Making Merry Until the New Year

The Laws of Making will return on Monday, January 3, 2011.

May your holiday celebrations be joyous,

Deren


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Seducing Readers Deeper into the Story

Reading thuRsday

I've heard the best books described as a hierarchy of enticements or compulsions: the first line encourages the reader to read the first paragraph; the first paragraph pulls them on to the first page; the first page pulls them into the first chapter; and so on.

As a principle, this seems like a sound and effective approach. But how do you pull it off in practice? How do you lure the reader from the beginning into the meat of the story?

Consider what Stephenie Meyer did with Twilight. At a structural level, she used a small mystery to seduce the reader into a larger mystery. Specifically, every-girl Bella arrives in Forks expecting that it will be a challenge to fit in. But her assumptions prove false: everybody likes her except one aloof boy who seems to hate her except when he's saving her life. This setup provides an irresistible emotional mystery for the book's target audience: what could possibly explain the anomalous behavior. The master stroke is that the answer to that mystery opens the door to the larger problem of the vampire story.

Love Twilight or loath it, you have to admit that it produced a strong reaction among its readers--like an emotional drug. We would do well to study and apply the pattern, seducing readers deeper into our own stories.


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Does Conflict Mean that Someone's Mean?

Writing Wednesday

We've often heard that conflict is the heart of a story. In fact, I've said that story is conflict. But that seems out of character with a season that is, nominally (shopping mall melees notwithstanding), about good-will. Perhaps the disconnect arises from an assumption that in order to have conflict someone has to be mean.

I spoke recently with a writer who was concerned that she didn't have enough conflict and was afraid she couldn't fix it because she didn't like to write about mean people. I pointed out that because they've found ways to justify their actions, even the most hardened criminals don't believe themselves to be bad people.

Worrying, however, about whether people are good or bad, nice or mean, muddies the storytelling waters and actually introduces a subtle bit of moralizing.

How so?

Some of the best writing advice I ever heard was that story and conflict arise from two simple questions:

1. What do each of your characters want?
2. What are they each willing to do to get it?

If you have two characters who each want the same thing (a thing that only one of them can have) and who are both willing to do a great many things to get it, you have automatic conflict.

And the beauty is that neither of them has to be mean. In fact if they're both driven by worthy motives you'll have a much better conflict than a simple good vs. bad scenario.

After all, the parents grappling in the stores for the last trendy toy are only in the melee because they want to do something nice for their kids.


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Ideas: Don't Stop with One Good Idea

Technique Tuesday

Animator Patrick Smith, writing at Scribble Junkies, shared some of John Lasseter's advice in a post on the 7 Creative Principles of Pixar.

The first principle is, "Never come up with just one idea."

Here's how John explains it:

“Regardless of whether you want to write a book, design a piece of furniture or make an animated movie: At the beginning, don’t start with just one idea – it should be three.

“The reason is simple. If a producer comes to me with a proposal for a new project, then usually he has mulled over this particular idea for a very long time. That limits him. My answer always reads: 'Come again when you have three ideas, and I don’t mean one good and two bad. I want three really good ideas, of which you cannot decide the best. You must be able to defend all three before me. Then we’ll decide which one you’ll realize.'

“The problem with creative people is that they often focus their whole attention on one idea. So, right at the beginning of a project, you unnecessarily limit your options. Every creative person should try that out. You will be surprised how this requirement suddenly forces you to think about things you hadn’t even considered before. Through this detachment, you suddenly gain new perspectives. And believe me, there are always three good ideas. At least.”

The first key here, and it bears repeating, is, "this requirement suddenly forces you to think about things your hadn't even considered before." There are a lot of people out there having good ideas. If you stop with your first good idea, chances are very good that someone has already thought of it. But with each additional good idea you bring to the table, the chance of someone else thinking of the exact same ideas drops dramatically.

The second key is the perspective you gain through detachment. That is, if you have more than one good idea then you've got a fall-back if one of the ideas proves less good than you thought. More importantly, you can compare and contrast the ideas and get a better sense of their relative merits than if you have only one, precious idea ... gollum.


