Patricia C. Wrede's Blog, page 40

Writing scenes

A lot of writing books lately seem to focus on scenes – what they are, how they work, and of course how to write great ones. Most of the books I’ve read urge writers to start by deciding on the point of the scene, or the characters’ goals for the scene, or the writer’s goal for the scene. Then you’re supposed to find the conflict, or raise the stakes, or pick a disaster/catastrophe/failure to lead into the next scene. There are a couple of problems with this kind of approach.

The first is that scenes do not exist in isolation, nor are they truly complete in themselves, any more than one link in a chain is. You can take a single link and refine it and polish it and make it shiny and perfect…and if it doesn’t connect to the links before and after it, you still have a broken chain. Furthermore, if you take one single link in a chain and polish it up, and only work on that one link, the chain is going to look a little odd.

There’s also the fact that chains usually have a purpose, and that means they need to be the right length for that purpose. If the point of the chain is to keep the dog out of the next-door neighbor’s garden, the chain had better not be long enough to let the dog get halfway down the block. Which is not something you can evaluate by studying the chain one link at a time.

 Studying the chain one link at a time will also not tell you whether the chain is actually connecting two things together, or whether it goes in a circle like a necklace. This is an important thing to know, because a necklace won’t help if you need to keep the dog out of the garden and a chain leash is not going to work very well to hang your grandmother’s diamond pendant on so you can wear it at your wedding.

 In other words, looking at the point of the scene, various goals, and so on, is … well, the phrase “can’t see the forest for the trees” comes to mind. The really important thing about each and every scene is “How does this further the story?”

 Which brings me to the second problem with the above approach: How, and how well, a scene furthers the story is something that is generally best judged when one has the whole story there to look at. Things don’t stay the same over the course of writing a book; plotlines shift, characters grow and change (and so do their motives). What looked like (and perhaps was) a brilliant scene when one was writing Chapter Twelve can turn out to be overdone or even superfluous when one looks back from the perspective of the ending in Chapter Thirty-Two.

In other words, I don’t think most of those great points about how to write great scenes are actually much help to most writers in writing the scenes. They may have value when it comes to editing and revising, but I don’t know any writers who actually plan out their scenes this way. (Though I assume there are some.) 

When it comes to actually writing scenes, most of the writers I know aren’t thinking about meta issues like what the conflict is or what the characters’ goals are for a particular scene. If you asked, at least half of them would say something like, “My character wants to put the groceries away before his roommate gets home” or “She wants to get that funny rattling noise in the car looked at before something breaks.”

 What I think about when I am writing any scene other than the very first one (and sometimes even then) is the previous scene. Where did I leave everybody – physically, mentally, emotionally, plot-wise? What just happened? What, specifically, does each of the characters want to do next (run, cry, go to sleep, talk, plan…)? Are they in a situation where they can do that, or are they still fighting sea monsters or running from the tsunami?

 Once I have that clear in my head, there’s a sequence I run through: What can they do next? (If they’re fighting sea monsters, they aren’t going to be having dinner or a nap any time soon.) Is what they can do important to the plot, or is it something I can skip over? (If they’ve left home, headed for the city, I can skip the whole trip if it’s routine; if the plot calls for one of the party to be kidnapped along the way, I’d better show at least that part.)

Finally and most importantly, is what they want to and can do interesting? Because if it’s not interesting, it really doesn’t matter how much conflict there would be, or what the characters’ goals are, or what the purpose of the scene is. If it ain’t interesting, it isn’t going to be the next scene. Not in my book, anyway.

Originality, Fanfiction, and a Few Other Things

Originality is something that is prized in modern-day fiction, at the very same time it is proclaimed to be impossible. You can find innumerable web pages and writing books that tell you solemnly that “there is nothing new under the sun,” that “there are no more original stories… everything written today is a sort of riff on previous stories,” and that “you can’t come up with a basic plot that has never been done before.” And then, in the next paragraph, these same essayists go on to say “but it has never been done your way,” or they talk about the “appealing freshness” of the latest retelling of “Beauty and the Beast,” or assert that originality is the (totally impossible) only way to achieve distinction in fiction.

This leaves a lot of authors in a bind. On the one hand, originality is held up as an absolute, fundamental prerequisite for high quality writing (and this is further reinforced by the attitude of modern society toward plagiarism). On the other hand, any author who stops to think clearly for more than a few minutes will have to recognize that after some four thousand years of recorded human history and storytelling, finding an original story to tell, or something new to say about the human condition, is going to be nearly impossible.

People have different reactions to this realization. Some are completely horrified whenever they (inevitably) discover that someone else has written something similar to their story, to the point of destroying whole manuscripts. Others come to an uneasy detent with the whole idea – a sort of head-in-the-sand, don’t-ask-don’t-tell approach. Still others blithely ignore the whole issue, or pretend to (apart from the occasional 3 a.m. crisis of conscience).

There is, however, one group of writers who are totally untroubled by the whole modern idea that complete originality is some kind of benchmark for quality. I refer, of course, to writers of fanfiction.

