Patricia C. Wrede's Blog, page 59

Lost Gold

One of the things I inherited from my mother was her collection of writing textbooks. Most of them date from the 1940s and 1950s; a few are as recent as the 1970s. It’s fascinating to look at them, especially in light of my own far more recent collection, and see how teaching people to write fiction has changed.

The first thing that’s obvious is the deep, deep divide in the earlier how-to-write books between “pulp” fiction and “real” fiction (it’s even phrased that way in a few). In the earliest books, there is “good fiction” – that is, the literary fiction that was respected – and that other stuff. Consequently, there are two kinds of how-to-write books: the ones that take a literary approach, and the ones that talk bluntly about what kinds of stories the popular audience wants and how to deliver them.

Among my collection of how-to-write books, the division is not nearly so clear. There are books that were pretty clearly written to be textbooks for college-level creative writing classes, but they don’t have the same condescending attitude (for the most part) toward popular fiction as their predecessors. The less academic books talk about things like quality, style, and theme as well as about the practicalities of writing action, structuring plot, and composing realistic-yet-readable dialog. The divide is still there to some extent, but it’s much less deep.

The second thing that is evident is that sixty or seventy years ago, the short story was the crown jewel of literary achievement. Hardly any of the older books on the literary side talk about writing novels; on the other hand, there are a number of them that are essentially collections of highly respected short stories with a few “study questions” at the end. The same authors appear over and over: Hemingway, Jackson, Thurber, Chekov, James, Twain. It’s the how-to-sell books that talk about novels, and even some of them involve a lot more short story examples than book-length works (though of course, the short story market was a lot larger in the 1940s and 50s than it is now, so it’s understandable).

The modern part of my how-to-write collection contains a few books that use the short-stories-as-examples technique, but far fewer of them (possibly reflecting the collapse of the short fiction market; possibly reflecting the difficulty of getting reprint permissions; but possibly reflecting as well a change in the philosophy of how teaching folks to write fiction should happen). The two (out of at least fifty titles) I can think of both use similar formats: the author writes about some particular aspect of writing, then has the short story that exemplifies it, followed by an analysis. In other words, the authors do a whole lot more work than just coming up with a set of leading questions.

The third big difference between the older how-to-write books and the newer ones is that all of them are overall, general texts. They all talk about all aspects of writing, from writing the first draft to plot and dialog to revising. Even the ones that are little more than collections of short stories look at different aspects of the stories they’ve collected: the first story will have questions that focus on structure; the second, ones that focus on dialog; the third, questions that focus on writing comedy, and so on.

From where I sit, I can easily count fourteen newer how-to-write books with titles like “Revising” “Plot” “Dialog” “Handbook of Short Story Writing” “Fiction Writer’s Research Handbook” … and that’s not even counting all the genre-specific stuff like “Creating Fantasy” and “How to write Speculative Fiction.” In other words, a sizeable number of the modern how-to-write books focus on one specific area or aspect of writing.

I think that the closing of the gap between so-called literary and so-called pulp fiction is a good thing. I’ve never met a writer who didn’t care about the quality of his or her work, regardless of what they wrote, and I think it is a good thing for this to be reflected in the books that try to teach fiction writing. The slow demise of the short story, I’m less happy about. I’m a novelist myself, so seeing more representation of novels and talk about how to write them in the how-to books seems to me like a Good Thing, but I don’t like this complete reversal. On the other hand, the market is what it is, and there’s no getting around the fact that there are very few short story markets left.

That last point, though…on the one hand, it’s nice to be able to dig into a single aspect of the writing craft in depth and detail, and some of those one-aspect books do exactly that. Others, though, don’t have depth so much as the illusion of it – many pages of questionable advice that makes it sound as if this one thing is the key to writing great/selling fiction. And even if the advice was brilliant…well, a book with one brilliant aspect and everything else mediocre-to-bad is not what most of the writers I know want to write.

On the plus side, the number of how-to-write books that take completely different approaches to writing fiction means that people who are more intuitive than analytic, or more practical than academic, or vice versa, have somewhere to go. No matter how many times someone says “There is no One True Way” or “Everyone works differently,” it’s a lot easier to believe it when you have an actual how-to-write book in front of you written by someone who does it similarly to the way you do.

I do think that it’s worth looking back at some of those older books. Some of them have things in them I haven’t seen anywhere else…and I like having my preconceptions shaken up every now and then. So I’m going to spend the next few posts talking about ways of looking at writing that I’ve found in some of those older books. Maybe some of the newer ones, too.

Thinking about first person

It’s been a while since I’ve talked about viewpoint, and first-person has been on my mind lately.

First person seems to be a love-it-or-hate-it viewpoint. I’ve heard folks say that it’s the easiest viewpoint for a beginner to use, that no one should ever use it, that it allows for more believability, that it’s always autobiographical (and therefore, in some obscure fashion I’ve never really understood, suspect in fiction…as if first-person should only be used in actual autobiography or memoir). I’ve heard readers say that they like first-person because it’s so immediate, or because the reader always knows the main character survives, or because “all first person stories sound like they’re written by writers.” (What?)

Let’s start with a definition: first-person is any story in which the narrator or viewpoint character uses “I” outside of dialog. The most common variety is as-it-happens narration, as if the main character is telling the story to the reader nanoseconds after the events happen, but epistolary fiction (a story told in letters, like Sorcery and Cecelia, or in emails) and journal excerpts are also common. Stream-of-consciousness writing – the sort that tries to mimic the chaos and distraction of the narrator’s thoughts, second to second – is usually used in short fiction (probably because it’s very difficult to sustain at length).

