This is probably more of a revision tool than a writing one. I'm having a hard time finding an overarching term for this. Story scale is definitely not right, because there's a lot more to it.

I'm unravelling a few of them because I think it's helpful to look at each element separately, because they're different facets of the same thing. And for each and every point on the list I will say that all of them can make great stories, though the ones at the very edges are harder to pull off then the ones more towards the middle of each spectrum, but there's no 'right' or 'wrong' - but there are stories that jar, because they're very intimate along one axis and very wide-ranging on another, and that jars.

If you can think of better terms for any of these (I'm not a hundred percent happy yet), please don't hesitate to make suggestions.

( Scope )

( Goals )

( Jeopardy )

( Impact )

( Permanence )

Thoughts, comments, further facets of scale that I have missed?

OK. So I've skimmed a fair amount more of The Glass Dragon and the follow-up volume 'The Perfect Princess'. And the Glass Dragon has a lot more action before it ends, but many of the encounters seem forced (good guys and bad guys turning up where and when it's convenient for the plot, without giving much motivation. Although not a thin book, it feels rushed somehow, lacking substance; and the eventual resolution is unsatisfactory, as The Enemy gains power quickly and without much opposition, and more or less remains in power. ( Names. From the 'I could not make this up' department )

Or rather, The Writer Attempts to Read. The eight deadly words ('I don't care *what* happens to these people') quickly morphed into four: I HATE THIS BOOK. Let me tell you why.

It's a book I expected to like. Maybe not fall madly in love with, but to be entertained by it, taken on a rousing journey, spend pleasant hours with. It sounded like good, solid, fantasy - published by DAW, edited by Sheila Gilbert.

I *did* miss a vital clue, though - a favorable review by the Romantic Times. (There is a perfect correlation between books they like and books I hate. I'm willing to admit that it probably does not extend across every book in existence, but every time in the last ten years I've read something they reviewed favorably and the publisher has used that review, I have hated the book.)

The edition I have is an omnibus of three books - originally published in 1994-6, reissued in 2007, and the series - The Dragon Nimbus - appears to be continued. So this is not some obscure wannabe, it's mainstream fantasy, and it's in the bookstores and supported by the publisher.

And I hated it. I liked the premise, was intrigued by the first few pages. Technically, they're well written - not exactly shining with beauty, but competent. If I had read on past the first two chapters, I would have spotted the things that I disliked - by chapter seven, I started to skim, by chapter eleven - they're short chapters - I decided that I did not want to invest any more time in this.

( Spoilerific Turnoffs )

( The real turnoff )

Ah well. At least I am spared further prose along the lines of "Replenishing my body's reserves is not a waste of time."

(I appreciate that tastes differ and that a) people love books that leave me cold or that I actively dislike; b) people write books that leave me cold or that I actively dislike; c) people who write books generally *are invested in them and try to make them the best they can,* and d) the following might well read like a 'the books I read/write are better than yours.' This post reflects the opinions of the author. If you disagree on the grounds of 'but this works for me,' please agree to disagree. I still want to hear why it works for you; I'm just exceedingly unlikely to change my mind. If you disagree on a factual point, or want to share your opinions, I am equally interested in hearing from you.


I don't know what other people use as a metaphor for their story telling, and I would be interested to hear. I see myself as a chronicler of events - they happen to real people in their own reality (although sometimes the records are lost and I have to interpolate how someone would have gone from A to B.) Bear this metaphor in mind, it becomes important later.


There are several reasons why I don't like the current wave of Urban Fantasy. One is that it often segues into Paranormal Romance, and I am not a Romance reader, so I find the tropes of Romance intrusive - they don't work for me in contemporary stories, don't work for me in historicals, and don't work with added supernatural elements - they're just not my kind of books. Closely interwoven with that is the archetype of the 'sassy heroine' who then pairs up with a being who is considerably older/more powerful than herself.

( Age imbalance )

Closely related with making the character's journey a Romance is another problem.

( A narrow experience of humanity )

One trend I personally find somewhat limiting - both as a reader and a writer - is the trend towards books with high stakes. There's always been a tendency in Fantasy to Save The World - or rather to, if you're going through all the trouble with building a complex world, show that world at a turning point, at the moment when something important happens, just as you show your character at a turning point in *his* life, not the first twenty, thirty, forty years where he went about his daily business.

( High Stakes )

Complex circumstances. Baffling choices. This leads me to the real point of this post. I have dusted my historian's hat, so I am now finding it easier to see the connection.

The story of the lone hero (who gets the girl) and saves the world is not just a staple of Hollywood films, Golden Age edition; it's not just a Fairy Tale myth - it's also a subset of the History Of Great Men. (Occasionally, great women, but rarely.)

( The History of Great Men )


( Another reason why high stakes adventures don't work for me )

Last but not least - it appears I could talk about this all day, but I'm hoping that some of y'all have comments on this, too - I think that much of the current batch of urban fantasy has taken the 'what if' out of speculative fiction.

What happens if a sassy heroine with hang-ups has to team up with a sinister supernatural? Together they fight crime. (Alternatively: Together they Save The World.) That's not why I read genre.

( Reading Genre )

Err, oops, it's Enid Blyton again. What can I say - it was there, right at hand, when I needed a book.

It was a timely re-read, because just the other day, someone was complaining about too many characters and not being able to tell them apart, and I wanted to have another look to see how Blyton is handling her rather large cast.

Very skillfully in some ways, very effectively in others.

One thing she's doing is a handover while paring down the cast as much as possible at any one time.

( One after the Other )

And so on. Each person gets introduced in turn, each person gets tagged, not necessarily with a physical description, but with a character/temperament/cardboard flavour.

( Stereotypes )

An amusing aside: Enid Blyton fails at basic math. There are four towers. Each tower holds sixty girls, divided into six forms. There are - correctly - ten girls in Darrel's North Tower First Form bedroom.

There are three other towers with - theoretically - ten girls for the first form each. (The only one we ever see are West Tower girls.) There are, in total, twenty-five to thirty girls in Darrell's class.

What are the other ten to fifteen girls doing all morning?

I started out fascinated by the idea and ended reading on because I was trying to find out why this book was published. There are two things I want to talk about in regard to this: structure/pacing and payoffs. The payoff thing has grown a lot of tentacles, so I have moved it to a seperate post.

( Structure/Pacing )

The next book I've picked up is 'Ths Sceptered Isle' by Mercedes Lackey and Roberta Gellis. It's also an alternate-history book, set in two worlds (Faerie and our - somewhat modified - world), and it's multiple viewpoint. It's also the first of several, so all in all, they are comparable.

( Contains a spoiler that shouldn't be one )

It's a common problem to find that a story starts too slow, so this is just a quick and dirty overview of possible solutions:

- If nothing much happens, start later when there's more action.

- If the story starts with something important and slows to a crawl while you infill the backstory.

- If it starts in the right place, but is still slow, condensing might be the answer.

