Patricia C. Wrede's Blog, page 58

Useful and unuseful lists

The other day I was browsing writing web sites and came across one that made me blink. Every post for months had a title like “Seven Dialog Mistakes” “Five ways to a Great Scene” “Ten Resolutions for Career Writers” “Twelve Dynamite Endings.”

OK, I get that a lot of people really, in their heart of hearts, want a quick-and-dirty paint-by-numbers approach to writing a great book. I also realize that a lot of people don’t want to read more than one screen’s worth of blog post (or so several of the How To Do A Great Blog web sites claim). Lists of tips and tricks and common mistakes seem like a perfectly reasonable way to get at both things at the same time.

The trouble is that, in my experience, a short list of tips or mistakes just doesn’t work very well when it comes to helping people improve their writing. (I can’t speak to the thing about sticking to one screen per blog post, except to note that I obviously don’t follow that advice, either.)

Writing a short story or a novel is complicated; every bit of it affects everything else. It’s easy to focus down on one particular aspect of writing, like dialog or endings, and dash off a list of dos and don’ts. But in an actual story, it’s not so simple. That #3 “Don’t…” from the dialog list, for instance, may be both thematically appropriate and more perfectly in character than any of the alternatives, not to mention being the ideal way of moving the plot along. #10 “Do make sure you…” from the characterization list may be impossible to make work, given the constraints of the style and setting.

But there are several sorts of lists that I find extremely useful. They just don’t have anything much to do with writing technique.

The first set of lists is stuff I use during the first draft to save time. For instance, I have one possible-next-book that involves characters from several different imaginary countries/backgrounds. I want their names to sound as if they come from different places with different languages and naming conventions, and I don’t want any of them to be token representatives of their cultures. That means that eventually, when I’m making up secondary characters like the barman and the traveling salesman, I’m going to need more names that sound as if they came from the same places, and maybe a few others from completely different backgrounds.

So I make a set of lists: six to ten male and female names that would come from each country, along with six to ten family/clan/house/tribe names for each country that mix and match well with the personal names I’ve picked. When I need the traveling salesman, all I have to do is decide which country he’s from, and pick from the list.

Or I make a list of place-names so that when they pass by that small town, I can grab a name on the fly. I’ll also make lists of things I’ve mentioned in passing, like local foods or animals I’ve invented, so that I can use them again if I need to (and so I can make sure that I didn’t name the fish stew “kishta” and the tiger with antlers “kitsa” – far too confusing, not to mention the potential for tragically horrible typos…)

The other kind of lists I find useful are checklists of things to do during the first round of revisions. There’s an ongoing, ever-changing list of all the phrases I tend to overuse, so I can do a search-and-destroy on them easily. There’s a list of things to check for consistency and continuity (I have a really bad habit of changing the spelling of a character’s name by one letter somewhere in the middle of the story, or calling someone “Anthony” for two chapters and then switching to “Andrew” because I couldn’t be bothered to look up which male-name-beginning-with-A I’d used, and I was sure it was Andrew…)

In other words, all the lists I find useful have to do with the content of the story: names, places, descriptive phrases, etc. That’s what I need to keep track of when I’m writing, not the five dialog mistakes that I may or may not be making in any given scene, or the twelve dynamite endings that don’t fit the story I’m trying to tell.

The Question of Voice

Recently, I was approached by a budding author who, after the usual polite introductory remarks, said, “Ms. Wrede, I’ve been wondering – how did you develop your voice?”

I muttered something relatively innocuous and vague, and stewed about it all the way home. Because while I’ve put a considerable amount of thought into the voices of my characters (especially when I’m writing first-person), I haven’t ever thought much about my voice.

So I did what I usually do when somebody comes up with a question like this: I did some googling. After an hour or so of browsing through articles full of solemn (and mostly contradictory) advice on the vast importance of voice, I did what I should have done in the first place. I pulled out my trusty Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms, which defines “voice” as “a rather vague metaphorical term by which some critics refer to distinctive features of a written work in terms of spoken utterance…assessed in terms of tone, style, or personality.”

Which begs the question: if “writing voice” is simply a vague and convenient metaphor, why do so many people seem to think it’s vastly important?

Answer: I have no clue.

So I did some more thinking, and what I thought about was the foundation of the metaphor. That is, one’s actual spoken voice.

Most people I know don’t spend a lot – OK, any – time developing their speaking voice. They just talk. The voices they have are a combination of genetics and life experience, of the accents (regional, cultural, ethnic) they heard growing up and the ones they’re living with now. And all those voices change over time, depending on lots of things (not least of which is whether the person has a horrible cold or not).

Yet most of those spoken voices are easily recognizable. When I pick up the phone and hear “Hi!” or “Hello” or “Hey,” I know right away which friend or family member is on the other end of the call. None of them had to work at having a unique voice. It just happened.

