Thinking about first person

May 16, 2012 – 6:08 am

It’s been a while since I’ve talked about viewpoint, and first-person has been on my mind lately.

First person seems to be a love-it-or-hate-it viewpoint. I’ve heard folks say that it’s the easiest viewpoint for a beginner to use, that no one should ever use it, that it allows for more believability, that it’s always autobiographical (and therefore, in some obscure fashion I’ve never really understood, suspect in fiction…as if first-person should only be used in actual autobiography or memoir). I’ve heard readers say that they like first-person because it’s so immediate, or because the reader always knows the main character survives, or because “all first person stories sound like they’re written by writers.” (What?)

Let’s start with a definition: first-person is any story in which the narrator or viewpoint character uses “I” outside of dialog. The most common variety is as-it-happens narration, as if the main character is telling the story to the reader nanoseconds after the events happen, but epistolary fiction (a story told in letters, like Sorcery and Cecelia, or in emails) and journal excerpts are also common. Stream-of-consciousness writing – the sort that tries to mimic the chaos and distraction of the narrator’s thoughts, second to second – is usually used in short fiction (probably because it’s very difficult to sustain at length).

I think that a lot of the mistrust of first person comes from the fact that it’s something all of us do regularly in real life. Everyone has written letters or emails; lots of people have kept a diary or a journal at some point in their lives. This makes it seem easy and predictable, something everyone already knows how to do…except that when you’re writing fiction, it’s never easy or predictable. Since experienced writers and editors know this, they get suspicious of anything that looks too easy.

At the other end of the spectrum are the new writers who think first-person is the trick to making writing easy and predictable. They’ve written emails, they’ve kept a diary; how different can this be? So they plunge ahead and make all sorts of mistakes, which lead the experienced writers, critics, editors, etc. to shake their heads and blame it on trying to write first-person. And next thing you know, how-to books and writing teachers and advice blogs are forbidding anyone to use it.

The truth is that, like every other viewpoint, first-person has both strengths and weaknesses. There are some beginner mistakes that are nearly impossible to make in first person; there are others that are an order of magnitude easier. The trick is in knowing what they are and in knowing whether your particular writing strengths and weaknesses are complimented or reinforced by the natural strengths and weaknesses of the viewpoint.

The first and most obvious characteristic of first-person is that the writer is stuck in the narrator’s head for the length of the story (or at least the length of the scene, if it’s one of the rare multiple-viewpoint-first-person novels). It is glaringly obvious whenever the writer strays outside what the narrator can see, hear, know, or reason out for him/herself. If head-hopping is something you have trouble with, first-person will keep you from doing it if you are paying any attention at all. Of course, you’ll probably find it incredibly difficult and frustrating when you can’t just jump to some other character and show how he/she feels or thinks, and you’ll be driven half mad figuring out how to let the reader in on important events or information that the narrator didn’t happen to be present for, but I did say that it wasn’t going to be as easy as it looked, didn’t I?

The second and only slightly less obvious characteristic of first-person is that whether it’s letters, diaries, stream-of-consciousness, or standard narrative, every line has to be in the voice of the narrator-character…not that of the author. This can be a lot trickier than it sounds, precisely because everyone uses first-person a lot in real life. When you’re used to speaking in your own voice, it can be hard to imitate someone else’s consistently, especially if the differences are subtle. It’s much easier if the narrator-character has a strong voice, including but not limited to vocabulary, syntax, and idioms.

A subset of this is that what the character notices also has to be in-character. This means, for instance, if your character is a farmer, she will likely notice and comment on every garden and the health of every plant (or at least, the useful plants, i.e., food), but may or may not have any interest in describing hairstyles or the interiors of other people’s homes. And what she does say about them will be from her own perspective and in her own words, not yours.

Logically, then, if you are good at “getting into” the mind of your narrator, but bad at sticking to what he/she sees and/or terrible at conveying information that the narrator isn’t around for, using a first-person viewpoint would force you to work on those areas you have trouble with, while giving your ability to get into the character’s head a chance to shine. On the other hand, if you are rock-solid on the what-the-narrator-sees stuff, but shaky on voice, doing a good strong-voiced first-person who does not sound like you will give you a novel’s worth of practice at using a character’s voice when your natural inclination is to use your own. It may be a bit of a trial by fire, but it’s likely to be effective.

If you have trouble doing a viewpoint character’s internal dialog, first person will likewise give you lots of chance to practice, though whether you make use of the chance or not is up to you. If, however, you are predisposed to writing internal monologue even in third-person, you may find that first-person encourages this tendency to an unfortunate extreme, and you may not want to try it until you’ve brought your description and narration skills up to the same level. As always, if you’re going to work on your skills, the first thing you have to do is figure out where you’re weak.

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

Trying to Improve

May 13, 2012 – 6:11 am

One of the things about writing is that if you want to improve, you have to work at it yourself. Nobody is going to make you practice; nobody is going to force you to get better. Even taking writing classes is a choice – I’ve known people who took how-to-write classes simply to have a deadline to work to (but that’s a whole ‘nother rant).

Some writers are perfectly happy letting things come naturally. Writing is a skill, and like most skills, it improves with practice. You can get quite a long way just by writing one novel after another, without paying much conscious attention to any particular area that may need improvement.

Eventually, though, one reaches a point where the pace of improvement slows. One then has a choice: one can accept that one has reached the plateau section of the learning curve, and just continue to take whatever progress shows up in the course of one’s regular writing; or one can deliberately push oneself.

There seem to be two schools of thought as regards pushing. The first set of writers treat improving their skills as something separate from their daily word count. They take classes and write exercises that are targeted on whatever they perceive their writing weaknesses to be, then integrate their new skills with their actual writing. The second sort treat pushing themselves as part of their normal writing process; they set themselves challenges and take on stretchy projects that will force them to improve while they produce their daily word count.

I’ve always been the second sort of writer, which is a bit odd because I’m normally not much for risk-taking, and deciding to write a stretchy, different kind of book is definitely a risk when you are making your living this way. The editors may not like it; the readers may not like it; people may be so put off by whatever-it-is that they never buy any of my books ever again. On the other hand, what most readers notice first is the content; playing with things like viewpoint and structure and word choice are not so much of a risk as far as the readers go, unless I fail utterly and disastrously.

I never saw the use of exercises; all the ones I’d ever seen wanted you to write a page describing a girl in blue, or two people watching a convertible at a stop sign, or something similar, and if I wanted to do that, I’d rather do it writing pay copy.

Then in 1998 Ursula le Guin’s Steering the Craft came out. It was the advanced writing manual I’d been craving, and it was full of exercises that I would never, ever have actually written in a novel. I like to experiment, yes, but I’d never try for an entire page with no punctuation whatever, or a scene written in sentences of less than seven words each, or a 300-word grammatically correct sentence.

In other words, you can get quite a long way by just writing and by setting yourself challenges, but there are some things that are much easier to get at in the artificial setting of an exercise.

Regardless of the way one chooses to push oneself, though, diagnosis is important. It’s less important, I think, if one is pushing by writing stretchy books; “stretchy” is subjective, and as long as it feels stretchy, it’s probably working on something, even if it’s not quite the thing one thought it would stretch when one chose the project. Exercises tend to be more pointed at one specific area, and if it isn’t an area you have a problem with, the exercise probably isn’t going to be much benefit.

The two easiest things to push on are probably viewpoint and structure, because they are the two aspects of fiction that are clearest and most obvious. First-person and third-person viewpoint are clearly different and easily definable, in a way that differences in description or narrative style or backstory revelations or even plot are not. A lot of structural techniques, like flashbacks or parallel scenes or multiple viewpoint, are likewise extremely easy to define. One can set oneself a task: write this book in first person; write the next book with two viewpoint characters in strict alternation, chapter by chapter. When the book is done, it’s obvious whether one succeeded or failed.

And sometimes one discovers something unexpected along the way. The book with the strictly-alternating-viewpoints has a character who enters the Elf Hill and is out of the story for ten years; does the writer skip ahead, forcibly following the set pattern, or break the pattern in mid-book? The first-person narrator is unexpectedly possessed by a second character; how does first-person work for that?

With an exercise, one rarely, if ever, runs into these unanticipated events. Exercises are short and targeted; there isn’t time or room for one’s subconscious to take off in a totally new direction. Novels and short stories are different. They have their own agendas, which take precedence over whatever challenge the writer set herself to begin with. In the end, the question isn’t really “should I break the alternating viewpoint pattern when the character enters the Elf Hill, or not?” It’s “which way is this story going to work better?” The important thing is to end up with an interesting story; exactly how one gets there is irrelevant.

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

Daily Life

May 9, 2012 – 6:30 am

First off, I am pleased to say that the three Kate and Cecy books will be going live as e-books on May 22. Stephanie Burgis did a lovely blog post on them. Which means that all of the backlist except the Enchanted Forest books are now available in nice, legal ebooks, one way or another (the two Mairelon books are available together, in the omnibus “A Matter of Magic,” rather than as individual titles). There are an assortment of issues with the Enchanted Forest that I hope to work out eventually, but I have no idea how long “eventually” will take, especially if lawyers get involved. So let’s just say it’ll be quite a while yet for those, and leave it at that.

For those who are interested in the glamorous, exciting lives that writers lead:  I have spent the last three days doing every stitch of laundry I could find anywhere in the house. I am currently waiting for the plumber to arrive to unhook the ten-plus-year-old washer and dryer, so that they can be hauled away when the replacements are delivered tomorrow. They don’t get hooked up until the new floor is down in the laundry room, though, which won’t happen until at least next week. And then they get to repair the ceiling, which will be much easier without the new machines in the way (hence the frantic laundry-doing, in hopes of minimizing the number of trips to the Laundromat during (re)construction.) Then I get to go to Home Depot to pick up some widgets. Doesn’t that sound glamorous and exciting?

Which brings me back around to another writing balancing act (several, actually). Everybody has daily life to do: cooking, laundry, cleaning, house maintenance, etc. For writers, it’s perilously easy to put off doing the words in favor of sweeping out the laundry room before the repair guy arrives (it’ll only take a minute), doing the dishes (they have to be washed some time, so why put it off?), sewing that loose button back on (it’s been bugging me for days, but I only seem to think of fixing it when I’m standing in the middle of Target, so now that I have thought of it, I’d better seize the moment).

It’s especially easy when the writing isn’t going well; it feels so much better to be doing something actually useful instead of just staring at the blank page/screen and muttering balefully under one’s breath. And if one is yet to be published, or doesn’t actually have a deadline at the moment, it’s even easier to justify. After all, there’s no guarantee that whatever words one manages to painfully extract from one’s backbrain will sell, so why not do something more obviously productive?

The problem with thinking like this is that if one does, one generally arrives fairly quickly at a point where no writing happens at all. Not only that, but “I’m not getting any writing done today, so I might as well do X” turns into “I can’t write today, because I’ll be more productive if I do X” and then to “X is more important to get done than writing, so I can’t write today” and finally to “I can’t write.”

The solution to this is fairly obvious, if notoriously difficult to implement: sit down and write anyway, whether or not you feel like it, whether or not there’s other stuff to do, whether or not you feel worthy or competent or whatever else you think you need to feel. Writing isn’t about how you feel; it’s about getting words on the page. You have to figure out how for yourself, but really, making time to write and guarding that time from everybody and everything else including yourself is ultimately what works.

The other balancing act is the one involving the characters in the story. They, too, have daily lives and need to cook, do laundry, etc. The convention in most fiction is to skip lightly over all this daily maintenance, because really, who wants to read about someone doing laundry? At the other end of the scale, there are writers who feel that giving the readers all the dramatic details of cooking and laundry makes the characters “more real” (or perhaps it’s “more realistic;” I’m never sure).

And of course, they’re both right – for elastic values of “right.” Which is to say that it depends on the story, the characters, etc. Every story has a unique balance point between showing the main character cleverly breaking into the museum and showing the main character lovingly chopping onions for the stir-fry. In some cases, even one scene of onion-chopping would be too much; in other stories, the right balance means spending several pages having the main character wax lyrical over the proper way to chop onions.

And once again, it’s up to the writer to figure out where that balance is and what the most effective way of achieving it is.

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

What Kind of Skeleton

May 6, 2012 – 6:38 am

I’ve been thinking a lot about the classic plot skeleton lately, for a variety of reasons, and I’ve been getting steadily more annoyed with most of what’s written about it, and about plotting in general.

The trouble is that most of what’s written about plot and plotting is stuff that’s written after the fact – it’s based on critical analysis of books that have already been written. Even the how-to-write books seem to have simply adopted the post-writing analytical outlook, lock, stock, and barrel. You can find some really excellent descriptions of plot structures (Linda Seger’s How to Make a Good Script Great has a terrific description of the three- and five-act structures common in plays, movies, and TV, for instance), but they’re all starting from pretty much the same place – the basic plot skeleton.

What this leaves out is all the other possible structures. To extend the metaphor a bit, not all stories are mammal, with endoskeletons. Some of them are insects that have exoskeletons, or mollusks that have shells, or even octopus- or amoeba-like things that have nothing resembling a skeleton at all.

And none of this is much of any help to a great many writers who are in the process of constructing a story. There are some writers who start with a plot and plan most of the story from there before they start writing, and a lot of others who, regardless of what other bit they started with (characters, setting, theme, idea…) have developed at least a basic sketch of a plot before they start writing.

But I don’t know anyone who sits down and thinks about plot as a plot-skeleton or a three-act, four-act, or five-act structure while they are making it up. The few writers I know who get that analytical about their own work do so only when they know something has gone wrong in the writing, and they’re trying to figure out what.

The thing that does seem to be useful to writers during the actual writing or pre-writing stages is questions. What are the characters trying to do, or achieve? Could it change in the course of the story? What happened five, ten, twenty years ago that set up these characters for whatever is happening now? What does the protagonist want? Why can’t he/she have it? What are they willing to do to get it? Are there societal barriers in the way of the protagonist getting what he/she wants? Or is it something they have internal doubts about for some reason?

Note that none of these questions talking about “what happens next.” “What happens next?” is possibly the most useless question writers can ask themselves; it’s practically guaranteed to create frustration in most folks (though I’ve known one or two who seem to be wired backwards; if you find that asking “what happens next?” provides you with just what you need to go on with, while asking anything more specific brings you to a screeching halt, you are probably another one, and can ignore most of the rest of this post, except as something of academic interest).

The most useful question, for the rest of us, tends to be “Why…?” Why would the protagonist turn left at that corner instead of right? Why would James Q. Villain bother trying to stop the hero? Why did the vampires pick this year to start a labor union, instead of last year or next year? Why was the Super-Duper Gizmo lost in the first place, and why did the hero “just happen” to find it?

These “why” questions lead fairly directly to a cause-and-effect relationship between whatever is going on – this happens, then that happens because of the first thing, which makes something else happen, and so on. For a linear story – one that moves the protagonist chronologically from today through tomorrow to next week and next month until it gets to the climax – this works really well, and quite often gets one to a typical plot-skeleton with very little extra adjusting.

But for those stories that aren’t linear – for ones that move back and forth in time, or that have deliberately circular or spiral structures, or that do other unusual things – the relevant questions may be a bit different. What holds the story together may still be the ups and downs and cause and effect of the events in the protagonist’s life, in which case asking “why” with a focus on the characters or the immediate situation still works pretty well.

If the story has an exoskeleton, though, the right question is more often “What is possible, given the set shape of this story?” or “What needs to happen next to maintain the shape?” In other words, the focus isn’t so much on the characters or the situation as it is on the constraints that the author has decided to place on the story (whether the constraints happen deliberately or inadvertently is a whole ‘nother question). Sometimes, the most useful place to start is “What are the constraints on this story, and why in heaven’s name did I think it was going to be a good idea to do it this way?”

The thing to remember is that all this stuff is voluntary. The author gets to decide whether to start out with a skeleton, or a mollusk shell, or a blob of jelly; whether to do a lot of pre-planning or whether to sit down and just wing it. The writer gets to make up the rules…and if she doesn’t like them, she can make up a different set for the next story.

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

What’s missing

May 2, 2012 – 6:04 am

Last week I got into another one of those discussions with a would-be writer who was convinced that before he ever sat down to write, he had to have the perfect idea – one with depth and resonance, something he found personally meaningful and inspiring, and above all else, something original. If it wasn’t original, fresh, and new, it wasn’t worth doing, as far as he was concerned…and he was positive that an original idea was all he needed to achieve not merely publication, but wildly successful publication.

I blinked at him a couple of times and then quoted Watt-Evans’ Law of Literary Creation (There is no idea so stupid or hackneyed that a sufficiently-talented writer can’t get a good story out of it.) and Feist’s Corollary (There is no idea so brilliant or original that a sufficiently-untalented writer can’t screw it up.) 

In other words, it isn’t the idea that has to be meaningful and full of depth and resonance; it’s the finished story that needs those things. Of course, he didn’t want to believe me, but it got me thinking.

How do I get from the stupid, hackneyed idea to a reasonably decent, interesting story?

Well, I start by looking at the parts of the story that aren’t included in the idea. Ideas, by their nature, need to be developed and expanded in order to become stories. They aren’t complete in themselves, or they’d be the stories we make them into. So whatever the idea is that one starts with, it’s missing something.

A lot of the ideas that get lumped into the “stupid or hackneyed or clichéd” category are plot ideas: the orphaned hero turns out to be the lost heir to the throne, for instance. What’s missing is characters (by which I mean “specific people with names and individual personalities,” rather than just roles like “orphaned hero” or “smart-mouthed sidekick”) and setting. Some of the “hackneyed or clichéd” ideas are the characters who’ve been around the block too many times: the spunky young girl, the thief with a heart of gold, the mustache-twirling villain, the noble hero who’s good at everything. What they’re missing is plot and setting. And of course Generic Fantasy Setting #2,349 needs a plot and characters.

So I look at the cliché “orphaned hero is lost heir” and I think about just who that orphaned hero/heroine is. Somebody different; somebody unexpected. Maybe she’s a Goth girl with no patience whatever for the rules of the court she’s suddenly thrust into. Maybe he’s an emo poet, or really, really, really wants to play major league football, and to heck with this being a king stuff. Maybe she’s the absolutely perfect ideal the court has been hoping for…too perfect? How’d she get that way, when she didn’t know she was a princess? What’s she really thinking, underneath all that perfection? What if my orphaned hero is a gang member (or equivalent)?

Or I look at the cliché and I think about where it could take place that would be interesting and different. Aliens. Insectoid aliens…maybe something like bees, where the new queen has to destroy all her competitors? Or merpeople – I could combine the “lost heir” with one of the selkie legends about the selkie maiden who was trapped by the fisherman and forced to live as his wife until she found the sealskin he stole from her. That’s certainly one way for the True Heir to get lost.

Telling a familiar story from the point of view of a normally-minor character often works well – the maid or valet, the coachman, the cook, the captain of the guard, all can bring a fresh perspective to a familiar tale…or sometimes spin off it sideways into stories of their own, for which the familiar “main” story ends up being no more than something happening in the background.

Ultimately, though, it comes down to execution. You can make anything sound horrible and clichéd and stupid in a summary, without even trying much. (“The Lord of The Rings” is about a short guy with hairy toes who throws a ring in a volcano.) And if you boil things down far enough, there aren’t any original plots…that’s why Heinlein could claim that all plots are variations or combinations of only three fundamental types. It’s the final product – the total impression made by 90,000+ words of novel – that’s going to be meaningful and inspiring and interesting and deep. Not the log-line.

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

How they say it

April 29, 2012 – 6:59 am

One of the things it took me a while to get a handle on was giving my characters different speech patterns, depending on both their personalities and their backgrounds. For my first couple of books, I was too busy juggling all the other stuff – background, plot, description, action, dialog, viewpoint, etc. – to even think about getting into more subtle distinctions. I think I managed to make the minstrel’s speeches a little more flowery than everyone else’s, but that was about the extent of it for the first three books or so.

When I finally did start to think about the way characters talked, I was at first bewildered by some of the advice I was getting. “Characters will choose different words depending on their personalities, cultural background, age, class, education and training, and so on,” I was advised. “Two characters should never say the same thing in the same way.” Then I’d look at a simple statement like “That’s a mistake” or “The house is on fire!” and wonder how else to put it. “That’s wrong” didn’t seem different enough to carry all that freight, and I couldn’t see any of my characters choosing words like “The domicile is ablaze!” (though someone who did might be interesting to write about).

What I didn’t realize for a long time is that I had the emphasis wrong. I thought it was “Two characters should never say the same thing in the SAME WAY,” when I should have been looking at it as “Two different characters will never say the SAME THING in the same way.”

Speech patterns are as much about WHAT is said as they are about the WAY it is said. “Madam, will you do me the honor of granting me your hand in marriage?” and “Hey, baby, why don’t we get hitched?” are both proposals of marriage, but that’s not all they are. There’s a lot more information in each of those sentences than just “Will you marry me?”…and it’s different information, depending on who the speaker is and what they think is important in addition to the basic question they’re asking.

A lot of that additional information has to do with the speaker him/herself. You can tell quite a lot about the two people who are proposing in the paragraph above – the first one uses formal, traditional language and is perhaps a little stuffy, while the second is slangy and informal. One can easily picture the first in a tuxedo, on his knees with a diamond ring in a box, while the second seems more likely to be sporting an untrimmed beard and a tie-dye T-shirt. One can, of course, set up circumstances in-story in which it would be the hippy in the tie-dye shirt using the formal language and the stuffy gent in the tux who’s being slangy, but if all you have is the dialog, that isn’t what first springs to mind.

In any exchange of dialog, each of the characters has a lot more going on than just the basic information they’re supposedly telling the other person. They have personal agendas; they have emotional reactions that they may not be able to – or want to – hide; they have ingrained ideas about the proper way to behave and speak (both in a grammatical sense and in terms of good manners). All of these things will affect what they say and how they say it.

What and how are often a lot harder to distinguish than first appears. When I made my first deliberate foray into giving characters different speech patterns (in The Seven Towers) I thought I was concentrating on how they spoke: Amberglas in a rambling, roundabout fashion; Vandaris using colorful swears, Ranlyn in a slightly archaic formal style, etc. But in order to ramble or swear or be archaic, I had to add things to whatever the basic underlying dialog was. And what got added depended on the character.

Amberglas  couldn’t just say “Don’t move; you’re injured.” If I wanted her to ramble, I had to add some things for her to ramble about. So what could have been a short, simple, straightforward line of dialog became “You really shouldn’t do that, especially if you’re not feeling well, which I can see you aren’t, what with that hole in your side and so on.  I assume you realize that, though one can never tell.  People can be so very odd.  There was a man I used to know, who always wore his boots on the wrong feet for one day out of every month.  So I thought I’d mention it, in case you didn’t.”

What people say isn’t just syntax and word choice (though those are an important piece of how they say things). It’s about what’s important to them – manners, image, people and things they’re worried about or afraid of, attitude toward the listener, and a host of other things. The more urgent the situation, the more of this stuff gets stripped out of the dialog, but one can’t write an entire book with people saying nothing but “Help!” or “Fire!” or “Duck!”

If you haven’t ever thought about this stuff before, syntax and word choice are a good place to start – things like having one type of character use shorter, less complex sentences and words of fewer syllables often work well.  Look at the way Shakespeare did it:  you wouldn’t mistake any of the rude mechanicals’ speeches for those of the nobility. Or you can try doing what I did – picking a cast of characters several of whom have exaggerated or extreme speech patterns that are very different from each other. Nobody else talks like Amberglas, so it was really easy to tell if I’d gotten her dialog wrong or if her style was creeping into someone else’s dialog inadvertently.

Nowadays, I do this mostly by instinct, and on a much less obvious (I hope) level. But that’s where I started.

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

Revising

April 25, 2012 – 6:52 am

The process of revising effectively tends to vary from writer to writer just as the first-draft writing process varies, and it’s not necessarily connected to the way one writes your first drafts. In fact, often (though not always) the revisions process seems to need to be the opposite of the writer’s writing process in some way: writers who are very methodical and who do outlines and character sketches and so on for their first drafts find themselves winging their revisions, while those who write things in order, front-to-back, find themselves skipping all over the book while revising.

Revising is a separate skill from writing it down in the first place — related, but still different. And like writing it down, revising is a skill that gets better with practice. By the time one gets to the end of the first draft, one has definitely had a novel’s worth of practice at getting the words down on paper, and a lot of writers expect this to translate into ease of revision. If you haven’t been revising-as-you-go, however, it is highly unlikely that your revisions skills will be up at the same level as your first-draft skills…and an awful lot of writers cannot revise as they go without killing the story.

One could, of course, try revision someone else’s terminally bad piece of prose for practice and hope that the techniques one figures out will be applicable to one’s own work. It’s not hard to find examples of bad prose on the net; the trouble is finding some that makes the same mistakes you do without also making you feel as if your stuff is too horrible to contemplate.

So most of us are left with getting to the end of the book, right about the point where we feel as if we know what we’re doing, and then starting over again trying to boot up an entirely new skill (revising). The first step is always, always, always figuring out what the problem is. Diagnosis is key; if you can’t see what’s wrong, and you try to fix it anyway, it’s like trying to fix a delicate piece of electronics blindfolded and wearing oven mitts. Don’t. Just don’t.

Figuring out the problem isn’t as easy as it sounds – after all, if you’d known it was a problem, you wouldn’t have written it that way in the first place. There are various ways of going about this. Some writers lean heavily on first readers and crit groups to point out problems; others swear by the “cold box” method (stick it in a drawer for a couple of weeks or months, until it’s “cooled off” and you don’t remember what you meant to say quite so clearly). Some find that just making the manuscript look different is enough to do the trick, which these days is a simple matter of changing the font and the margins. I have friends who swear that they get this effect from looking at hard copy (as opposed to seeing tings on screen), even though nothing else changes.

Or you sit down and analyze. This means approaching the work coldly and intellectually, looking for places that don’t work and (even more important) for why they don’t work. It means avoiding the trap of getting lost in the fun, brilliant bits that you just love, and equally avoiding the trap of deciding every word, every comma, is trash and utterly without merit. It means learning the difference between fixing a problem and second-guessing a decision.

A word about this bit: the common advice to “murder your darlings” does not mean that you are supposed to go through your manuscript and take out every single thing in it that you actually like. If you don’t like what you write, why should anyone else like it? What it means is that if the only reason a particular sentence is in there is to show how clever the author is…take it out. You can save it for some other book if you like, somewhere that it will add to the characterization or the plot or the setting or something story-related, rather than author-related.

When you’re analyzing your own work, you generally need to look at both the macro and the micro level. The macro level is stuff like structure and pace and flow and tension. First you look for where things seem to be not-working; then you look for why they’re not working. In the first draft of The Far West, for instance, I had three scene in a row of studying a critter in the lab, followed by three scenes in a row of reunions with old friends/family returning from elsewhere. I hadn’t noticed when I wrote them; once I saw the problem, it was obvious that I needed to move things around so that I had some critter-studying followed by a reunion followed by more critter-studying, instead of having my heroine do the same thing over and over with different people.

Sometimes it’s not the content of the scenes that’s the problem. Sometimes it’s a lack of transition between two bits, or the fact that something wasn’t set up properly two or three scenes or chapters earlier. Sometimes the macro fix is down at the micro level. The first editor who saw Talking to Dragons told me that the pace was too slow (a macro-level problem); I fixed it by cutting roughly 5,000 words…two or three words at a time. (Basically, I figured out that I needed to cut three lines per manuscript page, and then spent three weeks going through the ms. a page at a time, crossing out words and rephrasing sentences so they’d be shorter, until I got three lines out of each and every page. It was a horrible job, but I learned a lot.)

The micro-level revision is down at the scene-to-sentence level – getting rid of ambiguous phrasing and tongue-twisting dialog, spotting the places where you over-use a particular sentence structure or a particular word. (I recall one ms. in which the student had learned to use partial parallel repetition to emphasize a point. Had learned it too well. Had become vastly fond of it. Had used it over and over. Had driven me crazy with the particular tic…which took forever to make her even see, let alone fix.)

The micro-level is where one sometimes has to dismantle and reassemble a paragraph or a scene, or rewrite it wholesale. Sometimes several times. Occasionally, a sort of reverse-layering technique is useful here, especially if there’s a scene where one can’t figure out what the problem is. You take the scene and hide everything except the dialog, so it’s just talking heads, and then you look at the flow of the dialog and whether it makes sense as a conversation without all the emotion and internal dialog and stage business that it has in the scene. Then you do the same thing with the physical action, and then the descriptive bits. It’s a bit tedious and too labor-intensive to use on every scene, but it can be really useful when one hasn’t a clue where the problem is.

Some writers find that their prose hardens into concrete at some point, and chipping out the rough spots leaves visible seams. There are two approaches to this problem: one, get to the revisions soon, before the prose sets up (for some writers, this means the same day it gets written); two, figure out how to either delay the hardening-up or soften up the prose once it’s gone hard. One writer I know with this problem prints out her ms. formatted the way her page proofs look; since she’s used to fixing things in page proof, she can see and fix them on the printout when she can’t on the screen. Another writer is fine as long as she doesn’t print out the final draft of a chapter – as long as it’s all pixels, it stays workable for her. Still another has to set aside the written scene and re-imagine the whole thing from scratch, then write a whole new version. It depends, as usual, on how your particular mind works.

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

Must read?

April 22, 2012 – 6:30 am

Every so often, someone puts out a “top ten must-read” list of books for people unfamiliar with fantasy. There’s nothing much wrong with a list of this nature, if you’re looking for good reading and your taste happens to march with that of the list-maker. Some time back (fifteen years ago?), I was asked to come up with such a list myself – my “top ten must-read” fantasy books for writers.

I couldn’t do it, not even when they let me cheat blatantly by listing authors instead of single titles. And here is why:

It seems to me that a “must read” list for would-be fantasy writers should have as much breadth and depth as possible, both in terms of the length of time covered and in terms of the type of writing that’s covered. Because the point is, in my opinion, to give an overview of the field, both at present and historically. And ten slots just isn’t enough to do that in, as you will see in a moment.

J.R.R. Tolkein belongs on any must-read list for fantasy writers, whether you like his kind of thing or not; the success of “The Lord of the Rings” led directly to the founding of the modern fantasy genre as a separate category, and anything that seminal belongs on this sort of list. He also allows me to check off “epic fantasy” and “high fantasy” in the same slot. One down.

J.K. Rowling comes next, but not because of the wild popularity of the Harry Potter books – no, I put her on the list because her work is a synthesis of a whole lot of fantasy and YA fantasy tropes, from the coming-of-age story, to the boarding-school stories, to the orphaned protagonist and wise wizard mentor, to castles, secret passages, saving-the-world, magic swords, prophecy…. (I have remarked on more than one occasion that Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone had everything a kid could want in a story, except pirates.) It was a tough decision, because I’d really like to have Jane Yolen, Diana Wynne Jones, Nnedi Okorafor, Garth Nix, Tamora Pierce, L. Frank Baum, Patricia Wrightson, Edward Eager, Diane Duane, C. S. Lewis, Patricia McKillip, Robin McKinley, or Phillip Pullman in the childrens-and-young-adult fantasy slot. There is a LOT of really excellent children’s fantasy out there.

I’d want one slot for humorous fantasy, and that belongs hands down to Terry Pratchett and his Discworld books. I’d like at least one slot for modern urban fantasy, but the choice is a lot less obvious when you have Charlaine Harris, Neil Gaiman, Charles de Lint, and Jim Butcher all in competition for the slot. I think I’ll pick Neil for this one, on the grounds that his work covers a lot more territory than any of the others (though de Lint is a close runner-up in that regard). Two more slots full.

I’d like to have at least one slot for somebody who’s doing literary fantasy and/or magical realism, like Angela Carter or Robertson Davies or Gabriel Garcia Marquez or Italo Calvino or Jorge Luis Borges. I’ll throw a dart at the bookshelf and pick Marquez, though again, it’s a tough choice.

That fills five slots with more-or-less modern writers; time to start looking a bit farther back. Dark fantasy should really have more than one slot, because I want one for H. P Lovecraft or Clark Ashton Smith, and one for Bram Stoker, Sheridan Le Fanu, Mary Shelley, or John William Polidori. That only leaves me with three slots left, though, so I might have to drop to one choice for dark fantasy.  I’ll put Lovecraft in one and Stoker in the other, for now.

Three slots left. One pretty much has to go to something Arthurian – The Matter of Britain has over a thousand years of roots in English fantasy fiction, and its traces show up in all sorts of unexpected places once you start looking (Star Wars?), and there are a zillion retellings and spin-offs, starting all the way back at Geoffrey of Monmouth. (The Arthurian legends are, I maintain, the fan fiction of the tenth, eleventh, and twelfth centuries.) I’ll pick Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur, though T.H. White would also do very nicely; John Steinbeck’s version would be perfect if he’d only ever gotten it finished; Mary Stewart’s retellings are excellent and so are Rosemary Sutcliff’s two versions.

So now I have two slots left. I’m torn. There are all the Victorian fantasists (Oscar Wilde, Lord Dunsany, William Morris, George MacDonald); there are the classic literary fairy-tale writers like Charles Perrault and Madam d’Aulnoy; there are sword-and-sorcery greats like Michael Moorcock and Robert E. Howard (whose Conan the Barbarian arguably founded the whole sword-and-sorcery subgenre); there are the heroic fantasists like Howard Lamb and C. L. Moore; there are writers like Evangeline Walton, who’ve done magnificent retellings of older works like the Mabinogian. There’s historical fantasy, which includes much of Tim Powers and several of Poul Anderson’s as well as folks like Susanna Clarke, and the Orientalists, like Earnest Bramah, Barry Hughart, E. Hoffman Price, Lucy Chin, and William Wu. There are writers who don’t fit into any subclass, like Mervin Peake and E.R. Eddison and James Branch Cabal, and writers who fit in multiple possible subcategories, like John M. Ford and Ursula le Guin and Gene Wolfe and Roger Zelazny. And that doesn’t even get to things like Homer or Ovid’s Metamorphoses, or the explosion of fantasy in comics and manga…

I will throw out Shakespeare on the grounds that everyone has probably already seen or read “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” already, and I will throw out Sir Richard Francis Burton on the grounds that he merely translated The Arabian Nights Entertainment rather than actually writing it.

And then I will cheat mercilessly. Twice. First by putting the Ellen Datlow/Terri Windling Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror anthologies on the list, all sixteen of them, even though Ellen and Terri are editors and not writers. Those volumes are as close to a comprehensive overview of the best of the best fantasy, dark fantasy, and horror available in English for the sixteen years they cover, in-genre and out-of-genre, and they include recommendations for novels (which of course couldn’t be included in an anthology of short fiction).

And last I’m going to cheat by filling my last slot with that prolific writer, Anonymous, because it lets in an enormous number of folk tales, fairy tales, myths, and legends all at once, from the Poetic Edda and the Epic of Gilgamesh and the Ramayana, to Cinderella and Sleeping Beauty and the Arabian Nights.

And that’s where I give up. Ten slots, multiple candidates for all of them, and I still had to leave out dozens of possibilities and cheat twice. Fantasy is just too broad a field. Maybe if I did a “top 100″ list…

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

Layering

April 18, 2012 – 6:08 am

One of the things that makes writing difficult for a lot of folks is the notion that they have to do everything at once, on the first try. They’re sure their first draft has to look pretty much like an actual story – maybe it needs some tweaking, but everything’s more-or-less there: the plot, the dialog, the action, the setting, the characterization. They kind of know that they can put some of it in during the revision stage, but they don’t really understand what that means, much less how to do it.

I suspect that this is partly a problem left over from pre-word-processing days. When you had to type or handwrite every page, and adding a paragraph of description meant retyping not only the page with the new paragraph, but the entire rest of the chapter (if not right away, then at least when you got to the point of typing up a submission-ready copy), it was a whole lot easier and more practical to get as much down on the first pass as you possibly could, no matter how you’d really prefer to work. I still have vivid memories of the days when “cut and paste” meant actual scissors and glue or Scotch tape, and of the “page” that ended up being three feet long (folded carefully so that it would stack with the rest of the typed ms.) because I really, really didn’t want to take the time to retype all that stuff. And I only did one book that way before I got a word processor.

The thing is, I know quite a few writers whose first drafts are rather…minimalistic. Several of them start with screenplay-like drafts that sum up all the action scenes as “They fight. George wins.” and all the settings as “Hotel bedroom” or “in car, driving” or “hiding in woods; dark.” I didn’t understand how this could possibly work until one of them, about fifteen years back, introduced me to the concept of layering.

Layering is a writing technique that is slow and mechanical, and it will drive you crazy if you don’t have the discipline to keep going back over and over and over your work until everything you want to have in it is in it. Every so often, though, it’s just the thing, even for those of us who don’t normally work this way. And it’s easiest to explain by example.

Basically, you start with one specific thing: dialog works for most folks, but description or setting or action or narrative summary can do just as well. You write that part of the scene, and only that part. When you’re satisfied with it, you go back to the beginning and add a second layer: what people were thinking while they spoke, for instance (if you started with dialog), or what they were saying while they did things (if you started with action). Then you add a third layer, and so on. So the first draft would look something like this:

He:  “What are you doing here?”

She:  “Isn’t it obvious?”

He:  “Not to me.”

Draft two would put in tone of voice and names:

“What are you doing here?” James demanded.

“Isn’t it obvious?” Helen said sarcastically.

“Not to me,” James said.

Draft three put in the characters’ actions while they talked:

     “What are you doing here?” James demanded, glancing around the half-empty warehouse.  He shuddered.

     Helen shrugged and looked down.  “Isn’t it obvious?” she said sarcastically.

     “Not to me,” James said, refusing to follow her gaze.

Draft four put in more description of the place and the things in it, like so:

    “What are you doing here?” James demanded, glancing around the half-empty warehouse.  A pile of soggy cardboard boxes in one corner had split open, spilling moldy, unidentifiable contents across the filthy floor.  The whole place smelled musty and disused, and he was sure he had heard a rat squeak.  He shuddered.

     Helen shrugged and looked down.  The digital timer on the half-finished bomb at her feet clicked over another minute.  “Isn’t it obvious?” she said sarcastically.

     “Not to me,” James said, refusing to follow her gaze.

Draft five put in what the POV character was thinking about what was going on:

     “What are you doing here?” James demanded, glancing around the half-empty warehouse.   A pile of soggy cardboard boxes in one corner had split open, spilling moldy, unidentifiable contents across the filthy floor.  The whole place smelled musty and disused, and he was sure he had heard a rat squeak.  He shuddered.   It was, he thought, the last place in the world he would have expected to find his wife’s elegant, high-society friend, but here she was.  And what’s that thing she’s standing by?  It’s not … it can’t be … oh, god.

     Helen shrugged and looked down.  The digital timer on the half-finished bomb at her feet clicked over another minute.  “Isn’t it obvious?” she said sarcastically.

     “Not to me,” James said, refusing to follow her gaze.  She could, he supposed, have been dismantling the bomb.  She could even, perhaps, be unaware of what it was.  He refused to think about how much trouble he and Carol were in if Helen had actually been … no, he was not going to think about that.

And so on.  Note that there is nothing special about the order in which I layered stuff on to this example.  You could start with the dialog, and layer in the characters’ thoughts first, and then put in their physical actions or the description, and so on.  And one could also break it down even more finely  – physical description 1:  visual; physical description 2: smells; physical description 3: sounds; characters’ direct thoughts; characters’ indirect thoughts; etc.  It depends on how your mind works.

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

Off Track

April 15, 2012 – 6:27 am

Before we get to the post, I feel obliged to mention that we’re doing some more blog maintenance tomorrow – might as well get it over with as soon/much as possible – so there may possibly be another short outage. We’re expecting this bit to go smoothly, but just in case it doesn’t, I figured I’d best mention it. On to the post.

Recently I read two novels, one by an experienced professional writer, the other by a talented yet-to-be-published one, that both made the same mistake. In both cases, the stories were deeply character-focused, involving several people who disliked, mistrusted, or totally misunderstood one another’s viewpoints, who had to learn to understand and trust each other so as to work together to defeat a threat to themselves and/or their world. In both cases, the stories developed well, came to a climax, and then trailed off in an ending that left me shaking my head and going “Huh?”

After mulling this over for some considerable time, I came to the conclusion that each of the writers got muddled about just what the story they were telling was, and consequently the endings, the climax-and-validation part, didn’t come together the way they should have. The writers shifted gears unexpectedly, from the characterization focus they’d had throughout their stories to a bang-up action climax that left the culmination of the learning-to-understand-each-other plot feeling like an afterthought.

Mind you, the action climaxes were not only entirely justified, they were also totally necessary. The learn-to-understand, come-to-realize plots wouldn’t have been nearly so tense if they hadn’t had the urgency of the action problem behind them (“If this group can’t get along, the Evil Overlord will take over the world by the end of the year!”). The trouble was that as the action confrontations drew nearer, they took over. This left the emotional/characterization plot in the background, to be brought forward and finished up only after the villain’s defeat.

In most cases, this wouldn’t have been a problem. Leaving the wrap-up of the hero/heroine’s romance for after the big fight with the dragon is a really common trope; in fact, it often serves as the final validation, the thing that says “Yes, this time the dragon is really dead, the Evil Overlord is finally vanquished, the wicked stepsisters have had their comeuppance and can’t make any more trouble, and the story is really over.”

In the two cases I’m talking about, though, the first three-quarters of the story was focused on the emotional plot, with just enough action thrown in to keep upping the urgency. This led me, as a reader, to expect the Big Climax to resolve the emotional plot, as well as (or even instead of) the action plot. Instead, I got slam-bang we’re-all-in-this-together action climaxes, with the band of heroes working together like a well-oiled machine, and only after they’d taken out the Evil Overlord did I get to see the yes-I-do-trust-you-now scenes.

This left the stories feeling like a bait-and-switch. I’d have been perfectly satisfied by those endings if the focus in the early part of the story had been on action; I’d have been equally satisfied if the early part of the story had remained the same, but the climax and ending had been adjusted so that the emotional plot continued to be in the foreground.

I’m not completely sure why this kind of front end/back end mismatch comes about, especially not in these two cases. I can think of a number of possibilities, though: that for some reason the author felt that the action climax was the one that really mattered; that the author got too caught up in making the action work to remember the emotional plot until afterward; that the author simply didn’t have the writing chops to do both at once and decided to follow the common action-adventure wrap-up (action first, emotional plot later) even though that didn’t quite fit the story; the author buckled under pressure for action from an editor or a bunch of good friends/first-readers; the author was afraid the emotional plot would get “too purple.” All of them boil down to the authors losing sight of the story they were telling.

This kind of front/back mismatch doesn’t happen nearly so often the other way around – with a high-action front end and an emotional, non-action-oriented climax – but it does happen. In other words, while the solution is to make both ends match, it doesn’t matter whether the author changes the action climax to fit the non-action buildup or whether the author changes the buildup to fit the action climax. The important thing is to achieve consistency in what one is looking at.

By pcwrede | Posted in General, Writing | Tagged , | Comments (2)

Out of ideas?

April 11, 2012 – 6:30 am

So Minicon was last weekend, and in among seeing lots of friends (and managing to miss seeing far too many others) there was the usual crop of questions – what are you going to write next, where do you get your ideas, etc. Including one poor fellow who was convinced that he’d run out of ideas…at twenty-three, with six stories written.

The truth is that you’re not out of ideas until you’re dead, or maybe insane. Not really. What people mean when they say they’re “out of ideas” is one of three things: 1) For one reason or another, they don’t recognize what they’re getting as ideas, 2) The ideas they’re getting aren’t acceptable to them, or 3) They don’t know how to poke at their backbrain constructively.

#1 usually happens when people are used to getting whole stories, or at least large chunks of them, all at once. They don’t know how to take a character or a situation or a wispy hint of plot and develop it into a story, so they don’t recognize those things as ideas. They’re like someone who’s only ever gardened from mid-July to the first of September, when everything is in bloom; they’ve learned to pull weeds and make lovely flower arrangements, but not how to sprout seeds or thin seedlings, or how to tell the weeds that come up in May from the vegetables and flowers that are coming back at the same time. Usually, these folks figure things out pretty fast once they realize that there’s frequently more to the process than just taking dictation from one’s backbrain (much as we all love it when it works out that way).

#2 covers everything from “I can’t think of anything original!” to “But I don’t want to write a romance about space monkeys!” to “My mother will kill me if I write about X!” There are two basic approaches to these kinds of objections: go ahead and write it anyway, as a practice piece that will never be shown to anyone (suitable for the non-original and/or homicidal parent problems…and one can always change one’s mind about the “practice” part later), or poke at the unsatisfactory idea until it become satisfactory.

Which brings me to #3.

There are lots of ways to poke at your backbrain, whether the object is to develop an existing, inadequate idea or generate something totally new. The most obvious is brainstorming. You pick a topic - a random word from a dictionary, or something logical like “possible main characters,” or whatever you want. Then you set a timer for about ten minutes, and write down whatever comes to mind. The rules are: everything that comes up gets written down, no matter how stupid, crazy, or weird; and you have to keep writing all-out, full-steam-ahead until the timer goes off. Then you take each idea, one at a time, (all of them, or the “best” three, or whatever) and use them as topics, until something shows up that you don’t want to move on from when the timer goes off.

You can also use the three-random-things game, where you come up with three or four completely disparate things or actions or characters or events and try to come up with a plot connection among them: “tortellini with pesto sauce; an exceedingly ordinary middle-class American couple; an antique car; a terrorist threat to the Sydney Olympics” “a classical violinist; an avalanche; children playing ‘ring-around-the-rosie.”

If you’ve got a bunch of friends to help play, you give everybody an index card and ask them to write descriptions of two people/characters (one per card); an event (on another card); a plot-problem (on another card); an object (on another card) and so on. Then you collect the cards and shuffle them and lay them out. You can form them up in a sentence, if you want: “Hero is a (character card) whose problem with Villain (character card) is (plot-problem card). They clash at (event or location card); the problem is solved by (object card).” (Example: Hero is a classical violinist whose problem with the Villain, an eight-year-old computer genius, is stopping the Villain from taking over the Republic. They clash at a football game; the problem is solved by a banana.”) They usually do come out just about that silly, if you do them randomly…but it can be fun.

You can combine really unlikely characters and/or plots from two completely different stories, authors, or genres. Sherlock Holmes instead of Romeo in “Romeo and Juliet”; Aral Vorkosigan and Elizabeth Bennet in Robert Jordan’s “Wheel of Time” series; Dirty Harry in “The Lord of the Rings” (“I’ve lost track of how many spells I have left in this wand, Saruman. So, do you feel lucky today, punk? Do you?”) Or you can come up with a “cast” of characters from your favorites from other stories or movies. The idea is not so much to come up with a useable alternative as to get your mind unfrozen…but sometimes you do come up with a combination you like.

If you are visually inclined, browse the web for pictures that tickle your backbrain. (Caroline Stevermer does this on her Pinterest pages.) Decide who the people are or could be; think of something that could happen in a place; imagine what’s going on in a painting and make up how the people got into that situation (or what’s going to happen next).

Take one of the bits-and-pieces that’s floating around in your head – some proto-idea that hasn’t hit critical mass yet. Maybe it’s a phrase like “silver on the wine-dark sea;” maybe it’s a scene or a character; maybe it’s even a general subject like “I want to write a book about families.” Then start plot-noodling it. Look at pictures in search of people that look like they’d “go with” the proto-idea. Brainstorm it. Spin off a list of ten things from a related category: “Races: horse race, race to find cure for plague, space race, boat race, race to get Death Star plans back to the Rebellion, race against time, marathon, gold rush, Indy 500″.

What you’re trying to do here is stir things up. If you focus too hard on “getting an idea,” you probably won’t come up with anything – like those times when somebody says “Where shall we go for dinner?” and you suddenly cannot for the life of you think of the name of a single restaurant, not even McDonalds.

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

What is right?

April 8, 2012 – 6:35 am

Ask a writer what it is they want to do with their story, and something like eight out of ten will start by giving you a description of the plot. Ask again, push a little harder, and 99% of them will eventually come up with “I want to write a really good book.”

Unfortunately, there aren’t nearly as many writers who can answer the obvious follow-up question: “OK, but what does that mean?” Usually, they look at me blankly, or say “But – but – but everyone knows what a really good book is!”

Well, no, they don’t. If everyone agreed about what a really good book is, you wouldn’t have people arguing about whether various bestselling titles are works of genius or perversions of the writer’s art. And unfortunately, nine times out of ten, if I say “So OK, tell me what a good book is, then,” the writers can’t articulate it.

This is a problem, because if you don’t know what it is you are trying to do, you’re likely to have a hard time figuring out whether you’ve done it. I’m not talking here about knowing the ending of the story (though a lot of writers do need to have that to aim for). I’m talking about knowing exactly what you, as a writer, want to accomplish and why.

What does “write a really good book” mean to you? If the stories that you find gripping or engrossing are all thrillers, writing a moody, atmospheric story of character development is likely to leave you feeling unsatisfied and twitchy, no matter how brilliant everyone else tells you it is. And if you don’t realize that what you think makes for a good book is different from the opinions of your critics, teachers, friends, etc., then you’re likely to feel equally unsatisfied, if not downright miserable, when your top-notch action-adventure story or stylistic masterpiece receives a lukewarm reception from people for whom “a really good book” means something other than what you’ve written.

Every writer has, on some level, a vision of what they want to do with the story they’re writing, and if the writer betrays that vision, they’re not going to be pleased with the result, no matter what else goes right. Unfortunately, the writer’s vision is seldom the sort of clear picture that’s advocated by a lot of how-to-write books. It can be hard, if not impossible, to articulate. Sometimes, it’s little more than a feeling, which is intensely frustrating to both the writers and to the well-meaning people trying to tell them they have to come up with a log line or a summary paragraph or an outline or a theme.

“I’ll know when I get it right” is just not good enough for the more analytical types, but it’s often all we have – even for those of us who are ourselves analytical. So what does one do when the vision one has for the book isn’t something one can spell out in so many words?

What you do is, you take a deep breath and believe in yourself. If you’ll know when you get it right, then believe that you will know. Work at it, fiddle with the parameters, change the viewpoints, mess with the plot outlines – but trust that inner voice when it says “Not like this” to something that logic says is just the perfect thing. And trust it again when it says “Yes, this is right” to something that logic (and/or your editor, agent, friends, crit group, fans, etc.) all say is insane and unworkable.

If you find that your confidence is easily undermined by those other voices, you may have to stop listening to them for a while. That means not talking about your work-in-process with the dear, supportive friend who thinks you should be writing gritty urban fantasy instead of the sweet Romance that your inner voice is demanding. It means that you stop reading the writing forum where everyone talks endlessly and with great assurance about how books have to start with action to sell these days and how you must never use a first-person narrator, when the book that’s banging on the back door of your brain is a first-person memoir that starts with three pages of description and backstory. It may mean reading a lot of books like the one you want to write (to reassure yourself that yes, books like this do sell), or it may mean reading a lot of books that are totally unlike the one you want to write (so you don’t get the depressing feeling that it’s all been done before, much better than you’ll be able to do it).

You also want to be fairly certain that it really is your backbrain that’s insisting on doing this insane and unworkable thing, and not the lazy part that doesn’t want to be bothered doing things the hard-but-better way. Generally speaking, if I feel gloomy and depressed about the advice I’m getting (because in my heart I know it’ll be better for the book, but it’s going to take a lot more time and effort and I-don’t-wanna), then I knew I should follow it; if I feel cranky (because no matter what they’re saying it’s just not right for this story), then I know I shouldn’t. I expect that there are writers who are the opposite – who feel cranky about advice they ought to follow (because they know they should and hate being told/reminded) and depressed about the advice they ought to not follow (because they know that’s not the kind of story they want to write, but they think they have to). The trick is to know what your particular tells are, so that you can reliably ignore what needs ignoring and accept what needs accepting.

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

Better Living Through Technology?

April 4, 2012 – 6:13 am

It looks as if we have successfully migrated the blog and web site to the new servers, knock wood. I’m afraid a couple of comments got lost in the switchover, sorry. The whole process was a whole lot more involved than I’d expected, and I wasn’t even the one doing most of the work!

Basically, what happened was, my ISP was de-commissioning the very old server that all my files were on. As they are a no-frills outfit, this meant that all their customers had to move their files from the old server to the new one. They had a “preview” function set up so you could see that it worked, and when everything was fine, you called and had them switch the pointer for the domain name so that it stopped pointing to the old server and started pointing to the new one. Then, at the end of March, they would unplug the old server and sell it for scrap or recycling or something.

It all should have gone very smoothly, but as you all know, it didn’t.

Problem the first: I am reasonably computer-literate, but that’s mostly by comparison to a lot of my Luddite friends and family. I don’t have a lot of call to FTP things, and I hired somebody two years back to set up my blog for me. I can do the basic day-to-day stuff, like posting, but much beyond that and I’m lost.

