Category: criticism

            I wanted to prattle on a bit about character development.  I’ve been thinking about it a lot lately, and the way it can sometimes be a stumbling block.  And I think I’ve got my thoughts in an order where they’d make a semi-coherent post.

            So, first, a little story.

            A friend of mine has a semi-popular travel show on PBS.  She’s also been working on a book about how she ended up travelling and one of her first big solo trips (that’s her thing).  She’d been working on it for a while and asked if I’d be willing to take a look at it and maybe offer some thoughts.  Maybe help her think of a title for it.

            I’ll be honest.  There’s always a bit of nervousness when a friend asks for your opinion on something.  I bet most of you can relate.  But I said yes.

            Turned out, no big worry. It was a fun book about her trek through Italy.  No nightmarish spelling or grammar mistakes.  Great voice.  Good description.

            There was one issue I noticed though—it just took a little while to pin down.

            (no, don’t worry,  She and I have talked about this.  And she knows I’m mentioning her book this week)

            Y’see, the book had tons of good elements.  Travel.  History.  Comedy.  Some soul searching.  A little romance.  A touch of sex.  Even a kind of creepy night in a haunted building.

            Thing is, none of these was a dominant element.  They were all more or less equal.  A little more of this here, a little less of that there.  Okay, the creepy factor only lasted four or five pages, but past that… it’d be really tough to pin down the main theme of the book.  An informative travelogue?  An introspective journey to sort out a life?  A passionate summer in Europe?

            Yeah, lots of stories have multiple elements like this.  My own book, The Fold, has sci-fi and horror elements, but also mystery, some action-adventure, a bit of comedy, some sexy romance, and even a touch of political stuff.  At the end of the day, though… it’s pretty much sci-fi and horror.  The other things were side dishes, so to speak.  They were fun and flavorful, but they weren’t the main course.

            See, without that main course, the meal is nothing but side dishes.  And while there’s nothing wrong with that, it becomes very difficult to answer the simple question of “what did I have for dinner?”  Sure, I can say, “side dishes,” but that doesn’t really answer the question, does it?  It’s like asking what I’m wearing and I say “not a green shirt.”  It’s an answer and it’s true, but I haven’t really told you anything useful.

            I need to have some kind of answer to the genre question, because people are going to ask it. People like readers. And agents.  And editors.  And if I can’t give them a real answer, it’s going to be really hard for me to get anyone interested.  If you’ve been reading the ranty blog for a while, you may remember a little tidbit I once heard from an agent named Esmond Harmsworth—“It’s not like anything else is very hard to sell.”

            This brings me to the second half of this little rant…

            I’ve mentioned before that you can follow me on Twitter.  If you do, you get to watch every weekend as I rant about sci-fi and horror B-movies in real time.  Over the years—watching them and working on some of them—I’ve developed a theory about why they turn out so bad.  Not all of them, granted, but a good number of them.

            Genre comes with expectations.  Science fiction and fantasy each have their own standards, benchmarks, and tropes.  These are radically different from the ones we hold for horror, or for mystery stories, or for romances.  Seems straightforward, yes?

            When these expectations aren’t met, or when my story departs radically from them, things begin to stumble. Maybe my story recovers, but sometimes that stumble ends with a full-on faceplant.  I’m willing to bet most of us have read a book or seen a movie where we discover the big twist is aliens did it or angels did it or Bob was a deranged serial killer all this time.  And this made us roll our eyes and find something else to do.

            So, here’s my theory.

            I think sometimes, at one stage or another, a story gets tagged with the wrong genre.  And this creates problems.  Sometimes I look at one of those B-movies I mentioned and I see what may have started out as—for example—a really fine sci-fi movie.  But someone decided it was a horror movie, and they filmed it as a horror movie. And now the sci-fi story has horror timing and emphasis and angles—all those standards we expect from those films.  But they don’t really fit this story. And that awkwardness is why the movie never really hits its stride.

