Patricia C. Wrede's Blog, page 71

Fan mail from some flounder?

One of the things that happens when you write books that are marketed as Young Adult or childrens is, you get letters from kids who have been assigned to write them in class. It's really obvious, for two reasons: first, the number of letters drops off markedly during the summer months, and second, the class assignments tend to have the same format ("In the first paragraph, tell the author what you liked about his/her book. In the second paragraph, tell the author something about yourself. In the third paragraph, ask the author three questions. Sign your name…").

The three questions part is particularly obvious when the author of the letter really has only one question that they're burning to ask. It's usually something specific, like "What happens to…?" or "How did you ever think of an insubstantial floating blue donkey with wings?" And then they're stuck, so the next two are the sort of general questions that a lot of people ask writers. "Where do you get your ideas?" is really popular; so is "Are your characters real?"

And then there are the questions that betray a more specific class assignment. Chief among them are "What are your influences?" and "What is the theme/meaning of this book?" I mean, really - is there an eleven-to-thirteen-year-old anywhere who cares about the writer's influences unless there's a grade riding on the answer?

Not that I blame the letter-writers. It's the teachers who give them these assignments who enrage me … and I am not using hyperbole here. I am most particularly and especially infuriated by those teachers who tell children that they will get a better grade if the author to whom they write answers the letter. Invariably, those letters do not get forwarded by the publisher for two or three months, and when they do arrive, I'm out of town or working to deadline, and the mail waits another month before I get to it. So the poor kid, through no fault of his or her own, misses out on that grade-boost.

I'm also getting more and more e-mails pleading for an address to which someone can snail-mail an assignment letter directly, almost always in connection with that kind of "extra credit." I don't give my address out on the web or via e-mail, for an assortment of reasons, and I get a bit cross with teachers who expect me to set their students such a bad example.

We won't even discuss the number of teachers who seem to think that all writers are independently wealthy (or perhaps who think that no other teacher in the history of the world has had the brilliant idea of making their students write to a favorite author), and therefore do not have their students enclose a self-addressed stamped envelope with their snail-mail letters. Postage adds up a lot more quickly than you might think.

I like hearing from my readers, really. I don't always have the ability or time to respond right away (and there have been years when nobody at all got an answer, like the one right after my mother died, when I was trying to cope with being her executor and having a book deadline), but I do like hearing. I don't like it when it's forced. Although I confess that one of my favorite letters started "My teacher is making us write this because we read your book in class. I thought it was for younger kids. We are in the seventh grade!"

The Towering Inferno meets Airport meets Meteor!

Disasters bring out the best in a lot of people. We see the pictures on TV or the web, and want to help; it's a natural, human thing. Writers are human; we have those same reactions. We pull out our credit cards and donate to the Red Cross and Doctors Without Borders and other organizations. Then we head back to our computers or TV to search for more pictures and more information.

Not because we really need to know more. Because we're vultures.

This is a part of being a writer that a lot of people know about, but don't really think about or understand. That part of a writer's brain that takes the most horrible things that happen, to themselves or to other people, and cold-bloodedly turns them into stories.

People know about it because writers tell stories on themselves all the time. "It wasn't so bad when I broke my leg, because I knew I could use it in a book some time." But they don't really think about how it works in terms of big disasters or the books they love. When writers say "Everything is material," we really, truly do mean everything.

I have friends who live in Tokyo. I haven't heard from them, and I worry. And while I'm worrying and obsessively checking my e-mail, there is a little part of my brain recording everything in case I find a use for it in a book later. It's not just recording how I feel and my obsessive checking-in; it's also recording the photos and videos of walls of muddy water racing toward a town, of the piles of rubble left behind, of clear orange flames against muddy grey water as a building that used to be somebody's home or business burns.

As I listen to the reports of missing trains and damaged nuclear reactors, that part of my brain is keeping track of what bits of news turn out to be wrong, and whether they're under-estimates or over-estimates, and how other people are reacting both here and there. Because I might need it one day.

A lot of non-writers find this enormously disturbing. Looking at it with the non-writerly part of my brain, I find it enormously disturbing. Nevertheless, it is a part of the process that cannot be denied. Everything that happens to me goes into the mental compost from which my stories emerge, and one of the things that has happened to me more than once in my lifetime is watching a disaster play out at a distance.

