Patricia C. Wrede's Blog, page 69

Big three redux

I've talked more than once about the Big Three - plot, characterization, and setting. They started off as the earliest writing advice I recall getting (and I wish I could remember the name of the writer who told me that, so I could credit him properly), as the three things one can do in a scene. The longer I am in this business, though, the more I realize that the Big Three are a lot more than just elements in a scene.

Specifically, as the basic building blocks of story, the Big Three are the source of a whole lot of problems, flaws, and frustrations for writers. Nearly every writer I know has had problems with one or more of them, at one time or another. Most writers don't seem to have any problem picking out which one of the three they're best (or worst) at. Most readers, if you get them thinking even for a short while, will unhesitatingly point to one of the three as being the strong suit of each favorite writer on their bookshelf.

I'd say that for me, my strongest suit is plot. Yes, I put a lot of work into the twists and turns, but it's fun work; it's easy; it's nothing I break my brains over. I don't find myself avoiding writing a scene because there's a plot twist coming up that I'm uncertain about, and I have no hesitation at all about letting something come up unexpectedly during the writing process that I know will alter all my plot plans, because I'm confident that I can make it work out, one way or another.

Setting comes second for me. I think I'm good at settings, but they don't come quite as naturally to me as plots. I put a lot of work in here, too, but I always seem to miss something crucial, and I'm always fighting the low-level fear that I've missed something that ought to be obvious, or that I've contradicted myself by saying in one spot that dragons are vegetarians and then showing a dragon happily chowing down a cow in another. (Note to self: Cows are not vegetables.) I'm always much too aware of all the research I haven't done.

Characters are the area I've always felt were my weakest point. Yes, really. Some of that is a process thing. With plot and setting, I can make lists of the things that I need to put in (see Fantasy Worldbuilding Questions), and charts of the way things have to go to get to the end. I can draw maps. I can write reams of "history" that will never actually get into the story. Plot and setting, I understand, and if I don't, I can usually analyze them and figure them out.

But characters are people. I don't understand real-life people very well, not even the ones I've known for fifty-odd years. I feel that I have a better understanding of fictional characters, but it's all on a gut-level. Making lists doesn't help. Well, maybe with a character's personal appearance (brown eyes, black hair, medium height, scar on elbow…). But when it comes to a character's personality, I'm always working on instinct, and it's taken me years to get to the point where I have some of the same kind of trust in my character-instinct that I have in my plot- and setting-instincts.

This is not a bad thing, nor a good one; it's just how my process works. The point here is that I've known for a very long time that characterization was my weakest point … and that means that I always have something to work on when I'm up for working at improving my writing. This is not to say that I always put "work on characters" front and center - I found it much easier, especially at the beginning of my career, to start by working at techniques I didn't know how to use. Like dialog tags and point of view and flashbacks.

But ever since I recognized characters as my main weakness, "work on characterization" has always been at least in the number two working-on-this position. The Seven Towers - work on alternating viewpoints; work on characters. The Harp of Imach Thyssel - work on multiple viewpoints; work on characters. Like that.

I have learned a lot this way, and I am still learning. I recommend it to your attention.

Water, fertilizer, and other care

When would-be writers ask "where do you get your ideas?" they are often asking the wrong question. They're struggling to get started on a story, but they're not actually starting from scratch. They have an idea. It's just not enough to go on with yet.

So what these folks really want and need to know isn't where to get a new story idea; it's how to get the idea they have to "enough."

"Critical mass" is what I call that point, and I have about twenty story ideas backed up that aren't at the critical mass point yet. They're ideas; they're interesting to me; but they don't have quite enough there for them to really start moving. Once I finish the current book, I will consult with my agent and editor, pick one of those ideas, and start developing it. I expect that with sufficient attention, I could get any one of them going within a couple of weeks, but if I give it my best shot and it still won't start moving on its own within that time frame, I'll send it back to the farm team and pick a different one.

In other words, I don't just sit around waiting for one of those twenty-plus ideas to start growing. I work at it, the way gardners work at their gardening. Water, fertilizer, sunshine, drainage…

What does all that mean in terms of story?