Fanfiction, as I have pointed out elsewhere, can be looked at as a sort of map of various alternate routes through the implied decision tree that the original writer used. The whole point is that it’s not purely original in itself; it has to have something to be an alternative to, or an expansion of.

There is a lot of very good writing in fanfiction. And plenty of bad, too; Sturgeon’s Law most definitely applies – 90% of everything is crud. But that last 10% can be very, very good, and in at least some cases, I think one reason is that the writers do not have to angst about “being original” – at least, not as long as they write fanfiction.

And it isn’t new, not by a long, long shot. From where I sit, I can see an entire bookcase full of fiction dating from the twelfth century to the present, all spinning off from a few scraps of history and legend pulled together into The History of the Kings of Britain by Geoffrey of Monmouth. For the next three centuries, authors from Britain and France to Russia retold and expanded and elaborated the Matter of Britain in ways that a modern reader of fanfiction would recognize instantly, until Sir Thomas Mallory pulled most of it together in the Unified Field Theory that was Le Morte d’Arthur. Going farther back, one could, I think, make a good case for Virgil’s Aeneid being Homeric fanfiction.

The best retellings and reframings can stand on their own, but a knowledge of the original story makes them richer. You don’t have to be familiar with Romeo and Juliet to understand and enjoy West Side Story, but knowing Shakespeare adds a level of appreciation to the modern play. (And of course Shakespeare was adapting and retelling a couple of earlier stories that nobody would remember if they weren’t his sources. Nobody complains about plagiarizing something if your rewrite is better than the original…)

All of which leads me to the conclusion that the urge to retell and reframe existing stories is a fundamental human impulse that comes right along with the one to tell stories in the first place. Originality is not the be-all and end-all of literary quality; it is simply one of the many and several ingredients that writers use to create stories. Some stories need more of it than others; some need it in particular places but not in others. Ringing changes on familiar stories like Cinderella can be fun, and just as “original” and creative as making something up out of whole cloth.

Taxes again and again

It’s tax time again, and as seems to be the case every year, I have writer friends who are cussing and moaning about their taxes, other friends who can’t bear to look at it until 11:59 on April 15, and even a few who habitually ignore the whole thing until the IRS sends them a nasty letter a year down the road. (Don’t do this. Just don’t. It gives me palpatations just thinking about it.)

There is, however, one universal: every single person I know swears that next year, they’ll do better. Next year, they’ll start earlier; next year, they’ll keep track of expenses during the year; next year, they’ll get an accountant; next year, they won’t have to file an extension; next year, they’ll get caught up and then they’ll stay that way.

They hardly ever actually do. The relief of getting the taxes done is so great that they can’t bear to look at anything related any more, so they put it out of their minds. And that’s where it stays until the next deadline rolls around.

I am no exception to this trend. Many of my friends would be surprised to hear this, as I have not only my own taxes to handle but also my father’s (which are extremely complicated even with a CPA doing most of the actual work), and I have gotten all of them in the mail by April 15 every year except one. Even so, every year it has been a lot of stressful running around and checking things and updating things and notifying various people, and every year I have sworn to do better.

The thing is, to make a writer’s tax forms easy to do, you have to start early. Because what makes the taxes easy are not just lots of records, but the right records, and it is several orders of magnitude simpler to do them right from the start of the year than it is to try to re-create them later on. This applies no matter what it is you are swearing you will do better with next year.

This year, I made my life a lot easier by 1) emailing the accountant to ask about his schedule a good two weeks earlier than I usually do. This meant I didn’t need to panic two weeks later when his calendar and mine don’t match up until April 14; I already had the only available slots that worked with my calendar, and all those other people who took them last year can see him while I’m busy with other things.

2) I made a list of all the documents I needed, based on last year’s forms. When they arrived, I noted the date, and when things arrived that weren’t on the list, I added them and the date, too. This isn’t a big deal for major things like the advances and royalties that flow through my agent; those tend to come in on time, or I get a note explaining (usually in an exasperated tone) that XYZ publisher is late with their numbers again and everything will be along as soon as they arrive. What I needed to keep tabs on were the smaller things – payments for school appearances, reprints, the occasional speaking engagement. Because it isn’t enough to track these throughout the year; I need to know if the payer is going to send me a 1099, because what they report to the government is what I have to pay taxes on, and it really helps if we both have the same numbers.

The list of speaking engagements isn’t going to be exactly the same this year as it was last year, but there are other smallish income amounts that will be, or that will show up again in a year or two. Knowing whether and when to expect their forms to arrive takes a lot of the pressure off. For the rest…well, the plan is to keep a list this year of place, date and topic, and amount received. It is so much easier to write it down now…at least, it is easier in terms of making tax time less stressful. It is still a boring tedious job that I am as eager to put off as the next person, so we’ll see how that goes.

