Category: Writing

Series, –ologies, and Outlines

 A while back I got a question about planning ahead and the WebMage world come in and I thought the answer might be something I should share.

How far in advance do (did) you plan what happens to your characters. Did you know most of the things early on, or did they come to you as time went by? For example, (J) wondered about Ravirn’s name change.

That depends on the specifics and when I wrote a given book. I tend to know much more much earlier at this point in my writing career than I did when I started out.

So, Cybermancy was much more thoroughly plotted out than WebMage. I didn’t know about Ravirn’s name change in WebMage until a couple of weeks before I wrote it, though I knew that I wanted Ravirn cast out of his family months beforehand–the name change was a detail triggered by listening to Jane Yolen on a panel about trickster characters.

In terms of the impact of the Raven thing on Cybemancy, I literally had no idea until I started writing Cybermancy, because at the time I wrote WebMage I had no plans for a sequel. I only started playing with the idea of a second book when my agent suggested I might want to think about that if the eventual publisher asked for one.

Likewise, when I finished Cybermancy I wasn’t planning for more books, because the numbers hadn’t started coming in. But very shortly thereafter WebMage hit and almost immediately went into a second printing, and that suggested that it was something I should be thinking about. So, I figured out much of what I wanted to do with CodeSpell and MythOS the September after WebMage came out, though I didn’t write the proposals for another two months.

At the time I’m writing this, Book V, assuming there is a one, is roughly plotted in terms of the highly technical “things what has to happen” model but not in terms of a sequence of events. The looseness of this process is in part because WebMage wasn’t planned as a series and has just sort of grown, and in part because it’s an open ended series and not an –ology of any sort.

The Black School books (a trilogy of which two are now written) were always planned as a three book arc, with me knowing the broad outlines of II and III before I ever started writing I. The proposal for II and III looks radically different in terms of specifics than it would have if I’d written it before writing I, but the big events and the arc are much the same as they have always been.

(Originally published on the Wyrdsmiths blog November 27 2007, and original comments may be found there. Reposted and reedited as part of the reblogging project)

Point of View

POV Part 1, Shifts Within Scenes:

So, one of my students asked me about Point Of View (POV) shifts, multiple POVs, and multiple protagonists.

This is an interesting question for a number of reasons, not least because the way it is handled varies wildly from genre to genre and over time. For example, young adult is (or has been—these things shift with startling speed) mostly all right with mid-text snippets out of the POV of the scene’s main character. Modern F&SF frowns on shifting POV while in-scene, rather a lot, though, of course, there are exceptions.

Caveats: Note the “in-scene” there, it’s important, I’m not talking about multiple points of view alternating scene to scene or chapter to chapter. Also, as with every rule of publishing, sufficiently outstanding writing trumps all.

I personally have trouble with in-scene POV shifts. In my experience, jumps outside of a scene’s established POV tend to be weaker writing. This is for two reasons.

One, out of POV snippets are more likely than regular prose to tell instead of show, an inherently weaker form. Show, Don’t Tell when applied as an iron clad rule is a bad idea, because there are simply times when the writer has to tell or has to do both (Eleanor has commented on that here), but as a guideline it’s trying to get at an important point–actively engage the reader whenever possible.

Two, in-scene POV shifts usually signal that the writer has encountered some situation that he or she hasn’t figured out how to approach from within the established format of the ongoing narrative, thus forcing the writer to cheat, again inherently a weaker solution than maintaining the form established for the narrative.

The corollary to all this is that staying in POV usually results in stronger writing. Not always, of course, but usually.

That said, good writing trumps all. If you’re going to do in-scene POV shifting, make sure that you give your reader the tools to make sense of it. The few times I’ve seen it done well, the writer has always given the reader something to hold onto as they change POVs, a banister (term borrowed from Barth Anderson who got it from somewhere else). So, you might do something like this:

Main narrative voice.
Out of POV bits.
Main narrative voice.

Or this:

Main narrative voice.
***
Out of POV bits.
***
Main narrative voice.

