Author: drdoyleeditorial

Halfway Home

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In the beginning, writing is easy, because you don’t know yet how much you don’t know, and you don’t know yet how much work it’s going to take to get better.

And eventually, you know that you’re not yet as good at it as you can be, but you’ve been at it long enough to know that you’re at least adequate and — more importantly — you know how to work at getting better.

In between those two states, though, is a trackless waste where a lot of dreams go to die.  It’s the stage where you’ve realized how much you still don’t know, but you haven’t got any idea how to go about getting better.  This is the point where despair can take over.

What can an aspiring writing do to avoid getting mired in despair?  Different remedies work for different people, but here are some that have proven effective:

  • Write something with the pressure-for-excellence taken off.  Blog posts; a journal; letters to imaginary friends, or to real ones; fan fiction, even, if that’s where your heart lies.  You don’t have to write the Great Post-Postmodern Novel every time, or even the Next Big Novel in your genre of choice, any more than a concert pianist has to play the Warsaw Concerto every time he or she sits down at the keyboard.
  • Go for some education.  Sign up for a writers’ workshop, or take a course online, or read some books on writing.  These are all good ways to pick up tips on craft and technique, because craft and technique are things that can be taught.
  • Seek out the company of other writers.  You may not pick up any tips on craft or technique from them (then again, you might), but writing is a lonely business and too much time spent alone with it can make it seem like you’ve been hiking through the same stretch of desolate landscape since forever.
  • Read for pleasure — books in your genre, books out of it, whatever takes your fancy — and read for instruction as well.  Watch how your favorite writers handle the tricky bits you’ve been struggling with; notice when even your favorite writers sometimes don’t quite hit the mark.  (Even great writers don’t hit it every time.  Point of view in Moby-Dick wanders all over the place; Mark Twain had trouble writing endings; Dickens was fond of plot advancement through incredible coincidence.  And so on.)
  • And keep on writing.  Nobody ever got through the wasteland by stopping in the middle of it and waiting for something to happen.

Bowknots

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If the endgame of a novel is hard to write, the bit that comes after the endgame is even harder.  This is the part I think of as the “tying up all the loose ends into a bowknot” stage of a project –  and when I reach it, I have to struggle every time against the urge to simply ring down the curtain on the action climax and be done

But I know that I can’t let myself do that, because skimping on the bowknot stage is a quick way to leave the readers unhappy and unsatisfied with the entire rest of the book.  The bowknot is the part where all the plot coupons get gathered up, and What Was Really Going On gets summarized and explained, and everyone gets played out with sweet music and the implication that the world of the story extends beyond the FINIS and the fade to black.  Tying the bowknot is not the fun part of writing the novel, it’s the part that has to be done with sheer bloody craftsmanship, and sometimes it’s like pulling teeth.

The other thing to know about bowknots (and this took me longer that it should have to figure out, which is why the last scene of my first novel got rewritten multiple times) is that the length of an effective bowknot is proportional to the size of the work itself.  A short story can be tied up in a single paragraph, or even a single sentence.  A novel can take a whole chapter, or sometimes more.

How do you know you’ve tied up your bowknot in an adequate fashion?  Your best bet is to find a reliable outside reader and bind him or her with strong oaths to tell you truly whether or not the ending works.  Don’t be surprised if it takes several iterations of the process and more than one outside reader to arrive at an acceptable finished product.

And don’t worry too much.  Getting the ending right is a matter of craft, which means it’s something that can be learned, and that can be improved with practice.

From the Department of Annoying Tropes

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I was a Navy wife for about a decade, and a Navy girlfriend for three years before that. And sometimes I get so very very tired of the “Darling, I love you, but I can’t handle your job” routine that seems to be obligatory whenever you have an action-adventure television character who starts out the series married, or even just going steady. It’s a goddamned insult to all the people who are living that life and by God coping with it, is what it is.  (My issues, let me show you them.)

