Patricia C. Wrede's Blog, page 28

Lives of writers and characters

Quite a few well-known writers have had strange, exciting, or adventurous lives. Ernest Hemingway was an ambulance driver during WWI, after which he did things like bull running in Spain and safaris in Africa; Samuel Clemens (aka Mark Twain) was a gold prospector, worked on the steamboats going up and down the Mississippi, and served in the American Civil War. Jack Kerouac served on sailing vessels before he started the road trips all over the U.S. that he mined for the material of his famous...

Two Books for Writers

Ursula le Guin was and is one of my favorite writers, and when she published a book on writing some twenty years ago, I grabbed it at once. I wasn’t disappointed. Steering the Craft: Exercises and Discussions on Story Writing for the Lone Navigator or the Mutinous Crew has been my go-to book on writing ever since, most especially because it contained the only writing exercises and prompts I ever felt I would learn something from doing that I couldn’t have learned from simply writing a story f...

Places and things, mainly

Over the last couple of decades, I’ve noticed that more and more of the newer writers are over-describing things. It looks to me as if they are attempting to create a clear and specific image in words, the way a camera does with, well, a photo. At the same time, I’ve noticed more writing-advice people warning darkly about “telling too much” – by which they seem to mean “including words/paragraphs that can’t be easily identified as 1) action, 2) dialog, or 3) the POV’s internal monolog.

In my...

Awareness

Creating a novel – or anything, really – is like taking a trip around the world; no matter how much preparation you’ve done or how carefully you’ve planned things, the places you visit will be strange and surprising. Things will happen that you didn’t anticipate – some good, some not. The trip will take longer than you expected, it will be over much sooner than you want it to be; you will miss seeing some of the things you were certain you would see and you will see incredible things that you...

Comfort zones

There’s a phrase I use a lot when I’m talking to people who want to be writers: “If what you are doing isn’t working, try something else!”

Recently it has been borne in on me that a lot of those folks have nodded enthusiastically… and then they go off and work even harder at whatever they’ve been doing that hasn’t been working.

So let’s try this again. “Something else” does not mean more of whatever isn’t working. It means a thing that is different from whatever isn’t working. “Different” mea...

Following a trail instead of a hook

A lot of attention gets paid to “writing a killer hook” for one’s story, to the point where I’ve known people to spend more time writing their very first sentence than they spend working on the whole rest of their story. Not all at once, of course. They write something, then change it, change it again, settle on something for a day or two, then come back and fiddle with it some more. They ponder the value of something more dramatic, compared to a more intellectual tease. They fiddle with word choice, looking for more unusual phrasing and more striking details. For weeks. For months. In the case of some novelists, for years.

All of this is in the name of getting the reader involved. No, not just involved; chained to the story with bands of iron. These authors are searching for a magic sentence that, once read, means the reader can’t put the book down until they finish it. The trouble is, there’s no such thing.

A terrific first sentence will not keep very many readers reading through a mediocre first page. Most writers realize that “hooking” the reader doesn’t mean a thing if you don’t deliver on whatever that hook promised; what too many of them forget is that they also have to keep the reader interested long enough to get the delivery. A killer hook that sets up a brilliantly clever payoff in Chapter Twenty is not going to work if the chapters in between are pedestrian, not even if their pedestrian-ness is revealed to be a total lie, camouflaging a far more weird and wonderful reality, because the kind of reader who appreciates this kind of card trick rarely has the patience to plow through nineteen chapters of what appear to be ordinary, every-day events.

The first sentence of your story is not a fishhook that has to be set to catch your reader. It’s more like the first M&M in a whole line of M&M’s that your reader is picking up, not realizing that in doing so they’re following a trail deeper and deeper into the woods, until suddenly they look up and realize that now the only way out (or at least, the only satisfying way) is to keep going and finish the story.

Which means that the whole first part of your story – say, anywhere from a quarter to a third – has to be that trail of candy. It’s not one particular sentence or clever revelation; it’s a whole series of sentences that coax the readers in the direction you want them to go. It’s not a single memorable image or situation; it’s a whole line of situations and images that add up to something memorable, like pixels creating a picture.

The terminology is not really important. It doesn’t really matter whether you call that first section Act I, a hook, or the setup – it still has to do the job of coaxing the readers slowly into the swamp. Also note that it’s your trail; you can lead the reader anywhere you like. It doesn’t have to be a swamp. It does have to be interesting, both in terms of the journey and in terms of the eventual destination, or you’ll lose readers.

