Patricia C. Wrede's Blog, page 50

Plot points

The other day somebody asked me what a plot point was, and I had to stop and think about it. As usual, when I have to stop and think about anything writing-related, I end up doing a blog post to clarify my thinking.

“Plot points” are one of those writing terms with no standard definition. I was a bit surprised to discover that some people use the term to refer very specifically to the events that mark the theoretical boundary between “acts” of a story. That is, if you’re using a three-act structure, your story has two plot points, one between acts one and two, and one between acts two and three. If you’re using a five-act structure, the story would have four plot points.

At the other end of the range, I found a definition that boils down to “anything significant.” That’s a little broad, but when you get down to cases, I find it a lot more useful than the extremely limited version above.

And then there are the folks in the middle, who define “plot point” as synonymous with “turning point” – a life-changing decision or event that opens some new paths for the characters and closes others. In Lord of the Rings, the hobbits’ meeting with Strider in Bree is one such event; Frodo’s decision to volunteer to be ring-bearer is another. This definition is in the middle of the range because it’s generally accepted that there’s a major turning point at the end of each act, but there can be lots of lesser ones along the way.

After looking at a bunch of different definitions and examples, the best one I can come up with is this: plot points are the information the reader must have in order for the story to make sense. That’s why general examples of plot points tend to include the word “significant” a lot: The characters perform a significant action, or make a significant decision, or discover significant information or clues; a significant character or place or question is introduced; something significant is set up or paid off or answered, etc.

In other words, plot points are things that move the story forward. They can be large and obvious (finding out that Bilbo’s ring is the One Ring, hiding from Ringwraiths on the road to Buckleberry Ferry), or they can be seemingly inconsequential things that set up a scene or situation or key bit of information for later (Sam remarking, very early, that he’d like to see elves one day). They’re not limited to life-changing events or decision, but they certainly include them (a life-changing event or decision is nearly certain to be “significant” to the story-in-progress, after all).

So what are the things the reader needs to know to make sense of the story? Who the central characters are, for one; what the key strengths and weaknesses and relationships are that will cause them to take or not take important plot-relevant actions. What information the characters need to have at any given point in order to move forward. How they get that information (and if it seems to come out of nowhere, all too conveniently, then the writer may need to add a plot point earlier to set things up so it’s not such a coincidence). What choices they have and what decisions they can make. What actions they take as a result of the information and choices they have and the decisions they’ve made. What things need to be set up, and what the payoff of each setup is.

Looking at plot points this way is useful from a couple of different directions. The first is that if plot points are things that move the story forward, that means they are the source of narrative drive, and a writer can theoretically control the pace and drive of the story by controlling how many plot points are included in a scene or on each page. If readers are complaining about a scene or story moving too slowly, maybe it’s because there aren’t enough plot points per scene to maintain the narrative drive.

The second interesting thing is that you can examine and create plot points from either direction. That is, you can write a story or plot outline and then make a list of what plot points are missing (what things need to be set up or introduced or clarified for the reader), so you know what to add/fix in revision, or you can start with an idea and a blank sheet of paper, make a list of possible plot points, and construct the outline from there. Or you can work from both ends toward the middle: start by making a list of key plot points, and add to it or rearrange it as you write and realize that things are happening in a different order or going in a different direction.

The last interesting thing about this definition (and most of the others) is that “plot points” are not necessarily strictly about plot. Bringing an important new character onstage is a plot point (Gollum, for instance); so is introducing the reader to a major new setting (Rivendell, the Mines of Moria, Edoras, Mount Doom). One could color-code one’s list of “plot points” in a variety of ways (blue for characters; red for actions/decisions; yellow for settings/information; or perhaps using lighter shades or secondary colors like green, orange, and purple for subplots…)

My point here is not to encourage people to waste time (though if you find it useful to your writing, it’s not a waste of time). It’s more to remind folks that the reader needs to know more than just “what happens next;” they need to know who and how and why and where, as well as what. So if you’re going to try analyzing your writing for plot points (it’s not required, and it won’t be useful to everyone), don’t limit your “plot points” strictly to the action.

Prewriting

As near as I can tell, “prewriting” is a trendy catch-all term for “everything a writer does before they actually sit down and start writing the story.” Even that definition is a little dicey, given how many writers go through a stage where they’re writing down bits and snippets and scenelets and even whole scenes, which they pile up and later assemble into “the story.” It can be hard to tell where the line is between “getting ready to write the story” and “actually writing the story.”

That said, nearly every writer does some prewriting, even the serious seat-of-the-pants types, even if it’s mainly in their heads. There are basic decisions to be made about intended length, starting point, viewpoint character, place and time, even “I am writing a novel” vs. “I am writing a screenplay.” How much prewriting any given writer does … well, that depends.

And what it depends on is the purpose the prewriting serves for that particular author.

Prewriting can serve to clarify a story in the writer’s mind. It can prime the pump, increasing the writer’s interest, enthusiasm, and general idea-pressure so that the story will start off with a rush of writing. It can clear away the false starts. It can help determine a direction or a theme or a structure for the story. It can improve the writing flow for the rest of the book. It can help avoid wrong turns and “stuck” places and problems, making both the writing and the revision process easier and smoother.

But prewriting will do none of these things automatically. There are a million-plus websites that talk about prewriting, and most of them talk about techniques like brainstorming, mind-mapping, character and setting creation, choosing a theme, etc. What they don’t talk about is why bother…and/or why not to bother, and that makes all the difference.

One of the websites I looked at broke down the prewriting process into steps. Steps #2, 3, and 4 were, respectively, “pick an audience,” “decide on a theme,” and “draw a map.” There’s nothing wrong with doing any of those things as a part of prewriting…if they happen to serve the writer’s purpose in doing prewriting.

I expect my prewriting to clarify the story, and then to improve my writing flow and help me avoid wrong turns. Picking an audience does nothing to help me with that (or perhaps it is more correct to say that I have no need to pick any audience other than myself). Deciding on a theme is, I have found, monumentally counter-productive for me; far from improving my writing flow, it tends to impede it.

