Patricia C. Wrede's Blog, page 74

Exercising, part 1

Back when I was in 7th grade, I took a sewing class for beginners. In the first class, they showed us how to work the sewing machines and then gave us pieces of paper to "sew" with a dull needle and no thread, so we could see how to guide stuff through the feed. I waited until the teacher was gone and then started my actual project; I didn't see any point in sewing paper, when I already knew from the demo how the whole thing was supposed to work. 

Alright, the seam was maybe a little more wobbly than it might have been, but it wasn't bad enough to have to rip out, and it wasn't even as bad as the worst one that somebody who'd been practicing all day with the paper did.  And the second seam was better.  Alright, maybe I'd have done a better job on the first seam if I'd spent time sewing paper first.  But comparing the incremental benefit of the pointless paper-sewing with the amount of emotional annoyance it'd have caused me, I'm still glad I went straight to the material. 

I'm the same way when it comes to writing exercises, for the most part. The vast majority of them seem to me to be the equivalent of sewing paper with a dull needle - they're meant to teach one very specific thing: Dialog. Viewpoint. Voice. Description. Outlining. But when you're actually writing a story, you aren't every doing just one thing at a time. A scene may be mostly dialog, but it's from a particular viewpoint with a particular voice; the dialog will also display the personalities of each of the characters, and probably some background, and probably at least a smidgen of plot movement. Writing is a juggling act, and you can't really learn how to juggle if you only ever use one ball at a time.

Having taught writing classes, I've seen what happens when a would-be writer has gotten too focused on exercises. One gets stories that focus on one thing at a time: first, an opening "hook"; then a lump of description; then some dialog (often with the bare minimum of labeling); then some physical activity. You can practically draw lines across the page between exercises. And it's really hard to get people to stop doing this, once they've gotten into the habit.

On the other hand, there's a difference between getting exercise and doing an exercise. Many people - and I am one of them - need to take an hour or so several times a week to do some walking or biking or weight lifting, because their everyday lives are sedentary and don't get them moving enough for them to stay healthy. For my farmer uncles and cousins, however, going to the gym to lift weights after a day of shoveling manure and lifting hay bales would be … overkill, redundant, and unnecessary. They get plenty of exercise from their regular lives without ever having to do an exercise.

Which is why I contend that writing exercises are great for some people, some of the time … and a terrible idea for other people, some of the time. If you know you have something specific you need to work on, like keeping to viewpoint or working description into a scene, then doing an exercise that's focused on that particular thing can really be helpful. If you've been writing for a while and suddenly find yourself needing to know how to do something you've never tried before, a targeted exercise or two can help get you up to speed in a hurry. And there are exercises (the only ones I actually enjoy, myself) that challenge the writer to do things they'd never do in a story or chapter, like writing 300 words without using any punctuation, or writing a 250-word scene in complete sentences (no fragments) of seven words or less).

The key is diagnosis. If you are doing a lot of writing, and the writing you're doing is varied, you're probably getting enough "exercise." If you notice that you've written three chapters with no dialog at all, or no description to speak of, well, maybe a few dialog or description exercises would help target that particular muscle group…er, writing difficulty.

And of course, if writing exercises are your idea of fun, go for it.

Camera-eye

Back in the late 1960s or early 1970s, Algis Budrys wrote an excellent series of columns for LOCUS magazine on what he called "cinematic prose," using his Hugo-nominated novel Rogue Moon as an example. Alas, my copies have long since vanished into wherever things go when one has moved house multiple times over that many years, but I still remember some of what he said.

Chiefly, what I remember is his emphasis on the necessity for vivid visuals and over-the-top actions on the part of the characters, because in camera-eye, the visuals and actions are all the writer has to work with. In this kind of viewpoint, the writer can't dip into anyone's thoughts. He can only show whatever is on the surface…so he has to pick characters and situations where a lot shows on the surface.

Most of what I've learned about camera-eye since those early articles, I learned when I was asked to novelize the most recent three "Star Wars" movies as middle-school paperbacks. The job was a lot harder than I anticipated (partly because turning a 120-page screenplay into a 120-page novel means that every time you want to add something, like a description, you have to cut some of what's already there). But the real difficulty came because of the difference in viewpoint.

Screenplays are, obviously, written for the camera. They don't waste words or space on things the camera can't see. Because I chose to write the novelizations as multiple-tight-third-person, I had to put in all those things…which meant I had to think a lot about the differences between camera-eye and tight-third-person prose.

True camera-eye has some fairly extreme limitations: no direct thoughts or emotions, no physical sensations (whether internal ones, like a sinking sensation in the character's stomach, or external ones, like the feel of cool water running across a hand), no smells or tastes, not even the POV's guesses about what characters are thinking (a camera can't guess). The camera reports what it can see and hear, and that's it. This viewpoint is generally thought of as both difficult to write (because the writer has fewer tools to work with) and distancing (because the writer can't get inside the viewpoint character's head - indeed, one could argue that there isn't a viewpoint character at all, just someone the camera spends most of its time focused on).

Camera-eye has some advantages, though, which I might not have noticed if I hadn't been converting a screenplay into a novel. The biggest one is the ability to change focus easily in mid-scene. In tight-third, once the writer has picked the viewpoint character for a scene, that person has to be at least present for the whole scene, and usually not just present, but involved in whatever action or conversation is happening. In camera-eye, the camera can follow the conversation or the action, rather than one particular character.

