Patricia C. Wrede's Blog, page 56

So the house guests just left…

I’ve had house guests for the past five days (my cousin stayed with me; my Dad stayed with my sister), and in the process of doing all the show-the-out-of-town-family-around stuff, doing the blog got kind of behind. Which is why I’m late and a bit disconnected with this.

Yesterday, we went to the State Fair. Minnesota has a really, really amazing state fair, and it was actually cool enough in the morning that my cousin who had knee surgery last year and my father who is 92 and sensitive to high temperatures could both walk around all morning (and into the afternoon) without any real problems. We saw the butter heads and got milkshakes at the dairy barn, then went looking for the bacon ice cream (didn’t find it), had honey ice cream at the agricultural building in the section devote to bees (if you’re seeing a pattern here, I’m not surprised; yes, my Dad is very fond of ice cream). We saw the crop art, (which is made by gluing different seeds to a board…and it is amazing the fine detail some people can get that way), went through the Arts & Crafts building admiring the knitting (me), the quilting (my cousin), and the woodwork (my Dad, with my sister going “…and you can make me one of those, Dad, and one of those, and…”

We all admired the pirate ship done in folded paper, but agreed that it was too fragile to survive in any of our respective abodes. We went through the Fine Arts building, where the piece de resistance was a marble bust of a Native American in full feather headdress carved and polished with amazing care and attention to detail. Lunch at the Lutheran Evangelical kitchen (because you could sit down) and then we took the sky tram back to the bus. Yes, that wasn’t even half of what was available, and it took us about five hours and by then we were all bushed.

It did get me thinking, though. I’ve lived in Midwestern farm states all my life, and even though I’ve always lived in suburbs and my stomping grounds of choice have been urban, I’ve always been aware of the vast acreage of corn and soybeans and wheat outside the small area in which I circulate. When I was growing up in suburban Chicago, if you woke up too early and turned the radio on, you got the farm report, even if the rest of the day it was a music channel playing rock and roll, and even though they don’t do that any more, there’s still that awareness – you can’t listen to a weather report (even in a normal year when there’s no drought) without hearing a reference to soil moisture and how the rain or sun is going to affect the crops.

One of my sisters now lives on the coast of Maine. When I visit her, there’s a similar awareness, but it’s about the fishermen, how the fish and lobsters are doing, and how the weather and other trends will affect them. In Alabama, my sister and nieces there hear about hurricanes and the tornadoes they spawn, as well as regular updates on the condition of the Gulf of Mexico.

All of this stuff is almost subliminal, but it’s part of what gives each area of the country its own unique feel, even in major cities. It’s not just that the weather is different; it’s a sense that what people do for a living, the things that feed the city both literally and symbolically, are different. Even in metropolitan areas that are so enormous that some of that sense of being in touch with more rural areas seems to have been lost, there’s still a difference in the feel of the city. New York has Wall Street and Broadway, and Los Angeles has Disneyland and the film industry; you can’t tell me that doesn’t make any difference.

But I don’t see a lot of this in fantasy or science fiction, unless it’s in a story that’s set in a real-world city that the writer happens to love and have a feel for. Even with a real venue like Chicago or New York or L.A., a lot of writers seem to slap the name on a generic urban setting (it’s a big city; you can tell because it’s got skyscrapers, freeways, lots of traffic, lots of people living in generic apartment buildings, and maybe a couple of ethnic restaurants). There often isn’t much attention paid to major-but-strictly-local events like the Minnesota State Fair (heck, half the time there isn’t much attention paid to planet-wide events like elections or their version of Christmas or Independence Day. Lois Bujold’s Vorkosigan books have their Midwinter Festival and the Emperor’s birthday, but I’m drawing a blank for other examples).

And there especially isn’t a lot of attention paid to that subliminal awareness of the stuff that ought to make every planet, and a wide variety of specific areas of each planet, unique. When I visit my sister in Maine, she goes down to the docks and we have fresh lobster for dinner; when I visit my sister in Alabama, she makes southern shrimp boil; when I visit my friends in New York they take me to dozens of tiny, phenomenal restaurants (ethnic, fusion, traditional…world cuisine, sort of). In Chicago, the first place we stop is for the hot dogs at Hot Doug’s. I took my cousin and my Dad to the State Fair for honey ice cream and cheese curds and food-on-a-stick, and if it hadn’t been so hot during the early part of their visit, I’d have taken them to see Minnehaha Falls and the Minnesota zoo.

Where do your characters take their visiting friends to show off their town/planet? And what do they eat that can’t be had anywhere else?

Eight million or so

“There are eight million stories in the naked city. This has been one of them.” –The Naked City by Malvin Wald

The thing about those eight million stories is, they’re all different from each other. And trying to make them be the same is a mistake.

This is something that a lot of people – readers, writers, and editors alike – tend to forget a lot. In online blogs and forums, in writing workshops, in how-to-write books, in reviews and reader discussions and recommendation lists, you find comments that boil down to the same thing: do it this way, not that way; do this kind of thing, not that kind.

These recommendations are particularly insidious – and confusing – when they focus on one specific aspect of storytelling to the exclusion of everything else. Because while characterization, plot, and worldbuilding are important to all stories, the balance among them does not need to be the same for all stories.

