On not wasting what you're given

[truepenny]

matociquala and I, and mirrorthaw and I, have been having separate on-again-off-again conversations about some common things genre writers do that they really shouldn't. One of those conversations was/is tangential to this post of Bear's. And a common theme of these conversations is a fairly simple idea: don't waste what you've got.



As a writer (assuming that your writing is not merely an expression of your narcissistic admiration of your own navel), your primary goal is to get people to read your stories. All the craft and technical pyrotechnics and Cool Shit and Deep Meaning in the world is completely pointless if nobody's reading. So you want to get people to pick up your books, and you want them to put those books down again as infrequently as possible. Because every time a reader puts down a book, the thread gets broken. And every time they pick the book up again, there's some measurable amount of work they have to expend to get the spindle going again. Now, it may not be very much work, but there's always going to be that moment of, "Okay, where was I?" whether that's in the context of the story or simply a matter of which paragraph on the page.

Ergo, you want to NOT do things that will encourage the reader to put the book down. If a reader finishes Chapter 6 (of 12) and feels a real sense of closure and satisfaction, it's easy for them to say, I need to go to bed/do the dishes/restore feeling to my lower limbs and feet and get up and go do something else. Hence the auctorial fondness for ending chapters on cliff-hangers (or Terry Pratchett's stated preference for not breaking a story up into chapters at all). You want to get the reader to turn that page from the end of Chapter 6 to the beginning of Chapter 7.

The good news is that the reader is on your side. Readers want to be entertained, and they've chosen your book in the hopes that you can provide that. They want you to succeed. So--especially if this is the second or third or seventh of your books they've chosen--they'll give you rope, what Bear calls "author points." They'll go with you--until you make them bored or annoyed enough to put the book down and not pick it up again.

You are given the reader's willing complicity in the lies you're going to tell. Don't waste it.

And by that, I mean don't pull any of those annoying author tricks that get in the way. Don't dissipate the energy of the story. Particularly, don't dissipate the energy of the story by doing things because other, successful, beloved books in your genre--or other, successful, beloved movies or TV shows or sock puppet theater or whatever--do them.

There is no formula for writing a successful novel. . .

Wait.

It depends on how you define "successful." I define it automatically as being a book that rewards its readers on as many levels as I can manage--prose style, characterization, plot, world building, Cool Shit, theme, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. For me, it is an extremely pleasant side benefit if the book sells well, not a victory condition in and of itself. (I'm not denouncing financial motives for writing, because god knows we all have to do something to buy the cat kibble, and if you can make enough money to keep the cats fed by doing what you love, that is the best possible kind of job to have. In my case, "doing what I love" means writing the best book I have it in me to write--the money is the motive to turn professional, not the motive to write in the first place.) So for my definition of "successful," there is no formula, because there's no way to duplicate that kind of novel. What you can duplicate is the effort, not the result. And that means that part of the effort involved is listening to the story, or feeling its shape, or whatever metaphor works for you: figuring out what the best way is to tell this story. This story and no other.

For instance, there's a common narrative trick (which I think we learned from the movies) of interweaving two narrative lines by cutting from one to the other at a cliffhanger. This drives me nuts--as a reader because I'm agonized with tension over what's happening to Cuthbert in the Room of Broken Mirrors and now I'm being asked to care about Julia having tea with the Sultan of Ixiphibar. And then, when I've been brought round to be interested in Julia and OMG HAS SHE BEEN POISONED??? . . . we cut back to Cuthbert, and I no longer remember why I was worried about him at all. For me, this trick actually decreases narrative tension, because it reminds me that I'm reading an artificial construct, that Cuthbert and Julia and the Sultan are all signifiers that point at nothing except the interior workings of somebody else's mind. In other words, it makes me sharply aware of the man behind the curtain, principally due to my desire to throttle him. And this drives me nuts as a writer, because it's a dumb thing to do. It's being clever for the sake of being clever, also known as cutting off your nose to spite your face. There may be a story for which this is genuinely the best method of narration, but I haven't seen that story yet.

