Tales from the Before Time

September 8, 2012 ~ drdoyleeditorial ~ 1 Comment

This is a story from the days before electronic submissions, when all the internet was on dial-up and the web hadn’t yet been invented, and printing was done by dot-matrix printers on fanfold paper, and writers — by which I mean in this case my husband/co-author and I — turned in their novels in the form of four-and-five-inch-deep stacks of hard copy.

So there we were, on a sunny summer day, motoring down to New York from far northern New Hampshire, with the intention of handing over a stack of hard copy to our publisher and (if we were lucky) getting a lunch downtown on the strength of it. Under ordinary circumstances, we would have used the post office like normal people, but as it happens we were piggybacking the novel delivery onto a family visit in Westchester County. We were also hauling our complete computer setup — CPU, monitor, printer, and all — with us in the back of our mini-van, because my co-author’s other paying job at the time was as managing sysop for one of the pre-web online communities, and he couldn’t leave the place unwatched.

About fifteen minutes into what was going to be a six hour drive, my co-author said, “The middle of the book doesn’t work.”

I made a noise like Donald Duck being goosed with a cattle prod. “What do you mean, ‘the middle of the book doesn’t work’?”

“Don’t worry. I know how to fix it.”

And, in fact, he did. Because the novel in question was a space opera, “fixing it” ended up requiring the insertion of an entire space battle of epic proportions, plus all of its foreshadowing and repercussions, written in a single thirty-six hour push by the two of us hot-seating it at our computer in the living room of his family’s house.

But that turned out to be the easy part, because then we had to print out the hard copy — something we’d originally planned to do in a leisurely manner the day before we were to take the train from Mount Kisco into Manhattan, and which we now had to accomplish in the narrow window of time between writing “The End” to the revised novel at sometime past midnight and leaving for the train station in the mid-morning of the following day. And then, at around two in the morning, we discovered that the brand of dot-matrix printer we owned had a Feature: in order to protect the print head from burning out through overheating, whenever the print head got too hot the printer would simply stop printing until the print head cooled down.

We were in a house without air conditioning, on a sultry night in August, and we had a deadline.

“We do not care about the integrity of the print head,” we said. “Damn the torpedoes; full speed ahead.”

So we took the cover off the printer, set a fan blowing directly onto the print head, and let ‘er rip.

We finished printing out the manuscript with a couple of minutes to spare, and spent the train ride into Manhattan separating the fanfold pages and tearing off the perforated tractor-feed strips so as to turn the printout into a stack of hard copy fit to hand over to an editor.

Which we did, and then we had lunch. Martinis may have been involved, because we felt that under the circumstances, we deserved them.

I’m not sure what the moral of this story is, other than that if you need to fix the middle of the story, you do what you have to do in order to get it fixed; or possibly, that writers under pressure can come up with workable solutions to all sorts of things.

Also — laptop computers, broadband internet, and electronic manuscript submissions are all awesome developments; and I don’t miss fanfold computer paper at all.

Bowknots

September 6, 2012 ~ drdoyleeditorial ~ Leave a comment

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.

Go. Look. Read This.

September 1, 2012 ~ drdoyleeditorial ~ Leave a comment

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.

Getting Tense

August 23, 2012 ~ drdoyleeditorial ~ Leave a comment

I hate it when an otherwise literate writer uses may in past-tense narrative where might should have been used instead: “If there was any truth to {Name }’s story, {the villains } may already be in hot pursuit.”

No. That’s wrong. It should be “If there was any truth to {Name }’s story, {the villains } might already be in hot pursuit.” May goes with the present tense: “If there is any truth to {Name }’s story, {the villains } may already be in hot pursuit.”

(The question of “was” vs. “were” I’ll let slip, given the moribund nature of the English subjunctive.)

There. I just had to get that off my chest, is all.

Revision Research Weirdness

August 11, 2012 ~ drdoyleeditorial ~ Leave a comment

Today’s odd job: Invoking the awesome power of the internet in order to determine whether or not the closed and abandoned 86th Street Station on the commuter train line in to Grand Central could be used to gain access to the street above.

Our editor had queried this, since the stairs leading up from the old platform are covered at street level by secure hatches.

We eventually found a photo reference showing one of the hatches standing open, with the panic bar on the underside clearly visible. Victory!

(All this, in the service of about three paragraphs whose sole purpose is to get our protagonist from point A to point B without being spotted by the people who are watching for him at all the regular exits. But here as elsewhere, God is in the details.)

Another One of the Rough Spots

July 31, 2012 ~ drdoyleeditorial ~ Leave a comment

It’s always a tricky bit when — for reasons necessary to the forward motion of the plot — you have to have one character explain to another character a bunch of stuff that the reader already knows.

