Tag: plot

What the Eye Takes Note Of

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You can’t describe everything — everything has too much stuff in it.  And even if you could describe everything, your readers wouldn’t stand for it; their minds would buckle under the weight of all the stuff there is in the world.  So you have to pick and choose.  Give your readers not all that there is about something, but two or three things about it to hang their mental image on.

But how are you going to decide what those things are?

Start by thinking about your readers.  They’re going to assume that if you’re directing their attention toward something, then it has to be something important, something that they’re either supposed to be using now or saving for later.  So don’t let them down by wasting their attention on something that isn’t one of those things.

Stuff that they’re supposed to be using for the scene they’re reading right now would include:  a detail that conveys important information about a major character (this one is left-handed; that one is carrying a pistol in a shoulder holster; the other one has one brown eye and one blue eye; and so on); details that help to establish the setting (the floor of the grand hall is polished black marble and the ceiling is painted with a fresco of the apotheosis of King Egbert the Eighteenth); a detail that moves the plot forward (the golden apple has a tag on it saying “for the fairest”; the third red lozenge from the left on the lid of the enameled jewel-box opens the secret compartment.)

Stuff that they’re going to want to save for later might be:  the left-handed man’s ebony walking-stick (which he will use for self-defense in a later chapter); the velvet-lined secret compartment in the jewel-box (which will be used in the next chapter to hide the forged identification papers); the polished black marble floor of the grand hall (where the character with the one brown eye and the one blue eye will slip and fall while running to escape the character who’s carrying the pistol in a shoulder holster.)

You’ll note that some of the details up above are doing double duty — they’re establishing something about the “now” of the story and at the same time planting something that will be useful later.  Good writing is economical like that.

(And no, I have no idea what the story might be that would involve pistols and walking-sticks and forged papers and an odd-eyed fugitive in a land ruled by the descendants of King Egbert the Eighteenth.  But I’ll bet it’s a lively one.)

Causes of Reader Disgruntlement: an Intermittent Series

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(“Intermittent” meaning, “I’ll deal with them as I think of them.”)

We will assume, for the moment, that you don’t want your readers disgruntled; that you want to keep them pleased with your work so that they will, you hope, keep wanting more of it.  I will grant that there are writers whose goal, at least for a particular piece of writing, is something other than pleasing the reader — the desired effect may be a justifiable anger at the system, or a fuller understanding of the futility of it, or something else along that line — but for the purposes of this blog I’m assuming a less rarefied, but more common, goal.

One of the primary causes of reader disgruntlement is simply this:  The reader feels that the author has not fulfilled the implied promises he or she made at the start of the story.

For an example, let us consider a popular novel in the romance genre.  I’m using romance as an example not because I have anything against romance novels — far from it; I read them even though I don’t have the knack of writing them — but because a typical romance novel is as formal in its structure as a sonnet.  There will be A Heroine; there will be A Hero; the primary action of the novel will involve their relationship, its Trials and Misunderstandings and Ultimate Consummation (with all-out steamy sex or with a single significant kiss, depending upon the overall hotness level of the text); and there will be a Happily Ever After.  A story that lacks one of these things may be a failed romance novel, or it may be something that only looks on the surface like a romance novel — but readers who picked it up and read it in the understanding that what they were getting actually was a romance novel are not going to be pleased.

They will, in fact, be severely disgruntled.

It’s possible, of course, that the author of the story intended to subvert the romance paradigm in exactly that manner — but the intended audience in that case is not the community of romance readers, but the community of readers who derive pleasure from subverted or inverted or otherwise tinkered-with paradigms.  (Who can get just as disgruntled if they’re promised a subversive experience and don’t actually get one.)  Someone who’s been promised a steak doesn’t want artfully manipulated tofu, any more than a committed vegetarian wants to be slipped a piece of meat unawares.

About the only way a writer can get away with not delivering what was, by implication, promised is by giving the reader something even better — and not just any something even better, but the kind of something better than a reader who had his or her mouth set for the original dish is also going to like.

(Nobody ever said this job was going to be easy.)

 

Plot Device Obsolescence

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Technology changes all the time, and writers have to keep up with it.  This need for change doesn’t just affect our tools and our paths to publication — every so often a change comes along that wipes out or revises entire categories of plot devices and developments.

