Patricia C. Wrede's Blog, page 39

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Finding Time

Everybody has too much to do, always. You can tell, because half the time, the first thing people ask a writer is “When do you find time to write?” (the other half the time, the first thing is “Where do you get your ideas?” and the second thing is the one about finding time).

The thing about time is, nobody gets more than 24 hours per day. “Saving time” isn’t like saving money – you can’t take the fifteen minutes you spent waiting for the bus and put it in a time bank, so that when you are late on a novel you can pull it out and suddenly have an extra fifteen minutes to write. So logically, there are only three ways of “finding time” to write: 1) you can do fewer things, and write during the time you’re not using for whatever you gave up doing, or 2) you can do the same number of things, but a lot faster, so that they take less of your 24 hours and you can use the “extra” time to write, or 3) you can find ways to use little odds and ends of “wasted” time (like waiting on the bus) to write in.

Using odds and ends of time can be a lot of help, if you have enough of them (and the ubiquitousness of smartphones means that everybody can have a tiny electronic note-taker with them at all times), but it still requires that one have a process that can make use of small chunks of time (not everyone can) and/or that one have a larger chunk of writing time coming along somewhen in which to stitch together all the little bits that one collected during all those five and ten-minute time periods. It’s well worth doing, but it’s not a perfect solution.

Doing everything faster sounds like a good possibility, but it has a couple of problems. First, some things can’t be sped up – you can’t sleep any faster; you can only cut down on the number of hours you do it, which leads to sleep deprivation and other Bad Things (some of which may even impact on the creativity you were cutting back on sleep to have time for).

Second, most things reach a point where quality suffers if you do them too fast. For some things, this doesn’t matter a lot – if my lawn is a little ragged because I was paying more attention to how quickly I could finish than to whether I got the corners trimmed all the way to the edge, it’s not a huge deal. For other things, though, deteriorating quality can have serious negative consequences. You can only drive so fast before you get pulled over by the cops (best case) or lose control of the car and kill somebody (worst case).

Another problem is that, as I said before, you can’t bank time. If you speed up your breakfast and “save” ten minutes, odds are very good that by the time you get to your writing hour at four in the afternoon, you will not still be ahead of schedule by ten minutes. Something will have happened – the bus was late, there was more mail than you thought, you had to stop for groceries – to put you back on your normal schedule (assuming you have one). You can try to combine it with #3, using odds and ends, but that doesn’t always work, either.

The real problem with trying to do everything faster is that almost nobody can do this successfully for any length of time without burning out. Burning out makes everything harder; everything suddenly takes longer (if you can do it at all), and you can kiss your creativity goodbye for an indefinite period. In other words, working twice as fast only helps in the short run. In the only-slightly-longer run, it hurts far more than it helps.

That leaves the only real choice as #1: doing fewer things. This turns out to be a) exceedingly effective, and b) insanely hard to get people to do. Because, let’s face it, every single thing you are doing in your life is something you are doing because you have to (buy groceries, do dishes, get gas, eat, sleep) or because you want to (watch Sherlock, check your Twitter feed, stop at the bar for a quick one after work, garden, hang out with your friends).

There are a limited number of ways to cut back on the things you have to do, all of which involve getting someone else to do them for you (because, remember, they must happen). If you are persuasive, you can talk a friend or family member into running out to get your groceries, but they’re likely to get cranky if you never reciprocate, which means that in the end, you aren’t actually doing fewer things. If you have the cash, you can hire someone to clean your house and do your laundry, which does help, but how many can afford it? And there simply isn’t any way to get someone to eat or sleep or exercise for you – it doesn’t work.

What’s left is cutting back on the things you want to do. Record Sherlock and don’t watch it until you’re done writing. Turn off the Internet and write. Don’t stop at the bar; go home and write. Skip the concert or the party and write.

The trouble with this is, of course, that nobody wants to cut back on doing the fun and interesting stuff that they’re doing because they want to. Sometimes, this is reasonable; I once asked a gentleman who wanted to find time what he did on Saturday morning, and he shot back “That’s the time I spend with my kids. I’m not using it for anything else.” And he was right. On the other hand, there are a lot more people like the guy who said “Oh, Saturday morning is when I catch up on the five hours of TV shows that are on during the week at the same time as other shows I want to watch. I can’t write then; I’ll get behind.”

It’s especially hard to not-do something that is fun and interesting and appealing when the alternative is working at writing that is not going very well. That, however, is when one particularly needs to have exercised one’s discipline muscles, so that one can say “no, I can’t” to the spur-of-the-moment invite to the baseball game, knowing that one is probably going to spend the afternoon swearing at a blank screen.

Trust

How-to-write books and blogs and groups and forums are all over these days. Most of them focus on basic writing skills like dialog and plot and characterization – things that are key building blocks for nearly every piece of fiction. But there’s one that doesn’t get nearly as much air time, even though it’s one of the most important skills for a writer to have. And that one is earning the reader’s trust.

Readers who don’t trust the writer are likely to hold back from the story and be less involved. Being less involved means they have the mental room to be more critical of what they’re reading. They’ll notice the slips, the plot holes, the tiny inconsistencies that they might otherwise gallop past. All of this makes it much easier for them to put the story down and not pick it up again, which in turn makes it much more likely that they won’t buy anything from that author again.

