Words Deferred

Writing With a Zoom Lens

The biggest delight of writing fiction, at least for me, is the joy of creating places, characters and events from pure imagination. But this act of world-building is only the first step in telling a story.

To compare fiction to film, this is like set dressing, costumes, and blocking. The final step, and in many cases the unsung hero, is the way the story is imparted to the audience. It’s the swivel and pan and zoom of the camera; the edit, or in the case of fiction, the words we use to describe those places, characters and events.

The Zoom Lens

A zoom lens lets the camera get intimately close for that first kiss, or pan way out to show the vast world that these lovers have somehow traversed to find each other. Good cinematographers understand how seeing a scene from different angles and distances can greatly affect how that scene is perceived.

The “zoom lens” of fiction is the level of detail you choose to employ for a given scene. The level of detail can change over the course of a single scene, or across scenes; the literary equivalent of zooming in and out.

Take a look at the opening of Douglas Adams’ Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy:

Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the Western Spiral arm of the Galaxy lies a small unregarded yellow sun.
Orbiting this at a distance of roughly ninety-eight million miles is an utterly insignificant little blue-green planet whose ape-descended life forms are so amazingly primitive that they still think digital watches are a pretty neat idea.
This planet has—or rather had—a problem, which was this: most of the people living on it were unhappy for pretty much of the time. Many solutions were suggested for this problem, but most of these were largely concerned with the movements of small green pieces of paper, which is odd because on the whole it wasn’t the small green pieces of paper that were unhappy.
And so the problem remained; lots of the people were mean, and most of them were miserable, even the ones with digital watches.
Many were increasingly of the opinion that they’d all made a big mistake in coming down from the trees in the first place. And some said that even the trees had been a bad move, and that no one should ever have left the oceans.
And then, one Thursday, nearly two thousand years after one man had been nailed to a tree for saying how great it would be to be nice to each other for a change, a girl sitting on her own in a small café in Rickmansworth suddenly realized what it was that had been going wrong all this time, and she finally knew how the world could be made a good and happy place. This time it was right, it would work, and no one would have to get nailed to anything.
Sadly, however, before she could get to a phone to tell anyone about it, a terrible, stupid catastrophe occurred, and the idea was lost forever.
…
But the story of this terrible, stupid Thursday, the story of its extraordinary consequences, and the story of how these consequences are inextricably intertwined with this remarkable book begins very simply.
It begins with a house.

This opening zooms steadily inward. It starts at the edge of the galaxy, then zooms in to earth. It encompasses the entire breadth of human evolution and the problems of the entire human species before centering on a specific time and place, and a single, unnamed girl. After settling for only a moment, it pans away again, finally leaving us with the house.

The house belongs to the book’s protagonist, Arthur Dent, and the book zooms in on him and his house in the following chapter.

Adams, being who he is, uses this introduction to throw in some silliness. But he’s also zooming in on a particular time and place while simultaneously reminding the reader that this story will be about bigger things: the wider galaxy, the vast span of time, and the entirety of human civilization.

Show and Tell

One of the first rules of style that young writers learn is “show, don’t tell.” This oft-quoted and frequently misunderstood rule warns of the dangers of saying what happened (“He got on the subway.”) rather than describing the action in detail (“He took the litter-strewn stairs two at a time down to the subway platform, jumping the turnstiles and slipping through the doors just before they closed.”)

As new writers gain experience, “show-don’t-tell” starts to chafe. Sometimes it feels perfectly reasonable to tell. Maybe there’s an uninteresting span of time that needs to be elided. Perhaps the reader needs to know that something happened, but not the details of how.

The truth is that the overly vague “show” and “tell” of this rule are really just different adjustments of the zoom lens. When deciding how much to show or tell, it all depends on the amount and type of detail.

Time, Pacing, and Emotional Distance

When the story is zoomed-out (i.e. told with less detail), time contracts. It takes fewer words to describe a wider span of time, and the reader might cross years or centuries in the span of a sentence. Zooming in means describing that time span with more words. The reader spends more time getting through that portion of the story, literally making time feel like it is passing more slowly.

This has a fundamental effect on the pacing of the story. If an action scene needs to feel fast and frenetic, the details are necessarily going to be limited. Imagine a kung-fu battle where each punch and kick is described with an entire paragraph of prose. It begins to feel like slow-motion. The same fight, described with multiple attacks and blocks in each sentence will feel fast and fluid.

For similar reasons, the level of zoom also affects the emotional distance between the characters and the reader. In the opening of the Hitchhiker’s Guide, it’s difficult to feel any sympathy for these humans who misunderstand their unhappiness and try to fill their empty lives with money and digital watches. At a slightly tighter zoom, it’s a bit easier to feel some interest in the unnamed girl whose epiphany would solve the world’s problems. But it’s the following chapter, where the view is fully zoomed-in, that we can really sympathize with Arthur Dent as he discovers that he has to unexpectedly stop a construction crew that wants to knock down his house.

We experience the world at a personal pace, fully zoomed-in on our own viewpoint. Fiction allows us to zoom out to the edge of the galaxy, or traverse centuries in a sentence, but the closer the story comes to a character’s personal view of time and space, the easier it is for a reader to sympathize with the character and take an interest in what happens to them.

Revising With the Zoom Lens

The zoom lens is a great editing tool. Sometimes, a story that isn’t quite working just needs an adjustment to the zoom. If readers think that a chapter is boring, consider “zooming out” a little and trimming less important details. If a character feels a little flat, “zoom in” on their thoughts, dialogue or actions to give a better sense of what drives them.

There are many ways the writer’s zoom lens can be applied, but common applications are adjusting the pacing (less detail reads faster) and the emotional distance (more detail tends to get closer to the characters).

While characters, plotting, and world-building are popular topics for writers and important building blocks of the story, all of those things only reach the reader through the lens of individual words. So be your own cinematographer and pay attention to those lenses, and how they affect your story.

Razor Mountain Development Journal — Chapter 1

Welcome to the Chapter One development journal. For these journals I’m going to talk about what I worked on in a given chapter of my serial novel, Razor Mountain. These journals will be spoiler-free, as long as you’re caught up with the latest chapter.

If you want to check out my pre-production journals (which are definitely not spoiler-free) or the book itself, visit the Razor Mountain landing page.

