Category Archives: writing

Swan (songs) a swimming

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Beginnings in fiction are very important. If you don’t grab the reader’s attention and engage his/her curiosity at the beginning, they’ll never read the rest of your story. It’s no surprise, then, that numerous books, courses, seminars, and panels on how to write spend a lot of time on beginnings. They also spend time discussing how to develop and advance a plot, how do to characterization, and so forth. But I’ve always felt that endings get short shrift.

Knowing the right place to stop is deceptively harder than it looks. The ending needs to resolve the conflicts (both external and internal) which drove the plot. The ending needs to leave the reader with a sense of closure. Or, if not exactly closure, some indication of where things are headed for the characters the reader has spent the entire story bonding with.

I’ve been thinking about this a lot as I’m working on (what I hope is) the last round of edits on a novel. A couple of my advance-readers have commented that the final chapter is a little long. The climax and crisis action happens before the final chapter in a big dramatic fight, and then I have the final chapter to wrap everything up. In literary circles they call this the denouement: the unraveling of complications, the final resolution of the story.

This is one of the places where my tendency to write stories with lots of characters makes my job harder. The reader has spent a lot of time with many of these characters, and understandably wants to know at least a bit about how each has been affected by the events at the climax. Also, there are one or two running gags in the story which it was inappropriate to resolve during the battle. Those each have to have a pay-off (and judging by the writers’ group reaction when I read the first draft of the final chapter, those work). I don’t want to skip any character that had significant appearances, because each character, no matter how strange, will be the favorite of some readers.

I’m not saying that one needs to perform “fan service.” But, as a writer of a novel-length tale, I’ve asked the reader to come along for all the ups and downs of these characters. If I don’t finish the tale for each, I’ve wasted some of the reader’s time. As a storyteller I’m not obliged to give the reader what they want, but I am obliged to tell the best story I can.

Fortunately, a lot of the characters can appear in denouement scenes together, so the reader can see them one last time and see how they are.

I’ve also been thinking about this a lot lately because two different television series I’ve watched and enjoyed for a number of years are coming to their conclusions. In each case, the creators of the show have been given an opportunity to end things on their own terms. They knew in advance that this was the end, with plenty of time to write the ending they want.

A lot of writers (not just TV writers) don’t get the chance. While it is frustrating for a fan when that happens, trust me, it’s even more frustrating for the writer.

I wish them luck in their endings. As a fan I hope I get something that feels fitting, with maybe a surprise or two.

And as a writer struggling with an ending of my own, I really hope I don’t blow it!

Break neck

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I just finished Jim Butcher’s latest book in the Dresden series, Cold Days, and it was a wild roller coaster ride, as they always are.

The structure of a Dresden novel is pretty simple: open with the classic “into pot, already boiling,” then keep turning up the heat, throwing ever more dangerous/painful/insurmountable problems at the protagonist, raising the stakes again, and again, until a final couple of battles, and a solution that you feel you should have seen coming, but usually didn’t (or if you did, you hoped you were wrong).

They’re fun reads. And it’s a good story-telling method with a long history. Most people meet Freytag’s Pyramid in beginning creative writing classes. Gustav Freytag developed the pyramid to illustrate a classic Greek five-act play. Few modern stories follow his pattern, collapsing several of his stages together. The basic outline: protagonist confronts problem, struggles with it through a series of events of rising dramatic tension, which comes to a head, then is resolved, and the reader gets some sense of closure.

The Dresden stories take a high octane action adventure approach to the story, with the escalation of the stakes happening faster and faster. It’s kind of like being strapped to a missle, and not knowing for certain where you’re going, and whether everything will blow up when you get there.

I’ve written a few novella- and novellete-length stories using that break neck pace, and it’s kind of fun. I’ve not successfully pulled it off in a novel, yet. In a novel you need several subplots, and I like giving the reader that sense of closure on each one. That means some of the tension gets relieved earlier in the story, instead of just continuing to pile on. Or writing an extremely long and complicated climax. And my novels are complicated enough, already.

