Patricia C. Wrede's Blog, page 45

The Wrong Approach, A Personal Example

Plot is one of the things that has nearly always come easy for me. I had to spend a long time learning how to develop characters, how to write dialog that didn’t sound like one person monologuing, how to put together a setting that worked, and how to get all that stuff onto the page where readers could see it. Plot, on the other hand, was what I started with in most of my books (all but two, actually). Oh, it always morphed and changed along the way, and it didn’t always end up going quite where I initially thought it would, but it was always there.

Well, if there is one thing I’ve learned about writing in thirty-plus years, it is that nothing is ever the same for long. The current work-in-development has dozens of characters, a mountain of history and backstory…and an enormous number of plot-like bits that, for a solid year, have refused to jell into anything that sticks.

A large part of the problem is… Well, when you are doing something you have done before, you obviously begin by trying whatever worked the last time. When you have been doing similar things for thirty-plus years, the list of things that have worked at least once gets fairly long. If none of them is quite right for this story, it can take a long time to work your way through the list. And if there are a couple of specific angles that have worked reliably several times, it can be tough to admit that this time they aren’t doing the job.

In this particular case, the last several novels I’ve done have been character-focused. My main character had a desire, a goal, or a plain old job that gave them a direction, and it was relatively easy to come up with obstacles and problems and so on – in other words, plot. My current main character has a lovely snarky voice and a decided personality … and she is quite happy with her life, thanks all the same. Nobody is trying to keep her from doing what she wants, and while she’s not perfectly certain what that will be, she is in no great hurry to make decisions about it. She has no particular reason to be interested in the political conflicts between the various magicians’ guilds, nor in the problems of the merchants’ guild. There are responsible adults taking care of various family problems and doing a reasonably good job of it. And so on.

What this means is that looking at what my main character wants but can’t have is not going to be much help in generating plot for this one. The plot is going to have to come from outside, and it will have to impinge on my character in a way that will get her moving and keep her moving.

This is a lot harder to do than it sounds if you are used to looking to the main character for plot generation. Oh, there are classic macro events, like having a dragon show up and burn the city to the ground, leaving my character with the problem of surviving (and possibly with preventing a repeat occurrence), or having her rather odd uncle bequeath her a magic ring of great importance that needs to be dropped into a volcano, but those would not be anywhere close to the book I set out to write. Also, it doesn’t feel right for this character’s story, which is exceedingly important since I don’t have a deadline or a contract or any reason why I absolutely positively must make something happen Right Now.

There is plenty of plot floating around in the background. There’s the infighting among the three mages’ guilds, various overlapping plots involving city government, and several possible ways to connect all this stuff to international intrigues. There are interesting (to me, anyway) characters up the wazoo, several of whom have backstories that would make nice plots, except that they don’t involve my narrator. There’s a MacGuffin that fits my story-needs down to the ground, except that there’s no good way for my narrator to stumble across it and no reason for her not to hand it off to the first responsible adult who comes along even if she does stumble across it.

There are two to four possible primary villains, none of whom have any reason to be interested in my narrator or to involve her in their plots. There are any number of secondary villains and thugs who might possibly stumble into my narrator’s circle of influence, if I could think of a reason for such a connection. And so on.

Several solutions present themselves almost immediately. The first is to find a different narrator/main character, one who is involved with the MacGuffin or the politics or the guild infighting. The second would be to insert something in the narrator’s backstory that would connect to one of those plot centers, something that would drag her in whether she wanted to be there or not. The third would be to make her less content with her life, or to give her a burning desire for…something, anything, that could translate into classic plot.

After a year of poking, I can say with some certainty that none of those will work. I can junk this whole proto-story and write something completely different, about another character in another place and time, but this story is about this character, who walked into my head complete with voice, personality, and a fair amount of background and situation, none of which are amenable to change.

What I am currently thinking is that I need to approach from a different angle. I have plenty of plot pieces; what I don’t have are the connections among them…and most especially, the ways they might connect directly to my central character and give her a stake in the outcome. I’m used to getting a few of the main plot-pieces and then being able to see how they fit, like putting together a jigsaw puzzle, but that isn’t working this time. This time, it’s more like Tinker Toys – I have a stack of spools, and now I need a bunch of connecting rods in different sizes. And once I have them, I’ll have to play with them for a while to see what interesting shape I can make out of them.

And I will continue on the topic of plot next time, with a little less self-indulgent whinging.

Fairy tales and plot

Years ago, when I was just starting to learn my craft, I attended a panel at which someone asked a question about plotting, plots, and how to come up with a good plot. One of the panelists immediately replied that the best way to learn to plot was to study fairy tales, because they were “practically pure plot,” with all the extraneous stuff stripped away by a generations-long game of “telephone.”

The other panelists chimed in in agreement, and it all sounded very convincing, especially when I thought about the fairy tales I’d read (and I have read a lot of them). So I bought into the advice. I didn’t actually go and study fairy tales, because I was not, at the time, having any particular trouble with plotting, but I passed it on occasionally when someone asked me for advice on the subject.

Some years later, I was invited to write a novel for the Fairy Tales line – novel-length retellings and re-imaginings of traditional fairy tales. I accepted with glee, chose my favorite childhood fairytale, and went off to read it, happy with the thought that I wouldn’t have to do much in the way of plotting this time, because it was all already there in the story.

Then I read the fairy tale.

It was not “practically pure plot;” in fact, it had very little of anything resembling what I think of as plot. It was not only episodic, but disconnected; things happened that not only didn’t contribute to the main storyline, but also didn’t appear to have any point at all. Sort of like when your cousin is telling you about the fight in the bar last week and spends five minutes talking about whether he drove the pickup or the SUV that night.

I still didn’t get it. It wasn’t until years – decades – later that it began to sink in. Fairy tales are not “pure plot.” They are, most of them, “pure story,” which is not at all the same thing. The ones that are closest to being “pure plot” are the literary fairy tales, not the ones taken down directly from the oral tradition.

Plots are organized and connected. Things may appear to occur at random, but if a mysterious stranger shows up in Chapter Two to help the woodcutter’s daughter find her way out of the woods, the reader can reasonably expect that by the end of the tale, that mysterious stranger will have reappeared…or at least, that someone will have explained who he was and why he showed up to help.

