Patricia C. Wrede's Blog, page 75

One of those weeks

As you may recall, dear reader, in our last exciting episode on Wednesday morning I stated categorically that I wouldn't be doing NaNoWriMo this year for a lot of good reasons, including house guests, Thanksgiving, and general life workload. November-December are supposed to be slow months for work, because of all the holiday busy-ness.

I should know better than to say things like that out loud where the Universe can hear me.

By noon on Wednesday, it was clear that my writing had hit what I refer to as "a sticky bit." Things were not proceeding well, or, indeed, at all. I did not make my word quota on Wednesday, and I went to bed grumpy.

Thursday morning, while walking and talking with Beth-my-exercise-buddy, I had an unpleasant epiphany: the last couple of chapters are all wrong. One of the returning characters was working spells that were seriously overpowered for his supposed level of ability, among other things. That meant one-and-a-half to two-and-a-half chapters needed some serious rewriting.

I spent Thursday pondering options. I did not make my word count that day, either.

Friday morning, I had an even more unpleasant epiphany: not only was there a whole lot wrong with the particular returning character's behavior and abilities, the series of events in the main plot thread were in the wrong order. The structure of the opening chapters was all wrong.

After another two days of pondering, I have realized that I have to scrape the ms. back to Chapter One, Paragraph Three, and essentially start over. This means that my word count for the week is into five figures, and not the low five figures, either, and I am not a happy camper. It also means that I get to spend tomorrow finishing up a redrawn plot outline, and November trying to catch up to where I'm supposed to be if I hadn't gone so wrong in the first place.

Coincidentally, this is going to involve writing about 50,000 words in the month of November, houseguests notwithstanding.

I did not bring this up in order to whine about it (whining about it is merely a happy side effect, from my point of view). I brought it up so I could explain how I went wrong and maybe someone else can learn from my mistakes.

When I started work on this book, I had a magical critter which was new to my characters, and which they were trying to investigate (it poses a considerable threat). Lots of offstage characters came to help out, with varying degrees of success, but only three of them rated scenes actually showing them working on the critter in the lab. Call the outside helpers Jack, Sue, and Mary. Each of them has a different kind of magic; each of them has a different level of magical power and skill.

In the soon-to-be-dumped draft, Mary's scene came first, then Sue's, then Jack's. This was plausible given the chronology and travel distances I'm working with, but there's no deep structure behind it. Upon consideration it seems to me that I put them in that order because I was really looking forward to writing about Mary and Sue, so I did them first. It was fun, but the result just isn't working the way I need it to.

The problem is that Jack is the least powerful and least skilled of the magicians; Sue is the most powerful. But because I had Jack's scene come last, that was where certain vital information came out (see "character was overpowered," above). This does not display Sue's abilities to advantage; it also weakens her motivation for taking some plot-critical actions (because she doesn't have that key information yet). In addition, it makes Jack look a whole lot more important to the central storyline than I expect him to be.

I'm still considering the most desireable fix for all this. This sequence of events needs to build to a point that will provide enough plot-energy (information, in this case) to launch the next stage of my story. That means stacking the most powerful magician (Sue) with the most critical information at the end of the sequence, in order to get the most bang from the scene. So Sue's scene should come last.

I can make an argument either way for Mary and Jack, because they're each important to a different subplot, and the subplots have different weights; also, they're doing different types of magic. If I want to build the opening strictly on the basis of magical power and skill, then the order should be Jack-Mary-Sue; if I'm going more by the increasing relevance and importance of each character (and his/her subplot) to my central character, then Mary should come before Jack.

Either way I do it, I'm going to have to rework everything from Paragraph 3 on, because all the other scenes in those chapters are setting up for things, or reacting to things, in ways that will change significantly when the order of the Sue, Mary, and Jack scenes changes.

This is what comes of plunging in and tearing off without thinking things through (at least, this is what comes of it when I do it. Some people are quite successful at working like this on a regular basis. At the moment, I don't want to hear about them, though).

NaNoWriMo

November approaches, and with it comes National Novel Writing Month, a "writing event" that involves people all over the world trying to write a 50,000 word novel from scratch during the month of November. Along with NaNoWriMo comes, inevitably, a flock of earnest would-be writers asking whether or not they should participate (and, occasionally, whether I have).

Taking the easy part first: No, I haven't ever done NaNoWriMo myself. I've thought about it a couple of times, but I know my process pretty well, and generally, I'm a plodder. 500 words a day, day in and day out, works fine for me; 1700 words a day for 30 days is beyond hard, unless I've hit on an idea that simply won't let go and that just flows out my fingertips. Which has happened exactly twice in the past 30 years…and I'm not sure either thing would have continued to flow like that if I'd been trying to make myself meet that goal every single day.