Maps – OK, I do maps…but not always. It depends on whether I think I’m going to need one in order to keep straight where everything is and what all the place-names I’m throwing off go with. I find it a lot easier to glance at a map to see where Puerto del Oeste or Dangil is than to look up a description on a list, especially since the map tells me at a glance where it is compared to everything else, while the description is likely to only mention a couple of key locations that it’s north or east or south of. And I won’t necessarily need a map if I’m telling a story set entirely on one farm, or even in a city. I might want a floor plan showing which bedrooms each of my sixteen characters is in, but then again, it might not be important.

The point is that this sort of checklist doesn’t address my real question, which is “What do I need to know now, in order to make this story easier to write later?” If my main purpose in prewriting were to increase my enthusiasm and idea-pressure, what I’d need to do in those early stages would be different, depending on what sorts of things I thought were likely to get me pumped up about writing this particular story. (And even then, different things work for different writers. I get pumped up by talking about the story to lots of people; some of my friends get pumped up by not talking about it, so that the urge to get the story out is dammed up and gets stronger and stronger until they have to start writing.)

What I do for prewriting varies from book to book, and experience indicates that what is effective as prewriting varies from writer to writer. Among the things that can be helpful, depending, are: Drawing maps and floor plans. Making lists of characters, what they do for a living, and how they relate to other characters. Making a list of possible names of characters (so that when you suddenly need a name for the palace guard or cabby, you have a bunch of pre-generated names to pick from that all “sound right” for whatever world/country/culture you’re setting things in). Plot outlines, ranging in detail from the two-paragraph cover-letter summary to the thirty-to-fifty-page treatment. Brainstorming. Mind-mapping. Writing down bits and pieces of scenes. Drawing up a timeline. Research reading (especially if you’re doing a historical or semi-historical setting, but often useful even if you’re making everything up from scratch).

Some writers experiment a lot as part of their prewriting – trying out different viewpoints and viewpoint characters, or different possible openings, or different styles or voices. Basic decisions can also happen at this point, like whether it’s going to be a short story, novella, or novel; coming up with a theme; deciding on a structure or form; or deciding where the story begins and whether that’s also where the writing opens (or whether the writing opens somewhere else, and the beginning of the story comes later or as a flashback). You can decide whether there’s a McGuffin and what it is, or what level the main plot is going to be on (action, emotion, mental, spiritual).

Some of these things can be left to be determined when the need for them crops up during the actual writing; some will be inherent in whatever story idea the writer is starting with. For instance, Talking to Dragons started with the sentence “Mother taught me to be polite to dragons.” I didn’t have to decide what point of view to use or who the viewpoint character would be; I knew from that sentence that it was first person, and while I still had a lot of things to find out about the viewpoint character, I had his voice and a few key facts right there.

Nothing that is decided during prewriting is irrevokable. This puts a lot of people off the whole idea – why bother doing all that work, if you’re not going to stick to it? It depends, again, on why you’re doing it. For me, if I try out six wrong decisions during the prewriting stage, I’ve just saved myself months of going down blind alleys during the writing phase later on, so it’s worth it.

My view of viewpoint

It’s been a while since I’ve talked about viewpoint, so I think I’ll devote this post to it, and maybe a few more if people seem interested.

Viewpoint is one of those areas of writing where there seems to be a tremendous amount of confusion. A lot of the confusion stems, I think, from the imprecision and lack of standardization in the terminology, so I’ll start with that.

The term “viewpoint” itself can mean several things:

1. “The position or vantage point from which the events of a story seem to be observed and presented” – Concise Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms

2. The type of viewpoint

3. The viewpoint character

The first meaning is the broad overview sort that’s supposed to encompass everything, but often ends up just confusing people. I think of it as the angle from which the author chooses to tell the story – from inside the story or from the outside looking in? After the fact or as it happens?

The type of viewpoint is basically whether the narrative is in first-person (“I hit him”), second person (“you hit him”), or third person (“she hit him”). Second-person is rare; usually, the choice is between first person or third person. Plural viewpoints (“We hit him,” “They hit him”) are even rarer than second-person, but they do get used on occasion. The examples I know of are short stories.

The viewpoint character is the character through whose eyes the reader sees the story. The viewpoint character can be the protagonist, or he/she can be a major secondary character or sidekick (like Dr. Watson in the Sherlock Holmes stories), or she/he can be a minor character who’s in a position to observe most of the key plot moments. He can even be an omniscient narrator who doesn’t appear in the story, as with Steven Brust’s Paarfi novels.

Thus the answer to the question “What’s the viewpoint in this story?” could be:

1. The story is told “from inside,” as it happens

2. Third-person subjective

3. Jane Smith, identical twin of Judy Smith

Most of the time, people don’t stop to clarify which answer they’re looking for when they ask the question, which leads to lots of misunderstanding. This is especially true when people are talking about type of viewpoint (first, second, third), because viewpoint types can be broken down into finer and finer detail…and there doesn’t seem to be much agreement about what those sub-types ought to be, much less what they are called.

For instance, that viewpoint type I listed up there, “third person subjective,” is also called tight third person, third person personal, intimate third person, limited third person, and limited omniscient, depending on what source you’re looking at. And each of those terms breaks third person viewpoint down in slightly different ways, some of which map to each other (as “third person subjective” = “third person personal” and “third person objective” = “camera eye”) and some of which don’t.

One of the most useful ways of looking at all these different ways of breaking down point of view, for me, came when somebody pointed out that all these categories are trying to sort out different combinations of three different factors. The first one is the easiest and most obvious: whether the narrative is in first, second, or third person.

The second one is where the narrative falls along a range from subjective to objective. The more of the characters’ personal thoughts, feelings, opinions, etc. make it directly into the story, the more subjective it is; the more everything is conveyed by describing strictly what anyone and everyone could see/hear/touch/etc., the more objective it is.

The third factor is how limited/omniscient the narrator’s knowledge is or is not. This is especially relevant in third person, where an omniscient narrator can stop and tell the reader about the prehistoric geology of the landscape the characters are walking over (which none of them know anything about), or give a quick two-page summary of the entire future life of the cab driver who’s taking the protagonist from the airport to her hotel.

