Patricia C. Wrede's Blog, page 64

Obstacles in the Middle

Last post, Libby said:

I've been having trouble with that point in a story from the lead-up to the climax to the aftermath… once I hit the part where all the stuff I've been alluding to has to APPEAR, things tend to go over too smoothly and much too quickly, and I think it's ultimately unsatisfying. I don't know exactly what I'm doing wrong, but it feels like the story needs an extra PUSH that I don't know how to give.

I've read all the stuff about there needing to be a part where it all goes wrong, so that you can straighten it out at the climax, but when I do that, usually my characters have this barrage of crazy emotions, listen to someone explain the whole thing (or run around and save the day), and then it's tidied up and it just feels OFF. It's weird.

The plot skeleton, which is what I think you're referring to when you say there "needs to be a part where it all goes wrong," 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. It depends on the story.

There are three kinds of obstacles your heroes can face on their way to solving the Big Problem. The first kind are internal - the prejudices, blind spots, temperament, lack of skill or knowledge, etc. that could/would keep them from successfully doing what has to be done. The second kind are external - the moves the villain makes to counter them, the equipment they're missing (whether it's a magic sword or the ore to smelt to make cannons), the tornado or avalanche or attack by rabid beavers, the broken wagon axle or flat tire. And the third kind are those that result from the logical consequences of whatever the heroes have just done - for instance, they sold their cattle in order to pay for cannons to shoot the dragon with, but without cattle to eat, the dragon starts munching on people instead, making the situation worse. Or the new weather satellite makes it rain on the drought-stricken area, but causes a hurricane to hit the big city just to the south.

What kind of obstacles are the most useful for your story depend on the sort of story it is. If the main story is a Man Learns Lesson type of story, where the protagonist is his own worst enemy, then yes, a lot of the things that go wrong really should be coming from the mistakes the protagonist makes. That's how he/she is going to end up learning that lesson. In a Brave Little Tailor sort of story, the obstacles the protagonist faces often come from the outside. The villain, if there is one, isn't going to just sit around waiting for Our Heroes to come and lay siege to his castle; he's going to do something to try to stop them. If the opponent the heroes face is Nature, the broken leg will turn to gangrene, or a bear will attack, or there'll be a tornado or a blizzard or a hurricane.

The other thing is that ideally the obstacles need to build up toward the climax. In other words, as the heroes get closer to facing the Big Problem, the tension has to rise. It doesn't matter whether it rises because all three of the main characters have been arguing with each other for the entire book, and the fights get worse as the Grand Finale approaches, so that as they head for the final confrontation they're not speaking to each other and unlikely to be able to cooperate in solving the problem, or whether it rises because of a slow revelation that things are Even Worse Than They Thought - those lost sheep weren't lost, they were eaten; they weren't eaten by a bear, they were eaten by a dragon; they weren't eaten by just any dragon, but by an Ancient Wyrm; not only is this dragon an Ancient Wyrm, it has a personal grudge against Our Heroes/their village/their king; etc.

Also, you probably don't want to pile up a lot of things, expecting to straighten all of them out during the climax. It's usually more like a series of steep steps, where each minor solution leads closer to the Big Main Problem. Sometimes, what you need is a series of problems that are related, but still independent: Big Problem - we have to kill a dragon. Solution - we'll buy some cannons. First minor problem - no money. Solution - we raise some money by selling the sheep the dragon was eating anyway. Consequence/next problem - hungry dragon starts eating people. Solution - we all stay indoors while messenger runs off to buy cannons. Next problem - messenger is stuck at bottom of mountain with cannons; trail is too narrow to get them up, and dragon will eat anyone who goes out to widen trail. Solution - use old mining machinery to haul cannons up side of mountain from safety of stone building.

The dragon doesn't get any more dangerous, really, as the sequence progresses - but the urgency goes up when it starts to eat people, and then rises again when it looks as if there's no way to get the cannons up where they can actually be used to defend the village. If I were doing it, I'd have them get the cannons up and use them, but have one explode (since it was made by the lowest bidder), throwing the aim of the others off and resulting in an only-slightly-wounded dragon who is now really angry.

The alternative is a bait-and-switch. That is, when your heroes have figured out that they have to take down a dragon, and taking down the dragon turns out to be too smooth and easy, you give them an entirely new problem that results from their dragon-killing: a powerful cursed sword that one of them unknowingly picks up from the dragon's horde, for instance, or the Dragon-Master who's really mad that they've just killed his pet, or the army from the next kingdom over that can invade through the pass now that the dragon is dead and can't eat them. Of course, this means that what you thought was the end of the story isn't actually the end, and you still have a lot more to write…but it'll probably make a better story. And nobody ever said writing was easy.

Fear

All writers are afraid of something at one point or another.

We are afraid of looking foolish; we are afraid of rejection; we are afraid of overreaching, of not knowing how, of getting it wrong, of not being good enough. We're afraid of being broke, being taken advantage of, being stuck with something that turns out to be a bad deal. We're afraid that the idea that seemed so brilliant a week or a month or a year ago is not brilliant at all, only nobody is quite willing to say so. We're afraid that in choosing to write this story, we're letting a much better one get away.