- If all the scenes are in the right places, try raising the stakes for the characters - hint at the dangers of failing, make whatever they do really matter.

- Alternatively, add a suplot that will flesh out the book - instead of the characters passing time until the Big Bang hits, give them something meaningful to do. Which, ideally, ties in with the main plot

- intensifying the plot is one option, deepening the characterisation another, but some books read slow and bland because things are taking place in white rooms. Add more poignant description, more interesting locations, and the same events can read much better.

This is a book that has been described as 'Hornblower in space' and it's kind of fitting - Nick Seafort has all the self-doubt and anxiousness and sheer Angst of Horatio Hornblower. Only this book involves a space ship and a space navy.

There are four more books in the series, and in my opinion the first one is the best. It's not a _good_ book, but it's readable, and it carries you through, and it's fun and different.

One thing that strikes me about it is how disagreeable I find much of the worldbuilding and the philosophy that stands behind it. The worldbuilding becomes more important in the subsequent books, which is why I like them less.

( Pacing )

I have two problems with the worldbuilding in this book. One is that much of it seems gratuiduous, and the other that I find it unbelievable.

But the real problem with this is not the book itself - the worldbulding is intrusive and at times annoying, but the story moves forward at a tremendous pace.
The real problem are the other four books Feintuch wrote to follow it. He has a fairly wide universe including a number of different planets, yet much of the story plays out in similar environments to the first book. We never get to see much more of the universe, which means that the discoveries that have carried me through the first book don't exist - ok, there is the military academy which works for a bit, but it's not enough. And Nick Seafort barely changes, and many of the things that play out in the first book (relationships with middies, how to correct aberrant behaviours) are repeated. This includes, one by one, deaths of people who have become important - yes, it leaves Nick isolated, but damn, I liked those characters and they didn't need to die.

Also, Feintuch eperimented with PoV, which somewhat disrupts the cohesion of the series. Particularly in #5 where half the book is written in interpolated future slang. And last but not least, those social elements I disliked in #1 - puritanical attitude, hordes of antisocial people roaming the streets - become plot elements and gain more and more importance - and I like them a lot less onscreen than as background information.

Yet for all its weaknesses, it remains a book that draws me in and keeps me reading.

I'm sorry. I *am* going through the books that I'm not certain I want to keep, so I'm more likely to read ad comment on ones that don't work for me than ones that do.

And I'm sorry again, but there shall be a rampant growth of spoilers, but as some of them are on the back cover, well...

Sherry Tepper never writes without a mission. In theory, her environmentalist agenda is one I would support, but in books, it gets into the way of the story. This is, in short, a book I do not intend to keep because reading it is not much fun, and in any case, I *am* in the choir, I don't need to be preached to.

(Going a little bit by recollection, and somewhat by cover copy, with a dose of actual reading)


This book is set in two times in an alternate history. One is our time - pre cellphone age - in a backwater, where a ploice officer becomes aware that plants are attacking people. Or maybe they're only hitting back. The other is an unspecified future, that at first looks like Fantasyland Proper, but soon is given away by the presence of Latyn and Frinch and Swajili and Inglitch.

And at some point, IIRC, the two will meet and there's more magic and I can't recall how the whole thing is resolved. But part of the twist of this is that the 'people' of latter times are descended from animals and all the various tribes are descended from animals as we know them.

Perils of Worldbuilding

( Worldbuilding )

Perils of Description

( Description )


Perils of Characterisation

( Characterisation )

Add to that an unrealistic starting point - the coincidence that *this* character, of all the world, should be dragged into the story - and you have a book I just can't stand re-reading.

The writer, one needs to disclose, did not read this book. The writer read less than fourty pages, skimmed a few more, and put the book down in disgust.

Nonetheless, several writing techniques stood out. Not, as you might guess, in the positive. (Note to self: must review books I like for a change.)

( Five Techniques that did not work )

This is a novel set in Bronze Age Scotland, and the main reason I picked it up was that it was cheap and I was out of reading material.

The overall verdict is that I do not like it much, but it is a compelling read.

Firstly, I would classify it as a fantasty novel even though it is not marketed as that. It has magic in it, and that magic works in the context of its world - charms and spells and curses and potents. In many other ways, it is also strongly resonant of the genre - it's a coming-of-age novel with strong worldbuilding. My main beef with it is that I do not recognise the people and gods within it; they do not resonate with me, so I think it would have been better as a second-world novel where the writer could have invented *all* of the facts. Parts of it ring false because I've studied the Celts, their deities, and the people that lived around them; if this book was wholly invented it would feel more truthful.


( A character story with the wrong plot )


The viewpoint is first person. Right now, I feel I've overdosed, even though I am _writing_ one book in first - but everything I pick up seems to be in first.First person can be difficult because it's not always immediate - often the narrator writes long after the fact. (Personally, I am happy to suspend my disbelief and pretend I am simply following along.) The first part of the book has a lot of reminders that the story is not immediate - 'but I couldn't know that'. 'that was only the beginning of my misery' 'in the end it would turn out well, but first' This is something thir person narration might contain as well, but every time it happened, it drew me out of the story a little.

It's the perfect book for leaving next to my computer and reading half a page of. It's still infuriating, but page by page _I don't want to read on_ (which gets in the way of work) and it's almost bearable. Partly because I skim so much.

I'd like to point out a couple of things, though. Unfortunately, they're negatives - bits that this book gets wrong and which are Very Disturbing.

Depth-challenged characters
I think this is the poster child of why good omni needs a strong narrator. In the last two hundred pages, I must have been in the heads of twenty characters; and if you substract half of those average ten pages for backstory, you get a very small amount of text for each character - not enough to characterise them in depth; much less to show a lot of development. And I've spent so much time seeing all of these people from the outside that I've completely lost track of focal characters - there is no-one to root for that I would be interested in _as an individual_.

The forced brevity means that characters aren't complex, but it has another consequence:

Formalized Interactions

( Internalisation and a digression about Jane Austen )

Insufficient time with each character and insufficient weight on showing what the character is doing instead of telling the reader about it are consequences of the form and are difficult (but not impossible) to avoid. The technique demonstrated by Jane Austen that Ursula LeGuin calls 'Crowding and Leaping' will be helpful - instead of a uniform flow of narrative, cutting in and giving the most relevant scenelets and papering over the rest with highly condensed narrative - and then moving on to the next relevant point.


A missing sense of consequence
( And by the way, your enemies prepare for war )


The wrong telling detail
( Details, details )

This book was one of the earliest works of fantasy I bought, and it resonated with my sixteen-year-old self. Since then, I might have read it at Uni, but not for at least ten years; and I've heard it mentioned disparingly a few times.

Now that I've picked it up again, I know why...

I still love the premise. Celts in space! What's not to like? It's a fantastic rather than SFnal premise and the books are a useful blend of both - magic and spaceships, oh my.

