The Hardest Part of Ending...

... is starting again. Starting a new book is both an exciting and annoying time. Exciting because you'll finally be getting to another in the long list of stories you want to tell. Annoying because finding out where to start telling that story - and the manner in which you want to tell it - is freaking hard.

I've written the beginning to Clanless five times already. I thought I would never get it down the way I wanted it - then I had an epiphany.

I rewrote the beginning to TWIXT twice - after the first draft was done. It was better for that foreknowledge, too. I knew what I had ended up elaborating on, and what I had not. I cut out a lot of parts that seemed neat to me at first, but to which I had never returned.

There has always been a strong streak of perfectionist in me. I write slowly compared to a lot of other people, because I try to get it right the first time. I'm not one of those "real writing is done in revision" kind of authors. I do lots of revision, and editing, and rewriting, but plenty of the "first draft" survives until the end, because I spend a lot of time on the first draft.

Lately I have been considering trying a different tact. Speed through the initial writing and "fix it in post" as it were. I'm not sure that will ever work for me though, for the same reason I have never been able to start a story anywhere past the beginning and come back to write it later, as I've heard some writers do. I need to go in linear order, start to finish.

For this beginning, though, I'm thinking I'll let up on the internal filter a bit. Chances are I will rewrite the beginning, or at least tweak it heavily, once the book is written. I need to let myself pick up some momentum.

Chatting about Chapters

Chapters are a funny beast. Unlike... oh, I dunno, every other aspect of writing, there isn't much in the way of guidelines or rules held up by those who have come before. Long, short, titled or no, labeled with POV or no, etc etc. Everyone just does what they please and nobody tries to claim any one way as a general standard.

At first that was a bit unsettling. Years ago when I went hunting for that exact advice, I couldn't find much. Heck, I couldn't find anything at all. What? A topic that no visionary had expounded on? Is there nothing in the Chicago Manual of Style that could be of use here? WHAT DOES FRANZEN WANT ME TO DO?

In the absence of internet-approved guidelines, I had to formulate some of my own. The breakdown comes in three general flavors: Chapters with Titles, Chapters With POV Labels, and Chapters with Neither Label Nor Title.

The last one is the simplest, as you don't need to think about much when starting them. This is the only chapter type I've used thus far in my own writing. They end up breaking down roughly by POV and chronology, though there are exceptions. I admit it is a bit messy, though it allows for lots of freeforming with the chapter structure itself. Also, my chapters tend to gravitate towards a standard length, though I don't enforce this consciously.

Lately I have been thinking about giving the first option a try, and titling my chapters. This would the benefit of further 'focusing' a chapter on a specific plot point or event or what-have-you, and the hope is that the rest of the book would benefit from that focus. Plus, it allows me to think up interesting and evocative chapter titles. On the downside, thinking up lots of chapter titles would basically be like having to pick anywhere from twenty to forty titles for a single book, and I go through enough mental anguish just settling on one.

The very finest example I have seen of the chapters-with-titles tactic comes from Stephen Brust, in The Phoenix Guards. I will never forget one particular chapter, the title of which made me laugh my ass off even before I began to read: "In Which the Plot, Behaving In Much the Same Manner As a Soup to Which Cornstarch Has Been Added, Begins, at Last, To Thicken." (paraphrased, somewhat, as I do not have the book right here with me). 

The third option is less one of style, I think, and more of efficiency. George Martin beings the chapters in A Song of Ice and Fire by identifying the POV character for that chapter (though he has begun to give them more artful sobriquets than their actual names). This has the advantage of pulling the reader immediately to the memories of whats been happening recently with that character, and also eliminates the possibility of actual confusion - a very real benefit in epic narratives.

While I do not actively label the POV character at the outset of my chapters in Twixt Heaven and Hell, I do make sure to nix confusion by being very up-front about who the scene is centered on (except in rare cases when I want that to be a mystery).

