It’s All in the Timing

June 3, 2013 ~ drdoyleeditorial ~ 2 Comments

We had breakfast for dinner tonight.

To be more precise, we had buttermilk pancakes, maple syrup, bacon, and scrapple for dinner tonight, and our established grammar and syntax of dining say that this is breakfast, even if eaten at 8 PM. And a meal that would be eminently satisfactory in its accustomed time slot becomes something even better — unexpected and even a little bit subversive — when consumed at a time of day normally reserved for roast meats and steamed vegetables, for soups and stir-fries and casseroles.

The same principle holds for writing. Put a character into a setting that’s out of sync with his or her normal environment, and you add interest. Move an event out of its traditional or expected place in the storyline, and you generate suspense — if the author has played fast and loose with one set of expectations, all of the others are fair games as well, and anything can happen.

It’s not always necessary to invent new things. A lot of the time, you can do just as well simply by putting familiar things in unexpected places.

The Benefits of Forethought

June 2, 2013 ~ drdoyleeditorial ~ 3 Comments

A line of thunderstorms rumbled through northern New England late this afternoon, knocking the power out in our town (among a whole bunch of other towns) for over four hours, right about dinnertime. The only place on Main Street with power was the local video rental, ice-cream shop, and pizza joint, because they had at some point invested in a generator. And they were doing a land-office business, selling pizzas and sandwiches and ice cream to a whole bunch of people — including us — who didn’t want to open their refrigerators until the power came back on. At the point we got our pizza and took it home, they had seventeen pizza orders stacked in a holding pattern waiting for oven space, and were down to their last five foot-long sandwich rolls.

And thus we see the virtue of having a good backup.

Backup plans and equipment are a good thing in the writing business as well. Don’t throw out the old computer when you upgrade; you never know when you might be facing a hard deadline and looking at a dead machine. (We had to drop back once from an Atari ST to a nearly-antique Atari 800, under just those circumstances.) Don’t forget to keep backup files of completed and published works (otherwise you may find yourself laboriously rekeying something you wrote a long time ago; and yes, I’ve done that, too.) Don’t forget to keep backup copies of works in progress — save in multiple places on your hard drive, save to the cloud (Microsoft Skydrive, Google Drive, Dropbox; or what the heck, all three), save to removable media. That way, if two weeks before a hard deadline the state police start knocking on doors all over your neighborhood and yelling, “Get out now, the water’s rising,” you can, if need be, finish your work-in-progress on a library computer a hundred miles down the road.

Another Brief Note on Names

May 31, 2013May 31, 2013 ~ drdoyleeditorial ~ 2 Comments

The other day, I talked about portentous weather. Which led, in the course of time, to thinking about portentous names — by which I mean the sort of name that tells the reader right up front what he or she is supposed to think about a character.

The Victorians loved this sort of thing. Dickens positively reveled in it, especially for his secondary characters, who rejoiced in names like Thomas Gradgrind and Wackford Squeers; Gilbert and Sullivan parodied it in Ruddigore, when the trusty servant Adam Goodheart, upon his employer’s assumption of the role of Bad Baronet, changes his name to Gideon Crawle.

These days, most writers go for subtler effects — with at least one prominent exception. I refer, of course, to J. K. Rowling, who didn’t hesitate to give her secondary characters names like Malfoy and Crouch and Shacklebolt, and her readers loved her for it.

Twirling That Mustache

May 29, 2013 ~ drdoyleeditorial ~ 1 Comment

Subtle characterization is a wonderful thing. Unsubtle characterization . . . not so much. There are a number of tricks for quick-and-dirty characterization, useful mainly in those forms and media where screen time or word count is tightly limited and strictly enforced; one of the down sides to becoming a writer is that one also becomes entirely too quick for comfort at spotting these tricks in action.

Possibly the most famous of these tricks is the old Hollywood advice for writers of westerns: When your villain comes to town, have him get off the stagecoach and kick the nearest dog.

A bit more subtle — but still not much — is characterization by significant accessory. I read a mystery novel once where the author tipped the readers off that they weren’t supposed to like a particular character by noting with disapproval that he owned a leather couch. (I gave up on that mystery series not long after, when I started noticing that the author appeared to feel more moral concern for crimes against animals than for crimes against people.)

Then you get characterization by opinion, which results in the sort of book where all the good characters share the writer’s political (or other) opinions, and win all the arguments, and all the bad characters espouse the completely wrongheaded opinions of the other side, and generally not only lose the arguments, but meet bad ends. There was, for example, one well-known mystery writer (now deceased) whose villains I could almost always identify before the final reveal, simply by noting which character in the story had committed the most egregious offenses against feminism. At the opposite end of the spectrum, there’s an entire subgenre of science fiction in which staunch (and usually gun-toting) conservative protagonists have to save the world from the bumbling mistakes, or even the downright treachery, of woolly-headed or hypocritical liberals.

None of these tricks are of their nature inherently bad. They’re bad because they’re exaggerated and obtrusive versions of techniques which, when done with a delicate hand, use telling details of setting and behavior to illuminate the truth. As so often in writing (and art in general), the thing that matters isn’t what you do, but how you do it.

Another Neat Thing They’re Doing

May 27, 2013 ~ drdoyleeditorial ~ Leave a comment

Scholars are using computers “to help reassemble more than 100,000 document fragments collected across 1,000 years that reveal details of Jewish life along the Mediterranean” — a task that previously had to be done by eye and hand.

