September 24, 2020 / 1 Comment

A Few Basic Things I Should’ve Mentioned…

I  was glancing back over the whole A2Q thing I did a few months back. I admit, I’ve been toying with the idea of combining the posts, expanding on some aspects, and offering it as a cheapo ebook (at all interesting to anyone?). And it struck me there are a few aspect of writing I kinda skimmed over and others I barely touched on at all.

So I thought it wouldn’t be a bad thing to add in a few basics about forming a plot, shaping my structure, dealing with characters, that sort of stuff. A little less how-to (“press your foot down on the gas pedal to go fast”) and a little more but-keep-in-mind (“don’t go ninety in a school zone while a cop’s parked there”). Make sense?

I’ve mentioned most of these ideas before, so they may feel familiar. Also, since I’m loosely tying this back to the A2Q, I’ll use my character examples there rather than my standard Animaniacs references. I don’t want anyone to think I’ve abandoned Yakko, Wakko, and Dot.

Anyway…

First, I should be clear who my protagonist is. In my head and on the page. If I spend the first five chapters of my book with Phoebe… everyone’s going to assume Phoebe’s the main character. The book’s clearly about her, right?  So when she vanishes for the next seven chapters and I focus on Luna or Quinn… well, people are going to keep wondering when we’re getting back to Phoebe.  Because she’s who I set up as the main character.

Now, a lot of books have a big cast of characters.  An ensemble, as some might say.  That’s cool.  But if my book’s going to be shifting between a bunch of characters, I need to establish that as soon as possible.  If the first four or five chapters are all the same character, it’s only natural my readers will assume that’s going to be the norm for this book, and it’ll be jarring when I jump out of that norm.

Second, speaking of jumping and jarring, is that I need to keep my POV consistent. Even with a third person POV, we’re usually looking over a specific person’s shoulder, so to speak. Which means that character can’t walk away and leave us behind.  Likewise, we can’t start over Phoebe’s shoulder and then drift over so we’re looking over Luna’s.

It’s cool to switch POV—there’s absolutely nothing wrong with it—but I need to make it very clear to my readers I’m doing it. They need that stability and consistency. If they start seeing things from new angles or hearing new pronouns, it’s going to knock them out of the story and break the flow. And that’s never a good thing.

Third, while we’re talking about peering over other shoulders, is that I should be clear who’s part of my story and who’s just… well, window dressing. I probably don’t want to spend three or four pages describing Doug, hearing his backstory, reminiscing about his workday, and then discover he’s just some random guy at the bar. Phoebe serves him a drink and then we never, ever hear about him again.

Names and descriptions are how I can tell my reader if a character’s going to be important and worth remembering or is they’re just there to show Phoebe’s doing her job. Three paragraphs of character details means “Pay attention to this one.” So if I’m telling readers to keep track of people for no reason—or for very thin reasons—I’m wasting their time and my word count.

Fourth is I need to have an actual plot before I start focusing on subplots.  What’s the big, overall story of my book?  If it’s about Phoebe trying to fins out the secret of the super-werewolf, I should probably get that out to my readers before I start the betrayal subplot or the romance-issues subplot or the how-could-mom-and-dad-have-hidden-this-family-secret-from-us subplot.  After all, they picked up my book because the back cover said it was about fighting super-werewolves. I should be working toward meeting those expectations first.

If I find myself spending more time on a subplot (or subplots) than the actual plot, maybe I should pause and reconsider what my book’s about.

Fifth, closely related to four, is my subplots should relate to the main plot somehow.  They need to tie back or at least have similar themes so we see the parallels.  If I can pull a subplot out of my book and it doesn’t change anything it the main plot in the slightest… I might want to reconsider it. And if it’s an unrelated subplot to an unrelated subplot… okay, wow, I’m really getting lost at this point.