So how does a writer build trust? In much the same way as it’s done in real life: by making promises and then keeping them in a timely manner. The catch is that the “promises” are all implied, and what “a timely manner” is can vary wildly, depending in part on how the promise is eventually kept.

For instance, a story that begins with three characters fighting a huge mountain lion is promising several things: this is going to be a story with action and adventure and danger, and any survivors of the fight are going to be important later on (that includes the lion). If Scene Two opens in the hospital emergency room with a doctor saying “Lion bites? We have three patients with lion bites? How the hell did that happen?” there’s a minor payoff right away. Since the first scene is clearly relevant to the second one, the writer has built a tiny bit of trust, and even if the rest of Scene Two involves a romantic encounter between the doctor and one of the orderlies, the reader will likely be willing to wait a bit for further developments.

If, on the other hand, Scene Two opens with the romance and no sign of the lion fight, the reader may get restless. If the romance is even more interesting than the fight was, the reader will likely keep going for a while, but there’s still going to be that niggling question what was up with that lion fight? The longer it takes to come back around, the less likely the reader is to be satisfied with “We just admitted three patients who’ve been mauled by a lion” as anything other than the author signaling “Remember that fight with the lion? It’s going to be important; remember it!”

The longer the reader has to remember an incident without there being any payoff – some relevance to the plot or subplot – the bigger the payoff needs to be to be satisfying. Big payoffs are good; they move the story forward. You still have to get your reader to stick with the story long enough to get to them, though, and that means trust…which means lots of little payoffs and tie-ins.

Little payoffs build trust; they reassure the reader that the writer knows what he/she is doing. Little payoffs can be anything from a character getting a mysterious letter on Page One and opening it on Page Two, to linking the lion fight with the ER at the hospital. The important thing is that the payoff happens quickly: the writer presents the reader with a small question (“Who is phoning the main character?”) and answers it almost immediately (“She glanced at the caller ID, flicked the phone on, and said, “Hello, George.”)

The flip side of this is that an apparently-small question (“Who’s on the phone?”) can be built up into a larger one by withholding the payoff. (She checked the caller ID and answered the phone. “Hello? Yes, I know. I’ll be there.” She flicked the phone off and turned to Carol. “I have to go.”) Now the reader has several questions – not just “who called,” but “where is she going? Who is she meeting? Why isn’t she telling Carol?” Again, the longer the questions go without being answered, the bigger the payoff needs to be in order to keep the reader’s trust.

Because it’s not just earning the reader’s trust that’s vital; it’s keeping that trust. If the writer breaks trust in mid-story, a lot of readers will have a far more negative reaction than if the writer had never earned any in the first place. Building up a letter or phone call until it seems like something important, something that will have a major payoff, and then having it turn out to be an electric bill or a telephone salesman, is the sort of thing that nearly always does this…unless the writer is doing a parody like Northanger Abbey, where the gothic atmosphere is largely in the protagonist’s overheated imagination and the letdown is the payoff for the reader.

Switching viewpoints

Last week, I got an interesting question in my email, sparked by the posts on multiple viewpoint. The writer wanted to know about switching types of viewpoint – that is, writing a multiple-viewpoint story in which some POV characters are written in first-person and some in third-person.

This isn’t a terribly common choice, but it’s not unknown. P.D. James’ The Children of Men uses it; Marion Zimmer Bradley did it more than once, most notably in The Heritage of Hastur, and George Turner’s Drowning Towers could be argued as an example. And then there are all those detective novels in which, somewhere along the way, the author included letters or journal entries from other characters. Technically, those letters and journals are first-person interpolations in a mostly-tight-third-person narrative, and would qualify as “multiple viewpoint switching from third to first-person,” though it’s not usually the first thing anyone thinks of as an example.

The reason why people claim that switching viewpoint types is “wrong” or “can’t be done” is the same reason most writing “rules” come about: it’s a technique that’s hard to make work. “Hard” does not equal “impossible and wrong;” it just means that the writer who wants to attempt it needs to be more careful, and may possibly need to hone his/her writing skills and/or make several tries before they can be sure of pulling it off.

The main difficulties a writer faces in writing a multiple-viewpoint novel with different types of viewpoint as well as different viewpoint characters are the same ones that any multiple-viewpoint novel has, only multiplied: clarity, transition, and holding the reader’s interest.

Clarity means making sure that the reader always knows where and when she is, whose head she’s in, and what type of viewpoint she’s reading. Providing clarity about time, place, and especially viewpoint at the start of each new scene is always important, but it is particularly important in a multiple-viewpoint story, and it is vital if you are shifting from one viewpoint type to another. If the shift in viewpoint character and/or viewpoint type comes between the end of one chapter and the start of the next, it is particularly important to let the reader know quickly and clearly whose viewpoint we’re in, what type of viewpoint we’re in, and where and when the new chapter takes place compared to the previous one.

