Making Emotion Count in Fiction

In previous posts I have mentioned a Donald Maass writing concept [gives Maassketeer salute] that constituted a major writing brain-burn/breakthrough for me - the idea that it is better to use secondary or tertiary emotions as scene engines than the obvious primary emotions.

Let me explain a bit. If we have a main character whose father dies in the course of the book, what do we expect the character to feel? If they had a good relationship, we expect the character to be grief-stricken, right? And if it was a bad relationship, we'd expect him to be glad the old bastard is gone. And to some extent, that is probably exactly the way the character feels.

However, going into great detail about an emotion the reader already understands and assumes the character will feel is about as engaging as watching Andy Griffith Show reruns every night for fifty years. Yeah, yeah, seen it. Felt it. What else ya got?

The reader is going to do 99% of the primary emotional work for us all by his/her lonesome, instinctively keying into universally shared experiences. What will make the reader take notice, what will draw him into the story at a moment we might have lost him, what will really bring our characters to life for a reader, is the use of a secondary or tertiary emotion.

Here's the hitch. How much have most of us really thought about the topic of emotion? Have we even toyed with the concept of primary emotions - the building blocks of all other emotions? Have we ever tried breaking complex emotions down into the two or more primary emotions that make up the secondary emotions?

I'm treading on a bit of thin ice here, because 'secondary emotion' has more than one connotation. In one sense, secondary emotion simply refers to the second most prominent emotion our character might feel in any given situation. In another sense, it's an emotion made up of one or more basic emotions in combination.

I would suggest to any of my fellows doing some research on primary-secondary-tertiary emotions. The list of primary emotions will probably vary slightly, but is likely to look something like this:

• Joy
• Love
• Fear
• Sadness
• Anger

I've seen lists that included trust, surprise, disgust, and/or anticipation in a list of 'basic' emotions. I'm good with or without them. As I said, there will be variation in the lists.

The basic emotions then break down into more specific emotions:

• Love might mean fondness, attraction, affection, etc.

Or it combines with other basic emotions for a complex emotion:

• Trust + Fear = submission.

A tertiary emotion is a secondary emotion made more specific:

• Love can be broken down into the secondary emotions of (for instance) affection or lust; then lust could be broken down into arousal, passion, infatuation (etc).

By really becoming familiar with the range of emotions available to us, we can avail ourselves of some very specific shades of emotion to surprise and engross our readers with unexpected character depth.

Of course, this also assumes we know our characters well enough to know what lies beneath the obvious emotions they would feel when faced with all sorts of events. I will harp again on the importance of us knowing more about our characters than what color their eyes are and what they do for a living. We also need to know what issues they are passionate and opinionated about and how that force of conviction makes them react with these issues come up. We need to know what their emotional triggers are and why. We need to know what their deepest fears are - not about the outside world (like spiders or being alone in the dark) but about themselves (like the fear that they will never truly be loved). We need to know what their greatest hopes and desires are - and what they expect to get out of that thing/accomplishment/relationship. See Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs for help with this one.

There you have it, my fellows, me getting a little deep on a Monday morning. Obviously, this is a parallel universe. Or they forgot to make my coffee decaf again. What do you think?

What Makes a Reader Bond with a Hero?

It's a pretty common occurrence for writers to receive at least one rejection from a story or query submission that says the editor/agent wasn't able to identify with the main character or didn't feel there had been enough character development. Other common issues are antagonists whose motives they don't understand or who aren't very scary or threatening and secondary characters who are underdeveloped/two-dimensional/stereotypes.

So what makes a reader bond with a character, and especially the hero?

I've put together a list of things (borrowed liberally from Donald Maass, Noah Lukeman, James Scott Bell, and the personalized rejections I've received that made comments on character) I think go into the mix:

• An heroic quality softened by a measure of self-deprecating humor or self-awareness. Heroes, in contrast to protagonists, are...you know...heroic. They have at least one larger-than-life heroic quality that we as writers need to play up and introduce pretty much immediately (Don Maass recommends putting it in the first 5 pages). A super heroic hero, however, can come off as too perfect. Hence the need to add that little bit of humor and self-deprecation indicating that even the hero knows he's not perfect. The same can be said for secondary characters, who should have good and bad qualities of their own. Even the antagonist should be more than a vicious clump of flaws void of even the most basic level of self-awareness.
• Forgivable but real flaws. I think most writers realize it would be a hard sell to make your main character a likable serial torturer/rapist, but it's just as unlikely that readers will identify with a character whose only flaw is something like "I love too much, I'm too nice, I sacrifice too much for those I love." The first flaw isn't strong on the forgivability scale, and the second is a flaw too 'nicey nicey' to really qualify as a flaw at all -- and would likely draw criticism about Mary Sue characterization. I want to encourage writers not to be afraid to give our characters flaws. We have them. Our readers have them. I find that part of the reason books uplift readers is that it gives the reader an opportunity to see someone with flaws similar to their own dealing with problems far larger than getting their kids to clean their rooms or their spouse to spend quality time with them and overcoming adversity to succeed in the end. Plus, our characters are supposed to be struggling against their own flaws in our stories, losing more often than winning, until that all-hope-is-lost moment when the characters either overcome their personal demons and the flaws those demons instill or faces final and utter defeat. Flaws make a character human, and the struggle makes the flaws less damning.
• Illustrated Impact. Telling a reader that our hero is a saint does not have the same concrete immediacy of having a secondary character threatening to clobber a guy twice his size for calling the hero a jerk. What kind of person must the hero be, what extreme loyalty he must inspire, for another person to defend his honor even when it's a foolhardy action? How are the opinions other characters hold about a hero or a sidekick or an antagonist illustrated in their reactions to and about this character?
• Universality. This is a hard one to nail down and probably the one most subject to debate. At the Viable Paradise Workshop for sci-fi/fantasy writers, one of the books recommended by the instructors is all about comic books. One doesn't have to read very far into the book before a theme emerges. Usually, the character with the fewest physical idiosyncrasies is the hero. It's the Joker who wears the flamboyant face makeup and clothing. It's the exotic secondary character or love interest who has the eyes of remarkable color and hair description that goes on for a whole paragraph. The hero/protagonist generally doesn't get the same physical treatment, the idea being that the reader has to be free to sink into the hero's skin. Physical features dramatically different from a reader's could interfere with that even more than a flaw the reader does not possess. In defence of this idea, I will say I have this problem when reading LKH's Anita Blake books. As the series progressed, the passages going on about Anita's short stature, curly dark hair, skin tone, eye shape, etc., seemed to become more common and more distracting. My only physical commonality with Anita is her height. Would I have the same problem (in spades) with a male protagonist? In my case, no, because I don't expect to be able to physically sync with a male character. I'd expect to be able to identify with him intellectually and emotionally. So how to describe a POV character without excluding a significant number of readers? Probably not possible, but I would suggest being conservative with certain kinds of details and seeing what your critiquers think. For instance, I have one heroine who is described as having dark hair. That could be anything from black to dark blond (if the reader really wanted to interpret it that way). Light or dark eyes covers a lot of colors and, again, gives the reader some wiggle room. Give the reader some leeway in one area (like hair or eye color or physique) and you can probably get away with being more descriptive about something else (skin tone or height maybe?) without pushing the reader too far out of the hero's perspective.