This cannot be denied; but it can be abused. One can use a massive real-life tragedy as a cheap and easy way to wring emotions out of the reader…but doing so is, well, cheap. Tawdry. It will also rightly offend a lot of people, which is why everyone in the professional entertainment business tries to be sensitive and delay publication of the book or showing of the TV episode or movie that parallels a recent tragedy or disaster a little too closely, even when said books, episodes, and movies were written and filmed long before the actual disaster.

Using the same massive real-life tragedy as mere colorful background is as bad, if not worse. There is a difference between showing how one character experiences and copes with a disaster on a personal level, and showing that character waltzing through a mostly-unrelated story that just happens to take place during or after a major real catastrophe "because it is so cool!" (No, really, somebody actually said that to me once, ages ago - I think it was about Hurricane Andrew. It was a bad idea then, and it's still a bad idea.)

Most of the writers I know do not do these things. Instead, the ones who use writing stories as a coping mechanism go ahead and write them, and then bury them in a drawer somewhere until a) someone proposes a charity anthology that they can give it to, or b) it's fifteen or twenty years later and unlikely to hit raw nerves anymore. The rest of us let all those images and statistics and experiences sink into the story-compost in our backbrains, and in two years, or five, or twenty, we write the story of a meteor hitting a colony outpost on Mars or a malfunction in an undersea research base that draws on every disaster we've ever seen or heard - earthquakes, tidal waves, tornados, hurricanes, flash floods, bombings. And when readers compliment us on how real we made it feel, we just sort of give them a stiff smile and say thank you.

Because we know where we got it from. And the compost that grows the loveliest roses is the same stuff that starts off as ugly, smelly, horrible bits of things that even the most dedicated gardener doesn't really want to examine too closely sometimes.

Tools of the Trade, part 2

So I'm still poking through all the programs for writers. Storybook turned out to be another one that was more of a planner than a writing program, which shouldn't have surprised me, since it bills itself as a writing organizer. If I wanted a separate one of these, I think I'd really like it. I think it would be especially good for a multiple-viewpoint, ensemble-cast, multiple-storyline book, as it allows you to track which characters are in which places (as well as which characters are in which scenes, which a lot of other programs do). And the program is free under the GNU license.

I rather liked MyNovel. It's a free demo, pay $35 if you like it program. Unlike some of the earlier things I looked at, I had no trouble finding the word-processing part, which has a full-screen button and exports in useful file formats. I also liked having all my neatly organized notes available on a popup screen at one side whenever I wanted them, and I really liked being able to link characters to each other, to important places, and to events, independent of whether they were linked to particular scenes. I wasn't quite as fond of the forms it wanted you to fill out for each character, but there weren't a lot of required fields.

This one had a "diagrams" page rather than a corkboard, which I also liked because it seemed to be more flexible than the corkboards I've used. I could draw a geneology chart as easily as I could shift chapters around. I rate it B+. It'd be an A, except…

…Except I also tried yWriter5. Full disclosure: this was programmed by a writer net-acquaintance, which is how I came to know of it. It's free-please-donate, so the price is right, and in terms of features and flexibility, it does pretty much everything MyNovel does. It has things like character, location, and item tracking, a storyboard, etc. The online manual is a bit skimpy, but I found the program fairly intuitive to use and fun to poke around in when I couldn't see right off what I wanted to do. It organizes your work by scenes, which roll up into chapters; they're stored as rich text files, so you can get at them easily with other programs (a must for professionals, who are probably going to have to convert everything to MSWord for submission because that's what all the publishers use).

And I absolutely adore the analysis tools in yWriter. It lets you assign values to each scene for things like tension or romance - you get to pick - and then graphs them so you can see how different aspects of your plot are progressing. It can generate a schedule that shows what you've done, what stage each chapter or scene is at (outline, first draft, etc.), finished word count, days and words til deadline, what you still have to do,  target daily word count… It can analyze word usage so you can find out which words you've used too many times. And other stuff. (Why yes, my day job was as an analyst, and I really liked it. Why do you ask?)

The only thing that made me frown slightly was that I couldn't figure out how to make the work window go to full-screen mode, and I don't know whether that was me or the program. But the work screen was fairly large anyway, and it was easy enough to stretch it out manually…and when I did, I didn't cover up anything I wanted to see. Overall, I'd give it an A.

