Category: Writing

Different approaches to writing

National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) is coming up pretty fast here, again. This will be my 10th year participating – I haven’t missed a year since I first tried (and won, in 8 days and after two false starts, not to mention taking on the role of Phoenix ML & getting press coverage in 2 cities) in 2002. (No, I haven’t been an ML since; in 2003 I was out-of-region, and when I came back in 2004 Phoenix had 2 good MLs) I’m not sure I’ll be anywhere near following the “rules” of NaNoWriMo this year, though I rarely do, because the writing project in front of me, as I keep mentioning, is a dystopian duology (with vampires) which I’ve been thinking about and researching/studying-for all year – that’s two books to write, I don’t know how long each will be (probably longer than 50k words apiece), and it doesn’t particularly matter to me whether I begin and end writing them in November.

Anyway, as happens in NaNoWriMo circles as November approaches, a familiar meme has arisen in recent discussions with friends and family members; the idea of pantser vs. plotter (or pantser vs. planner – interestingly, I like both plotter and planner as words, but not pantser at all, so having a choice between two frustrating formations is worse than having no choice at all?). For those of you not in the know, this is a question of whether one writes “by the seat of their pants” or one plans/plots out their book ahead of time.

My sister, who was recently named one of the MLs of the Phoenix region (after only 1 year’s participation!), attended a pre-planning meeting with several other Phoenix NaNoWriMo participants a couple of weeks ago. One of the things which frustrated her was their assertion (the other writers in the group) that if you weren’t planning out every little detail of your books ahead of time, down to a minute level, you were a “pantser”. My sister doesn’t feel like a pantser; she has a plot laid out, outlines her chapters, and has a firm grasp on what her book is about, who the characters are, and what they’ve got to go through. She and I agree that a pantser doesn’t really have all those things. A real pantser probably doesn’t have any of those things. I’ve done that several times, myself, sitting down in front of a blank page/screen with literally no plan -no characters, no plot, no setting, no theme, nothing at all but the blank canvas of the page in front of me and my imagination behind me- and watched a book flow through me and onto the page as if by magic. When it works, it works splendidly. I often, in that situation, find myself startled, surprised, and delighted as I read the words a sentence or two behind where my hands are working and learn what happens next only after I’ve written it. In fact, in my most-planned novels, the full outline for the book and the plot and the characters and the conflicts, the chapter-by-chapter breakdown of events and pacing … has all fit on the front of one piece of paper… but has been a hundred times more planning than the books I’ve “pantsed”, with structure, length, pacing, and character arcs all carefully crafted ahead of time and the rest of the story and details fleshed in as I wrote. But I always knew where I was and where I needed to be and in how many words and what route to take, and I considered myself a planner, even if the exact words to get there, the characters’ exact thoughts and dialog and a lot of the specifics were unknown to me until I wrote them.

Which leads me around to what I wanted to post about tonight; I think the line between pantsers and planners is really a false division. Divided that way, it certainly isn’t black and white, and the division isn’t particularly helpful or useful. I know that part of my sister’s reaction to the other writers’ views (and the way they express those views) is because they believe that plotting is superior to pantsing, that their way of plotting is the right way, and everyone else isn’t as good at writing. I’ve certainly met plenty of writers who hold similar views, in my time. It’s a position I believe is artificially supported by the weight of words about writing and how to write which have been published (I include blogging as publishing, here), in that the plotters and the planners, the ones who have a formula, a method, or a list of rules or guidelines they follow, are the ones who can most easily document those ideas about “how to write” – whereas the pantsers, especially the real pansters like I sometimes am, when they try to tell you (or write down) “how to write” have nothing to say, or only something vague, quasi-mystical, and often poorly understood (both by the one trying to share and those trying to learn). So the plotters write more and write more often about “how to write”, and what they write is easier to simply follow/obey, and over time it is this disparity in documentation which has given the plotters the veneer of being “right”. And which has, thus, created an us/them mentality and needless strife amongst authors who feel they aren’t really authors, or aren’t doing things “right” or don’t belong, somehow.

