Patricia C. Wrede's Blog, page 38

Fixing Chapter One: Character

Here is where we start going through the three “boring first chapter” problems and ways to fix them…and a few ways not to fix them.

First up is the most basic and obvious problem: “The reader doesn’t care about the hero(ine) yet.” This is kind of a “duh” problem – at the start of the story, the readers don’t know the main character(s) yet, so why would they care about them any more than they’d care about any random stranger? It is the job of the first chapter to get your readers to care about the main character, or at the very least, to be interested enough in the character to keep reading.

A lot of writing advice-givers look at the above situation and start by assuming that readers are nice people who care enough about random strangers to be at least mildly sympathetic when the stranger is in some kind of trouble (especially if the trouble isn’t their fault). So they advise starting Chapter One with the main character in some kind of trouble, as a quick way to generate reader sympathy as well as theoretically getting readers interested in when/whether/how the character will get out of the trouble.

There is nothing desperately wrong with this approach, except that if readers come out of Chapter One with nothing more than a mild feeling of generic sympathy for the main character based on common humanity, then Chapter One has failed the “gets the reader to care about the character” test. It may still pass the “gets the reader interested enough to keep reading” test, but I think it’s more effective when the reader is interested enough to keep reading because they are starting to care about the character, rather than in spite of the fact that they don’t, really.

A character who is obviously charming and charismatic (and I mean actually behaving in a charming/charismatic way, not merely having the writer say “He was terribly charming” or “Her charisma had gotten her elected to the city council”) will usually get most readers pointed in the right direction from the very start. A character who is mysterious in an interesting way will also often intrigue readers long enough for genuine liking to take hold. But the real payoff is usually in a character the reader cares about from the earliest possible point in the story.

So how do you get readers to care? Well, how do people come to care for another person in real life? It is often something that happens slowly as they get to know one another, and it is usually based in common interests and understanding. Sometimes it comes about through one party’s charm or charisma; sometimes it is reciprocal reinforcement (I like you because you seem to like me, and then you like me more because I like you, and around we go). Sometimes it’s because two people are in the same situation or have had similar experiences, and they identify with each other. And it usually involves emotional intimacy – that is, you exchange confidences and stories about things that probably wouldn’t normally discussed with a casual acquaintance.

Translating this into fiction is not easy, since the fictional character can’t actually interact with the reader, but there are a few things to watch. The first point is that liking/caring for someone usually happens slowly, as one spends time with him/her. “Spending time with” in fiction means focused word count, preferably as continuous as possible. Usually, this means that the main character is the viewpoint character; that you don’t switch to a different viewpoint unless/until you have to (as in a braided story, where there is more than one “main character”); that if you have a choice between cutting off the scene or letting it go on a bit longer, you pick longer; that you keep the number of other characters introduced in the first chapter, and especially in the first scene, to a minimum so the readers won’t have to spend all their time remembering tons of new people instead of spending it getting interested in your main character.

If you can’t manage one or more (or any) of the above, it isn’t going to have dire and dreadful consequences; it just means your readers will have to fall in love with your character fast. Charm and charisma are good for this, or at least, good for getting the reader interested enough to keep going until he/she has spent enough time with the character to start caring. The catch is that the character has to be charming and/or charismatic; the writer can’t just say “He was charming” or “Her charisma had gotten her elected to the city council.”

Shared interests, qualities, and experiences are another way that people get interested in someone and/or learn to like them. In fiction, this sometimes extends to interests, qualities, and experiences that the reader doesn’t actually have, but would like to have or find out about, which gives one a somewhat broader range to pick from. This is good, because “the reader” is actually a bunch of different individuals, none of whom the writer actually knows, so the writer can’t easily choose the character’s interests and experiences to match up with the readers.

When you are in revising mode, of course, you seldom want to be coming up with new things about your character, especially if you already have a whole book written (any new background you stick into Chapter One at this point will mean additional revisions so as to integrate it with other parts of the story). What you’re looking for are 1) the interests, qualities, and backstory that you found out during writing the rest of the book, and 2) the places in Chapter One where you can show some of those things to the reader (or at least hint at them) without having them look shoehorned in. You want to do this anyway, in order to make the characterization more consistent, so really it’s a matter of picking the top two or three things that will make the character more interesting, appealing, or easy for most/many of your intended readers to identify with, and using those in Chapter One.

Finally, one of the things that makes many characters appeal to many readers is showing the reader some of their vulnerabilities, especially emotional vulnerabilities. One doesn’t usually start Chapter One off with a large, startling hole in the character’s emotional defenses, but hinting that it’s there can be just as effective. Knowing that a character has a mysterious angsty backstory can get readers involved really quickly and keep them going for quite a long time.

And if one can’t do any of that in Chapter One…well, Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes wasn’t a particularly likeable character, but he was interesting. If you can pique the reader’s curiosity, you may not need to make him fall in love with your character in Chapter One. Or ever. (Though you will have to do something else very right to get your readers involved with your story in some other way.)

Note that I haven’t said anything about describing the character, or even gone into a lot of detail about exactly how to do some of the stuff I’m recommending. That all tends to be a matter of preference and style – some readers demand a two-paragraph physical description the minute the character walks on stage, or you lose them; other readers will toss the book if you do more than mention in passing that the character is tall and dark-haired. Writers tend to gravitate toward what they like as readers in this regard, and as long as the writer isn’t at one extreme end or the other of the description/no description scale, it usually works fine. If you are at one end or the other, it is often a good idea to move consciously and deliberately toward the center (that is, cut a little of your two-page description, or put in at least another sentence after “dark hair and eyes”) if you want to give a little to the maximum number of readers. If you don’t care about that, don’t feel you have to change anything.

