Fiction Writing Tips – Page 2

NaNoWriMo Prep-o-Rama

The days are getting colder and the leaves are changing. It’s fall, and we all know what that means for writers: NaNoWriMo is coming.

If you’re not aware, NaNoWriMo is National Novel Writing Month, both an event and the organization that runs it. NaNoWriMo happens every year in November, and everyone is invited to try their hand at writing a 50,000-word novel in thirty days.

I’ve talked before about my mixed feelings toward NaNoWriMo. Years ago, I used to feel like missing a NaNoWriMo was a little bit of a shameful thing for an aspiring writer. These days, I’m juggling many writing projects (and the rest of my life), and I know that writing 1667 words per day isn’t always practical or even beneficial.

On the other hand, I haven’t participated in NaNoWriMo since 2019, and I spent over two years working on Razor Mountain, writing only 2-3 chapters per month. As November gets closer, I’ve been thinking that it might be fun to really jam on a different project and get a lot of words written in a short amount of time. I’m glad I spent the time and effort on Razor Mountain, but that’s a damn long time to be mostly working on one big thing. NaNoWriMo could be a nice palate cleanser.

The Prep

I’m a planner at heart, and I’ve found through brutal experience that if I want to succeed at NaNoWriMo and not burn myself out, I need to have a halfway decent outline ready before November. I want to be able to just write, without having to sit and work out plot points.

I don’t have any shortage of ideas for books, but some of them are much more fleshed out than others. I started Razor Mountain with an idea I had already thrown some words at, and I’m planning to do something similar with this year’s NaNoWriMo project. I don’t have a good title yet, so let’s just call it NaNo23.

I didn’t know NaNo23 was a novel at first, but then I went and wrote 10,000 words, and it wasn’t even close to being done. The upside is that I have a great beginning, with characters, setting and plot to extrapolate. The downside is that I’m not sure what exactly the middle or end will be. That’s what I’ll be working on in October.

Despite a good starting point and some time to plan, I expect to have much less of a detailed outline than I did with Razor Mountain. I’m actually looking forward to that. NaNoWriMo ought to be a little messy. I also don’t expect that I’ll actually finish the book in 50,000 words. That’s fine too. I’ll at least come out of November with a good chunk of something new.

The Project

My NaNo23 is an urban fantasy story in a Victorian England-esque setting. (I haven’t decided yet if this is actual England in some alternate history, or a fantasy homage.) The protagonist is Edward Argent, a man who has worked as both soldier and spy, and has seen a great many things he’d rather forget. He’s a little bit Sherlock and a little bit James Bond (or he would be if he wasn’t drugged up and miserable, haunted by his own past).

The magic of this world is very particular: anybody can do it, but it only works with physical objects. By using a particular object repeatedly, it becomes bonded to a person, and it gains power from use. A chef might use a magical spoon to enhance their cuisine. A soldier might imbue his sword with power. These objects are called “totems,” and a person can only have one. It takes time and effort to imbue a totem with power, and it’s a severe blow to anyone to have their totem broken.

There is another class of magic, however, and this is much more rare. Certain people find that they have the ability to create a totem that is not simply an object, but a living creature. These people are known as hexes, and they are so uncommon that the average person isn’t entirely sure they really exist. If they do exist, their power is far greater than ordinary people. They don’t just make a good soup or fence well. They do proper magic: fireballs and invisibility and even changing people’s thoughts. Hexes understand that their power comes from their animal, their familiar, and two minds focusing on the same magic are far more effective than one.

Then there is Edward. Edward is a special kind of hex. As far as he knows, he’s unique. When he wants to use an item as a totem or an animal as his familiar, he thinks about it and it happens. No great effort, no weeks and months of hard work. He can pick up new skills and new animals whenever he has need. He doesn’t advertise this ability. There are dangerous, powerful people who want to use hexes for their own ends. How much more dangerous would the world be for a hex with special abilities?

The Plan

One thing I learned while blogging through Razor Mountain was that some introspection really helps me stay focused and learn from my writing experience. I’d like to do that here, as well. Unfortunately, NaNoWriMo word goals tends to be a slog for me, and I’m not sure how much I’ll want to be blogging on top of those 1667 daily words.

I’ll probably post at least one more time as I do my October prep, and then a few times about the process throughout November.

If you’re thinking about doing NaNoWriMo this year, let me know in the comments. It’s always more fun to do with others.

Editing and Repetition

I’m still working on revisions for my novel, Razor Mountain. As I read through the chapters, looking for possible improvements, I’m constantly on the lookout for repetition, repetition, repetition.

