[— Karen Myers —]
I don’t know about you, but even when I’m caught up in a story my mental ear is always on the alert for that subtle clank, that sound of pot metal in the bronze bell, the false note that catches my attention and breaks my reading trance.
When it’s a character’s action (“but that character would never do that!”), it disturbs my confidence in the author’s ability to direct the story properly, to account for personalities and motives and capabilities. After all, if the actors are all puppets, they can hardly move convincingly across the stage.
Errors of fact are another (literal) show-stopper for me. A story should represent a real world, if not the real world, and so things with known properties should behave… consistently with those known properties (unless specifically presented as non-standard). This typically shows up as “That’s not how that works!” or “That’s not what happened!” [for a real world historical reference]. This manifests mentally for me as torn stage scenery, and sometimes my flung book (literally or figuratively) ends up impacting the bare stage wall behind it.
If the first of these instances is a failure of psychology, the second is a failure of education, and both are faults that a beta reader can perhaps help with.
But what I wanted to address today is a different sort of falsity — a sort of paucity of visualization. At any particular moment in a story, both the plot and the actions are poised for the next few words. Granted that an author may (or may not) have a rough plot or ending in mind or a particular plan for steering at this particular juncture, still in each moment all sorts of things might potentially happen next. The villain could do this, or do that. (Ditto the weather, the other characters, the random chances of fate, etc.). It’s the author’s job to choose what the next moment brings and to make the appropriate adjustments. This requires being able to visualize the next moment as a set of various alternatives, either constrained (by author fiat) or wide open (figurative dice roll), including all the options inbetween. It’s an opportunity for a sort of author improv, to try out what might be next, to sound out alternatives before committing.
Not every author seems to be sensitive to this opportunity. Others can overdo it.
There are stories where the author seems to haul the characters around like someone walking an uncooperative small dog — the tug of the leash in a particular pre-determined direction is all too evident, even while the reader yelps in frustration, hoping to go down a different path. Other stories seem to have authors who are fond of herding cats just to see what happens next, and then refusing to be responsible about corralling the side excursions.
My own opinion is that a storyteller is crafting a particular tale to a particular end, and thus needs to take ownership for the story, even if the generation process is not pinned down in every detail until the moment of choice arrives (and the particular end evolves as a result). But the story that results must not strike false notes in the process, regardless of the intent. That takes both imagination and selectivity.
What are some of the worse offenses of this nature you’ve encountered? What sort of “author improv” is part of your own writing process?
Mad Genius Club 
21 responses to “Listening for a false note”
Ummm. Ummm. Uh. Okay, I really had to work at this. Were you saying that every single sentence I write is an opportunity to write something different and I need to pay attention? (Paragraph 5, Sentence 2) I was just going to delete Scrivener from my computer and move on with my life.
Or are you saying that — there are certain specific moments when the alternative directions a story might take need to be considered carefully, because otherwise the story will lack plausibility? I think it’s number 2 (the moment of choice arrives). Then your comment about authors leading people around on a leash comes from stories where an author decided ahead of time that XYZ would happen, so it happens, even if the characters aren’t set up to make it happen.
Okay, and that takes us back to number 1. Every single sentence _is_ a chance to show a character or situation, and choose it such that the end outcome is inevitable for this set of characters. That’s still a bit weighty, but at least I can imagine a process.
As in… I need to write a scene that shows my character’s insecurity OR I can’t remember why I wrote this scene but I like it so how can I attach it to the plot.
Definitely about alternative directions, not alternative sentences. I used “author improv” deliberately, as if you were on stage with a character and a situation and had to decide where you were going to take the scene next. (Of course, that does start with a particular sentence choice, but that’s a downstream & local result, and a more detailed scale).
Very true. Some sentences are more revealing than others.
I once read a book, nominally in medieval England, where the writer realized that the heroine would not naturally speak of a traveler in a desert seeing an oasis so instead of digging around for a natural metaphor — a candle in the night, or land to a storm-tossed mariner, or a rain to drought-stricken peasants — she had her describe deserts as if the reader would not know, to use the metaphor. . . .
