Patricia C. Wrede's Blog, page 55

Frames

Today I decided to talk about frame stories. “Frame story” is a bit of a misnomer; it’s actually short for “story with a frame,” and it’s a very specific story structure in which the opening (whether that’s the prologue, Chapter One, or the first scene) and closing (whether that’s the epilog, last chapter, or last scene) form a separate-but-related story or incident that “frames” the main story. Some stories have a double-frame – the story-within-a-story-within-a-frame – and you can theoretically take it down as many levels as you want, as long as you can keep it all clear for the reader.

Frame stories used to be a lot more popular than they are now. The as-told-to frame, where two characters are talking (often in a bar) and one starts telling the other the story that is the main story, got used quite a bit – supposedly, having an authority figure within the story tell a tall tale made it more believable or acceptable to the reader.

Personally, I think that the reason frame stories fell out of fashion is that it’s difficult to come up with a framing incident that is interesting enough to get the reader involved, memorable enough that when the reader gets to the end they’ll recall what’s supposed to be happening, but not such a tense cliff-hanger that the reader will scream in frustration and flip straight to the end to find out what happens.

There are, however, two kinds of frame stories that you still see every so often. The first is the prologue-epilogue frame, in which the prologue and epilogue form a separate-but-related story or incident that brackets the main story. The prologue presents a character who is going to read, write, tell, be told, or set in motion the main story, and the epilog returns to the character to give his/her reaction once the story is finished.

A frame prologue-epilog usually takes place later in time than the main story, making the bulk of the novel a sort of mega-flashback. Generally the prologue/first frame scene ends with someone leaning back and saying or thinking “So why shouldn’t I hang/courtmartial/fire/exile you?” and the person in front of him saying “Well, sir, it’s like this…” and we’re on to the start of the real story, only coming back at the end to find out if sir really did hang/courtmartial/fire/exile the tale-teller.

The main trouble with this one is that the main story needs to be very strong to compensate for the fact that we know the characters who’ve appeared in the prologue are going to survive. I’ve also seen a few of these in which the author appeared to think he/she needed an excuse to write in first-person. If that’s all the frame is, it’s probably scaffolding that can be taken down and dispensed with once the rest of the story is finished, as most of the readers I know don’t need that kind of justification for a first-person story. (And I should probably add that a story within a frame does not have to be in first-person, even when the first frame scene ends “Well, sir, it happened like this…”)

The second sort of frame story you see around a fair bit is more like one of those shadow-box frames that has multiple compartments, each containing a different picture. It’s usually used to string together a bunch of closely related short stories. If the frame story is strong enough, and does a good enough job of stitching the short stories into a coherent whole, you get what’s commonly referred to as a “fix-up novel;” if it’s not, you get something more like a short story collection with a series of introductions by the characters, like Poul Anderson’s Tales of the Flying Mountains.

A good writer can use a frame structure to reinforce or undercut the events or the theme of the main story. You can give things an unexpected or humorous twist in the final segment of the frame, revealing information about motivations or manipulations or behind-the-scenes players that nobody in the main story had. Also, the frame story does not actually have to include the protagonist of the main story; maybe the frame is the sidekick or one of the villain’s minions explaining what happened to his/her mother.

The main question to ask when considering whether to use a frame is: does it add anything significant to the story besides word count? Does it make the overall story even cooler? If it doesn’t pass the coolness test, you should probably pass on including it. On the other hand, if all the story coolness is in the frame, maybe the frame should be a story of its own. Frames are, after all, supposed to enhance what they surround, not draw all the attention to themselves.

Hollywood science

The trip continues; we have reached LA after a stop in Las Vegas (neither of us did any gambling, but we ate some great food and saw Cirque du Soleil’s Mystere). And in justice to my father, I have to point out that when he ran off the road in the mountains, a) he was eighteen and b) the steering wheel had just come off in his hands (he was driving a “junkyard jalopy” that he and my uncle had built themselves out of spare parts). So it really wasn’t his fault (unless he was the one who’d tightened the bolt on the steering wheel, and at this date, I don’t think he remembers. It’s been 74 years…)

Anyway, since I’m now in the vicinity of Hollywood, I thought I’d talk a bit about “Hollywood science” and its uses and abuses.

Hollywood science is the term many folks use to refer to the improbable, outlandish, and just-plain-wrong “science” that appears in a lot of Hollywood films and TV. The attitude often appears to be that it’s only a movie (or worse yet, only a science-fiction movie) and therefore things don’t have to be accurate. This annoys those of us who feel that even if it is only a something, it’s still science, and ought to be as accurate as possible (and, at the least, ought not to be significantly INaccurate).

