My friend Mike Allen, who blogs over at Descent into Light tagged me, among others. I'm supposed to answer ten questions about my work in progress, so I'm going to use the book I just finished revisions on.
So here goes:
Ten Interview Questions for The Next Big Thing
1. What is the title of your book?
For Love, For Power.
2. Where did the idea come from for the book?
This book came to be as a result of a trilogy I had written. I had written about the downfall of a complex caste society, and I found at the end of it that I had a lot of unanswered questions about the society before it fell - how people lived, and why the nobles were so unhappy (because I was convinced they were unhappy) and how a society in decay managed to keep itself operating. The book was born out of my desire to delve into the intimate operations of this decadence, and also to explore the adolescent psychological development of some of the characters who played large roles in the later story as I had imagined it. Part of this also stemmed from my desire to get past the archetypes of "good ruler" "bad ruler" "nobility" "servant" and "undercaste" and really try to expand these traditional fantasy roles into a sociologically, anthropologically, and psychologically accurate environment, as if they were real (or perhaps science fiction).
3. What genre does your book fall under?
The book is definitely fantasy, but skews toward the science fictional in its advanced technology and in the scientific underpinnings of its events.
4. Which actors would you choose to play your characters in a movie rendition?
I love to try casting my books, though I'm limited in my knowledge of current actors. Here's the best list I've been able to come up with:
Tagaret (protagonist): Kevin Michael McHale
Reyn (Tagaret's friend): Chris Colfer
Della (Tagaret's love interest): Molly Quinn
Nekantor (Tagaret's insane brother): D.J. Qualls
Lady Tamelera (Tagaret's mother): Miranda Otto
Aloran (Lady Tamelera's servant): Harry Shum, Jr.
Grobal Garr (Tagaret's father): Alfred Molina
Sorn (Garr's servant): Viggo Mortensen
The Eminence Herin: Will Smith
5. What is a one-sentence synopsis of the book?
A young nobleman battles his insane brother to keep him from seizing power.
6. Will your book be self-published or represented by an agency?
I'm represented by the Grayson Agency, and I hope Ashley will be excited about this book!
7. How long did it take you to write the first draft of the manuscript?
It took just over two years. That is, if you don't count the first time I tried to write it and only got 40% through before it ground to a halt. The world design took a lot longer.
8. What other books would you compare this story to in your genre?
It's something like Kushiel's Dart by Jacqueline Carey, only without the S&M; also something like The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms by N.K. Jemisin, but without the gods/magic system.
9. Who or what inspired you to write this book?
As I mentioned above, it was initially inspired by questions about a trilogy I had written. However, I was also inspired by deep social issues that I've been encountering recently, such as the paradoxical effects of politics, the experiences of oppressed women, the question of sexual preference, and the question of how one can begin to recognize the effects of social privilege in one's life.
10. What else about your book might pique the reader’s interest?
Three things, I think. First is that it takes place in a glittering cavern city with an ancient history. Second is that including Nekantor's point of view meant I could write an obsessive compulsive paranoid sociopath from the inside (fun!). Third is that we get to peek not only into the noble viewpoints, but into the viewpoint of Aloran, the servant. Members of the servant caste are high-ranking personal servants with a very different view on service and selflessness from what you might expect, and they consider themselves fortunate not to have been born into the nobility!
Include the link of who tagged you and this explanation for the people you have tagged. Mike Allen tagged me, as I mentioned above. I have a few people I'd like to tag, too: Lillian Csernica, Janice Hardy, Dario Ciriello, and Doug Sharp. Tag - you're it!
Thursday, October 11, 2012
Wednesday, October 10, 2012
TTYU Retro: A checklist for deep POV (in 1st or 3rd person!)
It's been a year since I first posted my most successful post ever! So today we're revisiting it. I love POV!
Have you ever wondered what "deep point of view" is, or thought you might like to try to achieve it? Essentially, deep point of view means feeling "close" to the narrator in a story. It's a question of narrative distance: instead of being a distant storyteller aware of the story being told, the deep narrator feels as close to the protagonist and her/his instinct and gut reactions as possible. Since I've always loved feeling like I am experiencing the story in a visceral way alongside my protagonists, I've spent a number of years developing techniques for deep POV, trying to push closer and closer. The first article I ever wrote on point of view appeared in 2006 for the Internet Review of Science Fiction: "Point of View: Reading Beyond the I's." Since I've seen people discussing the question of deep POV again lately, I thought I'd put together a checklist of things you can do in order to create it.
I think the most important thing to keep in mind as you enter the task of creating deep POV is this: deep point of view is not created by personal pronouns. It has almost nothing to do with whether you are using first person or third person - you can make third person feel close or first person feel distant if you really try. Any text contains lots and lots of different opportunities to get closer or further away from your narrating character, and the more "close" opportunities you take, the closer your narrator will feel. The list below will give you a sense of where to look for these opportunities. Please do keep in mind that none of these are "rules," and you do not have to do all of them.
I'm going to go through each point of the checklist in detail first, and then repeat it at the end as a summary so you can run through it more easily. (So if you want to get the overview first, you can skip down to the end now and then come back.)