Here’s what I think is a better way of looking at it, a better question to address what is basically the same idea, but which I hope paints a more full picture and which paints different ways of storytelling as equally valid. This is not the complete picture, but consider: Are you engineering a story, or are you growing a story?

When I write, I’m growing a story. Sometimes I’ll build a lattice (an outline) to give the story the support it needs to grow in a particular direction, but the real shape of the story is not something under my direct/conscious control. I usually get to pick the seeds from which the story grows, but the stories then grow and change and thrive (or wither) according to their own designs. My job is to give the story a healthy environment in which to grow, to give it the characters and settings (and conflicts, et cetera) it requires, to prune it here and there, and mostly to stay out of its way and enjoy watching it unfold and expand according to its natural beauty.

Other writers, especially toward the more precise end of the plotting spectrum, prefer to engineer a story. Before they begin writing they create a detailed schematic (outlines, chapter details and synopses, notes, and more), a parts list (characters, usually with full biographies, settings, props and gadgets, et cetera), planning committee approval (careful, detailed world-building, sometimes writing/researching centuries of history and family lineages and architectural details of buildings and drawing/finding maps), and on and on so that, when the time comes to finally begin writing, nothing will be left to question. Often these writers are carefully engineering their stories to fit a very specific set of guidelines, ranging from economic viability in traditional publishing markets and established genre conventions to trying to express a particular political point of view or express a theme which is important to them.

When growing a story from the seeds of the theme and genre and characters and settings of your choice, there’s always the possibility that things won’t go as planned: That the book will be too long, or too short, to be considered by traditional publishers. That it won’t strictly adhere to the established conventions of a single genre, and will have trouble finding an audience because of it. That the characters will do unexpected things, take the story in unexpected directions, introduce new themes and come up with an ending you never imagined. Sometimes it turns out wonderful, sometimes you can get a publishing deal, or find an audience, or express a theme you didn’t even realize you cared so much about, in spite of all the randomness and unpredictability of growing a story. Other times you wish you were a story-engineer, because they at least seem to have some real control over their stories.

I can’t write as much, or as well, or as accurately, about those who engineer their stories, since I usually don’t. As I said earlier, my most-planned books have had little more than a lattice pointing the right direction and a few sketches guiding the placement of the seeds; when I try to engineer a story, or really even consider engineering a story, I get a little sick. (Nowhere near as bad as when I try to engage in Marketing; just a little … unwell.) Planning out every little thing, every scene in every chapter, every action, interaction, motivation and development, knowing it all in advance… just doesn’t work for me. (It occurs to me that the same is true, generally, of my life.) So I’ll not attempt it. There are already a lot of words out there about how to engineer a story, and what you’ll get when you do.

I’m just suggesting that the pantser/plotter division doesn’t really fit as well as that between engineering a story and growing a story. (Though there are positions even beyond those two, in this shape; the real pantser is probably more exploring a story; wandering around sniffing wildflowers, observing the shape of wild stories in their natural habitat, not really gardening or growing, and certainly not designing and constructing, but discovering and observing.) Every method of getting to your stories is a good one, as long as the result is a story told by you in the way which was right for you. Don’t let anyone try to get you down about being a grower of stories, or an engineer, or a wandering explorer. Embrace who you are and get good at it.

Remember, you won’t get any better at gardening by practicing drafting engineering schematics, and you won’t get any better at requisitioning parts and getting past the planning committee by wandering in a field of wildflowers. Try different things out, figure out what fits, and commit.

Piling on the challenges

Well, I started. Interestingly, I started work on my new interactive comic project the same way I began work on The Second Untrue Trilogy, last year: in Vegas, while my wife was attending an educators conference… I had three days where, during conference hours (roughly 8-4), I had almost literally no distractions from my work and nothing else I needed to accomplish and virtually no internet access, and I started from a blank page on a project I expect to take a huge chunk of time and effort. The final aspect of The Second Untrue Trilogy’s work wasn’t completed until almost a full year after it began, with the posting of the final episode of the audio version of Book Six on Podiobooks.com, and as I expect to explain in this post, the project I’ve just begun will probably take me even longer.