So Much Prep

Sometimes I envy exploratory writers. They just jump right into writing the story, feeling it out as they go along. But then, I remember my days as an exploratory writer, and the pain of half-done books that just didn’t seem to go anywhere, or the sudden realization that I needed to throw away and rewrite a whole slew of chapters, and once again I accept my fate as an outliner and planner.

I spent a lot of time in pre-production on Razor Mountain. Close to a year. Part of that was figuring out things like how to write a book description or create a book cover, since I’ve never self-published before. Most of it, however, was extensive outlining.

I knew that this was going to be a serial, and I was going to be writing chapters and publishing them without waiting for the whole book to be done first. That means no opportunity for big rewrites or even adjustments that span multiple chapters. I already outline to try to avoid that sort of thing, and the scariness of publishing as I wrote drove me to outline in even more detail than I typically would.

I have also never documented my process in nearly as much detail as I have in these development journals. A side-effect has been that I am much more aware of what I’m doing every step of the way, and just how long I’m spending on it. It’s easy to let things slide when I’m just typing in my little corner of the basement, with nobody watching.

Now I’m aware that I have an audience (however small). I try to be as honest as possible in these journals, but I do sometimes think about whether I’m going to be boring my readers when I’m really slow to make progress. I’d be lying if I said that didn’t affect me a little.

So, of course it’s exciting to be releasing the new thing. Even if it is a little nerve-wracking too.

Starting the New Thing

Anyone who outlines knows that weird feeling of finally starting to write the book after spending ages just outlining. It’s a very different set of skills. I’m always mildly irritated by my own writing in the first draft, and doubly so in this first chapter.

It’s almost a trope at this point, but the best way to deal with a first draft, at least for me, is to just power through. I have my outline and I know what happens. I just need to write it. I can come back later and worry about finding the right words.

While I was writing the first draft of this chapter, I got bogged down in research several times. It made me wonder if I should have spent yet more time in pre-production on research. But again, at some point you have to stop preparing and start doing, if you want to actually get something done.

Researching Planes and Falling to Your Death

Christopher is flying in rural Alaska, where towns and villages range from tens to a few hundred people. Most of them are inaccessible by road, and since traffic is so light, these flights run small aircraft.

I researched a variety of small aircraft that are used commercially. The Beechcraft King Air seemed like a great example. It’s been in production for decades and is often used for this kind of smaller flight. There are a variety of different models, with capacities around 5-16 people. I give myself some room to be vague here by not specifying exactly where Christopher is flying to, and since he doesn’t know anything about aircraft, it’s reasonable that he doesn’t know exactly what kind of plane he’s flying in. I use this leeway to fudge a few details, taking attributes from several different small aircraft.

I searched for images of the interior, the exterior, the cockpit, and diagrams of the layout. I wanted an idea of how much space you’d have, sitting inside one of these. Where would you put your luggage? Where are the interior lights? What do the controls look like? Where are the doors? The bathroom? That sort of thing. One of the best resources I found were actually websites that list small plane sales, because they post galleries of interior and exterior pictures to show off the planes for sale.

Some details that caught me by surprise, having never ridden in a plane like this, is that they often have pairs of seats back-to-back, so one faces forward and one faces backward. They also may have no bathroom, or a “bathroom” that amounts to a toilet with a privacy curtain.

Action and Feeling

One of the challenges in this first chapter was to perform a little bit of build-up and introduce the situation as Christopher realizes how wrong everything is. Once I get to the point where Christopher has realized the trouble he is in, and he’s flying the plane, getting frantic, and preparing to jump, it all gets more exciting to me. I tried to focus on Christopher’s emotion and what he was feeling.

I was worried about researching the plane layout and how it flies, as well as the mechanics of falling a long ways into water without dying. Ultimately, this is all set dressing. What is really going to make or break the chapter is getting across what it feels like to be Christopher in this crazy situation.

Revision

The first draft of the chapter ended up being longer than I expected: just over 5000 words. (Usually my chapters skew on the shorter side.) I felt a lot better about it as I wrapped it up than I did when I was in the first 1-2000 words. I felt like I had a much better idea of what I wanted this chapter to be.

This is the introduction to Christopher. I work in hints of his back-story and bits of personality, although the focus is on action and feeling. By getting inside his head during these dramatic events, I can start to build a bond between the reader and Christopher. Hopefully. It’s always hard to tell if you’re pulling off the magic trick until you see how the audience reacts.

Because this is the start of the book, I spent a lot of time working on the first page and the hook in particular. I think it’s wise to make the first page the most polished part of any book.

It’s a little unfortunate that I’m starting with the trope of the main character waking up, but I do think it makes sense in this context (and as the book goes on). The opening ties into several events that will happen later on, so I wanted to set up everything I needed to make those links.

Using Multiple Services

At this point, I’ve been blogging long enough to be fairly comfortable with WordPress. It has its irritations and inconsistencies, but for the most part, it stays out of your way.

When I started uploading the first chapter to Wattpad and Tapas, I immediately felt ill-prepared. It turns out to be slightly annoying.

Firstly, I had to deal with formatting. I’ve been using something close to standard manuscript format in Scrivener, but for publishing online I needed to convert to no tabs, and space between paragraphs.

Secondly, Wattpad doesn’t let me schedule an episode for release. I can save a draft, but I have to manually push a button to send it out into the world. As a software developer who has spent years automating repetitive processes like this, it’s an affront. Every post I’ve published on this blog for the past year has been written in advance and scheduled. Tapas and WordPress let me schedule posts. Why doesn’t Wattpad?

Tapas has its own oddities, however. It only lets you schedule posts in PST. Why? It’s not complicated to shift the time zone a few hours in my head, but still, I’m confident I’ll screw this up at least once over the course of publishing the whole book.

Onward

While it felt like a lot of work to do the initial setup, I got it all up and running. Now I just need a few chapters to get used to the process of publishing across multiple platforms each week, and do it efficiently.

See you next week, for Chapter Two.

Razor Mountain — Chapter 1.3

Blackness swallowed the orange light. It pulsed red with his heartbeat. The plane had crashed in a fiery cataclysm, and it had somehow engulfed him. He felt nothing. His muscles refused to respond. He was dead. A ghost. Or some remnant that soon would be.

A moment passed. Another. Feeling came back to him: pressure pushing from every direction, crushing inward. His vision was blurry and stinging. Recovering from the immediate shock that had forced the air from his lungs, he instinctively sucked in a breath and found himself choking.

