Patricia C. Wrede's Blog, page 62

Speed

There is an old saying that goes something like: "You can have it fast, you can have it cheap, you can have it good. Pick any two." Meaning that if you want it fast and cheap, it won't be good; if you want it fast and good, it won't be cheap; and if you want it good and cheap, it won't be fast.

Unfortunately, when it comes to writing, price often drops out of the equation completely, because how much the editor pays is determined in contract negotiations that are generally unrelated to deadline. One thus ends up with "You can have it fast, or you can have it good, but not both." This attitude has been around so long that it has percolated down to the reader level, leading to lots of grumbling when a writer puts out books "too fast." Often, the grumbling gets done by people who haven't even read the book…and who refuse to do so on the grounds that "anything written that fast can't be any good."

As usual with this kind of thing, there is a grain of truth in it that is being blown up into a zeppelin-sized, wrong-headed rule. The grain of truth is this: Every writer has a writing speed that works for them, and trying to push stuff out faster than this speed results in a drop in quality. This does not, however, translate into "writing six books in a year is too fast; they can't be any good" applied to all writers, because the "too fast" production speed varies from writer to writer.

I know professional writers for whom taking less than a year and a half to write a novel is "too fast" - it results in a drop in quality. I also know professional writers for whom writing a book in less than two weeks is "too fast" for the same reason…but taking three weeks makes no difference in quality that I can find. Yet the slower writers are admired, while the faster ones are castigated for scrimping on quality.

The really odd thing is that the folks who think that three weeks is "too fast to write a good novel" are often the very same people who proclaim that quality work comes through inspiration - and that when one is inspired, one can sit and write golden sentences for hours on end without effort (though they'll allow the writer to complain of cramps in their hands at the end). Apparently, writers are not allowed to be inspired for an entire novel's-worth of material at once, and inspiration is supposed to take time off between chapters and novels so that their publication dates will be properly spaced.

There's another problem that arises when critics, reviewers, and the general reading public make judgments of quality based on the perceived speed of writing, and that is that the number of books a writer has coming out in any given year does not necessarily have anything much to do with how fast those books got written. It can take a long time for a book to work its way through the whole publication cycle, even for a much-published author.

When one works steadily at a book-per-year pace, one can easily end up with three or four unpublished novels in the pipeline. If one is delayed (there's a printer's strike, the cover artist was backed up, there were three other books with a similar theme coming out that year and the publisher pushed it back to avoid competition) and one is rushed forward (there was a sudden gap in the schedule because someone else didn't deliver on time, and this book was done), one can easily end up with three titles coming out in the same year.

If the writer has been working on spec (that's "on speculation" for freelance fiction writers, not "to specification" as it would be for freelance article writers), and has had to submit a series project a couple of times before it sells, it's easy to end up with even more new titles coming out in one year. And then there are those "trunk stories" - the ones written ages ago that just didn't find a market, and that have been sitting in a trunk (real or metaphorical) for years until a random conversation with an editor suddenly results in a sale. On occasion, I've heard readers complaining about a "too fast" writer because they didn't realize that the books they were complaining about were a big chunk of the writer's backlist that had been written and published years before, and were being reissued to a new audience.

And then there are the books that the writer has been thinking about, and sometimes researching, for years or even decades before sitting down to put them on paper in a white-hot rush. Again, the assumption seems to be that no one could possibly work on more than one novel or story at a time, even though author's papers are freqently littered with bits and pieces of not-yet-written stories, partial manuscripts, and various other scraps that were obviously produced at a time when the author was supposedly concentrating on some other, now finished, project.

What this means is that readers can't tell how long it took the author to write a book. There's not much point in explaining all this to them, though it can be fun to mention (if you know it) that the literary masterpiece about which someone is currently waxing lyrical took a grand total of six weeks to write from the first typing of "Chapter One" to "The End." The point is that if you happen to be a really fast writer, don't worry about it…and don't let anyone tell you that you have to slow down in order to write well. If you happen to be really slow, the same caveat applies in reverse: Don't let people tell you that you have to speed up. There is no One-Size-Fits-All process. Figure out what works for you, and then keep doing that.

Getting from the Beginning to the Middle

For a certain kind of writer, the opening of a story is easy and fun - you get to allude to mysterious events and drop ominous clues. And then comes the middle, where all the stuff you've been alluding to has to start showing up and actually turning into something, and everything falls apart.

The first, most common reason for this is that the author didn't actually have any idea what was going on to begin with, and when they start having to explain all their mysterious hints and ominous warnings, whatever they come up with just doesn't measure up to the menace in the early chapters. It's as if they've had livestock go missing and a field mysteriously burned, and everyone's muttering about legends of dragons, and then they find out that the livestock was stolen by gypsies and the field caught fire when two kids were careless with the cigarettes they were smoking back behind the barn. It's a let-down.