3) The third thing I did was to sit down with Quicken and my tax forms and make sure all the things I deduct will print out with nice, neat subtotals for the lines I want to put them in. Yes, Quicken and Turbo Tax are supposed to do this for you, but their idea of what sorts of things belong in which lines does not always match up with the things a writer can deduct, and it never matches up with how I want to track my expenses for my personal budget. I have sworn every year for the past ten years that I would do this, and I always end up printing out their form and then making four or five manual corrections while I’m sitting in the accountant’s office. It’s not a big deal, but it’s annoying, and it ends this year.

That makes this year’s taxes run more smoothly, especially since I have most of it done and it’s not the end of March yet. For next year…the main thing is record-keeping during the year. The majority of it has been greatly simplified by Quicken’s ability to go on and download all my bank and credit card numbers; the catch is that the agencies often don’t keep an entire year-and-four-months-worth of records on their sites, so I have to remember to do the download periodically. Once a month when I pay the bills used to work before I put everything on auto-pay; this year, I’m going to try for once a quarter when I make my estimated tax payments.

And that should do it for this year. We’ll see how well it worked, next year…

Simple vs. easy

As some of you may know, I knit. (My current project is a heavily cabled cape [scroll down a bit for the pattern picture] and it’s my first time doing complex cables. I’m about halfway through and having a blast.)

Every so often, I take one of my knitting projects out to work on when I’m meeting people in a public place, and I always get comments. I get particularly nice comments about one project that’s a very simple stitch, done in a self-striping yarn (for non-knitters, that’s just what it sounds like – a yarn that changes color periodically, with long enough runs of each color that when you knit or crochet with it, you get stripes). It’s a little annoying, because people who don’t knit nearly always comment on how nice the stripes look and how hard it must be to do them, when all I had to do to get them was pick the right yarn.

What they almost never comment on is the stitch pattern itself. It’s nothing complex…which is the point. Two of the most difficult things to do well in knitting are plain stockinette stitch, and equally plain garter stitch, which are really basic. They’re difficult because even though they are simple, they show every single problem and every mistake. With cables and lace and color work, you can often hide an error in the complexity of the pattern, or just continue on in the certain knowledge that nobody but you (and maybe a few sharp-eyed other knitters) will ever know it is there. A plain one-color sweater in stockinette is unforgiving.

You see where I’m going with this, right?

Oh, and there’s one more thing: in knitting, certain kinds of mistakes (like accidentally splitting the yarn when you knit a stitch) do more than just look terrible; they also create weaknesses in the fabric. So most knitters will go to great lengths to fix a mistake, even if they discover it many rows back and even if they know that nobody but them will know. (Why, yes, I am a perfectionist about my knitting. This surprises you?)

Writing is one of the many other things that works this same way: that is, some of the hardest things to do are the basics, the fundamental things of which every story is composed, the things that look easy. The things that one might possibly be able to hide under various kinds of razzle-dazzle, but that sharp-eyed readers and other writers will notice (and probably complain about); the things that may weaken the story on some level even if few people spot them on a first read-through, or even a second.

The trouble is that knitting has words for these small but important basics: knits, purls, stockinette, garter stitch. Writing has large-scale general categories that are difficult to put a shape to, and hard to break down into the smaller building blocks where things go wrong. Plot, characterization, setting, and style are all considered writing basics, but each of them can be as complex and ornate as a lace shawl or cabled sweater, or as deceptively simple and straightforward as a garter-stitch wool scarf.

People tend to assume that things that have a complicated appearance are things that are hard to do. Writers are no exception to this tendency. The result is quite often that a writer will notice a weakness in a particular aspect of a story, and automatically assume that the problem is with the most complex parts. They don’t even look at the simple basics – because “simple” equals “easy,” and “basic” means “something you learn when you’re a rank beginner and then you know it and don’t have to worry about it any more,” right? (Also, on some level they know that the “simple basics” are going to be devilishly hard to fix…much harder, in most cases, than slapping on a layer of frosting in hopes of disguising the problem.)

So their plots develop subplots and complexities and complications piled on complications, when the real problem is a fundamental logical flaw or a breakdown in causation or even a key piece of information that never quite got nailed down on the page. Characters get more complicated and develop bizarre childhood traumas, when the real problem is that the writer doesn’t actually know what they want or why they want it. The author generates reams of notes on history and current politics, when the real problem is that there are fundamental inconsistencies, inaccuracies, and implausibilities in the description of the setting. Their style becomes more ornate, or more spare, when the real problem isn’t the length or elegance of the sentences, but their clarity.

But the thing about stockinette and garter stitch is, they’re the basis of everything else in knitting, and if you can’t do a good job on them, nothing else will look quite right or work quite as well as it should. The same is true of the fundamentals of writing – not everything that gets lumped under “plot” and “characters” and “setting,” but the basic what-story-are-you-telling-here, who-are-these-people-and-what-do-they-want, and where-is-this-happening elements. They’re simple, and they’re basic, but they’re not easy.

The Fun Part

Writing isn’t any fun. At least, that is the impression I often get from listening to earnest young would-be and beginning writers discussing their work. There are all these decisions you have to make and things to pay attention to, from word choice to plot twists. It takes forever to finish a novel (and sometimes just as long to finish a short story). And then you have to do the marketing (I have never once met a writer who claimed to enjoy the submission process, not even the ones who are very, very good at it).