Is it bad to do the same things over and over? That depends. There’s a lot of rhythm and structure to writing, and repetition can be an important tool if you’re doing it on purpose. It can be an element of personal style or provide structure to a piece. Unfortunately, repetition is often accidental: something you naturally do without realizing, a literary crutch or a sign that you haven’t put enough thought into some aspect of the work.

This is one of those cases where reader feedback is extremely useful. It’s hard to see these problems without an outsider’s perspective, because they naturally live in our blind-spots. When a reader notices repetition, you should scrutinize it.

Shortcuts

Writing fiction is an incredible challenge, because there simply aren’t enough words to fully describe a complete character, setting, or event. All writing is inevitably cutting out information; choosing what is important and what is not. It’s not surprising that writers take shortcuts. We’re constantly looking for things like a phrase that implies a character’s entire thought process, or a description of a smell that transports the reader to a location in the story.

There are also gaps in our thinking. No writer can think through every single detail of a story. There are always shadowy areas of uncertainty lurking around the edges. Even in the areas that we do put thought into, there can be dangers.

The human mind is a little bit like a hive of bees. Sometimes all those buzzing little thoughts work in concert toward a common goal, and sometimes the subconscious goes and causes problems while the conscious mind is not paying attention. We see this every day when people over-use favorite words or insert their verbal tics without even realizing it.

The Process of Noticing

The easiest way to find these troublesome repetitions is by outsourcing the job to others! Readers who aren’t familiar with your story will have a much easier time taking it at face value. After all, you have the best version of the story in your head, and that version will get mixed up with the words on the page, no matter how much you try to keep them separate. Readers have to suss out that story from mere words on the page.

There are also ways of getting more outside your own head. Reading the story out loud is a classic trick for changing your mode of thinking and catching problems that you wouldn’t otherwise catch. Reading out-of-order, a paragraph or sentence at a time, is another trick for assessing the words without getting lost in the flow of the story.

Danger Words

I’ve already mentioned in previous posts that I’m making a list of individual words and phrases that show up too frequently in my own work. For me, many of these words are “softening” or “weakening” verbs and adverbs; words like seemed, mostly, some, early, almost.

Interestingly, you might be able to discover something about yourself and your process by catching these issues. I suspect that I use these kinds of words reflexively, as a way to avoid fully committing to a description or idea. If I’m not entirely happy with the way I’ve described something, I use these words as a way to distance myself from my own description. Of course, that reflex doesn’t make the writing better, it makes it worse.

Luckily, as I notice these words, I can now reassess the description. If I think it’s actually good, I can remove the wishy-washy language and fully commit to my original intention. If I think it’s bad, I can change it.

Another common repetition I’ve found are vague adjectives, like little or flat. These words can add some value, because they refine the reader’s mental image of an object or idea. A little door is certainly more specific than a door, and a flat boulder is more specific than a boulder. The problem is that neither of these descriptions are very specific (how little is a little door), and they’re not as evocative as other adjectives or phrases I could use.

Opinions differ, but I’ve always felt a complete ban on adjectives to be stupid and reductive. They can be useful, but they also bloat a story. They are often “unnecessary” in the sense that they could be removed without breaking the meaning of a sentence, but they add nuance and impact the feel of the story, and that can have value. I personally think that judicious use of interesting adjectives can be the frosting that makes the cake. Depending on how you write, they might even be the cake.

Bigger Problems

Not all issues of repetition exist on the level of individual words or small phrases. Bigger issues can arise on the level of paragraphs, and even chapters. These are often more difficult to identify, because they can’t be confirmed with a simple word processor “find” function, like repeated words.

The simplest kind of repetitive sentences use an identical structure over and over. This often arises in long stretches of dialogue or action:

He said, “No.”

She said, “I think you’re wrong.”

He said, “I don’t care.”

She said, “I don’t, either.”

He swung his right fist. She dodged it. He swung his knee up. She brought her hand down to block it. He jabbed with his left hand. It struck her right cheek.

These are contrived examples, but they show the kind of painful writing that comes from overly-repetitive sentence structure. These are all short sentences, but even long and complex sentence structures can feel repetitive.

Sentences have a rhythm. It can help to visualize more complicated sentences by focusing on their punctuation and conjunctions, because these are the connective tissue that combine individual phrases and clauses into a complete sentence. A series of sentences with a single conjunction (“This and that,” “That but this,” “This or that”) can also create a dull rhythm.

Even consistently long or short paragraphs can be a rhythm that readers notice, sometimes subconsciously. Lengthening or shortening sentences and paragraphs can be a useful tool for speeding up or slowing down the pacing, but when similar lengths are used consistently, regardless of the intended pacing, it can throw off the feel of a scene.

How Often is Too Often?

