Author: drdoyleeditorial

Things to Avoid, Antagonist Division

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One of the things you don’t want to do, when you’re creating your antagonist and putting him through his protagonist-thwarting paces, is to end up with yet another instance of the amazing mind-reading teleporting menace.

You know how that one works:  your protagonist is running across country to escape from the monster, or running from room to room in the big old mansion to escape from the serial killer, or dodging about the streets of the big city to evade the hired-gun assassin-spy.  No matter which way he turns or where he goes, however, the bad guy is always right behind him — or, often, is already there waiting for him.

And a lot of the time, if you stand still long enough to think about it, you realize that there’s no way the antagonist could have gotten to that point from where he was standing before, or that he could have known which way the protagonist was going to turn for help, without being able to read minds and teleport.  Which most serial killers and assassin-spies are not, in fact, able to do.  (The jury is still out on monsters.)

There are two main ways to avoid this problem.  One way is to keep your story moving so fast, and so entertainingly, that the reader never has the time or the inclination to stop dead in his or her tracks and ask, “How the hell was he able to do that?”  The other way is by means of careful plotting and meticulous attention to continuity, which may in fact actually involve tricks like drawing charts and making timelines in order to keep track of what your antagonist is doing during those parts of the story when he isn’t on stage.

When you’re done, if you’ve done it right, your reward will be to have the reader never notice all the hard work that you put in.

One Thing After Another

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When you live three hours by road from the nearest city of any size (and by “of any size” I mean “is able to support at least two separate movie theatres and a shopping mall”), you end up listening to a lot of audiobooks.  You also end up realizing that not all books make good road listening.  You don’t want the sort of book you have to devote a lot of mental processing power to decoding in some fashion — at any rate, you don’t if you’re me, and spend a lot of your driving-and-listening time in the sort of environment where it’s necessary to devote at least a portion of your brain to keeping an eye out for moose in the road.

(Important safety tip, here:  Brake for moose.  As far as the moose is concerned, it doesn’t stop for other things, other things stop for it.  Unless you’re an entire pack of wolves, it doesn’t consider you a threat worth bothering with.)

What you want, for driving a long way at night on a moosey road, is a book that isn’t so complex you’ll lose track of everything else you’re doing, but with enough stuff going on that you’ll stay alert and not succumb to highway hypnosis.  Of late, our household has found that the novels of Edgar Rice Burroughs (available for free download from Librivox) are just the ticket.  Granted, Burroughs is not the most elegant of prose stylists, nor the most original of thinkers, and he can be counted on to exhibit just about every -ism to which a white male Anglo-Saxon Protestant writer from the first decades of the twentieth century might be susceptible . . . but when it comes down to sheer one-damned-thing-after-another plot construction, the man is hard to beat.

Attitude Adjustment

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The British novelist L. P. Hartley famously observed, “The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.”

This is a true thing, and the source of great and recurring headaches for writers of historical fiction, alternate history, historical fantasy, and historical romance (as well as any other fiction, genre or not, that deals with time past rather than time present or time future.)  Readers today are, or at least like to think that they are, enlightened and forward-thinking ; and when they read for pleasure, they want the characters they identify with to share their values.

At which point they run headfirst into the unfortunate fact that even historical figures who were howlingly progressive by the standards of their day are likely to exhibit turns of thought and vocabulary which can leave their modern ideological descendants gobsmacked.

I don’t mind it when a historical romance elides or passes over stuff like that; conversely, it irritates me no end when a writer feels obliged to make his/her characters progressive before their time, as it were. Granted, in almost every age you can find people whose attitudes and beliefs were more in line with those of our era than with their own . . . but their contemporaries usually regarded them as whackaloons. And again, granted, sometimes that attitudinal disjunction is the whole point of the story, but if it isn’t, it can be an almighty distraction from whatever the point of the story actually is.

This is, alas, one of those writing problems with no easy solution.  Which way you go is your own choice, based — ideally — on the nature of the story you want to tell and the expectations of the audience you want to tell it to and your own ideas about the relationship between truth and fiction.  But it’s a sad fact that no matter which path you choose to travel, at least some of your potential readers are going to think that you picked the wrong one, and are not going to be shy about saying so.

Hey — nobody ever said this job was going to be easy.

Weather for Working

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The writing life has its ups and downs, but on days like today it at least has the advantage of taking place largely indoors.  Because if I had to do my work outside on a day like today, I do not think I would get any work done at all.

Spring is a good time to write.  So is autumn.  Winter is great, so long as you can afford to keep the heat on.   But summer is not a good time for any sort of strenuous endeavor, even of the intellectual kind.

Summer heat waves don’t summon up the good times in fiction, either.  They bring us Southern gothic novels featuring humidity and honeysuckle and family secrets (a dead mule may also be involved at some point); and if the supply of Southern gothic fails, the dog days also have a stock of noir-tinged detective novels full of adultery, blackmail, and conspiracy to commit murder.

Only in children’s and young adult fiction, really, is summertime a pleasant source of adventure and romance.

A Weekend on the Road

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Or, why I haven’t posted anything for a couple of days.

I’ve been at Readercon, a science-fiction convention in Burlington, Massachusetts, restoring my soul and enjoying the air conditioning.

Regular posting should resume on Monday.

Music to Write By

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Some writers need absolute silence in which to write.  This post is not about them.