The things is to give the reader that banister–some simple way of knowing that this bit is different from that bit over there.

POV part 2, Multiple POVs and Multiple Protagonists

First thing these are NOT the same thing.

Second thing, multiple POVs is bog standard as a tool for writing fiction and perfectly acceptable to pretty much the entire writing world. It only becomes an issue (not a problem necessarily, but definitely an issue) when you start to get into a bunch of in-scene POV switching. There it will often both confuse the reader and weaken their emotional investment in the scene’s primary character.

Third thing, reader investment. That’s really what it’s all about. You, the writer really want your reader to have an investment in the story. You want them to feel a sense of possession–that this is their story too. That’s the root of having your reader really care about what you write. There are two primary types of reader investment, emotional and intellectual. The emotional one is significantly more powerful in keeping the reader involved. Intellectual investment is important and can substitute for emotional investment to a degree, but it’s not as visceral a commitment, nor generally as deep.

And reader investment is where multiple protagonist stories start to run into issues.

One of the first things that a reader does at a conscious or unconscious level is to ask Whose story is this? If the answer is simple: This is X’s story, then the reader brain moves on to the next tier of questions. If the answer is more complex: This is the story of a bunch of people and how they interact, or this is the story of a planet, or this is the story of a movement the reader brain has to do more work. Some readers prefer this. Some writers manage it so skillfully that the reader brain doesn’t worry about it too much. But no matter how you slice it, the reader’s brain is doing less work with a story that belongs to one character.

Likewise, it is much easier for the reader to emotionally invest in one central core character, particularly if other POV characters come into conflict with that core character. We are a tribal species and we tend to take sides. If we know whose side we’re on going into a conflict, we’re more comfortable. It’s easier to have a best buddy in the story or a single person that the reader can project themselves into.

Can more protagonists be included successfully? Absolutely? Can you have a story about a planet? A conflict? A movement? Again, absolutely. But it will be harder to get solid reader investment in the story and therefor harder to do successfully. Like everything in writing it’s a balance. Is the added degree of difficulty in engaging the reader worth whatever it is the multiple protagonists buy you in terms of the story you want to tell?

(Originally published on the Wyrdsmiths blog in two parts on November 12th and 14th 2007, and original comments may be found there as well as in this response post by Sean Michael Murphy where we discuss the subject at some length. Reposted and reedited as part of the reblogging project)

Writing Short Fiction

The major magazine markets for short F&SF are dying. Pretty much everybody agrees on that. The reactions range from please help save them (slushmaster) to so what (Scalzi). People have talked about causes, among them: the writers aren’t stretching enough (VannderMeer) and the short markets have become a bunch of writers writing for other writers who edit and put out stories for writers who read writerly stuff–see point four here (Bear). I tend to favor the club scene theory Bear is talking about plus a dash of the idea that the internet has really changed the way people digest small chunks of content, i.e. substituting blogs for shorts.

2013 update: Though the print magazine continues to decline, the online market for short fiction has really expanded into a much more viable scene in the years since I originally wrote this post. Many authors with an established fan base have also started publishing shorts either stand alone or in micro anthologies via Amazon and other ebook venues. At this point, only six years on from the original, I am no longer giving advice on what to do with shorts in terms of publishing, as my focus on novels has left me hopelessly out of date. OTOH, my main point about shorts from the writing/learning to be a writer point of view still stands…I think.

I give you all of that as a sort of background to what I really want to talk about, which is why I write short stories and I why I think any F&SF writer who can* write shorts should. Sarah Monette talks about some of the same things here in terms of why she writes them, and that’s definitely worth a read. One place where I disagree with both her and Scalzi is in terms of what shorts can do for a career, so I’ll start there.

Both Scalzi and Monette mention that there are better ways to raise your profile for readers–blogging is mentioned–and I agree on that. The thing that shorts can do for you career-wise that blogs and many other venues don’t do, is establish you as someone who has been vetted by some sort of serious professional editorial process. While that may not sound like much, it means a lot in terms of bona-fides for agent queries. And getting an agent is becoming ever more critical in breaking into the novel biz via the large houses, which necessity is something I’m going to talk about in its own post later. Beyond that, Monette’s point about learning how to be a professional writer through the short story markets is a great one.

