Category: Rubin

But I gave you two this week to make up for it. Okay, so one of them was the updated FAQ, but it’s still an informative post.  Just maybe not the information you were hoping for.

So, one thing I’ve mentioned here once or thrice is the idea of believability. On some level, we need to accept this character or world as real, because that’s how their stories become real to us.  If a character or a world asks us to accept too much… well, we just can’t.  One too many coincidences or secret cults or hidden talents and… we’re out.  That willing suspension of disbelief gets shattered.

Of course, what’s “believable” is kind of tricky, isn’t it? I mean, we completely accept  a tavern with fifty different alien races in it when we’re watching a Star Wars movie.  But if I’m reading the latest addition to the Their Bright Ascendancy trilogy, well… that doesn’t work quite as well. And if this was an episode of Elementaryor even iZombie we’d just roll our eyes and talk about the days back when this was a good show.

(they’re both great shows, just to be clear—but not if they suddenly had alien bars in them)

When we start to get invested in a story, part of it is that we get a good feel for what kind of world this story is set in.  Does magic exist?  Or aliens?  Does everyone know about vampires or are they still living quietly in the shadows, unknown to the average person? Assuming they’re even real.

A big problem I stumble across on a semi-regular basis is when a writer tries to change the world too late in the story.  We’ve been reading about a story set in the real world and suddenly there are goblins and vampires.  Or it turns out we’ve all known about aliens since the ‘50s.  I mean, we teach about them in school.  In history class!

I was reading a book lately that was set in Victorian London (locations, names, and/or supernatural beings may have been changed to protect the relatively innocent). A take on “the great detective” trope, but it was fun and had a nice mystery aspect to it (hunting a Jack the Ripper-esque serial killer) and the dialogue and descriptions of London were just fantastic.  I was really enjoying it.  Until…

A little more than halfway through the book, maybe close to 60 or 70% in, we find out that the serial killer is actually the Frankenstein Monster, gathering parts for yet another attempt at electro-alchemically creating a mate for himself.  It just came out of nowhere  Not so much a twist (it wasn’t really set up) as a weird reveal.  And it kind of… well, it knocked me out of the story.  It was a cool idea, but suddenly this was a very different world than I’d been led to believe. The type of characters who could be in it had drastically shifted. I had to reconsider a lot of things, and one of the biggest was “does this story still make sense?  Is this world still believable?”

Needless to say, I had to readjust my expectations as far as where this story sat on the plausibility/believability scale.  Which meant I then had to go back and reconsider everything that had already happened.  Were all those earlier moment still believable, now that I knew they were happening in this world?

And this isn’t to mean I came to a dead stop and started checking things off in a plus or minus column. It was just one of those moments where an instinctive reaction forces everything up into my brain.  I stopped enjoying and started analyzing. I was much more in my head for the rest of the story.

It’s kinda like wandering through a pool on a hot day. You may be really enjoying the cool water, the feeling of being outside, being with friends, all of it.  It might feel fantastic. But then you hit a spot of water that’s just a little warmer—just that certain amountwarmer—and now that one small-but-significant change has made you very aware of the pool.  Who else is in the pool. Where are they?  Where were they?  Now you’re not so sure if the pool’s a great place anymore. Sure, it may be nothing, but it’s kinda in your head now, how much water is on your skin.

And that’s a small change.  Imagine if you bumped up against a dead rat in the pool.  Or a shark. How the hell is there a shark in the pool?  Was it there all long?  Was it invited to this party, too? Is it responsible for the warm spot?

We need to feel comfortable in the world of the story.  I don’t want my readers to feel confused or betrayed. Bruce Joel Rubin made a wonderful observation years back that we experience stories in our gut, but we analyze them in our head.  So the moment we go into our head, trying to figure out what’s up with that warm spot, we start to lose our readers.

If I had to put a loose rule to it, I think any serious world-change like this has to be the end of act one/start of act two moment.  It’s part of the easing-in process.  The Matrix.  Red Rising. Harry Potter.  In all of these stories, the discovery that the world was than what we’d first been led to believe comes fairly early.  It’s probably notable that it’s also what gets all these stories really going.  This discovery is, arguably, the inciting incident, as folks have been known to call it.

Now, this moment can come later, sure.  I’m betting everybody reading this knows at least three or four “We were on Earth all along” stories.  But when these stories work—and that’s kind of a rare thing if you think about it—it’s because this is a very carefully set up twist.  And like any good twist, it’s been set up so the big reveal makes things fall perfectly into place rather than scatter across the table and spill onto the floor.

