Luc Reid

John D. Brown, author of the forthcoming fantasy trilogy that begins with Servant of a Dark God (Tor Books, probably summer of 2009), maintainer of a blog of bizarre and enjoyable miscellania, and a writer who's very accomplished at finding powerful ideas for improving writing, pointed out a technique for believability in writing that I never thought of when writing my essay on believable fiction: having someone question the thing that's unbelievable. By having a character who questions something that readers might find it hard to believe, the reader's disbelief can often be forestalled. Maybe this is just the "for the love of criminy, man, the ghost was just right there in front of you!" effect, or maybe it's the reassurance that in the world of the story, most of the usual rules apply and people will notice when they don't. In any case, it works, and it adds to your writer's arsenal.

It was about 10:30 or 11:00 PM on New Year's Eve, 2007, and I was at a party at the house of some friends, when the conversation shifted to New Year's resolutions. I mentioned that I never do them ... and then realized that this year I wanted to do one. With everything that had been going on in my life (and I'm a single parent with a full-time job who runs both a singing group and a large online writing group, so that is a lot), I hadn't been getting much writing done lately, despite my best intentions. So after thinking it through for a few minutes, I actually did make a resolution: I was going to write every day for 2008.

The rules were pretty lenient: there was no minimum length, and the writing could either be generating new material or making at least sentence-sized changes to existing material. However, all of the writing had to be for publication: no journal entries, blogs, etc. would count.

So I started. It was awkward at first. It would get to be time to go to bed, after a day full of things to do, and I'd realize that I hadn't written yet--so I'd sit down, chip away at making meaningful edits on some piece I wanted to get out the door for just 10 or 20 minutes, then turn the computer off and head to bed.

Within a couple of weeks, I had cleared out all of the projects that I felt were overdue and needed immediate attention and was able to get back on track with a novel I was working on.

This was more difficult. I wasn't entirely clear on where I was going with the novel, and because I was getting in my writing time late in the day, I really didn't feel like spending some time planning the story, then spending more time writing the story. So I tried just writing, an approach that has worked well for me some of the time before. Within a few weeks, it was clear I was driving myself through a trackless wilderness. Just Writing might work for me for some projects, but this one required a lot of thought and planning to come off well, and it wasn't working out. I began working on another project instead, one that I knew was more straightforward and would come out more easily.

But thinking back on that experience, I soon realized that I needed to change my resolution: my writing time could be for writing an actual piece, but it could also be for planning a piece, in writing (daydreaming and straight research wouldn't count).

Feeling I had gotten off track with the novel I had been "just writing," I set it aside and got to work on a new project, one that required a lot of brainstorming, imagination, ideas, and planning--and I've been working on it every day since. What I've found is that my brain has gotten fired up with the story, and since I don't take more than a day away from the old story forge at a time, the coals are still hot when I next get back to them, and just need me to blow across them a little for the flame to leap back up. This is <i>much</i> better than writing from a cold start: this is jumping into the saddle and having the horse break into a gallop.

Writing every day has become easier since I started, and I've found more opportunities to do it. So far, one quarter of the way through 2008, I've missed one day (when I was both sick and on vacation). As nice as perfection is, missing one day is fine for me. If I miss one day per quarter for the whole year, I'll consider that a massive victory.

And there have been more benefits, surprising ones. I find that before I go to sleep or when I'm driving, I'm working on the book in my mind: I've obtained a limited amount of that enviable obsession that produces idea after idea, insight after insight, into a project. I'm re-reading a favorite writing book at night now (Donald Maass' <i>Writing the Breakout Novel</i>, which I recommend highly), and as I go through it, I find myself easily able to see how Mr. Maass' insights can apply to my book, and what I need to do. The characters are getting richer and more human, the plot more surprising and satisfying, the milieu more real and engrossing.

So here's my advice to you: if you're serious about writing and you currently only write  every once in a while, perhaps because you really, honestly don't have the time (or just because you like to relax), try instead--just for a month or two--writing every day. Don't set high word count requirements, but follow your regime faithfully. What's interesting is that your work may change not just in the quantity of words you've generated, but in the way it feels to you to write it. After the first couple of months, writing for me began to feel effortless again, something I had only seen occasionally in the past and that I now suspect had more to do with having gotten into a habit of writing very regularly for a while than with some particular inspiration.

