Marie Brennan's Blog, page 57

New Worlds: Corporal Punishment

“Spare the rod, spoil the child” — or for that matter, the criminal. The New Worlds Patreon tour of punishments takes a look at those inflicted on the body. Comment over there!

The post New Worlds: Corporal Punishment appeared first on Swan Tower.

Songs in 5?

I need recs for INSTRUMENTAL music (no lyrics, or at least not in English) written in some form of quintuple meter: 5/4, 5/8, something more arcane, whatever. Songs which are only partially in such a meter are acceptable, though, y’know, not some complicated jazzy thing where it’s like a measure here and three measures there and so forth; I’d like it to be recognizably quintuple without following along on the score to see where it changes.

The post Songs in 5? appeared first on Swan Tower.

New Worlds: Lock ‘Em Up

As the New Worlds Patreon looks at punishments, it seems only natural — given modern practices — to think first of imprisonment. Comment over there!

The post New Worlds: Lock ‘Em Up appeared first on Swan Tower.

New Worlds: Why Punishment

This month on the New Worlds Patreon my patrons have voted to look at the punishment aspect of law and order. Before we get into the specifics of what types of punishment we inflict, we should consider why we punish people at all — what goal(s) that’s supposed to achieve. Comment over there!

The post New Worlds: Why Punishment appeared first on Swan Tower.

Level 40!

I think I’m officially middle-aged today.

Which is a weird thing to type, because I sure as hell don’t feel middle-aged. And of course in our youth-obsessed culture, we find all kinds of ways to reassure people that it’s fine, they’re not old yet, because being old is assumed to be a terrible thing we all want to put off as long as possible. We also have lost anything resembling coherent transitions between stages of life. Our childhoods are absurdly extended — and when do they even end? Are you an adult at puberty? Eighteen? Twenty-one? Graduation from high school? Graduation from college? People in their mid-twenties often don’t really feel like “adults” yet. So when the heck do you count as “middle-aged”?

I think I probably am; I just need to wrap my brain around it. I’m forty. To somebody who’s eighty, sure, I’m a “young person,” but not in general. I’m about halfway through my statistical life expectancy, which is pretty much the definition of “middle.”

Right now I don’t particularly anticipate having a mid-life crisis, because I’m lucky enough to have a job, a husband, and a home I love. But there may be a little bit of an identity crisis as I try to redefine my sense of where I fit into the general shape of society. Obviously 40 is an arbitrary threshold for that, but any number would be arbitrary, and the whole point of a threshold is to clearly signal that you have left where you were before and entered somewhere else. Thresholds have a purpose.

As does the rest of this post. Years ago — seventeen of them, I believe — I was, for reasons I no longer recall, having kind of a downer day on my birthday. The sort that led me to think (in full awareness of how people might smack me for it) “I’m twenty-three today. What do I have to show for it?” In order to stave off that gloom, I sat down and wrote up an egotism post, listing off everything cool I’d ever done, all my accomplishments, with a strict rule that I wasn’t allowed to downplay or “yes, but” any of them. I continued that tradition sporadically over subsequent years, though I just checked and apparently I haven’t done this since 2016.

Level 40 seems like a good time to revisit that, especially given how much of 2020 seems determined to get me down. In its original form, even: not just what I’ve done since the previous post, but the whole shebang. So buckle in, y’all — and remember, the point of this is egotism. If you don’t want to see me patting myself on the back for my life, don’t read onward, because this is a modesty-free zone.

Let’s start with what I’ve learned.

Thanks particularly to my eclectic habits of course selection in college, I’ve studied human evolution, the Bronze Age in both China and the Aegean, ancient Egypt, ancient Rome, the early Christian church and its later medieval cathedrals, ancient Irish literature and mythology, Japanese history from the Jomon Period to the modern day, historical European witchcraft and modern neo-paganism, Hinduism, the mythologies of the Maya and the Zuñi, Viking Age society, and more. Language-wise, I’ve taken courses in Spanish, Latin, Japanese, Irish Gaelic, and Old Norse, plus much briefer dips into Finnish and Navajo. Since leaving school I’ve read piles of books on Polynesia, the Himalayas, the Middle East, West Africa, Mesoamerica, later periods of China, and enough books on England to very nearly qualify as a home Ph.D. I have an undergraduate degree from Harvard, and I went to Indiana University for graduate school, in one of the best folklore departments in the country — and not only that, but they gave me a five-year fellowship to write papers about role-playing games.

I’ve taught a bunch, too. I was a TA for a number of classes during graduate school; then I designed and taught two courses of my own, one on fairy tale retellings, one on writing science fiction and fantasy. As a kid I took TIP courses on science fiction, marine biology, tropical ecology, and geology; as an adult I went back and taught creative writing to kids like me, and it went so amazingly well I’m not sure I’ll ever top it. I’ve led numerous workshops on writing fight scenes, I’m starting to dip my toes into workshops on worldbuilding, and since this spring I’ve been doing online tutoring for a student in Hong Kong, teaching him creative writing.

I’ve also learned things that aren’t academic subjects. I know how to play both the piano and the French horn, and dammit, I hit the high E at the end of “Born to Run” when I went back for the 100th reunion of the Harvard Band last fall, even after not playing for seventeen years. (Practicing some on my mouthpiece ahead of time was a good idea.) I was a ballet dancer for thirteen years growing up, plus jazz and lyrical later on; parts of that still show in my flexibility and my turnout — how many forty-year-olds do you know who can do a full side-split? I’ve done historical fencing. I have a black belt in karate, and I will be testing for my second degree in the near-ish future. I know how to use sai and bo, and to a lesser extent also nunchaku and tonfa. I’m familiar enough with the basics of stage combat to have been the go-to combat choreographer for the theatre club during all four years of college. I know how to inkle-weave, and a bit of sewing and embroidery, and in the last few years I’ve learned how to cook decently well, including the confidence to sometimes just make stuff up on the basis of what I know about the general principles of the thing.

