Patricia C. Wrede's Blog, page 53

Alexandria and the Terrible Horrible Parody Piece

I’m going to be taking Wednesday off, as I have things to do on Christmas other than compose a blog post; therefore here is a slightly-early Christmas present for everybody.

Alexandria and the Terrible, Horrible, No-good Very Bad Slush Pile

(With apologies to Judith Viorst)

I wake up with a hangover and miss the train and get to the office late even though I don’t take time to stop at Starbucks for coffee, and when I arrive the coffeemaker is already empty and the last little bit has dried out on the bottom of the pot and the editor-in-chief shows up while I am clearing it up and says she put the slush pile on my desk because it’s my turn to read it even though I have eighteen messages on my voice mail and a sales conference tomorrow.

The stack of manuscripts is two feet tall and even from here I can see that there’s a pile of pink pages in the middle and a smear down the side where somebody spilled coffee down it and I just know it is going to be a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad slush pile.

George, the other assistant editor, says he doesn’t know why I’m making faces, it’s just slush. I hate George

The top manuscript has a three-page cover letter. The first page is a diatribe about the Evil Publishing Conspiracy that won’t look at the author’s brilliant work, which we are all too stupid to appreciate anyway. I just love being insulted before I’ve had my coffee. The second page is a list of the author’s requirements for the book’s layout and cover, along with all the subrights that he is explicitly not offering us. The third page has his lawyer’s address and says that he’ll call on Thursday to negotiate the terms of the contract. Today is Thursday.

Maybe I can get a job selling life insurance.

The second manuscript is addressed very clearly to the editor-in-chief of the hard science fiction line, which is where I work. It is not hard science fiction; it is not soft science fiction; it is not any kind of science fiction at all. It is a Western. Why does the author think a hard science fiction line will buy a Western?

It is a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad slush pile.

I get some coffee from the office coffee pot because at the rate I’m going, I won’t finish the slush pile until midnight and I can’t take the time to run down to Starbuck’s. The coffee tastes like soap. Burned soap. George has a Starbuck’s Grande Mocha sitting on his desk. I hate George.

I bet people in insurance offices get to have Starbucks coffee whenever they want.

The next manuscript is three inches thick, and printed on pink paper. I hate pink. I glance at it anyway. It’s in a script font, too. And it looks like the author has replaced all the o’s with a graphic of a little heart. And here I thought the assistant editor over in Romance was exaggerating. I’m not even going to try to read it. I value my eyes.

What’s next? Looks like someone has typed up the pilot episode of the original Star Trek series, with the names changed. I even recognize most of the dialog. Did he think we wouldn’t notice?

The slush pile doesn’t seem to be getting any shorter. I’m going to have to have lunch at my desk.  I bet life insurance salespeople don’t have to eat at their desks. George is having lunch with a Big Name Author at the trendy café down the block. On the expense account. I hate George.

At least the next author actually read our submission guidelines and sent three chapters and an outline, instead of the whole book. Unfortunately, the outline is incomprehensible. What are kneebles? Why is the hero looking for them on Jupiter when the villain appears to be mining them on Rigel VI? Or is it the villain who’s looking and the hero who’s mining? The cover letter assures me that everything is much clearer in the novel, but I don’t think I believe it.

Here’s a submission…no, two submissions…no, four submissions from the same author. At least he’s prolific. Wait, they’re all versions of the same book. Apparently he’s rewritten his novel three times in the two months since he first sent it in; the cover letter says the current version is much better than any of the earlier ones. On a hunch, I check the incoming mail. Yup, here’s version number five.  I wonder if I can start a betting pool on when version six will arrive?

I’m putting my resume together tonight, I swear I am.

The next manuscript looks like science fiction, all right, but that may be just because the author didn’t bother to run the spelling checker. Or possibly he really is still in third grade and hasn’t learned about grammar or spelling yet; it’s hard to say. Also, the villain is Thrad Redav, and the hero is Kuel Cloudrunner, and the plot is…more than familiar. No.

This is really a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad slush pile.

This one looks like the author typed it with his fingers off by one key. There’s a legible note at the top – oh, it’s in a language that the author invented. Have to give him points for obsessiveness, writing a whole novel in an imaginary language. I wonder who he expects to read it? At least the cover letter is in English… I see, we’re supposed to write him for a translation if we’re interested. I don’t think so.

Ah, a pizza box. Somebody’s read all the stupid suggestions for how to get your manuscript read faster. I don’t suppose it occurred to her that opening a pizza box expecting nice, hot pizza and finding only another slush pile manuscript is likely to get the manuscript off to a really bad start – assuming, of course, that the editor (me) has never run across the pizza box trick before. I had three of them my first week on the job.

Nobody sends fake pizza boxes to insurance salespeople.

Here’s the last one. It is a history of the Roman Empire, with zombies. What is it with zombies? And why does the author think a hard science fiction line is the place for historical zombies? Or should that be hysterical zombies? I check the cover letter. The author appears to think her book is nonfiction. Hysterical zombies it is. I write her a note pointing out that we do not publish nonfiction.

That was definitely a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad slush pile.

At least now I can go home and work on my resume.

And tomorrow, it’s George’s turn to read the slush.

Ladders

One of the first things most people realize after they’ve sold their first novel is that, contrary to expectation, they haven’t reached the top of the tree. Instead, they’re now on the bottom rung of a whole new ladder.