A year ago or so, while working on some ideas for future novels, I came up with a slight variation to POV Labeling that I cannot wait to use. Sadly, the novels I thought it up for are awhile out in my project list,yet... the idea is that instead of simply announcing the POV, I will include some quote or other snippet that not only tells the reader who they are 'with' in that chapter, but also helps to inform the POV character themselves. If the character is a bard, then I might begin their chapters with a couplet or short verse. One character (who already exists in the notes for the novel) is a judge, and his chapters might begin with quotes concerning law and morality.

I think the device has premise, but much like thinking up new titles for each chapter it could get stressful. Setting apart a sentence or two like that means it really needs to shine.

I might have mentioned something about chapters that are divvied up entirely by length, but I can't recall any book where I've noticed this happening. I feel that most authors key their chapters to general events in the storyline and make them as long as they need to be. The above differences fall to style, but will still be guided by the relation between chapter and plot.

Prosaic Formulaic

I just finished reading this article, and I enjoyed it. Go check it out. I'll wait.

...

Amusing, isn't it? So many people writing How-To's for writing best-sellers and cracking the formula... and not a single one of them has actually written a smash-hit novel. One of them, Donald Maass, is a very successful agent - but not, to my knowledge, a particularly successful writer.

I'm not a statistics guru, but I believe one of the major failings of those experiments, which the author of the article referred to, is known to as 'selection bias' (Don't quote me on that). They picked only the best-sellers and located very general (in fact, too general - I'll come back to that) common traits.

They did not, however, locate these same traits in the books that didn't make it big. I love the description of Baldwin's grand flop (The Eleventh Plague). Could there be a more telling example? The authors studied the 'formula,' collaborated with the 'experts,' and even managed to convince the agents, editors, and big-wigs at the publishing houses that they had a sure-fire success, netting them a seven-figure advance...

... and Plague didn't even crack the NYT bestseller list, let alone become a runaway success.

I do have some theories as to why they so expertly fooled (if it can be called that) the pros of the industry, but I'll leave those for another post. Suffice to say that the most concerted research-driven attempt to find the formula was a huge failure.

How can I say it was a failure when it earned the authors a cool million each?

Because it is likely that the publishing house lost a lot of money on that investment. Whether or not Baldwin went on to publish anything else (a quick Google search reveals that he did), he did not impress the readers. He fooled the false prophets of the industry, and thus made money off them, but he did not actually write a book that millions of people loved.

All leading, of course, to the obvious conclusion: There is no formula. Just write your damn story.

As a final bit of fun, I looked at the ten elements that Baldwin apparently cooked up, quoted here for convenience:

1. The hero is an expert.
2. The villain is an expert.
3. You must watch all of the villainy over the shoulder of the villain.
4. The hero has a team of experts in various fields behind him, etc.
5. Two or more on the team must fall in love.
6. Two or more on the team must die.
7. The villain must turn his attentions from his initial goal to the team.
8. The villain and the hero must live to do battle again in the sequel.
9. All deaths must proceed from the individual to the group: i.e., never say that the bomb exploded and 15,000 people were killed. Start with "Jamie and Suzy were walking in the park with their grandmother when the earth opened up."
10. If you get bogged down, just kill somebody.

My first novel has all of these to some extent. It lacks 5 almost entirely - but you could make a case for a weak instance. 10 sorta happened. 9 sorta happens. All the rest are slam dunks. I looked over some notes for other books I have outlined, begun, or conceived the general storyline for - yep, these ten are found to a large extend in them too.

Seems like writing the formula for a best-seller is a lot like writing someone's horoscope...

Thus, and let me repeat this for emphasis:

There is no formula. Just write your damn story.

Some Comments on Someone's Advice

I recently read this article over using the search feature in word processors to find trouble spots in your writing. Some good points, and I especially agree with annihilating qualifiers. Words like "very," "bit," "quite," and "rather" occur far too often in my writing and it drives me crazy when editing.

However, I do take issues with some  of this advice. First, and more trivially, is that in her section on "weasel words" the author uses dialogue to show which of two passages is better than the other. I think it very important for writers to realize the difference between tightening narration and changing dialogue.