I’m a photographer. One who’s sold some photos, even; I’m also fairly sure the runaway success of my Reddit AMA a couple of weeks ago was due to me providing a photo with each response. As you can tell from the lineup there, I’ve been truly privileged to travel a bunch: I’ve visited the British Virgin Islands, Canada, Costa Rica, Croatia, France, Greece, India, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Japan (including Okinawa), Mexico, Monaco, Montenegro, Poland, Spain, Switzerland, Turkey, and the United Kingdom (including Wales and Scotland), plus in the United States, Arizona, California, Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Hawaii, Illinois, Indiana, Kansas, Maryland, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Missouri, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, North Carolina, North Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, South Dakota, Texas, Utah, Washington, and Wisconsin — maybe more where the visit was brief enough that I don’t recall it. Of those places, I’ve lived in four, those being Texas, Massachusetts, Indiana, and California, covering a pretty good swath of the this country.

I’ve played a lot of games, both tabletop and LARP. Currently Pathfinder and Numenera; prior to that, Vampire, Mage, Mummy, and Changeling; Aberrant, Exalted, and Scion; very briefly, Ars Magica; Legend of the Five Rings; Fading Suns; Nobilis; In Nomine; Unhallowed Metropolis; Buffy and Angel; D&D in it 3.5 and (very briefly) 2nd ed incarnations + some OGL d20 stuff in various settings. I’ve run campaigns for Changeling, Scion, Dragon Age (using Pathfinder as the rules system), and Legend of the Five Rings, plus two one-shot LARPs, and I’m incredibly proud of the fact that all of those games reached a conclusion — none of them fizzled out before the end, as games so often do. I’ve also written for games, particularly Legend of the Five Rings (fiction, setting material, and a little bit of mechanics) and Tiny d6.

Speaking of writing!

Yeah, this is a big one now — much bigger than it was when I was twenty-three. I have published . . . the numbers get complicated, actually. Let’s call it fifteen novels (Warrior, Witch, Midnight Never Come, In Ashes Lie, A Star Shall Fall, With Fate Conspire, Lies and Prophecy, Chains and Memory, A Natural History of Dragons, The Tropic of Serpents, Voyage of the Basilisk, In the Labyrinth of Drakes, With Fate Conspire, and Driftwood), plus a four-way collaborative novel (Born to the Blade). Three more are forthcoming: The Mask of Mirrors and its to-be-titled sequel, written in collaboration with Alyc Helms as M.A. Carrick, and The Night Parade of a Hundred Demons. Five novellas (Deeds of Men, Dancing the Warrior, Cold-Forged Flame, Lightning in the Blood, and The Eternal Knot), five novelettes (“And Blow Them at the Moon,” “False Colours,” “Welcome to Welton,” “Mad Maudlin,” and “La Molejera”), and fifty-seven short stories with another forthcoming (I’m not going to list those all individually), not counting the ten short stories I’ve written for L5R with another forthcoming. Also four novella-sized short story collections (Maps to Nowhere, Ars Historica, The Nine Lands, and Down a Street That Wasn’t There), two micro-sized collections (Monstrous Beauty and Never After), and five books of nonfiction (Writing Fight Scenes, Dice Tales, and three volumes to date of the New Worlds series — and oh yeah, that Patreon has been going for three and a half years without missing a single week).

And that doesn’t count the stuff I’ve written but not published, which I consider part of my achievements. There are six trunked novels, and (not counting things currently making the submissions rounds) about twenty short stories of various lengths, for a total of twenty-two full-length novels written not in collaboration with anybody else, five novellas, five novelettes, and about eighty-eight short stories. Add in the ones being submitted, and that last number goes up to ninety-nine . . . and then one I finished just a few days ago, bringing the number to a nice round hundred! Also a pile of fanfiction I’m not going to count up, mostly as gifts in exchanges, and stuff like scripts for Odyssey of the Mind scripts as a kid that I don’t really know how to count.

My fiction has been translated into French, German, Polish, Romanian, and Russian, along with many audio renditions of both novels and short fiction. It’s been nominated for the World Fantasy Award for Best Novel, the Hugo Award for Best Series, and the Grand Prix de l’Imaginaire; it’s won the Romantic Times Reviewers’ Choice Award for Best Fantasy Novel, the Prix Imaginales for Best Translated Novel, and the Isaac Asimov Award for Undergraduate Excellence in Science Fiction and Fantasy Writing, which was my first official success. A number of my stories have gotten honorable mentions in Year’s Best anthologies, and this year I unlocked the achievement of my first actual reprint, for “Vīs Dēlendī”. I’ve been solicited to provide a story for a number of anthologies. I’ve been a Guest of Honor at two cons, and there’s a third I can’t mention yet because it hasn’t been publicly announced. I’ve been on more panels than I can count, moderating quite a few of them, and the frequency with which people approach me afterward to say it was a great panel is truly gratifying. I’ve also done multiple book tours, and probably one of the biggest compliments I’ve received on my public reading skills was Mary Robinette Kowal — you know, the PROFESSIONAL AUDIOBOOK NARRATOR AND THEATRE PERFORMER — saying I read well enough that it didn’t matter which order we went in, when the two of us toured together.

In my personal life . . . a lot of this blurs the line between achievement and gratitude, because I can’t exactly take credit for all of these things. I’ve been happily married since 2007 to a guy I’ve been with since 1999, which is more than half my life now. We own a house that I love, in conjunction with a friend of sufficient depth and longevity that I just refer to her as my sister. Basically, and 2020 notwithstanding, my life is good.

