Nearly every writer has what I call a “default setting” for many or most of the basic pieces of writing. They tend to automatically write in first person, or third, or multiple viewpoint. When they’re thinking up stories or developing ideas, they gravitate toward the action/adventure plot, or toward one focusing on relationships, or toward something more character-centered where the main point is someone learning a lesson. They gravitate toward the same kinds of characters, settings, genres.
Which is not necessarily a bad thing. Every writer has strengths and weaknesses, and there’s a lot to be said for playing to your strengths.
After a while, though, doing the same thing over and over can get boring. Also, once you’ve polished those particular aspects of your writing to a high gleam, it can be more difficult to improve the things you aren’t as good at doing, both because you never give yourself the chance to practice them and because when you finally do try them out, your skill levels are so far behind your strengths that they make everything new you try look terrible compared to whatever you’re used to doing.
Which is why I’m a big fan of knowing what your defaults are…because if you know them, you can change your automatic choices, consciously and deliberately. This means that if you don’t like writing exercises (which I mostly don’t), you can learn how to do new things while you’re also writing pay copy. (This doesn’t work for everyone; some people learn better and faster from exercises, and they should use them. That’s part of figuring out your process and your defaults – figuring out whether you get the most out of learning specific pieces and then putting them together later, or from just jumping into the deep end and not drowning.)
Career writers are constantly torn between playing to their strengths (which often means writing the same kind of story over and over) and developing their weak points so as to have a broader range of possibilities available. Different writers make different choices about how to deal with this. Some are perfectly happy to never stretch too far beyond their current basic strengths…and sometimes that works really well for them, especially if they’ve developed a large fan base that is perfectly happy to have the same thing over and over. Others start off that way, polishing their strong points for their first few books, and only later begin pushing themselves. Still others begin pushing their limits as hard as possible right from the get-go, striving to get their skills up to some arbitrary level before they allow themselves to relax a little.
Me, I’m a slogger, and I don’t mean just the day-to-day grind. I don’t normally tend to push every one of my limits to the absolute max all at once, but I do try to stretch in a new direction with every book. My current default values are for plot-centered, tight-third-person, single-viewpoint, stand-alone stories that take place over a relatively limited time period, usually a few days to a couple of months. (Yes, I am indicating that they’ve changed over time.) So I’m currently writing a character-centered, first-person, memoir-style trilogy that takes place over the course of years – thirteen years for Book 1, two more years for Book 2, and probably two to three years for Book 3.
That’s an unusually large number of defaults for me to upset all at once…but the main default that I’m currently upsetting is my habit of only making onestretchy writing-technique change per book. I don’t recommend swapping absolutely everything around like this the first time you decide to shake things up, unless you already know that you need to do that kind of thing. But for me, it was time for a major shake-up…and while I did deliberately switch a lot of my defaults, not all of them were terribly stretchy, one at a time. I’ve done first-person before, in a couple of different flavors (letters, over-the-shoulder narrative), and I’ve written things that were longer and more character-focused. It’s certainly been stretchy trying them all at once, which was part of the idea (the other part being that once I got the story idea, particularly Eff’s voice, I wouldn’t have been happy telling it any other way.)
Here’s one reader who’s really glad you’ve pushed the envelope. I’ve read several of your earlier books and enjoyed them all, but Eff’s voice in “Thirteenth Child” took hold of me in a different way. I pass the books I enjoy along to my sisters, but they had to wait for this one, till I read it a second time. We’re all looking forward to “Circuit Magician.” Thanks for not sticking just to what you were already good at. And thanks for Eff.
I learn best with exercises, especially the kind that take the form of games! My current exercise is short-deadline, tournament-style, themed contests. Waaayyyy fun to kick someone’s butt with a creative piece – and the chosen themes can get REALLY stretchy. (which means I’m winning only slightly more often then losing right now)
Oh good, another book!
This trait – that you’re constantly stretching yourself – is one of the things I admire about you. It’s one reason I’m still working on my WIP – yes, it’s hard, and I’m not sure I will be successful, but I’m learning a lot, and I think it’s a good strategy to keep your skills high across the board.
Wow, this is really good advice! It does a lot to show why your books are all so different in exciting ways. For most of the authors I read there’s a certain recognizable approach, but for each group of your characters there’s something new and fresh!
I get bored with my defaults, but I don’t always stretch to break them. And as you implied in the last line, the reason some stories aren’t working is because they need a new bunch of settings. The defaults make them staticky and bleached out.
Thank you! (Now, of course, a ‘how to fix a poorly developed subplot’ could come in handy. Is there a way to figure out if your story is logical before you’re a hundred pages in?)
Cara, have you ever finished a book and found it illogical? If not, this might not be a problem. (None of my plots make way halfway through. Quite often I have scenes and subplots that seem superfluous, but when I try to cut them, I find that they’re actually absolutely vital in moving forward a hitherto unappreciated subplot, and everything resolves in the end.
In the meanwhile, I’m worrying madly that I have written book I, have a shape for book II, and can’t see book III wrap up with a sensible plot, because the two big questions that my shake my world have not even been raised yet.
Green Knight, your saga sounds awesome, and I mean that in the original sense of the word. I’m sure you’ll manage to figure out how to address those two questions, even if they end up being books 4 and 5.
I have actually read a few books and been puzzled by the logic of them, although its often easier to see in shorter works like movies or plays where you don’t get sucked in. For me it’s actually the opposite of superfluity, it’s a lack of resonance. I don’t plot things out before I go. With my current project i actually just worked off a list of things that i wanted to happen that i had scraped into a basic narrative (and about 75pp of backstory), and it worked pretty well. Except of course I tacked on an extraneous subplot that served the pacing and answered a few questions that needed to be answered, but my first readers zeroed right in on it. Apparently it is ‘convenient,’ ‘casual’ and ‘underdeveloped,’ and it doesn’t have a consistent zeitgeist. (I love my first readers. I really do.)
Of course, they’re right, and this whole subplot is problematic. It asks more questions than it answers, and it suddenly throws in huge worldbuilding issues which really don’t have anything to do with the little family drama that the story is really about. So I probably should get rid of most of it, and sprinkle the rest throughout the other parts of the story, and expand on the main plotline , which is also underdeveloped. (I always get into this situation where the real story is what happened with the parents and the child has to discover it and in some way or other fix it, which is really hard to do, especially if no one is interested in telling the child anything.) And I think I do need a new subplot, but the subplot is going to have to be about my main character and *not* his parents.
So many problems, so little time.