Patricia C. Wrede's Blog, page 48

Kittens and roofing and 4th street, oh my

As some of you already know, this is a rather busy weekend for me. I lost my elder cat, Nimue, to a combination of kidney failure, hyperthyroid, and general old age (she was 19) a couple of weeks back, and on Wednesday I acquired an 11 week (or so) kitten to keep Caz company. She’s a rescue kitten, part of a litter found in a window-well; gray tabby shorthair and barely more than a handful at the moment. She is tentatively named Karma, and is totally fearless…and fascinated by Cazaril’s tail. Caz, in turn, was rather dubious to begin with but is rapidly warming to the idea of having a self-propelled chase toy, even if it means his tail gets chewed on from time to time. I have put the breakables in the cupboard for the forseeable future.

On Thursday night, we had terrific thunderstorms; I woke to crashing at 3:30 a.m. and went downstairs to discover my living room ceiling raining on my good rug. Luckily, the water landed mainly in the open part of the room and not on any of the good furniture, but there was still a lot of scurrying around to make sure everything was pushed back and I had enough buckets and bowls in place to catch what was still coming in.

I spent the rest of the night ferrying buckets from living room to kitchen and back, in between getting books and papers and other easily portable stuff that might get water-damaged out of the living room. Friday, I spent on the phone with roofers and insurance people.

By 6 p.m. Friday, the roofer had put a temporary patch on the quarter-sized hole that the falling cottonwood branch put all the way through the roof – not just the shingles, the board underneath was splintered, and you could see daylight in the inside of the eaves where no daylight should have been. Now I’m waiting for the insurance claims adjuster to set up an appointment, which could be a while – there are a LOT of damaged homes in the area (apparently the wind blew the third story off a three-story building in a small town west of here – not just blew the roof off, blew the whole third story off. Not a tornado, eithe). I’ve had power off and on, and it seems mostly to be back by now, but there’s more thunderstorms expected tonight, so who knows…and my sister called because her power’s into its second day of being out and if it doesn’t come back on, she may want to spend the night in my air-conditioned spare room, cats or no cats (she has allergies).

And it’s 4th Street Fantasy Con weekend, which means I’m juggling panels and convention stuff on top of all this. And the kitten is doing gravity checks as I type (batting pens, hair clips, book marks, flash drives, scissors, paperbacks, and other small items off the edge of my desk to make sure gravity is still working properly). I will pick them up later.

All this is in aid of explaining why this is a somewhat disjointed post today. My brain is full of a jumble of fascinating 4th street stuff, plus insurance and cleanup stuff, plus remembering to call the vet on Monday to schedule the second round of kitten immunizations, and so on.

Protagonists rarely have this kind of jumble of events to deal with all at once (OK, it’s rare to have it all happen at once in real life, too, so this is reasonable). But the characters in a book, if they’re at all realistic, have as many roles to juggle as actual people: personal, career, family, friends, community, etc. Often, one or more of these possible roles gets ignored in the course of the story, or subsumed into some other role. A fantasy hero who’s busy saving the world isn’t expected to go to work at MacDonalds or volunteer at the food shelf – her/his job and contribution to the community is Saving The World, and that’s plenty enough to be going on with.

Nonetheless, it can be extremely useful to think about all the other things the protagonist could or should be doing, all the stuff he/she is neglecting in order to Save the World. Because some of it will have consequences. Maybe those consequences won’t come home to roost within the confines of the particular story the writer is telling, or maybe they’ll all show up at once, but if the writer never stops to think about them at all, they’re very unlikely to show up on their own even if it would be extremely useful to the story.

Of course, it’s at least as difficult to juggle a bunch of miscellaneous events, their setup, and their aftermath, as it is to juggle a bunch of characters all onstage at once. Some of the techniques are the same – keeping track of the various threads and making sure that each one gets some time onstage every few hours/paragraphs so that no balls get dropped. (This works pretty well in real life, too, though this writer is a lot more comfortable when it’s happening to fictional characters.)

Futurespeak

The other day, my walking buddy and I were discussing the use and misuse of slang in SF and fantasy. She was particularly exercised over an author whose entire repertoire of “future speak” seemed to consist of awkward and obvious portmanteau words like “carrocoli” for a hybrid carrot-broccoli plant. This is really more a matter of naming things than slang, but it falls into the same problem category: how does a writer make characters sound both believably futuristic (or fantastical) and comprehensible at the same time?

There are three different areas a writer has to consider when thinking about how people in a completely different place and time would talk: what to call things, what sort of slang and idioms people use, and what sort of technical jargon each of the characters could/would/should slip into their dialog.

The first is the naming of names – that is, what to call various common objects that the reader will be unfamiliar with. In most SF, the things are unfamiliar because they’re things that haven’t been invented yet, or things that come from other planets or alien societies; in medieval fantasy, they’re unfamiliar either because most people no longer have experience with a wide variety of formerly-common things and activities, from sailing a tall ship to shearing a sheep, or because the things are imaginary (like the spices the dwarves use or the herbs the elves grow).

The real things, like the parts of a harness or the names of the different sails on a schooner, the writer can find out from research. The imaginary ones need to “sound real,” and that means considering what the thing is, what it’s used for, where it came from, and possibly who invented it and when. Regardless of what something is originally named, if it’s a common everyday item that’s in constant use, the name will eventually get shortened to something easy to say: television to TV, telephone to phone, automobile to car. Names of existing items can get transferred to new ones – “notebook” is both a shorter form of “notebook computer” and a repurposing of the word that used to mean “blank pages bound in a cover to jot things down in.”

Who invented and named it is also relevant. Anything that came out of a big corporate research program will have had oodles of marketing people involved in making up the name, the way drugs and new car models do. Hybrid vegetables and fruits are often given portmanteau names like limequat, or variations on one of the names they started with, like broccolini. Things that were developed or invented in another culture sometimes keep their original name; other times, the name will be adapted, or something will be completely renamed.

