Patricia C. Wrede's Blog, page 63

Merry Christmas!

Merry Christmas (or midwinter holiday of your choice), everybody! I'm mostly taking the day off, but I couldn't leave you with nothing at all on the blog, so I thought I would give you some links.

As some of you may recall, back in September I had a three-day visit from a team of video and publicity people, sent by my ebook publisher to shoot footage for some publicity/informational videos. Those vids are now up on YouTube, so I thought I'd post links here for anyone who's interested.

The first one is the "Meet the Author" video, which is mostly me blathering on about writing. It has a couple of great shots of Cazaril, who is far more photogentic than I am.

Meet the author = http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D3xiJXLVSe8&feature=related

The second one is about the closets my sister Carol painted, and has some great shots of the Oz closet, the Narnia closet, and the Peter Pan closet - that's the one they had me walk down the hall and into (they must have really liked that shot; it's in both videos).

Closets - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UhVRGVgj_WQ

Have a great day; see you again on Wednesday!

Metaphorical manuals

This summer, I got a new car. Well, new to me - it belonged to Dad for several years, until he decided that with Mom gone, he didn't really need two cars and he liked the other one better.

Anyway, it's a 2008 model, with lots of snazzy bells and whistles that I've never had on a car before. Lots of bells and whistles. I had to drag out the owner's manual in order to figure out how to open the gas cap, and I had to dig through a stack of paper, including maps and a really fat maintenance-and-repair manual, before I found the bit of paper I was actually looking for.

A lot of the rules and recommendations about writing (you knew I was going to bring this back around to writing eventually) are like those different maps and manuals, except they don't come with neat labels that actually tell you that this batch is for normal operations and this other list is for hard-core repairs. They just give you a list of do's and don'ts. And applying the wrong set of instructions and/or data for what you want to do is very likely to make your problems worse instead of better.

The very first thing you need is a car. You do not, however, need a Porsche or a BMW or a high-quality racing car. They'd be nice to have, and they're not as likely to break down on the trip, but you don't need them. Just something that runs.

I'd say that the writing equivalent of this is a story to tell, and maybe some of the basic components like plot, characters, etc. Most writers begin with the equivalent of the junker car that they bought for $500 used when they were in high school or college - something that works well enough most of the time, but that really needs a lot of tinkering with to keep it running smoothly. This is not really a bad thing; one generally learns a great deal from tinkering, whether it's with a car or with one's stories.

Most people don't need or want a manual in order to pick a car to buy, though many people do a bit of research to find out which cars are reliable, what their safety record is like, how much they cost, etc. Most writers don't need or want directions on what to write about, though some will try to do market research to find out what's selling. The trouble is, there's a lot more good information available about the cost and reliability of cars than there is about what editors are buying at any given time.

Once you have a car, you need is somewhere you want to go. That's the writing equivalent of the road trip plan for getting from Chicago to Denver. You may not know where the road construction is, and you certainly won't be able to predict where the accidents have backed up traffic for ten miles along your route; you may not even have chosen a route, but you at least have some idea where you're trying to go. For writers, this would be a direction, a structure, a plot, an ending - whatever prewriting or outlining the particular writer needs in order to start writing.

In a car, what you need for this is a map. Same thing for writers; the trouble is that there are dozens of "this is how you get started" systems around, but nobody's ever organized all of them into a map that shows all the possibilities. Because the thing about a map is, it shows you where Chicago is relative to Denver, and that I-80 is the most direct route, but it doesn't say that you must go that way if you'd rather swing north and take a long route through the back roads of Wisconsin, Minnesota, and South Dakota.

The next thing you need to know is how to drive the car (unless you're planning to hire a chauffer/ghostwriter, which most people can't afford). You don't need to know how the car works in order to drive it; you just have to know a few things like how to work the steering wheel, gas pedal, and brakes, which switches are for the headlights and turn signals, and where the gas-cap release lever is. The owner's manual will tell you where things are; the actual driving part requires practical experience.

This would be the basic writing and storytelling skills: grammar, spelling, punctuation, syntax; some sense of how plot and characters work; a basic understanding of dialog and narrative and pace; etc. And, of course, actually writing. Most writers pick this up from reading and experimenting and maybe from books and English classes, and figure out how it all goes together by practicing.

Sooner or later, even a Porsche or BMW needs basic maintenance, like oil changes and tire rotation, and they do eventually break down and need fixing after a certain amount of use. For cars, that usually means taking them to a mechanic to be fixed, but most writers don't want to hire a book doctor to fix their novels even if they can find and afford a legitimate one. So sooner or later, all of us have to figure out how to repair our own stuff, for which one wants the repair manual. That would be the editing and revision stage, where you really dig into every aspect of the story to make sure it's in tip-top shape.

