Funny Once, Funny Twice, Funny Forever

September 1, 2010 – 6:30 am

Humor has a reputation as one of the hardest and most under-appreciated types of writing there is.

It’s a well-deserved reputation. Everyone over the age of five has at least watched someone else’s funny story fall flat, if not had it happen to themselves. And while you can find plenty of books on writing drama, there’s not much out there about writing comedy (and most of what is there seems to be geared toward writing screenplays for TV sitcoms, rather than dealing with the use of humor in novels and short stories). Every how-to-write book in existence seems to have chapters on plot, characters, dialog, and other basic elements of the writing craft, but in the eight shelves of how-to-write books I have collected in my office, I can easily lay hands on exactly one that has a chapter on writing humor (and a brilliant chapter it is, too - Connie Willis’s fabulous article “Learning to Write Comedy - Why It’s Impossible And How To Do it.”)

Having sent you all to Connies article (you did all go read it, right?), I am going to presume that I don’t need to talk much here about the basic techniques and tools of humor (surprise, language, exaggeration, understatement, divergent or lateral thinking, word play/puns). Maybe in a future post, though really, Connie said it all already. What I want to talk about is something Lois and I were discussing over dinner the other day: why some writing is only funny the first time through, while other pieces remain amusing and enjoyable through many re-reads.

We started off talking about things that aren’t the reason why some things only work once. Surprise, for instance. You’d think that surprise would be a key reason for something not working twice - after all, once you’ve been surprised into a laugh, you know it’s there, and you aren’t going to be surprised the next time you read it. But there are stories (many of them by Terry Pratchett) that I reread eagerly anticipating ”surprise” scenes that I know are coming. They were a surprise the first time, but they’re just as much fun the second time around, though in a slightly different way.

And of course there are also the things that are a matter of taste. Humor can be very individual; the things that one person splits their sides over, another will loathe. I’ve never cared for stupidity humor, or humiliation humor (which is why I’ve never liked I Love Lucy, though people are always praising Lucille Ball’s comedy).

We never did come up with a definitive answer, but I did manage a few observations. For instance, most techniques of humor have a range of applications that run from funny-once to funny-forever. Wordplay, for instance - puns tend to be funny-once (if they are your cup of tea at all); witty banter tends to be good for a lot more read-throughs.

One thing stands out, though. Every example we could think of that we thought was funny-forever had substance underlying the humor. The characters weren’t exaggerated cardboard caricatures stumbling from frying pan into fire; they had depth and goals and principles (sometimes exceedingly quirky and unusual ones, but nevertheless things they clearly believed in). The plots didn’t zig-zag from pillar to post simply to provide another opportunity for a joke; they hung together - in fact, often part of the fun was watching the causality play out as characters made (relatively) reasonable-seeming decisions that dug them deeper and deeper. The settings don’t look as if they were put together at random based on the writer’s latest brainstorm for a new joke and never mind what was said two pages ago; they have a rock-solid internal consistency, even when from outside they look as loopy as Pratchett’s Discworld (a flat world carried through space on the back of four giant elephants who, in turn, are standing on top of an enormous turtle).

In short, the stuff that lasts starts with all the elements of effective storytelling, handles them all with relative success, and then adds the humor like the cherry on top of the ice cream sunday.

No wonder humor has a reputation for being hard to do.

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

Say That Again, Would You?

August 29, 2010 – 10:12 am

Dialog is one of the bedrock necessities in about 99% of all fiction. Plays and screenplays are almost nothing but dialog, and it’s not unusual to see whole scenes or entire short stories that are told entirely in dialog (sometimes, without even speech tags to let the reader know who’s talking). It’s something that seems like it ought to come naturally - after all, everybody talks, right? Yet dialog is a considerable problem for a lot of writers, and a tin ear for dialog has brought more than one would-be novelist to disaster.

The first most important thing to remember about dialog is that it is a model of speech, not a transcription. I’ve talked about that before on this blog, so I won’t repeat myself in detail, but I think it’s worth at least mentioning here.

The second most important thing to remember about dialog is that it is communication between two or more characters. This means that it is almost always made up of short exchanges, back and forth. Unless one of your characters is giving a lecture, like the detective in a classic murder mystery doing his summing-up, you should expect a page of dialog to have paragraphs that are mainly one to three lines long. There’s usually lots of white space as a result; in fact, one of the classic tests for whether the characters’ speeches are running on too long is to print out a page and tape it to the wall, then walk across the room so that you can see the pattern of the paragraphs and how much white space there is on the page. These days, you can get the same effect by reducing the font size:

Description vs. dialog
Description vs. dialog

Above is an example. On the left is a page of descriptive paragraphs; on the right, a page of dialog. Shrinking the font makes it instantly obvious which is which - and you can see immediately if your dialog is bogging down in long speeches, and take steps to break it up.