            A great example of this was the latest Fantastic Four movie.  Director Josh Trank has done Chronicle, an indie movie widely hailed as a superhero story. But if we take a good look at it, it was really a superpowers movie.  Then Fox gave him the FF franchise and, well, Trank made another superpowers movie.  He forced the FF out of their natural genre and into a different one. 

            And we all know how that went.

            I’ve seen the flipside of this, too. When something gets made as, say, a sci-fi movie, but we’re told it’s a horror movie, by the advertising or the interviews or whatever.  So we walk in with those standard expectations, and suddenly the movie is “wrong” because it’s failing as a horror movie—which it was never intended to be.  I’ve seen books that were marketed as dark fantasy that were supernatural romance. Movies marketed as horror that were pretty straightforward sci-fi or fantasy.  Or even blog posts that were marked as character development when they’re all about genre…

            From our point of view as writers, this can be deadly.  If I’ve got an agent who wants to see sci-fi, I say my book is sci-fi, and then I send her or him literary horror…  Well, that’s going to get rejected really quick.  Yeah, even if it’s a fantastic horror story. 

            Heck, even if said agent reps horror as well, they can get soured just by those failed expectations.  They can go into it expecting sci-fi, like they were told, and maybe they’ll eventually self-correct.  But even then…  I may have lost those two or three vital ticks off their mental scorecard.

            And those two or three ticks can mean the difference between ending up in the big pile of the left or the very small pile on the right.

            Y’see, Timmy, I need to be sure what my genre is.  And I need to be honest about it, no matter how popular some other genre might be right now.  Because I want to score all the points I can with editors.  And agents.

            And especially with readers.

            Next time I want to talk about one of my favorite topics.  And a little bit about numbers.

            Until then, go write.

            Oh, and if you wanted to toss a buck or two at my friend’s travel show, public television needs all the help it can get.  Thanks.

            On this particular Thursday, it seemed like talking about voting could be an interesting idea.

            One thing I did all the time when I was starting out—well, once I’d become brave enough to show my writing to anyone past my mom—was to get as many opinions as possible.  If I had enough, I’d count them up like votes.  And I would do whatever they said.  If someone—anyone—wanted this line or that element changed, I’d change it.  Or remove it.  Or add in something new.  Anyone else’s thoughts were just as valid as mine.

            This happened to me again about thirteen years ago, just before I started doing this full time.  Slightly different direction, though.  Believe it or not, I ghost-wrote an exercise book.  This woman was very smart and savvy about exercise and the specialized niche she wanted to write toward… not so much about writing and publishing. So she hired me to help her out.  Alas, she kept talking about the book with her friends and fellow fitness professionals, showing them half-finished drafts, and taking everyone’s opinion as scientific fact.  So we rewrote the book again.  And again.  And again.  Not drafts, mind you.  Complete, start-from-scratch rewrites.  I think it went through six or seven major revisions before I had to bow out just for time reasons. And she still didn’t have much more than a first draft of her book.

            It was frustrating, but I couldn’t really fault her.  Like I said, I used to do it, too.  I think most people do when we’re starting out and looking for assurance.

            Really, it makes sense to do it that way. It’s what we’ve all been taught, right?  Democracy in action.  Let people vote on something, go with the majority.

            Except…

            Writing is not a democracy.  I’m a benevolent dictator at best.  An angry god at worst.

            Now, before anyone gets too excited about being a dictator…

            I’m not saying I’ll never, ever listen to other opinions.  I have some great beta readers I really trust.  I have a seriously fantastic editor who’s much, much better at spotting flaws than I am.  It doesn’t mean their opinions or suggestions are always right, but I’d be foolish not to at least look at them and consider them.

            At the end of the day, though… what my story needs is up to me.  I’m the one crafting and telling it. Every line of dialogue, every subtle character nuance, every beautiful piece of imagery, every clever plot twist.  It all comes from me.  If a dozen people think I need to get rid of the wine bottle scene but I think it’s vital and memorable, I get the last say.

