There are dreams I remember vividly, many years after they visited me. There was one dream that was practically monochrome (I usually dream in Technicolor and Sensurround, so this was notable)  – it involved, first, standing on top of a cliff at night, looking down onto a seashore and a long jetty extending into black water under moonlight. Then, when I was down on the jetty itself, I was met by these tall (too tall!) pale creatures wearing cloaks with large high collars like fans behind their heads, their eyes big and dark in their pale faces, their hands long and with fingers which had too many joints. There was a vessel waiting at the end of the jetty and I was supposed to leave on it, to go with them, to a destination I did not know. And yet, it was not a scary dream. I was calm. This was all okay, somehow. There was another dream which I had when I was sixteen or so (trust me, this was a LONG time ago) where I was walking first across a blasted heath that was just dust and scrub plants, and then through empty abandoned streets in an old-fashioned and almost medieval town where the upper stories of houses extended over the narrow streets to make almost a tunnel, practically touching over my head, and then past a low brick fence whcih had iron railings cemented into it. Beyond the railings I could see a fairground – a ferris wheel, a merry-go-round – all lit up, all turning, except that there was nobody there. At all. Except me. And then I came to a gate in this fence, a wrought-iron gate which had lettering in iron scrollwork arched above it – and the writing said WELCOME TO HELL. Perhaps at 16 hell just meant being alone and abandoned, I don’t know, it would take a brace of psychologists to work through all the symbolism here. But I remember that dream, in detail, to this day.

And then there was the dream in which my grandparents, both dead, came back to make me stop my inconsolable mourning for them – to tell me to let go, that they were both all right, that it was okay to release them.

And then there was the dream that I had where I walked into this hall where I was supposed to take an entrance exam for a school – and then, weeks afterwards, went to take an entrance exam for a school… IN THE HALL OF WHICH I HAD DREAMED. Perfect in every detail.

There is a recurring house that crops up in my dreams, to the pointwhere I would be able to draw you detailed plans for it if you wanted them.

There are recurring instances of dreams of dark water, which scare me.

There are times when I can stand back, the real me, and actually editorialise about the stuff that I am dreaming about – I distnictly know that I’ve thought “THIS IS WEIRD”, while still askeep, while in the middle of the dream itself.

Some I remember. Some I forget. Perhaps that editorial part of my brain decrees which are which – what dreams are important, and what dreams may be safely discarded as irelevant and just the entertainment department to keep your brain busy while the body is resting.

But people have odd reactions to these dreams or to my admitting to them – or to the fact that I’ve dreamed smells (like fresh bread – I’ve woken up to the smell of freshly baked bread when there was no such thing within a mile of my house) or sounds (if I knew how to write music I could probably make a living from the soundtracks of my dreams) or touch (I have distinct tactile sensations). My own flesh-and-blood kinfolk think it is strange that I dream *in colour* – or, at the very least, this particular person swears that no memory remains in waking hours of any colour present in the dreams of the night before.

Is it just the way my brain is wired? Is this why I write?

Do you dream?…

Just a quick post from me today, because I am deep in the throes of finishing DARKBEAST REBELLION (sequel to DARKBEAST, which you’ll be seeing on August 28 of this year…)  I *thought* that I was writing the penultimate chapter yesterday, but that turned out to be a lie, because I had to add one more chapter.  Then, I thought that I was writing the penultimate chapter today, but that’s turning out to be a lie, because I need to add one *more* chapter.  I know it’ll pay off in the end (and no one will be able to say that I rushed things!) but it’s a little frustrating to see my carefully-constructed timetable unraveling like this.

IN ANY CASE!

Here’s my question for you today:  Which conventions do you go to (or do you wish you *could* go to, if you’re not able to get there in person…)?  What are they like?  I wish that I had one of those personality quiz things, you know?  Where I could say that I prefer coffee-fudge-ribbon ice cream, and my favorite color is dark blue and I’m more an art museum girl than a zoo type girl, and then someone would say, “You are Con-tastic!” with a link for me to register…

So?  Advise away!

