Patricia C. Wrede's Blog, page 70

Tag, You're It

Yesterday, while bemoaning my lack of blog post topics to my walking buddy over our post-walk stop at the coffee shop (she gets coffee; I get tea), I had a revelation. (OK, not a big heavenly-choirs, life-changing sort of revelation, just a tiny hey-I-can-turn-that-into-a-blog-post revelation, but I'll take what I can get.) She was listing suggestions for a topic, and it suddenly occurred to me that two of them were variations on the same problem.

The two problems that caught my attention were said-bookisms and character tags (aka epithets). Said-bookisms are all those substitutes for "said" that some writers use obsessively in their speech tags - he shouted, she demanded, he stated, she whispered, etc. Character tags are those little descriptive phrases that replace the character's name when the writer needs to identify a character by more than a pronoun - "the brown-eyed man," "the younger woman," "the scarred man," "the second undergraduate." They can also be little bits of stage business, habits that the character has that supposedly distinguish him/her from other characters - popping his gum, fiddling with her cigarette, flipping his baseball hat, twirling her knitting needles.

Usually, these two techniques are treated separately in how-to-write advice, with said-bookisms being dealt with under dialog and character tags under either characters or narrative/description. But they're both techniques for doing the same thing - labeling something (a line of dialog or a character) so that whatever is going on is clear - they're both extremely useful when used correctly, and they're both overused or misused all too often.

Part of the reason for the mis- and over-use, I think, is that it doesn't occur to a lot of people that it is just as possible to overuse a technique as it is to overuse a specific word. It usually takes a little longer for the reader to notice and get irritated by an overused technique, but the aggravation factor tends to escalate rapidly after that. And once a reader is sensitized, she/he is likely to find even appropriate, innocuous dialog and character tags annoying, possibly to the point of giving up on the story.

Fixing the problem begins, as always, with diagnosis. If you can't see it, you can't fix it. And since these two problems are related, whenever you catch yourself doing one, it's probably worth checking to see if you're doing the other.

Once you realize what you're doing, the first thing to do is consider why you did it. If the only reason for choosing a different word is that you are avoiding "said" or "George" or "she," then delete the substitute and put back whatever you were avoiding, and see how it reads. If it still makes you twitchy, find an alternative technique - rephrasing for clarity, using stage business instead of a dialog tag, or whatever.

Sometimes, though, it's important that a character mumbles or shouts or whispers or whatever. If it is, leave the tag and get as much variation as you can by changing where it goes in the line - there's a very slight difference in how a given line will read, depending on whether "he mumbled" is at the beginning, in the middle, or at the end of the dialog.

And consider the paragraph that reads: "The captain stared out the window at his new spaceship, waiting for someone to speak. The tall, black-haired man shifted uncomfortably as the silence stretched. Finally, John said, "Looks better than I expected for a refurbished tanker." The ex-navy man nodded once as if to emphasize the words."

If that author was simply trying to avoid "he" or "John," then this would be a lot clearer if all those character tags except the first were replaced with "he" (unless there really are four different people standing around and not just tall, black-haired, ex-navy Captain John). But if the author was trying to work in a bunch of description and background information without stopping to info-dump…well, it didn't work very well here, but taking it all out is clearly not going to do the job.

So we're back to rephrasing. "Tall, black-haired, ex-navy Captain John stared out the window…" would, I think, be somewhat better (and certainly less confusing) than the original paragraph, but it does rather overload the opening with adjectives. I'd prefer to start with the name - "Captain John stared out the window…" - and then fill in physical description either in one blunt, straightforward sentence - "He was a tall man with black hair and gray eyes, whose rigidly erect carriage proclaimed him ex-navy" - or by working it into stage business or internal dialog ("He ran his fingers nervously through his black hair as the silence stretched, wondering if they'd given him this piece of junk because he was ex-navy.")

The thing about said-bookisms and character tags is that they're relatively easy to do. It took me a lot less time to write the first example paragraph than it did to do the "fixed" versions of the sentences. This means that even experienced writers are likely to find things like this creeping into their first drafts, especially when they're writing fast to get something down before it evaporates, and because they are actual techniques (and not just mistakes), they can't just be automatically taken out in the rewrite. One has to consider them carefully and decide. It can be a right nuisance, but it's worth the effort.

TANSTAAFL

As any devoted Heinlein fan knows, TANSTAAFL stands for There Ain't No Such Thing As A Free Lunch. It's one of those obvious truths about the world, like Murphy's Law, that ought to go without saying, yet people seem to need to be reminded of it over and over. Something in the human psyche really wants a free lunch, so we keep jumping on "deals" that a moment's rational thought would say look too good to be true.

