Destination unknown

On July 12, 2012, Lizzy wrote, …I had started a short novel a bunch of months back off of an idea that I couldn’t keep in my head any longer. For the first couple days I wrote like a mad women, trying to get down all the ideas flowing through my head. Many pages later I slowed down and finally I stopped. I had come to a ‘dead end.’ I wasn’t out of ideas but the current idea I led off from made me realize something when I came to the ‘dead end,’ I had no idea where the story was leading off to! When I started writing I had a couple of ideas to some events which I wanted to happen but then I realized that I hadn’t really thought of any ‘main problem’ or climax, no real moral, and or no ending. It has been months since I have touched the story and I really want to get back into it. Should I edit up what I have, start anew or continue where I left? Have any advice?

I’ve been listening to Brandon Sanderson’s lectures online that Caitlyn recommended. This will soon be relevant for Lizzy’s question, but as an aside, the lectures are quite interesting although I suspect not complete, which makes sense, since students pay for the real thing. Quite a few are devoted to publishing, especially to publishing fantasy and science fiction. For those of you who are at that point you may find the information very helpful. Mr. Sanderson’s experience is more up to date than mine, since I broke in in 1997, which now seems an age ago. The link again is, www.writeaboutdragons.com.

Back to Lizzy. Mr. Sanderson describes two kinds of writers, those who outline and those who don’t. Those who don’t he calls discoverers, and I count myself in that category. We “discover” our stories as we write. The trouble is, we can get lost. We wander around and start over and over and over. (Outliners have problems of their own, according to Mr. Sanderson.)

Before I start writing a book itself I write notes, which is the closest I come to outlining, and the distance is still vast. Usually by the time I think I have a solid idea and often a vague notion of the end, a beginning comes to me and I plunge in. But because I haven’t thought the whole thing through I make disastrous mistakes. I call it getting stupid. I’ve mentioned here that I wrote about 140 pages of the new mystery while forgetting to include any suspects and then about 260 pages of the same mystery. This time there were plenty of suspects but the mystery couldn’t be solved. Sigh. I went back to the beginning.

In my mistakes, however, I generally find something that leads me in the right direction that takes me finally through to the end. It’s not efficient. Obviously! I’m always hoping that the next book will run more smoothly.

And some have. A simple story shape is easiest for me. I don’t mean a simple story, just the shape. If I can see the arc I can throw in complications galore and still see my way through. My historical novel Dave at Night has such a shape. Dave, an orphan, needs a home. Everything that happens (mostly) has bearing on that essential problem. In Ever Kezi is on a quest to find her future – pretty straightforward. Princess Sonora and the Long Sleep is based on “Sleeping Beauty.” What could be simpler? It was a blast to write.

So for Lizzy and others with our problem, I suggest you think about your story shape. Even the books I had trouble with, like The Two Princess of Bamarre, for example, became possible once I found my story shape, in this case a quest for the cure to the Gray Death in time to save Addie’s sister, Meryl.

Since you haven’t looked at your manuscript in months, you might start by reading through it. If you can resist jumping in, just think about what you have. Write notes. Ask yourself questions that will help you continue. Here are some question suggestions:

What’s the main character’s main problem? You may not know, so other questions follow. What are all her problems? Which seems the most significant, the one that can sustain a lot of spin-off problems, that suggests more events in your story?

Who is your main? If you don’t know, who interests you the most? For whom do you feel the most sympathy, care about the most? Whose company do you enjoy the most? (That doesn’t have to be your main, but most often it will be.)

If what you have seems like a hopeless mess, stop calling your story names! But is there something, some incident, bit of dialogue, thought monologue, that pleases you? Where might it lead? Is that your story?

What does your main want? What, among your pages, have you thrown up as obstacles to the achievement of her desire? What else can you come up with?

What would finally solve the problem, happily or tragically? What might three alternative endings be? Think of two more after that. Which satisfies you the most?

Imagine an epilogue (which you may not need when you get there). Who would be there? What would the mood be?

An organized person, reading this post, would likely roll his eyes and say, Why didn’t you ask yourself all these questions and answer them before you started?

Because discoverers don’t work that way. We throw out lots of bait and let our stories find us.

The answer to the questions Lizzy ended with may be obvious by the time you finish answering mine. If not, I have an opinion. If it’s possible to just keep going and not start over, I think that’s best, because it will get you quickest to the end and the pleasure of revising, since most discoverers love to revise. It’s our great strength – if we don’t get so obsessed that we can never release our story.

But if your fingers feel paralyzed and your brain turns to mush whenever you try to continue (this happens to me), then probably you need to start over. It’s what I do when I must.

Here are two prompts:

∙ An outliner and a discoverer meet at a party. They hit it off, find that they both love the same books and both are writing a post-apocalyptic fantasy. In a burst of mad enthusiasm they decide to collaborate, but when they meet to discuss what they want to do, everything starts to fall apart. Write the scene. Keep going for a story of friendship or love or hatred.

∙ Start with a chase. Irena is fleeing a creature with the body of a horse, the head of a snake, and the spiked spine of certain dinosaurs. Meanwhile, her boyfriend Pasten is in a mud wrestling contest with the champion from their rival village, who does not fight fair. And her sister is at home, surrounded by three men from the rival village. Sew all this together into a coherent story, asking yourself the questions I ask above.

Have fun, and save what you write!

Writers’ range

So I was at a writers’ conference this past weekend and I mentioned the blog to Brianne Johnson, an agent at the respected Writers House, and told her the question that comes in fairly regularly here, about how teens can get published. She said she’d be happy to look at manuscripts from teens, and I leaped six inches into the air.

If you decide to submit to Brianne, send her a cover letter describing the book and send the first 25 pages in a Microsoft Word document, as an attachment.  Brianne prefers to receive submissions via e-mail, at bjohnson@writershouse.com. In your e-mail, say you got her name from my blog. Your writing sample should be double-spaced in 12-point type and the typeface should be easy to read. Your name, address, phone number, and email address should appear on the left above the title. Your last name and the title of the book should be in the upper left hand corner of every page that follows, like this: Levine/Ella Enchanted. This is in case a page gets separated from the rest.

After you send it, be patient, patient, patient. And good luck!

And here are some questions for everybody. Are you writing poetry? Would you like some posts on the subject? Do you have questions? I’m not as experienced a poet as I am a fiction writer for kids, but I have been published, and I love to read and write poetry. Right now I’m reading a fascinating book of essays about poetry called Structure and Surprise, Engaging Poetic Turns, edited by Michael Theune, on a pretty advanced level, high school and above, I’d say. Anyway, I’d welcome poetry questions. I probably won’t have definitive answers, but we can explore together.

Now for the regular post. On June 1, 2012, Michelle wrote, I’m homeschooled, and recently in one of my school books I studied novels/novelists. The book talked about ‘range’: an author’s limits and experiences, and his or her ability to work with them. They used Jane Austen as an example, saying that even though the Napoleonic Wars took place in her time, she chose not to write about them because wars were outside her range. Now, after pouring my heart into a fantasy series for over three years – a series that does include numerous battles – I’m wondering if I tried writing way outside my range. I know nothing about fighting other than what movies and the many books I read tell me. Do you think I was wrong to write outside my range? Can books like that still be successful?

