The second draft of "Common & Precious" is structurally done, by which I mean all the pieces are in place. I tried to review it yesterday and am still too close to be able to tell whether it works or not. I do think it's better, at least, and I'll spend this week doing some polishing to individual characters and storylines to improve them as well. Goal is to have the second draft done done done by Sunday evening.
It's tiring work, really it is. But extremely rewarding as well.
"New Coyote," by Michael Bergey
6/10 - A fun-filled half-mythical romp with some technical and story issues
I love mythology and I love animal stories, especially in the Canidae family, so "New Coyote" sits squarely in my sweet spot, as it were. I enjoyed it quite a bit, especially the Native American mythology parts, but was left somewhat dissatisfied at the end of it. Partly, I'm sure that's due to my recent workshops and laser-like focus on editing, which has rendered me unable to look at even a simple billboard without thinking, "Surely they mean 'fewer' rather than 'less'?" Sometimes even when those words aren't present on the billboard. Yes, yes, I'm like that most of the time anyway, but it's been worse lately.
"New Coyote" is a lot of fun to read. The main character has a great mischievous nature befitting his name--he is an actual coyote, living on a sort of commune in Washington (state), enhanced somehow (how becomes clear over the course of the story) to be able to talk and think as humans do. The book is his journey (part one of three, apparently) to discover his true nature and purpose, along which travels he meets many mysterious beings and has a number of adventures and misadventures.
Some of the other characters are well done, too: Mouse, a blind girl who befriends Coyote, has a touching story and is heartfelt and complex. John, who knows about Coyote's past; Mr. Burrey, a teacher with a secret; Fox, Coyote's spirit-brother; Ciceqi, one of Coyote's spirit guides: all these supporting characters are simpler, but effective in their use. My biggest gripes character-wise were with Mooney, Coyote's owner and best friend, who seems reduced to a simple "mom" stereotype and drifts in and out of the narrative after being set up early on to be important, and with the host of supporting characters who get just enough introduction to be interesting without enough face time to be developed. I've talked in this space about the ability to trim down characters in a story: there's a balance to be struck between having not enough characters to tell your story and having so many that some of them drift around without any purpose. A couple times, I had to flip back to remember who some character or another was.
I loved Bergey's descriptions of the Pacific Northwest. Clearly he's familiar with the area, as the lush forests and landscapes are brought vividly to life. The weather is so alive it might almost be another character in the novel: hail, snow, rain, wind, and the clear sunny days are all a beautiful backdrop to the story. I could close my eyes and see and feel the chill and damp after reading about them.
The story is told episodically: Coyote starts off alone in a house with Mooney, as the two of them worry about the government trying to take her land away. We get a nice little adventure that shows off Coyote's abilities and personality, and then abruptly get swept into another little narrative that takes him away from Mooney. This may be intended to mimic the episodic nature of the Native American folk myths of Coyote: How Coyote Foiled The DEA; How Coyote Went To School; How Coyote Accidentally Summoned A Crazy-Ass Demon, etc. For me, though, I was expecting more of a novel format, and though I enjoyed each individual adventure, the abrupt transitions left me somewhat disoriented on occasion. Within each story, the pacing is pretty good. The story never stalls, always keeps moving at a good pace, and kept me turning the pages to see what happened next. That's not an easy thing to pull off, and Bergey does it throughout the book.
Of more concern to me, story-wise, are two big issues. First, although Coyote is a great character, he's very passive throughout the book. He mostly gets dragged from one event to another, and even though he often escapes the adventures using his wits, he rarely makes any decision determining the course of his life. This may be something Bergey is building up to in his three-part series, but it left something lacking for me in this book. Second, the book's ending (minor spoiler) felt a little too happy to me. There was genuine tension at some points in the middle of the book, when Coyote meets Fox, but by the end of the book, everything seems to have worked out for the best and nobody's had to make any sacrifices to get what they want. I'm all for that, and sometimes things do work out that way, but when characters get to the ending of their story and achieve their goal, their story has more resonance if they had to give up something to make it there, even if it's something symbolic like your unqualified love for your father ("A Wrinkle In Time") or the reverse ("Field of Dreams").
Overall, I found this a good read. The issues I mentioned above didn't keep me from enjoying Bergey's imagination and sense of fun. He has a lively story and a great main character, and that's enough to recommend this book.