For me, working at an idea starts by looking at what I have, and turning it this way and that to see different possibilities. I've had two of them start inching through the development stage in the past week. One glommed on to a passing bit of background - a notion I had that wasn't even really an idea yet, more of a proto-idea or possibility. I was considering adding it to the idea queue, but it wasn't even enough for that - no characters, no plot, not even a complete bit of background, just an idea of a room and what people did there. And since I've been thinking about my idea queue a lot lately (because that's what happens when I'm a month or less from finishing up a current project), I found myself thinking "You know, this might work in Max's story…" And the next thing I knew, I was thinking about exactly how it might work, which characters it might affect directly, how that would play into their behavior, all the new plot-possibilities that it would open up…

The other one had about three pages written, but just…wasn't moving. (It's one of the ones I put back in the queue the last time I went through this process.) It didn't need anything new to get it going; all it needed was a shift in perspective. I was running through my list with my agent (see "consult with," above), when I realized that the problem was that I'd picked the wrong character to be the main character and central viewpoint. "This would be much more interesting if I picked one of the characters things are actually happening to," I thought, and bingo, large chunks of plot started rearranging themselves in a much more fascinating order.

Both of those story-developments were moderately serendipitous - I wasn't so much poking at those specific ideas as I was sort of generally thinking about my to-write list and which things I might want to work on next and whether I could actually get any of them going. But I've been doing this for over thirty years now, and my backbrain has gotten into the habit of tossing possibilities up in the air when I'm at this stage. (Habit can be a wonderful thing, when it works in your favor.) From here on, though, I won't be sitting around waiting for something else to bubble up out of the compost. I'll be poking around and trying out different possibilities.

The way I do this is usually to shuttle back and forth between plot, backstory, and characters, looking at what I don't know about them yet and trying out different things to see if they fit. Does this main character have any relatives - an aunt, perhaps, or a brother? Maybe a cousin? Aunt doesn't feel right, nor does brother; I think she's an orphan. A distant cousin, though…that might work. Put those down on the list as possiblities - orphan, distant cousin - switch to plot. Is she going to save the world? Revamp her society? No, those don't feel quite right. Staving off some sort of catastrophe, okay, but not a world-threatening one. City-threatening, maybe, or country-threatening. No idea what it could be yet, so on to the next thing.

Background…she's an orphan, so when did her parents die? Right away, I'm positive she didn't know them, so it must have happened early in her life. How? War? No, doesn't feel right. Plague? That works. So there was a big plague about ten to twelve years back. Maybe that ties into my present-day plot? Maybe some industries are still just starting to come back? Not sure; think about that later. Back to the plot and characters - am I going to have a villain? X could make a good one, but I like him too much already…maybe there's someone in the shadows behind him? Like the emperor behind Darth Vader. Yes, good, that works. So who's the new guy in the shadows, and what's his background? What's he after? No clue, so move on to the next bit; his part will come clear sooner or later.

Eventually, all these bits and pieces will start coming together and I'll write my first, tentative (and completely wrong) plot outline. This is more to give me something to ring changes on than it is a serious attempt at figuring out how the story will go. I talk with my friends and we toss possibilities around, and I get annoyed with them for haring off in directions that interest them but don't appeal to me. I may draw a map, or do a bunch of appendix-like background summaries for my own use. Or I may not. I start making lists: of characters, of places, of things I need to research, of things that need to go in, of things that need to stay out.

The point is, by then it's moving. It may be anywhere from another week to a couple of months before I sit down and start writing, but what I have is not just an idea any more. It's gotten through the preliminary development, and it's a baby story.

Hardy perennial

"Where do you get your ideas?" is probably the most-asked question writers get, and one of the reasons writers hate getting it is because it can actually be fairly hard to answer. Oh, not if the person asking the question is a semi-interested reader who's more interested in making conversation than in any kind of realistic answer - those folks are usually satisfied with throwaways like "From a post office box in Schenectady." But when an actual would-be writer asks in all seriousness…then it gets hard.

It's hard partly because not only is every writer different, both in their general process and in the specifics of how-they-do-it, but nearly every story is different. It'd be a lot easier if I could hand the eager or desperate young writers a card with a post office box number on it, but I can't. So here are some other things to look at.

In the long term, getting ideas is a matter of how you look at the world. I've posted about this before, so I won't go into great detail here, but basically it's a matter of not taking the ordinary for granted. You can find stories in commonplace things, from grocery lists to car repairs, if you look at them slantwise and ask yourself the right questions. ("Right" in this case being whatever sorts of questions make your backbrain start giving off little sparks. For some writers, those are character-related questions, like "where does the alien embassy get its groceries, anyway?" or "what is a dark dwarf doing fixing people's cars?"; for others, the questions are plot-related, or theme-related, or…whatever. You have to figure out for yourself what angle you approach things from, but once you do, it's usually not too much trouble to keep doing it. In fact, once you learn how, it's hard to turn the dratted thing off.)

