Patricia C. Wrede's Blog, page 60

Off Track

Before we get to the post, I feel obliged to mention that we’re doing some more blog maintenance tomorrow – might as well get it over with as soon/much as possible – so there may possibly be another short outage. We’re expecting this bit to go smoothly, but just in case it doesn’t, I figured I’d best mention it. On to the post.

Recently I read two novels, one by an experienced professional writer, the other by a talented yet-to-be-published one, that both made the same mistake. In both cases, the stories were deeply character-focused, involving several people who disliked, mistrusted, or totally misunderstood one another’s viewpoints, who had to learn to understand and trust each other so as to work together to defeat a threat to themselves and/or their world. In both cases, the stories developed well, came to a climax, and then trailed off in an ending that left me shaking my head and going “Huh?”

After mulling this over for some considerable time, I came to the conclusion that each of the writers got muddled about just what the story they were telling was, and consequently the endings, the climax-and-validation part, didn’t come together the way they should have. The writers shifted gears unexpectedly, from the characterization focus they’d had throughout their stories to a bang-up action climax that left the culmination of the learning-to-understand-each-other plot feeling like an afterthought.

Mind you, the action climaxes were not only entirely justified, they were also totally necessary. The learn-to-understand, come-to-realize plots wouldn’t have been nearly so tense if they hadn’t had the urgency of the action problem behind them (“If this group can’t get along, the Evil Overlord will take over the world by the end of the year!”). The trouble was that as the action confrontations drew nearer, they took over. This left the emotional/characterization plot in the background, to be brought forward and finished up only after the villain’s defeat.

In most cases, this wouldn’t have been a problem. Leaving the wrap-up of the hero/heroine’s romance for after the big fight with the dragon is a really common trope; in fact, it often serves as the final validation, the thing that says “Yes, this time the dragon is really dead, the Evil Overlord is finally vanquished, the wicked stepsisters have had their comeuppance and can’t make any more trouble, and the story is really over.”

In the two cases I’m talking about, though, the first three-quarters of the story was focused on the emotional plot, with just enough action thrown in to keep upping the urgency. This led me, as a reader, to expect the Big Climax to resolve the emotional plot, as well as (or even instead of) the action plot. Instead, I got slam-bang we’re-all-in-this-together action climaxes, with the band of heroes working together like a well-oiled machine, and only after they’d taken out the Evil Overlord did I get to see the yes-I-do-trust-you-now scenes.

This left the stories feeling like a bait-and-switch. I’d have been perfectly satisfied by those endings if the focus in the early part of the story had been on action; I’d have been equally satisfied if the early part of the story had remained the same, but the climax and ending had been adjusted so that the emotional plot continued to be in the foreground.

I’m not completely sure why this kind of front end/back end mismatch comes about, especially not in these two cases. I can think of a number of possibilities, though: that for some reason the author felt that the action climax was the one that really mattered; that the author got too caught up in making the action work to remember the emotional plot until afterward; that the author simply didn’t have the writing chops to do both at once and decided to follow the common action-adventure wrap-up (action first, emotional plot later) even though that didn’t quite fit the story; the author buckled under pressure for action from an editor or a bunch of good friends/first-readers; the author was afraid the emotional plot would get “too purple.” All of them boil down to the authors losing sight of the story they were telling.

This kind of front/back mismatch doesn’t happen nearly so often the other way around – with a high-action front end and an emotional, non-action-oriented climax – but it does happen. In other words, while the solution is to make both ends match, it doesn’t matter whether the author changes the action climax to fit the non-action buildup or whether the author changes the buildup to fit the action climax. The important thing is to achieve consistency in what one is looking at.

Out of ideas?

So Minicon was last weekend, and in among seeing lots of friends (and managing to miss seeing far too many others) there was the usual crop of questions - what are you going to write next, where do you get your ideas, etc. Including one poor fellow who was convinced that he'd run out of ideas…at twenty-three, with six stories written.

The truth is that you're not out of ideas until you're dead, or maybe insane. Not really. What people mean when they say they're "out of ideas" is one of three things: 1) For one reason or another, they don't recognize what they're getting as ideas, 2) The ideas they're getting aren't acceptable to them, or 3) They don't know how to poke at their backbrain constructively.

#1 usually happens when people are used to getting whole stories, or at least large chunks of them, all at once. They don't know how to take a character or a situation or a wispy hint of plot and develop it into a story, so they don't recognize those things as ideas. They're like someone who's only ever gardened from mid-July to the first of September, when everything is in bloom; they've learned to pull weeds and make lovely flower arrangements, but not how to sprout seeds or thin seedlings, or how to tell the weeds that come up in May from the vegetables and flowers that are coming back at the same time. Usually, these folks figure things out pretty fast once they realize that there's frequently more to the process than just taking dictation from one's backbrain (much as we all love it when it works out that way).

#2 covers everything from "I can't think of anything original!" to "But I don't want to write a romance about space monkeys!" to "My mother will kill me if I write about X!" There are two basic approaches to these kinds of objections: go ahead and write it anyway, as a practice piece that will never be shown to anyone (suitable for the non-original and/or homicidal parent problems…and one can always change one's mind about the "practice" part later), or poke at the unsatisfactory idea until it become satisfactory.