This comes as a great shock to some people, though anyone who’s actually thought much about it can surely see that there are plenty of achievements beyond “I can write well enough to get professionally published.” Still, even if you know intellectually that publishing your first novel isn’t the end of working hard, it’s usually a goal that the writer has been working toward for a long time, and one would really like to bask in the glory of reaching the top of the first ladder for a bit before taking that deep breath and starting to climb the next one.

Some folks, though, never seem to switch ladders. This is fine if you’re perfectly happy sitting at the top of the fan-and-unpublished-writers ladder while ignoring the professionally-published-writing-career ladder, but if you actually want a professional-publication-career, you have to work just as hard at climbing that ladder as you worked at climbing the first one.

Climbing that professional-career ladder takes more work, and different kinds of work, than the first. Most ambitious new professionals realize they’re going to need to do publicity work, and that in this day and age, that will mean having some sort of Internet presence (whether that’s heavily weighted toward social media like Facebook, Twitter, Livejournal, and the like, or whether it involves lots of guest blogging and activity on other people’s sites). There are lots of other things that the Internet makes easier, from ordering publicity bookmarks and postcards to doing specialized “pump up the buzz” contests and promotions. Lots of other things.

Unfortunately, there’s no reliable way of telling what things will actually have an impact on sales, and it’s far too easy to get so caught up in planning and executing one’s publicity campaign that one forgets (or can’t squeeze out the time for) writing the next book. (I’ve seen more than one instance where someone has spent so much time promoting their great new novel online that they haven’t had time to finish the thing. Do not make this mistake.)

The other difficulty is that having produced one publishable novel does not mean that the writer can stop worrying about the skill and craft part of writing and concentrate on their production-and-publicity responsibilities. No, it means that one has to do all the publicity and administration and production stuff (like revisions and copyedit and page proofs) while also writing the next book and trying to get better as a writer.

And it turns out that improving one’s craft does not just happen. You don’t improve your tennis backhand or your golf swing by whacking a huge bunch of balls at random for an hour a day. You improve by deciding to aim for a certain spot or location, hitting one ball, checking to see how you did, and then making an adjustment before you hit the next ball…and hitting a huge bunch of balls that way. Or by having an expert watch you hit one ball and then tell you how to correct your stance and your swing before you hit the next.

In other words, you get better by consciously and deliberately working at getting better. There are various ways to do this – working at exercises or prompts allows some writers to concentrate on specific problem areas, while other folks prefer to shoot for incremental overall improvement in their pay copy. Reading how-to-write books and blogs, or playing writing games with friends, or taking classes works for others. Critique groups are popular and helpful for a lot of folks. Studying other people’s work comes highly recommended (some advocate studying the classics, or the acknowledged “top hundred” works in one’s chosen genre; others advocate just as strongly studying the worst writing, because it’s often much easier to see what the writer is doing wrong).

I get a fair amount of mileage out of figuring out which areas and skills I need to improve, and then working out some way to improve them on my own – the figuring out and working out are important parts of my improvement process, just as much as actually doing whatever work I’ve decided to do. Other people like a more formal or more structured approach. The main thing is to do it – to work deliberately and consciously on improving one’s writing skills.

Because you never run out of room for improvement.

Worksheets

So for some reason or other I was poking around on the web last week and I ran across somebody’s “character worksheet” – basically a fill-in-the-blanks page that started with “name” “age” and “physical description” and then had half a dozen things like “career goals” and “religion” and “deepest fears.” I thought it was both fairly useless and over-the-top, until I found a similar one that was six pages long, with details like “is/isn’t a good kisser” and “favorite breakfast cereal.” By comparison, the first one looked positively restrained.

Looking at them more closely, I get the strong feeling that a few of them were designed by authors who needed a mental reminder of all the aspects of their characters that they could use – not so much a “fill in all these blanks and you’ll have a great character” sort of list, but more of a “do you need to think about this for this character?” list. The rest look as if they were designed by professors who analyzed a bunch of stories and novels and worked backward from what they thought they found there, under the assumption that the writers made it all up before they ever started writing.

I do things that could possibly be called “character sketches,” but they don’t look anything like any of the worksheets or assignments I’ve seen. Mine have the character’s name, who they are, and a couple of paragraphs of background information explaining what they’ve been doing lately and what they’re up to, and that’s about it. No list of “personality quirks” or goals or psychology; no childhood traumas; no physical description, even.

Emilie is an older relative – aunt? – of Everard, the head of the merchant guild. She teaches guild apprentices basic skills like reading and math, and has been doing so for at least two decades. She came up with the system and pushed it through (it was considered very radical when she started it), and is now highly respected for putting it into practice. She never married, but nobody has ever dared connect a scandal with her name; if she has lovers, she’s incredibly discreet about them.

That’s the actual notes about one of the minor characters who may or may not make it into the next book. For a major character, or someone I already know is going to be plot-important, I’ll have three or four paragraphs like that, detailing who they are, where they came from, what they’re up to, why they’re important to the plot, and perhaps what their connection to my protagonist is (or will be). If the character is one of the ones who just walked into my head, and I know a lot of other stuff, I may make a few brief notes about it, but usually that sort of character is memorable enough that I don’t need to write down those details.

As I get into the first draft, and various characters arrive on stage, I make up what they look like and add it to the character notes in an attempt to keep myself from writing that George has blue eyes in Chapter One, and then having George blink his brown eyes at someone in Chapter Ten. Similarly, I add any new background information that I discover and that I am afraid of forgetting.