In the short term, though, people are impatient. Also, a lot of folks haven't ever learned how to brainstorm, or even how to just poke around looking for possible ideas. Heck, a lot of folks haven't the first idea where to go to start poking. So here are some suggestions.

A lot of writers are very verbal (big surprise), so one of the logical places to start looking for ideas is with words. There are hundreds, if not thousands, of places on the web and elsewhere that will provide "writing prompts" - short suggestions to get you going. Or you can make up your own; a really popular one used to be to open a dictionary twice at random, take the first word at the top of the first page and the last word at the bottom of the second page, and see what you could come up with to link them all together. Another is to take several of your favorite poems and pull out six or eight phrases (three to four words each) that really appeal to you, write them on cards and dump them in a jar, pull two, and come up with something that ties them together.

For writers who are more aural than verbal, songs and music can be a similar sort of idea-trigger. One can get even more direct and take one of the many songs (modern or traditional) that tells a story in six dense verses, and expand it into ten pages of prose, or even into a novel. (Fairy tales work fine for that, too, but that's back to words.) Quite a few writers I know have gone so far as to assemble play lists of songs that "fit" whatever story they're currently writing, to keep them in the right mood while they work.

Pictures and photos can trigger a writer's imagination, too, whether they're ones you took yourself, or things you've found on the web or in an old shoebox at a garage sale. Objects, too - "Why on earth would anyone buy that?" can be a perfectly good story-trigger, and so can "The people who put together this garage sale must be aliens…wait a minute…"

Everybody has thoughts like that; the trick is to slow them down so that you notice whenever you think "That is so weird" or "I don't understand why anyone would…" or "What were they thinking?" And then, once you've noticed, to come up with a possible explanation or answer, or even just a mental picture of the sort of person who is that weird, who would do that, and who was thinking…something interesting.

Fanfiction aside, other people's stories can actually be a pretty good place to look for ideas, too. Nottaking someone else's background or plot or characters and redoing them, but looking at the things you'd put in, or do differently, and then dropping all of their characters and background and plot and riffing off just those missing/different bits that appeal to you. Change the characters and setting, and you have a brand-new story, even if the source material is recognizable. It worked for West Side Story (Romeo and Juliet), and for Working Girl (Cinderella), and for countless other things.

And one of my favorite methods is to take two characters from completely different stories - Prince Hamlet, say, and Darth Vader - change their names, and throw them into the setting from a third story (Lord of the Rings, maybe, or Oz) and see what happens.

That's the first half of the answer to the "where do you get your ideas?" question, and it's what most people want to know when they ask it. It is not, however, all that they need to know…that's for the next post, on Sunday.

Murphy is a writer's best friend

Lately, I've been getting anxious queries from a lot of close friends, who know a) exactly when my book deadline is, b) just how many other desperately important things I have going on to distract me from writing, and c) how many plot threads I still have to wrap up. "How is the book going?" they ask. "You do know what happens next, don't you?"

Well, not exactly. I have a pretty good notion of what's going on - what secrets they still have to uncover, what problems are about to materialize, what old decisions are going to come back to bite them. I can list three or four scenes that I'm pretty sure I'm going to need. Trouble is, a fair number of those scenes are still at the "There is a big fight and somebody might get killed, but maybe not" stage.

Yet the book is currently buzzing along nicely, with things dropping into place one after another. How is this possible?

It's possible because I don't have to know what happens next, not really … and certainly not in detail. All I really need to know is what each of the characters intends to do next. With as many characters as I have, some of those plans are bound to be incompatible, meaning that as soon as A and B both try to make time with C, somebody is going to be disappointed.

In the event that the characters have plans that clearly don't conflict - such as "Hey, everybody! It's time to head farther west! Pack up and let's get moving!" - I have Murphy to fall back on. "Anything that can go wrong, will" as much and as often as is necessary. Bad luck, in fiction, is always much more believable than good luck. When they start marching west and they break an axle two days out, the reader isn't going to blink twice.

Most often, though, the reason things go wrong is that whatever plans the characters have made, there's something they haven't taken into consideration. Usually, it's because they don't have enough information, but sometimes it's that they just didn't think of it, or didn't expect whatever-it-is to be as bad as it turned out to be (see "Bad Luck," above…). One does have to be careful with those last two, though; if the characters "just didn't think" of some really obvious possibility, they usually look stupid or negligent, which is usually undesirable.