Fixing Chapter One: Why

On account of me being a bit disorganized and forgetting to load the blog post I had ready for today before I left for Chicago, you get a new and different blog post about fixing Chapter One, and the one I had planned (on the character piece) waits for Wednesday.

Actually, based on some of the comments I got on the last post, it occurred to me that there was one more thing to address: whether one ought to be revising Chapter One at all.

Well, why do you think it needs to be revised?

“It isn’t perfect” is seldom a good reason, especially if it is the only reason. Nothing is ever perfect, and trying to make it perfect is usually just an excuse to delay submitting the work and/or to keep from moving on to something new and stretchy. Even perfectionists sometimes use “It isn’t perfect” as more excuse than part of their obsession with getting every little thing right.

“It isn’t right,” on the other hand, is a reason that is often given by writers who are not terribly analytical, who are quite, quite sure that there is something off about Chapter One, but who have enormous difficulty pinpointing and/or articulating exactly what that something is. It is therefore actually one of the better reasons for revising something, even though it frustrates the heck out of spouses, beta readers, crit groups, and anyone else in a position to be asking the writer to explain why they are revising this old thing instead of dumping it in the mail and going on to the next thing.

“You always have to revise Chapter One” is another not-particularly-good reason, if that’s all you have. No matter how true the statement is, if you cannot see any problems in your Chapter One, then there is nothing to be gained (and much to be lost) by tinkering with it. It’s like trying to repair a piece of delicate electronic equipment that you think is working just fine…and you’re wearing a blindfold and oven mitts while you’re doing it. It won’t end well.

“There is a specific, identifiable problem with the characterization/plot/background/consistency” is an absolute no-brainer – of course you fix it. If you changed the main character’s name from “Betsy” to “Angela” in Chapter Two, you had better revise at least that much of Chapter One. If you moved her home town from Chicago to Sydney, Australia, ditto.

Similarly, but not always so easily identified, if the story you started writing took a sharp left turn somewhere and ended up being totally different, so that the Chapter One you have no longer fits, you need some changes (and possibly a completely new Chapter One). It’s usually clear when the turn is sharp enough, as when Chapter One starts off with Character A breaking into a museum to steal a priceless Egyptian artifact, but the real story ends up being about Characters B and C and their involvement in sending the first spaceship to Alpha Centauri, but if the shift is gradual enough, the mis-match may not be as clear (and any fixing may need to extend considerably further than Chapter One).

Somewhere in the middle are the judgement calls: there isn’t an obvious problem to be fixed, but you’ve finished an entire novel and your writing has improved so much that Chapter One looks crude compared to Chapter Twenty. Or you know so much more about the characters/plot/backstory by the end of the book than you did when you started that Chapter One looks thin and pallid. Or your writing process involves rolling revisions, and tinkering with Chapter One helps get you unstuck from wherever you’re stuck in the mid-book.

There are two basic approaches to these kinds of decisions: either you look at the chapter analytically and dissect it until you are clear on what the problems are and what needs to be done to fix them, or else you listen to your intuition (and sometimes, your intuition will be saying “I know it looks bad, and that bit with the python doesn’t seem to fit, but leave it alone”).

If the two are in conflict – if you can see that there are problems, but there’s a little voice saying “No, don’t!” – then you are usually better off listening to the little voice. Either the thing you thought was a problem will suddenly turn out to be a critical element in the final big scene, or else you will get to the end and realize that Chapter One was scaffolding and cut it, at which point fixing it would have been a waste of time.

The exception is if the problems with Chapter One are preying on your mind so much that you can’t make forward progress without fixing them, even if part of you is pretty sure you are going to end up cutting the chapter. However, this is also one of the places where the writer has to keep a careful eye on him/herself, and be ruthlessly honest (and sometimes just plain ruthless).

If you know that you are the sort of writer who gets trapped in Endless Revision Syndrome (rewriting the first few chapters over and over, so that forward progress is minimal or non-existent), then be very, very clear about whether you really need to do this revising now, or whether you just want to avoid writing whatever comes next and are using the “needed” revising as an excuse. If you know that you lack self-confidence and/or that you are afraid of rejection or highly risk-averse, then you need to be very sure that revising Chapter One isn’t just a way of postponing the dreadful day when you put it in the mail and risk getting a “Sorry, no thanks” letter. There is a point where “good enough” is good enough. It is a really bad idea to do too much polishing, and suck all the life and joy right out of the chapter even as the sentences or characterization or whatever gets prettier.

(Hint: If you are on your sixth revision of Chapter One – or any other part of the book – and you think it will still need another two or three rounds after this one is done…think really hard about whether it’s necessary. I’ve known writers who needed that many rounds on their first books, but not many, and I don’t think I’ve ever met one who know while they were working on revision four or five that it was going to need another one. The point of revising is usually to fix everything you know is wrong, so that you don’t have to do it again. Sometimes this doesn’t quite work, but one generally discovers it after one is finished with a revision pass.)

To sum up: If there is something obviously and specifically wrong with Chapter One, then one equally obviously fixes it. If there isn’t anything obviously wrong, but you think the chapter can be improved, it becomes more of a judgement call. If one knows there is something wrong, if the chapter doesn’t fit the story, but one can’t quite see what the problem is…it is time to dig into the various possible parts of the chapter and see if analysis will tell you anything useful. (Sometimes it doesn’t, especially if you are a highly intuitive and/or non-analytical type. In that case, the specific suggestions in the next few posts may not be much help, but they may also be of use in focusing your intuition on different areas until it triggers that moment when you know exactly what you have to do, even if you still don’t know why.)

Fixing Chapter One, part one

I recently read a writing-advice column that argued that first chapters were always and necessarily boring. The column-writer never did explain why, if that were true, anyone would ever read the first chapter, or stick with a book long enough for it to get interesting, but he did give a couple of reasons why he thought this: because in the first chapter, the reader doesn’t care about the hero, because the action is relatively weak and/or meaningless, because there’s too much telling and too much backstory.