OK, sometimes I add that kind of thing to my notes. More often, I mention something on the fly, like the antique tea set the heroine’s great-aunt always uses, and then eight or nine chapters later, when I’m working up to the grand finale, I suddenly realize that it would be the perfect way for the villain to try to poison the heroine, and I go scrambling back through all the earlier chapters, looking for the scene where I mentioned the tea set so I can be sure it’s actually in the story and not just something I thought about putting in and then changed my mind about.

But the most important aspects of my characters show up as I am writing about them. Right now, I don’t need to know whether Emilie is still the passionately dedicated teacher she was as a radical young woman, or whether she’s looking for a new challenge now that she’s reached mid-life and her tutoring program is well established; whether she’s devoted mainly to the guild or mainly to her students; whether she’ll side with her nephew or with my heroine if she’s faced with that choice. I’ll find that out when she walks on stage and starts interacting with my other characters, and most especially when she’s faced with a decision.

This is why my plot outlines never last more than a chapter: because until I write the characters, I don’t know them well enough to make an accurate prediction of what they’ll think and how they’ll act, and whenever I’m wrong, it changes the whole direction of the plot.

Which brings me back around to those character worksheets. For me, they’re pretty much useless; I need to know my characters, not just know things about them, and in order to know them, I have to write them. For other writers, worksheets may well be a lot more useful, especially if one views them as a memory-jogging tool rather than a form to fill out.

An elf, a dwarf, and an Irishman walk into a bar…

OK, first the news: Sorcery and Cecelia is the Sizzling Book Club pick this month and Caroline and I will be joining their Live Chat on Wednesday, December 19 (that’s Wednesday, one week from today). The live chat starts at 9 pm EST and runs for an hour and a half; Caroline and I will be showing up for the last half-hour, starting at 10 pm EST.

Which makes this a reasonably good time to talk about humor, I think.

Humor is a lot harder to write than most people think (unless they’ve tried stand-up comedy themselves). In spite of this, humor also tends to get less respect than most other sorts of fiction. Making people laugh requires a clear eye, a clever mind, and an impeccable sense of timing, among other things, yet a lot of people seem to think it’s easier and less deserving of respect than serious, dramatic fiction (as if one can’t be serious about being funny).

Yet a leavening of humor can add a lot to nearly any book, even the most serious of them. A touch of comedy can give the reader a much-needed break from the story’s relentless march toward doom and destruction. Even Shakespeare’s greatest tragedies have occasional comic scenes and comic characters.

There are a whole bag of techniques for writing humor, most of which Connie Willis discusses in her article on “Learning to Write Comedy: Why it’s impossible and how to do it.”  Unfortunately, the web version has most of the formatting stripped out, including the capital letters, but it’s still a really excellent article on the topic. I am now going to repeat some of what she said, only from a different angle.

Specifically, I’m going to start by talking about different categories of humor, beginning with physical humor and slapstick. This is just what it sounds like – exaggerated fake violence and bodily harm used for comic effect – and it’s more often seen on stage or in movies than done in writing. It covers everything from the Three Stooges slipping on a banana peel to Wile E. Coyote blowing himself up with his own bomb. In novels, the best examples I can think of are in Terry Pratchett’s early Discworld books, especially The Color of Magic and The Light Fantastic. Or the scene in the second Harry Potter book in which the inept wizard, Lockhart, causes the bones in Harry’s arm to vanish.

The techniques used most often in physical humor are exaggeration, understatement, and surprise. The fake violence or harm is exaggerated, unexpected, over-the-top – nobody would really react to a nosy neighbor by going after them with a bazooka – while any realistic consequences are minimized (Wile E. Coyote would be dead within the first thirty seconds of the cartoon if he were suffering anything close to the actual effect of the bombs, falls, pianos, etc.).

Farce and screwball comedy also make use of surprise, understatement, and exaggeration, but this time, it’s not harmful actions that are blown up out of shape, it’s everything else: the setting, the characters, the social interactions, even the norms that the readers expect a story to follow (coincidences are normally considered something to avoid in a novel, but they’re a staple in farce and screwball comedy). The Marx Brothers movies fall into this category, and yes, they also use a lot of physical comedy as well.

Word play is important here, and so are unexpected contrasts and lateral or divergent thinking (taking things literally that everyone would normally understand as metaphor or idiom, putting lots of emphasis on things that would normally be considered unimportant while ignoring the real or important stuff, etc.). Gracie Allen was the all-time mistress of lateral thinking.

Parody, satire, and irony mock individuals, aspects of society, organizations, genres, events…pretty much anything, actually. It isn’t necessarily mean-spirited mockery – Pratchett’s later Discworld books fall somewhere in this spectrum, and I don’t see how anyone could reasonably call them mean-spirited. They’re all about word play and language, while still making use of all the other tools in the comedy toolbox

Two more techniques that occur in pretty much every form of comedy are contrast and comic patterns. Contrast is, perhaps, a variation on surprise or defeated expectations, but I think it’s important enough to rate its own position on the list – one of the reasons the absent-minded professor is a stock comic character is the contrast between his presumed intelligence and his absent-minded behavior. Comic patterns are another important tool, whether they’re things we’ve all absorbed from our culture (the way the title of this post leads you to expect a joke), or whether they’re something that the writer has set up through repetition over the course of the story, like the over-full closet that always drops a pile of junk on top of whoever opens the door.

