Patricia C. Wrede's Blog, page 49

Action

A lot of my friends have trouble writing action scenes. Not on the sentence-by-sentence level – they know all the tricks and tips – but on a more general level. They know that their first-person viewpoint character is only going to have a close-up, confused picture of the battle, and they don’t know how to get the bigger picture across, or they have a bunch of mini-scenes in mind that would have to come from all sorts of viewpoints that haven’t ever been part of the story. They know exactly what happens to their viewpoint character, but they have such a tight focus on him/her that they’ve never bothered to work out what everyone else is doing, how other people get into position to do what the POV sees them doing, or how the battle gets won or lost in the end.

Over the years, I have noticed that most of these folks have one thing in common: they’re starting with the small picture, with what their viewpoint character sees and experiences. This is not necessarily a bad thing (for a character-centered writer, it is the obvious, logical, most comfortable way to do it), but the folks who have the most difficulty seem to me to be the ones who really don’t want to consider the larger picture at all. They’re so focused on what happens to Jane or John and how it affects them physically and emotionally that they don’t want to think about practical aspects like the choreography of a fight scene or the strategy and tactics of a battle.

And choreography is exactly what it is. Action scenes in a story are among the least random scenes one can write. They have to be, precisely because they often involve a larger-than-usual cast of characters, a bigger-than-normal amount of space, and a lot of confusion and many possible outcomes.

When you have six characters sitting around a table in a bar and talking, the rest of the bar and the patrons and bartender are background – they’re present, but they’re a sort of shadowy backdrop to what’s important in the scene. The minute one of those six characters throws a punch and knocks one of the other characters over the next table, all the rest of the space in the bar and the other people in it become important, because their actions and reactions are going to have as much impact on the way the rest of the scene develops as the actions of the six characters you started with. You can’t have a character jump off a balcony if you don’t know the balcony is there to begin with.

There are a lot of things one needs to know in order to choreograph an action scene, some of which won’t actually get into the story at all. The first thing that comes to mind is where the scene takes place, and under what conditions. If your main character is on a broad plain on a clear day, the action will play out very differently that it would if she’s in the dank network of caves under the city, whether the action is a chase, a fight, a battle, or an attempt to sneak past a sentry.

The writer also probably needs to have some idea what the action scene is about, how many other people are involved, and how many of the people involved are actually going to interact with the main character. If Janet is running through a string of deserted back alleys, being chased by two city guards, what the action is and how it’s presented will be very different from a scene where George is one of two thousand archers defending the city walls against the invaders’ army.

This is one of the spots where people go wrong. They think that they don’t need to know any more about what’s going on than their viewpoint character does. The trouble is that if the author wants the dragon to come swooping unexpectedly out of the mist in front of the viewpoint character, he/she has to have some idea how that dragon found and followed that character in all that fog, and whether it’s plausible that a large, reasonably intelligent flying creature would go swooping around in a forest or city when it can’t see where obstacles or the ground is. (If the dragon has the kind of sonar bats do, fine…but if the author doesn’t think about it, there are likely to be inconsistencies over the course of the story that undermine the author’s credibility with the reader.)

Planning and choreographing an action scene doesn’t have to be done in a lot of detail, except for the bits that directly affect the viewpoint character. You want more than “The invaders attack and are beaten back,” but you don’t necessarily need every detail of the fire-fight that takes place around the main city gates if George is stationed on the opposite side of the city.

It’s especially important for writers who are deeply character-centered and seriously focused on their characters’ interior experiences to figure out what the exterior, physical environment is like and what the actual physical moves are that the character makes, and then make sure that enough of that gets into the scene. It is far too easy to write something like “George looked on in anguish as the king died” without bothering to mention that the king has just had his head cut off by the ogre that George’s arrow missed a few seconds earlier (hence George’s extra anguish and guilt about it).

Once you have a good idea how things go and what’s happening overall, you have the problem of presenting it to the reader. For big, sweeping, complicated things like battles, one common method is for the author to drop into an omniscient narrative summary, especially if the viewpoint character is an officer or commander who’d presumably have to be aware of the overall sweep of events. The obvious alternative is to stick to the confusing man-in-the-front-lines viewpoint for the main fight, and fill in the Big Picture stuff after everything is over, as the viewpoint character finds out from other people that the reason the reinforcements were late was because of the explosion that took out a section of the eastern wall. In a novel, especially if there are multiple viewpoints, authors often cut back and forth between various viewpoint character moments and an omniscient overview of the way the whole battle is going.

The fewer characters who are involved in an action scene and the smaller the space in which it takes place, the less useful the omniscient narrative summary technique becomes, because the fewer the characters and the smaller the space, the easier it is for the viewpoint character (and the reader) to comprehend all of the action at once. A scene in which two sailors struggle to keep a small boat from capsizing in a violent storm can be as gripping an action scene as a major battle, but the boat scene is more likely to be clear and comprehensible to the reader without the writer having to back off and explain the Big Picture.

Changing infrastructure

Infrastructure is all that everyday stuff we take for granted, from roads and bridges to garbage collection and cell phones. It’s one of the things that allows societies to function smoothly, if they want to. It’s vitally important…and it’s also vastly boring. Consequently, writers tend not to pay a lot of attention to it.

If one is writing in the modern world, this isn’t so much of a problem. One can presume one’s readers will be familiar with the real-life infrastructure that exists, so one can pretty much ignore it unless or until one needs a convenient pothole to blow out a tire during a chase scene, or a critical call to be dropped in the middle.