I think that a lot of the mistrust of first person comes from the fact that it’s something all of us do regularly in real life. Everyone has written letters or emails; lots of people have kept a diary or a journal at some point in their lives. This makes it seem easy and predictable, something everyone already knows how to do…except that when you’re writing fiction, it’s never easy or predictable. Since experienced writers and editors know this, they get suspicious of anything that looks too easy.

At the other end of the spectrum are the new writers who think first-person is the trick to making writing easy and predictable. They’ve written emails, they’ve kept a diary; how different can this be? So they plunge ahead and make all sorts of mistakes, which lead the experienced writers, critics, editors, etc. to shake their heads and blame it on trying to write first-person. And next thing you know, how-to books and writing teachers and advice blogs are forbidding anyone to use it.

The truth is that, like every other viewpoint, first-person has both strengths and weaknesses. There are some beginner mistakes that are nearly impossible to make in first person; there are others that are an order of magnitude easier. The trick is in knowing what they are and in knowing whether your particular writing strengths and weaknesses are complimented or reinforced by the natural strengths and weaknesses of the viewpoint.

The first and most obvious characteristic of first-person is that the writer is stuck in the narrator’s head for the length of the story (or at least the length of the scene, if it’s one of the rare multiple-viewpoint-first-person novels). It is glaringly obvious whenever the writer strays outside what the narrator can see, hear, know, or reason out for him/herself. If head-hopping is something you have trouble with, first-person will keep you from doing it if you are paying any attention at all. Of course, you’ll probably find it incredibly difficult and frustrating when you can’t just jump to some other character and show how he/she feels or thinks, and you’ll be driven half mad figuring out how to let the reader in on important events or information that the narrator didn’t happen to be present for, but I did say that it wasn’t going to be as easy as it looked, didn’t I?

The second and only slightly less obvious characteristic of first-person is that whether it’s letters, diaries, stream-of-consciousness, or standard narrative, every line has to be in the voice of the narrator-character…not that of the author. This can be a lot trickier than it sounds, precisely because everyone uses first-person a lot in real life. When you’re used to speaking in your own voice, it can be hard to imitate someone else’s consistently, especially if the differences are subtle. It’s much easier if the narrator-character has a strong voice, including but not limited to vocabulary, syntax, and idioms.

A subset of this is that what the character notices also has to be in-character. This means, for instance, if your character is a farmer, she will likely notice and comment on every garden and the health of every plant (or at least, the useful plants, i.e., food), but may or may not have any interest in describing hairstyles or the interiors of other people’s homes. And what she does say about them will be from her own perspective and in her own words, not yours.

Logically, then, if you are good at “getting into” the mind of your narrator, but bad at sticking to what he/she sees and/or terrible at conveying information that the narrator isn’t around for, using a first-person viewpoint would force you to work on those areas you have trouble with, while giving your ability to get into the character’s head a chance to shine. On the other hand, if you are rock-solid on the what-the-narrator-sees stuff, but shaky on voice, doing a good strong-voiced first-person who does not sound like you will give you a novel’s worth of practice at using a character’s voice when your natural inclination is to use your own. It may be a bit of a trial by fire, but it’s likely to be effective.

If you have trouble doing a viewpoint character’s internal dialog, first person will likewise give you lots of chance to practice, though whether you make use of the chance or not is up to you. If, however, you are predisposed to writing internal monologue even in third-person, you may find that first-person encourages this tendency to an unfortunate extreme, and you may not want to try it until you’ve brought your description and narration skills up to the same level. As always, if you’re going to work on your skills, the first thing you have to do is figure out where you’re weak.

Trying to Improve

One of the things about writing is that if you want to improve, you have to work at it yourself. Nobody is going to make you practice; nobody is going to force you to get better. Even taking writing classes is a choice – I’ve known people who took how-to-write classes simply to have a deadline to work to (but that’s a whole ‘nother rant).

Some writers are perfectly happy letting things come naturally. Writing is a skill, and like most skills, it improves with practice. You can get quite a long way just by writing one novel after another, without paying much conscious attention to any particular area that may need improvement.

Eventually, though, one reaches a point where the pace of improvement slows. One then has a choice: one can accept that one has reached the plateau section of the learning curve, and just continue to take whatever progress shows up in the course of one’s regular writing; or one can deliberately push oneself.

There seem to be two schools of thought as regards pushing. The first set of writers treat improving their skills as something separate from their daily word count. They take classes and write exercises that are targeted on whatever they perceive their writing weaknesses to be, then integrate their new skills with their actual writing. The second sort treat pushing themselves as part of their normal writing process; they set themselves challenges and take on stretchy projects that will force them to improve while they produce their daily word count.

I’ve always been the second sort of writer, which is a bit odd because I’m normally not much for risk-taking, and deciding to write a stretchy, different kind of book is definitely a risk when you are making your living this way. The editors may not like it; the readers may not like it; people may be so put off by whatever-it-is that they never buy any of my books ever again. On the other hand, what most readers notice first is the content; playing with things like viewpoint and structure and word choice are not so much of a risk as far as the readers go, unless I fail utterly and disastrously.

I never saw the use of exercises; all the ones I’d ever seen wanted you to write a page describing a girl in blue, or two people watching a convertible at a stop sign, or something similar, and if I wanted to do that, I’d rather do it writing pay copy.

Then in 1998 Ursula le Guin’s Steering the Craft came out. It was the advanced writing manual I’d been craving, and it was full of exercises that I would never, ever have actually written in a novel. I like to experiment, yes, but I’d never try for an entire page with no punctuation whatever, or a scene written in sentences of less than seven words each, or a 300-word grammatically correct sentence.