And it just occurs to me, that may be why there are almost always two really big battles at the end of most Dresden books. I may have to try re-reading a few and charting out the sub plots.

Purely for academic purposes, of course. And to hone my craft. Not because I just read one fantastically fun story and the next one won’t be out for at least a year. It’s not like I’m addicted.

I can stop re-reading them any time I want…

One problem with prequels

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“Prequels are really difficult,” Alan Dean Foster once said. The main reasons I recall him giving were that usually the readers who most wanted to read a sequel were fans of the original work. Therefore, they already knew the characters’ future, removing one source of dramatic tension. Also, they often had already imagined their own version of events, and whatever the author comes up with may not match up to their expectations.

Another reason is that the author often doesn’t know exactly what happened. So when we try to put the events into some sort of narrative that is satisfying to us, it may not actually add up to an interesting story.

This will prompt some people to ask, “But it’s your story! How can you not know the details?!”

Let me give an example from one of my current writing projects. At the moment it consists of two novels: one is a sequel to the another. In the first book, one of my protagonists is an apparently human, somewhat mysterious, fortune teller. One of the villains is the Zombie Lord. One of the mysteries surrounding the fortune teller is that she has some sort of past relationship with the Zombie Lord.

For plot purposes in the first book, the readers needed to know that some sort of friendly relationship had once existed, but there had been a falling out. So I’ve included only enough information to establish that before it becomes important. And no more.

At the time I was writing the first book, I knew more than the little bit I revealed, but it wasn’t a huge amount more. I didn’t need to know more. I knew how well they know each other, and how they feel about each other now, so I could write their interaction (and eventual combat) correctly, but that’s all I needed to know, so it’s all I’d figured out.

In the second book, their past—and their relationships to several more characters—is integral to the plot. So I have figured and filled in a few more details. Again, I’m figuring out more than will actually appear in the story, but there’s a lot I’m not worrying about.

One of the things I don’t know, for instance, is exactly what sequence of events led to them ceasing to be friends. Ultimately, it was because he became an evil overlord, of course, but was there a defining moment? An action he took where it became obvious that’s the path he was going down? Or was it a gradual thing?

All creative people do that sort of thing. For example, say you have this idea for a poem or a painting or a song about what it feels like to be a young person who decides to throw all your problems and cares away and just leave, start a new life on the other side of the country or something. So you create the work of art, and you do everything in your power to capture that feeling, and you might end up with something like this:

After writing it you spend the next forty years being asked by reporters, fans, and talk show hosts what exactly was the crime that set this whole thing off. For all of those forty years you keep coming up with variants on the answer that you don’t know, it didn’t matter for you in creating the piece. What was important was that feeling you were trying to evoke. He wanted his listeners to project themselves into the song and just experience that moment.

The other reason it doesn’t matter is because part of the point of art is to engage the audience. That song isn’t only about what Paul Simon was thinking when he wrote it. The song is also about what each and every listener who hears it finds within it. My meaning, when I hear it and sing along, is just as viable and true as the meaning he had when he wrote it. Your meaning when you hear it is just as viable and true, as well. His meaning when he performs it all these years later is no more, and no less, true than the meaning that someone who his never heard it before may find if they hear a recording tomorrow.

We leave things unsaid in stories because we should only include things that move the story along. We leave them unsaid because in our pursuit of telling the best version of the story we can, we can’t afford to let ourselves run down rabbit holes and lose the story. We leave them unsaid because the story isn’t real until it is heard or read and believed by an audience. We leave them unsaid because the audience can’t throw them self into the story unless we leave room for them.

Too much backstory

writing,

In order to write a character’s dialog correctly, I have to have a good image in my head of who he or she is. That doesn’t mean I need to know eye color and hair length and how they dress, necessarily—I’m using image metaphorically. I mean that part of the process of giving a character a personality is imagining their life and how they got to be who they are now.