For instance, take a dinner scene in which the characters get into an argument. Eventually, Character A stands up and storms out. In a tight-third scene, with A as the viewpoint character, that would have to be the end of the scene; if the writer wanted to show the reader whatever happens next, he'd have to start a new scene with a new viewpoint character (which isn't possible if the writer has chosen to write single rather than multiple viewpoint). In camera-eye, the writer doesn't have to end the scene or follow A out of the room; the camera can focus on A until he storms out of the room and then pull back and continue to watch whatever reactions the rest of the people at the dinner table have to A's abrupt exit.

Camera-eye is even more useful when there's a less obvious division within a scene - say, a dinner party for twelve, where there are bits of important/interesting conversation going on all up and down the table. It would be tough for one single tight-third viewpoint character to see all of the important bits, but a camera-eye (or an omniscient) viewpoint can follow the key conversations wherever they lead.

Quite often, a multiple-viewpoint novel will have most of its scenes written in tight-third with different POV characters, but one or two scenes done in camera eye. These are usually glimpses of the villain(s), and the writer uses camera eye because it keeps the reader out of the villain's head, and therefore limits the reader's knowledge of just what the villain is really up to.

Camera-eye seems to be becoming more popular lately, possibly because the visual media (TV, movies, videos) have become so pervasive. I personally still prefer tight-third in most cases, because I think that the ability to show the viewpoint character's thoughts is one of the advantages prose has over film, and why not use all the advantages one can get? Nevertheless, there are times and stories when camera-eye is just the thing (and flexibility is also an advantage). And it's always good to have another tool in one's writing toolbox.

Tight Third and Me

I wrote my first novel, Shadow Magic, in what I now call "sloppy omniscient viewpoint." Most of the time, a given scene would have a "viewpoint character," but whenever I thought someone else's thoughts or feelings were more interesting, I just jumped into that character's head for a few lines. I also backed off every now and then to say things like "Everyone felt saddened" when I wanted to look at my entire group of characters from the outside for a few minutes. I had no idea what I was doing, really; I'd never taken a creative writing course and my knowledge of analytical terminology was limited to a dim memory of my high school English classes, which had focused more on things like theme and symbolism than on stuff like plot and viewpoint.

By the time I finished the book, I knew something was wrong wrong wrong. I still wasn't sure what, but I'd at least begun to look at other books with a writer's eye, and I'd noticed that a lot of my favorites stuck with one character throughout, giving everything that person saw and thought and nothing that anyone else saw or thought. (I still didn't have any terminology for that). So I decided, quite arbitrarily, that I'd do that for my next book, just to see if I could. And even though that was thirty years ago, I remember it quite clearly.

The first few chapters were tough. I hadn't realized just how often I bounced around, or how convenient it had been to just say that so-and-so was angry or depressed instead of having to stop and figure out what "angry" or "depressed" would look like to my viewpoint character. Then I started to get the hang of it. It was kind of like method acting, I thought (not that I actually know anything about method acting). I just put myself into the viewpoint character's head very firmly, and described what "I" saw and felt.

Then I hit chapter seven.

In chapter seven, two things happened: first, my viewpoint character was separated from the rest of the group, and second, she was drugged up to the eyebrows. She wasn't going to be around to watch the exceedingly important things the other characters would be doing; she wasn't even going to be in any condition to make reasonable observations of what she was seeing.

I stalled dead on that chapter for weeks. I desperately wanted to pick a different character and tell the next bit from his/her viewpoint (two characters, actually; one to watch what the rest of the group was doing and one to watch what my original, now-drugged, viewpoint character was doing). I knew how to do that.

But I couldn't make myself do it. I'd set myself a challenge, and I really didn't want to blow it. More important, every time I started seriously considering which of my remaining characters to use for my new viewpoint, I realized it felt wrong. I'd gone six chapters seeing things through the eyes of one and only one character; to switch to somebody else in chapter seven would be a huge jolt. It would throw the story off track. It felt wrong.

So, after much agonizing, I went ahead and wrote the next scene through the drugged eyes of my original viewpoint character. I had to stop and consider practically every sentence to make sure I was staying with the right feel and not showing any thoughts or reactions or giving any descriptions that my too-tranquilized heroine wouldn't be thinking or feeling or describing. It was a big relief when she finally escaped and crawled into hiding to sleep it off.

Shortly thereafter, my POV reunited with the rest of the group. Everyone brought everyone else up to speed, and I found out something else. That scene I'd wanted to do so badly, the one my viewpoint character wasn't around to watch? It worked just fine to have my other characters tell her all about it after the fact, in detail, because, you know, she hadn't been around to watch. Oh, telling the story wasn't as immediate or vivid as the actual scene would have been, but it worked…and given that I'd chosen a tight-third viewpoint, it worked much better than breaking the viewpoint to switch to someone else (so I could show the scene).

After that, sticking with tight-third for the rest of the book was…less difficult. Not easy, but at least I'd finally gotten it into my head that whenever I found myself desperately wanting to jump into some other character's thoughts, I needed to think instead about how things looked to my viewpoint character and what conclusions she could draw from them. I didn't always get to provide the thoughts and reactions I wanted to, because my POV character didn't know most of her traveling companions very well, but I discovered that quite often, this was a Good Thing, because it let my POV character wonder and speculate and have her own interesting reactions, all of which ended up being even more revealing.

If I'd been a better writer, I might even have been able to manage showing enough of the other characters' reactions for the reader to draw the right conclusions while still having my POV draw the wrong ones because of her background…but hey, it was only my second book and I was still struggling with sticking to one and only one POV character. I wasn't up to anything more sophisticated.

