Jennifer Crusie's Blog, page 239

The Office Week Three: PROGRESS!

No, really. I managed to swap the bookcase and the library table–both of them heavy mothers and both of them wider than the room so NOT EASY–and get the floor painted when the rest of the boat paint came in. I sorted through the books and put only what I’m currently using on the bookcases. There’s still a lot to do–I had to wait to paint until yesterday when I’d have outside temps of above 50 for more than 24 hours–so progress pictures next week, but as God is my witness, I got a lot done.

And while I was sorting things out in the office, I also sorted things out online, clearing out the Business file in Dropbox and changing my Amazon Smile charity to Planned Parenthood because I have had up to here with damn men trying to take reproductive rights away from women. Also, Elizabeth Warren should live forever and be President someday, but not now because we need her fighting the good fight in Congress. (This is what happens when I’m doing relatively mindless things like building simple boxes and painting everything white: I brood.)

Next week: Please, please please let me finish this room and be done forever. I don’t mind cleaning, but this wrassling furniture around and dealing with oil base paint that takes 24 hours to even approach being dry is not fun, plus it leaves my mind free to wander, and that’s not good either (see tomorrow’s post). OTHO, now I can find things. Huge step forward.

And the floor looks really great, too.

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Questionable: Red Herrings and Gotchas

Sure Thing asked

“With mysteries, what about red herrings and misdirection in terms of plot? How far is too far that it may end up being a gotcha?”

Spoiler Warning: The endings of The Sixth Sense and The Murder of Roger Ackroyd are revealed below.



Let’s backtrack to the underlying assumption here which is that readers must believe in the authority in the text; that is, that the success of a story depends on the feeling that the writer knows what she is doing and sees the reader as a partner to be treated fairly, not a mark to duped. And that basically comes down to asking if the reversal/surprise/red herring/whatever is in the narrative as a legitimate part of the story or if it’s there to provoke and trick the reader.

One of the most lauded reversals in film comes at the end of The Sixth Sense when the little boy tells the point-of-view character that he’s dead. This is pretty universally regarded as a great surprise ending because it’s completely fair: if you watch the movie again, the clues are all there, but the fact is never onscreen because the point-of-view character thinks he’s still alive. But another reason for its impact is that this information is important; it’s not there just to be a surprise ending, it changes the entire story so that when you watch the movie again, you’re not seeing a little boy traumatized by his ability to see and speak with the dead being helped by a kind psychologist, you’re seeing a little boy traumatized by his ability to see and speak with the dead being helped by a kind, dead psychologist. The reversal at the end actually makes the movie better by making the child’s situation even more traumatic and his journey to stability even more poignant.

One of the most contested reversals in detective fiction is in The Murder of Roger Ackroyd because of its revelation at the end that the narrator is the murderer. This is not because the clues aren’t there throughout the story; in that sense the story is fair. It’s because the first-person point-of-view character knows he did the murder and skips over that part as he narrates the story. He tells of talking with Ackroyd in his library when Ackroyd gets a letter. He asks Ackroyd to read while he’s there, and Ackroyd refuses. And then . . .

“The letter had been brought in at twenty minutes to nine.

It was just on ten minutes to nine when I left him, the letter still unread. I hesitated with my hand on the door handle, looking back and wondering if there was anything I had left undone. I could think of nothing. With a shake of the head I passed out and closed the door behind me.”



See that paragraph break? That where he murdered Ackroyd. He (and Christie) deliberately leave out information that he would have been thinking about in order to dupe the reader. The reversal doesn’t cast the narrative in a new light or make it better. It’s a trick, not an extra layer of story. Christie tried to finesse her trickery by making the story a manuscript that the murderer was writing as the one case that Hercule Poirot never solved, which of course Poirot solves. So faced with ruin, he ends his manuscript with this confession (and suicide):

“I am rather pleased with myself as a writer. What could be neater, for instance, than the following:

‘The letters were brought in at twenty minutes to nine. It was just on ten minutes to nine when I left him, the letter still unread.