There are intense arguments over slanting stories for different markets, whether to look for an editor or for an agent first, the value and risk of multiple submissions, and traditional publishers vs. small presses vs. e-books. It all sounds so enormously exhausting and unpleasant that I wonder why anyone would want to get into this business at all, ever.

And then I run into someone who is so excited about their current project that they are nearly incoherent, or someone bouncing with joy because they found the absolutely perfect thing for Chapter Eight, and I feel better.

Any writer who wants a professional career does have to worry about all the things that go into getting such a career off the ground (and keeping it there), but there’s a down side, especially for those who get so caught up in the mechanics of writing and the procedures of getting their stuff sold that they forget why they’re doing it. I’ve seen more than one writer revise all the shine and sparkle out of a story in hopes of making it saleable. I’ve known more than one early-stage writer who has acquiesced to an editorial request that gutted a finished novel, or twisted the writer’s story totally out of shape.

None of them were having fun, and it showed in the finished product. It is therefore demonstrably worthwhile to sit down occasionally and remind oneself just why one is doing all this anyway.

When you sit down to write a story, what’s the thing that you’re most excited about? The coolness of the idea? The fascinating characters? The incredibly twisty plot? The history and setting? Getting to play with your nifty new Autocad program to draw maps?

When you are just gearing up on a project, what are you looking forward to writing? Is it a particular scene, or something longer like the arc of the unorthodox romantic relationship? Are you excited about a new writing challenge, or happy to be getting back to something you think you know how to do? (You are going to be wrong, if it’s the latter, but you know that and you don’t actually care.)

What is it about this particular book that is jumping up and down in your backbrain screaming “Me! Me! Write me now!” so loudly that you don’t care that nobody will want to buy a space opera about super-intelligent rabbits fighting against vampire carrots and their allies, the telepathic chickens? (Do not ask why your backbrain is excited about rabbits and chickens and vampire carrots. Just don’t.)

What, in short, is the fun part?

The fun part can stay the same for a twenty-novel series, or it can change from chapter to chapter, but ultimately, it’s the thing you have to keep an eye on. Because in my experience, if the writer isn’t having fun, it shows…and a lot of readers end up not having fun either.

Your idea of “the fun part” is unlikely to be the same as mine, or as any other writer’s. It may be something that your agent and editor frown at and politely but firmly categorize as “not commercially viable.” It may be something that your crit group, which is usually not as polite as one’s agent or editor, tells you bluntly is unsellable. They may be right, but fun is still fun, and sometimes you can make the fun part work in spite of the nay-sayers. Even if you can’t, it is often still worth writing the thing just to be able to have that particular bit of fun. You can always stick it in the back of your hard drive somewhere if you don’t want to make it a publicity give-away or self-pub it as an e-book.

Writing is work, there is no denying it. But if it isn’t fun, what’s the point.

Where it happens

Setting is one of the things that seems to get short shrift in a lot of beginner stories/novels. Even writers who are devotees of the Tolkien School of Background and Appendices tend to focus on the history and politics part of worldbuilding, and occasionally on various aspects of culture, rather than working on the setting of the story itself.

But place is a part of every story, and affects every story in fundamental ways. Sometimes, this is obvious; it is hard to imagine Ben Aaronovich’s The Rivers of London (aka Midnight Riot) being set anywhere but London, and L. Frank Baum’s color-coded Land of Oz is nearly another character (certainly Dorothy’s journey home would have been very different, had she landed in some other setting). Other times, the effect of place is more subtle.

The one thing that never seems to work for me, though, is a story that the writer seems to be trying to set in a kind of generic Everywhere, either deliberately or accidentally. I think it doesn’t work because place is inherently specific. Cities are different from small towns and from each other. Mountain settings are different from the plains; coastal cliffs are different from river bluffs; temperate forests are different from equatorial jungles. They are all different from each other in very specific ways: in the weather, the quality of light, the way the air smells, as well as in more immediately obvious things like the type of vegetation and what your characters can see when they look out the window.

Getting a sense of place across to a reader is as difficult for some writers as getting characterization across. Sometimes more so – characters can at least talk to each other and reveal themselves that way. Places usually just sit there while characters move through them.

Some of us are also hampered by our own backgrounds. When I was in grade school, we had loads of dreary “write a description of X” assignments, where X was something like “an autumn day” or “a sunset” or “a lake in winter.” Once one gets accustomed to padding three sentences’ worth of facts about the lake (it’s frozen over; it has houses or trees along the shore; there are footprints in the snow on the ice) into the two or three paragraphs required by the English teacher, one tends either to default to scattering similar little lumps of description throughout one’s prose, or else to leaving any description out entirely.

