Patricia C. Wrede's Blog, page 44

Character-based plotting…not

The first time I heard an editor talk about character-based plotting, it made me think I was doing something wrong. (This was around 25 years ago, mind.) “Your characters have to want something, and want it badly,” he said. “That’s where you start. All the best plots are character-based.” And I knew that wasn’t where I started.

There is just enough truth in those statements to be disturbing. I’ve heard much the same advice repeated many times in the last twenty-five years, and it got more disturbing every time. Until finally I noticed something.

The people who were saying “Start with the characters and what they want, and use that to develop your plot” were all editors and agents. They aren’t starting with a blank piece of paper. They’re starting with a rough manuscript, something that already has characters and a plot, but that could work considerably better. They’re right in that when the book is finished, the plot will likely revolve around the characters’ wants and needs, but it doesn’t always start that way, certainly not for every writer.

Now, there are certainly writers who do start with their characters, and who work up their plots based on what the characters want or need or have to learn. Two of my best friends routinely produce brilliant work this way. But working up a plot based on what the characters desperately want requires two things: 1) your characters have to want or need something desperately, and 2) you have to know your characters well enough, deeply enough, to know what it is that they want or need or have to learn.

A lot of writers don’t know this when they are at the plot-developing stage of writing. Frequently, they still don’t know it at the end of the first chapter. Doing more up-front work on the characters doesn’t help, because many, many writers have to write their way into their characters, living with them until halfway or three-quarters of the way through the book they finally understand them well enough to say with confidence what each of them really does or doesn’t want and why. At least two authors I know don’t even name their characters until they’re halfway through the book or more.

For these writers, the plot can’t develop out of what the characters want, not during the pre-writing and development stage. Trying to force them to “start with the characters” is an exercise in frustration and futility. For them, the plot has to come initially from things the character isn’t generating within him/herself – natural disasters, villainous plots, mysterious events, murders, a stranger coming to town. Once the writer has a skeleton of a plot, then they can start figuring out what the protagonist’s stake in it is, what they want, why they need to do what the plot says they’re going to be doing.

Sometimes, the writer will get partway through the book and discover that the characters are just not the sort of people who will do the things the original plot says they have to do to keep things on track. The writer then has no choice but to toss the plot outline, or see her characters turn to cardboard puppets. This happens especially often to writers who write their way into characters (and is often the cause of various friends, colleagues, and editors advising them to start with what the characters want, which is ultimately very frustrating because this sort of writer can’t start that way).

Tossing the plot outline is hard to make yourself do, but trust me, you’ll be much happier with the result than you will with a bunch of cardboard puppets. It is also a good sign, because it means you are starting to understand your characters well enough to know what they really will and won’t do, what they truly want (as opposed to what they’ve been saying they want), and what they have to do and be and learn over the course of the story.

Working this way usually means the front part of the manuscript will need revising, now that the author understands the characters’ needs and wants and motives better.  The goal, of course, is to end up with the events of the plot being motivated by the things you now know the protagonist wants and needs and has to learn, even if it all started as a story about the dam bursting or a mysterious stranger murdering the President. Sometimes, the front-end revising is a matter of inserting a few lines here and there to hint at motives or foreshadow later development; sometimes individual scenes and chapters will change radically, or double in size, or have to be cut.

If you are this kind of writer, that is just part of the process. Don’t whinge about it. You get to skip all the “get to know your characters” stuff during pre-writing, but you end up having to do more work on it during the revision phase. (You do get to be cross with people who try to make you “start with the characters to develop the plot,” though.)

Series flaws

For a variety of reasons, I’ve been rereading a couple of different series recently, even though I gave up on both of them somewhere between book 8 and book 12. One was a mystery series, the other science fiction…but both of them had similar problems. When I stopped to think about it, I could come up with several other series from assorted genres that did the same thing, and a couple that didn’t.

In all cases, the series started off focused on a central protagonist – the detective, in the case of the mysteries, a main hero in the case of all the others. Each book was a stand-alone, though as all the series went on there were occasional multi-book plot arcs in addition to the central problem of the individual volumes. Each book, from the first one on, had a slightly different setting as well as a different central problem; as a direct consequence, each book introduced a lot of new characters who were involved in some way with that book’s murder or adventure. Inevitably, some of those new characters were interesting and appealing, and often one would develop into a continuing character (one that appears in every book). Sometimes one or more of the new characters popped up three or four books later, becoming recurring characters.

In the series that eventually lost my interest, a couple of things happened. First, the authors developed a habit of “checking in” on all of the major continuing or recurring characters who would likely be around. This was especially obvious in the mystery series, as the detective had made friends with many clients and suspects who lived in the same city. After a while, the entire first half of each book was spent catching up on what each of these folks had been doing since the last book, even though nine out of ten of them had nothing whatever to do with the current murder mystery.

Second, in an effort to justify the presence of all these favorite characters, the authors started giving them subplots of their own in each book – subplots which often have little or nothing to do with the central problem of the volume. This works all right for a book or two, but then the books started getting fatter and fatter as the number of characters (and thus the number of subplots) increases and the reader gets more and more distracted from the main storyline.  Eventually, the author reaches the point where the central plotline is completely buried under the weight of the subplots.

