Patricia C. Wrede's Blog, page 54

Foreshadowing

Foreshadowing is the subtle art of suggesting or hinting at developments in plot, characterization, or setting that will happen later in the story. It’s a promise to the reader that the gun on the mantelpiece will go off eventually, that the main character will be forced to face his/her inner demons, that the seemingly-happy surface of the family or the town is either a sham or due to be disrupted in short order. It can range from the blatantly obvious (“Little did he know that he had less than an hour to live”) to the traditional (“It was a dark and stormy night…”) to the barely-visible (when the heroine scans the passers-by, is it the woman in the brown cloak who’s going to be significant later, or the man in the red vest? Or are they both just descriptive detail, adding artistic verisimilitude to an otherwise bald and unconvincing narrative, and not hinting at a reappearance at all?).

Dropping hints can be a tricky business; if the “hints” are too obvious, they telegraph future developments, which can remove both the suspense and the surprise (and often, the reader’s interest in continuing as well). If the hints are too obscure, the reader may not catch on at all, and then complain that things “come out of left field” and/or aren’t believable.

Authors use foreshadowing in order to increase tension or suspense, to set up later developments in character or plot so that they will be more believable, or to prepare the reader for future events in the story. Sometimes, the “foreshadowing” isn’t a conscious or deliberate choice on the part of the author at all; other times, it’s carefully planned from the get-go, or backfilled just as deliberately during revisions. It doesn’t matter when or how it gets in there, as long as it does the job.

What the job is, is a whole ‘nother question. There are so many possible things one can do with foreshadowing that it’s easy to get confused and try to do all of them at once. But foreshadowing is, above all, a promise to the reader that something interesting is going to come of this. If the writer doesn’t deliver on that promise, the reader loses trust.

For instance, the basic uses of foreshadowing are a) to make a future event or plot twist more plausible and believable, or b) to increase reader suspense, tension, or anticipation by pointing at important stuff that’s coming up. If an author heavily foreshadows an event that the reader already sees as plausible – say, the main character is going to stop at McDonalds on her way home from work – the reader will assume that the writer has a good reason for making a point of such an ordinary event. Consequently, the reader figures something interesting and plot-relevant is going to happen at that McDonalds (that is, since the foreshadowing is obviously not the “a” kind, it must be the “b” kind, pointing up something important).

If all that happens is that the character orders her burger and fries (no armed robbery in progress, no serial killer hiding behind the trash bins, no cheating spouse caught with their main squeeze), the reader is going to be disappointed. In the worst case – if the author has done a really good job of foreshadowing – the reader will spend the rest of the book wondering what the heck was so important about that visit to McDonalds, and when nothing ever comes of it, they’ll get cranky.

By the same token, the author can’t reasonably foreshadow every single thing that happens. For one thing, the novel would bloat up to an unreadable size. For another, plot twists and events are not equally important. If the author tries to give everything equal attention, the story flattens out into a tangle of subplots, with no one thread identifiable as the main plot, and the reader is likely to give up in confusion.

There are four basic techniques that are used to foreshadow upcoming events. The first is verbal, meaning, in dialog or internal monolog: the sensible character saying “We should stick together!” just before everyone splits up, the ranger warning the campers that there are snakes or bears in the area, the radio weather report suggesting storms. Next comes action, which covers everything from body language (a character whose hands shake and who breaks out in a sweat when his buddy suggests stopping at McDonalds, for instance) to screaming and running from a tiny spider.

Third is description – the proverbial gun on the mantelpiece, the three full bottles of aspirin in the medicine cabinet, the falling-apart jalopy that the reader can see is just ripe for a flat tire or breakdown. Last is a hard-to-describe category I call “authorial intervention,” meaning everything from direct statements by the narrator (“She didn’t suspect this would be the worst day of her life” “I shoulda known better than to trust a dame”) to things like prophecies and omens (because in most cases the black cat and the oracular pronouncement don’t arise from the cause-and-effect actions within the story; the author is the one who decided to have a prophecy or omen or symbolic storm at just exactly that right moment in the story).

A lot of people seem to consider authorial intervention to be “cheating,” so if you’re planning to use it in a story, you need to set it up with care and handle it delicately. Besides that caveat, there’s no reason to prefer one technique over another – which one to use depends on which one will get the job done smoothly in that particular story, without being either too subtle to see or hitting the reader over the head.

Movies vs. Novels

Let me start by pointing out that I’ve never written a screenplay myself. I’ve read some, and I’ve worked with some doing novelizations, but that’s a bit different from writing them myself.

I feel the need to point this out because I keep running into folks who think that because I write novels, I can advise them about their screenplays, either generally (“How should I write a screenplay? Who do I send it to?”) or specifically (“Could you critique this screenplay for me? There’s something wrong with this scene…”). There is, of course, a certain amount of overlap in the storytelling and structural aspects of both disciplines, so I can occasionally be helpful. But these kinds of questions always worry me just a little, because the people asking them are ignoring two really fundamental and vitally important differences between the two crafts…and as a result, they often make mistakes that can seriously muck up what they’re trying to do.

First off, movies are primarily visual, while novels are verbal.

Movies tell stories mainly with images. Have you ever been on a long-distance flight and not bothered to buy the headphones for the movie? I do it all the time, usually because I want to get some work done, and then I get distracted by the images…and son of a gun if I can’t tell at least 90% of what’s going on just from watching the pictures, no sound. Of course, they’re not meant to be watched that way, and I miss all the good lines and the ominous music and the creaking noise that alerts the hero just in time. Still, that seems to me to underline my point: movies tell the story with images, sounds, and dialog, and of those three, most of what the scriptwriter writes is the dialog part. (More of that in a moment.)