Obviously, one cure is to stop doing this - that is, first come up with the dragon, and then figure out what mysterious hints to drop to get there. Unfortunately, this doesn't work for folks who've already fallen into this trap and don't want to throw away a perfectly good set of three-to-ten-chapters. What they need to do is come up with a problem that lives up to whatever level of threat they've established at the beginning. Better yet, come up with something that's even worse than the opening implied.

My experience is that the most effective way to do this is to turn off your Inner Critic, sit down, and make a list of at least twenty things that could be the Big Problem. Gypsies, cigarettes, bandits, infiltrators from over the border, dragons, human sabotage, enemies setting a trap for the king or lord or Our Heroes, a new Fire Lord rising…twenty things, minimum. The first three to five will be the easy choices, the stuff that's at the top of your mind. Mostly, they're unlikely to develop into a particularly interesting story, but sometimes one of them is just the thing you want. After the first three-to-five, the ideas usually start getting more unusual and unexpected - dragons, traps, etc. - and you can pick one or more of those to use or combine into something that will live up to your opening. That's why it's a list of twenty things: to force yourself to come up with possibilities that aren't obvious.

The trick to this is not to judge your ideas as you're coming up with them, or think too hard about how they'll twist the story you thought you were telling. There'll be time for that when you have the list. Once you have the list, cross off the easy, obvious choices at the beginning and look at the rest of them. Maybe some can be combined for even greater impact - those infiltrators from over the border may be setting a trap for the king in preparation for starting a war, or perhaps the dragon is merely the servant of the rising Fire Lord.

The second reason for the falling-apart problem is that even though the writer has what's supposed to be a huge problem facing the protagonists - the dragon - it seems much too easy once everyone finally figures out what's going on. Missing livestock, burned field, dragon legends…ah, right, so there's a dragon. So we call in the army with lots of cannon support, they set out some fat sheep for bait, the cannons blow the dragon out of the sky, and bob's your uncle. This tends to happen either when a) the writer is much too eager to get to the Grand Finale and the confrontation with the dragon, and so skips over any problems that might occur on the way there, or b) hasn't thought everything through (i.e., as in, not realizing early on that an army with artillery could take down the dragon fairly easily, as soon as they know there is one).

The fix for this one is similar to the brainstorming I just described, but instead of coming up with a list of ideas for what the Big Problem could be, the author has to come up with two lists. The first is a list of What Could Go Wrong from wherever the beginning ends. We know there's a dragon now, so we'll send a messenger to the king to get the army and the cannons. But: the king won't send the army because he doesn't believe in dragons, the trail up the mountain is too narrow for the cannons, the dragon eats the messenger so the king never hears, the cannons were built by the cheapest bidder and explode, the dragon is one of a larger flock and the cannons can't take down twelve dragons at once, etc.

The second list is the list of What Else Could Be Going On that Our Heroes don't know about yet. The dragon is the servant of a new Fire Lord, who will be really annoyed when Our Heroes kill it. The dragon was lured to Our Heroes' village on purpose, by somebody who has it in for them and who will certainly try something else once they get rid of the dragon. The dragon has a dangerous object in its horde - cursed, stolen, something that possessed people, whatever - and once the dragon is gone and the object is found, they'll have a whole new problem to deal with. Again, no judging ideas or worrying about how they might fit into the story until after the lists are complete.

The last reason for the falling-apart problem is usually that the writer is paying too much attention to The Rules TM, specifically the ones about how the heroes have to make mistakes, make their situation worse, etc. until the Grand Finale. The standard plot skeleton is DEscriptive, not PREscriptive, and it just means that a story wherein things run along too smoothly is seldom interesting to read. The heroes have to face and overcome obstacles, but the obstacles don't necessarily have to be of their own making.

More on Prologues

The whole point of a good prologue is to do something that the writer cannot do in the main part of the story without violating some important aspect of storytelling, like chronology or viewpoint or continuity. For instance, if the main story is told entirely from the viewpoint of one central character and takes place over the course of six days, except for one critical scene that takes place twenty years before the POV character was even born, that one scene is a clear candidate for being made into a prologue. Similarly, if there's a ton of background detail and information that the reader truly needs in order to get through Chapter One, but which would bog that chapter down to a snail's pace, a cultural/historical summary prologue may be in order.

One needs to be very, very cautious about deciding that you really need a prologue to do whatever-it-is. There are very few things that a writer truly cannot do without resorting to a prologue. Adding a prologue may be the first and most obvious thing the author thinks of when faced with a recalcitrant bit of backstory or characterization, but that doesn't always make a prologue the best choice. Easy and obvious are not the same as effective.