Consider a chapter that’s been rolling along in Jennifer’s tight-third-person viewpoint. Jennifer’s scene ends, and the next scene begins: “The old Stone Manor sat on a hill overlooking a lake.” That sentence would be equally at home in a tight-third scene from Jennifer’s viewpoint, a first-person scene from Sam’s viewpoint, a flashback to someone’s childhood at the Stone Manor, or even the opening of a scene in which George is standing in the library looking at a picture of the Stone Manor. Unless the scene follows directly from the previous one and continues in Jennifer’s viewpoint, the reader is going to have to readjust every time she gets a new bit of information that contradicts that assumption, and if there are too many adjustments, the reader is going to get more and more confused and annoyed as she has to keep reevaluating stuff she has already read.

If the new scene had started “From my post behind a clump of lilacs, I studied the Stone Manor,” the reader would be sure the scene isn’t still in Jennifer’s viewpoint, even if it’s the second scene in the story and the reader has no idea who this new “I” character is.

Transitions are the way the viewpoint gets handed off from one character to another. In many novels, authors use a blank line or space break to indicate a change of scene, and as readers we’re so used to that that we just accept it as normal. Multiple viewpoint novels often require more of a handoff, especially early on when the viewpoints are still being established, and this goes double for switching viewpoint types in mid-stream.

The smoothest and most natural transitions are the sort I mentioned in the detective novels, where the third-person viewpoint character opens an envelope or book and begins to read a personal letter or diary, which is then presented to the reader. We expect letters and journals to be in first-person; furthermore, there is normally a salutation or a date at the top to signal that we’re switching from third-person-detective to first-person-suspect’s-journal. Finally, since we’re usually reading what the detective is reading, it doesn’t feel like a change in viewpoint at all; it feels as if we’re still looking through the detective’s third-person eyes and reading the letter along with him.

Doing first-person viewpoints as letters or diary entries is a useful technique for mixing first-person and third-person viewpoints even if the letters and diaries are a completely separate section that the third-person viewpoint character never sees. P. D. James uses this technique in The Children of Men. It’s not suitable for every story or every first-person viewpoint, but it’s worth considering. Alternatively, one can simply label each scene with a place, date, and viewpoint character’s name, or some subset of these, which is the approach Marion Zimmer Bradley takes.

Another way to do the handoff is from within the scenes. For instance, one character can wonder what’s going on with the next POV character, or hope she’s found the missing murder weapon, and then the next scene opens with the new POV character making a reference back to the previous scene. (“Jennifer sighed and went back to the paperwork, wondering when Sam was going to arrive.//A bullet whined past my ear as I ducked behind a car, and I promised myself that the next time Jennifer wanted me to come in early to handle paperwork, I’d say yes.”) This isn’t right for every book, either, and it can easily be overdone, but sometimes it’s just exactly the technique you want.

If the writer is working with a minimal number of viewpoint characters – say, two or three – he/she can set up a rigid rotation, so that after a couple of chapters the reader knows that all the even-numbered chapters are in first-person and all the odd-numbered ones are in third-person, or that every other scene is first-person. This can cause other difficulties, though, as when one viewpoint character has 15,000 words’ worth of important stuff happening to her and all your other chapters are around 6,000 words long.

Holding the reader’s interest as the viewpoint characters switch off is the final challenge, and at first it might look like a matter of content – giving the reader events that are interesting enough that they’ll want to keep coming back. But you can’t end every single scene or chapter on a cliffhanger without annoying a lot of readers, and there are also readers out there who will skip the next two or three viewpoints in order to find out what happens to their favorite character if you leave that character on a cliffhanger. So that technique is best used sparingly.

What most readers want is a sense that the story is getting somewhere – that each scene is building on what has gone before. The letter that the detective reads seldom knocks a reader out of the story or interrupts the flow, because 1) the viewpoint change is clear, and clearly signaled, 2) the transition is natural and easy to follow, and 3) the reader trusts that the letter is highly relevant to the central story-problem, because otherwise the writer wouldn’t have put the letter in the story.

And that’s the real key to holding the reader’s interest through the speed bump that is a change in viewpoint character or viewpoint type: the relevance of the new scene/new viewpoint, the sense that the story is getting somewhere, and the trust that the reader has learned to have in the writer.

George, Ann, and the Firefight – Some things to do and not do

I recently read a dual-viewpoint story that I nearly put down right in the middle, even though I’d been thoroughly enjoying it up until that point, because of the way the author handled the viewpoints. Specifically, the question of which viewpoint to use to tell the reader important information and events.

The events in question went something like this: The main viewpoint character, Ann, was laid up in the hospital after assorted adventures. The second viewpoint character, George, with whom she was developing a romantic relationship, had to go off to a family event for the weekend. As a reader might expect from this sort of book, the family event ended up in a shootout in which George was wounded, though not seriously. When Ann finds out what has happened, she is seriously upset by the risks George took and chews him out fairly comprehensively.