A lot of writers are trying to use the repair manual to decide where they're going or figure out how to turn on the windshield wipers. The repair manual won't help at all with figuring out where to go or how to get there, and it'll drive you mad if all you need to know is where the heck they put the wiper controls. On the other hand, if the wipers aren't working and you need to know which part to get and how to replace it, the nice little diagram of the dashboard in the owner's manual that labels the switches really isn't likely to be much help.

Knowing where you're going doesn't help you drive the car or fix it when it breaks down. Driving the car around at random is unlikely to get you anywhere useful or interesting. A great car that's in perfect condition but up on blocks because you can't drive and have nowhere to go…well, it may be pretty to look at, but again, it's not going anywhere. You have to start by looking at the right document for whatever it is you want to do or are having trouble with.

When they don't wanna

One of the most frustrating things that happens to writers is having a batch of characters worked into just the right spot for the plot to take off…and discovering that they won't do whatever is supposed to come next.

When you want your characters to go left, and they want to go right, there are three things you can do: 1) Just keep going as originally planned; 2) Figure out some solid reason why these people can't go the way they want; or 3) Go ahead and let them go right after all, and see what happens.

I've never had much luck with #1. Forcing characters to do what I'd planned instead of what those particular characters would do just never works for me; at best, I get stuck for ages, while at worst I manage to plow onward for several chapters, which eventually have to be thrown out. My characters turn instantly to cardboard in my head (well, they would - I'm basically turning them into puppets acting out the plot, rather than developed characters with attitudes and likes and opinions unique to them). It works for some writers though.

#2 has been very useful on a number of occasions. The simplest was when I had a large group on the move, for whom the most logical thing to do was to go around the kingdoms instead of trying to fight their way through; I put a nearly-impassable swamp in the middle of their logical route, thus making it faster to fight through the kingdoms (and speed was a consideration, as they were being chased). Two or three lines during the which-way-do-we-go discussion, and I was all set. Geography is so useful.

A lot of the time, though, forcing the issue isn't that simple and requires more setup, especially when a physical barrier isn't enough or isn't reasonable.  Say I'm faced with characters who want to hide in the woods when I need them to stop at the inn so they can encounter a bunch of other characters and move the plot along. Starting a forest fire to drive them to the inn would work, but would also end up with a whole lot more plot complications.

So instead, I think for a bit about what could happen/might already have happened that would make these particular characters decide that stopping at the inn is a good idea instead of a bad one. There are a couple of people they really, really want to meet up with; perhaps they catch a glimpse of one of them on the road? Or maybe I can go back to their last stop and plant a rumor…what would intrigue them enough that they'd decide to check it out despite the risk? Maybe I need to go back even farther, and give them reason to think there's evidence they need at the inn (which means they'll want to come up with a plan to get hold of it while avoiding being seen/identified…yes, that's got some meat to it).

In other words, I'm not changing who the characters are; I'm changing their circumstances, what they already know (and therefore, what they think they need to know), in order to get them to go where I want them to go so that the things I need to have happen will indeed happen. It can take a while to come up with appropriate (and non-obvious) shifts that fit the plot, and sometimes it takes quite a bit of rewriting of earlier stuff to get them all in, but it can work quite well.

Or, it can not-work, not at all. In which case I'm left with #3 - let the characters ignore the inn and see what happens. There are two sub-possibilities for this: 3a - The characters don't do what I wanted, and as a result, their situation gets Much Worse (because they weren't at the inn to see the bad guys getting ready for the attack, so they didn't know to try to stop it, and now the person they wanted to talk to is dead and the Sekrit Dokuments are on their way to the head villain); or 3b - The characters don't do what I wanted, and as a result, something entirely different happens, the whole story takes a sharp right turn and I have to completely rework what I thought was going to happen.

3a requires putting some thought into what the bad guys are doing (assuming there are bad guys) while my heroes are out camping, and also thinking about what other things could happen to make the situation worse because they're not paying attention to the things that need attending to. Maybe while they're out chasing down bad guys, the flooding river is slowly washing away the foundation of the manor house. Maybe ignoring the first mysterious death means that now there are three more mysterious deaths. Maybe the bad guys have plenty of time to translate the Sekrit Dokuments and get the jump on them. Basically, having a plot means that things are going wrong for the characters somewhere, somehow - and if there's one thing I've learned, it's that if you don't take care of a problem or situation while it's still small, it'll get bigger. So if my characters don't take care of whatever, it'll get worse while they're ignoring it, until they can't ignore it any more.

3b is really annoying when it happens, but it usually results in a much more interesting book. For one thing, if I wasn't expecting the characters to get caught by the police and have to stay in town, the readers are unlikely to be expecting it, either. For another, if I wasn't expecting the heroes to have to handle this situation, neither they nor the villain were expecting it, either, and they'll all have to come up with new plans on the fly, which tends to make for a lot more story possibilities.