I would be remiss if I didn’t mention multiple viewpoint in here somewhere, even though it isn’t really a viewpoint at all. Multiple viewpoint is a structure, in which different scenes are told through the eyes of different viewpoint characters and/or using different types of viewpoint. The most common multiple viewpoint uses tight third-person throughout, and shifts from one character’s point of view to another’s between scene breaks.

There are, however, books written in multiple first-person, and books that have both multiple viewpoint characters and multiple types of viewpoint (i.e., when George is the viewpoint, the scenes are in tight-third person, but when Jane is the viewpoint, they’re in first person, and when Kitty is the viewpoint, they’re in camera-eye). All of these are just as much “multiple viewpoint” as the more common ensemble-tight-third type, which is why I say it’s a structure and not a type of viewpoint at all.

Being an analytical sort of writer, I find it useful to look at and try to comprehend all these different ways of looking at point of view. Not everyone will. The good news is that you don’t have to worry too much if you don’t find the terminology or the various divisions helpful in your writing. The terminology really matters only when you’re talking about writing and books to other readers and writers. Since most writers do talk quite a lot about books and writing, however, it’s usually a good idea to have at least a passing acquaintance with the different terms, and an awareness of all the differences, so that one doesn’t end up having a three-hour discussion only to find out that you were using different terms for the same thing, or talking about two completely different aspects of viewpoint.

Weak and Strong?

One of the bits of advice that is often given to would-be writers is “Use strong verbs.” Apart from my usual allergy to rules and generalizations, one of the things that bothers me about this is that I’ve seldom seen anyone try to explain what it means, and on the rare occasions when someone does, the explanation usually boils down to “don’t use ‘is’.” Which is really just…wrong.

I’ve already done the rant on passive voice, so today I’m going to talk about verbs in general, and why there’s so much confusion about “passive verbs,” “weak verbs,” and so on.

First off, there’s no such thing as a passive verb. There’s passive voice, but that’s a construction that can be used with nearly any verb. Saying “He was hit by a truck” does not somehow make “to hit” less of an action.

What there are, are verbs that are a state of being and verbs that are actions. To hit, to stand, to jump, to buy, to taste are all action verbs. To want, to need, to owe, to hate are all states of being.

You can watch somebody running, or buying something, or hitting a baseball, and you can usually tell what he is doing. If you were asked, you could say “He ran across the street” or “She stood there and looked at the clouds.” States of being, however, are not necessarily visible or obvious. That woman who’s standing there looking at clouds – is she thinking? Wishing for something? Worrying? Feeling ill? You can’t tell from observing her behavior; all you can see her doing is standing there.

When writers are advised to dramatize scenes – to “show, don’t tell” – they’re usually advised to get rid of all the verbs except the action verbs, on the grounds that “showing” means describing what the reader would see if the reader were somehow able to hide in a corner or up a tree and actually watch the scene unfold. This works fine in a fight scene or a chase, when what’s going on is action. It gets a lot more problematic when most of the “action” is internal to various characters, and can only be “shown” through facial expression and body language.

The other big difficulty is, I think, a misunderstanding of some older terms of grammar that have mostly been superseded. When I was in grade school, what are now called “regular verbs” (that form the past tense by adding –ed or –d, such as owe/owed, hate/hated, burn/burned, jump/jumped) were known as “weak verbs,” while irregular verbs (that have a different past tense, such as run/ran, write/wrote, tell/told, feel/felt,) were known as “strong verbs.”  

This obviously had nothing to do with the effect the verb in a sentence, or with whether the verb was an action or a state-of-being (there are both sorts on each list). It certainly had nothing to do with how desirable it might be to use one sort over the other. But “weak verb” sounds as if it ought to be a bad thing, and “strong verb” sounds as if it’ll make your sentences more effective, and both phrases are short and punchy. Over time, as regular/irregular replaced weak/strong in grammar terminology, I think people ran across or half-remembered the older terms and started misapplying them.

Another major mistake is in identifying “to be” as passive, weak, and undesirable, especially when it’s part of the verb form. I recently saw a paragraph written in present progressive tense (“They are now running along main street; the office workers are gaping as the race is going by…”) which someone had marked as being “too passive” while circling every “are” and “is” in the paragraph. The critique was half right; a whole paragraph in present continuous made for awkward reading.

But the problem was a tense problem, not a problem with overusing “to be,” and I nearly went ballistic when I saw the critic patting himself on the back for “changing weak verbs into strong ones” and “eliminating passive verbs” when not one verb changed. Only the tense did (“Now they run along main street; the office workers gape as the race goes by…”) Yes, the revised paragraph is much more readable and flows much better, but not for the reasons the critic gave. And in my experience, showing people a good fix and then giving them a bunch of incorrect information about what was done and why only ends up confusing them, at best. At worst, the writers fixate on the wrong things and end up making their own prose far worse than it was when they began.

What it all comes down to is that authors can’t simply apply a bunch of rules. They have to think – think about what they’re doing, what effect it has, and what effect they want it to have. Is this a chase scene? Then lots of action verbs are probably appropriate. Is it an internal monolog by the viewpoint character? Then there’ll probably be a few more state-of-being verbs. Is it the dialog of the radio announcer, commenting on a race? Then “Now they are running along main street…” probably is the right tense to use, and the author will have to find some other way of eliminating the awkwardness of too much present-progressive in a row.

 

Composing a query

For some reason, I feel like talking about query letters again, possibly because I’ve recently been the recipient of a couple of queries that can only be described as dreadful. I begin with a couple of definitions:

A query letter is a one-page business letter that presents the author’s novel to an editor or agent in hopes they’ll ask to see more.

“One page business letter” means just that: one page, single sided. If you’re emailing your query, stick to one screen (less if you have a double-wide monitor, because many editors don’t). This means you don’t have much room, which is a Really Key Point.

Publishers’ submission guidelines trump everything else. Read them. Believe them. If they say they want to see three sentences scribbled on a Post-It-Note, send them that (but for heaven’s sake, don’t send it to anyone else!)

