I’ve written before of my tendency to write stories with scores of characters—and not just in my long stories. As I was working on my most recent novel, and the one before, a frequent comment from my writers’ group has been the difficulty to keeping track of so many characters.
Two of the three people who agreed to read the entirety of the finished draft novel for me said that when they read the finished work, the number of characters didn’t seem excessive. They were able to keep track of who everyone was and what was happening to them. And I had compared my tale to some published books and found that I didn’t have any more characters than some of them.
So I figured it was a product of context. My writing group was hearing typically one chapter a month, which is not how most people read books.
But now that I have gotten editorial comments back on the finished book, as I’m trying to finish it, I have had an epiphany. Context and the length of time between hearing pieces of the story are contributing factors, yes. But the real problem is that I’ve written the story as if it were a comic series…
Camp NaNoWriMo is described as NaNoWriMo Lite… but it doesn’t have to be.I was pleased with how much writing I got done with my Alternate National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) and/or being a member of the NaNoWriMo Rebels. But during the months since, I have had a hard time motivating myself to finish several of the missing or not quite finished scenes and chapters in the first draft of my novel, The Trickster Entanglement.
Then I found out my friend, Mark, was going to participate in Camp NaNoWriMo. I had heard of the Camp, but I hadn’t really known what it was. I thought it might actually me a physical meet-up. The organization that runs NaNoWriMo has sponsored such activities, like the Night of Writing Dangerously, so a weekend retreat or something similar didn’t seem unreasonable.
“Just let me finish this scene…”I made the decision to be a writer at a very early age, not long after asking my mother where books came from. Throughout my elementary school years, whenever we moved to a new town, one of the first things I would do when we visited the local public library was find out whether the library had a subscription to The Writer magazine, and/or whether they had any copies of The Writer’s Handbook, which was a book published yearly featuring a selection of articles from a year’s worth the the magazine, plus a listing of the addresses and submission guidelines for lots of different publishers.
I did it!I read a lot of articles and several books about the craft of fiction writing during my formative years. I internalized a lot of the lessons of those articles, often without remembering the context of where I learned them…
Just resting my eyes…This month we actually managed to make it to our friend’s monthly “Drink ‘n’ Draw” meet up. I had meant to take at least a few pictures, but between visiting, trying to draw, and some editorial pow-wowing, I never got around to it. It was a very pleasant way to spend the afternoon.
Our friend, Jared, had agreed to give the manuscript of the first novel in the Trickster series a copy edit pass. He handed back the pile of pages, and we discussed topics other than mechanical copy edits. One of the questions he had for me was whether I planned to create a map of the fictitious world to include in the book.
One reason was that there are some places where it is a bit confusing where some of the groups of traveling people are in the story.
I have a very rough map sketched out in my notes, along with description that would just be long exposition in the book. There is description of the setting, but generally I keep it short and focused on the immediate vicinity of the characters. I really don’t want to write a scene where one character says to another, “As you know, Philippe, the empire is bordered on the south by four independent lands: the Duchy of Molalla, the Duchy of Falatin, the Tlatskan Marches, and the Duchy of Matilla. The river Klitwatchee defines the border, and it’s many tributaries define the major trade routes between the larger cities of each…”
When one of the characters is actually at the river, I mention that the opposite bank is another country, but no one really wants a detailed geography lesson plopped into the middle of the adventure tale, right?
I feel a little reluctance to put in a map because of a number of reviews I recall reading some years ago (as in, when I was in my teens) disparaging such maps in fantasy novels. I don’t really recall all of the reasons that were given for treating the maps with such derision. I remember a suggestion it denoted either laziness or a case of copying all the more successful epic fantasy novels. Or something.
Which I realized is weird. I have somehow internalized these opinions that I only vaguely recall reading, and it’s made me ambivalent about the idea of including a map.
While I was talking about this, a couple of our other friends scoffed at the derisive commentaries. One said, “Some of my favorite books have maps!”