So now I turn the floor over to you, my fellows. What other aspects of character can you think of that help connect the reader to the hero? Or to the antagonist? Or to the impact character?

Reader Intuition

Meaning has been a theme lately here on my blog and on a writing forum I frequent. Meaning in details. Meaning in theme. Meaning as perceived by the reader. Whether they perceive it. How they perceive it. When they perceive it.

Writers seem to fall on a broad spectrum when it comes to attitudes about what should and shouldn't - or even can and can't - have meaning in a novel, as well as whether or not readers will perceive this meaning, at least subconsciously, as they progress in the story.

On one end of the spectrum is a position I can't help but feel comes from an author's self-importance and lack of respect for the reader. It's the idea that readers are too stupid or too impatient, etc., to pick up on meaning in most cases anyway, so there's no point in bothering to load that gun over the mantle (or to put much purposeful consideration into what room that mantle is in or in what kind of house or in what city).

Wedded to this idea is the one that blames the reader if they skip ahead, over the dry travel details, over the interior monologue of a character ruminating on recent events the implications of which are already clear to the reader because they are all based on primary (predictable) emotions, over backstory or action presented too soon in the reader's attachment process.

Dare I say it? That if we stopped writing those passages, the reader might stop skipping?

On the other end of the spectrum (and I'm not even going to pretend to be neutral on this issue) is a writer who recognizes that archetypal elements of storytelling - ingrained in the collective conscious of humanity - haven't changed since language became developed enough to sustain the communiation of a related string of events. The symbolism behind that language has been around since man learned to attach meaning to a symbol (see caves of Lascaux, circa 15,300 BC). More than 17,000 years later, 17,000 years of continuous storytelling (in symbol and/or language) later, we aren't capable of reading symbolism?

Perhaps instead the argument is that readers are too lazy to recognize symbolism. To me, that's like saying a person is too lazy to recognize a color when they see it. It's automatic. Involuntary. Instantaneous.

I also don't buy the agrument that a reader should be patient and wait until the end of a story to see if there was any meaning or symbolism in passages that might have felt flat or meaningless. Again, this dismisses the ability of the human mind to pick up on significant details (or meaningless details presented as though meaningful) and hold them in a suspended state, in an ongoing process of evaluation, testing assumptions as new pieces of information arise, making minute course corrections as necessary. If we as the writers are not providing appropriate data at appropriate points in the story (read as 'structural landmarks') in the appropriate way, it would be pretty silly to blame the reader for not picking up on what's not there, not in the right place, or not delivered in a way they will innately recognize.

In the end, my fellows, I think we need to respect the reader's process as much as we do our own. We need to respect several thousand years of structure (that still leaves almost infinite room for variation). We need to respect the intellect and intuition of our readers. We need to respect our own writing enough to craft meaninglessness right out of it. And we need to trust that our readers want to get something out of reading our work and satisfy that desire.

Note: As we can see, I'm in a bit of a ranty mood today. I'm having a hard time believing the number of ways in which writers use readers to justify the faults in our writing.

The Anchovies Are Restless

"The anchovies are getting restless." - Margaret Atwood

If you haven't already, head on over to Sommer Leigh's blog Tell Great Stories to check out the video clip of Margaret Atwood talking about authors and the publishing pie. In this talk, Ms. Atwood points out the ways in which writers are a primary (food) source, feeding (the careers of) agents, editors, designers, publishers, librarians, etc. Our piece of the publishing pie has gotten steadily smaller, however, with each new iteration of the industry. We're now the little guy in the equation, the anchovy feeding the larger animals. And thus was born a great title for a blog post. :)

I think it's pretty clear to most of us who network on forums or in writers groups that many writers are indeed wondering if we have much of a future in publishing. Some worry that they'll never get an agent and gain access to the major publishing houses. Others worry about how much of their rights they will have to sign away in the publishing contract, how small the royalties will be (especially for ebooks), and how little control (read as 'none') the writer will have over title and cover. Still others are distressed at lack of promotion from the publishing companies, many of whom expect the writer to blog, tour, tweet, keep a Facebook page, and do interviews with little to no budget or professional assistance. They end up asking themselves what they are getting out of the deal when they sign away 85-95% of all future income from their novel. As self-publishing ebooks becomes a more visible option, contract details a writer might have let slide 5 years ago might start feeling unacceptable.

I was surprised by several things Ms. Atwood said during her conference remarks, including relating how she had started out with self-publishing. That's how it was done in her literary circles in the 1960's. You or your friends designed your cover, often by hand. A friend took the author photo for the book jacket. The writer hand sold the book. Later, big publishers might come calling, and the writer might strike a deal with them. In that light, self-publishing doesn't seem so much like a revolt as a return to old patterns after the newest method proved unsuitable to at least some writers.

So here I am again evaluating the possibility of self-publishing. The jury is still out for me, still gathering data and deliberating. These comments by Margaret Atwood go into the mix, as do her comments about the emerging United Artists-style writer organizations and the appearance of book of the month-style subscription services that provide book recommendations to readers who might be feeling overwhelmed by the number of books filling up the Internet.

