The End

February 8, 2010 – 10:38 am

What makes an ending “The End”?

In a word: closure.

At the end of the story, whether the heroine won or lost, she’s not going to get another chance to try.  The Evil Overlord is gone for good, the wedding is on (or off), the murderer has been discovered and arrested. There may be some loose ends, but the main thing is over and done with…whatever “the main thing” is for that particular story.

In order to achieve this, the story first has to provide a question that needs answering, or a problem that needs settling. Will the hero get the girl? Will the detective catch the murderer? Will the Evil Overlord get a date for the prom?  The ending is the moment that provides the answer, whether that answer is Yes, No, or even Maybe.

That may seem obvious, but a lot of the beginner stories I see fail to present a central problem or a main question, and as a result they have serious difficulty finding a point of closure. Mostly, they end up sort of petering out and stopping, and their authors agonize over their inability to write endings. But their problem isn’t really with their ending - the problem is that they never set up anything that could come to an end point. You can’t close a door if no one ever opened it in the first place. The only fix for this is to rewrite the piece around a problem or question, so that there’s something to answer and a way to end. So that it’s a story and not just an incident.

Other writers overshoot the end because they’re looking for the perfect boffo closing line. It’s lovely when one gets a boffo line to end on, but it doesn’t always happen…and it’s usually much more effective to stop at a reasonable point than it is to make readers slog on through pages or chapters of filler, waiting for a punch line. The flip side of this is writers who cut things off abruptly as soon as the main problem is solved, without providing any wrap-up validation (of which more anon).

Still other writers string their endings out - first the scene with the action climax, where the heroine kills the dragon; then a scene for the big revelation, where the hero tells her he’s not her long-lost brother; then the emotional climax, where one of them proposes; then a scene for the climax of the secondary plot-thread, where the grand vizier runs off with the kitchen maid; and so on. Sometimes one does have to handle each thing separately, but it is often more effective if one can figure out how to bring as many of the threads together in one scene as possible, and tie them all up at once. Unlikely as it may be for the hero to propose in the middle of fighting the dragon while the vizier and kitchen maid try to sneak past the fray without getting killed, it’s often more convincing as a climax or ending scene (if, of course, one can pull it off). At the very least, the revelation and the proposal can usually go in the same scene.

The last mistake I see a good deal of is writers who don’t provide any wrap-up or validation after the big climax scene. Wrap-up is the bit where you let the reader find out how some of the minor subplots turned out, or what happened to other interesting characters while the hero and heroine were busy with the dragon, or where you tie up any loose ends that are still flapping around now that the main plot-problem is solved. Validation is something to let the reader know that it really is all over now; they really did succeed. In my standard plot outline, the ending is usually described as “there is a big fight and the good guys win; this is followed by awards and weddings, as appropriate.”  The “big fight and the good guys win” is the action climax; the “awards and weddings” is the validation. If you get a medal, it means you really did win…for this book, anyway.

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

Well, that was exhausting.

February 3, 2010 – 10:34 pm

I just (and I mean just, as in, haven’t unpacked the suitcase yet) got back from Chicago. The planned five-day trip turned into six (I should have known better than to schedule the meeting with the lawyer for the last day), but the estate tax return is now signed and with the lawyer to file, the bills are up-to-date, Dad’s new laptop has all the software he asked for on it (which is probably not all that he’s going to want, but I can’t read his mind, and he’s nearly 90 and never had a particularly good memory to begin with), his iPod is up to date, the latest round of banking arrangements is done (which involved a three-inch stack of photocopies of documents and signed and notarized things that took two visits to the lawyer to get all properly done - don’t ask), and we figured out how to run his new HDTV as a monitor for the laptop so that he can do slideshows of the family photos with music through the good speakers.

I still have a to-do list as long as my arm, but at least it’s new stuff to do, and I can do most of it from here instead of having to be there. For a while, anyway.

Needless to say, no writing got done.

Which is the long-winded explanation for why it will probably be another few days before I get to the next blog post. And if anyone has anything they want me to blather on about, I’m open to suggestions.

And I am now going to go take a nice hot bath (even with good weather, the 8-hour drive today was hard on my shoulders). See you all later.

