How Recent is YOUR Latest Backup?

Agent Rachelle Gardner has recently blogged about a writer of hers who almost lost a novel due to a hard drive crash. And what every writer should do to avoid that.

Myself, I have just spent a dozen hours collecting up twenty years of writing from various backups and getting it all (or most of it) copied onto a single writing machine. Over the summer, I expect to winnow it down to a single set of organized backups, where everything is actually organized in some semblance of logical order.

The important parts can probably all fit on a single flash drive, big as those are nowadays. That being done, I expect to start moving forward again presently.

Wish me luck.

World Building Notes by Hope Collier and others

There's an interesting article by YA author Hope Collier on her blog A Lilliputian's Journey to Publication.

Also worth looking at is J.M. Staff's reply.

I was going to give you a link to Holly Lisle's site as well, which has massive amounts of good stuff on it, but the minute I tried to open a tab onto it, IE started freezing up on me. Don't know what that's about. Here's one about Worldbuilding for Magic Systems. check the list to the right of that page to see other articles on world building.

And, if you want the granddaddy of all hypertext worldbuilding links, go over to Patricia Wrede's list of worldbuilding questions on SFWA.

And then, just for fun, over on io9 there's a list of sci-fi authors' favorite bits of worldbuilding. Except that's just where I found a bit of it - it's really over at SFSIGNAL.

Why Every Beginning Writer Should Study Horror

Lately I've been listening to podcasts. I listen to all three sister podcasts in the Escape Artists family: Podcastle for Fantasy, Escape Pod for Science Fiction, and PseudoPod for Horror.

Now, I don't particularly like Horror as a genre. I don't watch Horror movies, I don't read Stephen King or any of the horror greats much, and honestly, there are over 30 stories from Pseudopod on my iphone at the time of this writing that I haven't gotten around to listening to yet.

So, why am I telling you, a beginning writer, to study Horror?

Fiction is about having an effect on the reader. The effect is different for each genre and subgenre, and even varies by scene in longer works, but there's always an effect that the writer is trying to achieve.

When you are studying painting, you look at both the overall balance of the composition and the effects of the individual brushstrokes. You can do the same thing with writing. In Horror, the brushstrokes are very clear. Thus, a beginning writer can learn a lot from studying them.

Take, for example, Pseudopod 165: The Copse, by Robert Mammone, read by Ian Stuart. It's a relatively simple story about a family going to dinner someplace -- well, someplace bad.

To a writer's ear, this is no subtle piece. To use a musical metaphor, this is more akin to Wagner's great brass fanfares than Mozart's clever interplay of cascading notes. But "The Copse" works, and that's the point.

Pay close attention to the use of descriptive details, the symbols repeated, the visceral responses of the characters. This is Horror.

Definitions of Well Written

Over on Mysterious Matters about a month ago, Agatho (?) has published a few great tips on what "Well Written" might mean. And he has them well in order, from the things that almost everyone will agree bother them, to the things that are nice-to-have. I can't say that number 8 (a sense that the author is an interesting person whom I would like to meet) has ever been high on my list for novels, unless you count first-person-viewpoint-characters as "the author".

Since one of Agatho's points was about sentence variety, here's a quick pointer back to Alex Moore's discussion of that subject.

For another definition of well written, Alicia Rasley at Editorrent has just posted a "Quick Turning Points Schema" which summarizes the reversal points in the standard three-act story (such as a screenplay). Call it classic or call it cookbook, but it's something to measure against, and it works.

Editorrent does miss a few beats in the standard screenplay. For example, where she puts the initiating event, there are often two points in a screenplay - the first "Inciting Event", where the person finds out *what* they need to do, and the second "Plot Point One" where they decide *how* they need to do that. The *how* is usually modified at the "Reversal Point" halfway through the story. Examples from Ehow, better fiction and Lost Zombies Film School.

How Writers Write

The Wall Street Journal's Weekend Journal just printed an article by Alexandra Alter about how several award-winning literary writers write. Margaret Atwood, Richard Powers, Anne Rice -- and a lot of writers that Spec fiction readers won't have heard of -- are represented in sidebars. (Well, they're sidebars in the print version, they're inline in the online version.)

Hat tip, my lovely wife Gail, who handed me the print version!

Professional Authors and Gateway Standards

Randy Ingermanson has some interesting things to say about writers. He divides pre-published writers -- most of us at NTSFW -- into peer groups like a high school: Freshman, Sophomores, Juniors and Seniors.