It came to him, as he struggled for air, that the thunderous pain he had felt was his body hitting the water. The explosion of the plane only happened to coincide. The darkness lightened in faint increments. Christopher wondered how many miles he had plunged beneath the surface of the water.

Like everything else, breaching the surface came as a complete surprise to Christopher. The cold air needled his face. He coughed out an unbelievable amount of water, trying desperately to hold his mouth above the surface. Just as he thought he might have gotten most of it out, he went under again for a moment, sucking in a fresh mouthful that led to another round of gagging and coughing.

He finally managed a few quick, shuddering breaths of freezing air. It felt like breathing electricity. It arced down his limbs, into his fingers and toes. Everywhere it touched, fresh pain blossomed into his body. The pulsing black-redness encroached on his vision again and he had to fight it back.

His thoughts had been sluggish on the plane, even under the terror of his situation. The strange disassociation between body and mind had somehow gotten him this far. Now, with the impact of the water and the cold electricity suffusing him, he was fully awake for the first time.

He could breathe. He could swim. His body hurt all over, but there was an entirely different level of pain shooting up his right leg. With his newfound awareness, he knew that the water and the air were too cold. Though it was ostensibly early autumn, winter had clearly started seeping up into these Alaskan mountain valleys.

Whatever rational part of his brain had been guiding him up to this point, it was gone now. All that was left was the eerie sound of the water lapping all around him. Christopher didn’t need a guiding voice to tell him that he had to find shore as quickly as possible.

He pushed his leaden limbs through the water. It was like swimming through molasses. He was not a strong swimmer — God, how he knew he was not a strong swimmer — but he managed a fumbling breast stroke. Here and there, his hands shattered thin sheets of ice on the surface.

This wasn’t the first time he had found himself frantically swimming toward shore. As a child, he had once gone too far out, not fully understanding the differences between lake and ocean. In that case, he had been rescued. He had been a child, but uninjured. Now, he knew there would be no one bringing him to shore. He was grown, but might very well have broken the bones in his legs.

It took so much concentration to simply keep pushing forward that he didn’t notice the shore until it was close. He looked up, trying to muster the energy to continue, and saw a rocky shoreline. The sheets of millimeter-thin ice were smashed and piled up along the rocks under tufts of scrubby grass. Boulders loomed on the slopes beyond, which rose to a stone shelf some fifteen feet high.

Christopher redoubled his efforts, managing to cover more than half the distance before he had to pause again. Despite the intense exercise, he was shivering uncontrollably. He clenched his teeth to stop them chattering. He let his legs sink under him, stretching his toes and discovering that he could just barely touch the lake bottom. He took a few deep breaths and paddled forward.

His strength gave out with little warning, and he suddenly had trouble holding his head above the surface. As he went under, he scrabbled with his feet and found the bottom once more. It was shallower, enough that he could stand with his head tilted and barely keep his mouth above water.

His right leg was in bad shape. He had to push off the bottom with his left. Even a small amount of pressure on the right was excruciating. He fought the urge to reach down and check for protruding bone. He couldn’t pull his knee up anyway.

Pushing with his leg was faster than swimming, at least until the shallows where he had to stand. He took a moment to confirm that there were no jutting bones and nothing was horribly twisted. He tried to put all his weight on his left leg, but it was still too much strain on his right. He got halfway up before it gave out and he splashed down onto his right hip. The pain was a white sheet that covered him. He couldn’t see or feel anything beyond it. He couldn’t tell how much time passed before he was aware of himself again.

Unable to stand, he crawled through the shallows. This was no sandy beach. The lake bottom was covered in smooth-worn lake rocks, with occasional sharp bits that had tumbled down the slopes more recently. Christopher had little feeling in his fingers and suspected they would be torn up by the time he reached shore.

The final gauntlet the lake placed in front of him was five feet of rough gravel beach caked with razor shards of thin surface ice. He crunched through it painfully.

He looked up from his ground-level drama to find the nearest tree. It was a gnarled pine with clumps of finger-length needles. He set this as his target and continued crawling into the crispy, freeze-dried scrub grass. He was shaking with fatigue and pain now, as well as cold. Harsh wind sucked heat from his wet body. His clothes were already stiffening.

The lowest branches of the tree were five feet up the trunk. Christopher propped himself onto his left knee and grasped the deep crevices between chunks of bark. Finally hauling himself into a standing position, he kept his weight on one leg, hugging the trunk while he caught his breath.

It was incredible that he had survived all of this. The jump from the plane. The swim to the shore. The sort of thing they’d write about in world record books, or at least one of those “Strange, But True” articles. Really a shame then, that he would die of hypothermia after all that.

He thought he felt his shivering subsiding, though the creeping numbness made it difficult to tell. He knew that was the beginning of the end. Shivering meant the body was at least fighting for warmth. When it gave up the fight, you were really in trouble.

Now that he was on his feet, he wondered what good it would do him with one good leg. He probably wasn’t thinking clearly anymore. He probably hadn’t been thinking clearly at any point in this debacle.

He managed to move a few feet with a couple awkward hops, from the gnarled pine to the slanted rock face. He could see a deeper shadow among the rocks, an indentation in the side of the cliff that might offer some small shelter from the wind.

It was a little easier hopping along the wall, his left hand steadying him. The rock had fractured in fist-sized chunks, leaving plenty of handholds. He had to stop to breathe and recover from the pain between hops. Time was something theoretical to him now, not actually felt in any meaningful way. He had never been so exhausted. This, he thought, is what it feels like when all energy leaves the body. This is what it feels like to die.

The alcove in the rock, as it turned out, was deeper than he expected. It was more like a shallow cave. As he hopped inside, he found that he didn’t feel cold anymore. Probably the hypothermia, more than being out of the wind.

The little cave was the size and rough shape of a doorway, but it still came as a surprise to Christopher when he found a door set into the rock a couple feet inside. It was a very sturdy-looking gray metal door with dime-sized rivets around its perimeter. A thin strip of glass was embedded at eye-level, but it was covered with grime and frost. Christopher could see nothing but darkness behind it.

The door had a large handle embedded near the center, clearly intended to rotate. It was not dissimilar to the one Christopher had used to open the airplane door. A perfectly flat strip of rock had been cut away along the right side of the door, and embedded into this was a small box with little metal buttons bearing numbers from zero to nine.

