Patricia C. Wrede's Blog, page 65

Two or more at a time

Every so often, someone asks me if I work on more than one book at a time. It's a more complicated question than most people think it is, because there's work, and then there's work.

Writing comes in phases. Very long phases, but phases nonetheless. There's six months to a year of writing the first draft, then weeks or months of revision (depending on the author's process). Then another few weeks or months for editorial revisions, possibly in two parts if the editor separates major revisions from line editing. Then there's one to three weeks of copyedit, and another one to three weeks of galley proofing. And then there's the non-writing publicity stuff that happens after the book is out: autographings, appearances, and so on.

All of it can be considered "working on the book," and given how long the whole process takes, I'm not sure anyone could make a living writing if they waited until the book was out and all the publicity was finished with before starting the next one. So in that sense, I think nearly every professional author works on more than one book at a time. It isn't terribly easy at times, especially when you have one book that's just been published (so you're doing publicity), another that's at the editing stage, and a third that's just starting the first draft. For one thing, it can be hard to psych up to talk about the just-published book that (for you) is two or three years old, when what you're really excited about is the thing you just started working on.

What most folks seem to mean by the "working on more than one book" question, though, is "do you work on more than one first draft at a time?" That's a much clearer and easier question. For me, the answer is "rarely." Partly because I don't have time - it's hard enough to squeeze in work on one first draft while also doing editorial revisions and pushing the latest release.

Time is only part of the difficulty, however. The other part is the problem of shifting gears. I tend to write single-viewpoint books, which means I get into my narrator's head (and into his/her world) pretty firmly. (I was recently asked in a crit group meeting why I had phrased something a certain way, and for a minute all I could do was stare at the questioner. Because it's what the narrator would do, it was what she'd say and how she'd say it given her background and upbringing; there simply wasn't any alternative. It took me a minute to back out of the character's head and see what the objection was, and then get my author hat on and figure out if I could come up with a more acceptable alternative. And that was weeks after I'd finished the draft.)

Being that solidly in one character's head makes it difficult to change gears and get into a different character/narrator's head. I can make the switch - I've had to do it on occasion - but it takes time. And I'm not talking a couple of minutes here; I'm usually talking a day or two, sometimes more. That means that I lose somewhere between several hours and several days of writing time every time I switch from one project to another. I can't afford it.

Switching also means that I'm trying to keep two totally different plots and worlds straight and maintain their consistency. Since my brain isn't large enough to hold even one novel at a time, let alone two, this means I spend a lot of time rereading what I've written - more and more as the first drafts get longer and there are more things to keep straight. To some extent, I do this anyway, but it takes longer and there's more of it if I try to run two projects at the same time. It's bad enough when I'm revising or copyediting one novel and trying to write another.

Even with the Frontier Magic books, which have the same narrator/viewpoint and take place in the same world, it was more of a problem than you might think. It's much easier than you think to put in too much or too little mention of a particular bit of important backstory when you're copyediting Book 2 (in which the incident happens) but writing the first draft of Book 3 (in which the backstory needs to be clear for those who won't have read the prior book, but not driven into the ground for those who just read Book 2 and have the incident fresh in their minds).

I have, however, occasionally managed to work on two different first drafts at more or less the same time. It's never lasted for very long; I think the best I did was four chapters each of two books before one of them took off and I committed to it, dropping the other and coming back to it later. I don't really count the bits and pieces of noodling that litter my hard drive (I have several dozen first pages and a smaller collection of first chapters that haven't gone anywhere…yet). Those are just things I toss off when I'm playing around with ideas, when I'm between books and trying to decide what to write next.

There are, however, folks for whom working on multiple first drafts is the norm. Some of them can't stand the down time between scenes or chapters or event horizons, when their backbrains are working on coming up with whatever comes next but they're not actually writing, and they are capable of switching off to something else without disrupting that delicate unconscious process. In other words, they can write a chapter of their space opera while their backbrain is working on their fantasy, then switch to writing the fantasy while their backbrain works out what comes next in the space opera. I rather envy them; it seems like a marvelous way to be insanely productive…or maybe that's just insane.

Other folks have an attention span such that working on a single story gets boring after a few scenes or chapters. Switching to something else for a bit allows them to come back to the first project with fresh enthusiasm. Of course, that presupposes that they do come back; I know far too many people who think they work this way, when all they're really doing is producing one set after another of first-six-chapters. There's a difference between rotating from project to project to keep your interest fresh, and writing story after story up to the First Veil where it gets hard and then abandoning them for the next exciting new thing.

If working on multiple projects at the same time sounds interesting, by all means try it, but do be honest with yourself. If you're ending up with lots of first-four-to-six-chapters and no middles or endings, then empirical evidence indicates that this is not the method for you.

The Hat Lecture

Back in the day, on Usenet, I had a little lecture that I posted periodically, whenever too many folks seemed to be bemoaning the horribleness of the submission process so much that they were losing sight of the actual job of submitting. (Make no mistake; the submission process is horrible and lengthy and depressing, but there really isn't much that can be done about it - certainly not by writers.)

Recently, I went looking for it in order to link it to a post I was writing, and found, to my surprise, that either I've never posted it on the blog, or else I hid it well enough that I couldn't find it in ten minutes of searching. So for those who haven't seen it, here is

THE HAT LECTURE

Because writers are self-employed, they must wear many hats. There's the Creative Artiste's black beret, the Accountant's green eyeshade, the Editor's fedora, the Publicist's whatever's-current-in-headgear, and so on. This can create dangerous fashion difficulties for the novice writer, as many problems can be caused by wearing the wrong hat at the wrong time.

