Subtlety and stringing out the reader

How long do I wait before dropping the bomb? How long does it take before I reveal that a character is secretly pregnant? Or should the readers know all along, while it's the husband who's in the dark?

Well, that's complicated.

Still, it's not good to make them wait so long that they become frustrated and their heads explode. Also, if you're giving hints, it's not good if they're too oblique to be understood.

Still, if you want to be like Timothy Pratchett and draw it out until the end of the book, you can do that. He always withholds just one crucial piece. One little thing that's so bloody important. If you're smart, you can guess it.

Still. Not all of us are Terry Pratchett (bask in his brilliance). And he keeps his stories short on purpose; too much longer and we'd be over-taxed by it. We know the end and the satisfying twist will come soon. And we know it WILL be satisfying, not a let-down. (mine are sometimes let-downs)

Well, as I struggle with this, I've learned this much; you can't drag some things out more than three chapters into the book. If you don't let on by then at least some hint of what's really going on, you're in big trouble.

Names

Rule one: if you're writing fantasy and your character is named Trrrryygo'r'dn'yynnllith, you're working it too hard start again.

Seriously.

Rule two: do look up the name of your character, and the entyomology of it; but you don't need to tell the reader, not unless it's part of your story, or part of some natural dialogue. If you say 'and this man, Stephen Michael, whose first name means crowned one and whose second name means who is like unto God, and which is the name of an archangel, he was good-looking,' if you say anything NEARLY like that, you need to seriously consider taking some classes.

Subtlety is the rule.

You tell your reader what they need to know. Imply the rest. They'll love you for it.

At least, I love authors like that.

How long can you string a reader out without giving them that crucial piece of information?

Isn't it frustrating when you're watching a TV show and you realize they're simply NEVER going to come to the point and tell you what's what? Like Lost or Alias, which strings the viewer out forever. Or even some of the shows I love. (just what WAS the preacher's mysterious background? What kind of background could Book possibly be running from--was he an assassin? A soldier?)

I once wrote a book where one of the crucial pieces of information was that the bad guy was the good guy's brother. I just never told anybody, though. Not even the reader. It was subtle. It was between the lines. It was a joy to write.

It never made sense to anybody else.

It was a work of art, all right. And a complete muddle to everybody who read it, who didn't understand what was going on, why there were all these mixed feelings, why it was so bittersweet. Why the whole thing was falling apart.

In a book that had nothing else subtle about it, this subtle stroke was much too much. Would a revelatory scene at the end fix it? I doubt it! Then you'd be left feeling as if you needed to reread it to understand it, and it was so dry and boring nobody would want that.

So I'm rewriting it with the reveal in the middle, and significant foreshadowing. That's a lot better, a lot easier to take. A lot easier to read.

How much is too much? Some more thoughts on this later.

Job woes...

Okay, which is worse for writing:

A job you hate that pays little in a field you're not entirely comfortable in.

A job you love that pays better in a field you love.

Answer: number 2.

Why? Because if you love the work, you're gonna pull OT. You're gonna pay attention at work and not think about your book. You're going to challenge yourself. Push yourself. Work yourself.

In short; I got a new job. (shhhh! Everyone will want one)

It's back to programming for me. Wading through code. Loving it. Reading it.

And it's going to kill all my free time. All my ability to do the things I love so much. All the time that I write during.

But how can I complain, getting to go back to my first love, back to programming? I am so conflicted over this! Happy and sad, gleeful and miserable. I'll be the first to admit this is what I've been trying to do since I got here. Now, I'm doing it! Yay! Only it's going to kill me.

Threequels

Do I get to do movie reviews on here? Oh, wait. It's a blog! I get to do whatever I want!

Ah, creative freedom!

So I went to see Spiderman 3 the other night. Never before have I been so solidly kicked in the face and the butt at the same time. Never before have I had such mixed feelings about a movie.

A few things of note.