Anyway, by the time I finished Daughter of Witches, I felt fairly comfortable writing single-viewpoint tight-third person. I even knew what to call it, because by then I was in a writing group and had other writers to talk to, several of whom knew a lot more about terminology than I did and were happy to share. I wrote my third book in first-person, which helped even more with the sticking-to-the-inside-of-one-head thing (because in first person, it is really really obvious if the writer slips and says something the POV wouldn't know).

And that's how I learned to write tight-third person.

Third person: an overview

As I've said before, the terms "viewpoint" and "point of view" can mean two different things: either the viewpoint character or the type of viewpoint (first, second, or third-person). I'm using it in the second sense today.

Third person viewpoint, taken as a whole, is probably the most commonly used viewpoint in fiction. There are seemingly an infinite number of ways to do it, because third-person viewpoint has a very broad range, from what I call "tight third person," where the writer not only sticks with a single character's point of view, but also provides his/her thoughts and emotions (and only that one viewpoint character's thoughts and emotions), to the broad sweep of omniscient viewpoint that can dip into anyone's thoughts at any time or tell the reader things that are going on elsewhere, that happened in the past, or that will happen in the future.

The worst part of it is, neither the terminology nor the ways of dividing up the third person viewpoint are standardized. Some references will tell you that there is only ever the omniscient narrator (but sometimes the narrator chooses to focus on only one character); others will split things up into dozens of fine distinctions, depending on whether the narrative voice matches the character's voice, how much of the character's thoughts are or aren't shown, whether the narrator is explicit, and a bunch of other things.

I personally find most of those fine distinctions to be pretty useless from a writer's perspective. Maybe they're helpful if you're analyzing stuff after it's written, but I've never found them to be much help while I'm writing. So I break the third person viewpoint up into three general sub-categories, and lump the rest of the distinctions under "voice," where I don't have to worry about them so much.

My three categories are: 1) Tight third person (also known as intimate third-person, third-person-personal, limited third person, third person subjective, and probably a bunch of other stuff). This is the viewpoint where the writer sticks with a single viewpoint character, providing his/her thoughts and emotions directly. The only way for the reader to find out the other characters' emotions is for the viewpoint character to guess or infer them from what those characters say and do.

2) Camera-eye third person (also known as third-person objective, observer-in-the-corner, third-person-impersonal, fly-on-the-wall, third person indirect, camera-on-the-shoulder, and, probably, also a bunch of other things). In camera-eye third person, the narrator does not give the reader anyone's thoughts or emotions. The writer just describes expressions and actions, provides dialog and tone of voice - the stuff that a camera or observer could see, and nothing more. Sometimes the writer's "camera" sits on one particular viewpoint character's shoulder; sometimes it's further away, or changes focus; but it always shows only what is happening from the outside.

3) Omniscient viewpoint, in which the narrator is an invisible character who knows everything that has ever happened or will ever happen and everything that anyone is thinking or feeling, and who can report as much or as little of this as seems appropriate. I've heard the term "limited omniscient" bandied around a couple of times, but it seems to mean contradictory things depending on who's using it, so I'm waiting until a consensus definition appears before I worry about using it.

Unfortunately for precise terminology, these categories do not have neat gaps in between - there's a fuzzy area between each pair, where stories seem to be too objective to be called "tight third," but are still providing the viewpoint character's thoughts, so they can't quite be "camera eye," or where the narrator sticks with the same two characters' thoughts, so it doesn't really look like a truly omniscient viewpoint but it's still not a single, tight-third viewpoint character. This is of great interest to a lot of folks who like to analyze and categorize writing, but I don't think it matters nearly as much to writers.

What really matters to writers is that whatever the writer comes up with works. Usually, this means that there's a certain amount of internal consistency - one doesn't start off in tight-third and then switch to camera eye or omniscient halfway through (unless there's a major section break to clue the reader in that the writer is doing this on purpose).

As I said, third-person viewpoint, taken as a whole, is probably the most popular viewpoint among writers of fiction. I think this is because of its flexibility - in tight-third, the writer can get almost as up-close-and-personal with the viewpoint character as one can get in a first-person manuscript, or the writer can provide an illusion of objectivity by backing away into camera-eye, or even omniscient. The writer can manipulate the focus and scope of a story by choosing which end of the scale she tells it from, making a sweeping epic feel more intimate and personal by sticking with a tight-third-person viewpoint and a single-narrator structure, or opening up what would otherwise be a restricted, personal tale by using omniscient viewpoint to bring in broader social and political consequences that the obvious tight-third viewpoint character wouldn't know about.

And one can even have it both ways (both intimate/personal and with broader scope) by using a multiple-viewpoint-character structure while telling each characters' scenes in tight-third. (One can, of course, do the same thing with multiple first-person viewpoint characters, but it's a lot more difficult to pull it off because it's a lot easier for the reader to confuse three different "I" characters than three tight-third viewpoint characters, each of whom has a different name.)

Of my three categories of third-person viewpoint, omniscient was historically the most popular, up into the early 20th century. Somewhere since then, tight-third has become the predominant type of third-person viewpoint. I found tight-third hellishly difficult to learn to do, but once I learned how, it became my favorite. I'll talk more about that next time.