The people who do work on their speaking voice tend to be either those who have some particular difficulty with speaking, like a speech impediment, or those who are doing something more advanced with their voices than most people need to – actors, singers, public speakers of all sorts. All of whom, I point out, already have a perfectly good voice for doing normal, everyday talking. They don’t need to start doing exercises to improve their speaking voices until they want to project to the back row of the theater, or play a character whose speech is different. They certainly don’t need to “find their voices.”

At this point, I went back through some of those articles on writing voice. About half of them offer specific advice on “developing your writing voice.” The top three items always seemed to boil down to 1. Read a lot, 2. Write a lot, and 3. Do/don’t imitate other writers (about half the advice-givers thought that imitating a bunch of different voices would help; the other half thought it would just muddy the waters). In other words, general stuff that most writers and would-be writers are going to be doing anyway, the same way most people talk and listen in the course of their normal lives.

The only real difference I can see is that there’s a large contingent of folks out there who are really worried about “developing their writing voice,” in a way that normal people do not worry about developing their speaking voices. Like the beginning writer who came up and asked the question that started me off on this post.

It therefore seems to me that the best thing for the majority of writers, especially beginners, to do is to stop worrying about voice unless a) they have some specific identifiable problem with their writing voice that, like a speech impediment, needs exercises in grammar or syntax or whatever to fix, or b) they are trying to do something with their writing voice that’s more advanced than most stories or most writers need. Pastiche and parody come to mind as a possible equivalent of actors pretending to be other people; there are almost certainly other things like that that I’m not thinking about.

Mostly, though, “authorial voice” is one of those things that may, just possibly, be useful for critics to talk about, but that (in my not so humble opinion) mostly just gets in the way if you worry about it while you’re writing.

Long-range thinking

Back when I was getting started, I had the privilege of talking to a number of long-established SF/F writers and writer/editors – Ben Bova, Gordon R. Dickson, L. Sprague de Camp, et al. One of the things I noticed sort of vaguely at the time, but really didn’t think about all that much, was the emphasis all of them placed on managing the backlist.

Part of the reason I didn’t think about it much was because at that point I didn’t have a backlist; I had one novel just barely in print, another in production, and a third under submission. I didn’t think any of that advice could possibly apply to me.

Fast forward thirty years, and I am now the hoary Old Pro with a much greater appreciation for what “managing the backlist” means, why it’s important, and why I should have been thinking about it a lot more carefully all those years ago. It’s my turn to pass the advice along for the latest generation of writers to ignore for a while. Hopefully a few folks will remember at one or more critical points in their careers.

First, a definition: for the purposes of this post, the backlist is all of a writer’s published work that’s over two years old, whether it’s still in print or not. Two years is kind of an arbitrary cut-off point; I picked it because if you have a hardcover/softcover deal, the book usually gets some sort of sales push on its initial publication in hardcover, then another push when the paperback comes out a year later. By two years in, it’s definitely no longer “frontlist.” If the book is a paperback original, it probably ends up being part of the backlist by one year after publication.

For a career writer, the backlist is important because it’s a potential source of free money, or almost-free money. You, or your agent, have to do some work to track it and to re-sell it, but compared to the amount of work it takes to write and sell a book in the first place, this is minimal. And these days, the backlist is even more important than it used to be, because of all the interesting new avenues for selling that the Internet has opened up, podcasts and e-books being only two of the most obvious.

One of the things this means is that an awareness of the importance of one’s eventual backlist is highly desirable from very early in one’s career. Everything that gets published will eventually be part of the backlist. If all you think about up front is the current part of the deal, figuring you’ll worry about managing the backlist when the title becomes backlist, you’re moderately likely to miss things that affect what you can do with a backlist title until it’s too late to fix them.

Example 1: Years back, a friend of mine wrote a trilogy that was canceled after Book 2. Annoyed, the author took the third book to a small press publisher, so that the current fans of the trilogy could finish it. The small press did a bang-up job, and everyone was happy…then. Ten years later, the author had to turn down a lucrative offer from a major publisher for the whole trilogy, because the small press publisher still had the rights to Book 3 and was perfectly happy selling 10 copies per year, and so wouldn’t revert the rights. If the author had been thinking about long-term possibilities, he could have made sure that the small press contract contained a reversion clause that would have made things simple – after ten years, or upon notification by the author if sales are less than 50 copies per year, or whatever.

Sorcery and Cecelia was originally published in 1988 as an “orphaned” book – the editor who bought the manuscript had left the company and there was no one at the publisher who wanted to push the book. It didn’t do well, and went out of print fairly quickly. Caroline and I got the rights reverted right away, as a matter of principle, even though there seemed to be no likelihood whatever that we could ever re-sell the title (lousy sales of the first edition tend to make other publishers less than eager to acquire a title).

Ten years later, things had changed and we not only sold Sorcery and Cecelia to a new publisher, we also sold two sequels, The Grand Tour and The Mislaid Magician. Ten years after that (i.e., now), we were able to get them all issued as e-books by Open Road media.