The last writing program I've been playing with a lot is Liquid Story Binder. It's a download-the-demo-for-30-days program, so you can try it out and then decide if you want to pay $45.95 for it. Of all the programs I've seen so far, it is well and away the most flexible. It's also the most complex, with a fairly steep learning curve. I've been messing around with it for a month, and barely scratched the surface of what I can make it do. It's the only writing program I've found that lets you make up a music playlist right there in the writing workspace, to be saved right along with everything else, for instance.

LSB is in many ways a kitchen sink program, and unlike most of the others, it's designed to be maximally flexible. For instance, instead of a "Characters" tab, where you are expected to enter specific information about each character (name, gender, birthday, description, etc.) and a "Locations" tab where you enter place names and descriptions, it has a "Lists" file type that has a "Characters" template and a "Places" template - and you can edit the templates to provide just the information you think you need, just the way you want to see it. It seems to me that it would be especially good for people who have lots of visual references - pictures, photos, and drawings - because several of the file types are obviously meant to store and organize graphics.

The down side is that all these options can get a bit overwhelming…and there's that learning curve. The key to using this one, I think, is realizing that I don't have to use every possible feature it has. (It will take months just for me to look at all of them, let alone figure out how they can all be useful.) I'm tempted to rate it A+…but I'm a little worried that playing around with all those options will actually get in the way of writing instead of being useful. So for now, it's a plain A.

Right now, these two (yWriter5 and Liquid Story Binder) and Scrivener are my top three contenders for replacing my current word-processor, and I think I'm going to have to play around with all of them for a while before I make a final decision. And, of course, look at whatever other options come up in the meantime.

Tools of the trade

I have a confession to make: I love playing with writing programs. They're a window into other writers' working processes, something I find utterly fascinating and always have.

Lately, I've had another reason for poking through what's available: the latest and last version update to my favorite word-processor was over ten years ago, and I doubt it will survive the migration to a new OS the next time I upgrade my computer (I'm currently running Windows XP, which is already two operating systems behind). So I've been downloading demos of programs that other writers recommend and love. The first thing I noticed was that they all do a whole lot more than plain vanilla word-processing; now they also  keep track of your characters, locations, notes, plot threads, and electronic reference materials of all kinds. Many of them have analysis features that automatically track everything from reading level to daily word count.

The other thing I've noticed is that all of the programs I've looked at so far were pretty clearly designed for the sort of writer who piles up lots of bits and pieces, then assembles them into a first draft, or for the writer who does very heavy revision of the sort that involves moving chunks of text from scene to scene, rearranging chapters, etc. I've never worked that way, so those features are toys for me, rather than must-haves.

I started by checking out the  Writer's Cafe demo. To buy, it's $40 regular, $30 for the student edition. It's heavy on planning tools - a journal, a notebook, a scrapbook, an automatic name-generator, a random prompt generator with a timer to encourage you to write for a full fifteen minutes. It has a nice storyline/storyboard display.

The problem was that I found the word-processing part really inadequate. It took me ten minutes just to find the darned thing - it's the second tab of four in a smallish box on the storyline display, labeled merely "Content," and while you can stretch the pane out so that you can actually see more than a two-inch square of your writing, doing so means that if you want to look at the storyboard, you have to keep expanding and shrinking the windowpane. I assume that there's some way to change the format to whatever one is used to seeing, but by that time I was too annoyed to look for it. It also only seems to save files in its own format or in plain text, meaning that you'd lose all the italics and other formatting, which is pretty much a deal-breaker for me right there.

As you may gather, I wasn't impressed. A lot of it, like the random prompt generator and the writing advice and inspirational quotes, just isn't stuff that I need, or that most of the professional writers I know would see as useful. They might be just the thing for a beginner who's still struggling to get going, or for someone who actually needs and wants a computer journal, scrapbook, inspiring quotes, prompts, and the rest. Still, I'd call it more of a planning tool than one that's particularly useful for actually producing a novel. Overall, I'd give it a C-.

I've been hearing great things about Scrivener from my peers for ages, but it's a Mac program and I'm a PC user, so I hadn't looked into it.  Then I found out that they've been beta-testing a Windows version since November, and I went and downloaded it right away. (For Mac users, it's another free-trial-then-pay program, weighing in at $45 if you decide to buy; I assume they'll do the same with the Windows version when they finish testing.)

I was a little surprised after some of the other writing programs I'd looked at. Scrivener is a clean, versatile program that focuses on taking bits and pieces of text - generally scenes, but they can be as small as you like - and rolling them neatly up into chapters and novel-length manuscripts whenever you decide to do that. It has templates for tracking characters, places, and so on, a nice corkboard/storyboard, an outline view, places to keep your research, and so on, but from what I've seen it's really all about the writing. It would be especially good for folks who tend to move scenes or bits of scenes around a lot during the writing process (that seems to be what it's designed for, after all).