Novels have, for the most part, one tool and one tool only: language. Picture books include images as well as text, but the older the intended audience, the fewer illustrations tend to appear. By the time you get to YA novels, there’s hardly a picture in sight, and teen and adult novels limit illustrations to the dust jacket or cover (and even those are frequently abstract, rather than illustrative). In a novel, everything has to be done with words, which are processed in a linear fashion as the reader reads, right to left, one word at a time.

What this means is that a movie can make a huge impact with a single image. I still remember the first time I saw “The Wizard of Oz.” When the door swings open and the screen switches from black and white to color, and Dorothy (and you) get that first stunning glimpse of Oz…I don’t think anyone could duplicate that effect in prose. It would need a detailed description, and the more detailed it was, the longer it would be and the more time it would take…and the more time it took, the less you get that immediate stunning impact. On the other hand, the movie can’t give you Dorothy’s thoughts and feelings without an awkward voiceover, while a novel has little difficulty in providing a different sort of impact by going into her emotions when she realizes that she’s somewhere strange and far from hom.

The second fundamental difference between movies and novels is that all movies are massive collaborations, while most novels are solo efforts.

A movie is, at minimum, a collaboration between the writers, the actors, the director, the producer, the prop and costume people, the camera operators, the sound folks…all those people who get listed in the five minutes of credits that roll past at the end of the film. And note that I said “writers” – very, very often, a screenplay ends up being rewritten by a second or third writer, or worked on by a team from the very start. Novelists nearly always work alone. A scriptwriter is just the start of the process, and has little or no influence on what happens after the “final” script leaves his/her hands unless he/she is also directing or producing the movie. A novelist (or a team of collaborators) has ultimate veto power on whatever goes out in the final book unless it’s a work-for-hire.

Not being clear about these two differences causes problems for both types of writers.

I’ve seen screenplays where the writer kept inserting stage directions and notes to tell the actors how to say the lines or what the character is thinking at a particular time. Once in a while, this is necessary [GEORGE (sarcastically): That's a good idea!], but all too often, these directions betray the fact that the writer doesn’t really want to collaborate – he/she wants the actors, the director, the camera operators, etc. to make the exact movie the writer is picturing in his/her head. Furthermore, in concentrating on telling the actors and the director how to do their jobs, the writer often seriously neglects his/her own – writing dialog that tells the story without needing all those explanations of what the characters are thinking. Because, as I mentioned before, movies are notoriously bad at telling the viewer exactly what the character is thinking at any given moment. The camera can’t get inside the characters’ heads.

The scriptwriter also doesn’t necessarily know what is or isn’t available visually – what locations the director will be able to shoot at, what the budget will be for CGI, etc. Thus, the kind of detailed description of action scenes that you’d find in a novel are at best superfluous; at worst, counter-productive.  Shakespeare does not say “A bear enters stage left, and lumbers threateningly forward. Antigonus sees it and flaps his coat to distract the bear from the baby. The bear turns toward him…” No, the stage direction is “Exit, pursued by a bear,” and that’s all.

This can seem very foreign to a novelist. I was horrified when I was given the script for Star Wars Episode I and found the Big Fight Scene at the end, which I knew was going to be at least five minutes of spectacular lightsaber fighting on-screen. The script said, in its entirety, “The Jedi fight.” That’s all it needed. (I, on the other hand, had to come up with several pages of description, because it was, after all, the Big Fight Scene At The End, and there was absolutely no way I could get away with “The Jedi fought.”)

By the same token, I see a lot of young would-be novelists struggling to duplicate in prose the kind of dramatic visual revelations, zoom-ins, close-ups, and other dramatic visual techniques that the camera in movies perform effortlessly. Sometimes, one can do something similar, or find a prose technique that has a parallel function. More often, the result is awkward at best, impenetrably awful at worst.

There are things that transfer from books to movies and vice versa, but if one is going to try, one really needs to begin by asking “Will this technique actually work in this other medium?”

Meddling or editing?

Patricia, what is the dividing line between editing and meddling? The retitling of one of the Harry Potter books comes to mind.- Gene Wirchenko

There are a lot of flip answers I could give to this question, because it’s based on a fundamental misconception about the publishing process:  the idea that editors and publishers commonly make changes to an author’s work for which the author has no input and no recourse.

The reason for this misconception is that the editor’s work is invisible to everyone outside the process. The final book does not contain labels stating that this phrase or paragraph came from the editor, or that this scene or that was added or deleted due to editorial demand. So anyone who does not actually have an “in” to the business is guessing about just what parts came about as a result of editorial intervention, and what parts didn’t.

And what does the average reader or critic base these guesses on? Generally, it is the complaints they’ve heard authors make about the horrible things editors have done or have made them do. And the reason for this is that it is considered deeply unprofessional for editors to complain publicly about the work they put in for their authors, so they mostly don’t, resulting in an extremely one-sided picture.

On top of that, you have the situation with movie and TV scripts, where it is very rare, from what I’ve seen, for a script to have only one author, and it’s unheard of for any of the authors to have absolute veto power over the input of any of the other artists involved in what is, after all, a gigantic collaboration. Stories and complaints from this venue get folded into the realm of novel publishing – it’s all writing, isn’t it? – and it seldom occurs to people that the processes and basic assumptions for writing a screenplay are very different from those for writing and publishing a novel.

So, getting back to the original question: I would say that meddling is when an editor deliberately makes changes to an author’s work that the author does not have the chance to review and refuse.