I'm not the first person to try this by any means. Some writers--even other when-I'm-not-at-my-day-job-or-with-my-family writers, like me--have made it a permanent part of their lives, as I may come to do as well. A whole group of us on Codex, my writing group, are doing this. Lots of other people are first. Lawrence Schoen (Codexian, fluent Klingon speaker, and author of a variety of clever short stories published in English and translated into a passel of other languages) started doing it back in 2006 or 2007.

And what about your writing? Would it help you?

Nathan Bransford, a literary agent for Curtis Brown, has an excellent advice blog for writers that gets updated just about every weekday. Today he mentioned that he gets about five calls a day from people wanting to know how to get an agent. This makes me painfully embarrassed on behalf of the callers, and pitying of the callees.

To put it in context: calling an agent to find out how to get an agent is similar to calling an attractive man/woman up out of the blue and asking them how to get a date (with them or someone similarly attractive). If you have any inclination to do it, please don't.

You probably don't, though. I have a good feeling about you.

If you'd like to know how to get an agent, he explains it all right here, with convenient links in the right margin explaining more of the details (like how to write a good query).

• Go somewhere where you'll hear people having conversations and listen until you hear one that interests you
• Think about an event that interests you and imagine how it could have been different
• Think over your own history or your family history.
• Flip through an encyclopedia
• Read a book about a factual subject that interests you
• Combine aspects of two interesting people in your life
• Take any situation and ask yourself what would be the worst thing that could happen 
• Take a plot from a book or story or movie you've really liked and envision how it might play out in a very different setting, or with different characters. (Warning! Don't borrow feeling from books or movies: characters should feel and say things that you get from life, not things that you're used to hearing other people write about. Just ask yourself: Would a real person do that? Would someone really talk that way? We can make some allowance for artistic license, though.)

A few days ago a zebra came up to me and bit me. Just bit me. I live in Northern Vermont. We didn't happen to get a picture.

Now, you probably don't believe that, so let me shift gears for a moment and explain what this post is about.

Orson Scott Card, who is that rare combination of a person who can both write exceptionally well and teach writing exceptionally well, describes three key questions that are good to look out for in a reader's response to a story. I won't attempt to summarize or paraphrase the great information he gives on the subject, but do highly recommend his books Character and Viewpoint and How to Write Science Fiction and Fantasy to you. The short version is that these three key issues are understanding what's going on, believing it, and caring about it. ("Huh?", "Oh yeah?", and "So what?", respectively.)

This post is about believing. Just because something really happened doesn't make it believable, and just because it's believable to readers who don't know better doesn't make it realistic.

Back to the zebra: I really did get bit by a zebra this past Sunday. My son and I drove up from our home in Burlington, Vermont to Parc Safari, just across the border in Quebec. They have a drive-through safari where animals come up to you to be fed the food they sell at the entrance. They tell you not to feed the zebras, because they bite. Prudently heeding their advice, when a zebra came up to my window, I refused to feed it. I think that's why it bit me.

My son points out that I was trying to pet the zebra, but I hardly see how that has anything to do with anything.

Now do you believe that I was bit by a zebra? Because I actually was. I don't know if you believed it after that additional information or not, or if perhaps you have so much faith in me that you believed me at the beginning without any details (in which case bless you, kind soul!), but the fact of the matter is that the more detailed version was more believable than the less detailed version. Four of the main underpinnings of believability in fiction are confidence, inherent plausibility, willingness, and detail.

Confidence: If you are reading a new work by a writer whose previous works you know and love, you are much more likely to give that writer any kind of slack necessary to tell the story. If Stephen King opens a story with beetles crawling out someone's ears, most readers will accept that there are beetles crawling out of that person's ears without concern and read on. If an amateur writer whose writing is full of grammatical mistakes starts a story with beetles coming out of someone's ears, we're much more likely to say "Wait, how can beetles come out of somebody's ears? That just doesn't make any sense!" If you build up a good body of well-appreciated work, you may have to work less hard to get your readers to swallow the stories you're telling them.

