Title That Isn’t “Bringing Dexy Back”

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. . . I couldn’t help it. In my editing of Rabbit and Cougar, I’ve just reached the part introducing Dexy, who is one of my favorite characters of all time. He’s just so much fun to write.

My recent editing has brought to my attention one writing technique to explore here and one pitfall to avoid.

Pitfall first: This is, first and foremost, a matter of point-of-view consistency, but it’s a sneaky one. You might think of it as making your POV character slightly prescient. See the following example:

“I’m not sure that was a good idea,” said Bridget. Actually, she suspected it was illegal.
Aaron slid off the bed to look for his glasses. “I haven’t much choice, have I?” He shuffled through some papers on his desk, then opened the refrigerator. “Ha, got you!” He pulled out his glasses and put them on.

Don’t be distracted by the fact that Aaron has put his glasses in the refrigerator and possibly also broken the law: Bridget is the problem. Apparently, she is psychic. She knew immediately that Aaron was looking for his glasses. This is an issue both because it is unrealistic, if in a minor way, and because it removes the reader from the character. It’s nice to have the reader discover things at the same time as the POV character, to have the two on the same (forgive me) page. Basically, the story has slipped briefly into an omniscient POV. Try it again without that bit:

“I’m not sure that was a good idea,” said Bridget. Actually, she suspected it was illegal.
Aaron slid off the bed. “I haven’t much choice, have I?” He shuffled through some papers on his desk, then opened the refrigerator. “Ha, got you!” He pulled out his glasses and put them on.

I acknowledge that it sounds better partly because the word “glasses” isn’t repeated, but a legitimate issue has been eliminated. The prescience problem sometimes follows the word “to.” Make sure that when another character is going to do something, your POV character doesn’t know the intention or the next action before someone in her position would. Sometimes, the “to” phrase indicates that the character is already doing the next action: She opened her laptop to search for bank robberies in their area. “There haven’t been any in thirty years.” Note how “to search” could have been replaced by “and searched,” indicating an actual action rather than an intention. Alternatively, the intention could be obvious: “He climbed onto a chair to reach the top shelf.” The word “to” doesn’t always appear, though; in the original example, one could have said “Aaron slid off the bed and went looking for his glasses.” The problem remains.

Now, for the technique: working the story-within-a-story. I discovered, while editing Rabbit and Cougar, that Cougar tells some rambling stories. While storytelling is part of his character, some of these stories seemed pointless. I don’t beat myself up too much over these things: that’s what editing is for. When I’m writing the first draft, sometimes I don’t know what will come up again and what won’t. Dealing with one particularly pointless story was easy: I replaced it with another story that included important backstory (and actually made more sense for Cougar to tell at that point).

The second story posed a problem. Its primary significance was to explain the history of a town Rabbit and Cougar were about to visit, but that town (not to mention its history) is hardly a blip on the plot horizon of the overall novel. I didn’t want to cut the entire story, because it accomplished one other point: establishing the existence of hobgoblins as a dangerous force in the fantasy world. The story read like one of those instances when the writer wants to tell you something that you may not need to know. I actually did need to show that hobgoblins existed (they appear later), and it made sense to use a story because of Cougar’s upbringing and predilection toward storytelling. Unfortunately, the length and detail of the story seemed to imply that the upcoming town would be important. It was the town equivalent of giving a tavern wench a first and last name, full physical description, and family history, then having the protagonists walk out of the bar and never see her again. What to do?

I got someone else to look at the story and help me streamline it. Then, and most importantly, I changed what the characters got out of it. In my earlier draft, when the story ended, Rabbit commented on a character and asked a question about the town. In my edited version, Rabbit asks a question about hobgoblins and whether they might encounter any. (Foreshadowing much?) This changes the focus and direction of Cougar’s story. To continue the “tavern wench” metaphor, let’s say our protagonist spots a nasty scar on the tavern wench serving ale. Knowing a plothook when she sees one, Pattie Protagonist asks about the scar. The tavern wench replies that she got it in a hobgoblin raid when she was a child; her father lost his leg in the same raid. If Pattie now asks what it was like growing up with a disabled father, then she had better be prepared to have Wendy Wench become a prominent character in her story. If, on the other hand, Pattie expresses sympathy and comments on how nasty hobgoblins are, then she’s just set herself up to meet hobgoblins later. If your story requires the former, by all means, go for it; mine needed the latter.

