Tag: writing

Going There

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Sometimes, in the course of writing a short story or a novel, you come up to a scene that’s going to be . . . difficult.  You know going in that it’s going to be tough to write, because it means dealing with subject matter that makes you uncomfortable, or that could make at least some of your potential readers uncomfortable, or both.  It may touch on sex or violence or both, because as humans we tend to be kind of screwed up where those subjects are concerned, and especially screwed up at points where they intersect.†

At this point in the writing process, it’s usually a good idea to stop and ask yourself, “Do I really need to go there?”

Not “want” — we’ve already established that you don’t necessarily want to do any such thing.  You know that it’s going to be hard work, that it’s not going to make you happy while you’re doing it, and that there’s a good chance that at least some of your readers are going to be upset with you afterward.  So — not want, but need.  Is this the scene that’s going to best serve the long-term goals of your story?  Is its inclusion necessary to the truth — moral, thematic, artistic — of your story?  Can an equivalent but less disturbing scene serve the same purpose in your story, or would making such a substitution be tantamount to lying to your readers?

Some of the time, the answer is going to be “No, I don’t really need to go there.”  It’s entirely possible that what at first plot-outline thought seemed necessary is actually a hackneyed trope and the easy way out.  (Gratuitous rape scenes, I’m looking at you hard with a cold and fishy eye.  Common decency aside, gratuitous rape has been used so many times to provide characters with dark and troubled pasts, or motivate them to roaring rampages of revenge, that its inclusion in a narrative these days serves mostly as an indicator that the author couldn’t be bothered to think of anything original.)

Other times, however, you’re going to look at your story and ask it that question, and the story is going to look back at you and say, “Yes.  You need to do this.”

At that point, the thing to remember is:  Don’t flinch.

If you’ve made up your mind to go there — wherever “there” is for this story — step forward without hesitation.  Don’t walk around things you don’t want to look at, don’t keep your hands away from things you don’t want to touch.  Whatever you do, don’t worry about what your mother, your significant other, or the nice people in your writing group are going to think about you because you wrote this.  Think about your readers, who will always be able to tell when you’re dodging the issue, and keep yourself honest for them.

Nobody ever said that writing was a job for the timid.

†It could involve almost anything, though. There’s no telling what a given person may find unpleasant or disturbing.

Tales of the Before Time: From Paper to Pixels

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Back when I first started writing, as a wee young sprat, it was all paper and pen or pencil — I wasn’t yet up to the level of actually submitting things, so the idea of a typed manuscript was unknown to me.  The family typewriter was an Underwood that weighed approximately as much as a boat anchor, with keys so stiff that my grade-school fingers would have buckled under the strain of pressing them.  I wrote my first short stories (which sucked) and my first you-could-probably-call-it-a-novel (which also sucked) in ink on narrow-ruled notebook paper.  I used a cartridge pen for preference, rather than a ball-point, and my handwriting was dreadful.

Time went by, and eventually I achieved a Smith-Corona electric typewriter, a high-school graduation present from a maiden aunt who knew me, perhaps, better than some of my other aunts (who tended to give me things like hairbrushes and pillow-slips.)  That typewriter lasted me nearly a decade, and saw the production of numerous college and graduate school papers, plus a handful of not really very good short stories and the first five or six pages of a novel that never went anywhere.

The Smith-Corona electric in time acquired a companion, an Olivetti modern Icelandic manual that I used to prepare the first draft of my dissertation.  (Previously, with the Smith-Corona, I’d had to add in the special Old English characters by hand.)

Neither of these typewriters, however, was very good for writing fiction.  My handwriting was still dreadful, but my typing wasn’t much better — I estimated at the time that it took me about thirty minutes to produce a clean page of submittable copy.

Then came the glorious day when Atari brought out a personal computer that could be had for a price that ordinary human beings could afford.  Suddenly, it didn’t matter that I was a rotten typist; the computer was a very good typist, and just as soon as I could find a letter-quality printer to hook up to it, I’d be in clover.  In the meantime, at least I had a dot-matrix printer (does anybody out there remember dot-matrix?) for the early drafts.  And when we finally did get a household letter-quality printer, shortly afterward it was manuscript-submission time.

The next decade or so witnessed our household’s march forward through advancements in printer technology — dot-matrix to letter-quality daisy-wheel to laser to inkjet, faster and better and faster again.  And we bought paper.  Lots and lots of paper.  We bought fanfold paper in foot-high stacks; we bought 20-pound bond in ten-ream boxes.

And time kept moving on.  One day we looked around the office, and realized that it had been a year or more since the last time we’d submitted anything as a printout on paper that we sent through the US Mail.  At some point while we were busy writing, it had all switched over to electronic manuscripts submitted by e-mail, and we’d scarcely noticed.

I could spend some time at this point indulging myself in nostalgia, but the truth of the matter is that I am immensely grateful for the computer and word processor combination that types better than I ever could, and the electronic mail that doesn’t insist on proper postage and a stamped and self-addressed envelope.