I first read this long before I knew of the existence of Fanfic and Mary Sueism; and although this book did well in its time, there is *no way* it would be published today. Twenty years in publishing are a long time. Really.


A whole world of Mary Sues

( Really.  )

And then there was the viewpoint.

( Ah yes, the viewpoint. )

The dreaded Internalisation

( It gets worse: )

It is seventy-five pages into the book, and I am bailing out. I am bored enough by the whole thing not to want to pay attention to the language. So far, I have failed to spot anything that was particularly clever, any use of words that would make me read on. I'll leave you with a snippet so you can have a taste:


"I have no objections, First Lord of War," said Aeron, and Gwydion laughed inwardly at her none too subtle stressing of his title and sphere of rule in Council.
Now it was Aeron's turn to assess the room, and from under her lashes she studied the more obvious trouble spots. It was all so very tiresome. Now Gwydion was speaking with a patience and tact much greater than they deserved, and when he had finished it wold be as if they had heard not the smallest word of what he had said, so hot were they upon their own trail. She knew it so well, had seen it so often before.

This is a post about structure, and how to find a narrative among the events of any given plot.

It started out, as so many things do, as a comment from Patricia C. Wrede, who compared stories - or rather, Mallory's retelling of King Arthur - to a modern sports commentator.

And Sir Gawain is down. He'll take some time to recover from that blow, even though Sir Cei succeeded in pulling his attacker off. Over on the left side, Sir Lancelot has just felled his opponent in a single strike. He's had a tough time lately, Sir Lancelot, with accusations of cheating being made against him, and for a time it looked unsure whether King Arthur would send him into the field, but against this opponent, he needs every man. From over the hill I can hear trumpets-

( (writerly) facts about the game )

Here are seven possible narratives for a football game...

( Seven Narratives )

Of course, not every story even remotely resembles a football game, but I still find it a useful metaphor - because once you know what happens and what the key events are, you can decide to tell the story from various angles, various focal points, different points of view etc. It is always a pleasure to read a story by a writer who has a good grasp _of the story_, because then they can step back a little, branch out a little, describe from a point of distance instead of filtering every sentence through the character (as I tend to do); they know what the _story_ needs in terms of tension and pacing, they can adjust their narrative voice to convey a sense of urgency or peacefulness, supporting the events of the plot, providing counterpoints, or foreshadowing what is still to come.

I find the football game an easy metaphor because we all know what happens, and we know enough about the circumstances and likely events to step back and look at it in different ways. To have the same sort of control, of knowing the whole so they can step back and examine the parts and find a path through them takes a much better writer, but I suppose it is one reason I prefer 'football game' over 'landscape' - the landcape lies there passively while a football game is dynamic; it's all about 'what happens' and it is much easier to start with the simple narrative of 'these are the highlights of what happens' and move on to 'and this is how I want to tell them' when you have that sense first. Looking at plot as a landscape, I can't see that.

Until now, I guess, I *have* seen my plots as landscapes - something vast, something I couldn't get a handle on, something confusing. If I think of them as football games, as a definite order of key events that can be told from any of dozens of perspectives - grasping them as wholes seems much more doable.

A classic. And not at all speculative fiction. I love this book, and I've long since wanted to know _why_, and I've just discovered another layer.

Let's begin with the language. Lots has been written about Jane Austen's language, and the interesting bit is that although some of her constructions read _very_ awkward when you stop to think about them, they all flow. It's a very witty narrative, although it can be somewhat manipulative. I, for one, am willing to forgive her, but I don't think one should emulate her - she's a hard act to follow.

( Spotlight on characterisation )

The usual suspects: plot, worldbuilding, characters.

( Plot and Characters )

Then there is the status thing:

( Romance between Equals )


But what I *really* noticed this time round was how far P&P is from the typical romance novel where hero and heroine know they want to be together and agonise about the perceived obstacles and dance around the topic. Once Lizzie and Darcy talk openly, by gods they are honest and cutting to the bone. She tells him _exactly_ what she thinks of him, he lays open his soul in the letter. Next time round, she's terribly embarassed, but when Lydia elopes, she pours out everything that had happened. Next time round, they profess their love. Other than his initial behaviour, there are no misunderstandings between them, and I think it is this openness and honesty that attracts me to this book.

It's a subject that turns up all over the net at the moment, as it is want to do from time to time.

All the cool kids are doing it. Jessica Faust of bookendsllc contest in May (links are here and another on the 25th of October which she is slowly working through. (Sorry this notification comes too late to take part, but it still promises to be interesting.)

There's good stuff on Kristin Nelson's blog pubrants, for instance: authors post the queries that attracted Kristin's attention. (Look in the sidebar)

This is *one agent's opinion* and some queries that attracted her did little for other agents. I found the following pairing particularly interesting:

The author's query...

... and the agent's pitch to an editor

When they say an agent must love it... *this* is what they mean.

Kristin is also of the school that for the hook - the bit where you try to catch an agent's attention and make them want to read more - you need only the first 20-30 pages of you novel, or, in other words, the inciting incident: whatever sets your characters into motion, the first big obstacle they face.

Here she gives other good advice:

It’s more important for a query concept to be original than for a query to be perfect.

It doesn't have to be perfect. (paraphrased): Grammar mistakes and typos aren't the end of the world.

You can have the most perfect and original query letter in the world and if you can’t back that up with good sample pages, it doesn’t really matter how great the query letter is.

Also of interest is the fangs_fur_fey community, which is open only to published authors. They've run a query contest before where readers could send in their letters and got comments on it - as have Miss Snark and Rachel Vater at various times - and while it's interesting to see those, this time it simply consists of people publishing the query letters that actually attracted agents.

And the conclusion is that we can all stop worrying about query letters...

As this is still ongoing at the time of writing this post, I'll simply point to the first in line - mdhenry's query letter and leave it to you to scroll through. I *think* they've reached the end point - here. There are several unrelated (but nonetheless interesting) posts inbetween, so just keep scrolling.

There Are No Rules. Some queries are short, some long, some have gramatical mistakes, some don't, some are colloquial, some formal, some go into great details, some don't, some mention credits and contacts, some don't, some use rhetorical questions ('have you ever wondered what two outrageous things have in common') some don't, some outline the whole plot, others use only a hook, some query a specific project, some look for an agent to assist with their career...

There Are No Rules. The only thing all of these query letters have in common is that they attracted the attention of agents. Reading them I come to the conclusion that writers worry too much.

I have high hopes that I won't come back to this topic, because I think I've grasped the principles. What's left it plenty of practice, and people who tell me whether it works, but the candelabras have been lit.

There isn't just one type of description. There are, as far as I can make out, three.

( Three types of Description )

Errr, long time no write. Sorry.

Ribbon of Fire is a YA novel I read as a child, and loved it, and found recently. I still love it. I love it, if anything, more than I did then, because now I can admire the skill of the writer.