So I called in a friend and co-author who has actually studied stuff like this, albeit a while back. With much help from tech support, we got the files transferred (turns out you can’t go server-to-server; you have to copy them all to your desktop and then re-upload them to the new site). We checked “preview” and everything looked fine. So we said, go ahead and switch the domain.

At which point, the blog went down. WordPress does not agree with the new system. It didn’t agree with the old one, totally, but once my guru got it working, it worked fine for two straight years. Unfortunately, whatever she did to get it working did not transfer/translate to the new system.

So we spent five days on the phone with tech support, trying to figure everything out. My friend managed to get into the web site and put up a “technical difficulties notice,” but the blog was invisible. She re-downloaded, re-uploaded, upgraded, downgraded, and tried everything they or we could think of. Finally, she told them to put the domain pointer back to the old server, which is when the blog reappeared and I posted the first Technical Difficulties announcement.

We still didn’t have any idea what the problem was or how to fix it, so we called in another friend who has lots of experience with WordPress. It took her another day and a half to pin down and fix the underlying problem. She turned it back over to us, and we rechecked everything again.

All looked well. OK, we were by this time two days past the supposed drop-dead date for completing the migration, but we weren’t the only ones having problems and the ISP extended the deadline by a week, so that was all right. I didn’t even feel terribly guilty, because we’d started copying the data and doing all the stuff for the move a good ten days in advance of deadline; if everything had gone as smoothly as promised, we should have had five days to spare (see “on the phone with tech support”, above).

And then, just as we were ready to pick up the phone and say “OK, switch the domain pointer to the new server for real this time,” my Internet connection went out.

“Aha,” we said, “obviously they are having more trouble with the server than we knew!” So we made the call at 2 p.m. Monday to tell them the connection was down. They were busy enough that we left a call-back number, but we figured, again, that it was an overall problem and they were swamped. So we waited.

And waited. At 4 p.m., my friend left to attend to other responsibilities. I moped. I was still moping Tuesday morning, when I couldn’t stand it any more and took my iPad to a coffee shop to at least check on my email.

Which is where I discovered that at 2:10 p.m. on Monday, they’d opened a repair ticket based on the phone message…and closed it as “complete, no further action needed” at 2:15 p.m. And sent me an email to tell me that. Which of course I didn’t get, because I had no working Internet.

So I grabbed my cell phone and called tech support. Who referred me to the business office, where I finally found out that the credit card that auto-pays the ISP had expired last month and their email notification got caught in my spam trap, so they’d just shut everything down. I gave them the new expiration date, they ran the charge, and everything was back in business within about fifteen minutes.

Doing the final check and getting them to re-point the domain name was almost anticlimactic after that. Especially since it seems to have gone smoothly. (Knock wood.)

So I’m back in business, and will return you to your regular writing blog on Sunday. If nothing else happens…

And people wonder what writers do all day.

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

Technical difficulties

March 31, 2012 – 7:07 am

As many of you have noticed, the blog was out for a week and is now back. Unfortunately, the “back” part may be temporary; it’s back because the migration to the new server didn’t work properly and we had to un-migrate it.

This means that some time in the next week (hopefully within the next day or two) the blog will be re-migrated to the new server. At this point, I’m expecting it to go down again, because that’s just the way this whole process has been working so far, but perhaps we’ll get lucky this time.

There are people working on this, and I’m hoping we get it all figured out within the next week or so. My ISP informs me that I’m not the only one having trouble with the migration, so it’s not entirely under my control. And they’ve been absolute champions about answering questions and spending hours on the phone when they, too, are having an extraordinarily busy time.

In practical terms, what this means for you folks is: I’m not going to be posting quite as regularly until we’re finished moving everything, and the blog may go down again sometime in the near future (though not for as long, I hope).

Thanks for your patience, and I’ll try to keep this updated for any new developments.

By pcwrede | Posted in General | Comments (2)

Fictional Families

March 21, 2012 – 6:07 am

Families are often hard to deal with, even if you love them. This is true in real life, but it’s even more true in fiction, especially in science fiction and fantasy. A large part of the problem is that including the hero/heroine’s family in the story means that the number of characters instantly begins to proliferate: two parents, four grandparents, an unknown number of siblings, aunts, uncles, and cousins (it really isn’t plausible for the main character, both parents, and all four grandparents to have been only children, especially in an agrarian, pre-industrial, or even just pre-birth-control society). When you already have a strange world to establish and a bunch of plot-related characters to work in, the thought of making up and dealing with all those additional people (most of whom aren’t really relevant to the story you had in mind) is daunting.

Then comes the question of what to do with all those people once you have them, and how to make them individual enough so that the reader doesn’t get overwhelmed or confused. And unless the story is about the family and its relationships (which most action-adventure stories, SF, and fantasies really aren’t), one has to do all of that while developing the major characters who are actually important to the plot.

A character’s family is usually really important to the backstory and characterization, and often to the emotional plot as well, but they often aren’t that important to the action plot. In a character-centered story, this isn’t so much of a problem, but in an action-centered one, it can cause serious difficulties with balance.

One way to solve this dilemma, obviously, is to get rid of the family. This is why so many main characters are orphans (the Evil Overlord burning down the hero’s village has become an opening cliché for a good many fantasies), or adults who are estranged from their families, or who are adventuring hundreds or thousands of miles away from whatever family members they have. This works fine for a standalone or a classic trilogy that ends with awards and weddings as the validation, but these days an awful lot of things that were supposed to be standalones or trilogies end up as a series, which means that even if the main character’s family-of-origin has been disposed of by the Evil Overlord, he/she often ends up with a spouse and children long before the series winds down.

Some writers solve the problem by killing off the spouse and kids after a book or two, but one can’t do that over and over without the reader starting to wonder whether the main character is actually getting anywhere in his/her efforts to Save The World. After all, if the hero’s parents were killed by bandits and his first wife murdered by an ambitious flunky and his three kids killed by the Evil Overlord and his next girlfriend accidentally dies in an assassination attempt…well, it certainly doesn’t seem like his efforts have made the world much safer, does it?

Then there are the writers who shuffle the spouse and kids off somewhere safely offstage, so the main character can keep having adventures. This works find for one or two stories, but as a premise for an ongoing series it tends to be unsatisfying, if not downright annoying. Even a trophy wife is supposed to have some kind of presence in her husband’s life, if only “being seen in public so everybody knows he has a trophy wife.”

The third common way of dealing with the main character’s developing family is to skip ahead fifteen or twenty years and start telling stories about the next generation. Unfortunately, this puts the author right back at the beginning – what to do about the main character’s parents? – with the added problem that readers who’ve been following the series already know this character’s parents, like them a lot, and want them to continue living happy and/or interesting lives, which means that killing off the second-generation’s parents is not going to play well with those readers.

The final way of dealing with the main character’s family is to get them involved in the action plot. This works really well when the story is character-centered from the get-go (even if it’s not specifically family-centered). It also works when there’s a good fit between the characters who make up the family and the types of characters who are needed to move the action-centered plot along, but how many families are neatly made up of a hero, a thief, a swordsman, a mage, and a healer? It doesn’t work nearly as well when there are no plot-related roles other than “victim” for members of the family to occupy (realistically, how many times can a family member be mugged, kidnapped, murdered, or framed without the whole clan starting to look seriously accident-prone?).

I think the problem comes from several directions. First, some writers have trouble accepting that if they’re writing an action-centered plot, the main character’s family are going to be minor characters, no matter how important they are to the backstory and personality development of the hero/heroine. Second, the writer knows how to handle and develop major characters, but hasn’t yet figured out how to handle minor-but-important ones satisfactorily – it’s all or nothing; either fully-developed on-stage important characters or nameless spear-carriers, with no middle ground. And third, many writers have trouble juggling a large cast of characters, and adding even two parents into the equation can end up being two more than they can handle. Rather than starting to drop balls, they sensibly choose to write the extras out of the story.

By pcwrede | Posted in Writing | Tagged , | Comments (18)

Specific Research

March 18, 2012 – 6:46 am

A while back, I had an inquiry from a reader regarding research, specifically asking how I went about researching historical slang and stage magic. I decided I’d answer it here instead of in email, because while the specific subjects are fairly easy to address, there are some general questions that I think would be of interest to people as well.

Historical slang from the last three or four hundred years is not terribly difficult to find out about. There are quite a few dictionaries that deal specifically with slang. Partridge’s Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English has been around since the mid-1930′s; there’s also the Historical Dictionary of Slang, and several similar titles, like The 1811 Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue, that focus primarily on British (as opposed to American) slang. The time-consuming part is browsing through them in hopes of finding a word that means what you want – they aren’t reverse dictionaries.

Reading letters, novels, and especially plays that were written at the time you’re writing is a good way to find useful period idioms, euphemisms, slang, and/or specific changes in grammar and vocabulary. Reading modern historical fiction set in the time period you’re writing is a bit dicey – it’s often difficult to be sure that the author did his/her research (and there’s always the temptation to make something up), but they can be a reasonable shortcut to finding words which you can then check out in your historical dictionary to make sure they really are period. (The Oxford English Dictionary is exceptionally useful in this regard because it is not only more comprehensive than anything else, it gives references with dates for the earliest usage of a word in each meaning.)

Stage magic is another thing that’s not that difficult to find books about. A lot of basic sleight-of-hand tricks have been around for a really long time, and there are plenty of books about the history of sleight-of-hand, famous stage magicians, and how the tricks are done, as well as how-to books for those who want to learn a few tricks (or just find out how stage magicians perform some of their famous illusions, like sawing the lady in half).

In other words, an awful lot of the research that looks like it should be tricky and difficult is actually much easier than it looks.

There are really two sorts of research that writers do: general and specific. It’s usually most effective to start with general reading, whether you’re writing historical fiction or a modern murder mystery. An overview of the particular time and place (Elizabethan England, Heian Japan, modern-day Australia, etc.) or a particular topic (horses, guns, poisons, military strategy, accidental injuries) gives you some idea what you’ll need to know and where to go looking for it. Starting with a general overview also provides you with background and terminology that is a great help when you move on to specifics.

When I’m researching a particular period, I usually start with books like A Social History of England or The World of Jane Austen. I read at least three or four of these overviews before I move into the next phase, in which I continue reading general histories but start adding biographies. I pick the biographies according to what I know about the book I’m going to write: for the Mairelon books, I read biographies of Wellington and the Prince Regent; for the Kate and Cecy books, I read more of those, plus ones about Beau Brummel and Lady Caroline Lamb, and a charmingly gossipy period autobiography I found in a used bin, titled Diary of a Spinster Lady. For the Frontier Magic series, I started with books about the most recent Ice Age in North America and the geology of the continent, then moved on to the few titles about pre-Columbus America; I followed up with a bunch of biographies and autobiographies of settlers on the Great Plains, plus the journals of Lewis and Clark.

By the time I finish all that, I usually have a stack of additional titles that look interesting and a list of things I want to know but haven’t found yet, like the period slang references mentioned above. Sometimes the things I know I’m missing are very specific – I spent several hours at the library hunting up a street map of London in the eighteen-teens for the Mairelon books, and another hour or so tracking down descriptions of early railroad journeys for Thirteenth Child.

It is often extremely useful to expand one’s research horizons beyond what is initially obvious. For instance, there are some great books about the construction of historical costumes that are written for people designing costumes for plays, which you can track down in the theater section, there are lots of books about “the world of Famous Author X (Shakespeare, Pepys, Jane Austen, Keats)” under literary criticism, and there are books about the design of period furniture under antique collecting and about the architecture of historical buildings under architecture.

During the writing process, I usually accumulate things to double-check – descriptions, distances, timing of events – and I spend a day or two looking them up and fixing them every couple of chapters (usually because I’m temporarily stuck and want to do something productive). The worst ones are the ones I sort of vaguely remember reading about, but can’t quite recall where – it takes forever to track them down.

Obviously, a book with a real-world setting, whether historical or modern, will usually require a lot more research than one where the author is making up the background from whole cloth. The interesting thing is that it’s often present day settings that the writer has to be most careful about, especially if they’ve never lived in a place where they’ve set a story. One has to be extra-careful, because there are a lot of people who have lived there, and who will catch you if you get things wrong.

There are also a number of specific topics – horses, guns, period dress, ships – each of which has a passionate and vocal following of folks who have apparently memorized every detail of their chosen obsession down through history. If you can find one of these folks, they are invaluable research references; on the down side, if you make an error in the size of a screw, they will let you (and everyone else) know about it. It is therefore well worth the time to put in a bit of extra research in these areas (and on others that attract ardent hobbyists), and to find a knowledgeable person to vet the manuscript in those areas if you yourself do not happen to share that passion beyond what you need to know for the story.

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

Villains

March 14, 2012 – 6:03 am

There is really nothing like a good villain. From Blackie Duquesne to Darth Vader, they’re often the most striking and memorable characters in a story. A lot of the professional writers I know find villains a lot more fun and interesting to write about than heroes; several have gone so far as to turn their plots upside down so that they can write their villains as heroes. Warts and all.

Villains come in several varieties. There’s the villain who is purely evil, who can commit the most heinous of crimes without batting an eyelash or disturbing a (non-existent) conscience, whom the readers love to hate and in whose downfall they can rejoice without guilt or regret. There’s the slightly less evil villain who is at least comprehensible in his villainy; he/she may be a bit over-the-top, but in a way that suits the story. You also have the realistic villain, who is horrifying because he’s recognizable as someone you might meet in real life; this sort can range from the extremely believable and realistic portrayal of a psychotic sociopath (whom most people are unlikely to encounter, we sincerely hope) to the equally believable and realistic portrayal of a narcissistic bureaucrat that everyone recognizes instantly from a go-around day-before-yesterday. And then there are the non-villain villains, the pure antagonists, who are not evil but merely disagree with the hero about what needs doing and/or why and how.

If you want to write a Conan-style sword-and-sorcery adventure, you pretty much by definition need the purely evil, technically cardboard sort of villain, because the whole story and plot will fall apart otherwise. A realistic, believable antagonist-who-just-disagrees is next to impossible to make work in the sort of story; if you do manage to make it work, it’s usually by turning the sword-and-sorcery adventure into some other sort of story entirely. (This can, of course, be a Very Good Thing, but only if you happen not to care much whether you really end up writing a Conan-style sword-and-sorcery.) It is, therefore, reasonable to claim that a realistic antagonist is not a “good villain” for this kind of story.

Similarly, if you are writing a more-or-less realistic novel of complex interstellar politics and interpersonal relationships, a one-dimensional “pure evil” villain is problematic, because the thrust of the story is likely to be more realistic and a cardboard villain will very likely be out of place in such a story. Space opera, on the other hand, can work quite well either way, depending on the story and the writer’s preferences.

My very favorite sort of villain, though, is the villain who has style. This sort tends to be both confident and competent; they have what they see as very good reasons for the things they do; they’re frequently ruthless in pursuit of their goals, but they don’t go for unnecessary violence (though their standards for “necessary” are rather more elastic than most people’s). They’re intelligent and witty, and sometimes they even have some shreds of conscience and/or honor. They’re the ones you secretly wish would change sides.

The trick to creating a “good” villain is to match the level of roundedness and characterization to the sort of story you are telling, and then to put as much work into understanding the villain as a person as you put into understanding the hero. You don’t have to like the villain, particularly, and you certainly don’t have to identify with him (or with the hero either, for that matter). You just have to understand them, to whatever depth is appropriate to the story or more, and then reflect that understanding in your written portrayal of the villain in the story.

Where I think a lot of folks go wrong is in paying insufficient attention to the sort of villain they need for the sort of story they’re writing, especially when the story starts mutating in process. The writer starts off with a Conan-type adventure, where all the characters are types: Noble Hero, Evil Villain, Quirky Sidekick, Smarmy Minion, etc. The action-outline reflects this. But then the writer starts actually writing the story, following the Noble Hero and his Quirky Sidekick. By the time things are a couple of chapters in, the Noble Hero has expressed some rather non-Noble sentiments about peasant girls and mentioned some of his internal conflicts about fighting generally, and the Quirky Sidekick is having a minor depression over his attraction to the Hero’s promised bride, and in short, they’re starting to act like people rather than types.

But the Evil Villain and Smarmy Minion haven’t come on stage yet. The writer hasn’t had to live with them and figure out why they’re having nightmares about mourning doves and drinking quarts of Maalox and making occasional elliptical remarks about safety. So they remain types, motivated mainly by the necessities of the plot rather than by their own interior needs and wants. And if the writer doesn’t notice this, the result is an unbalanced book with realistic (sort of) good guys and cardboard villains. Often, even if the writer does notice, he/she notices too late to do the real work of making the villains into the same sort of rounded characters the heroes have become, so they throw in a couple of stock motivations like a traumatic childhood and hope that will cover things. It seldom does.

One of the ways of avoiding this problem is to bring the Evil Villain on stage right from the start. This is easier to do in some stories than in others; for instance, in the sort of Romance where the heroine has to choose between two suitors, it really isn’t very effective to bring the “bad” suitor on stage at the last minute. In an epic quest fantasy, on the other hand, it usually makes no sense for the Evil Overlord to be hanging around the Humble Hero’s village beginning in Chapter One. To get around this, a lot of authors move to multiple viewpoint format, providing scenes that look in on the villain from an early point in the book.

It’s also common to build up an off-stage villain’s reputation by having other characters warn the protagonist about him/her, have the hero run across the aftermath of horrible things the villain has done, etc. One has to be careful with this, however, as it is easy to build up an off-stage villain to the point where the actual villain is a big disappointment when he/she finally appears at last (because nobody could live up to the scary reputation the writer has created).

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

The Business of Writing: Addendum (Retirement)

March 11, 2012 – 6:38 am

So after all these business posts, people wanted me to write about retiring. I’m not surprised; it was kind of exhausting to think about doing all that stuff.

In any case, this is the retirement-for-writers post. The very first question is: what does retirement mean to you, as a writer? Writing isn’t quite the same as other jobs; most of us can’t imagine retiring in the traditional sense (leaving a day job and not doing it any more). Writers also have more of an option to continue working than people in normal jobs – as long as our brains and our fingers continue to work properly, so can we. I’ve known a good many older professional writers who’ve worked into their eighties, right up to the last minute.

So what does “being retired” mean for a writer?

For me, the main thing it means is having a choice. The majority of professional writers have historically worked on portion-and-outline, meaning that we write an outline and 50-100 pages of a book, sell it, then have to write the rest to a deadline set in the contract. At some point, this gets more than a little old. “Being retired,” for most of the writers I know, means not having to work to deadline – being able to write what we want, when we want, and then sell it. Some still choose to sell on portion-and-outline, but even then, having a choice makes a difference.

Choice also means the ability to experiment more – to write in other genres, for instance, without needing to consider the potential financial downside of trying to build a whole new readership. It means not needing to feel guilty for skipping one’s writing time for a few days in a row. It means being able to slack off on some (though not all) of the less enjoyable tasks involved in running a business (the ones I’ve been droning on about for eight or nine posts now).

In order to have those choices, a writer, like everyone else, needs retirement savings. How much you need will depend on the lifestyle to which you would like to become accustomed and on how you have managed (and will continue to manage) your writing career. Because there are so many different paths for a writing career to take, planning for retirement has to be a bit more active than for most people.

On the one hand, writing income is irregular, which means Social Security payments (which are based on average annual income) may not be as large as you might have expected (that’s assuming you think that there will still be Social Security payments by the time you retire, whenever that is). On the other hand, if you have managed your writing so as to generate royalty income and keep your backlist available and productive (as opposed to concentrating on big money advances), your existing work can continue to generate income for a long time even if you aren’t putting out anything new.

What this means is that your preference for your career changes how you handle your retirement planning. If you’ve been getting irregular big-money advances and not worrying so much about your books earning out or about the backlist, then your income will drop as soon as you stop writing (or slow down significantly, so you’ll probably need to sock a fair chunk of the big money away for later (and you’ll want to, too, because there are tax benefits to shoving money into your retirement plan). You’ll also want to keep an eye on how much Social Security thinks it’s going to pay out when you start getting it. As with most people, you want enough of a retirement-fund-plus-Social-Security to live on; there are plenty of financial counselors and online web sites to help you figure out what that will be. On the plus side, if you’re not writing new stuff and don’t need to manage the backlist, you’re pretty much done with your writing business.

If you’ve managed your career with a vast quantity of work-for-hire or low-to-medium advance originals that come and go and never come back again, you’re in the same shape as the big-money advances people, except that your annual income is likely to be more regular and therefore your Social Security payments will be larger and you may not need to sock away quite as much in your retirement plan. Once you stop writing, you’re done with the business.

If your books are the sort that earn out their advances and continue to sell for a long time, or that can be re-sold after the first publisher loses interest, you likely won’t need quite as large a bundle in your retirement savings because your backlist will continue to bring in income. However, you will need to continue managing your backlist, making sure that things stay in print and get resold and reissued over and over. In other words, you have to keep running the business to some extent, even if you aren’t writing anything new.

And if you absolutely intend to keep writing at full speed until the day you drop, you still need a cash cushion, albeit a smaller one, to deal with everything from medical emergencies to unanticipated changes in the writing market that affect your ability to generate adequate income. The older you get, the greater the likelihood that you will lose a year or two of writing time to illness or unexpected surgery. Medicare and health insurance may pay your doctor and hospital bills, but they won’t replace the income you lose…and illness is a huge drain on one’s creativity.

How much you sock away into a retirement plan under each of these circumstances depends on how much you make and how much you want to be able to spend once you decide to declare yourself retired. The calculation is pretty straightforward: you decide how much income-per-year you want to have, figure out how many years you expect to live after you retire, and plug the numbers into one of the many retirement-planning calculators online (be sure you pick one that adjusts for inflation and that has a reasonable rate of expected return on your investments).

Once you have determined what you think you need in your retirement account, it is wise to consider it a minimum, not your whole goal. The more money you have in the bank (or investment account), the more options you have. Options are good.

As a self-employed person, there are several kinds of tax-advantaged retirement accounts that you can use to accumulate your savings: a traditional IRA, a Roth IRA, a SEP (Simplified Employee Pension), a solo 401K, etc. You probably want to educate yourself about these and then consult with your accountant or a financial planner, because they all have different rules, advantages, and disadvantages. Or you can ignore the tax benefits of these and just stick money in a bank or a normal investment account, but seriously, you’ll be far better off going with one of the tax-deferred plans that works for you. Myself, I have a Roth IRA, an SEP, and a normal investment account, and I max out my contributions to the first two every year and try to add to the third as well.

The main trick to retirement savings is to start early. The power of compound interest is amazing. When I was in B-school, they made us do the actual calculations, comparing the amount of money at retirement generated by two strategies: one person who put $2000 in an IRA starting at age 20, but who stopped at age 30; and one person who did the same thing, only starting at age 30 and going on for the next 30 years. The one who only saved for 10 years, but who started early, always came out significantly ahead of the one who got a late clue. In other words, the sooner you start, the less you are likely to have to contribute out-of-pocket over the years.

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

The Business of Writing: Pulling it all Together

March 7, 2012 – 6:52 am

So there you have it: all seven areas of business – operations, sales and marketing, quality control, finance, administration, public relations, and executive – laid out for writers. Looking at them all at once like this is rather daunting, but not looking at them at all is a recipe for messing up.

If you are a professional writer – or hope to be one – you are running a small business. It’s kind of a peculiar small business, but it’s still a business. Even if the main thing you are interested in is the Art of writing, the business aspects deserve careful consideration and attention, because they affect both the time and energy you have for creating your work (if you’re spending twelve hours a day putting out fires because you neglected one area or another, there’s not much time or energy left for writing). How you manage your business also affects the availability and distribution of your finished work. This doesn’t matter much if you want to sell 100 copies to your family and friends, but it makes a big difference if you’re hoping to make a living at this.

If you’re just getting started, or have yet to sell, most of your time will be doing Production (writing), Quality Control (editing and revising), Sales and Marketing (researching publishers and sending the ms. out), and Administration (tracking your submissions). Finance will kick in as soon as you have either income or expenses to track; Publicity usually shows up a few years down the road.

Midlist writers tend to be juggling a lot faster, as they typically have several projects somewhere in the pipeline, meaning that they may be in the process of writing one book (Production), editing another (QC), while a third is just hitting the bookstores and needs a Marketing or Publicity push; two backlist titles are going up as e-books and those files need reviewing (more QC and Admin); meanwhile, Croatian subrights on half the backlist have sold and need to be tracked until the checks arrive (Admin and Finance), and maybe the writer should see if his/her agent can get them interested in the other half (Admin and Marketing); and an unexpected opportunity to edit an anthology has come up, which could take the writing career in a whole new direction and which the publisher needs a Yes or No on by the end of the month (Executive/strategy). And of course, writers who’ve achieved “lead title” or bestseller status have even more complications in all areas.

In other words, the farther along your career you get, the more work has to be done in each of the business areas, and the more complex that work becomes. This means that no matter what sort of planning you do in regard to your writing business, you’ll probably need to revisit it periodically and make adjustments according to where you currently are in your business, what the market is doing, and how your goals, skills, resources, and opportunities have changed.

As I said to begin with, most writers don’t have a formal business plan. This is because most formal business plans are designed for small businesses that are trying to get a loan from a bank, or for giant corporations that are trying to project their future business. They’re heavy on the financial stuff – sales projections, breakeven analysis, three-year projected P&L, and so on. That doesn’t work particularly well for writers because a) they’re hardly ever going to need a loan to support the business, and b) the time-line for developing a writing business is usually a lot longer than three years, which makes financial projections really difficult unless you have several contracts already in-hand.

For writers, planning the business is about managing their own resources (time, money, energy) in order to have their writing job/career/business go in whatever way they want it to. This obviously means that you have to start by figuring out which way you want things to go. Are you looking for the validation of professionally publishing a few stories? Are you hoping to make a living? Will you be happy writing one gigantic forty-volume popular series about the same people and places, or do you want to do something different with every book? Would you be happy doing some high-paying ghostwriting or working under several pseudonyms, or do you want all your work to be your original stuff with your name on it? What does “being a writer” mean to you?

Once you’ve done that, think about what you are willing and able to do to get there. I’ve talked to folks who weren’t willing to give up one hour of television per week in order to work at their writing, yet who were supposedly desperate to become bestselling writers. You can’t run a decent hobby business on one hour per week, let alone a bestselling writing business. Be honest with yourself about what you want, how much time and energy you’re willing to put into getting it, and how well those two things match up.

Also think about the kind of time and energy you are willing to put into each of the seven business areas, which ones you think you’re good at (or can be), and which ones you’re pretty sure you’ll hate. Then think a bit about how best to design your career in order to minimize the need to do stuff you hate, and get maximum benefit out of the stuff you like doing and/or are good at. (Hint: if you hate doing the Production part of Operations, i.e., the writing itself, this is probably not the career for you.)

What I’ve tried to do in this series of posts is a quick-and-dirty top-down overview of the business of writing, which I hope will be of use to people no matter what stage of their writing career they’re at. I may, at some future date, try to get into more specific practicalities in some of these areas, but probably not until after I’m done with my taxes (it’s too much like a busman’s holiday otherwise. Though I am going to add an extra post on retiring next, because people asked for it.)

Writing is a job, a career, and a business, as well as an art. If you don’t think about the business end before you actually start selling, you’ll have to play catch-up later…and the longer you wait, the harder it gets to figure it all out.

A final caution: Always keep in mind that there are only two line areas: Operations and Sales/Marketing. The Executive area, under which “making a business plan” falls, is not one of these. In other words, thinking about how you’re going to handle all this is worthwhile, even necessary, but it won’t do you any good at all unless you a) have a product (a manuscript, story, or book) to sell and b) can sell what you’ve produced. The first thing is always, always the writing: doing it and improving it and getting it out in front of editors and/or readers.

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

The Business of Writing: Executive

March 4, 2012 – 6:35 am

7. Executive – This has to do with strategic planning and overseeing everything else.

 For writers, the Executive area means keeping an eye on all the other categories to make sure nothing is left out and everything stays in balance (which can be quite a trick for a one-person business). This is also where long-range forward planning goes, which is a whole set of choices that usually get lumped under “managing your writing career.”

Exactly what is an Executive decision and what falls into one of the other areas of business is a slippery thing to determine – and generally unnecessary, as well. As long as you decide whether to let the publisher have e-book rights or whether to hang on to them and published the e-books yourself, it doesn’t matter whether you call it Operations, Finance, or Executive. The important thing is that the decision gets made.

Larger decisions fall squarely within the Executive category, especially those ”managing your career” decisions. There are a lot more options than many would-be writers think of, ranging from basic and fairly obvious decisions (self-publish or traditional publishing? Large, regional, small, or micro-press? E-books or paper? Short stories or novels?), to things that affect specific areas like Finance (go for the highest possible advance, or trade high advances for a better royalty rate, or even a royalties-only deal?) or Publicity (focus mainly on online, or offline? Push early and often, or wait until there are more books to push?), to career development (strictly original fiction, or work-for-hire? Under your name, a pseudonym, or multiple pseudonyms? In one genre or several? Working with other writers, packagers, etc., working solo, or some combination as opportunities arise?).

All these decisions can and do get revisited periodically, and sometimes they change as circumstances change. You may decide initially that you’re going to stick strictly to novels, and five years later unexpectedly get asked to participate in a prestigious short-story anthology with some of the most prominent writers in your field. You might still end up turning the opportunity down, but I guarantee you’ll want to think really hard about it first.

This is also where I’d put managing the backlist, which is a key element in making a living for any writer who’s been at it for a while. Your backlist is all of your older titles; it of course includes the stuff that’s out of print, but it also includes stuff that’s been in print for a couple of years, and maybe even some of those “trunk stories” that never sold at all. Older titles can be resold to new publishers once they go out of print; if you and/or your agent put some elbow grease into it, subrights like audiobooks and foreign translations can provide a surprising amount of income. And then there are e-books and print-on-demand, which have opened up a lot of options for the backlist…but again, you need to put some effort into getting things out there and maintaining them.

One of the most important aspects of the Executive area is keeping everything else in balance – making sure that Publicity isn’t taking over the time that needs to be spend on production/Operations, that the Finance and Administration paperwork is kept up to date, that Sales is covering the backlist as well as the current work, etc. This is especially tricky because in writing, all of this stuff comes in waves: Finance is pretty dead for most of the year, bar an hour or two a month for record-keeping, but it suddenly becomes a critical activity in April when taxes are due. Quality Control has a big surge right before a new book comes out (with the copyedit and galleys to go over); Publicity and Marketing usually have their surge right after. And so on.  So you can’t assign X hours per week to each area, week in and week out. You have to put a lot of hours into whatever is “hot” at the moment, while keeping an eye out to make sure the stuff that isn’t currently swamping you gets enough attention that it won’t blow up into some other kind of crisis.

Long-range planning is a major component of the Executive area. What do you want your eventual writing career to look like? Some writers make as much or more from giving workshops, speaking engagements, writer-in-residence gigs, and teaching as they do from the books they write; others make their money cranking out titles in multiple genres under multiple pseudonyms; still others work in multiple areas, writing screenplays or comics or RPG scenarios as well as short stories and novels; some stick to one much-loved series or set of characters; and so on.

There isn’t a one-size-fits-all way of managing your career, because there are many different possible goals and many different paths to reaching each one. Also, no two writers I know have ever been faced with the exact same set of opportunities and challenges coming out of the blue, nor have they made the exact same set of choices when faced with similar opportunities.

In the past thirty years, I’ve accepted or turned down various opportunities ranging from editing anthologies, to writing a work-for-hire, to helping a friend launch a small press, to teaching classes in writing, to writing a book specifically for a packager or a new line being developed by a friend/editor. Sometimes, my friends and colleagues thought I was crazy to take the risk I took; sometimes, they thought I was crazy for not taking advantage of whatever it was. At present, I don’t regret any of the choices I’ve made; I think that’s because I had a clear idea of what I wanted to do in the long run, and where I wanted to end up and why (if not always how to get there).

Another major component of the Executive area is keeping an eye on what the market is doing, and educating yourself about what it has done in the past and what possible directions it may be going in the future. Over my career, there’s been a major, market-changing event about every ten years – the Thor Power Tool tax decision in the 1980s, the collapse of the independent distributors in the 1990s, the explosion in e-books in the 2000s. Some were predictable; some weren’t – but all of them affected the way I handle my business (whether that means the kind of publicity I do, the way my agent negotiates various contract provisions, or which publishers I put at the top of my “I want them to publish my books” list).

Almost done; next is the summary, or Putting It All Together.

By pcwrede | Posted in Writing | Tagged | Comments (2)

The Business of Writing: Public Relations

February 29, 2012 – 6:05 am

Before we get to today’s post, I wanted to mention two things: first, some time in the next month I’m going to be changing servers. In an ideal world, this will be completely unnoticeable to all the readers of my blog and web page, but how often does everything actually go that smoothly? So if you have difficulty getting  in at some point, that’ll be why. Second, I just uploaded added a couple of map pages to the Frontier Magic section of the web page, for anyone who’s interested in where things are.

6. Public Relations – This has to do with the relationship between a business and the public in general – both the business’ current customers and all of the rest of the people who aren’t customers now but who may or may not become so at some future point.

Public Relations is subtly different from Marketing, in that PR is about the business as a whole, while Marketing is about one specific product. Obviously, there’s a lot of overlap, because both of them involve the way customers and potential customers see the business.

Full disclosure: Public Relations/Publicity is probably my least favorite aspect of running a business, right up there with Sales and Marketing. So if you’re looking for good tips and tricks, this is not the best place for them. This is just a basic overview; if you want to get really into this stuff, find somebody who’s a natural and/or who really likes it, and ask them for advice.

For writers, PR is a lot more personal than it is for most businesses. The closest thing a writer has to a brand name is their own name on the book cover; this means that “self-promotion” (which many people are uncomfortable with, and which some other folks frown upon as “showing off” or “not being about the books”) happens to some extent, whether one wants it to or not.

Being aware of this is half the battle, because PR becomes more and more relevant the more books one has out, the larger one’s readership, and the longer one writes – and until they invent practical time-travel, you can’t go back and fix any minor mistakes you made early in your career that snowballed into large problems as time went on.

For the un- and newly-published, PR is usually indistinguishable from Marketing. When you only have one or two books out, everything you do in public tends to be targeted at selling those titles, and larger implications seldom get considered. Also, when one only has one book out, one doesn’t usually get invited to do the sorts of things that would fall under general PR as opposed to marketing a specific book. This gives the writer a chance to ease into the PR stuff, attending conventions as a pro and getting used to doing panels before having to worry about being Guest of Honor at a Worldcon or giving TV interviews on one of the major networks (unless of course your first book is a mega-hit bestseller, in which case you’d better learn fast. We should all have such problems.)

As with Sales and Marketing, there are two levels to consider when you’re thinking about PR – professional (that is, the reputation/relationship the writer has with editors, agents, reviewers, other writers, and other industry professionals), and the general reputation that one has with fans and readers-at-large. There’s a lot of overlap, of course, but sometimes it’s useful to stop and consider for a moment. Dressing up in a clown suit and walking the streets wearing a billboard advertising your new book may get you some attention from local readers, but perhaps you’d be better off coming up with a PR gimmick that looks a little more professional from the editor/agent/etc. point of view.

A lot of early PR is basic courtesy and common sense: when you’re out in public, don’t be obnoxious; don’t insult people; don’t demand to be treated like a star; find the right balance between talking about your new book all the time and never mentioning it at all. “Out in public” most definitely includes Facebook, Twitter, blogs, comments on other people’s blogs, and any other Internet venues, even if they’re supposedly locked or private. This is especially important because the Internet is so very public – whatever you say can be easily seen by publishers, critics, agents, major authors, and important book buyers, none of whom, thirty years back, would have been likely to have much contact with a newbie author. It’s a lot easier to shoot yourself in the foot nowadays.

There are writers who’ve made a point of creating an obnoxious public persona for themselves and succeeded anyway, but there aren’t many. If you are considering something like this, you need to bear in mind that the way you present yourself in public, right from the start, will be with you for the rest of your writing career. If you get tired of acting that way, or decide that it isn’t serving you well, it’ll take an enormous amount of time and effort to change perceptions of you. There are possibly apocryphal tales of authors who had to change their names and start over because they couldn’t stand the public persona they’d constructed, but couldn’t persuade people to see them any other way. It’s much easier to be yourself.

You can, of course, go whole hog on the marketing/publicity for your early books – hitting the convention circuit hard, coming up with ways to get you (and your books) talked about on social media, throwing big book bashes in unusual places for potential readers, etc. The problems with this are a) it takes a lot of time and energy, b) it takes money (in varying amounts, but very little of it is totally free), and c) if you don’t know what you are doing, or don’t have the personality/experience for it, this kind of thing can backfire horribly. Some writers are naturals at this kind of thing – I’ve know five or six of them – but for those who aren’t, it’s usually better to start small and learn it gradually, rather than jumping in with both feet and ending up with two muddy shoes stuck in your mouth.

As a writer’s career develops and her audience expands, the scope of Public Relations gets larger. Rightly or wrongly, people associate writers closely with their books and assume that if they like/dislike the author, they will like/dislike the books (and vice versa). When making a positive impression may affect the sales of twenty titles, it’s a lot more important than if one only has two books out. The kinds of things you get asked to do (or that you can persuade people to let you get in on) get gradually larger and more significant – instead of a talk to the six English and Language Arts teachers at your local high school, you’re giving a talk to three hundred librarians from every school in your state, or to the the 50 folks who make major buying decisions for all the schools in their state.

Some writers (me included) find being “on” in public very tiring; other writers find it energizing. If you’re one of the latter, you may need to remind yourself periodically that PR is not a line function, and you need to apply that energy to Operations. If you’re one of the former, you need to know that actively doing publicity is not obligatory. You can become a writing hermit who is never seen in public – but that, too, is a publicity choice. In other words, you can minimize this area, but you can’t get away from it entirely.

Next up: Executive

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

The Business of Writing: Administration

February 26, 2012 – 6:33 am

5. Administration – This is the overall organization of people and processes, including everything from office management to the human resources department.

 For writers, Administration covers most of the day-to-day tasks of making and tracking submissions, answering mail, returning email and phone calls, filing, organizing manuscripts, maintaining the web site and blog, and so on. This is where the famous Secretary Hat goes – the job of logging submissions and rejections and then getting the manuscript back in the mail.

Administration, like Finance, is often considered dull, unglamorous, and downright boring. It generally involves a lot of paperwork and organization, which puts a lot of folks off. But like Finance, Administration is something no business can do without. The most obvious part is the aforementioned getting the manuscript in the mail – as I’ve said before, editors do not do house-to-house searches for publishable manuscripts. If Admin doesn’t get the manuscript out, the story won’t get published.

There are, however, a lot more ways in which Admin is important. Keeping track of submissions, for instance – you probably don’t want six novels all sitting at the same publishing house at the same time, even if it is your first choice of publisher. You certainly don’t want to forget that this story was rejected by Editor A at Publisher A three years ago, and send it back as a “new” submission. You may want to keep track of which markets respond promptly and which take years, or which places have bought more (or paid more for) particular types of stories.

You also don’t want to lose track of how long things have been under submission – there’s a point at which you really ought to query the publishing house to find out if the ms. got lost somewhere in the process, and that point is neither six days nor six years after you mailed it off. You don’t want the email from the agent or the prospective editor to sit unanswered in your “in” basket for a week. You want your files and data entry up to date in whatever system you have, so that if and when somebody asks whether you own the Portuguese language e-book rights for a story you published twenty years ago, you can look it up without spending hours and hours digging through old piles of paper, only to discover that the contract you’re after seems to have vanished.

Administration can also cover a lot of miscellaneous and occasional jobs, like travel agent, monitoring and reordering office supplies, mailing out ARCs (Advanced Reading Copies), correspondence, keeping the library in order, finding research materials, keeping the web page current, scheduling and coordinating whatever meetings or interviews or events need to be scheduled and coordinated, etc.

In a large company or corporation, pretty much every department has its own Administration section, because every department has paperwork, phone calls, and organizing necessities. For writers (and any small business), Administration doesn’t have such hard edges. Deciding what to write next is Operations; but is keeping track of the story notes and supporting research Administration or part of Operations? Deciding on a list of publishers to query is Marketing; but composing and printing the letters is probably Administration. Doing the taxes is Finance; filing the receipts and entering income and expenses into Quicken all year could be considered either Admin or Finance. Etc.

It isn’t particularly important that this area be broken out from all the others. What is important is that the work gets done – submissions get tracked, manuscripts get mailed, contracts get filed, the web page gets maintained, e-mails and letters get answered, and so on.

However you choose to keep all the various records and processes, it is generally easiest to set up a good system right from the beginning. The longer you wait, the more likely it is that your early work will never get properly entered when you finally get around to it. The problem is that the earlier one is in one’s writing career, the more all this tracking and record-keeping seems like overkill, or at the very least, over-optimism. And besides, it’s boring and it takes time and it’s boring and it takes energy and it’s boring. Nevertheless, if you stay in the writing business, your future self will thank you for doing it all right from the start. Trust me on this one.

Administration also includes the Human Resources department. Since few writers have any actual employees, this covers stuff like dealing with one’s agent, accountant, and any other professional services one has contracted for, plus whatever skills development one decides to invest in for oneself. “Skills development” here refers to anything that’s going to help the business. Writing skills are one obvious area; one can work on them deliberately in lots of ways, from doing informal experimental bits and pieces to critique groups to attending a seminar or workshop to taking classes in grammar or whatever other area you may feel weak in.

There are, however, lots of other business-related skills that are good for a writer to develop. Basic financial management is a fairly obvious weak point for way too many people; checking the latest marketing and publicity techniques never hurts; website management changes so rapidly that it’s certainly worth reading up on every year or so, and maybe even taking a brush-up class periodically. Publicity and Marketing are areas where writers tend to be at one extreme or the other: either they’re naturals, or they’re floundering. There are books and classes on all these things, frequently in Community Ed centers (which are usually cheaper and less time-intensive than college-level night school).

If you’re starting to feel overwhelmed, I’m not surprised. I started feeling overwhelmed about two posts ago, and all I’m really doing here is describing, in categories and a bit more detail than usual, the stuff I have to do to make a living writing. Seeing it all laid out in print makes me realize just how much I and all the other pros I know are juggling all the time…and there are still two areas to go.

Next up: Public Relations.

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

The Business of Writing: Finance

February 22, 2012 – 6:35 am

4. Finance – This has to do with all the monetary aspects of a business.

The financial end of the writing business needs and deserves a lot more attention than many writers give it absent emergencies. Especially the taxes part. I’ve said before that editors don’t do house-to-house searches …but the IRS does, and they’re not nice about it, either. Finances include a lot of record-keeping, starting with the must-do stuff for the IRS. They still like paper trails, so keeping receipts and printed records of income and expenses is vital.

However, Finance for writers isn’t only about keeping good records for your taxes and making your estimated tax payments on time. This is easy for a lot of writers to overlook, because writers don’t need a lot of cash flow to maintain the business – paper and pens don’t cost much, and once you’ve gotten over the initial outlay for a computer and software, you’re set for years. Really, the main thing writers need money for is their own income, and most think of that as a personal thing, not a business matter.

The trouble is that if you don’t pay attention to where the money is coming from – which titles and formats are selling, which publishers pay more and on time, etc. – you can easily end up missing opportunities and/or find yourself suddenly unable to pay your bills.

It is also perilously easy to live in the moment if you don’t have a reality check. Publishing tends to have a much longer pipeline than most jobs, and if you aren’t shoving stuff in now, you can easily run out of cash three or five years down the road and have to scramble – or start hunting for a day job – to cover day-to-day expenses. Paying attention to one’s projected future income lets you know that this was the last of the advance payments, and you only have until it runs out to sell a new proposal to someone.

Expenses are another problem area. I cannot tell you how many people have said to me “But you’re a writer, so that’s tax deductable; why aren’t you buying it?” What they don’t get is that “tax deductable” does not mean “free.” It means it’s an offset to whatever I made; if I didn’t make money (or if I’ve already accumulated enough expenses this year), the benefit is zero this year and maybe a loss carryforward next year…IF I make enough money next year to cover it. And you don’t want to pile up too many losses in a row, or the IRS gets interested and you may lose all your business deductions for several years.

The rule of thumb I use is “If I wouldn’t buy it on sale for 20% off, I shouldn’t buy it just because it’s tax deductable.” This is a little conservative, because as a self-employed person in the US, I pay both halves of the FICA (that’s Social Security tax), which adds up to 15%, and on top of that goes whatever my marginal tax rate is likely to be that year. So really, the “buy it if it’s on sale” rate should be a bit more than 20% off, but I prefer being conservative. Writers in countries other than the U.S., of course, have to work out their own percentages based on their particular tax situations.

If you’re self-publishing or hand-selling your own books, you have a lot more record-keeping because you’ll need to track inventory (unless you’re only doing e-books) and sales. I know more than one writer who’s gotten caught at tax time because for some reason they thought that as long as they spent all their sales income on more inventory, it wouldn’t count as income. If you are one of these, run, do not walk, to a reliable accountant and get them to explain to you what you can and cannot do and how to do it, or you will end up paying a whole lot more than you have to in taxes.

There also seems to be an unfortunate tendency for writers to underestimate how much they’re going to need to live on. They overlook things like insurance and emergency funds and retirement savings when they’re figuring out how much income they need to generate. But if you only include the expenses that come around weekly or monthly, and you spend your entire advance on them, you’re in for a nasty surprise when the car, homeowners’, or health insurance bill arrives, or when you have to spring for Christmas presents, or when the car breaks down. If you aren’t making enough from writing to cover this stuff, then you need a day job, and you’re far better off admitting it than pretending that the car will never break, you’ll never get sick or have an accident, and that Scrooge was right about the whole “bah, humbug” thing.

Cash flow is a particular concern for most writers, because either you know how much money you’re going to get (advance payments), but not when you’re going to get it, or else you know pretty much when you’re going to get it (semi-annual royalty payments), but not how much they’re going to be. What this means is that a) you shouldn’t count on having money to spend unless it’s actually in the bank (I know writers who’ve had trouble making rent or mortgage payments because they charged a large purchase, figuring the advance would come in time to pay for it…and then the advance took another three months to arrive), and b) you need to budget what’s in the bank to last for however many months it’ll be until the next payment is likely to arrive. Getting a $5,000 advance check doesn’t mean you can spend half of it on a new laptop if you aren’t likely to get any more income for the next ten months (unless you really can live on $250/month – do the math).

An especially vital aspect of cash flow management is putting aside enough to pay the taxes. I generally dump half my incoming checks straight into the tax account (which I keep in a separate bank from my regular checking account, to make extra-sure that I’m not likely to tap it for day-to-day expenses and then end up owing the IRS hundreds or, in a good year, thousands of dollars, and being caught short). It’s hard to do, but boy, does it make quarterly estimated tax payments less painful…and if I’m going to have to live on beans and rice for three months in order to make those payments, I know it right away, instead of having it come as a nasty surprise.

And then there’s the other stuff: checking royalty statements, keeping track of advances and subrights sales so you can bug the publisher if the payments are taking too long, watching sales trends so you can tell which of your publicity efforts are having an effect and/or figure out when it’s time to ask for new covers, a reprint, or a new push for a title (or do some of that yourself). A lot of writers consider this optional, mainly because they don’t want to bother with all the record-keeping and reviewing.

I don’t consider any of this optional. Especially checking royalty statements; over the years, I’ve found something like $5,000 worth of errors (all of which the various publishers corrected promptly and without argument when they were pointed out). And the unexplained discrepancy that looked at first glance as if I owed the publisher $300 turned out to be a more complicated error that meant they actually owed me $1,000, so yes, I report everything I find, whether it looks as if it’s good for me or for them. Computerization has eliminated errors in addition and subtraction, but it has resulted in a lot more data entry problems, so the checking still needs to be done.

Keeping good records allows you to know how your business is doing financially – and quite often why, which can give you an idea what to do about it. It also provides essential input into lots of decisions, from whether to attend a bookstore event/autographing, to whether to change publishers or agents, to which of two equally tempting ideas might be better to work on next.

Note that I didn’t imply that all of these decisions should be made strictly on financial grounds. You may be well aware that the autographing at a local bookstore will take three hours (what with driving time), and you’re only likely to sell two hardcovers to folks who wouldn’t have bought them anyway (meaning you’re working for around $1.30 per hour, less gas money), so financially it’d be a dead loss. But you may want to do it anyway, for the publicity, for contact with your fans/readers, for goodwill with the bookstore and its employees (who may be more willing to hand-sell your book once they’ve met you), or just because you get such a lift out of doing this kind of thing that you always come home and write six times as much for the next three days.

On the other hand, if you’re paying $300 to fly to another city for a similar autographing, the expense is so much greater than any goodwill generated that it’s probably not worth doing. On the third hand, if you’re going to be in some other town anyway, it may well be worth the good publicity to set up a couple of local autographings or unpaid library appearances (especially if you can do enough of them to justify deducting some of the travel expenses).

Crunching the numbers is something many would-be writers think of as boring and uninteresting, but it is surprising how fascinating all those figures can be when it’s your book, your sales, and your money.

Next: Administration

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

The Business of Writing: Quality Control

February 19, 2012 – 6:30 am

3. Quality Control. This is where products and processes are tested for defects.

For all writers, Quality Control obviously includes all of the editing and revision parts of the job; for the self-published, it includes packaging details as well – everything from design (page layout, font/typeface, cover design) to things like the choice of paper and cover materials.

QC isn’t considered a line function, most places, because it doesn’t directly generate sales, but it’s still a vital support function. Even if one’s overall business strategy is to produce vast quantities of minimum-quality stuff, sell them cheap, and make money on volume, there’s still a point below which customers just won’t buy. This is as true of writing as it is of any other field.

A surprising number of beginners think they can neglect quality control at some level – most often, the line I hear is that “it’s the editor’s job to fix my grammar, spelling, and punctuation.” What these folks are forgetting is that editors are their customers too. And as I said, all customers demand a minimum quality level in the manuscripts they buy.

That minimum applies to every aspect of the manuscript, from formatting and mechanics (grammar, etc.) to the more subjective aspects like “is it a good read?” The format and mechanics stuff is easy enough to find out about – check the publishing house’s submission guidelines and/or ask your editor, or get a copy of the Chicago Manual of Style. Fixing the mechanics, on the other hand, can be a long and tedious process, depending on the exact problem (if you don’t know what a comma splice is, for instance, you’re going to have a fairly hard time finding them, let alone fixing them).

This is one of the reasons why so many writers recommend learning grammar, punctuation, spelling, etc. really thoroughly, until getting it right is unconscious and effortless. It will save you enormous time and effort in the long run. If you haven’t a clue about grammar, you can try finding a tame English major who is willing to go over your ms., trade proofreading with a writer friend, or in a pinch you can hire your own copy-editor. Hiring one’s own copyeditor is relatively expensive, and not recommended unless you are self-publishing, in which case it’s part of the production costs that a traditional publisher would handle for you.

Many writers spend most of their QC time and effort on the subjective aspects of the story, which is fine as long as they’re reasonably sure that the format-and-mechanics part doesn’t need attention. The subjective aspects are what most revisions are about, and they’re also where first-readers and critique groups come in. Since “is it a good read?” is a subjective question, it’s generally a good idea to get other eyes on the manuscript at some point to double-check that what the writer thinks is “a good read” is coming out as “a good read” for other people, too - and for many writers, getting those other eyes early in the process is better than later. Those who don’t possess a temperament that allows for taking critique/comments from others have to work much harder to compensate for the lack of alternate opinions.

In pretty much all cases, Quality Control is a matter for more than one set of eyes. By this I mean that if you try to do it all yourself, you are highly likely to miss things, whether they’re dangling participles or stylistic problems. The author does get to decide whether or not to take the advice of others to heart, but it is a really good idea to a) find someone to ask for help and b) think really, really hard about rejecting that help once it’s been given.

Quality control is something that can (and probably should) be applied at every stage of the production process, so long as it doesn’t interfere with production. For writers, that means that any early brainstorming sessions, redrafting and rearranging chapters, major structural fixes, etc. are just as important as critique groups and final polish – and that editorial revisions requests also count. The trick here is to remember that quality control is not a line function; production is. That means that if the quality control part (also known as the Internal Editor) is getting in the way of production, QC gets pulled back and put off until later, after the production part has been done but before the product goes out to potential customers (i.e., editors).