I know why the powers that be do it, of course.  They want the (male) lead to be conveniently unattached, so that he’ll make a more convenient fantasy object for the viewers, as well as leaving the coast clear for the script writers to throw in a Babe of the Week or a Girlfriend in the Fridge whenever they run out of other ideas.  At the same time — because the powers tend to assume that the typical viewer is both casually misogynistic and casually homophobic — they want to make it crystal clear that the male lead is straighter than a ruler-straight thing.  Enter, therefore (and leave, shortly thereafter), the conveniently dissatisfied wife-or-girlfriend.

Personally, I think that the powers that be underestimate the tolerance of the typical viewer, or at least the typical viewer’s lack of a need for constant reassurance about a leading character’s sexuality.  Then again, I’m not gambling a million bucks or more per episode on my faith in human nature, either — one of the advantages to writing novels instead of series television is that the stakes are low enough to take some risks.

No POV Beyond This Point

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That’s what the sign said, anyway, in the parking lot of the Base Exchange.  What they meant, of course, was Personally Owned Vehicle — which is military-speak for the family car.  All the same, it gave aspiring-writer me a memorable moment of mental bogglement, because the same acronym, in writer-speak, is shorthand for Point Of View, and Point Of View is everywhere.

In the universe of fiction, nothing happens without an observer; without observation, the story would not exist.  Even the so-called “third person objective” has an observer — third person objective is nothing but observation.  It’s the “fly on the wall” viewpoint, the “camera’s eye” viewpoint, which gives the reader action and dialogue and description but nothing interior to the characters or to the narrator.  (This is all elaborate sleight of hand, or sleight of mind — the writer is only pretending not to judge or comment on what’s going on.  In fact, every detail is selected out of the near-infinite number of possible details with an eye to how it’s going to contribute to the impression the writer wants to make on the mind of the reader.  Not surprisingly, third person objective is fiendishly hard to do well, or to carry off at length; most of the famous examples, such as Hemingway’s “The Killers”, are short stories.)

At the other end of the spectrum from third person objective is the omniscient point of view favored by Victorian novelists.  For a long time in the mid to late twentieth century, omniscient POV fell out of favor, the victim of changes in literary fashion.  Not surprisingly, given the lack of contemporary models, most of the writers who attempted to write in omni POV struggled with the process; failed attempts at omni were denigrated as “head-hopping.”  It takes a keen eye and a steady hand to manage access to the interior lives of all a story’s characters, and to move freely between them without jarring or disorienting the reader.

Occupying the middle of the spectrum is tight-third POV, and its variant form, multiple tight-third.  In tight-third, the writer allows him- or herself privileged access to the interior life of only a single character — or, in multiple tight-third, to only a single character in a particular scene.  Tight-third, whether single or multiple, is probably the most common point of view in contemporary fiction, and to the extent that anything in this business is easy, it’s probably the easiest to get right.

Outside of the objective/tight-third/omni spectrum we have the varyingly-weird outliers:  first-person, the “reader, I married him” point of view; second-person, the “you are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike” point of view; and oddities such as the epistolary story, told through letters and other documents.  They’re all hard to write in their different ways, and a certain proportion of your audience is going to find them off-putting (there are readers out there who will never read a first-person story, for example, or a first-person story where the gender of the narrator doesn’t match the gender of the author, even though the text is plainly labelled “fiction.”)

What point of view should you use for your story?  As so often in the writing business, the answer is, “It depends.”  If your main character is talking to you in a distinctive voice and won’t shut up, first-person may be the answer.  If you’re concerned with how the society of the story both affects and deals with the events of the narrative, and if you feel up to the challenge, then omniscient POV may be what you’re looking for.  When in doubt, though, it’s always a good idea to go first for tight-third.  No reader is going to question that choice, and it’s one with a lot of good models available for emulation.

