Patricia C. Wrede's Blog, page 52

Advice you want vs. advice you need

For a variety of reasons, I thought today I’d do a rant on writing rules. OK, mostly it was because I haven’t done one for a while and I was in the mood for ranting. I started off by googling “fiction writing rules,” just to see what a few other people had to say on the subject.

I got over six hundred million hits.

That’s one heck of a lot of articles about the rules for writing fiction, and I’ll probably get to posting about that next time. This time, though, I’m going to talk about something else. Specifically, when I started looking at some of the “rules,” I found useful stuff like this:

Take a pencil to write with on aeroplanes. Pens leak. But if the pencil breaks, you can’t sharpen it on the plane, because you can’t take knives with you. Therefore: take two pencils.

Do back exercises. Pain is distracting.

–Margaret Attwood

This is the kind of writing advice I’ve loved ever since I read Ursula le Guin’s advice to would-be writers (“Learn to type”) back when I was a wannabe. (Fortunately for me, my mother made me take the secretarial typing class for one of my electives in high school; I doubt that I’d ever have taught myself to touch-type on my own. But Mom was a writer herself, and she made sure I had the tools I was going to need, even if I wasn’t really interested in learning to type when I was sixteen.)

It’s also the kind of writing advice that is a) unexpected and/or unwanted by a lot of folks (judging from the tone of some of the web sites I buzzed through) and b) undervalued by even more folks.

The undervalued part comes, I think, because of the unexpected/unwanted part. Looking at the interviews and FAQs and questions in general, it’s pretty obvious that when most people ask a published writer for advice, they want advice either about creativity or about craft. Not just any old advice, either: the Secrets of the Craft. Preferably in a list of five to ten pithy statements that can be applied cookbook fashion, like “never use adverbs” or “never use a dialog tag other than ‘said’” or “don’t use more than three exclamation points per book.”

Some writers, faced with the obvious expectations of the interviewer, give in and provide their personal list of pet peeves or bad habits, usually without appearing to realize that the peeves are a matter of opinion or that other folks have different “bad habits.”

Other writers try to fulfill the interviewer’s expectations while still telling the truth about what writing is like. So you get a few true-but-not-specific recommendations, like “Read a lot and write a lot” (Stephen King for that specific phrasing; the sentiment is common), and various contradictory and not-very-useful comments about the particular writer’s process, like the one writer who recommends going to cafés with a notebook and the other one who claims writing should only ever be done in total privacy.

(My non-favorite example of that last was the gentleman who stated very firmly that every writer should always have at least two stories in the first-draft stage at all times, so as to be able to switch from one to the other whenever the writer became stuck. It obviously works for him, but I’ve tried it, and for me it is beyond counter-productive except during the very, very early thrashing-around-in-search-of-a-plot stage. Past that point, having a second story in the works is, for me, like trying to make forward progress while towing a black hole. It generally ends in disaster for all concerned.)

And then there are the folks who, like le Guin and Attwood, confound the interviewer and the would-be writer’s expectations by telling them what they need to know, rather than what they think they want to know. Things like “Get an accountant” (Hilary Mantel), “Don’t wait for inspiration” (Esther Freud), “Create your own (rules), suitable for what you want to say” (Michael Moorcock), “Don’t let Google tempt you away (from your writing)” (A.M. Harte), “Don’t drink and write at the same time” (Richard Ford). And the things that nearly everyone says: Read. Write. Revise. Carry a writing implement and something to write on. Practice. Write. Make time, don’t wait for it. Work hard. Edit. Discipline. Write. Read. Learn to type. Write.

Thinking about “The Hobbit”

Do people actually need spoiler alerts for The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit? If so, consider yourselves alerted.

 So my sister decided she wanted to see “The Hobbit” before she goes off on vacation with my Dad, and we rounded up the usual suspects and made arrangements for Friday, two days ago. After much discussion we all decided to meet in the middle (geographically speaking), which had the significant benefit of allowing us to go have Indian food at the good spot four blocks away from the movie theater.

 Lois and I had seen the movie the week before (and our reaction was to immediately come home and watch “The Fellowship of the Ring” on Lois’s TV). Setting aside technical questions about frame rates and the desirability (or not) of 3D filming, the discussion brought up a lot of interesting things about working with a series in both literary and visual formats, and the difficulties inherent in translating from one to the other.

 The first interesting point is that Tolkien wrote The Hobbit first, and at the time it was first published he did not know the significance the ring – and Gollum – would have in the later books. The movies were made in reverse order: The Lord of the Rings came first, and now we’re getting The Hobbit.

 This difference creates some interesting storytelling problems. The first is in tone. The Hobbit was written as a children’s book; it became an introduction to the epic trilogy that followed, but that was later. Moving from the tone of a children’s book to that of the adult fantasy is a little tricky, but only a little. It does, after all, follow the natural chronological flow, from child to adult, from children’s story to adult sequel.