Query letters are mainly for novels. Short fiction doesn’t need to be queried, because it’s short; it takes the editor less time to read it than it takes him/her to read and respond to a query and then read the story. I understand that some markets want queries for nonfiction articles, but they should say that in their guidelines. I’ve done maybe three nonfiction pieces in thirty years, all by specific request, so I wouldn’t know.

Now let’s take apart a disguised mash-up version of the less-than-stellar queries I got sent recently. Here’s more or less what I received:

“This book is my attempt to write a story that justifies the longest and most detailed description of a forest in English Literature, which I hope is also enlightening and entertaining. It follows the development of an lumberman-turned-eco-activist in a world of magical realism, through his revelations and enlightenment over a lifetime, as he reflects on his mistakes and triumphs from youth to old age while he prepares to move out of the home he has lived in for over eighty years.”

This story may, possibly, have been a great one, though I have my doubts. I can, however, assure her (and everyone else) that “this book contains the longest description of a forest ever” is not going to be a big selling point for editors. Also, every author hopes their book will be enlightening and entertaining, so you really don’t need to tell the editor that.

There’s nothing wrong with wanting to write the longest, coolest description of a forest ever, and taking that as the starting point for a novel. Editors, however, are not interested in what inspired the writer to write the book, nor in learning which aspects of writing the story were the most fun for the writer. Editors want to know why a reader – preferably a whole lot of readers – would want to read this book so badly that they will pay money for it. They want to know what came out of the inspiration or challenge or whatever. They want specifics. They want the story.

The “plot summary” above doesn’t even tell us the main character’s name, much less where the story takes place. (Is this forest in northern Canada, or a South American jungle, or perhaps Russia?) There’s some indication of change on the part of the main character, but nothing about the whys, the hows, the obstacles he faces, or the events that precipitate the change.

The things you need in a query letter plot summary are:

-The protagonist’s name, or the two (or three) most important characters’ names, if it’s an ensemble cast

-An explanation of the central story problem or goal

-One or two key obstacles the protagonist has to overcome

-How the problem is resolved (or the goal achieved)

Once you have these things, you then arrange them into two or three paragraphs, being as specific as possible (“his mistakes and triumphs” is not specific. “His success in the lumber industry” and “the suicide of his youngest son” are specific) and adding just enough detail to connect things together. There isn’t likely to be room for subplots or a lot of backstory, but if you have room, you can add a few more key details, like where the story is located and how the main character got into the mess he’s in. 

For this particular query, I’d have to make up pretty much all of the above. So I will:

1. Protagonist’s name: George Landin

2. Story problem: George feels his life has been pointless

3. Obstacles: Moving out of the home he’s lived in for 80 years makes George feel more depressed. In sorting through his stuff, he keeps running across reminders of his mistakes and failures, ditto. And since this is magical realism, every time he picks up an object, he gets to re-live a vision/scene/memory, which gradually become more vivid and begin showing him alternate lives as he goes on. George begins to be swamped by his possible pasts.

4. Resolution: George lets go of his stuff and all the possible alternate lives, and makes his peace with himself and his past.

Those are still pretty general, but this is supposed to be the guideline that I’m going to use to write the plot summary, not the plot summary itself. As long as the specifics get into the actual summary, I’m OK.

So I took the above key points and string them together, and this is what I came up with:

As George Landin prepares to move out of the home in which he has lived for nearly eighty years, he is troubled by the feeling that his life has been pointless. Each object he must discard or pack away recalls a memory: of his lonely childhood in the north woods of Oregon, of his marriage, of his early success in the lumber industry, of the tragic suicide of his second son, the subsequent failure of his business, and his attempt to reinvent himself as an environmental activist. The memories grow more vivid and develop into visions of the life he might have had, had he made different choices. George is nearly overwhelmed by all his possible pasts, until he finds a wooden statue of a meadowlark that was carved by his grandfather. The statue anchors him enough to let go of the alternative realities along with all his mementoes and make his peace with himself and the life he has actually lived. As he leaves the house for the last time, he gives the statue to his son.

This is just an illustration of how to go about coming up with a query-letter-sized plot summary; I very much doubt that this one is anything like the story the author of the original query actually wrote.

The Parent Problem

Young adult fiction almost always features a protagonist who is a teenager or young adult for most of the story or series. This means that one of the largest problems YA authors face is the “Parent Problem,” that is, the problem of how to get their protagonists to have adventures without the adults of the community stepping in to protect them, the way actual responsible adults are supposed to.

Logically, there are really only four options: 1) The adults behave like responsible grown-ups who take on appropriate parts of the adventure and/or plot; 2) The adults behave like responsible adults, but the story problems revolve around things that most reasonable adults would expect a teenager to solve for themselves; 3) There are no adults around; or 4) The adults are irresponsible, incapable, incompetent, or outright evil.

Many story problems revolve around things that are too large for anyone, adult or not, to handle alone. There are plenty of books in which the dam breaks or a hurricane inundates the town; while the adults are busy coping with rebuilding, the teens and younger children cope in their own way with their parts of the problem. The problem is large enough that everybody has an appropriate piece to handle, so the young protagonist has plenty to do even though there are lots of adults around.

The second option is the method of choice for an enormous amount of present-day-setting YA. Adults cannot actually be on the high school basketball team; they can only coach. So if the story-problem is about winning the state basketball tournament, it’s fairly easy to keep the adults out of it (or make them part of the problem, see #4) Young adult and teen romances usually deal with high school dating problems; while an adult might reasonably give advice, one wouldn’t expect an authority figure to dictate who a teen could date or follow a pair of teens around to tell them when they should hold hands (and even if they did, there’d still be plenty of room for “but does he/she really like me?” angst). There’s a vast array of so-called “problem novels” that deal with teens coping with difficulties ranging from abuse to the death of a family member to their parents’ divorce. Sometimes, the protagonist gets adult help, sometimes not, but the thing all these stories have in common is that ultimately, the protagonist is the one who has to deal with the emotions involved, because nobody else can actually do it for them.

