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Commonalities Between Heroes and Villains

From Writers Helping Writers, this post: Five Commonalities Between Heroes and Villains

I am immediately suspicious, as you might imagine. Not that I think there aren’t commonalities. Both hero and villain are probably human. I mean, I can think of exceptions, but that seems likely. I expect both hero and villain have some sort of past that involves, probably, good days and bad days. Possibly both hero and villain might pause to pat a puppy, who can say?

But a post title like this means I suspect the post is going to say something like, “Villains are the heroes of their own stories! We should have sympathy for the villain. Poor guy has a tragic past! You should make your reader feel your villain is understandable. The best villains are just one step away from heroes!”

And so on. I do not agree, or at least I agree only around the edges of this kind of notion, so I’m prepared to be quite critical of this post. But I haven’t read it yet, so maybe I should do that. Here’s how it starts:

It’s been said that the best villains don’t know they’re villains; they think they’re the hero of the story. And this is true because a well-crafted baddie has his own moral code. Compared to the protagonist’s, it’s twisted and corrupt, but it still provides guardrails that guide him through the story. 

Bold and link from the original, and yep, there we go, the villain is the hero of his own story. Well, I don’t care. I’m not interested in the ins and outs of the villain’s twisted moral code. I don’t care about the traumatic childhood that made the villain into the person he is today, and I most certainly do not want to be forced into the villain’s pov to explore any of that.

Because villains are typically evil, it’s easy to fill them up with flaws and forget the positive traits. But good guys aren’t all good and bad guys aren’t all bad, and characters written this way have as much substance as the flimsy cardboard they’re made of.

The statement above draws on both the “villains should be sympathetic” and “the villain is just a step away from the hero” ideas, but actually depends primarily on a ridiculous strawman argument. I mean, you can write a villain who is sympathetic and pats puppies, I’m not saying that can’t work or is a bad thing to do. Like everything else, if you do it well, it’s fine. But there’s little excuse for the strawman above. Good guys aren’t all good, really! Wow, there’s a revelation! Unlike ALL THE BOOKS where the good guy is ALL GOOD, you should take care to write a sophisticated story where the good guys have FLAWS. That would be so different!

Look, there is no need to state a strawman premise like this. You can just say: Your villain will be most persuasive/engaging/complex/human/interesting if he has good traits as well as bad traits. I would still disagree with that — I mean, I would disagree that it’s necessary to strive to make the villain complex, though you can do that if you want to. But at least that kind of statement wouldn’t be based on an assumption that lots of authors haven’t noticed that heroes can have negative traits or villains can have positive traits.

Well, I did mention that the post title put me in critical mode. Maybe I’m being unfair. Let me see where this post is going …

Why are [villains] the way they are? What trauma, genetics, or negative influencers have molded them into their current state? Why are they pursuing their goal—what basic human need is lacking that achieving the goal will satisfy?

Wow, this was a predictable post. That’s not me being hypercritical, it’s just true. I honestly did not read this post before predicting what points it would make, but there they all are.

Fine, you know what, let’s go in a different direction. Not Five Commonalities, but instead:

Five Types of Villains, Some Of Whom Are Not At All Like The Hero:

1) The villain who is the hero of his own story, because sure, sometimes that happens. His priorities are iffy. This would be … hmm. It would be like the villain in Sharon Shinn’s recent book, The Shuddering City. The villain is the sort who’s all about the greatest good for the greatest number, and a spot of human sacrifice here or there is a price he’s willing to pay. Or it would be like the King of Casmantium in The Griffin Mage trilogy, who’s decided that a small war that nets Casmantium a decent harbor is a fine idea if he can pull it off.

2) The villain who is all about getting rich or self-aggrandizement or whatever, and doesn’t care about the mayhem he commits on his way to his goal. The sociopathic type, I guess. This is a villain who won’t go out of his way to torture puppies, but doesn’t care if puppies are getting tortured. Let me think. Okay, I haven’t read these for years, but this is like Edward in the Anita Blake series by Laurel Hamilton. Who isn’t a villain, incidentally, but he’s definitely a sociopath. Who else? Oh, Jamie Lannister in Game of Thrones. Little kid sees you involved incestuously with your sister? Throw the child off a roof, problem solved. (Or it was supposed to be solved, I grant it didn’t work out that way.) Throwing that child off the roof was Jamie’s defining moment, though he certainly got worse from there.

3) The villain who has been forced into evil and has been too weak to prevent that from happening. This may be my very least favorite type of villain. We’re often supposed to sympathize with this villain. I don’t. Worst of all if this is the protagonist, or a protagonist. The Gaslight Dogs by Karin Lowachee offers a character like this: Jarrett, one of the two protagonists, begins the story passive, ineffectual, and callous; but at the end, he is evil. It’s a horrific character arc, a grimdark character arc, and I will never read a novel where this happens except by accident. Extreme Ugh.

4) The creepy villain you don’t understand at all. This is like Lilienne from The City in the Lake or the Wyvern King from The Keeper of the Mist. This kind of villain can work great! You get an uncanny valley feel from this villain, who is not sympathetic, not understandable, has no revealed backstory, and does not resemble the hero or, indeed, any normal person.

5) The sadistic, vicious villain who would torture puppies except he has human playthings instead. This is like Lorellan, obviously. It doesn’t matter that this is arguably not his fault. It doesn’t matter that the curse of sorcery flattened his personality and turned him into this kind of villain. He is not a bit sympathetic and he isn’t mean to be, his backstory is totally unimportant, and look at that, we have a bad guy with no good traits and does that ruin the story? No, it does not. This kind of flat villain is perfectly fine in some stories, and TUYO demonstrates that. In my admittedly biased opinion, but still.

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Common problems with dialogue —

A post at Anne R Allen’s blog: 9 Common Dialogue Problems—And How to Fix Them.

Here’s how this post begins:

What we’re looking for is believable dialogue, not realistic dialogue. In fiction, we’re usually aiming for believability, not realism.