I hesitated with my hand on the door handle, looking back and wondering if there was anything I had left undone.’

All true, you see. But suppose I had put a row of stars after the first sentence! Would somebody then have wondered what exactly happened in that blank ten minutes?”



The problem with that is that even though it’s clever and fair since the narrative is being written by a sociopath, it still came across as a gotcha to many readers. And in readership as in so much else, perception is reality. They felt swindled and Christie’s rationale there at the end (and it’s hers, not just the murderer’s) doesn’t make up for the cheat.

So one way to think of it is that a reversal is “I surprised you and the surprise made the story new and better,” and a bad reversal/gotcha is “I duped you.”

Which brings us to Sure Thing’s question: What about red herrings?

Red herrings in a story are misdirections, analagous to a magician directing the audience to look at his glamorous assistant while he’s putting the rabbit in the hat. There is nothing stopping the audience from seeing the rabbit go into the hat, they’ve just been given two choices and they’re going for the one that’s bigger and better lit. Once they realize what’s going on, they can catch the magician’s act again, refuse to look away, and see that the rabbit was clearly there from the beginning. They play fair with viewer/reader because the truth is always on the page.

Red herrings go bad when the writer unfairly or illogically withholds crucial information. “We did a complete background check on that guy, but forgot to mention that he has a twin brother because it didn’t seem important.” No.

That means your red herring is fine if it’s part of the entire package of information the reader needs to solve the mystery. If your red herring is only that lovely color because important information is missing, it’s bad fish.

As a writer, you’re not required to say, “Hey, LOOK OVER HERE, this is IMPORTANT,” but you are required to put the information on the page if it’s something that would be known to the point-of-view character or would come to light in the logical progression of story events. You can gesture to the glamorous clue that’s better lit as a red herring, but you also have to put the rabbit in the hat on the page or it’s a gotcha.

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Internuts

I found this fragment of a post in the Argh Vault, a place that is now mostly Cherry Saturday bits scheduled to post on their various weekends. I started this in December of 2014, more than two years ago, but I know exactly why I started it: I’d been there.

Here’s the quote I pulled from Sam Biddle’s essay on Gawker:

http://gawker.com/justine-sacco-is-go...

“This is the one thing no one in public relations—pretty much a sham industry anyway, sure—has figured out, or is smart enough to put into practice. When you fuck up on the internet, do nothing. Say nothing. Remain motionless as best you can, no matter how much you want to explain, or argue, or contextualize. Shut up! Just shut up.”

The worst kerfluffle I ever got caught up in was the one over on Smart Bitches about the romance novelist they loved to bash for what in their opinion was truly terrible writing. Then one of the writers there found out that the romance author had copied passages from her non-fiction research books, and turned the hounds loose on her. And I opened my big fat mouth and said, “What did this woman do? Run over your dog?”

My point was that they had trashed her books twenty-eight times, and now they were going after her for sloppy writing. I was willing to bet that the romance writer didn’t realize what she was doing was plagiarizing. She wasn’t copying anybody’s story, she was just putting in the stuff she found on the black-footed ferret.

Yes, of course, that’s still plagiarism. My point, which I did not make well, was that she probably didn’t realize it wasn’t fair use because it was non-fiction. And then in my attempt to explain my position, I gave the example that when I was teaching college comp, I’d had to teach every one of my students what plagiarism was because almost all of them would copy their research. The romance author, I said, probably had never gone to college and had anybody explain that to her.

Yes, that was a STUPID thing to say because of course people took it to mean that I was saying anybody who hadn’t been to college would plagiarize because they were too dumb to know better. As a good friend of mine e-mailed me at the time, “SHUT UP ABOUT COLLEGE.”