Writing myths

There seem to be two basic myths about How Writers Work. The first is the painfully slow, unbelievably picky Brooding Poetic Genius typified by the Oscar Wilde remark about having a good day writing because he'd spent the morning removing a comma and the afternoon putting it back. The second is the inspired whirlwind All-You-Need-Is-An-Idea Genius typified by the montage scene in dozens of movies about writers - you know, the one that shows the writer being struck by an idea, racing for his typewriter, and then typing steadily away as images of pages pile up and up on the overlay, until at the end of the two-minute segment, he sits back with a sigh and his completed first, last, and only draft…which of course goes through the entire publication process in about a week and becomes a big hit.

I've never been able to decide which of the two I like least. Whenever I've met someone who takes either image seriously, the effect has always been detrimental to that writer's work. Half the ones who go for the unbelievably picky myth polish the silver shine right off their prose, then continue down through the copper until all that's left is a thin steel core, and then they go into despair because they "can't write." The other half struggle mightily to be as picky as they think they should, and fall into despair because they are really satisfied with their prose, mostly, and therefore they obviously aren't doing it right.

The folk who go for the inspiration myth are much harder to deal with for me personally, because I so do not work that way (which makes it very difficult for me to come up with alternatives that such writers will find useful). They, too, seem to fall into two groups: the ones who sit around waiting to be inspired, and who therefore produce nothing at all, and the ones who actually do produce quite a bit, but who refuse to believe that anything they produce this way could or should ever be changed. Every comma is golden even, the ones that, are in totally wrong places. I find this sort particularly frustrating, because it's obvious from their production rate that they've stumbled across a big chunk of What Works For Them, but most of them will never make that final step to publication that they're dreaming of because they think that as long as it's inspired, it must be good.

Inspiration is no guarantee of quality. It feels good, but that's not the same thing. There is, most definitely, such a thing as inspired dreck. There are, certainly, writers who can and do produce enough publication-or-better quality prose to make a living at writing, and who write only when they are inspired. I've met maybe three of these in the past thirty years, and all of them produced just as much unsellable stuff as the rest of us. The reason the inspiration-only method works for them is that they are inspired all the time. They never feel like not-writing. And they are under no illusion that everything they write is of the same high quality. They've learned to recognize when something is publication-ready and when it is going to need painful revision (and in my experience, the revision process is far more painful for these folks than it is for the rest of us…which is really saying something).

Also, I've never yet met anyone who could correctly identify, from reading the published version of Mairelon the Magician, which parts were written in a white-hot heat and got minimal revision; which were written fast and then revised to within an inch of their lives; which were done at an excruciatingly slow slog, etc. Heck, nobody's ever correctly identified where in the ms. I took a years-long break to write other stuff. If you can't tell the difference in the finished product, does it really matter whether the prose was inspired or not?

And ultimately that is the fundamental problem with all of the assorted would-be writers who get so invested in these writing myths. They get so focused on the "right" way to get to their goal that they forget about the goal itself. The goal varies, writer to writer, but it is always some form of a finished manuscript. For some, the goal is just to finish, and the heck with quality (NaNoWriMo writers, for instance). For some, the goal is to produce a "good" manuscript (according to their personal definition of "good writing," whatever that may be). For some, the goal is to get the story out of their head and down on paper as accurately as they possibly can. For some, the goal is a manuscript that meets the standards for professional publication.

Regardless of the specific goal, there are lots of ways to achieve it - probably as many ways as there are writers. The important thing is getting there, however one does it.

Query Letters

A query letter is one page, asking the editor if he/she wants to see a submission of the book.  It includes some sort of very brief summary of the book (so the editor can get an idea whether it's worth asking to see it), and there are two schools of thought about this.

One school is the "don't give the editor a reason to reject it" philosophy.  This means keeping the description of the book to the elevator-lobby version (you meet Stephen Spielberg in the lobby waiting for the elevator and have eleven seconds to pitch your book to him before his elevator leaves.  What do you say?).  The query, by this philosophy, would go something like"

Dear Editor: 

I have just finished my 100,000 word crossover fantasy/SF novel, The  Greatest Thing Since Sliced Bread.   The story deals with the manic adventures of a perpetual grad student and a purple monkey attempting to defeat the Evil Overlord of the Galaxy, in a style that is a cross between Douglas Adams and H.P. Lovecraft.  Would you be interested in looking at it?  The entire manuscript is available if you wish, or I can send a portion-and-outline if that is what you prefer.  Thank you for your time; I look forward to hearing from you.  

Sincerely…

The other school of thought is that if you have a page in which to get an editor interested, there's no point in limiting yourself to one sentence.  There's room for a paragraph or two of summary.  In this version, the query letter would read something like: 

   Dear Editor: 

   I have just finished my 100,000 word crossover fantasy/SF novel, The Greatest Thing Since Sliced Bread. 

   Perpetual grad student Linda Beaucomp is startled when a purple monkey arrives in her student apartment and demands that she save the world before she has had her morning coffee.  Justly annoyed, she cracks him over the head with the coffee pot, killing him on the spot.  Soon she is on the run, charged with gratuitous monkey-murder.  In desperation, she hooks up with a smart-alec Arcturan cab driver and his mysterious companion, who are oddly good at avoiding the robo-cops.

   "When the monkey proves to be alive after all, the three discover that the Evil Overlord of the Galaxy is behind the manhunt.  As it becomes harder and harder to avoid the Overlord's minions, Linda and her friends race to find the only thing that has a chance of defeating him:  the mysterious and deadly book known as the Necronomicon.  Soon they are dodging multi-tentacled horrors as well as robot cops, leading up to a three-way showdown to decide the fate of the universe.

