It’s All in How You Say It

I’ve been doing a bit of research on local history recently, and, while reading about one of the churches, came across the following sentence:

“[The Sunday School teachers] spent a great deal of time with the children and on various programs, including Children’s Day and Christmas, in addition to regular schedule of Sunday School, and it was at Christmas time in 1924 that the first little church burned.”

That’s probably not the way that you were expecting that sentence to end! When I first read that, I thought it was the most ill-advised attempt to join two independent clauses with a conjunction that I’d ever encountered. The information that the church burned down struck me as the sort of thing that was really worthy of its own sentence. Maybe even its own paragraph, entirely separate from the other activities of the Sunday School.

When I shared this opinion with friends, however, one pointed out an obvious point: “You don’t know what the “various activities” they were doing with the children may have entailed. It is possible that conjunction is warranted!” And to be fair, I think that she was right, at least to a certain extent. I do think that the Sunday School kids burned down the church. My source was written in a very non-judgmental, “just the facts” style, with a steadfast refusal to draw any conclusions based on those facts. However, the facts are that the kids were at the church rehearsing the Christmas pageant, they “built a good fire in the coal stove in preparation for the evening program,” and they came back for the service “to find the building in flames.” I suspect that you could find cause and effect in at least a couple of those clauses.

Regardless, though, my opinion remains unchanged: the fire was still worthy of its own paragraph, separate from other Sunday School activities that did not involve burning the church down.

My friend, however, pointed out that the way that the writer had phrased things made it, “Passive-aggression [as] a highly developed art.” Which I had to admit had some truth to it, and it got me thinking about the women who had written that sentence. It was written in 1956, 32 years after the fire, by two women identified only by their husband’s names. I don’t know how old they were, but it occurred to me that if they were in their late 30s or older, they might remember the fire. In fact, they might very well have been part of the infamous Sunday school class that burned down the church. Thinking about that, the sentence seems a little different, doesn’t it?

All of that in turn got me thinking about different voices in a story. What a character says says can tell the reader a lot about that person, but how they say it can tell even more. An insult delivered by a gangster will sound one way, an insult by a perfectly mannered southern belle quite another—and an insult by someone who want to be a perfectly mannered southern belle but hasn’t mastered the art of the subtle put-down is still a third thing.

Language is a tool, for both the writer and the reader. Grammar is a suggestion—but exactly how you and your characters choose to use that suggestion is something that can reveal quite a lot of information.

Another Anthology for the Collection

“The Emotional Support Unicorn,” part of Raconteur Press’s Spurgle Chronicles, is loose in the world.

Spurgle himself only serves a minor role in my story, that of getting the title character into court so that havoc can be wreaked. Still, I thought it was a rather amusing piece, and I hope that others get a chuckle out of it.

A WTF? Moment

Ah, March. That time of year when even those who don’t know the difference between a blocking foul and a backcourt violation pretend to be interested in college basketball so that they can fill out a bracket and join the office pool—which almost inevitably ends up being won by Suzie from Accounting who picked her winners based on their uniform colors.

For a nerd, I have an almost unseemly interest in sports, one I suspect that most of my readers do not share. But don’t worry, this post isn’t actually about the basketball tournament. Instead, it’s about a press conference at the tournament, nearly 10 years ago now. Sports press conferences in general are even more boringly predictable than political press conferences. In fact, they tend to be so predictable that recently a number of sportscasters admitted that, if they can’t manage to interview the coach before they go on the air, they just make up what he said—and nine times out of ten, they’re probably right.

But every now and then, you get something interesting out of them. Such was the case during this press conference on March 21, 2015. A number of players for the Wisconsin Badgers, including one named Nigel Hayes, had been made available to the media for questions. And this happened:

Question: Nigel…you’ve taken quite a leap in 3-point shooting…. Can you describe…the steps you took…to raise those parts of your game?

Nigel: Before I answer that question, I would like to say a few words: cattywampus, onomatopoeia, and antidisestablishmentarianism. Now, back to your question, it was just a lot of hard work, teammates giving you great confidence….