And dialogue tags! Dialogue tags are probably the biggest problem in newbie writing. Is “said” really invisible?” We want to show a little creativity, but avoid the “Tom Swifty” trap…

Yes, seems about right. Or maybe not quite, though those two things are certainly THE two things when writing dialogue: we want (a) the dialogue itself to sound good and (b) the dialogue tags to disappear from the reader’s attention. We also want something else, I think — no, two other things: we want the dialogue to establish character and we also want it to pull the reader into the setting. That’s definitely a lot to load onto the dialogue, but we want ALL of that. Let’s take a look at the linked post … okay, we just start by making the typical point, that to make dialogue sound right, it needs to sound real, which means it can’t be too realistic. That part is straightforward.

But the linked post says “we want to show a little creativity” in dialogue tags, but I don’t actually think “creativity” is what we’re going for in dialogue tags. Wait, let me rephrase that. I mean, I don’t think creativity is the aim AT ALL when it comes to dialogue tags; that’s the wrong way to frame it. Everyone’s all concerned about dialogue tags, that part is definitely true, but tension between creativity and “Tom Swifties” is not the reason. The thing with dialogue tags is: we want them to be clear but invisible. That’s why “he said, she said, he said, she said” can be just as obtrusive as “Tom Swifties.” AND we want the dialogue itself to build character, while we want the tags to build setting as the people speaking look or move around.

All right, back to the linked post. Nine common problems. What are these nine problems? Ten are actually given. The last supposedly isn’t a problem, but I think it can be. Let’s take a look:

1) Big Chunks of Dialogue with no Action or Internal Thought

Is that a problem? Yes, it is. Personally, if I think a character’s been speaking for a good while and the reader needs a break, good time to walk across the room and look out the window. Pick up a wine glass. Something. Anything! But yes, break up a big chunk of dialogue with action or — I would say — reaction. If someone’s saying something fraught, someone else ought to react to that. It needn’t be with internal thought, but it should be something.

2) Too Much Realism

Too obvious to bother pointing out. Sure, don’t make dialogue sound the way people really sound.

3) Not Enough Realism

Oh, now I see why we included point (2) — to provide a parallel for point (3), a much more interesting and important bit of advice.

If you use grammar rules for all dialogue, the third-grade dropout will speak as correctly as the lawyer or the librarian. So will the recent immigrant from Uzbekistan and the hairdresser from Queens. They’ll all sound exactly the same, and nobody will make any grammatical mistakes or use any kind of regional colloquialism.

I think of this when someone on Quora asks which is better for writing a novel, Grammarly or Writer Pro. Neither, of course, unless you are able to disregard ALL advice about correct grammar and punctuation when writing everything in general, but dialogue in particular. Grammarly will try to make every character sound like Mr. Spock, only stupider. If you can’t decline advice you know is wrong, or worse if you can’t tell the advice is wrong, prescriptive grammar checkers are going to lead you gently to disaster.

I have literally seen students take advice from a grammar checker to turn “Tourette’s syndrome” into “turrets syndrome,” by the way.

4) Reader-Feeder Dialogue: As-you-know-Bob

I think this is an interesting category, because in fact you can absolutely write good, believable “As you know, Bob,” dialogue. It’s not even hard. You do it like this:

“Forgive me; of course you know all this. I fear I’m a little fretful.”

“Now, I think we all agree thus and so and this and that, right? So then the question is …”

“All right, so let’s make sure we’re all on the same page here …”

And so on. There are zillions of situations in which somebody will explain or comment on something that the other characters already know. That’s not surprising, as in the real world, there are also zillions of situations where that happens, and I don’t mean situations where the office pedant insists on explaining in excruciating detail something everyone already knows. I mean people do this casually all the time, and you can make it sound fine in a novel as well. Not that you should do it for no reason, but if you have a reason to do it, you can do it so smoothly not a single reader will complain. Most won’t even notice, probably.

5) Show-offy Dialogue that Doesn’t Move the Story

Oh, well, I don’t know. I’m kind of a fan of witty, snappy dialogue. I don’t have any great gift for witty banter, I admire that in other people’s novels, and frankly if the banter is sufficiently witty, I’ll appreciate it for itself, even if the character has been quite sufficiently established and even if it doesn’t move the story forward. I’m thinking of Lindsay Buroker here. She can write clunky sentences in non-dialogue prose, but her dialogue is great. Who else does really good, witty banter? Ilona Andrews, especially in later books. Oh, Laura Florand. I was sorry when Laura Florand stopped writing. Hopefully she just turned her attention to other things, because her contemporary romances were the ones that got me reading the genre in the first place.

6) No Dialogue Tags

Yes, I’m sure we’ve all read passages of dialogue where we got lost and had to count up the lines to see who is speaking which part of the dialogue. That’s not great. There should always be enough tags to stop that from happening.

7) Cryptic Dialogue Tags

It is true that “he said” or “she said” tags are mostly invisible to the reader, while “he spat” or “she screamed” draw attention to themselves — often not in a good way. But that doesn’t mean he said/she said tags are the best way to attribute dialogue. Those tags can be boring. They also can withhold essential information.

After reading this section of the linked post, I think this means, basically, that the dialogue isn’t doing anything for characterization. That you know the “he” is a guy, but nothing else. I would add that if the characters aren’t (a) thinking, (b) reacting, or (c) moving, that you have quite likely fallen into a white room and the dialogue is not only failing to do anything for characterization, but also failing to bring the reader into the setting.

8) Improbable Dialogue Tags

I think we can all imagine what this means. This is your Tom Swifty and its cousins. “Hissed hysterically,” and so on.

9) Overloaded Dialogue Tags.

“I hate you,” Bob said, throwing the empty Oreo bag at Stephanie and watching it sail over her head onto the floor by the garbage can.

“I hate you more,” Marlene said, opening the kitchen cupboard and getting her box of Valentine chocolates, which she dumped on the table in front of Bob.

Yes, there’s such a thing as TOO much setting in the dialogue, and the sample provided crosses that line.

This segues to point 10:

10) Sometimes NO Dialogue Tags are the Answer

“I hate you.” Bob threw the empty Oreo bag at Marlene. It sailed over her head and landed on the floor by the trash can.

“I hate you more.” Marlene opened the kitchen cupboard and took out her box of Valentine chocolates. She dumped the contents on the kitchen table in front of Bob.

This is the one that’s supposedly not a problem, but the answer, or I guess an answer.