Sublots face a real danger of becoming, well, distracting. People are showing up for that sweet werewolf on werewolf action, and I don’t want to kill whatever tension I’m building by putting that on hold for  two or three chapters while I deal with inter-hunter rivalry and politics at the werewolf-hunting lodge. It’s like switching channels in the middle of a television show. What’s on the other channel isn’t necessarily bad, but it doesn’t have anything to do with the show we’re trying to watch.

Sixth is knowing when I need to reveal stuff. Remember how much fun it was when you met that certain someone and there were all those fascinating little mysteries about them? We wanted to learn all their tics and favorites and secrets. Where are they from? What’d they study in school? What do they do for a living? What are their dreams? Do they have brothers or sisters? Where’d they get that scar? Just how big is that tattoo?

But… we don’t want to learn those secrets from a dossier. We want to hang out with these people, talk over drinks, maybe stay up all night on the phone or on the couch. The memories of how we learn these things about people are just as important as what we learn. And it’s how we want to learn about characters, too. Just dumping pages and pages of backstoryactually make a character less interesting. It kills that sense of mystery, because there’s nothing left to learn about them.

Again, there’s nothing wrong with me having incredibly fleshed out characters. But I might not need to use all of that backstory in the book. And I definitely don’t need to use it all in the first two or three chapters.

Seventh and last is flashbacks. Flashbacks are a fantastic narrative device,but… they get used wrong a lot. And when they’re wrong… they’re brutal. A clumsy flashback can kill a story really fast.

A flashback needs to be advancing the plot. Or increasing tension. Or giving my readers new information. In a great story, it’s doing more than one of these things. Maybe even all of them.

But a flashback that doesn’t do any of these things… that’s not a good flashback.  That’s wrong.  And it’ll bring things to a grinding halt and break the flow.

And that’s seven basic things to keep in mind while I’m writing my story 

Now, as always, none of these are hard-fast, absolute rules.  If I hire someone to paint my house, there’s always a possibility this particular painter doesn’t use a roller. There can always be an exception.  But I should be striving to be the exception, not just assuming everyone will be okay with me not following all the standards. My readers are going in with certain expectations, and I need to be doing honestly amazing things to go against those expectations. 

Because if that same painter also doesn’t use a brush… or dropcloths… or a ladder…

Next time, just to be different, I’d like to explain something else to you. But I’m probably going to skim over most of it, if that’s okay.

Until then, go write.

August 2, 2019 / 1 Comment

Killer Sex Robots and Other Stories

I’m having a really crap day, but fortunately for you, this was already pretty much done. And maybe blabbing on about writing will make me feel better about stuff.  Probably not, but what the hell…

I’d like to babble on about another one of those “this is so self-evident why are we wasting time on it” ideas that… well, seems to come up a lot. 

As writers, we get cursed with ideas. Tons and tons of them. Books, comics, movies, epic television franchises, soooo many ideas. And, naturally, we want to use as many of them as we can. Cause they’re all friggin’ fantastic, right?

But, as I’ve mentioned here once or thrice before, that’s not always a good thing, no matter how fantastic my ideas are.  More isn’t always better. Sometimes stories get cluttered with ideas. I want to create a certain kind of character, use this cool idea I saw in a Gizmodo article, explore a few different themes, develop this awesome backstory I came up with, and then wait until you see all the stuff in chapter two!

We’ve all done this. Be honest. If I think I haven’t done this, it probably means I don’t realize I’m doing it right now in my current work.

Now, to be clear, there’s nothing wrong with having a lot of stuff in a story.  My book Dead Moon touches on zombie horror, body horror, sci-fi, action, mystery, and comedy. There’s a lot of talk about sex. There’s some politics. There’s some questions about self-worth and finding your place in the world (or the solar system).

But if you asked me… I’d tell you it’s about zombies on the moon.  Horror and sci-fi.