Those clearly were not the words that anyone was expecting, and led to a bit of confusion as everyone tried to mentally rewrite their predetermined narratives to account for them. The original questioner asked for clarification, and Nigel explained that his words were directed towards the stenographer:

Nigel: She does an amazing job of typing words, but sometimes if words are not in her dictionary, maybe if I say soliloquy right now, she may have to work a little bit harder to type that word. Or quandary, zephyr, or xylophone, things like that make her job really interesting.

It turned out that, the night before, after their game, Nigel and some of his teammates had been wandering around the tournament site, and they ran into the stenographer. They were interested in what she was doing, and she showed them how her machine worked, how she had shortcuts for pretty much all the standard words that she expected them to say, allowing her to keep up with their speech. But what if they said something she didn’t have a short cut for? Well, she would have to type that manually. So Nigel decided to do a bit of affectionate trolling at his next opportunity and find out how good she really was.

Tying this back to the point of the blog, I’ve been thinking about this story recently and why it is that it still sticks in my mind after nearly a decade. I’ve decided that there are two reasons.

First, there’s the sheer WTFery of the moment. As I said above, sport press conferences are predictable. And this one started out that way, then went straight off into left field…and then came back to the expected place. Nigel’s answer about his three-point shooting is one of those answers that the reporter could easily have written without ever actually asking Nigel about it. There was just that one moment that was so weird, one moment so brief you might almost wonder if you’d imagined it.

The other reason, though, was the fact that this story is in fact a story. There is an interesting explanation for Nigel’s weird comment, and it leads into a discussion about how players experience the tournament when they aren’t playing, some of the people involved in the production that you might not have thought about, and what happened when those people meet up.

The lesson is that I take from this is that WTF? moments can be extremely effective, but in order to make them so, you need both of the things I mentioned above. First, you need to make sure that your reader recognizes them as WTF? moments. If something went horribly…well, cattywampus…in your fantasy ritual, but the reader doesn’t know what the ritual was supposed to be like, it will fall flat. The other thing you need is an explanation: after you make the reader go, “Wait, what?” you have to give him a context in which this all makes sense. Without that explanation, it’s just a random thing that happened, and random things don’t stick in the mind the way that stories do.

Flat Characters

One of the worst tragedies to happen to writing is that the phrase “flat character” has become an insult.

“But it is an insult, isn’t it?” I can hear you saying. “Doesn’t everyone want their characters to be fully realized, three-dimensional people who stay with the reader long after the book has been put down?”

Well, yes. But not all of your characters. And, at any rate, that’s not what being a flat character is about.

What differentiates a three-dimensional character from a flat one is the ability to grow and change. To use an example from classic literature, in Romeo and Juliet, Juliet is a three-dimensional character. She starts as a shy, young girl, who hasn’t thought much about what she wants from the future and just wants to please her parents. By the second act, she’s fallen in love with Romeo and is conspiring with him and the nurse to arrange a secret marriage. And then, when Romeo is exiled and her parents are intending to force her into a bigamous marriage with Paris, she defies both them and the nurse to fake her own death, having decided that her loyalty to Romeo overrides everything else in her life.

Note that nothing I’ve said above should necessarily be taken as an endorsement of Juliet or a reason to like her. It’s simply a fact that, whether you love her or hate her, whether you agree with the choices that she made or not, Juliet is not the same person in Act 5 that she was in Act 1.

An example of a flat character would be the nurse. She’s bawdy, earthy, interested in seeing Juliet married above all else. In Act 1, that means encouraging Lady Capulet’s scheme of a match between Juliet and Paris. In Acts 2 and 3, it means assisting with the marriage scheme, then smuggling Romeo into Juliet’s room so that they can consummate the marriage. And then, after Romeo is exiled, it means going back to encouraging the marriage with Paris. But with all of these different positions she takes and decisions she makes, the underlying character is the same. The nurse is the same person at the end of the play as she was in the beginning.

But, just as I said above that Juliet being a three dimensional character wasn’t a reason to like her, the nurse being a flat character isn’t a reason to dislike her or to think that she’s badly written. Would the play have been better if it had included a fourth act soliloquy from the nurse musing about marital fidelity and whether it would be worth it for Juliet to give up everything to stay with Romeo? Questioning her loyalty to the Capulet family in light of Lord Capulet’s threats against Juliet? I don’t think so. Romeo and Juliet is the story of, well, Romeo and Juliet. It’s supposed to be about their relationship and growth. Trying to shoehorn in a subplot about how all of this affects the nurse would just get in the way.

