Elements Critique

Posted on April 21, 2010 by Victoria Janssen

A writer friend once commented that sometimes she needed a critique on plot and sometimes she needed a critique on character. And I think she was absolutely right.

Characters make plot, of course. And plot affects character, giving them things to do and things to which they must react. Plot and character have synergy. Sometimes, though, one of them is working better than the other.

A physical example of what I mean: you’re lifting weights using a resistance machine. The weight for your left arm and the weight for your right arm move independently of each other. One of your arms is generally weaker than the other, so it takes concentration and skill to lift and lower both weights at the same speed.

If your plot is stronger, or your characters are stronger, the story can be out of balance or synch. An outside reader might be able to identify the problem for you: “The attacking herd of hippos is really awesome, but Ermengard never would have stood in front of Yvette; she’s terrified of any animal larger than a cat. She would run instead, wouldn’t she? Which means Yvette is the one who’d be more likely to take action.” Or, “I love that The Great Og has to make a difficult decision here, but ‘pea soup or lentil soup?’ isn’t as intense a choice as it could be.”

Identifying the root of the problem can make it a lot easier to solve. Sometimes it’s all in the angle you’re using to look.

Related Post:
Backwards Outlining.

Posted in writing craft | 3 Comments

Writing Emotion

Posted on April 20, 2010 by Victoria Janssen

This post is more questions than answers.

I’ve been thinking about what makes some fiction so much more satisfying to read than other fiction, aside from factors such as story elements one loves, a well-constructed plot, and elegant prose style.

At bottom, I think emotional resonance is the most important element. Some characters, some stories, reach deeper inside me as a reader than others, and it isn’t always the ones that are most original or best-written.

For me, characterization is probably the most important element in “feeling” a story. The elements of characterization to which I react, however, can be unpredictable. Something that works for me in one book might leave me cold in another. I hesitate to quantify what it is that hits me on an emotional level. If I identify those factors, will I be unable to enjoy them?

But I also need to understand how a writer might produce such effects on her readers.

Can an emotional effect be created technically? Is some emotional investment on the writer’s part required, or even valuable, in accomplishing it? What causes the writer to become invested in a character? What causes the reader to become invested? Where does it happen? On the page, in the reader’s mind, or some combination? Or does it happen in some liminal, subconscious way?

Can a writer who feels a deep emotional connection with her character transfer any of that attachment onto the page? Is a certain level of technical skill necessary to make the writer’s feeling evident to the reader? Can a certain level of technical skill surmount lack of feeling on the writer’s part? Can a writer who deliberately keeps his or her distance from the characters make them seem alive?

Can these questions even be answered? Is a moose going to run over my head?

Related Posts:
Learning Who Your Characters Are.
Caring About Your Characters – Or Not.
Kinesics in Fiction.

Posted in reading, writing craft | 11 Comments

Unrealistic Dialogue

Posted on April 19, 2010 by Victoria Janssen

It’s a pretty common observation that dialogue in a story is unrealistic.

There are all sorts of linguistic studies that relate to “real life” dialogue. Here’s a pretty good introduction to sociolonguistics, for example. One of the things I learned from taking a linguistics seminar, many years ago, was how different speech is different from written communication, including letter-writing and even emails.

When we’re writing, we can see what we’ve done. We are much less likely to include speech disfluencies (fillers) such as “you know,” and “ummm,” stuttering, broken sentences, incomplete sentences, and the like. Written, those things look like clutter. Spoken, however, they do serve several purposes.

The speaker might say “umm” because she’s thinking of her next words, but doesn’t want the person to whom she’s speaking to interrupt. The “umm” might be a signal that the speaker still holds/wants to hold control of the conversation. Other fillers spoken by the listener, such as “mmm hmm,” and similar, can serve the function of affirming to the speaker that the listener is actually listening, and following, or sympathizing/emphathizing. Stutters might indicate emotional intensity, whether the person stutters normally or not. Brief overview of speech disfluencies.

In relation to writing fiction, I think speech disfluencies can also serve various purposes. They can be used for characterization. The small interruptions can be used for rhythm’s sake: to make a sentence flow in a different way (water over rocks instead of smooth flow); to break up long speeches so the reader doesn’t get bored, and/or for a more naturalistic effect; to emphasize something. So long as these tricks aren’t used as often as in actual speech, I think they can be very useful.

