Patricia C. Wrede's Blog, page 73

The Lego Theory, Part 1

Fiction is like Legos. It's built out of a series of different units, stuck together. Each new level of unit is built out of a clump of previous units. The more units you have, the more complex effects you can achieve by moving them around, putting them in different configurations, making different associations, etc.

What units am I talking about? Starting small and working up: letters, words, phrases, clauses, sentences, paragraphs, scenes, chapters, sections, books, multi-book story arcs.

Most of the time, creative writing advice focuses on things that matter at the middle levels: stuff like plot and characterization and setting that build up over the course of a scene or a chapter or a book. The assumption seems to be that everyone has already learned all they need to know about the words-to-paragraphs level of writing back in grade school, so that by the time people get to the point of trying to write a novel, they can jump right in learning about scenes and chapters and plot skeletons and so on.

Now, what I learned from Sr. Agnes and Sr. Winifred back in grade school was essential and invaluable, and I got a long way on just those basic rules of grammar, syntax, etc. Eventually, though, I came to a point where those basics weren't enough. I knew how to build letters into words and words into phrases and phrases into clauses and so on, but I wanted more. I didn't just want to build large, square Lego houses. I wanted to build Lego dinosaurs and airplanes and astronauts. And to do that, I needed to understand more than just how to snap one block into the next. I needed to know how and why they fit together, starting from the smallest units.

Yes, from the smallest. Most people don't even think about letters; they're just sort of there. They string together to make words, but as long as you run the spelling checker and aren't making up your own language, you're probably right.

Yet letters have the first key property of all these building blocks that's important to writers: sound. It's predefined, and the only way the writer can control it is by choosing words carefully, yet the sound of a word can be just as important as what it means. Words with gutteral or harsh sounds give things an unpleasant feel; they're a good way to add a creepy undertone to a description or a conversation without being too obvious. More smooth, liquid sounds, like oo's and l's, tend to make things flow peacefully.

Sound provides all sorts of tools, from alliteration to puns to rhyme. And sound gets really important when it comes to dialog. You don't want to give your characters impossible tongue-twisters to yell in mid-battle, or hand a talking snake a line like "Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers." "She sells sea shells," on the other hand, would fit a snake just fine…if the snake has a thing for alliterative tongue-twisters.

Some people are extremely sensitive to the sound of words, even when they are reading silently; others only notice the sounds if someone is reading the story aloud. Writers who fall into the second category need to remember that there are plenty of sound-sensitive readers out there, and do occasional checks (reading aloud) to make sure they haven't chosen words that don't sound right for the situation, or that don't fit together properly.

You have probably noticed that I'm talking mainly about the sounds of words, even though I'm supposed to be talking about letters. This is going to happen a lot in this series of posts, because many of the key properties of a particular unit of fiction only become useful to writers at the next level up, when you start snapping the Lego pieces together. You can't change the sound a particular letter is supposed to make, or the standard spelling of a word, but you can choose words with an eye to their sound, as well as their meanings.

Which brings us to words.

What you do with words is, you build phrases, clauses, fragments, sentences, etc. Most people do this more or less instinctively, once they've learned to talk, but the real nitty-gritty of how writing works starts with words, with how they work, with how they relate to each other, and, later on, with the different effects you can get because of the different properties they have.

The very first key property of words is one that most writers have heard over and over: specificity. Specific, concrete words nearly always have more impact and are more effective  at conjuring up an image than abstract words or general words. A "flaming sunset" has more impact than a "beautiful sunset;" a "brown car" has less impact than "a brown Lexus" or even "a brown convertible;" "he went away quickly" is less evocative than "he fled." This doesn't mean a writer can/should never use abstract words like "beautiful" or generic ones like "car;" only that if one does, one should probably examine them to see whether the "low impact" effect is what the writer really wants (and, if not, whether there's a less abstract, more specific word that will do the job instead.)

Next up: more about words, with specific reference to parts of speech.

The Most Basic of Basics

"It's not what you don't know that kills you, it's what you know for sure that ain't true."

- Mark Twain

One of the things that a great many people seem to know for sure is that they don't need any knowledge of the rules of grammar, punctuation, or syntax in order to write to a publishable standard. It is possible that I am overstating this; perhaps many of them merely know for sure that what they write is correct, or at least allowable. Whichever it is, it comes under the last part of that Twain quote: what these writers think they know for sure simply isn't so, and it's killing them…or at least, it's killing their stories.

A glance through the various websites that allow writers to upload their fiction without any pre-screening requirements should be enough of a demonstration for anybody. I don't know what some of these people are thinking. It's obvious that they didn't even bother to run the spelling checker before they put their stuff up for everybody to see. And I really don't understand those writers who blast any reviewer who dares to mention the fact that they obviously don't know what a run-on sentence is, or how to correctly punctuate dialog, or the difference between "affect" and "effect." Are they trying to drive readers away?