The point about all this is that one never really knows what is going to happen in the future. The market is constantly changing; so are the readers. People whose books were once wildly popular are now completely unknown (quick! Who was #1 on the NY Times Bestseller list for the week of June 21, 1953? Annamarie Selinko’s Desiree, #1 for 21 weeks, that’s who. Google is a wonderful thing), and books that died when they first came out become sneak hits months or years or decades later.

A writer who keeps this in mind will aim for long-run flexibility, so as to keep as many options open as possible, for as long as possible. There’s no guarantee that one won’t make mistakes; it is practically certain that one will. If one thinks about the long range possibilities, though, one can at least make conscious decisions: “I would rather have a small but steady stream of e-book sales now than hold off e-publication on the chance that I’ll get a better deal in five years” works, for me, much better than “I want an e-book NOW!” and then, five years later, “Wah! If I’d only known there was a chance of this, I’d never have put out that e-book!” or “I’m holding out for a big deal” and then, five years later “Wah! Nobody’s interested in buying this; I could have had five years’ worth of e-book sales if I’d only done an e-book back then.”

Estimated taxes

It’s June 13 and in the U.S., the first set of estimated tax payments for 2012 are due at the end of the week.

And if you’re making money from your writing, and you have to pay U.S. income taxes, you need to be aware of this. You may not owe estimated taxes, but if you do owe them and don’t pay them, you’ll end up with an estimated tax penalty on top of the taxes you already owe.

The U.S. government requires everyone to make income tax payments that total to the lesser of: 90% of your current year’s tax liability, OR 100% of your last year’s tax liability. More on this in a minute.

If all you have is a normal day job, these payments are withheld from your paycheck and you don’t have to worry about them. If you are totally self-employed, you have to make estimated tax payments. If you have both writing income and a normal day job, you have a choice: you can have more withheld from your regular paycheck, or you can make estimated tax payments to cover your writing income. The catch is that a) figuring out how much more to withhold can be tricky because of FICA (see below) and b) you have to keep a close eye on your writing income and adjust the withholding at your day job if you don’t want to over- or under-pay, and this tends to be a nuisance and make employers unhappy about the extra paperwork after a while.

Estimated tax payments are due unevenly, on April 15, June 15, September 15, and January 15 (for the prior year). There are three philosophies about estimated taxes. The first holds that it is better/cheaper to keep careful track of your current year’s income and make sure to pay 90% of the taxes you expect to owe, even if it means you have to adjust the payments in the middle of the year because you have a sudden influx of income. People who go this route need to keep careful records, so that if the IRS asks why you delayed payment of half your taxes until the fourth quarter, you can prove that it was because you got a ginormous advance payment in December – i.e., you didn’t have that income until the fourth quarter.

The second idea is that tracking and predicting income so carefully is too much trouble, so it’s better to pay 100% of last year’s income taxes in four equal payments. Sure, this means that some years you’ll overpay and others you’ll underpay, but it will probably even out…and it’s an easy, certain way to be positive that you aren’t going to face any nasty surprise penalties at the end of the year.

The third is that it depends: if you have a big drop or a big rise in income, you go for the “90% of actual taxes owed this year”; if your income is pretty much the same, you calculate your estimated tax payments based on the “100% of last year’s taxes” figure.

Note that “current year’s tax liability” for purposes of estimated taxes includes FICA (Social Security) withholding as well as income tax withholding. As a self-employed person, you owe both the employee half of FICA withholding (7.65%) and the employer half (7.65%), for a total of 15.3% right off the top. Whichever way you choose to calculate, do not forget about this.

Also note that the IRS does not care whether you take your advance in copies, or whether you sell copies and use that money to buy more copies. As far as they’re concerned, it’s all income (and if you’re selling copies straight to readers, you probably owe state income tax, too. And sales tax, for which you need a sales license.)

If you’re right at the start of your writing career, have a day job, and get minimal income from writing (say, a few hundred bucks from short story sales over the course of a year), the easiest route is probably to adjust your withholding at your day job. Eventually, you’ll want to switch to estimated tax payments. In my own case, my first sale was a novel, which meant I got an advance, which was a big enough bump that I made estimated tax payments right from the start.

Deciding which way to handle the taxes on your writing income is more a matter of situation, personal temperament, and budgeting skills as it is of picking a “right” way. If you know that keeping tabs on your writing income and adjusting your estimates will drive you absolutely crazy, go for the “100% of last year” method. If you make a huge sale in the first quarter, and you know yourself well enough to know that you are going to be VERY unhappy if you have to pay all the taxes on it come the following April 15, make estimated payments that are more than 100% of last year. If the huge sale was last year, and this year your writing income will be half what it was then and you don’t have money sitting around, use the “90% of this year’s actual taxes” to figure out your estimated payments. You don’t have to pick one method and stick to it forever.

From a cash flow standpoint, the first two estimated tax payments (April 15 and June 15) are usually the hardest: April, because it comes at the same time as your annual tax payments (though it’s not so bad if you’re getting a refund that you can apply), and June because it’s a mere two months later, not a full quarter.