The solutions provided were the same old tired ones: start with “strong action” (what’s that supposed to be?), make the backstory unique and fascinating (how?), make the character interesting (again, how?). There’s just one problem: as described, these “solutions” don’t work, because they are each addressing a specific problem area that may not be a problem in any one particular story.

The column-writer was entirely correct in saying that the first chapter is vitally important and deserves a lot of attention. I will go so far as to say that a boring first chapter is a major flaw that must be addressed. I just wouldn’t go about writing it – or fixing it – the way he recommended. Which got me thinking about what I would do…which led me to start this series of posts.

Let’s start by considering why Chapter One is so important. 99.9% of writing-advice books and blogs on the subject will tell you that Chapter One is important because Chapter One is where you sell the editor and hook the reader. I disagree. Oh, selling the editor and hooking the reader happen in Chapter One, but that’s not what makes Chapter One vitally important.

What makes Chapter One important is that it lays the foundation on which you build the rest of the story.

Take another look at the three symptoms that writing column mentioned: 1) The reader doesn’t care about the character, 2) The action is weak and/or meaningless, and 3) There’s too much telling and backstory. Basically, this means that there is something wrong with one or more of the three basic areas of storytelling: 1) the characterization, 2) the plot, or 3) the background/backstory. Getting one of these wrong at the start of the story is like getting the cement blocks in the foundation of a house laid in crooked or uneven or out of true. If the error is too big, the house won’t stand up; if it’s not so big, the house will stand up, but it will be crooked or the floors won’t be level or there will be other problems.

Depending on what kind of writer you are, you have several choices regarding Chapter One: 1) You can write it and rewrite it until you are really, really sure you have it right (because you are the kind of writer who can’t write the rest of the story until you are absolutely sure the foundation is all there); 2) You can write something that you think is right, continue on, and periodically come back and fiddle with it as the story progresses and you realize that this or that bit is out of whack (because you are the kind of writer who can revise the early bits without getting stuck in an eternal-revisions loop, and you need to have more of the story written before you know what you need in Chapter One); 3) You can write a Chapter One and leave it alone until the whole story is finished, then come back and revise it when you really know what it needs; or 4) You can write a chapter that you are sure is right, finish the book, and then delete the first chapter or two because they have turned out to be scaffolding – stuff you needed to write in order to get started, but not stuff that actually needs to be in the finished story.

If you have a scaffolding-type process, the only difference between what you do and what I’m advising for everybody else is, you need to take down the scaffolding first. That is, finish the story, erase the scaffolding chapters (or snip them and put them in some other file, if you aren’t brave or think you may need bits of them later), renumber your chapters, and then start in on the stuff below. There is no point in analyzing your first chapter if you are going to end up opening with Chapter Three. (And you would be amazed by the number of people who don’t think of this, and spend weeks or months polishing their “Chapter One” before it dawns on them that it is wasted effort.)

So you have a real Chapter One and you are ready to revise. The first think I’d do is look at the rest of the story. If the rest of the story isn’t written yet, write it. This helps on two counts: first, it allows you to look at the first chapter in context (some of the stuff you thought had to be in Chapter One may be obviously unnecessary once the whole story is written, or some of the stuff you were expecting to cut may turn out to be vital); second, writing the rest of the story gives you a novel’s worth of writing practice, so that when you come back to fix Chapter One, you will have more skills and be better able to implement whatever fixes you decide are needed.

If you are a #1-type writer – if you had to get Chapter One absolutely perfect before you went on to finish the rest of the book, fine. Trust me, by the time you finish an entire novel, Chapter One won’t look nearly so perfect any more, and you will find plenty of things to fix. Even if it is your nineteenth or twentieth novel.

Back to revising Chapter One. The first thing you need to know is that there isn’t a one-size-fits-all solution to a problematic first chapter, because whether you start with a battle, a tense political confrontation, an impossible-love-at-first-sight moment, or a murder, there are going to be readers who find the chapter boring, simply because you are signaling a kind of story that they are not particularly interested in reading. An “interesting” character is only going to be interesting to some readers; ditto the “fascinating and unique” backstory.

What you really don’t want to do is write a chapter that will alienate the readers who will like this kind of story. So you begin by looking at the whole story because context is important. Things like who the main character is and what the viewpoint is and what sort of story the author is telling and where it is going all affect what you can and cannot pull off in Chapter One.

So the first question is: Does Chapter One fit the rest of the story, or does it give a false impression of what the story is and where it is going? Could you just lop it off and open with Chapter Two? (It is useful to ask this even if you think you are not a #4-type writer; unintentional scaffolding happens at least once to nearly everybody.) Once you are clear about what kind of story you have in hand, you can look for – and hopefully address – some of the other specific problems, but you address them in whatever way fits the story you are telling.

Next post, I am going to start going through those three specific problem areas, one at a time.

Agency in Fiction

Yesterday, my walking buddy and I were discussing several movies from the 1930s and 40s, and she was complaining about a couple that she strongly disliked because, she said, the main character lacked agency, and had to be rescued from various plots by other people. I did some pro forma arguing because I liked a couple of the movies in question, though I was pretty much in agreement about the importance of agency to stories (and especially their resolution).

But the subject kept nagging at me, so when I got home, I started poking around the Internet. Agency turns out to be a popular (though sometimes nebulous) concept in literature – the word gets thrown around a lot without anyone ever actually defining it beyond occasional general statements like “the power to make choices” or “the ability to act” or “the true way to success.” I didn’t hit pay dirt until I started looking at philosophy (!) and sociology.

The best short definition I found was “Agency is an actor’s ability to make purposeful choices.” (“Actor” in this sense being “a person who takes action,” not “Robert Downey, Jr.”)