Posted in writing craft | 2 Comments

Geoffrey Faber, "Home Service"

Posted on April 18, 2010 by Victoria Janssen

Home Service

“At least it wasn’t your fault” I hear them console
When they come back, the few that will come back.
I feel those handshakes now. “Well, on the whole
You didn’t miss much. I wish I had your knack
Of stopping out. You still can call your soul
Your own, at any rate. What a priceless slack
You’ve had, old chap. It must have been top-hole.
How’s poetry? I bet you’ve written a stack.”

What shall I say? That it’s been damnable?
That all the time my soul was never my own?
That we’ve slaved hard at endless make-believe?
It isn’t only actual war that’s hell,
I’ll say. It’s spending youth and hope alone
Among pretences that have ceased to deceive.

–Geoffrey Faber (1889-1961)

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Wilfred Wilson Gibson, "Back"

Posted on April 17, 2010 by Victoria Janssen


Back

They ask me where I’ve been,
And what I’ve done and seen.
But what can I reply
Who know it wasn’t I,
But someone just like me,
Who went across the sea
And with my head and hands
Killed men in foreign lands…
Though I must bear the blame,
Because he bore my name.

–Wilfred Wilson Gibson (1878-1962)

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Slow Writers Anonymous

Posted on April 16, 2010 by Victoria Janssen

At the 2003 WisCon, there was a panel about “Slow Writers.” I’ve been thinking about it again, and thought it would be a good thing to post in my blog.

This post is comprised of my distilled memories of the panel.

Everybody works differently, and everybody is right.

There are at least two kinds of slow writers: those who write a tiny bit consistently, and those who just don’t write very often. Combinations of the two are also common.

Most writers want to increase their productivity.

There’s a difference between writing and typing that can affect our perceptions of how fast we write. For example, some people plot out an entire story in their heads, spending many months reworking it, and then type the whole thing in a day. Some people count the thinking period as writing time, some do not. Some think on paper or computer screen, some don’t.

A lot of the pressure to be a faster writer comes from having to market your work. Karen Fowler said (I paraphrase), “You have to finish your book before all the booksellers who’ve heard of you are dead.”

Methods used by panelists and audience to try and speed their writing, some of which were used to make themselves write anything at all, were varied.

Some of what follows came from the Slow Writers panel, some from comments at the Living Room event I attended with Ellen Kushner and Delia Sherman.

One writer found the pressure of having a contract for her novel helped her to finish it; being accountable to someone else for pages produced helped many people, but not all. Others said finishing a book for which they already held a contract was more difficult, because they felt they were forcing themselves to go faster than normal.

Keeping a journal was mentioned by more than one person (for example, Peg Kerr) as a way to keep track not only of daily word count but of daily thoughts and feelings about the work; one can go back and see that one always gets depressed around page 200 of a manuscript.

Candas Dorsey said that she has often used old reviews or commentary on her work to give herself a boost when she felt discouraged about her progress.

Some can only write a story in chronological sequence, so when they are stuck, they must often retreat before they can go on. Others wrote various scenes and then connected them later, so if they got stuck, they could just move on to another scene.

A related strategy I myself have used, and that was described in the panel, is to always have more than one project going. If one project needs more thought, then move on to a second one, or a third.

A method to encourage productivity is setting a writing date with a friend, who may or may not also be writing. For that hour or however long, you must write, or at least stare at a page. Being responsible to another person for showing up is a good motivation; that method has worked for me. A variation used by Delia Sherman involves sending a certain number of pages to a friend on a regular basis (I think my variation on this is posting draft sections in my journal).

Some found deadlines from their critique group were helpful.

All of this was very useful, but the best thing about that panel was, I think, the validation!

Posted in conferences, writing, writing process | 15 Comments

The Long and the Short of It

Posted on April 15, 2010 by Victoria Janssen

How do we decide a length for our stories?

I think a lot of it has to do with the stories themselves.

A friend of mine used to say that novels didn’t adapt as well into feature films as short stories did, because a feature film was essentially a short story, about the Most Important Event in a person’s life. If you adapt a whole novel into a feature film, you must perforce skip a lot, because novels are, in general, about the Most Important Time in a person’s life. (Yes, those statements are full of generalizations, but they’re still useful, I think.)