Monette also talks in brief about the risk-taking element, the fact that you can try things in a short that you wouldn’t dare try in a novel. I’d go beyond that to say that short stories are one of the best venues a new F&SF writer has for learning the craft, because in addition to being daring you can afford to be mundane–to practice the simple things.

You can write ten or dozen shorts where you focus on mastering a single aspect of craft like plot or character and let the rest of the stuff go hang. The brevity of the form allows for a lot more of the try/fail cycles an artist need to master the craft.

A short also forces the writer to pay attention to things they might not have to in a longer piece. If you’ve got a 5,000 word cap on how long the story can go, you have to make the hard choices about what elements of the story are important enough to keep on the page. You have to go for late entry and early exit. You have to make damn sure that every single word is important. You can’t have extraneous scenes that don’t advance the core of the story. In a short a writer knows that they must catch the reader’s attention right now and hold onto it–there’s no time to do anything else.

And, guess what? Those things are all true for novels as well. Sure, in the longer form you can get away with earlier entry and later exit and longer chunks that don’t do anything more than show off some cool side bits, but the question is: Should you? The answer: Maybe, but you should never do it unawares or unweighted. Short story writing helps teach the balancing skills a writer needs to decide when and where to go long.

*Some writers simply aren’t suited to the medium, and that’s fine.

(Originally published on the Wyrdsmiths blog October 29 2007, and original comments may be found there. Reposted and reedited as part of the reblogging project)

Author/Reader Interaction and Dumbledore’s Sexuality

Much ink has been spilled over J.K. Rowling’s revelation that Dumbledore was gay. I’m personally glad she said it for a number of reasons, one of which is a writing reason.

She showed respect for her readers. Giving an honest answer to an honest reader question is a matter of simple authorial courtesy. As an author, my default response to reader questions is to answer them to the best of my ability, unless answering them will create spoilers for later books.

Quite a number of people seem to disagree for various reasons political and literary. On the former I will simply say that I disagree vigorously. On the latter however, I am going to go into a little more detail as it is relevant to the core reasons for this blog’s existence.

The essentials of the literary argument are that the text is everything, and that authors should simply shut up about anything beyond what is on the pages in black and white because many readers don’t want the author messing around with their version of the empty pages that lie beyond the borders of the text.

My biggest problem with this it that it gives more weight to the readers who don’t want to know the author’s thoughts on something than it does to those who do, and it does so at a disproportionate cost to the curious.

J.K.Rowling was asked a direct question by a reader who really wanted to know Rowling’s answer. If Rowling had the answer in her head, should she really deprive those who are interested just so that those who aren’t don’t have to hear about it?

It seems to me that if an author doesn’t answer questions, it penalizes those who want to know the answers far more than answering penalizes those who don’t want to know. With the exception of a few very big names it is astronomically easier to avoid author answers to reader questions than it is to divine those same answers if they’re never given. If they stay in the author’s head, no one will ever know the author’s opinion but the author.

(Originally published on the Wyrdsmiths blog October 25 2007, and original comments may be found there. Reposted and reedited as part of the reblogging project)

Because it Can’t be Overemphasized

Writers write.

I want to put that all alone because it is the central point of this blog. It’s all about the writing. Everything else is fundamentally by way of amplification or refinement.

I’m teaching an advanced class on writing fantasy at the moment, one aimed at people who’ve completed at least one novel and who are serious about pursuing publication and I’ve told them several times that if they only take one thing away from my class it is this:

Write.

On the broader stage, I am trying to teach them techniques of craft, ways to think critically about their work, and how to form alliances with other writers to help them move forward. I’m showing them how to put together synopses and to see and talk about the hooks in their work. I am exposing the realities of the hard slog that is the norm in the quest for publication. I want them to understand the realities so that 50 or 100 rejections become a mark of honor, a sign of things written and submitted instead of a soul-crushing obstacle. But amongst all the lecture and critique and questions asked and answered I keep repeating two things.