It’s a unreasonable and counter-productive to suggest that we should completely remove repetition from our writing. After all, it’s a useful tool for style and structure in a wide variety of contexts. I suspect there are no rules of thumb about the “correct” amount of repetition that couldn’t be taken down with a counter-example.

So, as is usual with writing, the answer to the question is, “It depends.” (Yes, I’m aware that I’m repeating the first part of this post.) There are two criteria worth thinking about: when to take a closer look, and when to make a change. It’s easy to make rules of thumb for finding potential issues, but it always pays to look at the specific context when it comes to making changes.

When I’m looking at repeated words in my own chapters, my personal warning alarms go off when I find three or more examples in a single chapter, or examples in almost every chapter. However, just because I find four instances of “nearly” in a chapter doesn’t mean I’m going to change or delete them. To decide that, I look at the specific sentence and paragraph surrounding each one. If I can think of an equally good or better word to use, I’ll change it. If I find that the word isn’t pulling its weight, I might remove it entirely. Sometimes, it’s the perfect word, and I leave it alone.

The Power of Repetition

Repetition can weaken or strengthen your writing. Repetition makes writing weaker when it’s accidental, filling in details that the writer hasn’t thought through, or revealing subconscious processes that the writer hasn’t even noticed. Repetition makes writing stronger when it’s purposeful, to achieve a stylistic effect or provide a particular rhythm or structure.

That’s why repetition is a great target for revisions. Changes can simultaneously shore up weaknesses and create new strength.

Making a Novel Editing Plan

Previously, I talked about using reader feedback and critique to gather information about what needs to be improved in a story. Right now, I’m in the process of gathering that feedback for my novel Razor Mountain.

Today, I’d like to dig into the next part in the process, taking that feedback and deciding what to revise.

Deciding What to Edit

There are two parts to editing: deciding what to change, and making those changes.

Feedback and critique from readers is a great way to get fresh eyes on a project that you’ve been working on for a long time. It’s easy to develop blind spots when you know the story so well, and others can help you find the parts that exist in your head, but not on the page.

The most obvious source of feedback will be your own notes when you re-read your story. It’s important to read as an editor, looking for problems, and you may want to make multiple passes to really focus on different aspects of the story.

Finally, it’s important to pay attention to your personal foibles. Every writer has at least one or two bad habits. These could be broad things like letting your dialogue meander, or specific things like “danger words” you tend to overuse or use to bad effect. For example, I’ve recently caught myself overusing words like “seemed” and “mostly” and “felt,” words that make a sentence less precise.

You might notice these foibles yourself, or a good critique may point some out to you. Either way, it’s good to keep track of them so you can excise them from the current manuscript and work on avoiding them in the future.

The first step in editing is to create a list of things that need fixing. The items on the list can from any or all of these sources. Don’t worry too much about listing every single thing. Editing is an iterative process.

Editing Big to Small

The line between deciding what to change and making those changes can be blurry. When the issue is a typo or grammatical error, the fix is often obvious as soon as the issue is identified. This kind of editing can feel deceptively easy and productive: you just have to read and fix these obvious errors as you come to them. However, some issues are larger. If chapters or scenes need to be rearranged, or a conversation needs to be rewritten, there may be several complicated choices that need to be made.

Different types of edits affect the story at different levels of abstraction. The chapter that needs scenes rearranged might also include a dialogue that needs to be rewritten, which includes a typo or grammatical issue. In this case, fixing the typo may be a waste of time, because it will be deleted when you rewrite the dialogue. That may also be a waste of time though, because in rearranging the scenes, you find that you no longer need that conversation.

The ideal way to address this problem is to identify and fix the big-picture issues first, then systematically drill your way down into smaller and more detailed aspects of the story until you get to the individual sentences and words. Of course, the creative process is rarely that organized and straightforward, but it’s a good ideal to keep in mind.

By trying to address big problems before smaller problems, you can avoid a lot of wasted work. There will always be problems that you discover while working on something else, and that’s okay too. You can always back up to higher levels of abstraction to fix something before diving back into the nitty-gritty details.

The Editing Cycle

While the process I just described may sound totally linear (start big and work your way down), it’s really more complicated than that. Editing is iterative. A change in one place may necessitate an adjustment in another.

Feedback may not all come in at once, and you may discover high-level changes that need to be made when you thought you were down to line edits and little changes to word choice. These are the challenges and frustrations that are part and parcel of editing, especially in large projects like a novel.

The reward for these challenges and frustrations, however, is the transformation of a rough draft, with all of its flaws and blemishes, transformed into a sleek and polished work of art.