Note that in order for a character to have agency, he/she has to have a choice to make. If you are out in the rain with an umbrella, you have a choice: put up the umbrella, or don’t put it up. If you have no umbrella, you have no choice: you are going to get wet. Also note that the definition talks about the ability or capacity to make choices, not whether someone actually uses their capacity, and certainly not whether the results are what the person choosing wanted or expected.

And that’s where fiction comes in. When you start looking, agency is all over all kinds of fiction, from different angles. There are stories about people who made good or bad choices in the past and then suffer the consequences; stories about people who face current choices, large or small, personal or public; stories about people who have no choices and want some, or who struggle to find or create choices where there seem to be none. Fiction is, to a large extent, about the choices characters make and the desirable or undesirable results those choices have.

A character who gives up and accepts his/her fate at a critical moment in a story – especially someone who still seems to have choices, but who refuses to do anything about them or make any further moves to achieve his/her goals – loses a lot of readers, even though choosing not to act when one is able is, theoretically, still a choice. It is almost always a huge, horrible let-down when someone who has struggled through half a novel or better, against increasingly heavy odds, decides to give up the fight.

As always, there are exceptions. The two that come to mind are the character who has truly exhausted all his/her choices, and the character who still has choices but who has succumbed to despair and thus can’t see or act on any of his/her few remaining options. They both require a fair bit of groundwork and setup, and both are still tough to pull off. For my money, the character who succumbs to despair is a bit easier than the character who truly has no more choices, because if there is any other option that the reader can see (and readers can get really creative when it looks as if their favorite character is about to succumb to some inevitability or other), they will never believe that the character couldn’t/wouldn’t think of the same thing. And having a choice but not using it is far worse than having no choices at all. (Sitting and thinking hard about the best move to make next is a kind of positive action, provided it doesn’t go on so long that the reader starts getting impatient.)

Matters are a bit different when the story opens with the character paralyzed by despair. It can be hard to get the reader interested and involved with such a character, but the assumption is usually that things are going to change (else why are there all these pages after Chapter One?), and watching someone climb out of a hole when it initially looks as if they have no options can be interesting.

There are also stories where the whole point is a character’s moral and spiritual decay, like Huxley’s Brave New World and Orwell’s 1984; the entire plot is a slow stripping away of whatever agency the characters started with, until by the end they have no choices left. Note, however, that in both cases it takes the author an entire novel to get the characters to the point where they have no options – this is not a surprise plot twist that can be thrown in at the last minute, not if it going to be convincing.

For most stories, though, the point is that the main characters have options, and usually the power to choose among them – in other words, they have agency. It is annoying and frustrating when they don’t exercise their agency (which was the real problem, I think, with the movies my friend was objecting to – the characters still had choices, and could have picked a more productive course of action, but instead sat around waiting until someone else came to the rescue). It is especially annoying and frustrating when characters refuse to make choices or to act at a turning point or climactic moment in the story. So don’t let them do that.

Story climax, part 2

Possibly the most important scene at or near the end of any story is the climax. The first difficulty here is, exactly what is “the climax” when there are several possible types and a double handful of plotlines and subplots that all need to be wrapped up?

The answer starts with a series of questions. First, who is the main character? This is not necessarily the viewpoint character (Dr. Watson is not the main character of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s stories, though he is the viewpoint for most of them). Second, what is the thing that the main character has most wanted or needed or been trying to fix since the start of the story? What is most important or most in doubt? What, in short, is the central problem of the story? Third, what is the one thing that has to happen to the main character in order for the story to be over and the reader satisfied? Or, to put it another way, what is the thing that, if the writer left it out, will leave the story lopsided, out-of-balance, and unsatisfying, even if all the other plotlines and loose ends are tied up?

We’ve been conditioned by years of action-adventure stories, TV shows, and movies to be able to identify an action/achievement climax easily, and to expect that to be “the climax.” It isn’t always the case. In Lois Bujold’s Memory, for instance, I’d say that the climax of the book is the chapter that Miles spends alone in his room, wrestling with temptation. It’s his epiphany, a climax of realization. The action climax comes afterward, with the “assault on Cockroach Central,” and it ties up the climax of achievement and the climax of revelation in a fast-paced swirl of events, but without the epiphany that precedes it, the whole book would be off-balance and the main character’s victory would feel hollow.

When the action/achievement climax is not actually THE climax, it is usually possible (not easy, but possible) to leave it out of the story. Sometimes, an author does this by ending the story with the hero, fresh from his epiphany or personal revelation, heading out for the final battle (as, in the musical Camelot, the story ends on the night before Arthur’s battle with Mordred. Because even if we didn’t know the story already, it’s obvious how the battle is going to come out, and anyway, who wins isn’t the important thing by then). Sometimes, the author does it by skipping forward a few days or hours. These are tricky to pull off, because readers, too, have been conditioned to really, really want resolution of the action-adventure part of the story, even if it isn’t the climax, but pondering the possibility can help make it clear whether or not the action/achievement is the real climax or not.

Actually, “Could I make this story work if I left out this scene/event/incident/climax entirely?” is a pretty good test for whittling down which of several possibilities is “the climax.”

But what about stories that have an ensemble cast or a braided plotline – that is, there are two or more independent-but-related stories that follow different “main characters?” In that case, you start with the same set of questions, only the first one is “which of my main characters do I care the most about? Which one will the reader care the most about? Which one do I want the reader to care the most about?” Because no matter how “balanced” an ensemble cast is, the readers are always going to pick one as the main character. (This may not be the same as their favorite character, but even people who love Mr. Spock or Dr. McCoy recognize that Captain James T. Kirk is the main character in the original Star Trek series.)