There was a time when characters could leave town, or leave the country, and effectively drop off the edge of the world as far as the folks back home were concerned.  Twenty miles was a long way, a hundred miles was even longer, and across the ocean (or the continent) was gone-for-good-and-never-seen-again.  Which was good for sad plots, with lost true loves and all, and good for suspenseful plots, with mysteriously returning missing heirs, and good for providing characters in need of escape with a place to go.

Then transportation got faster, and we got the telegraph and the telephone and the transAtlantic cable, and writers had to deal with the fact that it was now a lot easier for their characters to stay in touch, and a lot harder for them to hide.

The status quo rattled along for a few decades, as far as plots and technology went.  There were a lot of technological advances, but most of them weren’t in areas that would require massive retooling of existing plot machinery.  Even personal computers opened up more plot possibilities than they closed off.

Then along came cell phones and social media.  All of a sudden, it became a lot harder for writers to put their characters in that state of fear and isolation that’s so productive of interesting plot developments.  So long as your protagonist has a cell phone — and your readers will assume that he or she does have one — then at least in theory help is just a phone call away.  If you want your character to be truly alone and forced to rely only on his or her own resources, you’re going to have to deal with the cell phone problem:  lose it, leave it behind, drain its battery, break it, or make sure your readers know in advance that the character’s potential location has cell phone dead areas.  (They do still exist, especially in rural or wilderness areas; and even in cities there are some places where reception is at best spotty.)

It’s enough to make a writer turn to historical fiction, it is.  Just don’t turn to near-past historical fiction, because then you’re stuck with figuring out the point at which — for example — cell phones went from becoming large, expensive, and rare to being small, cheap, and ubiquitous.  (At some point during the run of The X-Files, is my guess; check out the differences between the phones Mulder and Scully use in the first couple of season with the ones they were using by the end.)

Character Control

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You have to keep an eye on your secondary characters, because some of them are sneaky — there’s a couple of kinds, especially, who’ll take over the plot if you let them.

First, you have all those characters whose main role in the plot is to be a source of help and knowledge:  fairy godmothers, wise old men, kindly librarians who happen to have exactly the book the protagonist needs, colorful informants who can tell the detective about the word on the street, and all their fictional ancestors and descendants.  It’s necessary to make them interesting in their own right if they’re going to have more than one appearance in the work, lest their true nature as plot devices be discovered; the danger is that once they’re fully-rounded characters they can start to overshadow the hero or heroine they’re supposed to be assisting.  The cure is to strictly ration their helpful appearances, and to let them be wrong or unhelpful once in a while, so that asking for their assistance isn’t the first thing that the protagonist (and the reader) inevitably thinks of in a pinch.

More dangerous than the helpful secondary characters, though, are the ones who exert such a strong magnetic pull that they’ll warp your intended plot out of shape around them if you don’t watch out.  My co-author and I have had to deal with characters like that once or twice — one of them, we hit on the head with a piece of rebar and put into a multi-chapter coma, and he still damn-near took over what was supposed to be somebody else’s book.  With another such character, we had to arrange the plot so that he was well out of the way of the main action when the crisis hit, because if he’d been in place during the crisis he would have dealt with it handily and there wouldn’t have been another book-and-a-half to the story.

(We also had to promise to write him his own book later, when we were done.  That also works.)

All Good Things Must Come to an End

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(In which I natter on about television, because I’m working on an editing gig and don’t want to distract myself by talking about writing.)

I think it’s fair to say that some TV series end better than others. Old-fashioned push-the-reset-button drama series and sitcoms didn’t have to do much work to tie off the story — M*A*S*H had the end of the war, The Mary Tyler Moore Show had the tv station close down, other shows just moved without a ripple into the eternal reruns of syndication — but the development of arc-based storytelling put a new burden on television writers, the need for giving the faithful viewers a satisfactory denouement, and I think we’re still seeing them figure out how to do it.

The X-Files wasn’t necessarily the first of the arc-based shows, but it was definitely the one that showed everybody else How Not to Do It. Its sins were many — lack of a clear backstory, failure to end at any one of several perfectly good stopping places, failure to redeem plot coupons the audience had been holding onto for several years in some cases — but it could, I think, have mitigated at least some small portion of its general Fail if it had only done one thing.

