“First of all, if you find yourself coming up with an idea for a story that has NEVER been touched upon by another writer, that is ENTIRELY original, you deserve an award.  The fact is that much of what is published does draw upon some aspect of an idea or set of ideas that other writers have touched on.  There have been too many books written, and there are too many writers working today for this not to be the case.  The thing to remember is that books and stories are more than conceptual, they are more than collections of characters, they turn on more than a plot idea or a concept for a magic system.  Books and stories are also about character development, about tone and voice, about narrative progressions that are inherently unique to every writer.  You might start in the exact same place as another writer, but your creative vision will take the story elements with which you begin in one direction, and another writer’s vision will take it in another.  Relax, and write your book.  It is destined to be unique.”

As if to prove my points, two new series of YA books have captured the reading public’s imagination in the past year or so and have become enormously popular.  And while both of them offer innovative visions, both of them are also clearly derivative of well-known older works of fiction.  I am speaking of Suzanne Collins Hunger Games series and James Dashner’s Maze Runner books.

Let me state right off that I thoroughly enjoyed both series.  I was turned on to them by my teenage daughters, who LOVED them, and found both set of books to be some of the best fiction I have read in recent years.  The books are imaginative, readable, and thought-provoking.  But the basic concepts for both series owe something to other literary classics.

In the case of The Hunger Games, the first book especially seems to begin with an homage to Shirley Jackson’s classic short story, “The Lottery.”  I don’t believe I am giving away too much of the story, or providing too dramatic a spoiler when I reveal that the book begins with the main characters gathering for a ceremony in the central town of their District for the choosing of two Tributes for the dreaded Hunger Games taking place in the Capitol.  The Hunger Games are a battle-to-the-death tournament that only a single contestant is supposed to survive, so for at least one of the Tributes, selection for the Games is a death sentence.  I won’t say more; I don’t really need to.  If any of you have read Jackson’s story, you will immediately see the similarities and understand the literary connections.  Jackson’s piece is far shorter of course, and much of the reason for her deadly lottery goes unexplained.  But the tension of her story, and the drama in the opening scenes of The Hunger Games are rooted in something so similar that I find it difficult to believe Collins didn’t intend the reference.

The literary roots of Dashner’s The Maze Runner are a bit harder to describe, but they are, in their own way, far more pervasive.  Dashner, like Collins, has created a dystopian vision of our future.  In this case, we have a group of boys living in a place called the Glade.  None of them remembers how they have come to be there; all they know is that the key to their escape lies in figuring out the puzzle of the vast Maze that lies beyond the Glade.  But the Maze is always changing, its walls shifting, and it is patrolled by the Grievers, dangerous, canny creatures that are the stuff of nightmare.

For the purposes of this post, though, the fascinating thing about the story is that the boys of the Glade, while given supplies by their unseen jailers, are almost entirely on their own.  They have had to carve out a life for themselves, govern themselves, divide up the necessary labor among themselves.  This is a new take on William Golding’s classic book Lord of the Flies, in which a group of English boys, marooned in a primitive wilderness, revert to a primitivism of their own, becoming unruly, chaotic, and eventually violent.  Golding’s book offers a disturbing Hobbesian vision of the nature of adolescence and humanity in general.  Denied the moorings of society, his boys have created a world in which life is, indeed, nasty, brutish, and short.

Dashner’s book, on the other hand, takes a somewhat similar situation and turns it on its head, taking a more modern view of youth.  Rather than a Hobbesian nightmare, his is a more Lockean view.  Far from reverting to savagery, Dashner’s boys have imposed order on their ordeal, and so have given themselves a fighting chance to survive.  They have chosen to police themselves, though with rules that are at times brutal, and have developed a hierarchy that is strict and unforgiving, but also logical and effective.

The point is, though, that Dashner’s books draw on a strong literary tradition of which Golding’s book is the most famous example.

Let me state again that I loved these books — what I’ve written here is not intended as a criticism.  Rather it is meant to point out what may be obvious, but what is also worth saying to aspiring writers:  All books, even the most successful books on the shelves of bookstores right now, draw on themes and ideas explored in other works of literature.  Your book might not start from a place that is entirely unique, but it will become utterly yours as you write it and apply your creative process to the concepts with which you begin.  I could have talked about other books in this way:  The Sword of Shannara, the first volume in Terry Brooks’s highly successful Shannara franchise, draws a good deal from Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings.  Neil Gaiman’s American Gods owes something to Charles De Lint’s Newford books.  The more we look, the more we find that these connections among books are fairly common.

What other books can you think of that draw upon other works of fiction as the basis for something that eventually grew into a unique and enjoyable reading experience?  Let’s compare notes.

(A side-note: what if you don’t know your overall plot? As I’ve said previously, some writers plan their plots in advance while others just create a starting set-up, then wing it as they go along. If you’re winging it, you may not know what function the current scene serves within the rest of the novel; however, you obviously have a reason why you’re writing this scene now, or else you’d be writing something different. Of course, you may be stuck to come up with any scene you want to write…but we’ll deal with that problem in some future post.)

What Do Scenes Do?

Almost always, a scene should be about one or more characters trying to accomplish something. If no one is pursuing a goal, the scene is an unmoving blob. In the hands of a good writer, a tiny bit of motionlessness can work as a means of pacing—for example, a subdued aftermath scene following many pages of excitement can give the characters and the reader a chance to catch their breaths—but even then, some sense of forward motion is a must.