In a fairy tale, you can’t count on explanations. Things happen because they happen; the three princes reach the crossroads one at a time, and all three hear the thrush singing, but only the youngest listens to the bird’s advice and takes the overgrown path into the forest instead of the paved road to the pub. The story moves on, and you never do find out why the bird is singing advice at a crossroads all day, or how it is that the princes can all understand it (or could if they bothered to listen).

Turning a fairy tale – or any story – from a story into a plot involves, first off, making all the connections and coming up with all the explanations that the fairy tale left out. Maybe everyone in the fairytale world can understand animal speech, or maybe each of the princes was given an amulet that allows them to do so, or maybe only the youngest was given that gift by his fairy godmother. Maybe the thrush is part of the test for the three princes, or perhaps it is a fairy or enchanter with his/her own agenda, or an enchanted princess desperately trying to get someone to break the enchantment.

Not all the possibilities are compatible. Different combinations of explanations will drive the rest of the story in slightly (or greatly) different directions, opening up new possibilities and closing others. If only the youngest prince can understand the thrush, then either the thrush is not part of a test, or the youngest prince has a possibly-unfair advantage. On the other hand, if the youngest prince was given the animal-speech gift by his fairy godmother, then perhaps the thrush is the fairy godmother, directing him (and only him) for some reason of her own.

The next part of the process is one of taking all the connections one has filled in and checking to make sure they all work together. For me, this usually involves answering questions of who and what and why – who’s behind this, what is really going on (as compared to what the characters think is going on), and most of all, why is this happening here, now, to these people? Did someone plan it, or is it coincidence, or fate, or the effect of two or more plans colliding?

Lots of writers struggle with plot, and in at least some cases it’s because they start with story, like fairy tales, and either don’t realize they need to move to plot, or have no idea how to do so. Or, as in my case, they’re coming at it from the wrong angle entirely. Which I’ll talk about next time.

Macro and Micro

Practically every how-to-write book I’ve ever read (and I have read quite a few) breaks down “writing fiction” into a bunch of different areas – plot, characterization, structure, dialog, theme, etc. – and then examines each area separately, usually at the level of sentences or paragraphs. This misses two significant factors: first, that everything in writing has both a micro-level, sentence-by-sentence and paragraph-by-paragraph effect, and a macro-level overall effect, and everything really needs to work on both levels rather than only on one, and second, that all these bits and pieces and levels have to work together to form a pleasing and balanced whole.

Take dialog, for instance. There are lots of micro-level things that are important – giving each character his/her own speech pattern and voice, for instance, or polishing particular characters’ witty repartee. Recently, though, I read a novel where there was no dialog but witty repartee; nobody ever said anything as simple witty repartee; nobody ever said anything as simple as “Pass the coffee” without adding some clever comment, which was immediately topped by whoever happened to have the coffee pot. As individual conversations, they sparkled, but as an entire novel, it got really wearing. Even Oscar Wilde includes lines that are, in themselves, pedestrian (“Where have you been since last Thursday?” “In the country.” “What on earth do you do there?”) but that set up for the next clever line (“When one is in town one amuses oneself. When one is in the country one amuses other people.”)

People focus on the micro level mainly because it is where writing starts. It is fundamental. Nobody sits down and *blooph* there’s a chapter; even if they are very, very clear on everything that happens in the chapter, they still type it in one letter, one word, one sentence, one paragraph at a time. The macro levels are built up from stacks and stacks of micro levels, the way a wall is built from stacks and stacks of bricks. The assumption is that if you get the little stuff right, the bigger levels will take care of themselves.

Unfortunately, it doesn’t always work this way, because what is needed to make things work in the overall story, at the book level, are not always things that are obvious when all one ever looks at is the micro level. Like the book full of witty repartee, in which no one could explain a simple plot point without three pages of back-and-forth snarking, things that work one scene or paragraph at a time may not work when you string a bunch of scenes or paragraphs together.

Another example: a while back, I read a Romance novel that was curiously flat. The prose was quite readable; the characters were likeable; the dialog was realistic and varied; the characters encountered an appropriate number of obstacles on their way to the altar.

The trouble, when I got to analyzing it, was that there was very little tension, and the reason there was very little tension was that every time an obstacle cropped up, the couple dealt with it completely. On a scene-by-scene basis, this worked fine, but dealing so completely with each and every obstacle left the overall story with no development. The characters started out at emotional level 1, got up to level 3 due to an obstacle, and then dropped back to level 1 when they dealt with the obstacle. So every time they hit a new problem, they were starting from the same emotional point…and there is a limit to how much an author can crank up the tension/emotional level in one problem-solution cycle.

In other words, the author had been paying attention to the scenes and making sure that the loose ends from each plot-incident were tied off, but they’d lost sight of the effect that such a complete wrap-up of each incident ended up having on the story as a whole.

The tricky bit with the macro level is that for a lot of aspects of a story, it is difficult to see until you have the whole thing there to look at. Plot is commonly seen as an exception to this, but that’s only true for writers who plan their plot in advance and stick to their plan. For the rest of us, the overall shape of the plot is something that needs to be looked at when it is all there, and it isn’t all there until the book is finished.

Plot is a bit easier to examine on the macro level than some other things (dialog, theme, characterization, worldbuilding), mainly because part of marketing a novel is producing a plot outline, which forces the writer to condense the plot line into five to ten pages and then to examine those pages to be sure they make sense. For things like characterization and dialog and pacing and so on, there isn’t a built-in marketing tool that makes the writer examine things at a macro level whether they want to or not.

This means the writer has to find some other way of checking whether everything works on the macro level, and whether it all works together. This is one of the reasons so many writing books advise writers to let their work “cool off” for a few weeks or months once it’s finished, and then try to read it as if they’ve never seen it before. This can be really useful, as long as the writer doesn’t get bogged down in fixing the micro-level writing (which happens far too frequently), and as long as the writer doesn’t have too many personal blind spots for macro-level problems (a writer who really doesn’t much care about increasing tension/emotion is unlikely to spot the fact that his/her novel is emotionally flat, just as one who is only interested in the characters’ emotional angst is unlikely to spot problems with balance in exposition or worldbuilding).

