The Name Game

It’s a simple rule: don’t give a character in your book a name that is in any way similar to another character’s name. Why? Because it confuses readers. When you confuse your readers—when you make them stop and think about anything except your story—you jerk them out of the alternate universe you’re creating. And anything that jerks your reader back to reality is a Bad Thing.

I was reminded of this last night while reading a mystery/thriller by a long-published, NYT bestselling author (in other words, someone who really ought to know better). About a third of the way into the book, our author begins a scene by introducing his hero to two new characters, Parker and Paterson, in the company of another character named Barker whom we’ve met just once before. That’s right: Barker, Parker, and Paterson.

It gets worse. The love interest in this book is a woman named Madison. About half way through the book, the hero—followed by the bad guys—heads off to Madison, Wisconsin. A fairly big chunk of the book takes place in Madison and everybody keeps using the town’s name. I tried to give the author the benefit of the doubt; I mean, maybe—just maybe—he didn’t notice there was a wee bit of a problem with the name of his locale and his heroine’s name. But then at one point the hero is thinking about Madison, and our author helpfully ads, “The woman, not the town.”

Seriously.

Now, this isn’t enough of an irritant that I’m going to stop reading. I am actually enjoying this book; in fact, I’m having a hard time putting it down (not a problem I often have these days). But I have to wonder what was going on in our author’s head. There is nothing in this segment that requires the action to take place in Madison: any state capitol would do. So why didn’t our author have his hero go to Hartford or Tallahassee or—anywhere but Madison? Conversely, if our author really wanted the action to take place in Madison, then he could have changed the love interest’s name. But no. He obviously really liked the name Madison, and he really wanted the segment to take place in Madison, and so to hell with his readers.

And that just leaves a bad taste in my mouth.

The 100-Page Hiccup on Steroids

I always throw a fit just about the time I hit the 100-page mark on a new manuscript. I’ve even developed a name for it: the Hundred Page Hiccup. At that point I have the story established and the characters introduced and enough pages written that I can get a feel for how the story is shaping up. I go back, do some line editing, print out a clean copy, and sit down to read. And I always, always freak out.

This book is sh*t!! It’s too slow! The idea sucks! What’s wrong? I don’t know how to fix it! Oh my God, my career is ruined!

That’s exactly what happened to me last week when I sat down to read the first 100 pages of The Babylonian Codex, my next remote viewing thriller. Oh, I was happy enough with the first fifty pages or so. Then the story turned into a wet noodle. Since I’m already far, far behind on my schedule, I had a panic attack. Steve said, “Give it to me; I’ll read it.” So he read it, handed it back, and said, “I think it’s good.” I wanted to believe him. But in my heart of hearts, I knew he was wrong.

I headed up to the lake house anyway, planning to spend a few days of intensive writing. I am sooo far behind schedule it’s not even funny, so I really, really needed to tear out at least 75 pages. But before I buckled down to write, I decided to reread. And perhaps thanks to the extra oxygen in the air up there and the super quiet, light bulbs started popping in my head. I sent Steve a text message at 1:30 am that read, “I know what’s wrong with this book!” (Of course he was asleep.)

So what was wrong? So much that it deserves its own post. Suffice it to say that I spent virtually my entire time at the lake figuring out how to fix it (knowing what’s wrong and knowing how to fix it are two very different things). I only managed to write about 20 pages of new scenes to insert, and my reorganization and rethink ended up massively requiring me to rewrite the last 50 pages (I'm still working on that) and completely cut three entire scenes that added up to 16 pages. When you’re already way behind schedule, that’s a killer. But it was necessary.

Is the book better now? I don't know. Once I've finished this planned overhaul, I'll sit down and read it again. God help me.

Gratuitous Sex and Violence

I’m in the midst of slogging my way through the latest thriller by a NYT bestselling author. I’m putting myself through this torture because I like to keep current with the publishing industry, and because the subject of this particular book touches close to something I’ve written myself. Since I’m not enjoying the process, I’m reading fast. And I’ve found I can skip the action sequences without missing anything. I’ll come to one and think, Oh, good; the bad guys are going to try to kill the heroes again; I can skip ahead at least ten pages!