Onward to Level 41 and beyond! And happy my birthday to all of you– I hope you have a lovely day.

The post Level 40! appeared first on Swan Tower.

New Worlds: The Magic of Dreams

Have you ever experienced sleep paralysis, or tried to get an answer to some unsolved question from your dreams? The New Worlds Patreon is wrapping up its sleep month with a look at the magic of dreams. Comment over there!

The post New Worlds: The Magic of Dreams appeared first on Swan Tower.

Units of Fiction IV: Attention and Focus (Chapters)

(This is the fourth post in a series about the craft consideration that goes into deciding where to put breaks between units of your story. Part I, Part II, Part III.)

As I said at the beginning, this whole series of posts sprang out of a conversation I was having with other writers about chapter length, which included some discussion of deciding where to start and end a chapter, i.e. where the breaks should come between them. After three posts mostly about other things, we at last come full circle back to the original question.

Length first, and with it, the question of attention span. Ty Frank — better known as one half of James. S.A. Corey, author of the Expanse series — said this in an interview with Lightspeed Magazine:

One of the things we learned is that three-thousand-word chapters is a fast pace that invites the reader to keep reading, because it seems like most people have the energy to read about four or five thousand words in one sitting. If you do three-thousand-word chapters, they read a chapter and a half, and most people aren’t going to be satisfied reading a chapter and a half, so we get email and tweets all the time from people saying, “I stayed up all night reading your book.” Well, there’s actually structural reasons why our books invite you to stay up all night reading them, some of which is in the chapter length.

I can definitely see merit to this. As I said back in the first post, short chapters make it very easy for readers to fall into the “snack trap” of saying, oh, just one more. On the other hand, a chapter break is a natural place to put the book down — so the more frequently those come, the more often you’re asking the reader “continue, Y/N?” Which means more opportunity for them to hit N and walk away.

So whether this works depends in part on how you end your chapters. I haven’t read any of the Expanse myself, though I’ve watched some of the TV show; I wouldn’t be surprised if Frank and Abraham also have a strong tendency to end their chapters on DUN DUN DUNNNNNN!!!! moments designed to make the reader feel like they have to know what happens next. As with scenes, though, doing that too often can become wearisome or even predictable. I’ve definitely read books where I can see the twists and cliffhangers coming from pages away, because I know there’s a chapter break coming up soon.

So let’s go back to those other aspects of how units can direct the reader’s attention: relationship between the component parts, and particular points of focus.

How long people can stay immersed is going to depend a lot on the reader. A fast reader or somebody with lots of free time might plow through twenty thousand words in a sitting, or more. A slower reader or someone reading on their commute may only get through two thousand or so. But I believe this is also a function of how the chapter is structured: that slower reader might plow through five thousand in a go if the entirety of it is one big set-piece event, rather than a collection of less interconnected scenes.

True story: for a while in my career I basically forgot how chapters even worked, because for four years I was writing the Onyx Court books, which are only divided into scenes and parts. When I started writing the Memoirs of Lady Trent, I had to re-learn this skill . . . and honestly, half the time I had to remember that chaptering was a thing I even needed to be doing in the first place. Every so often I would stop and wonder when the last time was that I put in a chapter break, only to discover I’d written twelve thousand words since then. Then I had to go back and retrofit the text with chapter divisions — and a large part of my decision-making process involved looking at the shape of the story and figuring out where it could most naturally be separated into more or less intraconnected blocks within the bounds of a certain wordcount range, rather than arbitrarily whacking it apart at numerical milestones.

These days I plan for that more, rather than doing it retroactively. When Alyc and I were drafting The Mask of Mirrors, we consciously aimed to structure the plot in a way that lent itself to chapters with a distinct identity. The result is that I can very easily tell you what chapter most events happen in, because a chapter isn’t just “whatever happened in words 21,000 to 24,000 of the book”: the first one is the launch of Ren’s con and her mark’s response; the second is the big social politics to-do at the Autumn Gloria; the third is where the characters go slumming in Lacewater; the fourth features maneuvering around the charter for the river numinat; etc. Not every chapter has a truly coherent theme to it — it would have warped the story if we tried to hold too strictly to that rule — but by and large, the boundaries of a chapter in that book mark out a group of related scenes and plots for the reader. Sometimes in ways that aren’t obvious up front . . . but that’s a tool in its own right, inviting the alert reader to guess at the possible interconnections hidden beneath the surface.

And that brings me to the question of points of focus. Where do you want the biggest impact to land? Chapters call the most strongly for end-loading as the default pattern, and are the most tolerant of a quieter start. You still want something of interest going on right away, of course, but it’s okay for that to be working at the smaller level of paragraph and scene structure, rather than needing the plot of the chapter to have an explosion (literal or metaphorical) right away. When the latter happens, it’s most frequently the result of the author breaking the usual nested structure of chapter > scene > paragraph by essentially dropping a chapter break into the middle of a scene. To borrow a familiar movie moment into prose, it’s the equivalent of ending the chapter on Darth Vader saying, “Luke, I am your father,” and then the reader turns the page and they’re still there at the base of Cloud City and the text is describing Luke’s disbelieving, horrified reaction. You can occasionally get away with the same thing as a scene break within a chapter — I think of that as being like a narrative blink — but mostly we do this as a chapter-separating device, a specific flavor of cliffhanger ending.