The annoying part is that if what happens next is that different from what I'd expected, I nearly always have to ditch most of my plot and planned events and come up with new ones. But if it makes for a better story, I don't really have any excuse not to.

A few things not to do

In the last couple of months, I've had the opportunity to observe a number of new writers doing things that…well, to say they don't work is a serious understatement. I'm not talking about the writing itself, at the moment. I'm talking about the business end.

There are oodles of lists of what not to do in the submission process, and I'm not going to repeat them here - besides, you folks know all that stuff already, right? Unfortunately, a bunch of just-published-for-the-first-time writers have come up with a whole lot of brand new ways to sabotage themselves - and not just with industry professionals, like editors and agents, but with reviewers, publicity people, booksellers, readers…people who either are their ultimate audience, or who have a whole lot to say about how and when and whether readers can look at the book.

A lot of it comes out of the facts that a) publicity for a newly-published title is more and more being pushed off onto the authors, and b) authors are not publicists and often really, really don't know what they're doing. Even so, some of this should be common sense.

Take the matter of getting reviews. Usually the publisher prints up a couple of hundred ARCs (Advanced Reading Copies) and sends them to big review magazines like Kirkus and the New York Times book review section, and then sends the author ten or twenty with instructions to "send them out to places we won't think of." By this, they mean specialty bloggers, local papers that have book review sections that might be particularly interested in a local writer, local radio stations that do book stuff, library newsletters, already-published authors who might give a blurb or a mention on their blog, etc. - anywhere that the author thinks might have a shot at getting some attention for the book, but that isn't the sort of national-level, distributor-level publicity that the publisher is sending the ARCs to.

In other words, most of the people the author will be approaching are professionals, working in a professional capacity, from whom the writer is asking for free publicity. It is therefore not a good idea to tell them how to do their job - yet I have seen more than one letter explaining to a prospective reviewer just how important reviews are (they know), or saying that the reviewer's response will be considered inadequate if all the writer gets is a good review on their blog. No, the reviewer are supposed to go to Amazon.com, B&N, Goodreads, and various other review web sites and rate the book five stars in each and every venue. (Yes, more than one person did this. I didn't believe it, either, until I went and tracked down where I'd seen it before.)

When you're asking for a review, you're not doing the reviewer a favor by offering them a free ARC. They're doing you a favor. Don't demand extra work (which is what "don't forget to review this favorably on six review websites" is doing). If you've read their column/blog/whatever and you don't think they do a good job, don't waste your breath/paper/electrons telling them how you think they should do it right. Just don't send them the ARC. There are always more places you could send the things than you have copies.

Don't explain to the reviewer or publicity person that reviews are really really really important and you're trying to generate buzz, so could they post/print their review on the first Monday in August so that the publicity will all hit at the same time. Not even if you say "please." It's their column/blog and they presumably know what they're doing; saying "The book will be released in the first week in August." is the most you need (and that's probably printed in the ARC, so you probably don't need it in the cover letter.)

And speaking of Amazon reviews and other online reactions, arguing with reviews and reviewers is a really, really bad idea. Arguing with people in comments is worse, if that's possible. Some people will hate what you wrote. Deal with it. Telling them that they're wrong makes you look like an idiot - they know better than you do whether they like the book or not. It doesn't really matter that they're having a knee-jerk reaction to something that reminded them of that horrible thing that happened in second grade that has nothing to do with what you wrote. The author yelling at a reader or getting defensive about her/his writing always looks bad, no matter how much of an idiot the reader is being. Yell in the privacy of your home, not in public…and remember, everything online is public to some degree.

Printing up your own bookplates and bookmarks as giveaways is fairly common these days, but if you're going to do it, consult someone who actually knows something about graphic design. Once you have them, do not, not, not go into bookstores and demand that they put your giveaways up by the cash register. That is premium space that large corporations pay actual money - lots of it - to get their items into; the store is not going to put your stuff there for free, and it is ridiculous to get mad at the overworked clerk who tries to politely tell you this (or who accepts your freebies without comment because they don't want to argue, and then doesn't put them out, which you discover a week later when you pop around to check whether the store needs more).

Basically, don't act as if you're entitled to free space, free publicity, free comments, free reviews, free anything. And if you have no idea what professional behavior looks like, don't jump into the publicity game, because under those circumstances it will only end badly.

Decisions, decisions

A while back, I was talking with a young writer who was bogged down in mid-novel. The conversation went something like this (with names and plot points changed to protect the guilty):

Writer: "I'm totally stuck. My characters are down in the ravine and I don't know what happens next."

Me: "Sounds familiar."

Writer (despairing): "How do you decide what comes next?"

Me (frowning slightly): "That's not really your problem yet."

Writer: "Huh?"

Me: "You can't make a decision until you have something to decide. Right now, you have nothing."

Writer (wails): "So what do I do?"

Me: "Make stuff up. Then you decide whether it's useful, because you'll have something to decide about."