First of all, visually, this was the best movie ever made. The fight sequences made the Matrix look like a couple of sissies standing around and slapping at each other. I mean, when Peter and Harry took it to the air and fought, it was so sharp, so Silver Age, I wanted to cry. (even Scott Kurtz, who hated the movie, admitted that the moment when Peter was swinging around that tower firing web balls at Harry moved him)

Secondly, visually, I never believed they could pull Venom off. A big hulking version of Spiderman with a gaping maw and pointy teeth? No way. It would look silly!

It didn't look silly.

And emo-Spidey! I was expecting them to pull it seriously, to act like he really was all that with black hair down in his eyes. To act like we were supposed to be afraid of that. Instead, they made it hilarious. I have no words for how funny that was.

And Bruce Campbell made his best cameo yet as a French waiter. I mean, French. Capital F. He stole his scene with pizaaz.

And now, the negative news.

In terms of character development this movie was bogged down and constipated. It inched. It missed its marks. It threw away some great moments and replaced them with mediocre moments. For every great shot they threw in something less convincing. (JJJ was, of course, awesome; even better than last movie, and he ROCKED last movie)

Here's the thing. Sub-par superhero movies are slow and have too little plot. S3 went the other way. It overloaded the plot. It INUNDATED you with plot. There was so much, and so little time.

BTW, I was unsure as to how the final fight would go. The trailers let us know that Spidey was going to have to team up with a villain to fight two villains. "I need your help." That was a given.

But every single villain in this movie has been played sympathetically. Everybody knows Venom hates Spidey, but doesn't really hate other people. He can be an okay guy. Everybody knows Sandman is a good guy... he's just had some bad luck. And Harry? Everybody knows Harry is Pete's friend, even if he hates him now.

You could have gone any way you liked with it.

Incidentally, speaking of awesome visual effects; let's give a shout out to the team that made Sandman, shall we? The scene where he first pulls himself together is nothing short of magical. The pests I saw the movie with, who wouldn't stop laughing and talking, even shut up for that scene. And Thomas Haden Church is such a great actor (sigh)... he pulled it off. The Sandman was terrific.

Basically; this movie needed more time. It had great ideas, great concepts, but they rushed production. They didn't give it the time and development it needed.

It's a shame.

It's still better than any other franchise. S3 blew away anything in FF (at least the first one), any X-Men movie, anything Super. It just blew it away.

Sam Raimi's low point, his bad day, is still better than anything the competition is putting out.

So I'm completely divided on this movie. I KNOW it's flawed. I KNOW they could do better. I KNOW Gwen Stacy's role was wasted (although Bryce was certainly looking good... basically, I looked at her bottled blonde hair and Kirsten Dunst's bottled red hair, and I really wished they could switch places). I KNOW Topher Grace should have said 'we' at least once.

It was a good movie, but it could have great.

Well, here's hoping FF2 blows me away as much as S3 did.

RL woes...

Checking in briefly during lunch break. I'm at an all day training today--learning stuff I already know.

Yeah, more boring than watching glue dry.

My voice

A good author has a great voice, one easy to identify and powerful. Stephen King has a voice that's unmistakable. So does CJ Cherryh. A voice isn't about having a great story to tell; when we say 'they have a great voice' we mean they have the tools, the command of the craft, necessary to tell a great story in a great way.

Do I have the tools? The literary voice? Do I? Do you?

The first measure of that is how long it takes you to write a sentence. Do you dash a sentence out and run on, never stopping to read it back and consider whether you've used enough creepy words, whether it gets the information across clearly and cogently? In short, is this a conscious process, or are you just writing down the first thing that comes to mind?

I plead guilty of the latter, all too often.

Okay, I've failed there. Next; are you writing something that would fit in a newspaper, a cold analysis of what happened that isn't using words like weapons? Your words are your weapons. Some words are cold and impersonal. "John hit the guard." That doesn't have any ring at all to it. "John smashed the guard's face." All I change is the words, and it gives you a completely different image. Not only that, it's more information. You can't tell in that first one whether John managed to do a good job of it. Maybe it was a girly punch; you can't tell. When John smashes him, you know for sure exactly what happened.

