The Thing And The Half Of The Thing

First of all let me start by saying that yeah, yeah, yeah, we at Mad Genius are messing with you. We have all decided to randomly switch days so you never know which of one of us you’re going to get, Mwah ah a... I mean, Amanda is busy today, so I picked up her day and she’ll blog on Wednesday.

I debated briefly doing a web-linky type of post, but frankly, I haven’t looked at that stuff in so long I’d probably steer you wrong.

So instead I’m going to talk about something that I hit again and again and again in my writing life. (In art too, but since art is a hobby, that’s inconsequential.)

About a decade ago I took a workshop with Oregon Writers’ Workshops. It was invaluable for various reasons, but I got my money’s worth before the first day was over. As one of the instructors, Dean Wesley Smith was talking about this and that and the other thing, trying to get us acclimated to the surroundings and each other, he said casually, “of course, every novel dies halfway through. If you push through that point, you’ll find it lives again and gets finished.”

I had at this time several unfinished novels, because I lost interest about halfway through. That information alone, would have been worth what I paid for the workshop.

It had never occurred to me that this was normal or that it happened to other people. I assumed if the novel died, it was because something in it was fundamentally wrong.

Since then I think I’ve come to understand it better. See, when a novel first comes to me – and I suspect to other people – it’s this bright, splendorous thing, with complex connections and meanings everywhere.

There is only one problem with that – there isn’t the room to put all those connections and meanings into a book, let alone the fact that readers would need to STUDY it, not just read it and it would fail the basic duty of entertaining.

There is also the need to pin the book to the pages – to give enough information about whatever you’re talking about that the reader can follow. Like this: in your head, the book is of course complete and clear, but for the reader, you need to provide clues. “Must remember to start with John doing something nice, because if he is flogging conscript workers, they won’t know he has to do that to survive his brother’s rule” type of clue.

This takes away a lot of the cool and shiny that the novel had in your brain before you wrote it. And by the middle of the book, it might seem to you that all the cool and shiny is gone, and why bother finishing?

But if you push through, you eventually realize it’s just like ... falling in love versus being married; writing down your dream, instead of just dreaming it; baking the cookie and eating it, instead of dreaming of the cookie.

Reality – the reality of the finished book – might lack the shiny-cool that made it sparkle in your head, but it will be outside and – hopefully – in a form other people can read and enjoy. It’s a compromise, like seeing your spouse with messed up hair and morning face, but it is the only way to make it real.

So, next time you’re stuck around 40k words – or if you’re me at 20k, 40k, 60k, 80k, 100k – push through. You’ll be surprised, afterwards, that the split doesn’t show where the book stopped.

What is amazing is that by the time I took that workshop, I had written eight full novels (one recently published as Darkship Thieves ) and countless short stories, but I did not know this. I thought I was alone in having the novel “die” halfway through. While for the pros it was so obvious it wasn’t even the point of the instructor’s speech.

Well, I’m a pro now, more or less, and there are a bunch of other pros on this blog. What are the problems that consistently bedevil you that you think you might be alone in? Who knows? It might be a well known complaint, with a well known work around. See if you can stump the writer! (not hard) with your real or fictional writing problem. (Hey, since fiction is such a part of our lives, it should get its own billing.)

Evolution and the Romance Novel

Evolution and the Romance Novel

I am now about to venture on a strange path that has only ever been dimly lit - at least for me. I refer to the evolution of women (and implicitly, men) and the Romance Novel.

One of my - female - students once described the romance novel as 'porn for women', inplying that they occupy the same niche in the female psyche as girly pics for men.

Anthony Cox, Centre for Psychology & Computing, Dartmouth, Canada, and Maryanne Fisher, Department of Psychology, St Mary's University, Nova Scotia have analysed the romance novel in order to test evolutionary hypotheses about women.

They used 15,000 Harlequin novels (Mills and Boon in the UK) as their base data sets and checked for word use.

The five most common words used, in descending order were:
Love (840)
Bride (835)
Baby (696)
Man (672)
Marriage (612)

Other much used words were : Doctor, Cowboy, Night, Nurse, Boss, King, Knight, Rancher, Midwife, Bodyguard, Sheriff, Pirate.

Now evolutionary theory predicts that the sexual-specific strategy of women would suggest that they be interested in the following characteristics in a man:
Status, health, Commitment, Fertility.

Status is key because a high status man is better able to support her and her children.
Commitment clearly important - he has to stick around after the baby is born.
Health because a dead or sick man ain't much use as a provider or protector.
Fertility because, well, that's what it's all about.

If you look at the buzz words found in romance novels, they do tend to support evolutionary theory. Men are described by high status words (doctor, king, knight) or physically fit hero-words (cowboy, sheriff, bodyguard).