Fear is paralyzing. It affects everything: creativity, the mechanics of planning and working and sending things out, even the simple enjoyment of telling a story you really want to tell. Everything is suspended, like hitting a permanent "pause" button on life, because as long as one doesn't move, none of the things one is afraid of can possibly happen.

But fear is a natural part of doing anything new. Everybody is nervous the first time they exercise a new skill, and triply so if they're doing it in public. What a lot of folks don't take into consideration is that for writers, every book is a new thing. Yes, we develop skills over the years, but they're always being applied to a new story. "You're only as good as your latest book" is an industry truism, and it's just as scary a thought for bestselling veterans as it is for struggling mid-list writers and beginners.

I think that a lot of the problem stems from the difficulty of the balancing act all writers face. On the one hand, one must believe in the value and quality of one's work, else one would never send it out. On the other hand, one must believe that there is room for improvement, or one will never get any better. It's a teeter-totter, and when it gets out of whack, it's all too easy to end up in a frozen panic.

The other problem is that writers have a difficult time trusting themselves. We know that the stuff we turn out isn't perfect; if we didn't realize that to begin with, our crit groups and friends and editors would straighten us out in a big hurry. We have to know that it's not going to be perfect and do it anyway. And every so often, the teeter-totter tips and the fear goes up and we stop.

Getting past the fear happens in different ways for different writers at different times. I think the key is to recognize it and admit what's going on. It's a lot harder to make excuses about not writing when you've taken a long, hard look at yourself and admitted that really, you're just scared to mess up. Support from friends is vital - the sort of friends who won't simply dismiss the problem.

Experience helps, too. The first time I had to redo seven chapters of a manuscript, it took me a solid year (after I figured out that was what I needed to do) to sit down and start ripping the manuscript apart, because I was afraid that whatever I came up with instead was going to be even worse than what I already had. The second time, it took me a bit over eight months. The third time, it took about two weeks, and the enormous reduction in elapsed time was due entirely to the fact that I recognized the situation and the feeling, so that I could roll my eyes at myself and decide that it would be silly to waste all that time when I knew what I had to do, and that I was eventually going to do it.

Taking small steps, or even just zooming in on the details, can make a big difference. Yes, I'm afraid my novel won't be any good, but right now, I just have to think about this one scene, this one paragraph, this one sentence. And then the next sentence…but not until I get to the next sentence.

Which is another part of the trick: setting the future aside. Because the future is what fear is all about - all the horrible things that might happen, that we might not be able to handle if and when they do. Some of them are inevitable - death, taxes, rejection - and there's no point in worrying about what you can't keep from happening. Other fears are phantoms. But the only thing any of us can actually do anything about is whatever we're doing right now this minute.

Not writing a sentence because I'm afraid my novel will end up being terrible, I'll look foolish, I'll be rejected…well, that seems like an awful lot to load onto one measly sentence. Sometimes, it really is better to look at the small picture for a little while.

Making an impact

A novel is not a movie; writing a scene is not the same as filming one.

It is amazingly easy to forget this, when we are constantly bombarded with visuals in our everyday lives, from movies and TV, to YouTube and those animated ads that are all over the Internet, to the photo of Cousin Greg's new puppy that he emailed everyone. We're conditioned to think visually.

This can become a problem for writers, most especially for the sort of writer who gets a strong mental image of a place or scene that they want to convey to the reader exactly as it appears to them. Unfortunately, writing is a highly imperfect form of telepathy. Furthermore, it is inherently linear: it arrives in the reader's brain one word at a time, one sentence at a time. A three-page description of the view from a mountaintop or the chaos of a battle is never, ever going to have the same instant impact as a three-second shot in a movie.

So what do you do if you want that kind of impact in your story?

First, you have to accept that you aren't going to get the same effect, and what you do get is going to have to build up, rather than arriving instantly. What the camera does is different from what words do; trying to imitate the camera with words is never going to be really satisfactory. Second, you remember that what you are after is the impact; the actual description is simply the means to an end. So, third, you look at all the things words can do that a camera can't do, and you focus on getting the impact you want through them. In other words, you play to the strengths of the written word.

Smells, textures, and sensations are not things that are easily conveyed by a photograph or movie. A written description of a mountaintop view that includes only the sharp peaks and sweeping vistas is missing a bet. Oh, you want the peaks and so on, but sketching them with a light hand and then mentioning the snow-cooled breeze and the scent of the pines, or the cold damp seeping through the POV character's boots as the snow melts, or the slip of stones or crunch of snow underfoot, will make the scene more vivid and personal in a way the camera can't.

Which brings me to my second point: writing can be personal in a way the camera isn't. Cold water seeping through boots, the gag reflex triggered by a nasty smell, the sting and itch of a mosquitoe bite - all can make prose more immediate, because seeing someone else get bitten by a mosquito isn't the same as putting the reader in the head of the character who's just been bitten.  Two of the most commonly used viewpoints, first-person and tight-third person, let the writer give the thoughts and feelings of the viewpoint character; omniscient allows for the thoughts and feelings of anyone who is present. And since the whole point of describing a majestic view or a chaotic fight is usually to make the reader feel the way they'd feel if they were there, this is a huge advantage. Showing the reader both the scene and the viewpoint character's emotions/reactions can go a long way toward making a scene feel overwhelming or confusing to the reader, as well as to the character.