In other words, you can get quite a long way by just writing and by setting yourself challenges, but there are some things that are much easier to get at in the artificial setting of an exercise.

Regardless of the way one chooses to push oneself, though, diagnosis is important. It’s less important, I think, if one is pushing by writing stretchy books; “stretchy” is subjective, and as long as it feels stretchy, it’s probably working on something, even if it’s not quite the thing one thought it would stretch when one chose the project. Exercises tend to be more pointed at one specific area, and if it isn’t an area you have a problem with, the exercise probably isn’t going to be much benefit.

The two easiest things to push on are probably viewpoint and structure, because they are the two aspects of fiction that are clearest and most obvious. First-person and third-person viewpoint are clearly different and easily definable, in a way that differences in description or narrative style or backstory revelations or even plot are not. A lot of structural techniques, like flashbacks or parallel scenes or multiple viewpoint, are likewise extremely easy to define. One can set oneself a task: write this book in first person; write the next book with two viewpoint characters in strict alternation, chapter by chapter. When the book is done, it’s obvious whether one succeeded or failed.

And sometimes one discovers something unexpected along the way. The book with the strictly-alternating-viewpoints has a character who enters the Elf Hill and is out of the story for ten years; does the writer skip ahead, forcibly following the set pattern, or break the pattern in mid-book? The first-person narrator is unexpectedly possessed by a second character; how does first-person work for that?

With an exercise, one rarely, if ever, runs into these unanticipated events. Exercises are short and targeted; there isn’t time or room for one’s subconscious to take off in a totally new direction. Novels and short stories are different. They have their own agendas, which take precedence over whatever challenge the writer set herself to begin with. In the end, the question isn’t really “should I break the alternating viewpoint pattern when the character enters the Elf Hill, or not?” It’s “which way is this story going to work better?” The important thing is to end up with an interesting story; exactly how one gets there is irrelevant.

Daily Life

First off, I am pleased to say that the three Kate and Cecy books will be going live as e-books on May 22. Stephanie Burgis did a lovely blog post on them. Which means that all of the backlist except the Enchanted Forest books are now available in nice, legal ebooks, one way or another (the two Mairelon books are available together, in the omnibus “A Matter of Magic,” rather than as individual titles). There are an assortment of issued with the Enchanted Forest that I hope to work out eventually, but I have no idea how long “eventually” will take, especially if lawyers get involved. So let’s just say it’ll be quite a while yet for those, and leave it at that.

For those who are interested in the glamorous, exciting lives that writers lead:  I have spent the last three days doing every stitch of laundry I could find anywhere in the house. I am currently waiting for the plumber to arrive to unhook the ten-plus-year-old washer and dryer, so that they can be hauled away when the replacements are delivered tomorrow. They don’t get hooked up until the new floor is down in the laundry room, though, which won’t happen until at least next week. And then they get to repair the ceiling, which will be much easier without the new machines in the way (hence the frantic laundry-doing, in hopes of minimizing the number of trips to the Laundromat during (re)construction.) Then I get to go to Home Depot to pick up some widgets. Doesn’t that sound glamorous and exciting?

Which brings me back around to another writing balancing act (several, actually). Everybody has daily life to do: cooking, laundry, cleaning, house maintenance, etc. For writers, it’s perilously easy to put off doing the words in favor of sweeping out the laundry room before the repair guy arrives (it’ll only take a minute), doing the dishes (they have to be washed some time, so why put it off?), sewing that loose button back on (it’s been bugging me for days, but I only seem to think of fixing it when I’m standing in the middle of Target, so now that I have thought of it, I’d better seize the moment).

It’s especially easy when the writing isn’t going well; it feels so much better to be doing something actually useful instead of just staring at the blank page/screen and muttering balefully under one’s breath. And if one is yet to be published, or doesn’t actually have a deadline at the moment, it’s even easier to justify. After all, there’s no guarantee that whatever words one manages to painfully extract from one’s backbrain will sell, so why not do something more obviously productive?

The problem with thinking like this is that if one does, one generally arrives fairly quickly at a point where no writing happens at all. Not only that, but “I’m not getting any writing done today, so I might as well do X” turns into “I can’t write today, because I’ll be more productive if I do X” and then to “X is more important to get done than writing, so I can’t write today” and finally to “I can’t write.”

The solution to this is fairly obvious, if notoriously difficult to implement: sit down and write anyway, whether or not you feel like it, whether or not there’s other stuff to do, whether or not you feel worthy or competent or whatever else you think you need to feel. Writing isn’t about how you feel; it’s about getting words on the page. You have to figure out how for yourself, but really, making time to write and guarding that time from everybody and everything else including yourself is ultimately what works.

The other balancing act is the one involving the characters in the story. They, too, have daily lives and need to cook, do laundry, etc. The convention in most fiction is to skip lightly over all this daily maintenance, because really, who wants to read about someone doing laundry? At the other end of the scale, there are writers who feel that giving the readers all the dramatic details of cooking and laundry makes the characters “more real” (or perhaps it’s “more realistic;” I’m never sure).

And of course, they’re both right – for elastic values of “right.” Which is to say that it depends on the story, the characters, etc. Every story has a unique balance point between showing the main character cleverly breaking into the museum and showing the main character lovingly chopping onions for the stir-fry. In some cases, even one scene of onion-chopping would be too much; in other stories, the right balance means spending several pages having the main character wax lyrical over the proper way to chop onions.

And once again, it’s up to the writer to figure out where that balance is and what the most effective way of achieving it is.