In the case of the first Harry Potter book, 1) it is exceedingly common for foreign editions to be completely retitled; changing one word is really pretty minimal. (“Dealing with Dragons” was published in the U.K. as “Dragonsbane,” a much more significant change, and nobody, including me, thought anything of it. Some of the titles on the translations are even farther off, though that’s often as much a language problem as a marketing one); 2) changing the title is nearly always a marketing decision, not an editorial one, meaning that the editor frequently has nothing to do with it (aside from conveying the news to the author), because it’s the marketing gurus who make the decision; and 3) Rowling was consulted at the time; I believe she later said she regretted allowing it, but hindsight is always 20-20 and at least she had the opportunity to argue about it if she wanted to. (Admittedly, many first-time authors do not feel confident about arguing with a publisher over something so minor, especially when said publisher is paying them large sums for foreign rights.)

By my definition – changes to the work made without my input and with no recourse – I would say that I’ve never once had this happen to me in over thirty years of being published. That “Dragonsbane” thing? Hazard of selling foreign rights, and no big deal; certainly not meddling with my words (since “Dealing with Dragons” was the publisher’s suggestion in the first place).

Most of the stories of truly egregious editorial meddling that I’ve ever heard date back to the early-to-mid-twentieth-century (Horace L. Gold had quite a reputation for it, I’m told). The very few more modern instances I know of (and they are very few) are all, to the best of my knowledge, either instances where something slipped through the cracks (a particularly unfortunate last-minute change by a copyeditor that they forgot to run past the author before the book went to press, for instance – i.e., a failure of procedures, not deliberate meddling) or else are cases involving miniscule amateur presses, of the sort where everything from acquisition to production is handled by one person who has never actually worked in the publishing industry and who is therefore operating on the same misconceptions about “what editors do” as your average reader.

Note, please, that I said “the few stories” of editorial meddling – meaning that even among small, miniscule, and fan presses, it is highly unusual for an editor to change an author’s work without the author having the means and opportunity to change it back, should they desire to do so.

It is not meddling when an editor covers a page in little red circles and writes at the bottom: “You have seventeen semi-colons on this page, and that seems to be about average. Does your husband know about this love affair?”  It is not meddling when an editor changes “we went out” to “we left” and notes “You said ‘the candle went out’ just above; change to avoid echo and confusion.” Nor is it meddling when the editor says “You have this great action scene that your POV character is only told about. You need to have her be present for it” and then you have to write 10,000 new words in order to put the scene in. (And yes, those are actual examples.) It is especially not meddling when the author gets to see these (and all the other editorial changes and comments) before the book goes to the typesetter…and then gets another chance to go over everything when the page proofs come.

It is also not meddling when my editor and I disagree about a particular change, or set of changes, and I lose the argument. And that does happen, now and again. Yes, I could be one of those my-every-comma-is-golden authors who insists on winning every time…but the point isn’t to win all the arguments. The point is to make the book as good as it can possibly be.

If an editor suggests a change that I think is wrong-headed, or that I think will fundamentally change what I want the book to be, I object. Strenuously, sometimes. But I have to recognize that I am not always right, even about my own story. Being edited is a learned process. It is seldom comfortable, but the right editor can teach a writer a lot about humility and objectivity and taking the story to the next level.

Character motivation

I’ve been getting a lot of good questions lately, and I really appreciate it. However, even though Gene’s question about editing and meddling came first, I’m going to save it for next week, on the grounds that it’s about the business end, and I’ve been talking a fair bit about that lately and feel it’s time to get back to some craft stuff. I will get to it, though!

Meanwhile, I’m going to go with Emily’s request for a post about characters and their motivations. That’s pretty open-ended, but motivation is one of those basic character things where there’s plenty enough to talk about without further direction.

People (and therefore characters) have reasons for everything they do. Sometimes, those reasons are simple and obvious (the clerk at the Walgreens counter rings up your purchase because that’s his job); other times, the reasons are complicated and unclear, with roots that reach far back into a person’s past. One way or another, though, there’s always a “because” in there somewhere – because she promised, because he likes working with his hands, because they enjoy a challenge, because he’s afraid of pain/spiders/dogs/the dark, because she had a bad experience when she was eight, because, because, because.

The reasons people do things can be simple – because it’s the only way to survive – or they can be complex – partly because she’s ambitious, but partly because she likes the challenge, and partly because she really does want to help. They can be external – because that squeaky door hinge is going to drive her crazy if she doesn’t oil it – or they can be internal – because he can’t stand the thought of being betrayed again. They can be a desire to get or achieve something – because he wants that position, that ship, that girl; because she wants to become the best magician ever – or they can be a desire to avoid something – because she doesn’t want to go to jail, because he doesn’t want to feel pain, because they don’t want the kingdom overrun. Motivations can be obvious – because the dragon is right there; run away! – or they can be obscure – because he reminds her of a second-cousin she hasn’t seen in thirty years and has never mentioned to her traveling companions.

It is, however, very important to remember that  “because the plot says they have to” is not a motivation.

The plot is what the story looks like from the outside. The characters are inside the story; the plot may say they have to do X, but in order for that action to look and feel believable to readers, the characters have to have their own reasons for doing what they do. And those reasons have to be consistent with what the reader knows (or will learn) about the characters in the course of the book, or the reader very likely won’t believe in the character (and by extension, the plot).

Not all reasons have to be spelled out extensively, any more than every action the character takes has to be described in grim detail. Yes, George got up, showered and shaved, combed his hair, dressed, and had breakfast; 99.9% of the time, the author doesn’t need to mention that, much less go into detail about the position of the bed, the temperature of the shower, the type of soap, etc. About the same percentage of the time, the author doesn’t need to mention why George does these things – habit, fastidiousness, childhood training, etc. – because neither the actions nor the reason behind them is particularly important to the story, the character, or the reader.

Generally speaking, the spear-carriers and walk-ons, the grocery store bagger, cab driver, palace guard, maid, messenger, etc., who appear just long enough to bag the groceries, ferry the character from A to B, deliver the message – those characters don’t need motives for their actions beyond “it’s their job.” Even the charmingly chatty cab driver seldom needs more than “because he likes talking to people” as his reason for going on for a couple of pages.