Unfortunately, this is one of those areas where opinions differ as to how accurate things need to be, and how accurate they can be, given the constraints of whatever medium the writer is working with and the type of story the writer is telling. There are also differences of opinion when it comes to projecting the possibilities, which is always some aspect of science fiction. Nearly every science fiction writer I know has at some point been approached by someone who’s said “I don’t think X thing you have in your book is possible,” and then, on being told what science the author based it on and why, has said “I still don’t believe it.”

Such differences of opinion about what is and isn’t possible often lead to accusations of Hollywood science, and it’s impossible to say who is right or wrong. I choose to think that if the author did his/her homework and has a logical chain of arguments in favor of his/her projected science, then even if I don’t think it works, it doesn’t qualify as Hollywood science. But that’s me.

Where I think the line goes is when an author gets the easy stuff wrong. Confusing star systems with galaxies (or vice versa), using “lightyear” or “parsec” as a measure of time, rather than distance…those sorts of things are Hollywood science at its worst, and there’s no excuse for them. They’re pure laziness on somebody’s part.

And getting the easy stuff wrong to no purpose weakens the story. It gives the reader a reason to disbelieve, and at least some of them will take advantage of that (and then quit reading). Which is why ignoring reality, and especially ignoring real things that can be easily checked via Google, is not the best idea for most authors.

Sometimes, however, sticking to real science (and real reality) is detrimental to the story, and when that is true, the story comes first. This is, after all, fiction; by definition, it ignores reality on some basic level. There are two obvious ways I can think of for sticking too closely to real science to be detrimental to the story: 1) when doing so requires more skill in explaining than the writer possesses or the medium can bear, and 2) when the basic premise of the story is contrary to what we currently know of reality, as with fantasy or faster-than-light travel.

#1 is to some extent a judgment call, I admit. It also varies by media; what is an acceptable one-page explanation in a novel can be impossible to translate to a movie screen without slowing the story to a crawl and/or boring the audience to tears. This, I think, is one of the reasons hard SF (which SF practically requires all the whizzy science-fictional gadgets to have some solid foundation in physics-as-we-know-it-to-date) is so difficult to turn into movies or TV without warping totally out of shape. Space opera usually fares much better.

It is, however, also true that the ability to write an interesting infodump is a learned skill, and learning to do it can take a while. A writer who hasn’t yet developed that skill, and who knows he hasn’t developed it yet may be better off using handwavium that does exactly what the story requires, rather than embarking on a two-page infodump detailing why cesium, when subject to the proper pressures, behaves in exactly the same way.

#2 is also to some extent a judgment call, though it seems more obvious than #1. A lot of fantasy is intended to mimic reality in many ways except for the existence of magic or magical creatures. Where it’s supposed to seem real, the author has to stick with reality or start losing readers. Horses have to act like horses, not bicycles or motorcycles. But there are also totally surreal fantasies where the whole point is that anything is possible: flowers talk, china dolls move, monkeys can have wings and fly, woodland streams taste of lemons, etc. For those, sticking too closely to reality can ruin the fun.

What it comes down to is, as usual, not to make careless mistakes. If one is going to break the “rules” of reality, one ought to have a good idea what they are and why the particular story needs those rules to be broken. It is also a good idea to have a backup explanation for use when cornered by a fan who objects to whatever liberties one has taken with the laws of science.

Interlude: On the road

As my regular readers know, I’m currently on a three-week (roughly) road trip with my father, from Chicago to San Diego for Conjecture and then back. I let my Dad plan the route. If I ever do that again, I will double-check it a week in advance and find out whether there is anything going on that might necessitate actual room reservations at various planned stopping points along the way (we’ve already had one town nearly full-up with a state-wide convention and another full because of a free music festival). Dad tends not to worry about stuff like that.

Some things I expected to hear on this trip:

“Nebraska is very flat.”

“Didn’t we already cross the Platte River? Twice?”

“Did you remember the charger for the iPad? I forgot mine.”

Some things I didn’t expect to hear:

Dad: “This isn’t the right place! There’s a lake here, I don’t remember a lake!”

Me: “Dad, when was the last time you were here?”

Dad: “1938.”

Me: “So that would probably be BEFORE they built that nice new-looking dam over there?”

Also, while I’m driving on a twisty mountain road with a sheer drop on one side:

Dad: “I can drive if you want.”

Me: “Not now, there’s nowhere to pull over. Why do you want to drive?”

Dad: “I like this road. It looks just like the spot where your Uncle Richard and I ran over the edge when our steering went out.”