The second classing trick for checking your dialog is to read it out loud. This lets you know whether it sounds right in general; it also is an easy way to identify tongue-twister phrases that no one would actually ever say.

If you’re having trouble figuring out how to do dialog generally, try reading some plays or screenplays. Out loud, so you are seeing and hearing the words at the same time, and can get a feel for how the words-on-the-page work when spoken aloud and vice versa. If you really want a workout, get hold of the screenplay for any movie that has lots of dialog, read it aloud, and then watch the movie while following along with the script. Even if you’re not having trouble, paying a little extra attention to passages of dialog in your favorite movies and novels will very likely give you some useful ideas.

The next thing to think about is the difference in the speech patterns of your various characters - the way each particular person phrases things, depending on their individual personalities and backgrounds. You can do this either by consciously coming up with speech tics (like having a character who never uses contractions, or who always ends their sentences with “yeah?”), which can be effective in small doses but which gets really annoying to read when every character in a story has one, or you can come up with broader ways of distinguishing your characters’ voices (Shakespeare had all his noblemen speak in unrhymed iambic pentameter, and their servants and more ordinary people just any-which-way. The lyricist for Man of La Mancha gave Don Quixote complex sentences and syntax ["I am I, Don Quixote, the Lord of La Mancha; destroyer of evil am I!"] and his servant short, simple sentences and no words of more than two syllables  ["I'm Sancho! Yes, I'm Sancho! I follow my master to the end!"])

Or, you can just look at different speech patterns in real life.  Take the same sentence of dialog/information, and rephrase it in as many different ways as you can:

“I think you’re making a mistake.”

“That’s wrong, dumbo.”

“I believe, sir, that you are in error in this instance.”

“Um, do you think…I mean, is that really the way you want to do that? Because it doesn’t look quite right to me.”

“That ain’t no way to do that there thing.”

“Kiddo, you got that upside down and backward.”

“I’m afraid that’s not going to work.”

“A guy could have some problems, doing things that way.”

“You’re screwing up again! Honestly, can’t you do anything right?”

…and on, and on. 

I was on my third book before I started trying to do this consciously, and my first few efforts were exaggerated (Telemain in Talking to Dragons, Amberglas in The Seven Towers) because it was the only way I could be sure I was keeping them consistent. More subtle variations took me longer to get the hang of. Most of the time now, speech patterns and character voices are automatic  for me - I know when I’ve used a word or a turn of phrase that a particular character just wouldn’t say, that’s all, so I fix it immediately. But at the beginning, it required a lot more conscious attention. So don’t worry if it takes a while.

 

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

Before the Beginning

August 25, 2010 – 10:56 am

Probably the most often-asked question writers get is “Where do you get your ideas?” Very few people ever ask “What do you do with your ideas once you have them?” though that seems to me to be the logical next step. It seems a good many people don’t realize that there is a lot of development work to be done in between having an idea and actually writing a story.

A story idea can be anything - a scrap of dialog, a scene, a setting, a situation, a character or two, a plot - that the writer finds intriguing and wants to follow up. Step one is usually writing the idea down somewhere, which is why so many writing books advocate keeping a writing journal or an idea file. Step two is developing the idea, which means figuring out what all the missing components are.

And there’s always something missing. Scraps of dialog usually (but not always) come with characters attached (somebody has to be saying that stuff), but often have no plot (or only hints of one) or setting. Settings and situations usually don’t come with characters, and even a plot may only arrive with stick-figure sketches of people where the actual characters ought to be. And so on.

These things don’t just magically show up when you sit down to write (well, unless you’re one of the writers whose process involves surprising themselves, but if you are, you’ve probably figured that out already). For the rest of us, those missing bits have to be developed before the story is ready to write.

As with every aspect of writing, there are lots of different ways to go about this, from making formal outlines and summaries to taking long walks in the wood or using action figures to model bits of storyline. But if you step back a pace or two, there are two fundamental ways that story ideas develop: 1) From the inside out, and 2) From the outside in.

For writers who work from the inside out, the starting idea is like a seed. It needs to be planted and watered and allowed to grow before it’s ready to make into a story. Again, this manifests in different ways, but the one thing that story-seed can’t be is ignored. Thinking about the things that are missing and paying attention to the hints that are there in whatever the writer already knows; wondering how the characters came to be in this situation or who might participate in that plot or what the people are like who live in this place - all that can be the equivalent of feeding and watering and weeding. A lot of clues are usually right there in the idea-seed; it’s a matter of looking for them.