Editing Razor Mountain

I suspect I’ll continue to post here and there about editing for the next couple months, since a lot of my writing time and thought will be devoted to editing Razor Mountain. I plan to write at least a couple journals with specifics, but these will be more sporadic than the previous journals.

Feedback and Critique — User Testing Stories

I recently posted the last episode of my serial novel, Razor Mountain. Finishing a novel is a fantastic achievement, so the first thing I did was congratulate myself and take a little break from the book. However, the work isn’t done yet. I still need to edit and polish it to really call it finished.

Writing is often thought of as a solitary process, the lone writer hunched over a keyboard in a dark basement. It can be that way sometimes, but editing is much more effective if it incorporates reader feedback.

User Testing

In my day job as a software developer, we are constantly creating, changing, or improving features in our software. Those changes then go through a gamut of testing, with developers, with quality assurance, and with users. This process gives us feedback to understand whether the people who use the software understand the new features, and what they like or dislike. We can take that feedback and make features easier to use, less confusing, simpler, or more powerful, depending on what the feedback tells us. While there are best practices, acting on feedback like this is equal parts art and science.

Game makers (video games, board games, and table-top RPGs) also often incorporate this kind of user feedback into their creative process. Where business software is all about maximizing efficiency, ease of use and costs, testing and feedback in games is usually about maximizing fun. That might entail fixing bugs or broken rule sets, but it often involved blurrier concepts, like balancing different factions or ramping up tension from the start to the end of a match.

It may seem odd to apply these ideas of testing to a story that you’ve slaved over and poured your heart into, but feedback can be just as valuable for fiction.

Auteur or Aoidos?

There is a popular conception these days of movie directors, show-runners and novelists as genius auteurs who produce intricate stories all at once, from whole cloth. In that worldview, the story is an artifact handed down from author to audience. The audience appreciates the work or dislikes it, and that’s the end of the interaction.

On the opposite end of the spectrum is stand-up comedy. Successful stand-ups often do many shows per week, trying out different jokes in different sets, changing or throwing away what doesn’t work and polishing what does. Some will take their best material and craft a broader story as a through-line. Material may carry through hundreds of performances, with each one being unique. This kind of performance-first attitude isn’t so different from the ancient oral poetry performed by Greek aoidos thousands of years ago.

Both kinds of artists have a story that they want to tell to an audience. The cloistered auteur firmly believes that they are crafting the one, true version of their work, and will brook no other opinions. If the audience doesn’t connect with it, that’s the audience’s problem. The advantage that the performer has over the auteur is that the performer can see exactly what effect their work has on the audience. They can improve and adjust the bits that don’t connect with the audience.

As an author, it’s hard to test your work against a mass audience like a stand-up, but getting feedback from beta readers can achieve some of the same effects at a smaller scale.

Understanding Readers

One of the advantages of a smaller pool of feedback readers is that you can better understand them and categorize their feedback. Not all readers are the same.

Many writers will have family members or friends who are happy to read for them, but will thoroughly sugar-coat any feedback they give because they don’t want to hurt the author’s feelings. Readers who don’t often read your genre may offer to help, but will have a hard time grasping genre conventions that a reader deep in that genre would breeze past. Fellow writers in a writing group will likely have a much better idea of the kind of feedback you want, because it’s the same kind of feedback they want on their own work.

When gathering potential readers, segmenting your audience can be very helpful. It may be useful to adjust what you ask of different types of readers, and it is absolutely necessary to adjust your own expectations. If a random family member wants to read, but you know they’ll only say nice things, feel free to let them. They’ll feel like they’re helping, and you may still get some tidbits out of it. On the other hand, a writer friend in the same genre might be happy to take a list of your concerns for a story and provide a detailed and harshly honest response.

Preparing Readers

You may want to give your readers a set of questions to inform their feedback, especially if you know their particular strengths and weaknesses. You may also have different concerns for different stories.

The good folks over at the Writing Excuses podcast suggest a set of general questions that can apply to any story:

What parts were especially awesome, boring or confusing?
Were there any parts where it was difficult to suspend disbelief?
When did you feel most absorbed in the story?

Often, readers will offer possible fixes for the problems they perceive. It’s up to you whether you want to solicit that kind of feedback, but it’s likely to happen anyway. However, the reader’s feelings are more valuable feedback than their suggested fixes. The reader is always correct about how the story makes them feel. They know exactly where they got confused or bored or excited. They’re just not usually very good at figuring out what to do about it.

Don’t feel obligated to accept a reader’s suggested fix for a problem. Firstly, you may not think it’s a problem. Even if it is, the source of that problem may be somewhere that the reader doesn’t understand—this often happens when different readers point out different issues that stem from the same root cause. You, as the author, have the best understanding of the story your trying to tell, and that expert view will help you triage any problems.

