Patricia C. Wrede's Blog, page 66

Reality Isn't What It's Cracked Up To Be

Writers who set their stories in the real world, whether modern or historical, have a double advantage over those of us who alter reality/history to suit our own ends, or who make up our own versions from whole cloth. The first advantage is that they can look up whatever details they need - architecture, dress, maps, culture - and whatever they find, they don't have to worry about someone saying it couldn't possibly be like that. People can argue with their sources, but not with the fact that Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans in 2005.

The other big advantage they have is that they don't seem to get as many fans asking about obscure worldbuilding points, some of which aren't even in the story. I've never heard of someone coming up to a writer who has written a series of historical novels set in New York City during the American Revolution and asking "So, I've been wondering what was happening in Australia while all this was going on." And if somebody did ask, I know of nobody who would think the writer out of line if he answered, "How should I know? Google is your friend…"

But when you've invented a world, readers do this sort of thing all the time. I still remember the fan letter I got from a gentleman who'd read The Seven Towers that went something like this:

"Dear Ms. Wrede: In your book, you mention the Three Greater Obligations and the Twelve Lesser Obligations. I can only find nine Lesser Obligations in the text. What are the other three? Sincerely yours,"

For those of you who haven't read the book, the greater and lesser obligations were part of the culture of a secondary character, a foreigner who was the only member of his group who ever came onstage during the story (though we heard a lot about them). Since only the one character was actually in the book, I didn't bother making up the culture in detail; when he brought up the Three Greater Obligations, I knew what they were because they were important to the situation, but when he mentioned the Twelve Lesser Obligations, I figured that was enough to cover anything that was likely to come up in the course of the book, and I didn't actually need to have a list.

So when I got that fan letter, I didn't have an answer. Which tends to surprise and annoy the sort of fan who so earnestly asks questions like that. For some reason, they're positive that I have several sets of virtual encyclopedias, one for each of the imaginary worlds I've created, that cover everything anyone could possibly want to know about their history, geography, cultures, magic, and so on.

It doesn't work that way for most of us. Yes, every so often you get a curve-wrecker like J.R.R. Tolkein who spent forty years inventing everything from languages to poetry for his imaginary world - but those people are nearly always doing it for fun. As a hobby. Because they like making up every possible detail of their imaginary world.

Most working writers don't have that much time, not when we're trying to make a living as writers rather than Oxford Dons, and especially not when we're working with multiple different imaginary places. What we do instead is what I call the soap-bubble technique - we know a small number of key details, the sort that imply a lot of other interesting possibilities, and we scatter them through the story instead of giving them all to the reader at once. Like taking a drop of soapy water and blowing it full of air, this gives the illusion of a sizeable object much larger than the actual material that makes it up. There isn't anything in the middle but air, but it doesn't matter because the bubble is so pretty and it doesn't actually have to last any longer than the story it's background for.

Furthermore, some of the best and most important details in my books turn out to be things I made up on the fly. The interesting contradiction here is that I need to have put considerable thought into the background before I'm able to do that sort of on-the-fly invention…but most of it doesn't have to be at the detail level. I need a structure that things have to fit into, so that everything I come up with stays consistent, but I don't need all twelve of the Lesser Obligations, especially when I don't plan on mentioning any of them specifically in the text.

Sometimes I do work out unnecessary extras, just for fun. When I was writing The Raven Ring, I worked out the entire fortunetelling deck of cards and their meanings, just because, even though I only needed ten or so cards in the actual text. I had an obscure secret history behind them, too, though none of it ever got into that book. But that was just because I was having fun, not because I had to know all that in order to write the book.

There's one more factor involved in not-making-things-up besides the time and energy: the problem of being trapped, of needing something to be X in order for the plot to work, but it can't be X because you've already made up Y. Not "you've already put Y in the book." If the background gets too full of specific, interlocking, irrelevant detail, it can cripple one's ability to suddenly see a completely different possibility…because the new thing isn't a possibility; that part of the background is already filled in.

It's a delicate balancing act. Every writer has a different threshold for how much detail is enough, how much is too much, how much has to be done in advance, how much can be made up as needed. Sometimes it changes from book to book. The point is, the threshold can change, because all a fantasy writer really has to worry about is internal consistency. True, most of us set our stories in worlds that have some vague connection with reality - that have horses and rabbits and laws of physics that are mostly like ours (except for the magic part). Where there's overlap, one does research. But there's always the possibility of something different - there don't have to be horses or rabbits or the laws of physics as we know them.

And possibility is, for me, what writing in general and fantasy in particular are all about.

Order and outlines

Back in grade school, when they taught us to write essays, the first step was always "decide on a topic," and the second one was "make an outline/plan." Nowadays there's a lot more focus on creativity, i.e., writing fiction instead of essays. Based on what I've seen in school visits and from talking with teachers and kids, though, the process they teach is pretty much the same: Pick an idea, decide on your audience, make a plan.

No writer I know works this way, not even the ones who really do pick audiences and make outlines.

I've been thinking about this a bunch lately, because I just finished a book and I'm in the process of booting up the next one. And it occurs to me that the very first thing I do is decide why.

Why covers a lot of things: why write at all, why start another book when I have so much else going on, why pick this book to do next instead of that one. There are a lot of answers, but the one answer that it occurs to me I have never heard from other writers is "to get published."

Now, possibly this is because publication is a milestone that most of my writer friends have already passed, but I don't think so. For one thing, selling one story is no guarantee that you'll sell the next. For another, I don't hear it from my unpublished writer friends, either. Not if you ask them "Why are you writing that story?" Answers range from "For fun" to "I just have to," but "To get published" is never what anyone comes up with first. Publication is always tacked on at the end "…and of course, I'd like to get it published one day."

