Patricia C. Wrede's Blog, page 46

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Behaving professionally, Part II – Conventions

OK, the RSS feed is not working; I am also having trouble importing paragraph breaks in the new blog. So this is going on the old blog and we’ll work on fixing the new one when my webmaster gets back next week.

One of the things most newly published professionals do is attend conventions, school fairs, and trade shows in hopes of publicizing their books. Sometimes, especially if the publisher is enthusiastic, they will arrange the first few events and have someone around to steer their new authors. Most of the time, they don’t, especially if the event is small.

Either way can cause problems. Some folks get so used to having someone official around to handle all the little things and make sure everything runs smoothly that when they have to do it on their own, they miss things. Sometimes, this is merely inconvenient; other times, it makes them look bad.

The first principle of going to events is that you are doing it to publicize your book; therefore, you do not want to look bad. Not looking bad means that you are prepared for whatever you are being asked to do, whether that’s panels, a reading, autographing, an interview, a kaffeeklatsch, a speech, etc.

The first part of being prepared is knowing in advance what you are going to be asked to do, and when it is. I cannot begin to count the number of times some author has missed a panel on their first day because they didn’t arrive in time. Sometimes, this is a problem with scheduling on the convention side; other times, the author was notified but neglected to look at the email carefully enough to catch the problem. The convention can’t fix what they don’t know about.

Knowing what you are going to be asked to do means also knowing what to bring with you. If it’s a reading, bring something to read; if it’s an informal coffee, think up a few questions for the fans in case you need to get the conversation going (but if they have questions, let them go first). “What do you like best about my book(s)?” is a good one, on the theory that people sign up for informal get-to-know-the-author things because they like the author’s books and want to find out more about them.

Always bring several pens that you know work. Whether it’s a panel, a formal speech, an informal meet-the-author, or anything in between, you never know when someone is going to come up afterward and want an autograph because they can’t make it to the official signing. If things have run a bit late and folks are trying to set up for the next panel, point this out and ask your fans to come out in the hall so you won’t hold things up; then sign their stuff and chat for a little.

When you are at an event, you are “on” every minute you are not actually alone in your hotel room. This is true even if you are a first-time author whose novel is not actually out yet. So be polite. If the convention has a “green room,” spend some time hanging out there; it is a good place to meet fellow pros. If this is your first time on a panel or at a convention, admit it and ask for advice.

Do not spend all your time in the green room schmoozing with fellow pros. SF/F conventions always have a consuite; spend some time hanging out there. If you’re at a trade show like the American Bookseller’s Association, the American Library Association, the National Conference of Teachers of English, etc., there is often something similar; find out where.

If a convention invites you directly to go, or if you just want to go to one you’ve been hearing about for years and now have a good excuse to attend, let your publisher know. They may not be much help (this is actually likely if you’re new and the convention is small), but on the other hand, they might…and it is a relatively non-pushy way to let them know that you are out there actually doing publicity on your own.

If you are at a convention or trade show, try to make a pass through the dealer’s room early on. Note who has your books and who doesn’t (so you can point people to the right places if/when they ask after panels or at readings or autograph sessions). Introduce yourself if you have time; ask if they’d like you to come back and sign stock on the last day and if they do, what time.

Different types of conventions handle readings, autographings, and panels differently. Fan-run SF/F conventions tend to be informal; panels are usually three to seven people who’ve been given a topic to discuss and a moderator whose job it is to keep the conversation moving and take audience questions. Academic style panels involve similar numbers of people, but they give you the topic in advance and expect each “panelist” to present a ten to twenty-minute speech on the subject before taking audience questions. If you are expecting one kind and end up with the other kind, it can be nerve-wracking (especially if you were supposed to have a speech and don’t). Do not believe academic institutions when they tell you the panel will be an informal discussion. Their idea of “informal” is “it isn’t a paper with footnotes;” at least, that’s what has happened every single time to me.

Informal SF/F type panels have two basic functions: to inform, or to entertain. It often helps to connect with the moderator and/or other panelists in advance (in the green room) to find out which way they’re planning to slant it and what kinds of things they’re going to ask, especially if you haven’t done this much before.

At an SF/F convention, it is considered OK to bring a copy of one or two of your books and set them up in front of you so people can see what you wrote. It is not considered OK to bring eight or ten copies and fill the front of the table you’re sitting behind so that nobody can see you or the person next to you. The more academic or professional the event is, the more they’re likely to have policies about this kind of thing, so ask first, and don’t be surprised if they tell you they prefer that people keep the presenter’s table clear.

Being at a convention to promote your book does not mean talking about nothing else. If the first thing you think of when someone asks a question is an example from writing your own book – an especially if this happens every time someone asks a question – keep your mouth shut until you can think of an example from someone else’s book (unless of course the question was specific to you or your writing, like “How do you come up with the character names in your books?”)

If you are on a panel with someone who has more experience or who is better known than you are, try not to interrupt. Especially if it’s the Guest of Honor. Politely saying “That’s not the way I do it” or “I don’t think I agree” is perfectly acceptable; spending fifteen minutes of the one-hour panel in an impassioned attack on New York publishing is not. (I actually saw a small press editor do this once…on a panel with two highly respected editors from two different New York publishing houses, one of whom was the convention’s Editor Guest, whom I had come to hear. Not only was I annoyed, I determined five minutes in that I would never, ever, ever submit anything to this particular small press as long as that editor was running it. Which I doubt was what the editor had in mind.)