Which brings me to #3.

There are lots of ways to poke at your backbrain, whether the object is to develop an existing, inadequate idea or generate something totally new. The most obvious is brainstorming. You pick a topic - a random word from a dictionary, or something logical like "possible main characters," or whatever you want. Then you set a timer for about ten minutes, and write down whatever comes to mind. The rules are: everything that comes up gets written down, no matter how stupid, crazy, or weird; and you have to keep writing all-out, full-steam-ahead until the timer goes off. Then you take each idea, one at a time, (all of them, or the "best" three, or whatever) and use them as topics, until something shows up that you don't want to move on from when the timer goes off.

You can also use the three-random-things game, where you come up with three or four completely disparate things or actions or characters or events and try to come up with a plot connection among them: "tortellini with pesto sauce; an exceedingly ordinary middle-class American couple; an antique car; a terrorist threat to the Sydney Olympics" "a classical violinist; an avalanche; children playing 'ring-around-the-rosie."

If you've got a bunch of friends to help play, you give everybody an index card and ask them to write descriptions of two people/characters (one per card); an event (on another card); a plot-problem (on another card); an object (on another card) and so on. Then you collect the cards and shuffle them and lay them out. You can form them up in a sentence, if you want: "Hero is a (character card) whose problem with Villain (character card) is (plot-problem card). They clash at (event or location card); the problem is solved by (object card)." (Example: Hero is a classical violinist whose problem with the Villain, an eight-year-old computer genius, is stopping the Villain from taking over the Republic. They clash at a football game; the problem is solved by a banana.") They usually do come out just about that silly, if you do them randomly…but it can be fun.

You can combine really unlikely characters and/or plots from two completely different stories, authors, or genres. Sherlock Holmes instead of Romeo in "Romeo and Juliet"; Aral Vorkosigan and Elizabeth Bennet in Robert Jordan's "Wheel of Time" series; Dirty Harry in "The Lord of the Rings" ("I've lost track of how many spells I have left in this wand, Saruman. So, do you feel lucky today, punk? Do you?") Or you can come up with a "cast" of characters from your favorites from other stories or movies. The idea is not so much to come up with a useable alternative as to get your mind unfrozen…but sometimes you do come up with a combination you like.

If you are visually inclined, browse the web for pictures that tickle your backbrain. (Caroline Stevermer does this on her Pinterest pages.) Decide who the people are or could be; think of something that could happen in a place; imagine what's going on in a painting and make up how the people got into that situation (or what's going to happen next).

Take one of the bits-and-pieces that's floating around in your head - some proto-idea that hasn't hit critical mass yet. Maybe it's a phrase like "silver on the wine-dark sea;" maybe it's a scene or a character; maybe it's even a general subject like "I want to write a book about families." Then start plot-noodling it. Look at pictures in search of people that look like they'd "go with" the proto-idea. Brainstorm it. Spin off a list of ten things from a related category: "Races: horse race, race to find cure for plague, space race, boat race, race to get Death Star plans back to the Rebellion, race against time, marathon, gold rush, Indy 500″.

What you're trying to do here is stir things up. If you focus too hard on "getting an idea," you probably won't come up with anything - like those times when somebody says "Where shall we go for dinner?" and you suddenly cannot for the life of you think of the name of a single restaurant, not even McDonalds.

What is right?

Ask a writer what it is they want to do with their story, and something like eight out of ten will start by giving you a description of the plot. Ask again, push a little harder, and 99% of them will eventually come up with "I want to write a really good book."

Unfortunately, there aren't nearly as many writers who can answer the obvious follow-up question: "OK, but what does that mean?" Usually, they look at me blankly, or say "But - but - but everyone knows what a really good book is!"

Well, no, they don't. If everyone agreed about what a really good book is, you wouldn't have people arguing about whether various bestselling titles are works of genius or perversions of the writer's art. And unfortunately, nine times out of ten, if I say "So OK, tell me what a good book is, then," the writers can't articulate it.

This is a problem, because if you don't know what it is you are trying to do, you're likely to have a hard time figuring out whether you've done it. I'm not talking here about knowing the ending of the story (though a lot of writers do need to have that to aim for). I'm talking about knowing exactly what you, as a writer, want to accomplish and why.

What does "write a really good book" mean to you? If the stories that you find gripping or engrossing are all thrillers, writing a moody, atmospheric story of character development is likely to leave you feeling unsatisfied and twitchy, no matter how brilliant everyone else tells you it is. And if you don't realize that what you think makes for a good book is different from the opinions of your critics, teachers, friends, etc., then you're likely to feel equally unsatisfied, if not downright miserable, when your top-notch action-adventure story or stylistic masterpiece receives a lukewarm reception from people for whom "a really good book" means something other than what you've written.

Every writer has, on some level, a vision of what they want to do with the story they're writing, and if the writer betrays that vision, they're not going to be pleased with the result, no matter what else goes right. Unfortunately, the writer's vision is seldom the sort of clear picture that's advocated by a lot of how-to-write books. It can be hard, if not impossible, to articulate. Sometimes, it's little more than a feeling, which is intensely frustrating to both the writers and to the well-meaning people trying to tell them they have to come up with a log line or a summary paragraph or an outline or a theme.

