Patricia C. Wrede's Blog, page 51

Epics, part 2

So the topic is epic fantasy and the way so many of them get bogged down in an endless proliferation of characters and branching subplots, as described by Marie Brennan. Having spent last post talking about why authors fall into these traps, I’m going to talk more today about ways of avoiding them.

The most obvious and least practical method is to write the entire epic before allowing any of it to be published. This has the advantage of treating the multi-volume series the exact same way as one would treat a story complete in one volume: you write the whole thing, you edit and revise the whole thing, you review the whole thing for consistency and pacing, and then you finally publish it. Unfortunately, very few writers are in a position to do this with even a short series or trilogy (not to mention that most of us lack the patience necessary to do without readers for so long), which means that some of the books will probably be in print and un-revisable before the end of the series is even in first draft.

That leaves the would-be epic novelist with one option: prevention. It’s not foolproof, but it’s better than ignoring the whole issue.

The first thing to do is to understand the pitfalls. Really understand them, not just as a check-off list, but as things you can recognize almost as soon as you see them. If you don’t recognize something as problematic, it’s almost impossible to fix even after the fact; preventing it from happening in the first place will likely be a matter of luck, no more. Also, there is no writing technique that is always a bad idea. If you understand the potential problems, then you’re also more likely to understand when they aren’t problems, and when adding another viewpoint or subplot or volume is a plus for your story, rather than a minus.

The next thing to remember is that prevention involves a certain amount of planning ahead. This can be tricky for the sort of writer for whom outlining or telling the story kills it dead, but it’s usually not completely impossible if they avoid the particular areas (usually plot) that do the story-killing, and focus instead on more abstract aspects of the story.

For the rest of us, planning ahead usually begins with some kind of shape or structure. The Harry Potter series is shaped by the British school system; each book covers one school year until Harry reaches what should be his graduation year. That shape or structure is more or less inherent to the story Rowling was telling, but many stories don’t have such a tidy shape embedded in them from the beginning. For those, the author has to find or choose or invent the framework that will support the story: the seven deadly sins or cardinal virtues, one per book for seven books, for instance, or an invented set of tasks to be covered, events to happen, places to go, or people to meet.

While this kind of shape or structure, or even an arbitrary limit on the number of volumes, can do a lot to help an author keep a story under control, it isn’t absolutely necessary. The important thing is the control, not the specific mechanism by which it is achieved. The longer the journey, the more necessary it is to have a road map and compass, and to check them frequently to make sure one is still on track. (Sadly, they have not yet invented a GPS for writers that will break in while you’re typing to say “This scene is off track; your characters will never get across the mountains this way. To get back on track, delete the snow-elves, mystic polar bears, and cloud-fairies and have your characters go down Caradhras and head south to the Mines of Moria instead.”)

Then comes the outline, which is only for people who actually do outlines. People who can’t outline or who go by instinct still need something, but it’s usually not specific incidents or a plot line; it’s more of a feel for “what this story is.” Whatever you do, you will probably need it to be clearer and more detailed than you think, because the basics of prevention involve regular checking of what you write against your outline or feeling. It’s not a matter of rigidly following the plan; you’re allowed to decide that I-70 from Denver is closed, so you’ll have to swing south through Utah to get to L.A. What you’re trying to do is make sure that you don’t end up in Mexico City while you’re still promising everyone that you’re going to get to Los Angeles one of these days, yes, indeed you are.

To do this, you establish a routine of checking back with your road map/outline every ten chapters, or every 25,000 words, or every third-of-a-book, to make sure that what you’re doing is still heading in the right direction. If it isn’t, you then need to decide whether you can keep your shiny new characters/subplot/background and get back on track without too much of a detour. If it isn’t possible, you grit your teeth and take it out. The idea is to set your check-in so that it’s frequent enough that you won’t end up trashing half a book or more, but not so frequent that you start feeling like it’s a straightjacket that takes all the fun out of it.

Checking in at the end of the first draft of each book is not optional. This is where the prevention part really kicks into gear, because whether you’re following an outline or writing an epic by the seat of your pants, you are going to be stuck with whatever you’ve written for the rest of the series, so you need to make sure you can live with it. If you are particularly methodical, you can, at the end of each book, make a list of all the viewpoint characters and how many scenes they each have, or do a chart of all your subplots and where they are and where you expect them to go. The idea being, of course, to see if they’ve started proliferating madly on you, so you can catch them while you can still do something about it.

At this point – the end of the first draft for Volume-Whatever in the series – you have a choice: you can either revise backward, or revise forward. That is, you have your middle-of-series draft, which has started developing in unexpected directions. You can either trim it back ruthlessly so as to keep to your original vision (backward revision, i.e., revising the book you have just written), or you can change your vision of the story (forward revision, i.e., revising your outline or concept or whatever you’ve been using to keep things on track).

Be aware that revising your outline/concept is a lot of work. If you’re still early in your epic series, say book 1-2, you can rip up and rearrange major plot threads without it being too noticeable, but this will mean essentially redeveloping the entire rest of the series plot outline. The farther you’ve gotten in your epic, the harder it is to change course. This is possibly one of the reasons for Epic Bloat – if the writer has a Cool New Idea halfway through Book 3 of a six-volume epic, it looks like being easier to add another three or four volumes to the series (thus making the change barely 1/3 of the way through, rather than halfway through). Don’t. Really. It will not end well.

To sum up: preventing Epic Bloat is mostly a matter of paying attention and being ruthlessly honest about what is and isn’t necessary to the story. To do this, you have to know what your overall story is and how your subplots fit into it, and you have to keep checking as you write and finish various volumes to see if you are still writing the story you set out to write.