Taxes, including estimated taxes, are one area that is sufficiently important, sufficiently tricky, and sufficiently changeable that I recommend finding a good accountant sooner rather than later. Keeping up with the changes in the tax code is a full-time job, and I already have one of those. Exactly when you head to an accountant is up to you; if you’re only making $329/year in short story sales, it’s probably not worth it; if you have $50,000 in advance money coming in this year, it’s long past time.

Old ways of looking at viewpoint

One of the really interesting things about older how-to-write books is their take on viewpoint. Several don’t mention it at all; others give it barely a passing glance. When they do talk about it, it’s from a completely different angle from that taken by modern how-to-write authors.

For starters, none of them seem to consider the question of type of narration (that is, first person or third person) to be an aspect of viewpoint at all. Out of seven books from the 1950s or earlier, only two deal with the question of “grammatical form” explicitly in the section on viewpoint. One of them spends roughly two pages discussing “the logic of the use of the first-person observer,” but spends nearly as much time on the question of person in the sections on “distance” and “plot.” The other book dismisses the whole question in half a page with the admonition “Use the grammatical form with which you feel most ‘at home.’”

Instead, these books talk about viewpoint as being more an aspect of the author and less about the book or story or characters. The emphasis is on what the writer’s attitude is and what the writer wants to say; the viewpoint is the angle or perspective from which the writer chooses to say it.

By this interpretation, there are really only two basic viewpoints: from outside the story, which is synonymous with omniscient, and from inside the story (i.e., seen through the eyes of a character), which covers everything else. One of my favorite books further subdivides the “inside the story” viewpoint based on whether the author’s chosen character is a major character who is directly involved in the action, or a minor character who is more or less passively observing the action.

A slightly different classification of viewpoints (from the appendix of the second book) separates viewpoints by Internal (i.e., inside the head of the main character) and External (the story is told by someone who is observing the events, whether that someone is the author or a minor character in the story). The textbook author notes that either first-person or third-person may be used for either type of viewpoint, and then proceeds to the meat of his discussion of viewpoint.

Both books focus their discussion of viewpoint mainly on when and why an author would prefer an internal vs. an external viewpoint, with particular emphasis on when and why an author would choose a minor character as the angle from which to tell the story. The what and how of viewpoint – the technical difficulties and techniques of writing first-person or omniscient, for instance – don’t enter the discussion at all, not even in the book that’s supposed to be all about technique.

I couldn’t even find the term “viewpoint character” in either book; they talk about the “observer author,” “objective narrator,” “authorial angle,” and so on instead. It’s kind of disconcerting. On the other hand, there’s something to be said for the older approach, which pretty consistently takes the view that all these technical tricks are something the author can and should figure out for him/herself, through careful reading and analysis of a variety of great stories. It would have driven me crazy when I was starting to learn my craft, and really wanted to be told what was possible and how to do it, but at least it doesn’t give the impression that there is One Right Way to handle everything.

The other thing I like a lot about this approach is the unabashed acknowledgement that the author is the one who’s in charge and picking the viewpoint angle in order to say something, in the same way a film director picks camera angles, or a landscape painter or photographer picks the direction and height from which to portray a scene. A lot of the time, more recent writing books are so quick to start explaining the techniques of writing first-person, or the difference between tight-third and omniscient, that they don’t spend enough time pointing out that there are reasons for choosing one over another. And the whole internal/external way of looking at viewpoint seems to have gotten lost along the way as the internal viewpoint (whether first or third person) has become almost a standard. I think it’s nice to know that there’s more of a choice out there than first-person vs. subjective, tight-third person vs. omniscient, even if I’m fairly sure I’m going to be writing a main character/internal viewpoint 99% of the time.

Nonlinear storytelling

I’ve been fascinated by nonlinear storytelling for a long time now, though I’ve barely skimmed the surface of it in my novels. It’s one of those writing techniques that can be used lightly or delved into at great depth, and examining it is something I think can be useful for a lot of writers in thinking about structure and plot. Also, it’s a heck of a lot of fun to play around with.

First, some definitions. Linear storytelling starts at A, then B happens, then C happens, in chronological order: A -> B -> C. Pretty much everyone agrees about this part.

Where people seem to have a much harder time is in describing nonlinear storytelling. Every one of the few books that talk about it flounders around for at least a couple of pages, presenting arguments about whether this or that sort of story structure should be included, before they finally come up with yet another almost-incomprehensible definition.

I come down in favor of simplicity: if linear storytelling is presenting A, B, and C in chronological order, then nonlinear storytelling is everything else. That means that nonlinear storytelling includes everything from really common techniques like flashbacks and in medias res openings to Choose-Your-Own-Adventure books to more complex structures like that of The Time Traveler’s Wife.

The thing about looking at nonlinear storytelling this way is that, for me at least, it makes it less intimidating. Instead of being this highly advanced type of storytelling that’s really hard and difficult to understand, it’s a continuum of techniques that I can work my way into.