In first-person, and to some extent in tight-third person, one can sometimes slip into stream-of-consciousness writing for a paragraph or two, to really get the viewpoint character's feelings and reactions across. This is particular useful during battle scenes, disasters, and at other times when the character is getting a confusing amount of information all at once. It's also fun to write, which means that one has to keep an eye out for doing too much of it at once and ending up with a confused reader.

The history of a place or the background behind some action is another thing that the written word can do more easily than the camera, though this is something that the writer needs to handle carefully. It's easiest to slip in smoothly in omniscient; in tight-third and first-person, getting this kind of backstory in depends on the knowledge and personality of the viewpoint character - what they know and what they would think about when faced with the particular situation. Knowing that the peaceful valley the character is looking at has been the site of key battles for centuries can create a lot of emotional resonance; on the other hand, one has to be careful that one doesn't end up with a boring history lecture rather than something that actually deepens the effect of the scene.

When it comes to the actual visual description itself, less is more. It's tempting to spend three or four pages waxing lyrical about every detail, but frankly, most readers these days are going to skim or skip any chunk of straight description that goes on that long. Also, two people looking at the same majestic view may both be deeply moved, but it will be different things that move them; consequently, getting too detailed usually means losing more and more of the impact on every reader who does not happen to find the same things moving as the writer does.

On the other hand, if the writer provides a few of the right visual details, plus some sounds, smells, and sensations, plus the viewpoint character's reaction, the reader will generally fill in what's missing with his/her own details…and the resulting image will be more powerful because it's tailored to fit each reader by the readers themselves.

Reactions

One of the things that bites even experienced writers from time to time is giving insufficient consideration to the ways their characters react to things. (Me blogging about this has nothing to do with the fact that I just turned in the copyedit for The Far West and ended up deleting or rephrasing about twenty different character reactions because I'd gone with people rolling their eyes every time. Nope. Nothing to do with that at all.)

There are actually three parts to this, and each of them is equally important: there's the way the character sees what's happening, followed by his/her emotional reaction, followed by the character's physical expression of his/her emotional reaction.

Let me unpack that a little.

In any given situation, whether it's emotionally stressful, embarrassing, a fistfight, a laser battle, or just a couple of people shooting the breeze after work at the coffee shop, each character will have a different internal, emotional reaction to it that depends on that particular, individual character's personality and life experience. Even something as simple as the boss saying "No, don't do that right now" may feel like a stinging reprimand to one character, an oblique warning to another character, and a friendly reminder to a third character, depending on each person's level of confidence/insecurity, his/her past history with that particular boss, his/her past history with authority figures, etc. Each character will have an emotional reaction to their perception of whatever is going on, which will also vary, and each character will express those emotional reactions in a different way, depending on their personality, confidence, background, culture, etc.

For most characters, the only part of this that actually gets put into words on the page is the physical reaction part. Except in omniscient viewpoint, the reader only gets the narrator/viewpoint-character's thoughts and internal reactions to any given event; everybody else is limited to what the point-of-view character can see them do (i.e., the physical expression of the reaction). It is therefore all too easy to race past the "what the character thinks just happened" and "how the character feels about what just happened" parts and go straight to shrugging, smirking, eye-rolling, and hair-tossing, without really considering whether this character would actually do any of those things in this particular situation, or thinking about what they might do instead.

For example: start with a situation in which someone has just dropped a metaphorical bombshell in a room full of people: This is the One Ring, Darth Vader is his father, that boy pulled the sword out of the stone, whatever. If the writer is in a hurry, and most of the characters aren't very plot-important, you get things like "A stunned silence fell" or "Everyone turned to look." And sometimes, that's exactly what you want, because you want to keep the focus on the main character or the ring or the sword or whatever, and not on all the different reactions.

If, however, there are six major characters present, the writer needs to give a bit more thought to the matter. Since the situation is a Big Revelation, there's probably not going to be a lot of different perceptions about what is happening (though the guy on the end who's been established as paranoid and a bit too sensitive to personal slights may be less concerned about the revelation and more worried about why nobody chose to inform him about this before telling lesser folk). And yes, everyone is going to be astonished - but people will be astonished in different ways.

The girl next in line from the paranoid is rather sweet and sheltered; she's going to be astonished and full of wonder. The woman next to her hates surprises; she'll be astonished and she'll resent being made to feel astonished. Next in line is her husband, who's been telling people forever that something like this was going to happen; he's going to be just as astonished as everyone else (because he didn't really expect this to happen now), but he's also going to gloat. The eight-year-old who's been bored out of his mind by most of the meeting doesn't know enough to be truly astonished; he'll be surprised because everyone else is, but his main emotion is likely to be "Finally! Something interesting!" The jealous sidekick is going to be astonished and jealous; the reluctant hero is going to be astonished with a large leavening of "Oh, gods, why me?" and so on.