Putting on the Publicist Hat during revisions, for instance ("Baby! Every comma is golden! Let's do lunch…"), leads to lousy revising (or none at all) and an expanding waistline. Wearing the Accountant Hat when deciding where to send things out is often a bad idea as well ("Let's see, this will cost $3.27 to mail, plus return postage; if I send it to 100 places, that'll be over $600! Hey, if I don't sent it out at all, I can save $600!") And of course the perils of wearing the Editor Hat during the first draft are well-known.

But possibly the most common fashion error made by beginning writers is to choose the wrong Hat for dealing with submissions and rejections. Many try to wear the Publicist Hat, trying to come up with brilliant new ways of getting their manuscript noticed, like mailing it in a pizza box. How original! (Seriously, don't bother. I've been hearing this one from editors for at least twenty years.) In addition to making editors and mail room guys grumpy (how would you like to be all ready for nice, hot pizza, and then open the box to find nothing but another unsolicited manuscript?), they waste valuable time and money that would be far better spent elsewhere.

Worse yet is putting on the Creative Artiste Hat. The Creative Artiste Hat is for coming up with ideas and doing first drafts, not for mailing stuff off (too boring) or dealing with rejection letters. Faced with a rejection letter (or sometimes even just with the possibility of getting a rejection), the Creative Artiste strikes poses and wails - "It's over, over, I tell you! I'm through with this writing stuff! I'm going to retire to a monastery in Tibet…Can you get a visa to Tibet for that? Maybe India would be better; I really like Indian food…" Meanwhile, the manuscript sits on the author's desk, where nothing can happen to it, instead of in an editor's slush pile, where it will eventually get read and maybe bought.

What the writer needs to wear in order to deal with a rejected manuscript or a stack of query letters is the humble but vital Secretary Hat. Where the Publicist gets sidetracked trying to decide whether neon pink envelopes would be eye-catching enough for the query letters - perhaps they should be edged in bright purple? or green? - the Secretary grabs a stack of plain Number 10 envelopes and starts stuffing and stamping. Where the Creative Artiste moans an wails over the latest rejection, the Secretary merely gives the classic overworked-secretary snarl because the rejection means packaging the thing up again, and in time to make the mail pickup.

The Secretary does not care what is in the manuscript, nor what the rejection letter said. She does not go into a funk because the ms. might not be perfect yet, or into deep depression because it has been rejected for the 500th time. Her job is to type the cover letter, assemble the mailing, and make sure it gets in the mailbox in time for the five o'clock pickup, and she performs this job with efficiency (and only a little eye-rolling over the antics she anticipates from the Creative Artiste later on).

In other words, if it was good enough to send out to your first-choice Publisher A three or six or eight months ago, then it's good enough to send out to your second-choice Publisher B now that A has rejected it. So send it out again right away, BEFORE you start angsting over the rejection.

The Problem with Sequels

The problem with sequels is that the writing and publishing process gives readers too much time to think.

Let me unpack that a little.

It takes me one to two years to write a novel, and this is fairly typical of most of the professional writers I know. Yes, there are folks who work faster without detriment to their quality; the speedy crowd seems to work at a rate of around three to six books per year. And then there are the real outliers (whom the rest of us don't like to talk about so much). The fastest one I know could do a novel in two weeks without a decline in quality (two weeks really was her limit, though: the one that got written in eleven days shows some stress fractures).

But even the really fast folks do not end up with a book on the stands every two weeks. The publishing process doesn't allow it. What with getting the copyediting done, arranging for the cover art, doing the book design, printing and proofreading the galleys, advance publicity, and getting the book out to reviewers and bookstore buyers…well, the whole business takes six months to a year unless they throw massive amounts of money and people at it, which they only ever do when they have a hope of making some of those costs back.

What all this comes down to is that in most genres other than Romance (which has its own rules), a given publisher will do a book a year by a particular writer. There are occasional exceptions, but they're exceptions. Some of the extra-productive writers deal with this by working under pseudonyms; others rotate through multiple series for different publishers or even genres. But even if the writer has a book out in a different series under a different name every month of the year, each individual series usually has to wait a year for the next volume in sequence.

The wait is due to a combination of things: the production process, the fact that most writers can work to a book-a-year production rate, the desire of publishers to give the hardcover maximum time to sell before putting out the paperback (while also timing the paperback's release so that the hardcover of Book 2 or 3 will  be just out and available for eager new readers who can't wait). But one of the consequences is that it gives all of the eager readers who grabbed Book 1 the minute it came out lots and lots of time to speculate about what will be in Book 2.

Speculation is fun; I engage in it myself quite frequently. The trouble is that it is exceedingly easy to become overly fond of one's speculations, especially if one happens to have a lively crowd of Internet companions who like the same sorts of characterization and plot twists. It's frighteningly easy to convince oneself that one has a pipeline into the author's mind, and that the sequel will be a better, shinier, spiffier version of whatever plot-and-character developments one's particular group of readers thinks is most likely.

Inevitably, when this happens, the result is that the actual Book 2 (or 3, or whatever) arrives, it's a disappointment to any and everyone who had constructed an alternate vision of who'd live and who'd die, who'd end up in a romance and who wouldn't, what the important plot-points were and which things were totally extraneous. Either the readers have guessed right and worked themselves up so far that no writer, living or dead, could possibly find words shiny and spiffy enough to live up to their mental construct, or (more often) the writer is going in a completely different direction and the readers are outraged that their lovingly-rationalized vision isn't going to play out the way they thought.