Me: “Why are you still alive?”

Dad: “Oh, there were some pine trees that caught us about twenty feet down and some guy came by in a truck and pulled us out.”

Me (with some trepidation): “Who was driving when you went over the edge?”

Dad: “Oh, I was! But it wasn’t my fault.”

Me: “I think I’ll just keep driving for a while.”

So far, we’ve been to Estes Park and driven the high road through Rocky Mountain National Park, then spent a couple of hours at Bryce Canyon before we got to Zion National Park this afternoon. Which seems like a lot to me, but apparently Dad and my uncle hit 32 national parks in a 2-month driving trip in 1938 that should, from the sound of it, have killed both of them several times over. So he’s showing me the high spots. Literally, in some cases; according to the signage, we were 2 miles above sea level at a couple of points on the trip. He’s currently peeved because he bought a lifetime National Parks membership about 30 years ago when he turned 62, and didn’t remember to bring it (that’s assuming he could FIND it, which I doubt, but it’s really kind of a moot point).

If the hotel internet connection I’m currently using were more reliable, I’d probably try to twist this into some sort of writing point, but I’m afraid of losing it (again), so that’ll have to wait. With luck, I will be able to return you to your regularly scheduled blog post by Wednesday, by which time we should be in LA or San Diego, which I trust will be a bit more reliable as far as connection goes.

Imperfect telepathy

Writing is not a visual medium, not in the way that photographs, paintings, or movies are visual. Yet there are readers and writers who think of it this way. It’s quite common for writers to describe “the movie in my head” or “seeing the scene and just writing it down.”

There are two potential problems with this approach, from a writing perspective. The first is that the visually oriented writer often doesn’t realize that not all readers work the way she does, resulting in bewilderment when their work is criticized for things like grammar, style, or syntax. For an extremely visual writer, the sentences are not important. Sentences are a means to an end, the vehicle that creates mental pictures, like the pigments in a painting or the tints on a strip of film. Unfortunately, neglecting sentences in favor of the mental movie often means neglecting all those readers who do not “see a movie” when they read.

The other, more insidious problem is that writing is not telepathy. No matter how clearly the writer visualizes a scene and how minutely he describes it, his readers are not going to construct exactly the same scene in their own heads. Many, if not most, of them will come close, but even those who read visually will not construct exactly the same mental picture from the same set of words.

This is because words are more than their meanings. Words have personal resonances that depend on the life experiences of individuals. For instance: I grew up in Chicago. My idea of a river is the Chicago River or the Mississippi. When I read the word “river” in a story, I picture something that can handle steamboats and barge traffic. I’ve been to places, however, where the local waterway was five feet wide and maybe three feet deep, barely able to handle a string of canoes traveling single file…and they still name it a river, and I have to believe that that narrow channel is what they picture when they read the word “river” in the same story I read. Which is more than enough to result in major differences in the mental pictures each of us construct of the landscape, even if we (and the author) agree on the images that are evoked by every other description and phrase in the story.

There is no possible way for a writer to control this. A visual author who gets hung up on the reader getting exactly the same “mental movie” as the one he has in his own head is courting madness. Even if you get a group of intelligent, articulate beta-readers, you won’t hear the same things from each one, because they’ll each bes interpreting your words according to slightly (or majorly) different mental biases. 

This is especially true because a lot of readers these days don’t have the patience for the long descriptive passages that are necessary if a writer wants every detail of a scene clear in the reader’s mind. It may matter to you that there is a pencil sketch of Abraham Lincoln on the wall, a decorative porcelain egg in the middle of the table (just slightly off-center under the brass chandelier), etc., but unless the sketch and the egg tell the reader something useful about the characters or the plot, a lot of them will tire of such details very rapidly. Hence the emphasis, in writing advice, on the “telling detail” – the one thing about this person or place that’s unusual, that packs a whole lot of information and “feel” into a very small amount of description.

Writers have to accept (or at least learn to ignore) the fact that their readers are not going to produce exactly the same image from the words-on-the-page that the writer has (or wants them to have). We try, certainly, but it’s never going to be perfect.

You can’t give a reader the experience in your head unless you really are a telepath and can somehow broadcast your thoughts every time someone reads what you’ve written. What you are doing, as a writer, is giving the reader a whole bunch of building blocks and telling them to build a house or a skyscraper or a castle. They won’t build the exact same house or skyscraper or castle that you were picturing in your head, but as long as what they build pleases them, they’ll be happy. If that’s not good enough for you – if it’s really that critically important for your visually-inclined readers to “see” exactly what you “see” – you’re in the wrong field; you need to be making movies instead.