Here we go:
1. avoid overuse of personal pronouns
Personal pronouns are the ones people always ask about first when they talk about point of view. Usually they're either "I" (first person) or "he" or "she" (third person) but sometimes can be "you" (second person). Just because you've chosen one or the other of them does not mean that every sentence, or even every other sentence, should start with one. As a guideline for where you should use these pronouns and where you should not use them, think about dividing your character's narrative into action, perception, and judgment. Action sentences are the ones where your character is doing something, and those are the ones which will use personal pronouns. Perception sentences are the ones where your character is remarking on something that he/she perceives (sees, hears, smells, feels, etc.), and those should not use personal pronouns. Judgment sentences are the ones where your character is expressing an opinion about something that's happening, and those shouldn't usually use personal pronouns either. Chances are, if you're using personal pronouns for perception or judgment, then you're filtering.
2. avoid filtering
Filtering means putting extra words into your sentence that remove the reader from the experience of the character. When you go through your life you probably don't think distantly about what you're perceiving. You hear a car horn and you don't think, "I'm hearing a car horn." You think, "Hey, that's a car horn!" The filtering words in this case are "I'm hearing." Anything that describes the narrator's thought or mode of perception "I heard," "I saw," "I felt," etc. should be considered a filter between the reader and the character's experience. Expressing opinions is similar. You don't think to yourself, "I think that slime is disgusting." You think, "Eww, that's disgusting!" In a way, by writing down "I thought," or other filter words, you're reminding readers of the character's presence, drawing attention to the fact that he/she is a character in a book they're reading. If you do this as little as possible, your point of view will feel deeper.
3. use internalization
I'm going to pick up here on what I said in #2 above about what one thinks to oneself. Your character is going through the story, acting on the basis of what happens to him or her. In deep point of view you're trying to create the sensation that your reader is deep in the character's head, and that means listening directly to the character's thoughts - most often, right as they are having them. If you try to think of everything in deep point of view as internal in some way, then all description becomes perception. I'll come back to this below, because I'll be looking at a lot of tools to make description feel internal. My point here is that only what the character perceives should be described. Then, once something has been perceived (the character sees a rose; the character gets stabbed, etc.), then the character will have an emotional reaction, possibly one which evokes memories of backstory. After that, the character will form a motivation to respond and then he/she will respond.
Now I'm going to move into some more detailed techniques that involve specific grammar, and will contribute to the success of the first three above.
4. use deixis, or pointing words
When you move through life, you spend a lot of time pointing, both physically and verbally. Which one do you want? That one. Whose is that? Mine. Your character should be doing this, too. The trick to remember as a writer is that all pointing words indicate a "center" where the speaker is standing. Remember when the teacher called your name in class? You answered, "Here!" The word "here" points to the center; it points to yourself. In your narrative, the pointing words should all indicate your point of view character as the center. It's not actually very hard to make pointing words point to the character as the center in the case of dialogue, but it's much harder to remember to pay attention to the pointing words in general narrative. Every time you write "the night before" instead of "last night," you're taking a step away from your character's deep perspective. It's very easy to make pointing words in narrative point to you, as author, without even thinking about it. But in deep point of view, you don't want anything pointing outside the character. That character isn't aware that he/she is in a story, and thus you don't want author-centered pointing to remind readers that the author is still there. Here's a list of some kinds of pointing words that you can look out for (it's not an exhaustive list, so make sure to keep your eye out!).
5. use syntax
This one is directly related to the question of the character's action as I mentioned above. A character's action is anything from "He held perfectly still" to "She grabbed the knife and dived over the edge of the platform." I like to think of it as things the point of view character does which involve intent. Even things like "She looked at him" and "He didn't move" can be deliberate actions on the part of the protagonist. Mind you, they could be external too - they are open to either interpretation - but if everything around them is indicating an internal point of view, then these will be read as internal as well. The guidelines below basically are saying that you want to indicate that your deep point of view character is in charge of her/his own action by placing her/him in the subject position of the main clause of the sentence as much as possible.
I'm going to explain this one a little bit. Notice that my protagonist, "she" is not present in this sentence. That's because we're not looking at an action sentence. This is a judgment sentence, and thus, if I said "She thought it was ridiculous..." then putting her as the subject would create filtering, not a sense of action. We often use the empty "It is"/"It was" with judgmental adjectives to think about situations in our experience, so I encourage you to do this for deep POV.
This one is related to my point above about not putting the protagonist in object position. If I wrote out the whole situation, "He walked up to her," then she would appear in a non-subject position. If I leave "to her" off, then I find it seems more like what someone would think internally.
One last note of caution on syntax: when I say to avoid something, I'm not telling you you can't put your protagonist in these syntactic positions. I'm only trying to say that the effect will be different if you do: the emphasis will seem to rest somewhere other than on the protagonist's intent to act. Sometimes this is what people are actually referring to when they say to avoid "passive" constructions. However, if that different effect is what you want (for example, if you want the protagonist to be perceived as victimized) then no problem.