It's a compliment, in a way, when readers get so obsessed with ones characters, plot, and world - or with their vision of it - that they spend the between-books year talking and speculating and constructing their own extensions. And speaking for myself, there's nothing quite like the thrill when I realize that somebody got exactly what I was going for. Most of the time, though, folks are doing what my ex-husband used to call "jacking up the radiator cap and driving a new car underneath it." Where they think I'm going, or where they want me to go, isn't where I'm headed at all.

Even that isn't a particular problem for me, right up to the point where the readers start berating me for not writing the book they would have written. (I think I'm the most taken aback by the ones who come up and inform me that my main character couldn't have used magic to do X, because their magic can't do that. Um, what? My world, my rules. It'd be one thing - an embarrassing one - if they actually ever found an internal inconsistency, but as far as I can tell, they're just pulling it out of air.)

It is very hard to explain to these folks that they are not my patron and I am not ghostwriting their ideas for them. Usually, I don't even try. Occasionally, I get cornered by someone who has bought into the whole "ideas are the hard part" thing, and who thinks that the reason Book 2 isn't out fifteen minutes after Book 1 is that I must have writer's block. These folks are always eager to give me their outline for my next book, and they're generally quite crestfallen when I explain as gently as I can that Book 2 is all finished and working its way through the editing-and-publication process, so their pile of ideas is far too late to be useful, even if I were inclined to use them.

On the whole, I do have to admit that I much prefer having intelligent, involved, enthusiastic readers. Even if they do outnumber me by many thousands of brains to one, and therefore can and will catch every plot hole, inconsistency, implausibility, or factual inaccuracy anywhere in my books.

Hack Writer's Gambit

The other day, my walking buddy and I were discussing various bad-plotting mistakes made in various TV series, specifically the sort that used to be called "hack writer's gambit." I say "used to be called" because a quick series of googles found very little in the way of modern references for the term.

So I'm evidently going to have to start by defining the term, if I want to talk about it. Taking it in pieces: a hack writer was, back in the days of the pulp magazines, a writer who cranked out stories on demand, supposedly without regard to subject or quality. It's a term you still hear, though not as often as in the past. "Gambit" is a strategy, technique, or ploy.

The hack writer's gambit is a particularly bad ploy for getting oneself out of the corner one has written one's hero into. It was especially common in the old serials (both in print and at the movies) where each episode but the last would end in a cliffhanger, often one that seemed to show the hero's death. The next episode or segment would open with the same scene, but with an extra thirty seconds of footage or a paragraph that showed the hero diving off the boat seconds before the explosion destroyed it or slipping out of the handcuffs and escaping through the back door before the building was set on fire. Another example would be the previously unknown and unmentioned witness or relative who shows up at the very last minute to exonerate the hero(ine) or reveal the truth about the family secrets.

The classic example comes from Scott Meredith's how-to-write book, Writing to Sell: A serial writer is contacted by his editors because the current installment of the series ends with Lance O'Neil in a pit with sides too steep to climb, sharp spikes moving in to crush him, and molten lead pouring in from a pipe in the ceiling. The editors aren't sure the writer can get the hero out of the mess. The writer shrugs and hands them the next installment, which begins "With a mighty leap, Lance O'Neil sprang out of the pit." (Meredith's version is two pages long in the copy I have, and much more entertaining, but that's the gist of it.)

Generally, the unexpected and unreasonably easy escape is immediately followed by a bunch of fast and furious action - chasing down the guys who blew up the ship, set the house on fire, or stuck Lance in the pit - to take the readers/viewers' minds off just how outrageously they've been suckered. The only time this kind of thing actually works is in a parody, where the whole point is that one outrageous or unlikely or downright impossible thing after another keeps happening. If the story is sufficiently light and/or sufficiently action-centered, and getting out of the cliffhanger isn't totally ridiculous (as it is in the Lance O'Neil example), the author can sometimes get away with it. Rarely.

These days, you don't see many unlikely physical exploits - heroes making mighty leaps, or sneaking out past guards when we've already seen (we thought) that it didn't happen that way. Readers and viewers expect more consistency and foreshadowing than that, and writers know it. If the hero makes a mighty leap out of a death trap, he has to have done similar feats in less dire circumstances before, so that the escape becomes a matter of the villain having totally underestimated the hero's physical prowess, rather than the sudden revelation of an ability he's never had before (unless, of course, the hero got bitten by a radioactive spider right before he was shoved into the pit, and the escape is as much a shock to him as to the reader).

What you do see are other sorts of unlikely rabbits being pulled out of hats. The villain gloats that he's erased the critical data on the hero's computer so thoroughly that it is unrecoverable - and then someone conveniently shows up with a new bit of software that can magically recover the data anyway, just in the nick of time. Or a previously unknown and unmentioned hacker has a fit of conscience for no particular reason and turns up with the data he stole from the hero's computer just before the villain wiped it. Or a character who's been dead for two seasons or eighteen chapters turns out to have set up a secret backup system that is still running, even though she hasn't been around to maintain it.