I brought up the feature film issue because to me, that explanation also tells us something about the sorts of stories that work better as shorts and those that work better as longs. Sure, some novels focus on one event, and some novels take place in very compressed time frames, but most of them follow the characters for a little while. I sometimes envision it this way: the novel as a piece of string and the short story as a little round thing in the palm of your hand. (I never said I envisioned it in a clever way….)

So I think it’s important to know what your story is before you decide its length. Sometimes, one finds out what sort of story it is while writing it, and wastes a lot of time either trying to turn a short story idea into a novel, or to cram a novel idea into a short story.

Related Post:

Romance in Short.

Posted in short fiction, writing, writing craft | 5 Comments

Turn Your Writing Topsy-Turvy

Posted on April 14, 2010 by Victoria Janssen

In Jane Yolen’s Take Joy: A Writer’s Guide to Loving the Craft, she writes, “When we force ourselves to go topsy-turvy, we can see anew what is on the page,” (p. 49).

She suggests taking a single chapter and re-reading the whole thing while changing the gender of the characters, or the point of view, or leaving out all the modifiers, or counting how many times you’ve used each sense for events you’ve related. All this is to help you see where you’ve repeated yourself, among other things.

This path had no colored lanterns, and the pristine white gravel gave way to hard-packed earth. Abruptly, their steps were silenced, and the evergreen hedges seemed to lean in on them, concealing them from view and softening the sounds of distant voices. (c. Victoria Janssen 2010): sight – 4; touch – 1; hearing – 2. Of course, I chose that selection because it had a lot of sense impressions. Hmmm.

Checking a few other places in my current manuscript, in a very unscientific way, my pattern continues of sight being the sense I refer to most often, followed by hearing, followed by smell or touch, so perhaps sampling is just as effective a way to do the exercise. I seem to use scent a lot when I need a quick, vivid impression, which makes sense to me, as I find some smells very evocative. Some examples: “opulent smell of roasting beans and honeyed pastries” versus the later “bread fried in lard and sour wine,” along with a number of instances of distinctive scents associated with a particular character, either physical things (something they’d eaten or drunk) or associational (the person has a familiar personal scent which the pov character finds delicious).

I tried the gender switch exercise, and…in my writing, there’s not much difference between how males and females speak and behave (aside from physical differences). Which doesn’t surprise me much.

Yolen notes also that turning a prose paragraph into lines of poetry (just breaking the lines, not rhyming or anything) can help you identify where you’ve overwritten. Turning poetry into prose can help you see if you’ve been too cryptic.

Gulls swooped and
dove and
screamed.
Wading birds scampered
along the tide line,
stopping only to
stab their long beaks
into the wet sand
in search of food.
Behind the blindingly bright sand,
tall grasses waved
in the breeze, gradually merging into
low, darker green scrub and finally into
towering, densely leaved trees.
As she watched, a scarlet bird winged
from the trees to a rocky outcropping
that was white with guano.
(c. Victoria Janssen 2010)

(It’s harder than it looks! I think this is a little flowery, but it’s only one paragraph; I think it’s okay to leave alone.)

I read Take Joy shortly after it came out, and had forgotten these very useful pieces of advice until I was browsing through my notes.

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For Love or Money?

Posted on April 13, 2010 by Victoria Janssen

This post grew out of a discussion at one of my favorite blogs, Read React Review, specifically this post, “At What Point in the Writing Process Do Writers Think About What Will Sell?” Comments in italics are from Jessica, who wrote the original post. My comment was lengthy, and I’ve continued to think about the issues she raised.

I wonder where in the writing process writers think about this.

As you surmised, this is a difficult question. If you’re a writer who reads in your genre (and most are, that’s how they learn their genre), then you’re steeped in it, and to some extent genre equals what sells to readers of that genre and vice-versa. And round and round and round she goes…. Plus, if you read in that genre, likely you’re attracted to it anyway, on some deep level.

There is sometimes input from agent/editor/crit partners to try one thing or another. I haven’t really had that yet, but it’s common, and if I got such a suggestion, I would consider it seriously, to see if I could make that idea my own. I think it never hurts to consider outside advice, whether I take the advice or not. Sometimes others can see my writing more clearly than I can. I might be especially good at a particular type of story and have no idea that those stories are any better than anything else I’ve written. I might be good at something that’s more salable than what I’m currently writing. Again, it’s a tangled process of decision-making.