The old adage is, Write what you know. If we all followed it, there would be no fantasy genre, no sci fi, no horror, no paranormal, no historical fiction earlier than its author’s childhood. So, no, I don’t think you were wrong.

However, if the books you’ve read and the movies you’ve seen are entirely fictional, you might want to supplement that with some nonfiction and documentaries and see if the wider reading changes or confirms what you’ve written. You may find first-person accounts particularly helpful, even if you’re writing medieval fantasy and the weapons are swords and pikes, or if it’s a space drama and the soldiers fire ray guns and wield energy shields. You’ll learn how it feels to be in the middle of a battle, what the after effects are, what the relationships are in the unit, and more. Surprises will come along that you’ll use.

If any of you are writing realistic fiction, readers who are familiar with the weapons you include, for example, will notice if you get a detail wrong. If you’re writing historical fiction, to take another example, readers will hope to learn about the period, and it would be a shame to let them down.

When I write fantasy often I avoid elements that are too closely tied to our world. I made an important dog character in A Tale of Two Castles be a Lepai mountain dog, a breed that doesn’t exist outside my book. If I’d made him a poodle, that would have brought up associations with contemporary life. On the other hand, when I made Kezi in Ever be a gifted weaver, I learned about weaving. It didn’t seem to me that a made-up process would have been good enough.

The book you cite said that Jane Austen chose not to write about the Napoleonic Wars as outside her “range.” I suspect she knew a lot about the subject, which must have been much in the news and much discussed. “Range” may merely mean the kind of writing that suited her temperamentally. Narrow domestic concerns – marriage, family, fortune, local characters – were what interested her. You, Michelle and many others on the blog, unlike Jane Austen, may be more into the broad canvas of war, at least at this point in your writing.

Let’s consider the adage. It’s been around for a long time and, I suspect, must have some truth. What we all know most fundamentally is ourselves, our emotions, thoughts, physical sensations. We know what it’s like to feel well and to have a fever. We know our environment, the late afternoon sun shining slantwise on the street outside our house, the smell of a parent’s closet, the cell phone ring tone, and a zillion other details. Next level of distance, we know friends, family, pets pretty intimately. After that it gets more and more remote.

If you bring what you know well into your fiction, if you use a losing game on the soccer field last week in a battle between your heroine’s battalion and the invading aliens from the seventh planet circling a distant star, you’ll still be writing (partially at least) from what you know.

Complete knowledge is often impossible. Yesterday I shopped for groceries and asked a young woman if the store had any more of the ice cream my husband loves. When she came back with a case, she called me Sweetie. I’m about forty years older than she is! Where did that Sweetie come from? I didn’t mind. It was affectionate, so maybe it came from an excess of benevolence. Or maybe from a cheeky testing of the boundaries. I can guess, but I can’t know. Still, I see nothing wrong with putting her in a story and giving her a motive. I can call her Della Louise and make her live with an adored grandmother, or a hated one. I can turn her into a mermaid who’s living among humans and is really two hundred years old, so I’m a youngster to her. Not knowing, being outside my range, is a gateway to opportunity! If Della Louise comes across as real on the page, readers will slip inside her as easily as she slips into her scaly tail at midnight every night.

Here are three prompts:

∙ Your main character is lost in a forest filled with bears. Write what happens, and make sure the bears are part of the story. If you know a lot about bears and not much about aardvarks, make the forest full of aardvarks. Do no research! If you like, make the story fantasy.

∙ Read about bears or aardvarks. Write again, either a new scene or a revision, using your research. Compare. (I’m not thinking one will necessarily be better.)

∙ Write about an inventor, inventing an anti-gravity machine.

∙ Your main character parachutes into a battle in progress. Write what happens. Again, this can be fantasy.

Have fun, and save what you write!

To the finish

On the evening of Thursday, October 25th, I’m going to give a talk at the Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh. Here’s the link, where they ask you to reserve your seats: http://www.carnegielibrary.org/teens/events/programs/behindthebook/. I would be delighted to meet any of you in person.

Just want to say I’ve been listening to the lectures by Brandon Sanderson and finding them helpful and informative and delightfully geeky. He has my number when he talks about discoverers.

On May 30, 2012, Lark wrote, Gail, have you ever done a post on the motives of writing something? I was reading an article in The Writer’s Digest Handbook to Novel Writing (superb articles in there, btw) about what your motives are in writing a novel. It struck me that the only 2 stories I’ve finished I’ve had specific motives behind them– i.e., my short story last year had to be written for writing club (which is a weak motive) and a parody I wrote for the Hunger Games was for my best friend’s birthday– I wrote 7,700 words in 2 days. Whew! (Slightly better motive.) I wasn’t thinking about publishing, or writing a certain number or pages/words/etc. And when I did NaNo last year my motive wasn’t finish my novel, it was write 30,000 words. (That’s probably the reason why I didn’t finish my NaNo novel). When I set out writing a story and I think, I want to get this published, it is guaranteed that I don’t finish it.

And two days ago, flowerprincess wrote in a similar vein, I write historical fiction, and I usually start a story with tons of fire and energy (and very little research) as soon as the idea is developed enough. But by the time I’ve reached what seems to be the beginning of the middle, it flops. I just can’t write anymore. Sometimes it’s because I realize that I didn’t research enough, but sometimes I just find that I have absolutely no workable plot (I’m definitely a character writer). To put this problem in perspective: I am sixteen in a month, but I haven’t finished a draft of a story since I was nine! What can I do so that I don’t keep stopping before the story actually gets started?

I read two questions here, one about finishing and one about writing in the first place. They’re both mysterious.

To get philosophical: People are like locked doors and we may spend our entire lives looking for the key – to ourselves! We have more access to our innards than anyone else. We know what we’re thinking and feeling, and yet… We may have no clue about why we can’t lose a few pounds or quit smoking or not get angry when a certain person says almost anything or finish a story, or why we even start a story in the first place. Sometimes our friends and family can diagnose us better than we can – and vice versa. We may understand exactly why our friend Pamela bites her nails, although she has no idea.

I can tell you why I write: to tell myself a story, because I love books, because I have an itch to be creative that I just must scratch. And why I finish: because I am stubborn and because it feels too awful to fail – it’s intolerable (although at some point I may have to tolerate it). But I can’t come up with answers behind these. I have no idea why I want to tell myself a story or why I’m so stubborn.

So here’s an early prompt: Ask yourself the same questions. Why do you write? Why do you finish your stories or fail to finish them? Why do you finish some and not others? Your responses, regardless of how confused they are, may help you, may guide you in your revisions and your new stories. I would appreciate it if you’d post what you come up with, too, because your answers may help other writers who read the blog.