Making an Editing Plan

Soliciting reader feedback is just one of several ways to decide what to change in the edit. In my next post, I’ll talk about making an editing plan and tackling actual changes to the story.

It’s Not Style Unless Someone Hates It

I recently read The Wes Anderson Collection, and it got me thinking about style.

For the unfamiliar, Wes Anderson is the writer and director of numerous films, and he has a very particular style that can be seen in the art direction, special effects, dialogue, and many other aspects of his movies. He’s a critical darling, and he’s managed to collect an impressive array of well-known actors who are eager to work with him in movie after movie, even in small roles that might seem “beneath” them.

There are also plenty of people who absolutely can’t stand him. They think the dialogue is stilted and monotone, the sets are twee, and the man loves pastels more than the Easter bunny.

Whether you love it or hate it, it’s clear that Anderson has a distinct style.

What is Style, Anyway?

Artistic style is nothing more than a pattern in your work. It might be subtle or obvious, and it will probably change over time.

It’s often hard, as an artist, to be aware of your own patterns—the elements of your personal style. This is one way that feedback can be incredibly valuable. Others will often see patterns you haven’t noticed.

If you have regular readers, ask them about any repeated elements they see in your stories. Those ideas, characters or settings might tell you something about the topics you’re interested in exploring, even if you haven’t consciously realized it.

Digging Into Your Own Head

Style doesn’t have to be entirely subconscious. You can probably identify some elements of your personal style without a reader’s help.

Look at the things you’ve written, and the things you’ve thought about writing. Past writing is a map of the places you’ve been, stylistically, and brainstorms, journals, or half-baked ideas will tell you more about where you might want to explore next.

Know Your Influences

It can also be valuable to look at the work that inspires you. What were your favorite stories growing up? Which books on your bookshelf are well-worn? What about other media?

The most fertile ideas are often the ones that you see in your own work and your favorite stories. You might also find inspiration in non-story pursuits, hobbies, and even “regular” jobs. Life and art often intersect in interesting ways.

Follow Your Interests

The reason it’s valuable to think about your own style is because it will help you shape your stories to be exciting as possible for your primary reader: yourself. It’s a bit of common advice that you won’t get anyone else excited about your work unless you’re excited about it first.

Understand as best you can what thing you want to make, then make deliberate choices that project or communicate that to the reader. Depending on what you like, these choices might be intellectual (references, tropes, allusions, subtext), or emotional (feeling, sound, resonance).

Most importantly, make honest work. It’s easy to shy away from the parts of ourselves we don’t like (or the parts we think others won’t like). But those thoughts and emotions are important aspects of style too.

You have to be true to your thoughts and experiences. Don’t shy away from the unpleasant bits, the cringing embarrassment, the weaknesses. Good characters are usually flawed characters, and authors often need some insight and sympathy for the darker sides of our shared humanity.

Writing With Style

Style often plays out in the choices we make without realizing it. If something feels right, interrogate it. Look inward, and understand your loves, hates, influences, and fears. Play to an audience of yourself.

If you’re honest about the things that fascinate you most, it will help you to write stories you love. And if someone out there decides they hate your style, then at least you know you have it.

Becoming a Writer – Reference Desk #21

Becoming a Writer is a slim volume written by Dorothea Brand in 1934, based upon her experience as a creative writing teacher. As Brande is quick to point out, this is not a book about stylistic technique or story structure. She’s happy to guide readers to other books for that (and there are far more now than there were in the 30s). This book is exactly what it purports to be: a book about how to become a writer, and not necessarily how to write well.

The intended audience seems to be college students or post-school adults who want to get into writing, but aren’t quite sure how to start. Rather than get into all the technical details, Brande suggests what they need is an understanding of how to get into a writer’s headspace, to learn how to think and work like a writer.

While some of the language feels outmoded and there are one or two references to streetcars, Brande’s book stands up well almost a century after its original publication.

Writing Practice

As a first task for a writer to tackle, Brande suggests getting used to writing daily. The prospective writer must embark on a plan of writing immediately after waking up in the morning, before doing anything else. Once this has become habit, she advocates setting specific writing times based on each day’s schedule, and varying them to get used to writing at any time of day.

As a night owl, I am already fairly miserable in the mornings, even when I do get enough sleep. I’ve tried “morning pages” with mixed success in the past. I’ve decided that this is advice I can follow on the weekends, but I’m hit-or-miss during the week.

On the other hand, I have recently tried scheduling mini writing breaks in the middle of my day. It works surprisingly well, and increases my output a small but noticeable amount.

