Tag: Rules of Writing

Rules of Writing V

5. Thou shalt remember that there are four primary elements of a novel

Of the elements of a novel there are four, and four shall be the number of the elements. To two elements thou shalt not limit thyself, neither shalt thou write three, excepting in that thou proceedeth to four.

What are the four elements? They are the four foundations upon which I base my book reviews. Prose, Plot, Characters, and Ideas.

This identification of the four elements relates to the problem we discussed yesterday with a considerable amount of what is best described as women’s fiction, or if one prefers, fiction that merely happens to be predominantly written by women, published by women, and read by women. Which is to say most fiction today. For example, yesterday there were two very different takes on the writer Alice Munro, whose anthology of short stories presently heads the New York Times bestseller’s list.

Cretin wrote: “Alice Munro’s short stories are gifts to any reader with a discerning
eye and who is attracted to beautiful and insightful prose.”

Holmwood agreed, but added: “I’m willing to stipulate that she deserved the Nobel. She is a much more
talented prose artist than Vox Day or Larry Correia or Tom Clancy. But so what? The prose was indeed
fantastic. The content was hideously dull, pedestrian and outright
annoying.”

In other words, Ms Munro’s work is exceptionally strong in the first element, but apparently much weaker in the other three. That is enough to appeal to a certain type of reader, of whom there are clearly enough to land an author on the bestseller lists, but leaves a statistically significant group of readers totally uninterested in her books.  Clancy was notoriously tight with his Plot. Correia is strong on both Plot and Characters. I suspect most readers would say that I fare best in the Ideas compartment, with Prose being my area of weakness.

The point is that it’s not enough to write well, not even exceptionally well. One still has to write ABOUT SOMETHING. One could theoretically write a stylistically beautiful grocery list, or compose a litany of personal grievances that is full of literary pyrotechnics, but at the end of the day, what one has is a lovely wrapped box with nothing in it. If the end result of all the gorgeous prose is a finger-wagging lecture to Be Nice or Be Yourself or Sexiss is Bad, it’s worse than a box of nothing, it’s as if the author has condemned the reader to open a gift-wrapped fart.

What distinguishes a great novel from lesser novels is that all four elements are strong and in balance with each other. Let’s consider two very well-known novels, one that is considered great and one that is considered well-loved, but not great, and see how they fall into the four categories.

War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy

Prose: “Tolstoy was instrumental in bringing a new kind of consciousness to the
novel. His narrative structure is noted for its “god-like” ability to
hover over and within events, but also in the way it swiftly and
seamlessly portrayed a particular character’s point of view. His use of
visual detail is often cinematic in its scope, using the literary
equivalents of panning, wide shots and close-ups, to give dramatic
interest to battles and ballrooms alike. These devices, while not
exclusive to Tolstoy, are part of the new style of the novel that arose
in the mid-19th century and of which Tolstoy proved himself a master.” 10/10

Plot: Let’s just say “check” and leave it at that. It’s freaking WAR AND PEACE. 10/10

Characters: Powerful portraits of everyone from real historical characters to the fictional aristocrats of the five families. While perhaps not as unforgettable as the characters from Anna Karenina, the fact that the author wrote Anna Karenina should suffice to prove that he was more than competent when it came to characterizations. 9/10

Ideas: Brilliant. Mind-blowingly brilliant and may have inspired Kondratiev, Schumpeter, and Prechter.  “The 19th century Great Man Theory claims that historical events are the result of the actions of “heroes” and other great individuals, Tolstoy argues that this is impossible because of how rarely these actions result in great historical events. Rather, he argues, great historical events are the result of many smaller events driven by the thousands of individuals involved, (he compares this to Calculus, and the sum of infinitesimals). He then goes on to argue that these smaller events are the result of an inverse relationship between necessity and free-will, necessity being based on reason and therefore explainable by historical analysis, and free-will being based on “consciousness” and therefore inherently unpredictable.” 10/10

Total: 39/40. Verdict: Great Novel.