What Kind of Skeleton

I’ve been thinking a lot about the classic plot skeleton lately, for a variety of reasons, and I’ve been getting steadily more annoyed with most of what’s written about it, and about plotting in general.

The trouble is that most of what’s written about plot and plotting is stuff that’s written after the fact – it’s based on critical analysis of books that have already been written. Even the how-to-write books seem to have simply adopted the post-writing analytical outlook, lock, stock, and barrel. You can find some really excellent descriptions of plot structures (Linda Seger’s How to Make a Good Script Great has a terrific description of the three- and five-act structures common in plays, movies, and TV, for instance), but they’re all starting from pretty much the same place – the basic plot skeleton.

What this leaves out is all the other possible structures. To extend the metaphor a bit, not all stories are mammal, with endoskeletons. Some of them are insects that have exoskeletons, or mollusks that have shells, or even octopus- or amoeba-like things that have nothing resembling a skeleton at all.

And none of this is much of any help to a great many writers who are in the process of constructing a story. There are some writers who start with a plot and plan most of the story from there before they start writing, and a lot of others who, regardless of what other bit they started with (characters, setting, theme, idea…) have developed at least a basic sketch of a plot before they start writing.

But I don’t know anyone who sits down and thinks about plot as a plot-skeleton or a three-act, four-act, or five-act structure while they are making it up. The few writers I know who get that analytical about their own work do so only when they know something has gone wrong in the writing, and they’re trying to figure out what.

The thing that does seem to be useful to writers during the actual writing or pre-writing stages is questions. What are the characters trying to do, or achieve? Could it change in the course of the story? What happened five, ten, twenty years ago that set up these characters for whatever is happening now? What does the protagonist want? Why can’t he/she have it? What are they willing to do to get it? Are there societal barriers in the way of the protagonist getting what he/she wants? Or is it something they have internal doubts about for some reason?

Note that none of these questions talking about “what happens next.” “What happens next?” is possibly the most useless question writers can ask themselves; it’s practically guaranteed to create frustration in most folks (though I’ve known one or two who seem to be wired backwards; if you find that asking “what happens next?” provides you with just what you need to go on with, while asking anything more specific brings you to a screeching halt, you are probably another one, and can ignore most of the rest of this post, except as something of academic interest).

The most useful question, for the rest of us, tends to be “Why…?” Why would the protagonist turn left at that corner instead of right? Why would James Q. Villain bother trying to stop the hero? Why did the vampires pick this year to start a labor union, instead of last year or next year? Why was the Super-Duper Gizmo lost in the first place, and why did the hero “just happen” to find it?

These “why” questions lead fairly directly to a cause-and-effect relationship between whatever is going on – this happens, then that happens because of the first thing, which makes something else happen, and so on. For a linear story – one that moves the protagonist chronologically from today through tomorrow to next week and next month until it gets to the climax – this works really well, and quite often gets one to a typical plot-skeleton with very little extra adjusting.

But for those stories that aren’t linear – for ones that move back and forth in time, or that have deliberately circular or spiral structures, or that do other unusual things – the relevant questions may be a bit different. What holds the story together may still be the ups and downs and cause and effect of the events in the protagonist’s life, in which case asking “why” with a focus on the characters or the immediate situation still works pretty well.

If the story has an exoskeleton, though, the right question is more often “What is possible, given the set shape of this story?” or “What needs to happen next to maintain the shape?” In other words, the focus isn’t so much on the characters or the situation as it is on the constraints that the author has decided to place on the story (whether the constraints happen deliberately or inadvertently is a whole ‘nother question). Sometimes, the most useful place to start is “What are the constraints on this story, and why in heaven’s name did I think it was going to be a good idea to do it this way?”

The thing to remember is that all this stuff is voluntary. The author gets to decide whether to start out with a skeleton, or a mollusk shell, or a blob of jelly; whether to do a lot of pre-planning or whether to sit down and just wing it. The writer gets to make up the rules…and if she doesn’t like them, she can make up a different set for the next story.

What’s missing

Last week I got into another one of those discussions with a would-be writer who was convinced that before he ever sat down to write, he had to have the perfect idea – one with depth and resonance, something he found personally meaningful and inspiring, and above all else, something original. If it wasn’t original, fresh, and new, it wasn’t worth doing, as far as he was concerned…and he was positive that an original idea was all he needed to achieve not merely publication, but wildly successful publication.

I blinked at him a couple of times and then quoted Watt-Evans’ Law of Literary Creation (There is no idea so stupid or hackneyed that a sufficiently-talented writer can’t get a good story out of it.) and Feist’s Corollary (There is no idea so brilliant or original that a sufficiently-untalented writer can’t screw it up.) 

In other words, it isn’t the idea that has to be meaningful and full of depth and resonance; it’s the finished story that needs those things. Of course, he didn’t want to believe me, but it got me thinking.

How do I get from the stupid, hackneyed idea to a reasonably decent, interesting story?

Well, I start by looking at the parts of the story that aren’t included in the idea. Ideas, by their nature, need to be developed and expanded in order to become stories. They aren’t complete in themselves, or they’d be the stories we make them into. So whatever the idea is that one starts with, it’s missing something.

A lot of the ideas that get lumped into the “stupid or hackneyed or clichéd” category are plot ideas: the orphaned hero turns out to be the lost heir to the throne, for instance. What’s missing is characters (by which I mean “specific people with names and individual personalities,” rather than just roles like “orphaned hero” or “smart-mouthed sidekick”) and setting. Some of the “hackneyed or clichéd” ideas are the characters who’ve been around the block too many times: the spunky young girl, the thief with a heart of gold, the mustache-twirling villain, the noble hero who’s good at everything. What they’re missing is plot and setting. And of course Generic Fantasy Setting #2,349 needs a plot and characters.