The problem with looking very closely at what writers do is that the tolerance for sloppy writing will go right down. On the other hand, the sheer delight in good writing increases exponentiallly, so ultimately, I think it's fair cop.

This will be a short post, and one that's almost exclusively single-purpose. It's a neat little novel, moving forward quickly, but the two things that stand out are worldbuilding and voice.

Worldbuilding is important in Speculative Fiction, but not restricted to it. Dick Francis is a master wrodlbuilder - his plots and characters are intimately interwoven with teh worlds of horsetraining or painting or winetasting, and he gives a superb insight into these places. McLean does the same with the Scottish Highlands at the time of the Highland clearances. There's a lot at stake for the main character - death, starvation, loss of everything he owns and knows. But also the fear of losing his place in the community, of settting himself apart from his peers, and that almost weighs more heavily.

Voice and worldbuilding for this book are interwoven intimately. It took an adult to realise that the first person narration reads as if it was translated from the Gaelic, and he does it in two ways:

One is to use specific words, terms, and concepts. The main characters' mother, for instance, is referred to as 'the cailleach', he shares a bed with his brother and keeps his breeches on for fear his mother would confiscate them to stop him from leaving the house, and there is a shattering of Gaelic words and names - a very light touch, but enough to create a 'not-in-Kansas' feel.

That alone would have been enough to firmly settle the protagonist in his time and place. The genius behind it is that the first person narration is written using the grammar and vocabulary of someone for whom English is not his first language - without ever feeling heavyhanded about it. (As a thirteen-year-old, I never realised what was going on.)

"It was not me wrote that letter" "I am sick tired of questions. [...] I am not for answering any more supposing you keep on all night" 'Seumas Crubach was not away, i thought, but the same one would have been fly enough to keep out of sight of the police' "there is not much in the way o' work about a croft that I am not able for' - you get the hint. Scotticisms like Aye and Och, phrases like 'singing dumb' - but it was the strangeness of the language more than the obvious markers that made it beautiful to me.

The deliberateness (and skill) of the writer becomes more obvious when one pays attention to the dialogue other characters get. The laird - a general, and presumably well-educated in England, says "I am satisfied that it is not the same hand that penned this extraordinary document, despite the fact that the incorrect spelling of my name, in both cases, is identical.' The factor gets lines like "I would be failing in my duty if I did not seek to smoke out this vile nest of agitators and desperadoes, and prosecute them with the full severity of the law they have come to despise." The schoolmaster's sister has strong feelings - "A disgrace for a place of learning to be used in such a way. Duncan was not pleased at all", as does the coachdriver, a lowland Scot, but he expresses them: "Make off, ye Hielan' stot, or I'll land ye such a dunt ye'lll no' rise again in a hurry" which arrived in my mind's ear in a broad Scottish accept, _while the supposedly Gaelic bits did not_.

In case anyone is wondering: no, I can't write like that. I wish I could, I wish that each of my characters could have such a distinctive voice and personality, but that is far beyond me.

I'll admire it just the same, though. In my opinion it enhances the book - which would be a cracking adventure with great worldbuilding and atmosphere anyway - and lifts it to another level or authenticity.

Of course, it is far more difficult to do the same in fantasy where the rhythms of the language are, for the most part, languages that do not exist, never mind ones that are not known to the writer, but this, I think, is a book that shows what's possible.

I use the tern 'Storyverse' to refer to the sum of possibilities in a story.
It determines which kinds of choices thecharacters can make, which creatures they can encounter, which kinds of stories.
( Storyverses, defined )

The storyverse determines which choices a character can make and what he might encounter and is internal to the story. The mindscape, on the other hand, is internal to the reader.

( And now for mindscapes )

( ... and their relationship )

( Why it matters )

The best guideline I have heard for Reviews is 'don't ask what a book does wrong, ask what it does right,' so I shall put the 'right' at the top of this post.

I picked this up after a long hiatus, started reading, spent the next hour and a half in the bath, unable to put it down, went to keep reading and ignore my chores, broke off reluctantly to go to work, took it along because, y'know, I might arrive early and get to read another ten minutes, went home after work and finished reading it - at 5am.

So, clearly, he's doing *something* right. Let's see if I can find out what it is.

Fisherman's Hope is the fourth part of the Seafort Saga which follows a Hornblower-thinkalike in space, someone who blunders from one promotion to the next. The story arc is roughly that Nick Seafort takes over control of the training academy, cleans up there, and faces the biggest military challenge Earth has seen yet - the alien 'fish' which can only be overwhelmed by a suicide mission.


( An academy of challenges  )

So... is it a good book? A great book? Or even just an enjoyable book that people should have on their shelves?

Err, no. It's merely a book that kept me reading until I got to the solution. At which point I went 'is that it?' and put it down in disappointment.

It promises. It says 'keep reading, and I will resolve these threads.' It doesn't deliver.

( Scathing critique )

So. A closer look at the elements of this book that did not work. Which take up about two thirds of this post...

- Setting
( A place in time )

- Characters:
( Characterisation )

Tension
( Are you on the edge of your seat? )

Tolerance
( A brief word about tolerance. Promise. )

All this was rather longish, and it was mostly concentrating on the macro-scale, but that's where all the interesting bits lay. I'll finish with a closer look at the micro-level.

( Impressions can deceive. )

I would like Excel even better if it were easier to export graphs. This one was taken from a screenshot.

Anything else resulted in massive loss of quality. Not a problem if you use solid colours, but a problem if you insist on spiffy textures and a random background picture.

I thought this was quite useful. Ok, pretty, but they're mostly the same. I begin with a block that heaps quite a lot of interestingness on Kinush; then he gets into deep trouble, then he goes and looks for Meriok (which starts on a good note, goes through a valley of despair, and ends with an unexpected gift), then he does the right thing, apologises, and finds himself in a position where breaking his vows seemes the most honourable thing to do; he goes back to Rhiaton where he's knocked about a bit (but makes up with the girl). After that, he travels, finds his friend, and spends the next couple of months camped out waiting for his friend to actually _talk_ to him. Next he must face another test of character (and magic) that gains him approval. He comes out of that with a goal for which he fights back in Rhiaton.

It's an action-packed life the poor lad leads. What it doesn't have is proper antagonists.


I like graphical representations, and I happen to be particularly font of Excel's Donut Diagrams.

This is a screenshot of a Filemaker database (what else?) which I use to keep events straight.

Note that the Five Kingdoms have - how boring - twelve months of four weeks with seven days each.
The datefile allows me to take a scene or an event, add all the necessary dates and enough other details to make it easy to sort them at will. If I only want events from a particular book, I can select them. If I want a comparison that tells me at a glance (in another layout) whether Caidor talks to Kinush at a time when he's supposed to be two kingdoms away, I can do that, too.