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The Laws of Making in Retrospect

Making Monday

We've spent a fair amount of time considering the Laws of Making.

So what does it all mean?

There are two fundamental subtexts:

Selflessness

There was an episode of the television series Northern Exposure in which we learned that one of the characters was very good at complex paint-by-number landscapes. Another character insisted the first wouldn't be a true artist until he burned his newest painting because art is in the process and the painting was simply an alienable by-product.

I'm not here to tell you to burn your creations. That said, there is a recurring thread of selflessness in the laws of making. Users see a universe that revolves around them. Makers strive to create things that can take on a separate existence. This is why the highest Law of Transcendence is completion.

Life Cycles

The nine laws of making can be arranged into a 3 x 3 matrix:

Understanding	Love (1)	Beauty (2)	Truth (3)	(beginning)
Living	Hope (4)	Faith (5)	Charity (6)	(middle)
Transcendence	Vision (7)	Devotion (8)	Completion (9)	(end)
	(beginning)	(middle)	(end)

Notice that as we move from the Laws of Understanding, through the Laws of Living, to the Laws of Transcendence, we have a beginning, a middle, and an end. Similarly, as we move from left to right in each row, we have a beginning, a middle, and an end.

True makers have a role in and patience for all three acts.

The Wisdom of the Makers

Of course, stating the Laws of Making clearly, and illustrating them with a few examples, doesn't begin to convey the depth and majesty of the vision of true makers. You've got to experience making in all its dimensions to begin to understand.


Image: Bill Longshaw / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Kevin Smokler: Promotion is an Expresstion of Gratitude

Free-form Friday

Authors often wince when they come to understand just how much they need to promote their work. I confess to being in that camp, particularly when it sounds like we're expected to go out and convince people to read our books.

That's why I was quite taken with Kevin Smokler (co-founder and CEO of BookTour.com) and his idea that promotion is fundamentally an expression of gratitude. In that vein, I want to thank Nick James, who blogs at The Spectacle and posted the following

"I think the word “promotion” sends a shiver down many people’s backs. At its worst, it connotes a situation where an author is more or less trying to shove a product down readers’ throats. Very few people want to feel like salesmen. And not everybody is skilled in that area. That’s why Kevin’s definition struck me so strongly.

"Promotion, he says, is primarily “an opportunity to meet people who are interested in your book and thank them for their interest.” Or, more succinctly, it’s “an expression of gratitude and graciousness.” [source]

On Nick's recommendation, I listened to all of Dan Blank's interview with Kevin Smokler at We Grow Media. I recommend you do the same. Kevin has a number of interesting things to say about the changing role of the author in book promotion and about the industry in general.

I'm going to add the phrase, "Promotion is an opportunity to meet people who are interested in your book and thank them for their interest," to my list of mantras.


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Metaphors Should Flow from Character

Reading thuRsday


Jael McHenry, writing on Writer Unboxed, answered a reader's question about generating metaphors.

I was so delighted with her "lightbulb moment" that I've reproduced the two key paragraphs here:

"I had a HUGE lightbulb moment about metaphors a few years ago, thanks to Sands Hall, whose workshop I took at the Iowa Summer Writing Festival (that same program I mentioned above.) Before that I just considered a metaphor a metaphor: they were either lovely and apt or dead and clumsy. But when Sands described how she made each character’s point of view distinct in her book Catching Heaven, she mentioned how important it was that each character’s metaphors were true to that character. And that was the lightbulb. A rancher will use different metaphors than a schoolteacher. Even if the book is in third person and not first, if the point of view is close-in to the character, you want to apply that character’s “filter” to everything – including the metaphors.

"I took this to an extreme in my book The Kitchen Daughter, where the narrator Ginny is so obsessed with food and cooking — and so uncomfortable dealing with the wider world — that she filters absolutely everything through the lens of food. She bumps into a shoulder and it feels “like the shank end of a ham”; the voices of the people in her family she compares to orange juice, tomato juice, spearmint, espresso. In most cases your characters will draw from a larger pool, but still, the idea that there is a pool, and that it comes from that character’s particular bias and experience, that’s clutch."