What other recent information have I added to the data pool? I'm noticing that the ebook self-publishing model is evolving so quickly that trends are proven wrong almost as soon as they are identified. I found myself agreeing when ebook self-publishing guru J.A. Konrath pointed out that having multiple books available, with the magic $2.99 price point, was (probably) essential. Then Konrath hosted a guest blog post from author Victorine Lieske. For the last 9 1/2 months, Lieske has had a single novel available through self-publishing venues, and it has spent most of its time priced at 99 cents. In January, the book sold over 21,000 copies and made over $7,300. Over the full 9 1/2 months, the totals have been over 51,000 copies sold for over $18,000. Konrath is now engaged in an experiment offering one of his books for 99 cents.

I also noted that Amanda Hocking now has her first film option deal. If the books do complete their journey to the screen, I'll be very interested to see if audiences have the same reaction a segment of readers did to the ending and possible expectation violations.

I also started checking out the sales and the work of various paranormal writers. H.P. Mallory is, of course, doing well. She just signed with one of the Big 6. I found another author, who shall remain nameless, with a lot of buzz about sales near the 5k mark in a single month. I was distressed to find extremely poor quality work - no character development, no emotional content, flat simplistic dialogue, lack of plot and structure, glaring story inconsistencies. From what I can tell, the first 2-3 reviews to go up on Amazon are 5 star reviews and everything after that is 1-2 stars to acknowledge good ideas but horrible execution. I also noted that the author has over 20 books available (though comments about being able to read the whole thing in less than 30 minutes makes me think these are coming in far short of novel length). I found myself wondering if the author is just trying to blitz the readers, relying on one-time only sales, hoping people will buy multiple books before realizing they are truly bad and never coming back. Will this adversely affect writers considering self-publishing in the paranormal genres?

In the end I offer no conclusions, but I do offer another fabulous closing line from Ms. Atwood when asked if she felt self-publishing would lower the quality of books.

"The quality of literary output has always been questionable."

Bonus Blog - The Snoopy Dance

I now interrupt my usual weekend blog silence for...The Snoopy Dance. Why am I doing the Snoopy Dance? Because one of my own favorite bloggers, urban fantasy author Hillary Jacques, gave me my very first blog award. And here 'tis:



Oooh, pretty AND yummy. Oh, and fun! Because this blog award comes with instructions for sharing the love and passing on the praise. And here they are:

1. Thank and link back to the person who gave you this award. (Thank you, Hillary!)
2. Share four guilty pleasures that you have.
3. Pass the award on to six other blogs.

Now to the guilty pleasures. Only four? Well, this will take some prioritizing!

1. Celebrity gossip. Who is dating [hunky actor], has anyone figured out that [strange reality tv star] is an alien yet, and what mental illness is [sexpot singer] exhibiting today?
2. Cartoons. But they have to have a sort of off-kilter side to them, from Dexter's Laboratory to South Park.
3. Zombie movies. Any and all zombie movies. There is no such thing as a bad zombie movie. Extra points for any Resident Evil movie. Alice rules ('cept for that whole "thank you for making me human again" bullpucky. What's so great about being human again? Oh right, NOT having superhuman fighting skills and off-the-chart telekinetic powers. Yeah, cool.)
4. Low-quality processed food. Frozen pizzas. Gas station corn dogs. Microwave dinners that haven't changed since the 60's, and possibly ARE the same meals packaged in the 60's. After eating in some of the finest restaurants in California, and shedding great tears of disappointment, I have come to accept the fact that I will never have gourmet taste buds.

Now to the blogs I think deserve to share the award and some well-deserved props, I decided I want to celebrate a different kind of sweet. These are the kind of blogs that have great information and insightful ways of looking at and presenting their experiences, the sort of reading experience that makes me say, "Sweet!" whenever a new posts comes out. Check them out and show them some appreciation!

Claudie A. - by Claudie A. of course

Karenstivali.com - by Karen Stivali.

365 Days to Get a Life! - by Robin Lucas

Unpolished Words - by Alice M. Fleury

Chronicles of a Novice Writer - by Stephanie McGee

Literature to Learn By - by jkmcdonnell

I would have included Hillary Jacques and Sommer Leigh in my list, but Hillary gave me the award and beat me to awarding one to Sommer, too! Ah well, as long as everyone knows we're all awesome and has a chance to find some great blogs, it's all good!

The Insidiousness of Mwhahaha Evil

Most writers learn fairly quickly, especially those of us who write adult fiction, that mwhahah evil will sink our project pretty darn fast. Agents don't want to see it in a ms. Editors don't want to see it. Even readers will roll their eyes. (Family members excluded, but their opinions should be excluded in the first place.) Believable evil, living and breathing evil, evil that is actually going to be chilling is evil that has an understandable side, evil that has made a choice based on such sound reasoning that we could almost have made that choice ourselves. There but for the grace of God...

Again, most writers with a few short stories or novels under their belts already have learned that our antagonists cannot be mindlessly evil for the sake mindless evil. No kicking puppies and burning down orphanages just because they happened to be there on the way to the hero's house.

But wait. Are we sure that's the only place mwhahaha evil could leak into our stories? What about secondary characters? What about organizations?

Anyone else tired of the mindlessly evil corporation? Or the relentlessly evil government? Or the inexplicably evil secret fraternity? I'm the first one to say I boycott certain multinational corporations for their business practices. I'm also the first one to say that the mail room guy and the marketing VP's secretary probably don't step on kitten tails for fun and company merit points. Heck, the jerks in suits at the tippy top of the corporate ladder probably still have something or someone who plays on their soft spot. The CEO who covertly approves of the company's use of child labor in sweat shops might also be deeply involved in charity work for cancer foundations after he lost his mother and sister to breast cancer. And when our trusty hero and sidekick expose the company's business practices, and the executives are placed under Federal indictment, and the stock takes a dive, how about those laid-off employees with families to feed and those retirees whose 401k was heavily invested in the company? There is no perfect good and evil, and there are no perfect solutions. Someone innocent will always get hurt by solving the problems, just as someone suffers so long as the problem isn't solved.

Oh, and how about those stock characters we might use as shorthand for real characterization? The lecherous old man. The town drunk. The druggy hooker. The minority welfare mom. Trailer trash. The blond society girl. The jutting-jawed senator's son with the Colgate smile. If we're not careful we might give in to the temptation to pull these stereotypes out whenever we need someone to discriminate against our hero or leer at the love interest. This is mwhahaha evil-lite.

This kind of dichotomous thinking is fairly prevalent in modern culture, but it's also one of those things from real life that sabotages the functionality of fiction. As writers, we really need to root it out of any aspect of our stories, not just from the guy pointing a gun at the hero.