On the other hand, if you are thirty minutes into a one-hour panel and the “moderator” has yet to let you say anything, your only recourse is to interrupt. This has only happened to me three times that I recall, and twice were panels that included an academic who was clearly accustomed to the “give a ten minute speech and then someone else gets a turn” type of panel, rather than the “moderator asks a question and everybody starts discussing it” type. In the third instance, the moderator was clearly a big fan of one of the authors on the panel and essentially started interviewing just him, leaving the other three panelists completely out in the cold. If you have been asked to moderate a panel, do not do this. Ever.

If you have been asked to moderate a panel, be prepared. Remember: panels are to inform, entertain, or both. Come up with a bunch of questions to get the discussion going and keep it going. Try to talk to the other panelists about what they expect. The first panel I ever moderated, half of the panelists thought it was a serious panel on the numinous in SF/F, and the other thought it was supposed to be about Buddhism. If I’d figured that out earlier, I’d have been in a lot better shape. Also, if the discussion seems not to be going well, you can always start taking questions from the audience early.

If you are moderating, one of your jobs is to make sure that every panelist gets a chance to say something and that none of them monopolizes the conversation. Pay attention to who’s said things (and what) and who hasn’t.

Pay attention to the way other writers behave and how they are viewed by the attendees as a result. Don’t be late to anything you are scheduled for if you can possibly help it. If you’ve been scheduled for five panels in a row, right across lunch and dinner, talk to the convention staff as soon as you realize this and arrange to skip at least one. Let the moderator know, and let them know why.

Be polite.

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The new blog and website integrated format has gone live as of 8/22/13. We are leaving the old version here for a while so people can still find it, but everything new will be going on the new page, which can be accessed through the main web site at pcwrede.com (http://www.pcwrede.com/). Please email me at pcwrede@pcwrede.com or post ON THE NEW SITE if you have any problems with the new format.

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Behaving professionally Part 1: Autographings

Back in my very young and salad days, when I was around 15-16, the original Star Trek series was the hot new thing on TV and my parents took me to see Leonard Nimoy in a summer-season play at the Goodman Theater in Chicago. After the play, Mr. Nimoy not only came out and answered questions, but graciously offered to sign autographs, and my folks agreed to let me stand in line for one.

“Stand in line” proved to be a euphemism; Mr. Nimoy was at a folding table with half the audience crowded around and people shoving forward with their program books from every direction. I managed to find a spot near one end of the table, but I was 15 and shy and the only teenager there. So I stood waiting for the crowd to clear out and get less pushy.

And then, all of a sudden, Mr. Nimoy (who had been signing as fast as he could and exchanging an occasional comment with people while moving everyone along at a rapid pace, and who surely did not have any attention left for anything else) turned to me and said in an extremely kind voice, “Do you want your program signed? You’ve been standing there an awfully long time.” And then he signed it for me and went back to dealing with everyone else.

The signed program book has long since gone the way of things that vanish in the course of multiple house-moving, but I have never forgotten that moment. I never expected to have any use for the behavior, but I never forgot it. It set a standard for me in dealing with “the public” at conventions and autograph sessions that I didn’t know I was going to need…but boy, was it a lesson worth learning. I don’t expect that I will ever have a chance to meet Mr. Nimoy again, but if I ever do, I hope I remember to thank him for that moment of kindness to a shy fifteen-year-old, and tell him how its influence has rippled down the years.

Because one of the very best ways I know to get a sense of how to handle the change from unpublished wannabe to newly-published professional, reasonably successful midlist writer, or red-hot property, is to listen to and closely observe the people who are farther up the ladder than you are. “If you want a better job, dress and act like the people who already have it.” And pay attention to which of those folks are well-liked and approved of by fans and other professionals, and which rate a headshake or an eyeroll and an “Oh, that’s him again,” because it is a rare person who can pull off the truly-obnoxious-bad-boy persona among fans and other professionals and still have a solid professional career.

Behaving badly, whether to fans, to would-be writers, to fellow professionals, or to publishing professionals (editors, agents, etc.), is almost certain to hurt your career if you do it. I’ve watched a number of folks over the years try to imitate various well-known “bad boy” or “brat pack” authors. I only know two whose careers were as successful as they should have been (and that’s not just my judgment; I’ve had editors and agents weigh in with similar opinions in all cases), and both of those two not only recognized that there was a line they shouldn’t cross and tried not to cross it, but to my personal knowledge also admitted and apologized sincerely on those occasions when they did cross that line.

So assuming that you are not trying to become known for bad behavior, I present some recommendations for the published who are doing events and autographings. Note that many of them sound similar to last post’s tips for would-be writers. This is because, as before, a lot of it is common sense and basic good manners.

1. Be polite. Always. To everyone, from the pushy fan to the shy fifteen-year-old to the obnoxious old pro. (Note that “polite” does not mean “pushover.” If you have trouble politely dealing with obnoxious people, practice ahead of time.) Do not be a diva. Don’t kvetch if nobody shows up; it isn’t the staff’s fault. Bookstore autographings, in particular, are feast or famine: you either get five people in two hours, three of whom are family, or you get fifty people in the first ten minutes. Guess which is more common.

