect and be ready for, and they each ought to succeed at least some of the time.

That’s the next bit – when you set the battle in motion and work out how things happen on the macro level all along the line of battle. Diagrams are REALLY useful for this part.

Then you figure out where in the fighting your character(s) are going to be, and how much of this they’re going to know as it happens. If one of your viewpoints is a general, standing on a hill or a battlement trying to get an overview of the battle so he/she can order troop movements, then you’ll probably get to explain a lot of the macro-level movements; if your only viewpoint is a grunt down in the trenches, the battle scene will have to be limited to the grunt’s actual experiences, and your reader won’t find out how things played out overall until afterward, when the grunt finds out what happened. But if you don’t know that the left flank was under heavy attack and nearly collapsed before reinforcements came up from behind and scattered the attackers, the grunt’s experience of the battle more than likely will not fit properly when the big picture story comes out.

Which is why you want to go through all this planning, because unintentional stupid military mistakes on the part of the author really, really annoy a lot of readers. (This is not a problem when it’s obvious that the commander is supposed to be an idiot, but you still have to do all the planning, because there are some varieties of stupid military mistakes that simply will not be made by even a very stupid commander, so long as that commander has any military experience at all. The writer needs to know what these are and how not to do them, so that the fictional stupid commander can be realistically stupid in all the right ways.)

By pcwrede | Posted in Writing | Tagged , , , | Comments (7)

Random bad advice

July 18, 2012 – 6:19 am

One of the many things nobody warned me about when I was getting started was all the self-proclaimed “experts” who would show up and start giving me advice about my writing career, whether I wanted it from them or not.

By and large, these are not people who have any actual connection to the actual book-publishing industry; the closest any of the ones I’ve met came was having edited their PTA newsletter. They fall into three basic categories:

First, there are the ones who are in love with the sound of their own voice. They’ll claim to have contacts of some sort – they know editors or agents, or they do a lot of work “in the industry” for their job. They can sound really plausible, partly because they are so very, very sure of themselves.

Every once in a while, one of these has some sort of credential that makes him (all the ones I’ve met have been hims) sound even more plausible. He’s a professor of English Literature, for instance, or he met Mr. Famous Author at a party once. The thing that lets you know that you can safely ignore pretty much anything he says is this: he doesn’t actually want to hear about your book, much less read it to see what sorts of problems you might actually have. No, he wants to get straight to the giving-advice part. Fortunately, this sort usually doesn’t much care whether or not you follow all his advice, as long as you’re willing to spend hours listening to him give it.

The second variety is a sort of status-leech. These people are not capable of writing to a publishable standard, and they know it, but they desperately long to be associated with writers and writing. So they try to horn in on everyone else’s career, so that if somebody is, eventually, successful, they can say “I helped” or “I knew her when” or even “He couldn’t have made it without me.” They do listen when you describe the story, but their advice is either so basic or so obvious that it’s not much help. And if they do happen to know some editors or agents, it’s a safe bet that the editors/agents find them deeply annoying, and will not look kindly on any of their recommendations.

The third variety didn’t start showing up until I was five or six years into my published career, and they are much less obvious, at least initially. They don’t offer unwanted advice or try to horn in; they behave very politely for a while; and then, when I’m convinced that they’re nice, normal, socially-ept people, they ask in the most unexceptionable fashion if I will give them some advice about their writing. If I agree, they then spend three hours telling me all about their great ideas and fabulous plans, without ever allowing me to get a word in edgewise. What they want is a captive audience, and perhaps, once they have dazzled me with their unique ideas, an offer of collaboration (or at the very least, an introduction to my editor and agent).

The real trouble with folks like this is that they prey on the not-yet-published. The easy way to avoid them, at least at first, is simply not to tell anyone you don’t already know and trust that you are writing anyone, but this is a lot easier said than done, especially if one is looking for first-readers or a crit group, or if one just happens to be the sort of person who likes to talk about one’s writing. And there is always the (very slim) chance that whoever-it-is really does know what he/she is talking about – just because the unwanted-advice-givers I’ve met were all talking through their hats, it doesn’t mean everyone like that is.

This is the part that really sends beginners into a tailspin. Here is this person, sounding authoritative, maybe even with some credentials to back up her opinions…but she’s obnoxious and the advice she’s giving is not at all what you want to do with your story. But what if she’s right? She’s so sure of herself…

At this point, what you do is ask yourself 1) If you follow her advice, and it works, will you have the sort of success you want? If you’re working on a sweet children’s bedtime storybook, and she’s telling you to write a gritty R-rated screenplay about vampires and zombies, will you be happy if you switch and that gets bought? If he can guarantee that his editor friend will buy a niche mystery about fly-fishing, will you be happy publishing that instead of your far-future space opera? In other words, are you in this to tell your stories, or are you in this to get a publication credit for something, anything, doesn’t matter what?

Assuming that the answer to #1 is yes, you would have no regrets whatever about abandoning your current work forever, so long as it gets you published, the second question is 2) Can you stand knowing, for the rest of your life, that you are indebted to this obnoxious person for your instant success? If the answer to this is also yes, then there’s not much downside to taking the advice.

If, however, the answer to one or both questions is no, then you have determined that you don’t want to take this person’s advice. You then have three possible courses of action: 1) listen until they run down, thank them, and dismiss them from your mind as you walk away, 2) bluntly explain that you’re not interested in their advice, or 3) turn the situation around on them.

#1 is for people who are well-intentioned or whom you don’t want to alienate. #2 sometimes becomes necessary to get rid of repeat offenders (some folks simply will not quit pestering you until you say bluntly “I do not want your advice; I will not talk about my writing with you; I don’t want to hear any more of your stupid ideas. Bug off.”).

#3 works best on people who really do have some experience with real live authors, but who are clearly not giving you any useful advice, and who are not-giving it at tedious length. What you do is, you role-play a wannabe. When Mr. Know-It-All offers to show your work to an editor (after you’ve revised it to his specifications, of course), you wave your hands vaguely and say “Oh, the book really isn’t ready to show anyone yet. Actually, I only have an outline and the first scene written…or maybe it should be a Prologue, I haven’t decided. But I’d love to talk more when it’s a bit further along.” Then you never bring it up again. Should he ask how it’s coming, you say “Oh, I’ve been so busy lately…” and look guilty. If this doesn’t make him drop the question like the proverbial hot potato, I guarantee that he has zero experience in actual publishing, and you can safely ignore his advice ever after.

By pcwrede | Posted in Writing | Tagged , | Comments (4)

Show vs. Tell

July 15, 2012 – 6:25 am

“Show, don’t tell” is one of the two most misunderstood and misapplied pieces of writing advice that are commonly given to new writers (the other being “write what you know,” but that’s a different post.) It’s most commonly trotted out in relation to characterization, where “show” generally means “dramatize.” That is, rather than saying that George is both mean and a miser, the writer “shows” him complaining about his restaurant meal in order to avoid leaving a tip, turning the heat down on a bitterly cold day, kicking a puppy, etc.

One ought never, according to this advice, write something like “Oh! But he was a tight-fisted hand at the grind-stone…a squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous, old sinner!” That would be bad writing. Fortunately, nobody told Dickens that, or we wouldn’t have that lovely description of Scrooge.

There are two things one needs to be sure of when this sort of advice is trotted out: first, that the writer receiving the advice understands what the phrase really means; second, that the person so blithely giving the advice understands what it means. When one is clear on both of those, one can then decide how one wants to apply it in one’s current project, and/or whether to take the blithely given advice to heart.

The first problem I nearly always run into when I’m arguing with someone about this is that they don’t understand that “Jake stumbled out of bed, shut off his alarm, and sleep-walked through his morning routine” counts as “showing” just as much as saying “Jake stumbled out of bed in the general direction of the alarm. He got the alarm shut off after three tries, then shuffled into the bathroom. He turned the shower on and brushed his teeth while the water warmed up. He had time for a longer one than usual this morning, which almost made the damned alarm worthwhile. He was contemplating, in a groggy sleep-soaked fashion, whether to shave or pretend for the rest of the day that he was growing a beard, when the scent of coffee penetrated to the bathroom.”