Fillers and Placeholders

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When you’re hard at work on the first draft and running for daylight, you can’t afford to lose your forward momentum.  The first draft isn’t the time and place to spend fifteen minutes looking for the perfect name for that minor character who steps onto the page long enough to deliver a crucial bit of plot development before vanishing.

For the first draft, it’s often enough to have [CharacterName] appear from [NameOfPlace] with the necessary plot element in hand.  Just remember to search on the square brackets during the second-draft revisions, when you’re putting in that perfect name you finally came up with when you were drifting off to sleep the night before.

Identity Crisis

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You may be a novelist (and not a short story writer) if:

Your short stories regularly top out at 8000 words or more, even after you cut them for length.

Your short stories tend to have a half dozen or more named characters fully-equipped with backstories and personal agendas.

You find yourself amplifying your short stories with subplots and digressions.

You find yourself spending as much time on working out the details of your story’s background and milieu (what science fiction and fantasy writers call “doing the world-building”) as you do on working out the plot and the characters.

The milieu of your novel is bigger — more expansive, more full of implied consequences and further actions –than the story you’re telling in it.

Your trusted and reliable first reader gives you a look of deep sympathy and says, “I hate to tell you this, but what you’ve got here isn’t a short story.  It’s the opening chapter of a novel.”

If this happens to you, take heart.  For the natural-born novelist, novels are actually easier to write than short stories.

They just take a lot longer.

Bad Contracts and Worse Contracts

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Some contracts are bad.  They get their hooks into the author’s copyright; they have restrictive option clauses and punitive indemnity clauses; they want to grab not just world publishing rights but the right to publish in all forms everywhere forever, including Mesopotamian baked-clay tablets and electronic transmissions to the Oort Cloud.

Other contracts are worse than bad, they’re unconscionable.  They do all of the above, and they don’t do the one thing that could possibly induce a professional writer to sign them, which is to offer good money up front.

Just about every professional writer has signed at least one bad contract, and they’ve usually done it for only one reason:  they needed that up-front money, and they needed it right then.

Once in a while, in this business, you may need to sign a bad contract.  The roof may leak, your kid may need emergency orthodontia, the IRS may be demanding more blood than your normal turnip harvest can provide.  If that’s what you have to do, then do it with your eyes open and deposit the check before it can bounce.

But nobody, ever, has any reason to sign an unconscionable contract.

They Don’t Have a Word for It

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Some writing problems are problems across the board, no matter whether you’re writing mainstream or genre fiction: Point of view is tricky, and requires careful thought; the middle of a book is dreadful and disheartening; getting in the necessary exposition is hard work.

Other problems are genre-specific.  Take, for example, the problem of vocabulary and word choice in those genres where the stories being told are not set — or are not entirely set — in contemporary consensus reality: science fiction, fantasy, historical or alternate-historical fiction.  If you’re a writer working in one of these genres, there are going to be some words that simply aren’t available to you — at least, not if you’re a careful and word-conscious writer who doesn’t want to lose, or at least severely distract, some of your readers.

For example:  In a pre-clockwork society, timekeeping is unlikely to subdivide the day into pieces smaller than an hour or so; even an early industrial society isn’t going to break things down that finely.  Your characters aren’t going to have the vocabulary and headspace to think about doing things “in a minute” or “after a few seconds” . . . they might think about “in the blink of an eye” or “after a few heartbeats,” but they aren’t going to be pulling out their watches to check.

Likewise, your pre-industrial characters aren’t likely to think about things like nerves and adrenaline, because (absent some highly developed magical healing arts or the equivalent) they aren’t going to know about them.  Depending upon the state of medicine in that time and place, they’ll be lucky to know about the circulation of the blood.

Also, the English language as it exists in contemporary consensus reality has got all sorts of buried history and technology embedded in it.  If a character in your story wears his or her hair in a mohawk, or if a particular must-visit destination is a mecca for some group or class of people, then the history of your imagined world contains, by implication, both Islam and the Iroquois Confederacy.  If a character is a loose cannon and prone to going off half-cocked, then either you’ve got a post-gunpowder world or you need to rethink your description.

How long, you may ask, does it take before all the associated concepts and implications wash out of a word and leave behind an all-purpose bit of vocabulary?

As is so often the case with writing, the answer is “it depends.”  Generally speaking, the further back in time, or the more obscure the concept or technology, the closer the modern term is to becoming generic.  Also, a lot of your readers are never even going to notice or care about the issue.  On the other hand, some of your readers are going to be the sort of word and history nuts who pick up on this stuff and get thrown out of the story by it.

In the end, all you can do is know your audience and know yourself.  Then go with what feels right.

Peeve of the Day

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Today’s peeve falls into the Annoying Plot Developments category.

Say you’ve got a character who has been told by the bad guys, “Don’t go to the police or else very bad things will happen.”  Or a character who is being pressured or blackmailed by the bad guys into doing something that will jeopardize their relationship with their one true (and presumably competent) love.