2. Be on time. Do not plan your travel so that you will sweep in at the last minute, because there is sure to be a traffic jam or a flat tire, and even if there isn’t, you will make the event organizers worry enormously for no good reason, which is not polite (see #1). Also, if you arrive spang on the moment, you will not have any time to correct potential problems (see #4, below), and believe me, you will regret it.

3. Allow enough time. Try not to schedule an important meeting or dinner with your editor such that you have to leave at the end of your one-hour autographing on the dot (or worse yet, ten minutes before the hour is over). There are often last-minute arrivals, and they’re usually the ones who drove eighty miles in the snow to meet their favorite author. Also, staying a few minutes more allows you time to schmooz with the bookstore people, who may like you enough to hand-sell some more copies of your book.

4. Don’t leave early, even if there are only ten minutes to go and no one has come by since the two people who asked where the bathroom was, forty minutes ago.

5. Be prepared. Really prepared. Yes, the convention committee or the bookstore staff or the publisher’s handle should have made sure you have water/soda/coffee/tea and pens and comfortable seating and enough space and a working microphone and so on, but they don’t always. Bring a copy of your book (yes, I have arrived at “autograph sessions” to find that the books didn’t come). Bring pens (more than one, that you are sure work). Bring a water bottle, just in case. It is also nice (but not required) to have something to give away to people, like bookmarks, and it is frequently helpful to have a stack of plain book plates that you can sign for people who didn’t or couldn’t bring all their books from home. It is often useful to bring your own author placard (at conventions, you can usually swipe one from a panel, if you are on one).

6. Don’t go overboard. Having giveaway bookmarks is one thing; setting up your autograph table with souvenir mugs, T-shirts, and key rings with the cover of your book on them (for only $15 each!) is tacky at best. At worst, you will annoy the convention or bookstore people. If you want to sell your book-related stuff, make arrangements with someone in the dealer’s room (at a con) or check with the event organizers or bookstore people in advance to see what you can set up. Do not expect a bookstore to take your leftover bookmarks and put them by the cash register for more free publicity. Publishers pay money to have bookstores put their stuff by the cash register; they are not going to put your stuff there for free.

7. Unless you have stated up front that you will not put anything in the book but your name and the date, always ask if the person wants an autograph personalized, who to, and how to spell the name. You’d be surprised at how many ways there are of spelling even a simple name like “Kate” (Cate, Kait, Cait, Cayt…).

8. Try to exchange a few words with everyone, especially the shy ones. Keep an eye on the line, though; some folks will want to start a ten-minute conversation when there are still twenty folks waiting. Be pleasant. If somebody is really interesting, make an appointment to meet them later; don’t try to find out everything they know about obscure poisons or the weather in Kathmandu in the middle of an autographing.

9. Establish a policy ahead of time about pictures – yes, or no. Feel free to change it if the line is longer or shorter than you expect, but try not to change in the middle of a session. It’s not fair to the folks who came through earlier. And don’t let people take up loads of time getting different shots if there’s a line. They can wait til the end of the autographing if they want more than one picture. (If there’s no one else around, of course, you might as well spend the last fifteen minutes on an amateur photo shoot.)

10. If you have reason to believe that there will be a lot of people there, bring a friend who can and will gopher for you (“gopher coffee; gopher another pen; gopher that thing I left in the back seat of the car”) and who can sit and open books to the signing page to speed the line along. Also bring a pad of Post-It notes or 3×3 cards. If the line is really long, it will speed things up enormously if people write their names for you and mark the signing page. If it isn’t, you can doodle on them.

11. If the event organizers screw up, do not take it out on the fans. If they told you to come from 1-2 and the publicity said “will be signing from 3-4,”  try your best to stay or come back when people expect you to be there (and if you can’t, sign some books and leave some signed bookplates if there’s anyone there you trust to hand them out).

12. Be polite. Thank the people who invited you, even if they are the only ones who came. Blame the weather or the home game for the lousy attendance. Offer to sign their stock if they don’t ask. Don’t rant on your blog about what a horrible job they did.

Next time: professional behavior at conventions/trade shows.

Being professional before you are

This week, my walking buddy told me about an incident involving a mutual friend, who is a major tech consultant-type. Seems some gentleman who wanted advice on his algorithm offered to pay for two hours of critique/consulting time at a not-unreasonable-but-on-the-low-side rate. So the consultant-type agreed, took a look at the algorithm, and gave the gentleman his opinion.

Whereupon the gentleman attempted to open a correspondence arguing about the consultant-type’s analysis, in effect demanding a) more of the consultant-type’s time, unpaid, and b) that the consultant change his mind to an opinion the gentleman would find more palatable.

The incident got me thinking. It corresponds almost exactly to a problem faced by many, many professional writers: the would-be and wannabe writers who approach the professional, requesting or demanding review and comment and critique on their unpublished manuscripts. Many of us would very much like to assist these folks, as a pay-forward for all the professionals who helped us out back in the day, answering our newbie questions and providing information we didn’t know we needed.