The more important a character is to the story, the more carefully the writer needs to look at his/her motivation to make sure it holds up – that it’s believable emotionally and strong enough to explain why the character takes the actions he/she takes.

That doesn’t mean the motivation always has to be complicated and deep. “Because I don’t want the bad guys to kill me” is pretty simple and straightforward, for instance, and as long as the reader believes it, it can work well for everything from a straightforward action-adventure to a complex psychological thriller where nothing is quite what it seems and “the bad guys” keep changing from page to page. The reverse is also true – having a straightforward adventure plot doesn’t mean that the characters’ motives can’t be complex,

What motivation does have to be is plausible. That means the reader has to believe that this particular character would do whatever-it-is in this particular situation, for this particular reason. Not that “a girl” or “an alien” or “an Australian” or “a soldier” or “a redneck” or any other generic type or category of person would do this – what has to be believable is that Blytzmi, the Rigelian pipefitter who was raised in an isolated space colony, would do this for these reasons. Or that Indria, the runaway princess-turned-mercenary who’s spent three books now looking for revenge and who has no sense of humor whatever, would do it.

Because one of the other really important things to remember about motivation is that it is personal and individual. What works for one character won’t necessarily work for another, no matter how similar they are or seem to be. Also, people change over time, and so do their reasons for doing things…even if what they’re doing are the same things they’ve been doing for the last 200 pages. What started off as just a job may become a patriotic duty, or something done out of friendship rather than merely for money.

Finally, I want to add that as with many, many things in the writing process, figuring out the motivation of the characters is something that some writers do consciously, but other writers do intuitively. You may need to lay everything out clearly in your notes so that you can keep it obscure-but-consistent in your writing, or you may write by feel and only realize what your characters’ real reasons are when you get to the climax, or after. It really doesn’t matter, as long as the end product is a bunch of characters whom the readers will believe have their own individual reasons for whatever they’re doing…whether the readers ever actually find out what they are, or not.

Motivation

Motivation, according to my trusty Oxford American Dictionary, is “that which induces a person to act a certain way.” I like that definition a lot better than some of the others I ran across, including “inspiration,” “the desire to do something,” and “enthusiasm,” among others.

The reason I like that definition better is because it puts the emphasis on getting someone to act. You can be inspired, enthusiastic, and really want to do something…and still manage not to do it, as many, many writers can attest. Motivation is what gets people off their duff and actually doing something, rather than just talking about it.

Mind you, it’s pretty hard to get motivated to do something you don’t actually want to do (as the state of my kitchen sink will attest). Nevertheless, the sink gets cleaned periodically – perhaps not as often as my mother would have thought proper, but well before it starts growing blue fuzz. (OK, there was that one time…but it was an accident, really, I had to go out of town on short notice and…)

So when people ask me how to “get motivated” to write, I start with a couple of basic questions.

First, have you ever had a day job?

For most adults (and quite a few high school and college students), the answer is “yes.”

And did you always feel like getting up and going to work in the morning?

I don’t think anyone has ever said “yes” to this one, though a few folks have said “Almost always.” I think they’re balanced by the folks who don’t really wake up until they’re in the office and downing their second cup of coffee – sleepwalking your way to work does not count as “motivation,” in my book.

So what motivated you to go to work at your day job every single day?

This usually gets me some narrow-eyed looks, because people can see where I’m going. But if I can get people to answer honestly, it’s usually one of the following:

They have to eat, pay the mortgage/rent, etc.
Other people are depending on them for support/income.
They were afraid they’d get fired if they didn’t show up and work.
They have a responsibility (to the boss or the people they work with) to show up.
They find the work challenging/satisfying/meaningful overall.

Motivation, in other words, is not always a positive, happy, upbeat thing that makes you like the work. Motivation isn’t about liking. It’s about doing.

There is no motivation in the world that is going to make writing quick and easy and painless, each and every day. If that’s what you’re looking for, you’re pretty much doomed to disappointment. Motivation is what makes you sit down and work on the book even when it isn’t fun, when the prose is horrible and draggy and every comma looks wrong, when the characters won’t behave and the plot looks trite, and when you have the dismal feeling that something went off-track four chapters ago that means you’ll have to throw away 25,000 words or thereabouts.

Motivation comes in two basic varieties: external and internal. Having a boss or other authority figure who says you have to work is external; so is wanting to win a Pulitzer, or just wanting to get published. Wanting a challenge is internal; so is the desire to create, or just have fun. Most people find one sort more effective for them than the other (though really, for most writers it’s nearly always a mix. Everyone has bills to pay, and writing isn’t a field many folks get into if they don’t find it satisfying in some way).

Thus the first challenge for anyone who is trying to “get motivated” is to figure out what makes that particular writer willing to sit down and work. External or internal? Once that’s settled, figure out how to make that happen for you.

Every writer has his/her own tricks. Among the ones I’ve seen used successfully: Having one’s partner dole out one’s favorite cookies in return for word count (anywhere from one cookie per chapter to one cookie per paragraph, depending on how stuck the writer was). Taking a writing class in order to have a deadline. Participating in NaNoWriMo, ditto ditto. Having a partner/friend nag on a regular (daily, weekly, monthly) basis. Going to a coffee shop or library to write.

Making a “writing date” with a fellow writer, where you get together with your laptops and work for an hour or two before you have tea and scones (or Coke and a hamburger, or whatever rings your chimes). Joining a writing group (for crit, for support, for socializing – again, whichever supplies what you need).