“This must be the hallucination part,” Christopher whispered to himself. He normally made an effort not to talk to himself, but it hardly seemed worth it at this point. He jabbed a finger at the keypad, firmly pressing the “5” key in the middle. It depressed with a satisfying click, a bit like dialing an old pay phone. There was no readout or any other indication of the key he had pressed.
“The password isn’t ‘five’ then,” he muttered.

He was having a hard time keeping his eyes open. Even leaning against the door, he was barely able to stay upright on his one decent leg. Still, it felt right to make at least one attempt at the code before sliding into oblivion.

He decided that the code to his garage keypad was as good a guess as any. It was his birthday.

111183.

That was what he decided. Apparently his fingers had different plans. He was wavering. He observed that the code he entered was not the code to his garage keypad. It was not his birthday.

122, he observed.

199 followed.

There was the deep hiss of oiled metal on metal, followed by a surprisingly loud thunk behind the door. Christopher grasped the long handle with both hands and pulled. It held firm.

Good attempt, Christopher thought. “A” for effort.

A thick crust of dirt or ice broke free at the point where the handle connected to its axle, embedded in the door. The resistance gave way, and Christopher’s shoulder slid. The handle groaned, shedding the last of the caked-on gunk, and the handle rotated home, landing at the opposite end of its arc with another solid thump.

The door immediately swung open on huge, silent hinges. Christopher followed it, sliding, then falling. He landed, again, on his injured hip, but the pain was muffled in his fading consciousness. It was happening, but so far away. He rolled to his final resting position, on his back on some sort of smooth, warm floor.

The doorway was embedded a half-step up the wall, so that the door banged fully open, then ponderously swung over him, back the way it came. It blocked the faint light of the stars and moon beyond.

On the floor, in the utter blackness, there was nothing left to do. No more shore to find, no more tree to crawl to, no more strange doors or number pads. Christopher could stop. He could rest. He let go, and sank down, deep into the darkness.

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Razor Mountain — Chapter 1.2

Christopher sat in the pilot’s seat. He still felt like a passenger, panic-stricken and helpless while his body seemed to act of its own accord. There was some part of him that knew what it was doing. A part he wasn’t familiar with. A part that took in the situation without emotion and formulated a plan.

The lights and screens in front of Christopher flickered and died. He had touched nothing. The noise of the engines changed timbre, then cut out entirely, leaving only the roar of the wind.

He looked for landmarks through the windows. If he was anywhere close to his original destination, the only human habitation this far north would be small towns and villages. He didn’t see any lights on the ground.

Tentatively, he gripped the flight stick. This felt like a point of no return. He knew nothing about the plane, but it had apparently been flying itself. Was there an autopilot? In any case, he was introducing his own control into the equation. Whatever happened next, good or bad, would be his own fault.

The plane was going to crash. That was an inescapable fact. He probably couldn’t land a plane under the best conditions. Were there parachutes? He didn’t know where they would be.

A crash would almost certainly kill him. People survived plane crashes sometimes, but it was all down to luck. Would it be better to jump? Avoid the crash altogether? Without a parachute, he’d be splattered across some mountainside.

People jumped out of planes in action movies. They’d jump an absurdly long distance, land in water, and be running and gunning a scene later. Of course, that wasn’t real life. Still, real people jumped long distances into water. Cliff divers. Olympic divers.

He tried turning the plane, ever so slightly to the left. His instinct told him that he would have to really muscle the yoke, but it was actually a lot like driving a car. The plane slowly banked to the left. The nose nudged forward as well, and Christopher had to pull back to keep it level.

It was eerily quiet without the sound of the engines, leaving only the noise of the wind across the outside of the craft.
Christopher continued to bank gradually left, afraid that any attempt at a tighter turn would send the craft spinning out of control. He squinted into the dark landscape below, looking for the telltale glint of moonlight on water. All he saw was a shadowy mix of pines and rocky ridges.

When he finally saw water, he immediately realized he had two major problems. First, it was difficult to tell exactly where the water was. A glint here or there didn’t tell him how big the body of water was, or where the shore was. Second, he was very high, moving very fast. He didn’t know how big the waves on a placid mountain lake might be, but they were barely pinpricks of light from his vantage.

He tried to hold the plane in a wide, lazy spiral, in hopes of slowly descending while keeping the lake in view. The plane felt sluggish, and Christopher quickly discovered that his own internal sense of balance was fighting him up in the air. There was no flat horizon for reference. He was surrounded by jagged peaks, indistinct against the clouded sky. He felt the plane accelerating, nose too far forward, but when he pulled back to compensate, he had the sudden sensation that the nose was far too high, headed toward a catastrophic stall.

Christopher felt panic reaching up from his stomach into his chest. He he had been holding his breath, and his teeth hurt from clenching. He had no training. There was no way he could keep the plane level, and it was even more far-fetched that he’d be able to manage a nice spiral down to the water.

Instead, he turned the plane until the moon was more or less behind him, then tipped the nose down. He thought the water was beneath and perhaps behind him now. The plane was descending fast. The trees below, still indistinct, felt uncomfortably close. Facing the nearby mountains, snow-dusted ridges aglow in the moonlight, he realized that he was now below the tops of the larger peaks. If he kept going, he would crash head-on.

He continued in the same direction as long as he dared, feeling like he could vomit at any moment. He could only guess at the distances. Finally, he began to turn. He kept the nose of the plane slightly down, and felt the pressure of the g-forces before he realized he was in a much tighter turn than before. The entire airplane shook.

“Jesus, Jesus, Jesus,” Christopher said under his breath, yanking the control back the other direction. Now the nose was too high. Christopher could see stars peaking through the clouds, directly ahead. He couldn’t see the ground.

His mind was blank with fear. He had no idea how to control this thing. He was going to die.

At that moment, an overwhelming sense of detachment hit him. He felt his adrenaline-soaked body, but it was like a machine he was driving — one step removed from him. Likewise, his panicked thoughts were muffled, like someone was shouting in a room down the hall.

That other part of Christopher, detached from the emotion and the bodily chemicals, guided him. Look for the moon. Aim toward it. Find the moonlight on the water as you approach.

It wasn’t like talking to himself, where he was really carrying both sides of a conversation. This felt more like some internal filter had shut down. Like a door had opened in his chest, allowing these instructions in his guts to make their way up to his brain.

