Over on The Macaronis blog we’re having a day of posting excerpts and articles to do with our characters’ relationships with their mothers.
I’m ashamed to say that this topic has made me realize how little my lads have to do with their mothers. Alec from Shining in the Sun being the notable exception, since his mum is extremely hands on in his life. In fact, many of my characters don’t have mothers at all, since they died early in their life, leaving them Conveniently an Orphan.
I’ve recently had a streak of bad fathers as villains, but this makes me think it’s about time I gave some love to my mothers. As a mother myself, I would prefer not to be so easily written out.
So, you know how Captain America fights the evil organisation Hydra in order to save the world for the forces of freedom? Was someone in Random House trying to give us a subliminal warning about their new ebook-only imprint?
Obviously, I don’t have a problem with not getting an advance. I rather like knowing I have royalties coming in every month from the start, and I found the experience of getting an advance instead (for False Colors) rather a discouraging one. But to grab rights to a novel for the life of the copyright – ie, until 70 years after you, the author, are dead – is… it’s… despicable. And to then charge the author for set-up fees on top?
Seriously? I’ve always had “being published by Random House” as one of my life goals, but now I’m not so sure. Clearly they don’t respect their authors at all, so my respect for them has taken a body blow in return.
~
On other news – I’m still ill. An entire week lost due to flu. I am not happy. But I tried starting the edits on Crimson Outlaw today and it took me four hours to change Valeriu’s name (twice). He’s Anghel as of now, but I don’t guarantee he will stay that way tomorrow. Maybe by Monday I’ll be well enough to make sense again. I hope!
Eagle eyed viewers may have noticed that there is now a little picture of The Crimson Outlaw in the sidebar of this blog, under the “Coming Soon” heading. That’s because I’m delighted to say I have signed a contract today with Riptide Publishing to publish this.
Look for it in August 2013.
It certainly won’t be under this cover, as this is just the temporary cover I made for it. (Like picking actors to cast in the parts, one of my rituals when I officially start a project is to make it a temporary cover. It helps me feel that it’s more like a real thing and less like just a bunch of grey on grey pixels.)
It may not even be under this title. I often find that the publishers know better than I do when it comes to titles, and they can usually think of something more exciting. But a new cover and a new title is part of the excitement that comes with getting a publisher for it, so I’m looking forward to telling you all about them too, in due course.
In the mean time… back to the sick bed. Hopefully I’ll be well enough to start content edits on it tomorrow 🙂
Last week, I started to talk about the structure of stories. At its most basic level it’s true to say that a story has a beginning, a middle and an end. But there are other things that you might want to think about before you start to make a plan for how to write your story – refinements and additions to that basic structure which make it a bit more fine-tuned.
If you crack open almost any writing book on the subject of structure, you’ll come across more tables and graphs than – if you’re anything like me – you know what to do with. I do much better with words than pictures (it’s why I’m a writer and not an artist), so the graphs don’t convey a lot to me. But I can summarise what I’ve learned from these books so far:
Beginning.
In the old days, the beginning used to be quite a leisurely process. In fact, I have some writing software which suggests that every novel should start with the character in his ‘ordinary world’. We should see what our main character is like, when he’s in the setting where he has been up until the story started. We should get to know the character in the place where he is at home, before anything out of the ordinary happens to make things take a turn for the unusual.
You don’t have to look far to see examples of this. The Lord of the Rings opens with Frodo at home in the Shire, doing fairly normal things with fairly normal people. The Hobbit opens with Bilbo at home in the Shire, being determinedly ordinary, until Gandalf provides an inciting incident of some dwarves at the door.
In the old days, it used to be standard to introduce the MC by watching him grow up, so you got all the backstory as well as the current ‘Ordinary World’ setting.
The idea of this was that you would get to know what your MC was like on a normal day to day basis before something comes along and throws him into a story. The structure went a bit like this:
Ordinary World > Inciting incident > hero rejects the quest > hero accepts the quest > main story starts.
I’ve never been quite sure why it was important for the hero to reject the quest to start off with, but that’s what the epic journey people usually say ought to happen. These days, however, we’ve all become much more impatient with our stories and we’re no longer interested in watching your MC get up and have breakfast, brush his hair and feed the dog. Not, at least, unless he’s feeding the dog in small bite sized chunks to his unsuspecting room-mate.
