Patricia C. Wrede's Blog, page 42

Getting good critique

That last post of comments segues nicely into this one, which is about critiquing and being critiqued.

Good critique is hard to find. There are several reasons for this, starting with the fact that “good critique” means different things to different people. Some folks want the proverbial five pages of closely reasoned praise; that is, they want to be told, in depth and in detail, all the things they did right, and nothing else. Others don’t want to hear about the good stuff; they want every mistake, from typos and misplaced commas to major plot holes, characterization wobbles, and unbelievable or inaccurate worldbuilding.

Most folks are somewhere in the middle. I encourage people to give both the good and the bad, because I learned early that if you don’t tell someone “I love this bit,” the fabulous bit that you love may very well disappear in the second draft. And there are also people who are emotionally incapable of taking comments from anyone who isn’t buying the book (i.e., an editor). For them, the solution is simple: don’t ask friends for comments, and if they offer, just turn them down gently.

For everyone else, though, the first step in getting good comments is knowing what mix of praise and blame, typos and in-depth analysis, you find both comfortable and useful. You don’t have to explain it in detail to anyone else, but you do have to be brutally honest with yourself. If all the cool would-be and newbie-published writers are in serious crit groups, but the one time you tried that you got so discouraged that you didn’t write for six months, you are just not going to get much useful out of that kind of crit group, no matter how useful everybody else finds it.

You have to figure out what works for you, just as in every other aspect of writing…but it’s even more important with criticism, because you can seriously damage your writing (and even your ability to write) if you insist on going for the sort that isn’t right for you. That applies to both ends of the spectrum – some writers find in-depth, hard-nosed comments discouraging, while others find them challenging and useful. Similarly, some writers convince themselves that anyone who praises their work is either a) not perceptive enough to see its flaws, b) just being really nice, which means the good things they say can’t be trusted, or c) 100% right, which means the work is perfect and flawless, every comma golden, and nobody else’s negative remarks matter. Others need the reassurance they get from hearing that somebody likes their work, and the more specific and detailed their comments are, the better.

Once you know what you are looking for, you can communicate it to your beta readers…and if you don’t, you are unlikely to get it. Very few people are experienced in the kind of critique writers in general want and need; nobody but you has any chance at all of guessing what you will find useful. Being very clear about what you want from a critiquer is the only way you have a hope of getting it.

And by “being very clear,” I don’t mean saying “I want hard-nosed critique,” or “Be gentle,” though those can be useful to some people. I mean saying things like “Please mark every place where you laughed out loud” or “…every spot where you stumbled and had to reread the paragraph to figure out what I meant” or “…every time you caught yourself skimming.” “Mark typos” or “Don’t mark typos” is always useful to know up front. “Tell me what you want to see more/less of” is frequently a good suggestion.

If there is a part of the story that you do not want comments on, tell your critiquer. If there is a type of crit or an aspect of storytelling that you do or don’t want to hear about, ditto. I hate getting specific suggestions, but the more someone can tell me about why they think something struck them as wrong, the better. I’ve critiqued folks who do not want comments  on dialog, or plot, or Chapter Fifteen, and folks who were particularly worried about everything from their description to whether a particular scene fits their theme.

Comments on Wolf’s snippet

Alright, last week I promised Wolf that I’d do some comments on the bit he used as an example. For those who didn’t see it or don’t want to go back and hunt it up, here it is:

      “I’ve often wondered—why did your people send only one man? Why not a squad, or a regiment?”

       “We reasoned that way there’d be less of a chance of provoking a fight. A group of humans thrown in among a pack of wolf-kin…. You have to admit, that’d be a volatile arrangement.”

       “Whereas if just you piss us off, it’s one quick death, and it’s over with. Is that it? Are you that expendable?”

       Was she ribbing him, or was it a legitimate curiosity? [Grissom POV] Grissom smiled ruefully, took a deep breath. “I like to think I’m of some worth to my people. But that may have been part of their rationale, yes.”

       Sonja looked at him in that studied way of hers, and he knew he was being read again. “What?”

       She turned her head. “Just that a bit ago you said ‘we’, as though you had something to do with the decision, and just now you said ‘they’, implying that your superiors guard all the bones.”

       Grissom nodded. “For the most part, we all have our say, but the final decisions always lie with those in power.”

       “Even if you disagree with what they say?”

       “Even if we disagree.” He held his hands open in front of him, but close to his body, as though he were showing her something but not offering it to her. [Sonja’s POV] “We choose people to represent us, and we rely on them for their wisdom and guidance. We give them authority with the understanding that we will abide by their judgement as long as it serves the greater good for the long term.”

       Sonja looked back at him and shook her head. “Yours are a very strange people, Grissom.”

       “I won’t deny that.”