6. use adjectives, adverbs, and similes with judgmental connotations
In deep point of view, what you're describing isn't what you're describing. It's what your character is perceiving, noticing, and judging. Anything your character doesn't perceive shouldn't even make it into the description (I'll come back to this in a second). Whenever you describe a scene or an object, think through how your character perceives it. Describing something as "red" feels very different from describing it as "dirty red" or "sparkling red." Saying someone moves "reluctantly" is a judgment by the person perceiving it. Maybe that person is only moving slowly for some other reason. A character will compare something he/she sees to familiar things - so what is familiar? If you say her hair is like silk, presumably you know what silk is like. If your character compares something to silk but is too poor ever to have encountered it, you're looking at author point of view, not character point of view. I have a longer article about this, here.
7. use evidential adverbs and modal verbs
Whenever you can, it's important to create a sense of internal judgment - even in contexts where you wouldn't ordinarily expect to find it. Modal verbs and evidential adverbs can help you do this. I have a longer article about this, here, but here are some examples of how to use these.
8. use articles "a" and "the"
I just wrote an article about this one last week, but I'm going to add to it here. "The" indicates known information. It is especially useful in indicating places or things that your protagonist is already familiar with. As such it's really useful when you want to create a sense of internal point of view, because you can use it to reflect your character's internal knowledge. Be careful not to use it to reflect your own (the author's) knowledge rather than the character's. "A" indicates new information. As such it's a really critical tool because "a" is the primary indicator of noticing. If your character uses "a" with something, that means he/she has noticed that thing. Watch out for this, especially if you're trying to get a message to your reader without having your character get the same message. For example, your character can walk into a room where there's a really important key (a clue, or something needed to advance the plot), and just see it as "a room full of junk" (in which case the reader won't know the key is there) or "a room full of junk like old books, keys, and stationery" (here the reader might be able to pick up that the key is there, especially if some other hint has caused them to look for it). Here's the trick: the minute the character says she sees a key, that means she's noticed it. It's then up to the author to decide whether to show how the character responds - whether she looks by without thinking it's important, or whether she goes, "hey, that's the key I was looking for!"
9. use voice
Voice is a topic about which whole reams of information can be (and have been) written. What I'll say here is that if you're striving for a deep point of view that directly relates the inner thoughts of your protagonist, then those thoughts should reflect the way that character actually expresses him/herself. If this is a person who speaks a dialect, then the dialect should influence the internalization as well as the character's dialogue (though the internalization doesn't have to be quite as extreme as the dialogue). If this is a non-native speaker of English, find a way for the narrative and internalization to reflect that (as well as the person's level of proficiency in English, and level of education, so they don't sound needlessly stupid). If this is a person who swears, then that should show up in internalization. Whenever you can, consider whether your character's reaction would be worth expressing with direct thought exclamations. These are things like taking "He wondered if he could..." and turning it into "Could he...?", or taking "He wished..." and turning it into "If only...", or taking "She didn't want to..." and turning it into "No way would she..." or even "Damned if she was going to..." These can of course be overused, but they certainly will deepen the reader's sense of your point of view.
So, now that we've discussed everything in detail, here is the summary checklist:
1. avoid overuse of personal pronouns
3. use internalization
7. use evidential adverbs and modal verbs
Have you ever wondered what "deep point of view" is, or thought you might like to try to achieve it? Essentially, deep point of view means feeling "close" to the narrator in a story. It's a question of narrative distance: instead of being a distant storyteller aware of the story being told, the deep narrator feels as close to the protagonist and her/his instinct and gut reactions as possible. Since I've always loved feeling like I am experiencing the story in a visceral way alongside my protagonists, I've spent a number of years developing techniques for deep POV, trying to push closer and closer. The first article I ever wrote on point of view appeared in 2006 for the Internet Review of Science Fiction: "Point of View: Reading Beyond the I's." Since I've seen people discussing the question of deep POV again lately, I thought I'd put together a checklist of things you can do in order to create it.
I think the most important thing to keep in mind as you enter the task of creating deep POV is this: deep point of view is not created by personal pronouns. It has almost nothing to do with whether you are using first person or third person - you can make third person feel close or first person feel distant if you really try. Any text contains lots and lots of different opportunities to get closer or further away from your narrating character, and the more "close" opportunities you take, the closer your narrator will feel. The list below will give you a sense of where to look for these opportunities. Please do keep in mind that none of these are "rules," and you do not have to do all of them.
I'm going to go through each point of the checklist in detail first, and then repeat it at the end as a summary so you can run through it more easily. (So if you want to get the overview first, you can skip down to the end now and then come back.)
Here we go:
1. avoid overuse of personal pronouns
Personal pronouns are the ones people always ask about first when they talk about point of view. Usually they're either "I" (first person) or "he" or "she" (third person) but sometimes can be "you" (second person). Just because you've chosen one or the other of them does not mean that every sentence, or even every other sentence, should start with one. As a guideline for where you should use these pronouns and where you should not use them, think about dividing your character's narrative into action, perception, and judgment. Action sentences are the ones where your character is doing something, and those are the ones which will use personal pronouns. Perception sentences are the ones where your character is remarking on something that he/she perceives (sees, hears, smells, feels, etc.), and those should not use personal pronouns. Judgment sentences are the ones where your character is expressing an opinion about something that's happening, and those shouldn't usually use personal pronouns either. Chances are, if you're using personal pronouns for perception or judgment, then you're filtering.