What set me off on this was a rant I read recently from a reader who disliked science fiction because it was “too technical” and didn’t pay enough attention to characterization to suit that particular reader. There were some good points made, but by the end of the rant I was left wondering why on earth this person wanted to read SF at all; it seemed to me that his/her taste would be better suited by mainstream or literary fiction.

The gadget story and the idea story have been staples of science fiction from the very beginning, and yes, in many (though not all) cases, doing justice to the worldbuilding, the idea, and the extrapolation may not leave enough room for the author to do detailed, nuanced, in-depth characterization (especially in a short story). Obviously, if you demand detailed, nuanced, in-depth characterization in your stories, you won’t find these stories as satisfying as less idea-heavy stories that use the extra space for characterization.

But there are plenty of readers for whom the in-depth characterization that the ranting reader loved is something that gets in the way of the stuff they love – the ideas and extrapolation and worldbuilding. Or the slam-bang action plot.

What I don’t get is why the plot-lovers and the action-lovers and the idea- and gadget-lovers can’t happily read the action-plot books and the idea-centered books, while the character-loving readers read the character-centered books. Instead, you see people ranting at each other because “science fiction needs to return to its roots in hard-science-based stories because science is what real science fiction is about” or “science fiction needs to pay more attention to character arcs because characters are what makes a story satisfying.”

From where I sit, these statements are equally nonsensical. What makes a story satisfying to that second reader is the character arc, but quite obviously, what makes the story satisfying to the first reader are the ideas and the scientific extrapolation, the “gosh-wow” factor. Or, to restate a writing truism, you can’t please everyone.

This debate has been going on for decades, but I think it’s entering a new phase. The advent of the Internet and the growth of ebooks makes it possible (not easy; possible) for work to find an audience even if it is not “commercially viable” (i.e., that won’t make enough money to be worth the time of a major publishing house). That’s the good news. The bad news is that the Internet also makes it possible for a small number of readers with decided opinions about what constitutes “good” books or “real” science fiction to browbeat authors and especially would-be authors into believing that whatever standard they’ve set is the One True Way, and that they can’t write without doing X (whether X is hard-sf developed ideas, character arcs, action-centered plots, or whatever).

Ideally, of course, one would have it all: ideas and worldbuilding and plot and character growth and a hero’s journey and chocolate cake with ice cream and sprinkles. But sometimes, that’s not the story you’re telling, and something has to be left at the bare minimum standard. Or to put it another way, every story has to have as much plot, as much background, as much characterization, as much symbolism, as much dialog, as much action, as much description, and as much of every other possible story element as that story needs. And sometime, a story doesn’t need much of one element at all.

Putting in things – even really basic story elements – that a story doesn’t need is a good way of ending up with a jumbled mess that nobody will enjoy reading. Figuring out exactly what things a particular story needs and doesn’t need is, of course, not easy. A lot of it is a matter of practice and taste, and chipping away every part of the stone block that isn’t an elephant (or a duck, or whatever it is one is carving).

There are hundreds of SF novels published every year; why insist that all of them do the same things in the same way? I don’t see any value in trying to turn the eight million stories into eight million versions of the same story. It kind of defeats the purpose of having eight million stories in the first place.

Critique vs. Collaboration

One of the questions I’ve been fielding for years, usually from knowledgeable non-writers, has to do with the similarity between being in a critique group and doing a collaboration. Sometimes it’s buried in the assumptions behind the question (“In what ways do your critique group members influence your work?”) and sometimes it’s right there out in front (“How is collaboration like working with a writer’s group?”), but there’s always this feeling that there’s some kind of similarity between collaborating with a writer and being in a crit group with that writer.

Well, I’ve been in several critique groups, and I’ve worked on a number of collaborations, some of which were written with writers I was in a crit group with and some of which weren’t (and only one of which has seen publication for various reasons, the most common of which is that most of the others never got finished, but that’s another story). And I’m here to tell you that being in a writing group is nothing like collaborating with another writer. Not in any way, not at all.

In a writing group, you’re essentially getting extremely articulate, well-informed, critical reader-reactions. You can take them into account, or not, as you see fit, because it’s your book. You always have the last word, and you don’t have to explain why if you don’t want to.

In a collaboration, it’s not just your book. Somebody else’s name is going to be on the cover, too, and they have a stake in it. If they make a totally ridiculous and inappropriate suggestion, you have to take it seriously and talk them out of it; you can’t just ignore it.  

A writing group has neither ability, nor power, nor right, to rewrite your words. A collaborator does, to some extent. A writing group can object loudly and long to whatever you want to do, but at the end of the day, you can just say “Too bad, I’m doing it my way,” and there’s nothing they can do about it. A collaborator can, if they feel strongly enough, pull the plug on the entire project.

A writing group is: you make a cake, and you bring it in, and give everyone a piece of it, and they tell you that it needs more vanilla or nuts or something. You can decide for yourself whether Jack is really on to something with his suggestion, or whether he just always wants more nuts in everything, even cocktail sauce, so you can safely ignore that comment.