Too often, I think, we make our narrative choices based on genre expectations or on notions we had back when the story was a Platonic idea-seed, instead of basing our choices on the story that is unfolding beneath our fingers. I include myself in this indictment. We get focused on the wrong things, because telling stories is hard and we want there to be a formula, a way to know whether we're doing it right or not. And there just isn't. When we follow that mirage, we lose the story; it slips through our fingers like a bar of soap in a bubble bath. And that results in another sausage-worth of Extruded Fantasy Product, disposable fiction which people will read and discard and be unable to remember a week later.

I don't know about you, but that's not what I'm here for.

Comments

[txanne.livejournal.com]

I think the two-stories-with-cliffhanger comes from LOTR, and I think Tolkien got it from Chrétien. Not that I'm disagreeing with you! I've been known to read all of Cuthbert's chapters, then all of Julia's, then from the part where they join up again to the end. (But sometimes I just read the last chapter and then give the book away.)

[jonquil.livejournal.com]

Often by that point I don't care WHAT happens to Cuthbert, so I read all of Julia, get to the end, and put the book into the to-go bag. If I even finish Julia...

[lenora-rose.livejournal.com]

However, in his defense, Tolkien didn't intercut the stories. Book four follows one group. For the whole book. Book five, with a great big marker that "we are changing now", follows the other set. I didn't find the long long chunks indigestible the way I would have if it had interlaced the story the way, say, the movies did (except with more OMG!Cliffhanger). Of course, I may be alone in this opinion, but I find big "part One/Part two" markers very useful as a reader, and I use them extensively as a writer.

[calanthe-b.livejournal.com]

Yes, and while Tolkien moves from one group of characters to the other with each book, the narrative as a whole maintains an emotionally/tonally consistent line, which makes it much easier to accept the transition between groups.

[lenora-rose.livejournal.com]

I hadn't thought to put it that way, but your remark about emotionally/tonally consistent explains, too, why I find Guy Gavriel Kay's habit of cutting off scenes *on* cliffhangers much more tolerable than I do with other authors.

That, and often they're approaching the same scene from different angles, so the cliffhanger can be resolved almost immediately even with the POV shift. Which is what also works for our hostess's books, where the emotional/tonal link is intentionally not present, for Melusine, or placed in counterpoint, for the later books. But she doesn't, er - cliffhang? - every single one.

Thanks for thinking about this.

[dakiwiboid.livejournal.com]

I appreciate it when writers thing about what makes readers happy, and not just because you're creating a product, but because you think about what you like to read yourselves!

I was just discussing this sort of think with my husband yesterday. The subject of writers who toy with their readers came up. Vonnegut used to play icky little tricks on his readers--introducing fascinating subplots, then discarding them for seemingly no reason. That's one of the reason I stopped reading his books and basically smile and nod with a mildly frozen look on my face when other people rave on about how much they love his work. Sigh.

Re: Thanks for thinking about this.

[txanne.livejournal.com]

...Hey! I think you've explained to me why I don't like Vonnegut either! (Besides my strong sense of auctorial smugness radiating off the page, I mean.)

Re: Thanks for thinking about this.

[desperance.livejournal.com]

Auctorial smugness is my definition of John Fowles. Plus that sense of being toyed with, purely for the author to demonstrate how much more clever he is than his reader...

Re: Thanks for thinking about this.

[txanne.livejournal.com]

Ick! I don't think I've ever read any Fowles, and this doesn't make me want to start. There are so many *nice* authors whose work I don't have time to read....

Re: Thanks for thinking about this.

[sam-t.livejournal.com]

The other weekend I was trying to remember why I'd bounced off Fowles when my secondary-school librarian recommended him to me. I think you may have put your finger on the reason - thanks!

Re: Thanks for thinking about this.

[pennski.livejournal.com]

Aha! Yes I remember feeling annoyed that I was supposed to admire this man so much.