Modern readers tend to want to skip the ‘ordinary world’ part and go straight to the ‘inciting incident’ – the thing that happens that sets the MC off on a story.
Modern readers want to know, often in the first paragraph, that some epic shit is going down (or at least that something intriguing is happening right now.) This is what editors and agents mean by ‘a hook’ in the first paragraph. Something needs to be happening at once to grab the reader’s attention and make them want to read on.
I didn’t want to believe this, but after several weeks of reading indie fiction in which nothing does happen in the first few chapters I discovered that it doesn’t matter how brilliant your later chapters are if your reader is so bored by your earlier ones that they put the book down two chapters in and never pick it up again. If I read like this myself, I can’t blame others for doing the same, I must just accommodate them and start being interesting earlier.
This doesn’t mean you can’t have backstory any more, but it does mean that backstory will have to be threaded into the story while the story is going on, and is no longer allowed to take up chapters on its own.
So, the beginning has become quite minimal. We’ve jumped straight to the thing that happens to start the story. Our character has been shoved out of an aeroplane without a parachute, or he’s noticed that his room-mate is sporting a nice new pair of tentacles this morning, or he’s received a letter from the bank telling him he’s being thrown out on the street, or he’s knocked down a cyclist and fallen in love with them on the spot. We have hit the ground, hit the story and we’re running.
Middle:
But because our beginning is shorter – it takes less time to get the story up and running – our middle is longer. Suddenly the middle has to advance the story and let us get to know the character and include any absolutely necessary backstory. And it has to do this while resisting the tendency all authors know about – the tendency to get a little saggy and bloated around the middle.
There are a couple of things I’ve found in story structure books which suggest ways of tackling the long slog of the middle of a book without allowing it to be too much of a slog. One suggestion is that there should be a point in the middle of the middle – at the mid point of the book – where the story changes focus.
Perhaps our character has been seeking revenge up til now. Perhaps his housemate failed to water his special plant, and in return he fed the dog to the man, and has been systematically alienating all his housemate’s friends and trying to convince the housemate that he’s insane. As we’ve said before, this will be expressed as a problem (how to get revenge on his hm) to which he has tried several solutions, none of which have entirely worked. How about, at the mid point, one of these attempts fails so disastrously (not only does HM fail to believe he’s mad, he actually buys MC a new plant!) that MC is forced to realise that his goals until now have not been entirely a good idea.
Now the book has changed direction and the problems he faces are new ones (how can he get the friends back? Can he persuade that interesting fellow in the castle, Victor something, to reanimate the dog from the bits he has left? Our character is still driven by his reaction to the relationship with his housemate and the houseplant, but now he’s trying to mend the things he broke in the first half.
This gives you a nice opportunity to do something fresh and surprising in the second half.
Another thing to bear in mind with the middle is that the second half ought to be higher octane than the first. Yes, you start with something immediately interesting, and you carry on with interesting things, but the stakes ought to be getting higher and the tension building up as you go along. Nobody wants to read a story that gets less gripping as you go along, and a story that stays at the same level of peril and anxiety all the way through is rightly called flat.
So, when you’re structuring your novel, make sure things build up to a climax. And not an unrelated climax. It’s no good to suddenly have MC and his housemate come together because they’re threatened by random aliens. (Though you might get away with it if they were vegetable-aliens and the strange plant HM killed was actually an alien child.) The point is that the climax has to build naturally from everything that’s gone before.
To put it in a shortened form. Your middle can go something like this:
MC first attempt to solve problem, fails. MC does something even more serious in an attempt to get revenge, but that doesn’t work either. MC does something really bad, and HM responds with unexpected generosity (Mid point). MC changes his mind about his goals, but now his previous actions are having dire consequences which he must combat. He tries, but things get worse. He does some epic shit, but it only makes things harder. He tries something batshit insane. Crisis!
The crisis is the point where your middle turns into your end. For example, in The Hobbit, there’s a mid point shift where Thorin turns from being ‘relatively reliable companion’ to ‘gold and power crazed idiot,’ and is now acting as antagonist. Everything has escalated from uncomfortable behaviour at the dinner table to ALL OUT WAR.