As for #3, there are two basic ways of having no adults around in a story: first, the young protagonist can be separated from the adults by accident or design (that is, he/she can be the lone survivor of a shipwreck or plane crash in the wilderness, or she/he can run away). In Hatchet by Gary Paulsen, the teen protagonist is the only survivor when a small plane crashes in the Canadian wilderness; Jean Craighead’s classic My Side of the Mountain is the story of a runaway trying to live in the woods on his own, and while adults occasionally pass through, the protagonist always has to consider whether they’re likely to drag him home before he decides to interact with them, and never lets them take over the responsibility that he has seized for himself.

The second way of having no adults around is, of course, to kill them off or have them mysteriously disappear. Killing off the parents early on is a time-honored way of forcing a young protagonist to be responsible for him/herself; just look at all the fairy tales that start with the main character being orphaned. Mysterious disappearance is another good way of getting rid of the adults who’re supposed to be looking after things (and can do double-duty by giving the protagonist someone to go out looking for). The two are often combined, as when one parent goes off somewhere and vanishes, and then the remaining parent dies or is incapacitated. In modern stories, divorce is sometimes used as a less extreme way of disposing of at least one parent; like mysterious disappearance, it gets one adult out of the way while leaving open the possibility that the missing parent will return.

The trouble with killing off the parents, especially in a modern-day story, is that it doesn’t get rid of all the other adults who could or should take responsibility for a child or teenager. Families seldom exist in isolation, and most communities expect some adult to step in and take care of an orphaned child. This is particularly true if the parents are killed off when the protagonist is very young; somebody has to take care of a two-year-old, or the toddler won’t survive. Once the protagonist is old enough to get by on his/her own, the author can sometimes arrange to have the main character’s entire village wiped out by bandits, an invading army, plague, or a dragon, leaving the teenaged hero or heroine with no one to depend on but themselves, but this kind of wholesale slaughter doesn’t always fit the story the author wants to tell.

This brings us to option #4, the adults being irresponsible, incapable, incompetent, or outright evil.

This one can be used alone – in comedies, in particular, the bumbling, incompetent adults who have to be rescued by the kids are a perennial favorite – or in combination with killing off the parents, as with all those other fairy tales full of evil stepmothers and wicked uncles who’re after their ward’s fortune or title. Often, the supposedly responsible adults who take the orphan in turn out to be resentful, neglectful, or incompetent (or all three at once), like Harry Potter’s aunt and uncle, or Jane Eyre’s aunt and most of the adults in the boarding school she attends. Corrupt, venal, or abusive masters are a staple of fiction in which the protagonist is working as an apprentice, rather than living with family. There are also stories in which the “somebody” who takes responsibility for the orphaned child is unexpected or unconventional, and that’s the source of the story, as when Mowgli is adopted by wolves and raised by the animals in the jungle.

And then there are the stories where only the protagonist is capable of achieving the story-solution, because he or she has some power or ability that the adults lack. In a realistic modern-day story, this might be a talent for something like chess or music; in fantasy, the protagonist may be the subject of a prophecy or have some rare magic power; occasionally, one finds a story in which children have a power or ability that is lost at puberty or when they become adult or reach some other major life-milestone. The adults can be as competent and responsible as they like, but only the protagonist can win the game/pull the sword from the stone/kill the evil wizard/etc.

Historical fiction, science fiction, and fantasy allow for a final option: finding or inventing a culture in which teenagers are allowed and expected to do things that modern society reserves for adults. This can solve most of the Parent Problem quite handily; if a society considers people more or less adult at sixteen, then the sixteen-year-old hero can go off and have adventures like every other adult. Lots of fantasy takes this way out, either by basing the story on a real-life time and place where adulthood arrived much sooner than it does in the modern world, or by inventing an entirely new society that works the way the author needs it to. The Hunger Games postulates a future dystopia in which teens are deliberately put at risk as a way of enforcing the government’s control. And SF/F allows for all sorts of new ways to implement the four basic solutions, from spaceship crashes to teleportation accidents.

I have to finish by pointing out that the Harry Potter books makes use of nearly all of these methods at once: the hero is an orphan, the subject of a prophecy; the aunt and uncle who take him in are neglectful/incompetent; the other adults in his life cover the range from obviously incompetent (Minister Fudge) to supposedly-responsible but busy dealing with the Big Picture (Dumbledore) and thus leaving the kids largely to their own devices; he and his friends spend much of the final book as, essentially, runaways; etc.

The World in the Story

There are other kinds of worldbuilding besides the deep-background variety I was talking about last post, to wit, the immediate-background sort and the in-story sort. The immediate-background worldbuilding, like deep worldbuilding, is stuff that not everyone needs to do in advance. It’s very similar to the deep-worldbuilding in that it’s about making decisions, but most of the decisions are about how things are in the story-world right now. Do they drink coffee? Have public/private schools? Are there police, city guards, local security gangs, or do citizens just have to protect themselves if they’re out on the streets after dark? What do the locals eat? How do they dress? How do they greet each other?

Since the immediate-background stuff usually comes up in the story, a lot of writers can just make it up on the fly. I find that I’m better off at least thinking about some of it in advance, because if I wait until two of my characters are introduced to each other in Chapter Three, I’ll probably have them bow or shake hands just because that’s my default and I want to get on with the scene. If I make it up ahead of time, I’m more likely to take a few minutes to come up with a formal greeting that reflects the culture I’ve invented.

Which brings me to the other other kind of worldbuilding, the kind that every writer does to some extent, and that’s the kind that’s done in the story itself. It’s not about inventing the cool details and clever twists on history; it’s about conveying a sense of place and culture and background to the reader.

There are three things to look at when thinking about this sort of worldbuilding:

How familiar is the place/time/culture to your expected readers?
How much does your story depend on unique features of the place/time/culture in which it is set?
How much would your story be enriched by including unique features of the place/time/culture in which it is set?

1. A lot of present-day fiction is set in Generic City or Generic Town, Writer’s Home Country, because the writer quite reasonably expects the story to be published in his country, and they’ll all know how things work there. Also, if you set a story in a place, time, or culture that you have no experience of, you will have to do research to get it right, and let’s face it, generic is easier.