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review
"Stories of Your Life and Others," by Ted Chiang
8/10 -- a collection of great idea-based SF stories
Ted Chiang sounds like a character in a story himself. "The best SF writer you've never heard of," he's called (by me, if nobody else), having published only eight stories in the last fifteen years or so. Of course, from those stories he's won the Nebula (three times), Hugo, Sturgeon, Asimov, and Campbell awards. Seven of the stories are collected here, in a collection that is absolutely worth the money.
I tend to like character-based fiction these days, as I've mentioned before, but this collection reminds me why I started reading SF. Chiang reminds me of Avram Davidson or David Brin in the clear, pure originality of his ideas and the skill with which he constructs a story around them. Here is a story about the Tower of Babel and what they found at the top; here a story about golems in the Industrial Revolution; here a short piece about the evolution of scientists; here (one of the two most character-centric pieces) a story about what a scientist's work means to her and her husband. Chiang combines the sciences of mathematics and language with a keen sense of history and religion to produce some truly original stories.
My favorite is "Story of Your Life," in which a linguist communicating with aliens slowly learns their language and gains new insights into not just their behavior, but the world in general. It's one of those great stories with a slow reveal and that feeling that you're building toward something, and a terrific "a-ha!" when you figure it out. It's the best character portrait in the book, and the most successful at melding scientific theory with the protagonist's development as a character.
Chiang attempts that elsewhere with less successful results: the mathematical "Division By Zero" and the religious-historical "Tower of Babel" both felt like they were missing some dimension. "Understand," on the other hand, is a great contrast in characters in a "Flowers For Algernon"-like narrative.
If you like the science fiction of ideas, you should not be without this book.
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review
A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again, by David Foster Wallace
8/10, great social insight and humor, occasionally too thick or esoteric to follow
If Dave Barry had gone to Princeton rather than Haverford, he might have become David Foster Wallace. Not that it's a bad thing that either of them followed the path he did; both of them bring great insights to their work, and both of them show a tremendous versatility in the subject material they're willing to cover. Barry has toured New York and gone Extreme Sporting; Wallace, in this volume, visits the Illinois State Fair and takes a Princess Caribbean Cruise. Barry monitors tabloids for exploding cow stories and their relevance to society, while Wallace investigates the relationship of TV to modern literature. Both of them, oddly, share a moderate obsession with toilets.
Wallace's articles tend to be less accessible than Barry's, perhaps the reason I'd only peripherally heard of him. He seems to be part of the McSweeney's crew, the sort of intellectual satire I associate with New York writers, and while Wallace does live up to that stereotype, he also demonstrates a vivid awareness of his own faults and limitations. In visiting the Illinois State Fair, in one of my favorite passages, he finds a booth selling t-shirts bearing statements like, "I GO FROM 0 TO HORNEY IN 2.5 BEERS," and after a page of analysis about what these shirts signify to the people here and what the shirts as a whole say about them as a class of people, he comes back around: "The woman at the booth wants to know why I'm standing there memorizing t-shirts, and all I can think to tell her is that "HORNEY" is misspelled, and now I really feel like an East Coast snob..."
His insights into the game of tennis are fascinating and fun to read, and the titular essay, the one about the cruise, is brilliant and hysterical. Where he loses my interest is in his academic essays, like the aforementioned one on TV, and another explaining and critiquing an ongoing debate about the role of the author in book criticism. The latter is bearably short; the former lost me several times. Even those essays are worth reading for the ideas, but Wallace is at his best when he is wryly commenting not just on tennis, or the Midwest, or a cruise, but also on his own place in his subject. It's that endearing self-awareness that brings him back from the edge of being annoyingly smug and superior: he'll tell you how silly people are for falling for some marketing ploy, for example, and then frankly admit that he falls for it all the time too. That allows the reader to identify with him, which works well for me, because he's so smart in his writing that identifying with his flaws makes me feel smarter.
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So I have been editing the novel lately. This is a particularly painful process, but a necessary one, and one in which I try to find scraps of joy, much as someone in my office apparently digs for the Cinnamon 'n' Spice oatmeal flavor in the big box we get from CostCo every month and hoards them from the rest of us. The problem with editing is that either you're editing someone else's work, in which case you always have in the back of your head that this is Someone Else's Vision, or you're editing your own work, in which case it's Your Vision, and you end up either reluctant to change anything or disgusted at how amateurish it is, and in any of those cases there's a sort of despairing tedium to the whole process that makes you want to chuck it out the window and go do something fun again, like writing.