So the floor is yours, my fellows. What other weak spots do you see where mwhahaha evil might seep into the stories via ingrained cultural tropes?

Writing Tool - The Plot Scratchpad

One of the things I've learned about myself as a writer is that I have to actively resist the tendency to get locked in on one option, on idea, one plot point, one phrase, one anything.

I've mentioned before that when I find a major flaw in a story, I tend to keep the ideas and toss the execution. That is, I rewrite (in the strongest sense of the word) instead of revise. For me, it's too easy to get attached to (and trapped by) an especially good turn of phrase or bit of dialogue or scene. If I indulge this attachment, I find myself trying to twist a story around for the sake of little bits of this, little bits of that which no longer fit the story. And I've noticed this with quite a few of my fellow writers, some who don't even realize they're doing it.

So in this post I'm offering one bit of advice about dealing with 'idea lockdown' and one psychologically tricksy tool for avoiding it.

The advice is this: if you find yourself facing a truly major rewrite, sacrifice those bits you love. I know, I know. But that quip sounds sooo cool, and that line of dialogue really brought out how much this character really loves that character, and that paragraph has such beautiful description in it, and and and. See? Lockdown. We can't tear down a condemned house to build a great new one if we insist on keeping the old fireplace and chimney, and the columns, and those three interior walls, and the same floor plan, and all that cool antique plumbing, and... See what I mean?

Believe it or not, we will come up with new quips and more great dialogue and better descriptions that all work together with the new and improved story. We will fall in love with all the new stuff. And we might be surprised, looking back a few years later, how little we see in those original features we were sure we couldn't do without.

So basically, if the revisions aren't working out...rewrite instead.

My tool for avoiding lockdown, as mentioned earlier, employs a little bit of psychological sleight-of-hand. I use it in the planning stages of a project, but it sets a tone that ripples through the rest of the process. I call this tool the Plot Scratchpad. My fellows, you will probably all laugh at me when you hear how simple this idea is, but pay attention to the details.

As I am developing my story ideas at the beginning of a project, as the characters are starting to take form in my imagination, as I'm surfing around on Wikipedia deciding what I'm going to research further in scholarly sources and what comes to an immediate dead end, as I begin to brainstorm all aspects of the story, I create a Word document called Plot Scratchpad and list all my ideas as bullet points. I don't evaluate or censor my ideas at this point. But here's the trick - I phrase everything in the form of a question.

Okay, okay, take a few minutes to get the Jeopardy game show jokes out of your system, my fellows. I'll wait. [Jeopardy music in the background]

Done? Good. So why have I suggested you phrase all your ideas as questions? NLP, my brethren, neuro-linguistic programming. Okay, so it's not hardcore NLP, as controversial and debatable as NLP is in the first place, but it is a simple trick to tell your subconscious to keep these concepts fluid and malleable. The result -- I find -- is that I have an easier time avoiding attachment to ultimately unworkable ideas that would require me to go to silly and unsustainable lengths to keep an idea or character that I should really just scrap or put away in a box as spare parts for a different project. The tone of my notes isn't that I must include this plot complication but that maybe I could. If I find I can't do so in an effective way, it's way easier to dislodge that sucker.

So there it is, my fellows...Margo, NLP guru. Okay, not really.

Before I wrap up this post I want to remind folks that my writing sister, Sommer Leigh, has begun her blog series on the College of Blogging, as of yesterday. I urge you to head over to her blog and check it out.

I also want to encourage people to peruse the workshops being offered by writer C.J. Redwine, especially if you happen to be writing romance or some flavor of contemporary fantasy. She has some very interesting online workshops on writing a query, writing a synopsis, and plotting a novel. I'm two days into the current synopsis workshop, and the helpful tips are already thick in the air.

It’s not you, it’s me: When the Writer-Reader Relationship Goes Sour

It’s common for me to blog about the consensual nature of the writer-reader relationship inherent in writing for publication, and today is going to go into that from a slightly different angle. Lately I’ve noticed we writers doing a lot of complaining. We complain about the exclusivity of the Big 6 publishing houses and how they only want to make a fast buck. We complain about the lack of compassion from the eeebil gatekeeper literary agents. And now we’re complaining about the readers who are too dumb or impatient or shallow to see what we’re trying to accomplish with our writing.

I am tempted to phrase this issue in relationship terms. And you know what? I’m giving in to temptation. There’s only one constant in those three relationships: the writer. So if it’s a bad relationship in all three cases…maybe it’s not them, it’s us.

Writing for publication is a lot like being in a relationship. As I’ve said before, it has to be good for both partners. We as writers can’t be the stereotypical narcissist who insists that if it’s good for us it should be good for our partner. We can’t be the oversensitive neurotic, either, constantly asking, “Does this make me look fat?” Is this too much exposition? Is this description too long? Is the pace too erratic? We can’t keep packing a bag and going home to our mother when the answer is yes.

I’ve noted what I consider an unhealthy relationship trend lately among a good number of my fellows as we start to complain about readers who don’t like our work, as though they should like something just because we took the time to write it, even if their experience was beside the point to us when we were writing. Why is it surprising and offensive to us when we write for ourselves, when we write the story the way the story demands to be written (with our partner, the reader, as an afterthought), indulging in all manner of masturbatory exposition, description, and structure violation, and the reader doesn’t get off on being a voyeur left sitting in the corner?

Let me put this in personal terms. About a decade ago (my gawd I’m getting old) I was very active on the Del Rey Online Writing Workship for sci-fi/fantasy (aka the DROWW) – it has since morphed to the fee-based Online Writers Workshop, no longer associated with Del Rey. Anyway, I moved recently and found all the old printouts of beta critiques. With quite a few years between me and that writing project, I noticed something. The crits were more accurate than I had realized at the time. I wasn’t a newbie at that point by any means, but I wasn’t as far along in my writerly development as I wanted to think. I usually had the grace not to argue with a crit, but I also didn’t accept the validity of some criticism even when it was coming from more than one source. Now I can look back and see exactly what they were talking about. Maybe they weren’t able to put their finger on what was wrong with an opening or a scene, or maybe they even misidentified the problem, but they had spotted problem areas with 100% accuracy. At the time I was the defensive partner. They just didn’t get what I was trying to say. There was nothing wrong with that chunk of exposition. They just didn’t like those three paragraphs of description (a disembodied description opening a chapter no less) because they were men, and men don’t like description as much (I told myself).