The problem is that we don’t have the time to help everybody. We are writers, not teachers. Doing review and comments and critique and advice takes time, and when we’re on a deadline (and often even when we aren’t) there just isn’t time to spare for everyone who wants it. So we have to pick and choose and figure out how to tell people “No” – and which people to tell it to. And one of the things we base that choice on is how people behave.

Back in business school, they used to say “if you want a better position, you have a better chance of getting it if you dress and act as if you already have that position.” It holds for publishing, too: if you want to be professionally published, behave like a professional.

This doesn’t mean you can’t ask for advice or help; it merely means that if you do, you will get the best results if you do so in a professional manner. “Behaving professionally” is mostly common sense, but here are some guidelines:

1. Be polite. Always. Dust off your grandmother-manners; say “please” and “I really appreciate this” and do not make demands or insult the author, the author’s work, or the publishing industry (“With all the crap that gets published, I figure my book should be a shoe-in for the bestseller list. I figure you can confirm that since you’re published, even if I haven’t ever seen your name on the NY Times list.”)

2. Do not take your paper ms. to a convention, autographing, speech, or other author/editor appearance in hopes of giving it to them there. They are probably away from home and don’t have room in their suitcase anyway.

3. Do not accost a writer or editor at their sister’s wedding, their cousin’s bar mitzvah, their spouse’s office party, the church social, or any other non-publishing related event and start talking about your manuscript (or worse, your terrific as-yet-unwritten idea). It is insulting to the sister, cousin, spouse, or whatever the event is actually supposed to be about. And yes, those are real examples.

4. Let the subject of books, writing, etc. come up naturally (and it probably will). If you want to speed things up a little, you can ask if they’ve read anything interesting recently, but I’d advise against it unless you are actually willing to talk about other people’s books and what’s good and bad about them, rather than about your own ms. If you are willing, you may very well learn some things, and will probably end up with some excellent book recommendations, even if you never get around to mentioning the thing that you wrote.

5. It nearly always works best if you do not ask for comments or crit, even after the subject has come up. If the writer knows you, likes you, and has time, they may – may – offer to look at your work. Say thank you and try not to expect an introduction to their editor or agent, or even a blurb. Intelligent comments are actually going to do you a lot more good in the long run.

5a. If you already friends with one or more professional writers, do not be afraid to ask for help and advice. Most of the previous guidelines apply to people who are cold-calling, so to speak; folks who are meeting an author/editor for the very first time and hoping for some help. It doesn’t apply to you, because you already know the person. You won’t screw up years of friendship by asking, as long as you are willing to take “Arggh, the copyedit just came and my cat is sick and the dryer broke and I can’t, arggh” as a reasonable answer. Or a writer’s answer, anyway.

6. If you are going to ignore all of the above and approach a writer you don’t know, or know only slightly, directly with a request for crit, offer to pay for it up front. And be aware that you won’t be paying minimum wage, either. A good book doctor got roughly $10 per page the last time I looked at rates (several years back), and that works out to $3,000 for a 300-page ms. And the better known the writer is, the higher the reasonable price of their time will be. You are not just asking them to spend four hours reading your book and another six or eight hours writing up comments for you. You are asking them to spend twelve hours of writing time on your book. There is an opportunity cost. Recognize it.

7. When you get the author/editor’s comments, listen. Do not argue. You asked for an informed opinion (or were offered one); that’s what you are getting. If you don’t like what you hear, too bad. You have three professional-behavior choices: you can do what the author suggests, you can ignore the author’s advice completely, or you can decide on some different way of fixing whatever difficulty the author has fingered for you. Arguing and objecting is not one of the options here. Neither is explaining to the author which bits of his/her advice you deem acceptable and which you are going to ignore or handle differently. You don’t have to justify it or explain it, and you’re much better off not doing so. Just quietly make the changes you’re going to make and ignore what you’re going to ignore.

8. You can, and should, ask for clarification or explanation of any comments you don’t understand. You are allowed to ask “Why didn’t you like the protagonist?”; it is “But you are supposed to like the protagonist!” or “No, of course you like the protagonist! You have to!” that are…inadvisable arguments. The reader knows whether he/she likes something or not, and whether he/she understood something or not. If the author suggests something that you think is completely impossible, the most useful response is not “That’s ridiculous!” but something more like “I see what you are saying, but I have no idea how to fit it into this scene without slowing everything down.” If you are brave, you can ask for specific suggestions (assuming they haven’t already been made), but don’t do this unless you are serious. If you have every intention of ignoring the writer’s advice on this point, just say “thank you for that observation” or “I will certainly think about that” and move on.

9. The fact that someone is your favorite author does not mean that he/she will understand, enjoy, or approve of your ms. It also doesn’t meant that he/she will be particularly good at giving critique. Not all of us are. Also, everybody has hot buttons, and if you accidentally hit one of your critiquer’s, things can get remarkably fraught very quickly, because your critique is not reacting to your manuscript but to that horrible incident when they were trapped in a closet for five hours when they were nine, or whatever. Again “Thank you, I will think about that” can usually move things out of heavy waters without too much damage being done.

10. You have your own hot buttons. Try to be aware of them, so that if your critiquer hits one, you can take a deep breath and set it aside. Because your critique doesn’t know that you already tried opening the ms. ten months earlier and it didn’t work, or that there’s a bit of backstory that won’t come out until Book 3 that makes it impossible for the sidekick to ever get together with the hero’s sister.