Scrivener is simple enough for a fairly quick start-up, but flexible enough accommodate a lot of different styles of working once you get used to playing around and being a little creative with some of its features. And it will export in multiple different useful file formats. The beta I played with seemed to be stable; if it's at least that robust in its final version, I'd rate this as a real workhorse of a program. It doesn't have as many bells and whistles as some of the others I looked at, but if you really want those, it's flexible enough that you can figure out ways to do most of them. The only thing it's light on that would be tough to duplicate is analysis tools, and those are nice-to-have, not necessary. So I'd rate it an A, and it's currently one of my top three contenders for when mine finally becomes unusable.

I'll talk about my other two top contenders next post. And if anyone wants to recommend something else…

The Big Finish

 Nearly every piece of fiction has one main character and one central problem. Even when the story is told from multiple viewpoints with an ensemble cast, each of whom has a different important plotline, there is almost always one plot problem that is the problem that the reader wants to see solved, and one character for whom that problem is just a little more important, more life-changing, more critical in some way, than it is for any of the other characters. There's also one person - usually the same one - with whom most readers are expected to identify or sympathize with.

This doesn't mean that the other characters and plotlines are unimportant; on the contrary, the complexity is what draws a lot of readers to multiple-viewpoint-and-plotline stories. But one of the ways that complex stories can (and often do) go wrong is when the writer forgets or misidentifies the main character and the central problem, and as a result, the climax of the story falls flat. This can completely wreck an otherwise excellent novel.

Some writers try to give the finish of each plotline equal emphasis, which would be fine if the reader is reading the plots as a series of independent novellas, each starring a different character. In a novel where the plots have been braided together, though, going this route spreads out and flattens the "big finish." Instead of one peak moment and several lesser ones, there's a saw-edged row of similar points, one after another, until the reader loses track of when the novel is really over and ends up feeling vaguely dissatisfied even though everything has been wrapped up, point by point.

Instead, what generally works better is to give the greatest emphasis (the most tense, dramatic, emotional scene) to the solution of the central problem. The more other problems and plotlines that can be tied in to finish at exactly this same time, in this same scene, the better. For instance, if the central problem is defeating the Evil Overlord of Galaxy Prime, the battle may also rescue the hostage from plotline #2, solve the romantic triangle of plotline #3, and give the heroine of plotline #4 the chance to finally overcome her phobia about spiders when she shoots the Overlord's giant mutant spider pet, all in the same battle.

But the center of the battle is still defeating the Evil Overlord, and this is what determines the way most readers will see the book. If the Evil Overlord wins, or dies but takes the Main Character with him, then even if the hostage rescue, happy romance, and psychological healing are all wildly successful, the book will still generally be considered a tragedy. If the Main Character wins and survives, then several unsuccessful subplot endings will only make the book "gritty" or maybe "dark" or "realistic," rather than a tragedy.

Sometimes, of course, there is no possible way for a subplot to be wound up during the grand finale. In a multiple-viewpoint book where one or more of the established point-of-view characters is not present at the big battle or great reveal, this is especially true. In this case, the question becomes what order the finishing-up scenes should happen in. If the writer is going for a big finish, the way he decides is based on what effect each scene and subplot wrap-up will have on the scene, the one that's the solution to the central problem.

Most of the time, subplots that can't finish up during the grand finale get wrapped up very quickly immediately after, so that there is little or no release of tension until after the main problem has been solved. Occasionally, though, wrapping up a subplot just before the main finish will add tension to the grand finale, especially if the wrap-up folds two apparently-independent subplots together. The hero's search for his long-lost sister finishes…with the discovery that she is the hostage who needs rescuing. The traitor has finally been discovered…but he's already given the Evil Overlord the security code to get through the shields.

The other mistake people sometimes make is giving the big finish scene to the wrong viewpoint character. This is really only of concern in a multiple-viewpoint novel, but it still happens more often than you'd think. The author gets so caught up in cycling through each character's experience of the battle in short action bits that when the main character finally offs the Evil Overlord, that bit is shown from the point of view of one of the other characters who's been watching, rather than from the main character's viewpoint. If the writer has been doing a Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson thing from the start (where Holmes is clearly the main character, but Watson is always the viewpoint), then it's fine, but if the main character has been a viewpoint, the writer needs a really powerful reason to deny him the POV in the big finish scene or it just won't work very well.