Beta-readers can be a useful shortcut for spotting macro-level problems, if you a) can find good, reliable betas, and b) are the sort of writer who is OK with showing your not-completely-finished-and-polished work to other people. If you can’t and you aren’t, you will have to go the slower route of teaching yourself to look at all the aspects of fiction on the macro level when the work is finished.

Subtext

Subtext. According to one of my friends, it’s a “writer thing” that doesn’t matter much to ordinary readers and can therefore be ignored – indeed, that should be ignored if a writer wants to appeal to the maximum number of readers.

I am pretty darned positive that he is wrong.

Let’s start with a definition: subtext is the stuff in a book that isn’t said straight out, but that the reader can infer from what is in the text. At its broadest, it can cover everything from sarcastic dialog to character motivation to sweeping statements about culture and current events (as in Arthur Miller’s The Crucible, which is ostensibly about the Salem witch trials, but which has a strong subtext criticizing the McCarthy hearings of the 1950s as well as the abuse of power and law).

There are three kinds of subtext in every story: 1) The subtext the writer puts there deliberately, 2) The subtext that sneaks in because of the writer’s underlying life assumptions, which the writer is usually unaware of, and 3) The subtext that readers find because of their life experiences and assumptions, which often has little or nothing to do with anything the writer stuck in (whether on purpose or accidentally).

Subtext can be obvious, it can be subtle, and it can be layered. The deliberate use of subtext is most common in dealing with dialog and characterization. There are many, many places in a story where one or more characters say one thing, but mean something else, or mean something in addition to what is actually being said.

“The last orange is right over there” is, on the surface, a perfectly straightforward bit of dialog. The subtext, however, could be anything from “You need to eat more fruit; go eat that orange” to “I hope you don’t want it because I’ve been looking forward to eating it myself but since you’re here I have to offer” to “You’d better eat it after you spent all that money on a luxury item we can’t afford” to “I saved you the last orange; I hope you appreciate it” to “Take the damned orange and get out of here before I beat you to death with the frying pan.” An argument over who gets the TV remote can be, in the subtext, an argument about fairness, about which person has the power in the relationship, about differences in spending habits, about differences in personal taste…practically anything.

Almost all writers make use of subtext in dialog at some point, because few characters always say exactly what they mean, no more and no less. In fact, when a writer comes up with a character who is that blunt, the character often stands out as a little odd compared to the better-socialized characters around them (which can be either a good thing or a bad one, depending on the character’s role in the story). If the subtext of a conversation is extremely important to the plot – for instance, the ambassador is being offered a subtle bribe by one of the local businessmen – the author may make it more explicit for the reader by having the viewpoint character think “He’s trying to bribe the ambassador!” so that nobody will miss the plot point. Much of the time, though, the readers are expected to put the subtext together for themselves from the clues the writer provides (body language, tone of voice, word choice, context).

One of the more effective uses of subtext comes in layering it, such that the reader understands a scene differently depending on how much information he/she has. Memory by Lois McMaster Bujold is a great example: a lot of the conversations with the villain in the first two-thirds of the book mean something completely different once you have read to the end and know exactly what he did, how he did it, and why he did it. The subtext was there the first time through, but the reader doesn’t have quite enough information to interpret it correctly (even if the reader has fingered the villain right from the start).

Writers sometimes make use of broader subtext in order to talk indirectly about things that, for whatever reason, they don’t wish to deal with directly in their work. Writing about aliens or dragons or the way pet shelters are run can get past the automatic knee-jerk reaction that many folks would have if they were faced with a story that dealt directly with a hot-button political or moral issue, even when the parallels are as blatantly obvious as they are in Miller’s play. Dealing with things indirectly can also allow the author more freedom to play with alternatives than trying to look at the problem directly, especially with current controversies. Because if it is current and controversial, odds are good that the writer has just as strong opinions as many of the readers do, and while those opinions can add a lot to a story, they can also get in the way if the writer is more concerned with “proving” that his/her opinions are the right ones than with telling an interesting and enlightening story that will make people think about their own opinions.

Which brings us to the second kind of subtext: the writer’s underlying assumptions about how things are. The writer usually has little control over this kind, mainly because in order to control something, you have to begin by realizing it’s there, and in this case that requires both considerable introspection on a personal level and a lot of analyzing and thinking about the work itself. Writers seldom bother with this because practically no one a) wants to write a book based on faulty assumptions and b) thinks their own current assumptions are flawed. It’s only in retrospect, when the writer (and sometimes the world) has moved on that flaws in the writer’s worldview become obvious, and by then it’s usually too late to fix – as in loads of 1950s novels that are riddled with subtext about the proper roles of women and minorities, for instance.

Not all life-assumption subtext has to do with stereotypes. I know more than one writer whose life has been sufficiently difficult that they are convinced that nothing good ever happens without at least two bad things following it. Their work is good, but depressing, because this worldview underlies ever story they tell; even the “happy ending” stories have a clear subtext of “…but this will never last.”

Writers have no control at all over the third kind of subtext, the kind readers find in their stories because of the readers’ worldview, life experiences, and assumptions. The only way one could control it would be to interview every reader in depth before allowing them to read the book, which would be intrusive and impractical. About the only comfort the writer has is that for every reader who claims their writing is Satanic, there’s one complaining about all the overt Christian symbolism. When people ask me about this (usually in connection with the Enchanted Forest books, which have been called feminist, misanthropic, misogynistic, Satanic, Christian, and a bunch of other mutually contradictory things), I have found that my best option is not to say anything. If that isn’t possible, “That is a very interesting way of looking at it” is a nice, neutral comment that I can generally repeat over and over until the person goes away. (This is assuming that the person is looking to pick a fight, which is frequently the case. The rare ones who are just up for an interesting discussion are another matter.)

The one assumption that I will sometimes actually try to correct is the assumption that there must be subtext, preferably several layers of deliberately hidden subtext, in every good book (because this is what the reader’s Literature classes have trained them to believe). A reader who can’t allow themselves to enjoy a book without picking apart a lot of non-existent layers is missing a lot of enjoyment in reading; at the least, I think they ought to recognize that some books are good for that kind of analysis and some books aren’t, and one can get a great deal of pleasure out of either kind.