What might have helped at this stage would have been to change the series from a central-protagonist-with-supporting-characters type to one that was more of an ensemble cast, making the core series novels into braided plotlines using the “top” three or four characters and giving other favorites their own spin-off books. Another alternative, which has been used to excellent effect by both Tamora Pierce and Anne McCaffrey, would be to structure the series in groups, with new protagonists for each trilogy or quadrology within the main storyline. The effect of either method would be to reduce the scope of each individual book, while allowing the series to spread out and cover additional interesting ground.

The alternative is to keep a tight rein on the characters and plot. A lot of the good examples of this I could think of were written in the early-to-mid-1900s, when book length – especially mass-market paperback book length – was strictly limited. Authors had to keep their plots and subplots focused, because they only had 60,000 words to cover them in. New characters still appeared, and still became continuing or recurring characters, but you don’t see the murder mysteries of the 1930s, ‘40s, and ‘50s begin with the detective having a series of family dinners, teas, dates, and conversations with a dozen characters both author and reader have come to know and love.

I love Dorothy Sayers’ character the Dowager Duchess of Denver, but much as I’d have liked to see more of her, she simply doesn’t belong in most of the Peter Wimsey books and short stories. Most of the novels are about murders that have nothing to do with Peter’s family or social position, and a subplot involving them would distract from the main plot.

Another place where series writers – most especially science fiction and fantasy series writers – get into trouble is by attempting to treat their favorite settings in the same way as their favorite characters. That is, if they have come up with a particularly interesting place/culture/society that isn’t the central one that their hero belongs to and spends most of his/her time in, they find some way of giving it a cameo in every novel of the series after its first appearance. This is uncommon in mysteries, Westerns, thrillers, and other books set in the real world, possibly because authors are slightly less inclined to display how good they are at research than to flaunt how clever they are at making up neat places.

All the series authors who lose my interest have lost sight of a fundamental writing principle:  the writer gets the best effect by putting into the story the things that need to be in that particular story…and only those things. Subplots aren’t independent stories that have been dropped into the main story; they support, compare, and contrast to the main plot, enriching it. That is why they are called subplots. Unless the story takes place in one of those tiny “Population: 6” hamlets, the writer is not going to include every person in town as a character in the story, even though many of the folks offstage may be fascinating people. This kind of restraint is just as useful when applied to one’s imaginary characters and worldbuilding as it is when applied to real-world people and the Encyclopedia Brittanica.

Alternate History

One of several things I discovered this week is that when you have 31 hours of driving (spit over several days), a convention gig, and most especially a bunch of editorial revisions to do on a collection of blog posts, remembering that you also have to write a new blog post is easy to forget. I mean, I was (re)writing blog posts! Tons of them!  So my apologies for skipping Wednesday. We should be pretty much back to normal after this, at least, I hope so.

Octopodicon was a small but energetic steampunk convention, and I had fun. One of the things they wanted me to talk about was alternate history, and since that’s all right at the top of my brain now, and I haven’t talked about it here for a while, I thought I’d do that today.

For those unfamiliar with the genre, alternate history or alternate universe (AU) fiction is where the author changes the outcome of some historical event, or introduces some new non-historical event or thing into real history, and then works out (or pretends to work out) how this change affects the background of the story. Sometimes, the author is looking at the world years, decades, or centuries after the change, as in Randall Garrett’s Lord Darcy stories, which are set in the early 1900s in a world where the point of change was that Richard the Lion-Hearted did not die from the crossbow wound, but instead recovered and reigned for a good many more years, during which somebody discovered how to make magic work reliably. So that author has roughly 900 years for that one alteration to affect the history we know.

At the other end, you have stories like Harry Turtledove’s The Guns of the South, in which some time-travelers give Robert E. Lee modern machine guns in a deliberate attempt to change history. This novel covers the actual moment of divergence – the arrival of the time-travelers – and then follows the changes that it makes in the American Civil War (which are not quite what the time-travelers expected).

The farther back in time the point of change is, the bigger the impact it is likely to have on history-as-we-know-it. This means that writers who want their AU background to be just a bit different but still recognizable either have to pick a point of change that is relatively close to the time when they are writing their story, or else they have to fudge. I fudged the Frontier Magic trilogy rather heavily; if the changes I made to human pre-history had actually occurred, there is no way the world of 1852 would be at all recognizable (except possibly for the geography). This is probably true of any AU in which magic or magical creatures like dragons or unicorns or werewolves exist, or where magic works and has been known and developed since the very beginning of human history.

People who write really strict alternate history do their level best not to fudge anything, but to make as realistic and believable a projection of the changes that happen as a result of their one basic change as they possibly can. This is often easier if the writer picks a really obscure battle or discovery or person as the divergence point, because if it is really obscure, hardly anyone will know enough about its significance to argue with you. On the other hand, if it is that obscure, you will probably have to have some kind of end-note or appendix that explains what the divergence point is and why you chose it, or almost no one will realize how clever you are being.

Some writers take the other approach, making their divergence point some well-known historical event. The trick here is to make it specific. “The South won the American Civil War” is an instantly recognizable divergence point for anyone living in North America, but if that’s what the writer takes as a jumping-off point, they’re going to run into trouble, because there are too many Civil War buffs who want to know exactly how and why the South could have won. That means that if the writer wants the South to have won, they probably need to do enough research to find something that was a turning point in the war, and have that go differently.