            And I needto make that decision.  Opinions are great, but as the dictator the final decision is nobody’s but mine.  If I’m going to put things on hold waiting for a consensus or a clear majority… that just makes me a figurehead.

            This also holds for what I’m writing about.  If I just want to write to entertain myself—that’s great.  If I want to fill my story with in-jokes that only ten people on Earth are going to get, that’s also my choice.  I can deliberately focus my book on neo-con, government-hating survivalists or tree-hugging, socialist liberals—and absolutely nobody can say I’m wrong!  This is mystory.  Mine.

            However…

            This doesn’t mean anyone will want to read my story.  Or buy it.  Just because I’m staying true to myself and my vision–only bending where I feel I absolutely must—doesn’t mean my story is going to appeal to anyone else.  And some of those people it may not appeal to are editors.  Under other circumstances, they might be interested and willing to work with me, but if I’m not going to bend at all on that wine bottle scene…  Well, it’s not going to be their fault I didn’t make a sale.

            Plus… Let’s face it, I’m not going to please everyone, no matter what choice I make.  I’ve mentioned before that every story has a limited audience.   Sometimes a very limited one.  That’s the problem with leading—even as a benevolent dictator—the best you can ever hope for is a “greater good” situation.  There will always be people with no interest in the topic or genre, readers who just don’t like it.  Hop over to Amazon and check out well-established American classics like East of Eden or To Kill A Mockingbird.  Look at something newer like The Martian.  Heck, pick your favorite Harry Potter book.  All of these are unquestionably critical and financial successes with, I feel safe saying, hundreds of millions of fans each… but look how many one-star reviews they have.

            Y’see, Timmy, at the end of the day, nobody knows what my story needs but me.  It’s all mine. That’s the art part of it.  There is no democracy.  That’s where I get to be a dictator.

            But once I decide I want to put my writing out there, that I want an audience, that I’d like to get paid… Well, we’re not talking about being a dictator anymore. Now we’re talking about politics. We’re talking about compromises. We’re talking about tweaking my vision to appeal to a greater audience, even when it doesn’t appeal to me quite as much anymore.  Maybe not quite as great a good, but still a “very good” that reaches a lot more people.

            That’s the balancing act.

            Real quick before I wrap up, I’m going to be up in Tacoma, Washington this weekend for the Jet City Comic Show.  If you’re in the area, please stop by, say hi, and tell me how this blog is just a huge waste of time for everyone involved.

            Next time, I want to talk about something cool.

            Until then, go write.

            I really like this title, even though it makes me think of the conservative talk show host in V for Vendetta.

            So, a question was posed in the comments a few weeks back—how do you deal with criticism?  Specifically, how do you tell good, useful criticism from questionable opinions, and how do you weight those opinions to tell which are worth listening to and which are just… well, wrong.

            I think that was the question, anyway. If I’ve completely missed it, Chris, feel free to point and laugh at me in the comments. Until then, though, this is what I’m going with…

            This is kind of well-timed, too.  Back in May I handed in my new book to the publisher, and near the end of the month I got back notes from my editor.  Lots of notes.

            Pagesof notes.

            I won’t lie.  It stung.  It never feels good to have someone pull out lists of reasons why months of work needs… well, even more work. 

            Here’s the thing, though.  He was right on about 85% of what he said.  And I knew it.  My editor’s a smart guy, and he picked up on a lot of things—small things, really—that didn’t work in the story. But these small things snowballed into three or four big problems. 

            (Which I am now about halfway through fixing…)

            So… how did I know he was right?

            Assuming I’m actually open to receiving some honest criticism, one thing I can immediately look for is if this criticism is objective or subjective.  Is it a factual, provable point, or is it just a reader’s opinion.  If I use the wrong spelling of canon, drop commas in weird places, or don’t have a single transition anywhere… these are real problems that have a right or wrong answer.  This is objective criticism, and if I’m going to get argumentative about something like spelling, well… my writing career is going to take a while to get going.