The problem the writer faced was how to handle the events of the shootout. George is there; George is already a viewpoint character; obviously, the reader ought to see the scene through George’s eyes, right? But there were some problems with this alternative: first, George had already had three scenes in a row, which was already unbalancing the viewpoints. Giving him another big scene (possibly two or three, in order to cover the lead-up to the fight, the fight, and the aftermath) would seriously disrupt the way the viewpoint alternation worked. Second, the romance between Ann and George was at a critical stage; showing Ann’s emotional reactions to George’s actions and to him being in jeopardy would move things along nicely, but to do that in detail would take a blow-by-blow description of the fight. That would leave the story with two detailed descriptions, one from George as it happened and one later when the story is told to Ann. Third…well, this one is conjecture based on the rest of the book, but I definitely got the impression that the author wasn’t comfortable writing fight scenes, and would take any halfway decent excuse to avoid writing one.

So the author chose not to show the actual fight from George’s viewpoint. But he still gave the reader two versions of the fight, both as-told-to Ann. The first is when non-viewpoint-character Sam gives Ann an abbreviated version that makes it sound like a scuffle instead of a firefight – “We had a bit of trouble at the picnic, but everybody got away and we got some important new information, let me tell you about that part.” The second is when George arrives in Ann’s hospital room with his arm in a sling, so that she realizes that the “bit of trouble” was a lot more serious than Sam led her to believe. She then pries a blow-by-blow description out of George, and since it’s her viewpoint, the reader gets all her emotional reactions first-hand.

This solves the viewpoint-balance problem, allows the author to avoid writing a scene he isn’t comfortable with, and moves the romantic subplot forward as well as complicating it nicely – all good things. But I still put the book down, because I felt cheated. The firefight was a major plot event on several levels, and George was there. I didn’t want to hear him talking about it later. I wanted to see it when he was in the middle of it.

Which led me to start thinking about how the author could have handled this situation to solve most of his problems and still do the fight scene from George’s viewpoint. (The one “problem” that this cannot solve is “the author doesn’t want to write a fight scene; he doesn’t like writing fight scenes.” Sometimes you just have to suck it up and write the annoying scene you don’t want to write.)

There are a couple of different possibilities. The first and simplest would be to start in the hospital with Ann grilling George about the fight, then drop into a short flashback in George’s viewpoint to show what actually happened. This solves both the viewpoint-balance problem and the too-much-repetition problem, but it wouldn’t work in every story or with every set of characters. It’d work best where George’s account is significantly different from actual events, whether he’s downplaying or exaggerating his part in the fight, and the author wants to point up this aspect of George’s character.

Another obvious solution would be to put in George’s scenes at the firefight and write a couple of new scenes with Ann as viewpoint to alternate with them (“Meanwhile, back at the hospital…”). This is obvious and simple to say, but hard to do, because you have to come up with something to happen at the hospital that is of equal emotional weight and plot-importance with George’s new fight scene(s), and not only will this be hard to come up with, it will almost certainly affect the plot rolling forward.

Once the firefight scenes are in place, George’s retelling to Ann can be much less detailed, or even partly summarized while still giving Ann’s important emotional reactions (which become the primary focus of that scene). (“Ann listened impatiently as George described the beginning of the picnic and the arrival of the black limousine. ‘I knew it was the villain, so I grabbed Hetty, and – ‘ ‘Wait a minute, you said Hetty was playing in the fountain. You ran halfway across the park with the bad guys shooting at you?!?’ She didn’t know whether to shake him or hug him.”) One can also get a fair amount of characterization out of the way George chooses to describe the events, especially if his description differs from what the reader has already seen.

The keys to making the two-versions-of-the-same-event thing work are to do different things in each version. The first version, where we see the firefight through George’s eyes, is mainly about the action – who is where, who does what, who hits whom. In the second scene, where we see through Ann’s eyes as she hears about the firefight, the details of who and what and who shoots/hits whom are of secondary importance; they’re the vehicle that provokes Ann’s emotional reactions and realization that she cares more about George than she was pretending. If the author is careful with the focus, the two scenes can be sufficiently different to remain interesting, even though they’re covering much of the same event.

The way the author did it – trying to do both a detailed report of George’s action and getting all Ann’s emotional reactions in, in the same scene – would have worked fine if 1) the firefight scene hadn’t been as plot-critical as it was, and 2) the author hadn’t already ducked a couple of other fight scenes and given me the impression he didn’t want to write one. There are ways to leave out critical information, scenes, and even major chunks of plot, and still allow the book to work, but they require that the author know exactly what he/she is doing and have a much better reason for leaving stuff out than “I don’t want to write that bit.”

More on using multiple viewpoint

A couple of folks had questions about the last post, most notably “How do you know your story is complex enough for multiple viewpoint?” and “Does it count as multiple viewpoint if it’s a camera-type that follows different characters?” So I thought I’d spend another post on this.

Multiple viewpoint is one of the most confusing terms in writing, because it isn’t really a viewpoint at all. Think about it for a minute: viewpoint type comes in first-person, second-person, and third person, just like verb forms; arguably, one can also do first-person-plural and third-person-plural. There is no verb form “multiple.”

What multiple viewpoint is, is a structure, like “linear” and “parallel scenes” and “circular.” It is a way of ordering the events and incidents in the story. Unlike most other structures, though, it isn’t playing with the when and where of events, or with the mental/emotional effects on the main character. Instead, it’s playing with who and why. Specifically, it’s playing with whose eyes the reader sees through, and what each character’s reasons for doing things are. And, sometimes, with letting the reader know more than any individual character does.

