Repeat After Self: First. Draft.

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. . . is what I keep having to tell myself as I press on through the last fifth or sixth or so of The Dogwatchers. It’s wildly exciting to be so close to the end, but there are definitely things over which I pause, torn, before saying, “FIRST DRAFT!” and continuing to write.

One thing I’ve run into was well-put by literary agent Rachelle Gardner in her blog entry on foreshadowing versus “telegraphing.” When you, the author, already know that something unexpected is going to happen, it’s hard sometimes not to let that knowledge slip in. Indeed, while Ms. Gardner says that authors often do this in the name of foreshadowing, “telegraphing” – basically, giving overly-obvious hints as to something that’s going to happen, particularly if that thing is supposed to be a twist – can be far more insidious.

At one point in The Dogwatchers, I caught myself giving characters an explicit contingency plan for a situation that really had no reason to occur to them: “If A doesn’t work, we’ll do B.” They should have just planned on A, a solid-seeming course, been totally surprised when it failed, and come up with B afterward. This way, readers will be as surprised as the characters are when Plan A doesn’t work, rather than having the idea that it might fail already planted in their heads. Indeed, as I first wrote it, readers might assume that Plan A will fail, or else why would the story detail Plan B?

This is basically the same problem as that in Ms. Gardner’s example. Avoid having your characters consider the possibility that something will happen when that something is supposed to be even remotely surprising. This can be difficult, since you certainly don’t want your characters to fail to think of an obvious possibility, but then, of course, the problem is that your twist is obvious, and you’ll want to address that. I think some writers are tempted to include arguments against the likelihood of the twist, as in Ms. Gardner’s example: a character says, “What if X is the case?” and another character responds, “No way, for these reasons!” All this does is make readers aware of the possibility of X. They may even spot the loophole in the characters’ reasoning against X, which will make them suspect that X will, in fact, happen.

***

On a totally different note, I have to once again rave a little (the good kind of raving) about a book that I picked up for research, Daniel Pool’s What Jane Austen Ate and Charles Dickens Knew. Highly readable and sometimes humorous, it contains well-organized and information-packed chapters on various aspects of Victorian England, including money, the peerage, fashion, marriage, orphans, fox hunting . . . the list goes on. It explains the historical basics of each subject, then gives interesting tidbits, like which card games were trendy and which ones played mostly by stuffy old people *coughwhistcough*, and includes examples from Victorian fiction. There’s also a fantastic glossary of Victorian terms.

The book’s stated intent is to serve as a reference for people who are reading Victorian novels and can’t understand the money talk or want to know the difference between a barrister and a solicitor (like Eugene and Mortimer in Dickens’ Our Mutual Friend), but it’s also an amazing tool for worldbuilders insomuch as it presents a society with rules strange and different from our own, then explains the details and processes by which all of these things functioned. Especially valuable if you or someone you know writes steampunk. And after all, the holidays are coming up . . .

Smart like Smart? Or Smart like “ARRRGH”?

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I’ve always liked intelligent characters. Since most of the books I love are YA or middle-grade, this often means characters who are smart teens or children. In popular fiction, we have Hermione Granger, Library Ranger; Artemis Fowl, preteen evil supergenius; and Matilda Wormwood, she of the mighty brain that gets so bored of reading complete libraries and doing instantaneous long division that it turns to telekinesis. I love them all. It certainly doesn’t bother me to read about child characters with intellects more powerful than mine. Smart children are great. What I’ve come to realize, though, is that I detest wise children.

Kids have lots of great qualities. Energy, creativity, candor, and – overdone as it sometimes is in fiction – innocence and openness. Like all people, they vary, so even these traits don’t apply to all children, but one thing that just plain doesn’t belong with children? Wisdom.

Wisdom – the kind that can make a person empathetic, patient, a good judge of character, and knowledgeable about life, truth, and relationships – comes with experience. Once again, this isn’t cut-and-dried; an older person may not be more patient or empathetic than a younger one. But think about it: it takes a couple of years before a child is even capable of empathizing, of realizing that other people even have minds, internal lives, wants, needs. In general, children and teens have shorter attention spans, are less thoughtful, and have shakier, more selfish, or more myopic judgment than older people of similar backgrounds.

None of this means that I think people aren’t writing child characters impatient and selfish enough. (Although recognition of these flaws can be a powerful tool for getting reader sympathy. I love that Diana Wynne Jones’ characters often have selfish wants, even if they are too ashamed to express them.)

No. What it means is that (human) child characters need not to smile knowingly and state simplified universal truths, leaving the other characters in awe. They need not to instantly recognize relationships between other characters, and especially not to smirk and tell the protagonist how obvious it is that s/he likes the romantic interest, well before anyone else catches on. They need not to immediately recognize dishonesty or untrustworthy persons. I don’t care if they are streetsmart young members of the thieves’ guild or classically educated princesses in courts full of intrigue or blind kids who are super-duper practiced with using their other senses. They must not be Wise in the Ways of the World.

Ideally, you also want to be careful with younger child characters who open their eyes really wide and say, “Mommy, why do people hurt each other?”

