Author: drdoyleeditorial

Peeve of the Day

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Another thing a lot of writers get wrong:  cold.

Film and television writers are particularly bad in this regard, possibly because so many of them live in southern California, where cold is something that you make a day trip to visit and then drive home again.  But they aren’t the only ones.

Cold — true cold — isn’t charming and picturesque.  It’s dangerous and debilitating; it drains your energy and makes you stupid and has no compunction about killing you dead.

A few writers have gotten it right, notably Jack London in “To Build a Fire.” (The fantasy novelist Sean Stewart also got it right, in an elegant homage to London’s work that appears in his novel The Night Watch.)

More Thoughts on Rejection

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Anybody who writes for money is going to become, perforce, an expert in the types and levels of rejection.

There’s the generic form rejection, which usually reads something on the order of “Your manuscript does not meet our needs at the present time” — which may on rare occasions mean “Your story was so bad it made our eyeballs bleed” but which usually means nothing more than what it says.  Your manuscript didn’t meet their current needs, whatever those needs may have been.  Maybe they bought a story similar to yours just last week; maybe your story was an awkward length and they already have enough stories of that length in inventory to keep them supplied for a year; maybe you happened by chance to write upon a subject that gives the editor hives.  Or maybe your perfectly competent story just didn’t quite push the editor’s “Buy This One!” button.

(That last is a dreadful stage to be at in one’s writing career, by the way.  It’s like perpetually getting B-plusses and never quite getting an A; it’s like watching everybody else in your high-school class get asked out on dates while you’re spending your Saturday nights at home with a good book. A lot of aspiring writers give up at this point.  A lot of others turn bitter and morose, and are left unable to enjoy themselves when they finally do make that first sale.  The only consolation to be had is that everybody who’s eventually sold their writing has gone through this stage first.)

Then there’s the personalized and encouraging rejection, wherein the editor takes a minute or so from a busy schedule to add something like “Keep on writing!” or “Try us again with your next.”  These notes are good and flattering things.  The wise aspirant doesn’t take them as an invitation to initiate a personal correspondence,† but files them away in the “Attaboy!” (or “Attagirl!,” as appropriate) folder to take out and contemplate on those grey and rainy afternoons of the soul that writers are so often prone to.

Then there’s the rejection letter with specific suggestions:  “Shorten this by 500 words and I’ll give it another look” or “This isn’t really our sort of thing, but you might consider sending it to Anne Editor over at Marketable Magic Realism.”  In those cases — for heaven’s sake, don’t be dense.  Shorten the story and resubmit, or send it over to Marketable Magic Realism post haste with a note in the cover letter to the effect of “Joe Editor over at Rivetty SF suggested I send this to you.”

Maybe you don’t think your story was magic realism; maybe you think it was hard sf.  (You’d read Rivetty‘s submission guidelines, after all; that much of a newbie you aren’t.)  And maybe you’re right.  But editors make their reputations by knowing how readers are going to see these things, and Marketable Magic Realism‘s checks clear just as well as those from Rivetty SF Stories.  Take the money and run.

†Really, don’t. The last thing you want to do is inadvertently consign yourself to some editor’s Creepy Stalker file.

Some Things Never Change

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Found while looking through my bookmarks the other day,  a blog post from back in 2010 talking about something even earlier:

A (personalized and encouraging) rejection letter from William Dean Howells, in 1900.

I don’t know if Howells also had a stack of pre-printed “your manuscript does not meet our needs at the present time” letters, but I wouldn’t be a bit surprised to find out that he did.

Further Causes of Reader Disgruntlement: Tone/Plot Mismatch

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Sometimes, clothing the plot of one kind of story in the tone of a different and contrasting kind of story can  produce startling and unusual effects that give pleasure to the reader.  Other times . . .  well, at other times, the reader is more likely to conclude that the writer was trying to be clever, and failing.  This tends to make the reader unhappy.  (See John Scalzi on the failure mode of clever.)

This was brought home to me when I watched the 2009 film Duplicity, a complexly-plotted movie about corporate espionage and double-dealing which left me sufficiently disgruntled that I spent most of a long drive home from the movie theater trying to figure out what had gone wrong.  My ultimate conclusion, at least as far as my own disgruntlement was concerned, was that the tone and the plot of the film didn’t match. The tone was romantic comedy with a side order of intrigue, while the plot more properly belonged to a Cold War era spy thriller in the Le Carre or Deighton mode — the sort of film that gets shot with a monochrome filter and you count it a win if anybody even vaguely likeable is still alive when the credits roll.