If one is writing historical fiction – even fairly near-past, like twenty years ago – one needs to pay a lot more attention. A lot more, because infrastructure is something we almost all take for granted…and that makes it a prime place where authorial blind spots come back to bite them.

I was reminded of this recently when reading a student manuscript set in the late 80s, in which the student cheerfully assumed the existence of pocket cell phones and text messaging because he’d never, ever lived in a world without them.

One can, occasionally get away with this sort of thing by establishing that one’s characters are early adopters and very happy with the changes all this cool new technology has brought to their lives, but this, too, requires that the author notice that certain things simply weren’t available at certain points in the past. It also requires that the author think about (or research) how fast new technologies and infrastructure spread. The real world doesn’t work like the old John W. Campbell SF stories, where the heroes would invent a cool new gadget, and within two weeks they’d have produced and distributed enough of them for everyone in the world to have one.

But that’s all near-term stuff. What I wanted to talk about is the infrastructure of your average medieval fantasy novel. Which tends to be skeletal, if it’s there at all.

For example, consider the healing professions in the modern world. We have doctors, pharmacists, dentists, nurses, LPNs, chiropractors, acupuncturists, nurses’ aides, surgeons, med techs…and that’s even before you start in on specializations like cardiologists, pediatricians, anesthesiologists, radiologists…the list goes on and on. In most medieval fantasy novels, there are Healers and maybe midwives, and that’s it. Granted, real life medieval Europe didn’t have as wide a variety of medical practitioners as we do today, but they had more than “doctor” and “midwife.”

Physical infrastructure, such as transportation, is likewise frequently taken for granted in fantasy. When the rare wine that only the king drinks is poisoned, the author will likely spend a lot of time researching the poison, but often very little thinking about just why the wine is rare, and exactly how it got from the vineyard several countries over to the king’s table. Is there water transport, or really good roads, or are dragons common enough (and tamed enough) to haul freight like barrels of wine from city to city? Where did those roads or ships or dragons come from? How long have they been around?

Lots of medieval European cities have walls; lots of medieval fantasy novels therefore give their cities walls without thinking much about why the walls are there. Walled cities imply war, and not just one, but enough battles and seiges and attacks to make it worthwile putting up a wall. Also, if it’s been there for a while and the city is a living one, the city is likely to expand beyond the wall. If the wars and so on are still going on, that means the town will need, first, somewhere for all those folks outside the wall to stay during an attack, and, eventually, a second wall. And of course there’s the question of maintenance – somebody has to repair the wall after every attack, and check for various sorts of weather damage. It’s a lot of work, and expensive and time-consuming, and the town is likely to keep it up only if it really needs the protection.

A lot of the time, it won’t be necessary for the story to say much about the roads or ships or walls, or to go into the whole chain of people (grape pickers, vintners, coopers, carters, glass-blowers, bottlers, etc.) who have to exist behind the scenes in order for the king to have a bottle of wine on his table. Every once in a while, though, paying a little attention to this stuff can keep a writer from accidentally creating a tremendous plot hole. Alternatively, thinking about ways the wine can cover the thousand miles from vineyard to king’s table can lead to the invention of the dragon freight haulers, which could go a long way toward making a run-of-the-mill medieval fantasy into something with an interesting and unique feel.

Landscape vs. setting

Earlier this week, Minnesota Public Radio replayed  an interview with novelist Richard Ford, and some of his comments (around 23 minutes into the broadcast) got me thinking about landscape.

First off, landscape isn’t the same as setting. They overlap, of course, but one can tell an urban tale set in Denver, a rural tale set at a dude ranch twenty or forty miles west, or a story of aspiring ski stars set at a Canadian ski resort, and they’ll all have similar landscape, in the form of the Rocky Mountains.

Landscape, for my purposes, is a combination of the underlying geology – the rivers, hills, plains, lakes, mountains, etc. – and the way the land looks at the moment. Cultivated fields, lush forests, trees blackened by a recent wildfire or blown flat by a storm, a wasteland of stumps left by someone cutting acres of trees…all those are part of the landscape.

Setting includes landscape, but it also includes a lot more of what people have done on the landscape (as opposed to what they have done to the landscape, like digging canals or cutting trees). When you say a book is set in Paris, you’re including a lot more in that simple phrase than just the fact that the book is set in a city built on a broad river with some islands in it. You’re including political things – the country, the government at whatever time period you’ve chosen (and all the tensions with other governments that happen to be current), the language, the ethnic mix of people you’d expect to find. You’re including history, from the World Wars to Napoleon to the French Revolution and on back to Julius Ceasar’s Gallic wars. You’re including cultural stuff, from the food to the Louvre to the Moulin Rouge to customs to clothes.

From a writer’s perspective, landscape is a lot easier to make convincing adjustments to than setting, especially if we’re talking a fantasy or SF world that isn’t like Earth at all. I’ve solved several plot problems by inventing an impassable landscape feature (mountains, a river gorge, a swamp) and plunking it right where my characters were trying to go to avoid a difficulty (instead of facing it the way I wanted them to). Presto, they’re stuck doing what I want.