The thing about all these categories is that, as you can guess from the kinds of examples I was using, they mostly have their origin in classifying plays and movies. You can, therefore, move from purely physical, non-verbal humor to comedy that relies more and more on word play for its effect.

In a novel, however, the elements of language are an inevitable part of every single kind of humor the writer wants to do. Novels and short stories are language, and nothing but; even physical humor must, in a novel, be conveyed to the reader through words. And the tools and techniques of comedy and humor work on both levels – that is, the action and characters and so on need to be funny (exaggerated, understated, unexpected, etc.), but the sentences the writer uses can also employ the same techniques, just on a smaller and more constrained level.

Unexpected word choices or comparisons, emphasizing the “wrong” thing, delivering over-the-top silliness in a deadpan, matter-of-fact style (or using wildly exaggerated purple prose to describe someone’s bacon-and-egg breakfast) can all add a lot to a series of funny events. Above all, there’s the comic tone – the presentation that tells the reader that nothing that happens in this scene or story is to be taken perfectly seriously, even if it appears that very serious things are happening.

Of course, any of these things can also detract from the humor of a piece if they’re done in the wrong spot at the wrong time – the equivalent of a stand-up comic blowing his/her timing. As with stand-up comedy, the only ways I know of to avoid this are a) to read and watch a lot of the best comedy you can, learning as much as possible by osmosis and then studying it to try to wring even more out of it, and b) to practice a lot.

No battle plan…

“No battle plan survives contact with the enemy.” – Helmuth von Moltke

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

Prewriting notes – whether they’re about plot, background, or characters – are the writer’s battle plan, and therefore exceedingly important. Lots has been written about this aspect of writing, but there are really only two things that are absolutely vital to remember:

Every writer handles prewriting differently, and
Nothing is ever written in stone until the book is actually in print.

If you look at those two things long enough, you start asking yourself “Well, then, why bother planning at all, if there’s no right way to do it and if it’s not going to stay the same anyway?” All I can say is that, of all the authors I know well enough to have some idea of their work processes, only one or two do no pre-planning at all, and even they at least think about their stories a little before they sit down and write. Empirical evidence indicates that for most writers, planning works.

There are actually a bunch of other things that you may find useful to remember about planning, but they’re not things that everybody needs to remember. I really need to remember to spend enough time on the background and worldbuilding; I don’t seem to be able to get started until I have a solid feel for the world and its culture and history, as well as the more immediate background of the characters (i.e., how they heck did they get into the situation they’re in at the start of the story, and where do they think they’re going from here?). It’s a bit like looking at a chess problem – you know that there have been a bunch of moves made to get the pieces into this position, and before you decide what the next move is, you want to understand how they all got to this point.

But that’s me. I know writers who really need most of those pre-book moves to be unknown or undecided. They tend to be folks who have trouble changing their minds about “what happened” once they’ve made it up, and they need to leave lots of room for the pre-book events to change, in case they get to the middle of the story and discover that they need the bad guy to have stolen the crown jewels ten years ago, instead of having kidnapped the diplomat’s daughter (or vice versa, or in addition to).

Exactly what you have to do for prewriting, and how much, depends on how you think and how you write. Some people can figure this out by thinking about what works for them with other things, like cooking or learning to ski or building/making a new house or a new dress. For the rest of us, there’s trial and error.

You might need to work out who the characters are (or could be), and what their agendas and plans are, while leaving the plot strictly alone. Or you might need to work out the worldbuilding first, or a lot of the key events in the plot. Or you might need to do a massive plot tree, where you sketch out as many different ways the plot could go as you can think of, starting with “hero runs away to sea; gets berth as cabin boy, or doesn’t get berth, or is taken on as assistant by cook/sailmaker/?, or is mugged before he ever reaches docks…”

A couple of my friends do “zeroth drafts,” or what one of them refers to as “pseudocode” – a 100 to 150 page “draft” of what will eventually become a 400-page novel, which they later revise into a real first draft by adding scenes and incidents to explain plot twists or change the level of tension when it’s been too high or too low for too long. Often, adding these scenes alters the whole course of the rest of the book, which brings me to that second point.

However carefully you plan during your prewriting, it is never sacred and unchangeable. This is obvious, if you think about it a little. When you’re prewriting, you’re making stuff up – collecting materials (characters, plot turns, background), some of which you’ll use in the actual story draft. When you’re writing a zeroth or first draft, you’re making stuff up – only this time, it’s the specifics of exactly what was said, by whom, in what tone of voice, or exactly what was done, by whom, in what manner, and with what consequences. In other words, your brain is in making-stuff-up mode in both cases. So it’s not surprising for a writer to suddenly have a cool new idea in the middle of the draft that unfortunately means you have to change the plot, characters, or background in major ways. In fact, it’s more than unsurprising; it’s downright common.

Unfortunately, there seem to be a fair few writers out there who were scarred by their middle-school writing classes, and who think that once they have written an outline, they must stick to it. But if you’ve just had a really cool new idea that is going to make the story you’re writing even more interesting…why not use it? A more interesting, more effective, more surprising story is usually more desirable than the less interesting, etc., one.

Whatever the writer decides during any stage of the writing process, including prewriting, is subject to change without notice at any subsequent stage, right up until the book is published. Of course, it gets harder and more expensive to make major changes when the book is in production, but it’s still possible right up through the page proofs. If there’s a particularly egregious error, you can sometimes even talk the publisher into fixing it for the paperback version (e-books, of course, are a whole lot easier to fix at pretty much every stage of the game).

