I watched the finale of a show that I like (that shall remain unnamed, as it hasn't yet aired in Australia). It was unusually dark, even for a show that opens up some heavy psychological worm-cans on a regular basis. A character was staring in the face of complete despair, alone and desolate, and considering throwing away everything he'd worked for over the season, even though he knew it would cost him the only thing left that he cared about.

And then, just at the precipice, a rope was thrown. Love was offered, and understanding. Everything was going to be alright.

And it was sickening.

I've just started watching Castle, where Nathon Fillion's famous crime author helps the police with detectiveness. It's a delight to watch, despite the premise being so old it buys second-hand clothing with its pension. Though as I say that, I can't actually think of where I've seen it before, off the top of my head. Aside from Bones, which is similar-but-not-quite - Brennan was helping the police before she wrote the book, after all. I'm certain that I've seen the author-helps-police concept floating around, though. And I'd swear I've seen another character on film or TV pinning down the secrets pasts of those around him by the way they hold their coffee. Although the releasing "Castle"'s novel on Amazon's definitely a cute idea.

It's happened to everyone. You're writing along, chest-deep in the groove of the story, barrelling forward, and in walks a character you've not seen since the start of the previous novel. Everyone turns to look at them, and - wait, what did they look like, again? Did they have a weird speech mannerism? Do they like sushi?

What do you do? Stop everything and trawl through your work, looking for previous references? Skip over this bit with big FILL THIS IN LATER notes? Wing it and promise yourself you'll check it later (hah)? Whatever you do, your stride is now broken, the engine of story that was driving you along now sputtering and flicking on its fuel light.

And it's entirely avoidable.

 

Grief's an odd thing, especially for writing. It's not an everyday kind of emotion like anger, hatred, love, jealousy, or any of the other standards in the character playbox. In fact, I'd argue that it isn't even an emotion, but a mental state, like depression or mania or delusion.

As writers, grief is a difficult thing to communicate subtly. Where emotions have easily recognised shorthands - the clenched muscles of anger, the narrow-eyed petty sniping of jealousy - grief is not a cookie-cutter feeling. Each person journeys through a process entirely unique, based on their own personal baggage and their experience with the person, creature or thing they have lost. Some people cry. Some scream. Some turn to alcohol for numbness, others are numb in their own right.

Even the process we're given - the five stages of death, or five stages of grieving - are not one-size-fits all. Not everyone goes through all five stages - some may not travel through any, but instead opt for a far less recognisable way of dealing. 

 

So, we have swathes of information in hand, now. Treatments, loglines, plot and character arc flaws, and tension and pacing problems. All (hopefully) nicely organised so you can pull together all the aspects and problems of a particular chapter, arc, act, character or storyline with ease.  The whole time, I've been reiterating "don't fix it yet", "don't touch", and "just note what's wrong". Hopefully it's become clear why you don't dive in a fix the first problem you see - a lot of those problems are iceburg tips, or perhaps smoke signals from a problem much further away, or surrounded by other problems that aren't as apparent. Fixing things right off the bat is like sweeping the ice chunks off the titanic - it does nothing to fix the big problems, and you're going to wind up doing it over and over.

So, are we up to fixing it yet? Well, no. As you might have guessed from the title - we're not quite there yet. On the plus side, all this analysis will hopefully mean when we do come to the actual rewriting, you'll be itching to get your fingers back to the keyboard. But I digress - we've one more vital thing to look at before we start finding solutions. 

So we've created our treatment, our logline, and made notes on what isn't working with the plot and character lines. Now we have our novel in miniature (treatment), complete with mission statement (logline) and a note on all the ways and places it isn't fulfilling said mission statement. But we're not done, yet. Remember when I said we'd get to pacing and drama? Well, yes.

