Changing the irons

I have a collection of phrases I tend to use. I can never remember them all, funnily enough, and some might stay unused for weeks. I haven’t yet been accused of reducing life to cliches, but it’ll happen one day, I guess. But the phrase I particularly want to reference today is “I have too many irons in the fire”.

For those roughly my age and younger, this elderly phrase dates from before electric irons were a thing. Instead, ironing clothes required a heavy piece of iron with a handle that was heated on the (wood-burning) stove. The phrase itself, though, means that I have too many half-finished projects on the go. Which has always been true for me.

But it’s coming up to November (again) and that meant NaNoWriMo (again). And for various complicated reasons, I want to try to do this (again). I’ve never managed to finish fifty thousand words and it’s been several years since I tried. So I’ve decided to throw my hat in the ring again and charge at it.

So I have to re-arrange which irons of mine are warming in the fire. Some will just have to get cold for a month.

 

What’s the worst that could happen?

Learning new skills usually require learning things in the right order. It’s kind of pointless learning how to differentiate a mathematical equation if you don’t know algebra. It’s fruitless to learn how to form a subjunctive clause in a new language if you don’t know how simple verbs work.

It happens when you learn how stories work, too.

I had a revelation about stories the other day. I haven’t been doing much writing in the last year. A big part of that is that I’ve simply been living (I live on my own, well, with my cat), but another important reason is that I’ve been a bit frustrated at my inability to put a story together. There’s a reason this blog is called “Just Add Story”, after all.

Back to my revelation. I read a couple of webcomics on a nearly daily basis. One of them is Schlock Mercenary, a science-fiction action comedy set a few hundred years in the future. And the current point in the current story arc could best be described as “things go horribly wrong“. Up until this point, the toughs were doing something fairly tame. No-one was getting shot at, for instance. They were retrieving artifacts for some grumpy scientists and trying to appease a local alien race whose world they’re, well, plundering. Except these aliens have just now out-smarted the heros and have begun causing them a certain amount of chaos.

This happens fairly regularly in this webcomic. A large part of the reason is that the main characters running the show are not the sharpest crayons in the box – a fact frequently mentioned, but rarely successfully mitigated against. Thus we have all the things to Make A Good Story Happen.

How have I not noticed this before? Well, I have, but I wasn’t ready to learn it. What happens is the writer goes “what’s the worst thing that could happen?” – and then proceeds to do pretty much exactly this. It’s not a new concept. I’ve seen it mentioned a few times by writers and readers on my Twitter feed in the last month. But now I was ready to learn it.

My current novel has languished for a long time. Some of the reason is time – but that’s actually no excuse because I often do find time to do what I want to do. So why was I not interested in writing? Because it was getting boring.

That’s when I had my revelation. The protagonist in my writing has lost his farm, his village and his livelihood. He’s been thrown into (and out of) a city he doesn’t know and doesn’t understand. Now he’s following someone else who he doesn’t know well and who also doesn’t know what’s going on. However, he has his pregnant wife with him. She’s important to the larger story because she’s pregnant – but that isn’t so important right now. In fact, it’s kind of getting in the way. Meanwhile, our hero doesn’t have a direction in the story – he’s flailing around with nothing to do. And that’s makes for a story that isn’t going anywhere.

I’m guessing that experienced writers will probably say at this point: take the wife off him. And that’s the key. Do that and now he has something to do (get her back) vnd has to canvass help from a range of new acquaintances to figure out how to do it.

Basically, why would I give the hero a wife if I’m not going to take her off him?

 

Scientific Magic

Fantasy settings commonly have a magic system of some sort. It is often well-thought out and organised and more-or-less reliable. I’ve heard of authors writing themselves a “bible” about how it is supposed to work so that they don’t make mistakes.

Most of the magic in Harry Potter is reliable and repeatable, for example. Harry’s trademark Expelliarmus always fires. Fred and George’s joke candies always work. Yet the need to practice and perfect it is mentioned a lot of the time (it is a school, remember). And we also see the edges of an organised study of what magic can do. A major section of The Ministry Of Magic is for research, after all. And Dumbledore frequently talks about what they don’t know magic can do when talking to Harry about Voldemort.

The magic in most Dungeon and Dragons settings is reliable, too. I think this is because the settings inherit a game system because players use magic very frequently, either explicitly (like if they’re a wizard) or implicitly (a weapon or even a skill). Adding a reliability check to all magic in DnD would slow things down a lot. In the novels, it is common for a master thief to have an arsenal of magic objects, and they almost always function as designed.

There are sometimes multiple magic systems. Lyndon Hardy did this with his novel The Master Of Five Magics. Each is separate and a major piece of the world economy is built around them. In fact, a major industry is built around training for each magic. The whole story is about someone who sets about being trained in all of them, which is unheard of. With so many magic systems, Hardy created a structure for them all, and rules for each of them. He did this so well that with his sequel, The Secret Of The Sixth Magic, he could create a meta-magic system that describes how they could be changed. Both novels have been praised for creating such an organised description of magic.