The second thing to consider is slang and speech patterns. Anyone who’s read Chaucer can see how syntax and word choice have changed in the past 900 years or so; there’s no reason to think that similar changes won’t take place in the next 900. The problem is indicating those changes without turning one’s story into a language class project. Slang changes constantly and comes from many, many sources: abbreviations, portmanteau words, repurposed words, words and phrases borrowed from other languages, acronyms, etc. To give a plausible-seeming impression of future slang, a writer needs to use all of these possible sources, not just one (which was what my friend was complaining about in the book she’d read).

The other thing to consider is that unless the writer is doing very near-future SF, there will have been lots of slang and lots of idioms that have come along in the interim, and some of them will have stuck. We still talk about “reining in” someone who’s out of control, even though horses haven’t been part of daily life for nearly a century. If the only slang and idioms your far-future people use are a) those current in the far future and b) those that stuck around from 2013, it’s going to look a little odd. Similarly, if your medieval peasants are talking about not having the bandwidth for that, or even about telegraphing a punch, some readers will not be happy, but if the elves have interesting archery-slang and nature idioms, lots of people will be very happy indeed.

The third thing to think about, language wise, is whatever specialized jargon would be plausible for your specific characters to use. This comes in two varieties: terms that were once specialized to a particular field, but which have become commonplace so that everyone uses them; and terms that are still specific to a particular field that one of your characters is expert in.

The first sort of jargon is stuff that any of your characters might use, because it’s commonplace in whatever time you’ve set your story. “Laser” was, in the 1950s, a specialized acronym that hardly anyone besides physicists and SF fans had heard of; “byte” was, in the early 1980s, a term only computer geeks understood. In a story set in 2013 or later, it would be perfectly reasonable for pretty much any character to use them. On the other hand, unless one of your characters is a blacksmith, there’s probably not going to be a lot of need for anyone to list the names or uses of every hammer lying around the forge, and the whole reason Scotty can get away with all that engineering doubletalk about dilithium crystals is that nobody expects anyone to understand the jargon anyway.

Once you’ve thought about all this stuff and made up a rich linguistic stew for your characters to speak…think about dialing it back. Once in a while, somebody gets away with a book like Anthony Burgess’ A Clockwork Orange or Norman Spinrad’s The Void Captain’s Tale, but most of the time, it’s more effective to use a much lighter hand so that readers won’t get distracted by having to learn new syntax and slang and names and specialist jargon in every single sentence. A book that has to be decoded is seldom a fast read. Sometimes it’s worth the effort, and sometimes the story demands it, but be very sure it does (and that you can pull it off) if you’re going to try what is essential a whole new dialect that will be completely unfamiliar to every last one of your readers (because you made it up).

On the other hand, if you can make it work, it’s a heck of a lot of fun and a terrific tour de force. And if it works, fine.

Five W’s and…

Back in high school, I took one semester of journalism. As is pretty typical for a beginning journalism class, it concentrated on drilling into us the importance of the classic “five W’s and one H” – the Who, What, When, Where, Why, and How – that we were to be sure to include in every story. We were also told that this was very much a journalism thing, and nothing to do with fiction, thank you very much.

It took me quite a number of years to appreciate the utter baloney-ness of that second statement. The classic five W’s and one H are the fundamentals of story, whether they’re facts in the real world or imaginary constructs in fiction.

For instance, Who in fiction is obviously the characters. Yes, there are occasional stories that don’t have characters, like Ray Bradbury’s “There Will Come Soft Rains,” but they’re definitely the exception, even in science fiction. The vast majority of stories are about characters, people who may or may not be strictly considered human, but who have human virtues and flaws. Readers may like the main character(s) or loathe them, but they’re seldom indifferent if the story is any good. Even the most stereotypical, cardboard character can catch the reader’s attention if they represent something the reader values – the Loyal Friend, the Faithful Spouse, the Ordinary Guy Who Saves The Day, etc.

What is what happens to the characters in the course of the story. Plot, in other words. OK, in fiction “what happened” is invented – there wasn’t a real gas leak that blew up the apartment building or a real spaceship that actually landed on the White House lawn. But “what happened” is still vital; without it, what you have is a description of a setting or a person, not a story. Of course, “what happened” can be snuck into a description of a setting disguised as the history of the place, or into a character sketch as backstory, but that’s a difference in presentation, not a change in what it is.

When is the time when “what happens” happened. By time, I don’t necessarily mean “7 a.m. on a Sunday morning” – most stories don’t need that kind of precision. “Present day” is good enough for a lot of mainstream, romance, literary, and mystery fiction, but even then it’s usually a good idea to have some indication of whether it’s winter or summer, and whether a particular scene happens in the morning, afternoon, or late at night. For historical fiction, and for much fantasy and SF, giving the reader a clear idea of when the story is happening is a lot more important. If the main character has to attend a party at the White House, it makes a big difference whether it’s 1960, 1911, or 1863, and the sooner that’s clear to the reader, the better.

Where is the setting, the place where “what happens” happens. Some writers prefer to set their stories in Anytown, U.S.A. or Generic Modern City, hoping/intending that their readers will place the story “just around the corner from wherever I am.” This rarely works; it’s even harder than trying to make the main character an Everyperson so all readers can identify with him/her (and that’s next to impossible, given the difficulties of presenting a main character without giving away his/her gender and automatically futzing the identification of one half of the readers right there. Sarah Caudwell is the only writer I can think of who’s pulled it off).

And even Anytown, U.S.A. is going to have weather, and the weather will be vastly different depending on whether it’s near a coast, in the Great Plains, in the desert Southwest, or in the Rockies. Most of the time, writers are best off picking or inventing a specific, unique place: New Orleans or Boston or San Diego or New Ruritania. Most science fiction and fantasy writers are forced to work out their settings in detail even if their stories are supposedly present-day, in order to integrate the SF and fantasy elements believably.