If you are (as I am now) editing your own work, and you've gotten feedback from others, then you have to reconcile all of their visions of your work with Your Vision, and it's a difficult line to figure out, that balance. Because they are your readers, and their visions are not irrelevant. At the same time, you are the author, and Your Vision should be the one in the driver's seat. Your beta readers might insist that you stop off at Stuckey's, and you can do that, but don't let them take you to L.A. rather than Lake Destiny. (It is possible, sure, for one of your readers to have a vision that you like better than your own, but that usually will involve a rewrite rather than just an edit.)
So where is my Cinnamon 'n' Spice oatmeal in all this? Well, for starters, just the fact that people have read the manuscript and have put a significant number of cycles into trying to help me improve it is really flattering. Secondly, I've managed to take a little time away from the manuscript by working on the 48 Hour Film Project, so coming back to it, I can see the little problems here and there; the blinding glare of My Vision has faded somewhat to a nice office lamp. Thanks to my readers, I have a sense of the larger issues, too, so I can keep those in mind while tightening up language. So it's exciting to me, getting to go back and add more in to some of the characters--one of the comments I heard was that the characters needed to be more sympathetic, which I interpreted to mean that you needed to know more about them and understand them better, not that I want to put in pages of exposition, but maybe an action here and there. It's almost like I'm discovering the story again as I go through it, but this time with full awareness of how it will end.
That is, I have to admit, pretty cool.
A thought that occurred to me over the weekend, as I'm revising my novel with an eye to bringing out the characters:
What a character does makes him or her believable; it's how the character does it that makes him or her memorable.
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character
Last weekend, I participated in the 48 Hour Film Project for the third year in a row. This year, our film company joined forces with Bay Area Pictures, a group that had also entered last year. What this meant for me was that I handed off the directing responsibilities to someone else and focused on writing the screenplay and editing the footage.
Writing for this contest is always a fun challenge. The elements of the screenplay are in place at 7 pm Friday night, and generally you need to have your script done by 7 am Saturday, when the filming crew is ready to go. Besides the time element, there's also the collaborative element, which I actually find both immensely helpful and disconcertingly difficult.
When writing fiction, I tend to go off by myself and just work things out in my head until they feel right, then get them down on the screen and examine them as they come out. It is, as writing should be, a very solitary process. Editing is more collaborative, even if it's not always what we used to call in the telecom business "full duplex" (that would be sitting in the same room discussing the work). The collaborative screenplay process combines the writing/revising/editing phases, so you're throwing out ideas, kicking them back and forth, testing and adding to them, circling around to other ideas, presenting advantages and objections. Much as I hate to admit it, years of experience in corporate meetings is actually helpful in this process. Keeping things moving forward is essential.
By the time you've talked for a couple hours, you have a pretty good idea of which story "sticks" best. We were trying to come up with an idea for a "buddy film" this year, and the first idea we had kept coming back up as we brought up and discarded others. By about 9 pm, we were sure that's what we were going with. Then it became a process of working out the story.
One of my weaknesses in writing is that I'll have a beginning and sometimes an ending, and then a "here there be dragons" in between that I'm confident I'll be able to map as I actually come to it. That doesn't work so well in the collaborative writing environment. People kept asking "so what happens in here?" and then throwing out ideas as I was trying to think about it. This is the second part of the night where your intuitive sense of story becomes important. You have to be able to look at the individual scenes as assembled and hover above them, making sure the story feels right holistically. By about 11, we had the story nailed down enough to start writing.
The writing itself went smoothly. Mostly it was a process of creating the characters and throwing them into the story. Between myself and the others in the room, the dialogue flowed pretty naturally. I would write down the way I felt one scene going, and other people, looking over my shoulder, would offer opinions. If I liked them, I kept them. If not, we discussed them.
By 2, we had a first draft, which we read through. By 3:30, we had a draft ready to show the crew four hours later.
The takeaway from this writing exercise (which we did twice--we did a dry run the previous weekend) was the importance of several elements: character, planning out your story, and keeping everything to the bare minimum needed to tell your story. There were a lot of scenes that I thought would have been funny, but they didn't advance the story, and with limited time, you don't want to spend time writing scenes you won't include.
I realize that this is starting to sound suspiciously like an endorsement of outlining. Far from it, unless of course it works for you. It doesn't work for me, because as I'm writing, I discover new things and everything changes anyway. I'd rather jump right into writing and then go back and edit the story. But as you're writing, you can look for opportunities to overload your story with tricks we've talked about before: subtext in dialogue, for one; plot elements in description, for another. As you write, look for those passages that are just pretty and either make them relevant or eliminate them. You'll find that that will make your editing go much faster.