"I'll know when I get it right" is just not good enough for the more analytical types, but it's often all we have - even for those of us who are ourselves analytical. So what does one do when the vision one has for the book isn't something one can spell out in so many words?

What you do is, you take a deep breath and believe in yourself. If you'll know when you get it right, then believe that you will know. Work at it, fiddle with the parameters, change the viewpoints, mess with the plot outlines - but trust that inner voice when it says "Not like this" to something that logic says is just the perfect thing. And trust it again when it says "Yes, this is right" to something that logic (and/or your editor, agent, friends, crit group, fans, etc.) all say is insane and unworkable.

If you find that your confidence is easily undermined by those other voices, you may have to stop listening to them for a while. That means not talking about your work-in-process with the dear, supportive friend who thinks you should be writing gritty urban fantasy instead of the sweet Romance that your inner voice is demanding. It means that you stop reading the writing forum where everyone talks endlessly and with great assurance about how books have to start with action to sell these days and how you must never use a first-person narrator, when the book that's banging on the back door of your brain is a first-person memoir that starts with three pages of description and backstory. It may mean reading a lot of books like the one you want to write (to reassure yourself that yes, books like this do sell), or it may mean reading a lot of books that are totally unlike the one you want to write (so you don't get the depressing feeling that it's all been done before, much better than you'll be able to do it).

You also want to be fairly certain that it really is your backbrain that's insisting on doing this insane and unworkable thing, and not the lazy part that doesn't want to be bothered doing things the hard-but-better way. Generally speaking, if I feel gloomy and depressed about the advice I'm getting (because in my heart I know it'll be better for the book, but it's going to take a lot more time and effort and I-don't-wanna), then I knew I should follow it; if I feel cranky (because no matter what they're saying it's just not right for this story), then I know I shouldn't. I expect that there are writers who are the opposite - who feel cranky about advice they ought to follow (because they know they should and hate being told/reminded) and depressed about the advice they ought to not follow (because they know that's not the kind of story they want to write, but they think they have to). The trick is to know what your particular tells are, so that you can reliably ignore what needs ignoring and accept what needs accepting.

Better Living Through Technology?

It looks as if we have successfully migrated the blog and web site to the new servers, knock wood. I'm afraid a couple of comments got lost in the switchover, sorry. The whole process was a whole lot more involved than I'd expected, and I wasn't even the one doing most of the work!

Basically, what happened was, my ISP was de-commissioning the very old server that all my files were on. As they are a no-frills outfit, this meant that all their customers had to move their files from the old server to the new one. They had a "preview" function set up so you could see that it worked, and when everything was fine, you called and had them switch the pointer for the domain name so that it stopped pointing to the old server and started pointing to the new one. Then, at the end of March, they would unplug the old server and sell it for scrap or recycling or something.

It all should have gone very smoothly, but as you all know, it didn't.

Problem the first: I am reasonably computer-literate, but that's mostly by comparison to a lot of my Luddite friends and family. I don't have a lot of call to FTP things, and I hired somebody two years back to set up my blog for me. I can do the basic day-to-day stuff, like posting, but much beyond that and I'm lost.

So I called in a friend and co-author who has actually studied stuff like this, albeit a while back. With much help from tech support, we got the files transferred (turns out you can't go server-to-server; you have to copy them all to your desktop and then re-upload them to the new site). We checked "preview" and everything looked fine. So we said, go ahead and switch the domain.

At which point, the blog went down. Wordpress does not agree with the new system. It didn't agree with the old one, totally, but once my guru got it working, it worked fine for two straight years. Unfortunately, whatever she did to get it working did not transfer/translate to the new system.

So we spent five days on the phone with tech support, trying to figure everything out. My friend managed to get into the web site and put up a "technical difficulties notice," but the blog was invisible. She re-downloaded, re-uploaded, upgraded, downgraded, and tried everything they or we could think of. Finally, she told them to put the domain pointer back to the old server, which is when the blog reappeared and I posted the first Technical Difficulties announcement.

We still didn't have any idea what the problem was or how to fix it, so we called in another friend who has lots of experience with Wordpress. It took her another day and a half to pin down and fix the underlying problem. She turned it back over to us, and we rechecked everything again.

All looked well. OK, we were by this time two days past the supposed drop-dead date for completing the migration, but we weren't the only ones having problems and the ISP extended the deadline by a week, so that was all right. I didn't even feel terribly guilty, because we'd started copying the data and doing all the stuff for the move a good ten days in advance of deadline; if everything had gone as smoothly as promised, we should have had five days to spare (see "on the phone with tech support", above).

And then, just as we were ready to pick up the phone and say "OK, switch the domain pointer to the new server for real this time," my Internet connection went out.

"Aha," we said, "obviously they are having more trouble with the server than we knew!" So we made the call at 2 p.m. Monday to tell them the connection was down. They were busy enough that we left a call-back number, but we figured, again, that it was an overall problem and they were swamped. So we waited.

And waited. At 4 p.m., my friend left to attend to other responsibilities. I moped. I was still moping Tuesday morning, when I couldn't stand it any more and took my iPad to a coffee shop to at least check on my email.