Why is more than the characters’ motivations, though those are certainly critical. Why also includes the backstory and setup, and applies to every other W on the list: Why here? Why now? Why did this happen (and not that)? Why these people and not those?

And finally, How covers the mechanics and logistics: step by step, how did this happen? If what happened is “aliens blew up the library,” and why is “because they thought it was a secret robot factory,” the how has to do with the armaments on the alien ship and how they got the “evidence” that the library was really a robot factory. If what happened is that Frodo drops the One Ring in a volcano, how did this happen starts with “In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit…” and all the events that led up to Bilbo acquiring the ring, passing it on to Frodo, Gandalf discovering its nature, the Council of Rivendell deciding to destroy it, etc.

If you can nail down all six of these elements for your story, you have a good solid place from which to start writing. If you can’t figure out what’s wrong with something you’ve written, looking at these gives you another angle to use to determine if anything critical is missing, or just not as clear as it needs to be.

Finally, Jeremy Porter has a charming post on this subject. It’s supposedly aimed at journalists, but the example he uses to illustrate the six elements is a familiar story – “The Three Little Pigs.”

Crowd scenes

One of the first things I ever learned to hate about writing was writing council scenes. One character on stage had things to do; two characters on stage could talk to each other; three could talk and interrupt and disagree. But with every character after that who had to be part of a scene, it got harder and harder to keep things moving. Either some of the characters were just standing quietly in the background, doing and saying nothing (so why were they there, again?) or there was a mad jumble of actions and lines of dialog that didn’t make sense.

If the scene in question was a dinner or a party, I could stick to whichever two or three characters were important, and let the reader presume that everyone else was having a different conversation in another corner. But council scenes – scenes where a bunch of different characters with important agendas all got together to hash out what was going on and what they needed to do next – those were a nightmare.

And for some reason, whenever my characters held a council, it wasn’t the protagonist and three of her closest friends and advisors; no, I had to have the protagonist and friends, plus two or three ambassadors, plus representatives of every major faction in the city/country, from the city guards and the army to the magician’s guild, including the folks who want to take the bad guy’s side and the ones who want to collect the Humungously Powerful Magic Gizmo and study it or use it themselves instead of wasting it taking out the Evil Overlord.

I couldn’t shuffle anyone off into a corner, because they were all important to the scene. Even minor characters who only showed up for that one scene in the whole book were there because they represented some attitude or agenda that the major characters needed to consider and deal with, or because they had some obscure but critical piece of information that needed to come out in order for everyone to make the right decision. Nobody could go off and stand quietly in a corner talking to someone else, or if they did, that conversation had better be important and had to come out somewhere in the rest of the scene.

And that was just the conversation. Even with everyone sitting around a giant table, there was body language, and as soon as someone inevitably lost his temper, people stood up and started shouting, or attempted to make a stately exit, or just stormed out. Juggling it all so that my protagonists kept the center stage, but everyone else still got to have their say (and their reactions) was (and still is) a major headache. Council scenes, it turns out, are the simplest form of crowd scene (simplest because everyone is usually trapped around a table in a formal setting where they’re supposed to be polite and actually listen to each other instead of all trying to do or say something at the same time).

I did eventually learn a couple of tricks for handling everything. The first one was to start with a list: who is present in the scene? I listed everybody I could think of who would logically be present, from my main characters to the ceremonial guards standing on either side of the door.

Then, for each person, I listed why they were there. Did they represent a particular political faction? Was it part of their job, like the guards and the queen’s steward? Were they invited for a reason – influence or money or information that the main characters wanted? And then I listed their attitude toward the decisions that the council was supposed to consider. Were they for, against, or neutral? Could they be persuaded to change their mind? If so, by what – logic, bribes, blackmail, an emotional appeal for solidarity?

Next, I figured out my seating plan. Knowing who everyone is sitting next to or across from, at what distance from whoever they may want to agree or disagree with wasn’t just useful; it was all that kept me from making really basic mistakes like having the red-headed councilor seated next to four different ambassadors and his wife, all at the same time. For the more general crowd scene, “seating plan” is more “who’s standing where/doing what,” and can end up looking a bit like a diagram of a football play, but it’s still exceedingly useful.

Finally, I made a list of the points I, the author, wanted to get done during the course of the scene. This included everything from introducing an important new character to setting up the fight with the monster five chapters later, tangled relationships or politics that I want to bring up, and of course all the information and plot points that the characters need to cover.

I don’t plan the conversation exactly, though it’s usually obvious that certain points will need to be made by specific characters. The list of what I want to get done is to help me stay on track when I start writing, so that I don’t wander too far down a particular conversational byway without stopping to think about whether that’s really where I want the scene to go. I don’t always end up covering every point. Sometimes, the byway ends up being much more interesting than what I had planned, and I just go with it.

That, however, doesn’t come until I actually start writing the scene, and discovering how it’s all going to play out. The first key thing for keeping a crowd scene on track turns out to be viewpoint. In first-person or tight third-person, staying solidly behind the POV character’s eyes helps enormously in keeping everything under control. The scene follows the viewpoint character’s attention, so if five people are yelling at once and the POV can’t make out what any of them are saying, I don’t have to write dialog for all of them.

The second key thing, which is closely related to the first, is to roll the conversation along in short, three-to-five-line dialog exchanges that are limited to two or three people. If the POV is talking, he/she counts as one of the three; if not, the POV gets a reaction thought every three-to-five lines to remind us that he/she is there. It may be a bit of body language – a nod, an itchy elbow, a slight move to one side to get out of somebody’s line of sight – or it may be a mental comment on what’s just been said, or an emotional reaction to the revelation. Whatever it is, it comes right before the next set of dialog exchanges. Every so often, the dialog pattern gets broken by something – somebody standing up and shouting, tea arriving, ninjas leaping in through the windows.