Cloud Atlas, by David Mitchell
10/10: a brilliant journey through time and culture in six parts
I should preface this by saying that a 10 is not a rare shining gem of perfection. I hope to hand out many 10s as I work my way through books. If I look closely enough, there's always something that can be done to improve a book. Les Miserables? Sure, it'd be a ten, even though it rambles on about French and Parisian history interminably. Anyway, a "10" is something I enjoyed about as much as I've enjoyed any other book I've read. And with that out of the way...
Cloud Atlas is six stories loosely connected and interwoven, beginning with a journal kept in the mid-1800s by a notary who's been sent from California to Australia to track down the beneficiary of a will. He discovers the islands off New Zealand in the throes of colonization, where churches, plantations, and bordellos run by white men give the natives something to occupy their "previously pointless" existences. His journal, interrupted mid-sentence, is discovered by a young British man in 1931 who recounts his journey to become apprentice to a famous, ailing composer in letters to his best friend. His letters pass from the friend to a young journalist in 1974, and so on through the present day, a near future, and a far future. At the end of the sixth story, the fifth story resumes and concludes, then the fourth, and so on until we read the end of the notary's journal.
What is stunning about this book is the utter confidence with which Mitchell inhabits each of the six different voices, not only in attitude but in language, each section appropriate to its time, or convincing (in the case of the future times). It is rather intimidating to think of how much craft and research went into it, but none of those things enter your head upon reading it. With a couple minor slowdowns, the prose is delightful and the stories engaging enough to make any one of them worthwhile, let alone all six. Though they only connect very loosely on the surface, each one resonates with the same themes, and together they make for a very impressive cycle.
Mitchell's main theme is the question of what constitutes civilization. One character states that civilization is determined by how those with power treat those without, and that theme recurs again and again through the book. The theme is skilfully explored, but the real joys in reading Cloud Atlas come from reveling in the lush prose and voice, and from watching Mitchell's expansive imagination explore our past and paint our future. I loved the Infocom game A Mind Forever Voyaging, in which you get to explore the future in ten-year jumps, and while this is nothing like that, it evoked the same feelings in me.
This was a recommendation from my Fabulist Fiction workshop, and I can't pass on the recommendation strongly enough. It's the kind of book that leaves me thinking about it for days after finishing it, perhaps even weeks. It makes me want to write wonderful things.
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In reading Bill Walsh's wonderful "The Elephants of Style" (full review to come), I was struck by a quote he reproduced on clichés: they are "first-draft placeholders." The idea is that you use the phrasing that leaps to mind to hold the idea of what you want to say, and then when you go back and revise, you come up with something more original.
I like that thought.
Of course, clichés have other uses too. Sometimes a cliché really is the best way to say something, and you should leave it be. Sometimes you can use the reader's expectations of a cliché to deliver a little twist, one of the pleasures people get from writing. For instance, I knew I was going to like the movie "Garden State" when it began with Zach Braff looking in the mirror and the voiceover: "Some mornings, I don't recognize my own toothbrush." It was paced perfectly to bring up the expectation that he was going to say "my own face." Which would have been fine, an okay opening to a movie. A little predictable, but it sets expectations about where you're going.
The problem with it is that he just said, "toothbrush" to make it jarring and funny. It didn't really mean anything. If he'd gone on and had a story about how there was a relationship where the woman kept switching toothbrushes on him, then the line would've been perfect. As it was, it gave me enough of a laugh that I thought, "hey, this is going to be fun."
If you do use clichés as first-draft placeholders, here's another thought. The usual rule in revising is to trim out whatever is noticeable or distracting from the story. Clichés, though, can do exactly the opposite: make you glide over passages where you'd like the reader to linger. You need to walk a line between being too distracting and being too formulaic, and only you know where that line is. Would you rather say, "he was a mountain of a man" or "he stood a lofty six feet tall, muscles straining at the bonds of his flannel shirt"? The first is a cliché, but it conveys the sense of him well. The second is more distinctive but also draws attention to individual details, which you may not want to do.
Be aware of clichés; don't be afraid of them. Use them when appropriate, twist them when necessary. Just don't skewer them, or turn them on their heads--those are clichés too.
Through my small press publications, I have gotten enrolled in the "Amazon Shorts" program, whereby authors can sell short stories or essays digitally for cheap. I've uploaded the workshop story from my English 101 workshop, "Soft Release" (link is to the right). It's a story about a guy returning to his hometown in northern Minnesota after getting a University degree. He feels a connection to the woods and has spent the last several months rehabbing an injured wolf to release to the wild. The connection between him and the people in his hometown is much more tenuous, made more so by his decision to release what they see as a dangerous predator. As the story progresses, he has to come to terms with where he feels he belongs.