At which point I got a blank look, but after a bit more discussion (OK, a couple of hours worth), she did get things back on track. The problem was that the writer was looking too far ahead. She was trying to think about the next scene, the next chapter, what the next exciting bit was going to be, how to get her characters from the bottom of the ravine to the triumphant climax of the novel. What she wasn't thinking about was the very next step.

Getting to that step can be a little trickier than it sounds (which is why it took a couple of hours). First, you have to be clear about where the characters are. Where is their location? What do they know (or think they know) at this exact point in the story? And most important of all, what is it that they think they need to accomplish next?

What the characters think they need to accomplish right now - whether it's rescue someone from the villain's dungeon, or head to the cafe for a well-deserved cup of coffee after having decimated the wolf pack that was (they think) eating the sheep - will play a large part in determining the next step they take, and what direction they take it in. If they want to rescue a companion from a dungeon, the cautious one will want to plan a rescue mission and then get some supplies, while the reckless one may grab a musket and head for the lockup, but whatever they pick as the very next thing to do, it will take them in the direction of the dungeon, not in the direction of the coffee shop.

Sometimes there are multiple ways in which the characters can proceed. If they have just realized that the villain is up to something, and that they need to find out what, they may spend some time discussing the best way to find out, or they may go running off instantly in a variety of possible directions. Once the writer recognizes this, the first step is to figure out what the likely possibilities are.

Then one has something to decide: would these particular, individual characters, in this particular situation, do A, or B? If they need to find something out, will they stay in the ravine and plan for a few hours, dash back to town as a group to check the local gossip sheet, or send one of their number off to the oracle while the others compile lists of things to investigate and people to question?

Having made this first decision - what is the next step, or the next several steps, that the characters are going to take to try to do what they need to do - one has a second thing to decide: whether it is interesting and relevant enough to show in detail, or whether one would be better off skimming lightly past all the planning and dashing around, and going straight to the meeting three days later when they tell each other what they've found and realize, to their horror, that things are much worse than they thought.

The second decision is more complex, because it's not only a decision about whether the next few things your characters choose to do are interesting and relevant; it's also a decision about whether the writer can or should try to make them more interesting by throwing in something unexpected or having something go totally wrong. A trip to the library to check the microfiche of the 1851 newspapers that haven't been digitized yet may not rate a full-blown scene if that's all that happens, and sometimes what the writer wants is to say "Three days later, they got together and Gerald told them what he'd found."

Sometimes, though, the trip to the library is the perfect opportunity for the secondary villain to send a thug after Gerald to collect that gambling debt, or for an unexpected car accident, or a fire at the library, or an apparently unrelated attack by mutant ninjas on the library. So the writer has to decide: is this worth making into a scene on its own, and if not, do I add something to make it something worth showing? Or would that be too distracting? What does it do to the pace and the plot development and the characterization if I show or don't show the scene - and which is more effective for the story I want to tell?

My writer friend was trying to start by knowing about the gambling and the fire and the ninjas, before she even knew that the characters were going to send Gerald to the library. What she really needed was to back up, slow down, and think about what her characters needed to do next, one tiny step at a time. (And not just the characters in the ravine - the villain wasn't just sitting around twiddling his thumbs and waiting for the heroes to show up and thwart him, after all.)

Learning About Ebooks

A while back, I did a post on electronic publishing in general, in which I stated that I didn't know much, but nobody else does, either, yet. In the interim, I've learned a bit more, and I thought this would be a good time to share, because next week, the five Lyra books are being issued by Open Road as ebooks. And it's been quite a ride.

One of the first things I learned, when my current agent and I started looking at getting some of my backlist into ebooks, is that when the books were published makes a really huge difference. Before the mid-nineties, hardly anyone had electronic subrights clauses in their contracts. After around 2005, everybody had electronic subrights clauses. In between…well, lots to argue over and interpret, and a number of things ended up in legal limbo.

Several of my backlist titles, including The Seven Towers and Snow White and Rose Red, had been picked up and reissued by new publishers, whose contracts included ebook rights. Another publisher came and asked for a contract addendum covering electronic rights, so that they could put out an electronic version of the omnibus when they reissued the Mairelon books. The Frontier Magic titles are recent enough that the publisher had the clause in their contract from the get-go. That left the Lyra books.

The Lyra novels are some of my earliest work; all except The Raven Ring (1994) were written over twenty years ago. The most recent printing was in 1997, when the first three came out in an omnibus edition, so it's been a while since all of them were easily available in print.

Ginger (my agent) and I discussed the possibilities at length. Amazon offers a great royalty rate if you go straight through them, essentially self-publishing direct to e-book, but there are some down sides (including needing to do book design, covers, etc. all by yourself, not to mention publicity). We chose to go with an ebook publisher, Open Road. And thereby hangs a tale.