Finding a “writing buddy” to check in with daily or weekly to compare progress. Taping pictures around one’s monitor that inspire or remind. Keeping a progress log (page count, word count, time…whatever works for that particular writer). Selecting a music “sound track” that suits the story. Getting “instant feedback” from dedicated first-readers who camp on their email.

Talking about the story to anyone who will listen. Not talking about the story to anyone at all until it’s completely finished. Getting up early/staying up late to write. Making a daily page/half-hour a habit first thing in the morning, like showering or brushing your teeth.

Reading bad fiction (“I can do better than this!”). Reading good fiction (“Oh, wow, I have to try that!”). Reminding oneself that “if I don’t write this story, it will never be told.” Telling oneself “it doesn’t have to be good, it just has to be finished” or “I can always put a pseudonym on it” or “This is just practice.” Telling oneself “This is the best thing I’ve ever done; it’d be a crime not to finish” or “I can’t waste all this effort by not finishing!” or “This will change someone’s life, but only if I get it done!” Telling oneself these things regularly (like, every morning and evening, and before, during, and after writing sessions, and as often as one thinks of it at other times).

Basically, you have to figure out what works to get you to sit down and put words on the page, and then arrange to get it. And you have to be honest with yourself. You may like reading great books, but if you end up spending all your writing time head down in Jane Austen, it isn’t really getting you to write, now, is it?

So…have you written your page today?

Plot lists

I’m still listening to that 12-hour series of lectures on literature, and today’s talk was about plot. Practically the first thing the lecturer did was to quote the thing about there being only two plots: the hero takes a journey, and a stranger comes to town.

I’ve heard that before, but this time I got to thinking about how that fits with Heinlein’s three basic plots (Boy Meets Girl, The Little Tailor, and Man Learns Lesson), the five or six “man vs.” plots (vs. nature, man, society, etc.), and the various other lists of plots and plot patterns I’ve run across in writing books over the years. And the first thing I noticed is that most of the things on these lists aren’t actually plots, by my definition.

This was kind of a shock, as I’ve gone alone merrily for many years without particularly questioning the fundamental premise of most of these plot lists. But “The hero takes a journey” and “a stranger comes to town” are both precipitating incidents – they’re where the plot starts, but they’re not the plot. You can take any of the other lists of “types of plot” and map all of them to either opening – a stranger comes to town and meets a girl, faces a gigantic obstacle, or learns a lesson; the hero goes on a journey and ditto ditto ditto. “Man vs. nature/man/himself/society/etc.” is a list of types of conflict; again, not strictly plots. The hero can go on a journey and meet a girl whilst struggling against nature, another man, his own insecurities, social obstacles… Even in Heinlein’s three basic stories, the first two are technically the set-up for a plot, and the third is the ultimate resolution of the plot.

In other words, none of these lists of “the types of plot” match up the way they ought to if they were actually distillations of plots. Looking at it a little closer, I can see that many of these lists are in shorthand: for instance, “The Little Tailor” evokes the whole fairy tale reflected by the title, and “A stranger comes to town” implies that this arrival causes a whole lot of other things to happen. And if you start combining the lists, as I did above, you do get even closer to what I think of as plot. Even so, I find it kind of disturbing to realize that all these supposedly-helpful ways of looking at plot aren’t actually looking directly at plot.

The reason for this is fairly obvious, when I think about it. Plots – even plot skeletons that have been stripped down to the barest minimum – are tough to convey in only a few words. “Boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy gets girl” is probably the most concise, and for listing purposes, this nearly always gets shortened still more, down to the first three words.

This can be very confusing and unhelpful, especially if one doesn’t have the sort of brain that automatically extends the shorthand description of conflict or situation or characters’ problems into the whole rest of the plot that the description is supposed to be shorthand for. If you think “A stranger comes to town” is all the plot there needs to be, then you will be very puzzled when people look at your description of someone arriving at the airport and say it has no plot.

Plots are about change – external or internal. It’s about the difficulties of the journey, not the starting or ending point.

The hero who takes a journey may be a Genghis Khan who drastically alters the world around him without apparently changing much himself, or she may be an ordinary person displaced by the sweeping armies who is profoundly altered by her trek to a new home without apparently having a large impact on the world, or he may be a Ghandi whose life-changing journeys to England and South Africa changed him into the man who could and did change India. The stranger who comes to town may change herself as a result, or call into question things that the town has taken for granted (causing them to change), or disrupt external things in ways ranging from opening a new store to murdering the mayor.

And change is a process, and what’s interesting about it is usually the how and why, not what. Change is also often difficult and uncomfortable, whether the characters are changing their opinions or trying to cope with massive disruptions in the world they’ve lived in until the start of the story. Change also generally involves causality – something that sets things moving, tipping over that first domino that knocks over the next, and the next.

All of this makes plot – the process of change – hard to sum up in a short, snappy entry on a list. This is, I think, part of why people always, always ask for sequels, even if the story ends “and they lived happily ever after” – because we know that change has consequences, and even good changes like winning one’s True Love or defeating the Evil Overlord are going to mean things work differently from now on, and we want to know what those new changes will be, and how and how the characters will cope with them.

I also think this is where my lecturer goes ever-so-slightly wrong, at least from the point of view of someone who is trying to write a story rather than read one. Because classifying plots according to any of these lists may be a useful way of looking at things from the reader’s perspective, but it’s the wrong focus for most writers, because it’s static. Classifying something assumes it’s going to stay classified, but you can’t ever guarantee that about a story until it’s finished. Writing is a dynamic process, not a static one.

Deadlines

So MaKayla asked about deadlines, specifically whether they’re good or bad, interfere with the process or enrich it, etc.

The answer is “It depends on the writer.” I know writers who freeze up at the mere thought of a deadline, and writers who can’t seem to write anything without one.