It is also common for writers to place too much emphasis on quality control – to demand perfection (or at least a much higher standard of work) than is necessary or desirable. Perfection is not achievable; it is certainly not achievable in one’s very first story or novel. As long as you do your best, you can’t expect more than that. This time. If you finish something and aren’t satisfied – and I know very few writers who are – spend some of your between-books time working on your skills in whatever ways you find useful. After all, QC also includes making sure the production people are capable of doing the jobs they’ve been assigned.

Oddly enough, in writing, quality has very little to do with the absolute speed of production. Every writer has a speed that can be considered “too fast” – i.e., if they write that rapidly, the quality of their work suffers – but how fast is “too fast” varies wildly. I know writers for whom one book every two years is “too fast,” and others for whom a book in two weeks works fine, but twelve days is just too short a time period. It depends on the writer…and sometimes on the story. This means you have to be hard-nosed about looking at the actual quality of whatever you’ve produced, and not get distracted by how fast or slow you produced it. Sometimes, this means not telling your crit group that you wrote the last six chapters in two days until after they’ve made their comments.

In addition to the editing and revising parts of the writing job, QC also includes less obvious things like motivation, confidence, getting enough sleep and exercise, working at one’s writing skills, eating properly, taking a break now and then – all things that make a surprisingly large difference in the overall quality of one’s writing output.

Exercise, food, breaks, and sleep are particularly important because they are things that aren’t clearly part of the production process and that sometimes seem as if they’re actively interfering with it. If you neglect them, however, both the quality and the quantity of your production tends to drop like a rock. This is also an area where you cannot make comparisons with other writers. Everyone has different biochemistry, and the fact that Joe Pro can get by on two hours of sleep a night, four gallons of coffee, and a diet composed exclusively of Twinkies and still crank out high quality prose doesn’t mean you can. Be realistic about what you need, and then make sure you get it.

Next: Finance.

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

The Business of Writing: Sales and Marketing

February 15, 2012 – 6:47 am

2. Sales and marketing. Sales is defined as “the act of selling a product in return for money or other compensation.” Marketing is the strategy that the business uses to get to the sales part.

 Sales and marketing is generally considered the second of the two line functions in business, because it generates income directly. The Sales part is pretty obvious: you give someone something – a proposal, a manuscript, a book or e-book – and they give you money. The Marketing part is all the various research, techniques, and strategies that you use to get the sales.

Sales, for writers, splits into two categories: licensing and direct, or selling-to-editors vs. selling-to-readers. Early on, in the traditional publishing industry, it’s all about licensing. The writer sells (licenses) his/her work to a publisher/editor, who handles the actual production of the physical book, as well as a lot of the things that come under Quality Control. Selling to an editor involves the grunt work of sending the manuscript out over and over until you get an offer, followed by the contract negotiations over exactly what rights and subrights the author is licensing to the publisher. Eventually, most of us get an agent to handle this part, but that doesn’t mean it goes away entirely. The author still has to OK the deal, and then review and sign the contract, and there’s often a lot of networking on the author’s part that goes into getting the offer in the first place.

If you’re self-publishing, the whole licensing area drops out (except possibly for subrights); instead, you have expanded the Operations area and vastly expanded the Marketing and Publicity areas, in order to do all the things a traditional publisher would do.

Either way, direct sales-to-readers don’t come into the picture until there’s an actual physical book available to sell. For the traditional publishing industry, the publisher handles the vast majority of selling-to-readers, too, but there are at least some genre writers who generate direct sales themselves, at personal appearances or by setting up their own sales tables at conventions and book fairs. Usually, this kind of direct marketing-to-readers works best if one is in a genre such as SF (which has lots of conventions) or children’s/YA (school and library book fairs). For the self-published, there’s all of that plus the getting-the-book-into-bookstores part, which takes considerable time, effort, and persuasive ability.

Direct sales are also something that one has to watch closely. While it can be very satisfying to talk to readers and watch them buy your books, you have to sell at least one hardcover or two to three paperbacks per hour just in order to make minimum wage for the time you’re spending at the table. Add the same numbers for every hour you spend getting to the convention, hauling books in and out, setting up and tearing down, collecting and paying sales tax, and for most writers, it’s just not cost-effective. (I’m assuming here that the writer bought the books wholesale from the publisher at the standard author discount rates.)

For ebook publication, there’s nowhere near as much time and effort involved in distribution and direct sales; you sign up with the big e-retailers, put a link on your web site/blog, and you’re pretty much set. On the sales and distribution part, anyway.

Which brings me to the marketing half of Sales and Marketing.

There are two basic types of marketing: push marketing, in which one tries to get the book prominently displayed in as many places as possible, so as to encourage potential readers who pass by to pick up the book and buy it, and pull marketing, in which one tries to get a lot of potential readers to go to bookstores and ask for the book, “pulling” it into the store. Most of the marketing publishers do has traditionally been push marketing to bookstores and wholesalers. Authors do both: push marketing to editors and pull marketing to readers.

Like Sales, Marketing splits into two parts: marketing a manuscript to editors/publishers/agents, and marketing the book to readers. For writers who don’t yet have an agent, marketing a manuscript basically means doing a bunch of research to find out which publishers/editors/agents are most likely to be interested in their particular book, and then polishing their query letter/proposal. Those of us who have agents are not exempt from this; there are always questions of strategy that only the writer can decide. Would a collectors edition be feasible, or is it too early in the writer’s career for anyone to be interested? Is it better to do a free podcast now, as a promotion, or try to sell audiobook rights later? Will that high-profile work-for-hire generate enough visibility to be worth the lost time working on one’s own original series?

This part of marketing can also include choosing new products, which for writers means picking what to write next. Depending on your overall strategy for your writing career (see upcoming post on the Executive area), that might mean working out what’s “hot” in the current market, drumming up a work-for-hire contract, or settling down to whatever one is most longing to work on next. Whichever route you’ve chosen, it will require some thought.

The second part of Marketing – promoting books directly to readers – is where most writers focus their efforts once a book comes out, and it will eat your life (and every bit of cash you make on the books) if you let it. There are horror stories about writers who wrote their first book, and then had their careers collapse because they spent three to five years after it came out doing nothing but promotions and answering fan mail.

Direct promotion covers everything from autographings to “author loot” (like bookmarks) to special web site promotions to conventions to book launch parties. Most of the time, the author foots the bill for this themselves, and it can be quite high, especially for those determined to “do everything possible to make the book a success.” They’d usually be better off thinking for a few minutes about how much bang they’re getting for their bucks, and then choosing only those promotional events/items that make for the largest explosions. Figuring out what’s best to do is as important as actually doing it.

Promoting a book directly to readers is absolutely vital for the self-published, but it’s more and more necessary even for those of us who are published by traditional publishers. In-house publicity departments are run ragged, and publishers expect their authors to step up and fill in the gap. The catch is that doing the wrong thing can blow you right out of the water…and it’s not always obvious what “the wrong thing” is. Even experienced professional publicists mess up now and again.

Marketing a manuscript to editors means doing the research to find out if the book you have written fits their line. There is no point in sending a fluffy romantic comedy to a publisher that only does gritty action-adventure-thrillers, or a science fiction thriller to an academic press that only prints textbooks. Editor marketing also means not cornering the editor at her cousin’s wedding, his sister’s bat mitzvah, or their son’s college graduation party and handing them a copy of the ms. along with a demand that they look at it. (I am not making these examples up, only changing names and relationships to protect the innocent.) This is not networking; it’s obnoxious, highly unprofessional, and pretty much guaranteed not to work anyway.

Marketing a book to readers is a lot harder, because the market for fiction is so huge and diverse. Again, market research – but this time, look at what other writers are doing to promote their books, what other publishers are doing, and what’s being done for completely different entertainment products. Talk to readers and bookstore clerks about what they like/don’t like to see happen. Talk to your fellow pros and find out what they’re doing and not doing, and what they think has worked and what hasn’t. Then consider your own time, energy, and abilities, and do some brainstorming.

The most difficult part of marketing a book to readers is getting attention in more than your local community. An ad in the church bulletin usually isn’t costly, but it also doesn’t reach a lot of people. Bookmarks passed out to local bookstores may raise awareness in your city or town, but they don’t do much for the rest of your state, let alone the rest of the country. The Internet and social media have made it possible to reach people all over the world, of course, but doing so effectively takes a lot of time. If you’re self-e-publishing, you’re pretty much committed to it, though.

Next: Quality Control

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

The Business of Writing: Operations

February 12, 2012 – 6:45 am

1. Operations – This includes primarily production, but also design, development, and fulfillment.

The business of writing starts with Operations, the first, largest, and most important of the line function areas. It includes all of the aspects of production/manufacturing, but also such necessary elements as purchasing, order fulfillment, research, development, design, and fulfillment.

For writers, production means actually writing the first draft and delivering it to an editor. This is the one area of the seven that changes least, no matter what stage of your career you’re at. Whether you’re new at this or a veteran of twenty years and thirty published novels, you still have to produce new work.

Production is often hard to get your arms around, because it doesn’t have a lot of individual tasks that are clear and obvious and that build up to the end, like “buy envelopes,” “address envelopes,” “stuff envelopes,” and “mail out query letters.” “Write a page” and “write another page” don’t provide quite the same sense of direction, especially when you aren’t really sure how many pages there are going to be. Yet production is vital, because it’s the thing on which everything else depends. If you don’t produce a first draft, all the way through to the end, then Sales and Marketing has nothing to sell, Quality Control has nothing to edit, Finance has no income to track, and so on.

Since writing a novel takes a fairly long time for most of us, Production is where the majority of writers really need to spend the majority of their time. Breaking it up into one-half to two-hour chunks seems to work best for most of us, as the mental machinery tends to wear out after a few hours for a lot of us (yes, I know people who can sit down and write for 10-15 hours per day, but I’m not one of them, I don’t know many of them, and unless you have already demonstrated your own ability to do this and have lots of 10-15 hour chunks of time available to do it in, you’re probably better off not counting on being able to pull this off.)

An additional difficulty comes from the fact that, for writers, producing a manuscript is not something that can be done by the numbers. Every writer’s process is a little different (or a lot different) from that of every other writer. Not only do we not do things the same way, we don’t all do them in the same order. Parts of the process that one writer considers essential turn out to be things that another writer doesn’t do at all. It can end up just being easier to ignore the whole question.

Which is fine, as long as the production part actually happens, and doesn’t just get thought about or talked to death or outlined without actual progress. Some people write mainly by instinct, and as long as they produce pages and get all the way to the end of their stories, they don’t have to think particularly deeply about their particular production methods. Others of us (raises hand) are more analytical, and need to break things down into parts and then examine them in hopes of improving the process (or at least, of having some idea what to do when things break down entirely).

For those who self-publish, production also includes producing the actual books (whether that means printing and hand-binding them in the basement, hiring a vanity press or print-on-demand place to produce the copies, or putting together a cover picture and formatting the files for an e-book). And let’s not forget inventory management, for those who opt for the traditional basement-full-of-books (whether self-published or purchased from publisher stock).

Operations also includes research and development, though R&D is sometimes broken out as an eighth important area. “Research” here means the stuff one has to do in order to make the story work; market research comes under “sales and marketing,” which I’ll talk about next post. Operations research includes finding out what kinds of clothes people wore in the 13th century, or doing the calculations to figure out how to make two orbiting spaceships collide, or looking up what species of spiders live in the South African jungle where your protagonist’s plane is about to crash. Research is why writers who’ve been around for a while have huge libraries of nonfiction with titles like “Practical Blacksmithing,” “Alexander the Great and the Logistics of the Macedonian Army,” “The 1811 Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue,” “Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds,” “Mad Princes of Renaissance Germany,” and “Rats, Lice, and History,” to pick a few random titles from my own shelves. (The book on logistics is a thin volume that provides, in the footnotes, the equations for how much various pack animals can carry in the way of supplies and therefore how many of them you need to support an army of various sizes, and how long the army can travel without needing to stop and resupply. “Rats, Lice, and History” contains my all-time favorite footnote: “If the reader does not know the meaning of this word, it is too bad.” [The word in question is saprophyte.])

Writers are all intellectual pack-rats, absorbing and squirreling away all sorts of interesting nuggets of information to use later. But stockpiling all the random items that come along is rarely enough to make a book work as well as it could. Even if one is inventing the entire background, history, and all of the ecology, there are going to be things that one is better off looking up than trying to make up, if only so that they’ll hang together or be reasonably plausible.

“Development and design” covers any prewriting that happens between getting the idea and sitting down to write the first scene. For a lot of writers, developing ideas is a seamless part of the whole writing process. For others, brainstorming, fitting things together, and outlining in advance of actually sitting down to write are an absolute necessity. Again, this is a place where each writer has to look at his/her own process and honestly evaluate what is working and what isn’t, and then go for what is working, even if it is annoying and not at all the way one would like to be working.

Purchasing and order fulfillment are relatively minor matters for writers. Once you have a computer and software, you don’t really need another one for the next book; notebooks and pens aren’t horribly expensive or difficult to come by, and there really isn’t much else a writer needs to have to write. Similarly, sending a finished book off to the publisher is usually not an everyday occurrence, nor is it particularly complicated: you check whether the editor wants hard copy or electronic, then send whichever it is off.

Next up: Sales & Marketing.

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

The Business of Writing: Introduction

February 8, 2012 – 6:03 am

I have never met a would-be writer who has a business plan.

OK, I haven’t met many professional writers who have a formal business plan, either. Nevertheless, every last professional writer I know, of whatever genre, pays a great deal of attention to the business of writing, one way or another. Unfortunately, for most writers, on-the-job training is all they ever get when it comes to the business end of things (quite a few don’t even want that much, and reality tends to be a nasty shock for them, because if you are writing and selling your stories, or hope to do so, you’re running a business whether you like it or not).

I’m lucky. I grew up in a family of entrepreneurs who talked business over dinner…and pretty much anywhere else they happened to be. I enjoy reading business books and magazines; I enjoy talking business (except when my Dad and my brother start going off into engineering specifications). I loved getting my M. B. A., and I really enjoyed being an accountant and financial analyst before I quit my day job twenty-five years ago to write full time. I just liked writing more…plus, I knew even then that as a full-time writer, I’d get plenty of chances to do business-type stuff, while as an accountant, I probably wouldn’t get a lot of opportunities to write about dragons.

Back in business school, I learned the standard model for business organization, but I don’t believe I’ve ever seen it applied to writing. So I’ve decided to do that now. There are seven basic areas, and I’m going to do one post per area after this overview, and maybe a summing-up afterward, so if this is something you’re totally uninterested in, you can skip the next four weeks’ worth of posts (though if you are hoping to get professionally published at all, let alone make a living at this, I’d really recommend at least skimming the posts and thinking about what-all I’m going to say).

The seven basic areas that every business has to cover, one way or another, are:

1. Operations – This includes primarily production, but also design, development, and fulfillment. For writers, that’s everything from having the idea to delivering the first draft: research, developing/prewriting, notes and outlining, and, of course, actually writing the book and shipping it off to the editor.

2. Sales and marketing – Sales is defined as “the act of selling a product in return for money or other compensation.” For writers, sales can be split into direct (selling a book directly to the reader) and indirect (licensing production to a publisher, who produces and sells the book directly to readers). Marketing is the strategy that a business uses to get to the sales part.

3. Quality control – This is where products and processes are tested for defects. For writers, this obviously includes all of the editing and revision parts of the job, but it also includes less obvious things like motivation, confidence, and getting enough sleep.

4. Finance – All the monetary aspects of a business. For writers, this used to break down primarily into managing cash flow, recordkeeping, and tax preparation, but it’s rapidly getting more complex as new options arise in the other areas, which need to be balanced and evaluated.

5. Administration – The overall organization of people and processes, including everything from office management to the human resources department. For writers, it covers the day-to-day tasks of making and tracking submissions, filing, etc., but also things like skills development.

6. Public Relations – This has to do with the relationship between a business and the public in general – both the business’ current customers and all of the rest of the people who aren’t customers now but who may or may not become so at some future point. Writers usually lump it in with sales and marketing, but it’s much more general.

7. Executive – This has to do with strategic planning and with overseeing everything else; for writers, that means keeping an eye on all the other categories to make sure nothing is left out and everything stays in balance (which can be quite a trick for a one-person business). This is also where long-range forward planning goes, as well as a whole set of choices that get lumped under “managing your writing career.”

Generally speaking, the first two areas (Operations and Sales & Marketing) are considered “line” functions, because they are the things that bring in the money. Everything else is a “staff” function, that is, tasks that support the money-making side of the business, but that don’t directly generate income. Staff functions are necessary (just try running a business without paying taxes!), but the fundamental difference between jobs that directly generate income and jobs that don’t remains.

Juggling all this stuff is especially complicated for writers, because we’re trying to do most/all of it ourselves. Yes, the editor, agent, accountant/tax-preparer, publicist, and housecleaner all count as help, but it is very rare for a writer to be able to hand the whole of any of these seven job areas off to any of these support people – and it’s rarer still for a writer to be able to afford even one full-time employee. Also, even when one is just getting started it is common for more than one of these areas to be active at the same time. Once one is fully launched into a writing career, they’re pretty much all going on constantly, and not in any particularly logical order, either.

The kinds of things writers need to do in each area, and the degree of importance of each, varies somewhat depending on what stage the writer’s career is at, too. Unpublished and just-published writers will have to put more of their Administration time into setting up tracking systems for the long haul, for instance, whereas a midlist writer might be spending that time networking and practicing writing skills and a bestselling author might be keeping an eye on foreign editions and making travel arrangements for publicity gigs. It’s all still Administration, though.

I could probably natter on about each of these areas for pages and pages at a time, but for now I’m keeping this to one post per topic. That means I’ll talk mainly about the general kinds of things involved in each area, rather than a specific set of how-to recommendations, but one has to start somewhere.

Next post, the first line function: Operations.

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

Collaborating, Part 2

February 5, 2012 – 6:23 am

One of the great things about collaborating is that if you pick the right collaborator (and the right method), you can write until you get to a sticky spot, then hand it off to your collaborator and let them deal with it. In most cases, what is sticky for you will not be sticky for your collaborator (and vice versa), which minimizes “stuck time.”

Another big advantage is that whatever you’ve just written has an immediate audience – your collaborator – who is just as excited about the material as you are. There is nothing quite so motivating as wanting to show off for someone you know is going to giggle and squeak and gasp in all the right places.

If you’re considering collaborating with someone, there are a number of things to remember:

1) If both of you don’t feel as if you’re doing 80% of the work, something’s probably off. If you’re the sort of person who’s going to track time, effort, and word count in some misguided attempt to make sure each of you contributes the same amount to the project, you are probably not well-suited to collaborating, and if feeling as if you’re doing 80% of the work is going to make you grumpy, you probably shouldn’t try it, either. Collaborations are not usually twice as much work as a solo novel, but they do involved more total work than a single-author book. This means that if you divide the total work of a collaboration in half, each author will be doing less work than if they wrote a solo book, but not 50% less. If you’re not prepared to feel as if you’re doing more than your share (and unwilling to recognize that your collaborator also feels this way, and that both of you are, in fact, doing more than you expected), you may wreck the project, and possibly the friendship.

2) Collaborations are a meshing of two different processes, as well as two different writing styles. A number of the folks I know who have done successful collaborations do not work the same way on their collaborations as they do on their solo stuff. Sometimes, both writers end up with a sort of half-and-half compromise style of working that they can both live with; sometimes they do it one person’s way rather than the other’s; and sometimes, the collaboration gets done in a way that neither person uses when writing on their own. Be prepared to be flexible.

When you’re collaborating, you have to be willing to adapt to your collaborator (and vice versa) in terms of working methods, as well as stuff like plot and characters. If one writer normally works in huge bursts of activity with long fallow gaps between, and the other is a three-pages-a-day plodder, they may want to think twice about a collaboration method that means they have to switch off every time a scene, chapter, or POV character changes. If one writer is a “can’t talk about it in advance” sort and the other isn’t, you’ll have to experiment to figure out whether the one who usually can talk isn’t allowed to do it at all (which can kill the project if they’re a must-talk sort of writer), or whether the two of you can talk to each other but not to anyone else, or whether the must-talk writer can talk to anyone but their collaborator.

3) The whole point of a collaboration is that it’s something both of you are doing. I’ve known several promising collaborations that collapsed because one of the writers got so invested in his/her characters or plot twists that they absolutely refused to let the other writer change or invent anything. In a collaboration, no matter how much you love a character, plot twist, idea, style, chapter, prologue, background detail, etc., you are not the one in charge. You can argue, beg, plead, whine, and blackmail to get your collaborator to agree to take the story where you want it to go, but in the end, you both have to agree. There’s no point in winning the argument if it results in your collaborator being totally blocked because they just don’t think it would happen that way. If you can’t agree, you may need to take your lovely shiny plot/character/idea/whatever and turn it into your own solo book.

4) Collaborations are jointly owned. This means that unless you have a written agreement that spells out contingencies, each of you owns half the project, and neither of you can legally do anything with it (or with the characters, setting, elements of background, etc.) without the other’s permission. Much of the time, this is not important…but when it does become important, it is absolutely vital. And if you can’t manage to work out a basic agreement that says either of you can/can’t write about the world/characters without the other’s permission, and that if one of you dies, the other one gets full ownership/gets to make artistic and business decisions/can’t touch it again, then you probably aren’t going to manage a successful collaboration.

This is not about not trusting your collaborator. It’s about protecting both of you. People die; they get Alzheimer’s; they lose interest; they go haring off after possibly-brilliant but incompatible alternatives (“Why don’t we change everything to stream-of-consciousness and make this into a pastiche of Ulysses?”). I’ve known several authors who’ve had to abandon months or even years of work because they didn’t bother making a written agreement, and others who’ve avoided serious potential problems because they had it all spelled out in advance.

Most of the failed collaborations I’ve observed or been involved in have failed for artistic, rather than monetary, reasons. One writer lost interest, or discovered that they couldn’t slow down/speed up to the other writer’s working speed, or got so fascinated by a character or plot twist that they wanted to make it the center of the story (and in at least one case, they went off and did so, with the erstwhile collaborator’s blessing). Or one writer discovered that he/she was so invested in her/his vision of the story or characters or background that he/she couldn’t let the collaborator contribute or make changes.

5) Not all collaborations go to completion. Based on my experience, most of them don’t. It’s OK to start one that’s supposed to be strictly for fun (that’s how Kate and Cecy got going, after all. We didn’t know it was a book until after we finished; we thought we were just having a whale of a good time.)

Which brings me to the last point: if you are not having big fun, collaborating may not be worth the aggravation. And it will be aggravating at times – when your partner is late with their next draft, when she doesn’t have time to meet and work out that little plot-problem you need to settle, when he wants you to meet at an inconvenient time, when they are excited and you’re feeling worn down (or vice versa). It can be fun anyway. If it isn’t, it’s OK to talk it over with your partner and agree to stop.

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

Collaborating, Part 1

February 1, 2012 – 6:56 am

People go into collaborations for different reasons…and each project, and each co-author, is a different situation. Sometimes, two or more writers collaborate because they came up with a brilliant idea in the bar at three in the morning…and next day, it still looks brilliant and fun. Sometimes, the collaboration springs out of something that began as a mutual writing exercise. Sometimes, two friends discover they’re working on very similar projects and decide to share. Sometimes, one of the writers is trying to cheer up the other, or help them out of a hole. Sometimes, two writers find that they work much, much more effectively when they toss ideas back and forth between them and then dash to the computer to get something down than they do trying to crank stuff out on their own.

Similarly, there lots of different methods for collaborating. One that works well for a lot of people is “I write my characters; you write your characters,” in which each writer comes up with some characters, they decide mutually on which ones will be the central viewpoints, and then they work out (in advance or as they go along) which scenes will be from which viewpoint. The writer who has that character writes the scene.

Another one is to have one viewpoint character, and switch writers at the end of every scene or chapter. I heard once that this is how Fred Pohl and C.M. Kornbluth worked, with one writer spending his chapter getting the hero into a terrible fix and leaving him on a cliffhanger, and the other writer then having to write him out of the mess. I don’t know if that’s true, but it would certainly explain the plot-pattern in some of their collaborations.

I’ve also known collaborations where one writer does one type of writing – all the dialog, say – and the other puts in all the action or the narrative. This works really really well when each writer is playing to a particularly strong point, but it requires a whole lot of trust in each other.

Yet another collaboration style is the one where one writer does the prep work and a detailed outline, the second writer comes up with a first draft, and the first writer does the rewrite and polish. This is especially common in the sort of commercial collaboration wherein a publisher matches up a new, up-and-coming writer with one who’s more experienced and who has a large following, in hopes of boosting the newer writer’s audience, but there are other collaborative partnerships that just naturally fall into this pattern.

And there’s the one where both writers are in the same room, with one looking over the other’s shoulder, switching places whenever the one at the computer gets stuck or the one watching can’t stand it any more. It doesn’t seem to be common (since it requires both writers to be in the same place), but I know at least one set of roommates who work this way, and I’ve seen several folks do this to produce short stories while at a convention.

There is no one right way to collaborate with someone; there is only what works for a given pair of collaborators. I’ve worked on several, and each of them was different. For the Kate and Cecy books, Caroline wrote Kate (and later Thomas), and I wrote Cecy (and later James); we didn’t talk much about plot and the only editing of each other’s writing we did was for typos and consistency. Because they were in letter format, we were essentially doing the “you write your characters, I’ll write mine” method, plus the switch-writers/viewpoints-at-the-end-of-each-chapter method. The big advantage of working like this was that there was never any problem with the characters all sounding alike, or with one of us not really “getting” the other’s characters well enough to write them from the inside.

For two other collaborations (each with a different author), we picked a viewpoint character, then one of us wrote until we got stuck (which was sometimes in mid-sentence); then we handed it off to the other person. The next writer would go over the previous writer’s work, editing and making changes, then go on until they got stuck, whereupon they’d hand it back.  The editing-and-revision pass kept the viewpoint character’s characterization and the overall style remarkably consistent, even though, as I said, sometimes we switched writers in mid-chapter, mid-scene, or mid-sentence.

Another collaboration I worked on involved you-write-your-characters-I’ll-write-mine, but with lots and lots of joint plot-planninig and a lot more editing of each other’s chapters than Caroline and I did.

In each case, I don’t think the results would have been nearly as good if we hadn’t worked the way we did. Trying to write Kate and Cecy with lots of plot-planning and each of us editing the other would have a) killed the books dead (Caroline is the sort of writer who cannot discuss her work in advance of writing it without killing it), and b) probably smoothed out the voice and style more than was appropriate for an epistolary novel. Trying to write a single-viewpoint collaboration without editing each other would likely have made it lumpy and inconsistent in style, voice, and quite possible stuff-that-happens (also, in both cases, there really wasn’t anybody else either of us wanted to write. It was that character’s story, and nobody else’s).

All of the successful collaborations I’m familiar with have been ones in which both of the writers were having a tremendously good time. The Fun Quotient isn’t a guarantee that the project will get finished, much less reach professional publication - I’ve had loads of fun working on each and every collaboration, but the three Kate and Cecy books. are the only ones that ended up published, and only one of the others made it to any sort of ending.

Since this post got awfully long, I’m splitting it into two parts. So more random thoughts about collaborating next time.

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

Speed

January 29, 2012 – 6:27 am

There is an old saying that goes something like: “You can have it fast, you can have it cheap, you can have it good. Pick any two.” Meaning that if you want it fast and cheap, it won’t be good; if you want it fast and good, it won’t be cheap; and if you want it good and cheap, it won’t be fast.

Unfortunately, when it comes to writing, price often drops out of the equation completely, because how much the editor pays is determined in contract negotiations that are generally unrelated to deadline. One thus ends up with “You can have it fast, or you can have it good, but not both.” This attitude has been around so long that it has percolated down to the reader level, leading to lots of grumbling when a writer puts out books “too fast.” Often, the grumbling gets done by people who haven’t even read the book…and who refuse to do so on the grounds that “anything written that fast can’t be any good.”

As usual with this kind of thing, there is a grain of truth in it that is being blown up into a zeppelin-sized, wrong-headed rule. The grain of truth is this: Every writer has a writing speed that works for them, and trying to push stuff out faster than this speed results in a drop in quality. This does not, however, translate into “writing six books in a year is too fast; they can’t be any good” applied to all writers, because the “too fast” production speed varies from writer to writer.

I know professional writers for whom taking less than a year and a half to write a novel is “too fast” – it results in a drop in quality. I also know professional writers for whom writing a book in less than two weeks is “too fast” for the same reason…but taking three weeks makes no difference in quality that I can find. Yet the slower writers are admired, while the faster ones are castigated for scrimping on quality.

The really odd thing is that the folks who think that three weeks is “too fast to write a good novel” are often the very same people who proclaim that quality work comes through inspiration – and that when one is inspired, one can sit and write golden sentences for hours on end without effort (though they’ll allow the writer to complain of cramps in their hands at the end). Apparently, writers are not allowed to be inspired for an entire novel’s-worth of material at once, and inspiration is supposed to take time off between chapters and novels so that their publication dates will be properly spaced.

There’s another problem that arises when critics, reviewers, and the general reading public make judgments of quality based on the perceived speed of writing, and that is that the number of books a writer has coming out in any given year does not necessarily have anything much to do with how fast those books got written. It can take a long time for a book to work its way through the whole publication cycle, even for a much-published author.

When one works steadily at a book-per-year pace, one can easily end up with three or four unpublished novels in the pipeline. If one is delayed (there’s a printer’s strike, the cover artist was backed up, there were three other books with a similar theme coming out that year and the publisher pushed it back to avoid competition) and one is rushed forward (there was a sudden gap in the schedule because someone else didn’t deliver on time, and this book was done), one can easily end up with three titles coming out in the same year.

If the writer has been working on spec (that’s “on speculation” for freelance fiction writers, not “to specification” as it would be for freelance article writers), and has had to submit a series project a couple of times before it sells, it’s easy to end up with even more new titles coming out in one year. And then there are those “trunk stories” – the ones written ages ago that just didn’t find a market, and that have been sitting in a trunk (real or metaphorical) for years until a random conversation with an editor suddenly results in a sale. On occasion, I’ve heard readers complaining about a “too fast” writer because they didn’t realize that the books they were complaining about were a big chunk of the writer’s backlist that had been written and published years before, and were being reissued to a new audience.

And then there are the books that the writer has been thinking about, and sometimes researching, for years or even decades before sitting down to put them on paper in a white-hot rush. Again, the assumption seems to be that no one could possibly work on more than one novel or story at a time, even though author’s papers are freqently littered with bits and pieces of not-yet-written stories, partial manuscripts, and various other scraps that were obviously produced at a time when the author was supposedly concentrating on some other, now finished, project.

What this means is that readers can’t tell how long it took the author to write a book. There’s not much point in explaining all this to them, though it can be fun to mention (if you know it) that the literary masterpiece about which someone is currently waxing lyrical took a grand total of six weeks to write from the first typing of “Chapter One” to “The End.” The point is that if you happen to be a really fast writer, don’t worry about it…and don’t let anyone tell you that you have to slow down in order to write well. If you happen to be really slow, the same caveat applies in reverse: Don’t let people tell you that you have to speed up. There is no One-Size-Fits-All process. Figure out what works for you, and then keep doing that.

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

Getting from the Beginning to the Middle

January 25, 2012 – 9:50 am

For a certain kind of writer, the opening of a story is easy and fun – you get to allude to mysterious events and drop ominous clues. And then comes the middle, where all the stuff you’ve been alluding to has to start showing up and actually turning into something, and everything falls apart.

The first, most common reason for this is that the author didn’t actually have any idea what was going on to begin with, and when they start having to explain all their mysterious hints and ominous warnings, whatever they come up with just doesn’t measure up to the menace in the early chapters. It’s as if they’ve had livestock go missing and a field mysteriously burned, and everyone’s muttering about legends of dragons, and then they find out that the livestock was stolen by gypsies and the field caught fire when two kids were careless with the cigarettes they were smoking back behind the barn. It’s a let-down.

Obviously, one cure is to stop doing this – that is, first come up with the dragon, and then figure out what mysterious hints to drop to get there. Unfortunately, this doesn’t work for folks who’ve already fallen into this trap and don’t want to throw away a perfectly good set of three-to-ten-chapters. What they need to do is come up with a problem that lives up to whatever level of threat they’ve established at the beginning. Better yet, come up with something that’s even worse than the opening implied.

My experience is that the most effective way to do this is to turn off your Inner Critic, sit down, and make a list of at least twenty things that could be the Big Problem. Gypsies, cigarettes, bandits, infiltrators from over the border, dragons, human sabotage, enemies setting a trap for the king or lord or Our Heroes, a new Fire Lord rising…twenty things, minimum. The first three to five will be the easy choices, the stuff that’s at the top of your mind. Mostly, they’re unlikely to develop into a particularly interesting story, but sometimes one of them is just the thing you want. After the first three-to-five, the ideas usually start getting more unusual and unexpected – dragons, traps, etc. – and you can pick one or more of those to use or combine into something that will live up to your opening. That’s why it’s a list of twenty things: to force yourself to come up with possibilities that aren’t obvious.

The trick to this is not to judge your ideas as you’re coming up with them, or think too hard about how they’ll twist the story you thought you were telling. There’ll be time for that when you have the list. Once you have the list, cross off the easy, obvious choices at the beginning and look at the rest of them. Maybe some can be combined for even greater impact – those infiltrators from over the border may be setting a trap for the king in preparation for starting a war, or perhaps the dragon is merely the servant of the rising Fire Lord.

The second reason for the falling-apart problem is that even though the writer has what’s supposed to be a huge problem facing the protagonists – the dragon – it seems much too easy once everyone finally figures out what’s going on. Missing livestock, burned field, dragon legends…ah, right, so there’s a dragon. So we call in the army with lots of cannon support, they set out some fat sheep for bait, the cannons blow the dragon out of the sky, and bob’s your uncle. This tends to happen either when a) the writer is much too eager to get to the Grand Finale and the confrontation with the dragon, and so skips over any problems that might occur on the way there, or b) hasn’t thought everything through (i.e., as in, not realizing early on that an army with artillery could take down the dragon fairly easily, as soon as they know there is one).

The fix for this one is similar to the brainstorming I just described, but instead of coming up with a list of ideas for what the Big Problem could be, the author has to come up with two lists. The first is a list of What Could Go Wrong from wherever the beginning ends. We know there’s a dragon now, so we’ll send a messenger to the king to get the army and the cannons. But: the king won’t send the army because he doesn’t believe in dragons, the trail up the mountain is too narrow for the cannons, the dragon eats the messenger so the king never hears, the cannons were built by the cheapest bidder and explode, the dragon is one of a larger flock and the cannons can’t take down twelve dragons at once, etc.

The second list is the list of What Else Could Be Going On that Our Heroes don’t know about yet. The dragon is the servant of a new Fire Lord, who will be really annoyed when Our Heroes kill it. The dragon was lured to Our Heroes’ village on purpose, by somebody who has it in for them and who will certainly try something else once they get rid of the dragon. The dragon has a dangerous object in its horde – cursed, stolen, something that possessed people, whatever – and once the dragon is gone and the object is found, they’ll have a whole new problem to deal with. Again, no judging ideas or worrying about how they might fit into the story until after the lists are complete.

The last reason for the falling-apart problem is usually that the writer is paying too much attention to The Rules TM, specifically the ones about how the heroes have to make mistakes, make their situation worse, etc. until the Grand Finale. The standard plot skeleton is DEscriptive, not PREscriptive, and it just means that a story wherein things run along too smoothly is seldom interesting to read. The heroes have to face and overcome obstacles, but the obstacles don’t necessarily have to be of their own making.

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

More on Prologues

January 22, 2012 – 6:30 am

The whole point of a good prologue is to do something that the writer cannot do in the main part of the story without violating some important aspect of storytelling, like chronology or viewpoint or continuity. For instance, if the main story is told entirely from the viewpoint of one central character and takes place over the course of six days, except for one critical scene that takes place twenty years before the POV character was even born, that one scene is a clear candidate for being made into a prologue. Similarly, if there’s a ton of background detail and information that the reader truly needs in order to get through Chapter One, but which would bog that chapter down to a snail’s pace, a cultural/historical summary prologue may be in order.

One needs to be very, very cautious about deciding that you really need a prologue to do whatever-it-is. There are very few things that a writer truly cannot do without resorting to a prologue. Adding a prologue may be the first and most obvious thing the author thinks of when faced with a recalcitrant bit of backstory or characterization, but that doesn’t always make a prologue the best choice. Easy and obvious are not the same as effective.

On the other hand, while it may be quite possible to have your archeologists discover letters or a diary discussing life in Pompeii, it really isn’t plausible for them to find a first-person account written by somebody as they were fleeing the erupting volcano. The archeologists can piece things together and imagine what it must have been like, but if the author needs that dramatic flight scene as a scene, he’s probably going to have to put it in a prologue.

The second thing to remember about prologues is that if a book has a prologue, the prologue is the start of the book. The prologue doesn’t have to be full of action, any more than any other opening of a story does, but it does have to pique the reader’s interest so that they’ll keep reading. (This is why so many “ancient myth” and “historical background” prologues fail – they’re just not very interesting on their own.)

The third thing to remember is that no matter how brilliant your prologue is, there are going to be readers who skip it on principle. This means that a book with a prologue has, in essence, two different places (the prologue and Chapter 1) that each have to function as the start of the story (i.e., hook the reader into reading more).

Depending on the sort of prologue you’re doing, this usually means that Chapter 1 is going to have to start even more strongly than it normally would, in order to re-hook the readers when they have to switch gears, however slightly, at the end of the prologue. (Note that I said “start strong,” not “start with action.” There’s a difference.)

Prologues come in several varieties, and it helps to have some idea which sort you are doing. The different kinds of prologues tend to fall into categories according to timing, viewpoint, and style/function.

Timing: a prologue can happen before/long before the action of the main story; at the same time as the main story; or look backward after the main story is over. Viewpoint: The prologue can be told from the point of view of the main character from the main story, from the point of view of a secondary character, or from the point of view of some other character who never actually appears in the main story as a character (as with Steven Brust’s Paarfi novels, where the POV of the prologue is a crabby Dragaeran historian who is the putative author of the “historical fiction” that follows). Style/function: The prologue can be a scene; it can be narrative in a style different from but related to the main story (as when the prologue is a fairy tale or myth, or a summary of the historical background, or a fictional academic introduction to the material that follows); it can function as an introduction to the world or characters, or as a frame (usually with an epilog in the same vein) for the main story.

All of these aspects can be mixed and matched to some extent; that is, your prologue may be a dramatized scene from your protagonist’s childhood or a first-person protagonist’s narrative introduction to his memoir (setting the prologue solidly in the “future” of the main story); it can be a myth from your world’s ancient history or a centuries-in-the-story’s-future mythologized version of the events in the story; and so on.

A good prologue should leave the reader with more questions than simply “How does this tie in to the main story?” or “What happens to these people next?” This is especially important if the prologue is from a different viewpoint than the main story, because if the only thing the reader wants to know is what happens to these people next, she’s likely to get annoyed when the main story turns out to be about somebody else.

Generally speaking, a good prologue requires the reader to switch gears (from one time period to another, one viewpoint to another, one style/structure/format to another, or all of the above) between the prologue and Chapter One. The bigger the shift in gears, the stronger your opening of Ch. 1 has to be to re-catch and re-interest the reader. If there is no shift of gears between the end of the prologue and the beginning of Chapter 1, then what you have is probably actually Chapter 1 and not a prologue after all, and all you really need to do is renumber your chapters.

In addition to all of the above stuff, prologues are usually significantly shorter than the average chapter in the rest of the book. This isn’t an actual format requirement, but it is well to remember that the more one can condense the scene or information, the more likely one is to get at least some of those readers who hate prologues to read it anyway. On the other hand, three pages of super-neutronium-density narrative summary are likely to put off more readers than one might lose with a ten-page scene that conveys less actual information but keeps the reader interested with less effort on their part. It really depends on what you’re trying to do.

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

The Problem with Prologues

January 18, 2012 – 6:26 am

Prologues are out of favor these days, one of the “forbidden” (by whom?) writing techniques, yet people keep asking about them because they know intuitively that the technique has enormous possibilities. Quite a few folks go ahead and use them anyway. Sometimes this works brilliantly; other times, not so much…and the problematic usages reinforce the perception that prologues are a Bad Idea.

The first and biggest mistake a lot of writers make, especially in science fiction and fantasy, is to assume that there is no way to get the reader up to speed on the story background except to provide a three-page infodump of all the presumably-critical material right at the start of the story. So the writer starts off with a history lesson or a summary of cultures, and half the people who open the book close it and put it back on the shelf, while 90% of the people who do stick with the story skip the prologue and start with Chapter One…and have no problem whatever understanding what is going on.

Too many writers think that because they know all sorts of background information, said information is absolutely necessary in order to understand the story. It hardly ever is, and even if the writer is correct and the reader ultimately does need to know the tangled history of the United Planets and how various alien races came to join, they usually don’t need to know it in order to have a basic understanding of the opening scene where Bob is trying to book a seat on the shuttle to Betelgeuse. Yes, it will make the scene much richer in nuance if the reader understands exactly why Bob doesn’t want to take a seat designed for Rigelians, even if it’s the only one left, but it’s hardly ever truly necessary. It is, in fact, often much more effective to let the reader presume that Bob is worried about the fact that seats designed for three-legged insectoids aren’t particularly comfortable for humans, and only later work in the political tension…and later still, the historical reasons behind the political tension.

My friend Lois Bujold has a thirteen-plus book series, no volume of which has a “what has gone before” prologue. Yet new readers who pick up the latest book in the series never seem to have a problem understanding and enjoying the story, even if they don’t know all the details of the Time of Isolation, the Incendiary Cat Plot, the names and relationships of every recurring character, etc., right from the start of the story. Yes, some of this is because she is really, really good at working the necessary information into the story, but some of it is also because she is well aware that not all the existing information is necessary for this particular story. And also that readers are smarter than a lot of writers think.

The second big mistake a lot of writers make is that they forget that it is not enough for a prologue to contain necessary information; it must also be interesting to the reader. Too often, even the most necessary prologue presents information in a dry, dull, or utterly predictable manner, with the result that many readers put the book down and don’t pick it up again, and many others skip the prologue entirely.

If a reader can skip the prologue and still understand and enjoy the story, you don’t need the prologue. If readers complain that they don’t understand the story, and you find out that they are consistently skipping the prologue, the author needs to either fix the prologue to make it fascinating or ditch the prologue and find some other way of getting the necessary information into the story.

Which brings me to another point: prologues are not a clever way to dump all the background information, so that the author can start the real book with a slam-bang action scene. If a book has a prologue, the prologue IS the start of the book. It doesn’t have to be full of action, any more than any other opening of a story does, but it does have to pique the reader’s interest so that they’ll keep reading. Fifteen pages of history and/or cultural and worldbuilding detail belongs in an appendix for the truly dedicated reader who is fascinated by such stuff, not at the start of the story.

A prologue is also not a clever way to start with slam-bang action when the story opens with eight chapters of ordinary life and slow character building. Sometimes, this sort of thing happens, but it only ever works if the writer is doing more with the prologue than “Gosh, I’m supposed to start with action…I know! I’ll put in a prologue with a battle scene!” (I’ll get to what else you can do in the next post.)

There’s also the scaffolding problem. There are quite a few writers whose process requires them to warm up or ease their way into a story, and some of them use a prologue for this purpose. Usually, this is not a conscious decision, which is unfortunate, because in this situation, the prologue is not part of the story, it’s part of the writer’s process.

It’s like the scaffolding that construction workers put up in order to build a skyscraper. Once the building is built or the story is complete, the scaffolding is no longer needed and should be taken down. This is obvious when it’s a building, but not always so obvious when it’s a story and the writer isn’t really aware of his/her process yet. The best test for this that I know is the one mentioned above: if your first-readers can understand and enjoy the story without the prologue, you probably don’t need it. (The “probably” is there because, very occasionally, there’s a story that works fine without a prologue, but that is much cooler if one includes the prologue. The coolness factor tops everything else.)

Next time: Some thoughts on doing a prologue right.

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

Not Flashing Back

January 15, 2012 – 6:40 am

Flashbacks are one of those indispensable writers’ tools that tend to alternately get encouraged and discouraged, depending on whether or not they’ve been overused and abused recently or not. They’re a way of slipping the reader back into the past of the story, so that a particularly important incident or incidents from the characters’ backstory can be written as a fully dramatized scene, rather than merely letting the characters talk about the incident or summarizing it in narrative.

One medium-common use of flashback is during the Big Revelation just before or after the action climax, when everyone has known for much of the book that something dire happened on that fateful night twenty years ago, but no one knows exactly what because everyone who was there is thought to be dead. And then one of the heroes (or, sometimes, the villain) reveals that he was there. “Let me tell you what really happened…” he says, and instead of a long explanation, the author cuts to the scene itself, with the speaker as the viewpoint character.

This can be extraordinarily effective, especially if the author has either a) built up to the revelation by dropping hints over the course of the novel, or b) dropped no hints, instead allowing the reader to believe the version that everyone in the story believes, so that the revelation comes as a total shock. For it to work, though, the revelation has to be big – something that changes the heroes’ perception of themselves and/or what has been going on all this time (“Yes, Luke, I am your father!”). Generally speaking, something like “Actually, she was killed by a shark, not by piranhas” is more a correction of the facts than a big revelation, and shouldn’t rate a flashback scene unless there’s something about the mistake that changes everyone’s perceptions.

What you don’t want to use flashbacks for is to cover your own mistakes and/or as an excuse to be lazy. If you write your characters into a corner, and you need for one of them to have some piece of equipment that they wouldn’t normally be carrying (whether that’s a butane torch or a mithril oven mitt), you don’t get to have the character flash back to her meeting with the Wise Sage on the mountain so you can show the Sage giving her the oven mitt or the torch, and then proceed with the story. You have to go back and insert the Sage giving the oven mitt to her in the earlier scene, all those chapters ago – and if that throws off the pace and the timing and so on, you have to fix those things, too. Or you cogitate for three weeks until you figure out some other way out of the impasse that doesn’t require backfilling anything.

You also don’t want to use flashbacks to create false tension or pseudo-cliffhangers – the kind of thing where the hero is alone in a dark, empty house and hears the door creak, then there’s a two-page flashback to a childhood incident in a dark house with a creaky door, and when we get back to the present, he hears his wife calling “Honey? Are you there? I’m back with the fuse!” This kind of thing annoys a lot of readers (me included), unless you’re writing parody and deliberately hamming up and undercutting assorted clichés.

Most of the time, you don’t want to flash back to an entire scene that the reader has seen in this book before, not even if you’re short on length and could really use the extra words. Padding never works. Having the hero remember a significant line or two from an earlier scene at a critical moment is about all you can usually get away with, though if you’re writing a bazillion-word series and you want to remind the reader of Book 5 of something significant that happened in Book 1, you may be able to pull off a verbatim repetition. Even then, though, most writers use a couple of lines and a pointed summary, rather than repeating the whole scene.

I should perhaps mention here that time-travel stories that loop through the same scene with characters at different points in their subjective lives are not doing flashbacks in that case. Also, while it is certainly possible to use flashbacks in a time-travel story, you had better know exactly what you are doing and be able to make clear to the reader which scenes are from the past that the character is time-traveling in and which are the past that he/she is remembering.

Used properly, flashbacks let you do all kinds of neat stuff with structure, timing, tension, pacing, and a lot of other aspects of a story (in addition to their most common use, which is providing crucial background information). Used improperly, they can bog a story down, annoy and confuse the reader, and generally turn things into an incomprehensible muddle. If you’re not sure you can do them well, spend some time working on them until you are.

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

Misunderstanding grammar

January 11, 2012 – 6:48 am

Once again, I have been driven to frothing at the mouth by a would-be writer-and-critiquer’s thick-headedness in regard to both the construction of the English language and the so-called rules he’s trying to apply, and you folks are going to have to put up with the resulting rant. My apologies in advance.

This particular comment involved a total misunderstanding of verbs, tenses, and voice – specifically, the use of ”was.” The critiquer asserted, among other things, that “was” is a weak verb, that “was” is always passive (by which, from context, he appears to have meant not merely passive, but passive voice), and that every use of the verb “was” could and should therefore be cut or rephrased so as to use some other, presumably stronger verb instead. Like “is.”

This is complete nonsense, even before I point out that “is” and “was” are the same verb, just different tenses.

The verb “to be” in all its forms is not an action verb (like swim or climb), but it isn’t weak. It simply does a different job, grammatically. Action verbs tell you what something or someone is doing. A string of action verbs can imply a whole scene without adding any other words at all (Sneak. Steal. Hide. Trip. Scramble. Run!). To be is a linking verb; without a subject and an object, it doesn’t imply much of anything (Is. Was. Am. Are. Huh?). It doesn’t do the same job as an action verb – and while it is true that sometimes you can phrase a sentence either way (“His voice was a whisper” vs. “He whispered”), sometimes you just can’t (“Marley was dead, to begin with.” “It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.”)

Moreover, “to be” functions as an auxiliary verb in a number of different tenses. Denying a writer the use of the progressive tenses and the perfect tenses cripples the prose. For those who aren’t sure about the difference (and I had to look up the names repeatedly for years and years) the tenses work like this:

Present Tense:  He dies.
Past Tense: He died
Present Perfect tense: He has died
Past Perfect tense: He had died
Present Progressive tense: He is dying
Past Progressive Tense: He was dying.

You can’t replace “He was dying” with “He died” just to take out the “was.” The sentences don’t mean the same thing. “Was” isn’t in there as a stand-alone verb that you can remove or change; it’s part of the grammatical form. Yet over and over I meet people who want to tear through a manuscript crossing out forms of “to be” on principle, without paying any attention to what the writer is saying, how she is saying it, or why she said it that way. (This is particularly annoying when the person on the rampage is a copyeditor who keeps changing what the sentences mean in pursuit of some stylistic ideal that eliminates “was,” but that’s a whole different rant.)

Which brings me to the infuriating obsession that some people have with banishing passive voice from fiction. Passive voice is a sentence construction which puts the emphasis and the focus of the sentence on what is being done or the thing that it’s being done to.  “She hit him” is active voice; “He was hit by her” is passive voice. It’s a tremendously useful construction for any writer whose characters are facing a puzzle, because you can leave out the “by whom:” “The necklace was stolen.” Who stole it? Neither the reader nor the detective knows just yet.

Passive voice gets a bad rap because it’s often used in dense scientific papers and badly-done business memos to make the subject under discussion look objective. Instead of saying “I injected the mice with a 2% saline solution,” the scientist says “The mice were injected with a 2% saline solution,” implying that anyone could have done this and the results would be the same. The corporate executive says “The budget was exceeded by $3 million” in hopes of distancing himself from the problem. Unless your viewpoint character is a scientist or businessman, you usually don’t want to do this in fiction.

There are, however, things that one does want to do with passive voice in fiction. Take the sentence “The child, having been abandoned in the corner, cried herself to sleep.” The parenthetical phrase “having been abandoned in the corner” (by whom?) is passive voice; it has to be passive voice in order to have “the child” as its subject. You could rephrase it in active voice, but only by adding someone else to the sentence: “The child, whose mother had abandoned her in the corner, cried herself to sleep.” There’s nothing wrong with the latter sentence, but in a novel or story, it’s probably clear already who it is that’s abandoned the kid in the corner. The second, active version also splits the focuse of the sentence; it’s half about the child and half about the mother.

I’ve already mentioned the usefulness of passive voice in hiding a thief, murderer, etc., but it can also shift the focus to someone or something: “She was murdered by her brother” puts more emphasis on her and on the murder than on the brother, because you could just say “She was murdered” and leave the brother out entirely. “Her brother murdered her” puts the emphasis on the brother. Sometimes, you want it one way, sometimes you want it the other way, and it’s silly to overlook so useful a tool as passive voice for doing this.

And then there are the stylistic considerations. Sometimes, using passive voice allows for a more elegant sentence than active voice. “The duke was attacked four times: once by an assassin, twice by bandits, and once by his four-year-old daughter.” reads much better, to my ear, than “One assassin, two sets of bandits, and his four-year-old daughter attacked the duke.”

By pcwrede | Posted in Writing | Tagged , , | Comments (33)

Keeping track

January 8, 2012 – 6:34 am

When a writer has a big, complicated novel with lots of subplots and plot arcs that need to weave around each other, there are two main things he/she needs to do: 1) keep track of all the things that are going on offstage and in different plot arcs than whichever one is currently at the front and in focus, 2) making sure you don’t stay solely focused on a single plot thread for too long (because that makes the book feel lumpy and unevenly paced, or, in extreme cases, like a series of short stories strung together).

To write a novel with lots of subplots and arcs that need to intertwine, a writer needs to 1) keep track of what’s going on offstage in all the threads that aren’t currently at the front and in focus, and 2) make sure he/she doesn’t focus on only one plot thread at a time for too long (because that makes for lumpy, uneven pacing, and in extreme cases, for readers who’ve forgotten half of the important things going on).