By pcwrede | Posted in Family | Tagged | Comments (6)

Building a world

January 30, 2010 – 1:50 pm

Worldbuilding in some sense is a requirement for all writers. The people and places in fiction may have analogs in real life, but a writer in the U.S. cannot depend on every reader (or even most readers) being familiar with the Lincoln Park area of Chicago or the lower east side of Manhattan, much less the streets of Bombay or London or Ladysmith. The writer therefore has to recreate the real place in her fiction, choosing key details that evoke or imply a raft of other things that add up to that particular place and culture.

For those of us who write fantasy and science fiction, worldbuilding is even more of a necessity. The places our stories occur often have no real-life analogs; one cannot travel to Edoras or Cair Paravel to check out the sights and sounds and smells. One cannot look up the fashions of the Galactic Empire or the social customs of the kzinti or Klingons. The writer makes them up.

One of the first things you find out when you start paying serious attention to this is that every detail you invent implies other things, large and small. A codfish dinner served in a town far inland implies not only a fishing industry, but fast and reliable transportation (or the fish would spoil before they got to the table). The existance of such fast and reliable transportation means news will move as quickly as the fish do, so if you want it to be three weeks before they find out about the magical thunderstorm on the south coast, you suddenly need to come up with a really good reason why they wouldn’t hear about it a day later like everyone else. And so on.

Back when I was still getting the hang of all this, I discovered that one of my biggest problems with making forward progress was that I’d forgotten to make up some aspect of my imaginary world that I suddenly needed. The heroine arrived in a new town, and I’d forgotten to make up the architecture; the city guard showed up and I had no idea how they worked; a foreign diplomat arrived and I had no idea what he considered a proper, respectful greeting and what he considered an insult.

So I started keeping track. Fast-forward ten years or so. I had a twenty-plus-page list of things to think about, and it was still growing. I mentioned this on the Fidonet echo I was on, and people talked me into posting the list. One thing led to another, and my fantasy worldbuilding questions have been up on the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers’ of America web site for … I think it’s getting on for fifteen years now.

Every so often, I get complaints about them. Interestingly, the complaints are always that I left something out, not that X or Y is not really important to worldbuilding. I always tell the complainers the same thing:  The fantasy worldbuilding questions are my list of things I have a tendency to forget to think about. Stuff that I always remember to think about is not on my list. If they forget different things, they should make their own list of reminders.

But people persist in trying to make the questions into a prescription or a recipe. And of course, once again, there is no  one recipe or set of rules that work for this aspect of writing, any more than any other. I know quite a few writers who do little or no worldbuilding in advance - they have the sort of brain that needs to not be tied down to a previous decision (and they also seem to have a gift for making everything tie together, even if it was made up on the fly).

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

First person, part the second

January 27, 2010 – 3:35 pm

Another thing that it is really important to pay attention to in first-person writing is what that character knows. Not what he/she knows about the plot; that should be obvious. About everything else.

When your first-person narrator looks at the street outside his house, does he see Fords and Chryslers and Saturns? Or does he see red vans and silver cars and a blue pickup? In other words, is he the sort of person who knows all the makes and models and maybe even the year, or are they just all cars to him? When she sits on a rock under a tree, does she notice that it’s metamorphic limestone and a fine specimen of  Acer saccharum, some kind of unpolished marble boulder and a sugar maple, or just a rock and a tree?

In a third-person viewpoint, the writer can fudge the narrative a bit even if she’s doing a tight third-person point of view, and let the reader know that it’s a sugar maple even if the viewpoint character has no clue. In first-person, you can’t fudge. If the viewpoint character says “I sat under a sugar maple,” then obviously she knows it’s a sugar maple.

This seems like a small thing, but it can come around and bite you when you least expect it. You have your viewpoint character describe a tree or a car or a horse in specific terms, because you know what it is and you want the reader to get a clear picture of the scene…and then four or five chapters later, the character says he doesn’t know the difference between an oak and an elm, or a Saturn and a Lexus, and any reader who’s at all noticing goes “hey, wait a minute, he used to know that…” Or worse yet, you turn out to need him to know (or not-know) something as part of a major plot-point. If it’s first-person, the only thing to do is go back through everything and hope you catch every place where you might possibly have said something in the narrative that indicated differently.