The farther you get from the place, time, and culture your readers live in, the more worldbuilding your story has to offer them if you want it to feel as if it really is in a different place, time, or culture. Chicago is not L.A. is not New Orleans is not New York is not Miami…and those are all major cities in the same country. The farther out you branch, the greater the differences; Paris is a lot more not-Moscow and not-Beijing than New York is not-Chicago, and Paris in 2013 is not Paris in 1968 or 1798 or 52 BCE.

2. This ought to be a no-brainer; after all, anything that the story depends on needs to be in the book, right? When a story is based in a real place, time, or culture, though, some writers forget that they can’t leave out a critical bit of information just because their readers can google on the meaning of cranes in Japanese culture. Worse are the folks who presume that if they can rattle off a list of every type of hobgoblin in the British Isles, all of their readers will know all about them as well.

3. The first two points aim the writer at things that really need to be in the story; this one is for looking at the things that are optional. Every place has things about it that are unique, or groups of non-unique things that add together into a unique “feel.” A story may not need to be set anywhere more specific than Generic Metropolitan Area, but speaking as a Chicago ex-pat, there’s something special about books set in Chicago that capture the feel of the place. It may not matter to the story that the El (elevated train, for non-Chicagoans) is really, really noisy, but I get a warm fuzzy feeling when the characters in a Chicago story have to stop talking in mid-conversation every so often while the El rattles by.

And that brings me to the how part of the post. A lot of writers seem to think of worldbuilding as description: what things are there, what they look and feel and sound like. But places, times, and cultures are – or should be – a lot more than a painted backdrop that you can unroll behind your characters as they move through the story. Good description is certainly part of worldbuilding, but if you really want your readers to get into your world, you have to give them more than a handful of local placenames and a vivid description of the harbor/town square/other big tourist attraction.

Every aspect of the story is part of the worldbuilding on some level, from what the characters have for lunch to the style and type of clothing they (and others) wear to their manners when they’re greeting someone to things like having to stop in mid-conversation to let a noisy train go past. The particular piece of the world we live in affects every aspect of our lives, all the time, but we take it so much for granted that we don’t often think about how. My sister in Alabama does not have the January Reflex where you automatically take your shoes off just inside someone’s door, because where she lives, she a) does not have to wear snow boots in January, and b) does not come in with shoes covered in ice-melter and dirty snow that will track over two rooms, minimum, if you forget to take them off.

Worldbuilding in a story is remembering to include all those little things, from the vitally important social aspects (whether that means remembering to curtsey to the king and bow to the queen, never vice versa, or whether it means always stirring your tea clockwise) to the everyday things like swapping your shoes for an “indoor pair,” or opening/closing all the windows at particular times of day because of the temperature.

It’s the way living in a place affects the everyday lives of the characters down in the details. How many details are too many is a matter of taste; some authors go for lots of lush description of everything, even making breakfast, while others go for bare-bones Hemingway-esque sketches. One way or another, though, the world is always there in the story…because stories need a place to happen in as much as they need a problem to be about.

Deep worldbuilding

A couple of weeks ago, I finally figured out one of the several reasons I’ve been having so much difficulty booting up The New Thing. It’s because for my last eight to ten books, I haven’t had to do any deep worldbuilding, because all of them came with that part ready-made. The Frontier Magic books, the Star Wars middle-grade trilogy, the Regency books – all of them had either plenty of actual or well-developed imaginary history to work from. I had plenty of decisions to make, but the foundation was already there. So I’ve been trying to do what I “always” do, which is to skip straight to the plot and the immediately necessary specifics of the background.

This is complicated by the fact that one of my best friends and story-noodlers is highly character-centered and dislikes having to make up much/any deep background in advance of the story. So her noodling questions have all been focused on the characters and plot (because she knows I do plot), which sometimes hits the “deep worldbuilding” button, but mostly doesn’t.

What I mean by “deep worldbuilding” is all the background, from geography to cultural history, that shapes the place and time the characters are living in. When I’m writing alternate history, I have many libraries’ worth of information to use or choose not to use. I can look up where the rivers and active volcanoes are, or where certain crops originated; I have the Han Dynasty, the Egyptian Pharaohs, and the Greco-Roman Empire that can be assumed with all their real-life consequences, or tinkered with, or eliminated with all those consequences (what if the rulers of the Indian subcontinent had chased Alexander back home and conquered Greece? Or Cleopatra had managed to annex Rome, instead of Rome getting Egypt?). Even if I made the world unrecognizable save for the geography (because, oh, aliens messed around with life on Earth at the end of the Mesozoic Era, so we have civilized dinosaurs instead of us), I’d know where the mountains and rivers were, and what the climate was like in various places, and so on.

But the New Thing isn’t alternate history in any way, shape, or form. Bits of it are modeled on Real Life History, but it’s more like visiting a museum exhibit of Michelangelo’s work and then coming home and trying to build a Cubist version of the Pieta out of cardboard boxes than it is like a mash-up of actual places and events.

Doing a lot of deep worldbuilding in advance is not for every writer, but it helps me. In fact, as has become quite clearly obvious, I need to know a fair amount of it, or I can’t get things to hang together properly at the immediate-backstory stage. That doesn’t mean I do all the deep worldbuilding at once; on the contrary, it develops in fits and starts, forwards and backwards. That is, sometimes I know something (like “this is a coastal city”) that implies a bunch of other things (a harbor, trade, seafood dishes). Other times, I know something (there are three distinct and mutually exclusive types of magic) and it begs a question (how were they discovered, and why do they have more-or-less equal status and emphasis?). The answer to that (three major empires back in their early history, each with a different attitude/philosophy toward What Man Is Allowed To Tamper With) implies some more things (my city must be somewhere that was either not directly influenced by any of the empires, or influenced equally by all of them, there are going to be at least some people who still have very strong opinions about whether each type of magic is good/bad).