Mostly, though, the subtext that readers find because of their personal worldview is exactly like the subtext that gets into a book because of the writer’s worldview – the only thing that is going to clarify the person’s perception is a change in their own worldview resulting from more experience, the passage of time, and shifts in culture and society that expose them.

Writing about Writing

Every so often, I get a request from someone to do a guest blog post or answer some questions for a survey article someone is writing. I almost always turn them down; it is hard enough keeping up with twice-weekly posting on my own blog without adding additional writing on top of that.

Some of these requests are general “we will post anything you want to write” queries, but many want a post on a specific topic (usually some aspect of writing). When there’s a topic, the requester often includes a list of questions, presumably intended either to point the article in a particular direction, or to get my imagination jump-started.

Lately, I have noticed a disturbing trend in some of these question lists. They are starting to follow a pattern, which goes something like this:

-Define (topic)
-Why is (topic) important to a writer/writers of X-type fiction?
-Compare (topic) to (other topic); how are they the same? Different?
-How do you decide where in the story (topic) should happen? How do you get the reader ready for (topic)?
-What are the best and worst examples of (topic)? What are common mistakes writers should avoid?

Frankly, this sort of list always gets my back up. For starters, it reminds me all too strongly of the kind of assignments I used to get from my high school English teachers, which I do not recall with fondness. But the main problem I have is that this sort of list assumes a lot of things about the writing process that I know are not true for me, that I also know are not true for most of my professional-writer friends, and that I think are questionable in the extreme as a jumping-off point for any article intended for would-be writers.

Knowing the definition of terms like plot, subplot, viewpoint, turning point, climax, plot twist, etc. can certainly be useful, especially for analytical writers who want to discuss their work and/or process with other writers. It is hard to have a coherent conversation when the main topic is “that thing that happens in the middle somewhere, except when it happens earlier or almost at the end.” Having labels to hang on things like viewpoint and subtext can also be very useful when a lone writer just wants to examine their own work.

But they aren’t actually necessary. Most of the writers I know are self-taught; they learned their craft, initially, by being voracious readers and then imitating what their favorite writers were doing (sometimes deliberately and consciously, other times without realizing it)…and then looking at what they’d written and paying attention to what worked and what didn’t work, so that they could do more of the former and less of the latter. In many cases, the “paying attention” part involves running the first draft past beta readers, which does get back to the need for mutually-agreed on terminology for “that thing you always do with the characters that doesn’t work,” but if the writer can’t (or simply doesn’t wish to) use beta readers, this difficulty never arises.

As long as the writer has a way of noticing what works and what doesn’t that works for them, it really doesn’t matter whether they know and understand the terms dialog, speech tags, and stage business and break their work down into those categories, or whether they wrap those three things up together and think of them as “peoplespeak.”

The whole “define-explain importance-compare/contrast” sequence appears to me to assume that this essay-writing system is something that can and should be applied to creative writing. This becomes blatantly obvious with points four and five, “how do you decide where (topic) should happen?” and the whole best/worst/mistakes question.

At least half of the writers I know simply do not work in any way that maps to this neat little sequence. They don’t “decide where the climax/first plot twist/end of Act I/viewpoint change” should happen – not in advance, anyway. Several of my writer friends describe their plotting process as looking at a mist-filled valley with a couple of hilltops poking out of the mist in various places. They know (or think they know) that they are going to visit those hilltops in order to get through the valley, but they have no clue whether they are going to be able to walk down into the mist and straight to the first peak, or whether they’re going to find the mist hiding a cracked and broken landscape that makes it impossible to get to Peak #1 without first visiting Peak #3 and backtracking to Peak #2.

This happens to me all the time. I was absolutely positive, until about five chapters before the end of Mairelon the Magician, that the final confrontation between Dan Laverham and Mairelon was going to happen in a London warehouse, with my three main characters facing Dan and a veritable army of his goons. St. Clair was going to show up at the very end of the fight, just when it was supposed to all be over. None of the rest of the characters were supposed to be around at all. I knew exactly what was supposed to happen…only around six chapters from the end, I realized that I didn’t have a satisfying way of dragging them back to London. And I didn’t really need to, because they were all already in more or less the same place. So that clearly visualized dramatic climax got thrown out, and instead I ended up with the farcical confrontation at the lodge that settled a gazillion subplots in one scene.

But that didn’t happen because I sat down and analyzed my plot and decided that I needed to alter my climax. It happened because somewhere around six chapters from the end, the warehouse scene I’d been aiming for started…feeling wrong. Or maybe not wrong, but not as right as I wanted it to be. I could, perhaps, have made it work, but even though the confrontation part felt right, the place and time and cast of characters felt wrong. So I ditched the plan and let each of the characters behave exactly like themselves instead.

And since I didn’t really decide what the final confrontation was going to look like before I wrote it, I also hadn’t done anything to “get the reader ready for it.” Nor did I go back and revise the earlier parts with an eye to increasing the drama (or the comedy) at the end. The editorial revisions ended up having that effect, but that was a happy side-effect rather than a deliberately planned outcome.

Writing fiction is not something that can be done by the numbers – not successfully, anyway. Even the most analytical writer makes a lot of intuitive decisions about everything from specific word choices in a sentence to the overall structure of the story. Trying to turn every choice into a conscious, considered decision is a good way to make the whole process take ten or fifteen times as long as it should, if it doesn’t simply come to a screeching halt.

The last couple of times I got one of these question lists, I have replied as politely as possible that the questions as phrased don’t make a lot of sense to me, that they bear little to no resemblance to the way I write, and that if I answered them as written, I doubt my answers would be terribly useful to anybody. But just for the heck of it, here’s the generic set:

-Define (topic)

It’s a writing term.

-Why is (topic) important to a writer/writers of X-type fiction?   

 It isn’t, really, unless it is something the writer is having trouble with. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.

-Compare (topic) to (other topic); how are they the same? Different?   

They’re both writing topics. They are different because some people will find one useful and other people will find the other useful. Of course, there are also people who will find neither useful or both useful, which I suppose is back to how they are the same.

-How do you decide where in the story (topic) should happen? How do you get the reader ready for (topic)?

