Category: structure
July 15, 2016
You Want To Know What I Think?
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.
Pages of 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 take years 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.
January 30, 2016
Annnnnnd… ACTION!
Hey! Wanted to thank all of you who came out last weekend to the Writers Coffeehouse. Hopefully hearing me talk about writing in the real world was at least as semi-useful as all of this.
Also—shameful capitalist plug—my new book, Ex-Isle comes out next week from Broadway Paperbacks. Check out that fantastic cover over there on the right. It’s book five in the ongoing Ex-Heroes series, and I happen to think it’s pretty cool. Granted, I might be a bit biased…
(the audiobook’s still three weeks out but it is coming, I promise)
Anyway, enough about that. Now… story time.
About fourteen years ago some friends and I were in a pretty serious car crash. Someone sideswiped us as we were pulling onto the freeway and then sped off. My friend’s SUV was slammed into the concrete wall, bounced off, then slammed into the wall again because the wheels had twisted around to send us right back into it. We skidded ten or twenty feet scraping against the wall. The first impact was so hard that the passenger side door crumpled in, hit me, and fractured my ribs on that side. I also caught half the windshield with my face. I remember clenching my eyes shut on instinct, what felt like gravel hitting my cheeks and mouth and forehead. While part of me knew (in the greater sense) that we were in the middle of a collision of some kind, another part of me was still trying to figure out what the hell was going on. And there was so much noise. Screams and hollering from friends, metal on concrete, metal bending, glass breaking, highway noise because the windows were gone. It wasn’t until everything stopped that I realized how loud it had been.
Now, I took a while to write that out, and a while for you to read it, but the truth is, it took seconds. Six or seven seconds, tops. Really, at the moment, it was just a blur of sensations. I didn’t piece together what had happened—and what I’d experienced—until afterwards.
Action, by its very nature, is fast. It’s a blur. If you’ve ever been part of an accident of some kind, a fight, a collision, or any other kind of really dynamic moment, you know what I’m talking about. A huge amount of action is stuff we figure out after the fact. In the moment, I’m not quite sure how my shirt got ripped or why my arm’s bleeding or… oh, geez, I think I whacked my head a lot harder that I thought.
Here are a couple of tips on how I try to make my action scenes seem fun and cool.
Keep it fast–Action can’t drag. If it takes a full page for someone to throw a punch and connect, things are happening in slow motion. Even a paragraph can seem like a long time, especially once multiple punches are thrown.
My personal preference is to try to not have action take much longer to read then it would to experience. I trim fight scenes and action moments down to the bare minimum to give them (pardon the phrase) a lot of punch. One way I do this is to clump some actions together and let the reader figure out what happened on their own.
He slammed three fast punches into the other man’s kidney.
Karen did something quick with her hands, and now she held the pistol while the mugger wailed and held his wrist.
Keep it simple—I practiced martial arts for a while and I also have a lot of experience with weapons thanks to my time in the film industry. Even though I know lots and lots of terminology, I try not to use it. That kind of thing can clutter up an action scene, especially when I’m using a lot of foreign languages or obscure terms. I want this to move fast, and if my reader has to stop to sound out words and parse meanings from context… that’s breaking the flow. If they need to figure out if a P-90 TR is a rifle, a pistol, or a fitness program… well, maybe they’ll come back to it after lunch.
Remember, there’s nothing wrong with terminology, but there’s a time and a place for everything. That time is rarely when someone’s swinging a baseball bat at your head.
Keep it sensory—Kind of related to the above, and something I touched on in my story. Action is instinctive, with a certain subtlety to it. There isn’t a lot of thought involved, definitely not a lot of analysis or pretty imagery. Keeping in mind the fast, simple nature I’ve been talking about, I try to keep action to sounds, sights, and physical sensations. I can talk to you about a knife going deep into someone’s arm, severing arteries and veins as it goes… or I can just tell you about the hot, wet smell of blood and the scrape of metal on bone. Which gets a faster reaction?
Granted, writing this way does make it hard to describe some things, but a lot of that gets figured out after the fact anyway. My characters will have a chance to sort things out once things cool down.