Mindy, ducking back into her writing lair…

“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.

Admittedly, novels can contain other types of writing: essays, for example, where the author or a character expounds on his or her opinions. But that kind of stuff should be used sparingly—some might say not at all—so dialogue and description are by far the main components of prose fiction.

Stories, Not Lists

Teaching our class at Clarion West, Lucius Shepard said several times that he approached description as “a little story.” (Lucius writes gorgeous description; I encourage you to read as much as his work as you can, and learn from a master.) After reflecting on what Lucius said, as well as on the thoughts of numerous other writers, I’ve come to the following formulation:

A descriptive passage is the story of a character’s encounter with a person, place, or thing.

Feel free to memorize that or have it tattooed on your forearm. Print it in 48-point type and hang it above your desk. The formulation may seem simple, or even obvious, but it’s still a valuable statement to keep in mind…and every part of the statement is important.

First of all, a descriptive passage is a story (or at least it should be). Too often, writers describe things just by making lists of details. For example, when you want to describe a person, you may be tempted to list facial features, body type, clothing, and so on.

But that’s not how we actually experience other people. We don’t encounter people as static lists of characteristics, we encounter them in a temporal sequence of perceptions and resulting reactions: i.e. as a story.

Pay attention the next time you encounter someone, whether it’s seeing someone at a distance or close up. For example, if you spot somebody from a distance, you can’t see small details; however, you might notice brightly colored clothing or the way the person walks, and general things like tall/short, fat/thin, male/female, etc.

Or circumstances may prevent you from gathering such information. For example, I’m writing this on a cold winter’s day when people on the street are all bundled up. From a distance, some people are obviously male and others obviously female, but many are not obvious at all. That’s important to notice…and it’s important to figure out which details make the difference. Those are the telling details that you can use in your writing. If you can identify someone as female from half a mile away, what factors make it so? If another person’s gender is hard to tell even close up, what contributes to that effect? These are details to tuck away in your memory so that they’re available when you want to describe a character of a particular type.

Temporal Sequence

Lucius Shepard gave our class an assignment: whenever you enter a room, pay attention to what you notice and in what order. This is easier said than done; usually when you walk into a room, you notice several things in close succession, so quickly that they seem simultaneous.

But they aren’t simultaneous. Your consciousness has a very low bandwidth, and simultaneity is generally too difficult to manage. (It takes serious mental practice, for example, to take in both sight and sound at the same time. It’s possible, but we almost never operate in that mode.) Instead we time-slice our attention: first we may notice a sound, then a sight, then a smell, then another sight, then a touch, and so on. That’s how we actually perceive the world…and if you want to depict a realistic encounter, that’s how you must write the descriptive passage. (You may make the artistic decision not to pursue realism, and that’s a perfectly valid choice. Just be aware that you’re making it.)

The temporal sequence underlying an encounter also includes reactions: emotional, mental, and physical. When you step into a bakeshop, and the smell of fresh baking envelopes you, you react. You smile and you breathe in deeply. Perhaps you remember some bakeshop from your youth, or the smell of your grandmother baking pies. Maybe then you actively look around the shop in search of cherry pies like Grandma used to make. Instead, you see a teenage girl who’s looking at the clock as if she can’t wait to get off work…and you wonder what she’s got planned that’s so much better than inhaling the shop’s aroma. And so on.

Perception: smell. Reactions: breathe in deeply; remember Grandma; look around. Perception: girl looking at clock. Reactions: wonder what she’s got planned; philosophize about ignoring aroma. Perception: girl asks, “Can I help you?” Reactions: step forward; try to remember what you came in to buy; look around again to see if anything reminds you what you’re there for.

This illustrates how people actually experience their lives. You don’t experience the bakeshop as a list of details; you perceive a single detail, then you react (with emotions, thoughts, memories, and physical actions), which leads to more perceptions, which lead to more reactions, and so on—a temporal sequence of perceptions and resulting reactions.