Readers are, in a sense, collaborating with writers in creating the story experience. Neil Gaiman has several times told the story of a particularly memorable scene from a childhood favorite book, in which the protagonist rode through the night, unable to see far in the dark, with the wind whipping his cape and the snow swirling about and his fingers slowly growing cold and stiff on the reins. And then he finally found the book and turned to his favorite scene and read “They rode all night in a snow storm.”

You can’t predict when a simple sentence like this will strike that kind of chord in a reader, evoking a vivid mental picture of an dramatic multi-page scene that never existed. You can only be pleased when it happens, and glad that you have such excellent collaborators.

 

Body language

Body language is one of those things that has to some extent become a code. “He shrugged” “She sighed” “I smiled” and so on have become almost like punctuation – nearly meaningless things inserted into a paragraph or a line of dialog to let the reader know that there’s a pause here, or a small change in the level of the action, or something that needs just a little more emphasis.

As a result, some writers find it difficult to move beyond the code. They don’t stop to think about all the little things real people really do when they’re listening or fidgeting or concentrating or bored, because they have these basic code phrases already occupying that slot in their minds. And they especially don’t think about how body language can reflect characterization, because really, how much characterization do you get out of a shrug or a sigh or a smile?

But if you stop to think for a minute, body language is about the whole body. It’s not just a couple of gestures; it’s about how individuals move and stand and use every single part of themselves, from hair to toes. People slouch and slump and stiffen; they cough and swallow visibly and sneeze; they tense up, relax, turn red, go pale. Sometimes, the body language is under their control (as with raising her chin or crossing his legs); other times, it isn’t (few people can control their blush reflex). But no matter what else is happening, every single person in the scene is doing something with his or her body (unless they’re dead, and sometimes, even then).

So how do you get at all that stuff, if you’re not used to thinking about it this way?

Well, I suggest beginning with what you have to work with, i.e., what are all the various parts of a body, and what can be done with or to them?

Starting with the head, there’s hair, eyes, eyebrows, ears, nose, cheeks, forehead, mouth, teeth, tongue, lips…and then there are things that go on the head: hats and scarves, eyeglasses and monocles, earrings, nose rings, tiaras, necklaces. And that’s just the head, and I didn’t even try for a total and complete inventory.

So what can a person do with all these bits and pieces? Hair: comb one’s fingers through it, twist it (if it’s long enough), scratch at it (front, back, top, or sides), pull at it (or even pull out a bit of it), braid it (again, if it’s long enough), stroke or smooth it into place, toss it, shake it, hide behind it. Eyes: widen, narrow, squint, flick in one direction or another, close, blink, wink, rub at, tear up, roll, stare intently, glaze over. Eyebrows: raise one or both, bring or draw together, lower, wiggle. Hat: take off, tip, raise, put on, push back/forward, scratch under, use as fan…

You get the point. Each and every part of the body has multiple motions that it can make, and multiple things that can be done to or with it in combination with other parts. Every one of those movements can be used to indicate a feeling, a reaction, or a thought. You can add even more information by describing the way in which those motions are made; “slowly winding a lock of hair around a finger” gives a different impression from “madly winding and unwinding a lock of hair around a finger.”

Some bits of body language are involuntary, like blushing or shivering, but most of them are habits or expressions of an individual’s personality. So the next question is, what is each of the characters like? Who they are affects how they act and react on multiple levels. The guy who reacts aggressively to any criticism may consciously be making a fist, but narrowing his eyes and tightening his lips out of habit, and turning red because of his involuntary physical reaction to becoming angry. The more thoughtful character next to him, who’s a bit more controlled but just as angry, may do the same narrowing of his eyes, but without the red face, and his conscious physical response may be to tap a finger against his lips instead of making a fist.

Habits, in particular, can tell the reader something about both the character’s personality and the character’s past (the habit had to come from somewhere). Whether it’s the little dip and swing of the character’s head whenever she turns it (obviously, she used to wear her hair long and loose, and hasn’t yet lost the habitual motion she needed to toss it over her shoulder as she turns), or the way he half-reaches for his breast pocket every few minutes but stops midway (gave up smoking recently, didn’t he?), little non-standard habitual movements can make the characters feel more like real individuals than like standard roles (The Hero, The Ingénue, The Sidekick, The Comic Relief). Even characters who make a point of not showing emotional reactions can have habits that betray them in small, unconscious ways.

Obviously, the writer does not need or want to describe every twitch and wiggle that every character makes. And there’s certainly a place for simplified body-language-as-punctuation code like “he smiled” or “she shrugged.” But if all you’re using are the compressed code phrases, you might want to take another look for places where you can take things one step deeper by describing the narrow eyes, tight lips, and slowly tapping finger instead of saying “he looked angry.”