 You don’t get the same effect, obviously, when you go the other way (from adult epic fantasy to children’s story), as the films do. The movie-makers chose not to try: the movie The Hobbit is filmed in much the same tone as The Lord of the Rings, and I can’t really see it working any other way.

 The question of tone blends into the question of continuity. The makers of the movies opted for continuity of tone and presentation movie-to-movie, rather than for consistency of book-to-movie tone and presentation.

 I’ve heard people grumble about this, but do bear in mind: the movie-makers had the choice. They had all four books right there in front of them before they ever started working on the first movie. Tolkien did not have that choice, because when he wrote The Hobbit he hadn’t yet made up all the things that came up later in The Lord of the Rings. Yes, he made some continuity changes to later editions of The Hobbit, but he could not have chosen to change the tone without doing a complete, massive rewrite of the book.

 It is, of course, possible that even if Tolkien had known the story was leading to The Lord of the Rings and the end of the age, he would still have chosen to write The Hobbit as a lighter children’s book. I take leave to doubt it, but authors have done stranger things. That choice, however, remains firmly in the realm of speculation, because Tolkien did not know. And I personally do not think that it would be right for a modern movie-maker to pretend that he is in the same position as Tolkien – that he’s making a children’s movie that those other books and movies don’t inform.

 Series continuity, whether in film or in print, is always a tricky business. Whether you write in chronological order, as Tolkien did with The Hobbit and then The Lord of the Rings, or whether you tell one story and then back up and write a prequel, as Tolkien did later with The Silmarillion, there will be people who encounter the story out of order. I read The Two Towers first, because it was the only fantasy on the airport book rack when my family was heading out on vacation (I knew perfectly well it was the middle book of a trilogy; I simply didn’t care). I then galloped through The Return of the King, followed up with The Fellowship of the Ring, and only then discovered that there was an earlier book called The Hobbit.

 Similarly, one very-much-not-a-fantasy-fan acquaintance heard that The Return of the King had been nominated for Best Picture Oscar, so he went blithely off to see it without having seen (or read) The Fellowship of the Ring or The Two Towers. Needless to say, he was deeply puzzled by the experience.

There is nothing whatever that a writer or a movie-maker can do to prevent this. You don’t have a choice in the matter. The only choices you have relate to how you tell the story: whether you try to make it accessible to people who may not have all the background, or whether you don’t.

Plot or not

I got in a discussion the other day with a writer friend who’s having difficulty moving forward with her story. I’m having similar problems, so we sat down to compare notes. “So what’s the plot?” I said, because I’m a plotty kind of writer.

“Well, there’s this goddess, and she takes a vacation to the mortal world as a cat and meets this girl and…and…and they have adventures!”

“Um, right,” I said. “What adventures?”

“I don’t know; I haven’t made them up.”

“That would be why you’re having trouble writing them. That, and the fact that you don’t have a plot.”

Now, I don’t have a plot, either, but I at least know that I don’t have one. My friend, on the other hand, was so enamored of her vacationing goddess-cat and heroine that she hadn’t noticed that she didn’t. She had two characters (whom she loved), and a situation with plenty of potential, and maybe even an incident or two (she could describe the scene where the goddess left the Etherial Realm for the mortal world, and she knew exactly what happened when the goddess-cat met the heroine), but that was it. She had no central problem to be solved; she didn’t even have minor character problems to be solved. Nothing was at stake for either of her characters, and there wasn’t any urgency to the situation. Most of all, there was no big “why” – when asked, she couldn’t tell me why the goddess needed a vacation, nor could she tell me why the heroine decided to adopt the goddess-cat, let alone why she would get involved with whatever adventures were supposedly going to happen next.

Part of the problem was, she couldn’t decide which character to use as her viewpoint (and which one was the “main character,” and whether they’d be the same or not). There were points and possibilities on both sides, but which character she chose was going to make a huge difference in what kind of plot she could look for. A goddess, even one who is temporarily masquerading as a cat, is likely to have rather different problems than a more-or-less normal girl.

The other part of the problem was, she didn’t have a setting. It makes a huge difference whether the girl and the goddess-cat are operating in a near-accurate or totally alternate historical setting (be that Ancient Greece, warring-states China, pre-Columbus South America, Elizabethan England, revolutionary France, or modern-day Canada), or in a completely invented world (past, present, or future). The kinds of problems that could occur, which would eventually come together for a plot, are significantly different in each place and time.

In short, she had a whole lot of decisions to make before she could really begin to start writing even though she knew what the first couple of scenes were. She’d run into difficulty because knowing those two scenes (the goddess leaving the Etherial Realm in a snit and the mortal girl meeting the goddess-cat and taking her home) were so clear in her head that it felt like she knew enough to start writing.