This is a useful thing to remember about characters (though I, at least, want characters in books to be at least a little smarter and more sensible than I am), but today I'm talking about writers themselves and the things people believe about writing and the writing business that get them in trouble.

Probably the first one is that writing is  easy to do, and/or a quick path to fame and riches. It has always puzzled me how everyone seems to know and accept the artist-starving-in-a-garret trope, while simultaneously (it seems) believing that all writers make millions of dollars and sit home all day eating chocolate fudge and maybe occasionally flying out to New York or Los Angeles to consult with their publisher or agent about their latest movie deal.  I wish.

Then there's the one beloved of all newly-self-employed people of whatever profession: "But it's tax deductable!"  Repeat after me: "Tax deductable" does not mean "free." Rule of thumb for Americans: If you wouldn't buy it on sale at 15-20% off, you shouldn't buy it on the grounds that it's tax deductable. (People in countries other than the U.S. will have to come up with their own basic "sale rate" based on taxes, but there always is one.) Because when all is said and done, only the most careful and meticulous and obsessive of record-keepers are going to end up with tax savings of more than 15-20% of the cost of a tax deductable item. And let's face it, 99.99% of writers are not careful or meticulous or obsessive, at least, not about their tax records.

Next up on the too-good-to-be-true list are all the various "deals" offered to writers who are as yet unpublished, or still new to the business. These range from out-and-out scams, like the guy who was selling "professionl critique of your manuscript" for $300.00 for twenty pages and sending back three pages of generic how-to-write advice photocopied out of a how-to-write book, to things that are simply taking advantage of a newbie's ignorance of the way the field works.

Among true examples of the latter:  1) a writer who was offered a salaried "job" at twice his advance money to turn his first novel into a series…of course without anyone mentioning that this would make the series a work-for-hire that the publisher owned lock, stock, and barrel, that he'd never see a dime of royalty money on his books, and that if the publisher disliked what he wanted to do with his characters or the direction of the series, the publisher could hand it over to someone else to write; 2) a new writer offered a "non-negotiable" contract with a medium-to-small press that required…well, pick your nasty requirement: all rights in perpetuity, sequels to be written under the exact same contract, the writer to put up half the money for the cost of printing the book, that the writer be forbidden to sell any other writing until the contract book was published - the list goes on, as this has happened multiple times to multiple authors I know, 3) services that offer "to copyright your work for you" for a hefty fee (as of this writing, basic online registration of copyright is, according to the U.S. Copyright Office web page, $35).

It's easy enough to avoid all this stuff, if one can look away from the shiny "great deal" and turn one's brain on long enough to remember TANSTAAFL, and that if it looks too good to be true, it probably is. To avoid scams, there are web sites that can help, like Preditors and Editors that list agents and publishers and tell you which are legitimate, which are not, and which are borderline at best. The US government has a whole series of web pages on copyright and how it works, including a copyright FAQ page that covers the basics of what you do and don't

Mostly, though, it's a matter of common sense. Which, as always, isn't so terribly common, I am afraid.

TANATAAFL

As any devoted Heinlein fan knows, TANSTAAFL stands for There Ain't No Such Thing As A Free Lunch. It's one of those obvious truths about the world, like Murphy's Law, that ought to go without saying, yet people seem to need to be reminded of it over and over. Something in the human psyche really wants a free lunch, so we keep jumping on "deals" that a moment's rational thought would say look too good to be true.

This is a useful thing to remember about characters (though I, at least, want characters in books to be at least a little smarter and more sensible than I am), but today I'm talking about writers themselves and the things people believe about writing and the writing business that get them in trouble.

Probably the first one is that writing is  easy to do, and/or a quick path to fame and riches. It has always puzzled me how everyone seems to know and accept the artist-starving-in-a-garret trope, while simultaneously (it seems) believing that all writers make millions of dollars and sit home all day eating chocolate fudge and maybe occasionally flying out to New York or Los Angeles to consult with their publisher or agent about their latest movie deal.  I wish.