The two relative strips on the left - days/weeks since last and days/weeks to next - help to build the datefile. I might have one particular date that's fixed, something that's just couldn't happen at any other time, and that's the definite date I entered. Then I went through the text and took 'Kinush wins his blue'. 'The next morning, at breakfast' 'The first week was blissfully idle' 'In contrast, the next two weeks' - all of which are hidden _somewhere_ in the text - and turn them into separate entries.

And so on. Vague hints went into the comment field. Eventually, I arrived at my set date; and from then, I counted backwards. Hm. My proposed start date almost coincided with the proposed date the Court would arrive. Too close. So I put the Court a couple of weeks back (better) and made some of the journeys longer.

I had a couple of long journeys in there that had a little flexibility and it wasn't too difficult to turn something taking ten days into three weeks - all I did was extend his family visit from a brief 'must leave, mum' to 'I really want to leave, but I haven't seen my family in ages'.

Love Filemaker. Love Radio buttons. Love tickyboxes. Love advanced search capabilities - since the dates use a custom list, I can sort by that list, and get the dates right.

Revision time!

( Kinush swims )

'Show don't tell' is a continuum. The first quote is as much on the side of 'tell' as you are going to get in a work of fiction. The second has a little more showing in it; just a touch. In another context, I might well have left it in, but what happens later is that Kinush and Neshen fall out, and Verilik's constant bullying is part of the reason.


( Hostility )

Pile it on a bit, eh?

[it follows a short paragraph stating that members of the Black tend to scatter power]

Darmant, at first, had seemed a harmless enough man until Kinush watched him argue with Neshen about a spell Kinush could not make out, and raise power with a nonchalance that spoke of practice.

That's pretty far along the telling side of things. It's on a second axis, though; vague rather than precise. 'until Kinush watched him' could have happened at any part during the day. By not placing the incident in time and space, it appears examplary and gives colouring to the whole complex of 'Kinush in the house of a member of the Black'.

_Can_ I make it more concrete? Quite probably. All Kinush needs to do is to sharpen his ears a little. That's the whole of the secret of being precise - what, exactly, are they saying? What gestures/facial expressions can he observe? What spell is Darmant demonstrating? Zoom in, look closer, and the telling detail will come.

_Should_ I do it?
I'll have to find out. It depends on the next paragraph and the overall direction of the scene. Telling isn't always bad. Vague isn't always bad. They're just bad when you offer nothing else.

The following is a screenshot from valendon's Diary. I've been using the structure - who is involved, what happens, what's at stake, why does it matter - to condense each scene into a brief paragraph of synopsis.




I love Apple Works and it's ability to use collapsable outlines with full formatting (Word only does a very boring one, and as I depend on fonts and colours to quickly distinguish things, I don't get on with it); I am also finally happy with my ability to turn long scenes into lively synopses.

(And, of course, it should be 'will be heard') but I won't change that in the image. Too lazy.

The whole book yielded twenty-four sections, which is a little over half the amount of chapters (44).

(I'm cheating. I uploaded this a while ago, just didn't want to make it public with the rest to flood reading lists.) I *love* the 'private' function on entries.

Anthony Eglin: The Lost Gardens.
At the time of the Great Livejournal Discussion about flawed and broken books I meant to say something on the topic, and later I meant to do it again, and I never got around to it.
Since I started to randomly read library books I've read books of, well, varying quality. Some books were dreadful, some so bad I couldn't finish them, and many I didn't even check out because they were so offputting.
Some of the bad books <chorus: Mills & Boon> were immensely readable. This was a book where the badness lies not on the technical level, but in the emotional reaction I as a reader had to it. In examining what breaks this book I hope to be able to avoid similar mistakes.

Cover Blurb:
"Hidden within the derelict gardens of abandoned Wickersham Priory, a deadly secret is waiting. But when an unsuspecting young Californian named Jamie Gibson finds herself the new owner of the estate through a surprise bequest from a total stranger - a British army officer - the secret begins to stir.

Jamie, fiered with enthusiasm to restore the gardens to their 1930s glory, seeks the help of Lawrence Kingston, a retired profesor of botany, eccentric bon viveur and amateur sleuth. Lawrence soon unearths an old chapel, which leads to an ancient Healing Well, which in turn yields a human skeleton. And as the police pursue their enquiries Kingston begins his own investigations - following a baffling trail of clues that wind down though the centuries, from the battlegrounds of World War II to the depths of the Middle Ages.

It is a trail marked by misadventure, revenge, compassion and murder. When finally Kingston unlocks the secret of Wickersham Priory, he and Jamie must confront a reckoning that neither of them could have ever imagined."

The author-seeking-representation in me recognises this as a smashing query letter, all 171 words of it. And I would adore to read the corresponding novel. Instead, I was stuck with one that was far less interesting.

( False Expectations )

Given this disparity - a novel allegedly about garden reconstruction in which the garden was peripheral, it could not succeed for me, but it gets worse. Much worse.

A crawl of pacings
( The stakes were raised before the turf was laid )

The next problem was that the characters had never read a mystery in their lives.

The characters were Too Stupid To Live - TSTL - which is the kiss of death for any novel.

( Idiot Plot )

And there's more.
( Lesser stupidities and other stuff )

Uncomfortable reading:

( I don't like these people much )

All in all, a book that hangs together badly, does not flow well, contains a large number of very obvius plot devices and plot-furthering mistakes, with a central conflict that feels grafted on.

Broken. Not just bad, or flawed, broken.

Mine! All mine!
Still a work in progress, but I like is quite a bit.

The scene I wanted to look at in greater detail is the following:

( warning: beyond long )

Warning: Part II of II, please read this post first, for it has the quoted text.


Enough of the micro-level, as wonderful as it is. Let's go back to the macro-level and examine why it works.

( Analysis of a Scene )

So, she wails, how does one get from A to B? (And preferably before I submit the next thing? I'm ok with Valendon's Diary, _that_ works. It's all those other books I worry about.)

Let me attempt to lay out a possible path for this scene.


(This needs a disclaimer in three foot high letters. I'm not saying that this is how the scene was conceived/written, or even that it is possible respectively wise to even attempt to write a scene like that. But I was born a litcritter's daughter, and to some degree, this kind of thing is in my blood. )

( Getting to the Core )

Back to my set of questions, then, the ones that distill _the scene_, *this* scene.
( Possible, but not likely, way of constructing a scene )

The scene question is completely opaque until about halfway through. Only when the Shining Crane thinks about the sweet oblivion of the Opium dens does it become clear that the scene question is 'will he join in the fight.'


All of this does not tell me how to get from _there_ to _here_, but I have a little more confidence in my ability to explain why certain parts of this scene are in place, and why they work.

Hambly is anything but a formulaic writer. If she stuck to any one aspect of this, it is unlikely to work, which makes analysis harder, but reading indefinitely more wonderful.