I’d also add that just because we’re flexing that suspension of disbelief with one thing doesn’t mean another thing will slide off with no problem. Finding out the serial killer we’re chasing is Frankenstein doesn’t mean we’ll also accept that he leads a taskforce of steampunk cyborgs that protect the earth from alien invaders.  Just because there are vampires doesn’t mean I’ll buy that Abraham Lincoln really was a vampire hunter sanctioned by the Vatican.

So if halfway through my story I’m introducing an element that’s going to change how readers look at my world, I should take a good, long look at it.  How big of a change is it?  Is it very late in the story?  Is it coming out of nowhere?

Is it necessary?

Oh and hey, speaking of the Writers Coffeehouse (as I did way up above), there’s one this Sunday, noon to three, at the new Dark Delicacies in Burbank. There’s also going to be one at San Diego Comic-Con, one week from today, from 2:30 to 4:30, and that one’s going to have me, Jonathan Maberry, Delilah Dawson, Scott Sigler. and maybe some other folks, too.  Come hang out with us and talk about writing. Plus I’m also doing the dystopian book club at the Last Bookstore this Sunday, too.

Next time… well, next time is Comic-Con, like I said. I probably won’t have a post up next week, but I may have a few fun cartoons and such if you want to check back in.  And then maybe the week after that I’ll blab about cool camera shots.

Until then… go write.

            First off, so very sorry post have been irregular here as of late. Believe I’ve mentioned I’m juggling a few things.  One of which is the con I’m at right now.

            But we’ll talk about that in a bit…

            This week I wanted to revisit an idea that I’ve brought up a couple of times over the past few months.  I’ve heard it called a few different things, but my preferred term has always been flow.  First heard it that way from a wonderful author and writing teacher named Drusilla Campbell, and it always stuck with me.

            The visual I’d like to put in your head for flow is traffic. Regular old automobile traffic.  I’m going to go out on a limb and guess most of you reading this can drive, and the few who don’t have still ridden in a car.  And hopefully most of you have been to a city, or at least on a highway of some kind.

            So… let’s talk about the flow of traffic.

            Living in Los Angeles (and before that San Diego, and before that the greater Boston area), I’m very used to highway traffic.  Sometimes, often late at night, the highway is clear and wide open.  There’s barely anyone on the road and you can pretty much fly.

            Of course, even if there aren’t many cars on the road, something big can still create a traffic jam.  Major construction or a big accident can condense things down to one lane, and suddenly that very open road is densely packed and moving at a crawl.

            During the day it can be even worse.  When there’s a million people on the road (no exaggeration here in LA) one small problem can slow everything down.  A large one can bring things to a crashing halt.  Hell, there’s a big hill on the 405 through the Sepulveda Pass and it always causes traffic slowdowns, both ways, up and down.  I’ve been in traffic jams so bad you could actually shut your car off, get out, and stretch your legs for a bit.

            There are places where the very structure and layout of the freeway just naturally causes traffic jams. There’s no way to avoid it the way things have been constructed.  I know a couple stretches where—for no reason—the road goes from six lanes to three.  And then back up to five.  That mile of three lanes… it’s almost always clogged.

            Traffic patterns can even get messed up when people just start looking at the wrong thing. We’ve all been in massive slowdowns that are simply caused by people staring at something on the side of the road. Or sometimes on the other side of the road.  A big accident in the northbound lane can make everybody in the southbound lane slow down to take a look.

            Sometimes it works great, though.  Those million people can be on the road and it’s fantastic.  Everything works.  I’ve had times when I’ve been looking at all the cars on the road, but then looked down to realize I’m almost doing sixty-five.  We’re all going at almost sixty-five, in perfect sync.  I was just caught up in everything and didn’t even realize what was actually going on.

            But that flow can get disrupted so easily.  Again, one car going really slow.  One closed lane.  One distraction over on the shoulder.

            What’s the point of this little visualization?

            Reading a story is a lot like traffic.  It has a flow.  When the flow’s great, we barely notice how fast things are going.  We just zoom along and suddenly realize we’ve read a hundred pages and it’s dark out and where the hell am I?  A book that you can’t put down has great flow.  A book that you should love but you just can’t get into… probably doesn’t.

            Here’s a few things that have the potential of causing a traffic jam in my story.

            A friend of mine has a book where the main character slips into sort of a fever dream.  She’s sick, she’s been medicated, and now she’s… a bit out of it.  And so the next two chapters of the book are in stage play format.  It becomes a bit more separated from reality for the reader and we understand it’s more surreal for the character as well.