I'm getting better at a command of the words. A little bit.

Finally, and most importantly, are you showing them the stuff you talk about? Or telling them? "Mitch saw a spaceship fly by, and it was the coolest thing he'd ever seen." Wow, that's nice. You told us that Mitch was awed, and the spaceship was cool. How about a few words on what that means? "The silvery streak of the spaceship moved contrary to every law of phsyics, and Mitch's eyes popped open." I included a color, a movement (albeit a boring one) and an action on Mitch's part. I didn't call it cool, and I didn't call him awed, but you get the idea anyway.

And I'm sure you can think of a million better ways to show the readers he was awed.

If you just tell the readers how awed Mitch was, they don't feel it. They may know it, but they don't feel it. And they didn't enjoy it much. Show them, and they will love you forever.

Show; don't tell.

I know, this is hard. All we do with words is tell, right? The best authors, the ones who are remembered, are the ones who create images with those words. The ones who write vividly, so that we're sure we know what the character looked like, even though there were no pictures, no images. Just words.

I'm not sure how well I do that.

Awesome and cool means difficult and impossible

There is an correlation between how hard something is and how awesome it is. If you want to write an awesome and cool book you have to slave at it. It took me a good five years to produce a book that I didn't hate. (that's just the production of the book itself, not the failed projects that came before it)

Everybody is after the quick and easy fix. Nobody wants to hear me say 'you need to take more time on your grammar.' Or, worse, ' you need to work on your voice.'

So many aspiring authors have no idea what a literary voice is, or how to develop it. I'll give you a hint; it rhymes with WORK.

Usually it involves writing. Your voice is your style, the way you express yourself that is unique. Some twist of phrase, some way of doing things that's different. CJ Cherryh is a great example. Nobody writes quite like she does. Critics might say 'who would want to,' but the truth is that everybody wants to be like her. That is, published, known, praised. This despite the sometimes boring machinations and politics she dabbles with, the overly ambitious novels with anticlimatic endings, the trivial way she deals with most topics... (can you tell I'm a big fan? Oh, yeah, I am)

But the journey as she takes you through a story that any author could screw up is always great. If you summed up her stories, the synopsis is boring. I can't even read the summaries of her stories any more; it's just painful.

But she builds, with words, a world so real it hurts sometimes. She builds characters that speak with their own voice, and she uses her words carefully and viciously. She gets in your head, and hangs on tenaciously, using that voice, that particular way of putting things, to stay there.

That's what an author's voice should do.

More on my own voice later.

Too ambitious

The worst projects are the ambitious ones that you don't QUITE have the talent to pull off. Like a little community theater project turning into a full-blown musical when you KNOW you have a handful of good singers, a couple of fair singers, and nowhere near the amount of time to forge it into a work.

Or, worse, trying to write the script for an hour-long play in one sitting. Ambitious; but futile.

All that gets you are frustrations.

I am that ambitious man. I read a few graphic novels and went out and plotted in my mind this vicious little graphic novel with wizards and magicians and demons. It was epic, and yet intensely personal. It was about growing up, and killing one's friends. (well, that's really allegorical in nature)

I have just enough art skills to draw the sketches for the first run through the script. I can't draw nearly well enough to even put together a basic low-rent copy of this thing. I mean, I CAN'T.

But it still niggles at me, and I still work to complete the script. To pull all these complex characters together to the ending that must happen.

Ambitious? You have no idea. Overwrought and overdone? Incredibly so.

I'm like that with all of my projects. I set impossibly high goals, I kill myself trying to achieve them, and then I cry about how hard it is. I set myself against five projects at once and complain I'm spinning my wheels because no single project is getting done. It can't! It's timesharing with all the others!