Because even though alternate history is alternate, all of the usual worldbuilding caveats and principles apply, plus a few extra. To be believable and effective, the alternate history has to be internally consistent…but it also has to be consistent with those parts of actual history that the author isn’t changing. In an AU, anything that the author mentions as being different from real history is presumed to be both significant and derived from whatever changes result from the point of divergence. If the author doesn’t know when safety matches were invented and gets the date wrong, it will throw off a certain part of the readership who will be sure it was done deliberately. This is frustrating, because it means you have to do a lot of research to find out how things really were, just so you can change some of it but not all of it.

Nevertheless, alternate history can be a lot of fun, especially if you enjoy research and/or are a history buff. Still, if you are going to try it you should be aware that there are a lot of highly opinionated history geeks out there who not only will argue about whatever path you decide your new history will take, but also will be able to cite historical sources to support their contentions. This can lead to all sorts of arguments, because unless the author is showing the divergence point itself (as in The Guns of the South), the characters in the story cannot know what the differences are between their world and ours, or why they occurred. Their history is just how it happened for them, and there is seldom reason for them to talk about alternative possibilities they don’t even know exist. This means that a lot of the writer’s development work is invisible to the reader, and people will complain that you didn’t think about X when you have twelve pages of notes on why X is the way it is, only there’s never any way to get them into the story.

The Name on the Cover

One of the first decisions writers have to make, once they’ve actually sold a manuscript, is what name to write under. There are a lot of possible considerations here, so let’s start with your actual name. My current full name is Patricia Collins Wrede; I could have chosen to put the whole thing on my book covers (as my friend Lois McMaster Bujold did), or I could have gone with Pat Wrede, P.C. Wrede, P. Collins Wrede, Patricia Wrede, or even, heaven help me, “Patsy” or “Trish” Wrede. And that’s before we get to considering using my maiden name as my writing last name (which would have happened quite naturally if I’d started selling just a few years earlier than I actually did).

The name you put on the cover is one you will likely be stuck with for the rest of your writing life. It will be your public face: you will have to answer to “Jane Doe” if you ever go to a convention, you will have to sign autographs as “Jane Doe,” your fans will refer to you as “Jane,” and so on. Consider carefully before you put something on the cover that isn’t what people normally call you. It’s much harder than you think to get used to being called by a different name, especially if it’s only for a few weeks out of a year.

These days, it is also worth considering the ease with which someone who wants to buy your book will be able to find you on Google (rather than getting two pages on the famous-in-his-field electrical engineer of the same name).

Length is another consideration, for two reasons: first, the longer the author’s name is, the smaller the typeface it has to be in in order to fit it on the cover and the spine of the book, and the harder it will be for a prospective reader to spot from a distance. Second, if you stick with a writing career and amass a large number of titles and a reasonably large audience, signing “Nathanial Gregorovich Zoroaster Radegundegast-Abernathy III” over and over is going to make your hand very tired and make the line move very slowly. On the other hand, it might be more recognizable than “J. Smith.”

Those who have changed their name upon getting married have to balance questions like the length of the last name (if hyphenated) and the possibility of getting stuck writing under an ex-spouse’s surname ten years down the road (as has happened to more than one woman I know, including, obviously, me) against the problems that can come with writing under a name that isn’t quite the same as what’s on your legal I.D. Convincing people that you really are the Jane Smith who wrote the book they’re buying, when all your I.D. says “Jane S. Brown” can be difficult.

Which brings me to the question of pseudonyms.

There aren’t actually all that many good reasons to use a pen name … and if you don’t have a good reason, you will probably regret the decision in the long run.

Good reasons include: Your publisher has asked you to (because your real name is too close to some other established author’s name – Robert J. Heinlein, for instance – or because you are switching genres and your editor thinks a pen name will keep readers from getting confused, or because you are writing the next Nancy Drew book and it’s a work-for-hire contract that requires you to use a house name, or because your editor thinks your new work is a major departure and will sell better as a “first novel” for some reason); you are incredibly prolific and you can’t sell six books a year under your real name; you will get fired from your day job if your boss finds out you write; you are writing for a genre that requires you to be the other gender (Westerns, thrillers, and Romances are about the only ones where this is still partly true, though it used to be quite common); you have written an exposé of a dangerous group who are likely to send people after you to kill you if they find out who you are (drug dealers, gangs, the Mafia, etc.); you are collaborating with somebody and you want a single pen name for your “team” efforts; you have deep-seated personal reasons for not wanting your real name on your books (one author I heard about was abused by his parents and didn’t want their last name honored by showing up on his books, for instance).

Reasons that are not so good include: You think it would be cool. Your best friend thinks it would be cool. You want to find out what other people “really” think about your book. You don’t want people to recognize you at the grocery store checkout. You want to hide your early “bad” work and only put your real name on stuff after you get “good.” You think everybody does it. You like the idea of having a Big Secret.

The hassle of using a pen name for the next 25 or 30 or 50 years is just not worth the miniscule amount of “cool” or the brief fun of having a Big Secret. And if you really plan on keeping it a Big Secret, you will not be able to talk to anyone other than your agent and editor about your writing, which really takes a lot stronger motivation than “secrets are fun.”

Unless they know you are the one who wrote it, most of your friends won’t have read your book and won’t be able to tell you what they “really” think anyway.