[oneminutemonkey.livejournal.com]

Then you get readers like me, where, if there are multiple narrative threads occuring at the same time, I'm apt to skip over the intervening chapters to follow the thread I find the most interesting. If Bob is breaking into Hightechorama HQ, and Sally is off training her psychic abilities, I may just decide that Bob's more entertaining and go with him to see where he ends up.

If you have to cut between character threads, make them all equally compelling and keep it short so we don't mind the transitions. Or, like certain fantasy authors, just dedicate either chunks of the book to these side-missions...

That's just my thought, though. I can get so worried about a character or a relationship that I'll flip to the end to see who lives, who dies, and who's a couple. :>

[marykaykare.livejournal.com]

I adore those intertwining cliffhanger narratives, if the writing's good and the characters interesting. Multiple viewpoints are my favorite thing to read I think. All kinds and varieties. I'm weird. I haven't tried to write one though.

MKK

Rooting for the writer

[muneraven.livejournal.com]

Somebody asked me once if I ever want a book to fail because I write stories too and want other writers to screw up because I compete with them. I was horrified! I never want a book/writer to fail! I want every book I pick up to be supremely entertaining and riveting from beginning to end. After all, I am a reader FIRST. And besides I like writers. I've never seen other writers as rivals for anything; nobody can write my stories but me.

It is actually very disheartening when a story fails. I want them all to be really good.

[shoshanaruth.livejournal.com]

Huh. What you've said about multiple viewpoint books is very interesting. When I was recommending Melusine to a friend, she was wary of it because of that, but we both figured that was just because she'd end up liking only one character . . .
I see the importance of writing whole scenes and not breaking them up in the middle now. Though I can understand why authors would do that . . .

[junkilope.livejournal.com]

Because I read so much SciFi Fantasy it is impossible for me to avoid this particular device. I know for one book series in particular there were no especially bad cliff hanger between the character changes but I only liked one of the characters. One of four, that is. I got about three books into the series, without reading the other character's sections at all, before I could no longer follow the story. The other characters were so intolerable that I couldn't be bothered.

[jonquil.livejournal.com]

"interweaving two narrative lines by cutting from one to the other at a cliffhanger."

Thank you. I loathe that, too. And I, too, blame Tolkien.

[callunav.livejournal.com]

I usually have that reaction to the two-cut narrative for somewhere between 1/3 to 1/2 of the book, and then I settle into the rhythm of it. On the plus side, I *do* settle into the rhythm of it and sometimes start to feel like I'm getting depth and intricacy and increased tension from the technique. (Mostly, I think I feel like that because I am - that is, only with authors who really know their shit and handle it with flair.) On the down side, even 1/3 is way the hell too long. That is so much too much time in which to lose a reader, I can't begin to express it. So even though there are several books that have done that (argh, and now I'm trying to think of them and I can't come up with a single damned example) that I've ended up really enjoying, I agree that it's a losing technique, because there is no guarantee that a writer will manage to hook me so hard that I'll put up with being irritable and feeling disjointed for a hundred pages. It could happen. Sometimes it does happen. Lots of times it doesn't.

The one book I've ever encountered where I not only felt like this technique was a good one for the book, I felt it was necessary and fantastically, mesmerizingly well-played out was Ursula K. Le Guin's The Dispossessed. It's not that the chapter-to-chapter shifts didn't throw me out of the story in the beginning, same as any other cut narrative, because it did. It's that after a little while, I began to understand how the two parts were talking to each other, moving forward to meet each other. The novel is all about time because the protagonist's genius is his multi-level understanding of time, and the structure of the novel - moving back and forth through time and weaving it together - becomes the center, the pivot point, the crux of the story, of the societies ("Anarres is our future,"), the families, the individuals, and the spiral of the protagonist's own thinking. It's superlative. The structure is not less problematic in the ways you describe, it's just worth it.

Off hand, I can't think of anything else I've read where I'd say anything similar.