This is sort of the opposite of the much commoner “how do I work in the necessary exposition” problem, and tends to crop up in long, complex novels, or in novels where the interlocking plot developments are engineered with clockwork precision, or in parts of an ongoing series. Unlike the necessary-exposition problem, where the characters already have the required information but the reader does not, with this problem it is the readers who are already in possession of the information, and one or more of the characters who must somehow acquire it.

The trick, to the extent that there is one, is to remember that the reader doesn’t need to be given the information all over again; the reader only needs to understand that the character has been made aware of it. You can be blunt and direct: “On Wednesday at lunch, the Director told the Chief of Police everything that had happened during the preceding spring.” Or you can be more subtle, and have a scene with the Director and the Chief of Police talking over steak and baked potatoes, during which you slip in as much as possible of the known-to-your-reader stuff in indirect discourse, while using the up-front chatter for character and atmospherics and other hopefully-interesting new material.

What you want to avoid is having your reader exclaim, upon finding out that one of your characters is in possession of a particular piece of knowledge, “But how did he know that?”

Crass Commercialism for the Win

July 30, 2012 ~ drdoyleeditorial ~ Leave a comment

It’s been a while since the last such post, so I suppose it’s time to remind the kind people who read my blog that in my offline life one of the things I do for a living is provide freelance editorial services.

I work specifically in the area of genre fiction — that is to say, science fiction, fantasy, mystery, romance, historial and alternate-historical fiction, and horror. Not coincidentally, those are also the fields in which I’ve done most of my own writing. Genre fiction comes with a different set of reading protocols than standard mimetic realism, and presents some specialized problems in addition to the ones common to fiction of all kinds, and it really helps to have your editor/critiquer be aware of such things.

So if you’re a writer in one of those fields and you have a book that you’re looking to polish up for submission, or that you’re hoping to self-publish, I can help. The details, if you want them, can be found by following either the sidebar contact link, or the link up there in the first paragraph.

Dots and Dashes

July 29, 2012 ~ drdoyleeditorial ~ Leave a comment

Or, This is Not a Guide to Proper Punctuation.

Because where punctuation is concerned, the dirty little secret is that most of the rules are a lot more like local customs. Different languages have different customary punctuation, and so do different time periods. Medieval English texts had next to no punctuation at all — once in a while, if the text was meant to be sung or chanted, the scribe might throw in a mark that would someday be a comma or an apostrophe, as a way of saying to the reader, “take a breath here; you’re going to need it.”

Modern editions of older texts — especially the renaissance and medieval stuff — often impose modern punctuation on the material, in the interest of making it more accessible to the reader. Standardized, or at least sort of standardized, punctuation came in with printing, and it was the printers, not the writers or the readers, who more-or-less codified it.

Even today, there’s a lot more leeway in the area of punctuation than your old high-school grammar texts would have had you believe. Sure, sentences need to end with a period or a question mark or an exclamation point, and using a comma splice instead of a semicolon is just plain wrong, but when it comes to things like whether to use a colon or a dash, or paired dashes instead of parentheses, or serial-comma-yes versus serial-comma-no . . . you’re on your own.

And don’t worry too much. You can get away with almost anything, so long as you’re consistent about it.

(Get your dialogue punctuation right, though. It’s all purely arbitrary, done according to conventional rules that are easy enough to learn and to follow, and to check for errors in the final draft. And messing them up is likely to put off a potential reader faster than almost anything.)

Backstory, We Got Backstory

July 24, 2012July 24, 2012 ~ drdoyleeditorial ~ 1 Comment

Every story has a backstory. It’s the crucial information that you-the-reader need to know if you’re going to understand what’s happening now, in the story’s present day. Or it’s the buried secret that shapes the character of your protagonist, or the skeleton in the family cupboard, or the Dreadful Thing that happened at college in senior year that nobody ever speaks of and nobody ever forgets.

Sometimes a plot only needs a bit of light-weight backstory work, somewhat in the nature of a trellis to support the ornamental vines of the action, the better to reassure you-the-reader that what you’re seeing has something underneath it to keep it fixed in position and to hold it up. Other times, the backstory isn’t just there for support; it’s the heavy-duty engine that drives the entire narrative.

But no matter the relative importance of the backstory, there is one thing that the writer needs to remember: What went on in the past of the narrative cannot be more entertaining than what’s going on in the present. Because if it is, then the writer might as well give up on the present-day portion of the narrative entirely and concentrate on writing about all the past-era stuff that’s actually interesting.