If I’d tried to do the same thing with setting, the ripple effect would mean changing all sorts of other things – at best, a heavy-duty rewrite; at worst, a completely different book. Of course, there’s a ripple effect from changing landscape, too, but it usually ripples out away from the story, into the Terra Incognita that the characters haven’t been to (so no rewriting) and aren’t going to go to ever (which was the point of inventing impassable mountains in the first place).

Landscape is something that different people react to in different ways. A lot of early settlers to the “big sky” country in Montana and the Great Plains went home after a few years because they couldn’t stand all that space; others found it gave them the sense of infinite possibility that Ford talks about in his interview. I have friends raised in cities who are acutely uncomfortable in rural areas, or going camping…and others who love it and who wouldn’t miss their annual trek to the Boundary Waters wilderness area.

That may seem obvious, but a writer has to think about it on three levels: the writer, the readers, and the characters.

Writers first need to be aware of their reaction to whatever landscape they’re using, and that others may not feel the same way, because without that awareness, it’s almost impossible to tweak what one is doing in the story, even if one knows that other people may not react the same way.

Next, the writer needs to think about whether their characters are similar or different – whether the wilderness the writer loves is something that his fussy scholar character would find untidy or even threatening, for instance. It’s also good to have different characters in a book have different reactions and comfort levels, even if those never quite come to the surface in obvious ways. The author may never explain why the London street-thief is wide awake in the woods all night while his companions, who’re used to camping out, snore away, but it’ll add to the characterization even if only on a subconscious level.

Finally, the writer needs to be aware that not all readers will react to a particular landscape the way the writer does. This means that the writer who sees “big sky” country as a land of infinite possibility may want to throw in a line or two somewhere to indicate this for readers who find that landscape agoraphobia-inducing, instead of just assuming that everybody who reads the story will get it because it is SO obvious. It’s obvious to the writer, but not necessarily to everyone else.

Sharjah

So I’m back from five days at the Sharjah Children’s Reading Festival in the United Arab Emirates and beginning to recover from the hideous jet lag and nearly 24 hours of travel (each way, counting layovers and plane delays) that it took to get there. Since I’m still not quite mentally ready to tackle a regular blog post, you get a trip report today.

When I was first invited to the Sharjah Children’s Reading Festival, I knew nothing whatever about it. My agent, however, did, and strongly recommended that I attend. The Children’s Reading Festival is one of the two book festivals held annually in Sharjah, and according to my agent, they are fast becoming the Bologna Book Fair and Frankfurt Book Fair of the Middle East. (For those of you who’ve never heard of any of this, those two are the premier places that agents and publishers’ reps go every year in order to sell translation rights. The Bologna fair focuses on children’s and YA; the Frankfurt fair covers everything.)

So I was excited. Also nervous – I haven’t done any of the international book fairs before, though there are quite a lot of them and some authors book a lot of Frequent Flyer miles making appearances at them. But definitely excited, both by the opportunity to visit a part of the world I hadn’t been to before and also, let’s be honest here, by the opportunity to get away from the SNOW we’ve still been having here. (I had to shovel my walk the Tuesday before I left; my flight home was delayed because there was a blizzard in Minneapolis and the plane that was supposed to go round-trip from Minneapolis to New York and back had deicing problems and got in to NY two hours late…but that’s a whole ‘nother story.)

Anyway, after a brief false start (I realized one block from the house that I’d forgotten to pack any copies of my books; fortunately, we had time to turn around and collect them), I was off. I left for the airport at 9:30 on Saturday morning and arrived at the hotel at 8:30 Sunday evening. Even with a 9-hour time difference and a five-hour layover in Dallas, it was a very long trip. Luckily for me, Emirates Air Lines is extremely comfortable.

The weather, on the other hand, was a bit of a shock. It was in the upper 80’s every day, with a nighttime low of 72 – that was about 60 degrees warmer than Minnesota (snow, remember? In April! Aaargh!), and it took some adjusting. Then I discovered that the day before I arrived, one of the other writers had had his school visit canceled on account of rain. Like a snow day, only…different. It makes sense when you consider that the streets aren’t designed for drainage, so an inch or two of rain ends up causing two-foot-deep puddles that stall cars, but it certainly drove home that I wasn’t in Kansas anymore. Or Minnesota.

Sharjah and Dubai impressed me as probably the most cosmopolitan place I have ever been, and that includes New York, London, and Paris. I shouldn’t have been surprised – after all, the Middle East has been the crossroads of the world for thousands of years. The main reason, I think, is that in Sharjah nearly everything operated on the assumption that there would be people of multiple cultures and languages to deal with. Nearly all the signs and billboards were in both English and Arabic; several also included Japanese. The buffet meals always had at least one Western-style entrée and one Indian, Thai, or Japanese entrée, as well as the Middle Eastern dishes (plus the salads, the sandwich fixings, and the deserts from around the world…I’m amazed I didn’t gain fifty pounds).

The Children’s Reading Festival was similarly international. OK, about 80-90% of the book dealers were Arabic publishers, but many had books in English (I picked up one on local history), and there were several who clearly act as distributors for American, British, or Japanese publishers (possibly others as well; I didn’t manage to examine all the booths as thoroughly as I’d have liked). The art display included children’s book illustrators from Mexico, Sweden, Canada, Germany, and Japan, as well as Jordan, Lebanon, Iraq, and Egypt (which I’d expected).