A lot of the documents retrieved so far deal with the minutiae of daily life: contracts and sales records and legal documents and even recipes. For a historian, and even more for writers who are trying to recreate history for their readers, such details are golden, worth far more, sometimes, than the word about who defeated whom on the battlefield, and where.

(I’d be particularly interested to know the ingredients and techniques involved in what the article describes as a “particularly vile” recipe for honey-wine. Purely as a matter of academic curiosity, you understand.)

A Weather Eye

May 26, 2013May 26, 2013 ~ drdoyleeditorial ~ 1 Comment

It snowed today in parts of New Hampshire, and in other parts the Connecticut river is over its banks and the flood warnings are out for local streams . . . which is a good enough reason to think about the use and misuse of weather in fiction.

For example, there’s emotionally appropriate weather: whenever the protagonist is depressed, it rains; whenever the protagonist is happy, the sky is blue and the sun is shining. You can get away with this maybe once per novel, if you’re lucky and if your readers don’t notice what you’re doing. Use a light hand, and don’t milk your effects.

Then you’ve got ironically inappropriate weather: your protagonist is depressed, but it’s a glorious day out; your protagonist is deliriously happy, but the rain is pouring down. Again, use a light hand. If your narrator or viewpoint character feels obliged to point out the irony, you’re probably overdoing it.

There’s also plot-complicating or plot-resolving weather. The rule of thumb here is similar to the rule of thumb for luck or coincidence: weather effects that make things worse for your protagonist will be more readily believed than weather effects which make things easier. (Also, be parsimonious about these things. Readers will buy one instance of bad weather-luck; you’re pushing it if you expect them to buy three or four.) With weather, remember also to keep your weather patterns appropriate for the region and the season, and don’t forget to lay the groundwork in advance. A thunderstorm at the end of the chapter needs a hot afternoon and thunderheads on the horizon at the beginning of it.

Finally, there’s weather that’s gone missing — stories where every day is neither overcast nor blindingly sunny, neither excessively hot nor excessively cold, neither excessively windy nor a dead calm, neither swelteringly humid nor parchingly dry. We’re writers, people; we don’t need to wait for good weather to film our stories; we can give our chosen locale its full range of seasonal effects. And we had better, because if we don’t, our readers will notice that something is missing.

From the Department of Things I Don’t Miss at All

May 24, 2013 ~ drdoyleeditorial ~ 1 Comment

There are some aspects of the writing business that the march of time has marched right on past, and I don’t miss them even a little bit.

The SASE, or Stamped And Self-addressed Envelope, for manuscript submissions, is one of them — because when you had only one good typescript of a story or a novel, you were going to want it back. So first you had to get an envelope, or a cardboard box, that would fit your manuscript; and then you had to get another envelope or cardboard box that would fit into the first one along with the manuscript; and after that you had to get the post office to weigh first the manuscript and both envelopes (or boxes) and then the manuscript and just one envelope (or box); and before you could put the manuscript in the mail you had to double-check and make sure that the correct address and postage for the outer box had actually gone onto the outer box, and the correct address and postage for the inner box had actually gone onto the inner box . . . and when the manuscript finally got rejected and came back to you, you had to start the entire process all over again.

It’s a whole lot easier just to do the whole thing by e-mail; or if you’re dealing with hard copy, to slip in an ordinary self-addressed business envelope with a single first-class stamp on it, and put in your cover letter the magic words, “Please consider this a disposable manuscript.”

Two from the Guardian

May 23, 2013 ~ drdoyleeditorial ~ Leave a comment

Today’s “Go look over there!” links, both from the Guardian online:

First, we have the plagiarism scandal du jour: The poet David R. Morgan got caught lifting other poets’ poetry and publishing it as his own: American poet Charles O Hartman realised Morgan’s poem “Dead Wife Singing” was almost identical to his own, three-decades-old “A Little Song”.

Keep an eye on this one, folks; there’s no telling who else he may have stolen from.

Then, on a less dispiriting note, a column on overdone or imprecise metaphors: “A catalyst is something that speeds up a chemical reaction but is itself unchanged at the end of the reaction. Someone who sparks a revolution by setting themselves on fire shouldn’t be described as a catalyst.”

Another One from the Department of Bad Ideas

May 22, 2013 ~ drdoyleeditorial ~ Leave a comment

What do I think about the recently announced Kindle Worlds development?

I think it’s a really bad idea, from the point of view of just about everybody but Amazon.

John Scalzi, unsurprisingly, lays out why it’s a bad idea considered from the viewpoint of professional writers in general. (Short version: Alloy Entertainment and Amazon between them take all rights, and there’s no up-front advance to sweeten the grab.)

The blog Letters from Titan covers some of the troubling issues raised from the fanfic community’s point of view. (Short version: Conflict with the community’s traditional gift economy; potential for attempts at corporate control; restricted subject matter by comparison with the anything-goes world of unauthorized fanfic.)

My own opinion? Kindle Worlds isn’t going to give the world more high-quality fanfic; it’s going to give the world more lousy media tie-ins. And I say this as someone who has in her time written original fiction, tie-in fiction, licensed-property fiction (I was one-half of Victor Appleton not once, but twice!), and, yes, fanfiction.