Limits

 "When I use a word," Humpty Dumpty said, in a rather a scornful tone, "it means just what I choose it to mean-neither more nor less." - Lewis Carroll

One of the things I didn't understand when I started writing was the pliability of words. Oh, I knew that the way I phrased things was important. I could see when this way of putting something worked better than that way. But I was young and sure of myself, and it never occurred to me that the words themselves didn't necessarily mean the same thing.

Then I went off to live in Minnesota, which our license plates proclaim as "the Land of 10,000 Lakes." And at first I was a little puzzled by the exaggeration. OK, there were a few lakes, as I saw it, but nowhere near 10,000 of them. Most of the things they called "lakes" were, well, duck ponds - I could walk all the way around some of them in less than fifteen minutes.

It wasn't until I visited a town out to the west, and heard folks seriously referring to a stream of water that was ten feet wide and two feet deep as a "river" that I realized that the problem wasn't with other people's definitions; it was with mine.

See, I grew up in Chicago and suburbs, and to me "lake" means something like Lake Michigan (or at least, something that takes a day or more to walk all the way around), and "river" means the Mississippi somewhere http://www.caleuche.com/River/RiverFa... along the middle of its run, which is a heck of a lot wider and deeper than ten feet wide and two feet deep.

It took me even longer to realize that everybody does this … and to work through the implications of what that means for my writing. Basically, I can't count on even the simplest words to say exactly what I mean to all my readers. They'll say something comprehensible - we all agree that a lake is a body of water surrounded by land, something you can walk around - but the implications won't necessarily be the ones I think I'm providing.

Some writers, when they realize this, try to micro-control their readers' reactions by describing things in minute detail…and some readers really like this approach, even though it's never quite as completely successful as the writers would like. Other writers describe as little as they can get away with, preferring to let the reader's imagination fill things in. I'm somewhere in the middle, mostly (my current POV character is…rather selective in what she bothers to observe, which means the books are skewed toward the "no description at all" end of the spectrum).

The important thing, though, is not to get so attached to whatever picture you see in your own head that you expect or insist that all your readers end up looking at the same mental image. It will only frustrate you. Writing is not telepathy, only a murky approximation of the same.

Stressing Out

Sooner or later, everyone gets stressed, and stress affects everybody's writing, one way or another. There are a few folks whose writing is their escape from stress, who write more when they get more stressed and less when they get happy, but that doesn't seem to be all that common among published writers (probably because it's too hard to balance on the knife-edge of stressed-enough-to-write-but-not-so-stressed-that-there-really-isn't-time-to-write). Most writers hit a certain level of stress, and find that it's using every bit of energy they have just to stay alive, and there's none left over for writing. (Which can add stress, if writing is one's main occupation and source of income.)

Everybody gets overstressed at some point, and the result can be quite dramatic in terms of productivity (and if it isn't, you frequently end up paying for it later). There are a bazillion books out there on how to manage stress, and they all say the same things and they're all right: exercise, eat right, take care of yourself, take a break, take a walk, meditate, talk to people about it, find ways to reduce it if possible (move, change jobs, change the locks on the house or the phone number, etc.), see a professional if it gets to be too much. The trouble is that they're all long-term solutions, and we're a quick-fix society…and most people don't even start trying to deal with stress until they're already in over their heads and sinking fast.

But it's like writing: nobody else is going to make you write…and nobody else is going to take all the stress out of your life for you. You have to work at it yourself. Some of it you can get rid of permanently; some, the only thing you can do is to change your attitude. And sometimes, it's a matter of remembering your priorities. Much as we all love it, writing a book is not the most important thing in the world. Not compared to, say, getting your kid to the emergency room when she's fallen out of a tree and broken her arm, or taking care of your elderly mother who has dementia, or calling the plumber about the flood that's happening in the basement right now. Sometimes it's OK not to write for a while.

It can be hard to admit that there's just no time for writing right now, especially when your backbrain is nagging you to Get This Story Down Immediately. You have to be honest with yourself about whether writing is part of your coping mechanism (in which case it may be worth it to make the time, because it will help reduce the stress) or whether it isn't (in which case you need to not-write, or you will just make the stress worse).