In its most extreme form, one ends up with a manuscript like one I read recently, in which almost nothing actually happens or is described in the story, except in dialog. Even a major fight scene involving one of the two main viewpoint characters happens offstage, and the reader only finds out about it when one character describes it to the other. By the end of the description, what we know is that the fight happened at “a hotel,” and we can deduce that the hotel had at least two rooms, because the character who was in the fight refers to retreating into “the next room” while waiting for reinforcements.

While it is true that few readers have the patience for the sort of pages-long scene-setting that was popular in 19th century novels, most fiction is more effective if the characters are not moving through a gray fog or across an empty stage, with an occasional chair or door or tree appearing as required by the action.

How one achieves this will depend in part on one’s process. Some writers have to write themselves into a place, or discover it as the story unfolds, the same way some write their way into characters. Others benefit from having some level of description written out in advance (‘some level’ varies by writer, from the aforementioned two-paragraph summary to several pages of details, possibly accompanied by maps, floor plans, layout diagrams, and sketches).

Whichever way one proceeds, it is usually useful to think a bit about place at some point from three vantage points: the author’s, the reader’s, and the character’s. From the author’s view, the first question to ask is, “What are the things that make this place – these mountains, this village, this sitting room or pub or throne room – unique? How is it different from every other mountain/village/thing of this sort in the entire world?” The second question is “Am I going to need any specific/unusual details later on in the story?” If the main character slips on a moss-covered log at a crucial moment, or dodges behind a lamppost, you probably want a passing mention of those features earlier to avoid their too-convenient appearance just when the character needs them handy.

From the reader’s view, the question is “What are the things about this place that most readers will not think of visualizing unless I mention them?” If you say the characters come to a lake, you probably don’t have to mention the water (unless it is purple or otherwise unusual), but you might want to mention the fog, and probably the lightning-struck pine at the water’s edge with half its branches gone.

From the character’s view, the question is always “How do these characters react to this particular place?” Usually, one worries first about the viewpoint character: Has he/she ever been here before? If so, do they take it for granted, or do they have strong feelings or memories (positive or negative) associated with the last time they were here? If they haven’t been here before, how does it make them feel? If one of the secondary characters has a strong reaction (because this is where she proposed to her first husband), how do they express it in their actions/words/tone of voice and is this strong enough for the viewpoint character to notice?

Different folks

One of the first challenges a new writer faces is that of showing characters who are different from the writer in a convincing and realistic manner. Everybody knows this if they think about writing at all; most beginner-advice books talk about it. And most make one of two really fundamental mistakes.

The first mistake is in presuming that “different from the writer” must mean “a character who falls into a different category entirely” – different sex (or sexual orientation), different race, different ethnicity, different age, different class, different religion, different culture. Any writer who has been paying the slightest bit of attention knows that a character who has this type large fundamental background differences like these is going to need extra attention and care in order to make him/her realistic and not merely a stereotype.

Unfortunately, knowing this leads to sub-problem that, judging from my email over the years, is way more common than it ought to be: assuming that all people who are X have a single, essential identity that can be layered on to a character to make him/her convincing and realistic, if only the writer can find out about it. Typically, this belief comes out in questions like “How would a 30-year-old woman talk?” and “How would a child of X background react to having his parents murdered?” and “Would a man from Y class/culture/ethnic group behave this way in this particular situation?” The subtext is, of course, that all 30-year-old women, children from X background, and men from Y class/culture/ethnic group will sound, act, react, and feel exactly the same way about every situation or experience.

That is, of course, nonsense; nevertheless, it is surprising how long it takes many would-be writers to understand that this is what they are doing. They are, after all, trying very hard to “get it right” in regard to whatever group(s) of people their character(s) belong to, and they often get very, very bent out of shape when they are told they are not quite looking in the right direction.

The way a character sounds, acts, thinks, feels, and reacts is informed by things like race, age, class, sex, etc., but it is not determined by those things alone. Even if things did work that way, most people belong to multiple overlapping categories, which interact with each other depending on the character’s personality and background. Ultimately, the question the writer needs an answer to is not “How would a 30-year-old Chinese-American woman talk?” but “How would this 30-year-old Chinese-American woman talk?” This certainly means thinking about the character’s age and sex and how they could influence her speech patterns, but it also means thinking about everything else that makes her who she is. A 30-year-old Chinese-American woman who was born and raised in New Orleans is not likely to have the same speech patterns as a 30-year-old Chinese-American woman who has lived her life in San Francisco or New York, regardless of their commonality of age and ethnicity.

Focusing on big differences, however useful and necessary, often means the littler ones will trip a writer up. A character who is left-handed when the writer is right-handed, or short when the writer is tall, can be just as much of a headache to write as a character who differs from the writer in most of the major traits mentioned above. The writing challenges are less obvious, that’s all; it’s not “How would this character talk?” it’s “Would this (short) character be able to see over that fence, even from this vantage point?” or “Can he reach that shelf without a ladder?” when those are not questions the author is accustomed to asking him/herself.