Once the writer has sorted out all the various ways people feel about what is happening, she/he has to decide how each person shows those feelings in character. The paranoid guy may glare (if he's really upset about not having been told first)…or he may smile and nod and try to give the impression that he knew all along. It depends on what he's like. The rather sweet girl may look on in wide-eyed astonishment, or blush and look away; the woman who hates surprises may stiffen or look angry, or her face may go blank; her husband may grin or look smug or triumphant or straighten up as if he's the one who just pulled the rabbit out of the hat. And so on. It depends on what each person is like.

And of course, for writers, this cuts both ways: early in the book, the writer may well be finding out what each character is like by assigning them different reactions and body language and then figuring out why each of them did that, while late in the book, the writer will probably know the characters well enough to tell what they'd feel and figure out how they'd express it. Readers, though, only have the actions (and perhaps some thoughts from the POV character), and have to figure out what the characters are thinking and feeling from the way they behave. Hence the importance of making each character's reaction - both emotional and physical - characteristic and unique to them.

…Or Not to Sell Out

There's another side to the whole selling-out discussion that rarely gets looked at. And that's the folks who think that if there is any resemblance whatsoever between what they want to write and any recent bestseller, they must be selling out. Or that everyone will think they are selling out. Never mind that they've adored vampire books since they were seven, have been dying to write one for the last twenty years, and have a plot that owes more to Beowulf than modern teen romance novels - if it has vampires in it, it's a Twilight ripoff.

In its most extreme form, this attitude can be summed up as "If what you are writing is at all likely to make money, even a little, you're selling out and you shouldn't do it." Which is complete and utter hogwash.

Writing a story you love is not selling out, even if it makes you a zillionaire. If you happen to love a story that looks like it will make money, you're lucky, not a sell-out.

Writing something you hate and despise in order to avoid the appearance of selling out is just as much of a sell-out as writing something you hate and despise in order to make money. More, sometimes - money can pay medical bills or help a family member or friend who is in trouble; avoiding the appearance of selling out doesn't really do any good for anyone.

In the long run, refusing to write what you love will almost certainly you miserable (in some cases, so miserable that the would-be writer gives up on writing entirely). And that holds whether you refuse because you want to make more money, or whether you refuse because you're afraid other people will think you have lousy taste or are just greedy.

This is occasionally difficult to get across to people whose tastes cover only a small, specific portion of the wealth of literature that is available. Those who deeply admire the style and characterization typical of literary novels, but who dislike action-adventure or other genre fiction, often simply cannot understand why anyone would want to write the latter unless it was to make more money. I had more than one student in my writing class, back when I was teaching, who had been told in so many words that they could not be a serious writer, or serious about writing, if they wrote fantasy or science fiction.

You can find exactly the same phenomenon in reverse among certain devotees of  particular kinds of genre fiction: people who can't understand why anyone would want to write literary fiction or literary-style genre fiction unless the writer is "selling out" in order to get recognition.

And then there are those as-yet-unpublished writers who are terrified that selling their book at all will force them to sell out - who think that editors will demand more sex, more violence, less of whatever-the-writer-wants. Never having been through a professional edit or the publication process, they assume that such demands will be universally market-driven, guaranteed to destroy whatever the writer wants, and something that they won't dare to argue about for fear that their book will never see print. It doesn't occur to them that the editor a) probably bought the book because he/she liked it and thought it would sell, and b) wants to make it the best book possible so that it will sell lots of copies and make the editor look good to his/her bosses.

Write what you love to read; write what you really want to write. Don't worry about whether or not it looks like the current bestseller. Don't twist it out of shape to make it look more (or less) like what you think editors are looking for or what you think people will buy. Just do the best you can, then send it out and start on the next one.

To Sell Out…

For the last several weeks, I've been running from one convention/appearance/trade show to another, and it seems that at every one of them I've run into at least one would-be writer who is worried about "selling out." More accurately, they've been worried about having to sell out in order to get published.

These folks look at mega-bestsellers like the Harry Potter books and the Twilight series, identify one or more aspects of those books which they dislike, and then leap to the twin conclusions a) that the books are bestsellers because of the particular thing(s) they dislike, and b) that in order to be a bestselling writer (or in extreme cases, in order to sell any manuscript at all) they must incorporate these specific distasteful elements in their own work.

It ought to be obvious that these are rather silly things to worry about. If anyone could identify one thing (or even two or six or twelve things) that all mega-bestsellers have in common, there would be zillions of books out there with exactly those features already. Because publishers and editors aren't stupid, and they want to make money; if they knew for sure what made for a mega-bestseller, every single book they publish would be one.

Unfortunately, most people don't look at the process of making money as a writer logically. It is really, really, really difficult for a lot of folks to accept that once they have written the best book they can, the only work they have left to do is address envelopes, stuff them, stamp them, and mail them. It's especially hard when the ms. comes back from editor after editor. It's a lot easier to believe that there's some trick to the whole process - that publishers insist on more violence, or zombies, or pirates, or star-crossed lovers, or whatever the flavor of the moment is that their book doesn't have - than it is to accept that their wonderful, brilliant manuscript is going to take a long time to sell…or worse, that it may not be quite as wonderful as they think.