    Would you be interested in looking at it? The entire manuscript is available if you wish, or I can send a portion-and-outline if that is what you prefer.  Thank you for your time; I look forward to hearing from you.  

    Sincerely…"

I personally favor the second sort of query, but that's partly because I have such a hard time boiling things down.  I'm a novelist; if I coulda said it in less than 100,000 words, I woulda.  But there's nothing wrong with the first sort, either; it's a matter of preference and personal philosophy which you choose. 

Note that neither version contains comments such as "This book is terriffic!  A great read, start to finish.  I am sure the movie people will be all over it.  It is full of original ideas and you will love every bit of it.  My mother and my best friend think it is superb, and so does everyone else I have shown it to, so I know that readers will buy it.  The world needs more funny stuff like my book.  It is really excellent."  (Each of which I have seen in proto-query-letters written by students…and sometimes, more than one.)

The editor knows that you think your book is terrific and original and a great read and so on, and she doesn't much care what your Mom and best friend think unless they happen to be personal friends of hers, also.  The editor has his own opinions about movie people and what the world needs, and doesn't really want to deal with them in a query letter, thanks.  The editor wants to know facts about this book you are offering:  is it finished, how long is it, do you think it belongs to any particular subgenre (the presumption is that you are smart enough not to send a medieval quest fantasy ms. to the editor of a line of Westerns or mysteries, though not everybody is this smart), what is the book about, what is the book like.

The last two are the tricky bit with a query:  you want the one-line or two-paragraph summary (whichever you choose to use) to be intriguing, but you don't want it to sound like the hyperbole on the back of a mass market paperback that's trying not to give away too much of the plot.  Editors are, by and large, allergic to puffery.  So you need to figure out which facts and events are intriguing and important enough to present, and how to present them in an interesting manner, without trying to fit everything in.  I didn't, you note, mention Linda's roommate, or the incident with Chthulu at the truck stop, or the head robo-cop's serious problem with battery acid abuse.  There'll be room for some of those in the five-to-ten-page outline/synopsis that goes in with the portion. I didn't get coy about the ending, either (OK, I didn't say who wins, but I didn't end the summary on an attempted cliffhanger or a teaser question. That's for blurbs; this is a query.)

For this supposed book, I also stuck strictly to the action-adventure plot, because that's what it is.  If it were a more character-centered book, I'd probably spend at least a line or two on Linda's emotional development and maturation (or whatever character-growth thing is going on in the book), and the more character-centered it was, the more time I'd spend on it.  The point of the summary is to give an accurate and intriguing representation of the book, so that the editor can get an idea whether he's interested.  It isn't going to do you any good to write a brilliant action-adventure summary that the editor thinks would be just great for his space opera line, and then send in a manuscript that turns out to pay only the most superficial attention to the action because it is really a deep and serious character study of the long-range psychological and emotional impact on the main character of losing his pet dog when he was six.  The editor probably won't like it or buy it, and you will have wasted months with the ms. sitting on the wrong editor's desk, because the right editor read the action-adventure summary and passed (since he was only interested in deep psychological etc. stuff).

Lightning and the Lightning Bug

A bit over a hundred years ago, Mark Twain made the famous remark that "The difference between the right word and the almost-right word is the difference between the lightning and the lightning bug."  At around the same time, Gustave Flaubert came up with his le seule mot juste [the only right word], which seems even more applicable in English than in French. After all, there are a million-plus words in the English language, and hardly any two mean exactly the same thing.

Those two famous quotes have been flung at writers and would-be writers for the last century, often with a smug certainty that no one would ever dare to argue with with them. I mean, it's Flaubert! It's Twain! And they agree! It would be hard to find anything more literarily respectable.

Nevertheless, I spent years being just a little uneasy about the whole notion of the need to find the perfect word, every time. It sounded good, but I didn't trust it. Then one day I ran across a quotation from Ursula le Guin: "Flaubert has been set up as such a universal model, and his le mot juste has been made into such a shibboleth, that it's salutary to watch the poor man founder in a quicksand consisting entirely of mots juste."

"So," I thought to myself, "this perfect right word thing isn't something that works for everyone." I felt relieved, but I wasn't entirely sure why until a few days later, when I was pouring over my current chapter-in-process, struggling mightily with a recalcitrant sentence. I finally put down something or other as a placeholder and went to bed, figuring that if I got a good night's sleep, I'd have a better chance at finding the really right way to say what I wanted. Lo and behold, morning came, and I looked at the placeholder sentence, and could not for the life of me see why I'd been in such a lather the day before, because it was perfectly fine.

I thought about that for a while, and realized that this happens to me at least half to three-quarters of the time. What is worse, sometimes I'll work for half an hour trying to bring up that mot juste  that I know is buried in my brain somewhere, and then a day or two later, it will suddenly come to me…and when I flip back triumphantly intending to replace the pallid, limp, totally wrong word I'd ended up using instead, I find to my horror that this word I've spent so much time and anxiety on is not the right word at all. Indeed, whatever I ended up using is much, much better, most of the time. That "mot juste" was only the perfect word in my imagination; if I'd been able to call it up instantly, I'd have seen that and gone on and not ended up wasting half an hour.

A novel is a lot of words, and most of them, quite frankly, aren't anything special. You have to go a long way to make a big thing out of "the" or "and" or "is/was," which are generally right at the top of everybody's list of "most often used words." Even if it's true that you really can't use anything else most of the time. Also, if you do get one word a little bit wrong in a 100,000 word novel (or in one of those 300,000 word monsters that are currently so popular), you're talking 0.01%, and most people just aren't going to notice (or if they do, they'll figure it was a typo).