A multiple viewpoint structure can be used with any story that has more than one character. For example, take Cinderella. The fairy tale is straightforward, and most retellings are equally straightforward: the Cinderella character is put upon by the evil stepfamily, the godmother interferes and sends Cinderella to the ball anyway, the prince falls in love and seeks her out, and the evil stepfamily gets their comeuppance.

Retelling the story using a multiple viewpoint immediately raises the question which viewpoints to use? The answer depends on whether the author wants a complex retelling or a straightforward one. For the straightforward one, Cinderella, her godmother, and the prince are the obvious main choices; the evil stepsisters and stepmother could be viewpoints, but if they are, they’ll almost have to be one-note caricatures in order to keep the storyline the same. Most authors don’t try; if they want more viewpoints, they go for original characters whose presence is implied by the setting – palace footmen, the king and queen, servants, townsfolk.

A complex retelling, on the other hand, almost requires the stepsisters and the stepmother’s viewpoints as well as Cinderella’s, and not as caricatures, either – as individuals who have a different take on what is going on, and good reasons for what they do that the reader would never know about without those viewpoints. Perhaps the stepmother is being blackmailed and that’s why money is so tight, or perhaps she’s trying to fend off a skeevy old rich dude who wants to buy all three of the girls for his harem. Maybe the stepsisters are running a charity fundraising business that Cinderella made a nasty comment about once (not knowing they were involved). Maybe the stepmom has cancer, unknown to Cinderella, and is trying to get her family safely settled before she dies. Maybe the chores she sets Cinderella aren’t really so bad if one looks at them from a different viewpoint (I certainly thought that I was much-put-upon when I was sixteen and had to do dishes and fold laundry).

Whatever the reasons, the complex multiple-viewpoint story looks vastly different from the simple one. It may still be obvious who the good guys and bad guys are, but neither side looks quite as black-and-white as they do in a straightforward story, because the reader knows more about everybody.

Because multiple viewpoint is a structure, rather than a first-person, second-person type of viewpoint, it can be used to mix up types of viewpoint as well as viewpoint characters. That is, one viewpoint character’s scenes may be in first-person, another’s in tight-third, and another’s in camera-eye or omniscient. This lets the writer play with different levels of intimacy with different characters – that one-shot viewpoint where the warehouse guard gets killed is often (not always) in camera-eye because the point isn’t to get the reader identifying with and understanding the guard, it’s to move the plot along by showing the killing. Sometimes, this kind of one-scene viewpoint is a good way of ramping up tension or creating a mystery or just moving the plot along; other times, it’s a cheap way for the writer to get out of learning how to get a particular bit of information in when none of the current viewpoint characters are conveniently to hand.

The answer to “does moving the camera focus around count as multiple viewpoint?” is, therefore “No, because camera-eye and omniscient are third-person viewpoint types; multiple viewpoint is a structure.” The answer to “How do you know when your story is complex enough?” is “Actually, that’s irrelevant; the structure can be used with any kind of story. The question is, is it the most effective structure for the story you want to tell?” If you want to focus strictly on Cinderella’s story, you probably don’t need multiple viewpoint (and it may get in the way). If you want to show that the stepmother and sisters are perfectly justified, from their viewpoint, you may not need Cinderella’s viewpoint. If you want to examine the complexity of a blended family from inside and outside and across generations, you probably do need multiple viewpoint.

It depends on what story you want to tell, and how you want to tell it. The problem isn’t the complexity of the story, so much as it is mis-matching the kind of story you want to tell with a structure that works better with a different kind. If you desperately want to write a multiple-viewpoint story, but you also want to focus really tightly on Cinderella…maybe you should think about doing Cinderella as tight-third or first-person, and save the multiple-viewpoint for Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.

Setting out to do multiple viewpoint

Note to self: When the blog posting date happens the day after a major busy day (like, say, the day the taxes are due), write it in advance, because you are going to get home from dropping stuff in the mail and collapse and completely forget to write it until late the following morning.

Announcement: The e-book of Wrede on Writing is on sale for $1.99 at SF Signal  through the end of next week . If you were waffling about buying it, here’s a chance to have it for less.

This week, I am being a “counselor” for NaNoWriMo’s April “camp” session, which I take to be NaNoWriMo for all the people who can’t do it in November because of Thanksgiving and holidays coming up and such. As part of this, they sent me a set of questions  the WriMos asked, and one in particular was interesting but would take way more space to answer properly than I have in the NaNoWriMo blog. So you get to watch me muse on it.

The question had to do with writing a good book with multiple viewpoints, and I’m going to start with the obvious: to write a “good book,” you have to know what you think a “good book” is (other people will disagree with you) and you have to do all the non-viewpoint-related things like dialog and plot and structure and background that you’d have to do for any book. “Multiple viewpoints” is not a get-out-of-jail-free card for all the other things a writer has to do effectively.