My reaction here is: Come on. Those are tags — those are movement tags. When it comes to dialogue, movement tags are one of the most useful techniques you can have in your toolbox. These particular movement tags are still overloaded imo, which is why this is not a get-out-of-jail-free card when it comes to dialogue. I agree that it does help to get rid of the “he said she said” part, but you can still pile too much movement into a tag and in this case, this is on the edge of doing that.

Not a bad post, though! I do think it’s better to ask not: What are common problems with dialogue? but instead: What is dialogue for and how can we do those things effectively? Having read this post, I think I would actually identify five different things dialogue can and should do. In no particular order — I started to try to arrange these in order of importance, but they’re all important —

Dialogue should:

Engage the reader’s attentionConvey informationBuild characterizationBuild the settingMove the plot forward

And while no particular bit of dialogue does all five things, I think a whole lot of dialogue DOES do all five.

Okay! Who’s especially great at dialogue? I mentioned three authors earlier, but I have a great appreciation for Lois McMaster Bujold in this regard. I specifically remember opening up one of the Vorkosigan books a long time ago, when I was just starting to write, to see how she handled dialogue. I thought at the time she was great with dialogue and I still think so now. Want to write great dialogue? Do it like that.

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Book Bub Ads: Exploring a new universe

All right, so, I have made my first tentative forays into the world of advertisement this year. I’m not trying to learn all about the Big Three Ad Platforms all at the same time, because (a) I don’t have time, and (b) learning about every aspect of marketing, ugh, please, no. One at a time is all I can tolerate.

I took a cursory look at Amazon ads, Facebook ads, and Bookbub ads and picked the latter to explore first because it looked like the simplest platform. I’ve poked at Facebook ads a little and seriously, ugh. It’s complex: it’s not intuitive AT ALL, as least not for me; it’s actively unpleasant to try to deal with it, and no thanks. I tried one Facebook ad without any particular enthusiasm or success last year and then set that platform aside for the present. Ditto with Amazon ads, except that platform doesn’t look nearly as difficult or unpleasant as Facebook. BookBub looked like the easiest interface.

So I read David Gaughran’s book about BookBub ads, and watched his video about using Canva to create BookBub ads, and looked at ads he says have been successful — all this in between waves of revision and proofreading and whatever else — and finally put together a series of ads I’m going to try out later in August, when I run a sale on the TUYO series.

Wait! You may be saying. A sale on the TUYO series? Should I have waited to get TASMAKAT? If that question occurs to you, the answer is no. I really don’t think it’s fair to early buyers to drop the price dramatically soon after releasing a book, so that’s one thing; plus it’s going to be a good long time before I get over wishing I’d brought it out as three books. I’m going to drop its price by a whopping one dollar and even that is just so Amazon puts a “lowest price in thirty days!” banner on it.

However, I’m going to discount the rest of the series heavily, run an aggressive ad campaign on Book Bub in conjunction with promotion services, and see what happens. Have I followed all of David Gaughran’s advice? No, I have not. I don’t have time to test each and every author whose followers I’m targeting. Would I have had time to do that earlier this year? I mean, maybe, if I’d jammed that kind of thing in with everything else. But I have genuinely been super busy this year, so if the ads don’t work as well as they might, fine. At least I understand the kind of testing he recommends, why he recommends it, and how to do it, so maybe later. For now, I’m skipping that step in the full understanding that this is possibly unwise. I am, however, following a lot of his other advice. Here, if you’re interested, take a look:

And this one

It’s exactly the same except the background is a little more faded. Maybe I should redo them all this way because this does make the book covers pop a little better, doesn’t it? But check out this one:

I have five iterations of this same basic ad, and let me just mention that honestly, Canva really is a great tool. Your image has to be 300×250, which you can specify, and you know what is especially helpful? You can copy a correctly sized template, erase everything you don’t want and add different elements. I did all this over the weekend, and it wasn’t awful. I’m far from a graphic designer, but if I saw some version of this ad, I’d probably click through. The tiger would catch my eye for sure. I’m making it as easy as possible for people to click through by making the first book free, so we’ll see how it goes.

Here’s what Gaughran says:

1) Use a background pulled from your bookcover. Drop the transparency of the background.

I wasn’t sure how far to drop the transparency of the background, so I tried different levels of transparency.

2) Put your actual bookcover on the ad. If you’re doing a series sale, put every single book in the series on the ad.

This seemed like a good idea, and thank you to the cover artist for automatically including 3D images which were perfect for this.

3) Put a big, obvious box on the ad that says “FREE” or “0.99” or “NEW” or whatever. Make the box red with white letters, black with yellow letters, or yellow with black letters. Don’t worry about whether that clashes with the book covers; statistically, ads with those colors of boxes and letters work better.

I couldn’t quite disregard all possible artistic judgment. I could not make myself use neon yellow or red. I tried, but it was really hard to disregard how awful that looks. I guess I should make a version with neon red and try it one day, then this more aesthetically tolerable red a different day.

4) Try different versions of the same ad because tiny tweaks can make a big difference.

BookBub ads are easy to adjust on the fly (says Gaughran). You can switch out the ad image every day, drop more money into the ad if you like, and changes are practically instantaneous.

5) Use Cost Per Thousand Impressions (CPM) rather than Cost Per Click (CPC). Bid high-medium to promote a sale, and bid uneven amounts. That is, if you want to bid $12, don’t, bid $12.06 instead.

I don’t remember the reasoning for the first bit of advice, except it’s supposed to work best if you do author targeting and testing the way he wants you do, which I didn’t. The reasoning for the second bit of advice is obvious: you’ve just outbid everyone who bid $12 even or $12.01 or $12.05.

6) If you’re running a series sale, take out all the automatically generated links to the first book and drop in links to the actual series page. Do that for the US, UK, and maybe CA Amazon pages.

Canada is not included in countdown deals. If you’re going to manually lower the prices, you can include Canada, and now I get why Gaughran spent some time explaining how and why to target different countries that are not the US. Canada is included in free deals — every country is included in free deals.

Either way, targeting the series page is a very good idea! I wouldn’t have realized that was possible, but it’s actually easy.

Final note: What does Gaughran mean by “testing authors?”