Point of View

But there’s another layer to this. “A descriptive passage is the story of a character’s encounter…” Typically, the character is your viewpoint character and that character’s personal traits exert a strong influence on both perceptions and reactions. As I said in a previous posting, architects notice architecture, botanists notice plants, and police notice “suspicious behavior.” The background and agenda of a character will change the nature of your descriptive passages.

For example, how do you write the bakeshop description if the person walking in is a boy with a crush on the teenage girl? He’s entering the shop in the hope of seeing her. In all likelihood, he won’t even notice the smell; all he’ll notice is her.

Will he notice that she’s staring at the clock? It depends on what sort of boy he is. One sort will only look at her body; another will look at her face without thinking about her expression; another will wonder what she’s thinking, but will go off on a fantasy that she’s dreaming of him, not just wishing for her shift to be over. The boy may never notice the baked goods at all…in which case, your descriptive passage shouldn’t mention them either. If you’re describing this scene from the boy’s point of view, it will ring a distractingly false note if you deviate from his viewpoint.

(You might say, “But it’s important for my plot that readers know there’s a giant wedding cake on the counter.” If so, then you have to find a way to bring the cake to the boy’s attention, or else you have to tweak the boy’s personality so that he’s someone who would notice the cake. This isn’t rocket science—you could just start the scene with the girl in a backroom, so that when the boy enters, he has time to look around before she shows up.)

While I’m thinking of it, there’s another important point to note: personal factors influence what a character notices, but they don’t override all other considerations. Even the most love-besotted boy will notice if there’s a zebra standing at the checkout counter. The same goes for other blatant oddities. In real life, humans can be monumentally oblivious, but in fiction, we ought to assume that big unusual things will be noticed by anyone.

Time’s Up

That’s it for this post, but there’s more to be said about writing description. Next month, we’ll look at pacing and what I call “wordspace”. In the meantime, I’ll open the floor to your thoughts on description. Expound away!

Ah, you say, but Jim Hines is a writer, a class of people known for their sedentary lifestyle. Those heroines are probably all in fantastic shape, the better to kick supernatural ass.

Okay, I’ll see your counter-argument, and raise you a link I meant to post before Jim beat me to it. A fabulous lady on Tumblr made her own pair of posts on the topic, complaining about the ridiculous contortions of women in superhero comics. That lady? Is a highly-trained martial artist and contortionist. (No, really. There are pictures to prove it. I’m “thirteen years of ballet training” flexible, but some of the pics of her make me wince.)

And she says these poses are stupid.

Sure, comic books are way worse than we are over here with our fantasy novel covers. (Like that’s anything to be proud of.) But it’s all part and parcel of the same thing, which is the notion that depictions of women must put T&A on display.

We can come up with all kinds of specious justifications for it. Leather is practical! Wonder Woman can’t have her mobility restricted by pants! Gameplay requires that Elizabeth stand out somehow! (Apparently “somehow” = “breasts.”) What it boils down to, though, is the knee-jerk habit we have in our society, of using women’s bodies to market things. Books, comic books, video games, movies, cars, Axe body spray, anything and everything. Because women are sexy, and sex sells.

Here’s the thing. You get people claiming that giving Elizabeth blatant cleavage in Bioshock Infinite “broadens its appeal” — and that’s a quote from the article criticizing the decision. Even the guy who’s on my side unthinkingly parrots the party line, that everybody likes boobs. But I don’t find that kind of thing hot, and not just because I’m a straight woman.

What do I find hot? Competence.

Contrast the tumblr Escher Girls (WARNING: pics there often not safe for work, or sanity) with Women Fighters in Reasonable Armor. As far as I’m concerned, the latter wins, hands-down. Or take a look at blogger Anna’s response to Jim’s post, where she contrasts the poses of men and women on book covers. There’s just no competition. One set says “competence and strength;” the other does not. One attracts me to the people depicted; the other drives me away.

