Tag: writing

The Benefits of Forethought

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A line of thunderstorms rumbled through northern New England late this afternoon, knocking the power out in our town (among a whole bunch of other towns) for over four hours, right about dinnertime.  The only place on Main Street with power was the local video rental, ice-cream shop, and pizza joint, because they had at some point invested in a generator.  And they were doing a land-office business, selling pizzas and sandwiches and ice cream to a whole bunch of people — including us — who didn’t want to open their refrigerators until the power came back on.  At the point we got our pizza and took it home, they had seventeen pizza orders stacked in a holding pattern waiting for oven space, and were down to their last five foot-long sandwich rolls.

And thus we see the virtue of having a good backup.

Backup plans and equipment are a good thing in the writing business as well.  Don’t throw out the old computer when you upgrade; you never know when you might be facing a hard deadline and looking at a dead machine.  (We had to drop back once from an Atari ST to a nearly-antique Atari 800, under just those circumstances.)  Don’t forget to keep backup files of completed and published works (otherwise you may find yourself laboriously rekeying something you wrote a long time ago; and yes, I’ve done that, too.)  Don’t forget to keep backup copies of works in progress — save in multiple places on your hard drive, save to the cloud (Microsoft Skydrive, Google Drive, Dropbox; or what the heck, all three), save to removable media.  That way, if two weeks before a hard deadline the state police start knocking on doors all over your neighborhood and yelling, “Get out now, the water’s rising,” you can, if need be, finish your work-in-progress on a library computer a hundred miles down the road.

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.

Another Neat Thing They’re Doing

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Scholars are using computers “to help reassemble more than 100,000 document fragments collected across 1,000 years that reveal details of Jewish life along the Mediterranean” — a task that previously had to be done by eye and hand.

A lot of the documents retrieved so far deal with the minutiae of daily life:  contracts and sales records and legal documents and even recipes.  For a historian, and even more for writers who are trying to recreate history for their readers, such details are golden, worth far more, sometimes, than the word about who defeated whom on the battlefield, and where.

(I’d be particularly interested to know the ingredients and techniques involved in what the article describes as a “particularly vile” recipe for honey-wine.  Purely as a matter of academic curiosity, you understand.)

 

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.

From the Department of Things I Don’t Miss at All

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There are some aspects of the writing business that the march of time has marched right on past, and I don’t miss them even a little bit.

The SASE, or Stamped And Self-addressed Envelope, for manuscript submissions, is one of them — because when you had only one good typescript of a story or a novel, you were going to want it back.  So first you had to get an envelope, or a cardboard box, that would fit your manuscript; and then you had to get another envelope or cardboard box that would fit into the first one along with the manuscript; and after that you had to get the post office to weigh first the manuscript and both envelopes (or boxes) and then the manuscript and just one envelope (or box); and before you could put the manuscript in the mail you had to double-check and make sure that the correct address and postage for the outer box had actually gone onto the outer box, and the correct address and postage for the inner box had actually gone onto the inner box . . . and when the manuscript finally got rejected and came back to you, you had to start the entire process all over again.

It’s a whole lot easier just to do the whole thing by e-mail; or if you’re dealing with hard copy, to slip in an ordinary self-addressed business envelope with a single first-class stamp on it, and put in your cover letter the magic words, “Please consider this a disposable manuscript.”

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.

Thought for the Day

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One of the many things I like about writing in the digital age: you can compose your text in any typeface you like, from Courier to Comic Sans — you can even write in Wingdings, if a wayward spirit so moves you — and then convert it for submission into whatever font it is that your publisher wants even if what your publisher wants is so butt-ugly you couldn’t write an original sentence in it to save your life.

I like to compose in single-spaced Courier New, then double-space it for editing and revisions.  Sometimes I’ll switch to Century or Times New Roman, just to change the physical layout of the words on the page, and their relationship to each other — it’s an easy way to get a fresh look at the text if it’s starting to get stale.  Double-spaced 12-point Courier New is good for doing printouts for readings, because you can get a good estimate of time that way:  One page with standard margins is roughly 250 words is roughly one minute if you’re reading it aloud.   But again, you can always get the estimate, then switch to some font you like better.  (Orator, as its name implies, is a good clear font for making reading printouts, though it does take up more paper than Courier or Times New Roman.)

Everybody has their typographical preferences, and in this age of electronic writing, we get to indulge them.  And it is good.

Tales from the Before Time: Springtime Surprise

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Today’s mail brought us the spring royalties on the Mageworlds e-books (available from Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and other e-book retailers.) The pleasant glow this cast over the morning brought to mind another springtime royalty period, some time ago — and thereby, as they say, hangs a tale.

The first thing you need to know is that the book in question was an anthology of short stories, Bruce Coville’s Book of Monsters.  We’d contributed a story to the anthology — “Uncle Joshua and the Grooglemen” — and had been paid a good rate-per-word for it; and that, we thought, was that.  Because the second thing you need to know is that most of the time, the on-acceptance payment for a short story, whether in a magazine or in an anthology, is the only money you’re going to see from it.  Every once in a while, though, a particular story will turn into one of its author’s good children, and continue generating revenue, sometimes in unexpected ways.

The next thing you need to know is that Book of Monsters came out at the peak of the early-nineties middle-grade and young adult horror boom, when the Goosebumps and Are You Afraid of the Dark series were filling up the bookstores and selling like very scary hotcakes.  Not only that, it hit the shelves in October of that year, just in time for Halloween.  It also had some really good stories in it, which probably helped a little bit as well.  At any rate, the anthology not only sold, it sold in sufficiently large numbers that it earned back its advance in the first royalty period.  (This is a thing that never happens — except, of course, for the one time when it does.)

Fast-forward to the following May.  By that time, we’d forgotten all about the anthology and our short story in it.  The money we got for the story had gone to gasoline and groceries long before, and we knew better than to expect anything more from that direction.  Meanwhile, our elder son, whose birthday was coming up, had been agitating for some time for a mountain bike, and we in turn had been pointing to the bloodless turnip that was the family budget and saying, “Think again.”

Then an envelope arrived in the mail, and in that envelope was a royalty check for roughly ten times what we’d been paid for the short story in the  first place.  Our eyes bugged out like a Tex Avery ‘toon’s, and the next thing we did, after carefully replacing the check in the envelope, was call Bruce Coville and ask him if that royalty payment was for real — because, as we said to him, we’d hate to deposit it and then have it turn out that somebody in the publisher’s accounting department had slipped a decimal point.

Bruce assured us that the check was real; and we, in turn, said to our elder son, “Happy birthday — let’s go down to the bicycle shop.”

That story continued to be one of our good children.  The anthology generated royalties for some time thereafter; there was an audiobook edition, for which we got an additional payment; and we later expanded and reworked the short story into a middle-grades novel for Harcourt, which in turn had a French edition from Hachette.

The thing is, though (and I suppose that it’s the moral of this tale) — you never can tell in advance which of your stories is going to be the good child.  All you can do is give each one of them your best shot, and then wait to see what happens.

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.