This does not mean things have to change in mid-story in order for it to be any good, nor does it mean that what changes must be large and significant. It depends on the writer. If you’re the sort who puts a lot of thought into your battle plan…er, outline and prewriting, the new ideas that you have while working on the first draft or revisions may be small tweaks that leave the main plot/characters/etc. mostly intact. If you’re the sort whose prewriting consists entirely of something like “I think I’ll write a book about a pirate,” and then you make it up as you go along, well, it’s much less likely that you’ll come up with something that changes your prewriting (though it’s possible, as when the book turns out to be about the pirate’s robot servant, or the noblewoman he captured, instead of about the pirate you started with).

Plot AND Characters

Plot and characters go together like green eggs and ham; one without the other just isn’t as interesting. Yet a lot of writers consistently have trouble making them work together. Either they’re so focused on their characters that they forget to make the plot work, or they’re so focused on the plot that the characters become little cardboard puppets just going through the motions.

Whichever way the problem runs, the keys to getting out of it are balance, flexibility, and occasionally reminding oneself that what you’re after isn’t green eggs or ham; it’s both together.

Balance means that you don’t spend three weeks twisting and polishing your plot to a high gloss and then you start writing. It means you spend a couple of days thinking about the plot, and then a couple of days thinking about the characters, and then a couple of days thinking about how putting those people into your original plot idea will change it, and then a couple of days thinking about how your people will react and change if your current plot events happen to them, and so on. Back and forth.

Flexibility means that you aren’t wedded to any particular idea – plot or characters – at all times. When you’re developing the story, especially, you have to keep trying out new notions and alternate possibilities even if they completely change everything you thought you were sure of so far.

If you are somebody who likes to talk about your stories in development, this will drive your friends absolutely crazy.

“Wait, I thought the purple mage was the bad guy,” they say.

“Oh, I decided it’d be more interesting if he was spying for the good guys.”

“But then why does he kidnap the heroine’s son?”

“Oh, he doesn’t; he got caught spying and she finds him when she goes to let all the kids out of the dungeon.”

“Kids? Dungeon?”

“I decided to make her a school teacher, so instead of one son she has a whole classroom of kids to rescue along with the spy. Or wait, maybe it’d be better if the villain kidnapped her, and the kids have to rescue both of them…wait, no, she’s the spy, and he’s the teacher! Yeah, that’ll work…”

“I’m confused…”

“It’s OK; it’ll make sense after I’ve written it.”

When a writer gets too focused on one thing, be it characters or plot, they tend to forget to think about the interaction between the two, and they end up with something like chocolate-covered-garlic or sour-cream-and-onion ice cream: mixing two things that would be fine on their own, but that really don’t work together very well.

Plot and characters are inextricably intertwined in any effective story. Plot is stuff that happens to the characters because of who they are and what they do, and living through the events of the plot changes the characters (as any life experience changes the person who experiences it). Separating the two is often useful in order to examine and talk about particular aspects of each, but in practice, it’s a lot like trying to separate an egg yolk from the egg white after the egg has been scrambled.

If you have a character who Just Wouldn’t Do That at a critical point in your plot, you have only two choices if you want your story to continue to work: you can jettison the plot, or you can jettison the character. Forcing the character to sneak into the dungeon when he’s more of a let’s-negotiate-a-ransom type isn’t going to work without some kind of change.

This sort of problem generally crops up in mid-book somewhere, and if the writer isn’t paying attention – if she’s focused too narrowly on Following The Plan – she may just steamroller on past it and end up wondering why the story’s gone flat. (This happens to character-centered writers just as often as plot-centered ones; the character-centered ones really, really don’t want to have to come up with a different plot when they sweat blood getting this one done, so they stick to the outline, while the plot-centered ones really, really like the whole rescue-from-the-dungeon sequence and don’t want to change it.)

This is where flexibility and balance and keeping both plot and characters in mind at once come into play. Once you see that the dungeon scene isn’t going to work as planned, you can decide whether you’re going to rewrite the character so he’s more of a jump-in-and-do-it guy and the sneaking becomes plausible, or whether you’re going to rewrite the plot so far so that your negotiator-guy has some really excellent and believable reasons for not negotiating this time, or whether you’re going to throw away your plot from here on out and let him go ahead and negotiate instead of sneaking, and then see what happens.

Blind spots

Every once in a while, I come across someone who has a blind spot for a particular major part of writing: description, emotions, action, internal monologue, or whatever. A lot of these folks think they can’t write because, without whatever it is they’re missing, their stuff doesn’t work…and they assume that if what’s missing doesn’t come naturally to at least some degree, they’ll never figure out how to do it.

This happens not to be the case. Every writer has some kind of blind spot; it’s just that for most of us, it’s something that’s not quite as obvious up front, something more minor than “action” or “dialog,” and we learn to dance around it or compensate for it fairly quickly. It’s more difficult when the blind spot is something central, like description or action, but it’s still possible.

The biggest difficulty, in my experience, is usually figuring out that one has a problem and exactly what the problem is, because of course the salient feature of blind spots is that one can’t see them. Often, the stuff one writes looks perfectly fine to the writer, and it’s only when the crit group or beta readers get at it that the writer begins to suspect there’s something wrong.

Unfortunately, at this point many writers decide that what’s wrong is the readers, not the writing. It always astonishes me when a writer’s first response to “I didn’t understand this bit” is “But it’s right there, see?” If somebody didn’t get it, then they didn’t get it; the question at that point is to figure out why and do something about it.

