Patricia C. Wrede's Blog, page 57

Subplots

“subplot – a secondary sequence of actions in a dramatic or narrative work, usually involving characters of lesser importance (and often of lower social status).” – The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms

Subplots are one of the largest and most obvious differences between short stories and novels. There is rarely enough room in a short story, or even a novelette, for even one subplot, let alone several, while a novel often needs multiple subplots just to keep from feeling flat. Consequently, subplots are one of the things that a lot of short story writers have trouble with when they start writing longer work.

The first mistake a lot of these folks make is in looking at subplots as something they have to graft onto their main storyline, consciously and deliberately. They treat their subplots as a bunch of independent semi-stories that have to be brought together like different threads being tied up in a knot, all of which remain discrete and separate strands.

But subplots are more like the leaves on a long-stemmed rose – they’re part of the same plant, and they feed the stem and the flower. They can illuminate different aspects of the main characters or the central plotline; reinforce or reinterpret the theme of the story; expand the scope of the world beyond the a narrowly focused storyline or put human faces and feelings on a broad, sweeping storyline; or provide the reader with insight and information that they otherwise wouldn’t get. Subplots are part of what makes novels rich and gives them more depth.

The second mistake a lot of folks make is in thinking that they have to know exactly what the reason is for the presence of each subplot, what purpose it serves, and what it adds to the story, before they’re allowed to put it in. “This looks fun and interesting” isn’t good enough for them.

Fiction is supposed to be fun and interesting. Oh, some writers do create their subplots very consciously and mechanically: “Let’s see, the main story is an action-adventure plot focussed on bringing back the magical doohicky from the End of the World.  I want the hero to get married at the end, so I’ll need a romantic interest and a romantic subplot; stick that into chapters 3, 7, 11-12, 15, and of course the final resolution.  And I think I want a little more emotional depth; better come up with something internal that he can search for  — like courage or a brain  — at the same time he’s hunting up the magical doohicky…” There’s nothing wrong with working that way, if it works for you. By the same token, though, “fun and interesting” is plenty enough justification for throwing something into the first draft. You can always take it out or make adjustments when it comes to the revisions phase.

And for most of the writers I know, subplots grow organically out of the events in the story, like the leaves growing out of the stem of the rose. That is, the writer doesn’t think “Ah, Chapter Three; time to introduce a subplot” and then deliberately insert a scene that adds a potential love interest or a political complication. What the writer does is more like, “Well, here’s my heroine, racing down Main Street to escape from the Evil Assassin Wizard, and she runs into this guy and fast talks him into hiding her…hey, he looks interesting, and they seem to be hitting it off. Maybe I’ll keep him around. I wonder what he does…oh, he works for the EPA. I bet they have regulations for magic pollution…” And next thing you know, the writer is juggling the ramifications of romance and politics as related to magic, in addition to the original plot.

I’m one of the latter sort. My subplots usually come about because I’m looking at everyone in the book, not just the main characters and the main storyline.  Everybody has a story, including all the supporting characters.  Some of their stories are necessarily tangled up with whatever my main storyline is, and their lives will be affected by whatever is going on (though, presumably, not so dramatically affected as my main characters, or else they’d be the main characters instead). 

And I look at levels:  there’s the action plot, the events that are happening; and then there’s the emotional plot, what those events mean to the main character.  There’s what’s happening in the “big picture” (“Hey, we got a major riot down by the docks.  Send out the City Guard and put a couple magicians on the alert…”) and there’s what’s happening up-close-and-personal (“Ye gods, that maniac just tried to brain me with a dead fish!  Where do I find a safe spot until this riot is over?”).  There’s what everyone thinks is going on (“Someone is trying to assassinate the King!”) and there’s what is really going on (it’s actually a convoluted plot to get the Royal Guard beefed up at the palace, so that somebody can steal a pair of seven-league boots from the hunting lodge more easily).

And I look at relationships:  there’s what the heroine is doing under orders for her king; there’s all the stuff she’s been trying to prove to her father since forever; there’s her mixed feelings about her kid brother the lame wizard; there’s the bratty obnoxious witch she has to work with even though they hate each other; and so on.

A lot of this stuff just ends up being background, or not getting into the book at all.  But sooner or later, some of it ties into whatever the main thrust of the book is, or I decide I really like one of the minor characters and want to see more of him/her, and presto, there’s a subplot.  Though by that point, I don’t think of them as separate subplots.  They’re just part of the story, like leaves on a rose.

Micro and Macro

I apologize for being a bit late with this today.

Revising a first draft is one of those things that sounds as if it’s easy to talk about until you try…and then once you start digging into it, you start wondering how it’s even possible to do, let alone define well enough to talk about.

The first problem is that “first draft” means different things to different writers. Among the professional writers I know, first drafts range from something that looks more like a collection of notes and dialog bits (which needs massive work just to get to the point where someone else can read and understand it), to a “talking heads” thing that reads a good deal like a screenplay, to an almost-clean manuscript that needs only a little polishing.

And just as there is a range in what the first draft looks like, there’s a range in what’s wrong with it. Some writers are brilliant at the word-by-word, sentence-by-sentence level – the microwriting stuff – but have serious problems at the macro level – pacing, plot, structure, all the big picture things that affect the story as a whole.