The two descriptions have different levels of detail, but they are both “showing” what Jake is doing in the morning. The “telling” version is “Jake had a hard time getting up in the morning.” In other words, “telling the reader” means giving the reader the conclusion they would draw, without giving them any of the actions or thoughts or descriptions that would lead them to that conclusion.

None of those examples is inherently “better” or more desirable than the others – not the first, short dramatization; not the longer, more detailed dramatization; not the “telling” version that skips the whole boring getting-up-in-the-morning description. They are only more or less desirable in the context of the particular story the writer is telling.

And context means the whole context: pacing, characterization, plot, setting, theme, etc. If Jake having trouble getting up in the morning is eventually going to be important to the plot, the writer would probably choose one of the dramatized version – letting the reader come to a conclusion by observing the character in action is almost always more vivid and effective than just summarizing things. If the pace has been headlong and a breather would be welcome, the writer might choose the longer version; if the pace needs picking up, the writer might choose the “telling” version and look for a place later on to confirm the judgment by dramatizing Jake getting up some other morning. If it’s not plot-critical but adds to the theme or atmosphere in some important way, the shorter dramatized version might work best (assuming pacing considerations don’t enter in). It depends on context.

“Telling” the reader something is most obviously important when the writer needs to move lightly over a long period of time. “The long, dangerous trip to Byzantium took them six months, and they were nearly captured by pirates twice, but they arrived safely at last just in time for the coronation” lets the reader know that a) six months have passed, b) they were probably fairly eventful months, but c) the events aren’t particularly important to this story. Telling is also highly useful for background and plot-related exposition where there’s so much necessary material to get through that doing it all in dialog would be implausible, would slow the pace to a crawl, and would take far too many pages.

One of the first places people go wrong in applying the “show, don’t tell” business is in making it an absolute blanket “rule” that can never be broken…meaning that these writers use much less effective methods for certain things in order to avoid the evil expository lump. So once you have decided that what you are doing is, in fact, “telling” or exposition, you then have to decide whether it is a) necessary in this place, and b) effective in this place. If it is neither, then yes, it should probably be cut or rewritten more dramatically. But if it is merely ineffective-but-necessary, then what it needs is to be fixed, not to be cut.

By pcwrede | Posted in Writing | Tagged , , | Comments (15)

Reading like a writer

July 11, 2012 – 6:00 am

Back in the day, one of the pieces of advice I got that drove me crazy was “you have to learn to read like a writer.” I didn’t know what that meant, and no one ever really explained it to me. Evidently it was one of those things that was so obvious that everyone but me knew what it was.

Then one day I was stuck on a scene involving several characters talking to one another. I had no clue how to handle the speech tags (I didn’t call them that, because I didn’t know what speech tags were; I just knew that everything I tried looked wrong).

So I went to my bookshelf and pulled down one of my favorite books, more or less at random, and turned to a section of dialog. I remember paging around a bit, looking for a spot where three or four characters were all talking together. And when I got to it, I didn’t just read the scene; instead, I looked at the lines of dialog…specifically, at how I knew who was saying what in each one.

The first thing I noticed was that most of the lines did not end with “he said” or any equivalent. Some had the “he said” in the middle, or at the beginning, instead of at the end; some didn’t have a “he said” at all. Sometimes the characters did something or thought about something in the middle of a dialog paragraph, and quite often when they did, there were no “he saids” anywhere around. And so on.

I came away from that page with a much clearer idea of how to do what I wanted to do with my dialog. Much later, I realized that that was what people had been talking about when they said “read like a writer.”

What “reading like a writer” means is asking “what is this writer doing here?” or “how did the writer get that effect?” and then going and looking for the answer. It means you look at the words and phrases, at the way sentences and paragraphs are put together, at where the paragraph breaks and scene breaks are and what sort of sentences come before and after them, at the structure of scenes and chapters, instead of relaxing into them and just reading them for whatever effect they have.

It means paying attention to more than the story. You notice when the writer strings together chains of parallel structure, or how often (and exactly where) they use sentence fragments, dip into a character’s thoughts, provide graphic details (or don’t). You pay attention to rhythm and word choices, to italics and tenses, to what’s in dialog and what isn’t, to what’s implied and what’s explicit.

Most specifically, you look at what is on the page, not what you think is on the page. More than once, I’ve had someone tell me quite positively that something was or wasn’t in a particular book, and had to show them the text in order to convince them that they were wrong. More than once, I’ve been wrong myself, and not realized it until I looked at the text and saw that X wasn’t in the story at all (or was there all the time). And you can’t build yourself a solid toolbox of useful writing techniques if you’re remembering the effects of the words on the page, and not the actual words that are there.

This is a lot harder than it sounds. I’ve had people inform me flat out that James White does not use any infodumps in his “Sector General” books…and had those same people come back suitably embarrassed after looking at the actual text and realizing that White nearly always uses a long narrative summary in the middle of one of the early briefing scenes, so as to get very lightly over the description of the case history of whatever medical problem the main characters will face. They hadn’t registered it as an infodump because White transitions into and out of the narrative summary so smoothly (and makes the information so interesting).

Yet moving seamlessly into and out of a long, interesting narrative summary is exactly the sort of thing I, as a writer, want to learn how to do…and that means that I have to learn to see what he did at the words-and-sentences level, so that I notice that hey, there’s a big infodump in the middle of this scene! And then I can ask, how did he do that without me noticing when I was just reading? And then I can maybe figure out exactly what he did, so that I have a chance of duplicating the effect some time when I need it.

I don’t read like a writer all the time. Mostly, I read to enjoy what I’m reading. But every so often I come across something in another writer’s work that makes me stop and ask myself, “How did he/she do that?” And then I go back to see if I can figure it out. Most of them don’t stick in my memory; it’s become a habit.

By pcwrede | Posted in Reading, Writing | Tagged , , | Comments (8)

The First Veil

July 8, 2012 – 6:00 am

It’s pretty easy for most writers to get about four chapters into something based on an interesting idea/situation/character/plotpoint and a bunch of mysterious happenings. But somewhere around Chapter 4, one hits what has been variously termed “the wall,” “the first veil,” or “the first event horizon.” Sometimes it’s as early as Chapter 2; sometimes it’s as late as Chapter 7 — but basically, it is the point at which the author has to really understand what is going on: how the character got into this situation, what all these mysterious interesting hints the author’s been dropping for the past four chapters actually mean and how they tie together eventually, who is behind the scenes pulling strings, where the story is going and how.

Most of the writers I know of use one of three basic methods to get past this point: 1) Power on through; 2) Composting; 3) Plot Noodling.

Powering on Through works best for those writers who like to sit down with a blank sheet of paper and just make it up as they go along, and for those who actually do know “what happens next” but who for some reason just don’t want to be bothered writing it down. (For me, it’s usually because the sticky bit that comes next is going to be an explanation of something or a transition scene, and I purely hate writing explanations and transitions. Other writers have different stuff on their hate lists.) Powering on through is just what it sounds like: you sit down and write something, anything, to get past the sticky bit.

The trouble with powering on through is that if you aren’t the sort of writer who makes it up as they go, or don’t know what happens next, it may not get you anywhere useful. You can end up with two or three chapters that are totally wrong, and have to go back and pitch them, which is painful. It’s a particularly bad idea if what the story actually needs is more development, which is what the other two methods do.

Composting is my term for letting the story sit in one’s backbrain until it’s ready to grow things. This is the one where you stick the story in a drawer or file somewhere and work on other stuff. Periodically — every couple of months, say, or if you’re really busy, maybe once a year — you pull it out and look at it and see if it’s ready to be a story yet. You do this in order to gently remind your backbrain that it is supposed to be working on this story. This one works well for people who have so many possible stories to do that they don’t have to develop any one in particular because they’ve got plenty of other ones to work on in the meantime, for people who get bored easily by working only on one project, and for people who like to maximize production time by rotating from one story to another while they’re waiting.

The trouble with composting is that there’s a tendency to end up with a whole heap of WIPs or UFOs (UnFinished Objects)…and no finished projects. This problem seems to be particularly common for relatively new writers, but it can strike anyone. It helps to go back over everything in the compost pile once every month or two, like stirring a real compost pile to keep it cooking. It also helps to be really determined about working on things, and perhaps to try the next method from time to time.