This is pretty clearly not the opening of the story; that’s obvious from the way the conversation moves. Nonetheless, I can draw a lot of conclusions about what is going on, which means Wolf is doing a whole lot of things right. For instance, right in that first line the “Why did your people send only one man?” tells me that the two speakers are not from the same people (which could mean different countries, different tribes, or different species; my bet is on countries, and ones that aren’t terribly friendly based on the following “Why not a squad, or a regiment?”). “…send only one man” implies that the second speaker is an ambassador or envoy of some kind. The use of “squad” and “regiment” tells me that this is probably not a medieval or earlier technology level (a bit of googling tells me that those terms came into use in the 16th and 14th centuries, respectively, so they would work for Renaissance-level tech, but to me they sound even more modern, especially “squad.”)

The second paragraph confirms the ambassador/envoy theory as well as the not-friendly theory, and adds some more information – the first speaker is probably non-human and one of the “wolf-kin.” This kind of thing continues all through the piece, telling me a lot about the situation and the background without being too obvious about it. That makes me trust that the author knows what he’s doing, that he has worked out the background and is making effective use of it as more than a cardboard stage set.

On to the viewpoint, which is where this got started. Wolf labeled the opening of the fourth paragraph as Grissom’s POV, and the middle of the fourth-from-last as Sonja’s POV. The fact that he felt he had to label them makes me wonder if he’s not entirely clear on just what viewpoint this scene is supposed to be in, which is more or less confirmed by the way the scenelet flows.

In the story, there is presumably a lot going on prior to this passage that would anchor the reader in one type of viewpoint or the other; here, we have very little. The snippet is mainly unlabeled dialog, plus a very few bits of stage business. It works fine (partly because of the slightly awkward phrasing in some of Sonja’s lines – she sounds like someone speaking a second language fluently, but not quite the way a native speaker would), but it leaves us with all of three lines to clue the reader in to which viewpoint it is. They are:

“Was she ribbing him, or was it a legitimate curiosity?” – Clearly Grissom’s viewpoint, and it’s a direct quote of Grissom’s thought, not a rephrasing like “He wondered whether she was ribbing him, or legitimately curious.” This way of showing internal monologue is really common in tight-third, much less so in omniscient, so this line indicates tight-third, Grissom’s viewpoint. It is also very close-focus on Grissom (you can’t get more closely focused than directly reporting the character’s thoughts like this).

“Sonja looked at him in that studied way of hers, and he knew he was being read again.” – The “he knew” puts this equally clearly in Grissom’s viewpoint, but the way it’s phrased is a bit more distant than the previous line. That makes it a toss-up – we’re still looking at things from Grissom’s viewpoint, but the line itself would be equally at home in tight-third or in omniscient. I’d call it medium-close focus: we’re still in Grissom’s viewpoint, but it’s more distant than that first line.

“He held his hands open in front of him, but close to his body, as though he were showing her something but not offering it to her.” And this line is ambiguous. Read one way, the way Wolf labeled it in parentheses, it’s what Sonja sees when she looks at his body language, so Sonja’s viewpoint. However, you could also read it as Grissom being very conscious of his movement, trying to convey something to Sonja by deliberately using some very specific body language, which would be Grissom’s viewpoint. Either reading works fine as omniscient; reading it as Sonja’s view would obviously be inconsistent with a tight-third-Grissom viewpoint. But if the viewpoint has been solidly established as tight-third-Grissom over the first umpty-some scenes of the story, the reader will be predisposed to read the line the second way, as a self-conscious Grissom, and will probably blip right past it without registering it as a viewpoint bobble.

As far as distance goes, this is the most distant of the three; it’s not clearly in anyone’s head (“…as though he were showing her something, but not offering it to her” is somebody’s interpretation of the body language, but “somebody” could be Grissom, Sonja, or the omniscient narrator). It fits the passage, because leaving so much of the dialog unattributed gives the whole snippet a somewhat distant feel, but it’s a rather sharp contrast to that first bit of internal monologue.

And that is the real viewpoint difficulty in this snippet: the viewpoint isn’t clearly tight-third or clearly omniscient; it could be either. Also, it moves from quite close, tight, internal focus to a more distant and general one. It reads to me as an author who’s writing omniscient but who either didn’t intend to, or isn’t comfortable with it.

Dealing with this snippet is fairly straightforward (it is another matter entirely when one has a whole novel full of this sort of thing to deal with). If you want it to be tight-third, the only sentence that doesn’t quite work is that third one, so you add a few words and rearrange the others to make it less distant and to make it clear that it’s Grissom’s view of his body language, not Sonja’s observation of it: “He opened his hands, keeping them deliberately close to his body to mimic showing her something, rather than offering it” or “He nodded, then opened his hands, carefully holding them close to his body…”

If you want the passage to be omniscient, the only sentence that isn’t as clearly omni as it could be is the first of the three cues (because directly quoting the character’s thought like that is so strongly associated with tight-third, and because it is so internal). To fix that, you move the focus out a bit to make the distance match the other two cues: “She might be ribbing him, or she might be legitimately curious; Grissom couldn’t tell from her expression.”