Other writers like to have some background sound.  Usually, these days, that means music.

Writers who love their background music have a variety of different tastes and requirements.  Some writers prefer orchestral music, finding the intrusion of human voices distracting, while other writers can’t do without their vocalists.    Different time periods appeal to different writers as well.  One writer will have a preference for Baroque concertos, another for heavy metal, a third for show tunes.

I like writing to vocal music with a steady beat —  not surprisingly, there’s a lot of classic rock in my playlists.

What about you?

Wrong Word of the Day

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Today’s wrong word is “smirk.”

Writers — especially beginning writers — use it far too much, and in the wrong places.  They use it in places where a wry smile, or even a plain ordinary smile, would be more appropriate.  They put it on the faces of characters who are meant to be sympathetic and likeable.  And they make me want to yell, “Stop!”

As Inigo Montoya says in The Princess Bride, “You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.”

According to the dictionary, to smirk is to smile in an affected, often offensively self-satisfied manner., and a smirk is an affected, often offensively self-satisfied smile.

Neither of these are things that you should want associated with that nice character you hope that your readers will like and identify with.  That is all.

(All right.  I admit it.  It’s summer and I’m cranky.  But I’ve been carrying that peeve around with me for years.)

Canon Fodder

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Literary canon formation is a zero-sum game.  I can think of several reasons for this, including the tendency of the literary establishment to turn absolutely everything into an exercise in hierarchical ranking — there are people out there in the world who can’t even look at a sack of potatoes without wanting to sort them in order from The Very Best Most Nearly Platonic Potato down to The Potato Which Barely Made It into the Sack in the First Place.

And then you have the Two-Semester Literature Survey Course — taught, usually, from the Fat Two-Volume Anthology. Combine compulsive ranking of everything with a limited amount of anthology shelf space, and literary scholarship starts to look like an episode of Survivor: Bibliography.  Tenured professors and rising scholars engage in war to the knife to decide whose chosen texts are more important, more artistic, more nourishing to the mind and spirit . . . and recognizing something as “good” isn’t going to be enough.  It can’t just be good.  It needs to be better.  It has to be best.

If this is beginning to sound a bit like those other arguments . . . the ones over whether the Enterprise-D could take out the Death Star, or about who’s the bigger hero, Batman or Superman . . . well, let’s just say that the people involved in all of these arguments take them very very seriously.  The problem with the literary-canon-formation argument is that it slops over onto the heads of everybody else in the reading world, and tends to alienate a whole lot of people once they notice that it’s often their preferred reading material that’s getting dissed.  Their reading material doesn’t get a ticket onto the canon island at all, and when they ask why, the answer that comes back sounds to them an awful lot like “because all that fun prole stuff you people like isn’t high-level enough to be art.”

I don’t want to blame the literary canoneers too much, though.  It’s amazingly difficult to talk about the whole idea of voluntary avocational reading without the use of language which, deliberately or not, imposes rank and hierarchy upon it. We speak of “higher levels” of difficulty, and “greater” challenges; and — in our still-puritanical society — even words like “pleasure” and “relaxation” have a faint negative cast to them, especially when set beside words like “instruction” or “insight” or “self-improvement.”

I’m willing to accept that somebody else may find enjoyable something that I do not. After all, most of the people who tried to convince me, during my school days, that organized team sports were fun, certainly appeared themselves to enjoy them. But I’m no more fond than the next person of being told, or even feeling like I’m being told, that my enjoyment of those things that I do like is in some fashion inferior to the enjoyment experienced by other people who like something else.

My theory (I believe I’ve articulated it at the Viable Paradise workshop once or twice) is that what most of us are looking for in our reading is the perfect birthday present effect — the perfect birthday present being the one where you’re completely surprised by exactly what you’ve always wanted.

And nobody likes being told that their perfect birthday present is actually a cheap piece of Walmart trash.

A Lonely Business

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Writing, that is.

It’s a job that you mostly do sitting at your desk, listening to the voices inside your own head. It’s not surprising that some writers end their careers as eccentric hermits; what’s surprising, actually, is that more of them don’t.

It isn’t required to be an introvert in this job, but sometimes it helps. At the same time, if you’re going to make a living (or at least a part of your living) as a writer, you’re going to have to get out in the world. If you don’t, you’re going to lose touch with all the stuff you’re writing about.

So make the effort. Schedule time for things like community involvement — things like scouting, or the volunteer fire department, or the folks who clean up sea birds after oil slicks. Whatever works for you, so long as there are other people involved in it. From an artistic-development standpoint, it helps if it’s the sort of group that attracts a cross-section of different types, so that the repertory company of actors living in your brain can have as wide a range as possible.

Don’t isolate yourself from other writers, either. Some days, it can be vitally important to your sanity that you’re able to have a conversation with somebody else who understands why it is you do what you do with all those words on the computer screen, and who understands why it matters.

Which is why I’m moving mountains, right this minute, in order to be at Readercon this weekend, down in Burlington, Massachusetts.

Thought for the Day: Less is More

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When writing fantasy, it’s often more effective to be parsimonious with your use of magic, rather than the reverse.

The Fellowship of the Ring, after all, came away from Lothlorien with the equivalent of some cammie cloaks, a hank of nylon parachute cord, and a flashlight.