Starting and Stopping is Killing my Pacing

 

On my last revision of my novel, I was working through a lot of pacing issues.  Parts were accused of being slow, and I argued, "It can't be slow!  It's a fight scene!  It's exciting!" and "It can't be slow!  It's witty banter!  They're cute!"  But no, I was wrong, and it was slow.

In the past, when my critique group noted that a section felt slow, I would trim.  I would trim down interiority, and I would cut words and cut clauses and just generally shave down sections until the word count was lower.  After all, writing advice givers always talk about using strong verbs and cutting adverbs and filler words.  Surely I needed to scrape all that off to make the section more streamlined.

But then when I would send my critique group the section again, they would comment on how it was missing some of its charm.  I felt the same way, but when they said it I would get defensive.  They asked me to do this horrible thing!  They can't have it both ways!

But I realized on this set of revisions that that's not the issue.  To try to make the scene read faster, I was stripping out the voice, and the voice actually did work to propel the reader through.  The voice-y-ness, with all the words that people who give advice about writing hate, was not the problem.  I had not improved the pacing.  I had only made it slow and soulless.

So what was the problem?

The problem was stopping and starting.

So in this novel, there's a lot of sparring with a martial art that I made up from a meshing of other martial arts.  In a section towards the beginning, the main character is sparring with a bunch of people one after another.  He fights with one partner, notes a problem in their technique and fixes it.  He fights with the next partner and does something cool.  Through this we learn that he's great at this martial art and also a great leader and teacher.

And everyone said it was slow.  I didn't want to believe that because there's lyrical language all throughout this that should propel a reader forward, and we're learning about our main character, so the scene is doing two things: both character building and world building and with the final partner it forwards the plot.  Also it's cool!  Swords are cool!  Are you not entertained?!

The thing was that he would spar.  And then he would spar again.

Even though he executes a seamless transition from one partner to the next, any tension that has built during the first spar is cut with the next partner.  The tension has to build again.

The same with the sections of dialogue that felt slow.  I wanted to fit, say, four pieces of information into this conversation.  They are cute and flirty with each other and the first piece of information was presented to the reader.  And then the conversation would lull.  And then it would build again to get to the second piece of information.  It was one long conversation, and yet it felt as if it started and stopped.

That conversation needed to build throughout.  Instead of having the conversation around each bullet point resolve (which cuts tension), one piece of information needed to lead to the next.  This reminds me of that piece of advice that when you tell your story you should always use transitions like "because" or "so" rather than "and."  I always took this advice to be on the scene level.  For example, Luke Skywalker's family dies, so he has nothing holding him back from going on an adventure.  But I think it could also be used on a much smaller scale.  "So" acts to increase tension and push the reader along, whereas "and" is another thing for the reader to keep track of and separates them from the tension that was just happening.

Once I noticed this, I started finding it in my friends' writing too.  They'll have two scenes that do similar things.  The scenes "need" to be two scenes because otherwise the timeline of the story gets messed up.  But really the second one feels slow because the scene started and then stopped and then started again.  Or my friends will have a conversation that goes on a bit too long, and then I'll notice that actually they ended a conversation and started a second one.

Make Me Cry

 

Recently, one of the writers in my orbit complained of "dry eyes," and announced a contest where people would submit short stories and whoever made her cry the most would win.

This writer carries drama behind her like a cape that flares as she walks.  It trails after her, and heedlessly, she keeps walking with the wind in her hair.  So when she announced this contest, I got out my popcorn to watch the inevitable weirdness and fallout.  (It delivered.)  But I got to thinking about how the premise of this contest might be inherently flawed.

We all have different thresholds to what makes us cry. I cry just thinking about the movie "Arrival," but I rarely cry at books. (The big exception is "The Paper Menagerie.") And not everyone cries when they're sad. I mostly get quiet and need a nap after I read a very sad book.

You cannot control someone's reactions. As someone who plans out whole, difficult conversations and then gets disastrously off track when they say something I didn't plan for, I can tell you with certainty that people's reactions are in no way guaranteed. I suppose it could be different when you're writing for an audience of one, and you have an idea how they react to stimuli, so you can trigger those reactions. I know what's going to scare my kid, and I know what's going to make my cat snuggly. But not everyone reacts the same way, so if you're writing for a broader audience, it's unreasonable to write one thing that's going to cause all your readers to cry.  

Instead, something I think is doable is to trigger an emotion. It sounds strange, because in real life, I can't control the way someone else feels the same way that I can't control someone's reactions.  But I think in fiction, a particular emotion is a larger target to hit.  Wanting your reader to feel sad/angry/uplifted/frustrated is an attainable goal. Not every single person will feel that way, but you can set a tone with story beats and language and how you layer a story to make it come to an emotional head. I can check with my beta readers, "How do you feel about this? How did you feel when you read that?" and if I'm not hitting it right, I can adjust by changing or removing the parts that made them feel differently. If they're not sad about a character's death, because they're still upset about something he did back at the beginning of the book, then that part in the beginning of the book needs to change, or there needs to be more of an adjustment throughout the rest of the book, building up to the character's death.  If I was asking, "Did you cry here?" when they say no, that's a much steeper mountain to climb, and a peak that in the end may be unattainable.

So I'm side-eyeing the goal of this contest a bit.  There was some discourse on writer twitter a while back about how fiction writers emotionally manipulate their readers. Someone claimed this was bad, and others claimed that that claim was ridiculous.  I think that it's fine to try to inspire emotions in a reader.  It's good even.  And at the same time there are cheap punches an author can throw that do feel like manipulation.  And some of my hesitancy surrounding this contest has to do with how asking for this seems to be encouraging some level of manipulation.  Dragging up emotions in your readers is one thing, aiming for a specific reaction does feel manipulative, and it feels like a breeding ground for those cheap shots.

But I think another aspect that gives me pause is the individual nature of this contest.  If I wrote something for it, I would be writing a story just for this writer to enjoy (and by enjoy, I mean cry over).  It would be my tearful, urgent gift to her.  There are people I would do this for, and I hope that she is that person for everyone who enters, or that the people who enter are thinking about this completely differently than I am.  But as it is, asking me to write a story for her, is a bit too personal and too big of an ask on my time and resources.

(No matter what I think of it, it did deliver on the drama.  And, in the end, that's really all I ask.)

When the Podcast Season Changed Theme

 

I started Season 7 of the podcast inspired by the subreddit "Am I the Asshole?"  In this subreddit, posters present a story in which they have a conflict with another person.  They then ask the commenters if they are the asshole in the situation, or if the other party is.  Sometimes, both parties are at fault (Everyone Sucks Here) or no one is at fault (No Assholes Here).  Although the stories are supposed to be true, there really is no guarantee of that.  Therefore, this form of storytelling has become a new genre of short fiction.

I love it. 

So I wanted to write a season which was all posts with a story like these, with a wildly one-sided story, and a low stakes conflict, and there would be something supernatural involved.  Then there would be comments debating who was the asshole.  It sounded so fun, and I was stoked about writing the podcast for the first time in a long while.

But there were several problems with this.

The first stumbling block was fairly minor, but just using the word "Asshole" would lose me the "clean" label on iTunes.  I've had to work fairly hard in a few previous episodes to avoid swearing, and it feels like a waste to throw that away by doing a whole season labeled as "Explicit."  So I needed to change the name, and I changed it to "Am I in the wrong?" which works, but doesn't have the same pizazz.