You also probably want a certain kind of consistency. If you are laying a trail of M&Ms, and suddenly you switch to peppermint hard candy, you’re likely to throw some people off. Or, to unpack the metaphor, if you are luring your reader along with fascinating character bits and then after two or three chapters suddenly switch to cool techno-action bits, some readers won’t follow the shift. You can lead them along anyway, either by alternating for a while to ease readers into the change, or by embedding the stuff they’d got used to in the new, larger bit (like starting with a trail of M&Ms and then switching to M&M cookies…very few people I know will complain about that).

What you don’t want to do is let your guard down. There is no point in the book where you can think, even in the deepest darkest recesses of your subconscious, “There; I have the reader hooked, so now I can coast a bit.” Because I can just about guarantee you that that is the exact point at which your readers will get an emergency phone call from their teenager, or the dental assistant will come out and say it’s time for them to come in, or hear their spouse say “We need to talk…put that thing down and look at me!” Because you can’t predict these vagaries of your readers’ everyday lives, you have to keep the whole thing interesting.

In the end, I find this a lot more appealing to me, as a writer, than trying to hang the success or failure of my work on one “killer hook” of an opening sentence. I’m writing a 100,000-word novel, not 6,000 lovingly polished haiku.

Update notice

This is just to let everyone know that sometime in the next day or two we are rolling over to the new site format, which is not that different from the current one but which will (we hope) be more mobile-friendly. I’m hoping that there won’t be problems, but if there are, that’s what’s going on.

Little things

The subject matter of a story is seldom what really makes it interesting to a reader. A great idea that can be summed up in one tantalizing sentence may attract attention, but what keeps the reader going past the first page is a combination of the subject matter, the way the story is told, and whatever the particular reader brings to the story in terms of life experience, curiosity, prior knowledge, personal taste, and a dozen other things. The writer can only control two out of those three things, the subject matter and the way the story is told, and of those two, the subject matter is the least important. Done right, the hero/heroine’s struggle to save a stray dog or repair an old house can be riveting, while his/her desperate attempts to save the universe can end up being dull and boring.

Yet a lot of writers, especially genre writers, seem to believe that the only stories worth writing are “big” stories and/or wildly original ideas. They act as if no readers will be interested unless the hero/heroine isn’t dealing with shattering, life-changing events…preferably large-scale events that affect the whole town, the whole country, or the whole world.

Which is fine, if that’s the kind of story the writer is interested in writing. It becomes a problem when writers think they have to write about something big…especially if they define “something big” as Saving The World, when what they really want to write about is the way their main character deals with finding a birthday gift for their kid after a car breakdown has just wiped out the family budget. And it’s a problem because, in my experience, 95% of writers do a better job when they are writing about things that interest them, things they love reading, things they want to write about.

Doing the best possible job is important because, as I mentioned earlier, it’s actually more important than the subject matter. A well-told story is more likely to sell and be read than one that is clumsy, regardless of how original or dramatic the fundamental idea or situation is. It’s just a bit less obvious to some folks what “well-told” means when the central story problem is small, quiet, and personal rather than world-changing.

The basic technique for getting the reader involved is the same in both cases: presenting the reader with a character who is interesting and/or sympathetic, and for whom this particular small, quiet, personal problem is important for reasons that are understandable and believable. It isn’t necessary to exaggerate the importance of saving a puppy into something that must matter to the whole world, or even to all the other characters in the story. In fact, when the writer suddenly throws in the fact that the alien starship will destroy the Earth if they don’t get that puppy back in good shape, it usually doesn’t work very well (though it would be a fine twist in the right sort of comedy).

The reason upping the ante with an alien threat doesn’t work is that what the main character has, presumably, been caring about in the story so far is the puppy, not the whole Earth. Sure, anybody worthy of being a main character ought to care about the Earth being destroyed, if only because they will go up with it. But if the writer has done a proper job of getting the reader involved, the reader is already invested in the well-being of the puppy. Yeah, we also care about the Earth not getting blown up, but that’s not the story we thought we were reading. The focus of the central story problem has shifted so abruptly that it gave everybody mental whiplash.