If you publish a bunch of “bad” stuff under one name, and then try to switch to your “real” name, you will probably find that you lose a lot of your audience – as far as the market is concerned, your “real” name is an unknown first novelist, and you will have just thrown away several years of building a following (and, potentially, several thousand dollars in sales). [Note: I'm not talking about the kind of situation where the publisher wants the change, as mentioned under "good reasons" above. That usually does have something to do with the market.]

In fact, I once met an author who, for several of the bad reasons listed above, began publishing under a pseudonym. After a couple of years, he decided it was too much hassle and he wanted to switch to his real name. So he started publishing “collaborations” between his pseudonym and himself. And he started getting fan letters that said “It’s really nice of you, Mr. Pseudonym, to try to help out beginners, but that new guy is ruining your work and you should go back to writing solo.” Really.

The odds of having a stranger in a checkout line recognize your name are … small. Very small. I’ve had it happen exactly twice in the past 20 years, and one of them was someone who’d seen me on a panel at a convention two days earlier, so I’m not even actually sure that it was the name she recognized. Even with bookstores, the only ones I shop at where people recognize my name are the two local SF stores, whose proprietors have been acquaintances since long before I started writing – and I shop at a lot of bookstores.  Lois McMaster Bujold, who has a string of Hugo rockets lined up on her mantelpiece and a rabid fan following, also does not get name recognition at most non-SF-specialty bookstores, much less at the grocery store or the department store. She has to tell them who she is before she offers to autograph their stock. And she, too, has been writing for nearly twenty years.

Think very carefully before you commit to a pen name without having a really good reason.

If you are still determined to use a pen name, refer to the considerations farther up, like length and whether you will be OK answering to that name at public appearances. And since you are making it up, consider a bit where you’d like to be on the bookstore shelves. It is unlikely that you can arrange things so your books will be at eye level – there are too many other titles coming and going that can move yours up or down a couple of shelves – but you can pick a name that will be shelved close to somebody else whose books are similar to yours, and you can shoot for the front, middle, or back of the alphabet.

Some Useful Books

First, the exciting news (exciting for me, anyway): I have just signed the contract to do a collection of these blog posts (selected, edited, and occasionally augmented) on writing for Diversion Books. It should be coming out in December as an e-book with a hard-copy option (so folks have something to wrap for under the tree). I’m having a lot of fun revisiting and revising older posts…and I’m rather astonished at just how many of them there are to choose from. Doing a blog twice a week for four and a half years adds up.

This has, as you might expect, got me thinking about how one goes about explaining fiction writing and how to do it to other people. Which leads me to look at how other writers have explained writing in their how-to-write books. The thing that makes this more than a bit difficult is one of the fundamental premises of this blog: There Is No One True Way.

For years, I have had a shelf of basic how-to-write books that I recommend to would-be writers. The interesting thing is that, unless I am talking to a large group, I don’t recommend all of them to everybody at the same time. I talk to the writer for a bit about how they work and what things they’re having particular problems with, and I try to recommend the how-to-write books that I think will do the best job of explaining stuff to them. Which depends a lot on their process.

For instance, I have a thin little paperback titled Zen in the Art of Writing by Ray Bradbury. It came highly recommended by a friend, and I like Bradbury’s work, so I got it and read it. It did nothing at all for me…but I recommend it highly to people who seem to have that kind of holistic, zen-like process, and I have seen it be a lightbulb-like revelation for quite a few of them.

Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird is a classic book on writing that I recommend to the nervous and insecure, to folks with a major Internal Editor problem, and to people who are so determined to write mainstream/literary fiction that they get twitchy if I tell them to read a how-to-write book by a genre fiction writer. Ms. Lamott talks a lot about writers’ states-of-mind and emotions, so this is also good for folks who worry a lot that they are doing something wrong, or that other writers are more confident or don’t have these problems. It’s fun, funny, and true, and I enjoyed it a lot.

Linda Seger’s How to Make a Good Script Great is technically about writing movie scripts, but it is possibly the best analysis of the three-, four-, and five-act structures that I have ever seen. I recommend it to people who are strongly visual (because, movies) and, obviously, to folks having trouble with the act structure (usually with the caveat that they’ll have to ignore her strictures on page count, because those are based on a 120-page screenplay, and most novels are a lot longer than 120 manuscript pages).

My favorite how-to-write book comes with a large caveat. It’s Lars Eighner’s Lavender Blue: How to Write and Sell Gay Men’s Erotica, also titled The Elements of Arousal, and it is not suitable for younger would-be writers or folks easily put off by the sort of example sentences you might expect to find in something with that title. It is, however, a brilliant book that covers skills any fiction writer will find useful – and I defy anyone to ever again mix up passive voice with the progressive tenses after reading his explanation and examples.

For a more general audience, I recommend Lawrence Block’s Telling Lies for Fun and Profit, partly because I think it is one of the best titles ever for a how-to-write book. It’s a collection of some of the how-to columns he wrote for Writer’s Digest Magazine, and it is good, solid, basic practical advice. He has several other how-to-write collections which are also good, but he only got to use that title once.

Natalie Goldberg’s Writing Down the Bones is another good one for the holistic, zen-process type of writer. Like the Bradbury title mentioned above, I don’t find it personally useful, but I know plenty of people who love it and find it useful to reread regularly. So I recommend it to people who seem to have a process similar to the folks I already know love the book and find it useful.

