Flawed or obnoxious?

Working on a short story with a fairly awful protag, I found myself wondering whether I should bother writing someone I didn’t like.  There are, though, lots of protag’s I don’t like in other people’s writing – particularly in “chick-lit”.

So is that me – do other readers like them? – or is it that sometimes you have to go on fictional journeys with the same kind of selfish, bigoted, small-minded people that we meet in real life?

And, within that, where is the line between presenting your protag as human through their flaws and presenting them as obnoxious?

Organising writing

It strikes me that there are many organisational challenges for writers, from organising our lives to find time to right through to organising ideas.

Recently I’ve been chatting with a writer friend about how to organise all the ‘snippets’ of ideas we have written down in physical and electronic notebooks. Over years of writing these tend to become vast collections if you’re an author who gets lots of ideas. But how do you utilise them? This is an interesting question.

And of course for novelists – even for a ‘pantser’ like me – there are points in a novel where you need to map stuff out because novels get too big to fit in your head (about the 40K mark for me). For the non-pantser writers there are of course index cards, sticky notes, exercise books, white boards, cork boards, the study floor, and any number of pieces of software.  Still I’ve only come across a few writers that feel their system of organising and planning works 100% how they’d like.

Even the short story writer needs something to track where all their winged-ideas have been sent, and which ones have flitted sadly home.

Of course there’s no one-size-fits-all solution because we all have our own ways of thinking and working, but it often amazes me how much time writers put into this aspect of the work. It almost seems at odds with the creative process to be so organised!

Chapters and rhythm

As a part of my rewrite, I’ve been equalising the lengths of chapters. Except in one or two spots I probably didn’t need to do this, but it actually started as an unconscious thing. I simply began to find the chapters were ending up within a certain range, and that led to me doing it more consciously.

Now I’ve read books that were very even in chapter length to a degree similar to one my friend discovered that matched the length of her bus ride each day. I’ve also read some fast-paced books where chapters are sometimes no more than a handful of paragraphs but vary between ultra-short and just short.

I think there is a rhythm created by chapters of a similar length which is a bit like waves crashing – regular, lulling and you learn the timing.  Short and varying chapter lengths seem to create something more like a summer rain storm – staccato and irregular. Personally, as a reader I’m happy with either.

As a writer I find it challenging to decide when in the process to actively impose a length. With this rewrite, I think it was better I did it now because the things I need to add are the perfect putty for filling in dips in length without bloating dialogue etc.

A beautiful sentence

As I mentioned two posts back, I read a ‘writing book’ that was all about focusing on your sentences.  One of the fantastic things about this, was the inspiration to pull some of my favourite  authors off the shelf, and take a peek at how they structure their sentences.

Mind you,  I probably didn’t need to open all the books – I have a pretty good sense of how most of them are written – but it was interesting to do it as an exercise.  And it led to a lot of unintentional re-reading!

There were books that I didn’t have much of a sense of the sentence types used or the variety.

One was Fight Club which sticks in my memory as being very conversational in style, so it was interesting to see the way that worked. Lots of short sentences.

The other was Soulless, which I knew had a mock Victorian style and was quite funny, but I was surprised to see how simple the sentences were.

I did have a pretty good sense of Austen’s sentences, but I was surprised at how little variation there was in structure.

All-in-all it made for a fun afternoon of revisiting books!

Why can’t they get it right?

For me a great pleasure is finding a good TV show. One that makes me excited to see what happens next time. One that I will regret the ending of.

For a split second a few months back I thought I’d found one. Buried in the late night schedule I found the kind of show I like, but because it was on so late I saw too little to be 100% sure.  So I finally tracked it down.

Oh weep ye angels of writing for the small screen… it’s got all the elements of an excellent TV show and yet it fails.

Why does it fail? It does the one thing that can never be good writing;  it breaks its internal consistency.  And it does it in the worst possible aspect of story – its characters.

In a show that is character driven, this is probably the worst thing you can do because the characters are what everyone’s focusing on. When they suddenly say things out of character, or have unexplained mood swings, it’s very hard to miss.

So a show that has a strong cast and a good premise and an interesting set of characters – including one who’s delightfully well written – falls flat because characters are doing what suits the scene. Yes, not even the episode’s plot in a lot of cases, but just the individual scene.

Why, oh why, oh why?