This is for everyone, even walk-on characters who may have only one or two lines of dialog out of an entire novel. I’m not one of those authors who has to write all of that down before I can use the character. Walk-ons usually just pop up when I need them. I’ve put my protagonist in jail, let’s say, and I’d planned who his cellmate would be before I got to the scene, but I hadn’t thought much about any other prisoners. As I start writing the scene between the protagonist and his cellmate, the other prisoners just chimed in at appropriate parts. While I don’t know the names of any of them, I have a small sketch in my mind of each one’s personality and a bit of his or her history, too. It just blossomed as soon as I needed someone to make a humorous interjection.

That’s just the walk-ons. Supporting characters that are planned as parts of subplots have quite a bit more than that, while the main characters have even more.

Most of the backstory remains in my head and my notes. My stories tend to be character- and dialog- driven, so usually the only details about a character’s background that come up are the ones that would normally occur in conversation:

“You always have to be smarter than everyone else, don’t you?”

“There was a time when you found that endearing.”

“I grew up!”

Even without any description or names, reading that dialog tells you that these two have known each other a long time, that they used to be close (perhaps even romanticaly involved), and now they are less friendly. I may never reveal more about the past experiences between these two characters, but I know how they met, how long they were close, how they spent their time together, and how they had their falling out.

Usually I’m pretty good about not letting the backstory over shadow the current action. But not always. Especially if I get some characters together in a scene who are very talkative. The dialog can go on and on for a while, if I let them.

During re-write I always find some scenes like this, filled with a lot of interesting banter, but that I need to trim. When reading the scenes aloud, even just by myself, I can tell when they’re going on too long. Fortunately, usually it only takes a little pruning to punch up the scene and get things moving.

But sometimes that backstory includes information the reader needs, and it isn’t always clear until I get a reader’s perspective that some details I thought could be inferred weren’t obivous.

I have a couple of supporting characters I’m working with right now whose scenes I was trimming the last couple of nights. They’re both intresting characters. I’ve gotten feedback indicating readers like them. (Even though in the current novel they don’t have any scenes together, one of them had a short story of his own published a few years ago, and the other happened to be a supporting chracter in it.) But they’re only supporting characters in this tale, and the parts they have to play in the current story aren’t big enough to justify all that information.

Even though I saved the removed dialog elsewhere, it still hurts to trim it.

But when it’s too much, it has to go!

Getting unstuck

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A long-stuck story came unstuck last week, and I was able to read a complete draft to my writers’ group on Saturday. One of my friends present asked how I got the story unstuck. The more I think about it, the more I realize just how incomplete an answer I gave.

I’m not sure how much a complete answer will help, but here goes:

Continue reading Getting unstuck →

Semi-autobiographical, part 2

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I wrote before about one form of semi-autobiographic writing that can drive a reader nuts. There’s another kind that some audiences just eat up, which drives a lot of writers nuts.

It’s the fictional, semi-autobiographical best seller. This seems to occur in movies and television far more often in books—or maybe I’m just lucky and don’t read those kinds of books. It’s the tale of an author who wrote a semi-autobiographical novel or series of novels that became bestsellers, and she/he either a) has to eventually deal with the fallout of friends and relatives who felt betrayed or somehow stolen from, or b) it’s a big secret that it’s semi-autobiographical, because there is some tragedy or a long-hidden crime or something.

Continue reading Semi-autobiographical, part 2 →

An elf, a shapeshifter, and a knight walk into a bar…

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I’m coming to this latest iteration of this perennial debate a little late, but since the principles apply to many genres of writing, I wanted to inflict my opinion on the net.

Certain critics of anthropomorphic fiction take issue with stories in which the author seems to avoid (or is simply oblivious) to the question, “Why talking animals?”

Watts Martin makes a good point that if a story features elves, dwarves, and hobbits, no one raises an analagous critique1. Then he posits that the real question ought to be, “How does the fact that some of the characters are talking animals affect the story?” In other words, in most stories involving elves, dwarves, et cetera, the differences in the fictional culture and characteristics of the elves, humans, and so on is usually inherent to the plot. Or at the very least figures into the characterization of each character.