The second stumbling block was making the format make sense in an entirely audio medium.  I can change my voice for different commenters, and I was planning to put in a little ting noise each time there was a new comment.  I think that would have worked, but for a while I was considering bringing in some voice actors.  That would, however, require that I have everything written WELL ahead of time, and then I would have to wait on the turn around as they recorded.  It seemed that it would be less time, less of a logistical struggle, and cheaper to do it myself.  Someday, I might look into it further, but not now.

The final issue (and the nail in the coffin) was that my usual short stories have a chronic tension (a problem that the character has been having for quite a while) and a situational tension (the event that sets off the story).  Stories that work well have these two tensions work together and the situation will make the chronic tension more prevalent and the chronic tension will make the event hit harder for the character. 

Am I the Asshole posts are specifically about a situation.  The relationships between characters are often unclear, and the background (if it's given at all) is either given as an info dump at the beginning, or comes out in bits and pieces in updates or comments.  The background info is often VERY important, and when it shows up, it makes the original poster the asshole.  But the narrators are not reliable to clue you into the chronic tensions they're experiencing.  They're here for advice about this one single situation.  They often aren't self aware enough to realize that the situation is the straw that broke the camel's back.  And often, knowing more about the situation and the poster's life makes it too real to be a silly distraction.  There was a girlfriend who was mad that her boyfriend buried beans in the back yard.  That's so strange and ridiculous.  But if we knew more, it might turn sad.  What kind of insecurity is the boyfriend going through to bury food stuffs?

I wrote four episodes, then decided it wasn't working, and scrapped the concept.  Luckily, around the same time, a friend introduced me to a radio show where people called in to apologize.  This felt related, and the show changed theme to "The Apology Hour".  Several of the story concepts have been preserved, but with the change of format to prose, it's easier for me to weave in that chronic tension and get at something deeper.

Chapter Endings and Jokes that don't Land

I recently read a blog post from BookFox, in which they categorized twelve different kinds of chapter endings.  They gave an example of such a chapter ending for each of their categories, which was illuminating.  It's worth reading, and I'm not going to repeat what they said.  Instead, I'm going to talk about what I got from it. 

Namely, however you end a chapter should have some pull to draw the reader further into the story.  A cliff hanger is the obvious one, but there was also ending in a question or a mystery or having someone enter the scene who you know will carry forward the action in the next chapter. 

On the other hand, the end can be a breath, or a moment of pause, and that's fine as long as the rest of the chapter sets up action pushing the reader forward.  Let's say something very exciting happened in the chapter, but then the chapter ends with a description or a character moment or reminds you of the main themes.  It's fine to take that pause because the reader is propelled through it and into the next chapter.  I found that to be a relief, because I find it exhausting to ready when every chapter ends on a cliffhanger, and even more exhausting to repeatedly write cliffhangers.  I'm reminded of feeling manipulated while reading The Divinci Code.  I'm reminded of getting bored reading weekly Shōnen manga, that attempt to have to have a cliffhanger or a reveal at the end of every issue.  The issues are so short that there are hundreds of reveals and therefore they all blur together until none of them are important.

But the main take away I got from this blog post was that I could go through the chapter endings in my novel and identify what I was trying to do in each one.  It gave me a vocabulary.  And with that vocabulary, I was able to pin-point what was going wrong with the endings that felt weak.

There are four chapter endings that I'm unsatisfied with.  In all four of them, I try to end on a joke that doesn't land.

Keep in mind, a lot of my jokes do land, and make for great chapter endings.  As pointed out in the chapter ending blog post, a good joke can elicit an emotional response that will connect your reader to the work so that they carry on reading.  Jokes can also be surprising, which can draw a reader along.  There are several good jokes in this novel (as far as I'm concerned).  And the ones that weren't working are good jokes that I hadn't set up to be "chapter ending jokes."  They aren't set up so they end in a cymbal sting.  They're set up like jokes thrown in during a longer dialogue.  I need to recenter the conversation leading up to them so that the conversation actually leads up to them.

If you have chapters, I encourage you to try this exercise, because it's a good one.

Characterization through a Lens

Spring Fling, a conference for the Chicago North Romance Writers of America, was the other weekend.  I didn't know about it, but a friend of mine attended virtually and had nothing but rave reviews about it.  Since it was virtual, participants got to see every presentation and panel, instead of having to chose to fit a schedule.  That sounds very very cool. 

"I'm so smart now," she told my critique group.  "I learned about tension and character arcs and--Oh!  There was this thing!" She dug into her copious notes, which shows better than anything what a great time she had.  "Okay," she explained, "so you can assign every character a movement."

There's a theory from anatomy and kinesiology called Laban Movement, created by a dance choreographer.  He said that any human movement has four parts: Direction, Weight, Speed, and Flow.  Each of these can is on a polarity: Direction is either direct or indirect, weight is either heavy or light, speed is either quick or sustained, and flow is either bound or free.  Or, as Wikipedia explains it: Both punching someone in anger or reaching for a glass are done by extending the arm.   But the strength of the movement, the control of the movement and the timing of the movement are different.  So basically, there end up being eight broad categories of movement:  Float, Punch, Glide, Slash, Dab, Wring, Flick, and Press.

Now you can assign each character a characteristic motion.  This character who is direct is a Punch Guy.  This anxious dude is a Wring Guy.  Then if you write your character through this lens, their physical stances and their motions will set them apart from one anther.  This will also trickle into their dialogue, because a Flick Person and a Float Person will speak differently.  Then it will affect their thoughts and motivations.  Looking at your characters through this lens will color every aspect of their characterization.

I think this is a helpful thing to think about.  Not because I believe there are eight type of people.  That rings of explaining everything you do through the lens of your astrological sign or your Myers-Briggs type, which I generally find reductive.  But I think this could be helpful because 1. it is descriptive enough to be an easy visualization to keep your characters from all sounding and acting the same.  And 2. if you keep referring back to this lens, it can keep your characters on target and in character.

A while back, a friend of mine was trying to explain a theory that I now see is remarkably similar: every character is a color and the three primary colors (red, yellow, and blue) are aspects of a character that I have now forgotten.  I think red was active and blue was thoughtful, so a red person acted before they thought and a blue person thought very hard but never acted and a purple person would both think and act.  My friend then proceeded to tell me that the main character of my story was red, and I got a bit miffed, decided this framework was unhelpful, and didn't think of it again until now.

But now, I'm working on revisions for a novel, and I'm reading through and constantly asking myself "What does this scene have to do with this central theme?  How can I bring the theme out in this section?  How can I tie it all back together?"  It's kind of like I'm looking at my whole novel through a lens and making sure everything lines up and stays on target.  And suddenly these methods of forming a character through a lens make more sense to me.

It doesn't matter what lens you look through: movement types; elements like water, air, fire, and earth; or even zodiac sign.  Simply having a lens, even if you only use it during one round of revision and not through the entire writing process, can be useful.  Just coming back to one central visualization, one solid idea throughout a story can pull things tighter and cut out extraneous bits that wander away from the point you're trying to make or the idea you're trying to express.

On Endings

If you're following the podcast, you might notice that I just end the episode when I'm done.  Maybe threads are left unresolved, because life is messy and I can't solve all this character's problems in twenty minutes.  Sometimes I leave a listener wanting more.  I consider this a victory, because it's far better than the alternative when a listener is thankful that the episode is over and they are 100% done with these characters.  Sometimes the resolution a listener thinks they want would be super dull if I actually gave it to them.  They would turn against me by the time I was done.  "Well, it was fun episode about kelpies until Carolyn stated talking about the process of getting a restraining order."  Maybe the lack of conclusion will eat at them until they start a conversation with my work by creating their own.  (That would be rad, but to my knowledge has never happened.)