Monday I was part of a panel on “Great Stories Around the World” with a British writer, a writer and scholar from one of the U.A.E.’s universities, and a well-known Arabic children’s writer. The panel was both the same and different from those I’ve been on before. The similarity was most noticeable in the way nothing anyone said had much to do with the supposed topic. The panel followed the academic model, where each panelist gives a five or ten-minute presentation, rather than the SF-convention model, where the moderator asks questions and everyone answers them. As is fairly common with such panels, the university scholar’s presentation ran at least twice as long as any of the writers’ speeches; what was much less common was that it was thoroughly fascinating, and the gentleman’s passion for his subject (designing books to appeal to as many senses as possible, so as to involve children more fully in reading, especially kids who have trouble with the traditional ways they’re taught to read) came across even in translation.

I had a little difficulty with the translation earphones, which I hadn’t used before. (I found it extremely distracting and disorienting to be listening to someone speaking in Arabic while I was trying to think of what to say next.) I finally took the headphones off when anyone was speaking in English, and put them back on when someone was talking in Arabic and I needed the translation. I found out later that there was an on/off switch I could have used, which would have been much less intrusive.

I did one thing right, and that was to remember to speak slowly enough for the translator to keep up. It was a bit tricky, as I tend to talk faster and faster when I’m nervous. I was glad I’d been warned about that in advance; one of the other presenters went so quickly that the translator kept getting lost, and I missed about 25% of what he said.

The school visit I did later in the week was much like any school visit. I’d worried about needing a translator for that, too, but evidently many of the schools teach English by immersion, and I was sent to one of those. The students were very bright and eager and asked lots of good questions, and I was able to present their library with some of those books I’d nearly forgotten to bring.

The rest of the trip, I split between napping (I never did adjust to the time change), doing touristy stuff, and hanging around the Festival. I signed an enormous amount of stock for the dealer who had copies of my books, sat in on a couple of other panels, watched some of the demos and presentations (the storyteller sounded amazing, even if I couldn’t understand a thing he said, and he must have been good because the kids in the audience were absolutely enthralled).

The other foreign authors who, like me, had been invited to present at the festival were from all over – Sweden, Germany, England, Wales, Egypt, Jordan … and those were just the ones who were there at the same time I was. It was both fun and frustrating to meet them, as we were all on different schedules, so half the people I met Monday were leaving Tuesday morning, and new writers arrived every day. After a while, I lost track of who was coming and who was going.

And then, just when I was finally starting to adjust to the time change, I had to get up at 4:30 a.m. to catch the flight home. If I ever go again, I want to stay longer (and start adjusting to the time change in advance, so it’s not so much of a shock).

Tin Ear

One of the worst criticisms that can be leveled at an author is “He has a tin ear for dialog.” In short form, it means the writer in question doesn’t do dialog well; in the longer version, it means the writer has no sense of the rhythms of speech, of variation in voice, or of the difference between narrative and dialog. Their characters sound stilted and formal, and not just when they’re supposed to be feeling awkward. In extreme cases, the writer’s dialog sounds exactly like their narrative; the only difference is that it has quotation marks around it.

Interestingly, one of the first things I noticed when I poked around looking at writing advice for dialog was that practically everyone spends a lot of time focusing on the part of the scene that’s not dialog – that is, on the speech tags and stage business. Those things are really important parts of the way you present your dialog, but you can do them to perfection and still have a tin ear for the speaking part.

Dialog is imitation speech. That means that above all else, it has to sound like something a person might actually say, which is why the one piece of advice you see over and over is this: if you’re having trouble with your dialog, read it out loud. It’s good advice, but if you have a truly tin ear, it may not be the place to start.

The other really common piece of advice is to listen to real people talk. Eavesdrop on the bus, in restaurants, at the mall, even take notes if you can get away with it. This sounds like reasonable advice, and it does seem to work for some people; the trouble is that dialog is an imitation of the way people speak, not a transcription of it. It’s a slightly-idealized, simplified model, not word-for-word and um-for-um dictation.

Listening to real people talking can help one get a notion of the differences in syntax and vocabulary and rhythm that make up the elusive thing called “the character’s voice.” I’ve never found eavesdropping to be terribly useful as a way into the writing part, though, because real conversations were never much help when it came to extracting that idealized, simplified model that I needed for my stories. Not even if I went through and cut the ums and ers and digressions and cleaned up half or more of the sentence fragments.

What did and does work, for me, was studying plays, screenplays, and movies. This ought to be obvious, but it wasn’t for me and it doesn’t seem to be for many, many other folks. Shakespeare is particularly useful, because you have not only the scripts, but also multiple films of many of them, which means you can study the dialog on the page and several different ways that different actors delivered the lines. Listening to radio plays, or movies where the picture is turned off so that all you get is the dialog, is also really informative.

Mostly, though, I read plays. All kinds of plays by all sorts of playwrights. I read them out loud with the play-reading group, out loud in my office, silently in my living room.

The thing about plays and screenplays is that the scenes are nearly all dialog. They’re also in a format that means the non-dialog parts – the speech tags and stage business – drop out of the way. A scriptwriter doesn’t have to worry about whether to use adjectives or where to put the speech tags, because the format is going to be “MARIA (angrily): That’s my hat.” So the writer isn’t as likely to be distracted by things that aren’t dialog.

The other thing about plays and movies is that they are already written in that idealized, somewhat simplified imitation-of-real-speech that you want for dialog in a story. This means that you don’t have to sort out which bits of vocabulary and syntax and so on are things that need to be cut (because they make things run on too long) and which bits are part of the specific character’s voice and therefore absolutely necessary.