Ursula le Guin’s Steering the Craft is the only book with writing exercises in it that I have ever found interesting and useful. It’s more of an intermediate-how-to book than one for beginners, and there aren’t very many of those around. With one or two exceptions, it’s not looking at things you’re likely to learn from working on any old random story (how often do you need to write a grammatically correct 300-word sentence, or 100 words composed of sentences that are all seven words or fewer?), which is why I like it, but that can be frustrating for someone who just wants to know the basics of dialog or scene construction or character development.

Brenda Ueland’s If You Want To Write was written in 1938 and has been reprinted periodically since then; I fell in love with it when I opened it to read the chapter titles and got to “X. Why Women Who Do Too Much Housework Should Neglect It For Their Writing.” Like Bird by Bird and Writing Down the Bones, it isn’t going to provide practical hints on writing action or a step-by-step guide to a dialog scene; it’s more about attitude and commitment and creativity and, yes, Art. I like it anyway.

I have an entire bookcase full of how-to-write books, but these are the ones I keep recommending to people.

Then there’s the permanent computer shelf, meaning the shelf of books that I can reach by swiveling my computer chair around. There are actually two shelves; one has usually got the research books for whatever I’m working on, and the other has a permanent set of writing reference books: Strunk and White’s The Elements of Style, Karen Elizabeth Gordon’s The Deluxe Transitive Vampire and The New Well-Tempered Sentence, my battered copy of Roget’s Thesaurus that dates from college, the Oxford American Dictionary with half the cover missing, the two-volume squint-eye version of The Oxford English Dictionary, and the second edition of Fowler’s Modern English Usage. I’ve used most of them for twenty or thirty years, and I don’t have to refer to them as often as I used to (especially the basic grammar and punctuation ones), but they’re still there, just in case I need them.

Not-Writing

One of the most common questions I get, right up there with “Where do you get your ideas?” and “How can I get published?”, is “How do you deal with writer’s block?” Sometimes it gets asked plaintively; sometimes with a note of desperation. Once in a great while, it gets asked merely with a note of curiosity. In all cases, though, there is an underlying assumption that writer’s block is something that all writers will face sooner or later, inevitably and inexorably, probably multiple times per story, and that it is a demon to be fought and defeated.

I have always had trouble answering this question, because it’s based on conflating at least two different definitions of “writer’s block.” There is what I think of as “true writer’s block,” which is an actual inability to get bits of fiction on paper despite wanting to do so, and which in my experience is quite rare; and there is not-writing, which is a choice and which is common as mud.

The people I know who’ve had real, true writer’s block have almost all had some clear reason for it: side-effect from a medication, an episode of depression, sleep deprivation, massive stress. The only way to clear it up is to deal with the outside reason, and that often takes years. Not-writing, on the other hand, can go on and off like flipping a light switch, because it is fundamentally a choice.

I spend quite a lot of time not-writing. I have, on occasion, been told that I have writer’s block when I haven’t produced anything in a long time. I always find this a bit puzzling, because I don’t feel particularly blocked. I could sit down and write a new first chapter or a bunch of backstory for something or any number of bits and pieces that might eventually find their way into a story; I just don’t see much point in doing so right then, for one reason or another.

Sometimes, the reason is that I have more important things to do, like getting the plumber to stop the waterfall in the bathroom while I move all my paper books out from under the leak in the ceiling, or like being executor of my mother’s estate. Sometimes, the reason is that I am sick and tired of the thing I’m working on, but I know better than to start a shiny new project while I am in the miserable middle of an older one, so I choose not to write anything. Sometimes, the reason is that it is a nice day and I am going to take a book outside and sit under a tree and read. Sometimes, the reason is that I need to mull over the things I already know need to happen in the current story so that I can figure out the exact right thing to be the next piece of it. Sometimes, the reason is that I’ve taken a wrong turn somewhere and I need to completely rethink my plot, starting two or six or fourteen chapters ago. And sometimes, I simply have a profound disinclination to write.

I don’t call any of those things “writer’s block.” I don’t think they are deserving of the term, and I don’t think I ought to be allowed the copout.

Writing is work. Work of any kind does, occasionally, get boring. Nobody I know likes being bored. It is human nature to try to avoid doing boring stuff. This is not “writer’s block;” it’s self-indulgence.

Yet somehow, writers have pulled off one of the greatest marketing coups ever: they have convinced everyone that if they are not-writing, they must have “writer’s block,” and are therefore to be offered tea and cookies and sympathy and support. If a bank teller or accountant tried to claim they couldn’t work today because they had a paperwork block, everyone would laugh.

In a lot of ways, this is a great boon to writers. Much of the work we do doesn’t look like work to non-writers, and there aren’t a lot of non-writer folks around who understand the creative process. Telling these people “I have writer’s block; I’m going for a walk to see if that helps” gets them off your back instantly, when “I need to think; stop distracting me” doesn’t and “I’m going for a walk to ponder the next chapter” gets you a long list of errands to run “as long as you’re out.”

The trouble comes when writers start believing their own press. Having convinced everyone else that it is normal for a writer to “get writer’s block” ten or fifteen times per novel (at least one of which lasts for three weeks or more), people start worrying if everything is going along smoothly without interruption, or else they start labeling the slightest sticky bit as “writer’s block” and panic because they’re sure it’ll be weeks or months before they write anything else ever again.