Being overly optimistic can work, if it's an established character trait, but taken to extremes, this, too, can make the character look stupid. It depends on how far out-of-the-ordinary the Bad Luck is. A character who doesn't take an umbrella because he doesn't anticipate rain on a cloudy April day looks a bit stupid; a character who runs indoors when the thunderstorm blows up, instead of heading for the storm cellar, can be forgiven for not anticipating the twister that picks up the whole house and carries it off to Oz.

So I may not know exactly "what happens next," but I know that A is sulking around camp, not expecting anyone to notice. Obviously (to me), what goes wrong is that B does notice, and confronts A, so A has to do a lot of explaining that wasn't in his plan. B then drags A off to talk to C and D, figuring that this will solve A's problem and get him out of his sulk. Unfortunately for B, that goes wrong, too - C and D aren't willing to cooperate. So A is worse off than when the whole thing started…and B now has to worry about A, as well as whatever other things were already on deck for B, and C and D have a bunch of stuff to react to and make new plans about. Which I can then have more things go wrong with.

And while the characters are spiraling deeper into the mess, I, the author, am chortling because in the course of all these supposedly-unproductive discussions, a lot of information came out that I can see will be useful, if not critical, when I get to the grand finale; also, in about three more paragraphs, A, B, and C are going to develop a tentative alliance which will move the plot forward in exactly the direction I want…at least, until something goes wrong with my plans.

Murphy is a writer's best friend, but you have to keep an eye on him, or he'll steal the silver.

Some uses for fanfiction

Fanfiction is a fascinating phenomenon. Yes, yes, I know that there's still a huge argument going on between the people who think it's all right to do and the people who consider it illegal, unethical, and unprofessional, but I think it's a rather silly argument, on the whole, and I certainly don't want to get into it here. What I want to talk about today are the ways fanfiction can be instructive for writers.

The first and most obvious use is as practice. Even if you don't take seriously the old saw about having to write a million words of crap before you can write anything publishable, some amount of practice is generally a Good Thing, and it is ever so much easier to do the practice pieces if you're doing something you can show to eager readers. Nowadays, you can even get actual feedback and responses from people you do not actually know, which is even better (at least, it is when the feedback is positive).

The value of fanfiction as practice has been tacitly recognized for a really long time. Even back in the 70s and early 80s, when fanfiction was about as acceptable as thirteen Hells Angels at a highbrow Southern garden party, it was quietly acknowledged that quite a few writers (and some editors) got their start in the business writing, editing, and publishing fanfiction. As fanfiction slowly inches toward respectability, more writers are willing to let people know that they started off writing fanfiction, and there are quite a few who are willing to admit that they still write the stuff for fun.

The thing that fascinates me about fanfiction, though, is the way that it models the decision tree that writers go through (whether consciously or unconsciously) to get to their final product. For those of us who do this part mostly unconsciously, it can be interesting and instructing to see the multitude of alternate paths that a story could have taken, all laid out more-or-less neatly in different authors' fanfics. The main character's horrible childhood could have been much worse, or much better, with interesting plot-consequences either way. The protagonist could have chosen to trust a different wise mentor figure or companion, or to go it completely alone. Different aspects of the background are brought forward or pushed back, sometimes changing the whole feel of a story even if the basic plot remains much the same. The main character's decision to take - or ignore - a particular bit of advice, to provide - or not provide - a bit of crucial information to someone else a few chapters earlier, an impulsive or better-considered act by anyone at all results in the plot veering in a completely new direction. Friends become enemies; enemies become friends; goals and objectives and results shift and change.

The enormous number of alternatives are easiest to see in those fandoms that have a correspondingly enormous number of fanfics available - things like the Harry Potter books, or The Lord of the Rings. And if one can manage to mentally adjust for the wildly varying levels of skill that the different fan authors have, and their frequent obsession with romance, etc., it becomes even clearer just how many completely different stories one can get out of a single situation and set of characters.

I think the whole question of alternatives is key to understanding the mixed-to-lukewarm reception a lot of fanfiction gets from authors. I rarely read any of the fanfiction based on my own books (never, unless it's been recommended by one of the five people I trust to screen for me), and a large part of the reason is that I, like most writers, know a whole lot more about my characters and my world than the stuff that gets into the books. I can't let go of that when I read the fanfiction; consequently, there is about a 95% chance that even the best fan story will "feel wrong," because the author has no way of getting the unpublished details right. I suspect this is a problem for a lot of writers who squirm uncomfortably when they're asked about fanfiction.

My other problem is that if, by some miracle, the fan author does get it right, their story tends to slide into my head and take up residence as "what really happened." Which creates all sorts of potential for legal problems if I ever hope to write anything else in whatever the base series is. It's much simpler to just avoid the problem, and to be able to say truthfully that I don't read it.