I’ve finished every book I started – sort of. In thinking about this post I realized that the skeletons of unfinished stories pave the length of almost every one of my books. When I started Fairest, for example, I thought it was going to be about the unrequited love of the gnome zhamM for Aza. Couldn’t do it. There isn’t even a ghost of this in the published book. So the specter of that story is haunting the ether somewhere. In an earlier version of what used to be called Beloved Elodie, Elodie’s mother falls under a spell that makes her totally greedy, that makes her prefer a golden statue of her daughter to the living, breathing girl. I loved it. It was powerful and horrifying. But I couldn’t do anything with it, so it’s hanging out with love-smitten zhamM.

If the problem is that your main story thread peters out, you may find it helpful to assume that wasn’t your real story. Look at what you’ve got. Think about where else you might go with it. Some story choices narrow the future possibilities, which is good when you’re near the end but not at the beginning or the middle. Did you choose directions that limited your characters’ options? Can you see other paths that excite you? This is not failure! This is finding the actual story.

In my case, I always have to simplify to write the book I can write. In my dark hours I feel bad about this and disappointed in myself. But the rest of the time I’m proud and happy that I finished, and I think my books are pretty good.

Obviously we’re all different. Some people do better with a stick and some with honey. Lark, you seem to do best when you set goals for yourself. So do it! NaNoWriMo is coming up. This time make it your goal to type “The End” when the month is over. If it helps, you can say that I demanded it. Write stories for the birthdays of all your friends and relatives. And your pets! Write a story for the major and minor holidays. (Halloween is coming up.)

flowerprincess, in the cases when more research would get you going again, I’d suggest undertaking the research. What you discover may give you a detail that will move your story forward, as has happened to me more than once.

Lots of us work well with small time goals and rewards. I’ll often tell myself that if I write for half an hour I can take a break. Not too much later I demand another half hour of myself. I also have a time goal for the day’s writing. In doing this, I’m not thinking about finishing my book, but underneath I know that if I put in enough time and write enough notes and think enough, I’ll get there. In fact, worrying about finishing may be a distraction. Just write. Just follow the story. Face the ending when you close in on it.

I see two options if the idea of being published gets in the way. One is, don’t think about it; don’t make that your goal. The other has two parts. The first is to imagine yourself published. Imagine a call from your agent to say that your book has been accepted by a publisher and the editor wants to call you to talk about how wonderful it is and how it could become even greater. You can go on to imagine all the stages that follow, the editorial letter and the edited manuscript, you revising, the book in bound galleys, the early reviews, the book in bookstores. The second part is to imagine your book rejected. Think about how bad you feel, how you wallow in misery for, maybe, a couple of weeks. And then you recover (I did, many times) and find that there’s Life After Rejection. And you send the novel out again and resume writing your current project. Then you can return to the first image of acceptance. The idea with this approach is to take the fear and trembling out of the publishing notion. If you live with it, its power will diminish.

Here are two prompts:

∙ Write a ghost story. A life cut short is like an unfinished story. Imagine a character who dies young and have the story be about the life he didn’t have. Bring him in as a ghost.

∙ An unsolved mystery is also like an unfinished story. Dr. Ellen Imoldo is a veterinarian who, in the 1980s, claimed to have discovered a serum that would significantly increase intelligence in dogs. She disappeared along with her notes and her vials. Your main character has found a clue. Solve the mystery of her disappearance and the serum.

Have fun, and save what you write!

Story history

Before I start – Caitlyn posted this link early this morning, which you may miss: www.writeaboutdragons.com, which may be of interest to many of you, so I don’t want you to miss it.

On May 26, 2012, Inkling wrote, …I’ve almost kinda decided to start on my book, but I’m having issues. It’s set in a post-apocalyptic version of the southern U.S., but I’m having trouble working on the time period. I want enough time to pass (after the disaster) for everyone to forget what happened, but I still want houses standing from when the disaster happened. Then, when I try to write the beginning (which I thought I had planned out), the wording doesn’t sound right! I can’t figure out how to put the backstory in, and I’m pretty sure it needs to be told fairly early on. I would be EXTREMELY grateful for any help!!!!

In response, carpelibris wrote, Inkling, what are the houses made of? From this list, it looks like the oldest houses standing in the US are from around the 1600s: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oldest_buildings_in_America

How long it takes everyone to forget will depend on if you have electronic communications, newspapers, books, widespread literacy, professional lore-keepers or storytellers, etc.


What doesn’t sound right about the wording?

And Inkling answered, I’m not really sure what the houses are made of (the thought never occurred to me!), but probably about the same as the houses today, since that’s what they look like. No electronics, whatever happened knocked everything back about 200 years from now. There’s still books, but literacy is considered useless for the most part. My MC can read, though, and has read several books she’s found. Most of the people are pretty much nomads, and just wander around to different houses. There are still some “towns” but they’re more like old west towns.

I’m trying to fit all the info about my MC’s family into the first few paragraphs since she leaves at the beginning of the book and you never actually meet them. I’m having trouble figuring out how to do this without it seeming all shoved in there.

When I followed carpelibris’s link, I noticed with pride that my house falls into the time line on Wikipedia’s list, although it certainly isn’t anywhere near the oldest continuously occupied home in the U. S. It was built in 1790, a simple wooden farmhouse, and it’s probably good for another few centuries, as long as it’s kept up. If it hadn’t been lived in and maintained, it probably would have rotted and collapsed long ago. We also still have the outhouse (just for historical value). It’s wooden too, and the effects of weather are obvious; it gets eaten away bottom up. If we don’t deal with it every few years, it will be a goner. So upkeep would be another factor for Inkling to factor in.

carpelibris suggests several areas to think about: composition of houses and other buildings, communications infrastructure, historical records, storytellers, interest in the past, education, possibly degree of civilization. I’d add that if people are nomads, you’ll probably need to know what the roads are like and how people are getting around, whether by car or mule or bicycle, whatever.

Usually I work this background info out in my notes. I don’t have to know everything at the outset, just as much as I need to get going. I can figure out the rest as I move along.

Inkling is asking several questions: how to figure out the world; how to drop in the backdrop while still moving the action along; how to find the right voice.

For the first, carpelibris and I have raised some topics to consider. More may come up as Inkling continues. But there was another part to the question. Everybody in this post-apocalyptic world has forgotten the disaster, which worries me a little.

One of my greatest challenges as a writer is my tendency to over-complicate my stories. I put in elements that strain credulity and then I have to explain them. Sometimes the explanations introduce new complexities that demand further explanation until I’ve erected such a tall, wobbly structure that it all comes crashing down, and I have to build fresh out of the rubble, and if it’s going to work, the next assemblage has to be much simpler.

An entire population forgetting the disaster that destroyed their civilization sets off alarm bells for me. How could they forget? How did they fall into general illiteracy? What happened?

The collective amnesia does tie into the question about the houses. How much time would be necessary for such forgetting to happen? Would all the artifacts of the earlier civilization have to have disappeared, been buried, been obliterated?

It’s interesting to consider. The classical world was all but forgotten, I think, in the Dark Ages and then gradually rediscovered during the Renaissance. How that happened might be worth some research.

