Four questions from WFC

I find myself more and more answering questions in ways that I worry my listeners find rather vague and skirting the issue at hand. At Writing For Charity, this weekend here are some of the questions I remember being asked:

1. What do you do when you can't fix a book you've been working on for years?

You write a different book. You write about twenty more different books. And then maybe, just maybe, you'll be able to go back to the first book and see what it was that you couldn't get out on the page because you've become a good enough writer to do a very complex job that you're not up to yet. Or alternatively, you will realize that there is really nothing salvageable, and you will discover to your enormous relief that you don't care anymore because you've become a writer in the meantime who is much better than in the past, and those characters who are pestering you to tell their stories now will find other books to morph into in wonderful ways you will never know now if you keep banging your head against the wall.

The problem with this answer is that it is really turning around all the assumptions in the question and essentially refusing to answer the question as stated. But the reason I still stand by this answer is that I think it is often true that our questions turn out to be the wrong questions, or at least that we are asking them in a way that doesn't really make any sense to someone who is further down the line than we are. Also, a lot of the time, it turns out that what we think we are doing isn't what we are really doing. And that no one can answer certain questions except the person we will become if we can get where we are meant to be going. The other real answers others can give are a pat on the head and a sympathetic nod, saying, yeah, I was there, too. I remember how it felt. I remember that I didn't know what to do then, either.

2. Is it bad if you know you're writing the same story that has been told a thousand times before?

The simple answer to this: No.

The slightly more complex answer to this: No, because all writers are liars and thieves. Thieves because they steal everything they can get their hands on, then mix it up with all the other things that they've stolen so no one will ever guess where it all came from. The real trick is in reading so widely and knowing so many stories that people can see the line of theft because you know stories they have never heard of. And liars because writers are always refusing to admit the truth about being thieves and perhaps in the end are incapable of remembering everything that they have stolen, not because they don't know they've stolen it but because they don't know where.

The even more complex answer to this is: The problem with asking this question has nothing to do with the story and everything to do with where you are as a writer. Writers are incredibly neurotic. We wander around like the bird in "Are You My Mother?" and we ask everyone--am I OK? Am I a good writer? Am I good enough? Now? What about now? You're just going to have to learn to live with that uncertainty. No one can tell you enough times that you are good. No review, no award, no amount of money, no agent, no movie deal, no letter from a reader is ever going to fill the hole that is your neediness, at least not for longer than a few hours. That isn't to say that good news shouldn't be celebrated. It should. But it should be celebrated as a confirmation of your own acceptance of yourself as flawed but perfect in that imperfection. You must learn to stop looking to others for reassurance and approval and ask yourself. If you want to tell the story you are telling, then that is the only thing that matters. If it still interests you, then keep writing it. If it doesn't, then decide if that is because of your fear or because you really have moved on to something else. Fear should not keep you from writing. Fear is what we write about, ultimately.

3. How much is too much backstory?

Um, too much.

Or if you want a more specific answer: one paragraph. Except with epic fantasy, and then it can go on for about two hundred pages, but only if you can write it interestingly, and with a particular stylistic panache. And in memoir, you can do backstory for exactly ten pages, but only if the language is perfect. Oh, and historical can have backstory for five pages. Also, any mysteries can have backstory if it has to do with the crime.

But mostly, if you think it has too much, it has too much.

Unless you're one of those people who are so smart they never think of backstory, and then you need a lot more than you're giving right now, only don't do it condescendingly. Do it like you're talking to a teen child who is looking at you with shining eyes and you know every word is going to be memorized and repeated to a teacher who is going to think of every reason you are wrong.

4. What is the right balance of telling and showing?

47% and 53%. Always.

Of course, this is just a question of what effect you want to have on the audience. A masterful writer seems to intuit what almost every reader will feel on every page. How you get to that expert level? Well, you write a lot. More than you think is a lot. And you throw that all out and then you've still got about fifty novels before you're anywhere near an expert.

But even the experts will tell you that the balance you choose is going to be your personal choice. You may want there to be a slower sense of pace in one novel and a faster one in another. You may want the reader to feel as if everything is going to happen in its own good time. Or you may want the reader ready to hit you over the head if you don't tell her right now what is going on.

There is a cost in telling and that is that it feels like you are manipulating the action of the story. The payout is that you can tell things a lot more easily and more clearly than you can show them. Showing allows the reader the chance to interpret the story. Telling not so much. But showing often feels faster to the reader. I remember Orson Scott Card once said he tried writing his first novel and it was only a hundred pages and he showed it to a friend and the friend tried to read it, but said it was just too long. Then he figured out how to write scenes, made the story 400 pages long and the friend wondered how he had made it so much shorter.

I think what beginning writers often write when they come to conferences (certainly this was what I wanted when I came to conferences) was a list of items to tick off in order to write a good novel. Do these things, and your book will be good and people will buy it and you will be a real author. So that's why writers start making up rules about writing with numbers and lists. But the further along you get, the less you find such things useful and the more you tend to mock them because you can see both sides of any answer to any question. But if you say that to beginners, it makes them feel as if they aren't being told the truth, or that there is some secret conspiracy to keep all the rules of good writing to the people who are already "in the know." Which is exactly the opposite of the truth. We are happy to share, it's just that the answers aren't always ones that sound like answers.

Sorry.