May 18, 2023

Getting the Last Word

Not a great surprise, I’m sure, but I follow a lot of writers on social media. Other authors, screenwriters of television and movies, some game writers, some journalists, an essayist or three. I love reading their random thoughts about writing-related things. Because, as I’ve mentioned here once or thrice or dozens of times, there are always other ways to do things. New angles to approach problems from. Different ways to catch problems before they go too far or grow too big.

And that of course brings us to Q getting punched in the face on Deep Space Nine and Sherlock Holmes living in New York.

There’s a screenwriter named Robert Hewitt Wolfe who (odds are) worked on at least one of your favorite genre shows. A while back on Twitter he did a list of 25 things he’d learned about writing for television. It’s a really fantastic little thread and you should check it out. A bunch of it applies to storytelling in general, not just television.

One particular bit stood out to me. Wolfe mentions giving the good lines to your main characters, not the dayplayers—what you’d probably think of as the guest stars. The folks who are just there on set for a day or two of this particular episode. He also adds on that your main characters should definitely be the ones getting the last line before the show cuts to commercial. Which all makes sense, if you think about it.

But I think this applies in a greater sense, too. My main characters should be the ones doing things. They should get the funny lines, yeah, but they should also be the ones taking the risks. They should be the ones solving deadly puzzles and and capturing the scorpions and working up their courage to ask out Dinah from accounting. Nobody watches a show (or picks up a book) thinking “wow, I hope that cashier is a lot smarter than our protagonist, because there’s no way Yakko’s getting out of this on his own…”

This really sums up what was wrong with so many of the B movies I used to watch during Saturday geekery. They didn’t know who they were supposed to be focused on. They’d give the cool lines, the big fight, the horrifying death, or the dramatic sacrifice to… well, anyone except one of the main characters.

And that means all these things are immediately diminished because they’re not happening to people we care about. I mean, sure, on a basic human level we care that the mutant landshark just chomped Hiker #3 into bloody chunks but honestly… did it get any reaction from you? Maybe a chuckle? Definitely not any concern or horror. Hiker #3 was pretty much just there to die. I mean, if they’d killed Phoebe… holy crap, can you imagine?

Maybe even more to the point, if my supporting characters are the ones being clever, being brave, and getting things done… what are my main characters doing? Are they just standing there being less interesting? Less active? Hell, they’re not even pushing the plot along by dying. If the landshark killed Phoebe, we’d be screwed right now. But Hiker #3? My main characters don’t even know he exists. He’s somewhere on the other side of the forest, barely on the fringes of our story. His death is irrelevant.

And, yeah, sure, maybe it’s an ensemble piece. Maybe I’m writing a huge epic with twenty main characters. My WIP, the thing I’ve been calling GJD, has over half a dozen characters in it I’d consider protagonists. But even then… I’ve got my heroes and I’ve got everyone else. In any given scene, it should be one of said heroes doing things, noticing things, reasoning things out.

It’s not exactly uncommon in my rough drafts to have a scene or a chapter end in a way that just doesn’t feel quite right. Maybe the beat’s there, but it’s just not landing the way I want it to. And more often than not, when I step back and look at it, I realize the problem’s usually that the beat’s landing with the wrong person. I’ve let someone else—someone we’re not invested in—make the big reveal or get in that cool last line.

So as you’re going through your manuscript, take a look at who’s talking. Who’s doing stuff. Who’s drawing the reader’s attention with their dialogue and their actions. Because it should be main characters. Not always, sure, but the majority of the time… yeah. And if it’s not them, maybe I need to reconsider who’s talking. Or who my hero is.

And that’s my last word on this topic.

Next time… be ready for an argument.

Until then, go write.

April 29, 2021 / 3 Comments

The Best Pace

I know I said I was going to try to do two posts this week but Tuesday was second shot day which ate up a bit of time but I’m now fully vaccinated! With no real side effects. So go get your second shot so we can all hang out together and things can get back to normal. Well, normal but with some major social reforms that this pandemic has really highlighted as necessary changes.