The Mindful Author

Brande is of the opinion that most writers spend too much time discussing the conscious work that a writer has to do, and not enough on the unconscious part of the writing brain. She believes that much of what makes for great writing comes from this unconscious well of ideas, and that great writers learn to effectively use and cultivate it.

To this end, she offers a series of exercises that sound an awful lot like mindfulness and meditation to the modern ear, but must have seemed rather “out there” when the book was first published.

She encourages writers to pay attention to the world around them, observing it with as much child-like wonder as they can muster, and avoiding distractions. This observation, however, should be followed by carefully describing the exciting bits with exacting and detailed language—practice for the unconscious brain in observing, coupled with practice for the conscious brain in relating the raw experience through words.

She also believes that consuming stories while working on a story of one’s own will contaminate it with other authors’ voices. Instead, to release a writer’s inner genius, she suggests some mostly-mindless, hypnotic activity to help free the unconscious—whether that be walking, cleaning, sewing, etc. She essentially recommends cultivating a meditative state with the story as its focus.

Here There Be Writers

A short book with strong opinions, Becoming a Writer tackles the task of writing in a surprisingly holistic way. On the other hand, it makes sweeping generalizations about artistic sensibilities in almost every word, and I can’t bring myself to believe that those kinds of generalizations ever apply to everyone. But it’s a unique take on the writing book, with ideas that kept me thinking well after I had finished it

Despite being a book of concrete ideas about how to cultivate a good writing process, it is surprisingly romantic—and even borderline mystical—about writers and their art. It treats us as dragons and unicorns, imbued with a certain amount of innate magic, but also gets detailed about the practical care and feeding of these creatures to get optimal results.

If you’re looking for a writing book that is more about getting in the writing headspace, and less about rehashing the hero’s journey for the umpteenth time or tightening up your first five pages, Brande’s book is a good choice.

Reblog: On “Prose-Forward” Writing and the Pleasures of Different Genre Conversations — Lincoln Michael

Good Lord, Lincoln Michael is a treasure. He lives with one foot in genre fiction and one foot in literary fiction, and he’s erudite enough to use that vantage point to illuminate the literary landscape.

Every time I read one of his Substack articles, I come away with five tabs open for further reading, and a whole new vocabulary to describe topics that I had vague ideas about, and which he has described with exacting precision.

In this post, Michael suggests that the common discussion of “invisible vs. visible” prose is shallow, and Max Gladstone’s tension between “textured and aerodynamic” prose adds to the conversation. He follows that up with a discussion of yet more theoretical axes for comparing fiction: plot-forward and prose-forward.

As an author who is published about equally in the SFF ecosystem and literary fiction ecosystem, this is a topic I think about a lot. It’s very easy to say “all these labels are false and mean nothing!” And obviously as someone who writes both SFF and “literary fiction” I think the binary is bullshit, the snobs on both sides are annoying, and all of these terms are fluid, overlapping, and spectrums. Etc. At the same time, questions of what gets called literary and what is embraced or rejected by SFF readers is a practical concern. Saying “it’s all bullshit” or “it’s all just marketing” doesn’t change the hard reality of where your work gets published, whether you have shots at awards, and how readers will find or fail to find your work.

…

I often hear SFF people ask why some speculative writers are embraced by the literary world and others aren’t. I think “prose-forward” is much of the answer. Indeed, I’d go so far as to say that “prose-forward” writing is the defining quality of what is called “literary” in general. (Note that in my view authors can be simultaneously literary and genre. This is a Venn diagram, not a binary.)

Prose-forward doesn’t mean a specific style but rather that the prose itself is an integral part of the work. The texture of it, to use Gladstone’s metaphor. That texture might be dense and lush like Southern Gothic or gritty and minimalist like dirty realism or a million other things. But the literary world places great focus on the texture of sentences, whatever that texture might be.

I’m a big fan of anyone who can get past the supposed binaries that people love to define for these kinds of topics, and Michael is great at sussing out those details and making me want to dig deeper.

Check out the rest of the article at Counter Craft…

Reblog: The Grand (Chaotic) Master Plan — Daniel Gomez

This week’s reblog comes from StarNinja (a.k.a. Daniel Gomez), who discusses the problems with villains who craft master plans so perfect and unpredictable that everything the protagonists do plays right into their hands.

So there’s this thing that happened a couple years back where every movie villain had to be a meticulous, devilishly detailed, timed to the very millisecond, chaos magician master planner. If the good guys where competent and intelligent, the villain was even more so, disguising their super duperly complex schemes as “random chaos” that no one can predict because there’s no way to plan for this kind of madness!

