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Lessons learned


Student of Trinity

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My writing project is still slowly going along. It will eventually end up as at least one finished novel. I don't really have a lot of time to work on it, but I hack away when I can. Sometimes I plunge ahead writing; sometimes I step back, frown, and gun down darlings. Up to a point I have high standards, but I'm not trying to write a Great Novel; just write something I like. If you want to make money from writing, I am no-one to advise you, but I can recommend writing a novel as a hobby. It's fun.

 

What was originally going to be one book has expanded into a trilogy. First I cut it into two. Then this summer I recognized that the first volume was getting too big because it was really two stories, and I decided I had to surgically separate the conjoined twins, to make a total of three books. Compared to what was going to be that single, fat first volume with one sequel, the new result for the first and middle books of the trilogy would be two books that were each less densely packed with wild and crazy stuff; but I decided that this was for the best. A dense story that seemed cool to me, having lived along with it for years, would be incomprehensible to a reader. I'm writing to please myself, but still the task with which I'm trying to be pleased is writing a book that could be popular with other readers, at least in an ideal world.

 

When I first carved off the part of my story that will now be Book 3, I was still at an early stage in the project. Splitting the first volume into Books 1 and 2 is being done now in a heavily re-written second draft. So it's really quite a surgery. It's an interesting task. Some things that I like don't look so easy to save in the separated version; for one reason or another, things they needed to work will no longer work. Some of these may be salvageable, with effort; and that's an interesting puzzle. Some may just have to be lost. That's disappointing, but everybody says you have to kill your darlings. I'll try my hand at that, too. And some things that were kind of pinched into the previous story now have room to expand to a natural length. So it's not all disappointing.

 

I think I've learned a few basic things about writing longer stories. Who knows whether these are things that will help anyone write commercially, but they're things that, when I first started writing, I didn't realize that even I myself wanted them. Now I realize I do.

 

One is that there's a kind of physical limit to how complex your plot can be. Past a certain point, you can make your logical connections as solid as you want, but the mere fact that there are too many of them makes the story feel rickety. It just becomes too hard to take seriously. I think that what goes on is that every reader knows instinctively that in any real scenario there are bound to be a bunch of unknown factors. It's plausible that two or three clear and basic reasons are decisive over all these unknown factors; but it's just not plausible that a string of ten reasons would really hold together without getting screwed up by something unknown. So complicated scenarios are just inherently unbelievable. You have got to keep it simple. Ingenious answers for nitpicking hit a plateau of diminishing returns.

 

A sort of related thing is that you have to give the reader a sense of where your book is going. You may get a certain grace period at the beginning, a couple of chapters in which the reader is prepared to simply gawk and nod Uh Huh. But pretty soon, you have to give your readers a confident sense of which issues they are supposed to be keeping in mind, so they can relax and let the rest of the stuff just wash over them without trying hard to keep it all straight. You can't expect your readers to keep perfect track of everything. It needs to be enough for the reader to be clear on just a few things — and the reader has to know which those things are. They could be things like your protagonist's love life, or where the Maltese Falcon is, or what lies over the mountain. Probably all kinds of different things will do; but by around Chapter 3 the reader has to have a sense of what these main issues will be, for the long haul of the book. You cannot wait until The Two Towers to bring in the Ring.

 

Once you've established that sense of direction, of course you can mess around with it. Instead of just pulling a plot twist, it's a subtler but deeper way to pull off surprise, to make what seemed like a minor theme turn out to be more important than it seemed to be. Of course you have to watch that this isn't just annoying or disappointing. But at least at this point, my feeling is that those problems are not so impossible to avoid. A well-managed surprise can be good, I think, but a lack of direction is just boring to read.

 

The other surprising thing I've found is that Anastasia Morandau has taught me to write. Literally: she's my narrator, and in an effort to give her a distinctive voice, I gave her writing a couple of characteristics that I thought would be interesting and yet still easy to take in large doses. In particular, I made her follow most of Elmore Leonard's rules for writing — not because I thought his was the only way to write well, but because I thought it was one way to write well, and it suited her character.

 

So Anastasia is spare with adverbs, especially emphatics and superlatives. She almost never says 'very'. She has no fear of short sentences. She doesn't use cliché expressions. She almost never reports dialog with anything other than an unqualified 'said'. And she never ends a sentence with a preposition, because she saves the emphatic last place in a sentence for a word that carries more than a preposition's worth of her thought.

 

Well, after writing a bunch of chapters in her narration, I found I preferred Anastasia's style to my own. I felt that her style was blunt and forceful. I thought it made you take seriously whatever she said. I started writing more like her, all the time.

 

The other quirk I gave her narration was an aversion to commas. She hardly ever uses them unless they're grammatically necessary. I try hard to make her sentences comprehensible just by making them clear and simple, and by avoiding ambiguous antecedents. So if the sentence is comprehensible at all when read all in one breath, she writes the sentence that way. This is supposed to indicate the high speed of her thought. Her brain is always in top gear. When she speaks to other people, though, her dialog has plenty of commas. She knows instinctively that she has to slow herself down for other people to follow.

 

Whether this works, I don't know. Maybe I'm mistaken about how clear her sentences are, and they're really misery to read, and at some point I'll have to go through the whole book line by line, adding commas. But these are fun experiments to make.

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