I confess that my knowledge of events before I was born is spotty. I know only the high points that I was taught in school, those that I remember. And I’ve forgotten a lot that’s happened during my life. But many people do know. The knowledge is available.

Anyway, maybe Inkling has an answer. Whatever it is, probably simplest is best.

If Inkling hasn’t come up with an answer, I’d suggest reconsidering the forgetting. Is it necessary? And for everyone else (and me!), I warn us all of the dangers of basing our stories on a premise that’s hard to explain.

On to the second question, how to drop the info in. I’ve written posts on this, which you can find by clicking on the labels back story, backstory (sorry about that!), fantasy world introduced, and flashbacks. A Tale of Two Castles begins similarly to Inkling’s story. Elodie leaves her family and doesn’t see any of them again for the rest of the book. But she thinks about them and brings them to life for the reader with her thoughts and without interfering with the forward action. So I’d say that background can be dropped in in short bursts at quiet moments in a story, generally in thoughts and narrative, sometimes in dialogue.

For example, Kiara leaves home while her family is sleeping so she doesn’t have to say goodbye. She pauses to look down on the form of her brother Bobo in his bed. He’s an imp when he’s awake, but, oh, how sweetly he sleeps, nose to nose with his stuffed toy chipmunk. On a hook by the door hangs her mother’s blue scarf, which smells of carnations, her mother’s scent. Kiara takes it and ties it around her own neck. She’s about to slip out when she notices her father’s umbrella with the broken rib. She takes this too, even though it’s the dry season. Her father never buys anything for himself, and this will force him to get a new umbrella. The tears are flowing when she closes the door behind her. As she walks through the silent streets she thinks more about her family. Later, at important moments, if we decide to go that way, she can be guided – or misguided – by what members of her family would advise or do in her place. She can be homesick sometimes and recall a memory in her thoughts. In A Tale of Two Castles Elodie now and then spouts her mother’s sayings.

As for voice, I suggest trying different ways until you find something that pleases you. Here are a few possibilities imagining the moment when Kiara stands over her brother’s bed.

Bobo, how chilled out and all innocent you look there with your silly toy. Do you want your big sister gone, no more Miss Bossy forever? No more me always knowing your secret mischief? You going to remember to keep safe against old bad Mr. Milton?

Or,

A shaft of moonlight illumined a curl in the center of Bobo’s forehead. How could I leave that curl?  And the rest of him, that knowing look when he caught me in a lie to Father. But he never told. I mouthed the words: “Take care, Bobo. Give Mr. Milton a wide berth.”

Or,

Leave, Kiara, I told myself. Ignore Bobo and his chipmunk. Harden your heart. Think of yourself for once.

And of course there’s the choice of POV and tense, both of which will influence the voice.

This has been a long post! Time for prompts.

∙ Write Kiara’s departure as told by an omniscient third-person narrator. Keep going with the story.

∙ Write it in the voice of Kiara’s older sister, who is pretending to be asleep. Keep going.

∙ Write a page of notes about how the disaster came about that destroyed a civilization. Explain how the descendants of the survivors have lost all knowledge of what went before.

∙ Write a scene in which Kiara discovers an artifact from the past. Her curiosity is aroused. She decides to find out the meaning of her discovery, but there are forces that don’t want her to succeed. Continue with the story.

Have fun, and save what you write!

Fast out of the gate

On May 20, 2012, Jillian wrote, I always like stories that aren’t slow and get going quickly. But now I look back at my story and am thinking, It’s going too quickly. I have had my friends read it and they understand the beginning completely. I even have backstory in there but it’s just very quick. Is there such a thing as too quick a beginning?

I wasn’t sure I understood, so I asked for clarification, and Jillian answered with this: Continuing my last comment, I guess it moves quickly in that I feel like most beginnings have parts where the narrator takes its time in explaining what’s going on. Like in Ella Enchanted in the beginning she talks a lot about her mom to give backstory. But in my story I give backstory, but it’s slipped in here and there, and the events move quickly one after the other, making a very short exposition. Is there such a thing as too short?

Hard to tell. My favorite writing teacher used to say that a story, and this would go for a beginning too, is the right length if it’s as long as it needs to be.

Let’s consider what the beginning is, because that may be part of the confusion. In Ella Enchanted, to take Jillian’s example, is the beginning those first two paragraphs about the fool of a fairy, Lucinda? Or the first few pages, in which the curse of obedience is explained? Or does the beginning continue through the funeral of Ella’s mother?

I’m not a student of story arcs and rising and falling action, although maybe I’d have an easier time if I were. So I’m not sure. If the beginning is just revealing the curse, very few pages are involved. If it includes Ella’s mother’s death, then it’s two chapters.

Maybe it will be more productive to think about what a beginning needs to do. I mean a final beginning, not the beginning that gets us writers into the story, but the beginning after we’ve reached the end of the entire tale and done all the revising.

First of all and most of all, a beginning needs to engage the reader and make her care enough to keep reading. There’s no such thing as too quick for that. I don’t mean that there has to be a crisis on the first page. Some authors are leisurely about drawing the reader in. It’s gradual. But there has to be enough from the start to intrigue. Why are we examining the wallpaper in an ordinary bedroom? What’s going on? That curiosity may be enough.

Everything else pales in comparison with the imperative to make the reader want to read.

A beginning also acquaints the reader with the world of the story, which is different for every book or every series. Two books set in a contemporary suburb, for example, will still be in different worlds. The characters will differ, their families, their friends. One character is home schooled; another attends an enormous high school. One character likes to buy from thrift shops, another favors big box stores. One lives in a condo subdivision, another in an old house that was built by her great-grandfather. And so on. Both may mention the antique clock tower by the train station, where the trains no longer run, but that’s it.

Familiarity with the world may take a while if POV or time period or setting shifts from chapter to chapter. The reader may be four chapters in before she feels completely at home. In the novel I’m reading right now, Adam & Eve by Sena Jeter Naslund (high school and above), all three change. Some sections are told in first-person, others in third. Time and setting move around too. I have to pay attention! But the story is strong enough to keep me interested.

The beginning also introduces the voice of the story, or voices if the POV shifts, and if it does, the beginning will also be prolonged.

There’s nothing wrong with either approach, consistency or variation. The same voice, same time period, same narrator all the way through are absolutely fine. They’re just likely to shorten the beginning.

Some stories require more set-up than others. If there are aspects of the world that the reader needs to know going in, we’re going to have to spend more time getting started, which is neither virtue nor vice, only a little harder, because while we’re doing the set-up we still have to engage the reader.

We can make the reader care about main character Kira right on the first page. She rescues a puppy then gets hit by a bus and then says something endearing to the EMT who’s loading her on a stretcher.

But we don’t have to. We can lead with the wallpaper. There’s a spot where it’s torn, and the tear is in the shape of a crescent moon. The surface of the dresser is dusty, and in the dust someone has drawn a five-pointed star. The area rug has a pattern of suns. So far the reader has seen only setting, but she’s curious. Why all the celestial symbols?

