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Did You Want Some Fiction With Your Message?

As several folks here have observed a few times, sermons thinly disguised as fiction suck. And not in the fun way, either.

Personally, I’ve never enjoyed a message tract with a thin veneer of fiction, regardless of whether or not I agreed with the message. These can work reasonably well in short form, if written well enough (very few authors meet that bar), but in novel-length works, not so much.

The end result emerges rather like the pizza the Husband and I once ordered from the local pizza joint, where we made the mistake of requesting extra garlic. What we got would have given any self-respecting vampire fits: we couldn’t taste anything except garlic. We took a bite, looked at each other. The rest of the pizza went in the trash. The words “I wanted a pizza with extra garlic, not garlic garnished with pizza” were used. Then we found something else to eat, and we never went near that place again. Even though at the time it was quite literally half a block away.

This is what message fiction usually does to the reader who isn’t reading it for the message (someone who’s reading for the message is likely to get irritated by the unnecessary plot and characterization the author has added, so it’s a no-win either way). It turns them off. Sometimes it turns them off reading altogether, especially when they’re force-fed a diet of the most dreary, dismal, and shitty message fiction imaginable (hello, school reading lists).

I’m sure the proponents of having fiction with the message would think this is not a bad thing, but I beg to differ. You see, readers of fiction tend to draw their own messages from that fiction. It was fiction that taught me it was possible to endure and emerge more or less intact despite years of vicious bullying. Fiction gave me hope, and it showed me there were ways to be who I was even if things were shitty at the time.

It wasn’t message fiction. It was a mix of things: any historical fiction I could get hold of in the school and town library (and that they’d let me borrow, since librarians tend to be kind of reluctant to let the 8 year old kid borrow from the grown-ups section), Doctor Who novelizations (which lead into my love of science fiction and fantasy), and pretty much anything else that took my fancy. I read so much that I didn’t have a library card, I had a set of them stapled together and I used the initials of the book title to write in what I was borrowing because I was getting them in job lots.

Along the way I picked up an extra serve of Heinleinian cussed independence, some of Laura Ingalls Wilder’s self-sufficiency, an abiding loathing of bullying in any form, and many, many reminders that I could do good and sometimes heroic stuff too, even if I was scared.

If I’d been stuck with message fiction, I wouldn’t have gained any of that, not least because the characters in every message piece I’ve read are functionally ciphers standing in or sometimes embodying the virtues the author wants to showcase or the evils the author wants to decry. I preferred the heroes who were scared and did it anyway because they had to. Edmund Pevensie, confused and frightened, and realizing what he’d betrayed but still going after the White Witch and nearly dying in the process. Jill in a later Narnia book crying and trying to keep her bowstring from getting wet because she couldn’t afford to do that. Laura Ingalls and her battles with jealousy of her too-perfect older sister who she also loved dearly (Yes, I’m aware the Little House books are fictionalized autobiography. I didn’t know that when I read them as a child). Anne Shirley and her often disastrous romantic fantasies.

The messages came through without the sermon. Simple messages: it’s better to be honest than not. It’s better to be kind than cruel, but sometimes you have to be harsh and sometimes the wrong group wins. Life is harsh and life doesn’t care. Be true to yourself. Those messages.

Perhaps more to the point, I learned them for myself, without some Great Expert telling me how it was supposed to be. It’s because I learned them for myself that they stuck and they meant something to me. Being lectured is just like being stuck in a classroom waiting for the bell to go so you can be free again.

Since most people want to do things their way at some level, letting message emerge seamlessly from the interaction of your characters and plot for your readers to discover has much more impact. It also doesn’t make reader-puppies sad and desperate to escape you.

I know which way I choose.

Ride Alongs

Yesterday I found myself trying to agree with/explain to a young man how to find the thread of a novel, and how to prune the parts that don’t fit.

I was doing this LONG before I knew why I was doing it, based it on a “gut feel” I couldn’t explain.  (There are things I STILL do by gut feel, including finding the voice and setting the pace of a novel.  I don’t think it’s entirely possible to control every detail of a novel RATIONALLY.  Or at least not for a certain type of writer, which I’d guess I am, which is why I say “the thing isn’t exactly under my control.”)

