One, Two, Three

August 17, 2012 ~ drdoyleeditorial ~ Leave a comment

The general rule, for position of things in a linear sequence: The final position is the most emphatic, the initial position is the second-most emphatic, and the middle position is the least emphatic.

In terms of sentence structure, this is why you shouldn’t end a sentence with a weakening word like “though” or “however” (unless you have a specific reason for wanting that particular kind of anticlimactic effect), and why you should arrange your main and subordinate clauses in such a way as to reserve the final position for your most important idea.

In terms of plot structure, it goes a long way toward explaining why the middle of the book is always the hardest part to write.

Take It Where You Can Find It

August 3, 2012 ~ drdoyleeditorial ~ Leave a comment

Good writing advice can be found in all sorts of places.

This page, for example, features a set of maxims for stage magicians. Some of them are fairly magic-specific (“Look after your hands and nails. Make sure they are clean or painted”); others, though, hold true for anyone working in the arts and entertainment fields (“Making things as easy as possible for your audience comes before making things as easy as possible for yourself.”)

Though I suspect it never hurt a writer to have clean nails, either.

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?”

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.

Things to Avoid, Antagonist Division

July 20, 2012 ~ drdoyleeditorial ~ Leave a comment

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.

Sentence Structure Peeve of the Day

July 6, 2012 ~ drdoyleeditorial ~ Leave a comment

(Because I’m the sort of person who gets peevish over sentence structure.)

It’s a common fault in the work of beginning writers, or in the early drafts of texts by experienced writers (but what makes the writers experienced is that they know how to spot their faults and remove them in the second draft): They will write sentences where the important idea, or one of the important ideas, is relegated to a subordinate clause — or, worse, a modifying phrase — like this:

Fred’s brief attempt at independence subsided, his desire to act on his own still surging through him, but in the end he had no choice except to obey.

That’s a bad sentence for a lot of reasons (and deliberately writing a bad sentence is work, let me tell you), but structurally it’s a bad sentence because there’s an important idea buried in it that should be given space to stand on its own. Important ideas deserve their own independent clauses. Like this:

Fred’s brief attempt at independence subsided. His desire to act on his own still surged through him, but in the end he had no choice except to obey.

It’s still a bad sentence (or set of sentences.) But at least it’s not a structurally bad sentence.

Thought for the Day

July 2, 2012 ~ drdoyleeditorial ~ Leave a comment

(For yesterday, actually, by now. Oh, well.)

When writing extraordinary characters: follow the default normal person in the story.

We meet Dr. Watson, the former army surgeon with the budget and housing problems, before we meet Sherlock Holmes the eccentric genius, even though meeting Holmes is the point of the exercise.