Accessibility is one of those aspects of fiction that lots of people talk about (especially in the SF field), but nobody ever seems to define adequately. (I hope it’s obvious that I’m not talking about physical accessibility here, that is, whether or not someone can get their hands on a book.) Furthermore, in some circles the term “accessibility” carries considerable baggage, usually because “accessible” is equated with “commercial” (as opposed to “literary”) writing, and is therefore automatically assumed to be undesireable, lowest-common-denominator writing.

I’ll do the rant about commercial vs. literary some other time; for now, let’s just mention that I don’t think accessibility has a lot to do with that particular argument. I also don’t think accessibility means a story can’t also be complex, layered, or nuanced.

On an individual level, accessibility seems relatively easy to recognize: any book that a particular individual can pick up and sail on through without wanting/needing some kind of outside explanation or pause for thought is accessible to them. Or, to put it another way, any book that contains barriers that block a particular individual’s understanding of the story is less accessible to them, and the more barriers there are, the less accessible the book is.

Expanding this definition at first looks easy: you just judge a book by the number of readers who find the book accessible on an individual level, and the more of them there are, the more accessible the book must be. Unfortunately, looking at it this way can lead to a number of problems, the first and most obvious of which is the “accessible equals popular/commercial equals bad/lowest-common-denominator” equation mentioned above.

This equation is a problem because hardly any writer I know aspires to write lowest-common-denominator fiction, especially if you phrase it that way, and no writer I know wants to write badly.

The second problem with the expanded definition is that it doesn’t recognize that a book can be highly accessible to one group of readers, while being virtually incomprehensible to everyone else. Advanced mathematics textbooks come to mind. (OK, they’re not fiction, but all of you got the point right away, didn’t you?)

The definition also doesn’t recognize that a book can be accessible (or not) on multiple levels. Take children’s books. Alice in Wonderland is, on one level, a splendid adventure for a 13-15 year old; on other levels, it’s an acid trip full of sophisticated word play, parody, mathematics, and political satire, or a parable about losing the wonders of childhood. Many, if not most, of the best and most lasting children’s books have multiple levels, some of which are not fully accessible to their most likely readers…at least, not on their first read-through at age eight or ten or fifteen. One of the reasons such books last is that they stick in the memory, and when one comes around, as an adult, to read them again (for oneself, or as a read-aloud to a child), one finds new levels have become accessible by virtue of one’s adult knowledge and experience.

So the definition is flawed, but it’s the best I could come up with. And it does allow for a way of looking at accessibility that can be useful to writers. One can examine the kinds of things that can be barriers to different individual readers, and try to take out (or leave out) as many of them as possible.

Most of the barriers I can think of – vocabulary, syntax, lack of the background knowledge or personal experience that the author is assuming his/her readers have – can be summed up as a level of unfamiliarity with something in the story that is uncomfortable to the reader.

This is a really tricky thing to judge, because one of the reasons readers read stories is to encounter new things – new characters, new plot twists, new places. Furthermore, every reader has a different point at which he or she gets uncomfortable with the “newness” of the story. The writer is left to balance between imitating “real life” so closely that the readers get bored (because they’ve seen it all before) and scaring off half his/her possible audience by throwing too much unfamiliar stuff at them, too fast.

The classic way around this problem, for fantasy, is the one used by both Alice in Wonderland and the first Harry Potter book. Both Alice and Harry begin the book as, to all appearances, perfectly ordinary children in the real, familiar world; as they move from the familiar to the fantastically unfamiliar, so does the reader. They don’t understand the new places in which they find themselves any better than the reader. The writer can then explain things gradually to the reader as the main character begins to explore and understand…or if the main character is floundering, at least the reader has some company in a frustrating situation.

Making use of multiple levels of accessibility is a little trickier. This isn’t like a plot-braid, where the writer can have a scene from Plotline A and then one from Plotline B and then go back to A. Doing that with different accessibility levels means that the reader who only gets Level A will be completely lost for an entire scene as soon as he/she gets to the Level B part. What one needs to do is mange both levels at the same time, in such a way that the reader who doesn’t get Level B will not even notice that he/she is missing anything unless someone else calls it to his/her attention.