When this kind of thing happens in a television series, it is sometimes understandable. Often, the logical place to plant the information about the software or the hacker or the backup system was several episodes prior to the one in which it becomes necessary to pull the hero out of the swamp, and by the time the writers need it, it's too late to plant it. (That's the problem with serials in general, really - they take a lot more careful planning than one may realize in the early stages.) When you have something like this happening between the front and back cover of a single book, there's really no excuse for it. Yes, it's a lot of work to go back and find places to plan the hacker or the software guy and his project or the secret backup system, but if you ever thought writing was not going to be a lot of work, you really ought to have gotten over the idea by the time you got to the end of your first draft and realized you needed some plot handwaving to get your hero out of whatever hole you'd written him into. Heck, that's half the reason why there are second drafts in the first place - so the writer can get the reader out of some corner without having to leave obvious footprints all over the fresh paint on the floor.

Getting to know them

Characterization is one of the things I had a hard time getting a handle on. In my early books, I was doing it all by instinct - which was all well and good (I still do it pretty much by instinct), except that I hadn't thought about characterization, about what goes into it or how you do it. I hadn't educated my instinct.

I got better at it by practicing, but it was a long, slow process because I still wasn't thinking explicitly about character - what it is, how it's expressed, how the reader learns about it. It wasn't until many years and many books later, when I had to explain to someone how it worked, that I started to see what I was doing and figure out how to do it better.

There were several layers of realization for me. The first one was kind of a "duh!" thing - you find out about characters the same way you find out about actual people. You figure out what they're like based on their physical appearance, what they say and how they say it, what they do, how they act and react, and on what other people say to them and about them, and how people you already know react to them. If someone you already like and trust says that George is a good guy, if a little stuffy, you're inclined to believe him and give George the benefit of the doubt; if someone you distrust and think is a bad guy says that George is a perfect example of honorable behavior, you're a lot more inclined to count your change twice when George hands it back to you than to trust him with your wallet and I.D.

The next realization came when I figured out why so many other people thought I didn't have much problem with characterization - it was because I did dialog reasonably well, and that meant that readers were able to judge my characters based on what they said and on what other characters said to or about them. I was leaving out a lot of the other things that would make my characters deeper and better rounded, but the dialog was enough for a lot of readers to go on with, especially in the sort of adventure novels I was writing at that point.

At that point, I started paying more attention to some of the things I'd been doing by instinct; that is, I started trying to deliberately educate my instincts so that they'd work better without me having to constantly watch what I was doing. Mostly, this involved thinking about exactly how one presents all those aspects of a character's personality in a novel.

Physical appearance looks easy, at first glance. It's just a description of what the person looks like, right? Well, yes. But physical appearance is more than height, weight, and the color of hair, eyes, and skin. It includes clothes, which in nearly every society in history have been a marker of class, status, and degree of general coolness, and often of occupation and/or education as well. Things like cut and color, fit, fabric, style, whether clothes look/are comfortable, the degree of repair they're in, how becoming they are to the person - mentioning just one or two of these can tell a lot about a character and his/her situation. The same goes for a character's hairstyle and, in the case of men, whether they wear a mustache and/or beard, in what style.

What the character says and how he says it covers tone of voice and vocabulary as well as syntax. It includes things like whether the character is very blunt ("No. Not ever. Not for a million dollars."), less blunt ("I won't be available Tuesday. Or any other day."), or vague and non-committal ("I'll just have to see how things go."); whether she yells or whispers; whether he's gentle or sarcastic or abrupt or abstracted.

What the character does and how she acts divides into two parts: body language and actual actions. Facial expression - smiles, frowns, narrowed eyes, raised eyebrows, twitching lips, blushes - get included her, but so does every other part of the body, which some authors tend to forget. Things like stiffening, turning away, crossing one leg over the other, waving a hand, leaning forward - all these are part of a nearly unconscious mode of communication that all of us do in real life all the time. It's so nearly unconscious, in fact, that many people have to go to some lengths in order to start seeing it so that they can describe it piece by piece, because they don't naturally break down "He was interested" into "He leaned forward, eyes fixed on the contract, lips pursed slightly as if to keep from admitting anything too soon."

For me, my characters' body language ends up being sort of like method acting. I'll be writing a scene and type "He was interested" and immediately know I want the specifics. So I act the character in my head:  I'm him; I'm interested; what, exactly, is my body trying to do? Oh, I'm leaning forward - hands are twitching a bit, but they're under the desk, so nobody would see - eyes want to squint - what's my mouth doing? Shoulders?   Once I figure all that out, I decide which bits to put into the description, and opt for the pursed lips rather than the tense shoulders.

The other part of "what the character does" is action, which is more movement than body language and comes in two subtypes. First, there's immediate short-term behavior - whistling, slamming a door, crying, laughing, slapping someone; second, there are more complicated, long-term actions, like buying someone a gift, running away, challenging someone to a duel, pretty much any sort of plot-related activity. With immediate action, I find that the context and body language part is as or more important than the action itself. Someone who flounces out the door, slamming it behind her, does not come across as a threat, while someone who storms out and slams it hard enough to break the glass is a lot scarier.

The hardest part is often figuring out what that particular character would do in a given situation. Would he fidget with his pocket watch? Hum softly? Pace? Start studying the view out the windows? Sigh, softly or noisily? Unobtrusively finger the dagger up his sleeve, in a way that makes everyone watching think that he's fluffing the ruffled cuff of his shirt?

How the character reacts to different people and situations builds on everything else, because the way they show their reactions is in their dialog and tone of voice, their body language, their immediate and longer-term actions. You can, of course, simply say "Carol disliked Jane instantly," but it's usually much more effective to say "Carol stiffened more and more as Jane simpered through George's rambling introduction. When George finally finished, Carol inclined her head a quarter of an inch. "Pleased to meet you," she said in an icy tone."