When this manifests as grumbling about how the Evil Publishing Conspiracy is too short-sighted and greedy to published Herman Q. Wannabe's wonderful-and-brilliant first novel, it is mildly annoying to already-published writers. After all, it was those short-sighted, greedy Evil Editors who bought and published our books. Most of us just nod politely, knowing that the system itself will take our revenge for us: either Herman's book will never sell and he'll have to deal with all that rejection, or it will sell, and he'll eventually have to listen to unpublished writers complain about the short-sighted, greedy Evil Editors who bought his book instead of Henrietta Q. Wannabe's.

Too often, however, Herman and Henrietta lose patience and make up their minds to sell out. They will, they decide, knock out a couple of bestsellers according to the obvious formula that they (or some trusted authority) are sure is the secret to success, and once they have a name and a track record as a bestselling author, then they will get their brilliant, moving, wonderful, real work published.

There are so many things wrong with this scenario that I hardly know where to begin.

First off, see above comments about editors and publishers not being stupid, the lack of any reliable format for mega-writing-stardom, etc. Second, there's the time factor: as of this writing, the mega-bestseller that everyone seems to be trying to duplicate is Twilight. Which first came out in 2005. That's six years ago, and you have to add at least another year for the whole first-novel publication process. And 150,000 words or thereabouts takes a year or two to write, for most people. So we're looking at folks trying to imitate what editors were buying seven or more years ago, hoping that when they finish it in another year or two, editors will still want something like that.

People, the market moves a lot faster than that. Even if you catch the latest mega-blockbuster hot off the press, you're looking at something an editor bought two to five years before, which will probably take you at least a year to copy. So the absolute best case is that your manuscript will hit an editor's desk with a three year lag - and three years is a long time in publishing. Don't bother.

Next comes the mental factor, which Herman and Henrietta hardly ever take into consideration. They assume that all they have to do is hold their noses and crank out something that they don't much like - indeed, that they actually have contempt for. (That is, after all, pretty much what "selling out" means.) It never seems to occur to them that writing something you dislike is exponentially more difficult than writing something you love (and writing is difficult enough to begin with). Also, if a writer is secretly sneering at his/her readers, it nearly always comes through in the writing somewhere, and since nobody likes being sneered at, sales of the title aren't likely to be particularly good even if the author can get it past an editor. Which isn't going to do much for that sales track record they're hoping to generate.

But the biggest thing that Herman and Henrietta are overlooking is that editors aren't looking for "the next Twilight," not really, not even the editors who say they are. They're looking for "the next mega-blockbuster-bestseller," and odds are that the next big hit won't look anything like the one right before it, any more than Twilight looks like Harry Potter.

Editors are no good at all at predicting what writers ought to write. That's not their job. They are, however, quite good at identifying the Next Big Thing when it turns up in their in basket. Which they cannot do unless writers do their job and write something new and wonderful, instead of trying to imitate the Last Big Thing.

In short, I've never seen the sell-out thing work, not once in thirty years. I have to wonder why people keep trying.

But there's another side to the whole selling-out discussion that rarely gets looked at. I'm going to talk about that next post.

Beats Now and Then

"Beat" is actually an acting term. In a movie or play, it describes a brief interruption or pause in the action or dialog. The result of putting a beat in can change the emphasis on a line of dialog or the meaning of an action, and do it extremely economically. The detective's moment of stillness before he slowly reaches for the matchbox tells us that she's realized something important; the brief pause between two lines of dialog gives the characters - and the audience - time to react.

The terminology has bled over from acting and visual media into prose writing, but it means the same thing. The difference comes in how a writer indicates the pause. An actor hesitates; a writer has to actually say "he hesitated." A director has the camera cut away from the fight for just a second to show the horrified look on a bystander's face; the exact same interruption for a writer runs into all sorts of viewpoint and pacing considerations (Would the first-person narrator actually notice a bystander's reaction when he's dodging punches? Would it distract him if he did? Is it too flat and generic to say "The bystander looked on in horror"? Is it going to be too much of an interruption to give a couple of sentences or paragraphs of description of the bystander?)

On the other hand, writers have a couple of useful tools that actors don't. Punctuation, for instance. Standard punctuation is meant to indicate differences in tone and timing; there's a reason that the period is also called a "full stop." Commas are shorter pauses - just enough for a breath - while semi-colons and colons indicate longer breaks, dashes more of an interruption, and ellipses a hesitation or fading out.

Punctuation gets even more useful for indicating beats when writers use it in non-standard ways. This has to be done with a light hand, or it looks as if the writer is simply ignorant of standard punctuation rather than doing it on purpose. Still, the ability to write "'Put. It. Down.' He scowled - she lifted it higher - a flurry of motion; a crash; a fading cry…then silence, and curtains blowing through the broken fourth-story window." makes it all but impossible for a fiction writer to stick strictly to correctly punctuated sentences. It's hard to pull off effectively, though, if one doesn't know the standard rules and usages to begin with. For those who are doubtful, or who want an engaging refresher course, I recommend Karen Elizabeth Gordon's The New Well-Tempered Sentence.

