Story Arcs

There’s a couple of TV shows that were good but didn’t make my list because they contained story arcs.  These are stories that encompass the entire season.  Bad guy shows up in the first episode, and then he’s defeated in the season finale.  Or, in the case of other series, the arc continues as long as the series lasts (The X files) or resolves at the end of the run (Babylon 5).

These don’t hold up well for me over time.  Great in the first run, but not when I come back to it.  Much harder for me to get into.  The problem is that they need to be watched in order in entirety to get the story, and I need to see the entire season.  Worse, if the story arc doesn’t work, it isn’t an episode or two that’s affected–it’s the entire season (Buffy the Vampire Slayer’s 6th season).   One of the B5’s DVDs was not available so I was sent the next DVD, which created a lot of confusion for me because I didn’t know what was going on.  I couldn’t just tune into an episode at random.

I’ve also seen the same thing in some books.  There was a urban fantasy writer I picked up because I liked the title.  There were whole sections that referenced the previous part of the series in a vague sort of way, and it essential to understanding what was going on.  But I hadn’t read the first book, so I couldn’t get into the story.  I never took the time to read the author again.  On the other hand, I’ve picked up books with underlying story arcs that are less dominant–Jim Butcher–with a stong story that has a resolution.  Those are written so that a reader could pick it up at any point in the series, read the book, enjoy the story, and maybe want to get the first book to start reading the entire series.

On  the other end of the spectrum, there are also both TV series and books where they ignore what’s happening in previous books.  One of my bottom five TV shows, Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, was like that.  The crew would encounter an alien or a monster trying to take over the world and act like it was the first time it would happened.  Whereas, in shows like NCIS, they bring a character back who appeared in one episode in another season, and everyone knows her from that.  Not necessary for us to have seen the episode, but it might make us want to see the episode.

A good story arc in a series should allow us to pick up at any point along the way and not require readers or viewers to have prior knowledge.

 

Getting Facts Wrong

We’ve all read a book and run into an factual error that the author made.   John Gilstrap discusses this in You Can’t Stand on a Broken Leg (I met John a few years ago).

I think the story should come first, because sometimes factual isn’t interesting.  About eight years ago, I tried writing a book about my Desert Storm experiences.  I had this section where I described in great detail soldiers marching off to war.  It was accurate, but not exactly a page turner. 

But I also think that story doesn’t mean blowing off facts or not bothering to research them at all.  I read one book where the author did both.  The book was about a woman Vice President someone tries to kill.  Though it was billed as a thriller, the story was a romance novel with some action, and I could see how a publisher would have jumped on a romance with a woman Vice President.

• Problem #1:  The character was twenty-something.  Maybe the author decided to ignore the fact that there’s age requirement (35) for the sake of the story–but it made the author look sloppy.  Especially on top of the other two mistakes. 
• Problem #2:  None of the politicians acted like well, politicians.  Not hard to research.  Any newspaper on a daily basis would have done it.  I think I could have bypassed that one if the story had been pretty good. 
• Problem #3: The character had egregiously bad judgement.  The kind of bad judgement that would have made her unsuitable for being one step away from the Presidency.  The lack of research and not caring to kind of get it right made me put this author on my “Do not read” list. 

What deal breaking problems with facts have you seen in books?

Dead Writers Still Publishing

An article from the Washington Times on Publishers Find Deceased Authors Draw Many Readers.

The first thing I thought of when I saw this was V.C. Andrews.  I’d read her book Flowers in the Attic when it rocketed to best seller status (the book was like watching an accident happen–I wanted to look away but couldn’t).  The author died in something like 1985, after writing three or four books.  But if you go to the bookstore, there are many books by her still being published today!

Pictures of Characters

Jill Kemerer talks about searching the Internet to find the perfect picture of her characters:

Now, I fill out my character sheets for a new book, and when I form a mental picture of the hero and heroine, I spend a few hours on the internet, searching for models/actresses/musicians who come close to the ideal.

When I started my first novel, I remember hunting through fashion magazines for just the right picture of the characters.  Still have it, too, stuck away in a drawer.  At the time, it gave me a clear picture of the character, though it certainly didn’t help me with the characterization.  She turned out to be very unlikable!

But I stopped doing it somewhere along the way.  Not entirely sure why, though I know why I wouldn’t do it now.  The photos in magazines and stock sites are too perfect.  After the photos are taken, a guy comes along with Photoshop and retouches the photos.  Blemishes?  Gone!  Bustline?  Add an inch.  Hips? Take off an inch.  Skin?  Smooth it out and make it less shiny.  They’re not real people–just an idealized image.