This method of stopping when I'm done works for the podcast (or at least, I've decided that it works) because episodes are short.  Hopefully if a listener finds an ending unsatisfying, they won't feel cheated because they've only "wasted" twenty minutes.  Hopefully, their appreciation of the brevity will outweigh their disappointment that there's not more story. 

It does not work for a novel. 

In reading a novel, a reader has devoted hours to a single story, and they will feel betrayed if they are left unsatisfied at the end.  A reader has given an author's work their valuable time and valuable attention, so not providing they a payoff is almost aggressively rude.  Some novelists like breaking that implicit contract that they will resolve a problem (or at least not resolve it in a satisfying way), but I don't want to be one of those writers who purposefully frustrates their reader and purposefully makes a novel difficult to read.

So this is all a way of saying that endings are hard.  When my agent read my last novel, she asked if I planned a sequel.  I had not.  "If you're not going to write a sequel, you need to tie up these loose ends," she said.  "This reads like there's going to be more." 

Of course, I'd intended for it to be like "everything's not always tied up in a neat bow!  Life goes on and chronic issues take time to work on!  Whishy washy wishy washy."  But she was absolutely right, and what she said has stuck with me to the point where I've gone through other novels looking for this, and sure enough, it's there.  I tie up the main plot is a satisfying way, with some big show pieces and some drama and some fireworks, but what about all those other threads that flushed the novel out along the way?  I've just let those hang, thinking they'd fade into the background after the big showpiece climax!  But you know what?  If you let too many threads hang, you just end up with a frayed looking edge.

In trying to improve, I've been looking at my manuscripts and asking myself, "What story threads feel like they're leading into a sequel?"  And then working on those.  I've been removing them completely.  I've been altering how they play out so they end up with a conclusion, which is hard when I know how the story goes and this isn't it.

The other thing she said, that I'm trying to keep in mind is that I need to be mindful of y themes.  Those themes I've been bringing up like motifs throughout the novel, need to come back at the end.  I need to bring those back up at the end so that when a reader thinks back on the book, they think back on its themes.  That's hard for me because I want a reader to think back on the big, exciting explosion at the end, and I have to wrestle that desire under control because it's not helping.  And if the themes are tied to the explosion, then they both stand out.  They're both more rooted into the story.

Someday, I'm going to nail an ending, and it's going to be great.

Tension and Paw Patrol

Lately, my son has been watching a whole bunch of Paw Patrol.  For those not in the know, Paw Patrol is an animated show from Nickelodeon with two fifteen-minute episodes, or the occasional half hour episode.  In it, there is a team of dogs, called the Paw Patrol, and each dog is a kind of community helper (police officer, firefighter, bulldozer driver, recycling truck driver, etc.)  Each episode, doofy townspeople have an issue and call up Ryder, the little boy who coordinates the Paw Patrol, and he sends the dogs that would be helpful out to fix the problem.  It teaches about community helpers and problem solving and teamwork.  It's also very formulaic, which kids like, and the theme song plays a lot and is super catchy. 

If you still have "Toss a Coin to Your Witcher" stuck in your head, I know how you could fix that.

There are a couple things that absolutely fascinate me about Paw Patrol.  The first is how quickly the stakes escalate. 

There's one episode (we tend to watch the same episodes over and over) where this kid, Alex, has a big-wheel that he's McGuivered together out of duct tape and spare parts.  He hits a curb and the big-wheel falls apart.  Pieces of his big-wheel are in the street, and it wouldn't be safe for him to get them, so he calls the Paw Patrol for help.  Ryder calls the dogs together and sorts out that the Police Pup will stop traffic around the scattered parts and Recycle Pup will help put the scattered parts back on the big-wheel.  They explain this plan, then follow through on the plan, and huzzah!  Fixed big-wheel!  But then, Alex takes off on his newly fixed big-wheel and careens down a hill straight toward a busy intersection.  What will the Paw Patrol do about this?  Well, Police Pup can block off traffic in the intersection and Helicopter Pup can help bring Alex to a stop.  Okay, that's a good plan!  Which they execute and it succeeds, and Alex learns a lesson about going slow on his big-wheel so he's not hit by a car.

There's another episode where there's been a bunch of snow, and the Mayor's car swerves off the icy road into a snowbank and gets stuck.  She calls the Paw Patrol to help tow her out.  Ryder calls the dogs together and decides that Bulldozer Pup will clear the roads like a snowplow and Police Pup will use the winch on his Police Pup Car to haul the mayor's car out of the snow.  This plan is successful, and everyone feels good about themselves.  Or at least they do until Ryder gets a call from a train engineer.  There's a bunch of debris on the track and the train is going to hit it and derail, and he can't slow down because the tracks are too icy.  Oh no!  Well, what should the Paw Patrol do about this imminent emergency?  They can have Police Pup clear some of the little debris and Snow Rescue Pup remove the big debris and Bulldozer Pup scrape the snow off the tracks with his bulldozer.  Does that sound like a good plan?  Good!  Yay!  They execute this plan and the day is saved and there's no train derailment.

Sometimes Paw Patrol makes me anxious.  There is a boy on a big-wheel hurtling towards traffic, and you're going to call a dog in a helicopter in from across town and talk about your plan before running after him?  Ahhhhhhhh!  But the other thing that's fascinating about Paw Patrol is how much it doesn't freak out my easily freaked-out kid.  By stopping the ticking clock, which is essentially what happens in this time dilation moment when they have time to make a plan--as my kid sees it--that means the ticking clock must not exist.  They have all the time in the world to decide on a step-by-step plan about what they're going to do.  And that step-by-step plan is comforting even in the face of a train derailment or an erupting volcano or a sinking boat.  The Paw Patrol's calm is comforting.  While taking their time makes me (an adult) anxious that they're not going to get to that kid in time, it actually lowers the stakes as my son understands them.

The episodes are also set up to mimic the way kids play.  You can think of it like there's a group of kids and they each have a different pup toy, and one of them comes up with a problem.  "Oh no!  There's a tree on the tracks and the train can't stop!" and the other kids jump in and say, "Police Pup can use his wench to move the tree!"  "Let's call in Snow Rescue Pup!  She can shove the rest of the trees off the track!"

It's the opposite of what you would do in a story written for adults, where you want the tension to be high and you want the reader/viewer to feel the danger.  For instance, I would have Police Pup tear after Alex the second he started going too fast down the hill, and Police Pup would rolling tackle him off the street right before he drove into the intersection.  So in a way, this show is demonstrating things not to do when storytelling: Don't stop and talk about your plan in the middle of an action scene.

But also, maybe I have such problems watching this show--maybe the reason it makes me so much more anxious than it should, is that it doesn't follow traditional story telling structures that appear in adult stories.  The beats are off, and I find that jarring and stressful.  So maybe that's a lesson too: do something jarringly to disrupt story beats to create a different kind of tension.  Get back to the story!  Oh my God!  Ahhhhh!

Trying to Cut back Ablist Language

 Ablest language is tricky.  I personally find it confusing, and I could explain what I don't get about it, but that would take away from the point, which is: some words hurt people.  When someone tells me, "This hurts me," it's my job to do better rather than explain why I don't get it and how their feelings are incorrect.  I don't need to understand.  I just need to try to do better, and I'm trying, even if I'm not perfect.

Using these words hurts people.  And wouldn't you rather not hurt people? 

Isn't not hurting people worth being mildly inconvenienced?

It's hard to cut words out of your vocabulary.  And these words are SO ingrained, that it makes it extra hard.  (Don't use the word "superfluous"?  Sure thing, boss!  Don't use the word "st*pid"?  ...Well, crud.)  There's the added bonus that as I try to cut words from my vocabulary, I also try no to expose my son to these words so he'll start life a step ahead of me: being a kinder person and not having to prune his vocabulary in the future.  And it's impossible.  These words are thrown around so causally on even the most wholesome kid's shows.  These words are thrown around casually at school and by neighbors and by the ladies in the Jewel checkout line. 