A collaboration is two cooks making the same cake. If it’s a good collaboration, one of you sifts the flour and baking powder together while the other one creams the butter and sugar, and you get done twice as fast; if it’s not so good, you get in each other’s way because you’re both trying to do the same thing at the same time, or you end up with a cake that has no sugar because you each thought the other one put it in. It’s a whole different thing from critiquing.

The one place I do see some overlap between collaborating and crit groups is this: in order for either to work, the author has to have a certain level of both trust and detachment.

Crit group members have to trust each other’s critical judgment and motivations, or at best it won’t be useful (because the writers will rightly ignore any advice they don’t trust). At worst, the group is likely to rip itself apart being competitive. Collaborators have to have an even deeper level of trust in each other’s judgment and abilities, because they need to be able to thrash things out without worrying that the other is going to pull the plug on the project if they disagree about a plot twist or the necessity for a particular incident or character.

A writer in a crit group has to be detached enough to realize that one isn’t required to rewrite one’s book according to the guidance of a committee, while also being detached enough from the work to realize that maybe it does need to have Chapter 6 deleted and some tweaking done to the characterization. Similarly, collaborators have to be detached enough from the work that they don’t see every change the other collaborator makes as a threat or an insult.

Collaboration, however, requires more flexibility than a crit group. If all six members of your crit group agree that the cake needs nuts, you can nod politely and ignore them without a second thought. If your collaborator insists on adding nuts, you have to either think about it seriously or have a cast-iron reason for not adding them (like “I have a nut allergy that will put me in the hospital with anaphylactic shock if I have them anywhere in my kitchen.”)

An Illusion of Reality

Fiction is an illusion. It’s a made-up tale of something that never happened…and it’s the author’s job to get the reader to accept that illusion for the length of the story, however long the story is.

This basic unifying principle tends to get lost a lot, because so much fiction is mimetic – meant to imitate real life on some level. The more closely a piece of fiction imitates real life, the easier it is for the author to lose track of the fact that it’s still an illusion created with words, and moreover, that the illusion is a key aspect of every single component of the story.

Every time a writer breaks the illusion they’ve created, they give the reader a chance to break out of the story. It doesn’t matter what the break is – an inconsistent bit of characterization, an illogical-but-plot-necessary action, an inadequate bit of setup, wooden dialog, or even a line of narrative that sticks out because it’s clunkier (or smoother!) than all the prose surrounding it. Breaking the illusion gives the reader a chance to escape it.

Not every reader will take the chance when it is offered, of course. Some are less sensitive to certain types of illusion-breaks than others; some will ignore or not even notice illusion-breaks in one specific story-component. I have one friend who can happily remain immersed in a story that has gigantic plot-holes, so long as the prose is lovely and the characters charming, and another who will ignore the clunkiest prose as long as the plot hangs together.

That, however, is readers. Writers are another story. While it is a truism that no piece of writing will ever please everyone, most writers would really like to hang on to the maximum possible number of interested readers. (Note that I said interested readers. A writer may be very well aware that his or her stuff appeals only to a very small slice of the total reading public…but even so, they’d really like to grab and hang on to every single reader in that very small slice.)

One of the ways to hang on to readers is to give them very few places to escape the story, and that means maintaining the story-illusion on every level as much as one is capable of. Ideally, one would want to avoid both the clunky prose that would put off my first friend, and the giant plot-holes that would alienate my second. One doesn’t want to provide a really convincing and consistent illusion of a far-future war between the insectoid aliens and genetically-engineered humans, only to have a reader give up on the book because the dialog is wooden or the characterization inconsistent.

An that’s the first mistake a lot of writers make in this regard: they focus on one type of illusion-consistency (usually the worldbuilding or characterization) and forget that the plot, the prose, the dialog, the descriptions, the ways the characters interact, etc. also have to foster the overall story-illusion and be consistent with it (and, perforce, with each other). Writers will throw in really cool, well-worked-out worldbuilding details without stopping to think about how their characters would/could make use of them or what the effect would be on the plot if they did. They’ll work out an intricate and consistent political plot that doesn’t work because the characters they’ve created just wouldn’t do that (or rather, too many readers believe the characters-as-portrayed wouldn’t do it).

The second major error a lot of folks make is that they don’t have a feel or a plan for just what the story-illusion they’re creating is, so when they get to a tricky bit of dialog or plot or worldbuilding, they fall back on reality, even when reality is at odds with the illusion they’re trying to create. But not all fiction is mimetic, not even fiction that’s “present day” (or that was when it was written. Bertie Wooster and Jeeves wouldn’t be nearly as much fun if they weren’t comic exaggerations.)

Unfortunately for writers, reality is where we live. This means that it’s a whole lot easier to spot places where a flaw in the story-illusion also doesn’t match everyday real life than it is to spot places where imitating real life too closely is at odds with the story-illusion the author is trying to create. For instance: I read an SF story once in which the characters had really useful hand-held anti-gravity gadgets that they used for lots of plot-important stuff…but when they walked by the spaceport, the ships were being unloaded by workers using fork lift trucks. There are five or six really easy ways this could have been fixed…if the writer had noticed and/or thought about how a hand-held anti-gravity gadget would logically be used. But she didn’t notice, and I did, and it threw me out of the story.