But incomprehensible as this behavior is when I see it in amateur arenas, it pales beside the would-be professional writers who blithely send their un-proofread, un-reviewed, un-spell-checked work off to editors in hopes of selling it. What are they thinking? (Answer: They aren't.) This is like going to a job interview for Ambassador to France dressed in stained and badly worn blue jeans, a muscle shirt, mismatched socks, and filthy old running shoes with the laces in knots. It doesn't matter what your credentials are, or how well you might actually be able to do the job; you aren't going to get in the door for the interview.

I have some sympathy for the writers who truly don't know any better. It is very hard to improve your skill set when you don't yet realize that it needs improving … and I've run into an unfortunately large number of younger writers who were never really taught grammar, punctuation, or syntax because their teachers were more concerned with encouraging them to be creative and get their stories down on paper. There's nothing wrong with encouraging creativity, but in the long run, you still have to know the rules. At a bare minimum, you have to know that there are rules and that you don't know what they are, or you will never realize that there are helpful things you still need to learn.

I have no sympathy at all for the prima donas who do know their work is full of errors, but who are convinced that it doesn't matter. "It's fiction," they say. "I don't have to follow any rules." (Wanna bet?) Or: "Oh, it's the copyeditor's job to fix all that." (It isn't.) Or "Editors are used to seeing unpolished manuscripts." Well, yeah - editors see a lot of  manuscripts full of sentence fragments, run-on sentences, misspelled words, and incorrect punctuation. They see them in the slush pile. And what they do with them is, they pick them up out of the slush pile and move them into the "rejections" pile as fast as they can possibly manage. It's an obvious and easy filter: if the writer didn't care enough about the work to clean up the grammar, spelling and punctuation, the writer probably didn't care enough about it to do a decent job on the plot, characterization, and setting, either.

The real trouble, though, isn't with the inevitable editorial rejection. It comes earlier than that. The real trouble with ignoring the basic rules of English is that it limits a person's ability to write effectively.

A writer whose work is littered with sentence fragments and run-ons because he/she doesn't really understand what a sentence is (much less what fragments and run-on sentences are) cannot make effective use of sentence fragments to increase tension or pacing or emphasis, because there are already so many fragments in his/her stuff that another one isn't going to have any effect at all. He/she can't use a run-on sentence to give a breathless feel to a particular character's dialog, because run-on sentences are all over the place already, and one more isn't going to be a change. In extreme cases, such writers aren't even aware enough of syntax and sentence structure to get adequate variation in their sentences, resulting in prose that just plods along, regardless of whatever exciting or emotional thing is happening.

It's the contrast from standard English that makes sentence fragments, run-on sentences, and other non-grammatical techniques work. If everything else is in standard English, dropping some unusual syntax, punctuation, or grammar into the text has an impact because of the change. The less often the writer does it, the bigger the impact. Lots of non-standard syntax, grammar, etc. means no change, no contrast, and no effect.

Those problems are a severe handicap while writing. Even if the writer (or their tame English major best friend) goes over the story later on and fixes the punctuation, grammar, and spelling, the story won't be as effective as it could be. The writer has lost the chance to get the maximum possible impact from his/her writing, because a bunch of really basic tools are missing from his/her toolbox and some things are nearly impossible to retrofit during revisions. Besides, if the writer doesn't know what a run-on sentences is, and that they need to avoid it most of the time unless they're looking for a particular effect, they aren't going to be able to get that effect any better during revision than they were during the writing phase.

Of course, if a writer doesn't care about doing the best work, or even about doing a good job, that "writer" doesn't have to know the basic rules of English (or whatever language they're using) and doesn't need to think about learning them. I don't really understand why such people want to write, though.

New Year's Resolutions 2011

I think I was back in high school when I first started setting goals for myself on a regular basis. I didn't start saving copies of them until I was out of college, though, and I rather regret that. At this point in my life, looking back over 35+ years of goals is really interesting. My life is there in the history of goals I've met ("Sell one story by the time I'm 35″ [from 1974 - I figured 14 years was long enough that I could probably manage to sell at least one short story. I sold my first novel six years later, in 1980, handily beating my self-imposed deadline]) and goals I haven't met ("Get promoted to manager within three years" [from 1984, one year before I quit my day job forever, making this one impossible]).

I've kept up with my goal-setting ever since those early years. Gradually, it evolved into an annual review, on or around New Year's, in place of the New Year's Resolutions that everyone else seemed to be doing. A little over nineteen years ago, I mentioned this to one of my dearest friends, and we've been meeting on January 1 every year since then (unless one of us was out of town, in which case we schedule it as soon in January as we can both make it) to talk over what we did in the previous year and set goals for the upcoming year (and on into the future). Our goal-setting get-together has evolved over the past nineteen years; we now do our major goal-planning on Jan 1, and then meet quarterly for a progress and reality check.