Anyway…

Look! More questions, more answers! And this takes so much pressure off me, because I don’t have to think of topics…

So, last week, after I prattled on about prologues, JD asked…

“I’m wondering if you have any suggestions on how to judge my pacing? I know every story is different, but in general, are there any tricks or tools to better know when I’m “running out of time” to get back to action before I lose the interest of my (hypothetical future) readers? Not just during the world build, but throughout?”

This takes even more pressure off because this question already contains part of the answer. Not all of it, but, y’know… maybe 20-25%.

When we talk about pacing, the first important thing, as JD said, is to recognize that every author (and every story) is going to approach things differently. Some need to dive right in with the fist fights and explosions. Others may take the slow burn, ramping tension approach. Right off, we need to recognize that pacing isn’t something that’s going to hit a bunch of universal guidelines. I think I’ve mentioned once or thrice before (here and at the Writers Coffeehouse) that I’m verrrrrrrry leery whenever folks set down rules like “introduce your love interest on page 16, inciting incident on page 23,  your first conflict by page 42.” Following blanket rules like this either creates cookie-cutter, formula stories… or it just turns good stories into bad stories. Because they’re being forced to hit benchmarks that don’t apply to them.

I mean, my new book doesn’t even have a love interest. So does that mean everything else bumps up by one page, or…?

The second important thing is to always remember Lee Pace is the best pace. I mean, seriously, look at the range this guy has. Pushing Daisies to Guardians of the Galaxy? I don’t know about you, but I freaked out when I realized that was the same guy.

But, seriously, let’s look at a few rules of thumb. Things we could probably consider as loose guidelines if nothing else. Because again, every book’s going to be different.

I think the best thing to remember is that pacing is a structure issue. Specifically, dramatic structure. I’ve talked about dramatic structure a few times before, so I won’t bore you with it again now. The important thing to remember for this discussion is that it’s always a slope. Sometimes that slope goes up, sometimes it goes down. But what it should never do is amble along on a flat line. Because a flat line means… well, you know. Dead.

Any chapter (or broad swath of my book, if I’m being clever and not doing chapters) should have a clear up or down on that slope. It doesn’t have to be a huge slope, but if I’m starting and ending at the same level of character growth, of overall tension, it probably means I’m doing something wrong. A chapter (I’m just going to keep using chapter as our nice, simple, unit-of-book-construction) should lean things one way or another, whether it’s holy crap you found the lost sword Dyrnwyn or just no, Jules, I’m not just going to give you some of my Doritos. Things need to move higher or slip downwards.

Probably worth mentioning… sometimes in our stories we plant things that don’t pay off until later. Character details. Worldbuilding. Set-ups for twists or other cool reveals. Such things are fantastic, of course, but they still need to work within my overall dramatic structure. It can’t be a situation where a chapter will be interesting in retrospect—it has to be interesting now, on the reader’s first time through.

Granted, this doesn’t mean it has to be interesting for the same reasons. It’s a wonderful skill to be able to pull that sort of sleight of hand, to make my readers look at this and be totally enjoying it, only to later realize that was the thing they should’ve been watching. But it still needs to be a chapter that moves things one way or another on that slope.

Because, again… the worst thing my chapter can do is flatline.

The sort of parallel to this—should be obvious but I’ll say it anyway—is that something needs to happen in every chapter (just to be clear, still using chapter as our basic, large-scale building block). In the same way we want to start with someone’s life changing, on some level or another, we want to keep having things happen. That’s what a good story is—the plot driving someone’s arc and their arc, in turn, is driving the plot. And driving implies we’re going somewhere, not sitting in a parking lot with the engine running.

Again, this doesn’t need to be huge movement. Every chapter doesn’t need huge leaps forward from the plot or broad swaths of character development that completely changes how we look at someone (that’ll usually ring a bit false anyway). Because every story is different and they’re going to move at a different pace depending on where we are in said story.

But they should always be moving. At some speed. In some direction.