Most of the time, though, you’re not going to do that. Instead you’ll be looking at your scenes and weighing which one has the most exciting or intriguing conclusion, which one most tempts the reader into turning the page to see what happens next. And/or you’ll be considering the local through-line, and wrapping the chapter up when that line ends and a new one begins. If you’re working with multiple plotlines in multiple points of view, then you may have a high degree of freedom to sequence individual scenes as suits your chapter-building needs; a single-stranded plot with a single point of view will have much less. But you’ll also be working within the general confines of your chapter length, so that you don’t wind up with something two or three times the length of the one that came before — not without good reason, anyway.

Which means the structures, lengths, and break-points of scenes and chapters are interlocked, and furthermore those also interlock with the nature of what you’re writing. I’ve got an idea for a future novel that I want to have the general feel of a Jurassic Park-style thriller; as a result, I’ll be aiming for shorter chapters (around 3K), which also means I need shorter scenes (1000-1500 words, or big set-pieces that are 3K all on their own). For The Mask of Mirrors, the sweep and lushness and political intrigue means that Alyc and I regularly have scenes that are more like 2000-3000 words, and our chapters are very much on the long side, 8K and up. But that’s fine, because it gives us room to build up the larger structures of our plot, as opposed to telling a more linear story where it’s a cascading crisis from A to B to C.

Once that pattern is set, you start having to make decisions that take into account both the natural shape of the narrative and the unitary structure you want it to have. If you normally have three scenes of a reliably consistent length per chapter, but you’ve got a sequence of four scenes that forms a coherent whole and ends on a great bang, then you have to decide whether to group them into a longer chapter/split them into two shorter ones/make Scene 17 its own mini-sized chapter or whatever. Which you can do: I mentioned before that I had a short, single-scene chapter into the fifth book of the Memoirs of Lady Trent, for the same reason I sometimes write a single-sentence paragraph. If putting something at the beginning or end of a unit shines a spotlight on it, then making it be both the beginning and the end is like having all the spotlights converge on center stage. But in the hypothetical case of that four-scene arc, I might keep them together to make a longer chapter, because of the aforementioned idea of connection.

People who outline to a high degree can plan for this kind of thing. Those who figure out the story as they go along will need to be sensitive to its rhythm. Either way, playing with where you put your divisions can help you massage things into the shape you want: if an exciting chapter is getting way too long, maybe do an “I am your father” break at some key point in the middle. If a pair of closely related scenes feel really choppy, try narrating through the bridge between them to make a single scene instead. Move a conversation to a later chapter so that it’s rubbing shoulders with related ideas (assuming your timeline allows for that), rather than making it hang out on its own in a void of other things, especially if that levels out your chapter lengths in the process.

There aren’t any hard and fast rules for this, except the very few I mentioned before (like starting a new scene when you switch viewpoints in third limited). Mostly it’s a matter of getting a feel for it through practice, and through paying attention to how other authors do it. But hopefully these posts have offered up at least a few concrete principles to think about when making those decisions.

The post Units of Fiction IV: Attention and Focus (Chapters) appeared first on Swan Tower.

Units of Fiction III: Attention and Focus (Scenes)

(This is the third post in a series about the craft consideration that goes into deciding where to put breaks between units of your story. Part I, Part II.)

The second post of this series looked at the ideas of attention and focus, and how those apply to the structure of a paragraph. Now let’s turn those same lenses onto scenes.

First, the notion that a unit asks you to sustain your attention until its over. Scenes don’t require the same degree of concentration from the reader as a paragraph; if you put a book down in the middle of a scene to go refill your water glass, you probably won’t have to start over at the beginning because you don’t remember where you left off. But ideally, a scene should hold the reader’s attention without pause, and not let them up for air until it’s done.

One of the ways it can do this is through unity. We no longer hold to Aristotle’s classical unities as such, but in some ways the concept is still alive today at the scene level: we do generally expect unity of viewpoint, as I mentioned before, and we have a tendency to default to unity of location and time as well. When the characters shift location or a lot of time passes, we often insert a scene break to signal the transition and skip over the intervening gap.

But that isn’t the only way to handle those shifts. You can also use the narration itself to signal movement or the passage of time. How do you know which approach is better in a given situation?

As with some of the paragraph-level decisions, this is partly an aesthetic choice. I do find, though, that certain conditions encourage me to use narrative bridging rather than a scene break. If a character arrives in a location and then is made to wait, the arrival would be too short to qualify as a scene on its own — it’s really more just setting up the actual scene — so the waiting will be narrated (briefly) rather than skipped. And that can provide me with a useful opportunity for exposition, as illustrated here (again drawing from The Mask of Mirrors):

Renata advanced with the confidence of someone who believed she deserved to be at the head of the line. That got her halfway there; she made it another quarter on river rat instincts, finding gaps to ooze through, feet to “accidentally” step on. After that she had to shuffle slowly forward with everyone else, until she finally made it to the secretary and presented her license and her request.

At that point, her expensive-looking clothing and the Traementis name carried enough weight to get her out of the press of public advocates crowding the entry hall and into the antechamber for Fulvet. A bribe — originating in Vargo’s pocket, not Renata’s — moved her name up the list there, but Donaia was right; no one at the Charterhouse was eager to do House Traementis any favors. Renata settled in for a long wait.

She knew a little about the history of the Fulvet office from the days when it had been held by House Traementis. Letilia’s father, prior holder of that seat, was the man notorious for polluting half the Dežera. Not on purpose; no, it was just Nadežra’s usual graft and corruption, Crelitto Traementis pocketing so many of the funds for a bridge across the river at Floodwatch that the bridge later collapsed. Fifty-three people died, and the bulk of the wreckage washed into the West Channel, where it collided with the enormous prismatium framework of the cleansing numinat . . . and broke it.