Which is where I discovered that at 2:10 p.m. on Monday, they'd opened a repair ticket based on the phone message…and closed it as "complete, no further action needed" at 2:15 p.m. And sent me an email to tell me that. Which of course I didn't get, because I had no working Internet.

So I grabbed my cell phone and called tech support. Who referred me to the business office, where I finally found out that the credit card that auto-pays the ISP had expired last month and their email notification got caught in my spam trap, so they'd just shut everything down. I gave them the new expiration date, they ran the charge, and everything was back in business within about fifteen minutes.

Doing the final check and getting them to re-point the domain name was almost anticlimactic after that. Especially since it seems to have gone smoothly. (Knock wood.)

So I'm back in business, and will return you to your regular writing blog on Sunday. If nothing else happens…

And people wonder what writers do all day.

Technical difficulties

As many of you have noticed, the blog was out for a week and is now back. Unfortunately, the "back" part may be temporary; it's back because the migration to the new server didn't work properly and we had to un-migrate it.

This means that some time in the next week (hopefully within the next day or two) the blog will be re-migrated to the new server. At this point, I'm expecting it to go down again, because that's just the way this whole process has been working so far, but perhaps we'll get lucky this time.

There are people working on this, and I'm hoping we get it all figured out within the next week or so. My ISP informs me that I'm not the only one having trouble with the migration, so it's not entirely under my control. And they've been absolute champions about answering questions and spending hours on the phone when they, too, are having an extraordinarily busy time.

In practical terms, what this means for you folks is: I'm not going to be posting quite as regularly until we're finished moving everything, and the blog may go down again sometime in the near future (though not for as long, I hope).

Thanks for your patience, and I'll try to keep this updated for any new developments.

Fictional Families

Families are often hard to deal with, even if you love them. This is true in real life, but it's even more true in fiction, especially in science fiction and fantasy. A large part of the problem is that including the hero/heroine's family in the story means that the number of characters instantly begins to proliferate: two parents, four grandparents, an unknown number of siblings, aunts, uncles, and cousins (it really isn't plausible for the main character, both parents, and all four grandparents to have been only children, especially in an agrarian, pre-industrial, or even just pre-birth-control society). When you already have a strange world to establish and a bunch of plot-related characters to work in, the thought of making up and dealing with all those additional people (most of whom aren't really relevant to the story you had in mind) is daunting.

Then comes the question of what to do with all those people once you have them, and how to make them individual enough so that the reader doesn't get overwhelmed or confused. And unless the story is about the family and its relationships (which most action-adventure stories, SF, and fantasies really aren't), one has to do all of that while developing the major characters who are actually important to the plot.

A character's family is usually really important to the backstory and characterization, and often to the emotional plot as well, but they often aren't that important to the action plot. In a character-centered story, this isn't so much of a problem, but in an action-centered one, it can cause serious difficulties with balance.

One way to solve this dilemma, obviously, is to get rid of the family. This is why so many main characters are orphans (the Evil Overlord burning down the hero's village has become an opening cliché for a good many fantasies), or adults who are estranged from their families, or who are adventuring hundreds or thousands of miles away from whatever family members they have. This works fine for a standalone or a classic trilogy that ends with awards and weddings as the validation, but these days an awful lot of things that were supposed to be standalones or trilogies end up as a series, which means that even if the main character's family-of-origin has been disposed of by the Evil Overlord, he/she often ends up with a spouse and children long before the series winds down.

Some writers solve the problem by killing off the spouse and kids after a book or two, but one can't do that over and over without the reader starting to wonder whether the main character is actually getting anywhere in his/her efforts to Save The World. After all, if the hero's parents were killed by bandits and his first wife murdered by an ambitious flunky and his three kids killed by the Evil Overlord and his next girlfriend accidentally dies in an assassination attempt…well, it certainly doesn't seem like his efforts have made the world much safer, does it?

Then there are the writers who shuffle the spouse and kids off somewhere safely offstage, so the main character can keep having adventures. This works find for one or two stories, but as a premise for an ongoing series it tends to be unsatisfying, if not downright annoying. Even a trophy wife is supposed to have some kind of presence in her husband's life, if only "being seen in public so everybody knows he has a trophy wife."

The third common way of dealing with the main character's developing family is to skip ahead fifteen or twenty years and start telling stories about the next generation. Unfortunately, this puts the author right back at the beginning - what to do about the main character's parents? - with the added problem that readers who've been following the series already know this character's parents, like them a lot, and want them to continue living happy and/or interesting lives, which means that killing off the second-generation's parents is not going to play well with those readers.

The final way of dealing with the main character's family is to get them involved in the action plot. This works really well when the story is character-centered from the get-go (even if it's not specifically family-centered). It also works when there's a good fit between the characters who make up the family and the types of characters who are needed to move the action-centered plot along, but how many families are neatly made up of a hero, a thief, a swordsman, a mage, and a healer? It doesn't work nearly as well when there are no plot-related roles other than "victim" for members of the family to occupy (realistically, how many times can a family member be mugged, kidnapped, murdered, or framed without the whole clan starting to look seriously accident-prone?).