What puzzles me is the fact that these urban fantasy covers are almost always on books written by female authors, for a largely female readership. Romance, which is comparable in terms of authorship and readership, doesn’t look like that; they do have a percentage of scantily-clad women, badly-posed on the covers, but they also have all the beefcake you could want and more. I understand the message of those covers: imagine you look like this, and a guy who looks like that wants you more than anything in the world. But the urban fantasy? Imagine yourself contorted in this uncomfortable position, holding a sword like you don’t know what to do with it. That isn’t a message that draws me in.

Do these covers actually appeal to women? It seems like they must, or publishers wouldn’t use them . . . but I’m not sure it’s that simple. At this point, they definitely work in terms of advertising “this book is an urban fantasy!,” but that doesn’t necessarily mean the underlying appeal is very strong. Possibly it’s a move designed to attract male readers, who otherwise might not pick the book up. I don’t actually know. I just know it doesn’t work for me, at all. I was pretty happy with the original cover for my first novel — she’s (almost) fully clothed, standing in a reasonable position, and holding that sword like she knows how to use it — but I love the cover for the reissue. The way she’s staring straight at you speaks of confidence and determination. And that will get my attention any day.

I meant for this post to go on and talk about competence some more, but I’ve already rambled on for quite a while, so we’ll call it quits for now and come back to this next month. I leave you with this post by an actual armorer, discussing how to do female armor wrong, and how to do it right. He, too, thinks the ridiculous crap isn’t nearly as sexy as more reasonable alternatives.

If only more artists and game designers agreed.

 Creative writing classes were part of the English and American Literature Department at my school, but that was because no one else wanted them.  The English and American Literature Department didn’t want them either, but enough students did, so they were offered begrudgingly.  The teachers were all graduate students who’d never published anything, and they usually picked their small classes (five or six, max), from the cool, artsy crowd, or their friends.

 Since I was neither, I applied, but I never got in.  Then one semester, a visiting professor from the University of Virginia hung up his shingle.  His name was Peter Taylor, and he was a regional writer of some repute from the South (a decade later he won a Pulitzer for his novel, A Summons to Memphis), but nobody I knew had ever heard of him at the time.  I hadn’t, either.

 The usual twenty or thirty people signed up for his class, but, instead of picking the hippest six, he took all thirty, divided them into two sections, added another five latecomers to each section, and settled in to a heavy workload.

 It was a great class.  Taylor devoted each session to discussing one anonymous story, which meant everyone had a couple of stories read and reviewed out of the three or four we each wrote that semester.  It was not the most arduous class in the catalog, and you always got an A no matter how awful your stories, as long as you handed them in on time and showed up regularly to class.  That was another reason you got so many pre-meds.  Their classes were already impossible, and they could use the easy grade.

 The stories were pretty much what you’d expect.  Ruminations on the old man who swept up the bus depot in the golden light of the afternoon sun, the day the writer’s grandmother died, a poignant love story from freshman year.  Taylor read them all, made small suggestions about phrasing and imagery, and went on to the next one.

 Until the day my story was discussed.  That day, Taylor was animated from the start, waving the pages over his head, or smacking them with the back of his other hand to make his point.  “Finally!” he exclaimed, “someone has written a story!  Not a very good story, or one I even understand.  I think it’s science fiction.  But at least it’s a story.  Things happen.  The characters do things.  Everything else that’s been turned in, most of them much better written than this one, aren’t really stories.  They’re vignettes.  Descriptions.  Small slices of life.  But they’re not stories.  And since this is a short story class, I’d like to commend the author for actually writing a story.”

 My classmates stared at Taylor for several seconds, then spent the next forty-five minutes shredding my work for its terrible writing and implausibility.  (I think I was in a Philip Jose Farmer phase at the time, and it was a terrible story.)

 I, of course, was pleased as punch.

 Anyone else out there have any fun tales about learning the craft?