Then, too, November tends to be a busy month, with holiday preparations and Thanksgiving both taking a big chunk of time that would normally be available for other things. There have been quite a few years where I didn't even make my normal 500 word daily quota. This year, I'll have all the usual, plus house guests early in the month, plus a bunch of family business that's been hanging fire while I got the page proofs for Across the Great Barrier proofread. In other words, I'd have the chance of the proverbial snowball in hell of finishing.

The hard question, though, is really the first one - should someone try this? The reason it's hard is because there isn't a one-size-fits-all answer. You have to know something about the person asking, their capabilities, and their other responsibilities before you can even begin to guess whether they'll be able to tackle it. (When Lois and I did a college tea the week before last, one of the students we were talking to asked us whether she should do NaNoWriMo. Lois looked at her and said, "Do you have any finals that month?" The student looked startled, having apparently expected a simple yes or no response.)

So if you're thinking about doing NaNoWriMo, consider: What else do you have to do in November? If you have no finals, projects, or reports due at school or at work; if you aren't responsible for anything at Thanksgiving except showing up to dinner; if your holiday presents and preparations are either well under control or perennially done at the last minute some time in December…then you're good in this regard. If one or more of those things isn't true, you're going to be juggling priorities. Take a long, hard look in advance and decide just how good a juggler you really are before you make a commitment.

Also consider: How do you react to failure? If you're going to be devastated if you get to the end of the month with 49,000 words instead of the requisite 50,000, maybe this is not the thing for you. If, on the other hand, you're pretty sure that if you weigh in with 25,000 words at month's end, you'll be utterly delighted because that's twice as many as you've ever achieved before…maybe you should give it a go.

Next, consider whatever you already know about your work habits and what works for you. If you work best and produce most under pressure, by all means try and see whether this sort of public deadline helps. If deadlines and pressure make you freeze up, you probably shouldn't. If you're not sure…well, sometimes experimenting is the only way to find out what works.

Even if you're pretty sure that you are, like me, a slow-and-steady plodder,  you might want to experiment with NaNoWriMo, just to see whether the commitment, the deadline, and the public support and accountability help or hurt your production rate. Sometimes, forcing yourself past your limits helps move those limits outward. Other times, it results in a nervous breakdown. Consider carefully what your particular reaction is likely to be, and factor that into your decision.

The absolute most important question to ask yourself, though, is this: Will it be fun?

Because really, if it isn't going to be fun on some level, why do it?

Search-and-Destroy

I wrote my first novel on a typewriter, and one of my most vivid memories of that is proofreading the final submission draft and trying to decide, over and over, whether it was worth retyping a whole page in order to get rid of one too-common word or phrase. Mostly, it wasn't.

When I got my first word-processor, I was immensely pleased by the way it let me go back and tidy up at the last minute. The "search and replace" function was especially helpful for getting rid of words and phrases that I'd overused. The only catch was, I had to know which words I was overusing, in order to search for them.

Over the years, I've developed a search-and-destroy list of words and phrases that creep into my rough drafts no matter how hard I try to avoid them. Some are things I've noticed; some are things my first-readers have called to my attention enough times that I have to reluctantly admit that what I think of as a charming or evocative phrase has been overworked, to say the least. The list changes a little from book to book, and from viewpoint character to viewpoint character. Daystar had a terrible tendency to overuse "really" (and we won't even talk about the semi-colons); Eff doesn't have a problem with "really," but I have to watch that she doesn't overuse "a mite" and her sentences sometimes go on for whole paragraphs and need some breaking up.

One of the things I've noticed recently is that "search and destroy" is really the wrong name for that list. The words and phrases on it aren't things that always have to disappear; they're things that need an extra look. About 80% of the time, I don't need them, but the other 20% of the time, they're exactly right.  For instance, the sentence "She seemed to be able to see a lot more from the high window" is a lot stronger and shorter as "She could see a lot more from the high window" (both "seemed to" and "be able to" are fairly high up on my search-and-destroy list; in combination they're an instant kill).

On the other hand, the sentence "Even if he chose not to answer some questions, she would be able to tell a lot by which questions he refused." is more ambiguous; here, the choice to change "she would be able to tell a lot" to "she could tell a lot" is as much a matter of voice as it is of over-use. I'd probably change it in most cases, but if I hadn't used the phrase in a while (a couple of chapters, say) and my viewpoint character tended to be pedantic, I might very well leave it alone. And the sentence "He wondered if he would be able to swim all the way to the far side of the river" is almost certainly going to remain unchanged, because "he wondered if he could" probably isn't going to imply enough self-doubt for what I want there.