Wherever the instructions came from, they had a better grip on the situation than he did, so he did his best to follow them. With the nose of the aircraft already too high in the sky, it wasn’t hard to find the moon, still some 45 degrees to his left. He stopped fighting the controls and let the plane continue its too-tight bank toward the moonlight. He did his best to tip the nose back toward the earth.

The moon moved toward the center of the windshield, then continued past, still accelerating. Christopher pulled back slowly, still keeping the nose down. He nearly fell out of the seat. The plane shook so hard he thought it might break in half. The moon was high and at an angle now, but coming back in the right direction.

The clouds around the moon parted, imparting fresh light on the landscape, and Christopher became aware of a ridge as the plane was passing over it. It could have been five feet below, or fifty.

He didn’t see the glint of the moon on the water until it was already beneath the plane. How big was the lake? Was it too late now? Wasn’t he still too high up?

It doesn’t matter, the internal voice told him. There was no way he could bring the plane around again, and even if he could, the moon would be behind him and it would be nearly impossible to see the water. It wouldn’t matter how high he was.
Jump now, and there’s a chance. Wait, and there isn’t.

Christopher forced himself to let go of the controls, jumped out of the seat and tried to run down the narrow aisle between seats. He misjudged how tilted the plane was, and veered hard into a seat, knocking the breath out of him.

He continued down the aisle, struggling to breathe, grabbing the chair backs and pulling himself more than walking. The nose of the plane was plunging now. He reached the back of the plane, the rearmost seat quickly becoming a ledge that held him on a steepening slope. His backpack and the other luggage strained at the netting that held them. There would be no time to extricate anything.

Christopher half-crawled, half-climbed the rear seat to reach the doorway. It had a lever slightly inset, with a helpful red arrow painted beneath. He pulled it in the indicated direction with a satisfying “thunk.” It barely opened, thrumming in the wind.

Christopher had expected it to slam open or even be torn off, but the door faced the wrong direction — the airflow was holding it closed. He gave it a shove, but was only able to move it an inch or two before it slammed back.

He found a foothold in the metal connections between the seat and the floor, pressed his back and shoulder against the door, and pushed. The handle dug into his back. The door gave a few inches, and he held it, trying to push hard enough to lock his knees. The gap was wide enough to force an arm through. He took a deep breath and shoved again, trying to force his upper body through. As the roaring wind whipped at his hair, he tried not to imagine what would happen if the door slammed shut with his head in it.

Squirming and shoving, Christopher forced his upper body through the door and became intensely aware that he was hanging out of a plane. The clawing fear in his chest tried to reassert itself, but the calm calculation that was driving him left no room for doubt.

What he was doing was insane. He would probably die. But the alternative was to definitely die. There was no time, and there was no room for argument.

He pushed with arms and legs, the metal door scraping his back and stomach and tearing the hem of his shirt. He felt a button pop, and then, as though that were the last thing holding him in, he slid out of the aircraft and into the night sky.

He tumbled violently end-over-end, first screaming and then vomiting into the cold night air. He wanted to curl into a ball, to hide from the wind that tore at him, but that quiet internal voice told him he needed to stabilize and orient himself. He flung his arms and legs out wide, centrifugal force aiding him against the wind, his tumble slowing to a ponderous pirouette.

A shoe tumbled past. It was his own, pulled off his foot as he slid through the plane door.

There was a sudden flash of light, an instant sunrise, followed a fraction of a second later by a shockwave of heat and noise. Christopher had just enough time to register a fireball outlining trees and rocks in searing light, and pull his limbs in before he was engulfed in pain.

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Razor Mountain — Chapter 1.1

The cave was night-dark and claustrophobic, crowded with indistinct shapes. Christopher struggled to identify his surroundings through eyes bleary with sleep. All around him was loud buzzing; it permeated his body. He pressed his palms to his eyes and breathed deep, trying to clear his head.

His surroundings were shadowy, but Christopher could make more sense of the shapes around him as he blinked away his grogginess. The hunched shapes were seats. He fumbled around, felt the thin padding beneath and behind him, felt the armrests.

Christopher’s perception shifted and he understood what he was seeing. Not a cave; an airplane cabin. Why had he thought it was a cave? Moonlight illuminated the small, round windows. The prop engines buzzed. Now that he was paying attention, Christopher could feel their vibration through his seat.

He tried again to blink away the sleepiness that clung like cobwebs. Even when he had pulled all-nighters in college, he hadn’t felt this brain-dead. This was worse than a hangover.

The other salespeople had warned him against sleeping on planes. Better to hold out and hit a new time zone running. They all had their little rituals and superstitions for effective travel. He had rolled his eyes, but it all seemed less absurd now, as his brain pounded against his skull.

He tried to stand and found himself still seat-belted. He fumbled the clasp open and got to his feet, immediately banging his head on the sloped ceiling above. For a moment, pain cut through the fog of his thoughts.

It was too dark in the passenger section of the little plane. Before he had dozed off, Christopher recalled little LEDs along the aisle floor between the seats, and recessed lights hidden in the seam between wall and ceiling. This little plane had pairs of seats back-to-back, and he was facing the tail. He had to turn around to face the front of the plane. There were only eight pairs of seats in the passenger area, and Christopher’s was in the middle.

The seats were all empty.

Christopher took a few tentative steps forward, sidling up the narrow aisle. Nobody was slouching or sleeping against the window. The seats were definitely empty. Hadn’t there been passengers on the plane with him?

He struggled to remember, stepping back toward his own seat. There were two pairs of seats ahead of him, and one pair behind. Beyond that was the tiny toilet that faced the boarding door, the privacy curtain open, the toilet unoccupied. What little space was left in the tail end was taken up by the luggage area, separated from the passengers by netting that attached to hooks along the walls, floor and ceiling. The netting was detached from several of the floor hooks. Christopher’s travel backpack lay on the other side, next to a black duffel bag and a large travel suitcase with a blue and green floral pattern. Those other bags weren’t his. They had to belong to someone.

He tried to think back to boarding the little plane in Anchorage. It felt like a long time ago. Christopher had never tried any drugs stronger than alcohol or coffee, but he wondered if this was what it might feel like. Like there was a gauzy separation between his sense of self and the thinking part of his brain.

There had been a person, a man, who had stepped onto the plane before him. Younger, Christopher thought. Dark hair, parted. Jeans and a brown sport coat. The coat stood out vividly. It was a very “70s TV professor” look that reminded Christopher vaguely of the suit his father had worn in old wedding photos.