I know, I know, but she's such a wonderful writer. I can't say that I have one favorite writer, but she's right on the top tier of writers I adore. And I adore her for so many reasons - the unpredictability, the way that she builds rich worlds and trickle-feeds them into her books so that I am left in awe; her characters - people you can love, not just fall in lust with - oh, many ways. And her language! The more I learn, the more I like her.

So here's a brief one from Bride of the Rat God. In the hands of another writer, this would be a horror book; it has all the ingredients of a really strong enemy and darkness. Lots of darkness. And yet it's not a 'save the world' plot, the world remains small and managable., and the characters are warm and sympathetic. Her world happens to be Hollywood-before-talkies. You want strange worlds? This planet has plenty of them on offer, and she makes use of them. With added monsters, mostly (not in the Benjamin January series, it must be said, which is plenty strange just the same.)

Have a look at the following passage:

( Read it. Then read it again. )

TWR - David & Leigh Eddings: The Elder Gods

David - or David-and-Leigh as the entity prefers to be known these days - has written one not overly imaginative book twenty-one times over.

Not a record - after all, even two books a year add up over a 40 year career - but the monotony of it grates on the ear.

I used to adore the Belgariad and the first five volumes of his Sparhawk series. (The last one read like he had an editor standing over him with a whip, telling him to wrap it up or else. It broke conventions and took the plot into places it shouldn't have gone.) In more recent times, I thought 'The Redemption of Althalus' hit the spot exactly - the tone was right for the narrator. (That was before I developed a sensitivity to micro-level writing, so I might think differently now.)

These days, I can take-or-leave a new Eddings, and have borrowed most of them. The plot, many of the characters, and in particular the tone are *so* similar that I can just re-read an old one.

Sad to say for a new book, there wasn't *anything* new or remotely surprising about The Elder Gods. Some of it were things Eddings himself hadn't used before, but there really wasn't anything of interest in it. However, I have so many things to say about this book, that it has proven extremely valuable to me.



Judicious use of geography
( You've got Geography. Now use it.  )

Depth and complexity

Most plots, when you reduce them to their basics, are not very dense. Boy meets girl, boy wins girl, boy loses girl, boy wins girl again. Man meets Dark Lord, man gets defeated, man rallies friends, man defeats Dark Lord.

Won't carry a book. So you tie two of them together - an internal and an external storyline, which allows terrible decisions - to woo the girl *or* go off fighting, which means success on one level and disaster on the other, giving the hero nice measures of angst and tension, and keeping the reader's interest.

And you add twists and turns - the hero sets out to solve one problem and finds that it was only the first battle, or only a symptom of a greater problem; and you throw enemies and potential love interests in his way.

And you add subplots, which highlight certain aspects of the hero's character, or show off the world, or give a sidekick more depth, or illustrate the dangers he'll face, or foreshadow the big battle at the end.

And for the sake of the reader, you layer the story so it can be read as a straightforward romance or adventure story, but when you re-read it, you're beginning to notice things that escaped you first time around, and the story really isn't as black and white as you thought, and 'Lizzie Bennet finds love' becomes an uncomfortable story illustrating just how much women rely on either inheriting or marrying money, because without money, there is no security, no one to look after you when you are old and infirm, no guarantee of food on the table.

That is 'you', of course. Back to Eddings.

( Dig deeper... )




A few observations on prose.

( Mind your language! )


Eddings' speech tags deserve a mentioning of their own. Much of the overall effect of the text appears to be achieved through the judicious use of speech tags.

( I say, I say. )


On a personal note, the flippancy of the text - not just the toots and the sarcastic comments, but exchanges like
What should we do about it?"
"How does 'run away' sound to you?"
"Narasan tells me that the proper term is 'retreat', but 'run away' sounds close enough to me."

are amusing for a while, and cease to be thus some time later.

Nor do I like twee girly characters who give other characters hurtful nicknames and demand to be kissed which are a staple of Eddings' work. Oh well. I guess I've outgrown Eddings, just as I've outgrown Xanth.

This is the tenth - in order of publication - book in the Aubrey/Maturin series which began with Master and Commander. I have a curious relationship to these books - I don't like them very much as books, but I am very much in favour of them as stories - nobility, high adventure, sea-fights - what more can you want?

My answer is 'better Aubrey/Maturin novels', I'm afraid, because in many ways this is a deeply flawed book, but it's not, to pick up on another recent discussion, 'broken.' It works as a story. It's perfectly readable. It's a pageturner, to some degree - you need to know what happens next. And yet....

( Serial thoughts )

I should say something about the language or the omniscient narrator, but nothing struck me as curious enough to remark upon it.

Middle-of-the-road, that's what it is.

Edit:
For those interested in the Writer At Work, check out 'The Final Unfinished Voyage of Jack Aubrey' (London 2004) which contains a facsimile of the original mss, and a transcript of the pages he types - about three chapters all in all. I haven't got time to look at it closely, but it's certainly interesting.

Second Edit: (for I forgot to talk about this earlier):

One great advantage about writing a series is that you have a shared world - all the worldbuilding needs to be done only .75 times per book or less (I think a lot of worldbuilding goes into 'the world as relating to the individual', and every character will frequent different environments.)
The other advantage is that there are a lot of minor characters and settings that can be used and re-used frequently, and which might need the same amount of introduction, but not the same development.
The shopkeeper and the spearcarriers that frequent the village shop, for instance. If characters in three books stop by, you already know what the shop looks like and who'll be in it - but the reader will be able to piece together the narratives to form a more rounded impression of the village and its inhabitants. It can be fun in an 'where's Wally' way to follow minor characters - oh, look, there's the guy with the dog again, what'll he do this time?

I am trembling somewhat in choosing this book to analyse because I like it so much, and I like Barbara Hambly so much, so I am somewhat appreciative whether I can do her justice. (And throughout this post I was tempted to write 'Kira' who is a different person alltogether.

The last TWR post was about romance novels, so this fits perfectly. On one level, this *is* the romance novel to end all historical romances - it thumbs its nose at your typical because it contains everything a fluffy Mills and Boon will have - *and then some* What is a tiny fraction of this book will make a full-blown romance. It plays with the genre, it mocks it, it dances around romance conventions and turns them on the head.

( The Romance )

Pure Mills and Boon.

What I've left out is the other plot.

( With added jeopardy )

( High Stakes )

As for wonderful writing techniques - I don't know where to start. Hambly is a master of so many, and I'm certain I'm missing out a lot of them.

There is the art of starting a scene in the right place, for instance.

( Powerful introduction )

As if the first scene wasn't enough - it oozes danger and strangeness and powerful people not knowing what to do - the second scene deepens those impressions, making it clear that Kyra *really* is in trouble.

( Upping the stakes )

( Richness )


( Anything can happen )

( Letting the reader fill in gaps )

Convoluted storylines

( Past and Present )

Oh, well. Go and read it yourself. It's a great book.

I meant to post this picture shortly after zeborahnz pointed out that I had a perfectly good tool for creating nested outlines: Apple Works.