On the other hand, if your frontbrain is what's telling you that It Is Your Job/Duty To Do Revisions Today, or that You Cannot Waste This Valuable Writing Time Just Because You're Stressed … tell it to go take a hike. You don't have to write when your Mom is in the hospital or your kid is running a temperature or you're worried sick about layoffs or the roof just blew off in a tornado. You can if you want, but you don't have to.

Be warned that which hand you're using may well change with the circumstances. Most of the time, writing is part of my coping mechanism, but when my mother was dying and just after, I lost a good six months or more of writing time because even the thought of dealing with the plot was the very last straw that I couldn't cope with on top of dealing with the estate and everything else. And it took a while to realize that trying to make myself write "in order to cope" (which had always worked before) was the exact wrong thing this time.

People aren't machines…and even machines need down time for repairs and maintenance.

No Snow Days

The Twin Cities are currently cleaning up after the…fourth or fifth? I forget…big storm of the season.

Somewhere between a foot and a half and two feet of snow fell from Sunday afternoon to Monday evening, on top of the more-than-a-normal-winter's-worth that we'd already had by the end of January. The snow mountains at the end of my driveway are nearly as high as the roof of my car, which makes me very glad I live on a quiet street and mostly don't need to worry about backing out into traffic that I can't see.

The side streets are getting narrower and narrower. Walking down sidewalks is like walking through a tunnel. Most of the parking lots have lost an entire row to the snow-mountains. Snow plows have gotten stuck trying to clear particularly heavy drifts. I shoveled through a smaller one by my back door this morning - it was only about thigh-deep, not enough to stop a plow, could one have reached it, and really not so bad compared to the waist-deep one that I dug out back in December (I got smart this time, and went out halfway through the storm to shovel.

In short, it's great weather to stay home in.

Of course, I stay home most of the time anyway. That's the thing about being a full-time writer; you don't get to call in to work because your driveway is drifted shut and the plows haven't gotten to your street yet. The work is always right there with you.

This seems particularly important to notice this year, when we've already had so much snow (according to the National Weather Service, even if we do not get even one more inch of snow this season, it will be the 2nd snowiest winter on record…and we're not even to March yet, and March is historically our snowiest month).

There's something about being trapped in your house by foot on foot of white stuff. It's quieter than usual, even on a quiet street (at least until the neighbors rev up their snowblowers). Even with the undone housework, the piles of unread books, the TV, the Internet, and oh, yes, that book that's due pretty soon now, there's a peculiar feeling that one ought to be able to take the day off. The thought of relaxing with a cup of hot tea or cocoa in front of the fire all day is tempting. Seductive.

But the thing about writing is, it can still happen under these circumstances. Heck, it can still happen under far worse conditions - as long as one has pencils and paper, it doesn't even matter if the power goes out. And just because other people couldn't get in to work until well after noon, it doesn't mean I got to take the morning off.

This is where I pay for not having that commute every morning and evening that normal people complain about. (Well, OK, it helps a lot that I don't feel any obligation to get out and go slipping and sliding around on the half-plowed streets the very minute the snow stops, just to convince my boss that I really tried.)

1200 words Monday, while watching the snow pile up. It really is pretty when you don't have to go out in it. Even if you still have to work.

Sax and violins

A long time back, a friend of mine (tongue firmly in cheek) told me that when it came to fiction, all the trashy stuff was full of sex and violence, while all the great literature was about love and death.

The truth underneath that bit of word play is that which you have - sex and violence, or love and death - depends a lot on both the way the writer handles them and on the eye of the beholder. There's not much the writer can do about the eye of the beholder, unfortunately, but the content and tone are all ours. And the first and most important choice in both cases is whether a particular scene is going to be merely explicit, or whether it's going all the way to graphic.

Explicit covers a lot more ground and is a lot more flexible than graphic, because explicit just means that it's clear that it happened. You can be very explicit without being at all graphic, but I don't think it's possible to be graphic without being explicit. "The battle lasted three days in the rain" is explicit without getting into the details of mud and sweat and blood and who wounded whom how badly. It's explicit without being graphic. "The knife cut through the muscles of his back and into his kidney" is both graphic and explicit, and it's hard to see how it could be the one without also being the other.