So this is really about juggling multiple viewpoints, and the first question is, does the story have to be multiple viewpoint, or is the writer just defaulting to multiples because it seems easier or because The Game of Thrones is multiple viewpoint? If the reason is “it seems easier,” run away fast. Multiple viewpoint, like omniscient, is harder for most writers to do well than most single-viewpoint alternatives, because you have to all the same things you’d have to do for a single-viewpoint story and you have to do them several times in different ways depending on each viewpoint character’s voice, personality, etc. It is also desperately tempting to throw in a scene from the viewpoint of a minor character whose only reason for having a viewpoint is that he/she happens to be in the right place to “show” an important event that none of the viewpoint characters will actually see. This is almost always a bad idea, and I don’t care if George R.R. Martin does it. He’s George R.R. Martin. You aren’t.

Using multiple viewpoint because you’re used to seeing TV and movies done that way, or because your favorite novel is multiple viewpoint, is a failure of imagination and attention. TV and movies have different requirements from novels, and different constraints; applying the techniques of film and video to written fiction without thinking about their appropriateness and effectiveness is very nearly a recipe for mediocrity. You may get lucky and be writing a story where the use of these borrowed techniques does work well, but depending on luck is never a good idea, because it comes in two varieties and one of them you really don’t want.

Assuming that the writer has already done all this thinking, and is writing a complex, interwoven story that really will benefit from being told from multiple viewpoints,  the next question is, which characters should be viewpoints? Every character has a story, but some of them are completely different stories from the one you are telling, and others only have a bit of overlap. You want viewpoint characters whose individual stories and/or subplots are crucially relevant to the story you are telling, not just viewpoints who happen to be in the right place at the right time to let you have a scene you want.

You also want viewpoints that will let you show what you need to show and avoid showing what you want to avoid showing, which can be a lot trickier. It is easy enough to avoid making the villain a viewpoint (so that the writer doesn’t have to worry about giving away the Evil Plot too soon), but it is not always obvious up front that Character A is never going to be around when interesting/exciting things happen, or that making Character B a viewpoint means the reader will learn about the kangaroo escape too soon and the plot will fall apart, or that if Character C is a viewpoint you will end up repeating certain things often enough that you will have to worry about the reader getting bored with hearing them.

How many viewpoints is another question, one that is both important and dangerous. Every character has his/her own story, usually at novel length. If you have two viewpoint characters, both of whom are focused on stopping the nuclear reactor from having a meltdown, they’ll still be doing it for different reasons, and they’ll have very different angles of approach to the problem (if they don’t, there’s no reason for them all to be viewpoint characters). Theoretically, you would be able to write two different 100,000-word novels, one from each viewpoint, but by using both characters as viewpoints in the same book, you can cut that back to two 60,000-word stories because so much of the central event (the damaged nuclear reactor) is the same. That gives you a perfectly reasonable 120,000 word book, but not one that fits most people’s definition of multiple-viewpoint. Add one more viewpoint, with his/her own different story, and you’re up to 180,000 words, which is quite long; at four viewpoints, fully-fleshed out, and you’re at 240,000.

The solution is to have several tiers of viewpoint characters:  say, two to three central viewpoints, whose stories are more complicated and will be fully fleshed out; another two to four characters who have shorter, more focused stories (they’d maybe be novelettes or novellas if they weren’t part of this book); and maybe a couple who have short story-length stories. The problem here is keeping oneself focused; many writers dive into their viewpoint characters so thoroughly that they can’t keep D’s story to the 5,000-word short-story length they’d intended when they know they are writing a novel. This can end up with eight to twenty viewpoint characters all of whom have novel-length stories that the writer wants to tell. Inevitably, this leads to fuzzing the focus on the main storyline as the writer wanders off into the fascinating but irrelevant underbrush of different characters’ tangential stories.

Character voices

Announcements: For the past year, Tim Cooper has been running around Minneapolis taking pictures of different people reading Emma Bull’s War for the Oaks in places featured in the book. He’s currently running a kickstarter project to finance an art book collecting all the photos. Check it out. (Full disclosure: I’m one of the readers in one of the forty-two photos.)

People talk about the importance of making different characters’ voices different, but they often don’t get down into the nitty-gritty of how to do it. It’s one of the things that took me a long time to begin to get the hang of.

“Differences in character voices” applies to dialog, which means what you have to work with are the character’s word choice, grammar, and syntax. At first glance, this doesn’t look so complicated, but if you think about it, the character’s background will affect all of these things. His/her beliefs, attitudes, and worldview will also factor in, as will the character’s culture-of-origin, class, and life experience, which in turn are affected by things like race, religion, age, ethnicity, and gender. Personality is a big factor, too – just think about that person you know who goes on and on about his/her current hobby or crush, without regard to whether anyone else is interested, and compare them to the one who never says much of anything about him/herself.

Lots of writers do character voices by instinct, basing them on specific people or groups of people they know. I did that with Telemain in the Enchanted Forest Chronicles; he sounds like every obsessed computer programmer I knew at the time, rolled up into one guy, with the topic changed from computers to magic. Sometimes, though, one wants to be a little more conscious about one’s choices, and one way of doing that is to look at your tools, one at a time.