Why? Because you want the reader to keep reading. On the absolute crudest level, readers should feel that important events are happening and they should be asking, “How will this all turn out?”

We writers love to blather on about art, emotional resonance, social comment, masterful prose, etc., etc., but if we don’t keep readers asking, “How will this all turn out?” they’ll feel no pressure to go on to the next page. No pressure means they can cheerfully set down the book and never pick it up again.

(Another side-note: I’ve lost count of the times when I’ve thought, “Hey, this book is really well-written,” but never finished it. I’ve also lost count of the times when I’ve said, “This is mindless crap,” but I had to keep reading because I needed to know what happened next.)

So a scene should make readers ask, “How will this all turn out?” That means you should be presenting something where there’s a degree of uncertainty. One or more characters should be going through difficulties whose outcome remains to be determined…and they have to have a reason for contending with those difficulties, or else they’d just walk away.

That means your characters must want something; they must want it badly enough to keep going despite significant obstacles; and there must be pressure on the characters to keep going once they’re in the muck. If your characters have no reason to press on, why should your readers do so?

Conflict

At a workshop a few years ago, I heard Nancy Kress say, “Every story is a war and every scene is a battle.” The battle may be between different characters, between a character and impersonal forces, or between a character and him-or-herself…but one way or another, someone is fighting to achieve some goal in the face of opposition. If you don’t have a fight, you don’t have a scene—you don’t have the reader asking, “How will this all turn out?”

In this context, “fight” can mean physical combat, but usually it doesn’t. Most scenes are mental or social struggles, often played low-key. A detective tries to pry information from a reluctant witness; two teenagers try to figure out what each other is thinking; a parent tries to get a baby to go the f**k to sleep. There is effort to achieve some goal, and there is resistance which prevents that effort from immediately succeeding.

In most scenes, the tide of the battle unfolds in a series of beats where the upper hand passes back and forth between the participants. This builds dramatic tension (“How will this all turn out?”) by extending the length of the battle. It can also raise the stakes by heightening the emotions that accompany the conflict: a conversation turns into a clash of egos, and the next thing you know, Henry the Eighth is chopping off Thomas More’s head. (For some interesting case studies of beat analysis, see Hamlet’s Hit Points by Robin D. Laws.)

One way or another, every scene should be built around a struggle to achieve a goal, against resistance and under pressure. In a now-famous memo to TV writers, David Mamet put it this way—every scene should be built on a foundation of three questions:

Who wants what?
What happens if they don’t get it?
Why now?

When Sailing is Smooth

“But,” you might ask, “what about scenes I know are necessary but don’t have obvious conflicts?” For example, what about a detective talking with a cooperative witness? In a classic whodunit, detectives talk to lots of witnesses, and they can’t all be reluctant—that would be repetitive and unrealistic. So what do you do when a character has a goal (“Get information”) and there are no immediate obstacles?

That’s where skill comes in. (This is the Skill List Project, remember?) There are many ways of handling situations where there’s no dramatic tension screaming to be let out:

• Tell, don’t show. You don’t need to write an actual scene if a situation lacks dramatic possibilities. You can just say

  I talked to a guy who’d seen the whole thing. He told me the shooter had been wearing the colors of a gang called the Deviants, so I figured I’d give them a visit.

  Instead of playing out the conversation between the detective and the witness, this passage deals with it in two quick sentences. This sets up a real scene with the Deviants, which is guaranteed to have a good juicy conflict.

• A witness may want to cooperate but be bad at it: muddle-headed, or distracted, or amorous, or tongue-tied. The detective must overcome the difficulty in order to get the desired information.
• The environment might provide obstacles of its own: crude distractions like noise and danger, or more subtle ones like the risk of being overheard by the wrong people. A whispered conversation in a dark alley is more likely to grip the reader than an unpressured chat over tea and scones. (Unless, of course, the reader has reason to think that the tea may be poisoned…)

The point is to keep throwing obstacles at your character so they have to work hard in pursuit of their goals. I don’t mean you should invent artificial nuisances—I hate it when authors dump on their characters gratuitously—but “How will this all turn out?” demands that your characters sweat.

Before, During, or After

All this being said, when I write the first draft of a scene, I’m often exploring a situation rather than choreographing a fight. I’m getting the feel of the characters and the setting: understanding the motivations and issues. For me, the first draft is a process of discovery, and that means I don’t get hung up on, “I have to make this compelling.”

But in the second draft, “compelling” is the key to a scene’s survival. There must be a struggle, and there must be a chance that the characters will fail to achieve their goals, thereby being set back and risking overall defeat. Lame scenes must be changed or deleted; they’re the O-rings that can make your whole novel crash. If the reader stops asking, “How will this all turn out?” the reader may well stop reading. A roller-coaster can have fast parts and slow parts, but it can’t have a dead patch in the middle where there’s nothing to draw the riders forward.

Done for Now

That’s it for this time, but there’s still a lot more to be said about writing scenes. We’ll get into that next month…but in the meanwhile, it’s your turn. Head for the Comments section and set phasers on RANT.