These two things don’t necessarily match up. That is, the writer with the extremely clean and nearly-polished first draft may actually be the one whose microwriting needs more work, while the writer whose first draft looks more like an extensive plot outline than a manuscript draft may be the one with the structural or plotting flaws that need attention. Or in other words, the stuff that looks and feels as if it comes easily may be the places that need the most work.

Or they may not. This is where it helps for writers to be able to back up and take a clear, objective look at themselves and the work they’ve done…and if one can’t manage that, one needs to have critiquers whose judgment one trusts, who are able to point out that yes, the sentences are clunky again or that no, the plot doesn’t make sense. But a good critiquer also has to be able to roll her eyes and remind the writer that he always gets paranoid about the plot being senseless when really, it’s just fine and it’s the microwriting he should worry about (or vice versa).

This alone can drive a writer crazy. You need to have confidence in your work, but you also need to see its problems; you need to believe in your critiquers, but you also need to know when not to follow their advice. It’s a constant balancing act.

But then we come to the second problem, which has to do with keeping the revision balanced. The writer has to stay aware of both the micro and macro levels at once (or at least remember to look rapidly from one to the other). Because it is remarkably easy to focus so much on one half of the revision process that, in the course of fixing something, you mess up something on a different level that was working just fine before.

What I mean is the sort of thing that can happen when one or two words in a sentence get fixed: that’s enough to wreck the rhythm of the sentence, but one doesn’t always notice that it has unless one rereads the whole sentence with conscious attention. And even if the revised sentence works as a stand-alone, the new rhythm may throw the paragraph off. The fastest method I know of for finding this stuff is fairly time-consuming: read it aloud.

The other, related thing to look at (besides sentence rhythm) is the flow of the story. This can be difficult — the writer already knows what the sequencing is supposed to be and how all the pieces are supposed to fit, so it’s harder to see where there are missing or overlapping bits than it would be for someone who is not so immersed in the story. Rereading helps; reading aloud helps; practice helps; being aware of the problem helps; “cooling off” periods help.

Developing this kind of awareness is especially important when one is moving paragraphs or scenes or chapters around. It is perilously easy to develop continuity problems at the macro level because one added a phrase to a clunky sentence to make it flow better without realizing that one had already said almost the same thing three paragraphs earlier…or worse yet, one cuts or moves something without realizing that it established some information that’s used later, and now it doesn’t make any sense when Character A refers to it on the next page, because whatever-it-is hasn’t happened yet.

Awareness is the main thing. You can’t fix a problem that you can’t see, and you are unlikely to see it if you don’t look for it at all.

Planning battle scenes

Back when I was writing my first novel, I got somewhere in the middle and realized I needed to write a battle scene. Not just a bar brawl or a fight between six of the good guys and ten or twelve bad guys; an actual clash of armies. Furthermore, the battle plan had to make sense. I immediately panicked for a couple of weeks; when that didn’t help, I eventually had to sit down and figure out how to do it.

I was reminded of this last week when a good friend started panicking over her first battle scene. So I thought I’d do a post on How To Write Battles When You Don’t Know Anything About Battles.

The first thing you do is to learn something about strategy and tactics. This means hitting the library; there are tons of good books on the subject. However, when I hit the library, back when, I read several books on strategy and tactics and emerged no wiser than before, because even the basic ones were too advanced for my meager level of knowledge on the subject.

So I hit the children’s section.

Seriously, if you really, truly don’t understand basics terminology (which was at least half my problem with the adult-level “beginner” books), the children’s section is the place to go. I think I worked my way down to middle-grade books before I found something comprehensible, and then started working my way back up the age groups. It was exceedingly useful.

The second thing I did, which I also highly recommend if you can manage it, is to find someone who actually knows something about military strategy – a wargamer, a military history buff, someone who’s actually been in the army or navy. Then you ask them to help you plan the battle, and take copious notes on what sorts of questions they ask you, because those are all the things you need to know in order to figure out what the battle is going to look like.

The very first thing my military consultant asked was “What kind of terrain are they going to be fighting in?” And he didn’t mean “plains” or “hills” or other general descriptors; he wanted a map showing the rivers, woods, hills, city walls, etc. in the immediate vicinity of the battle, along with basics like what the weather had been like and where the sun would rise and set.

The next thing he asked was “What kind of forces does each side have?” This included numbers, equipment, and capabilities for every segment of the armies from cavalry and infantry to archers and magicians. This is moderately complex even if the armies are all “regular” troops of the sort you’d find in real life, because you have to decide whether the army is balanced between infantry, ranged attackers, and cavalry, or whether it’s predominately one kind of troops with few or none of the others. When you have multiple species involved – aliens, elves, dwarves, etc. – or futuristic technologies, it goes from moderately complex to insane.

Which is why most writers, especially those of us for whom the military stuff is not a major interest (to put it mildly), have to plan things out in advance.