Sentence fragments and short paragraphs can also provide beats, especially when they are a) not overused and b) in sharp contrast to whatever is around them. That is, a sentence fragment in the middle of an action paragraph composed of relatively short sentences will provide a less strong beat than one that occurs in the middle of a long description. Compare:

He dodged left. The bear dodged right. He ran for the tree. The branch was just out of reach. He jumped. Missed. And the bear was on him.

A row of ornate picture frames lined the back of the mantelpiece. Most of the pictures were of a single person in dark, old-fashioned clothes, but two were of couples, and one showed a family grouping of three adults and five children. A white candle-stub stood in front of each picture, trailing cold wax and bits of blackened wick across the gray stone. Except for one. At the far end, half-hidden behind the portrait of a stern-faced matron in black, stood the picture of a ten-year-old boy in a baseball uniform, glaring at the unseen photographer…and at the empty space in front of the picture where his candle should have been.

In dialog, the speech tag can act as a beat, especially if it is longer than "he said" and/or comes at the beginning or in the middle of a line. "You insist that I say it? All right, then," he said doesn't have a beat in it (this is what people really mean when they claim that "said" is invisible as a speech tag). But "You insist that I say it?" he said. "All right. then." has a very short beat in the middle, because the dialog is interrupted just a little, even if it's only by "he said." And "You insist that I say it?" He looked down. "All right, then." has a longer beat, because the reader has to switch from dialog to the character's actions and back.

Beats in dialog can come at the beginning or the end of a line, too, to indicate the pacing and the rhythm of the conversation. There are a couple of things to watch out for here: one is to not get carried away and put a beat somewhere in each and every line. Another is to vary your placement. Even if it's the sort of conversation where there's a dramatic pause between several lines in a row, you can make it look varied by putting the first beat at the end of the first line and the second beat at the beginning of the third line: "I'm coming with you," she said firmly, and waited.//"You're not going to give up on this, are you?"//She smiled. "Do I ever?" reads more smoothly, in most cases, than "I'm coming with you," she said firmly.//"You're not giving up on this, are you?" He sighed and shook his head.//"Do I ever?" she said with a smile.

Fantastic history

This was supposed to go up Sunday; apparently being out of town glitched my brain and I managed to get it written but not posted. Sorry about that. We now return to our regular posting schedule.

I'm in Tulsa at the moment, at the Nimrod conference, and yesterday they had me do a session on using history in fantasy. It's kind of a broad topic, and most of it ended up being Q&A, but I did end up with a few points I thought I'd share.

I break down history-in-fantasy into several categories. The first is what's referred to as "Secret History," or what I call "fantasy in the cracks." this is the kind of story that starts from the assumption that everything we know (or think we know) about real-life history is true…but only as far as it goes. More was happening behind the scenes - the battle was won with the secret help of the magician's cabal, the earthquake happened because of an escaped elemental or a spell gone wrong, and so on.

Fantasy-in-the-cracks requires a tremendous amount of research because the first thing you have to do is find the cracks…and once you've done that, you have to be very sure that all the events around your story are as accurate as you can make them. It only takes one mistake to invalidate your whole premise, and believe me, the readers will find it. When they do, their suspension of disbelief falls apart, followed quickly by the story. If you think there's a good chance of you missing something, you're almost always better off deliberately making something alternate history or parallel history; on the other hand, if you trust your sources and your research skills, this kind of fantasy can be enormously fun and satisfying.

Alternate History With Rivets is the second type, and it can require even more research than Secret History, because here the writer is extrapolating the ripple effect of one specific change in history. Some writers pick a major event, such as Napoleon winning at Waterloo, which instantly causes major changes in history-as-we-know-it; other writers pick something obscure or something that will take a while to have an impact. In either case, though, the idea is to do a rigorous and justifiable examination of the consequences of a single change (or perhaps a tight cluster of small changes). This one needs both research and logic, and even if you can justify every comma, people will argue about it.

Then there's what I call Parallel History, which is like Alternate History With Rivets, only looser. This is the kind of thing I do. In nearly all of my pseudo-historical fantasies, magic has been around, known, and an accepted part of society for a long time, usually since prehistory. If I were doing AHWR, everything would be different; at the absolute least, the names of people and countries would be strange and the cultures would be unrecognizable.

But Parallel History assumes that for some reason (which the author may or may not have made explicit in their notes, and which hardly ever can make it into the book), history proceeds more or less along the same route even with this major difference that goes back thousands of years. A lot will be different, but enough will be the same that many places, people, and events will be recognizable.

Next would come the total alternate history, the sort you find in Lois Bujold's Sharing Knife series, where the only thing that's the same as the real world is the geography. And finally, you get the books where history is used only as something to mine for ideas from which to build a totally imaginary world, from climate to culture.

Which of these things a particular writer chooses to write will depend on a number of things, including how much the writer likes reading about history, what sort of story they have hold of and what they think it needs, and how much confidence the writer has in his/her ability to pull off the degree of worldbuilding accuracy that each sort demands.