Plot Noodling basically involves taking the idea you have and the chapters you have written and looking at them very carefully, poking at them and turning them over and looking for loose threads and rough edges and incomplete background and generally trying to figure out what it is you need to know in order to move on. “What it is you need to know” is, quite often, backstory: How did this character get into this mess? What have all the other characters, especially the villains/antagonists, been doing? What is the goal each of the main characters is trying to head for (and it may be “I want to get home and not be bothered with swords in stones and saving the country!”)? What are the possible things that can interfere with each of these goals (especially the main character’s)?

Sometimes, one also needs to clearly define what constitutes “winning” the situation for the Hero — or, to put it another way, what sort of ending you’re heading for. Is the ultimate resolution going to be the wedding, or the defeat/death of the dragon, or the main character wrestling with temptation (again) and winning at last? Some writers need a goal to aim for; others are better off with a general sense of direction.

Plot Noodling often works best if you can find someone who is good at asking you the sorts of questions you haven’t thought about asking yourself, but you can learn to do it all on your own (and in my experience, at least, there aren’t a whole lot of people who are good at asking the right sorts of questions without considerable training, so you may be best off planning to do it yourself). It can often be profitably combined with Composting — you poke at the story and make some notes and think about the obelisk or the missing sword or the international political situation (the one in the story, not the real-life one), and then put the manuscript away for a couple of days or weeks. When you bring it out, you poke at it some more, have a brilliant idea about a useful minor character and a possible plot twist, make more notes, and set it back to compost some more.

Eventually, it reaches the point where when you pull it out, you realize that all the pieces are there and it’s ready to grow roses. (One of my friends refers to this stage as “the story reaching critical mass,” but that works for nuclear bombs, not compost…) And then you sit down and write it, until you hit the next wall or the next veil and the process starts all over again.

By pcwrede | Posted in Writing | Tagged , , | Comments (7)

Query letter bad examples

July 4, 2012 – 6:00 am

A quick recap from last time: the primary principles to apply when writing a query letter are that you keep it short and specific; that the story synopsis matches the book; and that you are not coy in the manner of back-blurbs. Just in case somebody isn’t clear on this, here is a bad example of a query letter story synopsis:

“Having been tragically orphaned at the age of ten, Dorothy Gale has been sent to live with her only relatives on a farm in Kansas. She has great difficulty in adjusting to her new life, and to her dour new guardians. As her aunt and uncle have no children and the farm is miles from the nearest house, Dorothy is lonely and friendless, a situation that will be familiar and appeal to many of the children who are the intended readers of this book.

A year after arriving at the farm, a freak storm separates Dorothy from her aunt and uncle and she has to make her way back to the farm on her own through many strange and startling adventures. My nieces love this book and it is their favorite bedtime reading. My wife and her book club think it would make a great movie! I’m sure you’ll want to see the manuscript and find out just how Dorothy gets home again!”

The book in question is “The Wonderful Wizard of Oz,” and all of the problems with it are ones I’ve seen multiple times in real-life query letters: spending the first paragraph on backstory that is not even mentioned anywhere in the book (I made almost all of the details up); leaving out all the specifics the editor would really want to know about the actual book (Oz, the wicked witches, the Scarecrow, Tin Woodman, and Cowardly Lion, etc.); offering the opinions of relatives; attempting to tease the editor into finding out “just how Dorothy gets home.” This query makes the book sound like a modern “problem novel” about grief and adjusting to a new situation; the “freak storm” sounds as if it’s the beginning of the climax of the book, instead of happening on page 4 (which is where it is in my copy).

A somewhat different wrongheaded query letter might look like this:

“It’s the middle of the Napleonic Wars, and the British army is raising militia to combat a possible invasion. One such regiment is quartered in the sleepy village of Meryton, where officer George Wickham makes the acquaintance of the Bennet sisters. Both Elizabeth and Lydia are drawn to him, but it is Lydia who follows when the regiment is moved to Brighton. While older sisters Elizabeth and Jane struggle with their own romantic problems back home, Lydia and George must choose between duty and their hearts, and more lives than their own will be affected by their decision.”

The problem with this query is, again, what it leaves out. None of the facts in it are wrong; they’re all in the book. It’s just really misleading – it makes “Pride and Prejudice” sound as if it’s focused on the military angle, with George Wickham as the main character. And it’s being coy about the ending again, but since the whole “plot summary” is about a subplot, it hardly matters. You could actually get a decent novel out of this summary, but it wouldn’t be the one Jane Austen wrote.

What you want in a query is specifics:

“When a cyclone carries Dorothy off to the magical Land of Oz, her one desire is to return home. On the advice of a good witch, she embarks on a journey to the Emerald City to find the wizard who may be powerful enough to send her back to Kansas. Along the way, she rescues a Scarecrow and a Tin Woodman, befriends the Cowardly Lion, is attacked by wolves, and barely escapes from a deadly field of poppies.

Finding the wizard sends Dorothy and her friends on a new quest – to retrieve the broom of the powerful Wicked Witch of the West. Even when she is captured, Dorothy remains determined. In the end, she defeats the witch and returns triumphant to the wizard, only to discover that he is a fraud. Dorothy must embark on a third journey, to find the good witch who can tell her the secret of the magic slippers that will take her home to her aunt and uncle at last.

This is not, perhaps, the very best possible example of a story summary suitable for a query letter, but I’m a novelist – if I could say it in less than 100,000 words, I wouldn’t have written the book in the first place. For those of you who want more examples (and a different set of eyes), I refer you to Miss Snark’s blog posts on cover letters. (Miss Snark is, alas, no longer posting.)

Oh, and one other basic principle of query letter story summaries: boiling down fifty or a hundred thousand words or more into two paragraphs is going to sound stupid and thin no matter what you do. Accept it. Your query letter isn’t competing against other people’s rich, deep, fascinating novels; it’s competing against other query letters. All of which also have to boil their rich, deep, fascinating novels down to two or three stupid paragraphs. So don’t worry about it.

By pcwrede | Posted in Writing | Tagged , , | Comments (6)

Query letter principles

July 1, 2012 – 6:00 am

Lately I’ve been getting a lot of queries about, well, queries. So I figure that it’s probably time to do a post on them, even though I feel like I’ve been talking about the “boring business stuff” an awful lot lately.

Anyway, the first thing I’m going to say is that I am explicitly talking here about queries for NOVELS. You do not query for short stories; short fiction is a quick enough read that it’s as much work for the editor to answer a query letter as it is for her to read a submission, and reading the submission on the first go-around means the editor doesn’t have to deal with it twice, so that’s what they prefer.

The second thing is that a cover letter is not a query letter. If you’re submitting a manuscript, whether it’s short or long, the cover letter should basically say “Dear Editor: Here is my story of XXX,XXX words. I hope you like it. If you don’t want to buy it, here is a SASE. Yours truly, The Author.” You can fiddle with the phrasing, and if you have relevant credentials you can put in a line or two about them (but not a four-inch list of semi-prozines or every creative writing class you ever took), but that’s basically it.

A cover letter does not include a story synopsis. It does not need one; the actual story is attached. It also does not include warnings about your lawyer or rave reviews from your friends and relatives (unless one of your friends/relatives is somebody like Stephen King, J.K. Rowling, or the owner of the publishing company). This ought to be obvious, but from the rant I heard last weekend from an editor, apparently it is a much more obscure and difficult concept than I thought.

Query letters are just that: a one-page letter containing a summary of your story and any other relevant information that you send to editors/agents in hopes that one of them will ask to see the manuscript. Query letters also should not contain warnings about your lawyer or rave reviews from friends, though they do generally contain a paragraph or two of story summary.

A query letter is a sales document. This is where most of the people who have trouble with query letters get off on the wrong foot. The first common problem is that the author does not think of the query as a sales document at all, or does not think much about what that actually means. Instead of telling the editor the things the editor needs to know, he/she talks about what he/she found exciting about writing the book.

Sometimes, this is fine – if you’ve written an action-adventure, and what got you interested and excited and happy about writing it was the exciting face-off at the end between Darth Vader and Dr. Demento, describing what you’re excited about is exactly what you want to do. If, however, what got you interested was the really neat backstory and/or worldbuilding that you did, or the nifty looped-and-braided structure you came up with…well, this is the equivalent of going up to someone who has a bad headache and saying “I have these really pretty red pills – they’re cubes, very unusual, and you just don’t get this nice shiny red color in pills” when what the person you’re talking to wants to know is, “Will they get rid of my headache and how fast?”