I’m doing some graduate student mentoring at a university, helping a student with her thesis project and also instructing a couple of independent courses with her.  This is something I’ve done before at this school, and I enjoy it a great deal.  For the courses, I’ve assigned lots of reading — classics of speculative fiction for one course with another student, and most recently examples of terrific worldbuilding for this fall’s course.  And so I’ve gotten to re-read some of my favorite books in fantasy and sf.  This got me to thinking that it might be fun to share our favorite reads — books that we go back and read again and again because we love them that much.

It’s always dangerous for a writer to make a list like this, for the simple reason that with every book we leave off the list, we risk offending a colleague.  So let me say up front that none of my books are on my list, and I’m not taking it personally.  I don’t expect that my books will be on many (or any) of your lists either.  And I’m fine with that, too.  Just because it’s not on this list, that doesn’t mean I didn’t love the book.  It’s just that some books lend themselves (for me) to periodic re-reading.  Okay?  We good?  Phew!

Moving on…

My list of favorite books to re-read every now and then, in no particular order:

Ender’s Game, by Orson Scott Card — Ender is one of my favorite heroes, and I find the storyline utterly compelling.  The second book in the original sequence, Speaker for the Dead, is also very good.  The other two books I found somewhat less compelling.  But this first one is brilliant.

Slow River, by Nicola Griffith — Her shifts in POV and voice are so masterful, and her character work is so good.  Reading this book is like taking a writing course.

Lord of the Rings, by J.R.R. Tolkien — I expect this one will show up on many people’s lists…

Tigana, by Guy Gavriel Kay — Masterful worldbuilding, lovely prose, achingly beautiful story.  That rarest of things in epic, alternate world fantasy:  a stand alone novel.

The Fionavar Tapestry (The Summer Tree, The Wandering Fire, The Darkest Road), by Guy Gavriel Kay — See above.  I love Kay’s work, in large part because he proves false with every book the snobbish assumption that genre fiction can’t be literary.

Dune, Dune Messiah, and Children of Dune, by Frank Herbert — The worldbuilding and political intrigues of these books totally do it for me.  Yes, they’re complex, at times to the point of bewilderment, and yes, after the third book the story becomes a bit too much for me.  But I love these three.

The Earthsea Trilogy (A Wizard of Earthsea, The Tombs of Atuan, The Farthest Shore) by Ursula LeGuin — I just read these three again for the worldbuilding course.  They are gems.  Understated, quiet, but magnificently written and stirringly beautiful.

American Gods, by Neil Gaiman — This is a somewhat controversial book.  I know lots of people who loved it and lots who hated it; very few in between.  I loved it and think the concept and execution are both brilliant.

I’ll stop there with my list — eight projects; fourteen books in all (if you count LOTR as a single book, as I do).  Not a round number, but those are the titles that come to my mind.

How about you?  What does your list of favorite re-readable books look like?

Happy Thanksgiving to all of you.

I first heard the term Young Adult applied to books in the early ‘70s. It described fiction written for adolescents, who weren’t quite ready to move on from Middle Grade books to more adult reading matter, but who nonetheless wanted more complex and challenging subjects. Judy Blume’s issue novels were the first books I ever heard described that way, along with Robert Cormier’s The Chocolate War.

The key part of that description is, “Weren’t quite ready to move on…to more adult reading matter.” What this meant was that YA books had a more limited vocabulary and syntax than books written for adults, and it showed. When I was in junior high, that was the time when the kids who liked to read started to move on to the sorts of books their parents read. Not Faulkner and Proust, but definitely Ian Fleming, or Agatha Christie, or Barbara Cartland, genre writers who wrote books for adults, not children, and who were easy enough to read that they made excellent stepping stones to more complicated stuff.

Given that definition, it’s easy to see why those of us in junior high who liked to read back then despised early YA fiction. We found the language patronizing, and the characters, often simplified to make the author’s point, annoying.  YA was for people who, we thought, didn’t really like to read, or they’d learn to do it properly.  A very immature perspective, but we were adolescents. 

That definition of YA  certainly doesn’t work now. Everyone reads YA; it seems to be the fastest growing segment of the fiction market. Everyone I know is writing YA – I write YA myself.  And yet, to my mind, the one thing I believe still holds true for YA, is that the prose remains limited. Not as limited as Middle Grade books, but still limited compared to a Neal Stephenson or China Mieville. A lot of YA writers prefer to define YA as books with YA protagonists, but I think that definition is far too broad. Are Hemingway’s Nick Adams stories YA? How about Narnia? (Narnia is actually referenced as YA in Wikipedia’s YA entry.)

My own opinion is that I know YA when I read it, and it’s usually the language that gives it away.

What do you think?

This twist was hardly surprising given the controversial discussions of the underrepresentation of women in SF — particularly Hard SF — that have been unfolding at SFsignal and elsewhere in the online SF community. However, it did bring into clearer focus something that has surprised me over the last few months: the gusto with which people have been flinging around labels. Feminist SF. Women’s SF. SF by Minorities. White Male SF. People have been deploying these phrases as if they were listing elements in the periodic table. As if they thought that they had some objective lock on the difference between the writings of men and women, or of people with differing skin colors. As if they thought that the author photo on the back cover was the single relevant datapoint for determining which genre a book belongs to and who can reasonably be expected to read it … you know, for fun, and because it’s good science fiction, instead of just to fulfill their annual guilt-expiating requirement for reading books by people who don’t look like them.