Do they, at that point, go straight to the authorities or the one true love and say:

Sirs/My Darling [as appropriate]–

The villainous kidnappers/my wicked uncle [as appropriate]

Want/wants me to steal government secrets/hide him in the hayloft [as appropriate]

Which will naturally cause you to believe that I am a spy/am meeting a secret lover [as appropriate]

No, they do not.  And a goodly chunk of the middle of the novel is taken up with the resulting unnecessary running-around — which may have been the reason for the annoying plot development in the first place.  But it is a sloppy and clichéd way to handle the problem, and your readers deserve better.

What’s in a Name?

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It’s a sad fact that short stories and novels have to have titles.  If they didn’t, then there’d be nothing to put on the spine of the book, or in the table of contents for the magazine or the anthology.

This means that the unfortunate writer, after having labored for weeks or months on something that may have lived quite happily with the designation “NewNovel.doc” or “short story in progress” or even “that thing in the green notebook”, now has to give his or her brainchild an actual name.  Cue angst, flailing, and general unhappiness.

Composers have it easy by comparison.  They call a project “Concerto Number 3 for Xylophone and Orchestra in B-flat Minor” and get away with it, where a writer who tried to run “Space Opera Volume Three with Blasters and Scaly Aliens” past an editor would only get laughed at.  (Oddly enough, though, the same writer could probably get away with using that title for a short story — there’s a lot more room for weirdness and wordplay in short story titles — but not more than once.)

Desperate writers do have a few resources they can turn to in their quest for a title.  Quotations from Shakespeare are always good; likewise, quotes from the Bible.  And if the Bible and Shakespeare don’t come through, there’s always Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations.  Pulling a relevant or evocative phrase from the book itself also sometimes works.

If all else fails . . . console yourself with the thought that most editors know that thinking up titles is not necessarily a part of the common writer’s toolkit.  If an editor likes your book or story, but thinks that the title sucks, he or she will tell you so.  And at that point, it’s perfectly okay to turn the job over to a professional ask the editor for suggestions.

The Hazards of the New

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The other day I tried a new recipe — Pollo Oaxaca, from Allrecipes.com — and as I did so, I had some thoughts about writing.  (Writers can relate almost anything to writing.  But it was my co-author who explained how a lime pie is like a short story.)

Although I’d decided to try this recipe, I still had misgivings.  For one thing, it was green.  Tomatillos, cilantro, and jalapeños, put through a food processor with some garlic and onion and lime juice, are never going to be any other color.  And green food is always an iffy proposition, even for an audience that will happily eat pasta with pesto (known around the house as “green slime sauce”, because, well, it is) and spinach lasagna and pork stew with green chiles.  For another, it was spicy — and again, even when you’re playing for an audience that likes things rather more spicy than otherwise, there’s no telling whether or not a particular combination is going to please.

It didn’t help that I’d had a recent experiment with a recipe for curry meet with a distinct lack of enthusiasm from all parties, including me.  (I’ve more or less decided that Indian food goes into the category of “things I will pay somebody else to cook for me.”)  There’s nothing like a recent lackluster effort to put one off of the idea of making another experiment.

Writing is the same way.  It’s tempting to keep the same list of known reliable dishes in regular rotation.  You know how to make them, your audience likes them, you tend to have most of the ingredients right there in the pantry, it’s all good.  Sometimes, though, you want to expand your range a bit — you want to do the writer’s equivalent of trying out a new regional cuisine, or some new ingredients, or a new kitchen technique.  Maybe you’ve always written romance, and you want to write a gritty, noir-tinged mystery for a change.  Or maybe you write hard science fiction, and you want to add a romantic relationship to all the rivets and equations.  Or maybe you want to try something risky with narrative voice or chronological order or point of view.

And you’re scared.  Because maybe your audience will devour it with glad cries of great joy, and demand that you add this one to the regular list.  But maybe they’ll taste it, and eat just enough to be polite (if you’re lucky and their mamas raised them right), and say that they’re sure you must have worked hard on it but they really don’t think it’s a keeper.  And there’s nothing you can say to that, because if they don’t like it, they don’t like it, and you don’t get points for effort in this game.

But the thing is, you have to try new things.  Otherwise, you’ll end up cooking the same dozen or so meals over and over again, and eventually your audience will get bored, and so will you.

(Oh.  Yes.  That chicken recipe I linked to up above . . . it was declared a keeper.)

Q and A

~ drdoyleeditorial ~ 2 Comments

Dear Dr. Doyle:

What am I allowed to write about?

Signed,

Worried

Dear Worried:

You’re allowed to write about whatever you damned well please.

You just have to be willing to accept the consequences.

In some times and places, those consequences may be political, and they may be severe.  In which case, good luck and may the blessings of whatever deity, if any, you prefer be upon you, because you’ll need them. In other times and places . . . somebody you’ve never met may say unkind things about you on the internet.  Which is no fun, to be sure, but on a scale of zero to “taken outside and shot” is maybe a three.

What should you do if strangers are saying unkind things about you on the internet?  Most of the time — nothing.

If you’ve actually screwed up, apologize.  Then get back to work and do better the next time.

If, upon sober reflection, you decide that you haven’t done anything you’re sorry for — don’t fake it.  Get back to work and don’t waste your energy on an argument that nobody’s going to win.

Remember — if you’re arguing, you aren’t writing.  Let your work make your arguments for you.