Then there's the one beloved of all newly-self-employed people of whatever profession: "But it's tax deductable!"  Repeat after me: "Tax deductable" does not mean "free." Rule of thumb for Americans: If you wouldn't buy it on sale at 15-20% off, you shouldn't buy it on the grounds that it's tax deductable. (People in countries other than the U.S. will have to come up with their own basic "sale rate" based on taxes, but there always is one.) Because when all is said and done, only the most careful and meticulous and obsessive of record-keepers are going to end up with tax savings of more than 15-20% of the cost of a tax deductable item. And let's face it, 99.99% of writers are not careful or meticulous or obsessive, at least, not about their tax records.

Next up on the too-good-to-be-true list are all the various "deals" offered to writers who are as yet unpublished, or still new to the business. These range from out-and-out scams, like the guy who was selling "professionl critique of your manuscript" for $300.00 for twenty pages and sending back three pages of generic how-to-write advice photocopied out of a how-to-write book, to things that are simply taking advantage of a newbie's ignorance of the way the field works.

Among true examples of the latter:  1) a writer who was offered a salaried "job" at twice his advance money to turn his first novel into a series…of course without anyone mentioning that this would make the series a work-for-hire that the publisher owned lock, stock, and barrel, that he'd never see a dime of royalty money on his books, and that if the publisher disliked what he wanted to do with his characters or the direction of the series, the publisher could hand it over to someone else to write; 2) a new writer offered a "non-negotiable" contract with a medium-to-small press that required…well, pick your nasty requirement: all rights in perpetuity, sequels to be written under the exact same contract, the writer to put up half the money for the cost of printing the book, that the writer be forbidden to sell any other writing until the contract book was published - the list goes on, as this has happened multiple times to multiple authors I know, 3) services that offer "to copyright your work for you" for a hefty fee (as of this writing, basic online registration of copyright is, according to the U.S. Copyright Office web page, $35).

It's easy enough to avoid all this stuff, if one can look away from the shiny "great deal" and turn one's brain on long enough to remember TANSTAAFL, and that if it looks too good to be true, it probably is. To avoid scams, there are web sites that can help, like Preditors and Editors that list agents and publishers and tell you which are legitimate, which are not, and which are borderline at best. The US government has a whole series of web pages on copyright and how it works, including a copyright FAQ page that covers the basics of what you do and don't

Mostly, though, it's a matter of common sense. Which, as always, isn't so terribly common, I am afraid.

One at a time or everything at once

There are two basic approaches to combining or developing ideas and story:  in-depth development, and the kitchen sink approach. These are opposite ends of a continuum, of course; there are very few writers who work strictly one way or the other. Still, it's useful to think about the extremes before one starts thinking about how to mix them.

In-depth development is just what it sounds like - the writer takes one idea, one character or scene or situation or theme or puzzle, and explores it thoroughly. Depending on the writer and where he's starting from, this can result in unexpectedly complex stories with multiple subplots, each of which illuminates a different aspect of whatever-it-is the writer is digging into, or in more focused stories with a single central thread that dig deeply into each character's motivations and reactions.

Kitchen sink stories, by contrast, take a "more is better" attitude - the writer throws in everything she can think of. There are flying horses and an emotional argument in chapter one, a mysterious stranger and a set of magic swords in chapter two, aliens land in chapter three and have a fight with pirates over the flying horses, the ninjas break in through the window in chapter four to steal one of the magic swords while the mysterious stranger blackmails the main character and one of the pirates absconds with the second romantic lead, and so on. There are dozens of interlocking plots and subplots - action, politics, romance, mystery … everything the writer can make fit, and maybe even a few extras that don't quite work but that seemed like a good idea at the time.

Each way of working has good points and bad ones. In-depth development is likely to hold strongly any reader who likes whatever idea the writer is examining, but it may lose folks who aren't thrilled by that particular thing. Also, the writer can inadvertently start repeating the same points in supposedly-different subplots, or slow down the central plot thread out of a need to check out every character's reaction to whatever just happened before proceeding to the next plot point.

Kitchen sink stories can be virtuoso performances, with lots of cool shiny events and glitter, like a Mardi Gras parade. They have something for everyone, but it can be easy for plotlines to fall though the cracks and remain unresolved (which will end up being unsatisfying for those readers who really liked that particular plotline). It's easy to lose focus.

Although it's not a hard-and-fast rule, it also seems to me that kitchen-sink stories occur more often near the beginning of a writer's career and in-depth development ones nearer the end. I'm not sure why. It could be a matter of confidence (or lack thereof) - early on, the writers may think they have to throw absolutely every cool idea that comes to mind into the story, because they might not get another chance, while later in their careers, they figure that if this story doesn't work out, they can always write another one. Or some of those late-career writers might be hoarding their cool ideas in case they run out.

