I’d like to report a partially failed experiment.

See, I get bored easily, and I have an overactive imagination. (It’s amazing I did so well at school, really.) Accordingly, I try things that might or might not work, to see what happens. It often produces less reliable results than sticking to what everyone else does, but it’s worth it to me for the times I manage to pull it off, and it’s more interesting while I’m doing it.

My experiment was this: in my novel Realmgolds, I would convey emotion not so much by using the names of emotions, but by talking about the physical feelings associated with those emotions.

Here’s an example. Determined (that’s the name of my protagonist) is about to speak in public, something he has avoided in the past. I write:

By the time he stood at the podium on the library steps, his anger had cooled – and so had something lodged in his gut, because it felt as if he’d swallowed a snowball…

While the square was far from being packed with citizens, they were considerably more numerous than he’d anticipated, and for a moment he wanted to back down and hand his speech to Reliable. Then he thought of Victory’s serious dark eyes and her calm daring, swallowed hard and began.

Note that I don’t say at any point that he was nervous. I say how he felt physically, I mention what he wanted to do (back down and pass his speech over to someone else to give), I describe his physical response, but I don’t give a name to his emotion. I also don’t report his inner dialogue. I leave the reader to do a lot of the work.

There are other scenes in the book where I say more about the emotions Determined is feeling, and still others where I say less. I picked a scene as my illustration that’s kind of in the middle: the emotions are there if you look for them, but you have to look, imagine, project, hypothesize.

The reason I say this is a partially failed experiment is that two reviewers have now said that they couldn’t get inside the character’s head, that the whole book felt emotionally distant and didn’t engage them.

I say “partially failed” because it’s only two people (others haven’t mentioned this), and “failed” because those were two people who wanted to read my book but didn’t enjoy it as much as they’d hoped.

Now, I know as an author that I shouldn’t pay too much attention to reviews, unless there’s a chorus in unison telling me the same things all the time. I also know Neil Gaiman’s dictum, that when people say that there’s something wrong with your work they’re usually right, but when they tell you what it is they’re usually wrong. And it is only two people. Nevertheless, I want to improve my writing, and one of the reasons people read is to engage emotionally with the struggles of the characters. If I’m not giving them that, I want to work harder at it.

There are some other causes, of course, that could be contributing to this effect. Firstly, I’m a New Zealander of British descent, and used to being understated in my emotions. My wife is from California, and it’s striking how much her level of expressed emotion differs from mine. I apply what I call the “Reeves discount” (Reeves being her family name) to bring it into what I consider a “normal” range, to translate it, to scale it so that I can tell how upset she is in terms of the level of emotional expression I grew up with. It’s a large scaling factor.

Wonderlane / People Photos / CC BY-NC

I’m also a meditator, practicing techniques that make you emotionally very even. People I work with, people from my own ethnic background, have remarked on how I “don’t get upset easily”. In the book, Determined practices similar techniques.

Also, I’m not all that experienced at writing in third person, though I’ve read plenty of it and that’s not much of an excuse. (City of Masks was in first person, and Gu in second person. Yes, that was another experiment.) Even when I do read third-person narratives, though, I quickly grow tired of the ones that patter on with the character’s internal dialogue for pages, so that when something happens or someone else speaks you have to page back to remind yourself what happened or what was said last so that you can pick up the thread. I may have overcorrected for that.

It’s probably a combination of factors. My experiment, my own ethnic and personal background, my fiction preferences, the fact that sometimes not everything in my head makes it onto the page, some kind of missed connection with those particular reviewers so that they didn’t notice the emotional cues that were there, or dismissed them, who knows what else. The important thing is that for Hope and the Clever Man, I’ll be asking myself as I revise each scene, “How does she feel about this? And how does the reader know?”

I’ll try not to overcorrect the other way and make it into a constant description of Hope’s feelings, though.

I’ve been thinking a bit about pacing in fiction lately.

Partly, that’s because of things I’ve been reading. I’m currently finishing a long book that has a short book inside it, struggling to get out. I swear, 500 words to describe a man abseiling down a cliff, when two paragraphs, at most, would have been plenty.

And then there was the book submitted to me for review recently. I declined it, after reading the first few chapters. Not only were the sentences long and rambling, but the chapters were long and rambling. It purported to be a book about a group of gamers who discover that the game they’re doing so well in is training them to fight in an interstellar war (kind of a Last Starfighter idea). So far, so good. But instead of cutting to the chase, we get the protagonist going for a surf before going off to work, and then a long scene where he and his best friend complain to each other about their employment, financial and romantic situations over the phone, and then we start into the backstory of how they met as kids, and at the point where the author began the blow-by-blow account of the friend’s academic history and how it disappointed his father, I put the book down and didn’t pick it up again.