Or, you could just delete the three sentences I fingered, and call it camera-eye. That’s not unusual for a passage that’s so dialog-heavy, and so light on internal monolog and emotional reaction (not that this seems like a particularly high-emotion conversation).

Keep in mind that in the context of the actual story, the type of viewpoint is presumably well-established by the time we get to this scene. The reader will be expecting tight-third or omniscient, and will therefore be predisposed to read this snippet that way, so “fixing” the rather subtle possible difficulties in this passage may not be necessary at all. Except to make the author feel better.

Viewpoint problems #3 – It’s still a writing problem

One of the conclusions that folks could have, and perhaps should have, drawn from my last post on omniscient viewpoint is that it is easy for editors and critiquers to mistake it for something else. When this happens, you are likely to get “you have viewpoint problems” comments based on the fact that they think you are writing tight-third-person, but you aren’t “following the rules.”

This looks like a critiquing problem, and in some instances it is. Readers, editors, and critiquers have all seen the same how-to-write books, and absorbed all the same “writing rules” about “head-hopping,” as writers have, and sometimes one simply cannot convince them that there is nothing wrong with what one is doing because it’s omniscient. Much of the time, though, this isn’t a critiquing problem – or at least, it isn’t the kind of critiquing problem you get with the rule-obsessed.

It’s a writing problem, and it often arises when the author is suffering what I described as a failure of nerve in the last post. It can be because the author is unconsciously writing omniscient and feeling uncomfortable about it because he/she doesn’t get omniscient (or, sometimes, even recognize that’s what it is), and keeps trying to shove the viewpoint back to a typical tight-third. The shoving doesn’t work, and it makes it really obvious that the viewpoint isn’t proper tight-third, so it ends up looking as if the author is trying to write tight-third and failing.

This is true, in a way, but the problem isn’t that the author set out to write tight-third and blew it. It’s more as if the author got halfway through the book writing in first-person and suddenly thought, “Wait, I’m not supposed to be writing in first person; I better switch everything to third-person.” Only the switchover doesn’t work; the author gets the pronouns changed, but there are still turns of phrase and personal opinions and a bunch of other things that are fine in first-person, but that just don’t work in third-person because there’s a lot more to switching viewpoint types than just changing the pronouns.

The other reason for failure of nerve is the one I described last time: the author does indeed intend to write omniscient, but they think of it as nerve-wracking and scary and strange, so they keep retreating back into the nice, clear rules and conventions that they are used to having in tight-third. This, too, results in a weird hybrid that just doesn’t work.

This is where it becomes a writing problem, rather than a critiquing problem – since the viewpoint isn’t written as clearly one thing or the other, the reader has to guess whether the writer was trying for tight-third and sliding into sloppy omniscient, or trying for omniscient and not quite pulling it off. Since the most common third-person viewpoint these days is tight-third, the readers, editors, and critiquers are almost certain to look at the story and assume that the hybrid is faulty tight-third, and they will base their comments on that assumption.

One can, of course, tell one’s beta readers and/or editor right up front, “I am trying to write omniscient and I’m a bit worried about how it is coming out.” (About half of the people you say this to will look at you as if you have two heads and ask why on earth you want to write omniscient, nobody does that these days, it’s old-fashioned, and anyway it is hard. It is worth warning them anyway, if only so you know their attitude.) Unfortunately, one generally can’t go around to every single one of the readers who picks up one’s book and tell them that.

The only other solution is to clarify the viewpoint. This is not at all easy with omniscient (as witness the list of books in the last post that are, all of them, written in omniscient, but that many, many readers interpret as some odd variant of tight-third, simply because they aren’t used to seeing omniscient). If your editor/critiquers are identifying as “problems” things like seeing the thoughts/feelings of more than one character per scene, or a narrative voice that is significantly different from that of the supposed POV character, or including information in narrative that the supposed viewpoint character couldn’t know, you have to be clearer, cleaner, and smoother about all of them so that they read “more omniscient” and less like tight-third.

If your intention is to write tight-third (or you decide that the viewpoint is close enough to tight third that turning it into tight third will be vastly easier than trying to clarify it as omniscient), fixing things is considerably easier, as it’s usually a matter of getting rid of everything the POV character couldn’t see, hear, feel, know, or think. Note that I said “easier” – it isn’t easy, in any absolute sense. Usually, all the places where the viewpoint slides out of tight-third and into someone else’s head are spots where the author has some piece of information that they absolutely want the reader to know, but that the POV can’t see, hear, etc. Which means that one has to find some other way to get that information across right then, move it to some later point in the story when the POV does find/figure it out, or do without it.