How about this. Remember back in the A2Q when I made up a rough outline for a werewolf novel? Let’s take a look at those first few chapters I planned out and how they’re paced.

–Start with Phoebe and  Luna at home.  Both getting ready to go out for the evening, but Luna’s heading out to another party and Phoebe’s going hunting. So they’re looking for things, asking who borrowed what, warning each other to be safe, and so on.

(You can see a more fleshed out version of this here)

This is a slow opening, yeah, but there’s stuff happening. Both characters are doing things, I’m establishing relationships, doing some worldbuilding, which will should build some interest. And things are actually progressing. Both of them are getting closer to their goal of being ready to head out for the night.

–Phoebe’s out hunting and encounters the super-werewolf (although she doesn’t know it’s super yet). She puts a silver crossbow bolt in it and it’s going to ignore it and run off. This will also give her a chance to grumble about losing a silver bolt because they’re expensive. She can track it for a while, find the bolt… but no body.

Now we’re moving at a faster pace. A lot more action, and it’s action moving the story forward as it introduces a bit of an unexpected mystery and what looks to be a greater challenge. The first part got my reader intrigued, so now hopefully this gets them a bit more hooked with a sample of what’s to come.

–The next morning Phoebe goes to the lodge and we meet Luc and talk about hunting last night, if he saw anything noteworthy. Maybe some one-sided flirting?

Intro. Andrea, the Warden of the lodge. She’s willing to entertain the ‘super-werewolf” idea, and will pay an extra $2500 bounty for proof.

Things slow down here, but logically so—it’s daylight, the hunt’s over. Also, structure-wise, we can’t keep things ramped up to nine for the entire book or it’ll make getting to ten seem a lot less interesting. And when everything hits ten on the tension-ometer, I want it to mean something.

Plus, there’s some more worldbuilding, a possible love interest/rival/both, and a new goal for my heroine. It’s a lot of talking, but there’s some physical action taking place and it’s all nudging things along in the plot. Creeping forward, inching the tension up a bit with this new goal (and the implied possibility of not achieving it).

See where I’m going here? The pacing speeds up and slows down, but the big thing is that there’s always a pace. The story’s always moving. I mentioned something a while back that’s very true here–stories are like sharks. If they stop moving they’ll die.

(the shark thing’s not entirely true? Depends on the type of shark? Huh. Learn something every day…)

Again, every story is going to be different, so please don’t look at this as me saying “go slow, then fast, then slow again.” Your story is your story. It’s going to have its own pacing requirements that need to line up with what you want your story to do.

But hopefully this has given you a few things to look for.

Next time, I might finally get to clowns. Or maybe I’ll talk about plotting. That was a question I got a while back that’s still owed an answer. And questions get answers.

Until then, go write.

July 30, 2020

Time To Reduce

As we come out of an SDCC@Home weekend where I probably ate about as healthy as I would at an actual con (I was going for the full experience) I thought it’d be a great time to talk about reducing things.

He said, in a blog post he skipped getting on the treadmill to write….

Anyway, back when I was doing the A2Q we broke down different types of editing, and one of them I touched on was reductive editing. This is when I start cutting and trimming to make my story lean and tight. Figuring out what needs to be there as opposed to all the stuff I threw down while I was working on the first draft.

And since I just finished doing this with my new book last week, I thought I’d talk about some of the cuts I made and explain why I made them.

The first cut was easy. I had a section where two chapters overlapped. I liked the overlap at first. It was an action scene with multiple characters, and I thought it kept things moving to show all of his fight and then all of her fight, even though they happened at the same time.

But when I looked at it again during my editing pass it just felt… slow. Also kinda repetitive, since I kept referring to the other fight in both versions to show how they overlapped. Also, it created an odd problem with ending the chapters—either one had to end flat or I had to repeat the cool end-beat and weaken it. So I cherry picked a bit, leaned more into his than hers (for a couple of reasons, but I feel pretty good about it for the moment) and then cut 750 words of overlap.

