A book is not soup. If a short story were a dish, it would be centered around a particular ingredient, and all the accompaniments would be designed to bring out the flavor of that ingredient.
Say a short story is chocolate truffles – it might have a hard or a soft center and be sweet or sweet-sour but – you wouldn’t shove a radish inside a truffle, much less would you shove carrot, onion,garlic,kale, potato and a dozen other things into the truffle. Because that would muddy the flavors and make the chocolate irrelevant.
A novel is more like a three course meal, starting with a carefully chosen salad, which prepares your palate for the main course, followed by a desert to finish with a reward.
On the other hand in soup – the sort of homey vegetable soup you make every day at home, not your refined lobster bisques — you just throw in a bunch of ingredients that work sort of uniformly, but the goal is not to showcase any “theme” or particularly flavor.
The problem is when your novel becomes soup.
I’m very prone to doing this to novels. I’m a “putter inner” which means every time I revise a novel I put more things in, including things that dilute the central theme.
However, there is another way to do just this – and you might do it because you think you’re supposed to.
Look, when the how to write books tell you that everyone has a story and everyone has his motives, it’s easy to get carried away.
When I was young and stupid (a condition persisting until last week) I took this advice to heart. This meant I wrote a book – 163k words – in which every character who came onto the page had a riveting story, and his ideas, and his goals. EVERY character.
It read something like this.
John came into the café. The waitress, whose name was Mary didn’t known that his name was John. What she saw was a young man, with thinning hair and a hard mouth. He reminded her of her uncle Mark, who had died in Vietnam. She’d never recovered from her favorite uncle’s death, and she thought that that early feeling of having been abandoned was responsible for her entire history of clutching too hard at her boyfriends so that they always left.
She sighed. “What will it be.”
“I’ll have the grapacino mocha double,” John said. He noticed there was a man sitting at the other end of the counter.
He didn’t know the other man’s name was Azrahel and that he’d always hated his name. In fact, when he was a little boy, he’d considered changing his name to Bob. His odd name often caused people to think he must be eccentric, which was a disadvantage for a chartered accountant, which was probably why he’d been laid off……
On and on and on for pages and pages and pages.
I’ve told you before it’s okay to have the occasional scene that just rounds out your character but which does not – necessarily – advance the plot. That’s fine. Those scenes – funny or serious, or remembered – might illuminate your character or world building.
On the other hand, make sure the extra scenes aren’t taking attention from your main plot. And your main characters aren’t being upstaged by your secondary or tertiary characters.
It’s okay to have two dimensional characters who show only as one characteristic and whose only purpose is advancing the plot – trust me on this. Provided they’re not your main characters, we really don’t care if their uncle Mark died in Vietnam.
And more than that, it’s okay to have walk-on characters who just show up to bring the coffee or ask if your character would like fries with that.
In real life, you cross paths with several people whose only function in your life is to ask something or bring something. They have no other reason in your story. In their own stories, they might be main characters and very important.
But in this story they just want to know if your coffee is all right.
Don’t let them steal the scene.
Mad Genius Club 
20 responses to “How Not to Make Soup”
This is very reassuring as I am trying to figure out just how much to flesh characters out in the ongoing book. The last one had a reviewer comment on cardboard characters (I know, I know, I am NOT to read my reviews, but it was an accident, and what has been seen…) so I was worried about it.
I tend to make huge complicated soups. And then start scooping out the non-essentials. Which often go into another pot, when I really wanted to be done cooking for awhile. But I usually wind up analyzing the original, and taking out whole subplots that have nothing to do with that particular story problem, and no, those characters really don’t need to have a cameo appearance just so my series readers know they’re still around.
And I really hate even giving names to secondary characters. Too many of them get uppity and start demanding their own stories.
Great. Now I’m hungry. Have you any idea how hard it is to keep this new year’s resolution?
I have to agree with this. There is nothing more annoying than having a character introduced and then… nothing. That’s it. If I’m learning a bunch of stuff about a character I expect that character to matter. They should be showing up again. When Tom Bombadil shows up and saves Merry and Pippin, then disappears not to be heard from until he gets a passing mention in the epilogue of the last books, it’s like, “Huh?” Why did Tolkein waste his (and my) time on this? Ironically, the purists were all upset when he got left out of the movie. I thought it was the greatest thing ever.
If we go into the waitresses uncle dying FOR NO REASON it does nothing for the story and frustrates the reader. Now,if it’s a murder mystery and a Vietnam era politician is the victim, and this waitress works nearby his office…
I mean, even if she didn’t do it, maybe she’s useful as a red herring. But at the end of the day, that’s still a reason for her to be there. It’s just when useless characters are introduced that I start to get frustrated.
I like to say that my short stories want to be novels (and the novel I’m working on started out that way . . .). With the novel, spare characters can be useful. If I hit a plot wall, I look back at the supporting cast who haven’t appeared for a few chapters and I can usually see how one of them can help the plot advance.
. . . or you start a pattern so that readers know that any minor character who gets a full biography and life history is going to be bumped off, and have lots and lots of minor characters. *koffDWkoff* And info-dumps, have lots and lots of info-dumps, too.
huh? John Ringo’s habit of doing this for every terrorist doesn’t fit any sort of DW initials I know… Though it is an amusing inversion of trope. 🙂 Once I figured out that every recitation of life story, education, and training was going to involve “and after five years of training, he was in this building, working on (project). He stuck his head up to see what was going on, and was promptly shot between the eyes by (protagonist)”… it was hilarious.