I emailed the author and suggested that he should cut heavily, and his response was that he had known about the problem for some time but was anxious to move on to the next book, so he encouraged me to “push through” the slow first five chapters, because they do set up important stuff…

Sorry, my friend, but that’s not how this thing works.

Your first couple of chapters are what will be in your sample on Amazon. They are your third opportunity to hook people, after your cover and your blurb. Like many other people, I filter books at each of those stages.

Amateurish cover? Author doesn’t care enough. Next.

Grammatical errors in the blurb, or it’s a confusing mess? I assume the book will be the same. Next.

Sample chapters don’t hook me so that I will lay my money down to read the rest? I will not lay my money down to read the rest.

Now, I’m on record complaining about books that are all sizzle and no sausage, too, so I’ll point out that I’m looking for a balance. I don’t, personally, love books that are just like action movies, that begin page 1 with someone being shot at and progress by means of chases and explosions to a huge chase and an enormous explosion, without stopping for character development along the way. At the same time, I don’t love books that are all about getting ready to do something, or trying to decide to do something, or the minute details of doing something that might have been interesting if it hadn’t been described so exhaustively.

Take the book I’m reading now, for example. It’s Declare, by Tim Powers. In other words, it’s a book that was up for four or five major awards that I’ll never be nominated for, written by a better writer than I’ll ever be, so I can criticize it by name and not worry about hurting someone else’s career.

The characters in Declare can’t just get into a helicopter and fly somewhere. They get into a specific model of helicopter, and we have to hear not only what kind of engine it has, but what the rotor blades are made of. He’s obviously done a ton of research to get so many details right, but the thing is that as far as I’m concerned, I don’t care if the details are right. I don’t need the details. Guy gets into a helicopter, that’s all I’m looking for. Tell me the rotors are made of wood if they explode and splinters go everywhere. They don’t explode? Splinters don’t go everywhere? I don’t care what they’re made of, then.

psiaki / Foter.com / CC BY

I’m not a highly detail-oriented person, as you may have guessed (despite my obsessive spotting of proofreading errors). People who go into excessive detail irritate me. I once worked with a man who would never give me a straight answer to any question, but would instead go into a lot of background detail which I was, presumably, somehow supposed to extract an answer from. “Yes,” I’d say, “but [original question]?” And then he’d do it again. Drove me absolutely nuts.

Partly, then, this is a personality thing. I would suggest, though, that for maximum audience appeal, we writers need to write enough detail that the detail-oriented don’t leave unsatisfied, and not so much that the people like me get bored and skip. How do we do that? (And I say “we,” because I know I tend to the extreme of not enough detail.)

My novel Realmgolds is about political maneuverings. It has a very high proportion of speeches and conversations to gunshots (though there are certainly gunshots). Several reviews, though, have mentioned its “fast pace”. How do I achieve that effect (which, incidentally, I didn’t know I’d achieved until people told me)? Simple.

I write short chapters.

Very few of my chapters are in excess of 3000 words. Some are much shorter. Yet something important always happens in each chapter.

If you’re worried that your story is dragging, or might drag because it’s about people talking instead of shooting, shorten your chapters, while making sure that something significant happens in each one. This will give your readers a sense of forward momentum, because finishing a chapter is like walking through a door into another room.

I was working on a YA novel a while ago (which I abandoned, in the event), and I deliberately kept it pacey by aiming for chapters of roughly 1000 words. It was great discipline.

Also, write short sentences. I used to use a lot of semicolons in my writing. My rule of thumb now is that if a sentence is long enough to need a semicolon, it’s long enough to use two sentences. “Say one thing per sentence” is another good rule of thumb.

So how do I keep that from becoming choppy and losing any depth? Here are a couple of strategies (which I’m still working on).

Firstly, when a new person, or a new significant thing, or a new significant idea comes into shot, linger the camera on it a bit so that the audience can tell they should pay attention to it. Spend a sentence or two giving a couple of key pieces of description of the person, thing or idea. Roger Zelazny, one of the most evocative writers who ever lived, had a simple method for this (I remember reading or hearing somewhere, though I’ve sadly forgotten where). He would give a character a couple of “tags” when they were first introduced, the two or three things you would instantly notice, and refer back to them when the character returned, so even his minor characters are easy to remember.

It’s just two or three things, though. And it works the same for setting details, significant objects or key concepts. Some things, of course, can’t be conveyed in two or three tags, but if you can do it that way, my vote is that you do. We don’t need a character’s entire backstory the moment they appear. Striptease your readers with significant details, preferably as and when they become significant, though you can foreshadow a bit if it’s not at the expense of getting on with telling the story.

Picking just two or three things is a creative limitation. It encourages you to pick the most telling details, the things that make this character or setting item unusual or interesting or memorable or different from what you could see walking down the main street of your town. It also keeps the momentum going.