Writing on the road

Next week, I’m leaving on a 2-1/2 week road trip with my father. It’s not really a vacation – I’m guest of honor at Conjecture in San Diego Oct 5-7 – but Dad and I decided to take the extra time to drive out from Chicago and stop to see things and maybe visit some family along the way. (I don’t expect any interruption in the blog, but one can’t ever be completely sure. So if there’s a sudden interruption, that’s why.)

There’s rather a lot of family scattered around; my Dad’s family has been keeping track since umpty-great-grandpa James decided to quit being a British spy after the Revolutionary War and stick around the new U.S.A. instead (I’ve always thought that maybe umpty-great-grandma had something to do with that, but there’s no family lore to back it up).

Be that as it may, I’m not in a position to lose two and a half weeks of writing time right now, especially since I’m still in the development phase. If I take that much time off now, dire experience tells me that I’m likely to find the whole project not merely cold, but encased in a three-foot layer of ice when I get back to it…which is another way of saying I really, really had better not do that. So I’m going to be writing on the road.

Writing on the road means planning ahead. It’s not enough to haul the electronics along, though the laptop is essential and the iPad is convenient for reading in the car (I thank my stars that I am capable of doing that; lots of folks can’t). I know from more experience that the Internet is not always reliably available when one is driving cross-country, no matter what they claim…and anyway, roaming charges are expensive. So I also have to consider what I want to make certain is on the electronics in the way of software and reference materials, as well as what sorts of non-electronic things (hard copy books and notes, CDs) I also want to haul along.

Since there’ll be a lot of driving on this trip no matter how many stops we make, I’m planning on bringing a fair lot of reference materials. This weekend, I’ll be combing Project Gutenberg for free primary-source downloads that look interesting, as well as ripping a couple of CDs I just bought of lectures about writing and literary criticism. I already have the gadget that plugs into the cigarette lighter socket (do they even still call it that?) that you can plug your laptop or iPad into to extend the battery. And I have a number of gadgets, from the wireless mouse to the portable external hard drive, all of which fit handily into the giant laptop bag. (The bag is really for all the externals; the laptop itself is small enough to fit in my handbag. OK, it’s a big handbag, but it’s not that big…)

No matter how much preparation I do, though, writing on the road is never easy. When I drive alone, I obviously can’t read or type, and I’m no good at dictating. I do carry a recorder to grab ideas on the fly, but it’s a pain to transcribe when I’m done driving (and I know from experience that if I don’t type them onto my laptop that night at the hotel, they’ll probably never get transcribed at all…or by the time I do get around to it, they won’t make any sense to me). I can, however, listen to whatever I want (usually audiobooks or podcasts). Driving with somebody is different. I still don’t have much luck typing in a moving vehicle, though I can read if we’re not talking. On the other hand, I have to negotiate what we’re going to listen to.

Destinations are just as difficult as the driving part – there’s a reason why I’m in Texas or New England or California or Washington, and it’s not to spend my days laboring over a hot laptop. If that’s all I was going to do, I could just as well have stayed home. There are things to see, people to meet up with, dinners to have out…

What it all boils down to is that “writing on the road” nearly always ends up meaning writing in a hotel room, either early in the morning before everyone else is up and about, or late in the evening when one is exhausted and only wants to get to bed. Either way, it takes even more discipline than usual to forego that extra hour or so of sleep and put the time into writing instead. If one is setting one’s own schedule (or if one is traveling with people who have the opposite biological rhythm – they sleep in while you like getting up early, or they go to bed early while you like to stay up), one can sometimes carve the writing time out of one’s daytime schedule, rather than from one’s sleep, but it still has to be carved.

Usually I can keep a rhythm going on a trip by using the trip itself as material – writing descriptions of what I saw or did that day, or bits of ideas, or overheard conversations that work as idea-triggers can keep the habit going even if I’m not seriously working on pay copy for a few days or a week. Sometimes, though, the book is at a critical stage, or there’s a deadline, or an editor has a last-minute request, or there’s some white-hot scene or short story that has to be grabbed right now, and there’s nothing for it but to squeeze in some serious work regardless of time, place, and general convenience.

And the way you do that is…you just do it. You get up early and crack open the laptop (or stay up an extra hour or three, if it’s the white-hot thing), and you sit at it and write. Sometimes, you’re lucky and being in a different place shakes things loose in a good way; sometimes, it’s harder than ever. You do it anyway.