One should probably resist the temptation to rely too heavily on idiosyncratic, character-based metaphors, particularly in a fantasy where the reader doesn't know the character's referential context. (Does, "He was as happy as a skurlump on a fringbol," say anything to you?)

That said, not only are a few well-chosen character-based metaphors a great way to contribute to the voice of the narrative, this is also a good way to avoid anachronistic metaphors if you're writing about another time or place.


Image: Michelle Meiklejohn / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Showing Involves Specificity

Writing Wednesday

From time to time, I see comments about pieces having or needing concrete detail. Several years ago I came across a discussion by Annette Lyon about specificity on the Writing on the Wall blog that helped clarify my understanding of concrete details:

"Showing has several elements, but specificity is one of my favorites. The gist is to take a general noun (such as a car) and tell us more. Make us see it.

"Is it a VW Bug? Is it a little red Toyota truck with rusted wheel wells? Is it a sleek, black Jaguar? A yellow Jeep with fuzzy, pink dice hanging from the mirror?

"The more specific you are, the more clearly readers will see the “movie” in your head—and be drawn into your imaginary world."

[You may read the entire post here.]

In your quest to be specific, however, remember that if some is good, more is not necessarily better. If you describe every detail in the scene or setting minute, concrete detail, your story will grind to a halt and you stand a good chance of losing readers with anything less than a Herculean attention span.

In general, a few specific, evocative details, leaving plenty of room for your reader to fill in the rest, work best.


Image: Simon Howden / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Ideas: Rebuttal Theory and Adding to the Conversation

Technique Tuesday

I once heard that Shannon Hale's approach to retelling fairy tales is motivated by the question, "What's bugging me about this story?"

I started thinking seriously about this question after reading several books that bugged me enough that I wanted to make a rebuttal (it's hard to set aside old debating instincts). It's not that I had problems with the books themselves as much as some of the ideas in the stories.

Two interesting things happened as I thought about the ideas that bugged me in each story and they ways in which I might handle them differently:

1. I was drawn into the "normal science" process of thinking through each idea (that I described last week) and uncovered a host of interesting ideas.
2. The different lines of inquiry came together as a fascinating story molecule.

Shannon's question, "What's bugging me about this story?" is a powerful idea generator if you follow it with a second question: "How would I do it differently?"

There's another important consequence: as you work through the ideas until you can clearly express what bothers you about the story and how you would handle it differently, you find you have something to add to the conversation.


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Laws of Making 9: The Highest Power is to Finish. The Greatest Wisdom is to Know When to Finish.

Making Monday

The third Law of Transcendence is that The Highest Power is to Finish, and The Greatest Wisdom is to Know When to Finish.

Finishing is implied by the Second Law of Transcendence, Devotion, but it is an under-appreciated and poorly understood element of Wisdom. The final step of the Buddha's enlightenment, for example, was his realization that he had completed the final step to enlightenment.

Our culture is fixated on beginnings. If you visit a book store, you'll find shelf after shelf devoted to getting a job or starting a business. There are very few books on leaving a job or ending a business. We enjoy a collective myopia with the comforting belief that everything we'll be fine and we'll know what to do if we can only solve our present problems.

A related problem is that in much of our experience, certainly at school and often a work, someone else has defined what it means to finish. With that training, we tend to think of projects in terms of assignments and gauge our efforts based on the "grade" we hope to receive.

Of course, saying that you should judge a thing finished based on your own criteria is not a license to ignore mentors, coaches, and teachers. There's a place, particularly in training situations, where it is right and proper to conform to criteria established by someone else. Rather, it's a challenge to transcend them by developing your own wisdom and your understanding, as a maker, of the integrity of the thing being made. True makers are not copy machines: unperturbed by the terror of the blank page, they live to bring new things into the universe. That's why the First Law of Transcendence is Vision.

The Law of Completion is the complement of the Law of Vision. Specifically, you must have some idea what finished means when you begin a project. Not that you must know exactly how it will end, but you must have a clear enough vision of where you're going that you can recognize the place when you get there.