So I look at the cliché “orphaned hero is lost heir” and I think about just who that orphaned hero/heroine is. Somebody different; somebody unexpected. Maybe she’s a Goth girl with no patience whatever for the rules of the court she’s suddenly thrust into. Maybe he’s an emo poet, or really, really, really wants to play major league football, and to heck with this being a king stuff. Maybe she’s the absolutely perfect ideal the court has been hoping for…too perfect? How’d she get that way, when she didn’t know she was a princess? What’s she really thinking, underneath all that perfection? What if my orphaned hero is a gang member (or equivalent)?

Or I look at the cliché and I think about where it could take place that would be interesting and different. Aliens. Insectoid aliens…maybe something like bees, where the new queen has to destroy all her competitors? Or merpeople – I could combine the “lost heir” with one of the selkie legends about the selkie maiden who was trapped by the fisherman and forced to live as his wife until she found the sealskin he stole from her. That’s certainly one way for the True Heir to get lost.

Telling a familiar story from the point of view of a normally-minor character often works well – the maid or valet, the coachman, the cook, the captain of the guard, all can bring a fresh perspective to a familiar tale…or sometimes spin off it sideways into stories of their own, for which the familiar “main” story ends up being no more than something happening in the background.

Ultimately, though, it comes down to execution. You can make anything sound horrible and clichéd and stupid in a summary, without even trying much. (“The Lord of The Rings” is about a short guy with hairy toes who throws a ring in a volcano.) And if you boil things down far enough, there aren’t any original plots…that’s why Heinlein could claim that all plots are variations or combinations of only three fundamental types. It’s the final product – the total impression made by 90,000+ words of novel – that’s going to be meaningful and inspiring and interesting and deep. Not the log-line.

How they say it

One of the things it took me a while to get a handle on was giving my characters different speech patterns, depending on both their personalities and their backgrounds. For my first couple of books, I was too busy juggling all the other stuff – background, plot, description, action, dialog, viewpoint, etc. – to even think about getting into more subtle distinctions. I think I managed to make the minstrel’s speeches a little more flowery than everyone else’s, but that was about the extent of it for the first three books or so.

When I finally did start to think about the way characters talked, I was at first bewildered by some of the advice I was getting. “Characters will choose different words depending on their personalities, cultural background, age, class, education and training, and so on,” I was advised. “Two characters should never say the same thing in the same way.” Then I’d look at a simple statement like “That’s a mistake” or “The house is on fire!” and wonder how else to put it. “That’s wrong” didn’t seem different enough to carry all that freight, and I couldn’t see any of my characters choosing words like “The domicile is ablaze!” (though someone who did might be interesting to write about).

What I didn’t realize for a long time is that I had the emphasis wrong. I thought it was “Two characters should never say the same thing in the SAME WAY,” when I should have been looking at it as “Two different characters will never say the SAME THING in the same way.”

Speech patterns are as much about WHAT is said as they are about the WAY it is said. “Madam, will you do me the honor of granting me your hand in marriage?” and “Hey, baby, why don’t we get hitched?” are both proposals of marriage, but that’s not all they are. There’s a lot more information in each of those sentences than just “Will you marry me?”…and it’s different information, depending on who the speaker is and what they think is important in addition to the basic question they’re asking.

A lot of that additional information has to do with the speaker him/herself. You can tell quite a lot about the two people who are proposing in the paragraph above – the first one uses formal, traditional language and is perhaps a little stuffy, while the second is slangy and informal. One can easily picture the first in a tuxedo, on his knees with a diamond ring in a box, while the second seems more likely to be sporting an untrimmed beard and a tie-dye T-shirt. One can, of course, set up circumstances in-story in which it would be the hippy in the tie-dye shirt using the formal language and the stuffy gent in the tux who’s being slangy, but if all you have is the dialog, that isn’t what first springs to mind.

In any exchange of dialog, each of the characters has a lot more going on than just the basic information they’re supposedly telling the other person. They have personal agendas; they have emotional reactions that they may not be able to – or want to – hide; they have ingrained ideas about the proper way to behave and speak (both in a grammatical sense and in terms of good manners). All of these things will affect what they say and how they say it.

What and how are often a lot harder to distinguish than first appears. When I made my first deliberate foray into giving characters different speech patterns (in The Seven Towers) I thought I was concentrating on how they spoke: Amberglas in a rambling, roundabout fashion; Vandaris using colorful swears, Ranlyn in a slightly archaic formal style, etc. But in order to ramble or swear or be archaic, I had to add things to whatever the basic underlying dialog was. And what got added depended on the character.

Amberglas  couldn’t just say “Don’t move; you’re injured.” If I wanted her to ramble, I had to add some things for her to ramble about. So what could have been a short, simple, straightforward line of dialog became “You really shouldn’t do that, especially if you’re not feeling well, which I can see you aren’t, what with that hole in your side and so on.  I assume you realize that, though one can never tell.  People can be so very odd.  There was a man I used to know, who always wore his boots on the wrong feet for one day out of every month.  So I thought I’d mention it, in case you didn’t.”

What people say isn’t just syntax and word choice (though those are an important piece of how they say things). It’s about what’s important to them – manners, image, people and things they’re worried about or afraid of, attitude toward the listener, and a host of other things. The more urgent the situation, the more of this stuff gets stripped out of the dialog, but one can’t write an entire book with people saying nothing but “Help!” or “Fire!” or “Duck!”