Really, it’s not so different from writing at home, whether you feel like it or not…

It’s not the same

There are a number of bits of wisdom that nonwriters frequently impart to writers, usually with the best of intentions. Some of them are useful and very true, like “You need to send that out, you know.” Other times…not so much.

One of the not-so-much categories comes in the form “If you (the writer) do X, the reader will also do X.” For instance, if the writer likes/dislikes the characters, the reader will dislike the characters. If the writer loses track of the plot, the reader will lose track of the plot. If the writer is having fun, the reader will have fun.

The trouble with this kind of pronouncement is that it confuses product with process. On the most basic level, there’s the matter of time. Most writers spend months or years producing a manuscript; most readers buzz through the same manuscript in days or hours. It’s relatively easy to remember the key hint or the bit of foreshadowing in Chapter Two if you read it within the last day; it’s not so simply if you wrote that bit two or three months ago. It’s even worse if you wrote it four months ago in Chapter Ten, moved it to Chapter Eight a month later, deleted it entirely when the front end of the story got reshuffled a week after that, then changed your mind and decided it needed to go in somewhere and tried it in three or four places before settling on Chapter Two as the right spot (for now) a month ago.

By the same token, the writer has to live with the characters – and their quirks – a lot longer than the readers do. The protagonist who was charming and fascinating at the start of the series can start to feel old and stale after the writer has lived with him/her for four or five years…but the readers, who’ve only had four or five weeks of the character over those same four or five years, frequently still find the character fresh and appealing.

In other words, what works in fiction that is read over a relatively short period – say a week – does not necessarily have the same effect when it is spread over months or years. What works for the reader may well not work in the same way for the writer.

Conversely, what works for the writer (or what the writer thinks is working) may not work for a reader who hasn’t been steeped in the story for weeks and months. Things a writer thinks are blindingly obvious (because he/she has been pondering the character’s motivation or the series of plot twists) may be totally opaque to most readers because the writer forgot (or didn’t think it necessary) to put it on the page. Things a writer thinks are just the right level of incluing may strike the reader as being beaten about the head and shoulders with hints (because the hints that the writer put in weeks apart, the reader is running across within minutes of each other).

Which brings me to the second part of the product-process confusion: the writer and the reader are not looking at the same thing. The reader has a finished product; the writer is working with an unfinished product, right up to the very end.

A story that’s in process is frequently very different from the final version. Not only does it change, it keeps on changing. As a result, the writer’s relationship to the story is very different from even the most dedicated and fanatical reader’s relationship to the story. The reader is looking at a porcelain teacup, finished and glazed. The writer is looking, at various times, at a lump of clay, a lopsided bowl that has to be squished down and reshaped, a mug-like cylinder that’s closer but still too tall, an unfinished cup that still needs to be fired and painted and glazed but that’s at least the right shape, and, eventually, the finished teacup…which may be a lovely and pleasing teacup, but which is nothing at all like the water pitcher the writer had in mind when she sat down with that lump of clay at the beginning of the process.

For writers, it’s as much about the journey as it is about the end result.

Election year writing

It’s election year in the U.S. and there’s almost no getting away from it anywhere. One of the things I hear over and over is people complaining about the polarization, how nasty the ads are, and so on. All the drama is, of course, a gold mine of material for writers, but stepping back a pace and considering it all in the abstract is equally worth doing. Because American politics provide textbook example after textbook example of something most writers absolutely should not be encouraged to do.

As near as I can tell, no one on either side of any issue in this election wants to admit that the other side even has a point of view, let alone actually consider it for a few seconds. And while this may be effective in politics, it tends to make for pedestrian writing, at the very best. At worst, ignoring “the other side” (whatever side that may be) results in fiction that’s didactic, preachy, and only enjoyable by people who already agree with the writer’s position.

Even if the number of people who agree with a particular stance is large (and thus the presumed audience and sales will be equally large), not considering the other side of the argument – and treating it, and the people who hold it, seriously – is nearly always a prescription for a second-rate book.

The reason is that obstacles that are too easy for the protagonist to overcome are almost always boring to read about (unless they’re a deliberate parody, e.g., the hero’s dreadful battle wound turning out to be a paper cut). Too-easy victories imply that the problem wasn’t really that bad to begin with. A protagonist who spends an entire book slaughtering paper tigers isn’t going to qualify as a hero for the reader, no matter how many medals the folks in the book pin on him.