I don’t.

-What are the best and worst examples of (topic)? What are common mistakes writers should avoid?

I don’t have any examples because I don’t classify books that way in my head. Mistakes to avoid: having it not work. If it works, it’s not a mistake.

The more things change…

I have officially been in the book business since the late 70s, when I started work in the finance department at B. Daltons; I’ve been selling my writing since 1980, when Ace books bought my first novel, Shadow Magic. So that’s a bit more than thirty-three years, or slightly more than half my life.

And one of the things that has bugged me about the book business, right from the start, is the way business decisions and business discussions are driven by emotions and rumor, often to the exclusion of facts, logic, and common sense. And I don’t mean just among people who desperately want to become writers, either; I’m talking about everybody, up and down the chain, from writers to editors to booksellers to readers.

I can understand some of it. The book business is populated largely by people who love books, and that can’t help but skew the way decisions get made. And let’s face it, everyone makes emotional decisions now and again. But somehow the book business seems to have more than its fair share. And it hurts everybody.

What got me off on this was a discussion I saw a few months back on a writer’s forum, bemoaning the horrible effect that the Borders bankruptcy has had on book sales and worrying over whether Barnes & Noble will be going the same way soon, and how horrible that will be for book lovers everywhere if it happens. And I had one of those do-I-laugh-or-cry moments, because for at least the first ten years of my book business career, from the mid-1970s through the mid-1980s, all I heard from “book people” – especially authors – was how evil the chain bookstores were, how they’d been driving traditional independent bookstores out of business, how much better independent bookstores were, and how great it would be if the big chains like Barnes & Noble would disappear.

I heard the same things for the next ten years or so, only by then it wasn’t the mere existence of chain bookstores folks were bemoaning, it was the “superstore” bookstores they were opening to drive their competition out of business. And now, of course, all those writers are exercised about the very thing that they spent all those years supposedly hoping for – to wit, the potential demise of the bricks-and-mortar chain bookstores.

The context is, of course, different. What is driving the chain bookstores to the brink are ebooks and Amazon and iPads and Kindles and the availability of huge quantities of out-of-copyright fiction for free online. But when it comes right down to it, I don’t think that’s the ultimate problem here.

The real problem, as I see it, is that people don’t like change. They don’t like not knowing how the system works, and they really don’t like not being able to find anyone they trust who is willing to explain the new system to them (even if the explanation is wrong).

I was at a panel a few years ago in which five relatively new writers (i.e., folks with one to five novel sales under their belts) were supposed to talk about the brave new e-publishing and e-marketing world. Instead, the panel turned into fifty minutes of those writers complaining, sometimes bitterly, about how they were floundering around because none of the older, more established writers in the community would explain to them how all this electronic publishing stuff worked and what deals would be good ones and how to use social media to best advantage.

The irony was that the audience was full of older, more established writers who were all hoping that these bright young stars who’d grown up with computers and the Internet and e-everything would explain all this stuff to us.

Change is inevitable, and so, I suppose, is complaining about it. Not everyone is going to like the New Thing that’s replacing their beloved Old Thing, whether that Old Thing is paper and pen being replaced by a typewriter, a typewriter being replaced by a computer, one’s local indie bookstore being replaced by a cookie-cutter chain store, or one’s local chain store going the way of the dodo because they can’t compete with the online retailer.

Still, one doesn’t have to like something in order to cope with it. One does, however, have to admit that it has to be coped with. Continuing to do business-as-usual while complaining bitterly that nothing is like it used to be is not coping. Neither is waiting for someone else to come along and explain it.

The first step in coping is realizing that one needs to do so. The second step is to collect enough information to decide on the third step, which is either to find or hire someone to handle it for you, or else to educate yourself further so that you can handle it yourself. (“It” in this case being everything from online marketing and publicity-via-social-media to ebook contracts [whether with an e-publisher or for direct placement/self-publishing]).

It is perfectly possible to be a happy Luddite about all the online stuff (I know several), but unless you have someone knowledgeable who will keep an eye on it for you, odds are this will come back to bite you in the end. Unless you are lucky and there is another total sea-change in the publishing business before the alligators come after you on this one.

 

Secondary characters

Once you know enough about your main characters to go on with, you have a whole raft of additional characters who also need to be dealt with. Six realistic, deeply realized, well-rounded, fully developed characters surrounded by five or fifteen or thirty cardboard cutouts do not make for an interesting and balanced story in most cases. Of course, if your plot is one where there are no other characters – the five-person crew of a space transport dealing with an emergency far from everywhere, for instance – then this is not a problem.

Most stories, though, need more than just the central characters. There are usually a string of secondary characters, a bunch of minor characters, and sometimes hosts of walk-ons (those armies that are battling at the gates of Mordor are composed of thousands of characters, even if the readers only actually know ten or twelve of them by name).

The difficulty with secondary characters and walk-ons is that for most writers, the more you know about a character, the more interesting they become. This is particularly true if you are the sort of writer who finds out about characters through their stories, and it can result in the writer paying more and more attention to the increasingly interesting secondary character without realizing it, throwing off the whole balance of the story. If the writer is aware of the shift, and OK with switching stories to a new main character, this is not necessarily a problem…unless it happens over and over again.

What such writers need to realize is that every character has an interesting story of their own. The main character’s valet may be a secondary character in the story you are telling, but he is the main character in his own story, where it’s his employer who is the secondary character or a minor walk-on. It is much too easy to get caught up in the fun of making up a new story to fit the suddenly-interesting valet character, and to drop the half-finished employer’s story, especially if the half-finished story is at a sticky point or some bit that is unpleasant or difficult to write.

Recognizing that every character has his or her own story is only the first part of the solution; the second is disciplining oneself to finish up the current project before starting the new one about the valet. Or the one about the bus driver (who turns up in the next chapter and is also incredibly interesting – now that one is paying attention to her personality and backstory – compared to the supposed main character of the current thing). One has to discipline oneself to take a few notes and set them aside for later, for some other story, or in case they come in handy in the current story, and then go back to concentrating on the main character.