After a while it starts to feel like listening to someone pontificate about why the dinosaurs went extinct while sitting in a room full of parakeets. Yes, of course, we can all agree that a bird is not a dinosaur. But is that the only way to talk about birds and dinosaurs? And is it even remotely the most useful or interesting way? And does it really do justice to either birds or dinosaurs in all their complexity?

I keep thinking of Octavia Butler as I’m writing this, because she was a brilliant, multifaceted and widely influential writer who I see as particularly ill-served by this way of talking about science fiction. Are race and gender both central elements in her work? Of course. Was her work deeply important in expanding the diversity and inclusiveness of our genre? You bet. Does that somehow magically erase the fact that she worked across the full spectrum of science fiction from hard SF to fantasy, and that she profoundly influenced almost every science fiction writer of my generation that you have ever heard of? I don’t think so. And I came of age as an SF fan in the decades when you couldn’t walk into a bookstore without seeing a foot-long row of her books in the science fiction section. Yet when I hear people talk about her today, I sometimes feel that there is a secret life of labels in which her widespread influence on the genre as a whole is being increasingly minimized and forgotten.

Now don’t get me wrong. I’m not making some kind of Kumbaya statement that we’ve reached a post-race, post-gender nirvana in which perfect equality has been achieved and labels no longer matter. I’ve made my living writing hard SF for over a decade. And I am a woman. Which is another way of saying that I’ve seen things that would set any reasonable person’s hair on fire. I’ve also talked to enough women of color in the genre to know that I have it relatively easy compared to them. And more recently, I’ve watched two eminently reasonable colleagues set off full-blown internet firestorms simply by making relatively mild comments about the need to try to address the gender imbalance in science fiction.

Niccola Griffith suggested a “Russ Pledge” (in honor of Joanna Russ) in which people would make a mental note to try to recommend SF by women alongside SF by men — or if they can’t think of “equally good” books by women to honestly admit it, and discuss whether there’s anything the SF community can do to encourage women to participate in certain genres. And Charlie Stross simply stated that it embarrasses him when his stories appear in anthologies with few or no women writers, and that in the future he would prefer not to contribute to them. Do those two statements sound more or less reasonable to you? I mean, is there a problem with Niccola suggesting that people try to talk about SF by women more often? Or with Charlie making a personal choice about which anthologies he chooses to spend his time writing for? Yep, it all seems pretty reasonable to me too. But the reaction in the blogosphere was, to say the least, intense.

So clearly we still have a very long way to go before we reach a world where labels are irrelevant.

Still, I keep coming back to my basic discomfort with the readiness of people to define and label books in ways that have more to do with the name on the cover — or at least so it sometimes seems — than with the words inside. I don’t think my writing is that simple. I don’t think any good writing is that simple. In the end, I don’t think people are that simple.

That is, I fully admit, a gut reaction. And following one’s gut is notoriously dangerous when it comes to this sort of complicated and divisive issue. But even when I dig below the gut reaction, there is another layer of discomfort with the current terms of the debate. And it comes down to this:

I love science fiction. I believe in science fiction. I’ve been reading and writing science fiction for almost as long as I can remember. Writers like Isaac Asimov and Ursula K. LeGuin, C. J. Cherryh and Vernor Vinge, Bruce Sterling and Octavia Butler shaped my vision of what it means to be an intelligent life form in the universe. This is their genre: the genre that reaches out beyond the farthest stars, into the deep mysteries of the universe. The genre that lets us imagine who we might be and how we might see the world if we weren’t even human.

So how can we be stuck, after all this time and all those brilliant flights of imagination, in a stupid fight about whether the genre is even broad enough to include women?

And, more to the point, how do we get out of it?

How do we get back to questioning hidebound traditions, knocking down threadbare assumptions, picking apart stale stereotypes … you know, the stuff science fiction is supposed to be about? How do we move the discussion beyond divisive slugfests about quotas, and toward something a little more in keeping with the science fictional ideal of confronting difficult concepts with creativity and originality? How do we move away from labels and pigeonholes and try to grapple with life in all its glorious diversity … including the awe-inspiring complexity of our own nature as (usually) intelligent diploid organisms who participate in the genetic lottery of evolution by means of sexual reproduction.

Those are my questions. I’d love to hear your answers, however and whenever they come to you. And if you want to follow the evolution of my own thoughts about our genre’s unhealthy addiction to labels? Well … I’m currently working on a guest post for Night Bazaar about Dystopian SF, which seems to be turning into an account of the importance to me as a Hard SF writer of two books that are much more commonly discussed as feminist SF and whose legacy in SF as a whole I feel is often overlooked: Ursula K. LeGuin’s The Dispossessed and C. J. Cherryh’s Cyteen.

He was hugely important to me, but then how could he not be?  I was ten, exactly the right age for his juveniles, which are basically adventure stories for boys, six years after the last was published (Have Space Suit—Will Travel) in 1958.  You couldn’t go into a library in America in the ‘60s without finding every one of them in the children’s section.  I devoured them, and from them I jumped straight to Clarke, Asimov, Herbert, E. E. Smith, and the Golden Age.  A few years later I was reading Brunner, Ballard, and Delany. 