When you’re setting up Book Bub ads, you can tell the ad to target readers of fantasy AND you can tell it to target readers who follow, say, Guy Gaviel Kay or Kate Elliot. According to David Gaughran, you should look at Book Bub through the reader interface, not the author (“partner”) interface, and take a quick look at all the authors whose readership should reasonably overlap with yours to see how many followers (not readers) they have. You should then pick out ten to twenty authors, each with 1000 to 20,000 followers, then test each author by dropping your book to $0.99 and running the same exact ad targeted to one author at a time, one day each, dropping $15 or so into each ad. I’m sure the point of this exercise is obvious. What Gaughran says is that once you find out which authors’ followers work best for you, that result tends to remain consistent long-term. That may be, but as I say, I haven’t done this. Maybe later this year, maybe next year. I’m willing to go to the trouble when I have time and attention to spare.

Which authors’ readers ought to overlap with mine? Well, I think Kate Elliot is a good choice, Guy Gaviel Kay, Sharon Shinn, Robin McKinley, CJ Cherryh, maybe Robin Hobb. I came up with twenty names or so, including pulling some by looking to see whose books are recommended on TUYO’s page on Amazon, and dropped a lot of them into the targeting for the ad.

I guess it also makes sense to ask you all, anybody who has read this post: Who are some of your favorite authors? Because maybe I should add them to the upcoming ad targeting.

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Update: SO BUSY, but making progress on everything

All right, so, this past week involved:

A) Proofreading the Tuyo World Companion

B) Listening to the audiobook of TANO and making many, many corrections. Well, probably not that many REALLY, compared to making corrections when actually proofreading, but it probably seemed like a lot to the narrator, alas! He should be loading the corrected files to ACX soon, maybe today, and then I will listen to the full thing again. Which I will enjoy very much. I got a remarkable amount of dusting done while listening to it the first time, a win all the way around.

Comments about the audiobook: To me, this voice sounds right for Tano himself. As has happened with Patrick McCaffery’s Ryo, Aras, Geras, and others, I’m hearing Tano with this voice now. Even more important — and I’m not sure why this strikes me as so utterly crucial — but this narrator (Timothy Little, so if I say “Timothy,” you’ll know who I’m talking about) — anyway, Timothy gets Raga’s cheerful tone exactly right. That seemed to be a serious challenge, as almost no one who auditioned got Raga anywhere close to right, and I guess his voice is so clear to me I couldn’t stand it. He’s cheerful! He’s light-hearted! If he’s got depths (and he does) they’re hidden most of the time!

Timothy also made all four young men sound different from each other, SUCH a challenge, and to my great delight, Sinowa and Marag both sound a LOT like they do in the audiobooks of TUYO and TARASHANA. Ryo sounds a bit different, but fine. Aras sounds different, but acceptable. Did I mention Raga sounds great? Raga sounds great. Getting Tano and Raga both right means that when I pick up these young men again and write the next book from Tano’s pov, I’ll probably be asking Timothy to do that one as well. Timothy does pronounce “inTasiyo” differently than I do, and seemed really stuck on his pronunciation there, and I finally said fine, let it go, and let myself get used to it. I guess I hereby declare that the people that far to the west pronounce some words differently than the people closer to the inGara tribe.

So that will be out soon, and btw the audiobook for SUELEN should be right behind this one; SUELEN’s narrator told me he is also closing in on that one.

C) Lots of progress on this semi-final revision of INVICTUS, and I am now officially tired of this story. I got pretty far with revisions before that happened. I think the problem is not just that I’m impatient to move on to other projects, but that I have been practically experiencing whiplash going back and forth between the world of Tuyo and this world.

However, I’ve made enough progress that the thought of the fast-approaching upload deadline is not quite as terrifying as it was this time last week. I’m still making minor tweaks to CAPTIVE, but I should have that one fully tweaked way before the mid-September deadline, and I got surprisingly close to all the way through CRISIS this weekend considering this is a fairly extensive, thoroughly annoying revision.

Among other things, Mike S pointed out a serious worldbuilding problem — a “why didn’t they?” question involving absolutely crucial backstory — and I will just say, this is the kind of thing I REALLY NEED early readers to spot, so that readers who pick up the final version don’t ask, “But why didn’t they?” about that element. In my experience, practically anything can be made to look sensible and plausible, but only if you realize there’s a plausibility problem before it’s too late. In this case, since I was stuck for a good answer to this question, I called my brother and said, “Craig! Why didn’t they?” and we kicked ideas back and forth and boom, ten minutes later I had two different good answers to this backstory question.

Next step, tweaking CAPTIVE to integrate the answer to the “why didn’t they” question plus resolve other issues early readers have tripped over. Also finishing this round of revision with CRISIS and sending the revised version to early readers. Will I have this done before August? Ha ha ha, sob, not a chance. Will I have it done before August 15th? Wow, I sure hope so. Will I have it done before the deadline? YES.

Take home message: it is IMPOSSIBLE to give yourself too much lead time for revision, especially if you’re not keen on stress.

D) Kittens! Alas, I still have all four.

Can you spot all three kittens?

I’ll be making a real effort to find a place for at least two of them in the next week or so. I don’t want to wait till school starts. That’s a good time, of course, but they’ll be practically teenagers by the end of August, less cute, more difficult to place. If I have to, I’ll take them to a rescue or shelter, if there’s anything in St L or some other decent-sized nearby town that has a place open. But I really, really do not want to drop a tabby kitten into a shelter. I fear he would languish, ignored for any kitten that is not tabby.

The kittens have hit an exploratory period as distinctive and obvious as when puppies hit it. I didn’t know kittens did that! But between one day and the next, they’re exploring downstairs. Guess what’s downstairs? That’s right, the bedroom. The orange tabby spent the night curled right next to my pillow. As far as I can tell, he purred all night. I bet you can surmise which kitten I would most be okay with keeping. I could see myself keeping the orange kitten and a gray tabby brother. None of the boys are as venturesome as the Tortie, or as the female kitten last year. I don’t know whether that’s coincidence or if female kittens are more venturesome in general, which seems weird, but I don’t know. I sort of hope these male kittens might stay in the yard rather than trying to get over the (high) fence. The little Tortie, not a chance. She’d definitely go through or over any possible barrier.

UPDATE: almost as soon as I posted this, I got a response for the two kittens I would most like to place — hopefully by tonight, the Tortie and a gray tabby brother will be settling into a new home!