And she did know enough…to write those two scenes. For some writers, that would be plenty; by the time she finished writing those scenes, she’d know enough more to write the next one, and the next, and eventually there’d be a book at the end of it. Unfortunately, she doesn’t normally work that way, and she had the brains to know that she couldn’t write those “perfectly clear” scenes without a bunch more work on the setting and viewpoint.

Lots of stories start life as a couple of characters in an interesting situation, and for “surprise me” writers (the sort who can’t do any planning, even in their own heads, without killing the story), that’s enough for them to take off running. Most writers, though, need a bit more than that (how much more, as I said, varies writer to writer). Half the trick is realizing when one still needs more – recognizing that the lovely idea is a situation or an incident or a couple of related events, but not really a complete plot yet. The other half the trick is developing the idea, incident, or events until one has enough (whatever “enough” means to the particular writer).

There’s also always the possibility that the story one has hold of is something picaresque – a “marvelous journey” story that really doesn’t need much of a plot except maybe “eventually, we need to get home or settle down somewhere.” That doesn’t mean the initial idea/characters/situation doesn’t need developing; it just means the kind of development will be a little different. A marvelous journey story has to be marvelous; the place the characters journey through and the sub-stories and other characters they encounter on the way have to be fascinating enough to keep the reader going even when the characters don’t have a central plot problem and/or steadily increasing urgency and tension to drive the story forward.

That was then, this is now

Some while back, I was talking with long-time writer friends about the good old days, and I had an epiphany. I was complaining about how The New Thing is refusing to go anywhere and various of my usual tricks and techniques weren’t working, and I realized that a whole lot of the things I spent years training myself to do and not do, back at the beginning of my career, have become counter-productive now that I’m thirty-plus years into it.

I’m not talking about writing specifics like dialog or characterization or syntax. I’m talking about process.

Let me explain.

Back when, I learned very quickly that if I took the attitude “I’ll fix it in the rewrite,” and simply plowed ahead as fast as I could without paying attention to the quality of my writing, my writing got sloppier and sloppier, until I wasn’t writing a first draft or even a zeroth draft, I was writing some semi-coherent notes that were hardly worth the time and energy spent on them. So I spent a lot of time learning not to get too far ahead of myself, and making it a habit to pay as much attention to how I was writing at any given moment as I paid to what I was writing.

Not that I give my Internal Editor free rein; far from it. But I found that some things were a lot easier to get right the first time than to hunt through the manuscript and fix later – things like unnecessary dialog tags, wordy or unclear sentences, descriptions that didn’t quite say what I wanted them to say.

Somewhere in the intervening thirty years, this way of working has…stopped working so well. Looking at it carefully, the problem appears to be that I got better at writing.

That sounds very odd, so let me unpack it a bit. The kinds of things I had to pay attention to, early on, were early-stage mistakes. As I got better at writing, getting those things right became a habit, and eventually almost automatic. Oh, my crit group still has to whop me upside the head every once in a while to remind me not to over/under-write, but it usually only takes one whop because it’s so obvious that all some has to do is say, “now, in this conversation here – ” and I interrupt with “Oh, rats, I did that thing again, didn’t I?” I also got enormously better at revising unsatisfactory stuff.

The combination means that slowly the kinds of things I need to pay attention to while writing changed. They got tinier and pickier on the sentence-by-sentence level, and larger and more sweeping on the structure level. A whole batch of new, not-possible-to-consider-until-a-draft-is-finished things cropped up in terms of plot flow and pacing and complications and balance, and I was still trying to get them right on the very first try.

The upshot is that, for quite a while now, there hasn’t been nearly as much payoff in paying attention to how I’m writing while I’m doing the writing. The things I most need to pay attention to have changed. I’m more interested in complicated plots and structures that require a lot of tinkering with after the first draft is done, because it’s impossible to tell on the first time through the manuscript what sorts of backfill will be needed and which scenes need to be added or deleted.

The other rather annoying change is that, due to the aforementioned complicated plots and structures, I need more pre-planning. My outlines are still all wrong, but they’re wrong in different ways from the way they used to be wrong. The characters are more likely to do what I thought they were going to do, but their reasons for doing it aren’t what I thought they would be, and this leads to needing more scenes on one side of the plot and fewer scenes on the other.

I’ve known since very early on that every book was at least slightly different in terms of the process it needed. Talking to Dragons and Sorcery and Cecelia were totally unplanned, sit-down-and-make-it-up stories; Snow White and Rose Red was much more constrained than usual both by the actual history I was playing off and by the fairy tale I was retelling; Mairelon the Magician had all sorts of charts of different characters’ relationships and position in the plot. Even so, I didn’t expect the particular change in process that’s crept up on me, especially since it’s a general change that appears to apply on a fundamental level to everything I write.

At least, it does right now. Ask me again in thirty years, and we’ll see how much else has changed.