Basically, keeping track means taking notes and updating them regularly. There’s no other way to do it, really, unless you have an eidetic memory. Notes can be done in advance or after-the-fact, or both at once (if you check in at the end of every scene, you’re also checking in before the beginning of every scene that comes next). I’m a check-in-after/before-every-scene writer; before I start in on a scene, I want to have some idea what’s going on in each of my subplots. And since my scenes rarely go quite the way I’d planned, I need to look at them as soon as I’m done writing them and figure out how what did happen onstage is going to affect the way all the offstage plots are developing, which in turn will affect what the next scene is and what happens in it.

One of the ways I keep track is with a calendar, because most of my stories are told in chronological order over a period of weeks or longer. I usually set up a one-month template in Excel (because it gives me more control than a real-life calendar program) and as I write each scene, I log in what happened, time and viewpoint (if those are relevant or not obvious), place, and any important events (e.g. “G and J picnic in Central Park; Uncle W interrupts; J loses necklace”). This gives me a picture of what my characters actually have done (as opposed to what I’d planned) and when, and whether it’s plausible to have G foil the villain’s bank robbery in Paris at 3 p.m. when he was picnicing in New York with J at 11 a.m.

For the Frontier Magic books, I had a list of what-happened by year and how old the main character was (because those three books cover nearly twenty years). I also had a chapter summary at the start of each draft chapter that said something like “1843 – Eff is four/five; family leaves for Mill City late summer” so that if I had to move scenes or bits of narrative around, I’d have some idea whether I’d have to check all the age and date references or not (if they went in the next chapter, “1843 – Eff is five; arrival and settling in to new house” then no; if the bits moved three chapters forward to “1849 – Eff is 10; Eff is 11; McNeil Expedition leaves town,” then definitely yes.)

Making sure you don’t focus on just one plot thread at a time again requires awareness, first of all. Once you know it’s something you need to do, there are two basic techniques for doing it: first, you balance the scenes, interleaving the various plot threads so you don’t have eight action scenes in a row and then eight romantic ones; second, you incorporate more than one plot thread into the same scene as often as possible.

One technique for balancing the focus is making a color-coded scene list. Again, you can do this before you start writing, build it as you write, or use it as a tool for analyzing your first draft once it’s complete. List the scenes in the order that they appear in your manuscript (“G and J picnic” “L kidnapped” “Q steals secret bomb plans”) and then color code them according to whether they’re part of the main action plot, the sidekick’s romance, the annoying little brother’s subplot, etc. If things are well interwoven, the list will end up looking like a rainbow, with colors changing quickly; if not, it’ll look like large blocks of color stacked one on top of another with little overlap.

When I do this, I get a zillion different colors of Post-It-Notes and assign them to the different plotlines, then lay them out in order on the dining room table. This lets me move scenes around easily once I’ve noticed that I have six bright green Post-Its in a row and then no green ones at all for the next 20 scenes. Using Post-Its also means they stick to the table so the cats can’t scatter them all over. Also, I can stick two different-colored Post-Its together when I realize that I can have the kidnapping happen during the romantic picnic and get a scene that’s a two-fer. I also look for scenes that I can delete entirely. You don’t actually have to dramatize everything, just because you can; it’s OK sometimes to say “After three hours of shopping, they finally had all the parts for the bomb” instead of writing three scenes where they stop at different hardware stores to buy what they need.

Incorporating more than one plot thread into the same scene uses exactly the same sort of skills that writers use to put plot, characterization, and background into the same scene, or dialog, action, and summary. There will be some scenes that can only do one thing – it doesn’t make sense for the hero to stop in the middle of the crucial fight with the villain to worry about his grandmother’s illness, for instance – but a lot of the time, you can work two or more subplots together (as in the action-kidnapping interrupting the romantic-picnic mentioned above).

This multiple-plotlines-per-scene technique is particularly painless when two or more characters are in a position to talk for a while. Whether it’s a tea party scene or two characters talking on the bus or at the water cooler, conversations can be full of gossip that covers several other characters’ romances or financial problems (and their associated plotlines) in addition to whatever planning/plotting/clues the scene was originally thought up to provide. The trick here is usually to pick one main subject of conversation (presumably whatever the point/plotline the scene is supposed to focus on), and then look for places where the characters would naturally get off course and talk a bit about seeing George at the bar with a shady-looking character last night, or just how Jin is supporting her shopping addiction. One can also occasionally have such a scene interrupted by a phone call, letter, or the arrival of someone new with a message, which gives the illusion of bringing some of the offstage developments onstage temporarily.

Also, do remember that for a lot of writers, doing this kind of in-depth scene-balancing analysis is something that’s only necessary when they’re stuck or when there’s a problem that they can’t put their finger on. I don’t haul out the Post-Its for every book I write, and even when I do, I don’t always haul them out in advance.

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

Weaving (plot) threads

January 4, 2012 – 6:18 am

First off, thanks to everyone who commiserated about the computer crash. I now have all my critical data back (including my in-process Skyrim game! Very important, right up there with the email archives, the address book, and the calendar. Books? Those were never the problem; I’m paranoid about backing up work-in-process, finished work, copyedited versions…) So I’m totally back in business.

On to the writing stuff. Today I thought I’d take a shot at a problem that caught my eye in an enormously fat, complicated novel I read recently: handling subplots. The book was engaging and competently done, overall, but halfway through I started feeling a little odd. At first, I thought it was a subtle problem with the pace, but the scenes all seemed to be moving along just fine. I finally realized that the trouble was with the subplots.

As I said, this was a fat, complicated novel. Meaning, lots of subplots. There were several romances, two or three different political plots, a bad guy converting to the good guys, two sets of long-lost relatives, a secret birthright, and a whole raft of interrelated action plots helping the build-up to the climax. The book started with the background and the first action-plot, and just as the action was passing its first big peak, the author introduced the romantic interest. We then had a couple of chapters of the romance, at which point the first big political plot showed up. Politics occupied the next few chapters, and just as the big political problem was solved, the action moved into its next phase. And so on.

Each subplot or plot arc would be almost finished when the author started dropping hints about the next, completely different, subplot or arc. By the time the current arc was disposed of, the next one was bubbling along nicely and ready to take off without giving Our Heroes more than a few minutes of down time.

It should have been gripping. It wasn’t. And the reason for it was threefold: first, the pattern quickly became predictable; second, the author was so locked in to the pattern that she/he kept it up right to the end of the book (yes, that means that in the last two chapters, right before the villain was defeated for good and all, the author introduced a new plot…which of course was never wrapped up. I wanted to spit nails; that scene would have been the perfect opener for a sequel, but as something dropped on the reader at the end of a book, coming out of nowhere, it really didn’t work for me); and finally, I couldn’t believe that all these subplots would come along in quite such tidy duckling fashion, one after another, with just enough overlap that they didn’t look like a bunch of short stories strung together.

Basically, the author was focusing on one thing at a time: first the setup, then an action arc, then the first romance, etc. Now, some things really had to happen in order; the villain had no particular reason to kidnap the heroine until after the hero fell in love with her, for instance. But I just couldn’t buy that both the villain and the evil politicians were going to hunker down and do nothing for two weeks while the hero and heroine fell in love, or that the sidekick and his love interest would go through several hair-raising adventures showing no interest whatsoever in each other, then have their two-week romance while everything else was suddenly on hold.

In real life, everything is happening all the time. National politics didn’t get put on hold for four days while I got my computer back up and running; neither did my exercise program or the people coming to install my new water heater. And in fact, my computer got fixed as fast as it did thanks in large part to some timely tips from my walking buddy.

Subplots need to weave around each other in the same way. Some things have to happen in order or in totally different and unrelated places, but there are an awful lot of things that can overlap for more than one scene or ten minutes. The politicians and villains and evil corporations will be plotting and making moves all the time, separately or together, whether the hero is taking a well-earned vacation or not.

Once the writer grasps this, the problem becomes keeping track of what everyone is doing and then figuring out how to bring it into the story so that one doesn’t have subplot lumps. I’ll try to talk more about that on Sunday.

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

Happy (?) New Year’s Crash…

January 1, 2012 – 6:55 am

Last Wednesday, I updated my blog, checked my email, did all the usual computer things, and at the end of the day, I logged off and went to bed, as usual. Thursday morning when I turned on the computer…everything had gone missing. By which I mean, the machine still ran, but it behaved as if it was a brand-spanking-new-fresh-from-the-box machine, complete with setting up stuff like Internet Explorer that I set up when I bought the thing five years ago.

Considerable poking around and a visit to the Geek Squad later, the problem appears to be a corrupt profile file. Unfortunately, there doesn’t seem to be an easy way to put everything back the way it was. The data seems to all still be there, but I have to dig through the file trees and/or the backup in order to find it (at present, I still haven’t located my email files, but I think it’s just a matter of figuring out where the program keeps its data files. I hope it is, anyway. I think I’ve found pretty much everything else.)

In other words, reconstructing the computer setup – the address lists, the bookmarks, the calendar, various non-standard datafile locations – is possible, but it’s going to take me quite a while. I am SO glad this didn’t happen in the middle of Hell Month (when I’d have been scrambling to find the copy-edit and get it back to the publisher in time) or next month (when I’m going to be frantically trying to get various obscure tax documents filed in the two-week window that the government allows for them).

Which is a long-winded explanation for why you’re not getting the usual blog post on writing this morning. I’m hoping to be back on schedule by Wednesday. In the meantime, have a nice relaxing holiday!

By pcwrede | Posted in General | Comments (3)

Imagination

December 28, 2011 – 8:17 am

The holiday season is a time for parties, especially the sort of parties that people throw in order to introduce interesting friends and neighbors to other interesting friends and neighbors they haven’t met but might like. It’s a great way to meet interesting people, and the first thing most of them ask is, “So, what do you do?”

The thing I’ve noticed, over the years, is just how many people react to my declaration that I’m a writer with a rather wistful statement that boils down to “I’ve always wanted to write, but I don’t have any imagination.”

It took me a long time to decide that maybe they were right…but not for the reasons they think. Their problem is indeed a failure of imagination, but it comes a whole lot earlier than the point at which they try to think up a story. They simply can’t imagine themselves – or people like them – being writers, and so they never really try to become one.

Occasionally, I run across someone for whom it’s not so much that they can’t imagine themselves being a writer as that they’ve never seen stories of the sort they want to write, and thus they assume either that a) nobody will buy the kind of stories they want to write, or b) there is something wrong about the stories they want to write – they’re not good because they don’t follow the patterns and tropes of the fiction they’ve read or seen on TV and movies.

What these folks are doing is telling themselves a story: that because they have never seen X before – whether X is someone like them who writes or whether X is a murder mystery with magic set in historically accurate Han Dynasty China – they can’t or shouldn’t try to do it themselves.

Sometimes, folks like this can be inspired by suddenly finding out that someone like them – a homebody, a lawyer, a high school dropout, a person of color, an eighty-year-old ex-wrestler – has successfully written (or written the kind of story they’re dying to write). More often, though, I meet them again two or six or ten years later and discover that they still are convinced they can’t do it, despite whatever counter-examples I’ve provided (and I have quite a collection of them).

The stories we tell ourselves about ourselves and our dreams are enormously powerful – far more powerful than the stories that come from outside. And the longer we’ve been telling them, the more powerful they become. I know people who persevered through decades of outside discouragement and apparent failure because they told themselves the story that they were writers; because they had a powerful vision of themselves as someone-who-writes; because they told themselves that there were other people out there wanting to read the stories they wanted to write, the ones they couldn’t find on the current bookshelves or on TV.

Not all of them have been successful, even by their own definitions (which do not always include publication or making a living writing as measures of “success”). A lot of them have, though, and the jury’s still out on the rest of them. The ones who don’t try at all are guaranteed never to make it (whatever “making it” means to them).

You don’t have to believe you will be a success in order to write. You don’t even have to believe that you could be. You just have to believe that you, or someone like you, can sit down with a notebook or at a computer and make up stuff that somebody else might want to read; that you, or someone like you, can learn the craft part of writing and rewriting so as to make your stories more effective at doing whatever it is you want them to do until you’re satisfied with them; that even if there are only three other people in the entire world who will like the particular, peculiar fiction you have to tell, it’s worth your time and effort to put them down in pixels for them and for you; and that all this is something you want to put time and effort into doing.

The so-called “writer’s imagination” starts by imagining oneself as a writer.

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

Merry Christmas!

December 25, 2011 – 6:18 am

Merry Christmas (or midwinter holiday of your choice), everybody! I’m mostly taking the day off, but I couldn’t leave you with nothing at all on the blog, so I thought I would give you some links.

As some of you may recall, back in September I had a three-day visit from a team of video and publicity people, sent by my ebook publisher to shoot footage for some publicity/informational videos. Those vids are now up on YouTube, so I thought I’d post links here for anyone who’s interested.

The first one is the “Meet the Author” video, which is mostly me blathering on about writing. It has a couple of great shots of Cazaril, who is far more photogentic than I am.

Meet the author = http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D3xiJXLVSe8&feature=related

The second one is about the closets my sister Carol painted, and has some great shots of the Oz closet, the Narnia closet, and the Peter Pan closet – that’s the one they had me walk down the hall and into (they must have really liked that shot; it’s in both videos).

Closets – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UhVRGVgj_WQ

Have a great day; see you again on Wednesday!

By pcwrede | Posted in Family, General | Tagged , , | Comments (2)

Metaphorical manuals

December 21, 2011 – 6:30 am

This summer, I got a new car. Well, new to me – it belonged to Dad for several years, until he decided that with Mom gone, he didn’t really need two cars and he liked the other one better.

Anyway, it’s a 2008 model, with lots of snazzy bells and whistles that I’ve never had on a car before. Lots of bells and whistles. I had to drag out the owner’s manual in order to figure out how to open the gas cap, and I had to dig through a stack of paper, including maps and a really fat maintenance-and-repair manual, before I found the bit of paper I was actually looking for.

A lot of the rules and recommendations about writing (you knew I was going to bring this back around to writing eventually) are like those different maps and manuals, except they don’t come with neat labels that actually tell you that this batch is for normal operations and this other list is for hard-core repairs. They just give you a list of do’s and don’ts. And applying the wrong set of instructions and/or data for what you want to do is very likely to make your problems worse instead of better.

The very first thing you need is a car. You do not, however, need a Porsche or a BMW or a high-quality racing car. They’d be nice to have, and they’re not as likely to break down on the trip, but you don’t need them. Just something that runs.

I’d say that the writing equivalent of this is a story to tell, and maybe some of the basic components like plot, characters, etc. Most writers begin with the equivalent of the junker car that they bought for $500 used when they were in high school or college – something that works well enough most of the time, but that really needs a lot of tinkering with to keep it running smoothly. This is not really a bad thing; one generally learns a great deal from tinkering, whether it’s with a car or with one’s stories.

Most people don’t need or want a manual in order to pick a car to buy, though many people do a bit of research to find out which cars are reliable, what their safety record is like, how much they cost, etc. Most writers don’t need or want directions on what to write about, though some will try to do market research to find out what’s selling. The trouble is, there’s a lot more good information available about the cost and reliability of cars than there is about what editors are buying at any given time.

Once you have a car, you need is somewhere you want to go. That’s the writing equivalent of the road trip plan for getting from Chicago to Denver. You may not know where the road construction is, and you certainly won’t be able to predict where the accidents have backed up traffic for ten miles along your route; you may not even have chosen a route, but you at least have some idea where you’re trying to go. For writers, this would be a direction, a structure, a plot, an ending – whatever prewriting or outlining the particular writer needs in order to start writing.

In a car, what you need for this is a map. Same thing for writers; the trouble is that there are dozens of “this is how you get started” systems around, but nobody’s ever organized all of them into a map that shows all the possibilities. Because the thing about a map is, it shows you where Chicago is relative to Denver, and that I-80 is the most direct route, but it doesn’t say that you must go that way if you’d rather swing north and take a long route through the back roads of Wisconsin, Minnesota, and South Dakota.

The next thing you need to know is how to drive the car (unless you’re planning to hire a chauffer/ghostwriter, which most people can’t afford). You don’t need to know how the car works in order to drive it; you just have to know a few things like how to work the steering wheel, gas pedal, and brakes, which switches are for the headlights and turn signals, and where the gas-cap release lever is. The owner’s manual will tell you where things are; the actual driving part requires practical experience.

This would be the basic writing and storytelling skills: grammar, spelling, punctuation, syntax; some sense of how plot and characters work; a basic understanding of dialog and narrative and pace; etc. And, of course, actually writing. Most writers pick this up from reading and experimenting and maybe from books and English classes, and figure out how it all goes together by practicing.

Sooner or later, even a Porsche or BMW needs basic maintenance, like oil changes and tire rotation, and they do eventually break down and need fixing after a certain amount of use. For cars, that usually means taking them to a mechanic to be fixed, but most writers don’t want to hire a book doctor to fix their novels even if they can find and afford a legitimate one. So sooner or later, all of us have to figure out how to repair our own stuff, for which one wants the repair manual. That would be the editing and revision stage, where you really dig into every aspect of the story to make sure it’s in tip-top shape.

A lot of writers are trying to use the repair manual to decide where they’re going or figure out how to turn on the windshield wipers. The repair manual won’t help at all with figuring out where to go or how to get there, and it’ll drive you mad if all you need to know is where the heck they put the wiper controls. On the other hand, if the wipers aren’t working and you need to know which part to get and how to replace it, the nice little diagram of the dashboard in the owner’s manual that labels the switches really isn’t likely to be much help.

Knowing where you’re going doesn’t help you drive the car or fix it when it breaks down. Driving the car around at random is unlikely to get you anywhere useful or interesting. A great car that’s in perfect condition but up on blocks because you can’t drive and have nowhere to go…well, it may be pretty to look at, but again, it’s not going anywhere. You have to start by looking at the right document for whatever it is you want to do or are having trouble with.

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

When they don’t wanna

December 18, 2011 – 6:55 am

One of the most frustrating things that happens to writers is having a batch of characters worked into just the right spot for the plot to take off…and discovering that they won’t do whatever is supposed to come next.

When you want your characters to go left, and they want to go right, there are three things you can do: 1) Just keep going as originally planned; 2) Figure out some solid reason why these people can’t go the way they want; or 3) Go ahead and let them go right after all, and see what happens.

I’ve never had much luck with #1. Forcing characters to do what I’d planned instead of what those particular characters would do just never works for me; at best, I get stuck for ages, while at worst I manage to plow onward for several chapters, which eventually have to be thrown out. My characters turn instantly to cardboard in my head (well, they would – I’m basically turning them into puppets acting out the plot, rather than developed characters with attitudes and likes and opinions unique to them). It works for some writers though.

#2 has been very useful on a number of occasions. The simplest was when I had a large group on the move, for whom the most logical thing to do was to go around the kingdoms instead of trying to fight their way through; I put a nearly-impassable swamp in the middle of their logical route, thus making it faster to fight through the kingdoms (and speed was a consideration, as they were being chased). Two or three lines during the which-way-do-we-go discussion, and I was all set. Geography is so useful.

A lot of the time, though, forcing the issue isn’t that simple and requires more setup, especially when a physical barrier isn’t enough or isn’t reasonable.  Say I’m faced with characters who want to hide in the woods when I need them to stop at the inn so they can encounter a bunch of other characters and move the plot along. Starting a forest fire to drive them to the inn would work, but would also end up with a whole lot more plot complications.

So instead, I think for a bit about what could happen/might already have happened that would make these particular characters decide that stopping at the inn is a good idea instead of a bad one. There are a couple of people they really, really want to meet up with; perhaps they catch a glimpse of one of them on the road? Or maybe I can go back to their last stop and plant a rumor…what would intrigue them enough that they’d decide to check it out despite the risk? Maybe I need to go back even farther, and give them reason to think there’s evidence they need at the inn (which means they’ll want to come up with a plan to get hold of it while avoiding being seen/identified…yes, that’s got some meat to it).

In other words, I’m not changing who the characters are; I’m changing their circumstances, what they already know (and therefore, what they think they need to know), in order to get them to go where I want them to go so that the things I need to have happen will indeed happen. It can take a while to come up with appropriate (and non-obvious) shifts that fit the plot, and sometimes it takes quite a bit of rewriting of earlier stuff to get them all in, but it can work quite well.

Or, it can not-work, not at all. In which case I’m left with #3 – let the characters ignore the inn and see what happens. There are two sub-possibilities for this: 3a – The characters don’t do what I wanted, and as a result, their situation gets Much Worse (because they weren’t at the inn to see the bad guys getting ready for the attack, so they didn’t know to try to stop it, and now the person they wanted to talk to is dead and the Sekrit Dokuments are on their way to the head villain); or 3b – The characters don’t do what I wanted, and as a result, something entirely different happens, the whole story takes a sharp right turn and I have to completely rework what I thought was going to happen.

3a requires putting some thought into what the bad guys are doing (assuming there are bad guys) while my heroes are out camping, and also thinking about what other things could happen to make the situation worse because they’re not paying attention to the things that need attending to. Maybe while they’re out chasing down bad guys, the flooding river is slowly washing away the foundation of the manor house. Maybe ignoring the first mysterious death means that now there are three more mysterious deaths. Maybe the bad guys have plenty of time to translate the Sekrit Dokuments and get the jump on them. Basically, having a plot means that things are going wrong for the characters somewhere, somehow – and if there’s one thing I’ve learned, it’s that if you don’t take care of a problem or situation while it’s still small, it’ll get bigger. So if my characters don’t take care of whatever, it’ll get worse while they’re ignoring it, until they can’t ignore it any more.

3b is really annoying when it happens, but it usually results in a much more interesting book. For one thing, if I wasn’t expecting the characters to get caught by the police and have to stay in town, the readers are unlikely to be expecting it, either. For another, if I wasn’t expecting the heroes to have to handle this situation, neither they nor the villain were expecting it, either, and they’ll all have to come up with new plans on the fly, which tends to make for a lot more story possibilities.

The annoying part is that if what happens next is that different from what I’d expected, I nearly always have to ditch most of my plot and planned events and come up with new ones. But if it makes for a better story, I don’t really have any excuse not to.

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

A few things not to do

December 14, 2011 – 6:01 am

In the last couple of months, I’ve had the opportunity to observe a number of new writers doing things that…well, to say they don’t work is a serious understatement. I’m not talking about the writing itself, at the moment. I’m talking about the business end.

There are oodles of lists of what not to do in the submission process, and I’m not going to repeat them here – besides, you folks know all that stuff already, right? Unfortunately, a bunch of just-published-for-the-first-time writers have come up with a whole lot of brand new ways to sabotage themselves – and not just with industry professionals, like editors and agents, but with reviewers, publicity people, booksellers, readers…people who either are their ultimate audience, or who have a whole lot to say about how and when and whether readers can look at the book.

A lot of it comes out of the facts that a) publicity for a newly-published title is more and more being pushed off onto the authors, and b) authors are not publicists and often really, really don’t know what they’re doing. Even so, some of this should be common sense.

Take the matter of getting reviews. Usually the publisher prints up a couple of hundred ARCs (Advanced Reading Copies) and sends them to big review magazines like Kirkus and the New York Times book review section, and then sends the author ten or twenty with instructions to “send them out to places we won’t think of.” By this, they mean specialty bloggers, local papers that have book review sections that might be particularly interested in a local writer, local radio stations that do book stuff, library newsletters, already-published authors who might give a blurb or a mention on their blog, etc. – anywhere that the author thinks might have a shot at getting some attention for the book, but that isn’t the sort of national-level, distributor-level publicity that the publisher is sending the ARCs to.

In other words, most of the people the author will be approaching are professionals, working in a professional capacity, from whom the writer is asking for free publicity. It is therefore not a good idea to tell them how to do their job – yet I have seen more than one letter explaining to a prospective reviewer just how important reviews are (they know), or saying that the reviewer’s response will be considered inadequate if all the writer gets is a good review on their blog. No, the reviewer are supposed to go to Amazon.com, B&N, Goodreads, and various other review web sites and rate the book five stars in each and every venue. (Yes, more than one person did this. I didn’t believe it, either, until I went and tracked down where I’d seen it before.)

When you’re asking for a review, you’re not doing the reviewer a favor by offering them a free ARC. They’re doing you a favor. Don’t demand extra work (which is what “don’t forget to review this favorably on six review websites” is doing). If you’ve read their column/blog/whatever and you don’t think they do a good job, don’t waste your breath/paper/electrons telling them how you think they should do it right. Just don’t send them the ARC. There are always more places you could send the things than you have copies.

Don’t explain to the reviewer or publicity person that reviews are really really really important and you’re trying to generate buzz, so could they post/print their review on the first Monday in August so that the publicity will all hit at the same time. Not even if you say “please.” It’s their column/blog and they presumably know what they’re doing; saying “The book will be released in the first week in August.” is the most you need (and that’s probably printed in the ARC, so you probably don’t need it in the cover letter.)

And speaking of Amazon reviews and other online reactions, arguing with reviews and reviewers is a really, really bad idea. Arguing with people in comments is worse, if that’s possible. Some people will hate what you wrote. Deal with it. Telling them that they’re wrong makes you look like an idiot – they know better than you do whether they like the book or not. It doesn’t really matter that they’re having a knee-jerk reaction to something that reminded them of that horrible thing that happened in second grade that has nothing to do with what you wrote. The author yelling at a reader or getting defensive about her/his writing always looks bad, no matter how much of an idiot the reader is being. Yell in the privacy of your home, not in public…and remember, everything online is public to some degree.

Printing up your own bookplates and bookmarks as giveaways is fairly common these days, but if you’re going to do it, consult someone who actually knows something about graphic design. Once you have them, do not, not, not go into bookstores and demand that they put your giveaways up by the cash register. That is premium space that large corporations pay actual money – lots of it – to get their items into; the store is not going to put your stuff there for free, and it is ridiculous to get mad at the overworked clerk who tries to politely tell you this (or who accepts your freebies without comment because they don’t want to argue, and then doesn’t put them out, which you discover a week later when you pop around to check whether the store needs more).

Basically, don’t act as if you’re entitled to free space, free publicity, free comments, free reviews, free anything. And if you have no idea what professional behavior looks like, don’t jump into the publicity game, because under those circumstances it will only end badly.

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

Decisions, decisions

December 11, 2011 – 9:29 am

A while back, I was talking with a young writer who was bogged down in mid-novel. The conversation went something like this (with names and plot points changed to protect the guilty):

Writer: “I’m totally stuck. My characters are down in the ravine and I don’t know what happens next.”

Me: “Sounds familiar.”

Writer (despairing): “How do you decide what comes next?”

Me (frowning slightly): “That’s not really your problem yet.”

Writer: “Huh?”

Me: “You can’t make a decision until you have something to decide. Right now, you have nothing.”

Writer (wails): “So what do I do?”

Me: “Make stuff up. Then you decide whether it’s useful, because you’ll have something to decide about.”

At which point I got a blank look, but after a bit more discussion (OK, a couple of hours worth), she did get things back on track. The problem was that the writer was looking too far ahead. She was trying to think about the next scene, the next chapter, what the next exciting bit was going to be, how to get her characters from the bottom of the ravine to the triumphant climax of the novel. What she wasn’t thinking about was the very next step.

Getting to that step can be a little trickier than it sounds (which is why it took a couple of hours). First, you have to be clear about where the characters are. Where is their location? What do they know (or think they know) at this exact point in the story? And most important of all, what is it that they think they need to accomplish next?

What the characters think they need to accomplish right now – whether it’s rescue someone from the villain’s dungeon, or head to the cafe for a well-deserved cup of coffee after having decimated the wolf pack that was (they think) eating the sheep – will play a large part in determining the next step they take, and what direction they take it in. If they want to rescue a companion from a dungeon, the cautious one will want to plan a rescue mission and then get some supplies, while the reckless one may grab a musket and head for the lockup, but whatever they pick as the very next thing to do, it will take them in the direction of the dungeon, not in the direction of the coffee shop.

Sometimes there are multiple ways in which the characters can proceed. If they have just realized that the villain is up to something, and that they need to find out what, they may spend some time discussing the best way to find out, or they may go running off instantly in a variety of possible directions. Once the writer recognizes this, the first step is to figure out what the likely possibilities are.

Then one has something to decide: would these particular, individual characters, in this particular situation, do A, or B? If they need to find something out, will they stay in the ravine and plan for a few hours, dash back to town as a group to check the local gossip sheet, or send one of their number off to the oracle while the others compile lists of things to investigate and people to question?

Having made this first decision – what is the next step, or the next several steps, that the characters are going to take to try to do what they need to do – one has a second thing to decide: whether it is interesting and relevant enough to show in detail, or whether one would be better off skimming lightly past all the planning and dashing around, and going straight to the meeting three days later when they tell each other what they’ve found and realize, to their horror, that things are much worse than they thought.

The second decision is more complex, because it’s not only a decision about whether the next few things your characters choose to do are interesting and relevant; it’s also a decision about whether the writer can or should try to make them more interesting by throwing in something unexpected or having something go totally wrong. A trip to the library to check the microfiche of the 1851 newspapers that haven’t been digitized yet may not rate a full-blown scene if that’s all that happens, and sometimes what the writer wants is to say “Three days later, they got together and Gerald told them what he’d found.”

Sometimes, though, the trip to the library is the perfect opportunity for the secondary villain to send a thug after Gerald to collect that gambling debt, or for an unexpected car accident, or a fire at the library, or an apparently unrelated attack by mutant ninjas on the library. So the writer has to decide: is this worth making into a scene on its own, and if not, do I add something to make it something worth showing? Or would that be too distracting? What does it do to the pace and the plot development and the characterization if I show or don’t show the scene – and which is more effective for the story I want to tell?

My writer friend was trying to start by knowing about the gambling and the fire and the ninjas, before she even knew that the characters were going to send Gerald to the library. What she really needed was to back up, slow down, and think about what her characters needed to do next, one tiny step at a time. (And not just the characters in the ravine – the villain wasn’t just sitting around twiddling his thumbs and waiting for the heroes to show up and thwart him, after all.)

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

Learning About Ebooks

December 7, 2011 – 6:34 am

A while back, I did a post on electronic publishing in general, in which I stated that I didn’t know much, but nobody else does, either, yet. In the interim, I’ve learned a bit more, and I thought this would be a good time to share, because next week, the five Lyra books are being issued by Open Road as ebooks. And it’s been quite a ride.

One of the first things I learned, when my current agent and I started looking at getting some of my backlist into ebooks, is that when the books were published makes a really huge difference. Before the mid-nineties, hardly anyone had electronic subrights clauses in their contracts. After around 2005, everybody had electronic subrights clauses. In between…well, lots to argue over and interpret, and a number of things ended up in legal limbo.

Several of my backlist titles, including The Seven Towers and Snow White and Rose Red, had been picked up and reissued by new publishers, whose contracts included ebook rights. Another publisher came and asked for a contract addendum covering electronic rights, so that they could put out an electronic version of the omnibus when they reissued the Mairelon books. The Frontier Magic titles are recent enough that the publisher had the clause in their contract from the get-go. That left the Lyra books.

The Lyra novels are some of my earliest work; all except The Raven Ring (1994) were written over twenty years ago. The most recent printing was in 1997, when the first three came out in an omnibus edition, so it’s been a while since all of them were easily available in print.

Ginger (my agent) and I discussed the possibilities at length. Amazon offers a great royalty rate if you go straight through them, essentially self-publishing direct to e-book, but there are some down sides (including needing to do book design, covers, etc. all by yourself, not to mention publicity). We chose to go with an ebook publisher, Open Road. And thereby hangs a tale.

Initially, the experience was exactly like selling a book to a traditional print publisher: I said “Agent, we need to sell these as ebooks;” my agent said “I will get right on that” and did so. Some time later she came back and said “We have an offer; this is what it is and how it works,” and I thought about it and said, “Right, sounds good, send me the contract.”

That was when the first difference showed up: they emailed me the contract, and said I could use an electronic signature and send it back. Since I don’t have an electronic signature, and had no time to figure out getting one, I printed out the requisite copies, signed them, and FedExed them back instead.

The next interesting thing was that they wanted three copies of each book to scan. I pointed out that I’ve been working on a computer since my second novel, and had put the first one into my word processor when I revised it for the omnibus, so I already had electronic copy that really just needed to be proofread for the editorial and copyeditor fixes (which is WAY easier than scanning and using OCR software. OCR is lots better than it used to be…but a 1% error rate means an average of three typos per page, at best).

The Open Road folks allowed as how having electronic copy would be a big help. At which point, I realized that while I certainly did have electronic copy, most of it was…how shall I put this…not in any format remotely resembling modern WYSIWYG, or even Rich Text. No, it was old-fashioned ASCII, with in-line codes to mark scene breaks, italics, centering, etc.

So I spent a frantic two weeks or so cleaning up the files and sent them off. Hey, it was better than having to write 10,000 new words for editorial revisions!

Normally, I wouldn’t expect to hear from a publisher any more at this point, except maybe to send me cover copy and/or pictures of the cover paintings for informational purposes. The books were written and in final form; that’s all most publishers want.

Most traditional publishers, anyway. Open Road turned out to be a lot more hands-on, and a whole lot more let’s-get-the-writer-involved. I got emails from what seemed like everyone in the company, explaining what they were planning to do. I got two conference phone calls from their publicists; I got blurb copy to approve; I got author bio copy to approve; I got a two-page questionnaire (which I still haven’t finished filling out – honestly, what do they expect with questions like “describe each of these books in a paragraph”? I’m a novelist; it took me 80,000 words to describe each of them the first time!).

The pièce de résistance was when they sent a team of video people out from New York to Minneapolis to spend three days shooting footage of me, my cats, my closets, and whatever else took their fancy, in order to make a two-minute vid for their web site. They were lovely people, and it was a hectic, exhausting, and fascinating couple of days (and they got some wonderful shots of Cazaril, too; Nimue decided it was too much excitement and spent most of the time hiding). I haven’t had so much attention paid to me in, well, ever.

And once everything calmed down and I had a chance to breathe, I realized that that was the point. A traditional paper-and-ink publisher does book and cover design, but most of their efforts (and expenses) come from printing and distribution – getting those paper books into bookstores all over the country. Ebooks are a lucrative extra for them.

An ebook doesn’t have printing and distribution expenses. So what does an ebook publisher have to offer a writer in return for the license to publish the books?

Promotion. 

Which is what all the blurbs and questions and everything are about. Remains to be seen how well it all works, but so far I have to say I’m happy with their efforts.

Next week is the official release of the ebook versions of the five Lyra titles – Shadow Magic, Daughter of Witches, The Harp of Imach Thyssel, Caught in Crystal, and The Raven Ring. I’ll put links up on the web site eventually, but right now I’m out of town, so this will have to do until I get home and get some breathing space.

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

Too many, too much

December 4, 2011 – 6:24 am

There’s a problem I’ve noticed cropping up more and more often lately, in the way some authors first develop and then over-develop their plots and subplots, allowing both them and their characters to proliferate beyond the ability of mere mortals to keep track of them all, until the whole edifice starts crumbling under its own weight. It’s most common (and most noticeable) in multiple-viewpoint stories, particularly those that have an ensemble cast dealing with complex plots and subplots.

The advantages of writing a fat, complicated, multiple-viewpoint, ensemble-cast book are many: they’re popular; they provide both writer and reader with more than enough variety to keep from getting bored; they are in many ways a truer reflection of the complexity of real life events than something more straightforward would be; the variety that an ensemble cast allows for means that more people will find someone they’re interested in and want to follow through all the adventures in the book; the multitude of viewpoints lets the writer show all sorts of cool stuff that would otherwise be behind the scenes; etc.

The trouble is that most of those advantages can very easily become disadvantages if they’re handled even a little bit clumsily – and the more viewpoint characters and subplots the writer has to juggle, the easier it is for them to let things get ever-so-slightly out of balance. Which is all it takes to annoy a sizeable subset of readers.

A few years back, a friend who was working on her first big multiple-viewpoint book got six chapters and eight viewpoints into the thing, and then stopped and took two of the viewpoints out. All of her first-readers screamed bloody murder; we liked those two people, and we thought the scenes they had were great. My friend was adamant, however – and perfectly correct in her decision. Those two people weren’t close enough to the central story she wanted to tell, and leaving them in would have thrown everything off-balance.

Or, to put it another way, whenever a character is the viewpoint character, the story is about them. It doesn’t matter if the character is the cab driver whose only importance is that he drove Our Hero from Kennedy Airport to a hotel downtown; while he’s the viewpoint, he’s the center. And he’s the center of his story, which, to him, is much more important than anything else that’s going on in the book.

This means that in a multiple-viewpoint book, each and every viewpoint character has to be chosen with great care. This is particularly true when the writer intends to have a cast of five or ten people who are all meant to be “the main character” in some way – that is, a classic ensemble cast. It can be very hard to identify exactly which characters are at the heart of the writer’s story (each of them is, of course, at the heart of his or her own…which is the fundamental problem).

A story told from a single viewpoint, whether it’s first-person, tight third-person, or the sort of limited omniscient that still only follows one character around, has built-in protection against subplot proliferation. The reader can only see and find out what the single viewpoint character sees and finds out, and there are only so many things that one person can reasonably be involved in. The kind of multiple-viewpoint book that has a strong core plot or theme also doesn’t usually tend to have problems with subplot-and-character proliferation; the strength of the main plot through-line keeps everything else from going too far astray.

The real trouble comes when the author lets him or herself be distracted by shiny minor characters and/or interesting bits of business that “might develop into something.” Because the minute that cab driver gets his own viewpoint scene, his story is the one the writer is telling. And it’s always, always fascinating and fun and interesting, because people’s stories always feel that way to themselves, and when you’re writing from the viewpoint of a character, you see their story they way they see it. And next thing you know, the caper novel about the ensemble cast trying to rob the Metropolitan Museum of Art has this whole involved subplot about the cab driver’s romance with a police detective (see, the writer says to herself, it’s relevant! There’s police involved!).

And then the cab driver’s family come into it, and there are more interesting complications there, and pretty soon the original caper novel is practically buried under the cab driver’s cousin’s drug smuggling subplot and his sister’s angsting over whether she’ll get into art school (see, the writer says desperately, Art! And they’re planning an art heist! So it’s, um, thematically relevant!) and the police detective’s difficulties with precinct politics.

I’ve learned the hard way that any time I start justifying the presence of a scene, character, viewpoint, or general Cool Bit Of Business, it almost certainly doesn’t belong in the story. If it belonged, I wouldn’t have to do any justifying. (Saying confidently “That’s setup for the problem with X that they’re going to have three chapters from now” is not justifying it; saying “But…but…but it’s relevant! Because there’s, um, important stuff in this bit!” is a dead sure sign that I’m going to need to cut, and the sooner, the better.)

When I notice myself slipping into this pattern, I find it helps to snip the scenes to a file, and promise myself that I can write that other story later. Because that’s the thing that’s so seductive – all those fun, fascinating stories that aren’t the one I’m telling right now, but that could be shoehorned in with just a little work… Promising myself that I can write a whole book about them and do a proper job of telling their stories, instead of giving them just a corner of this one, is what keeps me from falling victim to Endless Subplot Proliferation Syndrome. Most of the time.

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

When is it over?

November 30, 2011 – 6:25 am

When is the story over?

Really over, I mean, as in “this is the last paragraph, and what comes next is ‘The End’ at the bottom of the page.” This is usually some way after the big climax in which the central story problem is solved (they kill the dragon/blow up the Death Star/arrest the murderer), but how long after?

The answer, as usual, is: it varies. To some extent, it depends on the length of the story – a five page short story may be too long if there’s more than half a page after the climax, but nearly every reader I know would feel that having only a page or two of wrap-up to a trilogy just wasn’t enough. Similarly, if three pages out of the five are wrap-up, there’s probably something wrong with the short story, while it may take five or ten chapters or more to do a proper job of wrapping up a complex trilogy.

The two obvious problems are stopping too soon, and carrying on too long. On the whole, I tend to think that too little is better than too much. A reader who finishes a book wishing there’d been just a little bit more is a reader who is likely to come back for the next one; a reader who gives up with a bored sigh two pages before “The End” appears under the last line of text is a reader who is likely to avoid the next one like the plague. And it really hurts to discover that you have overshot the end of the story by two or six or ten chapters, and that you must therefore cut all that material. For most of us, it’s a lot easier and less painful to add a scene or a chapter than it is to cut one.

Nevertheless, most novels need a certain amount of post-climax wrap-up to be satisfying. A novel is a long haul, and many readers need to be eased out of it gently, so to speak. If it’s a complex novel or a multi-book series (trilogy, quadrology, innumerable-fat-books-a-la-Jordan/Martin-series), there are likely to be a bunch of subplots and loose ends that need wrapping up, because they couldn’t all be tied up neatly as part of the big climax. And since most novels follow the classic plot structure (a series of attempts by the protagonist to solve bigger and bigger problems, where each try ends with the protagonist in a worse situation than ever, until the very last one finally succeeds/fails for good), they need something at the end to reassure the reader that this time the protagonist finally pulled it off, and there isn’t some nasty surprise waiting to turn the “ending” into a cliffhanger.

And finally, this part of the story – the part between the climax/solution and “The End” on the last page – is about consequences. This is the part that leads a lot of writers astray, I think, because in a lot of books the consequence of the protagonist’s actions is that he/she moves on into a new life (or returns to an improved version of the old one). This looks and feels like a beginning – and it is. But it’s the beginning of a new and different and unrelated story. The writer is allowed to tell that story, of course, but in the next book. The bit that goes at the end of this book is the acknowledgement that things have changed.

For instance, one writer I know was working on an action-adventure of the sort in which the protagonist is a junior space officer, faces a crisis, succeeds while annoying the top brass, and is “rewarded” with the captaincy of the worst ship in the fleet, posted to the worst spot in the galaxy, as a way of getting rid of him. Naturally, he goes on to shape up his new command, defeat new enemies (and make more political ones), and so on.

The problem was that this novel was approaching half a million words and the writer couldn’t figure out how to cut it. But it didn’t need cutting; it needed splitting into the several books that it actually was. The writer had run right through the ending of his first book (which occurred a quite reasonable 100,000 words or so into the story) and on into the next. All he had to do was stop at the point where the hero was notified that he was being promoted and given a new ship, but before showing the rust-bucket full of misfits that was his new command.

Part of the difficulty here was that the writer was so caught up in the “show, don’t tell” advice that he thought he had to show the new command, which led directly into the next story, leaving him no good break point. But the other part was that after spending 100,000 words and many hours working on making the characters “feel real” and planning all the hero’s future adventures, the writer had made them too real in his own head. Real people’s lives rarely divide themselves up into neat episodes, and their stories don’t end until they’re dead.

The second reason too many wrap-ups drag on is that the writer is trying to give attention to every single subplot and character individually, one scene or chapter per subplot. This is as unwise as it is unnecessary, especially in a book with lots of characters and subplots. A lot of long goodbyes and subplot finishes don’t make these things seem more important; they make the scenes feel thin. It’s often more effective to pack two subplot resolutions and a couple what-these-characters-do-next into the same scene, and then do some summarizing, than to have four or five long scenes to show each character moving into his/her new life and another three or four to resolve subplots. Alternatively, a series of mini-scenes – a two-to-three-paragraph look in per character to hint at where they’re heading now – can be very effective for a complicated, cast-of-thousands book or series, as long as they’re mini-scenes.

Finally, a lot of writers keep going in search of the boffo ending line, sometimes whole chapters past wherever the story should have cut off. Don’t do this. Just don’t. It never ends well.

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

What education?

November 27, 2011 – 6:41 am

This is the time of year when a lot of high school students are thinking about college, and as a consequence, I’ve had several earnest requests for information about the best places to go to school, what to major in, etc. Since I usually figure that what one person is brave enough to email and ask about, many others are interested in, here are some of my thoughts.

First off, I’m not a teacher; I’m a writer (that is, I make my living writing). That means that my knowledge and judgment of programs, workshops, classes, etc. is a) fairly limited, and b) strongly skewed toward the practical. By limited, I mean that I have a poor-to-middling knowledge of the programs and workshops in my state, because some of them have asked me to speak at them. Beyond that – I can name all of four workshops and one graduate program outside Minnesota. All four of the writing workshops are genre-focused (specifically in SF/F); the graduate program is the Iowa Writing Workshop, which is the premier literary MFA program in the country, and undoubtedly familiar to pretty much every editor who’s been around for longer than ten minutes.

Basically, this means I am not ever going to be able to tell people which college(s) are the best choice for writers. I can recommend the Clarion workshops – Clarion and Clarion West – but those are all of six weeks. Viable Paradise is only one week. None of the websites mention academic credit at first glance, though the Clarions are associated with universities and I believe that they did offer course credit at one time.

None of that is going to help anyone pick a college or a major.

Which brings me to b) – the fact that my knowledge and judgment in this area skews toward the practical. This is based on something I’ve said many times before: writing is a skills-based profession. In a lot of careers, a degree is the credential that lets the folks hiring you know that you have a certain minimum level of knowledge in the field. Writing, however, is a skills-based discipline and a product-oriented business. Editors don’t give two whoops what someone’s credentials are; they care whether the story in front of them is a good one, and they can tell that by reading it.

Of the professional writers I know, roughly one-third did not graduate from college, another third have degrees in something unrelated (i.e. NOT an English or Creative Writing degree), and the final third have a college degree in English or Creative Writing (and I should mention here that this third weighs in heavily in favor of English Lit – I think I only know two professional writers with a CW major). That’s roughly two-thirds of professional writers who don’t have an English or other writing-related degree.

This is, of course, a very unscientific sample. It’s also colored by the fact that I fall into Group #2 – my own degrees are a bachelors in Biology and a Masters in Business Administration. (The MBA was hands down the best thing I ever did for my writing career; far too few of the starry-eyed teenagers determined to Become A Writer ever stop to think that this means they are going to be running a business.)

Nevertheless, I think it’s obvious that writing skills can be successfully self-taught (for at least two-third of the pros I know, anyway). It should also be apparent that there isn’t one typical, clear educational pathway toward being a writer. My personal preference and recommendation is therefore for would-be writers to major in something that’s not English or Writing.

I have two reasons for this: first, it’s all material anyway, and it’s a lot easier to pick up writing skills through self-study and practice than it is to do chemistry experiments or study ancient Greek history in-depth on your own.

Second, writing for a living nearly always requires a long, slow startup. It takes most people years to finish their first novel, and more years to get it published, and one has to eat in the meantime. Even once one has begun selling, it takes more years to fill up the writing income pipeline, and a lot of discipline to keep it full. One doesn’t want to suddenly run out of money because five years ago one had plenty coming in and so didn’t write anything for much too long a time.

All of which boils down to needing a day job for at least a few years, and it’s a lot easier if the day job is something one enjoys and that pays better than working at Wal-Mart or waiting tables. Such jobs are never easy to come by, particularly in the current job market, but majoring in something other than Creative Writing is at least a step in the right direction.

The one exception to the above is that if one wants to teach as one’s backup job, especially at the college level, you will need that MFA. Not as a writing credential; as a teaching credential. Quite a few mainstream and literary writers seem to do quite well with the teacher/writer combination – the summers give them a solid three months to work on their writing, and teaching for the rest of the year pays the bills.

Writing is a career for the long haul. It takes discipline, an ability to live with uncertainty, and some serious budgeting and planning skills (because royalties only get paid twice per year, and whatever you get has to last until the next payment cycle). What it doesn’t take is any particular educational background.

Which I’m afraid isn’t much help to the folks trying to make college plans, but that’s writing for you.

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

Family

November 23, 2011 – 6:16 am

Tomorrow is Thanksgiving in the U.S., which is generally considered a family day, so I thought I’d talk about family and writing this time.

One way or another, family is something every writer has to deal with, and it’s never nice and clean-cut. Family can be supportive, or they can be a big obstacle, and sometimes they seem to be both at once. Family members can and do automatically provide things that other people often don’t even know a writer needs, from computer upgrades and chicken soup to just exactly the right kind of reassurance when the writer is having an artistic crisis and thinking of retiring to a monastery in Tibet. They’re right there to provide babysitting and grocery runs when the writer is on deadline. They can brag about your writing to other people when you can’t. Some of them even handle a lot of the business end of the writing job, so that the writer has more time to actually write.

On the other hand, these are the same people who can’t seem to get it through their heads that sticking their head into the office “just for a second to see how you’re doing” may derail an entire day’s worth of work – it’s not the amount of time, it’s the mere act of interrupting. They’re also sometimes the ones who get bent out of shape because they’re convinced that some character or plot twist is based on them – or else they demand that the writer “put them in one of your books.” They want to give you ideas…or they claim that you’re stealing theirs. They think that because you’re home all day, you must have plenty of time to run their errands or go to lunch with them or hang out on the phone for hours. They post hideously embarassing, gushy reviews of your work on Amazon and then get hurt when you try to explain that it’s really considered highly unprofessional for a writer to get their family to skew the reviews like that.

They’re wonderful, frustrating, helpful, annoying, encouraging people. In other words, they’re family.

Since everyone’s family is unique, everybody has to come up with their own method of dealing with them, both the good parts and the bad. I’m lucky; my family is heavily weighted on the good end of the scale. My mother used to type up my handwritten “manuscripts” when I was in 7th grade, trying to write my first stories. For years, every time my parents had a party, my father would go around the house making sure that copies of my books were on display and that my sisters’ paintings were prominently displayed on the walls. My sisters and my brother all listen to me go on about my stories-in-process, and then when they’re finally finished, they buy the books even though they have to be sick of hearing about them by that time.

So right now, this is my family: My Dad is 91 and still chopping wood, climbing mountains, taking road trips, and giving me all sorts of impossible advice about what he thinks I ought to write next. My sister Susan runs a community/summer stock theater in Maine, the Boothbay Playhouse (http://www.boothbayplayhouse.com/), which pretty much takes up all her time in the summer. They have a fantastic kids program (and I am only slightly biased on account of having watched my niece and nephew do amazing things in their productions). My brother David runs the metal stamping business that my parents started over sixty years ago; he also is a major plot sounding board for me and talks up my books on the home schooling chat group he’s part of. My next sister, Margaret (Peg), retired from the metal stamping business a few years back; now she’s a Master Gardener, writes for Alabama Gardening and several other local gardening publications, and has a terrific gardening blog (http://hiddenhillsgarden.com/blog/ – and she just posted a bunch of great pictures of my father on it). My youngest sister, Carol, lives here in town; she paints, gardens, scolds me about my housekeeping, paints fabulous things inside my closets, and makes sure I take time off in between books…and that I don’t take too much time off.

They’re great, even when they’re annoying. And I’m sure I annoy them just as much sometimes (hey, it’s a requirement when you’re the oldest, isn’t it?).

Happy Thanksgiving, everybody.

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

Obstacles in the Middle

November 20, 2011 – 6:56 am

Last post, Libby said:

I’ve been having trouble with that point in a story from the lead-up to the climax to the aftermath… once I hit the part where all the stuff I’ve been alluding to has to APPEAR, things tend to go over too smoothly and much too quickly, and I think it’s ultimately unsatisfying. I don’t know exactly what I’m doing wrong, but it feels like the story needs an extra PUSH that I don’t know how to give.

I’ve read all the stuff about there needing to be a part where it all goes wrong, so that you can straighten it out at the climax, but when I do that, usually my characters have this barrage of crazy emotions, listen to someone explain the whole thing (or run around and save the day), and then it’s tidied up and it just feels OFF. It’s weird.

The plot skeleton, which is what I think you’re referring to when you say there “needs to be a part where it all goes wrong,” is DEscriptive, not PREscriptive, and it just means that a story wherein things run along too smoothly is seldom interesting to read. The heroes have to face and overcome obstacles, but the obstacles don’t necessarily have to be of their own making. It depends on the story.

There are three kinds of obstacles your heroes can face on their way to solving the Big Problem. The first kind are internal – the prejudices, blind spots, temperament, lack of skill or knowledge, etc. that could/would keep them from successfully doing what has to be done. The second kind are external – the moves the villain makes to counter them, the equipment they’re missing (whether it’s a magic sword or the ore to smelt to make cannons), the tornado or avalanche or attack by rabid beavers, the broken wagon axle or flat tire. And the third kind are those that result from the logical consequences of whatever the heroes have just done – for instance, they sold their cattle in order to pay for cannons to shoot the dragon with, but without cattle to eat, the dragon starts munching on people instead, making the situation worse. Or the new weather satellite makes it rain on the drought-stricken area, but causes a hurricane to hit the big city just to the south.