On the other hand, while it may be quite possible to have your archeologists discover letters or a diary discussing life in Pompeii, it really isn't plausible for them to find a first-person account written by somebody as they were fleeing the erupting volcano. The archeologists can piece things together and imagine what it must have been like, but if the author needs that dramatic flight scene as a scene, he's probably going to have to put it in a prologue.

The second thing to remember about prologues is that if a book has a prologue, the prologue is the start of the book. The prologue doesn't have to be full of action, any more than any other opening of a story does, but it does have to pique the reader's interest so that they'll keep reading. (This is why so many "ancient myth" and "historical background" prologues fail - they're just not very interesting on their own.)

The third thing to remember is that no matter how brilliant your prologue is, there are going to be readers who skip it on principle. This means that a book with a prologue has, in essence, two different places (the prologue and Chapter 1) that each have to function as the start of the story (i.e., hook the reader into reading more).

Depending on the sort of prologue you're doing, this usually means that Chapter 1 is going to have to start even more strongly than it normally would, in order to re-hook the readers when they have to switch gears, however slightly, at the end of the prologue. (Note that I said "start strong," not "start with action." There's a difference.)

Prologues come in several varieties, and it helps to have some idea which sort you are doing. The different kinds of prologues tend to fall into categories according to timing, viewpoint, and style/function.

Timing: a prologue can happen before/long before the action of the main story; at the same time as the main story; or look backward after the main story is over. Viewpoint: The prologue can be told from the point of view of the main character from the main story, from the point of view of a secondary character, or from the point of view of some other character who never actually appears in the main story as a character (as with Steven Brust's Paarfi novels, where the POV of the prologue is a crabby Dragaeran historian who is the putative author of the "historical fiction" that follows). Style/function: The prologue can be a scene; it can be narrative in a style different from but related to the main story (as when the prologue is a fairy tale or myth, or a summary of the historical background, or a fictional academic introduction to the material that follows); it can function as an introduction to the world or characters, or as a frame (usually with an epilog in the same vein) for the main story.

All of these aspects can be mixed and matched to some extent; that is, your prologue may be a dramatized scene from your protagonist's childhood or a first-person protagonist's narrative introduction to his memoir (setting the prologue solidly in the "future" of the main story); it can be a myth from your world's ancient history or a centuries-in-the-story's-future mythologized version of the events in the story; and so on.

A good prologue should leave the reader with more questions than simply "How does this tie in to the main story?" or "What happens to these people next?" This is especially important if the prologue is from a different viewpoint than the main story, because if the only thing the reader wants to know is what happens to these people next, she's likely to get annoyed when the main story turns out to be about somebody else.

Generally speaking, a good prologue requires the reader to switch gears (from one time period to another, one viewpoint to another, one style/structure/format to another, or all of the above) between the prologue and Chapter One. The bigger the shift in gears, the stronger your opening of Ch. 1 has to be to re-catch and re-interest the reader. If there is no shift of gears between the end of the prologue and the beginning of Chapter 1, then what you have is probably actually Chapter 1 and not a prologue after all, and all you really need to do is renumber your chapters.

In addition to all of the above stuff, prologues are usually significantly shorter than the average chapter in the rest of the book. This isn't an actual format requirement, but it is well to remember that the more one can condense the scene or information, the more likely one is to get at least some of those readers who hate prologues to read it anyway. On the other hand, three pages of super-neutronium-density narrative summary are likely to put off more readers than one might lose with a ten-page scene that conveys less actual information but keeps the reader interested with less effort on their part. It really depends on what you're trying to do.

The Problem with Prologues

Prologues are out of favor these days, one of the "forbidden" (by whom?) writing techniques, yet people keep asking about them because they know intuitively that the technique has enormous possibilities. Quite a few folks go ahead and use them anyway. Sometimes this works brilliantly; other times, not so much…and the problematic usages reinforce the perception that prologues are a Bad Idea.

The first and biggest mistake a lot of writers make, especially in science fiction and fantasy, is to assume that there is no way to get the reader up to speed on the story background except to provide a three-page infodump of all the presumably-critical material right at the start of the story. So the writer starts off with a history lesson or a summary of cultures, and half the people who open the book close it and put it back on the shelf, while 90% of the people who do stick with the story skip the prologue and start with Chapter One…and have no problem whatever understanding what is going on.

Too many writers think that because they know all sorts of background information, said information is absolutely necessary in order to understand the story. It hardly ever is, and even if the writer is correct and the reader ultimately does need to know the tangled history of the United Planets and how various alien races came to join, they usually don't need to know it in order to have a basic understanding of the opening scene where Bob is trying to book a seat on the shuttle to Betelgeuse. Yes, it will make the scene much richer in nuance if the reader understands exactly why Bob doesn't want to take a seat designed for Rigelians, even if it's the only one left, but it's hardly ever truly necessary. It is, in fact, often much more effective to let the reader presume that Bob is worried about the fact that seats designed for three-legged insectoids aren't particularly comfortable for humans, and only later work in the political tension…and later still, the historical reasons behind the political tension.