This brings me to the second big mistake as regards writing characters who are different from the author, which is the assumption that the greater the differences are between the author and the character, the more difficult the character will be for the author to write and/or to keep in character. When the author is not paying attention, or not thinking through what influence a particular character’s background is likely to have on his/her actions and attitudes, this may be true – at the least, an author who is writing a character very similar to themselves is likely to make much smaller and less noticeable mistakes, so the character will very likely be more consistently in character (or close to it) even if the writer is not very good at keeping them there. But for an awful lot of writers, it is actually easier to write a character who is very different from themselves than one who is similar, because large differences are easier to keep track of, and the times when the character is out-of-character are more obvious and easier to notice and fix.

The way to avoid either of these mistakes is to start by thinking a bit, not just about one’s characters, but about the way one writes them. Which approach feels more comfortable – writing “almost-me” characters, or working with “nothing-like-me” characters? Are you the sort of writer who likes a major challenge, or do you like to work your way gradually into using a new technique?

The second thing to think about is what viewpoint you are planning to use in your story. The close viewpoints – first-person and tight-third-person – require particular attention to keeping the viewpoint character in-character, because the writer has to make the same kinds of choices in regard to the entire narrative as they usually have to make solely in regard to the dialog. In first-person, especially, the narrative, from summary to place descriptions to action scenes, has to sound like the viewpoint character, because the viewpoint character is the one telling the story. Tight-third can be less demanding in this regard, depending on just how tightly the author sticks with the inside of the viewpoint character’s head.

If you are most comfortable building up a new technique gradually and/or writing “almost-me” characters, you may find it easiest to make your viewpoint character similar to yourself in personality and outlook, and figure out how to justify that with a different background, and look to your secondary characters for practice on characters who have larger differences. If you find it easier to keep track of your POV character’s personality when it is nothing like yours, go the other way and pick a viewpoint who is very different in several key ways, and try for at least one secondary character who is only a little different from you.

The third thing to think about is the ways in which your characters are different from each other. It is all very well for a shy, introverted writer to decide to write an outgoing, smart-alecky main character, but if all the secondary characters are also outgoing smart-alecks, the writer may have a problem. Furthermore, one needs to think about the ways in which the differences among the characters affect the way they relate to each other. Especially if the ways the characters relate are not quite what you (or the reader) might expect.

Walk first

A while back, I was talking with a would-be writer who started off with all sorts of sensible questions about writing characters and plotting and so on. Then I looked at some samples of her writing, and realized that the particular writer was trying to get ahead of herself.

The questions I was getting were about things like differentiating the dialog between two very similar characters, writing culturally subversive subplots, and deliberately using subtext to undercut a too-obvious moral. The trouble was, the writing samples I saw had enough really basic problems that it was clear the writer wasn’t able to handle the kinds of subtleties she was asking about.

When the king’s son, born and raised in the palace, and the peasant girl fresh off the farm sound, act, and think so similarly that I have to keep checking to see which viewpoint I’m supposed to be in, the writer has a bigger problem to deal with than giving the king’s chancellor a different voice from the king’s chamberlain. When the main plotline has holes you could drive a truck through and the subplots appear either to be completely irrelevant or else rerun the main plot in slightly different guise, the writer has a lot of basic work to do before there’s any point in working on subtext and subverting the reader’s expectations.

The writer, unsurprisingly, did not want to hear any of this. She wanted to learn how to do “the hard stuff,” presumably on the theory that if she could distinguish the chamberlain’s speaking voice from the chancellor’s, getting the prince and the peasant girl to sound different from each other would be easy.

She wasn’t entirely wrong about this; most writers who can manage to convey subtle distinctions on the page can also do large ones. The trouble is that unless the subtle distinctions come naturally and are therefore where the writer starts, vanishingly few people can learn to do them first. It’s kind of like starting with red, yellow, and blue fingerpaints and expecting to be able to produce a detailed, pseudo-photographic painting of a landscape at sunset.

I see more and more writers like this: people who want to run before they can walk. They’ve read tons of good and great fiction, and they want to write like that…right now. They’ve read tons of how-to-write books and blogs and crit group comments, and they feel that they understand the basics quite well already, thanks, so they want to move on to the more advanced stuff immediately. Then they get frustrated when their writing doesn’t read like the books they love, and conclude that there must be still more advanced secrets that they have to learn.

What they don’t realize (and often don’t want to) is that there is a difference between understanding something and applying that understanding. There’s no question that knowing the theory is useful to many people, but all the theory in the world is useless if one can’t put it into practice, which takes…practice. Too many would-be writers pay lip service to the proverbial “first you write a million words of crap,” but secretly they seem to expect to be exceptions to the rule – to make small but clear character distinctions or to do tricky plot razzle-dazzle before they’ve learned how to write dialog that actually sounds as if someone would say it or a simple, straightforward plot that hangs together.

I occasionally worry that this blog contributes to the problem. I’ve been writing it for nearly five years now, and I don’t make any effort to stick strictly to basics – and anyway, there are only so many ways one can describe the fundamentals of characterization, setting, dialog, and plot, without getting boring and repetitious. Also, I highly approve of writers being ambitious and stretching their skills. On the other hand, I don’t want to give folks the mistaken impression that they can and should be able to do everything, including the tricky advanced stuff, before they can write anything.