Here’s an example of how I think this process works for me. I’d like to do a Victorian historical romance one day, and one reason is because mass market historical romance sells more than erotica and I’d like to make more money for a book. Market-wise, there seem to be a few more Victorian-set romances at the moment, so presumably they’re selling.

My other reasons for that goal, though, are myriad: I love historical romance – it’s the sub-genre I read most of these days – and I am always wishing for more Victorian-set books, and I love research. The Victorian period is a nice segue backwards from the Edwardian/WWI I’ve already used, so I’d be following my own interests. I already have some books, which I’ve been sporadically reading.

The thing is, if I wasn’t intellectually and emotionally interested already, I don’t think it would have occurred to me to try and write a Victorian historical romance in order to make more money. You’re not guaranteed a sale, especially in a genre in which you’ve not previously sold. It’s not worth it (to me) to put all that time and mental effort into a project unless I’m going to enjoy the heck out of it. For most novels, your hourly rate (counting writing, thinking, researching, editing, revising, proofing, marketing) is…minimal.

So far, this project consists of a few notes on hero and heroine, a few research books I’ve purchased but not yet read, and a substantial research wishlist (ahem, yes, I know my weaknesses!). The project is a carrot to me, a prize for when I’ve done the work for which I’m already contracted. That looms larger for me than any monetary motivation.

Does saleability function like a limiting set of pre-writing conditions, which, once determined, leave the writer free to forget about them, as long as she stays within their boundaries? Or is sales always one of the voices in a writer’s head as she types away?

Since I’m under contract right now, I tend to think more of my editor’s opinions and the constraints of the line for which I write. Luckily for me, the Spice line does not seem to have many constraints. If I’m in doubt about something (real example: the male/male scenes in The Moonlight Mistress), I write what I want and let the editor decide. So far, both of my editors have been okay with my decisions. If the editor requested a change, I would probably make it, because after all, they’re paying me for the book and they have more experience at what will sell. I do want people to buy my books and read them. If I felt strongly about, say, cutting a scene, I would bring it up with my editor and give her my opinion. But I suspect in most cases I would end up giving in, or at least compromising. Knowing myself, the editor likely sees the whole picture of the novel more clearly than I do.

I wonder if a never-published or early career writer has to pay more attention to what sells?

Since I support myself with an office job, this is less of a concern for me. I write for my own purposes first, money second. The money is icing, for me, lovely but not necessary every day. I know this about myself: I would write even if I wasn’t being paid. I did it for years.

I know a number of people who support themselves through writing. It’s difficult, and can be very unreliable as you wait to be paid, especially if you don’t have a large output and are dependent on a limited number of contracts. I do not want to attempt that at my present level. I am more comfortable receiving a regular paycheck. Worrying about money is stressful and makes me less interested in writing. If I was selling amazing amounts of money with every book, that would be different, but I don’t think that’s likely to happen!

I’d love to hear opinions on this post.

Posted in business of writing, writing process | 12 Comments

History as Fantasy

Posted on April 12, 2010 by Victoria Janssen

In many ways, writing historical fiction is like writing fantasy. And reading historical fiction is like reading fantasy.

In one genre, you have to look up a lot of tiny details to make the reader accept that the world they’re reading about is real/true. In the other genre, you have to make up a lot of details to make the reader accept that the world they’re reading about is real/true. In both cases, those details have to be sprinkled into the text in ways that make sense for the story and don’t distract the reader from the story, either. In both cases, the details have to hang together.

Both genres have similar reading protocols, as well. Fantasy readers can lose their suspension of disbelief if some part of the fantasy world doesn’t make sense to them. This will vary according to how critically the reader reads, or what story elements are more or less important for them.

Historical readers can lose their suspension of disbelief when a historical detail in the story is inaccurate. This varies according to the reader’s historical knowledge; for instance, if you know a period very well, you might catch slips that a less-informed reader might miss. And some readers can accept slips, because historical details or period-appropriate diction are less important to them than the story as a whole. Occasionally, the reader might lose their suspension of disbelief because, even though the historical details are accurate, they do not believe in its accuracy because they believe it contradicts something else they know – and that, too, can be a problem of how details are used and presented, part of creating believable architecture for an imaginary world.

Worldbuilding techniques cross-pollinate.

Related post:
Historical Detail in Fiction.

Posted in genre, historical fiction, reading, sf/f | 4 Comments