For writers, the next thing you want to know is how you want the battle to come out. Is it a clear win for one side or the other? A win, but with major casualties to some portion (or all) of the winner’s army? Indecisive? You also want to know where you want your heroes/protagonists to end up, plot-wise, at the end of the battle, so that you can design the fight to put them where they need to be.

As regards that last, battles are usually a lot easier to manipulate than bar fights, because, as the author, you have a lot more ways to make things go the way you want them to. You can manipulate the size of the armies, their composition, the supplies and training each side has, the communications they have, how well each side knows the terrain they’ll be fighting on, whether it’s been raining or not. You can turn the battlefield into a sea of mud that will bog down the attackers’ cavalry or provide strong, gusty winds that play hob with the defenders’ archers. You can arrange for reinforcements to arrive early, late, or not at all. And so on.

Once you know what you have to work with and where you want to go, you get to sit down and design two battle plans, one that makes sense for the attackers and one that makes sense for the defenders, given the kinds of forces each of them has and what they know about the terrain and the troops that are facing them. The thing to bear in mind here is that neither commander is going to have any idea what the other intends to do unless there are spies of some sort involved, so it’s really unlikely that at this point, the two plans will fit together neatly.

In fact, you don’t want the two plans to fit together neatly. Each commander is going to be trying to do things the other one isn’t going to expect and be ready for, and they each ought to succeed at least some of the time.

That’s the next bit – when you set the battle in motion and work out how things happen on the macro level all along the line of battle. Diagrams are REALLY useful for this part.

Then you figure out where in the fighting your character(s) are going to be, and how much of this they’re going to know as it happens. If one of your viewpoints is a general, standing on a hill or a battlement trying to get an overview of the battle so he/she can order troop movements, then you’ll probably get to explain a lot of the macro-level movements; if your only viewpoint is a grunt down in the trenches, the battle scene will have to be limited to the grunt’s actual experiences, and your reader won’t find out how things played out overall until afterward, when the grunt finds out what happened. But if you don’t know that the left flank was under heavy attack and nearly collapsed before reinforcements came up from behind and scattered the attackers, the grunt’s experience of the battle more than likely will not fit properly when the big picture story comes out.

Which is why you want to go through all this planning, because unintentional stupid military mistakes on the part of the author really, really annoy a lot of readers. (This is not a problem when it’s obvious that the commander is supposed to be an idiot, but you still have to do all the planning, because there are some varieties of stupid military mistakes that simply will not be made by even a very stupid commander, so long as that commander has any military experience at all. The writer needs to know what these are and how not to do them, so that the fictional stupid commander can be realistically stupid in all the right ways.)

Random bad advice

One of the many things nobody warned me about when I was getting started was all the self-proclaimed “experts” who would show up and start giving me advice about my writing career, whether I wanted it from them or not.

By and large, these are not people who have any actual connection to the actual book-publishing industry; the closest any of the ones I’ve met came was having edited their PTA newsletter. They fall into three basic categories:

First, there are the ones who are in love with the sound of their own voice. They’ll claim to have contacts of some sort – they know editors or agents, or they do a lot of work “in the industry” for their job. They can sound really plausible, partly because they are so very, very sure of themselves.

Every once in a while, one of these has some sort of credential that makes him (all the ones I’ve met have been hims) sound even more plausible. He’s a professor of English Literature, for instance, or he met Mr. Famous Author at a party once. The thing that lets you know that you can safely ignore pretty much anything he says is this: he doesn’t actually want to hear about your book, much less read it to see what sorts of problems you might actually have. No, he wants to get straight to the giving-advice part. Fortunately, this sort usually doesn’t much care whether or not you follow all his advice, as long as you’re willing to spend hours listening to him give it.

The second variety is a sort of status-leech. These people are not capable of writing to a publishable standard, and they know it, but they desperately long to be associated with writers and writing. So they try to horn in on everyone else’s career, so that if somebody is, eventually, successful, they can say “I helped” or “I knew her when” or even “He couldn’t have made it without me.” They do listen when you describe the story, but their advice is either so basic or so obvious that it’s not much help. And if they do happen to know some editors or agents, it’s a safe bet that the editors/agents find them deeply annoying, and will not look kindly on any of their recommendations.

The third variety didn’t start showing up until I was five or six years into my published career, and they are much less obvious, at least initially. They don’t offer unwanted advice or try to horn in; they behave very politely for a while; and then, when I’m convinced that they’re nice, normal, socially-ept people, they ask in the most unexceptionable fashion if I will give them some advice about their writing. If I agree, they then spend three hours telling me all about their great ideas and fabulous plans, without ever allowing me to get a word in edgewise. What they want is a captive audience, and perhaps, once they have dazzled me with their unique ideas, an offer of collaboration (or at the very least, an introduction to my editor and agent).

The real trouble with folks like this is that they prey on the not-yet-published. The easy way to avoid them, at least at first, is simply not to tell anyone you don’t already know and trust that you are writing anyone, but this is a lot easier said than done, especially if one is looking for first-readers or a crit group, or if one just happens to be the sort of person who likes to talk about one’s writing. And there is always the (very slim) chance that whoever-it-is really does know what he/she is talking about – just because the unwanted-advice-givers I’ve met were all talking through their hats, it doesn’t mean everyone like that is.