Epics, part 1

Yesterday, a friend of mine forwarded a link to this post on the pitfalls of writing a long fantasy epic, defined as “four or more books that tell an ongoing story.” It’s a fabulous analysis, and the author, Marie Brennan, hits a bunch of really good points to watch out for to keep an epic story from bloating into unreadability. Since Ms. Brennan has done such a good job of covering the what, I thought I might address some of the reasons why authors get tempted into these particular swamps and how to avoid them.

Her first and biggest point is: Pick a structure (a specific number of books) and stick to it. The difficulty here is that for a lot of epic series, this is essentially an arbitrary decision…and the author knows it is arbitrary. It’s one thing when the story itself falls into obvious, well-defined chunks (as with the Harry Potter series, where each book covers one school year). It’s another thing entirely when one sets out to write an epic of, say, half a million words that doesn’t fall naturally into neat one-to-two-hundred-thousand-word segments.

You can, of course, pick a number and figure you’ll cover the story in that many books, period. That can cause other problems down the line, though. If you’ve guessed right, it’s not a problem, but if you’ve over- or under-estimated the amount of story you have, and don’t discover this until mid-series, it can be impossible to stick to your resolve without harming the story.

It’s fairly common for authors to mis-estimate the length of a novel by ten to thirty percent, sometimes more. When you’re looking at a single, hundred-thousand-word novel, that’s an extra 30,000 words, which is often OK with the publisher (and if it isn’t, it’s usually possible to edit the book down to within shouting distance of the publisher’s limits). When you’re looking at a 500,000-word, four-to-five-book series, that’s a swing of 50,000 to 150,000 words, or up to one entire additional novel…and by the time one realizes that, the first two books are usually already on the shelves and cannot be edited. Making all the length adjustments in the last two books of the story can be next to impossible; adding one more book is a lot simpler, especially if it’s a popular series.

And once the author has added one book, it’s easier to do it again. Absent an obvious natural structure like the number of school years, there’s no real reason not to add one more book…and that opens the door for a lot of the other problems Ms. Brennan identifies in her post, the next of which is control your points of view.

Modern epic fantasy seems to be written mainly in tight-third-person with multiple viewpoints. One of the reasons for this is an extreme addiction to “showing” things rather than “telling” them. This manifests not merely as a reluctance to cover offstage plot points in narrative summary, but as a reluctance to allow the characters within the story to tell each other anything. If the messenger or dying villager isn’t allowed to tell your POV character about the burning of the village, your only alternative is to “show” it by presenting the scene in its fully dramatized glory…which generally means adding a POV character, because none of the main characters or existing POVs were around.

I blame this addiction to dramatizing scenes (and the consequent multiplying of POV characters) squarely on movies and TV. There’s good reason for it on screen; time is limited, and it’s a lot more efficient and dramatic to show a five-second shot of a hotel blowing up than to spend thirty seconds on the scene where the messenger describes it. On-screen, you also don’t have the same viewpoint problem – the camera is the viewpoint, whichever character it chooses to follow. In a novel, it works the other way: narrative is usually more compact than dramatization, and you do have the viewpoint problems.

Adding a viewpoint can also be an easy way to get offstage information to the reader; it can also the reader know more about what is going on (if they can keep track of it) than the main characters do, which supposedly makes the readers feel clever. Sometimes there are Really Cool Bits that the writer simply can’t put in unless somebody is actually viewing the scene (“murder your darlings” anyone?). Early in the series, the writer may want to foreshadow something or establish characters for later, and by the time they turn out to be unnecessary, the first book is in print and it’s too late to cut the scene. And finally, POV characters proliferate on occasion because the writer likes them and really, really wants to write their POV.

This leads directly to Ms. Brennan’s next points, which are control your subplots and centralize. The trouble with introducing a new POV character is that every person is the hero and central focus of his or her own story. The minute you give a character a tight-third viewpoint scene, that character starts reconceiving the whole story on their terms, and brings in all their personal concerns about their gambling debts or their son’s education. And unless they’re a throwaway viewpoint, like the villager who gets killed in the raid just so the writer can “show” the raid onstage, the writer is very likely to have to deal with some of those concerns, which means more scenes for that character, as well as a whole new branching tree of subplots.

The second reason for proliferating subplots is the problem of balance. If you have two viewpoint characters who are both supposed to be central to the story, you really want to give them almost-equal time on stage. This means that if you have one character who is sitting in town having several chapters-worth of adventures in a couple of days, you don’t want your other viewpoint character to be having a boring two-week voyage from point A to point B. So you either have to stretch the timing of the in-town adventures (which can be tough to make plausible), or you have to have your traveling character run into some interesting trouble so as to keep the timing and emphasis the same, or you do what Tolkien did and spend several months and many chapters on one character, and then abandon them and spend an equal number of time and chapters on the other character(s).

The other big reason writers fall into this kind of trap is that a multi-volume story feels, initially, as if it has loads of room for all this stuff. The whole point of an epic is to be able to spread out and dig down into the detail, isn’t it? So it’s easy to throw in lots of subplots at the start, without quite realizing just what it’s going to take to develop them and then bring them all to a satisfactory conclusion.

The crowning problem is the one I mentioned earlier: the problem of publishing. Most of the errors don’t show up as problematic right away, and if the book is in print, it can be difficult or impossible for the writer to really recover. If you realize while writing Book 5 that you don’t need a subplot that you introduced in Book 2, and the first three volumes are already in print, you’re probably stuck. Even trying to revise Book 4 to downplay it may be difficult, depending where that book is in the production process.