The other thing to remember is this: if you’re watching a movie, and the camera lingers on, let’s say, a knife on a kitchen bench, you can be confident that someone is going to pick up that knife later and at the very least wave it around, if not stick it in someone. As a general thing, the camera doesn’t linger for no particular reason. Same with description. If I get a description of something in a book, I’ll expect it to be relevant to the plot, characterization or setting, ideally more than one of those, and if it turns out not to be relevant (and if detail after detail turns out not to be relevant), I’ll become vexed very quickly. I only have so much working memory to devote to your book. Don’t fill it up with things I won’t need later.

You can still have quieter moments of character reflection, still have the occasional brief passage of evocative description. But in a world where your reader can download any of 30 million other books in the next 30 seconds, boring them with your book is a really bad move.

This is a follow-up to my post on the Spoiled Protagonist, which seems to be resonating with a few people. Since I wrote that post, I’ve read another book with a seriously spoiled protagonist. How spoiled? Would you believe, the villain has his minion rescue her from certain death, reunite her with the only weapons that can stop his evil plan, and help her get to where he is – and all he seems to get out of it is a brief villain-gloat?

Characters like that are what I call “plot puppets”. They do things, not for reasons that make rational sense within the world of the story, but in order to advance the author’s preordained plot. Plot-puppetry is a particular risk if you’re writing to a formula, like the Monomyth or Hero’s Journey.

How not to spoil your protagonists

It doesn’t have to be that way, though. I recently read and very much enjoyed Saladin Ahmed’s Throne of the Crescent Moon (the link is to my review on Goodreads).  His plot is as old as the hills: kill the monster. We’ve been reading that plot since Marduk and Tiamat. But what he does to make it interesting and fresh is that he gives each of his characters something they desperately want but can’t have, and something they must do even though they don’t want to. These elements are almost completely apart from the main plot, but they upstage it because he does it so well.

There’s the secret to avoiding plot puppets: Give each character a clear agenda. If everyone, definitely including your villain, is acting out of obvious, understandable motives that are consistent with who they are, your protagonist won’t get the chance to be spoiled, either. The grim, duty-bound, important people she meets in the course of her adventures won’t neglect their responsibilities in order to help her, for example.

Some of the best advice Kathleen Dale, my editor for Realmgolds, has given me is to give my main character a clear goal right from the outset. I’ll write another post soon about how I raised the stakes for that character and made his goal more personal, but as soon as I did so, the book picked up momentum. A pressing goal that’s emotionally important to a character is one of the best gifts a writer can give them to help make them a strong protagonist.

It’s not all about you

Here’s the other part of not spoiling your protagonist, and I owe it to Robertson Davies.

Robertson Davies was a Canadian academic and novelist. He wrote literary fiction with a weird twist, sometimes, though not always, supernatural. But to me, the most interesting thing about his writing is the way he wrote his trilogies.

As specfic readers, we’re used to trilogies that tell one long story. Davies’ ones don’t, or at least, it’s not that simple. What he tends to do is take minor characters from his first book and put them at the centre of the next book, relegating the main characters from the first book to relative or complete obscurity. Or he tells the second book from the perspective of someone who doesn’t even appear in the first.

The extreme example is his incomplete “Toronto Trilogy”, his last work, of which only two books were written. In the second book, The Cunning Man, the narrator obsesses over the son of his mistress, speculating (despite her denials) that he is also his son. The young man is tremendously important to him, and yet when you read the first book, Murther and Walking Spirits, which is narrated by that same young man, he never mentions The Cunning Man‘s narrator even once. The older man apparently has no significance in his life at all.

What reading Robertson Davies taught me is that everyone is at the centre of their own story. When I’m walking down the street, I often look around at the people I pass and think about that fact. Each one of them has their own story, as important to them as mine is to me, and I don’t know, and will never know, what that story is.

While I work on the last edits of Realmgolds, I’ve started the next book, currently called Hope and the Clever Man. It’s set during the same time as Realmgolds, not far away, and some of the events in each book very much impact the other, but the main character isn’t even mentioned in Realmgolds. And yet her story is very important to her and the people around her, and without her the events of Realmgolds would have gone very differently.

She lives in a Robertson Davies world. Despite her considerable talents, I hope that will help keep her from becoming a spoiled protagonist.

I’ve read a couple of books lately which have what I’ve started to think of as “spoiled protagonists”.

“Spoiled” in the sense that everyone treats them like a princess (or a prince – one is male), even though they’re very ordinary people. When they come on the scene, people with serious responsibilities will neglect them in order to help with whatever the spoiled protagonist is doing. Villains go out of their way to give them grief, but it’s all right, because everyone else is their humble servant. Their relatively small successes are treated as world-saving  triumphs and the cause for endless gratitude. They break the rules, or even the law, and are blithely forgiven by the toughest authorities when they explain their reasons.