What kind of obstacles are the most useful for your story depend on the sort of story it is. If the main story is a Man Learns Lesson type of story, where the protagonist is his own worst enemy, then yes, a lot of the things that go wrong really should be coming from the mistakes the protagonist makes. That’s how he/she is going to end up learning that lesson. In a Brave Little Tailor sort of story, the obstacles the protagonist faces often come from the outside. The villain, if there is one, isn’t going to just sit around waiting for Our Heroes to come and lay siege to his castle; he’s going to do something to try to stop them. If the opponent the heroes face is Nature, the broken leg will turn to gangrene, or a bear will attack, or there’ll be a tornado or a blizzard or a hurricane.

The other thing is that ideally the obstacles need to build up toward the climax. In other words, as the heroes get closer to facing the Big Problem, the tension has to rise. It doesn’t matter whether it rises because all three of the main characters have been arguing with each other for the entire book, and the fights get worse as the Grand Finale approaches, so that as they head for the final confrontation they’re not speaking to each other and unlikely to be able to cooperate in solving the problem, or whether it rises because of a slow revelation that things are Even Worse Than They Thought – those lost sheep weren’t lost, they were eaten; they weren’t eaten by a bear, they were eaten by a dragon; they weren’t eaten by just any dragon, but by an Ancient Wyrm; not only is this dragon an Ancient Wyrm, it has a personal grudge against Our Heroes/their village/their king; etc.

Also, you probably don’t want to pile up a lot of things, expecting to straighten all of them out during the climax. It’s usually more like a series of steep steps, where each minor solution leads closer to the Big Main Problem. Sometimes, what you need is a series of problems that are related, but still independent: Big Problem – we have to kill a dragon. Solution – we’ll buy some cannons. First minor problem – no money. Solution – we raise some money by selling the sheep the dragon was eating anyway. Consequence/next problem – hungry dragon starts eating people. Solution – we all stay indoors while messenger runs off to buy cannons. Next problem – messenger is stuck at bottom of mountain with cannons; trail is too narrow to get them up, and dragon will eat anyone who goes out to widen trail. Solution – use old mining machinery to haul cannons up side of mountain from safety of stone building.

The dragon doesn’t get any more dangerous, really, as the sequence progresses – but the urgency goes up when it starts to eat people, and then rises again when it looks as if there’s no way to get the cannons up where they can actually be used to defend the village. If I were doing it, I’d have them get the cannons up and use them, but have one explode (since it was made by the lowest bidder), throwing the aim of the others off and resulting in an only-slightly-wounded dragon who is now really angry.

The alternative is a bait-and-switch. That is, when your heroes have figured out that they have to take down a dragon, and taking down the dragon turns out to be too smooth and easy, you give them an entirely new problem that results from their dragon-killing: a powerful cursed sword that one of them unknowingly picks up from the dragon’s horde, for instance, or the Dragon-Master who’s really mad that they’ve just killed his pet, or the army from the next kingdom over that can invade through the pass now that the dragon is dead and can’t eat them. Of course, this means that what you thought was the end of the story isn’t actually the end, and you still have a lot more to write…but it’ll probably make a better story. And nobody ever said writing was easy.

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

Fear

November 16, 2011 – 6:29 am

All writers are afraid of something at one point or another.

We are afraid of looking foolish; we are afraid of rejection; we are afraid of overreaching, of not knowing how, of getting it wrong, of not being good enough. We’re afraid of being broke, being taken advantage of, being stuck with something that turns out to be a bad deal. We’re afraid that the idea that seemed so brilliant a week or a month or a year ago is not brilliant at all, only nobody is quite willing to say so. We’re afraid that in choosing to write this story, we’re letting a much better one get away.

Fear is paralyzing. It affects everything: creativity, the mechanics of planning and working and sending things out, even the simple enjoyment of telling a story you really want to tell. Everything is suspended, like hitting a permanent “pause” button on life, because as long as one doesn’t move, none of the things one is afraid of can possibly happen.

But fear is a natural part of doing anything new. Everybody is nervous the first time they exercise a new skill, and triply so if they’re doing it in public. What a lot of folks don’t take into consideration is that for writers, every book is a new thing. Yes, we develop skills over the years, but they’re always being applied to a new story. “You’re only as good as your latest book” is an industry truism, and it’s just as scary a thought for bestselling veterans as it is for struggling mid-list writers and beginners.

I think that a lot of the problem stems from the difficulty of the balancing act all writers face. On the one hand, one must believe in the value and quality of one’s work, else one would never send it out. On the other hand, one must believe that there is room for improvement, or one will never get any better. It’s a teeter-totter, and when it gets out of whack, it’s all too easy to end up in a frozen panic.

The other problem is that writers have a difficult time trusting themselves. We know that the stuff we turn out isn’t perfect; if we didn’t realize that to begin with, our crit groups and friends and editors would straighten us out in a big hurry. We have to know that it’s not going to be perfect and do it anyway. And every so often, the teeter-totter tips and the fear goes up and we stop.

Getting past the fear happens in different ways for different writers at different times. I think the key is to recognize it and admit what’s going on. It’s a lot harder to make excuses about not writing when you’ve taken a long, hard look at yourself and admitted that really, you’re just scared to mess up. Support from friends is vital – the sort of friends who won’t simply dismiss the problem.

Experience helps, too. The first time I had to redo seven chapters of a manuscript, it took me a solid year (after I figured out that was what I needed to do) to sit down and start ripping the manuscript apart, because I was afraid that whatever I came up with instead was going to be even worse than what I already had. The second time, it took me a bit over eight months. The third time, it took about two weeks, and the enormous reduction in elapsed time was due entirely to the fact that I recognized the situation and the feeling, so that I could roll my eyes at myself and decide that it would be silly to waste all that time when I knew what I had to do, and that I was eventually going to do it.

Taking small steps, or even just zooming in on the details, can make a big difference. Yes, I’m afraid my novel won’t be any good, but right now, I just have to think about this one scene, this one paragraph, this one sentence. And then the next sentence…but not until I get to the next sentence.

Which is another part of the trick: setting the future aside. Because the future is what fear is all about – all the horrible things that might happen, that we might not be able to handle if and when they do. Some of them are inevitable – death, taxes, rejection – and there’s no point in worrying about what you can’t keep from happening. Other fears are phantoms. But the only thing any of us can actually do anything about is whatever we’re doing right now this minute.

Not writing a sentence because I’m afraid my novel will end up being terrible, I’ll look foolish, I’ll be rejected…well, that seems like an awful lot to load onto one measly sentence. Sometimes, it really is better to look at the small picture for a little while.

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

Making an impact

November 13, 2011 – 6:31 am

A novel is not a movie; writing a scene is not the same as filming one.

It is amazingly easy to forget this, when we are constantly bombarded with visuals in our everyday lives, from movies and TV, to YouTube and those animated ads that are all over the Internet, to the photo of Cousin Greg’s new puppy that he emailed everyone. We’re conditioned to think visually.

This can become a problem for writers, most especially for the sort of writer who gets a strong mental image of a place or scene that they want to convey to the reader exactly as it appears to them. Unfortunately, writing is a highly imperfect form of telepathy. Furthermore, it is inherently linear: it arrives in the reader’s brain one word at a time, one sentence at a time. A three-page description of the view from a mountaintop or the chaos of a battle is never, ever going to have the same instant impact as a three-second shot in a movie.

So what do you do if you want that kind of impact in your story?

First, you have to accept that you aren’t going to get the same effect, and what you do get is going to have to build up, rather than arriving instantly. What the camera does is different from what words do; trying to imitate the camera with words is never going to be really satisfactory. Second, you remember that what you are after is the impact; the actual description is simply the means to an end. So, third, you look at all the things words can do that a camera can’t do, and you focus on getting the impact you want through them. In other words, you play to the strengths of the written word.

Smells, textures, and sensations are not things that are easily conveyed by a photograph or movie. A written description of a mountaintop view that includes only the sharp peaks and sweeping vistas is missing a bet. Oh, you want the peaks and so on, but sketching them with a light hand and then mentioning the snow-cooled breeze and the scent of the pines, or the cold damp seeping through the POV character’s boots as the snow melts, or the slip of stones or crunch of snow underfoot, will make the scene more vivid and personal in a way the camera can’t.

Which brings me to my second point: writing can be personal in a way the camera isn’t. Cold water seeping through boots, the gag reflex triggered by a nasty smell, the sting and itch of a mosquitoe bite – all can make prose more immediate, because seeing someone else get bitten by a mosquito isn’t the same as putting the reader in the head of the character who’s just been bitten.  Two of the most commonly used viewpoints, first-person and tight-third person, let the writer give the thoughts and feelings of the viewpoint character; omniscient allows for the thoughts and feelings of anyone who is present. And since the whole point of describing a majestic view or a chaotic fight is usually to make the reader feel the way they’d feel if they were there, this is a huge advantage. Showing the reader both the scene and the viewpoint character’s emotions/reactions can go a long way toward making a scene feel overwhelming or confusing to the reader, as well as to the character.

In first-person, and to some extent in tight-third person, one can sometimes slip into stream-of-consciousness writing for a paragraph or two, to really get the viewpoint character’s feelings and reactions across. This is particular useful during battle scenes, disasters, and at other times when the character is getting a confusing amount of information all at once. It’s also fun to write, which means that one has to keep an eye out for doing too much of it at once and ending up with a confused reader.

The history of a place or the background behind some action is another thing that the written word can do more easily than the camera, though this is something that the writer needs to handle carefully. It’s easiest to slip in smoothly in omniscient; in tight-third and first-person, getting this kind of backstory in depends on the knowledge and personality of the viewpoint character – what they know and what they would think about when faced with the particular situation. Knowing that the peaceful valley the character is looking at has been the site of key battles for centuries can create a lot of emotional resonance; on the other hand, one has to be careful that one doesn’t end up with a boring history lecture rather than something that actually deepens the effect of the scene.

When it comes to the actual visual description itself, less is more. It’s tempting to spend three or four pages waxing lyrical about every detail, but frankly, most readers these days are going to skim or skip any chunk of straight description that goes on that long. Also, two people looking at the same majestic view may both be deeply moved, but it will be different things that move them; consequently, getting too detailed usually means losing more and more of the impact on every reader who does not happen to find the same things moving as the writer does.

On the other hand, if the writer provides a few of the right visual details, plus some sounds, smells, and sensations, plus the viewpoint character’s reaction, the reader will generally fill in what’s missing with his/her own details…and the resulting image will be more powerful because it’s tailored to fit each reader by the readers themselves.

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

Reactions

November 9, 2011 – 6:20 am

One of the things that bites even experienced writers from time to time is giving insufficient consideration to the ways their characters react to things. (Me blogging about this has nothing to do with the fact that I just turned in the copyedit for The Far West and ended up deleting or rephrasing about twenty different character reactions because I’d gone with people rolling their eyes every time. Nope. Nothing to do with that at all.)

There are actually three parts to this, and each of them is equally important: there’s the way the character sees what’s happening, followed by his/her emotional reaction, followed by the character’s physical expression of his/her emotional reaction.

Let me unpack that a little.

In any given situation, whether it’s emotionally stressful, embarrassing, a fistfight, a laser battle, or just a couple of people shooting the breeze after work at the coffee shop, each character will have a different internal, emotional reaction to it that depends on that particular, individual character’s personality and life experience. Even something as simple as the boss saying “No, don’t do that right now” may feel like a stinging reprimand to one character, an oblique warning to another character, and a friendly reminder to a third character, depending on each person’s level of confidence/insecurity, his/her past history with that particular boss, his/her past history with authority figures, etc. Each character will have an emotional reaction to their perception of whatever is going on, which will also vary, and each character will express those emotional reactions in a different way, depending on their personality, confidence, background, culture, etc.

For most characters, the only part of this that actually gets put into words on the page is the physical reaction part. Except in omniscient viewpoint, the reader only gets the narrator/viewpoint-character’s thoughts and internal reactions to any given event; everybody else is limited to what the point-of-view character can see them do (i.e., the physical expression of the reaction). It is therefore all too easy to race past the “what the character thinks just happened” and “how the character feels about what just happened” parts and go straight to shrugging, smirking, eye-rolling, and hair-tossing, without really considering whether this character would actually do any of those things in this particular situation, or thinking about what they might do instead.

For example: start with a situation in which someone has just dropped a metaphorical bombshell in a room full of people: This is the One Ring, Darth Vader is his father, that boy pulled the sword out of the stone, whatever. If the writer is in a hurry, and most of the characters aren’t very plot-important, you get things like “A stunned silence fell” or “Everyone turned to look.” And sometimes, that’s exactly what you want, because you want to keep the focus on the main character or the ring or the sword or whatever, and not on all the different reactions.

If, however, there are six major characters present, the writer needs to give a bit more thought to the matter. Since the situation is a Big Revelation, there’s probably not going to be a lot of different perceptions about what is happening (though the guy on the end who’s been established as paranoid and a bit too sensitive to personal slights may be less concerned about the revelation and more worried about why nobody chose to inform him about this before telling lesser folk). And yes, everyone is going to be astonished – but people will be astonished in different ways.

The girl next in line from the paranoid is rather sweet and sheltered; she’s going to be astonished and full of wonder. The woman next to her hates surprises; she’ll be astonished and she’ll resent being made to feel astonished. Next in line is her husband, who’s been telling people forever that something like this was going to happen; he’s going to be just as astonished as everyone else (because he didn’t really expect this to happen now), but he’s also going to gloat. The eight-year-old who’s been bored out of his mind by most of the meeting doesn’t know enough to be truly astonished; he’ll be surprised because everyone else is, but his main emotion is likely to be “Finally! Something interesting!” The jealous sidekick is going to be astonished and jealous; the reluctant hero is going to be astonished with a large leavening of “Oh, gods, why me?” and so on.

Once the writer has sorted out all the various ways people feel about what is happening, she/he has to decide how each person shows those feelings in character. The paranoid guy may glare (if he’s really upset about not having been told first)…or he may smile and nod and try to give the impression that he knew all along. It depends on what he’s like. The rather sweet girl may look on in wide-eyed astonishment, or blush and look away; the woman who hates surprises may stiffen or look angry, or her face may go blank; her husband may grin or look smug or triumphant or straighten up as if he’s the one who just pulled the rabbit out of the hat. And so on. It depends on what each person is like.

And of course, for writers, this cuts both ways: early in the book, the writer may well be finding out what each character is like by assigning them different reactions and body language and then figuring out why each of them did that, while late in the book, the writer will probably know the characters well enough to tell what they’d feel and figure out how they’d express it. Readers, though, only have the actions (and perhaps some thoughts from the POV character), and have to figure out what the characters are thinking and feeling from the way they behave. Hence the importance of making each character’s reaction – both emotional and physical – characteristic and unique to them.

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

…Or Not to Sell Out

November 6, 2011 – 6:50 am

There’s another side to the whole selling-out discussion that rarely gets looked at. And that’s the folks who think that if there is any resemblance whatsoever between what they want to write and any recent bestseller, they must be selling out. Or that everyone will think they are selling out. Never mind that they’ve adored vampire books since they were seven, have been dying to write one for the last twenty years, and have a plot that owes more to Beowulf than modern teen romance novels – if it has vampires in it, it’s a Twilight ripoff.

In its most extreme form, this attitude can be summed up as “If what you are writing is at all likely to make money, even a little, you’re selling out and you shouldn’t do it.” Which is complete and utter hogwash.

Writing a story you love is not selling out, even if it makes you a zillionaire. If you happen to love a story that looks like it will make money, you’re lucky, not a sell-out.

Writing something you hate and despise in order to avoid the appearance of selling out is just as much of a sell-out as writing something you hate and despise in order to make money. More, sometimes – money can pay medical bills or help a family member or friend who is in trouble; avoiding the appearance of selling out doesn’t really do any good for anyone.

In the long run, refusing to write what you love will almost certainly you miserable (in some cases, so miserable that the would-be writer gives up on writing entirely). And that holds whether you refuse because you want to make more money, or whether you refuse because you’re afraid other people will think you have lousy taste or are just greedy.

This is occasionally difficult to get across to people whose tastes cover only a small, specific portion of the wealth of literature that is available. Those who deeply admire the style and characterization typical of literary novels, but who dislike action-adventure or other genre fiction, often simply cannot understand why anyone would want to write the latter unless it was to make more money. I had more than one student in my writing class, back when I was teaching, who had been told in so many words that they could not be a serious writer, or serious about writing, if they wrote fantasy or science fiction.

You can find exactly the same phenomenon in reverse among certain devotees of  particular kinds of genre fiction: people who can’t understand why anyone would want to write literary fiction or literary-style genre fiction unless the writer is “selling out” in order to get recognition.

And then there are those as-yet-unpublished writers who are terrified that selling their book at all will force them to sell out – who think that editors will demand more sex, more violence, less of whatever-the-writer-wants. Never having been through a professional edit or the publication process, they assume that such demands will be universally market-driven, guaranteed to destroy whatever the writer wants, and something that they won’t dare to argue about for fear that their book will never see print. It doesn’t occur to them that the editor a) probably bought the book because he/she liked it and thought it would sell, and b) wants to make it the best book possible so that it will sell lots of copies and make the editor look good to his/her bosses.

Write what you love to read; write what you really want to write. Don’t worry about whether or not it looks like the current bestseller. Don’t twist it out of shape to make it look more (or less) like what you think editors are looking for or what you think people will buy. Just do the best you can, then send it out and start on the next one.

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

To Sell Out…

November 2, 2011 – 6:37 am

For the last several weeks, I’ve been running from one convention/appearance/trade show to another, and it seems that at every one of them I’ve run into at least one would-be writer who is worried about “selling out.” More accurately, they’ve been worried about having to sell out in order to get published.

These folks look at mega-bestsellers like the Harry Potter books and the Twilight series, identify one or more aspects of those books which they dislike, and then leap to the twin conclusions a) that the books are bestsellers because of the particular thing(s) they dislike, and b) that in order to be a bestselling writer (or in extreme cases, in order to sell any manuscript at all) they must incorporate these specific distasteful elements in their own work.

It ought to be obvious that these are rather silly things to worry about. If anyone could identify one thing (or even two or six or twelve things) that all mega-bestsellers have in common, there would be zillions of books out there with exactly those features already. Because publishers and editors aren’t stupid, and they want to make money; if they knew for sure what made for a mega-bestseller, every single book they publish would be one.

Unfortunately, most people don’t look at the process of making money as a writer logically. It is really, really, really difficult for a lot of folks to accept that once they have written the best book they can, the only work they have left to do is address envelopes, stuff them, stamp them, and mail them. It’s especially hard when the ms. comes back from editor after editor. It’s a lot easier to believe that there’s some trick to the whole process – that publishers insist on more violence, or zombies, or pirates, or star-crossed lovers, or whatever the flavor of the moment is that their book doesn’t have – than it is to accept that their wonderful, brilliant manuscript is going to take a long time to sell…or worse, that it may not be quite as wonderful as they think.

When this manifests as grumbling about how the Evil Publishing Conspiracy is too short-sighted and greedy to published Herman Q. Wannabe’s wonderful-and-brilliant first novel, it is mildly annoying to already-published writers. After all, it was those short-sighted, greedy Evil Editors who bought and published our books. Most of us just nod politely, knowing that the system itself will take our revenge for us: either Herman’s book will never sell and he’ll have to deal with all that rejection, or it will sell, and he’ll eventually have to listen to unpublished writers complain about the short-sighted, greedy Evil Editors who bought his book instead of Henrietta Q. Wannabe’s.

Too often, however, Herman and Henrietta lose patience and make up their minds to sell out. They will, they decide, knock out a couple of bestsellers according to the obvious formula that they (or some trusted authority) are sure is the secret to success, and once they have a name and a track record as a bestselling author, then they will get their brilliant, moving, wonderful, real work published.

There are so many things wrong with this scenario that I hardly know where to begin.

First off, see above comments about editors and publishers not being stupid, the lack of any reliable format for mega-writing-stardom, etc. Second, there’s the time factor: as of this writing, the mega-bestseller that everyone seems to be trying to duplicate is Twilight. Which first came out in 2005. That’s six years ago, and you have to add at least another year for the whole first-novel publication process. And 150,000 words or thereabouts takes a year or two to write, for most people. So we’re looking at folks trying to imitate what editors were buying seven or more years ago, hoping that when they finish it in another year or two, editors will still want something like that.

People, the market moves a lot faster than that. Even if you catch the latest mega-blockbuster hot off the press, you’re looking at something an editor bought two to five years before, which will probably take you at least a year to copy. So the absolute best case is that your manuscript will hit an editor’s desk with a three year lag – and three years is a long time in publishing. Don’t bother.

Next comes the mental factor, which Herman and Henrietta hardly ever take into consideration. They assume that all they have to do is hold their noses and crank out something that they don’t much like – indeed, that they actually have contempt for. (That is, after all, pretty much what “selling out” means.) It never seems to occur to them that writing something you dislike is exponentially more difficult than writing something you love (and writing is difficult enough to begin with). Also, if a writer is secretly sneering at his/her readers, it nearly always comes through in the writing somewhere, and since nobody likes being sneered at, sales of the title aren’t likely to be particularly good even if the author can get it past an editor. Which isn’t going to do much for that sales track record they’re hoping to generate.

But the biggest thing that Herman and Henrietta are overlooking is that editors aren’t looking for “the next Twilight,” not really, not even the editors who say they are. They’re looking for “the next mega-blockbuster-bestseller,” and odds are that the next big hit won’t look anything like the one right before it, any more than Twilight looks like Harry Potter.

Editors are no good at all at predicting what writers ought to write. That’s not their job. They are, however, quite good at identifying the Next Big Thing when it turns up in their in basket. Which they cannot do unless writers do their job and write something new and wonderful, instead of trying to imitate the Last Big Thing.

In short, I’ve never seen the sell-out thing work, not once in thirty years. I have to wonder why people keep trying.

But there’s another side to the whole selling-out discussion that rarely gets looked at. I’m going to talk about that next post.

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

Beats Now and Then

October 30, 2011 – 6:54 am

“Beat” is actually an acting term. In a movie or play, it describes a brief interruption or pause in the action or dialog. The result of putting a beat in can change the emphasis on a line of dialog or the meaning of an action, and do it extremely economically. The detective’s moment of stillness before she slowly reaches for the matchbox tells us that she’s realized something important; the brief pause between two lines of dialog gives the characters – and the audience – time to react.

The terminology has bled over from acting and visual media into prose writing, but it means the same thing. The difference comes in how a writer indicates the pause. An actor hesitates; a writer has to actually say “he hesitated.” A director has the camera cut away from the fight for just a second to show the horrified look on a bystander’s face; the exact same interruption for a writer runs into all sorts of viewpoint and pacing considerations (Would the first-person narrator actually notice a bystander’s reaction when he’s dodging punches? Would it distract him if he did? Is it too flat and generic to say “The bystander looked on in horror”? Is it going to be too much of an interruption to give a couple of sentences or paragraphs of description of the bystander?)

On the other hand, writers have a couple of useful tools that actors don’t. Punctuation, for instance. Standard punctuation is meant to indicate differences in tone and timing; there’s a reason that the period is also called a “full stop.” Commas are shorter pauses – just enough for a breath – while semi-colons and colons indicate longer breaks, dashes more of an interruption, and ellipses a hesitation or fading out.

Punctuation gets even more useful for indicating beats when writers use it in non-standard ways. This has to be done with a light hand, or it looks as if the writer is simply ignorant of standard punctuation rather than doing it on purpose. Still, the ability to write “‘Put. It. Down.’ He scowled – she lifted it higher – a flurry of motion; a crash; a fading cry…then silence, and curtains blowing through the broken fourth-story window.” makes it all but impossible for a fiction writer to stick strictly to correctly punctuated sentences. It’s hard to pull off effectively, though, if one doesn’t know the standard rules and usages to begin with. For those who are doubtful, or who want an engaging refresher course, I recommend Karen Elizabeth Gordon’s The New Well-Tempered Sentence.

Sentence fragments and short paragraphs can also provide beats, especially when they are a) not overused and b) in sharp contrast to whatever is around them. That is, a sentence fragment in the middle of an action paragraph composed of relatively short sentences will provide a less strong beat than one that occurs in the middle of a long description. Compare:

He dodged left. The bear dodged right. He ran for the tree. The branch was just out of reach. He jumped. Missed. And the bear was on him.

A row of ornate picture frames lined the back of the mantelpiece. Most of the pictures were of a single person in dark, old-fashioned clothes, but two were of couples, and one showed a family grouping of three adults and five children. A white candle-stub stood in front of each picture, trailing cold wax and bits of blackened wick across the gray stone. Except for one. At the far end, half-hidden behind the portrait of a stern-faced matron in black, stood the picture of a ten-year-old boy in a baseball uniform, glaring at the unseen photographer…and at the empty space in front of the picture where his candle should have been.

In dialog, the speech tag can act as a beat, especially if it is longer than “he said” and/or comes at the beginning or in the middle of a line. “You insist that I say it? All right, then,” he said doesn’t have a beat in it (this is what people really mean when they claim that “said” is invisible as a speech tag). But “You insist that I say it?” he said. “All right. then.” has a very short beat in the middle, because the dialog is interrupted just a little, even if it’s only by “he said.” And “You insist that I say it?” He looked down. “All right, then.” has a longer beat, because the reader has to switch from dialog to the character’s actions and back.

Beats in dialog can come at the beginning or the end of a line, too, to indicate the pacing and the rhythm of the conversation. There are a couple of things to watch out for here: one is to not get carried away and put a beat somewhere in each and every line. Another is to vary your placement. Even if it’s the sort of conversation where there’s a dramatic pause between several lines in a row, you can make it look varied by putting the first beat at the end of the first line and the second beat at the beginning of the third line: “I’m coming with you,” she said firmly, and waited.//”You’re not going to give up on this, are you?”//She smiled. “Do I ever?” reads more smoothly, in most cases, than “I’m coming with you,” she said firmly.//”You’re not giving up on this, are you?” He sighed and shook his head.//”Do I ever?” she said with a smile.

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Fantastic history

October 26, 2011 – 6:13 am

This was supposed to go up Sunday; apparently being out of town glitched my brain and I managed to get it written but not posted. Sorry about that. We now return to our regular posting schedule.

I’m in Tulsa at the moment, at the Nimrod conference, and yesterday they had me do a session on using history in fantasy. It’s kind of a broad topic, and most of it ended up being Q&A, but I did end up with a few points I thought I’d share.

I break down history-in-fantasy into several categories. The first is what’s referred to as “Secret History,” or what I call “fantasy in the cracks.” this is the kind of story that starts from the assumption that everything we know (or think we know) about real-life history is true…but only as far as it goes. More was happening behind the scenes – the battle was won with the secret help of the magician’s cabal, the earthquake happened because of an escaped elemental or a spell gone wrong, and so on.

Fantasy-in-the-cracks requires a tremendous amount of research because the first thing you have to do is find the cracks…and once you’ve done that, you have to be very sure that all the events around your story are as accurate as you can make them. It only takes one mistake to invalidate your whole premise, and believe me, the readers will find it. When they do, their suspension of disbelief falls apart, followed quickly by the story. If you think there’s a good chance of you missing something, you’re almost always better off deliberately making something alternate history or parallel history; on the other hand, if you trust your sources and your research skills, this kind of fantasy can be enormously fun and satisfying.

Alternate History With Rivets is the second type, and it can require even more research than Secret History, because here the writer is extrapolating the ripple effect of one specific change in history. Some writers pick a major event, such as Napoleon winning at Waterloo, which instantly causes major changes in history-as-we-know-it; other writers pick something obscure or something that will take a while to have an impact. In either case, though, the idea is to do a rigorous and justifiable examination of the consequences of a single change (or perhaps a tight cluster of small changes). This one needs both research and logic, and even if you can justify every comma, people will argue about it.

Then there’s what I call Parallel History, which is like Alternate History With Rivets, only looser. This is the kind of thing I do. In nearly all of my pseudo-historical fantasies, magic has been around, known, and an accepted part of society for a long time, usually since prehistory. If I were doing AHWR, everything would be different; at the absolute least, the names of people and countries would be strange and the cultures would be unrecognizable.

But Parallel History assumes that for some reason (which the author may or may not have made explicit in their notes, and which hardly ever can make it into the book), history proceeds more or less along the same route even with this major difference that goes back thousands of years. A lot will be different, but enough will be the same that many places, people, and events will be recognizable.

Next would come the total alternate history, the sort you find in Lois Bujold’s Sharing Knife series, where the only thing that’s the same as the real world is the geography. And finally, you get the books where history is used only as something to mine for ideas from which to build a totally imaginary world, from climate to culture.

Which of these things a particular writer chooses to write will depend on a number of things, including how much the writer likes reading about history, what sort of story they have hold of and what they think it needs, and how much confidence the writer has in his/her ability to pull off the degree of worldbuilding accuracy that each sort demands.

That last is particularly important. The past is different from the present in a lot of ways; one is constantly faced with decisions about when, where, and how to present differences in everything from culture to morality to changes in everyday life. I’ve had several people comment on the size of Eff’s family in Thirteenth Child as if it were very strange and unlikely for anyone to have fourteen children, yet my mother was one of ten children, and her family was not considered unusually large, and that was as late as the 1920s.

There are also a surprising number of history buffs around, which one can view as either a feature or a bug. The bug is, of course, all the passionate amateur historians who will point out your mistakes and argue with your interpretations after the book is published and they’re too late to change. The feature is that if you can find any of these folks while the book is still in manuscript, they’re usually happy to provide help with the research.

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After the Writing

October 19, 2011 – 6:55 am

In the comments on “being a writer,” JP asked about the afterward part – the stuff that’s not writing. And this is rather a good time to write about it, since I’ve been in the midst of doing publicity stuff for Across the Great Barrier for the past few weeks.

Much as nobody believes it from outside the process, getting published is not the pinnacle of achievement. It’s the bottom rung on a whole new ladder. It’s like graduating from high school; you may have been a Big Shot in the senior class, but now you’re either a freshman in college or the lowest replaceable flunky in an entry-level job, and nobody cares that you were voted Most Likely To Whatever.

In addition, the ladder isn’t a nice straightforward one; it’s more like those drawings by Escher with the stairs that go around in an endless square that you’re always climbing but never getting to the top. This is because there’s no real definition of what “the top” actually is. Is a book that sells two million copies closer to “the top” than one that wins a Pulitzer Prize? What about one that gets really good reviews but flops at the cash register? If you get a movie deal, does that make up for six reviews panning the book and a bunch more saying the movie is “even more treacle than the book it was made from”? And what if you get a mega-best-seller…and then your next book is a total flop?

That last bit is the thing a lot of people don’t count on. There’s a saying in the industry: You’re only as good as your last book. And every book is a whole new thing, with all the problems of attracting people to an untested new product. Yes, even if it’s the second book in a trilogy or the eighth book in a series.

Which brings me to promotion and publicity.

There are two pieces to this: the public appearances (which a lot of folks think of as the glamorous part), and all the prep work and support effort that goes into making them happen. The public appearances are enormous fun for writers of a gregarious temperament, but they’re pure torture for those who are shy or solitary, or even for those who are not wildly social. In either case, they are an energy drain (how noticeable depends on how much energy one has to begin with). One has to be “on” for hours at a time – not merely socializing, but socializing to a purpose (i.e., persuading people you have never met that they should buy, read, and hopefully talk favorably about your latest book to all their friends).

Speaking engagements require the most preparation – you have to write a speech (duh). Readings are simpler; all you have to do is pick out a passage that you can cover in the amount of time allotted. In both cases, there will almost certainly be questions afterwards, which is a bit scary the first couple of times until one has done it enough to have been asked the standard batch of writer questions and developed answers for them. (Where do you get your ideas? Where do you get your characters? Who were your biggest influences? What is your favorite book? Do you ever put real people in your books? etc.)

Some speaking engagements pay a fee (which can range from a token $25.00 for gas to several thousand if you’re a famous author giving a keynote speech at a prestigious conference. In the YA field, you also have school visits, which generally involve speaking to one or more groups of students (which can mean anything from the advanced Young Creative Writers class of fifteen to an all-school assembly of a thousand kids or more). Often, several schools and libraries in a particular area will get together to bring an author to town, splitting the travel fees. If the author isn’t wary, this can result in a schedule such as: arrive in town at 5:30 p.m.; check into hotel; dinner with school and library board; 7 a.m. breakfast with School A librarians; presentation to School A literary club at 9:30; all-school assembly at 10:20; drive to School B; lunch with School B teachers; presentation to School B classes in the afternoon; autographing at local bookstore; dinner with adult book group; public library presentation at 7:30 p.m.; breakfast and morning presentations at School C; dash to airport to catch 1 p.m. flight. If you’re really unwary, they’ll try to cut expenses by scheduling you to leave on a 6 a.m. flight, arriving at 8 a.m., race to School A for the 9:30 literary club presentation and proceed from there, thus reducing their costs by one night of lodging and two meals.

Mixers and parties require the least advance preparation; about all you have to do is make sure that you have a stack of business cards, an intriguing two-sentence summary of your book memorized, and a really clear idea of what your tolerance for alcohol is. You also have to remind yourself not to hole up with all the other writers in the corner; it’s the bookstore owners, book buyers, teachers, librarians, and readers that you’re supposed to be there to talk to. Even though you know that the writers won’t ask the Standard Writer Questions (see above) and everybody else will.

Science fiction conventions don’t pay (except room and meals if you’re the Guest of Honor), but they tend to be friendly and more laid-back and off-the-cuff than school visits and speaking engagements that pay.

Autographings come in three varieties, plus the hideously embarrassing “signing stock,” which is where one slinks into a bookstore, checks to make sure they actually have a copy of one’s book on the shelves, and then walks up to the cash register to tell the clerk “I’m an author, and I notice you have some of my books; would you like me to autograph them?” This is almost as bad as the normal autographing, where the author gets to sit in front of a small mountain of books for two hours, while an average of five people stop to get copies signed (three of them employees of the bookstore).

Then there are the special autograph sessions at some of the giant teacher, librarian, or bookseller’s conventions, where the publisher is giving books away free as publicity. This nearly guarantees that there will be a line (though that is “nearly”…and it’s really embarrassing and depressing when you are giving away books and nobody is interested). It also means that a lot of the folks in line will be there because they are getting a free book, not because they know anything about the book, or you. (Which is, of course, the whole point.)

And then there are the rare, precious times when everything goes right and fifty people show up at the bookstore to get your new book signed. Even then, however, there is always someone who insists on telling you in detail about some mistake you made in the previous book…which holds up the line and makes everyone else crabby.

In short, all of the public-appearance after-writing publicity stuff involves talking to and being polite to large numbers of strangers, most of whom are not going to view you with awe simply because you are a published writer. The teachers, booksellers, and librarians make up the largest part of the audience for public appearances. They are sharp, finicky customers; they often admire authors, but they’re seldom overawed by them. The readers are, by and large, much better for the authorial ego (barring the ones who seem to think that the more holes they can pick in a writer’s work, the more the writer will appreciate their honesty and diligence).

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

Being a writer

October 16, 2011 – 10:13 am

When people ask me when I knew I wanted to be a writer, I always tell them that I never did want to be a writer. I wanted to write. Being a writer was something that happened by accident.

Recently someone asked me what I meant. Surely, if you want to write, that kind of assumes you want to be a writer.

Well, that depends on how you define “writer.” If you define “writer” as someone who writes, then “being a writer” is trivial: you sit down and write something, and presto! You’re a writer. It’s not this huge thing to aspire to, because it’s too easy. By that definition, I’ve been a writer since I started working on my first story back in seventh grade.

Most folks, of course, aren’t talking about that basic definition when they speak of “being a writer.” What they mean is being a published writer, a career writer, a professional writer, a full-time writer. And what they’re really asking about is rather more complex than the question sounds.

Because there are two parts to “being a writer” the way they mean it. There’s writing, and there’s what happens afterward. Most of the people who talk about “being a writer,” whether they’re asking the question or whether they’re announcing to the world that they themselves want to be writers, are either talking about the perceived glamour and respect and status that they think goes along with publication and a writing career, or else they’re talking about the validation of getting published – the fact that someone, somewhere, has deemed their story worthy.

All that is stuff that happens after the writing part, if it happens at all. (And when it does happen, it’s nothing at all like the rosy dreams people have of what it’s going to be like…but that’s a different post, I think.)

Wanting to write means wanting to get the words down on paper (or, these days, pixels); wanting to tell stories; wanting to get the stories right on as many levels as possible. It’s not about the stuff that happens to the paper or pixels after the story is written.

Which is not to say that I never desired publication; on the contrary, getting my stories published was a goal from the time I realized such a thing might be possible, which was around age thirteen. But I never wrote in order to get published. I wrote in order to get the story down and get it right. Publication was one of several possible proofs that I’d done what I set out to do; it was also the most effective way of getting the stories out and read by other people. (This was not only pre-Internet, it was pre-personal-computers.)

I don’t remember publication ever being the same kind of goal that the writing itself was. I didn’t sneak time in class or jot weird notes in the margins of my textbooks because I wanted to be published. I didn’t spend my lunch hours and coffee breaks at my office typing instead of chatting with my coworkers or eating with my friends in order to get published. I did it because I wanted to tell the story. I wanted to find out how I would get it to turn out right. (Sometimes, I just wanted to find out what would happen; I don’t always know in advance.)

People who talk about “being a writer” usually don’t want to write; they want to have written. They want to skip ahead to the part that comes after the writing. They want the status, or they want the validation.

And while validation is lovely, and all the publication and publicity stuff is certainly a necessary and legitimate part of a writing career, they’re not writing. Hardly anyone who wants to have written makes it to publication, and if they do, they usually don’t continue past one or two books, because if you are going to “be a writer,” you spend 80% of your career time writing. Not doing the stuff that comes afterwards. And 80% of your time is way too much to spend doing something you don’t really enjoy, just to get to the “good parts.”

The flip side of this, of course, is that unless one aspires to be Emily Dickenson and only ever publish posthumously, one does have to think about selling and publication and publicity at some point. Validation is important; so are sales (especially if one hopes to make a living at this). Ignoring or sneering at the business end of writing is just as problematic as wanting to skip over the writing part and get to the afterwards.

The difference is that if one truly can’t stand the sales, publication, and publicity part, one can skip it completely. Nobody goes around arm-twisting people into sending their manuscripts out, or querying editors, or even just putting their stuff up on one of the freebie web sites. If one wants to be Emily Dickenson, nobody will stop you (though people will probably look at you funny if you tell them, so perhaps it’s better not to mention it).

If, however, it’s the writing part that one strongly dislikes, one is pretty much up a creek. You can’t sell a book that hasn’t been written yet (not the first time, anyway…and it’s getting harder even for writers with a proven track record). You can’t publish a non-existent manuscript, or even an incomplete one; you certainly can’t do all the sales-and-marketing stuff for a book that doesn’t exist.

What it comes down to is being honest with oneself about why one is doing this. The professonal writers I know range from barely tolerating the publication-and-after stuff to reveling in it with great glee, but what keeps all of us at this job is the writing part. Telling stories. Making things up. Even for the writers who most enjoy the publicity bits.

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

Two or more at a time

October 12, 2011 – 6:30 am

Every so often, someone asks me if I work on more than one book at a time. It’s a more complicated question than most people think it is, because there’s work, and then there’s work.

Writing comes in phases. Very long phases, but phases nonetheless. There’s six months to a year of writing the first draft, then weeks or months of revision (depending on the author’s process). Then another few weeks or months for editorial revisions, possibly in two parts if the editor separates major revisions from line editing. Then there’s one to three weeks of copyedit, and another one to three weeks of galley proofing. And then there’s the non-writing publicity stuff that happens after the book is out: autographings, appearances, and so on.

All of it can be considered “working on the book,” and given how long the whole process takes, I’m not sure anyone could make a living writing if they waited until the book was out and all the publicity was finished with before starting the next one. So in that sense, I think nearly every professional author works on more than one book at a time. It isn’t terribly easy at times, especially when you have one book that’s just been published (so you’re doing publicity), another that’s at the editing stage, and a third that’s just starting the first draft. For one thing, it can be hard to psych up to talk about the just-published book that (for you) is two or three years old, when what you’re really excited about is the thing you just started working on.

What most folks seem to mean by the “working on more than one book” question, though, is “do you work on more than one first draft at a time?” That’s a much clearer and easier question. For me, the answer is “rarely.” Partly because I don’t have time – it’s hard enough to squeeze in work on one first draft while also doing editorial revisions and pushing the latest release.

Time is only part of the difficulty, however. The other part is the problem of shifting gears. I tend to write single-viewpoint books, which means I get into my narrator’s head (and into his/her world) pretty firmly. (I was recently asked in a crit group meeting why I had phrased something a certain way, and for a minute all I could do was stare at the questioner. Because it’s what the narrator would do, it was what she’d say and how she’d say it given her background and upbringing; there simply wasn’t any alternative. It took me a minute to back out of the character’s head and see what the objection was, and then get my author hat on and figure out if I could come up with a more acceptable alternative. And that was weeks after I’d finished the draft.)

Being that solidly in one character’s head makes it difficult to change gears and get into a different character/narrator’s head. I can make the switch – I’ve had to do it on occasion – but it takes time. And I’m not talking a couple of minutes here; I’m usually talking a day or two, sometimes more. That means that I lose somewhere between several hours and several days of writing time every time I switch from one project to another. I can’t afford it.

Switching also means that I’m trying to keep two totally different plots and worlds straight and maintain their consistency. Since my brain isn’t large enough to hold even one novel at a time, let alone two, this means I spend a lot of time rereading what I’ve written – more and more as the first drafts get longer and there are more things to keep straight. To some extent, I do this anyway, but it takes longer and there’s more of it if I try to run two projects at the same time. It’s bad enough when I’m revising or copyediting one novel and trying to write another.

Even with the Frontier Magic books, which have the same narrator/viewpoint and take place in the same world, it was more of a problem than you might think. It’s much easier than you think to put in too much or too little mention of a particular bit of important backstory when you’re copyediting Book 2 (in which the incident happens) but writing the first draft of Book 3 (in which the backstory needs to be clear for those who won’t have read the prior book, but not driven into the ground for those who just read Book 2 and have the incident fresh in their minds).

I have, however, occasionally managed to work on two different first drafts at more or less the same time. It’s never lasted for very long; I think the best I did was four chapters each of two books before one of them took off and I committed to it, dropping the other and coming back to it later. I don’t really count the bits and pieces of noodling that litter my hard drive (I have several dozen first pages and a smaller collection of first chapters that haven’t gone anywhere…yet). Those are just things I toss off when I’m playing around with ideas, when I’m between books and trying to decide what to write next.

There are, however, folks for whom working on multiple first drafts is the norm. Some of them can’t stand the down time between scenes or chapters or event horizons, when their backbrains are working on coming up with whatever comes next but they’re not actually writing, and they are capable of switching off to something else without disrupting that delicate unconscious process. In other words, they can write a chapter of their space opera while their backbrain is working on their fantasy, then switch to writing the fantasy while their backbrain works out what comes next in the space opera. I rather envy them; it seems like a marvelous way to be insanely productive…or maybe that’s just insane.

Other folks have an attention span such that working on a single story gets boring after a few scenes or chapters. Switching to something else for a bit allows them to come back to the first project with fresh enthusiasm. Of course, that presupposes that they do come back; I know far too many people who think they work this way, when all they’re really doing is producing one set after another of first-six-chapters. There’s a difference between rotating from project to project to keep your interest fresh, and writing story after story up to the First Veil where it gets hard and then abandoning them for the next exciting new thing.

If working on multiple projects at the same time sounds interesting, by all means try it, but do be honest with yourself. If you’re ending up with lots of first-four-to-six-chapters and no middles or endings, then empirical evidence indicates that this is not the method for you.

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

The Hat Lecture

October 9, 2011 – 6:18 am

Back in the day, on Usenet, I had a little lecture that I posted periodically, whenever too many folks seemed to be bemoaning the horribleness of the submission process so much that they were losing sight of the actual job of submitting. (Make no mistake; the submission process is horrible and lengthy and depressing, but there really isn’t much that can be done about it – certainly not by writers.)

Recently, I went looking for it in order to link it to a post I was writing, and found, to my surprise, that either I’ve never posted it on the blog, or else I hid it well enough that I couldn’t find it in ten minutes of searching. So for those who haven’t seen it, here is

THE HAT LECTURE

Because writers are self-employed, they must wear many hats. There’s the Creative Artiste’s black beret, the Accountant’s green eyeshade, the Editor’s fedora, the Publicist’s whatever’s-current-in-headgear, and so on. This can create dangerous fashion difficulties for the novice writer, as many problems can be caused by wearing the wrong hat at the wrong time.

Putting on the Publicist Hat during revisions, for instance (“Baby! Every comma is golden! Let’s do lunch…”), leads to lousy revising (or none at all) and an expanding waistline. Wearing the Accountant Hat when deciding where to send things out is often a bad idea as well (“Let’s see, this will cost $3.27 to mail, plus return postage; if I send it to 100 places, that’ll be over $600! Hey, if I don’t sent it out at all, I can save $600!”) And of course the perils of wearing the Editor Hat during the first draft are well-known.

But possibly the most common fashion error made by beginning writers is to choose the wrong Hat for dealing with submissions and rejections. Many try to wear the Publicist Hat, trying to come up with brilliant new ways of getting their manuscript noticed, like mailing it in a pizza box. How original! (Seriously, don’t bother. I’ve been hearing this one from editors for at least twenty years.) In addition to making editors and mail room guys grumpy (how would you like to be all ready for nice, hot pizza, and then open the box to find nothing but another unsolicited manuscript?), they waste valuable time and money that would be far better spent elsewhere.

Worse yet is putting on the Creative Artiste Hat. The Creative Artiste Hat is for coming up with ideas and doing first drafts, not for mailing stuff off (too boring) or dealing with rejection letters. Faced with a rejection letter (or sometimes even just with the possibility of getting a rejection), the Creative Artiste strikes poses and wails – “It’s over, over, I tell you! I’m through with this writing stuff! I’m going to retire to a monastery in Tibet…Can you get a visa to Tibet for that? Maybe India would be better; I really like Indian food…” Meanwhile, the manuscript sits on the author’s desk, where nothing can happen to it, instead of in an editor’s slush pile, where it will eventually get read and maybe bought.

What the writer needs to wear in order to deal with a rejected manuscript or a stack of query letters is the humble but vital Secretary Hat. Where the Publicist gets sidetracked trying to decide whether neon pink envelopes would be eye-catching enough for the query letters – perhaps they should be edged in bright purple? or green? – the Secretary grabs a stack of plain Number 10 envelopes and starts stuffing and stamping. Where the Creative Artiste moans an wails over the latest rejection, the Secretary merely gives the classic overworked-secretary snarl because the rejection means packaging the thing up again, and in time to make the mail pickup.

The Secretary does not care what is in the manuscript, nor what the rejection letter said. She does not go into a funk because the ms. might not be perfect yet, or into deep depression because it has been rejected for the 500th time. Her job is to type the cover letter, assemble the mailing, and make sure it gets in the mailbox in time for the five o’clock pickup, and she performs this job with efficiency (and only a little eye-rolling over the antics she anticipates from the Creative Artiste later on).

In other words, if it was good enough to send out to your first-choice Publisher A three or six or eight months ago, then it’s good enough to send out to your second-choice Publisher B now that A has rejected it. So send it out again right away, BEFORE you start angsting over the rejection.

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

The Problem with Sequels

October 5, 2011 – 6:58 am

The problem with sequels is that the writing and publishing process gives readers too much time to think.

Let me unpack that a little.

It takes me one to two years to write a novel, and this is fairly typical of most of the professional writers I know. Yes, there are folks who work faster without detriment to their quality; the speedy crowd seems to work at a rate of around three to six books per year. And then there are the real outliers (whom the rest of us don’t like to talk about so much). The fastest one I know could do a novel in two weeks without a decline in quality (two weeks really was her limit, though: the one that got written in eleven days shows some stress fractures).

But even the really fast folks do not end up with a book on the stands every two weeks. The publishing process doesn’t allow it. What with getting the copyediting done, arranging for the cover art, doing the book design, printing and proofreading the galleys, advance publicity, and getting the book out to reviewers and bookstore buyers…well, the whole business takes six months to a year unless they throw massive amounts of money and people at it, which they only ever do when they have a hope of making some of those costs back.

What all this comes down to is that in most genres other than Romance (which has its own rules), a given publisher will do a book a year by a particular writer. There are occasional exceptions, but they’re exceptions. Some of the extra-productive writers deal with this by working under pseudonyms; others rotate through multiple series for different publishers or even genres. But even if the writer has a book out in a different series under a different name every month of the year, each individual series usually has to wait a year for the next volume in sequence.

The wait is due to a combination of things: the production process, the fact that most writers can work to a book-a-year production rate, the desire of publishers to give the hardcover maximum time to sell before putting out the paperback (while also timing the paperback’s release so that the hardcover of Book 2 or 3 will  be just out and available for eager new readers who can’t wait). But one of the consequences is that it gives all of the eager readers who grabbed Book 1 the minute it came out lots and lots of time to speculate about what will be in Book 2.

Speculation is fun; I engage in it myself quite frequently. The trouble is that it is exceedingly easy to become overly fond of one’s speculations, especially if one happens to have a lively crowd of Internet companions who like the same sorts of characterization and plot twists. It’s frighteningly easy to convince oneself that one has a pipeline into the author’s mind, and that the sequel will be a better, shinier, spiffier version of whatever plot-and-character developments one’s particular group of readers thinks is most likely.

Inevitably, when this happens, the result is that the actual Book 2 (or 3, or whatever) arrives, it’s a disappointment to any and everyone who had constructed an alternate vision of who’d live and who’d die, who’d end up in a romance and who wouldn’t, what the important plot-points were and which things were totally extraneous. Either the readers have guessed right and worked themselves up so far that no writer, living or dead, could possibly find words shiny and spiffy enough to live up to their mental construct, or (more often) the writer is going in a completely different direction and the readers are outraged that their lovingly-rationalized vision isn’t going to play out the way they thought.

It’s a compliment, in a way, when readers get so obsessed with ones characters, plot, and world – or with their vision of it – that they spend the between-books year talking and speculating and constructing their own extensions. And speaking for myself, there’s nothing quite like the thrill when I realize that somebody got exactly what I was going for. Most of the time, though, folks are doing what my ex-husband used to call “jacking up the radiator cap and driving a new car underneath it.” Where they think I’m going, or where they want me to go, isn’t where I’m headed at all.

Even that isn’t a particular problem for me, right up to the point where the readers start berating me for not writing the book they would have written. (I think I’m the most taken aback by the ones who come up and inform me that my main character couldn’t have used magic to do X, because their magic can’t do that. Um, what? My world, my rules. It’d be one thing – an embarrassing one – if they actually ever found an internal inconsistency, but as far as I can tell, they’re just pulling it out of air.)

It is very hard to explain to these folks that they are not my patron and I am not ghostwriting their ideas for them. Usually, I don’t even try. Occasionally, I get cornered by someone who has bought into the whole “ideas are the hard part” thing, and who thinks that the reason Book 2 isn’t out fifteen minutes after Book 1 is that I must have writer’s block. These folks are always eager to give me their outline for my next book, and they’re generally quite crestfallen when I explain as gently as I can that Book 2 is all finished and working its way through the editing-and-publication process, so their pile of ideas is far too late to be useful, even if I were inclined to use them.

On the whole, I do have to admit that I much prefer having intelligent, involved, enthusiastic readers. Even if they do outnumber me by many thousands of brains to one, and therefore can and will catch every plot hole, inconsistency, implausibility, or factual inaccuracy anywhere in my books.

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

Hack Writer’s Gambit

October 2, 2011 – 6:17 am

The other day, my walking buddy and I were discussing various bad-plotting mistakes made in various TV series, specifically the sort that used to be called “hack writer’s gambit.” I say “used to be called” because a quick series of googles found very little in the way of modern references for the term.

So I’m evidently going to have to start by defining the term, if I want to talk about it. Taking it in pieces: a hack writer was, back in the days of the pulp magazines, a writer who cranked out stories on demand, supposedly without regard to subject or quality. It’s a term you still hear, though not as often as in the past. “Gambit” is a strategy, technique, or ploy.

The hack writer’s gambit is a particularly bad ploy for getting oneself out of the corner one has written one’s hero into. It was especially common in the old serials (both in print and at the movies) where each episode but the last would end in a cliffhanger, often one that seemed to show the hero’s death. The next episode or segment would open with the same scene, but with an extra thirty seconds of footage or a paragraph that showed the hero diving off the boat seconds before the explosion destroyed it or slipping out of the handcuffs and escaping through the back door before the building was set on fire. Another example would be the previously unknown and unmentioned witness or relative who shows up at the very last minute to exonerate the hero(ine) or reveal the truth about the family secrets.