I mentioned this to Beth-my-walking-buddy and she pointed out that publication is the validation, not the motivation. It's the thing that says I did a good job, not the reason I'm trying to do the job in the first place.

"Why am I writing this?" is not actually something I think about all that often, but knowing whether I'm writing a story to fulfill the option clause in my contract, to make one of my friends smile, because the idea wouldn't leave me alone, because I have bills to pay, or because this is a story I am desperately in love with and want to tell, does make a difference. Sometimes more than one thing is true at a time, and it's easy to forget that wanting to tell the story is really more important to me than paying the bills. And when I forget why I'm writing and what my original vision of the story was (the one that got me excited about it in the first place), I tend to wander off track, and eventually things bog down and get difficult.

The second thing I do when I'm booting up a new book is brainstorming. Sometimes, it's just tossing ideas around in my head; sometimes, it's the kind beloved of corporate managers, where I sit down with pen and paper and draw spidery diagrams all over a page; sometimes, it's focused on one particular aspect of the story. At the moment, I have two of these going: the first is an untidy heap of ideas, everything from scraps of possible dialog to potential characters and backgrounds to plots to "things I would like to see happen" (Max chewing out Jillian, for instance). Some of these will end up in the story, some not.

The other is a focused brainstorm on sevens - that is, lists of seven things (seven deadly sins, seven cardinal virtues, seven chakras, seven colors of the rainbow, seven holy mountains, seven wise men, seven wonders of the world, seven habits of successful people…every kind of seven I can think of or find). This one is because I know that my main character will be facing seven related tasks or tests, and noodling around with all the other sevens people have come up with makes me look at lots more possibilities for how to link my tasks together. I don't actually plan on using any of the real-life lists as the basis for whatever I come up with; they just sort of get me in the mood, and then I start making my own lists of seven things that might go together the way I want them to.

Eventually, I'll have enough of this story-stuff heaped up, and I'll organize it into a plot outline (the third step), and then I'll buckle down to serious writing. The point is, the outline comes rather far down the process (brainstorming for a whole novel can take a while). Outlining is not even a requirement; it's just a tool for organizing all that brainstorming that I find useful.

I think that all writers go through this sequence, though few of us break the process down into steps (and some of the steps moosh together, or happen so fast that the writer doesn't even notice). For those who don't bother outlining, the organizing and writing happen together; for writers who write to find out what happens next, the brainstorming and the organizing and the writing all happen at the same time; for of the "sit down in front of a blank screen and surprise myself" variety, even the vision of what the story is and could become happens as the words go down on the page one after another. And there's no particular reason to slow down and try to do the parts of the process one at a time, unless the just-sit-down-and-write thing stops working for a while.

I do think that it's useful to think about this stuff, because it allows me to notice when I'm trying to do things in the wrong order. If I think of my outline as a necessary first step, instead of as a tool for organizing all the brainstorming, I get extremely frustrated when it doesn't go well. But really, if I haven't done the brainstorming, if the story-stuff hasn't reached critical mass, there's nothing to organize. And a generic outline ("There are some good guys who have a problem. They start trying to solve it, but they have trouble with some bad guys…") is pretty useless.

Telling details vs. clutter

Another one of the truisms about writing that you hear a lot is "the power of the telling detail." And it's quite true; a single specific detail at exactly the right time can do more to evoke a world or a mood than pages of description, even if we're talking about really well-written description.

In a sense, the definition of "well-written description" is "a collection of telling details." But what, exactly, is a telling detail? I'd say it's something that does double or triple duty; something that points to things beyond itself. Often, it's the unexpected or unique item or action that, just by existing in that place, at that time, says something or implies a whole lot of other things.

A telling detail grabs your attention. Too many of them, all piled up, become overwhelming. A single Lalique figurine displayed in the center of a marble table can be a dramatic statement; forty figurines covering the whole tabletop looks like a yard sale. The difficulty comes with where one draws the line. A grouping of two figurines may work just as well as the single one; three may be less dramatic but more symmetrical or more graceful; four…well, you get the idea. At some point, things go from "an attractive display of items" to "a mountain of clutter."

Say I have a character who walks into a bar. I haven't thought much about the bar, so in my head, they walk into a generic gray mist labeled "bar," with whatever default bar-stuff in it that my head comes up with: tables, bar stools, a counter, kegs of beer behind.

Now, I can describe all that and maybe even make it interesting, but it's all generic, default, just the stuff I'd expect to find in a bar (and so would a reader). What I want is the thing that's different. What's the one thing in this bar that, if I mention it, every reader who walks into this bar will instantly know they're in the place I'm talking about?

I could put a collection of antique beer mugs on a shelf over the bar, if they're strange enough or eye-catching enough. I could try to come up with unique tables or stools. But for this bar, in this story, what presents itself - the thing that instantly attracts my mental attention - is the mosaic depiction of a winery over the fireplace with the starburst of cracks in the corner where the stray bullet hit during a fight last year.

I'd call that cracked mosaic a very telling detail, because it not only what the mosaic looks like; it implies a lot about the bar. It's the sort of place where fights break out, where someone might pull a gun. It probably used to be more upscale (mosaics are fairly expensive), but it isn't any more - either the owners can't afford to fix the bullet hole or they haven't bothered, and either way, they're probably not doing a lot of maintenance on the rest of the bar, either.