Since very, very few writers are in a position to write four or more books entirely on spec (i.e., without a contract and without allowing any of them to be published until they’re all finished), this leaves prevention as the only option. Since this post is already a bit long, I’ll work on that on Wednesday.

What you like

 When all your friends are bookaholics, one of the things that inevitably happens is that they recommend books to you and to their other friends, frequently in glowing terms. Quite often, other members of your social group will read those books before you do, will also love them, and will second, third, and fourth the recommendations in equally glowing terms.

It is always a bit awkward when you finally get around to reading this much-ballyhooed book and discover that as far as you are concerned, it is at best OK. It’s much worse when you read it and decide it’s awful.

I’ve had that happen a number of times over the years, and my first reaction is always “Ohmigosh, what am I going to say to all those friends who love it so much?” After a small delay, my second reaction is usually “What the heck do they see in this, anyway?” and my third is “I’m really tired of hearing about how great this is when I disagree.”

That’s the point at which I generally pull up my big girl pants and admit to everybody that no, I didn’t think the couple were absolutely adorable, I thought they were idiots and spent most of the book wanting to smack them upside the head, or that the style was so wooden that the characters never came alive for me, or that no, I didn’t think that plot was particularly clever and original, I thought it had long gray whiskers back when Homer was looking for subplots for the Odyssey.

Fortunately, most of my friends react to this with long, productive discussions about what each of us likes in a book and why, rather than with tar and feathers. One of the first things that becomes obvious when you do this is that every reader seems to have a particular itch or two. If a story doesn’t scratch that itch, it doesn’t matter what else it does right; the reader won’t like it.

For instance, a while back one of my friends highly recommended a story that she’s read many times; I thought it was fairly decent, but I’ll never go back to it. The difference is that for her, plot is paramount, and this story had it in spades; it was a convoluted spy thriller that never dropped a thread or faltered in pace or atmosphere. I could appreciate that, but I didn’t actually like any of the characters, which dropped it from good to decent for me. More characterization might have helped, but the author seemed to be relying on characterization tropes that anyone who regularly reads that sort of spy thriller would be able to fill in, and since I read them by fits and starts, I couldn’t.

The first and most obvious conclusion to reach from all this is that the writer can’t please everybody. Some things are incompatible: you can’t do a book that’s both sweet, light, and fluffy and bitter, dark, and edgy. You also can’t write a story that has both a simple, spare, transparent style and a convoluted, lush, dense style at the same time, nor can you write simultaneously in first person and third person.

You could, theoretically, write a book that is neither one thing nor the other; that has light bits and dark bits, that’s fluffy in some spots and edgy in others, that has passages that are simple and spare and passages that are convoluted and lush, that alternates between scenes in first person and scenes in third. What usually happens when somebody tries that, though, is that they don’t get a story that appeals to everybody; they get a mish-mosh that doesn’t appeal to anybody.

Trying to give equal time to every possible thing that some reader might like ends up not giving enough time to anything to scratch any reader’s particular itch. It also tends to pull the writer’s attention away from the story and on to matters of technique, which is fine if the writer is trying for a technical tour de force or if he/she is trying to learn as much as possible as fast as possible by juggling as many things as possible. Focusing on technique to the exclusion of story is, however, not usually the best way to end up with a story that other people actually want to read. This is why writing exercises are called “exercises” and not “recipes for stories you can send out and sell.”

On the other hand, a story that is particularly strong in one area – one that does a really, really good job at scratching one particular, and particularly common, itch – will often find a large audience even if it does a lousy job with a lot of other things. It’s not always obvious just what itch the story is scratching, especially if one happens to be one of the folks who doesn’t care about it. This is the kind of book where people start off “Well, the characters are kind of cardboard, and the basic premise is pretty stupid, but…” and then they tell you why they love it anyway.

Ideally, of course, one wants to write something that is strong in as many compatible areas as possible. One may not be able to write a story that’s simultaneously slow-paced and fast-paced, or that has both a straightforward, linear plot and a convoluted one, or that uses a simple style and a dense, lush one at the same time, but one can certainly write a fast-paced, convoluted plot using a simple style, or a straightforward plot using a dense, lush style.

This is obvious once somebody says it, but too often it gets taken for granted, especially when writers of a particular genre – say, action-adventure – have realized that a particular combination of elements – say, fast-pacing, simple style, linear plot – works particularly well for whatever they’re writing. If enough writers adopt it (and they will, if it’s effective), that combination of elements becomes a standard for the particular genre, so much so that writers and readers don’t even notice what’s going on any more, until somebody does something different. It’s good to at least think about, though, because mixing things up can be a lot of fun – and can attract new readers.

Losing interest

Sooner or later, every writer hits a point where they lose interest in continuing to write a story that isn’t finished yet. This isn’t the same as getting stuck; when a writer is stuck, they want to continue and intend to continue, but can’t seem to do so for one of a variety of reasons. A writer who’s lost interest doesn’t particularly want to continue.

For a writer who’s under contract, there’s no help for it but to slog on and hope the juice comes back before the deadline arrives. A writer who isn’t under contract can dump the story and move on to something else, which may or may not be the right decision, but which is always a hard decision.

Abandoning a story halfway through – truly abandoning it, without mumbling about coming back to it someday – is not an easy thing, even when the writer knows for certain that the story has gone totally cold and isn’t likely to warm up any time in the next couple of centuries. And a lot of the time “losing interest” isn’t really about the story going cold.

So what is it about, then? Well, what kinds of things make one reluctant to sit down and work on a story?