11. Be polite. Always. Say “thank you for taking the time” even if you hate everything you’ve heard. Do not go home and rant on your blog about the horrible advice you got from the nasty professional author, not even if you do it “in private” to a few close personal friends. On the Internet, it’s never truly private, and it lasts forever, most especially whenever you particularly don’t want it to.

Idiot Plots

An idiot plot was first defined by James Blish as a plot that only hangs together because all of the main characters act like idiots. I’d add “…when they’re not supposed to be idiots,” because there are plenty of effective (usually comic) stories where the point is that the main characters are supposed to be idiots. The Three Stooges, for instance. Or Bertie Wooster.

A true idiot plot isn’t supposed to be funny, and it isn’t usually a matter of a single stupid mistake or decision on the part of a couple of main characters (though if the mistake is big enough, it can happen). It’s a matter of supposedly intelligent characters overlooking the obvious, making foolish decisions, and ignoring better choices over and over again, without any plausible justification.

Let me repeat that in slightly different words: one giant plot hole does not an idiot plot make, nor does one stupid character, nor does a character or set of characters who are obviously supposed to be feckless and inattentive. An idiot plot is when you have five supposedly-sensible characters sitting around trying to come up with a plan for getting into the fortress, and the very first thing they all agree is that they should not try to trick the guards, and ten pages later the plan they’ve come up with is to trick the guards anyway, when it is perfectly obvious to the reader that based on what they’ve said, they don’t need to get into the fortress at all. And this sort of thing happens over and over.

Every once in a while, you run across a single mistake that is enough to turn a story into an idiot plot all by itself. Usually, it is something that’s a major turning point in the plot that the average reader just can’t buy. For instance, I read a story a while back in which the heroine was supposed to be very smart. The story opened with this woman explaining to her partner why she could not, under any circumstances, contact her sister in any way, for fear of leading the drug lords they were chasing to her innocent family. The heroine had, in fact, sent the sister off into hiding with cleverly designed, multiply-redundant safety factors, and no one but the heroine knew where the sister was.

OK, at this point it was already obvious, given the tropes of modern fiction, that something was going to go wrong and the villains were somehow going to find the sister. The question was, how? The heroine had done a really good job of hiding her, so about all I could think of was the heroine breaking under torture.

No such thing. In mid-book, the heroine’s partner is killed and she is so distraught that all she can think of is going to find her sister and crying all over her. She forgets all about the careful safety factors and redundancies and so on, and buys a plane ticket in her own name and goes straight to where the sister is living, without making any effort at all to throw off the villain’s henchmen that she knows are tailing her and without telling anyone where she is going. Naturally, the villain follows, captures them both, torture and questioning, etc., followed by the heroine on a massive guilt trip for leading the villain straight there, which provides much of the character development for the last half of the book.

The rest of the plot was fine, but so much of it hung on this one incident that I’d have to call the whole thing an idiot plot. I suspect, though I have no way of knowing, that the author had a really clear vision of the heroine’s guilt trip in the last part of the book. Unfortunately, the author didn’t have the heroine make the kind of mistake that a careful, smart, planning-ahead sort of person would make. I might even have bought it if the writer had spent a few more paragraphs on the heroine’s emotional breakdown, and made me believe that this woman would suddenly go to pieces to such an extent that she would completely ignore her sister’s safety out of her own need for comfort, but as it was…no.

I don’t know whether coming up with a different mistake or better reasons was too hard, or whether the author was deeply afraid of committing purple prose during the breakdown scenelet, or whether it was so obvious in the author’s head that the things that made the heroine’s actions believable just never got down on paper, but whatever it was, that one incident pretty much wrecked the book for me.

The three most common times this sort of thing happens are 1) when the author is running their plot by-the-numbers (the plot outline says the hero does X, so that’s what the hero does, whether it is in character or not), 2) when the author is so involved in the next scene and writing towards it in such a white-hot heat that he/she never stops to consider that the really plausible thing for the character to do would be to take a cab home from the restaurant and never get mugged in the alley at all, and 3) when the author has everything so clear in his/her head that the parts that make things believable and reasonable never make it onto the page.

A good critique group or a good batch of first-readers can head all of these off at the pass. Failing that, the author has to stop at some point and think very hard about all the possible moves the character could make, and which of them the character would be most likely to actually do, regardless of what the author has planned. If there is anything that is a smarter, more reasonable, more obvious choice of action, the author has two choices: have the main character do that, and ditch the plot as planned (no matter how much in love with it the author is), or else take the action the author wants the protagonist to take and come up with some setup or event that will make it the most reasonable choice. (I find geography very useful for this; a convenient impassable mountain range, swamp, or river can force characters to take the only remaining route, which they would otherwise be far too sensible to go anywhere near.)

Different structures

The structure of a story is its bones – or rather, it’s the way those bones are presented to the reader, the way things are organized and the patterns they make. Like bones, there are large ones and tiny ones; chains of things that fit together to provide flexibility and long solid ones for support. Also like bones, there are a multitude of possible workable arrangements, from birds to fish to mammals. Finally, like bones, the structure of the story is usually hidden under all the other stuff that’s going on…and if it isn’t, if it’s obviously poking out somewhere, that almost always means something is seriously wrong.