2. avoid filtering
Filtering means putting extra words into your sentence that remove the reader from the experience of the character. When you go through your life you probably don't think distantly about what you're perceiving. You hear a car horn and you don't think, "I'm hearing a car horn." You think, "Hey, that's a car horn!" The filtering words in this case are "I'm hearing." Anything that describes the narrator's thought or mode of perception "I heard," "I saw," "I felt," etc. should be considered a filter between the reader and the character's experience. Expressing opinions is similar. You don't think to yourself, "I think that slime is disgusting." You think, "Eww, that's disgusting!" In a way, by writing down "I thought," or other filter words, you're reminding readers of the character's presence, drawing attention to the fact that he/she is a character in a book they're reading. If you do this as little as possible, your point of view will feel deeper.
3. use internalization
I'm going to pick up here on what I said in #2 above about what one thinks to oneself. Your character is going through the story, acting on the basis of what happens to him or her. In deep point of view you're trying to create the sensation that your reader is deep in the character's head, and that means listening directly to the character's thoughts - most often, right as they are having them. If you try to think of everything in deep point of view as internal in some way, then all description becomes perception. I'll come back to this below, because I'll be looking at a lot of tools to make description feel internal. My point here is that only what the character perceives should be described. Then, once something has been perceived (the character sees a rose; the character gets stabbed, etc.), then the character will have an emotional reaction, possibly one which evokes memories of backstory. After that, the character will form a motivation to respond and then he/she will respond.
Now I'm going to move into some more detailed techniques that involve specific grammar, and will contribute to the success of the first three above.
4. use deixis, or pointing words
When you move through life, you spend a lot of time pointing, both physically and verbally. Which one do you want? That one. Whose is that? Mine. Your character should be doing this, too. The trick to remember as a writer is that all pointing words indicate a "center" where the speaker is standing. Remember when the teacher called your name in class? You answered, "Here!" The word "here" points to the center; it points to yourself. In your narrative, the pointing words should all indicate your point of view character as the center. It's not actually very hard to make pointing words point to the character as the center in the case of dialogue, but it's much harder to remember to pay attention to the pointing words in general narrative. Every time you write "the night before" instead of "last night," you're taking a step away from your character's deep perspective. It's very easy to make pointing words in narrative point to you, as author, without even thinking about it. But in deep point of view, you don't want anything pointing outside the character. That character isn't aware that he/she is in a story, and thus you don't want author-centered pointing to remind readers that the author is still there. Here's a list of some kinds of pointing words that you can look out for (it's not an exhaustive list, so make sure to keep your eye out!).
- demonstratives this and that (especially this)
- adverbs here and there (especially here)
- adverbs now, soon, today, tomorrow, last night
- verbs come, go
5. use syntax
This one is directly related to the question of the character's action as I mentioned above. A character's action is anything from "He held perfectly still" to "She grabbed the knife and dived over the edge of the platform." I like to think of it as things the point of view character does which involve intent. Even things like "She looked at him" and "He didn't move" can be deliberate actions on the part of the protagonist. Mind you, they could be external too - they are open to either interpretation - but if everything around them is indicating an internal point of view, then these will be read as internal as well. The guidelines below basically are saying that you want to indicate that your deep point of view character is in charge of her/his own action by placing her/him in the subject position of the main clause of the sentence as much as possible.
- place the protagonist (or the protagonist's group) in subject position
- avoid placing the protagonist in object or other syntactic position
- avoid placing the protagonist in a subordinate clause for action
- use empty subject constructions to convey judgment
I'm going to explain this one a little bit. Notice that my protagonist, "she" is not present in this sentence. That's because we're not looking at an action sentence. This is a judgment sentence, and thus, if I said "She thought it was ridiculous..." then putting her as the subject would create filtering, not a sense of action. We often use the empty "It is"/"It was" with judgmental adjectives to think about situations in our experience, so I encourage you to do this for deep POV.
- use bare verb+preposition combinations
This one is related to my point above about not putting the protagonist in object position. If I wrote out the whole situation, "He walked up to her," then she would appear in a non-subject position. If I leave "to her" off, then I find it seems more like what someone would think internally.
One last note of caution on syntax: when I say to avoid something, I'm not telling you you can't put your protagonist in these syntactic positions. I'm only trying to say that the effect will be different if you do: the emphasis will seem to rest somewhere other than on the protagonist's intent to act. Sometimes this is what people are actually referring to when they say to avoid "passive" constructions. However, if that different effect is what you want (for example, if you want the protagonist to be perceived as victimized) then no problem.