Here is the example:

With weasel words: Suddenly, she stood up and said, “Oh well, let’s retire to the drawing room and just stay out of his way.”

Better: She stood and said, “Let’s retire to the drawing room and stay out of his way."

 The problem is that, because this is dialogue, this change isn't a matter of refining the writing - it changes the way the character speaks, and thus how we read her. Dialogue should not be 'tightened' unless it suits the character.

The second point is a battle in which I am ever on the losing side, concerning adverbs. Again, here is the example used in the above article:

With adverb: “I’ll kill him,” she said ferociously. (Really?)

Better: “I’ll kill him,” she said.

To be fair, I don't think we can judge the 'proper' use of an adverb without more context, but taken alone these two are not the same. In the "better" example, she could be saying it calmly, jokingly, in a little-girl sing-song voice, whatever. Details like these could be established before or after the actual dialogue. The fact remains that the adverb changes how we interpret the quote, and thus affects both our knowledge of scene and character.

Adverbs are like any other tool - use them in moderation and they're fine. Use them too often and readers start noticing them. They are make-up: If you use them sparingly they enhance the overall beauty of your work without anyone remembering they were there. Use them heavily and you've only created another flaw.

Getting Past the Big Dumb Thing

I recently wrote an article for The Roundtable Podcast (which should be appearing soon). I had to meander a little bit in order to find my topic, and a couple of those meanders produced some bits I still wanted to share. I turned them into this somewhat disjointed blog post.

We writers of fantasy have a dangerous fixation on the Big Dumb Thing.

BDTs are those objects, locations, and phenomena that carry a feeling of awe and mystery. Larry Niven’s Ringworld, the Monolith of Arthur C. Clarke and The Wall in George R.R. Martin’s Song of Ice and Fire. They wow the audience, and provide iconic images that serve as symbols for entire bodies of work.

Furthermore, a BDT can be abstract - such as Robert Jordan's system of the One Power, or countless fictional technologies present in science fiction. 

The one thing a BDT cannot be, is a character - and that means that a BDT can never be enough to drive a story.

You probably already knew this. Most writers of sci fi and fantasy come across this caution early and often - and yet still I meet writers who are ‘building their world’ before they write their story.

Wrong order! If you want to tell people about “your world” then you need to draw their interest with compelling stories and, especially, interesting characters. Until you weave it into a compelling story and demonstrate how it affects the lives of characters we love (or hate), your Big Dumb Thing is just a glorified prop.

Another common stumble for these world-builders is to 'design' their characters just like they design their world (sci-fi and fantasy is overrun with engineers, it seems). If you approach creating a character like assembling a robot, you’ll end up with something that shares a few traits with a machine: artificial, lifeless, and driven by the mission to destroy mankind.


You can't pick a bunch of traits and try to glue them together into a character. You'll end up with a monstrosity of hard angles and poorly fitting parts, where the cracks between his "brutal upbringing" and "love of puppies" are glaringly obvious.

Real people aren’t engineered - they grow. Let your characters do the same. You may have an idea for their personality, but then you need to decide how they got that way. It is a common quirk for writers that they know their characters' back-stories, even if the reader never finds out. This is a quirk of necessity - this history informs the character. In effect, it mimics the natural development of a real person.

The Delights - and Dangers - of "In Jokes"

"Protect the land and despoil the sea? It seems an odd bunch of rules to me."

This is a line from the story I'm currently writing - "The Giant of Tidesmouth." Obviously, there is more to it, and I expect many of my readers will get it and enjoy the reference.

But if you don't, I'm not telling you what it is. Neener neener.

Of course, if I hadn't told you there was something more to get, then those of you who saw nothing beyond the line of dialogue would not have known you were missing anything. Which, generally speaking, is good. In jokes are great for the people who share in them, but they make others feel excluded and that won't make readers feel welcome.