Initially, the experience was exactly like selling a book to a traditional print publisher: I said "Agent, we need to sell these as ebooks;" my agent said "I will get right on that" and did so. Some time later she came back and said "We have an offer; this is what it is and how it works," and I thought about it and said, "Right, sounds good, send me the contract."

That was when the first difference showed up: they emailed me the contract, and said I could use an electronic signature and send it back. Since I don't have an electronic signature, and had no time to figure out getting one, I printed out the requisite copies, signed them, and FedExed them back instead.

The next interesting thing was that they wanted three copies of each book to scan. I pointed out that I've been working on a computer since my second novel, and had put the first one into my word processor when I revised it for the omnibus, so I already had electronic copy that really just needed to be proofread for the editorial and copyeditor fixes (which is WAY easier than scanning and using OCR software. OCR is lots better than it used to be…but a 1% error rate means an average of three typos per page, at best).

The Open Road folks allowed as how having electronic copy would be a big help. At which point, I realized that while I certainly did have electronic copy, most of it was…how shall I put this…not in any format remotely resembling modern WYSIWYG, or even Rich Text. No, it was old-fashioned ASCII, with in-line codes to mark scene breaks, italics, centering, etc.

So I spent a frantic two weeks or so cleaning up the files and sent them off. Hey, it was better than having to write 10,000 new words for editorial revisions!

Normally, I wouldn't expect to hear from a publisher any more at this point, except maybe to send me cover copy and/or pictures of the cover paintings for informational purposes. The books were written and in final form; that's all most publishers want.

Most traditional publishers, anyway. Open Road turned out to be a lot more hands-on, and a whole lot more let's-get-the-writer-involved. I got emails from what seemed like everyone in the company, explaining what they were planning to do. I got two conference phone calls from their publicists; I got blurb copy to approve; I got author bio copy to approve; I got a two-page questionnaire (which I still haven't finished filling out - honestly, what do they expect with questions like "describe each of these books in a paragraph"? I'm a novelist; it took me 80,000 words to describe each of them the first time!).

The pièce de résistance was when they sent a team of video people out from New York to Minneapolis to spend three days shooting footage of me, my cats, my closets, and whatever else took their fancy, in order to make a two-minute vid for their web site. They were lovely people, and it was a hectic, exhausting, and fascinating couple of days (and they got some wonderful shots of Cazaril, too; Nimue decided it was too much excitement and spent most of the time hiding). I haven't had so much attention paid to me in, well, ever.

And once everything calmed down and I had a chance to breathe, I realized that that was the point. A traditional paper-and-ink publisher does book and cover design, but most of their efforts (and expenses) come from printing and distribution - getting those paper books into bookstores all over the country. Ebooks are a lucrative extra for them.

An ebook doesn't have printing and distribution expenses. So what does an ebook publisher have to offer a writer in return for the license to publish the books?

Promotion. 

Which is what all the blurbs and questions and everything are about. Remains to be seen how well it all works, but so far I have to say I'm happy with their efforts.

Next week is the official release of the ebook versions of the five Lyra titles - Shadow Magic, Daughter of Witches, The Harp of Imach Thyssel, Caught in Crystal, and The Raven Ring. I'll put links up on the web site eventually, but right now I'm out of town, so this will have to do until I get home and get some breathing space.

Too many, too much

There's a problem I've noticed cropping up more and more often lately, in the way some authors first develop and then over-develop their plots and subplots, allowing both them and their characters to proliferate beyond the ability of mere mortals to keep track of them all, until the whole edifice starts crumbling under its own weight. It's most common (and most noticeable) in multiple-viewpoint stories, particularly those that have an ensemble cast dealing with complex plots and subplots.

The advantages of writing a fat, complicated, multiple-viewpoint, ensemble-cast book are many: they're popular; they provide both writer and reader with more than enough variety to keep from getting bored; they are in many ways a truer reflection of the complexity of real life events than something more straightforward would be; the variety that an ensemble cast allows for means that more people will find someone they're interested in and want to follow through all the adventures in the book; the multitude of viewpoints lets the writer show all sorts of cool stuff that would otherwise be behind the scenes; etc.

The trouble is that most of those advantages can very easily become disadvantages if they're handled even a little bit clumsily - and the more viewpoint characters and subplots the writer has to juggle, the easier it is for them to let things get ever-so-slightly out of balance. Which is all it takes to annoy a sizeable subset of readers.

A few years back, a friend who was working on her first big multiple-viewpoint book got six chapters and eight viewpoints into the thing, and then stopped and took two of the viewpoints out. All of her first-readers screamed bloody murder; we liked those two people, and we thought the scenes they had were great. My friend was adamant, however - and perfectly correct in her decision. Those two people weren't close enough to the central story she wanted to tell, and leaving them in would have thrown everything off-balance.

