Writing a Novel, Part Nine: Characters, Characters, Barely Even Human

Say you have a character.  His name is Bob.  He sees the world through your eyes.  Whether he’s the main character, or the sidekick of the story, or a love interest, or an evil mastermind bent on breaking open the world’s crust with a space laser, he is fundamentally limited to the sorts of things you can imagine he will do.  If you want Bob to be sweet and sentimental in once scene and a rude piece of crap in the next, he’s not going to protest about his motivations not making sense, because his actions are dictated by you.  You are his creator.

When writing characters that are going to get more than one line, keeping them consistent is important.  A Bob who alternates between giving flowers to orphans and recoiling at the sight of children is probably going to contribute towards making your story seem a little less real.  Try to get a sense of your character’s personalities before you force them into dialogues and actions.  If a certain something has to happen to advance the plot, try to think about which character most fits the activity.

Next week, we’re going on hiatus.

Writing a Novel, Part Eight: Setting

Honestly, setting has always troubled me.  Way back in the day, I read some writer’s lament about an old manuscript of theirs that tried to tell sweeping war epic but failed to be anything other than silly.  The point was about ‘writing what you know,’  one of the more important clichés.  When an author starts typing away about something outside the realm of personal experience, factual mistakes are guaranteed, and the only question is how many there will be.

I took this law of writing to imply that the safest settings were alternate worlds, born entirely out of one’s mind and thus safe from criticism about things like actual driving distances or US court procedure.  My first two books were set on the continent of Shivell, and my third was set in an expansive and equally imaginary empire.  Because of their locales, those books qualified as epic or heroic fantasy.  Urban fantasy, meanwhile, is the moniker for magical books set in the real world, or something quite close.  In my new genre, I have to write about cars and planes and all sorts of things that can actually be checked.  But real-world settings, as complicated as they are, can be opportunities to teach something, excuses to do research, and thematic hooks.

Specific settings are excellent at conveying tone, metaphor, and plot.  What’s more interesting than two people talking?  Two people shouting across an empty road.  Think about the lightsaber battle between Obi-Wan and Anakin at the end of Star Wars: Episode III.  The lava made the scene.

Anyhoo, next week we’ll cover characterization.

Writing a Novel, Part Seven: The Zone of the Tone

Tone, more popularly known as style, is one of the harder things to teach, according to conventional wisdom.  It’s one thing to tell students to have plots with a beginnings, middles, and ends, to have snappy dialogue with clear attribution, to have a core idea for a story, but an author can have all three checkmarks without really being interesting.  What’s the deal?

A middle school teacher of mine put the dynamic quite well.  In books, the tired old metaphor is true—it’s the journey, not the destination.  But don’t mistake good style with flowing literary writing.  Flowing literary is only one kind of tone, and not all flowing literary is good.  A rule of thumb is this:

Be interesting.  Be always interesting, every sentence, every word, every scene.

Some people think that the key to novel writing is length.  While verbosity might intimidate some people (there’s a whole literature on the fine art of using big words to bluff knowledgeability in scholarly writing [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sokal_affair]) it’s the wrong way to go if you want to be a good novelist.  Why?  Consider the following:

George dismounted from his simpering, whinnying equestrian animal and took careful padded steps towards the great beast, a fine example of the genus Draco, speaking in a nuanced cant as he sauntered ever closer: “You must not, I say, bother this fine village again, because if you do, my dear creature, you will find that the pointy end of my spear will pierce your left dragon eye, cutting off your depth perception and rendering you unable to hunt even the smallest, most youngling waterfowl in all of the Five Duchies.”

Or,

George dismounted towards the dragon, speaking in a cant: “You must not bother this fine village again, because if you do, my spear will pierce your left eye, cutting your depth perception and rendering you unable to hunt even the smallest waterfowl in all the Five Duchies.”

To step into the dangerous world of assessing one’s own writing, the problem with the first sentence is not in the individual phrases (even ‘equestrian animal’ could have uses towards comedy or characterization) but rather in all the redundancy.