For writers who work from the outside in, the starting idea is more like one of those seed-crystals they used to demonstrate crystal formation in my high school chemistry class - the one where you make a super-saturated solution of something like salt or sugar or alum and then lower one tiny grain of whatever-it-is into the goo and a week later you come back and there’s a perfectly faceted crystal the size of a golf ball that’s grown from the stuff in the solution layering itself onto the outside of the seed crystal.

When a story idea grows this way, the writer looks around for other scraps and ideas and bits that fit the existing seed-crystal. Instead of looking at the setting and thinking, “What kind of people live here?” the writer looks at people and characters (in real life or other fiction) and thinks “Would somebody like this work in that setting?” It’s like holding auditions for a play; there are far more real and imaginary people than you need to have as characters in a book, so even if you reject the first ten or twenty, sooner or later the right one will come along and you have your lead. Instead of looking at a character-seed-crystal and thinking “Where does this person live? Who are her friends? What does she want?” the writer thinks “Would she live in this house? Would she befriend that person? Is this thing something she wants?”

Most of the writers I know use both methods, though they have individual biases in one direction or another. It ends up being something of a circular process for a lot of us - looking at the developing seed or seed-crystal to see what’s missing, then looking around outside to see if anything fits, then looking at the inside to see if the newly added bit implies more interesting things, until the story has enough there that it’s ready to write.

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

Time and again

August 22, 2010 – 3:58 pm

“I don’t have time to write” is one of the most common writers’ complaints, both from people who haven’t published yet and from seasoned pros.

The statement means different things to different people, but the most common meaning is “There are a lot of other things in my life that are more important to me than writing, so those are what I spend my time on.”

For professional writers, writing time is too often eaten up by the things required to manage a writing career. By the time you’ve spent time on fan mail, emails to your agent and editor, studying up on the latest twist in the Google settlement, keeping track of which publisher is going out of business or being acquired or just having difficulties (and checking whether any of your backlist is affected), blogging, tweeting, twittering, checking Facebook and MySpace, reviewing writing-and-book-related chat lists and mailing lists, reading enough to at least pretend to keep up with the field … even if there’s time left in the day, it’s hard to muster the energy, let alone the inclination, to produce new words, even if one doesn’t have a family or a day job on top of all that (and many professional writers have both).

For the not-yet-professional writer, the list is a little different, but the basic idea is the same. Work, family, friends, hobbies, and general daily life can take up all the time there is - those things do, in fact, take up all the time there is for everybody who isn’t a writer, after all. Sometimes just getting the laundry done and meals on the table in addition to a job is about all there’s time or energy for.

But. Nobody gets more than 24 hours of time in a day, or more than 7 days in a week. That prolific professional who has six novels coming out next year (and four the year after that, and five more the year after that) has exactly the same amount of total time as the much-admired writer who produces one novel every eight to ten years, the newly sold author who’s trying to juggle editorial revisions and copyedit and galleys while producing his second book, the as-yet-unsold writer who’s struggling to persuade herself that her writing will sell one day in spite of the latest rejection letter, and the one-of-these-days-when-I-have-time “writer” who hasn’t produced two sentences in thirty years on account of having “no time to write.”

It’s not about having time. It’s about making choices.

There are some people whose choices are constrained by circumstances: they have responsibilities (toddlers to care for, elderly parents requiring assistance, family members or friends requiring help during a critical or chronic illness), or their own life has gone pear-shaped due to illness or financial problems or some other disaster. Their time is spoken for and scheduled to the max, and piling on guilt for not-writing is just adding to their stress. I lost months of writing time before and after my mother’s death, first due to helping Dad cope with her illness and later due to the time, energy, and stress of handling her estate … and I don’t feel one little bit guilty about it, even though I missed a major writing deadline three times as a result. Sometimes, you just can’t.

Most of us, most of the time, are not actually in a situation like that, however. Most of us have, during any given 24 hour period, some number of minutes that we can choose to use this way or that. Fifteen minutes relaxing with a cup of tea, or fifteen minutes cleaning out the junk drawer. An extra half-hour of sleep, or half-an-hour of exercise. An hour watching TV, or an hour mowing the lawn (one more day won’t hurt, really…). All that is necessary is to pick some of those minutes, and to choose to use them to write.