What’s hard to portray in fiction is when a villain has to improvise. When something comes up the villain didn’t plan for, either thanks to the hero’s meddling or because of a cool twist thanks to outside actors, as a writer, your options are “villain improvises” or “it was part of the plan the whole time!”. Consider the “getting caught on purpose” trope we see a lot these days. If the heroes capture the villain in the 1st Act, it can’t be because the villain fucked up. No, they wanted to get captured from the start. Because if there’s chaos, it must be planned…?

I really do like the idea of throwing out the “master plan” trope, or at least having the master plan not always work out. It’s common writing advice to mess up your protagonist’s plans and force them to adapt. Why would it be any different with villains? Surely a villain who can adapt and overcome problems is even scarier?

Read the full post over at The Wormhole Less Traveled…

Growing the Language of a Story

My day job is in software development, and in pre-Covid times, when a solid majority of our teams used to still work in the office every day, I would host occasional “lunch and learn” meetings where we’d have our lunch in a conference room and watch a programming-related video.

Of these videos, one of my favorites is called Growing a Language, by Guy Steele. While it’s made for an audience of programmers, I think it’s fairly palatable to the layman. It is fascinating to me because it has a bit of a literary bent, where the form of the talk is, itself, a comment on the subject.

(I don’t blame you if you don’t want to watch the whole thing, but it’s worth watching to the 9-minute mark—the “now you see” moment.)

Primitives

Steele starts his talk with a long string of definitions, ranging from nouns like “man” and “woman,” to the names of particular people, to grammatical constructs and mathematical concepts. His speech is oddly stilted to the ear, and some of his definitions cover complicated ideas with surprising conciseness. He perseveres for nine minutes in the face of the awkward, confused giggling from his audience.

At last, he gets to the point.

“A primitive is a word for which we can take it for granted that we all know what it means[…]. For this talk, I chose to take as my primitives all the words of one syllable and no more[…]. My firm rule for this talk is that if I need to use a word of two or more syllables, I must first define it.”

Steele starts with a somewhat arbitrary limitation: words of a single syllable. This is the reason for his stilted cadence. And despite his clever use of this artificially limited language, it’s apparent that he cannot get across everything he wants to say without expanding it. So he begins with simple definitions, then uses those to build more complex definitions.

The first several minutes of the talk are almost entirely devoted to building the language he needs. Then he begins to make his arguments. But he continues to sprinkle in more definitions as he goes, expanding the language so that it is ready to tackle each subsequent concept.

The Language of Stories

Steele is trying to make a point about the construction of computer programming languages, but his ideas are just as applicable to fiction. Each story has its own language, and as authors, we must construct that language as the story unfolds. We are just like Steele, defining concepts and grammar between making points. We are the train conductors laying track in front of our own speeding train.

In science-fiction and fantasy, this is especially obvious. We often need to build a secondary world that feels real, or a magic system, or the rules of some future technology. But even in more “mundane” genres, there are rules that must be defined. Who is the story about? What is the time period and setting, and how do the circumstances of the world affect the characters? What perspectives will be used?

Writing a story is a balancing act—the act of providing exactly enough information for the reader to understand what’s going on, at exactly the moment when it is needed. Too much, too early, and the whole story becomes bogged down in dull definitions. Too little, and the language becomes muddled and confusing; the story, difficult to follow.

Assumptions and Audience

Steele’s other key insight is that the starting point is extremely important. He chooses words of a single syllable. The starting point for a story is more complicated. It’s what you as the author assume about and expect from your audience.

For example, I might be writing about a dystopian future. I might focus on the technologies that enable the authoritarian regime to keep the people down. I might focus on the social constructs that make it difficult for the characters to fight back. I might focus more on the language and structure of the story, or the internal depths of the characters, or an intricate plot. The version of the story that highlights tech might appeal to a reader of hard sci-fi, while a focus on the society itself may appeal to a reader of “softer” sociological science-fiction. The version that uses challenging language and structure might appeal to a reader of literary fiction.

Whether we recognize it or not, every author must make assumptions about what their reader will bring to a story. A story that expects the reader to bring less will necessarily have to start with a simpler “language” and do more defining up-front. A story that expects more from the reader might start with a more complex “language,” but this runs the risk of confusing or driving off part of the potential audience. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Better to write a great book for a particular audience than a mediocre book that tries to cater to every reader.

Breaking Expectations

Most of the time, it’s good to cater to your chosen audience, starting with a language they can understand and building it as the story progresses. But it can also be a powerful tool to break those well-defined rules.

It can be a story-defining twist to reveal something new about a setting or character that the reader wasn’t prepared for. It can be shocking and exciting to suddenly change up the structure or the way the story is told. The best authors can even carefully lure an audience into a story that they would have thrown away, were it revealed at the outset, and make them enjoy it. Maybe the main POV character dies at the end of act II, and the book shifts to the villain’s perspective?