There had been a middle-aged woman too. Older than Christopher, maybe in her forties? She had boarded after him and gone to one of the front seats. All he could picture of her was a tight bun of blond hair, loose wisps of gray at her temples.

Had they landed and taken off again, all while he slept? Wasn’t it a direct flight? He found his boarding pass in his pocket, but it was impossible to read the smudged text on the low-res picture of Alaskan mountains and forests. Why was it so dark?

In the curve where ceiling met wall above each seat, there were shapes and depressions. Christopher ran a hand along them, trying to find some button or control for the lights. He found what felt like a vent, and what might be a light in a sort of ball socket that allowed it to rotate. There was no control for the light, as far as he could tell.

The plane shuddered and lurched, forcing Christopher to grab on to the seat back. He froze as a thought meandered through the maze of his brain. He looked toward the front of the plane.

He had only ever flown on large commercial flights. He was used to thinking of the passenger area of the plane being a separate universe from the pilot’s cabin. He had vague memories of a time before 9/11 when kids could meet the pilot in the middle of a flight and the cockpit was wide open and friendly, but all of his adult life, the doors to the front of any passenger plane had been locked like a vault.

On this little plane, however, there was only a curtain between the eight passenger seats and the two-seat cockpit of the plane. Christopher could ask the pilot to turn on the interior lights. He could ask what had happened to the other two passengers. He’d probably feel like a fool when the pilot explained the flight plan that was no doubt printed on his boarding pass.

He felt a heart-thumping trepidation sidling up the aisle toward the cockpit. He tried to think exactly what he wanted to ask the pilot. The plane lurched again, and Christopher fell forward. He tried to grab the faux-wooden partition that bordered the curtain, but missed and got tangled in the curtain itself.

The curtain was attached to a rail with metal rings, and there was a series of snaps as they tore away. The curtain slid to the side, and Christopher stumbled awkwardly against the partition, halfway into the cockpit, left arm still wrapped in the curtain.
The only light in the cockpit came from the glow of the instruments: panels of LEDs, switches, buttons, dials and levers, and three small monitors. They illuminated two empty seats.

Christopher stared at the myriad instruments for a moment. The monitors showed a little representation of the plane superimposed over lines that must be altitude or angle or something, and a crawling topographic map of mountainous terrain, overlaid with dozens of readouts, numbers, dials and graphs.

Christopher knew there were reasonable explanations for the missing passengers. He had no trouble coming up with potential explanations for that. When he saw the pilot’s seat empty, however, his mind stopped working for a moment. There was no explanation for Christopher being on a plane with no pilot.

He looked through the front windshield. They were definitely in the air. The moon was visible among wispy clouds, off to the left. The darkness below was rough and textured: pine forest and snowy rock. Glints of moonlight on water. The ground appeared worryingly close, but it was difficult to tell by the moonlight.

Christopher could feel his own heart, beating too fast in his chest. He heard his breathing over the buzz of the prop engines. He looked past the curtain, down the aisle to the luggage area at the back of the plane. He was incredibly alone.

The mental fog that had surrounded him since he woke now threatened to envelop him completely. He was numb. He was aware of his own hands shaking, but he couldn’t feel them. His body was something entirely disconnected from him.

He felt something else: a wordless voice, a stream of dispassionate information at the back of his head. It told him, with neither interest or judgment, that he needed to act immediately or he was going to die.

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Changing Characters: Evolution and Transformation

There’s a popular truism in fiction writing: rounded characters, and especially protagonists, need to change over the course of the story. Now, you might argue that characters don’t always need to change, or that you want to focus on other engines to drive your story. But let’s say you do want your character to change. You want that change to be believable, and you want that change to meaningfully affect or even drive your plot.

In that case, let’s talk about two strategies for making that character change happen: evolution and transformation.

Building Character Background

Characters usually don’t spring into existence at the start of the story. They have history, and that history should affect their current personality, their fears, and their goals. Characters need reasons to be who they are. This gives them depth and makes them believable.

If your character is going to change along the course of your story, they need to have a starting point — a steady state that gets disrupted by the events of the story, leading to change. For the change to make sense, the character has to start in one place, with certain ideas or point of view, and end up seeing things differently by the end.

By this logic, a character change can be broken down into four parts:

The background that shaped the character before the story.
The state of the character at the beginning of the story.
The event(s) that change the character.
The state of the character at the end of the story.

These parts don’t all need to be given equal attention. There may only be hints of the backstory. They also don’t have to be revealed in order. Many great villains initially appear to be unreasonably evil, until their background is revealed later in the story, humanizing them.

In my opinion, one of the easiest ways of figuring out character transformation is to start with #2 and #4. If you know where your character starts, and where they’re going, it’s just a matter of coming up with the reasons why they are the way they are, and the troubles you’re going to put them through to force them to change. However, you can really start with any of these and build out the others. It all depends on what aspect of the character comes to your first, or excites you the most.

Now, let’s look at the actual methods of changing the character during the story.

Sudden Transformation

The sudden transformation is the epiphany, the “ah-ha” moment, the shocking twist, or maybe even the sudden-but-inevitable betrayal.

The sudden transformation is a form of character change that happens all at once…or at least appears to. There is a particular event or short period of time where the reader sees the exact nature of the change. This is usually going to be an important point in the plot. If the character is a protagonist, it almost has to be.

This might be an event where the character’s strength becomes a weakness, or vice-versa. They may undergo something terrible and develop a debilitating fear, or they may be forced into a situation where the only way forward is to overcome their fear. The event might make the character’s goal obsolete, and introduce a new goal. Perhaps they wanted to save someone from the villain, but they failed, and the villain killed that person. Now they have a new goal: revenge.

Superheroes are great examples. Many super-heroes have a sudden transformation where they gain their super-powers and also undergo some event that gives them a reason to use those super-powers.

Peter Parker is bitten by a radioactive spider, and he can suddenly run up walls, shoot webs, and smack a bad guy with every limb simultaneously. His first instinct is to use his powers selfishly, but his uncle Ben is almost immediately killed by a criminal, making Peter realize that he has to use his powers to help others.

Let’s look at a more villainous example: the Darth Vader of the original Star Wars trilogy. Vader spends all three movies working to crush the rebellion and bring Luke to the dark side. Only at the very end, when Luke has pleaded with him and Vader sees his son about to die, does he kill the Emperor, sacrificing himself to save his son.