Since our readers are human, it certainly seems reasonable to ask that any time we use non-human characters of any sort, there should be some sort of literary reason for doing so3.

Some authors assert that they are using the talking animals as stand-ins for different races, ethnic groups, and so on, making it a little easier to make certain kinds of commentary on social issues, let’s say. Others harken to Berke Breathed’s comments about choices comic artists make: a person sitting on a toilet reading a paper is off-putting, at best, while a penguin sitting on a toilet reading a paper is cute. Still others say that the species serve as a kind of shorthand for personality traits. Otters are playful, for instance, and cats are aloof.

Those are valid reasons, though I would quibble that many of the authors I’ve heard use those excuses don’t seem to write stories actually demonstrating those techniques. But maybe they’re doing it in a subtle, nuanced fashion I’m just missing4.

My particular problem when I hear someone talk about the culture or personality traits of particular non-humans, is that my contrarian instincts always kick in. Okay, so raccoons in your world are sneaky, clever, and have a rather cavalier attitude about the concept of ownership, leading many of them to be thieves or pursue similar professions. As soon as you say that, I immediately wonder, “But what about the one who doesn’t want to go to raccoon practice, but would rather be a dentist?56” And don’t tell me there’s only one raccoon in all the world who isn’t particularly sneaky and clever.

Which is why I sometimes respond to those who insist that a story needs to answer that “How does it affect the story” question with, “I’ll agree every story using talking animals has to answer that question if you agree that every story which mentions a character’s eye color has to also answer the question of how the heroine’s eye color affected her behaviour in the story.7”

So why am I writing two novels that include a shapeshifting fortune teller, a raccoon thief, an otter priest, dragon-riding knights, and so on? One truthful answer is that I’ve been hanging around anthropomorphic fans, artists, and writers for over two decades. I have lots of images, snippets, conversations, and tons of debates about this topic floating around in my head all the time. Of course they’re going to pop up in stories!

Or you can look at some of the jokes in my stories—the raccoon thief who keeps protesting his innocence by accusing his accusers of species-bias, or the otter who insists he’s a kitsune trapped in an otter’s body—and you can say I’m using the animals as metaphors to tackle issues such as racism and transphobia; topics which could be too grim and depressing if told using ordinary people in a realist setting.

Or you can look at some of the fun I’ve had with things like the Church of the Great Shepherdess9, the Predation Congregation, and the Omnivoral Free Fellowship, and say I’m looking at how our social institutions are more of an outgrowth of our biological identity than we may like to admit.

I suppose those do, in fact, answer the “how” question. I couldn’t have a church like the Predation Congregation10 in a comedic tale if I wasn’t doing it in a world where a talking golden retriever and a talking cat can be teamed up as police constables.

I have done the world building to figure out why I have talking animals, dragons, elves, and even ordinary humans, living in a civilization together, but so far it hasn’t been important to the plot (though there are a few clues here and there in the existing narrative). But neither the answers to the “How?” as stated above, nor the “Why?” answered in my world-building will satisfy some people.

To them, I can only quote Tolkein: “He that breaks a thing to find out what it is has left the path of wisdom.”

Footnotes:
1. That isn’t entirely true, of course. When I was younger, I was frequently asked by my most fundamentalist relatives why I wrote about elves or aliens rather than “stories that would help people find Jesus2.” But the number of people who take issue with elves and the like is infinitesimal compared to the number who get in a tizzy over talking animals.

2. I was not always diplomatic enough to stop myself from replying, “I didn’t realize he was lost!”

3. If nothing else, as an author, everything you do in your story ought to further at least one of the goals of moving the plot forward, illustrating the character, or setting the scene.

