Patricia C. Wrede's Blog, page 47

Get it Out

“Outside of a dog, a book is man’s best friend. Inside of a dog it’s too dark to read.”  – Groucho Marx

Every so often, someone comes up to me at a social event and after talking for a while, they come out with “I have a novel inside me; I just know it.”

One of these days, I am going to look at that person and solemnly paraphrase Groucho Marx: “Inside of you, it’s too dark to read it.” Instead, I usually respond with something like “When are you going to write it?” or “Then you should write it.”

Nobody ever responds with “Yes, I should,” much less goes away and does it. Instead I get “But I don’t know how to start” or “I don’t have time right now” or “I have to finish X first (where X is anything from “reading the latest bestseller” to “an important project at work” to “remodeling my house”)” or “I don’t have the right equipment or the right place to work in.”

I always tell them very nicely to go and write anyway, that people find or make time for the things that are important, that I’m sure they can do what they set their minds to. And they nod and go away happy and I don’t think any of them ever write anything more than a grocery list.

What I want to say is:

Honey, you’re making excuses, and as long as you’re making excuses, that novel inside you is going to stay right where it is. Because nobody knows how to start a novel, until they sit down and do it; there is never enough time, until you decide there is; something else is always going to be more important, until you decide it isn’t; and the “right” place and “right” equipment will elude you until you realize that the right place is wherever you are and the right equipment is whatever you have at hand to make marks with and on.

You made enough time to come to this event (dinner, party, convention, meeting, whatever). You didn’t have to finish X before you came to this event. You could have stayed home and written for two hours. Have you got a pen and paper in your pocket? You could take them over in that corner and get some notes written right now. You could…but you won’t.

And you won’t because…well, because of a lot of things, but they all boil down to the fact that you aren’t a writer. That novel inside you? It isn’t a novel. It’s a vague feeling that writing a novel is something you could do, and that it would be a rather nice thing to do. It’s the same way you think that you might like to visit the space station, or learn to do brain surgery, or become a virtuoso pianist. You think it might be nice, but you don’t really want to put the work into actually doing it.

You’re actually perfectly happy coming to events like this and cornering people who’ve actually done those things and whining about how you could do them, too, if you just had the right equipment or the time or less to do. Because we’re all too polite to tell you what I’m saying right now, so you can go home in a comfortable glow, knowing that a real professional writer told you you could write if you wanted, and believing in your heart that whatever you’re doing instead (bestseller, work project, home remodel, etc.) is more important than writing. And since you could write, but you have more important things to do, you don’t have to take the chance that you actually aren’t very good at it, and you won’t have to put in the work to learn to do it well.

And you know what? That thing you have to finish instead of writing? It is more important than writing…to you. You just won’t admit, even to yourself, that it’s your choice. Until you do, you won’t ever be a writer.

That’s what I want to say, but I don’t. Partly because I was born and raised in the Midwest, and you just don’t do that to people who are trying to have a pleasant, innocuous conversation at a social event; partly because I’m not really into conflict and tearing people down; partly because it’s not my job to deprive people of their illusions.

But also partly because at least some of those people will eventually realize on their own that all those excuses are just a way to keep from taking the scary first step. And no, I don’t mean sitting down in front of a blank page/monitor to actually write something (though believe me, that’s plenty scary). I mean the very first part, the part where you say to yourself “OK, come hell or high water, I am going to write a novel” and mean it. The part where you commit to actually writing something, instead of thinking vaguely that it’d be rather nice to do so.

Those people will get that novel inside them out onto paper/pixels where others can read it. Some of them will have professional careers. A few of them will be brilliant. And since I am not smart enough to pick out those people in advance, I want to give everybody the benefit of the doubt. Also, I’d really like to encourage those few people who aren’t looking for another excuse to continue doing what they’re doing (i.e., not writing), but who really do need a little reassurance that writing gets done by ordinary people just like them, and so they might as well try.

Sometimes, though, it gets frustrating enough that I just have to rant. So I do it here. Because I don’t mean any of you folks.

 

Being mean

Lots of writers talk about being mean to their characters. Lots of critique groups tell writers to be meaner to their characters, to figure out what the worst possible thing is that can happen to that character, and then somehow make it happen. Of course, it has to happen believably, so if your character is terrified of drowning and your story is set in a desert, well, you’ll just have to change the setting. Or come up with a reason for there to be a pool or a lake or something out there, or for the villain to pick waterboarding as his/her preferred method of torture, or…

There are a couple of things wrong with this approach. First off, there’s the practical aspect: in this age of multi-volume sagas, if you use the absolutely worst thing that can happen to a character in the very first book, you’re either going to be repeating yourself a lot, or you’re going to have to make do with those second-through-tenth-worst things for later books, or you’re going to have to come up with a reason for the character to develop a new worst-possible-thing for every new volume.

More important, though, is the fact that “be mean; hit the character with the worst thing that can happen to him/her” makes it sound as if everything bad that happens to the protagonist comes from outside, from a decision that the writer makes. And while this is true from one angle (I am, after all, making one choice after another regarding who I’m writing about and what happens to them), it also encourages writers in some very bad habits.

Foremost among these is the attitude that the writer can make an arbitrary decision about what goes into a particular story at any time. There are certainly lots of decisions to be made as a story gets written, but if one wants a readable book at the end of the process, they aren’t arbitrary ones. Every decision the writer makes places limits on what can happen later on, and once one is past the first flurry of initial choices (is the ship captain the protagonist, or should that role go to the first mate? Is she coping with an enemy or a natural disaster or her own bad choices in the past?), every new choice is limited by the things the writer has said before.