Kids can certainly be know-it-alls. Hermione is a great example of this, and one of my favorite fictional brainiacs. Her know-it-all-ism is much like mine was in school: a lot of book-smarts plus a desire to prove herself plus some social awkwardness. She is, in that way, quite a realistic character, as well as sympathetic and entertaining.

Of course, kids and teens may think that they are wise when they aren’t – as may anyone. And like anyone, they can have moments of insight or brilliant realizations. Just don’t make them frequent, and don’t make them enough of a distinguishing characteristic of a child character that one could call the character “wise.”

In part, this just comes down to the fact that it’s okay for a child character to have more knowledge and/or technical skill than I do, just like it’s okay if a child character can use magic when I can’t. When a child character has more wisdom than I do, it sets off both my BS-detector and my growly face. I resent being told how life works by people who have experienced very little of it.

I’m sure that, like any rule, this has exceptions, and I welcome hearing about them!

***

On an unrelated note, I’m not sure whether any of you are doing NaNo this year – if so, good luck, and do tell! – but here is a most entertaining little explanation and endorsement of the phenomenon.

Doings

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This past week I:

– Worked on The Dogwatchers. Muddled through a scene that is supposed to be subtle. Repeat after self: “First draft.”

– Officially accepted place at the school of Information and Library Science at UNC Chapel Hill. Will start in January. Exciting!

– Read Farenheit 451.

I’m also reading, for world-building purposes, an excellent book called What Jane Austen Ate and Charles Dickens Knew. Their time periods are later than my world’s analogous period, but the book is fascinating in its own right as well as providing insight on how a number of extinct institutions and traditions actually functioned. It’s really intended to be a reference while reading the works of Dickens, Austen, Trollope, Thackeray, and so on – some of its detailed explanations (English currency, brief rules of whist and other card games) are hard to take in. In some cases, though, as with the rules of social precedence, this is the point – people living at the time had trouble with them, too.

The most interesting thing I’ve learned so far is that debtors’ prison was a less-nonsensical concept than I had imagined. I used to think, “Wait, they can’t pay, so you put them in jail? Now they can’t work or do anything to get money to pay! This isn’t even a vicious cycle, it’s a dead end!”

What actually happened depended on whether you were a “debtor” or a “bankrupt,” a distinction relying on whether you were considered legally to be a tradesman. A “bankrupt” would have all of his or her possessions seized, sold, and used to pay creditors as much as was possible. Any extra money went to the bankrupt person. If the debts weren’t covered, oh well; they’d done all they could, and no one could get more from them. (Interestingly, if someone failed to pay rent, the owner of the establishment could go in to take and sell the person’s furniture to make up the rent money.)

In the case of a “debtor,” things started when a creditor paid a shilling for an arrest warrant, which they gave to the sheriff, who arrested the owing party and put him or – well, okay, generally him – into custody. It wasn’t always bad custody; he might even be put up in the sheriff’s house. This was just to ensure that the person appeared in court, where he might yet be found not to owe money at all. No one seems to have checked these things, so the whole situation reminds me of those charity events at college where you pay to have one of your friends “arrested,” and the friend then has to get someone to pay “bail.”

Once you were found a debtor, and without cash on hand to pay, you were asked to sell your possessions and pay as much of the debt as possible, like a bankrupt. The difference was that a debtor could refuse, at which point it was off to debtors’ prison. The prison actually acted as a coercion device to encourage people to sell their belongings and pay off their debts. Once they had nothing to sell – no way that they potentially could pay their creditors – they could no longer legally be held in prison.

So, huzzah for learning things!

Bookage

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I just finished reading War of the Rats by David L. Robbins, bestselling author and Advanced Fiction professor extraordinaire. As I told him, I kept picking it up with the intention of reading critically to see whether he’d done any of the things he told our class not to do, but I failed, as I was always drawn into the story right away. So if anyone “sits down” or “looks up at the stars” (“You don’t need to say ‘looks up at the stars!’ That’s where we keep them!”), I know nothing about it.

I loved the book – which is really something, considering that I am a person of notoriously squishy sensibilities whose last encounter with what you might call a war novel was a required reading of The Killer Angels in tenth grade. This was the poignant, moving, and exceedingly high-stakes story of snipers in WWII Stalingrad, centered on a duel between the single best sniper in the Russian army and the Nazi supersniper flown in from Berlin to hunt him. All but one of the four POV characters are meticulously-researched real people, and the action takes place in the jagged, haunting landscape of the bombed-out factory city. A great book, and one I thoroughly recommend.

Aaand, yesterday was the release date of DLR’s new book, Broken Jewel. Be excited!

I plan to follow a fun piece of advice I once saw for friends of authors. I will walk into my little local branch of Barnes & Noble – the only bookstore in our area – and ask where the book is. If they do not have it, I will make Eyes of Surprise and say, “Really? David L. Robbins is a bestselling Virginia author!” (Do not say this if this is not true of your author friend. Just focus on the what is true and sounds good.) Then I will order the book. If nothing else, it may put his name on their radar a little bit. And if they do have it already, then yay! New book for me!