Truth and Fiction

It is an odd and interesting thing that in a group of professional liars and their willing audiences, there are so many people who are so deeply concerned with telling the truth. Fiction is made-up - that's part of the basic definition (though calling it a flat-out lie is perhaps an exaggeration) - yet it is common for people who want to compliment or complain about a story to focus on how "true" it is.

The reason, of course, is that fiction shows us ourselves. We consider that important, at least some of us do, enough so that most of the stories that last are ones that many people consider the truest in their portrayals of emotion or the human condition. Consequently, a lot of writers find themselves struggling to enhance this aspect of their writing, and worrying excessively about it.

There are two problems with obsessing about truth in stories, though. The first is an aspect of the human condition itself: there is not one lone, solitary truth to be told, but many truths. My fiction reflects my life experience and the lessons it has taught me, but not everyone draws the same lessons from the same experiences … and we certainly don't all have the same experiences to begin with.

The disparity in experience and in what lessons and issues we each consider important shapes fiction, both from the writer's side and from the reader's, and therefore it shapes the critical judgment of the work. Those readers who agree that what the work is examining is important will be more likely to be interested and enthusiastic about the story, sometimes even if they do not entirely agree with the writer's conclusions. Those who think that what the writer is saying is unimportant tend either to dismiss the story as "badly written" or "fluff", or to criticize the story directly for focusing on what they see as the wrong thing.

When this criticism is obviously far off base, it's generally easy to ignore. If a novel is primarily focused on the main character's emotional recovery from a traumatic brain injury, few writers (or readers) will take it seriously when someone objects that the story doesn't deal with the implications of global warming or the politics of gay marriage in the U.S. No matter how important one thinks those issues are in real life, they aren't what the book is about, and leaving them out is a perfectly reasonable thing for the author to do.

Sometimes, though, things are not so clear-cut. An author who writes a murder mystery in which the victim is shot to death has an opportunity to include a stance on gun control and/or the right to bear arms, but bringing up that whole political debate may (and quite often will) drag the murder mystery very thoroughly off-track. When this happens, the author has to decide which is more important: making a point about the right to bear arms (or gun control), or telling the story effectively.

Whichever choice the writer makes, he will be open to criticism from people who think the other choice is more important. And because including the politics of gun ownership in a story with a gun-related murder looks more plausible than shoehorning global warming into a story about traumatic brain injury, a lot of writers take this kind of criticism on board and second-guess their choices.

The thing is, either choice is valid. Nobody is required to believe that global warming (or any other issue) is more important than telling an effective story…and nobody is required to put telling an effective story ahead of their personal convictions, either. And I can acknowledge the validity of both choices, even if I disagree with the author about which thing I personally would consider more important if I'd written the story.

Which brings me to the other problem with truth-telling in fiction: space. Even in a multi-book series, there isn't room to examine every possible problem, or even to explain the backstory behind a particular variation on a problem. Of necessity, things get compressed. The writer has to choose which things to demonstrate in detail, which to mention in passing, and which to leave out completely. And there are always things that have to be left out completely, and some of them are things that are extremely important in real life.

What that means is that the writer is only ever really telling part of the truth, even if he's doing his best to focus on just one thing and explore it in depth and in detail. We count on our readers to read between the lines, to catch the hints and implications, to fill in the bits that just aren't part of this particular story.

The truth the reader finds in a story - any story, even Shakespeare's or Homer's - is at least half their own. The writer's job isn't to spoon-feed their audience neat and tidy bits of truth that they already agree with; it's to find an interesting patch of jungle to explore, light it up and maybe hammer in a couple of signposts at particularly interesting places, and then point the reader in its general direction.

It's a lot harder to do than it sounds, and there are always going to be people who think the signposts are pointing in the wrong direction, or worse yet, who think that the signs are in a completely wrong place. They're unhappy that their particular truth has been left out of a story, or left mainly to the reader to fill in, and the only thing the writer can do is to have written a completely different book. Which will make other people unhappy because their truths have been left out. In other words, you aren't ever going to be able to please everyone, and obsessing about it is both pointless and counter-productive. Tell the truth that's right for the story and for you, and leave the other truths for the stories they're right for.

Why did he do that?

Back in high school, I read a lot of mystery novels, many of which were police procedurals, and I got the basic triumvirate for figuring out who was the killer pounded into my brain: Means, motive, and opportunity. They actually apply to any villain undertaking any dastardly deed: the villain always needs a way to do it, a chance to do it, and a reason to do it. And of the three, motive is the most commonly neglected, to the extreme detriment of many otherwise-excellent stories.