1) The plot and/or characters have gotten predictable, pedestrian, and boring…at least as far as the writer is concerned. Sometimes, this is because the writer has more experience as a reader; the idea that seemed fresh and exciting when she started writing turns out to have been fresh only because the writer hadn’t run across the multitude of similar stories doesn’t look so cool when she’s reading the forty-leventh story of the same type. Sometimes, the predictability is simply because the writer has been reviewing the plot too often and too much, and she’s gotten to know it too well. Some writers are more sensitive to this kind of thing than others; the extreme case is the writer who gets bored with the story if she knows anything about what comes next.

2) The story is technically more than a little too stretchy, and the writer is tired of not being able to get it down properly and sees no prospect of ever getting it the way he wants it. A writer who feels as if he is making progress is usually willing to hang in there, but banging your head against a stone wall is not something anyone wants to keep doing if they have a choice.

3) The writer has taken so long to write the story that they have outgrown their interest in the premise, the plot, or the characters. The novel I started writing in 7th grade never really even reached the mid-point of the story; by the time I’d gotten thirty or so pages into it, I wanted to write better-conceived, more consistent, more grown-up stories. So I left it and never looked back. The same thing can happen to adult writers; the plots and worlds and characters and problems I was deeply interested in when I was in college don’t draw me any more.

4) The writer finds she has said everything she had to say about those characters or subject. This one usually affects writers who’ve been writing a series, often a popular, long-running one. After a while, you get to the point where you’re just done with those people or that place.

5) The writer has taken so long to write the story that the real world has overtaken his premise. This one is a problem for people who do modern, real-world, or near-future stories; the classic example is the way the sudden collapse of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s affected all the writers who were in the middle of writing spy thrillers involving the U.S.S.R. when the collapse happened. Any real or near-future story that involves technology in a central way is extremely vulnerable to this kind of thing – what looks like a cutting-edge computer when you’re writing it may very well look like it dates from the last century when the story actually comes out.

6) The story may be moving inexorably in a direction the writer simply doesn’t want to go for some reason. The intricate murder-mystery is turning into a drawing-room comedy, and the writer hates drawing room comedy and is just not going to write it, that’s all. Or perhaps the fast-paced action-adventure is insisting on becoming a psychological drama within a couple of chapters, and that particular psychological drama cuts a little too close to home for the writer to want to write about it now (or, maybe, ever).

Some of these problems are fixable; others aren’t. If the world overtakes your near-future plot, there’s not much you can do; they’re not going to roll back the Arab Spring just so your novel will still work. If, however, you’re just bored and finding the plot predictable, you can often change things up to rekindle your interest (this is the origin of the well-known advice about having ninjas jump in through the window if you’re stuck). Outgrowing your story or your series is a good thing, at least in a personal sense (though if one has been making one’s living from a series one can no longer stand to write, it seldom seems so at the time).

The main thing, though, is to be quite, quite certain that one really has lost interest, and is not simply avoiding writing a tricky or unpleasant bit that’s coming next. Because one cannot avoid the tricky and unpleasant bits completely or forever, and while it probably doesn’t hurt to abandon one novel or story in the middle every so often, abandoning a whole string of them sets up a pattern of bad habits that can be really hard to break.

This little piggy stayed home

I’ve always been fascinated with process and with what it takes to get that initial story-seed-idea developed enough to actually start writing it. One of the things I’ve noticed for years is the differences in what writers say they need in order to actually sit down and start writing, especially as regards the background and backstory – not just “what has happened to the character so far to get him/her to this point,” but “what is the history and the culture and the politics and the society like that shaped both the character and the problem to be faced?”

It doesn’t take much thought to realize that anyone who is writing a story set in a time/place/culture that they actually live in (and are therefore very familiar with) is not going to have to make up nearly as much as a writer who’s setting a story in a totally imaginary secondary world. There’s always some necessary research (it’s not what you don’t know that trips you up; it’s what you think you know that ain’t so), but mostly, the contemporary-real-world writer has to make up the specific circumstances and details of their characters’ lives and history. If they need an important historical figure to be a character’s influence or role model, they have an encyclopedia’s worth of folks to draw on, from thousands of years, countries, and cultures.

What I hadn’t thought about much until this weekend (when I was complaining to one of my exceedingly patient friends about the amount of backstory I feel it necessary to invent for The New Thing before I can actually sit down and start writing it) was that how much backstory one needs, in how much detail, is also a function of the type of story one is telling.

There’s an old saying that there are only two stories: a person leaves home, or a stranger comes to town. Regardless of how useful this is to think about as far as plots are concerned, it turns out to be a very important distinction (for me, anyway) when it comes to how much background/culture/backstory I have to know (and, if I’m not using a real or close-to-historical setting, make up) before I start writing.

Here’s why: A character who’s at home when a stranger comes to town is familiar with the status quo; the character has a life that’s steeped in the customs, culture, and history of the place they live. They usually take it all for granted, which means they don’t think directly about it much, yet this affects nearly everything they do, the way they think, the attitudes they have toward themselves and other people, and so on.

A character who leaves home is not moving through familiar territory. They’re off balance. Anything and everything, from social skills to architecture to fashion, can be different from what they’re used to. The character has to find out about customs, culture, history, etc. as they go along, and so does the reader…and the writer. Which means that the writer has more room to make up background as things go along and the character tries to make sense of this strange new world by connecting it with his/her familiar past.