Of course, this can work to your advantage, too. If the first-person narrator describes elms and sugar maples by name, but just “red cars” and “blue cars,” then when the plot requires him to not be able to identify the robbers’ getaway car, he doesn’t have to say that he can’t tell one car from another. It’s already there, in the word choices he’s made every time a car came up in the narrative.

Furthermore, this cuts both ways with the worldbuilding as well as the characterization, especially if you’re a fantasy or science fiction author writing in a completely imaginary world. The reader builds up a picture of the world from what the narrator says, and how she/he says it. In first person, you have to be a little more careful, because the reader can’t tell whether the first-person narrator is omitting details about the trees because they’re unimportant and/or the same as in our world, or whether she just doesn’t know what sort of tree it is. Yet you can also use things like the way the narrator takes purple carrots for granted, or thinks of lemon-flavored streams as rather commonplace, to tell the reader things about the world that are a lot trickier to get across in third person.

In fact, one of the things that is, for me, the most fun about writing first person is that the narrator can have attitude. Her opinions about people and things don’t have to be implied or shown; she can just say them straight out. “I hate pickled beets.” “Donald is stupid.” Because of this, though, first-person is almost inherently unreliable. That is, the reader is predisposed to believe what the first-person narrator says, so if the narrator lies or doesn’t know what she’s talking about, it’s a lot harder to let the reader know that she really does like pickled beets and is just grousing, or that Donald actually could have been a rocket scientist if he’d wanted to.

Every type of viewpoint has advantages and disadvantages like this, and eventually, I’ll probably get through most of them.

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

First person, part the first

January 25, 2010 – 2:00 pm

As I’ve said before, the term “viewpoint” gets used to mean both the person who is seeing the action (viewpoint character) and the way in which everything is written (viewpoint type). This is going to be about the latter sort of viewpoint. Specifically, it’s about first-person.

First-person viewpoint is the “I” viewpoint: “I hate pickled beets. I’ve always hated them. But Ma thinks they’re good for what ails you, so whenever I’m sick, I get pickled beets.”

A lot of people jump straight to first-person when they start writing, because it looks easy. For quite a while, first-person was so over-used by beginning writers that it got a really bad reputation as something only an amateur would try. There are still traces of that around, some places.

But first-person isn’t as easy as it looks, and there are a lot of possible varieties. “Plain” first person is the most common - something written as if the reader is riding along in the narrator’s head. There’s the subtly different form in which the narrator is writing everything down immediately after the fact (or years later). Then there’s the as-told-to, where the first-person narrator is telling the story to someone (possibly the reader; possibly another character) and the reader is listening in. Diaries, letters, memoir, stream-of-consciousness - all different formats requiring slightly different approaches, but all first-person.

The thing that’s most difficult for a lot of writers to grasp about first person is that they are not the putative narrator. When I say “I did this or that” in normal everyday life, I mean me, the person currently sitting here typing. But when my first-person narrator says “I did that,” the “I” doesn’t mean me-who-is-typing. “I” means the character.

This is so obvious that to most folks it goes without saying. But if one doesn’t say it or think it or pay attention to it, one is likely to find that habit takes over. All my life, “I” has meant me-who-is-typing, and that’s a lot of habit to overcome. It’s no wonder that a lot of first-person narrators sound (and think and act) a lot like their authors. (It is also no wonder that a lot of readers leap to the conclusion that anything written in first person is autobiographical, or at least reflects the writer’s opinions and errors of knowledge, rather than the character’s - but that’s a rant for another time.)

It can help to pick a first-person narrator who has a strong voice of their own - one that is unlike the author’s natural voice. It can also help to pick a character who is significantly different from the author in some way - age, sex, ethnicity, ability/disability, etc. But these things only help if the author thinks about them and the ways they’ll affect the character’s voice and opinions and attitudes; when the author doesn’t think, you get the young black woman protagonist who sounds oddly like a middle-aged white author (and who more than half the readers don’t even realize is black until nearly the end of the book. If then.)

A strong voice helps because first-person is written in the voice of the character - in a lot of the varieties, the narrative is supposed to sound like dialog, like the viewpoint character telling you the story. A question always comes up when the viewpoint character has an accent or uses dialect or pidgin as their normal speech pattern, because it is a writing truism that too heavy a hand with dialect or phonetic respelling can make something almost unreadable (the poetry of Robert Burns, anyone?).

