Tag: techniques

It’s That Time of Year Again

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Yes . . . it’s my sporadically-recurring post in which I wave my hands and point to the “Editorial and Critique Services” bit of this blog’s title, and to the About and Editorial Services links on this page.  (Click on either one; the content is about the same either way.  The salient details certainly are.)

Short version:  One of the ways I keep the electricity and the internet running around this place is with freelance editorial and critique work.  If you’ve got a short story or a novel that you’d like to spruce up for submission or for self-publication, or that you’d like to make better for some other reason (including the learning experience), then I’m available to help you out.

My base rates:  $1500 for a standard 80,000-100,000 word novel; $100 for a short story or the first chapter/first 5000 words of a novel.  Rates for odd lengths – novellas, extra-long novels – are negotiable.  Also, if you go for the first-chapter deal on a novel, and then decide you want the whole enchilada, you get $100 off on the novel fee.

Scum and Villainy

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Writing effective bad guys can be tricky.  You want them to be three-dimensional, not flat, and you want them to be worthy opponents for your protagonist, but you don’t want to go overboard and give them so many extra coolness points that they end up stealing the show.  If that happens, you might as well give up and give them the novel.  Relabel them as a “rogue” or “antihero” and pretend that you meant to do it that way all along.  The only thing harder than adding coolness points to a character who doesn’t have enough of them is removing them from a character who has too many.

But here are a few things you can try if (as is more common) your problem is a villain who’s not interesting enough:

Give them virtues to go along with their vices.  If they’re ruthless and ambitious, make them brave and capable.  If they’re dishonest, make them intelligent, or amusing, or kind to homeless people and stray animals.  Real people are never only one thing, and your characters shouldn’t be, either.

Give them actual goals that they’re striving to achieve – not just “I want to rule the world/make lots of money,” but specific stuff like, “I want to rule the world because once I’m in charge of all of it there won’t be any reason for countries to fight each other any more” or “I want to make enough money to go back home to West Nowheresville and buy up the whole town and ruin all the people who made my high school years a living hell.”

Grant them the valid points in their arguments.  Even in debates where one side is clearly Right and the other is clearly Wrong, the party of Wrong is still likely to have a couple of good arguments in their favor.  Let your bad guys score those one or two measly points before your good guy brings out the steamroller of righteousness and flattens them like smashed pennies.

(Science fiction, I’m looking at you.  As a genre, you have a long history of making all your conservatives sound like wild-eyed militaristic loons, or all your liberals sound like fuzzy-minded ineffectual do-gooders, depending upon the bias of the author.  Please stop.)

Resist the urge to make your bad guys even more villainous by sticking extra and unrelated bad qualities onto them like artificial warts.  Especially resist the urge to do this with whatever the criminal or moral bad thing of the moment happens to be.  If your bad guys are attempting to take over a perfectly adequate and functioning government, for example, don’t give them a sideline in clubbing baby seals just because everybody knows that clubbing baby seals is bad.

And, finally, remember that – with the memorable exception of Shakespeare’s Iago and Richard III – most villains don’t think of themselves as villains, and don’t wake up in the morning saying, “Now, what villainous thing am I going to do today?”

A Handy Trick

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Naming characters is always a hassle – I can’t get mine to settle properly in my head until they’ve been correctly bemonickered – and most writers have their favorite resources for the job.  Baby name books and web sites are always good, especially for tales set in contemporary consensus reality, and if your interest is more historical, sites like the Social Security Administration’s Popular Baby Names page will let you search for popular American names by decade going back as far as the 1880s.  I’m sure that other countries have similar resources; the SSA page just happens to be the one I know about firsthand.

If you’re writing science fiction or fantasy, though, you’ve got problems.  Good science-fictional names, if you’re going to put some thought into them, are part of the worldbuilding:  You have to make some complex calculations about the probable ethnic makeup of your future society, for example, and about possible changes in naming styles (the all-whitebread science-fictional future is, if not yet completely dead, definitely moribund, and a good thing, too; and while it’s not likely that we’re ever going to see a resurgence of multi-word Puritan-style virtue names of the Praise-God Barebones variety, there’s always the off-chance that some future society may produce dimpled tots named Respect-for-the-Rights-of-Others Herrera or Earth-is-not-the-Only-Planet Jones.)