Or it could be a natural part of the way writing changes as writers get more comfortable with their process and, perhaps, more interested in exploring particular aspects of writing that appeal to or challenge them, instead of trying to do everything at once.

Or it could just be that ideas are the easy part, so some just-starting-off folks throw in as many as possible in hopes of compensating for perceived lacks in other areas (which gets back to the confidence thing).

Whatever the reason, there's something really satisfying about a successful kitchen sink book: watching the writer juggle all those balls can be a wonder and delight. A well-executed book that explores one idea or theme in depth, twisting and turning it through as many permutations as the writer can, is equally satisfying in a completely different way. The two things scratch different itches, for both reader and writer, and I think it's well worth experimenting with both types.

Changing on the fly

I'm in what I hope is the downhill stretch of The Far West at last. I have finally gotten my characters out of town and moving, and yesterday I got to what was supposed to be a throwaway bit at their first stop, just a little bit of business to establish how their expedition operates before they get out into dangerous territory. Two paragraphs of summary, tops.

It came out six and a half pages long.

What I had initially thought was going to be a brief reminder of several bits of backstory with maybe a tiny bit of foreshadowing that could be useful in the future, all in tight summary form, became six pages of action and conversation involving nine named characters (old and new) and several unnamed spear-carriers. The dialog is, I hope, colored by the different attitudes the various characters have toward each other, the varying positions of authority they occupy, the differing sorts of magic they have, and a couple of things that are going on so far off stage that I'm not sure they'll even end up getting into the book.

I like the scene very much, but it's certainly not what I had planned when I sat down to write.

This is why I have to keep revising my plot outlines, even when I'm supposed to be three-quarters done with something. It's also why I can never use the sort of plot-planning worksheets and programs that seem to be beloved by so many, not even to work things out that are only a chapter away. Because I can't actually predict which of my events and plot-points are going to be scenes or chapters and which are going to end up being a two-paragraph summary.

This is also why I can't "write ahead," the way some writers do. There are some upcoming scenes that are going to be affected by the fallout from this particular incident, if only because several of the characters who had not previously encountered each other have now met and formed opinions of each other. A now worries that B is going to undercut his authority, while C was favorably impressed by B and D, and E is having to suppress his jealousy a lot earlier than I'd expected.

As far as plot goes, at least two future incidents that I'd been considering are no longer possible at all unless sabotage is involved…hmm…. (What? Oh, sorry, distracted for a minute there.) And I'm not going to need the scenes I'd planned for later that establish all the various things I talked about in the last paragraph, because now they've already been established in this scene. They'll need development, but that will happen differently from the way I'd planned, too, and therefore it will require different scenes. And so on.

If I'd gone ahead and written the scene at the river that's coming up about three weeks in my character's future (and that is supposed to go in the next chapter somewhere, though I'm beginning to doubt that I'll get there that fast), I'd have to, at best, tear it apart to make all the relationships and reactions consistent with what just happened. At worst, I'd have to bin the whole thing and start over. If I'd written the heart-to-heart talk between D and E, I'd have had to pitch the whole scene, period - after this, it's just not going to happen. And there are a couple of new possibilities for A and C and G that I hadn't even thought about until I got to the end of this scene and saw how they were interacting.

My backbrain is a lot smarter than I am. Sometimes, this is depressing to contemplate, but at least it does interesting things to my books.

Internet pros and cons

Nearly everyone, these days, can name a lot of obvious advantages brought on by the establishment of the Internet. Pre-Internet, for instance, most writers only ever saw the small selection of their readers who came to autographings and readings; now, any reader with Internet access and ten minutes of free time can drop their favorite author a line. I can track my sales rankings on Amazon, read through reviews by professional reviewers, everyday readers, and anyone in between, and lurk on forums where real readers are discussing various aspects of my work from an assortment of different angles.

All of those outlets also give me tons of new ways to publicize my work - web pages, blogs, guest blogs, social networks, Twitter, book trailers, mailing lists, forums…the list goes on and on. I'm constantly amazed at the creative ways more net-savvy writers find to get and keep in touch with their readers.

A less obvious advantage, from outside, is the speeding up of professional interactions. Used to be that if my manuscript was due on Monday, I had to have it finished nearly a week before, to allow time for printing it out and sending it via regular mail. FedEx shortened that up by a day or two…but sometimes, you really, really want that last day. Every writer in town who started along with me can probably still tell you which FedEx office was the one with the longest hours, and more than one of us made it in the door five minutes before closing.