Anyway, I'm doing this Amazon thing to increase exposure. The story's only forty-nine cents, so I'm not going to retire. I'd ask you, if you get it and like it, to recommend it to other people you think might like it. If they like it, hopefully they'll tell people about it too. Hey, you can't even get a soda for $0.49 anymore! Why not try half an hour of entertainment? :)
"An Invisible Sign Of My Own," by Aimee Bender
8/10 - A very enjoyable fabulist narrative about a young woman trying to find her place in an offbeat world that doesn't quite fit her quirks.
Mona Gray, the protagonist of "An Invisible Sign of My Own," once had a math teacher named Mr. Jones who lived next door to her parents and wore his moods around his neck in the form of wax numbers. The higher the number, the better the mood. By the time Mona has turned twenty and begun teaching math herself, Mr. Jones has retired to open a hardware store, but she continues to watch his numbers. The practice strikes her as odd, but not bizarre; the same could be said of her decision to mark her twentieth birthday by purchasing an axe at his store.
I first encountered Bender's work in my fabulist fiction workshop. I was impressed with her sparse prose and eccentric characters (a boy with keys for fingers!), and her ability to use fabulist elements to draw out people's characters. "Invisible Sign" showcases that talent as well, brimming with lovely word pictures and funny, poignant characters. Mona's second grade math class is richly drawn, eight-year-old kids with fully developed personalities; her father is trying anything he can think of to get rid of an illness that's dogged him for a decade, leaving him faded to gray; one of her fellow teachers, a young man with burns on his arms, assigns the children diseases to act out.
The joy in this book is watching the genuine emotions of Mona and her fellow townspeople in the array of familiar and absurd situations they encounter. Despite her eccentricities, Mona is an engaging and sympathetic heroine, and by the end of the book, I really cared about her and wanted her story to end well. I didn't always quite understand everything she did, but I felt the force of emotion behind it, and that carried me through the parts that didn't jell as well for me.
This reminded me quite a bit of "The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time," with the strangeness of that book's protagonist diluted somewhat and spread out through the world. The styles are similar, very matter-of-fact and direct but with a wealth of detail pressed into compact sentences. Both books are a quick read, but well worth it. Simply because this one is less famous, don't pass it by.
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review
Inspired by the news that the original Star Wars movies on DVD, to be released this fall (packaged with the newer edits, apparently), will be not from the original prints but from the laserdisc transfer (why would they do that? --scroll down to the May 19 entry), and by my own current issues in working with various pieces of fiction, I wanted to take a look at editing.
Most aspiring authors I know have one of two issues with editing: either they don't do enough, or they do too much. The don't-do-enough crowd tend to be the people who are less passionate about writing, who get their idea down on paper and then think the fun part is over. I'll save that for another time. The do-too-much crowd are often those who are either perfectionists or unsure of their ability or both. And the thing is, it's likely that at one time or another, or from one project to another, everyone who writes will be part of one crowd or another. I certainly have been.
But: editing too much. There's always going to be something you can improve in your story. Read through any published book you like, and chances are you'll find a sentence that could have been tightened, a description that's a little too vague, a piece of dialogue that rings just a little artificial. If you keep going through the edit -> give to friends -> incorporate comments cycle, you'll never be finished, and the goal of writing is to produce something that people can read. So get it 95% there. Get it 98% there. Get it 99% there. Whenever you're seeing that the edits you're making are too minor to matter, declare it done and stop messing with it.
Of course, it's not done, unless you're publishing it yourself or sending it to your website. If you're sending it around for consideration, and you get some suggestions back that the publisher says would improve your manuscript's chances, go ahead and make some tweaks. This is toward a specific goal of getting it published.
And then, when you're world-famous and everyone is clamoring for you to reprint your work, what do you do? Do you take out the publisher's suggestions? Edit your work to fit your current sensibilities?
That will (hopefully) be your decision. My thinking right now is that your readers know and love your stories based on what they read. A story is a discussion between the writer and the reader, and to edit your work after your reader has engaged in the discussion devalues their participation in the process. You're the writer. If your old stories bother you, write new ones.
Are you listening, Mr. Lucas?
Adverbs, by Daniel Handler
8/10 - delightful tragicomic collection of vignettes about love, and people, but mostly love.