One of the big differences, for me, between goals and New Year's Resolutions is that tesolutions tend to be about immediate life changes, like starting to exercise. People make up their minds to do it, head down to the gym every day in January, and then give up. They might as well be called "New Month Resolutions." My goals are a lot more specific, and I always have at least a year to get them done, though I try to have ones that  cover a series of time-frames from immediate, one-year goals to ones that I don't expect to accomplish for five or ten years, or even longer. (One that's been on my list for about five years now is "Take a trip to Rome with friend before we are both 75." I have another 17 years to accomplish that one.)

I also divvy things up to make sure I have short, medium, and long-term goals for different areas of my life, from work to friends and family to hobbies to householding. (The new water softener I need has been carried over from last year's goals; as soon as the next advance payment comes in…) Sometimes, I subdivide areas i think are particularly important, to make sure I really have them covered properly. This year, for instance, I've decided to split my "work" goals into two parts - production (1. Finish the third book of "Frontier Magic" by the deadline. 2. Write up a submission proposal for something new, etc.) and administration (1. Go through backstock and figure out which books I'm running low on, then order more copies of everything that's in print, 2. Go over backlist with my agent to see which titles need to be reverted this year, etc.). Those are the immediate, short-term work goals; the longer-term ones are things like "Figure out a three-year schedule to finally get the research done for that Arthurian book I've been putting off for so long" and "Find a way to organize the non-fiction so I can find all the pirate books when I want them, even though they have to be on three different shelves because they're all different sizes." and "Come up with the coolest new story idea in the world because I'm bored with all my old ones."

I doh't go through exactly the same process or exactly the same categories every year. I keep changing things around, looking for better ways to plan out what I want (just as I'm always looking for a better/easier way to write than whatever I'm currently using). Some years I have "Career" goals and "Writing" goals (the former having to do with things like publicity, generating sales, and so on, while the latter has to do with improving my craft and finishing my current WIP); other years, like 2011, lump both of those under the category "Work." It can make it a little difficult to see how I'm doing, year to year, but that's part of the fun.

This year, I had a rather busy fall and wasn't  quite as ready for our annual goal-setting meeting as I usually am, so the first goal on my list is to spend January firming up a more specific list and coming up with a few that aren't as obvious as "Get my taxes done on time" and "Finish writing Book 3 by deadline."

And I know I'll do it, because in three months, I'll be meeting Caroline again for our first quarter check in, and she'll ask me about it. There's nothing quite like having someone to keep you honest.

Happy New Year, and may all your New Years resolutions or goals be a wild success this year!

Obsessive overbuilding

The flip side of forgetting about the implications of all the things one puts into one's worldbuilding is becoming obsessed with getting every detail just so.  It  is a great way not to produce a lot of finished writing.

Overbuilding an imaginary world is a problem that is closely related to over-researching. They have similar pitfalls both before and during the writing process: there's the tendency to get so caught up in researching/inventing details that one keeps putting off the actual writing (in extreme cases, this results in the person abandoning writing altogether, and taking up worldbuilding/researching as a hobby); and then there's the tendency to try to pack all of the research/invention into the story (also known as "but I can't waste all that work!" and "I suffered for my art (doing all this research); now, Dear Reader, it's your turn…").

It is, of course, a truism that the writer knows more about the world, its history, and the background and backstory of the characters, than ever gets into the story. The thing that seldom comes up is the fact that when the writer knows it and how much the writer knows are things that vary from writer to writer and book to book. The most extreme examples at either end of the scale are those writers who sit down in front of a blank screen and make it all up as they go along, and those other writers like J.R.R. Tolkein, who spent somewhere between forty and sixty years developing the world of The Lord of the Rings.

In between are the rest of us, varying from one end of the scale to the other in terms of how much worldbuilding we need to do before, during, and after writing a story. Yes, after - it's not unusual for a book to require more worldbuilding to resolve plot-and-consistency problems discovered during the rewrite, and it is exceedingly common to need more worldbuilding when one is writing more than one book using the same setting. I made up steam dragons, daybats, spectral bears, and swarming weasels for Thirteenth Child, but I didn't nail down the entirety of the magical ecology of the Western plains and the Rocky Mountains. So there are a lot of new critters in Across the Great Barrier that I didn't know existed until I needed to mention them, even though I'd already written an entire novel in that world. I still don't really know anything about the magical ecology of South Columbia, Aphrika, Avrupa, etc. I know it's there, and that it's different from the ecology of the part of North Columbia I'm dealing with in the books,  but I don't need to know the details unless and until they come up in the story.