The obstacles the protagonist faces can arise from outside circumstances (the bandit attack that separates the protagonist from his/her guide), or they can arise from the protagonist’s own emotions and misconceptions (losing his/her temper and chewing out the ambassador), but they have to fit the story the writer is telling. And they have to fit on lots of levels. Facing public rejection by her older sister may be the heroine’s worst nightmare and make for a wonderfully emotional, intense scene; but shoehorning that scene into a plot where it doesn’t belong can wreck the pacing, the structure, and the flow of the story the writer is actually trying to tell.

Which brings me to another problem: “Figure out the worst thing that can happen to your characters and then make it happen” pays no attention whatsoever to the story the writer wants to tell. Yes, of course, “…in the context of the story…” should be in there right after “…worst thing that can happen to your characters…” but it never is (at least, not any time that I’ve seen the comment made), and I know from bitter experience that there are tons of people out there who will take one look at this, decide that it’s really good advice, and proceed to jettison the neat desert setting they’d planned on, and instead send their protagonist on a sea voyage because he’s afraid of the water, or who’ll ditch the space-opera action in favor of a family saga because their protagonist’s family is a nightmare. And then they bog down because they don’t know anything about ships and they don’t like family sagas, and they wonder what went wrong.

The thing is, being mean to your characters starts with putting them in a story in the first place. Most stories do not involve happy people happily living happy lives without problems…and there’s a reason why “may you live in interesting times” was a curse in ancient China. And there certainly are writers who fall in love with their characters and proceed to make everything much too easy for them, which is hardly ever as interesting as watching a character struggle with an almost-insuperable obstacle and triumph over it in the end.

The second part of being mean is that whatever happens, whether it’s an external problem like a bandit attack or an internal one like choosing to trust a long-time enemy, what’s at stake has to matter to the character. If the main character doesn’t care what happens to the princess, one way or the other, then they’re not going to worry about the delay caused by the bandit attack – it doesn’t matter to them whether the dragon gets hungry and eats the girl before they get there, after all. But if the princess is the protagonists One True Love, then the delay the bandits cause is horrifying and traumatic.

It is usually helpful to think a bit about why the character cares so much about whatever-it-is. OK, if the princess is his/her One True Love, then it doesn’t take much thought, but sometimes the reason isn’t so obvious. If you are going to confront the protagonist with his/her most awful nightmare, your protagonist had better want something else enough that he/she will deal with it and keep going, instead of saying “Face that? No way; I’m out of here.”

The third part – the one that gets left out a lot – is that the thing the character cares about has to be relevant to the story. Throwing in an angsty little subplot about the hero’s near-drowning in childhood has nothing whatever to do with trekking across the desert to find the cursed tomb, and trying to come up with a way to make it have something to do with it…well, if there’s some obvious and brilliant tie-in, by all means use it, but it is not worth bending your brain – and your story – all out of shape just so you can get that “worst possible thing” into a story where it doesn’t really belong. There are plenty of things that can get in the way of your protagonist’s goal that belong in a desert. Use one of them.

Plots without villains

More than once over the years, I’ve run into writers who complain about writing villains or who have trouble finding a “Big Bad” for their stories. Usually, they’ve somehow gotten the impression that every story has to have a villain of some sort, who has to be defeated utterly at the end of the tale. Whether this villain is an Evil Overlord, a space alien planning on conquering Earth, a supernatural demon (vampire, werewolf, evil force), or a sleazy lawyer or banker doesn’t matter much in their minds; they need a bad guy for their heroes to go up against, and they can’t come up with one that satisfies them.

In at least half these cases, the real problem has turned out to be that the author wanted to write some other kind of story, one that didn’t have a villain or Big Bad or monster-of-the-week. They already had a perfectly good plot, and adding a villain to it was a distraction, something that took away from the central point of the story, rather than adding to it. Naturally, under those circumstances they were having trouble finding a villain to fit their story – they didn’t have an empty niche in the plot for a villain to fit into.

The other half of the time, the author had a character who was supposed to fit the “villain” plot niche, but as the character developed, they kept turning out to be “too nice.” In other words, the author had a classic antagonist on his/her hands – someone who wasn’t really a bad guy, but another good person whose agenda and beliefs clashed with the protagonist’s desires. This generally lead to the author’s plot collapsing, because a non-villainous antagonist simply wouldn’t do some of the horrible things that the author’s initial plot required.

In both cases, the solution is twofold: first, the author has to recognize that even in the action-adventure genre, it is possible to write a gripping story that has no villain at all; second, the author has to think long and hard about the story they want to write, and look at how to do it without layering on a lot of assumptions about what “has to” be there.

SF has entire subgenres of stories that don’t require villains (though most of them can accommodate one, should the author decide that one of the characters is more evil than they had at first thought). First contact stories don’t require a bad guy; figuring out how to communicate with an alien species and how to understand an alien culture can provide plenty of problems without adding a bad guy to mess things up further. Stories of survival after a crash landing also don’t require a bad guy. Exploring new star systems and/or settling new planets can easily present sufficient problems and difficulties for characters without needing an actual villain, though in any sizeable group of humans there’s likely to be interpersonal conflict just because people disagree. Stories of discovery (whether of new star systems or of new knowledge) and invention cover the whole range, from the villain out to sabotage the exploration/research to the antagonist/rival who’s trying to beat the protagonist to the discovery to having no human obstacle or villain at all, because solving the problem is a big enough challenge all by itself.

There are also, in every genre, stories that focus on the growth of the character(s) – where the murder mystery or the quest for the unicorn scepter or the month-long cattle drive is the background and/or subplot to the main story about the character’s beliefs or relationships or personal growth, none of which involve a villain (other than the protagonist him/herself). These can be trickier to write than they sound, because even authors who understand the whole “no rules for writing, except do it and make it work” thing can get caught by their unconscious assumptions about what certain choices mean for a story.