The mosaic and the bullet hole don't have anything to do with the plot (at least, not right now, when I'm making them up. Maybe they'll turn out to be important later on, or maybe not. I don't have to know whether I'm going to use them later, or why they might be important. All I have to know is that this is something that grabbed my attention, that is a cool detail about this bar…and if I say "From where he stood, he could just make out the starburst of cracks where a bullet had hit the mosaic…" I can let the reader fill in the tables and stools and counter.

Or, I could come up with some more details to expand and modify the impression of the bar: the beer mugs that are lopsided amateur pottery with crooked smiley faces on the side; the giant Elvis-on-black-velvet paintings that are being used as curtains on the back windows; the dusty disco ball that's off-center in the ceiling; the jazz-rock version of "West Side Story" that's playing on the Muzak. After a bit, they start to meld into an overall impression of "old, odd, maybe a little tacky, maybe a little rough." If I go on too long, the impression will change again, to this-writer-talks-to-much-I'm-skippping-straight-to-the-action.

Exactly where the line is depends on the writer, the story, the style the writer has chosen, the reader, and maybe the phase of the moon. There isn't a clear-cut, unchanging rule for this stuff. It's like riding a bicycle - you can describe mass and force and momentum with equations, but what you really need is the feel for doing it.

And yes, in order to get that feel, you fall off a lot at first and skin your knees and bang your elbows. But that's what it takes for most of us to get that sense of balance. Once you have it, you don't have to think about what you're doing any more, unless you're navigating a particularly tricky stretch of road (and even then, it's not so much thinking about what you're doing and controlling every aspect as it is about paying attention and concentrating and keeping that feel of balance).

Analyzing

One of the things that professors of literature have been doing ever since they were invented is trying to analyze literature of all kinds. And one of the chief ways of analyzing something is to break it down into small pieces, label them, and then look for the patterns in how they fit together.

Breaking a story apart can be done in various ways. You can talk about structural units: sentence, paragraph, scene, chapter, section. You can talk about the different elements of story: plot, characterization, setting, backstory. You can talk about the different ways of presenting the story: dialog, description, commentary, dramatization, narrative. You can talk about the stages of writing that everyone goes through: thinking, writing, revising, proofreading. You can talk about dramatic or emotional units or structure: rising action, turning point, complication, climax, falling action, resolution. You can take any of the various elements or ways or units or stages and break them down into subcategories: point of view character, major characters, minor characters, walk-ons; types of description (static, active; sight vs. sound vs. smell; objective vs. subjective or filtered).

All these various ways of taking stories apart overlap. Rising action takes place across chapters and scenes full of dialog, plot, description, characters. Characterization happens during scenes, via dramatization, dialog, action and reaction. And the sentences and paragraphs and structure are there for everything - they have to be, they're how we tell stories.

The terminology we use for analyzing stories isn't totally standardized, but it's not totally random, either. This doesn't matter at all when you're all alone trying to figure out how to fix your latest book; if you find it useful to define rising action as "any time the main character goes up in a balloon," that's fine. If, however, you try to talk about your fiction with other writers, you are likely to have a difficult time if you are using your own idiosyncratic definitions for terms that everyone else thinks they understand. You'd be better off making up a new term - maybe "balloon action"? - because even though you'll have to explain what it means, the people you're talking to won't already have their own ideas about it, and won't keep getting distracted or mixing up your meaning with the more common usage.

Analyzing stories and taking them apart to find out how they work is something I find fascinating. I'm reasonably good at it, and I learn a lot from it. But there are things I don't learn, and one of them is what I need to do in my story to make it effective. I can pick up specific techniques for writing dialog or description from looking at the way someone else did it. Sometimes, I can even figure out that Writer X always does Y in a tense scene, or when X is trying to make a particular kind of point about her characters.

None of that tells me whether the same technique will work in my tense scenes, or for my characters. Sometimes I try it and realize that doing Y in this scene doesn't make it tense; it makes it look as if I'm trying too hard. And when I notice this, I take it out immediately.

And the reason Y doesn't work in my story often doesn't have anything to do with the technique or the tension or whether I'm executing it properly. The majority of the time, it has to do with the rest of the story. Because as I said earlier, everything overlaps, everything affects everything else. It's a lot like cooking; there are some ingredients that you just can't use in the same dish - or if you do, you have to add them very carefully in a particular order, or they combine in ways you don't want. If you add the milk to a cream sauce too fast, you get lumps; if you start by melting cheese and then try to add milk and flour and butter, you get a horrible stringy mess instead of a nice, smooth cream sauce, even though the ingredients are the same. (I tried that once in college. "Horrible stringy mess" barely begins to describe it.)

Even following a recipe sometimes doesn't work, and you don't know why. I had a miserable failure with a layered vegetable terrine that I made for the last tea we had here. I swear I did everything the same as last time, but the thing didn't set up properly, and ended up more like a very thick vegetable sauce. We eventually decided that it had something to do with the humidity, but really, that's just a guess.

Writing is like that, too. Sometimes all the analyzing in the world doesn't help, and you get vegetable sauce instead of a nice, solid terrine, and you can't figure out why. Do the best you can; come up with a theory that you hope will help you avoid the problem next time; and then let it go and move on.

And if you already know that you're the sort of writer who isn't helped by analyzing things, forget the analyzing part. When you know you want toast, it isn't really helpful to take the toaster apart and line the pieces up on the counter in neat rows. Heck, sometimes when you want toast, the thing to do is stick a piece of bread on a fork and hold it over a fire, and forget about all these modern gizmos.

Narrative Summary

Narrative summary is possibly the most flexible of the various ways of presenting a story. Narrative summary doesn't necessarily tie the author down to chronological order, the way dialog and dramatization do, nor does it require a focus on one particular aspect of the story, as description often does. This makes narrative summary at once both one of the most useful tools in a writer's toolbox, and one of the trickiest.