If you successfully don't use these words, no one notices.  You're not losing anything.  No one is offended by you not saying something is cr*zy.

In the last few years, I feel like I've done a good job taking cr*zy out of my vocabulary.  I think it's been relatively easy because when I used to say, "That's cr*zy!" I didn't mean, "That's illogical and counter-productive to the point of mental illness/disability."  I meant, "That's wild!  I can't believe it!"  So there's a pretty direct 1:1 between "cr*zy" and "wild," so I can just say "wild" instead.  Which I do now.  All the time.

I've had a lot more trouble with "b*nanas" and "n*ts."  I think that's because there's a subtle difference in my brain between something being wild and something being b*nanas. There's an component of endearment and playfulness to calling someone a n*t that doesn't exist in calling someone wild. In my experience, "You n*t," is like a soft way to say, "What you're doing is goofy.  You probably should stop, but I know you won't because you can't control your feelings or reactions.  I accept this about you and love you, but we both know it's still weird."  This connotation doesn't exist in the word "wild."  "Goober" or "Goofus" work pretty well, but I'm much more likely to call someone a "pine cone" and have them look at me funny, not knowing what I mean.

I just did a pass on my novel where I tried to search and destroy ablist language.  Yeah!  Doing good! 
The problem wasn't with these above examples, but with "st*pid."  When I say, "That's st*pid," I mean "That was poorly thought out."  I cannot think of a shorter way to say that.  Sometimes I mean "careless," or "reckless," or "thoughtless," which are shorter, but the problem is that in written dialogue, if one character just called someone out for acting "st*pid," changing that to "thoughtless" can mess up the voice.  It doesn't sound like a real person talking, or at least not like this character talking.

Then the huge hold up for me was "id*ot."  In this novel, there are multiple multiple times when one character will do something so thoughtless and poorly planned that it puts other people in danger and the main character is upset about it.  "You put people in danger by not thinking through your actions and I'm upset about it!" does not have the same immediacy and tension and anger as "You id*ot!"  I think the problem is that here I do mean it to be insulting.  And "id*ot" is meant to be insulting.  So I have trouble substituting, because this word is exactly what I want to convey: they were not smart and that is bad.

And that's the real problem with these words.  They actively compare lack of intelligence with a decrease in human value.  Our culture values being "smart," so when people do unintelligent things, that's viewed as bad.  This means that people with learning or intellectual disabilities are seen as having lesser value than someone who doesn't.  When I went looking for synonyms I found a list that included not just words like "thoughtless" and "nonsensical" and "outrageous," but also "bad," "contemptible," "gross," "horrible," and "evil."  When you say "st*pid," someone with an intellectual disability hears these synonyms, even if going that far is unintended. The very existence of these words says a lot about our cultural values, and who we value and why.

In this novel, I was mostly able to change "id*ot" to "damned fool."  But I'm worried about my next novel, in which the main character wrestles with her self-worth, which she (and people around her) have tied to her perceived level of intelligence.  She calls herself "st*pid st*pid st*pid," several, several times.  So I'm concerned, because it doesn't seem right to soften her negative self-talk and cut her a break, but at the same time, it doesn't seem right to drop ablist slurs left and right, harming readers.  So this is an ongoing issue for me to work through.

Writing to be Read

I have a friend who said something that blew my mind the other day. 

He said that he writes to be read, and if he's not going to be read, he has no interest in writing.  He said that he's not the kind of person who has a story that needs to be told, a story he needs to get out.  He said that he would never write just for himself.

I cannot understand this mindset.  I've tried to use my empathy and see where he's coming from, and I literally cannot do it.

I write because I can't sleep at night if I have too much story in my brain, so I need to tidy up in there.  The projects I have the most fun with are the ones that I assume no one will ever read.  They're just for me, so I don't have to do boring transitions or work too hard on continuity or grammar.  In fact, with some of the later Twenty Percent True Podcast seasons, I've gotten in my own head about it, because I know people will listen to it.  It makes it so I don't want to work on it.  Or maybe it makes it so I HAVE to work on it, and I get anxious about the quality of it, and I fight back against that anxiety by shouting, "You cant tell me what to work on!" and then procrastinating.

I will often go back and read my own unfinished writing.  "Oh.  This is fun," I say to myself, reading the first chapter of a novel from eight years that's only 15 pages long.

So the idea of "I'm going to write something because I want people to read it," just doesn't make sense to me from a philosophical standpoint.  But it also doesn't make sense from a publishing standpoint.  If you're going the traditional publishing route, you spend a year or more on a novel with no guarantee that it will be published.  You find that out at the end, after you've put in the work.  There are so many reasons outside your control for why a book could get canned, and there are a thousand reasons why it might not sell as much as it should. 

I understand why the thought that someone could read your book could be a motivator.  I find that feedback on an unfinished project can encourage me to keep going.  But if that was my only motivation, if I was pouring out my blood, sweat, and tears in hopes that a hypothetical stranger in the future will like it...that's dangerous.  You are not going to get enough out of it to keep you moving.  Every piece of negative feedback is going to hit you ten times harder, because you've basically failed in your single goal to have people like your work.  And, most importantly, you're putting your success and your enjoyment and your project's value entirely in someone else's hands. You're forcing a situation already out of your control even further out of your control.

As tired as the saying goes: Write for you.

Gradually Increasing Tension and Moments to Breathe

4theWords, one of the writing resources I use, had a scavenger hunt this October, where they sent their members to people's blogs so they could be introduced to writing resources.  I found it pretty interesting.  Also I was one of the stops, so maybe I'm biased.

But on one of the stops, there was a woman who made videos about craft, and the one I watched was something like "Common mistakes amateur writers make during character arcs."  And I want to talk about it.

First, I don't think there are really "mistakes" you can make in story telling.  There are grammar rules you can violate and you could switch point of view in confusing ways or jump time periods or have continuity issues in a way that makes the story hard to follow, and I think those could be called mistakes.  But in my opinion issues that deal with the shape of a story should be approached like, "This is a place where you have an opportunity you're not using to its fullest," or "You could do more with this," instead of "this is an error."

So with that in mind, let me tell you about the structure of a character arc.  Since junior high, you've probably seen the diagram that makes a story look like a mountain.  There's rising action, a climax at the peak, and then falling action.

The y-axis on this graph is not labeled, and I want to burn it to the ground.

What this video said was that everything during your rising action--so everything from your inciting incident to your climax--should get harder, and one of the common mistakes she sees with new writers is that one event will be very hard and the next event will be less hard and the next event will be a little hard, and it won't escalate.

And I have some issues with this.  Mainly, I think that if things just escalate and escalate and escalate without breathing room, the narrative becomes overwhelming.  Moments of quiet are necessary for the characters to reflect on why the last horrible event was horrible.  They're also necessary in novels to give the reader a break. If we look at the hero's journey, there's always a point where the hero faces death and usually has a revelatory moment or a second wind.  Think of "Die Hard" when John McClane is in the air duct with his feet all cut up, talking to Carl the cop, thinking he might not make it.  It's a lull in the action, a breath before the climax.  There's still tension, but it's a different flavor, and I'm not gripping my seat waiting for someone to get thrown out a window. 

So already, our neat triangular shape has some divots in it, or some moments between events.