6. use adjectives, adverbs, and similes with judgmental connotations
In deep point of view, what you're describing isn't what you're describing. It's what your character is perceiving, noticing, and judging. Anything your character doesn't perceive shouldn't even make it into the description (I'll come back to this in a second). Whenever you describe a scene or an object, think through how your character perceives it. Describing something as "red" feels very different from describing it as "dirty red" or "sparkling red." Saying someone moves "reluctantly" is a judgment by the person perceiving it. Maybe that person is only moving slowly for some other reason. A character will compare something he/she sees to familiar things - so what is familiar? If you say her hair is like silk, presumably you know what silk is like. If your character compares something to silk but is too poor ever to have encountered it, you're looking at author point of view, not character point of view. I have a longer article about this, here.
7. use evidential adverbs and modal verbs
Whenever you can, it's important to create a sense of internal judgment - even in contexts where you wouldn't ordinarily expect to find it. Modal verbs and evidential adverbs can help you do this. I have a longer article about this, here, but here are some examples of how to use these.
- can, could, may, might, must, shall, should, will, would, have to
- apparently, evidently, of course, clearly, surely, no doubt, naturally, likely, etc.
8. use articles "a" and "the"
I just wrote an article about this one last week, but I'm going to add to it here. "The" indicates known information. It is especially useful in indicating places or things that your protagonist is already familiar with. As such it's really useful when you want to create a sense of internal point of view, because you can use it to reflect your character's internal knowledge. Be careful not to use it to reflect your own (the author's) knowledge rather than the character's. "A" indicates new information. As such it's a really critical tool because "a" is the primary indicator of noticing. If your character uses "a" with something, that means he/she has noticed that thing. Watch out for this, especially if you're trying to get a message to your reader without having your character get the same message. For example, your character can walk into a room where there's a really important key (a clue, or something needed to advance the plot), and just see it as "a room full of junk" (in which case the reader won't know the key is there) or "a room full of junk like old books, keys, and stationery" (here the reader might be able to pick up that the key is there, especially if some other hint has caused them to look for it). Here's the trick: the minute the character says she sees a key, that means she's noticed it. It's then up to the author to decide whether to show how the character responds - whether she looks by without thinking it's important, or whether she goes, "hey, that's the key I was looking for!"
9. use voice
Voice is a topic about which whole reams of information can be (and have been) written. What I'll say here is that if you're striving for a deep point of view that directly relates the inner thoughts of your protagonist, then those thoughts should reflect the way that character actually expresses him/herself. If this is a person who speaks a dialect, then the dialect should influence the internalization as well as the character's dialogue (though the internalization doesn't have to be quite as extreme as the dialogue). If this is a non-native speaker of English, find a way for the narrative and internalization to reflect that (as well as the person's level of proficiency in English, and level of education, so they don't sound needlessly stupid). If this is a person who swears, then that should show up in internalization. Whenever you can, consider whether your character's reaction would be worth expressing with direct thought exclamations. These are things like taking "He wondered if he could..." and turning it into "Could he...?", or taking "He wished..." and turning it into "If only...", or taking "She didn't want to..." and turning it into "No way would she..." or even "Damned if she was going to..." These can of course be overused, but they certainly will deepen the reader's sense of your point of view.
So, now that we've discussed everything in detail, here is the summary checklist:
1. avoid overuse of personal pronouns
- Personal pronouns are for action with intent.
- Try to avoid them for perception and judgment.
3. use internalization
- all description becomes perception.
- demonstratives this and that (especially this)
- adverbs here and there (especially here)
- adverbs now, soon, today, tomorrow, last night
- verbs come, go
- place the protagonist (or the protagonist's group) in subject position
- avoid placing the protagonist in object or other syntactic position
- avoid placing the protagonist in a subordinate clause for action
- use empty subject constructions to convey judgment
- use bare verb+preposition combinations
7. use evidential adverbs and modal verbs
- can, could, may, might, must, shall, should, will, would, have to
- apparently, evidently, of course, clearly, surely, no doubt, naturally, likely, etc.
- "The" indicates known information.
- "a" is the primary indicator of noticing.
- dialect
- profanity/swearing style
- "direct thought" exclamations (if only, no way, damned if)
Tuesday, October 9, 2012
I finished my revisions! And the nerves are ramping up...
Yesterday afternoon, while my kids were playing with some friends, I fixed the last thing on the list of revisions to my novel. I've been working on For Love, For Power for more than two years, and it has been fun, difficult, and occasionally heartbreaking. The heartbreaking part was two years ago Thanksgiving, when we had a break-in and both our computers were stolen. I was fortunate in that I only lost two and a half chapters of my work. Rewriting those two and a half chapters did make them better, but still...
This novel takes place in my Varin world, which some of you are familiar with and others of you might not have heard of (especially if you've joined the blog recently). It's a world I've been working on, and working in, for twenty years or more. The first story ever published from it was "The Eminence's Match," in Panverse Publishing's Eight Against Reality anthology. In fact, that was the first time I felt I'd really achieved a story that executed this world in a way I could be proud of. And I'm happy to say that For Love, For Power has built on that. I love how it turned out.