The truth is that a lot of the sticky spots have nothing to do with being able to write something; they are, more often than not, about not knowing how to make what one writes into the shining, perfect thing it is in one’s head. They are, in other words, about being a perfectionist. This is particularly common among beginners, because no matter how much raw talent or imagination they have, they almost certainly haven’t nailed down all the skills they need just yet. It is inevitable that they will periodically come to a scene or a line that they don’t know how to handle, simply because this is the very first time they’ve tried to write a flashback or a love scene or whatever. It generally takes them longer to figure out what to do and how to do it, because they haven’t done anything remotely similar…and it is very, very easy to go from “I am not writing because I don’t have the skills I need to do this scene/fix this plot point/see what the structure needs here” to “Ohmigosh, I have writer’s block and it will be months before I can write again.”

That kind of “I have to stop for a while and figure out how to do this” stickiness comes around less frequently as one gains experience, but as long as a given writer keeps trying to stretch, they’ll keep hitting spots like that. Again, it’s easy to call that “writer’s block,” because writers and non-writers alike will accept that as a reason, and they probably won’t try to give you advice about how to do whatever-it-is (which is generally about as useful as me trying to give advice to a brain surgeon in mid-operation would be). The trick is not to call it “writer’s block” to oneself; instead, one goes off and studies how other authors get in and out of flashbacks, or the way they structure love scenes, or one does some practice scenes or exercises if one finds that sort of thing helpful.

Working at gaining the skills one needs in order to write the next bit is still working at writing, even if one is not making visible forward progress on the book. The same goes for stopping to iron out a troublesome plot twist, or make up a consistent backstory or bit of worldbuilding that one suddenly needs (and that has to fit seamlessly in with all the other backstories and worldbuilding that one has already done).

Opinions on villains

“A villain is the one who knows the most and cares the least.” – Chuck Klosterman

 I get a lot of good blog ideas from radio quotes. That one came in a July 9, 2013 NPR segment interviewing Mr. Klosterman, who has just written a book about real and literary villains. I don’t agree with all his views, but that particular line struck a chord.

Thinking about it, the reason behind the first half is obvious, at least for fictional villains. The villain is nearly always the one who is moving the plot along – he/she has a goal and a plan for getting there, and it is his/her evil plans and plots that the hero must first discover and then thwart. Of course the villains know the most about what is going on; they are the ones making it go!

The second bit is a little more problematic. Cares the least about what? Obviously, villains care about getting to their goals, whether that’s power, money, the girl, elephants, or all four at once. Usually, though, villains don’t care about any bad effects their actions may have on other people (sometimes, not even the people on their own side). Or they care a little, but not enough to stop. Achieving their goal is the most important thing; the ends justify the means.

It helps if the villain’s goals are something that most readers would likely consider either undesirable or not worth doing evil things to accomplish. A “villain” who has a thoroughly admirable goal – say, getting desperately needed food to a starving village – has to do a lot of really evil and outrageous things in order not to be viewed as a hero…and even then, he’s likely to graduate from “villain” to “antagonist,” simply because his ultimate goal appears to be unselfish.

This is one of the problems that occasionally crops up for fiction writers: the fact that readers, whoever they are, tend to identify with characters who believe in, value, and work toward the same things the reader believes in, values, and tries to work toward. If the villain’s goals and motives are too close to those of a particular reader, then that reader will likely be turned off by the author portraying him/her as evil…even if the villain is wiping out towns and bribing government officials and doing other horrible things that the reader would never, ever dream of doing.

There’s a truism in fiction that villains are often the most interesting characters, especially for authors and for actors who play villains. Mr. Klosterman’s theory is that adults want to understand themselves better, and that villains help us do that. Another theory I heard recently was that villains are interesting because they have an internal tug-of-war between good and evil. I think those may be true for some readers, and some villains, but they ignore a couple of other important factors.

First, in most fiction, the villains do not actually spend a lot of time on-stage. They cast a long shadow when they’re not around, because the heroes are always trying to figure out their plan, or planning to stop them, or escaping their traps, but it’s hard to get in-depth, up close, and personal with a character who isn’t present. There are exceptions, of course – Shakespeare’s MacBeth and Richard III come to mind – but in those cases, they’re the central characters, the anti-heroes of their own mistaken stories.

Second, some villains are just plain bad – they have no apparent internal tug-of-war between good and evil. Emperor Palpatine of Star Wars comes to mind. You can read things into the character (because he’s mostly orchestrating things from behind the scenes), but I don’t think anyone is going to learn a whole lot about themselves or the world from the Emperor we see on screen (except maybe “Don’t join the Sith”).

Then there’s the fact that, for the last couple of decades, the fashion in heroes has been for the reluctant Everyman – the ordinary guy forced by circumstances beyond his control to face villainy and evil and overcome it. Frodo and Harry Potter both follow this pattern. Heroes who are smart or rich or charismatic have to have some negative trait to balance things out, the way Iron Man/Tony Stark has his abrasive personality and heart problem, or Miles Vorkosigan has his brittle bones.

