The recalcitrant scene

On and off for the past year or so, I've been wrestling with a difficult scene. It was one that initially caused me writer's block, but then I told myself to get over it -- that if I couldn't write that scene there were plenty more I could write. So I did those instead. But I kept coming back to this one.

At first, I thought it was that I didn't know what my character would do. That surprised me, because it's a character I know well. Eventually, I wrote the scene, but I wasn't happy with it. It didn't feel right, and I couldn't figure out why.

Then one day, in the shower, I had an epiphany. (And this is where I grumble about droughts that necessitate four minute showers, because I used to do some of my best thinking in the shower. These days epiphanies are fewer because I'm under the water a lot less.) The reason the scene wasn't working was that I had my character doing what the plot needed him to do, not what he would really do. I had forced his hand. In my head, where he ended up was where I'd envisaged him ending up right from the start. And the truth is -- he didn't want to go there. That's why I had so much trouble in the first place. It wasn't that I didn't know what he would do -- I did know, but it wasn't what I (or rather the plot) needed him to do.

Okay, easy enough. Scrap the second half of the scene and rewrite it. The more I looked at the scene, though, the more I liked what I had done, the emotional journey he'd gone on, the reasoning he'd used. So I put the scene aside again. I reread it. And reread it.

Then I thought that maybe I could just cut and paste some of the old scene and rewrite a new bit in the middle. I did this and now suspect I've ended up with a mishmash of what the scene had been and what it should be, but I have something I can work on now and refine. I'm excited. I love the refining process. I love writing! I'm going back to it right now.

What is story?

While I was at work, beavering away at writing materials for one of our online subjects a few weeks ago, I got into a discussion with another teacher about the difference between plot and story. Both are interesting words because everyone seems to define them differently. Plot can be seen merely the sequence of events in a story, and so can story. EM Forster is often quoted as having said (or at least written in his Aspects of the novel) that "The kind died and then the queen died" is a story, but "The king died, and then the queen died of grief" is a plot. Plot, according to him, involves a causal sequence. Sometimes it is just defined as the storyline, or the order that events happen in the story (which can of course differ to the order in which they unfold!). Plot unfolds in sequential order (in causal order), but isn't always presented that way. It's all very interesting, and I could spend days (if I had them) researching the differences, but as a writer I feel that it's more important that I spend this time actually writing! It's so easy to get sidetracked into interesting, but essentially meaningless (in terms of how it will improve my novel) research!

So what is the point of this blog post then? Only that I had a minor epiphany last week about short stories. Not so much an epiphany because I had already gathered in the knowledge and consolidated it, but last week was the first time I related it back to something that happened to me in my early days of writing. So what is this piece of knowledge -- I'm sounding mysterious, I know, and I'm not consciously trying to do so.

In my early days of writing, we had a guest writer come into one of our writing groups and do a workshop with us. I submitted a story I had written that I really liked and thought worked well, and braced myself for the criticism I knew would follow. What I didn't expect was at the end of the criticism, the writer said something along the lines of: "This is a nice piece of writing, but of course it's not a short story."

What?

It had a beginning, middle and end. It had conflict and rising tension, a climax. And it was short. How could it not be a short story? The criticism itself was fairly positive and constructive, but that one little worm of a comment dug into my psyche. Unfortunately, I was too shy then to ask for clarification -- his throwaway words "of course" made me feel like I must be stupid if I didn't know that, and so I came away full of doubt. And for the next year, I wrestled with that doubt and didn't write a thing, because I had decided that I didn't know what a story was. Of course I always get over such hiatuses -- what writer doesn't? And in the time I had been reading, and writing drabbles and things -- just no "formal" short stories.

So, the other day I was workshopping something in our writing group and said that I really liked it (which I did), but it wasn't a short story. Hang on a minute. I'd come full circle. So what did I mean?

What I want out of a short story is to see the main character changed by the events of the story, i.e. they have to grow. If the character isn't changed, then at least I want to come away with some new perspective, some new insight into the way the world works. In this particular story, the character came away with new insight, but it wasn't a new insight to me (and I didn't feel it would be for many people) and so, although the story was vividly written and evocative, it failed to satisfy me as a reader -- failed to satisfy my needs of what a short story should do. The character had new insight but hadn't grown because of it. It's almost like truncating a hero myth story before the character returns to the real world, so that we can see their growth. (Maybe Jane Campion should take heart, considering all the flack she copped for The piano where that is exactly what she did do! She showed the return, and from the return, we see the character's growth, in action.)