That last is particularly important. The past is different from the present in a lot of ways; one is constantly faced with decisions about when, where, and how to present differences in everything from culture to morality to changes in everyday life. I've had several people comment on the size of Eff's family in Thirteenth Child as if it were very strange and unlikely for anyone to have fourteen children, yet my mother was one of ten children, and her family was not considered unusually large, and that was as late as the 1920s.

There are also a surprising number of history buffs around, which one can view as either a feature or a bug. The bug is, of course, all the passionate amateur historians who will point out your mistakes and argue with your interpretations after the book is published and they're too late to change. The feature is that if you can find any of these folks while the book is still in manuscript, they're usually happy to provide help with the research.

After the Writing

In the comments on "being a writer," JP asked about the afterward part - the stuff that's not writing. And this is rather a good time to write about it, since I've been in the midst of doing publicity stuff for Across the Great Barrier for the past few weeks.

Much as nobody believes it from outside the process, getting published is not the pinnacle of achievement. It's the bottom rung on a whole new ladder. It's like graduating from high school; you may have been a Big Shot in the senior class, but now you're either a freshman in college or the lowest replaceable flunky in an entry-level job, and nobody cares that you were voted Most Likely To Whatever.

In addition, the ladder isn't a nice straightforward one; it's more like those drawings by Escher with the stairs that go around in an endless square that you're always climbing but never getting to the top. This is because there's no real definition of what "the top" actually is. Is a book that sells two million copies closer to "the top" than one that wins a Pulitzer Prize? What about one that gets really good reviews but flops at the cash register? If you get a movie deal, does that make up for six reviews panning the book and a bunch more saying the movie is "even more treacle than the book it was made from"? And what if you get a mega-best-seller…and then your next book is a total flop?

That last bit is the thing a lot of people don't count on. There's a saying in the industry: You're only as good as your last book. And every book is a whole new thing, with all the problems of attracting people to an untested new product. Yes, even if it's the second book in a trilogy or the eighth book in a series.

Which brings me to promotion and publicity.

There are two pieces to this: the public appearances (which a lot of folks think of as the glamorous part), and all the prep work and support effort that goes into making them happen. The public appearances are enormous fun for writers of a gregarious temperament, but they're pure torture for those who are shy or solitary, or even for those who are not wildly social. In either case, they are an energy drain (how noticeable depends on how much energy one has to begin with). One has to be "on" for hours at a time - not merely socializing, but socializing to a purpose (i.e., persuading people you have never met that they should buy, read, and hopefully talk favorably about your latest book to all their friends).

Speaking engagements require the most preparation - you have to write a speech (duh). Readings are simpler; all you have to do is pick out a passage that you can cover in the amount of time allotted. In both cases, there will almost certainly be questions afterwards, which is a bit scary the first couple of times until one has done it enough to have been asked the standard batch of writer questions and developed answers for them. (Where do you get your ideas? Where do you get your characters? Who were your biggest influences? What is your favorite book? Do you ever put real people in your books? etc.)

Some speaking engagements pay a fee (which can range from a token $25.00 for gas to several thousand if you're a famous author giving a keynote speech at a prestigious conference. In the YA field, you also have school visits, which generally involve speaking to one or more groups of students (which can mean anything from the advanced Young Creative Writers class of fifteen to an all-school assembly of a thousand kids or more). Often, several schools and libraries in a particular area will get together to bring an author to town, splitting the travel fees. If the author isn't wary, this can result in a schedule such as: arrive in town at 5:30 p.m.; check into hotel; dinner with school and library board; 7 a.m. breakfast with School A librarians; presentation to School A literary club at 9:30; all-school assembly at 10:20; drive to School B; lunch with School B teachers; presentation to School B classes in the afternoon; autographing at local bookstore; dinner with adult book group; public library presentation at 7:30 p.m.; breakfast and morning presentations at School C; dash to airport to catch 1 p.m. flight. If you're really unwary, they'll try to cut expenses by scheduling you to leave on a 6 a.m. flight, arriving at 8 a.m., race to School A for the 9:30 literary club presentation and proceed from there, thus reducing their costs by one night of lodging and two meals.

Mixers and parties require the least advance preparation; about all you have to do is make sure that you have a stack of business cards, an intriguing two-sentence summary of your book memorized, and a really clear idea of what your tolerance for alcohol is. You also have to remind yourself not to hole up with all the other writers in the corner; it's the bookstore owners, book buyers, teachers, librarians, and readers that you're supposed to be there to talk to. Even though you know that the writers won't ask the Standard Writer Questions (see above) and everybody else will.

Science fiction conventions don't pay (except room and meals if you're the Guest of Honor), but they tend to be friendly and more laid-back and off-the-cuff than school visits and speaking engagements that pay.

Autographings come in three varieties, plus the hideously embarrassing "signing stock," which is where one slinks into a bookstore, checks to make sure they actually have a copy of one's book on the shelves, and then walks up to the cash register to tell the clerk "I'm an author, and I notice you have some of my books; would you like me to autograph them?" This is almost as bad as the normal autographing, where the author gets to sit in front of a small mountain of books for two hours, while an average of five people stop to get copies signed (three of them employees of the bookstore).