I didn't add a y-axis label

Also, I think phrasing it like each episode or event should get harder is a simplification, which is fine when your audience is new writers.  You want to lay out rules and then later talk about how and when they can be broken.  Let's say I have a story where the kickball team has to play against a neighbor school who is also not very good, and then they play against the good team in town, and then they go to state.  That gets harder with every new challenge.  It would be a little weird for the games to happen in a different order.  But why's this team only playing three games in their combined season and post season?  Surely the teams they play in the regular season will be a mix of difficulties.  Maybe they'll even lose a few!  The thing that maybe would make each challenge progressively more difficult is that after winning against an easy team, maybe now there's an expectation set up, and they're fighting not just the other team but their own hopes and fears and the expectations of their coaches and parents.  Maybe after the game they lose, they're fighting against their fear of losing, maybe they super have to prove themselves.  Maybe they have to impress one kid's dad who finally shows up!  So it's not just that each team they play is more skilled and therefore more difficult to beat, but each game they play is harder because of baggage the characters have.

So if there's a story like a character is trying to get the band back together and has to visit the rhythm guitar player and the bassist and the drummer, it could be that the drummer is harder to convince than the bass player, who's harder to convince than the rhythm guitar player.  Or it could be that our main character has bigger drama with the drummer than the bassist than the rhythm guitar player, and each encounter is emotionally more fraught if not more difficult.   OR!  It could be that our main character brings all the drama from meeting the guitar player into their visit with the bassist, so they're going into the conversation with level 2 anxiety rather than level 0 anxiety, so already it's a harder meeting.  They go into the meeting with the drummer all wound up from meeting the guitarist and the bassist and they're starting from anxiety level 5. As long as they consistently carry that with them, each new situation builds.

So instead of the problem that each new episode doesn't provide a greater challenge, the real issue with the story telling might be that the character isn't carrying previous challenges with them or that the writer is letting the tension drop in unhelpful and unrealistic ways.

Link's Awakening and Player Buy-in

Spoilers for Link's Awakening, a game that first came out in 1993.  And if you're wanting to play it for the plot...I'm happy to offer up some suggestions for different Zelda games that will scratch that itch for you.

So, Legend of Zelda: Links Awakening was first released on the Game Boy.  The big Game Boy.  The one where I had a power adapter that plugged into the wall, because my mom refused to buy any more AA batteries.  The one where I had a designated Game Boy playing chair with a lamp (because the Game Boy was hard to see) and my power outlet.  And--not to brag, but--I had the fun magnifying glass attachment that I thought would make people want to talk to me. 

Recently, they re-released it for the Switch and updated the graphics and the music and everything.  So I recently bought a Switch to play this game again. (I know, okay.  I know.)

Now, if you haven't played this game, it's a weird one. At the beginning, Link is sailing a tiny boat alone through a storm, when the ship is destroyed and he washes up on an island.  In order to escape the island (according to a random owl), he must wake the Wind Fish, and he must do this by gathering the eight fancy instruments (each at the end of a dungeon) and playing a song in front of the Wind Fish's egg.  None of the recurring cast appears in this game.  There's no Zelda.  No Impa.  Not a single reference to Ruto.  And there are weirdly a bunch of enemies from the Mario games.  But the weirdest part of all is that about half way through the game, it becomes clear that the sleeping Wind Fish is dreaming the whole island.  All the dungeons and monsters are part of his dream.  But so are all the people who live there, along with all their histories and hopes and dreams.  Waking the Wind Fish will cause the island to vanish and everyone who lives there to disappear.

And yet, the designers of this game intended for me to keep playing.  I continue to collect instruments and interact with people who are going to cease to exist because of my actions.  And I just keep on going.  But I feel bad knowing that the "right" thing to do would be to stop collecting instruments and live a nice, quiet life on this fairly nice island.

Why doesn't he just...not?  Why don't I just stop playing?

In part, I kept playing in hopes that maybe there had been a mistake.  Maybe they've changed it so after I beat the final boss, it turns out that that owl giving me directions is evil and I have to fight him to save the island.  Maybe there's not going to be a cut scene at the end where I see every character that was kind to me go up in a flash, and then I'm left floating in the ocean on the few pieces of driftwood while the Wind Fish sails away.  Or maybe I've forgotten that the Wind Fish gives me a ride back to Hyrule...

Oh...No?  Okay...Bye, Wind Fish!  See ya in hell, I guess.

These dilemmas actually pop up a lot in Zelda games.  The most glaring being if you ever play through Ocarina of Time for a second time (or eighth time).  In that one, Zelda has this great idea to gather up these magic stones to open a door to the spirit realm, and Link goes and does that, but when he opens the door to the spirit realm half way through the game, it unleashes unspeakable horrors and the second half of the game takes place in a post-apocalyptic environment.  So on the second play through, you think "...Wait a second.  If I just did nothing, there would be no problem and the world would not need saving."

There's another part like this in Skyward Sword when you finish up a dungeon and right as you get to the end, Impa pops up and yells at you for taking so long, and thank goodness she was here to handle everything, and if you're not going to do better, why don't you just go home?  And, chastised, I wondered...why don't I just go home?  I mean...Impa looks like she's got this, and who am I anyway?
And the answer here for why I don't just stop playing is that there is more game to play, and it's still enjoyable even if I ought not be doing it.

The real problem comes when this happens in a novel, and I start to question, "Why don't you just go home?" "Why don't you just not try to date this dude?"  "Why don't you just use that magic mirror Sirius gave you to talk to him in case of emergencies?"  It's not a plot hole; it's a failure of motivation.  And it's the worst.

I worked really hard in my last novel to make sure my main character's motivation made sense, that the reader bought into why he NEEDED to do all this nonsense.  I wanted the reader to understand it was a bad idea, but also understand that it needed to be done.  I worked so hard on it.  And I succeeded, by which I mean no one has called me on the beginning since I worked on it so hard. 

They called me on it at the 2/3 mark.

The nonsense escalates, and it gets to the point where the reader asks, "Why is anyone else letting him keep doing this?  Why don't they just stop him?"

And I banged my head against a table.  Because they're right, and I need to devote a big chunk of time to working on that.

I forget where I first heard the best piece of parenting advice I've ever received.  It's this: If anyone ever starts their advice that starts with "Why don't you just..." that advice is bad.  That word "just" implies that the solution is easy, and I'm just too wrapped up in my own drama to see that simple solution, that I'd rather complain about how my life is so difficult than do something easy that will fix my problem. 

And when I was new at this parenting thing and doing everything wrong, that implication that it was easy for everyone else just made me feel worse.  Is there a simple answer, and I'm just too stupid to make it work?  Clearly no one else has this problem, and I am a disaster.  But being able to recognize--to have a key word like an alarm that would go off--made it so I could say, "Wait.  No.  This is bad advice."  It would stop that spiraling before it could get started.

In writing it's the opposite.  When a reader asks, "Why doesn't he just..." it means there is an easy answer to the problem, and the reason the writer doesn't have the characters do that is because they want the book to keep going.  If the characters don't answer a call to adventure, there's no story, and the writer wants there to be a story.  If I stop playing Link's Awakening because I don't want to destroy the island, then I'm not playing the game. If Harry Potter calls Sirius on his mirror phone and Sirius picks up and says he's fine, the whole last act doesn't happen.

When someone says, "Why doesn't the character just..." that's when you, as a writer, need to pay attention.  That's when you have a horrible problem and a big revision in the future.

When they say, "Why don't you just..." and then they suggest some way to fix something that's broken in your story...that maybe you can ignore.