If you haven’t ever thought about this stuff before, syntax and word choice are a good place to start – things like having one type of character use shorter, less complex sentences and words of fewer syllables often work well.  Look at the way Shakespeare did it:  you wouldn’t mistake any of the rude mechanicals’ speeches for those of the nobility. Or you can try doing what I did – picking a cast of characters several of whom have exaggerated or extreme speech patterns that are very different from each other. Nobody else talks like Amberglas, so it was really easy to tell if I’d gotten her dialog wrong or if her style was creeping into someone else’s dialog inadvertently.

Nowadays, I do this mostly by instinct, and on a much less obvious (I hope) level. But that’s where I started.

Revising

The process of revising effectively tends to vary from writer to writer just as the first-draft writing process varies, and it’s not necessarily connected to the way one writes your first drafts. In fact, often (though not always) the revisions process seems to need to be the opposite of the writer’s writing process in some way: writers who are very methodical and who do outlines and character sketches and so on for their first drafts find themselves winging their revisions, while those who write things in order, front-to-back, find themselves skipping all over the book while revising.

Revising is a separate skill from writing it down in the first place — related, but still different. And like writing it down, revising is a skill that gets better with practice. By the time one gets to the end of the first draft, one has definitely had a novel’s worth of practice at getting the words down on paper, and a lot of writers expect this to translate into ease of revision. If you haven’t been revising-as-you-go, however, it is highly unlikely that your revisions skills will be up at the same level as your first-draft skills…and an awful lot of writers cannot revise as they go without killing the story.

One could, of course, try revision someone else’s terminally bad piece of prose for practice and hope that the techniques one figures out will be applicable to one’s own work. It’s not hard to find examples of bad prose on the net; the trouble is finding some that makes the same mistakes you do without also making you feel as if your stuff is too horrible to contemplate.

So most of us are left with getting to the end of the book, right about the point where we feel as if we know what we’re doing, and then starting over again trying to boot up an entirely new skill (revising). The first step is always, always, always figuring out what the problem is. Diagnosis is key; if you can’t see what’s wrong, and you try to fix it anyway, it’s like trying to fix a delicate piece of electronics blindfolded and wearing oven mitts. Don’t. Just don’t.

Figuring out the problem isn’t as easy as it sounds – after all, if you’d known it was a problem, you wouldn’t have written it that way in the first place. There are various ways of going about this. Some writers lean heavily on first readers and crit groups to point out problems; others swear by the “cold box” method (stick it in a drawer for a couple of weeks or months, until it’s “cooled off” and you don’t remember what you meant to say quite so clearly). Some find that just making the manuscript look different is enough to do the trick, which these days is a simple matter of changing the font and the margins. I have friends who swear that they get this effect from looking at hard copy (as opposed to seeing tings on screen), even though nothing else changes.

Or you sit down and analyze. This means approaching the work coldly and intellectually, looking for places that don’t work and (even more important) for why they don’t work. It means avoiding the trap of getting lost in the fun, brilliant bits that you just love, and equally avoiding the trap of deciding every word, every comma, is trash and utterly without merit. It means learning the difference between fixing a problem and second-guessing a decision.

A word about this bit: the common advice to “murder your darlings” does not mean that you are supposed to go through your manuscript and take out every single thing in it that you actually like. If you don’t like what you write, why should anyone else like it? What it means is that if the only reason a particular sentence is in there is to show how clever the author is…take it out. You can save it for some other book if you like, somewhere that it will add to the characterization or the plot or the setting or something story-related, rather than author-related.

When you’re analyzing your own work, you generally need to look at both the macro and the micro level. The macro level is stuff like structure and pace and flow and tension. First you look for where things seem to be not-working; then you look for why they’re not working. In the first draft of The Far West, for instance, I had three scene in a row of studying a critter in the lab, followed by three scenes in a row of reunions with old friends/family returning from elsewhere. I hadn’t noticed when I wrote them; once I saw the problem, it was obvious that I needed to move things around so that I had some critter-studying followed by a reunion followed by more critter-studying, instead of having my heroine do the same thing over and over with different people.

Sometimes it’s not the content of the scenes that’s the problem. Sometimes it’s a lack of transition between two bits, or the fact that something wasn’t set up properly two or three scenes or chapters earlier. Sometimes the macro fix is down at the micro level. The first editor who saw Talking to Dragons told me that the pace was too slow (a macro-level problem); I fixed it by cutting roughly 5,000 words…two or three words at a time. (Basically, I figured out that I needed to cut three lines per manuscript page, and then spent three weeks going through the ms. a page at a time, crossing out words and rephrasing sentences so they’d be shorter, until I got three lines out of each and every page. It was a horrible job, but I learned a lot.)

The micro-level revision is down at the scene-to-sentence level – getting rid of ambiguous phrasing and tongue-twisting dialog, spotting the places where you over-use a particular sentence structure or a particular word. (I recall one ms. in which the student had learned to use partial parallel repetition to emphasize a point. Had learned it too well. Had become vastly fond of it. Had used it over and over. Had driven me crazy with the particular tic…which took forever to make her even see, let alone fix.)

The micro-level is where one sometimes has to dismantle and reassemble a paragraph or a scene, or rewrite it wholesale. Sometimes several times. Occasionally, a sort of reverse-layering technique is useful here, especially if there’s a scene where one can’t figure out what the problem is. You take the scene and hide everything except the dialog, so it’s just talking heads, and then you look at the flow of the dialog and whether it makes sense as a conversation without all the emotion and internal dialog and stage business that it has in the scene. Then you do the same thing with the physical action, and then the descriptive bits. It’s a bit tedious and too labor-intensive to use on every scene, but it can be really useful when one hasn’t a clue where the problem is.

