by Kate Paulk

After the most basic tools come the tools that use those basics. My view here is a little unusual: I’ve never seen what I consider then next level of essentials listed as things a writer should know. My view is that the next level of tools contains – drumroll please – logic, reason, and rhetoric.

Okay. While staring at a virtual sea of stunned mullets is kind of gratifying, it’s not exactly what I want. Here’s why I chose these as the second-layer writer’s tools:

Logic – in the mathematical and English forms – is utterly essential when you want to figure out what the implications of something might be. If you don’t know the basics, you’re going to make mistakes that can render your world-building – or worse, your characters – ridiculous. Like statistics, logic is a tool that can go into all manner of strange places once you know how to use it, but you have to know how to use it or it will bite you. It’s a foundation. To take a famous example, Douglas Adams’ proof of the non-existence of God is a lovely example of taking logic to interesting places. Go and look it up if you’re not familiar with it, and remember the fallacy Adams deliberately embedded in the argument for comedic effect: God is by definition not bound by human constructs like logic (well, one of the fallacies. If you don’t like the spelling, read Pratchett’s Lords and Ladies instead, where phallacies abound. And… do other things that don’t need to be mentioned on a PG blog-space).

Reason – the use of normal language to state logical postulates rather than using the specialized subset of language that classical logic employs. After all, if your book contains something like “For all elephants in Asia, there exists a subset of elephants such that…” you’d better be writing a logic textbook. Fiction readers aren’t going to read that. They want something more like your character being surprised by something about Asian elephants that’s not true of African elephants. And of course, that tidbit had better be critical to the plot somehow – which is a more advanced part of the toolbox. Okay, that’s not the world’s best example, but I don’t have the time to do the kind of research I’d need to go into much more detail.

Here’s an example I used way back: let’s assume that blood – human blood – is the currency. So you don’t pay in dollars, you pay in pints. Or whatever. The blood bank literally stores blood. Okay… Why? The obvious answer there is that vampires are in charge. To them, blood is more important than anything else, and as a rule, people tend to use something that’s both important and not super-abundant as a proxy for value. And reasoning back a little further… the vampires worked out that they had to ration themselves or they’d wipe out the supply. So they set up a tithing system to keep the mortals as happy serfs and them supplied with the red stuff. Naturally someone’s going to offer to do someone else’s tithe for them in return for something they really want… and you have the beginnings of a currency. As soon as some inventive sort works out how to store it and keep it “good” for vampires, people can deposit when they have enough, and the vamps make withdrawals… and then people can make withdrawals using notes that are effectively promises to supply a quantity of blood. That makes it money – and sets the stage for some fun conflicts. That’s reasoning through the potential of some kind of situation to see where it takes you, and whether you can use it in a story.

Rhetoric builds on logic and reason – it’s language, written or spoken, intended to persuade. We need this as writers first because we want to persuade people to look at our books, preferably by a more sophisticated method than jumping up and down going “Is book! Is good!” (totally useless bonus points to the first person to name that reference). Then we need to persuade them to keep reading – and we need to know how to recognize someone who’s trying to persuade us about something. Anything.

Why does it matter? We’re at the very bottom of the power heap in traditional publishing. Readers have more power over our careers than we do. This isn’t a bitch, it’s a statement of fact. What’s more, a lot of people have a great deal of power riding on keeping us there. When someone wants to publish your book, they’re naturally going to want to do so at the lowest possible cost to their side of the fence – which translates to not paying you as much as you’d like. If you can’t tell when someone is trying to convince you that smell is actually the finest caviar and not a pile of fish bones that have been left in the sun for a week in midsummer, well… I only hope you have a good sense of smell.

On top of that, of course, you need to convince them to not only buy your book, but to buy it, get it printed and on shelves, and a whole host of other things that go with publication. When the only thing you’re allowed to use is your book. Learn the techniques. Read ads, read opinion pieces, and above all read political statements from every flavor of politics you can get hold of. Read them to analyze them: what they’re trying to convince you to do or think, what they left out, what they’re highlighting. Use that in your book. Front load it with sparklies and cookies that will grab a reader’s attention, and make sure you sprinkle the cookies throughout, so that they don’t want to put it down. Because in today’s world, chances are if someone puts that manuscript down, they’re not picking it back up except to round-file it. (Cookies here mean little details that you know – because you did do your research, right? – will appeal to the person you’re trying to get to buy it. Or the demographic who’s most likely to be the first-pass filter as well as the person you hope is going to buy). Rhetorical skills are beyond price in this battle of wills. If you can persuade someone without appearing to be making any attempt to convince them of anything… You have the upper hand, no matter what it looks like from the outside.

Next time: word games. Fair warning – there will be puns. Because I’m just that pungent.