“All” I say, but it’s actually a hard choice for many people. Because all of everyone’s minutes are already full of something - hardly anyone I know can look at their last month and point to an hour where they just sat and did nothing at all. Choosing to write means giving up on doing something else - watching TV, socializing, surfing the Web, sleeping, reading … something has to go. And it has to not be replaced immediately by something else that isn’t writing - giving up an hour of TV in order to mow the lawn may be a Good Thing, but it doesn’t get the chapter written.

A popular choice for many writers is to select one end of the candle to burn a little extra on - either they get up half an hour or an hour early and write first, before anything else, or they stay up half an hour (or an hour, or several hours) late to write after everyone else has gone to bed. Each method has obvious disadvantages; either one can leave the writer short on sleep, and it can be hard to get up (or stay up) when you’re tired. If you have family or roommates, sooner or later they start asking you to do things for them “since you’re going to be up anyway,” and if you give in, your writing time quickly vanishes under the weight of all those daily more important things to do.

The temptation to put the writing off until tomorrow and mow the lawn (or whatever) today is strong and endless. Unless someone you care for, or you yourself, is going to die, be in pain, starve, or go to jail if the not-writing thing doesn’t get done, resist. Do the writing and put the whatever-it-is off until tomorrow. If you don’t defend your writing time - even from yourself - no one else is going to.

By pcwrede | Posted in Writing | Tagged , | Comments (17)

Whose Turn Is It? (Mailbag #4)

August 18, 2010 – 7:32 am

From the mailbag::

I know some people who feel quite strongly about keeping to the main character’s POV except when it’s absolutely necessary to go to someone else, but I’ve also seen that rule (like so many others!)broken successfully. It can be so useful to show someone else reacting to the MC.

Any guidelines on choosing? I keep having to write these scenes in more than one version to see which is the right way.

OK, first off, single-character-viewpoint tight-third-person is one kind of viewpoint. There are lots of others. It’s a stylistic choice: does the writer want the focus and intimacy that comes with sticking to a single character’s view for an entire novel, or does the writer want the flexibility that comes with using multiple viewpoints or omniscient third-person?

From the way the question is phrased, this particular writer is probably using a third-person multiple viewpoint structure. I call it a structure rather than a type of viewpoint because one can obviously do multiple first-person as well as multiple-third-person, or even do a mixed multiple viewpoint, with some of the viewpoint characters told in first person and others in third person. Or, I supposed, second person, though that would be very unusual…and is getting a little off-topic.

Back to multiple viewpoint. I group this into several loose categories: a) the ensemble cast, where the viewpoint characters all have their own storylines and importance; b) a plot-centered book with a wide-ranging plot that really needs to be seen from multiple angles; c) a character-centered story with a main character who needs to be seen from multiple angles; and d) the braided novel, where three or four plotlines interweave and overlap a bit, but may not come together until the end.

How the writer picks the viewpoint character for the next scene depends on what kind of story she/he is telling.

A straightforward braided novel that has, say, one viewpoint character for each of three plotlines, might go in strict rotation: a scene from A’s viewpoint, then B’s, then C’s, then back to A, repeat until they all come together at the end. If one plotline is more central than the others, it will likely have more scenes (perhaps A-B-A-C-A-B-A-C), or the A scenes may just be longer than the B or C scenes. Not all writers like to be tied down to a mechanical rotation like this, but if it’s right for the story, one can learn a lot from doing it…and it makes the question of whose viewpoint to use in the next scene really simple.

A plot-centered or character-centered book where there is a central thread that the writer wants to view from several directions is more complicated. A multiple-viewpoint, plot-centered story is a lot like a football game - the person who has the ball is the one who’s important, the one who’s moving the plot forward. So for each scene, the question is “who has the ball here?” Which character is moving the story forward? Who did the quarterback (your main character) hand the ball off to this time…or did he/she throw a pass to someone else, or run with it him/herself? Or has the other team intercepted?

A character-centered book is similar, except that instead of moving a plot-football forward, the idea is to get ever more interesting and deeper understanding of the central character, but from different angles. The first question here is therefore “whose opinion of the main character changes the most during this scene?” Which character does the scene make the biggest difference to, in terms of their relationship with or opinion of the main character?

An ensemble cast is, for me, the hardest kind of book to keep balanced, because you have all these people who are in the same place, who are supposed to be of equal (or nearly equal) importance. The one time I tried this, I found the balancing act very difficult - I had to look at it in all three ways - who’s doing the next plot-important thing? who do these events matter to the most? who’s had too many/not enough viewpoint scenes so far? - and then make a conscious decision each time as to which factor I was going to let have the most weight this time. (There is a reason why that story is lying mostly-abandoned on my hard drive…)

When all else fails - trust your backbrain. Go with what feels right. If nothing does, do the best you can; maybe later it will become clear what the right choice should have been. And yeah, rewriting a scene several times from different viewpoints is a pain … but I know more than one pro who does exactly that. So if it’s any comfort, you’re in good company.