The thing that would make a beginning feel rushed to me is an absence of detail. If we start with the rescued puppy, the reader will want to know the circumstances. Is the puppy being abused? Or is it alone in a cardboard box on the street? Did whoever left it also leave a few dog biscuits and a toy? How cute or un-cute is the puppy? And then there’s Kira. Does she love dogs? Is she afraid of them? Allergic? Does she have time to pick up the puppy, or is she making herself late for an interview for the internship she’s wanted for five years?

In the wallpaper example, I’ve given a few details but the reader will certainly want to know if anyone is in the house. And what’s the smell? Is there silence? Is the electricity working, the water running?

Without detail the reader can’t enter the story.

Let’s try some prompts.

∙ Now I’m curious. Write the beginning of the puppy story. If you like, keep going.

∙ Write the beginning of the wallpaper story. What is going on in that house? Delay the entry of characters for as long as you can while still maintaining the reader’s interest. Continue and make it a story.

∙ In a new version, combine the puppy story and the wallpaper story. Switch settings and POVs and time frames. The EMT, the puppy, the rescuer can all have their own chapter. The house with the wallpaper can come much earlier or much later.

Have fun, and save what you write!

Off we go

On May 9, 2012, Kelly wrote, I was curious to see if you had any ideas on what to do when you don’t know where to start when you begin writing. I have a great plot, and do-able characters–but I can’t decide where I should start. Anybody have any ideas?

I usually find my beginning in notes. As I’m jotting down ideas for how my story might go, a first scene drops into my head, so I start writing. This first scene may not ultimately be the first scene by the time I reach the end, and it may change again as I revise, but it’s enough to get me going…

which is all we need. The beginning we begin with is no more precious than any words that come later. It needs only to move us further into the story. If we give it too much importance we’re likely to freeze up and never get beyond a few paragraphs written and rewritten until we want to snap our pens in two or pour molasses on our keyboards.

The famous advice, to begin in medias res, in the middle of things, is one way to go. Suppose your plot involves Julie’s quest to establish her independence, a need she doesn’t recognize at the outset. She tends to rely on other people and rarely asserts herself. We can start with action: Julie is doing something foolish on a dare that a more self-possessed character would have refused to take on.

But that’s only one option. We can begin with setting. Say Julie lives in a model housing development for a repressed minority group in the totalitarian kingdom of Ambur. We might start with a guided tour for the free press of the nation’s democratic neighbor, the republic of Guma. If we see Julie at all, she’s merely one in a chorus of teenagers brought out to sing a paean to tyrannical King Stanil. This beginning focuses on setting. We show the small, neat houses where the grass is always kept three inches long; the box-like school with its tiny, barred windows; the community vegetable garden, where space is not allowed for flowers. And because we want to introduce a little blip of tension, we have a rock-and-roll song (considered degenerate by the king) waft out of an upstairs window, which causes the tour guide to take out her notebook and jot down the address of the offending house. (Later we can learn that the house belongs to Julie’s family.)

Or we can take on an explication of the era with a page or several pages from a history book about the reign of King Stanil the Terrible. The excerpt may include the housing complex,.

Or we can start with character. Julie is in the bedroom of her friend, who’s showing off her new leggings in a pattern of tiny mice and rats. Julie’s real reaction is Yuck!, but she expresses only admiration.

Of course there are many ways to begin with character. When we started with action before, with the dare, we were also revealing character. Thoughts are another option for a character start. Julie is trying to fall asleep, but she’s worrying about a dispute between two of her friends and planning how she can position herself so that each one feels her support and both continue to like her.

If we don’t want to go the thoughts route, we can put this rumination in her diary and open with that. In this case, Julie doesn’t have to be the POV character. The next chapter can show our POV character, Mel, reading the diary. Or the next chapter can be Mel’s diary.

If beginnings make you choke up, you can jump right into a scene further along and write the beginning later. When you’ve gotten going you’re likely to discover scenes that come before the one you’ve written. At that point you may know exactly what’s needed, and your beginning may sail right out.

Let’s imagine that Julie discovers that her neighbor Mel is an informant for King Stanil. We write the scene, imagining the circumstances, but we realize the emotional impact on the reader is blunted because the relationship between Julie and Mel hasn’t been shown. So we write an earlier scene between Julie and Mel. Maybe we show Mel being kind to Julie and Julie being a little afraid of him. Now we’re wondering what Julie’s going to do later about the informing and we decide we need a scene that will shed light on her thought process. In this scene, which also takes place before the informing has been revealed, Julie asks her older sister if she ever finds Mel scary. Her sister says, “Mel has been nothing but good to this family. If he could hear you he’d be so disappointed. We’d be shamed, all of us.” When Julie discovers Mel’s perfidy she’s going to have to take her family’s obligation to him into account. Maybe she’ll even decide she should spy along with him.

Taking another tack, it’s possible that the problem in entering a story that has a fine plot may be blurriness about the characters who will put it into action. Suppose we know there’s a despotic monarch and a network of domestic spies and a downtrodden population who will rebel led by a young girl, but we don’t know who the girl will be. We haven’t imagined Julie yet or given her her personal struggle to act independently. We’re certain we need a leader of the spies but we haven’t imagined him either. And every despot is despot in a different way, but we haven’t fleshed out King Stanil.

Once we figure out our cast of characters we can think about how they might rub against each other. We can imagine King Stanil in his royal chamber with his chief counselor while his barber cuts his hair. How does he behave? We can show Mel walking through the housing complex, taking mental notes. We can have Julie’s mother set her a task and watch the way she carries it out. From this, from thinking about who else we may need, we can start writing.

These prompts come from Julie and the kingdom of Ambur:

∙ Write the scene between King Stanil, his barber, and his counselor. Consider not only Stanil but the others too, and how they may figure in the coming drama.

∙ Put Julie in the middle of the quarrel between her two friends. Write the scene and make both of them get mad at her. Use this as the beginning of a story.

∙ Write Julie carrying out the foolish dare. Get her into trouble. Write the story that follows.

∙ Write the scene in the model housing development. Have King Stanil come along in his armored vehicle and motorcade of security guards.

Have fun, and save what you write!

Double, double toil and trouble

On April 19, 2012, Chloral Florderoy wrote, An author told me once that there comes a point in the writing process when the characters start talking to you. I mean, you know what they would do/say in a situation because you’ve spent a long time with them and you feel as though you know them. Does this mean that it’s hard when it comes time to write their deaths? How have you dealt with making bad things happen to your characters, or is it fun for you?

Every writer is different. My characters don’t talk to me unless I start the conversation, generally on paper. I may interview them to find out what they’d do in a particular situation. Otherwise it’s rare for one of them to chime in when I’m out and about in the world.

But recently a friend described a close friend of hers, someone I know a little, and his flaws sounded like one of my character’s flaws. That was a nice moment, when my character came to life in life.

As for making bad things happen, depends on the character. If it’s my main and I love her, then it’s hard. If she suffers, I suffer. And a particularly bad kind of pain is the self-inflicted kind. If my character behaves foolishly or inappropriately or hurts someone because of her faults and suffers the consequences, and she knows she’s to blame, then ouch! I squirm and writhe along with her. In Fairest, for example, Aza’s desire to be beautiful gets her into trouble over and over again.