Inherent plausibility: If someone writes about an accountant standing on a sidewalk, that's fairly easy to accept. If that same person writes about a living blob of intelligent pond scum standing on a sidewalk, that's a little harder to get past.

Willingness: Of course, if the reader just wants a good story and isn't in a critical mood, you can get a lot more by that reader with less work. Unfortunately, this is in the individual reader's hands rather than the writer's, so it's best to write for the skeptical and unwilling reader, since the willing reader won't be overly bothered by the detail.

However, there is one element of willingness over which you have control, which is how compelling your story is. If you introduce your pond scum creature in the midst of a tense scene in which it immediately becomes clear that the pond scum creature may be able to give your main character the name of his birth mother, the reader may care so much about the story that they will accept whatever they need to in order to continue seeing it unfold.

Detail: Detail is the thing over which you arguably have the most immediate control. If you really want to write a story about that pond scum, you can describe it as moving sluggishly, stretching and contracting like a cautious leech, a smell rising from it like dead fish and mowed grass, a thin layer of translucent bluish membrane holding all of it together. As it passes over a discarded cigarette, the cigarette hisses out. It makes a sound like a soaking wet towel being dragged over rock.

Those details aren't going to make everyone believe in the pond scum creature, but they'll up your numbers.

Remember that just because something really happened in your experience, unless it has also happened in the reader's experience, it's not necessarily believable to them. If I write a story about a man being bitten by a zebra and don't give some details to shore up plausibility and add detail, readers who have actually been bitten by zebras may have no trouble with that part of things, but readers who haven't have a good chance of objecting to it.

And there's the flip side: just because something's believable to many readers doesn't mean that it's actually plausible. Take for example making someone go unconscious by hitting them over the head. According to friends of mine with medical backgrounds, you cannot hit someone over the head hard enough to make them pass out without the possibility of doing significant permanent damage. We've all seen people knocked out hundreds of times, but for the great majority of us, only in fiction, TV, and movies.

"So?" you may say. "If the reader believes it, who cares?"

But of course we're not writing for just one reader, and any reader who knows that people can't be casually knocked out without the risk of serious damage are going to either think your character is a psychopath who doesn't care who dies just so long as he gets his caper finished, or think you the writer are kind of ignorant.

Therefore I strongly recommend never using fiction as a source of research about how things work in the world if you can help it. If you want to know about knocking people out, talk to a doctor or someone with a lot of training in personal combat. You'll win more readers and gain more confidence from the readers you already have ... believe me.

A writer friend/acquaintance whose work I quite like was discussing a short fiction project (the Daily Cabal, which is very, very short science fiction posted every weekday morning) today and said "For some reason I can't quite fathom, most of SF readers are also SF writers."

Titles can benefit a story in as many as five meaningful ways, only one of which is based on having read the story already. Therefore it tends to be a bad idea to use a title that becomes interesting only after reading the story (e.g. "Charlie"). In no particular order, titles can (and arguably should):

1. Intrigue someone into being curious about the story ("Something Wicked This Way Comes," The Da Vinci Code).

2. Give the reader an immediate and accurate sense of what kind of story is coming in terms of genre, mood etc. (I, Robot, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy).

3. Serve as an easily-remembered and easily-communicated label for the book when telling others about it (Dune, The Hobbit). An easily-communicated title is easy to remember, spell, and say, and is strongly connected to the story itself. It stands out: you remember it specifically rather than something like it.

4. Lend a sense of authority or poetry ("To the East, a Bright Star," The Once and Future King).

5. Be unlikely to be confused with other titles. This particularly makes one-word titles problematic unless the word is extremely unusual (Xenocide).

Caveats:

Ÿ         These rules don't apply in the same way to movies, in part because there are only a very limited number of movies out at a given time and most interested consumers are exposed to a poster and/or trailer for each, making the title less important except for item #3.

Ÿ         Also, many very successful books have "broken" these rules, because of course the book itself is more important than the title.

Ÿ         And of course it's debatable how many people will actually be influenced in any way by a title if they don't have another recommendation for the book. That said, some readers are intrigued by titles, and a title can be the difference between your book being looked at on a shelf or within online search results or disregarded with the all the other books the reader has never heard of.