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Story vs Plot vs Theme

A post at Writers Helping Writers: Story vs. Plot vs. Theme: Know Your 5Ws and H

First reaction: Five Ws, hmm? And an H. Right up front, I’m feeling skeptical. I guess this is what, why, who, when, where, and how, and I think that is not remotely helpful because fiction is not journalism and because, as a discovery writer, I’m going to start off knowing Who and Where in a very limited sense, and that’s it. Also, none of that gets at theme.

Unless I’m wrong and the journalism thing isn’t where this post is going. Let’s take a look!

No, this is totally the journalism thing.

Journalism writing often uses the 5W1H structure. The first few paragraphs of a news article should answer 6 basic questions (which start with 5 Ws and an H): Who, What, When, Where, Why, and How. While fiction writing doesn’t try to cram the essentials into the beginning paragraphs, those same questions are important for our storytelling. In fact, we can use specific questions from that structure to understand the big picture—or essence—of our story, plot, and theme.

Bold in the original, and I have my doubts about whether this is useful, at least for non-outliners.

First, though, we need to understand that our story and our plot are not the same. A story is about our characters’ struggle, while a plot is the events that reveal the characters and choices explored in the story.

There, I agree. Bold is still in the original.

Anyway, we now use the journalism thing to, essentially, rough out an outline. I think this is all useless and annoying, like everything else that involves outlining. But you know when it could be useful? Not before writing the novel; no. I think this could be handy when writing a synopsis, or more particularly when writing a one-sentence summary, a query, or back cover description. That’s when you need to write, essentially:

When ________ faces _______, he must _________ in order to ___________.

And that’s the basic structure of a one-sentence summary. That’s a way of encapsulating character and plot, and it’s very much a who-what-why kind of structure. It doesn’t touch theme, though. Nothing in this touches theme. How does the linked post get to theme? With “Why,” like this:

Why? Why does our character participate in the story (in the big picture)? …. Our Why answers help us narrow down what we’re trying to say with our story, which then helps us define our intended themes. Our protagonist could learn to not take life for granted. Our plot events could present reasons and opportunities for our protagonist to give up, but they believe in the importance of their actions and make choices revealing their persistence. 

I seldom intend themes. Themes, to me, are something that emerge, not something I intend from the beginning. Oh, there’s one Black Dog novella where I realized what at least one important theme was almost at the beginning and deliberately strengthened that theme (family). Usually I notice themes late, or I don’t notice themes at all.

Anyway, I’d do it this way:

Plot is what happens.

Story is how the characters cope with what happens.

Theme is what the story means, not just to the characters, but also to the author and the readers.

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How real are your characters?

At Writer Unboxed, a post by Juliet Marillier: Princess, Washerwoman, Warrior, Goatherd: How Real are Your Characters?

This post caught my eye because, I mean, Juliet Marillier! She’s a wonderful writer! Usually wonderful! Stylistically wonderful, and often a great storyteller; sometimes I love her books and I always love her actual writing. How does she start this post?

In traditional storytelling, especially in fairy tales, the main characters often don’t have names. Instead they are referred to only by their roles: the tailor, the shepherdess, the knight, the princess, the giant. … Legends are different, being almost always associated with a particular location, a notable event that took place (or may have taken place) there, and a person or being: Robin Hood, William Tell, King Arthur. Each of those has some historical basis, but in the cases of Arthur and Robin, the old story has morphed over the years into an elaborate piece of (mostly) fantasy. … Today’s writers, and fantasy writers in particular, have produced some ground-breaking work when re-interpreting well-known, and often well-loved, traditional stories. A case in point is Juliet E McKenna’s The Cleaving ... In this compelling novel, the heroic trappings of the Arthurian story are stripped away, and we are confronted with the gritty reality of the time and culture through the eyes of the women in the tale.

I’m pausing here to react.

AAAAGH no please do not show me the gritty reality of the time and culture! Not through the eyes of the women OR the men! While I wish Juliet McKenna all the luck in the world with her book, I’m also making a firm mental note not to read it myself. No, thank you!

I’m sticking with Mary Stewart’s version. Which, wow, is not available in a Kindle version. Why, why, why do publishers DO this? I had to search multiple times in multiple ways, finally found an audio version, from there I could get to a paperback version, and from THERE finally I could get to series page, which lists a kindle version, except that is not actually available! For crying out loud!

I am debating whether it might be nice to get this series in audio format. The language is beautiful. The pace is slow. Would the beautiful prose make the pace a pleasure rather than otherwise? Not sure. I think I’ll just add the audio version to my wishlist so I don’t totally forget it’s available.

Back to the linked post:

For purposes of this post, I tried giving my current cast of characters names like those in old fairy tales: the Girl; the Goatherd; the Guard; the Adviser; the Ruler; the Bishop; the Commander…. But that kind of name is inadequate for the three-dimenstional human beings I’m trying to create on the page … Each of them with a personal journey to make. Instead I’d have to make some kind of list …
– A person with a perilous ability
– A person blind to the needs of others
– A person with a secret agenda
– A person who finds it impossible to tell a lie
– A person expert at twisting words to convey a particular message
– A person whose religious beliefs drive their every decision
– A person who believes the end justifies the means, however cruel those means may be
– A person who will do just about anything to salvage their reputation

The next step, of course, is getting inside the head of even the most misguided member of this lineup and understanding why they do what they do. Then crafting each journey. Does that character change along the way? Do they learn anything? Do they become wiser? And how does that come about? With those whose general outlook on life is similar to mine it’s not so difficult. With others it’s super-challenging. But worth it when the words flow and the true individual emerges like a butterfly from the chrysalis, a real person who has well and truly earned their name.

I don’t think I ever try to encapsulate characters in neat little phrases like that. I don’t mean I think that’s a useless thing to do; actually, that sounds like kind of a neat idea. Although sometimes I think if you try to capture someone in a sentence like that, you risk making that character too one-dimensional. I think I would lean more toward

A person whose religious beliefs drive their every decision, until the beliefs they thought they held most dear turn out to be in total opposition to something they know is true or something they have to do, and then they have to reassess everything and reinterpret what they thought they believed.