There are also a few problems that almost never happen except in omniscient, because they involve things you can only do in omniscient, like providing the thoughts of multiple characters at once, or giving information that nobody in the story could know. Clumsy transitions between characters, blatantly trying to force the reader to see or interpret things the way the writer wants, and the had-they-only-known type of “foreshadowing” (which is usually both clumsy and dated) are problems wherever they show up, but they usually only show up in omniscient.

Viewpoint problems #2 – Omniscient

First a housekeeping announcement: I am going to be off on vacation for the next couple of weeks. I’ve left some posts for my webmaster, but I won’t be viewing comments and moderating new people will likely be even slower than normal. It also means that the next post will be more on the when-it-isn’t-a-critiquer-problem/omniscient combination, and critiquing Wolf’s snippet will come after that.

So, more about viewpoint problems. Today is on omniscient, because omniscient viewpoint causes more confusion and viewpoint problems, in my experience, than everything else put together. This is because so few people have a good understanding of what omniscient is and how it works, and because omniscient viewpoint can be handled in so many, many different ways.

I can’t tell you how many times someone has told me that the Patrick O’Brian books, or Lord of the Rings, use a viewpoint that “floats” or “jumps around”, or how often someone’s said that Larry McMurty’s Lonesome Dove is multiple viewpoint, or that Georgette Heyer does a lot of head-hopping, when all of them are simply very good examples of omniscient viewpoint. The trouble is that they look so different from each other that people don’t recognize them as having the same type of viewpoint. Folks can identify them as third-person, but they misidentify what sub-type of third person, and every bit of evidence that should tell them it’s omniscient is taken instead as evidence that the writer isn’t doing a good job of tight-third or multiple viewpoint or whichever subtype the particular reader has decided the author is using. They aren’t bad tight-third or bad multiple viewpoint. They’re perfectly good omniscient.

The mistake is understandable, though, because there are many, many beginning writers who are trying to write good tight-third or good camera-eye, but who make a lot of mistakes that turn their work into bad omniscient. I did that myself in my first novel; even after all the editorial revisions, the first edition was very, very sloppy omniscient. I knew there was something wrong with it, but I didn’t know what. This is not an uncommon position for writers to find themselves in with omniscient.

For the vast majority of writers, omniscient is the easiest of all viewpoints to do badly and the hardest to do well. I’ve known maybe two writers for whom omniscient was their natural choice; everyone else I know who has tried it has had to work at it. Hard. Many writers don’t ever even try it. Omniscient viewpoint has not been a popular choice, especially in the non-literary genres, for decades (though as the selection of titles above should indicate, it is still very much around).

The first thing about omniscient viewpoint is that you can quite literally do anything you want. You can stop in mid-scene to tell the reader the entire life story, past, present, and future, of the cab driver whose one appearance in your novel is the five-minute drive that takes your main characters from the airport to their hotel. You can include a few sentences from the point of view of the cat watching said characters from the window ledge overlooking the hotel. You can dip into six different characters’ heads in a single sentence or stick with just one character per paragraph, scene, or for the entire novel.

This is hard to wrap your head around when you are used to the constraints of first-person or tight-third. A writer in one of my crit groups once came in three or four times complaining that she didn’t know how to get a particular bit of information in because the main character couldn’t see it or wouldn’t know it, even though she was writing in omniscient and the narrator knew it and could just say “While they were arguing, a small spider crept across the blanket and climbed George’s back, unseen by anyone.”

What does not ever seem to work in omniscient is trying to do absolutely anything all the time. It’s like the old saying “You can fool some of the people all of the time; you can fool all of the people some of the time; but you can’t fool all of the people all of the time.” In omniscient, you are allowed to make up whatever rules you want, but once you decide on them, you have to stick to them. You can’t do anything you happen to feel like whenever you happen to feel like doing it, not and expect it to work consistently.

In order to decide what you are doing in omniscient, you pretty much have to think about it consciously and deliberately. The narrative voice is usually not that of a single viewpoint character; it’s the voice of the omniscient narrator. But who is the narrator – the author, or a character who does/doesn’t appear in the actual novel? Is the narrator going to be obvious and in-your-face-dear-reader, or barely noticeable? Is the narrative going to maintain a particular distance, or zoom in and out like a movie camera that focuses on one character’s face and then on a different one? Will it be matter-of-fact, or ramble all over? Follow only particular characters (which often gets mistaken for a multiple-viewpoint structure), or go ahead and drop three pages about the walk-on cab driver’s life into the middle of the main story?