There’s nothing wrong with feeling for our characters. If our emotions are engaged, the reader’s likely will be too.

When I killed Ella’s mother in Ella Enchanted I used some of my own feelings from when my mother died, which had happened about six years before I started writing the book. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that. My writing was more authentic, and my grief for my mother no less real. If you’ve never lost someone you love, you can remember the loss of a pet or even a beloved object. It’s not the same of course, but you can still use the sadness.

On the other hand, killing a bad character is fun. In Fairest again, I enjoyed doing Skulni in. In The Two Princesses of Bamarre, knocking Vollys off was a pleasure too. She has redeeming qualities but she’s evil and I reveled in ending her in a melodramatic way. I didn’t kill Hattie in Ella Enchanted, but it was a delight to make trouble for her. She’s so self-satisfied that I always wanted to take her down a peg or two.

But killing is only an extreme case of getting our characters into trouble, which we have to do constantly. At the beginning we may not know them well enough to predict what they’ll say, do, and feel, so we have to throw them into situations, and initially we have to dream up responses for them, responses that are expressed in the ordinary way, through action, thoughts, feelings, dialogue, and occasionally setting. Each response narrows the possibilities for the next situation. A character who jumps whenever he hears a loud noise probably won’t be calm in the face of a snarling Rottweiler, possibly not even in the face of a snarling toy poodle.

But anxiety isn’t enough to make a complex character. Maybe as soon as the dog showdown is over, our character texts twelve of his closest friends. We’ve learned something else. And suppose he apologizes to the dog’s owner for being snarled at and rushes to the pet food store to buy a treat for the dog. Put all this together, and pretty soon your characters will be talking to you, too, and going with you when you walk your own dog.

Suppose we toss Jack into a new environment. He’s into fencing, so at the start of our story his supportive parents enroll him in a fencing club.

Some people and characters are fine with strangers. They know just how to fit in. They put others at ease. But we want to make trouble for Jack, so we start developing his character in a direction that will make this new situation torture for him.

We can make him shyer and more solitary than a turtle. But that’s not the only option. He can be socially awkward. He speaks too loud. He assumes that everybody shares his sense of humor. What else? As a prompt, think of five other ways that Jack can fail in a new social situation. Use one (or more) in a story.

Suppose we want to write an interior kind of story. Everything is fine in Jack’s life. He doesn’t have to go to fencing club. His family is wonderful; he has friends; his studies interest him. But we need a story and we want it to be Jack’s struggle with his inner demons. What can they be?

Well, let’s give him some faults. Maybe he’s a tad paranoid. He’s suspicious of his good fortune. There’s a worm in the apple of his life, and he’s going to find it, by gum! His friends and family, at first amused by his mistrust, begin to be annoyed, then angry.

Or he’s easily bored and deliberately sets out to shake things up, with unfortunate results.

I recently read William Styron’s Darkness Visible, his short and interesting memoir of his depression (high school and up). Styron’s descent into madness (his term) hit him hardest just as he was collecting a literary award, when everything was going splendidly.

So, as the next prompt, think of five more ways that a character with a great life can fall apart. Make a story out of one or more of them.

I’ll end by stating the obvious: Even if it’s hard to bring misery down on our complex, interesting, beloved characters, the solution is neither to spare them nor to make them not complex and not interesting.

Here are two more prompts:

∙ Marie is helping her best friend Peony get ready for a little party. Four friends are coming over. One is a boy Peony likes. Nothing has ever happened between them but she has hopes. The two girls are baking a cake for the occasion. Marie has only the best of intentions but she keeps creating disasters. Write the scene. Continue onto the arrival of the boy, and keep the trouble coming.

∙ In Perrault’s version of “Cinderella,” Cinderella forgives her stepsisters, and they marry lords. Rewrite the ending, and punish them. Be harsh.

Have fun, and save what you write!

Unoriginal sin

On March 22, 2012, Inkling wrote, My book is the same genre as Lord of the Rings, and I’m having trouble being original. All books of the fantasy genre are takeoffs (not sure if this is the right word) of LOTR because Tolkien created the genre, and I’m afraid of my book being just another takeoff. The plot isn’t the same (far from it) and I’ve tried to add big differences, such as my Elves mainly being samurai-ish unlike most fantasy books where Elves are pretty peaceful, but I’m still afraid of not being original. I’d let my dad read it (his picture is under the definition of blunt), but most of the book is still in my head since I tend to plan my stuff out before I write. Can you help me???

I’m not sure I agree that Tolkien invented fantasy as a genre, although he certainly was a major figure and has influenced lots of writers. I just looked at a Wikipedia article, and here’s the link http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_fantasy, that discusses the roots of fantasy, which go back to antiquity. The article defines modern fantasy as taking place in an invented world beyond the ordinary or tucked into the ordinary. It credits Tolkien as the founder of the sub-genre of epic fantasy. Maybe, although I think there are Arthurian tales that are pretty epic.

Originality is at least as slippery a topic as the origins of fantasy. I wrote a post that also addresses the subject, which I suggest you visit. Just click on the label Originality. Then come back because I have a few more thoughts.

First off, there’s the question of outright infringement, that is, appropriating someone else’s creativity. We’re in danger of that if we copy word for word or if we put another author’s characters into our stories, not merely their names but also their essences. Fanfiction routinely uses other author’s characters, which I think is okay (I’m not a lawyer) when the writer is open about it and not profiting.

Even without infringing we can be unoriginal. If our story revolves around the rediscovery of a lost object of great power we may be in danger. LOTR isn’t the only example of this. Think of the movie Raiders of the Lost Ark and even stories about the search for the Holy Grail, and there must be many more. Then suppose the forces of good and the forces of evil are both vying to get to it first. You can write the rest in your head. Many struggles, many battles, and good wins out but at great cost.

But we can take this framework and still be original. Our characters can be so unexpected that they surprise the reader at every turn. We can spoof the prototype and exaggerate everything until the reader is laughing so hard he’s gasping for air.

In your example, Inkling, why do your characters have to be elves? If you’re worried about originality, why not invent a new kind of creature with a samurai sort of culture? Maybe your creatures have long heads and short bodies and their limbs are extraordinarily flexible. In my Disney fairy books I came up with tiffens, who are smaller than people and whose ears are thin and floppy like elephant ears and who debate everything and accomplish little beyond banana farming.

In writing there are a zillion candidates for fretting, and worry about originality may just be one of them. Writing  a quest, say, or a conflict between good and evil doesn’t mean you’re unoriginal. There must be thousands of novels that involve one or the other or both. Some are tired and predictable, but many many  take a fresh approach. Both are archetypal plot structures that probably will never get used up.

But if you’re still worrying, go through your story or review your conception of it. In every spot where you’re unsure, list at least five other possible ways to go. See if one of them pleases you more than your first choice. But also keep in mind that your fears very likely are exaggerated. You’re you and not this other author. Your choices will be your own. Your uniqueness will infuse your tale.