4. And it’s a quibble I’m sure people would make with some of my stories in this “genre,” as well.

5. Bonus points if you recognize that allusion!

6. To be fair, writing a character who fights against the stereotype is a perfectly legitimate way to use an elf or an otter or whatever as a metaphor for ethnic/racial/religious prejudices.

7. I understand if you object that eye color is not on the same scale, as it were, as species8. I counter by pointing out that talking animals in stories have been around for at least as long as written language has existed. Ancient Sumerian tales occasionally featured talking animals. The Bible has talking animals. Aesop’s fables are almost all about talking animals. I could go on. The point is that as a literary tool, talking animals aren’t outlandish, and many of Aesop’s fables would work just as well with a human instead of a fox or a crow as the main character.

8. I should also mention the time when I was involved in a collaborative project featuring elves, and wound up in a conversation where another contributor was appalled to the point of refusing to ever work with me on any projects because I couldn’t remember the eye color of one of my own characters without looking it up. She didn’t believe it was possible for someone to plot a story about a character unless you knew that character’s eye color, hair color, hair style, et cetera. So for some people, it is definitely on the same scale.

9. Members tend to be from herbivorous species that live in herds. Adherents are sometimes derogatorily called “Bo Peep-ites.”

10. Whose members have been known to hunt, kill, and then eat sentient non-members.

…and a cast of thousands!

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Back when I was very active in ElfQuest fandom (I think it was the early Triassic age), I wrote a lot of stories for several fanzines, and one of the things I became a bit (in)famous for were stories featuring a whole lot of characters. I would squeeze in dozens, sometimes scores of characters into relatively short stories.

It wasn’t something I set out to do. It was just the way my brain worked. If something was happening in the little fictional tribe or village or whatever that we had created, the way that something affected each of the characters in said setting just seemed natural. I didn’t include every one of the reactions that occured to me, just the ones that moved the story along, or would naturally play out in a particular scene I needed for the plot.

It wasn’t hard. It just felt right.

I tend, therefore, to be fond of books, movies, and TV shows with ensemble casts. I love watching the way all those characters interact. I love seeing how the consequences of even the smallest incidents can sometimes ripple out to a wide communtiy.

I still write that way. The book I’m currently most busy writing has at least three major protagonists (and a secret fourth), at least (counting quickly on my fingers) twenty-six supporting characters with multiple lines of dialogue, four primary antagonists, and about eleven minor antogonists/minions.

It may seem an impossible number, but then I pull some books from my shelf by some quite successful authors, and when I count all the characters, I get very similar numbers. So clearly there are readers out there besides me who can follow this sort of thing.

I may wind up trimming some sub-plots. I certainly did in the last one. I even managed to get at least one funny short story/spin-off out of it. But while I’m in the middle of writing the first draft, I have to just point all the characters toward the finish and shout, “Charge!”

“Maybe it was the heavy syrup?”

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When shopping late-ish last night for ingredients for packing lunches this week, I grabbed a can of the wrong fruit salad. Instead of the version packed in fruit juice, I got the one packed in heavy syrup. Which means the extra sugar absorbed from the high fructose corn syrup negates the healthy value of the fruit fibre.

When I realized my mistake, after getting home, I wasn’t thinking of my blood sugar or related topics. No, the moment I saw the words on the label, from some dark recess of my memory came the sound of an actress in a situation comedy saying, “Maybe it was the heavy syrup!” images from the sitcom flooded my head: the wife saying she had left a note on a car because she lost control of her shopping cart and banged into a stranger’s car; the husband saying she shouldn’t have left the note; an insurance adjustor contacting them with an exorbitant bill; denials, recriminations, meeting with the married couple who owned the car, seeing the car which looks like it was run over by a herd of buffalo; finally, the hilarious scene where two of the characters observe one of the owners of the car doing incredible damage to their own car trying to back out of the driveway.

The problem is, half of those scenes in my memory are in black and white. And in one set of scenes, the protagonists who are being stuck with a bill for damages they didn’t cause are Marine Pfc Gomer Pyle and his Sergeant, and in the other it’s Edith Bunker and her husband, Archie.