In general, talking about your own stuff in any kind of self-aggrandizing terms is seen as vaguely icky, period.  many writers tend to just shy away from the whole prospect, period – because we DO find it hard to kind of sit there and announce, here, look, I’ve written a book and it’s SO award worthy, you lnow. Many of us, I would even venture to say most of us, tend to look at our own stuff and rather than see it as utterly perfect and worthy of every award being offered out there all we see are the problems and the imperfections and the stuff we could have improved or done differently if we had to do it over again. For many a writer an award nomination, never mind a win, is enough to occasion said writer to burst into tears – because SOMEONE ELSE FOUND IT WORTHY. Somehow the work that the writer himself or herself actually brings to anybody’s attention is inferior by definition – because it was not do brought by an independent third party.

It brings to mind a phrase whose provenance – place or author – I can no longer recall (if anyone knows please do enlighten me). I won’t even quote it directly because I don’t remember it precisely but the subject was Queen Victoria, and her having actually proposed marrage to Albert instead of being in the fortunate position of having him propose to HER as tradition and propriety demanded. But then, she was Queen, or she was going to be Queen, and there are certain proprieties that do go out of the window in the circumstances. And many an author finds themselves, sooner or later, in the same position, eventially – having to propose the marriage of their work to a reader (or an award nominator) instead of being in the fortunate position of waiting to be asked.

There is a LOT of reading material out there. Much of it simply falls through the cracks. In today’s straitened economic circumstances, in particular, any given reader is even less likely than they might have been in the days of yore to take financial chances on an author whose work, or at the very least whose NAME, they already don’t know well enough to expect that they will like the newest offering. Many new authors are left in the dust by this because nobody CAN know their name yet, and fewer readers might be willing to give them that first all-inportant chance than they might want, need, or deserve. And yet, if they ever so much as pipe up with “Well I wrote this thing…” they get squashed by the self-promotional recoil juggernaut and even some of those who might have liked their work if they had read it are turned off by the manner in which they were made aware o fit.

Particularly at certain times of the year, like right now, when the awards nominations are in full swing, authors find themselves caught between the rock of simply staying quiet and the hard place of doing at least a single simple blog post of a list of their eligible works for that year and letting those chips fall where they may. Mostly, I don’t bother with it. This year, I’ve a bunch of short stories out there, so I put out that blog post. But ambivalently, and with trepidation, and wondering whether I was simply doing more harm than good to begin with. Would those who haven’t read the stories not read them anyway because of the way they now learned about their existence (in which case I really haven’t lost that much) or would they have read them if only they’d found those stories BY THEMSELVES (which I jave no clue how many did) or would they only have been deemed eligible if they had actually been recommended somewhere else by somebody else? And in the latter case does the identity of that “somebody else” matter” Because most of us reach a point where we acquire a fairly wide circle of writerly friends and acquanitances who ALSO write. So, if not touting oneself, is touting works by such friends and acquaintances permissible by current etiquette or is it also tainted? Is a list of stories worthy of potential award nomination, for instance, only really acceptable if it is produced by people who absolutely do not personally know or have any remote connection with the authors of said works?

What if you wrote something that is really very very good but just hasn’t been read by enough strangers? And no, don’t tell me that something that is that good WILL HAVE BEEN. Sometimes strangers read the buzzworks and not the lost great gems which they simply never trip across. Sometimes we have the Oscar-clump situation – you know, a work, or perhaps a handful of works, gets simply ALL the available attention for any given year and it’s like nothing else even exists out there in the vacuum because that one work wins EVEYRTHING (think of the years of the blockbuster Oscar winners with the same movie winning practically every award in the running, or at least every award that anyone cares about – I know they give Oscars in technical categories but few people other than those who receive them actually know or care, the big awards of the night are the big splashy ones like best picture, best actress, best actor…)

Sure, like the good Queen, it is best if you are sitting over here and someone comes over on bended knee and proposes (an accolade) to YOU. But is it remotely acceptable, and if so in what circumstances, for the Queen to propose? For the writer to sit up and say, these are the things that they have creaated, that they believe worthy of your attention – and these are the awards that are floating out there in search of a winner – and no, they are not buying your vote or attempting bribery and corruption they are merely offering a matchmaking services for the reader to take advantage of or not as they choose?