Now, I can work up to noon on the very day the ms. is due and still get it in "on time" with the press of a key. I also don't get interrupting phone calls that derail my train of thought nearly so often, because people send e-mails instead. It's not as if my phone was ringing off the hook before, but it only takes one call at exactly the wrong moment to lose that perfect plot twist you'd just figured out after two weeks of cogitating. (The plot twist that gets away is always perfect. It's a rule.)

Some of the disadvantages of the Internet are also obvious: all those interactions take time, hours and hours of it. That time has to come from somewhere, and there are only two possible choices: either it comes out of our writing time, or it comes out of the rest of our life. (Yes, writers have lives, too…well, some of us do, anyway.) Writers complain about this fairly regularly, so most folks are aware of it.

There are other, not-so-obvious disadvantages, though. With the advent of all those ways for an individual writer to publicize his/her books, a lot of publishers have begun more or less demanding that the writers do so. What used to be an option - heavy involvement by the writer in end-user book promotion - has become very nearly mandatory. If you don't have at least a web site and a blog or Facebook page, you obviously aren't really serious about selling your books … justifying, in the minds of many publishers, even more cutbacks in the amount of promotion they're willing to do. After all, if you aren't serious about your work, why should they be?

The other big but not-always obvious problem with the Internet is that it offers a seemingly infinite number of ways to screw up your own career. When I'm typing in a blog post or website update, or even a comment on someone else's blog post, I'm usually alone in my office. It's incredibly easy to forget that the off-the-cuff remark that I make to a close personal friend is not just being shared with her and the three other people who are part of the active discussion, but with all the lurkers who enjoy reading but who don't wish to comment…and with even more who may stumble across my words months or years later. As one of my friends said, it's like holding an intimate tea party in an airplane hanger that could be (and probably is) full of invisible watchers.

The airplane-hanger effect can be particularly insidious when the writer really wants to talk about something they shouldn't - an exciting new proposal for reissuing one's out-of-print work, for instance, or a potential media deal. It's awfully easy to forget that even a privacy-locked entry may have quite a few more folks cleared to look at it than you remember…and some of them may be the very business colleagues you really didn't want knowing about this until the deal was tied down.

And then there's plain old bad behavior. I've watched more than one would-be or newly-published writer (and some old and experienced ones, too!) shoot themselves in the foot by complaining, on line and in public, about a bad review or a demanding editor or an uncooperative convention or an irritating fan. I sympathize, to some extent (it is far too easy to dash off a fiery rebuttal and hit "send" in the heat of the moment), but it's a small extent. I've had a terrible temper since I was quite small, and I learned a long time ago to sit on my hands until the first rush passes. It isn't easy, but it's quite doable, and it can keep you from making yourself a laughingstock or a horrible example.

 Probably the worse examples of speaking-before-thinking are the folks who argue with their on-line reviews. It may seem to the writer as if he's only saying mildly, "I don't think you quite understand what I was getting at," but somehow the comments always end up sounding more like "You ******* imbecile! How dare you dislike my golden prose? You *******!" when a disinterested reader looks at them. Being rude to people who are giving their honest opinion only ever makes you look bad.

I like the Internet, and all its advantages. But I do try to remember that there are disadvantages too. Most of the disadvantages, I can compensate for, if I think. So I do try to think as much as possible.

More than repetition

"There's more to the theater than repetition. There's more to the theater than repetition. There's more to the theater than repetition…

"But not much!"  - The Flying Karamozov Brothers

 

There are some basic things about writing that people who've done it for a while tend to take for granted. I was reminded of one of them last week, when I was reading over a young writer's manuscript and discovered a line of dialog that went something like this:

"Jack, why didn't you tell Jane I would be here? It's not fair. I knew that Jane would be here. "

To be fair, it's not really a particularly horrible line, and it's also the sort of thing that shows up in my own manuscripts from time to time - but only ever in the zero-eth draft. Because there's something about the repetition of "Jane … would be here" that just…bothers me. So if it were me writing it, then before anyone else got to see it, that line would get changed, along the lines of "Jack, why didn't you tell Jane I was coming? It's not fair. I knew that she would be here."

Most would-be writers have at least some awareness that it's a bad idea to repeat a word like "fewmets" or "rococo" too many times too close together (sometimes even twice is once too many) without a really good reason. Words that aren't in common, daily use stick out a little, even when they're just exactly the right thing to say, and repeating them makes them stand out even more. But it doesn't always occur to people that the same effect can occur when two phrases are repeated, especially when they're phrases we hear all the time, made up of ordinary, everyday words. And the closer the two identical phrases are to each other, the stronger the resonance they set up.