Seniors are people who
A) regularly write luminous prose,
B) have developed many contacts in the industry,
C) continually write and send excellent queries and/or book proposals,
D) regularly are requested for sample pages,
E) often get encouraging rejection letters from agents and editors,
and so on.

They are operating on all cylinders as a near-pro writer, but are still unpublished. Seniors are also frustrated beyond belief.

For Juniors, the above adjectives and adverbs become less superlative, and for Sophomores, they become pretty spotty. Let's not talk about Freshmen.

Honestly applying the above standard criteria, I believe that most of us in NTSFW are Sophomores and Juniors. Despite now getting paid for ghost writing, and having a novel under contract, I consider myself a Junior who is concentrating on becoming a Senior.

The standard of work for a Senior to graduate to professionally published author is higher than the standard of work for a professional author to continue publishing. This is a gateway standard, not really a double standard, because you only have to meet it once. It may seem painful when you are on this side of it, but you'll be quite glad for it once you have earned your way through the gate.

* * *

Why does the gateway exist? At least three practical reasons.

First, your first published novel has no time requirement. You literally have no deadline, so you can make it as perfect as your ability allows. Everything you write after that will have deadlines, and will have to be just good enough.

Second, there's the obvious matter of name recognition-- to be a good risk for publication, a novel by a nobody has to be better than a novel by a known person, who a certain number of prior readers will buy on the strength of the prior book. (Actually, psychology shows that on average they will actually *enjoy* the book more when it is by an author that they already enjoy than if the same work were written by an unknown. One of the various psychological "priming" effects.)

Third, closely related to the second-- as you gain a track record, you will have more leverage to keep the "darlings" that you really should have killed, if you had possessed enough sense to take the excellent advice of your agent and editor. Your work will not be improved as much in the editing process. Do you suppose anyone says "no" to Stephen King?

So, there are a number of reasons that professionals might be able to publish a product that a first-time novelist cannot. And all of them make sense, no matter how painful they are to first-timers like us.

* * *

But there's another major factor involved. Perceptual bias on the part of the writer-reader. Writers are the harshest critics, especially those of us who are learning to write, and trying to develop a particular set of workable rules for our own writing.

We are so busy training ourselves to not make certain so-called "mistakes" of writing, that we diminish our enjoyment of alternative forms. In essence, we judge a work by the "mode" that we are attempting to learn to write, rather than evaluating it on its own terms.

Take a painting as a metaphor. Looking at a French Impressionist masterpiece, we could evaluate it as a incompetent piece from the POV of classical photorealism, horrible from the POV of cubism, and/or pedestrian from the POV of surrealism. And it is.

So what?

Honestly, I tried to reread Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn last year, and couldn't get a dozen pages due to the excessive use of misspellings to represent dialect. This is a book I absolutely loved as a boy, and can't bring myself to read now.

Likewise, I only managed to get about halfway through Susanna Clarke's Johnathan Strange and Mr Norell, which won the 2005 Hugo award. There was a plot there, and a fascinating universe, but I kept waiting for the *story* to begin. Because of my training as a writer, I wanted to connect to some particular character, rather than bouncing around the universe observing things occurring to a range of people, from a distance. The novel's style was modeled after a Regency (Jane Austin-type), but with scholarly footnotes that led ever deeper into the lore of Clarke's world. Readers and Hugo voters loved it. Someday, I might untrain myself so I can love it too. But not today.

How does this apply to us as "junior" and "senior" writers?

Remember that the rules we are taught have limited applicability. (Although we may not be aware of the exact limits.) They describe one particular mode of writing.

Remember that the vast majority of all things written and published do *not* belong to that particular mode which is being vaunted.

Remember that awards are won by those who create their own mode, not by those deciding to slavishly adhere to a mode designed by others.

Remember to read widely, especially among acclaimed books, to diversify your repetoir, to stretch your abilities, and to find new things that are fun for you.

Remember to read as a reader first, to experience the effect of a work, THEN go back and read as a writer to find out how that effect was achieved. Don't dissect the dog until you're done playing "fetch".

Pay attention to how all the parts work together. What did the writer gain by violating your standard rules? What did she lose? What other adaptations was she forced to make, and how did they work together?

And above all...

Feel free to abandon a work if you are not enjoying it, even if it IS famous. Life's too short to read bad books.