You have to start where you are, and go on from there.

For some, that means going all the way back to grammar and punctuation and syntax; for others, it means working on specific skills like dialog or description or plotting. But the first step has to be to figure out where you are and what you need to work on, and to do that, you have to be ruthlessly honest with yourself.

Layering on cool subtext and dazzling subplots is not going to plug the truck-sized holes in your basic plot; it won’t even disguise the holes. Giving the chamberlain and the chancellor obvious, non-identical verbal tics is not going to make them more real, individual characters, or even improve your ability to write basic dialog if that’s where your real problems lie.

Saying no

These days, a career in writing has innumerable options. Even if you limit yourself to fiction, there’s screenwriting, playwriting, comics and graphic novels, short fiction, novels, and that’s all before you even get to the Internet and ebook side of things.

And it’s not just a matter of deciding for yourself what it is you want to write, though that alone can be hard enough. The real problem comes from the unexpected opportunities that you have to decide about.

I knew from the start that I wanted to write short stories and novels. What I didn’t know was that I was going to get other opportunities from a very early stage. I’ve had offers to do everything from teaching to editing to screenwriting to publishing; some from people who were well-established and some from hopeful folks just starting out. Some, I’ve accepted; most, I’ve turned down. But because I wasn’t expecting any of them, I often had to think very hard and expend a lot of emotional energy on the decisions. Especially the ones that looked grand and glorious, but weren’t (I decided in the end) quite right for me.

It doesn’t help to have folks like Neil Gaiman around, who are energetic and multi-talented enough to write comics, TV shows, short stories, novels, and movie scripts, all to a high level and without, apparently, reducing his productivity. The reality is that most of us aren’t like that, and so even if we’re interested in many kinds of writing and writing-related work (like editing), we’re better off with a focused career with maybe a few digressions here and there.

If you’re going to have a focused career – and really, even if you’re not – sooner or later, you have to learn to say No. Not just to the things you aren’t really interested in doing, but to things that everyone around you thinks are brilliant opportunities (and sometimes you agree with them), to things you’d actually like to do, but that you don’t have time and energy to do well, or that you can see would take you in a direction that’s a digression, or that you know you don’t have the skills to do properly and the interest in learning the skills fast enough to do the job as it deserves to be done.

The flip side of this, of course, is that sometimes you find yourself deciding to work on a project for the love of it, in spite of the fact that everyone around you disapproves and/or thinks you are wasting your time. That’s fine, to a point; I’ve certainly done it a time or two. The trouble here is that unless you are the sort who, like Neil, can hit the target whang in the gold in multiple areas, it is best to pick your for-love projects with a bit of care, and not just jump into whatever interesting comes down the road.

Writers are intellectual pack rats, and that means that we are easily distracted by the latest shiny new interesting thing…and everything is shiny and interesting. Few people can write something for the local small press and start a comic book with their best friend from college and write a script for a small theater company and get deeply involved with writing and producing an Internet video series on vampires and finish their novel on time. If you are one of them, go for it, but if not…learn to say No. Or at least, “Maybe later.”

The Submission Outline or Synopsis

There are several reasons why, for the last two posts, I have been using terms like “planning” and “pre-writing” and “notes” more often than “outline.” The main one is that the outline that the writer sends to an editor as part of a proposal is a very different matter from the writer’s personal pre-writing plan, and using the same term for both confuses a lot of people.

For one thing, there are more requirements for a submission outline. A pre-writing plan is a personal tool; it doesn’t have to make sense to anyone but the author. A book proposal outline (aka synopsis) is a sales document; its purpose is to help sell the book to an editor. It therefore has to be clear and well-organized and communicate to somebody else. A book proposal outline needs to tell the editor the important story information he/she needs in order to decide to buy the book – who the main characters are, what the key plot-points are, what the book is about, how the central problem is finally resolved. This is seldom the same as “the things the author has lots of trouble with and needs to figure out in advance,” though there’s often a lot of overlap.

Most book proposal outlines are plot summaries (See #4, below). Approximately 90% of people, when they hear this, go straight to the action plot, even if that is not what the book is actually about. “Elizabeth and Jane have tea with Darcy’s sister” isn’t what most people these days would think of as a main action plot-point; “Lydia elopes with Wickham” is more like it…which is fine, if they are writing The Hunt for Red October, but not so good if they are writing a book whose core story is social or emotional, like Pride and Prejudice. In other words, pay attention to what your book is actually about, not to what you think will sell or what you think the editor might want.

Do not be afraid to rewrite. It took me four “final drafts” to get a plot summary for Thirteenth Child that my agent found acceptable, and every objection she had to the first three was absolutely right…and each of those “final drafts” went through multiple rewrites where I revised and honed and refocused them before I sent them to her.

Also, 100+ thousands of words will sound dumb when you boil it down to 2% of the total; everybody’s does, get used to it. And remember that your proposal outline is competing with other people’s proposal outlines, which are boiled down just as far and sound just as stupid, so you all are operating under the same handicap.