This is the part that really sends beginners into a tailspin. Here is this person, sounding authoritative, maybe even with some credentials to back up her opinions…but she’s obnoxious and the advice she’s giving is not at all what you want to do with your story. But what if she’s right? She’s so sure of herself…

At this point, what you do is ask yourself 1) If you follow her advice, and it works, will you have the sort of success you want? If you’re working on a sweet children’s bedtime storybook, and she’s telling you to write a gritty R-rated screenplay about vampires and zombies, will you be happy if you switch and that gets bought? If he can guarantee that his editor friend will buy a niche mystery about fly-fishing, will you be happy publishing that instead of your far-future space opera? In other words, are you in this to tell your stories, or are you in this to get a publication credit for something, anything, doesn’t matter what?

Assuming that the answer to #1 is yes, you would have no regrets whatever about abandoning your current work forever, so long as it gets you published, the second question is 2) Can you stand knowing, for the rest of your life, that you are indebted to this obnoxious person for your instant success? If the answer to this is also yes, then there’s not much downside to taking the advice.

If, however, the answer to one or both questions is no, then you have determined that you don’t want to take this person’s advice. You then have three possible courses of action: 1) listen until they run down, thank them, and dismiss them from your mind as you walk away, 2) bluntly explain that you’re not interested in their advice, or 3) turn the situation around on them.

#1 is for people who are well-intentioned or whom you don’t want to alienate. #2 sometimes becomes necessary to get rid of repeat offenders (some folks simply will not quit pestering you until you say bluntly “I do not want your advice; I will not talk about my writing with you; I don’t want to hear any more of your stupid ideas. Bug off.”).

#3 works best on people who really do have some experience with real live authors, but who are clearly not giving you any useful advice, and who are not-giving it at tedious length. What you do is, you role-play a wannabe. When Mr. Know-It-All offers to show your work to an editor (after you’ve revised it to his specifications, of course), you wave your hands vaguely and say “Oh, the book really isn’t ready to show anyone yet. Actually, I only have an outline and the first scene written…or maybe it should be a Prologue, I haven’t decided. But I’d love to talk more when it’s a bit further along.” Then you never bring it up again. Should he ask how it’s coming, you say “Oh, I’ve been so busy lately…” and look guilty. If this doesn’t make him drop the question like the proverbial hot potato, I guarantee that he has zero experience in actual publishing, and you can safely ignore his advice ever after.

Show vs. Tell

“Show, don’t tell” is one of the two most misunderstood and misapplied pieces of writing advice that are commonly given to new writers (the other being “write what you know,” but that’s a different post.) It’s most commonly trotted out in relation to characterization, where “show” generally means “dramatize.” That is, rather than saying that George is both mean and a miser, the writer “shows” him complaining about his restaurant meal in order to avoid leaving a tip, turning the heat down on a bitterly cold day, kicking a puppy, etc.

One ought never, according to this advice, write something like “Oh! But he was a tight-fisted hand at the grind-stone…a squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous, old sinner!” That would be bad writing. Fortunately, nobody told Dickens that, or we wouldn’t have that lovely description of Scrooge.

There are two things one needs to be sure of when this sort of advice is trotted out: first, that the writer receiving the advice understands what the phrase really means; second, that the person so blithely giving the advice understands what it means. When one is clear on both of those, one can then decide how one wants to apply it in one’s current project, and/or whether to take the blithely given advice to heart.

The first problem I nearly always run into when I’m arguing with someone about this is that they don’t understand that “Jake stumbled out of bed, shut off his alarm, and sleep-walked through his morning routine” counts as “showing” just as much as saying “Jake stumbled out of bed in the general direction of the alarm. He got the alarm shut off after three tries, then shuffled into the bathroom. He turned the shower on and brushed his teeth while the water warmed up. He had time for a longer one than usual this morning, which almost made the damned alarm worthwhile. He was contemplating, in a groggy sleep-soaked fashion, whether to shave or pretend for the rest of the day that he was growing a beard, when the scent of coffee penetrated to the bathroom.”

The two descriptions have different levels of detail, but they are both “showing” what Jake is doing in the morning. The “telling” version is “Jake had a hard time getting up in the morning.” In other words, “telling the reader” means giving the reader the conclusion they would draw, without giving them any of the actions or thoughts or descriptions that would lead them to that conclusion.

None of those examples is inherently “better” or more desirable than the others – not the first, short dramatization; not the longer, more detailed dramatization; not the “telling” version that skips the whole boring getting-up-in-the-morning description. They are only more or less desirable in the context of the particular story the writer is telling.

And context means the whole context: pacing, characterization, plot, setting, theme, etc. If Jake having trouble getting up in the morning is eventually going to be important to the plot, the writer would probably choose one of the dramatized version – letting the reader come to a conclusion by observing the character in action is almost always more vivid and effective than just summarizing things. If the pace has been headlong and a breather would be welcome, the writer might choose the longer version; if the pace needs picking up, the writer might choose the “telling” version and look for a place later on to confirm the judgment by dramatizing Jake getting up some other morning. If it’s not plot-critical but adds to the theme or atmosphere in some important way, the shorter dramatized version might work best (assuming pacing considerations don’t enter in). It depends on context.