The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe by CS Lewis

Prose: Effective, evocative, but aimed at children. 7/10

Plot: Fast-paced, efficient, and entertaining from start to finish. Too short to harbor any twists and turns beyond the resurrection. 8/10

Characters: Flawless and unforgettable. Even the secondary characters, like Trumpkin and the captain of the White Witch’s secret police, Maugrim, are powerfully portrayed. 10/10

Ideas: Clever, but derivative. From the concept of the closet to another world borrowed from George MacDonald’s The Princess and the Goblin to the entire world being a parable for the Christian religion, Lewis is putting a fresh and shiny polish on existing ideas. 6/10.

Total: 31/40. Verdict: Good book, but without such exceptional characters and the power of the Christian narrative, would probably have been forgotten by now.

So, the reason we see the Tolstoy book as being a Great Novel while the best-known, most successful Lewis book is merely a well-loved novel is because the Prose and the Idea elements are stronger in Tolstoy.

Most fiction is lacking in two elements. Historically, the so-called male genres tended to be lacking in Prose and Characters. The female genres tended to be lacking in Prose, Plot, and Ideas since most woman-written fiction utilizes a single plot: will the reader’s representative choose Male A or Male B?(1)  I suspect this is why female writers historically tended to be more successful in the mystery genre; the structural limits imposed upon the genre by its nature tended to reduce ability to rely upon The One Plot.

What changed over the last forty years in SF/F is that more writers of both sexes with stronger, better-trained Prose skills and a greater interest in Characters entered the field, but what they didn’t realize is that they had little in the way of Ideas and their substitution of conventional and feminist left-wing ideology for original Ideas tended to cripple their Characters despite their greater interest in it.

So, whether you make use of an outline or you are disposed towards simply making up your story as you go along, you should be cognizant of what you, as a writer, have to offer the reader in terms of the four primary elements. No writer has it all; we all have strengths in some areas and weaknesses in the other. And whether one decides to try to shore up a weakness or compensate for it by providing excellence in one particular area, understanding where one’s strengths and weaknesses are should help one write better fiction.

(1) There is also the thinly disguised alternative to The One Plot, in which Male B is actually herself, her freedom, her education, her career, etc. It would be interesting to research what percentage of female fiction boils down to dithering between two options for several hundred pages. It’s basically shopping by proxy.

Rules of Writing IV

4. Thou shalt make thy plots and thy characters mutually consistent

Most writers understand the need to make their plots coherent and to keep the dialogue and actions of their characters self-consistent. However, a surprisingly common error is to fail to understand the necessity to make the intersections of plot and character consistent with both as well.

Let me provide an explanatory example. In Piers Anthony’s Split Infinity, the protagonist Stile is a serf and master gamesman who has been lurking just out of the top rankings for his age group because he did not wish to rank highly enough to qualify for the big annual tournament that will lead to either citizen status or exile. However, circumstances change and Stile decides he has to compete in the tournament even though he has another year or two before his serfdom expires and he would be automatically exiled.

Stile rapidly defeats the first few competitors he challenges and moves up the ranks to challenge Hulk.  He has to beat Hulk and he is under severe time pressure to not only beat him and complete the next challenges quickly before the start of the tournament.

However, Hulk is a physical giant and Stile, being a jockey of small stature, has serious size issues. Through one of the more entertaining aspects of the book, the Game Grid, the two end up competing in a marathon. Stile is in bad shape physically, but it’s a lot easier for him to run long distances than the massive Hulk, so he literally runs Hulk into the ground.

Being a serious competitor, Hulk won’t quit but runs until he collapses. Despite his pressing need to win, despite the time pressure, Stile mysteriously offers Hulk a draw, even though doing so will cost him at least one critical day according to the rules, and possibly more depending upon the rules concerning injuries.