The other thing I noticed is that "destroy" isn't exactly accurate, either. At least half the time, I don't just delete an overused word or phrase. Instead, I replace it with something else. "Would be able to see" often becomes "could see," or even just "saw." "Very red" sometimes becomes "crimson" or "scarlet,"  if the character's voice allows it. Sometimes it doesn't; one of my characters prefers similes such as "as red as my grandmother's cranberry sauce" to terms like crimson or scarlet, so that's what I change it to for her.

The point, as always, isn't really to come up with a list of forbidden words (which won't be the same for every writer anyway). The point is to make the writing more effective by looking at the standard words and phrases the writer comes up with by default, and then making a conscious decision whether to look for a clearer or more vivid or more succinct way to say the same thing.

Changing Characters

One of the things writers are urged to do, over and over, is to create characters who grow and change over the course of their adventures.

Obviously, growth and change are not an absolute requirement; there are plenty of long-running series in which the characters are exactly the same at the end of the book or episode as they were at the beginning. Still, character growth can be important even in the least character-centered, most action-adventure type of story.

So what makes a character change and grow?

The same things that make real people change and grow:  facing a major outside challenge (physical, mental, or emotional); developing a close relationship with someone very different from themselves (as friend, sibling, parental figure, or lover); or facing their own inner demons and prejudices. It is not at all coincidental that these are the same sorts of things that make for gripping plots.

The basic action-adventure plot, for instance, is an example of the first sort of thing: the character faces a series of outside challenges, usually physical ones. He has to climb the glass mountain, slay the dragon, blow up the Death Star, win the championship game. Often, the physical challenges have an intellectual or emotional component ("I am your father, Luke"), but action-adventure means primarily physical action. Murder mysteries are another example of the "major outside challenge," though in this case the challenge is as often mental (who did it?) as physical.

Romances obviously fit the second example:  change due to a relationship (in this case, a romantic one). And a lot of mainstream and literary fiction seems to slant toward the third kind, a character being forced by circumstances to face his or her inner demons (though they can and do include the other sorts of changes as well).

Science fiction and fantasy don't have a primary bent toward one or the other of the ways characters change. There are genres that do, of course; for instance, the sword-and-sorcery subgenre of fantasy and the space opera subgenre of science fiction are both varieties of action-adventure, and therefore have a strong tendency toward external, physical challenges that the main character must rise to meet. But even then, it can be hard to be sure that what the character is facing is really an external challenge. SF and fantasy both have a long history of stories where the main character's inner demons are externalized in some concrete way, so that the external challenge is also a challenge on the internal level.

Note also that "facing a challenge" does not mean winning over that challenge. A character may learn more from failure than from success, though if it's the final challenge that the main character fails, it can be hard to sell the reader on the idea that even so, that character came out of the story better off than when he/she went in. Often, that kind of lesson-learned-from-failure is reserved for secondary characters whose failure to achieve their goal can set off the main character's triumph (it's especially good for sympathetic secondary villains that the reader really wants to see reform…or at least, reform enough to survive when the good guys win).

What the change in the character is, depends on both the character and the challenge. Joe Hero may look like he needs to become more open-minded about other people, but if his big challenge in the story is killing the dragon without any help, he's not likely to have a lot of opportunity to learn that particular lesson. I personally don't set out to find ways for my characters to grow and change; if I try, either they go all stubborn on me and refuse to learn anything at all, or else the story gets so preachy that I can hardly stand it myself (much less any hypothetical readers).

What works for me is to let the characters wander around the story dealing with whatever curve balls I've thrown them until a pattern starts to emerge. Once that happens, I can either try to pull it all together in the Grand Finale, or (more likely) go back during the rewrite and tweak a dozen or so scenes to make everything clearer and more pointed. Sometimes I don't see the pattern myself at all until an editor or first-reader points it out to me (that's one reason why Across the Great Barrier added 10,000 words during the editorial revisions). Other writers know consciously what they're aiming for right from the start; still others have a gut feel so strong that once the story is all written, it looks as if everything was carefully planned and positioned beforehand, even though it wasn't.

Characters can change for the better, or they can change for the worse, and they aren't limited to one change per book (though too many major epiphanies can be hard to justify). Changing for the better involves increasing positive characteristics (confidence, unselfishness, etc.) or decreasing negative ones (prejudice, temper); changing for the worse is, obviously, the opposite. You can play this off against your ending in whatever way you like:  having the hero change for the better can make a catastrophic ending seem less of a downer, while having him/her change for the worse can mitigate the triumphalism of a great success; or you can have the catastrophe-plus-negative-change to get a real tragedy, and the success-plus-positive-change to make a really glowing happy ending. It all depends on what you want to do with your story.