Okay, so now I’ve had a bit of a rant, I’d like to point out that this is something I think is afflicting so many British shows that it’s become a style. It’s why I stopped watching Spooks in the second series, and it probably would have stopped me watching this one too, except it only got 2 seasons.

And that I think is a shame, because this series could have become a classic. It’s got all the elements. As it stands I doubt many will remember The Fixer.

Though anyone who’s seen it will remember what I think is one of the best characters on TV in a long time – Callum, played by Jody Latham.

What the reader forgives

Reading this post over at my friend Natalie’s blog reminded me of a conversation I had about the long running TV series CSI. I have a soft spot for the original Vegas based one, yet my enjoyment of it was somewhat dulled when a friend who wasn’t a fan said: I can’t watch it because of all the time they spend telling each other stuff they’d already know.

In writer terms this is classic ‘as you know Bob’ stuff. And in CSI they do it at least once every episode. Yes they try to dress it up as though the fellow staff member is complimenting them on their thought process but it’s sooooo obviously there to tell the viewer, for example, what an epithelial is.

The funny thing is that you often don’t notice this stuff until someone points it out to you, and while that’s partly for writers about a sort of specialist knowledge, it’s also about what you’ll forgive a book/movie/series that you’re enjoying.

A story that absolutely rocks your world when you first read it will often not stand up to a second reading where what blew you away wasn’t the writing but the story, character or idea. You can connect with the work and be carried away by it so that your mind skips over the bumpy bits.

My own take on why successful books etc often seem to achieve this is that people are connecting deeply with the adventure, romance or intrigue of the book. Particularly connecting to character seems to immerse the reader enough to blur the faults of a text, because all you care about is what’s happening to the character.

Meaning attached to objects

As I launch myself into a spot of home decorating, I’m reminded that objects represent meaning.

Colour schemes, styles of furniture, whether spaces are crowded or minimalist and even what kind of intimacy a space has, are all part of the visual language of interior design. And this kind of design, says volumes about who we are or want to appear to be.

As we decorate our personal spaces we engage in a kind of worldbuilding which tells the viewer a range of things about us based on the meaning they attach to those same objects. What’s interesting is that the meaning attached mightn’t be the same for them as for us.

That is something I often think of as a lover of Austen and Conan Doyle. What tiny hints and clues to status or character do we miss as modern readers because the language of objects (as well as many of the objects themselves) have changed over the intervening century?

It’s something that the best worldbuilders in spec fic do to perfection… using the POV character’s eyes to teach us what objects mean in a world we’ve never seen. Obviously it’s also the biggest challenge of worldbuilding where the world doesn’t correlate closely to the world outside the book, not only because it makes setting hard to picture, but also because we don’t get that attached meaning.

Usurping expectation

As any reader of this blog will know, I like puns. (Have no fear, there are none in this post!) One of the reasons I enjoy a good pun is the way they shift your expectation or understanding of what a sentence means.

This shift in expectation is the core of a lot of humour, and often also a feature of good drama:

• In romances, the love interest is on face value a bad man, but then the protagonist and reader find out he’s not bad at all.
• In thrillers and sometimes in crime stories, your understanding of who is good and who is bad often has to flip to the opposite.

When done skillfully, it’s a joy to read stories that usurp your expectation without leaving you feeling cheated or led astray.  I admire authors who pull it off.

And why am I thinking about this? Blame the following joke:

Two hunters are out in the woods when one of them collapses. He doesn’t seem to be breathing and his eyes are glazed. The other guy takes out his phone and calls the emergency services.

He gasps: “My friend is dead! What can I do?”

The operator says: “Calm down, I can help. First, let’s make sure he’s dead.”

There is a silence, then a gunshot is heard. Back on the phone, the guy says: “OK, now what?”

That drafting thing

I always go a bit pale when I hear author’s say they did 20 drafts of their novel. Probably because a draft to me is an interminable thing that goes on, and on, and on. Multiplying that by 20 sounds insane.

For the author’s sanity I hope they don’t draft the way I do, but still – 20? That is a big number when talking about novels.

My novels get done three or four times over, with some scenes probably six or more, but I honestly can’t imagine 20.

Head jumpers anonymous

One of the things about point of view that always strikes me as interesting and often amusing is the degree to which the ‘correct approach’ is considered crucial in some genres and not others.

And by ‘correct approach’ I mean the idea that one should change POV as rarely as possible and at the very least only with well flagged breaks between POVs (like new chapters).

But whole genres do actually thrive on the head jump approach.

Interesting, no?