At that point, I shut up about everything, but I’d still incurred the wrath of the mob and to this day, there are still people who think I love plagiarism. Not only do I love it, but anybody who speaks to me loves it: Poor Bob went to a Thrillerfest in NYC and had somebody demand that he condemn me for my stand; since we were barely speaking at the time, he said, “I don’t give a damn what she does,” and the woman said, “Well, you’re just as bad as she is then.” Yeah, that helped.

All of which is to say that I agree with Sam Biddle. If you’re on the net, sooner or later people are going to come after you, whether you deserve it or not, especially if you criticize something they’re invested in. Ignore them. You can’t win.

XKCD

Just shut up.

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Synopsis Post at Writing Romance

The How To Write a Synopsis post is up over at Writing/Romance.

This is probably going to end up as a section in the book, not an introduction, but since I didn’t realize that until I finished it, I put it up anyway. One way I can tell: it’s twice as long, almost a thousand words, as my post limit for this series.

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Cherry Saturday 2-20-2016

Today is Love Your Pet Day.

Which is like saying Today is Breathing Day. EVERYDAY IS LOVE YOUR PET DAY.

Also Love Your Kid.

The Zootopia trailer is a hoot, too.

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Book Done Yet? It’s Time for a Plan

So I’m working my way through twelve years of drafts (no exaggeration, the earliest ones are dated 2002) and I realize this book has passed through so many versions that there are actually different books here. It’s a mess.

In one version Zelda and Beth (who will become Scylla) write biographical cookbooks and Rose is trying to bribe them into acting as maid and cook for a week by offering them her diaries. That one’s farfetched, but I could make it work especially since just one of the files from the dozens in that version is 22,000 words.

Then there’s the latest version which is Zelda coming to the house to look through the diaries and scrapbooks in the attic to find out who her father is and getting roped into the Christmas party with Scylla. That’s the one with ghosts, and ironically, it’s not as farfetched.

I could try to combine the two, but that’s just compounding problems in both versions. No, what I have to do is stop reading through a zillion drafts and make a plot plan. Start with turning points and acts, figure out the big scenes in each act (I’m that far along on the draft that that’s feasible), and then pull those scenes from the mass of material I’ve already written and slot them into the new story docs or put them on the list of scenes to be written.

I really hate doing plot plans. I love thinking about plots, the whole what-if bit, but actually sitting down with graph paper and plotting a book out? No. It’s like sticking a pin through a butterfly. And yet, given the mess I’ve made by stretching the writing on this out over more than a decade, a plot plan is the only way out. Graph paper and then Curio.

So I’ll shove all the drafts away, and start with the five turning points. Maybe make a synopsis, that would be good. (Post on writing a synopsis coming up on Writing/Romance on Monday.) Get the entirely of the story in my head in its simplest form.

And then start dumping drafts in the trash as fast as I can because I’m drowning in them. It doesn’t matter how much I like a scene I wrote in 2004; if it doesn’t fit the synopsis/plot plan, it goes into the trash.

Okay, THAT’s a plan.

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The Office: Week Three

My big move this week was to clear the floor at the end of the office, the part in front of the couch and the back door, and begin painting there. Except for some reason, I didn’t check the can of Rustoleum White that I picked up. It didn’t go very far and when I finally put my glasses on, I saw that I’d found the only can of boat paint in the house. It looks just like the latex I’d bought except there a very small boat on the label. The good news is, that stuff’ll last. The bad news is, it’s oil based so I can’t put latex over it without a lot of prep. So I ordered four more cans of the stuff (not cheap) and it’s coming on Friday. It takes forever to dry, so I’ll be moving into the front of the house while the floors back here cure. And it has to be done this weekend before the temps get so low again that it’s not above 50 degrees on the back porch.

In other words, I made progress but . . .

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Questionable: Digital Collage

Julie B wrote:

“If you can, at some point, talk about digital collage v. 3-D, I’d be interested to hear what you like about it. ”

First a word about discovery and collage.