One I enjoyed, but that seems to push a lot of people’s buttons, is Storm Swift by Madeleine Brent/Peter O’Donnell. There’s a kind of bait and switch between two potential love interests for the heroine, with a more conventional leading man surrounded by more conventional melodrama as the red herring and a more fun but less conventional leading man (I imagined him as British Jimmy Durante for some reason) as the one who gets the girl. I liked the latter character enough to roll with the somewhat manufactured and downbeat sequence of events needed to get him together with the heroine, but a lot of reviews really did not care for that aspect of the book.
The more formulaic the genre convention is (like Romance), the less people appreciate a non-standard direction. It’s hard to move a love-interest in that genre, since the reader comes to it with an expectation of HEA day-dreaming, and it’s easy to feel cheated.
But if the same sort of plot is “sold” as a different genre (e.g., “Women’s Fiction”), I suspect it would be easier to please, since the expectations are more relaxed. A Romantic Thriller could identify the 1st love interest as a mistake with a hidden villain, and the second as a rescue without too much reader whiplash.
What do you think? It’s not a shift I’ve ever really played with in SFF, and I haven’t written Romance.
I’m kind of playing with the romantic false lead thing in the gothic fantasy adventure WIP I’m working on right now (Hunter Healer King, just started serializing on Vella). The square-jawed Disney Gaston type the heroine is flirting with when the story opens turns out to be a blowhard, mildly obstructionist jerk; the guy she thinks is cute and downtrodden and tries to help, turns out to be an evil werewolf/sorcerer; the guy she doesn’t initially think is all that handsome is the one she’s supposed to have three short novels’ worth of adventures before marrying. I do try to set up the eventual love interest as a cool, mysterious dude (from audience POV) early on, so hopefully it will be less of a shock to them than it is to the heroine. Also, as with a lot of my books, it is so far sitting uncomfortably on that line between adventure with a no-heat romance on the side, and adventure powered by a no-heat romance, so…shrug.
Gothics generally had a false romantic lead. Most modern day romances don’t make him a serious threat.
I believe it may have been you who posted a while ago about Madeleine Brent, who I had never previously heard about, and as a consequence I chased down the titles and have started reading them. The ones I’ve read so far are definitely not conventional genre Romance (in its modern incarnation), and so I wouldn’t be surprised if modern readers have misunderstood and applied an anachronistic expectation.
I thought it was TXRed who mentioned Brent; like you, I found out about Brent through MGC and have been tracking down used copies and reading them. Storm Swift is about my favorite of the three I’ve read as story telling; I liked the characters of Golden Urchin better but felt like the plot was messier, and there’s one or two spots where I felt like Male Author Appeal was showing through in a way that didn’t really work for me. Merlin’s Keep just annoyed me.
At your reference, I just sat right down and read Stormswift. Gack! Given the events as described, the final matchup makes, um, local sense, but no “Romance” novel in the last few decades would structure the plot like that, and it does not leave a good taste in the mouth given a modern expectation.
So I’ve been puzzling about why it was written that way…and why it is marketed as “Romance”. The publication date is 1984, which is startlingly recent — it reads in some ways like a book from the ’40s, where the relevant concept is more “romantic thriller” than “Romance”, and thus the solve-the-mystery elements tend to take precedence over the ultimate results for the couples. (And oh-so-convenient slayings of surplus villains or romantic candidates are de rigueur.) Personally, I tend to find the “thriller” elements of that period rather tedious in a romantic context.
I have similar disappointments when I read some of the popular works from the ’40s, but there’s an exception which is one of my top favorite novels: Brat Farrar (Josephine Tey), which I think carries off its romantic beats very well (though it’s from the male POV) without being a modern “Romance”. That book is more like a Dick Francis, psychologically, and those aren’t “Romance” works, either, though there is very often a significant romantic element.
I’ve never looked into the details of the birth of the Harlequin-style Romance conventions and structures, so perhaps Stormswift is not grossly out of line for the period, but (period or not) I’d hesitate to call it “Romance”.
Peter O’Donnell had been writing as Madeleine Brent since the early seventies and had won an award for Merlin’s Keep (which has a relatively conventional romance arc married to a lot of borrowings from adventure/thriller literature starting with Wilkie Collins and working his way forward), so possibly his publishers just gave him a pass on stuff that would not have flown with a less established author. I only just realized that Stormswift was the last book he published under that pen name.
Also, I like Brat Farrar pretty well, only Tey I can stand.
Agreed — I tried many of them looking for another acceptable read.
I like to think of it as a road trip.