Basically, narrative summary is just telling some of the story in whatever way seems to make the most sense. It gets used for everything from brief transitions between scenes ("He left the office and went down to the coffee shop.") to longer summaries of what's been happening ("The next six months were hard on everyone. Even after George found the whatchamacallit and Celia figured out where it fit into the alien machine, nobody could get it working. They almost ran out of air twice when the electrolysis machine broke. Etc.").

Infodumps are chunks of narrative summary; so are most historical prologues, appendices, and those plot summaries of what happened in the previous two books of a series that crop up occasionally. Narrative summary can even crop up in dialog, as when the detective is presenting the case against the murderer, or when the guy who's been missing for a week finally shows up and fills everyone in on where he's been and what he's been doing. Bits of narrative summary can be embedded in the middle of dramatized scenes to provide backstory or widen the scope. Traditional fairy tales are almost nothing but narrative summary, with maybe a few lines of dialog.

All these possibilities can make it a little hard to get a handle on narrative summary, and it's complicated even more by the possibilities for stylistic variation. The style for narrative summary ranges from what's referred to as plain, simple, or invisible to detailed or even elaborate. "The elders took their places on the dais. Elder Morgan stepped forward and presented Janet's plan; after much discussion, the villagers voted in favor." is plain narrative summary; "The elders filed in and seated themselves, one by one, on the dais, their white hair gleaming in the lamplight. Elder Morgan hobbled forward, and in a creaky voice that barely carried to the rear of the hall, read the plan that Janet had cooked up. When he finished, the villagers began talking…and talking…and talking. When the elder finally called for a vote two hours later, three-quarters of the men raised their spears in favor." is more detailed and colorful, but it's still narrative summary.

When you have a brief transition or a bit of narrative summary that's embedded in a dramatized scene, it's usually (not always) most effective to stick to the plain style of narrative summary. If all you need is a brief transition to get the characters from Time-and-Place A to Time-and-Place B, "He left the office and went down to the coffee shop" will do the job. Within a scene, one generally doesn't want to bring the action to a screeching halt by suddenly calling attention to a bit of backstory, and a plain style (or one that matches the level of description in the scene, anyway) is likely to be the least noticeable.

The more lengthy the narrative summary section, however, the more interesting and memorable it needs to be in order to hold the reader's attention. "Interesting and memorable" can come from content or from providing more concrete details and making stronger word choices than one would for a plain/invisible style (and really, trying to write three pages, or even three paragraphs, of narrative summary "invisibly" is just asking for readers to skip over them). Ideally, one would do both.

For example, "Sorry, Robert," Jane said. She'd been there when Robert murdered Sam, and she wasn't about to give him reason to make her his second victim" is plain style, but if this is the first we've heard about Robert murdering someone or Jane being there, the revelation alone is plenty dramatic enough to be memorable. On the other hand, "She'd been crouched behind the sofa when Robert cut Sam's throat two years before…" isn't much longer, but it's considerably more specific and dramatic. Possibly too dramatic; if I don't want the murder and Jane's presence to overshadow what's going on in the rest of the scene, I'll stick to the plain version. If I do want this revelation to cast a long shadow, I'll opt for the second.

The plain-vs.-detail decision also applies when the writer is using narrative summary as a third alternative to the usual "show it or skip it" system that writers are so often encouraged to adopt. "For six months, they worked on the gizmo, to no avail. Finally in April, they…" makes a very fine, plain, simple transition if nothing interesting or story-relevant happens during those six months. There are at least three times when a writer may want a lot more than this single sentence, however: first, when things happen during that six-month period that are interesting and story-relevant, but not quite important enough to show in detail; second, when the writer wants the reader to have more of a sense that six months have actually gone by and the next scene can't possibly be happening two or three hours after the previous one; and third, when the writer isn't actually sure whether anything interesting or story-relevant happens in that six months and can't find out without writing more of a summary than "For six months, they worked on the gizmo."

That last is, I think, more common than a lot of writers want to admit, and the biggest problem with it is that if one writes the six-month summary and discovers that nothing really interesting or story-relevant happens after all, one has to cut it. Lots of us really, really hate doing that. When one has made up several pages of details, there are nearly always cool bits that the writer loves somewhere in there, and it is extremely hard to be clear-eyed about which of them are really needed in the story and which aren't. It's even harder to be ruthless enough to cut the ones that one dearly loves (and spent hours figuring out), even after it's become obvious that they just don't belong in this book.

Deeper still

Years ago, before I was ever published, I was at a convention where Gordy Dickson was answering writing questions for a mob of would-be hopefuls. And somebody asked the "how do I write deep characters?" question, and I was kind of disappointed in the answer, because it was all basic stuff I already knew. I wanted something more than that.

In the interest of not making the same mistake, I decided to do a follow on post to the one I did Wednesday on getting depth into your characters. It's still a two-part problem - first, knowing your characters; second, getting that down on the page. I think that's part of what makes it so difficult for some writers…and such a difficult question for experienced writers to answer. Because nobody is equally good at both parts, and when someone asks you "How do I…?" you usually don't know which part of the problem they're having trouble with, and they can't tell you because they've never thought about it that way.

The other problem is that for a lot of writers, me included, both things happen at more or less the same time. Those who are before or after writers - who make up your characters in depth and in detail in advance, or who finish a first draft and only then go back and add characterization - tend not to have this problem, and occasionally give those of us who do have it funny looks.