As writers, we deal in words. For us, words are work. But a lot of creativity, particularly in the discovery phase of writing, gets shut down by work because we’re trying to make up stuff while trying to think of the right word. So we need a way to access creative story ideas that’s more like play. There’s a ton of research on the important of play in creative thinking, but the key in writing is to find a way that isn’t words/work. Music is great for sparking a mood, for getting the feeling right, for leading to daydreams that lead to story, but so are pictures, seeing things that spark ideas. And that’s where collage comes in. (“Collage” essentially means “gluing a bunch of things together to make one thing.”)

The idea behind collage as discovery is that you find pictures that somehow remind you of the book. You’re not looking for illustrations, you’re looking for things that look like the book to you, that evoke the mood and feeling of the book. My old You Again collage, for example, had a lot of pearls in it. I still don’t know why, but they were important. Tea cups. (I know why they were important now.) Lots of blue. A picture of a chicken. A woman from a Pre-Raphaelite painting. A big staircase. I didn’t have a plan, I just saw those things in magazines and ripped them out because they looked like the book in my head. They all grabbed my attention, and then I paid more attention as I cut them out, sometimes lopping off part of the image if my subconscious said, “Yeah, we don’t need that part.”

BUt the creative part really comes when I starting putting the images together. Meanings (and ideas) change when two things are put next to each other, when one is glued on top of another, when they’re linked by another element in the collage, so the process of collaging often causes new ideas lurking in the soup of your subconscious to rise to the top. And since this collage is not an artwork, you can be as sloppy and as silly as you want. It’s not work, it’s play.

I think scissors-and-glue collage is the most helpful, but it’s definitely not the easiest. Even if you’re not stockpiling magazines and are instead pulling and printing your images off the net, you’ve still got a backing board and scissors and glue and god knows what else. My last physical collage was for Monday Street and I completely lost my grip: the damn thing is huge and made of hardwood. It was also hugely helpful and will continue to be as I work on it, but finding a place to keep it is a PITA. You know what’s easier? Digital collage.

Digital collage is just like scissors-and-glue collage except it’s not messy and you’re not touching anything. “Not messy” is good; “not touching anything” is bad because part of that spurring-creativity thing happens when you touch the pictures and found objects you glue together. Still, sometimes I just can’t, as on the late/final version of Maybe This Time and the now in progress, You Again. In those cases, I go digital.

1. Finding images in digital collage is much more intuitive.

Here’s the great thing about googling images: You type in your key word (any descriptive word that evokes your story for you) and scan down the page until you find an image that feels right; when you select it, a black box opens up with the image in it and then to the right another square that says, “More like this.” You can follow those links down rabbit holes forever, which in real life is a time sink but in digital collage is brainstorming because you’re flipping through hundreds of images, rejecting most of them without thinking, pulling the one or two that your intuition tells you look like your book to your desktop. Doesn’t mean you’ll use all you’ll pull, but you’ve got thousands of images to sprint through, stopping only when your subconscious says, “Wait! That one!” And that search will inspire other searches, on and on, until you have a wonderful, chaotic file of images to play with, a variety that you cannot get searching through paper sources, all of them chosen by instinct. (That’s why I use a digital search these days even for my scissors-and-glue collages, although I think I might be losing something in that process.)

2. It’s much easier to alter images in digital collage.

You’ve found the perfect picture to evoke your protagonist but the woman in the picture has blue sunglasses on and you know the sunglasses in your book are red. You can fix that with just about any image editor (if you’re on a Mac, I recommend Acorn). You can also flip them, make them black and white or sepia, tint them blue, stretch them, and–my personal favorite–make them transparent so you can layer images on top of each other.

3. It’s much easier to move things around in digital collage.

If you want to move a glued image, you have to peel it off and reglue it. That leaves your collage with torn and missing places. I have no problem with that–this is discovery not art–but it’s so much easier to do digitally when you can just select the image and drag it where you want it to go.