I think there are a couple of reasons why motivation seems to get short shrift so often. For one, people do all sorts of peculiar things in real life for reasons that seem thin to the rest of us. It's always tempting for a writer to say "But I read in the news where this woman picked up a knife in a restaurant and stabbed the waitress because her tea was cold! So it's believable! It really happened!" But "it happened in real life" does not absolve the writer from the need to convince the reader that "it" happened in the story…and the whole reason incidents like that make the news in the first place is that they are strange and nearly unbelievable.

Another reason is because authors make the mistake of thinking that making a villainous character unpleasant and unlikeable is enough. While it is true that most people are more easily convinced that someone they don't like is behaving badly than that someone they do like is behaving badly, just being a nasty SOB doesn't automatically make someone willing to lie, cheat, murder, blackmail, or commit whatever other crimes one's villain needs to commit. Unlikeability is not a motive.

The third reason why motive gets neglected a lot, I think, is that villains often don't spend a lot of time on stage. They are, after all, trying to get away with their crimes without being caught or punished, and that often means keeping a low profile - and always means keeping the main characters from finding out that the villain had the means, motive, and opportunity to commit the crime. This means the writer doesn't have a lot of chance to show what the villain is really like, even if she knows - and a lot of writers learn about their characters by writing them, which means that a mostly-off-stage villain doesn't get to be known very well by writer or reader.

And a fourth is that the author sometimes realizes in mid-book that they can twist the plot in a new direction, if only some particular thing happens…and Character A is the only one who is in a position to take that action. So they have A do it, but they forget to go back and figure out why on earth he/she would want to.

A novel I read recently had what looked to me like several of these problems at once. The author had set up an intriguing mystery, plots within plots, and then about halfway through recomplicated things nicely with the discovery that the supposed villain was actually under the influence of an advanced drug that induced and mimicked the obsessive paranoia that can come with late-stage Alzheimer's. I was racing toward the finish when the discovery of the real villain, the man who had been secretly administering the drug, stopped me cold.

The real villain was, from a plot standpoint, an excellent choice. He had plenty of opportunity, and was one of the few who had the means (access to the drug). He wasn't onstage much, and he was quite unlikeable - abrupt, suspicious, impolite, and continually cranky. But I couldn't believe that he would feed a dangerous drug to a man he had supposedly been friends with for over twenty years, merely because he disliked the original and wanted to see them put in prison without getting his own hands dirty. It pretty much wrecked the book for me.

The author would have been much better off if she'd stopped to think more about why her real villain was doing what he did. She had two possible ways to make the book work (maybe more, but two that are blindingly obvious to me at the moment): she could have come up with a stronger reason than unfounded dislike and suspicion for her villain to go after his ultimate victim (a reason strong enough that the villain would betray an old friend in such a horrible way), or she could have turned the villain into a full-blown sociopathic personality who'd finally gotten to the point where he couldn't hide it.

The second choice is both the easier one to pull off and the one that would result in a weaker book. It would be easier to pull off, because it's perfectly reasonable that a high-functioning sociopath would have worked hard to conceal that condition, so when it comes out at the end that this is what is behind his actions, it's plausible for it to be a big surprise. It makes the book weaker, because it's too similar to what's already been done - the first "villain" turns out not to be responsible for his actions because of the drug, and the one who's really responsible is doing it because he has a disease. "Variation is good" applies to plot twists as much as to anything else in a story.

That leaves coming up with a stronger reason for the ultimate villain to drug his friend in order to get the friend to do what he wants done. This is difficult, but doable. Convincing the villain that his friend has betrayed him and deserves to be drugged, for instance, or giving him some dark event in his past that he can only cover up this way, or tying the friend and the victim together in some way that makes the villain see this as an appropriate revenge on both of them.

And it doesn't really matter whether one is talking about a murder mystery or a Regency Romance or an epic quest novel - if there's a villain, he'll be a lot stronger and more interesting if he has really good reasons for doing what he does.

What's not there

Fiction is a model of human behavior (among many other things, but this is where I'm going today). This means that no matter how a writer tries, real life and real people are always more complicated than whatever is in the model. Nevertheless, we do everything we can to make stories as "real" as we possibly can.

That leaves writers in a cleft stick. There's only so much room in any given story (even in one of those 200,000-plus word things), and showing complexities, whether they're complexities of situation or of character, takes a lot of space. Often, this means that the story in the writer's head has to flatten out a bit in order to fit…and the writer doesn't always notice. After all, we already know all sorts of things that never make it onto the page. The question is what to leave out.