But if you are one of those folks who finds out about characters by writing them, you're basically trying to do both things at once: figure out things about your characters and get them down on the page. This means that, especially in the early parts of a book, you have to constantly be aware (on some level) of exactly what each individual would do (and possibly why) in the particular situation. "What each individual would do" encompasses actions, dialog, reactions, stage business - everything you might be able to say about the character at any given time.

In addition, you also have to be aware of opportunities to tell the reader more/find out more about each character. This is a little different from being aware of what they'd do in a particular situation, because "what would she do here?" is focused on the now of the story, and the characters actions/reactions to the important onstage events. Opportunities are … more general. They're places where you can slip in a bit of backstory or sidestory or personality, but you don't really have to.

For instance, say I'm writing a scene with George, Janet, and Cindy, with George as the viewpoint character. The three of them are searching the library for the missing will, when George discovers a bag of crack cocaine hidden behind the encyclopedias.

At this point, I have to decide how everyone is going to react, specifically. In an actual book, I'd know these people to some degree already, so I'd know that George would make a shocked noise and wonder whether he should touch it or tell the two women (since he's the POV, I can give his thoughts), that Janet wouldn't even look up from the shelves she's going through as she says "If you have found something, do articulate it clearly instead of making pig-like grunting noises," and that Cindy will immediately come over to see what it is, probably knocking something over on her way. In other words, George is a well-meaning, kind of fussy prig, and totally out of his depth; Janet is a bit snarky and doesn't like George much; and Cindy is a bit of a curious puppy.

Those are the specific actions each of the characters take - physical actions, dialog, emotional reaction for the viewpoint character. They need to reflect what each character is like as an individual coping with whatever is currently happening right in front of them, and they need to be consistent with the way the character has been portrayed in the story so far. When George says "It's not the will; it's a bag of drugs," does Janet drop the book she's holding, or does she freeze and then set it back on the shelf with careful precision before she comes over? Does Cindy stand there staring wide-eyed, or does she babble questions? Either I already know (because of what I've written so far), or I have to think about all the myriad ways each of them could react, and then decide which one is right for the particular character.

In addition, the scene gives me an opportunity to reveal extra stuff about one or more of the characters. Maybe Janet orders everyone not to touch the bag and Cindy grumbles that she watches too many cop shows; maybe George's second thought, after he gets over the shock, is to wonder whether the cops will let him go in time to feed the dog I didn't know he had until now. I don't have to put in anything about Janet's obsession with cop shows or George's dog (or is it a cat, or maybe a bird? A cockatiel, perhaps? That'd be interestingly different…).

Neither the cop show obsession nor the cockatiel is, at present, relevant to the main storyline. They don't even exist yet…but if I put them in here, I will have to deal with them, one way or another, for the rest of the story. They probably won't matter…but they might develop as the story goes along.

The point is, I really do need to give the actions and reactions to finding the drugs when they search the library, but I don't particularly need to mention the cockatiel or the cop shows, or have Cindy start babbling about her cousin who pawned his mother's wedding ring to buy drugs fifteen years ago. The situation gives me a chance to bring them up (or invent them on the fly) if I want to, but that's all. The situation doesn't really lend itself to mentioning Janet's interest in chess, or George's fly-fishing hobby, or the fact that Cindy volunteers at the local animal shelter; other scenes may provide opportunities to mention those things…or not.

If all I do is to provide each character with an individual voice and unique but characteristic reactions/behaviors, I'll have characters who are interesting, but perhaps a little flat. If I pick up on every single opportunity that arises to shoehorn in irrelevant-but-interesting background details, the book will almost certainly bog down and perhaps grind to a halt. The trick is to find the right balance, for the characters and for the story, between too much detail and too little.

Depth

Matt G. asked: The burning question for me is character depth. How can you encourage the readers to identify with your characters? How can you add "depth" to characters - so the reader is rooting for them?

This is a fairly difficult question to answer, largely because it's something that took me a long time to get a handle on. I still do it mainly by instinct, which makes it kind of hard to articulate, but I'll give it a shot.

The first point is that "depth" doesn't actually have a lot to do with whether readers identify with or root for a particular character. It's perfectly possible to get readers rooting for characters they don't identify with and who have no depth or complexity to speak of - the popularity of certain cartoons, comic books, and pulp novels proves it. It's perfectly possible for the villain to have enormous complexity and depth…and this often makes for a great story, in spite of the fact that one generally doesn't want one's readers identifying with or rooting for the villain.

My second point is that there's a reason why both Matt and I put scare quotes around "depth" - and that reason is that it's one of those writing terms that gets thrown around a lot, but that doesn't have a terribly good definition. Everybody is supposed to know what it means, and accept that it's highly desirable in fiction. For purposes of this post, I'm going to claim that "depth" in a character means that the particular character has more going on with him/her than just their role in the story - probably a lot more.

All that extra stuff that's going on can come from a lot of different directions. It can be skills or knowledge; aspects of personality; old mental or physical scars; needs and wants; hobbies; relationships. In a novel, some of it may be crucial to one or more subplots involving the character. Some of it may be background experiences that shaped the character. A lot of it may be stuff that's irrelevant to the plot and/or that mostly happens offstage.

The point is that real people have a lot going on. They have jobs and hobbies, relatives and former romantic interests; they dropped out of ballet class in ninth grade but still like to watch (or can't stand going to the ballet because it reminds them); they wanted to be rock stars or firefighters or astronauts when they were nine or thirteen; they get on really well with one sibling but not another (but they'll be right there when either one is in trouble); they have secret fears and crushes. And all of this is part of them, and affects how they act, react, and interact with the people and places around them.