This means I am very very nervous now. I'm not sure how many of you have projects that have been this long in their creation (world + novel), but I'm sure you have projects you care about deeply. Whenever something like this is about to hit the world and be evaluated, I get super-nervous! Feedback is really important to me, so I have one more person looking at it (and may ask one more) before I send it to my agent. That's when things get really serious.
Yes, I am rather fried in my brain. Getting this out was a huge effort that required an enormous amount of drive and concentration, and right now I just want to sit and cuddle my cat! But I will keep you all updated as the submissions process on this one begins.
Thanks to all of you who have supported me! You're the best.
This novel takes place in my Varin world, which some of you are familiar with and others of you might not have heard of (especially if you've joined the blog recently). It's a world I've been working on, and working in, for twenty years or more. The first story ever published from it was "The Eminence's Match," in Panverse Publishing's Eight Against Reality anthology. In fact, that was the first time I felt I'd really achieved a story that executed this world in a way I could be proud of. And I'm happy to say that For Love, For Power has built on that. I love how it turned out.
This means I am very very nervous now. I'm not sure how many of you have projects that have been this long in their creation (world + novel), but I'm sure you have projects you care about deeply. Whenever something like this is about to hit the world and be evaluated, I get super-nervous! Feedback is really important to me, so I have one more person looking at it (and may ask one more) before I send it to my agent. That's when things get really serious.
Yes, I am rather fried in my brain. Getting this out was a huge effort that required an enormous amount of drive and concentration, and right now I just want to sit and cuddle my cat! But I will keep you all updated as the submissions process on this one begins.
Thanks to all of you who have supported me! You're the best.
Tuesday, October 2, 2012
TTYU Retro: Chapter Transitions and Story Drive
What is it that creates the sensation of story drive?
There is no one single thing that does, of course (no surprise). A character with goals, a sense of danger, making sure not to include any irrelevant description (or any description that doesn't fit with the mental state of a protagonist in a dangerous hurry). But that generally is what happens within the narrative, as you're reading along through a chapter.
How do you sustain story drive over a chapter break?
Point 1: A cliffhanger ending alone is not sufficient.
Cliffhangers come in different forms. Someone can be literally hanging from a cliff, can make a dangerous discovery, etc. Anything that makes a reader go "Aigh, what happens next?" Just make sure not to keep the answer hidden. Pick it up in the very next sentence if possible. I can't tell you how frustrating it is to be left demanding the answer to something and then either have the answer appear in backstory to the next chapter so you never see it, or have the next chapter not address the question at all. It doesn't have to answer the question directly, necessarily, but please don't make me ask that question and then hide the answer outside the narrative. "Aigh" quickly turns into "Argh!"
Point 2: A continuous timeline is helpful for drive, but not necessary.
I really really like switching chapters inside of a critical moment. One chapter ends one second, and the very next second, the next one starts. For example, I have one direct handoff (this is my nickname for them) where Tagret's father takes him into a room and Tagret discovers that his father has been interviewing the servant Aloran. This is a real shock for Tagret because it's a move that will really upset his mother, and he's been fearing that his father is hiding something from his mother. The instant he makes the discovery, I switch chapters and begin with Aloran going, "Oh, no, it's Tagret!" We already know what the stakes are for Tagret, and it's less obvious how Tagret walking in is bad news for Aloran...but it is, and switching to his point of view allows me to show that, and then have Aloran take the narrative in a different direction immediately thereafter.
When you are using a continuous timeline, even if you aren't using a direct handoff, your readers don't have to do the work of re-orienting themselves every time they start a new chapter. This is work that will pull them off the drive of the story conflict, so if you want high drive, try to reduce the amount of orientation work they have to do at the beginning of any chapter.
Point 3: Even without a cliffhanger, and even without a continuous timeline, you can create a sense of direct continuity between chapters.
The way I recommend doing this is to look for cohesion elements. These are things that readers will recognize because they have seen them in the previous section of narrative, and they then show up in the next. Cohesion elements are very flexible. For example, you could have an object in the first piece and then have it appear in the second piece: I'm imagining a scene where a criminal encounters a hand mirror at a crime scene, and then in the next section you have the detective picking up the mirror to examine it as evidence. (I'm sure you've seen this done on TV also!) It doesn't have to be an object though. It can be a topic of conversation picked up by the protagonists. Or it can be a location. A location can be mentioned in conversation in the previous chapter and then you can show up there in the next one. It can be an activity that appears on either side of the divide (with or without different people engaging in it), or a theme.
Point 4: If you have no obvious cohesion elements, you're placing a big demand on your readers. You're saying to them, "Trust me, this is relevant." And in fact they'll probably go with you up to a certain point... but they will be actively searching for cohesion elements. In Dragon in Chains by Daniel Fox, he achieves a very dreamy sense of the entire story by not connecting all the pieces directly, but by making sure to drop cohesion elements when you're looking for them (sometimes two or three paragraphs into the scene, and you'll have this "Aha!" moment). It's very effective, but it's also risky and I could imagine some readers feeling confused at different points.