What is interesting is that the physical appearance of men (other than healthy, fit, fertile physical clues) is not of much relevence in the books. That is why men's body's are functional rather than elegant.

I was once told by a journalist that women like reading about the appearance of women, and looking at pictures of women (fashion, hair styles etc) and, of course, so do men but for other reasons. This is why women's magazines tend to have pictures of women on the front and so do men's magazine.

You know, we should be able to reduce this to a mathematical formula. I do maths. If so, I could write the perfect romance novel without understanding romance.

What do you think?

Hooking the Reader

After all the recent discussion about openings, I've been grappling with the challenge of hooking the reader. Its always important, but I guess its been coming a little closer to home for me as I try to resurrect various short stories and get them onto the market, and look at writing new ones (hey Sarah, five on the market now!).


With short stories you have even less room to hook a reader -- one or two lines at the most. For a novel you might get half a page.

I don't think there is any magic formula.

Thinking about it, I could identify a few different tacks you can take:

• You can hook into character. Try to present something unique in the character, and hook into their personal dilemma somehow.
• Present a mystery. Something bizarre and/or intriguing enough to get the reader interested.
• Dangle a trope. Some writers are excellent at this. I recently read a Kelly Link story that hooked me in extremely well. I'd read the whole thing before I realised nothing happened. The unspoken promise (of finding the Faery Handbag) was not delivered.
• Go for the oddness factor. Present something that is so quirky and bizarre -- some sort of mental disconnect that is intriguing - that the reader is drawn in just to find out what the heck is going on.
• Or go for combinations

Now, some writers don't think endings are all that crucial in a short. Me, no matter how long they are (or short) I like to see them going somewhere -- or at least delivering on the initial promise. So I guess there is a word of warning there. That Kelly Link story was the first in an anthology. I did not read any more stories, having been fundamentally disappointed in the first. But that is just me. Others have raved about that same story and its magical quality.

So what other hooks can you think of? Or other ways of looking at hooking the reader?

Nobody understands my brilliance!

They're just jealous!

We've all heard it - and yes, to my shame, I've been known to say it. It's the perpetual lament of the unpublished writer. "If only those horrible [insert villains of choice] weren't blocking my master-works I would be FAMOUS!"

Okay, I admit I haven't gone that far. Not yet, anyway. When I start with the evil cackling and "if only they'd listened" then you may lock me in one of those nice rooms with the padded walls. Just leave me a computer with always-on internet and I promise I won't harm myself.

The thing is, as always, there's an element of truth in these complaints. Editors can and do block pieces for any number of reasons (most of them fairly sensible like "no, girl on guy on midget on sheep is not a large enough market segment, especially with the red leather" or "it looks like English, most of the words appear to be English, but they do not form anything resembling intelligible sentences in English") What's far more common if you're a relative or complete unknown is that you've fallen for one of the classic blunders! Never get involved in a land war in Asia!

Um. Sorry. (Inigo Montoya, I did NOT kill your father, shut up and let me write).

Inexperienced (and experienced) writers can sometimes commit horrible crimes against Story, because they don't know not to, because they're too tired to think straight and that deadline is tomorrow, but mostly because when you're caught up in that wonderful world inside your head, it's way too easy to forget that the person who has to read your stuff isn't there with you.

You know you've done that one when your first readers (you DO have first readers, right? Honest ones, who'll tell you when Baby is ugly and even on occasion the wrong species?) respond to you story with something along the lines of "huh? Where did you get from "here" to over -------> "there"?" That usually means you've left something critical out. I suffer from this, particularly when I'm tired. The more tired I get, the less supporting detail I write, leading ultimately to floating speech balloons in empty space. This is, I assure you, not a good thing.

Another common mistake is to throw in everything and the kitchen sink. AND your little dog, too!

Oh. Sorry.

This is a very common short story problem - and me being the overachiever I am, I have a novel on the shelf (okay, actually on my hard drive) that suffers from this. There's probably six or seven novel plots crammed into the 160k words of uber-stripped-down prose, all of them tangled together in a mess of subplots that will bite if you look at them wrong. Yes, my short stories have a tendency to do this too. Just because it's a neat idea or he/she is a fun character doesn't mean they have to be in THIS story. As a general rule, the more you've got in there, the more confusing it gets for the poor reader. For a short story, one or maybe two points of view, one decision point (i.e. decision that changes the direction of the POV character's life in some way), and no subplots is about right. For a novel, one major plot, one secondary plot, and a few supporting sub-plots. The key here is supporting - they have to actually work with the major plot or they distract from it. If you've got the proverbial cast of thousands, you've got fewer words per book to devote to your majors, and you end up with thousand-page atrocities that move your story forward ten miles and maybe a week. Most editors will treat these as if they have some horribly contagious disease - UNLESS (and this is very important to remember) you are already a proven good seller.