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

First Final

August 16, 2010 – 8:27 am

Every saga has a beginning, and this one begins four weeks ago, when my editor sent me a three-page, single-spaced revisions e-mail and a copy of the ms. for what is now Across the Great Barrier that was full of comment balloons.

It didn’t arrive.

We didn’t realize this for a week, because I was being restrained and not asking “Where the $#%@& are the revisions requests you promised me on Monday?” and he was being restrained and giving me time to think about them because they were fairly substantial (we’ll get to that in a minute). By the time we got that sorted out, I was down to two and a half weeks of revision time instead of four.

This was important because those two and a half weeks included a) my turn making tea for the girls (six of us have been doing this every other month for…over twenty years, for sure. Between cooking and cleanup, it’s a big production and eats up at least three days, counting the day of the tea itself), and b) a drive down to Chicago and back to take care of Dad’s paperwork and bills for the month, which took about four days but only ate two because I took the laptop and worked while I was there.

Fortunately, I didn’t have much in the way of questions; David is an excellent editor, very clear in explaining what he wants and why, and he’s also usually on the same wavelength as I am (meaning, he doesn’t ask for totally off-the-wall things like “Why don’t you put in some explosions? I like explosions.” or “What this needs is a completely new plot twist that has nothing to do with anything else in the story…put it right here, where it will wreck the pacing and twist the main plot totally out of shape.”)

Unfortunately… Well, I did mention that these were substantial revisions, didn’t I? By my standards, anyway. Among other things, I ended up needing a whole new chapter (containing a whole new character, because it’s really hard to do very much dialog that’s only tagged “one of the men said.” I needed somebody for my characters to talk to).

And of course David put his finger right on every single place where I’d hoped I could avoid dealing with some bit or other, or where I knew it needed a bit more but I’d figured I could skate by with what I had. I couldn’t even really argue.

So after I’d read the letter and the comments through once, I sent him an email and we worked out the new title and discussed a few aspects of the story that hadn’t been clear. To him, anyway; I knew the answers, but they hadn’t gotten down on the page. (One of my besetting sins is that I either over- or under-explain; I can’t seem to get the hang of making things clear without actually saying them straight out, so they come out cryptic instead of…well, instead of that thing Megan Whelan Turner does, where the reader figures it all out for themselves and feels clever). While we were discussing, I mulled things over. And made tea.

Mulling is a necessary part of the process, and very important. It doesn’t look like writing; indeed, it usually happens when the writer is doing other things (baking scones and making chocolate silk pie, in this case). Anyway, once tea was over and cleared off, I got started on the actual writing part, with two weeks left and a trip to Chicago coming up.

How I do revisions is, I look at the big ones, and if any of them look easy, I start with those. None of the big ones looked easy, this time. So I did a first pass, knocking off the little changes to get rid of as many comment balloons as I could and feel like I’d made some progress. ”Little changes” are usually stuff like deleting unnecessary adjectives or changing a word choice. Every so often, I’d go back and write a few sentences or paragraphs of the new chapter. Then I hit the short scenes, again alternating with the new chapter. The nice thing about revising is that every time I get stuck, I can skip to some other part of the manuscript and work on that for a while. The unfortunate part of revising this way is that it leaves all the hardest bits for last.

On Thursday, I emailed my editor and asked whether Production was really going to be working on my book all weekend, or was the deadline actually Monday morning? David assured me that Monday would be fine, so Production was off the hook for the weekend, and I was on. Until 9:01 last night.

The manuscript is now 10,000 words longer than it was when it started. It has one entirely new chapter in the middle (I hope I didn’t miss anything when I renumbered all the rest of them), four or five completely new scenes, and a whole lot of new paragraphs scattered throughout. The last chapter got taken apart and totally rewritten; so did two of the mid-book chapters. This is all a lot harder than it sounds, because when you add a new chapter, you have to revise about half a chapter before and half a chapter after to make the transition into and out of it work properly. Same thing for new scenes, and even new paragraphs.

So it’s done (until the copy-edit comes, anyway), and I am going to take the day off and play computer games. And then get back to work on the next one.

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

Title Wars, etc.

August 4, 2010 – 6:30 am

So the revisions request for Book 2 of the Frontier Magic trilogy have come in, and I’m head down for the next week and a half.