When you're working on a novel, keep your eye out for these cohesion elements. Try to use them consciously to bind the story together and keep up a sense of drive. Be aware that tiny things can make the difference between your readers taking a running step between chapters, taking a slow step, taking a long floating leap, or floating right off the page and out of your book for good.
It's something to think about.
There is no one single thing that does, of course (no surprise). A character with goals, a sense of danger, making sure not to include any irrelevant description (or any description that doesn't fit with the mental state of a protagonist in a dangerous hurry). But that generally is what happens within the narrative, as you're reading along through a chapter.
How do you sustain story drive over a chapter break?
Point 1: A cliffhanger ending alone is not sufficient.
Cliffhangers come in different forms. Someone can be literally hanging from a cliff, can make a dangerous discovery, etc. Anything that makes a reader go "Aigh, what happens next?" Just make sure not to keep the answer hidden. Pick it up in the very next sentence if possible. I can't tell you how frustrating it is to be left demanding the answer to something and then either have the answer appear in backstory to the next chapter so you never see it, or have the next chapter not address the question at all. It doesn't have to answer the question directly, necessarily, but please don't make me ask that question and then hide the answer outside the narrative. "Aigh" quickly turns into "Argh!"
Point 2: A continuous timeline is helpful for drive, but not necessary.
I really really like switching chapters inside of a critical moment. One chapter ends one second, and the very next second, the next one starts. For example, I have one direct handoff (this is my nickname for them) where Tagret's father takes him into a room and Tagret discovers that his father has been interviewing the servant Aloran. This is a real shock for Tagret because it's a move that will really upset his mother, and he's been fearing that his father is hiding something from his mother. The instant he makes the discovery, I switch chapters and begin with Aloran going, "Oh, no, it's Tagret!" We already know what the stakes are for Tagret, and it's less obvious how Tagret walking in is bad news for Aloran...but it is, and switching to his point of view allows me to show that, and then have Aloran take the narrative in a different direction immediately thereafter.
When you are using a continuous timeline, even if you aren't using a direct handoff, your readers don't have to do the work of re-orienting themselves every time they start a new chapter. This is work that will pull them off the drive of the story conflict, so if you want high drive, try to reduce the amount of orientation work they have to do at the beginning of any chapter.
Point 3: Even without a cliffhanger, and even without a continuous timeline, you can create a sense of direct continuity between chapters.
The way I recommend doing this is to look for cohesion elements. These are things that readers will recognize because they have seen them in the previous section of narrative, and they then show up in the next. Cohesion elements are very flexible. For example, you could have an object in the first piece and then have it appear in the second piece: I'm imagining a scene where a criminal encounters a hand mirror at a crime scene, and then in the next section you have the detective picking up the mirror to examine it as evidence. (I'm sure you've seen this done on TV also!) It doesn't have to be an object though. It can be a topic of conversation picked up by the protagonists. Or it can be a location. A location can be mentioned in conversation in the previous chapter and then you can show up there in the next one. It can be an activity that appears on either side of the divide (with or without different people engaging in it), or a theme.
Point 4: If you have no obvious cohesion elements, you're placing a big demand on your readers. You're saying to them, "Trust me, this is relevant." And in fact they'll probably go with you up to a certain point... but they will be actively searching for cohesion elements. In Dragon in Chains by Daniel Fox, he achieves a very dreamy sense of the entire story by not connecting all the pieces directly, but by making sure to drop cohesion elements when you're looking for them (sometimes two or three paragraphs into the scene, and you'll have this "Aha!" moment). It's very effective, but it's also risky and I could imagine some readers feeling confused at different points.
When you're working on a novel, keep your eye out for these cohesion elements. Try to use them consciously to bind the story together and keep up a sense of drive. Be aware that tiny things can make the difference between your readers taking a running step between chapters, taking a slow step, taking a long floating leap, or floating right off the page and out of your book for good.
It's something to think about.
Thursday, September 27, 2012
Link: What does English sound like to foreign ears?
My friend David Kotschessa Almodovar sent me this link today, and I think you'd really enjoy it. I imagine most of you have heard what it sounds like when English speakers try to pretend they're speaking other languages (French, Chinese, etc, etc). Well, this site shows what fake English sounds like when speakers of other languages imitate it. There's a fabulous Italian video with a totally fake English song (which rocks, even as it is incomprehensible) and some examples of onomatopoeia differences, and other fascinating stuff.
Thanks, David! I hope you all have as much fun with it as I did.
Thanks, David! I hope you all have as much fun with it as I did.
Tuesday, September 25, 2012
TTYU Retro: Tired of cliché? Want to be unique? Pursue the why.
They say it's details that make a setting unique. Some would say, "Don't just create a character who is the generic chosen one who grew up on a farm unaware of his destiny," and they'd be right, but it's been done successfully. I'm thinking a lot of this is about details.
If you're just starting out on something like this, though, hearing this advice can be maddening. Details? What details? The last thing you want to do is take the same old tired scenario and add on a few bells and whistles, a bunch of superficial stuff that you made up because somebody told you that you needed details. Then you're still sitting where you started, just with a lot of extra words.