            Which takes us to subjective criticism.  This is when my editor or beta readers express their opinions on my writing.  And opinions can be taken with a grain of salt. Or several grains.  Sometimes a spoonful.

            For example, some opinions are informed.  My agent doesn’t think this is a good time to try selling an urban fantasy book.  He spends his time talking to different editors and looking at recent market trends, so he’s probably got a pretty good sense of things.  That doesn’t mean selling a UF book right now is a guaranteed failure, but it’s probably a good way to approach things for now.

            On the other hand, some people’s opinions are a bit… less informed.  I think zombies suck.  Maybe you could give her a dog?  Or a cat?  I feel like this sex scene could be cut.  Have you considered ending the book on Chapter Six and just making it a novella?  Have you considered giving this up and going back to investment banking?  These are all critical statements, but there’s nothing backing them up except one reader’s opinion.

            And don’t get me wrong.  Everyone’s entitled to an opinion, and their opinion is (usually) totally valid.  But at the end of the day, some opinions carry more weight than others.  Neil deGrasse Tyson’s opinions on moon colonies carry more weight than mine, even though I once did a whole month of research for a zombies-on-the-moonbook.  Pretty much every woman on Earth has better thoughts than me about the struggles, barriers, and sexism they encounter as a woman.  On the plus side, my opinions on G1 Transformers and Micronauts carry more weight than my brother’s (he was more into sports when we were kids…and as adults, too).

            But how do I tell objective feedback from the subjective stuff? There are so many rules and accepted standards!  It could takeyears and dozens of drafts to learn them all!
            Well, here’s one easy rule of thumb.  If I’m giving you feedback for something, and my notes have a lot of phrases beginning with–

            “I think…”

            “I feel…”

            “This didn’t do it for me.” 

            “I just don’t…”

            –my critique probably isn’t that objective.  Just because my personal reading preference may be for casual dialogue, implied sex and violence, or clever twists doesn’t automatically mean these things are right for a given story.  And it doesn’t mean a lack of them is wrong.  So when I’m saying “I think you need this,” I’m not offering advice based on facts or rules, just off my own thoughts and feelings.

            However…

            Yeah, there’s always a however…

            As I’ve mentioned before, some people will try to soften the blow with criticism because they don’t want to hurt my feelings when I read their notes. So even though they’ll have a perfectly valid, solid point to make, they’ll lead it with one of those phrases I mentioned above.  “Not 100% sure, but I think you may want to check if Schwartzenagger is the correct spelling.”  I’ve done this to other writers.  Readers have done it to me.  It’s just human nature.

            Except…

            The flipside of this is the people who don’t realize they’re just voicing their opinions or some half-understood advice. And these folks will declare with absolute certainty that I must change this character’s name or move that comma or turn all my zombies into witches because, seriously, who still writes about zombies?  It’s over, people. Witches are the new hot thing.

            So when I’m wading through my feedback, I need to be able to sort good opinions from bad ones.  And real objective criticism from heartfelt opinions.  That’s part of my job as a writer.

            Now, all that being said… there are times someone’s personal opinion might hold a little more weight.  If some producer wants to pay me to rewrite my screenplay to include an alien love-child, or to rewrite the main character of my civil war slave story to be a white guy…that’s their call.  If a publisher wants to buy my Agent Carter fan-fic with all the names and a few genders swapped, I probably won’t tell him no.  If someone wants to pay me actual money to do something that could very well ruin my story…  well, getting paid is nice.  A lot of writers cover their monthly bills that way.  Especially in Hollywood.

            Y’see, Timmy, the bad news is that a huge amount of knowing how to sift through criticism and make these choices is just plain experience. It’s the ugly process of writing, getting feedback, rewriting for the feedback… and realizing two or three drafts later some of that critique could’ve been ignored.  Then having this happen again… and again.  And again.  The only way to learn this is through writing and rewriting and learning exactly how all of this word-stuff fits together and then writing some more and having it suck a little less.