On the other hand, I know way more about cinderdwellers and steam dragons and assorted other things than has made it into either of the books I've written so far (and it doesn't look like getting into the new one, either). Some if it is written down; some isn't. This pattern holds for everything, from the politics and history of my world(s), to cultures and customs, to things about the family: some of it is written out, some of it is still just in my head. I also do not require myself to stick strictly to every worldbuilding decision I've made - as my friend Lois says, "A writer should always reserve the right to have a better idea." There are always a few things that are non-negotiable, but most things, I'm not stuck with until I've used them in the story, and sometimes, not even then.

I work this way because it suits the way my imagination handles things. I require a basic framework for my background, but it can't be too detailed. Without the basic framework, I go into choice paralysis - I could have any kind of setting, background, history, without limit, and my brain seizes up at the prospect. If the framework is too detailed, though - if I've made the mistake of trying to work out an entire imaginary encyclopedia of background - then I start feeling constrained and tied down. Too much detail, for me, makes it feel as if I were writing real-life mimetic fiction, without enough freedom to make up the stuff I want.

That closed-in feeling - the sense that you have to check every other noun against your encyclopedia to make sure you're being consistent with all that background that isn't even in the story - is the surest indication I know that the writer has produced more background in more detail than they really need in order to get on with the story. And that itchy point will be at a different level of background information for every writer. Some folks need a three-inch ring binder full of notes on everything from weather to favorite foods to different cultures; others get twitchy if they have more than a few key facts tied down before they start writing.

The trouble is that the itch doesn't show up while you're doing the advance worldbuilding; it only shows up once you start to write, and by then it's almost too late. There are a few other signs of overbuilding a world; one of them is creating Tolkein-esque mountains of material that you find boring to read through. The whole point of writing down aspects of your worldbuilding, for a writer, is so you can write the book without forgetting key points or ending up with major inconsistencies. "Enough worldbuilding" equals "however much YOU need to have in order for the book to be coherent, believable, and consistent." Whether your background notes are in the form of a glossary, an encyclopedia, a tiddlywiki, a single page of bullet points, or whatever - if they aren't useful and accessible to you, while you are writing, there's not much point in having them.

Doing a lot of worldbuilding in advance is not a requirement for writing a fantasy/SF novel. It's one possible way of getting to the desired end, which is to have a believable portrayal of a world in one's novel. Whichever way you work - doing it in advance, or making it up as you go - if the result isn't coherent and consistent and believable without interrupting the story, you have a problem. Ultimately, the solution is yours to figure out, because your solution is going to have to work for your particular brain and writing process. It is, however, a good bet that if you have such a problem, the solution is unlikely to be "do more of whatever you were doing that got you into the problem."

If what you are doing isn't working, try something else.

Happy holidays

Merry Christmas, everybody, and happy whatever-you-celebrate-at-this-time-of-year!

My Dad and youngest sister are here for Christmas this weekend, so I'm doing the big Christmas dinner thing, with full tree (and happy cats eyeing ornaments whenever they aren't on someone's lap getting petted). Which means this will be a little short.

And now that we have that clear…what are your characters celebrating?

It's oddly rare for fantasy and SF to include holidays (except, of course, for the giant victory feast at the end of the story, which always seems to me like Thanksgiving with medal-awarding, at best, and at worst like the sort of retirement dinner where everyone eats rubber chicken and the honoree gets a Certificate of Appreciation in lieu of anything that might actually be useful or worth something). It's even rarer for fantasy/SF to include multiple holidays for different cultures or belief systems. Surely the insectoid aliens from Betelgeuse don't celebrate Hanukah or Christmas or Diwali? And surely both the elves and the dwarves have their own holidays, which are distinct from those celebrated by humans? (Not to mention the fact that there really ought to be multiple different cultures and traditions for each race - see Hanukah, Diwali, Christmas, etc.)

But it often seems that the only holidays in fantasy are the solstices and equinoxes and maybe a harvest feast, which are celebrated by everybody in the story, whether they're humans, elves, dwarves, or dragons. The elves don't celebrate the Faerie Queen's Jubilee; nobody has an equivalent of President's Day or a bank holiday. Heck, fantasy and SF children don't even seem to get off school for snow days (though I suppose that if children are home-school or apprenticed, that wouldn't be a possibility).

And I've almost never seen (or written; I admit it) the sort of massive feast-and-gift-exchange events that seem to be common across cultures in Real Life (birthdays, potlatch ceremonies, Christmas, etc.) except, occasionally, in stories like the Harry Potter books that use a setting close enough to reality to use the same real-life holidays.

I'll also point out that while food is often a big part of holiday traditions, different real-life holidays frequently have different foods associated specifically with them. Chocolate eggs are not commonly associated with Valentine's Day, nor heart-shaped pink-frosted cakes with Christmas.

Holidays aren't going to fit into every story, but they're both a fascinating aspect of worldbuilding and a potential source of much character conflict and/or background revelation (if they do fit the story), which makes them well worth considering for at least a few seconds. So in between whatever happy holidaying you are doing this month, think about what your characters celebrate and why, and what differences there may be, both from character to character and from holiday to holiday.