The classic example comes from Scott Meredith’s how-to-write book, Writing to Sell: A serial writer is contacted by his editors because the current installment of the series ends with Lance O’Neil in a pit with sides too steep to climb, sharp spikes moving in to crush him, and molten lead pouring in from a pipe in the ceiling. The editors aren’t sure the writer can get the hero out of the mess. The writer shrugs and hands them the next installment, which begins “With a mighty leap, Lance O’Neil sprang out of the pit.” (Meredith’s version is two pages long in the copy I have, and much more entertaining, but that’s the gist of it.)

Generally, the unexpected and unreasonably easy escape is immediately followed by a bunch of fast and furious action – chasing down the guys who blew up the ship, set the house on fire, or stuck Lance in the pit – to take the readers/viewers’ minds off just how outrageously they’ve been suckered. The only time this kind of thing actually works is in a parody, where the whole point is that one outrageous or unlikely or downright impossible thing after another keeps happening. If the story is sufficiently light and/or sufficiently action-centered, and getting out of the cliffhanger isn’t totally ridiculous (as it is in the Lance O’Neil example), the author can sometimes get away with it. Rarely.

These days, you don’t see many unlikely physical exploits – heroes making mighty leaps, or sneaking out past guards when we’ve already seen (we thought) that it didn’t happen that way. Readers and viewers expect more consistency and foreshadowing than that, and writers know it. If the hero makes a mighty leap out of a death trap, he has to have done similar feats in less dire circumstances before, so that the escape becomes a matter of the villain having totally underestimated the hero’s physical prowess, rather than the sudden revelation of an ability he’s never had before (unless, of course, the hero got bitten by a radioactive spider right before he was shoved into the pit, and the escape is as much a shock to him as to the reader).

What you do see are other sorts of unlikely rabbits being pulled out of hats. The villain gloats that he’s erased the critical data on the hero’s computer so thoroughly that it is unrecoverable – and then someone conveniently shows up with a new bit of software that can magically recover the data anyway, just in the nick of time. Or a previously unknown and unmentioned hacker has a fit of conscience for no particular reason and turns up with the data he stole from the hero’s computer just before the villain wiped it. Or a character who’s been dead for two seasons or eighteen chapters turns out to have set up a secret backup system that is still running, even though she hasn’t been around to maintain it.

When this kind of thing happens in a television series, it is sometimes understandable. Often, the logical place to plant the information about the software or the hacker or the backup system was several episodes prior to the one in which it becomes necessary to pull the hero out of the swamp, and by the time the writers need it, it’s too late to plant it. (That’s the problem with serials in general, really – they take a lot more careful planning than one may realize in the early stages.) When you have something like this happening between the front and back cover of a single book, there’s really no excuse for it. Yes, it’s a lot of work to go back and find places to plan the hacker or the software guy and his project or the secret backup system, but if you ever thought writing was not going to be a lot of work, you really ought to have gotten over the idea by the time you got to the end of your first draft and realized you needed some plot handwaving to get your hero out of whatever hole you’d written him into. Heck, that’s half the reason why there are second drafts in the first place – so the writer can get the reader out of some corner without having to leave obvious footprints all over the fresh paint on the floor.

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

Getting to know them

September 28, 2011 – 6:27 am

Characterization is one of the things I had a hard time getting a handle on. In my early books, I was doing it all by instinct – which was all well and good (I still do it pretty much by instinct), except that I hadn’t thought about characterization, about what goes into it or how you do it. I hadn’t educated my instinct.

I got better at it by practicing, but it was a long, slow process because I still wasn’t thinking explicitly about character – what it is, how it’s expressed, how the reader learns about it. It wasn’t until many years and many books later, when I had to explain to someone how it worked, that I started to see what I was doing and figure out how to do it better.

There were several layers of realization for me. The first one was kind of a “duh!” thing – you find out about characters the same way you find out about actual people. You figure out what they’re like based on their physical appearance, what they say and how they say it, what they do, how they act and react, and on what other people say to them and about them, and how people you already know react to them. If someone you already like and trust says that George is a good guy, if a little stuffy, you’re inclined to believe him and give George the benefit of the doubt; if someone you distrust and think is a bad guy says that George is a perfect example of honorable behavior, you’re a lot more inclined to count your change twice when George hands it back to you than to trust him with your wallet and I.D.

The next realization came when I figured out why so many other people thought I didn’t have much problem with characterization – it was because I did dialog reasonably well, and that meant that readers were able to judge my characters based on what they said and on what other characters said to or about them. I was leaving out a lot of the other things that would make my characters deeper and better rounded, but the dialog was enough for a lot of readers to go on with, especially in the sort of adventure novels I was writing at that point.

At that point, I started paying more attention to some of the things I’d been doing by instinct; that is, I started trying to deliberately educate my instincts so that they’d work better without me having to constantly watch what I was doing. Mostly, this involved thinking about exactly how one presents all those aspects of a character’s personality in a novel.

Physical appearance looks easy, at first glance. It’s just a description of what the person looks like, right? Well, yes. But physical appearance is more than height, weight, and the color of hair, eyes, and skin. It includes clothes, which in nearly every society in history have been a marker of class, status, and degree of general coolness, and often of occupation and/or education as well. Things like cut and color, fit, fabric, style, whether clothes look/are comfortable, the degree of repair they’re in, how becoming they are to the person – mentioning just one or two of these can tell a lot about a character and his/her situation. The same goes for a character’s hairstyle and, in the case of men, whether they wear a mustache and/or beard, in what style.

What the character says and how he says it covers tone of voice and vocabulary as well as syntax. It includes things like whether the character is very blunt (“No. Not ever. Not for a million dollars.”), less blunt (“I won’t be available Tuesday. Or any other day.”), or vague and non-committal (“I’ll just have to see how things go.”); whether she yells or whispers; whether he’s gentle or sarcastic or abrupt or abstracted.

What the character does and how she acts divides into two parts: body language and actual actions. Facial expression – smiles, frowns, narrowed eyes, raised eyebrows, twitching lips, blushes – get included her, but so does every other part of the body, which some authors tend to forget. Things like stiffening, turning away, crossing one leg over the other, waving a hand, leaning forward – all these are part of a nearly unconscious mode of communication that all of us do in real life all the time. It’s so nearly unconscious, in fact, that many people have to go to some lengths in order to start seeing it so that they can describe it piece by piece, because they don’t naturally break down “He was interested” into “He leaned forward, eyes fixed on the contract, lips pursed slightly as if to keep from admitting anything too soon.”

For me, my characters’ body language ends up being sort of like method acting. I’ll be writing a scene and type “He was interested” and immediately know I want the specifics. So I act the character in my head:  I’m him; I’m interested; what, exactly, is my body trying to do? Oh, I’m leaning forward – hands are twitching a bit, but they’re under the desk, so nobody would see – eyes want to squint – what’s my mouth doing? Shoulders?   Once I figure all that out, I decide which bits to put into the description, and opt for the pursed lips rather than the tense shoulders.

The other part of “what the character does” is action, which is more movement than body language and comes in two subtypes. First, there’s immediate short-term behavior – whistling, slamming a door, crying, laughing, slapping someone; second, there are more complicated, long-term actions, like buying someone a gift, running away, challenging someone to a duel, pretty much any sort of plot-related activity. With immediate action, I find that the context and body language part is as or more important than the action itself. Someone who flounces out the door, slamming it behind her, does not come across as a threat, while someone who storms out and slams it hard enough to break the glass is a lot scarier.

The hardest part is often figuring out what that particular character would do in a given situation. Would he fidget with his pocket watch? Hum softly? Pace? Start studying the view out the windows? Sigh, softly or noisily? Unobtrusively finger the dagger up his sleeve, in a way that makes everyone watching think that he’s fluffing the ruffled cuff of his shirt?

How the character reacts to different people and situations builds on everything else, because the way they show their reactions is in their dialog and tone of voice, their body language, their immediate and longer-term actions. You can, of course, simply say “Carol disliked Jane instantly,” but it’s usually much more effective to say “Carol stiffened more and more as Jane simpered through George’s rambling introduction. When George finally finished, Carol inclined her head a quarter of an inch. “Pleased to meet you,” she said in an icy tone.”

The longer version is more effective partly because the readers can judge Carol’s reaction for themselves, but also because George’s and Jane’s actions hint at what they’re like and why Carol might be having the reaction she’s having.

I still do most of my characterization by instinct – that is, I don’t get this analytical when I’m actually writing a scene. As I said, for me, it’s more like method acting – trying to be the character for an instant or two, long enough to figure out what to describe. But taking it apart this way helps me educate my instincts, so that I don’t have to stop every time one character is introduced to another whom they dislike, and make lists of all the possible ways she might show her reaction, then consciously and deliberately pick out the one thing that would be right for that character to do/say/think. If I do my thinking about the mechanics of how characterization works outside my actual writing time, I don’t have to do it when I’m trying to figure out the scene.

But that’s me. Your mileage may vary.

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

Banned Books Week 2011

September 25, 2011 – 6:59 am

Some years back, a good friend of mine told me a story about her nine-year-old son, who came to her wanting to read a particular series of adult books that he’d heard his late-teenaged siblings talking about. The books in question were great adventure books, but they did contain several explicit mentions of sex – not graphic, but quite clear. After long consideration, the parents decided that the boy could read the books, provided he came to talk them over with his parents afterward.

The son went away happily and read the books, then dutifully presented himself for the talk. And the first thing his mother said was, “So, did the sex in those books bother you at all?”

The boy’s eyes went wide. “There was sex in those books?” he said in astonishment. “I better read them again!”

I mention this because once again it is Banned Books Week, and I’ve been poking around in the statistics on book challenges that the American Library Association has been collecting for the past twenty years. A few quick calculations show that sexual explicitness was a factor in roughly thirty percent of the challenges, and that 72% of the recorded challenges were to books in schools or school libraries…and the vast majority were brought by a concerned parent.

This is unsurprising, really. People will go to amazing lengths to protect children – their own or other people’s. And I don’t know anyone who, reading levels aside, thinks third-graders should be reading graphic horror, slasher books, or something like The Silence of the Lambs. The problem is with where to draw the lines, and with who draws them.

It’s also a problem of trust and fear. Challenges to books always are. We don’t trust other people to see the same things we do, to have the same objections, to be intelligent or compassionate or concerned enough to come to the same conclusions we do about a particular subject or a particular portrayal. We don’t trust them to agree with us – and why should we? There’s plenty of evidence around that other people don’t hold the same opinions, whatever those opinions may be.

When it comes to children, however, the issues of fear and trust come out even more strongly. As I’ve pointed out before, fiction is dangerous. Parents fear – sometimes rightly – that their children will be hurt, that they won’t be able to handle scenes or concepts that are too advanced, that they will be exposed to ideas and values that are contrary to the ones the parents believe in. That fear knows no politics; in talking with librarians and teachers, I’ve heard over and over that as many challenges come from the political left as from the political right. The objections are different; the reasoning is always the same: children should not be exposed to X because it will hurt them in some way.

And the more I see and hear of this, the more I wonder: Does anyone ever ask the kids what they think? Not often, I suspect. Yet the vast majority of children I’ve talked to seem to me to be much more sensible and aware than most adults give them credit for. They’re quite capable of spotting and avoiding books that bother them. They know a lot more, at pretty much every age, than most adults think they do, and they don’t automatically absorb and agree with things just because someone wrote about it.

Nevertheless, protecting children is an adult’s business. Unfortunately, protection is not a one-size-fits-all thing. The book that gives one child nightmares may be exactly what another child needs to read to help him/her cope with a difficult situation. The real decision is not “Should we protect all children from nightmares by removing this book from places they can easily find it?” but “Do we take the chance that one child will be hurt directly by leaving on the shelves a book that will give her nightmares, or do we remove the book and take the chance that another child will be hurt indirectly because he has been denied access to something that would have helped him?”

People who want books pulled off school library shelves are trying to protect all children, without recognizing that different kids have different needs and without trusting young people to stop reading books that are too much for them. They come down hard on the side of preventing direct harm (as they see it), rather than preventing indirect harm. Yet it’s a lot easier to teach children not to put a hand on the stove because it will burn them (immediate, direct harm) than to convince them that eating greasy hamburgers from the take-away place is bad for them (long-term, indirect harm) – at least, my siblings and I begged for the take-out hamburgers for years and years, despite our parents’ explanations, while I don’t recall any of us ever defying them over the stove.

Adults, as a group, don’t really trust anyone under twenty-one to make good decisions or good choices. But while it is obviously true that the younger the child, the less life experience they have from which to draw conclusions, I don’t think that young people do any worse, as a group, than adults when it comes to a lot of the decisions they have to make. I also think the old saw about the way you avoid making mistakes is through experience, and the way you gain experience is by making mistakes. And frankly, making a mistake about what kind of book to read is a lot safer than some of the, um, experience I remember gaining along the way.

Lines do have to be drawn sometimes, but I think that decisions about what is appropriate for all children (as opposed to a particular parent’s individual child) need to be made with great care and consideration, and probably with the default being to let a particular book stay on the shelves. Because I think that children can be trusted considerably farther than many adults think when it comes to avoiding – or, like my friend’s son, just not seeing – material in books and stories that are harmful to them.

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

Gaming for Writers, or Writing for Gamers

September 21, 2011 – 6:15 am

I’ve been doing role-playing games off and on since the mid-1970s, when I was first introduced to the concept of D&D style tabletop games. The group I gamed with wasn’t big on number-crunching and stats; we were more about the improvised story-telling. At least five of us ended up inventing and running our own gaming worlds; of those five, four eventually wrote and sold novels, and three of those four have had significant careers in writing and are still going strong.

Which is not to say that there’s a cause-and-effect relationship between running/playing RPGs and success in writing. Far from it – I’ve seen far too many hopeful gamers who think that what made for a wonderful adventure in their game will make an equally wonderful novel if they just write it up. It doesn’t work that way; the things that make for a wonderful and memorable game are just not the same as the things that make for a wonderful and memorable novel. There’s some overlap, but unfortunately not enough.

I will say, however, that I think that running my own invented-from-the-ground-up game did a lot for my writing. Not in any of the obvious ways that people like to leap to conclusions about – I’ve never used a storyline from any of the games I ran, for instance. But trying to make up a background and rules, and then watching my players twist it all to their advantage (and then desperately trying to twist it back) gave me a sense of the possibilities and alternatives that even the simplest decision could set in motion. And trying to keep on top of the player characters during a marathon session was really good practice for staying on top of the rickety heap of branching plotlines that tend to develop when I’m in the early stages of story construction.

But the thing that I personally found most useful about being gamesmistress (GM) was running all the non-player-characters. I thought of it as a bit like improvisational acting, with me having to do a varying number of sufficiently-different characters every session, depending on whether my players were in town dealing with local politics (lots of different non-player-characters [NPCs], each of whom had to have a different personality and agenda even if the players only talked to him/her for five or ten minutes out of a three-hour session), or chasing down an enchanted sword in the ruins far from civilization (usual NPCs limited to evil critters whose dialog and personalities could be summed up as “Aaaargh! Die!”).

When I started writing, I was lousy at giving characters actual personalities. Plots and twists, fine; characters, not so much. Fortunately for me (and my eventual readers), I started gaming when I was barely halfway through the first draft of Shadow Magic, my first novel. Having to act out different characters (starting with my own player characters in other people’s games) made the second half of the first draft much better in terms of characterization, and the second draft better still.

Years of observation have taught me that this is not so for everyone. I was lucky; the kind of game I was participating in was just what I needed to exercise a particularly weak set of skills, in just the right way for me. I’ve seen other writer-gamers rave about similar growth in other areas – worldbuilding being a prime one. The biggest successes seem to come in places that aren’t the point of the game – in things that support and add to the richness and fun of both the game and the books, but that aren’t actually the main thrust of the adventure.

I think that’s an important piece of why a great gaming episode usually doesn’t make for a terribly good story (not without a whole lot of writing and rewriting, anyway). All of the folks I know who have successfully turned a game into a novel or series of novels haven’t actually turned the game into a novel. They’ve taken their character and some favorite NPCs, the setting and history, some of the political situation, and maybe a few of the plot elements (though often not), and remixed them into a new story.

The other part of why great gaming episodes don’t make good novels has to do with pacing and focus. In a game, the focus is on having fun and leveling up your character, so even a totally irrelevant attack by wolves or bandits is interesting. In a book, those considerations are much less important. Yes, we want to watch the hero improve, but watching is much less fun than being part of the action. What I, as a reader, want is to see the hero move forward toward his plot goal; I don’t really care that much about his imaginary stats.

Similarly, I’ve had great gaming evening where the entire group basically sat around chatting with an interesting NPC. The adventure part didn’t get any farther along, but nobody cared because everyone was enjoying the banter. In a novel, that sort of scene can work IF there’s some heavy-duty characterization development going on, but if it’s nothing but witty banter, it’s going to have to be absolutely brilliant to keep a lot of readers from starting to skim.

To make those scenes work in a novel, they have to be made relevant to something besides fun and player stats, and that usually involves adding a lot of plot or character stuff that didn’t happen in the original game. This generally ends up being a lot more work than you might expect…which is why so few of the hopeful gamers actually produce a saleable story when they try to turn their games into books.

And you can’t trust most of your fellow gamers to be objective about a writeup. At best, most of them will love it simply because they were there, too. At worst, they’ll complain bitterly that you gave their character too little time on stage, that you left out all their clever dialog, and that you’re changing the game by putting in stuff that didn’t happen (which of course is what you have to do to make it work as a story).

Mining a game for writing can work…as long as one understands that it is work, and not a quick and easy road to success.

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

Mailbag #6

September 18, 2011 – 6:15 am

How did you know that you wanted to be a writer?

I didn’t. I never, ever wanted to “be a writer.” I wanted to write. I wanted to tell stories. I wanted to get these blasted characters out of my head and nailed down on paper so I wouldn’t have to keep thinking about them.

Being a writer is something that happened as a result of writing, almost by accident. It was never my goal. My goal was always to finish the current story, and then come up with something even cooler to write about next time. Publishing and making a living were afterthoughts.

At what point in your life did you think you could actually make a living from your writing?

About five and a half books in. That is, I had written and sold five novels, of which two (I think) were somewhere in the production process, and I was partway through the next book, which I was about to send off to my agent to sell. My first book had earned out by then, and I think the second had, too, so I had variable royalty income from those, plus the known amounts I was getting as the second- or third- partial advance payments on the two that were in the production process. This meant I had a pretty good idea what my writing income was likely to be over the next year or two.

At that point, I’d been thinking about quitting my day job for a few years, so I’d been building up a savings account in anticipation. The idea was that I’d have enough cash to get me through a dry period or two, and if it ever dropped below six months’ living expenses, I’d start looking for a new day job (figuring that six months would be long enough to find one). I’ve had to dip into that fund several times over the years, but it’s never gone below the six months line (knock wood).

So if you’re asking when I started thinking about quitting the day job (and planning and preparing to do so), the answer is some time around 1983, roughly two years before I actually quit and went full-time. It didn’t become a serious possibility until I had the income and the bank account in place, which took two years to get fully set up.

When you work with fantasy, how is it different from something like realistic fiction?

I wouldn’t know; I’ve never written anything that wasn’t fantasy. I did try once, but one of the characters turned out to be a wizard in Chapter Two, and I gave up.

Still, I think I can say a little more than that. The basics of writing are the same, regardless of genre: style, viewpoint, dialog, characterization, plot, etc. Sometimes there are genre conventions that are important and that can expand or limit the range of techniques that are available to the writer in that genre, but by and large, effective writing is effective regardless of content.

Worldbuilding and background tend, I think, to be a bit more important in speculative fiction in general than in so-called realistic fiction, simply because one can choose to set realistic fiction in places that the reader is likely to be familiar with already, and which therefore need much less development in the story. That’s about all I can think of, though — and it’s not a hard and fast rule. Lots of realistic-fiction authors set their novels in places that their likely readers will consider exotic (whether that means New Orleans or Tokyo, Los Angeles or Paris, Moscow or Sydney). Part of the point of doing so is to give the readers a chance to image places that are strange to them, which requires just the same sort of in-story background setting as any SF story.

What are some of the criteria you look at when first starting a piece?

Sometimes, there a business considerations that dictate what comes next; for instance, if I’ve signed a contract to write a trilogy, then when I finish the first book, the next piece is going to be Book #2. Or if my agent is trying to re-sell some of my out-of-print backlist, sometimes it is easier if I promise to write a new sequel. Or I need to write something to fulfill the option clause in a contract before I go on to what I really want to write next.

But apart from a couple of multi-book contracts, business considerations haven’t come up terribly often for me, so the main thing I think about when I’m deciding what to write next is, “Is this a story I’m interested in writing?” Since I usually have anywhere from three to twenty possible stories for which the answer to that question is “yes,” the next question is “Is this story insisting on being written now?” If one of them is, then that’s the one that comes next. Usually, there isn’t any one piece on the list that’s at critical mass and/or chomping at the bit to get going, so the next questions are “Which story(s) are almost ready to move forward and/or can be gotten to that point with the least amount of work? Or which one(s) will be the most fun to play with, even if they’re going to be a whole lot of work to get moving?” and “Of the stories that appeal to me and that I think I can get moving, which one(s) does my agent think she can sell most easily in the current market?”

That usually whittles the list down to one or two titles, at most, and if I still can’t decide, I flip a coin.

By pcwrede | Posted in Mailbag, Writing | Tagged , , , | Comments (1)

Teamwork

September 14, 2011 – 6:57 am

When you look at the arts, there are some that clearly, obviously require the talents of multiple people to produce. Movies, for instance, need not only writers but actors, camera operators, prop and costume people, and on and on – last time I went to one, the credits rolled on for nearly five minutes.

At the other end of the scale are things like painting, where one person can theoretically do the whole job themselves (though very few painters today stretch their own canvases or grind their own pigments).

And then there’s writing.

We’ll set aside the problems of production and distribution for now; the Internet is changing that part drastically. But I will point out that for the last century or two, even so-called self-publication didn’t mean you set your own type, printed your own galleys, and bound each copy of your book by hand.

Writing is in many ways a solitary activity; when push comes to shove, it’s just me at the keyboard typing. Even when one is collaborating, you can’t type four-hands the way you can play a piano duet side-by-side at the same piano keyboard. But writers have always talked to each other over tea, over coffee, over beer and wine, from afternoon to the wee hours of the morning, and in letters when they couldn’t get together in person. The Inklings and the Algonquin Club and the Bloomsbury Group were none of them the first of their kind.

Nevertheless, the myth that most non-writers (and far too many writers) believe is that books are an act of singular creativity; they spring from the head of their author in true and pristine condition, and whatever minor changes occur afterwards are mere refinements of the author’s vision. Yes, some people really believe this. A professor of literature at the local university once told a friend of mine rather condescendingly that editors never asked for substantive changes in a manuscript, and therefore they never needed to discuss what changes might have been requested for marketing reasons vs. which were made for artistic ones.

In fact, every editor I have ever had has asked for changes to the manuscript – nothing ever goes straight to copy-edit. Furthermore, most of those changes have not been for marketing reasons (or if they were, the editors were clever enough to come up with good, solid artistic reasons for asking for the changes). I don’t always do everything the editor asks, or do it the way he suggests, if he makes a suggestion. In the current work-in-production, for instance, the editor wanted the opening scenes rearranged in a certain order; unfortunately, this would have required me to change the timing on several key events that were pretty much nailed to the floor, either in previous books or by the weather (settlers did not pick up and move in the middle of winter in Minnesota).

So I did something else, which fixed the pacing-and-tension problems (I hope) without playing hob with timing-and-plausibility, and I got the email yesterday saying they liked it, and we’re good to go to copyedit. The point is, I think the changes were good ones.

And I wasn’t just working on the problems my editor pointed out. My new crit group had a few things to say, too, and while I couldn’t address everything (since, again, some things were nailed down in earlier books), there was still quite a bit to chew over. And that’s not even counting the comments made by a variety of first-readers, long before things ever got to this point, or the discussions with friends about plot points before anything at all was ever written down.

There are also plenty of people whose contributions are more indirect but no less necessary. These are the ones who answer questions about castle construction or the development of guns; who loan out obscure books on British slang in 1811 or the development of railroads; who drag one out to dinner or over to watch a movie just before one’s brain starts racing around and around the squirrel cage.

The books might still happen without all of this support, but they wouldn’t happen nearly as fast and they wouldn’t be nearly as good. It’s an odd sort of teamwork – I’m the one doing the writing and trying to make everything fit coherently, but it would be disingenuous to ignore just how much everyone else is a part of the process. Yet it’s not something you can break down into discrete parts – you can’t say George put the wheels on, Janet did the upholstery, and Gene and Jennifer painted the trim.

I can’t point at a paragraph and say, “Lois wrote that bit,” because she didn’t; I wrote it. Even if I say “Beth or David or Carol gave me that idea” or “I put that bit in for Rosemary or Pamela or Caroline,” it’s never as pure and simple as it sounds. Yes, Lois or Carol or David gave me that idea, sort of, but I worked out how to write it and fit it in, and it changed along the way. Yet it wouldn’t have gone that way if it hadn’t been for that talk we had.

It’s more than just support, but it’s not the kind of influence my English teachers talked about when I was in school. It’s both more collaborative and less; most of these people aren’t trying to write parts of my book, they’re just joining a conversation about it. But that stimulus from outside my head is sort of like binocular vision for ideas – it’s part of what lets me get a clear picture of what the story needs to be. It’s possible to get along without it, just as one can still see even if one is wearing a patch over one eye; but without two points of view, one loses depth perception.

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

Hooking the Reader

September 11, 2011 – 6:25 am

I’ve talked before about the opening of a story and some of the things that can go wrong with the all-drama, all-action, all-the-time “hook.” But it occurs to me that I haven’t talked much about what a hook is, or how to do it right. Hence today’s post.

Openings are important; nobody denies that. In my mother’s collection of writing textbooks from the 1930s and 40s, there are chapters and sections on the importance of the opening, complete with admonitions to hook the reader. But something interesting happened along the way from then until now.

Back in those early how-to-write books, the opening, even of a short story, was considered to be the first manuscript page – basically, 250 to 300 words, comprising several paragraphs and quite a few sentences. Over the years, that shrank from the first page to the first paragraph, and then to the first sentence. “The opening is vitally important” became “The first sentence is vitally important.” Sometime between then and now, the emphasis changed again, until these days you can hardly find a how-to-write book or blog that doesn’t advocate writing a first-sentence “hook” that’s dramatic, dynamic, and full of action.

When you stop to examine it, the assumption behind the “dramatic, dynamic, action-packed hook sentence” advice is that drama and action are The Best Way to grab the reader’s attention. The trouble is that a) there is no The Reader; there are hundreds of thousands of individuals who don’t all like to read exactly the same thing, and b) a dramatic, action-packed opening may be inappropriate for a particular book (one that, say, is chiefly about a quiet romance between a shy scholar and his introverted next-door neighbor).

But even the book about the shy scholar needs a first line. So let’s drop all the how-to advice for a minute and look at what a hook actually is.

A hook is an opening that makes the reader want to keep reading. Sometimes, this can be as much as the first chapter, but these days when people refer to “the hook,” they usually mean the first sentence, first paragraph, or the first couple of sentences/paragraphs (usually if the paragraphs are a series of snappy one-liners).

In order to make the reader want to keep reading, a hook has to do three things: 1) it has to catch the reader’s attention; 2) it has to provide a reason for the reader to keep reading; and 3) it has to do both things in a way that is true to the story, characters, and plot that follow. #3 is not strictly a property of the hook, but of the match-up between it and the story. If your opening sentence is “At full speed, the two trains bore down on each other, racing along the track toward their inevitable fatal crash” and then you reveal some paragraphs later that these are a couple of model trains and the story is a sentimental tale of a small-town Christmas in 1940, you are likely to annoy your readers so much that not only will they skip the rest of this story, they won’t pick up anything with your name on it ever again.

Drama and action tend to be eye-catching, which is why they’re so often advocated as important in a hook, but there are a lot of other things that intrigue people. Gossip, for instance – why else are there all those magazines and papers full of stories about the relationships of people most of us have never even met? Mysteries, large and small – things that seem unexpected or out of place, yet there they are. Striking personalities, whether eccentric or merely emphatic. Sometimes a build-up of details will do it, or a sudden twist of prose.

Hooking the readers isn’t about action. It’s about telling them something interesting, something cool, something exciting. (Years ago, one of my writer friends hung a sign over his computer that said “Now I am going to tell you something cool” to remind himself.) And “exciting” is not synonymous with action. People get excited when their favorite singer releases a new album, as well as when they’re on the first downhill rush of the rollercoaster. Some of us got wildly excited last year when they found the first extrasolar planet in the zone where life-as-we-know-it can exist.

The thing to remember is that even the folks who advocate the in medias res action openings aren’t advocating action because they think action is the only right way to open a story. They’re advocating it because they think that action will catch the reader’s attention and give him/her a reason to keep reading.

Too many writers hear all the emphasis on action, and forget about the reason behind it; they end up with openings describing a car crash or a sword fight that isn’t particularly interesting. They comply with the letter of the directions, but not the spirit.

Part of why they do this is that their heart isn’t in it in the first place. They don’t want to open in the middle of a chase or a laser duel, but they think they have to. And while it is very true that sometimes a story will require the writer to write about things that he, personally, finds uninteresting, one doesn’t want to be doing it in the first sentence. Because it is very, very difficult to take something that you yourself find boring and write it so that readers will find it compelling. In the middle of a book, one can manage it by embedding the boring bits in sections of stuff that one is interested in, but in the first line, there isn’t anything else to surround it with. And unless the writer is very good and very advanced, it’s going to show that he’s not terribly interested in what’s going on in the opening.

If you aren’t excited and intrigued by your first couple of sentences – if what you’re saying in them doesn’t make you want to write more, just to find out what comes next – they aren’t likely to grab your readers, either.

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

Reality Isn’t What It’s Cracked Up To Be

September 7, 2011 – 6:07 am

Writers who set their stories in the real world, whether modern or historical, have a double advantage over those of us who alter reality/history to suit our own ends, or who make up our own versions from whole cloth. The first advantage is that they can look up whatever details they need – architecture, dress, maps, culture – and whatever they find, they don’t have to worry about someone saying it couldn’t possibly be like that. People can argue with their sources, but not with the fact that Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans in 2005.

The other big advantage they have is that they don’t seem to get as many fans asking about obscure worldbuilding points, some of which aren’t even in the story. I’ve never heard of someone coming up to a writer who has written a series of historical novels set in New York City during the American Revolution and asking “So, I’ve been wondering what was happening in Australia while all this was going on.” And if somebody did ask, I know of nobody who would think the writer out of line if he answered, “How should I know? Google is your friend…”

But when you’ve invented a world, readers do this sort of thing all the time. I still remember the fan letter I got from a gentleman who’d read The Seven Towers that went something like this:

“Dear Ms. Wrede: In your book, you mention the Three Greater Obligations and the Twelve Lesser Obligations. I can only find nine Lesser Obligations in the text. What are the other three? Sincerely yours,”

For those of you who haven’t read the book, the greater and lesser obligations were part of the culture of a secondary character, a foreigner who was the only member of his group who ever came onstage during the story (though we heard a lot about them). Since only the one character was actually in the book, I didn’t bother making up the culture in detail; when he brought up the Three Greater Obligations, I knew what they were because they were important to the situation, but when he mentioned the Twelve Lesser Obligations, I figured that was enough to cover anything that was likely to come up in the course of the book, and I didn’t actually need to have a list.

So when I got that fan letter, I didn’t have an answer. Which tends to surprise and annoy the sort of fan who so earnestly asks questions like that. For some reason, they’re positive that I have several sets of virtual encyclopedias, one for each of the imaginary worlds I’ve created, that cover everything anyone could possibly want to know about their history, geography, cultures, magic, and so on.

It doesn’t work that way for most of us. Yes, every so often you get a curve-wrecker like J.R.R. Tolkein who spent forty years inventing everything from languages to poetry for his imaginary world – but those people are nearly always doing it for fun. As a hobby. Because they like making up every possible detail of their imaginary world.

Most working writers don’t have that much time, not when we’re trying to make a living as writers rather than Oxford Dons, and especially not when we’re working with multiple different imaginary places. What we do instead is what I call the soap-bubble technique – we know a small number of key details, the sort that imply a lot of other interesting possibilities, and we scatter them through the story instead of giving them all to the reader at once. Like taking a drop of soapy water and blowing it full of air, this gives the illusion of a sizeable object much larger than the actual material that makes it up. There isn’t anything in the middle but air, but it doesn’t matter because the bubble is so pretty and it doesn’t actually have to last any longer than the story it’s background for.

Furthermore, some of the best and most important details in my books turn out to be things I made up on the fly. The interesting contradiction here is that I need to have put considerable thought into the background before I’m able to do that sort of on-the-fly invention…but most of it doesn’t have to be at the detail level. I need a structure that things have to fit into, so that everything I come up with stays consistent, but I don’t need all twelve of the Lesser Obligations, especially when I don’t plan on mentioning any of them specifically in the text.

Sometimes I do work out unnecessary extras, just for fun. When I was writing The Raven Ring, I worked out the entire fortunetelling deck of cards and their meanings, just because, even though I only needed ten or so cards in the actual text. I had an obscure secret history behind them, too, though none of it ever got into that book. But that was just because I was having fun, not because I had to know all that in order to write the book.

There’s one more factor involved in not-making-things-up besides the time and energy: the problem of being trapped, of needing something to be X in order for the plot to work, but it can’t be X because you’ve already made up Y. Not “you’ve already put Y in the book.” If the background gets too full of specific, interlocking, irrelevant detail, it can cripple one’s ability to suddenly see a completely different possibility…because the new thing isn’t a possibility; that part of the background is already filled in.

It’s a delicate balancing act. Every writer has a different threshold for how much detail is enough, how much is too much, how much has to be done in advance, how much can be made up as needed. Sometimes it changes from book to book. The point is, the threshold can change, because all a fantasy writer really has to worry about is internal consistency. True, most of us set our stories in worlds that have some vague connection with reality – that have horses and rabbits and laws of physics that are mostly like ours (except for the magic part). Where there’s overlap, one does research. But there’s always the possibility of something different – there don’t have to be horses or rabbits or the laws of physics as we know them.

And possibility is, for me, what writing in general and fantasy in particular are all about.

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

Order and outlines

September 4, 2011 – 6:38 am

Back in grade school, when they taught us to write essays, the first step was always “decide on a topic,” and the second one was “make an outline/plan.” Nowadays there’s a lot more focus on creativity, i.e., writing fiction instead of essays. Based on what I’ve seen in school visits and from talking with teachers and kids, though, the process they teach is pretty much the same: Pick an idea, decide on your audience, make a plan.

No writer I know works this way, not even the ones who really do pick audiences and make outlines.

I’ve been thinking about this a bunch lately, because I just finished a book and I’m in the process of booting up the next one. And it occurs to me that the very first thing I do is decide why.

Why covers a lot of things: why write at all, why start another book when I have so much else going on, why pick this book to do next instead of that one. There are a lot of answers, but the one answer that it occurs to me I have never heard from other writers is “to get published.”

Now, possibly this is because publication is a milestone that most of my writer friends have already passed, but I don’t think so. For one thing, selling one story is no guarantee that you’ll sell the next. For another, I don’t hear it from my unpublished writer friends, either. Not if you ask them “Why are you writing that story?” Answers range from “For fun” to “I just have to,” but “To get published” is never what anyone comes up with first. Publication is always tacked on at the end “…and of course, I’d like to get it published one day.”

I mentioned this to Beth-my-walking-buddy and she pointed out that publication is the validation, not the motivation. It’s the thing that says I did a good job, not the reason I’m trying to do the job in the first place.

“Why am I writing this?” is not actually something I think about all that often, but knowing whether I’m writing a story to fulfill the option clause in my contract, to make one of my friends smile, because the idea wouldn’t leave me alone, because I have bills to pay, or because this is a story I am desperately in love with and want to tell, does make a difference. Sometimes more than one thing is true at a time, and it’s easy to forget that wanting to tell the story is really more important to me than paying the bills. And when I forget why I’m writing and what my original vision of the story was (the one that got me excited about it in the first place), I tend to wander off track, and eventually things bog down and get difficult.

The second thing I do when I’m booting up a new book is brainstorming. Sometimes, it’s just tossing ideas around in my head; sometimes, it’s the kind beloved of corporate managers, where I sit down with pen and paper and draw spidery diagrams all over a page; sometimes, it’s focused on one particular aspect of the story. At the moment, I have two of these going: the first is an untidy heap of ideas, everything from scraps of possible dialog to potential characters and backgrounds to plots to “things I would like to see happen” (Max chewing out Jillian, for instance). Some of these will end up in the story, some not.

The other is a focused brainstorm on sevens – that is, lists of seven things (seven deadly sins, seven cardinal virtues, seven chakras, seven colors of the rainbow, seven holy mountains, seven wise men, seven wonders of the world, seven habits of successful people…every kind of seven I can think of or find). This one is because I know that my main character will be facing seven related tasks or tests, and noodling around with all the other sevens people have come up with makes me look at lots more possibilities for how to link my tasks together. I don’t actually plan on using any of the real-life lists as the basis for whatever I come up with; they just sort of get me in the mood, and then I start making my own lists of seven things that might go together the way I want them to.

Eventually, I’ll have enough of this story-stuff heaped up, and I’ll organize it into a plot outline (the third step), and then I’ll buckle down to serious writing. The point is, the outline comes rather far down the process (brainstorming for a whole novel can take a while). Outlining is not even a requirement; it’s just a tool for organizing all that brainstorming that I find useful.

I think that all writers go through this sequence, though few of us break the process down into steps (and some of the steps moosh together, or happen so fast that the writer doesn’t even notice). For those who don’t bother outlining, the organizing and writing happen together; for writers who write to find out what happens next, the brainstorming and the organizing and the writing all happen at the same time; for of the “sit down in front of a blank screen and surprise myself” variety, even the vision of what the story is and could become happens as the words go down on the page one after another. And there’s no particular reason to slow down and try to do the parts of the process one at a time, unless the just-sit-down-and-write thing stops working for a while.

I do think that it’s useful to think about this stuff, because it allows me to notice when I’m trying to do things in the wrong order. If I think of my outline as a necessary first step, instead of as a tool for organizing all the brainstorming, I get extremely frustrated when it doesn’t go well. But really, if I haven’t done the brainstorming, if the story-stuff hasn’t reached critical mass, there’s nothing to organize. And a generic outline (“There are some good guys who have a problem. They start trying to solve it, but they have trouble with some bad guys…”) is pretty useless.

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

Telling details vs. clutter

August 31, 2011 – 6:14 am

Another one of the truisms about writing that you hear a lot is “the power of the telling detail.” And it’s quite true; a single specific detail at exactly the right time can do more to evoke a world or a mood than pages of description, even if we’re talking about really well-written description.

In a sense, the definition of “well-written description” is “a collection of telling details.” But what, exactly, is a telling detail? I’d say it’s something that does double or triple duty; something that points to things beyond itself. Often, it’s the unexpected or unique item or action that, just by existing in that place, at that time, says something or implies a whole lot of other things.

A telling detail grabs your attention. Too many of them, all piled up, become overwhelming. A single Lalique figurine displayed in the center of a marble table can be a dramatic statement; forty figurines covering the whole tabletop looks like a yard sale. The difficulty comes with where one draws the line. A grouping of two figurines may work just as well as the single one; three may be less dramatic but more symmetrical or more graceful; four…well, you get the idea. At some point, things go from “an attractive display of items” to “a mountain of clutter.”

Say I have a character who walks into a bar. I haven’t thought much about the bar, so in my head, they walk into a generic gray mist labeled “bar,” with whatever default bar-stuff in it that my head comes up with: tables, bar stools, a counter, kegs of beer behind.

Now, I can describe all that and maybe even make it interesting, but it’s all generic, default, just the stuff I’d expect to find in a bar (and so would a reader). What I want is the thing that’s different. What’s the one thing in this bar that, if I mention it, every reader who walks into this bar will instantly know they’re in the place I’m talking about?

I could put a collection of antique beer mugs on a shelf over the bar, if they’re strange enough or eye-catching enough. I could try to come up with unique tables or stools. But for this bar, in this story, what presents itself – the thing that instantly attracts my mental attention – is the mosaic depiction of a winery over the fireplace with the starburst of cracks in the corner where the stray bullet hit during a fight last year.

I’d call that cracked mosaic a very telling detail, because it not only what the mosaic looks like; it implies a lot about the bar. It’s the sort of place where fights break out, where someone might pull a gun. It probably used to be more upscale (mosaics are fairly expensive), but it isn’t any more – either the owners can’t afford to fix the bullet hole or they haven’t bothered, and either way, they’re probably not doing a lot of maintenance on the rest of the bar, either.

The mosaic and the bullet hole don’t have anything to do with the plot (at least, not right now, when I’m making them up. Maybe they’ll turn out to be important later on, or maybe not. I don’t have to know whether I’m going to use them later, or why they might be important. All I have to know is that this is something that grabbed my attention, that is a cool detail about this bar…and if I say “From where he stood, he could just make out the starburst of cracks where a bullet had hit the mosaic…” I can let the reader fill in the tables and stools and counter.

Or, I could come up with some more details to expand and modify the impression of the bar: the beer mugs that are lopsided amateur pottery with crooked smiley faces on the side; the giant Elvis-on-black-velvet paintings that are being used as curtains on the back windows; the dusty disco ball that’s off-center in the ceiling; the jazz-rock version of “West Side Story” that’s playing on the Muzak. After a bit, they start to meld into an overall impression of “old, odd, maybe a little tacky, maybe a little rough.” If I go on too long, the impression will change again, to this-writer-talks-to-much-I’m-skippping-straight-to-the-action.

Exactly where the line is depends on the writer, the story, the style the writer has chosen, the reader, and maybe the phase of the moon. There isn’t a clear-cut, unchanging rule for this stuff. It’s like riding a bicycle – you can describe mass and force and momentum with equations, but what you really need is the feel for doing it.

And yes, in order to get that feel, you fall off a lot at first and skin your knees and bang your elbows. But that’s what it takes for most of us to get that sense of balance. Once you have it, you don’t have to think about what you’re doing any more, unless you’re navigating a particularly tricky stretch of road (and even then, it’s not so much thinking about what you’re doing and controlling every aspect as it is about paying attention and concentrating and keeping that feel of balance).

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

Analyzing

August 28, 2011 – 6:14 am

One of the things that professors of literature have been doing ever since they were invented is trying to analyze literature of all kinds. And one of the chief ways of analyzing something is to break it down into small pieces, label them, and then look for the patterns in how they fit together.

Breaking a story apart can be done in various ways. You can talk about structural units: sentence, paragraph, scene, chapter, section. You can talk about the different elements of story: plot, characterization, setting, backstory. You can talk about the different ways of presenting the story: dialog, description, commentary, dramatization, narrative. You can talk about the stages of writing that everyone goes through: thinking, writing, revising, proofreading. You can talk about dramatic or emotional units or structure: rising action, turning point, complication, climax, falling action, resolution. You can take any of the various elements or ways or units or stages and break them down into subcategories: point of view character, major characters, minor characters, walk-ons; types of description (static, active; sight vs. sound vs. smell; objective vs. subjective or filtered).

All these various ways of taking stories apart overlap. Rising action takes place across chapters and scenes full of dialog, plot, description, characters. Characterization happens during scenes, via dramatization, dialog, action and reaction. And the sentences and paragraphs and structure are there for everything – they have to be, they’re how we tell stories.

The terminology we use for analyzing stories isn’t totally standardized, but it’s not totally random, either. This doesn’t matter at all when you’re all alone trying to figure out how to fix your latest book; if you find it useful to define rising action as “any time the main character goes up in a balloon,” that’s fine. If, however, you try to talk about your fiction with other writers, you are likely to have a difficult time if you are using your own idiosyncratic definitions for terms that everyone else thinks they understand. You’d be better off making up a new term – maybe “balloon action”? – because even though you’ll have to explain what it means, the people you’re talking to won’t already have their own ideas about it, and won’t keep getting distracted or mixing up your meaning with the more common usage.

Analyzing stories and taking them apart to find out how they work is something I find fascinating. I’m reasonably good at it, and I learn a lot from it. But there are things I don’t learn, and one of them is what I need to do in my story to make it effective. I can pick up specific techniques for writing dialog or description from looking at the way someone else did it. Sometimes, I can even figure out that Writer X always does Y in a tense scene, or when X is trying to make a particular kind of point about her characters.

None of that tells me whether the same technique will work in my tense scenes, or for my characters. Sometimes I try it and realize that doing Y in this scene doesn’t make it tense; it makes it look as if I’m trying too hard. And when I notice this, I take it out immediately.

And the reason Y doesn’t work in my story often doesn’t have anything to do with the technique or the tension or whether I’m executing it properly. The majority of the time, it has to do with the rest of the story. Because as I said earlier, everything overlaps, everything affects everything else. It’s a lot like cooking; there are some ingredients that you just can’t use in the same dish – or if you do, you have to add them very carefully in a particular order, or they combine in ways you don’t want. If you add the milk to a cream sauce too fast, you get lumps; if you start by melting cheese and then try to add milk and flour and butter, you get a horrible stringy mess instead of a nice, smooth cream sauce, even though the ingredients are the same. (I tried that once in college. “Horrible stringy mess” barely begins to describe it.)

Even following a recipe sometimes doesn’t work, and you don’t know why. I had a miserable failure with a layered vegetable terrine that I made for the last tea we had here. I swear I did everything the same as last time, but the thing didn’t set up properly, and ended up more like a very thick vegetable sauce. We eventually decided that it had something to do with the humidity, but really, that’s just a guess.

Writing is like that, too. Sometimes all the analyzing in the world doesn’t help, and you get vegetable sauce instead of a nice, solid terrine, and you can’t figure out why. Do the best you can; come up with a theory that you hope will help you avoid the problem next time; and then let it go and move on.

And if you already know that you’re the sort of writer who isn’t helped by analyzing things, forget the analyzing part. When you know you want toast, it isn’t really helpful to take the toaster apart and line the pieces up on the counter in neat rows. Heck, sometimes when you want toast, the thing to do is stick a piece of bread on a fork and hold it over a fire, and forget about all these modern gizmos.

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

Narrative Summary

August 24, 2011 – 6:30 am

Narrative summary is possibly the most flexible of the various ways of presenting a story. Narrative summary doesn’t necessarily tie the author down to chronological order, the way dialog and dramatization do, nor does it require a focus on one particular aspect of the story, as description often does. This makes narrative summary at once both one of the most useful tools in a writer’s toolbox, and one of the trickiest.

Basically, narrative summary is just telling some of the story in whatever way seems to make the most sense. It gets used for everything from brief transitions between scenes (“He left the office and went down to the coffee shop.”) to longer summaries of what’s been happening (“The next six months were hard on everyone. Even after George found the whatchamacallit and Celia figured out where it fit into the alien machine, nobody could get it working. They almost ran out of air twice when the electrolysis machine broke. Etc.”).

Infodumps are chunks of narrative summary; so are most historical prologues, appendices, and those plot summaries of what happened in the previous two books of a series that crop up occasionally. Narrative summary can even crop up in dialog, as when the detective is presenting the case against the murderer, or when the guy who’s been missing for a week finally shows up and fills everyone in on where he’s been and what he’s been doing. Bits of narrative summary can be embedded in the middle of dramatized scenes to provide backstory or widen the scope. Traditional fairy tales are almost nothing but narrative summary, with maybe a few lines of dialog.

All these possibilities can make it a little hard to get a handle on narrative summary, and it’s complicated even more by the possibilities for stylistic variation. The style for narrative summary ranges from what’s referred to as plain, simple, or invisible to detailed or even elaborate. “The elders took their places on the dais. Elder Morgan stepped forward and presented Janet’s plan; after much discussion, the villagers voted in favor.” is plain narrative summary; “The elders filed in and seated themselves, one by one, on the dais, their white hair gleaming in the lamplight. Elder Morgan hobbled forward, and in a creaky voice that barely carried to the rear of the hall, read the plan that Janet had cooked up. When he finished, the villagers began talking…and talking…and talking. When the elder finally called for a vote two hours later, three-quarters of the men raised their spears in favor.” is more detailed and colorful, but it’s still narrative summary.

When you have a brief transition or a bit of narrative summary that’s embedded in a dramatized scene, it’s usually (not always) most effective to stick to the plain style of narrative summary. If all you need is a brief transition to get the characters from Time-and-Place A to Time-and-Place B, “He left the office and went down to the coffee shop” will do the job. Within a scene, one generally doesn’t want to bring the action to a screeching halt by suddenly calling attention to a bit of backstory, and a plain style (or one that matches the level of description in the scene, anyway) is likely to be the least noticeable.

The more lengthy the narrative summary section, however, the more interesting and memorable it needs to be in order to hold the reader’s attention. “Interesting and memorable” can come from content or from providing more concrete details and making stronger word choices than one would for a plain/invisible style (and really, trying to write three pages, or even three paragraphs, of narrative summary “invisibly” is just asking for readers to skip over them). Ideally, one would do both.

For example, “Sorry, Robert,” Jane said. She’d been there when Robert murdered Sam, and she wasn’t about to give him reason to make her his second victim” is plain style, but if this is the first we’ve heard about Robert murdering someone or Jane being there, the revelation alone is plenty dramatic enough to be memorable. On the other hand, “She’d been crouched behind the sofa when Robert cut Sam’s throat two years before…” isn’t much longer, but it’s considerably more specific and dramatic. Possibly too dramatic; if I don’t want the murder and Jane’s presence to overshadow what’s going on in the rest of the scene, I’ll stick to the plain version. If I do want this revelation to cast a long shadow, I’ll opt for the second.

The plain-vs.-detail decision also applies when the writer is using narrative summary as a third alternative to the usual “show it or skip it” system that writers are so often encouraged to adopt. “For six months, they worked on the gizmo, to no avail. Finally in April, they…” makes a very fine, plain, simple transition if nothing interesting or story-relevant happens during those six months. There are at least three times when a writer may want a lot more than this single sentence, however: first, when things happen during that six-month period that are interesting and story-relevant, but not quite important enough to show in detail; second, when the writer wants the reader to have more of a sense that six months have actually gone by and the next scene can’t possibly be happening two or three hours after the previous one; and third, when the writer isn’t actually sure whether anything interesting or story-relevant happens in that six months and can’t find out without writing more of a summary than “For six months, they worked on the gizmo.”

That last is, I think, more common than a lot of writers want to admit, and the biggest problem with it is that if one writes the six-month summary and discovers that nothing really interesting or story-relevant happens after all, one has to cut it. Lots of us really, really hate doing that. When one has made up several pages of details, there are nearly always cool bits that the writer loves somewhere in there, and it is extremely hard to be clear-eyed about which of them are really needed in the story and which aren’t. It’s even harder to be ruthless enough to cut the ones that one dearly loves (and spent hours figuring out), even after it’s become obvious that they just don’t belong in this book.

By pcwrede | Posted in Writing | Tagged , , | Comments (22)

Deeper still

August 21, 2011 – 6:54 am

Years ago, before I was ever published, I was at a convention where Gordy Dickson was answering writing questions for a mob of would-be hopefuls. And somebody asked the “how do I write deep characters?” question, and I was kind of disappointed in the answer, because it was all basic stuff I already knew. I wanted something more than that.

In the interest of not making the same mistake, I decided to do a follow on post to the one I did Wednesday on getting depth into your characters. It’s still a two-part problem – first, knowing your characters; second, getting that down on the page. I think that’s part of what makes it so difficult for some writers…and such a difficult question for experienced writers to answer. Because nobody is equally good at both parts, and when someone asks you “How do I…?” you usually don’t know which part of the problem they’re having trouble with, and they can’t tell you because they’ve never thought about it that way.

The other problem is that for a lot of writers, me included, both things happen at more or less the same time. Those who are before or after writers – who make up your characters in depth and in detail in advance, or who finish a first draft and only then go back and add characterization – tend not to have this problem, and occasionally give those of us who do have it funny looks.

But if you are one of those folks who finds out about characters by writing them, you’re basically trying to do both things at once: figure out things about your characters and get them down on the page. This means that, especially in the early parts of a book, you have to constantly be aware (on some level) of exactly what each individual would do (and possibly why) in the particular situation. “What each individual would do” encompasses actions, dialog, reactions, stage business – everything you might be able to say about the character at any given time.

In addition, you also have to be aware of opportunities to tell the reader more/find out more about each character. This is a little different from being aware of what they’d do in a particular situation, because “what would she do here?” is focused on the now of the story, and the characters actions/reactions to the important onstage events. Opportunities are … more general. They’re places where you can slip in a bit of backstory or sidestory or personality, but you don’t really have to.