The next one was rough. Throughout the book I had a few chapters where we switched POV and checked in with the main antagonist—the big bad in charge. Essentially, that big voice going “Meanwhile, at the mad scientist’s lair…” Thing is, these chapters never sat right at any point in the process. Not in my first draft. Not in my second, “cleaning up” draft. I didn’t want to give away too much in these chapters (since my villain was much more in the know than my protagonist), but it was hard not to mention some things without feeling like characters were deliberately not talking about things.

I’m not sure exactly what did it, but I know during my second draft I had the realization that I could probably cut one of these POV chapters altogether. There wasn’t a lot of necessary information in it, and I realized what there was I could shift to other chapters and characters without any real trouble. And that made me suddenly wonder… wait, do I actually need any of these chapters? I mean, a big chunk of the first one was just backstory justifying the antagonist and their behavior… while not talking about anything that would give things away. Another one introduced a character I’d only created to make some exposition read better. The more I looked at it… yeah, I’d definitely have to rework some things, but for the story I was telling these chapters were really distracting and didn’t add anything. Heck—two of them I still hadn’t even fleshed out, even though they’d been through two drafts.

So that was another six thousand words gone. A little over six thousand, really. Only a few pounding heartbeats for that one. And now the knives come out. Time for the death of a thousand cuts.

I’ve talked before about looking out for overused words. So I did a couple passes looking for that, adverbs, a lot of the “somewhat” words and phrases I can’t help but use in train-of-thought mode. We all have them, and you might already be aware of yours. If not, feel free to borrow mine for now and see where they get you.
I also had some other things that I was worried about—words that might be showing up a lot by nature of this specific story and how it was being told. That was another pass or three through the manuscript. I was kinda surprised that one or two didn’t get used as much as I thought they would, but… one I included as an afterthought showed up way more than I expected. Think I deleted eighty-something uses of that one.

One thing that did strike me with this is I didn’t find a lot of my usual padding. The adverbs and the “somewhat” phrases. It was still there, yeah, but not as thick as I’ve piled it on at times in the past. After twelve full books, I’m finally improving. Maybe.

In the end not quite a death of a thousand cuts. With additions and rewrites as I went, it worked out to a little over 300 words less. A full page gone.

That’s how this part of editing goes. Word by word. Sometimes chapter by chapter. All of this added up about 7,250 words gone out of what began as a 124K manuscript. And I still may trim a little more when I get notes back from my beta readers.

Next time, if you’re up for it, I’d like to play doctor for a little bit. No, not like that. Get your minds out of the gutter!

