Jennifer Crusie's Blog, page 203

It’s Thursday and This is a Good Book

So thanks to all of you, I have been reading up a storm lately and not watching TV at all.  Weird.  I’ve been doing series–the Lockwood books were a lot of fun, the Myron Vale books were not–in between looking at my own book with new eyes.  The best news, though, is that Michael Sheen and David Tennant are starring in Amazon’s six-episode mini-series of Good Omens.  OMG, when that comes out, I’m goin’ back to TV.  (Actually, I’ll be back when Legends returns in October, but definitely for Good Omens.)  

In the meantime, I’m sitting in front of a fan with a dachshund lying on his back beside me.  No parasol, though.  So what good book have you read this week? 

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Bujold Does It Again

The fabulous Lois McMaster Bujold is discussing her latest novella, “Penric’s Fox,” with the fabulous Eight Ladies Writing right now.  From our Micki:

“Lois McMaster Bujold’s new novella, “Penric’s Fox” came out last Tuesday, and she’s agreed to answer three questions about writing it for the Eight Ladies Writing Blog (August 12, 2017: Michaeline: Lois McMaster Bujold and Three Questions About Writing “Penric’s Fox”). I hope you’ll come over to see what she has to say about process. The new novella is the third in the Penric series, but the fifth she’s completed, which I found fascinating. How does a writer write out of order like that? It’s all about writing what wants to come next.”

You cannot go wrong with Bujold, or with the Eight Ladies, for that matter.  Go check it out.

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Cherry Saturday August 12, 2017

Today is World Elephant Day.

The elephant is white because it’s also Garage Sale Day.

I did look up images for “garage sale,” but they looked too much like my present garage to be anything but depressing.

So let’s have an internet white elephant swap.  What totally useless thing will you give up from your house?  (I’ll have to think about it.  The selection here is wide.)

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This is a Good Book Thursday

I’ve been on a Rex Stout/Dick Francis reading jag lately.  Must get some estrogen into my fictional life.  Or I could, you know, write a book with a female protagonist.  That would do it.

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Bookending Nita

I’ve often said that you can’t write a first scene until you’ve written the last scene, at least not a final write.  You have to know where you’re going to know where to start from, know what happens in the final scene to introduce it in the first scene.  So now that I’ve written the final scene (not finished the book, I just wrote that scene), I can go back to the first scene and do some of the massive cutting and shaping it needs.  I’m looking at it in several ways, but the one that’s most crucial, I think, is seeing how it  bookends..  

Bookending just means making making the climax fulfill the promise of the beginning scene in both content and structure.  No, this is not a rule, it’s just a way to look at your beginning and your ending and make sure you didn’t start out heading for Maine and end up in Texas.    

One of the keys to bookending is balance.  In my first scene rewrite, there’s now a lot more emphasis on how wrong everything is in Nita’s mind, stating her goal to eradicate the wrongness on the island, and in the last scene, she faces down the antagonist and says, “You’re the source of all the wrong,” and ends it.   Put another way, if the first scene is turning the screw to tighten the intensity and focus of the story in which the protagonist’s stable life is made unstable, the last scene unscrews the intensity so the protagonist can return to a stable state.

Another key is structure.  At the beginning of the first scene, Nita tries to get out of the car three times and Button stops her.  At one point in the climax, Nita blows past three people who want to stop her in Hell.  That sequence in the climax is a fraction of the length of the same sequence in the first scene, but it’s still an echo of that beginning.  Do I expect that people will actually remember a three-peat from four hundred pages earlier?  Consciously, no, but a reader’s subconscious is an amazing thing, and dotting i’s she doesn’t remember reading means she won’t be left with any vague loose ends to the story.

• And a big key is parallelism.  At the end of the first scene, Nita tells Button to leave and get a new partner, and Button surprises her by saying no, beginning the partnership.  At the climax, Nita says good-bye to Nick,, who’s now the Devil, on the assumption that she’ll be leaving Hell by herself, and Nick surprises her by saying no, foreshadowing a new partnership. 

So here’s balance, structure, and parallelism in a chart I did while I was figuring out how to bookend this (you knew there’d be a chart).

SOME SPOILERS BELOW:

That’s not how the climax actually works.  E happens in a previous scene, and D and C never happen, but the chart showed me how to structure the end,   (I’m not sure that the first scene wouldn’t be better if I cut C & D there, too, but there’s a lot of set-up I have to get through in that scene that’s completely unnecessary in the climax, so for now, I’m just cutting those pieces way back.)   

Or to make it even simpler:

And now back to writing.  