An example: I did a reading of Calling on Dragons once to a mixed audience of adults and children, some of whom were quite young. I got to the point in Chapter 2 where the enormous white rabbit is explaining why he is late for something: “It runs in the family; my brother even got himself a big gold pocket watch, and he still can’t get anywhere on time.”

All of the adults and older children laughed. A six-year-old in the front row immediately looked around suspiciously and demanded in a piercing voice, “Why is that funny?” She obviously hadn’t seen or read Alice yet, so the joke wasn’t accessible for her…but the reference goes by quickly and looks like just the sort of throw-away line that somebody in this situation might say (even if the somebody is a giant rabbit), so if she’d been reading it alone, she wouldn’t have realized that there was a joke she wasn’t getting.

Back about sixty or seventy years ago, there was something of a fad for analyzing and classifying plots in various ways. Georges Polti came up with thirty-six dramatic situations in a stunningly boring book that, when referred to, is nearly always condensed down to a list that occupies about two pages. Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch classified plots according to seven types of conflict (Man against Man, Man against Nature, Man against Himself, etc. Unaccountably, his list omits Man vs. the IRS). And Robert Heinlein summed it up in three: Boy Meets Girl, The Little Tailor, and the Man-Who-Learns-Better.

Looked at a little more closely, these classifications are actually looking at different things. The 36 situations are about content, and fairly specific content at that. “Adultery” (#25 -Two Adulterers Conspire Against a Deceived Spouse) is barely different from “Murderous Adultery” (#15 – Two Adulterers Conspire To Murder the Betrayed Spouse). The “seven types of conflict” are about the sorts of obstacles the protagonist can face: other people who don’t want him/her to succeed, natural disasters, the narrator’s own internal prejudices or flaws, etc. And Heinlein’s three basic plots, if one looks carefully, are the three things that result in change/growth in the main character, that is, people change because they’ve established (or want to establish) a new relationship, because they have to grow in order to face an external problem that looks bigger than anything they ought to be able to cope with, and because they have to face themselves and their own wrong judgments and mistakes.

One of my favorite old how-to-write textbooks takes a completely different perspective on plot, classifying stories as Character Story, Complication Story, Thematic Story, and Atmosphere Story, and the Multi-phase Story (a combination of two or more of the other types). It’s a very dense text, but as near as I can make out, the classification is based on where the plot’s main focus of attention is and/or where its driving force comes from.

All of these things are important, but none of them say much about the movement of a plot. That’s left for a different set of classifiers, who generally draw diagrams and graphs to represent tension over time, or complications, or the protagonist’s situation (good or bad). The classic one is the saw-toothed triangle, with the rising action, the climax, and the falling action, but there are others. One of the older texts I’ve been looking at separates plots into three types: a cup-shaped one it calls the Comic Plot Arc, which begins and ends with the character in a good situation, but which dips in the middle where the character is in trouble; a hill-shaped one it calls the Tragic Plot Arc, which begins and ends with the character in a bad situation, but which rises in the middle where it looks as if the character is going to make it out of the mess; and a flat line which the book call the Modern Story, in which the protagonist doesn’t struggle against Fate but passively accepts whatever events come his/her way.

And then there are the folks who attempt to deal with non-linear storytelling (which deserves, and will eventually get, a post all to itself), using circles and spirals and chains of linked boxes and arrows to try to sort out and classify plots that don’t move in strict chronological order.

All of these different ways of looking at plot are valid. Internalizing this is really useful; it means that when you are looking in despair at a plot whose action doesn’t follow the classic saw-toothed triangle pattern, you can switch gears and see it as a spiral Man-Learns-Lesson pattern, or perhaps as a Character or Atmosphere story whose primary plot-pattern isn’t on the action level at all. When there’s a problem, one doesn’t have to look only at the movement of the story; one can look at the obstacles, or the focus, or the content, or the shape.

The thing I like about all this is the richness of all the different ways of looking at plot, what constitutes plot, and what’s important about plot. It allows for much greater complexity than the basic plot skeleton and/or three-to-five-act structure that is the main substance of most modern how-to-write books. The basic skeleton and the act structure are, certainly, one set of plot fundamentals…but they’re only one set, and fundamentals are supposed to be something that you learn in order to build on, not something that you learn and then stop because that’s all you need to know.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.