You have an atlas or paper map, and know that you want to get from Charleston to San Diego. Maybe you take the back roads, maybe the highways. Maybe you stop at a few historical markers, maybe you take a scenic byway. But you are choosing the journey as you go. It’s up to the driver (author) to choose the path that is most entertaining/exciting/educational/nostalgic for the reader, and make sure that they don’t end up in dead ends or too much construction, or that the road they chose isn’t gone now.
But, some people insist on using the GPS, don’t stop at any roadside attractions, and they follow every turn plotted out on the GPS, even if it leads them into a lake or the ocean, or to a vacant lot. And have a very boring, but fast journey.
And some people head out with a tank of gas and a vague knowledge that San Diego is West. But, who knows where they will actually end up?
That’s the way I see it, too. And if you manage to end up somewhere even better than your original intended destination, well, instead of making up excuses when you call home in the real world, you get to rewrite the earlier bits to justify the new-and-improved result and pretend that’s what you always had in mind.
A voyage of discovery….
I’ve used the same metaphor a time or two. Writing a novel like taking a road trip:
You can have your full route planned. That doesn’t necessarily mean that you don’t stop at roadside attractions, but the ones you stop at are pre-scheduled.
You can head out with a route but also a plan to deviate if you see an interesting backroad, linger over an attraction if it’s more interesting than you thought it would be, or perhaps blow by a planned stop altogether if, upon closer inspection, it looks boring.
You can head out with a vague idea of a destination and a direction but no real planned route to get there and just see how it goes.
And finally, you can just set out, no destination in mind, and see where the road takes you.
I know which type of trip I prefer, but they’re all legitimate ways to take a road trip–or write a novel.
(At the moment, on the other hand, I’m working on short stories. Those are like driving to work. Not only do you need to know exactly where you’re going, you need to know, within a few minutes either way, exactly how long it’s going to take you to get there.)
There’s the danger of running out of gas in the road.
Also, I find that sitting down with a map and saying okay we will hit this and this and this and this (knowing there will be detours or unexpected attractions), but sometimes that results in a flimsy structure. Fine for a road trip, not so fine for a novel.
Pick a few highlights to make waystations.
“Hey writer, yes you. Yes, I know *you* would sit back and watch what’s going on and think about it for half a month, but I am sick of this nonsense, and frankly waiting never did me any good. I’m walking over there right now and asking them what the heck is going on. ‘K? No, I wasn’t asking.”
The most railroady thing I’ve pulled so far was skipping how one of the characters decided to not tell their boss what happened. I just couldn’t quite figure out how they got there and the point of that story wasn’t how they made the decision, but rather the discovery that the boss had essentially set them up.
That story has a bunch of weird false starts in it I had to prune out too. Ended up starting after the inciting incident because the incident itself was boring, had a weird diversion involving bribing a turtle with noodles that had to be streamlined as well. It was a weird story.
Some of the issues are what I think of as “Wizard of Oz” problems. Once your story goes clang, either in small or in large, the reader wakes up and suddenly notices you behind the curtain. And you’re not really dressed yet, and your hair is a mess, and you want to try and block their view of that dustball under the desk, all while keeping an eye on them in case you need to dodge the incoming flung book.
Not a pretty picture. Gotta keep the reader in the trance, but there are just so many gol-darn ways to startle them awake.
I’d say the worst one I found recently was the detective story where the author seemed to give the villain what amounted to telepathic powers. The villain had arranged a secret meeting with his co-conspirator, and she wanted her detective to be praised for being oh-so-smart and figuring out the code being used to send messages. However, if the villain had shown up to the meeting, if he’d even gotten close enough for the detective to see him, the book would have been over, and the author wanted to continue for another hundred pages. Thus, the villain had to be able to figure out, from his view through a bus window half a block away, that the completely ordinary station wagon parked in front of the coffee shop actually belonged to undercover cops.
I finished the book, but then returned it to the library with a “okay, tried that author. Next?”
I hate the “Goldielocks” problem of writers.
Some writers write very little of their stories, and you get the whole “then a miracle happens” endings that made no sense at all.
Some writers write too much of their stories, and you have to dig through all of the bumf to find where the actual story is…and that feels too much like work.
Very few writers hit that sweet zone of “enough information to get things across” without burying the reader in unnecessary dross.
(Does not look at my description-porn issues in my writing…)