The Power of Writing Letters to Yourself

My writing group this week talked about submissions and ways to feel good about yourself through the rejection.  For the most part, I'm pretty good about rejection.  What people like is subjective, etc.  Maybe they'd already agreed to publish someone else's story, which is completely inferior, but also about weasels, and they can't have two weasel stories, and even though it's the hardest decision they've ever made, they need to do the right thing and not call this first writer to tell them that, actually, they've found a better story about weasels, so... 

But then sometimes I get my hopes up, and let myself get crushed, and then it's work to get rolling again.  So the writing group time was timely and invigorating.

My friend running the group talked about a Sara Connell lecture she went to recently.  A lot of it sounded like The Secret and just a bit too silly for me.  For example, we wrote acceptance letters to ourselves, to visualize what it would look like, and now that letter is going to come, and it's going to look just exactly the same.  Here's an except from mine: "We offer $0.08 per word, so please fill out and return the attached tax documents within 5 business days."  I had just finished sending out 1099s.  I don't think this happens in acceptance letters, but, now that I've poured my good vibes into it, it will! 

We were also supposed to pick a future goal and talk about it as though it had already happened.  Even in a goofy exercise with my writing group, lying about my accomplishments felt gross.  "Why yes, I do have two PhDs from Oxford and cancer.  It's sad.  But also inspirational.  Don't you feel inspired by me?  And also I sent you those tax documents last week.  Did you not get them?  Did they get caught in your spam filter?  No?  G-mail must have eaten them, because I definitely sent them.  Arg!  Let me try again, but this time with a special computer-savvy step that only I know about to make sure it goes through.  Did that work?  Yeah, because I'm great at computers." 

See?  That got out of control real fast.

Some of the tricks, however, I found really helpful.  There was one called "writing a love letter to yourself," which includes five things you like about the thing you're going to submit.  The love letter part sounds silly, but a bulleted list of five things that are good about a story was mind opening.  Yes, this story is good.  It's worth submitting it and submitting it and submitting it, because it's going to find a home.  It's going to find a home for these reasons.  Keep trying.  That was helpful.

Another suggestion was to aim for 100 submissions rather than 100 rejections.  That way it puts the focus on the process you can control, rather than on the part where you fail.  I usually aim for 100 rejections, but I heard this and now I'll never go back.  I like to think about my rejections (submissions) as pokemon.  You gotta catch them all.  When you get to a second round, your pokemon evolves.  While querying my novel, I kept track of which pokemon I'd caught, and I realized that I should start up again with this new round of sending stories to literary magazines.  Let me show you my Pokemans.

Homophones!

I got edits back from my agent this week.  Most of the edits were line edits, which are edits for spelling or punctuation or word usage.  Line edits are things where you go, "Oh shoot!  You're right," and then you click to accept the change and then move on with your life.  They aren't big, global things like "I don't understand this character's motivation," or "This scene makes no sense," or "You should add a bunch of background or world building or cut a character."

Most of the edits were line edits.  A big chunk of them were homophone mistakes.

Homophones are words that sound the same, but are spelled differently.  Two, Too, and To.  Your and You're.  Don't worry, I've got those under control.

What I don't have under control are things like "compliment" and "complement."  Did you know those are two different words?  I just learned that a few years ago, and it's still blowing my mind.  One means that things match or improve upon one another, like "That dress complements her complexion."  The other is something nice you say to someone.  "Thank you for the compliment about my dress!"  For a real long time, I thought they were the same word, because both words are about lifting one another up.  We're complimenting each other!  We're complementing each other!

Alas!  This is not the case.

The other one that blew my mind was "wander" and "wonder."  One is when you stroll around without direction.  One is when you think about something real hard or are in awe of something.  I thought these were the same, because when you wonder, you are wandering around in your thoughts.  Just...figuratively.

Alas!  Also not the case.

I'm real bad at homophones, y'all.  This is why the podcast was successful.  No one can hear if those mistakes are there.  Or not there. Maybe I did everything right.  You'll never know.

This week, I made myself a Big List of Homophones.  It's a list of way too many homophones that I'm likely to mess up, and before I send anything else out to my agent, I have to check everything that's on there and make sure I'm using it all correctly. 

Slang dates your writing. And that's OKAY.

I'm following the facebook page for Just Write Chicago, a group where I used to be an active member but these days not so much.  Mostly, I ignore what they post, so I probably shouldn't be following them, but every now and then they link to an interesting article about craft.  A couple weeks ago, though, they linked to an article called "Writing with Slang."  It's from Grammar Girl, which has the lay/lie chart that I always google and gives some good tricks for remembering homophones, which I suck at.  This article, however, gave me THE RAGE.

It's about how using slang in your writing dates your writing.  Yes.  This is true.  Using language particular to a time and place, sets your work in a time and place.

HORRORS!!!

The article starts with a list of slang phrases, all of which are either derive from African American communities or from teen girls.  Huh.  It's almost like their language shouldn't be taken seriously.
It goes on to give an example of Lord Buckley, who translated Marc Anthony's funeral oration for Caesar into slang used at the time by beantniks. 

A screenshot

I beg your pardon?

That passage is great!  Do you feel the way it flows?  How it perfectly matches the meter?  How it's poetry that washes over you, even if you don't know what every word means?

It reminds me a lot of listening to...what am I thinking of?...hmmm...oh wait.  Shakespeare.

Is this article serious telling me that Shakespeare, with its many many footnotes, makes more sense?  Surely they're not saying that Shakespeare's writing is more timeless because he doesn't use slang.  Surely they're not saying that his writing isn't dated by the language it uses.  They're saying here that Shakespeare is easier to understand (I would argue it's not), and they're arguing this without getting into the fact that we have accepted Shakespeare's slang due to linguistic imperialism: slang from cultures that beat all other cultures into submission ends up not being considered slang anymore.

I'm so mad.

 

Then it goes on to tell me not to use slang in my writing, except sparingly in dialogue.  Because this person has never heard of a first person or close third person perspective.  Or maybe they have, but they've only thought about it if an upstanding character who does not use slang (or whose slang is not considered slang) is the point of view character.

I get it.  Language changes fast, and there's a chance a new term or a phrase won't survive more than a few weeks or months, or that it won't find a place outside the niche culture in which it was conceived.  There's a real threat that no one's going to know what you're talking about by the time the book you wrote gets published. 

However.  Sometimes those niche cultures need representation.  Those people need to see themselves.  They need to see the way they talk and the way they think.  And anyway, teen girls are not a niche culture.

I'm also done with this idea that your Great American Novel can be timeless by making it not apparent what time period it's set in.  I run into this idea a lot in writing meet ups, and I'm sick of it.  Let's look at the white dude cannon: Hemingway, Falkner, Fitzgerald, etc--they set their books in a particular time and place, which gives their settings and characters a distinct richness.  Let's look at sci-fi set in the future or in second-world fantasy not set on Earth.  Within a decade, these become clear products of the times in which they were written.  They can bring baggage of biases about race or sex or gender or colonialism, or they can date themselves with ideas about where technology will progress or with the lack of technology that has progressed, or they can date themselves by what they see as a threat: fascism, nuclear annihilation, climate change...Okay, maybe that one's a bad example as those threats have all made a comeback. 

This idea that you could possibly write something that wouldn't show its age is the height of hubris.  That's not what being "timeless" is about.  To attempt to do this, you would have to suppose a world where you could remove all things that would change, where biases and power structures remain stagnant or are so far removed from the characters' experience as to be non-existent.  Or both.

Yeah, it's natural to cringe away from things that feel a decade old, things that are at the point of being embarrassing instead of nostalgic.  It's easy to make fun of Elaine Benes's shoulder pads or the language in Clueless.  But if the things that set your story in a certain place and time are too much to look past, maybe you have bigger problems. 