There are a couple of things that I think are really important to remember about nonlinear storytelling, no matter where on the continuum one happens to be. The first one is that the story still has a beginning, a middle, and an end, and from the reader’s viewpoint, the beginning is on Page 1, no matter when in the internal story chronology Page 1 takes place. If the opening scene is in the middle of a battle, that’s the beginning of the story, and it has to work as a beginning as well as working as something that the characters have come to after all the flashbacks to pre-battle events that occupy chapters six through ten. This is part of what makes nonlinear stories so challenging to write.

Nonlinear stories also have to have a structure, and since chronology has been eliminated, the writer has to think about the structure rather than taking large chunks of it for granted. There are lots of ways to do this, from setting up a mostly-arbitrary pattern (as Roger Zelazny did in Roadmarks) to finding some non-time-based progression around which to group and order the scenes.

The second thing the writer needs to remember is that the protagonist and the characters are experiencing events chronologically, in a linear way, even if the writer is presenting them out of order. Even in a time-travel story, the protagonist’s subjective experience of events is linear – even if she’s born at C, lives til D, then goes back in time to A and lives through B, everything happens to her in order. It’s just that her order of events and the order of events for the external world isn’t the same.

This means that the viewpoint character in any scene may need to remember or refer to things that, for the reader, haven’t happened yet. Other times, characters may need to express views or beliefs that the reader already knows are false because of a chronologically “later” scene that’s already been shown. Keeping this kind of internal consistency is a good part of what makes nonlinear storytelling so difficult. (Part of what makes The Time Traveler’s Wife so interestingly complicated is that the two central characters aren’t experiencing events in the same order, and the story isn’t presented strictly according to either person’s internal chronology.)

The third thing is that process does not need to mimic the story. Some writers write their nonlinear stories in the order the reader reads the events, without more than a vague idea of how the straight-line chronological version would have happened. Other writers have a clear idea or outline of what happened in chronological order, even though they write the story nonlinearly, in the order the reader will read it. Still others write the story in chronological order, then shuffle the scenes around to get to the finished nonlinear product.

The final thing that I think more writers should be aware of is that all series are potentially nonlinear for some subset of readers. Even with a trilogy that’s published one-two-three over a short period, there will be some readers who pick up the second or third book first, and who do not go back to read the first volume until after they’ve finished whatever they ran across. I myself read The Lord of the Rings this way – The Two Towers was the only fantasy novel on the rack at the airport, so that was where I started reading. And it worked fine, even though I ended up reading the trilogy as 2-3-1 instead of in the normal order. So I suppose I’m saying that readers are likely to be very forgiving of this sort of inadvertent nonlinearity, especially if the book is clearly labeled as “Part 2” so they know what they’re getting into, but it’s still worth thinking about occasionally if you’re doing a long series.

There are also a lot of SF/F series where the author will write seven or eight books in chronological order, then jump back and write the “origin story” that’s been part of the implied backstory for the whole series, or do a prequel about the lives of some of the popular secondary characters before they met up with the main characters. Most people aren’t used to thinking of this as nonlinear writing, because we’re accustomed to looking at a novel or a short story as the basic unit of “story,” but it’s nonlinear for both the writer and all of the readers who’ve been following the series that far.

If all this tends to break your brain, don’t worry about it. The vast majority of novels are mostly linear, with maybe a few flashbacks thrown in and a medias res opening every once in a while. But if you’ve been looking for a place to stretch, or just have some interesting fun, it’s something to consider.

Old ways of looking at plot

Most experienced writers know in their bones that plot operates in far more directions and on far more levels than most modern how-to-write books acknowledge. It’s the folks who’re just getting started who get bogged down in strict adherence to the basic skeleton or act structure, or worse yet, to one of the many and several “scene formulas” that purport to be the One True Way to produce a successful story. There is a lot more to plotting than producing chains of action-reaction or crisis-catastrophe-consequences scenes.

Back about sixty or seventy years ago, there was something of a fad for analyzing and classifying plots in various ways. Georges Polti came up with thirty-six dramatic situations in a stunningly boring book that, when referred to, is nearly always condensed down to a list that occupies about two pages. Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch classified plots according to seven types of conflict (Man against Man, Man against Nature, Man against Himself, etc. Unaccountably, his list omits Man vs. the IRS). And Robert Heinlein summed it up in three: Boy Meets Girl, The Little Tailor, and the Man-Who-Learns-Better.

Looked at a little more closely, these classifications are actually looking at different things. The 36 situations are about content, and fairly specific content at that. “Adultery” (#25 -Two Adulterers Conspire Against a Deceived Spouse) is barely different from “Murderous Adultery” (#15 – Two Adulterers Conspire To Murder the Betrayed Spouse). The “seven types of conflict” are about the sorts of obstacles the protagonist can face: other people who don’t want him/her to succeed, natural disasters, the narrator’s own internal prejudices or flaws, etc. And Heinlein’s three basic plots, if one looks carefully, are the three things that result in change/growth in the main character, that is, people change because they’ve established (or want to establish) a new relationship, because they have to grow in order to face an external problem that looks bigger than anything they ought to be able to cope with, and because they have to face themselves and their own wrong judgments and mistakes.