Once you have a feel for the rhythm and syntax of speech in plays, then you start reading your own dialog out loud. If that doesn’t seem quite enough, try recording yourself saying it and then listen to it, or have someone else read it out loud while you listen. Start with just the dialog – no speech tags or stage business – because that’s the part that has to sound like speech. The tags and stage business and description that goes around the dialog is presentation, and it’s not the part people are talking about when they say someone has a tin ear for dialog. (It is the part they mean when they say someone has a tin ear for syntax or rhythm or narrative or just in general, but that’s not what I’m talking about here.)

The other thing that leads a lot of folks to say “he/she has a tin ear for dialog” is actually not so much about the dialog itself as it is about the characters who speak it.  I have quite a bit to say about it, so I’ll leave that part for next post.

Rifles and fishing rods

“If you say in the first chapter that there is a rifle hanging on the wall, in the second or third chapter it absolutely must go off. If it’s not going to be fired, it shouldn’t be hanging there.”  – Anton Chekhov, quoted in Shchukin’s Memoirs

 At some point in their career, most writers have heard that quote, or one of the several variations on it. The idea is supposed to be that one shouldn’t introduce unnecessary elements into a story or play. It’s supposed to be about the importance of simplicity and not doing foreshadowing that you aren’t going to make use of.

In fact, what it’s about is audience expectations and the ways that authors manipulate them. You can tell by changing the supposed dramatic element in the quotation: “If you say in the first chapter that there is a fishing rod hanging on the wall, in the second or third chapter, someone absolutely must go fishing” does not make me nod and agree almost automatically, the way “If you hang a rifle on the wall…” does.

Why? Because rifles are dangerous; rifles are dramatic; rifles sound as if they ought to be important, and if they turn out not to be, the audience is going to be disappointed.  Fishing rods, on the other hand, are not inherently dramatic, dangerous, or important, so the reader or audience is unlikely to take one look at a fishing rod and go “Ohmygosh, what’s he going to catch?” More usually, the fishing rod will just be part of the décor, something that hardly even registers.

That is, unless there’s something about the fishing rod that strikes the reader as unusual or out of place. A fishing rod made of solid gold, for instance, or an ordinary one hanging on the wall in a space station. Either one raises questions, because a solid gold fishing rod is impractical and there’s nowhere to go fishing on a space station (probably) – and the reader expects the writer to answer those questions before the end of the story.

The notions that a rifle is dangerous and interesting but a normal fishing rod isn’t, that a gold fishing rod is a peculiar thing, and that there’s not likely to be anywhere to fish on a space station all come from the reader’s experience outside the story. If you present something you know the reader will think of as dangerous or unusual, it raises questions: why is this here? Why is it so unusual? Is there an explanation? Will it be used somehow later? And as soon as you start raising questions, the reader starts expecting answers…maybe not right away, but at some point before the story ends.

Context also has a lot to do with the reader’s expectations. If there’s something unusual on the living room mantelpiece, the reader is going to expect the story to do something with it, whether the something is a rifle or a frying pan. If, however, the frying pan is on the kitchen stove and the rifle is in the gun room at the hunting lodge, readers are much more likely to just blip past them as part of the normal landscape. Similarly, if the mantel is occupied by a rifle, a frying pan, three slices of bread, a dirty sock, a 1911 edition of the Field Guide to Insects of the Amazon Rain Forest, a postcard from Paris, a machete, two fake diamond rings, and a trombone, the reader is not as likely to register either the rifle or the frying pan as particularly significant; instead, it’s the oddness of the collection of things that commands attention.

There are lots of ways writers can make use of this. For instance, the really important item in that miscellaneous list might be the postcard from Paris (which contains the clue to the murder), but burying it in the middle of a list of much more peculiar items makes the reader less likely to notice it. Conversely, if the writer wants the reader to notice and remember something ordinary, they can put it somewhere that’s not its usual context, or make it an unusual color or material. It depends on the kinds of questions and expectations the writer wants to raise.

But there’s one more thing, and that’s the spaghetti method (as in, “throw a handful of spaghetti at the wall and see what sticks”). When you don’t know where your story is going – or sometimes, even if you think you do – you throw in some cool description or a character bit or a little razzle-dazzle that doesn’t seem to have much to do with anything. It’s just there because it was a fun bit. And then one of three things happens:

1) You get to the end of the story, and it was just a fun bit and doesn’t add anything really. It didn’t stick to the wall. So you cut it out when you do the revisions.

2) You get stuck a chapter or two down the road, so you go back and look at what you’ve already written, and there’s your cool bit, and it’s just what you need to get the characters moving, or get them out of the hole they’re in. Presto, you have just become a genius of foreshadowing. (Don’t tell anyone it was an accident.)

3) The little bit about the music box or the character’s fondness for pistachios crops up again a few scenes later, and then again, and then suddenly it’s become a recurring theme, or a setup for a key plot point, or a poignant memory for someone else, or the clue that proves the character guilty/innocent. You didn’t plan it, but once the pattern started to form, it was irresistible and useful. Sometimes, when this happens, you realize that you need to go back and mention the pistachios in Chapter One for just that last little bit of necessary backfill, and sometimes everything ends up in the perfect place because that’s just where it happened. You’re still a genius of foreshadowing, just don’t mention that you made it up as you went along.