Tension is how you tell the reader something is important, how you draw them in to caring about this particular moment more than what's come before. It's not just a matter of making the monster bigger or the reward greater, it's in the writing itself - the rhythm of sentences, the character and narrator focus, the sound and the impression of words. You can make a scene about someone tying their shoes inordinately tense, if you want to. Controlling tension through your novel is a lot of work, but absolutely essential.

Tension, pacing, drama - whatever you'd like to call it - is essential to a novel, but it's not like chocolate topping. You can't just pour some over and make things tasty. Tension in the wrong place is perhaps worse than no tension at all.

So, we have a treatment for our novel - a one-page-per-chapter breakdown - and an act structure, synopsis and logline. Now comes the part where we start looking at all these things, deciding what isn't working and - more importantly - why.

Note that there's no mention of how to fix things yet. Hold off on that until you've found all the structural things that you think need fixing, otherwise you'll constantly be rebalancing your fixes and your original work while you find new problems. So - for now, we're just isolating the cracks in the plot.

It starts out with pulling together a lot of the things we've just been creating:

Make graphs out of those rating systems so you can see the rise and fall (and progressive build, if you used a cumulative system like I suggested) of themes, character arcs, tension, interest and anything else it occured to you to write. Create a table (or another format, if it makes more sense for you) of plot and character information across each chapter so you can easily access one 'strand' of a story at a time. (This is why excel spreadsheets are awesome - you can code it to pull all those together for you). Take your logline, print it out, and tape it to the wall or somewhere easily accessable. This is now the Divine Commandment of your novel; everything must bow to it. 

 

A common trope, particularly in horror or thriller stories, is the throwaway character. The blonde in the tank top who wanders in the monster's jaws, the jock who jeers at the mysterious MacGuffin and promptly snuffs it. It's an excellent and easy way to show the reader that this situation is dangerous, people can and will die, and we need to take these things seriously and not push random big red buttons because they're shiny, but without having to throw anyone we really care about under the bus.

I'm not talking about the big sacrificial scenes at the end of the book, either. Not deaths that mean something - only deaths that are purely there to show the reader that this story means business. To show you that when you are infected by an alien, you die, horribly, and it's something that the characters are justified in being scared of.

But you can't just throw the lambs in wherever, or because you can't think of an easier way. There are some particular ways and means of using them that are essentially verboten, because the damage they cause to the reader's experience of the book is irreparable, especially if the character concerned hits more than one category.

Picked this up a while ago as an Australian fantasy debut:

Can healing defeat the sword? In seasons long past, twin gold-eyed princes sundered a kingdom. Rejecting his twin brother's warrior ways, Kasheron established a community deep in the southern forests. Forgotten by the outside world and protected by the trackless trees of Allogrenia, Kasheron's Tremen community has flourished, with his legacy of peace and healing upheld generations on. But now the forest has been breached by hostile intruders ... Fighting and bloodshed follow, testing even the skills of Kira, the greatest of all Tremen Healers. As well as sharing Kasheron's gift for healing, Kira has inherited his golden eyes and inspirational qualities - she, too, is seen as a leader amongst her people. As the attacks upon the Tremen become more violent, Kira is faced with a terrible dilemma. Should she stay and risk the annihilation of her community, or set out on a perilous journey north to seek aid from their long-lost warrior kin?

 

 

There is a trend in teenage fan-fiction fiction for creating characters with overly interesting eyes. Either they're a completely unnatural shade, cat-shaped or perhaps bioluminescent, but the one I find truly groan worthy is eyes that change colour. Double demerits if the eyes change colour according to the character's mood. Googleplexian-demerits if they're the only character in the world/book with emoti-coloured eyes.

I take comfort in the fact that I'm not the only one, here - somewhere along the way, enough people have noticed this that its made its way into various Mary-Sue litmus tests. I encountered an otherwise-well-written novel the other day whose main character hit the jackpot - the only eyes in the world that flashed gold whenever she was happy, angry, excited, surprised or presumably any emotion other than morose.