Implications

Back in the day, I spent a couple of years as gamesmaster for what would now be called an RPG that I basically made up myself, based around the background I was using in my Lyra series. Paper-and-pencil gaming was fairly popular then, at least in my social circles, so there were quite a few other games, gamers, and gamesmasters running around.

One evening, a bunch of us were at a party and one of the other gamers was complaining bitterly about how cheap his gamesmaster was - his group would get almost killed fighting a dragon and then discover that its hoard consisted of a rusty dagger, six copper pieces, and a couple of tiny, badly flawed gems, for instance. He wanted to know why they never got any good spells or powerful weapons. Without even thinking about it, I shot back, "Because there is no spell or tool, no matter how cheesy or apparently useless, that the gamers cannot find some way of using to short-circuit the gamesmaster's most carefully worked-out plans. The only hope we have of keeping you guys under control is to limit your obvious firepower, so that you have to work a little harder for it."

I learned a lot from being a gamesmaster, but that was possibly the most useful thing of all. It applies to writing in two ways: first, if your heroes get too powerful too fast, they'll overcome all their problems too easily. So you have to jack up the level of problem they're dealing with and the power level of the bad guys, and next thing you know, they've gone from needing to save the village to needing to save the universe, completely bypassing saving the kingdom, world, planetary system, and galaxy along the way (which can be really inconvenient if you end up writing a series, because you could have gotten several more books out of saving all those other things along the way).

Second, anything a writer puts in a story has implications, and if you don't think about them at least a little bit, you can run yourself into believability problems. I recall one story in which, early in the story, it was established that a) in this particular future, people had figured out how to manipulate gravity, and b) they'd used this technology both to make their space stations comfortable and to make really deadly hand weapons.

So far, so good. But then in mid-book came the scene in which Our Heroes were waiting for the fork lifts to unload their cargo, and I set the book down and didn't pick it up again for a long time. Because from the description, these were obviously normal 20th-century mechanical fork lifts, and if this society had whizzy gravity-control based hand weapons, there didn't seem to be any reason why they wouldn't have applied that technology to unloading space ships.

This author was not a beginner, nor was he terrible or careless. He was, I suspect, simply so wrapped up in his story that he didn't think through the implications of having gravity control. It happens to a lot of SF/F writers, because the things we come up with haven't been reality-tested. In real life, when someone comes up with a nifty new technology or gadget,  there are billions of people to look at it and think "Hmm…how can I use this to make my life easier?" And it's fairly obvious from real-life experience that even the people who invent various new gadgets cannot always predict how people are going to use those gadgets in real life.

When I come up with a nifty cutting spell for my characters to use against the bad guys, there's nobody but me around to say "Hmm…how would that help me dissect animals in the lab?" or "Hey - that'll make butchering cows much easier!" or "What a great thing to use to cut the grass! I wonder if I can use it on trees, too?" If I don't think about the implications, nobody will. And when I'm focusing on getting my characters out of a sword fight and on to their next adventure, I'm not really thinking about cutting the grass or doing dissections or the hundreds of other places where a cutting spell might be useful in everyday life. I have to stop and think about the possibilities for a while (and even then, I probably won't come up with all, or even most, of the obvious ones).

And there isn't time to think about all the implications of each and every thing one puts into a book. When you're inventing a whole imaginary world, there's simply too much of it to get everything. This is one of the reasons I prefer to do a large chunk of my worldbuilding in advance - because as long as I'm not head down in finishing the fight scene, I can take time to consider the implications of at least some of the things I'm putting into my imaginary world. I can, with luck, spot the things that could throw things out of balance, and put some limitations on them. I can talk about them with friends who will spot different problems from the ones I see, simply because they have different jobs, different life experience, a different point of view.

I'm never going to catch everything. Even the best writers occasionally miss things. And there are a lot more of my readers than there is of me; it is inevitable that some of them are going to spot places where some technology, spell, or ability that I've put into a book has important implications that I haven't thought of. All I can really do is stop and think…and try and make those people have to work a little harder.

Da Rulez

Recently, I got an email from a reader asking about the relationship between a writer's success and/or fame and that writer's ability to disregard the rules of writing and still have their books be considered great. The two sides of the argument seemed to be 1) once an author has published or won some awards, they can disregard the rules of writing and still be considered a great writer, vs. 2) writers can't follow the writing rules in order to become famous and expect to then be able to disregard those rules and still be considered a great writer. "So, Ms. Wrede," my correspondent asked, "what do you think? How important to the success of a work are the rules of writing, compared to the fame of the writer?"

I bet at least half of you can guess what I said, but I'm going to repeat it anyway.

The rules of writing are not important because there are no real rules of writing. There are rules for spelling, punctuation, grammar, and syntax, and all of them are quite important (though if the writer is working in dialect or with a strong narrative voice that requires otherwise, they can be disregarded). But in thirty years in this business, I have found only two "rules" for writing that actually apply, and that I've never seen broken.