The longer version is more effective partly because the readers can judge Carol's reaction for themselves, but also because George's and Jane's actions hint at what they're like and why Carol might be having the reaction she's having.

I still do most of my characterization by instinct - that is, I don't get this analytical when I'm actually writing a scene. As I said, for me, it's more like method acting - trying to be the character for an instant or two, long enough to figure out what to describe. But taking it apart this way helps me educate my instincts, so that I don't have to stop every time one character is introduced to another whom they dislike, and make lists of all the possible ways she might show her reaction, then consciously and deliberately pick out the one thing that would be right for that character to do/say/think. If I do my thinking about the mechanics of how characterization works outside my actual writing time, I don't have to do it when I'm trying to figure out the scene.

But that's me. Your mileage may vary.

Banned Books Week 2011

Some years back, a good friend of mine told me a story about her nine-year-old son, who came to her wanting to read a particular series of adult books that he'd heard his late-teenaged siblings talking about. The books in question were great adventure books, but they did contain several explicit mentions of sex - not graphic, but quite clear. After long consideration, the parents decided that the boy could read the books, provided he came to talk them over with his parents afterward.

The son went away happily and read the books, then dutifully presented himself for the talk. And the first thing his mother said was, "So, did the sex in those books bother you at all?"

The boy's eyes went wide. "There was sex in those books?" he said in astonishment. "I better read them again!"

I mention this because once again it is Banned Books Week, and I've been poking around in the statistics on book challenges that the American Library Association has been collecting for the past twenty years. A few quick calculations show that sexual explicitness was a factor in roughly thirty percent of the challenges, and that 72% of the recorded challenges were to books in schools or school libraries…and the vast majority were brought by a concerned parent.

This is unsurprising, really. People will go to amazing lengths to protect children - their own or other people's. And I don't know anyone who, reading levels aside, thinks third-graders should be reading graphic horror, slasher books, or something like The Silence of the Lambs. The problem is with where to draw the lines, and with who draws them.

It's also a problem of trust and fear. Challenges to books always are. We don't trust other people to see the same things we do, to have the same objections, to be intelligent or compassionate or concerned enough to come to the same conclusions we do about a particular subject or a particular portrayal. We don't trust them to agree with us - and why should we? There's plenty of evidence around that other people don't hold the same opinions, whatever those opinions may be.

When it comes to children, however, the issues of fear and trust come out even more strongly. As I've pointed out before, fiction is dangerous. Parents fear - sometimes rightly - that their children will be hurt, that they won't be able to handle scenes or concepts that are too advanced, that they will be exposed to ideas and values that are contrary to the ones the parents believe in. That fear knows no politics; in talking with librarians and teachers, I've heard over and over that as many challenges come from the political left as from the political right. The objections are different; the reasoning is always the same: children should not be exposed to X because it will hurt them in some way.

And the more I see and hear of this, the more I wonder: Does anyone ever ask the kids what they think? Not often, I suspect. Yet the vast majority of children I've talked to seem to me to be much more sensible and aware than most adults give them credit for. They're quite capable of spotting and avoiding books that bother them. They know a lot more, at pretty much every age, than most adults think they do, and they don't automatically absorb and agree with things just because someone wrote about it.

Nevertheless, protecting children is an adult's business. Unfortunately, protection is not a one-size-fits-all thing. The book that gives one child nightmares may be exactly what another child needs to read to help him/her cope with a difficult situation. The real decision is not "Should we protect all children from nightmares by removing this book from places they can easily find it?" but "Do we take the chance that one child will be hurt directly by leaving on the shelves a book that will give her nightmares, or do we remove the book and take the chance that another child will be hurt indirectly because he has been denied access to something that would have helped him?"

People who want books pulled off school library shelves are trying to protect all children, without recognizing that different kids have different needs and without trusting young people to stop reading books that are too much for them. They come down hard on the side of preventing direct harm (as they see it), rather than preventing indirect harm. Yet it's a lot easier to teach children not to put a hand on the stove because it will burn them (immediate, direct harm) than to convince them that eating greasy hamburgers from the take-away place is bad for them (long-term, indirect harm) - at least, my siblings and I begged for the take-out hamburgers for years and years, despite our parents' explanations, while I don't recall any of us ever defying them over the stove.

Adults, as a group, don't really trust anyone under twenty-one to make good decisions or good choices. But while it is obviously true that the younger the child, the less life experience they have from which to draw conclusions, I don't think that young people do any worse, as a group, than adults when it comes to a lot of the decisions they have to make. I also think the old saw about the way you avoid making mistakes is through experience, and the way you gain experience is by making mistakes. And frankly, making a mistake about what kind of book to read is a lot safer than some of the, um, experience I remember gaining along the way.

Lines do have to be drawn sometimes, but I think that decisions about what is appropriate for all children (as opposed to a particular parent's individual child) need to be made with great care and consideration, and probably with the default being to let a particular book stay on the shelves. Because I think that children can be trusted considerably farther than many adults think when it comes to avoiding - or, like my friend's son, just not seeing - material in books and stories that are harmful to them.

Gaming for Writers, or Writing for Gamers

I've been doing role-playing games off and on since the mid-1970s, when I was first introduced to the concept of D&D style tabletop games. The group I gamed with wasn't big on number-crunching and stats; we were more about the improvised story-telling. At least five of us ended up inventing and running our own gaming worlds; of those five, four eventually wrote and sold novels, and three of those four have had significant careers in writing and are still going strong.