“Telling” the reader something is most obviously important when the writer needs to move lightly over a long period of time. “The long, dangerous trip to Byzantium took them six months, and they were nearly captured by pirates twice, but they arrived safely at last just in time for the coronation” lets the reader know that a) six months have passed, b) they were probably fairly eventful months, but c) the events aren’t particularly important to this story. Telling is also highly useful for background and plot-related exposition where there’s so much necessary material to get through that doing it all in dialog would be implausible, would slow the pace to a crawl, and would take far too many pages.

One of the first places people go wrong in applying the “show, don’t tell” business is in making it an absolute blanket “rule” that can never be broken…meaning that these writers use much less effective methods for certain things in order to avoid the evil expository lump. So once you have decided that what you are doing is, in fact, “telling” or exposition, you then have to decide whether it is a) necessary in this place, and b) effective in this place. If it is neither, then yes, it should probably be cut or rewritten more dramatically. But if it is merely ineffective-but-necessary, then what it needs is to be fixed, not to be cut.

Reading like a writer

Back in the day, one of the pieces of advice I got that drove me crazy was “you have to learn to read like a writer.” I didn’t know what that meant, and no one ever really explained it to me. Evidently it was one of those things that was so obvious that everyone but me knew what it was.

Then one day I was stuck on a scene involving several characters talking to one another. I had no clue how to handle the speech tags (I didn’t call them that, because I didn’t know what speech tags were; I just knew that everything I tried looked wrong).

So I went to my bookshelf and pulled down one of my favorite books, more or less at random, and turned to a section of dialog. I remember paging around a bit, looking for a spot where three or four characters were all talking together. And when I got to it, I didn’t just read the scene; instead, I looked at the lines of dialog…specifically, at how I knew who was saying what in each one.

The first thing I noticed was that most of the lines did not end with “he said” or any equivalent. Some had the “he said” in the middle, or at the beginning, instead of at the end; some didn’t have a “he said” at all. Sometimes the characters did something or thought about something in the middle of a dialog paragraph, and quite often when they did, there were no “he saids” anywhere around. And so on.

I came away from that page with a much clearer idea of how to do what I wanted to do with my dialog. Much later, I realized that that was what people had been talking about when they said “read like a writer.”

What “reading like a writer” means is asking “what is this writer doing here?” or “how did the writer get that effect?” and then going and looking for the answer. It means you look at the words and phrases, at the way sentences and paragraphs are put together, at where the paragraph breaks and scene breaks are and what sort of sentences come before and after them, at the structure of scenes and chapters, instead of relaxing into them and just reading them for whatever effect they have.

It means paying attention to more than the story. You notice when the writer strings together chains of parallel structure, or how often (and exactly where) they use sentence fragments, dip into a character’s thoughts, provide graphic details (or don’t). You pay attention to rhythm and word choices, to italics and tenses, to what’s in dialog and what isn’t, to what’s implied and what’s explicit.

Most specifically, you look at what is on the page, not what you think is on the page. More than once, I’ve had someone tell me quite positively that something was or wasn’t in a particular book, and had to show them the text in order to convince them that they were wrong. More than once, I’ve been wrong myself, and not realized it until I looked at the text and saw that X wasn’t in the story at all (or was there all the time). And you can’t build yourself a solid toolbox of useful writing techniques if you’re remembering the effects of the words on the page, and not the actual words that are there.

This is a lot harder than it sounds. I’ve had people inform me flat out that James White does not use any infodumps in his “Sector General” books…and had those same people come back suitably embarrassed after looking at the actual text and realizing that White nearly always uses a long narrative summary in the middle of one of the early briefing scenes, so as to get very lightly over the description of the case history of whatever medical problem the main characters will face. They hadn’t registered it as an infodump because White transitions into and out of the narrative summary so smoothly (and makes the information so interesting).

Yet moving seamlessly into and out of a long, interesting narrative summary is exactly the sort of thing I, as a writer, want to learn how to do…and that means that I have to learn to see what he did at the words-and-sentences level, so that I notice that hey, there’s a big infodump in the middle of this scene! And then I can ask, how did he do that without me noticing when I was just reading? And then I can maybe figure out exactly what he did, so that I have a chance of duplicating the effect some time when I need it.

I don’t read like a writer all the time. Mostly, I read to enjoy what I’m reading. But every so often I come across something in another writer’s work that makes me stop and ask myself, “How did he/she do that?” And then I go back to see if I can figure it out. Most of them don’t stick in my memory; it’s become a habit.

The First Veil

It’s pretty easy for most writers to get about four chapters into something based on an interesting idea/situation/character/plotpoint and a bunch of mysterious happenings. But somewhere around Chapter 4, one hits what has been variously termed “the wall,” “the first veil,” or “the first event horizon.” Sometimes it’s as early as Chapter 2; sometimes it’s as late as Chapter 7 — but basically, it is the point at which the author has to really understand what is going on: how the character got into this situation, what all these mysterious interesting hints the author’s been dropping for the past four chapters actually mean and how they tie together eventually, who is behind the scenes pulling strings, where the story is going and how.