            Compare this to another book I read recently when, for no reason, maybe 15-20% of a page would suddenly be in screenplay format.  Dialogue, prose, prose, slugline, dialogue, stage direction, prose, dialogue.  It jarred me out of an otherwise wonderful book every single time, and the author did it every four or five pages.  I looked for patterns and tried to figure out if there was a recurring motif, but couldn’t find anything.  I loved the story, but I kept getting knocked out if it.

            There’s nothing wrong with doing clever things.  It’s highly encouraged.  But I need to have a reason to do them, because my readers are going to assume there’s a reason I did it. That’s natural, isn’t it? I made the effort to put it in the book, so there must be a point to it.  Bruce Joel Rubin once mentioned that when we stop experiencing stories in our gut, we go into our head and start analyzing them.  That’s when the flow breaks.  When we stop reading and start drawing mental diagrams.

            I was reading this big sprawling generational family saga recently.  Not normally my kind of thing, but I’ve been trying to expand my reading umbrella lately.  And I’m overall glad I read it.

            But…

            One issue it had was that, by nature of being multigenerational, there were lots of people who were called “Dad,” and quite a few who were “Mom.”  And they were all Dad and Mom.  No “Pops” or “Papa” or “Daddy Dearest.”  No “Mum” or “Ma” or “Mother.”  Which got confusing because the book also jumped POV and timeframes a lot.  We might be in Yakko’s head for a chapter, then hop over to his granddaughter’s.  Which meant “Dad and Mom” is now referring to different people.  Some of them even had the same name, so there was a Yakko Jr. and a Yakko the III (fortunately grandpa had died)

            Anyway, what it amounted to was me going back to analyze the book every ten or fifteen pages to make sure the person behind this POV was who I thought they were.

            This is closely related to something else I’ve mentioned before—when lots of people have very similar names, especially when they all begin with the same letter.  We naturally lock on to that first letter to help keep things straight in our heads. If my story has a large cast featuring John, Jerry, Jacob, Jared, Justin, Jean, Jon, Jeri, Juan, Jenn, and Jess, people are (again) going to spend just as much time going backward to figure out who’s who as they are going forward to, well… read my story.

            We work with words.  That’s a simple fact of the job.  And nobody wants to use common words.  We want to work with amazing words.  Exciting, sexy, awe-inspiring words that people will remember years from now.  Decades from now, even.

            But here’s the thing to remember.  The words don’t really matter. The story matters. The characters matter.  The actual words are just a delivery device.  They’re how I’m telling you the story.  As a writer and a reader, I don’t want to be focused on the act of communication more than what’s being communicated.  The words should be almost invisible.

            And the truth is… the common words are going to be a lot less visible than the uncommon words. As readers—as people—we notice the uncommon. It stands out. And in many cases… it’s distracting. 

            This isn’t to say we can’t use uncommon or obscure words. There should be a reason for using them, though, and that reason shouldn’t just be me wanting to show off the obscure word I learned on Doctor Who a few months ago.  They shouldn’t be stumbling blocks for my reader.  Again, they should be adding to the story, not the delivery device.

            That’s just a few things.  I’ve mentioned some others before.  Flow is kind of tough to get too specific about because something that causes a small bump for me might be slamming you into a metaphorical wall.  Or vice versa.

            Y’see, Timmy, that’s the biggest lesson about flow.  It’s an empathy issue.  It’s about being able to put myself in someone else’s shoes—a lot of other people’s shoes—and make an honest assessment about things.  Will this reference trip people up?  Is this structure confusing?  Is it easy to keep all these characters straight?

            Because if I can’t be honest about my work, there’s a good chance I’m going to jam things up.

            And if that happens too often, to stick with our traffic metaphor… people will start looking for alternate routes.  

           Next time, I’d like to talk about that opening chapter.  You know what I mean.  The P word.  Although, fair warning, next time might not be for two weeks or so.

            Oh, and hey—I’m at Phoenix Comic Fest right now!  Are you reading this? You should come find me. I’m that guy typing on his phone. And also talking on panels and signing stuff and all that.  Come by and say hi.

            And then go write.

            I tried to come up with a clever title using Flo from those Progressive Insurance commercials, but I couldn’t come up with anything that didn’t feel… well, kind of awkward.  They weren’t bad titles, they just didn’t read well.  Or they required a bit of mental gymnastics to make sense.

            Either way, they didn’t work.