I like the idea of a trade crossroads at some point in the middle of my three empires, which fits with the harbor-and-trade part I established earlier, but it might be inconvenient. I’ve already got a three-way magical conflict; do I really want a three-way philosophical and political conflict as well? Even if it ends up being just the historical remnants of the empires that my present-day people have to deal with? On the other hand, can I really avoid it, given what I have so far for background, even if I stick the city far away?

If I make the location somewhere well away from the ancient empires, then it’ll need to have some local resource that’s valuable enough to stimulate trade with all three, but not so valuable that any of the empires would come all the way out there and conquer the place to get it. So not iron or gold, but maybe silk or purple dye or porcelain. That will probably also affect their trade and lifestyle during the period of the story, and possibly the prosperity of the city, depending on whether said trade item is still in demand or has been made obsolete by some new invention or discovery.

There’s also the question of when and how those empires collapsed. Rot from within and barbarians from without, like Rome? War, leading to mutual exhaustion? Plague? Is any of that still a danger? And what’s left of them – a handful of more-or-less equal countries, or some small new places trying to expand into the decaying core of the original empire? I don’t plan on getting into lots of geopolitics in this story, but if my city is a trade center, what’s going on in it will be of interest to the rest of the world, and vice versa. Also, at least one of my characters is from away, so I’ll need to have her place-of-origin developed more than just “up north.”

Then there’s the city government (is it a charter city, like London, with a mayor and aldermen, but still answerable to the king? Or a city-state run by its own prince or council?), what the local factions are (besides my three kinds of mages), and a bunch of cultural stuff, especially cultural stuff revolving around clothes (because my main character is a seamstress).

Which brings in the question of what fabrics and decorations are available, and whether they’re produced locally (they don’t have to be; it’s a trade center, after all), which ones are expensive luxuries and which are the working-class wear, whether or not there are sumptuary laws. I know that unicorn leather is banned, but do they feel the same way about anything else?

I know there are at least some magical creatures in this world – fairies of the small-butterfly sort and unicorns, at minimum – so I need to know whether or not they’re intelligent and/or have their own magic, how different cultures treat them, and how the inevitable conflicts in attitude will get handled in this particular place. Possibly also how they’ll be handled in other places, if I end up with more characters who are From Away or who have traveled widely.

Many of these things, when I get them fully developed, won’t get into the story directly, but they’ll affect it profoundly because the historical and cultural cross-currents affect almost everything in the story. This is particularly frustrating for my story-noodler, because every time another bit of background clunks solidly into place, part of the plot changes, and she’s not used to it because I haven’t done this for the last eight or ten books. Also, because she doesn’t need to do as much of it, or not in advance anyway.

The perils of a better idea

“A writer should always reserve the right to have a better idea.” – Lois McMaster Bujold

This is an excellent philosophy and makes a great one-line quote, but the other day I ran across a story that showed the perils of applying even such an excellent piece of advice too literally. The story started off as an adventure, with the main character discovering the huge central story-problem (invasion imminent! Must prepare to defeat aliens!), convincing some key people, and doing a bunch of sensible things to prepare for the invasion that was drawing ever-closer.

Then the aliens arrived, and were defeated completely by accident (making all those carefully set up preparations pointless), and the whole story turned into a slapstick, screwball comedy-of-bureaucracy. The second half didn’t match the front half, not in tone, not in content, not in anything except the presence of some of the same characters in both parts.

Mind you, both parts of this particular story were more than competently written, and each was, taken on its own, very enjoyable. They just didn’t match. It was as if two different books had each been split in half at Chapter 15, and the front half of one glued to the back half of the other.

When a reader has spent ten or eleven chapters following the preparations for the alien invasion and getting worked up about which characters are likely to die and whether they’ll get all the ships built in time, having the story suddenly turn into bureaucratic farce is a bait-and-switch. Furthermore, it’s a lousy bait-and-switch, because the readers who really like bureaucratic farce will have gone away long before they got to the middle of the book, and the ones who really like military fiction are not going to be happy with bureaucratic farce. Even the ones who, like me, occasionally like both will probably be going “Huh?” at some point, and will finish the story scratching their heads in confusion.

Possibly the author was trying to do something really clever and sophisticated by taking the mid-book “turning point” and using it to make the whole book into a completely different story. If so, for my money they didn’t pull it off. What I actually think happened (based on no evidence whatsoever, you understand) is that the author had a great new idea in mid-book, and went with it. So far, so good. The trouble was, the new idea didn’t fit what the author was currently writing.

At that point, the author had three choices if s/he wanted to keep working on that book: save the brilliant new idea for some other book and keep on as planned, go with the brilliant new idea and revise the front end to fit, or charge on ahead without ever looking back and let the chips fall where they may.

The author chose Door Number Three, and the chips fell on the floor and rolled down a knothole, never to be seen again.

This class of thing – a mismatch between two parts of a story – happens to everybody once in a while. You have your whole plot laid out and you’re writing along and suddenly you realize that your comedy has turned serious, your war has turned into a romance, your mystery has become vampire chick-lit, or your characters have turned out not to be the sort of people who would do whatever you have planned.

What most of us do, in my experience, is to go with the characters. If they won’t do what you have planned, you let them do what they want to do. If they’re turning the war into an unplanned romance, you let it be a romance…but you go back and tone down the war parts in the front half, and punch up the budding-romance parts, so it’s not so much of a surprise. Sometimes, the war turns into a romance in Chapter Sixteen and the only thing to do is cut the first twelve chapters and write a new Chapter One, because there isn’t any way to tone down the war setup enough to make it work.

To put it another way, if the characters put a tremendous amount of effort into doing something (whether that’s building a fleet to stop the invaders or trying to discover why the third floor corridor is off-limits), the author should not normally render that effort completely pointless (no matter how nice it is that the invading fleet came out of warp drive too close to that black hole, or how reasonable it is to find out that the third floor corridor is having the floor tile redone). Not unless the point of the story is supposed to be the futility or ridiculousness of the protagonist’s efforts (as in Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey.)

And if you’re writing parody or a life-is-futile story, it really ought to be clear to the reader from the start (or soon after) that this is what you’re doing. Otherwise, you’ll get accused of bait-and-switch even if that’s not what you intended.