Most of the writers I know of use one of three basic methods to get past this point: 1) Power on through; 2) Composting; 3) Plot Noodling.

Powering on Through works best for those writers who like to sit down with a blank sheet of paper and just make it up as they go along, and for those who actually do know “what happens next” but who for some reason just don’t want to be bothered writing it down. (For me, it’s usually because the sticky bit that comes next is going to be an explanation of something or a transition scene, and I purely hate writing explanations and transitions. Other writers have different stuff on their hate lists.) Powering on through is just what it sounds like: you sit down and write something, anything, to get past the sticky bit.

The trouble with powering on through is that if you aren’t the sort of writer who makes it up as they go, or don’t know what happens next, it may not get you anywhere useful. You can end up with two or three chapters that are totally wrong, and have to go back and pitch them, which is painful. It’s a particularly bad idea if what the story actually needs is more development, which is what the other two methods do.

Composting is my term for letting the story sit in one’s backbrain until it’s ready to grow things. This is the one where you stick the story in a drawer or file somewhere and work on other stuff. Periodically — every couple of months, say, or if you’re really busy, maybe once a year — you pull it out and look at it and see if it’s ready to be a story yet. You do this in order to gently remind your backbrain that it is supposed to be working on this story. This one works well for people who have so many possible stories to do that they don’t have to develop any one in particular because they’ve got plenty of other ones to work on in the meantime, for people who get bored easily by working only on one project, and for people who like to maximize production time by rotating from one story to another while they’re waiting.

The trouble with composting is that there’s a tendency to end up with a whole heap of WIPs or UFOs (UnFinished Objects)…and no finished projects. This problem seems to be particularly common for relatively new writers, but it can strike anyone. It helps to go back over everything in the compost pile once every month or two, like stirring a real compost pile to keep it cooking. It also helps to be really determined about working on things, and perhaps to try the next method from time to time.

Plot Noodling basically involves taking the idea you have and the chapters you have written and looking at them very carefully, poking at them and turning them over and looking for loose threads and rough edges and incomplete background and generally trying to figure out what it is you need to know in order to move on. “What it is you need to know” is, quite often, backstory: How did this character get into this mess? What have all the other characters, especially the villains/antagonists, been doing? What is the goal each of the main characters is trying to head for (and it may be “I want to get home and not be bothered with swords in stones and saving the country!”)? What are the possible things that can interfere with each of these goals (especially the main character’s)?

Sometimes, one also needs to clearly define what constitutes “winning” the situation for the Hero — or, to put it another way, what sort of ending you’re heading for. Is the ultimate resolution going to be the wedding, or the defeat/death of the dragon, or the main character wrestling with temptation (again) and winning at last? Some writers need a goal to aim for; others are better off with a general sense of direction.

Plot Noodling often works best if you can find someone who is good at asking you the sorts of questions you haven’t thought about asking yourself, but you can learn to do it all on your own (and in my experience, at least, there aren’t a whole lot of people who are good at asking the right sorts of questions without considerable training, so you may be best off planning to do it yourself). It can often be profitably combined with Composting — you poke at the story and make some notes and think about the obelisk or the missing sword or the international political situation (the one in the story, not the real-life one), and then put the manuscript away for a couple of days or weeks. When you bring it out, you poke at it some more, have a brilliant idea about a useful minor character and a possible plot twist, make more notes, and set it back to compost some more.

Eventually, it reaches the point where when you pull it out, you realize that all the pieces are there and it’s ready to grow roses. (One of my friends refers to this stage as “the story reaching critical mass,” but that works for nuclear bombs, not compost…) And then you sit down and write it, until you hit the next wall or the next veil and the process starts all over again.

Query letter bad examples

A quick recap from last time: the primary principles to apply when writing a query letter are that you keep it short and specific; that the story synopsis matches the book; and that you are not coy in the manner of back-blurbs. Just in case somebody isn’t clear on this, here is a bad example of a query letter story synopsis:

“Having been tragically orphaned at the age of ten, Dorothy Gale has been sent to live with her only relatives on a farm in Kansas. She has great difficulty in adjusting to her new life, and to her dour new guardians. As her aunt and uncle have no children and the farm is miles from the nearest house, Dorothy is lonely and friendless, a situation that will be familiar and appeal to many of the children who are the intended readers of this book.

A year after arriving at the farm, a freak storm separates Dorothy from her aunt and uncle and she has to make her way back to the farm on her own through many strange and startling adventures. My nieces love this book and it is their favorite bedtime reading. My wife and her book club think it would make a great movie! I’m sure you’ll want to see the manuscript and find out just how Dorothy gets home again!”

The book in question is “The Wonderful Wizard of Oz,” and all of the problems with it are ones I’ve seen multiple times in real-life query letters: spending the first paragraph on backstory that is not even mentioned anywhere in the book (I made almost all of the details up); leaving out all the specifics the editor would really want to know about the actual book (Oz, the wicked witches, the Scarecrow, Tin Woodman, and Cowardly Lion, etc.); offering the opinions of relatives; attempting to tease the editor into finding out “just how Dorothy gets home.” This query makes the book sound like a modern “problem novel” about grief and adjusting to a new situation; the “freak storm” sounds as if it’s the beginning of the climax of the book, instead of happening on page 4 (which is where it is in my copy).