Or, to put it another way, whenever a character is the viewpoint character, the story is about them. It doesn't matter if the character is the cab driver whose only importance is that he drove Our Hero from Kennedy Airport to a hotel downtown; while he's the viewpoint, he's the center. And he's the center of his story, which, to him, is much more important than anything else that's going on in the book.

This means that in a multiple-viewpoint book, each and every viewpoint character has to be chosen with great care. This is particularly true when the writer intends to have a cast of five or ten people who are all meant to be "the main character" in some way - that is, a classic ensemble cast. It can be very hard to identify exactly which characters are at the heart of the writer's story (each of them is, of course, at the heart of his or her own…which is the fundamental problem).

A story told from a single viewpoint, whether it's first-person, tight third-person, or the sort of limited omniscient that still only follows one character around, has built-in protection against subplot proliferation. The reader can only see and find out what the single viewpoint character sees and finds out, and there are only so many things that one person can reasonably be involved in. The kind of multiple-viewpoint book that has a strong core plot or theme also doesn't usually tend to have problems with subplot-and-character proliferation; the strength of the main plot through-line keeps everything else from going too far astray.

The real trouble comes when the author lets him or herself be distracted by shiny minor characters and/or interesting bits of business that "might develop into something." Because the minute that cab driver gets his own viewpoint scene, his story is the one the writer is telling. And it's always, always fascinating and fun and interesting, because people's stories always feel that way to themselves, and when you're writing from the viewpoint of a character, you see their story they way they see it. And next thing you know, the caper novel about the ensemble cast trying to rob the Metropolitan Museum of Art has this whole involved subplot about the cab driver's romance with a police detective (see, the writer says to herself, it's relevant! There's police involved!).

And then the cab driver's family come into it, and there are more interesting complications there, and pretty soon the original caper novel is practically buried under the cab driver's cousin's drug smuggling subplot and his sister's angsting over whether she'll get into art school (see, the writer says desperately, Art! And they're planning an art heist! So it's, um, thematically relevant!) and the police detective's difficulties with precinct politics.

I've learned the hard way that any time I start justifying the presence of a scene, character, viewpoint, or general Cool Bit Of Business, it almost certainly doesn't belong in the story. If it belonged, I wouldn't have to do any justifying. (Saying confidently "That's setup for the problem with X that they're going to have three chapters from now" is not justifying it; saying "But…but…but it's relevant! Because there's, um, important stuff in this bit!" is a dead sure sign that I'm going to need to cut, and the sooner, the better.)

When I notice myself slipping into this pattern, I find it helps to snip the scenes to a file, and promise myself that I can write that other story later. Because that's the thing that's so seductive - all those fun, fascinating stories that aren't the one I'm telling right now, but that could be shoehorned in with just a little work… Promising myself that I can write a whole book about them and do a proper job of telling their stories, instead of giving them just a corner of this one, is what keeps me from falling victim to Endless Subplot Proliferation Syndrome. Most of the time.

When is it over?

When is the story over?

Really over, I mean, as in "this is the last paragraph, and what comes next is 'The End' at the bottom of the page." This is usually some way after the big climax in which the central story problem is solved (they kill the dragon/blow up the Death Star/arrest the murderer), but how long after?

The answer, as usual, is: it varies. To some extent, it depends on the length of the story - a five page short story may be too long if there's more than half a page after the climax, but nearly every reader I know would feel that having only a page or two of wrap-up to a trilogy just wasn't enough. Similarly, if three pages out of the five are wrap-up, there's probably something wrong with the short story, while it may take five or ten chapters or more to do a proper job of wrapping up a complex trilogy.

The two obvious problems are stopping too soon, and carrying on too long. On the whole, I tend to think that too little is better than too much. A reader who finishes a book wishing there'd been just a little bit more is a reader who is likely to come back for the next one; a reader who gives up with a bored sigh two pages before "The End" appears under the last line of text is a reader who is likely to avoid the next one like the plague. And it really hurts to discover that you have overshot the end of the story by two or six or ten chapters, and that you must therefore cut all that material. For most of us, it's a lot easier and less painful to add a scene or a chapter than it is to cut one.

Nevertheless, most novels need a certain amount of post-climax wrap-up to be satisfying. A novel is a long haul, and many readers need to be eased out of it gently, so to speak. If it's a complex novel or a multi-book series (trilogy, quadrology, innumerable-fat-books-a-la-Jordan/Martin-series), there are likely to be a bunch of subplots and loose ends that need wrapping up, because they couldn't all be tied up neatly as part of the big climax. And since most novels follow the classic plot structure (a series of attempts by the protagonist to solve bigger and bigger problems, where each try ends with the protagonist in a worse situation than ever, until the very last one finally succeeds/fails for good), they need something at the end to reassure the reader that this time the protagonist finally pulled it off, and there isn't some nasty surprise waiting to turn the "ending" into a cliffhanger.