I think the problem comes from several directions. First, some writers have trouble accepting that if they're writing an action-centered plot, the main character's family are going to be minor characters, no matter how important they are to the backstory and personality development of the hero/heroine. Second, the writer knows how to handle and develop major characters, but hasn't yet figured out how to handle minor-but-important ones satisfactorily - it's all or nothing; either fully-developed on-stage important characters or nameless spear-carriers, with no middle ground. And third, many writers have trouble juggling a large cast of characters, and adding even two parents into the equation can end up being two more than they can handle. Rather than starting to drop balls, they sensibly choose to write the extras out of the story.

Specific Research

A while back, I had an inquiry from a reader regarding research, specifically asking how I went about researching historical slang and stage magic. I decided I'd answer it here instead of in email, because while the specific subjects are fairly easy to address, there are some general questions that I think would be of interest to people as well.

Historical slang from the last three or four hundred years is not terribly difficult to find out about. There are quite a few dictionaries that deal specifically with slang. Partridge's Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English has been around since the mid-1930's; there's also the Historical Dictionary of Slang, and several similar titles, like The 1811 Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue, that focus primarily on British (as opposed to American) slang. The time-consuming part is browsing through them in hopes of finding a word that means what you want - they aren't reverse dictionaries.

Reading letters, novels, and especially plays that were written at the time you're writing is a good way to find useful period idioms, euphemisms, slang, and/or specific changes in grammar and vocabulary. Reading modern historical fiction set in the time period you're writing is a bit dicey - it's often difficult to be sure that the author did his/her research (and there's always the temptation to make something up), but they can be a reasonable shortcut to finding words which you can then check out in your historical dictionary to make sure they really are period. (The Oxford English Dictionary is exceptionally useful in this regard because it is not only more comprehensive than anything else, it gives references with dates for the earliest usage of a word in each meaning.)

Stage magic is another thing that's not that difficult to find books about. A lot of basic sleight-of-hand tricks have been around for a really long time, and there are plenty of books about the history of sleight-of-hand, famous stage magicians, and how the tricks are done, as well as how-to books for those who want to learn a few tricks (or just find out how stage magicians perform some of their famous illusions, like sawing the lady in half).

In other words, an awful lot of the research that looks like it should be tricky and difficult is actually much easier than it looks.

There are really two sorts of research that writers do: general and specific. It's usually most effective to start with general reading, whether you're writing historical fiction or a modern murder mystery. An overview of the particular time and place (Elizabethan England, Heian Japan, modern-day Australia, etc.) or a particular topic (horses, guns, poisons, military strategy, accidental injuries) gives you some idea what you'll need to know and where to go looking for it. Starting with a general overview also provides you with background and terminology that is a great help when you move on to specifics.

When I'm researching a particular period, I usually start with books like A Social History of England or The World of Jane Austen. I read at least three or four of these overviews before I move into the next phase, in which I continue reading general histories but start adding biographies. I pick the biographies according to what I know about the book I'm going to write: for the Mairelon books, I read biographies of Wellington and the Prince Regent; for the Kate and Cecy books, I read more of those, plus ones about Beau Brummel and Lady Caroline Lamb, and a charmingly gossipy period autobiography I found in a used bin, titled Diary of a Spinster Lady. For the Frontier Magic series, I started with books about the most recent Ice Age in North America and the geology of the continent, then moved on to the few titles about pre-Columbus America; I followed up with a bunch of biographies and autobiographies of settlers on the Great Plains, plus the journals of Lewis and Clark.

By the time I finish all that, I usually have a stack of additional titles that look interesting and a list of things I want to know but haven't found yet, like the period slang references mentioned above. Sometimes the things I know I'm missing are very specific - I spent several hours at the library hunting up a street map of London in the eighteen-teens for the Mairelon books, and another hour or so tracking down descriptions of early railroad journeys for Thirteenth Child.

It is often extremely useful to expand one's research horizons beyond what is initially obvious. For instance, there are some great books about the construction of historical costumes that are written for people designing costumes for plays, which you can track down in the theater section, there are lots of books about "the world of Famous Author X (Shakespeare, Pepys, Jane Austen, Keats)" under literary criticism, and there are books about the design of period furniture under antique collecting and about the architecture of historical buildings under architecture.

During the writing process, I usually accumulate things to double-check - descriptions, distances, timing of events - and I spend a day or two looking them up and fixing them every couple of chapters (usually because I'm temporarily stuck and want to do something productive). The worst ones are the ones I sort of vaguely remember reading about, but can't quite recall where - it takes forever to track them down.

Obviously, a book with a real-world setting, whether historical or modern, will usually require a lot more research than one where the author is making up the background from whole cloth. The interesting thing is that it's often present day settings that the writer has to be most careful about, especially if they've never lived in a place where they've set a story. One has to be extra-careful, because there are a lot of people who have lived there, and who will catch you if you get things wrong.

There are also a number of specific topics - horses, guns, period dress, ships - each of which has a passionate and vocal following of folks who have apparently memorized every detail of their chosen obsession down through history. If you can find one of these folks, they are invaluable research references; on the down side, if you make an error in the size of a screw, they will let you (and everyone else) know about it. It is therefore well worth the time to put in a bit of extra research in these areas (and on others that attract ardent hobbyists), and to find a knowledgeable person to vet the manuscript in those areas if you yourself do not happen to share that passion beyond what you need to know for the story.