But if you’re writing fantasy, at least of the pseudo-western-medieval variety, there’s at least one good cheap trick out there:   Grab a copy of Malory’s Morte D’Arthur, or Geoffrey of Monmouth’s History of the Kings of Britain, and steal from there.  Go right past all the too-familiar major characters, and head for the ranks of (sometimes literal) spear-carriers, of which there are a good plenty.  This will give you lots of names which look vaguely western-medieval without belonging to any specific name-hoard, and which can usually be sounded out and pronounced by the average reader.

Unexpected Ingredients

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When you’re constructing a piece of fiction, sometimes what you need to make an old standby memorable again is an unexpected ingredient, a theme or a place or a character that the reader isn’t expecting to find in combination with the other, more familiar elements in the story.  Time was, something as simple as switching in a female character for a male one in a particular role was enough to add the requisite element of strange; these days (and if we’re not all grateful for it, then we damned well should be), the entry into the narrative of a person of the female-presenting kind is not remarkable enough by itself to push the story off of center.

(Actually, these days it’s inadvisable to rely on the mere presence of any character type to provide your story with a hint of strange.  Well-drawn characters are going to have better things to do with their personal narratives than spending them being decoration for other characters’ plots – and if you aren’t going to create well-drawn characters, what are you doing in this game?)

But doing something unexpected like, say, using the story of a zombie apocalypse in order to examine philosophical issues such as the relationship of the individual to the larger group, and how to live a moral life in an imperfect world . . . that’ll provide you with more than enough strange to keep you going.

And as an extra, a recipe, also with an unexpected ingredient:

Beef Short Ribs Braised in Coca-Cola

Ingredients

  • At least 2 pounds boneless beef short ribs (if what you’ve got is bone-in ribs, make that at least 3 pounds)
  • 1 large or 2 medium onions, finely chopped
  • 4 garlic cloves, minced (I also throw in some dried minced garlic partway through the cooking time, because we like our garlic around here)
  • 3 scallions, chopped
  • 1 can of Coca-Cola
  • 1 teaspoon salt
  • fresh-ground black pepper, to taste (we also like our pepper around here, so I’m generous with it)

 

Directions

  • Put your short ribs into your crockpot.
  • Season with the salt and pepper.
  • Add the onions, garlic, and scallions.
  • Pour in the Coca-Cola.
  • Cook for 5-6 hours on high or 7-8 hours on low.
  • Serve over egg noodles.  (Actually, over whatever starch you prefer, but we like our short ribs with egg noodles around here.)

The amazing thing, once you’re done, is that this dish tastes nothing whatsoever like Coca-Cola.  But it doesn’t taste like short ribs braised in the usual red wine or beer or beef stock, either.

 

Stringing Ideas Together

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Or, actually, not.

When you’re building up a sequence of ideas (which generally results in a paragraph, and a whole bunch of paragraphs together generally results in a completed story, or an essay, or a letter thanking your Great-Aunt Euphemia for the half-dozen silver fish forks in a pattern that isn’t yours), you don’t want to just string the ideas together as they occur to you.  You’re constructing something that has to stand up when you’re done with it, not just lie there on the carpet like a string of Christmas lights after the tree has come down.

This means that you need to think about the relationship of your ideas to each other, and put them together in ways that indicate those relationships – while at the same time making sentences that have good sound and good rhythm and good grammar.

Take a simple example.   Here’s a little paragraph where the sentences are all (mostly) grammatical, but it’s still a bad paragraph:

As she hit the ball, Jill ran for first base.  Running for first base, her foot turned under her, spraining her ankle and putting her on the bench for the rest of the season.

This is, as I said, (mostly) grammatical, in that a native speaker of English can read it and understand what’s going on at the softball game.  But it isn’t good.  It’s clunky, the ideas are in the wrong order, and there’s a dangling participle lurking in there as well.

(Also, entirely too many present participles, period.  Writers get told at some point in high school or thereabouts that they need to vary their sentence structures, and for some reason, the method that a lot of them latch on to is the introductory participial phrase.  People, I’m here to tell you – too many sentences starting with participial phrases is just as monotonous as a bunch of simple subject-verb-direct object sentences lined up in a row.)

But I digress.  Let’s fix that little paragraph, a bit at a time.