I used it, I liked it, and I thought I'd illustrate it with a screenshot. Being able to collapse all the bits I'm not working on and see only a single paragraph really helps in the editing process - I'm not tempted to read on, I *can't* read on without clicking the mouse and expanding the text. And equally, it's useful to see whether the argument in a scene flows - all those 'did I say that before' moments, all the 'why is the conversation jumping around.' This tool is definitely staying in my toolbox.

This entry deviates from the common pattern for these posts in several directions: it is not about a single book, and it is a structural post rather than focussing on the prose. Previous posts have focussed on useful techniques that work; this one is almost the opposite.

I'm also sticking my neck out way into the field because I picked two random books off the shelf and have no idea how typical they are for the genre. Given that these two random books share so much, I'm willing to risk it; what this _isn't_ is an analysis of the whole historical romance genre. I wrote about this a little on rasfc, so some of you might see some phrases twice, but I felt strongly enough about this to expand it a bit.

The books in question are:
Elizabeth Bayley: Nell
Gayle Wilson: Anne's Perfect Husband
but any of that series will do, I think.

I can see why they're addictive - you're hungry fifteen minutes after
finishing one.
That sentence sums up what is wrong with these books.

( unfavorable comparison with fast food )

- Length
75,000 – 90,000 words

( Musings on length )

Bear with me. I think a lot can be learnt by watching what books do wrong (really wrong, in this case!) because any pitfall you see and avoid will make more people like _your_ books.

But first, an appreciation of what they do _right_.

They were amusing, romantic and I could fall for both the heroes and the heroines (no whimpering females in these books). Parts were quite moving indeed. While there is a little headhopping going on (both hero and heroine need screen time, y'know), they are both competently written. There's very little about them that makes one roll one's eyes and go 'oh, year, that's *so* obvious. They are not bad books. They just aren't good enough.

( In Detail: )

In this respect, I think the regencies work better than modern-day romances, because there is a certain romanticism inherent in the setting, as well as the strange world to discover.

So, given that they've got something of all of these, why aren't they good books? Because to be 'good' overall, a book has to be more than adequate in the sum of its parts.

( And now for the dark side: )

The question remains: if the books are no shorter than any number of 'real' books, and still read terribly thin, what is missing?

( I think I know )

There's another lesson in there for me, a scene from Anne's perfect Husband I needed to analyze because it tugged my heartstrings - while at the same time I felt that it was pathetic because the underlying cause was not important enough.

( Click for pathos )

I still want to read the real book about these people.

( Pathetic heroes )

Oh, did I say I was _really_ battling with this?

On rasfc, Tim Silverman gave a very detailed analysis of one of Patricia's layering examples (the whole thread is called 'describing peoples', the message I'm referring to in particular is <c027e990.1453f%tim@timsilverman.demon.co.uk>).

Anyway, she had a paragraph of describing a mountain, and Tim pulled it apart phrase by phrase. I quote:

1) What's the big obvious dominating feature here?
>> The mountains

2) Place it: where is it/what's it doing? With added verb of motion:
>> The mountains rose from the plain.

And so it went on.

I ground my teeth, gnashed, wailed, and decided I would just have to practice this, and seeing that Tim gave me a structure that obviously worked, it might be a good starting point, a scaffolding so to speak. And thus, I picked a photograph of something appropriate, and I settled on the following:


( The result )

Doing it step by step has given me some insights, amongst them

- *I can do it*. I might struggle, but I can write passages that are lively and interesting.
- it didn't work until I had some sort of characterisation of the items I was describing - a sense of opposition between the church and the river, and until I assigned emotions and agendas to both sides.
- I have no idea what functions description can fulfill in the narrative, but that's an old insight.

Of *course* I wouldn't write like this on a regular basis, but it was a useful exercise. I more than ever want to grok externalisation. I think that the stories I write are of a kind that would _benefit_ by having rich description - I am very interested in geography and history and tend to have weird and wonderful places, and description-rich books are the ones I tend to cherish.

It's not easy, Mr. Fox, sir.

There was a long thread on rasfc in which Patricia C. Wrede demonstrated the technique of 'layering' - when you have one aspect of your story, say dialogue, and then go back and put in others. Including description.

The following is part of my desire to nail down description. I have no idea which story this snippet belongs to, I don't know the world or the characters or anything, but this is how I would write _today_.

( Short and sweet - 279 words that could stand on their own. )

Note that it is not _devoid_ of description - I have sights and smells and tactile information - but it has none of what I call 'external description' - neutral, not-immediately-involving-character description.

The whole scene was inspired by one particular picture:
link to flickr

( And now, with added door (635 words): )

A while ago, I said that the writing tool I really wanted was the ability to collapse or expand text at will.

zeborahnz pointed out that I already had a tool with that functionality: It's called Apple Works and came with my computer. So I've started to play around with it.

I can report that this has proven an invaluable revision tool.

( Benefits )

(I see even more rolled eyes than the last time ;-) )

I'm reading - and re-reading, and re-reading it AGAIN just to see what Enid Blyton does with her viewpoint, which is spectacularly wonderful.
I think next on my list to master should be omniscient, respectively good multiple thirds, and this is a perfect book to pick apart - it is *masterful* and short. And immensely readable, for all that it's terribly moral-laden and trivial. If *I* had gone to this school, I'd not be part of the in-clique. I'd be the fat kid who cried easily and 'wasn't a good sport,' the one that sucked up and sat in the front row and answered every question...
In fact, the older I get, the less I like the protagonists, and the more sympathy I have for the kids being bullied. And just because the bullies are the heroes of Enid Blyton's books, doesn't make it any less bullying.
That aside, it's a great book to pull apart.

Closely related to her mastery of viewpoint is her ability to follow the story. I wish I had half as strong a sense of story than she does.

Synopsis: (Not behind cut, as it's short): Darrel and her friends are in the Fifth Form. They deal with several new classmates, each of which have moral lessons to learn (one is hard and domineering, another likes to be a doormat for everybody, one is conceited...). A first former (cousin to one of the girls in the fifth) also has character development to do. Highlights of the term are a first form lacrosse match and the pantomime put on by the fifth as school entertainment.
Err, that's it. There isn't much plot - there is plenty of characterisation, though. One-dimensional characterisation, but this is all about character development.

Cameram Mobile
( focus on the story )

Suitability of Omniscient Viewpoint
( Involving a cast of thousands ) Structure and Plot
( Plot? What plot? ) Crowding and Leaping
Ursula K. LeGuin uses the term 'crowding and leaping' for techniques of moving the story forward. When it was handed out, I was still in the basement, riffling through the ideas bin...
I'm not certain whether the term for this would be 'pacing' or where else it would fall into the matrix of things I don't grok - but I want to talk about these techniques in greater detail.
Within thes narrative, nothing is fixed, not time, not place, not PoV character, leading to sequences like:

( Leaps ) The role of the narrator
( The same, with added attitude ) Narrative summary

( Crowded narrative )

Temporal Focus
( Time passes ) Crowd scenes
( Who's talking? )

Juggling character threads
( Maintaining awareness ) One last word about the main character, such as it is. In this book, Darrell undergoes next to no character development, and she's not given a lot of screentime, either, but she is there for almost every important event, and for almost every unimportant one. So when the scene is set 'the girls go back to school' it's Darrell's journey we follow, she goes into the dormy and the classroom and down to tea, and in this manner she is being kept at the forefront of the reader's mind, screentime and character development or not.

