I just discovered (well, last week, but I'd already written posts by then) a new blog called storyfix.com, maintained by one Larry Brooks. While I'll admit he pushes his 'how to write a novel' book a little too loudly for my taste, a lot of the posts I've been reading so far have been great. Two in particular on story structure present great visual aids for structuring your story. They're PDF's (and pretty large PDFs at that) but they're great visual conceptualisations of story structure, arcs, plot points and turns.

On a completely different note, Dan Wells had a great article on the inherent commercial difficulties in using dramatic, world-changing events in your story - that it means the world that readers fell in love with no longer exists, and can't (easily) be used for other tie-ins, merchandise, sequels or other fund-generating avenues.

And on a more humerous angle, Michael Stackpole has a great article about how much spammers seem to know about him, and (drumroll) there's a new Simon's Cat video out - whee! Also, love the concept behing Neil Gaiman's recent tweet: I dreamed that people from Wikipedia came round to your house to adjust reality if it differed from what they had online. Given some of the discussion pages I've read on wikipedia, my gut response is *shudder*.

I've always loved stories with double meanings, things that leave it to the audience (or reader) to decide one way or another. Not just 'does this happy ending last', but the meaning of the piece altogether. Margaret Atwood's A Handmaiden's Tale is perhaps the best example of this I've ever seen. It's something I've tried several times myself in short stories - unsuccessfully so far. I suspect that's largely to do with the fact that I couldn't decide / never knew which of several versions was actually happening, which made it impossible to write clearly. That and I always aimed for something far too complex to be ambiguous.

Having just seen Inception, which pulls this trick off beautifully, I think I'm getting a better idea of just why my previous attempts fell apart.

Writing games are tricks, exercises, things to try to get your writing brain in the mood. I find them useful when a story's giving me trouble - I can't think of a way out of the corner, or I can't think of a corner to get into, or I'm just not feeling in the right mood to write that story - as well as generating new ideas, and just keeping my writing-mind in shape. And on the plus side, they're usually fun to try, and you can end up with the germs of some great little stories.

Downsizing

You can do this with a story you already have, or write one specifically for it. The challenges are different for either - perhaps working from an existing story is closer to the 'spirit' of things - you might be inclined to 'cheat' with padding if you're writing one for it, but either works. This is also a really good exercise if you're struggling with a query for a novel, or if you're trying to figure what a story's actually about.

Start with a story that's at least 1000 words long. Your first challenge is to rewrite it in 500 words*. It must still work as a story - a beginning, middle and end, logical progression, arcs, prose that pulls the reader along. That means you're not just converting the story from 'show' to 'tell', and you're not just cutting out every second and third sentence. It has to be reimagined, re worked.

Don't start from a "what can I cut" perspective - it'll take forever, and won't work. The story will have to change or simplify - maybe the perspective, the details or the way you're telling it. Fewer characters, more straightforward plot. That's okay, it doesn't damage or change your original story - what you're doing is giving yourself another perspective on what the story really is.

Once you have your 500 word version, take that version (not the original) and write it in 100 words. Again, you'll have to simplify and streamline it to get it to work as a story within the limit.

When you have your 100 word story, make it a sentence. A whole story in a sentence. Here's where you'll have to be very economical with words - nothing can be wasted. If you doubt you can, just think of Hemingway's now near-legendary six word story - For sale: baby shoes, never worn.

*If you're working with a novel, try going to a few thousand words first, and then to 500. 100,000 to 500 can be a little difficult.

Writing games are tricks, exercises, things to try to get your writing brain in the mood. I find them useful when a story's giving me trouble - I can't think of a way out of the corner, or I can't think of a corner to get into, or I'm just not feeling in the right mood to write that story - as well as generating new ideas, and just keeping my writing-mind in shape. And on the plus side, they're usually fun to try, and you can end up with the germs of some great little stories.

Working Backwards

I find this helps on the days when everything coming out of your brain is foul sludge from the OverWritten Swamps of the planet Cliche, when I know where I need to be, but not how to get there, or for [insert individual reason here] I'm finding a scene particularly impossible.

It breaks your mind away from the standard word-after-word process, and stops you focussing on the wrong areas of your craft, and frees you from the standard "what happened next" approach that can stall your mind.