The alternative to gritting one’s teeth and getting on with the original project is to be extremely careful not to develop secondary characters so much that they become more fascinating than the main character one started with. This is, for my money, even trickier, especially since it is both a trial-and-error thing and a process thing – for some writers, starting off with the “wrong” main character is something that happens routinely. It is just how they work, and however frustrating it may be, trying to short-circuit the process will only make things worse. Also, every writer has a different point at which a secondary character is “too developed” and starts to take over and wrap the story one intended to tell around them and their story.

Having secondary characters who have really interesting personalities and backstories can contribute a lot to a novel as long as the writer can hold back from trying to cram in a detailed rendition of every minor character’s personal history and/or from running after every new plot thread that starts as soon as a secondary character takes on their own life. The difficulty in holding back appears to increase rapidly if the author starts making the secondary character a viewpoint for a scene or two, which is a really good reason to limit viewpoint shifts even in a multiple-viewpoint novel. It is much more painful to have to cut out an entire set of scenes from a particular character’s viewpoint than it is to not-write those scenes in the first place, for most authors.

That said, if a writer is having trouble getting into a secondary character’s head, one of the best ways to do so is to write a scene from that character’s viewpoint – for preference, something that the writer knows from the start doesn’t belong in the current story. So rather than writing a scene in which the hero’s valet discovers that someone has tampered with the costume the hero is supposed to wear to the ball, it might be better to write a scene in which the hero’s valet is providing advice to his nephew, who wishes to take up the same profession (valet to a hero), or one where the valet is assisting his elderly mother in making her annual bottling of elderberry wine.

As with the central characters, most writers find it useful to know a lot more about secondary characters than ever makes it onto the page. How much is enough…that depends on the writer and the story, as usual. I know very few writers who start off their books knowing everything about all their characters – most of us invent or discover new bits of backstory along the way (and sometimes, those are the best bits).

And then there are the people who never get into the story at all.

A lot of writers go charging into their plot once they have their central characters nailed down, without ever thinking too much about who else is there…or who else could be there. One of the useful ways of checking for plot, character, and backstory holes is to stop and think about this a little. Where does the story take place, and what does that mean about the types of people your protagonist can run into every day? She works in an office building downtown…so she has co-workers, a boss, the boss’s boss, maybe some subordinates, maybe some folks she knows in other departments (everybody knows the I.T. guy sooner or later…)  There’s the barista at the Starbucks where she stops for coffee on her way in, the janitor who always says hi when she’s working late, and that person she’s never met who plays the saxophone every blasted Thursday on the sidewalk eight stories below…right underneath her window. There are the folks from other companies in the same building that she runs into in the elevator or lunch room or parking ramp or on the bus to work. There are her co-workers kids, who have persuaded their parents to sell soccer chocolates or Girl Scout cookies for them at the office. There’s the guy from the United Way who shows up once a year, the UPS delivery person, and the copy machine repair person.

You don’t have to make up all those people before you ever start, because the majority of them will probably never actually appear in the story…but they are all characters who are around, even if they don’t have parts to play this time. I find it useful to keep at least a sketchy list (elevator folks, bus folks, barista, sax player, boss, coworkers) in case I need to mention somebody. Mostly, just thinking about who could be around is enough to let them slip in where they are needed, and if somebody on the list turns out to be more important than I thought, I will usually get an idea of what they are like when they start becoming more important to the main story.

The point is not to show all these people during the heroine’s normal day. Most of them won’t appear at all; in fact, most of them won’t even be mentioned. Knowing that they are out there, though, often allows the author to slip in natural comments or references that they would not have thought of if they were totally focused on the conversation the protagonist is having with her fiancé, without ever having considered who all the protagonist’s casual acquaintances might be.

Booting up the Characters

There are a couple of truisms in fiction, and one of them is “stories are about people.” I’d say “Most stories…” but unless you’re really setting out to write something like Islandia or Utopia or Voyage to Arcturus, you can pretty much go with the truism. This means that learning to write “good characters,” or writing “good characters” even better, is a major focus for all writers, whatever stage of development they’re at and whatever sort of fiction they write.

The trouble is that how one goes about writing “good characters” depends both on the type of writer and on the sort of story one is writing. Some writers have to develop their characters very methodically and in a lot of down-on-paper detail, starting with their birth, childhood, home environment, etc. Others have characters walk into their heads with their personality and appearance fully formed (though they may have to dig for details at certain points in the story). Still others begin by “casting” their characters, basing them on their favorite actors (or on favorite characters played by those actors) and then letting them develop in their own directions as the story progresses. And others “write their way into” their characters…and then have to go back and rewrite the early part of their story where their people were cardboard.

The type of story also has a big impact. Realistic, deeply realized, well-rounded, fully developed characters are seldom suited to a parody like Cold Comfort Farm or a light comedy like P. G. Wodehouse’s Bertie Wooster stories. (OK, Jeeves and Bertie, Flora Poste and the Starkadders are certainly fully realized, but realistic and well-rounded they are not. Which is part of the point and the fun.) Conversely, populating a serious drama with over-the-top stereotypes is unlikely to work well in most cases.

So if one is having trouble with one’s characters, the first step is to figure out what kind of characters will work with whatever story one has in mind. Are you going to be better off with comic exaggeration or a more realistically rounded set of people? Most stories aren’t homogenous – they don’t have only comic characters or only realistically rounded ones or only stereotypes. Think about what mix is going to work most effectively in your story.

If you have a plot, or the skeleton of a plot, you can start with the central characters you know you need – say, a villain, her chief minion, a hero, and his sidekick. You know what their roles in the story are; to make them more than their roles, to make them characters, you need to know what they are like as people. As individuals.

The exact way you approach finding out what each character is like will depend on how you work. If you are a casting-call sort, you start by considering all the TV and movie characters and actors you know, and figuring out who you’d want to play each part in your story. If you are a “walk-into-the-head” type, you can probably ignore everything else here, because you already know what your characters are like. But the methodical-development process can be useful for anyone who’s stuck, if only as something to make your backbrain scream “No! Not like that! Like this!” so that you can get on with things.