For instance, take the author who has decided to write a story about a group of space marines. Practically the first thing the author looks for is what sort of war they’ll be involved in, or what mission they’ll be on. The story is about marines, so it’s obviously going to be action-adventure and involve fighting and a big battle as the climax, right? It’s so obvious and clear that nobody thinks twice about it.

But…why does this author want to write about space marines? What is it that’s about these particular characters? Maybe the author wants to examine the interpersonal relationships among these men and women, and the effect of long separation on their relationships with their families. Maybe the author wants to write a story about soldiers adjusting to a new peace, or performing a non-military mission like evacuating a planetary system whose star is about to go nova.

If the writer starts by asking questions like “who are they fighting/who are the bad guys? Where’s the big climactic battle going to be?” they’ll probably put a lot of effort into coming up with an action-adventure plot that may hang together, but that doesn’t really satisfy them, because the thing they considered the important thing about the story is the relationships, or what happens after the war, or the logistics of moving the population of an entire star system.

And this writer will almost never be happy with their villain, because having a villain at all is an artifact of the particular type of action-adventure plot the author has layered on top of the real story they want to write. If that sort of adventure is actually necessary to the story at all, in this case it needs to be a subplot…and we’re so used to action being central that it can be tough to relegate it to second place, even if one is consciously trying to do so.

Writers whose plot keeps collapsing because their “villain” is “too nice” are starting at the other end and working backwards to pretty much the same place. That is, instead of starting with a story and then developing an unnecessary action-adventure plot, complete with villain, they start with an action-adventure plot and develop characters that they can’t make fit. The two obvious solutions here are 1) change the characters or 2) change the plot.

Unfortunately, my experience has been that #1 seldom works. If the writer could have come up with different characters for this plot, she would have. If the character whom she assigned to the “villain” role has become too complex and/or interesting to behave as a stereotypical power-mad or money-hungry villain, I tend to see that as a Good Thing, even if it means making major changes to the plot.

In order to make those changes work, though, the author has to go through an extremely similar sort of thought process as the one who started with the characters and got off-track in the plotting: They have to think about what really interested them enough to tell this story in the first place, and whether that’s changed as they’ve developed the characters. They also have to think about whether having a more complex antagonist means radical changes to the plot (the original plan was for her to order an invasion for no particular reason, except that she’s eeeeevil, but now that she’s complicated, that just doesn’t work and the invasion will have to be jettisoned, along with everything that was supposed to result from it), or whether the grand outline of the plot can stay the same, but all the motivations and a lot of the details need to be reworked and deepened to fit the antagonist’s new personality (though finding a good, believable reason for the ex-villainess to order the invasion may be just as much work as redesigning the entire last half of the book to eliminate it).

Some announcements and some characters

First, a couple of announcements. My e-publisher is having a summer sale, which includes Sorcery and Cecelia and a bunch of other things. It lasts until July 22nd.

Second, I’m hoping that at some time in the next month or thereabouts, the new, improved, much cleaner and more readable web site and blog will be going up, and there may be a bit of disruption around the switchover. The content won’t change, and the archives should still be there, but there are always bugs and glitches with this sort of thing. I’ll try to provide more specific notice once we have a date for everything to go live.

We now return you to our regularly scheduled writing post, which today is about characters.

You can find lots of different techniques and writers’ aids for doing characters, ranging from writing a character study to letters to ten-page-or-more worksheets that attempt to cover every aspect of your characters’ lives that might possibly be important to the story. They’re supposed to help writers write characters who are unique and believable and realistic, and like every other writing method, each of them works for some writers but not for others. What I haven’t seen anyone talk much about is why these things are necessary. Why does a writer need to think about all their characters (not just the protagonist) in so much depth?

It’s because 99.9% of those characters are not the writer.

Oh, all characters embody aspects of their author. They have to. My own head is the only one I really, truly know anything about the inside of, no matter how many people I’ve talked to or observed closely or studied in depth. But if you stop and think about it, the vast majority of characters in the vast majority of stories are significantly different from their authors. They have to be. The real world is, after all, populated by billions of people who are not the author; authors who are making even the smallest attempt to make their fiction realistic or believable have to populate their stories in a similar manner.

Among my real-life friends and acquaintances, none of them, not even my best friends or my sisters, are exactly like me. We aren’t the same size, shape, height, or age; we don’t share all the same background, life experiences, hair color, skill sets, or tastes; we haven’t the same ethnic origins or religious beliefs.  Sometimes there’s a lot of overlap in one or more of those things, sometimes next to none. The high school boy who mows my lawn is different from me in practically every way, except for the fact that both of us want/wanted to earn some extra cash over our summer vacations.

Everyone deals constantly with people who are not exactly like them: customers, neighbors, coworkers, classmates, store clerks, relatives, friends, enemies. Translating this to books almost always takes considerable thought, which is what all the character study aids are trying to stimulate, but there’s usually more to it than they make it seem.

The two classic mistakes writers make are 1) making all the characters fundamentally alike, and 2) making all the characters consciously and completely different. The first one is common when writers are working on autopilot. They’re writing about a family – Mom, Dad, teenaged brother, preteen sister – and having assigned roles and genders, they slap different hair, eye color, height, and clothes sense on each of them and call it good. They don’t stop to consider that Mom and Dad aren’t exactly like each other, and certainly won’t share the same opinions as their children. The characters may be different ages and genders and have different jobs, but if you replaced all the names with A, B, C, and D, you wouldn’t be able to tell who was expressing which opinions, having which ideas, or even taking which actions, because all of them sound and act the same. They have superficial differences, but fundamentally they’re exactly alike.