Then we have the terrible demon of PC. Yes, political correctness. No, I'm not going to rant about anyone's politics. I'm just going to point out that there are certain things you can't do in stories now or they won't be published. Period. No ifs, buts or maybes.

You can't have one character who is obviously Asian/Black/Insert ethnicity of choice in a story and have that character be the villain. If there are two of that ethnicity, one of them can be evil so long as one is good, but you can't do something like a heroic Sherlock Holmes fighting the dastardly Fu Manchu. Unless of course, you're already a bestseller, in which case none of the rules apply. It's not fair: neither is life.

You can't have every character of Insert ethnicity of choice be bad. You might get away with all of them being good, if you choose the correct ethnicity, but bear in mind that slush readers may not share your ideas of a) what constitutes 'good', and b) which ethnic groups should be favored or not favored.

You can't write an evil matriarchy, and you'll have a hell of a time getting a good patriarchy through, unless of course your name is something like Stephen King or Terry Pratchett or... But you get the point.

It's not that the mysterious all-powerful "they" hate your stuff. "They" are human too. They have hot buttons and prejudices, and like any other human, they're more comfortable with things that are familiar to them (which is why Stephen King could probably sell his grocery list for a small fortune and it would be a bestseller - although I really do not want to know why he has items like 'stakes' and 'holy water' on it (yes, I am joking)) and that more or less fit into the way they believe the world works. Whether you agree with them or not doesn't matter: if you don't want to end up boring everyone you meet with how horrible "they" are and if they'd only look at your books with an open mind they'd know how great you are, you need to know what will get your book an express trip to the recycling bin.

Any other examples of common things that will get a story bounced? I admit freely that I've made every one of the mistakes listed above, and seen them all in other writers work, but you don't have to use your examples.

Plagiarism and Axolotl Roadkill

Why do authors plagiarise?

Traditionally, there were two reasons:

1. They couldn't write but had a fantasy of being an author, and

2. They could write but writing is hard work and it is far easier, and quicker if you are chasing a deadline, to copy someone else's work.







Sometimes both reasons apply.

See:
http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/000/738lfddv.asp

Then a few years ago in 2006, a new phenomena emerged. It started with a teen chick-lite book, "How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild, and Got a Life".

This was written by Kaavya Viswanathan, a daughter in a high-achieving Indian family. She was pushed very hard to go to an Ivy League University, attending various booster courses for gifted children, eventually ending up with IvyWise who apparently process children to get them into the aforesaid Ivy League. Ivywise passed her on to a book packager, Alloy Entertainment who helped her 'conceptualise' her novel in return for a 50% cut.

It was duly published but within three weeks accusations of plagiarism surfaced. Chunks were lifted from the work of Megan McCafferty, Sophie Kinsella, Meg Cabot, TD Hidier, and even Salman Rushdie.

Kaavya's book was a composite. This has become increasingly a problem in the academic world. The cut and paste generation seems to have trouble understanding that a quote must be a quote, not just lifted and incorporated in one's own work. The question arises whether Kaavya really understood what she was doing.

A similar situation has just arisen in Europe. Helene Hegemann, 17, has just published a novel, Axolotl Roadkill, about the debauchery of the Berlin club scene. And a cracking good read it is, resulting in it being shortlisted for the Leipzig Book Fair. Like Kaavya, Helene come from a high-achieving family - her father is professor of Dramaturgy (wot us plebs call playwriting) at, wait for it, Leipzig.

The problem is that chunks of the novel turn out to have been lifted without credit from a novel called Strobo.

Helene has an interesting new defence against a plagiarism charge. She was not plagiarising but 'mixing', 'entering into a dialogue with the original author', indulging in 'intertexuality' - after all, says Helene, there is no such thing as originality.

Strabos publishers disagree, as do their lawyers, who have extracted a fee.

However, the book is selling and she is still up for the Leipzig literary award, who apparently know all about the copying but discount it as a modern art form. In contrast, Kyaava's book was withdrawn - the poor girl has been forced to retrain as a lawyer.

Is this what the ancient Leipzig University (founded 1409) teaches its students? Is the East German rot that deep?

Am I a dinosaur? Is it just me or is this just plain wrong?

Do your surroundings influence your Creativity?

We're selling our house.

It's been a great house. We've been here 20 years and our children have all gone to the local school and we've been happy in this house but everything is falling apart.

Now that our children are leaving home we're going to do it up and buy a smaller place. And this brings me to what is important to me as a creative person.