So the scene ends up going something like this: A speaks, B answers, A speaks; POV rolls eyes; B answers, C objects, B sits down in a huff, D comments, C argues; POV nods; D responds, A repeats original point, D agrees, B objects again, E says he has a point; POV notices F looks nervous; etc.

That’s if everybody is more-or-less having the same conversation, which is what’s supposed to happen in a council scene. In a crowd scene, on the other hand, there’s a mob of people on stage who all have their own agenda. The trick there is to break the mob up into two-or-three-person groups, each of which can pursue their own course and take brief turns on center stage as the POV character’s attention is dragged from one group to another.

The last key thing is to make sure that nobody goes too long without being mentioned, so that the reader (and the author!) don’t forget they’re there. If somebody hasn’t had a chance to speak or do anything in two or three pages (depending on how many characters one is juggling), then a line like “A, D, and G nodded emphatically; F hesitated, then made a jerky movement that might have been agreement” takes care of four people at once.

Being edited

“So how can you stand being edited?” is a question that’s been coming up at conventions lately. The subtext usually assumes that all editors are a) idiots and/or b) out to ruin everyone’s brilliant manuscripts, and that they must therefore be fought off with every bit of a writer’s strength and energy.

This happens not to be the case. There are, in fact, so many misconceptions inherent in this attitude that I’m not even going to try to correct them one at a time; just throw the whole notion overboard, and let’s start with how the process really works.

For starters, at most major publishing houses, there isn’t one event that is clearly identifiably as “being edited.” There are at least two, often three, and they all occur at different times and deal with different levels.

The first editorial pass is known as “revision requests.” It occurs a month or two after the author has turned in a completed draft. The editor has had time to go over it and identify things that he/she wants changed: this scene is too important to happen offstage, these two characters are an awful lot alike and could be combined to the benefit of the story, the pacing drags in the middle, etc. The editor does not, in my experience, demand any of these changes; the editor presents them to the author, there’s a discussion about which ones are or aren’t objectionable (see #5 and #6 below), and the editor and author come to some reasonable compromise (rarely does either editor or author “win” the discussion, i.e. persuade/insist on doing everything their way, no exceptions).

The author takes these comments away and produces a revised draft, which then undergoes the second editorial pass known as a line edit. This is where the editor goes through the microwriting and complains that this sentence is awkward, that the phrase “she said icily” has been used three times in two pages, that the viewpoint is floating, that this paragraph would make more sense if it came before that one instead of after, and so on.

The third round of editorial comment is the copy-edit, in which the copy-editor does three very specific things: 1) double checks factual information like dates, names of historical figures and places, etc. (this can be hell on a copy-editor who is working with an alternate history manuscript); 2) checks grammar, syntax, and punctuation as appropriate; and 3) marks things like em-dashes and en-dashes, space breaks, and other typographical stuff for the typesetter. #3 has changed from marking the changes to actually making the changes in most publishers that are using electronic typesetting, but the typographical stuff is the only thing a copy-editor is supposed to actually change. Everything else, even the incorrect grammar, they’re only supposed to query. Very occasionally, one of them gets carried away, but that’s what “stet” stamps and “reject change” buttons are for.

Depending on the experience of the editor and author and how clean the final submission manuscript is, some editors combine the revision requests and the line edit; others wait and combine the line edit and the copy edit. In all cases, the author gets to review any queries or proposed changes and approve or disapprove them.

Which brings me to the sorts of things that come up in the course of editorial revisions, line editing, and copyediting. In my experience, these fall into six loosely-defined categories.

1.  The obvious mistakes – the places where I called the character Lewis in Chapter 4 and Louis in Chapter 8, or accidentally doubled a word, or phrased a sentence so that it can easily mean the exact opposite of what I meant. These are the no-brainers, and I change them immediately and hope that the editor won’t actually remember that I did that.
2.  The arguable things – the places where I have seventeen semi-colons on one page, or have twelve places where people do the same bit of body language (roll their eyes, blink, shrug), or echo the same phrase too close together. Most of the time, these are mistakes, and I treat them the same as #1 – change immediately and try to forget I ever did something so stupid. Every once in a while, though, I want the echo of that same word, or the parallel body language, or whatever. I leave those and flag them for review as the last thing I check before I send the ms. back to the editor. Usually, I end up keeping a few the way I wrote them, but going ahead and changing most of the ones I initially flagged.
3.  The things that make the book better – the scene the editor wants added (I’ve had five to ten thousand words added to each of the last two books as a result of the editor saying “I really want to see the bit where…”); the bit the editor wants moved, or cut, or combined for the sake of clarity or tension or drama;
4.  The changes that don’t matter much to me – places where the editor wants to change “there was a difference” to “there were differences” or “tomorrow” to “Monday,” or add or delete a phrase to make a sentence clearer. These are things that usually don’t mess with the story I want to tell, so I’ll let them go (unless they noticeably mess up the rhythm of the sentence/paragraph, in which case I’ll try to come up with an alternative that does what the editor wants without messing up the rhythm).
5.  Things I’ll argue about, but I can be persuaded if the editor feels strongly. Usually, these turn out to be places where the editor was trying to fix a problem by making a specific suggestion (“Change the scene so that it looks like they’re going to kill the girl if things go wrong”). The specific suggestion gives me hives, but when I discuss it with the editor, I find out what the problem was (“There wasn’t enough tension in that scene; a death threat would up the stakes”) and I can fix it quite satisfactorily some other way, without doing violence to my story. So the editor’s happy, and I’m happy. Every so often, I lose one of these arguments; it is a measure of how right my editors are that I cannot remember any of the specific incidents that I changed. (Or possibly it’s a measure of how much I hate losing, so I wipe them from my memory…)
6.  Things I absolutely refuse to change. There haven’t been many of these, because I’ve always had editors who are willing to talk about the whys and wherefores, and usually when they’ve given me the reason they had for suggesting a change, and I’ve given them my reason for wanting to keep it, we can come up with something that works for both of us.