But dialog in any book isn’t an accurate transcript of the way people really talk. Dialog leaves out the ums and ers and most of the sentences that trail off into nowhere and a lot of the digressions and speech tics that happen in real life conversations. It’s a model of the way people talk…and first-person narrative is even more so.

When you’re writing first-person, you are inside that character’s head (or nearly) all the time. People don’t sound to themselves as if they have an accent. Inside their heads, that’s just how everyone talks. I’m not the one with the accent; it’s my friends from the deep South, from New England, from Scotland who have regional accents. The French I speak in my head sounds just fine to me; it’s everyone else who knows instantly from my accent that I’m a native English speaker. So a writer can skip most of the phonetic respelling aspects of doing accent in narrative, which instantly makes everything a lot more readable, and stick with word order and idiosyncratic word choice to convey the narrator’s speech patterns.  (This also works well in many cases for the dialog of characters other than the narrator who have accents.)

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

The Other Big Three

January 21, 2010 – 4:42 pm

When professional writers are asked “what are the books you keep within arm’s reach of your desk or computer?”, many of the lists have for years included Strunk and White’s The Elements of Style. Fowler’s Modern English Usage is also popular, as is The Chicago Manual of Style and Karen Elizabeth Gordon’s delightful The Deluxe Transitive Vampire and The New Well-Tempered Sentence. Dictionaries are still common, despite their availability on the web, as are thesauruses.

There is a reason for this.

It is a reason many, many would-be writers do not like to hear.

The reason is the other Big Three: grammar, spelling, and punctuation. They are at least as important as plot, characterization, and setting, possibly more so - because a reader or editor can usually spot poor grammar, spelling, or punctuation on page 1, frequently in paragraph 1, and may well stop reading there, whereas poorly handled plot, characterization, or setting usually take a bit longer to become evident.

Yet over and over, I see would-be writers (and their advisers) claim that correct grammar, spelling, and punctuation are unimportant. “That’s the editor’s job,” “The ideas are the important part,” and ”The important thing is to just get the scene down; don’t worry about details like spelling or punctuation” are some of the claims made by people who don’t want to bother with “technical details.”

And they are so very wrong.

First of all, the editor’s job is to choose, out of a stack of 100 to 300+ manuscripts per week, the ones he thinks his readers will like. Yes, the stories he chooses will go through a copy-edit, where any remaining errors will hopefully be caught, but that’s part of making sure he doesn’t accidentally alienate some of his readers by offering them sloppy stuff. One would thing that the corollary would be obvious: the writer ought to try not to accidentally alienate any of his customers - the editors - by offering sloppy stuff that will make the editor’s job harder (more mistakes to correct).

Second, ideas are the easy part; they’re all over. The hard part is getting them down in pixels (or electrons) effectively. Part of getting ideas down effectively is getting the grammar, spelling, and punctuation right (see “accidentally alienating readers,” above).

Third…well, IF what works for you is to get the scene down and only then fix the grammar, spelling, and punctuation, and IF you really DO go back and fix it once the scene is down, I will grudgingly allow that it could be a valid working method for some people. In my experience, however, there are two problems with this approach. The first is that allowing oneself to write sloppy prose that needs fixing tends, again in my experience, to lead to the writing of sloppier and sloppier prose, which makes revising hellish and ends up being more work than it’s worth.

The second reason is a little harder to articulate. Style is an important aspect of writing. The careful choice of words, the rhythm of sentences, the flow of paragraphs all contribute to the word-picture that the writer builds up of whatever action or emotion or idea she is trying to convey. If a sentence is grammatically wrong, it usually doesn’t function effectively to get across what the writer is trying to say. Incorrect spelling and punctuation trip many readers up, jerking them out of the story.

None of these are good things…and there is often a ripple effect that makes fixing them in revision harder than one might expect. Turning a sentence fragment into something gramatically correct can make the sentences around it cease to work - the rhythm is off, there are clunky redundancies…it’s as if someone put a green filter over the TV screen. More things need fixing, not because they’re incorrect, but because they just aren’t in balance any more. It’s a lot easier, in my opinion, to get it right the first time around, if I can.