Training oneself to notice this stuff is not easy. I learned a lot of it from being in a critique group with a bunch of very good writers who differed a lot in the types of illusion-breaking flaws they were sensitive to. Reading a lot of books of different types and differing quality with an eye toward noticing what does and doesn’t work also helps, but in my experience, it’s a lot easier if you have other folks to point insistently at the stuff you yourself don’t notice, until you get to the point where you do start noticing.

Characters, Plot, and Process

Writing processes are interesting things, not least because there are so many different kinds. Mine is particularly odd, in that I am neither a sit-down-and-wing-it writer, nor am I a plan-in-advance-and-stick-to-the-plan writer. I’m smack in the middle of the range, a plan-in-advance-and-then-periodically-throw-away-the-plan writer.

The reason why I periodically have to throw away the plan has to do with my characters at least 80% of the time. I’ll get to a scene that should be perfectly straightforward, one that I have a fairly clear idea about what happens, and in the middle of writing down the detailed version, one or more of my characters will refuse to follow the script in some way that throws the entire plan completely off the rails.

The best example comes from THE RAVEN RING. The original plot outline needed Eleret (my main character) and Daner (a young nobleman) to hook up with another character, a thief, just prior to their leaving the city at the end of Chapter 7. The part of the submission outline that describes the scene reads: “Next morning, Daner and Eleret start to leave the city. On their way to the gate, a thief named Karvonen tries to swipe Daner’s purse and is caught in the act by Eleret. Karvonen is chagrinned to realize that he has tried to rob a Cilhar, and offers to make amends. While they are still discussing it, a group of Syaski attack them. Karvonen helps fight them off and guides Eleret and Daner through some back streets to safety. The three leave the city together…”

The scene worked just fine, right up to the end of the Syaski attack, when Karvonen said “This way…” and pointed down an alley. At that point, Daner refused to follow him. He wanted to question the one attacker who’d survived the fight, and he didn’t like or trust Karvonen one little bit. The argument lasted just long enough for the city cops to show up and start demanding answers.

So Karvonen ran off alone, and I spent two chapters on Daner and Eleret dealing with the city cops instead of leaving town. By the time they had finished, they’d figured out a whole bunch of stuff they weren’t supposed to know yet, and run across a minor villain’s machination that they would have completely missed if they’d gone straight to the city gates.

Once they were finally free to leave, Eleret refused to go, on the very sensible grounds that it was silly to leave town with an unknown enemy after her, when if she stayed in town, she had the city guard and several other important and useful folks at hand for backup. So the entire rest of the plot outline was toast, because it depended on everybody leaving the city, and nobody did. Furthermore, since they stayed in the city, a whole lot of new characters cropped up, and the interactions with them changed everything again. Several times.

But it all stemmed from the way Daner reacted to Karvonen and to the fight and having a prisoner, and the resulting delay that kept them on the scene just a little longer. And I did not realize until I actually went to write the scene that he would react that way; it was only when I got all the way down into the details of who-said-what that it became obvious that he wasn’t going to behave the way I’d planned.

In one sense, yes, I could have forced the scene to work out according to the outline…but I promise you that if I’d done that, I’d have stalled dead three chapters later and not been able to progress any further. Because that scene would have been wrong.

And the reason it would have been wrong was because it would have contradicted and been inconsistent with a whole lot of background and personality stuff that I already knew about the place and the characters. Some of that stuff was already in the story (I’d already written seven chapters), and some of it was in my head, but what it boiled down to was that in order for Daner not to argue, he would have had to be a different person; in order for the cops not to show up, they would have had to be less competent than they were supposed to be; and so on.

Sticking to the plan would have required rewriting the entire previous seven chapters to make the characters into different people. And doing that would have thrown off the plan as well, just in a different direction, so it wouldn’t really have gained me anything. Either way, I would have had to re-envision the rest of the book. So I chose the way that meant I didn’t have to rip up seven chapters.

This is the reason why I rarely, if ever, write scenes out of order, even when I’m so positive something is going to happen that I can practically hear the dialog and smell the wood smoke as they chat around the campfire. Because nine times out of ten, if I write that scene, some earlier scene will change things so much that the “future” scene won’t happen at all.

Once in a great while, a scene does play out exactly as I’d hoped – the housebreaking scene in MAIRELON THE MAGICIAN was one I’d been thinking about for months, and when I got to it, it just rolled on wheels. But I’ve learned not to depend on that happening, not at all.

I’ve thought about this for a long time, and what I finally decided is that for some writers “what would really happen” is the plot – the specific series of events that bring the characters to whatever the final confrontation scene is. For me, “what would really happen” is whatever these particular characters would do, based on the background and personalities I’ve written for them so far.

This is particularly interesting because I’ve always thought of myself as a plot-centered writer. But it’s not the exact sequence of events that I want to hang on to – it’s the fundamental problem that is going to follow the characters around until they solve it. So it doesn’t really matter whether the characters follow the exact path I initially envisioned (though it is frustrating when they don’t). They still have to find a way to deal with the problem, and the story will still end up being a book.

Also, it will probably be a much better book, because if I didn’t realize the characters were going to do X until they did it, my readers are probably not going to complain about my plot being too predictable, either. Though I’m still a little jealous of writers who can stick to a plot outline…it looks so much easier than what I do (greener grass, I know).