            Also, it’ll help a lot if I read more.  Lots of things in lots of genres.  If I can name a hundred manuscripts that have done the same thing as mine with a character, with structure, with dialogue, that’s probably a good sign that what I’m doing is acceptable. But the only way I’m going to know that is if I’ve read lots and lots of material. 

            By the same token, if I read a hundred books a year and not one of them has done what I did with dialogue… well, it might mean I’m a visionary, but odds are it means this isn’t really an acceptable practice.  If I find one or two out of that hundred that do it, they’re probably the exception than proves the rule.  Again, though, the only way I’ll know is to read.

            Yeah, this sounds like a lot of work.  It is. I didn’t figure all this out overnight, or even in the eight or nine years since I started this blog.  This is actual decades of experience, stretching back to the early ‘80s when I first started screwing up this stuff with fanfic, comic book scripts, and lizard man stories.  And I screwed up and got rejected a lot.

            As I’ve mentioned before, experience is what you get when you don’t get what you want.

            Speaking of not getting what you want…

            There will be no post next week because I’m going to be down at San Diego Comic Con.  If you happen to be there Saturday, though, I will be part of a panel on worldbuilding and storytelling, so you could show up and mock me in person.

            And I’ll probably put up a few photo tips to make up for the lack of actual post.

            When we do meet again, though, I’d like to talk about chefs.

            Until then… go write.

             Wow. This is post #325.  Go figure.

            If the title of this week’s rant sounds familiar, you’ve probably read or watched a lot of how-to pieces.  Y’know, the ones that say something like “Here’s how to turn this stuff we scavenged from a dumpster into a full wedding reception –with food—in just six simple steps.”  Or maybe it’s “Learn how to play concert piano in four easy lessons.”

            We’ve probably all tried one of these at least once.  Okay, maybe tried the belly fat ones twice.  And a few things become clear pretty quick.  If I’ve tried a few of these, I’ve probably also noticed a few recurring issues with these steps…

            1) They still require lots of practice.  Yeah, this is easy to do—on the nineteenth try.  The first eighteen are going to be messy and somebody might die, but by my nineteenth attempt I should be getting completely adequate results.

           2) They often require lots of other skills or equipment.   Learning the ceremony is easy once you’ve got a working knowledge of the Basque language. Yes, making these carrot roses is no problem at all as long as I have a 1 3/4” mellonballer (not a 2”—that’ll ruin the whole thing).

            3) They’re rarely simple.  A lot of times each of these “easy steps” ends up sounding like that guy at Comic-Con who walks up the microphone and says “I have a five part question, but first I just want to say how wonderful it is that all of you have come out to meet all of us, and the positivity in this room reminds me of a poem by Emily Dickinson, which I’d like to read a few lines from…”

            4) They’re rarely effective. In the long run, most of these “four-or-five easy steps to accomplish something” methods just aren’t worth it. Oh, I might learn a small trick or polish a skill, but in the end, all the money and time and frustration wasted on trying to do it the easy way could’ve been spent on learning… well, how to do it.  If I really want to learn how to make carrot roses that look fantastic, maybe I should actually… well, learn how and not try to figure out some trick that’ll let me skip the learning curve.

            Oddly enough, this kind of ties back to something I mentioned a while back. It’s a hypothesis I came up with during my time in the film industry and, well, it’s stood up to all my testing and research so far.  Maybe next time I write about it I’ll be able to refer to it as a theory.

            I call it the four step rule.  Pretty much everyone’s professional career goes through four stages.

            *Not knowing what I’m doing. 

            *Thinking I know what I’m doing. 

            *Realizing I don’t know what I’m doing. 

            *Knowing what I’m doing.

            I don’t remember exactly how I stumbled onto this, but it was one of those instantly-makes-sense things.  I know my film career followed it.  And just looking around set, I could see it in all the people I worked with and where they fit into this pattern.  In fact, the more I looked, the more I came to realize this pattern applied to almost everything.  I could see it with people on movie sets, yeah, but also with the staff members for an online game I worked on for a while.  I have a friend who was a police officer, and he agreed a lot of cops followed the same pattern. 