Word choice: Start with overall vocabulary. At least some of your characters won’t have as large a vocabulary as you do; what kinds of words are they missing? Long, polysyllabic ones? Formal ones? Specialized terminology about cars or gardens or knitting? Why are they missing these words – lack of interest in car engines, or lack of opportunity to study them?

Are there words this character would never use? Swear words are one obvious choice, but there are gradations; you can have a character who never swears or only uses euphemisms like “darn it,” or one who swears but only using vulgar words, never profanities like “God damn it,” or one who is always profane but never vulgar. Are there things the character would never talk about, given his/her background? (Money, power, and sex are both the three great motivations and, at times, the three great conversational taboos, but there are plenty of others.)

Grammar and syntax vary based largely on class and background – not just ethnic or cultural background, but which part of the country someone is from. In the U.S., a Southern accent is very different from a New England or Midwestern accent, and within the South, a Texas accent is different from a Georgian accent or Mississippi accent. If one is inventing one’s own world, one should keep in mind that in a large country, there are going to be regional styles of speech; if it’s a multi-cultural empire, things are likely to be even more varied.

Grammar, syntax, and word choice can also vary with membership in a particular social or professional group. Computer programmers can speak what sounds like a totally different language when they’re discussing their specialty; so do most professionals, from doctors to insurance salespeople. Science fiction fandom has its own set of terms; teenage slang changes with every generation (in part so as to be impenetrable to adults); groups from motorcyclists to hip-hop artists to surfers have their own idioms and speech rhythms.

Above all, though, speech styles reflect personality. The anti-social character may choose to speak seldom and in monosyllables whenever possible, in spite of his vast vocabulary and noble background, because he wants to be left alone. The one with a tendency to be a drama queen may use long, rambling sentences as a way of hanging on to control of the conversation (as long as she’s talking, nobody else can get a word in).

What it ultimately comes down to is:  for this particular character, which of these things has the greatest effect on the way they sound? The answer will be different for each of them; the monosyllabic character and the garrulous drama queen may be next-door neighbors or even siblings, with the same ethnic, class, cultural, and educational backgrounds.

Once you have a clear speech style for each character, you have to keep that in mind whenever you’re writing a line of their dialog. Again, this ends up being largely intuitive. There have been many times when I wrote a line for someone and stared at it, because it was what they would say, in terms of content, but it didn’t feel like the way they would say it. Sometimes, fixing it is a matter of changing a word or the word order; sometimes, it takes rewriting the whole sentence. It is both embarrassing and gratifying when a beta reader or editor points out where a character’s voice is not in character – embarrassing because of the mistake, but gratifying in that it means that the character’s other dialog has a clear enough voice that a reader can spot the wrong bits.

From the mailbag #7

How much do you develop your characters prior to their appearance onstage?

Not much. Usually, they either walk into my head fully formed or develop as I write them. Very occasionally, I’ll poke at one of them before I start writing, but it never seems to be much use as far as their personality and what they’re like is concerned. I either know them, or I don’t.

What I do do is backstory – who is related to whom, who works for whom, who is plotting with or against whom, what kinds of agendas different characters may have. But much of that can change when they finally show up on the page, if their personality demands it. Or if the story does. Sometimes, it feels kind of like casting an actor in a role and then realizing that he/she doesn’t have the right chemistry with the rest of the cast and having to replace them after a couple of days.

What’s your daily work schedule like?

Extremely varied. I have enough else going on in my life that I can’t set a time and stick to writing, unless I get up at 4 a.m., which I am not about to do when I don’t have to. For me, what works best is to get some words written on a daily basis; how many, for how long, and at what time of day doesn’t matter as long as they happen.

What are your passions outside of writing?

Reading and, at the moment, knitting. Reading is the only constant; I’ve dabbled in gardening, home repair, tailoring, cross stitch, and a variety of other things over the years.

How many books had you written before your first major sale?

My first novel was my first sale, so none. I’d done a number of unsellable short stories, mainly because everyone told me that was how you were supposed to do it, but I’m not a short story writer, so they all sounded like plot outlines or else like a chapter excerpted from the middle of a novel. Which is why they never sold. Well, that plus them being really terrible.

How much time do you spend creating your worlds? Do you shape your worlds around your characters or vice versa?

It depends on the book. I have to have a certain amount of backstory done before I start writing, but it always keeps developing as the story gets written…and backstory is not quite the same as worldbuilding. How much I need to have figured out before I start the story varies from book to book; it also depends on how close I am sticking to real-life history vs. making things up entirely out of whole cloth, like the Lyra books.

I don’t always start with the same set of ingredients, so there’s no one answer to “Do I shape the world around the characters or vice versa” – it depends on the story. If I start with the characters, things shape around them to some extent; if I start with the plot, that’s what both world and characters grow from; if I start with the world, the plot and characters grow out of it.

What writers have influenced your work the most?

J.R.R. Tolkien, Dorothy Sayers, L. Frank Baum, Georgette Heyer, and Jay Ward.

 After thirty years or so, does finishing a book still give you the same thrill of accomplishment?

I wouldn’t call it a thrill of accomplishment; it’s more like a huge sigh of relief.

 What do you think of women’s (characters) roles in Sci-Fantasy? Are they given enough credit for their strength and ability?