Let me give you a less personal example. I watched this geekery movie recently that was… okay, let’s just say it was about AI (or was it?  Maybe cloning? I’ll never tell). Anyway, there was a lot in it about the ethics of creating an intelligence solely for a specific purpose (is this slavery??). There was also stuff about the morality of assassination. Plus a lot of assassination-related action scenes. Then questions were brought up about the possible ethical issues when the scientist starts having sex with this thing she created. More so when it turns out the body said scientist made for this AI is the spitting image of her dead husband. Plus there’s a heist element as they plan to rob the CEO of the company. And some torture porn. Arguably some parenting, nature-vs.-nurture aspects, corruption of the innocent bits, too.

Now, all of these could be cool things to bring up in a movie. Hell, any one of them is probably a story in and of itself.  There’s a lot of fascinating character moments that can happen with almost any of these.

But again… what is this story about?

’Cause this AI movie made it about everything. The filmmakers gave every one of these elements equal weight. It was the ethical AI-assassination morality-action-sex issues-heist-torture porn-corruption movie we’ve all been waiting for. Just search for that category on Netflix.

(it’s not on Netflix—the category or the movie)

Is something just a conceit for the story?  Cool.  But to be clear… what’s my story then?  If I’m using clones to tell a long-distance love story, that’s cool.  Super clever. One of you should take that and run with it. But if that’s the case, I probably shouldn’t spend half the book talking about the science behind the cloning.  Likewise, if I’m writing a taut thriller about cloning assassins… maybe there shouldn’t be 250 pages of clone-love in there.

Subplots? Great.  Parallel plots?  Fantastic. Twiststhat subvert the plot? SOOO COOL! But what is this book about? What’s the dominant idea here? What aspect of the story are we spending the most time with?

Here’s a way to think of it.  There’s a Hollywood term you may have heard—the elevator pitch. It basically means I should be able to explain my story in one or two sentences, the length of an elevator ride. It comes from the awful idea that I should leap at people when I find myself alone in elevators with them. Because who doesn’t respond positively to that?

Anyway, if I got a chance to elevator-pitch the AI story above, how many of these things do I mention and explain? How many would I leave out? When I’ve only got thirty seconds to tell my story, what parts of it do I not bother telling?  It’s not going to be 100% accurate, sure, but it’s a safe bet my elevator pitch is going to make me really focus on the key things in my story.

And if I can’t focus on them… well, that’s probably telling me something.

Y’see, Timmy, it shouldn’t be that hard to explain what my story’s about.  It can have lots of elements—and hopefully it does—but there should be an overriding idea I can point to and sum up in a few lines.  “It’s about an android assassin who starts to question the morality of his existence, especially when he learns more about his creation.”

Which, alas, is not what that movie was about.

Next time, let’s talk about winding things up.

Until then, go write.

May 23, 2019 / 1 Comment

Recycling

So, I wanted to blather on about something that seems to come up now and then.  I’m guessing for at least three out of four of you, this is going to seem kinda obvious.  But for that other person… you may really need to hear this.  No matter which direction you’re approaching it from.

I’m a big fan of recycling. Fan’s probably not even the right word. It just seems like a no brainer to me. Why wouldn’t you do it? Why would someone be against it? We recycle our glass and plastic. We compost a lot of our food waste and cardboard and even some old clothes. Yeah, you can compost old clothes.  Weird, I know.

We reuse and repurpose a lot of stuff, too. That comes out of, well, being poor.  Even though I’m on a much better footing these days, financially, I still try to reuse things. We never broke the habit of using those spaghetti sauce mason jars as glasses. Half our Tupperware is take-out containers. And I still look at frozen pizza boxes as potential tanks.

What’s odd, though, is a certain subset of folks who’ll mock you for doing this with your writing.

I’ve brought up many, many times the need to cut manuscripts.  We write so much stuff that gets trimmed away.  Clever bits of descriptions.  Cool dialogue.  Sometimes whole scenes, subplots, or even whole characters. When it comes time to hone and focus that first draft, all these things can fall under the editorial knife.

