Category: Writing

It’s All in the Timing

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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.

Twirling That Mustache

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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.

A Weather Eye

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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.

Another One from the Department of Bad Ideas

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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.

How to Set a Plot in Motion

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This isn’t the only way, but it’s a good one.

First, you give your main character something to want.

Next (this bit of insight courtesy of Elizabeth Bear), you figure out what it is that your main character actually needs.

Then you build your plot on the tension between the two.

Choosing Sides

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Most story problems occur across all sorts of fiction, but a few of them are specific to particular types of fiction.  Writers of historical fiction and historical romance, for example, have the “Tiffany Problem” –that is, the necessity of coping with a historical detail that nobody is going to believe, such as the fact that “Tiffany” is, in fact, an in-period medieval name.†

Writers of science fiction and fantasy, for their part, have problems even at the basic-building-blocks level.  If you’re working in that field, your difficulties start right at the beginning of the job, when you have to declare, at least to yourself, the genre of your novel — is it science fiction or is it fantasy? The two may be shelved together in the bookstore, and may share an overlap in writers and audiences, but they nevertheless have different reader expectations and slightly different reading protocols. You therefore need to signal to your readers which genre you’re primarily working in for a particular book.

Published works signal to their audience in multiple ways — the cover art and the cover copy; the advance publicity and the in-store placement; even the choice of who blurbs the novel or who gets an advance copy for review. But a manuscript out on submission goes to the publisher without benefit of any of that stuff; the writer needs to embed the signals in the text itself.  What this means is that you need to be clear in your own mind which side of the sf/fantasy divide your story is on, and you also need to be clear about just how much you want to obscure or reveal your story’s position before the end.

There are in fact some novels in both genres where part of the point of the tale is the ultimate revelation that what appeared to be fantastic is actually science-fictional, or that what appeared to be solidly rational science fiction has actually lured the reader deep into the murky id-forest of the fantastic. But playing that game requires crystal clarity in the writer’s mind about what’s really going on, plus a deft hand with the placing of clues and the pacing of revelation. Once your own mind is settled on the question, then you can punch up the details that point in the desired direction and lower the emphasis on the ones that point the other way.

If you’ve done it right, your readers may feel surprised and they may feel disoriented, but they won’t feel cheated.

†That one’s actually fairly easy. Go with a period spelling, like Tiphaine, or go back to the original Greek Theophania. Problem solved.

A Timely Reminder

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gay head wireless For anyone out there who might be considering applying to the Viable Paradise Writers Workshop, the application period for this year closes on midnight of June 15th.  Class size is twenty-four — with eight instructors on-site for the entire week, this makes for a fairly impressive teacher-student ratio (the nautically-minded among us like to think of it as hitting them with a full broadside.)

Viable Paradise is a one-week† residential workshop held annually in the autumn on the island of Martha’s Vineyard; the focus is on fantasy and science fiction, and the students can submit either short stories or an equivalent portion of a novel for workshopping.

†Why one week, rather than six weeks or a month, like some other workshops? Because not everybody out there in the world can free up that much time in one block. Students can, and people who have already committed themselves to some kind of major lifestyle change, but other people have things like families and day jobs. Almost anyone, though, can hack out a single week — take that overdue vacation from the office, or stock the freezer with a week’s worth of pre-made casseroles and indebt yourself to your mother and your mother-in-law and the teenager next door for the necessary babysitting, and come spend a week with people who actually understand why you’re still obsessing about this writing thing.

I Meant to Do That!

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There are some things, as a writer, that you should only ever do on purpose.  A short and incomplete list:

