Nervous, puddy tat?

[truepenny]

I meant to link to this a while back, because Ursula Vernon has, as usual, whanged the nail squarely on the head.

Anxiety Creature (don't forget to read her commentary, too).

This is also an excellent graphic rendition of how revising for publication makes me feel. Especially (and, before anybody says anything, I know this doesn't make any sense) the basic stupid stuff like providing the bits of backstory from Mélusine so that people who pick up The Virtu without having read it, or who don't have perfect recall of everything they read, don't get lost.

I admit that this is a fair cop. But, you know? I fucking hate it.

I think part of my problem is that I'm one of those people with perfect recall. (It's a great parlor trick, but otherwise? So useless.) So the reader in the back of my mind (you know the one, the one who's me, only me in my worst and nastiest mood with a fresh supply of venom and razor blades) is rolling her eyes going, Yeah, yeah, we KNOW this already, cut the crap, wouldya? I feel like I'm over-explaining, like I'm insulting my readers and wasting paper and ink in the process.

I know that's not true, but that feeling makes it (a.) really hard for me to concentrate, when concentration is pretty much the key to this sort of detail work; and (b.) really hard for me to judge where the line is between not giving enough information and giving too much. Summarizing everything that happened in Mélusine would be too much, I feel pretty sure of that, and what I've currently got is too little, because my editor says so and I believe her.

It makes me understand why authors stick those synopses (the ones I always skip) in the front of later volumes of a series. Sure, it's a cop-out, but it saves you from sinking up to your ass in this particular mire.

Also, my own hand-wringing over this is boring me to tears.

Tomorrow, I am going to make some decisions and abide by them and move the hell on.

So there.

Comments

[heresluck]

As your local far-from-perfect-recall person ("I recognize this character name! Cool! Isn't he the one with the tattoos? And the other one is the one who's secretly from Tennessee? We left them... where the hell *did* we leave them? I think there was a library?"), I promise to note possible pitfalls whilst reading, and then you can figure out what the holes are and which ones need filling. *g*

[cija.livejournal.com]

I used to read books out of order all the time, because part of the interest was not knowing what had happened before - it made it more realistic, somehow - and I thought that recaps spoiled the fun of reading the first books later and finding out with great flashes of enlightenment why the people were the way they were and what great traumata had made them so snippy and so on. It's like those books where you start out in one exciting place and get a explanatory flashback a few chapters later, but better. I'm sure your editor is wise, but I hate it when people speaking on behalf of readers advise all the things that (as a reader) I don't want.

Which is not to say that clear bits of backstory are bad things to have.

[diony.livejournal.com]

I used to do that too, and I think it was part of the enormous appeal superhero comics had for me when I was in junior high -- it had been going on forever and I got to piece the story together.

[touch-of-ink.livejournal.com]

If I'm reading a series, I hate the "first chapter recap". Terry Pratchett does it for his Diskworld stuff and I understand why. Because his series is a "pick up at any point" series. He also just puts it in the first chapter so I can easily skip it.

However, the style of recap that I like best is none, unless it's important to *this* story. If someone is picking up the second book in the series, and hasn't read the first, what are the things that won't make sense? Those are the only things that need a little backstory, in my opinion.

If the story absolutely requires that they have read the first book, I'd prefer no recap at all. (Someone, please tell JK Rowling that. Does anyone on the planet need to be reminded that Harry didn't grow up knowing he was a wizard? Or that Ron and Hermione are his best friends?) If they have read the first, and just don't remember, they will want to re-read it. (I know someone that re-reads the entire "Wheel of Time" series, every time a new book comes out, so the story will be fresh in her mind.)

[papersky.livejournal.com]

I also have the total recall problem.

This second volume set-up of backstory is an especial problem in first. Omni makes it easy. Patrick O'Brian just damn stops the story for a couple of paragraphs of summary of the pertinent facts, and as for Trollope, I don't think he ever inclued backstory in his life, he didn't even bother to be consistent for all love.

Have you read the "what has gone before" in Lord of Castle Black in which Paarfi rails at length against splitting novels into volumes and tells the reader not to read it unless they've read the one before?

You could do that, at least in Mildmay POV. "You should know all this from having read the previous fucking volume, but if you don't remember..." followed by a brief if scatological summary. That's probably better than trying to do lots of subtle painful incluing you don't have any feel for. That does unfortunately lead into the possible Charybdis of exactly when and why this first person stuff is being written.

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

Or if it's being written at all.

Which is a potential paradox I try extremely hard not to think about--elephant in the living room style.

[larryhammer]

I have that problem writing any first person -- who's telling it when to who, and how? If I don't know that, I tangle myself in knots because I can't voice it. Omniscient's much easier, in that regard.

---L.

[veejane.livejournal.com]

Yeah, yeah, we KNOW this already, cut the crap, wouldya?

I am this reader. Possibly not quite so much with the razor blades, and my recall is not perfect. (But, people always seem to inclue a lot more than they think they're doing, or the Minimum Inclue Quotient is much higher overall than it is for me.) And, except that you are yourself one, you would probably rather not know that this reader does really exist.

On the upside, I will always guess whodunnit 50-80 pages before I'm supposed to. And, you know, it's easier to tolerate the presence of something unnecessary than it is to tolerate the absence of the necessary. Papersky's proposed solution sounds like a great idea -- It's not a bug; it's a feature.

[superversive.livejournal.com]

P.G. Wodehouse was acutely aware of this problem, which afflicted him with unusual severity because so many of his books belonged to long, complicated series which the average casual reader could be counted on not to have read. Of the various ways he solved it, this is my favourite:

A thing I never know, when I’m starting out to tell a story about a chap I’ve told a story about before, is how much explanation to bung in at the outset. It’s a problem you’ve got to look at from every angle. I mean to say, in the present case, if I take it for granted that my public knows all about Gussie Fink-Nottle and just breeze ahead, those publicans who weren’t hanging on my lips the first time are apt to be fogged. Whereas, if before kicking off I give about eight volumes of the man’s life and history, other bimbos, who were so hanging, will stifle yawns and murmur, ‘Old stuff. Get on with it.’

I suppose the only thing to do is to put the salient facts as briefly as possible in the possession of the first gang, waving an apologetic hand at the second gang the while, to indicate that they had better let their attention wander for a minute or two and that I will be with them shortly.

This is from The Code of the Woosters, and is immediately followed by three paragraphs of backstory on the aforementioned Fink-Nottle and his intended, the ghastly God-help-us Madeline Bassett. Since Wodehouse couldn’t come up with any suitable way of slipping in the necessary matter unobtrusively, he made a performance out of it, played it for laughs, and shunted the burden of any reluctant infelicity onto the hapless narrow shoulders of Bertie Wooster.

My own method is to leave this inclue business severely alone until some chump of a character ambles along and needs to be told. Then I put it as shortly as I can, with emphasis on personal slants and reactions, so at least there is some development of character going along with the infodump. I call this method ‘As You Don’t Know, Bob, But Would If You Weren’t the New Bug in School, and a Consummate Thickie Besides’.