Estimating the length of time it’s going to take to finish a project is a dark art at the best of times. Other times . . . .
“Four weeks? Sure.”
typity-typity-typity
…time passes…
“Make that five, and I’ll have it by close of business on Friday.”
typity-type-type
…more time passes…
typity-type-type-damn!
“Um . . . Monday morning?”
Let’s just say it can make me feel like Achilles trying to catch that damned tortoise.
Actually, it’s not just floating eyeballs. It’s disassociated body parts in general. Eyes are possibly the most common offenders — “her eyes darted around the room,” “his eyes fell to the floor,” and so on — but just about any part of the external anatomy can suddenly start wandering around and acting on its own. (When this happens in the romance and erotica genres, the results can be . . . disconcerting, to say the least.) At least in my opinion, if the word “eyes” can be replaced by “gaze” without changing the meaning of the sentence, then it damned well should be.
Likewise, if the whole sentence could just as easily be phrased, “he/she looked at whatever-it-was”, then for heaven’s sake, write it that way.
Disassociated body parts turn up in all sorts of writing, but the problem is most acute, and most dangerous, in the science fiction and fantasy genres. Why? Because those are the genres in which metaphor becomes reified, and in which — for example — detachable and/or self-propelled eyeballs are not outside the realm of possibility.
(I can think of at least three fantasy/science fiction examples right off the top of my head, and I’ll bet you can, too.)
From time to time, most of us are moved by a desire to see more fiction out there about something. Possibly something noble and uplifting, in the “I want to see more fiction with realistic and empowered female characters” line; or possibly something not quite so noble and uplifting, more along the lines of “There should be more fiction about pirates; also, crossdressing.”
(Or you could combine the two, and get Anne Bonney and Mary Reed.)
One feels the urge, at this point, to explain to the writers of one’s acquaintance (which is to say, all the writers one has read, because they count as acquaintances for the purpose) that they should address this sad lack. One might even go so far, in the pursuit of the noble and uplifting, as to imply that the failure to do so represents a moral lapse on their part.
This is usually a bad idea. Writers are contrary creatures, who dislike being chivvied in directions they had not already planned to go; moreover, it is often the case that they do not so much choose what to write as write those things which present themselves and demand to be written. Attempting to extort the desired item is more likely to result in a cranky writer than in a piece of fiction meeting the necessary criteria.
The traditional next step, for those with the ability to do so, is to write one’s own fiction to meet the need. “I wrote the book I wanted to read that nobody was writing,” is a not-uncommon statement from writers asked to explain the origins of a particular work.
“But what about those of us who don’t/can’t write fiction?” one might ask. “What are we to do?”
Suffering in silence is probably a bad answer. Better to assume that if one feels the need for a particular kind of fiction, someone else probably does too — and would be happy to share his or her favorite examples of that kind of thing done right. One might even get together with other like-minded readers and post recommendations for more of the good stuff, whatever it might be.
Crossdressing pirate fic recs, anyone?
Or, more reasons why in-person research is still important. Some things just aren’t the way they look or sound on television and in the movies.
For example — explosions. Black powder explosions (which is what you’ll be getting with just about anything pre-dynamite, which is to say 1867) don’t go up in a blaze of flame like they do on television. And they don’t go bang! either, they go whump! — a really loud, earthshaking whump! When the gunpowder factory in our town blew up, the force of the explosion was enough to shake the car I was riding in, several blocks away. (The first thing I thought was, “Oh, no, the transmission’s fallen out again!”, which says more about the bad luck we’d had with our previous vehicle than anything else.)
Artillery, now . . . artillery makes a noise more like pom!, and distant artillery really does sound like thunder. And musket fire rattles like a string of firecrackers going off. It also fills the air with white smoke — the classic “fog of war”. (I spent an enlightening afternoon, once, at a Revolutionary War re-enactment. Being a writer, I took lots of mental notes. If you’re doing anything historical, re-enactors can be a useful resource for hands-on look-and-feel stuff.)
And if your characters aren’t wearing ear protection, it’s going to be a while before they can have a conversation that isn’t mostly shouting and hand gestures. That long talk full of angst and conscience-searching will have to be deferred until later.
I’d file this one under “common errors of fantasy”, except that it’s more ubiquitous than that. Call it a common failure of visualization, maybe.
The thing is, no matter where your scene is set, the light is going to be coming from somewhere . . . and a lot of beginning writers forget that you need to keep track of such things. If the action is taking place outdoors in broad daylight, or indoors during the modern era, illumination can be more or less assumed. The reader will need to know if something happens to make the light diminish or go away — power failure, dense cloud cover, a darkness at noon of biblical proportions — but unless there’s something special about the source or quality of the light, it doesn’t need to be mentioned.
Outside of those circumstances, though, things change. If the characters are operating at night, or underground, or in deep woods, or indoors during any pre-electric era, then you-the-writer are going to have to be aware of how much or how little light there is available for every scene. A cloudy night, a clear night in the dark of the moon, and a clear night with a full moon are going to have different light levels — enough to make the difference, for instance, between your characters being able to operate unseen (if they can avoid tripping over tree roots and large rocks) and being plainly visible to any alert sentry on the castle wall.
Meanwhile, inside the castle, the wizard perusing his books of lore by the flame of a single candle isn’t going to have all that much light to work with either. As a writing experiment, try lighting one candle in a dark room and then describing how much you can and can’t see. If you’ve got access to an oil lamp, try that sometime. Life without incandescence or fluorescence looks a lot different. (And it’s no wonder that the reading-light spell is a classic beginning wizard’s trick in so many fantasies, right after the fire-lighting one.)
