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.