Usually, this kind of thing happens either because the author got cold feet halfway through the story and decided their original small idea just wasn’t enough, or because the author got to a point in the plot where some major twist had to happen, and to them “major” means that it must be large-scale, regardless of the context so far. But “a major turn in the plot” always has to be considered in the context of the story that is being told. If the plot revolves around an eleven-year-old kid trying to get a pet puppy, the big twist has to be “big” in the context of the story. It needs to introduce an obstacle that seems insurmountable to the eleven-year-old protagonist. Getting mugged by the school bully, who takes the money the kid was going to use to buy the puppy, would work just fine, because it is a problem that is in the same scale as the story. A sudden threat to blow up the Earth is a lot harder to make work in a book about saving a puppy, because it’s almost always too big for the story so far. Sometimes, proper foreshadowing and setup can make it work, but only when the aliens are the real central story problem…in which case, the book isn’t actually about saving a puppy at all.

The other common reason for this kind of whiplash-inducing shift in mid-book is that the author has had a great new idea halfway through, and never goes back to harmonize the two parts of the story. When this happens, one can go back to the first half and put in some setup, so that the change in focus is more gradual and satisfyingly foreshadowed; one can tone down the second half so that it is closer to the tone and scale of the first half (OK, the aliens aren’t threatening to blow up Earth; they just want the puppy as a pet for one of their kids); or one can separate the two ideas and write one story about an eleven-year-old who wants a puppy, and a different story about an eleven-year-old who saves the world from alien invaders.

Of course, there’s a long tradition of opening books with a relatively small problem that leads the main character deeper and deeper into the weeds, until the true, world-shattering threat is revealed. Unfortunately, this really only works when the world-shattering threat is meant to have been the central story problem all along, and has been properly foreshadowed. By the time Frodo gets out of the Shire, I doubt that there’s a reader left who really believes that the central story problem is getting the Ring to Rivendell, even if they couldn’t guess from the number of pages left.

Synopsis, Part II

Most of the positive things to remember about writing a synopsis are hard, because they run counter to everything else one gets told about writing. First among them is this:

A synopsis is the place to tell, not show.

Fiction writers have “show, don’t tell” pounded into their heads so often and so hard that a lot of them can’t bring themselves to “tell” anywhere in a story, even if it would be more effective in context. It absolutely breaks their brains to consider that in a synopsis, “telling” is the preferred way of presenting their story. They’re also told over and over about the power of the “key detail” and the “perfect word.” So they start their synopsis with “Ivy loads a mountain of dirty laundry belonging to herself and her younger siblings into the last three machines at the down-at-heels laundromat on the corner. The load is half done when her cell phone rings and a mysterious, unfamiliar voice warns her that not all is as it seems…” instead of “Twenty-three-year-old Ivy Duncan gets a cell phone message warning her that she is in danger. Ten minutes later, she is nearly shot walking back to her apartment.”

The synopsis is nearly always part of a package, known as a portion-and-outline. That means the editor/agent is getting three actual chapters of your book. Those three chapters are full of “showing;” they will display your lyrical prose style or gritty action; they’ll demonstrate your way with description and dialog; they’ll show your ability to pick the perfect word and get readers hooked on your story. If they don’t…why are they the first three chapters of your book? (Hint: if you find yourself wanting to send the agent/editor chapters 1, 5, and 9 because 5 and 9 have the really cool stuff in them and 2-4 and 6-8 are kind of ho-hum…you need to do some rewriting.) So none of that needs to be in the synopsis.

“Telling” in a synopsis works best if it sticks strictly to stuff that’s actually in the book. “In a touching scene…” is not in the book (unless you’re doing something weird and meta where you start each scene with a label like “exciting action scene” or “boring speeches here”). Describing the scene (“touching” “exciting”) is not the same as describing what happens in the scene. Telling the editor/agent how she/he is supposed to react (ditto, ditto) is not the same as describing how the characters react. Stick to what’s in the story.

The main reason telling is preferred for a synopsis is:

A synopsis needs to be clear.

The editor or agent wants to look at the synopsis and get a sense of the book: Who’s the main character? When and where does the story take place? What’s the goal? Why does the character want that? How do they get it…or not? Yes, that’s the old journalistic Who, What, When, Where, Why, and How. The editor/agent doesn’t want to be muddling around a laundromat trying to figure out whether the laundry and siblings are important to the story or whether it’s going to be something about the use of those last three machines that turns out to be key. They absolutely do not want a bunch of details that don’t end up being key…not in the synopsis. They want a nice, clear through line, laying out the key plot points in whatever order makes them most comprehensible.

This means that the writer has to know what the plot is. If Ivy Duncan’s main problem is that she’s torn between her duty to raise and protect her younger siblings and her drive to discover the truth about her parents’ death, the synopsis needs to focus on the character, and the siblings and dead parents are far more important to work in than the specifics of the hair-raising action-adventure stuff. If, however, Ivy’s central problem is an action-adventure one, the assassination attempts and car chases take up most of the synopsis and the siblings and parents fade off into the background.