1. Take everything I say as a tool to be used or discarded as it suits your needs. If something I tell you helps you to write, use it. If it stops you, discard it and find something that gets you writing.

2. There are 1,000 and 1 ways to write a book and every one of them is right. Find what works for you and use it to write.

Are you seeing a theme?

Write more. Write again. Revise. Send out. Write more. All of those things are predicated on the initial writing. You achieve success in this business by the expedient of writing, improving your writing, and not giving up. The formula is a simple one to lay out but it can be awfully hard to follow, especially the not giving up part.

Being published takes time and effort and deep down-in-the-bone stubborn. It takes craft and talent and luck and more than a little blood sweat and tears to boot. But mostly it takes this:

Writing.

(Originally published on the Wyrdsmiths blog October 23 2007, and original comments may be found there. Reposted and reedited as part of the reblogging project)

Difficult Things

The most difficult things I’ve attempted as a writer are to write funny and to write poetically well—i.e. in a way that doesn’t look overwrought or overwritten.

I’m not actually sure which is harder, but I know which I’m better at. The books where I’ve written poetically are none of them in print yet, though I’ve had more than one editor say very nice things about them. Mostly that they like them but don’t think they’re commercial enough. I’ve even had editors try to put deals together for them, but as yet they have all gone boom at some point.

Funny on the other hand. Well, even my more serious books get reviewers saying nice things about the elements of humor. I’m good at funny. I have the checks to demonstrate it. Poetic…well, I think I’ve done it well when I’ve tried, and the lurkers* support me in email—I have the very kind rejection letters to demonstrate it.

The thing that I occasionally find frustrating about this is that if you’re doing comedy right, it looks effortless. The reason this is frustrating is that when it gets really hard, as it does sometimes, you feel a bit of a jerk for saying “Hey, this is hard, and I’m stressed about it.” Whereas, no one thinks twice if you’re known for writing beautiful, poetic prose, and you say “Hey, this is hard, and I’m stressed about it.”

This is because, when you’re reading along and you come across a long beautiful poetic passage, you generally think something like “wow, that’s gorgeous, I wish I could write like that,” or “wow, that’s gorgeous, they sure can write.” It’s obvious that what the poetic writer is doing is hard, and people acknowledge it without even thinking about it.

OTOH, when you’re reading along and you come across something really funny,** you laugh and keep right on moving, because that’s what a good joke does. It makes you laugh and it makes you feel a little lighter and more ready to go on. It acts as a lubricant for life, and lubricant is something you generally notice most in its absences.

Don’t get me wrong, I’d much rather have the book contracts and the money that comes with them and make people smile when they read than be able to get more sympathy when I’m feeling whiny. But it was something I was thinking about, and when I’m feeling thinky I generally end up writing about it, because, hey, writer—that’s what we do.

One final note here and I shall go back to attempting to make the very difficult look like slipping on a banana peal. Neil Gaiman. Among the things that make Neil one of the best writers in our field is his ability to simultaneously do both. He writes things that are beautiful and poetic and funny, which makes people say “Wow, that’s gorgeous, how does he make it look so easy,” and then laugh about it, which is amazing.

__________________________________________

*In this case lurker = editor.

**There are exceptions, of course, mostly in the realm of socially relevant humor, where you laugh because it hurts, or because it’s uncomfortable. But the kind of humor I write is mostly there to make you feel like your day just got a little better.

King Lear, Ian McKellen, and Character

Last night (as I’m writing this) I was fortunate enough to see The Royal Shakespeare Company’s King Lear with Ian McKellen (major props to my aunt Lee for scoring the tickets—2013 update: Lee has since passed away and I miss her). W. O. W.!