Editors work similarly – that is, they have changes they think are absolutely needed, and things they suggest but are OK with the writer not doing. Interestingly, I’ve not yet run into something that each of us felt was a 6 – where the editor absolutely thought it was needed, and I absolutely wasn’t going to give.

Building in the time

“How do you write with a day job/kids/other responsibilities?” is a question that doesn’t have an easy, one-size-fits-all answer, because, like so many other aspects of the writing process, exactly what works depends on the particular writer. But there are a few principles that can be applied.

The first one is this: If other people are getting writing done but you aren’t, it’s not because they have more time or you have less. Everybody gets 24 hours per day, 7 days a week, and that’s all. If someone else has more time for writing, it’s because a) they have fewer responsibilities and commitments, b) they’re better at juggling their responsibilities and commitments, or c) they rank writing as a higher priority compared to their other responsibilities and commitments – not necessarily in the abstract, when they’re making a list of what’s most important, but in concrete day-to-day action choices. Most often, in my experience, the problem is c).

Let me give you an example. A few years ago, I was doing one of those “list your most important priorities” exercises, and as usual “Health and fitness” was at the very top of the list (because, as my mother used to say, if you haven’t got your health, it’s hard to do anything else). Only then the exercise asked you to list the things you were doing to support each priority…and the only thing I could think of was that I got a checkup once a year.

So I was spending about two hours per year on my “very top priority.” And this had been the case year after year, for…way too long. If somebody else had told me that their top priority was health and fitness, but that all they did about it was visit the doctor for an annual checkup, I’d have looked very skeptical and asked what their top priority really was.

At that point, I had two choices. One was to rearrange my list of priorities to reflect what I was actually spending my time on, and the other was to rearrange my time so that I spent it on the things I thought were most important. I picked the second. I went out and hired a trainer, started walking with a friend on my off days, and took a course in nutrition. And I’m at least aware that there are still discrepancies between what I say is most important to me and the way I actually act, and that helps keep me on track.

In other words, there is no Big Secret to the way writers get their writing done. We spend time on it. We write instead of doing other things: instead of gardening, instead of baking a cake for the charity bake sale, instead of volunteering to run part of the convention, instead of joining the book club, instead of watching TV, instead of browsing the Internet, instead of doing all sorts of other things that we would also like to do. The thing is, we want to write more than we want to do those other things, so that’s what we choose to spend our time on.

That said, “how do you find/make time?” is a perennial topic of writerly conversation. Among the things I’ve heard other writers suggest in the past year are:

1. Turn off the Internet. This is the absolute number one tip I hear other writers recommend to each other, over and over, at every convention I attend, every time I get into this conversation. People get programs like macfreedom to block the net so they can’t change their minds; they go to coffee shops that don’t have wi-fi; they even pay to rent offices and don’t hook up Internet service so that they have somewhere to go where they can’t get online. Those who do this, swear by it. Those who don’t do it, exhibit more resistance to giving up their Internet than I see for all of the other suggestions combined, including “give up TV.”

2. Make use of existing time slots. This is number two, especially common among writers who have day jobs (write on coffee breaks and lunch hours instead of socializing) and kids (write in a notebook while waiting to pick up kids after activities, while sitting in the stands at a game, while listening to choir practice). Nearly everyone who has commitments outside the home (job, kid activities, classes) has a structure imposed on their life that has a few gaps in it. Use the gaps.

3. Drop less important activities and substitute writing time. Quit watching one TV show and use the time to write. Drop the book club and use the reading and meeting time to write. Go to lunch or dinner with a fellow writer and don’t talk; both of you write. Pick the least-fun, least-important activity you currently are involved in, stop doing it, and use the time to write. But be absolutely ruthless about using the time for writing.

4. Take a notebook or laptop to a place where nothing else can distract you and write. Go to a park, a coffee shop, a library. If your kids are too young to leave alone, hire a babysitter and go to the library, or trade babysitting with another would-be writer. Some folks actually rent an office (one guy I know says that after fifteen years of going off to work every day, it doesn’t feel like work unless he, you know, goes off to work), or find coworking or collaborative office space.

5. Stay up later or get up earlier. This is the last resort for people who are constantly distracted or interrupted by other folks, but it’s a last resort, because shorting yourself on sleep can kill your creativity just as dead as all the interruptions.

6. Don’t count anything as writing unless you’re writing pay copy. Blogging isn’t writing. Journaling isn’t writing. Emailing your editor or your agent isn’t writing. Commenting on writing forums isn’t writing. Reading how-to-write books isn’t writing. Researching isn’t writing. Spending two hours reading random Wikipedia articles and following links to fascinating web sites is, my goodness, most definitely not writing. Yes, a lot of those things are also necessary for a writer, but if you only have an hour a day to write and you’re spending it on any of this stuff, it’s no wonder you aren’t producing any actual stories. People hate hearing this almost as much as they hate the idea of turning off the Internet, but it’s still true.

None of this is new news. People make time for the things they really care about, for the things they really enjoy doing, and for the things they really want to do.

Once in a very great while, I run across somebody who really can’t drop anything. The woman who was undergoing chemotherapy while caring for an elderly parent, holding down a full-time job, and raising two toddlers is an example. But be honest with yourself. There’s a lot of space between “have to” and “really, really want to.” And if something really is more important than writing time, then it is, and you can stop beating yourself up over it.

Icebergs and soap bubbles

Worldbuilding is one of those basic skills that’s important for all writers, but vital for those of us who write in totally imaginary science fictional or fantasy worlds. There are two basic approaches, the soap bubble and the iceberg.

For the iceberg worldbuilders, there’s a whole lot of information underlying the stuff that actually gets into the story. What the reader sees is the 10% of the iceberg that sticks out of the water, but the writer has come up with a ton of supplementary supporting detail – politics, maps, languages, music, clothing design, law, culture and customs, and on and on. All this gives the imaginary world a tremendous solidity and consistency, because the writer has all this stuff to draw on…and the writers who do this usually spend an enormous amount of time researching and doing their best to make sure that everything ties together.