            Which is, oddly enough, what I wanted to blather on about this week.

            Have you ever read a book you just couldn’t put down?  One where you start reading just after lunch and suddenly realize it’s two in the morning?  Or maybe it was a movie that sucked you in and you were stunned to realize that the 163 minute run time was already used up.

            Oscar-winning screenwriter Bruce Joel Rubin made a wonderful observation a while back.  To paraphrase, we experience good stories in our gut, not in our head.  A good story grabs us at an emotional level—in the gut.  But whenever something goes wrong, we start to analyze and examine it—we go into our head. 

            The best term I’ve heard for this is flow.  Put at its simplest, flow is the readability of my story.  It has to do with how much effort it takes for the reader to keep reading.  Having good flow means my writing is smooth and slick, that every line, paragraph, and chapter rolls into the next and carries you along for the ride.  Readers can’t stop because it’s actually easier to keep turning the page than to put the book down. 

            On the other hand, a story with bad flow will make a reader stumble a lot.  If I’m reading a book, whenever I pause to roll my eyes, scratch my head, or go back two or three pages to figure something out… each one’s another bump in the road.  If you’ve ever tried a book and just couldn’t get into it, odds are the flow sucked.  You’d read, trip over a page or two, and put it back down.  You can’t get into it because you keep getting knocked back out.

             Flow is a large part of editing.  I’ve mentioned giving things a polish before, and it’s just what it sounds like.  It’s going through my manuscript and smoothing down the rough edges. It’s me knowing this could be a little clearer and people might get hung up on that.

            Unfortunately, this means flow isn’t something I can just fix by changing a word here or there.  It’s one of those things where you can tweak each element but still not affect the final outcome.  Getting good (or even better) at flow is an experience thing that just comes from writing.  The more I write, the more subtle methods and tricks and fixes I develop.

            That being said… here are a few things my story needs to do if it’s going to have good flow.  Or, if you prefer, these are some of the things a story with bad flow often won’t do…

            Be interesting–  Easiest way in the world to keep my story from lagging—don’t be boring.  This doesn’t mean I need five explosions and a swordfight on page one, but when I’m telling a story, I need to get to the story.  If it’s sci fi, I should show the reader something amazing.  If it’s a love story, my characters need to display some passion.  If it’s a horror story, I need to scare some folks, or at least weird them out a bit.

            Have characters act in character–  A writing coach named Drusilla Campbell once commented that when the nun viciously kills a gardener, that’s also when most people remember that laundry they have to fold.  People who are blatantly incompetent at their jobs, cruel people who do nice things, people who are just a little too smart or too scared or too law-abiding when it suits the story.  It’s jarring when my characters act in contradictory ways to what the reader’s come to expect.  And that jarring is what gets books and screenplays tossed in the big left-hand pile.

            Have smooth  dialogue–  Kind of related to the last point.  I can get away with one character who talks like a computer.  Maybe another who keeps slipping into a foreign language.  But too much stylized, unnatural, or just plain bad dialogue brings things to a grinding halt.  Adults should talk like adults, kids should talk like kids, and cybernetic lizard men should talk like… well, you know.

            Watch the word choice–  If I’m picking obscure or overly-long words just to create flowery descriptions or show off my vocabulary, there’s a good chance I’m disrupting the flow of my writing.  It’s really cool that I can describe someone as a female with resplendent obsidian ink ornamented across her glabrous scalp, but it’s much smoother and just as visual for me to say she’s a bald woman with dark tattoos.

            It’s worth noting that typos and misused words fall into this category, too.  Anytime someone sees something like that in print, it pulls them out of the story and puts them back in analyzing mode.  In their head.  And that’s not where I want them to be.

            Take it seriously.  Everyone makes a joke now and then to break the tension, but things need to carry the correct amount of gravity in my writing.  Death, rape, unrequited love, violence… I shouldn’t bring these things up and not address them in an appropriate way.  If my characters are drowning cats, threatening their employees, or punching strangers in the head, these acts should all be getting a response from my characters.  If the reader thinks I’m not taking the events in my book seriously, well… why should they?

            Again, though, just adjusting these elements doesn’t guarantee that my writing now has great flow.  Every story is unique and has its own path to follow.  But if you keep at it and continue to work on it, one day you’ll start to see the patterns.  And then you’ll be able to go with the flow.

            Next week, unless any of you have some requests or suggestions, I’ve been thinking about Captain America and superheroes a lot lately.  So I wanted to make a small distinction.  

            Until then, go write.