1) The writer must write. This is really more of a definitional thing in my opinion, but given the number of "writers" I meet who seem to want to talk about writing without ever actually writing anything, I always include it as number one. If you don't write, none of the other rules matter. Not even the ones about spelling, punctuation, grammar, and syntax.

2) What the writer writes must work on the page. "What works" varies from story to story, and often from reader to reader. It's a subjective judgment, and it gets applied one story at a time. The fact that one writer has used a trick or technique or twist successfully in their story doesn't automatically mean that every writer can use the same trick, technique, or twist in any other story. If whatever-it-is doesn't work in a particular story, that writer needs to not use it. By the same token, the fact that something doesn't work in a majority of other people's stories doesn't prohibit anyone from using that technique in their story, so long as it works.

The problem is that English professors, creative writing teachers, critics, students, and would-be writers have been trying to come up with a set of rules for "good writing" pretty much ever since writing was invented…and every time, they run smack into the incontrovertible fact that for each and every "rule" they come up with, there are a whole lot of famous/successful/much-admired/much-loved books that break it.

Now, my background is in science (I was a biology major in college), and in science, if you find that your data does not support your theory, you are supposed to throw out your theory and come up with something else. Finding a bunch of famous/admired literary works that "break the rules" looks to me a whole lot like data that contradicts the theory. My conclusion is that there is something very wrong with all these "rules" … and if the "rules" only apply to mediocre-to-bad fiction, and one wants to write famous/successful/much-admired fiction, why would anyone ever pay any attention to them at all?

There is no One True Way. There is no One Size Fits All. There is no guaranteed no-fail recipe.

There are plenty of guidelines, certainly. There are a lot of things that will work in many, if not most, cases. There are things that one should generally consider doing or avoiding. But guidelines are not absolute rules; "most cases" is not "all cases;" and "generally do or avoid" does not mean "always/never do this."

Ignoring "da rulez" will not automatically make a writer's work great and the writer famous; neither will following them. Famous writers who appear to ignore "the rules of writing" are famous because their stories work on the page, rules or no rules. Famous writers who appear to be following "the rules of writing" are famous for the same reason; they just happen to write stories that work when viewed through the lens of "the rules." Most of the latter, if they are around long enough, eventually confound the rules-proponents by writing something that doesn't follow the rules, because their backbrain finally handed them a story that need to be written some other way, so they did.

A lot of writing "rules" are worth looking at and thinking about, because the reason they've been made into "rules" is that they address something that a majority of successful writers do or don't do - things that get done in a lot of stories that seem to appeal to or irritate a lot of readers. But all those things appeal to or irritate readers because they work (or don't work) in those specific stories. Consequently, it is often a good idea to check to see whether X also works (or doesn't) in one's own story. It is nearly always a bad idea to simply "fix" X in order to follow the rules, without first checking to see if it works. Because oddly enough, when one does that, it usually doesn't work (generally because the diagnosis was wrong…but that's a different post).

It's not about rules. It's about the story, and what works for the story.

Chapter's End

Having just talked a bit about beginnings, I'm now going to talk about endings…sort of. Specifically, I'm going to talk about chapter endings, because when you're writing a novel, you end up having to do quite a lot of those.

A good chapter ending, from the point of view of a writer, is one that draws the reader on to keep reading even though the chapter is over. (From a reader's point of view, this tends to end with finishing the novel at 3 a.m. and being grumpy at the office all the next day, but that's another matter. And really, most readers who say that sound kind of smug about it…) The question is, what draws a reader further in?

The common answer is the cliffhanger - leaving the protagonist in the middle of some dire situation, so that the reader will have to keep reading in order to see how he/she gets out of trouble. This is the equivalent of the "hook" for starting a story, and it's just as misguided. "How does the hero get out of this situation?" is certainly one possible place to end a chapter, but if every chapter ends with crocodiles snapping at the hero's heels or a train bearing down on the kidnap victim who's tied to the tracks, the story starts to look like bad pulp fiction or a cheesy action serial from the 1920s. Which is fine if you want to write cheesy action serials or bad pulp fiction, but not so good if you have other ambitions.

So how do you end a chapter to make readers want to keep reading? All you really have to do to have a good chapter ending is lead the reader to expect that something is coming up soon that they'll really want to find out about. It can be a revelation ("I bet that in the next chapter George is finally going to tell Jack what Harriet has really been doing all this time!"); it can be action ("I bet the battle comes next!"); it can be the answer to a question ("Why is everyone being so sinister about that interview? Well, she's going in; I guess the next chapter is where we find out"); it can be the arrival of a much-anticipated character, or a pending important discovery.