I'm not sure I quite have all the arguments sorted in my head yet to give an effective enough treatise (to the author) about why her short story wasn't a short story to me, but it's almost there, and then I'll have to do just that, because such comments need to be qualified, justified, so the author has something to work with and to learn from -- rather than just go into a fugue from. Workshopping is never meant to be a tool to sharpen writer's block, but to pierce and deflate it!

Immersed in editing

Writer at work -- it's a hard life!

Here's a great recipe:

Take two writers, two partially finished manuscripts, four days, a holiday house on an island, and Easter -- throw them all together and what have you got? You've got a recipe for getting lots of work done. And feeling inspired.

Four days and lots of chocolate later and a serious amount of work has been done. Last time E and I went away together I was NaNoWriMoing (and working on book 2). This time I was doing an editing pass on book 1.

Normally, when I'm editing, I work from front to end. Simple really. Start at page 1, finish on the page that says "Ends". But this time I decided on a different approach. I have eight POV characters (I think) in my novel: four in each storyline, and one in each is quite minor. This time I chose the major storyline (about two thirds of the novel) and worked through the storyline one character at a time.

First was my major protagonist, who's story this really is. Working through his scenes was always going to be a joy, because, let's face it, I love spending time with him. And I did love it. (Though enjoyed the other characters almost as much.)

Things to think about for me in this pass were to add to characterisation, and make sure character motivation is always clear. When I was at Clarion I was told that motivation was one of my great strengths, but someone had recently said they thought it was lacking in my novel. Now this may or may not be true, but when I get a comment like that I always want to take it seriously and give it due consideration. After all, I want to put the strongest book I can in front of editors and, indeed, the world. So these two things have been my key -- oh, and cutting words. Not that the book is wordy. It isn't. But it's a big, sprawling story, and so involves a lot of words to get all that action across. But long novels cost more to produce so the risk is greater, and we're all about getting our mss into as publishable shape as possible, right?

The thing about looking at individual storylines is that it gives you a really great feel for whether the individual voices are working and whether they are what they're supposed to be: individual. Staying with just one storyline allows you to make sure the voice is consistent -- so, for example, the different characters speak with differing levels of formality, they notice different sorts of things, they have their own vocabularies and favourite sayings. Oh, this is such fun.

(Similarly, in an earlier draft I colour coded all my dialogue, by character, and that was equally insightful.)

Of course the trap is that you need to do this over a fairly short period of time to pick up any plot inconsistencies, because you're now not reading in a causal sequence anymore. It's also harder to evaluate pacing as a whole, because you're not looking at the whole novel. Still a worthwhile experience. I'll have to do at least one pass this way on every multiple-person POV story I ever write. More on the weekend later.

Currently reading

Ah, the non-teaching part of the year, and the best part about that is that there's time to read for pleasure! Of course, this doesn't mean I stop reading as a writer, but still it's nice to read something that I have to think about purely for me and not with any other motive.

So, the first book I've tackled was a change -- I decided I'd like to give Matthew Reilly a go. I've bought two of his books along the way, with the intent of reading them (obviously!). I think as writers, no matter what type of fiction we're writing, it's interesting to go and have a look at the writers who are selling megacopies, because obviously they are doing something right. Now, I was at a writers' group meeting awhile ago and Matthew Reilly's name came up, and those who had read him (iirc) said that they couldn't finish his books, that they were badly written. Hmm. Always interesting. He's not had one book that has sold megacopies but many. Readers don't keep coming back to writers whose books they don't finish. Not everyone, it seems, feels the same way that my friends do.

So, I sat down, prepared to be entertained. And within a few pages I could both see why my friends (writers) didn't like his writing, and why lots of people (readers) do. Matthew Reilly is doing something right. I finished the book (all 700 pages of it) in two days (and I'm very happy to see that the other book that I have has the same main character -- maybe they all do?). So, that might be my next read -- though I had said that these holidays would be my Harry Potter catch-up time.

Anyway, for the writers out there, here's my analysis of what I think (and it's only my opinion of course), MR is doing right, and what he's doing wrong. (And Matthew can laugh all the way to the bank, clearly.) I'm just going to pick three things for each argument.