Now, the heavy syrup line is only in the All In the Family version of the tale, though it is the most hilarious line in the episode, thanks to the acting talents of Jean Stapleton. But otherwise, the two episodes from two shows made by different companies a decade apart, are incredibly similar.

Many people (some of them dear friends) would take this example as proof that all TV is bad, recycling old plots.

But if recycling plots makes something irredeemably bad, than no story created by humans in the last 10,000 years or more is good.

There are no truly original plots. Humans have been telling each other stories for as long as we’ve been human. Certain neuroscientists and anthropologists have made a very good case that telling stories is the most critical defining trait differentiating humans from other creatures. In all those generations of tales told round the fire, someone has already thought of the cool idea for a tale that just occured to you.

There is no such thing as a unique character. There is no situation which, at least in the abstract, hasn’t been used for a tale. There is no incongruity that hasn’t been exploited as a punchline.

The magic isn’t in the setting, or the situation, or the character, or the nifty plot twist you think no one will see coming. There is a certain alchemy in the combination of ingredients, but even that isn’t it.

It’s the execution.

Can you, the storyteller, evoke the situation in the mind of your audience? Can you make it so compelling that they willingly follow you into the dream, and make it real?

Just as the joke about the heavy syrup wasn’t that original, but the actress made us believe, for just a moment, that her character was so innocent and naive, she believed that the heavy syrup in a single can of fruit could be responsible for all that destruction.

Update, June 2013: Since Jean Stapleton’s death, I’ve been getting a lot of hits on this page with people searching on Ms Stapleton’s name and the about syrup. I suspect you’re looking for a video clip, such as:

Or:

Sometimes you just need to scrap it

writing

Despite feeling sicker than I have in a long time, and it being the two hottest days of the year here, so far, I got a decent amount of writing done over the weekend. Much of it at odd hours, because I napped a lot. I would be awake for a few hours, then sleep of a few. It became a little confusing.

Months ago, I wrote the opening paragraph for a scene which I expected to use a few chapters later in the novel than I was, at that time. I’ve had this very strong image in my head for all that time of one of my protagonists sitting at a table in a tavern he used to hang out at during his mispent youth (note: the character is a professional thief of some notoriety-so it could be argued he’s in his misspent adulthood and approaching his misspent middle age) and slowly coming to the realization that much more has changed than meets the eye.

I hadn’t written more than the one paragraph because I knew some of the intervening scenes would determine what information I needed him to obtain during this scene.

So I wrote the scene yesterday. It was funny and closely matched my original vision. There was a big problem: by the time I’d finished, the character hadn’t learned anything important to the actual plot. Nor could the scene be said to reveal anything new and significant about the character.

I read it through again, and I had absolutely no idea what the character logically should do next to move the plot along.

Or rather, I had ideas for what he should do next, but this scene didn’t point to any of them. It made sense that he would go to this place to try to find something he needed. And it made sense, based on other events, that he’d experience some bewilderment that this former hub of underworld activity was now a sad used-to-be. But it wasn’t worth making the reader go through that for a few chuckles. Not when there are kidnapped children to rescue, a princess in peril, a possible war simmering, et cetera.

It would be like spending a thousand words describing the public restroom your hero has to visit in between action scenes. Yeah, everyone has to go sometime, but usually it isn’t interesting.

For a few seconds I thought about my usual rule: don’t go back to revise a scene until I’ve written the next one. But if there’s a time to break your own rule, this was it.

I didn’t delete the scene. I just cut it and pasted it into the Research section of my Scrivener project.

Then I re-wrote the scene. I kept a few lines. And the humorous discovery that things have changed in ways he hadn’t expect is still there, but it’s much less the focus of the scene. Once I stopped trying to think of more clever ways to surprise the character that something has changed, the scene flowed forward, and led him to his next step.

Sometimes you have to write a bad scene before you can write it right.