Somebody complained at me once about one of my books (I believe it was THE RAVEN RING, so that's what I'm using as an example), claiming I'd ended every single chapter on a cliffhanger so that they couldn't put it down.  While very gratified by the reaction, I couldn't remember doing any such thing, so I went back and looked.  The first several chapters ended with:  1) the end of an interview and the POV being shown out of the building; 2) The end of a wait for another interview, and the POV being shown into the office, 3) the end of another conversation and the main character exiting to the street, 4) the POV arriving at her rooms, 5) the main character kitting up and leaving her rooms, 6) the POV and escort preparing to head off down the street, and 7) a secondary character asking a question.

Not very cliffhangerish sounding, any of them, I'd say…but that's looking at it from an action point of view. In each case, the most recent bit of action has ended; the interview is over, the wait is over, the character is leaving somewhere or arriving somewhere new. If you look back at what has just happened, there appears to be closure.

But that's only if you look very specifically at the action in each scene. I could equally well have described the first several chapter endings as: 1) the POV, having been given directions, sets off to do the job she came to do, 2) an interruption of a conversation that had unpleasant overtones, and that insinuated that the coming interview will be unexpected in some way, 3) a verbal threat made against the character on her way out of the building, with more mysterious insinuations about what's really going on, 4) the character's safe arrival at her rooms, having successfully dodged a threatening stranger who was following her for reasons which remain both unknown and unresolved, 5) the character donning weapons in obvious preparation for trouble, before leaving her rooms, 6) the character and her escort, having survived an unexpected attack, considering which direction to head to avoid further trouble, and 7) the cops demanding an explanation for various dead bodies and assorted mayhem.

In each case, the chapter ends both with closure and without closure. The incident is finished, but the POV character is left with new information to mull over…and that information is, quite frequently, obviously incomplete, which adds to the tension. Both the POV and the reader know that they are missing what is very likely to be important information, and that without it, the POV is likely to make mistakes. Furthermore, each chapter ending looks "closed" if you look back at what just happened (which is what I did with the first set of descriptions), but if you look forward, the reader has been led to expect that something interesting or tense is likely to be coming up soon: a conversation, an encounter, an explanation, something. And each of those things will provide the reader with the answers they're looking for…but they'll also raise a bunch more questions that won't be answered for another chapter or two. So the reader has to keep on going, and going, all the way to the end.

If you set it up right, you can end a chapter with your POV character going to sleep and still have readers react as if it's a cliffhanger, because they're eagerly anticipating whatever they expect the POV to be dealing with once he wakes up in the next chapter.

The Opening

It has become a truism in writing that one should always open a story with a "hook" - something that grabs the reader and pulls them into the story, forcing them to keep reading. The problem with this is that what "hooks" one reader will annoy or repel another, and this is seldom acknowledged by the advice-givers.

So you get one set of folks advocating "start with action," because getting dumped in medias res is what hooks them. You get another set saying that one should always start with dialog, because it's active and brings the characters onstage right off, and that's what hooks them. You get how-to-write exercises like "write ten one-sentence hooks," on the theory that opening with one exciting or intriguing line (like "The elephants blocked the highway from nine until noon; after that, the ostriches took over.") is enough to carry the reader through whatever comes next.

The truth is that the opening generally needs to fit the story more than it needs to be wildly intriguing. A false hook - an exciting swordfight opening on a contemplative political story; witty, character-centered tea-party dialog opening up a slam-bang horror/action novel; an intriguing incident or setting opening on any story in which it plays no other part - will alienate both those readers who don't like that sort of opening (but who might very well like the rest of the story as it actually plays out) and those readers who very much like that sort of opening, but who are then disappointed by the rest of the book or story.

In the opening sentences, paragraphs, and pages of any book, the writer is making a series of implied promises to the reader: These are the people you will see more of. These are the kinds of problems they will have to solve. You can trust me to pose interesting questions, and you can trust me to answer them satisfactorily. This is the sort of story you are reading, and this is how I am writing it. Every time the writer breaks one of these promises, it pushes the reader away from the book. Push hard enough, or too many times, and the reader puts the book down and never comes back.

One of the classic bad examples of a hook-gone-wrong was the slushpile story that opened "Blood spurted!" then dropped into a flashback for several paragraphs, a combination that made it look like the opening of a horror novel…only to reveal on the second page that the viewpoint character had just cut himself shaving, and move from there into a piece of contemporary realism. Making a story look like something it isn't is not a good way to hook either readers or editors; it is more likely to earn the writer a reputation for being untrustworthy and/or not worth reading.

This doesn't mean you can never, ever write a story with a misleading opening; it only means that doing so is harder to pull off than writing a story with an opening that fits. There needs to be a reason for the misdirection, some payoff to the reader that will make them chortle in glee rather than growl in outrage. And the bigger, longer, and more misleading something is, the bigger and more compelling the payoff has to be to justify it.