My friend Lois Bujold has a thirteen-plus book series, no volume of which has a "what has gone before" prologue. Yet new readers who pick up the latest book in the series never seem to have a problem understanding and enjoying the story, even if they don't know all the details of the Time of Isolation, the Incendiary Cat Plot, the names and relationships of every recurring character, etc., right from the start of the story. Yes, some of this is because she is really, really good at working the necessary information into the story, but some of it is also because she is well aware that not all the existing information is necessary for this particular story. And also that readers are smarter than a lot of writers think.

The second big mistake a lot of writers make is that they forget that it is not enough for a prologue to contain necessary information; it must also be interesting to the reader. Too often, even the most necessary prologue presents information in a dry, dull, or utterly predictable manner, with the result that many readers put the book down and don't pick it up again, and many others skip the prologue entirely.

If a reader can skip the prologue and still understand and enjoy the story, you don't need the prologue. If readers complain that they don't understand the story, and you find out that they are consistently skipping the prologue, the author needs to either fix the prologue to make it fascinating or ditch the prologue and find some other way of getting the necessary information into the story.

Which brings me to another point: prologues are not a clever way to dump all the background information, so that the author can start the real book with a slam-bang action scene. If a book has a prologue, the prologue IS the start of the book. It doesn't have to be full of action, any more than any other opening of a story does, but it does have to pique the reader's interest so that they'll keep reading. Fifteen pages of history and/or cultural and worldbuilding detail belongs in an appendix for the truly dedicated reader who is fascinated by such stuff, not at the start of the story.

A prologue is also not a clever way to start with slam-bang action when the story opens with eight chapters of ordinary life and slow character building. Sometimes, this sort of thing happens, but it only ever works if the writer is doing more with the prologue than "Gosh, I'm supposed to start with action…I know! I'll put in a prologue with a battle scene!" (I'll get to what else you can do in the next post.)

There's also the scaffolding problem. There are quite a few writers whose process requires them to warm up or ease their way into a story, and some of them use a prologue for this purpose. Usually, this is not a conscious decision, which is unfortunate, because in this situation, the prologue is not part of the story, it's part of the writer's process.

It's like the scaffolding that construction workers put up in order to build a skyscraper. Once the building is built or the story is complete, the scaffolding is no longer needed and should be taken down. This is obvious when it's a building, but not always so obvious when it's a story and the writer isn't really aware of his/her process yet. The best test for this that I know is the one mentioned above: if your first-readers can understand and enjoy the story without the prologue, you probably don't need it. (The "probably" is there because, very occasionally, there's a story that works fine without a prologue, but that is much cooler if one includes the prologue. The coolness factor tops everything else.)

Next time: Some thoughts on doing a prologue right.

Not Flashing Back

Flashbacks are one of those indispensable writers' tools that tend to alternately get encouraged and discouraged, depending on whether or not they've been overused and abused recently or not. They're a way of slipping the reader back into the past of the story, so that a particularly important incident or incidents from the characters' backstory can be written as a fully dramatized scene, rather than merely letting the characters talk about the incident or summarizing it in narrative.

One medium-common use of flashback is during the Big Revelation just before or after the action climax, when everyone has known for much of the book that something dire happened on that fateful night twenty years ago, but no one knows exactly what because everyone who was there is thought to be dead. And then one of the heroes (or, sometimes, the villain) reveals that he was there. "Let me tell you what really happened…" he says, and instead of a long explanation, the author cuts to the scene itself, with the speaker as the viewpoint character.

This can be extraordinarily effective, especially if the author has either a) built up to the revelation by dropping hints over the course of the novel, or b) dropped no hints, instead allowing the reader to believe the version that everyone in the story believes, so that the revelation comes as a total shock. For it to work, though, the revelation has to be big - something that changes the heroes' perception of themselves and/or what has been going on all this time ("Yes, Luke, I am your father!"). Generally speaking, something like "Actually, she was killed by a shark, not by piranhas" is more a correction of the facts than a big revelation, and shouldn't rate a flashback scene unless there's something about the mistake that changes everyone's perceptions.

What you don't want to use flashbacks for is to cover your own mistakes and/or as an excuse to be lazy. If you write your characters into a corner, and you need for one of them to have some piece of equipment that they wouldn't normally be carrying (whether that's a butane torch or a mithril oven mitt), you don't get to have the character flash back to her meeting with the Wise Sage on the mountain so you can show the Sage giving her the oven mitt or the torch, and then proceed with the story. You have to go back and insert the Sage giving the oven mitt to her in the earlier scene, all those chapters ago - and if that throws off the pace and the timing and so on, you have to fix those things, too. Or you cogitate for three weeks until you figure out some other way out of the impasse that doesn't require backfilling anything.