This is because the length of a synopsis is severely limited, compared to the length of a novel. Do the math: If your novel is 100,000 words, and you write a 5 page synopsis, you have to convey the entire story in 1.75% of the words (assuming a standard 350 words per page). You have room for key points, and that’s all. The more subplots and complexities you try to include, the harder it is to keep your summary clear. Clarity is more important. Really.

Also, if you don’t know what the central story problem is, you’re likely to pick “key points” that aren’t key or that misrepresent the novel, leading to an editor rejecting the action-adventure story you wrote because the synopsis led him/her to believe he was getting a character-development story (or vice versa). Finally,

A synopsis is a spoiler.

The synopsis does not end with a cliffhanger unless the story does. “With her youngest brother in the hospital, the discovery of the missing diary means that Ivy must finally make a decision that will change her life” is not the end of the synopsis, because it’s not the end of the story. “Her youngest brother’s injury at last convinces Ivy that her obsessive quest for answers is putting her entire family in danger to little purpose, and she throws the diary into the ocean and returns home a wiser and less self-indulgent person,” on the other hand, tells the editor what happens and why it should be satisfying for the reader.

Being vague about your story’s ending (“…finds a key clue that solves the mystery”) is annoying and doesn’t help the editor make a decision. Editors and agents have seen hundreds – thousands – of blurb-like teasers, and they’re immune. Bored, even. They are far more likely to be intrigued if you tell them what the clever final twist is, because they get a thrill out of seeing an actual new revelation or a well-thought-out-and-presented familiar one.

If you have reached the point where you have sold several novels and are now submitting a portion-and-outline on a partially complete manuscript, you may not know enough about the ending to be specific. In this case, you have no choice but to be vague as regards the details, but you can still say “Ivy finally has to decide whether to continue her obsessive quest or give it up; she chooses to give it up” even if you’re not quite sure how or why Ivy comes to that decision. If you have not yet sold a novel, you have no excuse and no exemption. Your novel should be complete before you start sending it out, therefore you know exactly what happens at the end. Put it in the synopsis with no waffling around.

Writing a good synopsis is hard. Heck, writing a bad synopsis is hard. For me, the simplest way to get to something acceptable (and my agent made me rewrite the last two I sent her, so I’m not that great at it) is to start with the one-to-two-paragraph summary in the query letter and expand it. This is because I have to stick to the central plot problem when I only have one or two paragraphs; if I start with the outline, I tend to drift off into interesting subplots or background that I think is cool and fascinating (and it may be, but it takes up too much room in a plot outline). I also find it necessary to go over every synopsis several times, because dammit I’m a novelist and I always try to put in stray details and subplots and stuff that doesn’t fit. Even when I’m expanding two paragraphs into five pages.

Another useful technique is to get hold of a good friend, imaginary or otherwise, start a recorder going, and tell them the story. A live person works better, because they can ask questions when you’ve been unclear, but even lecturing an imaginary audience can be a help. If you have a trustworthy beta-reader who has read the whole thing, ask them to tell you the story. (Do not ask them to write the synopsis. That trick never works.) This can be especially useful if you are having trouble picking out “the main story.”

In the end, your synopsis is likely to sound dry and boring compared to your 100,000 word novel. You’re going to have to leave out lots of cool details and intricate subplots. It’s going to lose all your charming style and infectious humor. It’s not going to have any emotional impact.

Don’t worry about it. Everybody else’s synopsis has exactly the same problems.

And for those who still hunger for more analysis, try Miss Snark’s posts on the subject. Miss Snark is, alas, no longer blogging, but she’s left plenty of great reading material.

Synopsis, part 1

I’m going to pretend that this blog entry was delayed by the Labor Day Holiday on Monday. Which it sort of was; I lost track of “Wednesday, time for blog post” because my week started a day late. So mea culpa.

Anyway, today I’m going to talk about synopses. There are two major things to remember about the synopsis, aka plot outline, that you include in your portion-and-outline submission to an editor or agent. Let’s start with the two big ones:

There are two types of synopsis/plot outline. Only one goes to an editor or agent.