Without Heinlein, I might never have gotten to any of them.  Heinlein introduced me, and thousands of other readers (mostly boys, unfortunately, but that’s another post), to the language and ideas of true SF.  Andre Norton just wasn’t the same, though I loved her books as well.  Her SF was more lyrical and fantastic.  Heinlein’s was down to earth and full of common sense.  And he made the fantastic seem commonplace in a way that few writers have before or since, allowing the reader to go right to the heart of his characters and stories, but without losing any of the “WOW” so necessary for good SF.

A couple of years ago I had dinner with several other F&SF writers, half of whom were my age, and half of whom were younger.  For some reason the conversation turned to Heinlein, and we were all carping on the crap he turned out in his dotage, when one of the older writers said, “At least we have his juveniles.”

“Heinlein wrote YA?” asked one of the younger writers in stunned surprise.

Heinlein’s juveniles aren’t really YA, though you might make the case for Podkayne of Mars.  But the fact that this young writer writes YA and had never heard of, or read, any of Heinlein’s non-adult novels amazed her.  She’d read the later novels and hated them, and couldn’t believe Heinlein could write for a younger audience.  In fact, none of the other younger writers at the table had read any of Heinlein’s juveniles, or any of his Golden Age writing for that matter, basically because they detested his later books, the one’s that had come out when they were coming of age, so thoroughly.

They hadn’t needed to.  There is so much more SF available now, so many more writers applying the ideas and techniques developed by Heinlein and the other early greats, that I’m not sure it’s actually necessary to read them anymore.  Not to have a basic understanding of the genre, at least.  If you want to be well-read, then you certainly have to sample them.  And LeGuin, and Delany, and Tiptree, and Gibson, and Willis.  You don’t have to like any of them, but you do have to read them.

But if you want to be a writer or a fan rather than a scholar these days, then I don’t think you have to read Heinlein at all.  You only have to read what you like.

What do you think?  Does Heinlein still matter?

She Brushed Her Fiery Red Hair Out of Her Piercing Green Eyes

Here’s the thing: I almost never think about what color my hair and eyes are. Even when I look into a mirror, that stuff never enters my consciousness; I’ll notice if I need to comb my hair, but I won’t consciously note that my hair is the same color it’s been FOR MY WHOLE FRICKIN’ LIFE [1]. Same thing for my eyes—I’ll notice if they’re significantly bloodshot, but not that they’re the same-old same-old brown.

Yet I can’t count how many times I’ve seen stories by beginners, where the viewpoint characters pointedly mention the color of their hair and eyes, not to mention their “heart-shaped faces”, their “generous mouths”, and their “slightly too big noses”. [2]

I’ll grant that some people probably do take conscious note of exactly how they look, no matter how familiar the details are; some people care a great deal about the face they present to the public. It’s also easy to imagine circumstances where the details leap out at you—if you’ve just started wearing colored contact lenses, you’ll be very conscious of your new eye color whenever you look in a mirror.

But when I see “eyes and hair” passages in writing, they seldom have any in-context excuse. They read as if the writer felt obliged to give a physical picture of the character, so details were shoehorned into the prose without considering what the viewpoint character would actually notice.

The effect is to take readers out of the story. Instead of connecting with the believable thoughts of a particular person, the reader is suddenly presented with thoughts from…where? It’s nothing but an authorial intrusion, and it breaks the spell of the narrative. We can feel the writer forcing stuff into the story, not naturally but from a sense of, “I have to do this—readers will expect it.” What actually happens is that readers get disconnected, even if they don’t consciously realize why. It’s like when a bad stage actor gestures artificially to “indicate” some emotion.

How the Pros Do It

So what’s a good way to describe your viewpoint character? Usually, you don’t have to. In many books, the viewpoint character isn’t directly described at all.

I just pulled three books off my shelf at random and checked the first three pages of each to see if the viewpoint character was described. In two, there wasn’t a single word of description (although there were descriptions of people the viewpoint character met). In the third, there’s one vital detail: “He dug his claws into the snow.” This tells us that the viewpoint character isn’t human…but apart from that, there’s nothing to indicate what kind of creature he is.

On the other hand, all three books reveal plenty of psychological details. They show us how their viewpoint characters think, not how they look. One depicts a scheming politician debating how to manipulate another person. (This mental debate also gives us useful background info about the political situation…but we’ll deal with exposition in some future post.) Another book describes an unfortunate first-mate on a ship, fearful about a storm and several other threats; the character’s fear establishes foreboding and suspense, always good elements at the start of a story. The final book I happened to pick is about the aftermath of a battle, in which a non-human soldier is ritually burying the dead. This establishes the setting (we’re in the middle of a war) and tells us something about the culture of one of the sides.

In all three examples, the authors create approachable viewpoint characters with whom we can connect. We understand what kind of people these are, even if we have no idea what they look like. We see what they care about and what they do to achieve their ends. In other words, we quickly get to know these characters, even if we don’t have a picture of them.

The most important skill related to viewpoint is establishing a connection between the character and the reader. Don’t let unhelpful details get in the way.

In some cases, however, physical qualities are central to a character’s psychological identity—see my own book Expendable. Expendable was written in first-person, so I handled the character’s description in the simplest possible way: the narrator addressed the reader directly and said, “Here’s what I look like.” The same approach is used in almost every first-person story I can think of; if and when it becomes relevant to the action, the narrator says something like, “Now you have to understand I’m a big tough-looking guy…”

In third-person limited stories, the usual solution is equally simple: have your major characters described by lesser characters. “The doorman had heard that Miss Elizabeth was a beauty, but seeing her in the flesh took his breath away. From a distance, the first thing he noticed was her walk…”

In third-person omniscient stories…well, we’ll save that till next time.