And yes, sometimes the problem is with the particular reader – but for a writer, that really needs to be the last possible conclusion, and never a final one. Because if you start from the assumption that the problem is always with the reader, you will never find and fix anything that you didn’t notice on your own, and there’s really no point in being in a crit group or having beta readers at all.

Even when you’re pretty sure that this particular reader has a bee in her bonnet about dialog or description or whatever, it’s worth reconsidering her comments from time to time, because as one’s writing improves, one generally gets better at spotting real problems, so it’s possible that in six months or a year or five years, one will look at the story and smack one’s head and think That’s what she meant! Why didn’t I see this before? And then one can proceed to actually fix the problem.

Because the very first thing to remember about fixing anything is that if you can’t see the problem yourself, it is practically impossible to fix it without mucking up everything else. This is what makes dealing with blind spots so extraordinarily difficult; by their very nature, one can’t see them, so how can one fix them?

Reader and crit group comments can alert one to the fact that one has a blind spot – that one always seems to start the story a chapter ahead of where it needs to start, or carry on three chapters past the actual end, or never say what the main characters look like, or never describe anyone’s thoughts/emotions, or whatever.

The next step is to learn to see the problem for oneself…and decide whether it’s a charming stylistic eccentricity, or a serious problem that needs to be fixed. A character who constantly “sings out” instead of calling or shouting may be fine for one book, though it can become a really noticeable and tiresome tick over a multi-volume series. On the other hand, if there are no action scenes at all (because the kidnapping, rescue, barroom brawl, chase through the ravine, and final shootout all take place offstage), that’s probably a very large problem unless you’re doing something meta and literary and know exactly what you’re doing.

Teaching yourself to see a problem happens in two main ways: by reading other people’s stuff and paying conscious and deliberate attention to seeing what they’re doing that you aren’t, and by going over your own stuff in revision and doing the same thing. This can be extremely difficult to do alone, though it’s not impossible. Sometimes, though, what’s needed is for you to go over the passage in someone else’s book, looking for the action (or description, or dialog tags, or whatever), and then have someone else go through the same passage and highlight it so you can’t miss it.

Once you learn to see when something’s there and when it really isn’t, and have decided that the book you’re writing will be improved by including it, you go to your own stuff and look. This is even harder, especially if whatever-it-is is something that’s missing (like action or description), rather than something that you’re doing too often. It’s relatively easy to go through a manuscript and highlight every spot where someone blinks or rolls their eyes; it’s a lot harder to mark places where there could be action or description or emotions, only there isn’t.

For most writers, especially if they’re still in the early stages of learning to write, this is second-draft and revision stuff. My personal experience has been that going through a manuscript and carefully deleting all the eye-rolls or overused “verys” and “reallys” and “managed tos” is painful enough that after doing it once, I remember and avoid doing that particular thing during subsequent first drafts…but that hasn’t stopped me from making new and different mistakes, which then need to be discovered and corrected. It’s a never-ending journey, but it’s the only way I know to keep improving.

The structure of the end

Most novels have three parts: beginning, middle, and end. At least, that’s what Aristotle said, and who am I to argue with a guy whose writing advice has been taken seriously by folks for the last 2000+ years? Today I want to talk about the end.

First off, let me point out that the end part is a whole section of a story or novel, not just the Big Story Climax or the final confrontation scene. The Big Climax or Grande Finale is the thing that gets the most attention in most how-to-write books, because it’s clearly critical to the whole book – mess up the scene where the main problem gets solved, and everything else falls apart. But really, there’s a lot more to it than that.

The first bit of the ending section is the transition from the middle part to the end part. Often, it’s a gradual transition, like heading for a mountain and not really being able to pinpoint the spot where the foothills end and the mountain range begins. Other times, there’s a sharp demarcation – a character suddenly sits up straight and says “I know how to steal the sword!” and we’re clearly off into the endgame. Sometimes, it’s even sharper, with the author dividing the story into sections or parts or books in a way that makes it obvious that the characters have reached the point of no return, and one way or another are about to take their final swing at solving the central story problem.

The second part of the ending section is the specific setup for the Big Climax. The general setup, where the reader works out what the central story problem is and why it matters, usually takes place in the middle of the book; the specific setup is the point where they settle their affairs the night before the battle, or the hero agrees to marry the villainess as the last possible way of saving the family farm, or the prince announces he’s going to be coming around tomorrow with this glass slipper for all the unmarried girls to try on.

Right before the Big Climax, the characters hit bottom in as many ways as the writer can make work at once. The heroine’s True Love appears to have abandoned her just before the battle in which the army is outnumbered five to one; the villainess locks the church doors as the wedding march starts; Cinderella is locked in her room while the stepsisters try on the shoe.

And then comes the climax – the big scene in which the heroine’s True Love shows up with reinforcements just in the nick of time; the organist reveals herself as the hero’s mother who’s brought the paid-off mortgage so her son won’t have to marry the villainess after all; Cinderella escapes in the nick of time and not only can wear the shoe, but has the other half of the pair.

In a straightforward story, the author has been promising and building up this particular conflict for chapters and chapters. The climax is the payoff – the point where the central story problem gets faced and solved once and for all…or where the problem overwhelms the characters for good. It’s very difficult to pull a bait-and-switch in the climax scene – to have an entire novel in which the problem appears to be returning the rightful king to the throne, for instance, and then have the climax be the establishment of a parliamentary democracy. It can be done, but only by a) carefully planting clues in the beginning and middle, and b) having the “switch” (the unexpected solution) be a more satisfying solution to the problem than the one the readers thought they were going to get. Not a better solution: a more satisfying one, in the context of the story.