It goes on a bit from there, and I won’t quote the whole thing because it would be too long. But the breathing space between Renata’s arrival and her meeting with Fulvet is a prime opportunity to fill in some relevant information about the situation she’s walking into. Likewise with a spatial transition:

As the bearers [of her sedan chair] headed for a narrow exit from the square, Renata drew the curtains shut. Traementis Manor was in the Pearls, a cluster of islets strung along the Upper Bank of the River Dežera. The river here ran pure and clear thanks to the numinat that protected the East Channel, and the narrow streets and bridges were clean; whichever families held the charters to keep the streets clear of refuse wouldn’t dream of letting it accumulate near the houses of the rich and powerful.

But the rocky wedge that broke the Dežera into east and west channels was a different matter. For all that it held two of Nadežra’s major institutions—the Charterhouse in Dawngate, which was the seat of government, and the Aerie in Duskgate, home to the Vigil that maintained order—the Old Island was also crowded with the poor and the shabby-genteel. Anyone riding in a sedan chair was just asking for beggars to crowd at their windows.

A scene break here, picking up when Renata arrives at her destination, would miss out on the chance to orient the reader in the geography and personality of the city. Especially since this takes place early in the book, using the travel time to fill in that context is very handy; later in the book, we’d be far more likely to skip over it to keep the action moving.

Deciding whether to narrate through or skip over isn’t just about exposition, though; it goes back to the idea that a unit signals to the reader that there’s a relationship between its component parts. Take that first example, with Renata waiting in the antechamber: the overall concept for that scene is “Renata visits Fulvet’s office to propose that he grant House Traementis the new charter they desperately need.” Her arrival at the Charterhouse and time spent waiting for the actual meeting are part of that concept, therefore they fit naturally into a scene together. But if the flow of the narrative were that Renata gets into a shouting match with a rival in the foyer of the Charterhouse, then goes to Fulvet’s office to bargain for a new charter, we would almost certainly split that into two scenes. We might keep the exposition, but it would be part of the opening for the second scene (“Renata had been waiting nearly an hour . . .”), not a bridging element to graft two unrelated encounters together.

What about the question of focus? For scenes, it’s a little different from paragraphs. It’s fine for a paragraph to start off with something vital but end with no particular impact, but a scene structured that way would read a little oddly. At this level, there’s more expectation that the conclusion will pack some kind of punch. Said punch generally falls into one of two categories: either suspense, or resolution.

In its most overt form, the suspense approach is the classic cliffhanger ending. When I was on book tour and reading from Voyage of the Basilisk, I got a lot of very satisfying reactions because the scene I chose ended with the sentence, “And then I began to drown.” DUN DUN DUNNNNNN!!!! Naturally everyone wanted to know what happened next. This approach is excellent for propelling the reader onward into the next scene.

But if you do that all the time, it gets wearying. For a while the TV show Alias ran with a structure where every single episode consisted of the last quarter of the previous episode’s plot, followed by the first three quarters of this one’s plot, apparently just so they could constantly be ending on a cliffhanger. Doing that occasionally can be okay, but over and over again? I found it obnoxious.

Fortunately, suspense doesn’t always have to be at the level of DUN DUN DUNNNNNN!!!! Anything that evokes curiosity or apprehension in the reader falls under the header of suspense: what will the character choose? Where are they going? How can they solve this problem? What will the consequences of this event be? Think of it as a trail of breadcrumbs, leading the reader onward.

In the long run, though, the reader will also crave some resolutions here and there. This is especially true in longer books, or in stories that aren’t aiming for the feeling of a breakneck thriller — but frankly, even in the latter, I think quieter moments have their place. If everything is always crashing onward, the effect starts to grate.

Resolution endings are anything where the reader gets payoff for a thing they’ve been anticipating. This might be a problem solved, a conflict settled, a question answered, a secret revealed. Which may still have knock-on effects, of course; these two types of scene ending aren’t binary opposites, but rather flavors that may predominate to a greater or lesser degree. A character making a decision is a resolution, but one whose unknown consequences may leave the reader in suspense.

What this means for your structure and your breaks is that you want to order the flow of the scene such that there’s some kind of impact at the end, rather than it just tailing off until it stops. If there are multiple impacts in the scene — which is totally fine — then look at the shape they create, and ask yourself whether it’s a good shape. Are they building up from small to large? That’s often desirable, so the ending doesn’t feel like an anticlimax. But sometimes what the content actually requires will be a big impact up front, followed by its effects; then what you need is some feeling of closure at the end, or the introduction of a new element to provide some fresh momentum. Once you have that, you’re done.

Up to a point. Co-writing is a great way to force yourself to articulate things you’ve always done by unconscious reflex, and while Alyc and I were drafting The Mask of Mirrors, we had numerous discussions about “playing” characters on and off the metaphorical stage. Do you show a character arriving at a location, or start the scene with them already there? Do you show them concluding their business, or cut off on interesting line of dialogue?

Films and TV have, I think, really encouraged us in the direction of in medias res beginnings and endings to scenes — TV especially, because the constraints of broadcasting make for a very strict runtime, and they have to ensure that every minute counts. I think that approach has a place in prose fiction, but as with the question of whether you narrate or break past a shift in location or time, that place depends on where you are in the story. Early in a novel, playing a character on or off gives you more opportunity for context. Later in the story, or at other points of faster pace or higher tension, getting in and out fast keeps things moving.

(On the other hand, that does encourage one to end scenes on characters saying something scathing or dramatic, followed by the author skipping out on the effect of said line. In real life, we don’t poof away from a conversation after someone delivers a grand revelation or a biting insult — and sometimes your story is better served by making everybody stand there awkwardly, dealing with the fallout.)

With paragraphs and scenes addressed, our last post will return to where this whole pile of thinking started: chapters.

The post Units of Fiction III: Attention and Focus (Scenes) appeared first on Swan Tower.