For Every Action, There is an Equal and Opposite…

In all cases, don’t neglect the usefulness of in-story reactions from other characters. You can show how your viewpoint character looks by the way other characters react. Almost always, this works better than listing physical details.

Let’s go back to Miss Elizabeth, mentioned above. If it’s important for readers to understand that this woman is gorgeous, don’t waste your time listing “attractive” physical traits. If you say, for example, she’s blonde and curvaceous, not only is that a cringe-inducing cliché, but many readers will have vastly different opinions on what constitutes beauty. The buxom blonde cliché will also bring in cartloads of the readers’ mental baggage: they may decide she’s an airhead, cheap and easy, a gold-digger, etc.

It’s far better to show people simply reacting to her beauty…trying to impress her, gazing at her longingly, making envious remarks, and so on. If you show the reactions without actually giving specific details, readers will develop a mental construct that’s more beautiful (to the readers’ personal tastes) than anything you can actually describe. Even better, you can move the action forward at the same time that you expand our understanding of the character; you don’t have to stop what’s going on while you list the character’s qualities.

The same applies to any character whose physical appearance is significant, whether the person is intimidating, a laughingstock, repugnant, or whatever. If their looks are notable enough to affect what’s going on, then people looking at the characters will have discernible reactions. If a character’s appearance isn’t striking enough to provoke reactions, how important is it to your story?

Characterization is about a character’s entire identity, not just their outward appearance. For many of us, the precise details of how we look don’t play that big a part in who we are. If you had to list the ten most important facts about yourself, would you mention the color of your hair and eyes?[3]

Still Not Done

Am I finished with viewpoint? I’m going to post (at least) one more entry on this topic, discussing something I talked about in Viewpoint and Story Experience: stories where readers may not directly identify with the viewpoint character, but where the character is just so entertaining that you’re willing to listen to whatever he or she says. In the meantime, it’s time for your comments!

[1] Except for that time the director made me dye it when I played John in The Importance of Being Earnest. ↩

[2] Note to anyone looking for a post-grad thesis topic: investigate why beginning writers so often choose a slightly flawed nose to be their protagonist’s obligatory lapse from physical perfection. Why is this a whimsically charming way for a character to avoid being too good to be true? Discuss. ↩

[3] You realize I’m not just talking about hair and eyes, right? I’m talking about any time when a writer lets I ought to mention that overrule what the viewpoint character would consciously observe. ↩

Don’t get me wrong. I love books. I love the feel and smell of the paper. I love the pretty pictures on the covers. I love the sight of all my books lining the walls of my house, reminding me of great worlds, great characters, great stories. But … these days I just don’t buy that many of them.

I still buy words, of course. But I buy them on my cell phone. And “real” books — the kind they chop down trees and roll printing presses to make — have become my word delivery vehicle of last resort.

I’m not sure how I feel about this. Or, actually, I am sure. I feel … conflicted.

On the one hand, the convenience of e-books is awe-inspiring. I can fit hundreds of books onto my phone, which now also contains my calendar, internet, fax, and pretty much everything else I need to make a living writing fiction (short of full-featured word processing and an ergonomic keyboard, which I’m sure are coming soon). As a writer of research-driven science fiction and historical fantasy, I also love the convenience of having all my notes and highlights instantly available in searchable form. No need to sift through index cards so I can track down citations for the copy editor. It’s all right there in my computer: notes, quotes, page numbers, everything.

The convenience factor has even changed my relation to my once-beloved paper books. The other day I was ransacking my shelves for a book when I felt a surge of new and unfamiliar annoyance. Why was this book hiding from me in such a childish manner? Why couldn’t it just tell my cell phone where it was and end the pain for everyone? In short … why wasn’t it acting more like the real books that were already on my phone?

That was a very strange moment, and I still don’t quite know what to make of it.

I’m not sure anyone else out there knows what to make of it either. Here are two major players in the e-book revolution — each taking opposite positions about the change from paper books to e-books.  On one end of the spectrum, Joe Konrath waxes poetic about the e-book as multi-media platform and social network. At the other end, Cory Doctorow argues that people still buy his books on paper even though he gives the e-files away for free because reading the old-fashioned way remains a precious refuge from the constant stimulus and interruption of life in the wired age.

And the thing is … they’re both right.

On the one hand, e-books offer both stupendous convenience and miraculous new creative possibilities. Not least, they free writers of the tyranny of printing, binding and distribution costs. They replace the tyranny of paper with the tyranny of time: a publishing paradigm in which delivering words is so cheap that the true “cost” of a book will be measured not in dollars but in attention spans.

On the other hand, as Cory points out, reading a good book on paper is richer, deeper, more visceral than reading it on a screen. And if I had to pick one word to describe what sets paper books apart, it would be — once again — time.

Time flows fast and shallow when you’re on-line. There’s the constant pull to check the email, check the news, make sure you’re not missing the latest frog-on-monkey video. Sometimes I watch myself pinging back and forth between research, email, news, and writing … and I can’t help thinking of the line in The Grapes of Wrath about how a man’s life moves in starts and jerks but a woman’s life flows deep and steady like a river. I don’t know if that’s true of men and women (and I doubt Steinbeck did either). But I do think it captures something essential about the emotional and intellectual commitment we make when we shut the computer, step out of the everyday world, and give ourselves up completely to a book.