And all that applies just as much to political, intellectual, and moral arguments in fiction as it does to physical obstacles. If Sleeping Beauty’s prince was faced with a neatly trimmed, foot-high “hedge” that he could step over instead of with an impenetrable forest of briars, it wouldn’t be nearly as memorable a story. If the protagonist of the story never doubts her purpose or her moral position, and always has an irrefutable answer for the weak and flimsy objections and challenges raised by her misguided and/or evil-and-corrupt opponents, it starts to look as if she’s in the proverbial battle of wits with an unarmed opponent – obviously, nobody even halfway rational, smart, or sane would ever take that other position.

Yet “everyone is the hero of their own story” – and that applies as much to the corrupt, evil, stupid antagonist as it does to your favorite main character. I know a number of writers who pay lip service to this idea, but who can’t seem to deliver when it comes to really understanding the antagonist’s view and portraying it without a secret sneer (which never seems to be quite as secret as the writer ought to have wished). I’m not really surprised by this. Putting oneself on the other side of an argument is hard, especially if one is passionately involved with one’s actual beliefs on the subject.

I don’t know any easy way to learn to do this. One has to make a deliberate, conscious choice to look at things from an unfamiliar (and usually extremely uncomfortable) angle…and one has to keep making that choice, noticing whenever one starts slipping back into thinking that no reasonable person would ever think that way or do that thing. Sometimes, it is easier to start with something that one isn’t quite so passionate about, something that doesn’t hit one’s personal hot buttons quite so hard. Other times, one simply has to change one’s plot (and/or the character of the antagonist) so that he doesn’t do that thing, think that way, believe that nonsense. Still other times, what works is to take the “opposite” viewpoint and give it to the hero (and not just to convert him to the “right” side at the end!), or do an ensemble cast story in which every one of the “good guys” has a different, not-altogether-palatable slant on whatever the question is.

In the long run, seeing the other side clearly, and being able to see (and, ideally, understand, and maybe even to some extent sympathise with) the reasons why the antagonists might think that or behave that way, is vitally important for anyone who wants to write realistic antagonists. And if it has a little real-world application as well, so much the better, I say.

Idioms and catchphrases

One of the many areas that some writers find problematic about dialog is the use of idioms. This is especially tricky for SF and fantasy writers who are trying to create a realistic-sounding but still-comprehensible imaginary world.

The first common mistake, especially for science fiction writers, is to go to one extreme or the other – either the writer unthinkingly uses nothing but current real-life idioms and catchphrases, like “once in a blue moon,” or the writer uses nothing but their own made-up idioms.

If you look at common, ordinary American speech in 2012, you will find common phrases and idioms that arose long ago, like “keep it under tight rein” or “give it free rein”…but you will also find ones of much more recent vintage, like “I don’t have the bandwidth to do that today.” A future society that uses only those idioms and catchphrases that are currently in use in English implies that nobody has invented a catchy new turn of phrase in the intervening time, that none of the catchphrases or idioms in use in other cultures will migrate into the English language, and that none of the current idioms will shift in meaning. This is unlikely, to say the least.

The second problem is that while people occasionally use clichés, idioms, and other such turns of phrase in their conversations, most of us don’t use them constantly. And a novel gives the impression of things happening very quickly. It is very likely that in real life someone would say “time flies” to one person and then, a couple of days later, “add his two cents” to another conversation. In a novel, those two conversations, days apart, can quite easily take place on consecutive pages. This gives the illusion that the characters are talking in clichés all the time, even when they aren’t. And a conversation like the following would be ridiculous: “Harry! Haven’t seen you in a blue moon.” “It has been a coon’s age, hasn’t it? How’s your aunt?” “Fit as a fiddle. Her son is always in trouble though, and keeps leaving her holding the bag.” “And him born with a silver spoon in his mouth! What’s the world coming to?” “You hadn’t heard? I thought it was the talk of the town.”

The third problem is that realistic dialog in a novel is not a transcript of the way people actually talk. If you were to tape-record a conversation on a bus, or over dinner, and then transcribe it exactly, you would have a lot of boring, unrealistic-reading stuff like “Well, you know, it was, um, that other one – yeah, the pink, and the thing, er, went…I dunno, it, um, went. So I said, like, um, wow, I mean really. But, um, then it stopped.”

Dialog in novels is a model of the way people speak in real life. It leaves out all the “ums” and “ers” and “likes” and “I means” and the rest of the verbal static that people use in real-life conversations. Dialog also tends to be a lot more coherent – you don’t see as many sentence fragments or dangling bits as you do in real-life conversations. And you don’t see as many idioms.