The real problem is that American society is an awkward combination of prudish and obsessed when it comes to sex, while when it comes to violence, it's pretty much just obsessed. What this means is that there is a bias in most published fiction toward explicit-but-not-graphic sex on the one hand, and graphic violence on the other. It also means that most readers are sensitized enough to sex that the traditional "stopping at the bedroom door" is considered explicit - think of the old movies where the couple kiss, fade to black, and then there's a picture of two pairs of shoes next to a bed, and that was plenty enough to let the viewers know what happened. Using a similar technique to avoid a fight scene is problematic, unsatisfying, and rarely done.

The interesting thing is that an awful lot of the time, the writer has no real story-related need to be graphic. All the reader needs to know is that the sex or violence happened, not every tingly or gory detail. And a lot of time, the writer doesn't get graphic…but the techniques are different. It's far more common to imply that sex happened and entirely skip any description that goes past a kiss, going straight to both parties looking/feeling happy and smug next morning, than it is to imply a fight scene and make do with a description of the loser's bruises later on.

"Graphic" for sex scenes starts fairly early in the process of simply describing the actions the characters are taking. When writers go for explicit-not-graphic, they often do so by describing the emotional impact of the characters' actions, rather than the actions themselves.

On the other hand, fight scenes don't start being considered "graphic" in most cases until the writer gets into painful or bloody description of the effects of the violence. The actions themselves are fair game. Shooting, stabbing, or punching someone isn't considered graphic until the writer starts talking about blood spatters, torn flesh, and broken teeth.

There isn't an exact line between explicit and graphic, of course, but it helps to be aware of the difference…and of the difference between where explicit sex starts and where explicit violence starts. You'll notice that all the graphic details in this post are from the "violence" side of things. It is supposed to be a family-friendly blog, after all.

The Eight Deadly Words

"I don't CARE what happens to these people." - Dorothy J. Heydt

Stories are, at bottom, about people (or people-analogs, like anthropomorphized talking animals). But more than that, they're about people or people-analogs that the reader cares about. Hooks and cliffhangers, opening in medias res, lots of fast-paced action, brilliant worldbuilding, intricate plots - all these things that are supposed to get readers interested in a book and keep them reading - won't matter if the reader doesn't care about the characters on some level.

Well, OK, there are some people who don't care about characters, but most of them are reading nonfiction. And even with nonfiction, there are all those folks reading biographies and the story of the people who did X or Y and historical anecdotes of all kinds that are mainly about people. Because what draws most readers back to the book every time they put it down is wondering what is going to happen to these people next, and whether they're going to get out of whatever trouble they've gotten into.

It is even more important for the writer to care what happens to these people. You are going to be living with them for a lot longer than the readers are, and if you don't like these people and you aren't interested in them, you're going to have a much harder time keeping at it at all, much less actually making an interesting story out of what happens.

Not to mention the fact that if the writer doesn't care, why on earth should the reader?

So the first thing to ask yourself is, what kind of people do you like to read about? I'm not talking about vampires vs. wizards vs. spacemen here; I'm talking about whether you like to read about people who focus on things outside themselves (like politics or engineering or dragon slaying) or people who focus on their internal problems (like getting over a traumatic past or learning new skills). Do you like to read about outgoing characters or shy ones who need to be coaxed out of their shells? Can-do go-getters, or Gen Y slackers? One-of-a-kind super-powered heroes, or more ordinary folks who do a lot of just muddling through? People like you, your family, and your friends, or people who are very different in certain ways?

The next two questions are of equal importance: First, where do you like to see characters go? Do you like watching them make enormous changes in themselves or their lives or their worlds, or less dramatic ones? Are you interested in characters whose spiritual journey is at the center of their story, or ones who are more practically inclined?

Second, what kinds of trouble can these characters get into - trouble that matters to them, I mean? It's no help to have a "problem" that the character doesn't care about and has no personal emotional investment in; she or he will just ignore it. Also, it's really hard to make the reader care about plot problems if the character doesn't.

It doesn't actually matter whether you start by thinking about your characters this way and develop the plot from there, or whether you start with a plot or an idea or something else and then look for the characters who'd be interested in doing those things. What matters is that you do think about it at some point, on some level. (Not everybody does it as a conscious and deliberate process.) It is also wise to keep in mind that you aren't ever going to find a character that everyone likes; tastes differ in this, as in everything else, and your best bet is to please yourself.

Because if you don't like your characters, especially your main character, odds are that you'll get tired of living with him in your head before you actually finish your story. It's amazing how fast an unappealing-to-the-writer character can make one go from thinking one has the best plot/idea/setup for a story ever, to thinking that one never wants to see anything related to this story, ever again.