Continuity

Lots of chattering out there recently on continuity this week. For instance, Laura Anne Gilman at SFNovelists writes about how annoying continuity slips can be to a reader. Deborah Teramis Christian writes about her challenges in keeping her multiverse straight, and her personal wiki for that multiverse. David Weber, who was Writer Guest of Honor at ConDFW this weekend, posted an authorial note regarding his multiple Honor Harrington series [what the heck is the plural of series, series's?] and the fact that an occasional scene is going to have to appear in multiple novels, generally from different points of view, because that is what works for what he's trying to do.


While there are many details that author/creators must remember and control, there are some realistic strategies that you can use to limit the effect of slips.

Memory is not perfect: People don't always remember things correctly, so thinking that you met someone on planet A when you really met on station B is par for the course among humans. If you're a subtle author, you can intentionally drop in a few of these mistakes by a POV character, and then the unintentional ones will seem planted. This also allows some really cool effects like getting the reader to anchor characters together and see parallels.

History is not perfect: Actually, History is like a mashup collage seen in a funhouse mirror, especially once postmodern academics get through with it. There is no reason that people in a novel will have a clear view of events that happened even five years before - the stories that people have told about the events will have gained more credence than the actual events.

Information has a viewpoint : When you are using POV and telling what a character knows or believes, the character doesn't have to be right. That information may be faulty in some basic way, and it definitely should include whatever biases would be natural to that character.



At best, fiction is an attempt to create understanding about [pseudo-]events that happened in a particular way at a particular time. In order to create fiction, even "creative nonfiction" about real events, we have to delete massive amounts of information. We are collapsing a general superimposed wave form into a single line and then abstracting that line to an aesthetically pleasing abstract presentation in the form of language.

Get it right if you can, but you can also get it artfully wrong, and please just as many readers.

Andy Meisenheimer on Show and Tell

As a guest blogger on Rachelle Gardner's Blog, Zondervan fiction editor Andy Meisenheimer gives this and more on Show versus Tell:

[Showing is...] Letting the audience put together the clues; presenting simply a sensory experience through the lenses of a character’s viewpoint. Passing no judgment, but allowing the characters to speak for themselves.

Down in the comments, he adds this:

Telling can be very useful. Think about when you tell a story to a friend over coffee. "So, my brother, right? He's totally paranoid. Get this--yesterday..." And instead of showing me paranoid, you told it to me, but that's the only way to make the following story funny or interesting or whatever. Telling is usually reflective of your point of view character.

So he's using "Tell" to include viewpoint attitude or tone, rather than just being a level of detail or summary in the writing.

Interesting.

Maria Snyder on Show and Tell

Lots of authors have written on this particular item, but I really like Maria V Snyder's take on the subject. In particular, she talks about exactly how to show things.

Show and Tell

Lots of people write about "Show vs Tell". It's a good concept to be aware of, but it should be and in the phrase, not vs.

What do I mean?

Well, let's start with being honest. If you write prose, it's all tell. Except for little visual tricks, illustrations, doodles, perhaps visual page layouts when you are describing a sign, or other modifications of form- except for those, everything you are doing is telling.

Everything is telling.

It isn't so in movies, where almost everything should be visual, but in prose, everything is telling. Even when you go so far towards subtle detail as Raymond Chandler's "A line showed on her jaw", you are still just telling about the line on the jaw. Okay, Chandler didn't tell that she was angry, he told a detail that allows the reader to infer two levels - that her jaw muscle was tightening, and that it was anger that made it happen.

But it's all tell.

The question is, what level of detail are you telling? Is the level of detail appropriate to your story and your audience?

Look at the following sentence, and then decide whether it is showing or telling.

John loved Marsha.

Well?

If you've fallen for the "Show vs Tell" fad, you probably said "tell."

Nope.

The correct answer depends upon context. It is impossible to know without seeing the scene and the surrounding phrasing. Look at it in the following paragraph:

John loved Marsha. John's brother Abel loved Grace. Marsha loved Abel, but had an obvious liking for Grace as well. And then there was Prudence, who thought her brothers would be better off staying away from the brothel completely.

In this case, "John loved Marsha" is a detail regarding the current emotional situation in the family. If you buy the "show vs tell" concept, it is a "show" statement.

Really, any sentence or detail can be a "tell" at one level, while it is a "show" at the next higher hierarchical level. The proper question is, what layer of detail is appropriate to the audience and the purpose of the scene?

More later.