Most writers, especially early in their careers, choose what to leave out by instinct. Usually, that works fairly well - most writers have read enough fiction that they've developed a reasonably decent eye for what does and doesn't have to be in a story.

Sometimes, though, working by instinct alone causes difficulties, and when it does, it's usually due to one of four things: either the writer leaves out really important things because they are so obvious to the writer that he/she forgets that they won't be nearly as obvious to the reader, or else the left-our bits are what I call "word-processing errors" (things that happen because word-processors make it so easy to snip a bit here and a bit there, without ever realizing that the snipped bit was the only mention of a particularly critical piece of information), or else the writer is strongly plot- or character-centered, and tends to leave out important parts of whichever one they're not centered on, or else the writer has overestimated just how common some critical piece of information is, or how good his/her readers will be at picking up on assorted hints.

About the only thing one can do to avoid the first two problems - leaving out things because they are so obvious to the writer that they seem not to need mentioning, or snipping something critical and not realizing it - is to have a bunch of first readers who are not afraid to say "I have no idea where the hero got hold of that sword he's suddenly using in Chapter 6″ so that the writer can look and realize that he never mentioned the hero picking it up during his visit with his uncle in Chapter 4. Once the writer's attention has been called to something like this, she/he can make a conscious decision how much of a mention to add.

First readers also help with the third sort of problem - being so strongly plot- or character-centered that important bits get left out because they're not plot- or character-related. So does experience of the sort that leads to self-knowledge. Writers who know going into a manuscript that they're plot-centered (or character-centered) can often make conscious adjustments, reminding themselves during the first draft that they need to put in more plot, or making an extra revision pass specifically to add some of the missing character or plot bits.

And then there's that last one: overestimating the breadth of knowledge available to one's readers, or the sort of hints they're likely to pick up. The thing about this is that unlike the other three, it's not necessarily a writing problem. It's not really about the story, or the clarity of the writing; it's about the readers themselves.

Writers control their words, not their readers. Some stories need to be told by implication; sometimes the most effective approach is the indirect one. When this happens, the writer simply has to accept the fact that a choice must be made: either the writer tries to be clear and obvious for the maximum number of readers, regardless of what that does to the story, or else the writer tells the story as it needs to be told, and accepts the fact that not all readers will appreciate it or get it.

Of course, if the writer simply has a horror of being too obvious, then being aware of this and trying to push one's limits a bit can prevent a story from sinking in clouds of needless obscurity. I feel, however, that it is generally better to overestimate one's readers a little bit than to underestimate them. A writer whose work gives people the impression that he/she thinks all readers are more than a little dim is unlikely to be terribly popular.

Miscellaneous Updating

 First things first: a bit over two weeks ago, our own Michelle Wood emailed me that she's done a wonderful video trailer for the Frontier Magic series. I've been planning to put a link to it on the website, but I'm in the downhill rush to finish the book and updating the web page is low, low priority. So I finally decided to mention it here, so people can start enjoying it. There'll be links on the website eventually, I promise.

Second, one of my cousins is taking a marketing class and needs a variety of people from all over to answer a survey. It's only two questions, so if you have a minute to pop over, it would be much appreciated.

And speaking of the book, I thought maybe folks would like an update. I'm supposed to be finished by next Monday. I'm not completely sure I'll make it; it took me 17 chapters to get them out of town this time, and the outbound leg of their trip is taking a lot longer than I expected, mainly because it has suddenly dawned on me that I have a trilogy's worth of plot lines to bring together in the last ten or so chapters, and I'd better get started.

For those who are interested: there will be quite a bit more of the mammoth in The Far West than there was in either Thirteenth Child or Across the Great Barrier, and I apologize for making you wait so long for it. Also, I finally talked my Cathayan Master Adept character into paying a visit to Mill City (she was supposed to show up in Across the Great Barrier, but she absolutely refused to waste her time that way). It's a very short visit, unfortunately, but it means that there will be at least a little more about Hijero-Cathayan style magic and the Cathayan Confederacy.

Once the first draft is done and turned in, I get to take a short break (emphasis on "short"). I'm planning to be at Wiscon this year, though I'm not on any programming, and Elizabeth Bear, Lois Bujold, and I will be giving a pre-convention writing workshop for Fourth Street Fantasy convention in June. Somewhere in there, I'll have to have a talk with my agent about the perennial What To Write Next question. I'll probably get the editorial revision requests in July or early August, which means odds are good that they'll overlap with the release of Across the Great Barrier, and since I really don't want to wait until September to start Whatever The Next Book Is, I'll probably be too busy to think straight for a couple of weeks.