Formal and informal

First off, it has been brought to my attention (thanks, John!) that I need to tell my regular readers that The Far West is now out and available in hardcover. The e-book will be out in October, they tell me. On to the post.

Back in the day, one of my earliest beta-readers took me to task, at some length, for using the sentence “It was going to take her twice as long as usual” on the first page of Daughter of Witches. (“What was?” said the beta reader. “This pronoun has no antecedent!”) As you may guess from the fact that, thirty years later, I still remember this so clearly, I was not amused (and that person didn’t remain a beta reader for long).

At the time, I was quite clear that the comment was wrong-headed, but I couldn’t explain why, or figure out why the beta-reader got something so obvious so very wrong. Now, I can. That particular beta-reader had taken a basic college-level composition course, designed to pound the fundamental rules of formal standard English into the heads of freshmen, and internalized all of them without really understanding them. She’d also never heard of the expletive pronoun usage “when a clause or sentence lacks a plausible subject.” (Thank you, Karen Elizabeth Gordon.)

Basically, that particular beta-reader was applying rules and advice for formal writing to what was, at most, semi-formal. It was a bit like making a big fuss about using the proper fork at a barbecue.

Formal English is the standard we learn in school – all the rules of usage and syntax and grammar, and some of the less hard-and-fast rules for good style. The grammar-and-syntax rules are things like “The subject of the sentence must agree with the verb” (“He am” is incorrect, as is “I is”) and verb conjugations (“had went” is wrong, no matter how many words intervene between the two parts of the verb form). The stylistic rules are things like “Do not use contractions in writing” and “Sentences always have to be complete.”

These are the rules of basic English; these are the rules for writing an A-grade essay or college paper; these are the rules that most people in the adult world, from business to science to politics, are expected to have at least some grasp of (though judging from some of the business memos I’ve seen, there are an awful lot of people who don’t have a clue about apostrophes, much less proper sentence construction).

These are also the rules that people mean when they say “You have to know the rules before you can break them.” (And all that training in importance of those basic rules of English, I think, is what gives so many of us such enormous respect for and fear of Da Rulez of Writting, as promulgated by so many workshops, web sites, and wannabes. But that’s another rant for another day.)

The thing about all these rules is, there is a continuum for applying them. Different kinds of writing require different spots on the continuum from formal to informal. If you are writing a legal document, a science article, or a paper for your English class, the Chicago Manual of Style, current edition, is your best friend. If you are texting your sister about that movie you both want to see tonight, you can let proper sentence structure, punctuation, and even spelling go hang, as long as you’re sure your sister will understand the message.

I bet a lot of you are waiting for me to say that fiction falls more toward the informal end of the continuum, and therefore fiction writers can get away with not paying attention to a lot of those rules. Not quite.

Fiction does not fall on a point on the continuum at all. Fiction makes use of the whole range, depending on exactly what it is the writer is doing.

An analogy: English and all the various rules for using it, from “Keep it simple” to “Never open a book with the weather,” are tools in the writer’s toolbox. If you wish to build a wooden deck, you use a saw and a hammer and nails; if you wish to build a concrete block wall, you use a trowel and a mason’s hammer and chisel; if you wish to make a ladder-back chair, you need a lathe and a wood chisel and some sandpaper. The trowel won’t help you build the deck or the chair; the saw and the sandpaper won’t be much good for building the concrete block wall.

Most fiction is, indeed, somewhere in the middle of the formal-to-informal range. Dialog is usually less formal than narration (unless the book is in first person or the character who’s speaking is intended to be a prolix stuffed shirt). But every novelist gets to decide, at the start of every book, exactly where on the continuum that story needs to be…and the decision will be different from writer to writer and book to book.

This is where knowing the rules comes in. If you don’t know the rules for formal English, your writing is perforce limited to the more informal end of the range. It’s not so much a matter of “when to break the rules” as it is knowing what tools you want to apply – knowing whether you need a hammer and saw or a trowel and chisel.

 

Why This Is Not A Proper Blog Post

So this week has been crazy, yes, but it’s the last two days in particular that really did me in. Saturday in particular. It went something like this:

 

Wednesday

 

Me: Cazaril, that’s about six too many hairballs. I’m calling the carpet cleaners.

Cazaril: Hmmm? Did you know there’s a bird outside this window? I bet if you let me out I could catch him.

Nimue: You have no claws and almost no teeth. You’d never survive. Yes, slave human, let him out.

Me: No. He has no claws and almost no teeth and there are raccoons and foxes around. I’ve seen them.

Nimue: Whatever. I have more important things to do.

Me: Right. Now I get to move the office furniture around and make sure all the computer cords are out of the way.

Cazaril: Yay! Cords! Can I play with the mouse?

 

Friday

Me: Cazaril, that is my knitting. It is not a cat toy.

Cazaril: What? You didn’t get out the fishing pole toy the very instant you came into the room. Without a fishing pole toy, I have to make my own fun.

Me:

Cazaril: You know, I really like it with all the furniture pushed out to the edges of the room like this.

Me: Enjoy it while you can. It’s only still like that because the carpet is still damp.