Villains

There is really nothing like a good villain. From Blackie Duquesne to Darth Vader, they're often the most striking and memorable characters in a story. A lot of the professional writers I know find villains a lot more fun and interesting to write about than heroes; several have gone so far as to turn their plots upside down so that they can write their villains as heroes. Warts and all.

Villains come in several varieties. There's the villain who is purely evil, who can commit the most heinous of crimes without batting an eyelash or disturbing a (non-existent) conscience, whom the readers love to hate and in whose downfall they can rejoice without guilt or regret. There's the slightly less evil villain who is at least comprehensible in his villainy; he/she may be a bit over-the-top, but in a way that suits the story. You also have the realistic villain, who is horrifying because he's recognizable as someone you might meet in real life; this sort can range from the extremely believable and realistic portrayal of a psychotic sociopath (whom most people are unlikely to encounter, we sincerely hope) to the equally believable and realistic portrayal of a narcissistic bureaucrat that everyone recognizes instantly from a go-around day-before-yesterday. And then there are the non-villain villains, the pure antagonists, who are not evil but merely disagree with the hero about what needs doing and/or why and how.

If you want to write a Conan-style sword-and-sorcery adventure, you pretty much by definition need the purely evil, technically cardboard sort of villain, because the whole story and plot will fall apart otherwise. A realistic, believable antagonist-who-just-disagrees is next to impossible to make work in the sort of story; if you do manage to make it work, it's usually by turning the sword-and-sorcery adventure into some other sort of story entirely. (This can, of course, be a Very Good Thing, but only if you happen not to care much whether you really end up writing a Conan-style sword-and-sorcery.) It is, therefore, reasonable to claim that a realistic antagonist is not a "good villain" for this kind of story.

Similarly, if you are writing a more-or-less realistic novel of complex interstellar politics and interpersonal relationships, a one-dimensional "pure evil" villain is problematic, because the thrust of the story is likely to be more realistic and a cardboard villain will very likely be out of place in such a story. Space opera, on the other hand, can work quite well either way, depending on the story and the writer's preferences.

My very favorite sort of villain, though, is the villain who has style. This sort tends to be both confident and competent; they have what they see as very good reasons for the things they do; they're frequently ruthless in pursuit of their goals, but they don't go for unnecessary violence (though their standards for "necessary" are rather more elastic than most people's). They're intelligent and witty, and sometimes they even have some shreds of conscience and/or honor. They're the ones you secretly wish would change sides.

The trick to creating a "good" villain is to match the level of roundedness and characterization to the sort of story you are telling, and then to put as much work into understanding the villain as a person as you put into understanding the hero. You don't have to like the villain, particularly, and you certainly don't have to identify with him (or with the hero either, for that matter). You just have to understand them, to whatever depth is appropriate to the story or more, and then reflect that understanding in your written portrayal of the villain in the story.

Where I think a lot of folks go wrong is in paying insufficient attention to the sort of villain they need for the sort of story they're writing, especially when the story starts mutating in process. The writer starts off with a Conan-type adventure, where all the characters are types: Noble Hero, Evil Villain, Quirky Sidekick, Smarmy Minion, etc. The action-outline reflects this. But then the writer starts actually writing the story, following the Noble Hero and his Quirky Sidekick. By the time things are a couple of chapters in, the Noble Hero has expressed some rather non-Noble sentiments about peasant girls and mentioned some of his internal conflicts about fighting generally, and the Quirky Sidekick is having a minor depression over his attraction to the Hero's promised bride, and in short, they're starting to act like people rather than types.

But the Evil Villain and Smarmy Minion haven't come on stage yet. The writer hasn't had to live with them and figure out why they're having nightmares about mourning doves and drinking quarts of Maalox and making occasional elliptical remarks about safety. So they remain types, motivated mainly by the necessities of the plot rather than by their own interior needs and wants. And if the writer doesn't notice this, the result is an unbalanced book with realistic (sort of) good guys and cardboard villains. Often, even if the writer does notice, he/she notices too late to do the real work of making the villains into the same sort of rounded characters the heroes have become, so they throw in a couple of stock motivations like a traumatic childhood and hope that will cover things. It seldom does.

One of the ways of avoiding this problem is to bring the Evil Villain on stage right from the start. This is easier to do in some stories than in others; for instance, in the sort of Romance where the heroine has to choose between two suitors, it really isn't very effective to bring the "bad" suitor on stage at the last minute. In an epic quest fantasy, on the other hand, it usually makes no sense for the Evil Overlord to be hanging around the Humble Hero's village beginning in Chapter One. To get around this, a lot of authors move to multiple viewpoint format, providing scenes that look in on the villain from an early point in the book.

It's also common to build up an off-stage villain's reputation by having other characters warn the protagonist about him/her, have the hero run across the aftermath of horrible things the villain has done, etc. One has to be careful with this, however, as it is easy to build up an off-stage villain to the point where the actual villain is a big disappointment when he/she finally appears at last (because nobody could live up to the scary reputation the writer has created).