Thus, I try to make them subtly. I love making references, and homages, and little tributes to the artists and the people and the things that I love. I do it all the time. I even have some 'big' ones planned. Snippets of a song lyrics or a particularly poignant turn of phrase that I intend to - ahem - "borrow" into my books at some point. I do not intend to make them stick out. They will blend and only the people who instantly recognize the borrowed bit will know what I was doing - ideally,  the tribute will blend so completely that even those people wonder if it was intentional.

After all, too much reference becomes gratuitous and gets in the way of the story - even self-reference, which has the added sin of being masturbatory. I'm talking story-telling sin, not religious, folks. As I hint at in the post where I introduced The Wandering Tale, I want people to be able to read these stories, starting anywhere in the series, and never have the feeling they were missing anything. Characters and themes and events might reappear, but in a quiet way. Too much self-reference would ruin the stand-alone nature of each story. Readers would know that there was something there weren't getting, and feel like I was pushing them to read the other parts. I don't want that - I want them to read cuz the writing is just so damned good.

This may be one of the hardest parts of writing this series. Despite being in my anti-epic kick for a little while, I normally like an expansive narrative, and it is in my nature to write that way. Perhaps it will be good practice to ensure that each entry into The Wandering Tale can stand proudly alone.

The Art of Editing

Normally, I'm the kind of writer that moves fairly slowly through a story. I don't tend to write scenes out of order and I don't move on from a scene until I'm happy with it. This fits with my general philosophy of "Get it right the first time!"

As I try out self-publishing and start thinking about what life would be like as a professional author, though, I've been giving thought to different strategies. Namely, the 'get the draft done quickly and revise the hell out of it' method.

Changing habits has never been easy, and this is no exception. I keep trying to revise every scene to death while I'm writing it the first time, which - as my theory goes - might be wasting time in the long run because not every scene makes it into the final version, or needs to be heavily revamped due to choices later in the story.

Thus, I'm giving the rough cut a try lately. It is very hard to move on from writing I know is bad, but I'm doing it anyway - and it is oddly liberating. Empty as it may be, it feels good to add ~1000 words to a story most times I sit down to write. It also lets me write the fun stuff more quickly (I'm not sure when I'll try writing books 'out of order.' Not sure I'll ever be that kind of writer), or at least the parts of the story I see most clearly and have better figured out.

The biggest danger I see is that it might make revisions more complicated when I rewrite scenes and change details which have an effect upstream in the story. As the chaos theory and every good movie dealing with time travel tells us, "everything depends on everything else."

Self-Pubbed Freedom

If I hadn't decided to try out self-publishing (and if services like Amazon's KDP and Smashwords weren't around to make that choice possible) I never would have been able to get stories like Swordsman of Carn Nebeth or Three Fingers of Death published. Even though they are perfectly good and I'm sure lots of people will like them, they're just too awkward a length. I can't think of even one professional venue that publishes novella-length fiction, though I imagine there are a couple out there.

I've been thinking lately of another little detail that self-published authors don't need to worry about as much, and that is cutting their stories down to size. Story length matters a lot less in digital publishing in any case. Printing costs are nonexistent and shelf space is unlimited (at least, in the physical sense).

I mentioned in my last post that the mantra of the writing world is "cut, cut, cut." Beginning writers are often told to cut every last unnecessary word out of their story. This always struck me as odd. We are writers, not chroniclers. Arguably, if a 'word' is entertaining then it is necessary. It certainly wouldn't do to simply state the cold-blooded events of a narrative - that's not a story, it's an outline.

I've always wondered how much of that pressure comes from the publishing industries worries about cost versus how much comes from actual concern about the best methods to tell a story. I'll bet that a lot of really good passages and wonderful character development has ended up on the cutting room floor over the years. It's the same thing that happens with movies: to hit a target 'theater length' a lot of scenes have to be cut out and the movie often ends up as a sub-optimal specimen until the inevitable (in these days of DVD releases) "Editor's Cut" is released. A lot of the time? Those Editor's Cuts really ARE better.