I’ve since learned that I was wrong; I was the problem partner in the relationship.

I had an experience a couple of years ago that helped hammer this home for me. About five years prior, I had written a couple of novellas just for myself, no intention of ever letting anyone else read them. No thought for writing rules or the reader experience. Then I put them away and went about life and ran into them unexpectedly a few years later. I had been away from the stories long enough that re-reading them was almost like reading something someone else had written. It makes me wish I had the discipline to put all of my WIPs away for five years after they’re finished before coming back to do a final polish. Anyway, I read through the first one – little structure, lots of exposition, way more telling than showing, etc – and thought, awww that’s kinda cool. I read through the second one – tension from the first scene, a story centered on the interpersonal conflict between two people whose personalities played on one another’s internal conflict, limited backstory and exposition, steadily increasing pace – and I couldn’t turn the pages fast enough. I fell in love all over again with this story, this time as reader instead of a writer. And it was good for both of us.

Lest anyone think I’m coming down solely on aspiring writers frustrated with negotiating the publishing process or that established writers don’t have these relationship issues, I would expressly mention I’ve seen two well-established authors very publicly sabotage their relationship with their readers when they were in a defensive mindset.

The first is a name well known in urban fantasy. The writer has been facing a growing swell of reader criticism over close to ten series novels now because of some character choices centered around a plot device that a large number of readers really hated. It was a fairly classic case of violating reader expectation for the series, in my opinion. It got ugly, however, when the writer went to a forum where readers were complaining about the series and proceeded to post a scathing message insulting the readers’ intelligence and reminding them in tantrum-like language that the story didn’t belong to them. It was the writer’s story. The writer’s characters. The writer’s choice. The writer the writer the writer. And the readers could take it or leave it. I could actually hear the argument in my head: “This is my house! I pay the rent! And if you don’t like it, you can pack your crap and get out!” We’ve had those arguments with significant others, haven’t we? Not very productive for the relationship, are they? Are they lasting relationships? Are they healthy? By the way, after a few days, the writer removed the post and refuses to acknowledge it.

The second writer was a breakout success, so even people who don’t read that genre would have heard of the writer. After a long string of highly successful novels in a certain genre, the writer became utterly disdainful of the genre and switched to another. Fans of the old genre lamented the change. As the books gathered new readers, the lament continued for a number of years. The writer showed up on an Amazon forum to not only decimate and desecrate the series but to belittle (in NO uncertain terms) the fans of the series, who in the writer’s opinion were misguided and stupid for ever having liked it. The writer declared there would never ever be another book in that world, and the writer was glad. Read as “I wouldn’t go out with you again if you were the last man/woman/reader on the planet.” Well it turns out that the new genre didn’t work out as well for the writer. The forum message has been removed, and I’ve heard rumors that said writer is considering another book in the old genre. Relationship counseling might be necessary. I think there’s no saving that one, though.

In the end, my fellows, if we are writing for publication we are entering a relationship. We can’t just think of ourselves all the time. And if all of our ex’s have the same complaints about us, we owe it to everyone (ourselves included) to ask if the problem in the relationship is not them…but us.

Realism in Fiction Sucks

Warning: I'm on a little bit of a tear this morning.

I'm going to say it plainly: realism in fiction does not always work.

It's a theme that's been following me lately. Every time I mention something an established writer has done (that an aspiring writer couldn't get away with, by the way) that has violated reader expectation or broken the meditation of a work or exhausted reader trust/suspension of disbelief, someone who wants to do the same thing in their WIP has jumped up and down about how the author's choice is closer to the way things happen in real life.

Yeah...so?

How many times, my fellows, have we had a profound moment of human understanding, a flash of recognition about the human condition, while going about the minutia of real life? Enlightenment in the produce section, anyone? Nirvana in line at the DMV? Hey, it's possible, especially if we happen to be Buddhists.

How many times have books brought on that moment, though? How many times has a book made us look at something from a startlingly different angle or elevated our spirits? How many of us are writing because we've had those experiences with fiction?

Fiction is not real life; it's only masquerading as real life to make a point or generate an experience using conveniently familiar symbolism. If you, my fellows, imagine an angel coming down from Heaven to speak to you, do you expect the angel to speak your language? Yes? Do you expect the angel to talk major league baseball and weather? Books speak our language, but the last thing we need from them is realism.

On a side note, I probably don't need to say this, but I will. Realism and believability...not the same thing.

So in the spirit of my Friday tear, I've come up with a quick and dirty list of real life that should never appear in fiction:

• Idle chit chat, including traditional greeting habits ("Hello, nice to meet you." "Thanks, nice to meet you, too." "Haven't I seen you here before?" "Yes, Sandy brought me here last week." "Oh, Sandy, yeah, I know her. Nice girl."). How many times a day do we engage in this kind of an exchange, in the elevator, in line at the market, interacting with co-workers, passing a neighbor? It certainly is realistic. It was also nearly as painful to write as it would be to read.
• Traveling. Hey, we gotta get from here to there, right? Yet travel scenes (like coffee-drinking for the sake of coffee-drinking) are some of the most boring scenes imaginable. It's a writing cliche by now. The only times these kinds of scenes should ever appear is when they are doing double duty, when something regarding the conflict of the story is also going on in the scene. No, establishing the setting doesn't count. That's called a travelogue.
• Minor details that have no purpose. I went into this a little bit the few times I've mentioned Chekov's gun, but I don't want us to get bogged down with the idea that every detail has to be supremely important to the plot or it must be omitted. We can dress a character in a modest navy blue skirt suit or a tight crimson BCBG suit, and we're talking two very different images, right? Those details are establishing character. Other details might be foreshadowing or establishing the character of the observer. A description of a room might be saying something about the owner of the home. A description just to paint a picture ("because in real life this is what the reader would see") is pointless clutter, and the reader will either pick up on this immediately or assign it undue importance and feel confused or miffed when the detail turns out to be nothing but window dressing.
• Convenient coincidence and blind luck. A character who happens to run into someone on the street that he went to college with right when he (*cough* the author *cough*) really needs an expert in physics to explain a plot device. A major plot obstacle removed by a natural disaster. The heroine who needs to find the villain in a hurry, and he happens to be in the first place she looks. First of all, this makes things too easy for the main character. Second, it lacks a sense of order and purpose. It's random, cuz well ya know coincidence and blind luck are random, synchronicity notwithstanding. Why would we want a reader to experience our story as random? Don't we have a point? Don't we have a theme? Don't we have a plan? Isn't there something we are trying to express?
• Events that have no purpose in the larger scheme of the story, that exist only because in real life these kinds of events happen under these circumstances. Let's say I have a character who is a young college kid working nights at a convenience store to make ends meet. Convenience stores get robbed a LOT at night. Police officers in my areas like to refer to these as "stop-n-robs" and "rip-n-zips". Should I have a robbery occur when my character is working for no other reason than realism? Even if I only made him a store clerk to use the odd hours and lonely environment to contribute to the isolation that plays into his main internal conflict?