 

 

 

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The Crusie Theory of Sex Scenes

Sex scenes are not fun to write.  (Well, for me, they’re not; Krissie loves writing them.)  And since I’ve struggled with them for over twenty years, I now have Theories, which I am about to inflict on you, mainly because I’m struggling with the sex scenes in Nita now.  

So here’s what I think about sex in fiction:

A sex scene must move the plot, not just the earth.

A sex scene is first a scene which means it must have structure: conflict that rises to a climax (yes, I know) that throws the story into the next scene.  The fact that there’s sex in the scene is content, and content alone is not enough to justify including a scene in a story.
A sex scene must arc character.

A sex scene should have an impact on character.  If the characters are the same people they were before the sex scene, then the story doesn’t  need the sex scene.   But since most people who are having sex for the first time are coming into the scene with different expectations, hang-ups, hopes, and fears, you can pretty much bet that any realistic sex scene is going to change those characters, at least in their attitudes and expectations toward each other.  Which is why I write sex scenes: it’s a cheat not to do if it changes something about the characters, and the first time they have sex, it always changes things.
Sex scenes are about emotions and physical feelings.

They are not about what the characters are actually doing (unless you’re writing erotica; then have at it). Chances are that anybody who is reading your sex scene has either had sex or seen it on cable TV.  Therefore writing Ikea scenes (“Put tab A into slot B, use enclosed screw and wingnut . . .”) is ineffective because that’s not where the rush is.  The rush is in all those emotions clashing together, the physical sensation that results from the physical action.  The rush is in the characters and what they’re feeling,  not in the specific description of the physical action.
Sex scenes are most effective when they give readers room to use their imagination.

I have heard that readers often skip sex scenes in books because nothing is happening except Ikea.  So how do you keep people reading?  Well first, see points one through three here; they make the sex scene integral to the story and therefore necessary reading.  But the fourth point may be the most important: Sexy is in the brain of the beholder.  Just as monsters that are fully described in detail are the least frightening, so sex scenes that are fully described in detail are the least compelling because they’re the most distant from the reader’s experience.  (Think of the last time you had sex and thought, Penis, let alone velvet-covered manhood.)  If you give the reader the white space in the text to write in her own preferences and fantasies, she’s going to think that’s the hottest sex ever put on the page. 
Sex scenes are most effective when the characters are vulnerable.

Two beautiful people who fall into each other’s arms and have perfect sex are boring.  Two flawed people who enter into a sexual relationship with reservations that have been overwhelmed by lust and who then have flawed but interesting sex are fun to read because (a) there’s conflict there, (b) unexpected things happen, and (c) we worry about them.  And that means that the characters aren’t fabulously beautiful and completely in control.  Think Irene Adler purring at Sherlock that smart is the new sexy; he’s completely taken aback and even though he’s a genius, he falls into her trap and sputters out the answer to her question.  Think Indiana Jones in his glasses in the classroom in Raiders; he’s stunned into silence watching a student blink I love you.  Think how much hotter Clark Kent is than Superman because he’s flustered around Lois.  Yes, all those men are played by very attractive actors, but they’re also in roles that aren’t the stereotypical Hot Guy Named Rod.  This is one of the reasons why I like to write The Screwball Best Friend instead of the Beautiful Rom Com Heroine: the best friend is vulnerable.  I think the first Thor movie would have been vastly improved if Thor had fallen for Darcy instead of Jane.  (It’s also the reason I like the Oh-Hell-Not-You romance, but that’s a different essay.)

So that’s what I think about sex scenes.  Now here’s what’s happening with Nita.

Nick, as we all know, is dead.  Nita is not, but since Nick’s body isn’t real, she’s pretty much ruled out a physical relationship from the beginning, especially since she’s finding out that she’s not completely human and that tends to occupy her thoughts.  Meanwhile, Nick is being poisoned with Lazarus Bell which is making him a paradox: a dead guy with a live body.  Because of these things, they go through some hefty emotional bonding in the first two acts of the book, so there comes a point when they hit the sheets.  

Sex Scene 1, Act 2: Nita is fine with casual sex, Nick is just starting to remember it.  The sex is okay but they’re both disconnected; Nita’s dealing with the underlying knowledge that Nick is both dead and about to become the Devil, and Nick’s mind is melting out his ears because he’s remembering sex while he’s doing it.  There’s some fairly heavy mental adjustment going on afterward, not to mention the necrophilia jokes (Hello, Keres).  They’re not upset with each other, they’re mostly dealing with the impact side-by-side, not together.