Oddly enough, another place to go for originality is real life. I wrote in an early blog post that when I want to describe a new character, in particular a character character, like a character actor, not beautiful or handsome, I like to look at photographs or portrait paintings from the art books on my shelves. Seeing actual faces moves me beyond the standard elements like hair and eye color, complexion, smile, into shape of upper lip, length of jaw line, forehead furrows – elements I wouldn’t have thought of otherwise. Likewise, the real life attitudes and struggles of actual personalities involve so many variables and quirks that we can never run out of ideas. We can recast the efforts of a friend to get along with a sibling as a the challenge of a new initiate to establish herself in society of warrior butterfly hunters while hanging on to the actual idiosyncratic approach our friend takes.

Here are four prompts:

∙ Invent a new species of creature different from elves, ogres, giants, fairies, and the like. Imagine that their habitat, which may not be a forest (a forest is unoriginal), is threatened. Invent a character who is such a creature. What happens? Write it!

∙ Retell “Beauty and the Beast,” setting it in the future and making all the characters robots.

∙ Turn something difficult, a struggle in your life or in the life of someone you know into an epic. For example, from my life, finishing Beloved Elodie was tough. If I were going to dramatize it, I might cast my editor and my critique buddy as guardian angels battling along with me and I’d incorporate aspects of their personalities into the story. There could be a swamp, a mountain, certainly a desert. Maybe a mine would need to be explored or a tunnel dug.

∙ As an exercise, which may turn into something more, chart out the story of LOTR. At each plot point, imagine other directions the story might have gone. For example, what if Sam had chosen not to go with Frodo? Write what might have happened. Keep going. Suppose Sam had gone along, but Strider wasn’t at the inn in Bree? What then? And so on. If you get to a point that intrigues you, write a new beginning that plunged your characters into this fix, replace the cast with your own creations, and keep going. You’ve got a new, original story on your hands.

Have fun, and save what you write!

Stalled in Slow Gear

First off, a follower of the blog got in touch through my website and asked me to announce this free event, and I’m happy to oblige. Here’s what she wrote:

“…the Newbery Honor Winner and author of over 80+ books for children, Marion Dane Bauer, will be doing a FREE, LIVE teleconference call entitled “The Basics of Writing Successful Picture Books.”  It will be held on Wednesday, September 19 at 7:00 EST, and her readers can go to http://www.writingforchildrenlive.com/Marion_Dane_Bauer.html for more information.  She will also be offering a FREE, LIVE Webinar on Point of View in Fiction the following Wednesday, September 26, 7:00 EST.”

I plan to attend or tune in later. My picture book skills could use work.

And – you are among the first to know – I sent Beloved Elodie to my editor two weeks ago. I was afraid to announce that in case she despised it and told me to start over, but she called me, and looks like the manuscript will actually be a book! …after I revise and mostly trim. She does not like the title, so, after I bang my head against a wall a few hundred times, I may come to you guys for help again.

One more thing: I’ll be signing books at Children’s Book Day at Sunnyside in Tarrytown, New York, on Saturday, September 15th, from noon to 2:15. Hope to see some of you there! Please let me know if you found out about the event on the blog.

Now for this week’s question. On March 19, 2012, writeforfun wrote, In my last book, the beginning was really good. The conflict is introduced on the second page. For 15 pages, it’s all exciting and keeps the reader’s interest. After that, it goes downhill. The first 50 pages cover one week. During that week the MC never leaves the apartment he’s in, and the only action is his conversations with the others that live in that room and the secrets he learns about them (of which there are many). The reason for that is because he’s been kidnapped, and I needed all that time to learn about the kidnappers, who become co-MC’s, and to make them seem likable, as they are actually good guys. The trouble is, readers start to get bored. They tell me that they like knowing all this about the kidnappers, but it seems a little dragged-out, although they can never tell me what I should omit. I guess all I’m asking is, how do I know what to cut, and how do I keep the reader’s interest until AFTER the 50 page mark, when the action kicks up again?

To start, congratulations for soldiering through the gluey part, where the action is stalled. For me, when I sense the reader’s boredom the going gets tough. Writeforfun, if you’ve finished your story, by now you may already have figured out what to cut. For the rest of us, often we can get perspective on the parts we need and the parts we don’t only after we’ve written “The End.” As the plot works itself out, we develop our characters and discover what they’re driven to do. When we’re done we realize that some of the incidents, sometimes entire chapters, we thought were crucial have become unnecessary or actually impede progress.

But if you have finished and you still can’t tell, here are my ideas:

Consider whether all the secrets are necessary. Maybe you’re giving the reader too much and she’ll never keep it all straight as the plot progresses. If you can slice out a few story strands the pace may pick up. Or maybe some secrets can be revealed later, after the characters leave the room. You may be able to work in a few pauses for exposition, a break for a meal, a fireside chat before your characters go to sleep.

The message that the kidnappers are good can be conveyed economically. I gave an example of this in my post of November 2, 2011, in which Fllep and Yunk, aliens from another galaxy who don’t speak English, enter Keith’s house in the middle of the night and tie him to his bedstead. However, before leaving him alone and going on to the rest of the household, the aliens bring his stuffed elephant over from the bureau for him to cuddle with. From this single gesture, the reader gets the idea, at least provisionally, that these beings with a single eye and hands that look like spiders, may not be so bad. Follow this up with a couple more indications, and the reader is likely to be won over. The dog may be following them and wagging his tail; the cactus plant in the window may suddenly break into flower. A few sentences may be all that’s needed.

However, going the other way, I’m not sure that cutting is required.

If the characters are stuck in a single room, the setting may start to feel claustrophobic. I had that problem in Beloved Elodie. For most of the book many of the major characters are confined to the Oase, a residence and museum inside a mountain. I love being in caves, but even I started to twitch after a while. One approach I took was to shift POV to characters on the outside. Another was to have Elodie explore parts of the Oase beyond the great hall. In writeforfun’s setup there’s just one room, but there may be ways to create private, separate areas, perhaps a closet or bathroom that could be its own environment. Or maybe there could be a screen; or two characters might barricade themselves behind a piece of furniture. Or, getting imaginative, two characters might have a way to communicate that the others don’t understand, a secret language or hand signals or something else.

*Warning!* I’m about to use a word concerning the afterlife that may offend some of you. If you’re worried, skip this paragraph:

There’s a great play, Jean-Paul Sartre’s No Exit (definitely high school and above) that might be worth reading if you have this problem. For those of you below high school level, it’s about three souls in hell (literally), and their hell is a single room, a modern room, like a hotel room, no torture devices. The hellishness is that the three have been chosen because their company and their combination will provide each with unending torment. The setting doesn’t change but the audience or reader is never bored.

If all your characters are in a single room, dialogue still isn’t the only option. There can be action. For instance, a fight can break out; there can be escape attempts. Depending on who’s there, the characters can engage in a project that can break up the talk. They can play a game – rummy, Scrabble, Monopoly, whatever – which may reveal goodness and evil and power relationships.