When you have all out war, there’s not much further you can go in terms of racking up the stakes and the tension, so now it’s time for the story to resolve itself.
Ending
Once you have a crisis, there are generally only two ways the story can go. The characters fail, or they succeed. MC and HM fail to rescue Victor from the mob and the dog remains dead, leading them to be permanently estranged. The elves kill the dwarves and then are killed themselves by the goblin army, and the kingdom is never restored.
This kind of tragic ending will gain you much kudos from literary reviewers who think it’s an unflinching look at the realities of life. I generally find them terribly depressing – and every bit as made up as the happy ending, but if that’s the way you want to take it, it’s your story. Do what you like with it 🙂
Or, your characters can succeed – the dog is reconstituted, the household is saved. The battle is won and the kingdom is left to prosper.
But ending the crisis is not quite enough. There must also be a resolution to all the other plot threads you may have going, and there must be a sense of closure.
It’s unsatisfying just to finish with the end of the big battle. We want to see how the world and our characters have been changed by the ordeal they’ve just been through. The heroes need to come home and apply the things they’ve learned to the task of making the world a better place, otherwise what was the point?
So the ending is where the characters come home (or decide not to come home, but find somewhere new to belong.) Plot threads are tied up, and all the unanswered questions you’ve raised finally get an answer.
Ends don’t seem to have undergone the shrinkage that beginnings have, but that’s probably because they’ve always been short. To go back to The Lord of the Rings, there’s nothing worse than the situation in the Return of the King film, where the ending just kept not being over. Everything would be said that needed to be said, there’d be some cathartic weeping and a sense of home coming, wrapping everything up, and then a fade to black and everyone would sigh with satisfaction. And then, fuck me, they’d wind it all up again and do it a second time, and a third, until by the end my feeling of satisfaction had turned into a wish to just get on with it already.
Endings – wrap everything up once. Then finish.
~
Next time – strangers from the subconscious. Still in ‘stuff to do before you even start’ mode, we’re on to creating our starter set of characters.
It took me three tries to read it. Not because it’s poorly written. Oh, no, it’s just as beautiful, poetic, and immediately engrossing as all her other works have been. I couldn’t go on because my teeth were chattering and the shadows in the corner of the bedroom were moving… it’s very atmospheric. Very. Atmospheric. The book.
Thank you! And I’m sorry!
On the self publishing side, I’ve put my two Loki stories, with a new, longer one, up on Smashwords. So if anyone likes my all-mythology-all-the-time cheerfully amoral trickster version, rather than Marvel’s clearly-up-to-no-good psycho version, you can find that here:
I like the freedom with self-publishing to write stuff that doesn’t comfortably fit into genre lines. I don’t think I’m going to concentrate on it, but it’s nice to have it there as another string to my bow.
(Violin bow, I presume, because I can’t think why you would want more than one archery bowstring at once, unless you had more than one bow to go with them.)
So, I’ve got the contract for Too Many Elf Princes, and we haven’t quite started on the copy editing process yet, but on the content editing side, my editor said to me “I’m curious about Kjartan’s relationship to his mum, can we have a bit more explanation there? Oh, and could you beef up the romance with a capital R in the second half of the book?”
I thought “well, the first thing will be easy enough. His relationship with his mum isn’t really relevant, so I’ll just put a paragraph in early on explaining this, and that will be done.” But clearly my editor knew more than I did, because when it came to the big commitment scene, it turned out that Kjartan’s (non)relationship with his mum was pivotal, and I’ve just spent the morning crying over it as I typed.
A good editor and an obliging muse are two wonderful things.
Have an excerpt to celebrate 🙂
Too Many Fairy Princes
In the throne room, the king had been dressed in gold, and a thin film of gold leaf had been blown onto the exposed white, waxy skin of his face and hands. The great cavern of a room faced due east, and as the sun came up, the king caught its light and threw it back in a dazzle that lit the walls.
The night’s damp air was held back by a magical shield such as closed off Kjartan’s rooms, and the scent was all dust and dryness, cracked and sifted as desert sand, spiced with turpentine and frankincense and other preservative resins.