In Amazon forums, the Amazon staff routinely nuke posts made by people whose only response to any topic or a plea for reading suggestions is “Well, I wrote this book…” – and yes, it can get wearying indeed to read post after post of those particular attempts at attention grabbing. But sometimes – even while you’re irritated and annoyed at the brazenness of it all – you can also sort of see the point of view of the writer who might have been published by a small press with little or no resources to devote to extensive publicity and who has joined the discussion on, say, somebody asking for recommendations for new fantasy to read, and who can see post after post telling people to read George R R Martin (who, let’s face it, hardly needs the publicity…) but even though their own book might be absolutely apropos to what the original asker of the question might have wanted they are prohibited, by protocol and by Amazon fiat, from mentioning their own work. And it becomes a self fulfilling prophecy because nobody reads their work because nobody knows it exists because nobody has read it to talk about it because nobody knew to look for it because…

People cannot read things of whose existence they have no inkling – it has been said that the greatest enemy of any writer is not so much piracy as obscurity. The conundrum of how to break the wall of silence before you gather enough momentum for those oh-so-valuable strangers to be doing your promotion for you… remains a conundrum.

How about it, readers? Are you utterly and completely averse to reading anything at all, if you first heard the author of that thing speak of it? Word of mouth is the most valuable but also the most unpredictable  and unreliable publicity that any author can ever hope for. But where does it start? And if it starts with the author, for instance, posting a list of eligible stories during the awards season… does it also end there…?

First of all, I want to assure you that I have been very good this year.  Really.  I’ve done A LOT of writing; I’ve put my butt in my chair just about every day.  (My butt’s actually a little flat and wide at this point for all the writing I’ve done.  But that’s probably more than you wanted to know.)  I’ve met my deadlines.  I’ve dutifully posted at my various blogs.  I’ve read a bunch, done a ton of research, and tried my best to keep my website up to date.  Oh, and I’ve been nice to my wife and kids and friends.  Just ask them.  Well, maybe don’t ask my teenager, but go ahead and talk to the others.

So, since I’ve been so good, I thought you might like to see my gift list.  It’s not too long.  Well, okay, it’s a little long.  But what do you expect?  I’m a novelist.  You want pithy, go to a short story writer.

Just kidding.  A bit of humor there for you.  You like humor, don’t you?  If not, I apologize.

Maybe I should get to my list….

First of all, I’d like a bestseller.  Which is not to say that I want you to give me a book that is a bestseller.  Not that I have anything against bestsellers.  They’re great.  I’m sure the authors who write them are very happy.  It’s just that, well, what I really want is for my next book to BE a bestseller.  Can you do that?  I mean, I’m sure you can do it.  You’re Santa, after all.  But it would be nice if you did that for me.

I’d also like a movie contract for one of my books.  Or several.  All would be great.  But that’s probably asking a lot.  Why don’t we start with one?

Nice reviews would be, well, nice.  I understand that we’re in a tricky area here.  I’m kind of asking you to bend people’s opinions, which might not be kosher.  (It doesn’t offend you when I use the word “kosher,” does it?  I hope not.)  Let’s do it this way:  if you could be really nice to the people who give me good reviews, and give broken glass and rusty nails to the people who crap on my books, that would be great.  (It doesn’t offend you when I use the word “crap,” does it….?)

Also, do you know Oprah?

There are also a few things I want that can actually be put under a tree.

Like a Hugo, a Nebula, and a World Fantasy Award.  I don’t need all three in one year (though that would be really cool!) but I would like to get started on a collection of shiny new hardware.

I should ask for other stuff, too, shouldn’t I?  I mean it’s not all about ego and money, is it?  It’s also about material goods.