The problem is this: the gut feeling can lead you astray and the thing it most often leads you astray on is plot, at least if you don’t figure out what you’re trying to accomplish.  It’s your world and your people; you love it like you can’t help loving it, and of course you want to spend way more time there just hanging out with your creations than anyone not invested in it is likely to.

My first book, I was painfully aware that I wasn’t getting “plot” at the level the pros did.  Thing was, ever book I read said things like “Plot are the things that happen.”  Well, thank you very much.  And I suppose the white horse of Napoleon is white?

There are guides, of course, and you can find them yourself, you look for them.  The W plot is a series of try fail sequences, in which the W tracks how well your character is doing at extricating him/herself from difficulties.  You start at the top, the stable situation, but you want something, and you try for it, and when you end, you’re at a lower position.  Then you try again, and end slightly higher, but there is still (the same or another problem) and you try again and–

It’s a mutant W as most of them have at least three try fail, even for short stories, and the low point goes lower and lower, until the climax, when the problems are solved, etc, and suddenly the leg goes shooting back up to where you started.  It looks something like this, for a novel with multiple try-fail sequences:

This type of plot is particularly useful for thrillers, women in peril, hard boiled mysteries and other sorts of plot where your character faces the gates of hell and death is at his side.

It is less useful for plots of interior development, self-discovery or — as my novels tend to be — mixed.

The greatest danger with this peaks and valleys W plot is that you’ll end just having elephants fall from the ceiling at your characters.  I.e. the character’s efforts make things a little better, you need to get him/her in trouble again, so you just have something drop on the character, unforeseen.  That type of plot is tiresome and weirdly gets boring quickly.  The rules of writing determine that your character trip over something the reader can foresee but which is invisible to the character.

Say your character is being chased, goes into an old house to escape. Things get a little better, the house is a place to hide.  But he/she overhears someone plotting a crime.  Worse, the criminals know someone is listening.  Character comes out, into fog, and realizes he/she lost a distinctive, traceable piece of jewelry.  Things get worse.  Character is now being chased by original antagonist AND people who know they were overheard (they might be the same or not, mind you.)

So, why have things get slightly better?  Why the respite of having a place and not being chased, before things get worse?  Well, mostly because otherwise it’s incredibly tiring.  I did this with a book of mind, Mirrorplay (whose title is now being used for something else) because I didn’t know any better.  It was my first novel in a consciously created world, and I felt it was important to do this big heroic thing, and I just had things drop on my character, and he couldn’t escape.  Round about the middle of the novel, that character was worse than dead.  He was lifeless.  And I had no more interest in him.  There’s only so many walls you can drop on a character before he’s pancake-flat.

Turns out the best structure for a heroic novel is Campbell’s hero Journey.  the best destillation of it is the one used by Disney (yes, Disney, deal) which is compiled in the book writers’ Journey.  Your library probably has it, and if not, it’s NOT available on kindle, because eh traditional publishing.  But you can find reasonably priced used copies here.

Thing is that the hero journey is very flexible.  VERY flexible.  And if you don’t have an internal compass to tell you when you’re going wrong, you’re going to get lost in your own head.  So you’d better take some breadcrumbs.

What are the breadcrumbs you can take for this sort of thing?

Well, in my case… with my very first novel that was published, I knew I didn’t know how to plot, and I was sure there was some sort of secret to it, some thing that told you when a plot fit.  I’d got enough rejections telling me I needed to learn to plot.  (Actually they were wrong, I needed to learn to foreshadow.  I had sort of an instinctive grasp on plot, but I didn’t know it and was overthinking it.  (Thank you to Dave Freer who after I had about 8 books out, published, looked at my uh… oeuvre, and put his finger on the problem in a way agents and publishers had missed, and told me “You have to learn to foreshadow, Sarah.  I can see the plot, but one experiences it like something dropped from nowhere.”  (If you want a post on foreshadowing, which I had to learn hand over hand, by observation, let me know, will do that next week.))  So for my first book, I ended up — which was not… abnormal for me in those days — with a 350k word formless blob.