A somewhat different wrongheaded query letter might look like this:

“It’s the middle of the Napleonic Wars, and the British army is raising militia to combat a possible invasion. One such regiment is quartered in the sleepy village of Meryton, where officer George Wickham makes the acquaintance of the Bennet sisters. Both Elizabeth and Lydia are drawn to him, but it is Lydia who follows when the regiment is moved to Brighton. While older sisters Elizabeth and Jane struggle with their own romantic problems back home, Lydia and George must choose between duty and their hearts, and more lives than their own will be affected by their decision.”

The problem with this query is, again, what it leaves out. None of the facts in it are wrong; they’re all in the book. It’s just really misleading – it makes “Pride and Prejudice” sound as if it’s focused on the military angle, with George Wickham as the main character. And it’s being coy about the ending again, but since the whole “plot summary” is about a subplot, it hardly matters. You could actually get a decent novel out of this summary, but it wouldn’t be the one Jane Austen wrote.

What you want in a query is specifics:

“When a cyclone carries Dorothy off to the magical Land of Oz, her one desire is to return home. On the advice of a good witch, she embarks on a journey to the Emerald City to find the wizard who may be powerful enough to send her back to Kansas. Along the way, she rescues a Scarecrow and a Tin Woodman, befriends the Cowardly Lion, is attacked by wolves, and barely escapes from a deadly field of poppies.

Finding the wizard sends Dorothy and her friends on a new quest – to retrieve the broom of the powerful Wicked Witch of the West. Even when she is captured, Dorothy remains determined. In the end, she defeats the witch and returns triumphant to the wizard, only to discover that he is a fraud. Dorothy must embark on a third journey, to find the good witch who can tell her the secret of the magic slippers that will take her home to her aunt and uncle at last.

This is not, perhaps, the very best possible example of a story summary suitable for a query letter, but I’m a novelist – if I could say it in less than 100,000 words, I wouldn’t have written the book in the first place. For those of you who want more examples (and a different set of eyes), I refer you to Miss Snark’s blog posts on cover letters. (Miss Snark is, alas, no longer posting.)

Oh, and one other basic principle of query letter story summaries: boiling down fifty or a hundred thousand words or more into two paragraphs is going to sound stupid and thin no matter what you do. Accept it. Your query letter isn’t competing against other people’s rich, deep, fascinating novels; it’s competing against other query letters. All of which also have to boil their rich, deep, fascinating novels down to two or three stupid paragraphs. So don’t worry about it.

Query letter principles

Lately I’ve been getting a lot of queries about, well, queries. So I figure that it’s probably time to do a post on them, even though I feel like I’ve been talking about the “boring business stuff” an awful lot lately.

Anyway, the first thing I’m going to say is that I am explicitly talking here about queries for NOVELS. You do not query for short stories; short fiction is a quick enough read that it’s as much work for the editor to answer a query letter as it is for her to read a submission, and reading the submission on the first go-around means the editor doesn’t have to deal with it twice, so that’s what they prefer.

The second thing is that a cover letter is not a query letter. If you’re submitting a manuscript, whether it’s short or long, the cover letter should basically say “Dear Editor: Here is my story of XXX,XXX words. I hope you like it. If you don’t want to buy it, here is a SASE. Yours truly, The Author.” You can fiddle with the phrasing, and if you have relevant credentials you can put in a line or two about them (but not a four-inch list of semi-prozines or every creative writing class you ever took), but that’s basically it.

A cover letter does not include a story synopsis. It does not need one; the actual story is attached. It also does not include warnings about your lawyer or rave reviews from your friends and relatives (unless one of your friends/relatives is somebody like Stephen King, J.K. Rowling, or the owner of the publishing company). This ought to be obvious, but from the rant I heard last weekend from an editor, apparently it is a much more obscure and difficult concept than I thought.

Query letters are just that: a one-page letter containing a summary of your story and any other relevant information that you send to editors/agents in hopes that one of them will ask to see the manuscript. Query letters also should not contain warnings about your lawyer or rave reviews from friends, though they do generally contain a paragraph or two of story summary.

A query letter is a sales document. This is where most of the people who have trouble with query letters get off on the wrong foot. The first common problem is that the author does not think of the query as a sales document at all, or does not think much about what that actually means. Instead of telling the editor the things the editor needs to know, he/she talks about what he/she found exciting about writing the book.

Sometimes, this is fine – if you’ve written an action-adventure, and what got you interested and excited and happy about writing it was the exciting face-off at the end between Darth Vader and Dr. Demento, describing what you’re excited about is exactly what you want to do. If, however, what got you interested was the really neat backstory and/or worldbuilding that you did, or the nifty looped-and-braided structure you came up with…well, this is the equivalent of going up to someone who has a bad headache and saying “I have these really pretty red pills – they’re cubes, very unusual, and you just don’t get this nice shiny red color in pills” when what the person you’re talking to wants to know is, “Will they get rid of my headache and how fast?”