Of course, it’s a hard trick to pull off. When done poorly, betraying the reader’s expectations can ruin the story for them. It can feel dull, like deus ex machina that impacts the story without earning it, or even like a mean prank played by the author at the reader’s expense. This is where beta readers and editors prove invaluable, helping to ensure that the trick actually works.

So Easy, You’re Already Doing It

Building a language for each story may seem daunting at first, but the good news is that every author does it, either deliberately or intuitively. By actively thinking about growing the language of the story, we have the opportunity to build it well—providing exactly what’s needed, when it’s needed, and not a sentence too early or too late.

When You Aren’t Inspired, Trust Process

As I approach the final leg of writing my serial novel, Razor Mountain, I feel like I’m finally on the other side of the difficult middle. The central 50% of novels almost always feel like the hardest part to me, and I know I’m not alone. However, I have a big advantage on this project: posting it on the blog gives me deadlines and external accountability.

When I finish writing a chapter, sometimes I feel pretty good about it, and sometimes I’m disappointed. But I set myself a schedule, and I keep writing more chapters and posting them. Sometimes, my only consolation is in telling myself that I can always perform major revisions after the thing is done.

On the good days, writing feels like making art, but on the bad days it feels more like working an assembly line. Clock-in, spend a few hours sticking words together, and clock-out. It’s not glamorous, but it’s often what needs to be done.

Is It A Good Day?

I recently binged through the incredible 32-episode documentary Double Fine PsychOdyssey, which follows the seven-year development of the game Psychonauts 2. Even if you’re not particularly interested in video games, it’s a fantastic study in the complexities and interpersonal challenges of building a creative project with a large group of people.

Tim Schafer, who is something of a game design and writing legend, has a habit of daily writing when he’s working on a project. Over the years he has accumulated piles of old project notebooks that he can look back on. This offers an amazing archaeological view into how these stories grew and changed over the course of development.

Early in the documentary, Schafer flips through a few pages of the notebook for the original game, Psychonauts. These pages contain the first mentions of many of the ideas that became central to the story, although he had no way knowing it at the time. Schafer reads these tentative forays into ideas that now seem predestined, laughs quietly to himself and says, “that was a good day.”

What’s interesting about these “good days” is that they’re often not obvious when we’re living in them. It’s only in retrospect that we can see what works and what doesn’t.

Doing the Work

Cory Doctorow has a great article about this, called Doing the Work: How to Write When You Suck.

In those years, I would sit down at the keyboard, load up my text-editor, and try to think of words to write. Lots of words occurred to me, but they felt stupid and unworthy. I would chase my imagination around my skull, looking for better words, and, after hours, I would give it up, too exhausted to keep chasing and demoralized by not having caught anything.

That feeling of unworthiness and stupidity has never gone away. There are so many days when I sit down to write and everything that occurs to me to commit to the page is just sucks.

Here’s what’s changed: I write anyway. Sometime in my late twenties, I realized that there were days when I felt like everything I wrote sucked, and there were days when I felt really good about what I had written.

Moreover, when I pulled those pages up months later, having attained some emotional distance from them, there were passages that objectively did suck, and others that were objectively great.

But here’s the kicker: the quality of the work was entirely unrelated to the feeling I had while I was producing it. I could have a good day and produce bad work and I could have a bad day and produce good work.

What I realized, gradually, was that the way I felt about my work was about everything except the work. If I felt like I was writing crap, it had more to do with my blood-sugar, my sleep-deficit, and conflicts in my personal life than it did with the work. The work was how I got away from those things, but they crept into the work nonetheless.

This is a profound realization. There is a freedom in just writing (rather than trying to write well) that can be necessary to actually get anything done. The louder your internal editor is, the more important it becomes to be able to turn it off.

What Cory experienced is something I’ve noticed as well. I often don’t feel very good about my writing in the moment. It’s only when I come back to it later that I can take notice of the parts that I like. That’s not to say I don’t need editing. I always find plenty of things to improve. But most of the time my opinion of my writing is higher when I’m reading it back than when I’m in the process of writing it. I just can’t trust my own opinion while I’m writing.

And even if it turns out to be bad, I can always fix it later.

Writing as Manual Labor

As I get older and more experienced, I am more and more drawn to the idea of writing as manual labor. When I treat writing as a simple project of putting one word after another, it takes away the pressure to make those words great. I get the words written faster, and with less anguish.

I don’t always know if what I’m making will be good. I would love to feel constantly inspired—to have the muse always looking over my shoulder and making suggestions—but inspiration comes fitfully.

Sometimes the muse only strikes because I gave her room and did the work.