Cooking vs. writing

One of the things writers get asked about a lot is how we do it, either specifically (“How do you plan an action scene?”) or in general (“Where do you get your ideas?”). A lot of the time, it’s fairly evident that the person asking the question thinks there’s a clear-cut answer. They’re looking for a series of steps to follow, a recipe for writing romances or mysteries or literary fiction or just plain old stories. And there are plenty of books and classes and blogs and software out there that try to provide just that.

Which leads me to the rather obvious conclusion that most people aren’t great cooks.

Because following recipes will get you a decent meal if you’re not trying anything too complicated, but it won’t get you a great meal except by pure luck. Fancy or complicated recipes, in my experience, often take several tries to get right even when you think you’re following the directions perfectly (my first try at puff pastry came out as quarter-inch-high hockey pucks).

Furthermore, you won’t get the best possible results by following a recipe exactly, because there are too many variables: how fresh the ingredients are, for instance, or how dry or humid the day is, or whether your oven temperature is accurate. A great cook has to adjust everything on the fly, from cooking time and temperature to whether to add an extra pinch of spice (or an extra tablespoon).

Old recipes assume the cook knows this (and really old recipes assumed that nobody had standardized measuring tools anyway), so they call for “butter the size of an egg” and “a pinch of salt.” These days, though, a lot of us have learned to follow modern recipes that specify everything from three cups of flour down to an eighth of a teaspoon of ginger, and we’re not comfortable unless we have something exact to follow.

Which is fine if all one wants to do is have a decent meal, but not the best idea if one wants a great one. All the really good cooks I know use recipes – if they use them at all – as a sort of starting guideline, adding and subtracting ingredients according to their own taste, experience, and inspiration.

Writing is like that.

There are certainly formulas for different sorts of fiction, and if one has a reasonably good grasp of grammar and syntax, one can produce a fairly readable story by following them. If that is all one does, though, it shows. (Although these days “fairly readable” is really not enough, if publication is your goal.) Great writers – if they bother with a formula at all – adjust it on the fly, adding and subtracting things until the end result is something beyond formulaic. Hamlet is more than a revenge tragedy; Henry V is more than a docudrama.

How you get to that point…well, different people use different routes. You can learn to cook by starting with recipes and trying a lot of similar ones, paying close attention to the similarities and differences and how they affect the outcome, or you can take a class, or you can hunt up some of the historical cookbooks and try out the recipes that aren’t so exact, or you can just throw different things in a pot every night and see what happens. You can learn to write by closely imitating your favorite writers, or by trying out several different plotting and development systems, or by taking a class, or by just sitting down and trying different things until they begin to come together.

Both cooks and writers need certain basic skills – chopping and dicing and mixing and so on for cooks, plotting and dialog and characterization and so on for writers – but again, how and when one learns them is up to the individual cook or writer. You may want to practice one specific thing for a couple of hours and then file the pages of dialog or freeze the chopped carrots; or you may do your practicing on the pay copy.

The one thing that isn’t optional in either case, though, is practice. You can learn a lot about cooking and ingredients and so on by reading cookbooks and watching cooking shows, but if that’s all you do, you aren’t a cook…and you won’t ever become one until you put on the apron and get in the kitchen and spend some time chopping and dicing and sautéing and baking. And there will be disasters (see hockey puck reference above).

You can learn a lot about writing by reading how-to books and blogs and analyzing other people’s work, but if that’s all you do, you’re not a writer. You need actual, on-the-ground experience to get good at it, and getting that experience takes time and effort, and there will be disasters. Some of the things you try won’t work the first time, or the second, or the eighth. Some of the things you are quite sure will never work turn out to be brilliant. You will hardly ever be able to tell in advance which is going to be which.

Cooks have to actually cook; writers have to actually write. Thinking, reading, or talking about it isn’t enough.

Dragons and Gender Bias…huh?

Back in the mid 1990s, shortly after Dealing with Dragons came out, I was asked to join a panel of folks to talk about dragons, and the topic I was handed to talk about was “Dragons and Gender Bias.” After blinking several times, I asked the moderator just what he expected me to talk about with a title like that, since I didn’t think he’d be too happy if I stood up and said “Dragons don’t have any gender bias. Thank you very much.” and sat down again.

He laughed and said blithely something along the lines of, “Oh, I thought you would talk about why you decided to use a strong female heroine (sic) in your first book Dealing with Dragons, and how you went about creating such a wonderful strong female-” for some reason, people who ask about this (and he’s not the only one by a long shot) always refer to Cimorene as a “strong female” and never as a woman or girl “-such a wonderful strong female. And if there’s time, maybe you could talk about the reasons you made her become the princess of a female dragon, and why you decided to make ‘King of the Dragons’ a title that has no connection with gender. That sort of thing.”