The other really common mistake would-be authors make is to make the query letter sound like the back blurb on a book. This is understandable: the goal of both the query letter and the back blurb is to get someone to read the book, right?

Not quite. The goal of a back blurb is to get the reader to buy the book for himself, so that the reader can spend an enjoyable couple of hours reading it. The editor isn’t going to be reading the ms. for personal enjoyment. What the editor wants to know is not “Is this something I might enjoy reading, to the tune of seven or eight bucks?” but “Does this look enough like something other people will buy from my company that I’m willing to spend my precious time evaluating it?”

You can have written the greatest domestic comedy-of-manners since Jane Austen, and it won’t sell if you send it to a line of action-adventure novels. You can, of course, write a query letter that makes your domestic comedy-of-manners sound like a clone of The Hunt for Red October, but as soon as the acquiring editor gets a look at the actual manuscript, she’ll bounce it.

Therefore, the first principle of writing query letters is that the summary you give needs to reflect the actual book you have written. Also, notice that I keep saying “story summary” rather than “plot summary.” A good many writers see “plot” and automatically think “action plot,” even if the central, A-level plot is a political, intellectual, or emotional one. They end up describing the “B-level” kidnappings and car chases, which are really maybe 10% of the story and not the center of the book, because that’s “the plot,” when the story is about two brothers trying to reconnect after not seeing each other for twenty years.

A corollary of this is to start where the book starts and end where it ends. If the protagonist is a starship captain with an interesting background, you don’t start the query with two paragraphs about the interesting background that all happened before Chapter One, nor do you waste valuable words explaining how many children the protagonist has after the book ends, nor describing their adventures that might make great sequels when/if you get them written.

The second principle is to be as specific as possible (given that you have, at most, two or three paragraphs to fit everything into). “After many adventures” is not specific. “After being kidnapped, taming a dragon, and rediscovering the Library of Alexandria, among other things” contains specifics without going into so much detail that the mid-book adventures crowd out the other important stuff. Do not be coy. “In a shocking twist, Joe Hero must face his greatest fear to overcome his nemesis” is neither shocking, nor specific, nor even interesting…and could apply to about 9 million slush pile manuscripts, all but about three of which aren’t worth the editor’s time. The synopsis should describe your specific book, clearly enough that the editor can tell that it isn’t one of those other nine million.

Boiling 90,000 to 150,000 or more words down into two or three paragraphs is, of course, hard. Next post, I’m going to provide some examples, so you can see how it works.

By pcwrede | Posted in Writing | Tagged , , | Comments (3)

4th Street 2012

June 27, 2012 – 6:08 am

I spent last weekend at 4th Street Fantasy convention, which was one of the best I’ve been to in a long time. The only trouble with 4th Street is that almost every single minute, you were faced with, for instance, the choice between a fascinating conversation about folklore in the con suite, a fascinating conversation about astronomy (with solar telescope) outside on the patio, a fascinating conversation about viewpoint in the lobby, and a fascinating panel on politics in fantasy worlds (which did not go off topic into real world politics, despite it being an election year). The topics and the people conversing kept changing, but they were always fascinating.

The thing that 4th Street always does for me, and this year especially, is to remind me how much fun it is to talk to people who are real, deep experts in their particular field. Writers tend to have an extremely broad range of knowledge, because we have to, to make stories work, but it’s not that deep expertise that you get from digging into, say, the development of Han dynasty bronzework for twenty or thirty years. It is a Good Thing for me to be occasionally reminded of just how much I don’t know.

Friday night, a bunch of us went to the Chinese restaurant around the corner – Elise Matthesen (art jeweler extraordinaire), Ellen Klages (auctioneer an author of The Green Glass Sea), two Swedish visitors who’d read one of my Swedish translations (it was really nice to find out that the traslation was good), and me. We had a yummy meal and lots of good wide-ranging talk, and of course at the end, they brought us fortune cookies. I was busy talking and waving my arms around as usual, so I ended up with the last of the fortune cookies. It read:

“You will become an accomplished writer.”

I laughed so hard I couldn’t even read it out to the rest of the table. Still, it’s good to know I’ll get there eventually… 

I don’t think I’m going to try to talk about the panels, but the list of books that got recommended, by panel topic, is here: https://sites.google.com/site/4thstreet2012/ along with a couple of good quotes from various people. I forsee another bookshelf (for the new to-be-read acquisitions) in my future…

Most of what I remember clearly is conversations – there was a really good one about ways of looking at viewpoint, several what-are-you-working-on-now things that got off into various eras of history and how much most people don’t know about them, one on families and accounting, one that I overheard part of that seemed to be about color perception and anthropology. LizV and I missed two panels and the lunch break talking about query letters and synopsis (which I will be addressing more in future posts, by request).

It’s interesting to me that the more stripped-down 4th Street gets (no GOH, no dealer’s room, no art show, no media room, etc.), the more intense and interesting the discussions seem to get. It isn’t for everyone, but for me…well, there’s nothing else quite like it. And there were scores of people I wanted to talk to and didn’t get the chance – even in three days, you just can’t get around to an in-depth conversation with 100+ different people.

Ah, well – there’s always next year.

By pcwrede | Posted in General | Tagged , , , | Comments (4)

Useful and unuseful lists

June 24, 2012 – 6:30 am

The other day I was browsing writing web sites and came across one that made me blink. Every post for months had a title like “Seven Dialog Mistakes” “Five ways to a Great Scene” “Ten Resolutions for Career Writers” “Twelve Dynamite Endings.”

OK, I get that a lot of people really, in their heart of hearts, want a quick-and-dirty paint-by-numbers approach to writing a great book. I also realize that a lot of people don’t want to read more than one screen’s worth of blog post (or so several of the How To Do A Great Blog web sites claim). Lists of tips and tricks and common mistakes seem like a perfectly reasonable way to get at both things at the same time.

The trouble is that, in my experience, a short list of tips or mistakes just doesn’t work very well when it comes to helping people improve their writing. (I can’t speak to the thing about sticking to one screen per blog post, except to note that I obviously don’t follow that advice, either.)

Writing a short story or a novel is complicated; every bit of it affects everything else. It’s easy to focus down on one particular aspect of writing, like dialog or endings, and dash off a list of dos and don’ts. But in an actual story, it’s not so simple. That #3 “Don’t…” from the dialog list, for instance, may be both thematically appropriate and more perfectly in character than any of the alternatives, not to mention being the ideal way of moving the plot along. #10 “Do make sure you…” from the characterization list may be impossible to make work, given the constraints of the style and setting.

But there are several sorts of lists that I find extremely useful. They just don’t have anything much to do with writing technique.

The first set of lists is stuff I use during the first draft to save time. For instance, I have one possible-next-book that involves characters from several different imaginary countries/backgrounds. I want their names to sound as if they come from different places with different languages and naming conventions, and I don’t want any of them to be token representatives of their cultures. That means that eventually, when I’m making up secondary characters like the barman and the traveling salesman, I’m going to need more names that sound as if they came from the same places, and maybe a few others from completely different backgrounds.

So I make a set of lists: six to ten male and female names that would come from each country, along with six to ten family/clan/house/tribe names for each country that mix and match well with the personal names I’ve picked. When I need the traveling salesman, all I have to do is decide which country he’s from, and pick from the list.

Or I make a list of place-names so that when they pass by that small town, I can grab a name on the fly. I’ll also make lists of things I’ve mentioned in passing, like local foods or animals I’ve invented, so that I can use them again if I need to (and so I can make sure that I didn’t name the fish stew “kishta” and the tiger with antlers “kitsa” – far too confusing, not to mention the potential for tragically horrible typos…)

The other kind of lists I find useful are checklists of things to do during the first round of revisions. There’s an ongoing, ever-changing list of all the phrases I tend to overuse, so I can do a search-and-destroy on them easily. There’s a list of things to check for consistency and continuity (I have a really bad habit of changing the spelling of a character’s name by one letter somewhere in the middle of the story, or calling someone “Anthony” for two chapters and then switching to “Andrew” because I couldn’t be bothered to look up which male-name-beginning-with-A I’d used, and I was sure it was Andrew…)

In other words, all the lists I find useful have to do with the content of the story: names, places, descriptive phrases, etc. That’s what I need to keep track of when I’m writing, not the five dialog mistakes that I may or may not be making in any given scene, or the twelve dynamite endings that don’t fit the story I’m trying to tell.