Just as a movie is not a novel, a novel is not real life. It's not a one-to-one trade. This is not art imitating life, this is art using life for its own purposes.

Thank you, my fellows, for your patience and indulgence. All thoughts, alike and contrary, are welcome. And have a great weekend.

Supernatural Soup - My Personal Take on Combining Supernatural Elements in Urban Fantasy

My apologies for being a day late with this, my fellows. This cold faked me out by getting better before getting worse.

But to the topic at hand... We know, of course, that some of my posts come with a larger than usual disclaimer warning that the contents are my personal opinion. This one is one of those. You may feel differently. YMMV. Whatnot and what have you and all that.

Right now I'm working on (surprise!) an urban fantasy. The definition of UF varies greatly, but in general an UF takes place on Earth rather than an original world and usually in the present day, though some are set in an historical Earth period. I'm thinking Gail Carriger with her interesting combination of a little bit historical, little bit UF, little bit steampunk, little bit romance. I won't get into the whole rural=contemporary fantasy and city=urban fantasy issue.

The interesting thing about UF set in a modern Earth city is that the writer has to deal with things that are already defined for them: defined histories, defined cultures, defined mythologies. This comes into play most especially when it comes down to incorporating supernatural - aka mythological - creatures in the story. Unless we choose to create completely original creatures (which could be fun!), we have to deal with what people already know about and expect from the creatures we are borrowing from other sources. We have to determine where the line is between taking a creature and changing it up a little to be original and to avoid predictability and taking a creature and turning it into someone unrecognizable to a silly, arbitrary extent. For instance, how many decisions in paranormal literature have been panned as badly as sparkly day-walking vampires (no disrespect intended)? I also have a couple of friends who hurl books against the wall for having faeries turn out to be aliens. And anyone remember the second Highlander movie? I'm trying to block that from memory, but the scar is too deep.

Those of you who know me from Nathan Bransford's forum also know I go on a lot about consistency and congruence. It's important for me that fantasy have an internal logic to it, even if I'm working with something entirely or substantially original. For instance, when I was writing epic fantasy and wanted to name cities and people, I developed my own naming language. I did this by studying how letters typically change over time - for instance, it's common in many languages for 'l' and 'r' to change places over a few centuries - and using this on a real language that had the same basic tone and cadence I wanted for my fantasy language. (There were a few more steps in the process that I won't get into.) The results always had a certain innate consistency, a tone of realism.

I value the same sense of congruence when I start working on supernatural creatures, which is why I have chosen not to embrace the 'kitchen sink' method of populating my books. That is, I won't have Scandinavian trolls doing lunch with Native American skinwalkers, Celtic faeries, Japanese dragons, and Romanian strigoi, at least not in any significant numbers. I know quite a few very successful authors do have all manner of mythological creature brushing elbows in the same environments, but it lacks a believable level of congruence for me.

Does this mean that I plan to have only one kind (or one culture) of supernatural creatures in my books, even series books? That would be incredibly limiting, wouldn't it? So, no, but it does mean that they won't all be distributed evenly throughout the globe. This is made easier for me by my decision to make supernatural creatures a secret in my world, a minority hunted to near extinction by shadowy international task forces. The distribution of my supernaturals will mostly be a function of story elements drawing certain supernaturals to a particular place, sometimes because of the type of supernatural energy there, the types of humans there, or an impending event centered there.

For instance, for the current WIP, my city is dominated by a history of Scandinavian immigration. Supernatural elements of Scandinavian origin came with them. (Really, it's not nearly as Gaiman-American-Gods as it sounds, honest.) This particular book, and any future books should I make it a series, will predominately feature Scandinavian versions of supernatural creatures. But my city also has a strong Hmong, Japanese, and Mexican presence, and I have included several important characters of these ethnicities, so I might also end up incorporating a few supernatural creatures from those cultures. In fact, my most recently completed short story has a Scandinavian supernatural colliding head-on with Hmong cultural politics and tangling with Hmong shamanic and soul-related issues brought on by her friendship with a young shaman. I refrained from adding a couple of Romanian vampires or an Indian goddess of death just for color.

So the questions go out to you, my fellows. How do you address making a supernatural element seem natural and consistent? How do you decide what to include and how much of it to use? Are you more comfortable with the kitchen-sink-recipe? Do you even prefer it, and why?

Writing's Significant Other: The Reader

I've had some infamously vehement disagreements with several fellow writers over the role reader experience and reader expectations should play in the actual writing of a story. Some people very much prefer the stance that writers are artists answering the higher calling of the story that must be written as the story demands to be written, that writers must write only for themselves, and readers will just inherently respond to the integrity of that position. I have never agreed with that, and I'm refreshed to see more successful writers coming out to say they write, from project inception to THE END, with the reader in mind. The reader's reaction. The reader's experience. The reader's expectation.

Reader expectation. Now that's an interesting topic. We can decry 'formulaic' writing and 'cookie-cutter stories' all we want, but the fact is that reader's have expectations. We can surprise them and delight them by giving them more than they expect or giving them something in addition to what they expect, but I believe we flirt with abject failure when we refuse to satisfy the basic reader expectations.

What is this vague concept of reader expectation?

Reader expectation has two essential parts. The first part is genre-specific. Every romance writer knows a romance -- historical, contemporary, paranormal -- has to have a happily ever after (shortened in writer-speak to HEA). There's a great deal a romance writer can do within the scope of a romance novel, but they cannot violate the ultimate expectation of the romance reader, the HEA. Sci-fi and fantasy must have some kind of speculative element that is essential to the story. That's the unbreakable reader expectation for spec fic - not a gizmo or magic do-dad thrown into the mix for color, to turn that rejected thriller into science fiction, but a speculative element without which this story would not exist. That might sound obvious to most of you, my fellows, but this issue made it to the Turkey City Lexicon of bad sci-fi ideas for a reason. Check out the one marked 'Abbess Phone Home' under Part Four.