What he's doing wrong:

infodumps -- oh, my goodness. Does this guy love to infodump. We tell our students not to do this -- do not stop the story to give information. Try to weave it in some other way. MR has infodumps on missiles, aeroplanes, ice -- you name it. Now, here's a little admission, I go quite gooey with any information that's vaguely aeronautical (well, especially anything pertaining to space/rockets/astronauts) so I actually didn't mind some of these infodumps, though there might be better ways to handle them. The thing is that there's so many that doing them other ways might not be possible. So the real question becomes: how much of this info is absolutely essential to the reader?

description -- MR tackles this the same way that he does infodumps -- stops the story to deliver it. Usually, it's better to show the protagonist (or other characters) interacting with the scenery, e.g. rather than "The gantry was made of steel and painted blue. It spanned the chasm between the two platforms. David ran across it", it could be something like: "David ran across the steel gantry, his feet sending slivers of blue paint plunging into the chasm between the two platforms". (These are all my words, not MR's.)

suspension of disbelief -- okay, this is a high-octane story, and everything's happening in the last second before disaster strikes, but sometimes this goes a bit far. The baddies are all bad shots. The good guys are not. (MR attempts to explain this away with an infodump about weaponry that helps, but doesn't solve the problem.) One small team against a much larger force of the world's best? Hmm. But it's also the little research things -- a doctor with no equipment diagnoses how a person died by spotting lactic acid in the dead guy's throat. Really? I don't think so. There were a few moments like this for me. But still I'm prepared to give a little here, for two reasons: one is that I was being swept along, and two is that I think it's a hard call for writers to be expected to get every little thing right. Clearly, we are not experts in every field, and while I do think it's important that we endeavor to get things right, I recognise that it's not always possible. Some writers employ researchers to do the research for them, but even so surely there must come a time when we say enough is enough? If not, we could spend all our time researching and never get around to writing. There must have been about a zillion things Reilly had to research for this book. I can't tell how many things he got right and wrong, but I suspect they're mostly right. I'm prepared to cut him some slack here, but I do notice them, and they do pull me out of the story.

Let's look at the other side of the coin: what he's doing right:

plot -- most bestsellers are strongly plotted, and MR's book is no exception. This book is as tightly plotted as they come. MR does all the things a good plotter should do -- he takes his characters, puts them under pressure and then tightens the screws. He puts his characters under intense pressure, makes it as hard for them as possible, constantly backs them into corners where they seem to have no escape, and then he makes it worse. Not a page passes without something happening. A new writer could do far worse than study Reilly to see how he handles plot. Hell, I could do far worse than study how Reilly handles plot...

pace -- make no mistake, this book zips along, even despite the infodumps, and that's no mean feat given there are so many of them. Never did I feel bogged down or impatient. No, those pages were flipping over. His writing style is clean, not overly laden with adjectives, and written simply in a manner that doesn't impede the reader's progress. Still, I think the pace has a lot to do with the plot -- there being so much action and conflict -- and lots of dialogue.

scene endings/cliffhangers -- lots of these. Nearly every chapter ends on a cliffhanger. Sometimes this is overdone and verges on the Goosebump-type endings that drive me nuts, but Reilly never really crosses that line. A cliffhanger, of course, drags you on to the next scene. You have to find out what happened, and so the book becomes unputdownable. Not a bad thing for a book to be, of course!

Final word: the other book I've bought has an interview with Reilly at the back, and he addresses the question of how he interacts with his two military advisers, and says that he sometimes eschews their advice to better serve the plot. It's not a bad point, but then if credibility suffers, if readers do find their disbelief no longer suspended, then really the plot hasn't been served at all -- something we all should think about, and maybe it's a game of risks, and speculating about how many readers are going to be affected by any one error. I had an award-winning book ruined for me once, because at the beginning the main character was talking about the Morlocks in the War of the Worlds. Trouble was the Morlocks were from Wells's "other" book, The Time Machine; the Martians were the bad guys in War of the Worlds. It's all about the way the information was delivered -- it made the character lose all credibility for me. Another reader may not have been bothered (though it was for an audience who might be expected to know this).

Final final word: the real test is will I read another book. Having discovered that the two books are based on the same characters, I have to say that I will definitely read this second book. Will I buy another? Trickier question, because I see in the back of this other book that they're not all based on the same character. So many books... I might buy another based on this character, but maybe not his other books. Then again, I might not. This isn't my usual genre, and that's really where I want to be doing most of my reading. Still, it has made for a good diversion for a couple of days.

Editing anthologies

The last few days I've been preparing an anthology for a competition. Now, while I don't want to go into too many details -- because it is meant to be anonymous -- suffice to say we were over the word limit and so I had to do some cutting. Now, perhaps the easiest part was that I had more pieces and longer pieces than anyone else, so it was easy to be ruthless. I didn't want to touch other people's pieces too much, except to fix punctuation, and iron out any inconsistencies. It's strange the small inconsistencies that creep in.

