GENREALITY

This is a cheater post:  one link to someplace else.  I apologize.  Clearly, my summer of chaos has begun.

Last week, I got the first chapter of Kitty’s Big Trouble up on my website.  The book is due out June 28.  Not long now.  Does this stage of the game get any easier?  No, it does not.  I just talked to my agent and asked him what I was going to do if this book flops.  He assured me that would not happen.

I’m still going to go gnaw on my fingernails for awhile.

(I’m working on a post about what it’s like working on the tenth and eleventh books in an ongoing series.  I’ll have it ready in the next week or so, I hope.)

The idiot plot:   When the character has to be an idiot for the plot to work.

This is not a real example.  It’s something I made up, but it’s based on an example in an actual book I just read:  The character’s driving along.  His check engine light’s been on for awhile, but he ignores it, because haven’t we all done that at some point?  Sure enough, the car breaks down — in the creepy abandoned town where a hundred people died in a suspicious mining accident twenty years ago.  Or something.  Pretty scary, right?  The character is now stranded, and things look bad.

Now what if I told you the character’s an auto mechanic?

If you’re like me, you yell at the book, “You stupid idiot, you should have known better!  You can fix this!  Why do you keep doing stupid things that a real auto mechanic would never do?!”

I was thrown completely out of the story, because I could no longer trust the character, who had failed utterly in something he really should know better about.

This is the same reason I despised the movie Sunshine.  The plot cascade happened because one of the astronauts “just forgot” to adjust the heat shield when the ship changed course.  I sat there in the theater biting my tongue so I wouldn’t yell, “You idiot!  This is why NASA has thousand-point checklists, so nobody ‘just forgets’ something that can kill you all!”  Then everyone got all emo and started fighting and crap, and nothing they did after that could convince me that they were real astronauts.  I couldn’t believe anything that happened in the entire story.

So you’ve got this plot, in which your character needs to get stuck in this scary abandoned town.  And you also need your character to be an auto mechanic for some other plot reason.  How to make it work?  Find another reason than the car breaking down for the character to get stuck.  Or make the car break down in a way that an expert can’t figure out, and make that part of the plot.  The highly competent character’s specialized knowledge doesn’t help — now that’s scary.

Some warning signs of an idiot plot:

• If you find yourself thinking, “Oh, surely a reader won’t notice that.” Because readers will notice.
• You find yourself writing long, convoluted explanations as to why your character has done something illogical and out of character, trying to justify it.  This kind of padding doesn’t really work.
• The characters have to be ignorant of something basic that the readers know — or that any human being living in their society would know — for the plot to work.
• The readers figure things out long before the characters do.  Or the characters ignore basic clues in order so that the story can trundle on along longer than it probably needs to.

If you read over your work and find any of these things happening, you may need to rethink the plot, or the character, so the two match up better.

There’s a philosophy of critiquing that goes something like this:  be as absolutely mean, vicious, and cutting as possible when you’re critiquing someone’s story.  If the author of said story is really cut out to be a writer, he can take it, maybe learn something, and maybe even get shocked into becoming a better writer.  On the other hand, if you scare them off and they never write again, they were never meant to be a writer in the first place and you’ve done them a favor.

I don’t recommend this technique.  I’ve been on the receiving end of it, and while I proved that I really am cut out to be a writer because I didn’t quit and came back with a better story, the trauma it engendered has stayed with me on some level for a very long time.  And I pretty much stopped listening to the person who delivered the critique entirely.

Here’s a much better litmus test to discover if you or someone you know is really cut out to be a writer:

“He left her.”
“He left her alone.”

What are the differences between those two sentences?

Now, if you just spent fifteen minutes thinking through every permutation of meaning you can achieve by adding or subtracting the word “alone,” you’re probably a writer.

(And yes, I really did get stuck on those sentences a couple of nights ago.  I was just describing someone leaving a room, but I became utterly fascinated with how the word “alone” changed the sentence, and the tone of the entire page.)