One such writer I know took advantage of living near a university to get input on his design. He started with the astronomy department, where he found an interested grad student who helped out with designing the star system, other planets and moons, and the composition of the planet’s crust. Then he went to the geology department, where he figured out the tectonic plates and mineral deposits; geography for mountains, lakes and rivers; agriculture for crops, and so on. As I recall, he ran aground in the climatology department – they were happy to point out basic climate zones, but when he asked about weather, they said “We don’t know enough; just make it up.”

Soap-bubble worldbuilders take a different approach. They’re all about illusion – they invent broad swath of interesting detail that’s shiny, hangs together, and implies a lot of history and culture and so on, but which has no more substance behind it than the air that fills a soap bubble. Everything is consistent and plausible on the surface, but surface is all that’s really there.

The advantage of the soap-bubble method is that there’s lots of room to make up useful background whenever the story happens to need it. The disadvantage is that the writer has to fit any new information in around whatever has already been established, or risk the reader losing their suspension of disbelief.

Note that soap-bubble worldbuilders are not necessarily just making things up as they go along. All the ones I know invent quite a lot of their settings before they ever start writing; they just aren’t going into nearly as much depth as the iceberg worldbuilders. What they all seem to have in common is a strong sense of what their setting is like. They will make up a really cool detail and then sigh and say “Yes, it’s cool, but it doesn’t belong in this world” even if there is nothing specific in their worldbuilding-to-date that would make that detail not-work. Sometimes, writers who absolutely cannot do any pre-planning in regard to plot or characters can quite happily do extensive worldbuilding in advance of sitting down to write.

When soap-bubble worldbuilders write long, multi-book series, either their worldbuilding starts to break down, or they become inadvertent iceberg worldbuilders as they accumulate more and more background that doesn’t actually need to be put in the next book. It’s very difficult to keep track of all the random details one has to make up for even one novel, even if one already has a lot of underwater background; it gets harder and harder as a series progresses. It’s easy to overload the soap bubble – to give just one or two bits of information that don’t quite fit with what’s already been said, so that the whole structure collapses. It’s the equivalent of blowing a little too much air into the bubble and popping it.

Iceberg worldbuilders have an easier time going on for multiple books without the worldbuilding collapsing, though if there was an unnoticed flaw in the initial underlying structure, it’s likely to be stressed under the weight of carrying more and more novels, until it either melts down or fractures. It is extremely difficult, in my experience, to come up with a fix for a worldbuilding mistake that will work retroactively, though it can sometimes be done.

The good news is that anyone who has a five or seven or ten-book series almost certainly has enough rabid fans to keep things going for quite a while longer, even if the worldbuilding is starting to show signs of problems. The bad news is that a writer whose worldbuilding is starting to break down is likely to be really bothered by it, to the point of having difficulty continuing (unless the writer really doesn’t care about consistency and believability at that level, in which case the breakdown probably occurs sooner rather than later because the writer didn’t put any effort into worldbuilding in the first place).

Whatever method one prefers, it’s well worth putting time into worldbuilding. Holes in the setting/world often translate into holes in the plot, and if the background is recognizable (i.e., real or based closely on somewhere/somewhen real), holes in the worldbuilding frequently mean that anyone familiar with that time/place will reject the story as implausible or unrealistic even if the story is a complete fantasy. Maintaining the reader’s belief in the story is important to every kind of fiction; consistent and believable backgrounds are a key ingredient in doing that.

Spring Shadows, or How Should I Become A Writer, Ms. Pro?

Spring is always a busy time for YA authors and would-be authors. Teachers are trying to come up with ways of keeping middle-grade and younger students interested when the weather is turning nice, so they have students write to their favorite authors, and if they can swing it, they schedule author visits. High school students are worrying about college, and college students are worrying about what to major in (and perhaps about grad school), and their career counselors are urging them to contact someone in their field for an interview, to find out what jobs are available and what skills they’ll need. (And there are a raft of good, fun SF/F conventions, for those of us in that field.)

Most of the time, the student authors I talk to have fairly realistic expectations. The trouble is, they often have teachers who are trying to shoehorn an atypical career (writing fiction) into a standard set of questions and procedures. Here are some of the things that come my way, and how I usually respond.

I’m supposed to job shadow someone in my field; would you be willing?

Job shadowing a fiction writer is about as worthwhile as watching paint dry. I sit and type; sometimes, I’m typing answers to emails from my agent, my editors, or my fans, or answering/forwarding inquiries about subrights availability, sometimes I’m writing a blog post, but mostly I’m working on some aspect of a book. Once in a while, I get up and look something up in a book, or flip open my browser and google something on the Internet. None of it is particularly interesting or informative. You’re better off just doing a long interview.

OK. I have a bunch of interview questions I’m supposed to ask, too.

Go for it.

What is the best part of your job?

Being able to set my own hours.

What is the most stressful part of your job?

Having to set my own hours.

See, writing isn’t terribly predictable. Some days – or weeks – I’m going great guns and I can do three work sessions a day and get 5,000 or more words per day. Other days, I struggle to get 200 words. And it’s terribly tempting to slack off on nice days and go to the park, regardless of how well I’m doing or how far behind I am. (Somehow, one is never ahead. Not ever.)

Where did you go to school and receive your training?

I went to Carleton College and majored in Biology. Any “training” specifically for writing was in the School of Hard Knocks.

What training would you recommend? What classes should I take?

Learn to type. Even if you are a pen-and-paper writer, or a chisel-and-stone writer, you will eventually have to get your manuscript into typewritten form, and it will go a lot faster and easier if you know how to type. Yes, you can pay somebody else to do it, but that’s an additional upfront expense that not very many writers can afford.