There is no genre that has only good or only bad portrayals of one kind of character. There is also no genre that has only one way of portraying a particular type of character. Some books have complex characters, while others have flat ones; some have a realistic variety of characters, while others have a sprinkling of stereotypes. There are also a variety of reasons why this happens, ranging from intentional authorial effort through unintentional reflection of authorial beliefs to lack of authorial skill on the part of an author who wants his/her characters to be realistic and complex, but who doesn’t have the chops to pull it off. And all of this applies just as much to male characters as female ones.

Why do you write children’s fantasy?

I don’t write children’s fantasy. I write books I would like to read, and then the Young Adult/Teen Fiction people offer me more money than the adult publishers for them, so they are printed and marketed and sold as YA.

Is there anything about the writing process that absolutely sucks?

 For me, it’s transitions and middles and council scenes, especially in the first draft.

Plotting in bits and pieces

There are a myriad of books out there on how to construct a plot. Most of them, so far as I can tell, seem to take one of two approaches: either they focus on the main character as the driver of the plot, or they focus on the traditional plot-skeleton as the way of pushing the plot forward.

Both of these methods (and most of the others I’ve run across) begin by saying things like “have an idea” or “pick a main character” and then proceed directly to either “decide on the main plot problem” or “decide how it ends.” This isn’t wrong – the plot problem and the ending are important, and in most books really do need to be there by the time the story is over. They’re also perfectly valid places that one can start working out one’s plot. They just don’t work first time, every time, for every writer…or even for a writer who has developed plots that way in the past.

But these systems are top-down approaches, the equivalent of saying to a sculptor or potter, “First, decide what you are going to make. A statue of an elephant? A teapot?” The idea is that once you know where you are going, it is much easier to chip away everything that doesn’t look like an elephant, or add material until it looks like a teapot.

What these approaches don’t help with are the people who work from the bottom up or the inside out. These folks are more like quilters who start with eighteen different types of fabric and a box of triangles and squares left over from the last project, and ask “What can I make out of this that would be interesting?” rather than starting with “I am going to make a Log Cabin quilt; what do I have that I can use?”

If you’re starting with a box of bits and pieces – a couple of characters, a scene that doesn’t seem to have a point, a notion that a sea voyage ought to come in somewhere – the approach you have to take to generate a plot probably isn’t the tidy linear method that so many plotting books describe. It’s going to be iterative, going around and around or back and forth until a pattern emerges. Because that’s one of the things plot is: it’s a pattern that goes somewhere.

The first thing to do is to see what you have. For a quilter, that means spreading out all the fabric and bits so they can get an overview; for a writer, it usually means reading through everything, though it might also mean printing stuff out and spreading it around like the fabric bits.

Depending on your personal preferences, you can then proceed in a couple of different ways. You can pick out all your very favorite bits and then try to see if any of what’s left fits around them or connects them. You can group and regroup your snippets – by obvious mechanical categories like length or type (dialog, description, action) or category (characters, places, backstory, plot twists), or in more intuitive “these feel like they belong together” groupings. You can move stacks of paper around, or use 3×5 cards or Post-It Notes, or make diagrams in a brainstorming program. You can clump things together (all the bits that involve Mary Ann) and then shuffle the clumps, or you can sort things individually and then look for all the different groups that have a Mary Ann bit in them.

As you do this, two things usually happen: one is that as you go over and over the bits from different directions, they will start to collide in your head and cause new bits to appear; the other is that you start to notice the things that are missing. Again, depending on your personal style and preference, you can scribble a list of new ideas and missing bits and keep going, or you can stop and write down the whole idea (whether that’s two lines or a five page scene) or try to make up some bits that would fit in the missing places.

If you are very, very lucky, you will start scribbling down something and come out of the daze several hours later realizing that you have just written Chapter One and you can stop looking at the bits and pieces and just keep writing now. Don’t count on this, though; it’s rare.

More usually, you will shuffle bits and pieces, and add new bits and pieces, and eventually you will start noticing a pattern or patterns. Maybe you have eight scenes where someone is rescuing someone or saving something, or a set of conversations that all seem to involve family crises of different sorts. If the emerging pattern appeals to you, make it your centerpiece and look through all the remaining bits to see what might fit with it. (You won’t ever use all the bits and pieces.) Or just resort and regroup everything until the emerging pattern grows clearer or you nudge the missing bits into view.

If the pattern(s) you come up with don’t appeal, pick the one that includes your favorite scene/clever line/dialog/character and ask yourself what would make it appealing and interesting – not to readers, you’re not at that point yet. Interesting and appealing to you. Or try recombining it with something else – maybe the action-adventure bits would be a lot more fun to write if the main character was trying to deal with the family crises at the same time, or the typical romance scenes would be more interesting if it involved a pod of dolphins.

Eventually, you probably do want to get to the “where does it end?” and “what is the big problem?” questions, but the odds are good that by then you will have a fairly good notion what your story is and where the plot is heading. Then you can tidy up all the stacks of papers and take a quick look at the top-down planning models to make sure you haven’t missed anything you really need or want. Or you can just start writing once you have whatever your backbrain considers “enough to go on with.”