When you read on-line it’s easy to get stuck halfway between the book world and the real world. But when you settle in with a paper book, your inner time flows as slow and deep as the story needs it to flow. A great story is its own universe, full of pleasures and insights that only reveal themselves when you let the book set the pace. Some of those rewards are sturdy enough to survive the constant interruptions of reading on-line. But others are more fragile. And that facet of the reading experience — that timeless feeling of being submerged in a dream that unfolds at its own rhythm — is what pulls me back time and again to my favorite paper books.

But on the third hand … here’s an article by Adam Penenberg about the future of reading in the digital age. As he points out, the first cars were called “horseless carriages” — and that’s pretty much what they looked like too. So the books of the future may look as different from today’s e-books as a Maserati is from a Model T. Hypertext and book-based social networks are just the beginning of an evolution that we can’t predict any more than Johannes Gutenberg could have predicted us. In fact, I’ve been talking recently to a high tech startup that’s already developing new interactive e-book features much like the ones Penenberg describes. Their work is intriguing. To me, it’s more than intriguing. It’s downright inspiring. And here’s why….

• Imagine reading a science fiction novel where made-up science terms are hyperlinked to a database that explains how the writer invented them and points you to the underlying research from which the invention was extrapolated.
• Imagine reading a book whose full annotated text is live on Goodreads so you can share your reading experience with others in a permanent moveable feast of an online reading group.
• Imagine reading the “Director’s Cut” of your favorite book: a version that includes all the earlier drafts so you can follow the editing process from first draft to publication; a version that includes extra scenes or chapters that the editor and writer both liked but that were cut simply to keep down printing and binding costs; a version that includes alternate viewpoints or additional backstory about your favorite characters, or even alternate endings.
• For that matter, imagine a book with no ending at all … a book that continues to evolve, digging deeper, uncovering new thematic resonance and hidden emotional depths, for as long as the writer is still alive to work on it.

Some of those new insights would come from the writer alone. But some of them might come from … you the reader? After all, why not? Isn’t every serious reading of a book a conversation across time between writer and reader? Why shouldn’t that conversation go both ways? And why shouldn’t it be part of the book? No reason at all, as long as writer and reader want it to be….

These things aren’t science fiction. They’re all possible — right now, with the technology we already have. The only thing standing between them and you is the fact that publishers are still treating e-books like the red-headed stepchild of paper books instead of what they really are: a completely new story delivery system with its own universe of possibilities and opportunities.

So here are some questions I’d like to ask you about e-books — and I might as well confess now that these questions are the real purpose of this post, since this is only my first, provisional attempt to grapple with what e-books mean for me as both a writer and a reader.

• Have you made the jump to e-books, or are you still on paper?
• Are there any books you’ll always want to read on paper? Which ones? And why?
• How have e-books changed the way you read?
• How have e-books changed the ways you imagine you could read?

I’ll take a stab at that last question myself, just to get the conversation started. And since I’ve bloviated more than enough for one post, I’ll make my answer concrete and personal…

Right now, as I sit in my office typing, I’m looking at a stack of paper in the bookshelf across the room from me. That stack of paper is a book. Actually, it’s three books: a big fat doorstop of a science fantasy trilogy that I finished just before I wrote my first published novel. People ask me about that trilogy all the time, because it’s the book that explains the big picture of the universe my published SF novels are all set in. But even though I know there are readers out there who would love to read it, I’ve never seriously tried to sell it. Why not? Because it’s basically my personal Lord of the Rings. It took over a decade to write. It has an invented language with its own alphabet, marginal notes and illustrations, and lengthy appendices discussing the history, literature, religions, and culture of the major characters. And, um, did I mention the illustrations?

I love all that stuff, of course. And so do lots of readers just like me — the same readers who actually learned Elvish when they were kids and can still tell you who El-ahrairah is and what silflay means. But publishers, of course, hate it with a passion which surpasseth all mortal understanding … for the simple reason that it makes books insanely expensive to produce and screws up their profit margin.

Anyway, El-ahrairah is not the point (though perhaps he should be). The point is that only a decade ago, that trilogy was unpublishable because turning it into words on paper was just not going to happen for any writer whose name couldn’t guarantee publishers an automatic spot on the New York Times Bestseller List. But now? Now anyone with a decent laptop could publish it.

And that is exciting. It’s not all that exciting to me as a writer; even if I decided to get back to that book the second I was done with the books I currently have under contract, I wouldn’t be able to start work on it another five years. And, as the Soviet Union learned to its detriment, there’s a limit to how excited anyone can really get about a five year plan. But it is exciting to me as a reader. Because here’s the thing: If I’m sitting here daydreaming about ‘cheating’ on the books that pay my mortgage in order to self-publish a book that’s too big and complicated and expensive for traditional publishing, then you can bet there are a thousand unpublished writers out there right now who are actually doing it.

And you know what? Some of their books will be great. And they’ll be great in ways that would never have survived the sales, editing, and marketing process imposed on traditionally published fiction. And when those great, new, unconventional books hit the internet … I’ll be right there ready to buy them. And so will a host of other readers just like me.