“I see,” I said. “All right.” And I hung up the phone. I was somewhat taken aback, partly because “female heroine” is redundant, but partly because I was in the rather rare position of being able to answer every one of the questions he brought up.

The problem was that every last one of his basic assumptions was wrong.

Dealing with Dragons was not only not my first book, it wasn’t even the first book I’d written in the Enchanted Forest chronicles. Talking to Dragons was published in 1985; Dealing came later, in 1990. And it is in Talking to Dragons that Cimorene and Kazul appear for the first time, as relatively minor characters. In that first appearance, Cimorene is not a “strong female heroine” – she is the main character’s mother, and she is exactly like all the mothers (mine and my friends’) that I remember having to deal with when I was sixteen. Well, maybe not exactly like them…

But in any case, the character who appeared later, in Dealing with Dragons, had to be someone who could reasonably be expected to grow up into the character in Talking to Dragons. Most of the things the moderator was asking about were my attempts to explain why Cimorene had turned out the way she did, not attempts to write about “a strong female heroine.”

It is also in Talking to Dragons that I first mentioned that “King of the Dragons” is a genderless job title (so far as dragons are concerned, anyway). I happen to remember very clearly writing the particular scene, because I was looking for a way to demonstrate that dragons were, in essence, aliens, not just very large human beings in lizard suits. I wanted a shortcut to show that they thought differently from humans, and I was very pleased when I came up with the idea of making the King of the Dragons a female. Similarly, Cimorene having been Kazul’s princess was an off-the-cuff invention that was intended to be a shock to the main character, the way it often is a bit shocking to a teenager to discover that his/her parents were once rowdy teenagers themselves.

In other words, pretty much all of the things the moderator wanted to know about were dictated by the needs of the first story and the personalities of the characters, not by the author’s desire to make a point in the second book.

This is something I think too many readers and would-be writers forget: most stories are not allegories, and the vast majority of characters in a non-allegorical, realistic piece of fiction are not going to work if they are portrayed first as a member of a group (“a typical ___”), and only second as an individual with whatever strengths and weaknesses, quirks and phobias, that particular individual happens to have.

And I would argue that regardless of what traits or attributes a character has – race, size, ethnicity, sex, age, hair color, etc. – what shapes them most is the interaction between their own personality and the attitude of the culture they grow up in toward their particular traits, because that pretty much determines both the way the characters think of themselves (and others) and the ways they expect other people to think and behave.

Dragon culture, as it developed in the Enchanted Forest books, pretty much ignores gender because dragons get to choose which sex they’re going to be. It’s important, but it’s important to a dragon in the same way as choosing the right hairstyle is important to human beings. They wouldn’t judge another dragon’s intelligence, competence, or abilities based on what gender that dragon was. Kazul is a fairly normal, mainstream member of that culture, so she doesn’t think twice about being king, and she’s perfectly happy having her princess learn magic and carry a sword.

Cimorene, on the other hand, grew up in the fairy-tale-kingdom culture…and rebelled against it. That’s what I mean when I say it’s the interaction between the character and the culture that really makes them who they are in the story. If I had written Dealing with Dragons first, and I’d reversed the personalities and made Cimorene a normal, mainstream princess and Kazul a rebel against dragon culture, they’d have been very different characters…and I could have chosen to do that. Which would, of course, have led to a very different story, but that’s another matter.

…And When It Isn’t

I spent last time talking about a manuscript full of stupid mistakes that didn’t work. This time, I’m going to talk about some where it does. Because in real life, people forget critical information, give in to impulses that turn out to be a Really Bad Idea, and generally do things that, if they’d stopped to consider, are clearly likely to have a less-than-good outcome. If characters never did this kind of thing, they’d be unrealistically perfect (and quite possibly boring as well).

On the other hand, characters who make mistake after mistake, or whose mistakes conveniently occur whenever the plot needs a boost or twist, are equally unrealistic, and seldom work except in the sort of parody where the whole point is that they can never do anything right. Similarly, if the characters never face any consequences from their mistakes, or never appear to learn anything from those consequences, the story is unlikely to feel real or be satisfying.

So how do authors strike a balance between too-perfect characters who never make a mistake and unrealistically stupid characters?

First off, mistakes in a story work like coincidences, meaning that the bigger the mistake or coincidence, the fewer of them are likely to work in a story. A tale that opens with an enormous, life-changing mistake implicitly promises the reader that the rest of the story is going to deal mainly with the consequences of that mistake. That means that the author can’t use a second enormous life-changing act of stupidity in mid-book in order to change course; whatever happens has to flow in some way from that original giant error. If other characters make mistakes, it’s most likely to work if a) they’re small mistakes, b) they’re very different from the original giant error, and c) they don’t result in a major plot event or twist, but just push the story along in whatever direction it’s currently going.