4. When I’m finished, I can reproduce that collage in any size I want. My collage-in-progress for You Again is my laptop wallpaper, but I could also take the jpg to Staples and have them print it up in postersize. Meanwhile my Monday Street collage continues to block out the sun in my workroom.

Take for example, the Maybe This Time collage. (MTT was once called Always Kiss Me Goodnight, which explains the title on the digital collage.) As I remember, I worked on them both on and off. The scissors and glue gave me a much better foundation for the story world; the digital collage helped me explore and brainstorm relationships.

Here’s the digital:

I could do a lot more with emotion and theme in the digital because I could make images transparent and layer them. Using the images in rectangles as I overlaid them helped, too: they formed a pattern instead of a setting or a framework.

But the scissors and glue collage was deliberately built as a world, a structure, and that’s the one that most looks like the book to me:

You can see that it’s a lot more chaotic, but it’s not supposed to be an integrated artwork. That chaos shows all the connections my brain made while I was gluing stuff down, all the details and moments that I needed to know, dredging them up from my subconscious as I carefully cut out salvia plants.

In short, I’ll probably always use both, and the scissors-and-glue version will probably always be the most evocative of the story for me and the most helpful for discovery. But when time and space are short, digital is the way to go.

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What Can a Romance Heroine Do?

Cleaning off the website, I found an old page that came from a post here many years ago: “If I Am a Romance Heroine, I will never . . .” It was inspired by the wonderful Evil Overlord list, and it really didn’t belong on the website; it wasn’t a serious critique of the romance heroine, it was mostly jokes.

But looking over it again, made me think.

Is there anything a romance heroine can’t do? It’s 2016, aren’t we beyond restricting our heroines? Uh, not really. It’s the Protagonist Problem. There’s nothing a woman can’t do in romance fiction, but there are a lot of things she should avoid if she wants to be a protagonist. Romance is, after all, about an optimistic ending, and it’s hard to root for an HEA for a child-abusing, terrorist, racist, homophobic, puppy mill owner.

So taking as a given that a romance heroine has to be basically a decent person, flawed but not cruel or sociopathic*, what are the things that would make me throw the book against the wall? I took another look at the list. [The comments in brackets are my comments from the original page on the website.]

“If I am ever a romance heroine, I will not…”

1. Go up in my nightie to see what all that screaming in the attic is about. (Jenny) [Don’t be a Darwin Heroine.]

I think the irritation with this one is that it makes her a TDTL (Too Dumb To Live) heroine. It’s great if a protagonist is vulnerable and makes mistakes, not if she says, “Gee, what’s in here?” and puts her head in the lion’s mouth. You want readers saying, “Oh god, I’d do that and I’d be in just as much trouble as she is,” not “WHY WHY WHY would she do that?” One aligns the reader with the heroine, the other distances her from Our Girl.

2. Have a baby and not tell the father to protect him and his future. (Jenny) [Because fathers have rights, too, so she’s not being noble, she’s being selfish. He gets to decide if he wants to abandon a baby.]

This one, I think, has to do with values. Again, heroines should be flawed and make mistakes (like the baby), that’s what makes them human. But the choices they make characterize them, and choosing not to tell a man he’s a father means that Our Girl thinks she can make decisions for him. A heroine who says, “Listen, I’m going to raise this kid on my own, my decision, I don’t want your help, but you should know you’re going to be a father,” is admirable. A heroine who says, “I’m going to raise this kid on my own, he’s not even going to know the kid exists,” is selfish and controlling, unless Dad is a serial killer or rapist, in which case he’s not going to be the hero anyway.

3. Decide to barge into a dangerous situation just to show him! (Corrina) [Actually, don’t have her barge into a dangerous situation at all unless not barging in means she or somebody she loves is gonna die.]

This goes back to the TDTL heroine. Again, we’re not talking about understandable mistakes or actions taken in the heat of the moment for relatable motivations, we’re talking about stupidity walking. Motivation is everything.