Now, weird as this may sound—like I said, for most of you this is going to sound bizarre, but—some people think this cut material’s gone for good. It’s been deleted. Even if some record still exists, it’s unusable now. Toxic. Radioactive. It’s somehow been tainted forever.

I think a lot of this comes from people who lean a little too heavily on the art side of writing. Oddly enough… the ones who don’t write that much.  They get a little too focused on the idea and the craft and the ART of it. I put these words together in this way for this story.  I didn’t use them like that or like that, and so pulling them out and putting them somewhere else would just be wrong.  It’s not what I first intended.  It’s not what those phrases were created to do.

If I listen to those folks too much… or maybe if I am one of those folks (it’s okay, admitting it is the first step)… I probably have a somewhat shallow view of recycled material.  Those dialogue exchanges that I cut, or that subplot or character… they’re not going to work anywhere else.  I’m not being artistically honest or something like that.  How could a character crafted for story A possibly work in story B? Dialogue that I’d intended for X just shouldn’t work coming out of Y’s mouth, especially if Y’s in a completely different book.
And if I do try it and it does work… well, that just says something about me, doesn’t it?  I probably don’t know what I’m doing. My writing must be pretty thin and generic if I can just pluck some material from here and drop it in over there.  I’m probably lazy as hell in other aspects of my life, too.

If you happen to be the one out of four who thinks this… sorry.  It just isn’t true.  In any way.  Just in case my tone wasn’t carrying through.

Of course I can repurpose material. Artists have done it throughout history.  We jot down notes for one thing and end up using them for another.  We cut from that and then repurpose it for this.  Exchanges of dialogue. Neat ways to describe something.  Maybe a whole scene of morning-after awkwardness or a supporting character who got nixed for space.

Granted, none of this is going to slide right in without a bit of work and some tweaks.  I’m probably going to have to change a few proper nouns, and possibly a few personal pronouns, too.  Maybe an adjective or three.  That’s just the nature of such things. But it’s still absolutely fine to use it.

And honestly, because it’s older stuff I didn’t use before… I may have improved since I first wrote it (hopefully I have). That was a great bit back then, but y’know, if I just did this it’d be fantastic.  Or maybe he seemed like a good character for back then, but now I realize this should all really be centered around her.

I’ve got a book coming out later this summer/early fall called Terminus(that’s probably what we’re calling it), and it’s got a discussion between two characters I’ve been trying to use for almost eight years now. Seriously. I had to cut it from another book, but it’s got some great character stuff and I’ve always wanted to use it. Terminus finally gave me a great place where it could fit. And, yeah, it needed some adjustment to fit in this story with these characters at this point in the overall story. But it’s still 80-85% the same and I think folks are going to love it when they read it.

Still not convinced? Are you one of those one out of four who’s ready to pop down to the comments and point out I’m one of those lazy hacks who barely qualifies as a real writer?

How about Ray Bradbury? Is he a lazy hack? Most of Fahrenheit 451 is recycled ideas, after all. Bradbury had already used the firemen (the book burning ones) in a bunch of different short stories.  They even show up in The Martian Chronicles.  He’d also done longer stories about book burning and corpse-burning (seriously).  The spider-like Mechanical Hound is from an old short story he’d never finished.  There it‘s a law-enforcement tool used by sheriffs and police. He lifted the entire description, almost word for word, and dropped it into 451, along with some dialogue about it. Heck, the whole book is an expanded version of his short story “The Fireman” which he expanded into a novella and then expanded again into a full book.

And he’s not alone. Lots of writers have files of material they had to cut. And they’re always trying to find that material a new home.

Y’see, Timmy, yeah, writing is an art. But like every kind of art, the “how I do it” is entirely up to me. My manuscript might be pristine and pure and new. It might make Frankenstein look like somebody with a small appendectomy scar. But honestly, none of that matters. The only thing that matters is the manuscript I have at the end. Does it flow? Are the characters believable?  Is the plot interesting? Does the dialogue ring true?