The consensus seemed to be that a map wouldn’t hurt. Since the plot of the novel does involve several characters traveling, not to mention a battle with multiple armies, a map would probably be quite useful for at least some readers.
I’m still working on wrapping up the second novel in the Trickster universe and getting the third going. So to help with that, I signed up for Camp NaNoWriMo. Which is intended to work in the same the same way that I did NaNoWriMo anyhow: set your own goal and it doesn’t have to be a new project.
In related news, I have spent a frightening amount of time this week using Scapple to map out some family trees and the subplots and complications of book three.
I received an enthusiastic review and demo of A Novel Idea earlier today. While I’m not sure it does things I don’t already do with WriteRoom1, I think I will give it a try because my Mom has been asking about more apps she could use on her phone for plotting and planning her book3.
Thinking about this reminds me that I need to migrate my PlainText app stuff over to PlainText 2 at some point… or, alternatively, look into a different iOS doc editor that synchs with Scrivener.4.
Footnotes:
1. Which is no longer available for new purchase on the iTunes store, alas2.
2. While there are lots of things I like about app stores and mobile computing on phones and iPads, one thing I don’t like is that the current models don’t allow app developers a revenue stream for updates. I love WriteRoom for iOS and for Mac since I first got them several years ago, and have recommended them to people looking for a good distraction-free writing solution that works across devices. But updating the software to keep up with operating system upgrades takes effort, and developers find themselves in the very unpleasant position of either doing that work for free, or trying to convince loyal customers to pay the full price of a new app in order to upgrade. Which means that the small developers who create software that meets any sort of specialized need are constantly going out of business and customers having to find something new to do what they were already doing with a tool they liked perfectly well.
3. Mom was one of my writing buddies last year for NaNoWriMo, and wants to do it again this year.
4. Since the maker of WriteRoom and PlainText sold his iOS apps to another company, said company has come out with an updated version of one of those products, PlainText 2. The original PlainText only worked on iPad, while WriteRoom worked on iPad and iPhone. WriteRoom was meant as a distraction-free program, so it was stripped down to the bare essential features of a writing program, while PlainText could do a lot more. PlainText 2 does work on both the iPhone and the iPad, and seems to interact with my other programs as I like, which is good. Right now I’m using the free version to test it out5.
5. On the other hand, if I’m going to have to go through the process of switching to another app anyway, and if getting all the features I want on said apps will require me spending some money, I should look at more than one, which is why I’ll probably also be playing with Textilus, which has been strongly recommended by a few friends.
Real herrings are never this red.When a writer (particularly a mystery or detective story author) places details in a story to distract the characters and/or the readers to a false conclusion, that’s called a “red herring.” For many years, dictionaries and other references claimed that the origin of the phrase was a reference to a technique that used to be used to train hunting dogs to stay on the trail and not be distracted. When certain kinds of fish are preserved by being smoked and/or brined, the flesh of the fish turned a brownish red, and they often had a very pungent odor. Such “red herrings” or kippers supposedly could be used to throw a dog off the scent.
That origin is now generally accepted to be apocryphal, with the actual origin being from a political article written in 1807 in which the author said that he once distracted a dog with a red herring, and then accused other journalists of having been deceived in a similar way by a rumor. There is no indication of any actual hunters or dog trainers making it a practice to regularly use such fish in the training of hunting dogs.
But the apocryphal story remains useful in explaining the figurative meaning: distract the reader by placing a hint that appears to lead to something interesting in her path.
For the red herring to work in any type of story in which the characters are trying to solve a puzzle, it isn’t enough for the red herring to be a distraction. The red herring should point the characters (and the reader) toward a plausible alternative solution. When the trail turns out to be a dead end or a wrong solution, the trail itself still has to be something that plausibly would happen in that world.