Some writers find that their prose hardens into concrete at some point, and chipping out the rough spots leaves visible seams. There are two approaches to this problem: one, get to the revisions soon, before the prose sets up (for some writers, this means the same day it gets written); two, figure out how to either delay the hardening-up or soften up the prose once it’s gone hard. One writer I know with this problem prints out her ms. formatted the way her page proofs look; since she’s used to fixing things in page proof, she can see and fix them on the printout when she can’t on the screen. Another writer is fine as long as she doesn’t print out the final draft of a chapter – as long as it’s all pixels, it stays workable for her. Still another has to set aside the written scene and re-imagine the whole thing from scratch, then write a whole new version. It depends, as usual, on how your particular mind works.

Must read?

Every so often, someone puts out a “top ten must-read” list of books for people unfamiliar with fantasy. There’s nothing much wrong with a list of this nature, if you’re looking for good reading and your taste happens to march with that of the list-maker. Some time back (fifteen years ago?), I was asked to come up with such a list myself – my “top ten must-read” fantasy books for writers.

I couldn’t do it, not even when they let me cheat blatantly by listing authors instead of single titles. And here is why:

It seems to me that a “must read” list for would-be fantasy writers should have as much breadth and depth as possible, both in terms of the length of time covered and in terms of the type of writing that’s covered. Because the point is, in my opinion, to give an overview of the field, both at present and historically. And ten slots just isn’t enough to do that in, as you will see in a moment.

J.R.R. Tolkein belongs on any must-read list for fantasy writers, whether you like his kind of thing or not; the success of “The Lord of the Rings” led directly to the founding of the modern fantasy genre as a separate category, and anything that seminal belongs on this sort of list. He also allows me to check off “epic fantasy” and “high fantasy” in the same slot. One down.

J.K. Rowling comes next, but not because of the wild popularity of the Harry Potter books – no, I put her on the list because her work is a synthesis of a whole lot of fantasy and YA fantasy tropes, from the coming-of-age story, to the boarding-school stories, to the orphaned protagonist and wise wizard mentor, to castles, secret passages, saving-the-world, magic swords, prophecy…. (I have remarked on more than one occasion that Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone had everything a kid could want in a story, except pirates.) It was a tough decision, because I’d really like to have Jane Yolen, Diana Wynne Jones, Nnedi Okorafor, Garth Nix, Tamora Pierce, L. Frank Baum, Patricia Wrightson, Edward Eager, Diane Duane, C. S. Lewis, Patricia McKillip, Robin McKinley, or Phillip Pullman in the childrens-and-young-adult fantasy slot. There is a LOT of really excellent children’s fantasy out there.

I’d want one slot for humorous fantasy, and that belongs hands down to Terry Pratchett and his Discworld books. I’d like at least one slot for modern urban fantasy, but the choice is a lot less obvious when you have Charlaine Harris, Neil Gaiman, Charles de Lint, and Jim Butcher all in competition for the slot. I think I’ll pick Neil for this one, on the grounds that his work covers a lot more territory than any of the others (though de Lint is a close runner-up in that regard). Two more slots full.

I’d like to have at least one slot for somebody who’s doing literary fantasy and/or magical realism, like Angela Carter or Robertson Davies or Gabriel Garcia Marquez or Italo Calvino or Jorge Luis Borges. I’ll throw a dart at the bookshelf and pick Marquez, though again, it’s a tough choice.

That fills five slots with more-or-less modern writers; time to start looking a bit farther back. Dark fantasy should really have more than one slot, because I want one for H. P Lovecraft or Clark Ashton Smith, and one for Bram Stoker, Sheridan Le Fanu, Mary Shelley, or John William Polidori. That only leaves me with three slots left, though, so I might have to drop to one choice for dark fantasy.  I’ll put Lovecraft in one and Stoker in the other, for now.

Three slots left. One pretty much has to go to something Arthurian – The Matter of Britain has over a thousand years of roots in English fantasy fiction, and its traces show up in all sorts of unexpected places once you start looking (Star Wars?), and there are a zillion retellings and spin-offs, starting all the way back at Geoffrey of Monmouth. (The Arthurian legends are, I maintain, the fan fiction of the tenth, eleventh, and twelfth centuries.) I’ll pick Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur, though T.H. White would also do very nicely; John Steinbeck’s version would be perfect if he’d only ever gotten it finished; Mary Stewart’s retellings are excellent and so are Rosemary Sutcliff’s two versions.

So now I have two slots left. I’m torn. There are all the Victorian fantasists (Oscar Wilde, Lord Dunsany, William Morris, George MacDonald); there are the classic literary fairy-tale writers like Charles Perrault and Madam d’Aulnoy; there are sword-and-sorcery greats like Michael Moorcock and Robert E. Howard (whose Conan the Barbarian arguably founded the whole sword-and-sorcery subgenre); there are the heroic fantasists like Howard Lamb and C. L. Moore; there are writers like Evangeline Walton, who’ve done magnificent retellings of older works like the Mabinogian. There’s historical fantasy, which includes much of Tim Powers and several of Poul Anderson’s as well as folks like Susanna Clarke, and the Orientalists, like Earnest Bramah, Barry Hughart, E. Hoffman Price, Lucy Chin, and William Wu. There are writers who don’t fit into any subclass, like Mervin Peake and E.R. Eddison and James Branch Cabal, and writers who fit in multiple possible subcategories, like John M. Ford and Ursula le Guin and Gene Wolfe and Roger Zelazny. And that doesn’t even get to things like Homer or Ovid’s Metamorphoses, or the explosion of fantasy in comics and manga…

I will throw out Shakespeare on the grounds that everyone has probably already seen or read “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” already, and I will throw out Sir Richard Francis Burton on the grounds that he merely translated The Arabian Nights Entertainment rather than actually writing it.