“Viewpoint problems” in omniscient are not quite the same as for other POV types. For starters, quite often omniscient itself is the problem – that is, the writer intended to write tight-third-person, or to use a multiple-viewpoint structure, and slid accidentally into omniscient as part of the problem he/she was having with the story’s chosen viewpoint type. Inevitably, this ends up with a sloppy, not-quite-one-thing-or-the-other viewpoint.

When the author is trying to write omniscient, the problems aren’t usually with violating standard, expected viewpoint constraints, because there aren’t any standard constraints on this type of viewpoint. Instead, the problems end up being inconsistency, confusion, and lack of clarity because the writer hasn’t thought about what he/she is doing and is just grabbing whatever technique is handy and hoping it will all fit together and work at the end of the story. If this is what’s going on, I’d suggest studying a bunch of books written in whatever you think of as “really good omniscient,” until you think you have a better handle on how you want your to work. Or look very hard at what you have done in your story so far, and continue using whatever techniques you’ve been using (and only those) for the rest of the story.

The other frequent problem with omniscient is a failure of nerve – the writer is so used to the specific constraints of first-person, tight-third-person, and the multiple viewpoint structure, that (like the writer in my crit group) they try to stay within them even when it is not only unnecessary but detrimental to the story. If you are writing omniscient, and you stick too closely to the conventions of tight-third-person (no head-hopping, one viewpoint per scene, etc.), your readers and critiquers are likely to settle comfortably into the conviction that you are writing tight-third, and to perceive any deviations from that as jarring or wrong. Also, if you are going to stick closely to tight-third conventions, you might as well just write tight-third.

“You have viewpoint problems”

“Point of view problems” are one of those things that a lot of editors and beta readers cite, expecting the writer to know what the phrase means. If you take it apart, though, it assumes a fair bit of theoretical knowledge, as well as the practical skill to apply it. So let’s unpack it a bit.

“Point of view” can refer to two different-but-related things. The first is who the viewpoint character is, as in “Who’s the point of view in this scene?” The second is the type of viewpoint it is, first-person, second person (rarely), or some variety of third person.

“Viewpoint problems” means the reader thinks the writer is violating the constraints of whatever viewpoint the writer has chosen. This can occur with either of the meanings of viewpoint: If the writer is violating constraints of viewpoint character, they’re switching to someone else in mid-scene, or head-hopping; if the writer is violating the type of viewpoint, they’re switching from first-person to third-person (which is usually easy to spot, though I’ve seen this kind of POV bobble in actual published books), or from one sort of third-person to another sort (which is much harder to spot).

The problem with all this is that the “rules” for viewpoint are not clear-cut. Take head-hopping as an example. I can’t recall reading a single published murder mystery in which the author does this. In science fiction and fantasy, I’ve seen head-hopping occasionally, but it is generally considered a symptom of “bad writing” and looked down on when an author does it. In Romance novels, though, limited head-hopping is not only acceptable, but almost an expected convention.

Even viewpoint type gets a bit squishy at times. It is really easy to spot (and avoid) switches from first- or second-person to any of the other types. (“I went through the dead man’s pockets. His pants pockets held nothing to interest me, but in his jacket pocket you find a letter and a bill for $22.19 from a health club.”) Third-person, though, is a problem because it is a continuum, with highly filtered, almost-first-person tight-third at one end and completely omniscient at the other end, with no real dividing lines along the way.

So when an editor or reader says that a story has viewpoint problems, it can mean that 1) The writer has switched from one viewpoint character to another in mid-scene (while using a viewpoint other than omniscient), violating the “one viewpoint character per scene” convention; 2) The writer has violated the constraints of whatever type of viewpoint they have chosen, either by switching types (from first-person to third-person, for instance) or by doing something that is not appropriate to whatever variety of third-person they have chosen to write in (if you are writing in camera-eye, you can’t suddenly give a character’s thoughts directly, as that is something a camera can’t see); or 3) The reader has mistaken what the writer was doing – the POV character for the scene really was George right from the start, but the reader presumed it was Sally at the beginning, so when it became obvious that it was George, the reader perceived it as a switch, or the reader presumed that the story was camera-eye or tight-third, when the writer intended it as omniscient all along.

In order to fix any of these, the writer first has to know what they meant to do. That is, the writer has to be clear what type of viewpoint he/she is using (first-person, second-person, tight-third, limited third, camera-eye, omniscient, etc.), and who the viewpoint character is for each scene. Yes, there is a viewpoint character even for camera-eye and omniscient – for camera-eye, the viewpoint is the invisible camera; for omniscient, it can be variously God, the author, or a character outside the story who knows everything. The writer has to know these things because you can’t tell where you have violated constraints if you don’t know what constraints you have chosen to use.