Right about then, I noticed that most of the people I knew who were pushing the whole mot juste thing were either poets themselves, or were people who gave poetry first place on their personal hierarchy of literary arts. And while there are very long poems, they tend to be the exception rather than the rule these days…and if you get one word a little bit wrong out of thirty or fifty or five hundred words, it sticks out a lot more than one or two or ten out of 100,000.

And then I found out that Virginia Wolf had some of the same reservations (or at least, I think that's what she meant when she said "Style is a very simple matter; it is all rhythm. Once you get that, you can't use the wrong words."

After I read that, I felt a lot better about my doubts. Eventually, I came to the conclusion that, like everything else in writing, the whole question of Finding The Right Word is a balancing act. Because sometimes there really is a right word; it just happens a whole lot less often than I think it does. More important, I find that if I try to completely ignore the whole question of finding the perfect right word, and just write whatever seems close, I end up getting sloppier and sloppier, until my "first draft" is well nigh unreadable and requires more work in revision than I'd have done if I'd just taken a few minutes to consider alternatives the first time through.

So these days, I try to limit the amount of time I spend hunting for the perfect word. I give myself less time to agonize about it before I put in the "placeholder" and move on. Oddly enough, I seem to have just about the same (small) number of later revisons as I did before I instituted this policy, which says to me that I've got the balance right…for now.

A Few Basic Definitions

When I was writing my first novel, I didn't know any other writers (well, except for my mother). I'd also never read a how-to-write book. Consequently, there were a lot of things that I did without knowing there was a name for them; as far as I was concerned, they were just things I'd seen other people do. I imitated without knowing why.

Once I finally started meeting other writers, I learned very quickly that there were terms for all those things (and quite a few others, too), and that it was extremely useful to know those terms when talking about writing. There's also a fair amount of specialized jargon and shorthand that just makes talking about writing faster and easier. For those who haven't run across these yet, here are some brief definitions of a few basic terms that I think are useful:

 as-you-know-Bob - The SF version of "maid-and-butler dialog"; that is, two characters having a conversation in which they tell each other things they both already know, for no good reason except to let the reader overhear and get up to speed. See also "incluing" and "infodump."

braided novel - A multiple-viewpoint novel that follows the separate-but-related storylines of three (or sometimes more) primary viewpoint characters, with equal emphasis on each storyline and scenes from each storyline intermingled.

deus ex machina - Literally "the god from the machine," this refers to any improbable or totally unexpected event that hasn't been foreshadowed but that conveniently solves all the characters' problems at the end of the story (especially when the author has written him/herself into a corner)

fix-up novel - A book that has been assembled from a series of short stories (usually previously published) that have been strung together with extra transitional material.

flashback - A scene in which the narrative "flashes back" in time to dramatize something (often a viewpoint character's memory of some crucial event) that took place in the past. Generally, flashbacks take the reader back to something that happened before the story opened, but sometimes an author will skip a scene and then do a flashback to it later in order to keep something from being revealed too soon. Readers often consider this "cheating." Roger Zelazny's Doorways in the Sand and Steven Brust's Taltos and Dragon use regular flashbacks as part of the narrative structure.

foreshadowing - Anything (events, details, actions, comments) that prepares a reader for a future event in the story, especially if the event would otherwise seem unlikely, unexpected, or implausible.

hook - Any dramatic thing (an event, a mystery, a question, an image, even a turn of phrase) that is intended to catch the reader's attention and "hook" them into reading the rest of the story. Although the most common usage seems to refer just to the opening sentence, a hook can be longer, up to several paragraphs, if the payoff is big enough.

in medias res - More Latin, this time meaning "in the middle of things." Refers to the technique of opening a story in the middle of some exciting or emotional action and only later on explaining (usually in a flashback or infodump) how the characters got into such a mess.

incluing - Term for "getting the reader clued in" to important aspects of the characters, background, and/or setting that are likely to be unfamiliar. Incluing can be necessary in any type of story, but it is especially important in SF and fantasy stories, where much or all of the background, history, setting, etc. has been made up by the author and therefore can't be known by the reader without some kind of explanation. Ideally, the incluing is done subtly, but sometimes an obvious infodump is necessary.

infodump - Also known as "expository lump." A large chunk of exposition, usually intended to provide a summary of some vital aspect of the background or setting. While the term is generally considered pejorative, it's possible to do infodumps well; see "The Artful Infodump"  for an excellent analysis.

McGuffin - The thing that everyone in a story is trying to get hold of or protect, which drives large parts of the plot. It can be anything; in a caper story, it's the necklace or the painting that the protagonist is trying to steal; in a spy story, it's usually the secret blueprints or the defecting scientist. In The Maltese Falcon, it's the statue of the black bird. Not every story has a McGuffin, and some have more than one.

multiple viewpoint - Using different viewpoint characters in different scenes. There may be several equal primary viewpoint characters, as in a braided novel (see above), or there may be secondary viewpoint character who do not appear as often. Multiple viewpoint is not omniscient. Most (though not all) multiple viewpoint books use the same type of viewpoint (first, second, or third person) for all of the scenes, even though the viewpoint character varies from scene to scene.

narrator - The person or character who is presumed to be telling the story. In most third-person stories, the narrator is the invisible author, or at least, someone who is not part of the story; in first and second person, the narrator is usually the viewpoint character.