That’s a problem I feel that a lot of modern writers have. They don’t want their characters to be flat. But showing character growth takes time and pages. If you insist on making everyone from the innkeeper in the town where the hero grew up to the ferryman who takes him across the river into “well-rounded characters,” the net result is that either the book is so crowded that there’s no room for any character to stand out—or that what should have been a relatively simple story balloons into an epic dozens of books long with no end in sight.

Now, there’s nothing wrong with falling in love with a secondary character and wanting to give him or her more depth. But you can only do this with so many characters. For most of them, what you want is a bit of shading: a line or two that hints that there may be more to this person than the stereotype, and if they were the main character, you’d see something interesting. But you have to keep in mind that this isn’t the main character, and hints are all you should give. Don’t let them take over or occupy page space that needs to be reserved for your actual main characters.

The tl;dr version of all this is that you shouldn’t be afraid of flat characters. It’s okay to have a character who just fills a role in the narrative and never exhibits any growth. A bit of shading on the secondary characters can make your world feel more real and lived-in, but too many “well-rounded” characters will distract from your story and cause unneeded bloat in your book.

Do Fairies Believe in Science?

That’s a question that I’ve been pondering for a while as part of my Seelie Court series. The conclusion that I’ve come to is, no, not really. The Fae as a whole don’t really have any interest in science. There are a few individual fairies who might try science, but even they are hampered by two key factors.

Before I get into those factors, it would be helpful to clarify what I mean by science. There are two commonly used definitions that refer to different things. The first definition of science is that it’s a process we use to learn about the world. The scientific method consists of observing things, coming up with a theory about how things work, designing an experiment to test that theory, doing the experiment over and over again to be sure you’ve got the right result, and then, assuming the experiments turned out the way you thought, tentatively adopting your theory as truth—though always with the caveat that future information might force you to change your mind and adopt a new theory.

The second definition of science is a body of knowledge organized so as to be useful. This is what we mean when we talk about, for example “political science.” Politics doesn’t really have testable hypotheses or the ability to rerun experiments, but we do know something about how politics works, we can write about those general trends, and organize those writings, and teach what we know.

So, when I say that the Fae don’t believe in science, which definition am I talking about? Well, both. And the two problems I mentioned above relate to those.

The first problem that a potential fairy scientist has is that experimental science doesn’t really work in the Fae Realm. Now, this is the point at which my college roommate would start scoffing. She never accepted the idea of science and magic being incompatible. “It all starts with the inclined plane,” she used to say. “Things roll down when you put them at the top of the hill, right? All of mechanics proceeds from there.”

The problem with that argument in my Fae Realm is that, when you ask, “Do things roll down when you put them at the top of the hill?” the answer is, “Well…usually.”

In the Fae Realm, magic is not a discrete force, just one of many. It permeates everything and everyone. “The ball rolled up the hill rather than down, because the ball didn’t want to go down” is a perfectly legitimate thing to happen in the Fae Realm. Obviously, this is a hinderance to science. It’s not that science can’t be done, but there are so many factors that have to be taken into account: the moods of not only the artifacts in your experiment but of any powerful Fae who might affect the place where you’re experimenting; the nature of the experimental location itself; astrological signs, whether or not the moon is a waning gibbous or Venus is in the fifth house; and many more. All of these, which would be so insignificant in the real world that they’d have no measurable effect, can change things in the Fae Realm so drastically that you get diametrically opposite results.

(As a side note, I will say that I have another fantasy world where magic is a discrete force, my friend’s argument is valid, and magic and science can work together to form magitek engineering. But that’s a subject for another post.)

So, any would-be fairy scientists have a big hill to climb. And they have to do it alone, which brings me to the second problem with Fae science: the Fae don’t really believe in organizing knowledge in a way that will make it useful.