I would love a new laptop.  A mac.  One of those really, really thin ones that’s lightning fast and wicked cool looking and mega-expensive.  I need it for work.  Seriously.

I’m also wondering about a new muse.  Not that I don’t like my old muse.  But she is getting a little long in the tooth, as they say, and I’m interested in writing some different stories and books this year, so I thought that a new muse might be in order.  I don’t know if that’s something your elves can make, or if one needs to be captured.  We might be getting into another of those tricky areas.  I’ll leave the muse thing to you; you know best.

And that’s all!  See, I told you it wasn’t too long.  It’s not like I’m being greedy or anything.  Thanks, Santa!

Best,

David

PS.  What do I REALLY want for the holidays this year?  Love and laughter, health and happiness; great successes in the coming year for my colleagues here at SFNovelists (and, yes, for me, too); story and book sales for the aspiring writers among our devoted readers; and peace, joy, and freedom for all the people of the world.  May all of you have a merry holiday!

David B. Coe
http://DavidBCoe.livejournal.com
http://www.DavidBCoe.com

“Late In, Early Out”

Hollywood has the adage, “Start every scene as late as possible and end as early as possible.” For example, if a scene is about Lois confronting Lex in his office, you don’t show Lois driving up to the building, parking her car, going past security, talking to a series of receptionists, entering Lex’s office, and going through the niceties of Lex saying, “May I offer you some coffee?” Instead, you cut straight to Lois, already in the office, asking her first confrontational question. Similarly, when the interview is over, you don’t show Lois walking out and going down to get her car; you simply cut to the next thing Lois does that’s meaningful to the plot.

Of course, books aren’t movies, and a novel-length work often needs to talk the reader through significant transitions. Even movies do a certain amount of scene-setting: instead of cutting directly to Lois in the office, a movie might taken a few seconds to set an emotional tone, showing how huge and impressive the office building is, and how small Lois is in comparison. This can heighten our sense that Lois is up against serious opposition, and that Lex may be too much for her. This ratchets up the tension, which is seldom a bad thing.

Still, movies usually minimize these intervals of transition and scene-setting; they give enough to orient the viewer and set an ambiance, then they go straight into action that’s pertinent to the plot. The scene ends when the plot-pertinent action is over…except for an ending-hook, which we’ll talk about shortly.

“Late In, Early Out” in Prose

As I’ve said, books aren’t movies, and screenwriting principles don’t translate directly to prose. Even so, novelists should be on guard against any tendency to produce mere filler…and that tendency often surfaces at the start and end of scenes.

How much transition and scene-setting will actually work for the reader? How much does the reader need, and how much will the reader enjoy? These questions require artistic judgment, and the answers depend on many factors including the general tone of the story (fast action? sprawling epic?), the narrator’s voice (is the viewpoint character engaging enough to spin out long descriptions, or should you get straight to the point?), and the context within the story (do you want to maintain the same pace as previous scenes, or is it time for a change-up?). There are no formulas, but you still have to ask yourself: when does “useful transition and scene-setting” become “counterproductive padding”? The answer is usually, “Several sentences less than what you put in your first draft.”

Figure out where your scene actually begins, and start there. The scene begins when the struggle begins. Struggles may begin subtly—in our Lois-and-Lex example, the struggle may begin as the building’s imposing architecture assaults Lois psychologically—but subtle or not, the reader must have a sense that something is happening right now and the story is moving forward. Otherwise, the reader may be tempted to “skip ahead to the good stuff” or even set the book down.

“Every Scene’s Ending Must Rise”

Last time, I mentioned a workshop that Nancy Kress and I taught at a convention. During that workshop, Nancy said, “Every scene’s ending must rise.” I took that to mean that every scene should end with a sense of, “There’s more to come, and it’s going to be juicy.” In other words, the ending should have a hook that makes readers keep reading.