Also, learn to budget. The odds of a fiction writer having a steady, reliable income are not good, not even for the blockbuster Big Names. If you can’t cope with that, you’ve got a problem. A couple of business classes for entrepreneurs would be really useful, but almost nobody actually does that, so I can’t really claim they’re necessary.

In addition, I’d recommend taking enough basic English grammar that you understand what a dangling participle is, know the difference between “affect” and “effect,” and can recognize and avoid writing things like the “wrong” example sentences in The Deluxe Transitive Vampire even if you can’t explain exactly why. I also recommend reading vast quantities of fiction and nonfiction, of as many different types as possible (but if you are only doing this because you think you want to write, it probably won’t help much).

Beyond that, take whatever classes interest you. It’s all material, and it’s especially nice if you are interested in something that might lead to a paying day job. (See “learn to budget,” above.)

Wait a minute! Shouldn’t I take Creative Writing? Or at least English?

Hardly any of the professional writers I know took Creative Writing before they became writers. I can think of two who did, and two more who got M.F.A.s after they sold some novels, but that’s it for CW, so obviously it’s not particularly necessary. If you find it useful, go ahead.

English – well, about a third of the professional writers I know majored in English, and they’re some of the best writers I know (in my own opinion, of course). All of them had considerable trouble getting started though – and not because they weren’t writing well enough to be published. The trouble was that English teaches you how to see what’s wrong with a story, but not how to correct it, so all my English-major friends were extremely discouraged by their own early efforts (since they could spot every flaw, they thought they were terrible writers. Even though I have learned to point out that they should be comparing themselves to other not-yet-published writers, rather than to Jane Austen and Shakespeare and Dickens and Faulkner.) As long as you’re prepared for that effect, and stubborn enough to keep on in spite of it, English is a perfectly good choice.

What kinds of jobs are available in your field?

There aren’t any, not the kind you mean, with a boss and an office you go to and a regular salary. There are a few one-time jobs, like ghostwriting someone else’s book, and there are a number of related jobs that aren’t actually writing, like teaching, editing, proofreading, agenting, etc., but novelists are freelancers. That means that whatever you make is yours (less what Uncle Sam takes), but it also means that if you happen not to make anything, you’re out of luck.

Has the field changed much since you entered it?

Oh, boy, has it. And it’s currently in the middle of two of the biggest changes in well over sixty years: the explosion in e-books, and the concurrent rise of print-on-demand and Amazon.com, which have opened up distribution possibilities that authors have never had before. It’s a little complex to be going into in this kind of interview, but believe me, the book field is changing so fast that everyone in it is dizzy. So pay careful attention, use your brains, and check the dates on any advice you get about the business, because chances are it will be out of date in six months.

And that includes all of this.

What you do right

Years ago, I had a chance to talk to a bunch of high school English teachers about writing, and one of the first things they asked was what my high school teachers had done to inspire me to write. I had to honestly tell them “Nothing,” because I was well into writing long before I got to high school, and the stuff I cared about writing was stuff my teachers never saw and therefore had no influence on.

Then one of them asked a very perceptive question: What had my teachers done right, and what had they done wrong? I had to think about that for a bit. The “right” part was fairly easy; I got a terrific grounding in grammar and syntax and sentence structure from  my grammar school and high school teachers. No, it didn’t have a lot to do with creativity and inspiration; it wasn’t part of the glamorous fun stuff, but boy, was that important.

The “wrong” piece was a lot harder. I had really good English teachers. But after a minute or two, what I came up with was “They didn’t tell me what I was doing right.” When I got an essay back, all the mistakes were marked in big red letters, but there weren’t any red letters that said “Great metaphor!” or “This flows well.” When I got an A, there’d be almost no red marks on the page; when I got a C, there’d be lots.

I’m thinking about this because I was at a panel yesterday (I’m currently at Conquest 44 in Kansas City) listening to editors talk about what makes the difference between the top ten percent of the slush pile – the stuff that’s competently written but that just doesn’t grab folks – and the top two percent that actually gets published. And one of them commented to the effect that most would-be writers are busy avoiding mistakes, on the theory that a mistake-free manuscript will be saleable. Many critique groups and beta readers also spend a lot of time trying to root out errors (which is where all those “Do Not Ever Do This” lists come from). We’ve been conditioned to do this by years of school in which we were rewarded for turning in a mistake-free essay.

But it is almost trivially easy to write a perfect, mistake-free story – correct grammar and syntax, no spelling errors, technically correct dialog, good balance between narrative and action, etc. – that is, unfortunately, also BORING. And the one thing that a successful piece of fiction must not be is boring.

That is, perhaps, an extreme example. My point is that somewhere along the line, would-be writers have to stop focusing on eliminating mistakes and start focusing on whatever it is they do right.

This doesn’t mean that if you know you are very good at witty banter, you fill you entire novel with more and more witty banter; what it means is that if you do good banter (or complex political plots, or appealing characters, or slam-bang action), you look at ways to make those bits even better. You don’t make a diamond by taking a lump of coal and eliminating all the black bits, or by adding more carbon to it, or by cutting and polishing the coal. You make a diamond by taking a lot of coal and subjecting it to enormous heat and pressure until it crystalizes…and then what you have is raw diamond, which still needs to be cut and polished in order to sparkle.

What editors want is something that sparkles, or at least that has the potential to sparkle. Most of the slush pile is unrefined ore – mostly useless dirt. Coal is at least useful, and has the potential to become something more, but it’s the diamonds, raw or cut and polished, that the editors are hunting for.

Figuring out what you do well, and then figuring out how to do it even better, is a lot harder than it sounds. The first step is to look at your writing and notice what things you most enjoy writing, where you have the most fun, which things get you excited about your story and make you want to sit down and work, which scenes you always look forward to doing, and which scenes always seem to creep into the work even though you hadn’t intended them to. People usually enjoy doing things they do well, so the stuff that you most enjoy writing is the first place to look for your particular strengths.