The magic in Terry Pratchett’s Discworld is more than a bit organised, too. The wizards of Unseen University are a lot more like scientists than practitioners of nefarious arts. In the later novels, we have everyday devices powered by magical means: cameras and personal organisers are the visible two Pratchett has fun with. Each have a tiny demon running things inside them and they are mass-market products. This magical-being approach is even lampshaded right in the first novel when Rincewind is given Twoflower’s camera to operate. He knows that there are certain chemicals that react to light and he begins wondering how to get from there to a functioning camera. At that point, the tiny demon inside Twoflower’s camera opens the access hatch for the first time to tell him that he’s run out of pink paint.

Pratchett even lampshades this in the large with four whole books that he co-authored with two scientist friends, beginning with The Science Of Discworld. These use the fictive construct of the wizards and their world to explore the sciences of our own world. And I mean “sciences” in a very broad sense of the word. Early excursions look at nuclear physics and cosmology, but later ones look at social sciences like narrative history, and how belief shapes our thinking.

This takes us back to where magic exists in our own history. And that is usually spirituality and religious practice. I know enough about both to recognise that neither are treated very much like science, though.

Praying to a deity is common in both the real world and in fantasy settings. In most fantasy settings, it is often like a magic spell: you say the right words and the deity automatically grants the supernatural effect you’re seeking. Except when they don’t because the plot requires it. And this also doesn’t work in the real world, either. It would be news all around the world if a Catholic Cardinal in the Vatican could reliably and repeatedly summon a fireball by prayer.

One of the allures of fantasy novels is, of course, reading the characters doing the impossible. Particularly in an analogue of our own world. This is one reason the Harry Potter novels are so popular. Who wouldn’t want to be able to wield magic with a simple stick of wood in their home or workplace? Except if lots of other people have one, too. And Hogwarts does teach a lot of offensive magic.

There are some fantasy worlds where magic is rare. I built one for a gaming campaign, yet only one player really grasped what that meant for playing. It was at least three sessions before they had access to magical healing, for instance. Settings where prayers (usually) don’t do anything, yet those who pray think they do are also rare. The Dragonlance novels had a period where that was the case. This was because the gods had deserted the world for a period of time, and people were calling to new gods that did not actually exist.

So how reliable is the magic in your fantasy worlds?

Let there be conflict.

There are many pieces of potted advice given out to writers. This is the sort of two or three sentence idea that is intended to address a specific problem. Or sometimes a favourite observation. Or just a favourite response.

Not that they can’t be helpful. One reasonably common one is that every scene needs a conflict.

Usually when people hear the word “conflict” they think of two people in strong disagreement, perhaps so strong as to warrant a physical altercation. Trench warfare is a conflict. Armed robbery is a conflict. Domestic violence is a conflict. But so is a mild difference of opinion. In writing, the term seems to have a unique definition.

Of course, a lot of conflict will be heated and/or violent. In writing, this is where weapons often come out and characters can be injured or killed. In real life that tends to bring down the force of the law on to you in the first world (not always, I’ll admit). In fantasy writing, you often find out who is quicker or more accurate with a sword or crossbow. Or who is just luckier.

But conflict in writing can and will take many forms. There is a conflict if someone has incomplete information and says something that betrays that. That could lead to another conflict if they don’t want to be corrected, but it could also be a process of gaining understand that involved a to-and-fro as they grasp it. There could be a conflict of motive, where two people want to achieve the same task for entirely different reasons. At first they could work well together, but because of the difference of motive there is a chance that this will devolve as they approach completion.

Sometimes the conflict itself can be mis-characterised. This might happen if one person sees two points of conflict whilst the other sees just one. You’ve probably seen this in real life where two people disagree over a fact, and then one makes it personal, which is rarely helpful and they don’t always realize they’ve done that. Now we have more than one conflict in play.

Writing conflict is not easy for me. I do not have a good physical reaction to the stress associated with high-levels of conflict and I struggle to not take verbal conflict personally. So writing scenes where this is needed can be stressful all by itself. Oddly enough, writing armed conflict is easier, as is a simple transfer-of-knowledge scene.

Still, that’s what learning to write is all about:  figuring out where your weaknesses are and bettering the skills. I know enough to realize that when a scene is not working it is because there is no “conflict” hinging the interaction.

 

Write the crap.

It is a sobering fact that a successful author with a few novels to their name will have probably written several million words of original fiction by then. This is an uncomfortable fact that new writers have to both ignore and respect. Including me.

When you do get the writing bug and want to create The Next Great Novel, many new writers launch into it with a vague idea and just spew out a cascade words of undirected fiction. This is how NaNoWriMo is intended to work and some people create best like that, but there is a much older technique, too. And that is to write less than novel-length stories. Lots of them. Your first half-dozen might tap out at a few hundred words, but with even this little practice you will get better at creating bigger ideas. Before long two thousand words feels like not enough. Given enough time, ten thousand words will sometimes not be enough room.

However, it is still a god-awful big leap to go from a ten thousand word story into a sixty thousand word novel.