But if tight-third isn’t working for you, or if your narrative persists in veering toward one of the other models, then try the various alternatives until you find the one that clicks.

Go. Look. Read This.

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Christopher R. Beha’s essay, “The Marquise Went out at Five O’clock: On Making Sentences Do Something”, is chock-full of good crunchy insights and thoughtful advice and things I would have liked to say only he’s saying them first and better.  A snippet:

People can disagree, and have, over whether a novel or a story must itself have a “purpose” apart from being beautiful. But it seems to me inarguable that the parts of a novel or a story must have a purpose within the whole. These days, when I find that a sentence I’m writing isn’t working, I don’t think about what I want that sentence to look like or to be; I don’t pull it from the page to weigh it in my hand; I don’t worry over its internal balance. I simply ask myself, “What do I need this sentence to do?” I ask myself what role the sentence plays in its paragraph, what role the paragraph plays in its scene, the scene in its story. If I can’t answer these questions, even in some inarticulate and intuitive way, then I’ve got a problem, and that problem is bigger than this one sentence.

Speaking as a person who spends a lot of time wrestling with sentences, both her own and others, I can only say, Yes.  This is how it is.  Yes.

Review Halloo

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In addition to editing and blogging and occasionally teaching, I also write fiction.  Or, as we sometimes put it around here, “I tell lies to strangers for money.”

Which means that from time to time the books I write get reviewed — sometimes by people who like them, and sometimes by people who don’t. A good review is always nice. A good review that makes it clear that the reviewer didn’t just like the book, but actually got what the writer was doing with it –above and beyond buying groceries and paying the rent — is something beyond nice.

(There’s no predicting which reviewer you’re going to get such a review from, either. Sometimes it’s from a friend who’s liked your stuff since forever; sometimes it’s from somebody whom you’d swear wouldn’t give you the time of day. Just another one of those things that make most writers just a little bit crazy.)

But a good review is not required.

It’s okay if you-the-reader or you-the-reviewer don’t like my book. Maybe the book sucks. It happens sometimes. Bad stuff can happen to the writer, or to the publisher, or to the world in general that causes the book to be radically screwed up in one way or another.

Sometimes what sounded like a good idea in the writer’s head, and a good idea in the proposal stage, and a good idea at the outline stage, turns out to have been a bad idea after all when the time comes to make an actual story out of it. Sometimes it’s a really good idea, but not, as it turns out, a really good idea that the writer in question is able to carry off.

Or maybe the book is a good book for its target audience, and that audience is not you. Maybe it’s a good book that you disagree with so intensely that it makes your eyeballs bleed. And it’s your right to say so, at whatever length you feel necessary.

But please don’t feel like you’re obliged to let me know about it. I don’t go chasing down reviews, whether good or bad – that way madness lies, at least for me – and I’m not especially interested in defending my work after I’m done with it. Once it’s all grown up and out in the world, it needs to stand or fall on its own.

The Iron Laws

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The problem with the auto having been diagnosed as an easily-fixable (and not especially expensive as these things go) rust hole in the oil filter, I’m free to turn my attention to other matters . . . things like the Iron Laws of Storytelling, for example.

What am I talking about when I speak of the Iron Laws?

They’re the set of reader expectations that have been hanging around in western art and literature for so long that they’re practically hardwired into our brains.  If you’re a writer, you violate those laws at your peril; which is to say, you should only do it on purpose and with your eyes wide open.  (“A gentleman,” my father used to say, “is never accidentally rude to someone.”)

A few of the Iron Laws, slanted toward science fiction and fantasy, but applicable everywhere:

Truth spells (or truth serums, or whatever) never make anyone happier. You’d think people would have figured that one out by now, especially with the way that nobody under a truth spell ever tells one of the good truths, like “The pie here is so delicious I always stop by for a piece after a bad day, because it makes everything better” or “Your hair is beautiful; if you ever cut it I think I’ll cry” or “You’re the only reason I made it out of seventh grade alive.” But fictional characters keep on trying, just the same.

