Coming Up Short

One of the big accomplishments for MAGIC STUD is that I got close to my minimum word count, instead of way under (twenty pages as opposed to one hundred). I’m hoping for the next one that I do better up front!  But these are some things I learned from battling with it:

• Ask yourself why it’s coming up short, and keep asking why if the problem isn’t solved.  I think this is the most important thing because the reason might be hard to find.  Everyone always suggests to ad subplots or more plot, but if the problem is coming from something else, these solutions won’t help.
• Keep trying to find ways to work around it, no matter how frustrating it is.  I think I would have never discovered the problem if I hadn’t kept at it. 
• Don’t just add subplots or words to pad the story.  I think this is a big reason why I’ve had such difficulty with subplots.  Not that I do these things–but at a time when I was trying to understand subplots, the books that I was reading had subplots that were filler.  They just felt like the author ran short and came up with something to fill the gap, but didn’t do anything else with it.

I’m adding a new subplot with my edits.  A little slow going, but I’m working through it.

Subplots Revisited

When I wrote my first book, I tried writing it like a long short story.  No subplots.  At the time I didn’t get the concept of subplots because I was thinking short story. 

Since then, I’ve wrestled with subplots through three projects, cursed at the subplots, threw them against the wall, and stamped on them.  I needed to use them, and they weren’t cooperating!  I’d try one, get horribly stuck, have to remove the subplot and try different one.  I think I went through about twenty:

I finally yanked them all out because every time I put one in, I kept thinking, “But I wouldn’t read this.  If I ran across it in another book, I’d skip it.” I just wasn’t finding subplots very interesting.  I kept thinking it related to all the problems had from writing short stories.

Turned out I was wrong.

When I researched how to do subplots, this article on Scribblepad was pretty typical of what I found.  The suggested subplots are:

• Romance
• Troubled past
• Childhood
• Character arcs (added by me)

My novel is a treasure hunt with magic and action.  If I read an action novel about a treasure hunt, I don’t want to see a subplot about the main character’s marital problems–that was in a book I read recently.  It had a treasure the main character had, bad guys chasing her–and a lot of the book was spent on the marriage angst.  The subplot just didn’t fit the story.

And that was what happened with all the subplots I was trying to add.  While they’re pretty traditional, they’re not this book.  Just look at a Lee Child book as an example.  We are never going to see Jack Reicher suffer from angst.  Just writing that about Reicher sounds so wrong!

Sans Subplots

I’ve written here before that I have a lot of trouble with subplots.  I tend to think of them as unimportant, even when I tie them into the main story.  Worse, my efforts to get two into the story have felt like I’m trying to force it to fit where it doesn’t.  I’ve been trying to add two into the story during the revision.  I was going pretty good until I tried to add those subplots, and it kicked me off course.

So I picked up a couple of different writing books to see what the authors (both agents) said about subplots.  Anything to help!  Anything at all!  Donald Maass’ Writing the Breakout Novel provided the most interesting insight:

Not all books have subplots.

Maybe mine is one that doesn’t need subplots either.

So I’m doing several things:

1.  I took out all the subplots.  Unfortunately, it made the book shorter.  Grumble, grumble.

2.  I’m replacing the chapters with ones that follow the bad guy.  The plus side of that is that it may help me solve some other problem areas.

I did see an immediate result from removing the subplots.  The character names were driving me crazy.  I had 23 characters, and I kept having to change a name so it didn’t sound like another name.  By removing the subplots, I shed six characters–all characters needed for the subplots but not part of the rest of the story.

It’ll be interesting to see how this works, since the conventional wisdom is that a book should have subplots.

What Did I Learn This Year?

One of the great–and aggravating things about writing–is that no matter how much I learn, I always find there’s something else new to learn.  This last year is no different.  So what did I learn this last year?

1.  That I could finish a book on my own.  I’d gotten into co-writing for two books (same book, completely different rewrite) because I struggled so much with plotting the story itself.  Then we broke up.  I wrote a first draft in thirty days to prove to myself I could actually get an entire book done without a co-writer.

2. To outline.  This last year, I finally found an outline that really works for me.  I think I’ve tried every form there is, so I ended up making up one of my own.  That’s one of the major reasons why I’ve done better with plotting.  Still not perfect, but the outline has helped me keep from doing rewrites of the entire book to work my way into the story.

3. That I need to stick with writing what only I can write.  Earlier this year, I was trying to make a subplot work (the one I’ve been having so much trouble with), so I introduced a crime to the book.  I figured it would be a way to make those elements Ineeded for the story come into play.  Spectacular crash and burn.  It should have been a sign when I fought my way through the chapter showing the discovery of the body.  I like to read crime novels, but write them?  Not for me.

4.  Omniscient viewpoint.  This year, I discovered omniscient viewpoint.  All of the writing books had generally dismissed it as not being used any more and never had explained why you might want to use it.  I did a viewpoint workshop in February where I rewrote my opening in all the viewpoints and realized that my story needed to be omniscient.

What I go into the new year learning:

1.  Taking advantage of everything in the story.  If an unnamed waitress walks into the book for one scene, I’m reminding myself to think about what else I can do with her.  At the moment, said waitress is going to tattle to the tabloids about something she didn’t hear (no, that’s not a typo; she just made something up).

2. Subplots.  I still have a lot of problems with this one, but each effort I make chipping away at it gets me close to possible solutions. 

3.  The sense of smell.    Earlier this year, I did a workshop on description that I had a really hard time with.  Two reasons:  How I do description and inflexibility on the kinds of scenes we were writing using all the senses.  I tend to spread my description over more than a few pages.  I also had a problem with describing characters and senses like smell in the middle of an action scene (that was the inflexibility part) where the choices were things like fighting and extreme sports.  But since then, I’ve run into a book which used the sense of smell throughout (Perfume: The Story of a Murderer) and did a different workshop where smell was approached differently, and I’m thinking about ways to use it more.  Not in the middle of an action scene, though.