Now, you can publish formless blobs if you’re lucky — I’ve read a number of them, some in mystery — but a) I’m not lucky.  b) unless you have a lot of promo to convince the reader you’re just too deep for normal humans, the reader will get to the end of it and go “now, what WAS the point of that?” which was not the reaction I wanted. c) even if you’re lucky and get some following there ain’t no way you’re going to appeal to a lot of people with your avant garde formless blob.

So I did what writers do when there’s a part of their craft that’s lacking: I stole it.  Ill Met by Moonlight borrows a lot of its plot from Tam Lin.

Unfortunately I still had exactly clue zero what I was doing on the plot front, which means I was easily influenced, and my second agent convinced me my second book, as finished, had no plot.  (It did.  It NEEDED foreshadowing.)  So, he made me rewrite it and superimposed what he seemed to think was the “one, true plot” which was a thriller plot.  Since it sat very uneasily on an Elizabethan fantasy, that book — All Night Awake — traditional AND indie, is my WORST selling book out of thirty many (I haven’t counted recently, okay?  Give me a break. Do you want me to count, or do you want me to write?)

I continued sort of blundering around, looking for a plot, before I developed my current philosophy of plot I THINK around the time I wrote the second Shifter’s book, Gentleman Takes A Chance.  (Available as part of the omnibus Night Shifters.)

So, does that mean that my books up till then had no plot?  Well… no.  In fact Darkship Thieves was written before Ill Met By Moonlight and it has a plot, though it is arguably three novellas shoved together (the second half, the sequence of Thena waking up in the hospital was written first and I thought it was going to be a short story.  When it became clear it was too large to sell anywhere, I wrote the two beginning sequences.  In reverse order.  Because the thing isn’t entirely under my control and also some assembly required.)  BUT it has a perfectly functional plot.

The problem is after I started overthinking it, I had to think myself out of it.  Because that’s how I work.  And it took me to Gentleman Takes A Choice to take full hold of my plot philosophy.

It turns out all those people who told me the plot was that things happened, were right, if unhelpful.

The reasons I can’t tell you how to plot, is that IT’S YOUR PLOT.  Plot is intimately bound up with who you are, how you think, and how you process information.  Also, your objectives for your book.  What I mean is there is no right or wrong way to plot.

Asking me what is the right plot for your book is like asking “Why is a mouse when it spins?”  It can be asked, there just isn’t an answer in this universe.

As to what belongs in a novel and out, you get some useful answers — ahem useful — like “remove everything that isn’t advancing the plot” (which meant I used to cut things to the bone, including character development and leave the reader nothing to hold onto.)  And “your novel must be x length, so cut what you need to cut so it’s x length and still a story.”  The butchery done in the name of that last can’t be described.

Then there’s the slightly more useful — for certain writers — “follow your theme.”  This is particularly useful to writers who first come up with a theme, say “motherhood” or “love of dogs.”  You just remove everything that doesn’t enhance that, though you might end up writing a lot on the way there.

Problem is I’m not one of those writers.  Oh, my novels have a theme, and it’s usually something I’m trying to noodle, because I’m brain is not very useful as a direct-thinking instrument.  Sure, it’s okay if the theme is small enough.  But when I’m trying to digest something big, like an emotional experience, the only way I can process it is by accretion and similarity.  And sometimes I only realize afterwards what the “theme” was.  (Sometimes when I get my first review and go “Oh.”)  Sure, in retrospect it’s easy.  And I know why I’m in that mental cull de sac. For instance, right now there’s a whole lot of mothering and motherhood in my books, because I’m at the almost-empty nest stage, and at a guess my brain is going “So, what was THAT all about?” about the entire “raising the boys” period.

At some point before GTAC I realized what I WANTED to do, which is part and parcel of what plots are in a book.  Sort of the pointing arrow of the objective.

I realized this by trying to figure out why the nineteenth century novels a friend adores and tries to imitate no longer draw or hold (with limited exceptions.)  Which led me down the path of the novels I studied in school, which often had a whole novella or unrelated sequences stuck in, or the path of why Jane Austen has almost no description (she was writing about a small set to that same small, homogeneous set.  This means when she said “it was a handsomely appointed drawing room” to us it’s a puzzle, to them it was a vivid picture.)