For instance, say I’m writing a scene with George, Janet, and Cindy, with George as the viewpoint character. The three of them are searching the library for the missing will, when George discovers a bag of crack cocaine hidden behind the encyclopedias.

At this point, I have to decide how everyone is going to react, specifically. In an actual book, I’d know these people to some degree already, so I’d know that George would make a shocked noise and wonder whether he should touch it or tell the two women (since he’s the POV, I can give his thoughts), that Janet wouldn’t even look up from the shelves she’s going through as she says “If you have found something, do articulate it clearly instead of making pig-like grunting noises,” and that Cindy will immediately come over to see what it is, probably knocking something over on her way. In other words, George is a well-meaning, kind of fussy prig, and totally out of his depth; Janet is a bit snarky and doesn’t like George much; and Cindy is a bit of a curious puppy.

Those are the specific actions each of the characters take – physical actions, dialog, emotional reaction for the viewpoint character. They need to reflect what each character is like as an individual coping with whatever is currently happening right in front of them, and they need to be consistent with the way the character has been portrayed in the story so far. When George says “It’s not the will; it’s a bag of drugs,” does Janet drop the book she’s holding, or does she freeze and then set it back on the shelf with careful precision before she comes over? Does Cindy stand there staring wide-eyed, or does she babble questions? Either I already know (because of what I’ve written so far), or I have to think about all the myriad ways each of them could react, and then decide which one is right for the particular character.

In addition, the scene gives me an opportunity to reveal extra stuff about one or more of the characters. Maybe Janet orders everyone not to touch the bag and Cindy grumbles that she watches too many cop shows; maybe George’s second thought, after he gets over the shock, is to wonder whether the cops will let him go in time to feed the dog I didn’t know he had until now. I don’t have to put in anything about Janet’s obsession with cop shows or George’s dog (or is it a cat, or maybe a bird? A cockatiel, perhaps? That’d be interestingly different…).

Neither the cop show obsession nor the cockatiel is, at present, relevant to the main storyline. They don’t even exist yet…but if I put them in here, I will have to deal with them, one way or another, for the rest of the story. They probably won’t matter…but they might develop as the story goes along.

The point is, I really do need to give the actions and reactions to finding the drugs when they search the library, but I don’t particularly need to mention the cockatiel or the cop shows, or have Cindy start babbling about her cousin who pawned his mother’s wedding ring to buy drugs fifteen years ago. The situation gives me a chance to bring them up (or invent them on the fly) if I want to, but that’s all. The situation doesn’t really lend itself to mentioning Janet’s interest in chess, or George’s fly-fishing hobby, or the fact that Cindy volunteers at the local animal shelter; other scenes may provide opportunities to mention those things…or not.

If all I do is to provide each character with an individual voice and unique but characteristic reactions/behaviors, I’ll have characters who are interesting, but perhaps a little flat. If I pick up on every single opportunity that arises to shoehorn in irrelevant-but-interesting background details, the book will almost certainly bog down and perhaps grind to a halt. The trick is to find the right balance, for the characters and for the story, between too much detail and too little.

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

Depth

August 17, 2011 – 6:49 am

Matt G. asked: The burning question for me is character depth. How can you encourage the readers to identify with your characters? How can you add “depth” to characters – so the reader is rooting for them?

This is a fairly difficult question to answer, largely because it’s something that took me a long time to get a handle on. I still do it mainly by instinct, which makes it kind of hard to articulate, but I’ll give it a shot.

The first point is that “depth” doesn’t actually have a lot to do with whether readers identify with or root for a particular character. It’s perfectly possible to get readers rooting for characters they don’t identify with and who have no depth or complexity to speak of – the popularity of certain cartoons, comic books, and pulp novels proves it. It’s perfectly possible for the villain to have enormous complexity and depth…and this often makes for a great story, in spite of the fact that one generally doesn’t want one’s readers identifying with or rooting for the villain.

My second point is that there’s a reason why both Matt and I put scare quotes around “depth” – and that reason is that it’s one of those writing terms that gets thrown around a lot, but that doesn’t have a terribly good definition. Everybody is supposed to know what it means, and accept that it’s highly desirable in fiction. For purposes of this post, I’m going to claim that “depth” in a character means that the particular character has more going on with him/her than just their role in the story - probably a lot more.

All that extra stuff that’s going on can come from a lot of different directions. It can be skills or knowledge; aspects of personality; old mental or physical scars; needs and wants; hobbies; relationships. In a novel, some of it may be crucial to one or more subplots involving the character. Some of it may be background experiences that shaped the character. A lot of it may be stuff that’s irrelevant to the plot and/or that mostly happens offstage.

The point is that real people have a lot going on. They have jobs and hobbies, relatives and former romantic interests; they dropped out of ballet class in ninth grade but still like to watch (or can’t stand going to the ballet because it reminds them); they wanted to be rock stars or firefighters or astronauts when they were nine or thirteen; they get on really well with one sibling but not another (but they’ll be right there when either one is in trouble); they have secret fears and crushes. And all of this is part of them, and affects how they act, react, and interact with the people and places around them.

The writer who wants a character with “depth” thus has two things to do: 1) Figure out or make up what all that extra stuff is, and 2) Get enough of it into the story so that the reader is aware that it’s there.

The vast majority of “how to do characters” books and web sites that I’ve looked at assume that the writer is going to do #1 in advance; that is, that the writer can and should start by filling out a character questionnaire that has everything on it from hair and eye color to location and shape of scars to childhood trauma to name of first pet. Which is all very well, if that works for you, but it never has for me. Filling out those questionnaires (some of them are ten pages!) gives me a large, miscellaneous heap of facts and quirks and odds and ends that never manages to gel into an actual character.

I usually find out about my characters during the writing process, as I write. The group sits down to a meal and suddenly there’s a fight over who gets the last serving of David’s green beans, and suddenly I know that a) David does the cooking, and is good at it, and b) green beans are favorites for both George and Janet, but not Harold (and Sissy likes them but not enough to fight about). And there are writers whose first drafts are really, really thin, who go back during their first rewrite and make the stuff up then. Before, during, or after; it’s your choice when to make up/figure out what else is going on with your characters besides the main plot.

And it doesn’t all have to be worked out at length and in depth. I may never find out how David became such a good cook…or maybe something more will come out in Chapter 17. In fact, one of the things that provides character depth is that some things aren’t ever totally explained; they’re just how the character is. What is important is that whatever is in the story is internally consistent – that David doesn’t make a gourmet meal in Chapter 3, then is unable to tell the difference between an onion and a head of garlic in Chapter 10.

This is the problem, for me, with the questionnaires. The assumption is that as long as you know up front that Jack secretly knits, hates cats, loves Mozart and the Beatles, and has seen every movie made in English before 1939, you’ll remember to use those things in the story when and as the opportunity arises. But if what I have is a big heap o’ facts, rather than an idea of a person, I have to keep looking up all the stuff I decided before I can figure out which bit to use (or not use) in a scene. For some people, though, having all that stuff decided up front and written down frees up their imagination to do more important things about the plot and structure when they get to actually writing the story.

As for getting it into the story – you do it the same way you do any other aspect of characterization: by showing it in what the character says, what she does, what he thinks, what other people think and say about them. It all boils down to thinking about what this particular person would do, say, notice, react to in any given situation, rather than just running down the plot checklist.

And you don’t have to get all the character’s stuff out in the open in the course of the story. Sam’s secret teddy-bear collection may never come up during the course of the slam-bang action-adventure he’s currently involved in, and that’s fine.

Which brings me to a final point: you don’t need to know vast amounts of background information about every character in your novel. The doorman at the hotel whose one line in the book is “May I take your bag, sir?” does not need a ten-page background questionnaire. (If you want to do it for fun or practice, fine, but you’re not going to need to know all that stuff.) The receptionist that the protagonist flirts with three or four times as she’s heading into the office may need a bit more background, but he’s not going to need as much as the protagonist herself, nor the protagonist’s sidekicks. Trying to develop every character who walks onstage in the same depth and detail will just make you crazy.

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

Where are you?

August 14, 2011 – 6:37 am

There’s an analogy that’s been around for a long time – I’ve been using it myself for years – comparing writing a novel to a long-distance road trip, usually at night. The comparison goes, in the car, you can only see as far as the headlights light up, but you only need to see that far at any given moment. You can get from New York all the way to San Francisco without ever seeing the whole road at once; in fact, you can’t see the whole road at once when you’re in the car. You can only see it all at once if you’re in a satellite, which doesn’t do you a lot of good if you’re driving.

It’s the same way with writing; you don’t have to have a detailed plan for the whole book, you just need to know where you’re going and have a clear idea of the next chapter or two. As long as your planning stays a chapter or two ahead, you can get to the end of the book that way.

It occurred to me recently that this analogy makes two really key assumptions that aren’t necessarily the case. First, it assumes you know where you’re going (and that you care where you’re going and whether you get there). A sizeable minority of writers don’t work that way. Their writing “road trip” is more like driving around for a day or two and then looking at their surroundings and going “Hey, we’re close to Denver! Let’s go there.” And it works fine for them…but that brings me to the other key assumption, the one that really matters.

And that’s knowing where you are. If you’re trying to drive to Chicago, and you don’t know whether you’re starting in New York or San Francisco, you don’t know whether to head west or east. If you’re trying to drive to Chicago, and you’re starting in Honolulu or Beijing, you’re going to have a serious problem when you get to the Pacific Ocean. And if you don’t know where you are, you certainly aren’t going to be able to figure out what interesting places might be nearby to visit or even to finish off an open-ended road trip in.

Knowing where you are is something that’s so basic that most of us do it unconsciously, which is why the original analogy doesn’t usually address it, but only looks at where you’re going and how you get there. And most of the time, this works just fine. Every once in a while, though, someone I know gets stuck or runs into trouble because they’re doing the equivalent of trying to cross the Pacific Ocean in a car, or driving east from Chicago in hopes of arriving in Los Angeles in a day or two.

Invariably, when this happens, it takes forever for the writer to sort out what the problem is. Once the person finally takes a look at where they are and what they’re doing, it’s usually a head-banging moment – “Dang! How did I not realize that I need a BOAT?” or “Geez, I’m in Pennsylvania, not Colorado! No wonder this doesn’t look much like the Rocky Mountains.”

What I mean by “where you are” in the writing sense is basic stuff, like what kind of story you’re actually telling, as opposed to the one you may think you’re telling (a friend recently got tied up for months because she was trying to write action-adventure, when the part she’d already written was clearly comedy-of-manners), who the protagonist and villain really are (they may be different from the ones you started off thinking they were), what the real problem is that the protagonist and friends are currently facing, and where facing their problems is likely to lead.

It’s not easy to do this, because it requires backing off from one’s preconceptions about what one has been doing and where one has been heading, and taking a long, hard look at where one actually is. And, sometimes, admitting that one is completely lost, and even the map is no help, because one can’t figure out where to go next to get back on track if one isn’t aware that one is in Pennsylvania and not Colorado.

Crit groups and editors and first readers can make a reasonably good analogy for asking directions at the local gas station, but one still has to listen – and also, one has to remember that the directions aren’t always totally correct. Still, it’s often a lot easier for someone else to see where a book is than it is for a writer to let go of what they thought they were doing…though one does need to remember to ask, and not everyone is good at that part.

It is a great pity that there isn’t a writing equivalent of a GPS system (preferably one that marks out all the road construction and missing bridges up ahead). Until someone invents such a thing, however, we all have to muddle through the hard way.

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

Scenes

August 10, 2011 – 6:43 am

scene: in a drama, a subdivision of an act or of a play not divided into acts….”scene” is also the name given to a “dramatic” method of narration that presents events at roughly the same pace as that at which they are supposed to be occurring, i.e., usually in detail and with substantial use of dialogue. In this sense, the scenic narrative method is contrasted with “summary,” in which the duration of the story’s events is compressed into a brief account.

–The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms

Scenes are one of the fundamental building blocks of narrative fiction – so fundamental, in fact, that almost all of the how-to-write books I looked at in the course of writing this post hardly talked about them at all, any more than they talk about spelling or grammar. The assumption seems to be that if you write at all, you already know what a scene is and how to write it.

The two key characteristics of a scene are place and time. The term originated in the theater, where the definition was basically “continuous action that happens in one place at one time, and when it’s done we have to change the set or at least lower the curtain to let people know that we’ve just skipped a couple of hours.” Characters can come and go during the course of a scene; the focus can change from one person to another; but the place where it happens generally stays the same and the scene itself runs continuously from start to finish.

Note that I didn’t say anything about action. Stuff happens during a scene; people move, talk, punch someone else, whatever. But it’s not the action that makes the scene; the scene is the container for the action. Place and time constrain what can happen. You’re not going to see an army on horseback riding to battle if the scene takes place in Lady Grenville’s drawing room; you’re not going to write a half-hour argument if the scene takes place during a two-minute commercial break while the characters are watching TV.

Not that action is completely unimportant. A so-called scene that simply described several hours of an empty, unchanging drawing room doesn’t make for much of a scene or story in most cases (though Ray Bradbury pulled it off in the magnificent tour de force “There Will Come Soft Rains.”) In most cases, the point of choosing this place and that time interval to show as a scene is that one’s characters are doing something interesting and story-relevant there and then.

Scenes are the “show” part of “show and tell.” “They spent three hours in the library, hunting for the next clue” is a summary, not a scene. “They walked into the library. ‘You take the shelves on the right,’ Sandy told Bob. ‘Dan, you do the ones on the left. I’m going up by the windows, and we’ll meet in the middle.’ Dan nodded. ‘Yell if you find anything,’ he said over his shoulder as he started toward the back corner. ‘Anything at all.’ The other two nodded soberly at his back and went off to begin the hunt.” is a scene (an extremely short one, granted, but this is just a blog post, after all).

Scenes have a beginning, middle, and end, but except for the very last scene in a story or novel, the “end” of a scene is never a complete resolution; it leads onward. The action and events that take place here and now are over, but there’s more going on elsewhere or later on that is or that will be important. That bit of openness at the end of every scene is usually some kind of unanswered question (Will the hero escape from the snake pit? What is Uncle Al doing while all this was going on? Who wrote that letter? Where did the cheese come from? Is she really in love with the lawyer? If the clue isn’t in the library, where is it…or did someone else get to it first? What are the consequences of whatever just happened?), and it is a large part of what ties a novel together and keeps it moving forward.

What all this means is that scenes are where all the basic elements of writing – dialog, description, action, characters, setting, conflict, viewpoint, etc. – come together at once. Sometimes you can strip away some or most of these elements – there are scenes that are pure dialog, for instance – but that doesn’t work as a regular thing. It’s too abstract for most stories except as an occasional teaser (who are the characters behind these two voices, what is the mysterious stuff they’re talking about, and why is it relevant to the rest of the story?).

Juggling all those other elements makes it easy for some writers to lose track of those key scene boundaries, place and time. A scene that was supposed to be a brief, tense dinner-table conversation drags on over dessert and coffee because the characters are still doing and saying things that follow one another and never seem to get to a good stopping spot, though they’re long past the point of being story-relevant. Time – and the scene – just keeps rolling forward until all the characters finally go off to bed. This is why so many beginning writers seem unable to end scenes or chapters unless their viewpoint character falls asleep or is knocked unconscious; they’re being true to life (in which we keep on doing stuff as long as we’re awake) instead of being true to the story (in which most of the stuff the character does – dressing, eating, etc. – doesn’t contribute anything to the story).

Asking “where does this scene start?” and “what is the end?” are important questions. Starting too early or too late, or stopping too early or too late, can throw the scene out of balance even if everything else is working just fine. If the scene is about the tense dinner conversation, it may be tempting to lead into it by starting with someone setting the table, but unless they’re also poisoning the plates or rearranging the seating in a way that’s going to cause trouble later, the table-setting is too early in most cases. The important/interesting action that’s taking place here-and-now is the tense conversation; show that, with maybe a line or two of lead-in to keep things smooth, if you need it, and when the conversation is over, stop and move on to the next scene or transition.

If you’re having trouble with this, try studying some plays. The scenes are all laid out right there in front of you, and since they’re almost nothing but dialog, there isn’t a lot going on to distract you from the structure of the scenes, especially their beginnings and endings.

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

Rules? What Rules?

August 7, 2011 – 6:26 am

Recently, a fan came up to me, enthusiastically waving Thirteenth Child. “This book blew me away!” he said. “It breaks all the rules! How did you do that?”

Naturally, I looked him straight in the eye and said, “What rules?”

What most would-be-writers mean when they’re talking about “breaking the rules” are the absolute pronouncements about style, structure, and content that purport to be guidelines for “good writing.”  There are tons of how-to-write books and web sites and articles with names like “Ten Rules of Writing” (or five, or eight, or twenty – ten is popular, but there’s plenty of variation). Most of them have some kind of authority behind them – a famous or bestselling author, a professor of English Lit or Creative Writing, the leader of a workshop, an editor or agent. They range from pointed restatements of basic English grammar (“Don’t use no double negatives”) to “rules” that are actually just good basic writing advice (“Make the reader care about the main character.”)

A lot are things that people overdo or underdo or get sidetracked by; things that can be misused; things that are really a lot more difficult to do well than they look (and thus things that a lot of beginners can’t manage to pull off); things that have been done so often (and often so badly) that a lot of people (readers and editors both) find them cringe-worthy.

But they aren’t things that you can’t do. “Hard to make work” does not equal “completely impossible, so don’t even try.” They aren’t even things that you shouldn’t ever do; “Often done wrong” does not equal “Your story will automatically be rejected if you even think about trying this.”

Let’s look at a couple. First up: Never write in the first person.

This one cropped up on at least half a dozen web sites, and…excuse me, what? Last I heard, there are still a lot of first-person novels getting published. Possibly it started off as some kind of warning against writing that gets too autobiographical? I don’t know; I don’t understand the point of this one at all. The only real trick to first person is making sure the narrative voice is that of the character’s, not yours; it’s kind of like method acting. Yes, some people have a horribly hard time with it; if you’re one, then by all means stick to third person. But as a general rule, this one makes no sense to me at all.

Next comes Never open a book with weather/dialog/description/the character waking up in the morning/a prologue.

This is actually five different so-called rules that crop up constantly; when you put them all together like this, I have to wonder if there’s any way left to begin a book at all. OK, “It was a dark and stormy night” is supposedly one of the most famous bad opening lines in literature…but a) it’s memorable, and b) it’s considered bad mostly because the sentence goes on for nearly another half-page of heavy-handed description without actually getting anywhere.  Still, I don’t see anything wrong with starting a book in any of those ways if it is the right spot for that particular book. Starting with weather is a bad idea if that particular story really needs to start with dialog or a description of the manor house; opening with a character waking up worked fine for Kafka’s “The Metamorphosis” (of course, the character woke up to discover he’d become a cockroach…).

Recently, the rules lists have added Never use a verb other than “said” to label dialog.

Really. So I’m supposed to throw out dozens of perfectly good English words just because somebody doesn’t like characters who shout, whisper, growl, mumble, etc.? I’ll admit that writers who never use “said” can be tiresome to read, but the same can be said for those who never use anything else. The problem is with the word never, not with said or its near-synonyms.

And then there’s the ever-popular Never use an adverb to modify the verb “said.”

Once again, this is overkill. Yes, a lot of beginners overuse adverbs; all their characters seem always to say things gracefully or sternly or moderately or admiringly or whatever-ly. And yes, usually if the dialog is done right, an adverb isn’t necessary. Usually. A blanket prohibition like this, however, denies the usefulness of lines like: “Why, you rotten, sneaking, low-down bastard,” she said appreciatively. And there are always cases where the dialog is too simple or plain to convey the tone the writer wants (though in a lot of those, I’d usually use one of the near-synonyms for “said” that the last “rule” forbade me to use: “Yes,” he snapped, rather than “Yes,” he said angrily.)

And the equally popular Never use the passive voice, often extended to Never use any of the forms of the verb “to be,” just in case.

I’ve done the rant on passive voice before; basically, it boils down to “sometimes nothing else will do.” “He’s been poisoned!” is passive voice, and it’s more elegant than “Somebody has poisoned him!” Similarly, “The ambassador, having been insulted, left in a huff” is shorter and more elegant than “After somebody insulted him, the ambassador left in a huff” or “The ambassador, whom somebody had insulted, left in a huff.” And the verb “to be” is not only arguably the single most useful verb in the English language, it is an indispensible part of several tenses (the perfect and progressive ones); throwing it out completely and indiscriminately is very much a baby-with-the-bathwater thing.

And then I ran across these two: Never use second person and Never write in omniscient.

Combine those with the “rule” I started with, and once again there’s hardly anything left. OK, second person seems kind of gimmicky to me, but I’ve read one or two things where it worked just fine, so I can’t see forbidding it entirely. I’d class it as “extra-hard to pull off,” rather than “impossible, don’t even try.” Omniscient is what Patrick O’Brian’s popular sea-stories are written in, among other things; again, it strikes me as silly bordering on stupid to forbid an entire technique or viewpoint that actual published writers are clearly using quite successfully.

Finally, there’s the perennial favorite Show, don’t tell, which I’ve seen modified as Never describe or summarize anything; always dramatize it instead.

Which pretty much means that the entire Frontier Magic trilogy is obviously unpublishable and will never sell, along with most memoirs and fiction intended to be similar to them. Oh, wait; memoirs have been hot sellers for several years now, and the second book of the trilogy is just out, in spite of the tremendous amount of “telling” or summarizing I had to do in order to cram several years’ worth of events into each volume.

Speaking for myself, I’d sum it all up as If somebody’s writing “rule” has the word “never” in it, or can be easily rephrased so as to have the word “never” in it, it’s probably safe to ignore, though you might want to think about it in passing just to make sure that whatever you’re doing instead is working.

I think that’s too long to be a writing rule, though. Which suits me just fine.

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

It’s All Material

August 3, 2011 – 6:36 am

A couple of posts back, nct2 asked what Other Helpful Stuff a writer could do – besides writing, taking classes, or learning new skills – to improve their work. I blinked at that a couple of times, because my very first reaction was “Learn to touch-type,” and I wasn’t at all sure that would be helpful (since for all I know, nct2 and all the rest of you can touch-type faster than I can, and have been doing so for years).

But that got me thinking about why that was my first reaction, and I realized that it’s because I get this question a lot from middle-school kids, and “learn to touch-type” is one of the first things I tell them. Which got me thinking some more about what I tell people and why.

See, the very first and absolutely most important thing one needs to do in order to improve one’s writing is the obvious one: to write. Writing is a skill that gets better with practice. nct2 already had that first on the list, and anyway I’ve said that enough, at enough length, that right now I’ll leave it at that.

But there are other things that help, and they can be divided into two basic categories: practical skills (like touch-typing) that make one’s writing life easier, and what I’ll call non-specific research.

Practical skills are the things most people really don’t want to hear about. They’re work to acquire, and most of them don’t obviously and directly affect the quality of one’s work. But in my experience, the lack of them generally has a subtle but profoundly negative effect, at the very least. At worst, not having these skills can become an insurmountable obstacle to one’s career progress, the more insurmountable because it’s frequently unnoticed.

In this category, I’d put things like touch-typing and the fundamentals of English (spelling, grammar, punctuation, syntax, vocabulary). Also things like the correct use of often-confused words like “affect” and “effect” (see paragraph above for example). Karen Elizabeth Gordon’s books, starting with The New Well-Tempered Sentence and The Deluxe Transitive Vampire, are an excellent, non-boring, humorous place to start; Strunk and White’s The Elements of Style has been a perennial necessity (I don’t think I’ve ever met a writer who wasn’t familiar with it; the vast majority of professionals I know own one or more copies, some of which are falling apart from having been re-read so often); and Lynne Truss’s Eats Shoots & Leaves is a nice cranky, humorous, and informative rant on the uses (and modern misuses) of punctuation in general.

I’d also include things like techniques for organizing and filing (piles of research material don’t help if you can’t lay hands on the one bit of it you want, and spending three hours trying to dig up the contract for a book you wrote twenty years ago to see if you still have electronic subrights is just silly. It generally takes me all of thirty seconds to find that sort of paperwork, and that’s because I have to walk across the room to the file cabinet for seldom-used papers. Several of my friends tease me that my house is a mad clutter of papers and books, but my file cabinets are perfectly organized. They’re right.) Basic business knowledge comes in here, too – getting familiar with the kinds of clauses you’re likely to see in a book or short story contract, and what’s reasonable and what’s not. Exercising. Budgeting. All the boring life-maintenance skills.

I put a lot of emphasis on these things because, as I said, most people don’t want to hear it, let alone do any of it, and I have a slim but optimistic hope that if I say it enough times in enough different ways, somebody will listen.

What most people want to know about is the “other stuff.” The stuff that sounds like more fun, the stuff I call “non-specific research.” At the very top of that list is reading.

I have never met a professional writer who wasn’t a voracious, omnivorous reader. Gordy Dickson once spent ten minutes on a panel trying to find a type of book that none of the other writers had read/liked; he finally ended up at “Men’s Boxing Novels,” which he got by with because most of the other writers on the panel hadn’t been alive and reading when that was an actual category of fiction, so we hadn’t even known such things existed. Writers read.

But writers read in two different ways: for fun, and as writers. We’ll read and enjoy a great new book, then go back over it and tear it apart page by page, looking at the techniques the other writer used, the turns of phrase, the structure. Some of us read things we know we’re not going to like, simply because they’re getting a lot of praise or sales and we want to find out why and whether we can use whatever that other writer did right. We read so-called bad books, because a) it’s frequently easier to learn what not to do by studying someone else’s blatant errors than to learn advanced techniques from a brilliant piece of prose, and b) those books are doing something well enough to attract readers (or at least, to make a publisher think they’ll attract readers), and again it’s often easier to spot the one right thing amongst all the wrong ones.

The other big thing one can do is to have a life. If one never does anything but read and write, it’s hard to make the stuff on the page sound real and interesting. Pay attention to your life, whether that means close observation and no more, writing things down in a journal, or taking up photography or painting. Find something you love besides writing, whether that’s playing the flute, water-skiing, or knitting. Do it with other people and get to know them. Go to the religious service of your choice or get involved in local politics or Habitat for Humanity.

Because doing things, especially things involving other people, has a double benefit: you learn about whatever-it-is you’re doing (and that will inevitably creep back into your books, whether you’re doing gourmet cooking or climbing mountains), and you meet different kinds of people, who agree and disagree with you in areas that are not what you’re used to. Which will, if you’re paying attention, stretch your brain in all sorts of ways that are good for writers, especially writers who don’t want to write the exact same types of characters over and over.

Travel can be good, but you can get just as much mental mileage out of approaching your own city as if you were an out-of-town tourist. Go to museums and water parks and concerts and shopping malls and plays and baseball games, even – or especially – if you’ve never gone before and/or dislike (or think you will dislike) whatever-it-is. Take a free class at a local park. Shop the farmer’s market. Learn to fence or knit or rollerblade or folk dance.

Be awake for your life. Pay attention. Do things.

Doing things and keeping a journal about them really helps for some people, but the journal part has never worked well for me, so don’t feel obligated. The important part is the doing things part.

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

Musing on Ebooks

July 31, 2011 – 6:23 am

OK, I had a whole long blog post ready to go about non-traditional publishing, and then I looked at it and realized that I was just saying the same thing again: there are scams, it is a ton of work, you have to educate yourself, check Writer Beware and Editors and Preditors before you commit yourself if you’re going this route, it’s right for some people/books but not for others, etc. If people are really interested, I can put that post up some other time; in the meantime, I’m going to talk a bit about the electronic scene.

I am a little reluctant to do this, which is why I had that other post all set to go. And the reason I’m reluctant is that I don’t actually have a ton of experience with ebooks. Then I looked into some statistics and realized that nobody has a ton of experience with ebooks – at least, not with the current ebook market. Because the current market is less than two years old. If my rough calculations are correct, two years ago, ebooks were less than 1% of the total US book market; last year, estimates were running 15-20% of the total market. And nobody seems to know whether this means people are buying ebooks instead of hardcopy books, or whether they’re buying ebooks in addition to hardcopy books.

Personally, I suspect it’s a bit of both. I adore my iPad, which I’ve had all of six months, but I only have two kinds of books on it: 1) books I already own in hardcopy, but that I want the convenience of being able to read on the road (that would be things like Pride and Prejudice for fun, and The Journals of Lewis and Clark for research), and 2) books that were only ever published electronically, so I couldn’t get them in hardcopy.

This may change at some point. I can foresee a day when I’ll only want my most favorite books in hardcopy, and I’ll get everything else in electronic format. (If I start seriously running out of bookshelf room, that day may come sooner rather than later…a four gigabyte flash drive would hold most of my collection, could I get them all in e-format, and it takes up a lot less space and is only about $10 if I catch the sale at Target with a coupon.) I have no idea whether this is the usual way to use ebook readers, or whether most ebook users went fully electronic as soon as they could and never looked back.

As a professional writer, I’m deeply interested in this cool new method of publishing stuff. For one thing, it represents a possible end run around the traditional publishing system for all sorts of things. Novellas and short story collections have both been hard to sell to traditional publishers; a lot of writers seem to be putting together their own ebook-only versions and taking them direct to Amazon. Similarly, gigantic 300,000-word novels are too fat for traditional publishing; they have to be split into two volumes in order for the binding machinery to be able to handle them, and then they seldom do as well as all-in-one-volume books. For ebooks, length doesn’t matter so much – at least, it doesn’t affect the cost of publication.

I also know a couple of professional U.S. writers who’ve been unable to get British publishers interested in their work; Amazon.uk is perfectly happy to take their ebooks and make them available direct, for a much larger royalty cut than they’d get from a traditional publisher.

I am much less sure how well all this would work for an unknown new writer. There seems to be at least some indication that the book-buying public is skeptical of novels that haven’t been through some sort of publication process involving gatekeeping, editing, and proofreading. A writer who has a following may be able to get people to buy his/her original ebook publications; I suspect it’s a lot harder for unknown newcomers to bypass the usual publication process and make a go of it.

My opinion in this regard was unfortunately confirmed by a quick run through some of the direct-to-Amazon ebooks that are available. A lot of them read like the bottom half of the slush pile – incorrect punctuation, sloppy syntax, incoherent prose, mixed-up word choices. Some of them obviously didn’t even run the spelling checker before they made their deathless prose available to all comers.

There are gems in the pile, but it’s not worth my time to hunt them down – not when I can spend that time browsing more e-editions of traditionally published books than I’ll ever have time to read, all of which have passed some minimum editorial standard, as well as having been professionally edited and proofed. I suspect I am not the only reader to feel this way.

On the other hand, I find myself a lot more willing to take a chance on an electronic freebie or 99-cent publication by an author I don’t know than I am on a $7 paperback that’s going to take up shelf space and be a lot more nuisance to get rid of if I don’t like it. I still want someone to pre-screen things for quality, though, and for now, that means traditional publishers.

What does this mean for writers trying to break into publication? More choices, and not enough information. Nobody really knows how all this is going to affect traditional book publishing, and it’s all changing so fast that today’s predictions may be totally out of date by next Wednesday. So once again, we’re back to figuring out what it is you want, how much and what kind of work you’re willing to do, etc.

If you really want to get in on the ground floor of exciting new technology (and are willing to take the risks that go with that sort of thing), then I’d say now is the time. Ground-floor time doesn’t tend to last very long. Do bear in mind, though, that e-publishing is so new that even the e-publishers don’t necessarily know the best way to publicize and sell original e-books, so you’ll likely be spending a fair amount of time and effort doing publicity even if you get accepted by one of them. If you decide to self-e-publish, the work load will be even greater – you have design and layout, editing and proofing considerations as well as marketing…and your marketing efforts will have that extra resistance to overcome in readers like me who still want the kind of gatekeeping that publishers do.

If, however, you’re interested in doing your own e-book simply because you’re so frustrated with the traditional publishing system…well, it’s not going to be any less work, or any less frustrating, really. The work and the frustration will be coming in different places, that’s all – and if you are the sort of person who can tolerate those frustrations and do that work, but who can’t tolerate the stuff that goes along with traditional publishing, it’s a possible alternative. I wouldn’t, but I’m not a risk-taker and I would purely hate doing all the promotion and marketing stuff. But that’s me. Different strokes, mileage varies, etc.

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

Selling the first one

July 27, 2011 – 6:12 am

The book business has been changing radically every couple of years for the entire time I’ve been in it, but one thing does seem to remain constant: lots of people still want to break in and sell their novels, and a sizeable number of these folks either haven’t got a clue where to start, or don’t believe what the people in the business have been telling them.

For those of you who haven’t got a clue, the basic process of selling a novel is simple but frustrating: you make a list of potential editors/publishers; you check it over, collect names and addresses, and look up each publisher’s submission requirements; you send the first one whatever version of the novel they want to see (portion-and-outline, query letter, or full ms.; hard copy or electronic); and when your manuscript gets rejected, you send it to the next publisher on your list. Over and over and over, until the thing sells.

That’s it. There are no short cuts. There is no trick or secret handshake. There is no password that only someone in the business can tell you. You send it out, and you keep sending it out until it sells.

So why are there a bazillion articles, discussion groups, blog entries, etc. on How To Sell Your First Novel?

Several reasons. For starters, while there is no trick, password, or big secret method, there are mistakes one can make that will likely get a manuscript bounced within nanoseconds, and a fair amount of the wordage is just reminding people not to make them. Most are common sense: don’t fax the publisher your manuscript; don’t send a sweet Romance novel to a publisher that only does hardboiled detective novels; don’t badger editors at conventions or workshops; don’t turn a page upside down somewhere in the middle; don’t bring your manuscript to your brother’s wedding because you heard that one of the bride’s relatives was an editor and you thought you’d get him to read your novel during the reception. (Yes, that is a true story. No, the editor didn’t buy it.)

Then there are the specifics of How You Make Your List of Editors, which are pretty much the same as the ones I just laid out a couple of posts ago for How To Make A List of Agents (look at who publishes the books you like; get addresses and editor names from Literary Marketplace or Writer’s Market; google for their submission requirements; check them at Writer Beware and Preditors and Editors; do not pay an agent, publisher, or editor to look at your book). That can pretty much fill up a post right there, but I’m assuming that all my readers are smart enough to look at what I said about finding an agent and figure out how to apply it to finding an editor/publisher.

Those two things – trying to prevent basic mistakes and walking people through the process of making their initial list of publishers-to-send-the-manuscript-to – make up about 98% of the posts and articles by the actual published authors, actual editors, and actual agents who give advice to beginners. Unfortunately, the other 2% get most of the attention. These are the how-I-beat-the-system posts by people who used some non-standard submission technique and got lucky, and who mostly haven’t been around long enough to realize that they succeeded in spite of, not because of, whatever they tried.

Because while there is no secret method, password, trick, or short cut to selling, there is such a thing as luck. The trouble is, you can’t control luck. It happens when it happens. Also, it comes in two varieties, and there’s never any saying whether you’ll get the good sort or the bad. Luck is not something you want to depend on.

Most people know that intellectually. But it’s really, really hard to keep believing that it’s true when the ms. keeps going out and coming back, over and over. And all the stories about how Gone With the Wind was rejected forty times before it sold, or how Madeleine L’Engle was about to give up on writing completely when A Wrinkle In Time came back from the very last publisher (except it didn’t come back, that last time) – those stories don’t help much with the discouragement and frustration.

So people look for a second opinion. And they get it from those last 2% of published authors…and from all the rest of the on-line posts and articles and especially forums and discussions by people just like them who haven’t sold anything yet, and who therefore don’t actually know anything first-hand.

This is where you find the folks who claim that “it’s all about who you know,” that you must do certain things (sell short stories first, have an agent, attend conventions, go to workshops, hire an editor/book doctor, etc.), that you’re better off doing something else (self-publishing; starting with the small presses; e-publishing; putting it on your web site; doing a lot of social networking and/or other pre-sale publicity, etc.), that analyzing form rejection letters will tell you something useful, that gaming the system works.

Reading this stuff will make you crazy. Because people argue very plausibly, and there is the niggling feeling that getting published can’t possibly be a matter of make list, send it out, send it out again, repeat over and over til sold. There has to be something more you can do to improve your chances. Doesn’t there?

Well, no, there doesn’t. Because what it all boils down to is, whether your manuscript sells or not depends on somebody else’s decision. Somebody you can’t influence, because you probably don’t know them, and even if you did, it’s their job to not be influenced. Breaking your brains trying to figure out something else to do is like breaking them trying to figure out a way to guarantee you’ll have good weather for Saturday’s picnic. It really doesn’t matter what you come up with; the weather will do whatever it does, and you’ll just have wasted a bunch of time.

There are, admittedly, alternatives to traditional publishing. But that gets back to what you actually want…and anyway, it’s another post.

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

The Great Wall of Publishing

July 24, 2011 – 6:06 am

I hadn’t planned on doing more about agents, but all this talk got me thinking.

See, there’s a big difference between how the publishing industry (or anything, really, but I’m talking about publishing today) looks from the outside, compared to what it looks like from the inside. Most people know that, at least intellectually, but too often, nobody stops to really consider what it means.

From the outside, it looks as if there’s this big wall around the Promised Land of Getting Published, and every so often there’s a door in the wall labeled “Editor at work!” In front of the doors, there’s a long row of agents, and in front of them is a vast crowd of eager would-be writers, waving manuscripts and query letters. Every so often, one of the agents takes one of the manuscripts, reads a bit, and then looks up with a discerning nod. She/he waves the Chosen Author forward and escorts him/her to one of the doors, which immediately opens to let the author and agent in. A few minutes later, the agent emerges to start the process all over again.

Obviously, from this perspective, the absolute most important thing is…to get inside the wall. It’s next to impossible to catch even one agent’s attention, and since all of them seem to be doing pretty much the same thing, it doesn’t seem to matter who the writers choose. Heck, it doesn’t seem as if the writers have much of a choice; it’s the agents who are doing the picking and choosing.

The view from the other side of that wall is a little different. For starters, it isn’t a green and pleasant field; no, it’s more like a maze of twisty little passages, all different, all interconnecting, all ending up in slightly different places. When the agent and the author walk through the door and start down a passage, what happens next can be very, very different, depending on things like how much experience the agent has, what sorts of choices the agent makes about navigating the maze, and which place the agent figures they’re going to end up (which may or may not be the same place the writer was envisioning).

And the agent doesn’t just walk the author through the maze to the editor(s) and then bow out. On the contrary, for a first novel, the agent/author pair may make many stops before they find an editor who’s interested. Then the contract negotiations begin, and after that, keeping an eye on payments and production…all with an eye to how this is going to affect the writer’s second book, and third, and so on. And then comes selling the next manuscript, and negotiating, and so on.

Publishing being the slow, lengthy process it is, the agent doesn’t hover at the writer’s elbow every minute. There are weeks and months when she’s busy negotiating and selling and collecting things for other clients, while her new client is writing. But it’s a long-term relationship…and even if you figure you’ll move on to someone else after a few books, you will still be dealing with your original agent on every book that agent represented for you, probably for years, if not forever. (It depends on the contract.)

An agent who is very good at getting a writer through the publishing door, but who is lousy at everything else, is worse than no agent at all. He can do everything that Eager-Would-Be-Writer wanted, back when EWBW was outside the wall – and if that is all that he is good at, EWBW is going to be desperately unhappy, at the very least. At worst, the so-called agent can make it much, much more difficult for the newbie writer to get a career off the ground – not out of malice, maybe not even out of incompetence, but just by automatically steering the newbie writer in a direction that said writer isn’t happy with.

From inside the Great Wall of Publishing, the agent isn’t just a gatekeeper; in fact, being a gatekeeper is probably the smallest and least important thing he does. From inside the Great Wall, agents aren’t all doing the same thing; different agents have different approaches and are good at different things. From inside, an author-agent relationship is something you’re going to be stuck with for years. From inside, it pays to do your homework and be a little choosy, even if it seems to be to your disadvantage in the short run.

Because from inside, it’s all about the long run.

The difficulty is always, always in communicating all this to the Eager Would-Be-Writers on the outside. Because from the outside, all that stuff sounds impossibly far away. The immediate, important problem is still Getting Inside, and it seems like the folks inside just don’t understand. Meanwhile, the folks inside are equally frustrated, because all the EWBWs Just Don’t Listen. (Well, obviously not - they’re being told all this stuff about problems they don’t even have yet; why should they care?)

I don’t know that there’s a solution to this (and if I knew the solution, I could probably make mega-bucks as a successful international mediator). It’s part of how people are wired: getting across the river to the grove of juicy fruit trees is a lot more important right now than worrying about the snakes and scorpions and tigers that won’t be a problem until we’re over on the other side where they are, especially when one can see the river and the fruit, but the snakes and scorpions and tigers are all hiding. But really, planning ahead so that one brings along the insect repellent and the snakebite kit and the elephant gun is a really good thing to do beforehand. Wishing for them after one has been bitten or stung or pounced on is too little, too late.

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

On agents, part the second

July 20, 2011 – 6:12 am

So you have your FINISHED novel-length manuscript, and you’ve done some thinking about what you’d like your agent to do for you in addition to submissions, negotiations, and collecting from your publishers. Now it’s time to actually start looking for an agent.

And the first thing you do is, you check around and make a list. If you have writer friends, ask who their agents are, whether they’d recommend their agents, what their agents do for them, and whether they’ve heard of any agents who’re looking for new clients. Check Literary Marketplace to find out who is agenting your favorite authors. Make friends with your local indie bookstore owner (especially if it’s a specialty store specializing in your field) – they often hear a lot of industry gossip, including stuff about agents.

If there’s a writer’s organization in your field, check their web site for information (the Science Fiction Writers of America have a number of excellent articles on the subject of agents and the etiquette of agenting, for instance; some other sites have lists of reputable agents). Some writer’s organizations accept serious-but-as-yet-unpublished writers as affiliates (the RWA and the SCBWI, for instance); the memberships can seem pricey to a cash-strapped beginner, but if you’re in this for the long haul, you’ll probably be joining something eventually anyway, and they can be an invaluable source of inside information. If there’s an active local chapter, you’ll have a place to meet other folks who are actively working in your field, many of them professionals. (Do remember that they are not there just to give you advice and answer questions for you, though. People are a lot more willing to talk to folks who’ve shown up at a few meetings and offered to help with organizing the refreshments than to someone who shows up out of nowhere with a list of fifty important questions that they need answered right now, and never mind that discussion about ebook contracts you were trying to have with someone else.)

The Association of Authors Representatives is another place to check; not only do they have a nice, informative FAQ, but their members are required to subscribe to a code of ethics that they have published on their web site.

Once you have your list of named agents, check them out on Writer Beware and Preditors and Editors to eliminate scam agents and as many other problem types as you can. Google the remaining names.  Agents who are taking new clients often mention this on their web sites; also, in this day and market, you want an agent who is web-savvy enough to at least have their own web site (you’ll want to decide for yourself whether a particular agent is or isn’t putting enough/too much time into maintaining a web presence). You also want to check whether the agents on your list are familiar with the field(s) you’re writing in; if you are trying to write hard action-adventure SF, for instance, you probably don’t want an agent who sells mostly children’s fantasy and paranormal romance. If you can, find out one or two of the agent’s current clients and talk to them; if you can find one of the agent’s ex-clients, talk to them, too. In both cases, try to consider what you’re told objectively, bearing in mind that current clients are likely to be happy and ex-clients are likely to be unhappy and sometimes it’s about personalities and not actually about service.

Yes, this is a lot of work. Yes, this will take a lot of time. Yes, you do all this before you ever write or email an agent. Why? Take another look at #3 under “what you can expect a legitimate agent to do” in the previous post. Your agent is going to be collecting your pay. ALL of your pay, and then sending your share along to you. Do you really want to put that kind of trust in someone you haven’t thoroughly checked out?

So you have a short list of possible agents. Now what?

Ideally, you’ve been sending that novel-length ms. around (or at least querying) while you’ve been doing all this research. Ideally, some editor will have offered to buy your book while you’ve been busy making up your list. Ideally, you had the sense to tell said editor “That sounds really great, but give me a day or two to think” and then immediately called the first agent on your short list to ask if she/he will negotiate this contract with a view to taking you on as a client.

If your life is that ideal, it is very likely that you’ll get an agent to bite within two or three tries. Having an offer on the table is not a guarantee that you will get your first-choice agent; an ethical agent with a completely full client list won’t take on another client even if she really, really would like to, because she doesn’t have the time – and trying to make the time will mean shortchanging not only you, but all her existing clients. But if you’ve done your homework as outlined above, you have several possible agencies to try.

If your life is not ideal…well, the process is pretty much identical to getting an editor: you query the agent, submit the manuscript, and wait; repeat as necessary. The only difference is that the cover letter says “…and I hope you will consider taking me on as a client” instead of “…I hope you will consider publishing my book.”

And just as with editors and publishers, there aren’t any reliable short cuts. If you have a friend who is a published writer, they may be willing to recommend you to their agent, which will probably get you put on top of the agent’s slush pile. It will NOT get you an automatic acceptance; in some cases, it may not even get you to the top of the slush, depending on what the agent thinks of that particular author’s judgment. And if you don’t know the author (and I mean know them really well, not just as a casual acquaintance), don’t ask for a recommendation. I personally find it annoying to have someone I’ve seen twice in the hall at a convention come up and demand a recommendation right now for a book I haven’t even read (and probably don’t have time to read right now even if that sort of approach didn’t automatically make me disinclined to even look at the first page, which it does). I’ve been known to recommend people to my agent, and she’s taken a few of them on, but in most cases I was the one who offered, based on what I’d seen of someone’s work. The one time I recall being asked, it was a) someone I’d known for several years, b) whose work I loved (and she knew it), and c) a general letter of recommendation, not a specific referral to my agent (who, sadly, wasn’t taking clients at the time).

A few last points: even in this day of Internets, most agents live within a short driving distance from New York/Boston (if they’re book agents) or Los Angeles (if they’re screenplay agents). This doesn’t mean you should ignore the perfect person who lives in backwoods Montana, but it does mean you should be a little more careful to ask around before you sign on with such a person, to make sure they are legit and have the experience they need to run an literary agency at a distance from their primary customers. If you can arrange to meet with a prospective agent at a convention or some other place you’re going to be, by all means do so; if not, a phone call once you’re at the negotiation stage is definitely indicated. A lot of writer/agent agreements fall apart because of personality clashes that might have been dodged if the two people involved had actually talked to one another for a few minutes before entering an agreement.

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

On agents, Part the first

July 17, 2011 – 6:10 am

So Julie D. asked: Could I put in a request for a post about finding the right agent as a first time author, and/or whether self-publishing electronically is a bad idea?

It’s actually two questions, but I’m going to start with the question about agents. Actually, let’s start before agents: Do you have a novel-length manuscript to market? If not, don’t bother trying to attract an agent. Skip reading this post and go finish your book.

If you have nothing to sell, an agent can do nothing for you, and they aren’t going to use up a spot on their client list on the off chance that you’ll someday produce something worth their time. Also, if you are writing short stories, you won’t be able to get an agent to handle them. Period, the end. Even when I was starting off back in the early 1980s, the only writers I knew whose agents handled their short stories were people who’d were still with the same agent they’d had since the 1960s or early 70s…and that was only because they were grandfathered in.

So you have a novel-length manuscript to market and you want, not just an agent, but the right agent. What do you do next?

Well, the very first thing you have to do is decide what you want in an agent and why. This means a) finding out a little about what agents normally do and don’t do for their clients, and b) thinking about why you write, what you want out of your writing, and which of the things you found out about under a) are things you want/need.

B) is something you have to do for yourself; nobody’s list is going to be quite like anyone else’s. (More on that in a minute.) So we begin with a) – what agents normally do.

There are three main things that you can expect a legitimate, reliable agent to do: 1) submit novel-length manuscripts to markets, 2) negotiate contracts on your behalf, and 3) collect your payments from your publisher(s) and send them to you, less the agent’s cut. Your primary agent (or their office) will handle these three things him/herself for the domestic market; for subrights (foreign language translations, movies, merchandising, etc.) the primary agent often uses subagents specializing in those areas.

To the best of my knowledge, current rates as of this writing are 15% for first rights, 25+% for subrights (varying depending on why kind of subrights and what the subagent’s percentage is). In other words, the primary agent takes 15% of whatever the publisher pays you, when the publisher pays you. Under no circumstances do legitimate agents charge a reading fee or ask for an up-front payment (though some agents do ask for expense reimbursement for things like overseas postage, phone calls, and photocopying. These expenses should be minimal – even before email and Skype, I don’t recall ever paying more than about $50 for that in any given year – and they should be clearly itemized). This stuff should all be laid out in the agency contract.

In addition to the three basics (submission, negotiation, collection), agents can and do perform a variety of other functions, depending on their temperament and inclination. Some provide various levels of editing for their clients, ranging from a quick wash-and-brush copyedit to agents who act almost as co-authors or packagers starting from the first glimmer of the developing idea. Some provide in-depth career advice. Some are well-known in the business for their foreign contacts, or for their ties in Hollywood. Some are really good at hand-holding nervous writers (and most of us get nervous at some point in the process). There are also different approaches to managing an author’s career: some agents make it a policy to ask publishers for big advances; others, for retaining the maximum number of subrights; still others, for publicity packages or author promotion opportunities.

Everything mentioned above, beyond the three basics, is optional at the discretion of the agent. I’m emphasizing this because a lot of folks go into their agent-hunt with really unrealistic expectations, which can end up with bad feelings on all sides. Know what you must have, what would be nice to have, and what you absolutely don’t want an agent to do for you, ever.

Finally, there’s the question of ethics. I’m not talking here about the problem of scam agents who are out to soak authors for all they are worth; if you do Part II of the agent hunt right, you’ll discard most of the scammers right off. I’m talking here about the author/agent relationship with publishers. This is, in my opinion, an area where it is vital to have a match between author and agent. Whether it’s the agent who’s willing to push the envelope and the author who’s determined to be a goody-two-shoes, or vice versa, the fact remains:  if you aren’t in agreement with your agent about which moves are ethical and which ones aren’t, you’re probably going to be very unhappy, very quickly.

These extra questions are where b), above, comes in. For instance, speaking for myself, I don’t want my agent editing my work. I don’t expect a lot of career advice, either, certainly not of the “XYZ is hot now; you should drop everything and write that” variety. I do welcome input when I’m trying to decide what to write next (of the “which of these six ideas do you think you can sell right now?” sort). I don’t expect financial advice. I do like a certain amount of reassurance when I’m worried, and especially when I’m late on a deadline. I do want to have the occasional in-depth discussion about what the best next move would be – hold the rights for the backlist and try to resell them, or start marketing them as e-books on our own? Concentrate on increasing foreign translation sales, or put more effort into publicity for initial publication and hope the foreign rights sales follow? And I’m not interested in pushing the boundaries of what I consider fair and reasonable in my business dealings.

Other writers have different lists; you likely will, too. The point is to know what, if anything, you need/want, over and above someone to submit, negotiate, and collect for you. Once you have that, you’re finally ready to start agent-hunting.

At which point I realized that this post is WAY too long for one thing, so part the second will come on Wednesday. I had a lot more to say about this than I thought I did.

Late edit: And I just now realized that I’d accidentally turned off comments and pingbacks on this post. Sorry, folks: unintentional. Though at this point, you might just as well wait and comment on tomorrows second-half post.

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

Now what?

July 13, 2011 – 6:30 am

So the first draft of The Far West is done at last, turned in a bit over two weeks ago, and I’m past the first walking-around-in-a-daze bit where I spend all my time feeling as if I ought to be finishing the book and then remembering that no, I’m actually done until the editorial revision requests arrive. I already know two fairly important things that need fixing (the current climax is a bit of bait-and-switch, and also not nearly as dramatic as it would be if I can rearrange it a bit so as to have my two different Solutions To Big Problems happen in one giant emergency, instead of two; also, the final chapter sort of dribbles off into “…and then we got home,” instead of, you know, actually ending), but those can wait until I’ve recovered a bit, run the draft through my new crit group, and have the editorial requests in hand.

Which means I am now looking at my huge list of Possible Things To Write and contemplating which idea(s) to start poking at. My agent has weighed in, and so have several of my friends; they’re all pretty much in agreement, so unless my publisher gets really demanding about some other possibility (and does so pretty soon, before I’m totally committed to this project), I probably have settled on The Next Thing.

And what it started with was this:

No shit, there I was –

What, you don’t like the opening?  Listen, it’s fairy tales that start “once upon a time.”  War stories are supposed to start “No shit, there I was.”

So, no shit, there I was, thread in one hand, needle in the other, and a silk bolt worth four thousand isiri spread over my lap, when -

Now what?  Oh, you think this doesn’t sound much like a war story?