You also don't want to use flashbacks to create false tension or pseudo-cliffhangers - the kind of thing where the hero is alone in a dark, empty house and hears the door creak, then there's a two-page flashback to a childhood incident in a dark house with a creaky door, and when we get back to the present, he hears his wife calling "Honey? Are you there? I'm back with the fuse!" This kind of thing annoys a lot of readers (me included), unless you're writing parody and deliberately hamming up and undercutting assorted clichés.

Most of the time, you don't want to flash back to an entire scene that the reader has seen in this book before, not even if you're short on length and could really use the extra words. Padding never works. Having the hero remember a significant line or two from an earlier scene at a critical moment is about all you can usually get away with, though if you're writing a bazillion-word series and you want to remind the reader of Book 5 of something significant that happened in Book 1, you may be able to pull off a verbatim repetition. Even then, though, most writers use a couple of lines and a pointed summary, rather than repeating the whole scene.

I should perhaps mention here that time-travel stories that loop through the same scene with characters at different points in their subjective lives are not doing flashbacks in that case. Also, while it is certainly possible to use flashbacks in a time-travel story, you had better know exactly what you are doing and be able to make clear to the reader which scenes are from the past that the character is time-traveling in and which are the past that he/she is remembering.

Used properly, flashbacks let you do all kinds of neat stuff with structure, timing, tension, pacing, and a lot of other aspects of a story (in addition to their most common use, which is providing crucial background information). Used improperly, they can bog a story down, annoy and confuse the reader, and generally turn things into an incomprehensible muddle. If you're not sure you can do them well, spend some time working on them until you are.

Misunderstanding grammar

Once again, I have been driven to frothing at the mouth by a would-be writer-and-critiquer's thick-headedness in regard to both the construction of the English language and the so-called rules he's trying to apply, and you folks are going to have to put up with the resulting rant. My apologies in advance.

This particular comment involved a total misunderstanding of verbs, tenses, and voice - specifically, the use of "was." The critiquer asserted, among other things, that "was" is a weak verb, that "was" is always passive (by which, from context, he appears to have meant not merely passive, but passive voice), and that every use of the verb "was" could and should therefore be cut or rephrased so as to use some other, presumably stronger verb instead. Like "is."

This is complete nonsense, even before I point out that "is" and "was" are the same verb, just different tenses.

The verb "to be" in all its forms is not an action verb (like swim or climb), but it isn't weak. It simply does a different job, grammatically. Action verbs tell you what something or someone is doing. A string of action verbs can imply a whole scene without adding any other words at all (Sneak. Steal. Hide. Trip. Scramble. Run!). To be is a linking verb; without a subject and an object, it doesn't imply much of anything (Is. Was. Am. Are. Huh?). It doesn't do the same job as an action verb - and while it is true that sometimes you can phrase a sentence either way ("His voice was a whisper" vs. "He whispered"), sometimes you just can't ("Marley was dead, to begin with." "It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.")

Moreover, "to be" functions as an auxiliary verb in a number of different tenses. Denying a writer the use of the progressive tenses and the perfect tenses cripples the prose. For those who aren't sure about the difference (and I had to look up the names repeatedly for years and years) the tenses work like this:

Present Tense:  He dies.
Past Tense: He died
Present Perfect tense: He has died
Past Perfect tense: He had died
Present Progressive tense: He is dying
Past Progressive Tense: He was dying.

You can't replace "He was dying" with "He died" just to take out the "was." The sentences don't mean the same thing. "Was" isn't in there as a stand-alone verb that you can remove or change; it's part of the grammatical form. Yet over and over I meet people who want to tear through a manuscript crossing out forms of "to be" on principle, without paying any attention to what the writer is saying, how she is saying it, or why she said it that way. (This is particularly annoying when the person on the rampage is a copyeditor who keeps changing what the sentences mean in pursuit of some stylistic ideal that eliminates "was," but that's a whole different rant.)

Which brings me to the infuriating obsession that some people have with banishing passive voice from fiction. Passive voice is a sentence construction which puts the emphasis and the focus of the sentence on what is being done or the thing that it's being done to.  "She hit him" is active voice; "He was hit by her" is passive voice. It's a tremendously useful construction for any writer whose characters are facing a puzzle, because you can leave out the "by whom:" "The necklace was stolen." Who stole it? Neither the reader nor the detective knows just yet.

Passive voice gets a bad rap because it's often used in dense scientific papers and badly-done business memos to make the subject under discussion look objective. Instead of saying "I injected the mice with a 2% saline solution," the scientist says "The mice were injected with a 2% saline solution," implying that anyone could have done this and the results would be the same. The corporate executive says "The budget was exceeded by $3 million" in hopes of distancing himself from the problem. Unless your viewpoint character is a scientist or businessman, you usually don't want to do this in fiction.