I was thinking of D. Weber.
I can think of at least three fanfics on the internet, that I enjoy, that may qualify as soup.
Maybe there is a place for soup, or maybe it results from errors of project management in storytelling.
I dunno.
I do know that meeting my taste is not the same as being best optimized for ‘selling’ the story to the reader.
If I like a setting, I may well enjoy reading the world-building notes.
It seems like I can’t be hit too many times with the ‘simplify’ clue-by-four.
ANYTHING that goes on long enough/is episodic, eventually becomes soup. Sometimes good soup.
So, I surmise a buffet is right out? (btw – I cop to having reached a definite middle of my young and stupid phase).
Just thinking about a different analogy. Specifically, drawing or sketching? Where one often picks out specific elements that are the focus of the piece, and reduces others to background, often deliberately removing or simplifying them. A master may very well include most of the stalks of wheat in the field or individual blossoms in the garden or even trees in the forest, but for most of us, a few in detail and the rest as just suggestions does the job.
Incidentally,
John came into the café. The waitress sighed. “What will it be?”
“I’ll have the grapacino mocha double,” John said. He noticed there was a stranger sitting at the other end of the counter.
Hum. Taking out the other folks, John turns out to still be pretty two-dimensional. Might need to beef him up a little… Should he smile at the waitress? Look at the menu, chuckle about how it used to be simple to get coffee, but now… I’ll have that grapacino mocha double? Check his hideout pistol after noticing the stranger at the end of the counter? Do something to show that he’s more than just a piece of cardboard pretending to be a primary character?
I usually have the opposite problem. Far from being primadonnas, most of my characters are just not into themselves and trying to get them to share their thoughts and feelings with the world requires a sternum saw of epic proportions. Probably why I end up being a filler-inner as well…
Oh, I have that too occasionally. My current problem is an extreme introvert and tells me NOTHING.
Find the chatty one and put them into a room together. See what they do. The reactions can tell you a lot. But then, the last time I had that problem I just put the quiet one into hell (literally, or at least a handy slightly satirical stereotype) and then wait. For me, interesting things happen. YMMV.
I make Dada stew, not just soup. It’s like big chunks of different novels are armwrestling for domination. Sometimes I think I should just keep writing and get out of the way, except that there are times when I have to keep track of what is happening. Or…do I? Is that just another anti-jedi mind trick?
My most cohesive plots are the ones where I didn’t plot. It’s like a knock without the door.
But it seems (from what you said) you get the stripped down version first– then more stuff later. Nope. I get the unfiltered full bore EVERYTHING the first time. I can get a vague and elusive sense of the story right off the bat, and I try to write it down. But that can backfire (often). As soon as I pay attention to that vague notion the whole rest of it spills out like hot soup from a firehose. Everybody is real. Sometimes I get the stories of inanimate objects… it’s insane. (No, not like The Sword. I get that too. No. That bookcase. That golf ball. That rug. *headdesk*)
By the time I get to the end of the data dump that is the cropduster depositing soup loads, I don’t have a complete one because it ranges so far and wide outside the point– and is trying to mate with three other incomplete stories– and the original vague sense is lost forever. So I have to figure out how to examine that vague sense while holding back chowder falls that’s fighting with black bean chili and tortilla soup. Eh, or maybe that’s cabbage. From this angle, who can tell!
I know it’s weird that I’m giving anybody advice (especially you, Sarah) but I’m great at getting the guys to talk. What I suck at is getting them to sit down, shut up, and talk one at a time.
A separate issue is how I suck at soup separation surgery… and honestly how do you practice that. A novel is a huge unwieldy object I can barely hold in my mind all at once. Especially when they come as a multiplex glob– and the finished product(s) wants to be “The Baroque Cycle” in more ways than one.
My short stories are never fragmented in this way, but are simple, so I don’t have that route. That may change with this current one which is longer than average, and I hope is not yet another novel. Oh, and it just broke 10k words. Live in hope…
This is not the sort of mess I feel like outsourcing. I don’t think I could, honestly– it’s just too much put on the shoulders of another person. A very good editor who specializes in newbies I think just gave up.
Though I’ve just run across those ancient memory exercises again. I’m thinking of trying to put form structure from soup in the same way. This way, it doesn’t have to be a rigid linear object that kills the spirit of the thing. But it would have certain built in limitations that incentivize a complete story. At least the thought experiment is promising.
I hope this wasn’t *too* whiny. I think I’m chasing my tail, and that is frustrating. We’ll see what happens when my new idea hits pavement.
font, no. I don’t get a stripped down version. A lot of my books are basically first version with typos fixed — aka AFGM. I had to teach myself to stop going over it, because I add cr*p, not needed stuff.
I’m sorry. I’m seeing my betas, two of which write for this blog, laughing their heads off at the idea of my “stripped down” first draft. heck, when I have major revision recommended by my publisher, it’s “cut this”
Got it. I’ll just keep plugging away, and like an economist, learn how to subtract. 🙂