Which is not to say that there's a cause-and-effect relationship between running/playing RPGs and success in writing. Far from it - I've seen far too many hopeful gamers who think that what made for a wonderful adventure in their game will make an equally wonderful novel if they just write it up. It doesn't work that way; the things that make for a wonderful and memorable game are just not the same as the things that make for a wonderful and memorable novel. There's some overlap, but unfortunately not enough.

I will say, however, that I think that running my own invented-from-the-ground-up game did a lot for my writing. Not in any of the obvious ways that people like to leap to conclusions about - I've never used a storyline from any of the games I ran, for instance. But trying to make up a background and rules, and then watching my players twist it all to their advantage (and then desperately trying to twist it back) gave me a sense of the possibilities and alternatives that even the simplest decision could set in motion. And trying to keep on top of the player characters during a marathon session was really good practice for staying on top of the rickety heap of branching plotlines that tend to develop when I'm in the early stages of story construction.

But the thing that I personally found most useful about being gamesmistress (GM) was running all the non-player-characters. I thought of it as a bit like improvisational acting, with me having to do a varying number of sufficiently-different characters every session, depending on whether my players were in town dealing with local politics (lots of different non-player-characters [NPCs], each of whom had to have a different personality and agenda even if the players only talked to him/her for five or ten minutes out of a three-hour session), or chasing down an enchanted sword in the ruins far from civilization (usual NPCs limited to evil critters whose dialog and personalities could be summed up as "Aaaargh! Die!").

When I started writing, I was lousy at giving characters actual personalities. Plots and twists, fine; characters, not so much. Fortunately for me (and my eventual readers), I started gaming when I was barely halfway through the first draft of Shadow Magic, my first novel. Having to act out different characters (starting with my own player characters in other people's games) made the second half of the first draft much better in terms of characterization, and the second draft better still.

Years of observation have taught me that this is not so for everyone. I was lucky; the kind of game I was participating in was just what I needed to exercise a particularly weak set of skills, in just the right way for me. I've seen other writer-gamers rave about similar growth in other areas - worldbuilding being a prime one. The biggest successes seem to come in places that aren't the point of the game - in things that support and add to the richness and fun of both the game and the books, but that aren't actually the main thrust of the adventure.

I think that's an important piece of why a great gaming episode usually doesn't make for a terribly good story (not without a whole lot of writing and rewriting, anyway). All of the folks I know who have successfully turned a game into a novel or series of novels haven't actually turned the game into a novel. They've taken their character and some favorite NPCs, the setting and history, some of the political situation, and maybe a few of the plot elements (though often not), and remixed them into a new story.

The other part of why great gaming episodes don't make good novels has to do with pacing and focus. In a game, the focus is on having fun and leveling up your character, so even a totally irrelevant attack by wolves or bandits is interesting. In a book, those considerations are much less important. Yes, we want to watch the hero improve, but watching is much less fun than being part of the action. What I, as a reader, want is to see the hero move forward toward his plot goal; I don't really care that much about his imaginary stats.

Similarly, I've had great gaming evening where the entire group basically sat around chatting with an interesting NPC. The adventure part didn't get any farther along, but nobody cared because everyone was enjoying the banter. In a novel, that sort of scene can work IF there's some heavy-duty characterization development going on, but if it's nothing but witty banter, it's going to have to be absolutely brilliant to keep a lot of readers from starting to skim.

To make those scenes work in a novel, they have to be made relevant to something besides fun and player stats, and that usually involves adding a lot of plot or character stuff that didn't happen in the original game. This generally ends up being a lot more work than you might expect…which is why so few of the hopeful gamers actually produce a saleable story when they try to turn their games into books.

And you can't trust most of your fellow gamers to be objective about a writeup. At best, most of them will love it simply because they were there, too. At worst, they'll complain bitterly that you gave their character too little time on stage, that you left out all their clever dialog, and that you're changing the game by putting in stuff that didn't happen (which of course is what you have to do to make it work as a story).

Mining a game for writing can work…as long as one understands that it is work, and not a quick and easy road to success.

Mailbag #6

How did you know that you wanted to be a writer?

I didn't. I never, ever wanted to "be a writer." I wanted to write. I wanted to tell stories. I wanted to get these blasted characters out of my head and nailed down on paper so I wouldn't have to keep thinking about them.

Being a writer is something that happened as a result of writing, almost by accident. It was never my goal. My goal was always to finish the current story, and then come up with something even cooler to write about next time. Publishing and making a living were afterthoughts.

At what point in your life did you think you could actually make a living from your writing?

About five and a half books in. That is, I had written and sold five novels, of which two (I think) were somewhere in the production process, and I was partway through the next book, which I was about to send off to my agent to sell. My first book had earned out by then, and I think the second had, too, so I had variable royalty income from those, plus the known amounts I was getting as the second- or third- partial advance payments on the two that were in the production process. This meant I had a pretty good idea what my writing income was likely to be over the next year or two.

At that point, I'd been thinking about quitting my day job for a few years, so I'd been building up a savings account in anticipation. The idea was that I'd have enough cash to get me through a dry period or two, and if it ever dropped below six months' living expenses, I'd start looking for a new day job (figuring that six months would be long enough to find one). I've had to dip into that fund several times over the years, but it's never gone below the six months line (knock wood).

So if you're asking when I started thinking about quitting the day job (and planning and preparing to do so), the answer is some time around 1983, roughly two years before I actually quit and went full-time. It didn't become a serious possibility until I had the income and the bank account in place, which took two years to get fully set up.