Then it’s good.  And that’s all that matters.

Next time… okay, to be terribly honest, next time is the day before my birthday. One of those milestone, “we should make note of this” birthdays. What I’m saying is, I’m probably going to be drunk. Which means I’ll end up talking about Godzilla or something.

Until then… go write.

January 18, 2018 / 5 Comments

Down to Basics

            It’s come up once or thrice that I’m a lover of bad movies.  Partly for the laughing aspect, partly because I think you can learn as much from bad storytelling as you can from good.  Partly because I need to justify my drinking, and some of these movies make it reeeeeally easy.
            A while back I tossed out a list of really basic things a lot of these movies messed up.  Film school 101-level stuff that people were getting wrong.  Even though some of them went to film school.  And I wondered if it might be possible to do something with stories in general.
            Kristi Charish (of the fantastic Kincaid Strange series—book two coming soon) recently mentioned this idea (for a different topic) in a much better way—the invisible handshake.  It’s sort of an unofficial, unspoken contract between the author and the reader. If you’re picking up my book, there are certain automatic assumptions you’re making about what I’ll be providing you with, and I should be meeting these assumptions.  Basic things about plot and structure and character that are just… well, basic.
            At the end of last year I read a book that fumbled that handshake.   Fumbled it bad.  It was like that awkward moment with someone at the end of the night where you’re not sure how to say goodbye, so the two of you make a bunch of half-moves toward different things.  Do we hug?  Shake hands?  Peck on the cheek?  Write an awful book? 
            We’ve all been there, right?
            I ranted a bit about said book on Twitter, but even then I was thinking I should revisit a lot of those issues here.  And while said book was very rant-worthy, I’ve been .trying to keep things a bit more on the positive side here.
            So, a few general things I need to keep in mind when I’m writing.  I’ve mentioned most of them before, but I thought a general, all–at-once
            First, I need to be clear who my main character is.  If I spend the first four chapters of my book with Yakko… everyone’s going to assume Yakko’s the main character.  This book’s clearly about him, right?  So when he vanishes for the next seven chapters… well, people are going to keep wondering when we’re getting back to him.  Because he’s the main character.
            Now, a lot of books have a big cast of characters.  An ensemble, as some might say.  That’s cool.  But if my book’s going to be spending time between a bunch of characters, I need to establish that as soon as possible.  If the first three or four chapters are all the same character, it’s only natural my readers will assume that’s going to be the norm in this book.
            Secondis that I need to keep my point of view consistent.  This kinda goes with the first point—being clear who my main character is.  Even with a third person POV, we’re usually looking over a specific person’s shoulder, so to speak. Which means that character can’t walk away and leave us behind.  Likewise, we can’t start over Wakko’s shoulder and then driiiiiiiiiiiiiift over so we’re suddenly looking over Dot’s.
            Again, it’s cool to switch POV and there’s nothing wrong with it, but I need to make it clear to my readers that I’m doing it. If they start seeing things from new angles or hearing new pronouns, it’s going to knock them out of the story and break the flow.  That’s never a good thing.
            Thirdthing I need to do is be clear who my actual characters are.  Who’s part of the story and who’s just… well, window dressing.  If my two protagonists go out to dinner, there’s going to be other people in the restaurant.  But I shouldn’t describe them all. Or name them all
            Names and descriptions are how I tell my reader a character’s going to be important and worth remembering.  Three paragraphs of character details means “Pay attention to this one.”  So if I’m telling the reader to keep track of people for no reason, I’m wasting their time and my word count.