And I still cannot resist editing as I write, which makes my own raw output considerably slower than it could be.

So what do I do?

Well, I started paying attention to some of the more sober advice about writing. They usually all descend into: write. Write lots. And then write some more. No, still more. When you reach at least a million words of finished work, throw it all away and keep going. This is the writer’s version of an old programming mantra: “Be prepared to throw the first one away.”

Another way of putting it is that anyone has to practice a new task before they get better at it. Our brains don’t come with much pre-wiring. Unlike most mammals which can figure out how to walk in a few days, we need about a year. Any task needs practice. Although I did woodwork in high school, I’m still pretty crap at it. I still usually fail to cut wood square and easily strip screw heads. But I know it’s just a matter of practice. Likewise, I’ve picked up a few random phrases in Korean, but if I want to speak the language, I have to learn it properly.

Writing is the same. “Waiting for the muse” is a furphy.

Similarly trying to produce Great Writing means you first have to produce Good Writing. And that means you have to first produce Okay Writing. And that means you have to first produce Crap Writing.

So I’m trying to just write potential scenes for one or more of my Works-in-Progress. It doesn’t matter how well they all meet up. There will be conflicting storylines. That’s okay. Once I have a body that tells a more-or-less complete story, I can clean it all up into a coherent work. But there needs to be the writing to edit first.

After all, you can’t edit an empty page.

 

When world-building overwhelms.

I may as well say right at the outset that whilst quality world-building is a great thing, you can have too much of it.

A number of years ago, I bought and read a fantasy series by a new author. An Australian imprint was looking for someone to spearhead their fantasy publishing down under and had found someone to publish. This was before the rise of ebooks, note. It is probably just as well I don’t remember the author’s name because the books were atrocious. My enduring memory was how little characterisation there was. Like most epic fantasy works, there was a great deal of magic, adventuring and gods dabbling in the affairs of men.

But the story was dry as dust. The world was interesting, the magic system fairly original, but everyone was a cardboard cutout of a cliched idea. It was difficult to discern anyone’s motives and most of the action was mechanical.

In other words, characterisation was sacrificed for world-building.

You wouldn’t be surprised to know I’ve long since gotten rid of those books.

More recently, I started reading another epic fantasy novel by a much more well-known author. Like most in the genre, there was a prologue filled with characters that I did not expect to see again and narrating events I would expect to be only referenced in legend in the rest of the story. So far, so good. The first real chapter started with some action – a somewhat mysterious assassin was at work, fighting off mooks as he sought his target in a place he didn’t really know. Completely tropish scene, clashes of culture driving action and interaction, plenty of opportunity for small info-dumps about the world. Which the author took. The assassin has a few magical skills unusual in the culture of his quarry and us readers were treated to quite detailed descriptions of how it worked.

There was a warning there, I think. Because it turned out it was a second prologue.

The next “chapter” was with another set of characters in a third location. And more world-building. The chapter after that did it again! But this time – finally – there was one character in common. His circumstances were vastly different, however, and I nearly didn’t recognise him. But then it happened all over again with the next chapter!

This novel has a lot of world-building. A lot. Maybe too much. Arguably too much to throw at the reader at this point in the novel. It’s all quite interesting, but I’d much rather have characters I can get to know instead of introducing them and then putting them on a shelf for a little while. It makes for a read that doesn’t engage me as well as it could.

And no, the novel I am describing is not A Game Of Thrones, although that work has also been accused of the same problem. The book I am referring to is The Way Of Kings by Brandon Sanderson. I’ve seen other authors do the same: as well as George R. R. Martin, Peter F. Hamilton comes to mind. His space opera The Night’s Dawn Trilogy does the same thing: multiple interleaving threads, scads of major characters and an immense amount of world-building.

But Hamilton makes it work. The characterisation he lends his characters is a match for the world-building and the action moves at a solid pace. I don’t feel Sanderson is giving his characters enough room. However, it is early in the novel and this problem may sort itself out.

But I still maintain that world-building can crowd out characterisation. It’s not a good idea to let that happen.

 

Starts and Finishes

There are many lessons a writer must learn. How to create distinct characters. How to craft a narrative. How to throw away words. Where to start and where not to to. And when to finish.

To mutilate a sentiment that is often spoken to new writers, a story needs to be finished before it can be published. Or should be submitted. And figuring out how to wrap a multitude of story threads into a conclusion, satisfying or not, is a pleasant experience.

On the other hand, pick another project you might have started over the years. How many have you finished? I mean really? Still got boxes not-unpacked even though you’ve lived there for five years? Or that cross-stitch someone convinced you would be fun? How’s the garden? Full of plants thriving? Or is it mostly weeds? I could go on. That’s not to say that writing fiction is only ever going to be a fad for most people.

Maybe a closer example is song-writing. This is as tough as writing a story. I know this because I’ve tried it. I’ve heard from well-known song-writers that for every song they finish, there are easily ten they don’t. Ten songs unfinished! How does that stack up on your story-writing? Ten ideas or story starts for each one that went to completion?

It rather puts things into perspective, doesn’t it?