But the thing I really don’t get is…most of the people who think that grammar, spelling, and punctuation don’t matter are the same people who are always looking for The Rulez 4 Writing. They want rules for characterization, for action, for plot, for number and position of adverbs and adjectives…but they react like a tribble facing a Klingon to being told that they should pay some attention to the things in writing that actually do have rules: grammar, spelling, and punctuation. How much sense does that make?

By pcwrede | Posted in General, Writing | Tagged , | Comments (20)

Where do I begin…

January 18, 2010 – 8:13 am

 How do you decide where a story starts?

Stories, short or long, generally are not about characters who are happily living their normal lives. Something unusual is going on; something has upset the status quo (whether the status quo was a miserable life as a slave, or a happy life as a king).

Stories therefore generally start in one of four places:  either just before, just at, or just after the point at which the status quo is upset, or else in medias res, smack in the middle of whatever is going on. 

I have found that, since I am a natural novelist, starting in medias res for a short story is seldom a good idea for me. Usually, it means that I’m trying to write a novel, but because I’ve artificially decided to write a short story, I’m leaving off the beginning and most of the middle of the book, and the end result is just not going to work as anything but an excerpted piece of a novel, no matter what I do. Starting in the middle of things works fine for some novels, and I’ve used it at least once (The Seven Towers, if you were wondering), and it works find for other short story writers. Just not for my short stories.

“Just before” works well for fantasies and SF, because in these stories, the “status quo” background is usually unfamiliar.  “Once upon a  time, there was a woodcutter who lived at the edge of a great forest with his three sons” is a just-before-things-change opening; it sets up the status quo.  The change arrives with the sentence that begins, “One day, when he was out in the woods working…” something happened that set the story going.  The trick is to keep it just before the thing that changes everything happens - it is very easy to back off too far, and provide too much introduction to the status quo.  The current situation isn’t the story; the story starts happening when things begin to change.  And of course, this sort of thing isn’t limited to starting with a fairy-tale-type opening; “The woodcutter shouldered his ax and started off into the forest for another day’s work.” is also a just-before sort of opening; he’s not doing anything he hasn’t done a million times before.

“Just at” the point where something changes the status quo would be “A poor woodcutter, hard at work in the woods, heard a cry for help.  Running in the direction of the cry, he found a small man about to be eaten by a lion…”  It is not usual for the woodcutter to rescue small wizards (for that’s obviously who this is) from lions, and the woodcutter’s reward, whatever it turns out to be, is going to form the basis of the rest of the story.

“Just after” would be “The woodcutter set his ax beside the door, stared at it a moment, and went in.  His three sons looked up; at the sight of his face, their expressions grew worried. ‘Father, what has happened?’ said the oldest.  ‘I met a man in the woods today,’ the woodcutter replied. ‘And he told me…’”

In medias res would be something like “The woodcutter crouched behind the arras, watching the guards pace outside the king’s treasure vault.  Through the iron grate that covered the window, he could see the glitter of gold - and, more important, the shine of his magic ax.  If he could just get his hands on it again…”  This works really, really well for lots of people, but as I said, for me it’s a bit dangerous to open a short story with it, because (for me) it usually means the story really wants to be a novel.  In addition, one needs to be careful not to disorient the reader too much.  Also, I find it hard to fill in the background/backstory in the limited wordage of a short story, unless I’m doing something like a fairy-tale, where the backstory is so familiar to readers that they can fill it in themselves.  “Cinderella stood at the top of the stairs, looking down at the sea of wondering faces that filled the prince’s ballroom” would make a perfectly good in medias res opening for a short story.  On the plus side, the in medias res opening generally gets things going with a bang; it is often a very good opening for an action-adventure.

How you decide which one works best - well, you just have to look at the story and think about it for a while.  There aren’t rules for this sort of thing, unfortunately.

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

A Different View

January 15, 2010 – 9:06 am

One of the problems with talking about writing is that the terminology isn’t standardized. Even when everybody agrees what something is called, the same word gets used to mean other things, which can lead to confusion.

Take the term “viewpoint.” It can mean either the person through whose eyes the story is told, as in “Who is the viewpoint character? Whose viewpoint is this from?”, or it can mean the way the story is told, as in “Which viewpoint are you using - omniscient or first-person?”

