lizvogel

I really should post more about Narrativity here. It was excellent again this year, as always. Some behind-the-scenes drama made it far more stressful and exhausting for me that it needed to be, but that got resolved pretty smoothly once I could address it in person, and it didn't spill over into anyone's enjoyment of the con. (And please ghod, we should be done with that particular flavor of drama from now on. A group of people all pulling together in the same direction is a beautiful thing.) I'm always too tired once I get home to do more than scrawl a few brief lines, if that, and by the time I recover it's been long enough that the con-impetus is past. But I'll see what I can do here:

As usual, the best part was the people, both old friends and new. One of the new folks was a long-time friend of the con who was finally able to attend, and turned out to be even awesomer in person than he was in email; another was a serendipitous find in the "smoking lounge" (aka the hotel parking lot) who turned out to be very much One Of Us and was promptly sucked into the rest of the con. And many other nifty new faces who I'm hoping to see next year, along with the standard crowd.

Probably my favorite moment was hanging out in the hotel lobby... some evening... (I was a bear of even less brain than usual this year)... with S and L and K (one of the nifty newbies) discussing my "weird clown story", which turns out to not have at all the problem I thought it did, but some other problem entirely that was expertly mimicking the first kind, and branching off into visual vs. non-visual readers and kinetic vs. visual understanding of one's location in space, and all kinds of brains-are-neat-and-also-weird stuff. This, my friends, is what Narrativity is for.

I also tested a theory. I have talked many times, here and elsewhere, about needing to learn how to Do Plot. (This is different than understanding plotting in general; I chose those words deliberately.) Well, one of our panels was "Help Steve Write A Book", which sounded an awful lot like what I'm talking about when I talk about plot. And... it wasn't, quite, because he comes at a book, or at least this book, in a very different way than I do, but the process was similar enough in principle that I could apply it to my own struggles. And yes, that. That is what I'm looking for: something that functions the same way a big room full of people all focused on helping figure out how to make this particular story go the way the author wants it to does.

IOW, I need a writers group. Which sucks, because I've been trying to find/build one of those for long enough that I've pretty much given up on ever getting what I need, but it's good to identify, at least.

Writers need other writers. The stereotype of the hermit writer in their attic churning out pages may exist in a few, isolated cases, but for most writers, some like-minded folks to bounce ideas off of is somewhere between incredibly helpful and vitally necessary.

And one of the things Narrativity does is help people make those connections. That's pretty fabulous.

I realized something last night that goes a long way toward explaining why I'm having trouble getting any of my mystery ideas off the ground.

1. Red Herrings

Red herrings are necessary to a traditional mystery, the suspects and leads that seem promising at first but ultimately prove to be unrelated (or only tangentially related) to the crime. Often other crimes are revealed in the process of investigating them; the dead man's wife didn't kill him, but she's been acting secretive because she's having an affair or embezzling from the company she works for. The embezzlement has nothing whatsoever to do with the murder; at most it might be her alibi because she was at the office after hours fudging the books when he was killed.

I've also been known to use "red herring" to describe a plot thing I hate to write, but have reluctantly accepted the necessity for: the things the main character tries that don't succeed. (I should probably come up with a better term for it.) They're necessary to build tension; if the spy tries to hack the computers, and fails, then tries to finagle information out of the secretary, and fails, and then finally uses her best friend's daughter to pose as an intern and plant a bug, it's much more dramatic than if the spy just shoves the daughter into danger in the first place. All fine and well, but my brain knows those first two things aren't going to work, and it resents spending the time and effort on portraying them.

A mystery, therefore, is largely composed of things I hate to write. Dramatically necessary things, I don't dispute that, but that doesn't make me like them. And since I'm an extremely intuitive writer, what my brain doesn't want to write comes very hard to me.

This part I kind of already knew, but it ties in with the part that really struck me last night. (After watching the end of Magpie Murders, for those who like tracking influences.)

2. Characters

A traditional murder mystery requires a fairly large cast of characters, because you need multiple people who had reason to want the victim dead. Most of those reasons will ultimately be set aside by alibis, by not being a strong enough motive, or by other factors, rendering them irrelevant to the solution of the mystery. They're distractions, effectively.

In any other genre but a mystery, irrelevant distractions are a bad thing. They're something you want to cut, or not write them in the first place.