Deciding to be a Writer

One of the questions I get asked a lot is "how did you decide to be a writer?" And the short answer is, I didn't. Oh, I've been writing since I started my first (unfinished, unpublishable) novel in seventh grade, but it was always about writing, not about being a writer.

Part of that was because I had no idea you could actually make a living as a writer. I knew people got paid for their stories, but I had no idea how much - and I certainly didn't know anyone else who was a writer (or who wanted to be). No, I take that back; I knew my mother, who wrote for the Confessions magazines for a few years as a hobby when I was in my early teens. So what I thought I knew was that you could write and sell, but it wouldn't be your full-time job.

But somewhere along the line, I decided that it would be kind of neat to be a "career writer," whatever that meant. Being me, I sat down and worked out a plan: I would keep writing in my spare time, as my mother  had, until I improved enough to sell a few stories. I figured that twenty-five years ought to be long enough to learn to write one or two short stories that would be good enough to sell (I was, at this point, around twenty). That would take me up to age forty-five or so, which gave me plenty of time to both start selling and build up a nice fat savings account to live on. Then I could have a major mid-life crisis, quit my job to write, and maybe even tackle a novel…and I'd have at least a minimal track record from those two or three short stories I figured I could sell, plus that nice bank account to live on.

Things didn't work out the way I expected.

For starters, I turned out to be a natural novelist, not a short story writer. I tried and tried to write short stories, but what I produced were unsellable plot summaries and things that read like awkwardly excerpted things from much longer works. (Not that I realized that at the time.)

The second problem was, I'm not very patient. I think that if I'd stuck to my plan and kept at the short stories, I probably could have learned to write well enough to sell a few in twenty-five years' time, but after about two years of trying, I got this idea that I knew was a novel. And, not being a patient person, I started writing it.

I didn't take it seriously, of course. I was still stuck on that plan, so working on the (unsaleable, horrible) short fiction came first. I worked on the novel other time, when I knew I was likely to be interrupted - lunch hour in the cafeteria, coffee breaks, waiting for my grad school class to start when the bus got me there early. Bits and scraps of time. The two- and three- hour blocks of time I carved out of the occasional weekend morning were for the (dreadful, unreadable) short stories.

And then one day, the novel was finished (there's a whole 'nother story behind that, but that's a different post). And there I was, seventeen years ahead of schedule, with a complete novel manuscript and no track record of short story sales to help me sell it.

I could have stuck it in the bottom drawer of my desk, but at that point blind, dumb habit kicked in. I'd been trying to sell short stories, and I'd learned enough by then to know that the way you sold something was to keep it in circulation. Finished manuscripts got sent out, and if they came back, they got sent out again (the same day, for preference, but next morning was OK if the mail delivery was late). Sending things out was just what you did, as soon as the manuscript was as good as you could make it. 

So when I finished the first book, I sent it out, not because I thought it would sell or thought it was particularly good, but because I couldn't think of anything else to do with it and sending it out was what you were supposed to do if you were gonna be a writer.

Just like the short stories, the finished manuscript came back, rejected. It just took a little longer. And, just like with the short stories, I sent it out again as fast as I could turn it around (which also took a little longer, as I hadn't been prepared with the right mailing supplies when it showed up the first time.)

And then one day it didn't come back for the longest time (and there's a whole 'nother story there, too), and the next thing I knew, it had sold. By then I was nearly finished with my second novel (once I put the first one in the mail, I thought "Hey, that wasn't so bad; I could do that again" and gave up on the short stories), and when I mentioned that to the editor, she asked me to send it along. So I did, and they bought that one, too.

The decision to quit my day job and write full-time came five years later, after I'd published five books and had another couple of novels in the pipeline (and finally learned how to write a halfway decent, saleable short story at least some of the time). By then, I already was a writer, and it was more a matter of not having time for two full-time careers and having to choose between them. And my two-short-story-sales-by-age-forty-five plan was long gone.

I still think it was a good plan, though.

Standing on your Head in the Shower

There is no bad way to write a story.  No editor cares how you wrote it.  No editor, to my knowledge, has ever rejected a story on the grounds that the author did not have a plan, character sketches, maps, or time lines before writing the story.  Editors want a good story; if you write it backwards, standing on your head in the shower at 2 a.m., in Greek and then translate it … they won't care, as long as it's a good story.  Heck, they won't even know, unless you tell them.  And it wouldn't be that much weirder a working method than the ones some of the writers I know use…

Writing is a product-based business, not a service or process-based business.  Editors and readers look at the finished result - the story - and decide if they like it.  How, when, why, where it was produced do not matter, so long as the product - the story - catches and holds the interest of a sufficient number of readers, and carries them along to a satisfying conclusion.  There are no "musts" about the production process; everybody does it differently.  And nobody in the business cares how the author does it, so long as the author turns out stories that other people like to read.