And finally, this part of the story - the part between the climax/solution and "The End" on the last page - is about consequences. This is the part that leads a lot of writers astray, I think, because in a lot of books the consequence of the protagonist's actions is that he/she moves on into a new life (or returns to an improved version of the old one). This looks and feels like a beginning - and it is. But it's the beginning of a new and different and unrelated story. The writer is allowed to tell that story, of course, but in the next book. The bit that goes at the end of this book is the acknowledgement that things have changed.

For instance, one writer I know was working on an action-adventure of the sort in which the protagonist is a junior space officer, faces a crisis, succeeds while annoying the top brass, and is "rewarded" with the captaincy of the worst ship in the fleet, posted to the worst spot in the galaxy, as a way of getting rid of him. Naturally, he goes on to shape up his new command, defeat new enemies (and make more political ones), and so on.

The problem was that this novel was approaching half a million words and the writer couldn't figure out how to cut it. But it didn't need cutting; it needed splitting into the several books that it actually was. The writer had run right through the ending of his first book (which occurred a quite reasonable 100,000 words or so into the story) and on into the next. All he had to do was stop at the point where the hero was notified that he was being promoted and given a new ship, but before showing the rust-bucket full of misfits that was his new command.

Part of the difficulty here was that the writer was so caught up in the "show, don't tell" advice that he thought he had to show the new command, which led directly into the next story, leaving him no good break point. But the other part was that after spending 100,000 words and many hours working on making the characters "feel real" and planning all the hero's future adventures, the writer had made them too real in his own head. Real people's lives rarely divide themselves up into neat episodes, and their stories don't end until they're dead.

The second reason too many wrap-ups drag on is that the writer is trying to give attention to every single subplot and character individually, one scene or chapter per subplot. This is as unwise as it is unnecessary, especially in a book with lots of characters and subplots. A lot of long goodbyes and subplot finishes don't make these things seem more important; they make the scenes feel thin. It's often more effective to pack two subplot resolutions and a couple what-these-characters-do-next into the same scene, and then do some summarizing, than to have four or five long scenes to show each character moving into his/her new life and another three or four to resolve subplots. Alternatively, a series of mini-scenes - a two-to-three-paragraph look in per character to hint at where they're heading now - can be very effective for a complicated, cast-of-thousands book or series, as long as they're mini-scenes.

Finally, a lot of writers keep going in search of the boffo ending line, sometimes whole chapters past wherever the story should have cut off. Don't do this. Just don't. It never ends well.

What education?

This is the time of year when a lot of high school students are thinking about college, and as a consequence, I've had several earnest requests for information about the best places to go to school, what to major in, etc. Since I usually figure that what one person is brave enough to email and ask about, many others are interested in, here are some of my thoughts.

First off, I'm not a teacher; I'm a writer (that is, I make my living writing). That means that my knowledge and judgment of programs, workshops, classes, etc. is a) fairly limited, and b) strongly skewed toward the practical. By limited, I mean that I have a poor-to-middling knowledge of the programs and workshops in my state, because some of them have asked me to speak at them. Beyond that - I can name all of four workshops and one graduate program outside Minnesota. All four of the writing workshops are genre-focused (specifically in SF/F); the graduate program is the Iowa Writing Workshop, which is the premier literary MFA program in the country, and undoubtedly familiar to pretty much every editor who's been around for longer than ten minutes.

Basically, this means I am not ever going to be able to tell people which college(s) are the best choice for writers. I can recommend the Clarion workshops - Clarion and Clarion West - but those are all of six weeks. Viable Paradise is only one week. None of the websites mention academic credit at first glance, though the Clarions are associated with universities and I believe that they did offer course credit at one time.

None of that is going to help anyone pick a college or a major.

Which brings me to b) - the fact that my knowledge and judgment in this area skews toward the practical. This is based on something I've said many times before: writing is a skills-based profession. In a lot of careers, a degree is the credential that lets the folks hiring you know that you have a certain minimum level of knowledge in the field. Writing, however, is a skills-based discipline and a product-oriented business. Editors don't give two whoops what someone's credentials are; they care whether the story in front of them is a good one, and they can tell that by reading it.

Of the professional writers I know, roughly one-third did not graduate from college, another third have degrees in something unrelated (i.e. NOT an English or Creative Writing degree), and the final third have a college degree in English or Creative Writing (and I should mention here that this third weighs in heavily in favor of English Lit - I think I only know two professional writers with a CW major). That's roughly two-thirds of professional writers who don't have an English or other writing-related degree.

This is, of course, a very unscientific sample. It's also colored by the fact that I fall into Group #2 - my own degrees are a bachelors in Biology and a Masters in Business Administration. (The MBA was hands down the best thing I ever did for my writing career; far too few of the starry-eyed teenagers determined to Become A Writer ever stop to think that this means they are going to be running a business.)