Now, characters are normally not a problem for me. Characters routinely wander into my head and set up shop, unbidden. If they're main characters, they kvetch until I sit down and write their story. If they're comparatively minor characters, they normally don't show up until I'm writing along, and then they appear when I need them. The operative phrase there is need them -- that is, they show up when they're necessary to the plot. The main line of the plot, that is, or as a characterization or setting tool that's integral to the story. They don't just wander in, give voice to something that ultimately doesn't matter, and then wander out. My brain simply doesn't generate characters who don't have a useful function, or if it does, it edits them out before my consciousness ever sees them.

In a science fiction adventure, or a spy novel, or a romance, this is a good thing. You don't need to hear about the hotel clerk's problems with his girlfriend, if his only function in the story is to demonstrate the hotel's low standards; he's not really a character, he's just mobile set dressing. The rich man's poor sister, who resents his success and her poverty, doesn't have anything to do with the spy who's burgling secret documents from the safe, and bringing up her issues in the middle of the theft would make no sense at all.

But if the rich man is the murder victim, then his sister's letter berating him for not helping with his nephew's school fees may be a vital clue. And when her handwriting turns out not to be a match for the fake suicide note, that doesn't make her whole sub-story an irrelevant distraction that should be cut, it makes her a red herring that is now resolved, which is a valid and necessary thing to a good mystery.

Most of the characters in a mystery are "red herrings" in my own idiosyncratic terminology, as well as in the more commonly accepted meaning. My brain generates characters for me without conscious effort, but my brain also doesn't waste time generating things I don't need. Therefore, I'm sitting at the front end of a mystery not knowing what characters I'm going to need because they'll come to me when I need them, but I'll need them to produce the clue that they're tied to, but I don't know what that clue is because it comes out of the characters' relationships, but I don't know what those relationships are because I don't have the characters yet, which I won't have until I have the clue.... And here we see the difficulty.

Characters come easy to me, but I don't just sit around noodling over a character and making up all his friends and enemies and relations and rivals whether I need them or not, and muddling through their histories and what happened last week or ten years ago that they've never really gotten over. My writing brain is much more efficient than that. And I'm beginning to wonder if it's that very efficiency that's causing me problems.

A comment elsewhere by Deep Lurker nailed something so fundamental that I don't think I'd ever fully realized it before, when brainstorming story ideas and rejecting what seem like perfectly reasonable suggestions:

When I have a Cool Idea as a story-starter, I really don’t want it to become the Story Problem. It might be the Cool Solution to the problem, but I don’t want it to be the problem itself, and I really don’t want “Something goes wrong with Cool Idea” to be the problem. Instead, I need something else adjacent to be the problem.

This isn't every story idea I get... but it's a lot of them.

For example, I have this idea for a novel about a war criminal who joins an FTL colonization ship in order to make a fresh start. That's an intriguing character and a good scenario, but it's not a plot. And the thing is, I don't want it to be the plot; doubtless his past will come out at some point, and it's certainly going to influence some events, but whatever the plot is (and I have no idea, yet), it's not about his past. It's about something else entirely; at most, something "adjacent".

I'm still processing how to incorporate this into my ongoing quest for plot discussion, but I wanted to get the concept down for reference.

( More spoilerish rambling about unpublished novel )

This probably means I'm asking the wrong questions.

I wonder what the right one is.

So, here I sit, some few chapters/15,000 words or so from the end of the novel. I know, in broad strokes, what still needs to happen: they find the bad guy's contact and interrogate him/her, the rebels do that thing I've been thinking about since I realized I had a sub-plot, the second both helps and gets in the way of the first, etc., etc.

And I've got no words.

This can mean a number of things, including that I've taken a wrong turn (don't think so, in this case), that there's some necessary element missing (quite likely), or that I'm utterly exhausted by various Life and can't brain (pretty much certain). The missing element requires brainstorming (if I don't just want to wait for it to appear, and I don't), so I've spent the afternoon playing with post-it notes, and organizing the remaining snippets I'm hoping to use, and reading plot-related articles. So far I've gotten that there's a bit I set up that will come in handy for a plot twist -- don't know what -- and there's a character I set up earlier that I meant to use again and haven't, and maybe he can provide the solution to the twist -- don't know how. And I've still got no words.

I remember something similar at about this point with the Haley novel, where I knew what happened and couldn't make it go. Maybe I should look up when that was, and see if I uncharacteristically made any journal entries that shed some light on the process.