Rather than repost here the nine-page handout on viewpoint that I used for my classes, I suggest than anyone who does not know what camera-eye, tight-third, etc. are should go here (Edit: OK, that wasn’t working, so instead go up to the menu and click “links,” and then go down the list to “Pat’s summary of viewpoint” and click that, and you’ll be there. Folks with RSS feeds will either have to go to the web site or wait until my guru gets back and figures out how to make the in-line link work again.) and then maybe take a quick look through some of the older posts about viewpoint.

As I said, it is generally pretty easy to spot viewpoint problems in first- or second-person, whether the problem is a shift from one POV character to a different one or a shift from first-person to third-person. Often, this kind of thing happens when the author has recast a scene from third-person to first-person and missed catching a line or two, or when the writer decided in mid-scene that George would really be the better viewpoint but forgot to go back and fix the first few paragraphs.

The real problems come with third-person, because even though you have a particular viewpoint character, the narration feels as if it is coming from the outside. “I did this” is me (or the POV character) telling you what I did; “He did this” feels like me, the narrator, telling you what the character did, even if that character is supposed to be the POV/narrator. Because it feels as if it is outside, it is easy to slide from “He never takes me seriously, Sally thought” to “George shook his head, wondering where Sally came up with these notions” without quite recognizing that one is, in both cases, reporting the characters’ thoughts, and that in a tight-third-person viewpoint, your viewpoint character won’t know what the other one is thinking unless they are a telepath (and in camera-eye, the camera doesn’t know what either one is thinking).

Again, the first thing to do is to make a firm decision about exactly where on the continuum of third-person viewpoints you are writing. Often, the “problem” with a third-person viewpoint is that the author is writing something that falls in the fuzzy gray area between, oh, a highly filtered tight-third-person and a somewhat looser, unfiltered but still focused third-person. This can certainly be done successfully, but if your editors and beta readers are coming back to you with “you have viewpoint problems” comments, you are not doing it successfully. The simplest solution is to shift the viewpoint up or down the continuum of third-person so that you aren’t writing in the fuzzy gray area.

The most common problems seem to arise with writing tight-third-person and randomly floating out of the POV character’s viewpoint. If you are trying to write tight-third and having horrible, horrible trouble seeing where you slide out of viewpoint, it can be helpful to rewrite a couple of the most problematic scenes in first-person. It is usually pretty easy to tell that “That’s odd, I thought” is fine, but that “George looked at me and thought, That’s odd” is not something “I” would know. If you still can’t see a problem, pick one of the characters and rewrite the scene as a letter from that character to one of the others, paying particular attention to the sentences you have to change in order to get it to work as a letter.

If it’s camera-eye you’re having trouble with, try doing a search on every synonym for “think/thought” and “feel/felt” that you can think of. Basically, you have to train yourself to notice when your viewpoint is sliding around, and one way of doing that is to force yourself into a viewpoint like first-person that has even tighter constraints on the troublesome part than whatever you are using. It is almost always easier to loosen up from a tighter viewpoint than to tighten up from a looser viewpoint.

Which brings me to omniscient, and Problem #3 (when the reader has mistaken what the writer is trying to do). I will deal with that next post, or this one will be huge, but at this point I do wish to emphasize that #3 is not a problem with the reader. It is still a writing problem. It just isn’t quite the same writing problem as the first two

For those who just couldn’t stand it

Here is the picture of my office as of yesterday morning.

It is still pretty much the same, except for the cat bed next to the computer, which I had to add to keep Karma from trying to sleep on the stuff I was working on. And then I had to put a sheet of paper in it or she wouldn’t sleep there. Strange beast.

It’s 2014

Happy New Year!

It is the first day of 2014. I’ve spent the last week or so tidying up loose ends from 2013, and now it’s time to look forward to the next year. I was going to upload a picture of my cleared-up desk, but apparently when we switched to the new blog format, the uploader got upwhacked, so you’ll have to take my word for it that it is MUCH better than it was. I can actually see most of the desk surface. I’ll put up the picture as soon as we get it straightened out, I promise.

I admit to some cheating – a lot of the papers got shoved into a “sort this” basket and hauled out to the dining room for the actual sort, which isn’t finished, but progress is progress. I also appear to need to do the sorting somewhere where there is a lot of floor space, because working on the desk means the Karma-cat keeps shoving everything onto the floor, leaving it more mixed up than ever.

But the office is clean and picked up, for now. It won’t stay this way long, but it is well worth the effort to get things totally clear once in a while, and the start of a new year is a good time for that, especially since I’m not head down in a manuscript at the moment. Clearing my desk clears my head, which gives me a good place from which to look forward.

Planning for 2014 starts with looking back at last year – the things I planned to do and did, the ones I didn’t plan, and the ones that never quite got done. It also means looking at why things did or didn’t get done. A surprising amount of writing depends on other people, especially once you get past the initial production phase. It seems one is always waiting on someone to respond – beta readers, proofreaders, copyeditors, agents, editors, your Internet provider’s service department that’s supposed to be fixing that problem with the web site… And of course there are plenty of life emergencies that come from out of left field and throw off the best plans.