Then there are the special autograph sessions at some of the giant teacher, librarian, or bookseller's conventions, where the publisher is giving books away free as publicity. This nearly guarantees that there will be a line (though that is "nearly"…and it's really embarrassing and depressing when you are giving away books and nobody is interested). It also means that a lot of the folks in line will be there because they are getting a free book, not because they know anything about the book, or you. (Which is, of course, the whole point.)

And then there are the rare, precious times when everything goes right and fifty people show up at the bookstore to get your new book signed. Even then, however, there is always someone who insists on telling you in detail about some mistake you made in the previous book…which holds up the line and makes everyone else crabby.

In short, all of the public-appearance after-writing publicity stuff involves talking to and being polite to large numbers of strangers, most of whom are not going to view you with awe simply because you are a published writer. The teachers, booksellers, and librarians make up the largest part of the audience for public appearances. They are sharp, finicky customers; they often admire authors, but they're seldom overawed by them. The readers are, by and large, much better for the authorial ego (barring the ones who seem to think that the more holes they can pick in a writer's work, the more the writer will appreciate their honesty and diligence).

Being a writer

When people ask me when I knew I wanted to be a writer, I always tell them that I never did want to be a writer. I wanted to write. Being a writer was something that happened by accident.

Recently someone asked me what I meant. Surely, if you want to write, that kind of assumes you want to be a writer.

Well, that depends on how you define "writer." If you define "writer" as someone who writes, then "being a writer" is trivial: you sit down and write something, and presto! You're a writer. It's not this huge thing to aspire to, because it's too easy. By that definition, I've been a writer since I started working on my first story back in seventh grade.

Most folks, of course, aren't talking about that basic definition when they speak of "being a writer." What they mean is being a published writer, a career writer, a professional writer, a full-time writer. And what they're really asking about is rather more complex than the question sounds.

Because there are two parts to "being a writer" the way they mean it. There's writing, and there's what happens afterward. Most of the people who talk about "being a writer," whether they're asking the question or whether they're announcing to the world that they themselves want to be writers, are either talking about the perceived glamour and respect and status that they think goes along with publication and a writing career, or else they're talking about the validation of getting published - the fact that someone, somewhere, has deemed their story worthy.

All that is stuff that happens after the writing part, if it happens at all. (And when it does happen, it's nothing at all like the rosy dreams people have of what it's going to be like…but that's a different post, I think.)

Wanting to write means wanting to get the words down on paper (or, these days, pixels); wanting to tell stories; wanting to get the stories right on as many levels as possible. It's not about the stuff that happens to the paper or pixels after the story is written.

Which is not to say that I never desired publication; on the contrary, getting my stories published was a goal from the time I realized such a thing might be possible, which was around age thirteen. But I never wrote in order to get published. I wrote in order to get the story down and get it right. Publication was one of several possible proofs that I'd done what I set out to do; it was also the most effective way of getting the stories out and read by other people. (This was not only pre-Internet, it was pre-personal-computers.)

I don't remember publication ever being the same kind of goal that the writing itself was. I didn't sneak time in class or jot weird notes in the margins of my textbooks because I wanted to be published. I didn't spend my lunch hours and coffee breaks at my office typing instead of chatting with my coworkers or eating with my friends in order to get published. I did it because I wanted to tell the story. I wanted to find out how I would get it to turn out right. (Sometimes, I just wanted to find out what would happen; I don't always know in advance.)

People who talk about "being a writer" usually don't want to write; they want to have written. They want to skip ahead to the part that comes after the writing. They want the status, or they want the validation.

And while validation is lovely, and all the publication and publicity stuff is certainly a necessary and legitimate part of a writing career, they're not writing. Hardly anyone who wants to have written makes it to publication, and if they do, they usually don't continue past one or two books, because if you are going to "be a writer," you spend 80% of your career time writing. Not doing the stuff that comes afterwards. And 80% of your time is way too much to spend doing something you don't really enjoy, just to get to the "good parts."

The flip side of this, of course, is that unless one aspires to be Emily Dickenson and only ever publish posthumously, one does have to think about selling and publication and publicity at some point. Validation is important; so are sales (especially if one hopes to make a living at this). Ignoring or sneering at the business end of writing is just as problematic as wanting to skip over the writing part and get to the afterwards.

The difference is that if one truly can't stand the sales, publication, and publicity part, one can skip it completely. Nobody goes around arm-twisting people into sending their manuscripts out, or querying editors, or even just putting their stuff up on one of the freebie web sites. If one wants to be Emily Dickenson, nobody will stop you (though people will probably look at you funny if you tell them, so perhaps it's better not to mention it).

If, however, it's the writing part that one strongly dislikes, one is pretty much up a creek. You can't sell a book that hasn't been written yet (not the first time, anyway…and it's getting harder even for writers with a proven track record). You can't publish a non-existent manuscript, or even an incomplete one; you certainly can't do all the sales-and-marketing stuff for a book that doesn't exist.

What it comes down to is being honest with oneself about why one is doing this. The professonal writers I know range from barely tolerating the publication-and-after stuff to reveling in it with great glee, but what keeps all of us at this job is the writing part. Telling stories. Making things up. Even for the writers who most enjoy the publicity bits.