Many writers, from beginners to established pros, seem to want to come up with titles that cleverly cap off or sum up the story. They'll write a story about a magical cape and call it "The Cape," or a story in which the secret is that the protagonist is really dead and call it "Unsettled." These types of titles often lose the opportunity to ensnare the reader's interest and advertise what they're about.

Titles are much more important for books than for short stories, since a person who is browsing for a book online or in a bookstore, or who glimpses the title in a list, has the opportunity to find out about the book and perhaps buy it. Short stories, by contrast, are usually available only in groups within magazines, anthologies, and collections, and so individual titles are unlikely to have much opportunity to attract readers to buy the work.

In terms of learning to write good titles, I highly recommend exercising this part of your brain wherever possible by using good titles for e-mail subjects, forum discussion titles, boring reports you put together for work, etc. It's a rare situation where anyone will be bothered by you slapping a magnificent title on an otherwise dull report or a quick e-mail, and the more you work to come up with titles the stronger that facility will be.

There's an old and revered legend that circulates among science fiction and fantasy writers, and it goes like this: "A lot of people won't read science fiction just because it's labelled 'science fiction,' so publishers call some science fiction 'mainstream' and then people will read it, but it's really science fiction." Optionally, the legend may include "Authors who won't call their work science fiction are selling out."

The same thing is said about fantasy; I'll deal with science fiction here for convenience, but the same arguments apply.

As you can probably tell from the title of this entry, I don't exactly agree with this idea, and I think the exact reason the ghetto is a myth leads to an important thing for writers (at least science fiction and fantasy writers) to understand, of which more in a moment.

What books are we talking about here? Margaret Atwood (for instance, The Handmaid's Tale) and Kurt Vonnegut (Slaughterhouse Five, for example) get a lot of mentions in this context. More recent examples include Maria Doria Russell (The Sparrow) and Gregory Macguire (Wicked).

Here's how people seem to look at this: if a story is set in the future (like The Handmaid's Tale) or contains science fictional elements (like the interstellar flight in The Sparrow), it's science fiction. If science fiction is defined solely by subject matter, that makes sense. But is that the most useful definition of science fiction? I'm big on "useful."

Think about it this way: as a reader, which of the following is more important for you to know about a book?

A) Exactly what subject matter it contains, or

B) Whether or not you're likely to enjoy it.

Or as a writer, which of the following do you care about more?

A) A taxonomic classification of your book based on an analysis of story and setting elements, or

B) Who will buy your book.

In both cases, we have a choice between A, which gives us rigid categories that take into account only certain aspects of a book and B, which gives us information about what books are good for what people.

A and B are not equivalent. Putting a spaceship into a story doesn't necessarily make it appealing to all science fiction readers, and for many readers, how a story is told counts for a lot more than what props show up in it or when it's set.

I'll use the term "mainstream science fiction" here to describe stories that contain elements we usually associate with science fiction but that are written for a general audience instead of primarily for science fiction readers.

So, recently a writer friend and I were discussing Mary Doria Russell's The Sparrow, which I'd call "mainstream science fiction," and Hyperion, by Dan Simmons, a novel that's clearly labelled and read as science fiction. My friend asked what I thought made The Sparrow mainstream science fiction and Hyperion genre science fiction. My answer was this:

1) The Sparrow focuses on the story and characters rather than the speculative elements. The speculative elements are background rather than foreground.

2) The Sparrow presents speculative elements gently, in ways that mainstream readers find easier to adjust to. No terms are thrown out without indications of what they mean. No speculative elements are introduced simply for coolness factor: they are streamlined to the essentials required to tell the story.

I readily admit that these aren't hard-and-fast distinctions, but they're meaningful distinctions to readers.

Here's the opening of The Sparrow:

On December 7, 2059, Emilio Sandoz was released from the isolation ward of Salvator Mundi Hospital in the middle of the night and transported in a bread van to the Jesuit Residence at Number 5 Borgo Santo Spirito, a few minutes' walk across St. Peter's Square from the Vatican.

And the opening of Hyperion:

The Hegemony Consul sat on the balcony of his ebony spaceship and played Rachmaninoff's Prelude in C-sharp Minor on an ancient but well-maintained Steinway while great, green saurian things surged and bellowed in the swamps below.