Possibly, you know Daniel Handler better under his psuedonym, Lemony Snicket, author of the "Series of Unfortunate Events" books. Unfortunately, this is likely to remain the rule rather than the exception, since "Adverbs" does not lend itself well to a movie adaptation (though I did get to see a staged performance of four of the chapters by San Francisco's "Word for Words" troupe which was very entertaining). Unsurprisingly, if you enjoy the "Unfortunate Events" books' clever and smart wordplay, you will enjoy "Adverbs."
Initially you might think that all the vignettes are connected by the characters that inhabit them, moving back and forth in space and time. Subsequently, you would notice that although many of the characters share identical or similar names and circumstances, they are not all the same--for example, not all the characters named "Tomas" across different stories are the same character, except perhaps they are. Cannily, Handler keeps us guessing about the characters and their histories, weaving the stories together with small tugs of reference here and subtle and not-so-subtle themes there. Familiarly to fans of the "Unfortunate Events" books, the narrative's images also recur throughout (magpies and volcanoes, for instance), here in a more grown-up if no less fantastical setting.
Delightfully, Handler crafts wonderful sentences and characters and situations, each one a joy to read about. Often I stopped just to read a sentence back to myself, and I am not usually a proponent of the "beautiful sentence" school of writing. Unfortunately, I wasn't as clear on how some of the stories fit into the overall narrative, though I enjoyed them all. Sometimes it seemed as though he were more interested in writing something offbeat than following the narrative, which is fine, I suppose, since as I said, I enjoyed all the stories on their own. Thankfully, Handler does expose his hand in "Truly," giving us his message in case, like me, we're too dense or too impatient to puzzle it out on our own. Admirably, he has a good reason for the way the book is structured, and an important message to deliver, unlike this review, which has neither, whose only point is to tell you that if you like sentences like, "Love is candy from a stranger, but it's candy you've had before and it probably won't kill you," then you should pick up and read this book. Definitely.
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One of the first rules in "So You Want To Be A Writer," the beginning writer's book of rules I have just now made up, is "Show, Don't Tell." A corollary of "Show, Don't Tell" is: "Exposition Is Bad." This is a good rule for beginning writers; it warns them against spending the first fifteen pages of their story telling the reader about the fantabulous history of the magical land of Xenovia, or the founding of the town of Humble Hill where their story begins, or the entire childhood of their heroine. Get to the action, let the action tell the story. Good rule.
Like any rule, though, it is not universal. There are times when you will need exposition, especially in cases where there is something different about the world that you need to communicate to the reader. How much time you spend on this depends on how difficult it's going to be for the reader to figure out the world, and how essential figuring out the world is to the story. The Lord Darcy mysteries take place in a Renaissance-era England (I may be misremembering the time period, but it's around then) where magic is a skill like woodsmithing or archery. The books do not start with a paragraph about how magic works. They set the stage (England circa 1700) and then quickly show a character performing a magic spell. This is not, we see immediately, unusual. That's all we need to know.
But what if your book is set in an alternate Nebraska in the early 1900s in a past where the British won the War of Rebellion in 1778, the Confederacy won the Revolutionary War in 1865,
and highly evolved intelligent ears of corn are conspiring with aliens on the moon to increase rainfall in the heartland by 20%? Chances are you won't be able to situate the reader in the world without a little explanation. So how do you go about it?
Don't take the awkward solution of having exposition come out in dialogue. Readers react to that rather like you'd react to your parents trying to talk hip to you in high school. All the words are there, but something just ain't natural. [This isn't to say that the time-honored device of introducing your world to the reader by introducing it to a newly-arrived character is bad; it just has to be set up better, and informed in equal parts by dialogue and discovery. But that's another post. Remind me to write that one sometime.]
My solution is to find the one or two elements that it is critical for the reader to understand immediately. Bring those out first. Start the story rolling. Introduce the rest of the world gradually. Maybe you've plotted out in intricate detail the brilliant military strategy by which General Lee led his Graycoats to victory at Appamattox. If that's the core of your story, start there. But if your story is about a young girl who discovers the corn's nefarious plot and is worried about the increase in mosquitos, then maybe you just need to start with "Vanessa caught the corn talking to the man in the moon one night," and go from there. Let General Lee's brilliance wait until chapter 5, when her father is talking about his wartime memories.
This sounds obvious, but what it forces you to do is take a step back, look at the construction of your world, and see how your story relates to it. There may be cherished elements of your world that are not important to your story at all, and so the reader may never know about them. That hurts; you've put a lot of thought into it. I have a solution for that, too.