The Fae, as a whole, are not a curious bunch. Again, there are individual exceptions to this rule, but as a whole, there aren’t many of them who sit around and wonder about things. Not just scientific things like, “How does this gizmo work?” or “If I throw something in a westerly direction in the lands of the Lady of the West Wind, how long will it take to blow back to me?” but also historical things like, “How long has the Seelie Court existed?” or “Who built the Spire of Time where the Seelie Court meets?” much less philosophical questions like, “Why do the Fae exist in the first place?” Thus, there are no libraries, neatly organized by subject, where you can go and find out about fairy history or culture or, well, science. There are no survey papers or books that present a general overview of any area. Therefore, each individual with an interest in these things has to start from scratch.

Fairy scientists exist. One of them has made himself at home in my skull, and I’ll probably have to tell his story at some point in order to get him out of it. But consider how being such a scientist would be. Imagine trying to study astronomy under such conditions. You have no books to read about the stars or the planets or their movements. You have no one you can ask. All you know is what you can see and what you can deduce based on that. And now imagine that the moon might randomly not show up one night, or that the sun might decide to say, “Eh, screw it, I’m sleeping in this morning.” Is it any wonder that science is not a major force in the Fae Realm?

The State of the Writing

Because I’ve been neglecting my blog for a while now (we won’t talk about just how long “a while” has been), I wanted to give a bit of an update on what I’ve published since the last time I’ve updated here and what my plans are for the next year or so.

I have published Books 1-5 of my Seelie Court series. My plan for that series is for it to be 12 books: a trilogy of trilogies about my main character Emma, as well as one book each featuring side characters Shane, Saoirse, and Kenneth. So, right now, we’ve just started the second four-book “trilogy.” In the first trilogy, Emma learned about the Fae and their world. Now that she’s passed the point of no return and can no longer go back to ignoring magic even if she wanted to, she needs to figure out her own powers and her plans for working through the challenges that are rapidly coming her way.

Book 6 is Saoirse’s book and will give us a closer look at the shapeshifter who serves as an investigator for the Seelie Court, what motivates her, and what she values—and what happens when it all ends up in jeopardy. Right now, I’m about halfway through the second draft of that one, and I’m hoping to get it finished by February.

Books 7 and 8 are about Emma learning what she needs to know, taking command of her powers, and being ready to champion all of humanity as we move towards the climax of the series. These books are still with beta readers, but I hope to get them back and revised soon.

My plan is to do all of the remaining revisions on these books and get them out in quick sequence, hopefully about a month between release dates. And I’d like that to happen before the end of the year. And then, we’ll have reached the 2/3rds point of The Seelie Court, with only Kenneth’s book and the finale left to go.

And then what?

Before I hit the end of The Seelie Court, I would like to some books published outside the series. I have my stand-alone The Little Mermaid retelling, but I also have a couple of other series in the works. One is an epic fantasy set in a world where magic and technology work together. The other is a steampunk fantasy that I don’t quite know what kind of series it will turn into yet; I just know that there are more stories about these characters.

I’ve also been working at writing short stories. I’m now in a bunch of anthologies with other authors, and I’ll admit, I’m excited about it. See the following:

“Once a Goddess”: A young Maltese girl flees from the Nazis, only to find an even darker secret hidden in the caverns underneath Malta.

“The Red Horse of War”: Zach Allen is a small-town cop doing his best to hold his jurisdiction together after it’s been devastated by disasters both natural and unnatural. But the borders of reality are collapsing, and the local biker gang has formed an alliance with a creature from another world. Zach must make a desperate gamble in hopes of saving his hometown. A story from the Seelie Court universe.

“The Key to the Phoenix”: A new professor at Phoenix Valley University must overcome her awkwardness and uncertainty in order to embrace the traditions of her new school and save her grad student.

“What Rory Learned”: When a telepathic cat and her telekinetic pet mouse set off in an alien space craft, they find more than they bargained for.

“You Belong to the City”: “From the moment I saw that dame, I knew she meant trouble….” But when the dame in question is a High Lady of the Fae, trouble takes on a whole new meaning. A story from the Seelie Court universe.

“A Song About Holly”: The fairy Aderyn is given the task of creating a holly plant that has both red berries and white blossoms at the same time. But she finds that even her magic can’t make this happen in within the confines of the Fae Realm. A story from the Seelie Court universe.