The equivalent, or at least related, law for contemporary mimetic realism is, of course, “Eavesdroppers never hear anything good about themselves.”  They will, however, almost inevitably hear only the most misleading portions of any important information actually exchanged.  Likewise, in a romance novel — or almost any novel with a romantic sub-plot — any platonic hug or similar physical gesture of affection between two uninvolved characters will inevitably be witnessed, sans context, by the significant other of one of the two parties.

And if you’re a character in a story with a title like “Appointment in Samarra”, there’s no point in buying a bus ticket to Omaha instead.  You’re still going to end up in Samarra by the end, and it won’t be pretty.

There are other Iron Laws besides the ones I’ve mentioned here — feel free to enumerate them in the comments.

 

The Lone and Orange Sands

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A correspondent asks, “Why don’t ‘jar of Tang’ stories work for readers?”

Before I take a stab at answering that one, some definition of terms is probably in order.  The concept of the “jar of Tang story” comes from the Turkey City Lexicon, a collection of workshop terms originally compiled by and for the Texas-based Turkey City Writers’ Workshop:

A story contrived so that the author can spring a silly surprise about its setting. . . . For instance, the story takes place in a desert of coarse orange sand surrounded by an impenetrable vitrine barrier; surprise! our heroes are microbes in a jar of Tang powdered orange drink.

This particular kind of failed story is especially common in science fiction and fantasy, since determining the nature of reality and figuring out the rules of the universe are recurring themes in both genres, and the reader is presumed to be an active participant in the process.

It’s also necessary to acknowledge that once in a while you’ll find a reader who actually likes this kind of story, because there’s no accounting for taste and nothing is so weird that there isn’t somebody out there who will like it.  Also, a sufficiently accomplished writer can make anything work — but for some stories, “sufficiently accomplished” means “maybe Will Shakespeare could have pulled it off on a good day.”  (But mostly Will Shakespeare didn’t even try, because part of being an accomplished writer is knowing how to pick your battles.)

Setting aside idiosyncratic tastes, here’s the big reason why “jar of Tang” stories don’t work:

Readers like being fooled; they don’t like being made to feel foolish.

Being fooled is the good kind of surprise, the one where the rabbit comes out of the hat and the ace of spades is on the top of the deck instead of in your hand and the nice young man who works at the coffee shop is really the Crown Prince of Ruritania in disguise.

Being made to feel foolish is something different.  It’s the writer saying to the reader, “Ha-ha, gotcha!  You totally thought that those characters you were identifying with had slogged across a vast and waterless desert only to come up hard against an impenetrable but transparent — and clearly the product either of magic or of superscience — wall!  But you were wrong!”

Whereupon the reader feels stupid for not having considered alternate interpretations, and feels like a chump for trusting the author to play straight with him or her, and is generally full of resentment and wounded ego — because the reader is supposed to be a fellow-traveller on the voyage of discovery that is the story, and not anybody’s dupe.

Pitfalls Comma the Avoiding of

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Offhand, I’m thinking that “strident,” as a descriptive term, should for the foreseeable future be restricted to things like ambulance sirens and fire alarms.

Where I Was Yesterday, Other than Here

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Yesterday was a non-posting day, because it was also move-the-son-back-into-college day.  Four hours there, four hours back, and a lot of running around doing paperwork and toting luggage in between — and that’s when everything goes smoothly, which it often doesn’t.

This time the car started leaking oil just as we finished the move-in process, and we only made it back home by dint of adding more oil every sixty to a hundred miles to replace the stuff that was running out.  The car is now reposing in the local auto shop and awaiting repairs, and I am left reflecting upon the feast-and-famine nature of the freelance life.

Which is why I wasn’t thinking much about Writer Stuff yesterday, and also why I’ve argued my natural reticence into submission and added a tip jar to the sidebar of this blog.