I take that back: there are three types of people who can be described as "in the business" who care (at least sometimes) about the "how" of the writing process: the marketing department, the purveyors of how-to-write systems, and, occasionally, critics.

The marketing department cares only if one's writing process is sufficiently strange as to be interesting, attract attention, and sell books. They aren't terribly interested in normal variations, like whether one does or doesn't use an outline, but if you dress up in costume and play out your character's adventures or go to extremes to get "actual experience" of things like falling off a mountain or the taste of ashes, or if you do your rough drafts in Spencerian verse and only convert them to prose later…well, if they can use it to sell books, they will. Of course, you have to tell them how you work before they can do anything with it, so it's the writer's choice when and whether to mention it.

Critics (some of them, not all) get interested in the writing process when they can use it to bolster their contention that a book is well or poorly written. If they know anything about the writer's actual process, they will hold it up for admiration (if they think the book is good) or condemnation (if they think the book is bad). A very few, very occasionally, will be overconfident enough to make assumptions about the writer's process and/or influences when they have no actual knowledge to fall back on. I had the extreme pleasure once of pointing out to one overconfident critic of the Enchanted Forest series that not only had he gotten the order of publication wrong (he'd forgotten to check the copyright dates), but that I hadn't read any of the very literary things he thought were "strongly influential" until well after the first book had been published (some of them had in fact not been written until after the first book was out), and that if anything was an influence on those books, it was the Rocky and Bullwinkle cartoons of my childhood. He was not terribly happy to hear this.

The last category is the folks who sell how-to-write systems. I don't mean how-to-write books; many of those are fairly prescriptive, but it's not a requirement. I haven't seen any how-to-write systems that don't have a series of steps you're supposed to follow. There's some flexibility, but a lot less than it looks like. There's one, for instance, that starts with a lot of questions about the main character; you can answer them for some other character first, and get around to the main character later, but eventually, you're expected to have character sketches for all your central characters (and each of them is supposed to fit into a particular role: protagonist, antagonist, mentor, etc.) before you start working on the plot.

And the thing that all these systems have in common is that they focus on the pre-writing stage. This is reasonable, in a way - developing an idea into a story can take time and attention, and it's easy for one piece to get lost in the shuffle. People are often not sure how to do it, so having a structure can help. The pre-writing development is also one of the few places in the writing process where it is possible to construct a plausible series of steps for someone to follow. One can construct a series of steps for producing a scene, but it is obviously very mechanical, and it's equally obvious that very few writers work that way. It's not plausible.

Getting back to the writing systems - the problems are that 1) pre-writing can vary just as much as any other part of the process, so it's a toss-up whether any particular system will work for any particular writer, and 2) prescriptive systems that depend on getting a lot of stuff decided and down on paper in advance can be actively detrimental to at least two sorts of writer: the seat-of-the-pants writer who works best when they make things up as they go, without planning, and the tell-it-once-only writer for whom telling the story once in any form (including outlining) kills it dead and prevents them fro writing anything at all.

It's not the method that makes the difference; it's the match-up between the writer and the method.

A Group of One's Own

January of 2010 marked the thirtieth anniversary of the first time six would-be writers in Minneapolis got together and formed a critique group. Within five years, all seven of the eventual members sold, and six are still publishing (the seventh went back to his first love, music and songwriting). You may have heard of us: the Scribblies, aka the Interstate Writer's Workshop. Me, Steven Brust, Pamela Dean, Kara Dalkey, Will Shetterly, Emma Bull, and Nate Bucklin.

Ever since, I occasionally get asked what we did so right. Why were the Scribblies so successful?

I've had a lot of chances to observe other writing groups since we all got started, and I've been in a few of them myself, and I think a large part of the answer to that question is, we were lucky, and I don't mean lucky about our writing or our submissions. I mean lucky in the people we ended up with in the group. Because we didn't ask each other any questions about what we wanted before we got started (except of course "Do you want to join a writing group?"). We just jumped right in. And the first and biggest reason I've seen why some writing groups stick together and others fall apart (after the sort of personality conflicts that can occur in any sort of group) is a mismatch in the expectations and needs of the various members.

It seems to me that there are three basic things that writing groups do: they provide a social group of people who have similar interests, they provide a support group of people who understand the hard parts of the job, and they provide serious comment and criticism that's hard to get anywhere else these days. Most groups perform all three functions to some extent, but most also end up focusing primarily on one of the three.

The problem comes when someone who really needs a support group ends up in one where most of the other people want serious criticism, or someone who really wants lots of good criticism ends up in a mostly-social group. If people don't recognize that some folks need and want a different mix, the best outcome is that some of the members will quietly leave. The worst outcome involves blowups and shouting and friendships that may never recover.