In the last few weeks of thinking about this rather minimal story-seed, I added a McGuffin (although I have no idea yet why it’s significant), a notion of what happens in the first half of the opening scene, and the barest hint of a plot thread. Oh, and two, count them, two secondary characters, one of whom probably won’t be around for more than two chapters, tops.

This is not much to start writing a novel with.

I could just take what I have and keep writing for a while, to see what happens and what I come up with. I already know, however, that this seldom works well for me, so I’m not going to start by trying that. I need to develop what I have a bit more, until it gets past the Critical Mass point and really starts rolling, and that means poking at what I have until new things show up and start to gel.

The question always is, where and how to poke. Up until last weekend, the obvious point to poke at this story was the characters. The story needs more of them, and I need to know more about the few that I already have (well, about two of them, anyway. I don’t think I really need to know much more about the one who’s disappearing within two or three chapters). And characters and what they want or need (but can’t have…yet) are the heart of most stories.

So I’ve been thinking about these people off and on: who they are, where they come from, what they’re each trying to do and why. I was thinking about the second character, the one who’s not the protagonist but who will be a major player, and why that was happening…and I figured out something about the McGuffin. And suddenly, I had a structure for my plot.

As soon as this happened, where I need to poke at this idea changed. See, structure is fundamental for me. It’s what goes under the plot, to hold it up. What I need to know next, for me to be able to finish that first scene, is what I’m going to build on that structure and why. Once I know that, I’ll know who the rest of the characters have to be and what they’ll have to do. Undoubtedly, that will change the plot – once I have characters and they start acting and interacting, they always end up changing the plot details. That’s what makes it all work, for me.

But the characters and incidents won’t change the structure. That’s solid. I know how many incidents I need, and the effect they have on the McGuffin; now I need to figure out what they are and why the villain set things up this way and how they’re going to affect my characters. (I’m not too worried about how my heroine is going to mess up the villain’s plans; after that opening, I have no doubt she’ll think of something.) Oh, and I need a villain…the structure requires one.

If this were going to be a different book, or if it had started with a different set of bits – say, a well-developed setting and a bunch of characters, but no plot or structure – I’d probably have started by poking at the characters. The point isn’t how I’m doing this, or that anyone else ought to work the same way. The point here is: 1) The basic idea needs a lot more development before I can make much forward progress; 2) The development doesn’t just happen; it requires poking; 3) Where I poke keeps changing, depending on how much I’ve already figured out.

Changing where I poke at ideas is part of the process of developing them. I don’t make up a list of characters, then figure out everything about their backgrounds and personalities and desires before I ever start thinking about plot or setting. I think about a character for a bit, then about the McGuffin for a bit, then about a different character, then maybe about the setting/history/culture.

This morning, in conversation with Beth-my-walking-buddy, I got a handle on the villain, and the whole plot changed. So did one of my two supposedly-known secondary characters. The structure’s still the same, though, and so’s the McGuffin; a little more background, and I’ll be ready to start writing my first totally-wrong outline.

(Julie D, I’ll put up the post on agents on Sunday, when I’ve had a chance to think about it a bit more.)

By pcwrede | Posted in Writing | Tagged , , , | Comments (18)

Support systems

July 10, 2011 – 6:54 am

One of the things 4th Street Fantasy Con did this year was a workshop on writers’ support systems, which I participated in. I did a lot of thinking about the topic, and it occurred to me that most of my blog readers probably weren’t there and could use the information (and besides, it means I have another three days before I have to come up with another blog topic). So here’s the quick summary version of what I had to say.

Everybody needs support systems. There’s simply too much to do for any one person to be able to take care of all of it, all the time. Most of the writers I know think of their support systems in terms of their friends and families, and pretty much take whatever comes, but I think there are more effective ways of looking at it.

First off, there are multiple levels of support systems, and they exist on both professional and non-professional, formal and informal areas. Too many people don’t look at their whole support system, or they look at various pieces of it in isolation; as a result, they don’t get maximum benefit from whatever they’ve put together.

The other thing to remember is that no one piece of any support system is absolutely necessary in all cases. For instance, most authors consider an agent essential, but there are still some who handle their own contracts and negotiations. Nobody I know of does it all, but everyone I know has a different subset of the possible support network. In other words, you have to build your support system according to what you, personally, need other people to help you do.

The most obvious component of a writing support system is the professional one. By this I mean the group of paid professionals who handle various aspects of the writer’s business; editor, agent, accountant, publicist, lawyer, webmaster/tech support, and personal assistant being the obvious possibilities. Some, like the editor, are usually paid by the publisher and can change without notice; others, like the writer’s agent and accountant, are people the writer has to hire for him/herself. Hardly anyone I know has all these people working for them, though nearly all have the first three. One or two have substituted “lawyer + personal expertise” for “agent.” There are noticeably more writers who’ve hired a personal publicist these days than there were when I was starting out, but I don’t think it’s to the point yet where a majority of lead writers have them, let alone the folks who’re still in the midlist.

A key consideration for paid professional support is, of course, how much a writer can afford. Another is what the writer’s personal skills and interests are like. I know several writers who love doing self-promotion (and who are very good at it), but who would never even consider doing their own contract negotiations; I also know writers who would far rather pay a publicist than an agent. It depends on what one is good at.

Paid professionals are obviously part of a writer’s formal support system, but writers often have a lot of unpaid support that I’d call formal but not professional (at least, not professional in quite the same sense). I’d put critique groups in this class; they come in varying degrees of formality, but it is rare (in my experience) for a group to be composed of professional critics, or even teachers. Writers’ organizations like SFWA and the Author’s Guild also go here (yes, they’re made up of professional writers, largely, but the members don’t join in order to write; they join to find out what’s going on in publishing and maybe do some lobbying or put pressure on publishers to give writers a better deal…and most members aren’t professional lobbyists or lawyers), and maybe things like workshops or writer’s retreats.

Then there’s the informal support system, which is what most people think of first when I bring up this subject. These are the friends who volunteer to help figure out what’s wrong with the computer software, who willingly provide in-depth knowledge of Russian sleigh construction or Babylonian history or the development of hieroglyphics, who cat-sit, who drag the writer out on sanity breaks, who offer rides when the writer’s car breaks down, and who listen patiently to endless complaints about insensitive editors and unperceptive readers. These are the family members who take an extra turn making dinner or doing laundry or running household errands when the writer is working against deadline.

But there is also an informal support system composed of one’s fellow writers. This is the classic “networking” beloved of big corporations and career counselors. Among professional writers, it is sometimes very difficult to distinguish from gossip. These are the people you call when you are faced with some professional task you have never done before, like giving a speech or putting on a writing workshop, and you are desperate for someone to tell you what to expect. They’re the people you ask when you get an out-of-the-blue proposal from a publisher or other company you’ve never heard of before, for something your agent won’t handle, and you want to know whether it’s legitimate and/or a good idea. They’re the folks you take out to dinner when you’re having trouble with first-person viewpoint or with the plot twist in Chapter 13, and you need a new-but-well-informed alternate perspective.

The informal support systems, professional or not, generally work on a reciprocal basis: you feed my cats when I’m out of town, and I’ll mow your lawn when you go on vacation next month. You listen to me whinge about viewpoint, and I’ll listen to your complaints about plot. You give me advice about hiring an agent or running a panel at a convention, and I’ll tell you about the nifty new service the library just started or give you a referral to the tax accountant I just found. It isn’t quite that tit-for-tat, of course; sometimes I’ll have to rely very heavily on my informal support without giving much back, while other times I’ll be the one helping everyone else out without much in the way of return. Over the years, it averages out…and if it doesn’t, the folks who take, demand, or expect support without ever giving anything back eventually discover that their informal support system has withered away.

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

Obstacles

July 6, 2011 – 8:17 am

One of the supposed truisms of writing is that a good plot must have conflict. And while this is, in fact, true, I’ve seen it misinterpreted so many times that I thought I’d talk about it a little.

The problem always seems to come in the definition of “conflict.” We hear that word so often on the news that in many people’s minds it seems to have become irretrievably associated with violent physical conflict between two or more people. And since there are a good many folks who don’t want to write about violence or physical conflict, the near-universal insistence on conflict as a part of story can become an insurmountable obstacle.

But as I’ve said before, there are more kinds of conflict than the straightforward physical I-punch/stab/shoot-you, you-punch/stab/shoot-me sort. Emotional conflict is frequently far more powerful, story-wise, than physical conflict; social/political conflict can be just as gripping (and can also be far easier for a reader to identify with, as it’s far more common in most people’s daily lives than being punched, stabbed, or shot at).

More and more, though, I’ve come to believe that the thing some folks can’t wrap their brains around isn’t the definition or the possible types of conflict; it’s the word itself. It just carries too much emotional freight. Also, it is inaccurate.

Stories do not require conflict in order to be effective. What they do require is struggle – steadily increasing effort on the part of the protagonist to overcome one or more obstacles, whether internal or external.

A two-block walk to the grocery store isn’t a struggle for most people, and therefore doesn’t make for a terribly interesting story. Put some obstacles in the way – serious ones that the protagonist is going to have considerable trouble overcoming – and it becomes a lot more interesting.

And that’s where the trouble begins. The first obstacle that occurs to most writers is usually another person – a gang of bullies after the protagonist’s lunch money; a mugger in an alley; a kidnapper; a robber holding the store clerk at gunpoint. If the author is really going for something big, they’ll set the scene in a war zone somewhere, so that the two block walk becomes a matter of dodging bullets, mines, or bombs.

But that two-block walk can be just as dramatic (and perhaps even more powerful) if the obstacle the protagonist faces is not another person. You can make a perfectly good story out of an agoraphobe taking his first trip outside his home in ten years, or from the first post-accident walk by someone trying out her new artificial leg, or even from someone dreading they’ll screw up on their first day at a desperately needed job working at the grocery store.

The key words are obstacle and struggle. An obstacle is something that the protagonist is going to have serious trouble getting past. Again, people are the most common, but there are plenty of others. An animal, a memory, an emotion, extreme weather (such as a hurricane or tornado or blizzard), difficult terrain, physical incapacity…there are plenty of things to choose from.

The second point is that getting past the obstacle has to be difficult for the protagonist. Years ago, my then-husband and I went on vacation to the Canadian Rockies. Our second morning, we were hiking in the backwoods when we reached a rock face of maybe ten feet. My husband climbed it easily; I got stuck halfway and could not make further progress. My husband was five inches taller than I was; the handhold that he could reach to get past that point was a good four inches beyond my absolute farthest ability to stretch. What was barely an obstacle at all for him was an insurmountable block for me.

Which brings me to the next point: the reader has to understand just how difficult the obstacle is for the protagonist, and why. This is, I think, one of the main reasons most people opt for physical violence/conflict as their struggle-of-choice – they don’t have to worry about explaining why it’s hard or dangerous for their protagonist. If I’d left out the next-to-last sentence in the paragraph above, everyone would have gone “Huh?” Because without knowing about the five-inch height differential, there seems to be no reason why I should have gotten stuck when he didn’t. Unless the reader knows that the protagonist is an agoraphobe or a desperate new hire, the walk to the grocery store won’t seem particularly tense to the reader even if the protagonist is flinching at every bush. The story might work anyway – giving people a mystery (“Why is this guy acting so scared?”) can be as good as giving the protagonist an obstacle, if the payoff is right – but the chances are a lot lower.

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

Multitasking mansucripts

July 3, 2011 – 6:20 am

In the two years and a bit that I’ve been producing this blog, I’ve developed a rule of thumb that goes “Any time three people ask me more or less the same question in the same week, it’s probably time to do a post on the topic.” Last weekend, as I said, I was at a convention, so I got lots of material, but this post’s topic came up first and most often.

More specifically, I had a number of people ask “Should I work on one story at a time, or should I work on a bunch of them at once? What do you do?”

Anybody who’s read this blog for more than about a post can probably figure out that my short answer is “You should do what works for you. What works for me is irrelevant.” But the fact that people kept coming up and asking makes me think that more discussion is warranted. (That, or I’m just not convincing when I say “Do what works for you.”)

The longer answer requires consideration of two things: why the writer wants to work on more than one story at a time (or only one), and what the writer needs in order to improve his/her writing. In other words, there still isn’t a one-size-fits-all answer (and is anyone really surprised to hear me say that?), but there are some ways of looking at oneself and one’s work that can aid one in making the initial decision.

First, there’s what the writer wants to do and why. Generally, I meet three kinds of writers who really, really want to be told “Sure, go ahead, start as many projects as you want.” The first kind of writer loves doing the beginning. That’s the fun part; it’s where they get to make up all sorts of cool new stuff, and they don’t have to worry about tying it together. These are the writers who get six to ten chapters in, hit the first big wall, and immediately start a new book. After all, they reason, at least they’re writing something.

The trouble is, these folks clearly know in their hearts that this isn’t working; that’s why they’re asking me this question in the first place. They have seventeen different first-six-chapters scattered around their hard drives…and they’ve never once gotten any further, let alone actually finished something. Why they think I’m going to say “Sure, keep doing that” is beyond me, but that’s evidently what they expect, because they get kind of perturbed when I ask “And is that working for you? No? Then cut it out!”

The second kind of writer who comes to me with this question is the one who is spinning off ideas faster than she/he can keep up with. They want to work on eight projects at once because they’re afraid they’ll lose a brilliant idea if they don’t write it down immediately. They’re all about the “Oooo, shiney!”

This group is a bit harder to sort out, because for some of them, working on multiple projects at once does work. (The definition of “it works” in this context is: these people finish stories on a regular basis, even if they don’t finish absolutely everything they start, and the number of projects they finish keeps growing compared to the number of projects they don’t.) If that sounds like you…then go to your word processor or your “completed works” file and count up how many things you have finished, how many are abandoned, and how many you’re working on right now. If the number of abandoned works is two or more times as many as the number of finished works, you should seriously consider cutting back on your number of projects, because this system may not actually be working quite as well as you think it is.

Those for whom the multiple-project system works well cite the lack of down time as a plus – when they get stuck on one project, they can move on to another while that one is cooking, instead of having to waste days or weeks while they wait for the first project to get un-stuck. This can work well…or it can be distracting. Mileage varies; in this case, one has to be honest with oneself about what is working and what isn’t.

The third group that comes up and asks about this are the ones looking for a second opinion. Somebody told them “You should work on multiple projects! It works great for me!” and they don’t really want to, or else they’ve been told that they shouldn’t ever be working on more than one thing at a time, and they really want to. So first I have to give the “There are no rules except that you have to write and what you write has to work” speech, and then we have to sort out why they don’t want to follow whichever bit of advice they’ve been getting and whether it is or is not a good thing to do for them.

Because the second piece of the decision depends on what the particular, individual writer needs in order to write publishable stuff…and this may very well not be what that writer wants to be doing. As should be obvious from the above discussion, there are quite a few writers who would really like to work on multiple projects, but for whom this is not going to be a particularly fruitful way of proceeding. Also, even writers for whom multiple projects have worked for years and years occasionally find themselves with a book or story that absolutely requires them to focus on it, and only on it. Again, if the hard drive is littered with abandoned starts-of-stories, whatever you’re doing probably isn’t working. Try something else.

And trust your instincts; if you know in your heart that you aren’t being as productive as you’d like, but you keep working the same old way because it’s more fun, then admit it to yourself. You don’t have to do anything about it if you really don’t want to. Honestly, nobody’s making you do any of this.

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

Out of Context (Overheard at 4th Street 2011)

June 29, 2011 – 6:55 am

Rather than do a normal sort of round-up of how wonderful last weekend’s Fourth Street Fantasy con was, I opted to collect an assortment of interesting comments heard and overheard during the course of the weekend. A few were made by panelists on actual panels; some were made at panels by members of the audience; quite a few were simply overheard in the con suite or in the halls. Unlike the semi-official con recorder, I didn’t get attributions for many of them. I have mixed feelings about this: on the one hand, it would have been nice to be able to acknowledge particular people for their wit or the depth of their insights; on the other, pretty much everyone at Fourth Street was being witty, intelligent, and insightful, on and off panels, and I think perhaps the unattributed quotes give more of the flavor of the con.

So here, unattributed and in no particular order, are a few things that caught my attention during the course of the weekend. Should this inspire anyone with interest in next year’s convention, the link is here.

 On to the quotations:

I’ve been artificial for over a year now.

So if the monsters are human, and the humans are monsters, it’s really a definition problem?

In case you haven’t had breakfast yet, there are cheese blintzes in the consuite.

Some of us write by the seat of our pants.

Point of view solves all your problems.

If the author is being obviously sneaky, this is not a plus.

Genre books are built around secrets.

The author borrows the reader’s brain; if he leaves potato chips ground into the carpet, we have a right to be upset.

History will do what it wants, and so will I.

Cows on spaceships? OMG, the methane!

Yeast-risen bread is hard to make when you’re migrating.

Nobody is going to domesticate a wolverine.

Writers like audiences. They pay the bills.

I’m a writer; I don’t know how to retire.

Is this row knitting friendly?

I am not in this position, but I’d sure like to be.

I was trying to see how many genres I could fit into one series.

Writing about one main character is not limiting if that character provides what the author needs artistically.

Readers come at you from such different directions that it is catastrophic to pay attention to them.

If you worry about making your audience angry, you will bore them, and then it’s time to get a job at Walmart.

You can either leave readers wanting more, or leave them wanting less…and if you leave them wanting less, there is retroactive damage to the series.

People in most fantasy novels are strangely healthy with very good teeth.

I am impervious to your eyeballs.

The world is weirder than we thought.

Oh, are those fingers tasty?

A well executed death makes the world seem less messy.

I don’t write fiction. I’m not that brave.

Sometimes you just have to line your characters up against a wall and ask, OK, which one of you guys is screwing things up?

Not all experiments get you a parade in the streets.

Being miserable in a tent is intrinsic to the teen experience.

If you’re not a control freak, you’re not really a writer.

When society is monstrous, monsters become human.

If you want money, become a banker.

You’re not going to run a whole culture on nothing but mushrooms.

Having two publishers is like being a bigamist who doesn’t want to give up either wife.

Humans use magic; monsters are magic.

There is nothing less interesting than a universe in which no one ever grows, no one ever changes, and no one ever dies.

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

What Everybody Knows

June 26, 2011 – 6:29 am

On the very first day at Fourth Street Fantasy convention (which as of this posting, is still in session for another half-day or so), Elizabeth Bear mentioned running into a writing myth I’d never heard myself before: Women can’t ride stallions, because stallions get aggressive around women. Geldings or mares only for female riders, please.

Say, what?   

This particular bit of misinformation is officially categorized as an urban legend. I call it a writing myth as well, because, while it is not a myth about writing, it is typical of a particular class of background misinformation that gets some writers (and occasionally editors) in trouble.

Specifically, the class of things that one is so sure of that one is positive one doesn’t need to check them out. Things “everybody knows,” or things that one learned from some supposed expert or authority figure. So the writer doesn’t check, and the misinformation gets propagated further. If the writer is lucky, the copyeditor will fact-check the assertion and point out the problem. If the writer is unlucky, then either a) the copyeditor will not check, and the writer won’t find out about the mistake until the story is in print, at which point the writer will learn about it from the most obnoxious fan at the convention, at the worst possible time, or b) the writer will have based a key scene or plot point on the misinformation, necessitating rewriting large chunks of the story when the copyeditor catches the mistake.

And then there are the things you find out that are verifiably true, but you can’t use because “everybody knows” something different. When I was writing Mairelon the Magician, I discovered that the use of “pig” as a vulgar slang term for the cops dates back to the 17th century. I thought that was really interesting, but there was no possible way I could use it in a novel set in an alternate 1814 England. After all, “everybody knows” that calling cops “pigs” dates from the 1960s. Similarly, there’s no way I would use the term “gay” to describe something bright and cheerful in a book set in the 1890s, even though that was what the word meant then. The word has been very thoroughly repurposed since then, and it’s too difficult for most modern readers to make the mental shift.

Once in a while, it’s worth the effort to fight to correct a particularly egregious and common “everybody knows,” but most of the time, trying to make it clear within the story that this is neither an accidental mistake nor an ill-informed invention on the writer’s part just throws the whole story out of balance and puts far too much emphasis on a minor bit of information. What this means is that sooner or later, someone is going to come up to you after the story is published and explain that you have gotten things wrong – that the word “telegraph” was not in use until after Samuel Morse invented the electric telegraph in the mid-1840s; that women can’t ride stallions; and so on. Almost invariably, these people inspire a deep desire in the writer to commit violence; equally invariably, there is no point in arguing with them. Experience shows that even if one says “The Oxford English Dictionary has four citations of the use of telegraph in the 1790s,” (sorry; mine’s a paper copy, so I can’t post a link) the person will simply blink and reiterate, “Yes, but there were no telegraphs until the mid-1800s.”

In other words, getting the facts right will not protect you from the terminally misinformed. Every writer I know who’s been around for more than a book or two has run into someone like this, and none of us enjoy the experience. (Even worse are the people who have confused their personal convictions and opinions about the past with historical fact, and who are perfectly ready to go on for hours or pages about their pet topic, whether that is a JFK-assassination-conspiracy theory, what the primary cause of the American Civil War was, or whether Ares and Aphrodite were considered lovers by the Ancient Greeks.

This nearly always prompts someone to say, “Well, if people are going to think it’s wrong anyway, why bother with all that research?” And some writers do adopt this attitude. Me, I’d rather be criticized by people who are provably wrong in their claims (go look at the OED; there really are four cites for “telegraph”, from 1794 to 1798, and a bunch more in the early 1800s) than by the people who actually know what they are talking about. Especially if a plot-point depends on it.

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

Surprise and Suspense

June 22, 2011 – 9:57 am

Alfred Hitchcock gave a famous definition of the difference between surprise and suspense. It boils down to this: If a bunch of guys are playing poker and suddenly a bomb goes off under the table, that’s a surprise. It’s not what the viewer expects. If, however, the viewer knows the bomb is there from the start, and watches the timer ticking down toward zero while the men play on, oblivious, that’s suspense.

The definition assumes a couple of things, not least that the viewer (or reader) actually cares about what happens when the bomb goes off. Note that it doesn’t actually matter much whether the reader cares because the hero is playing poker and the reader doesn’t want him blown up, or because the villain is supposed to be in the game but hasn’t arrived yet and the reader/viewer is hoping that the bomb won’t go off until he gets there.

It’s a great definition, and it illustrates one of the basic techniques for creating tension or suspense: let the reader know more than any one character knows, so that the reader can see trouble coming a long way off. But it’s not quite as simple as that, and trying to apply this technique without some level of understanding often results in false suspense.

For instance, take a slightly different situation: the heroine has discovered a plan to kidnap her son; she calls his cell phone, but there’s no answer. The kid frequently forgets to charge the phone, though, so he might still be fine. She jumps in the car and tears across town to his last known location -

- and halfway there, she gets stopped for ten minutes by one of those hundred-car freight trains going by.

That’s false suspense. The train doesn’t just stop the heroine; it stops the story, because the story doesn’t progress until the heroine gets where she’s going and a) finds her son, b) doesn’t find her son, but finds a clue as to where he’s gone, or c) arrives just in time to foil (or not foil) the kidnap attempt. Yes, waiting for the train makes it more likely that she won’t get there in time, but dragging out the trip for no story-related reason annoys most readers. So you don’t want to do that.

The basic elements of suspense are the same as for any story: a protagonist we care about and something important at stake. What creates the suspense is the reader’s awareness of some reason why the protagonist is very likely to fail. It can be something the protagonist doesn’t know about, like the bomb under the table, or it can be something the protagonist does know about, like his own fear of heights or alcoholism. One can get a tremendous amount of tension and suspense out of a scene in which a former alcoholic, pushed almost to the edge, hesitates in front of the door to a bar, or studies the cocktail tray at a big party.

Usually, a suspenseful scene has some sort of time constraint – the bomb under the poker table wouldn’t be very suspenseful if it was just sitting there, unprimed, with no timer. It doesn’t have to be a short, specific time constraint, either; “…before the plane runs out of fuel” or “…before the virus mutates into its deadly form” work just as well as “…before the bomb goes off at 12:23 p.m.

But time constraints aren’t always necessary; the recovering alcoholic who is resisting that moment of temptation doesn’t have any particular deadline. The lack of deadline is, in fact, part of the point – resisting temptation is something that he’s going to be facing for the rest of his life.

One can also create tension by limiting the amount of information the reader and/or protagonist has, doling out important details with agonizing slowness. The trouble with this technique is that it is very easy to limit the information too much, and end up with mere surprise, rather than suspense. In other words, if you’re going to create suspense by limiting what you tell the reader and only revealing it slowly, the reader needs to know that there are important things you’re not telling him/her. You also have to get the timing right; if the revelations come along at too slow a pace, eventually the reader is likely to give up.

One thing you absolutely do not want to do (except possibly in a totally over-the-top parody piece, and even then I’d advise caution) is a deliberate false-tension fake-out – the sort where the protagonist screams, blood spurts, and after two pages of backstory (his life flashing before his eyes?) the writer reveals that the protagonist has just cut himself shaving. This kind of thing destroys the reader’s trust in the author (apart from obvious parody), and generally leads to instant wall-flinging.

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

Rewriting the past

June 19, 2011 – 6:30 am

“The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there” – L.P. Hartley

 One of the tricky aspects of writing books set in any vaguely recognizable version of history is the inevitable clash between now and then, on pretty much every level. There are an enormous number of things that most people know or believe in the present day – the earth moves around the sun, tomatoes are not an aphrodisiac, flossing is important, recycling is desireable, smoking cigarettes causes cancer - that people did not know or believe at various points in the past.

Any writer who goes poking around even a little way into the past will quickly run into attitudes and beliefs that are very, very different from the ones we hold today. And when the beliefs and attitudes of the past clash with modern values, the writer is immediately faced with a dilemma: Does she portray the past accurately, and take the chance that her central characters will be less likeable and sympathetic (or perhaps that they’ll be actively offensive) because they have attitudes that are consistent with their own time rather than ours? Does she “fix” things by giving at least her main characters more modern, more enlightened attitudes and beliefs that no one in that time period would hold? Or does she just ignore any differences and present what is essentially a modern novel with the characters in funny clothes?

Different writers answer these questions in different ways, depending on what things they think are most important. An example: Some years back, I read a novel set in England around 1810. One of the central characters was clearly a full-blown alcoholic, resulting in a good many difficulties for him and his family (as one might expect). Then, in mid-book, the character hit bottom and essentially invented the entire Alcoholics Anonymous twelve step program (though he didn’t call it that) and then worked his way through it, with support from his family and friends.

To me, this story was problematic to the point of being a wall-flinger, because the twelve step program (and the modern attitude toward drinking, drunkenness, and alcoholism) is an anachronism in 1810, especially in England, and the author clearly did not mean the story as an alternate history of any kind. The author of this particular book, however, obviously felt that portraying alcoholism and recovery accurately (according to the modern understanding of this condition) was much more important than being historically accurate.

Had I been writing this book, I would not have made the same choices. But that’s me, and it wasn’t my story. I’m not saying the author was wrong to make the choice she did; I’m saying that the result was a book that I, personally, didn’t like much, won’t reread, and wouldn’t recommend.

BUT – there are other readers who love the book, some of them for the same reasons that I dislike it. They place a greater importance on having their fiction reflect modern values, understanding, and culture than on having those things be historically accurate. And I am okay with that, so long as those readers (and especially writers) know exactly what they are doing (and don’t try to pretend that those stories are historically accurate when they aren’t).

What I am not okay with are the writers who don’t bother even trying to understand the periods they use as settings. The author I mentioned above obviously knew that there was no Alcoholics Anonymous program in England in 1810; equally obviously, she made a deliberate, conscious choice to have her character come up with the twelve steps so that he could work his way through them and begin to recover, and she put some effort into making her characters’ actions plausible. I didn’t buy it, myself, but at least she didn’t have one of the other characters say “Look, why don’t you come to an AA meeting with me tonight?” in London in 1810.

Unfortunately, there are too many writers who do just that sort of thing. Sometimes it’s a relatively minor and innocent gaffe, like the Victorian-era “historical” that had characters taking showers; sometimes it’s a more fundamental lack of research; sometimes it’s complete and utter cluelessness of the sort that simply cannot imagine a world without cell phones or the Internet. The result, though is that the writer portrays the past as if it was exactly like the present, only with different fashions and horses instead of cars.

That carelessness is where I draw the line between I-don’t-like-it-but-it’s-your-choice and don’t-do-this-just-don’t. Because I agree with George Santayana that “Those who cannot remember the past are doomed to repeat it,” and pretending that the past was exactly like the present is the first step in forgetting the parts that we need to remember. Even (or especially) if they’re parts we don’t like.

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

Where one writes

June 15, 2011 – 6:42 am

Writing is one of the few occupations that aren’t tied to a particular place and time. It’s something that you can do anywhere, any time, if you want to. So I used to find it odd to hear so many writers talk about their desks and offices (and I thought it was especially odd that some writers actually went out and rented office space. Why spend money when you didn’t need to?).

A lot of this bemusement was because I started writing my first (unfinished) novel when I was in 7th grade. Literally in 7th grade – during the class. Sister Mary Louise never quite caught me; it was occasionally obvious that I wasn’t quite paying attention, but she never seemed to figure out why I wasn’t paying attention.

Starting off that way was excellent practice for the writing I did in college – at the library, outside in the arboretum, in the cafeteria, in the dorm elevator, in class, even sometimes in my dorm room with my three roommates talking on the other side of the big room we shared. Which, in turn, was excellent practice for the writing I did when I got out of school and got my first job, which once again was mostly in the company cafeteria, in coffee shops, on the bus (though not often; it was too hard to decipher the results), in restaurants, and, occasionally, on the dining room table in my one-bedroom apartment.

In other words, I started out writing anywhere and everywhere that I could carry a notebook and pen, mostly regardless of other conditions. Okay, I didn’t try to write outside in the rain, or in places where it got cold enough to make my fingers stiff, or in the dark, but basically, I didn’t worry too much about where I was working or what else was going on around me. I’d learned to block it out, so that I could grab writing minutes whenever and wherever they happened to occur.

And then I got a house, and a computer, and set up an office to write in. It worked well for a long time, but gradually, I came to realize some things:

1. Having an office is great, because if you go there every day and write, your backbrain gets used to thinking “Hey, we’re at the computer in the office; must be time to write!” and you start getting more productive after a while.

2. Having an office is terrible, because it trains your backbrain to only write when you’re in your office, so you stop grabbing those minutes at the bus stop or the coffee shop or the dentist’s waiting room, even if you have a cool new iPad that you can take everywhere (with a nifty app that lets you scribble notes right on it) just the way you used to take your paper and pen. Also, your frontbrain starts using “I’m not in the office” as an excuse to not-write. Like you need another excuse.

3. Having an office is really terrible, because the minute you start doing things in it that aren’t writing (like paying bills and answering e-mail and searching the web and playing FreeCell and Civilization), your backbrain decides that maybe it’s not such a great place to write after all, and now you don’t have anywhere that your backbrain likes writing.

4. Fixing points 2 and 3 is really hard. Especially #3. It takes time and energy and application.

Once I realized all that, I figured that despite the fact that time, energy, and application are all in chronically short supply in my life, I had better get busy on fixing things so that I could maybe get back to #1 again. I started off by getting back in the habit of hauling writing implements around with me wherever I go, and using them, even if only for a few seconds. “Writing implements” used to mean paper and pen; now it means iPad or laptop, but it’s the same old principle. The laptop turns out to be a little clunky for grabbing quick minutes – mine’s several years old, and takes long enough to warm up and shut down that if I only have a sentence or so to grab and a minute to grab it with, it’s not the right tool. So my iPad has become my notebook-of-choice for wandering around.

The next thing I did was to start taking advantage of time-chunks that were already built into my day. Three days a week, I go walking with my friend Beth, and afterwards we stop for coffee (tea, in my case). So now I haul the laptop along, and when she goes off to work, I stay in the coffee shop, plug in the laptop, and get an hour or so of work done before I leave. For larger chunks of non-office writing time, the laptop is perfect…plus, I’ve gotten myself in the habit of dumping my writing session onto the flash drive I carry on my keychain before I pack up to leave, which a) makes it easy to transfer to the desktop when I get home and b) means I have my most recent data backed up and with me at all times.

And then I started making new chunks – nipping out to the library in the afternoon, stopping somewhere that has a bench and an electrical outlet on my way home from shopping, etc. All of which got me to stop using the “I can’t write now; I’m not in the office” excuse.

Getting the office back to being a primary writing environment is going to be a lot harder, because the e-mail isn’t going to stop coming, the research and blogging have to be done, and there’s no point in taking Civilization off the computer when I know perfectly well that if I do, I will just put it right back on the minute I get the urge. (My sister borrowed one of my games once…and I went out and bought a second copy because I was in the mood to play and I couldn’t wait for her to return it. I am hopeless.)

So I have to come up with balancing writing in the office with all the other things I have to do there. I’m starting small – when I return from a laptop session at the coffee shop, I’m now in the habit of immediately transferring the files from the flash drive to the main hard drive, and then opening the file to check over what I did. Usually, that means I write a few lines more, which always makes me feel smug and virtuous (because I generally get my day’s word count done at the coffee shop, so those extra lines are gravy).

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

Mailbag #5

June 12, 2011 – 6:09 am

What first inspired you to write?

I hate questions like this because they make so many assumptions about “inspiration.” But since you ask… Probably a combination of my mother, my father, and the family I grew up in.

This tends not to be the answer people are looking for when they ask this question, so let me explain. Both of my parents told me and my siblings stories and read to us, practically from the time we were born. My earliest memories include my father making up bedtime stories that included references to whatever had happened during the day. One of my earliest memories of my mother is of her reading “Little Women” to the three oldest of us when I was about five, to amuse us during a long train trip from Chicago down to New Orleans. And the family – well, basically, the only rooms in the house that did not have fully loaded bookshelves somewhere in them were the porch and the dining room, and in both cases the only reason they had no bookshelves was that there was no wall space on which to put them; both porch and dining room were surrounded by windows and/or double-doors.

In other words, I grew up with stories, with people who told stories, and with people who read stories. I didn’t need “inspiration” to start telling stories, any more than I needed inspiration to eat dinner every night or breathe. I’ve been doing it as long as I can remember. Dad says, even earlier than that. :)

What inspires you the most in the process of writing?

Having bills to pay. No, really.

Writing fiction for a living is a job. If I worked at McDonald’s, nobody would ask how I got inspired to go in to work every day. It’s expected; it’s what you do when you have a job. Same thing if I worked in corporate advertising or copywriting, both of which demand that the job-holder “get ideas” for new ads or copy. And Visa is not going to accept “I’m sorry I can’t pay you this month; I didn’t have any income because I haven’t been inspired for a while” as an excuse.

And while it is true that some days are more productive than other days, the unproductive ones are generally due mainly to lack of energy (I stayed up too late reading/watching TV/knitting/partying; I didn’t eat right the day before; I haven’t been exercising; I’m stressed out about something), not to lack of inspiration. There are, of course, some writers who have slow days on account of lack of inspiration, but in my experience they tend to a) have a creative process that is very different from mine, and from many, if not most, of the other professional writers I know, and b) be the sort of writer for whom ideas really are the problem. Which is kind of a rare thing among professional, write-for-a-living type writers.

Career writers have been saying this and saying this and saying this, since long before I was born, even. I’m not sure why people are still asking.

Do you write morning pages?

The first three times somebody asked me this, I had no idea what they were talking about. Finally someone explained: “morning pages” are an exercise recommended by Julia Cameron in her book The Artist’s Way. Basically, you’re supposed to get up a bit earlier and write three full pages of…well, anything: thoughts, descriptions, reactions, “I hate morning pages” 280 times, whatever, as long as you keep your hand moving to “dump” all the stuff that’s on your mind. And you’re supposed to do this every single day.

I am not very big on “supposed to”s.

I did finally read the book. I’d describe it as a twelve-step program for would-be writers, and for me it was absolutely worthless. I’ve met a few writers who’ve told me that they loved the book, that it changed their lives, and that they do morning pages every day, and it vastly improves their creativity. Me…well, I tried the morning pages thing. I lasted a week, and got no writing other than the morning pages done any day during that time. And I was bored.

So the short answer to this question is “No, I don’t do morning pages.” The slightly longer answer is “No, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t do them if you want.” The medium-long answer is “No; but if you think they’ll help you, go ahead and try them. They might work brilliantly for you, and if they do, you have a useful tool to help your process along. Just don’t be afraid to stop if you’ve given them an honest try and they don’t seem to be working for you…and if they don’t work, remember that you can still be a writer even if you don’t do morning pages. Every tool works for some writers, but not for other writers; if this one works for you, use it; if it doesn’t work for you, nod pleasantly, let it go, and move on to something else.”

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

Barn Door

June 8, 2011 – 6:43 am

Once again, I am late on a book. This time, it’s a combination of things: first off, I didn’t count on how much time handling my Dad’s taxes would take this year; second off, I didn’t count on yet another family crisis involving meeting with lawyers and bankers and what-not cropping up at more or less the same time; and third, I didn’t expect this book to be 30,000 words longer than the last one I turned in.

I am – finally! – within three chapters of the end. (I think it’s only two more chapters, but things often take longer than I expect them to, so I’m allowing myself three just in case.) And I am therefore confidently expecting (absent any additional crises) to have the whole thing done by the end of the week.

Yes, that means I expect to write two to three chapters in four days. No, this is not my usual work speed. So why am I so confident?

Barn door syndrome. Like the horse coming home at the end of a long day, I can see that I’m almost there, and no matter how tired and sick of this book I am, the thought of being done provides all the oomph I need. Also, with only 2-3 chapters left, I have a very clear idea of What Happens Next, and very little time for unexpected twists to mess things up. The next scene will be the Last Big Crisis, followed by whatever immediate clean-up is needed; that should complete the next chapter, or a bit more if handling the Big Crisis takes more space than I think it’s going to. Then I have some character issues to get finally resolved, (half a chapter, or possibly a whole one…characters will keep talking on, even when I really want them to get on with it). Then I can send them all home at last.

I’ve been anticipating this rush-to-the-end for the last ten chapters. I was really hoping it would hit about five chapters ago, but that was before I realized how much I still had to cover in detail and how much space it would take.

Which goes to show that one ought not to depend too much on one’s previous process or productivity levels, as they can and do change without notice. I am already having to tell myself firmly, on an hourly basis, that just because I am currently producing nearly a chapter a day, this does not mean I can blithely assume that I will continue at this rate, and can therefore figure on writing my next book in a month or less (much as I would like to).

On the contrary, experience shows that my daily word-count production is likely to drop way, way back as I fiddle with plot outlines and plans. It’ll spike for a couple of chapters around chapter two or three, then I’ll hit a wall somewhere between chapter 7 and chapter 10. There will be a long, slow slog (punctuated by quicksand and distracting emergencies) until somewhere around chapter 20, where things will start picking up until I once again get within three to five chapters of The End, whereupon the rest of the book will come out in a rush.

The pattern is fairly reliable. The trouble is figuring out how many chapters the book will have (and/or how long the chapters will be, as a shift there can throw off the pattern quite easily). I was expecting this book to be around 25 chapters. I finished chapter 31 this morning, and have, as I said, two or three to go.

You’d think I’d know better than to count on the predictabilty of my process by this time.

By pcwrede | Posted in Writing | Tagged , , | Comments (2)

On Characters

June 5, 2011 – 6:19 am

There are four really, really important things to remember about characters:

  1. Characters are people. (Yes, even if they’re aliens or elves or talking rabbits.)
  2. People, and therefore characters, are all the same.
  3. People, and therefore characters, are all different.
  4. Most important of all: Every person, and therefore every character, is an individual.

Taking these assertions in order: Characters are people because readers are people, and because writers have to work with human languages. I’ve seen the occasional attempt to write a “truly alien alien,” and every one ends up being incomprehensible. Even if one trusts that the writer has actually managed to get his or her brain wrapped around a “true alien,” getting it across to a reader in a story just doesn’t work (except, of course, where the whole point is the utter incomprehensibility of the alien).

Stories start from where we are, and where we are starts with being human. “Truly alien aliens” are interesting and make interesting stories when humans meet them and have to cope with them, but the focus ends up being on the humans. The alien becomes less a character than an intriguing, unsolvable mystery. When the story gets told from a nonhuman point of view, the alien or rabbit or whatever has to have enough overlap with recognizable human wants and needs to be understandable, or there’s no story.

Which segues neatly into point #2: people are the same. This is why we’re still reading the Illiad and Romeo and Juliet and the Ramayana and the Tale of Genji, even though the writers who produced these stories lived in totally different times and cultures from our own: the stories speak to universal human themes and wants and emotions. Everybody hungers, loves, wants, fears, wonders. Every human culture has clear notions of what is right and what is wrong, what is done and what is not done. Exactly what it is that is done or not done, feared, loved, wanted, etc. varies from culture to culture and person to person, but the basic urge is common to us all.

And that variation brings me to point #3: People are different. Different cultures place their highest value on different things: individuality vs. the good of the community, or independence vs. obedience to authority, for instance. What is considered polite varies; what makes for high status varies; which people are held up for admiration or vilification varies. Within a culture, different subgroups are treated differently and thus have different life experiences that make those people think and react differently from people in other subgroups.

Even when nearly everything lines up – background, age, gender, culture – no two people are exactly the same. My sisters and I are very far from having the same wants and fears and so on, even though we grew up in the same family, time, and culture. Even my identical twin cousins, raised in the Alaska bush, are not perfectly interchangeable in their tastes and ways of thinking.

There are writers who get stuck at point #2 – all their characters are the same. Oh, they look a little different, but when it comes to personality and the way they react to things, the way they speak and think, the fact that A is an elf, B is an autistic teenager, and C is a polygamous 200-year-old alien makes about as much difference as the fact that they each have different colored hair.

Oddly, points #2 and #3 are often problems for the same writer, sometimes at almost the same time. A writer considers some group – modern teenagers, women, men, trauma victims, racial or ethnic minorities, rednecks, Christians, pagans, gays – as “too different” to understand, while also being exactly alike within that group. This usually results in the writer avoiding having characters that are, say, rednecks (because they “can’t write rednecks” – i.e., they’re too different), or defaulting to stereotypes (because “all rednecks are like that”) when a particular story forces them to have a redneck (teen, woman, man, minority, etc.) in the story after all.

I think most of these problems happen because these writers lose sight of point #4. They forget that they are not writing about a group of men, a group of rednecks, a group of gays or Christians, a particular minority. They are writing about George and Chuck and Shaku and Mary Lou; Aki and Robin; Marge (never Margie!) and Shawn and Caitlyn. They are writing about individuals who share a common human heritage (or at least, enough human characteristics to interest the reader, even if they’re rabbits) and a variety of unique life experiences that shape their personalities and fears and desires.

“What would a disabled-person/teen/Christian/man/rabbit do in this situation?” is not a relevant question for any writer; the question should be “What would Chuck (or Caitlyn or Aki or Robin) do?” The answer will not be shaped by only one of the groups that person belongs to (Chuck is, perhaps, a Christian as well as a teenager, a soldier, a father … the list could go on, and all of those things will factor into what he does next).

Writers who wish to write realistic characters have to avoid the trap of defining their characters (even the secondary characters) by only one aspect of what they are. They have to remember that characters are people. all the same, all different, all unique individuals with bits that overlap with other characters and bits that don’t.

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Keeping the pipeline full

June 1, 2011 – 6:31 am

Writing is a profession with a very long lead time. For the majority of writers, writing a novel takes somewhere between six months and two years (there are, of course, folks who can do it faster or who require even more time, but they’re outliers). Then you have a wait for editorial revisions, and then it’s usually one to two years before the book is published. And, as I mentioned last post, the advance money is spread out in irregular chunks over all that time.

Essentially, it’s like a long, long pipeline, with the writer standing at one end pouring manuscripts in. No matter how fast you pour, it takes quite a while for the money to start coming out the other end. This can be intensely frustrating, especially at the start of one’s career. One works for years for a payoff that never seems to arrive, or that looks inadequate when it does finally start trickling out.

A lot of people get discouraged during that initial start-up period. It’s hard not to. It takes a long time to fill up the pipe. Eventually, though, money does start arriving.

And that’s where things get even trickier. Because that pipeline is long enough that a lot of the time, there isn’t a lot of correlation between how productive a writer is being and how much money is coming in. As your career builds up, there are occasional bursts of subrights money – which covers everything from foreign editions to audiobooks to movie options and merchandising – as well as money for reselling books that have gone out of print and had their rights reverted (though as ebooks become a larger part of the market, I expect “out of print” will become a quaint notion and rights reversion will get a lot more complex). About half my income in any given year derives from books I wrote more than ten years ago.

So money does not end up being good positive reinforcement for continuing to work hard at producing stories. Which is the next place where a lot of writers get into trouble. Since that pipeline is really long, it is quite easy to let up and coast for a while, because once you have filled up that long pipeline with work, the money will keep coming out for a good long while, even if you stop putting things in at the other end.

The trouble, of course, is that if you stop putting things in, eventually the flow at the other end dries up, too…and then it’s another long, long haul to try to fill the pipeline up again. If I finish the current WIP within the next month, I could sit back and not write another word for two solid years, and I’d still have a new book coming out each year. Three years, if you count the paperback versions. Of course, at the end of that time, I would have at least a three-year drought before any more books came out, because that’s how long it would take to refill the publishing pipeline…and if it takes me a year or two to write and sell a book, that gets added on top, so call it four or five years.

This is why I keep saying that discipline and persistence are the two most important characteristics a writer can have – because it takes discipline and persistence to keep writing when it gets hard, when it doesn’t seem as if you need to (because the far end of the pipeline is spitting out enough money to meet your bills now, and three years from now is a long way off). Also because discipline and persistence are much rarer qualities than the talent that so many want to depend on instead.

Talent doesn’t pay the bills.

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

Cash flow

May 29, 2011 – 9:09 am

Back when I was just out of college, I remember laughing at one of my friends who was complaining about the effects of her promotion on her budget. “Sure, I get more money now,” she said. “But I only get it every two weeks, not every Friday! It’s really hard to remember not to spend it all right away, because it has to last longer!”

I laughed then because as an office worker, I was “staff,” and therefore got my meager paycheck once a month. Nowadays, I would laugh even harder. Because a writer’s income isn’t just a long time coming; it’s unpredictable in ways a lot of people have a really hard time coping with.

You see, there are two kinds of payments you get as a writer: advances and royalties. Advances are a dollar figure that’s set in the contract you sign; royalties are based on your sales numbers (usually 5-6% of cover price for mass market paperbacks and 10% of cover price for hardcovers, sometimes with escalators that raise the percentage if you sell an astronomical number of copies. Royalties on e-books vary all over the place, but they’re usually MUCH higher).

Royalties are paid twice a year, spring and fall (e-books, again, can be different), and you don’t actually collect any until the advance has been “earned out.” In other words, your first royalties go to paying back the advance, and you don’t see any more money until that’s taken care of. Once the advance has earned out, you start getting checks…but you have no idea how large the checks are going to be until you actually get them, because they depend on how many copies your book sold in the six month period the royalty statement covers.

The amount of your advance payment, on the other hand, is fixed in the contract. The payment dates, on the other hand, depend on events and processes that are only partly under the writer’s control. Generally, an advance is paid out in two to four equal parts, the current possibilities I know of being: on signing, on delivery, on publication/release (hardcover), on publication/release (mass market paperback). And it can take up to three months (though that is VERY unusual) for a publisher to actually cut the check when one of those milestones is reached.

To clarify things a bit, here’s an example:  Jane Q. Newwriter has finished her first novel, The Best Thing Since Sliced Bread, and joyfully signs a contract with a publisher for a hefty first-time advance of $10,000 and typical royalty rates. Delighted by her good fortune, she immediately quits her day job, figuring she can live on that $10,000 for quite a while, if she’s careful. A month later, her rent is due, and there’s still no check from the publisher, so she takes an advance on her credit card and complains to her editor. The editor explains that they’re still processing the paperwork.

Another month goes by; Jane is living on her credit cards and starting to rack up the debt. Finally, her copy of the signed contract arrives from her agent, along with a check for $2,125 – barely enough to pay off the debt she’s already got, and nowhere near enough to keep living on. What happened?

Well, Jane’s contract divided the advance up into four payments of $2,500 each, and her agent gets 15% of every check. That $2,125 is Jane’s “on signing” payment, minus her agent’s 15%, and it got paid fairly promptly (Jane’s signed contract has to also be signed by someone at the publishing house, reviewed by legal, and then the check has to be cut. This generally takes six weeks minimum, and as I said, up to three or four months if anybody is on vacation). Jane won’t get her “on delivery” part of the advance until she delivers an acceptable manuscript (and it’ll take another three to six weeks for that check to get cut, too); then she’ll get 1/4 when the book is actually published (one to two years after she delivered it) and the final 1/4 will come when the paperback comes out (generally at least one year after the hardback is published.

So that $10,000 that Jane was counting on to live on for her first year as a full-time writer is actually getting spread out over a minimum of three years, probably longer. Since the book is already finished, she may be able to get the editorial revisions done fast and get her second $2,125 this year, but the “on hardcover publication” chunk isn’t going to come until the book is published, and that will take one to two years after she turns in the finished manuscript. One year after that, when the paperback comes out, she’ll get the final “on mass market paperback” part of the advance. Assuming, of course, that the publisher doesn’t delay publication of either hardcover or paperback for any of half a dozen reasons.

Basically, what I’m saying is that when you’re a writer, you either know exactly how much money you will get (the advance), but not exactly when it will arrive, or you know when it will arrive (the royalties), but not how much they will be. This makes long-term budgeting and cash flow management a critical skill for writers.

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

Big three redux

May 25, 2011 – 6:23 am

I’ve talked more than once about the Big Three – plot, characterization, and setting. They started off as the earliest writing advice I recall getting (and I wish I could remember the name of the writer who told me that, so I could credit him properly), as the three things one can do in a scene. The longer I am in this business, though, the more I realize that the Big Three are a lot more than just elements in a scene.

Specifically, as the basic building blocks of story, the Big Three are the source of a whole lot of problems, flaws, and frustrations for writers. Nearly every writer I know has had problems with one or more of them, at one time or another. Most writers don’t seem to have any problem picking out which one of the three they’re best (or worst) at. Most readers, if you get them thinking even for a short while, will unhesitatingly point to one of the three as being the strong suit of each favorite writer on their bookshelf.

I’d say that for me, my strongest suit is plot. Yes, I put a lot of work into the twists and turns, but it’s fun work; it’s easy; it’s nothing I break my brains over. I don’t find myself avoiding writing a scene because there’s a plot twist coming up that I’m uncertain about, and I have no hesitation at all about letting something come up unexpectedly during the writing process that I know will alter all my plot plans, because I’m confident that I can make it work out, one way or another.

Setting comes second for me. I think I’m good at settings, but they don’t come quite as naturally to me as plots. I put a lot of work in here, too, but I always seem to miss something crucial, and I’m always fighting the low-level fear that I’ve missed something that ought to be obvious, or that I’ve contradicted myself by saying in one spot that dragons are vegetarians and then showing a dragon happily chowing down a cow in another. (Note to self: Cows are not vegetables.) I’m always much too aware of all the research I haven’t done.

Characters are the area I’ve always felt were my weakest point. Yes, really. Some of that is a process thing. With plot and setting, I can make lists of the things that I need to put in (see Fantasy Worldbuilding Questions), and charts of the way things have to go to get to the end. I can draw maps. I can write reams of “history” that will never actually get into the story. Plot and setting, I understand, and if I don’t, I can usually analyze them and figure them out.

But characters are people. I don’t understand real-life people very well, not even the ones I’ve known for fifty-odd years. I feel that I have a better understanding of fictional characters, but it’s all on a gut-level. Making lists doesn’t help. Well, maybe with a character’s personal appearance (brown eyes, black hair, medium height, scar on elbow…). But when it comes to a character’s personality, I’m always working on instinct, and it’s taken me years to get to the point where I have some of the same kind of trust in my character-instinct that I have in my plot- and setting-instincts.

This is not a bad thing, nor a good one; it’s just how my process works. The point here is that I’ve known for a very long time that characterization was my weakest point … and that means that I always have something to work on when I’m up for working at improving my writing. This is not to say that I always put “work on characters” front and center – I found it much easier, especially at the beginning of my career, to start by working at techniques I didn’t know how to use. Like dialog tags and point of view and flashbacks.

But ever since I recognized characters as my main weakness, “work on characterization” has always been at least in the number two working-on-this position. The Seven Towers – work on alternating viewpoints; work on characters. The Harp of Imach Thyssel – work on multiple viewpoints; work on characters. Like that.

I have learned a lot this way, and I am still learning. I recommend it to your attention.

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