Of course, this is also the way I work best. This way when I get sick of one incredibly bleak character and just can't write another word about how they plan to kill their parents I can just jump back to another story and start writing a character who might be happy right now. (probably not)

So, there are upsides and downsides.

I think that in the next few months I will focus entirely on one story. One book. One...

Just the thought makes me shiver. And how to choose? Go with the fan favorite, or the one that I think needs the most work? The one closest to done? Or the one with the most developed characters?

I need to think hard about that.

Most people focus on one project and it keeps them sane. I'll try it, but it sounds like a recipe for insanity. How can I ever let go of my other projects?

Quick post today

Just thought I'd share this.

Scam? Photoshop? Experimental aircraft? Aliens? Yeah, whatever. It's awful pretty, that's all I'm saying.

Almost enough to get me over my fear of flying.

Almost.

A real post tomorrow, hopefully.

Seat of the pants versus planning

There are two bodies of thought regarding planning your book out in a careful and precise way and plotting and outlining it.

Do. Or don't.

Pretty simple, no? :)

Put simply, most people plan their novel. They have the theme, then they add chapters. They know ahead of time that in chapter 16 the spaceship crashes. They know when Darth Vader will reveal things to Luke. They know.

Or, there's the seat of the pants people. Like me.

I usually have a vague idea when I start writing what'll happen. I know Darth is Luke's father, but I'm not sure if he'll tell him, or if the reader will know, or why anybody is hiding it. I just know that Luke hates Darth, while Darth is kind of proud of his kid for being so darned mean to him. I mean, come on, who doesn't want to see their kid blow up the Death Star, even if it's YOUR Death Star? I know Darth is conflicted. I know he's a whiny baby pretending to be a big, tough man.

What else do I know?

Well, not much, really. Let's write!

And it flows out, and when halfway through Luke actually starts to have a bright idea, instead of squishing it because he's not supposed to have it yet I let him go with it. To me, that makes sense.

I tried writing a really structured book once. I planned out every scene, how it would advance, what would happen.

It was plotted very well. By which I mean, everything happened in just the way that it needed to, and we got to the end when I had planned. In between? Sometimes I had to make my characters idiots. Sometimes they acted out of character. Because, let's face it, I never did give them any real reason to do that.

I'm done writing that way.

I'm rewriting that book now, Seat of My Pants. And I got to a crucial scene where before the male lead fell for the female lead... and he's not there. Instead, this time through, he's going to try to KILL her.

What? Well, it's where his motivations are. It's where he is at this point. It's what makes sense. Not only that, it puts some real tension between them instead of the faked up little tension I had before. It puts them at odds. It makes their later romance a little more twisted, a little harder, a little less likely. It really sets a tone for the book that's a lot darker.

How will we avoid having him kill her at this point? How will they reconcile? Darned if I know. But this also provides her with a much-needed impetus to turn on her own father, since this is his fault. This drives the whole book forward, with a much-needed burst of energy and life.

And it just makes sense.

Maybe planning and careful plotting could have solved this the first time around, but I live and love my characters too much. I drive them forward with a methodical attention to what they're doing and why, and to me that makes them so much more real.

And I know what happens in the end. I know that both characters are attracted to each other despite their initial hatred. I know that both characters have a growing respect for each other's fighting ability. I know that this will end badly, and eventually kill both of them.

I'll be darned if I can ever stop flying by the seat of my pants!

Do you plan and plot, or do you fly by the seat of your pants?

Some other dude's e-zine

I just signed up for a writing e-zine. Advanced Fiction Writing, by Randy Ingermanson. It's pretty cool. I'd link you to it and get money for it, but I'm not signed up to do that, so you can just go find him on your own and I'll get nothing. It's cool. I'm used to it. (you wouldn't have coughed up the money for the expensive one anyway, admit it!)

He's the Snowflake Method Guy.

Anyway, he has some good advice. A lot of interesting insights, time management advice, and even advice for beating writer's block. I'm a seat-of-my-pants writer, and I'm always unsatisfied with my endings. He has advice for that, too.