The writer who wants a character with "depth" thus has two things to do: 1) Figure out or make up what all that extra stuff is, and 2) Get enough of it into the story so that the reader is aware that it's there.

The vast majority of "how to do characters" books and web sites that I've looked at assume that the writer is going to do #1 in advance; that is, that the writer can and should start by filling out a character questionnaire that has everything on it from hair and eye color to location and shape of scars to childhood trauma to name of first pet. Which is all very well, if that works for you, but it never has for me. Filling out those questionnaires (some of them are ten pages!) gives me a large, miscellaneous heap of facts and quirks and odds and ends that never manages to gel into an actual character.

I usually find out about my characters during the writing process, as I write. The group sits down to a meal and suddenly there's a fight over who gets the last serving of David's green beans, and suddenly I know that a) David does the cooking, and is good at it, and b) green beans are favorites for both George and Janet, but not Harold (and Sissy likes them but not enough to fight about). And there are writers whose first drafts are really, really thin, who go back during their first rewrite and make the stuff up then. Before, during, or after; it's your choice when to make up/figure out what else is going on with your characters besides the main plot.

And it doesn't all have to be worked out at length and in depth. I may never find out how David became such a good cook…or maybe something more will come out in Chapter 17. In fact, one of the things that provides character depth is that some things aren't ever totally explained; they're just how the character is. What is important is that whatever is in the story is internally consistent - that David doesn't make a gourmet meal in Chapter 3, then is unable to tell the difference between an onion and a head of garlic in Chapter 10.

This is the problem, for me, with the questionnaires. The assumption is that as long as you know up front that Jack secretly knits, hates cats, loves Mozart and the Beatles, and has seen every movie made in English before 1939, you'll remember to use those things in the story when and as the opportunity arises. But if what I have is a big heap o' facts, rather than an idea of a person, I have to keep looking up all the stuff I decided before I can figure out which bit to use (or not use) in a scene. For some people, though, having all that stuff decided up front and written down frees up their imagination to do more important things about the plot and structure when they get to actually writing the story.

As for getting it into the story - you do it the same way you do any other aspect of characterization: by showing it in what the character says, what she does, what he thinks, what other people think and say about them. It all boils down to thinking about what this particular person would do, say, notice, react to in any given situation, rather than just running down the plot checklist.

And you don't have to get all the character's stuff out in the open in the course of the story. Sam's secret teddy-bear collection may never come up during the course of the slam-bang action-adventure he's currently involved in, and that's fine.

Which brings me to a final point: you don't need to know vast amounts of background information about every character in your novel. The doorman at the hotel whose one line in the book is "May I take your bag, sir?" does not need a ten-page background questionnaire. (If you want to do it for fun or practice, fine, but you're not going to need to know all that stuff.) The receptionist that the protagonist flirts with three or four times as she's heading into the office may need a bit more background, but he's not going to need as much as the protagonist herself, nor the protagonist's sidekicks. Trying to develop every character who walks onstage in the same depth and detail will just make you crazy.

Where are you?

There's an analogy that's been around for a long time – I've been using it myself for years – comparing writing a novel to a long-distance road trip, usually at night. The comparison goes, in the car, you can only see as far as the headlights light up, but you only need to see that far at any given moment. You can get from New York all the way to San Francisco without ever seeing the whole road at once; in fact, you can't see the whole road at once when you're in the car. You can only see it all at once if you're in a satellite, which doesn't do you a lot of good if you're driving.

It's the same way with writing; you don't have to have a detailed plan for the whole book, you just need to know where you're going and have a clear idea of the next chapter or two. As long as your planning stays a chapter or two ahead, you can get to the end of the book that way.

It occurred to me recently that this analogy makes two really key assumptions that aren't necessarily the case. First, it assumes you know where you're going (and that you care where you're going and whether you get there). A sizeable minority of writers don't work that way. Their writing "road trip" is more like driving around for a day or two and then looking at their surroundings and going "Hey, we're close to Denver! Let's go there." And it works fine for them…but that brings me to the other key assumption, the one that really matters.

And that's knowing where you are. If you're trying to drive to Chicago, and you don't know whether you're starting in New York or San Francisco, you don't know whether to head west or east. If you're trying to drive to Chicago, and you're starting in Honolulu or Beijing, you're going to have a serious problem when you get to the Pacific Ocean. And if you don't know where you are, you certainly aren't going to be able to figure out what interesting places might be nearby to visit or even to finish off an open-ended road trip in.

Knowing where you are is something that's so basic that most of us do it unconsciously, which is why the original analogy doesn't usually address it, but only looks at where you're going and how you get there. And most of the time, this works just fine. Every once in a while, though, someone I know gets stuck or runs into trouble because they're doing the equivalent of trying to cross the Pacific Ocean in a car, or driving east from Chicago in hopes of arriving in Los Angeles in a day or two.

Invariably, when this happens, it takes forever for the writer to sort out what the problem is. Once the person finally takes a look at where they are and what they're doing, it's usually a head-banging moment – "Dang! How did I not realize that I need a BOAT?" or "Geez, I'm in Pennsylvania, not Colorado! No wonder this doesn't look much like the Rocky Mountains."

What I mean by "where you are" in the writing sense is basic stuff, like what kind of story you're actually telling, as opposed to the one you may think you're telling (a friend recently got tied up for months because she was trying to write action-adventure, when the part she'd already written was clearly comedy-of-manners), who the protagonist and villain really are (they may be different from the ones you started off thinking they were), what the real problem is that the protagonist and friends are currently facing, and where facing their problems is likely to lead.