One of my favorite old how-to-write textbooks takes a completely different perspective on plot, classifying stories as Character Story, Complication Story, Thematic Story, and Atmosphere Story, and the Multi-phase Story (a combination of two or more of the other types). It’s a very dense text, but as near as I can make out, the classification is based on where the plot’s main focus of attention is and/or where its driving force comes from.

All of these things are important, but none of them say much about the movement of a plot. That’s left for a different set of classifiers, who generally draw diagrams and graphs to represent tension over time, or complications, or the protagonist’s situation (good or bad). The classic one is the saw-toothed triangle, with the rising action, the climax, and the falling action, but there are others. One of the older texts I’ve been looking at separates plots into three types: a cup-shaped one it calls the Comic Plot Arc, which begins and ends with the character in a good situation, but which dips in the middle where the character is in trouble; a hill-shaped one it calls the Tragic Plot Arc, which begins and ends with the character in a bad situation, but which rises in the middle where it looks as if the character is going to make it out of the mess; and a flat line which the book call the Modern Story, in which the protagonist doesn’t struggle against Fate but passively accepts whatever events come his/her way.

And then there are the folks who attempt to deal with non-linear storytelling (which deserves, and will eventually get, a post all to itself), using circles and spirals and chains of linked boxes and arrows to try to sort out and classify plots that don’t move in strict chronological order.

All of these different ways of looking at plot are valid. Internalizing this is really useful; it means that when you are looking in despair at a plot whose action doesn’t follow the classic saw-toothed triangle pattern, you can switch gears and see it as a spiral Man-Learns-Lesson pattern, or perhaps as a Character or Atmosphere story whose primary plot-pattern isn’t on the action level at all. When there’s a problem, one doesn’t have to look only at the movement of the story; one can look at the obstacles, or the focus, or the content, or the shape.

The thing I like about all this is the richness of all the different ways of looking at plot, what constitutes plot, and what’s important about plot. It allows for much greater complexity than the basic plot skeleton and/or three-to-five-act structure that is the main substance of most modern how-to-write books. The basic skeleton and the act structure are, certainly, one set of plot fundamentals…but they’re only one set, and fundamentals are supposed to be something that you learn in order to build on, not something that you learn and then stop because that’s all you need to know.

Wiscon and worldbuilding

Wiscon was fun but, for me, low-key – I caught a nasty cold the week before, and was still recovering, so I ended up napping a whole lot more than usual and skipping a lot of the parties. But I got to see a bunch of friends and I picked up a couple of books (and a slew of recommendations) and had fun and lots of good food. And the cold is a lot better, so I can’t even grouse that the napping was a waste of time.

One of the interesting things this year was that there were three (!) panels on worldbuilding, and that’s not counting the ones on specific bits of worldbuilding, like the panel on “Designing a Magic System.” I was on the third panel, “The Joy of Worldbuilding,” which suffered a bit, I think, from being at the end of the run of panels on the topic. Nevertheless, we had a good crowd, and that tells me something about the interest of readers and writers in the topic, especially since they’d already had (potentially) at least three related panels in the previous twenty-four hours.

The topic was supposed to be about the sheer fun of worldbuilding for its own sake, but the discussion drifted (as such things are wont to do). What I ended up taking away from it was neither a list of recommended books (though there were quite a lot on display), nor tips and tricks for doing worldbuilding (though a few of those ran by as well), but a number of thoughts about process and utility.

For at least some fans and writers, inventing a coherent, consistent imaginary world is immense fun. Yes, even doing the math-and-science bits (sometimes especially the math-and-science bits). Yes, even when you know perfectly well that 99.9% of your readers are never going to notice that the orbital mechanics of the space station or the plate tectonics of the land masses are right (as far as scientific theory as of the copy-edit date knows). Yes, even when it’s a totally-imaginary fantasy world and the notion that there even are plate tectonics or fossils is never even going to occur to them. Getting it right, making it work within the rules-as-we-know-them is fun. So is making up a bunch of one’s own rules and then figuring out as many ramifications as possible.

In spite of the fun and the intellectual puzzle aspects of it, worldbuilding for its own sake has a bit of a bad rap in an awful lot of fan communities. I think that this is because so very many fans want (or think they want) to be writers, and worldbuilding is perceived as both a vital necessity for writing science fiction or fantasy and as a snare that can easily sidetrack the would-be writer into spending years doing worldbuilding instead of producing stories.

What people forget is that J. R. R. Tolkein spent forty years working on the worldbuilding for Middle Earth…for fun. Yes, eventually The Lord of the Rings came out of it, but the goal, at the start, wasn’t to write a bestselling fantasy. The goal was to make up some cool languages and then some neat people/elves/dwarves/ents/hobbits/etc. to speak the languages and then some poetry and history and cultures for the neat people/elves/etc. The story came last, almost as an afterthought.