Nimue: Speaking of damp carpet, my favorite sun spot is still wet. Make a lap, slave human, so I have somewhere warm to sit.

Me: You’ve taken over the couch. Isn’t that big enough for one small cat?

Nimue: Lap. Now.

Me:…

Nimue:

 

Saturday noon

Me: Well, that’s the dishes and three loads of laundry and some work on the book done. I’m going to sit down for a minute with the iPad.

Cazaril: Weren’t you going to move the furniture back and write that blog post?

Me: I have a couple of hours yet before I have to leave for the concert. I can take a few min… Hey!

Nimue: You have made a fine lap, slave human. I will deign to sleep on it.

Me: I thought you settled on the couch.

Nimue: I am tired of the couch cushion.

Me: There are three of them.

Nimue: I am tired of all of the couch cushions. I have shed on all of them. Now I will shed on you.

Me: Don’t settle in. I’m getting up in a minute.

Nimue: That’s what you think.

Me: I’m bigger than you are.

Nimue: Nice slacks you have, slave human. And nice furless skin under them. Be a shame if anything were to happen to them.

Me:…

Nimue:

Cazaril: Oooo, laps! Well, a lap. Can I share?

Nimue: Try it and die. I have claws and you don’t.

Cazaril: Um, yeah. How about if I sit on the top half of the slave human?

Nimue: I suppose.

Me: Wait a minute, what… Mmmpf! Cazmpgh…furry mplbf…wah! Phew!

Cazaril: You don’t like me being a neck warmer?

Me: Neck warmers are supposed to wrap around the back of the neck, not the front. They are also and especially not supposed to interfere with breathing.

Caz: Oh, all right, I’ll move down a bit, but you have to shift your arm so I won’t slide onto the Nimmie-cat. She’s scary.

Me: Now look…

Caz:

Me: Well, at least I have a hand free for the iPad.

Cazaril: You know, you could scratch my ears any time now.

 

 

Saturday, several hours later

Me: Aack! I have to leave for the concert! Move it, cats!

 

Saturday, midnight

Cazaril: You’re back! Finally! I’ve been sitting here for hours.

Me: I am fatootsed.

Nimue: Fatootsed enough to forget my medication?

Me: Not quite. Open up.

Nimue:

Me: Come back here!

Me: Gotcha! Now for bed.

Cazaril: Yes, come and make a warm spot for me to sleep on. I’ve been waiting days.

Nimue: Weren’t you going to write that blog post?

Me: Aaack!

Cazaril: It’s one in the morning and I want my sleeping spot. Do it tomorrow.

 

And that, folks, is why I have no proper writing blog post this morning.

Accessibility in Fiction

First, a happy dance: NPR just put out a list of 100 Best Ever Teen Reads, and guess what ended up at #84? I’m scunnered. Happy, but scunnered. It’s a fabulous reading list; check it out. And thanks to anybody out there who nominated or voted for my books.

Accessibility is one of those aspects of fiction that lots of people talk about (especially in the SF field), but nobody ever seems to define adequately. (I hope it’s obvious that I’m not talking about physical accessibility here, that is, whether or not someone can get their hands on a book.) Furthermore, in some circles the term “accessibility” carries considerable baggage, usually because “accessible” is equated with “commercial” (as opposed to “literary”) writing, and is therefore automatically assumed to be undesireable, lowest-common-denominator writing.

I’ll do the rant about commercial vs. literary some other time; for now, let’s just mention that I don’t think accessibility has a lot to do with that particular argument. I also don’t think accessibility means a story can’t also be complex, layered, or nuanced.

On an individual level, accessibility seems relatively easy to recognize: any book that a particular individual can pick up and sail on through without wanting/needing some kind of outside explanation or pause for thought is accessible to them. Or, to put it another way, any book that contains barriers that block a particular individual’s understanding of the story is less accessible to them, and the more barriers there are, the less accessible the book is.

Expanding this definition at first looks easy: you just judge a book by the number of readers who find the book accessible on an individual level, and the more of them there are, the more accessible the book must be. Unfortunately, looking at it this way can lead to a number of problems, the first and most obvious of which is the “accessible equals popular/commercial equals bad/lowest-common-denominator” equation mentioned above.

This equation is a problem because hardly any writer I know aspires to write lowest-common-denominator fiction, especially if you phrase it that way, and no writer I know wants to write badly.

The second problem with the expanded definition is that it doesn’t recognize that a book can be highly accessible to one group of readers, while being virtually incomprehensible to everyone else. Advanced mathematics textbooks come to mind. (OK, they’re not fiction, but all of you got the point right away, didn’t you?)

The definition also doesn’t recognize that a book can be accessible (or not) on multiple levels. Take children’s books. Alice in Wonderland is, on one level, a splendid adventure for a 13-15 year old; on other levels, it’s an acid trip full of sophisticated word play, parody, mathematics, and political satire, or a parable about losing the wonders of childhood. Many, if not most, of the best and most lasting children’s books have multiple levels, some of which are not fully accessible to their most likely readers…at least, not on their first read-through at age eight or ten or fifteen. One of the reasons such books last is that they stick in the memory, and when one comes around, as an adult, to read them again (for oneself, or as a read-aloud to a child), one finds new levels have become accessible by virtue of one’s adult knowledge and experience.