  • Humor.  There’s nothing worse than making people snicker when you were hoping to tug on their heartstrings, unless it’s making them guffaw when you were aiming for elevated dignity.  Accidental humor is often fatally easy — all it needs, sometimes, is a random typo of the “united/untied” or “public/pubic” variety — while deliberate humor can be fiendishly hard even if you’re one of the rare few with the gift for it.  (And in the realm of bad things that can go wrong with deliberate humor — if the little voice in your head says, “Maybe this is a bit too edgy,” then for the love of all the Muses, listen. And remember, as always, John Scalzi on the failure mode of clever.)
  • Ambiguity.  Properly managed, a judicious amount of certain kinds of ambiguity can add depth and texture to your story.  Done badly, all it does is cover your story with an unnecessary layer of shadows and mud.  How can you tell if you’ve pulled it off?  You probably can’t — you’ve got privileged access to the inside of your own head, and can see the stuff you didn’t put down on paper or in pixels.  This is where trusted first readers come in.  If they say that something isn’t clear, don’t waste time explaining how they’ve missed it.  Fix the text so that they don’t miss it, instead.
  • Offense.  Sometimes it’s necessary for a writer to give offense because the target is, no kidding, offensive.  Other times . . . well, writers often have big feet as well as big mouths.  If you did decide to give offense on purpose, don’t bat your eyelashes afterward and claim that you didn’t. That’s tacky.  And if it truly was an accident, then apologize without groveling and try not to do it again, okay?
  • Conspicuous alliteration, internal rhyme, or recognizable meter.   Unless you’re very very good indeed, all of these verbal juggling tricks and somersaults can distract from the point of your story, rather than ornamenting it.  (The late Poul Anderson wrote A Midsummer Tempest, in which some of the characters speak in blank verse written out as prose, but Poul Anderson was good enough to get away with it.)  Accidental occurrences of things like this should be eliminated ruthlessly from the text.  As for doing it deliberately — if you’re a certain kind of word-mad writer, you’ll probably at some point end up trying out the technique.  Just remember, don’t attempt this feat without a net seek out a trusted first reader for help in determining whether or not you’ve carried it off.

There are plenty of other things that writers should only do on purpose, but the four above are biggies, and should do for a start.

Too Much of a Good Thing

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As I said in my previous post, there’s another big way in which description and scene-setting can go wrong, and that’s through a superabundance of detail.

You don’t want to describe too much of the scene, forcing your readers to tally up detail upon detail.  With no way to sort out the important details from the unimportant ones, the readers get swamped, unable to build a convincing mental picture out of the material supplied.  A handful of judiciously-chosen details, on the other hand, will give your reader the seed crystals from which they can grow their own settings and scenery.

A version of the handful-of-details technique is useful for historical or alternate-historical fiction as well.  You don’t have to have to give your readers all the information you could possibly gather about everything in the period you’re writing about.  Give them enough interesting and world-illuminating details, and let them do the rest of the work.  And nobody but you needs to know that you’ve structured the description around the interesting details you were able to collect, rather than researching every possible detail that the description might possibly include.

But because you’re relying upon your readers to do their share of the work in the matter of world-building and scene-setting, you don’t want to give them more of a burden than they can carry.  Every time they have to stop and recompile the scene in their heads to incorporate yet more details, you run the risk of losing them for good.

A White Room Problem

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Which is to say, one of the main ways to have your setting and background not work.

You know you have this problem when your workshop buddies point it out to you when a lot of your action takes place in the equivalent of a white room, description-wise — that is to say, in settings that are so barely visualized that they might as well be blank.  They lack what W. S. Gilbert might refer to as “corroborative detail, intended to give artistic verisimilitude to an otherwise bald and unconvincing narrative.”

If two of your characters are talking in a white room, you still need to give the reader some details to hang their visualization on.  Mention the unsettling flicker of the dying fluorescent light panel, or the faded scuff marks on the floor, or the spot on the wall where a few remaining bits of sticky tape hint that someone once put up a poster in that spot.  (See?  Now you’re in somebody’s former office, now empty of furniture.  It’s not just any white room; it’s a particular white room.)

And don’t forget:  for good description, you want more than just the visuals.  You want the sounds and the smells and the tactile sensations as well.  Does that empty office smell of industrial-strength cleaning agents?  Or does it smell of dust and old paper?  Can you hear the faint almost sub-audible hum of electric devices somewhere nearby, or the whirr of a fan, or the breezy rumble of an air conditioner?  Does the static electricity in the dry air make the hairs on your arms and neck stand up?  Or does the lack of ventilation send a trickle of sweat down between your shoulder blades?

It’s the particularity of detail, not the amount, that’s the key.  (We’ll talk another time about the other way that scene-setting can go wrong, which is through detail overload.)