This led me to what novels are NOW.  Not all novels, mind you, and I’m not saying you can’t rationally start with theme and build a plot from there.

What I’m saying is that the novel these days has ONE great advantage over movies and games (besides being cheaper to create): it’s easy to create as a unit of emotion.

You can write things in such a way that your readers are ride-alongs in a plot that creates a complete emotional experience.  Sure, movies do it too, to an extent, but it’s a little different, because seeing things happen is a distancing magazine.  It’s harder to remember then as things that happened to you.

However a novel done right means the writer takes a ride-along in the space behind the eyes.  For a time you’re someone else, and you experience something as intensely as if it happened to you.  In fact, done right, it is capable of creating false memories.

This is a guide to the plot, because inviting the reader in is making him your accomplice/co-conspirator.

I was discussing with a friend collaborating on a book of how to write violence for writers (probably four actually and yes, more anon.  We had one very long meeting, and then I left to to to Dallas, so I haven’t sent him the outline yet, and I’m the one supposed to write that.) And we came up with “when the hero kills the villain, if you’ve done things right, you’ve built the need for the villain to die to the point the reader is an accomplice before the fact.  He’s going “KILLHIMKILLHIMKILLHIM.”  long before the last bullet is fired/the sword is driven home, etc.

But it’s not just with violence.  It’s with everything.  If the writer has done his/her job and guided the plot accordingly, by the end you’re riding along with the romance, too, and you want the marriage as much if not more as the main character.

So, in every type of book, if your philosophy of writing is like mine (and I’m not saying it is) sure, use the W or the campbell, or whatever you want.  But when you’re looking at your plot in the cool and dispassionate light of day, keep in what enhances the experience and invites readers into that ride-along, and discard everything that doesn’t.

It’s that simple.  And I think it will take me the res tof my life to master.

‘Bring out yer dead’

I’m a volunteer Ambulance officer, and my son assures me on the verge of canonization. Oh, it’s not what I do, or that I’m God’s gift to that (I’m not. I’m a very minor and inept cog.  I find the fact that I’m responsible for taking decisions (fast and effectively) that if I have screwed up, I could kill or maim the person I’m trying to save incredibly hard to handle.). No: It’s all the miraculous cures when the death’s-door patient sees who will be driving: “I’m feeling much better! I think I’ll take a little walk.”

Heh. I’ll probably have a terrible accident tomorrow, but oddly, besides reversing my ute into a stump hidden in the tall grass, I haven’t hit anything yet. I used to ride a motorbike with only a front brake. It made me quite observant. And when I’m actually conveying patients I give that task my full concentration, and try not to help them too much to suddenly find religion.

Ahem. I seem to have lost my thread again. Anyway, what I was going to write about was something that came out two of us Ambos talking about very stuff of sf and some fantasy: real disaster. Now, let’s be honest many a writer has never experienced much in the way of disasters. Trust me, this is a good thing, even if it does sometimes make their books irritate the hell out of me. I’ve never been through a major disaster (and I’d like to keep it that way. About 60 injured in bunch was my worst. That was pretty terrible. I can only admire the guys who deal with hundreds or thousands) but I’ve been through a lot more than my fair share of lesser ones – on both sides of the equation (the victim and the rescuer) and a couple of times both. I hasten to assure you that I’m not a jinx (much).

The awkward thing is how badly you remember a lot of it. Seriously, the adrenalin kicks in, and you just do stuff. Well, about 10% of people just do stuff, some of it incredible, some incredibly stupid. The other 90% do freeze and/or panic. Okay maybe I exaggerate a trifle. I’m not much good at most things, but fortunately that also includes panic. I’ve done the wrong thing a few times, but without the panic. I’ll probably master it at precisely the wrong time. That still doesn’t mean I am that good at reconstructing disaster and what happens – besides that people panic. It does mean that when I read SHTF disasters, I often find them throwing me out of the book, without precisely knowing why.