So the definition is flawed, but it’s the best I could come up with. And it does allow for a way of looking at accessibility that can be useful to writers. One can examine the kinds of things that can be barriers to different individual readers, and try to take out (or leave out) as many of them as possible.

Most of the barriers I can think of – vocabulary, syntax, lack of the background knowledge or personal experience that the author is assuming his/her readers have – can be summed up as a level of unfamiliarity with something in the story that is uncomfortable to the reader.

This is a really tricky thing to judge, because one of the reasons readers read stories is to encounter new things – new characters, new plot twists, new places. Furthermore, every reader has a different point at which he or she gets uncomfortable with the “newness” of the story. The writer is left to balance between imitating “real life” so closely that the readers get bored (because they’ve seen it all before) and scaring off half his/her possible audience by throwing too much unfamiliar stuff at them, too fast.

The classic way around this problem, for fantasy, is the one used by both Alice in Wonderland and the first Harry Potter book. Both Alice and Harry begin the book as, to all appearances, perfectly ordinary children in the real, familiar world; as they move from the familiar to the fantastically unfamiliar, so does the reader. They don’t understand the new places in which they find themselves any better than the reader. The writer can then explain things gradually to the reader as the main character begins to explore and understand…or if the main character is floundering, at least the reader has some company in a frustrating situation.

Making use of multiple levels of accessibility is a little trickier. This isn’t like a plot-braid, where the writer can have a scene from Plotline A and then one from Plotline B and then go back to A. Doing that with different accessibility levels means that the reader who only gets Level A will be completely lost for an entire scene as soon as he/she gets to the Level B part. What one needs to do is mange both levels at the same time, in such a way that the reader who doesn’t get Level B will not even notice that he/she is missing anything unless someone else calls it to his/her attention.

An example: I did a reading of Calling on Dragons once to a mixed audience of adults and children, some of whom were quite young. I got to the point in Chapter 2 where the enormous white rabbit is explaining why he is late for something: “It runs in the family; my brother even got himself a big gold pocket watch, and he still can’t get anywhere on time.”

All of the adults and older children laughed. A six-year-old in the front row immediately looked around suspiciously and demanded in a piercing voice, “Why is that funny?” She obviously hadn’t seen or read Alice yet, so the joke wasn’t accessible for her…but the reference goes by quickly and looks like just the sort of throw-away line that somebody in this situation might say (even if the somebody is a giant rabbit), so if she’d been reading it alone, she wouldn’t have realized that there was a joke she wasn’t getting.

Show and tell redux

“There are three rules for writing a novel. Unfortunately, no one knows what they are.”

-W. Somerset Maugham

I’ve had at least four questions from people in the last week or two about that hoary old piece of advice “show, don’t tell.” So even though I just did a post on it a few weeks ago, I decided to do another, somewhat different one.

Most of the questions boil down to “Where is the line between showing something and telling it? Does this or that count?”

To which I can only sigh, and shake my head, and respond, “IT DOES NOT MATTER.”

Neither readers nor editors keep a running mental checklist of how much an author “shows” versus how much she “tells.” Even if they did, their results wouldn’t be the same because a) people have different taste, b) there is no standard definition of “showing” vs. “telling” that everybody accepts, and c) the whole thing is something of a false dichotomy anyway, since on the most basic level everything in every story is being told to the reader by the author.

Most of all, though, whether something is “showing” or “telling” does not matter, because it is the wrong question. Labeling a sentence, paragraph, or scene “showing” does not make it an effective way of getting that information across to the reader in the context of the particular story the author is telling, any more than labeling it “telling” makes it ineffective.

Or to put it another way: the line between “showing” and “telling,” and the “best ratio of showing to telling,” are not matters of empirically defined, unchangeable fact like, oh, the speed of light or Planck’s constant; they are matters of art which (to the extent they can be pinned down at all) change from author to author and book to book. What matters is not whether an author can write some pre-defined Golden Ratio of showing to telling; what matters is whether whatever the author did works in the particular book she has written.

The answer to the question “How much telling (or showing) am I allowed to put in my book?” is like the answer to “How long should a person’s legs be?” That is, “Long enough to reach the ground” in the case of the legs, and “As much as it needs to make the book work” in the case of the writing.

Microwriting advice of the show-vs.-tell sort is, I think, meant to be of use at the revision stage, when one has a completed first draft that one knows has an as-yet-unidentified problem. One can then, in an attempt to identify the problem, go down the list of common, known problem areas asking “Is this that problem I can’t figure out?” Most of the time, the answer will be “no; I do it, but it’s not why Chapter 3 drags or why my readers lose interest in Chapter 7,” but occasionally one will smack one’s forehead and think “Doh! Why didn’t I see that?” And then one can fix it.

Unfortunately, what too many would-be writers do is turn this on its head. They go looking for problems that aren’t there. They don’t ask “Does this scene work? Does it feel right?” They ask “What’s wrong with this scene?”