Nevertheless, I think it's obvious that writing skills can be successfully self-taught (for at least two-third of the pros I know, anyway). It should also be apparent that there isn't one typical, clear educational pathway toward being a writer. My personal preference and recommendation is therefore for would-be writers to major in something that's not English or Writing.

I have two reasons for this: first, it's all material anyway, and it's a lot easier to pick up writing skills through self-study and practice than it is to do chemistry experiments or study ancient Greek history in-depth on your own.

Second, writing for a living nearly always requires a long, slow startup. It takes most people years to finish their first novel, and more years to get it published, and one has to eat in the meantime. Even once one has begun selling, it takes more years to fill up the writing income pipeline, and a lot of discipline to keep it full. One doesn't want to suddenly run out of money because five years ago one had plenty coming in and so didn't write anything for much too long a time.

All of which boils down to needing a day job for at least a few years, and it's a lot easier if the day job is something one enjoys and that pays better than working at Wal-Mart or waiting tables. Such jobs are never easy to come by, particularly in the current job market, but majoring in something other than Creative Writing is at least a step in the right direction.

The one exception to the above is that if one wants to teach as one's backup job, especially at the college level, you will need that MFA. Not as a writing credential; as a teaching credential. Quite a few mainstream and literary writers seem to do quite well with the teacher/writer combination - the summers give them a solid three months to work on their writing, and teaching for the rest of the year pays the bills.

Writing is a career for the long haul. It takes discipline, an ability to live with uncertainty, and some serious budgeting and planning skills (because royalties only get paid twice per year, and whatever you get has to last until the next payment cycle). What it doesn't take is any particular educational background.

Which I'm afraid isn't much help to the folks trying to make college plans, but that's writing for you.

Family

Tomorrow is Thanksgiving in the U.S., which is generally considered a family day, so I thought I'd talk about family and writing this time.

One way or another, family is something every writer has to deal with, and it's never nice and clean-cut. Family can be supportive, or they can be a big obstacle, and sometimes they seem to be both at once. Family members can and do automatically provide things that other people often don't even know a writer needs, from computer upgrades and chicken soup to just exactly the right kind of reassurance when the writer is having an artistic crisis and thinking of retiring to a monastery in Tibet. They're right there to provide babysitting and grocery runs when the writer is on deadline. They can brag about your writing to other people when you can't. Some of them even handle a lot of the business end of the writing job, so that the writer has more time to actually write.

On the other hand, these are the same people who can't seem to get it through their heads that sticking their head into the office "just for a second to see how you're doing" may derail an entire day's worth of work - it's not the amount of time, it's the mere act of interrupting. They're also sometimes the ones who get bent out of shape because they're convinced that some character or plot twist is based on them - or else they demand that the writer "put them in one of your books." They want to give you ideas…or they claim that you're stealing theirs. They think that because you're home all day, you must have plenty of time to run their errands or go to lunch with them or hang out on the phone for hours. They post hideously embarassing, gushy reviews of your work on Amazon and then get hurt when you try to explain that it's really considered highly unprofessional for a writer to get their family to skew the reviews like that.

They're wonderful, frustrating, helpful, annoying, encouraging people. In other words, they're family.

Since everyone's family is unique, everybody has to come up with their own method of dealing with them, both the good parts and the bad. I'm lucky; my family is heavily weighted on the good end of the scale. My mother used to type up my handwritten "manuscripts" when I was in 7th grade, trying to write my first stories. For years, every time my parents had a party, my father would go around the house making sure that copies of my books were on display and that my sisters' paintings were prominently displayed on the walls. My sisters and my brother all listen to me go on about my stories-in-process, and then when they're finally finished, they buy the books even though they have to be sick of hearing about them by that time.

So right now, this is my family: My Dad is 91 and still chopping wood, climbing mountains, taking road trips, and giving me all sorts of impossible advice about what he thinks I ought to write next. My sister Susan runs a community/summer stock theater in Maine, the Boothbay Playhouse (http://www.boothbayplayhouse.com/), which pretty much takes up all her time in the summer. They have a fantastic kids program (and I am only slightly biased on account of having watched my niece and nephew do amazing things in their productions). My brother David runs the metal stamping business that my parents started over sixty years ago; he also is a major plot sounding board for me and talks up my books on the home schooling chat group he's part of. My next sister, Margaret (Peg), retired from the metal stamping business a few years back; now she's a Master Gardner, writes for Alabama Gardening and several other local gardening publications, and has a terrific gardening blog (http://hiddenhillsgarden.com/blog/ - and she just posted a bunch of great pictures of my father on it). My youngest sister, Carol, lives here in town; she paints, gardens, scolds me about my housekeeping, paints fabulous things inside my closets, and makes sure I take time off in between books…and that I don't take too much time off.

They're great, even when they're annoying. And I'm sure I annoy them just as much sometimes (hey, it's a requirement when you're the oldest, isn't it?).

Happy Thanksgiving, everybody.