Finally, there’s the denouement or validation, where any remaining loose ends get tied up, awards and weddings and funerals take place, and the characters are poised to move off into the sunset and the rest of their lives, for good or ill. There are three common, closely related mistakes that writers make here: 1) trying to tie up every single subplot and loose end, 2) running on for too long, and 3) overwriting the ending in a desperate attempt to find a killer last sentence.

Mind you, a killer last sentence is an excellent thing, if you can in fact find one. It is not, however, a necessity. (Given a choice, you’re much better off spending all that time looking for a killer opening sentence…but that’d be a different post.) Also, sometimes things that don’t look like killer ending lines, like “He walked out and closed the door gently behind him” or “Well, I’m home,” he said,” can become killer ending lines in context.

That whole last-sentence thing is a lot harder to recognize than you’d think. When you’ve been immersed in a novel for months, it’s hard to let go. Sometimes, even with a short story. When I was writing “Stronger Than Time,” an editor friend asked to see it. I sent a rough draft, with the comment “I know it needs about another half page, but this is what I got,” to which the editor wrote back “Don’t you dare add anything. It’s perfect right where it is.” And it is, and I can see that…now. Then, I was quite taken aback, as at the time I was really sure I needed to get my remaining characters actually out of the castle, instead of just talking about it.

Really abrupt endings, where the validation or denouement is cut to a sentence or two, are not my favorite things, but on the whole I’d say they’re better than the ones that go on and on even after the main problem has been solved. There’s a balance point that feels right – the longer the story, the longer the validation sequence. A short story may be fine with a few sentences or a paragraph; a novel may need anywhere from a paragraph to a chapter or so; a multi-book series may need several chapters of wrap-up to really feel finished.

Three kinds of research

Every so often, somebody asks me if I do research for my stories. I suspect this is because I write fantasy, and there is a perception among non-fantasy writers and readers that fantasy can simply be made up straight out of one’s head, without regard to tedious things like facts. This is, of course, nonsense, but you’d be surprised how many otherwise intelligent people hold to this view.

There are three basic kinds of story-research: specific, general, and accidental. I don’t know any writers who don’t do all of them, though I don’t think anyone else breaks it down quite this way (or if they do, I haven’t heard of them).

Accidental research is the kind of thing every writer does all the time, in the course of living. Some of it is common everyday life experience; some of it is stuff you stumble across when you’re watching TV or talking to a friend; some of it is uncommon, unsought events that a writer stores up for later. It’s the reason my writer friend who got caught in Hurricane Sandy spent her spare minutes scribbling notes (and when she didn’t have a pen and paper, focusing on things and mentally chanting “I have to remember this, I have to remember this). It’s the reason another friend, after crawling on hands and knees through a smoke-filled hallway to escape from a burning apartment, spent the next ten minutes cursing the fact that she hadn’t grabbed her glasses before she left, because without them she couldn’t get a really clear view of the progress of the fire and, later, what the firefighters were doing, so that she could remember it for later.

It’s also the way the sky looks on a clear autumn day, the annoying jingly Christmas Muzak that’s everywhere in December, the way the air smells near a freeway, the sounds the pots and pans make when someone’s cooking in the kitchen, the way bare trees develop a green haze for a day or two in spring when the buds break just before the leaves come fully out. It’s the way your best friend wrinkles his forehead when he’s thinking, or your sister flaps her hands (you can’t call it waving) when she gets excited. It’s all the little details that everyone glances at, but writers work at storing up and remembering for when they have to write that scene in the spring woods or on the summer beach or at the Grand Harvest Festival.

Accidental research is about paying attention to whatever is going on around you, because everything is material, and you never know what you’re going to need one of these days. It’s not about going out hunting for experiences to have; that comes under general or specific research…and really, if you aren’t paying attention to what’s already happening around you, going out to experience something new isn’t likely to be a lot of help.

General research, on the other hand, is about going looking for things you don’t know that you need to know. When I decide to write a book set in another place or time, the first thing I do is read a bunch of books that I hope will give me a feel for that place and time – biographies, historical overviews, social histories, books about daily life. When I’m between books, I read random things that catch my eye – books about pirates, women mine owners, castle building, Roman engineering, British diplomacy in the 1800s.

Writers are intellectual pack-rats; we store up interesting facts and curious stories from every source we can find, from Uncle Joe’s terrible jokes to scholarly works on obscure subjects. Sooner or later, it all comes back out in the work.

Specific research is what you do in order to find out the things you know you need to know. If I’m writing a book set in London in 1816, I go looking for street maps of London in 1816 (or as near to then as I can get). If I have a character who speaks thieves cant, I reach for my copy of The 1811 Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue. If my characters are mixing up a potion, I look through my various herbals in search of ingredients a) that people of whatever time I’m writing about thought were associated with the things I want the potion to do and b) that my modern herbals agree are harmless (I don’t add mercury to anything, for instance, even though according to some of my sources, it was considered a good remedy for quite a few things in the 1600s).

Accidental research is continuous. General research is usually a pre-writing activity – it happens between books, or when one has settled on a type of book that hasn’t been fleshed out yet and needs more real-life background before the writer can pick a direction to go. Several writers of my acquaintance allot particular amounts of time for pre-book research – two months, six months, a year or more, depending on the project and the particular writer’s temperament.