Then, too, writing is not the most predictable of professions. It is all very well to say “I will finish the first draft of the novel by May 15,” but that doesn’t allow for getting stuck in mid-March, or realizing on May 1 that you have to rip up twelve chapters and rewrite them from scratch. It also doesn’t allow for getting invited to contribute short stories to someone’s anthology that has a deadline of April 30, or for taking a week off to go to the convention that is looking for a last-minute guest because the one they asked is in the hospital with a burst appendix.

Having some kind of plan, though, helps keep me on track. What kind of plan depends on what kind of year I’m expecting and how much “hard landscape” is already filled in. Conventions are hard landscape; so are contract deadlines and production deadlines (like reviewing the copyedit and page proofs). Non-writing-related events with firm dates also count, like that family vacation my sister is planning, or that 5k walk in May, or the theater ticket series (yes, I can reschedule them, but they’ll still take up my time).

So the first thing I do is look at my calendar to see how much time I actually am expecting to have. Then I look at where I am and where I want to be, and I start with the lists.

I have two kinds of New Years’ lists, really, though I don’t always separate them. First, there are the resolutions: the ongoing habits I want to form, like daily exercise and keeping up with the laundry, that can’t ever be checked off as “done” because there’s always another day and another load. Then there are the goals, like getting the novel proposal to my agent. I try not to put anything on this list that I don’t actually have control over (“sell the novel” depends on the editor; “submit the novel,” on the other hand, is all my job, as is “finish the novel”).

This year, I have one novel to get underway – that means planning, writing the proposal, and getting at least a partial draft done. There’s a lot of hard landscape, and some potential deadlines that will materialize if one or more possible deals go through, so I need to have a range of goals: the ones for if nothing else comes along and I have all the time it currently looks as if I’ll have, and the ones for if all the deals suddenly happen and I’m swamped with deadlines and have three months less time than I’m currently expecting. Or, to put it another way, the ambitious level goals and the more conservative goals.

So that’s what I’m doing today: dishes, laundry, and lists of things I want to get done (and a much shorter list of what I can realistically expect to actually get done). And playing with the cats.

Getting Ready for Next Year

We’re coming down to the end of 2013. A lot of folks use the week between Christmas and New Years to “clean house” – that is, they take stock of where they are, clear up outstanding projects, and generally get ready to start the new year on an up note.

I do this myself, but for a long time I ignored the writing part of my life when it came to the annual clearing-the-decks week. Writing didn’t seem well suited to a whirlwind end-of-year cleanup and evaluation. After all, I couldn’t finish a novel in a week unless it was already almost done; even finishing a short story would be pushing it for me.

What it took me a long time to realize was that a) there are a lot more things in my writing life that need looking at, evaluating, and clearing up than just the current manuscript, and b) “clearing up” at the end of the year doesn’t necessarily mean finishing all my projects, or even finishing one or two of them.

So now my end-of-year routine looks something like this: first, I look at my current work-in-process. What did I get completely done this year? How many projects do I currently have in some stage of development, and where are they at? How much progress have I made since last New Year’s? Right now, I have a collaborative collection of short stories that needs a few tweaks and a final proofreading before I send it off to my agent, a novel that’s still in the plot-developing stage, and several novellas and short stories that are stalled somewhere in the middle.

The collection will probably be ready to send to my agent in January; after that, it’s hurry up and wait. The various other projects are a bit disturbing; the stalled ones aren’t moving, and the novel needs some serious skull-banging time that’s going to be hard to come by until my Dad’s taxes get filed in April. (I am responsible for coordinating that with Dad’s tax advisors, and you don’t want to hear any more about that. Honest.) Anyway, I will need to pay attention to scheduling time for the novel over the next couple of months, or I’m liable to get to April and discover that I am no farther along than I currently am, which would Not Be Good.

Next, I look at all the not-actually-writing support stuff I have to do. This ranges from research (I have a large stack of books and another of videos that I really need to get to), to planning what conventions to attend, to, yes, taxes. I should really take a look at how my backlist is doing and whether I should do anything more with any of the titles, which will mean a certain amount of number-collecting-and-crunching. That can wait until later in the year, but I’d better make a note in, oh, July or August so I don’t forget about it completely. I have to allow time for reading and critiquing whatever my crit group produces, though I don’t know yet what that will be. And it wouldn’t hurt to come up with a list of possible blog topics (suggestions, anyone?), and maybe a few emergency posts that I can plug in if/when something comes up and I can’t get anything written in time.