Most of the non-writing folks who talk about that Chekhov quote only look at point #1, and argue that it would be easier not to put the “unnecessary” bits in in the first place. They don’t realize that the writer doesn’t always know what is or isn’t necessary until later on in the process. And that they don’t have to.

Beats and games and instinct

Beats and plot points aren’t the same thing, though they sometimes sound as if they ought to be. Basically, plot points are about content; beats are about rhythm. Beats make a pattern; plot points make a causal chain. They support and depend on each other, but they’re not the same.

In acting, where the term comes from, beats refer to the natural pauses that occur when something in the scene changes direction. If a character is making coffee and then answers the phone, that’s at least two beats; if the phone conversation starts off funny and then suddenly turns serious, that would add another beat…as I understand it, anyway.

Try to translate that to writing and you get another one of those ways of analyzing scenes that sounds great on paper, but isn’t much use for actually creating the scenes. Not directly, anyway.

What got me going on this was a little book called “Hamlet’s Hit Points,” written by Robin Laws for the stated purpose of helping gamesmasters do better storytelling. The book begins by describing a rather overly-complicated system of classifying story beats into different types and sub-types, and then proceeds to analyze of Hamlet, Dr. No, and Casablanca according to the author’s system.

He does not, however, advocate applying the system directly to one’s game. When you’re gamesmastering, you can’t do that, because your gamers never, ever follow whatever script you had in mind. They’ll take your serious dramatic scenario and turn it into low comedy in about ten minutes; they’ll refuse to follow the lures you lay out for them and head to the bar to consult instead of rushing off to rescue their buddy from the dungeon; they’ll decide to go shopping to kill time while their new super-weapon is being built, instead of heading off for another adventure; they’ll find a political solution to what you’d planned as an action problem and knock all the diplomats through the wall when you’d planned a nice frustrating round of political negotiating. Much the way many of one’s characters work when one is writing.

Running a role-playing game is about three parts careful planning (two of which will be useless, but you don’t know which two, so you have to do all of it), two parts method acting, and four parts improv (with a hefty dose of stand-up comedy, though if you’re lucky, one of the gamers will be the comedian and you’ll only have to be the straight man). A lot of what happens, you make up in the moment, changing plans on the fly as you react to what the gamers have decided to try and to the random dice rolls. You don’t have time to stop and think about whether you’re working with the A plotline or the B plotline, or whether what’s going on is action or reaction. You certainly don’t have time to think “Now, we just had a nice action bit, so next should come the reaction,” and even if you did, the players would probably ignore you if you tried to make them follow that kind of script.

What you can do is hone your instincts, so that when you are riding the chaos that is an intense gaming session with fifteen people all clamoring for attention at once (or worse yet, plotting something quietly at the far end of the table where you can’t hear them and start working out a counter), you will make the right decision in the moment.

And that – honing the storytelling instinct – is what the author of “Hamlet’s Hit Points” is trying to do with his system of beats and resolutions. His idea is not that people will build scenes and stories consciously and deliberately in this way; it’s that people will analyze already-existing stories until the rhythm sinks into their subconscious, so that when they’re making things up in a white-hot frenzy, they’ll have a better rhythm.

Which is, of course, why the whole thing appeals so much to me. (Well, that and the fact that I love that kind of analysis, and it makes such a good distraction from, you know, actually writing something.) Because for me, and for most of the writers I know, writing the first draft of a scene is a lot like riding the chaos of a gaming session. You don’t need a system; you need good instincts. The main difference is that with writing, you can patch some of it up in revision; with a gaming session, if you want to “fix” something, your only hope is that all your gamers will have really bad memories (and that trick never works…)

Most of the writers I know have been training their storytelling instincts since forever…by reading everything they can get their hands on. Still, the idea of working at it a little more deliberately, a little more consciously, appeals to me (certainly a whole lot more than a lot of the rules and directions and systems for writing fiction that I’ve ever run across).

Which brings me back to beats, and analyzing writing according to a system originally invented for actors. It is, as I said, not directly useful for constructing scenes (or at least, it isn’t for anyone I know. There’s probably somebody out there that it works for, though. If you’re that person, ignore that last sentence). As a way of training one’s instincts, or even just spotting places to improve in the second draft, though it might just be worth trying.

Hooks

Every story needs to open with a hook, or so says conventional writing wisdom. Conventional writing wisdom, unfortunately, seldom goes on to address the obvious question:

Just what is a hook, anyway? And how do you write one?

There are three things everybody seems to agree upon when it comes to hooks: 1) They come at the beginning of the story; 2) They catch the reader/editor’s attention so they’ll want to keep reading; 3) They’re really, really important.

After that, everybody goes in a different direction. Starting with length: the most common definition seems to be “the first sentence of the story,” but you can find places that define the hook as the first paragraph, the first page, the first scene, or the first chapter of a story.

Once someone has defined how long they think a hook can or should be, they usually jump right in with recommendations. “Start with a question.” “Start in the middle of something.” “Start with dialog.” “Start with conflict.” “Start with a dilemma.” “Start with a simile or metaphor.”

None of these are particularly bad advice, but none of them really address the fact that a hook has to fit the story. Any fisherman knows that if you bait your hook with worms, you won’t catch the same fish that you would if you used minnows, or a lure that imitates flying bugs. And you don’t use the same bait in the ocean as you’d use in a fresh-water stream or in a lake, because the fish are different.