Sex Scene 2, Act 3: The people poisoning Nick decide it’s taking too long and up the dosage and he forgets who he is and thinks he’s back in fifteenth century.  Trouble ensues as he works his way up to the twentieth century (he doesn’t get to the twenty-first until the last act), and Nita tries to help while keeping him from killing anybody or getting sucked back to Hell in his vulnerable state, while dealing with all hell breaking loose on her island and new revelations about her own heritage.  Nick’s not a completely different guy, she can still see the basic Nick in there, but he doesn’t remember her or the key aspects of his situation.  So when they sleep with each other this time, it’s like another first time with a lot more baggage.  (One of the reasons I wanted this in here is that it’s a good indication of mature love–“I need you because I love you,” not “I love you because I need you.”)

Love Scene, Act 4: I don’t know if this is going to be a sex scene or not, I’m pretty sure it’s not because by Act 4 things are moving so fast that they really don’t have time for anything horizontal, but there has to be a third beat where all the people Nick has been coalesce into one permanent Nick and where all the people Nita has thought she was coalesce into one Nita, and they recognize that no matter who they’ve thought they were, they still loved and wanted each other (it’s that mature love thing).  

Which brings me to:

6. In a romance novel, the sex scene is there to arc the relationship.  If it doesn’t at least foreshadow that the characters are on an irrevocable path to mature love, then it’s not selling the major point of a romance novel, the most important clause in the contract with the reader: These people are going to love each other forever.

And now I must get back to work.  Sex scenes.  Bleah.  Feel free to tell me how wrong I am, or how right I am, or your theory of sex scenes.  Like I could stop you.

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Cherry Saturday 8-5-2017

 

Today is Sandcastle Day.

Enjoy something ephemeral.

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This is a Good Book Thursday–OMG It’s August.

It’s really hot in the northern hemisphere.  Apologies to the south for non-representational illustration.  (How ya doin’, Australia?  South Africa?)

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Taking Over the Island

First, thank you all very much, you gave me a LOT to think about.

One of the best ways to focus an idea is to argue with somebody about it.  I’d read through your comments and think, “No, not that,” and then think, “Wait, why not that?”  Some of the time there was a good reason, but just as often I had to stretch my plot to discover that there was a good reason to include that.  My background plots suddenly got a lot deeper not just because you all had good ideas, but because I had to think about them all.  All of which is to say, thank you very much.:

So here’s the situation.

One group is trying to take over the island to make it a permanent hellgate, a demon get-away, and a place to plot in order to strengthen their position in Hell.   So they’re concentrating on rallying the demon population on the island by hook (bribes) or by crook (threats), and their plan to do that is to take over businesses on the island, weaken the cops and the mayor, and keep Nick from becoming Devil.  They don’t want to run the government or the utilities, they’re not interested in political power, they’re interested in economic power.  That is, they don’t want to run things, they just want to own the island so they can dictate terms.  So they have the Lemon Brothers running things, and Ranger Rich out in the Nature Preserve handling hidden gates and the disposal of Hell’s agents, they’re blackmailing businesses to sell to them, infiltrating the police, collecting protection money from demon businesses, threatening demons, etc.    Think the the demon version of the mob.  

The other group is the anti-demon group, and they do want political power so they can deport (or worse) all the demons on the island and make it impossible for them to return.  So they have people in place in government who have put iron at the entrance to the bridge and to the airport, effectively trapping demons on the island.  They handed out the poisoned doughnuts to identify demons hiding in plain sight.   I’ll add the private internet community (they already had group meetings) and a new Breitbartish tabloid.  CIty Manager is a great idea here.  They are definitely running against the Mayor in the next election and they’re rabid about party loyalty (think Tea Party).  They want an ethnically pure island, and they’re only interested in money because it pays for their plans, but they’re not in this to get rich or even wield power outside of the need to eradicate all demons from the island.  They’re bigots, but they’re not the mob.

Neither group wants to disrupt communications or food supplies or anything that keeps the island running.  Both of them want to manipulate the island’s inhabitants for their own ends.  So they’re working behind the scenes, rarely butting up against each other.  For example, the anti-demon group doesn’t care who owns the businesses as long as they’re not demons.  Demons First group doesn’t care about the iron at the bridge and airport because they can get anywhere they want by going back to hell and opening another gate.  But now both groups are getting out over their skis, starting to do big things–like buy the amusement park–and people are starting to notice, especially people like Nick and Nita, so both sides are out to discredit them or, if they get too close, eliminate them.  

So Nita and Nick are fighting two battles against two groups who both see them as roadblocks to their plans.  Of course since one group wants a demon-free island and the other group wants a demon-centric island, they’re gonna clash, but first they have to get rid of Nita and Nick. 

And a lot of your ideas are going to tie right into that.  So once again, we thank you for your support.

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Cherry Saturday 7-29-2017

Today is International Tiger Day.Celebrate.

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