By pcwrede | Posted in Writing | Tagged , , | Comments (8)

The Question of Voice

June 20, 2012 – 6:47 am

Recently, I was approached by a budding author who, after the usual polite introductory remarks, said, “Ms. Wrede, I’ve been wondering – how did you develop your voice?”

I muttered something relatively innocuous and vague, and stewed about it all the way home. Because while I’ve put a considerable amount of thought into the voices of my characters (especially when I’m writing first-person), I haven’t ever thought much about my voice.

So I did what I usually do when somebody comes up with a question like this: I did some googling. After an hour or so of browsing through articles full of solemn (and mostly contradictory) advice on the vast importance of voice, I did what I should have done in the first place. I pulled out my trusty Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms, which defines “voice” as “a rather vague metaphorical term by which some critics refer to distinctive features of a written work in terms of spoken utterance…assessed in terms of tone, style, or personality.”

Which begs the question: if “writing voice” is simply a vague and convenient metaphor, why do so many people seem to think it’s vastly important?

Answer: I have no clue.

So I did some more thinking, and what I thought about was the foundation of the metaphor. That is, one’s actual spoken voice.

Most people I know don’t spend a lot – OK, any – time developing their speaking voice. They just talk. The voices they have are a combination of genetics and life experience, of the accents (regional, cultural, ethnic) they heard growing up and the ones they’re living with now. And all those voices change over time, depending on lots of things (not least of which is whether the person has a horrible cold or not).

Yet most of those spoken voices are easily recognizable. When I pick up the phone and hear “Hi!” or “Hello” or “Hey,” I know right away which friend or family member is on the other end of the call. None of them had to work at having a unique voice. It just happened.

The people who do work on their speaking voice tend to be either those who have some particular difficulty with speaking, like a speech impediment, or those who are doing something more advanced with their voices than most people need to – actors, singers, public speakers of all sorts. All of whom, I point out, already have a perfectly good voice for doing normal, everyday talking. They don’t need to start doing exercises to improve their speaking voices until they want to project to the back row of the theater, or play a character whose speech is different. They certainly don’t need to “find their voices.”

At this point, I went back through some of those articles on writing voice. About half of them offer specific advice on “developing your writing voice.” The top three items always seemed to boil down to 1. Read a lot, 2. Write a lot, and 3. Do/don’t imitate other writers (about half the advice-givers thought that imitating a bunch of different voices would help; the other half thought it would just muddy the waters). In other words, general stuff that most writers and would-be writers are going to be doing anyway, the same way most people talk and listen in the course of their normal lives.

The only real difference I can see is that there’s a large contingent of folks out there who are really worried about “developing their writing voice,” in a way that normal people do not worry about developing their speaking voices. Like the beginning writer who came up and asked the question that started me off on this post.

It therefore seems to me that the best thing for the majority of writers, especially beginners, to do is to stop worrying about voice unless a) they have some specific identifiable problem with their writing voice that, like a speech impediment, needs exercises in grammar or syntax or whatever to fix, or b) they are trying to do something with their writing voice that’s more advanced than most stories or most writers need. Pastiche and parody come to mind as a possible equivalent of actors pretending to be other people; there are almost certainly other things like that that I’m not thinking about.

Mostly, though, “authorial voice” is one of those things that may, just possibly, be useful for critics to talk about, but that (in my not so humble opinion) mostly just gets in the way if you worry about it while you’re writing.

By pcwrede | Posted in Writing | Tagged | Comments (10)

Long-range thinking

June 17, 2012 – 6:46 am

Back when I was getting started, I had the privilege of talking to a number of long-established SF/F writers and writer/editors – Ben Bova, Gordon R. Dickson, L. Sprague de Camp, et al. One of the things I noticed sort of vaguely at the time, but really didn’t think about all that much, was the emphasis all of them placed on managing the backlist.

Part of the reason I didn’t think about it much was because at that point I didn’t have a backlist; I had one novel just barely in print, another in production, and a third under submission. I didn’t think any of that advice could possibly apply to me.

Fast forward thirty years, and I am now the hoary Old Pro with a much greater appreciation for what “managing the backlist” means, why it’s important, and why I should have been thinking about it a lot more carefully all those years ago. It’s my turn to pass the advice along for the latest generation of writers to ignore for a while. Hopefully a few folks will remember at one or more critical points in their careers.

First, a definition: for the purposes of this post, the backlist is all of a writer’s published work that’s over two years old, whether it’s still in print or not. Two years is kind of an arbitrary cut-off point; I picked it because if you have a hardcover/softcover deal, the book usually gets some sort of sales push on its initial publication in hardcover, then another push when the paperback comes out a year later. By two years in, it’s definitely no longer “frontlist.” If the book is a paperback original, it probably ends up being part of the backlist by one year after publication.

For a career writer, the backlist is important because it’s a potential source of free money, or almost-free money. You, or your agent, have to do some work to track it and to re-sell it, but compared to the amount of work it takes to write and sell a book in the first place, this is minimal. And these days, the backlist is even more important than it used to be, because of all the interesting new avenues for selling that the Internet has opened up, podcasts and e-books being only two of the most obvious.

One of the things this means is that an awareness of the importance of one’s eventual backlist is highly desirable from very early in one’s career. Everything that gets published will eventually be part of the backlist. If all you think about up front is the current part of the deal, figuring you’ll worry about managing the backlist when the title becomes backlist, you’re moderately likely to miss things that affect what you can do with a backlist title until it’s too late to fix them.

Example 1: Years back, a friend of mine wrote a trilogy that was canceled after Book 2. Annoyed, the author took the third book to a small press publisher, so that the current fans of the trilogy could finish it. The small press did a bang-up job, and everyone was happy…then. Ten years later, the author had to turn down a lucrative offer from a major publisher for the whole trilogy, because the small press publisher still had the rights to Book 3 and was perfectly happy selling 10 copies per year, and so wouldn’t revert the rights. If the author had been thinking about long-term possibilities, he could have made sure that the small press contract contained a reversion clause that would have made things simple – after ten years, or upon notification by the author if sales are less than 50 copies per year, or whatever.

Sorcery and Cecelia was originally published in 1988 as an “orphaned” book – the editor who bought the manuscript had left the company and there was no one at the publisher who wanted to push the book. It didn’t do well, and went out of print fairly quickly. Caroline and I got the rights reverted right away, as a matter of principle, even though there seemed to be no likelihood whatever that we could ever re-sell the title (lousy sales of the first edition tend to make other publishers less than eager to acquire a title).

Ten years later, things had changed and we not only sold Sorcery and Cecelia to a new publisher, we also sold two sequels, The Grand Tour and The Mislaid Magician. Ten years after that (i.e., now), we were able to get them all issued as e-books by Open Road media.

The point about all this is that one never really knows what is going to happen in the future. The market is constantly changing; so are the readers. People whose books were once wildly popular are now completely unknown (quick! Who was #1 on the NY Times Bestseller list for the week of June 21, 1953? Annamarie Selinko’s Desiree, #1 for 21 weeks, that’s who. Google is a wonderful thing), and books that died when they first came out become sneak hits months or years or decades later.

A writer who keeps this in mind will aim for long-run flexibility, so as to keep as many options open as possible, for as long as possible. There’s no guarantee that one won’t make mistakes; it is practically certain that one will. If one thinks about the long range possibilities, though, one can at least make conscious decisions: “I would rather have a small but steady stream of e-book sales now than hold off e-publication on the chance that I’ll get a better deal in five years” works, for me, much better than “I want an e-book NOW!” and then, five years later, “Wah! If I’d only known there was a chance of this, I’d never have put out that e-book!” or “I’m holding out for a big deal” and then, five years later “Wah! Nobody’s interested in buying this; I could have had five years’ worth of e-book sales if I’d only done an e-book back then.”

By pcwrede | Posted in Writing | Tagged , | Comments (7)

Estimated taxes

June 13, 2012 – 6:08 am

It’s June 13 and in the U.S., the first set of estimated tax payments for 2012 are due at the end of the week.