When you work with fantasy, how is it different from something like realistic fiction?

I wouldn't know; I've never written anything that wasn't fantasy. I did try once, but one of the characters turned out to be a wizard in Chapter Two, and I gave up.

Still, I think I can say a little more than that. The basics of writing are the same, regardless of genre: style, viewpoint, dialog, characterization, plot, etc. Sometimes there are genre conventions that are important and that can expand or limit the range of techniques that are available to the writer in that genre, but by and large, effective writing is effective regardless of content.

Worldbuilding and background tend, I think, to be a bit more important in speculative fiction in general than in so-called realistic fiction, simply because one can choose to set realistic fiction in places that the reader is likely to be familiar with already, and which therefore need much less development in the story. That's about all I can think of, though — and it's not a hard and fast rule. Lots of realistic-fiction authors set their novels in places that their likely readers will consider exotic (whether that means New Orleans or Tokyo, Los Angeles or Paris, Moscow or Sydney). Part of the point of doing so is to give the readers a chance to image places that are strange to them, which requires just the same sort of in-story background setting as any SF story.

What are some of the criteria you look at when first starting a piece?

Sometimes, there a business considerations that dictate what comes next; for instance, if I've signed a contract to write a trilogy, then when I finish the first book, the next piece is going to be Book #2. Or if my agent is trying to re-sell some of my out-of-print backlist, sometimes it is easier if I promise to write a new sequel. Or I need to write something to fulfill the option clause in a contract before I go on to what I really want to write next.

But apart from a couple of multi-book contracts, business considerations haven't come up terribly often for me, so the main thing I think about when I'm deciding what to write next is, "Is this a story I'm interested in writing?" Since I usually have anywhere from three to twenty possible stories for which the answer to that question is "yes," the next question is "Is this story insisting on being written now?" If one of them is, then that's the one that comes next. Usually, there isn't any one piece on the list that's at critical mass and/or chomping at the bit to get going, so the next questions are "Which story(s) are almost ready to move forward and/or can be gotten to that point with the least amount of work? Or which one(s) will be the most fun to play with, even if they're going to be a whole lot of work to get moving?" and "Of the stories that appeal to me and that I think I can get moving, which one(s) does my agent think she can sell most easily in the current market?"

That usually whittles the list down to one or two titles, at most, and if I still can't decide, I flip a coin.

Teamwork

When you look at the arts, there are some that clearly, obviously require the talents of multiple people to produce. Movies, for instance, need not only writers but actors, camera operators, prop and costume people, and on and on - last time I went to one, the credits rolled on for nearly five minutes.

At the other end of the scale are things like painting, where one person can theoretically do the whole job themselves (though very few painters today stretch their own canvases or grind their own pigments).

And then there's writing.

We'll set aside the problems of production and distribution for now; the Internet is changing that part drastically. But I will point out that for the last century or two, even so-called self-publication didn't mean you set your own type, printed your own galleys, and bound each copy of your book by hand.

Writing is in many ways a solitary activity; when push comes to shove, it's just me at the keyboard typing. Even when one is collaborating, you can't type four-hands the way you can play a piano duet side-by-side at the same piano keyboard. But writers have always talked to each other over tea, over coffee, over beer and wine, from afternoon to the wee hours of the morning, and in letters when they couldn't get together in person. The Inklings and the Algonquin Club and the Bloomsbury Group were none of them the first of their kind.

Nevertheless, the myth that most non-writers (and far too many writers) believe is that books are an act of singular creativity; they spring from the head of their author in true and pristine condition, and whatever minor changes occur afterwards are mere refinements of the author's vision. Yes, some people really believe this. A professor of literature at the local university once told a friend of mine rather condescendingly that editors never asked for substantive changes in a manuscript, and therefore they never needed to discuss what changes might have been requested for marketing reasons vs. which were made for artistic ones.

In fact, every editor I have ever had has asked for changes to the manuscript - nothing ever goes straight to copy-edit. Furthermore, most of those changes have not been for marketing reasons (or if they were, the editors were clever enough to come up with good, solid artistic reasons for asking for the changes). I don't always do everything the editor asks, or do it the way he suggests, if he makes a suggestion. In the current work-in-production, for instance, the editor wanted the opening scenes rearranged in a certain order; unfortunately, this would have required me to change the timing on several key events that were pretty much nailed to the floor, either in previous books or by the weather (settlers did not pick up and move in the middle of winter in Minnesota).

So I did something else, which fixed the pacing-and-tension problems (I hope) without playing hob with timing-and-plausibility, and I got the email yesterday saying they liked it, and we're good to go to copyedit. The point is, I think the changes were good ones.

And I wasn't just working on the problems my editor pointed out. My new crit group had a few things to say, too, and while I couldn't address everything (since, again, some things were nailed down in earlier books), there was still quite a bit to chew over. And that's not even counting the comments made by a variety of first-readers, long before things ever got to this point, or the discussions with friends about plot points before anything at all was ever written down.

There are also plenty of people whose contributions are more indirect but no less necessary. These are the ones who answer questions about castle construction or the development of guns; who loan out obscure books on British slang in 1811 or the development of railroads; who drag one out to dinner or over to watch a movie just before one's brain starts racing around and around the squirrel cage.