On a note related only to this journal itself, it’s very odd to write original examples for these points. Obviously with the second one, I was being somewhat silly. I’ve read journals and articles like this blog, and I rarely see original examples in them; I think it’s because of how self-conscious one gets about them. Honestly, even choosing names suddenly seems like inviting people to judge you. But, of course, no one ever got anywhere in writing by not letting their work be read, and sometimes examples make these things much easier to understand! I hope they’ve been helpful.

Now, off to pack. Very soon, I will be leaving for England!

“Practical” Writing

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In an unusual convergence of what I want to do and what I need to do, editing Rabbit and Cougar has become important to my grad school applications. I’m going to use the beginning of it as my writing sample. This is highly convenient. I needed, for aforementioned sample, either a few chapters of a novel (I assume that, like agents, they want the first chapters) or one to three short stories. Not only is it nice not to have to edit another piece (or three) while I’ve already got one editing project going, but I feel my novels represent my writing style better than do most of my short stories.

I also recently wrote the personal statement for my applications. I had to mention that simply because it meant me writing about me writing about my writing. And now I’ve written about writing about me writing about my writing. And now . . . the madness must end!

Of late, I have plenty of reading time and am finally taking a look at some of the recent blockbusters and big names in YA fantasy. Not only am I curious as to what they might have in common and whether I can see why each is so successful, but I do like to see what other people are doing in the genre. I’m currently reading Eragon, and hope to try out Inkheart and perhaps The Spiderwick Chronicles and Twilight. Feel free to suggest others. I have already read Harry Potter, Narnia, and every book I can get by Diana Wynne Jones. I also, when the planets are aligned just right, read books written for people my age. I recently read From Dead to Worse; at some point, I will have to try some other non-YA works of fantasy. It fascinates me to see how experience (and discussions from Advanced Fiction class) makes me a more critical reader, much more able to find what specifically went wrong or right in a book.

To round out this rather general entry, I read a suggestion in Writers Digest that writers not make their blogs about writing. It made the very good point that some readers aren’t writers and don’t care about the how-tos of writing or the ins and outs of a writer’s life. Many people do care, hence the existence of Writers Digest, but some do not. I chose that subject for this journal because:

A. It is extremely relevant to me and what I do on a daily basis

B. It holds great interest for me, making weekly updates doable

C. For the “writer’s life” aspect, since I am living it continually, I cannot run out of material

D. I enjoy reading other peoples’ blogs and articles on writing

Besides that, I don’t see a clear alternative subject. If I wrote, say, nonfiction, that would be easy: the topic of my blog could be related to the topic of my books. The closest thing I can think of is general “medievalesque” research. This does not seem like a coherent subject. However, when I’m in England and hopefully have access to loads of historical sites, ruins, castles, etc., I may write some entries as “research profiles” to record interesting things I learn there. But as of now, I expect this blog to remain centered on writing.

I Should Practice Calling It “Research” . . .

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. . . because someday, I could get school funding to do things like this! 😉

On Tuesday, I got a chance to do the most interesting thing I’ve ever been able to call research. This seems appropriate to mention, since I talked about research last week.

My research opportunity was a trip to Biltmore House in North Carolina. A few weeks ago, wanting to design a mansion that appears in The Dogwatchers, I searched online for mansion floor plans. Most that I found were, strangely, too practical. They had a few rooms unusual in less-expensive houses (game rooms, indoor pools, etc.), but mostly, I saw conventional rooms in larger sizes. There were certainly no corridors.

Biltmore House, finished for the Vanderbilts in 1895, has forty-three bathrooms. Towers. Twenty-one bedrooms just for servants. A bedroom with gilded walls. An entire room devoted to showcasing a model of the Biltmore House. Not to mention hundreds of paintings, prints, friezes, sculptures, fountains, figurines, ornate furniture, tapestries, and decorations that simply would not have occurred to me (see above, “gilded walls”). I even got a brochure that showed me the floor plans!

Touring the Biltmore helped me in two unexpected places. First, though I had hoped to find floor plans for a mansion in The Dogwatchers, it ended up being more applicable to a totally different mansion that appears in Rabbit and Cougar. Then, too, I found something even more exciting than floor plans: a real sense of an extravagant mansion as a home. In Rabbit and Cougar, one important character was raised in such a place. Walking through that amazing house helped me know him better. It was particularly interesting to think of how the two homes in my novels would each differ from the Biltmore based on their inhabitants, their surrounding areas, and so on.