The proper ending for a romantic comedy/caper flick is for the sympathetic characters to finish it up drinking champagne and eating strawberries and chocolate in bed on high-thread-count sheets in a luxury hotel someplace with no extradition treaties. Nothing else counts as a win. With a Cold War spy thriller, just having the sympathetic characters (if there even are any) come out of things alive at the finish is enough to keep it from being a stone downer, and alive-and-together is enough to count as a win.

Similarly, the reader of a Cold War thriller will accept betrayals and skullduggery and sympathetic people doing morally-ambiguous things because the fate of nations is at stake — if things go wrong enough, it won’t just be a few people sold out and bleeding, it’ll be whole armies of them, and civilians as well.  The reader of a romantic comedy is unlikely to be as accepting.

(Does this mean you should never play mix-and-match with tone and plot?  No.  It means that if you’re going to do it, be certain you can carry it off — and keep in mind the consequences of the failure mode.)

Film and Television Aren’t Your Friends

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There are a few things — more than a few, actually, but this is a blog post, not an exhaustive list — that you’re going to get the wrong impression of, if you’re relying on film and television and not real life:

How dark darkness really is.  Scenes on television and in the movies that are supposedly set in lightless or minimally-lit places (the woods on a moonless night; a windowless room) are in fact taking place in a representation of darkness and not the real thing, and the representation has to have enough light going on that the viewers can follow the action.  You’re a writer, not a film or television director, so you don’t have access to that particular artistic convention.  You need to keep track of what your light sources are, and if you don’t want your characters to be tripping over furniture in the dark, have them remember to bring along a flashlight.

How much injury it actually takes to put somebody out of action.  If all you want to do is sideline a character for a few chapters so that, for example, other characters are temporarily deprived of their assistance, it’s not necessary to riddle them with bullets or put them in a coma.  A severe sprain, a minor dislocation, a bad case of flu or even food poisoning . . . any of those will work as well.

How loud gunshots really are.  Make that how LOUD.  Your characters aren’t going to be holding any complex conversations in the immediate aftermath.

At what speed the wheels of justice really turn.  Anybody who’s ever served on jury duty knows that the reality is a long way from its fictional counterpart.  There are fewer moments of high drama, and more moments that sound like a couple of highly-paid professional litigators playing a complex but boring game of Mother-may-I.  (If you’ve never served on a jury, do so if you’re called — the experience, for a writer, is invaluable.  Lacking that opportunity, you can sometimes find gavel-to-gavel trial coverage on television or the internet.)

The moral of the story, unsurprisingly, is that if you find yourself writing about something that you only know about through media representations . . . back off and do some research.

A Friendly Reminder

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As of this week, we’re roughly halfway through the application season for the Viable Paradise workshop.

If you’re planning to apply, now is a good time to do it; there’s always a big rush of applications at the very end.

(In the interest of full disclosure, I’m one of the eight instructors at Viable Paradise; this year’s full set also includes James D. Macdonald, Patrick and Teresa Nielsen Hayden, Elizabeth Bear, Sherwood Smith, Steve Gould, and Steven Brust.)

 

Going There

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Sometimes, in the course of writing a short story or a novel, you come up to a scene that’s going to be . . . difficult.  You know going in that it’s going to be tough to write, because it means dealing with subject matter that makes you uncomfortable, or that could make at least some of your potential readers uncomfortable, or both.  It may touch on sex or violence or both, because as humans we tend to be kind of screwed up where those subjects are concerned, and especially screwed up at points where they intersect.†

At this point in the writing process, it’s usually a good idea to stop and ask yourself, “Do I really need to go there?”

Not “want” — we’ve already established that you don’t necessarily want to do any such thing.  You know that it’s going to be hard work, that it’s not going to make you happy while you’re doing it, and that there’s a good chance that at least some of your readers are going to be upset with you afterward.  So — not want, but need.  Is this the scene that’s going to best serve the long-term goals of your story?  Is its inclusion necessary to the truth — moral, thematic, artistic — of your story?  Can an equivalent but less disturbing scene serve the same purpose in your story, or would making such a substitution be tantamount to lying to your readers?

Some of the time, the answer is going to be “No, I don’t really need to go there.”  It’s entirely possible that what at first plot-outline thought seemed necessary is actually a hackneyed trope and the easy way out.  (Gratuitous rape scenes, I’m looking at you hard with a cold and fishy eye.  Common decency aside, gratuitous rape has been used so many times to provide characters with dark and troubled pasts, or motivate them to roaring rampages of revenge, that its inclusion in a narrative these days serves mostly as an indicator that the author couldn’t be bothered to think of anything original.)