In thinking about it, four of my first five novels have protagonists who are, one way or another, on a journey away from home. The fifth is dual-viewpoint, and one of the two POV characters is out running around away from everyone else. I didn’t start writing about people who stayed home until I started writing books based more closely on real history (specifically Snow White and Rose Red, which is set very firmly in Elizabethan England in 1582-3).

Looking at a number of my favorite long-running series, a lot of them begin with characters who are away from home – on a mission to another planet, stationed at a faraway outpost, discovered to have a talent and swept away from wherever they’ve lived so far. Once the writer has a few books under his/her belt – and has built up a lot of background in the process – they start showing the characters “at home,” writing prequels, or “historical” background novels, or finally allowing their main character to settle down and start having local adventures. In the few exceptions I can think of, either a) the series is strongly based in real-life history in some way, b) the characters think they understand their world but very quickly turn out to be wrong, or c) the author spent years working up background and backstory information before ever sitting down to write.

All of this is particularly relevant because the currently planned Work-in-Development involves a main character who is, so far as I’ve currently planned, not going anywhere. I’ve been complaining for months about how I keep trying to start writing and end up discovering that I need to make up more background before I can…and now I have some glimmer of understanding why.

The coming-of-age journey has been a staple of SF/F since its very early days. I’ve always more or less just accepted it – long before TV and Star Trek, science fiction was supposed to be about exploring strange new worlds, seeking out new life and new civilizations, and boldly going where no man has gone before. It still is; I’d just never before thought about the advantages that gives to the writer in quite these terms.

Middles

Every story has a beginning, a middle, and an ending.

That seems like a pretty obvious statement, until you start looking at all the different ways of analyzing stories: the three-act structure, the four-act structure, the five-act structure, the four-acts-plus-teaser structure, linear, nonlinear, parallel running scenes, reverse parallel scenes…the list goes on and on, and people are constantly inventing new ways of telling stories and of looking at and analyzing those stories once they’ve been told.

Nevertheless, that basic beginning, middle, end lies behind even the most complicated story, once you untangle the chronology and the ups and downs of the various ways of presenting or structuring it. And every writer I know has trouble with at least one of those three basic areas. Which area is problematic varies from writer to writer and book to book, but for a whole lot of us, it’s the middle of the story that’s the slog, and it doesn’t seem to matter whether the story is a hundred-thousand-word novel or a two-page short story.

The middle is where things veer off course, and where seemingly minor oversights, missteps, and detours can ruin what should have and could have been a dramatic and moving endgame. Because the middle is where the characters grow and change; it’s where the plot twists; it’s where the characters (and often the writer) struggle to get somewhere, figure something out, make a plan or a decision.

Middles are vitally important to any story. In one sense, they are the story; going straight from setup (beginning) to wrap-up (ending) is rarely satisfying. How interesting would The Lord of the Rings have been if Tolkien had begun with the first few chapters in the Shire and then said “So Frodo left, carrying the ring. Nearly a year later, he and Sam approached Mount Doom…” and went on to the destruction of the ring? Not very; indeed, the ending would hardly make any sense at all without knowing some of the things that have happened along the way, like how he lost track of Merry and Pippin, who Gollum is and what he’s doing there, etc. The best opening hook won’t keep readers reading if the middle of the book bogs down, and the most amazing ending won’t salvage a dreadful middle because the readers won’t ever get to the ending.

Yet middles get short shrift in a lot of how-to-write books. Most of them spend a chapter or two on the standard plot skeleton (problem-complications-crisis-resolution), and then spend most of their time on particular elements like dialog, characterization, description, theme, style, viewpoint, etc. This strikes me as explaining to someone how to make lovely bricks without ever telling them how to put them together to make a sturdy wall.

To my way of thinking, what the middle part of a story needs is the sense that we’re getting somewhere. That doesn’t necessarily mean there’s a physical journey involved; “getting somewhere” can just as easily mean slowly whittling down the list of suspects in a murder mystery, or the deepening relationship between the main characters of a Romance novel, or any number of other things that make the reader feel as if something important is coming closer and closer.

(The somewhere the middle is getting to will, eventually, be the end of the story. This ought to go without saying, but it’s amazing the number of writers who find themselves heading in some completely unanticipated direction. When this happens, it is usually best to adjust the ending and pretend that is what you meant to do all along.)

Most often, the sense of progress in the middle of the story is expressed as an increase in tension – as time and the story go on, the situation keeps getting worse despite all the main characters’ efforts – but there are other ways to keep the middle moving. Increasing apprehension (where the actual physical situation is not any worse, but the characters are finding out more and more reasons to be worried) is one; increasing urgency is another (where there’s some sort of time limit: the cure must be found before the patient deteriorates past a certain point, the bomb must be disarmed before the countdown timer reaches zero, the dress must be finished by the afternoon before prom night). The main character’s emotional involvement with the problem, or with some other character, can increase over the middle of the story; his/her self-knowledge can grow; the amount of information the character (and thus the reader) has about the central story problem and/or its solution can grow.

Managing the middle of the story usually means paying attention to several levels at once, because everything affects everything else. The emotional level (how much the main character cares) affects the reader’s perception of the physical level (how dire the physical threat is). If the physical threat or the urgency keeps rising, but the main character cares less and less about whatever is being threatened, the middle will probably bog down. If the main character cares, but doesn’t appear to be learning anything despite repeated encounters, the middle will probably bog down. It’s like adjusting the sliders to balance the speakers on your car sound system; it’s not enough to get the treble perfectly right if the bass is way off.

People who aren’t like you

Every writer ends up writing about someone who isn’t exactly like them sooner or later – and it’s nearly always sooner, given the number of characters in the average novel. The minor characters, walk-ons, and even the important secondary characters can usually be fudged, but the main viewpoint character is another story.