Or

A person who believes the end justifies the means, however cruel those means may be, until they realize they’re in danger of going too far. Maybe they have gone too far, and now they realize they need to back up and redeem some possibly terrible mistake.

If the character is a protagonist or an important secondary character, then you’re likely to need to keep going into the back half of that kind of encapsulation. Otherwise the character is going to be flat. Some kinds of stories work fine with flat characters; it depends. But saying “A person whose religious beliefs drive their every decision” does not strike me as actually any more detailed than saying “The bishop.” Both look equally simplistic to me.

Marillier winds up her post by asking:

Writers, how well do you know your characters, both major and minor? How do you go about forming them? At what point in the writing process do they become real for you (so that you know subconsciously how they will react in any given situation?) Do their names play any part in the process of character development?

I don’t know. I mean, I don’t think I can exactly tell. I think I know who important characters are, I think they’re real for me, in the first scene. I’m not completely sure about that, because maybe I actually discover who they are (within broad limits) as I write the first couple of scenes. But I think I knew Aras would say kindly, “I think you’re judging yourself much too harshly” before he had reason to say it, and I think I knew Ryo was the kind of person who would knock Aras off his horse and save his life before it happened. Those are the kinds of characters I like to write about, so that’s what my characters are like.

I think I know much less about my villains than about other characters. That’s why reviews sometimes point out that my bad guys are flat. Sometimes that’s because the villain is actually a pretty simple person — the madness really did flatten Lorellan’s character; that was an actual thing. He couldn’t be complex because the madness was driving him. You know, that would be interesting to do sometime — show a sorcerer in this world who is sliding into evil and can tell and still retains individuality and complexity. And comes to Aras for help and the story goes on from there, and yes, one of you here suggested this idea and I do think that’s a great idea. I even have a potential scene from that story in my mind, though I hadn’t thought of that in exactly this way before.

Sometimes my bad guys are flat just because they’re flat. I don’t think I did a lot with the villain in the Death’s Lady series. Ambitious, manipulative, long-range planner, not a nice person, that’s pretty much it. Not particularly well-developed. I wasn’t particularly interested in him and he’s just well-developed enough to play his role in the plot and that’s it.

Antagonists aren’t the same. I like antagonists just fine and they turn into real people for me. I’m thinking of Oressa and Gulien’s father in The Mountain of Kept Memory; he was much more ambiguous than most of my antagonists. Or, maybe the king of Casmantium, the Arobern, in the Griffin Mage trilogy. He’s much more interesting than an actual villain. Oh, side note, looks like Hatchette has put the whole trilogy on sale at $1.99, which they do periodically but unpredictably, so I strongly suggest you pick it up now if you haven’t and think you might someday like to read it.

However, ordinarily, I’m just not very interested in the bad guy, and sometimes that shows. It gives me something to work on, I guess. But there’s zero chance I will ever put as much attention into writing real villains as I do into writing good guys.

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Places that sort of exist

Here’s an entertaining post: The Imaginary Town That Refused To Stay Fake

If you’re ever in Delaware County, be sure to head over to the tiny hamlet of Roscoe. There’s not really anything to see there (unless you’re into fly-fishing: Roscoe calls itself “Trout Town, USA”). But drive past the gas stations and convenience stores and head just a little north, to where an unnamed dirt road meets NY 206. Stop the car a second, stretch your legs, and look around. Apart from the two roads meeting and a faint shadow of a knocked-down building at the side of the road, it’s nothing but trees, grass and birdsong round here. But trust me. This is a once-in-a-lifetime experience you’re having right now. You’re standing in Agloe, Colchester: a place which, simultaneously and without contradiction, does and doesn’t exist.

Our maps are filled with imaginary places – and it’s usually the map-makers that did it. …

Here’s where it gets weirder. At some point in the 1950s, some uniquely enterprising soul looked at this eye-wateringly uneventful intersection at the scrag-end of Nowhere, N.Y., and said to themself, “You know, with a few groceries and a lot of love I could make a real go of this place.” They grabbed an Esso map to get the name right – and so the Agloe General Store was born.

Skip forward a few years. The mapping company Rand McNally (one of the other “Big Three”) releases its own state map. And someone at Esso – the company that had bought General Drafting’s map for commercial use – was checking for copyright theft, and spotted the inclusion of “Agloe” on the RM map. They probably thought “aha! Got you, you thieving *******” – and in came the lawyers. In their legal defence, Rand McNally said their map designers went to the official map of the county, found the name of the place, and logically concluded it existed. On what grounds? Well, on the grounds that there were actual people there. Specifically, the owners of the Agloe General Store.

There’s more to it — the town sort of hovered along at the boundary of real/not real, and then John Green picked up this exact semi-fictitious “town” for use in his book Paper Towns, which I had not realized, and well, the whole idea is kind of neat. I do think that a contemporary fantasy novel could make excellent use of fake places that are named on maps …

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Series and spoilers

Here’s a post from Kill Zone Blog: Spoiler Alert!

Today I’m seeking advice from authors who write series fiction as well as people who enjoy reading series books.

Here’s the situation: I have an idea for the ninth book in the Tawny Lindholm Thriller series, but this new plot would reveal several surprise twists from prior books. These are major league spoilers. … Here’s my dilemma today: the potential plot for book #9 would require revealing crimes and the killer’s identity from book #3, Eyes in the Sky.

At this point, I haven’t written one word of #9. The new plot vaguely swirls in my imagination but it’s far from pinned down.

That’s a somewhat different concern for a mystery or thriller series. Still, this is kind of a good question, isn’t it?

Personally, I’ve never tried to avoid the single most essential spoiler for TUYO in any of the other novels in that series. I just don’t see any way to avoid that one, so I don’t try to avoid it. BUT, I do hope readers mostly come to TUYO without reading any reviews that contain dire spoilers, because I do think the story works best if you haven’t been spoiled about, you know, that big revelation or that other thing that happens and so on.

After TUYO, each book does build on ones that have come before, and I don’t really try to avoid what we might call spoilers-of-fact. When such-and-such happens in TASMAKAT, this depends on stuff that happened in TARASHANA and SUELEN, and I don’t try to avoid references to those past events. My own feeling here is, the details of how something happens are much more important than the fact that it happened. I don’t think it’s a problem at all. Also, I just don’t think any other spoilers matter as much.