And if your characters are going exploring someplace where they’ll need to take their light source with them, don’t forget that someone in the group is going to have to be carrying the torch or candle or lantern, and that person won’t have both hands free to do other things.
Horses are not motorcycles.
If your protagonist’s interactions with his/her gallant steed could equally well (with a change of costume) be interactions with his/her Harley-Davidson, then you have a problem.
If you don’t feel comfortable writing the horse stuff, but are dealing with a fictional milieu where horsepower is what you’ve got, then either do the research (as I’ve said here before, horse people are, taken as a group, glad to be helpful in this regard) or keep your characters indoors and on foot as much as possible.
While you’re at it, take a moment to consider whether or not the horses-as-motorcycles issue might be symptomatic of a larger problem with your story. Pre-industrial societies are different from modern ones, even if they’re entirely imaginary, and it takes doing the research (again) to get them right.
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.
In the beginning, writing is easy, because you don’t know yet how much you don’t know, and you don’t know yet how much work it’s going to take to get better.
And eventually, you know that you’re not yet as good at it as you can be, but you’ve been at it long enough to know that you’re at least adequate and — more importantly — you know how to work at getting better.
In between those two states, though, is a trackless waste where a lot of dreams go to die. It’s the stage where you’ve realized how much you still don’t know, but you haven’t got any idea how to go about getting better. This is the point where despair can take over.
What can an aspiring writing do to avoid getting mired in despair? Different remedies work for different people, but here are some that have proven effective:
That’s what the sign said, anyway, in the parking lot of the Base Exchange. What they meant, of course, was Personally Owned Vehicle — which is military-speak for the family car. All the same, it gave aspiring-writer me a memorable moment of mental bogglement, because the same acronym, in writer-speak, is shorthand for Point Of View, and Point Of View is everywhere.
In the universe of fiction, nothing happens without an observer; without observation, the story would not exist. Even the so-called “third person objective” has an observer — third person objective is nothing but observation. It’s the “fly on the wall” viewpoint, the “camera’s eye” viewpoint, which gives the reader action and dialogue and description but nothing interior to the characters or to the narrator. (This is all elaborate sleight of hand, or sleight of mind — the writer is only pretending not to judge or comment on what’s going on. In fact, every detail is selected out of the near-infinite number of possible details with an eye to how it’s going to contribute to the impression the writer wants to make on the mind of the reader. Not surprisingly, third person objective is fiendishly hard to do well, or to carry off at length; most of the famous examples, such as Hemingway’s “The Killers”, are short stories.)
At the other end of the spectrum from third person objective is the omniscient point of view favored by Victorian novelists. For a long time in the mid to late twentieth century, omniscient POV fell out of favor, the victim of changes in literary fashion. Not surprisingly, given the lack of contemporary models, most of the writers who attempted to write in omni POV struggled with the process; failed attempts at omni were denigrated as “head-hopping.” It takes a keen eye and a steady hand to manage access to the interior lives of all a story’s characters, and to move freely between them without jarring or disorienting the reader.
Occupying the middle of the spectrum is tight-third POV, and its variant form, multiple tight-third. In tight-third, the writer allows him- or herself privileged access to the interior life of only a single character — or, in multiple tight-third, to only a single character in a particular scene. Tight-third, whether single or multiple, is probably the most common point of view in contemporary fiction, and to the extent that anything in this business is easy, it’s probably the easiest to get right.
Outside of the objective/tight-third/omni spectrum we have the varyingly-weird outliers: first-person, the “reader, I married him” point of view; second-person, the “you are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike” point of view; and oddities such as the epistolary story, told through letters and other documents. They’re all hard to write in their different ways, and a certain proportion of your audience is going to find them off-putting (there are readers out there who will never read a first-person story, for example, or a first-person story where the gender of the narrator doesn’t match the gender of the author, even though the text is plainly labelled “fiction.”)
What point of view should you use for your story? As so often in the writing business, the answer is, “It depends.” If your main character is talking to you in a distinctive voice and won’t shut up, first-person may be the answer. If you’re concerned with how the society of the story both affects and deals with the events of the narrative, and if you feel up to the challenge, then omniscient POV may be what you’re looking for. When in doubt, though, it’s always a good idea to go first for tight-third. No reader is going to question that choice, and it’s one with a lot of good models available for emulation.
But if tight-third isn’t working for you, or if your narrative persists in veering toward one of the other models, then try the various alternatives until you find the one that clicks.
Christopher R. Beha’s essay, “The Marquise Went out at Five O’clock: On Making Sentences Do Something”, is chock-full of good crunchy insights and thoughtful advice and things I would have liked to say only he’s saying them first and better. A snippet:
People can disagree, and have, over whether a novel or a story must itself have a “purpose” apart from being beautiful. But it seems to me inarguable that the parts of a novel or a story must have a purpose within the whole. These days, when I find that a sentence I’m writing isn’t working, I don’t think about what I want that sentence to look like or to be; I don’t pull it from the page to weigh it in my hand; I don’t worry over its internal balance. I simply ask myself, “What do I need this sentence to do?” I ask myself what role the sentence plays in its paragraph, what role the paragraph plays in its scene, the scene in its story. If I can’t answer these questions, even in some inarticulate and intuitive way, then I’ve got a problem, and that problem is bigger than this one sentence.
Speaking as a person who spends a lot of time wrestling with sentences, both her own and others, I can only say, Yes. This is how it is. Yes.
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