Other times, however, you’re going to look at your story and ask it that question, and the story is going to look back at you and say, “Yes.  You need to do this.”

At that point, the thing to remember is:  Don’t flinch.

If you’ve made up your mind to go there — wherever “there” is for this story — step forward without hesitation.  Don’t walk around things you don’t want to look at, don’t keep your hands away from things you don’t want to touch.  Whatever you do, don’t worry about what your mother, your significant other, or the nice people in your writing group are going to think about you because you wrote this.  Think about your readers, who will always be able to tell when you’re dodging the issue, and keep yourself honest for them.

Nobody ever said that writing was a job for the timid.

†It could involve almost anything, though. There’s no telling what a given person may find unpleasant or disturbing.

From the Department of Good Advice

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Billy Wilder’s tips for screenwriters.

Most of them also apply to novelists.  The only one that could be debated is #10:

10. The third act must build, build, build in tempo and action until the last event, and then – that’s it. Don’t hang around.

But that’s because movies are more like short stories, or at most novellas, than they are like novels.  That’s why Tolkien’s extended fourfold wrap-up of The Lord of the Rings works in the context of the novel, but is less effective on the big screen.

(Also, of course, it is necessary to remember that in a perfect world any writer’s advice on writing would come with a clearly-printed THIS IS HOW IT WORKS FOR ME, ANYHOW label attached.)

Another Thing it Doesn’t Pay to Worry About

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Back in the dark ages, when I was first learning to type, the Word of God as passed down from on high by the instructor (who was more interested in training 80-words-a-minute secretaries than in teaching the rudiments of touch typing to a future English major) was that you double-spaced following a period.

I never became an 80-words-a-minute typist, but those two spaces after the period were hardwired into my brain, not to mention into my spacebar-hitting thumb.

Cue the musical montage representing the passage of time, with the tappity-tappity-tappity-bing! of the typewriter fading into the musical-popcorn boop-boop-boop of the old computer keyboards, and that sound fading in turn into the near-silence of keyboards today . . . followed by the Word of God saying that it is now customary to space only once after a period.

Why is this something it doesn’t pay to worry about?  Because, one, of all the reasons an editor may have for rejecting your manuscript, the question of how many spaces you’ve put after your periods is way low on the list.  And, two, if the whole thing bothers you that much, you don’t have to sweat blood retraining your spacebar thumb — all you have to do is run a search and replace during the final edit, and change every instance of two spaces to a single space instead.

Pi Day

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That is, 3.14.

Over at the Boskone blog, they’re posting pie recipes.  Which inspires me to post one here:

Pecan Pie

  • 1 cup white Karo syrup
  • 1/2 cup sugar
  • 3 eggs, well beaten
  • 1 and 1/2 cups chopped pecans
  • 1 tsp vanilla
  • 2 T butter, melted
  • 1 uncooked 9″ pie shell

Mix syrup and sugar well.
Add eggs, butter, vanilla, and pecans.
Mix well; pour into pie shell.
Bake at 350 for 45-50 minutes or until firm.

I haven’t made this recipe for about a decade now, because the canonical version of it, in my mind, requires the pecans that grew on the three pecan trees in the yard of my family’s house in Texas.  My father would spend the autumn picking up the pecans from those trees (two Georgia papershells and one native pecan — the latter were smaller and harder to dig out of their shells, but sweeter), get the shells cracked at a pecan-packing plant across the Red River in Oklahoma, then spend the winter picking the nuts out of their shells while he watched television.  Some years, those three pecan trees would yield 70 pounds or more of pecans; every spring, most of the ones that hadn’t gotten used up over the course of the previous year would get baked into apple-nut cakes and sold at the parish bazaar.  And a lot of them found their way to me, wherever I happened to be living at the time — instead of crumpled newspaper or styrofoam packing peanuts in boxes of stuff from home, I’d get ziploc freezer bags full of fresh pecans.

I was, of course, spoiled forever for store-bought pecans.  They always tasted dry and rancid by comparison.  After my father died, nobody picked up the pecans from the yard anymore, and the house in Texas belongs to someone else now anyway . . . but I still don’t have the heart to make this recipe with any other pecans.

There’s not much connection to writing in all of this, except maybe for the principle that almost everything has a story attached to it if you look hard enough.