June, for instance, gets screentime and development, and she's shown playing a trick - but the trick is framed by Felicity talking to Darrell about it, Darrell thinking about it, Darrell seeing the back end of it and giving brief advice, and Darrell's reaction to it. Objectively, not a lot of involvement - subjectively, the matter is different.

(repost from rasfc, March 2003) Jack M. Bickham: Scene and Structure. This is a book that has been frequently mentioned on rasfc, so I thought I'd give it a go. I picked up a copy cheap from abebooks, and thought 'what the hell.'

As an inspirational book, this ranges somewhere below a russian thesaurus. I speak exactly five words of russian: yes, no, to your health, please, and peace, so that tells you how smitten I was.

It feels all wrong. And I mean _all_ wrong.

My first impression was that there's too much conflict in this method, too much disaster. A 'scene' basically consists of lots and lots of conflict between the PoV character and someone else; with the sequel giving him a little time to think, bounce back from disaster, and take the next action. He also wants the character plunged from disaster to disaster, in deeper shit all the time. I can see that working for a thriller - private detective takes on harmless job and ends up chased by the KGB - but for the kind of books I write and want to read, all this action-hero stuff isn't useful. I work on the basis that a good scene should do more than one of the following: worldbuilding, characterisation, plotting. Bickham's approach seems to be geared only towards plotting.

My second impression was that it was _far_ too strict. I know that for me mastering this form and then adapting it would stifle my ability to write. That's happening in part because Bickham is very much of the opinion that characters aren't real (mine are) and that you have to plot everything including the end from the moment you start out. I can't write like that.

Well, here's the gist of Bickham's book, filtered through my annoyance of it:

( Bickham redux )

I can see a few people roll their eyes already.

Heh.

Yes, this is in German. Yes, it's a pony story meant to be read by people half my age. Yes, it's parly based on an idiot plot. (Much of the conflict/disasters could have been avoided if the parents had, well, parented better.

*So why do I keep reading this book*? And it's equally fluffy companions?

It's only in the last few weeks that I've started to be able to see what a writer is doing on the micro-level, so I thought I'd put it to good use. What I want to do with this series of posts is to describe techniques I spot. Not all of them are applicable for every book or all of the time, but I hope that by becoming aware of them I'll have them at hand when they could be useful.

With the caveat that there was a time, not that long ago, when thinking about these things would have prevented me from writing anything useful. I had to get story and characterisation and all of that down first. I see these more as revision than as writing tools.

This post is gettting very very long, which might reflect on the quality of the writing as much as on the fact that this is the first post of this kind I'm doing...

<brief synopsis of book follows>

( synopsis )

It's a nice, compact, short-book length story. I can't do this without quoting, so forgive the quick-and-dirty translations from German.


Story Questions
( How will she...? )

Chapter lead-ins

( stepping through doors )

Multi-Level Conversation

( You were saying? )

Reaction Chains

( one thing leads to another )

Here's the illustrative example:


"I don't want to move." Julia tore the comb so forcefully thorugh Danny's long mane that the dark brown gelding turned around to look at her in astonishment. "Particularly not so far away."
"Hey, if you continue to be this rough with my horse, you'll soon wish to live in Timbuktu,' complained Stephanie. 'It took years before the mane got this long. Vent your anger elsewhere." The young woman tossed at softer brush at Julia. "I don't know why you make such as fuss. When we did our long ride through the Senne [the landscape in question] you spent hours telling us how wonderful it was. And now you'll live almost in the middle of it."
"But the ride was with you and Danny, not with her mother's new husband," concluded Kathi sharply. The red-haired girl had finished grooming her mare Pretty Girl and now reached for her tack. "Admit it, Julia, you're annoyed by the marriage as well as the move."
"I'm annoyed by everything," called Julia and let her anger out on the brush she drew wildly across the currycomb.

<end excerpt>

Everything Moves

( Keep movin''! )

Temporal References

( Time passes )

Temporal Disjoint/Compression

( Emphasis on Story )

Unexpected Direct Speech

( Say What? )

I guess that answers, to some point, why I am reading these books. They're written in a manner to draw the reader in, and do their job exceedingly well. The other part of the answer lies in sympathetic characters, interesting situations, and, of course, horsies...

First, the sounds. The roar of civilisation, swoosh, swoosh, as cars pass on the motorway. They destroy the illusion of wilderness from the beginning for all but a few, never even let it arise. Those who can learn to ignore it hear the rustling of wind in the leaves and the song of birds. Three, four, five calls, though the callers never appear. Then the flapping of wings and a cackling of rooks, followed by silence. Underneath one's feet, leaves rustling. Above, autumn colours in all their splendour, whispering as the trees turn to sway with the breeze. Underneath, only deadness, remnants of summer, struggling; threats of winter and darkness and despair. Feet squelch through the mud, mud that tries to suck the shoes from one's feet, mud waiting for the traveller's fall, mud waiting to rejoice in it. Mud with _personality_. A forest of birches, out of tune with the Countryside. Oaks, like the one providing shade to the observers bench, yes. But birches? In England? Opposite, the mother of birch trees, its dryad dancing on the grass. Across the clearing stand her sapling children, stem after stem after stem reaching for the sunlight and dancing with the breeze, _flirting_ with it, even if the dance costs leaves. Further along the path, and the observer curses the sense or propriety that forces her to resist the impulse to take off her shoes. *Now* she understands the mud. Last, the swoosh, swoosh of cars on the motorway, connecting the observer with reality. ---- This was a little easier because there was no character involved at all, only birds and trees and mud. I think it comes off halfway. I still could not keep the observer out of it; in an ideal world there would have been no one at all in my scene. I tried to keep in mind to give it an arc, rather than rattling through a shopping list of 'birds, trees, mud' I started with sounds leading to touch and ending on sound, but the interpretation sneaked in at the back door and you get the dancing tree nymph and the flirting young birch trees. I'm slightly happier, but it still feels as if I have a long way to go. A LONG way to go.

Castles. It's always castles in these stories. No one arrives at a leisure complex or in the stationmaster's office; a meeting hall, a shipyard.
No, it's always somewhere romantic and unbelievable and perfectly ridiculous like a castle. I've seen pictures, our library isn't so wonderful that I didn't snoop around on shelves I had no reason to touch, but that doesn't mean I can tell what a proper castle would be like.

( Charis' meditation )