The opposite extreme are the folks who seem to have a check-off list of characteristics they want to get into the story. They have an even number of characters, exactly half of whom are male and the other half female. None of the characters have overlapping backgrounds, ethnic origins, or ages (unless two of them are supposed to become romantically involved, in which case those two are usually relatively close in age). Everyone has a different hobby, whether it’s woodworking, basketball, playing an obscure musical instrument, or being a gourmet cook. (One wonders how the characters who like sports manage, since even if there is more than one person who is into sports, they’re never into the same sports, and even tennis needs two players.) Nobody has anything in common with anyone else in the story. It’s hard to see how these people can be anything other than the most distant of coworkers; they’re certainly not going to be believable as the close-knit team that works together smoothly to defeat the Horrible Menace.

Reality is always somewhere in the middle. People are not fundamentally exactly alike, but they’re seldom completely different from each other, either. In fiction, it’s up to the writer to manage both sides of this equation in service to the story, to decide what similarities and differences will be believable and appropriate, and to choose characters whose differences and similarities will contribute to, rather than distract from, the plot and subplots (or whose differences and similarities will generate interesting plots and subplots, if the characters come first for that particular writer).

Crossovers

“Crossover” is one of those writing terms that has multiple meanings, depending on to whom you’re talking and what you’re talking about. In fanfiction, for instance, it refers to a story that includes characters from totally different series or settings – Superman shows up in “Romeo and Juliet,” for instance, or Harry Potter does Star Wars. Since you can’t do that kind of thing in professional publishing without permission from all the rights holders, “crossover” in professional terms means either 1) a book that you could easily sell in several different genres (Fritz Lieber’s Conjure Wife is the classic example; over the years, it was published as SF, fantasy, horror, mainstream, mystery, and romance – pretty much every possible genre of its time except Western), or 2) a book that deliberately mixes common tropes from two very different types of category fiction, which hopefully means it will appeal to both (Sorcery and Cecelia, co-written by myself and Caroline Stevermer, falls into this category).

The Conjure Wife sort of crossover, that just happens to be a story with multiple possible markets, is seldom, if ever, written deliberately for that purpose. When people say “the market changes,” they mean all parts of the market; if a writer consciously tries to aim at all possible current market genres, the result may sell to one of those markets, but by the time the rights have reverted, all the other markets will have moved on to something else. So I’m going to look at the other two.

Yes, two, because apart from the problems of copyright permissions, the sorts of stuff that can go right and wrong with a fanfiction-type crossover (where it’s the characters and/or worlds that are being mixed) and with the more general two-or-more-genres type of crossover are pretty similar.

Advantages first: done well, a good crossover potentially doubles one’s audience by enhancing the fun and appeal of both the elements of the cross. It can also be a huge lot of fun for the writer (and if it isn’t, you grabbed the wrong things for the wrong reasons).

The disadvantage is that one has the possibility of significantly reducing one’s audience (instead of all readers who like X, plus all readers who like Y, one can end up with something that appeals only to those readers who like both X and Y). In extreme cases, one can completely alienate an entire segment of one’s potential readership, possibly permanently. Also, finding a publisher who appreciates and understand both sides of one’s crossover (and who knows how to market to both of them) is not always easy.

The first step, though, is writing one. In order to get the kind that’s fun and has potential for double the audience, the first requirement is that the author has to really know and understand both parts of the source material. This doesn’t mean that if you want to do a science fiction-mystery crossover, you can read two or three detective novels (if you’re an SF fan) or two or three science fiction novels (if your first love is mysteries) and call it good. It means that you know both genres, settings, and/or sets of characters well enough to recognize what readers expect and don’t expect, what the genre conventions are with regard to pacing and filling in background as well as plot and characterization.

Knowing both genres isn’t quite enough, in my opinion; the writer also needs to love them enough to write them. I read a lot of mysteries, and I think I have a pretty good idea of how that genre works, but I’ve never been moved to write a fantasy-mystery crossover. Our fantasy-Regency-Romance, on the other hand, practically wrote itself.

A writer who loves and understands both of the genres that they’re crossing is far more likely to avoid the sort of wall-flinging mistakes one commonly sees in books that are marketed as crossovers, but which are actually primarily one genre with a few token nods to the other. I’ve read SF-Romance “crossovers” where the Romance author couldn’t be bothered to get things like the speed of light right, or made plot-critical mistakes in basic science (they apparently felt that as long as they used skiffy-sounding doubletalk, it didn’t matter that genetics doesn’t work that way, or that a galaxy is composed of a lot of star systems, rather than the other way around). I’ve also read ones where the “romance” was nothing more than a subplot in a typical space opera adventure – fine for an SF audience, but totally unsatisfying for a Romance reader.

If you’re writing a crossover, you have two sets of source material, and you have to respect both of them or it’s not really a crossover. You also have to satisfy both sets of readers on some level, or it isn’t likely to be a particularly successful crossover.

The next major trap is the “insider” one, in which the writer fills the story with plot-critical things that the reader has to be a long time fan of one genre or the other to understand. As a result, the only people who really appreciate the story are folks who are already fans of both genres. There isn’t anything actually wrong with this, as long as the writer a) knows what he/she is doing and b) accepts the fact that the audience is going to be much smaller than the audience for either genre.

There is a way around this potential problem, however, and it is to a) make sure that one does not need familiarity with a particular trope or convention to understand the story, the plot, or the characters’ actions, and b) make sure that one does not highlight the insider information in such a way that anyone who doesn’t have it realizes they are missing something. This allows readers familiar with one genre to smile in recognition of a particular stock character or plot twist, while readers of the other genre can marvel at the author’s originality in those areas and recognize other things from the books they love, and nobody feels stupid or slighted.