The most common structure is the linear, chronological one: the author presents the events of the story to the reader in the order they happen to the viewpoint character. Sometimes, that means that the POV character (and the reader) find out about something long after it actually happened, but from where the POV is standing, that’s when they found out, so that’s when the reader finds out.

This is the workhorse of structure, used by everything from fairy tales to Shakespeare and Beowulf. The author has plenty of decisions to make: Was the tiara stolen before the murder, or after? Did the queen set the fire to cover her escape, or did she wake up smelling smoke and run from an already-existing fire? But once those decisions are made, the author doesn’t have to decide anything more about the order to present them in; the linear, chronological structure takes care of that for her.

Linearity doesn’t necessarily mean single-viewpoint. Multiple-viewpoint novels are often fairly linear; the author switches from one POV to another, but the events keep marching steadily forward. Every so often, there’s a slight jog back in time, as we catch up with what Jennifer was busy doing while George was having lunch with the villain in the prior scene, but for the most part things progress from A to B to C in the order they happen; it’s just that the reader gets to see what Lisa was doing as she does it, instead of hearing about it later when George finds out about it.

Non-linear structures cover everything else, and require a lot more decisions on the part of the writer, because not only does she have to decide what order things happen in, she then has to decide what order to present them in. Does she want the shock of showing the protagonist’s attempt to steal the tiara, and then go back to describe the events leading up to it, or would she rather have the long, slow buildup of events culminating in the theft?

There are two basic approaches to non-linear structures: the kind where there is a fixed pattern to the scenes shown (as in Steven Brust’s Taltos, where each chapter opens with a flash-forward scene that’s part of the spell the narrator is casting at the end of the book, then has four sections that alternate between the narrator’s “present” [which slowly converges on the spell] and his biography-to-date; the sequence doesn’t vary), and the kind that’s more like free verse, where the pattern of the scenes is less clear, more flexible, or random.

Ian M. Banks The Use of Weapons is another example of a nonlinear pattern: one set of chapters moves forward in time chronologically from Chapter One; the alternate chapters move backward in time, and are numbered in reverse. Roger Zelazny’s Roadmarks also plays with structure and chronology in alternate chapters as the characters travel along a road through time, and within chapters as the reader sees the cliffhanger problem and then sees how they got out of the last one and into this one.

Non-linear patterns don’t have to be based on chronology or reverse chronology. Scenes can be ordered according to their emotional weight, or the pattern may be one of style (one short story I ran across alternated scenelets that were total narrative summary, standard dramatization, and nearly pure dialog/talking heads). They can circle or spiral back to a place or time or event or emotion repeatedly. There are lots of patterns, and some of them can be used in conjunction with the common linear one, too.

A non-linear story that has no pattern to the scenes – one that’s random, where a flashback is thrown in whenever and wherever it seems to be needed – is surprisingly difficult. You would think that being required to repeat a sequence of scenes would be more limiting than being able to do whatever you want, whenever you want, but without a structure behind one’s choices, it is a lot harder to be sure that a flashback or flashforward is really needed (as opposed to simply being the easy way out for the author, which nearly always ends up looking sloppy).

Structure is fun to mess around with (at least I think it is), but there are times when a non-traditional, non-linear structure really makes a difference. The “parallel scenes” technique, for instance, where the author takes a straightforward story A-B-C-D-E-F-G, and splits it in two, opening with D (an exciting predicament), then flashing back to A, continuing on to E, then back to B, so that the story is presented as D/A-E/B-F/C-G. This is particularly useful when the first few chronological scenes (ABC) contain critical but not very dramatic information, or when C is a climax of revelation that the author wants to occur close to the action climax at G, instead of half a book away.

On the other hand, there are plenty of excellent writers who have never strayed from the straightforward linear structure. I think it is useful to be aware of the possibilities, but if you have no interest in actually writing them and/or no story ideas that would be well-suited by a non-linear approach, then there’s no reason to push yourself in that direction. And for most of us, non-linear storytelling is a stretch, and best done after getting a gut-level feel for how the more common linear structure works. For those others, the ones for whom non-linearity comes naturally and it’s the linear mode that is hard, well, do the same thing in reverse – that is, really master what you start out with, and then stretch into the tricky stuff.

Noon vs. Midnight

“You can’t tell stories about sunshine.” – Garrison Keillor

Last Sunday, I was listening to “A Prairie Home Companion” as I frequently do of a Sunday morning, and the news from Lake Woebegone was about a group of men going out bass fishing on a day that turned out to be windy and rainy and awful, and they didn’t catch many fish, but it wasn’t about fish, it was about doing something that made them happy. At the end of the day when they all went home, they had no fish but they all had stories about the day they went out and it was cold and windy and rainy and miserable and they fished anyway. Because, said Garrison Keillor, “you can’t tell stories about sunshine.”