Don’t be redundant.  If you have a good turn of phrase, use it to advance plot, setting, or characterization.  Otherwise it’s just getting in the way.

Next time—Setting the table, kingdom, empire, or whatever the place may be.

Writing a Novel, Part Six: Plotting, Overplotting, and Laughing at James Bond Right Before the Laser Slices Him in Half

Plot, so goes the joke, is the difference between literary and genre fiction.  The condensation goes both ways—literary writers with poetic language but less-than-logical narratives can say that commercial writers don’t choose individual words with as much care, and so don’t produce work of lasting value.  Sometimes the argument surfaces that all old fiction read today is literary.  While both sides of the genre argument have interesting points, the more specific notion that only ‘literary’ works stand the test of time is bunk.  Shakespeare and Mark Twain, among others, most assuredly wrote for the popular audiences of their day, and their works most assuredly contained plot.

To imagine plot, imagine a flowchart of the events that happen in a novel.  With Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, an abridged version would be something like:

Harry is invited to Hogwarts -> Harry goes to Hogwarts, meets friends and teachers -> Harry discovers a conspiracy -> Harry and his friends solve some puzzles, and save the day

This sort of thing can be much more or even much less detailed, but the point is that pure plot is essentially the description of a path.  Rowling's writing style—her tone, characterization, humor, wit—these are all different things entirely.  Plot is a blueprint for fiction, just as dialogue is a key tool.

What might your plot be?  Genre fiction, at least, has a sort of standard narrative (in common with many movies) that is very hard to break away from.  Step One: Hero(ine) leads boring, or at least repetitive life.  Step Two: Heroine experiences some irresistible call to adventure.  Step Three: Heroine vanquishes physical evil, metaphorical evil, or both.  Step Four: Heroine returns to a level of normalcy.

In series, sometimes this process is dragged out over many books.  Sometimes there are twists—the heroine’s retirement is death, the bad guy or true love is someone other than expected, etc…  But this narrative arc, explained in great detail in Joseph Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces, is startlingly consistent across a wide variety of stories.  Indeed, tales that don’t have clear endings are sometimes accused of being done ‘wrong.’

If you want to write gene fiction, like urban fantasy, it is probably better to ponder how your first novel will explore the four stages I outline above, rather than how it can break away from the constraints.  Don’t fret too much.  Understanding the paradigm probably the first step towards figuring out how to rearrange it.

Next week—Tone, so fickle.

Writing a Novel, Part Five: Beginnings, Plural

From a certain perspective, starting a new novel a new novel is nothing special.  After all, you’re going to be staring down a blank page many more times in the future.  Each new chapter, scene, and paragraph is the start of a sort of story.  Moreover, since we never know where a reader might skim, any given sentence might serve as reintroduction to the flow of text.  Your Real First Sentence, the one that goes at the tippity top of the word document, isn’t sui generis, but rather similar to the sort of work you’re supposed to be displaying all across your novel.  Its uniqueness is much more psychological than mechanical.  But that said, first sentences do have a hallowed place in writer culture.  So let’s take a look at some famous examples:

“Mr. and Mrs. Dursley, of number four, Privet Drive, were proud to say that they were perfectly normal, thank you very much.” –Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, by J. K. Rowling

That’s the opening line to a billion-dollar franchise of novels.  And it’s good.  But what’s striking is that the reasons why it’s good aren’t things that we aspiring authors should think are confined to mysterious and holy Real First Sentences.  Rowling rolls out setting (an ordinary home), characters (a married couple), tone (the Dursleys are snooty, defensive), and foreshadowing (why do the Dursleys feel a need to point out their normality?) in only a line and a half.