If, however, the story doesn’t include one single, enormous mistake, the author can often get away with having two large-but-not-enormous mistakes, or three or four small errors of judgement, etc. One ought not to get too carried away by this, of course; there’s a point where one hits “too many” even if they’re all eensy-weensy errors.

Back to the large mistake thing. Once I started thinking about it, I could think of three or four novels that open with a ginormous mistake on the part of the major character, and they generally follow the same pattern. First off, the big mistake doesn’t occur on page 1; it’s usually near the end of the first or second chapter. This gives the author plenty of time to lead up to it…and they do.

In every case I could think of, the events leading up to the mistake are shown carefully and in sufficient detail to make it clear to the reader why the character made the mistake…and each of them has several points at which they could have backed out and changed direction. The characters hesitate briefly, but pride or inertia or drunken bloody-mindedness keeps them on track for the inevitable train wreck at the end of the first chapter.

As a result, the reader can see that the characters are being stupid, but they can also see and understand why they’re being stupid. For this one, it was a combination of being angry, drunk, and too proud to back down once he realized he’d dug himself into a hole; for that one, it was a combination of hubris and fear; for the other one, it was midlife insecurity combined with temptation and needing to prove something to himself. The reader can see and sympathize with the character, maybe even think “There but for the grace of God go I,” even as she’s shaking her head about the dumb decision itself. Yes, the decision is still dumb, but we believe that this character, under these circumstances, really would do it.

It is, admittedly, extremely difficult to do this kind of thing for mistakes that various characters made before the story even began. One can, however, show that they regret the mistake, and that they’ve learned something from having messed up so badly five or ten or twenty years before…and one can certainly arrange for them not to repeat the same mistake. A character doing the exact same stupid thing for a second time tends to really put readers off, even if the first time happened twenty years pre-story and we didn’t get to watch it.

If the pre-story mistake really is vital to the current plot, one can use flashback to show the circumstances and motivation, or one can have some really understanding other character explain it to everyone in the present story who doesn’t know.

In every case, though, it all keeps coming back around to making sure the reader understands the reasons the character made the mistake…and the bigger the mistake is, the more time the writer probably needs to spend setting it up. “Um, sorry, officer, I left my driver’s license at home” needs maybe half a line earlier about how fast she flew out of the house; “Er, I sort of told the Evil Overlord where our Sekrit Base is” needs a lot more advance justification.

About the only time this isn’t true is when one has a central character who is supposed to be an idiot – Bertie Wooster, say – and the whole point of the story is watching him bumble into trouble and watch Jeeves pull him out again. Which works in comedy, but seldom in drama.

When it’s stupid…

As some of you already know, I’ve been listening to a series of lectures on literature and theory and basically all the college-level English stuff I didn’t take in college. One of the recent lectures examined two books that, in the words of the lecturer, each began with “an example of monumentally bad judgment.” It intersected interestingly with a manuscript I was also reading in which the characters made one bad decision after another until I wanted to scream at their stupidity. So I thought I’d talk a bit about why this worked in one case and not in the other.

I’ll start with what didn’t work and why, and the first thing I want to say is that I’m not talking here about the standard idiot plot.

For those of you unfamiliar with the term, an idiot plot is one that cannot work unless all the main characters are idiots – if they acted or reacted like a normal sensible five-year-old, they’d solve the story problem on page two.

What I’m talking about is a bit more subtle than that, though it’s closely enough related that it could perhaps be considered a subcategory. In the case of the manuscript I mentioned, nearly every plot point and twist in the manuscript was the result of some character’s monumental bad judgment, either in the “now” of the story or years earlier. At least half of the bad decisions were due to impulsive stupidity on the part of the characters: “I think I’ll dump this bucket of fish slime over that assassin guy’s head and see what happens.” It’s obvious that the character is being stupid, but it’s not obvious why.

I can buy arrant stupidity on the part of one character, provided he’s been established as being, well, the kind of guy that would dump a bucket over an assassin’s head just for the heck of it. When every character in the story, including the putatively-wise old scholar, the supposedly-clever spy, and the kid who’s seen all the horror movies and who knows and says that it’s stupid to split up and explore, all make one thoughtless, impulsive mistake after another, I get cross.

I get even more cross when each and every mistake leads to another tense showdown and/or plot twist. I mean, if the author wanted a big fight with the assassin at that particular point in the story, couldn’t he have come up with a way of starting it that didn’t require one of the characters to do something perfectly idiotic? Or couldn’t he at least have shown some sort of chain of events that made his readers believe that the character really would make this particular mistake under these circumstances? Even a half-paragraph about how drunk he was, or how he never could resist a bet, would have done the job. The character would still be doing something insanely stupid, but I’d have at least understood, and maybe accepted, why he did it.