And it's always interesting trying to make substantial cuts -- in this case akin to removing a subplot. One small change snowballs throughout the manuscript. Interesting, too, trying to edit for balance. I cut one scene completely to get within the word limit, but couldn't take the one that would have made the least impact, because that was also the writer represented least. The trouble was that my scenes impacted other scenes, which therefore also needed parts stripped out of them, just so that they still made sense.

Cutting like this is a great way to learn editing skills. I think I learnt many of mine while trying to cut more than 10% out of short stories to get them within competition guidelines. I get my class to do this every year, and every year there will be someone who is unable to complete the exercise, and I'll get them to hand it to me. They're always amazed at exactly what they can lose, and how much more smoothly the text reads.

NaNoWriMo

Every year I've looked at this NaNoWriMo thing and thought, why does it have to be in November? Why not NaJaWriMo or NaFeWriMo -- months when I'm not marking. Last year I spent most of November wrestling with writes and rewrites (students') of Liberal Arts essays. I felt like my head was going to explode. This year I wasn't teaching over there -- our semester ends earlier and mine earlier still because of the Cup Day holiday, and so I really had no excuse.

I was 50 k from the end of my novel (in the rewrite) and it's a 50 k commitment, so I thought, why not? Except when I read the rules it's not supposed to be stuff you're rewriting. Originally, I thought that it didn't matter. After all, if it's my NaNoWriMo, it could be whatever I wanted, right? Right. Except that when I read the reasoning why it shouldn't be a rewrite, I thought they made a good point. So I decided to head into book 2. Now, technically, this is also a rewrite because I'm already 140 k into book 2; however, I haven't worked on it for a very long time and don't remember the ins and outs. Plus I wrote a lot of it so long ago that it needs to be partly rewritten, so I decided to tackle this and do it from scratch.

Now, this was the perfect project for my long weekend away, and boy did I make a great start at it. But I still wanted to be working on my novel too, so it became a juggling act. Normally, I can't work on more than one thing at a time, but these are both the same world and characters -- same headspace -- though there is this curious experience of writing 50 k to the end, and 50 starting at the end. Bizarre. And in book 1, I'm working on two storylines simultaneously: human and Myrad (alien), whereas for NaNoWriMo, I've restricted myself to just writing the one (Myrad).

But now I'm stuck. I was referring back to the original book 2 far more than I wanted to -- but, in any case, I've introduced a major new storyline that affects this storyline dramatically so things were about to diverge radically from what I had. I think for me that really what is needed is an hour of plotting. Sometimes, I like to write without plotting, just see where it goes, but sometimes I need more structure. I suspect this might be one of those times. Today, I'm going to spend half an hour plotting and then some time writing. I'll report back in later to say how I've done!

Watching like a writer

Yesterday, Sir Talkalot and I went to the movies to see Stardust. I hadn't heard anything about this movie, and by chance followed a link off the cinema website to find out what it was about. Neil Gaiman -- that told me enough. So, then I had a look at the preview -- fantasy -- and knew this was a must-see for me.

How did this little sleeper get past me? It was a wonderful film, full of other worlds, fallen stars personified, sky pirates -- though Sir T and I both decided it would be immeasurably improved by cutting the last line, but that's another story.

What I found interesting was how quickly I picked up clues, which later turned out to be right. Was this the writer in me watching, or was it as simple as just being an adult watching? Sir T didn't get any of the clues I got, which doesn't help me sort it out. At the first mention of things, puzzle pieces were slotting into place, leaving me wondering whether I was supposed to be making these leaps or not. Quite possibly I was.

It's that eternal quandary when writing about how much you tell the reader. I know we had a discussion about it the other day in Western Women while workshopping a story.

When is a twist not a twist but a well-earned turn in the plot, rather than an abrupt about-face because the reader has held back information or gone off in a new direction? Does it differ in different genres? This movie was obviously meant for children (as well as adults), so obviously more information has to be given out. Children can't work as hard as readers because they just don't have that experience.

Anyway, back to the movie -- it had a lovely, innocent warmth to it, a charm, and a great undercurrent of humour that ran through it. Highly recommended for everyone, but especially for fantasy lovers!

Process

One of my students blogged on our student blog about how she's writing two different novels: one for my novel class and one for her Writing for Young Adults class -- one she's writing sequentially and one she's not. She's having a lot more trouble with the one that she's writing in bits and pieces. In my response to her post, I said she had to find the method that works best for her. We all write differently, all have a different process.