On the basis of it being otherwise an enjoyable read and a debut novel, I granted the author the benefit of the doubt and grimaced my way through each passage that was devoted to those damned irises. But I started to wonder - exactly what is it about eyes that change colour that makes them so (forgive the pun) eye-roll worthy?

 

Picked this up while on a small spree a few months ago, largely to see what all the fuss was about. Crime isn't my usual genre, but Larsson's books seem far more 'general fiction that happens to be about crime' than crime novels in themselves, which is perhaps some of the basis for their broad appeal.

The back copy makes the book sound positively pedestrian, sprinkling adjectives like candy around the character descriptions of CEO, journalist and security specialist.  Lisbeth Salander - our girl with the dragon tattoo - is an extremely socially awkward but highly intelligent hacker and investigator assisting Mikael Blomkvist, super-moral but convicted-of-libel financial journalist, in investigating a supposed murder for Henrik Vanger - friendly but manipulative head of a giant (and failing) corporation. There's a fair whack about business and secret accounts in the Cayman Islands, more family members that you can possibly keep track of, and the odd gruesomely violent scene.

 With a book this popular, I feel I have to either love it or hate it. But I'm rather ambivalent. It's not a bad book - Larsson certainly puts enough twists in the story that the reveal of The Big Bad People is a surprise, and the plot itself is fairly strong. But it suffers from the translation - the voice of the novel is clunky and uneven, and the pace is far too slow.

 

It's a decision that most authors seem to make on whim or instinct - who's telling the story? The character who communicates the story to us, whether first or third person, present or omniscient, reliable or unreliable, is integral to the flavour and feeling of the story itself. Imagine Jane Eyre in first person, or Robinson Crusoe with omniscience. If Nick had been someone we could trust to tell us about Gatsby.

Having multiple characters convey your story can add huge depth to it - if that's what you want - each giving their own layer of interpretation and bias. I wrote an honours thesis about using multiple unreliable narrators as a form of characterisation, as Jonathon Safran Foer does in Everything is Illuminated. Multiple narrators allow you not only to explore the arcs of more than one person, or take the story beyond the limitations of a single vision, they can add a rich layer of complexity to the existing story.

 I picked up Sawyer's Wake as part of an "I have a book shop gift card!" spree, from a bookshop that doesn't bother to separate young adult from adult in its (considerably large) science fiction section.

I'm not usually a young-adult-fiction reader - perhaps my own such melodramatic trials are too recent in memory for me to feel anything but tedium for the pangs of first love, schoolyard taunts and peer pressure. And, given the bookshop's all-in-one attitude, I've only got my own judgement as to whether this was aimed at young-adult.

It's certainly got the language for it. Our protagonist, nearly-sixteen, mathematical genius (pause to look up her name again on the Amazon page... not a good sign, folks) Caitlin, talks in teenage-speak, especially on her blog, which comprises a significant part of the book. The story focuses on her regaining her sense of sight (the descriptions of which are done remarkably well) and another, rather more important subplot that I can't delve into for spoilers, sperad amidst the usual teenage boy trouble.

However, Sawyer goes to pains to explain Google, instant messaging, email, binary, Google's page ranking system (and alternatives) and other very pedestrian elements of the internet. Or, rather, Caitlin explains it to us (or has it explained to her). Which is utterly redundant, not to mention boring, for today's young-adult reader, who grew up with the internet surrounding them. It's like explaining the desert to an Aboriginie.

 

So I'm rather left wondering who Sawyer was aiming at. Adults are unlikely to be attracted to the gushy teenage voice, and Sawyer's over-explanation of the obvious is likely to grate on a younger reader's nerves. That's not all, either.

 

I nabbed this with glee from the bookshop some time ago, and it gradually filtered up through my giant To Read interdimensional-bookshelf-portal. I knew of (though have not yet located and read) Black Juice, her most famous work of short stories (though I didn't know she's actually produced a fair number of books, most of which are largely unheard of by even the literati, it seems) but she's held a special place in my author-repository ever since a judge somewhere compared my writing encouragingly with hers nearly a decade ago. Ego is a powerful thing.