Finally, and most difficult of all, when the project is complete, you must let it take its rightful place in the universe and move on. This is the transcendence of the makers.


Image: Bill Longshaw / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Entertainers vs. Artists

Free-form Friday

Writing in the November 2010 issue of Electronic Musician, Steven Wilson said, "This, for me, is the distinction between an entertainer (cater to an audience) and an artist (create your own audience)." [Emphasis mine.]

I found Steven's distinction enlightening, not because the artist is more noble than the entertainer but because of the way in which it clarifies the nature of the audiences.

This is not about selling out or maintaining artistic integrity. I've already discussed the notion of meeting the market half-way. That's something you must do whether you're catering to an audience or creating one. In the catering case, you've got to bring something new to the existing audience: without some variations on the theme, they'll get bored and go elsewhere. In the creating case, you've got to frame your novelties in familiar terms so that the audience you attract can get their bearings.

The distinction between catering to an audience and creating an audience is like the distinction between promotions that are compelling or enticing. When you're catering to an audience, you need something that will compel them to pay attention to your project. When you're creating an audience, you need to entice them to explore something new.

How do you know what kind of audience you should address?

If you're writing something that fits comfortably in one genre, like epic fantasy, where readers expectations are fairly clear, the audience expects you to cater to them. If you're writing something that mixes genres, you'll likely have to create an audience.

Think about what you're trying to do. Now think about how your audience will find you. I suspect the distinction between the entertainer and the artist will help clarify the issues.


[If you enjoyed this post you may also be interested in Professional Relationships, book 2 of the Dunlith Hill Writers Guides.]
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Messages or Conversations

Reading thuRsday

Many of the people who give advice about writing are quick to say that nothing kills a story faster than having a "message." A corollary is that if you have a message, you shouldn't write fiction.

On the other hand, I really dislike books that aren't about anything (e.g., standard swords and sorcery that seem to be a chronicle of the violence perpetrated by a muscle-bound barbarian who is, apart from a few more scars, no different at the end).

I understand the dangers of allowing something about which you feel strongly to subvert your story, but if you don't have anything to say your story is, at best, nothing more than a "me-too" exercise.

So what's the difference between a message (bad) and something to say (good)? I think it's the difference between a conclusion you want to promote and an idea you want to explore. Put another way, it's the difference between a lecture and a conversation. Readers have no patience for the former but they're happy (sometimes eager) to engage in the latter.

The Great Books series from the University of Chicago was founded on the belief that the classics are part of a great conversation that has been going on for thousands of years. I like that idea because I believe the best new books contribute to that grand conversation.

How will you contribute to the grand conversation?


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Which is the Highest Writing Virtue, Persistence or Patience?

Writing Wednesday

If you had asked me whether persistence or patience was the highest writing virtue several months ago, I would have chosen persistence. Now I'm more inclined to say patience.

I've discussed patience here as one of the unpopular virtues of makers and as an important tool for writers.

Natalie Whipple brought the topic to the forefront for me with several posts this past week. In the first, she discussed the grinding doubt of being on submission for fifteen months without a sale. In the second, she explored what she learned from the experience.

You might argue that patience and persistence are both aspects of devotion; that both similarly imply sticking with something even if you don't want to. Granted, but I think there's one important distinction: persistence implies something more active than patience.

Here's what Natalie said:

"What I was least prepared for was the loss of control. It was easy to have faith in my agent, but at the same time it was strange not being able to do anything. I just have to...wait. In querying, when you get a rejection you can send another letter out. You can decide who to send to, when, and what. That all goes away, and while it's nice it's also weird. I was so used to working for myself, and now my writing fate is out of my hands."

For those of use who cope with difficult situations by finding something constructive to do, situations where the only thing you can do is wait are extremely trying. Put another way, the wannabe-writer-sphere is so full of encouragement to keep writing that it leaves you ill-prepared for the time when the writing is done and the waiting begins.

"But isn't that when you should work on your next book?"