For this, you start with one of your major characters – the villain’s chief minion, say – and look at what the plot requires him to be. Then you invent some backstory for him, based on what you know about the story and the world. How did he meet the villain? Has he been with her since she started her villainous career, or did he sign on once she already had her evil organization up and running? Did he work his way up through the ranks, or did he hire on at a high level to begin with? Do you need to know anything about his childhood? Does he have any personal grudges against any of the other characters? Is he content to be Chief Minion, or is he plotting a takeover? How does he present himself – is he sleek and smooth-talking, or is he a brute force kind of guy? What does he like doing for fun that’s not evil and villainous?

Some of the answers you come up with – like whether he has personal grudges against other characters, or how he met the villain and became her Chief Minion – will affect the backstory of other characters. Some of it may require tweaking the worldbuilding so that there suddenly are pirate magicians in this world, or some other thing you didn’t previously know about that you need in order to give Chief Minion the background that feels right, and that gives you a feel for what he’s like. These are not set questions; you ask yourself whatever you need to ask in order to get to know the character. If he has a ragged scar across the left side of his face, but you already know that it doesn’t have anything to do with what he’s like or with the plot, then you don’t have to waste time coming up with backstory for how he got it. You need to know what you need to know so that you can write the way this character moves, talks, acts, and thinks, and so that you know what kinds of choices he will make.

Once you’ve gone as far as you can with that character, you move on to another one and go through the same process. You may not yet have enough to really write Chief Minion yet, but that’s all right; you can circle back to him later, when you have at least some background/backstory on each of the other characters. In fact, you probably will have to circle back, because unless all these characters are complete strangers at the start of the story (and Chief Minion really ought to at least know the villain by then), things you make up for one of them can affect the backstory for others, and the tweaks you have to make to the worldbuilding for the sidekick’s background to work may have a ripple effect on the villain’s background, and from there to the minion’s. Or you may come up with an idea for the hero that doesn’t feel quite right for him, but that suits your Chief Minion admirably.

Every so often, you will hit something that you just know is the way things are. My current viewpoint character is the eldest of at least three children, has an uncle she adores for various reasons, and is currently an apprentice seamstress. Lots of things can change about this character, but those elements are set in stone. I also currently think she was brought up in the country, that her mother is emotionally fragile, that she gets on well with the woman she’s apprenticed to; I’m still waffling on whether she has magic, but I’m leaning toward yes. Those things can change if I think of something that feels as if it fits better than what I’ve decided so far.

If you are having trouble with a particular character at this point, it can help to scrape everything back to the stuff you are absolutely positive of, the stuff that your backbrain screams “NO!” at you if you even think about changing it. For Max, that’s two younger siblings, being an apprentice seamstress, and the uncle. If you have quite a lot of development done, but it just isn’t gelling, start from the stuff that is rock-solid and try on alternatives for everything else. I thought she was a country girl; maybe she’s always lived in the city. I thought her father was dead; maybe he just disappeared, or maybe he’s still around as a respectable tradesman or a soldier; maybe he abandoned the family; maybe he faked his death. Lots of those alternatives would affect the plot, but I’m not worried about that at the moment. I’m worried about what feels right as Max’s backstory, the stuff that I can point at and say “This is what happened, and it’s why she’s like that.”

I tend to approach my characters through their stories – that is, I think about the things that have happened to them, and then think about the ways it might have made them turn out. It is perfectly possible to do it the other way – to decide that your character is shy, or intellectual, or bad-tempered, and then come up with incidents from their past that will explain how they got that way.

The whole development stage eventually turns into a round-robin, with the worldbuilding changing to accommodate the background for the Chief Minion, which affects the plot, which affects what the hero and villain have to be like, which affects their backgrounds, which affects the worldbuilding again. If you keep going around and following all the ripple effects, they eventually get smaller and smaller (usually). At some point, you will have enough information to go on with; at that point, or perhaps one round after, it’s a good idea to, well, go on. You can keep chasing tweaks and ripple effect stuff forever if you don’t set yourself some limits. And really, you probably don’t need to know what kind of ice cream they served at the hero’s sixth birthday party. You just need to know that the hero now likes strawberry better than chocolate.

Writing YA fiction

I’ve had a couple of emails in the past week about writing YA or teen fiction, with emphasis on what the writer has to do differently in terms of plot, worldbuilding, characterization, description, dialog, etc. when writing for that audience. So I thought I’d talk a bit about that today.

My first reaction was, predictably, that the writer doesn’t do anything different about any of those things just because he/she is writing for a younger audience. At a certain point – middle grade and under, usually – questions of reading skill come into play, and vocabulary and sentence length get shorter and simpler as you get more and more toward beginning readers, but from YA up there really isn’t any difference in the amount of work the writer puts into each of those things.

What there is, is a difference in tone. This is difficult to describe, and is getting less important as YA and teen publishers go for “edgy” titles that get gritty and graphic about problems like drugs, sex, and suicide (to name three that are perennially popular topics for edgy teen fiction). If you are determined to consider your audience while writing (something that has never worked for me), the best way to get a feel for YA tone is to read a lot of YA books.

My personal feeling is that one gets the best results by telling whatever story one needs to tell, to the best of one’s ability, in whatever way and with whatever techniques, characters, world, etc. that particular story seems to require. Once it is all done, then you figure out whether it will sell better as a YA, teen, or adult book. Or better yet, let your agent decide what it is, assuming you have one. The market keeps changing, and what used to be adult fantasy is now YA, and several YA series have migrated to the adult shelves.

Doing it this way can be disconcerting. You may write an entire 90,000 word novel that you are positive is going to be gritty, realistic, fraught adult SF, only to discover that your agent is merrily sending it to YA and teen lines. You may find your fluffy YA going out to a “light fantasy” adult line. If something like this happens, you will undoubtedly be tempted to make some revisions to “make the story more compatible with its intended audience.”

My advice is, do not do this. Not unless, and until, an editor has bought the thing and asks for some specific changes, and even then consider carefully. Because if you followed the initial advice – write the story you need to tell, to the best of your ability, in whatever way it needs to be written – then trying to tweak it for a specific audience will very likely break one of those things, to the detriment of the story. (That it, it will no longer be quite the story you wanted to tell, or done the best way, because that’s where you started off before the tweaks, and there’s nowhere to go, theoretically, but down.) And in my experience, it is easier to sell a story that has been done as right as one can do it, than to sell one that has been turned into something mediocre but with a “slant” toward a particular audience.