Beyond that, I’ve continued to edit. One thing I’ve found helpful in this process is to keep a chapter-by-chapter log of events, recording in a separate document a list of chapters, each with a note for every important happening therein. It’s a sort of retroactive outline. This is great to keep track of plot-related events, even small ones (“First mention of . . .”), but also because it helps me recognize things I need to cut. I keep running across things that, when I condense them to a sentence for my outline, are clearly unimportant to the story – even boring. I’ve never planned chapters this way in advance; with Lord of the Dark Downs, I kept track of events in this way as I wrote them, but that was to remember whose POV described each event. (That novel had a lot of POV-switching.) I don’t know that I could do this in advance. I usually know, while writing, what will happen in the rest of my current chapter, but not after that.

A friend recently expressed trepidation about a class requiring the writing of a novel. (You know who you are. 🙂 ) I suppose it isn’t for everyone, but I recommend that anyone who likes writing try it out. NaNoWriMo might be a good introduction for people who don’t have class deadlines; it provides an online environment of sympathetic companions to the process. It’s also excellent in helping people restrain their editing impulses while working on the first draft. I enjoyed NaNo 2006, when I wrote Dragons Over London. As to the nature of novel-writing, it allows for an expansion of plot and character development that I absolutely love. It also lets you unpack slowly, if you will: for example, my funny short stories are much more laugh-a-minute than are my novels, though I consider them humorous as well. Furthermore, the structure of chapters differs a lot from that of short stories. I actually like novel-writing much more. True, I sometimes get ideas that demand short-story form, and I’m more than happy to write them, but novels are my passion. I wish my friend the best of luck, and encourage everyone who writes fiction to try at least one!

Building a . . . Fantasy

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This week, I’d like to talk about world-building. I’ve done quite a bit of it this week in addition to, and in conjunction with, editing Rabbit and Cougar. It’s a big topic in fantasy writing, so I won’t tackle everything, but here are a few points.

Fantasy worldbuilding is about much more than the fantastical. To make a world real, you must consider logic. Consider it early and often. Any fantastical assumptions you make must be followed by the proper logical progressions. This is a major factor with things like magic, especially because it can be difficult to think of everything that might follow a certain development, but it is also important to the economy, politics, social relations (including those between different intelligent species, if your world has more than one), and even ecology of your fantasy world.

This applies to non-fantasy as well. Let’s say you’re writing a non-fantasy book (for some reason ;P) set in Virginia, and you decide to make up a town because you don’t want to deal with making mistakes about real places or getting sued by anyone. If setting is going to be any non-negligible part of your story, you need to have some idea of the reason your town exists and how it works: What are major employers? Is it a college town? A farming area? Historical site? What is there to do? If you want your setting to be a city of 80,000 people, then make sure they have a reason to be there. Conversely, if your town has a population of 5,000, you may not want to give it a major shopping center or university. Make your setting make sense.

Medievalesque fantasy, my main writing area, has some special challenges. In a town, city, or other settlement: What is the main water source? People will not usually settle in a place without readily available drinking water – unless you have designed a species that doesn’t need it. Where do the inhabitants get food, and what kind? Clothes? What do they do for entertainment? With whom do they trade, and for what? I recently had issues when I realized that a character owned a frying pan whose society had virtually no way to obtain metal. That had to be reworked, and my understanding of the character’s society deepened as I actually decided how they would use other materials in situations when we might use metal. Indeed, it led to a convenient plot point.

Ecology, too, can be a real issue in fantasy. Many fantasy writers seem tempted to throw a whole bunch of apex predators into a world which otherwise, it seems, contains mostly the same animals we have on Earth. What, one wonders, do their dragons eat? And sphinxes, leviathans, chimeras (chimerae?), basilisks, and so on? Do any of them compete with predators we would recognize? (I once saw a program in which a dragon and a tiger fought out a territorial dispute.) How many of these creatures – and the answer is often “all of them” – eat people? Can they survive on people alone, or do they also eat livestock and large wild animals (buffalo, deer, whales, or things that in this world are top-tier predators, such as bears).

