Month: November 2012

You Never Forget Your First Time

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First publication, that is.

My first publication ever was a three-sentence paragraph on tadpoles.  No, I’m not making this up . . . I wrote it in first grade, because when I was six years old I thought that the whole egg-tadpole-frog thing was fascinating.  And my mother thought the paragraph was cute enough to send in to the “By Our Readers” page of Jack and Jill Magazine, which accepted it.  And then didn’t print it until I was in the fifth grade.

(If I’d known then what I know now about slush piles and backlogs, I wouldn’t have been so surprised.  But what does a fifth-grader know about publishing?)

My first paid publication was also my mother’s idea.  I was in the eighth grade, and prone to writing dreadful poetry.  She sent in one of the slightly-less-dreadful pieces to the “By Our Readers” page of our church denomination’s national youth magazine, and they accepted it.  They also sent me a check for three dollars and seventy-five cents (which at that point in time was three-and-a-bit times the cost of a paperback novel), and I was so deliriously happy that I ran barefoot to our next-door neighbor’s house to share the good news.

It was high summer in Texas and my feet got stuck full of sand-spurs, but I didn’t care.  Somebody who wasn’t related to me had liked something I’d written well enough to pay me actual, spendable money for it.

My fate was sealed.

Causes of Reader Disgruntlement: an Intermittent Series

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(“Intermittent” meaning, “I’ll deal with them as I think of them.”)

We will assume, for the moment, that you don’t want your readers disgruntled; that you want to keep them pleased with your work so that they will, you hope, keep wanting more of it.  I will grant that there are writers whose goal, at least for a particular piece of writing, is something other than pleasing the reader — the desired effect may be a justifiable anger at the system, or a fuller understanding of the futility of it, or something else along that line — but for the purposes of this blog I’m assuming a less rarefied, but more common, goal.

One of the primary causes of reader disgruntlement is simply this:  The reader feels that the author has not fulfilled the implied promises he or she made at the start of the story.

For an example, let us consider a popular novel in the romance genre.  I’m using romance as an example not because I have anything against romance novels — far from it; I read them even though I don’t have the knack of writing them — but because a typical romance novel is as formal in its structure as a sonnet.  There will be A Heroine; there will be A Hero; the primary action of the novel will involve their relationship, its Trials and Misunderstandings and Ultimate Consummation (with all-out steamy sex or with a single significant kiss, depending upon the overall hotness level of the text); and there will be a Happily Ever After.  A story that lacks one of these things may be a failed romance novel, or it may be something that only looks on the surface like a romance novel — but readers who picked it up and read it in the understanding that what they were getting actually was a romance novel are not going to be pleased.

They will, in fact, be severely disgruntled.

It’s possible, of course, that the author of the story intended to subvert the romance paradigm in exactly that manner — but the intended audience in that case is not the community of romance readers, but the community of readers who derive pleasure from subverted or inverted or otherwise tinkered-with paradigms.  (Who can get just as disgruntled if they’re promised a subversive experience and don’t actually get one.)  Someone who’s been promised a steak doesn’t want artfully manipulated tofu, any more than a committed vegetarian wants to be slipped a piece of meat unawares.

About the only way a writer can get away with not delivering what was, by implication, promised is by giving the reader something even better — and not just any something even better, but the kind of something better than a reader who had his or her mouth set for the original dish is also going to like.

(Nobody ever said this job was going to be easy.)

 

Another Thing Not to Do

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Suppose you’ve got a character who’s a poet.  This is dangerous territory, because readers are wary of characters who are poets or playwrights or novelists or artistic sorts in general, because the readers have a well-founded suspicion that any  artistic character is liable to be the author him-or-herself in a thin disguise . . . but let’s say that you’ve got good and sufficient reasons for doing it anyway.

And suppose, then, that your poet-character at some point has to write, and possibly even to recite (or sing, if this is a fantasy story and your poet-character is not just a poet, but a bard) a poem.

And suppose, further, that this poem is supposed to be a masterwork, something so profound and affecting that it moves the villain to mercy, or the populace to revolution, or the poet’s beloved to bestow love in return.

If that’s the case, then do not write that poem.  Do not give your readers the chance to read it and say, “Huh.  That poem isn’t really anything to write home about.”  Because if that happens, your reader will not believe in the villain’s mercy, or the people’s revolution, or the beloved’s affection — all those things that were supposed to have been caused by this masterwork of poetry will fail when it falls short.

What to do instead:  Don’t show the work of art.  Instead, show the other characters reacting to it.  Show the villain weeping, the crowd picking up paving stones and chair legs and broken bits of pipe, the beloved person meeting the poet’s eyes and smiling at last . . . that sort of thing.  The readers will believe in your great fictional work of art, because they will have seen your other characters behaving as though they were in the presence of greatness.

(Yes.  I know that Shakespeare actually did a Great and Moving Oration live on-stage in Julius Caesar, but he was Shakespeare and the rest of us aren’t.  And Tolkien crammed The Lord of the Rings chock-full of his own poetry, but point one, while he wasn’t William Shakespeare he was a competent versifier in his own right, and point two, his characters never asserted that their poems and songs were great works of art.)