And I find the whole concept of the "hook" to be a little over-sold anyway. Take a look at some first lines from real-life published novels:

"The youthful gentleman in the scarlet coat with blue facings and gold lace, who was seated in the window of Lady Worth's drawing-room, idly looking down into the street, ceased for a moment to pay any attention to the conversation that was in progress." - An Infamous Army, Georgette Heyer

"It is said that fifty-three years after his liberation he returned from the Golden Cloud, to take up once again the Gauntlet of Heaven, to oppose the Order of Life and the gods who ordained it so." - Lord of Light, Roger Zelazny

"The queen waited." - The King of Attolia, Megan Whelan Turner

"The music room in the Governor's House at Port Mahon, a tall, handsome, pillared octagon, was filled with the triumphant first movement of Locatelli's C major quartet." - Master and Commander, Patrick O'Brian

"Miri woke to the sleepy bleating of a goat." - Princess Academy, Shannon Hale

Few to none of these examples would get a passing grade if they were turned in to a creative writing teacher as part of that "write ten hooks" assignment, yet the books were not only published but have lasted and/or been celebrated. They're interesting sentences, but not exaggerated. Most of them provide at least a hint of a character or a place or both, and that's what's a bit intriguing. Which is all one really needs.

Exercising, Part 2

Having gone on and on about how much I dislike writing exercises, I'm now going to talk a bit about how and when I think they're useful. That would be mainly as very specific, targeted ways of addressing particular problems or writing skills that aren't as developed as the rest of the writer's tool set.

Unpacking that a little: Most writers, in my opinion, don't need to do special exercises on (for example) dialog or description, because their stories give them plenty of opportunity to practice those things. Every once in a while, though, one runs across somebody who just can't get the hang of something. Maybe it's because they normally don't think that way, or maybe they picked up bad habits somewhere along the line, or maybe it's something that is their absolute least favorite thing in the world to write, so they unconsciously avoid it whenever possible.

Such writers can write whole novels without ever picking up the skill they're missing, because part of the reason it's missing is that they consistently leave whatever-it-is out of their work. Sometimes, they don't even notice that it's missing until half a dozen beta readers complain bitterly and at length. In my experience, the right writing exercise can go a long way toward fixing the problem, because it forces the writer to address it directly. They can't avoid writing dialog if the exercise is to do two pages of "talking heads" (dialog and nothing else).

Another use for writing exercises is in helping the writer understand more clearly how to use some of the basic tools in the writing toolbox, like language and punctuation. A lot of the exercises in Ursula le Guin's excellent Steering the Craft are this sort. Excercises can also help with understanding concepts like "show, don't tell" and the effect of using different types of viewpoint.

As with so many other things in writing, diagnosis is critical. Doing a bunch of dialog exercises isn't going to be much help if the real problem is with characterization or viewpoint. That said, here are a few of the exercises I found useful when I was teaching writing classes. If they don't appeal to you, or if you already know how, skip it and work on your ms.

1. Characterization, word choice, and description. Start with a character of average build, brown hair and eyes. Write a paragraph describing this character in such a way that the reader really likes him/her, using only the character's physical characteristics. Then describe the exact same character, using the same physical characteristics, so that the reader will dislike and mistrust the character.

2. Description again: Choose a picture of a place. With the picture in front of you, write three paragraphs of description without using any visual cues or images (that means no shapes, colors, etc.). Use only sounds, smells, sensations, and taste. Nouns are OK.

3. Viewpoint: Write a one-page scene in first person. Write it again, from the viewpoint of the same character, in second person, tight-third-person, camera-eye, and omniscient. (If all you do is change the pronouns, you're missing the point.) For bonus points, do it again in several different formats, e.g., letters, journal, first-person-over-the-shoulder. I did this by accident when I was writing the viewpoint handout I used in my writing classes. I used the same scene to illustrate each kind of viewpoint, and I was amazed by how much I got out of doing that, even though I'd thought I knew quite well what all the differences were.

4. Indirect characterization and description: Describe the contents of a woman's purse (or someone's junk drawer, or some other personal collection of miscellaneous useful stuff), so that by the time you're done, the reader knows a lot about the owner of the purse, junk drawer, or whatever, even though you don't get to say anything about that person directly.

5. Write two to four sentences summarizing (or "telling") an event or a character. Then write one-half to two pages dramatizing (or "showing") the same thing.

6. Viewpoint/characterization. Pick a character from something you're writing. In either first-person or tight-third-person, write a description of a place (inside, outside, doesn't matter) using that character as your POV. Pick a different character, and describe the same place in either first-person or tight-third-person from that character's viewpoint.

7. Anything out of Steering the Craft, mentioned above. I like the no-punctuation, no-adjectives, and short/long sentence exercises best, myself. These exercises aren't suited to everyone, and a lot of them seem to appeal more to experienced writers than to beginners, but I think they can be useful for anybody.