Why? The reason is that Stile is obviously Anthony’s Mary Sue, so much so that I concluded, before I’d even finished Split Infinity, that Anthony was very short himself.  (Sure enough, I looked it up and learned the following: “his physical development was also delayed, causing him to be unusually short into his college years.”) Because Stile is the Mary Sue, Anthony can’t resist the urge to portray Stile as the noblest of the noble, turning down a certain and well-merited victory out of sporting concern for his opponent, despite the way in which the noble gesture completely destroys both the plot as well as the reader’s view of Stile as a maniacal competitor.

In fact, this scene comes only a few pages after we’ve been treated to a strange little explication of what we are told is the notorious “Stile stare”, a gaze of such implacable hostility that it can cause an otherwise adept Gamesman to stumble and make basic mistakes in an intellectual contest.  So, we’re asked to believe, in less than 10 pages, that Stile is willing to throw away a victory just because his opponent is exhausted despite being as viciously competitive as Michael Jordan? This simply isn’t credible.

Anthony belatedly salvages the plot by having Hulk provide an ex post facto concession, which does nothing more than get Stile right back to where he had been before his inexplicably magnanimous gesture, the victor of the contest.  Only now, instead of knowing him to be a ruthless competitor and a hero trying to save two worlds, we have learned that he is also the ultimate good sport. Which, of course, turns out to be of absolutely no import whatsoever.

Injecting this sort of plot-character inconsistency isn’t necessarily related to Mary Sue characters, though. It can also stem from an attempt to generate artificial drama, or to provide the author with a chance to provide a little impromptu lecture. Robert Heinlein not infrequently indulged in the latter, writing scenes where the male protagonist would suddenly and inflexibly take a stand on some incredibly minor principle in a manner that would not only put his romantic relationship in doubt, but in some cases, jeopardize the character’s primary objective.

There are two problems with this sort of inconsistency.  First, the effect usually comes off as bathos because any drama created in this manner is observably artificial by the logic of the fictional world. Second, the inconsistency tends to jolt the reader out of the story because it forces him to question his previous conclusions about the character.

If you know who your characters are and you understand how they relate to your plot, there will be no need for them to come into conflict. Resist the urge to show off how wonderful your favorite characters are, in fact, I would encourage you to intentionally show them failing from time to time, or indulging in a genuine human weakness, just to combat the usual authorial tendency to always present his favorites in an unconvincingly rosy light.  It is better to exaggerate a character’s behavioral tendencies than to violate them, especially when the plot depends upon those tendencies.

Rules of Writing III

3. Thou shalt not make thy characters graven images of thyself

One of the weakest elements in a distressingly large amount of modern fiction is the character as authorial wish fulfillment. While all of the author’s characters spring from either the author’s personal experience, historical research, past reading, or imagination, the character as author’s representative almost always tends to weaken the story as well as the reader’s ability to immerse himself in it.

This can be seen most clearly in the example of the Mary Sue trope, which is described as follows:

The name “Mary Sue” comes from the 1974 Star Trek fanfic A Trekkie’s Tale. Originally written as a parody of the standard Self Insert Fic of the time (as opposed to any particular traits), the name was quickly adopted by the Star Trek fanfiction community…. The prototypical Mary Sue is an original female character in a fanfic who obviously serves as an idealized version of the author mainly for the purpose of Wish Fulfillment. She’s exotically beautiful, often having an unusual hair or eye color, and has a similarly cool and exotic name. She’s exceptionally talented in an implausibly wide variety of areas, and may possess skills that are rare or nonexistent in the canon setting. She also lacks any realistic, or at least story-relevant, character flaws — either that or her “flaws” are obviously meant to be endearing.

She has an unusual and dramatic Back Story. The canon protagonists are all overwhelmed with admiration for her beauty, wit, courage and other virtues, and are quick to adopt her as one of their True Companions, even characters who are usually antisocial and untrusting; if any character doesn’t love her, that character gets an extremely unsympathetic portrayal. She has some sort of especially close relationship to the author’s favorite canon character — their love interest, illegitimate child, never-before-mentioned sister, etc. Other than that, the canon characters are quickly reduced to awestruck cheerleaders, watching from the sidelines as Mary Sue outstrips them in their areas of expertise and solves problems that have stymied them for the entire series.