I've been a visitor at meetings where it was simply taken for granted that nobody would say "anything mean" - meaning, you weren't expected to say anything negative at all, not so much as pointing out typos. When they got to me and the group leader said, "Now, we're going to get some of that real Scribblies criticism!" I had to tell them that no, they weren't. Because while we certainly included positive comments, "real Scribblies criticism" very much involved saying negative things. We pointed out everything from weak characterization to plot inconsistencies, pacing problems, slithery viewpoint, and awkward or ambiguous sentences, and we weren't nice or hesitant about it, either. We didn't have the time.

Because that's the other reason I think we were so successful: We all took both our writing and the group very, very seriously. We had six members to begin with; seven, eventually, and at the beginning there was rarely a meeting where we didn't have material from at least four people to go over (and it wasn't always the same four). Once we hit our stride, we generally had at least six people with material every month, and we had to go to two-to-three-week intervals in order to keep from having ten-hour marathon critique sessions. Very occasionally, someone wouldn't have time to read and critique everything before the meeting; even more rarely, life would intervene and someone would miss a meeting, but neither happened very often.

The Scribblies were a critique group with occasional support and social functions. We photocopied our pages and passed them out to other members a week or so before each meeting, so everyone would have time to read them and scribble comments in the margins before the meeting. At the meeting we went over each project (usually a chapter or three of a novel, but sometimes a short story, and on a few memorable occasions, complete novels that the author had been storing up to dump on us in one fell swoop) page by page, with everyone making whatever points they had and arguing about them.

The author wasn't prohibited from joining the discussion, but he or she didn't get any more floor time than anyone else, and had the ultimate right to cut off discussion by saying "Thank you, I will think about that." Once in a while, the author would say "OK, what I was trying to do here was X, and obviously it didn't work" and we'd discuss why it didn't and what could be done instead, but mostly, as I remember it, we didn't make suggestions unless the author asked for them. We just pointed out things we thought were problems and things we really liked, and let the author decide what to change and how during revision.

Meetings were all very chaotic, with lots of arm-waving, occasional eye-rolling, and quarts of coffee and tea. We took breaks now and again (you really can't go for ten hours straight without snacks or pizza or take-out or something), but we kept them short. We never had a leader; we never needed one.

I learned an enormous amount from the Scribblies, as much of it from doing the critique of other people's work as from having my own done. Still, I don't recommend crit groups for everyone. Some people are hermits, or just can't accept comments, or need a writing group that provides more support or socializing. If it's not for you, don't force yourself. For those who are interested, though, it can be a great experience and very, very good for your writing.

(I originally did this post for novelspaces.blogspot.com back in July, but I thought folks here would like a look at it, too.)

Plotting nonfiction

An awful lot of the techniques that get used in fiction have applications in nonfiction as well. They're not necessary in nonfiction, but they can add a lot of appeal, interest, and readability, among other things.

One of the less obvious candidates for this sort of usefulness is plot. The problem is, I think, with that nonfiction is supposed describe reality, and reality doesn't have a plot…or does it? If plot is a pattern of events, questions, and answers that builds to a final climax, then no, reality doesn't have a plot, because reality never has a final climax - it just keeps on going.

But a book about reality does have an ending…the author has to stop somewhere. The trick is to find a story-like pattern within the reality that the book is describing…and if there is one thing that human beings are really, really good at, it's pattern recognition. Once the author has that, it becomes a matter of arranging the facts so that they build up to a climax.

Sometimes, the plot-pattern doesn't take much looking for. In a few years, there will probably be a bunch of books out analyzing the events of the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, and I'd be willing to bet that the most successful ones will end with the capping of the well, even though there's still a lot of work still being done down there and a lot of issues that haven't been resolved. Most of the books about the Enron collapse a few years back ended with the arrests of the top management. Biographies of famous individuals tend to end either with their deaths or with some key event in the person's life - Napoleon's final loss at Waterloo, Oppenheimer watching the first atomic bomb tests.

Picking that key, climatic event is the first step; the next one is organizing and presenting the facts and events leading up to it so as to keep the reader in suspense. Yes, suspense, even though in a lot of cases the reader already knows what happened. Napoleon lost. Enron collapsed. The oil well got capped.

What the reader doesn't know is exactly how things came together to produce that ending, and that's the part that the writer can make fascinating. The very best example I know of is the movie Apollo 13. Even the first time I saw it, I knew how it came out; I remembered listening to that four minutes of silence when it was the real thing. And I was still on the edge of my seat along with everyone else in the theater…and I still am, every time I watch it.

