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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

…“and what is the use of a book,” thought Alice, “without pictures or conversations?”

-Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland

Dialog occupies an odd place on the list of fundamental fiction-writing skills. It’s a component of nearly all fiction, but it’s not absolutely necessary (Hatchet and My Side of the Mountain, for instance, both have only one character present for most of the book; there is thus almost no dialog). Many people, like Alice, prefer dialog-heavy stories; others warn sternly about “talking heads” or sneer at dialog-heavy books as being “too easy” or a cop-out of some kind.

Yet dialog is one of the more flexible – and therefore complex – aspects of writing. Dialog can be used to describe people, places, and things, to convey the speaker’s personality and background, to advance or explain the plot, to provide background and backstory – anything that narrative does, in fact. The writer has to pay attention to all the normal concerns, like pacing, in addition to some things like keeping it clear who the speaker is, which is only a problem with dialog. And there are some things, like voice, that become more important in dialog because the writer is dealing with, potentially, as many different voices as there are characters.

In fact, the way characters talk inevitably tells the reader a lot about them. Consider the following untagged talking heads:

“I ain’t doin’ it, and that’s flat.”

“Have I requested any such thing of you?”

“Um, well, I don’t like saying this, but it certainly sounded to me as if you did. Ask, I mean. Though of course I may be mistaken; still, somebody will have to water the roses while you’re away – it’s such a lovely garden, it would be a shame to let it go – and I do think – “

“I ain’t watering no damned flowers. Sissy job.”

“No, no, there are ever so many men who are florists. It’s just like farming, really. Sort of. Isn’t it? Don’t you think?”

“Your defense of my position leaves a great deal to be desired. In the first place, garden maintenance has very little to do with being a florist, and in the second, I have still not requested that he perform any.”

“Good. You got some sense, anyways.”

Now consider what you know or can guess about these people just from their dialog…starting with how many of them are present in the conversation. If I did my job right, it should be pretty clear that there are three people talking, and it should also be clear whether A, B, or C is saying each line. The reader can, I think, make at least tentative assumptions about the relative social class and education level of each speaker, the fact that they aren’t complete strangers, how well they get along, and the general personality type of each. Also, one ends up with a pretty good idea of their various opinions of gardening.

That’s quite a bit to get out of seven dialog exchanges, and there may be some other things in there as well that I’m not noticing because I put it in unintentionally. Theoretically, one could tell many stories using only dialog (and I don’t mean just plays). Normally, though, untagged dialog is a technique that’s used only briefly, for reasons of variation or emphasis or pacing.

The point I wanted to make here, though, is twofold: first, that the most effective dialog is frequently the sort that could work without any speech tags at all (whether or not it has any) because each character has a unique voice that is obviously or subtly different from that of every other character in the book; and second, that the most effective speech tags, description, and stage business are the sort that add something more to that already-effective dialog.

If I’m over-simplifying, I’d say that there are two kinds of things that fall into that second category: stuff that’s already there in the dialog, and stuff that isn’t and can’t be in the dialog. In other words, you can take the personality or emotions or whatever that’s already implied by the way the dialog is phrased, and emphasize it with stage business or a speech tag: “I don’t – I can’t – oh, dear, oh, dear.” Her fingers twisted and untwisted the curtain cord in time with her stammering. This can be perilously easy to overdo, though, and overdoing it often weakens the impression the author wants to make, rather than strengthening it.

Stuff that can’t be in the dialog is, in part, fairly obvious. It’s possible to have one character describing a room or a landscape in detail in his/her dialog, but it’s difficult to justify doing more than once (and if one does do it more than once, it starts looking obvious and overdone pretty quickly). The same goes for commenting on another character’s actions.

Less obvious are things like contrasting tone of voice. “You are a rotten, scheming bastard!” seldom needs a speech tag of “he shouted,” but if the speech tag is “she said admiringly” it is absolutely required.

OK, I get that a lot of people really, in their heart of hearts, want a quick-and-dirty paint-by-numbers approach to writing a great book. I also realize that a lot of people don’t want to read more than one screen’s worth of blog post (or so several of the How To Do A Great Blog web sites claim). Lists of tips and tricks and common mistakes seem like a perfectly reasonable way to get at both things at the same time.

The trouble is that, in my experience, a short list of tips or mistakes just doesn’t work very well when it comes to helping people improve their writing. (I can’t speak to the thing about sticking to one screen per blog post, except to note that I obviously don’t follow that advice, either.)

Writing a short story or a novel is complicated; every bit of it affects everything else. It’s easy to focus down on one particular aspect of writing, like dialog or endings, and dash off a list of dos and don’ts. But in an actual story, it’s not so simple. That #3 “Don’t…” from the dialog list, for instance, may be both thematically appropriate and more perfectly in character than any of the alternatives, not to mention being the ideal way of moving the plot along. #10 “Do make sure you…” from the characterization list may be impossible to make work, given the constraints of the style and setting.

But there are several sorts of lists that I find extremely useful. They just don’t have anything much to do with writing technique.

The first set of lists is stuff I use during the first draft to save time. For instance, I have one possible-next-book that involves characters from several different imaginary countries/backgrounds. I want their names to sound as if they come from different places with different languages and naming conventions, and I don’t want any of them to be token representatives of their cultures. That means that eventually, when I’m making up secondary characters like the barman and the traveling salesman, I’m going to need more names that sound as if they came from the same places, and maybe a few others from completely different backgrounds.

So I make a set of lists: six to ten male and female names that would come from each country, along with six to ten family/clan/house/tribe names for each country that mix and match well with the personal names I’ve picked. When I need the traveling salesman, all I have to do is decide which country he’s from, and pick from the list.

Or I make a list of place-names so that when they pass by that small town, I can grab a name on the fly. I’ll also make lists of things I’ve mentioned in passing, like local foods or animals I’ve invented, so that I can use them again if I need to (and so I can make sure that I didn’t name the fish stew “kishta” and the tiger with antlers “kitsa” – far too confusing, not to mention the potential for tragically horrible typos…)

The other kind of lists I find useful are checklists of things to do during the first round of revisions. There’s an ongoing, ever-changing list of all the phrases I tend to overuse, so I can do a search-and-destroy on them easily. There’s a list of things to check for consistency and continuity (I have a really bad habit of changing the spelling of a character’s name by one letter somewhere in the middle of the story, or calling someone “Anthony” for two chapters and then switching to “Andrew” because I couldn’t be bothered to look up which male-name-beginning-with-A I’d used, and I was sure it was Andrew…)

In other words, all the lists I find useful have to do with the content of the story: names, places, descriptive phrases, etc. That’s what I need to keep track of when I’m writing, not the five dialog mistakes that I may or may not be making in any given scene, or the twelve dynamite endings that don’t fit the story I’m trying to tell.

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.

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

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

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

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

He:  “What are you doing here?”

She:  “Isn’t it obvious?”

He:  “Not to me.”

Draft two would put in tone of voice and names:

“What are you doing here?” James demanded.

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

“Not to me,” James said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Which brings me to #3.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Next time: Some thoughts on doing a prologue right.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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