It’s been annoying me about a lot of series I’ve been watching lately. Characters have a problem to solve, some information is found that points in a particular direction, when suddenly, blam! a supporting character that is loved one of one of the protagonists is attacked mysteriously. For the rest of the episode, everyone runs around like chickens with their heads cut off accusing people that have absolutely no motive at all for being involved in either problem. Eventually protagonist is confronted by the very person that clues which were seen before the distraction pointed to in the beginning. And here’s the part that’s crazy: either the mysterious attack is never explained, or it was done by some random person completely unrelated to the bad guy who is revealed three episodes later as a new big bad, but no rational explanation for why the new big bad attacked that character three episodes earlier is ever given.
I’m not sure if the problem is that most shows are written by teams where there may not be a clear “coordinator” with a strong artistic vision of what the story line is supposed to do, or if they simply think that throwing random stuff at the reader/viewer is what you’re supposed to do, or if they’re always in a rush without time to think things through. Or maybe they have fallen into that trap of thinking that, since sometimes meaningless things happen in real life, it’s okay for a story teller to do it, too.
It’s not okay. It shows that you are a bad writer. Yes, random things happen in real life. And you can even have some events happen in the story where the explanation in the story is that it was just dumb luck. But you are the story teller, and it’s your story. You have chosen to show this random action happened to your character. You need to have a reason, a reason that furthers the story or reveals something about the characters, for showing the bad luck to the reader/viewer.
It is okay if a red herring occasionally leads to a laugh without furthering the plot. If you have previously established one supporting character as being a bit of a dork or a goofball, for instance, you can one clue that leads to something completely unrelated to the plot that this funny character is doing. But it needs to be something that the readers/viewers will immediately think, “Oh! That’s so like him.”
Let’s say your current puzzle involves someone apparently attempting to kill a teacher by leaving some sort of deadly device for him. While the protagonists are following up clues, they discover that the teacher’s car in the parking lot is sparkling clean, as if someone wiped down the entire exterior. You can have the characters waste time trying to find a bomb of something on the car that never turns out to be there. Eventually, another supporting character finds video showing one obscure supporting character who is a student lurking around the car earlier. Eventually, the protagonists find out that said student, but realize that he’s failing said teacher’s class, and has been trying to curry the teacher’s favor.
It was suspicious behavior, it leads to a dead end, but it also makes sense within the story and is completely believable as something that could happen independently of the real stalker. Good writing.
On the other hand, having two supporting characters shot by a mysterious person off screen, who leaves them huddled together, holding each others wounds while waiting for an ambulance, and then never showing who shot the characters? Not so plausible. Or, showing who shot the characters three episodes later, but the person who did it is someone the audience would expect to want to kill the characters who were shot, and there was absolutely no reason for her not to have finished the job three episodes earlier? Bad writing.
It’s your story, yes. But you need to tell it the best it can be told.
This may or may not be an accurate representation of me writing.I’ve been bogged down at nearly the end of this novel for a while. I had thought, once I’d finally written the scenes where several of the characters die, that my difficulty finishing would be over.
It was a struggle writing those scenes. I was literally crying while writing one. I’ve opined many times before that in order to write a character convincingly, there’s a part of you that has to believe the character is real. There’s some neuroscience to indicate that the part of our brain from which emotions and gut reactions originate literally cannot tell the difference between real people we know, and ficticious characters we become attached to. So it made sense, when (for plot purposes) some of my non-villain characters needed to die, that it would be upsetting.
In wrapping up the plot, some of the bad guys need to make a similar exit, and I find myself just as conflicted about writing those scenes. Again, it makes sense in that, in order to make them interesting characters, I have to see them as well-rounded people. They aren’t just bad for badness sake—they have reasons they believe that what they’re doing is justified.
But I can also see that it’s not just that I empathize with them. There is more than one kind of finality, here. Once I finish them off, once I complete this conflict and move to the denouement, there’s no turning back. Oh, yes, as the author, so long as the book hasn’t been published, I can go back and change things to go a completely different way. If I really want to, I can comepletely rewrite the entire book.