Ideally, a good crossover will not only appeal to readers of both genres, it will permanently expand the audience for both of them as some of the readers discover that they like whichever part of the crossover they don’t normally read. The Harry Potter books got a lot of adult fantasy readers to read YA and children’s books for the first time since they were kids themselves, and introduced a lot of readers (librarians and teachers and parents, largely) who did read YA to fantasy. (As well as getting a lot of kids hooked on reading and fantasy for the long term.) More readers is something of which I, as a writer, heartily approve.

Intuition

Even for the most analytic of us the creative process is intuitive to some extent. I’m way over on the analytic end of the spectrum, and I still surprise myself constantly when scenes don’t go the way I’d thought, or characters say or do things in the moment of writing that I’ve never planned. There are choices I make in the writing because they “feel right,” rather than because I’ve thought through all the logical consequences for the story.

Some writers are over on the other end of the spectrum; their primary mode of operation is intuitive, rather than analytic. For them, it’s the thinking and planning parts that are the “once in a while” things that don’t come easily.

A lot of folks seem to think that intuition is something that “just is,” rather than something you can acquire. But a two-year-old doesn’t have any intuition about pacing or plot or characterization. Neither do most seven-year-olds. Intuition is something that people acquire over time; it may be a subconscious synthesis of experience, but it still depends on experience.

And that means that intuition can be trained, or at least influenced, according to what sort of experience one has. This is what’s behind all the urging to read lots of good books and well-written stories – so that you fill up your backbrain with examples of good writing, in hopes that it will use them when it comes time for you to work on your own stories.

But experience in reading is not quite the same as experience with writing. There certainly is plenty of stuff that we absorb about storytelling and writing techniques from reading, but there are also things where observation isn’t enough. One may recognize that a writer’s dialog is great without quite getting exactly how they did it, or absorb the way the pace picks up toward the climax without absorbing the techniques for doing it.

This leads me to two conclusions: first, that being an intuitive writer does not mean one cannot and should not be an analytical reader; and second, that practice in writing is perhaps even more necessary for the intuitive writer than it is for the highly analytical one.

I’m not saying that one ought never to read for fun, without paying much attention to what the writer is doing or how she is doing it, nor that the only sort of reading a prospective writer ought to do should be of the “improving” variety. But I think that it is often well worthwhile to go back to one’s favorite writers and observe the mechanics of one’s favorite bits, with particular attention to the parts one didn’t notice or care about in the for-fun read-through.

I once had an argument with a gentleman over the use and misuse of exposition, a.k.a. infodumps. He took the common position that one ought never, ever, ever to use them; exposition was bad writing per se. I asked him if he’d ever read James White’s Sector General novels. He said he had, and they proved his point; there was no exposition in them, not anywhere at all. I asked him to go home and read one of them again, paying particular attention to what was actually going on, writing-wise, during the scenes in which the doctors are being briefed on the puzzling new cases that they are going to be dealing with for the rest of the novel.

He did, and came back half-appalled and half-apologetic. Because White segues from fully-dramatized “showing” to exposition and back in those scenes, so smoothly that this reader had never noticed that they contained two to five pages of exposition right in the middle of the scene.

If this reader had never actually studied those scenes to find out what the writer was really doing, I can see one of two things happening: either he’d have tried to write without any exposition at all, ever, never recognizing when it could work or realizing how to make it work; or his intuition would keep trying to make him write exposition (because he’d subconsciously absorbed some of White’s technique) and he’d keep fighting with it and never would get it right because he didn’t know he could do that.

So my first recommendation to intuitive writers is the same as everyone else’s: read a lot. But I’d go a step farther and say, from time to time, stop (or go back) and study your favorite bits by your favorite writers. Do at least some analytical reading, and see if it makes a difference. If it doesn’t, stop…but at least give it a try.

My second recommendation is to be observant about your own process. What gets your writing juices flowing? Do you get into things faster if you start your writing session by reading something good – a favorite passage by someone else, or some poetry? Or do you work best when you don’t look at anyone else’s stuff before you write some of your own? What about other things? I know a fair number of writers who make themselves a sound track of various music that gets them in the mood for the book they’re working on, but what about pictures?

If you watch yourself, you may find that music isn’t your thing, but a slide show of pictures on your computer may be just what you need. When I was working on The Mislaid Magician, I changed my computer wallpaper to a period map of England. Every time I turned it on, it reminded me of what I was working on, and it helped.

My third recommendation is one that I personally would hate, and I wouldn’t blame you for not trying it, but here it is: do some writing exercises. If intuition is trained by practice, and you want to train it to do the right things, then deliberately working on exercises that target techniques you’re not good at may work like playing scales on the piano (I hated those, too), as a way of making “doing this right” a habit that you don’t have to think about when you get to work on your pay copy.

Finally, don’t be afraid to experiment, especially if things aren’t moving. Because if they aren’t moving anyway, it’s not going to hurt to try something radical, like writing the last scene first or drawing stick-figure diagrams of how the rest of the plot might go, or dressing up in costume to write the next scene. If it works, it works, and you don’t have to admit to anyone that that’s what you did if you’re embarrassed about it. This is one of the good things about writing being a solitary occupation.

And one last thing: remember that I’m mainly an analytical writer. Most of this comes from observation of other writers who are more intuitive than I am, so if you are an intuitive writer and you try it and it doesn’t work, do something else. Whatever your intuition tells you.

Blocks

I love writing, most of the time. I like making things up, and then making them fit together. I love the feeling I get when I’ve come up with something I think is really clever and unexpected (whatever the judgment of the rest of the world may be after).

But every so often, I. Just. Can’t.

I can still write a grocery list. I can still write a letter. I can still write a blog post complaining bitterly about my “inability to write.” Sometimes I even know what’s going to happen next, either in general terms or in very specific ones. I simply don’t feel like sitting down and doing it.