To summarize: The main climax of the story a) happens to the main character, b) whom the reader cares about, and c) leads to the resolution of the main story problem (whether that is an action problem or something else). To achieve all this, the scene usually needs to be clear and focused. Ideally, the main climax also resolves as many of the secondary plotlines as possible, or at least sets them up to be swiftly resolved, but if doing so would dilute the clarity or focus on the resolution of the main problem, then one is almost always better off leaving them for later.

The main climax is repeatedly described as the moment of highest intensity or greatest tension in a literary work. Resolving it causes a large drop in tension – usually the largest drop anywhere in the story. This means that resolving subplots and secondary plots is generally most effective if done after the main story climax, if they don’t naturally wrap up during the main climactic scene. This is because resolving anything, even a completely different part of the story, tends to lower the overall tension level, and you don’t want to lower the tension level right before you are supposed to hit the highest point of tension in the whole book. The exception is if resolving a particular subplot in advance of the main climax will cause a net increase in the tension around the main plot; in that case, it is sometimes desirable to put that resolution before the main climax, as a sort of appetizer.

Once the main climax is over, it is quite often obvious how the remaining plotlines will resolve themselves, or at least, it’s obvious that they will be resolved. Going back to Memory, the climactic scene (Miles wrestling with temptation) ends with his recognition of who he is and what his decision must be, which in turn allows him to have the crucial moment of insight that leads to solving the main action plot. Bujold then entirely skips all the preparations for the next move, and goes straight to the action climax, which is no longer about whether the action plot will be solved (that is inevitable at this point), it’s about exactly how the solution will happen. Everything moves along briskly, because we’re on the downhill slope of the story. Pausing to add a new complication or an explanation might, just possibly, increase the tension, but at this stage of the game, increasing the tension would be an annoying and unnecessary delay.

Story climax, part 1

Climax: any moment of great intensity in a literary work.

                     –Concise Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms.

Everybody knows what the climax of the story is, right? It’s the battle with the monster, the discovery of the cure for the plague, the revelation of the murderer, blowing up the Death Star, Harry finally telling Sally he loves her. It’s so obvious in all the most memorable stories that it’s easy to overlook the fact that it may not have been all that obvious to the writer when the story was under construction.

For one thing, as the definition above implies, most stories have more than one moment of great intensity scattered through the story. Only one of them is ever THE climax, so when people are trying to get a bit more specific they talk about things like “the highest intensity” and “the final crisis” and “the point where the problem can potentially be finally resolved.” The only trouble is, most stories have multiple problems on multiple levels, each of which will come to a final climax and resolution somewhere in the story (unless the author is deliberately leaving some of them hanging in the name of either future sequels or realism). This leaves the author not only having to decide which of the several climactic moments is THE climax, but how to juggle all the secondary climactic moments in order to give them their appropriate importance and impact, without taking away from the big one.

In most novels, the author knows what the Big Problem is…or at least, the author knew when he/she started writing. Sometimes, the plot develops in unexpected directions; the story that started out as a crime drama morphs into a story about stopping a potential plague, for instance. In this case, the solution of the initial crime problem still needs to be addressed, or the writer is breaking a promise to her/his readers, but stopping the plague is so much more important that it has become THE problem. If the writer tries to stick to the original plan and make the dramatic solution to the crime the climax of the book, it is going to fall completely flat unless the scene also solves the problem with the plague…and when the readers get asked what the climax is, they’ll say “finding the cure.”

Sometimes, the author gets distracted by shiny new subplots. The heroes set out to find the sword that will kill the dragon, but they get sidetracked into this unexpected adventure with pirates, and the author tries to make their escape from the pirates into the climax of the story. This only works in the early books of a series, where the reader fully expects the author to eventually get back around to the dragon in the last book…by which time the dragon-slaying had better be totally awesome, or they are going to be cranky about having been made to wait so long.

And sometimes, the author gets confused by the various possibilities and/or is unclear about what the story really is. This happens most commonly when there is a strong action/adventure subplot, but the main problem/plot is really on some other level. There is so much emphasis on action that it is easy for writers to assume that if there is any action thread at all, then that will be THE climax, even if the main story problem is emotional or intellectual.

There are at least four different types of climaxes that can appear in a plot or subplot, maybe more. First, there is the climax of achievement, which is when the main character succeeds at whatever he/she set out to do: win the game, kill the dragon, fall in love, survive the crash landing and make it back to safety. Second, there is the climax of revelation, as when the detective calls all the suspects together to review all the evidence and reveal the murderer. Third is the climax of discovery, when the main character discovers fire, radium, the cure for the plague, life on Mars, or a way to communicate with the aliens at last. Fourth is the climax of realization, when the main character finally has the epiphany he/she has been building toward for the whole story.

Sometimes the central plot problem has aspects of more than one type of climax. When the spaceship crew that has gone out in search of intelligent life actually makes contact with aliens, that could be both a climax of achievement and a climax of discovery. Usually, the author will emphasize one aspect or the other, depending on how the story has developed so far. The trick is to be consistent. If the story so far has emphasized the importance of the mission, then finding aliens is more of a success/achievement; if the story took the mission for granted and spent more time on the methodical search and the procedures, then finding the aliens might be more of a discovery. And if the story focused on the ship’s captain learning how to deal with people as equals, rather than just ordering them around, then the actual story climax might be one of revelation/epiphany, and finding the aliens is more of a validation or subplot climax.

Ideally, you want the Big Climax Scene to  be the climax for both the central plot problem and for as many subplots as possible, on as many levels as possible. This isn’t always possible, and it’s generally better to stick with doing a great job of wrapping up the central plot problem than it is to do a mediocre job on the central wrap-up while cramming in lesser climaxes for three or six subplots. If, however, you end up with a string of six separate climactic scenes, one for each of your six subplots, you may need to either work harder on getting them to combine, or else prune some of the subplots.