Volmar’s eyes were dry as they gazed on his dead son, dressed still in his white sleep robe, but covered in a blanket of polar-bear fur, and with an emerald circlet in his fiery hair.
The King’s eyes could not be other than dry, the moisture in his tear ducts having evaporated a dozen years ago. They made a scratching noise when he blinked, and the hall was so silent, Kjartan could hear it from where he stood at the foot of the dais, on the circle of mother of pearl set into the floor that marked the traditional place for an accuser.
On the circle of slate opposite, Tyrnir yawned and failed to raise a hand to cover it. He could not – his hands being bound together behind him in three cords of marsh grass and one of twisted seaweed.
They stood together, dark holes in the radiance of the morning, while the conches blew harsh and mournful notes to welcome another dawn, and the silver trumpets echoed them, in threat and warning to the sea-elves. We are still watching. We are still ready. Our knives await you.
Then the sun slipped a little higher into the heavens and its beam slid off the golden king onto the floor, and in the suddenly dimmed light they stirred back to life.
“So,” Volmar creaked, looking down at the bruises around Gisli’s mouth. “After an age of stagnation, we move and strive again. Which one of you was it?”
“It was Tyrnir, my king.” The strange not-pain had given way to a kind of hollow lightness beneath Kjartan’s breastbone. It gave his voice a tone like metal, and made him feel tall as thunderclouds. “Lob here, and Tuburrow will tell you I took this…” he held out the button like a soul-stone in a palm that didn’t shake, “from Gisli’s hand as they brought him here.”
“They fall off all the time,” Tyrnir scoffed. “And he collects them. You know he does – rooms and rooms of buttons and belt toggles, boot plaques and broken pendants. And you think this is enough to accuse your own brother of fratricide?”
“I have the coat you were wearing yesterday…”
Lob held it out in two of his six arms.
“Look where the material has been torn. That button didn’t fall off, it was grabbed, wrenched, when our brother fought back against you.”
Tyrnir gave a sharp sigh and shifted his weight onto one foot, either deliberately or genuinely nonchalant. “One of the riding birds tore it off, when Gisli and I were at the scrapes yesterday. It rolled to the boy’s feet and I told him he could keep it. For his collection, you know? He was grateful.”
Avenging angel did not seem to be one of Kjartan’s talents. His lightness crumpled in on itself. He ground his teeth. “You came to ask me, yesterday, if the youngest son always won. I said yes. So you made it that you are the youngest son. You killed him, brother. Don’t try and…”
“I agree,” the king sat straighter in his seat, hitching himself upright with slow, deliberate toil. Already the gold foil had begun to flake off onto his collar, leaving him particoloured in glory and decay. “Do not try to deny it, if it’s true, Tyrnir.” He flicked his fingers towards the black clad woman who stood behind the throne, her mother of pearl skin gleaming beneath her deep hood. “Aud, does he lie?”
“He does, my king.”
“You see. Simpler then to tell me the truth. Did you kill Gisli, Tyrnir, or must we look elsewhere for our prince-slayer?”
Tyrnir cast Aud, the court’s archmage, a glance that promised retribution. She smiled, and the smug invulnerability of it seemed to puncture his resistance. “Oh,” he said, “very well. Yes, I killed him. I want to win. I will do what it takes.”
Kjartan thought his father coughed, at first – weevils lodged in his throat, perhaps. But then that part of him, inside, where the not-pain was, flinched and contracted, as it had learned to do very early in his life. Things became – if not more bearable – at least more numb. For his father laughed, laughed so wildly he had to press his arms around his middle to stop his stomach from bursting.
“Well, good. I’m glad to see one of you has some gumption. Surprised to see you’ve stopped at one, though. Kjartan stayed awake all night, I suppose?”
Tyrnir laughed and raised his dark eyes to regard his father fondly. “Kjartan is no threat. Once I’ve killed Bjarti, Kjartan will give me the kingdom freely. All he wants is to be left alone. He doesn’t care.”
And that was true enough. He didn’t want any of this. If he had stopped to think, he would have acknowledged it, stepped down, surrendered, glad to be spared the unpleasantness. But somewhere inside, squeezed by pressure into a heat like that at the earth’s core, Kjartan was angry, and his anger worked his mouth without going through his mind.