If that isn’t the definition of gratuitous violence, I don’t know what is. I’m reminded of the gratuitous sex scenes that populate so many of today’s romance novels. When I was judging RITA entries, I frequently found myself skipping sex scenes, too. Now, since authors put in sex and violence in order to make their books more entertaining, yet some of their readers are actually skipping those scenes, something is obviously wrong.

So how does a writer keep an action sequence—or a sex scene—from being boring?

In the best action sequences or a sex scenes, something happens that actually moves the plot forward. We learn something new about the characters. The characters learn something new about themselves or each other. The action ups the stakes. Or it changes the characters’ motivation. Or it changes the characters’ goal. Or the characters acquire new information that causes them to alter their course of action. But something has to happen besides just violence or sex. When nothing changes—if the characters and the conflict are all the same at the end of the scene as they were at the beginning—then the scene is gratuitous. The writer could yank the car chase/shootout/sex scene from the plot (or the reader could skip it) and no one would notice. The plot line would flow on without interruption or confusion.

Unfortunately, today’s audiences are so addicted to sex and violence that writers frequently feel the need to insert sex/violence every so many pages/minutes. Now, it’s pretty hard to make each and every one of those scenes pivotal. Yet I do think it is possible to have gratuitous sex and violence without boring the more discriminating members of your audience. How? By creating sympathetic characters.

If your readers care about your characters, they will be carried along by the action, both because they care what happens to the characters and because they like spending time with them. If I’m watching a movie and I don’t like the characters, I have nothing at stake; I couldn’t care less if they killed or caught. Oh, our heroes are being shot at again? Yawn. Let me go make another cup of tea…

Even if I don’t care about the characters, an action sequence can still hold my attention if it’s well done, if the sequence is original, or funny, or cleverly orchestrated. Ironically, the NYT bestselling author of the thriller I’m reading at the moment writes really, really bad action sequences. They’re unoriginal, unbelievable, and badly executed. There is absolutely nothing to entice me to read them. So, I skip. A lot.

Of course, a lot of people really don’t care if the sex and violence in a book or movie is gratuitous or unoriginal--they're actually reading/watching for the sex and violence. Sigh.

Lessons Learned

If I could go back in time, one of the many things I’d do differently in my writing career is this: I’d keep a Lessons Learned journal.

What kind of Lessons Learned? All those hard-won insights and Ah ha! moments—large and small—that come in the course of writing every book. One might think that knowledge gleaned at the price of so much pain and suffering would never be forgotten, but I am cursed with a lousy memory. Recently, I’ve found myself repeating mistakes I should have remembered from earlier books.

What kind of mistakes? Well, in the initial drafts of my third book, SEPTEMBER MOON, my heroine came off as a starchy English bitch. She really was a likeable character once we got to know, understand, and sympathize with her, but in the first rendition of the manuscript, my editor had a hard time warming to her. Solution? Instead of beginning the book with Amanda’s arrival in the wilds of Outback Australia, I first introduced readers to her at her employer’s deathbed. We learn that she has missed her ship home, stranding herself penniless and friendless in an alien land in order to comfort a dying woman. Result? Instant sympathy! Lesson learned: if you’re going to have a protagonist display potentially unlikable characteristics, make sure to get your readers solidly on the character’s side before you have her start displaying those characteristics.