Hooks can take many forms. As a clichéd but simple example, the Lois-Lex scene might end with Lex picking up a phone and saying, “That woman has become an inconvenience. Deal with her.” This does two things. First, it promises action to come: something bad will happen to Lois. Naturally, we want to find out what the bad thing is and whether Lois will be okay. But the hook does a second important thing: it assures us that the scene we just saw was important. The scene wasn’t just Lois asking pointed questions and Lex stonewalling her; the scene was about Lois getting under Lex’s skin, whether or not he showed it. If the hook isn’t there, how do we know that the conversation actually achieved anything? The hook tells us the conversation did have an effect. It assures us that the ball was moved forward and the scene wasn’t a waste of time.

So a good scene ending often does (at least) two things: it points toward the future, and also caps off the past. It provides evidence that the preceding scene went somewhere; it wasn’t just talk or meaningless action.

If you look at good scene endings, those two factors are always present, however subtly: some assurance that the scene really has shifted the ground, and a promise that as a result, important developments are on the way. This is especially vital in low-key scenes where readers might ask, “Well, what did that accomplish?” Many scenes don’t have fireworks or immediate repercussions; conversations, for example, may be so guarded that readers can’t tell if any forward progress was made. The scene ending must put such doubts to rest. It doesn’t have to be flashy—it might just be a thought in the viewpoint character’s mind, “He’s good at saying nothing; I’d better follow a different lead”—but one way or another, you must signal that the scene has had an effect.

If you can’t devise such a signal, take it as a danger sign. Every scene should advance the story; at the end of a scene, you should be able to say what it actually accomplished and how it contributed to the story as a whole. What has changed between when the scene started and when it ended? You, the writer, should always be able to answer that question…maybe not in the very first draft if you’re still just exploring the story, but definitely before the final draft is done.

And the reader should also feel that the scene accomplished some purpose. Readers may not be aware of a scene’s full implications—it’s lovely when a scene contains under-the-radar bombshells that will detonate later—but whatever your long-term plans might be, you have to think short-term too. You can’t let your readers think, “That scene was a waste of time—nothing happened.” The scene’s ending is where you can (crudely or subtly) indicate how the scene moved everything forward.

(P.S. Negative accomplishments still count. If Lois’s interview with Lex goes nowhere, no problem. You can just end the scene with Lois deciding, “All right I’ve tried the civilized approach and it didn’t work. Time to get primeval.” That’s perfectly fine. Lois may have failed to achieve her goals, but the scene still advanced the action: it persuaded Lois to change tactics and to try more underhanded measures. Lois’s failure is the story’s win.)

This Scene Ending Too

Time for me to end this scene, having accomplished as much as I wanted about the structure of scenes. Next time, we’ll move on to actual content…and I think we’ll begin with the skill of writing description. In the meantime, what are your thoughts on scene beginnings and ends?

What is pacing? you ask.  Pacing is the art of holding a reader’s attention through the boring stuff, but it is also the art of making different parts of a book move at different speeds.  For example, is the final fight scene of a novel, where our heroine is kicking the villain’s ass, a good place to add a description of her talking sword?  Of course not.  The early parts of the book are where you set things up, the end is where you bring them to a clever close, and the middle is where you do a little of both, depending on how long, and what kind of book you are writing.

How do you do this?  Well, for one thing, you want to push your descriptions and exposition as early into a story as possible.  You want to establish your characters’ proclivities, peculiarities, and peccadilloes in the first half of the book, before showing how they lead the characters to the eventual conclusion.

Most important of all, you want your prose to reflect the pacing as well.  Writing an action scene?  Keep the sentences short and punchy.  Writing a scene you want the reader to really focus on?  Don’t digress.  Explaining something?  Keep your writing clear and concise.

Like all writing, pacing is also a matter of taste.  Some people like doorstops, others prefer brevity.  But stories with a lot of action in them especially require pacing, even thousand page books with lots of politics and intrigue, at least in the last hundred pages.  Even Gormenghast picks by the end, which, to this reader, justified the enormously long, slow set up of the first one and a half books.

YA, on the other hand, is frequently paced at near light speed.