Keep it real—Like so many things in fiction, it all comes down to characters. There’s a reason we can zone out dozens of attacks on the news but be gripped by a single one in a book. Action needs to be based in real characters because my readers need to care about the people involved. A stranger in a car crash is kind of sad in an abstract way, but Wakko in a car crash is a tragedy and we want constant updates.
This also kind of works against the idea of “always start with action,” which is something I’ve talked about before. It’s tough for readers to be invested in action when we don’t know the people involved. If I start with an action scene it has to be twice as big to compensate for the fact that we don’t know the characters, and once it’s that big it’s going to effect the level of everything that comes after it.
Now, as always, it’s pretty easy to find exceptions to these. As I said, these are more tips than rules. But there’s one particular exception I want to talk about.
A pretty common character is, for lack of a better term, the fighting savant. Batman, Jack Reacher, Melinda May, Ethan Hunt, Sarah Walker, Joe Ledger, Stealth—characters who’ve taken physical action to an art form through years of study and experience. For these people to not use precise terminology for weapons or moves could seem a little odd. It makes sense they’d be able to dissect action, picking out the beats and planning out responses like a painter reviewing their palette. But…
Keep in mind, these characters by their very nature should be rare. If I have a dozen utterly badass characters who all have badass moves with badass weapons… that’s going to get boring real quick. It’s monotone.
Also, keep the point of view in mind while writing. Stealth may be a trained master of unarmed combat, but St. George gets by with his invulnerability and raw strength. Whose narrative this is will affect how her actions are seen by the reader.
And that’s that. A handful of tips for writing killer action.
Next time, I’d like to talk about, arguably, one of the finest episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation that was ever produced.
Oh, and next Thursday I’ll be at Mysterious Galaxy in San Diego, blabbing away and signing copies of Ex-Isle. If you’re in the area, please stop by and say “hullo.”
Until then… go write.
January 21, 2016
No Photobombers
I spent time at a few conventions last year and, as I do, I tried to get lots of photographs of the various cosplayers there. I’m always blown away by that sort of thing. I worked in the film industry for years and it’s amazing to see so many folks who are so dedicated they can do costumes that are on par (or better, in some cases) than the ones that end up on film.
Alas, one or two of my shots were spoiled by photobombers. You know that term, right? The folks who decide to lean into a picture and draw attention to themselves with a goofy grin or thumbs up, even though it’s really clear they’re not who the photographer wants things focused on. If you’re Chris Pratt, Hayley Atwell, or William Shatner and you end up photobombing somebody—hey, power to you. How fantastic would that be, looking at your pictures later and finding Hayley Atwell smiling and waving at you?
On the other hand, if I’m someone that’s going to make 99.9999% of humanity say “who the hell is that?”… I’m kind of being a jerk. Because I’m not supposed to be the focus of this picture. And by drawing attention away from what is supposed to be the center of attention, I’ve messed up this image.
Or, for our purposes, this story.
In some ways, being a writer is a thankless job. If I do it right, people shouldn’t even notice me. If I do a spectacular job, people should forget me altogether. Screenwriters get hit even worse with this—their work is often credited to the actors or director. The ugly truth of storytelling is that none of us really care about the storyteller, we just want to hear the stories.
Some storytellers try to get noticed. It’s a deliberate choice. They lean in and draw attention to themselves. They wink and point. Sometimes they make goofy expressions and shout “Look at me! Look what I’m doing!”
When I do this as a writer, it’s just like photobombing. Textbombing? Prosebomb? Whatever we want to call it, it’s me drawing attention away from telling my story, which—in theory–is supposed to be the focus of my writing.
Here’s a few simple ways I can make sure I’m not ruining my focus…
Vocabulary—Stephen King once said that “Any word you have to search for in the thesaurus is the wrong word.” And, personally, I think he’s completely right about that. I don’t think using a thesaurus is bad. I’ve got one right here on my desk. I often use it to jog my memory when I know there’s a specific word I’m looking for, and the easiest way to find it is to look up a synonym.
But some folks default to their thesaurus. They have a sentence—let’s say “The thin woman wore a red hat.”—and then just immediately go to find bigger, better words for it. That’s how you end up with sentences like… well…
“The rawboned feminine figure accoutred her cranium with a chapeau of deepest carmine felt.”
That’s me, as a writer, trying to draw attention to myself when you, the reader, want to be focused on the story.