Now, it is perfectly possible that it throws me out simply because of my background. That other people, with the same lack of experience as the writer, think that in a crisis most people do something (besides freeze, panic, or run around like chickens just after having their heads cut off). There is a reason why the military and emergency services practice, practice, practice, practice – because seriously, it’s a lousy time to try and think. Some people do, but most can’t. They (or at least some people) can however go through a pre-thought, pre-practiced routine – whether that’s taking cover and returning fire, or applying pressure to a major bleed, or sounding a fire-alarm. Yeah, I know: all that planning usually goes to shit, because it never happens according to plan. But, speaking personally, that few seconds of practiced, drilled-into-you behavior calms me and helps me to think. Sometimes it’ll be wrong reaction, but generally it saves lives.

So I thought it might be worth trying a bit of this ‘crowd-sourcing’ stuff. Maybe if pool experiences and memories, we’ll get the whole picture. Adrenalin does strange things to me, I don’t even know if they’re normal. Yes, heart rate goes up, mouth dries. Those are common. I also lose all emotion (and normally I’m a big softy. Bawl my eyes out at a funeral) – but I can (and have) dealt with the horrible and tragic with a complete clinical detachment. I know hysterical strength is well reported. It’s very real – I’ve carried twice my body-weight, lifted things I can’t normally move. Pain is another odd one. Unexpected injury can be mind-numbingly sore, robbing you of the capacity for action – expected (or at least possible and known to be) when you’re full of adrenalin – hurts like hell… later.

Under that sort of stress – especially searching or waiting, the jokes are tasteless, crude, and absolutely necessary. Oh and really funny.

What you don’t do (or not me, anyway) is agonize about decisions, or experience a second’s worth of angst. (one of my co-authors –Misty — has people angsting mid crisis. Maybe she does.  It’s so unlike me, it drives me spare)

Later is always hard. The hardest part is remembering it all. I find I get scenes, like snapshots, rather than a whole movie. I replay it a lot. I can’t sleep – even a call-out will have me awake for 4-5 hours. Maybe that’s just me. Sex, if it happens is pretty desperate, urgent, and usually entirely without pre-amble.

So: anything you guys can remember?

The other thing I am very aware of is just how in disaster, people actually show a face that you don’t see in day-to-day life. Some of it… seems a great reason to preserve the human race. And some of it shows what useless assholes some people are (the guy who ran up his wife’s back to get into a tree when they were being chased by a Rhino comes to mind. Photographs of the boot-print on her back were used in the divorce case.)

Other people show sacrifice and kindness and courage so far past any expectation as to leave you wondering if anyone knew that quiet guy who drowned, going back into the water for the fourth flood victim, was really something of a demi-god in disguise. (That’s my only ghost story. I was underwater, bleeding like a stuck pig with several 8 inch cuts down my back from being swept over a rock. I was exsanguinating and drowning. I had already passed trying, and was to all intents and purposes in final stage of drowning, and going to die. Then I saw my brother (who was a 1000 miles away at the time) – with muttonchop sideburns (which he never had). He lifted me and shoved me into the wave that washed me up at my father’s feet, who hauled me up the rocks and emptied water out of me. I kept trying to tell him to get help for my brother. There was no-one else in the water. Years later I had the eerie experience of being shown an old picture of the man who had saved me: my Great Uncle. He’d been dead for seventy years or more, drowned after rescuing three Mosotho women in a flooded river. I’ve never been able to explain that one.)

It’s the one place where I have trouble with the basic building block of good character writing – people do not do what you expect, so it is hard to foreshadow. Look, I cheat. I do foreshadow it, even if by putting it in in lesser incidents – so it is not so implausible when it happens. But yes, disaster: when the veneer of human society is stripped off, and you see the raw steel, or the raw crap underneath. And size and strength… don’t seem determinants.

It does make me wonder what will happen if – or rather — when, we have the big disaster. When the power grid goes down, or Yellowstone blows, or that asteroid hits. Odds are those who do have the right background – the military, the outdoor survivalist, the paramedic will have a better chance. But of course every time is different, and just because you kept your head before, doesn’t mean it will be true this time (more likely, but not sure). I always have this lurking fear that I’ll flip out, run away, myself, if it was big and bad enough, or just do the wrong thing. It’s something you just can’t write off. And then there are opposite extreme: the people who will panic, the people who will turn feral to save themselves. The people with no experience and no skills. Most will die. But I believe some will surprise us… and that would be a story to write.