After much emailing, the consensus is that, among many other things, it needs a title change. The editors felt that Circuit Magician was a good title…for a different book. I have to admit, they’re right. Eff is still the viewpoint character, and it’s still about her, but she’s not a circuit magician. Wash is a circuit magician (arguably the best one they have, but I’m biased), but while he has a large part in the book, it’s really not his story. So - new title.

The editors suggested The Far West. Which is the perfect title…for the third book. This is a good thing, a great thing, because I didn’t have a working title for Book 3 and I was beginning to worry about it. However, it still left us without a title for Book 2. I am generally totally terrible at titles; all I could think of was that it should maybe have something to do with magic. Between us, the editors and I came up with a bunch of things that just didn’t work: Dreams and Spells, Border Spells, [Total Spoiler Title], Magical Mammoths (which not only sounds silly but is totally inaccurate and misleading, as there are hardly any mammoths in this one at all, and none of them are magical in any way).

So I did what I usually do when I’m stuck for a title, and started asking friends. And, as frequently happens, I was in mid-conversation with one of them, explaining why The Far West had to be the title of the third book, when I heard myself say “…and while most of it takes place past the Great Barrier, it…OH. Past the Great Barrier?“  Beth, being Beth, thought for a moment and then said “Across the Great Barrier.” The editor liked it, so Book 2 is now officially Across the Great Barrier (unless Marketing hates it, in which case we’ll have another round).

Meanwhile, I have a ton of revisions to make, some of which have serious implications for Book 3. I have at least one full new chapter to insert (editor wants my viewpoint character along on something that originally happened offstage), and I may need a second one for a complication I summarized later on that he wants more details on. I get to take the ending apart and reconstitute it. I need to add some letters from offstage folks. And I have a week and a half to do it in, during which I also have to make my monthly trip to Chicago.

The funny thing is that while this is a lot of head-down-in-the-manuscript work (and tight timing on top of it, which is not all the editor’s fault - he meant to give me three weeks, but his original email got lost in cyberspace somewhere, so I lost a week), it’s also a lot easier than the death march to the deadline was. Because with revisions, I can skip around. I don’t have to work on each chapter in order; in fact, sometimes it works better if I don’t. I can look at something, decide to leave it for a while, and still get other stuff done while my backbrain is working out how to deal with whatever I skipped. I have a framework.

Sure, working like this does mean that I frequently have a whole collection of really hard bits to frantically finish up the night before it’s due in. But they’re just bits; if I don’t get to them, it can probably go to production without (well, not if I don’t finish the whole new chapter, but that’s not the sort of thing I’d put off til last, either). Sometimes, leaving the hard bits for last actually means I don’t have to do them at all, because the other changes I’ve made elsewhere make those last few things work perfectly as they are (I really like it when that happens, though I can’t count on it.) So even though there’s pressure and a deadline, it’s just not the same as that final trying-to-run-while-knee-deep-in-molasses slog to the end of the first draft. For me, anyway.

But you’re probably not going to get much in the way of blog updates for the next week.

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

Complicated Webs

August 1, 2010 – 7:45 pm

Big, fat, complex, multiple-viewpoint novels have been popular for quite a while, and they have a whole set of problems all their own. Once of those problems is pacing.

The temptation is always to take advantage of a slow moment in the main plot to advance a subplot, and it’s frequently a good idea in many respects, but it can lead to a too-even pace as the intense high points of one subplot cancel out the lows of another. So what does one do?

Well, the first thing is to look for places where you can do two things at once. You have a super-fast fight scene that relates to the main plotline; maybe you can drop some background information about a secondary character’s skills that will be relevant to his subplot later on. You have a planning scene that works as a pause in your tense political subplot; maybe you can work in some character development that will be relevant to a couple of other things that are going on.

Everything in a story affects everything else, even (or especially) when there are multiple viewpoints. Even if your secondary viewpoint character is two hundred miles away from your main character, or you have an ensemble cast scattered across multiple star systems, they’re all in the same book for a reason. A character who’s hundreds of miles from the main plot focus can run across a piece of information that’s irrelevant to him, but that the reader can see is going to up the stakes for those other characters. This serves a dual purpose: on the one hand, it ties things together across plotlines; on the other hand, the inclusion of more information makes the subplot scene more dense, which slows the scene down a little. The fact that the additional information isn’t directly relevant to the subplot slows it down even more.