By the end of the first day, I had basically nailed down the core idea and the story structure I wanted to use, as well as some detailed characters and settings, some of them well-visualized for the comic. I had ideas about exactly how the possibilities of multi-touch interaction combined with some limited animation and the infinite canvas could be used to more fully immerse the reader in the story while also being invaluable to conveying the inner lives of the characters as well as the exterior spaces which represent such a significant part of the protagonist’s journey. The next two days were spent filling in the story details, outlining, doing research on recent history and on interstellar physics, plus some preliminary sketching, and by the time Mandy was done with her final session I had a plan for every “page” of the comic, good ideas about the “panels” they’ll each be composed of, and excellent ideas about the transitions / interactions between them. Continue reading Piling on the challenges

A possible new direction

Something which has occurred to me recently, as I’ve been thinking about my relationship with books, writing, and art; that now might be the time for me to get back to working on the sorts of interactive storytelling (and/or comics) which I haven’t attempted in the last six years or so, but which I often think of. This would require me to both get my mind back into a state where it thinks programmatically and also to teach myself a new programming language or two (most obviously Objective-C, since most of my ideas are for iOS apps). It probably also calls for me to spend a lot of time working on my drawing/illustration skills, whether for comics or for most of the apps I’ve been thinking of developing, lately. I haven’t seriously worked on any programming (save basic web development) or on drawing any comics (or art anything like comics) in the same six years… Realistically, I haven’t done any serious programming (certainly no standalone applications) since high school. I’m sure I’ll be reasonably able to get back into the swing of things, and then to implementing some of the ideas I’ve been having lately.
Continue reading A possible new direction

Showing, more [Updated]

In the post I wrote this morning I began to explain about my experiences with and views on the idea of “Show, don’t tell.” Then it was time to go to sleep, for me, or I’d probably have continued writing. I certainly continued thinking about the subject, as I drifted off to sleep. Here’s a bit more on the subject. Continue reading Showing, more [Updated]

Showing, peril

Several adventure stories and thrillers have found their way into my reading, lately. In the lead up to writing Cheating, Death as I was increasing my reading (with some focus on reading zombie novels) I read quite a few popular thrillers. I’d had an inkling before that I don’t like thrillers, but reading several of them in a row solidly confirmed it. In the years since I’ve been thinking more and more about what I like and don’t like about books, but also about how books are written. I’ve mentioned it here before, but that’s something I hadn’t much considered before the last year or two; the structure, style, and intentions of the books I read. Prior to writing Forget What You Can’t Remember, I didn’t think much about them in the books I wrote, either. I’ve been beginning to identify some specific things about most (not all) thrillers and adventure stories I don’t enjoy, and key among them is the ever-mounting, ever-present peril required in every scene and sequence.

I’ve seen other writers, and people giving advice to writers, describe in detail the absolute requirement of this ridiculous, frustrating, and annoying feature in all fiction. Every scene must have challenges to overcome, they say at the less-ridiculous end of this ridiculous religion. In thrillers and adventure stories, those challenges must be thrilling in order to engage the reader (so they say) and as the story progresses, each thrilling challenge must me more thrilling and challenging than those which came before it. In modern books (and other media; I bemoan the same thing on TV and in the movies), I have found, that this leads very rapidly to quite ridiculous levels of peril, usually in parallel with stakes so high as to be totally out of scale with the capabilities of the characters involved.

((For example, in the YA series which began with Uglies, in the first book the stakes ramped up from danger of getting caught breaking the rules to risking the lives of the protagonist and her close friends. The second book ramped the stakes up from risking a few people’s lives to risking an entire city. When the third book ramped the stakes from endangering one city to the equivalent of international war, to be resolved by a 16-year-old girl, I predicted that the fourth book would have to threaten the entire world population to keep with the ridiculous requirements of this writer’s religion… and indeed, very quickly in the fourth book the stakes are raised to the annihilation of the entire world, with only a fifteen-year-old girl to save everyone. With her video-blogging prowess as her primary tool to do so.))