The books might still happen without all of this support, but they wouldn't happen nearly as fast and they wouldn't be nearly as good. It's an odd sort of teamwork - I'm the one doing the writing and trying to make everything fit coherently, but it would be disingenuous to ignore just how much everyone else is a part of the process. Yet it's not something you can break down into discrete parts - you can't say George put the wheels on, Janet did the upholstery, and Gene and Jennifer painted the trim.

I can't point at a paragraph and say, "Lois wrote that bit," because she didn't; I wrote it. Even if I say "Beth or David or Carol gave me that idea" or "I put that bit in for Rosemary or Pamela or Caroline," it's never as pure and simple as it sounds. Yes, Lois or Carol or David gave me that idea, sort of, but I worked out how to write it and fit it in, and it changed along the way. Yet it wouldn't have gone that way if it hadn't been for that talk we had.

It's more than just support, but it's not the kind of influence my English teachers talked about when I was in school. It's both more collaborative and less; most of these people aren't trying to write parts of my book, they're just joining a conversation about it. But that stimulus from outside my head is sort of like binocular vision for ideas - it's part of what lets me get a clear picture of what the story needs to be. It's possible to get along without it, just as one can still see even if one is wearing a patch over one eye; but without two points of view, one loses depth perception.

Hooking the Reader

I've talked before about the opening of a story and some of the things that can go wrong with the all-drama, all-action, all-the-time "hook." But it occurs to me that I haven't talked much about what a hook is, or how to do it right. Hence today's post.

Openings are important; nobody denies that. In my mother's collection of writing textbooks from the 1930s and 40s, there are chapters and sections on the importance of the opening, complete with admonitions to hook the reader. But something interesting happened along the way from then until now.

Back in those early how-to-write books, the opening, even of a short story, was considered to be the first manuscript page - basically, 250 to 300 words, comprising several paragraphs and quite a few sentences. Over the years, that shrank from the first page to the first paragraph, and then to the first sentence. "The opening is vitally important" became "The first sentence is vitally important." Sometime between then and now, the emphasis changed again, until these days you can hardly find a how-to-write book or blog that doesn't advocate writing a first-sentence "hook" that's dramatic, dynamic, and full of action.

When you stop to examine it, the assumption behind the "dramatic, dynamic, action-packed hook sentence" advice is that drama and action are The Best Way to grab the reader's attention. The trouble is that a) there is no The Reader; there are hundreds of thousands of individuals who don't all like to read exactly the same thing, and b) a dramatic, action-packed opening may be inappropriate for a particular book (one that, say, is chiefly about a quiet romance between a shy scholar and his introverted next-door neighbor).

But even the book about the shy scholar needs a first line. So let's drop all the how-to advice for a minute and look at what a hook actually is.

A hook is an opening that makes the reader want to keep reading. Sometimes, this can be as much as the first chapter, but these days when people refer to "the hook," they usually mean the first sentence, first paragraph, or the first couple of sentences/paragraphs (usually if the paragraphs are a series of snappy one-liners).

In order to make the reader want to keep reading, a hook has to do three things: 1) it has to catch the reader's attention; 2) it has to provide a reason for the reader to keep reading; and 3) it has to do both things in a way that is true to the story, characters, and plot that follow. #3 is not strictly a property of the hook, but of the match-up between it and the story. If your opening sentence is "At full speed, the two trains bore down on each other, racing along the track toward their inevitable fatal crash" and then you reveal some paragraphs later that these are a couple of model trains and the story is a sentimental tale of a small-town Christmas in 1940, you are likely to annoy your readers so much that not only will they skip the rest of this story, they won't pick up anything with your name on it ever again.

Drama and action tend to be eye-catching, which is why they're so often advocated as important in a hook, but there are a lot of other things that intrigue people. Gossip, for instance - why else are there all those magazines and papers full of stories about the relationships of people most of us have never even met? Mysteries, large and small - things that seem unexpected or out of place, yet there they are. Striking personalities, whether eccentric or merely emphatic. Sometimes a build-up of details will do it, or a sudden twist of prose.

Hooking the readers isn't about action. It's about telling them something interesting, something cool, something exciting. (Years ago, one of my writer friends hung a sign over his computer that said "Now I am going to tell you something cool" to remind himself.) And "exciting" is not synonymous with action. People get excited when their favorite singer releases a new album, as well as when they're on the first downhill rush of the rollercoaster. Some of us got wildly excited last year when they found the first extrasolar planet in the zone where life-as-we-know-it can exist.

The thing to remember is that even the folks who advocate the in medias res action openings aren't advocating action because they think action is the only right way to open a story. They're advocating it because they think that action will catch the reader's attention and give him/her a reason to keep reading.

Too many writers hear all the emphasis on action, and forget about the reason behind it; they end up with openings describing a car crash or a sword fight that isn't particularly interesting. They comply with the letter of the directions, but not the spirit.

Part of why they do this is that their heart isn't in it in the first place. They don't want to open in the middle of a chase or a laser duel, but they think they have to. And while it is very true that sometimes a story will require the writer to write about things that he, personally, finds uninteresting, one doesn't want to be doing it in the first sentence. Because it is very, very difficult to take something that you yourself find boring and write it so that readers will find it compelling. In the middle of a book, one can manage it by embedding the boring bits in sections of stuff that one is interested in, but in the first line, there isn't anything else to surround it with. And unless the writer is very good and very advanced, it's going to show that he's not terribly interested in what's going on in the opening.

If you aren't excited and intrigued by your first couple of sentences - if what you're saying in them doesn't make you want to write more, just to find out what comes next - they aren't likely to grab your readers, either.