The Business of Writing: Addendum (Retirement)

So after all these business posts, people wanted me to write about retiring. I'm not surprised; it was kind of exhausting to think about doing all that stuff.

In any case, this is the retirement-for-writers post. The very first question is: what does retirement mean to you, as a writer? Writing isn't quite the same as other jobs; most of us can't imagine retiring in the traditional sense (leaving a day job and not doing it any more). Writers also have more of an option to continue working than people in normal jobs - as long as our brains and our fingers continue to work properly, so can we. I've known a good many older professional writers who've worked into their eighties, right up to the last minute.

So what does "being retired" mean for a writer?

For me, the main thing it means is having a choice. The majority of professional writers have historically worked on portion-and-outline, meaning that we write an outline and 50-100 pages of a book, sell it, then have to write the rest to a deadline set in the contract. At some point, this gets more than a little old. "Being retired," for most of the writers I know, means not having to work to deadline - being able to write what we want, when we want, and then sell it. Some still choose to sell on portion-and-outline, but even then, having a choice makes a difference.

Choice also means the ability to experiment more - to write in other genres, for instance, without needing to consider the potential financial downside of trying to build a whole new readership. It means not needing to feel guilty for skipping one's writing time for a few days in a row. It means being able to slack off on some (though not all) of the less enjoyable tasks involved in running a business (the ones I've been droning on about for eight or nine posts now).

In order to have those choices, a writer, like everyone else, needs retirement savings. How much you need will depend on the lifestyle to which you would like to become accustomed and on how you have managed (and will continue to manage) your writing career. Because there are so many different paths for a writing career to take, planning for retirement has to be a bit more active than for most people.

On the one hand, writing income is irregular, which means Social Security payments (which are based on average annual income) may not be as large as you might have expected (that's assuming you think that there will still be Social Security payments by the time you retire, whenever that is). On the other hand, if you have managed your writing so as to generate royalty income and keep your backlist available and productive (as opposed to concentrating on big money advances), your existing work can continue to generate income for a long time even if you aren't putting out anything new.

What this means is that your preference for your career changes how you handle your retirement planning. If you've been getting irregular big-money advances and not worrying so much about your books earning out or about the backlist, then your income will drop as soon as you stop writing (or slow down significantly, so you'll probably need to sock a fair chunk of the big money away for later (and you'll want to, too, because there are tax benefits to shoving money into your retirement plan). You'll also want to keep an eye on how much Social Security thinks it's going to pay out when you start getting it. As with most people, you want enough of a retirement-fund-plus-Social-Security to live on; there are plenty of financial counselors and online web sites to help you figure out what that will be. On the plus side, if you're not writing new stuff and don't need to manage the backlist, you're pretty much done with your writing business.

If you've managed your career with a vast quantity of work-for-hire or low-to-medium advance originals that come and go and never come back again, you're in the same shape as the big-money advances people, except that your annual income is likely to be more regular and therefore your Social Security payments will be larger and you may not need to sock away quite as much in your retirement plan. Once you stop writing, you're done with the business.

If your books are the sort that earn out their advances and continue to sell for a long time, or that can be re-sold after the first publisher loses interest, you likely won't need quite as large a bundle in your retirement savings because your backlist will continue to bring in income. However, you will need to continue managing your backlist, making sure that things stay in print and get resold and reissued over and over. In other words, you have to keep running the business to some extent, even if you aren't writing anything new.

And if you absolutely intend to keep writing at full speed until the day you drop, you still need a cash cushion, albeit a smaller one, to deal with everything from medical emergencies to unanticipated changes in the writing market that affect your ability to generate adequate income. The older you get, the greater the likelihood that you will lose a year or two of writing time to illness or unexpected surgery. Medicare and health insurance may pay your doctor and hospital bills, but they won't replace the income you lose…and illness is a huge drain on one's creativity.

How much you sock away into a retirement plan under each of these circumstances depends on how much you make and how much you want to be able to spend once you decide to declare yourself retired. The calculation is pretty straightforward: you decide how much income-per-year you want to have, figure out how many years you expect to live after you retire, and plug the numbers into one of the many retirement-planning calculators online (be sure you pick one that adjusts for inflation and that has a reasonable rate of expected return on your investments).

Once you have determined what you think you need in your retirement account, it is wise to consider it a minimum, not your whole goal. The more money you have in the bank (or investment account), the more options you have. Options are good.

As a self-employed person, there are several kinds of tax-advantaged retirement accounts that you can use to accumulate your savings: a traditional IRA, a Roth IRA, a SEP (Simplified Employee Pension), a solo 401K, etc. You probably want to educate yourself about these and then consult with your accountant or a financial planner, because they all have different rules, advantages, and disadvantages. Or you can ignore the tax benefits of these and just stick money in a bank or a normal investment account, but seriously, you'll be far better off going with one of the tax-deferred plans that works for you. Myself, I have a Roth IRA, an SEP, and a normal investment account, and I max out my contributions to the first two every year and try to add to the third as well.