In other words, the term “Mary Sue” is generally slapped on a character who is important in the story, possesses unusual physical traits, and has an irrelevantly over-skilled or over-idealized nature.

The most important aspect of the Mary Sue is its role as the author’s idealized self-representative in the story.  An example that many of the readers here will recognize is Owen Zastava Pitt in Larry Correia’s Monster Hunter International. Now, the character of Pitt works much more effectively than the average Mary Sue because the idealized version of a giant Portuguese man who makes a regular habit of shooting very large guns is both intrinsically interesting and entirely credible when it comes to slaughtering werewolves and other monsters.  Larry can get away with it because he is a literally larger-than-life character himself. The average novelist, being an obese woman or a man of low socio-sexual rank, whose most notable personal characteristics are a moderately high IQ and a preference for snarky wit, cannot.

But even a credible Mary Sue limits the story and tends to render it predictable. This is because we immediately know who is going to win the argument, have the last word, get the girl, and save the day.  We know who the good guys and the bad guys will be on the basis of Mary Sue’s likes and dislikes. That’s not a problem in formulaic genres such as mystery and romance where the experience expected is akin to a literary roller coaster, but doesn’t work as well in other genres, particularly in a series.

Now, because they are drawn from his imagination, most of an author’s characters will reflect some aspect of the author.  A female character might not represent him, but rather, the sort of woman to whom he is attracted. Heinlein’s ubiquitous redheads would be the primary example here. A villainous character might not represent the author, but possess traits that the author dislikes or fears in himself or others.  Jim Butcher has written a guide to writing characters which I found very interesting in that it reveals how he has created characters who are both memorable and irritatingly unrealistic at the same time.

What is (or what makes) an interesting character?  While no one thing can really stake a sole claim, several things consistently make a team contribution: 

Exaggeration
Exotic position
Introduction
Verisimilitude
Empathy

I found Butcher’s thoughts on the subject to be fascinating because he has, over time, managed to create some of the most successful but irritating characters outside of the world of Robert Jordan.  But I suspect that the weaker aspects of his characters actually stem from the strength of his approach; the problem appears to be that Butcher often gets the aspects of verisimilitude and empathy wrong due to low socio-sexual rank and a sub-par grasp of human intersexual relations. I suspect that Harry Dresden is somewhat of a Mary Sue due to his arrested psychosexual development that prevents him from pursuing women or even responding to female advances.

(Holding off on banging the little supercop for a book or three in the interest of not devolving into a story about relationships is fine. Serially turning down every sexually interested woman for twenty books indicates either a religious vocation or serious problem.)

I’m not sure about the Exaggeration aspect either. I mean, I can see how it would be effective in the sort of series where one or two characters are considerably more important than the rest, but I think it would be mistake in a series that features more of an ensemble cast.

Exercises:

1. Write down the five chief characteristics of your Mary Sue character using Butcher’s guide. Now write five chief characteristics of a character that has nothing in common with the Mary Sue.  Then write a one-page interaction in which the latter character gets the better of the Mary Sue.  (You can post the Mary Sue characteristics here if you like.  But spare us the second five and the interaction.)

2. Identify which character from ATOB most closely approaches my Mary Sue. Explain why you believe that to be the case.

Rules of Writing II: Thou shalt know how it ends

Rules of Writing II

2. Thou shalt know how it ends

This may seem obvious, but based on numerous books I have read, knowing the ending is something that far too few writers do before they initially set their metaphorical pen to paper.

There are three types of novelists. The first is the Outliner. These are highly organized writers who are able to carefully plan out how the book will proceed and more or less stick to their plan.  This is probably the ideal way to go about writing novels, but it’s also extremely difficult if you are insufficiently organized.  Outliners tend to write books that are tightly plotted, idea-driven, complex, and formulaic. Due to the complexity and scope of A Throne of Bones, most people assume that I am an Outliner, but as it happens, I am not. JK Rowling is one example of an outliner and I suspect most writers of murder mystery series are based on the predictable sequence of events in many murder mysteries.