Might not the same be true of novels? How many writers have had to cut out perfectly good material because it wasn't essential to the plot? As I've said, very few things in any novel are truly essential to the plot. The element that matters is whether or not it will entertain the majority of the readers - if it adds to the quality of the book.

That being said, it makes it all the more imperative to know what adds to the quality of the book. For damn sure there still needs to be some cutting going on. It just doesn't need to be as drastic. The publishing industry impressed on us the need to do things with as few words as possible - it would be easy to fall into the trap, when self-publishing, of disregarding the value of a good lean piece of storytelling for something pudgy and fat.

Now, I don't want my stories ultra-lean or fat. As always, the optimal spot lies in between. "Fat is flavor" but it isn't substance. I'll do us all a favor and leave the meat metaphor behind (it was making me hungry anyways) and summarize that point I'm slowly realizing: Cutting is still important, but maybe we can afford to lighten up with the knife.

To Authors: Work on the those summaries

I knew for a month and a half that I was going to publish the story at the end of February.

I had a time-frame for initial revisions, beta-reading, and secondary revisions. I had target dates for getting cover art done and formatting done. Yet somehow I still waited until the night I published The Three Fingers of Death to write the story summary - you know, the little description field you see on Amazon or Smashwords.

Stupid, stupid, stupid me.

It's an old truth that many writers never really get the hang of writing succinctly. For those still pursuing the traditional publishing route (which I am) the mantra is 'cut, cut, cut'. Agents and authors will go on for pages (ironic, eh?) about the need to trim the fat out of your book. Stephen King had a rule of thumb he received from an editor at some magazine which went something like: "Final draft = first draft - 10%".

I'm not sure how I feel about the general pattern of 'cut everything that isn't essential.' I think a lot of that pressure came from traditional publishing's need to save money on printing costs and the general impatience that came from the industry being overburdened with too many wannabe authors and not enough time to wade through them.  I'm okay with the odd paragraph of purple prose as long as it's a pleasant shade.

On the other hand, the story summary (or description, whatever you want to call it) is one place where the ability to write in a more taciturn manner comes very much in handy. Furthermore, you need to be able to use those few words to tease and tantalize the reader, hook them in exactly the way your opening pages should do (though if your story starts out slower, hooking them in the summary is a good avenue of attack!).

Needless to say, I will be re-writing the summary. Come to think of it, I need to do that for both my currently-available works, and I need to generally pay more attention to that aspect from now on. Especially in the self-publishing world, you can't afford to ever come off as an amateur. That summary is the first thing a reader sees of your book. You need to make it shine.

... and by you, I mean me.

(PS: The Three Fingers of Death now available on Amazon and Smashwords!)

Finding my Voice

Lately I think I've found my own voice as a writer. Ever since reading The Phoenix Guards in middle school I've been very aware of 'voice' as a component of stories. In that book Brust grabs you with the voice of his narration. It's flamboyant, unique, and at all times amusing. A masterpiece.

My voice isn't like that, and for a time I thought that because my voice wasn't immediately noticeable, it wasn't really a voice at all. It's taken me years to realize that voice often is subtle. It doesn't 'grab' the reader. Most voices are, for the most part, unnoticeable until attention is called to them.

It can be thought of like any natural, human voice. Some people have voices so distinctive that after hearing it once you'll know it forever. James Earl Jones, Gilbert Godfried,  Patrick Stewart - these are the folks with voices so unique they grab you. However, most everyone's voice is distinct. Nine times out of ten you can identify your friends and even acquaintances by their voice. You wouldn't know how to describe it, because while their voice is unique it isn't particularly distinctive.

So, my writing voice isn't a James Earl Jones type of writing voice. I can live with that. Because the folks who do end up reading my work will still know my voice, even if they can't really describe what it's like to their friends (which is fine - they can just tell their friends to read my stories!).

For a long time I studied and imitated voice. I knew what I wanted from each author I read - the legendary feel of Tolkien, the conviction and viscerality of Goodkind, the whimsy of Brust, etc. I thought at the time that if I managed to synthesize all these things into one voice then that would be mine.