The second type of reader expectation is harder to nail down and is, in my experience, most often the target of the 'cookie-cutter' accusation. Plot and structure has to maintain a certain element of Aristotelian logic. Humans have been telling stories around the fire for thousands of years. Joseph Campbell has been exploring the common elements of all human myth and storytelling since before I was born. When Aristotle wrote Poetics, describing the Three Act Structure, the idea was already old and familiar. I've seen great writers chop the Three Act Structure into four or even five parts, but the function of those parts still corresponds to the classical Three Act Structure. I think there are many elements we can play with within that structure, just as a house can be a Tudor or a Georgian, a townhouse or a palace, a bungalow or a double-wide mobile home. Certain elements necessary to satisfy function remain constant. A place for sleeping. A bathroom. A food-preparation area, large or small.

So what are these elements of Aristotelian logic? If I stick hard and fast to the literal ideas, it's about the early introduction of an inciting incident (which means we can't take five chapters to warm up our engines and send an agent a query letter that urges them to stick with the slow beginning 'because it really picks up after the first 100 pages'). It's about the steady climb of tension and conflict to the ultimate confrontation between the main character and the major force of opposition. It's about the points of no return that drive the main character(s) from one act to the next.

I, however, include more than just those elements under that umbrella. I believe readers, at the very level of their/our subconscious and even the collective conscious, require certain archetypal elements be satisfied. Chekhov's 'gun over the mantle' would be one example, which is shorthand for saying that no detail or event can be random or meaningless. There must always be a point - even if the point is to say there is no point. I do believe reader's sense the underlying order in story elements even very early in the story - and also sense when there is no underlying order.

Other elements I would place under the umbrella would be the main character acting as an impetus in the story. I've blogged about this before in promoting the proactive protagonist, alliteration notwithstanding. I would include the necessity of bringing the main character to a place of decision and sacrifice. I would include bringing the main character face-to-face with his greatest fear and his greatest desire.

Some of these are, of course, debatable. Experimental fiction tosses every one of these out on their rear ends. But, like most people, I'm not a fan of experimental fiction. In fact, every fan I've even met of experimental fiction has been a writer of experimental fiction, usually embittered by the fact that nobody 'got them'. I would suggest that problem is that they never 'got' the reader or the fact that writing a book for publication is not about satisfying the writer's needs. My famous comparison (which drives a LOT of people crazy) is to compare art-for-art's-sake to masturbation and writing for publication to having sex with another consenting adult - you want it to be good for both of you.

Template Experiment #1 - Fail

Well, it turns out the new template I tried on the blog was buggy, and a couple of people had to email me to let me know they couldn't leave comments. Too bad, because I really liked that design. For now, I've defaulted to basic ol' RED. It's not fancy, but it should get the job done.

Organizing a Novel In Progress - The Extreme Planner Edition

I've seen some nice posts recently on how this or that writer organizes all the notes and timelines and scribbled half-scenes that accumulate over the planning and drafting of a novel. Today I decided to offer a glimpse into how an extreme researcher/planner/pre-plotter goes about said organizing.

I tend to keep all my notes electronically, for a number of reasons. I type really fast, so this is the easiest way to keep pace with my thoughts when the ideas start picking up speed. Wrist injuries from my days as a 911 dispatcher make writing longhand rather painful. And paper copies aren't as easy to backup as electronic copies, not when we're talking about the volume of research and notes I keep.

My notes fall into five categories -- or folders.

1. Character Folders. Each of my characters (my city included) gets their own folder, tucked away into a master character folder. Inside each character folder will be: links to online photos that match my vision of the character (I call this the character prototype); notes on character flaws and strengths; a detailed character profile (about 15 pages of questions -- before answers are added) including notes on defining qualities, a psychological profile, a medical history, education, vocation, romantic history, legal history, home environment, personal relationships, religious beliefs, and a large section called Other that encompasses everything from physical description to notes on inner conflicts and primary through tertiary problems. This profile will differ depending on whether it is for the protagonist, the antagonist, or a secondary character.



2. The Plotting Folder. This contains a scene spreadsheet in Excel (I love me some Excel) divided and color-coded by act, with notes on scene function (for instance: action, reaction, complication, First/Second Plot Point, no backstory/backstory allowed, etc); a summary of all the scenes with more detail than the spreadsheet (for instance: a paragraph about the events of the scene, notes on how the scene addresses the theme or a particular throughline); brainstorming notes on the novel theme(s); throughline charts for the main character, the impact character, and the overall plot.



3. The Research Folder. This should be pretty self-explanatory. Do the research, my fellows. There's no substitute for it. For instance, for my Scandinavian form of werewolves, my research folder includes notes on vargs (a word used to describe both the destructive lone or rogue wolf and an outlaw), various werewolf legends from around the world, Odin's wolf warriors, and real life wolf behaviors. Research can spark a LOT of ideas, so don't scrimp on this. You could be missing out on inspiration.
   
   
4. The Misc Folder. Here I have things like my age conversation chart. Since I have numerous mythological creatures encountering one another, each with slightly different lifespans and rates of aging, I made a chart comparing them to humans. So if, for instance, one of my elf characters appears to be a 30-year-old human, I can check my chart and see that his actual age is probably 85-90 years and fill out his experience accordingly. This folder also includes a list of the supernatural creatures that exist in this world or will be included in this book. I tend to dislike the kitchen sink world with creatures from umpteen different mythologies thrown together without context. That's just personal taste. So while the world I'm working in has all those creatures in it somewhere, I use this list to make sure I've limited the range of creatures in any story to just a couple different mythologies. For my current WIP, the vast majority of creatures will be pre-Christian Scandinavian, with a touch of Hmong and Japanese, because my city has a significant Hmong and Japanese population, and Hmong and Japanese characters will figure into the story.



5. The Working Draft Folder. I tend to write in one long file instead of separate chapter files. If I make sweeping changes I will save the file separately and add the date at the end of the file name, year first, month, then day, meaning in the file list they will come up in chronological order. While I try not to write anything before I've finished my planning and plotting, sometimes a phrase or scene will rise to the surface of my subconscious ahead of schedule. If I don't write these down as soon as they arrive, I will lose them. So this folder will also have a few files containing an opening paragraph or a last line or a whole scene from the end of Act 2, etc.