It is, perhaps, possible to make a story work, even though the two ends are out of step, by doing a gradual, stunningly smooth transition in mid-book. I can’t think of one that does it, though, and I confess to grave doubts about the matter. It’s the old Chekovian principle at work: If you hang a loaded gun over the mantelpiece, someone should really use it before the end of the story. Better ideas are all very well, but if they don’t fit the book you have, you should almost certainly either save them for later, or revise the book you have until they fit.

Keeping records

It’s tax season again, which means loads of published writers out there are cursing their lack of record-keeping and vowing to do better next year. Fortunately, early March is usually not so late in the year that the very idea of going back over all the business receipts is an overwhelming task (for most writers, anyway). Especially since if you’re in this position, you’re probably facing an entire year’s worth of stuff from last year to sort and categorize, so what’s another two months?

The basic system is actually pretty simple: you find Schedule C (or whatever its equivalent is for your country, if you aren’t in the U.S.), mark all the line-items that you’re going to have writing expenses or income in, sort all your writing income and expenses into those categories, and add them up. Then you enter those numbers on the tax schedule and move on to filling out the rest of your forms.

The two questions that exercise most writers are 1) Which line-items are relevant? And 2) How the heck do I keep track of them all during the year?

#1 depends to some extent on what point in your career you’re at and on how you choose to run your writing business. If you’re filling out this form at all, it’s probably because you had some writing income; what isn’t always clear is that that “Gross receipts or sales” line is where ALL your writing-related income goes – advances, royalties, speaking fees, money from copies of your books that you sold to your neighbors, Amazon associate payments, etc.

The expenses, though, are where it can really get tricky. They’ll vary depending on how you handle your business. If, for instance, you rent an office for your writing, you will have entries under Utilities and either Rent or Mortgage; if you write in your living room or on your laptop at the local Starbucks, you won’t have those items (but you may be able to deduct your coffee on those days under “meals and entertainment”). If you have an agent, you’ll have an entry under Commissions; if not, not. If you have an accountant do your taxes, you’ll have something under “Legal and Professional Fees,” if not, not. Pretty much everybody will have something under “Office expense” and “Supplies,” even if it’s just the occasional notepad and pen. If you’ve been doing this for a while, look at your last year’s tax forms and see which lines you put entries in then.

So you look at Schedule C and make your list of which areas you expect expenses in. Mine includes Advertising, Car and Truck, Commissions and Fees, Office Expenses, Office supplies, Travel-Meals-Entertainment, and the home office deduction. Then you decide what kind of system suits you and your lifestyle best.

For beginners and many part-time writers, a manual system will be all they need. For this, you start with a stack of regular, letter-sized envelopes. You label each one with one of the categories, and then as you spend money on that during the year, you put the receipt (or a note, if it was paid in cash or direct-deposited) into the envelope. You can do this however works best for you: every day when you come in, every Friday, once a month as part of your bill-paying day. If you let it go for more than a month, it gets to feeling burdensome and you tend to slack off and next thing you know, it’s early March and you have a stack of empty envelopes and a bunch of unsorted receipts.

The manual method saw me through the first eight years or so of my writing career. As I got busier and had more expenses, I took to writing the amount of each receipt on the outside of the envelope when I filed it, so that I had an already-written column of numbers that I could total up easily, but at the beginning, there weren’t enough of them to make it necessary. If I were still doing it this way, I’d get one of those letter-racks and set it on the kitchen counter, so I could empty my pockets and purse straight into the envelopes the minute I hit the house every day.

The second possibility is what I call the semi-manual method. This is similar to the manual method, except that instead of sorting everything into envelopes, you set up a spreadsheet in Excel with columns for each category, and you put in each receipt as it arrives, entering the amount in the appropriate column. Then you throw the receipt into a file folder and forget about it. At the end of the year, Excel adds them all up for you. I did this for a couple of years with varying degrees of success. The success got more frequent when I started carrying around a PDA so I could make the entry right away as I spent things (these days, I’d use a smartphone).

Then came the Internet and online banking, and keeping track became ever so much simpler. These days, Quicken will download all your check and credit card transactions straight from the bank (so no data entry, yay!). Once you have matched your list of tax categories to Quicken’s tags (yes, they have a list of tax-categories pre-set, so you can use those if you want, but I prefer mine), all you have to do is review the entries every so often to make sure everything got put into the right category. I’ve heard from some writers who use Quickbooks, but that’s really overkill unless you’re doing something like running your own sales table at conventions.

Some folks don’t understand why they should bother with anything more than a shoebox to throw receipts in. If you’re one of those folks who really likes that panicked scramble on April 15 (and who doesn’t mind maybe missing a few deductions. I prefer the gradual approach (plus I was raised to think that paying Uncle Sam one dime more or less than he was entitled to was a crime worthy of life imprisonment, and you can’t do that if you aren’t really careful.

I, for instance, eat out a lot. When I have dinner with Lois at Pizza Lucci and we talk books and publishing the whole time, the charge gets tagged as tax-deductible “Meals and Entertainment.” When I have dinner with my sister and we talk about Dad’s plans to go to Tanzania and whether one of us should really go with him, the charge goes in non-deductible “Eating Out.” Just to make sure I keep them straight, I sign the charge slip at the restaurant, then flip my copy over and write “Dinner w/Lois – Ch. 3 problem” on the back for extra documentation.

And this is why you really, really want to track this stuff regularly throughout the year – I doubt that many people remember, come March 2013, whether that dinner a year earlier was the one with the writers where they heard about that anthology they submitted a story to (clearly a writing expense), or whether it was the one with their next-door neighbor where they talked about taking the kids to the Winter Carnival together.

If you are at all tech-literate, I’d recommend using Quicken, simply because it significantly lowers the possibility of data entry errors. If you don’t have very much in the way of writing income/expense yet, and you find that Quicken is way more than you need for your other personal financial tracking, go with the manual or semi-manual system, whichever suits your temperament.

Or you could just keep a shoebox…but really, even having a token system that you only manage to keep up to date for the first three or four months of the year before reverting to the shoebox will make tax time easier.