There isn’t a standard format for book proposal outlines.  I have seen a lot of them, from professional writers, all of whom sold books, and the formats vary wildly.  For instance:

1.  Chapter by chapter

“Chapter 1:  Linda, the heroine, finds a purple monkey sitting at her breakfast table when she comes downstairs in the morning. Much surprised, she questions it, and finds out that she is to be recruited to Save The World. She refuses and strangles the monkey.

“Chapter 2:  The monkey’s death is registered with the local police, and Ropcop is assigned to the case. Linda quickly finds herself on the lam, charged with gratuitous monkey-murder…”

2.  Gossip column style 

“On Beta Eta Nine, in the first half of the year 3419, lived LINDA – a perpetual student attempting to get her third AED (Alien Education Degree – two steps up from a Ph.D.) from the College of Improbable Sciences. An egghead, a bit of a loner, and outwardly conventional, Linda discovers a taste for action when she meets…REGINALD, a purple monkey with a low taste for meddling and an irritating earnestness. Though she kills him at their first meeting, he will return – but only after she has begun running from ROPCOP, a depressive lawman with a serious narco-tab problem …”

After setting up the characters and their motivations, the outline then continues with the summary of the plot.  This seems to be most effective when the book is a character-centered one.

3. Dramatis Personae, followed by plot

MAJOR CHARACTERS:

LINDA:  Perpetual grad student living on Beta Eta Nine.  An egghead and a loner, she is too conventional for her own good.  Her goal is to clear her name so that she can get back to earning yet another Alien Education Degree from the College of Improbable Sciences.

REGINALD:  A purple monkey with no sense of humor and a low taste for meddling.  Faced with the End Of The Universe As We Know It, he just has to do something.

ROPCOP:  A cyborg policeman with a tendency to depression and a serious narco-tab habit…

PLOT

LINDA discovers REGINALD in her kitchen one morning.  When she demands an explanation, he tells her that she has been chosen to Save The Universe.  LINDA kills him in a fit of rage at his meddling, then flees in panic…

4:  Straight narrative, starting with background information

“Five years before the opening of this book, in the year 3414, the five-tentacled inhabitants of Ursula IV held a revolution. The government of the planet was destroyed; unfortunately, so were a lot of embassies and neutral spaceships. Most unfortunately of all, in one of those embassies was the Gizmo Of All-Get-Out, a gadget with the ability to influence the mind of the Evil Overlord himself (yes, that’s why he always makes such stupid mistakes!). The Gizmo was thought lost, and the Evil Overlord began a rampage across dozens of worlds, unstoppable at last…until he neared the Beta Eta system five years later.

“As the E.O. approached their system, the meddling monkeys of Beta Eta Seven sent Reginald, one of their most irritating members, to Six to recruit perpetual grad student Linda in a last-ditch attempt to stop him. But Linda was having none of it; she murdered the emissary (a temporary inconvenience for Reginald) and took off into the back alleys one step ahead of the law…”

5. Narrative, opening where the story does (This is usually third-person, but I’ve seen it done in first so I’m throwing it in here this way, just as an example of how far the format question can be stretched.)

“So there I was, hair in rattails, looking for my Cheerios, and there’s this purple monkey sitting in my kitchen. He told me some nonsense about saving the universe from the Evil Overlord, but I knew I didn’t have time for that if I was going to get my last thesis in on time.  And then he keeled over, right in front of me. So I ran. I mean, I’m not used to purple monkeys dying in my kitchen, and I hadn’t had my coffee yet.  Ropcop will tell you that I killed the little jerk, and if I’d known what he was getting me into…but I didn’t, honest…”

Using a first person voice for a plot synopsis is probably best done if the book itself is in first person and if the character is not too discursive in her speaking style – the idea is to keep the thing short, after all.

6. The grade-school outline method:

I. Beta Eta Six
   A.  Linda comes downstairs and finds a purple monkey
         1.  He is eating her breakfast cereal
         2.  He tells her she has to Save The Universe
         3.  She kills him.
   B.  Linda is immediately charged with gratuitous monkey-murder
         1.  She runs away
         2.  Ropcop is assigned to the case.
         3.  He pursues her.
                i.  etc...

This is by no means an exhaustive list, and I’m quite sure anyone here could come up with several more perfectly usable varieties if they wanted.  How you do a synopsis depends on what you think will best reflect the book you have written.  But really, the function of the synopsis is mostly to reassure the editor that you have something that hangs together, that the ending doesn’t come completely out of left field, that the plot doesn’t morph from action-adventure to brooding-atmospheric in Chapter 6 (well after the first-three-chapters the editor has actually gotten to look at).

And yes, it probably sounds a bit contradictory to say “a synopsis or proposal outline is a sales tool” and then tell you to ignore what you think the editor wants to buy when you write it. But a bang-up outline that misrepresents the book is not going to sell it; all it will do is annoy the editor. And you really don’t want to do that.