If pacing in a complex novel is a really serious problem, you may have to resort to charting out your scenes, so that you can see what the problem is. There are a bunch of different ways to do this; the simplest is to use letters for the various plotlines and upper and lower case for fast or slower paced scenes. So if you have scenes that go A - B - A - C - b - A, you probably have a too-fast pacing problem (and if A isn’t your central plot, you may have an emphasis problem). An A - a - B - b - C - c  pattern moves like a rocking chair; it’s not bad, but maybe a little more variation would help. If you’re doing two-fers, an Ab - B - aC - Ac has some nice variation in terms of which subplots each scene is looking at, but the low spots and the high spots may be smoothing each other out too much.

If you want a more visual representation, you can go with Post-It Notes - one color for each plotline, bright shades for fast-paced scenes and pale shades for slower ones. Or you can list your scenes in an Excel spreadsheet and assign each one a value for each subplot and then use the graphing function…the possibilities for cat-vacuuming are endless. Nevertheless, you can’t fix a problem until you know what and where the problem is, and charts and graphs of various sorts are a good way of doing that.

Once you have some idea where your pacing problems are, you can look at ways of correcting them. If you have too many intense scenes in a row, but they’re all from different plotlines (A - B - C - D), you may be able to move some slower scenes from later on to provide some breaks: A - Bc - d - Cb - a - D. If you can’t move slower scenes from later in the story, you may be able to write something new to insert to provide a breathing space. Similarly, if you have a string of slow scenes from different subplots, you can move higher-intensity scenes from later to intersperse with the slower ones, or write some new high-intensity scenes to break up the slow section, or speed up one or more of the slow bits.

And if none of that seems appropriate, you can use various tricks and techniques to “slow down” and de-intensify one of your fast scenes, so that you still have some pacing variation. As I said in the last post, each of the aspects of storytelling has more intense, faster-reading forms and less intense, slower-reading forms. For instance: Shorter sentences read fast. Short fragments, faster. Longer sentences tend to slow thing down, even if there’s a lot of activity happening; complex sentences that have multiple clauses tend to slow thing down even more. The same is true for viewpoint: a close-in camera tends to read faster than a more distant view, even if less of the overall scene is visible close up. Dialog and dramatization tend to read faster than narrative summary. Short, simple word choices read faster than polysyllabic ones. Cramming lots of important information into a single paragraph or line tends to make it dense and therefore slower reading. By adding a few longer, more complex sentences and moving the viewpoint camera a little farther out, you can slow down a too-fast action scene without actually changing much of what happens. And of course, it works the same in the other direction.

You also have to keep an eye on the rhythm of the subplots. You may have a perfectly acceptable overall pace that comes out as A - b - C - b - A - a - b - C, but your subplot B is composed of nothing but slow scenes. Sometimes, that’s all right; sometimes, it means some of the subplot scenes need to be intensified; sometimes, it means the subplot really needs to be given less emphasis and combined with other scenes because it doesn’t have the oomph to stand on its own; and sometimes, it means the subplot needs to be cut.

And as with the original “Big Three,” you can advance more than one subplot in a single scene, which tends to make it more intense and important even if both of the subplots are at a low-intensity point in their rhythm.

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

Hup, Two, Three, Four

July 28, 2010 – 11:09 am

Pacing is movement, and movement has rhythm. Some rhythms are fast, staccato beats, rat-tat-tat-tat; some are slow, leisurely swells; and some are a steady heartbeat. One thing is true for all of them:  in order to have a beat, in order to have rhythm, there must be sound and then silence. A single continuous blast of a foghorn has no rhythm; neither does complete silence. It’s only when you get the foghorn in multiple blasts that a rhythm can develop.

But there’s more to rhythm than noise-silence-noise-silence. Rhythm has a beat, and that means emphasis in some places and not in others. The marching cadence isn’t one, two, three, four; it’s Hup, two, three, four; the heartbeat is a steady lub-dub, lub-dub. Rhythm can also change the length of each beat, like the shave-and-a-haircut door-knocking rhythm: dum-da-da-dum-dum…dum dum.

And all of that applies to pacing in a story. In addition, you have the increase in tension to play with, until it all comes unwound at the climax. You can climb your plot-hill in a steady upward heartbeat, lub-dub, lub-dub, a tense action scene followed by a lower-key relief/reaction scene,  like the “scene and sequel” model most recently promulgated by Jack Bickham. You can have a series of  quick action scenes of varying length and importance, rat-a-tat-tat. Or you can go for something more complicated, like the door-knocking rhythm, where the long and short beats and the emphasis on each is irregular, but still pleasing.

The tools a writer has to work with are not sound and silence, but action, reaction, relevance, length, description, tension, density, word choice, and viewpoint. Each of those tools can be used in a way that’s “fast” or “intense,” or in ways that are slower and less emphatic; the writer mixes and matches them in each scene to manipulate the reader’s impression of speed or pace. The story gets told one word at a time, regardless.