Most of the time, it is clear which meaning is intended, but I had a long conversation once with someone about the importance of choosing the right viewpoint, which turned out in the end to have been completely at cross-purposes - he meant the importance of picking the right character; I meant the importance of picking the right way of telling the story. I’ve had similar conversations over the years with quite a few people who were ”having trouble with viewpoint,” who turned out to be looking at which character to pick when the problem was with which way to tell the story (or vice versa).  It doesn’t help that you can talk about each thing in much the same way, or that they vary independently of each other.

For instance, you could tell “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs” from the point of view of Snow White, or from the point of view of one of the seven dwarfs, and the story ought to be a little different depending on who the viewpoint character is. To take one obvious matter: the dwarfs weren’t there when Snow White lived in the palace, so the writer who is using their viewpoint can’t show the palace directly. That whole part of the story has to be told to them by this strange woman they find sleeping in their house. You can also tell the story in first-person or third-person, and the story also ought to be a little different depending on which you choose…but it can be Snow White’s first-person, or the dwarf’s first person (and each of the dwarfs should have a slightly different take on the story, too).

Writers have been playing around with viewpoint forever. Showing the same events from the viewpoint of two completely different people, for instance, or telling the same story in camera-eye third-person and then in first-person or omniscient (to show all the things that got left out the first time around). Or using different viewpoint types in conjunction with different viewpoint characters in a multiple-viewpoint novel, to make the differences between scenes and characters more textured and distinct.

Viewpoint looks as if it ought to be easy to play around with. After all, it’s pretty easy to tell the difference between first-person and third-person, or between Snow White and Grumpy the Dwarf. It’s trickier than it seems, though, especially if one type of viewpoint or one sort of character tends to come  more easily to a particular writer than others. I wrote my entire first novel in a horrible sloppy-omniscient semi-multiple-viewpoint viewpoint. Realizing there was something wrong (I didn’t have any of the terminology I needed at that point), I decided to stick with the inside of one character’s head for my second novel (tight-third-person, essentially).

It turned out to be one of the two most difficult things I ever made myself do. I learned a lot from doing it, and I am very, very glad I did - tight-third-person became one of my favorite viewpoints - but it was terribly hard. On the other hand, it got me addicted to experimenting with different ways of handling viewpoint, which I think did a lot for my writing skills.

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

Name it…what?

January 12, 2010 – 11:29 am

If people would ask writers where they get their titles, instead of where they get their ideas, they’d probably get a lot more interesting answers much of the time.

In my experience, it’s really difficult for most writers to articulate exactly where they got the idea for something (except in those few cases where it’s blindingly obvious). But titles…that’s another matter. Many of us struggle with titles; after all, the title is supposed to sum up the story somehow, or at least attract the right sort of reader. And there are constraints, at least when you’re talking about novel titles. “Time Considered as a Helix of Semi-Precious Stones” works brilliantly for Delany’s short story, but fitting that and the author’s name on the cover of a book gets a bit hard.

The biggest constraint with novel titles, though, is that the publisher has to like it. Which means it has to “sound right” to the marketing department. I found that out the hard way with my second novel. The publisher didn’t like my first title (Night of Two Moons) on the grounds that “it sounds like science fiction, not fantasy” (I guess it was the mention of moons that did it?). I don’t remember how many versions we went through before we settled on Daughter of Witches.

Sometimes, a book has a title that is obviously the right one, right from the very beginning. Talking to Dragons was one of those; so was The Grand Tour. Other times, the author slaps something temporary on the computer file, hoping the right title will come along (or be generated) later on. I have learned that if I don’t want a mediocre temporary title to end up as the actual title, I had better make it an obviously unsuitable one. The result is that several of the early-in-process first-draft manuscripts on my computer were titled things like “The Stupid Book I’m Working On” and “New Fantasy Novel #3″.  Such titles don’t usually stick for more than about the first third of the book, for me, because I can’t stand it, but some writers get all the way to the end with a temporary title.