Call me shallow, but I love beautiful things. A walk through the art gallery leaves me feeling like I'm walking on air. A piece of beautiful music will bring tears of joy to my eyes. Conversely, a messy house, makes my head feel fusty and I can't think straight until the house is straightened up.

I suspect it is a female gene because my husband seems to be able to walk through snow drifts of mess and still function.

I haven't been able to write, I've been feeling overwhelmed by the house. At one point we had 9 people living here and three sets of furniture, as adult children moved back with their belongings. Now that some of them have moved out, taking their furniture I can see light at the end of the tunnel.

So we are selling our house and I want to live somewhere beautiful, preferably by the sea. I want to feel that uplifting sense of wonder when I walk down the road, catch a glimpse of the sea, see storm clouds rushing in ... you get the picture.

When I was a child I used to capture beautiful moments so I would always have them, like treasures. I still do. And I go fishing through those beautiful moments when I need a setting for a scene.

I feel more creative in a beautiful setting. I feel like I can't wait to get ideas down on paper (or computer screen). Bringing up our 6 children, we surrounded them with ideas both challenging and fun, we watched documentaries, and shared our love of music and art. Will they become creative people? I don't know.

As a teacher in a computer games college I come across creative kids all the time. And I wonder how they will get on in a society that values football players ahead of artists.

Can artists (creativity) be taught or is it born in us? This article looks at the question and answers it in a measured way. It raises the point that if you are living in the back of beyond and no one ever sees your art or hears your music, and you receive no stimulation from other artists, then you will never produce to your full potential. So as parents, the best thing we can do is stimulate our kids and stand back.

Maybe I am shallow, but I want to live somewhere beautiful. I believe I'm more creative in beautiful surroundings, especially, if the dishes are done.

Do your surroundings influence your creativity? Do you have to be sure the bed is made before you can write? Does it help you, if the cat sits on your lap and purrs while you write?

Attractors and super-attractors

Just another manic Monday, and here I am juggling writing, proposals, real life, bills, doctors, family etc. So as usual my head is all over the place. But what I wanted to talk about was fishing (in our case for readers) and how to make your trailed lure look more attractive than the rest. It's useful for picking up girls (or males or probably furry green aliens if your tastes run that way)too.

You see it's all about attractors... and super-attractors. We've talked about fitting your writing into the 'attractor' mould often enough here. Vegetarian fish don't bite often on bits of steak - anymore than vegetarian editors from New York are likely to bite on the "Texas Ranch-style Barbeque book" or something that stinks of unappetising - like bad grammar or spelling, or yet another prologue or murdered village with one survivor. But, very much like fishing, you are tossing your attractive (right kind of) lure into a varied environment swimming with the rare editor-fish of different diets and tastes and then... hoping they take YOUR lure, not Ed's or Mary's or Joe's or Frankie's or any one of the 10% of well presented, reasonably attractive lures/books on offer (the other 90% suck and would never be touched anyway. You don't belong among 'em or you wouldn't be reading this).

Now, this is a problem well-known and researched among the angling fraternity, who have a lot more money collectively than wannabe writers. Ergo, they had some very good biologists trying to work out just how to make your lure stand out... and the answer is actually a very simple one. It's a lure that looks and behaves just like all the natural prey items... ONLY JUST A _LITTLE_ MORESO. There are features of the prey items which fish fixate on (editors of course never do this. Perish the thought. Neither do potential partners in a singles bar) and they'll bite even if the rest of the package is unattractive. So for instance, if the fish is eating mayflies, and picking them out by the 3 little wiggly bits on tail... 1)if you don't have 3 wiggly bits on the tail of your fly you can go home, 2) those little wiggly bits need to be just a little larger than they are in life - believably so - say 10% up - to get the fish to choose your fake mayfly and not ther 5000 real ones on offer. Too big and they won't be believed, and too like the rest and you're back to pure chance. Now, without going into the wiggly bits in the singles bar (I leave this to Kate's mind, mine might explode) when you think about it (not the wiggly bits!) that's what we have to do. And while there are editors that fixate on prose, or setting or description, or even plot... it's usually character that catches their interest. Which is why the character need to be well... real, but endowed with that extra 10% and... to throw a sabertooth among the ground-quail, these often are actually stereotypes in the plane of expectations... with extra in that dimension and often quite a lot that the poor editor didn't see coming along because he/she fixated on the super-attractor - this makes the book interesting and different AND gets the reader. From Miles to Honor - to give examples.

So: how do you 'build' a super-attractor? Give them features that readers feel at ease with, can identify with... and bit more? Dumpster diving furniture restorers for example.
Or am I missing this entirely?
What do you think?