Villains don’t have comparable limitations – they can be as smart, talented, handsome, rich, famous, charismatic, etc. as the author wants or can make them, with no need for offsetting disadvantages. Being a villain is, after all, enough of a disadvantage all by itself. The question then becomes, why would someone with all that going for them turn to the dark side? That’s a question that a lot of writers find interesting, even if they can only explore it in the villain’s backstory. Also, it is fun to write about somebody smart, talented, handsome, etc. every so often, and if you can’t do it with your hero…

Simple and complex

OK, first as regards the computer problems: They are tearing down and rebuilding a house just down the street from me, which evidently was the cause of the problem. Unfortunately, the work is ongoing…and on top of that, they are going to start tearing down and rebuilding another house just up the street from me come Monday. So there may be more interruptions. I will try to get stuff written and scheduled early to allow for possible difficulties, but life is always crazy and it may not always be possible. Now, for todays’ writing post:

Complex characters are, according to a bazillion how-to books and web sites, highly desirable for fiction writers. The alternative, we’re told, is writing flat or cardboard characters, which everyone knows is a no-no.

And which is actually not true. One of the most likeable, memorable characters I’ve read was a viewpoint character who, as a child long prior to the story’s start, had suffered severe brain damage and as a consequence was mildly to moderately disabled intellectually. She was not a complex character in terms of her personality (though one could perhaps argue for a complex background); in fact at one point she told her therapist cheerfully that she had “less pieces of me than other folks do.” But she was most definitely not flat or cardboard, and she’s stuck in my head for years, long after I’ve forgotten the plot and the author of the story she was involved in.

Which leads me to this: the opposite of a complex character is not a flat or cardboard character; it’s a simple character.  

Simple characters don’t necessarily have fewer pieces than complex characters; it’s more that for a simple character, all the pieces point in the same direction, while for a complex character they point in different directions. A simple character is one you (or the reader) can safely take at face value. They don’t show up looking in control and put together, and then later reveal that they are secretly a mess and barely holding things together. If they look like they’re in control, they are; if they’re a mess, the reader (and the other characters) know straight off.

Complex characters, on the other hand, have a tangled knot of motivations, and everything from how they present themselves to how they act and react in the course of the story can change, depending on which bit of knot things are bouncing off at any given moment. They can look like a mess, but under stress reveal a core of steel, or appear in control of themselves only to fall apart when things get tough. This makes complex characters much more useful to writers, in most cases, because they are more flexible – the writer can get many different reactions from one character by adjusting the circumstances.

This does not mean that complex characters act at random. They are still supposed to be people, which means that there is some underlying unity of character, however deep one may have to go to find it. Unfortunately, in the rush to create “complex, well-rounded, realistic characters,” some folks lose sight of this.

I read a manuscript last week in which the author appeared to have just this problem with one of her secondary characters. The particular character was in a position of authority, which she exercised judiciously and well in regard to one of the main characters, but which she came near to abusing as regards another main character. If you looked at only one plot thread at a time, all of the captain’s actions made sense – the author had worked in enough of the character’s backstory to explain why the captain acted as she did in each case.

What the author didn’t do was to explain why the two, very similar, cases evoked completely different behavior – sympathy, help, and understanding in one instance; obstructiveness, anger, and a refusal to even try to see a problem (much less solve it) in the other. The reader was left wondering why the good reasons from the character’s backstory that made her help Character A didn’t also apply to Character B, and vice versa.

There were two ways the author could have fixed the problem and had her complex character work. The first would have been to choose a completely different subplot to replace either the help-character-A or the hinder-character-B plot. Having the captain be very helpful to A, but not entirely ethical and accurate when it came to reporting his expenses, or angry and obstructive with B, but secretly funding a shelter for homeless families, would have provided a complex character without the jarring problem of why that character is nice to one person we like and nasty to another person we like, when she seems to have equally good reasons to be nice/nasty in both cases. Cheating on expense reports and funding a homeless shelter are things that are far enough removed from being nice/nasty to a particular person that they don’t create a major mental conflict when the same character does both.

The second way the author could have fixed the problem was to make a greater distinction between the two cases. If there had been more of a difference between Characters A and B, or a bigger difference in their situations, then it would become much easier to explain the difference in the captain’s behavior. To pick an extremely obvious possibility, if A is polite and defers to the captain’s authority, but B smarts off, then it is a lot easier to see why the captain would respond in kind, especially since she already has those backstory reasons.

No matter how complex a character gets, they still need to be internally consistent. And it isn’t enough for a character to be consistent within a subplot (unless that subplot is the only place the character appears); the character has to be internally consistent across the whole story.

Unfortunate Interlude

Sorry folks; I am having a variety of computer problems that prevent a post today. Regular service will (I hope) return on Sunday.

Jigsaw puzzles and Tinker Toys

Sometimes it seems that there are a zillion different metaphors for how writers construct a plot. There’s the sculpture metaphor (carve away everything that doesn’t look like an elephant). There’s the pottery-making metaphor (add a lump of clay, work it until you have the center, then shape and add more clay as and where needed). There’s the jewelry metaphor (like stringing different colored beads in a pleasing pattern) and the quilt-making metaphor (combining small scraps of different-colored cloth to make a large pattern). There’s the soup-making metaphor (see what you have in the fridge and start popping things in a pot to cook; season to taste).

The metaphor that I’ve run into most often – and the one that’s been most descriptive of the way I usually work – is the jigsaw puzzle metaphor. You have all these pieces with parts of a picture on them, and each one goes in only one place. It doesn’t matter whether you put the edges together first and then fill in the middle, or do the barn first and then work out to the edges; all that matters is that the pieces are in the right place when you are finished.