She became something of an unknown-role-model (interestingly, she also resorts to technical writing 'when the money runs low'), without my ever taking the time to go and research or, you know, actually read her work. 

 

 But - Tender Morsels, her much acclaimed novel released mid-to-late last year, did not disappoint. Except for the parts where it did, but the rest of it was so strong that I didn't mind - ney, I even expected and was happy to receive - disappointment.

 

Last night I had an long, long conversation with my mother, where she did most of the talking. Some things that were upsetting her about life in general needed voicing and acknowledgement. I sat and listened and interjected or questioned where appropriate. It was a conversation that revealed a impressive amount of information about how she thought and felt, how she 'worked' on the inside.

And it occurred to me that this is something you can never do in fiction.

I had a dream the other night, where I had an impossible choice. The six-week trip to China that my partner and I about to take was pulled out from under us: we were separated at the airport, and I found myself aboard a spaceship bound for a 5-year interstellar journey. I was kept in my room, and given the choice to stay on the vessel or go back home. My partner would be given the same choice. The catch was, I had no way of knowing what he would choose until I had already chosen.

If I elected to stay but he didn't, I would wander the halls of the gargantuan vessel for five years while he moved on with his life back home. If I went home and he chose to stay, he'd spend half a decade exploring the galaxy while I lived back in my same-old existence. 50% chance we wouldn't see each other for five years, without even the chance to say goodbye. What would you choose?

This is a review (of sorts) of a book that shall remain Nameless, broken down into all the things it did that you Really Shouldn't Do. Parts one through five are listed here.

There's a tendency in fiction to use shorthand. The characters you're supposed to root for are all uncommonly comely, the enemy is hideous, and the charming sidekicks are unattractive-but-in-an-attractive-way, which has to be one of the more ridiculous concepts I've seen someone try to communicate. This works if you use it well. Most readers are happy to identify with a beautiful protagonist, and willing to allow an instinctive distress about deformation to colour their judgement of the antagonist. Beauty is a valid descriptive technique for a character, and by extension a characterisation.

But it doesn't work when everybody you ever meet is the most beautiful person on earth.

Fire is Cashore's pseudo-sequel to Graceling, focussing on different characters in a different part of the same world - the Dells. Here, instead of Gracelings possessing innate, unsurpassable talent, there are monsters: versions of everyday creatures that are mesmerisingly beautiful (literally - they have mind powers), carnivorous and savage.

Fire - the title character - is a rare human-female-monster, so-named by her mother for the impossibly vibrant reds, pinks and coppers of her hair. She is beautiful, so much so that men lose their heads at the sight of her, succumbing to their basest instincts to possess, rape or destroy.

Fire, however "monstrous" her appearance and abilities, understands and feels the difference between right and wrong. She fears her own power, fears the nightmare she could become if she allowed herself the ease of manipulating those around her. But her kingdom, and those she loves are in dire peril, and Fire must face that fear if she wants any chance at protecting her home.

 

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I picked this up some time ago, while browsing in Reader's Feast for someone else's birthday present. The premise in the blurb intrigued me - inverting the traditional roles of Orcs as savage aggressors, and humans as victims:

Stryke, Captain lf the legendary Orc Warband the Wolverines, though that he had lef them to safety in a realm far from Maras-Mantia. A santucary fom the cruelty of man. But hen a message reaches him. A message from his past. A message of terrible foreboding for Orbs everywhere...

 When I picked it up, I'd never head of Nicholls, and had no idea that this was actually the first book of a sequel-trilogy to the Orcs: First Blood trilogy. Probably the kicker "the orcs are back!" should have clued me in, but it didn't - it actually wasn't until I went looking on amazon (where I swiped the cover image, right) that I discovered the previous series. And  that explained a lot.