In Hyperion, we're supposed to take a variety of speculative elements (the existence of some sort of Hegemony; big, green monsters; and a spaceship with a balcony) in stride.

In The Sparrow, the only immediate speculative element is the date, and that is immediately comprehensible to everyone. Russell failed to take the initiative to come up with a more plausible future vehicle than a bread van or to create a brand new religious order. Throughout the rest of the first chapter, there is only a reference to a mission to a place (the reader will probably conclude that it's a planet) called Rakhat, and a mention in passing of the fairly non-speculative effects of travelling at near light speed.

Hyperion has several times as many speculative elements on the first page as The Sparrow has in the entire first chapter. Actually, Hyperion has more speculative elements in the first sentence than The Sparrow has in its entire first chapter!

The essence of mainstream science fiction as compared to genre science fiction is how it expects its readers to deal with speculative elements, their tolerance and ability to grok them. So mainstream vs. genre is a meaningful distinction that is useful to readers, because it helps them select books that are or are not suited to their tastes. Some genre readers aren't interested in mainstream fiction because it doesn't have enough wild stuff. Some mainstream readers aren't interested in genre fiction because it asks them to do things with their brains that they don't like to do and that their brains aren't currently good at.

Why is this important to writers? Because while every book you write has to be a book you love, you also have to know who else out there in the world will read it. If you want to reach a larger audience, you have to tell your story in a way that they will be willing to read. If you want to reach science fiction readers, you need to tell the story in the way that they want to hear it told. And these are basic writing choices rather than simply labels slapped on by publishers.

From here we get into trickier questions, like the Harry Potter stories. In a sense, Harry Potter stories are clearly fantasy: they throw out a lot of magical things and don't explain everything. But they still don't demand the reader to juggle ideas in the way the usual adult fantasy novel these days does, in part because there's no attempt to justify the magical system. Thus the Harry Potter books manage to be mainstream books in the same way a science fiction movie like Independence Day, which doesn't require audiences to imagine anything radically new, is a mainstream movie.

But there's a subtler point here, which is that if you can make the payoff high enough, you can ask more of your readers (or viewers). Many kids and adults who wouldn't have been interested in reading a fantasy story under normal circumstances simply got so much enjoyment out of Harry Potter that they were willing to accept his impossible world, just as many of Michael Crichton's readers will sit still for discussions of reconstructing DNA because later in the story, they get to see characters they care about running from a ravenous T-Rex.

The lessons I take from all this are as follows, then. Rule one: write a story in a way that readers are willing to read it. Rule two: if you can write a story that fascinates people, you can break rule one and any number of other rules. Rules aren't made to be broken, but you could argue that in writing, they are made to be transcended.

Recently I was e-mailed this question:

My daughter is looking into [a particular college writing program] because she would like to become a fiction writer, and their school, in her opinion, is where she needs to attend to accomplish her goal. I, on the other hand, feel that she doesn't need to go into loads of debt to a major college to learn how to be a writer.... am I wrong? What would your advice to her be?

Here's the answer I gave:

Well, it certainly depends on the situation. It's very difficult to make a living writing fiction. In our writing group, out of about 80 active members only a handful have yet been able to go full-time, and generally this was after at least a few years of writing seriously and constantly. Many more of us have made professional fiction sales but are nowhere near being able to live off the proceeds. Short stories typically pay so little that the income can't possibly add up to a full-time living; $350 for a story, for instance, is a good pro rate, and there are a limited number of markets that pay even that (although there are a very few that pay much more). So writing fiction for a living basically means writing novels. First novel sales generally net well under $10,000 for the advance--$5,500 would be typical, and the writer's agent gets 15% of that--so even selling a novel is only a baby step on the road to a full-time fiction writing career--although if that novel is exceptionally good it might get a higher advance and/or earn royalties above the advance. This is, however, the exception rather than the rule. Later novels begin to net more money if earlier ones do fairly well. And first novels are extremely hard to sell, even for talented writers. And those first novels sold aren't necessarily the first novel written; it's very common for a good writer to take two or three or more novels before they've written one that will sell. It takes both talent and a lot of practice to get it right for the vast majority of people.