In other words, worldbuilding does not have to have a utilitarian purpose in order to justify doing it. If one’s goal is to write a novel, well, then, yes, one does need to do some worldbuilding, whether one enjoys it or not, and one does have to be a bit careful that if one enjoys it, one doesn’t get too distracted from the ultimate goal (writing the novel). But if one just wants to have fun making stuff up…why not? You don’t have to be a writer to enjoy constructing an imaginary place.

The other point is a process one. We had two writers on that panel, and we represented the opposite ends of the worldbuilding process. I need to have a certain (fairly significant) amount of the worldbuilding done in advance in order to keep my story and my characters in line and everything consistent. I didn’t need to make up every single magical creature on the Great Plains in Frontier Magic (though I did make up quite a few), but I did have to know that I wanted an entire magical ecology that existed simultaneously with the non-magical, real-life one…which meant making sure that I talked about magical plants and insects and birds as well as things like dragons that you’d expect to find in a fantasy. I need a fair bit of foundation laid before I start working on the story, even if I don’t actually use most of it.

In contrast, the other writer on the panel apparently did much of his worldbuilding as needed during the writing of the story. I have a good friend who works similarly; where I need the structure and foundation to keep things in line, she needs the freedom to come up with an emergency escape detail on the fly that can get her characters out of a sticky situation. I don’t recall her actually having to do this, any more than I actually use the specific details I come up with in advance, but just as having a foundation is necessary to my process, being unrestricted and able to make up details is necessary to hers.

The last thing about worldbuilding is that we use the word in two different ways. On the one hand “worldbuilding” is that pre-writing or hobby-like invention of a coherent imaginary place, in as much detail (or lack thereof) as the inventor happens to want or need. It’s independent of story, just as real-life places exist independent of the people that live in them and the things that happen in them. On the other hand, there’s the worldbuilding that takes place within the story – the accumulation of details and bits of description and information that the characters find out about the history of the place(s) they move through, all of which creates an image of the world in which the story takes place. This kind of worldbuilding is a writing and storytelling technique, and it applies as much to modern mimetic fiction as it does to the most surreal of fantasies. The existence of real-life New York, Capetown, or Bombay does not make it easier to convey a sense of them to a reader than it is to evoke the feel of an imaginary place like Hobbiton or Edoras.

It’s the second kind of worldbuilding – the in-story techniques for conveying the look and feel of a place, whether real or imaginary – that is vital to fantasy and science fiction. The pre-writing make-it-up sort of worldbuilding is optional, depending on one’s personal process.

 

To preach or not to preach

Around about twenty years back, I had the privilege of being at a convention where Judith Merril was appearing, and I made sure to go to every panel she was on. There weren’t a lot (she wasn’t in the best of health at the time), but when she was there, she was amazing to watch and hear. The panel I remember best was the one in which one of the (much younger) panelists, in response to a question from the audience, spouted that old, well-known line about “if you want to send a message, use Western Union” and finished up with the assertion that “fiction isn’t the place to preach.”

Judith straightened up, fixed the panelist with a gimlet glare, and said, “Why not? What better place is there?”

There was a moment of stunned silence as both the audience and the panelists tried to absorb the fact that a major SF writer known for promoting higher literary standards in the field had just contradicted something that the rest of us had assumed was a fundamental writing principle that everybody agreed on. Everyone except Judith. She gave us a minute or so to recover, then proceeded to list a number of well-known novels that had obvious agendas of various sorts and that were either better for having them or that wouldn’t have existed without them. I wish I’d written the list down, but I was too busy grappling with her confident writing heresy to grab a pen.

That moment of silence when everyone tried – and failed – to come up with a solid, logical answer for the obvious question that no one else had asked made a big impression on me.  What it did not do was instantly convince me of the rightness of Ms. Merril’s position. (Nor the wrongness of it, either.)

I’ve thought about that experience, off and on, for years since. The result of all that thinking has brought me around to the same position I’m in on a lot of writing (and other sorts of) issues:  It Depends.

The interesting thing about the whole to-preach-or-not-to-preach question (aside from the fact that pretty much all the writing advice I see still takes the position that having an overt agenda is inherently a Bad Thing, full stop) is that it depends more on the writer and the writer’s attitude than on the story. Taking an overt moral, religious, or political stand in one’s fiction is something authors choose to do, or not do. It’s rarely something dictated by the necessities of storytelling.

Once you start actually looking at novels, you can find rather a lot of them that clearly have some moral, ethical, or political ax to grind…and that work, or don’t, on a variety of different levels. Some seem to work in spite of the author’s agenda; others seem to work because of it. Some make the agenda subservient to the story; others make the story obviously serve the agenda…and manage to work anyway.