And then there are the books and titles that… Well, take the manuscript that eventually became Dealing with Dragons. I originally called it In the Mountains of Morning, but when I told my editor, she said it wouldn’t work (too long and not snazzy enough for a children’s book, apparently). So I suggested The Dragon’s Princess. Meanwhile, my friend Lois heard me complaining, mis-heard the title and liked it, and asked if she could use it on a novella as “The Mountains of Mourning.” I said yes. She did. Word came back from the publisher: The Dragon’s Princess was a great title (and indeed, got used on at least one of the foreign editions), but it was too similar to the title of another book they had coming out the same month, The Dragon’s Egg. They didn’t want them confused, and first come, first serve.

So we eventually went with something similar to Talking to Dragons, and settled on Dealing with Dragons (if I remember correctly, Difficulties with Dragons was the other leading contender; I don’t recall exactly why we made the final choice).

For that title, I had the pattern (gerund-preposition-Dragons) to follow, but usually when I or one of my friends is generating a title at the last minute, we’re starting from scratch. So what we do is, we ask all our first-readers to suggest words and phrases and titles that they think suit. If we’re lucky, one does; if not, we break them down into words and phrases, use a thesaurus to generate some more words that might fit, and start shuffling them around until something looks reasonably acceptable. Sometimes that process triggers a brainstorm and the perfect title emerges from left field, but usually it’s just a slog.

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

Making soup

January 9, 2010 – 12:15 pm

It’s been a little over a year since my mother died, and one of the things I inherited from her was her collection of cookbooks.

It’s quite a collection, too. When Mom ran out of space on the kitchen cookbook shelf, she just started putting them elsewhere. I’ve taken three large boxes and two paper bags full of cookbooks out of the house already, and I haven’t touched the ones in the bedroom, the office, or the bookcase in the spare room. I’m afraid to even look in the attic.

My mother loved reading cookbooks and clipping recipes out of magazines. She had a real eye for good ones, and when she took soup to work for lunch, she always took extra to share. And someone would always ask for the recipe. So she’d photocopy the recipe and hand it to them, along with a few tips: “I didn’t have any navy beans, so I used pinto beans instead. And I had some extra tomato juice left from a different recipe, so I used it up in this; I’m not sure how much. And some vegetables that were starting to look a little wilted - spinach and cauliflower. Oh, and since it used ginger, I added a little nutmeg, too, because it goes well with cauliflower and ginger…”

Needless to say, nobody could make one of Mom’s soups by following the recipe she gave them.

A lot of people who want to write, especially when they’re just getting started, want a recipe to follow. “Take three characters, one Evil Overlord, and eighteen pages of backstory. Stir twelve times counter-clockwise. Add two mysterious magical artifacts; mix until blended. Pour into large computer; bring to a slow boil. Add six cups of action, two cups of character development, and a dash of  narrative transition. Reduce heat and simmer for six months. Strain to remove adjectives and adverbs.”

But writing doesn’t work like that, any more than making Mom’s soups did. Both things are arts, as well as crafts. Oh, you can turn out a passable soup by following the recipe exactly, but a good cook tastes and adjusts as she goes, and a great chef doesn’t even have to start from a recipe. You do need the skills - chopping and mincing, simmering and sauteing, etc. - but the skills alone aren’t enough (else it would not be possible for me to produce something that is adequately nutritious but not at all tasty from the same recipe that was one of Mom’s ”no leftovers, ever” specialities).

I don’t have Mom’s gift for messing with recipes, though I can produce a decently edible meal at need. But I use the same tricks she did all the time…in my writing. “Three characters…hmm, I only have two; well, how about if I throw in a dragon? And I haven’t used the Wicked Uncle in a while; better substitute him for the Evil Overlord before he goes stale. Mysterious magical artifacts, check…oh, and I have an Ancient Spell and a couple of Standard Plot Twists sitting around; let’s just throw those in and see what happens. Eighteen pages of backstory? Way too much - let’s give it two pages, I can add more later if I need to. Bring to a boil…hmm, computer overheats easily, let’s just simmer it for a good long while and see if that will do.

“Yes, this looks promising. Now, to add the action and character development - darn, I’m low on action. I can manage four cups; maybe I can fill in the other two with a bit more character development and some cool new extra background-and-setting. Right, this is working - a bit thicker than the original recipe would have come out, but that’s all to the good. Now, simmer and…strain? Why would I want to do that?”

The recipe never comes out the same way twice, but it’s always good enough for me, so I’m not complaining.

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