I spent all last week at a writing workshop/retreat (and had a lovely time, but the mountain location meant three days of snow.  Crazy!).  The term “hiding the football” was discussed, and now I’m going to discuss it with you.

Here’s a rough description of the most egregious example of hiding the football I’ve ever encountered:  The novel was in first-person point of view.  The protagonist discovered an important piece of information — the secret identity of one of the antagonists.  The text showed this by having the protagonist state something like, “Oh my God, I knew who he really was!”  Then the chapter ended.  I eagerly turned the page, thinking the next page would tell me what the hero had discovered.  Oh no — the hero spent the entire next chapter talking about how he had to tell another character what he had discovered.  And when he told the other character, did he reveal the identity to me?  Oh no again.  The text stated:  “I told her.  ‘Oh my God!’ she said.”  It wasn’t until the next chapter that the protagonist finally revealed what he had discovered.

And that’s “hiding the football:”  deliberately hiding a crucial piece of information that the protagonist/narrator knows from the reader.  As with most writing “rules,” a really good writer can make it work.  But often, the effect falls flat.

This writer (and many others) mistakenly thought that by not revealing the crucial piece of information, he could entice his readers to continue reading in order to discover it.  Instead, readers are so disgusted by this obvious manipulation, they stop reading.  At least, I did.

Counterintuitively, hiding information from the reader is not a good way to generate suspense.  Instead, hiding information often generates confusion and frustration.  If the protagonist knows it, the reader knows it.  Or should know it.  Suspense comes from finding out what the protagonist will do with that information.  If the protagonist knows something, and the author deliberately hides it from the reader, suddenly revealing that information won’t surprise the reader — because we know you’ve been hiding something from us.

Revealing information to the reader can actually increase suspense.  In the above example, imagine what would have happened if the protagonist had simply stated what he had discovered:  I would have experienced a moment of shock right along with him.  And I would have kept reading to find out how his partner would react to the information.  And kept reading after that to find out what he would do with that information.  That’s where the real suspense ought to lie — not in the information itself, but in what the information does to the plot.

Here’s an example of what revealing information can do to a story that I’ve heard attributed to the master of suspense, Alfred Hitchcock:

• In one version of a story, we see two people sitting across from each other on a train.  They talk for several minutes.  Suddenly, a bomb that was hidden under the seat goes off!
• In a second version, we see a man in a black coat look inside a package, which holds dynamite and a ticking timer.  He hides the package under the seat of a train car and sneaks quickly away.  Two people enter the train and sit down on that very same seat.  They talk for several minutes…while we wait for the bomb to go off.

Which version is more suspenseful?  You should have answered the second version!  And that’s how disclosing information to the reader can generate more suspense than hiding information.

Sorry I’m a bit late today…I’m on the road, and catching up on sleep.  Things — like blog posts — slip through the cracks.  But here’s a quick thought I’ve been pondering:  when not to take someone’s advice.

Remember, the advice a particular writer gives will reflect that individual’s own experience in the business.  The person who broke into the business thirty years ago may not be the person person to listen to about how to break in now.  The one with the most extreme position may be fun to read, but may also not have the best advice.

The solution to the problem of who to listen to and who to ignore is what it always is:  do your research.  Listen to lots of people, get lots of advice.  Make your own plan — where do you want to be in ten years?  What are the proven steps for accomplishing that?  Listen to the people who’ve done what you want to do.

I have a lot of people asking me about e-publishing these days, and I’m a terrible person to talk to about it because I haven’t done any of it.  I don’t have an out of print backlist, and I have more work than I can handle lined up for the next couple of years.  That may change someday, but for now, I’m not starting up any e-publishing projects because it’s not part of my current plan.  So, someone who wants to get started in e-publishing?  They definitely shouldn’t listen to me.

You need to be very clear on what kind of career YOU want to have, and what your own plan for breaking in or conducting a career is.  That will help you figure out what advice, amidst a vast sea of writing and publishing advice, to follow.