Beta readers are another place to look for your strong points, though one has to take a little care to be sure that when Gina says “I love your action scenes!” it’s because you really are doing very nice action, and not because Gina adores action of any kind whether it’s done well or not. Mostly, though, a second set of eyes can sometimes see things that you, as a writer, don’t see (or don’t see as strengths).

Once you have some idea where your strengths lie, you can start condensing the coal into diamond, or cutting and polishing the raw gem into a jewel. You do this the same way you go about working on the areas where you know you’re weak, except that it is often more difficult to figure out how to improve something that you’re already doing well. I’d recommend that the first thing you look at is whether it needs to be more or less – that is, whether tightening up the prose will make each individual instance work even better (which is frequently the case), or whether you need more instances, or whether you’re one of those writers who under-writes and who needs to spread out a bit or flesh out existing scenes to bring out the virtues that are already there.

A lot of it is intuition and developing a feel for what makes the cool stuff cool and the fun stuff fun.

Writing methods

One of the questions everybody seems to ask writers – right after “Where do you get your ideas?” – is “Do you have a time of day when you write?” I can’t figure out whether they want me to say “yes,” hoping that writing is the same as any other nine-to-five job so maybe they can do it, or whether they want me to say “no,” confirming that writing is a mysterious and unpredictable process that they can give up on.

What I say, of course, is “It depends on the writer.”

Most would-be writers these days are familiar with the “planners vs. pantsers” work methods – the planners who do lots of prewriting, plotting, character sketches, outlining, etc. and the seat-of-the-pants writers who just wing it, but the variation in working method is wider than that. There’s a second axis, for starters: the time vs. task writers, and each of those has a couple of subgroups. And a third axis, the burst writers vs. the sloggers.  And a fourth, linear vs. nonlinear.

Time-sensitive writers are the ones who work to a schedule. Some know they’re particularly productive at certain times of the day (or night), often 2-4 a.m. (for night owls) or first thing in the morning, so they’re careful to set that time aside for writing. Others find that it doesn’t matter what time of day they pick as long as they stick to it – they’re the ones who say things like “It’s important to always be at your desk at the same time every day, so the Muse will know where to find you.” Still others set themselves a quota in terms of minutes spent working per day, and don’t care whether they’ve produced 50 words in half an hour or 500 words, so long as they got that half-hour of work in.

Task-focused writers, on the other hand, are less concerned with when or how long they write, and more fixated on what or how much. If they set themselves a daily quota, it’s often in terms of word count, and some days they leap right to it, while other days they have to prop their eyelids open with toothpicks in order to finish their required word count before bedtime. Other task-focused writers work by chunks – until they finish a conversation, or a scene, or a chapter, or some other easily identifiable chunk of story.

Sloggers work for a while every day, or at least on some regular schedule, week in and week out. Burst writers get a large chunk of story down very fast, usually working many hours a day, then write nothing at all for a while. (Sometimes “a large chunk of story” is an entire novel produced in two or three weeks; other times, it’s a chapter or a section of story from wherever they last stopped up to the next big revelation or cliffhanger.)

Linear writers start writing at the beginning of the novel and continue on in order through to the end, even if the novel itself is structured non-linearly. That means they write Chapter one first, then Chapter Two, Three, and Four, in that order, even if Chapter One is set in 2010, Chapter Two skips back to the main character’s ancestors in 1753, Chapter Three happens one month before Chapter Two, and Chapter Four goes back to 1754, and so on. The writer may or may not have done a lot of advance thinking and planning about their non-linear structure, but it comes out his/her fingers in the same order that the reader reads it.

Non-linear writers write scenes, conversations, chapters, etc. in whatever order they happen to feel like writing them, even if the novel happens in strict chronological order. A non-linear writer can write the last chapter first, then write Chapter One, then Chapters Twelve and Thirteen, then a scene from Chapter Six, and so on. Some don’t even know what order their scenes will go in; they just write a whole heap of bits and pieces, then somehow assemble them into a novel by moving them around like jigsaw puzzle pieces until they fall into place and make a picture.

What makes this even more complicated is that each axis is independent of the others. That is, some writers are non-linear, time-sensitive pantser-sloggers; others are linear time-sensitive planner-burst writers; still others are task-focused linear pantser-burst writers; etc. There are even more complicated blends of subgroups: the writer who works in scenes (task-focused), but who also finds he’s vastly more productive at 1-4 a.m., who slogs through the first half of his novel at a steady 300 words-per-day but always finishes the last 50,000 words in a three-day sprint, and who does meticulous character sketches in advance but who can’t write a thing if he’s put down more than three words of plot outline.

All this makes recommending a writing method to anyone else a rather fraught proposition. Slogging away on a regular basis works for a lot of writers, and even the most bursty writer I know has occasionally had to slog along for a month or two from time to time, so it’s a pretty safe bet as a place to start…but that still leaves time-vs-task and plan-vs-pants. And it’s not totally clear-cut even then; one can easily be a task-focused writer who prefers to work in chunks…but who is nevertheless most productive in the evening after dinner. (Note that I’m talking here about productivity rate before any additional factors, like the presence of toddlers, is taken into consideration. Anyone who’s responsible for toddlers is an exogenous time-sensitive writer whose best writing time is whenever the kids are napping, regardless of what kind of writer they’d be if the toddler wasn’t around.)

The only way I know to figure out which sort of writer one is, is to experiment with different methods and see how they work. Most people have some idea which way they lean – I, for instance, never had any doubt that I was a linear task-focused slogger-planner. I have a physical biorhythm that has a lot to do with when I prefer to write (a.m. or evening, but not late night or mid-afternoon), but I’ve never noticed any difference in the quantity or quality of the words I produce when, for some reason, I end up working during one of my less-favorite writing times.

I do keep experimenting with alternative working methods, though, even after thirty years at this. I keep hoping that something will turn out to be ever so much easier than what I’m doing…