It's easy to overlook such niceties during the white heat of getting a scene down on paper. It's almost as easy to miss them during a review of the draft, especially if one hasn't bothered to cultivate an ear for the look and sound of effective prose. It wasn't until I settled in to write this post, though, that I realized that the real trouble with that original line isn't so much the repetition, as it is that the repetition emphasizes the wrong thing.

Because repetition isn't just a potential problem; it is also an extremely useful tool. The resonance between two or three identical or nearly-identical phrases or sentence structures can build emphasis and give more strength to the series:  "I wasn't tired. I wasn't scared. I wasn't sick. I was angry."

In that dialog line above, the point is that the speaker is chewing out Jack for telling something to one friend and not the other. The phrase that repeats, though ("would be here") is about the friends, not the telling. To get the emphasis back on Jack and what he said, I'd use: "Jack, why didn't you tell Jane I would be here? You told me she was coming. It's not fair." Or maybe even "Jack, you jerk! You warn me that she's coming, but you don't warn her that I'll be here? How fair is that?" The exact phrasing would depend on the voice of the speaker; either way, repeating the verb "tell" or "warn" points up Jack's actions, where repeating "would be here" doesn't.

On the other hand, if there were several people in the know, then the author might want to point up the fact that Jane has been left out by repeating: "You didn't tell Jane I would be here? Everyone else knew I was coming - Greg knew; Sally knew; Jonathan knew; heck, even Geraldine knew! So why didn't you say anything to Jane?"

Whether repetition is a problem or whether it's a tool, the first step in correcting or using it effectively is noticing that it's there. You can find analysis tools that will tell you how many times you've used each word in a manuscript, but when it's a phrase or a sentence structure that's repeated too often, the best help for it is to train your eye. Second-best is finding a helpful friend or colleague who will spot them for you.

Once you find a repeated word or phrase, the next step is to figure out whether it works or not, and if not, which occurrence stays and which one goes. A good friend of mine pointed out some time back that about 80-90% of the time, the one you want to keep is the second one, because the reason you repeated the word or phrase is that writing it the first time brought it to the top of your mind, so that the second use is the perfect spot for it. Note that this means the second time you wrote it, not the order the reader will read it…especially if you went back and added it in while revising a previous sentence or paragraph.

About half of the rest of the time, it's like that sentence about Jane - you want a repetition in there somewhere, but just not the one you have. And the remainder of the time, it's just fine the way it is. (Percentages vary by writer - some of us are more inclined to egregious and unnecessary redundancy than others.)

Diana

Diana Wynne Jones died on Saturday. I heard the news on Monday morning, so I've had a day and a bit to absorb it before trying to write this. Which is probably a good thing; I'm not sure I'd have been able to do anything but wail if I'd tried to say anything right away.

I think the first Diana Wynne Jones book I ever read was the paperback of Charmed Life, some time in the early '80s and I immediately went looking for more of the same. I was delighted to find the run of Greenwillow hardcovers under YA, and rapidly became a devoted fan.

In 1987, I attended the World Science Fiction Convention, which was held in Brighton, England that year. Practically the first thing I saw was that I'd been put on a panel that Diana was to moderate. I had that sinking sensation that you get when you know you're going to make a fool of yourself in front of one of your idols, but it wasn't like I was going to tell them I couldn't do it. And then I walked into the Green Room a bit ahead of the panel, checking out name tags, and there she was.

She looked like the best kind of witch in the world, with bushy black hair down to her shoulders and an infectious grin, a book in one hand and a cigarette in the other. I took my courage in both hands and stepped up, and she blinked over at me and said cheerfully, "You're on my panel. I have to introduce you. Who are you? What have you done?"

I was still suffering from the worst kind of stage fright, so I just pulled out the copies of my books that I'd brought along and handed them to her. She shuffled through them and then looked up at me with a frown. "But these look marvelous!" she said accusingly. "Why haven't I heard of you?"

"Um, American writer?" I stammered, and she grumbled something about publishing and which books got published in different countries, and that was the start of a twenty-four-and-a-half-year friendship.

Most of the time, it was a letters-and-emails sort of friendship, and an erratic one at that. Neither of us had a lot of time to spend writing letters. Periodically, one of us would put together a big box of books that weren't yet available in the other one's home country and ship them off to the other; it was a toss-up whether it was more fun to pick out things I thought she'd like, or to see what she'd chosen for me. That was how I got hold of Nancy Farmer's The Ear, The Eye, and The Arm, and Sally Odgers' Translations in Celadon.