Next time, I’m going to talk more about actually writing the climax scene itself.

Not Talking About It

A while back, I got a deceptively simple question with an apparently obvious answer, all of which turn out to be neither so simple nor so obvious as they at first seemed. The question was, in essence, “What parts of your writing career can you talk about in public, and which ones should you not talk about; how do you decide which is which…and if you’re not talking about something exciting, how do you do it?”

The question is not as simple as it appears because “in public” means so many different things these days. There is often a considerable difference between telling your mother you just won a writing contest and putting it on your Facebook page. (Not always, of course; it depends on what your mother is like and whether she will instantly post it on her Facebook page…) Even so, the answer seemed like basic common sense to me…until I thought about it.

What makes the answer more complex is the way each person thinks about their writing. If writing is your beloved hobby, there isn’t nearly as much incentive to behave professionally as there is if writing is, well, your profession. I am in business; this is my job that pays the bills. The answer to “What parts of my writing career can I talk about in public?” is 1) Whatever is already public, or 2) whatever both the other party (the contest, the publisher/editor) and I feel comfortable making public. As a professional writer, I expect my publisher, agent, and business colleagues to behave in a professional manner, which means not blurting out all sorts of my personal business without first making sure it is OK; I feel obligated to maintain that same level of courtesy toward them. If writing were my hobby, there wouldn’t be nearly the same kind of incentive to behave professionally, and while the basic requirements of courtesy remain the same, honesty compels me to admit that not everyone in the world is as courteous as I think they ought to be.

The short form of the above is “When in doubt, ask.” If you just got an offer but haven’t signed the contract and you want to know if you can tell people, ask if it’s OK with the editor. If you just got word that you’ve won an award or a contest and you want to post it to every forum you’re on, ask whoever just called to tell you. Half the time, they’ll say “Go ahead;” the other half, they’ll say “We’d like to announce it ourselves at/on/after …” and then they’ll give you a date or an event: at the conference, on May 2, after the contract is signed, after we put it up on our own web site, after we let the organizers and other contestants know.

And in case it isn’t obvious, for some things you have to keep asking, no matter how long you have been in this business, because there isn’t a hard and fast rule. Some publishers want the writer out there drumming up buzz for the book right away; others want to wait. Some awards/contests let the winning author know first thing and want to hold the announcement at least until they can let the other contestants or nominees know; other times, the winner is the last to find out, and by then it doesn’t matter who else he/she tells.

For myself, I am happy to discuss most of my projects-in-development (that is, ideas and things that are still churning around and haven’t even reached the outline stage). Once they reach the point at which they are under submission, or even seriously approaching submission, I tend to stop talking about them in open forums unless and until I have a signed contract. I also have a sort of hierarchy of revelation: First, there’s stuff I will talk about “in public” (defined here as “any venue where I have no idea who might see it” – in magazine articles or interviews, in this blog or other online forums, during a speaking engagement). Then there’s the stuff I will talk about in person with people I know to some extent (mostly local acquaintances or fan-friends I see at conventions once or twice a year). There is business stuff that I will only talk about with other professional writers who need to know it, though that usually isn’t stuff I particularly want to broadcast to the world anyway.

There is a very small group – six or eight people, tops – that are good enough friends that I’m comfortable telling them that I have X project under submission at Y publisher and the editor looks interested, or that I just got an offer on something but it’s all hush-hush until the contract arrives. These are the folks I trust not to gossip about whatever-it-is until I let them know it is OK – and sometimes, they are already keeping their mouths shut. Last time I sprang an I-got-an-award announcement on them, two of them grinned and allowed as how they’d known for months I was up for it because the committee contacted them for letters of recommendation. And they hadn’t said a thing.

And then there’s my Dad.

I tell him pretty much anything, for two main reasons: first, he doesn’t know anyone in the industry to spread gossip to, were he so inclined, and second, he turned 94 two weeks ago and I don’t want to take a chance on waiting to give him any good news that comes up, even though he is in very good shape for his age. Also, having one person that it is safe to brag to makes it much easier not to tell anyone else in situations where that is really important.

As for other ways to insure one keeps one’s mouth shut when necessary, they are pretty individual in nature. One person I know writes and rewrites his/her announcement letter (but doesn’t send it) whenever he/she gets the urge to tell people. Some call their agents (which can quickly get into the realm of unreasonable pestering). Some are so concerned about giving things away inappropriately that they don’t tell anyone anything until it’s all totally public – the book is out, the awards ceremony has been held, the acknowledgement plaque is ready to hang over the mantelpiece. Another large chunk, for me, involves not getting into situations or conversations where I know I am likely to let something slip, and having three or four perfectly true answers ready for when someone asks “So what’s new?” or “How is your next book coming?” that a) don’t give anything away and b) take the conversation in a different and non-dangerous direction. Cats are very good for this. Speaking of which, let me tell you about the cute thing Karma did yesterday…

Leaving stuff out

The other day, I was looking over two different multi-book series, each of which is easily pushing a million words. Both are quite popular in their respective genres, but they are very different in their approach. Yet it could be argued that both writers make similar mistakes.

In the first series, the author (for my money) got a bit carried away by having all that space to play in, and so the reader gets to watch nearly everything the hero and heroine do, from the hero’s detailed morning routine (turn off alarm, shower, shave, brush teeth, make coffee) to the heroine endlessly revisiting her difficult relationship with her sister. The scenes involving action and mystery don’t totally take a back seat, but the pacing is leisurely. The author doesn’t just drop hints about various characters’ personalities or opinions; he/she provides five or six different scenes that beat the reader over the head with the fact that this character has a mysterious past that makes him untrusting and brooding, that character is all sunshiny optimism, and this other character is a wimp and a bit of a coward.