Proverbially

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One of the first bits of style-improvement advice most writers get is “eliminate your adverbs.”

Like most entry-level advice, it’s good right up to the point where you don’t need it any more, and after that it can hinder as much as it helps.

The thing is, most entry-level writers do have a tendency to rely on adverbs to fine-tune the descriptive power of their verbs, or to be placeholders for better words that they promise themselves they’ll think of later.  (And sometimes they do think of the better words later, in the second or third draft, which is a sign that they’re not entry-level writers any more.)  For those writers, “eliminate your adverbs” is a real and valid step toward improving and streamlining their prose.  The act of going through their manuscripts and deleting all the words ending in -ly is, if nothing else, instructive — they see how little meaning is lost in that process, and how much force and directness is gained.  They train themselves not to be compulsive adverbializers.

At that point, though, it’s time to stop, before they train themselves to be obsessive adverb eliminators — because adverbs, like all the other parts of speech, exist for a reason.  Sometimes the only way to express a precise shade of meaning, or to give a sentence the exact rhythm that it needs, is by using a carefully chosen adverb.

(See “carefully”, above.  Yeah.)

Rejection is Your Friend (Sometimes, Anyhow)

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There are a lot of small press start-ups these days — the rise of electronic and print-on-demand publishing has lowered the bar for entering the business by quite a bit.  This is, I think, a good thing; small presses can take on books that have small (but dedicated) audiences, books that the major publishers might not want to take on.  But it’s an unhappy truth that if you have a lot of small press start-ups happening, not all of them are going to succeed.  In fact, a lot of them are going to fail spectacularly.

Unsurprisingly, this does not make life easier for writers.  Sure, once you’ve finished your book, you’ve got a lot more places to send it than writers did just a couple of decades ago.  But now you can’t just ask, “Is this publisher likely to accept my manuscript?”; you also have to ask, “Is this publisher likely to stay in business long enough to publish my book and pay me what it earns?”

This requires research, and listening to the industry chatter, and watching which way the wind blows.

One thing that you can listen for, when publisher-shopping: Does the publisher in question reject more manuscripts than it publishes?  If so, that’s a good sign.  One of the things publishers are for is rejecting manuscripts — they do it so the readers don’t have to.  Readers trust the publishers to have sorted through the vast piles of truly dreadful material and pulled out the good stuff.

“Truly dreadful” isn’t an exaggeration, by the way.  The industry term for unsolicited manuscripts is “slush,” and it’s exactly as uncomplimentary as it sounds.   Probably 99% of it is absolutely dreadful. Anybody in the world who can afford the price of a ream of paper and some postage can send in an unsolicited manuscript, and on a bad day at the publisher’s office, it can seem like most of them do.

I’ve read slush. Publishers who accept unsolicited manuscripts tend to put off reading them for as long as possible, just because most of them are so very very bad; as a result, sometimes the editorial department will declare a “slush kill” and draft all the editors and editorial assistants and — sometimes — visiting writers and just about anybody else in the office who’s known to be literate and in possession of a pulse, and there will be a massive effort to go through as many manuscripts as possible and sort out the utterly at-first-glance unpublishables from the ones that might merit a longer look by somebody a rung or so higher up the ladder.  A lot of things get thrown out at this stage: obvious plagiarism; blatant insanity; sheer incompetent prose; stuff meant to be taken seriously that nevertheless has the first reader giggling insanely; stuff so utterly dull from the very start that going on to the next page is a chore.  Most of what’s left still isn’t going to get published; not being actively dreadful isn’t the same thing as being good.

None of this is fair. Publishers aren’t in the business of being fair to aspiring writers. If they’re in the business of being fair to anyone, it’s to the readers, who are trusting them not to provide a bad product.

So if the small press where you’re interested in submitting has a track record of rejecting manuscripts that don’t meet its standards, that should count as a point in its favor.

An Amazing Lack of Accomplishment

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Some days are like that.  Today was one of them.

In my defense, it was grey and rainy outside all day.

Doesn’t make any difference, though.  I still need to get some words done before I go to bed.

Trust Me on This

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You don’t need an adjective attached to every noun.

You really don’t need two or more adjectives attached to every noun.

Distribute your adjectives with a light hand.  Also, choose better nouns.

Strong descriptive writing is all about the nouns and verbs, not about the adjectives and adverbs.

Why Translation is So Hard

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It isn’t the literal meanings of the words that make it difficult.  It’s the connotations — all those associated ideas that hang around a word like shadows of other meanings.  It’s connotation that makes house different from  home, and makes scheme into something shadier in American English than it is in British English.

A good translator, accordingly, will try to convey the connotative as well as the literal meanings in the text; but sometimes that can be a whole bundle of meanings at once, and trying to fit all of them into the space available can be like trying to stuff a down sleeping bag back into its sack.