But… Once I actually write the scene, it’s harder. If the scene works, if it feels real as I write it, I’ve committed to this sequence of events as a viable way for the story to unfold. I can revise it, yes, but there will always be part of me that knows it could have gone this way. And unless an alternate scene that I think of gets written, and unless it feels as solid when I write it, the first version way will seem like the more likely option, the more real option.
At least as real as a fictional narrative can get.
So, as much as part of me is reluctant to kill off these next five characters slated for a big defeat, there is another part of me that’s just as reluctant to commit. “It doesn’t have to be this way,” a voice whispers from my subconscious. “There’s still time to go another way.”
The problem is, if I give in to this impulse for too long, it will become even more tempting to go back and undo a few things. “Why does that innocent character have to die?” The voice will ask. “Why does any of this have to happen?”
On one level, it’s my story and I can change anything I want.
On a completely different level, I’m its author, and it deserves to be told the best it can be. It’s fiction, but all fiction is about making sense of the world, of finding meaning in events big or small, profound or mundane, pleasant or unpleasant.
Contrary to what some will tell you, a fiction writer’s job is not to lie. A writer’s job is to tell the truth. And to tell it the best we can at the time.
So, I have to stop equivocating, stop spinning excuses for avoiding the tough part, and I need to tell this story, this discovery, this truth.
What?My fiction seldom contains much exposition. I describe the actions of the characters, I give them a lot of dialogue, then just try to let the action and interaction speak for itself. Not everyone can always infer the motives or feelings a character is experiencing just from the action and dialog. So, when my writer’s group points those things out, I try to fix it.
I was reminded about the difficulty in perceiving character motivation by an extremely odd set of actions on my bus ride Tuesday morning…
Some time back an acquaintance was ranting on-line about his pet peeve: people who criticized a movie by saying it had no plot. This was his pet peeve, he said, because it was impossible. “No matter how badly written or executed a movie is, something happens. So it has a plot!” He wasn’t very happy with me when I told him that he didn’t know what the word “plot” means, at least in regards to a narrative such as a play or novel.
The definition I usually cite is one common in books and articles about writing: “a plot is a problem, riddle, or obstacle that confronts the protagonist at the beginning of the story, is resolved by the protagonist’s own actions at the end of the story, and is the thread which connects everything the happens between the beginning and ending.”
In other words, it’s not just that things happen, it’s that the events of the story need to be related. A well constructed story can appear to have a lot of chaotic things happening, but by the end the audience needs to feel that those seemingly random events meant something, or contributed to the character’s struggle. The whole point of a narrative—the whole reason humans tell each other stories—is to create meaning…
I nap a lot…Almost all the writing I’ve gotten done in the last 7 weeks (outside of work) has been posting for this blog. On my novel, I’ve done some revision, spelling clean-ups, sorted out some of the scene- and chapter-order issues I ignored during NaNoWriMo, and have managed to write only one actual new scene. Since between us, we’ve been sick pretty much continuously since late December, maybe I shouldn’t feel so bad about how little I’ve actually finished.
The last 7 to 9 days have been particularly bad. Those days that I’ve worked, pretty much every bit of energy I had has gone into trying to make deadlines there.
Last night was the first commute home from work since February 6 that I didn’t feel it was a struggle to walk the last block (or more) to the house. Even the day I drove in, I had to sit in the car for a few minutes after I parked to work up the energy to pick up my laptop bag and walk into the house.
And what did I wind up doing? I read, finishing off the book that I’ve been reading on my morning bus rides the last few weeks.
Maybe I needed a recharge before I can get writing again.
I’ve written before of my tendency to write stories with scores of characters—and not just in my long stories. As I was working on my most recent novel, and the one before, a frequent comment from my writers’ group has been the difficulty to keeping track of so many characters.
Font Folly 