Doing it all at once

Before I begin, let me just mention that Points of Departure, the anthology of Liavek stories Pamela Dean and I did, is going live on May 12, and we just got a very nice starred review http://www.publishersweekly.com/978-1-62681-555-1 at the Publisher’s Weekly website. This is a very big deal, as PW affects things like library purchases. I’m not sure how this will work for an ebook, but libraries do carry them now and it is also available as a print-on-demand paperback, so I guess we’ll find out.

Also, we are in the process of migrating the website to a new server and new, more mobile-friendly design. I am hoping that we can do it seamlessly, but hope and practice are seldom the same, so if the site goes missing unexpectedly or suddenly becomes illegible, that’s probably what’s going on. I’ll let you know when we’re safely done.

One of the problems with nearly all how-to-write advice, including this blog, is that in order to talk about writing fiction, we inevitably focus on one aspect of it at a time. The more analytical advisors tend to break things down along lines that focus on story: this is how you do characterization, here is some advice about plotting, that is how you do setting or style, dialog or action, pacing or structure; always remember these important things about theme, beginnings, suspense, tension. The more intuitive advisors talk mainly about the writer: this is how you get motivated, cultivate your inner idea-generator, take yourself on “creative dates,” get over your hangups about your unworthiness or lack of skill, let go of your inner critic.

The truth is that when you are writing, you have to do all of that at the same time. You have to be motivated while you are writing the action that shows off the characterization that furthers the plot as you get over your hangups while you continue writing the dialog that goes along with the action to keep the pacing consistent as you invent new ideas and squash your inner critic so that you can keep the suspense up and the middle moving.

This is why writing is hard.

A writer who spends too much time focused on any one aspect of writing, whether it’s something about them and their process or some more analytical thing having to do with the story itself, almost always ends up unbalancing the story. In the worst cases, the whole thing sinks; in less extreme ones, the book ends up full of lumps: here is a page of characterization, then two pages of pure action, followed by three of dialog. It’s like driving over a corduroy road, or like mixing butter, flour, and milk and getting dumplings when what you wanted was a smooth cream sauce.

What advice-givers seldom mention is that all these things – including the writer-specific ones as well as the story-specific ones – are ingredients. You do want to use the best and freshest ingredients possible, but that alone will not guarantee that you end up with cream sauce instead of dumplings. You also have to get the proportions right, and mix them properly, in the right order, and under the right conditions, and then cook the result in the right way for what you are making. You can make a perfectly fine cake batter, but if you try to cook it in boiling water, the way you would make dumplings, well, it is not going to work very well, that’s all.

Unfortunately, nobody has come up with recipes for the novel equivalents of cake vs. dumplings vs. cream sauce. Writing is much more like the kind of recipes my grandmother used: take some leftover mashed potatoes, mix with flour, and roll out; spread with some cut apples and sprinkle with cinnamon sugar. Roll it up and bake in a hot oven until done. If you’re an experienced cook, you can probably make something edible from that recipe; if you’re not, it will probably take some experimentation, even if you have seen the dish made (or eaten it) and therefore have some idea what you’re going for.

Having some idea what you’re going for is important, because, as with cooking, different end results require starting with different proportions and preparations, and not necessarily all the same ingredients. Cake uses flour, butter, and milk, but also eggs, sugar, and a rising agent; cream sauce is generally just flour, butter, and milk. Dumplings…well, it depends on whether you’re making them to go in chicken soup, or whether you’re putting them in a stewed blueberry dessert, and also on whether you like yours light and fluffy or solid and chewy. Personal taste is an important factor.

What ingredients go into your novel depend, in part, on what kind of thing you want to do, in the most general sense. Fluff or drama? Comedy or tragedy? Specific genre or subgenre, or let’s-just-write-it-and-see? Planner or pantser? Different genres and subgenres require different proportions; a sweet Romance will have a lot more characterization and emotion and a lot less physical action than an action-thriller. A murder mystery pretty much requires a murder, the way stuffed mushrooms pretty much require mushrooms. If you hate the idea of writing a murder the way some people hate mushrooms, best pick a different story.

It is perfectly possible to cook/write something that you dislike yourself, but that people who do like that sort of thing really love. It takes a lot of motivation, though, because it’s usually not much fun, and usually quite a bit of experience, because if you don’t like it, you don’t know a good-tasting one from a bad-tasting one. I don’t make coffee for my guests because I hate the stuff and have no idea how to tell good from bad. On the other hand, my sister, who hates ginger but who is a very good cook, made some fabulous sweet-and-savory ginger not-quite-cookies for the three of us who came for lunch last weekend, because she knows we all love ginger…but she made us take the leftovers away. (It was a sacrifice, but somehow we managed.) I don’t think she’d have done that for very many other people.

So if you like light, fluffy fiction that’s heavy on characterization, you perhaps ought not to start off trying to write a gritty, action-packed dystopian novel. And when you are frustrated over your inability to shoehorn in more action or characterization, perhaps you should stop and think. Maybe your cream sauce isn’t supposed to have sugar in it.