“The Texas Pterodons”: Early in 1976, several witnesses in the area south of San Antonio claimed to have seen pterodactyls. This story explores what might have been behind that incident.

Simon Biles and Difficulty vs. Execution

The gymnastics world was in an uproar this weekend over Simon Biles and her performance of the “Double Pike Yurchenko,” an extremely difficult vault on the edge of what’s possible to do. Biles is the first woman to land it in competition.

On Twitter, everyone was debating whether Biles is superhuman or whether she was just absent on the day that they taught the laws of gravity and thus just doesn’t know that they apply to her. Well, almost everyone. There was That One Guy who had to point out, “She didn’t stick the landing.”

That One Guy was being obnoxious, but he was also right: Biles didn’t stick the landing. She over-rotated, stumbled backwards, and had to take a huge step in order to keep her balance. Her vault was amazing, incredible, and spectacular…but it wasn’t perfect. Back in the day, when gymnasts were all chasing the perfect 10.0, Biles doing this vault would have been a serious mistake; she should have done an easier vault that she could execute better.

Fortunately for Biles, this isn’t “back in the day.” Modern gymnastics gives two scores: one is the traditional “how close to perfect” score that approaches 10, while the second is a difficulty score for every successfully executed element. The two parts are added together for the final score. It’s a recognition that there can’t really be a “best” score; if I do a triple flip perfectly, that’s awesome, but what if someone does a quadruple flip perfectly? Or a triple flip with a half-twist? Why should we all get the same score?

At any rate, this new vault was given a preliminary difficulty of 6.6, meaning that even though Biles had the step on the landing, she still got a 16.1 total, a very high score. So her big gamble paid off…maybe. A score over 16 is a big deal, but Biles’s own eponymous vault is a 6.4 difficulty. If she had done that one, could she have stuck the landing, gotten a better execution score, and done even better at the total?

From what I’ve heard about Biles, I don’t know if she cares. My amateur psychologist reading of her says that even if she knew for certain that doing the easier vault would have gotten her a 16.2 or a 16.3, she’d have gone for the double pike. It seems that the appeal of pushing herself as far as she could and doing something no one else had done before would matter to her more than the extra tenths would. And that’s admirable in a way. But it occurs to me that it’s also admirable to pursue perfection. To do one thing over and over again until you can do every aspect of it so well that there is literally nothing anyone can complain about.

Thinking about it, I think I share the philosophy that I’m assuming Biles has. I don’t have the patience to work on the details over and over again. The challenge of doing something new would appeal to me more. But that doesn’t mean that I think it’s the right choice. In mathematics, a proof that isn’t perfect isn’t a proof. And in writing, I enjoy creating new novels, but I would love it if just one of the novels I write could actually be the novel in my head.

So difficulty or execution? Is it better to push one’s limits, or become the best possible within them? If you had to choose, which would you master?

What’s Up With West Virginia?

Happy Super Bowl Monday! For those of you who aren’t fans of American Football, this is the day when those of us who are wake up slightly hung over, look in our trash cans, and say, “I ate how many chicken wings last night? Nope, it’s not possible.” There’s a lot of hashing back and forth about how the winning team is the greatest ever, the losing team wasn’t ever really that great to begin with, and all in all, football fans enjoy one last session of talk about the game before enduring the long darkness of basketball and baseball seasons. I’m going to do that too (I’ll get back to my discussion of novel planning next week), but rather than talk about whether the chiefs choked or whether Tom Brady is the greatest football player or simply the greatest athlete period, I want to talk about the biggest mystery of the game. I’m talking about West Virginia.

For those of you saying, “Huh? What does West Virginia have to do with a game between Tampa Bay and Kansas City?” that’s kind of my point. My question comes from this map:

The map gives the team that, in each state, the majority of people were rooting for. As can be seen, most of the country, 33 states, preferred Kansas City. This makes sense, given that the Kansas City coach, Andy Reid, is often considered one of the perpetual underdogs of the NFL; people like him and like to see him win. The Kansas City quarterback, Patrick Mahomes, is also generally well-liked (except by me) and considered to be one of the great stars of the future. On the other side of the ball, we have Tom Brady as the QB of Tampa Bay, who’s considered by many to be one of the villains of the NFL; most people are only sort of kidding when they suggest that Brady sold his soul to a crossroads demon.