Any word I choose just to get attention, to prove I don’t need to use a common, blue-collar word, is the wrong word. Any word that makes my reader stop reading and start analyzing is the wrong word. I can try to justify my word choice any way I like, but absolutely no one is picking up my manuscript hoping for a vocabulary lesson. When my reader can’t figure out what’s being said for the fourth or fifth time and decides to toss said manuscript in the big pile on the left… there’s only one person to blame.
Like I said, I’ve got a thesaurus on my desk. But it’s not right here in arm’s reach, like the dictionary. It’s a shelf up and off to the side. Just enough that I really need to stand up to get at it. And move some LEGO people.
Structure—A friend of mine is really into cirque school. I’ve seen her do some of those aerial silk tricks where she’ll climb to the top of the studio, wrap her legs, bring the silk around her body, and then sort of roll down the silk. She spins and the silk twirls all around her and it takes two or three minutes for her to work her way back down to the floor. I’m sure most of you reading this have seen some version of this, either live or maybe on television. Its really beautiful and amazing when done right.
It’s also—and she’d be the first to admit this—a really inefficient way to get from point A to point B. And taking even longer to do it, well, that just gets exhausting for the performer and the audience. None of us have the stamina for that kind of thing. Getting there is half the fun, absolutely, but the point of most trips is still getting there.
When the trip itself becomes the focus, it means my goals have shifted. Getting to point B isn’t the important thing anymore. And since storytelling is, in essence, getting characters from point A to point B… well…
If I think of my story as an A—B line (to fall back on geometry), how often does my chosen structure deviate off that line? How many times does it not move along the line at all? How often does it go backwards?
And how much of this is because of how I’ve chosen to structure things? I’ve seen people write page-long sentences which serve no purpose except to be a page-long sentence. Sure, it’s very impressive in an MFA, grammatical-accomplishment kind of way, but past that… does it really advance the story? Is it pushing the narrative, or just pushing the fact that I sat through half a dozen classes on creative writing?
If I’m overloading my story with flashbacks, a non-linear plotline, or twenty-two points of view… what am I hoping to accomplish? Are they adding anything? Would it honestly lessen the story to not have them? Or am I just adding in gimmicks that I’ve heard make a story betterwithout any real understanding of how or why they work?
Just like how an obscure word is wrong if it’s just there to be obscure, an overcomplicated structure is wrong if it serves no purpose except to be overcomplicated.
Said—I’ve mentioned this a few times. People will never notice if you use said. Honest, they won’t. Saidis invisible. What they notice is when my characters retort, respond, pontificate, depose, demand, declare, declaim, muse, mutter, mumble, snap, shout, snarl, grumble, growl, bark, whimper, whisper, hiss, yelp, yell, exclaim, or ejaculate. Yeah, ejaculate. Stop giggling, it was a common dialogue descriptor for many years. Once I’ve got three or four characters doing this all over the page, I shouldn’t be too surprised if my audience stops reading to shake their heads or snicker. Now, granted, there are times where my characters will be hollering or whispering or snarling. And when that happens, I don’t want my readers to already be bored by my constant use of different dialogue descriptors. I want it to count. Overall, they’re just going to be saying stuff. So I shouldn’t overcomplicate things and draw attention to myself.
These are just a few things to watch for in my writing, granted. There’s always going to be that person who finds a clever new way to draw attention to themselves. And there will always be exceptions, sure. Really, though, photobombing my own story isn’t going to be a winning strategy.
Never forget… first and foremost, people are showing up for the story.
Quick note, before I forget. If you happen to be in the Los Angeles area, this weekend I’m hosting the Writers Coffeehouse at Dark Delicacies in Burbank on Sunday. It’s three hours of writers talking about writing, it’s open to everyone, and it’s free. Stop by and talk. I guarantee it’ll be highly adequate.
Next time, I’d like to talk about a big car accident I was in many years back.
Until then, go write.
Quick note, before I forget. If you happen to be in the Los Angeles area, this weekend I’m hosting the Writers Coffeehouse at Dark Delicacies in Burbank on Sunday. It’s three hours of writers talking about writing, it’s open to everyone, and it’s free. Stop by and talk. I guarantee it’ll be highly adequate.
Next time, I’d like to talk about a big car accident I was in many years back.
Until then, go write.
Just don’t be seen doing it.