It also depends on what else is going on in the writer’s life at the time. A writer who is under a lot of pressure in other areas of her life (unexpected illness, serious financial problems, a death in the family, etc.) may suddenly find that having a deadline is one thing too many to handle, even though it’s never been a problem in the past. I’ve also known writers for whom the existence of a deadline was the only thing that kept them going during times of illness, financial crisis, etc. Mileage varies.

So first comes the old “know thyself” part. Which sort of writer are you?

If you can’t write (or can’t write much or steadily) without a deadline, and you don’t yet have one, you’ll have to figure out some way to persuade your backbrain that you have to get Chapter Three finished by next Saturday. Some folks take writing classes because it gives them a time and place at which they have to have some amount written. Others join writing groups for the same reason (though for this to work, the writer has to really take it seriously, and I’ve seen too many crit groups where 80 to 90% of the participants just didn’t have anything at all for any given session, which makes it hard to take it seriously as a deadline). Still others make a solemn promise to someone that they’ll see pages every Sunday, with the recipient given the right to impose penalties. (I know one writer who missed this sort of deadline and was forced to buy the recipient a hot fudge sundae…and watch her eat it.)

The more common problem, though, seems to be people who freeze in the face of a deadline.

If you’re this kind of person, the first thing I recommend is that you stop for a few minutes and think about why this happens to you. And be brutally honest. At least half the people I meet who have this “problem” only have it with their writing…they don’t freeze up when faced with a deadline at the office, and when they had papers due in college, they just buckled down and did them (OK, sometimes at 4 a.m. the day they were due, but still).

For folks like this, the problem is not so much the deadline as it is the fact that it’s a fiction writing deadline, which says to me that a good part of the difficulty is in the way they think about writing fiction – as something scary and special and not subject to the normal rules of work. Fixing this is a matter of attitude adjustment, which is never easy and which may involve lots of poking around in your childhood and your backbrain in order to figure out what you really think, why you have these reactions, and how to change them to something more productive.

But that still leaves the other half of people who have problems meeting deadlines. There’s still a lot of variation in this group: some people are convinced that no one can be creative writing to deadline (this is not true; many people can. The question is whether this particular writer is one of them or not); some chronically underestimate how long it’s going to take them to write ten pages (or how many pages it will take to cover X amount of material); some simply have bad time management skills; some procrastinate out of habit; and some go into such a panic at the thought of missing a deadline that it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy – their brains start running around in circles and screaming about the deadline instead of making up the stuff that will allow them to actually meet the deadline.

Again, diagnosis is key. If you’re having trouble meeting the deadline because it is One Thing Too Many on top of your child’s cancer, dealing with your soon-to-be-ex-husband’s lawyer, taking care of your elderly parent, and worrying about layoffs at your job, what you do will be very different from what you’d choose if the problem is habitual procrastination or underestimating how long it’ll take to get ten pages done.

Once you know why you’re having problems meeting deadlines, most of the solutions are common sense. There are a gazillion books on time management and beating procrastination out there; if one of those is your problem, it’s fairly easy to figure out what to do. (Actually doing it is another story, but no one can really help you with that part.) If it’s lack of discipline (or butt-in-chair time), the solution is likewise both obvious and not something anyone else can help with.

If you’re one of the folks who panics and/or freezes…well, if your brain and/or your backbrain is busy worrying or panicking about when something is due, it doesn’t have a lot of room left for actual work. Basically, you have to find some way to take the pressure off. In extreme cases, this may mean writing everything on spec (you aren’t required to sell on portion-and-outline after you’ve started publishing professionally, and of course if you haven’t sold anything yet, you pretty much have to work this way, as I don’t know any publishers who buy uncompleted first novels).

In less extreme cases, negotiating a deadline that’s much longer than you need can help; so can an understanding editor, agent, and/or spouse/partner. The main thing that seems to work, though, is forgetting about the deadline and refocusing on getting the writing done. For some, this means putting the deadline out of their minds and logging lots of concentrated time writing on a regular basis. Having a writing buddy to check in with (or to go for a “writing date” with – one of my friends and I have taken to hauling our laptops to a café once a week to spend an hour or two working) can help. If you’re of a more methodical/analytical mind, figuring out how many words-per-day you have to write to meet deadline and then making sure you meet that minimum every single day can work, as long as you only think about today’s word count and not that looming, panic-inducing deadline.

And of course, asking other writers for their methods of beating deadline-anxiety can be useful, as long as you don’t take any of them for the One True Method. Every writer develops his/her own tricks as they need them. These are some of mine; do, please, contribute your own in the comments, if you like.

Series backstory, part 2

Last time, I talked about ways to get series backstory (the stuff that has happened in the previous books of a series) into the sort of series that’s really a three- or five- or seven-volume novel split into parts. Today I’m talking about the backstory for the other sort of series, the kind that’s a collection of stand-alone novels, usually (but not always) about the same set of characters having different adventures or problems. Most detective series are good examples of this kind of thing.

As I said before, there are a lot of really good reasons for a multi-volume-novel type series to need a bit of review or reminder in the first couple of chapters (ideally in Chapter One, but you can’t always swing that).

None of those reasons apply to the stand-alone type series.

If what you’re writing is a collection of stand-alone novels, then each one ought to stand alone. That means that the writer doesn’t put in lots of extraneous-but-interesting information to get new readers up to speed, any more than the writer of a non-series stand-alone novel puts in a huge infodump recalling the protagonist’s life history to that point in his/her life. Everything that happened before Page 1 of the current novel is history, and the fact that some of your readers already know it doesn’t mean you have to treat it any differently from the background/backstory you made up prior to Book 1.