There are certainly exceptions to this, but they are few and far between, and generally not the sorts of things that arise for an unpublished or early-career writer. About the only one I can think of is the rare instance in which the author has, for some reason, had an epiphany about writing and/or the particular story that changes one of those basic parameters – that is, the story you want to tell or the best way to tell it. (I am currently doing a major rewrite on an unpublished short story that I wrote nearly thirty years ago, as a result of such an epiphany – I ran it through my current writer’s group, two of the members fingered two separate problems, and in a stunning revelation I realized that eliminating one character and giving all his action to a different one would not only solve both problems at once, but would significantly tighten the story. So this kind of thing is not limited to a particular point in one’s career, or to a particular time period after completing a draft.)

All that was my first reaction to the whole “What is different about writing YA?” question. My second reaction was much delayed, probably because it ought to go without saying for every audience, but it is a problem one sees more frequently in children’s fiction than in other sorts:

Do not condescend to your readers.

This is a Bad Thing no matter what you are writing, but it is especially deadly in children’s books, because you can get away with it just long enough to wreck things permanently. Children’s book manuscripts are bought and edited by adults; once published, they are largely reviewed, distributed, and sold to other adults. If the book pleases those adults enough, some of them will overlook a light condescending tone, or even see it as a nudge-nudge-wink-wink that adults will get and kids won’t.

That trick never works.

Kids are, if anything, even more sensitive to being condescended to than adults are, and they will stay away from such an author’s books in droves. Eventually, this will get through to the adults who are buying copies for libraries or grandchildren or nephews and nieces, and the author’s sales will tank. If the author is lucky, he/she will be able to switch to selling to the adult market, but that doesn’t happen often. Basically, if you think you are smarter and better and cooler and more grown-up than kids, and/or that you have lots of worthwhile lessons to convey to them in your writing, you probably shouldn’t be writing fiction for them at all.

Getting ready to get ready

When I was in college, I had a friend who wanted to be a fantasy writer. He had his career all planned out, and the first thing on his list was to acquire the skills and information he needed to write good fantasy. He had chosen his major and area of focus – medieval history – so that he could write about the Middle Ages accurately, and not just imitate imitations invented by other fantasy writers. At the time, I was really impressed by his planning and forethought.

A few years later, as I was going back to grad school, I ran into him again. He’d gotten a job in computers, because it paid well, and he was working long hours to save up a nest egg so he could quit for a year and write a novel. Again, I was impressed. I still wasn’t even sure what I wanted to be, and here he was, working hard to get where he wanted to go. I was embarrassed to show him  my half-written first novel, since I was sure he could pick holes in it. So I didn’t.

Time passed: I graduated, got a job, and finished my novel. About the time I started submitting it, I ran into my friend again. He was in a night school creative writing program so he could get the skills he would need to create great prose. And somehow his nest egg wasn’t growing as fast as he’d expected, so it was going to be a while before he could take that sabbatical and write his novel. As I was halfway through my second manuscript by this time, without ever quitting my day job, I was slightly less impressed than I’d been before.

Another year or two went by. My first novel sold; so did my second. My would-be-writer friend decided he needed some psychology classes so his characters would be realistic and believable. I sold more novels and quit my day job to write. My friend started investigating  advanced writing workshops.

You see where this is going, right? I haven’t run into him for a good while, but the last time I heard, he was working on writing the perfect computer program with which to write his book (since none of the available word processors or writing programs were suitable in his eyes). So far as I know, he still hasn’t written a word of fiction. He’s spent more than thirty years getting ready to be a writer, none of which has involved actually writing anything. And if he ever decides to take that first step, he is then going to have to spend more time getting ready to write whatever story he’s decided to tell.

Getting ready to write is an important step, and it can take longer than you think it will. I know writers whose modus operandi is to wander around, party, and reading/doing interesting things apparently at random for eight or ten months, at which point they vanish into their offices for three months and emerge with a finished manuscript. Their work style is a bit like the sports teams that spend six days practicing in order to have a perfect two-hour game on Sunday. Other folks go at it in an extremely organized fashion, allotting six months or a year or two to research and pre-writing work and then starting in on the actual manuscript at the end of that time. And some of us do the research and learning as we go on, muddling a bit farther, then looking some things up, revising, noticing how something could be better, revising again, and trying to improve all the time.

The thing is, all of us have a goal, and it’s not “to be a writer” or “to write a perfect story.” The goal is “to get this story finished so I can go on to the next one.” Getting this story finished can involve plenty of getting ready, whether that means research on the Middle Ages or figuring out how to make good use of a technique like flashbacks, or creating a richly detailed background and complex characters in advance.

All of that work, though, is aimed at something specific. When I am reading about the Middle Ages or the Renaissance, I’m sort of generally grazing through history, hoping something will spark an idea and knowing that even if it doesn’t, it’s all going into compost. I’m not pretending that it’s any better preparation for “being a fantasy writer” than reading mysteries set in modern Los Angeles. The part that is actually getting ready to write is the research I do on London in 1683, or Kent in 1814, or the development of the first railroad lines in England, because those are specific things I need to know about for ideas that I know I am making into a story any minute now.

How much preparation any given writer needs to do varies. Some take years; others take hours or days. It varies with the book, too; I did a good year of research for Snow White and Rose Red and none at all (or all my life to that point, depending on how you look at it) for Talking to Dragons. And my friend started off with the right idea – knowing how the real Middle Ages work is something that will be invaluable to him, if he ever gets around to writing anything.

But ultimately, it’s not about wanting to write, or having terrific skills at creating beautiful prose, or making up a complicated and fascinating setting. It’s about having a story to tell. And stories come from different places and different combinations of things for every writer. If researching the Middle Ages gives you stories to tell, do it and do lots of it. If it doesn’t, hunt up the thing that does. You can still read about the Middle Ages for fun, or for general background on the story you got from reading the book on weaving, or watching the video about dinosaurs, or eavesdropping on the next table at the coffee shop. Just don’t fool yourself by saying you’re “collecting material” when you don’t actually have a story you want to tell, because if you don’t have a story, you can pile material up to the moon and still not write.