And if you’re making money from your writing, and you have to pay U.S. income taxes, you need to be aware of this. You may not owe estimated taxes, but if you do owe them and don’t pay them, you’ll end up with an estimated tax penalty on top of the taxes you already owe.

The U.S. government requires everyone to make income tax payments that total to the lesser of: 90% of your current year’s tax liability, OR 100% of your last year’s tax liability. More on this in a minute.

If all you have is a normal day job, these payments are withheld from your paycheck and you don’t have to worry about them. If you are totally self-employed, you have to make estimated tax payments. If you have both writing income and a normal day job, you have a choice: you can have more withheld from your regular paycheck, or you can make estimated tax payments to cover your writing income. The catch is that a) figuring out how much more to withhold can be tricky because of FICA (see below) and b) you have to keep a close eye on your writing income and adjust the withholding at your day job if you don’t want to over- or under-pay, and this tends to be a nuisance and make employers unhappy about the extra paperwork after a while.

Estimated tax payments are due unevenly, on April 15, June 15, September 15, and January 15 (for the prior year). There are three philosophies about estimated taxes. The first holds that it is better/cheaper to keep careful track of your current year’s income and make sure to pay 90% of the taxes you expect to owe, even if it means you have to adjust the payments in the middle of the year because you have a sudden influx of income. People who go this route need to keep careful records, so that if the IRS asks why you delayed payment of half your taxes until the fourth quarter, you can prove that it was because you got a ginormous advance payment in December – i.e., you didn’t have that income until the fourth quarter.

The second idea is that tracking and predicting income so carefully is too much trouble, so it’s better to pay 100% of last year’s income taxes in four equal payments. Sure, this means that some years you’ll overpay and others you’ll underpay, but it will probably even out…and it’s an easy, certain way to be positive that you aren’t going to face any nasty surprise penalties at the end of the year.

The third is that it depends: if you have a big drop or a big rise in income, you go for the “90% of actual taxes owed this year”; if your income is pretty much the same, you calculate your estimated tax payments based on the “100% of last year’s taxes” figure.

Note that “current year’s tax liability” for purposes of estimated taxes includes FICA (Social Security) withholding as well as income tax withholding. As a self-employed person, you owe both the employee half of FICA withholding (7.65%) and the employer half (7.65%), for a total of 15.3% right off the top. Whichever way you choose to calculate, do not forget about this.

Also note that the IRS does not care whether you take your advance in copies, or whether you sell copies and use that money to buy more copies. As far as they’re concerned, it’s all income (and if you’re selling copies straight to readers, you probably owe state income tax, too. And sales tax, for which you need a sales license.)

If you’re right at the start of your writing career, have a day job, and get minimal income from writing (say, a few hundred bucks from short story sales over the course of a year), the easiest route is probably to adjust your withholding at your day job. Eventually, you’ll want to switch to estimated tax payments. In my own case, my first sale was a novel, which meant I got an advance, which was a big enough bump that I made estimated tax payments right from the start.

Deciding which way to handle the taxes on your writing income is more a matter of situation, personal temperament, and budgeting skills as it is of picking a “right” way. If you know that keeping tabs on your writing income and adjusting your estimates will drive you absolutely crazy, go for the “100% of last year” method. If you make a huge sale in the first quarter, and you know yourself well enough to know that you are going to be VERY unhappy if you have to pay all the taxes on it come the following April 15, make estimated payments that are more than 100% of last year. If the huge sale was last year, and this year your writing income will be half what it was then and you don’t have money sitting around, use the “90% of this year’s actual taxes” to figure out your estimated payments. You don’t have to pick one method and stick to it forever.

From a cash flow standpoint, the first two estimated tax payments (April 15 and June 15) are usually the hardest: April, because it comes at the same time as your annual tax payments (though it’s not so bad if you’re getting a refund that you can apply), and June because it’s a mere two months later, not a full quarter.

Taxes, including estimated taxes, are one area that is sufficiently important, sufficiently tricky, and sufficiently changeable that I recommend finding a good accountant sooner rather than later. Keeping up with the changes in the tax code is a full-time job, and I already have one of those. Exactly when you head to an accountant is up to you; if you’re only making $329/year in short story sales, it’s probably not worth it; if you have $50,000 in advance money coming in this year, it’s long past time.

By pcwrede | Posted in Writing | Tagged , | Comments (3)

Old ways of looking at viewpoint

June 10, 2012 – 6:32 am

One of the really interesting things about older how-to-write books is their take on viewpoint. Several don’t mention it at all; others give it barely a passing glance. When they do talk about it, it’s from a completely different angle from that taken by modern how-to-write authors.

For starters, none of them seem to consider the question of type of narration (that is, first person or third person) to be an aspect of viewpoint at all. Out of seven books from the 1950s or earlier, only two deal with the question of “grammatical form” explicitly in the section on viewpoint. One of them spends roughly two pages discussing “the logic of the use of the first-person observer,” but spends nearly as much time on the question of person in the sections on “distance” and “plot.” The other book dismisses the whole question in half a page with the admonition “Use the grammatical form with which you feel most ‘at home.’”

Instead, these books talk about viewpoint as being more an aspect of the author and less about the book or story or characters. The emphasis is on what the writer’s attitude is and what the writer wants to say; the viewpoint is the angle or perspective from which the writer chooses to say it.

By this interpretation, there are really only two basic viewpoints: from outside the story, which is synonymous with omniscient, and from inside the story (i.e., seen through the eyes of a character), which covers everything else. One of my favorite books further subdivides the “inside the story” viewpoint based on whether the author’s chosen character is a major character who is directly involved in the action, or a minor character who is more or less passively observing the action.

A slightly different classification of viewpoints (from the appendix of the second book) separates viewpoints by Internal (i.e., inside the head of the main character) and External (the story is told by someone who is observing the events, whether that someone is the author or a minor character in the story). The textbook author notes that either first-person or third-person may be used for either type of viewpoint, and then proceeds to the meat of his discussion of viewpoint.

Both books focus their discussion of viewpoint mainly on when and why an author would prefer an internal vs. an external viewpoint, with particular emphasis on when and why an author would choose a minor character as the angle from which to tell the story. The what and how of viewpoint – the technical difficulties and techniques of writing first-person or omniscient, for instance – don’t enter the discussion at all, not even in the book that’s supposed to be all about technique.

I couldn’t even find the term “viewpoint character” in either book; they talk about the “observer author,” “objective narrator,” “authorial angle,” and so on instead. It’s kind of disconcerting. On the other hand, there’s something to be said for the older approach, which pretty consistently takes the view that all these technical tricks are something the author can and should figure out for him/herself, through careful reading and analysis of a variety of great stories. It would have driven me crazy when I was starting to learn my craft, and really wanted to be told what was possible and how to do it, but at least it doesn’t give the impression that there is One Right Way to handle everything.

The other thing I like a lot about this approach is the unabashed acknowledgement that the author is the one who’s in charge and picking the viewpoint angle in order to say something, in the same way a film director picks camera angles, or a landscape painter or photographer picks the direction and height from which to portray a scene. A lot of the time, more recent writing books are so quick to start explaining the techniques of writing first-person, or the difference between tight-third and omniscient, that they don’t spend enough time pointing out that there are reasons for choosing one over another. And the whole internal/external way of looking at viewpoint seems to have gotten lost along the way as the internal viewpoint (whether first or third person) has become almost a standard. I think it’s nice to know that there’s more of a choice out there than first-person vs. subjective, tight-third person vs. omniscient, even if I’m fairly sure I’m going to be writing a main character/internal viewpoint 99% of the time.

By pcwrede | Posted in Writing | Tagged , | Comments (7)

Nonlinear storytelling

June 6, 2012 – 10:07 am

I’ve been fascinated by nonlinear storytelling for a long time now, though I’ve barely skimmed the surface of it in my novels. It’s one of those writing techniques that can be used lightly or delved into at great depth, and examining it is something I think can be useful for a lot of writers in thinking about structure and plot. Also, it’s a heck of a lot of fun to play around with.

First, some definitions. Linear storytelling starts at A, then B happens, then C happens, in chronological order: A -> B -> C. Pretty much everyone agrees about this part.