In the book I’m writing now (in between ripping out walls and laying floors and packing up my mother’s Stuff, etc, etc, etc) my protagonists do a lot of traveling. We follow them on a breakneck race to Berlin, to Kaliningrad, to Turkey, back to three different cities in Germany, to Lebanon, to Israel, back to Russia… Whew! It’s a lot of fun, so what’s the problem here? Well, this book is a thriller. And in today’s market, this kind of thriller needs to be fast-paced with a loudly ticking clock. I had originally planned to have this book play out over four or five days, max. But it takes time to travel to all these different places. In fact, if you find out on Friday night that you need to fly from New Orleans to Kaliningrad, Russia, you won’t be able to get there until SUNDAY morning. My characters take a lot of overnight flights, and I still had to stretch my ticking clock out to eight days, about twice as long as I’d have liked. Lesson learned: if you want a fast-paced, doom-is-breathing-down-your-neck book, limit the wide-ranging international travel.

These are two lessons I suspect I’ll never forget. But all those other little Lessons Learned? I should have written them down.

Pantsers, Planners, and the Box Myth

Sphinx Ink has an interesting response to my question, How Do Pantsers Write a Book Proposal? It seems that after she mused on the subject, author Tim Hallinan—a pantser--contacted her by email.

According to Hallinan, he writes the first 10,000 words of his manuscript, brain storms possible developments and plot points both by himself and with friends, writes it all up into a short synopsis and sends it off.

You know what? That’s actually not all that different from my approach. I suspect the main difference is that I take the time to think those developments and plot points through a bit more carefully, write it all down, and then use those brainstorming sessions as a guide when I sit down to finish my novel. Hallinan basically ignores his synopsis and sets off on a journey of exploration. Some of those ideas he uses, some he doesn’t.

There seems to be this myth that pantsers write character-driven books while those who preplan their books create plot-driven stories that become—to use Tim Hallinan’s unflattering description—“a box to squeeze characters into.” No, no, no, no!!!

When I sit down to preplan my books, I don’t build a plot and then stick my characters into it. I ask, What would X do next? How would Y react to that? What is he thinking and feeling at this point? What’s the worse thing that could happen to X? (“Put your hero up a tree and throw rocks at him.”) My plots are very complicated with lots of twists and I like being able to shift things around at the planning stage rather than after I’ve invested months writing scenes that then need to be changed. It’s why the more books I’ve written, the more I’ve tended to preplan. I’m a basically lazy person. I don’t like wasting time and effort, and I don’t like tying myself in knots with rewrites. I also have this thing about control.

I understand that for pantsers, preplanning takes out all the fun. For me, it takes out a lot of the frustration and anxiety and severely reduces rewriting. It’s a trade off I’m willing to make, and can make, since I still enjoy the process of fleshing out the scenes I’ve envisioned.

How much do I preplan? That varies. Sometimes I’ll write down snippets of dialogue if they come to me. But mainly I focus on the conflict in a scene, and the outcome. When I was writing my medieval, THE LAST KNIGHT, for instance, I had a segment where the hero is thrown into prison and the heroine is locked up by her uncle. In my outline I had written, “They escape.” When I finally got to that point in the book, I looked at those two words and thought, “Yeah, right! HOW do they escape?” That was not preplanned. That was a fun, rollercoaster exploration that was actually four escapes—the heroine escaped from her room, then freed the hero, then together they escaped from the castle, and then the next morning they escaped from the walled city. Was it plot-driven? Yes, in the sense that I knew they had to escape (or the story would have ended). But it was also character driven, and character revealing. My heroine was the kind of woman who was risking her life to save her brother; of course she wasn’t going to simply sit in her tower room and say, “Pass the embroidery thread.”

There are also times when I’ll reach a scene and realize it’s wrong, that a character wouldn’t do what I’d envisioned. What I don’t do is squeeze my character into my preconceived plan. I change the plan. In MIDNIGHT CONFESSIONS, I was halfway through when I decided I needed to change the murderer. I’m a big girl. I can handle that.

But I also don’t allow my characters or my imagination to lead me astray. I keep a fairly firm hand on the reins, always conscious of where I’m going. That’s a personality thing, though, and has nothing to do with whether I write plot-driven or character-driven. I mean, I used to write historical ROMANCES, remember? No genre is more character driven than that!