What do I do now?  I go for impressions of the characters rather than what they look like.  I have 21 characters, so it’d be time consuming coming upwith photos of every one of them.  If they came up with a cover with the main character on it, I’d like to see what he looks like, too!

Do you use pictures for your characters or something else?

Brand Names in Fiction

The Washington Post article Skip Past the Ads, But You’re Still Being Sold made me think about using brand names in fiction.  It’s a topic that new writers often ask, evidently fearing they’ll get sued for using a brand name in a story.

Reasons to use them:

• Establishes an instant image.  If a character is driving around in a Rolls Royce, that set up an instant image of the character. 
• Where specifics help.  If it’s a scene with a police officer, he’s likely to notice that getaway car is a late model Toyota.
• Important to the characterization.  If the main character is going through a midlife crisis and buys a sports car, then it make sense to go into the extra detail to build on that.

Reasons not to use them:

• Dates the book.  Sometimes I’ll pick up a book by an author published by an author ten years ago, and there’s a brand name that no longer exists.  While the rest of the book is still current, this dates it.
• Sounds like product placement.  There’s too much of that as it is.  When I read a few chick lit books, I kept wondering if the designers had paid for product placement!
• Just plain unnecessary.   There’s been some I’ve run across, and my first reaction is “Why was this necessary?” 

More often than not, I simply try to avoid the use of the brand names in my stories.  With all the product placement everywhere–I mean, the advertisers were even thinking of putting advertising in public toilet stalls–it just seems like too much.

Do you use brand names in your fiction?  Why?  Why not?

Reading the Entire Book

When you come across a bad book, do you continue to read to the end of the book or stop?  Check out Closing the Book on a Bad Read from The Washington Times.

If I’m reading a book and it’s not very good, I’ll stop at the point where I can’t put up with any more.  Sometimes it’s one or two pages; sometimes it’s halfway. 

Some reasons I’ll stop reading:

Overuse of profanity.  Urban fantasy writers seem to like the f-word.  But if I’m three pages into the book, and I’ve already seen five instances of it, this is a sign the book probably isn’t very good.

Dialect.  You know the kind–the words a horribly misspelled to convey the dialect.   The worst was a fantasy novel where the main character spoke with a dialect, so everything he said was misspelled.  I actually tried to read that to the end, but I finally had to beg for mercy and stop. 

Gratitutious violence.  I’ll stop reading instantly (stop watching movies instantly, too).   

Too much angst.  Some of the urban fantasies have suffered from this. 

Story just doesn’t keep me interested.  This is a vague sort of reason, but I run into a lot of books that look interesting until I start reading them.  Then, they just fail to capture my attention.

And I’m also a page skipper.  If the main storyline is interesting, but the subplot is a flop, I’ll skip  over it.  I remember mentioning this on a message board, and everyone was shocked.  Why would you skip over pages in book?  Same reason to put it down.  Just didn’t hold my interest.

The only time I won’t do this is if I’ve agree to do a review.  I read everything from cover to cover.  Granted, that’s been occasionally quite painful …

Do you continue to read to the end or do you stop when the book doesn’t catch your interest?

Writing Too Short–Adding Length

An article on Adding Length to Your Novel, courtesy of Suite 101.  She avoids some of the usual tips about adding subplots and instead talks about adding scenes.

 This important tip gets a bit buried, so it’s worth highlighting:

Make sure the new material you have added seems a part of the book, and is not just excess padding.

One of the biggest headaches I had was that I had to be careful not to simply add words for the sake of trying to get the word count higher.   It’s easy to do this when focus on trying to reach a word count and being too low.

A Novel is Not a Long Short Story

When I did my first book, REMEMBER NO EVIL (amnesia story, but we won’t discuss that bad choice), I had continual frustration because I would get to about page 100 or so and it would fizzle out.  Surely I had enough material! 

So I went around to writing message boards, asking about running too short.  Someone said “I wish I had to that problem!” probably not realizing how frustrating that was to me.  Someone else accused me of padding the novel, which was very odd.  It just didn’t seem to be a problem that other writers could relate to.  I searched writing how-to books, but they addressed books that were too long.

But I kept looking.  Finally I ran across a reference that short story writers often have a hard time with novel-length work because they tend to write it like a long short story.

Light bulb goes off.

That was exactly what I had been trying to do.  It had seemed like a logical jump going from short stories to a novel because they were both fiction, both stories about someone trying to solve a problem–except that that they weren’t the same thing. 