All of those bits of characterization are important to the story, mind. But by the time I’d watched Character C agree to three different bad ideas in three different scenes because he was too scared to speak up, I’d more than gotten the message. And I wasn’t really interested in the hero’s musing about the advantages of using a safety razor versus an electric one, even if they did provide some insight into his tendency to over-analyze and over-organize absolutely everything. I’d already figured that out from the super-tidy pencil drawer in his desk.

In the second series, the writer also got a bit carried away be having all that space, but used it somewhat differently. Instead of limiting his/her viewpoints to the two main characters and using the extra space to show the minutia of their daily lives, the author started handing out viewpoint scenes to pretty much every character he/she happened to get interested in, as well as to every minor character who happened to be present at an important event. Unsurprisingly, at least three-quarters of the characters developed their own storylines and/or subplots as soon as they became viewpoints, which made it harder and harder for me to keep track of what was going on, as well as slowing the pace to a crawl, simply because every “main plotline” scene was followed by at least a chapter’s worth of subplot scenes (sometimes more) before the next “main plotline” scene could happen and allow things to make progress.

Last week, I also picked up one of my old SF paperbacks from the 1960s, when 60,000 words was long for a science fiction book. I hadn’t read it in years, and while certain aspects of it were clearly dated (engineers in the twenty-second century still using slide rules?), I was pleasantly surprised to realize just how much characterization and how many subplots were crammed into that short wordcount.

It made me think of those Japanese ink drawings, the kind that make a picture of a cat or a horse out of two or three curved lines drawn in exactly the right places to enclose empty white space in the essence of cat or horse. The author made every word count, frequently several times for several different purposes at once. There is no wasted space…but there are also no extra words. Most of the subplots and most of the characterization takes place in the things that are not said in words on the page. They’re in the things that are suggested, implied, and left to the reader’s imagination.

In our media-saturated world, we’re used to getting more information than we need – often a lot more than we’re actually interested in. It becomes a habit, and then we start thinking that all that information has to be there, or the reader won’t understand. Because TV and movies show exactly what every character looks like, exactly how they dress, and every detail of the character’s home décor, writers get caught up in trying to paint the same kind of picture in words. In other cases, the writer has such a clear mental image of what is going on, and that image is so important to them, that they get caught up in trying to force the reader to recreate that exact same image in their own minds. This will never work (the written word is a spectacularly inaccurate form of telepathy) but that never stops people from trying.

The most effective writing is often counter-intuitive. In this case, it is nearly always more effective to coopt the reader’s imagination – poke it a few times, give it a couple of essential details and a lot of empty space, and let it fill in the mental image that has meaning and emotional impact for that particular reader.

It takes a lot of practice and work and concentration to come up with the fewest possible lines with which to enclose empty white space with essence of story, but it is so very worthwhile.

Strengths and weaknesses

One of the questions I get a lot, especially when a class of students has been asked to come up with three questions each, is “Which one of your books is the best?” It’s not quite up there with “Where do you get your ideas?” but it’s definitely one of the top ten. And it is probably one of the ones I have the most trouble answering.

The problem I have is that I can’t pick out one title as a sort of “best in show,” which is what I think these people are asking for. I can’t pick out “which one has the best characters?” or “…the best plot?” or “…the best writing?” I even have trouble with “Which book are you proudest of having written?” because I’m never quite sure whether I am more pleased with the worldbuilding in Book A, the characters in Book B, the complexity of the plot in Book C, etc. I can answer the question “Which book did you have the most fun writing?” (Sorcery and Cecelia, hands down), but hardly anyone ever asks that.

“Best,” you see, is a subjective term when it comes to writing. There isn’t a list somewhere of how to weight different aspects of writing so that you can say with confidence that the clever, twisty plotting in this one makes it “better” than the one over there with the stellar character development…and even if there were, I expect nearly everyone would disagree with the results. Some people just like character development more than anything else, so as far as they are concerned, a book with stellar character development will always be “better” than one with weak characterization, even if the first one has a plot full of holes, leaden description, and clunky style.

Furthermore, different genres have different conventions. In science fiction, “head-hopping” is generally considered a sign of bad writing; in Romance novels, it is quite common, especially in the key scenes where the writer wants to “show” the inner monolog of both hero and heroine as they try to make up their minds about their relationship. Literary fiction places heavy emphasis on characterization; thrillers, on action-based plots; many mysteries, on the puzzle aspects of discovering whodunit.

Ideally, of course, one would try to do as many different things well as possible: good characterization and a well-developed setting and a strong plot or puzzle or idea. Sometimes, though, the various conventions are incompatible, as with the head-hopping/no-head-hopping divide between SF and Romance. More often, the writer just doesn’t have the space – or the skills – to do everything, all at once.

At that point, things become complicated. The writer can choose to focus on the thing he/she does very well, and write the lyrical style or the slam-bang action adventure or the character study that they know is their forte. The trouble is that if the writer does this repeatedly, they’ll never get better at doing the other things, the stuff that doesn’t come naturally. The only way I know to get better at plotting or characterization or action scenes or dialog is to practice, which means writing things that require stronger plots, deeper characterization, more action, or more dialog than whatever one has been writing.

Unfortunately, a fair number of folks go overboard when they try. That is, the writer whose strength is action-adventure will decide to work on his/her characterization, and proceeds to plan out a book that focuses closely on heavy-duty emotional changes in a raft of complex characters. Then they sit down to write it, and have to focus so closely and work so hard at the characterization that the plot (which was normally their strong point) ends up simplistic or full of holes due to the writer’s lack of attention.

This kind of hyper-focus on something in order to build the writer’s skills does work for some writers, so if you have a track record of jumping into the deep end of the pool and not drowning, and the idea appeals to you, by all means try it. Most of us, though, are better off with a more gradual approach – starting with the kind of story that does showcase the writer’s strength in plotting or characterization or action or dialog, and working out a subplot that will showcase more complex characterization or trickier plot twists or more clearly define speech patterns, then in the next story stepping up the desired skill-set in the central plot or main characters.