Aboutness

No, it’s not a word. It’s a concept developed by our Monday night writers group to describe a certain kind of book’s appeal. Probably the best way to explain it is to talk about the novel I’ve just finished reading.

Since I’m still luxuriating in my recent delayed discovery of Martin Cruz Smith, that book was WOLVES EAT DOGS. In this installment of the trials and tribulations of Moscow investigator Arkady Renko, Arkady ends up in the Ukraine—in Chernobyl, to be exact.

I don’t know about you, but I haven’t read or heard much about Chernobyl since the big bang. So one of the (many) aspects of reading the novel that made it so enjoyable was the incredible wealth of information I acquired in the process. Chernobyl today is a strange, frightening place, and it was fascinating reading about it. This background—life in the area around Chernobyl after the accident and all the implications that has for a future many others will doubtless someday face—gave the book “aboutness.” So in addition to experiencing a great novel, I also learned about something that interested me.

This is a tendency surveys have disclosed before: readers like to feel they’re learning something from the fiction they read or the movies they watch. THE GODFATHER helps us to understand the Mafia, SHOGUN teaches us about ancient Japan, Clancy thrillers tell us everything we could want to know about modern weapons technology and techniques, THE DEVIL WEARS PRADA gives us an inside peak at the fashion industry.

The trick to “aboutness” is finding something that interests readers/viewers and then making them think you know what you’re talking about even if you don’t. It isn’t enough to take readers someplace they haven’t been before—it has to be someplace they want to go. Americans in the Cold War wanted to learn about life in Moscow, hence the huge (and well-deserved) success of GORKY PARK. Were readers as eager to learn about life on a floating arctic fish factory? Probably not. I personally found POLAR STAR an even better book than GORKY PARK, but PS never touched GP’s sales.

Of course, all too often what we “learn” is wrong. Martin Cruz Smith is fanatical about his research, which is why his books take so long to write. Others are considerably more careless. The infamous DVC, while touted far and wide as an “intelligent” book, made so many mistakes about everything from art to history that I was laughing by about the third chapter. And since I’d already read HOLY BLOOD, HOLY GRAIL and JESUS THE MAN, that theory was yesterday’s news and I could see exactly where the story was going. The “aboutness” didn’t work for me. But boy did it work for millions upon millions of other people around the world. Likewise, I quit reading Patricia Cornwell when, in the space of about twenty pages, she called Iranians Arabs and introduced a Navy general. If she made such simple, careless errors, how could I trust anything she said about forensics? After all, it wasn’t even her field. But again, her sales figures tell us that most readers are more trusting.

Where am I going with all this? No place, really. It’s just a useful concept to keep in mind when the stray wisps of a book idea start forming in our minds. If you can take your readers someplace they want to go, teach them something they want to know, give them a glimpse at a way of life that is normally hidden from them—in other words, give your book Aboutness—you will only up its appeal.

Heroes, Villains, and Cognitive Dissonance

An interesting experiment from the world of psychology: When people were asked to describe an instance in their lives when they had hurt someone, most insisted that their harmful acts had been either justified or unavoidable. They also portrayed their actions as having caused only brief pain to others.

But when people were asked to describe an incident when someone had hurt THEM, they invariably described the actions as senseless, immoral, and despicable, never “unavoidable.” They also reported the pain as lasting a long time. Ironically, the hurts described were basically the same—betrayals, lies, acts of unkindness. (If you’re interested in reading more about this experiment, just Google Roy Baumeister, the social psychologist who conducted it.)

The technical name for this is cognitive dissonance. It seems that when we do something that hurts others, a part of us knows our action is despicable. This is true both on an individual level, such as when a man cheats on his spouse, and on a national level, such as when one country attacks another and causes the deaths of hundreds of thousands—or even millions—of innocents. Since most people believe they are fundamentally good people, these actions produce a conflict, or dissonance. People solve this dissonance either by reinterpreting their actions to minimize their responsibility, thus recasting their actions in a different light, or—in the case of the massive civilian casualties in Iraq or the WWII concentration camps in Germany—rejecting whatever evidence might prove something too unpleasant to assimilate.