            Now, there’s an unfortunate side-effect of this.  I also noticed a few people who were pretty mediocre workers, but were convinced they were amazing. These folks were stuck at step two because they never had (or never acknowledged) that slap down moment.  They never bothered to improve because they never acknowledged a need to improve.  They just stayed at those early, flawed levels.

            I’m sure most of you can see that all of this applies to writing, too.  When I first sat down to write a story in third grade, every aspect of it was a mystery to me.  I didn’t even know what I didn’t know.  Character elements, linear and narrative structure, dialogue —these terms meant nothing to me.  Of course, once the words were typed out in front of me, it was clear I was a genius. I mean, look at them—they’re typed!

            Alas, many editors did not agree with my assessment of those pages, and I had a good sized stack of rejections before I had body hair.  And that file folder got thicker and thicker for many years.

            I think I was in college when I started to consider that every single editor I submitted to might not be the problem.  Maybe my stories weren’t genius just because they were typed.  Yeah, the ones I was writing at that point had a much more elaborate vocabulary than my old ones (and I used it as often as I could), but were they really any better than the ones I’d been writing at age eleven…?

            I had dozens and dozens of rejections under my belt, but it turned out I really didn’t know much about writing or storytelling. All my “experience” was essentially eight or nine years of doing all the wrong things.  I’d missed opportunities and ignored good advice because I was convinced I knew it all. 

            And being able to admit that was what let me finally improve. And improving was what let me get where I am today.  Working with other professionals who treat me like a professional.  Able to offer actual advice with experience backing it up (even if a chunk of that experience is, “wow, I screwed up a lot back then…”).

            Now, last time I talked about these four steps, a few folks asked me if it was possible to skip some of them—specifically, step two.  If I realize I’m at step one, can I jump right to step three?  I’ve thought about this on and off, and also heard a few things in other interviews and articles that fit into this little outline.  So I’m going to say this…

            No.  You cannot skip any of the steps.  If I tell you that I did skip step two, it really means I’m stuck there and in denial.

            It comes down to, as my lovely lady has called it, paying your dues.  We all have to do it.  We can pay our dues sooner and get it over with or pay them later with interest.  I can get down in the gritty, sweaty, unrewarding trenches and take the long route—doing all the work and learning how to do it.  Or I can rely on nothing but luck, tricks, and gimmicks to get me there in a tenth the time—and then fall from a much greater height when it comes out I don’t know how things are done.  I’m sure we can all think of tons of Hollywood stories of someone who shot to the top in record time, only to come crashing all the way back down to where they started out (or even lower…).

            Y’see, Timmy, we need that screw-up stage.  It’s important.  Not to sound all new-agey or melodramatic, but it’s the crucible that burns away the screw-ups and forges us into better writers.  We go in like iron, but we come out like steel.  If we don’t go through it, we’ll never be as good as we could be.

            All that being said…  It is possible to manage how much time you spend on step two. How do we do it?

            I need to be open to criticism.  And to listen to it.  Try not to be defensive.  Learn how to tell valid feedback from personal preferences.  Be able to admit something isn’t good or doesn’t work like it’s supposed to.  Yeah, it’ll be frustrating and disheartening and there’s a good chance I’ll find out I spent a lot of time on something that’s just going to go in the circular file.  But if I’m open to learning from all that—to admitting I need to improve—that’ll speed up the learning process.

            One last thought.  Joe Quesada—an artist/writer/editor-in-chief at Marvel Comics—made a wonderful observation in his foreword to Brian Michael Bendis’ storytelling book Words For Pictures.  “If you’re not falling, you’re not trying hard enough.”  If I don’t screw up now and then, it’s probably a good sign I’m not trying too hard.  If I never challenge myself, I’m never going to get better. 

            We all need to fail.  And it’s okay to fail.  The only problem is if I’m determined not to learn from it.

            Next time, I’d like to talk to you about something you may have seen before. And before.  And before.

            Until then, go write.