“I do care now! Now I care! I won’t leave my home in the hands of a man who killed his own brother. Don’t either of you hurt for him? He was your kin and he liked you both. How can you stand there and look at his corpse and laugh? I will have this dung-grown kingdom just to pay you both back for that.”
“Aha,” Volmar settled back with a sigh like a dying breath and gave his youngest a patronising smile. “Lose one enemy, gain another, eh, Tyrnir? Stamp on the eggs before they hatch, for even a baby dragon can give you a nasty searing. I must say I haven’t had this much fun since I died. My boys, you may just have been worthwhile after all.”
He motioned Aud forward, and with a touch of her finger the cords that bound Tyrnir fell away. Tyrnir rubbed his wrists one after another and looked at Kjartan thoughtfully. Then he smiled like the curve of a scythe as it approached a field of long grass.
“But Kjartan is no dragon, father. And soon he will be nothing at all.”
This may be a timely reminder of how awesome you all are, and how you should not let society convince you there’s something wrong with you.
It was for me 🙂
In our family, sitting together in the same room while browsing the internet on our phones/tablet/laptop can be sometimes substituted for sitting together in the same room while reading a book. But the chances are that three quarters of us are still reading fiction on them and the other is reading blogs.
How come I know a bunch of boring stuff about Henry VIII and didn’t know about this?
As part of my ongoing love affair with all things Romanian, I now discover that in Roman times they had artifacts of spectacular weirdness and opulence. Why have I not heard of the Dacians before? I was assuming a people the Romans thought of as ‘barbarians’ would be at a level of sophistication comparable with Dark Ages Saxons, not living in cities whose watercourses could be blocked to end a siege, and dining in such splendour as this:
wearing a wreath like this one
Although, speaking of Dark Ages Saxons, this is described as Dacian gold, but I’d have pegged it as Anglo-Saxon any day:
I do honestly feel quite cheated that I was pretty much taught that the Romans were the only interesting people out there at the time, and everyone else was a mud-covered bog dweller. History (like the Truth) is out there, but sometimes you don’t know it’s there to be found until you stumble over it by accident.
So, you have an idea for a story. You’ve asked yourself lots of questions and you know you have a central situation in which one or two main characters find themselves, which they don’t like and want to change.
The essence of any story is to have a beginning, a middle, and an end.
In the beginning you establish who the story is about – you draw your main character and you attempt to make the reader like him/her. You also give your main character a problem. Something is wrong in their life or their world. Something needs to be changed in order to save the character’s self-respect/the company/the princess/the world.
Beginning = establish the character and his problem.
In the middle we follow the character as he tries to solve his problem. In a typical story the character will have about three tries at saving the thing that needs saving, and he will fail each time. Ideally, when he fails, he will make the situation worse, until finally it looks utterly hopeless. The point at which the situation looks utterly hopeless is called the ‘black moment’, and it’s there to rack up the tension and the sense of peril – the sense that an unhappy ending is just around the corner.
Middle = the character tries to solve the problem, only to end up in a situation where everything looks hopeless.
But our character does not succumb to despair. He pulls one final attempt out of the bag and against all the odds he succeeds this time, solving the problem, making the world of his story a better place and learning the virtues of persistence/self-sacrifice/whatever virtue you were writing about in the process.
End = the character pulls out all the stops and succeeds, learning something in the process. The world is left better off (even though you may have introduced a second problem later on to set up a sequel.)
This is a very basic account of how it works.
For example – in a romance [beginning] we meet the characters. Each character’s goal is that they want to end up with the other, but both of them have a problem which is preventing that. Maybe A is already married, and B has a psychotic alien bounty hunter on his trail and doesn’t want A to get messed up in his life.
[middle] Now both of them attempt to solve their problems – A asks for a divorce, B sets a bear trap in his garden. But this only leads to A’s partner deciding they need to go to relationship counselling, and B finds an actual bear in his trap which tries to maul him. Oh noes! It all looks hopeless.
[ending] But then A has the brilliant idea of disguising his partner as B. The bounty hunter kills his spouse and A and B are free to be together (until the intergalactic police come to arrest them for the murder of the bear.)