Sentence one:  As she hit the ball, Jill ran for first base.  This is bad because one, it takes two ideas of roughly the same weight and makes one of them subordinate to the other; and two, it puts the actions into the wrong order.  First Jill hits the ball; then she runs for first base.  So we can fix this sentence by changing it to:  Jill hit the ball and ran for first base.

Sentence two:  Running for first base, her foot turned under her, spraining her ankle and putting her on the bench for the rest of the season.  This sentence is also bad for a couple of reasons and not just one.  The biggie, of course, is the dangling participle right at the beginning:  Running for first base, her foot turned under her.  This is wrong because it isn’t the foot that’s running for first base, it’s Jill.  The first thing we do to fix this sentence, then, is to break that part off from the rest of the sentence and rewrite it:  While she was running, her foot turned under her.  (We also ditch the repetition of for first base, because the reader’s seen that already and we don’t need to have another iteration of it cluttering up the page.)

This leave us with spraining her ankle and putting her on the bench for the rest of the season.  There are a couple of different ways to fix this part, depending upon whether you think that the sprained ankle or the benching for the season is the more important idea, or whether you want to give the two ideas approximately equal weight.

You could throw the emphasis onto the sprained ankle:  She sprained her ankle, which put her on the bench for the rest of the season.

You could emphasize the fact that Jill has been put out of action:  Because she sprained her ankle, she was put on the bench for the rest of the season.

Or you could get fancy and use a semicolon to hook up two equivalent clauses, giving them both equal weight and letting the reader determine their relationship:  She sprained her ankle; the injury put her on the bench for the rest of the season.

I like that last one – but then, I generally like semicolons.  Let’s use it anyway, for maximum sentence variety.  That gives us a new, finished paragraph:

Jill hit the ball and ran for  first base.  While she was running, her foot turned under her.  She sprained her ankle; the injury put her on the bench for the rest of the season.

This still isn’t one of the world’s blue-ribbon paragraphs – but it’s better than the one we started with.

And the voice from the back of the lecture hall asks, “Do I have to think like that about all my paragraphs?”

Sadly, yes.  But not until the second or third draft.  Finish the story first, then work on making the sentences better.  Because pretty sentences will get you nowhere if you haven’t got a story for them to tell.

As I Write This…

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…I am moved to peevish comment.

People, don’t use “as” to string clauses together when you’re narrating action.  Save “as” for linking together actions which are simultaneous or nearly so, and are directly related – “He leaped aboard the train as it pulled away from the platform’’ or “As he wandered about the room, he absent-mindedly rearranged all the knick-knacks and framed photographs.”  That sort of thing.

Don’t use it for joining clauses which would be more appropriately connected with “and” or “then.”

And remember, also, that “as” is a subordinating conjunction.  If you use it to join a clause to the main body of your sentence, the grammatical setup implies that the action of that clause is less important than the action of the main verb.  Don’t do something like that unless you really mean it.  (Which is a pretty good all-purpose piece of writing advice, in case you ever wanted one.)

In general, important actions deserve to star in their own independent clauses, rather than being supporting players in somebody else’s sentence.

Another Thing Not to Do

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Prologues.

And I say this who have written them.  In my defense,

  1. I was a much younger writer, then.
  2. I believed that the story demanded it.  And
  3. I think I got away with it.

Of the above, #3 is probably the most important.  Good writing is all about what you can get away with, and one of the big lessons to learn on the way to becoming a good writer is figuring out how much, and what sorts of things, you can get away with.

Usually, the answer to “how much can I get away with?” is “not nearly as much as you think.”  On the other hand, sometimes your muse doesn’t leave you with any choice except to say, “what the hell” and go for it.  At which point, you do your best and take the consequences as they come.

So, anyway, prologues.  Not nearly as many stories need them as have them, and entirely too many failed stories – especially in the Epic, or Doorstop, Fantasy genre – start out twenty years or so before the main action, with the portentous birth of the main character, or the portentous death of somebody important to the backstory, or the portentous prophecy of some future birth, death, or general catastrophic doom.  For this reason, if you find yourself feeling the urge to commence your novel with a prologue, at least stop first and ask yourself, “Can I put this same information into a flashback somewhere around chapter five?  Or into a couple of paragraphs of dialogue between the Young Protagonist and his/her Wise Mentor somewhere around chapter two? Or will this section work just as well if I label it ‘Chapter One,’ and commence the next chapter with ‘Twenty years later’?”

If you can answer any one of those questions with “Yes,” then you should probably take the hint and revise your no-longer-prologue accordingly.