And by the way, Clueless?  Still a great movie.  Know what else?  Similar to the example that started off this rant, it's a retelling of a classic work of literature. 

Editing Exercise

I led the workshop portion of my critique group last week.  It was nearing the end of Camp NaNo, which most of the group was doing, and I find that at the end of NaNo I have a pile of nonsense where I just dump huge swaths of backstory and utilitarian descriptions of characters and things like, "That made him sad."  There's a whole bunch of editing that goes on after NaNo if you ever want to make anything of the stuff I write, and I wanted to make an editing exercise for my group.  I didn't want us to edit our own stuff, because that would just open a can of worms.  I didn't want us to edit each other's stuff, because that would turn bitter.  So I wanted us to edit something that was already out there. 

Furthermore, a lot of what I see as pitfalls in my NaNo writing are things that are encouraged in middle grade books.  I find that middle grade readers are super smart and catch on to so much, but they need really weird stuff spelled out for them. 

So I grabbed the first page or so of five different Goosebumps books and presented them to my critique group.  I figure R L Stine is too successful to notice, much less take offense.

I didn't tell them what I'd given them exactly, just the first pages of popular middle grade books.  And I told them, "Pretend you wrote this for NaNo, and then you took a month away from it, and you're coming back now with fresh eyes."  The idea was to elevate the selections from mass market middle grade to a book for an adult reader (which is what we are all writing).  The idea wasn't that these books were bad and we needed to fix them, the idea was that this is what we had and we were going to change them.  And with that, we took five minutes and marked up what needed to change--not what words we would use to change them, but what we wanted changed.  More sensory details in description.  Sections cut for repetition.  Emphasizing themes.  Mixing up the diction.​  Afterwards, we discussed what we did.

We found that

• It was easy to pretend we had written these, meaning that it was easy to take ownership of them.  It was surprisingly easy to shift them into our own distinct voices​.  One woman in my group told us that she would change the selection from the mummy book so that the main character stealthily follows the tourist who bumps into her at the pyramid and stumbles onto an international mystery.  "That's...what the main character from your book would do."  It was also surprising how easy it was to go after the selections with a red pen.  I think this is because in the work we actually write, marking up your first draft is laying out guidelines for the cubic ton of work you'll have to do later, and that's not pleasant.  And then, aside from marking up our own work, we often mark up each other's work, and there we have to back off a bit because it's their story and not ours, and changing someone's work to sound like your work--again--turns people bitter or has them ignore what you're saying.
• We all were pretty much in agreement in the broad strokes of what should be changed.  This is good to remember when we're getting feedback.  On the other hand, we all approached how to address those problems differently, which is also good to remember.  I'm reminded of the Neil Gaiman quote, “Remember: when people tell you something’s wrong or doesn’t work for them, they are almost always right. When they tell you exactly what they think is wrong and how to fix it, they are almost always wrong.”
• When we read the selections aloud before our five minutes of editing, everyone thought they were pretty good.  Charming even.  But then when it was time to edit, everyone said, "Who's the main character here?" "Why is this description so boring?"  "Why is this character so obnoxious?" 
• I emphasized that these were published works--popular published works.  And we could still edit them to death.  You can always edit everything to death.

It was a pretty good exercise.  We had fun, and the group seemed to find it helpful.

Folklore is Dad Jokes

I went to a reading this week by Edward McClelland, the author of Folktales and Legends of the Middle West.  This sounded so far up my alley that my family didn't even give me any trouble for skipping out on bed time.

McClelland read several stories from Resurrection Mary to the Lake Erie Monster.  But in listening to the Paul Bunyun stories, I realized what was happening:

The stories were chalk full of dad jokes.  At the end of each dad joke, McClelland would pause, give us Pun Husky Face, and then keep reading.

"...And they took that copper and used it to make the dome of the Ohio capital building!"

 

"...And that was the start of the Mississippi River!"

Dissecting it on the walk home, I thought about how it wasn't the presence of the dad jokes that was novel during the reading, but it was their placement.  Usually you see them at the very end of a story, a joke ending where you would slap your hands together and throw them out into jazz hands.  "Ehhh?!  Get it!"  The point of each of my grandad's stories was that at the end he had solved the last engineering puzzle keeping a building from being completed, and once it was solved they were able to construct such-and-such famous building in downtown Dallas that you'd have heard from if you were from Dallas.  Or that he gave some advice and then that poet was Robert Frost. 

It's like a flag that you wave at the end to say, "Got ya!  That didn't really happen...Or did it?!"
So when these jokes are peppered throughout the story, as the punchline to each paragraph rather than the punchline to the full narrative, it sounds different to the ear.  It's more, "Let me tell you a string of puns," rather than, "Let me tell you one long, winding joke that sucks you in for a while before spitting you out with how it didn't happen."  So maybe not giving the listener time to get engrossed eases that sense of mild annoyance that comes after the big reveal.  The annoyance where your friend does jazz hands and cackles at their brilliance, and you boo at them and tell them to delete their account.

But really, they're the same, and it took a different format for me to see it.

Narratee

My friend Meg from my critique group introduced a bunch of vocabulary words at our last meeting, and I have found one particularly helpful this week.  That word is Narratee, or he receptive target to whom a narrator tells the story.  This can be another character in the story, a character in a frame narrative, or a reader/listener that the narrator imagines writing/speaking to.

When we talked about this at critique group, it seemed pretty self-explanatory, especially since usually my narratee is the same as my implied reader (or whoever I imagine reading my story).  The narratee and the implied reader are the same person, who is a stranger whom my narrator does not address directly. 

I saw this as a restriction that you have to think about when you decide to do something like using diary entries or letters.  In those cases, you want to get information across to your reader, but you have to keep in mind that in a letter from your main character to their sister, the sister is already aware of all the background and saying something artless like, "as you know, our parents died four years ago in a car accident," is pretty silly.  So a writer has to get creative in how they address the gap between the narratee and the implied reader.

But then I started work on a short story, where my initial idea was "a woman at The Moth open mic explains that there are different kinds of werewolves."  And once I got going, I realized that the opposite of how I had understood this concept was happening.  My narrator is telling a story where when the audience (the narratees) need information, she can straight out explain how things work.  This is perfectly acceptable in live storytelling events.  You can say, "For those of you not familiar with Starbucks, it works like this..." And it works because the audience either

• doesn't know the information but needs it to understand the story and is therefore appreciative
• does know the information already, but understands that others in the audience might not and can wait while it is explained
• does know the information, but finds the explanation amusing because it's familiar

So, since the narratee in this situation is not one person with a set experience, but a group of people all coming from different places, it allows for some wiggle room.  

As I've moved through the process of writing the draft of this story, if gained a few layers (thank goodness) and I've thought a couple of times about if it would serve the story better to drop the whole story telling event framework and make it more like my usual short stories.  But then I would lose that direct address.  "I know you don't know about werewolves, so let me explain."  Info dumps like this are generally frowned upon unless there is some direct address, so losing that direct address to a specific group of narratees would require a re-write and a re-thinking of how the information is presented.  Plus I would lose the joke that the narrator is supposed to be telling a true story, but gets up and talks about werewolves.

Mr. Fox Review

This week's novel is Mr. Fox, by Helen Oyeyemi.  This was recommended to me, again, by my friend Eric.  So thanks, Eric!

Mr. Fox is a novelist in a marriage that is fizzling out, when Mary Foxe, a kind of muse who is a figment of his imagination and with whom he's infatuated, walks back into his life to tell him that he is a monster and his novels are monstrous, namely because he keeps murdering his female characters.  Interspersed with this narrative are the beginnings of stories that maybe Mr. Fox wrote (that's not definite, but that's the impression I got), most of which star himself and Mary with some cameos from his wife (who is usually dead).