You can do this one at word level, sentence level, paragraph level or even chapter/page level. My personal preference is sentence level - it's far easier to put a paragraph together backwards than it is a sentence, and inserting entire paragraphs behind each other feels to much like cut-and-paste - your mileage may vary, of course. So:

Write the last sentence of your story (or chapter, or scene). Write the sentence that comes right before that.  Write the sentence that comes before that. Work your way back to the start of the paragraph. Repeat with either the previous paragraph or the next paragraph, depending on which works better for your brain.

And you have to build it backwards - no cheating by deciding working it all out fowards first. I find it works best on a computer, where insert-stuff-before-here is simple. If you're stuck with a notepad and pen, write them one after the other, so the story's in the "wrong" order, then transcribe it into the right order when you edit.

Alternatives

Word level - build the actual sentences backwards. Last word, then second-last word, then third-last word, etc. Paragraph level - build the scene or chapter backwards, writing each paragraph forwards. So, write te last paragraph in a scene, then the secon- last, third-last, etc. Chapter/Page level - build the entire story backwards. Write the last chapter (or page, if it's a short), then the second-last, then the third-last, etc. Combine any or all of the above.

Now that I have other projects out the way, I'm redeveloping the blog a little in terms of content - I have a tendency to write lengthy posts, and they take up a lot of the time that I'm supposed to be using for writing. So, in the interests of snatching some of that time back and introducing more variety to the blog, I'm bringing in some new concepts for some of the regular posts.

One of them is writing games - tricks, exercises, things to try to get your writing brain in the mood. I find them useful when a story's giving me trouble - I can't think of a way out of the corner, or I can't think of a corner to get into, or I'm just not feeling in the right mood to write that story - as well as generating new ideas, and just keeping my writing-mind in shape. And on the plus side, they're usually fun to try, and you can end up with the germs of some great little stories.

Random Objects

It's a simple game: look around you, right now, and take six to ten objects. Try to make them mostly unrelated; if you're in an office, look out the window as well, or in the fridge, on your coworker's desk, open a book to a random page and take the first noun you find. Six to ten objects.

Now put them in a story - and not as background fodder, make these objects integral to the story - the stapler is the reason someone got fired; the chocolate body paint in the fridge is somebody's lunch (true story, that). They can't all be the MacGuffin, obviously, but at least one of them has to be central to the plot.

The point is to make your brain stretch for how someone could get fired over a stapler, what kind of colleague would enjoy chocolate body paint on toast.

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.

Playing on the reader's expectations is elementary - which way will they go, which man will she choose, who will survive, who is the villain? A lot of what draws the reader along is wanting to see their expectation subverted in some way - we see the couple end up together, but not for the reasons we thought. They choose the seemingly worse idea, but it turns out better than the other could have. You give the reader what they expect, but twisted. Robert McKee's Story goes into a lot of depth on this, and is well-worth the read (despite his snarky comments about novelists).

You can, of course, attempt to give the reader no idea what to expect. There's a choice - who is the better man, which is the dream or the reality, and the audience is given no meaningful clue as to which is the correct choice. They have no indication which way to sway their expectation. It can make for a far-more-entranced reader, but at a cost.

I wrote a while ago about breaking your own rules, where the audience isn't given the expectation for some crucial elements of your world or story. Here, however, I'm talking about an altogether sillier version - breaking rules that you have specifically enunciated to the reader.

Inspired once again by Doctor Who - the second half of the Weeping Angels. Amy, for retcon-reasons we won't go into, has to keep her eyes shut and navigate a forest with Angels in it. Angels are a perculiar kind of alien that, as explained by Ten in Blink, don't exist when they're being observed - as soon as they're seen by any living thing, they turn to stone. When Amy inevitably encounters the Angels, she has to 'walk as if she can see', to fool the Angels into thinking she can see them, so they won't kill her. When she (of course) gives her blindness away, the Angels attack.

Not at all inspired by Moffat's new and improved Weeping Angels on Doctor Who last night, of course (I know it's magic pretending to be science, but is it too much to ask for a little narrative consistency?)

Retcons - "retroactive continuity" - are rife in television and film, where continuity takes second, third, or fourth place to the whims and wishes of the director, the execs, the screenwriter or even the marketing department. In novels it's rarer, but not unheard of (J.K's wand lore in Deathly Hallows, anyone?).  A retcon is a usually-game-changing factoid that, when introduced in a later story makes a previous story no longer sensible. Take the wand lore example - as there are already a half-million copies of this argument on the internet - in early books, the wand chooses the wizard, and wands don't work as well for wizards who aren't their masters. In book seven, a wand changes allegiances away from a disarmed master. Which means, as everyone goes through duelling practice at school, pretty much nobody's wand works properly anymore as a matter of course, and there's no way of knowing who the real master of anyone's wand is. And what happens if you defeat a wizard whose wand already thinks it's somebody else's anyway? Erk.