Write another story.
This is a huge topic, I know, so you have a long weekend to reflect. :) This question was sparked by an item in a Garrison Keillor column in Salon (registration may be required). I'll excerpt the relevant paragraph here:
I came back to Benson School as the only boy in the sixth grade to have seen New York City. Enormous status. Royalty, almost. A girl asked me if it was true that trains ran underground and went fast, and I said, yes, it was true and I had ridden them. It was the first time I had original experience to offer to an audience. That's how a writer is born. You went, you saw, and now you tell the others.
This isn't quite what motivates me, and I suspect it's not Mr. Keillor's entire motivation, either, though you could extrapolate it and include journeys in your imagination. You have almost an obligation to report those, because nobody else can.
If I had to narrow down my motivation to write to one thing, though, it would be the characters that populate my imagination. They don't usually spring up fully formed, like Pallas, but rather require some nurturing to reach maturity. On occasion, they continue to intrigue me. I want to write down their adventures so that they won't be lost, and perhaps in that sense, my pack rat tendencies serve me well--I live in fear that the characters will fade from my mind, their hopes and dreams forever lost, the same way that my fear of forgetting what the date of the Joe Jackson concert was prevents me from throwing out a ticket stub.
Funny, I hadn't thought that "why we write" was going to relate to hoarding, but I guess it kind of does. I just stumbled across a letter in Salon (that's two mentions in one post) about a guy dealing with his wife's hoarding tendencies. Cary Tennis, responding, linked to the children of hoarders site, which, to bring this post to a fitting and circular end, contains a number of affecting letters describing some interesting characters who really deserve their own stories.
Some of the stories I'm proudest of have come from a single idea so strong that I have no trouble keeping it in my head for the duration of the writing process. Those kinds of stories are typically pretty short, because although I might have a beautiful, strong idea for a novel, it's difficult to sit down and write for the solid 250 hours necessary to get the physical typing done.
Then there are the other kind of stories, by which I mean most of them. There are stories that start not with an idea but with an image, or a character, where the story arc isn't fully developed when you start writing. There are stories for which the original story arc proves insufficient to sustain the story. I'm in the middle of revising one such story now, the one I did for the Fabulist Fiction workshop, which started out being about friendship and is now more about morality and peer pressure. And ambition. Maybe.
The difficulty in writing a story like this is that the structure was built to accommodate a specific story arc, and then revised with something else in mind, and now resembles a messy hodgepodge of both. The original themes are not gone, just reduced to a secondary role, and so while certain elements of the story still belong, they do not need to be as prominent or as accented. How prominent do they need to be? When you're in the middle of editing, head down in your forest of words, you can't make those decisions, and it can be daunting and frustrating to have the niggling feeling that the story Isn't Working, but the solution doesn't seem to be apparent.
You need to step back and review: what is NOW the main character arc? What is the starting point, what is the ending point? What steps need to come in between? Write an outline (I find outlines are often more useful after I've written a draft than before). You'll suddenly see scenes that aren't necessary, and scenes that are missing and yet to be written. Go back. Don't give up.
At least, that's what I'm telling myself.
Certainly I wouldn't say it's everyone's goal to have their book be #1 on Amazon or the New York Times, but most writers wouldn't mind that, if only for the doors it would open for future projects. For some people, that might be a goal, but with more and more books out there, it's an increasingly fleeting goal these days. Now, there are still exceptions, like Harry Potter, but those tend to prove the rule.
Is that just because there are so many more books out there? One would think that even with a bigger selection, the ones that capture enough interest to be #1 bestsellers would do so over a long period of time. I have a feeling that this relates to a larger matter that we've discussed in the context of cable TV: if you can pick and choose channels specifically related to your interests, then the end result will be that there won't be any one channel broad enough to capture everyone's interest. The #1 channel will be something that edges out the others because 51% of the public like it, not because it's of better quality than the rest, and when the margin of #1 is that slim, you'll get a lot of change as the margin of error swings back and forth.
I think books are going in that direction. Not that there aren't books that could appeal to everyone, but that there are so many with a more specific narrow appeal that people gravitate to those first. The Da Vinci Code has more legs than I would've thought possible; of course, it's getting a bump now from the movie buzz. I can't think of another book aside from Harry Potter that I've really seen everyone reading in the past five years.
Which, y'know, is reasonably good news for those of us who pander to specific narrow interests...if we can just broaden them a little bit, we could be #1, if only for a day.