In fact, I’ll go farther: it’s not in the least desirable to avoid references to stuff that has happened previously if that stuff was important to the characters. You are going to lose the emotional heft of previous events if you try too assiduously to avoid spoilers. Readers, it seems to me — I’m probably generalizing from my own personal lack of concern about spoilers — but readers are surely going to want to know how it happened, not just that it happened. References to previous events are often, though not always, fine. It is, however, probably desirable not to spell out in detail exactly how events played out and why those events were meaningful.

I can see that this problem might be much more serious for a mystery series. Would it bother ME to have the killer’s identity from Book Three revealed in Book Nine, if I happened to read Book Nine first? I’m actually not sure! I don’t read mysteries for the puzzle. I read mysteries for character and setting. On the other hand, if killer’s identity is too obvious, that does bother me a little. I would PREFER not to have the identity of the killer revealed to me before I read the mystery. It’s a tough question!

The Tuyo World Companion has of course raised questions for me about spoilers. How many, how big, just in general how to handle spoilers in a companion book like this.

Basically, I made no attempt at all to avoid spoilers for TUYO; I’ve allowed a good many mild spoilers for other books; I warn readers, hopefully in a way it’s impossible to miss, that there are big spoilers in the letter from Selili to a friend; and I’ve done my best to avoid really big spoilers for TARASHANA and basically any significant spoilers for TASMAKAT. This means editing out certain references as I’ve gone along, as I’ve tended to cut back on spoilers during revision passes.

I also amused myself just a few times by adding [redacted] into the text of the Companion. For example:

Saraicana, a good-sized city on the Makanet River, a hundred miles or so downriver from Berenret. In KERAUNANI, it’s implied that something may be wrong in Saraicana, that a good deal of criminal activity is going on in that city. Even though that was some years ago, the problems there may have been difficult to solve because [redacted]. We haven’t yet visited Saraicana, but we’re going to, briefly, in an upcoming novel called RIHASI.

This is meant to serve as a mild teaser for an upcoming book … which I would really like to write, aargh, the lack of time is killing me … and as I say, I think it’s funny to drop lines like that in here and there. There are only a few! Anyone who has already read all the books will hopefully get a kick out of some of these, just as I do.

But, though I don’t in general want to see BIG PLOT DESTROYING SPOILERS before I read a book, I don’t usually mind seeing smaller spoilers.

AND, if I’m trying to decide whether to finish a book, or for that matter whether to start a book, sometimes BIG PLOT DESTROYING SPOILERS are exactly what I do want. It can be very reassuring to know the dog doesn’t die, the important characters don’t die, everything works out, whatever. Big stuff that I don’t want to have to worry about. I was talking to Sharon Shinn recently and she referred to a particular book and I said Sounds interesting, does everything come out okay, spoilers please. The answer is: kind of, but on the other hand kind of not. If I read the book, I’ll provide comments including about whether everything more or less comes out okay.

In some cases, big spoilers can be essential: a specific example. After SarahZ told me what was going on, I wound up finishing this book after all. I skipped two chapters, which turned out to be just right to skip over the part that was infuriating me to part where the story comes back together in a more satisfying way. This is still never going to wind up on my top ten list of SF novels, but I would never have read the ending if SarahZ hadn’t provided the giant spoiler.

How do you all feel about spoilers?

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Update: busy busy busy, plus kittens

Okay, so last week, I did primary fast revision of INVICTUS, both parts, and then slower revision of INVICTUS: CAPTIVE. Not sure what other early readers will catch there, but undoubtedly stuff will be caught. That was the primary thing I was working on this past week. Now I’m moving ahead with the slower, more tedious revision of CRISIS. Hopefully I’ll get through it by this time next week!

However, also a certain amount of time spent proofreading and final-final-final revision to the World Companion. My goodness, look at that, I see from the preview at KDP that I forgot to take the words “BOOK TITLE” out of the header when I dropped the manuscript into the paperback template. I note some other formatting weirdness. Well, I will finish THIS proofing run and then fix up that file and order another paper copy for proofing and THAT one should let me check and correct formatting. Still working on things like maps! Otherwise, closing in on the actual final version.

Commenter Mona Z turned out to be far better with Canva than I am and kindly volunteered to redo the frames for the World Companion, plus get the paperback cover in shape. I do know how to do a pdf cover in theory, so I could have done the paperback cover, but I definitely could not have done as good a job. I would most likely just have made the back cover black and the text white, because I was again struggling with getting any kind of frame to look okay.

Here’s the paperback cover, and I trust you will all admire the attractive frames. If you ever do covers using Canva, you will discover why these are something to admire.

As you see, I gave up on trying to write real back cover copy and just threw on a bulleted list that lets readers know what’s in the book. I trust the maps will actually appear, argh.

Let me see, what else was going on this past week? Oh, I finished beta-reading the Regency mystery, which was entertaining, but I did think the tone of the story absolutely revealed the identity of the killer. He was the only guy mean enough to make sense as the killer, given the story was pretty lighthearted.

ALSO

Awwww

Aren’t they adorable? I’m trying harder now to find these two kittens a new home. Everybody likes the tortie, no one wants the gray tabby, and I can’t say I’m surprised. It’s hard to get people to look at a kitten whose color is so perfectly ordinary. I understand that (I really do! aesthetics is a thing!), but I would really like to place them together, partly because the tortie will be happier that way and partly because I definitely do not want a gray tabby kitten languishing in a cage at a shelter for heaven knows how long because he’s the wrong color. I really do not want to keep three kittens myself. (I would be okay not keeping any.) (I don’t object strenuously to keeping two, though.)

I will add that the tortie would have been a problem to place last week, but she is at last! eating ordinary food! out of a dish! I was getting a bit concerned, but I treated her like a hard-to-wean puppy, softened kitten kibble in water, and added stuff. Canned kitten food, chicken baby food, whatever. I got her eating that and finally to my great relief she started crunching ordinary dry food with her brothers. Boom, she is immediately gaining weight much better. She hardly gained at all for the first several days. I’m not bothering to weigh the male kittens; anybody can see they’re fine. But this little female, I’ve been weighing every couple of days. She crept very slowly up from 1 lb to 1 lb 2 oz to 1 lb 4 oz. Then she started eating more, but not enough to make me happy. Now she’s eating much better, her special food plus dry food, and she shot up to 1 lb 11 oz and is looking less starved.

