Strengths and weaknesses

One of the questions I get a lot, especially when a class of students has been asked to come up with three questions each, is “Which one of your books is the best?” It’s not quite up there with “Where do you get your ideas?” but it’s definitely one of the top ten. And it is probably one of the ones I have the most trouble answering.

The problem I have is that I can’t pick out one title as a sort of “best in show,” which is what I think these people are asking for. I can’t pick out “which one has the best characters?” or “…the best plot?” or “…the best writing?” I even have trouble with “Which book are you proudest of having written?” because I’m never quite sure whether I am more pleased with the worldbuilding in Book A, the characters in Book B, the complexity of the plot in Book C, etc. I can answer the question “Which book did you have the most fun writing?” (Sorcery and Cecelia, hands down), but hardly anyone ever asks that.

“Best,” you see, is a subjective term when it comes to writing. There isn’t a list somewhere of how to weight different aspects of writing so that you can say with confidence that the clever, twisty plotting in this one makes it “better” than the one over there with the stellar character development…and even if there were, I expect nearly everyone would disagree with the results. Some people just like character development more than anything else, so as far as they are concerned, a book with stellar character development will always be “better” than one with weak characterization, even if the first one has a plot full of holes, leaden description, and clunky style.

Furthermore, different genres have different conventions. In science fiction, “head-hopping” is generally considered a sign of bad writing; in Romance novels, it is quite common, especially in the key scenes where the writer wants to “show” the inner monolog of both hero and heroine as they try to make up their minds about their relationship. Literary fiction places heavy emphasis on characterization; thrillers, on action-based plots; many mysteries, on the puzzle aspects of discovering whodunit.

Ideally, of course, one would try to do as many different things well as possible: good characterization and a well-developed setting and a strong plot or puzzle or idea. Sometimes, though, the various conventions are incompatible, as with the head-hopping/no-head-hopping divide between SF and Romance. More often, the writer just doesn’t have the space – or the skills – to do everything, all at once.

At that point, things become complicated. The writer can choose to focus on the thing he/she does very well, and write the lyrical style or the slam-bang action adventure or the character study that they know is their forte. The trouble is that if the writer does this repeatedly, they’ll never get better at doing the other things, the stuff that doesn’t come naturally. The only way I know to get better at plotting or characterization or action scenes or dialog is to practice, which means writing things that require stronger plots, deeper characterization, more action, or more dialog than whatever one has been writing.

Unfortunately, a fair number of folks go overboard when they try. That is, the writer whose strength is action-adventure will decide to work on his/her characterization, and proceeds to plan out a book that focuses closely on heavy-duty emotional changes in a raft of complex characters. Then they sit down to write it, and have to focus so closely and work so hard at the characterization that the plot (which was normally their strong point) ends up simplistic or full of holes due to the writer’s lack of attention.

This kind of hyper-focus on something in order to build the writer’s skills does work for some writers, so if you have a track record of jumping into the deep end of the pool and not drowning, and the idea appeals to you, by all means try it. Most of us, though, are better off with a more gradual approach – starting with the kind of story that does showcase the writer’s strength in plotting or characterization or action or dialog, and working out a subplot that will showcase more complex characterization or trickier plot twists or more clearly define speech patterns, then in the next story stepping up the desired skill-set in the central plot or main characters.

There are, of course, a few things that one can’t deal with using an incremental approach; for instance, a novel is either multiple viewpoint, or it isn’t, and trying to ease into it by having just one or two additional viewpoints scattered here and there in the story is seldom satisfactory (and probably won’t teach you much about how multiple viewpoint works). Story structure is a property of the whole story, and while one could theoretically have a story in which the central plotline follows one type of structure and a subplot follows another, that kind of mixed structure is actually more advanced for most writers than just telling the main story backwards or in parallel scenes or whatever.

The main thing to remember, though, is that “best” is subjective, and you will never get all readers to agree about it. There will always be people who don’t like your work at all, just as there will be those who think your first novel was your best and it’s been downhill all the way since then, or that it was your third or fifth or nineteenth novel that was the peak example of your writing skills. It can be gratifying to listen to these people argue with each other, until one stops to think about the implications. At that point, one is best off finding one of the readers who thinks you just keep getting better with every book, because honestly, that’s what we all want to do, isn’t it?