Not only that, when I couldn’t solve the problems I was having, I tried thinking of each chapter as–guess what?  A short story!  I cringe today every time I see someone say “Just think of each chapter as a short story” because it keeps the writer in the short story mindset.

It was a big step, identifying the problem.   Check out my next entry on how I worked through solving it.

Novel Running Too Short

Over all the books I’ve written, I have a tendency to run too short and always have to write up (while still editing down).  Just about every piece of writing advice assumes you’re going to be writing too much and have to cut it.  Right now, I’m hovering at 65-68K (keeps going up and down) as I add in the subplots.  I’d like to get it to 80K.  These are the most common things people have told me in relation to this problem:

• I wish I had that problem! 
• Just add more subplots
• Maybe that’s the length the story needs  
• Maybe the story isn’t big enough for a novel. 

All of which adds to up to everyone saying essentially, “Sorry, you’re out of luck!”  And there’s not a lot on the Internet on the topic, besides adding more subplots, so I thought this was worth doing.  Sometimes knowing the reasons why helps solve the problem.

So some reasons to think about:

Writing it like a long short story.  This is the first thing that tripped me up.  I used to write short stories, and I thought of a novel as a long short story.  About 100 pages, it fizzled out.  I made it worse by thinking of chapters as individual short stories, because that kept me in the short story mindset.  The two forms of writing are very different, and I had to start thinking novel (that was a whole lot harder than it sounds!).

Not enough description/narrative.  I’ve seen people who talk about doing bare bones, like lots of dialogue and have to go back in and fill with narrative.  My own special challenge with this one was that since I used to be a short story writer I tend to not do as much narrative as someone used to longer fiction.  I’ve had to both work on adding more to the narrative, and at the same time make sure it’s important.  On MAGIC STUD, I’ve caught myself a number of times explaining what was said in the dialogue, owing probably to trying to bring up the word count.

Weak Subplots.  This is me.  I’ve had a great deal of difficulty with subplots, in part because I’m plot-driven and most of the discussion on subplots leans more towards character-driven.  I still had them in the story, because they did naturally filter in, but I didn’t realize it because I kept thinking of the character-driven ones.  So they were under developed.  A red flag was when I wrote the query, and it just didn’t feel right.  Turned out was because paragraph 1 was plot.  Paragraph 2 was the subplot.  They’re so well-connected that it wasn’t obvious to me.

Not filling in the details and asking why.  This is the one I just discovered.  Even with an outline, I tend to want to just jump in and write and add things in as I go along.  That’s one of the reasons I crossed fantasy off my list as a genre and went with urban fantasy–I would have had to do too much world building, and I just don’t have the patience for it.  Unfortunately, where it also popped is that I would include something important in my story like a war, make up some details on the spot for it, and move on.  I’d add more details as I brought it back later in the story.  But what I didn’t do is fill in all the blanks and answer all the questions needed about it.  So I lose opportunities for building on those things.  All I’ve been doing over the last few months is chasing these down.  I came up with a problem at the end where I didn’t know where it was going to go.  That led to the fact I had never answered why the magic device had been hidden in this particular location.  Always ask why and answer it!

Please feel free to post your own insights into why writing comes out too short!

Fantasy Name Don’ts

I’ve always liked reading fantasy, especially after women characters really started to come into their own in the genre.  But one thing I’ve not liked about the genre is that sometimes the names are a little too unusual.  At one point, I was fed up with long, unpronouncable names that I had a hard time remembering over the course of the book. 

So when I wrote a fantasy story, I just went to my baby name book and picked normal, but unusual names.  Picked what I liked and didn’t pay much attention to the origin of the names.  The story was called “Necessary Evil,” and I think there might have been three characters.  I sent it off to a fantasy magazine and got a fast rejection with a handwritten note. 

They’d rejected it because of the names! 

I was quite mad at the comments, but I sat on the story for a month, willing to consider changing the names.  I looked at again and decided to let the names stand (though in hindsight, I should have changed the obviously Russian name.  That was probably the name that got the rejection).  I sent the story to the next magazine, and it got accepted, names and all.

Limyaeel has a rant on what writers shouldn’t do when coming up with fantasy names (I violated #6 with my story!).

With my WIP, I do have a few unusual names like Cabiessien (which is a made up name, based on another name) and Phannelia (straight out of my genealogy.  I have a branch of the family with names like Philander, Herminas, and Havilah.).  Everyone else has more of a Europeon flavor.  But I’m finding it a lot harder to pick names now than I did when I scanned the baby book for “Necessary Evil.”  We now have so may names available from different cultures, it’s hard finding ones that all fit together!