And then I will cheat mercilessly. Twice. First by putting the Ellen Datlow/Terri Windling Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror anthologies on the list, all sixteen of them, even though Ellen and Terri are editors and not writers. Those volumes are as close to a comprehensive overview of the best of the best fantasy, dark fantasy, and horror available in English for the sixteen years they cover, in-genre and out-of-genre, and they include recommendations for novels (which of course couldn’t be included in an anthology of short fiction).

And last I’m going to cheat by filling my last slot with that prolific writer, Anonymous, because it lets in an enormous number of folk tales, fairy tales, myths, and legends all at once, from the Poetic Edda and the Epic of Gilgamesh and the Ramayana, to Cinderella and Sleeping Beauty and the Arabian Nights.

And that’s where I give up. Ten slots, multiple candidates for all of them, and I still had to leave out dozens of possibilities and cheat twice. Fantasy is just too broad a field. Maybe if I did a “top 100″ list…

Layering

One of the things that makes writing difficult for a lot of folks is the notion that they have to do everything at once, on the first try. They’re sure their first draft has to look pretty much like an actual story – maybe it needs some tweaking, but everything’s more-or-less there: the plot, the dialog, the action, the setting, the characterization. They kind of know that they can put some of it in during the revision stage, but they don’t really understand what that means, much less how to do it.

I suspect that this is partly a problem left over from pre-word-processing days. When you had to type or handwrite every page, and adding a paragraph of description meant retyping not only the page with the new paragraph, but the entire rest of the chapter (if not right away, then at least when you got to the point of typing up a submission-ready copy), it was a whole lot easier and more practical to get as much down on the first pass as you possibly could, no matter how you’d really prefer to work. I still have vivid memories of the days when “cut and paste” meant actual scissors and glue or Scotch tape, and of the “page” that ended up being three feet long (folded carefully so that it would stack with the rest of the typed ms.) because I really, really didn’t want to take the time to retype all that stuff. And I only did one book that way before I got a word processor.

The thing is, I know quite a few writers whose first drafts are rather…minimalistic. Several of them start with screenplay-like drafts that sum up all the action scenes as “They fight. George wins.” and all the settings as “Hotel bedroom” or “in car, driving” or “hiding in woods; dark.” I didn’t understand how this could possibly work until one of them, about fifteen years back, introduced me to the concept of layering.

Layering is a writing technique that is slow and mechanical, and it will drive you crazy if you don’t have the discipline to keep going back over and over and over your work until everything you want to have in it is in it. Every so often, though, it’s just the thing, even for those of us who don’t normally work this way. And it’s easiest to explain by example.

Basically, you start with one specific thing: dialog works for most folks, but description or setting or action or narrative summary can do just as well. You write that part of the scene, and only that part. When you’re satisfied with it, you go back to the beginning and add a second layer: what people were thinking while they spoke, for instance (if you started with dialog), or what they were saying while they did things (if you started with action). Then you add a third layer, and so on. So the first draft would look something like this:

He:  “What are you doing here?”

She:  “Isn’t it obvious?”

He:  “Not to me.”

Draft two would put in tone of voice and names:

“What are you doing here?” James demanded.

“Isn’t it obvious?” Helen said sarcastically.

“Not to me,” James said.

Draft three put in the characters’ actions while they talked:

     “What are you doing here?” James demanded, glancing around the half-empty warehouse.  He shuddered.

     Helen shrugged and looked down.  “Isn’t it obvious?” she said sarcastically.

     “Not to me,” James said, refusing to follow her gaze.

Draft four put in more description of the place and the things in it, like so:

    “What are you doing here?” James demanded, glancing around the half-empty warehouse.  A pile of soggy cardboard boxes in one corner had split open, spilling moldy, unidentifiable contents across the filthy floor.  The whole place smelled musty and disused, and he was sure he had heard a rat squeak.  He shuddered.

     Helen shrugged and looked down.  The digital timer on the half-finished bomb at her feet clicked over another minute.  “Isn’t it obvious?” she said sarcastically.

     “Not to me,” James said, refusing to follow her gaze.

Draft five put in what the POV character was thinking about what was going on:

     “What are you doing here?” James demanded, glancing around the half-empty warehouse.   A pile of soggy cardboard boxes in one corner had split open, spilling moldy, unidentifiable contents across the filthy floor.  The whole place smelled musty and disused, and he was sure he had heard a rat squeak.  He shuddered.   It was, he thought, the last place in the world he would have expected to find his wife’s elegant, high-society friend, but here she was.  And what’s that thing she’s standing by?  It’s not … it can’t be … oh, god.

     Helen shrugged and looked down.  The digital timer on the half-finished bomb at her feet clicked over another minute.  “Isn’t it obvious?” she said sarcastically.

     “Not to me,” James said, refusing to follow her gaze.  She could, he supposed, have been dismantling the bomb.  She could even, perhaps, be unaware of what it was.  He refused to think about how much trouble he and Carol were in if Helen had actually been … no, he was not going to think about that.

And so on.  Note that there is nothing special about the order in which I layered stuff on to this example.  You could start with the dialog, and layer in the characters’ thoughts first, and then put in their physical actions or the description, and so on.  And one could also break it down even more finely  – physical description 1:  visual; physical description 2: smells; physical description 3: sounds; characters’ direct thoughts; characters’ indirect thoughts; etc.  It depends on how your mind works.