The place most people start is with action. It’s a writing truism that action scenes “read faster” than contemplative scenes around the campfire…but even so, some action scenes read faster than other action scenes. Using longer sentences and paragraphs, providing more detailed description of the setting in which the action is occurring, stretching out the blow-by-blow description of the action itself (like a slow-motion scene in a martial arts movie)…all that can slow down an action scene. Doing the whole scene as a two-paragraph summary instead of a fully developed and dramatized scene can change the emphasis on a major battle scene, making it the “a” in the rat-a-tat-tat  instead of the rat. Providing more of the viewpoint character’s immediate reactions in-scene, similar to stream-of-consciousness, can speed things up or slow them down, depending on where and how you place the reactions.

The denser the prose, the more slowly it tends to read. This is why one of the paradoxical fixes for a slow scene is often to make it longer - the lagging pace is the result of too much information coming at the reader too fast, so making the information less dense by spreading it out over another page or two is one way of solving that problem (the other being to take some of the information from the paragraph or scene out completely, and either dispense with it entirely or move it to another scene that needs slowing down some).

The key to all this is variation. Each of the elements of storytelling can vary independently, but they all come together to build the pace of the story. Yes, it sounds horribly complicated - which is one of the reasons why pacing problems are a horrible bear to fix - but it’s not something most writers do consciously and deliberately. It’s like riding a bicycle - you can tell when your balance is off and correct it without consciously controlling each and every muscle in your legs. The trick is to step back occasionally and look at the whole story, not just whatever scene you’re working on. Too many folks have had it drummed into their heads that a slow scene is “bad,” so they make all their scenes fast, action-packed, snappy, and tense…and end up with an overall story pace that is as even and unmemorable as a freeway ride through a desert at 90 miles an hour.

And next I’ll finally get to the complex-multiple-viewpoint pacing problems folks were asking about.

By pcwrede | Posted in Writing | Tagged , | Comments (1)

Time Travel the Easy Way

July 25, 2010 – 11:07 am

A few days ago, Beth my exercise buddy mentioned that she’d been rereading some of Connie Willis’ time-travel stories, and it inspired her to ask me a question:  If you could go back in time to do historical research, what time and place would you pick?

I mulled it over for a few days before I figured out why I was having so much trouble coming up with an answer. See, the problem is that I really, really like my creature comforts:  hot showers and central heating and air conditioning and the internet (and all the rest of the high-tech toys of modern life) and so on. And there aren’t very many times and places that have those things, and the ones that do…well, I lived through those, and my memory is pretty good. I don’t really see a need to go back ten or fifteen years to do on-the-spot historical research when all I really need is to look up the occasional fact. (Go back fifteen years and arrange to buy a big wodge of Microsoft stock, maybe, but not for historical research.)

Really, it comes down to the fact that I’m a writer, not a historian. I care about odd details of everyday life and peculiar historical events because they are useful in my work, not because they are my work. And I learned long ago that I don’t actually have to have personal experience of something in order to write about it. Which was a great relief to me personally; my entire genre would disappear overnight if “you have to have done it yourself” ever became a requirement for writing about dragons and magic and so on.

Even people with a strongly kinesthetic learning style don’t have to murder anyone to write a murder mystery. There’s a reason it’s called fiction - no matter how gritty and realistic the story, a lot of it is still made up out of the writer’s imagination. Besides, I don’t write historical fiction. I write historical fantasy, which ranges from the sort of thing that is historically accurate “secret history” through alternate histories of varying accuracy to things like Lois Bujold’s The Sharing Knife, where the only thing that’s the same is the geography.

My stuff is somewhere in the middle of the range. Depending on the story I want to tell, I play fast and loose with the effects of real, acknowledged, everyday magic on historical events (which, realistically, would probably result in things being very, very different starting from whenever real magic was discovered). I don’t do carefully extrapolated “make one change in real history and work out in meticulous detail what happens from there” alternate history - if that’s what people are after, Harry Turtledove has a long list of really fine books that will keep them happy.

I still do lots of research, though. If something in my story is going to be different from real history, I want to do it on purpose and not by accident. More than that, though, is the fact that consistency is one of the fantasy novelist’s most useful and effective tools, and the easiest way to make one’s worldbuilding consistent and complex is to use what’s already there in real life. But I don’t need to go look at it in person. I can get everything I need while sitting in my comfy chair with my cats sleeping on my legs. Books are a grand thing.

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