Sunshine is where we all want to live, and it’s what we wish for people – and characters – we like. But when we’re talking to folks, we seldom tell stories about what a good day we had. “I got up early and had a nice hot shower, played with the cats, had a good morning walk past gardens in full bloom, made eggs for breakfast, finished my knitting project, got the signed contract and the check in the mail, figured out what to do about the sticky spot in the ms. and not only got that done but another 10,000 words as well…” is just not as interesting to either say or hear about as “I slept through the alarm and then the hot water was out so I had to take a cold shower and the plumber can’t come until next Thursday, the cats tipped the litter box over, the copy-edit came in the mail and they want it back in three days and it’s a complete mess that I’m going to have to stay up late every night to finish on time, I went for my walk and halfway through it started pouring so I was soaked when I got home, I dropped a stitch in my knitting and had to rip back twenty rows, and I finally figured out what to do about the sticky spot in the manuscript – rewrite the first eight chapters from scratch.”

When I have a really good day, I don’t tell stories about it; I say “Yeah, Saturday was a really good day; I got a lot done and went to a birthday party at the end and it was fun.” When I have a really bad day, it’s an epic; I can string it out for at least an hour and a half of sympathy dinner. And it seems to work the same way for most folks. And all of us have both kinds of things, good days and bad ones, though the vast majority are a mixed bag.

When it comes to writing, though, many folks want to be at one extreme or the other: Either they want to tell stories of a lovely bright sunny day at noon, or else they want deep black midnight on the proverbial dark and stormy night. Neither one is all that effective. It is hard to make powerful, touching music if you’re only willing to use one note.

Of course, the writers who do this don’t see it that way. The ones who want to only write about sunshine tend to fall in love with their characters and resist allowing anything really bad to happen to any of them. Some of them have also misinterpreted the common advice about plot and conflict, and think it means interpersonal conflict, and hate that sort of thing, and simply won’t do it…and are so busy being stubborn that they don’t take time to think of anything else they could use instead (see last month’s post on plots without villains). Still others have strong moral or philosophical objections to whatever they see as the probable central story problem, and likewise refuse to use it without coming up with anything to replace it.

Midnight writers often talk a lot about being gritty and realistic, or about being edgy. Some of them hate their characters and delight in piling up disasters on them…and, in reverse of the sunshine writers, resist allowing anything really good to happen to them, or to persist for more than about one chapter at a time. Many of them also misinterpret the plot-and-conflict advice in the opposite direction as well: they think that “conflict” means non-stop battle with something, preferably losing all the way. And a few are trying so hard to write a particular sort of “if this goes on…” cautionary tale that they show nothing but the downward plunge, the “caution” part, and kind of forget about the “tale” part.

The most effective storytellers, in my opinion, are the dawn and dusk writers – the ones who mix both sunshine and shadow over the course of the story. Whether the overall impression is of struggling toward a happy ending or fighting a hopeless rearguard action against the coming darkness, the story needs that alternation between happy moments and sad ones, between apparent success and apparent failure, between things getting better and things getting worse.

Without moments of sunshine to relax in, the reader can get so accustomed to the level of tension that it stops having any impact. The midnight writers have to keep ratcheting up the level of horribleness in order to keep the reader’s interest. Without moments of shadow, there is no surprise and no tension, and the reader is likely to get bored even if he/she really likes these characters. The sunshine writers have to come up with more and more unlikely-but-happy twists, or the story ends up flat. This is why that diagram of how plots work that some of us learned in grade school looks like the edge of a saw blade: first the characters are up, then they are down, then up again.

The interesting thing is that the characters don’t have to be up or down in every aspect of their lives at once – and it often works best when they aren’t. The classic example is the two characters who are about to face a probably-deadly battle, who finally admit they love each other. Emotionally, it’s sunshine; in terms of physical survival, it looks pretty dark. Then they fight the battle and win, but one dies; emotionally dark, but sunny for the physical-action side of things.

But you can’t see contrast like that in the dark, and it doesn’t show up very well under blazing noonday sun, either.

Kitten Interlude

“A catless writer is almost inconceivable. It’s a perverse taste, really, since it would be easier to write with a herd of buffalo in the room than even one cat; they make nests in the notes and bite the end of the pen and walk on the typewriter keys.” – Barbara Holland 

Because I spent yesterday taking care of a sick cat (which mostly involved making sure Karma did not pounce on him), and because I have pictures, we are taking a brief break from the all-writing all-the-time blog posts so I can show you pictures.

As many of you already know, I adopted a kitten a few weeks ago, after losing my extremely elderly senior cat, Nimue, to “complications of old age.” Cazaril, who is about nine and usually fairly rambunctious, needed somebody to keep him busy while I do things like writing and laundry and such. So we now have Karma, who is Karma on account of 1) a friend saying she was the luckiest cat in the world to be coming to live at my house (I don’t know why; it’s not like I spoil my cats or anything. Much.), 2) Caz used to leap over Nimmie when she wanted to nap; now Karma is doing that to Caz (what goes around, comes around), and 3) the listing on the shelter web site had her original name as “Monica,” which was my mother’s name. So, Karma.

This is Cazaril (named for the hero of The Curse of Chalion by Lois McMaster Bujold), pre-Karma:

He is a rescue cat, supposedly a Main Coon/Abyssinian mix, and just about the friendliest and sweetest-tempered cat I’ve ever met, let alone been owned by.

This is Karma, when she first arrived. She’s about three times this big now, and getting into EVERYTHING. She has already located the Special Cat Sleeping Spot right in front of the monitor and directly over the keyboard, which is used by all cats in the house according to some arcane rotation system known only to them. Fortunately, she is still much too small for her paws to dangle over the edge of the desk and interfere with my typing. Won’t be long, though.