Where people seem to have a much harder time is in describing nonlinear storytelling. Every one of the few books that talk about it flounders around for at least a couple of pages, presenting arguments about whether this or that sort of story structure should be included, before they finally come up with yet another almost-incomprehensible definition.

I come down in favor of simplicity: if linear storytelling is presenting A, B, and C in chronological order, then nonlinear storytelling is everything else. That means that nonlinear storytelling includes everything from really common techniques like flashbacks and in medias res openings to Choose-Your-Own-Adventure books to more complex structures like that of The Time Traveler’s Wife.

The thing about looking at nonlinear storytelling this way is that, for me at least, it makes it less intimidating. Instead of being this highly advanced type of storytelling that’s really hard and difficult to understand, it’s a continuum of techniques that I can work my way into.

There are a couple of things that I think are really important to remember about nonlinear storytelling, no matter where on the continuum one happens to be. The first one is that the story still has a beginning, a middle, and an end, and from the reader’s viewpoint, the beginning is on Page 1, no matter when in the internal story chronology Page 1 takes place. If the opening scene is in the middle of a battle, that’s the beginning of the story, and it has to work as a beginning as well as working as something that the characters have come to after all the flashbacks to pre-battle events that occupy chapters six through ten. This is part of what makes nonlinear stories so challenging to write.

Nonlinear stories also have to have a structure, and since chronology has been eliminated, the writer has to think about the structure rather than taking large chunks of it for granted. There are lots of ways to do this, from setting up a mostly-arbitrary pattern (as Roger Zelazny did in Roadmarks) to finding some non-time-based progression around which to group and order the scenes.

The second thing the writer needs to remember is that the protagonist and the characters are experiencing events chronologically, in a linear way, even if the writer is presenting them out of order. Even in a time-travel story, the protagonist’s subjective experience of events is linear – even if she’s born at C, lives til D, then goes back in time to A and lives through B, everything happens to her in order. It’s just that her order of events and the order of events for the external world isn’t the same.

This means that the viewpoint character in any scene may need to remember or refer to things that, for the reader, haven’t happened yet. Other times, characters may need to express views or beliefs that the reader already knows are false because of a chronologically “later” scene that’s already been shown. Keeping this kind of internal consistency is a good part of what makes nonlinear storytelling so difficult. (Part of what makes The Time Traveler’s Wife so interestingly complicated is that the two central characters aren’t experiencing events in the same order, and the story isn’t presented strictly according to either person’s internal chronology.)

The third thing is that process does not need to mimic the story. Some writers write their nonlinear stories in the order the reader reads the events, without more than a vague idea of how the straight-line chronological version would have happened. Other writers have a clear idea or outline of what happened in chronological order, even though they write the story nonlinearly, in the order the reader will read it. Still others write the story in chronological order, then shuffle the scenes around to get to the finished nonlinear product.

The final thing that I think more writers should be aware of is that all series are potentially nonlinear for some subset of readers. Even with a trilogy that’s published one-two-three over a short period, there will be some readers who pick up the second or third book first, and who do not go back to read the first volume until after they’ve finished whatever they ran across. I myself read The Lord of the Rings this way – The Two Towers was the only fantasy novel on the rack at the airport, so that was where I started reading. And it worked fine, even though I ended up reading the trilogy as 2-3-1 instead of in the normal order. So I suppose I’m saying that readers are likely to be very forgiving of this sort of inadvertent nonlinearity, especially if the book is clearly labeled as “Part 2” so they know what they’re getting into, but it’s still worth thinking about occasionally if you’re doing a long series.

There are also a lot of SF/F series where the author will write seven or eight books in chronological order, then jump back and write the “origin story” that’s been part of the implied backstory for the whole series, or do a prequel about the lives of some of the popular secondary characters before they met up with the main characters. Most people aren’t used to thinking of this as nonlinear writing, because we’re accustomed to looking at a novel or a short story as the basic unit of “story,” but it’s nonlinear for both the writer and all of the readers who’ve been following the series that far.

If all this tends to break your brain, don’t worry about it. The vast majority of novels are mostly linear, with maybe a few flashbacks thrown in and a medias res opening every once in a while. But if you’ve been looking for a place to stretch, or just have some interesting fun, it’s something to consider.

By pcwrede | Posted in Writing | Tagged , , | Comments (5)

Old ways of looking at plot

June 3, 2012 – 6:49 am

Most experienced writers know in their bones that plot operates in far more directions and on far more levels than most modern how-to-write books acknowledge. It’s the folks who’re just getting started who get bogged down in strict adherence to the basic skeleton or act structure, or worse yet, to one of the many and several “scene formulas” that purport to be the One True Way to produce a successful story. There is a lot more to plotting than producing chains of action-reaction or crisis-catastrophe-consequences scenes.

Back about sixty or seventy years ago, there was something of a fad for analyzing and classifying plots in various ways. Georges Polti came up with thirty-six dramatic situations in a stunningly boring book that, when referred to, is nearly always condensed down to a list that occupies about two pages. Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch classified plots according to seven types of conflict (Man against Man, Man against Nature, Man against Himself, etc. Unaccountably, his list omits Man vs. the IRS). And Robert Heinlein summed it up in three: Boy Meets Girl, The Little Tailor, and the Man-Who-Learns-Better.

Looked at a little more closely, these classifications are actually looking at different things. The 36 situations are about content, and fairly specific content at that. “Adultery” (#25 -Two Adulterers Conspire Against a Deceived Spouse) is barely different from “Murderous Adultery” (#15 – Two Adulterers Conspire To Murder the Betrayed Spouse). The “seven types of conflict” are about the sorts of obstacles the protagonist can face: other people who don’t want him/her to succeed, natural disasters, the narrator’s own internal prejudices or flaws, etc. And Heinlein’s three basic plots, if one looks carefully, are the three things that result in change/growth in the main character, that is, people change because they’ve established (or want to establish) a new relationship, because they have to grow in order to face an external problem that looks bigger than anything they ought to be able to cope with, and because they have to face themselves and their own wrong judgments and mistakes.

One of my favorite old how-to-write textbooks takes a completely different perspective on plot, classifying stories as Character Story, Complication Story, Thematic Story, and Atmosphere Story, and the Multi-phase Story (a combination of two or more of the other types). It’s a very dense text, but as near as I can make out, the classification is based on where the plot’s main focus of attention is and/or where its driving force comes from.

All of these things are important, but none of them say much about the movement of a plot. That’s left for a different set of classifiers, who generally draw diagrams and graphs to represent tension over time, or complications, or the protagonist’s situation (good or bad). The classic one is the saw-toothed triangle, with the rising action, the climax, and the falling action, but there are others. One of the older texts I’ve been looking at separates plots into three types: a cup-shaped one it calls the Comic Plot Arc, which begins and ends with the character in a good situation, but which dips in the middle where the character is in trouble; a hill-shaped one it calls the Tragic Plot Arc, which begins and ends with the character in a bad situation, but which rises in the middle where it looks as if the character is going to make it out of the mess; and a flat line which the book call the Modern Story, in which the protagonist doesn’t struggle against Fate but passively accepts whatever events come his/her way.

And then there are the folks who attempt to deal with non-linear storytelling (which deserves, and will eventually get, a post all to itself), using circles and spirals and chains of linked boxes and arrows to try to sort out and classify plots that don’t move in strict chronological order.

All of these different ways of looking at plot are valid. Internalizing this is really useful; it means that when you are looking in despair at a plot whose action doesn’t follow the classic saw-toothed triangle pattern, you can switch gears and see it as a spiral Man-Learns-Lesson pattern, or perhaps as a Character or Atmosphere story whose primary plot-pattern isn’t on the action level at all. When there’s a problem, one doesn’t have to look only at the movement of the story; one can look at the obstacles, or the focus, or the content, or the shape.

The thing I like about all this is the richness of all the different ways of looking at plot, what constitutes plot, and what’s important about plot. It allows for much greater complexity than the basic plot skeleton and/or three-to-five-act structure that is the main substance of most modern how-to-write books. The basic skeleton and the act structure are, certainly, one set of plot fundamentals…but they’re only one set, and fundamentals are supposed to be something that you learn in order to build on, not something that you learn and then stop because that’s all you need to know.