It's not easy to do this, because it requires backing off from one's preconceptions about what one has been doing and where one has been heading, and taking a long, hard look at where one actually is. And, sometimes, admitting that one is completely lost, and even the map is no help, because one can't figure out where to go next to get back on track if one isn't aware that one is in Pennsylvania and not Colorado.

Crit groups and editors and first readers can make a reasonably good analogy for asking directions at the local gas station, but one still has to listen – and also, one has to remember that the directions aren't always totally correct. Still, it's often a lot easier for someone else to see where a book is than it is for a writer to let go of what they thought they were doing…though one does need to remember to ask, and not everyone is good at that part.

It is a great pity that there isn't a writing equivalent of a GPS system (preferably one that marks out all the road construction and missing bridges up ahead). Until someone invents such a thing, however, we all have to muddle through the hard way.

Scenes

scene: in a drama, a subdivision of an act or of a play not divided into acts…."scene" is also the name given to a "dramatic" method of narration that presents events at roughly the same pace as that at which they are supposed to be occurring, i.e., usually in detail and with substantial use of dialogue. In this sense, the scenic narrative method is contrasted with "summary," in which the duration of the story's events is compressed into a brief account.

–The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms

Scenes are one of the fundamental building blocks of narrative fiction - so fundamental, in fact, that almost all of the how-to-write books I looked at in the course of writing this post hardly talked about them at all, any more than they talk about spelling or grammar. The assumption seems to be that if you write at all, you already know what a scene is and how to write it.

The two key characteristics of a scene are place and time. The term originated in the theater, where the definition was basically "continuous action that happens in one place at one time, and when it's done we have to change the set or at least lower the curtain to let people know that we've just skipped a couple of hours." Characters can come and go during the course of a scene; the focus can change from one person to another; but the place where it happens generally stays the same and the scene itself runs continuously from start to finish.

Note that I didn't say anything about action. Stuff happens during a scene; people move, talk, punch someone else, whatever. But it's not the action that makes the scene; the scene is the container for the action. Place and time constrain what can happen. You're not going to see an army on horseback riding to battle if the scene takes place in Lady Grenville's drawing room; you're not going to write a half-hour argument if the scene takes place during a two-minute commercial break while the characters are watching TV.

Not that action is completely unimportant. A so-called scene that simply described several hours of an empty, unchanging drawing room doesn't make for much of a scene or story in most cases (though Ray Bradbury pulled it off in the magnificent tour de force "There Will Come Soft Rains.") In most cases, the point of choosing this place and that time interval to show as a scene is that one's characters are doing something interesting and story-relevant there and then.

Scenes are the "show" part of "show and tell." "They spent three hours in the library, hunting for the next clue" is a summary, not a scene. "They walked into the library. 'You take the shelves on the right,' Sandy told Bob. 'Dan, you do the ones on the left. I'm going up by the windows, and we'll meet in the middle.' Dan nodded. 'Yell if you find anything,' he said over his shoulder as he started toward the back corner. 'Anything at all.' The other two nodded soberly at his back and went off to begin the hunt." is a scene (an extremely short one, granted, but this is just a blog post, after all).

Scenes have a beginning, middle, and end, but except for the very last scene in a story or novel, the "end" of a scene is never a complete resolution; it leads onward. The action and events that take place here and now are over, but there's more going on elsewhere or later on that is or that will be important. That bit of openness at the end of every scene is usually some kind of unanswered question (Will the hero escape from the snake pit? What is Uncle Al doing while all this was going on? Who wrote that letter? Where did the cheese come from? Is she really in love with the lawyer? If the clue isn't in the library, where is it…or did someone else get to it first? What are the consequences of whatever just happened?), and it is a large part of what ties a novel together and keeps it moving forward.

What all this means is that scenes are where all the basic elements of writing - dialog, description, action, characters, setting, conflict, viewpoint, etc. - come together at once. Sometimes you can strip away some or most of these elements - there are scenes that are pure dialog, for instance - but that doesn't work as a regular thing. It's too abstract for most stories except as an occasional teaser (who are the characters behind these two voices, what is the mysterious stuff they're talking about, and why is it relevant to the rest of the story?).

Juggling all those other elements makes it easy for some writers to lose track of those key scene boundaries, place and time. A scene that was supposed to be a brief, tense dinner-table conversation drags on over dessert and coffee because the characters are still doing and saying things that follow one another and never seem to get to a good stopping spot, though they're long past the point of being story-relevant. Time - and the scene - just keeps rolling forward until all the characters finally go off to bed. This is why so many beginning writers seem unable to end scenes or chapters unless their viewpoint character falls asleep or is knocked unconscious; they're being true to life (in which we keep on doing stuff as long as we're awake) instead of being true to the story (in which most of the stuff the character does - dressing, eating, etc. - doesn't contribute anything to the story).

Asking "where does this scene start?" and "what is the end?" are important questions. Starting too early or too late, or stopping too early or too late, can throw the scene out of balance even if everything else is working just fine. If the scene is about the tense dinner conversation, it may be tempting to lead into it by starting with someone setting the table, but unless they're also poisoning the plates or rearranging the seating in a way that's going to cause trouble later, the table-setting is too early in most cases. The important/interesting action that's taking place here-and-now is the tense conversation; show that, with maybe a line or two of lead-in to keep things smooth, if you need it, and when the conversation is over, stop and move on to the next scene or transition.

If you're having trouble with this, try studying some plays. The scenes are all laid out right there in front of you, and since they're almost nothing but dialog, there isn't a lot going on to distract you from the structure of the scenes, especially their beginnings and endings.

Rules? What Rules?