We saw each other mostly at conventions. There was one where Diana was going around asking everyone to suggest types of magic swords for a project she was working on. The suggestions got increasingly more hilarious as the hour got later, but she wouldn't talk about the project because it wasn't completely settled yet. The project turned out to be The Tough Guide to Fantasyland, which later generated The Dark Lord of Derkholm.

Diana always said that her books were true after the fact - whatever she wrote about eventually started happening to her in some way - and she had a string of hilarious anecdotes to prove it. She was friendly to nearly everyone, and she and her husband were beyond hospitable - when I told her I'd be back in England in 1996 and asked if we could arrange a meet-up, the next thing I knew, she'd arranged a ride down from London for me and my travel buddy so that we could stay overnight at her home.

She was funny and dear and energetic, and even when she complained about things, she was entertaining. I will miss her for the rest of my life, even more than I'll miss her unwritten books, and I will always remember her as the best kind of witch there ought to be.

Is this a trick question?

My walking partner and I were talking the other day about the sorts of assumptions people make about books, and she said something that made me pause to think. I can't give you the exact phrasing, but the basic sense of it was that literary and mainstream fiction is, as a general rule, a lot more consciously thematic than genre fiction.

Not that genre fiction doesn't have themes; on the contrary, there are at least as many strongly thematic writers in genre fiction as there are in literary or mainstream fiction. It's just that the theme isn't front and center in the same ways. Often, even (or especially) for the most strongly theme-oriented writers, the themes arise from the interaction between the plot and characters, rather than being deliberately planned out before the book is even started.

This aspect of the Great Genre Divide has a couple of interesting implications. Teachers and professors of English Lit and Language Arts tend to study literary fiction primarily; teachers of Creative Writing also skew heavily in that direction. This means that anyone coming up through the U.S. school system is pretty much guaranteed to get the impression that theme is not only really, really important, but also something that all writers have to think about and plan carefully in advance.

This misconception is not particularly harmful to readers, though some writers find the assumption that they start with theme to be annoying. For writers, though, it can (and often is) very problematic, especially for the plot-and-character centered writers that genre fiction tends to attract. Because if you feel that you must start with X, regardless of all other considerations, you are pretty much guaranteed to have a hard time unless you happen to be one of the writers who just naturally does start off that way. And starting with theme is particularly problematic for me personally.

Because I'm one of those writers who really can't start with theme. Or even think about it much while I'm in the process of writing, really. I've tried a time or two, and every time I try to come up with "what this book is about," I a) get it completely wrong, and b) find it impossible to make forward progress as long as I'm thinking about theme and not plot or characters.

So I am always bemused when readers want to talk to me about the themes of my books. I'm particularly bemused when somebody gets it right. I can tell when somebody else comes up with what the theme is; there's a sort of internal recognition, "Oh, yes, of course!" And then I forget almost immediately, so that when the next person asks about that book, I'm just as much at a loss as I ever was.

The thing about theme, I think, is that it's almost as much about what the reader brings to the work as it is about what the writer put there (consciously or not). And I think that it matters which is which, on several levels. The conscious intentions of the author are as relevant as his/her unconscious worldview … and the way the reader's worldview and unconscious assumptions interact with both of those.

Theme is probably one of the most subjective parts of fiction. The plot (what happened) and the characters (who it happened to) are usually fairly clear, but you can argue about theme forever. It is also amazingly easy for a reader with a strong worldview to take a piece of fiction with a plot and characters that they like and warp the theme to suit the reader's own notions, regardless of whatever the author consciously or unconsciously put into the work. Which is why I've had different readers tell me disapprovingly that my work is Satanic, pagan, Christian; feminist, anti-woman, anti-male; too complicated, simplistic, radical, or traditional; and quite a few other mutually-contradictory things besides.

I know better than to argue with folks like this. The beliefs and attitudes that people bring with them to my work are not something I can control or change; about all I can say when someone comes up with something really off the wall is, "Well, that's an interesting way of looking at it."

The themes in my books are not things I put there mechanically and deliberately and consciously. They grow out of the interaction between the story I'm telling  - the characters and plot - and my worldview. But that doesn't mean I can't tell when someone has the right idea about what I was doing. Somebody pointed out to me once that there are a lot of ecological themes in my stories, and I kind of went "Huh. You're right."