Yes, knowing the background and relationships that have developed over the past nine or ninety books ought to make the reader’s experience of the current book richer, but new readers don’t need to know all that in order to enjoy the current book. Book seventeen will be a different experience for people who come to it with sixteen books worth of backstory than it will for readers who haven’t read anything else in the series, but different does not mean bad or boring or unenjoyable. And it certainly does not mean incomprehensible – in fact, the amount of background a new reader requires in order to understand what’s going on is usually a lot less than the writer fears.

(This is, in fact, one of the potential advantages of writing a collection-type series. If the first two books of a five-volume novel are out of print when the last book hits the shelves for the first time, it’s a major problem. Very few readers want to read only the last half or the last third of a novel. If the first twelve books of a nineteen-book set of detective novels are OOP, it’s an annoyance for new readers who grab the latest one, love it, and want to go back and fill in, but it’s not the same kind of catastrophe.)

So, what goes into the book is however much background, backstory, or history needs to be there for that story, whether we’re talking about politics, the history of ancient China, the protagonist’s confused relationship with his/her childhood sweetheart, or the slowly growing friendship between the sidekick and the alien from Rigel VII. And rather than dumping it all in Ch. 1, you put the information in when the reader needs to know it – some in the first chapter, some in the third, some in the tenth…wherever it makes sense.

Note that “the amount of backstory that needs to be there” a) is nearly always less than the writer and faithful readers think; b) is not going to be the same for every novel in the series; c) is not related to where in the series a novel falls (Book 19, in which the heroine has been kidnapped by pirates and spends the entire novel dealing with them, may need very little of the background that’s been established in the 18 prior books, while Book 7, in which she’s dealing with a complicated plot to assassinate her best friend’s father-in-law [who’s also Chief Justice of the Interstellar Tribunal] may need to refer to nearly everything in the previous six books, one way or another); d) can vary if there’s a two- or three-book story arc mid-series, and e) often varies depending on stylistic and thematic considerations. In other words, like “it works,” how much backstory one needs is a judgment call.

Most writers have a fairly good handle on this when it comes to their characters’ history. You don’t see detective novels that start with a run-down of every murder the detective has solved in the past six books. What seems to trip people up most frequently are the character relationships. I’ve seen more than one great stand-alone series bog down around book six with what I call “check-in syndrome” – the writer spends more and more time at the front end of the book “checking in” on all the recurring characters the readers love, even if those characters have no particular part in the current story. Then the book either bloats up to twice the length it needs to be, or else the actual plot is crammed into the remaining few chapters, greatly to the detriment of the story.

What all this boils down to is that in a collection-type series, I’d recommend erring on the side of too little backstory rather than too much, unless you already know that you under-explain or unless you have solid stylistic or thematic reasons for running on and on about what’s already happened (for example, a garrulous first-person narrator…)

Series backstory, part 1

Every so often I get an email request from one of the readers of this blog, asking me to address a particular writing question. This week’s inquiry boils down to “When you’re writing a series, and you’re on book three (or five or nineteen), how much backstory do you put in and where and how do you include it?”

This one seems to give a lot of people fits, because there’s a lot of conflicting advice out there. And the reason there’s a lot of conflicting advice is, in part, because what you do with series backstory depends on what sort of series you are writing.

There are two basic kinds of series: 1) the sort that’s really a multi-volume novel, where plots and subplots carry over from one book to the next, and 2) the sort that’s a collection of different stories about the same set of people, with each book being a relatively independent adventure. A lot of the confusion about series backstory derives from mixing up the two types, because they have very different backstory requirements.

When you’re writing the first type of series, each book after the first one necessarily starts in medias res, because you’re really only telling one story that’s been broken up into parts. New readers coming in at book 2 or 3 will very likely be hopelessly confused if they don’t get some sort of summary of events to-date, and even fans of the series from way back may need a few reminders of what’s been going on, because it’s normal for the books to come out a year or more apart. Ideally, one wants this reminder as early in the book as possible, to minimize reader confusion and settle the story back into place.

The difficulty here is one of pacing. One doesn’t really want Chapter One of a book to be slow, no matter how many complex plots and subplots one needs to remind the reader of. One especially doesn’t want a too-detailed reminder of plots and subplots that will annoy people who come to the series after all the books are out and they can gulp them down one after another over a long weekend or vacation.

There are three basic methods for getting the necessary updates in anyway: one can treat the story as a more normal in medias res opening; one can set up the reminder in the previous book; or one can begin with a what-has-gone-before prologue, which readers can skip if they’ve recently read earlier books (or if they’re on their eighth re-read and know the plot by heart already).

The first method, writing as if the story is a stand-alone that just happens to start in the middle of the action, tends to work very well for a lot of stories. The writer doesn’t have to dump a huge mass of information into Chapter One; everything comes along just as the reader actually needs to know it, which for certain facts may not be until Chapter Ten. That means one can avoid a potential slow opening and get on with the story. Readers who dislike in medias res openings won’t care for it if they get hold of it first, but that’s why the publisher should put “Book 2 of…” in some clear and obvious spot on the cover.

The second method, setting up the summary in advance, requires careful planning, because the set-up usually goes at the end of the previous book – someone promises to write and explain, or demands a report, or talks about the upcoming conference, or mentions a new character who’ll need to be brought up to speed on what’s going on. The next book opens with writing the letter or the report or with the conference or the arrival of the new character, so the overall story flows along seamlessly.

When handled clumsily, this looks like the device it is – a compromise between working things in in bits and doing a prologue – and it’s not something you’d want to use book after book in a long-running series, because it gets really obvious if you do it more than once even if you’re clever. It can, however, work well if one is fairly far into a longer multi-volume novel with a complicated plot that even readers who have all the books ready to hand may be glad to see laid out clearly.

The third method, the what-has-gone-before prologue, is pretty self-explanatory; the main thing to remember here is not to get too attached to it, because people will undoubtedly skip it when they re-read it. It’s a practical solution if one has a convoluted plot, lots of subplots, and lots of characters, all of which the reader needs to be up to speed on before the opening scene.