omniscient viewpoint - A type of third-person viewpoint in which the narrator knows everything and can therefore tell the reader anything at any time, including what several different characters are thinking in the same scene, the entire life history into the future of a minor character whom the reader will never see again, events that are happening simultaneously in different places, etc.

pacing - The reader's perception of how fast the story is moving. Pace is affected by a lot of things: variation in the narrative; scene, sentence, and paragraph length; how often critical questions come along (and how soon thereafter their answers show up); the rhythm of the rise/fall in the character's fortunes, etc.

plot coupon - One of a series of things that the protagonist has to do or collect before the plot can advance or end. If they are physical objects (the seven Ancient Amulets, the three pieces of the Sunkiller Bomb), they may also be multiple McGuffins, but a plot coupon can also be one or more things the protagonist is required to do before he/she can move on to the next stage of the plot.

plot skeleton - The basic bones of pretty much every plot there is: Protagonist has problem, protagonist tries to solve problem, protagonist's attempt makes situation worse in some way (either by failing outright or by creating a new, worse problem), repeat with increasing intensity until final success/failure.

said-bookism - The habit of using any verb other than "said" as a dialog tag (with bonus points if the verb has nothing to do with speech at all, as in "Do it," he shrugged or "Help," she shivered). Again, this term is generally used as a pejorative, though compulsively using "said" and nothing else can easily be as difficult to read as compulsively using substitutes for "said" (growled, whispered, cried, exclaimed, shouted, mumbled…etc.).

scene - A sequence of actions or events that all take place in the same spot at the same time and which are dramatized for the reader, rather than summarized. In other words, the reader gets to watch "in real time" as things happen, instead of simply being told "George and Joe started arguing; George threw a punch and in seconds the whole bar was fighting."

subplot - A secondary plot thread, usually found in longer works. A subplot may involve the protagonist but be of lesser importance to the main story (as with the romantic subplot in some mystery and adventure novels, or the adventure subplot in some romances), or it can be a completely separate storyline involving secondary characters. It is distinguished from the threads of a braided novel mainly by the fact that a subplot is of lesser importance, gets less time spent on it, and gets less emphasis than the central or main plot line.

subtext - A meaning or set of meaning that are implied by a text, rather than explicitly stated. Subtext can be deliberately and consciously manipulated by the author, or it can be inadvertent (in which case one is very likely to get into an argument with the author about it, if the author happens to be around when it is mentioned).

Tom Swifty - A word-play joke where the adverb in a speech tag relates in some way (often a pun) to the dialog spoken: "Turn off the lights," Tom said darkly. The name comes from the Tom Swift series of the early 1900s, in which nearly every dialog tag contained an adverb; the term has therefore also been used for speech tags that contain an adverb, especially an adverb ending in -ly.

unreliable narrator - A narrator whose account is biased, ill-informed, mistaken, incomplete, untrustworthy, or misleading in some other way. An unreliable narrator isn't necessarily morally suspect or deliberately misleading the reader; he/she may merely be naive, misinformed, etc.

viewpoint - 1) Short for "narrative point of view," meaning whether the narrative is in first, second, or third person, and what sort of first, second, or third person it's in (epistolary, stream-of-consciousness, omniscient, tight-third, camera eye, etc.) 2) Short for "viewpoint character," see below.

viewpoint character - The character through whose eyes the reader is "seeing" a particular scene. A single-viewpoint story has one viewpoint character, and all the scenes are told from that character's viewpoint, whether they are told in first-person, second-person, or third-person.

The Uses of a Skeleton

Ms. Wrede, do you use a plot skeleton? asked the earnest student. How do you apply it to your work?

I sat there for a minute, completely slumguzzled. Because the question was coming from such an alien perspective that it took me a while to come up with an answer that seemed even remotely sensible to me. I eventually babbled something, but it was pretty disjointed; fortunately, having a blog gives me a chance to be a little more coherent.

The problem with that question, for me, is that little verb, use. All my books have a plot skeleton, but it's like the skeleton of the human body. I use my eyes to see things and my hands to type and my legs to walk with; my skeleton is one of the underlying things that makes it all possible. I don't use my skeleton any more than I use my stomach or my circulatory system; it's just there, doing its own thing, deep under everything else, and I don't much think about it at all, except when something goes wrong with it.

I also don't see how a plot skeleton can be "applied." It's just there. Or not. Reading about happy people sitting around being happy isn't particularly interesting to most people (either to read or to write about), so you start off with a protagonist who has a problem.  People who sit around being miserable without doing anything aren't very interesting, either, so you have your protagonist take action in order to solve the problem. The action can succeed, fail, or be a partial success/failure-but, at which point the protagonist will either declare the story over (if it's a short one), or try again and again until he/she either permanently succeeds or permanently fails or gives up (if it's a novel).

The basic plot skeleton is descriptive, not prescriptive: it's just a way of pointing out the way most stories move, not a recipe that has to be followed. This is why there is only one of it. Your bones - your skeleton - may be slightly larger or smaller than mine, but if our skeletons were the only parts of us that showed, we'd all look practically identical.  It's the cartilage and muscle and tendons and skin and hair that make people look different from each other (unless you're an expert).  Plot is just the skeleton of the story.  You need one in order for the story to stand up straight, instead of collapsing into an unreadable pile of goo, but if you strip the flesh from Great Literature, you will find the same bones underneath that you find in schlock.