General research shifts into specific research gradually, sometimes imperceptibly. By the time I’m through the opening chapters of a book, I’m usually not reading general background any longer; I’m looking for specific bits of information. When and where was the first railroad built in New England? How much did a pair of stockings cost in London in 1822? How much of a load can a donkey carry, for how long, and how much of it has to be feed if there’s nowhere to get any along the route? When did armies start using drum signals, and how old were drummers when they were recruited and trained?

Those sorts of questions go on all through writing a book, right up to the end and on into revisions. They start to taper off during the copy-edit, which is when I go back to reading about typhus and geology and the history of coffee, until the next book comes along and the whole cycle starts over again.

Talking about it

One of the persistent pieces of advice given to new and would-be writers is “Don’t talk about your work until it’s finished!” Some folks get incredibly passionate about it, running on for pages in their how-to-write manuals and blogs, or shouting and waving their arms if they’re talking to you face-to-face.

There are a lot of reasons for both the advice and the passion. Quite often, the advice-giver is one of those writers who found out the hard way that if they talk about anything they haven’t written yet (whether that’s a novel idea, a plot outline, an upcoming scene, a bit of dialog or character development), they lose all interest in writing it. If they force themselves to write anyway, what comes out is flat and lifeless, and eventually they have to abandon it.

Obviously, anyone who’s had this happen becomes quite rightly paranoid about never, ever letting that happen again. Where they go wrong is in the assumption that this is the way everyone’s creative process works, and that therefore it is a Very Good Thing to warn incoming writers most strictly against doing themselves.

I happen to be one of those writers over on the other side of things. Talking about my work energizes me and helps me work through sticky bits (though it is often extremely disconcerting to the friends who hear me babble through what looks to them like a novel outline, whole and complete, and then find me next day, babbling with equal enthusiasm about a new plot twist that will fix some problem I hadn’t even hinted at the day before). It took me a while to figure out that one of my best friends is a can’t-talk-about-it type, and that my cheerful inquiries about her plot problems ran a serious risk of giving her a bad case of writer’s block.

There are, however, other kinds of bad experiences that make some writers advise against talking about works-in-progress, or, in extreme cases, against revealing that one is a writer at all. If the person one is talking to has a negative reaction to one’s plot or characters, it can have a crushing effect on one’s desire to write. Sometimes even a reaction that’s merely unenthusiastic can be profoundly dampening, especially when an idea is in its very early stages.

Also, different people react negatively to different things. I tend to get very grumpy and dig in my heels when well-intentioned relatives and the occasional acquaintance try to be supportive of my writing as a job – that is, they ask questions about my production (and I don’t mean “Have you written your page today?”) and if they aren’t happy with my answers, they trot out all sorts of anti-writer’s-block exercises and techniques they think I may not have heard of over the past thirty years. I hate nearly all possible writing exercises, and I’m quite capable of managing my production and output myself, thanks much.

All this means, though, is that I am selective about who I talk about my writing with. I want listeners who’ll get me revved up about the fun parts – making stuff up and coming up with plot twists and so on – not folks who spend half an hour reminding me that I’m in the miserable middle and I just have to grind my way on through (I can figure that out just by sitting down and grinding for a bit). If it’s not fun, what’s the point?

In addition to the negatives, there’s a positive reason for not discussing ones WIP. For some people, keeping it a secret is like lighting the fuse on a rocket, or shaking up an unopened can of Coke – it creates an internal pressure that helps keep them writing. In other words, they react exactly the opposite of the way I do: what gets them revved up is wanting to talk, but having to wait until the story’s finished before they do.

I come down, once more, solidly in the “whatever works for you” corner, with a couple of caveats. If you know or suspect that talking about your work-in-process will end up with you not producing anything at all, don’t talk about it. If you know or suspect that keeping your WIP a deep, dark secret will get you to write more, or faster, don’t let your beta readers see it until you’re all the way through the first draft. If, however, you know that you are energized by telling stories in a way that makes you go home and write them down, find some trustworthy friends and talk yourself blue in the face. Just be sure you have objective evidence – that is, more pages getting produced. It’s not at all uncommon for someone to think they’re energized and encouraged to write by talking, when in fact they merely enjoy telling the story a whole lot and the talk does not lead to actual pages produced.

If you’re going to talk, however, there are two classes of people for whom I advise extreme caution in discussing one’s writing at all. First, there’s one’s boss, if one has a day job (as most would-be and new writers do). I’ve known several people who, for one reason or another, explained to a supervisor that they were doing this writing thing, and in roughly three out of four cases, the reaction was negative (ranging from not getting that raise or promotion to forbidding the would-be author from working on the manuscript at the office on breaks or lunch hours). In at least two cases, the author in question fully expected the supervisor to be supportive, and was totally blind-sided by the negative impact it had on their second career. I’m not saying don’t do it, I’m just saying that you should be aware there’s a down side, and think carefully before you do.

The second class of people not to talk about writing with are those who are … “unsupportive” doesn’t begin to describe it. I’ve known writers whose families or friends have done everything from burning the would-be writer’s notebooks in an attempt to discourage them, to guilt-tripping (“Is it really fair to your children to spend so much time on this hobby of yours? You’re already away at the office all day…”) to deadly and destructive criticism to outright mocking. The only way to deal with such people is not to tell them you’re a writer at all. At least in this instance, it’s generally pretty obvious in advance that these folks are going to be toxic to one’s writing.