(As an interesting point, it seems that humans reached their current evolutionary stage on Earth starting as prey animals. With our intelligence and tool-making abilities, we turned the tables on our predators, many of which are now endangered. Keep in mind, if your fantasy world lasts for vast periods of time – say, several generations of long-lived dragons or elves – that humans will have had all this time to find ways to defeat, or at least deflect, their predators. They may even have magic in addition to tools, depending on your world.)

In my worldbuilding this week, I found a wonderful ally in a humble little book called The Audubon Society Nature Guide to Eastern Forests. I was, at the time, trying to get a feel for what it would be like to tramp through an oak forest; we have none in my immediate area, and my characters were walking around in one. It outlined different types of forests, explaining where each was found and why: the environmental factors, from temperature to soil content, that caused certain plants to grow, and how those plants plus weather, altitude, etc. affected the animals living there. I discovered that what I really wanted was an oak-hickory forest, and was immediately furnished with a long list of species found there.

The point I mean to make here is that ecology, like all of the various worldbuilding factors, can be done right or wrong even when no fantastical elements are involved. If you have a vast tundra with no wildlife except for the occasional snowshoe hare and large packs of wolves, then you have apparently invented wolves which feed on snow. As such, they should be little danger to travelers. And in a fantasy world, if you provide no reason why a thing should be different from our world, people assume it is not. (Think of gravity: unless you say otherwise, readers will assume that your characters walk on the ground and that dropped objects fall down.) This means that there are aspects of the world where you can make mistakes based on non-fantasy things. (This is common with horses. I have read many commentaries on the lack of realism associated with horses in some medievalesque fantasy. Do not let this happen to you.) Even in a world with magic, snakes cannot wink unless you expressly provide a reason why your world’s snakes have eyelids when Earth’s do not. This is a reason to research anything “real” that you plan to include and with which you are not already quite familiar – even if only very few readers, those who are experts in the area, catch an error, wouldn’t you rather not have that error? Besides, sometimes you come up with fun new facts, some of which you might use. I researched foxes over the past few days because a fox figures prominently in Rabbit and Cougar. I learned that foxes wag their tails when happy and that their “happy sounds” include clucks, whines, and what sound like human screams. I even read – though I need to check this – that they lack the facial muscles to bare their teeth. How interesting is that?

(Well, a lot, if you’re writing about a fox.)

Even if you don’t include everything – and please, don’t include everything – that you know, it’s usually better to know more. For example, the fact that my oak-hickory forest even has foxes implies that it has things they can eat – and I know what they are. That the forest contains mice, rabbits, insects, and berries (and oh yes, I do have specific species) may not come up, but knowing this will keep me from being inconsistent (for example, having the character who lives in this forest see a mouse and say “whoah, what’s that?”).

Research and good world-building makes the writing easier and more satisfying. It gives the story a deeper and more thought-out feel and allows you to confidently and correctly use specific examples. (I now know, for instance, what undergrowth grows in oak-hickory forests.) Your readers will appreciate it. And it’s loads of fun – win-win!

Actual Progress!

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This week saw me actually doing some real editing of Rabbit and Cougar. In a long-overdue measure, I decreed that I would edit at least one page every day that I had access to my computer. This is not the way I ordinarily work in writing or editing: I usually go for days without touching my work, then sit down some Saturday and knock out several – or many – pages. I know, I know: “Writers write. Every day.” I hear this a lot. I simply don’t write every day, and I haven’t had a problem with this. With editing, though, I’ve found this just-do-it approach to be quite effective. In the phrase “at least one page a day,” the “at least” is key; at one page a day, editing Rabbit and Cougar would take me about a year. 😛 But it’s pretty easy to edit more than a page once I’m sitting there with the document in front of me.

In fact, I finished editing the first chapter of Rabbit and Cougar. This took much longer than expected, as it needed significant rewriting, but I’m quite pleased with the result. In my first draft of the novel, Cougar tells a long story about – get ready – the past life of a character from Cougar’s past life, someone who never shows up in the story. Here’s the thing: when I begin a novel, I tend to know:

A. How it starts
B. How it ends
C. A few things that will happen in the middle, and
D. The important characters, or most of them.

I do not know how things get from A to B, as it were. I don’t know what might be important later in the story, and I tend to give characters free reign to do and talk about things which sometimes turn out to be extraneous and need to be removed in editing. In this way, I think novels can be easier than short stories – certainly easier to start. In a short story, it’s difficult to start unless you pretty much how the whole thing will happen. At least, this is the case for me. All that said, I think that I have now, when starting a novel, a better idea of whether certain things will be relevant or not.