Yes, of course. My point is that for some of us it can be very difficult to accept the fact that there comes a point where there is nothing more we can do to improve the chances of success for the book that's on submission--that there's no more scope for persistence--and that patience is the only way to continue.


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Ideas: What do you do with a great idea?

Technique Tuesday

What do you do with a great idea?

First, a reminder: one idea isn't enough to carry a novel. Long-form stories are best understood as a complex molecule made up of great idea atoms.

So, what do you do when you have a number of ideas in intriguing relationships?

Like any good evil genius, you turn to science!

Kuhn, 1962 (from Wikipedia)

More to the point, you turn to the history of science. Thomas Khun, a physicist who also studied the history of science, wrote The Structure of Scientific Revolutions in 1962. In that book, Kuhn challenged the notion that science was steadily progressive and argued that it is in fact episodic.

The two key ideas I want to introduce here are the alternating phases of revolutionary and normal science that make up an episode in Kuhn's model.

Revolutionary science is the time when a breakthrough throws the field wide open. Like settlers pouring into newly open territory, scientist rush from one discovery to the next as they map out the new landscape of possibilities.

Once the early leaders in the revolution have discovered the extent of the breakthrough, the discipline settles back into normal science mode. Normal science is far less glamorous than revolutionary science because it's about the careful work of confirming the initial findings and filling in the details.

"That nice for historians and scientists," you might say, "but what does it have to do with writing or creativity in general?"

A great idea is like the breakthrough that triggers a period of revolutionary science. But that's only the beginning of the job. In order to develop a novel-length story, you must do the literary equivalent of the work of normal science.

What do I mean by that?

Let's say you've just had an epiphany: the world will end when pigs actually start to fly--it's the Flying Pig Apocalypse! Tingling with excitement, you sit down to write ... and immediately run into questions: how do they fly? Levitation? Wings that grow because a mad scientist wanted bacon-flavored buffalo wings? Lighter-than air gas bladders? Do they flock or are they loners? Do they cause the apocalypse by flying, or is the fact that they take flight a sign of the impending apocalypse?

My point is that a "great" idea isn't ready to become a story until you've done the detailed, far less thrilling work of thinking through the implications of the great idea.

Like science, which we tend to think of only in terms of revolutionary breakthroughs, creativity is more about the normal work of thinking carefully about the "great" idea than the revolutionary work of having the idea in the first place.


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Laws of Making 8: The True Maker's Devotion Never Wavers

Making Monday

The second Law of Transcendence is that The True Maker's Devotion Never Wavers.

Devotion is, "ardent, often selfless affection and dedication, as to a person or principle." The word comes from the Latin verb vovere, to vow. Other  senses of the word mean to set apart by vow, or to consecrate.

I've already discussed devotion as one of the unpopular virtues of the makers. But it earns a place among the Laws of Making because, more than a good idea, it is a foundational maker value.

The devotion of makers is best understood in terms of selflessness and loyalty or fidelity. You could express this, the second law of transcendence in colloquial terms, such as, "If it's worth doing, it's worth doing right. And if it's worth doing right, you better see it through to the end."

You might point out that the Law of Devotion is similar to the First Law of Understanding, Love, and the Second Law of Living, Faith. And you would be right: the Laws of Making are like facets of a jewel that reflect part of something more elemental and inexpressible. But there are also important differences, the most important of which is that the maker stands with the thing being made, faithful and patient, even when no one else will, until it is finished.

If this is still too abstract, then consider what the parent of an infant does during the long months of sleepless nights. Is there a better word for that than devotion?


Image: Bill Longshaw / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Web Presence Theory: Create an Online Context for Discovery

Free-form Friday

The common wisdom among writers, agents, and editors is that you need to have a web presence. The problem, of course, with common wisdom is that it bundles up and glosses over a number of assumptions.

I'm not saying I think the common wisdom is wrong. Rather, I was never satisfied that I understood what a writer's web presence was supposed to accomplish in concrete terms. Yes, we talk around notions like building an audience and establishing a reputation. But what does that really mean? Or, more to the point, how can you know if you're doing it well.