So most places were for Kansas City, but there were seventeen exceptions. And these exceptions also make sense:

Florida, Alabama, Georgia, South Carolina: This would be where the actual fans of Tampa Bay are located.

Colorado, Utah, Idaho, Nevada: These are the fan bases for the Denver Broncos and the Las Vegas Raiders, the two traditional rivals of Kansas City. They wouldn’t root for KC if they were actually playing against Satan as opposed to someone who had merely made a deal with him.

Massachusetts, Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, Rhode Island, Connecticut, New Jersey: These are the fan base of Tom Brady’s old team, the New England Patriots. I’m a little surprised that the number of fans still loyal to Brady (and some of his teammates that went with him) is greater than the number who are furious with him, but while surprising, this is still explicable.

Michigan: Tom Brady attended school at the University of Michigan, so there’s still probably some loyalty there.

Thus sixteen out of the seventeen states who were for Tampa Bay make sense. But then there’s West Virginia, and try as I might, I can’t come up with any reason why West Virginia would go against the rest of the country here. There doesn’t seem to be any connection between West Virginia and any of the major Tampa Bay players or coaches. Searching for “West Virginia” on the Tampa Bay team website produces no results more recent than 2014, when they drafted a West Virginia running back in the third round.

So I don’t know what’s going on with West Virginia. A love of pirate-themed teams, maybe? Just an inclination to be contrary? But whatever it is, it’s going to bug me. Not seriously, but just enough to tickle my brain at idle moments.

Why am I bothering to write about this? Well, aside from the fact that this is my blog and I can write about whatever I feel like, I see two writing lessons that have come out of here.

One is taking a series of facts and constructing a story out of them, the way I managed to explain sixteen of the seventeen states. A story is more than a series of events; it’s the explanation for them and the journey from one to another. The story might not always be right, as I suspect mine isn’t necessarily. A football expert reading my story about the map above could probably poke any number of holes in it. Sometimes, though, it’s less important to make sure that your story is hole-proof than it is to have a story to poke holes in.

Two is the fact that the inexplicable makes a good place to look for story ideas. By “inexplicable” here, I don’t necessarily mean something along the lines of, “The bread floated across the room by itself, it could only be ghosts or aliens or telekinesis!” I mean the things that just don’t have an obvious explanation. Things like the car parked horizontally blocking two garage doors. Things like the tennis court in the middle of an empty field with no obvious subdivision attached to it. Things like why West Virginia is bucking the trends in the rest of the country. Things that tickle your brain and make you wonder. These things can be the basis of the story, as “I wonder…” turns into “Well, maybe…” turns into a tale.

Embracing the Inner Planner III: When the Characters Won’t Cooperate

One thing that I hear a lot from pantser is some variation of, “I’m a character writer. My characters come up with far more interesting things to do than I could ever plan.” Hearing this always makes me feel like a hack. I like to think that I’m a character writer, and other people have told me that my characters are good and interesting. Is that not true? Are my characters actually just paper-thin caricatures that I can force to do whatever I want?

Well, it’s not for me to say if my characters are any good or not, but I can say that they aren’t action figures under my complete control. I have plenty of strong-willed characters who won’t go along with my plans. Saoirse is a good example. There’s a scene early in my forthcoming book, The Harper, where Saoirse and Shane meet up, and I had planned for Saoirse to give Shane an explanation of the title character: who he was, what his goals were, and how he interacted with the rest of the Fae. Before I could write the scene, however, I heard Saoirse’s voice in my head, asking me how many drugs I had taken that I seriously thought she would do that, or conversely, how many drugs I planned to have her take in order to force her to do that. The Harper’s relationship to the Seelie Court is a complicated one, and the Court is unwilling to admit the truth about it to themselves, much less to outsiders. And I seriously believed that Saoirse, who goes above and beyond to make sure that she’s seen as a loyal, upstanding member of the Court, was just going to blab the full story to a mortal after one casual inquiry? Saoirse was right, I must have thought she was on drugs or had a serious head injury or something.