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Wiscon and worldbuilding

May 30, 2012 – 6:58 am

Wiscon was fun but, for me, low-key – I caught a nasty cold the week before, and was still recovering, so I ended up napping a whole lot more than usual and skipping a lot of the parties. But I got to see a bunch of friends and I picked up a couple of books (and a slew of recommendations) and had fun and lots of good food. And the cold is a lot better, so I can’t even grouse that the napping was a waste of time.

One of the interesting things this year was that there were three (!) panels on worldbuilding, and that’s not counting the ones on specific bits of worldbuilding, like the panel on “Designing a Magic System.” I was on the third panel, “The Joy of Worldbuilding,” which suffered a bit, I think, from being at the end of the run of panels on the topic. Nevertheless, we had a good crowd, and that tells me something about the interest of readers and writers in the topic, especially since they’d already had (potentially) at least three related panels in the previous twenty-four hours.

The topic was supposed to be about the sheer fun of worldbuilding for its own sake, but the discussion drifted (as such things are wont to do). What I ended up taking away from it was neither a list of recommended books (though there were quite a lot on display), nor tips and tricks for doing worldbuilding (though a few of those ran by as well), but a number of thoughts about process and utility.

For at least some fans and writers, inventing a coherent, consistent imaginary world is immense fun. Yes, even doing the math-and-science bits (sometimes especially the math-and-science bits). Yes, even when you know perfectly well that 99.9% of your readers are never going to notice that the orbital mechanics of the space station or the plate tectonics of the land masses are right (as far as scientific theory as of the copy-edit date knows). Yes, even when it’s a totally-imaginary fantasy world and the notion that there even are plate tectonics or fossils is never even going to occur to them. Getting it right, making it work within the rules-as-we-know-them is fun. So is making up a bunch of one’s own rules and then figuring out as many ramifications as possible.

In spite of the fun and the intellectual puzzle aspects of it, worldbuilding for its own sake has a bit of a bad rap in an awful lot of fan communities. I think that this is because so very many fans want (or think they want) to be writers, and worldbuilding is perceived as both a vital necessity for writing science fiction or fantasy and as a snare that can easily sidetrack the would-be writer into spending years doing worldbuilding instead of producing stories.

What people forget is that J. R. R. Tolkein spent forty years working on the worldbuilding for Middle Earth…for fun. Yes, eventually The Lord of the Rings came out of it, but the goal, at the start, wasn’t to write a bestselling fantasy. The goal was to make up some cool languages and then some neat people/elves/dwarves/ents/hobbits/etc. to speak the languages and then some poetry and history and cultures for the neat people/elves/etc. The story came last, almost as an afterthought.

In other words, worldbuilding does not have to have a utilitarian purpose in order to justify doing it. If one’s goal is to write a novel, well, then, yes, one does need to do some worldbuilding, whether one enjoys it or not, and one does have to be a bit careful that if one enjoys it, one doesn’t get too distracted from the ultimate goal (writing the novel). But if one just wants to have fun making stuff up…why not? You don’t have to be a writer to enjoy constructing an imaginary place.

The other point is a process one. We had two writers on that panel, and we represented the opposite ends of the worldbuilding process. I need to have a certain (fairly significant) amount of the worldbuilding done in advance in order to keep my story and my characters in line and everything consistent. I didn’t need to make up every single magical creature on the Great Plains in Frontier Magic (though I did make up quite a few), but I did have to know that I wanted an entire magical ecology that existed simultaneously with the non-magical, real-life one…which meant making sure that I talked about magical plants and insects and birds as well as things like dragons that you’d expect to find in a fantasy. I need a fair bit of foundation laid before I start working on the story, even if I don’t actually use most of it.

In contrast, the other writer on the panel apparently did much of his worldbuilding as needed during the writing of the story. I have a good friend who works similarly; where I need the structure and foundation to keep things in line, she needs the freedom to come up with an emergency escape detail on the fly that can get her characters out of a sticky situation. I don’t recall her actually having to do this, any more than I actually use the specific details I come up with in advance, but just as having a foundation is necessary to my process, being unrestricted and able to make up details is necessary to hers.

The last thing about worldbuilding is that we use the word in two different ways. On the one hand “worldbuilding” is that pre-writing or hobby-like invention of a coherent imaginary place, in as much detail (or lack thereof) as the inventor happens to want or need. It’s independent of story, just as real-life places exist independent of the people that live in them and the things that happen in them. On the other hand, there’s the worldbuilding that takes place within the story – the accumulation of details and bits of description and information that the characters find out about the history of the place(s) they move through, all of which creates an image of the world in which the story takes place. This kind of worldbuilding is a writing and storytelling technique, and it applies as much to modern mimetic fiction as it does to the most surreal of fantasies. The existence of real-life New York, Capetown, or Bombay does not make it easier to convey a sense of them to a reader than it is to evoke the feel of an imaginary place like Hobbiton or Edoras.

It’s the second kind of worldbuilding – the in-story techniques for conveying the look and feel of a place, whether real or imaginary – that is vital to fantasy and science fiction. The pre-writing make-it-up sort of worldbuilding is optional, depending on one’s personal process.

 

By pcwrede | Posted in Writing | Tagged , , | Comments (6)

To preach or not to preach

May 27, 2012 – 6:58 am

Around about twenty years back, I had the privilege of being at a convention where Judith Merril was appearing, and I made sure to go to every panel she was on. There weren’t a lot (she wasn’t in the best of health at the time), but when she was there, she was amazing to watch and hear. The panel I remember best was the one in which one of the (much younger) panelists, in response to a question from the audience, spouted that old, well-known line about “if you want to send a message, use Western Union” and finished up with the assertion that “fiction isn’t the place to preach.”

Judith straightened up, fixed the panelist with a gimlet glare, and said, “Why not? What better place is there?”

There was a moment of stunned silence as both the audience and the panelists tried to absorb the fact that a major SF writer known for promoting higher literary standards in the field had just contradicted something that the rest of us had assumed was a fundamental writing principle that everybody agreed on. Everyone except Judith. She gave us a minute or so to recover, then proceeded to list a number of well-known novels that had obvious agendas of various sorts and that were either better for having them or that wouldn’t have existed without them. I wish I’d written the list down, but I was too busy grappling with her confident writing heresy to grab a pen.

That moment of silence when everyone tried – and failed – to come up with a solid, logical answer for the obvious question that no one else had asked made a big impression on me.  What it did not do was instantly convince me of the rightness of Ms. Merril’s position. (Nor the wrongness of it, either.)

I’ve thought about that experience, off and on, for years since. The result of all that thinking has brought me around to the same position I’m in on a lot of writing (and other sorts of) issues:  It Depends.

The interesting thing about the whole to-preach-or-not-to-preach question (aside from the fact that pretty much all the writing advice I see still takes the position that having an overt agenda is inherently a Bad Thing, full stop) is that it depends more on the writer and the writer’s attitude than on the story. Taking an overt moral, religious, or political stand in one’s fiction is something authors choose to do, or not do. It’s rarely something dictated by the necessities of storytelling.

Once you start actually looking at novels, you can find rather a lot of them that clearly have some moral, ethical, or political ax to grind…and that work, or don’t, on a variety of different levels. Some seem to work in spite of the author’s agenda; others seem to work because of it. Some make the agenda subservient to the story; others make the story obviously serve the agenda…and manage to work anyway.

There are, I think, two basic dangers in starting with an agenda. The first is a writing problem: does the author have the skill to pull this off? It’s trickier than it sounds, because the writer has to strike a readable and appealing balance between the needs of the point he/she wants to make and the requirements of storytelling. Passionate conviction is seldom an adequate substitute for writing skill. Yet the balancing act is possible; we still read Aesop’s fables, in spite of the blatantly obvious fact that every one of them is constructed to make a very specific point.

The second danger is that if the writer’s agenda is too obvious, most of the readers who disagree with it will dislike the book (or, more probably, never pick it up in the first place). There really isn’t much the writer can do about this except realize that it’s going to happen and brace for it. One can try to bury one’s moral, ethical, or political point so deeply that it won’t offend anyone, but that gets right back to the don’t-preach-in-fiction argument…and quite frequently allows readers to miss the whole point. And if you feel strongly enough about a moral, ethical, or political stance to want to write about it, you aren’t going to be happy with what you do if you try to pretend that you’re not really doing it.

By pcwrede | Posted in Writing | Tagged , , | Comments (13)