I am writing my novel sequentially. I pick up from where I left off the day before, read back over my work and edit it, and this is usually enough to get me straight back into the story. It seems natural to me to write from start to finish -- in plotted order. I make this distinction because of course a plot follows a straight timeline, but plot isn't always presented in such a traditional, ordered manner. Writers can apply all sorts of structures to organise the plot/s in their novels.

The first book I ever started writing was a book about a buckskin stallion called Diablo. I wrote this sequentially. I was about eight, and doing the illustrations myself. I wrote about eight chapters. The second was a Star Wars ripoff. Somewat longer than my first attempt, and written sequentially. My third was a big sprawling King Arthur novel, which I wrote in bits and pieces. As a scene came to me, I wrote it down. I was travelling at the time, and spent several weeks in my aunt's house in Holland, where I was the only one who spoke any English. My characters kept me company, banished the loneliness. I remember reading The Quest for the Holy Grail, and basing several chapters on this -- but all from Arthur's POV, which involved scenes with grail knights coming back and relating their tales. I think I started by making it clear that it was reported dialogue but then segued into their scenes. Did it work? Don't know, because I decided it was too static and threw the whole lot out. (Note to self: remember, never, never discard your work this way!) I was always worried about how I was going to stitch it all together. These days, I'm not sure whether I'd be so worried.

My next novel is the one I've been writing/reworking. Back to sequential order. I have, on very rare occasions, written scenes ahead (usually in the second book) and then caught my way up to them. I'm not so worried about assembling bits anymore -- ever since I added a second major plotline to a finished draft, which required careful weaving in and, because it was an entirely independent group of characters from those already in the novel (with one very minor exception), building links between the two plotlines. A fascinating process that taught me a lot.

I also write in scenes. It seems natural to me to write this way. Novels are usually constructed of scenes -- so that's almost always been my reading experience of a novel. So it seems strange to find people who don't write in scenes, but in one long, flowing plot that they then break up into chapters. My best friend does this. That to me is more strange than writing out of sequence. To use an analogy, people who write scenes in sequential order have pieces of a puzzle they put together in a logical sequence. Those who write their scenes as they come insert the pieces in random order. But the others -- they don't even have a puzzle. What do they have?

Really, though, it doesn't matter. If whatever you're doing works for you, then you're doing it right. It's that simple. And if what you're doing doesn't work -- then try something else. Read books by writers on their process and see the many different ways they achieve what they do, and perhaps in that great collection of varied processes, you might find one that suits you.

Spiderman

Spoiler alert!

Today, the kids and I have been off to see Spiderman 3. Now, I'll fess up straightaway and say I'm a big fan of this incarnation of Spidey. I love the fact that Tobey Maguire has portrayed him as such a vulnerable superhero, that the character is so well rounded and shaded.

As I was watching, I was thinking about plot, because this movie, more than the others seems a tangled web of subplots, rather than one main plot with several subplots. I had been going to say tangled mess, but I guess with this movie web is better! Let's see -- there's:
(i) Peter and MJ
(ii) Peter and Harry
(iii) Peter and his inner demons
(iv) Spiderman and the Sandman
(v) Peter and his uncle's killer
(vi) Spiderman and the black alien thing, which turns him into the black-suited Spidey
(vii) Peter and another photographer

Some of these are related: (iv) and (v); (vi) and (vii); (iii) and (vi) -- oh, and (i) and (ii) tie into a number of them in all sorts of ways. I'd be hard-pressed to say which is the main plot, but it didn't really matter -- it worked for me. Just like Silence of the lambs, which is a really interesting study in plot because the subplot (Lector and Starling) is more gripping than and takes over from the main plot (Starling trying to catch the kidnapper/murderer before he murders again).

I must say I always watch James Franco with interest, because he's one of a number of actors I could imagine playing the main character in my novel. And Tobey Maguire was superb playing different versions of his character. And I'm not talking about the action scenes.

There are funny mistakes in every film. I think of the stormtrooper banging his head in Star wars. In this film, it's more of a continuity error. I'll just say watch the frypan that Harry and MJ are cooking in. Not that I can talk -- one of my major characters once changed from hazel-eyed to blue, and I hadn't noticed because I'm not visual but conceptual in the way I imagine things. I picked it up when reading through it, thankfully, but I always wonder if I could do that, then what else might I have missed.

Anyway, I'd recommend this movie. The action is mind-boggling, though at times so fast I couldn't actually track it with my eyes, but aside from the action, it's a superb character study. Can't wait till it comes out on DVD.