Also!

I’m happy to say that TASMAKAT topped all previous records for preorders, has continued to creep upward with direct sales, and absolutely, totally blew away all previous records for KU pages read. TASMAKAT is a third again as long as TARASHANA, but the earlier book never came anywhere near this many pages read per day. It’s not remotely close.

This is interesting and also it’s fantastic and deeply satisfying. The only interpretation is that the series gained significant traction between 2021 and now. Everyone who suggested TUYO to a friend in the past few years, thank you! I hope you’ll keep that up!

Here’s a Twitter thread with ALL THE SPOILERS, do not read this thread if you have not read the book! But the pictures, gifs, and comments are delightful if you’ve already read TASMAKAT.

25 pages into TASMAKAT and it sooooo good.

I last reread the TUYO series in… February? I think? (Whenever my DMs with @kilerkki hit a frequency of 35 texts per minute ) and it is SO much fun to sink back in Ryo’s narration. https://t.co/w87uH2GO0J

— singeli (@Singeli6) July 16, 2023

Happy Monday! Going back to INVICTUS now …

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Cozy Fantasy

Here’s a Book Riot post: WHAT COUNTS AS COZY FANTASY?

I’m sorry, but as this is a Book Riot post, I’m unable to resist the immediate guess that the best single example, the Ur-Cozy-Fantasy, as it were, might be Watership Down. I realize I link to that post probably twice a year, but what can I say? That particular Book Riot post was one of the weirdest posts I have ever seen anywhere. You might say it’s the single best example, the Ur-Example, of a post that defines a subgenre in a crazy way. I just cannot get tired of mentioning that post.

But! This post caught my eye because of the new Elemental Blessings book we’re going to see in a few months. To me, this series practically defines Cozy Fantasy as a genre.

Defining Cozy Fantasy by Example

There is basically nothing I like better than Cozy Fantasy, which I will define as, oh, how about like this:

Non-gritty; looks away from the grime of normal lifeOn the high fantasy end of the spectrumNeed not be a romance, but does need a HEA endingRelatively low stress throughout; even if you haven’t read twenty books by the author, you can tell your favorite characters are not going to meet horrific ends.

I think that last point has to do with overall tone. I honestly think you don’t have to have read anything else by Sharon Shinn to know that Troubled Waters is going to have a nice ending. For this book, and this series, it’s because the stories follow romance beats and romances have HEA endings, QED. But I don’t think all Cozy Fantasy is necessarily romance, although … I don’t know, because I *DO* think all Cozy Mysteries are romances. I think that’s a defining criterion for that subgenre. What is a Cozy Fantasy that is not a romance?

Well, would SUELEN count?

Cozy Fantasy: let’s be nice to each other

I guess that’s a fifth criterion:

5. People are nice to each other.

Maybe that’s a subset of “relatively low stress.” It’s definitely less stressful when people are nice to each other.

But let’s get back to this Book Riot post, which I still haven’t actually looked at. Book Riot posts tend to emphasize recent fantasy that I haven’t read. Their writers also tend to define categories in ways I don’t agree with, even aside from the Ur-Example of defining Watership Down as a classic of, heaven help us, Urban Fantasy. I fear that this Book Riot list may say, essentially, “Want a comfort read? Here, have a book about someone recovering from dire trauma!” and I’ll be left gazing at their list in bewilderment, baffled that anyone could find dire trauma, recovery or not, comforting to read about.

Let’s take a look at how this post begins:

I define the cozy fantasy genre as a fantasy book with slice-of-life scenes that center on community or familial relationships …. “Cozy” is an emotive modifier like “horror” or “thriller,” where the category informs readers what emotional effect the book builds. 

You know what, I agree with that. I think I may possibly agree with every part of that! How unexpected! I didn’t start off by saying “Cozy = slice-of-life,” but I think it probably does usually involve that. And a focus on community or family, could be! SUELEN doesn’t exactly do that, although it does if you define “community” fairly broadly. It’s definitely true that “Cozy” is a signal of tone more than of content.

The post continues:

I think we can apply the same approach to conflict in cozy fantasy. We can look at the range of the cozy fantasy genre with an understanding that some stories have less conflict than others. Although this is a large spectrum, I am going to assign three conflict categories to cozy fantasy books: Small Conflict, Medium Conflict, and Large Conflict. These categories have the caveat that because these books are cozy fantasy, they all have a cozy atmosphere and slice-of-life scenes, even though some books may contain more epic battles than others.

I would say, “Large conflict FOR A COZY,” because if you get too into the epic world-destroying battles, I think you necessarily lose the cozy tone. But let’s see what specific books this post pulls out.

The cozy fantasy romance Witchful Thinking by Celestine Martin also fits into this category. Lucinda Caraway is a local high school teacher and a witch who has a second chance at her first love in a magical small town. The love in question is a mermaid who has to decide if he finally wants to stay in one place as he renovates his house.

There we go, a Cozy Fantasy that is indeed a romance. I do think that’s the easiest way to get a Cozy anything: make it a romance and follow romance beats, including the HEA, and that is low-stress and soothing.

Let’s see if there’s a book on here that isn’t a romance … No. Nope, every single book on this list is a romance. I’m surprised the person who put this list together didn’t notice that and either specifically add “it’s a romance” as a criterion OR come up with an example of a fantasy novel that is NOT a romance but that IS a Cozy.

I hadn’t really thought of contemporary romances here, but now I think plainly I should have. That takes out “on the high fantasy end of the spectrum” from the list of criteria. Having considered this Book Riot post, here are my suggested criteria for Cozy Fantasy:

Non-gritty.Focuses on daily life more than epic adventure.Focuses on family and community.People are, as a rule, nice to each other.Need not be a romance, but does need a HEA ending.The tone reduces the stress level of the story.

What do you think?

What are some novels that fit these criteria? I bet a lot of MG fantasy would fit, such as The Dragon with a Chocolate Heart, for example:

But what else? YA or adult fantasy that fit the Cozy category and are also romances are probably fairly easy to think of. Novels that are Cozy but are not romances may be harder to find.

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