A couple of my favorite examples, from Old English because that’s what I studied:

“Cold” in Old English (and in the older Scandinavian languages in general) has, in addition to its literal meaning, connotations of “fated” — usually “ill-fated,” because nobody in the old Germanic literature ever had good luck — and “unlucky.”

So in the Old English poem “The Battle of Maldon,” when the poet says, Ongan ceallian þa ofer cald wæter Byrhtelmes bearn (“Then Bryhthelm’s son began to call out over the cold water”), the listener/reader knows that bad stuff is about to go down . . . as indeed it does, because what happens next is that the raiding Vikings wade across the ford — the cold, unlucky water — to engage with the Essex fyrd (the militia, more or less), and heroic disaster ensues.

Another of my favorites comes in the closing lines of Beowulf, after the hero is dead and everybody is explaining to everybody else just how bad things are going to get now that he’s gone (this is known as the Old English elegaic mode, and J. R. R. Tolkien stole large chunks of it outright for the poetry of the Rohirrim):   Forðon sceall gar wesan monig, morgenceald, mundum bewunden, hæfen on handa… (“Therefore shall many a morning-cold spear be grasped in the fingers, hefted in the hand…”)  That passage gives us the ill-fated “cold” again, and adds “morning” to it — morning, in Old English epic poetry, was a bad time of day, the time for surprise attacks and general low spirits.

All you need after that are two ravens flying past, and the wolves howling.

Deadline Dinners Redux

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Yet another dead-simple crockpot recipe for writers (and other people) on a deadline who aren’t yet ready to break out the emergency frozen pizza stash:

Crockpot Orange Chicken

For the chicken:

  • 1 1/2 pounds boneless skinless chicken thighs, cut into 2-inch chunks
  • 1/2 cup flour
  • olive oil

For the sauce:

  • 1 tablespoon kosher salt (actually, regular salt would undoubtedly do just fine.  But recipe writers love their kosher salt, and we have a box of it in the kitchen, so . . . .)
  • 6 ounces of frozen no-pulp orange juice concentrate, thawed.  (If, like me, you couldn’t find a 6-ounce can, use half of a 12-ounce can and make orange juice out of the rest.  Vitamin C for the win.)
  • 3 tablespoons brown sugar
  • 1 teaspoon balsamic vinegar
  • 3 tablespoons ketchup

Put the flour and the chicken pieces into a ziploc bag and shake it to coat the chicken all over.
Put 3 or 4 tablespoons of olive oil into a large skillet and heat it up.
Add the chicken and brown it on all sides, just enough to get the flour coating all cooked.  (Don’t worry about the chicken itself; you’re going to be cooking it in the crockpot for hours, anyhow.)
Put the chicken pieces into the crockpot.
Mix up the sauce ingredients in a small bowl and pour the sauce over the chicken.  Use a wooden spoon to mix up the sauce and chicken pieces until all the chicken is coated with the sauce.
Put the lid on the crockpot and cook the chicken on low for 6 hours, or on high for 3-4.
Serve over rice.

This feeds six people once around with lots of rice, or three people if they all have seconds/large helpings.

Plot Device Obsolescence

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Technology changes all the time, and writers have to keep up with it.  This need for change doesn’t just affect our tools and our paths to publication — every so often a change comes along that wipes out or revises entire categories of plot devices and developments.

There was a time when characters could leave town, or leave the country, and effectively drop off the edge of the world as far as the folks back home were concerned.  Twenty miles was a long way, a hundred miles was even longer, and across the ocean (or the continent) was gone-for-good-and-never-seen-again.  Which was good for sad plots, with lost true loves and all, and good for suspenseful plots, with mysteriously returning missing heirs, and good for providing characters in need of escape with a place to go.

Then transportation got faster, and we got the telegraph and the telephone and the transAtlantic cable, and writers had to deal with the fact that it was now a lot easier for their characters to stay in touch, and a lot harder for them to hide.

The status quo rattled along for a few decades, as far as plots and technology went.  There were a lot of technological advances, but most of them weren’t in areas that would require massive retooling of existing plot machinery.  Even personal computers opened up more plot possibilities than they closed off.

Then along came cell phones and social media.  All of a sudden, it became a lot harder for writers to put their characters in that state of fear and isolation that’s so productive of interesting plot developments.  So long as your protagonist has a cell phone — and your readers will assume that he or she does have one — then at least in theory help is just a phone call away.  If you want your character to be truly alone and forced to rely only on his or her own resources, you’re going to have to deal with the cell phone problem:  lose it, leave it behind, drain its battery, break it, or make sure your readers know in advance that the character’s potential location has cell phone dead areas.  (They do still exist, especially in rural or wilderness areas; and even in cities there are some places where reception is at best spotty.)

It’s enough to make a writer turn to historical fiction, it is.  Just don’t turn to near-past historical fiction, because then you’re stuck with figuring out the point at which — for example — cell phones went from becoming large, expensive, and rare to being small, cheap, and ubiquitous.  (At some point during the run of The X-Files, is my guess; check out the differences between the phones Mulder and Scully use in the first couple of season with the ones they were using by the end.)