That’s what it’s all about: readers and writers dreaming together. It is the shared dream that makes a book, not the ink or electrons or paper. If you dream better on paper … well, the paper will still be there for you. After all, people still ride horses for fun, don’t they? But if we use e-books creatively, then they can let readers and writers share new dreams … dreams that might have languished on writers’ shelves in the age of paper. Will the process of transition be disruptive and painful? Yes. I’d be lying if I said otherwise. But it will also be fertile … as fertile as we allow our imaginations to make it.

And when it’s all over? There will still be writers. And there will still be readers. And we will still be dreaming the strange and consuming dream of fiction together. And that strikes me as a pretty damn good thing.

Of course, now that I’m a responsible adult, I don’t get to indulge in those summer vacation reads in quite the same way.  I don’t get a three-month vacation from my job, from writing and editing and promoting my books.

But I *do* give myself a little more leeway when I choose what I read.  I read more of what I *want* to read, less of what I *should*.  I stray from the genres I write, from keeping up with award lists, from in-genre books that are getting all the buzz.

(Case in point – I have been *wallowing* in Tana French’s contemporary Irish mysteries – IN THE WOODS, THE LIKENESS, and FAITHFUL PLACE – they don’t relate to any of my writing projects, and/but I have been loving every single word.)

So?  What about you?  What do you plan on reading this summer?  Are your summer reads different from those you complete during the rest of the year?

That Famous Invisible Gorilla

By now, every self-respecting SF reader/writer should know about the Invisible Gorilla experiment: a psychology experiment at Harvard in which subjects were shown a video of people passing a basketball and were told to count how many passes the people made. In the middle of the video, someone wearing a gorilla suit ambled into the picture, waved to the camera, then ambled off again…but half of the test subjects didn’t notice the gorilla. They were too busy watching the basketball.

This experiment demonstrates selective inattention. Every second, your senses flood your brain with far more information than it can process and bring into consciousness. As a result, your brain is selective: your subconscious filters out anything it thinks isn’t important, so that you’re only conscious of what your subconscious decides is “meaningful.” (This has interesting repercussions, many of which have been explored in SF novels—see, for example, John Brunner’s The Stone that Never Came Down or my own Vigilant.)

For writers, the point is that people only notice a tiny subset of what’s around them. Furthermore, what they notice is dictated by their conscious and subconscious predispositions. If they’re consciously looking at or looking for something, their attention will obviously focus on the target object…but also, if they’re in the habit of paying attention to something (or if they’re just innately sensitive to that sort of thing), their subconscious is more likely to let that kind of information rise to the surface. Your subconscious delivers what it’s habitually asked for.

Usually this process is straightforward. Architects notice architecture, botanists notice plants, police notice “suspicious behavior.” If an interior decorator walks into a room, he or she will likely notice the décor, possibly to the exclusion of other significant details (such as the people in the room). A decorator’s subconscious is accustomed to placing importance on interior design, and will therefore give the décor more weight than other sensory input. If a carpenter walks into the same room, he or she will also pay attention to the furniture, but probably with a different emphasis: perhaps noticing small qualities about the woodwork rather than caring about the room’s overall look.

Selective inattention dictates how writers should and shouldn’t write scenes. Your viewpoint character will notice some things and ignore others; your viewpoint character will care about some things and be indifferent to others. This applies to all viewpoints, whether first person, third person limited, or even third person omniscient. What you put down on the page must be completely dictated by the character’s sensibilities within the context of the story.

How This Plays Out

Let’s take an example that’s fresh in my mind. I will name no names, but a few days ago I abruptly stopped reading a book which had SF content but which was written by a li-fi writer. The passage that made me slam the book shut was supposedly an email message written from one medical researcher to another. It described gory events that threatened the message-writer’s life…but the message didn’t contain a single word of medical terminology. It was (shudder) poetic. It was top-heavy with metaphor, and also with that maddening li-fi proclivity for characters dwelling on childhood memories, even in life-or-death situations when most people would be screaming, “What do I do now?” rather than having flashbacks to when they were six. (Honest to God, li-fi writers, it’s perfectly possible to characterize adult human beings without giving chapter and verse on their traumatic days in kindergarten. Give up the formula, folks!) To get back to that email message, it struck me as a bullshit authorial intrusion from someone who wasn’t even trying to depict a real medical researcher.

Look, I’m sure the real world contains at least one poetically-minded medical researcher who can’t let go of his childhood. But if that kind of man ever flashed a satellite transmission to a colleague saying, “My research has gone to hell and I don’t think I’ll survive,” surely he wouldn’t go into reveries and try to evoke an atmosphere. He’d try to convey as many solid facts as possible, using whatever technical jargon is necessary. It’s the writer’s job to simulate the feel of such specialized jargon while making it comprehensible to non-specialist readers. (Hmm, another skill to add to the list.)

In other words, if your viewpoint character is an expert speaking on his/her subject of expertise, the character had better sound like an expert and talk about the things an expert would care about. Otherwise, you cease to be convincing…and you make readers like me throw your book across the room.

Long story short:

1. Think about what your viewpoint character will pay attention to in a particular scene.
2. Write it down using the language that your character would use.
3. Don’t write down anything else.

Not Done Yet

There’s still a lot more for me to say on this topic—just wait till I start ranting about characters who seem compelled to mention the color of their eyes and hair. But this posting is long enough, so as usual, it’s time to turn the floor over to you. Comment away!