I actually think you do similar things for brief moments, not with time or place or dramatic events, but with perspective: I found it jarring at first to get yanked out of Felix's head and life and thrust into Mildmay's. (Come to think of it, you do alternate events in different places. Are you including yourself, or is the point here not the lack of continuity, but th lack of continuity combined with the cliff-hanger? After the first half of Melusine, most of the time the characters are able to pick up the story where the last left off, but it's not always that way.) But there are some lovely places where that momentary disorientation pays off as I find myself approaching the same event or even the same perception from multiple angles, layered onto each other. That's one of those times when you hold the book a little tighter, settle into your chair a little deeper, and try to get further in than your eyes will actually go because what's happening has absorbed you (well, me) on a range of levels, far more than a purely linear narrative can achieve.

Of course, handled badly, the technique just results in unreadable crap. But then, so many things do, when they're handled badly. I do think that that kind of layering demands more of an author than many other kinds of story-telling, and it would be nice if Perfectly Competent Writers who aren't up to it would realize they're not up to it. But then again, that's true of almost any aspect of writing.

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

It's the combination that I think is distracting.

And anything can be the right thing to do, if it's done well, and if you're doing it because it's the best way to tell the story. Just as anything can be wrong, if you're doing it for the wrong reasons. That's my point, not that one technique or another is anathema.

[callunav.livejournal.com]

I'm sorry. I was stupid, here. You were talking about cliffhangers and how they can be a good thing, and then moved to talking about inter-cut texts and cliffhangers and how they are often a bad thing, and somehow, in the space between one sentence and the next, I lost track of the common theme and thought you were talking about intercut narratives in general, not that specific methodology.

That was dumb. Sorry about that.

[aedifica]

I remember having read a few books where I objected to the cutting back and forth, but the ones that I remember more clearly are the ones where it worked very well for me. Interestingly enough, the ones that work well for me were in epistolary format: Freedom and Necessity, and Sorcery and Cecilia and its sequels.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

But for me there's a difference between multiple points of view (fine, no worse than single points of view, taking each in isolation) and the artificial cliffhanger.

[aedifica]

I'm pretty sure these each had a few cliffhangers, but they were worked in well enough that they didn't feel artificial--I could believe that the character stopped writing and sent the letter just then. I think that might be why the ones in epistolary format tend to work better for me.

[sophielandon.livejournal.com]

And in epistolary novels, what is a cliffhanger for the reader is also a cliffhanger for the recipient of the letter. You've got this extra insurance against suspension of disbelief.

[bookzombie.livejournal.com]

Splitting the narrative is difficult to make work, I agree. My personal feeling (as part of my 'too many books are too long' 10-year long rant) is that often it is too often done just to make the book longer!

[lindorm.livejournal.com]

"...it makes me sharply aware of the man behind the curtain, principally due to my desire to throttle him." *laugh my head off*

I totally agree!

[love_archived]

This was the reason why I could not read Elizabeth's Kostova's The Historian. I tried very hard, but I finally threw in the towel when they cut to the train carriage for the umpteenth time. I was at a wedding, and gave the book away to another guest, happy not to have to bring the book home.

I did like how the movie Sliding Doors did it. But it's rare I'll like anything with interweaving narratives.

Is Mildmay a Republican?

[(Anonymous)]

This is completely off topic, but last night I woke from my sleep in a cold sweat because in my dream it occurred to me that....Mildmay might vote Republican. In fact, he might even dig the Moose-hunting Sarah Palin. (Yes, I have electoral dreams, doesn't everybody?)

Can you assauge my fears, or are they all too feasible?

Distressed in Sydney
(Zaf)

Re: Is Mildmay a Republican?

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

No. Mildmay is not a Republican. He's pro-union, pro-choice, and from a very practical and personal perspective, against the death penalty. He would be in favor of giving the military's budget to our educational system, and he would be all about universal health care.

Re: Is Mildmay a Republican?

[(Anonymous)]

Thank you. Now I can sleep easy night. Zaf