Nitpicking what kinds of things constitute “showing” versus “telling” does not get one any closer to answering the real question, which is “Does this sentence (paragraph, scene, chapter) work in this book?” Of course, “Does this work here?” is a question that can only be answered one manuscript at a time; it is specific, not general, and no one can answer it without knowing where “here” is, i.e., without having read that specific manuscript. “Does this work?” is also, to a large extent, a subjective judgment; what works for one reader or editor will not work for another.

The things that work change from book to book and author to author…and from reader to reader. You have to develop your own feel for it, which is generally done by reading a ton of different books and noticing, on some level, what actually works or doesn’t work, and then by writing a ton of different things and noticing what works or doesn’t work.

Analytical writers may benefit from breaking down passages that work into pieces and figuring out why they work. I’m not quite sure how intuitive writers train their intuitions, but I’m pretty sure it involves the same amount of reading (and possibly even more).

I suspect this is why people keep asking me about where the line is and ratios and so on – because they want some objective (easy) way of measuring their writing skill. I’d be a lot more sympathetic if I didn’t think that a fair number of the folks who ask are looking for some way to game the system – if there were one specific, desirable ratio or a hard line between showing and telling, then they could twist this sentence a little bit, or use that technique, so that the sentence or paragraph falls on the “right” side of the line and their absolute ratio is correct, and this will magically make their manuscript saleable without actually changing it.

Sorry, folks; this won’t work. There is no system to game, and you can’t please everyone. Deal with it.

Dialog in general

…“and what is the use of a book,” thought Alice, “without pictures or conversations?”

-Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland

Dialog occupies an odd place on the list of fundamental fiction-writing skills. It’s a component of nearly all fiction, but it’s not absolutely necessary (Hatchet and My Side of the Mountain, for instance, both have only one character present for most of the book; there is thus almost no dialog). Many people, like Alice, prefer dialog-heavy stories; others warn sternly about “talking heads” or sneer at dialog-heavy books as being “too easy” or a cop-out of some kind.

Yet dialog is one of the more flexible – and therefore complex – aspects of writing. Dialog can be used to describe people, places, and things, to convey the speaker’s personality and background, to advance or explain the plot, to provide background and backstory – anything that narrative does, in fact. The writer has to pay attention to all the normal concerns, like pacing, in addition to some things like keeping it clear who the speaker is, which is only a problem with dialog. And there are some things, like voice, that become more important in dialog because the writer is dealing with, potentially, as many different voices as there are characters.

In fact, the way characters talk inevitably tells the reader a lot about them. Consider the following untagged talking heads:

“I ain’t doin’ it, and that’s flat.”

“Have I requested any such thing of you?”

“Um, well, I don’t like saying this, but it certainly sounded to me as if you did. Ask, I mean. Though of course I may be mistaken; still, somebody will have to water the roses while you’re away – it’s such a lovely garden, it would be a shame to let it go – and I do think – “

“I ain’t watering no damned flowers. Sissy job.”

“No, no, there are ever so many men who are florists. It’s just like farming, really. Sort of. Isn’t it? Don’t you think?”

“Your defense of my position leaves a great deal to be desired. In the first place, garden maintenance has very little to do with being a florist, and in the second, I have still not requested that he perform any.”

“Good. You got some sense, anyways.”

Now consider what you know or can guess about these people just from their dialog…starting with how many of them are present in the conversation. If I did my job right, it should be pretty clear that there are three people talking, and it should also be clear whether A, B, or C is saying each line. The reader can, I think, make at least tentative assumptions about the relative social class and education level of each speaker, the fact that they aren’t complete strangers, how well they get along, and the general personality type of each. Also, one ends up with a pretty good idea of their various opinions of gardening.

That’s quite a bit to get out of seven dialog exchanges, and there may be some other things in there as well that I’m not noticing because I put it in unintentionally. Theoretically, one could tell many stories using only dialog (and I don’t mean just plays). Normally, though, untagged dialog is a technique that’s used only briefly, for reasons of variation or emphasis or pacing.

The point I wanted to make here, though, is twofold: first, that the most effective dialog is frequently the sort that could work without any speech tags at all (whether or not it has any) because each character has a unique voice that is obviously or subtly different from that of every other character in the book; and second, that the most effective speech tags, description, and stage business are the sort that add something more to that already-effective dialog.

If I’m over-simplifying, I’d say that there are two kinds of things that fall into that second category: stuff that’s already there in the dialog, and stuff that isn’t and can’t be in the dialog. In other words, you can take the personality or emotions or whatever that’s already implied by the way the dialog is phrased, and emphasize it with stage business or a speech tag: “I don’t – I can’t – oh, dear, oh, dear.” Her fingers twisted and untwisted the curtain cord in time with her stammering. This can be perilously easy to overdo, though, and overdoing it often weakens the impression the author wants to make, rather than strengthening it.

Stuff that can’t be in the dialog is, in part, fairly obvious. It’s possible to have one character describing a room or a landscape in detail in his/her dialog, but it’s difficult to justify doing more than once (and if one does do it more than once, it starts looking obvious and overdone pretty quickly). The same goes for commenting on another character’s actions.

Less obvious are things like contrasting tone of voice. “You are a rotten, scheming bastard!” seldom needs a speech tag of “he shouted,” but if the speech tag is “she said admiringly” it is absolutely required.