True, introductions of setting and characters tend to show up at the start of scenes, but if Rowling had focused only on those two elements, and written a line like “Mr. and Mrs. Dursley lived at number four, Privet Drive,”  she would have been omitting the very parts of the sentence that made it most special.  Rowling’s use of ‘proud,’ ‘perfectly normal,’ and ‘thank you very much’ are the elements that unfurl the Dursleys’ tensions—and tension is the sort of thing that should be maintained across the scope of a good novel.

“I’d never given much thought to how I would die –though I’d had reason enough in the last few months – but even if I had, I would not have imagined it like this.” –Twilight by Stephanie Meyer

Meyer’s famous series is not often favorably compared to Harry Potter—read the last sentence of the third paragraph in this link for a fairly typical zeitgeist--and looking at Meyer’s opening line, it’s easy to see why someone predisposed to dislike her work would argue that she and Rowling are not in the same creative league.  Meyer uses an em dash construction, misses a contraction, manages to say ‘I’ five times, and is vague.

But consider her objective.

Bella, the narrator, is a great big bottle of angst, and if one takes the leap and identifies with her, those five ‘I’s become personal.  Meyer’s words are trailing and confused, but so is the viewpoint character.  Further, her last ambiguity, ‘I would not have imagined it like this,’ serves the same foreshadowing purpose as the final clause in Rowling’s sentence.

Both Rowling and Meyer’s starter lines build story.  Just like any other good pieces of novel writing.

Next time—What’s a plot, anyway?

Writing a Novel, Part Four: Chirping

Today, I’ll be writing some dialogue for y’all, but I’m going to start by opening a random book on my shelf…

Okay, I’m back.  Twenty-two of the thirty-two lines on page 164 of Hero’s Trial by James Luceno are COMPLETELY dialogue.  That’s 69% of the page.  My experiment won’t work so well all the time—go on, test it till it fails—but you get the point.  Dialogue is a major element in novels that deserves special consideration.

 In fact, stories can have segments of uninterrupted dialogue.  Here we go:

“Reeve just fell, man!”

“He moves.”

“He fell thirty feet!”

“Only to stretch His joints.”

“HELP!”

“Do not listen.  This is a lesson, not a tragedy.”

“Is that a giant spider?”

“Watch Smerdis’ blessed mandibles.”

There are no tags (he said, she said, she asked…) anywhere in the above eight lines.  And yet I’m guessing you got the gist.  I’ll finish up the post with a line by line breakdown of my short piece of flash fiction, so you can decide for yourself how effective I was.

“Reeve just fell, man!”

Character #1 is surprised.  Colloquial. Talking to a second person about a third, Reeve.

“He moves.”

Character #2 seems to reference  Reeve.  Is disdainful of Character #1’s panic.

“He fell thirty feet.”

Character #1 repeats the word ‘fell’ for emphasis.  Reveals part of the setting.  A cliff?

“Only to stretch His joints.”

Dark humor.  Character #2 seems to understate Reeve’s condition.  The capital ‘H’ adds suspense.

“HELP!”

Interjection.  Reeve speaks.  (Anything more complicated would probably require dialogue tags.)

“Do not listen.  This is a lesson, not a tragedy.”

Character #2 is overly calm.  Moralizes to Character #1.  Has an agenda.

“Is that a giant spider?”

Humor.  Unexpected.  Character #1 sees something in the distance.  Probably near Reeve.

“Watch Smerdis’ blessed mandibles.”

Smerdis eats Reeve.  Character #2, strangely religious, has no qualms.

The weakest parts of this dialogue are probably Reeve’s dialogue (unclear speaker) and the spider revelation (unclear location).  If this segment entered a book, I would consider adding dialogue tags to the fourth, third, and second to last lines.  What do you think?

Next time—Starting the First Bit.

Writing a Novel, Part Three: Point of View Madness

Welcome back to my ongoing series on how to write a novel.  Part One covered average novel lengths and how not to get overwhelmed by them, while Part Two discussed strategies to come up with a great story idea.  Part Three is all about a key stylistic element in your novel—Point of View, or POV.