Until then, go write…

June 7, 2018 / 2 Comments

Prologue Problems

            Random quick question.  Do the links I drop in here show up okay?  I’ve noticed a few times they seem to get overlooked, and I’m not sure if it’s a visibility thing or people just… well, not bothering to click through. Please let me know if you think it needs to be tweaked.
            So, anyway, I wanted to take a few minutes and talk about the P word.
            Over on the Writers Coffeehouse Facebook group, somebody asked a while back about prologues. I had thoughts, but that’s kind of a crappy platform for longer answers (Facebook, not the Coffeehouse group). Personally, I’m a big believer in the Facebook rule of thumb—with very few exceptions, if a post is longer than my thumb, there’s a good chance I’ll skip it.
            I don’t think I’m alone in feeling this way.
            Anyway, that long answer…
            Yes, it’s true. Most editors cringe a bit when they see a prologue. They may display a strong bias against them. Sometimes—very few, but it may happen on rare occasions—they might even judge them unfairly.
            But, usually, they’ve got a reason for acting this way.
            Two things to address.
            First is a small misunderstanding. It’s not like editors just hate the word prologue. They don’t see it and or fly into a blind rage or something. If I ask around, I won’t find a bunch of professional story editors who were beat up by a prologue every day after school in sixth grade and are exacting revenge now that they’re in the position of power.
            What this means is that I won’t avoid the issues here by going “heh-heh-heh… I’ll just title my prologue ‘Chapter One’ and they’ll never know…”
            They’ll know because of the real issue here.
            And that’s point number two
            Y’see, editors dislike prologues because so often… well, they’re done wrong. Yes, even when they’re titled Chapter One. Much like flashbacks, bad prologues are an all-too common problem, and on one level it just becomes a lot easier to say “don’t do it” then to explain the many issues that often pop up.
            (oddly enough, when I’ve talked about flashback flaws, the first one I discussis usually some kind of mislabeled prologue.  But that’s a discussion for another time…)
            Investment is probably the biggest problem with most prologues. It’s something I’ve blabbed on about before. Writers try to have something super exciting/mysterious/sexy/scary happen in the first three pages, because so many gurus have pounded that sort of thing home again and again.  
            Without an investment in the characters involved, though, none of it means anything. At worst, it feels like my story stumbles right out of the gate.  At best, it’s got a tenth of the weight it would have if it was happening to someone who mattered. 
            But wait, says the clever writer. I will create characters for you to be invested in. They’ll be great, even if they don’t make it past the prologue.
            Alas, I’ve talked about this before, too.  This is ye olde “describe and die” chestnut.  Or Brazil nut, really, because it’s so frustrating…
            Put it this way…  Have you ever seen a movie that begins with a lot of voice-over explaining things, but it turns out all that voice-over is unnecessary?  Or it all gets explained more organically once the actual story begins?  Sometimes in the first ten or fifteen minutes?
            That’s the problem with a lot of prologues.
            Now, if I may, I’d like to give one more thought on why—in my opinion—editors don’t like prologues.  Again, this is just my opinion.  Definitely not a hard-fast rule you should live by.
            But I’d really consider it…
            At least half of the time, an editor is only going to be reading the first fifty pages of my book.  I’m tempted to say most of the time.  And if those first nine or ten pages are completely unconnected to anything else in the next forty, well… I’ve kinda wasted 20% of my submission, haven’t I?  In fact, odds are I’ve wasted the whole submission.
            Hang on a minute, though!  What if I just (heh-heh-heh…) don’t include the prologue for this submission? I’ll give them those fifty solid pages, then add the prologue back on when the editor—inevitably—asks to see the full manuscript.  Dodged that bullet, didn’t I?
            Well, not really.  The editor’s going to remember seeing those first fifty pages.  They’re going to remember that they worked fine without the prologue.  Hell, they got a full manuscript request without the prologue.
            So why does it have a prologue now?
            Again, I’m not saying prologues are bad.  Nobody is. The first chapter of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone is essentially a prologue passing as Chapter One.  The Fold has a prologue.   So do all the Ex-Heroes books.  They’re even titled as prologues. 
            And y’know what?  My editor’s never mentioned them to me once.  Because they don’t feel like false attempts to ramp up the tension.  They’re all part of the story.  They tie directly to the main characters. 
            Three quick questions I should ask myself about my prologue…
            1)Does it involve the protagonists in any way?  If they’re not in it, not mentioned in it, if the events in it don’t effect them in any way… I may have a problem.
            2)Does it actually have an effect on the plot?  Okay, if it doesn’t affect the characters, hopefully it at least get the plot going.  This could be that inciting incident we’ve all heard about.
            3)How long does it take for it to pay off?  If my prologue isn’t going to make sense until the last twenty pages of the book—or halfway through book three in the planned series—oh, that’s a paddlin’.

            If my answer to one of these questions is iffy, I can probably still make my prologue work.  Probably.  If I’ve got questionable answers to two or three… well…
            You better believe that’s a paddlin’.
            And I don’t know about you, but I try to avoid getting a paddlin’. 
            Oh, since I brought it up earlier, this weekend’s the Writers Coffeehouse here in Los Angeles.  Come by Dark Delicacies noon to three on Sunday and join us for our usual, rambling discussion of writing and publishing.  You’ll get to watch me offer writing advice in real time.
            And next time here, we’ll try to have one of those character-building experiences.
            Hopefully, not a paddlin’.
            Until then, go write.

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