What really got to me in this particular case, however, was that in nearly every instance, the Giant Mistake scene looked initially like a mildly dumb but not unreasonable choice to make. That is, the mistakes didn’t appear to be on the order of deliberately annoying an assassin, but more on the order of pulling a stupid joke on someone’s obnoxious older brother. The trouble was that every time this happened, the author showed the incident, then showed the horrific and sometimes fatal consequences…and then, three or four chapters later, finally revealed to the reader not only that the obnoxious older brother was a highly trained assassin, but that the guy dumping the bucket of slime had known this all along.

In short, the author was trying to hide his characters’ stupidity from the reader by holding back information that the characters knew. In one instance, a character does the equivalent of deciding to explore the basement alone, when she and all four of the other characters present know perfectly well that the escaped serial killer is hiding somewhere on this block (but the reader hasn’t been clued in that there’s a killer on the loose). The closest any of the characters get to objecting is one of them saying, “OK, if you’re not back in an hour, I’ll call 911.”

There are several possible excuses the author might have made for withholding this kind of information from the reader, but that’s just what they are – excuses. If the viewpoint character and/or narrator has reason to think that the serial killer might be hiding in the basement, the reader ought to know. If all the characters have this knowledge, then one of them ought to bring it up. Hiding the information from the reader until the action is all over does not make the decision to go down into the basement less stupid, and it does not make the reader less likely to notice that it was stupid.

The one place where this kind of thing is sometimes (not always, but sometimes) justified is when a character has made a ginormous, plot-affecting mistake at some point in the distant past. In this case, the mistake is part of the character’s backstory (and the character is frequently ashamed of it and trying to keep the information from affecting his/her present-day life), so it’s frequently reasonable for the readers and other characters not to know about it until the mistake comes back to bite them all. Even so, it’s almost always most effective if the author at least hints at the fact that there is some mystery about the character’s past before it starts strongly affecting the current story. Once the critical incident happens – the plot twist or event that wouldn’t have happened if not for the character’s long-hidden mistake – the reader and the other characters usually need to get the explanation/justification as soon as possible.

That’s a good bit of what doesn’t work. But characters need to make the occasional mistake, even the occasional huge one, so next, I’m going to talk about how to make that work in a story without having all the characters look stupid.

The Question of Theme

Theme is one of the most difficult aspects of fiction to discuss. This is partly because there are so many different ways of looking at it…and because there is no one clear, simple definition that everybody agrees on. “The definition of theme” ranges from the simple and straightforward “The subject or topic of the piece” to the more obscure “the understanding that the author seeks to communicate through the work” or “a salient abstract idea that emerges from a literary work’s treatment of its subject matter” to the broad “theme is what the story means.”

Several of the web sites I looked at didn’t even try to come up with a definition; they just gave paragraph after paragraph of examples of things the writer thought were and were not themes. One had a list of “themes in the science fiction genre” that included things like “alternate history” and “generation ships” and “virtual reality,” none of which are anything like what I understand theme to be.

Not that I understand the concept of theme particularly well. It isn’t something I’ve ever needed to understand in order to write fiction; in fact, thinking too hard about theme during my writing process gets in my way. This isn’t true of every writer, by any means, but for me, it’s a subject that’s a lot safer to consider when I’m between books.

Still, I’ve always had a suspicion that if I could ever really get my arms around it, theme would be one more exceedingly useful way of looking at my work. So I keep poking at it periodically, in hopes of seeing how other people work with it and how I might adapt their methods to my own process.

Part of the problem is that the vast majority of writing about theme comes from literary analysts who aren’t themselves writers. This has always made me suspect that theme is one of those tools that is great for dissecting a story after it is written, but that may not be much help in getting the writing done. Nevertheless, there are writers who do start with theme (whatever they understand it to be), and who do find it a useful tool, so I keep looking at it.

The main thing I’ve taken away from all the various reading I’ve done on the subject is that theme is generally abstract to some significant degree. That means that “generation ships” and “faster-than-light space travel” aren’t themes, but “the future evolution of society” might be, and “loyalty and hatred” almost certainly is.

Most of the time, the versions of theme that make most sense to me are expressed one of three ways: as a one-sentence argument, as a one-word idea, or as a question. The one-sentence argument variety has always seemed to me the least useful to a writer, as it tends to be couched as a proposition to be demonstrated: “Pets should be treated nicely” or “Testing honesty builds character.” Laying out one’s theme this way seems to me to invite the author to “prove” it in the story, which in turn is just asking to turn the story into a sermon – and in the process, miss out on interesting characters and plot twists because they don’t prove the theme as stated.

The one-word idea – “loyalty” or “honor” or “integrity” – seems to me more useful because it invites the author to look at the theme from different angles: how one character demonstrates loyalty or honor, compared to another, or how different characters acquire or lose their honor or integrity. For me, though, the one-word theme is seldom obvious, even after I’ve written the entire book. This makes it of extremely limited use to me so far as writing is concerned.