Lest I spend too much time focusing on the minutiae of writing, I thought I would take a minute to talk about characters, as some comments on older works of mine mentioned that they thought the characters were a strong point.
I am a very character-focused writer and reader. I liked Asimov's Foundation Trilogy, but I never really wanted to read them again, and I think that's because there were no characters that really grabbed me. The appeal of Foundation is the universe Asimov built and the ideas he was expanding on, and while I admired and enjoyed those, they didn't engage me. By contrast, Tim Powers, whose work I recently wrote about, also creates a fascinating universe with interesting ideas, but he populates his universe with much more memorable characters.
In my own work, I find that my main characters tend to be less memorable, but I (apparently) create enjoyable secondary characters. Which is an interesting distinction. The main characters don't have much personality, but they seem real. We see them through the focus of the events of the story and we judge them by their reaction to what happens. Okay, I misspoke a little. They do have personality, but it's not a quirky memorable kind of personality. It's the kind of personality that lets the reader identify with them. Whereas the secondary characters can be drawn in broader strokes. We view them through the perception of the main character, as they're elements of his or her world. I think I wouldn't want a main character that was TOO quirky, as that distracts from the experiences of the book, but maybe, as I think of it, that's an artifact of the type of writing I gravitate to: single character focused. If I had a broader narrative that jumped between multiple characters, maybe they could all be more colorful without harming the story.
Colorful or not, it's important to me that they seem real, and I'm always happy when I get feedback to that effect, as I did recently for one of my stories. And I can always tell when I haven't spent enough time trying to get into a character's head, because they come out flat on the page. For me, that's the beginning and end of any story I write: start with a character going on a journey, and end with the knowledge that the character became real enough to me that the journey made sense and accomplished its goal.
As part of one of my revisions, I've gone back to examine a scene in a story to see whether I can get a better effect by having one of the characters recount the events in the scene to another rather than showing them directly. More specifically: rather than showing a fight between a bunch of kids, I'm rewriting the scene to show one of the kids telling his father about the fight later. The difference is in what impact I want the scene to have. The fight itself doesn't have much tension to begin with; it's told in flashback anyway, so we know the kid survives and how things turn out with the other kids. The thing I really wanted to give a sense of is the disparity in social standing between our hero and the other kids, and I thought the fight did that well enough. By changing the scene to the kid telling his father, though, I get to show the kid's perception of the other kids as well as the father's perception, and as a bonus explore the relationship between the father and his kid, which is something I was trying to bring out more.
Replaying events through a character's description can be a powerful device, giving you not only the details of the event but revelations about the character in showing what parts he or she chooses to emphasize, gloss over, or leave out. However, it does (of course) rob the scene of any narrative tension (unless, in this case, it's whether the dad will give his kid a whuppin' for fighting). It may also rob the scene of critical details, because people in retelling won't have the narrator's onmiscient eye, and giving them that eye ends up seeming contrived. "Oh, yeah, Dad, I noticed that their clothes all looked neatly pressed."
In this case, I think I don't need all the details (though I've already written them and I hate to toss 'em out), and I'd rather show the interaction between the kid and his father. So I hope this will work better.
A recurring theme of this journal, no doubt, will be treatment of the anthropomorphic animal characters that tend to show up in my work. When presenting a story to an audience conditioned to expect and like that kind of character, fine, no explanation needed, except maybe enough to fit them into one of several archetypes: four-foot, two-foot, plantigrade, digitigrade. For an audience without those preconceptions, the process of explaining what the characters are has to be quick and painless, and therefore has to use images and concepts that exist in the mainstream. Again, if it's just a smart/talking animal, not so much a problem. "Fluffy lounged in the afternoon sun, occasionally lifting her head to tell her pet, Carol, to open another can of cat food." But if the characters are more humanoid, then what?
I think this relates to the big question: what element of the story requires a humanoid animal character? When bringing in those descriptions of the characters, be sure to relate it back to that part of the story as much as possible. If it's the differences from humans that matter, emphasize those. If it's more of a parable with furry critters subbing for different social classes, highlight the species differences.
And then you get into what to call them. "Anthropomorphic animals" is unwieldy and too vague, anyway, applying as it does equally to Hazel from "Watership Down" and Disney's Robin Hood. The term I've come across most recently that I think works is "human-animal hybrids" (thank you, President Bush). That gives you a definite starting point that implies physical attributes of both humans and animals, and the most natural result is a humanoid creature with animal traits. The reader can then wait for you to fill in the animal traits.
I'm going to try that one out, but if anyone has other thoughts, I'd love to hear them.