Similarly, if your story is slam-bang action-adventure, then a bomb explosion in the first paragraph is likely to hook the right readers (i.e., the ones that will enjoy your book). If your story focuses on relationships, the explosion likely won’t work very well. Fooling readers into reading further because they’re expecting one sort of story will not make them suddenly like the kind you’ve actually written. Also, the wrong bait is likely to drive off the readers who would like what you’ve written. Bad idea.

So Principle #1 for writing a hook is: It has to suit the story.

Principle #2 is that the hook has to be intriguing. That is, it has to have bait on it, something that will interest the kind of readers who’ll like the story. The theory is that once you get somebody interested, they’ll stay interested…but this only works if you paid attention to Principle #1 – the hook has to suit the story.

This is why all those recommendations aren’t worth the pixels they’re displayed in. Any one of them might suit your story, but also might not. It depends on the story, and on the readers. You have to ask “Is starting with a question/conflict/a dilemma/dialog/etc. right for this story? Can I come up with a first line based on any of those things that will intrigue the readers who’ll enjoy the book?” Quite often, you can’t answer those questions until you know what the story is, which brings us to the third point.

And the third point is that a hook does not have to be the very first part of the story you write. Yes, the hook is the first bit of the story, where “bit” obviously ranges from one sentence to one chapter, depending on who you talk to. But it doesn’t have to be hook-y until the story is finished. (This is where most of the how-to advice places miss the boat; they assume that, since the hook comes first, it must and will be written first, and if it’s the first thing you write, then they don’t have to mention Principle #1, because of course the writer will write a story that suits the opening line.)

Some writers do start by coming up with a killer opening. Other times, ideas just arrive as a hook; “Mother taught me to be polite to dragons” hooked me into writing the rest of the story. But quite a few writers start writing with “scaffolding” – anywhere from a paragraph to a couple of chapters of “getting into” the story, all of which will have to be dismantled/deleted when the story is finished. And doing something just to get going (and then revising it later when one has a better idea what’s going on) works very well for quite a lot of writers, even when it’s not actual scaffolding.

If generating a killer first line is what gets you started, by all means sit down and write a list of twenty opening lines that intrigue you. But if not, don’t worry about it. Just treat it as a revision problem.

Which brings me, finally, to the actual question of writing hooks.

If you have a cool idea that came with an opening line, or an opening line that is just begging for a story to go with it, you already have your hook. Write it down and keep going. If generating one is the first step in your process, then Principle #2 is the most important thing to remember: the hook must be intriguing. Unless you already have a very specific audience in mind, start by intriguing yourself. You’re the one who’s going to have to write the story that flows from the hook, after all.

That means, if you love reading/writing action, start with action. If what gets you interested in a story is a question or a mystery, start with presenting the reader with a puzzle. If it’s characters, start with the most interesting thing about the most interesting character in your head. If you hate not knowing where the story is happening or what’s going on, don’t begin with a paragraph that hides these things from the reader; instead, think of the most interesting and intriguing way you can present them. And then write the rest of the story.

If you’re treating the hook as a revision problem, you do this in reverse. An analytical sort of writer or reviser will look at the story they’ve already written and think about it, about what kinds of things are at the heart of it (characters, relationships, adventure, etc.), and about what kinds of readers are likely to enjoy that kind of story. They ask themselves what those readers will like best about the story, and try to work out how to get as much of that thing into the coolest possible first few lines. (You can run down those lists of recommended ways of writing hooks as a sort of brain teaser, a way to jog your mind into coming up with some possibilities, but you don’t have to use any of them.)

A more intuitive writer will also look at the story they’ve written, but instead of thinking about all that, they’ll probably read it over a couple of times until something catches their attention, and then they work whatever-it-is into the perfect opening, even if they can’t explain why it’s perfect. They just know it feels right.

Either way, ultimately it’s the writer who gets to decide what makes the perfect opening line for a particular story. There aren’t rules or a limited list that you have to choose from. If all your betareaders stop reading before they get to the end of the first paragraph, then whatever you did isn’t working and you need to fix it somehow. That may just mean working on it, not changing it to someone else’s idea of “what makes a good hook.”

Note that although nearly every advice-giver looks at the punchy, first-line hooks when they give examples, the main reason they do this is because punchy, first-line hooks are short. Books that take a paragraph or a page as their opening hook rarely get quoted as examples, because that means there’s less room for the advice-giver to explain why they’re a perfectly good method of starting the sort of book that ought to start that way.

Boston

The first I heard about the Boston Marathon bombing was when my father called Monday evening to tell me my nephew was uninjured. My nephew goes to school in Boston, and had been watching the race, but not at the finish line. I’d been driving home from out of town, listening to CDs instead of the radio, so I hadn’t known a thing about it. Sometimes, having a weird schedule is useful.

The slight time lag in finding out about it didn’t make the event any easier to process. In fact, it brought up a whole lot of unpleasant memories of hearing about earlier disasters of one sort or another, from Sandy Hook and Columbine to 9/11, from the tsunamis in Japan and the Indian Ocean to Columbia and Challenger, all the way back to Kennedy’s assassination. Some of those horrors were man-made and deliberate; some were the result of terrible mistakes or accidents; some were just nature being nature.  Apart from the fact that people died every time, there’s no connection between them except for the personal one: I remember the same sinking feeling combined with shock as I heard about each of them.