Recently, a fan came up to me, enthusiastically waving Thirteenth Child. "This book blew me away!" he said. "It breaks all the rules! How did you do that?"

Naturally, I looked him straight in the eye and said, "What rules?"

What most would-be-writers mean when they're talking about "breaking the rules" are the absolute pronouncements about style, structure, and content that purport to be guidelines for "good writing."  There are tons of how-to-write books and web sites and articles with names like "Ten Rules of Writing" (or five, or eight, or twenty - ten is popular, but there's plenty of variation). Most of them have some kind of authority behind them - a famous or bestselling author, a professor of English Lit or Creative Writing, the leader of a workshop, an editor or agent. They range from pointed restatements of basic English grammar ("Don't use no double negatives") to "rules" that are actually just good basic writing advice ("Make the reader care about the main character.")

A lot are things that people overdo or underdo or get sidetracked by; things that can be misused; things that are really a lot more difficult to do well than they look (and thus things that a lot of beginners can't manage to pull off); things that have been done so often (and often so badly) that a lot of people (readers and editors both) find them cringe-worthy.

But they aren't things that you can't do. "Hard to make work" does not equal "completely impossible, so don't even try." They aren't even things that you shouldn't ever do; "Often done wrong" does not equal "Your story will automatically be rejected if you even think about trying this."

Let's look at a couple. First up: Never write in the first person.

This one cropped up on at least half a dozen web sites, and…excuse me, what? Last I heard, there are still a lot of first-person novels getting published. Possibly it started off as some kind of warning against writing that gets too autobiographical? I don't know; I don't understand the point of this one at all. The only real trick to first person is making sure the narrative voice is that of the character's, not yours; it's kind of like method acting. Yes, some people have a horribly hard time with it; if you're one, then by all means stick to third person. But as a general rule, this one makes no sense to me at all.

Next comes Never open a book with weather/dialog/description/the character waking up in the morning/a prologue.

This is actually five different so-called rules that crop up constantly; when you put them all together like this, I have to wonder if there's any way left to begin a book at all. OK, "It was a dark and stormy night" is supposedly one of the most famous bad opening lines in literature…but a) it's memorable, and b) it's considered bad mostly because the sentence goes on for nearly another half-page of heavy-handed description without actually getting anywhere.  Still, I don't see anything wrong with starting a book in any of those ways if it is the right spot for that particular book. Starting with weather is a bad idea if that particular story really needs to start with dialog or a description of the manor house; opening with a character waking up worked fine for Kafka's "The Metamorphosis" (of course, the character woke up to discover he'd become a cockroach…).

Recently, the rules lists have added Never use a verb other than "said" to label dialog.

Really. So I'm supposed to throw out dozens of perfectly good English words just because somebody doesn't like characters who shout, whisper, growl, mumble, etc.? I'll admit that writers who never use "said" can be tiresome to read, but the same can be said for those who never use anything else. The problem is with the word never, not with said or its near-synonyms.

And then there's the ever-popular Never use an adverb to modify the verb "said."

Once again, this is overkill. Yes, a lot of beginners overuse adverbs; all their characters seem always to say things gracefully or sternly or moderately or admiringly or whatever-ly. And yes, usually if the dialog is done right, an adverb isn't necessary. Usually. A blanket prohibition like this, however, denies the usefulness of lines like: "Why, you rotten, sneaking, low-down bastard," she said appreciatively. And there are always cases where the dialog is too simple or plain to convey the tone the writer wants (though in a lot of those, I'd usually use one of the near-synonyms for "said" that the last "rule" forbade me to use: "Yes," he snapped, rather than "Yes," he said angrily.)

And the equally popular Never use the passive voice, often extended to Never use any of the forms of the verb "to be," just in case.

I've done the rant on passive voice before; basically, it boils down to "sometimes nothing else will do." "He's been poisoned!" is passive voice, and it's more elegant than "Somebody has poisoned him!" Similarly, "The ambassador, having been insulted, left in a huff" is shorter and more elegant than "After somebody insulted him, the ambassador left in a huff" or "The ambassador, whom somebody had insulted, left in a huff." And the verb "to be" is not only arguably the single most useful verb in the English language, it is an indispensible part of several tenses (the perfect and progressive ones); throwing it out completely and indiscriminately is very much a baby-with-the-bathwater thing.

And then I ran across these two: Never use second person and Never write in omniscient.

Combine those with the "rule" I started with, and once again there's hardly anything left. OK, second person seems kind of gimmicky to me, but I've read one or two things where it worked just fine, so I can't see forbidding it entirely. I'd class it as "extra-hard to pull off," rather than "impossible, don't even try." Omniscient is what Patrick O'Brian's popular sea-stories are written in, among other things; again, it strikes me as silly bordering on stupid to forbid an entire technique or viewpoint that actual published writers are clearly using quite successfully.

Finally, there's the perennial favorite Show, don't tell, which I've seen modified as Never describe or summarize anything; always dramatize it instead.

Which pretty much means that the entire Frontier Magic trilogy is obviously unpublishable and will never sell, along with most memoirs and fiction intended to be similar to them. Oh, wait; memoirs have been hot sellers for several years now, and the second book of the trilogy is just out, in spite of the tremendous amount of "telling" or summarizing I had to do in order to cram several years' worth of events into each volume.

Speaking for myself, I'd sum it all up as If somebody's writing "rule" has the word "never" in it, or can be easily rephrased so as to have the word "never" in it, it's probably safe to ignore, though you might want to think about it in passing just to make sure that whatever you're doing instead is working.

I think that's too long to be a writing rule, though. Which suits me just fine.