Check him out.

Rejection!

First things first.

http://www.ralan.com/

That is an AWESOME site. They maintain a listing of fantasy and science fiction publishers--and even some other publishers--letting you know the rates you can expect, what kind of submissions they want, and even how long it takes these folks to reply. I wish I'd checked them before; I submitted twice to Tor fantasy. They take forever to respond. This time I cherry-picked one that replies much earlier. Very nice.

Did I mention I submitted to Tor fantasy? A new novel, but again, not the novel they were looking for. (sigh)

I loved Tor Fantasy's old FAQ page. It's informative and nice, especially for noobs like me. It's gone now, unfortunately, but it included this little gem.

"How can I increase my chances of getting my book published?"
"Well, write a book we'll like. We aren't going to accept a book we don't like just because we haven't bought anything in a while, and we won't turn away a book we like because of market pressures. If you're not sure if it's perfect for us, send it in. We might like it, we might not. It's worth a try."

It was an honest attempt to let you know that it's a subjective process. The right author, the right publisher, the right time.

My time is not now.

How do you avoid the feeling that you have been slapped in the face by the meaty hand of editors everywhere when that form letter comes to let you know that you aren't good enough, that you, personally, are a failure, and a horrible person? To let you know that YOU STINK?

You can't, really. You just have to move on to another publisher, consider how well you're selling your work, and consider options. Find a smaller publisher, a larger publisher, more mainstream, less mainstream...

In my case, I'm trying a smaller, more focused publisher. Refer back to that link from before. Aio Publishing is aimed at... well, off-beat thinkers books. Books that want to think and be all literary and dramatic. "Densely written sociological speculative fiction with deeply developed characters"? I gasp and cringe in awe and hope, for this is what I want to read, what my book aspires to BE.

Now, it's not a perfect fit. They don't like murder; I want to examine the causes of violence, and so there's a lot of murder in my book. They don't want a military book. My book spends some focus on the military. They want a book with a strong literary voice. Having trained in journalism, my voice is quite literally a whisper; I prefer the more subtle voice.

Those little wrinkles aside, I think this is a much better fit than Tor. MUCH better. A little online research, and POW. I'm a lot closer to something good.

Well, I expect them to reject me as well. But now I have a plan, a list. A resource that shows me which publishers are closer to what I'm all about, what I want to be. My plans for the book.

Very nice.

The joys of finance...

Or, why I don't think I can write a novel in a month this year.

For two years I have participated in NanoWrimo. It's a great event. Write a book in a month. 50,000 words. It RAWKS. Seriously. I've gotten the words out, twice in a row. Last year I took two weeks off from work to do it. It was, bar none, one of the greatest vacations EVER. Writing and writing...

Flash forward to this year.

I want to buy a house. A house, for heaven's sake! Wow. It's the perfect location, the opportunity of a lifetime. This house is in the neighborhood I grew up in, right in the middle of a loving community that has always been great to me. I mean, this house practically has my name on it.

It's too soon. I don't make enough money. It's too big. I don't have any money.

Basically, I'm going to go for it, even knowing that it'll kill me. This means (gasp) that I have to get a second job. No evenings to get my writing done. Instead I'm going to work 16-hour days for three months to try to get ahead enough to not worry about losing the house. That's a second job that runs 3 months working 5 hours a night. It'll kill me. But it'll mean some savings in the bank, an emergency fund that should get me through the hardest part of owning a new house.

...right through Nanowrimo.

I don't mind telling you, mixed feelings are an understatement. House: good. No Nano? Bad.

Especially since for my Nanowrimo I planned to do an expansive multi-thread epic about the nature of humanity, the simmering sociopath lurking within each of us, and the nature of great leaders like Napolean and how they are doomed to self-destruction. Also, aliens, vampires, and monsters.

Yeah, it was a little over the top.

In other news; I got a rejection letter! From Tor Fantasy! Yay! (waaaah)

More on rejection later.