The thing is, with a jigsaw puzzle, you usually have at least some idea what the finished picture is going to look like, even if it’s one of those horrible ones that’s a shiny lipstick red all over, so that you have to go strictly by the shape of the pieces to get the puzzle done. Even if the cover of the box has gone missing, you can usually get an idea of what the puzzle is going to be by looking at the pieces to see if there are lots of light blue ones (sky, so probably an outdoor scene) or things that look like bits of people or rugs.

The longer I work at writing, the more I seem to gravitate toward stories that don’t come with that sort of template. They aren’t jigsaw puzzles; they’re more like Tinker Toys or Legos or an Erector Set. In other words, what the story and/or plot will be like is totally open. I have all these pieces and connectors, but what I make of them is entirely up to me. They don’t provide hints. I have to decide for myself whether I want to put them together as a giraffe, a castle, or a model of the space station.

For somebody who is used to putting jigsaw puzzles together, this kind of thing can be hard to recognize, let alone start making decisions about. My first clue is usually that I have an enormous heap of bright shiny bits and pieces (a few of which I absolutely know go into the story somewhere, but most of which I am equally positive are mutually exclusive options) that I can’t make fit with each other.

At this point, what I do is take inventory. I make lists. Lots of lists, that sort all the different bits and pieces in as many ways as I can think of. There’s the list of all the characters by family and social rank; then there’s the list of the characters by political affiliation, and another that lists them according to where each of them works and for whom, and one that shows how much each character likes or dislikes the other characters they know at the start of the story. There’s a list of places and what goes on (in general) in each of them. There’s a list of events and incidents (Bertrand runs away; Xavier is kidnapped; Max argues with Uncle Jean; apprentice gets blown through the salon door) that could happen in the story, before the story, or after the story. There’s a timeline with the things I know are nailed down in one color, and several other timelines with the things I am still dithering about in other colors, sometimes with arrows showing how they could all change places.

What I’m doing with all this is attempting to get a feel for some of the different stories I could be telling with the material I have. Once I have things sorted, it is usually pretty easy to tell that I don’t have enough parts to build a castle. Or that I have enough pieces to make something shaped like a giraffe, but all of them are bright blue or grass-green. So I can build a green-and-blue patterned castle wall (but I’ll need a lot more pieces to finish it) or I can build something that’s giraffe-shaped, but blue with green splotches instead of tan with dark brown splotches. Or I can build a garden with a pond…

The trick with this is not to fixate on something too soon. I don’t like the blue giraffe idea (though under other circumstances it might be great), and the green-and-blue castle wall doesn’t do it, but the garden-and-pond has possibilities…and thinking about that, I realize that I can do a green castle wall with a blue moat, and that clicks. I still don’t have the whole picture, but I have somewhere to start.

Next, I look at ways different spools could connect to each other. Tinker Toys have lots of options; there isn’t just one way they fit together, so if you don’t really know what you’re making, you have to look at as many possibilities as you can think of until you find one that clicks.

The things that connect one scenelet, event, character, or bit of information to another can be time (A happens before C which happens before B), character (X planned both A and B, and accidentally ended up doing C as well), place (B and D both happen in the market square; A and C both happen near the docks), motivation (X, Y, Z, and Q are all trying to get their hands on the MacGuffin in order to become rich/powerful), relationships (Q and Y are siblings; S and T are cousins; Z works for X), emotions (Q and S hate each other; Q and X are both in love with Z; Y has a phobia about drowning so she avoids the docks), past events (J saved S’s life ten years ago); and so on…pretty much anything I can think of that can (not does, I’m not to that stage yet) link and cross-link the various things I’ve come up with.

As I go through this process, other potential connections start occurring to me. I already knew that J saved S’s life ten years ago…but what if he did it because X maneuvered him into it? Or what if some of them went to the same school, or had the same tutor? What if X has known about the MacGuffin all along, and has been grooming all these people for years to go get it for him? Whatever I think of, I add to my lists and diagrams, whether it’s a connection rod or a new spool.

At some point, I start eliminating possibilities. I generally begin with the ones I think are too obvious or over-done – if X is the villain, he is not going to turn out to be my heroine’s long-presumed-dead father, nor is one of her two potential romantic interests conveniently going to turn out to be a close relative in order to take him out of the running. Also, nobody is going to be dropping a ring, sword, belt, or anything else into a volcano.

Because I have enjoyed playing with colored pencils and Post-It-Notes since I was very small, I often get to a point where I start making diagrams and/or doing a Post-It layout where I put one event/incident/scene/important-node on each Post-It and then lay them out on the table and shuffle them around, adding and subtracting until I have something that flows. There are always leftover Post-Its, meaning there are always events or incidents or scenes that I made up that just don’t fit in whatever the eventual plot turns out to be. This used to bother me, until I decided that a) I could always save them for another story and b) it is better to have a run of twenty Post-Its that really looks and feels right than it is to have twenty-five that seem lumpy in places.

Running through all this gives me a sense of what I have to build a story with, what kind(s) of story I can build (and what kinds are really impossible, given the material I’m starting with), and what events/incidents/characters/backstory I may still be missing. And if I don’t start coming up with something plot-like enough to start writing after three or four rounds of list-making, diagrams, adding and subtracting ideas, and rearranging Post-Its, I’d figure it really isn’t ready to write and move on to something else. So far, it’s never come to that for me.