My point is that I don't need to know those things in order to write. Most of the genre writers I know also don't spend a lot of time worrying about theme, even the ones whose work is strongly thematic. We tend to trust that our backbrains will come up with whatever the story needs on that level. There's nothing wrong with starting from theme or paying a lot of attention to it; it's just that writers who work that way seem to get more support from the literary establishment already. The rest of us occasionally need to be told that it's OK if we can't sum a story up in a ten-word, thematically focused log line before we ever start writing it.

…and taxes

April 15 is coming up fast, and for anyone who made money writing, it tends to be rather traumatic. No matter how much you set aside from your payments, it never seems to be enough (for those of us in the U.S., that 15% Social Security payment is a perennial killer). And of course they always change the tax rules from year to year, which is why I recommend finding a good accountant. It's possible to fill out the forms yourself - my ex-husband insisted on doing so for years - but believe me, having someone on your side whose full-time job is keeping up with the regs makes an enormous difference, and it's worth every penny. And I don't mean a tax-preparation firm that just fills out the forms - if that's all you want, buy Turbo Tax or something similar.

As I've said before, writing is a business. It's too late to make changes in what you actually did during 2010 (unless you have a time machine, and if you do, please e-mail me - I could use one myself), but if you made any money from your writing at all (and possibly even if you didn't), you're going to have to deal with the tax part in the next couple of weeks. That makes it a good time to consider both what you did last year, and how you're going to keep your records this year.

Writing is not a particularly good tax shelter business - that is, expenses for starting up and continuing to run it tend not to be huge, so any losses are likely to be relatively small and not that great as tax deductions. You also cannot deduct nearly as many things as you would like to (though people keep trying). If you are allergic to record-keeping, don't try this. You don't have to start filling out the tax schedules until you actually have money coming in.

Nevertheless, if you are seriously trying to make a go of writing for pay, you can take all the appropriate business deductions, even if you haven't had any money coming in this year and show a loss. Just be very sure that you have the records to back up every expense (that doesn't just mean receipts; it means organized receipts and notes of what each is for) and copies of your submission records, enough to prove that you really are serious. (Hint: three short story submissions in a twelve-month period is not going to say "seriously trying to make money at this writing business" to the IRS.)

If you do have money coming in, you have to declare it somewhere, even if you had so many expenses that you ended up with a loss. Basically, the tax guys want a cut of whatever income you make. "Income" includes the full amount (before any deductions, such as your agent's cut) of any checks you get. It also includes the dollar amount of any payments-in-kind (for instance, if you decide to take your advance money in books, rather than in cash, you still owe the tax - and the IRS will not take 250 copies of your novel as payment of the taxes you owe on the 1000 copies you have sitting in your basement now. They want money.) Income also includes money from school visits or other speaking engagements, even if it was only a token $25, and any money you make from selling copies of your book yourself, whether you're going door-to-door, putting copies on e-Bay, or setting up a table in the dealer's room at a convention.

If you are selling copies of your book directly to readers, you also owe sales tax to whatever state you sold them in (unless it was an internet sale, though that may be changing). That means you need a sales license, and you need to keep track of sales by state and find out what their sales tax is. The record-keeping is a nightmare, especially for Ohio (which not only has a state sales tax, but has county sales tax that varies by up to half a percent per county. Ohio is why I quit trying to do mail order sales of my books years back…though these days there's probably software that'll calculate it based on zip code, if you're determined). If you sell wholesale to bookstores and distributors, and only wholesale to bookstores and distributors, you still need the sales license and you still need to do the paperwork, but you don't actually have to collect sales tax (in the U.S., anyway; I don't know how the VAT tax in the U.K. works).

Expenses are a different kettle of fish. You can deduct your direct expenses for writing materials, office supplies, postage, publicity - take a look at the line items on Schedule C. Some of them don't apply to most writers - I don't have any employees, for instance, so I don't have anything to enter under the lines for wages, employee benefits, or pension and retirement programs. This is where your good accountant can really help a lot; they're always changing what you're allowed to deduct and/or how to calculate it. You also want professional advice about things like whether it's a good idea for you to take the home office deduction and whether to depreciate your new computer or not.

Your life will be enormously easier at this time next year if you come straight home from your accountant and set up your Quicken categories so that the writing-relevant ones are the same as the lines on Schedule C.

And of course the usual caveat applies: Do Not Try To Stiff The IRS. Just don't. When your accountant says you can't deduct your dog as an employee, believe her. Really.