Units of Fiction II: Attention and Focus (Paragraphs)

(This is the second post in a series about the craft consideration that goes into deciding where to put breaks between units of your story. You can find the first post here.)

In the first post of this series, I talked about the mechanics and pacing of where to break between paragraphs, scenes, and chapters. But “you have to start a new one under these conditions” and “merits and demerits of short vs. long” doesn’t get you very far; there are still enormous aesthetic decisions involved in where you choose to place your breaks.

(This is where I start flailing vaguely in the direction of articulating things I know, but have never tried to explain.)

As I said in that first post, I think this is largely a matter of regulating your reader’s attention. Unpacking that more, I think there are (at least) three aspects to this:

A unit, be it a paragraph, a scene, or a chapter, asks the reader to sustain their attention until it’s over. The intensity of that attention varies — more for a paragraph; less as you go up the scale — but if they’re going to look away, they should ideally do that when the unit ends, not partway through.
A unit is a way of signaling to the reader that there is a relationship between its component parts. Units whose component parts are unrelated are usually less effective — and again, that’s most true at the paragraph level, and less so as you go up the scale.
Finally, a unit guides the reader’s attention to particular points of focus. This is primarily true at the beginning or end of the unit.

Because the operation of each of these things differs significantly between sizes of unit, let’s take them one at a time, starting with paragraphs.

*

First, sustained attention. It’s not uncommon or all that problematic for a reader to pause briefly in the middle of reading a scene or a chapter (because they need a drink or whatever), but I suspect people rarely do this in the middle of a paragraph unless they’re interrupted or really, really bored. That’s why, of the three units we’re discussing, I say the intensity of attention is probably highest at the paragraph level.

Which means that a paragraph that goes on for too long can be exhausting. I wouldn’t be surprised if this is partly due to the increasing pace of life and the many distractions around us, which have badly fragmented our ability to concentrate; I’ve read period works where a paragraph can go on for more than a page, and man, I find myself having to come up for air mid-swim. Conversely, a story whose paragraphs are all really short feels like I’m reading Twitter, everything chopped into bites small enough for the attention span of a hyperactive puppy.

And that has detrimental effects for the “grouping” aspect of the unit, which is again most vital at the paragraph level. If a paragraph signals that everything in it is connected somehow, then if all the paragraphs are short, nothing is connected very strongly. It’s just a bunch of beads on a string, and none of them are very large. You know how people say Twitter is a terrible place for conveying deep thoughts, because the format limits your ability to be nuanced and complex? The same is true here.

I also find that one of the most glaring flaws of amateur writing is the lack of awareness regarding paragraph unity. Consider a scene which shows a woman coming home, and compare the following three versions:

*

Monica came in and shut the door behind her. The living room windows were open, their curtains fluttering in the breeze. She dropped her keys in the dish. From the kitchen there was a tempting smell of gumbo. Easing out of her shoes, she sighed and dug her toes into the rug. On the couch, her cat woke up and began to wash himself. Then she hung up her coat in the closet and said, “I’m home!”

*

Monica came in and shut the door behind her. She dropped her keys in the dish. Easing out of her shoes, she sighed and dug her toes into the rug. Then she hung up her coat in the closet and said, “I’m home!” On the couch, her cat woke up and began to wash himself. The living room windows were open, their curtains fluttering in the breeze. From the kitchen there came a tempting smell of gumbo.

*

Monica came in and shut the door behind her. She dropped her keys in the dish. Easing out of her shoes, she sighed and dug her toes into the rug. Then she hung up her coat in the closet and said, “I’m home!”

On the couch, her cat woke up and began to wash himself. The living room windows were open, their curtains fluttering in the breeze. From the kitchen there came a tempting smell of gumbo.

*

(Not great prose, of course. Because I wanted something where I could keep the wording exactly the same and not have it be nonsensical or cause my eyeballs to bleed, I made up an example for this post, rather than using text drawn from a real story of mine.)

The first version jerks the reader’s attention around by switching repeatedly between things that aren’t very closely linked. Yes, they all have to do with “Monica arrives at home,” but there are two different components in there (what Monica is doing, and what’s going on in her environment), and mixing them does the story no favors. This is especially jarring when it happens in first-person fiction, because then you feel like the narrator’s focus is all over the place. The second is better, because at least it’s A and then B, but the third works best because it separates A and B with a paragraph break.

An aside, which is relevant to what I’m about to say: I think prose fiction writers should always be leery of craft comparisons to TV and film, because there is an utterly crucial difference between those two kinds of media. Prose feeds you information through one channel, which is the words on the page. TV and film feed you information through two channels, the audio and the video. Which means they can create effects through the juxtaposition of those channels, e.g. by having Character A talk offscreen (audio) while the camera remains on Character B and their reactions (video). You can receive the dialogue and its effect simultaneously, in a way that’s just not possible in the unilinear format of prose. But this isn’t to say that prose is somehow inferior; it can do lots of things A/V media can’t, like direct interiority. It just means that we have to take different routes to achieving our desired effects.

Having said that, I do think there’s a semi-useful A/V metaphor here, which is the cut. Ending one paragraph and beginning another is a bit like ending one camera shot and beginning another: it redirects the audience’s attention to a new subject. In a film, you wouldn’t generally expect to get a montage (a quick series of cuts) jumping back and forth between the woman putting her keys down — look, there’s a room with a couch and a cat — now she’s taking off her shoes — shot toward the kitchen — hanging up her coat — etc. It wouldn’t be unheard-of to get a single continuous shot panning from her arrival to the room. But the most common approach would be to first show her routine in the front hall, then cut to what’s going on at home.

Deciding where to put the “cut” is where the question of guidance and flow comes in. Most paragraphs are, to a greater or lesser degree, going to do one of two things: they’ll either start with the point of focus and then unpack it, or lead the reader up to the point of focus at the end.