The biggest problem most writers seem to have with all of these methods is a tendency to put in far more information than the reader actually needs to know in order to pick up where the story left off. (There are, as always, a rare few who put in too little information and end up making the reader’s potential confusion worse than ever, but as I said, they’re rare, and a good editor, beta reader, or crit group will call them on it.)

On the other hand, a multi-volume novel is still one story; it’s published in multiple books for reasons of production, or to give the reader a break (a million-plus words is somehow a lot more intimidating in a single volume than it is broken up into five or six more normal-looking books, even though nothing else about it changes). Deciding that one is not going to make any concessions to the publishing process (i.e., completely ignoring all of the above and putting in no what-has-gone-before stuff, nothing to remind a reader of what happened two books and three real-life years ago) is not a totally unreasonable position to take. One simply has to be very, very sure that one’s story is strong enough to hold up without extra artificial linkages between the parts, and willing to argue with or ignore all the editors, beta readers, etc. who tell you that you have to have something to fill in the reader on what has gone before.

As this is getting rather long, I’m going to stop here and do part 2, on handling the collection-of-stand-alones type series, on Sunday.

Conjecture, trip report, and some other stuff

I’m back home at last, after a solid week without a decent internet connection (hence the lack of a post last Wednesday. My apologies).

Conjecture was great fun; I recommend it to the attention of anyone in the San Diego area around this time next year. The hotel was a big of a maze, and their internet was “undergoing upgrading” and therefore wildly unreliable, but the staff was very nice and the convention space worked really well, I thought.

Among the standout moments were the Chowder Hour in the consuite, the joint Star Wars Reading (in which voice actor Mark Biagi and I, with some helpful volunteers from the audience, did a joint reading from the Star Wars novelizations, with Mark doing the voices and me reading the narration), the Iron Hack event (in which four of us composed a story on the fly, incorporating various people, places, and objects suggested by the audience, including Conan the Librarian, the Ark of the Covenant, William Gladstone, and Captain Nemo’s Hideout, among other things), and the Enchanted Tea, to which everyone was encouraged to come in Regency costume (I really must get around to making myself something more suitable to wear to such an event).

Following the convention, we had a long and very wiggly drive home, with stops at White Sands National Monument (where I was pleased to discover Green Glass Sea, Ellen Klages’ excellent YA about Los Alamos and the development of the first atomic bomb, on sale in the gift shop) and Carlsbad Caverns, where we got to walk around the cave and then stayed to watch the bats come out. Dad allowed as how White Sands was a lot more interesting now than it was when he was 18 and thought it was just a lot of sand and kind of boring.

One of the things I did during part of the drive was listen to the first part of a batch of recorded lectures I purchased recently. As many of you know, I never took any English, Literature, or Creative Writing classes after I got out of high school. I was a Biology major, and while my college required a certain number of distribution credits, English was in the same group as History, so I filled mine in with classes in the history of places that my high school didn’t cover, like China and India. I figured that reading books was something I’d do anyway, but I’d have a lot harder time figuring out what the best history texts were without a bit more background.

On the whole, I’ve never been sorry I made that choice, though I have often wished I hadn’t needed to make it. It would have been so much nicer to have had enough time to take both sets of courses… Anyway, after years of complaining about what I missed, I finally decided to take advantage of the availability of lectures on tape and the internet to fill in a bit of what I missed.

So I’m now about halfway through a lecture series that’s about twelve hours of what I’d call an overview of English Literature and the way college-level classes look at it. It’s been enlightening on a number of accounts, mostly in understanding how academics, who are by and large not themselves creative writers, view fiction, and how it is and isn’t helpful to people who actually want to write the stuff.

For starters, the first three lectures are mainly about authors and their relationship with readers. It’s very clear from the references and terminology that the lecturer is throwing around that this is considered a normal, maybe even fundamental, aspect of thinking about literature. He even poses (but does not answer) the question: How much does the reader need to know about an author in order to appreciate their work properly?

Now, I can see that sometimes it is useful to know things about an author, specifically when a) the author makes a habit of including in-jokes and references in his/her work that no one unfamiliar with his/her life can get, and b) when the book was written far enough in the past that it takes a certain amount of historical knowledge to understand it because things that were common knowledge at the time no longer are.

But does knowing stuff about the author really make a difference to a reader’s enjoyment of a book? If so, why don’t all books come with an authorial biography before or after, in order to enhance every reader’s experience? Oh, a lot of folks are interested in what their favorite authors are like, and want to meet them or read their blogs or send fanmail/email to express their appreciation, but that’s not quite the same thing. The “favorite author” part – reading and liking the books – comes first, and the interest in the author derives from that. Also, there are far more people who just read the books and don’t much worry about what the author is like.

It’s a tricky question, because I have noticed that for a lot of folks, knowing the author does change their judgement of a work…but not predictably. For some, knowing the actual author makes them less critical and more tolerant of flaws that would have them tossing a stranger’s book in the discard pile; for others, knowing the author makes them pickier and more inclined to object to minor problems they’d never notice in a random library book.

For myself, I don’t write novels in order to “create a relationship with my readers.” I write to tell stories, and it’s the stories that matter, not me. Thinking too hard about “the audience” is absolutely deadly when I’m writing. It’s a distraction I don’t need.

Actually meeting people at conventions and autographings and so on is fun and I certainly do enjoy it. Talking to people through this blog is also fun. But it’s not the reason I write novels, and the relationship that I have with the fans I meet here or at cons has nothing to do with how and why and what I write.

I’ll probably have more to say about this series of lectures as I work my way through the course. There are some on plot and subtext coming up that look interesting…