I have seen many great performances of Shakespeare including several other Royal Shakespeare productions. None of them was in the same league as this one. Lear, Goneril, Edmund, and Kent were beyond extraordinary. Regan, Gloucester, and the Fool were merely astonishing. Everyone else turned in the kind of performance that would have made a scene-steeling star turn in any other company. It was the playgoing experience of a lifetime and the small touches were every bit as telling and smart as the big ones. I’m only going to touch briefly on a few things so as to get to the part where this becomes a writing post.

In two seconds of side business in the opening scene—side business that managed to be the center of attention just for those two seconds without distracting from the main action, Regan established herself as an alcoholic and set up her own poisoning at the end of the play. Ian McKellen somehow managed to give Lear enormous dignity while naked from knees to armpits and wrestling with his clothes in the storm scene. The fool did quite a number of his pieces as singsong while playing a pair of spoons and managed to be both terribly funny and terribly tragic simultaneously. Kent’s exit at the end of the play to go commit suicide was so right and so poignant at the same time that it hurt.

And all of it was in some cases despite the writing. Yes, you read that right. Shakespeare is one of the greatest writers ever to have walked the earth, and in every other performance I have seen, the writing has transcended the acting. Where there have been moments that fell short it was always because the actors couldn’t quite live up to the play. In this case, the acting was so good that it exposed the weak spots in the writing. Despite the fact that it was Lear, despite the fact that it is one of the great plays, despite Shakespeare’s phenomenal pen, he was outperformed.

Cordelia’s performance in particular was positively heroic in a way that exposed the weakness of the part. The actress’ Cordelia was outstanding, Shakespeare’s not nearly so much. Likewise Edgar, who put into face and gesture things that Shakespeare did not put into the text.

And that is exactly what you want your characters to do in your books. To transcend your writing of them. This is why you want to leave some gaps in description and to sometimes choose to imply things about motivation instead of spelling them out absolutely. So that your actors and set–provided in a novel by the imagination of the reader–have room to do more than you can make them do on your own.

The writer who spells out absolutely everything leaves no room for the reader to make the book their own, and that investment of reader interest and effort is priceless. Of course, you can’t make them do too much of the work or you will lose them on the other end. As with everything in writing it is a matter of balance.

(Originally published on the Wyrdsmiths blog October 15 2007, and original comments may be found there. Reposted and reedited as part of the reblogging project)

Stephanie Zvan’s Very Smart Writer’s Spreadsheet

My friend and fellow writer, Stephanie Zvan, built a really useful novelist’s spreadsheet quite some time ago and I’ve been meaning to talk it up for ages–with her permission of course. It’s a very smart tool for looking at story on a scene by scene basis. Across the top are a series of categories, each with it’s own column and description.

The top row looks like this-reading from left to right:

1. Blank
2. Scene Functions:
3. Scene Plot
4. Story Plot
5. Character
6. Emotion
7. Senses
8. Info/Worldbuilding
9. Going Beyond/Literature
10. Blank

The second row has corresponding descriptions for each column. So:

1. Blank.
Scene

2. Scene Functions:
Description (of scene function)

3. Scene Plot
What are characters’ immediate goals? What conflicts are set up or resolved?

4. Story Plot
How does this scene advance or hinder characters’ long-term goals?

5. Character
What’s revealed or demonstrated about characters? Do they grow or change?

6. Emotion
What emotions is this scene intended to elicit?

7. Senses
What senses have you engaged?

8. Info/Worldbuilding
What necessary or cool information is given to the reader?

9. Going Beyond/Literature
What elevates this above narrative? Illuminating metaphor, wicked description, elaboration on theme(s), etc.

10. To Do

The first column then has a list of scenes by chapter running from top to bottom, 1a, 1b, 1c, 2a, for however many chapters and scenes are appropriate.

This allows the writer to look at each scene and how many of the goals it meets in an eyeblink and also to do a more in depth analysis of the piece on a topic by topic or scene by scene basis. As a spreadsheet it also allows for the writer to easily expand the number of topics covered.

One could add a column listing all the characters who appear in each scene as a tool to see whether some characters could be merged or eliminated. Or in a novel with many points of view, a column that says who is the POV character for each scene might allow for tying some sense or tag to each character to make sure that is engaged in each scene from their POV.