So there it is, my fellows, the proof of my OCD, the extent of my anal retentiveness. I used to try to moderate it, but after receiving too much positive feedback on my techniques from agents and editors, I have given myself to my disorder. :)

Your thoughts, my fellows? What are your techniques? What suggestions might you have for YET MORE FOLDERS? I'm always on the lookout for deeper and deeper levels of organization and specialization. LOL.

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P.S. As mentioned before, I wanted to try out some new blog templates. Let me know what you think about this one. I know they look different depending on screen size and settings.

In Writing News...

I don't know if anyone has noticed yet, but as of the new year I have cut back my blogging to MWF. It's the year of writing more and everything else less.

However, I'm blogging today for the sake of passing on some news and blog housekeeping.

First, Donald Maass has a new book coming out this month!!! It's called THE BREAKOUT NOVELIST. Pre-orders ship February 28, just in time for me to get a copy for him to sign when I hit the Wisconsin workshop on March 11. The book is described as a collection of craft and professional tips he has developed over the time he has been teaching the Breakout Novel Intensives. I have some handouts from the 2008 Chicago BONI, which he asked us not to share with anyone else. If that's the kind of stuff in the book, it should be a major treat.

I might also mention that Donald has his book THE CAREER NOVELIST up as a free download at his agency website. Some of the info is a little dated, but there's still an impressive amount of applicable professional advice - and quite a few reality checks.

My second bit of news is that my writing sister, Sommer Leigh, who has graciously appeared on my blog previously with a stellar guest post on writing believable dystopian cities, is doing a College of Blogging series. I'm soooo there.

And finally, I wish to solicit your opinions, my fellows. What do you think of my blog design? I didn't want to keep the generic blogger template, but I didn't want to spend a ton of money on a custom template. The photo you see in the background, made available for free in the public domain, by the way, through the amazing courtesy of pdphoto.org, is one I chose because it is urban and the water and palm trees kind of evoke California, where my urban fantasy is set. But while it says urban and Cali, it doesn't really say fantasy, does it?

So I've found a fabulous site where a designer has put up some free blog templates, and I've seen a few that might be good for urban fantasy. What do you guys think? Should I leave the site as is or try on some new looks?

Inquiring leos want to know!

Plato, Illegal Downloads, and the Community in the Writing Community

Sometimes I am seriously proud of the writing community. When a narrow-minded college teacher in a Missouri town wrote an Op-Ed piece in his local paper about how the YA novel SPEAK was pornographic and should be banned, the writing community rose up in defense of an important work in the YA realm, a book that dared address the shame and pain of teen rape. The fact that someone would call it porn was every bit as disturbing as the fact that he wanted to prevent teens from having access to a book that might help them understand a horrible reality of modern life, one that might have been a tragic part of their own lives. Writers rallied to inform the public what this book was really about and why it was important. One writer even felt so strongly that she came out as a survivor of teen rape herself.

I saw a similar outpouring recently when writer Saundra Mitchell wrote a blog piece about the number of times her novel has been illegally downloaded and how deeply these downloads had hurt her chances of getting her next novel published. Her official sales record was weak, so weak that the publisher might drop her next book. The downloads exceeded her legitimate sales. If even a fraction of those had been legitimate sales, should would have earned out her advance. Other writers blogged about similar problems either they or their writer friends had suffered. Readers were raving about how fantastic the book was...while killing the writer's career.

When this topic came up on a writing forum I frequent, I was unhappy but not surprised that one of the non-writers that contributed to the discussions defended illegal downloads and mocked the idea that a writer should aspire to earn a living by writing full-time. What floored me was two aspiring novelists defending the theft of other people creative effort. If they can justify the theft of someone's novel, how could we ever convey to non-writers the damage and betrayal of having a professional writing career destroyed for the sake of convenience and 'getting over' on an industry they don't like?

I'm not going to address each of the justifications, the moral contortions people use to tell themselves that plain old stealing is okay. In the end, the excuses are all BS and the people using them know that very well. Kindergartners understand the concept of stealing and why it's bad. Adults who refuse to see it are being willfully blind.

The one justification I will address is this one: everyone is doing it. Guess what, NOT everyone is doing it. I don't do it. I don't do it with novels or video games or music or movies. I'm not an especially religious or pious person. I have just made a conscious decision to honor other artists who have labored to learn their craft and put their best effort into their work. I have found a bare minimum of empathy within myself to see how I would feel if I finally got a novel published and learned that my next novel was being dropped because of poor sales - when there may have been tens of thousands of illegal downloads by people who just loved the book...to death.

If a person like me can make that decision, there are other people making that decision. There are other people who could be making that decision if they really wanted to and if their peers were making that same decision. I have already had this discussion with a friend who admitted she did have some movie downloads. She did feel kind of bad about it - because she knew it was stealing - and she agreed to stop viewing illegally downloaded movies. I didn't threaten her or get angry with her to make her stop. I just explained what illegal downloads do to people's careers and pointed out how I would feel if it happened to me. She doesn't want that to happen to me or any of the other writers/game developers/musicians/painters/etc that she knows and loves.

So what does Plato have to do with any of this? Two things. First I would call attention to something he once expressed - and I paraphrase here: the reward or punishment for the person you are is being the person you are. Part of that is about what it feels like to have no moral center, no scruples, no compassion and no hope for compassion. Part of that is about the world we create with the way we behave. If we are people who steal and victimize others, we make that okay for other people, and eventually we will be the victims of the world we have created.

Second, I call attention to the Simile of the Cave from Plato's Republic. We have a responsibility to unshackle ourselves, stop following shadows, and pursue the Good...even when no one else is doing it. Morality frequently comes not in black and white but in an uncomfortable array of gray. Is it wrong to steal bread to feed a starving child? But who will make the same argument when it comes to stealing novels and video games and movies? Stealing these are not a matter of feeding a starving child. It is about selfishness and laziness and willful harm to another, period.

I issue this challenge to you, my fellows. If you have downloaded the labor of others illegally in the past, stop. When you find friends who have done so, explain to them how they might very well be killing the careers of the same artists whose work they so enjoy. Let the seed take root, if it will. One person making a change. History is filled with them. It is possible.

Be the reward, not the punishment.