I also wonder why the reader has to find out right away that the kidnappers are good. Doubt increases tension, always a plus. Their virtue can emerge gradually in the course of the action. Sometimes, because I like my good characters, I don’t want anyone to think ill of them for even a page. I may mire my stories in mud just to shine their halos – I need to remember that there’s no way I can actually hurt their feelings!

Here’s another approach, it’s possible that the story starts too late and a better beginning would have begun earlier. The secrets that are revealed may more properly be shown in action when they happened. Let’s imagine that Allura, one of the kidnappers, was tortured by the terrible regime in power. Under torture, she revealed the true identity of one of those held in the room, who doesn’t even know who he really is. Now she’s got to protect him. Why not start the story with the torture?

Or, suppose another of the kidnappers, Borick, is there because he had a vision. Why not begin with the vision?

Here are three prompts:

• Nora, Nate, and Nina are trapped in the basement of Nora’s suburban ranch house during a tornado scare. When they judge that the storm must have passed and try to leave, they discover they’re trapped. Write the story, and don’t let it get boring. Create tension through their desperate situation (little water, no food, no bathroom, no cell phone reception), their personalities, their attempts to free themselves, the secret that Nate has been keeping from the others, and any other harrowing factors you invent.

• Nora, Nate, and Nina discover they’re not alone. Write the new story. Unknown to Nora’s family, homeless Norton has been living in the basement for a month. Norton is bigger and older than the others. Give hints that confuse the others and the readers about his intentions. Make him seem evil one moment, good the next until you finally resolve how he is.

• Although the entire story takes place in a modern basement, find ways to vary the setting. Write a scene of exploration. Write a scene of privacy for one or two characters.

Have fun, and save what you write!

Again again

On March 8, 2012, Lynn Weide wrote, In my novel, the same tropes/situations seem to come up all the time. For example, I have at least two instances of each of these: where the MC is listening in on someone else’s conversation to learn something crucial, or where she is chased by a “bad” guy, or where a character uses incriminating language to get someone else to confess something…You get my drift. These scenes feel so important and are good ways of advancing the plot, but I was wondering how much repetition of *basic* plot elements a reader is willing to accept and/or notice. Sometimes it feels almost impossible to make every situation unique in every way. Do you have any thoughts about this?

I’m guessing, but I imagine Lynn Weide’s repetitions happen in suspense stories with a mystery element. I’ve been grappling with the same problem in my mysteries, and I used the overhearing device in Beloved Elodie. In Elodie’s case she drinks a potion that enhances her senses of sight, hearing, and smell.

It’s hard to keep coming up with new ideas! For example, our hero, Mack, is in trouble. We may know Carmella is the villain and exactly what she’s plotting, but we can’t lay her plan bare or the fun will be over. Or we may not know, and we’re discovering along with Mack, and we have only the same means of investigation that he has, and they seem pitifully few. This is generally my plight; I’m in the dark along with my characters.

I’ve been watching the television series The Wire, definitely high school and above, excellent for the writing, the character development, the exploration of the effects of poverty. Anyway, the police unit the viewer cares about relies a lot on the use of wiretaps, hence the title of the series. When the detectives don’t have a wire they have to scramble for other ways to get information, and it isn’t easy. The poor writer is in the same bind as the police.

In fantasy although we can’t wiretap a phone, since there probably are no phones and no wires either, we can invent an equivalent. Terry Pratchett in his Discworld series (upper elementary, I’d guess, but check with a librarian) is a genius at coming up with nontechnological equivalents of our high-tech gizmos. So that’s one approach. For instance, Mack doesn’t have to overhear a conversation. He can find out from his pal, Prunella, the telepath. If you’re not writing fantasy, you can consider other ways of getting information; for example, your main can do an online search in newspaper archives.

Whenever you are on the verge of repeating a technique you’ve used before, try what I do: switch over to notes and list ten other ways your main can find out what he needs to know. For example, you might consider who else is likely to be privy to the info or where physically the answer might be discovered. Your ideas, of course, will be shaped by the conditions established in your story. In A Tale of Two Castles Elodie has to find out who poisoned the king. To help her I used story elements I’d already set up: she grew up on a farm and she loves to act and knows all the major plays in her world. The farm acquaints her with the common poisons and the tragedies with the exotic, expensive ones. She’s familiar with the symptoms of each and how quickly the poisons take effect.

I don’t feel like a master of the mystery, having written only two, but here are some devices I’ve either used or can think of to unravel a mystery. Please feel free to post your own suggestions on the blog.

∙ We can switch points of view. One character knows a little piece of the puzzle; another knows something else. Or Carmela can do some of the talking from her POV, and we can tantalize the reader with tidbits from her.

∙ The nature of the crime itself can lead to the criminal. If it involved great physical strength or, going the other way, tinyness, some suspects will be eliminated. (Or clever Carmela may use these limits sneakily to direct the investigation away from her.)

∙ We can give Mack particular abilities that help him figure things out, tailored to the situation of the story. And we can also handicap him in some ways to heighten tension.

∙ The nature of the victim can also lead to the perp. This is the obvious question asked by detectives: Who benefits? But there are more questions. Who hates this character? What made her be a victim? In A Tale of Two Castles the king is odious, but he’s most awful for one character in particular.

∙ Physical evidence of course, which we, in our wisdom, can plant. But we don’t want to make Mack’s job too easy.

As for readers, if we do recycle our methods, some may notice the repetition, some may not. But if we notice, we’ll probably feel more confident if we can expand our repertoire.

Regardless, we can comfort ourselves that there are other virtues beyond ingenuity. If the reader cares about our characters, if the writing is well-crafted, if the action zips along, if her emotions are captured, then she is likely to forgive a little repetition.

Lynn Weide’s instances of repetition seem significant. Overhearing is in a way what we do when we get lost in a story. We overhear events we’re not party to. And overhearing’s brother is self-incrimination. People reveal themselves without meaning to and without wanting to be found out, and we overhear their inadvertent admissions.

And the chase! The stuff of a zillion nightmares, possibly rising right out of the primordial soup, when we were chased by mastodons and saber-tooth tigers, oh, my! Naturally there’s power there and plenty of force to advance a plot.

Here are three prompts:

∙ Mack’s poodle has been kidnapped while Mack was at school and his parents were at work. The house has an alarm system which was not set off. A ransom note was left on the kitchen table. Write the investigation.

∙ I haven’t read Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, but let’s invent our own take-off on Jane Austen’s masterpiece. Elizabeth’s sister Mary (the studious, pompous one) is found murdered. This is during Mr. Collins’s visit, so you have an additional character. The killer is one of Austen’s characters, and the detective is, naturally, Elizabeth. Write the scene in which Mary is discovered and plant a clue. If you like, keep writing.

∙ Veering wildly from Little Women, Beth, home alone, hears noises. Mack, now an escaped slave on the underground railroad has taken refuge in the house, and his slave owner, improbably named Carmela, of course, is on the way. Write what happens, and if a chase ensues, write it.

Have fun, and save what you write!