Every story must have a beginning, a middle and an end. Short stories are no exception to this. The same structure holds true whether you’re writing something 1000 words long or 100,000 words long.
So how do you know what the right size is before you start writing?
This is largely a matter of complexity. The best short stories consist of one single, brilliant idea developed without any subplots or verbiage. What would happen if someone went into the past and stepped on a single butterfly? Would it unravel the whole future? What would a car accident look like from the perspective of the tree they crashed into?
Short stories tend to be very minimal. One person, one problem, one attempt at solving it, one shocking twist of a conclusion.
This doesn’t make them easy. Far from it, in fact. There is less space in a short story to make mistakes, to waffle around until you find the direction you want to go in, to have some fantastic things make up for the less brilliant stuff. Short stories have to be self contained, disciplined and lucid. I think they are the hardest thing of all to write.
If you have an idea that you really want to explore from the perspective of two or more people, something where you want to add a bit of complexity, a digression or two where your characters meet someone particularly awesome, or explore an awesome setting, or do something to exemplify some philosophical point at tangent to your main story, then you are looking at a longer form.
All stories have a beginning, middle and end, but some stories also have sub-plots. Subplots are like a little extra story woven into the larger one. Maybe during one of your character’s attempts to solve his problem, he goes off to Tibet to learn snow-magic from the yetis. Now you have a little story inside your story where the character has a sub-problem [how to find the yetis and convince them to teach him magic] and this too needs a middle and an end. [He tries bribing them with yaks, but they’re not having it. Then he saves the life of their shaman and succeeds, emerging having learned to control snow and ready to go and use this in the pursuit of his larger goal.]
It’s a good rule of thumb that the longer you want your story to be, the more characters you should add. But each of these characters has to be woven into the book’s overarching plot somehow, so unless you want to write something as long as the ASOIAF series, five main characters is probably an upper limit for a novel.
Whether you gravitate more to short or long forms will largely depend on the kind of story ideas that come to you by nature. The minimalist, single brilliant ideas of short stories can’t really be developed into novels, and the sprawling complexity of novel ideas can’t usually be reduced into shorts.
But the modestly complex ideas suitable for novellas can easily grow while you’re writing them and end up as novels. My feeling is that if you find that happening, it’s good to go with it. Never look a gift novel in the mouth.
You can also make short stories into novels if you really want to. I wrote Captain’s Surrender that way. By writing each incident in the characters’ ongoing relationship as a story of its own [Josh kisses Peter and Peter doesn’t condemn him], [Peter puts down a mutiny], [Peter decides Josh makes a good alternative to debauching the local women], [Josh appears to die in a naval victory and Peter grieves], etc etc, I was able to finish each part and feel a sense of achievement over each individual story, while slowly building an arc that would stand as one novel.
This is also how I wrote my first ever finished novel – an old man tells a story about Loki, Loki appears and tells a story about his listener’s true love, his listener finds the true love and tells her a story that means she has to come back home with him etc.
I don’t honestly think it’s a good way of writing a novel. In both cases, the joins are visible (at least to me) and the internal structure of the stories fights against the structure of the overarching plot. But if you have problems achieving length in a story – if you can only think of short story ideas, and you desperately want to write a novel – this is the only way I know of to turn one into the other. And the experience of fitting a series of shorts into an overarching structure which tells a novel plot from start to finish is very good experience in what goes into a novel, so that next time you can plot the novel without needing the stepping stones of the shorts.
To sum up. Look at the idea you got last week and ask yourself ‘how many main characters have I got?’ ‘How many problems have they got?’ ‘How many different settings are there?’ ‘How many potential ways are there for an attempt to solve this problem to fail?’
If the answer to most of these things is ‘one’ then you’ve probably got a short story on your hands. If it’s ‘Oh God, where do I start, there’s so many?’ then you have a novel. If it’s somewhere in the region of ‘a few’, then start off aiming for a novella, and see whether it grows as you go. It may, it may not. If this stuff was entirely predictable it would be a science, but it’s not. It’s art, and uncertainty comes with the territory.
The Boat of Small Mysteries - A cozy mystery aboard a narrowboat, in which a murder and a disappearance keep our aroace detective from fully relaxing into the idyll of country life.