Things to Love About November

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Writing and scarves, of course! I’m not actually doing NaNoWriMo this year, because I’m working on other projects, but Dragons Over London was the product of NaNoWriMo 2006, so I’m a big fan of the challenge.

And here, appropriately, is a great blog post combining two fall essentials: good self-editing techniques and cute boys in scarves. My scarf and I approve.

As regards icon: a cravat is basically a scarf for fops. Only they’ve worked things out so they can wear them all year round! Dastardly geniuses, those fops.

Wonders Abound!

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I have – tentatively – finished my edit of Dragons Over London! Sometime in the next couple of days, I will write the cover letter and send it all off to the contest.

In other news that makes me all kinds of happy, I have discovered the community dianawynnejones. With this discovery came a second one, that of a confusing logic problem. This group is for fans of author Diana Wynne Jones. It has about 674 members as of right now. According to the statistics page, Livejournal’s total number of accounts is currently 23,568,712. These numbers are not the same! HOW CAN THIS BE?

I joined the group immediately, of course, but careful mathematics indicate that this does not make the numbers equal. Strange. Well, I guess we can never know all the answers.

Here, though, is an example of why everyone with a Livejournal account should belong to this community: an interview with DWJ in which she reveals which countries send her the most (and fewest) fanmail marriage proposals for Howl, and also mentions that Cat Chant of the Chrestomanci books is supposed to have some kind of autism. Interesting . . .

On the topic of actual writing, something I recently read has stuck in my mind. Writing, it said, creates an experience in which readers focus on the moment much more than people do in most of their everyday lives. I find this is true. Most of the time that I’m working, walking, exercising, cooking, and so on, my mind wanders, not just to conventional daydreams, but to things I’ll do later, things I’ve read, things I’ve recently seen or done. I spend probably a very small portion of my day focused on what I’m doing right then, on my immediate surroundings, or on the emotions that those things elicit from me. When reading, however, I’m all about the moment that the characters are in.

I guess you can have a story in which the characters are themselves removed from their immediate realities. They can certainly plan, remember, and daydream. Technically, all flashback scenes are outside of the moment, although if the character is having a flashback, then we’re still following along closely with what she’s experiencing right now. In that sense, though, readers are in the moment with characters no matter what wacky internal side trips the characters take, because we’re still following what’s going through their heads right now. Strange that that could seem more immediate than a real person’s actual daydream.

Still, practically speaking, I find most characters to spend most of the time that I’m reading about them at least somewhat focused on what’s going on. I wonder if this is, in itself, a kind of escapism or vicarious thrill for readers. After all, most of the experiences that people wish they would have are things they would not tune out, things worth being fully present for. Maybe this is why people like to read about – and write about – others having experiences that make them mentally sit up and pay attention.

Thoughts?

A Different Approach

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This month, I have two unrelated special opportunities to submit a complete manuscript to a publisher. I just mailed Rabbit and Cougar to Karen Lotz of Candlewich Press (who generously offered to read the manuscripts of all the people whose pitches she missed at the James River Writers conference due to her being sick), and I will send Dragons Over London to a contest by Random House as soon as I’ve finished editing the last few chapters. This is especially exciting because because Dragons Over London, which I love but have hesitated to submit places because of its novella-category length, is just the right length to fit the requirements.

Both “submitting directly to publisher” and the “submitting full manuscript” are unusual to me. I’ve done each of them before in various situations, but most of my submissions are queries, sometimes with synopses and/or sample chapters, and most go to agents.

So that’s what I’m up to right now. I’ve also been doing some worldbuilding research, reading books about the Renaissance and the Elizabethan era. The more I read about that time, the more I realize that the average person’s life was quite similar to the life s/he might have led during the Middle Ages. Perhaps this is not *Jedi hands* the historical period of basis I was looking for.

Still, while you’re here, Interesting Renaissance Fact: in 1500, each of the three most populous cities in Europe had about 150,000 people. London, the largest city in England, had only 50,000.

James River Writers’ Conference

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I spent Friday and Saturday at the ever-excellent annual James River Writers conference in Richmond. Located in the Library of Virginia, it ran from 9:00 to 4:30 each of those days. A quick run-down of the fun stuff I did there:

1. Saw David L. Robbins, who I can now ALMOST call by his name instead of “Professor Robbins.” He’s now teaching at VCU, and hopes to return to William & Mary when its poor public-school budget has the monies.

Apparently he has named a character after me in his new book, Broken Jewel, which comes out November 10. He used my real last name – “Anica Lewis” is my writing name, “Anica” and “Lewis” being my two middle names. So that’s MAJOR Willcox to you! And if you forget the extra L, you can drop and give me ten!

2. Bought Professor David R.’s book War of the Rats. Also Shiver by Maggie Stiefvater. Edgy YA werewolf love story? Yes please. Got both books signed. Conferences are awesome. I felt even better about this because the book table was provided by a local independent, Fountain Bookstore.

3. Attended many panels. This means – that’s right – a list within a list!

Here, I’ll put it behind a cut.