Metaphors for writing

When I first started writing, I remember remarking to someone that it felt like what I've assumed learning to juggle would feel like. There were all these things to keep track of at once: plot, subplot, character, dialogue, description, showing vs. telling, active voice vs. passive...

As a metaphor, I think that's still pretty accurate (even if I've since realized that you can focus on one of those aspects at a time -- that's part of the point of revisions) but I realized this week that I have another one as well: writing is like assembling a puzzle.

My current project is Karen Miller's fault. I'd written a fanfic, a short story I'd done to satisfy a question I'd long had about a particular situation a man and woman might find themselves in. (In this case, the fandom was secondary to the question of the story.) And after reading it, Karen told me she thought I could/should turn it into a novel.

I'd been assuming I'd write a contemporary novel (the 'write what you read' isn't very helpful for me, since the only genre I don't read is horror) and this would have to be fantasy or historical. I chose fantasy because it was a better fit.

With a fantasy story, which comes first -- the world or the characters? I decided first to focus on the worldbuilding, convinced that whoever the characters turned out to be, they would be heavily influenced by the world they inhabited. (We're heavily influenced by our backgrounds -- why wouldn't fictional characters be?) Building a world that was sufficiently different from the fandom I started out in then took a while.

The heroine fell into place pretty easily, given the overall story idea and the worldbuilding. But the hero has been more of a question. On the plotter/pantzer scale, I'm somewhat of a 'plotzer' -- I start out knowing the characters, how the story begins and ends...and nothing at all of the middle. So I find myself thinking about the hero and realizing that he could go this way, or he could go that way, (in terms of his goals and motivations, and the conflicts that grow out of them) or, possibly, even a third way. And whichever one I choose will drastically affect the story. It will still start the same and end the same, but...different story.

And that's what I was thinking when I realized I was approaching the whole thing as a puzzle. If the hero is like this, it will fit with this piece of the plot in that way; if he's more this other way, it will cause the subplot to go in this direction...

Nothing really earthshaking in any of that from a thoughts-on-writing perspective, though it illustrates, I think, how very different one writer's approach can be to things like plot and characters.

Oh, and I'm getting closer to figuring out who the hero is. I like puzzles -- did I mention that?

Writers who don't read

Another blog I've been following is fantasy author Glenda Larke's:

http://glendalarke.blogspot.com/

In today's post, she addresses a (presumably fairly recent) phenomenon of people who want to be writers, but who don't read. Glenda says many wise things in response, but the one thing I'd like to add is that I don't think people who don't read can be good writers.

Maybe these people love stories (presumably visual ones from TV and the film industry, since TV is such a fixture in so many lives) and assume writing a novel is somehow easier than writing a screenplay. Or perhaps they're part of that percentage of people who think authors are all automatically rich, and how hard can it be to write a novel, after all?

This theme even came up this week in a library based comic strip I read, Unshelved:

http://www.unshelved.com/

In the past week's strips, a mother drags her teen son to the library, because he doesn't like to read. The librarian tries mightily to interest him in one genre or the other, and fails. When he finally asks, 'but why don't you like to read?" the teen reveals he doesn't have the time -- he's too busy editing his manuscript. (Which, according to the librarian, is 'really good.')

I don't buy it. I don't think you can develop the necessary facility with words that writing requires if you're not actually reading them. It's that simple.

But perhaps a caveat is in order: one NYT bestselling author I know of is dyslexic. She types her stories, but has an assistant check for misspellings and typos, and while I think she does read, most of her story intake comes via audio books. But I'm certain she considers herself a reader.

So...thoughts? Comments? Can you write a novel without being a reader and loving books?

Non-fiction (academic) vs. fiction writing

I've always accepted that there are differences between fiction and non-fiction writing (beyond topic) but it only recently occurred to me how important being aware of those distinctions is.

A few weeks ago, someone recommended the book, Getting the words right: 39 ways to improve your writing, by Theodore A. Rees Cheney. It's apparently been in print for decades, but I found a recent (2005) edition at the library.

It has three sections: Reduce, Rearrange, and Reword. I've been working my way through the first section, thinking about all the ways there are of using concision to make sentences more powerful.

But this, on reducing with metaphors and analogies, caught me:

One thing our education has taught us well -- perhaps too well -- is that, when writing nonfiction, we must qualify statements of fact. You must, in the name of truth (accuracy), make it clear that what you've written is not always true under all situations or for all time. You must qualify the statement, then and there, by telling the reader what all the limitations are. This makes for good research, because anyone who reads your work later will know precisely what you meant. The trouble with such qualification-laden writing is that it makes for slow reading -- it requires the long attention span of a highly motivated, dedicated reader. When the habit of qualifying is carried over into other kinds of writing, such as fiction, it doesn't work. (p. 17-18, 2005 ed.)

He then gives some examples such as writing 'the plane was like a bird of prey' rather than the stronger 'the plane was a bird of prey,' as well as listing some common words or phrases that frequently accompany over-qualification in fiction: seem to, apparently, looks as thought, looks like, it would appear that.

This is probably making me sound dreadfully thick that this was such a revelation. As I said at the beginning, it's not that I didn't know there were differences between the two styles of writing, but I don't think it would have occurred to me that over-qualifying was one of them, nor the degree to which I do it.

But I do. Even when I'm solidly in a character's head, I'm more likely to have her think, "It seemed as if the world was ending'' rather than, "the world was ending." I don't even think about it. Deep inside me is the Rigid Rule that 'all things must be crystal clear at all times.' Not for a moment should I risk the reader wondering whether the world is really ending, or if the character only thinks it is.

I remember being confused by a line in one of my favorite childhood novels, where the author used the phrase 'he was a blind and deaf man' to describe a character that was shocked, and I spent a lot of time trying to figure out when he'd gone blind and deaf and why none of the other characters seemed to care before I finally realized it was a figure of speech.

Another thing which plays into this is personality. I'm a very precise person, at least in my speech. When I'm describing something at work, I'm more likely to say, 'it appears that...' rather than just stating what's going on. It's always important to me that people know I'm stating my opinion rather than a general truth. But it should be my characters' voices on the page, not mine.

After reading some of Cheney's examples, though, it's easy to see how much better fiction flows without the over-qualifying. So now I'm on the hunt for all the 'it seems to' and 'it looked like' phrases in my writing, as well as any other ways a lifetime of academic writing is messing up my fiction.