Some writers handle this better than others. Within each book of the Uglies series, Scott Westerfield handled the escalating peril reasonably well; it was only as the series progressed that things got so far out of hand. Other authors get their characters too rapidly into life-threatening situations in the beginning of the story, and find they’ve nowhere reasonable to go – they must depart from reason to keep readers interested. Narrower and narrower escapes. Increasingly dire situations. Protagonists disarmed, injured, in foreign, inhospitable places, facing more (and/or tougher) enemies than they faced in the last dire situation. Yech. I have a really hard time maintaining suspension of disbelief in the face of such dire peril. The story could be firmly grounded in present-day, real-world events, histories (accurate or alternate), or outlandish fantasy, but if the situations become unreasonably perilous I simply can’t maintain immersion. I can’t buy in. It’s too silly. Especially when the protagonists are the ones whose lives are supposedly threatened; I know another tenet of this religion of writers is that their main characters are protected from true/permanent harm, especially if a book is to be part of a series. Side characters may die or face serious injury, but certainly never the main characters. Which means that the peril is all false; it’s only a waste of time and effort, a waste of words and pages. I don’t like it.

I’ve also oft-seen/read from these writers-religion-believers the repeated chant, “Show, don’t tell.” It’s difficult for me to wrap my mind around. I didn’t understand it at all, at first, though I’m beginning to. Like most anything else, there are ways of doing it well and ways of following the command as mindlessly as it’s repeated by and to writers. When it’s done well, the reader tends to be unaware of it – and the writer usually hasn’t stuck religiously to it. Alternatively, when that tiny idea is too religiously followed… books go bad. One of the adventure-type books I’ve been listening to of late, which has raised the stakes within the first third to the total annihilation of all life, is also so religious about “Show, don’t tell” that I keep finding myself unable to tell what’s going on. Rather than tell me what’s going on, what the characters are thinking or communicating or planning, sometimes even what the characters are doing, the author describes (in detail) the fashion and fabrics of their clothes, the shape of their nose, the color of their eyes, the look on their face, the way they stand, the tone of their voice, where they stand relative to one another while they speak… except the author never tells the reader what they mean, they only imply and the reader is expected to infer.

I’m not being clear here, partially because I don’t get it. Without quoting long sections of a book and breaking it down sentence by sentence I’m not sure I’d know how to accurately describe how, by showing me how the characters feel and what they want by the way they act, by the twitch of an eye and the speed of their step, say, or by stilted dialogue interspersed with descriptions of body language, rather than simply telling me, you’re leaving a whole chunk of your story out… And I keep getting lost. Hundreds of words will pass where nothing sticks, as I listen. ((I’ve run into this a few times in paper/eBooks, too, and I have to go back and re-read, sometimes whole pages, again and again because it’s so show, with no tell, and I just … get lost.)) I recently finished a several-book SciFi series and had to listen to the last 15 minutes three times because the author never actually states what the protagonist’s decision about what to do with his life has been; he simply shows how the characters react to that decision, never telling what the decision was. I was supposed to infer the answer. Except that, based on the words in the book, it’s unknowable. Either answer fits the behavior, as far as I understand it. I only know what the author believes the answer was because I’ve seen the author talk about the books/character in such a way that it can only be one way, not because the author put the answer in the book itself.

My brain maybe doesn’t work quite like other people’s. (Except I’m pretty confident that lots of people must be in the same boat.) ((Or the opposite one.)) I’d had similar problems absorbing books, or sections of books, in the past, but it wasn’t until I’d tried to understand the religious litany of “Show, don’t tell” that I began to understand what it was I was having trouble with. Again and again in recent years I’ve found that those difficult sections are, in fact, too strictly trying to avoid telling me what’s going on. It’s not an elegant mantra (yet), but I keep finding myself exclaiming to books (on their authors’ behalfs) something like “Stop trying to show, just tell me what’s happening!”

Sadly, it seems that the more closely authors hew to the tenets of this strange writers-religion, the more likely their books will find popularity and broad audience appeal.

I increasingly believe I’ll never write popular books.

I don’t think I could stand it.