Then I found an answer in an essay by Brian O'Leary at Magellan Media called, "Context First." Brian said:

"When content scarcity was the norm, we could live with a minimum of context.  In a limited market, our editors became skilled in making decisions about what would be published.  Now, in an era of abundance, editors have inherited a new and fundamentally different role: figuring out how “what is published” will be discovered."

The fundamental problem of the Internet is managing abundance. When a quick search returns hundreds of thousands of results, how do you make sense of any of it? How do you select what is meaningful out of all the background noise?

Meaning depends on context.

As I read Brian's essay, I had an epiphany: building a web presence is about creating context; it's how your book will be discovered. This isn't about search engine optimization or other ways of gaming the system. The context (which comes from Latin and literally means "with the text) that matters is the web of relationships, associations, and references that lead ultimately back to your book.


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Suspense According to the Panel at LUTE 2009

Reading thuRsday
I recently unearthed notes I took during various panels at Life, The Universe, and Everything 2009 (LUTE). Today's selection comes from a panel on suspense with Brandon Mull (BM), James Dashner (JD), John Brown (JB), Howard Tayler (HT), and Dan Wells (DW).

What is suspense?

• JD - worring about the character
• DW - Making people wait for something
• BM - A system of tension and release

What is not suspense?

• JB - Making things unclear is not suspense. You want a very clear threat where the only thing the reader doesn't know is when it will happen.

How do you like to do suspense?

• DW - "People aren't afraid of what happens to them, they're afraid of what they're going to do."
• JB - Give the reader a threat or opportunity (romance); suspense is fed by uncertainty; ratchet it up with conflict and surprise
• DW - Leave things open and people will fill it in more effectively than you could
• HT - Switch (briefly) to the PoV of the monster; the reader will tell themselves a better story about the monster than you could.
• BM - Action is the release in the system of tension and release

What makes bad suspense?

• JB - You need to care about the characters. The purpose of the beginning of the story isn't to build suspense but to build curiosity.
• DW - The "other shoe" - you've got to establish the pattern; people won't wait for the other shoe if they don't know (or care) how the pattern works.

Final Thoughts

• JB - If you build something up for a long time, people expect a big payoff

Image: Michelle Meiklejohn / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Flow in Writing

Writing Wednesday

Wikipedia defines psychological flow this way:

Flow is the mental state of operation in which a person in an activity is fully immersed in a feeling of energized focus, full involvement, and success in the process of the activity. Proposed by Mihály Csíkszentmihályi, the positive psychology concept has been widely referenced across a variety of fields.

You've probably heard about people who claim that the writing just flowed (and you've probably felt a bit jealous of them). It's hard to hear such a thing without, 1) taking it to be something mystical, and 2) judged yourself to be a lesser writer for not being able to make a similar claim.

I can't guarantee that you'll always enjoy flow in your writing, but if you understand the nature of the state then you might be more likely to experience it.

The most important thing to understand is that there's nothing mystical about flow. Indeed, it is effectively the opposite of mysticism because you're neither awed nor terrified. When you're fully immersed in the process you find, to the extent that you're even aware of your internal state, that you feel a profound calm.

Flow is like Baby Bear: you're neither too hot with great ideas, nor too cold bogged down in the details, but just right with the ideas and the words to express them coming together at the same time.

I've heard people argue that writing is a purely creative, right-brain activity. There's truth in that claim, particularly for those who see the action and the setting, and hear the voices of their characters. But encoding those ideas in well chosen words and ordering those words in compelling, grammatically correct sentences is a left-brain activity. Of course, your inner editor lives in your left brain.

People who focus on one side or the other short-change themselves. In my experience, flow is most likely to occur when I've mastered the left-brain mechanics (i.e., proficiency at typing, a command of grammar rules, a rich vocabulary) and energized the right-brain to focus on the story (and not entertain every distraction that comes along). Put another way, you can think of flow in writing as balancing right and left brains to produce and encode ideas.


Image: Simon Howden / FreeDigitalPhotos.net