There are, I think, two basic dangers in starting with an agenda. The first is a writing problem: does the author have the skill to pull this off? It’s trickier than it sounds, because the writer has to strike a readable and appealing balance between the needs of the point he/she wants to make and the requirements of storytelling. Passionate conviction is seldom an adequate substitute for writing skill. Yet the balancing act is possible; we still read Aesop’s fables, in spite of the blatantly obvious fact that every one of them is constructed to make a very specific point.

The second danger is that if the writer’s agenda is too obvious, most of the readers who disagree with it will dislike the book (or, more probably, never pick it up in the first place). There really isn’t much the writer can do about this except realize that it’s going to happen and brace for it. One can try to bury one’s moral, ethical, or political point so deeply that it won’t offend anyone, but that gets right back to the don’t-preach-in-fiction argument…and quite frequently allows readers to miss the whole point. And if you feel strongly enough about a moral, ethical, or political stance to want to write about it, you aren’t going to be happy with what you do if you try to pretend that you’re not really doing it.

Writing and Learning styles

Last Sunday, I was having so much fun going through Mom’s old writing books that I promised a couple more posts on the subject…forgetting that I was going to be out of town until the end of Wiscon. So you’ll have to wait a week for me to talk about the changes in the way folks talk about writing.

In the meantime… Back when I was doing literacy tutoring, one of the training classes they sent us to was about learning styles. They divided them up into three: visual, aural, and kinesthetic (that is, people who learn most easily by seeing an example or reading, people who learn most readily when they are told how to do something, and people who learn best when they actually do it themselves). This has lots of implications for education (our current system is heavily biased toward the first two learning styles), but what I want to talk about is the implications for writers and readers.

Reading is fundamentally a visual experience. Yes, there are audiobooks, but most readers are readers, not listeners…and most books meant for persons over the age of five or six are not written to be read aloud. Nevertheless, there seem to be at least two common types of readers: those who “see” the story as a movie in their heads, and those who “hear” the story in their heads as if someone were reading it. There are also the rare types who “feel” the story as they read it – who lean forward and tense up when the protagonist is running or jumping, and sometimes even fall off the chair if they’ve become too involved in the action.

Ideally, one would like to write stories that appeal to all three types of readers (and however many other categories are out there). The difficulty begins with realizing that this is something one needs to pay attention to. After all, every writer has his or her own learning and reading style, and it is only natural that one begins by writing in whatever way “feels right” to oneself. Reading is also generally a solitary experience, and the way we talk about the things we’ve read seldom gives much of a clue about the differences in how we experience it. “I loved the chase scene in Chapter 9!” may mean “I could visualize the horses galloping through the forest and the branches whipping past” or it may mean “I loved the way the words had the rhythm of hoofbeats and the sentences flowed into one another” or even “I could fell the wind in my hair and I was so into the ride that I kicked the footstool over when they jumped the river.”

If one doesn’t realize (or doesn’t believe) that other people don’t experience “reading a story” the same way one does oneself, one has no reason to suspect that some readers will trip over the clunky sentence fragments in that visually evocative section, or bog down and lose track of the story in a long flow of beautiful but slow-moving prose. I recall one writer friend who was mildly horrified to discover that there were readers who actually cared about “pretty sentences,” rather than about the mental images they produced, and another who was even more horrified to learn that not everyone stops to figure out exactly how to pronounce each and every alien name in an SF novel (because if you don’t know how to pronounce them, how can you tell what the rhythm of the sentence it’s in is supposed to be?)

I think that when any one person reads a story, they translate it from words-on-the-page into whatever their preferred mode of understanding is. In order to write a story, the process goes in reverse, translating the “mental pictures” or the “inner storyteller” into words-on-the-page. (This is one of the reasons why it’s never quite the story in your head.) If one wants to appeal to more than one type of reader, one’s translation into words-on-the-page has to end up with something that each type of reader will be able to “translate” from words-on-the-page into their particular most-valued way of experiencing the book.

Most of the writers I know do this kind of thing more or less by instinct. They lean towards “mental pictures” or “inner storytelling” or “reproducing the physical sensations,” but they’ve found ways of writing that also appeal to other sorts of readers. The writer who is all about mental movies learns to write sentences that are, if not rhythmic and flowing, at least not clunky. The writer who is all about poetic rhythm learns to include some visually evocative phrases. I’ve only known one or two writers who were so far into one mode or other that they had to consciously and deliberately work on acquiring the others in order to get any other styles into their work. Most of the rest of us pick up enough to get by without thinking about it.

“Getting by,” however, is not the ideal. I think an awful lot of writers could benefit from thinking about the reading/writing styles that don’t come naturally to them. Yes, it’s a lot of work to stop and think about the rhythm of the sentences, the word choices, and the flow of the syntax, when what really matters to you is the vivid mental images you’re trying to evoke. Yes, it’s hard to pull back and look at the “big picture” effect that all those lovely sentences add up to. Yes, it feels a bit strange to make yourself physically feel the tensions and the motion in the story. But even if one doesn’t make a regular habit of it, pausing every so often to think about the effects your words-on-the-page will have when they’re filtered through a different style of reading.