There are, of course, a few things that one can’t deal with using an incremental approach; for instance, a novel is either multiple viewpoint, or it isn’t, and trying to ease into it by having just one or two additional viewpoints scattered here and there in the story is seldom satisfactory (and probably won’t teach you much about how multiple viewpoint works). Story structure is a property of the whole story, and while one could theoretically have a story in which the central plotline follows one type of structure and a subplot follows another, that kind of mixed structure is actually more advanced for most writers than just telling the main story backwards or in parallel scenes or whatever.

The main thing to remember, though, is that “best” is subjective, and you will never get all readers to agree about it. There will always be people who don’t like your work at all, just as there will be those who think your first novel was your best and it’s been downhill all the way since then, or that it was your third or fifth or nineteenth novel that was the peak example of your writing skills. It can be gratifying to listen to these people argue with each other, until one stops to think about the implications. At that point, one is best off finding one of the readers who thinks you just keep getting better with every book, because honestly, that’s what we all want to do, isn’t it?

Six things I wish I’d known

Last Friday, Minnesota Public Radio reran a series of round-table shows in which they asked groups of people from various professions – teacher, musician, entrepreneur, doctor – what six things they wish they had known when they were starting out in their profession. Most of the answers ended up being things that would have enabled people to avoid mistakes; a few were things that would have allowed them to start doing some useful or valuable thing sooner.

Naturally, this got me thinking. On the whole, I am pretty happy with the way my writing career has turned out, but there are certainly things that I could have done differently that would have made my life easier along the way. So here are my “six things I wish I had known.”

1. You don’t have to start with any one length, style, type, structure, or viewpoint. The most obviously pernicious, for me, was the length one – I was told, early on, that I should write short stories to learn the writing craft, then move on to novels when I’d published enough to show that I had in fact learned. I spent years writing unpublishable short stories that, when I look at them now, are excerpts from, or outlines for, novels. I eventually gave up and wrote a novel anyway, which sold, and I’ve resented all that wasted time ever since.

It has only recently occurred to me that I’d also heard the “Don’t write in the first person” advice. It wasn’t promoted nearly so strongly then, and my natural bent was toward third person, but I think I’d have written my first first-person story considerably sooner if I hadn’t had that stricture in the back of my head…and since I learned a great deal about viewpoint and characterization from writing that book, I’d have gotten better as a writer considerably sooner if I hadn’t put off that particular story.

2. I wish I’d listened more carefully to more experienced writers. One of the joys of writing SF/F is the community of writers, many of whom are happy to talk shop with beginners and even wannabes. Like most newbies, I was eager to talk to them…but I can remember more than one instance in which I asked a question and the response was not what I thought I wanted to know, so I ignored it. Years later, I came to the realization that I had not been told what I wanted to know – I’d been told what I needed to know. Or I hadn’t been given a specific, pointed answer that would only apply to the situation I was currently wrestling with; I’d been handed a general principle that, with a bit of work, would have helped me get on in a variety of situations. Better late than never, I suppose.

3. I wish I’d had more confidence in my own intuition and my own choices. On the face of it, this seems to contradict the one above, but for me, at least, they apply to different levels of the writing process and career management. I’m not talking about confidence in my skills or in my decisions about characters or plot; I’m talking about career choices on the order of “Should I sell a story to Acquaintance A, who is starting up a new magazine, or should I submit it to Asimov’s or F&SF instead?” or “Should I accept the offer to co-edit a high-profile anthology, or should I pass on it and just write?” or “Should I risk antagonizing my current publisher by skipping over to a new one?” I spent weeks agonizing over various career decisions, usually when my gut was telling me one thing and most of my friends, colleagues, and business acquaintances were telling me something else. Going with my gut feel never led me wrong, but it would have been easier to do if I’d believed in it and not mentioned the decision to anyone else until it was made.

4. At some point, you will be more successful than someone you think is a better writer than you are, and less successful than someone you think is a worse writer. Guilt and jealousy are equally poisonous, if you don’t recognize them and wrestle them into submission. They can poison your friendships and your life; they can poison your writing. And it doesn’t much matter what’s going on with the other writer; it’s entirely possible that the “better writer” is jealous of your characterization, rather than your success, or even perfectly satisfied with their own success because they define “success” differently from the way you define it. It’s equally possible that the “worse writer” feels guilty, or jealous of some aspect of your writing or career or life.

Writing careers are like the caucus race in Alice in Wonderland – everyone starts running when they like, in whatever direction, and stops when they feel like it, and defining who won is as impossible as determining when the race is over…but people keep trying. It will make you crazy if you let it. So don’t.

5. Not everyone is on your side. There will always be people who are not happy to see you succeed, or who will only be pleased if you succeed by their definition and by following the path they think is the right one. This can be blatantly obvious, as with the people who congratulate you on your first sale and then stop talking to you, or it can be more subtle, as with the ones who can’t say enough nice things about your unpublished work, but who suddenly find all sorts of problems with the stuff that’s in print and are happy to inform you of each and every error, now that it’s too late to correct them. I’m always particularly bemused by the ones who inform me, quite seriously, that they have a problem with one of my books because “magic doesn’t work that way.” Um, it’s fiction; I made it up; how can it not work the way I decided to have it work?

6. I wish I’d known to buy Microsoft stock when it went public. If I had, I could probably have bought my own publishing company by now, or retired to Tahiti. And honestly? This should really be Number One. Because “Buy Microsoft” is probably the most all-around useful tip I could have given the thirty-years-younger me, though “Buy Apple” and “Buy Amazon” are right up there. Which actually tells you a good deal about writing as a career, if you stop to think about it.