Saoirse has set me straight on a few other things too, ones that I won’t mention right now since they contain spoilers for Book 6 and beyond. She’s the most vocal of the Seelie Court characters, but she’s far from the only one. Emma has nudged me about things that she wouldn’t let alone. Shane has occasionally had to remind me that I’m writing the “old” him, the one before he really adjusted to the idea of the supernatural.

So how do I reconcile the idea of careful planning with characters who insist on doing their own thing? Basically, I need to include the characters in the planning process. Whenever the plan includes a character making a choice that radically affects the direction of the story, I need to “ask” that character if this is really the choice that he or she would make. The characters are rarely secretive about it. The opinionated characters are more than willing to tell me what they will and won’t do, and usually they’re just as willing to tell me in the planning stage as they are when I actually try to write the wrong decision; there’s no reason to wait to ask them.

Note, however, that “usually.” There have been times when I’ve been writing and then just hit a problem with my given plan, either because a character won’t cooperate or for some other reason, I realize that I was doing the wrong thing. Next time, I’ll talk about what happens when the plan goes off the rails in the middle of writing.

Embracing the Inner Planner II: Getting a Plan to Plan

Admitting that I wasn’t a pantser was the first step to embracing the inner planner. However, admitting that I had a problem was only the first step. The next thing to do was to figure out how to plan. A lifetime of pantsing fiction while following the instructions of my teachers for various academic writings didn’t really give me a good idea of how to outline fiction. I was pretty sure that the standard “outline” consisting of a hierarchy of Roman numerals, capital letters, Arabic numerals, etc. wasn’t going to work, but I had no idea of what would.

My first attempt to be a planner consisted of opening my notebook and trying to write, chapter by chapter, everything that was going to happen in the book. That worked wonderfully…until I got to about the two-thirds or three-quarters point and realized I had no idea what happened next. After a couple of these, I figured out that I wasn’t actually planning—I was just pantsing without writing any of the interesting parts. I was still just writing through, hoping I’d be able to figure out what happened next.

I got closer to success when someone—I wish I remembered who so that I could give credit where it’s due—introduced me to the Snowflake Method. This made sense to me: figure out the story in broad strokes, then go back and fill in the details. I did my best to follow that for the next few books I wrote—and I failed miserably again. The outlining process was taking multiple months, and I lost patience in it before I wanted to write the novel. So again, despite trying to get the inner planner working, I ended up with a sprawling mess, spending a dozen chapters on something that should have been a side plot at best, and no closer to getting anything finished.

I analyzed why I’d failed, and eventually I figured out that the Snowflake Method had too many steps, and steps that were too different from what I personally needed. The basic idea was sound: figure out the broader story, then figure out more details the farther into the process I go. The problem was that I lost sight of that goal in trying to write the story in exactly one sentence, exactly five sentences, writing a paragraph on each of the major characters, etc. I needed to go back to the basics and work my way through.

I experimented, and eventually I developed the process that created Red Lights on Silver Mountain Road. It goes roughly as follows:

  1. Write the full story in a page or two. This is the stage where all major questions need to be answered, i.e. who’s the killer, what’s his/her motivation, just what is the secret of the giant magic crystal McGuffin.
  2. Write the Table of Contents. Each chapter should have a name that tells me what the chapter needs to do in order to move the story forward. Note that the names here don’t have to be the ones that show up in the final novel or even necessarily a serious attempt at making them such (one book I amused myself by making all the preliminary chapter names lines out of Tom Petty songs). However, they need to offer some general guidance, making sure that I’m not totally lost when I get to Step 3.
  3. Write about a paragraph description for what happens in each chapter. This is the stage where all minor questions needs to be answered, i.e. how is the detective going to find the killer, what does the mysterious note left at the scene of the crime mean, how will the heroes break into the top-secret lab where the giant magic crystal McGuffin is kept.
  4. Write the freaking novel already.

So that’s it, a simple, 4-step process to write a novel. Easy-peasy. I can now write anything I want.

Or not. In my next post, I’ll get into a few places where things go off the rails.