There are several ways of getting around these problems. One author had a modern-day character moving around in time; the people he talked to expressed amazement at his cleverness and wit every time he used a phrase like “time flies when you’re having fun,” because they’d never heard it before. Several books have postulated a future in which different social groups were based on different past eras, and tried to use the language, dress, and social customs of the time period they were re-creating (rather like the Society for Creative Anachronism, or some of the Civil War re-creation groups).

A more common solution is for the writer to invent his/her own idioms, ones that would arise out of the kind of society (different from ours) that the characters live in. In our society, “too many cooks spoil the broth;” in a seafaring or spacefaring culture it might be “you can’t have two captains on a ship;” in a culture of traveling merchants, it could be “the more people involved in bargaining, the worse the deal.” An excellent idea-generator for this sort of thing is IDIOM’S DELIGHT, by Suzanne Brock, which lists a whole bunch of Spanish, French, Italian, and Latin phrases that are just as commonplace and “clichéd” in those languages as ours are in English. (My favorite is Italian – instead of “I see you once in a blue moon,” they say “I see you once every death of a pope.”)

Plotting and planning

Plotting a story is one of those writing things where not only does every writer work differently, every book works differently. Oh, there are patterns – I’ve talked before about my write-a-plan-and-then-toss-it method – but they never seem to work one hundred percent consistently for even one writer, let alone a sizeable number of them.

A lot of people have particular trouble with plot. I think there are a variety of reasons for that, but most of them start with the notion that there is One True Way to come up with and develop one. There also seems to be a serious lack of understanding of what a plot is, at least in some cases.

A setting is not a plot. An idea is not a plot, nor is a character (or set of characters). Matching up a character and a setting does not automatically produce a plot, though for some writers getting the match-up right is a first and necessary step that can trigger a cascade of useful ideas.

Yet time after time, when I ask a would-be writer what the plot is, I get a description of a character or a situation. These things can lead to plots, but that’s not what they are.

A plot, by my definition, is a sequence of events, nearly always tied together by causality, that involve characters and take place in a setting. I prefer the sort that have a problem to solve and some sort of resolution or closure at the end.

This is why so many writing-advice types claim that in order to write a satisfactory plot, the writer must know how the story is going to end. But actually, one doesn’t always need to know exactly how the characters will solve the central story-problem; for many writers, it is often enough just to know what the problem is, at least during the early chapters. However, if one doesn’t have a resolution in mind, one does have to keep alert so as to avoid writing oneself into a corner.

How a particular writer goes about plotting a book depends on two things: first, what bits of story-idea they’re starting with, and second, the writer’s personal preferences – whether she is usually most interested in the spiritual journey of the characters, or in displaying their competence at puzzle-solving, for instance.

Stories can and do start with any of the usual story-bits – plot, theme, idea, setting, character, even bits of description or dialog. Some of these require more development and decision-making than others; if the writer begins with a situation involving a couple of characters, it’s usually easier to figure out what problems these people will be having than it is if one begins with a general theme. If one begins with an idea and setting, but no characters, it can take a while to figure out who the players will be, what they want and need, and how their wants and needs will drive the idea to a conclusion. And so on.

This is where the writer’s personal preferences come in. Some writers like to surprise themselves, and for them, too much planning can kill a story stone dead. In extreme cases, all they can have to begin with are characters and a setting; they have to develop everything else as they write, including the central story-problem and especially the eventual resolution. (This working method sounds terribly, terribly tempting to those of us who need to do a certain amount of work before we ever sit down to type “Chapter One.” Going straight to the fun stuff and letting the characters develop it all sounds SO much nicer than working up a plot outline. If it’s not your method, though, it seldom is as easy as that.)

At the other extreme are the writers who need a detailed, step-by-step plan to follow – something that gives them a clear framework within which they can let their backbrain loose to be as wildly creative as it can within those strict limits. And strung out between those two extremes are the rest of us.

Personal preferences also influence where a writer goes to look for a plot. One of the most common ways is to examine the characters, looking at what each of them wants and needs, and at the internal and external obstacles preventing them from getting those things. Some writers make a list of things they want in the story, which can range from “bandit raid” to “heroine jilts hero at ball” to “use vines as metaphor” to “include family – little sister?” to “giant explosions!” Some look at what’s going on in their story-world – the politics, the natural disasters, the culture clashes – find something they’re interested in examining, and put together a plot by looking at ways of examining it.

All this sounds very general…and it is. There’s really no way I can think of to explain plot-construction that isn’t either very general principles, or else so tied to a specific story that it isn’t likely to be helpful to anyone but the author of that story. It’s always a balance between what the author finds interesting to write about and what is available from the story elements the author has. It’s kind of hard to write a comedy-of-manners if your idea is to have your character cast away alone on a desert island for 90% of the story.