The other really common mistake would-be authors make is to make the query letter sound like the back blurb on a book. This is understandable: the goal of both the query letter and the back blurb is to get someone to read the book, right?

Not quite. The goal of a back blurb is to get the reader to buy the book for himself, so that the reader can spend an enjoyable couple of hours reading it. The editor isn’t going to be reading the ms. for personal enjoyment. What the editor wants to know is not “Is this something I might enjoy reading, to the tune of seven or eight bucks?” but “Does this look enough like something other people will buy from my company that I’m willing to spend my precious time evaluating it?”

You can have written the greatest domestic comedy-of-manners since Jane Austen, and it won’t sell if you send it to a line of action-adventure novels. You can, of course, write a query letter that makes your domestic comedy-of-manners sound like a clone of The Hunt for Red October, but as soon as the acquiring editor gets a look at the actual manuscript, she’ll bounce it.

Therefore, the first principle of writing query letters is that the summary you give needs to reflect the actual book you have written. Also, notice that I keep saying “story summary” rather than “plot summary.” A good many writers see “plot” and automatically think “action plot,” even if the central, A-level plot is a political, intellectual, or emotional one. They end up describing the “B-level” kidnappings and car chases, which are really maybe 10% of the story and not the center of the book, because that’s “the plot,” when the story is about two brothers trying to reconnect after not seeing each other for twenty years.

A corollary of this is to start where the book starts and end where it ends. If the protagonist is a starship captain with an interesting background, you don’t start the query with two paragraphs about the interesting background that all happened before Chapter One, nor do you waste valuable words explaining how many children the protagonist has after the book ends, nor describing their adventures that might make great sequels when/if you get them written.

The second principle is to be as specific as possible (given that you have, at most, two or three paragraphs to fit everything into). “After many adventures” is not specific. “After being kidnapped, taming a dragon, and rediscovering the Library of Alexandria, among other things” contains specifics without going into so much detail that the mid-book adventures crowd out the other important stuff. Do not be coy. “In a shocking twist, Joe Hero must face his greatest fear to overcome his nemesis” is neither shocking, nor specific, nor even interesting…and could apply to about 9 million slush pile manuscripts, all but about three of which aren’t worth the editor’s time. The synopsis should describe your specific book, clearly enough that the editor can tell that it isn’t one of those other nine million.

Boiling 90,000 to 150,000 or more words down into two or three paragraphs is, of course, hard. Next post, I’m going to provide some examples, so you can see how it works.

4th Street 2012

I spent last weekend at 4th Street Fantasy convention, which was one of the best I’ve been to in a long time. The only trouble with 4th Street is that almost every single minute, you were faced with, for instance, the choice between a fascinating conversation about folklore in the con suite, a fascinating conversation about astronomy (with solar telescope) outside on the patio, a fascinating conversation about viewpoint in the lobby, and a fascinating panel on politics in fantasy worlds (which did not go off topic into real world politics, despite it being an election year). The topics and the people conversing kept changing, but they were always fascinating.

The thing that 4th Street always does for me, and this year especially, is to remind me how much fun it is to talk to people who are real, deep experts in their particular field. Writers tend to have an extremely broad range of knowledge, because we have to, to make stories work, but it’s not that deep expertise that you get from digging into, say, the development of Han dynasty bronzework for twenty or thirty years. It is a Good Thing for me to be occasionally reminded of just how much I don’t know.

Friday night, a bunch of us went to the Chinese restaurant around the corner – Elise Matthesen (art jeweler extraordinaire), Ellen Klages (auctioneer an author of The Green Glass Sea), two Swedish visitors who’d read one of my Swedish translations (it was really nice to find out that the traslation was good), and me. We had a yummy meal and lots of good wide-ranging talk, and of course at the end, they brought us fortune cookies. I was busy talking and waving my arms around as usual, so I ended up with the last of the fortune cookies. It read:

“You will become an accomplished writer.”

I laughed so hard I couldn’t even read it out to the rest of the table. Still, it’s good to know I’ll get there eventually… 

I don’t think I’m going to try to talk about the panels, but the list of books that got recommended, by panel topic, is here: https://sites.google.com/site/4thstreet2012/ along with a couple of good quotes from various people. I forsee another bookshelf (for the new to-be-read acquisitions) in my future…

Most of what I remember clearly is conversations – there was a really good one about ways of looking at viewpoint, several what-are-you-working-on-now things that got off into various eras of history and how much most people don’t know about them, one on families and accounting, one that I overheard part of that seemed to be about color perception and anthropology. LizV and I missed two panels and the lunch break talking about query letters and synopsis (which I will be addressing more in future posts, by request).

It’s interesting to me that the more stripped-down 4th Street gets (no GOH, no dealer’s room, no art show, no media room, etc.), the more intense and interesting the discussions seem to get. It isn’t for everyone, but for me…well, there’s nothing else quite like it. And there were scores of people I wanted to talk to and didn’t get the chance – even in three days, you just can’t get around to an in-depth conversation with 100+ different people.

Ah, well – there’s always next year.