Let’s do some quick definitions:

First Person POV:  Text where the narrator (the writer or whoever the writer is pretending to be) uses words like ‘I’ and ‘me.’

Example – I will burn the Stone of Treva until its black grains scream to the gods a penance for being made.

Second Person POV: Text where the narrator uses words like ‘you.’

Example – You will burn the Stone of Treva until its black grains scream to the gods a penance for being made.

Third Person POV: Text where the narrator uses words like ‘he,’ ‘she,’ or ‘it.’

Example – She will burn the Stone of Treva until its black grains scream to the gods a penance for being made.

Here’s the complication—each of the example sentences included a third person element.  The Stone is an ‘it’ all the way through.  This isn’t a jokey sort of nuance.  Most books aren’t any one of the three POV types, but rather a combination.  Urban fantasy books show up these days primarily in First Person, but one common device in such works is to have the viewpoint character watch another group of people interact.  Such segments are effectively in Third Person, with some important Second Person elements.

Second Person has a reputation for not getting a lot of use in novels (Charles Benoit wrote a novel named You in order to better emphasize its special primary POV), but Second Person is a tool that has to be managed by just about every author who cares about dialogue.  If I’m writing a story where Sir Stalwart berates a lizard for jumping into a cup, the Stalwart is going to be talking at someone.  Long dialogue is rather like a miniature story in Second Person.

 To be fair, choosing whether to write from inside the head of your hero or from a remove is probably the most preliminary choice you as a writer has to make—“I rammed my axe at the dragon’s forehead” cannot be confused with “Henerik the Fire Eater rammed his axe at the dragon’s forehead.”—but it is crucial to be aware of role dialogue plays in fiction.  Writers can lose readers by not including enough of a First or Third Person frame around their characters’ conversations.

Next time—Making characters talk to each other.

Writing a Novel, Part Two: A Nugget

Last post, we pointed out that writing a novel-length work is the same thing as writing a page a day for most of a year, NOT BEING AFRAID TO PUMP OUT THE WORDS.   Bestselling author Jim Butcher would call such work Butt in the Chair time (Footnote 1).

Today I’m going to discuss the second step towards writing a novel.  Finding a story idea.

The core of your story, arguably the most important part, should be clear before you type the first word.  But having this sort of idea is not the same thing as coming up with a thirty page dossier of every twist and turn—that kind of thing is unnecessary.

It might be easier to think of a story idea as the answers to two interrelated questions:

1) Who are your central characters?

2) What is going to happen to them?

When I started writing 3 Days of Demons, I wanted my main character to start off working for some bad guys, get unceremoniously discarded, and turn against them to save his own skin.  My Who became a young demon-hunting executive named Joseph Harper and the group he coerced into helping clear his name.  My What was a straightforward extension.  Joseph and his coterie were going to tear down his old company or die trying.

What sort of story idea do you have?  Don’t worry if being put on the spot isn’t very helpful.  I can actually go a little bit further to suggest how people come up with ideas that speak to them.  One of the obvious-when-you-think-about-it secrets of fiction is that writers identify with their viewpoint characters.  Even when he’s writing as himself, Jim Butcher sounds rather like Harry Dresden from the Dresden Files. Christopher Paolini, author of the bestselling Inheritance Cycle, admits that his hero Eragon “began as me.”

If you feel inclined to rage against over-successful hacks, don’t bother.  When you can’t connect to your main characters well enough to make them come to life, you’re one step closer to writing a bad book.  I can’t speak for the entire writing community, but I believe that the best way to come up with a great story idea is to think back to some memory that really nags at you, in every sense of the word, pick a side, and embellish the drama.

Maybe that time you really didn’t want to ask for directions could turn into a story idea where your viewpoint character is trapped in a mysterious dimension and, accidentally insults the empress, and has to do penance.  Maybe that time you had a total miscommunication with your significant other could turn into the nugget of a paranormal romance where the heroine and the hero start off together, break up, and try to figure out if they really were made for each other (all while fending off possessed werewolves, of course).