It is also worth noting that the plot skeleton does not say anything at all about content. A lot of people seem to think that "plot" and "action-adventure" mean the same thing, but they don't. A story can have a plot that's chiefly emotional or intellectual - one that's focused on the protagonist coming to terms with a parent's death, for instance. The incidents of the story will be something like "Protagonist is depressed after funeral; protagonist goes to a movie to try to cheer up; cheerful movie makes protagonist feel even worse" rather than "Monster is attacking village; protagonist tries to kill monster; killing monster enrages monster's Mom, who is even more dangerous," but the skeleton underneath is still "Protagonist has problem; protagonist tries to solve problem; attempted solution makes matters worse."

Why even bother with the concept of a plot skeleton, then? Because it can be useful if a) one isn't very good at plotting-by-instinct, or b) there's something wrong at that level of the story. "A)" tends to happen during the pre-writing stage, when the author is having trouble coming up with the "what happens" part of the story. Asking basic questions like "What is the main character's problem here?" and "What does he/she do to try to fix it?" and "What goes wrong, and what's the new/worse situation that results?" can often result in useful answers that build a solid series of cause-and-effect incidents.

"B)" is something one usually notices after one has written a bunch of stuff that doesn't seem to be working. At this point, the same questions ("What's the problem? What does she do about it? How do things get worse?") can be useful to pinpoint what's missing, if something is. Sometimes, in order to do this kind of analysis, one has to unwind all the secondary and subplots first, because each plot and subplot has its own skeleton and in a complex, multi-stranded novel it's a lot easier than you might think to lose track and leave out a critical piece. As soon as you line everything up in order, though, it becomes obvious: "OK, the monster attacks the village; then the monster's Mom attacks…hey, I never did the bit where the protagonist kills the first monster!"

It's common sense applied to writing, that's all.

Dialect

When I first started writing, I didn't pay too much attention to the way people spoke. I figured I was lucky to get my characters to sound as if they were holding a real conversation, rather than reading alternate paragraphs from an 18th century tome on rhetorical devices.

Slowly but surely, I got better at making my characters' speech sound more natural. At first, they all still sounded pretty much the same, but after a while the voices started to be more individual. The process was both gradual and exaggerated - early on, I had one or two characters per book who had strong, unmistakable voices (nobody would confuse Telemain or Amberglas with any other character in Talking to Dragons or The Seven Towers, respectively), but everyone else still used the same speech patterns.

As I worked on it, I got better at making more subtle distinctions between my characters' speech patterns. A lot of it was instinct - as I got more sensitive to distinctions in speech, a particular line would "feel wrong" for a particular character until I rephrased it. And then I hit dialect.

Dialect, according to the dictionary definition, is a variation on standard speech that has its own grammar, vocabulary, or pronunciation. It's the pronunciation part that drives writers (and sometimes readers) to distraction.

Pronunciation is an integral part of speech, and it's especially important for dialect. Yet non-standard pronunciation is really difficult to render on the page (unless you use the International Phonetic Alphabet, which few readers are familiar with). Oh, there are a few things that work pretty well - a character who drops the final "g" or initial "h" on words like "writin'" or "'ospital" isn't hard to show. But it quickly gets murky after that. Phrases like "Whatcha doing?" and "kinda hard" work on the page, but they get very old very quickly. If you use them with too heavy a hand, they can really turn off a lot of readers, even if they are the only non-standard speech your characters use. And when you get to full-blown phonetic respellings like "I wad be laith to rin an' chase thee/ Wi' murd'ring pattle!" (from Robert Burns' poem), they can be practically unintelligible.

The thing people forget is that, like everything else in writing, dialect is mostly illusion. It's important that it be convincing, not that it be an accurate reproduction in every aspect and at all times.

Phonetic dialect has actually got two strikes against it:  the difficulty readers have in reading it (see Burns, above) and the fact that different readers will "decode" the phonetic dialect in different ways, no matter how hard you try to make it clear. People speak with various regional accents, and any respelling is going to be filtered through those accents. For someone who speaks with a Southern accent, "lakh" is not a phonetic respelling of "like;" "like" is how you spell that word that Northerners pronounce "lyke." At best, a phonetic rendition of a Southern accent is not going to work for them; at worst, they'll find it actively insulting. And it is generally a very bad idea to insult a sizeable chunk of one's potential readership.

I did a bunch of experimenting and came to the conclusion that by and large, dialect works best on the page when I use non-standard syntax and sentence structure, rather than trying to respell it.  Nobody had any doubt that my character Renee D'Auber was a Frenchwoman with a noticeable accent, yet she does not speak one word of French or have one bit of phonetically respelled dialog anywhere in either of the two books she appears in.  Huckleberry Finn speaks with a pronounced dialect, but only about one word per page is respelled (and since the book is first-person, everything in it counts as dialog for these purposes).  Manny in THE MOON IS A HARSH MISTRESS likewise speaks in an odd syntax, but not in a respelled one.  Keith Laumer was a master at this technique - every one of the many alien races in the Retief stories uses a different scrambled syntax. They end up all being clearly and obviously aliens speaking an alien language, yet their dialog is seldom hard for the reader to understand.

There are, of course, exceptions. One of the more obviously useful ones is if you have a minor character whose accent is so thick that neither the viewpoint character nor the reader is supposed to understand what he's saying without paying careful attention. Some writers even play with this if the minor character starts recurring regularly; they'll lighten up on the respelling as the viewpoint character gets more used to interpreting the accent, but they keep the syntax scrambled as a reminder that the character is speaking with an accent.