4. Tell the hero I’m a virgin as I’m about to have some really incredible sex. (Corrina) [You’d think that would have come up in conversation before that.]

I have no objections to virgin heroines, although they’re harder to explain these days, but I’m not sure how this one happens. That is, I can’t see a lot of men objecting to somebody being a virgin since not being a virgin isn’t a big deal, and it’s useful information to have before hitting the sheets. I’m just trying to figure out how it comes up. There’s the story where she decides to lose her virginity and plans it out; there’s plenty of time to give him a head’s up ahead of time. Or there’s the story where she’s so swept away by passion that she goes for it; but if she’s swept away why is she chatting? I think my big objection here is making virginity a point of contention. That’s so twentieth century.

5. Let my breasts taunt and/or tease the hero. (Jenny) [Most of my heroines are dealing with gravity; their breasts just don’t have that kind of energy.]

This is just “Don’t be a bad writer.”

6. See him talking to another woman and turn it into a Flaming Affair without asking him about it. (Jen) [This is the Big Misunderstanding. You go to Writer Hell if you write the Big Misunderstanding.]

Oh, god, the Big Misunderstanding. I hate the Big Misunderstanding, and it’s so easy to slide into. I’ve done it. I built a whole book on it (Trust Me On This.) It’s a terrible trope. I’ll never do it again, I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry.

7. Go into the basement to see what that strange noise was. (Beth) [More Darwin.]

This is TDTL again.

8. Permit my bosom to heave, especially while wearing a bodice. (Beth) [What is it with all these energetic bosoms?]

This is bad writing again.

9. Ever permit my bodice to be ripped, though I may rip it myself. (Beth) [I’d just avoid the bodice all together.]

I’m okay with this one. At this point, putting your heroine in a bodice and having the hero rip it is so meta, it’s cool again.

10. Wear a bodice. (Beth) [There. What did I say?]

I’ve got to get Zelda into a bodice.

11. Be more beautiful, thin, and/or rich than anyone else on the planet. (Cindy) [It’s so hard to build sympathy for a heroine indistinguishable from Paris Hilton.]

You can actually do all of those things, you just have to make her vulnerable in some other way. (Apologies to Paris Hilton; I must have been going through a Mean Girl stage.)

12. Conceal my identity, or if I already have, put off telling him who I really am. (Darla) [Unless, of course, she’s undercover and targeting him; in certain cases saying, “Hi, I’m Jeannie from the FBI” gets you a Darwin Award.]

Again, motivation. Really, you can have a heroine do damn near anything if you motivate her intelligently.

13. Have the longest legs the hero’s ever seen, especially if I’m only five foot tall. (Darla) [Right up there with being 5’9″ with a great ass and huge breasts and weighing 105 lbs. Look, the breasts alone weigh 105.]

This one still bugs me, the physically perfect heroine, but I think it’s changing. I’m okay with beautiful heroines although I rarely write them, but impossible heroines make me scream. I remember one romance I read ages ago in which the heroine was in a car accident, so the hero carried her inside (it was on a deserted road in the middle of the wilderness and his cabin was nearby, but still SPINAL INJURY, dude), and noticed her tremendous rack and then found her driver’s license and found out that she was 5’9′ and 105 pounds. At the time I was incoherent with rage–my teenage daughter was 5’9 and so skinny that people kept feeding her, and she weighed 140–but looking back on it, I have realized that it was because the heroine had lied to the DMV.

14. Borrow clothes that are too snug in the bosom. (Darla) [Unless they belong to the hero.]

“Oh, no, my breasts are too big,” does not engender sympathy in our culture. If you’re going for vulnerability, this is not the road to take.

15. Be at the absolute pinnacle of my profession when I’m 22. (Darla) [Unless she’s about to be indicted for insider trading or fired for sleeping with the boss.]