The first of those approaches will probably be familiar to just about everybody, since “topic sentence, then supporting evidence!” is the constant refrain of poor, beleaguered schoolteachers despairing of ever teaching their students to write a coherent paper. That always annoyed me, though, because sometimes your purpose is better-served by leading the reader through your train of thought, arriving at your conclusion at the end. But I digress . . .

Compare these two examples:

The Traementis made the perfect target: small enough these days that only Donaia stood any chance of spotting Renata as an imposter, and isolated enough that they would be grateful for any addition to their register. In the glory days of their power and graft, they’d been notorious for their insular ways, refusing to aid their fellow nobles in times of need. Since they lost their seat in the Cinquerat, everyone else had gladly returned the favor.

I consider this front-loaded because the purpose of the paragraph is to add detail to its opening sentence, i.e. why the main character has chosen a particular noble house to con. (This and subsequent selections are drawn from The Mask of Mirrors, so I don’t have to keep making up random examples with no surrounding context.) Therefore, it starts by calling them the perfect target, and spends the rest of the paragraph unpacking what makes them so perfect. Contrast with:

The close confines meant Sibiliat’s flock shifted like starlings in flight, changing partners to follow the banter. Renata doubted it was an accident that every single one of the nobles found occasion to walk alongside her and comment on her mask—and, by implication, the man she’d gotten it from. Their approach was more genteel than the river rats she’d known, but the behavior was the same: testing whether she was fit to run with their crew.

I consider this end-loaded because the important thing here isn’t that this group of people walking along keeps shifting their configuration; instead it builds up to the final line, which is that there’s some social fencing going on here, and if Renata doesn’t hold her own, she may find herself cast out.

Both approaches work just fine, and which one you want will depend on both the situation and your aesthetic preferences, though you should use both rather than always following the same format. Front-loading a paragraph is ideal when you want to explain a previously-established point, or when a character is reacting to something surprising or upsetting; it feels weird if the reader gets multiple sentences of context, then the supposedly knee-jerk reaction. (Though every so often, you can do that for ironic effect.) End-loading is ideal when the context is helpful to building up a new point. What you almost never want to do, though, is bury the focal point in the middle of the paragraph — or the middle of a scene or a chapter.

There’s one other option, but it should be used sparingly, because otherwise it stops working at all. Consider the following:

Ren eased backward, pressing herself against the wall for cover, even though it crawled with mold and river beetles.

As soon as she rounded the corner, she started moving faster, trying to put distance between herself and whatever [redacted] was doing.

She sacrificed caution for speed, and paid the price.

Hands shoved her shoulders from behind at the same moment a kick took her knee from under her.

Ren fell hard, skidding in the mud, all the wind driven from her lungs.

Where’s the focal point? Which part of that is supposed to really hit home, more than the other stuff around it?

A single-sentence paragraph is like shining a spotlight on something. But if you shine a spotlight equally on everything, the audience doesn’t know where to look. So while a really short paragraph is an excellent tool, it carries the most impact when it’s the exception to the surrounding rule. Overused, it starts to feel like every! sentence! is shouting! at! the reader!

In actuality, that segment is paragraphed like this:

Ren eased backward, pressing herself against the wall for cover, even though it crawled with mold and river beetles. As soon as she rounded the corner, she started moving faster, trying to put distance between herself and whatever [redacted] was doing.

She sacrificed caution for speed, and paid the price.

Hands shoved her shoulders from behind at the same moment a kick took her knee from under her. Ren fell hard, skidding in the mud, all the wind driven from her lungs. [etc; the paragraph goes on from here with some more action]

Because the part we wanted to spotlight was the transition from “get away” to “oh crap.”

When I’m drafting, I do a lot of fiddling with paragraph structure. I’ll rearrange a graf to shift a front-loaded point to the end or an end-loaded point to the front, move the final sentence of one graf to the beginning of the next or vice versa, break something out into its own graf or combine it with an adjacent one. I get annoyed with myself when five paragraphs in a row all have the same number of lines (it means my rhythm is getting predictable and repetitious), or if I realize I’ve got three sequential instances of larger graf followed by single line. Or just that the flow of ideas is muddy because I put my paragraph breaks in the wrong places or buried the focus in the middle somewhere. There’s a lot of flexibility here — rephrasing your sentences can allow you to make big changes in the paragraph structure — so this is where a lot of the moment-to-moment effect of the story happens.

Certainly not all of it, though. Which is why tomorrow we’ll turn our attention to scenes.

The post Units of Fiction II: Attention and Focus (Paragraphs) appeared first on Swan Tower.

Units of Fiction I: Mechanics and Pacing

A discussion among my fellow writers of chapter length and where to break (or not) got me reflecting on how little writing advice there is for thinking about this — and then from there I fell down a rabbit hole of realizing how even less advice there is for the sub-units below the chapter, the scene and the paragraph. (Or the higher-level units, the part or the book in a series . . . but that’s going to have to be a separate bit of pondering.)

This is stuff we’re apparently expected to learn by trial and error. You write stuff, and you notice — somehow — that breaking in certain places works better than others, and so you improve. Nobody ever really taught me how to think about these issues, beyond a few very basic mechanical points, and so as a consequence I’m not even sure how to articulate what it is that I do, even though I’m relatively pleased with how I’m doing it. This is the first in a series of posts that constitute an attempt to figure that out by talking through it out loud (so to speak), and I hope it will be of use to other people.

Note: what I have to say here is geared toward fiction writing, but certain aspects of it would apply to nonfiction as well, whether that be a blog post or an academic article.