Of course, this is all happening at a subconscious level, and not everyone does this to the same extent. In fact, some people spend years beating themselves up for transgressions that really were largely avoidable. Which leads me to wonder if certain cultures are more prone to collective cognitive dissonance than others. Many Germans, for instance, have spent the last sixty years in a paroxysm of guilt over WWII. The United States, however, still has yet to face the truth about everything from the genocide it perpetrated against the Native Americans to the atomic bomb it dropped on Hiroshima to the more recent invasion of Iraq.

But I’m drifting from my point here, which is that as writers, we need to remember this: most people don’t see themselves as evil. So no matter how despicable your villain, he needs to be the hero of his own story. He needs to see his actions as justified. That’s when the richest—and most chilling-characters are created.

Writing Ugly

This brilliant turn of phrase comes from Charles over on Razored Zen. It’s about turning off the inner critic that all too often squelches our creative drive, and just “letting it all hang out” as they used to say back in the Sixties. Other writers have talked about the “shitty first draft,” but I never felt it was helpful to call someone’s creative output “shitty,” even if it is a first draft. “Writing ugly” has the advantage of referring to the process, not the writer or the product. A subtle difference? Yes. A silly one? I don’t think so.

The problem is, no matter how we phrase it, it’s still so hard to do, especially for certain personality types. To quote Charles again, “You don’t blame yourself for your morning face and morning hair, and you should treat your writing the same way.” Well, maybe it’s one of those X vs. Y chromosome things, but I actually DO blame myself for my morning face and morning hair! I have a very, very hard time accepting anything less than perfection, whether it’s in my house, my garden, my diet, my exercise program, my appearance, my writing, my mothering—you get the idea. And since no one—least of all yours truly—is ever perfect, that means I’m always beating myself up for a thousand real or imagined shortcomings.

So how do we do it? How do we get ourselves into a first-draft mind-set that allows us to just tell a story without worrying about how it looks? After all, no one else need ever see that first, rough draft. As Steve Malley in his great continuation of this thread put it, They call it a rough draft for a reason, folks.

Is it enough to simply tell ourselves to relax and let go? I guess it depends on how well you listen to yourself. Time constraints can sometimes help. I certainly write uglier now that I have two book contracts than when I was “only” doing one book a year. Romance Writers of America periodically runs what they call “Book in a Week” marathons, where groups of writers pour out as many pages as they can in one week. Yet other people are paralyzed by time constraints.

Then there’s the old computer vs. longhand angle. Computers are wonderful tools when it comes time to rework subsequent drafts, but they can be a curse at first draft stage. I suspect I write faster up at the lake in longhand partially because there reaches a point where you simply cannot rework the written page and must move on (although I confess there’ve been many times when I’ve actually copied out a page—I can only tolerate so much mess).

Perhaps part of the secret to writing ugly is having confidence in your ability to come back later and smooth out the wrinkles. I frequently leave blanks when I’m writing—sometimes for a word, sometimes for an entire sentence or two. When what I want to say just won’t come, I’ll stick a “plain words” rendition in parentheses and just keep going. Often, I fill in those blanks easily on the second or third pass. Although I have to admit that sometimes the entire manuscript will be reworked and polished and I’ll still have half a dozen blanks that I simply can’t fill. Then I admit defeat and rework the scene.

Yet I don’t believe we should ever turn off our inner critic entirely. I’ve found over the years that when a scene “just isn’t working” it’s usually for a very good reason. Either I’m in the wrong POV or I’m trying to force characters to do something that moves my plot where I want it to go but is completely wrong for the characters. Or maybe I haven’t spent enough time exploring their motivation, or I haven’t given them enough motivation. In other words, I’m writing ugly because I’m writing wrong, and I need my inner critic to tell me that so that I don’t waste too much time going off in a wrong direction that’ll require a lot of backpedaling.

As Steve Malley says, it’s all a question of balance.