The main trick to retirement savings is to start early. The power of compound interest is amazing. When I was in B-school, they made us do the actual calculations, comparing the amount of money at retirement generated by two strategies: one person who put $2000 in an IRA starting at age 20, but who stopped at age 30; and one person who did the same thing, only starting at age 30 and going on for the next 30 years. The one who only saved for 10 years, but who started early, always came out significantly ahead of the one who got a late clue. In other words, the sooner you start, the less you are likely to have to contribute out-of-pocket over the years.

The Business of Writing: Pulling it all Together

So there you have it: all seven areas of business - operations, sales and marketing, quality control, finance, administration, public relations, and executive - laid out for writers. Looking at them all at once like this is rather daunting, but not looking at them at all is a recipe for messing up.

If you are a professional writer - or hope to be one - you are running a small business. It's kind of a peculiar small business, but it's still a business. Even if the main thing you are interested in is the Art of writing, the business aspects deserve careful consideration and attention, because they affect both the time and energy you have for creating your work (if you're spending twelve hours a day putting out fires because you neglected one area or another, there's not much time or energy left for writing). How you manage your business also affects the availability and distribution of your finished work. This doesn't matter much if you want to sell 100 copies to your family and friends, but it makes a big difference if you're hoping to make a living at this.

If you're just getting started, or have yet to sell, most of your time will be doing Production (writing), Quality Control (editing and revising), Sales and Marketing (researching publishers and sending the ms. out), and Administration (tracking your submissions). Finance will kick in as soon as you have either income or expenses to track; Publicity usually shows up a few years down the road.

Midlist writers tend to be juggling a lot faster, as they typically have several projects somewhere in the pipeline, meaning that they may be in the process of writing one book (Production), editing another (QC), while a third is just hitting the bookstores and needs a Marketing or Publicity push; two backlist titles are going up as e-books and those files need reviewing (more QC and Admin); meanwhile, Croatian subrights on half the backlist have sold and need to be tracked until the checks arrive (Admin and Finance), and maybe the writer should see if his/her agent can get them interested in the other half (Admin and Marketing); and an unexpected opportunity to edit an anthology has come up, which could take the writing career in a whole new direction and which the publisher needs a Yes or No on by the end of the month (Executive/strategy). And of course, writers who've achieved "lead title" or bestseller status have even more complications in all areas.

In other words, the farther along your career you get, the more work has to be done in each of the business areas, and the more complex that work becomes. This means that no matter what sort of planning you do in regard to your writing business, you'll probably need to revisit it periodically and make adjustments according to where you currently are in your business, what the market is doing, and how your goals, skills, resources, and opportunities have changed.

As I said to begin with, most writers don't have a formal business plan. This is because most formal business plans are designed for small businesses that are trying to get a loan from a bank, or for giant corporations that are trying to project their future business. They're heavy on the financial stuff - sales projections, breakeven analysis, three-year projected P&L, and so on. That doesn't work particularly well for writers because a) they're hardly ever going to need a loan to support the business, and b) the time-line for developing a writing business is usually a lot longer than three years, which makes financial projections really difficult unless you have several contracts already in-hand.

For writers, planning the business is about managing their own resources (time, money, energy) in order to have their writing job/career/business go in whatever way they want it to. This obviously means that you have to start by figuring out which way you want things to go. Are you looking for the validation of professionally publishing a few stories? Are you hoping to make a living? Will you be happy writing one gigantic forty-volume popular series about the same people and places, or do you want to do something different with every book? Would you be happy doing some high-paying ghostwriting or working under several pseudonyms, or do you want all your work to be your original stuff with your name on it? What does "being a writer" mean to you?

Once you've done that, think about what you are willing and able to do to get there. I've talked to folks who weren't willing to give up one hour of television per week in order to work at their writing, yet who were supposedly desperate to become bestselling writers. You can't run a decent hobby business on one hour per week, let alone a bestselling writing business. Be honest with yourself about what you want, how much time and energy you're willing to put into getting it, and how well those two things match up.

Also think about the kind of time and energy you are willing to put into each of the seven business areas, which ones you think you're good at (or can be), and which ones you're pretty sure you'll hate. Then think a bit about how best to design your career in order to minimize the need to do stuff you hate, and get maximum benefit out of the stuff you like doing and/or are good at. (Hint: if you hate doing the Production part of Operations, i.e., the writing itself, this is probably not the career for you.)

What I've tried to do in this series of posts is a quick-and-dirty top-down overview of the business of writing, which I hope will be of use to people no matter what stage of their writing career they're at. I may, at some future date, try to get into more specific practicalities in some of these areas, but probably not until after I'm done with my taxes (it's too much like a busman's holiday otherwise. Though I am going to add an extra post on retiring next, because people asked for it.)

Writing is a job, a career, and a business, as well as an art. If you don't think about the business end before you actually start selling, you'll have to play catch-up later…and the longer you wait, the harder it gets to figure it all out.

A final caution: Always keep in mind that there are only two line areas: Operations and Sales/Marketing. The Executive area, under which "making a business plan" falls, is not one of these. In other words, thinking about how you're going to handle all this is worthwhile, even necessary, but it won't do you any good at all unless you a) have a product (a manuscript, story, or book) to sell and b) can sell what you've produced. The first thing is always, always the writing: doing it and improving it and getting it out in front of editors and/or readers.