There are a whole lot of known psychological reactions to unexpected tragedy, starting with shock, disbelief, and feeling helpless, but I think the psychologists miss something when they look only at the emotions people have. They miss what people do.

People didn’t panic (which could have caused a lot more injuries, given the crowd). Some of them ran towards the explosion, and not only the police and firefighters and medical personnel who were on the job. A lot of people who were there as spectators did, too, and worked to help the injured. Some of them we know about, and some we don’t.

People who live in Boston signed on to web sites to offer their spare rooms to strangers who were stranded, or who suddenly needed a place to stay while a friend or family member was in the hospital. Others turned up with bottles of juice, water, and sweaters for the bewildered slower runners who weren’t allowed to finish because of the explosions. People who don’t live in Boston coordinated “random acts of pizza,” sending food to the police, firefighters, EMTs, anyone who needed it.

And people talked about what happened, and their reactions to it.  Some of us aren’t in a place where we can do anything but talk…and watch the news, and hope that the death toll doesn’t rise and that they catch whoever planted the bombs. But even that little is doing something, of a sort.

And as far as I’m concerned, doing what one can is important, whether that’s running toward an explosion in order to help, walking calmly away from it so that the EMTs will be able to get in and do their job, or donating $10 worth of pizza to feed the people who are in the thick of things.

Best and worst advice

The other day, somebody asked me what the best and worst writing advice I’d ever gotten was.

The best was easy: “Learn to type.”

My mother was the first to give me that particular bit of writing advice, though I’ve seen it since coming from a variety of authors, including Ursula le Guin and Isaac Asimov. But Mom was the one who made me take the secretarial typing class in high school (which you had to type 55 words per minute to pass) instead of the college student class (which you only had to be able to type 20 words per minute to pass). Mom, I owe you.

There are a bunch of reasons that still make this good advice, though there are writers who prefer a pen or pencil and paper for their first drafts. If it really is part of your process to slow things down and handwrite, stick to it. For the rest of us, though, there are two advantages, the first being the obvious speed of production gained by being able to touch-type at 55+ words per minute (after 40 years of practice, I think I’m a lot faster than 55 wpm, but I haven’t done a typing test in a very long time).

The other advantage of touch typing is less obvious and has to do with ergonomics and the long run. I have a good friend who essentially wore her neck out by spending thirty years looking from fingers/keyboard up at the computer screen and back down to keyboard, over and over, every few minutes. The doctor said it was like bending a spoon back and forth, over and over – eventually, the metal weakens and gives. Not something I ever want to have to worry about on such a personal basis.

(One can, of course, use dictation software to avoid the whole problem…but I also know someone who, having blown out her wrists typing 16 hours a day on a non-ergonomic keyboard, proceeded to blow out her vocal chords, i.e., gave herself semi-permanent laryngitis, by overusing dictation software. Possible the second bit of Really Good Writing advice should be “Don’t work 16 hour days on a regular basis.”)

The worst advice was a lot harder to pin down. The first thing that came to mind was “Learn your craft by writing short stories; don’t even think of trying a novel until you’re selling reliably as a short fiction writer.” The second one was “Get up half an hour earlier to write.”

The first one was demonstrably bad advice for me: I am a natural novelist, who wrote and sold five entire novels before finally managing to sell a short story. There are natural short fiction writers for whom the opposite is true.

Of course, when that advice was given to me, there was still a lively short story market in the SF/F field, and there were even still places you could sell literary/mainstream fiction for actual money (as opposed to being paid in copies of the magazine). Then the short fiction market pretty much vanished. The Internet is bringing it back a bit, but since I do very few short stories, I’m not that conversant with what markets are available for short story writers.

Still, whatever market is or isn’t out there, it remains true that a good X will sell sooner than a lousy Y, where X is whatever length comes naturally and Y is whatever doesn’t. And you are much more likely to do a better job on what comes naturally than on something that’s hard. Of course, if you are a genius brimming with talent, you may write a brilliant X, while your Y is merely good; the brilliant X is still likely to sell faster than the merely good Y, but the good Y is going to be far enough beyond the usual slush pile content that you’ll have a decent shot at selling it. Being a genius is, however, something that few of us can judge for ourselves, so it’s best not to count on it.

Getting up half an hour early to “squeeze in” writing time is something that sounds good in theory, but I don’t know anyone it actually works for. Staying up half an hour longer never seems to be recommended, but it does work for some folks I know…provided they have time to catch up on their missing sleep periodically.

Because the big problem with taking half an hour out of your sleep time is that if you short yourself on sleep for very long, your brain starts to crinkle up and shut down. And the first thing to go seems to be one’s creative juice.

All of the folks I know who make “stay up half an hour longer” work are people who do not have to get up and go to work in the morning, so they can sleep in an extra half hour or hour (and sleeping in is a lot more attractive than going to bed early, for most of us). To make “Get up half an hour early” work in the long run, one would also have to go to bed half an hour earlier, so as not to incur a growing sleep deficit, and nobody I know wants to do that.

You may have noticed that both my best and worst advice don’t have much to do with choosing the words one puts on paper. Anyone who’s been reading this blog for a while knows how I feel about all the writing “rules” that are out there (hint: not positive), but in my experience, the absolute worst advice is aimed at the process itself. Because once you get the words down on paper (or in pixels), you can fix them if you’ve messed something up, but if you mess up the process, you may very well never get the words down in the first place.