Today’s Nifty Links

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Link the first:  A newly-released on-line archive of images from the French Revolution, done as a partnership between Stanford University and the Bibliothèque Nationale de France.  There’s an article about the archive here; the bilingual, searchable archive itself is here.

Link the second:  Over at John Scalzi’s blog, there’s an open comment thread going on, with writers sharing the most valuable bits of practical craft advice they’ve received or read.

Backward, Turn Backward

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If you’re a long-form writer with a number of stories set in the same fictional milieu, the odds are that at some point or other you’re going to find yourself writing a prequel. (I don’t think the term counts as a neologism any longer, since at least two respected on-line dictionaries vouch for its existence since at least 1972, or possibly as early as 1958.†) Writing primarily short stories isn’t going to get you out from under this particular Sword of Damocles, either, since at some point you may be inspired — or be offered money, which often comes to the same thing — to expand a short story or series of short stories into a novel, or to write an origin story for one of your characters.

At which point you will find yourself engaged in one of the more masochistic pleasures of the writing life, that of retrofitting a backstory.

The big challenge in writing a prequel lies in the necessity of keeping your plot consistent with what’s been said or implied in the existing material, while at the same time writing a story that’s interesting on its own — the latter being, in my opinion, the more important job of the two. Not surprisingly (this is a blog about writing, after all) I have some thoughts about how to go about it.

Thought one: Writing a prequel is, in some ways, like taking off on a road trip with a certain number of must-hit way-points that you can’t ignore, even if your start point and your final destination are left to your discretion. When my co-author and I wrote The Gathering Flame, our prequel novel in the Mageworlds universe, there were really only a handful of such points: a couple of political agreements, two or three military engagements and a couple of daring space exploits, and the birth dates of a couple of children whose relative ages and birth order had been set in the original trilogy. (And it was the kids who gave me the most trouble, believe it or not.  The family setup in the trilogy had been established for effective storytelling in the context of those books; for the prequel, I had to go back in time and figure out not just how but why things had worked out that way, in a fictional milieu where “oops!” was a less-than-believable explanation for such things.)

So when you’re contemplating a prequel, it helps to make a list before you start of what your known past facts and must-hit way-points actually are.

Thought two: Not all of your known past facts and way-points are going to be of equal importance. Some of them, in fact, you may have to jettison or flat-out contradict for the sake of creating an effective story this time around. Yes, if you do that, you will probably get letters from readers pointing out your mistakes. Console yourself, in that case, with the thought that you’ve got readers who are paying close enough attention to what you’re saying that they can catch such things. Or you can point out to them that even in contemporary consensus reality, not everything comes with a completely known and consistent backstory, that “exactly what happened” is something that journalists and historians struggle with every day and don’t always come up with definitive answers, and that the bits and pieces of our lives don’t always match up tidily at the edges.

Or, as one of our own fictional characters said, in the (utterly invented, because we made it — and him — up) epigraph to The Gathering Flame: “What you have to realize, son, is that almost all of the people who were there at the time are dead. And everybody who’s still alive is lying to you about something.”

†That would be the on-line OED citation, which alas I cannot verify without purchasing a subscription.

Fun with the Internet

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So you’ve promised somebody (or promised yourself, it’s all good) a story, and now you’re stuck?

Try the Cool Bits Story Generator.

A handful of samples:

In Venice, a woman who does the unexpected encounters sailboats as the story begins. As the narrative unfolds, the protagonist meets a tough-as-nails yet likable woman with antiquarian knowledge, and they wind up in an ivy-covered tower with dark passions.

Sounds like one of those buried-historical-secret novels, after the manner of Dan Brown, or Katherine Neville’s The Eight.  Or maybe a thriller having to do with art smuggling.

Your story is a romance between a cynical religious practitioner with a secretly soft heart and a retired superhero. The lovers experience secrecy and the texture of warm stone while in Meiji Japan.

If this one isn’t already a manga, it probably ought to be.

This story begins as a flapper investigates a mystery about a bittersweet romance. Clues include the mythic or archetypal coming alive and love transcending limits. The villain is revealed to be a cat lover, and is motivated out of a need for redemption.

This one is clearly a historical detective story somewhere on the border between paranormal and alternate-historical fantasy, and if somebody were to write it I’d read it in a heartbeat.

I love these things.