Then I look at my office. Really, right now I’d rather not; the place is a mess. Karma can’t even find a clear spot on the desk to curl up in any more; she just plunks herself down on top of the papers. There are fourteen books stacked around the computer at the moment (I just counted), not one of which belongs there and none of which are necessary for any current writing project (including this blog). Wait, make that fifteen books and two videos. And that doesn’t even count the ones I’d have to turn around to see, or whatever Karma is currently sleeping on. There are papers everywhere; I don’t even know what all of them are any more. There are pens and pencils around somewhere, but there’s only one I can find at the moment, and it’s almost out of ink. There are stacks of Post-It Notes around, too, but most of them are buried under books and papers, so whenever I need one, I swivel around and get another one from the supply drawer behind me. Which then gets lost under the papers. There are at least three knitting patterns and a just-started knitting project. We won’t even talk about the mugs – plural – each of which contains ¼ inch of cold tea and some of which have been sitting around long enough to grow whole new civilizations.

And that’s just what is on the desk in easy reach; I haven’t mentioned the floor, the file cabinets, or the bookcase. Definitely, the office needs some serious attention. And while we’re at it, the computer could use a bit of file organizing, too; the virtual desktop is getting nearly as crowded as my real one. There are files that I needed instant visible access to at a moment’s notice…back in August. No longer. They need to go into archives.

So yeah, the office is pretty high on the list for working on in the next few days. OK, I am going to take some before pictures, and then again on New Year’s day. If that doesn’t get me to work on it, nothing will. Right, then, here is what it looks like at the moment:

Karma is barely visible just left of the computer monitor and behind the stack of books.

Last of all, I look at my list of ideas and possible future projects. This is last because unless I’m really between things, I don’t expect to get to any of them any time soon, but I don’t want to forget about them entirely. Also, I have a few more that I need to add to the list before I forget about them.

Except for the office, I don’t expect to get everything – or anything, really – finished up by Wednesday. But looking at it gives me a chance to plan ahead a bit, so I won’t have a preventable nasty surprise down the road. It also gives me a chance to think about what I can realistically expect to get done in the next week, month, and year. It is all too easy to plan on starting or finishing X-many projects in the year, and then discover that there are copy-edits and proofing pages and conventions and several odds and ends promised to people, none of which I’d allowed for and all of which invariably take even more time away from my planned projects than I hope they will.

In essence, what I’m doing is taking a mental snapshot of my writing life (and, I hope, clearing up a few corners of it before New Year’s Day rolls around). I don’t know that it makes a huge difference, but it at least gives me the illusion of being in control.

Still Merry Christmas

 

As you have probably noticed, updating the blog was more complicated than we thought. It is now here, hopefully for good this time.

Meanwhile, I just want to say Merry Christmas to all the readers out there, the ones who read this blog, the ones who read my books, the ones who read other people’s books.

Having intelligent, articulate readers is one of the biggest blessings a writer can have. It is extremely satisfying to finally get a scene down and know that it is right, but it is even more satisfying when a reader says something that tells you they really understood what you were doing with that subtle bit of character development, or that they got the point you were making underneath all the complicated plot twists.

It’s not so much the appreciation (though I don’t know any writer who is tired of hearing people say “I love your book”) as it is the comprehension. It’s why “Your book made me think” is up there with “Your book kept me up til 3 a.m.” and “Your characters are so real” and “Your book made me laugh/cry” on the list of the top things writers want to have said about their work. (Yes, those are examples from a panel; the question was “What was the best complement you ever got about your work?” And as usual, I was the outlier – the best complement I ever got was when my mother put down Snow White and Rose Red and said to me, in a tone indicative of rather more than mild astonishment, “Pat, this book is well written.”)

So Merry Christmas, and thank you all.

Merry Christmas to All

As you have probably noticed, updating the blog is proving more complicated than we thought. We are still hoping to get it done some time this week.

Meanwhile, I just want to say Merry Christmas to all the readers out there, the ones who read this blog, the ones who read my books, the ones who read other people’s books.

Having intelligent, articulate readers is one of the biggest blessings a writer can have. It is extremely satisfying to finally get a scene down and know that it is right, but it is even more satisfying when a reader says something that tells you they really understood what you were doing with that subtle bit of character development, or that they got the point you were making underneath all the complicated plot twists.

It’s not so much the appreciation (though I don’t know any writer who is tired of hearing people say “I love your book”) as it is the comprehension. It’s why “Your book made me think” is up there with “Your book kept me up til 3 a.m.” and “Your characters are so real” and “Your book made me laugh/cry” on the list of the top things writers want to have said about their work. (Yes, those are examples from a panel; the question was “What was the best complement you ever got about your work?” And as usual, I was the outlier – the best complement I ever got was when my mother put down Snow White and Rose Red and said to me, in a tone indicative of rather more than mild astonishment, “Pat, this book is well written.”)

So Merry Christmas, and thank you all.

Patricia C. Wrede