The nonfiction writer creates this buildup the same way a fiction writer does: by repeatedly calling the outcome into question, just when it seems to be a sure thing. Sometimes, this isn't hard at all - think of all the different ways they tried to cap that oil well before they finally got one that worked, or the problems and glitches on top of problems and glitches that kept happening to the Apollo 13 crew. After a while, it starts to seem as if success is going to be impossible, even if we already know what happened.

Other times, the writer misses the boat. I read a book once that recounted the founding and growth of a company that eventually became a household name. It should have been fascinating - there were so many times when the founder escaped disaster by the skin of his teeth that his eventual success should have been a triumph. But the writer got so bogged down in minutiae that he lost track of the story and overshot the ending - the book continued past the success of going public and petered out over several more chapters describing the growth and expansion of the stores (which was, at that point, inevitable).

Even a how-to book can often be presented so as to build to a sense of completion. I own several books on house construction; the best start by describing the foundation and then "building" things in order: a chapter on the basement, then one on the first floor, doors and windows, second floor, and finally the roof, so that at the end of the book there's a sense of having gone methodically through the whole house. There's no reason why the author couldn't have put the chapter on doors and windows first, followed it with the one on roofs, then the one on basements or the first floor…but it wouldn't have the same pattern.

Note that I'm not talking here about changing any of the actual facts. Accuracy is vital for nonfiction - that's the whole point, after all. But anyone who's ever watched two political candidates spin the same story in different directions knows that how you present the facts is nine-tenths of the battle.

Other aspects of fiction writing can apply to nonfiction…or not, depending. A book of knitting patterns isn't likely to have much use for techniques of characterization or dialog, but a memoir, biography, or the story of Apollo 13 or Enron probably will. And practically all nonfiction uses description and narrative summary in copious quantities. Style counts for a lot, as does clarity.

Necessary and Sufficient

Back in high school, I had a marvelous history teacher who made a point of going into more than memorizing dates and names and places. One of the key things I took away from that class was the concept of necessary and sufficient causes, and the difference between them.

Necessary causes are the things that absolutely must happen in order for some event or change to occur. In terms of plot, if you want to write a classic murder mystery, there has to be a murder. Sure, there are all sorts of other crimes, from theft to blackmail, that you could write about instead, but they won't be murder mysteries. Without the murder, there won't be a story.

But necessary causes are not always sufficient all by themselves. In order to have that murder mystery, you need the murder, but just the murder isn't enough. If the murder is never discovered, or if the murderer kills both the victim and himself at the scene of the crime, there's no mystery. (Which is why most people who pick up a murder mystery that opens with a murder-suicide will immediately assume that the real murderer has faked the evidence - because if this really is a murder-suicide, the story isn't going to be a murder mystery.) The story needs something else. Most of the time, the mystery is "who did it?", but sometimes, everybody knows who did it and the mystery part is in figuring out how they did it (and proving it enough to arrest the murderer).

Necessary causes are specific and immutable: without X, you don't get Y, not ever. Sufficient causes can be many and varied; they come in an assortment of different numbers and combinations. One or two big events can work, but so can a lot of little things that add up. The only requirement is that there are enough of them to tip the balance so that Y actually happens.

Plots and stories are about the sufficient causes - all the different ways of getting from here to there. And that can be a problem. A lot of people are quite good at figuring out what the absolutely necessary things are, and making sure to include them. Often, though, they're not so good at going beyond that. They put in the necessary elements, and they may even realize that they need a bit more than that…but they don't look closely at just what it's going to take to be enough to tip the story in the direction they want it to go.

The whole thing is made more complicated by the fact that exactly how much is enough to justify a plot twist or story event can vary wildly from reader to reader. Some people take a lot more convincing than others. Furthermore, there can be more than one thing in a story that needs sufficient cause before the whole story is believable. I had a horrible argument once with a gentleman who didn't understand why his beta-readers didn't believe his fantasy adventure. His central plot developed quite logically, after all … but a lot of the background politics were, at best, thin; at worst, they looked much too convenient. There weren't sufficient reasons behind them to make the readers believe them, and therefore they undercut the believability of the main plot. The background didn't matter to him, so he thought he had plenty enough to make the story work; unfortunately, his beta-readers had different standards for what was enough, and he hadn't met them.

In other words, it's necessary for the main plotline to hang together, but often it's not really sufficient. Even if you leave aside things like interesting, well-rounded characters and a writing style that doesn't go thud-clunk, which are also necessary for many readers, a novel has subplots and background and an assortment of other details that have to make sense. An author who wants to write a stripped-down, minimalist sort of story is mainly going to pay attention to the necessities and only the necessities - but in order for that to be enough to satisfy, that author is going to have to pay extra attention to what is necessary at all the different levels of the story, because there aren't going to be very many places to work them all in.