You may notice that most of these sudden transformations aren’t completely sudden. It often helps to throw in a few moments or bits of dialogue that lay groundwork for the change, essentially preparing the character for that vital moment. Peter Parker has conversations about responsibility with Ben before he dies. Luke repeatedly tries to convince Vader to leave the dark side before the final battle.

Slow Evolution

In contrast to the sudden transformation, where character change happens all at once, the slow evolution requires a longer series of events and revelations that add up to something larger than the sum of their parts.

The character may go through events, conversations and internal realizations that eventually lead to a change in perspective. The character may or may not realize that they’ve changed, but it should be evident from their words or actions that they’re behaving differently than they did before.

On the other hand, this series of small changes could culminate in a moment of realization when the change becomes clear, or impossible to ignore. This is often a decision point for the character. Whereas a sudden transformation comes as a shock that makes sense in retrospect, the slow evolution makes it clear that this moment is what it’s all been leading to.

To contrast with Vader’s sudden transformation, look at another character from the original Star Wars trilogy: Han Solo. Han starts out as a loner, worried about his own problems. He is willing to use people for his own ends, and he tries to avoid getting too close to others. However, Luke draws him into a rescue operation with the allure of a reward, and from there, he ends up entangled with Princess Leia and the Rebellion.

Han’s past catches up with him when he’s caught and imprisoned in Jabba’s palace, but it’s his friends who rescue him: proving once again that being a lone wolf is not a good strategy for him. By the third movie, we find that Han is not only a willing member of the rebels, but is marked as a leader and even volunteers to lead a dangerous mission that is vital to the success and survival of the rebels.

Alignment With the Plot

Characters don’t exist within a vacuum. They interact with other characters. They drive the events of the plot, and the events of the plot affect them in turn.

One of the most effective ways to make character change feel momentous to the reader is to make sure it aligns with the plot. In a traditional three act structure, this means that the most powerful places for character change to occur is at the boundaries of the acts.

Events at the beginning of the first act may influence or illuminate the personality of the character for much of the rest of the story. The end of the first act and the start of the second is typically a major disaster or setback that might cause a character to reevaluate (or double-down!) on their point of view. Likewise, the end of the second act and start of the third usually leads into the point of the story when things look bleakest for the protagonist, and when they are most likely to see a need for change, or have change foisted upon them. Finally, the end of act three is when the plot points resolve. This might be the culmination of a character’s change, when they have the opportunity to make a decision that really highlights the difference from the beginning of the story.

Change is Powerful

It’s always worth evaluating who your characters are, and how they change over the course of a story. Where do they start, and why? What do the events of the story do to them? Do they undergo a slow evolution, with many little points of change along the way, or a carefully foreshadowed sudden transformation? Look for opportunities to align the change with story beats, and use it to drive the action.

Characters have a history that affects where they start. They have experiences that affect who they are, and can subtly or fundamentally change them. Those experiences and that change are one of the reasons we read fiction, and some of the most emotionally impactful parts of a story when done well. Carefully crafted character change is one of the best ways to make characters spring to life, jump off the page, and endear themselves to readers.

Razor Mountain Development Journal #47

This is part of my ongoing series where I’m documenting the development of my serial novel, Razor Mountain. Be forewarned, there are spoilers ahead! You can start from the beginning here.

Last Time

I added and updated the fiction sections of the blog, and I set up Razor Mountain on Wattpad and Tapas.

Reminiscing Before The Starting Gun

Forty-seven weeks. That’s how long I’ve been working on Razor Mountain.

I brainstormed and researched. I outlined and outlined again. I created an author profile and a book description. I made a book cover. I wrote the first couple of chapters, revised them, sent them out for feedback, and revised some more.

As I did all that, I took you along for the ride and did my best to document the whole process in these journals. I hope you found it useful, or at least interesting, to follow along.

It’s been a long journey. The better part of a year, and about twice as long as I originally expected it would take. Now, everything is ready. Mostly. As it turns out, it always feels like there’s more I could do to prepare. I think a lot of writing is like that. You can always put in more time and eke out a little improvement. But at some point you hit diminishing returns and you’ve got to move forward.

This is the last pre-production journal. It’s time to publish, baby!

There’s Gonna Be Some Changes Round Here

I’ve settled into a comfy blog cadence:

Monday – A post about writing craft
Wednesday – A mini-post or reblog
Friday – A Razor Mountain development journal

Starting next week, I’m adding Razor Mountain episodes into the rotation. I’d like to post a chapter a week, but it will depend on how quickly I can write and polish them. I’ll also be splitting longer chapters into multiple “episodes,” since serial services (and readers) seem to prefer lots of smaller episodes.

I’ll still be writing these journals, but I’m going to switch to a journal per chapter instead of one per week like I’ve one up to now. I’m also going to continue writing my usual weekly post about craft.

The new schedule will look something like this:

Monday – A post about writing craft
Tuesday/Wednesday/Thursday – One or more Razor Mountain episodes. Sometimes a mini-post or reblog.
Friday – A Razor Mountain development journal

Not too different. Just a little more nebulous around the middle of the week, and hopefully with even more content. I’m still keeping the weekends open, because I don’t like weekend deadlines, and because I generally see more traffic during the week anyway. Lots of you coming into the office on Monday and reading blogs. I see you.

Results

I did more little revisions on Chapter One and Two. Like picking a scab. I worked on Chapter Three. I figured out how I’m going to adjust the posting schedule to accommodate Razor Mountain episodes. And I vacillated between nervousness and excitement about publishing.

Reblog: NaNoPrep: Signing Up and Getting Started — Connie J. Jasperson

Last week, I talked about the good and the bad of NaNoWriMo — National Novel Writing Month, where the goal is to write the entire first draft of a novel in the month of November. Now, November is almost upon us. Are you going to participate?

If you’re on the fence, or you’re just not sure where to start the whole process, take a look at Connie J. Jasperson’s latest NaNoWriMo prep post for a guide to getting a project set up on the NaNoWriMo site.

If you don’t like to plan, you can just start writing after Halloween midnight. If you’re an inveterate planner like me, that strategy might feel overwhelming. Luckily, Jasperson has you covered, with an entire series of NaNoWriMo prep posts linked at the bottom. They’ll get you figuring out your setting, characters, story arc, and more.