Minor miscellaneous jobs include the aforementioned update of the web page, reviewing the spring royalty statements (which are due at the end of April and May) and finishing the update to the royalty tracking database, a long skull session with my agent regarding all sorts of subrights, and swapping out the research materials for the last three books from the shelves near my computer to the main reference shelves (which are farther away). I also will probably need to do a fair amount of research for Whatever The Next Book Is, one way or another. Oh, and updating my Quicken categories to make next year's taxes easier, because they changed some of the lines again.

And that's just the writing stuff. There are dust T. Rexes under the bed, I have about eight loads of laundry stacked up, and there are still at least four large boxes of my mother's fabric stash to sort through and perhaps turn into something wearable. I have ongoing paperwork to do for my mother's estate, and I really ought to plan something for my Dad's 91st birthday besides a phone call! If I'm going to plant basil this year, I need to get the seeds started now, and dig over the garden as soon as it stops raining. The cats need vet appointments for their annual shots. I am at least 400 books behind on my To Read shelf. And let's not even talk about the UFOs (UnFinished Objects) that are my knitting and cross-stitch projects.

In other words, my life is pretty much like everyone else's - full to bursting with Stuff To Do, and unlikely to change any time soon. But right now, I have a hot cup of tea, one cat on my lap (who is purring loudly because she is making me sit sideways to type, which always pleases her greatly) and another cat perched on top of the computer pillar in Standard Cat Meatloaf Position #3, and I'm going back to finish up Chapter 22. Life is good.

Different strokes

I talk a lot about differences in the writing process and the way every writer thinks differently and therefore has to work differently. All those differences apply to a lot more than the writing process, though, and it is just as destructive when folks don't understand that.

Take the heady days following the publication of one's novel. A sizeable number of writers seem to become obsessed with numbers for those first few week. They check their Amazon rankings and Bookscan numbers. They pester their editors for orders-shipped figures and their local booksellers for sales numbers. They do complicated mathematical extrapolations that they would never have considered even thinking about two weeks earlier.

The obsession doesn't go away even after they've become relatively successful; they just start checking whether they're number seven or eight on the bestseller lists (and trying to decide whether number seven on the New York Times bestseller list is better than number five on the Washington Post bestseller list), or comparing how long their new book stayed in the number X spot compared to their last one, or to some other writer's.

There's nothing really wrong with this (unless the writer is one of those who goes a little crazy trying to process all this data), but it's not obligatory, either. I mean, once the book hits the shelves, there really isn't much the writer can do to influence those numbers directly, but if they like looking at them, why not? The trouble comes when people who don't really care about this stuff start feeling as if there's something wrong with them because they feel no particular urge to look at their numbers every hour or so.

Similarly, there are different approaches to managing one's career - and advocates of each sometimes get passionate about their preferences. For instance, there's the take-the-money-and-run school of thought (which includes most of the agents I know) that advocates pushing for the largest advance one can possibly talk one's editor into, on the theory that a) a known advance means a predictable (and to some extent controllable) income stream and b) a publisher who hands out a large advance is more likely to work hard at distributing and promoting the book than one who's only given out four figures ahead of publication.

At the other end of the spectrum are the folks who advocate taking a tiny advance (ideally in exchange for a better royalty rate), on the theory that this spreads the writer's income out over time (resulting in lower taxes) and avoids the problem faced by writers who got such huge advances on their last book that it couldn't meet expectations, and now no one will make an offer on their new one.

Again, neither choice is generally wrong…and either choice may be wrong for a particular writer, given that particular writer's financial circumstances and production rate.

In the same way, some writers choose to focus on trying to establish a series or on settling into a particular market niche, while others focus on spreading out into as many different areas as possible. Some writers advocate writing as much as possible, as fast as possible; others think that they get better results (for a selection of different values for "better results") from working more slowly and carefully. Some take six months off from writing to publicize each book as it hits the shelves; others find their time is better spent working on their next title. Some change agents every five years or so; some stick with one for twenty years or more.

Not one of these choices is right in general, or wrong in general. Just as there is no one-size-fits-all method of writing, there is also no single best way of managing one's writing career. It's a good idea to check out what other people are doing, but you have to decide for yourself whether what they are doing is something that is likely to work for you, and whether you think it will work well enough that it's worth trying for yourself.

And it is always, always your own responsibility to decide whether something is not working and when it's time to change it…whether that's something that's not working in your writing style, or whether something in your career seems to need rethinking.