Writers who use a plot outline as part of their writing process often treat it as a rough draft for the synopsis they’re going to send to the editor. This is a bit like strapping on your cross-country skis and jumping in a lake to go water skiing. It isn’t going to work. At all. Yes, they’re both called “skis” and the shape is roughly the same, but the weight, the width, the curve, the way it fits your foot, and countless other details are all very different because the purpose of the ski is different and the problems that a water-skier is likely to face are very different from the ones a cross-country skier is likely to face.

The plot outline one uses as part of one’s writing process is meant to help the writer write the story. The plot outline one sends to an editor as part of a portion-and-outline is meant to help sell the story. Writing is not the same as selling. A document that is optimized for writing is not likely to be a lot of help with the selling part, and vice versa.

Writers who don’t use a plot outline sometimes fall into this trap anyway. When they start their submission outline, they try to write the sort of synopsis they think they would write if they did use one as part of their process … and since they don’t normally use one, it’s not a particularly coherent job. They then try to use this mediocre example of a writing outline as their submission outline, which starts them off with two strikes.

This brings me to the question of what does go into a submission outline, and the second major point about this sort of outline:

The synopsis you send to an editor or agent is not just a shorter version of the story.

This ought to be obvious. You can’t take 100,000+ words of plot and background and characterization and boil it all down into five to ten pages without leaving out a lot. (If you can, you should probably be writing short stories, not novels.) Enough folks make this mistake, though, that it is pretty clearly not as obvious as it ought to be.

Furthermore, the structure, pacing, and above all purpose of this five-to-ten-page summary is not the same as that of the story. Yet over and over I see people starting with the novel they’ve written and applying the same structure, pacing, and plot to their summaries. Some examples:

Structure: The novel is written in alternating chapters, one set in the present, the next set in the past. The summary follows the same structure, one paragraph for each time, complete with cliffhangers. This makes it practically impossible to follow (what is quite clear in a twenty-page chapter can be immensely muddy in a four-sentence paragraph). Trying to keep the cliffhangers (and then resolve them two paragraphs later) adds unnecessary length to the synopsis, as does the necessary rigid paragraph-per-chapter structure.

Backstory: The characters have a complex and important backstory that is slowly revealed over the course of the novel. So the author attempts to do the same thing over the course of the five-page plot summary. Dropping hints about the hero’s tragic past works fine over five or eight chapters; done in three or four paragraphs, it’s either obvious or confusing.

Setting: The setting is one that’s likely to be unfamiliar to most readers (or it’s a unique construction by the author), but that the author sees as vital or integral to the story. The author has put most of it into a three-page prologue…which is, of course, part of the “portion” that they’ve sent along with the synopsis. Nevertheless, they spend the first page and a half of the synopsis repeating all this vital information, leaving much less room for summarizing the parts of the story that aren’t part of the submission.

Characterization: The writer attempts to show 400 pages of character growth and development in five pages, without explanation (because you’re supposed to show, not tell, he/she thinks). This makes the character’s actions and reactions look jerky at best and inexplicably random at worst.

Alternatively: The writer has twenty characters who have viewpoint scenes (though a couple of them only have two scenes in the whole novel). They include the names of all twenty viewpoint characters in the five-page summary, whether or not their particular subplot is referenced, which makes it difficult to tell who the main character is and how any of these other characters are related to the main plot thread.

Plot: The writer has numerous subplots that weave around and feed back into the main plot. So they try to get all of them into the synopsis, exactly as they appear in the story. This leads to synopses that start: “Mary barely survives the shipwreck of the Maria Andria and is washed up on a Caribbean beach. John studies for his music degree in upstate New York. San Francisco art collector Bob searches for a missing painting. Mary’s daughter Jenny runs away from her third week in a rehab program. Meanwhile, Carol is kidnapped by aliens.”

A synopsis that’s meant as part of a portion-and-outline submission is an adjunct to the three chapters you’re sending along with it. It needs to be clear. It needs to show the editor that the story has a shape, a flow, and an ending. It does not need to mimic the story or include every single character or subplot. It also does not need to mirror the novel’s structure or pacing.

It is perfectly OK for the synopsis to begin “Five years before the novel opens, Richard Merrill was framed for theft” or “Told in scenes that alternate between present and past, the novel begins when Jonathan learns that his estranged sister has disappeared” or “Jerry is a mid-level manager in a secret international conspiracy supposedly dedicated to controlling the world’s supply of titanium, but unknown to him, it is really a front for an alien race that intends to use a supposed geothermal project to turn the Earth into a second sun.”

I am going to leave it here for today, having covered a bunch of stuff not to do, and continue next week with some more positive recommendations for what to do.