There are, however, things that one does want to do with passive voice in fiction. Take the sentence "The child, having been abandoned in the corner, cried herself to sleep." The parenthetical phrase "having been abandoned in the corner" (by whom?) is passive voice; it has to be passive voice in order to have "the child" as its subject. You could rephrase it in active voice, but only by adding someone else to the sentence: "The child, whose mother had abandoned her in the corner, cried herself to sleep." There's nothing wrong with the latter sentence, but in a novel or story, it's probably clear already who it is that's abandoned the kid in the corner. The second, active version also splits the focuse of the sentence; it's half about the child and half about the mother.

I've already mentioned the usefulness of passive voice in hiding a thief, murderer, etc., but it can also shift the focus to someone or something: "She was murdered by her brother" puts more emphasis on her and on the murder than on the brother, because you could just say "She was murdered" and leave the brother out entirely. "Her brother murdered her" puts the emphasis on the brother. Sometimes, you want it one way, sometimes you want it the other way, and it's silly to overlook so useful a tool as passive voice for doing this.

And then there are the stylistic considerations. Sometimes, using passive voice allows for a more elegant sentence than active voice. "The duke was attacked four times: once by an assassin, twice by bandits, and once by his four-year-old daughter." reads much better, to my ear, than "One assassin, two sets of bandits, and his four-year-old daughter attacked the duke."

Keeping track

When a writer has a big, complicated novel with lots of subplots and plot arcs that need to weave around each other, there are two main things he/she needs to do: 1) keep track of all the things that are going on offstage and in different plot arcs than whichever one is currently at the front and in focus, 2) making sure you don't stay solely focused on a single plot thread for too long (because that makes the book feel lumpy and unevenly paced, or, in extreme cases, like a series of short stories strung together).

To write a novel with lots of subplots and arcs that need to intertwine, a writer needs to 1) keep track of what's going on offstage in all the threads that aren't currently at the front and in focus, and 2) make sure he/she doesn't focus on only one plot thread at a time for too long (because that makes for lumpy, uneven pacing, and in extreme cases, for readers who've forgotten half of the important things going on).

Basically, keeping track means taking notes and updating them regularly. There's no other way to do it, really, unless you have an eidetic memory. Notes can be done in advance or after-the-fact, or both at once (if you check in at the end of every scene, you're also checking in before the beginning of every scene that comes next). I'm a check-in-after/before-every-scene writer; before I start in on a scene, I want to have some idea what's going on in each of my subplots. And since my scenes rarely go quite the way I'd planned, I need to look at them as soon as I'm done writing them and figure out how what did happen onstage is going to affect the way all the offstage plots are developing, which in turn will affect what the next scene is and what happens in it.

One of the ways I keep track is with a calendar, because most of my stories are told in chronological order over a period of weeks or longer. I usually set up a one-month template in Excel (because it gives me more control than a real-life calendar program) and as I write each scene, I log in what happened, time and viewpoint (if those are relevant or not obvious), place, and any important events (e.g. "G and J picnic in Central Park; Uncle W interrupts; J loses necklace"). This gives me a picture of what my characters actually have done (as opposed to what I'd planned) and when, and whether it's plausible to have G foil the villain's bank robbery in Paris at 3 p.m. when he was picnicing in New York with J at 11 a.m.

For the Frontier Magic books, I had a list of what-happened by year and how old the main character was (because those three books cover nearly twenty years). I also had a chapter summary at the start of each draft chapter that said something like "1843 - Eff is four/five; family leaves for Mill City late summer" so that if I had to move scenes or bits of narrative around, I'd have some idea whether I'd have to check all the age and date references or not (if they went in the next chapter, "1843 - Eff is five; arrival and settling in to new house" then no; if the bits moved three chapters forward to "1849 - Eff is 10; Eff is 11; McNeil Expedition leaves town," then definitely yes.)

Making sure you don't focus on just one plot thread at a time again requires awareness, first of all. Once you know it's something you need to do, there are two basic techniques for doing it: first, you balance the scenes, interleaving the various plot threads so you don't have eight action scenes in a row and then eight romantic ones; second, you incorporate more than one plot thread into the same scene as often as possible.

One technique for balancing the focus is making a color-coded scene list. Again, you can do this before you start writing, build it as you write, or use it as a tool for analyzing your first draft once it's complete. List the scenes in the order that they appear in your manuscript ("G and J picnic" "L kidnapped" "Q steals secret bomb plans") and then color code them according to whether they're part of the main action plot, the sidekick's romance, the annoying little brother's subplot, etc. If things are well interwoven, the list will end up looking like a rainbow, with colors changing quickly; if not, it'll look like large blocks of color stacked one on top of another with little overlap.