Years ago, one of my dear friends termed this “not writer’s block, not an inability to put words on paper, just a profound disinclination to write.” Sometimes it’s even more specific – not a profound disinclination to write fiction, but a profound disinclination to work on one specific story.

This is, I think, what most people mean when they talk of “writer’s block” – this profound distaste for the act of sitting down and adding more words to this particular story, chapter, scene, page. It’s an unfortunate terminology, because “writer’s block” conjures up images of an impassable wall or a narrow pass totally cut off by a landslide. A block is something that’s in the way and all but impossible to get around; without dynamite or earth-moving machinery, there’s no way forward.

Which is why I prefer the term “stuck.” Saying I’m stuck or bogged down pulls up images of my car stuck in the mud or the snow…and I’ve been there, done that, and eventually gotten out of it more times than I can count. Being stuck is a condition that one can overcome, and since “writer’s block” is a mental obstacle rather than a physical one, the first step in getting out of it is reframing the problem in your own head.

The second and most critical step is diagnosis: why am I stuck? This can require some thought and digging, or it can be really obvious once I actually turn my attention to what’s going on. The most common reasons I’ve observed, in no particular order, are:

 Insufficient development and/or failure to think things through. The writer has a great character or scene or idea and doesn’t stop to think it through before plunging ahead. This works for a couple of chapters, but then comes the moment of truth when the story has to start coming together and/or making sense, and the writer simply can’t keep going on the fly. Or the writer has blithely written himself into a corner because he didn’t think long enough about the implications of his cool technology or magic system and the ways they would affect his grand finale,
 Process block. The writer is most comfortable and productive writing one way but for one reason or another is writing this piece some other way, or the piece demands to be written in some way different from the writer’s usual working method. Either way, there’s a mis-match that’s getting in the way of further production.
 Wrong turn. The writer has just made, or is just about to make, a boneheaded decision about the characters or plot, something that will take the story in a completely wrong direction that will not work. On some level, the writer knows this, and is subconsciously refusing to move forward until the mistake is fixed.
 No discipline. It’s a gorgeous summer day, and the writer would really rather go to the beach than write. Or it’s a sunny winter day after three inches of fresh powder fell last night and the writer wants to go skiing. So the writer does.
 Insecurity. The writer has hit one of those times where every sentence looks wrong or stupid or terrible in some other fashion, possibly because they just read someone else’s brilliant book, or possibly because they attended a lecture or read a how-to book where someone said “If you want to be a writer, you absolutely have to…” and whatever it is they supposedly have to do, they don’t do.
 Dread. The writer knows perfectly well what comes next, and is dreading writing it for some reason. She’s going to have to kill off a favorite character, or she’s going to have to juggle eighteen characters trying to talk at the same time, or it’s going to be one of those background-fill-in scenes she just hates writing, or require a technique she knows she’s bad at. Whatever the reason, it’s going to be unpleasant to write, and she knows it. So she puts it off.
 Exhaustion. The writer has been working twenty-hour days for a month now, and their brains are fried. Or they’ve been facing a series of unrelated crises – family, health, financial, disaster, whatever – that have made them incapable of facing one more thing to be responsible for, even if it’s a bunch of imaginary people in a story.

Obviously, the correct response to being stuck varies considerably depending on what the cause is. If the writer is exhausted, taking a break, a nap, and it easy for a while is the clear winner; if the writer is hearing the call of the beach, these remedies are not so helpful. If the problem is insufficient development or a pending wrong turn, the writer needs to stop and do some serious thinking about content; if the problem is a process mis-match, thinking about the story won’t help – the writer has to think about process and why they’re so determined to write things linearly when writing out of order seems more likely to work this time (or vice versa). If one is dreading the next bit or feeling insecure, one has to pull up one’s pants and just do it, but “just do it” is no help if what’s needed is thinking about process or content.

This is why all those books and articles and blogs about “how to beat writer’s block” aren’t terribly helpful; there is no one-size-fits-all solution. First, you have to figure out why you’re stuck, and you are the only person who can do that (though sometimes talking to an objective outside observer helps, if you have a good friend who’ll actually tell you “Writer’s block? Oh, you mean because the weather’s been so nice lately? You always do that.”)

Mixing up viewpoints

First, an announcement of sorts: my webmaster has gotten the handout I use on viewpoint put up on my web page. It’s accessible through the “links” page, or directly from here.

That handout covers some (not all) of the types of viewpoint – first person, epistolary, stream-of-consciousness, second person, tight-third person, camera eye, etc. Plus multiple viewpoint, which I consider a structure, rather than a type of viewpoint, but which there’s so much confusion about that I felt I needed to include it.

One of the things I did not include is something I ran across years ago in a how-to-write book that I think raised some interesting points, while also totally missing the boat when it came to what was actually going on.

The author was discussing uncommon viewpoints, starting with second person (“you do this”) and stream-of-consciousness, both of which were well and good. But then he got into what he called “combined viewpoints,” things he said were mixtures of first-person and second- or third-person, and I wanted to throw the book across the room.

Because “I thought of you” is not a combination of two viewpoints (as the author claimed); it’s solidly first-person. It does something unusual in fiction by dragging the reader directly into the story as the character “you,” but “you” is not a second viewpoint, any more than John would be if the sentence were “I thought of John.” The story is presented by the “I” character; that’s whose eyes it’s seen through, and no matter how convoluted and lovely the sentences addressed to “you,” “you” never becomes the viewpoint.