 

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. 

So, you've now trawled through your entire, sprawing manuscript, carefully refraining from line edits and rewrites as you went, and pieced together your super-synopsis of what's actually going on in those pages, and when. Those outline-first authors out there: does it match your plan? Is that chapter really as compelling / important / moving as it was in the plan? Did you spend an unexpected amount of time talking about something else entirely?

If the answer's "no", then you either took shortcuts with your synopsis-making or were so unbelievably disciplined with outline-following in your writing that I fear you may've ironed out the creative spark of that novel completely. But I digress.

As I said last time, novels are too big to think about all at once. You can look at the general story or the minutae of a scene, but you can't hold all of them in your head at the same time and think about how they're working together. So, step one - we condensed the novel into who, what, where, why, how, and added some notes and ratings on theme, action, character arcs, etc. But that synopsis is likely stretching at least a page per chapter - useful, for later, but still too big for the moment.

Fantasy has a great love affair with prophecies. From King Arthur to Eragon, prophecy is to fantasy what DNA traces are to CSI screenwriters - overused, underutilised, and usually nonsense.

They come in two flavours, usually:

We're All Doomed (but really I just meant that it'll be a little bit rainy on that day, everything's going to be fine.) We're Going To Win (but there's going to be a really big kick up the bum for somebody).

There's occasionally a prophecy like 'everyone will wear hats on Thursday' but unless you're Terry Pratchett, prophecies are rarely so incidental to your plot. In fact, they're usually the whole plot: Here is the Hero, Here is the Prophecy, Here is the Resolution, Hah, I bet you didn't see that coming!

Well, yes, that's exactly the problem. We did.

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?

 

 

The days of the Three Volume Novel are long since past. They were popular last century, when printing and binding were expensive, and novels were often first serialised in periodicals prior to publication. Part 1 was used to whet the reader's appetite for parts 2 and 3, ensuring an otherwise expensive purchase. With books being relatively rare, and life in general slower, readers were prepared to wait for the next installment to be printed - although usually, the books had already been written, edited, serialised and just needed to be bound and printed.

But a three volume novel is not a book series.

A book series is, at the risk of being obvious, a series of stories. Each story in the series is discrete, complete and structurally stands alone. It may rely on information in the previous books, but it has a hook at the beginning, a well-shaped structure, and closes off its end-points in the final chapters. It satisfies the reader with an ending, even if some of that ending leaves room for the rest of the story. Even if there's an overarching plot for the entire series, each book has its own plot that comes to a satisfying resolution.

The three volume novel does not do this. It's the one story chopped into three pieces. And it just doesn't work anymore.

There aren't many things you can do that'll have me instantly piffing your book to the other side of the room. Sure, if your book violates multiple 'Good Writing' rules, like introducing twelve narrators in the first hundred pages, having an ancient species evolve under a blue hypergiant that still exists, and failing to grasp the basic process of stellar formation, I'll plonk your book down unfinished in my 'don't bother' pile, and pick up the next.

The 'next' will not likely be a book by you. You're in literary-Azkaban, unless you've previously proven yourself of good standing.

But I do like to give a book a chance. A clumsy line here and there, a plot hole, a character whose motive's a little contrived, or some worldbuilding that went a bit askew with the laws of physics - I can forgive these. We're all friends here. But I do have pet hates. And of them, the unimaginable monster is one of the worst.

Just pondering a thought that occured yesterday, when ruminating absently about a book I semi-reviewed a while ago (because thinking about thinking about thinking is clearly a valuable use of my time) - Jaqueline Carey's Kushiel's Dart. A large part of the plot was made up by a character sketch so common it's bordering on cliche, if it isn't already. The unusually-intelligent would-be leader of savages wants his people to have the kind of life that the protagonist does. It doesn't really matter what kind of life it is (though it almost invariably involves capitalism, a supreme (rather than clan) leader and a greater industrial capacity, with better luxuries) just as it doesn't really matter what kind of society the savages have to begin with. The point is, the White Man  protagonist has it better.

When I got over my disappointment with discovering an irritating cliche in a book I otherwise enjoyed, I started musing - what brought this about, and why - when we are so clued in to the various White Man makes a better Native than the Natives Do stories - does it seem to slip under the radar?

 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.