When I do this, I get a zillion different colors of Post-It-Notes and assign them to the different plotlines, then lay them out in order on the dining room table. This lets me move scenes around easily once I've noticed that I have six bright green Post-Its in a row and then no green ones at all for the next 20 scenes. Using Post-Its also means they stick to the table so the cats can't scatter them all over. Also, I can stick two different-colored Post-Its together when I realize that I can have the kidnapping happen during the romantic picnic and get a scene that's a two-fer. I also look for scenes that I can delete entirely. You don't actually have to dramatize everything, just because you can; it's OK sometimes to say "After three hours of shopping, they finally had all the parts for the bomb" instead of writing three scenes where they stop at different hardware stores to buy what they need.

Incorporating more than one plot thread into the same scene uses exactly the same sort of skills that writers use to put plot, characterization, and background into the same scene, or dialog, action, and summary. There will be some scenes that can only do one thing - it doesn't make sense for the hero to stop in the middle of the crucial fight with the villain to worry about his grandmother's illness, for instance - but a lot of the time, you can work two or more subplots together (as in the action-kidnapping interrupting the romantic-picnic mentioned above).

This multiple-plotlines-per-scene technique is particularly painless when two or more characters are in a position to talk for a while. Whether it's a tea party scene or two characters talking on the bus or at the water cooler, conversations can be full of gossip that covers several other characters' romances or financial problems (and their associated plotlines) in addition to whatever planning/plotting/clues the scene was originally thought up to provide. The trick here is usually to pick one main subject of conversation (presumably whatever the point/plotline the scene is supposed to focus on), and then look for places where the characters would naturally get off course and talk a bit about seeing George at the bar with a shady-looking character last night, or just how Jin is supporting her shopping addiction. One can also occasionally have such a scene interrupted by a phone call, letter, or the arrival of someone new with a message, which gives the illusion of bringing some of the offstage developments onstage temporarily.

Also, do remember that for a lot of writers, doing this kind of in-depth scene-balancing analysis is something that's only necessary when they're stuck or when there's a problem that they can't put their finger on. I don't haul out the Post-Its for every book I write, and even when I do, I don't always haul them out in advance.

Weaving (plot) threads

First off, thanks to everyone who commiserated about the computer crash. I now have all my critical data back (including my in-process Skyrim game! Very important, right up there with the email archives, the address book, and the calendar. Books? Those were never the problem; I'm paranoid about backing up work-in-process, finished work, copyedited versions…) So I'm totally back in business.

On to the writing stuff. Today I thought I'd take a shot at a problem that caught my eye in an enormously fat, complicated novel I read recently: handling subplots. The book was engaging and competently done, overall, but halfway through I started feeling a little odd. At first, I thought it was a subtle problem with the pace, but the scenes all seemed to be moving along just fine. I finally realized that the trouble was with the subplots.

As I said, this was a fat, complicated novel. Meaning, lots of subplots. There were several romances, two or three different political plots, a bad guy converting to the good guys, two sets of long-lost relatives, a secret birthright, and a whole raft of interrelated action plots helping the build-up to the climax. The book started with the background and the first action-plot, and just as the action was passing its first big peak, the author introduced the romantic interest. We then had a couple of chapters of the romance, at which point the first big political plot showed up. Politics occupied the next few chapters, and just as the big political problem was solved, the action moved into its next phase. And so on.

Each subplot or plot arc would be almost finished when the author started dropping hints about the next, completely different, subplot or arc. By the time the current arc was disposed of, the next one was bubbling along nicely and ready to take off without giving Our Heroes more than a few minutes of down time.

It should have been gripping. It wasn't. And the reason for it was threefold: first, the pattern quickly became predictable; second, the author was so locked in to the pattern that she/he kept it up right to the end of the book (yes, that means that in the last two chapters, right before the villain was defeated for good and all, the author introduced a new plot…which of course was never wrapped up. I wanted to spit nails; that scene would have been the perfect opener for a sequel, but as something dropped on the reader at the end of a book, coming out of nowhere, it really didn't work for me); and finally, I couldn't believe that all these subplots would come along in quite such tidy duckling fashion, one after another, with just enough overlap that they didn't look like a bunch of short stories strung together.

Basically, the author was focusing on one thing at a time: first the setup, then an action arc, then the first romance, etc. Now, some things really had to happen in order; the villain had no particular reason to kidnap the heroine until after the hero fell in love with her, for instance. But I just couldn't buy that both the villain and the evil politicians were going to hunker down and do nothing for two weeks while the hero and heroine fell in love, or that the sidekick and his love interest would go through several hair-raising adventures showing no interest whatsoever in each other, then have their two-week romance while everything else was suddenly on hold.

In real life, everything is happening all the time. National politics didn't get put on hold for four days while I got my computer back up and running; neither did my exercise program or the people coming to install my new water heater. And in fact, my computer got fixed as fast as it did thanks in large part to some timely tips from my walking buddy.