Pursue the why.
It's not really the details that make the scenario unique. It's how the scenario grows out of your world organically. Does the city have dirty streets? Okay, then why are its streets dirty? Does the village have an idiot? Okay, then who is he, and what is his family like, and how did he come to be where he is? Does he have a real disability or is he simply disaffected?
There are all kinds of societal scenarios that we see constantly in stories. But the fact that we see them constantly may not be because people are unoriginal. It may simply be because these things are real features of our own world. If we're working in a different world, we can have these features appear, but it's important to dig down into the underpinnings of the world and ask, "Why would this common phenomenon happen in this world?" Because things don't happen for no reason.
To make this concrete, I'll tell you about an insight I had some time ago about my Varin world. Funny enough, it's about a part of my Varin world that plays only a tiny part in my current novel in progress. I was inspired by a recent discussion about how to make larger economic patterns in society concrete by thinking about their impact on individuals.
Here's the part that I had before the insight. It's the part that isn't as original as it could be.
Varin has an undercaste. They take undesirable jobs, so they work with trash, or in cremation, or as prison janitors (this will sound familiar to those who have read my "trashers" post). They get abused in their jobs. They live in small apartments. They have hoodlum gangs. One of my characters, Meetis, works in a prison and has a "good job" and a "good apartment." The other character, Corbinan, is a trash collector who has an "okay job" but not a "good apartment." He is a fighter who used to live on the streets.
It's not that it's not detailed. I had put in a lot of setting and stuff. But look how it changes when I tell you what I figured out.
The undercaste members get different economic benefits from their different possible jobs. People who work in prisons get apartments near their work, clothing, and food paid for by their place of work, but they get paid virtually zero cash, so once they have the job, it's almost impossible for them to leave (because they would be homeless with no money), so they have no recourse and are pushed around by their superiors quite easily. People who work in crematories get housing near their work, and are required to maintain high standards of cleanliness, but they don't get fed at work; they are paid cash to buy their own food. They are also paid "by the body" as an incentive for them to do the hardest work. Thus they carry cash but this money is often seen as dirty. Trash collectors are paid by the hour, in cash, and receive no other benefits. Thus they have a hard time securing apartments, and often a group of several people will join together and pool funds to secure an apartment (even if the apartment isn't designed for so many people). People (especially teenagers) without jobs form gangs and steal to keep themselves alive, but it's far riskier for them to try to rob members of other castes, so they target the trash worker neighborhoods first, the crematory neighborhoods if they're desperate, and only then would they try to target a member of another caste. They don't bother with prison neighborhoods because there's no money in it. The trash workers create their own gangs so they can stand up to the penniless hoodlums. The only way to get cash outside of the system without stealing it is to be able to read. These people deal with government workers all the time and are handed papers they can't read, so they will pay anyone who can actually read what they're being given and help defend them against manipulation by the contract writers.
It sounds complicated, but what it does is establish the reasons why gangs exist, who has them and who doesn't, and where they operate. These are details, but they are not random. So once it's all set up in theory, then I operationalize it on my characters' lives.
Meetis is the daughter of prison workers. Her mother is a reader, which is the only honorable way she could get the money to buy a ticket for her daughter to take a prison job in the capital when jobs are scarce at home. Thus, Meetis has an apartment near her work that she shares with her cousin Flara. It isn't well-maintained, but it works. She wears company clothes and eats at work. She works hard and doesn't eat a lot, but she has a safe home and doesn't starve, and she isn't targeted by gangs unless she goes into someone else's neighborhood. She is also a reader, so she has the means to earn cash if she can find the time to fit in reading work.
Corbinan is the son of crematory workers. As a result he got a lot of hard teasing as a kid, had to learn to fight early and ended up running away from home, and running with the hoodlum gangs. When he realized he was starving, but was too young to get a job, he decided to learn to read, so he cornered a reader and threatened him with a beating if he didn't teach him the skill. Once he could read he was able to separate from the hoodlum gangs and save some money, and when he was old enough he got a job as a trash worker. He lives in an apartment with six other people who work out of the same trash center, and though he's tired of gangs generally, he's now a target of the hoodlum groups, so he and the other six form a gang for their own protection. Now he uses his fighting skills to run off the hoodlums, and also to help the gang leader make sure everyone pays a fair share of rent. He's far too smart ever to pick a fight with a member of another caste, but if he and his gang become targets, he can hold his own long enough to help the others get away.
Suddenly he's not just some guy who knows how to fight for who knows what reason. He's simultaneously jealous of Meetis' easy life and a bit contemptuous of her for her lack of "freedom," and her lack of toughness. We can also see why Meetis' life is easy compared to his, but why it is hard on her anyway.
The phenomena are still there, but the whole thing feels different.
Wednesday, September 19, 2012
Link: A new dictionary of Demotic Egyptian
I just thought I'd pass on this link, about the newly completed dictionary of Demotic Egyptian. For those who may not know, this was the language spoken and written by the common people of ancient Egypt. So much cool stuff to be learned here!
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)