Organizing it is a little bit hard, though, because I want to talk about all three of paragraphs, scenes, and chapters, and some of the points apply to all of them, but some don’t. Which means it’s not ideal to separate them, but it also isn’t ideal to tackle them all at once. I’m going to do a little from Column A, a little from Column B; I’ll start out with talking about the aspects where they’re the closely related, then break it up for where they diverge. Which also means this is going to be a multi-part discussion — four parts in total, with one being posted each day.

So with that context out of the way . . . in thinking about this, I’ve come around to the opinion that there are three major factors at play in how we decide to break up the units of our tale. Those are: mechanics, pacing, and attention. And of those three, I think attention is both the most subtle and the most important.

*

Mechanics are fairly straightforward. We probably all got taught that when you change speakers in your dialogue, you should start a new paragraph — though even there, this rule can be bent. If all you’re doing is this:

“Shall we?” I asked, and he said, “Let’s.”

Then you can probably get away with not separating them (though fussy purists will make faces at you).

Similarly, we probably all got taught that if you aren’t writing in a deliberately omniscient point of view, then you should put in a scene break when you switch perspectives. I fudged this one in my first published novel, because I had a scene where it was very right for the reader to see what was happening in the heads of both of the main characters, but that was a special case; by and large, failure to separate points of view gets labeled “head-hopping” and is seen as a bad thing. (Though I’ll note that this, like everything to do with viewpoint, is purely an agreed-upon convention. As long as the reader doesn’t get confused, there’s no reason head-hopping couldn’t be a valid technique — and I believe in some corners of the fiction world, nobody bats an eyelash at it.)

Chapters are more flexible in this regard. The only mechanical constraints tend to be the ones you create for yourself: you don’t have to start a new chapter when you switch POV, but if that’s how you’ve done the first half of the book, there’s a bit of inertia pushing you to go on doing that. Only a bit, though; if you have a good reason to break that pattern, you can. A slightly stiffer constraint tends to be average length: if all of your chapters have been in the ballpark of four thousand words long, then one that’s only fifteen hundred or one that balloons up to seven thousand will feel out of place. But even then, sometimes you want that out-of-place feeling. I deliberately threw a very short chapter into the final book of the Memoirs of Lady Trent, in part to startle the reader.

I had other reasons for doing that, though. Which leads us into the next consideration here.

*

Pacing is something of an “eye of the beholder” deal. On the level of sentences, I’ve often seen the received wisdom that short sentences make the action seem faster, but my experience as a reader is that the opposite is true: since a period signals the end of a thought and a pause before the next sentence, lots of short sentences in a row make me feel like a choke-leash is jerking me to a halt every few words. I talked about this in Writing Fight Scenes:

Penthesilea charged at her enemy. She raised her sword. She chopped down at his head. He dodged. His sword cut along her side. She cried out in pain. Then she shoved him back with her shield. He stumbled. She ran him through.

Whereas longer sentences pull the reader along with less of a pause — up to a point, at least. When the sentence gets so long and complex that the reader has to stop and reorient themselves before the end, you’ve gone too far. (Eighteenth-century English writers, I am looking at you.) I suspect this becomes very noticeable in audio, where the narrator is controlling the pace of delivery. Also, note that short sentences seriously limit your options for how they’re structured: when there’s only one or two clauses, you can’t provide much variety.

When it comes to paragraphs, scenes, and chapters, though, I can see a better argument for “short goes fast” — again, up to a point. If every paragraph is a single sentence, I get the choke-leash effect once more. If every paragraph is the same length, then there’s no rhythmic variation, much like when every sentence is the same length. And I remember reading a book where the scene structure became absolute garbage, because the writer wasn’t thinking like a novelist. We were in the POV of a character clinging to the back of a truck while a monster attacked; then there was a scene break, followed by a single paragraph of POV from the driver of the truck, slamming on the brakes; then another scene break, and back to the guy clinging to the outside of the truck.

That isn’t prose fiction. That’s the author imagining the blockbuster movie they really hope someone will make out of their book.

But it’s true that if a scene is short, then the author isn’t leading us gently by the hand into the setting of the moment and exploring all the ramifications of what happens there. They’re getting in and out fast, hitting only the key elements in order to keep things moving forward. (Whether they’re doing so effectively is a separate question.) This can be a good thing to do as you reach a climactic section, and want the feeling of a fast-moving tale.

Similarly, short chapters serve a good purpose in luring the reader onward. The end of a chapter is a natural place to put a book down and take a break, but if each chapter is short, it’s easy to be tempted by the thought of just one more, because it won’t take long to read. On the other hand . . . the end of a chapter is a natural place to put a book down and take a break, so the more frequently those come, the more opportunities you’re offering the reader to walk away. They’re coming up for air, instead of staying immersed for longer periods of time. It’s a balancing act.

One which will probably be guided in part by what you’re writing. I haven’t done a statistical survey on this, but I wouldn’t be surprised in the slightest to find that thrillers, urban fantasy, and other such subgenres tend toward shorter chapters and scenes and even paragraphs, while (say) secondary world epic fantasy tends longer on all three fronts. Longer units give you more room to build stuff up, which is actively necessary when you need to orient your reader in an unfamiliar world. You can’t lean on reader familiarity as a shorthand, and incluing — the delicate salting of exposition throughout the text, rather than dropping it in efficient but infodumpy wodges — winds up requiring more words to pull off.

And that starts taking this in the direction of attention. Which is the point where I start needing to discuss paragraphs, scenes, and chapters individually, because what kind of attention you’re trying to manage and how best to do that becomes meaningfully different . . . different enough, in fact, that each of them will be getting its own post. For those, tune in for the next few days!

The post Units of Fiction I: Mechanics and Pacing appeared first on Swan Tower.