The second example, which was supposed to be a combination of first- and third-person, was muddled enough that I couldn’t tell whether what he had was a first-person narrator telling a story (“Let me tell you what happened. Bob walked up to the house…”) or whether it was a true mid-story change in viewpoint type (“I fell asleep. Jenny slept until midnight…” where “I” and “Jenny” are the same character). Even if it was the latter, I still wouldn’t call it a combined viewpoint, though, because the types of viewpoint aren’t ever truly combined. They come one after the other; it’s a shift, not a combination.

But the whole thing has been nagging at me for years, and I finally figured out that it’s because some stories do change viewpoint type and/or viewpoint character one or more times in mid-story. These aren’t combined viewpoints, though, any more than stacking two Lego blocks together makes them somehow a new, single Lego block. They’re stuck together as a unit, which is useful, but they’re still the same two blocks you started with. What these stories do is nesting viewpoints, one inside another, for different parts of the story.

Foremost among the viewpoint-shifting techniques is the frame story, which has largely gone out of style these days. In a frame story, the author starts with one viewpoint character, who at some point meets another character who tells the original POV character the main story. Frequently, there’s a shift in viewpoint type when the storytelling starts; if the frame was in third-person, the body of the story will be in first-person, for instance. This helps set off the “frame” part of the tale from the rest of the story.

But there are also tales-within-tales; the Thousand and One Nights (aka The Arabian Nights Entertainment) is probably the best known and most complex of these, but you see the same sort of character-telling-a-story-to-other-characters in many other novels. This can range from the detective’s summing-up at the end of a murder mystery to one character bringing the others up to speed on a critical incident they haven’t heard about to someone reading a book or newspaper clipping to a character telling bedtime stories. Sometimes, the viewpoint and/or voice of the tale-within-the-tale is the same as that of the main story; sometimes it’s not.

There are also times when the writer wants to shift the viewpoint type just slightly – from a standard first-person to epistolary when the POV character writes a letter, or from standard first to something closer to stream-of-consciousness for an action scene.  Usually, the reason is to show the reader exactly what was said in the letter, or provide more of a feel for the internal chaos the POV character is going through in a fight.

Multiple-viewpoint is another angle of approach. While the most common type of multiple-viewpoint uses an ensemble cast of viewpoint characters, one per scene, all in tight-third-person or camera-eye third-person, it is equally possible to give one or more characters a different viewpoint type, so that the main character’s scenes are all in tight-third, the sidekick’s viewpoint is a series of letters to his sister, the love interest’s viewpoint is in first-person, etc. This has to be handled with care, or it gets confusing, but done right, it can be extremely effective.

Once in a while, I’ve run across a story where the author either couldn’t make up his/her mind whether to write in first-person or tight-third, or else started it one way and switched to the other somewhere during the writing process…and missed a line or two in the middle of the story somewhere, so that you have “He swung the sword” in the middle of a first-person narrative, or “I just couldn’t do it” in the middle of a tight-third one. This always jars me right out of the story, because it’s a mistake, and an obvious one at that.

On the other hand, I’ve run across one or two stories where the author deliberately shifted viewpoint type in mid-story, and made it work. Every time, they’ve done it by including some sort of transition, making it obvious that the change was deliberate and easing the reader quickly into the new viewpoint. Again, this is something that has to be handled carefully to avoid confusion.

Killing them softly…

“He was already dead when I got there” is a common claim in mystery novels, but all too often it’s also the answer when fans ask writers “Why did you kill off my favorite character?” And as with mystery novels, the claim is frequently disbelieved, especially when the death happens to a major or recurring character in a long-running series.

But for a lot of writers – even those who plan ahead (or try to) – it really is true. You get to a certain point in a story, and you realize that George is going to throw himself on that unexploded grenade. It’s what he would do. You thought he’d duck and run with the rest of the gang, but he’s not absolutely sure that everyone else will get far enough away in time, and…well, it’s what he would do.

So you go back over the last chapter, hoping to tweak the fight some, but no, this is how it has to play out. That grenade is getting chucked into the room as the villain leaves because that’s what she would do.

You then have two choices: #1- You can change George’s behavior, or the villain’s, so that there is no grenade or George doesn’t jump on it, and the characters will turn instantly to cardboard and magically lose most of the personality and sympathy (or outrage) you’ve spend many chapters building up on their behalf, or #2 – You can go ahead and write the scene where George throws himself on the grenade and dies heroically.

When that happens, the choice is obvious (to me, anyway) – you do what’s best for the story, and cardboard characters are never best for the story, so RIP George.

Sometimes, it happens the other way around. In my second novel, I had a brief scene planned in which a spear-carrier was supposed to show up, do something that I and my readers knew was a mistake, and end up dead. He showed up…and I liked him. Really, really liked him. So my short, two-page scene extended itself and extended itself as my other characters tried to talk him into changing sides, but he had principles and wouldn’t. And the more he explained his principles, the better I liked him, even if he was wrong and headed for extinction in short order.

Eventually, I and my characters ran out of arguments, and he still hadn’t changed sides, and he was still going to make the mistake he’d been ordered to make, because he was honorable and had principles and so on. So I let him, and I killed him.

My crit group gave me hell for it, but even they couldn’t come up with a way for me to do anything different without wrenching the story out of shape and making it implausible to boot.

When a character earns his or her death – when acting absolutely in character will, in that situation, lead them inevitably to their end – it is next door to impossible to justify doing anything other than letting them die. Doing otherwise does violence to the story. Sometimes, the writer has known from the start that Jennifer or George was doomed; sometimes, it becomes obvious when one is writing the scene that a particular character cannot possibly survive (or that they couldn’t have survived something that happened offstage). Either way, they’re dead.

There are, however, a whole lot of bad reasons for killing off a character:

1. To prove that you, the writer, are not afraid to kill off a character that you are sure everyone is going to like. If you feel like you have to prove something, write the death scene and then pitch it. Stuff goes into a story because it belongs there, not because the writer needs to show off.