Our twenties is when we make our mistakes. And our thirties and forties and fifties, yes, but those early years are when we make banal mistakes because we all have to start somewhere. The idea that somebody who is twenty-two is a master of her domain is off-putting and unbelievable. Now if Dad died and she inherited the company at 22, you’ve got me: this is a woman with problems. The young-person-thrown-in-over-her-or-his-head is a great story premise; the young-person-who-is-a-Master-of-the-Universe is not.

16. Get in front of the hero and his gun when the villain is confronting us. [I might have done this one. I know I had a scene in What the Lady Wants where the bad guy draws a gun and the hero steps behind my heroine, but that was because the bad guy was her cousin and he was 95% sure she wouldn’t get shot.]

I’m not sure about this one, actually. If the heroine knows damn well the guy with the gun won’t shoot her, I’d be fine with it. If she’s sacrificing her life for the hero for a good reason, I’d be fine with it. If she doesn’t have a plan or a willingness to die, then she’s TDTL again. No TDTL heroines.

17. Limit…the breathy pauses in…my sentences…to only one…a phrase. (lslcw) [Unless she’s asthmatic. If she asthmatic, she’s gonna gasp sometimes.]

Bad writing again.

18. Have a “creamy” anything. (cyn/blinky) [I’ll allow a good mayonnaise.]

Eh, it’s a cliche, so bad writing, but not a deal-breaker.

19.Have sex with a hero who has a “velvet covered manhood” because of the annoying lint this would create. (liberryshortcake) [Especially if he’s the one calling a velvet covered manhood. Or Fred. If he’s named it, she leaves.]

Bad writing again.

20. Keep reminding the hero that I am independent and can take care of myself, while constantly getting into situations where he has to “save” me. (Carolyn) [Because the reader wonders how the hell she’s survived up until then.]

TDTL Heroine.

21. Insist I am independent then allow the hero to dictate my life. (Jen) [A variation on the “chase him until he catches you” plan.]

TDTL heroine.

22. Struggle futilely to break free from the hero’s punishing embrace before being overcome with desire. Either I want him, in which case I should not be fighting, or I don’t want him, in which case I should break his nose, foot, finger, and anything else handy. Enough with the wimpy struggles. (Jen) [No playing around with the concept of “no.”].

This is a dicey one. It’s a strong fantasy, so I wouldn’t rule it out, but it’s a really dangerous one, there are so many ways it can go wrong and turn the story into a wallbanger. I’d say “Avoid this.” Also don’t write punishing embraces, that’s just bad writing.

23. Tell all my suspicions to the nice looking, totally sympathetic “other” man only to find out he’s the killer. (TheTwoJeans) [I’m actually on the fence about this one because this is absolutely something I’d do. I collaborated with a Green Beret once who’d had training to withstand torture; he told me I’d never be tortured because all anybody would have to do to get information out of me would be hand me a Diet Coke and say, “So, what’s new?” Some of us are just natural sharers.]

It’s motivation again. If the reader would confide in the character and only finds out later he’s a Bad Guy, then it’s okay for the heroine to do it. I bought it completely in Charade.

So my takeaway from this is:

• Vulnerable heroines who make understandable mistakes are good; TSTL heroines are not.

• Motivation is essential.

• Avoid the Big Misunderstanding like an STD.

• Don’t write bad.

*As soon as I wrote “not cruel or sociopathic,” I thought of Madalena and Gareth on Galavant. I love Maddie and Gar: may they be bad but not evil together forever.

Today’s Good Advice:

Do not ever google Mark of the Beast.

It brings up some of the most batshit insane websites I’ve ever seen. And not good batshit, either.

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Writing/Romance on Subplot; Also OK Go

For those of you who wanted more of Jane the tightrope walker and the Nopefish, the Subplot post is up over at Writing Romance.

And then there’s Ok Go’s latest video which, as usual, is mindblowing.

Here’s the video and how they did it (it really is done in zero gravity).

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