That thing? Establish some kind of victory condition early on, and see to it that at least some of the show’s sympathetic characters survived and met that condition. The X-Files disappointed us on almost every count: Mulder never found Samantha or got justice for her abduction/death/whatever; the big conspiracy was never revealed or thwarted or destroyed; Mulder and Scully never achieved vindication and professional recognition (in fact, their FBI careers basically go down the toilet); Scully never got to have and keep a kid; hell, not even the damned aliens got a satisfactory resolution, since they never got to do their Big Colonization Thing while we were watching, either.

Buffy the Vampire Slayer, on the other hand, while it didn’t please all its viewers on all counts, succeeded in that one big thing. The show gave us, from the beginning, a main character with a big problem — to wit, her mystical destiny as “the one girl in all the world” — and at the end of the series not only have she and her friends defeated the final season’s Big Bad, she and they have succeeded in rewriting the terms of her destiny so that she is no longer forced to carry that burden alone.

Tristram Shandy Saves the World

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Playing with alternate histories is — if you’ve already got the sort of mind that likes extrapolations and what-ifs — a great deal of fun, and it’s not surprising that science fiction and fantasy writers in particular (because they do have that sort of mind) have turned alternate-history into a viable subgenre all on its own.  The fun of the game is muted somewhat when it’s played for money, however, because for the story to work the historical turning point has got to be one that a sufficiently large number of readers will recognize — which is why we’ve got “what if the South won the Civil War? novels by the cartload, but not a lot of “what if Mexico had never sold the Gadsden Purchase to the US?” stories, even though the resulting history of the American Southwest, and of Mexico, might have been a great deal different in a number of interesting ways.

I suspect that most writers who dabble in alternate history have got one or two “what-ifs” that they know will never make it commercially.  My personal favorite:

What if Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, instead of being a weird outlier in the early history of the English novel, turned out to occupy the position of genre-prototype that in our history was filled by the works of Richardson and Fielding?

When I’m feeling particularly energetic, I can make a good-enough-for-fiction argument that Sterne’s interest in free-associative internal monologue, if allowed to influence the fiction of the next several generations, would have led to the development of psychology and psychiatry at least a century earlier than actually happened, and in a climate of Victorian optimism rather than turn-of-the-century anxiety.  And when I’m really on a roll, I can argue that the earlier development of psychoanalysis would have done a great deal to alleviate Kaiser Wilhelm’s mental problems, especially his need to overcompensate for his physical inadequacies by building battleships.  And thus, ultimately, Laurence Sterne would have prevented the Great War, and by extension World War II as well.

Of course, there’s no easy way to make a scenario like that into a novel, because for one thing, a depressingly large number of potential readers are going to say, “Tristram who?”, and for another, it’s hard to come up with the conflict necessary for a good story when you’ve got an alternate history that consists of a lot of unpleasant events not happening after all.

Tales from the Before Time

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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

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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.

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.

Hazards of the Course: Endings

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It happens with any long-running and popular sequence of stories, whether it’s a film trilogy, a television show, or a series of novels. The final entry in the sequence could cure cancer, end world hunger, and bring about peace in our time, and people still wouldn’t like it.

I call it the Write-Your-Own-Ending effect. Fans of any long-running series – whatever the medium – are going to invest themselves heavily in their own ideas/speculations/opinions about how the series ought to end. Satisfying all of them at once is going to be impossible. Satisfying any one of them completely is going to be almost as hard, since there’s always going to be something left over that doesn’t please. (“He/she never thanked him/her for this/that/the other damned thing!” “Why wasn’t so-and-so part of the Big Group Hug at the end?” “The ending was all about Titular Hero! Joe/Jane Sidekick barely got a mention! That just goes to show that Titular Hero really is a jerk, just like all us Joe/Jane Sidekick fans were saying all along!” And so on and on.)

The longer the dedicated readers or viewers have been waiting for the conclusion, the stronger the effect is going to be.  Because they will not have been waiting passively all that time — they will have been making their own ending in their heads while they waited.  Some of them will have actually gone so far as to commit their endings to pixels or paper; but even those who don’t take that final step have still been thinking and speculating and developing their own opinions about how things ought to turn out.  So when it comes time for them to evaluate the actual conclusion to the work, they’re not just going to be holding it up against the previously existing material to see how well it fits — they’re also going to be holding it up against their own internally-developed Best Possible Ending, and the further it deviates from that ending, the more unhappy they’re going to be.