This was a great book.  It had depth and the structure was deft and impressive.  The shorter stories are all unfinished (until the very end of the novel), just as Mr. Fox doesn't know how his situation with Mary or with his wife is going to end.  Is he going to change his ways and become a more loving, caring person, or is his avatar in the story going to murder Mary after several other female characters have been tortured for no real reason other than to make it gritty?  And on that point, this novel says so much about violence against women in fiction without ever going on a diatribe about it.  In the first few pages, Mary tells him, "You kill women.  You're a serial killer  Can you grasp that?" And that's all that's said of it directly.  But it sets it up so that everything that follows is evidence of Mr. Fox (as a writer) killing women (characters).  The reader is looking for it: if the women die more frequently than men, if they die with purpose, and it becomes clear that he's enacting some internal misogyny in his writing if not in the real world.  (But also in the real world.)  So you could say that the whole book is about pointing out the prevalence of these tropes in fiction and about how one instance is fluke but eight of them is a pattern.  But since none of that is spelled out, it may just be my interpretation.

But let me tell you about fairy tales.

Several of the smaller stories have the feel of a fairytale, which was unusual considering that several of them were contemporary (or at least, not set in a vague "long ago").  When I say that they felt like fairy tales, I don't mean they were retellings of well known fairy tales in a contemporary setting, I mean that they had a fairy tale's typical flatness and magical realism.

Dr. Lustucru's wife was not particularly talkative.  But he beheaded her anyway, thinking to himself that he could replace her head when he wished for her to speak...After a week or so old Lustucru got around to thinking that he missed his wife.  No one to warm his slippers, etc.  In the nursery he replaced his wife's head, but of course it wouldn't stay on just like that.  He reached for a suture kit.  No need.  The body put its hands up and held the head on at the neck.  The wife's eyes blinked and the wife's mouth spoke: "Do you think there will be another war?  After the widespread damage of the Great War, it is very unlikely.  Do you think there will be another war?  After the widespread damage of the Great War, it is very unlikely.  Do you think..." And so on.
Disturbed by this, the doctor tried to remove his wife's head again.  But the body was having none of it and hung on pretty grimly.

This section feels flat, by which I mean that it's a lot of summary and the shocking moments are presented in a deadpan manner that makes them ordinary.  Of course she could talk when her head was put back on.  Sure.  It also relies on architypes instead of flushing out the characters.  Dr. Lustucru is a crazy doctor and his wife is his wife.  The reader fills in the rest.  When the story is over, we can go back and shiver at the beheading.  We can muse on how the wife must have felt, why she's stuck in a loop about the war, what her characterization must have been for her to be both a non-caracter from Dr. Lustucru's point of view, someone he can put away and then make speak at will, and a woman whose dead hands clutch at her dead head and cling to her last, chilling words.  There's a lot going on here, but non of it is unpacked for us.

In contrast to some of the other stories told by Mr. Fox, which feel less like fairy tales.  In those, we are placed in a scene and we get dialogue and reaction and intersection.  There's a kind of depth, a flushing out of things, almost like it's been unpacked for us.  And at it's heart, this is what makes a fairy tale.  Because of their flatness, they're open to interpretation.  In a lot of fairy tale retellings, the writer has interpreted it and is presenting us with their interpretation.  They've done the unpacking and removed the flatness from the tale.  So my question is: Do those still count as fairy tales?  Is a fairy tale about the plot points or is it about the form?  Lately, I've been leaning towards thinking it's the form.

***

Next week: Geekerella, a retelling of Cinderella at a Sc-Fi convention by Ashley Poston.

Power Writing

My friend Dani recently introduced me to power writing, which she learned from her professor, Goldberry Long.  Dani introduced it by saying that it sounds juvenile, but it's the most useful thing she picked up in grad school, so give it a try before judging it.

The rules go like this:

1. Write by hand.  You're not going to get the same flow, and you're going to back track too much if you're typing.
2. Set a timer.  I do 5 minutes. Dani does 16 minutes.  It doesn't really matter as long as it's not too long for you to keep it up and long enough for you to get something out of it.
3. You can't use periods.  A period ends a thought and you don't want to end a thought.  You want to keep going, just spewing ideas.  Instead of a period, you can use a comma and the word "and".
4. You cannot stop
1. You can write slow
2. No crossing things out, fixing, or editing.  You can say "That last bit should be crossed out" or "that's not the right word" or "No, no, I don't like that because..."
3. If you get stuck, you can repeat the last word or the last phrase until you know what to say next.

Power writing is not meant as a way to write your story fast.  Instead, it's an idea generator.  It's good to start with a kind of prompt.  So for example, the other day I power wrote on what my main character's job would be.  I rambled off options and wrote about the pros and cons, and by the end of five minutes, I had stumbled upon something that would work.  The next day I rambled about things that would change from one verse of a story to the next, and stumbled upon some things that were going to happen that I hadn't anticipated. 

The power write is pretty much unreadable when you're done, but there will probably be one good thing in there that's going to make it into a story.  Dani suggests chaining your power writes, so the one jewel you got out of the first one becomes the prompt that you can use for a second power write.  I've found that after a power write, I can make an action plan, or an outline of what I'm going to actually write, so I spend a few minutes doing that.  Then I'm ready to go and make the most of the time that I have.

It's pretty cool, and you might want to check it out.

More on Point of View

A while back, I got into a conversation with my critique group about when something is a 3rd person point of view that jumps and when something is an omniscient point of view.

We were looking at Ursula K. Le Guin's writing book, Steering the Craft, which we're reading together really slowly.  Le Guin talks at length about point of view.  Specifically, we were talking about her example from Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse, where the point of view shifts from one character to the next and back and around.  It's masterfully done, and most of my group agreed that trying it themselves just made a huge mess, and this was a lesson in sticking to the point of view of one character.

When I tried to write something like Woolf where the perspective shifts from one character to the next (and in my defense, I tried for about ten minutes and declared it good enough) I looked back on it when I was done, squinted at it, and said, "Well, that's just omniscient."

So that got me wondering, if you manage to make this work elegantly and smoothly, if you manage to change perspectives mid sentence without losing your reader, at what point is it still 3rd person and at what point have you moved to omniscient?

Feeling a sense of exasperation, Charlie Brown said, "Good grief," unknowing that Snoopy's activities were completely reasonable.

So we get information from Charlie Brown's point of view (he feels exasperated) and then information from Snoopy's point of view (his plan is reasonable, if you ask Snoopy).  So, without seeing any of the surrounding sentences, you could argue that this is in third person limited, but jumps from Chuck to Snoopy, or you could argue that this is omniscient and told by someone who knows what they're both thinking.  I think there's two things going on that lean towards one or the other. 

1. Voice.  If I did a better job of having the first half in Charlie Brown's voice and the second half being in Snoopy's voice, that would be evidence for a shifting third person POV.  If the voice is consistent through the whole sentence (which is not to say that there is no voice) that would be evidence for an omniscient POV.

2. Scope.  Or how far the camera that shows us the scene is zoomed in.  If this were a movie, and if the scene shows a wider view of the events, that's evidence for an omniscient POV.  So if the camera can pick up Chuck's exasperation and Snoopy's motives at the same time, it's like we have both characters in frame at the same time in a wider shot.  If the camera is zoomed in on Chuck, and then swivels or cuts to a close up of Snoopy, that's more like 3rd person POV.  I can't really tell if you could say which one this is from this example, so maybe that's not helpful here.  But one of my critique partners pointed out that an omniscient POV would be able to tell you something that the characters don't know themselves, and that seems to fit with this.