Eventually I moved on to focusing on other things, and lost my focus on - and keen awareness of - voice. This was a good thing, because as obsessed as I was in siphoning out those elements from each voice, I was doing nothing more than imitating them. Each passage of my work read like a different author, depending on which feel I wanted it to have. I didn't have my own voice - Like a literary Ursula I'd stolen (poorly, no doubt) numerous others. (Manly Disney Reference!)

When my focus drifted, my own voice finally emerged - or re-emerged, as I look back and read early stories from before that period, I see that my voice had already been developing. It had just been hijacked when I focused too much on the issue. Lately a lot of blogs and tweets I've been reading have concerned themselves with voice (and thus imply that the reader should be likewise concerned about it) and I can't help but cringe. Now, I think the best thing a writer can do when concerned about voice is to ignore it completely. It will inevitably come on its own.

The Art of Self-Reference

I wonder if anyone has named this reflexive phenomenon of having the title of the story explicitly mentioned within the story itself. Sometimes it works and in fact is necessary, such as when the title of the book/story is a part of the plot. Terry Goodkind does this - each of his book titles are in fact parts of the story, and thus need direct mention. (Edit: No sooner did I post than I thought of a couple exceptions. "Faith of the Fallen" for instance)

However, some authors use titles that never see direct mention within the story. I could be wrong, but I think that a couple of George R.R. Martin's titles have never actually been used as a part of the story - rather, they are allusions to the events within. A Feast for Crows, for instance. Obviously a 'Game of Thrones' is an exception. Everybody and their brother uses that phrase within the books... (I exaggerate, of course).

The same goes for songs. In fact, I like it when the song title is not an actual lyric. Some of my favorites are "Tripping on a hole in a paper heart" by the Stone Temple Pilots, and "Paralyzer" by Finger Eleven. It is a form a of meta-writing, I think. You're actually extending the meaning of the story/song itself by using the title to elaborate on its themes.

I just finished a story in which I really had to struggle not to put the title in. I wanted to use that meta-discourse, but damn I love self-reference. It's a weakness, I suppose. I find it amusing even when it is cheap and gratuitous.

What do the rest of you think of this sort of thing? Does anybody know of a name for it? What kind of effective uses of it have you seen and used?

Reducing and Removing Redundancy

Sometimes, when describing a favorite concept or some trick of magic in my stories, I tend to get a bit over-the-top. A little of that is no big deal - hey, we're reading/writing fantasy, we should be able to handle it. The biggest problem that comes with this habit of mine is the overuse of certain words.

Word repetition is actually a big pet peeve of mine as well, which makes it all the more embarrassing when I use the word 'power' or 'force' several times in the space of two paragraphs. The problem is that I get the opposite problem when I try to pare them down by substituting other words. Power. Force. Magic. Wrath. Anger. Vigor. Violence. Et cetera. Et cetera.It becomes a comical cavalcade of vocabulary.

Really the only solution for this is to abbreviate the descriptions themselves, thus necessitating the use of fewer of these words. In fact, the description of abstract concepts is a realm that I need a much greater mastery over, given my love of trying to share them with the reader.

A couple tools I've used for this are examining such passages sentence by sentence and making sure that each one is saying something different. This rule alone has helped me the most. After all, I can write:

"The force of the mage's will pressed inward upon his enemy, befuddling the man's mind and slowing his blows. The mage lashed his foe with power, robbing his every action of urgency."

Pretty passages, maybe. Too bad they say the exact same thing. I have a habit of falling in love with my own sentences, when worded just so. No doubt most writers do. Lately I find myself getting irritated when I come across a mistake like the above, though. This is good - if modern me can be annoyed at past me, it will be easier to kill past me's darlings.

It also comes down in part to trusting the reader. I know exactly what I'm imagining, and I want so badly to get the reader there as well. I have to learn to put the skeleton of an idea out there, with only the crucial aspects sketched, and let the reader fill in the less important details themself.