An author who is doing a more usual sort of story still has to get all the necessary stuff in - it wouldn't be called necessary if they could leave it out - but there are more possible places to put those important bits. It is even possible, sometimes, to let them be implied instead of stating them (though that can get tricky, because no matter how clear you try to be, some people will miss picking up on it).

Banning books

"Intellectual freedom can exist only where two essential conditions are met: first, that all individuals have the right to hold any belief on any subject and to convey their ideas in any form they deem appropriate, and second, that society makes an equal commitment to the right of unrestricted access to information and ideas regardless of the communication medium used, the content of work, and the viewpoints of both the author and the receiver of information."

–Intellectual Freedom Manual, by the American Library Association, 7th edition 

It is once again Banned Books week, and I still have a few things to say about the subject. I'm going to start by referring folks to the American Library Association website, where you can find information about banned books and an extremely interesting list of the top ten books challenged by year.

Books get challenged for all sorts of reasons, and by all sorts of people. A couple of years back, I was on a panel on the subject for a regional convention of the Society of Children's Book Writers and Illustrators that included a writer who'd been told that a particular young writers' conference would allow him to speak but would not make his most recent book available to children because the main character was a high school boy trying to figure out how to come out as homosexual to his friends and family; a writer who'd been told by a different conference that they would allow him to speak but would not carry his book because it had overtly religious content; and me, which is an interesting story on its own.

I was on that panel because six months earlier, I'd been at lunch with a number of fellow writers who had just heard about the first incident mentioned above. They were all indignant, shocked, appalled, and surprised…and while I was just as indignant and appalled at the conference's attitude, it fairly quickly became obvious to everyone at the table that I was neither shocked nor surprised that something like that could happen "in this day and age." So they asked me why.

"Because that kind of thing happens all the time," I said.

"No, no, certainly not!" they all told me.

So I told them about the teacher who almost got fired when a parent objected to her reading Calling on Dragons in her classroom, because "it taught witchcraft!" I mentioned the fellow YA author who was disinvited from a school visit (these are day-long programs where an author talks to several classes worth of kids and usually has lunch with the teachers, and for some YA authors, they contribute a goodly chunk to their income) because a parent noticed a title on her extensive bibliography that "sounded occult" (it was a mystery, with not a whiff of the supernatural anywhere in the text). I pointed out the well-publicized attempts to suppress the Harry Potter books (the series is #1 on the ALA's top ten most challenged books of the decade for 2000-2009), and a few less-well-publicized attempts to remove from school shelves things like The Wizard of Oz (because Dorothy is too independent and solves her own problems), The Lord of the Rings (because it is "Satanic"), and Grimm's Fairy Tales (because the stories are "too violent").

None of this was, I thought, stop-the-presses news - certainly not to anyone who writes fantasy. But the other writers at the table were shocked all over again. One of them happened to be on the program committee for the regional conference, and she went home and put the panel together.

When she asked me to be on the panel, I immediately said yes, and then I went off to the internet to do some research. I wanted some examples that would hit closer to home. I found quite a lot, but as I looked through the web sites, I noticed something interesting. I live in Minnesota. All of the descriptions of book-banning incidents in Minnesota were from the websites of organizations based in distant states: Florida, Texas, Washington D.C., Georgia.

So I poked a little more. There were quite a few local web sites publicizing Banned Books Week, and all of them did indeed have descriptions of surprising book-banning incidents. Incidents that took place in other states, like Texas, Georgia, and California.

OK, I admit that this is not a scientifically valid statistical survey. Still, it's suggestive. Book banning doesn't seem to be something that anyone wants to admit happens in their own backyard. And it is extremely easy to avoid admitting that it happens, because it is very, very rare that more than a couple of people even hear about a challenge. Often, the librarian (or, rarely, bookseller) and maybe an administrator are the only ones who ever hear that someone has objected to a particular book. They don't notify other parents (the vast majority of book challenges are to schools or school libraries). They certainly don't notify authors unless there's an appearance involved - the only reason I know about my book and that teacher is that she came up to me at a conference and told me herself.

You can find some of the information if you look for it. The ALA collects statistics, but they can only include challenges for which there is a record - a newspaper article or a written report. By some estimates, that's barely half the number of challenges or objections. And how many people ever bother to go looking? For the stuff that isn't reported…well, you have to ask the school librarian or volunteer for the library review committee (if there is one and if it includes non-employee members).

I support Banned Books Week. I support it for all kinds of books. Yes, there are some that I personally wouldn't have in my house, but if I only object to the banning of books I like and agree with, I'm as bad as the people issuing challenges to books I love.