The second type of novelist is the Explorer.  Most authors are Explorers and not only don’t have an outline to hand, they often have no idea what they’re going to write about when they sit down and stare at the blank page. They tend to follow the story where it takes them rather than forcing the story into preconceived directions. Explorers tend to write books that start well and finish badly, (or vice-versa), that are character-driven, dialogue-heavy, and of varying quality from book to book. I am an Explorer; of all the various characters who died in ATOB, there were only two characters whose deaths were planned and one of them was dictated by the historical event upon which the situation was based.

The third type of novelist is the Autobiographer. This is the author who is the protagonist of his every book.  They are generally uninterested in anything that isn’t themselves; if one looks closely enough, one can always see the image of the author underneath all of the major characters. If their lives or personalities are sufficiently interesting, Autobiographers may have one or two very good books in them, after which point they run out of material as their books are experience-driven rather than plot- or idea-driven. Jay McInerney is the foremost example of an Autobiographer; Dave Eggers and David Foster Wallace are more recent examples.  I also suspect that McRapey is an Autobiographer, which explains why his novels are more akin to professional fan fiction than original fiction.

But regardless of what type of novelist you are, it is always vital to know exactly how the book ends.  When I started writing ATOB, I knew precisely three things: the prologue, the conflict between the general and his young tribune, and the long retreat north.  But because I knew the beginning and the end, I had the necessary anchor points to prevent the story from wandering aimlessly adrift.

In the absence of an outline, knowing the end helps pace the story and forces it to keep moving forward. This can be done well or it can be done poorly, but one way or another, it will be done.  We have all read authors who wait too long to begin the descent into the end and wind up accelerating the story and crashing the book in the last two or three chapters, but even these negative examples are better than books that simply seem to stop without any warning or reason.  Knowing the end won’t only make the ending better, but it will help make everything in between the beginning and the end much more coherent.

Rules of Writing I: Thou shalt know thy world

Rules of writing I

A few weeks ago, Stickwick asked me if I would put down some of my thoughts concerning how one goes about writing fiction.  This is the first in who knows how many posts in response to her request.

1. Thou shalt know thy world

Many authors of SF/F don’t appear to give much, if any, thought to the world in which they are setting their novels.  I am not saying it is necessary to go to the lengths of a Tolkien and develop at least four of your own new languages and write a literature in each of them, only that if one simply leaps in and starts writing a novel without making some conscious decisions about the setting, one is going to be making unconscious decisions about it.

And most of the time, those unconscious decisions are going to draw heavily upon novels we have read or movies we have seen.  This is why, in many books in which one can readily observe that little conscious thought has gone into the setting, one can often recognize the various elements that are derived from other novels.  Even worse, those unconsciously copied elements are seldom harmonious and are not infrequently contradictory.

Let me make clear that I am not necessarily talking about the entire world here, only the section of the fictional world as it is exposed to the reader throughout the course of the novel. For example, in her Brother Cadfael novels, Ellis Peters seldom describes much of the world outside of Shropshire, but she provides a considerable amount of detail concerning Shrewsbury Abbey and the surrounding town and the bits of news that trickle in from outsiders indicate that she is well-versed in the relevant English history.

Exercises:  These should be answered here in the comments to permit discussion of them.  Try to come up with examples that someone else has not already provided.

1.  Name an example of a science fiction or fantasy world the author has clearly contemplated in some detail.  Explain why you believe that to be the case.  Middle Earth and Selenoth don’t count.

2. Name an example of a science fiction or fantasy world concerning which the author does not appear to have given sufficient thought to the setting.  Identify the primary disharmonious element that causes you to conclude that.  And just to forestall the obvious attempts at wit, Middle Earth and Selenoth don’t count.