Anyway, in the second draft of Rabbit and Cougar, I had changed the story from a full-length monologue in quotes to something like “he told them about ——,” though with a little of Cougar’s dialogue at the end. In this current edit, I removed this story and actually managed to have Cougar talk about something more important – his own past. This is particularly important because I’ve changed his view on his past in this edit, and I want the reader to know from early on what he thinks about his origins. My main concern now is that the character may come off as too share-y. He’s really fairly reticent, and reluctant to talk about his past, thoughts, etc., and I hope that in my desire to have him open up more to readers, I haven’t made him open up too much to the other characters.

After finishing with Chapter One, I went around checking the lengths of first chapters in YA books – particularly fantasy ones – in my house. They ranged from 7 to 44 pages. Removing one outlier at each end makes the range 11 to 18, with each of those numbers representing several books. Of course, type size varied. This made me feel better, as I had feared that 17 pages was too long.

I have hopes that one or more young family friends will read and comment on the story once this edit is finished. How lucky that those kids I used to babysit are now in my target age group!

Another Busy Week

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Yet again, my main efforts this week went toward things only indirectly related to writing. First and foremost, I studied for the GRE, which I will take tomorrow. I’ve also been narrowing down my list of graduate schools to the ones to which I will actually apply. I was going to make that a list of ten, but it ended up being eleven.

The list.

Plotting versus Subplotting

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In reading yet another book on writing – yes, I know, I have a problem – I came across a description of subplots saying that they “can be slight or crucial to the story” and “should climax and end just before the main plot reaches a climax.” (Writing for Children and Young Adults by Marion Crook.) While I definitely agree with the first point and would probably concede the second, this made me think about my own definitions of, and rules for, subplot.

Subplots, by definition, enrich a story. They provide prime opportunities for character development, and may keep the story from being tiresomely single-minded. (At the same time, they can put characters in what turns out to be the right place/interaction/mood/etc. for a new development in the main plot.) They may even end up contributing directly to the main plot.

Still, defining what is and is not a proper subplot can be tricky. The one big no-brainer – “a subplot is not the main plot” – aside, on what level do a set of related happenings become a subplot? Also, is a “subplot” the same as a “plotline”? Often, in casual conversation about a book, one hears reference to a minor character’s “plotline,” suggesting that a plotline is defined by the character to which it pertains (which, of course, would mean great overlap, as a scene may be important to several characters). One hears about “romantic subplots” and “family subplots.” A subplot could also be seen as requiring a complete arc, just like the main plot.

To some extent, this is all semantics. You could decide to call any set of related events a “plotline” and only one with a distinct introduction, climax, and resolution a “subplot.”

I was interested by Ms. Crook’s suggestion that a subplot “should climax and end just before the main plot reaches a climax.” It seems to me that a fair number do not. Some even end after the main plot does – the classic (if somewhat chauvinist) example being the hero who gets the girl after completing his big challenge, possibly even earning her attentions by completing said challenge. Comic relief-type subplots, too, may resolve at the very end of a story, often with witty last words. And what about books in sets? They often have subplots that arc through multiple books as well as those that resolve within each.

I’ve been resisting very hard using the Harry Potter books as examples here just because I do that a lot, but they really do show what I mean. We have the main plot – “Harry fights Voldemort” – and many, many smaller plots. Harry and Ginny get together. Ron and Hermione get together. Neville becomes awesome. One could see subplots (or plotlines, or what have you) with the rest of the Weasleys, Remus and Tonks (and the clear parallel between Teddy’s sad little orphan story and Harry’s), and even the Dursleys.

I don’t suppose I have clear conclusions to draw here regarding subplots and what they are. I am for them, certainly. Ms. Crook seems to be a proponent of the outlined story – she suggests outlining subplots as well as the main plot, which obviously would mean deciding what qualifies. I tend to make one big, loose outline, and include events if I think they are important or am afraid I will forget them. Sometimes, clear subplots emerge; sometimes, connected events that seem like a subplot end up being part of the main plot. The holistic approach to story planning has worked well for me. For example, if part of a plotline must be changed, it often affects things outside that plotline; separate outlines could make it harder to realize all of the things that will need to change. What I will conclude, then, is that as long as they are done well, it’s fine not to define subplots too strictly.