The trick is to avoid becoming so invested in your plot that you accidentally write a polemic.  But as long as you make sure to let your main characters make mistakes, you probably have enough distance.

Next time: Point of View Madness!

Footnote 1: Jim Butcher’s livejournal hasn’t been updated all that much, it’s all good stuff about craft and work ethic.  Particularly notable is a post from 2006 that quotes a whole bunch of scathing reviews, which implicitly points out that even #1 New York Times bestselling authors have their own bête noirs.

Writing a Novel, Part One: The Nature of the Beast

I’ll be upfront: the impetus for this blog was the idea I could convince you guys to buy my ebooks (3 Days of Demons and Hero, Prepackaged, available at Smashwords.com, Amazon, and BN.com).  But I know that expecting sales as some sort of birthright is silly.  So here’s the deal.  I’ll do my best to provide weekly informative and entertaining blog posts on topics related to novel writing and urban fantasy.

Today, we’re going to start a series on how you write a novel.

Let’s get one thing out of the way first—pacing, plot, and style are all crucial, but the first step is to NOT BE AFRAID TO PUMP OUT THE WORDS.  There’s a reason I wrote that in all caps.  Creating relatively long blocks of text is a skill in just about everybody’s toolkit—I remember 1,000 words essays from high school, 3,000 word essays from college, etc.  Even for those of you who never did any of that, or thought what you produced was crap, I’m guessing you speak.  The average rate of English speech is 150 words a minute (http://www.ncvs.org/ncvs/tutorials/voiceprod/tutorial/quality.html). But even though people can put lots of words together, there’s a sort of mystique surrounding novels, because putting a lot of words together over and over again gets a little intimidating.

But it’s possible.  Lots of people do it.  It’s amazing to see how frequently authors upload books.  3 Days of Demons managed to stay on the home page of Smashwords.com for less than a day before being pushed down to make room for new releases.

So maybe you can write a novel.  But how long is this creature we’re talking about?

According to a well trafficked post of Colleen Lindsay over at The Swivet, a publishable adult novel by a first-time author is traditionally between 80,000 and 120,000 words (http://theswivet.blogspot.com/2008/03/on-word-counts-and-novel-length.html).  Since I’m indie, you might be wondering why I think traditional counts matters.  The answer: those counts are what readers expect.  I’m looking at a bookshelf right now, and just about everything that sits there is about the same thickness—not hugely far away from 400 pages in one direction or another.  Now, even on my shelf, there are exceptions—Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 is well on the low side, and Robert Jordan’s The Great Hunt is fairly gargantuan—but an average is still an average even with outliers.

Let’s go over some equivalencies.  That 80,000 to 120,000 word novel with its roughly 400 typeset pages translates into approximately 170 pages of single-spaced Times New Roman 12 pt font.  That’s the target.  There’s a saying in the novel-writing biz that if you can write a page a day for a year, you have book, but in point of fact, the epigram overstates it a bit.  If you write in single-space, like I do, you can produce at that speed while taking off two seasons.  Even if double-spaced type is more your fancy, you still can slack for about a month.

Let’s talk about what it means to write one single-spaced page a day.  Conveniently enough, my blog post up to this point is about the equivalent of a single-spaced page, and I’ve been writing for maybe an hour, including research, planning, and some insta-editing.  An hour is a television program.  Two lunch breaks.  Both sides of a reasonable-length commute.  If you decide to write on the bus, or to skip Late Night, or to take a break from just some of your daily wanderings around the internet, you can find that hour.

If, on some primal level, you view writing a novel as work, I can’t help.  For you, there really are better things to do with your hour.  But if you think writing a book might be something you want to do, just remember that you can stride at a quite reasonable daily pace by skipping one episode of Firefly or Jay Leno.  And writing one book a year puts you in the same league as the big boys (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/3649184/A-novel-in-a-year.html).  Jokes about George R. R. Martin aside.