That leaves the theme-as-question. I like this because it seems more open-ended than the other versions. “What question am I asking/examining in this story?” can be answered with something as abstract as “Which is more important, loyalty or personal integrity?” or with something as pointed as “What makes a family break down?” The temptation, though, is to make the question into something a little too specific, like “How does the hero defeat the dragon?” which gets right back to plot and away from theme.

Ultimately, though, I doubt that thinking about theme will ever do me much good up, because the concrete has more appeal for me than the abstract, at least when it comes to stories. The themes in my work arise from the stories themselves – from these particular characters and the exact obstacles they face and the various choices they make, which have everything to do with who they are and very little to do with the author trying to demonstrate or examine anything other than the characters.

Prophecies

Some while back, I had a conversation with a reader. It went on for quite a while, but I can sum it up pretty quickly:

Him: “That book is terrible. I shouldn’t have been surprised. It has a prophecy in it. Stories with prophecies in them are always horrible; they’re pretty much a sign of bad writing.”

Me: “Um, no. Really, really, no.”

If having a prophecy in a story were a sign of bad writing, Homer’s Illiad and Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex would not still be read, watched, studied, and enjoyed over 2500 years after they were written. Yes, there are plenty of perfectly terrible modern fantasies that contain prophecies, but as with so many things in writing, the problem is not with the device or technique, it’s with the way the technique is employed.

What too many writers fail to realize, I think, is that from a story-structure viewpoint, a prophecy is a point of intersection between characters and plot. A plot-centered story can easily founder on a prophecy that makes the rest of the plot inevitable; a character-centered story can similarly founder on a prophecy that makes the characters’ actions appear pointless or turns them into puppets. Characters and the rest of the plot have to balance on the point of the prophecy, or the story goes lopsided and fails to work.

In most of the old Greek stories, the characters are usually struggling to avoid an unfavorable prophecy, but sometimes, they seem to see it as a deadline. Laius tries to avoid his prophesied death by disposing of his infant son (which naturally sets the prophecy in motion); Achilles, having decided to take the “die young and covered in glory” part of his prophecy rather than the “die old and unremarkable” part, seems to be cramming as much living as he can into whatever days he has. In both cases, this puts the characters in tension with the prophecy, pulling against it in some way, and that keeps things in balance.

Many modern fantasies, by contrast, have the characters struggling to fulfill a prophecy. This puts the characters and the prophecy on the same side, both pulling in the same direction. For this to work, something has to be pulling equally hard in the opposite direction, or the plot takes on an air of inevitability no matter how difficult the heroes’ tasks are.

There are several ways to make a story work anyway. One is to have an ambiguous prophecy: “If you cross the river, a great kingdom will fall.” Which kingdom? Maybe not the one you’re hoping for… Another method is to have competing prophecies, only one of which can be true, or a prophecy that predicts a confrontation, but not the outcome (or at least, not a clear outcome: “The armies of East and West will clash, and the victor will rule for a thousand years” leaves out one obvious and important fact – who the victor will be). Or have one like the one about Achilles that gives two mutually exclusive outcomes to choose between.

A prophecy that lends itself to misinterpretation, or to multiple interpretations, can provide all sorts of interesting plot twists. “The Red Dragon and the White shall battle, and at first the White shall seem victorious, but the Red shall conquer when the Boar comes out of the South” is the sort of thing that can be made either blindingly obvious or nearly impossible to interpret, depending on how the author sets things up.

What all these alternatives do is to lessen the obviousness of the “pull” of the prophecy on the plot and characters. If the prophecy says “whoso pulleth this sword from out this stone is rightwise born king of Britain,” the next step is obvious: line everybody up and have them tug on the sword. If it says “The rightful king shall be revealed under the sign of the dragon,” the next step isn’t nearly so clear…and the characters’ actions are less likely to feel scripted and inevitable.

In modern fantasy, prophecies are usually central to the story. There’s plenty of precedent for this, but it isn’t strictly necessary. It is perfectly possible to write a story set during the Trojan War that deals with the struggles of a merchant family trying to survive in a city that’s been under siege for ten years, in which none of the characters have much of anything to do with the prophecies about Achilles dying young or Paris bringing about the city’s downfall. One can also do what the Arthurian legends do: pulling the sword out of the stone is the start of the poor kid’s problems – now that he’s king, he has to chase the Saxons out of the kingdom and then figure out how to get a war-ravaged land back on its feet again, while also dealing with cutthroat court politics. Fulfilling the prophecy was the easy part.

One last key thing for any author to remember when including a prophecy in a story: the exact wording of the prophecy is the sort of thing that fans of the story will pick apart endlessly, given the slightest cause. It pays to be very careful about it, and to solicit advice and alternate interpretations from as many other people as possible, so as to catch and eliminate (or better yet, incorporate into the story) as many of the potential objections/alternatives as one can.