2. To provide an emotional, heartwrenching scene. Mind you, the death of a well-liked character should certainly be emotional and heartwrenching, but if you’re deliberately killing off nice characters just to get a rise out of your readers, and for no other reason, you need a bigger repertoire of heartwrenching and deeply emotional scenes. And if you’re just doing it to add angst…no. Just no.

3. To make the reader feel unsafe; to let the reader know that no, really, anybody might die in this book, nobody’s safe. This used to be more likely to work (though I disapproved of this kind of reader manipulation even then), but these days, “the nice guy dies” is so common that it’s become a TV trope. If you insist on doing it, it’s going to need exceptionally careful handling to work, and you probably still won’t get the shock value you want unless you actually kill off the main character him/herself in the tenth chapter or so.

4. Because you can! You’re the writer, bwa-ha-ha! (Similar to #1, but more extreme.) You may be the writer, and you can certainly write the words, but if this is the sole reason the character dies, you’re highly unlikely to end up with a good story.

The interesting thing is, you actually can do all those things, or any one of them, and still make it work, if one of two things is true: either the character’s death is plot-important (in addition to being heartwrenching or proving anyone can day or whatever), or the character’s death, however random and senseless, has serious consequences for other characters, emotionally and (again) plot-wise.

For instance, there’s a scene in Dorothy Dunnett’s The Game of Kings in which a moderately important and extremely likeable character dies unexpectedly, randomly, and senselessly. It works because it is shocking and unexpected; because the way it happens makes it abundantly clear that nobody is safe, but most of all because it has repercussions throughout the entire rest of the five-book series. The characters are as shocked as the reader, and their shock reverberates through both their emotions and their actions. Things would have gone very differently if that character hadn’t died just then, in both the short-term and the long term.

In other words, when you kill off a character, it has to matter. To the other characters, to the plot, to the readers.

Meeting the author

A while back, I had a frustrating conversation with a guy who claimed to want to write. I’d hoped for better, given his email (which was why I agreed to meet him in the first place), but…well. So here are some of the things he did right, and a whole lot of things he did wrong.

Right: he was absolutely courteous, offered to buy me coffee and munchies in return for an hour of my time (it ended up being a bit longer, but hey, free munchies). He did not spend the entire hour explaining his idea in detail while giving me no opportunity to get a word in edgewise. He listened carefully and took occasional notes. He stayed polite, even when he was wondering aloud why the advice I was giving him was so different from the advice he’d been getting elsewhere.

Which brings me to what he did wrong. Which was mainly that he did not want to talk about his brilliant, as-yet-unwritten blockbuster fantasy novel. No, he wanted to talk about selling it. When he hadn’t put even one word on the page yet.

Now, this is not the first time (nor the second, nor the tenth) that this has happened to me. And I can understand the impulse; the wannabe author has an honest-to-god experienced professional right in front of him, someone who knows stuff about the business end that he hasn’t been able to find out no matter how hard he’s looked. Of course he’s going to want to ask about getting published and submissions and query letters and so on.

But…

This guy spent the entire hour and a bit asking about the finer points of query letters, ebooks versus traditional publishing, getting an agent, portion-and-outline, marketing plans, foreign translations, self-publishing in hardcover, whether he should set up a blog/web page for the book, etc. He said not one word about actually writing the book. In fact, if I hadn’t asked, I wouldn’t even have been sure it was fantasy and not science fiction or a Romance or mystery.

In return, I spent the entire hour and a bit repeating, in smaller and smaller words, “None of that matters until you write the book. There is a word for people who spend a lot of time setting up elaborate schemes to sell something that does not exist, and it is not a nice word. Write the book, finish the book, and then worry about all this. It’ll take you a year or more, probably, and by that time the market may look completely different. None of the publicity and marketing stuff matters until you have a manuscript to sell. None of it.

“No, planning your query letter before you have even written Page 1 is not getting a jump on things. If you are going to write one page, write Page One. And then Page Two. Thinking about how to boost your international sales is pointless when you have nothing to sell. Think about your plot. Setting up a book blog when there is no book and there won’t be for years is not going to win you an audience, and if you actually do it right, you’ll spend so much time writing the blog that you won’t write the book. Write the book first. A query letter is a job application for a novel; your novel can’t get a job because it hasn’t even been born yet, let alone grown up enough to apply for work. Write the book.” And so on.

I am just about positive that not one word sank in. As I said, I’ve been through this before, and whenever I’ve encountered a similar would-be writer in the past, one who is totally focused on how to sell an as-yet-unwritten book/manuscript, that would-be writer has never once, to the best of my knowledge, actually finished a book.

The tragedy is that not all of these would-be writers are after easy recognition. They really do have an idea they love, and they want to do their best by it. But they are so worried about the whole mystical, amorphous creativity thing, and so uncertain about the whole writing process, that they latch on to what seems more concrete, something they’re familiar with, something that sounds doable, or at least learnable: publicity and sales. They ignore the chance to get some tips on craft that might actually be immediately useful, in favor of asking about stuff that won’t be any use until their novel is finished, by which time they’ll be lucky to remember the general outline, let alone any of the fine points.

Interestingly, in my experience, people who have finished a first draft, and who are actually in a position to need to know about query letters and submitting stuff, tend to grill me about technique and editing and how to improve their manuscript, and only get down to query letter stuff in the last ten minutes of the meeting. Or, if they begin by handing me a query or an outline to look at, we end up spending two hours talking about the structure of the book, or pacing, or what the theme really is, before we get down to talking about improving the query letter in the last ten minutes or so.

Possibly this is because anyone who has actually made it through a first draft has a much clearer idea of what the hard part is, and what is and isn’t easy to find advice about.