Subplots need to weave around each other in the same way. Some things have to happen in order or in totally different and unrelated places, but there are an awful lot of things that can overlap for more than one scene or ten minutes. The politicians and villains and evil corporations will be plotting and making moves all the time, separately or together, whether the hero is taking a well-earned vacation or not.

Once the writer grasps this, the problem becomes keeping track of what everyone is doing and then figuring out how to bring it into the story so that one doesn't have subplot lumps. I'll try to talk more about that on Sunday.

Happy (?) New Year's Crash…

Last Wednesday, I updated my blog, checked my email, did all the usual computer things, and at the end of the day, I logged off and went to bed, as usual. Thursday morning when I turned on the computer…everything had gone missing. By which I mean, the machine still ran, but it behaved as if it was a brand-spanking-new-fresh-from-the-box machine, complete with setting up stuff like Internet Explorer that I set up when I bought the thing five years ago.

Considerable poking around and a visit to the Geek Squad later, the problem appears to be a corrupt profile file. Unfortunately, there doesn't seem to be an easy way to put everything back the way it was. The data seems to all still be there, but I have to dig through the file trees and/or the backup in order to find it (at present, I still haven't located my email files, but I think it's just a matter of figuring out where the program keeps its data files. I hope it is, anyway. I think I've found pretty much everything else.)

In other words, reconstructing the computer setup - the address lists, the bookmarks, the calendar, various non-standard datafile locations - is possible, but it's going to take me quite a while. I am SO glad this didn't happen in the middle of Hell Month (when I'd have been scrambling to find the copy-edit and get it back to the publisher in time) or next month (when I'm going to be frantically trying to get various obscure tax documents filed in the two-week window that the government allows for them).

Which is a long-winded explanation for why you're not getting the usual blog post on writing this morning. I'm hoping to be back on schedule by Wednesday. In the meantime, have a nice relaxing holiday!

Imagination

The holiday season is a time for parties, especially the sort of parties that people throw in order to introduce interesting friends and neighbors to other interesting friends and neighbors they haven't met but might like. It's a great way to meet interesting people, and the first thing most of them ask is, "So, what do you do?"

The thing I've noticed, over the years, is just how many people react to my declaration that I'm a writer with a rather wistful statement that boils down to "I've always wanted to write, but I don't have any imagination."

It took me a long time to decide that maybe they were right…but not for the reasons they think. Their problem is indeed a failure of imagination, but it comes a whole lot earlier than the point at which they try to think up a story. They simply can't imagine themselves - or people like them - being writers, and so they never really try to become one.

Occasionally, I run across someone for whom it's not so much that they can't imagine themselves being a writer as that they've never seen stories of the sort they want to write, and thus they assume either that a) nobody will buy the kind of stories they want to write, or b) there is something wrong about the stories they want to write - they're not good because they don't follow the patterns and tropes of the fiction they've read or seen on TV and movies.

What these folks are doing is telling themselves a story: that because they have never seen X before - whether X is someone like them who writes or whether X is a murder mystery with magic set in historically accurate Han Dynasty China - they can't or shouldn't try to do it themselves.

Sometimes, folks like this can be inspired by suddenly finding out that someone like them - a homebody, a lawyer, a high school dropout, a person of color, an eighty-year-old ex-wrestler - has successfully written (or written the kind of story they're dying to write). More often, though, I meet them again two or six or ten years later and discover that they still are convinced they can't do it, despite whatever counter-examples I've provided (and I have quite a collection of them).

The stories we tell ourselves about ourselves and our dreams are enormously powerful - far more powerful than the stories that come from outside. And the longer we've been telling them, the more powerful they become. I know people who persevered through decades of outside discouragement and apparent failure because they told themselves the story that they were writers; because they had a powerful vision of themselves as someone-who-writes; because they told themselves that there were other people out there wanting to read the stories they wanted to write, the ones they couldn't find on the current bookshelves or on TV.

Not all of them have been successful, even by their own definitions (which do not always include publication or making a living writing as measures of "success"). A lot of them have, though, and the jury's still out on the rest of them. The ones who don't try at all are guaranteed never to make it (whatever "making it" means to them).

You don't have to believe you will be a success in order to write. You don't even have to believe that you could be. You just have to believe that you, or someone like you, can sit down with a notebook or at a computer and make up stuff that somebody else might want to read; that you, or someone like you, can learn the craft part of writing and rewriting so as to make your stories more effective at doing whatever it is you want them to do until you're satisfied with them; that even if there are only three other people in the entire world who will like the particular, peculiar fiction you have to tell, it's worth your time and effort to put them down in pixels for them and for you; and that all this is something you want to put time and effort into doing.

The so-called "writer's imagination" starts by imagining oneself as a writer.