As a slight aside, this is one of the main reasons why beginning writers are so often urged NOT to write in first person: because many find it extra-difficult to get into someone else’s head when they’re writing “I” and for so many years “I” has meant them, the author, and not some totally different character. More on this in a minute.

Characters can be unlike their authors in a whole variety of ways, from relatively minor aspects of physical appearance (height, hair length, eye color), to their personality, to the moral and political views they hold, to more substantial things like race, ethnicity, age, gender, sexual orientation, cultural background, etc. And the first step toward writing somebody different is to notice that they are.

This may sound obvious, but it always surprises me how often people attribute their own life experience to characters without thinking. I ran across a twenty-something writer whose sixty-ish hero made a comment that as a teenager, he’d gotten an eyebrow piercing to freak out his parents. I could only shake my head. Any guy who grew up in 1960s suburbia did not get an eyebrow piercing or a tattoo; if he wanted to rebel, all he did was grow his hair to chin length. Shoulder length or longer, if he really wanted to freak out the grownups.

Even the little things like height and hair length affect your character’s actions. The greater the differences between the writer and the character, the more aware the writer has to be of how the differences affect everything else in the character’s life. Really big differences (like race or a significant difference in age or ability) often require research, even if the writer is working in a completely imaginary world with a made-up history and culture.

What with all those problems, it almost seems as if it would be easier for authors to write about people who are exactly like themselves. Unfortunately, most of us find it far more interesting to write about folks who are different from us (and besides, most of the authors I know have fairly ordinary lives, no matter what all those intriguing author bios say, which means that writing about somebody different makes for a much more interesting story).

So how do you write about somebody different?

It starts by thinking about him/her, and noticing the differences. All the differences, not just the large ones, because not only do all of the differences make a difference, they all interact and affect one another. A 6’7” teenaged boy is probably going to attract interest from the school basketball coach, whether he’s into sports or not; a 6’7” senior citizen is not (though basketball may have been his sport when he was young).

Then you think hard about all the ways in which those differences, and the interaction of those differences, might affect that character’s life experiences and about how they would react to both their past experiences and to the ones they’re going to have in your story. Not how you would react, because for you, suddenly being a different height, age, sex, race, etc. would be a change. For your character, it’s how things are in their life, and the difference that makes in their life experience ripples through everything else. 

From the character’s goals, motivations, and aspirations, to their reactions to other characters, to their speech patterns, anything can be different from your personal baseline, and all of those will be affected by their life experiences, which in turn will be affected by their physical, mental, and personality differences from the writer, so all of it has to be at least looked at and decided about. Even small things make for differences in behavior. The character who’s shorter than I am will have a step-stool handy for getting to the top shelf and use it without thinking; the one who’s a lot taller than me will see things on the top shelf and reach them easily, but might miss important clues that are lower down, and may have trouble banging into low doorways, slanted ceilings, etc.

 

It’s also important, especially with secondary and minor characters, to think at least briefly about your own reaction to them, where and how that reaction relies on stereotypes, and how you can change things up. Perhaps your first impulse is to make that minor bartender character a middle-aged, beer-bellied, balding dispenser of wise advice; if you stop to think about it, you can instead make the bartender a young woman working her way through college or a middle-aged character actor doing research for a part. It can help to remember that everyone has his or her own story…or it can be a distraction, depending on the writer.

 

Integrating all this into actually writing the character is another matter. For me, writing characters is a kind of cross between method acting and playing “let’s pretend” from when I was five. There’s always a little part of my brain that’s trying to pretend to be the character, warts and all. There’s another, more analytical part that’s always checking the character’s actions and dialog and reminding myself “This isn’t me here, is it? This is Jennie, or George, or Herman.” It can feel more than a little odd because in some scenes I have to stop every couple of lines to check on a different character’s actions/reactions. And then I do it all again during the revisions.

Some writers find it easiest to learn how to write different characters by writing someone who is very different from themselves right off the bat, because it’s easier for them to spot the places where they get off track. The big difference between them and the character makes it obvious when they slip and start writing their own reactions and opinions, rather than the character’s. For other writers, it’s easier to keep their characters consistent if they start with something closer to autobiographical and work up to the seriously-different characters in small steps. Some writers have to lay everything out in advance; others immerse themselves in research and reading and then wing it.

The exact process by which you get into your characters’ heads isn’t terribly important; as usual, every writer does it a bit differently, and whatever works for you is what you should do (though be aware that it may take a few tries to figure out what that is).

Too Much Talent

For years and years, I’ve been pointing out to people that talent is one of the least important things a writer needs – because you don’t actually need very much to go on with, and it’s actually pretty common to have that much. In fact, “talent” is as common as mud; what’s rare is the motivation to sit down and actually do something with one’s talent, the discipline to do it regularly, and the persistence to stick with it until it’s finished.

What isn’t quite so obvious is that having too much talent can be a drawback. I’ve seen far too many new and would-be writers who’ve written amazing first novels or parts of novels…and then died on the vine when writing suddenly got hard. They were used to being able to produce words easily, words that were better – a lot better – than the words being produced by their fellow first-novelists. What they didn’t know was what to do when the words stopped coming, or when they stopped improving.

Basically, these writers were coasting before they even got started. Their first book (or a significant part of it) came easily to them, without a lot of the flaws that are usual in a first novel, and they expected that to keep on happening. They never had to work at getting better, so they don’t try (some of them appear not to know how). When writing starts to get hard, they either wait for the solution to come to them, or they give up. Either way, their competition starts out-producing them pretty quickly…and since those other writers are used to working at getting better (because they’ve had to do so all along), they get better faster, and go on getting better while Mr. Talented Writer stagnates.