 And here we have Karma and Caz in Caz’s favorite chair. Which is supposed to be my reading chair, but lately, it is always full of cats.

And finally, we have Naptime for Two. And here I was worried that they wouldn’t get along…

(And because I know somebody will ask, Caz spent Friday night at the vet; we were afraid he’d eaten some yarn or a rubber band or some other non-food item, but it turned out to be just too much of the regular cat food, impacted. So he spent a very uncomfortable time and will need to be on a high-fiber diet from here on, but is recovering well so far as long as Karma the fierce ninja kitten doesn’t jump on him and attempt to wrestle. I say “attempt” because even as much as she’s grown, she’s less than 1/3 his weight and can’t roll him over if he doesn’t want to be rolled.)

Hats and Rabbits

Writing isn’t magic. You can’t just say “Presto! A rabbit!” and pull a rabbit out of a hat. (Well, you can, but nobody is likely to believe it.) No, if you’re going to pull a rabbit out of a hat, you have to start by sneaking the rabbit into the hat while nobody is supposed to be looking.

There are two ways of doing this: first, you know that at some point you’re going to need the rabbit in the hat, so you mention the rabbit in chapter one and the hat in chapter three and a few chapters later you comment about the rabbit’s interest in the hat and then you establish that the rabbit has a habit of crawling into small, dark places it’s not supposed to be. Then, when you need the rabbit to come out of the hat, nobody will think it’s an unbelievable coincidence.

The second way is to do all of that after the fact. That is, you discover while writing Chapter Twenty that you need a rabbit to come out of a hat right then, so that’s what you do. But it’s completely deus-ex-machina, out of the blue. It’s a really unbelievable coincidence. It doesn’t work. But you need it to happen that way; it’s right. So you go back to the first chapter or two and find a place where you can mention the hat, and a different place where you can mention the rabbit, and so on.

Oh, wait, there’s a third way: you get to the middle of Chapter Twenty and realize that you need something to happen right then, but you’re not sure what. So you look back over the first few chapters and realize that you mentioned a rabbit that would be just perfect for distracting the villain at the critical moment. And you check over the next few chapters and don’t find another mention of the rabbit, but there’s a mention of a hat. Then you do a search on “rabbit” and discover that the rabbit has been nibbling on the hat in Chapter Ten…it’s all there already, all you have to do is have the rabbit pop out of the hat.

Basically, what I’m talking about here is setup. Sometimes, it happens by accident, as in that “third way,” but you can’t depend on things going that well. More usually, either you know the event is coming and you build in the setup as you write, or you go back and fill in the bits that make the event believable after you write the scene where it happens.

Either way, what you’re looking for are ways of establishing various elements of the Big Surprise so that when it happens, it’s plausible. It’s not quite the same as foreshadowing, though it is related. For instance, in The Lord of the Rings, Isildur’s last-minute refusal to destroy the ring both foreshadows Frodo’s refusal and is part of the setup (in that it is one of many reiterations of the fact that it is practically impossible for anyone who has the ring to give it up voluntarily, let alone see it destroyed). Bilbo’s reluctance to give up the ring, on the other hand, is more setup than foreshadowing (I think); Gollum’s obsession with it is definitely setup.

The terminology is not actually particularly important for a writer; the important thing is that there is a difference between warning the reader that something big is about to happen and getting the reader to believe in whatever happens. The classic “dark clouds hovered ominously on the horizon” is usually foreshadowing trouble to come; it becomes setup when the characters are caught in a downpour a few hours later.

The one thing I have never seen work is trying to do all of the setup after the fact. Which is not to say it couldn’t ever work that way, but nearly all the writers I’ve seen try it have been beginners who either can’t figure out how to set up their Big Surprise, or can’t bring themselves to go back and put in the setup after they’ve written the scene.

In the first case, the problem is often that the author has chosen a single-viewpoint story, and the most obvious place for the setup is in a scene or scenes for which the viewpoint character wouldn’t be present. The solution is to look for non-obvious places and more indirect setup; instead of mentioning the rabbit, the hat, etc., the writer might have a character complain about rabbits hiding in ridiculous places, and later someone gets a letter about his niece receiving a rabbit for her birthday. A more complete explanation may still be needed after the fact, but it will be filling in the blank spots, not trying to create a whole canvas from scratch – it ends up being like the detective’s explanation in a mystery novel, stringing together the clues that were right there all along.

In the second case, the author is often terrified of giving too much away too soon. They are so focused on the necessity of the Big Surprise being a surprise that they are afraid to tell the reader anything, for fear of tipping them off. This writer needs to get over it and accept that for some exceptionally perceptive readers, the story is going to be a thriller, not a mystery – that is, the point is not finding out whodunnit, but watching the protagonist beat the antagonist to the finish line – and then go back and put in some setup. In extreme cases, the writer needs a reliable first-reader who can tell them that they need more setup and no, it won’t spoil the ending (or, very occasionally, that they really have done too much and need to obscure some of it if they want the surprise to be surprising).

Note that none of this applies to the author who is deliberately putting most of the plot offstage (John M. Ford comes instantly to mind). That’s a completely different style of writing, and whether one likes it or not is a matter of taste, not flaws in the construction.