Check it out on Jasperson’s blog, Life in the Realm of Fantasy…

Asking For Feedback

No matter what I’m writing — short story, novel, or something else — I’ll start with a first draft, do some amount of editing, and then feel the need for feedback. No matter how great you are at editing and revision, you can’t catch everything. In fact, if you’re me, you can’t catch a lot of things.

As I’m working on my serial novel, Razor Mountain, feedback is going to be interesting. While I’m going to start with a buffer of a couple completed chapters, I’ll be publishing as I write. Unlike my normal process, I’ll be interleaving the first draft writing, editing, and incorporating feedback for different chapters.

Regardless of the project you’re working on, getting feedback is critical to making your writing the best it can be. However, it’s important to understand that you’re not just throwing a manuscript over the wall to your reader and expecting them to toss back some notes. To get the most out of your readers, it can and should be a collaboration!

Who Is Your Reader?

When you’re asking for feedback, consider who you’re asking. If you have friends and family who are willing to read, that’s a fantastic resource. Many writers have a spouse or trusted friends who act as beta readers. You might also have writer friends, a critique group, or fellow writers on a critique website.

The largest differentiator between your early readers will probably be between “regular” readers and fellow writers. Readers tend to look at what they like or dislike about a story, and point out typos and grammar issues. Writers are much more likely to think about story structure or word choice, and to think about how they would do it were they writing your story.

If you use the same readers for several projects, you’ll get to know what feedback they’re good at giving. If you use a big online critique group or service, you might get different people every time. In either case, there’s a simple way to stack the deck in your favor and get more of the feedback that you want. Ask for it.

Know Your Weaknesses

First, think about what your own weaknesses are. What mistakes do you make? Writer, know thyself! The easiest way to do this is to pay attention when you’re editing. Keep track of the errors you fix and the things you improve.

For example, I love asides in the middle of sentences — like this one — and I have to restrain myself when it comes to em-dashes, parentheses, and sometimes colons.

I also tend to hedge when I’m not entirely sure about a moment in the story. For example, I might say that a character felt angry when or seemed upset when it would be more forceful to just say that the character was angry or upset. And then, I usually try to do away with that telling entirely, and show that the character is angry or upset through their actions or words.

If you don’t already pay attention to your editing like this, taking inventory of your foibles as a writer is a great way to improve. It’s also a way to build up a list of things for your early readers to look for.

What Are You Worried About?

When I write, there are some parts of the story that are rock solid. They’re straightforward and I know exactly what I want to do. I write them, and it comes out pretty well. Then there are other parts of the story where I’m less certain that I’m doing the right thing. I know there’s room for improvement. I feel like the character’s actions don’t quite match their personality, or the story is taking a detour, or the words just don’t fit together in the way I’d like.

You’ve probably had similar feelings. We all have parts of the work that we’re worried about, for one reason or another. That’s great. Those are perfect targets for your beta readers. Let them tell you whether you’re right to be worried, or doing better than you thought.

Asking For What You Want

Now we get to the crux of it. You have a list of your writerly tics and foibles. You know the parts of your story that you’re worried about. And you have some readers waiting in the wings.

If you have readers with a particular set of skills, you can always sic them on specific problems. Maybe you have a reader who is great with grammar and spelling. Don’t feel bad telling them to focus on those things. Don’t prevent them from bringing other issues to your attention, but cater to their strengths.

If you have readers who are generalists, or you’re not sure what their feedback strengths are, you can always include a few bullet point notes with your manuscript to guide them. Have them pay attention to a particular character that you’re unsure about, or particular scenes. Also consider whether you want to put these notes up-front at the start, guiding your reader to pay more attention to that particular thing, or at the end where they will prompt your reader to reflect on your concerns after they’ve finished reading.

You don’t always have to be extremely specific either. Maybe you’re worried that your comedic sidekick character, Phil, is unlikable. Rather than asking that directly, you might just ask how the reader feels about Phil. You can suss out their feelings without guiding them too much in one direction or another.

Guided Feedback is Great Feedback

Almost any beta reader feedback is going to be beneficial. When you find good readers, you need to take care of them and nurture them as a precious resource. You’ll find that they’re even more effective when you ask them for the kind of feedback you want.

Nobody knows your story-in-progress better than you do. If you have concerns about some particular part, there’s a good chance they’re justified. Use your beta readers to shore up those weaknesses and turn them into strengths, and your stories will be better for it.

Razor Mountain Development Journal #46

This is part of my ongoing series where I’m documenting the development of my serial novel, Razor Mountain. Be forewarned, there are spoilers ahead! You can start from the beginning here.

Last Time

I continued revising and editing chapters one and two. I created a book cover that I’m satisfied with.

Preparing For Launch

I have to admit that I slacked on the writing front this week. I made small tweaks to my first two chapters, but I’m waiting on reader feedback to do another big editing pass. I really need to get myself in “writing mode” if I’m going to start pumping out weekly episodes. Luckily, if there’s anything having a blog has taught me, it’s that deadlines are a great motivator.

There’s really not that much left to do before I embark. However, there are still a few of those non-writing tasks that need to be done. First, I finished setting up a Razor Mountain project on the two services that I’m planning to use for serial publishing: Wattpad and Tapas. I considered some other services, or even something like Substack, but I think it will end up being a lot of busywork keeping these updated along with the blog. My hope is that publishing on multiple platforms will increase visibility, but I’m also going to be evaluating their strengths and weaknesses for future projects. I may stick to one in the future, or dump them for something like Kindle Vella (which has exclusivity requirements).

I already ran into one annoying issue: while Tapas allows scheduled posts, Wattpad does not. That is a real downer for me, since I always prefer to schedule posts, and it would be nice if I could post new parts everywhere at the same time. Wattpad will just have to be a little out of sync.

Site Improvements

While I’m writing for the sake of writing, I do hope that posting Razor Mountain on other services will bring some new readers to the blog. In anticipation of that, I did some cleanup and improvement that I’ve been meaning to for a while.

I spruced up the Razor Mountain page by adding the book cover and description. I also added pages for microfiction and drabbles under the fiction section, so those little stories aren’t buried in old posts. Finally, I updated my “About” page with my author profile.

I’ve been looking at changing the blog theme, but I haven’t found a theme that I’m entirely happy with, so the search for that will continue. I may also make adjustments to the home page.

Results

I added and updated the fiction sections of the blog, and I set up Razor Mountain on Wattpad and Tapas.