The prose and the techniques that look so great in that first novel (because Mr. Talent was doing things no other first-novelist was doing) don’t look nearly so impressive in the fifth novel. Editors and readers expect writers to improve, regardless of where the writer started, and if the writer doesn’t, folks start to lose interest.

And then, of course, there’s the fact that nobody, not even Mr. Talent, is good at everything that goes into a story…which means that even those early, surprising books that were so much better than the other first novels still had some flaws. Maybe even serious flaws. People will overlook that in a first novel, but they start getting impatient if a writer is still having the same problems with plotting or characters or whatever in their fifth book.

All too often, though, the writers who’ve been admired early on for their talent do not recognize any flaws in their work, and thus see no reason to try to get better…at least until they’ve been whopped upside the head by reality a couple of times. I recall one young gentleman whom I met on a visit to a high school; his English teachers raved to me about how great his writing was, how imaginative, how creative. They’d obviously been raving to him along the same lines, because he clearly expected me to refer his short story to the nearest professional editor I knew, and he was quite put out by the amount of red ink on the manuscript when I handed him back his great, imaginative, creative…and ungrammatical, plotless, poorly thought-out…story.

In my experience, people like that make one of three choices. 1) Most of them quit writing fairly quickly when their stuff starts coming back from the professional markets, because what got them to try for publication was the fact that so many other people thought they’d be good at it. Faced with the evidence that they’re not going to be able to just toss a manuscript on an editor’s desk and listen to the praise roll in, they give up (often with some grumbles about the Big Bad Publishing Industry and how it isn’t open to great, imaginative, creative work like theirs.

2) The next-largest group submits their story a couple of times, then decides that since the Evil Publishing Industry obviously doesn’t appreciate their work, they’ll self-publish. This used to be a fairly small group, because pre-Internet, most of this category went to vanity presses that required up-front payments of several thousand dollars, so you had to have quite a bit of money to go this route. These days, Amazon and the Internet and print-on-demand have made it easy, so this group is growing rapidly.

And 3) one way or another, the author realizes that he or she still has a lot to learn, talent or not, decides they really do want to learn it, and buckles down to the learning part. The realization can come in a variety of ways: sometimes, it’s getting a couple of stories ripped apart in a good workshop or class; sometimes, it’s a series of rejection letters; sometimes, it’s an uncomplimentary review of their self-published masterpiece that hits home. Whatever it is, it provides them with the motivation to really start working on the discipline and persistence parts. They’re the ones who eventually make themselves careers in writing.

Mind you, every writer needs to have a certain amount of confidence and belief in his/her work, or we’d never send anything out. There’s a difference, however, between thinking that a particular story is as good as one can presently make it, and thinking that anything and everything one writes is brilliant and not to be improved upon.

Where your time is

I have met a great many people who claim they want to be writers, but who don’t act like it. I have also met more than one professional writer who claims to want to quit his/her day job and go full-time as a writer, but who doesn’t act like it. And I’ve even met a couple of folks who claim they want to stop writing, but who don’t act like it.

What it all boils down to is the decisions people make, most especially the decisions they make about how they spend their time and, to a lesser extent, their money.

For instance, the first category includes a gentleman who complained of not having enough time to write. “What do you do in the evenings after work?” I asked. He said he either watched TV or went to the bar with his friends, and no, he couldn’t possibly cut an hour out of either thing. “What do you do on Saturday morning, then?” He said he was an avid body-builder and that was his time at the gym. “OK, how about the afternoon?” That was for catching up on the TV he’d missed when he was out at the bar with his buddies; he had everything set up to tape his favorite shows. Saturday evening was late night at the bar (no wonder he needed all that time at the gym!) and Sunday was for more TV and the occasional catchup with family. It boiled down to about thirty hours of TV every week, and he absolutely, positively could not give up any of it, and he had a Netflicks queue about 300 movies long for if he ever ran out of TV to watch.

That man doesn’t want to be a writer; he wants to be a professional TV watcher.

The first category also includes a young woman with an equally crowded schedule, except hers was taken up with voice lessons on Monday, art class on Tuesday, photography Wednesday, community theater group Thursday, Friday, and Saturday evenings (when there was a performance; other days when something was in rehearsal); outdoor photography sessions during the day on Saturday, and a desperate round of weekly life maintenance (laundry, shopping, housekeeping, prepping for all those other activities) on Sunday. And another whose week was similarly crowded with volunteer activities, and another with a social schedule that simply would not quit, and even one person who’d gone to great lengths to “balance” everything – photography class Monday, gym on Tuesdays and Thursdays, volunteer at the food shelf on Wednesdays, dinner with friends on Friday, one of four monthly meetings or events on Saturday (church committee, investment club, knitting group, family outing), life maintenance Sunday.

Those sorts of stories are common and fairly obvious, at least from the outside (the folks who overschedule themselves like this never seem to realize that they can’t get more time without stopping something). But there are also a few older writers who “want to retire,” but who keep cranking out stories and articles as if it’s a habit they can’t break. And one who claims in one breath to want to retire, and then in the next complains that he/she has no ideas for the next story and feels twitchy for not writing. If you’re retired, the whole point is that you’re not writing…at least, that’s what I always thought (which is why I’ve never felt much inclination to worry about retirement in the traditional sense; my “retirement fund” is basically there for late-life medical conditions that would actively prevent me from continuing to write, because that’s what it’s going to take to stop me).