(Originally published on the Wyrdsmiths blog October 12 2007, and original comments may be found there. Reposted and reedited as part of the reblogging project)

Late Entry

In his wonderful screenwriting book Which Lie Did I Tell?: More Adventures in the Screen Trade, William Goldman spends more than a little bit of time talking about Late Entry, by which he means starting the camera as late as possible in any given scene. This, like much of the advice in Goldman’s two books on screenwriting–the other is Adventures in the Screen Trade–is absolutely dead on for novels and short stories as well.

Every scene in a story has a beginning and an end. It starts when a character comes into the setting and ends when they leave. This can be made more complex by the fact that most scenes have multiple characters that may or may not enter and leave all at the same time, but is at root the basic structure of scene. But not every scene does or should appear in the story from beginning to end.

A simple example for why this is true might go like this: Character A enters a room. They then spend forty minutes peacefully reading a magazine before character B comes along and starts a dialogue. Several minutes might then go into them exchanging pleasantries about their extended family before a troublesome memory of A doing something stupid at B’s wedding comes up. A fight ensues and eventually B pulls out a gun and shoots A dead, then flees the scene.

In a movie, with it’s limited time budget, it is obvious why most if not all of the waiting and initial family discussion will not and should not end up being filmed. It’s boring and it wastes half of the two hours you have to tell the entire story. The question is where exactly do you start the camera rolling? The answer is and should always be as late as possible for the scene to make sense and show the audience what they need to see. Depending on the story, you might put in snippets of the wait and pleasantries or you might not. You will almost certainly put in parts of the argument (though those might be better brought it in flashback) and you must put in the shooting.

The question of when to leave a scene is a mirror of the Late Entry principle. How soon can you get out while still giving the audience what they need? The answer is: As soon as possible. And the same principle applies to writing a novel or short story. Any part of a scene that doesn’t cover something the reader needs to know about should go.

(Originally published on the Wyrdsmiths blog October 10 2007, and original comments may be found there. Reposted and reedited as part of the reblogging project)

Don’t Drown the Reader in Strange

So in my class last night (in October 2007, actually) I talked a little bit about this and thought I’d expand and expound on it here. F&SF is the genre of the fantastic. It is defined by the idea of a world not like our own. This can be a world of the future, of the past, of a now that is somehow different from the one we live in, or a world that never has been. We include elves and dragons, cyborgs and star ships, magic, and technology-indistinguishable-from-magic, and we mostly start doing it on page one. This is what our readers expect and demand and yet….

You still have to give your reader banisters–ideas and terms they can hold onto as they ease into the story. Every time you introduce a strange magical beast or a polysyllabic alien name you need to give the reader context, let them know that a gobbledygook is really basically a dragon with the serial numbers filed off, or that Svbuewioboie is really an engineer on a star ship not all that different from star ships they’ve seen in the past. To make a work original and to draw in the reader you have to have gobbledygooks and Svbuewioboie, and whozits and Xzasdxssa as well, but you probably don’t want to introduce them all on page one, because the contextualization you will have to do for the reader is going to kill your pacing.

Spacing out the weirdness is one of the things you can do to help the reader ease into the strange and hopefully come to love it. One other thing you can do is make certain that there’s a good reason that you’re calling a dragon a gobbledygook or a cell phone a WAA (weird-ass acronym) and not do it if you don’t have to. “Dragon” is a fine word with all sorts of wonderful history and built-in associations. A phone is an entirely comprehensible piece of technology and unless the specific nature of the phone is really really important to the story there’s not much point in calling it a WAA.

Like everything in writing it’s a balancing act. You have to decide what strangeness really serves the story and what strangeness is there because it’s really cool, and what strangeness should probably be sidelined in favor of making it easier for the reader. At root it’s learning how to decide whether the glorious history of the gobbledygook species is more important than not calling a dragon a dragon.

(Originally published on the Wyrdsmiths blog October 5 2007, and original comments may be found there. Reposted and reedited as part of the reblogging project)