            I want to note a specific way people do this, too.  I’m calling it “describe and die” (trademark 2018).  This is when the author introduces a character, spends five or six pages describing them, their history, their goals, their loves, their life—and then kills them.  We’ve all seen this, yes?  Here’s Yakkoshiro, a twenty-nine year-old salaryman who spends all his free income on Gundam models and always wears long sleeves to the office because he won’t stop wearing his fathers watch, even though nobody wears watches anymore and looking behind the times like that could hurt his chances at a promotion so… long sleeves, never rolled up, even when the air conditioner dies (which happens a lot). And tonight he has a date with the beautiful woman from the Gundam store, who he’s exchanged nervous banter with for months now and, oh, he’s dead.  A kaiju stepped on him.  Now, back to our heroes…

            Don’t do that.
            Fourthis that I need to have an actual plot before I start focusing on subplots.  What’s the big, overall story of my book?  If it’s about Wakko trying to save the family car wash, I should probably get that out to my readers before I start the romance subplot or the backstabbing partner subplot or the Uncle Gus has cancer and wants to travel around the world before he dies subplot.  After all, they picked up my book because the back cover said it was about saving the family car wash or escaping that Egyptian tomb.  I should be working toward that first—meeting those expectations.
            If I’m spending more time on a subplot than the actual plot, maybe I need to revisit what my story’s actually about.
            Fifth, closely related to four, is that my subplots should relate to the main story somehow.  They should loop around, tie back in to the main plot, or at least have similar themes so we see the parallels.  If I can pull out a subplot out of my story and it doesn’t change the main story in the slightest… I probably need to reconsider it.
            And if it’s an unrelated subplot to an unrelated subplot… okay, seriously, I’m wasting pages at that point.  Not to mention this all starts getting, well, distracting.  I don’t want to kill whatever tension I’m building in my main plot by putting it on hold for eight or nine pages while I deal with… well, something completely unrelated.  It’s like switching channels in the middle of a television show. Nobody’s saying what’s on the other channel is bad, but it doesn’t have anything to do with the show we’re trying to watch.
            Sixth
            Okay, this is an odd one.
            Remember how much fun it is when you meet someone you’re interested in and there’s all these fascinating little mysteries about them?  We want to learn all their tics and hidden secrets.  Where are they from?  What’d they study in school?  What movies do they like?  How’d they develop a taste for that?  Why do they have that accent?  Where’d they get that scar?  Just how big is that tattoo?
            But… we don’t want to learn those secrets from a book report.  We want to hang out with these people, talk over drinks, go on road trips, maybe stay up all night on the phone or on the couch.  It’s how we get to know real people… and it’s how we want to learn about characters, too. Pages and pages of backstory often makes characters less interesting because it leaves me with nothing to reveal about them.  It kills that sense of mystery, because there’s nothing left to learn about them.
            There’s nothing wrong with me having all that backstory, but I don’t need to use it all in book.
            And I definitely don’t need to reveal it all in the first two or three chapters.
            Seventhand last is flashbacks.  Flashbacks are a fantastic narrative device, but they get used wrong a lot.  And when they’re wrong… they’re brutal. A clumsy flashback can kill a story really fast.
            A flashback needs to be advancing the plot.  Or increasing tension. Or giving my readers new information.  In a great story, it’s doing more than one of these things. Maybe even all of them.
            But a flashback that doesn’t do any of these things… that’s not a good flashback.  That’s wrong.  And it’ll bring things to a grinding halt and break the flow.
            Seven basic things to keep in mind while I’m writing my story.
            Now, as always, none of these are hard-fast, absolute rules.  If I hire a pastry chef for my bakery, there’s always a possibility this particular one doesn’t use a whisk.  There can always be an exception.  But I should be striving to be the exception, not just assuming everyone will be okay with me not following all the standards. My readers are going in with certain expectations, and I need to be doing honestly amazing things to go against them.  
            Because if that same pastry chef also doesn’t use a spatula…  Or butter… Or flour…
            Again—the invisible handshake (trademark K. Charish, 2018). 
            It’s a legally binding contract in forty-two states and four Canadian provinces.
            Next time, I’d like to tell you about something that happened off-camera on a TV show I worked on years ago.
            Until then, go write   

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