But there’s another level of anti-writing decision-making that’s one up from the folks who can’t give up their TV or who’ve overscheduled. It’s the level of major life decisions that end up making it easier or harder to do other things (like write), and it’s a lot less obvious and a lot more complex than just overscheduling.

For instance, you have the folks who’ve embarked on a career path doing something they hate because it pays well, and then discovered that it pays well because you have to put in 80-hour weeks. Between time on the job and hating what they do, they’re too physically and emotionally exhausted to do much of anything else with what little “free time” they have. Or you have the first-time homeowners who didn’t realize in advance how much time and money they have to put in on maintenance and yard work.

When a person decides to do anything that takes time, the time has to come from somewhere else. “Somewhere else” means “something that you’re doing now that is less important than the new thing you’re adding to your schedule.” If one thinks about it in advance, one can make reasoned decisions based on what one is willing to give up in order to have the new thing. If one doesn’t think about it, one ends up with more to do than one has time for, and something has to go. Quite often, it’s the writing time that gets cut “temporarily” (as if there’s ever going to be more than 24 hours in a day). Which, logically, says that writing time is less important than whatever you’re doing instead.

Actions, they say, speak louder than words…but quite often, if one doesn’t think about the consequences, one ends up saying something completely different from what one intended.

A Stake Through the Heart

(No, this post is not about vampires.)

The question “what’s at stake for the characters?” has been much on my mind lately, as it’s been at the root of some of the difficulties I’ve been having developing a plot for my current work-soon-to-be-in-process-I-hope. I have what I think is an interesting world, and a set of characters I like. I have some cool incidents and events. I even have quite a lot of plot-like stuff waving about in the breeze, looking for somewhere it can anchor.

The trouble is that the plot-stuff won’t anchor, because my characters don’t have enough of a stake in what’s going on.

What anchors a central plot-problem to the characters is a stake through the heart: something that makes the central plot-problem matter to the character in a deep and personal way, because that problem affects something that the character cares deeply about. Sometimes, the stake connects straight to the central problem itself; sometimes the connection takes a couple of steps to get from character to central problem. Ultimately, though, if there’s no connection – if the main character has no reason to care about the pirates or the murder or the Evil Overlord – there’s no reason for that character to get involved in the first place.

Years ago, I heard somebody on a panel say that there were two ways of getting a character moving: either find something really important that she doesn’t have and dangle it in front of her, so that she struggles to get it, or else take something really important away from him, so that he has to struggle to get it back.

The “something really important” doesn’t have to be an object; it can be something like “peace of mind” or “becoming a doctor” or “keeping my family/friends/country safe.” It can even be something that, from the outside, looks enormously trivial, like “getting my rubber duckie back,” as long as it’s a) really important to the character and b) seriously at risk due to whatever the central plot-problem is.

The first trick is finding that really important something. Because an awful lot of things that are Really Important on the grand scale that we like to read and write about turn out not to be important enough to a particular character to get him/her to work at achieving them or fixing them or finding them or getting rid of them. It took Tolkien seventy-five pages (in my edition of The Lord of the Rings) and the appearance of the Black Riders just to get Frodo to leave home, despite what Gandalf had already told him of the One Ring and the importance of getting it to Rivendell.

Whatever the important thing is, it is going to vary from character to character. It’s easy to fall into the trap of thinking that some things are universal – that anybody would want to rescue their child, or be rich and famous, or be king/president/CEO. But in real life, those things are not always true, not even that first one…and any writer who wants to write realistic, memorable individuals needs to at least consider whether their central characters need to be the mythical average “everyman,” or whether something unusual and different might be at the center of their heart (at least for this particular story).

Of course, the more unusual the Thing That Matters is, the clearer the writer has to be about the fact that it does matter, and why it matters. It isn’t too difficult to get a reader to believe that a parent would leap into a flooding river to rescue a child. On the face of it, it’s a lot harder to convince a reader that a character would jump into a flooding river in order to grab a soggy McDonald’s Happy Meal that’s floating by. (And my backbrain immediately responds “The Happy Meal is the crucial piece of evidence in a murder investigation, of course; the character needs it to keep an innocent man from getting the death penalty” which just goes to show that it can be done if it’s set up properly.)

Some plot-problems are easier to give your characters a stake in than others, depending on context. If the dragon or the Evil Overlord’s minions or the plague strikes directly at Our Heroine, her family, or her friends, it’s easy to believe she’ll buckle down and do something about it. If the dragon is ravaging and destroying down at the other end of the country, it’s a little harder to come up with a reason why she’d pick up and go off to defeat it. If the dragon is several kingdoms or an ocean away, one starts to wonder why it should be up to Our Heroine – don’t those folks have their own dragon-slaying heroes?

Implicit in all this is the idea that the Thing That Matters is in some way at risk – that the character may lose it or fail to gain it – or that the character will have to risk other important things to end up with it. What the character is willing to risk ties back to just how important the Thing That Matters is to that character, and how much risk that Thing is itself in.

Putting one’s life in jeopardy is usually viewed as the ultimate risk, something that one does to protect equally important things (people, honor, country, freedom, truth…). Risking one’s life is, therefore, generally not common in sitcoms, domestic comedies, or comedy-of-manners, where what’s at stake is the characters’ social status, interpersonal relationships, or general happiness. (Which insight I credit to Beth, my walking buddy.)

All this is, at bottom, why stories about happy people happily being happy are generally unsatisfying. Nothing is at stake; the characters have nothing to lose, nothing to gain, and no reason (except perhaps insanity) to risk so much as a hangnail.