The Oblique Strategies offering for this is "Don't be afraid of things because they're easy to do".

So maybe I should just go ahead and write the MC and compatriot chasing after the contact, which seems like it'll be too easy, and see what pops in to trip them up.

After a nap or three, that is. |)

(Whattaya know, for once I've actually managed to do the 'nother post!)

So, I've been flailing pretty hard on the Haley novel lately. I've worked out the new plot satisfactorily, for definitions of "plot" that include where the characters start and where they end up. But as I've said before, there's knowing what happens, and then there's knowing what happens.

And I've been stressing a lot over what happens. Trying to work out the intricate puzzle-piece steps of getting from E to Z. Trying, in short, to write a plot-driven book, or rest-of-book. And I've realized that I'm barking up not just the wrong tree, but possibly an entire wrong grove, if not outright forest.

Some things to remember, for the rest of this book and perhaps future ones:

1. When in doubt, play to my strengths. I'm good at character stuff, perhaps especially angsty character stuff. Intricate puzzle-piece plot, not so much. And I've been so focused on making the replacement plot work that I lost sight of anything else. This was never meant to be a plot-driven book, I've no desire to write all-plot-no-character, and let's face it, anybody who's looking for a Christie-esque puzzle will have given up long before the end of Chapter 7. I need to focus on the characters; while the plot has to hold together, it is primarily a framework to hang the character stuff on.

A practical demonstration: I had two options for a minor point in the scene I was working on the other night. I stopped and considered: which way would make my MC suffer more? And 900 words just fell out of my fingers.

2. Real mysteries don't do what I'm trying to do, either. This part of the book is essentially a mystery plot; my character has to figure out what the bad guy is up to, and how all these other people connect to it. This, I've been telling myself, mostly involves my character looking at a lot of accounting records and similar tedious legwork details. How on earth do you make that interesting?

Answer: You don't.

I've been studying mystery plots a bit lately. Mostly by watching Remington Steele, a task which is its own reward. Remington Steele is an all-around good show; while I primarily watch it for character, it also has solid mystery plots. Frequently -- I'd hazard more than half the time -- key clues to the mystery are found via the DMV, tax and financial records, and other equally exciting database searches. And yet, these are virtually never shown on screen. Oh, occasionally we'll see Laura surrounded by stacks of paper or Steele struggling with the computer, but even those are brief glimpses; we don't see the process. The vital information is presented by the simple expedient of one character telling it to another. (Mildred especially does a lot of this. A lot.)

And this is a thing I've been really struggling with in the current WIP. My MC needs to be looking up this sort of info, and since I've been doing spy-procedural stuff in other sections, I felt like I ought to show her doing it. But while I know generally what's in these sources, I don't know what they look like, so the usual descriptive tactics aren't available to me. And there's still the issue that even the cleverest wordsmithing can only do so much to make a computer search sound cool.

So the solution is: Don't describe it. Just present the end results to the reader, perhaps with some reported thought about how hard/easy it was to find. It feels like cheating, but it's cheating with a long and honorable tradition behind it.

3. Characters can talk to each other. The other significant thing in the above is that a character reveals the discovered-off-screen information by telling it to another character. This works great if you have a detective duo (or trio). It's trickier if you have a character flying solo. You can always have a character talk to themselves, of course, either outright or as reported thought, but it works a lot better if they've got someone to explain things to. (Cue every Doctor Who companion ever.) And my poor MC is flying solo for much of this story.

I was already subconsciously leaning toward addressing this: there's a scene where the MC's boss passes along a fistful of leads, several of which I'd tucked in before I quite knew what I was going to do with them. And to keep other factors balanced, I was setting my MC up to have to work with, hmm, not the antagonist, exactly, but another player whom she for very good reasons doesn't trust, but, for equally good reasons, has to keep at least somewhat involved. (Some of those reasons are the same reason, in fact.) So there's a question of how much she'll willingly tell this person, which limits their utility as a reveal-to-the-reader sounding board... but there are interesting character things I can do to work around that. Which takes me right back to #1, not coincidentally.

Add these up, and I might just be able to get a finished novel out of this thing.

Oh, yes, and:

4. Get the damn coffee, already. Yes, money, calories, whatever. Bought the double mocha?: 900 words, easily. Didn't really "need" the mocha?: struggling to write anything. You do the math.