If they want to go stupidly and unnecessarily into a dangerous situation (and they do), they only need to whine a little and stamp their feet for people who should know better to let them do so. Nameless spearcarriers or even minor characters will then be sacrificed to protect them, without a cross word being spoken to the precious spoiled protagonist.

It didn’t take me long to work out a theory of why this is happening. The authors have been reading too many Chosen One stories. The spoiled protagonist is the Chosen One by stealth.

See, a Chosen One is typically of humble origins, but everyone in the world wants to either oppose them or help them. They’re destined to save the world, but first they have to grow up, and that involves making stupid decisions that have a cost mainly to other people. Because they’re the focus of the Prophecy, it’s literally all about them.

The spoiled protagonist is the Chosen One without the justification of the prophecy. They’re a person who actually is ordinary, injudicious and inexperienced who’s stumbling around, doing a poor job of dealing with a situation that they weren’t prepared for. The unrealistic part is that everyone is downing tools and either helping or hindering them as if they were the most important person in the world.

To the author, of course, the main character is the most important person in the world. The world exists because of the character. But the other people in the world shouldn’t act as if they know that.

Stop spoiling your protagonists, authors. If they’re whiny, headstrong and inept, drop the consequences on them, not on hapless, uncomplaining minions around them. Better still, don’t make them whiny, headstrong and inept in the first place.

I was reading this post about period language on Wondermark this morning, and it got me thinking about language in fiction.

I love the English language, for all its quirks. My long-ago master’s degree is in that field, after all. I love to see it well and skillfully used, something which is becoming sadly rare. Perhaps it always was.

I’ve recently left a popular writers’ community on Google+, only partly because of the high volume of posts. What really drove me out was the high volume of posts that were along these lines: “So im wanna be a writer lol any advise?” I exaggerate only a little.

And to weave in another thread to my thinking, I was reading i09’s best science fiction and fantasy books of 2012 post today, having got there from a comment on N.K. Jemisin’s blog, and read this comment:

Is there anyone out there who is unimpressed by NK Jemisin? I keep reading these glowing reviews of her novels and how they’re destined to be classics, but all I could think when I read The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms was that it read like mediocre fanfiction, especially the interactions between the protagonist and the scary love interest dude.

I mulled that over, and what I realized was that I enjoyed that book mainly because of the skill of the language, and not so much because of the story, which is largely made up of tropes. (Apparently her later books get better.)

I loved Emma Bull’s War for the Oaks, too, and was surprised to read reviews on Goodreads from people who just didn’t get what the fuss was about. They were bored by the 80s music references and all the band stuff, they said (honestly, that didn’t do much for me, either), and disliked the main character. Again, I loved it mostly because of the language.

Language by itself, though, isn’t enough for me. In both The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms and War for the Oaks, the central characters have a strong moral core, which they act upon. They are actually strong women, not the fake “strong women” that you get in so much contemporary writing who are actually headstrong women, and cause most of their own problems, while relying on others, usually men, to solve them.

I think the character issue is why I can’t stand Gene Wolfe’s books, and have a love-hate relationship with Neil Gaiman’s work, although both are generally admired for their prose by people who love the more literary end of speculative fiction. Gene Wolfe’s protagonists are so emotionally alienated that I can’t even understand them, let alone identify with them, and Gaiman’s are often far too dark for my taste. I enjoyed American Gods, but I stay well clear of Sandman. It’s brilliant, but emotionally it’s too much for me.

What I’m teasing out here, I think, is that there are several different ways in which a book, or a writer, can be “good”. There’s language, facility with prose, which the authors I’ve already mentioned do well. There’s story, which includes things like pacing, suspense, the right mix of foreshadowing and surprise, as well as the structural elements of plot. There’s setting or worldbuilding, coming up with a world of wonder that has a believability to it, or at least a majesty or a richness to it. And there’s character and its close cousin situation.

Alongside these multiple ways to be skilled, there are matters of taste.

I don’t mind a little period language, since I’m well-read in English literature back to Beowulf (with a gap, I’ll admit, in the 18th century), but some people struggle with it. Those people shouldn’t read my book City of Masks, which has a “period” style taken from no actual period, and nor should people who obsess about historical accuracy. And for me, period language done ineptly is a complete turnoff, whereas for some people it won’t matter at all. Likewise, some people will give a book four or five stars even if it is full of incorrect homonyms and punctuated on the Jackson Pollock principle, but for me, that’s tiresome and distracting.

I personally don’t mind a story that’s constructed mostly of tropes, if it’s done well and the book has other merits. I also can enjoy a book that’s well-plotted even if the other elements are weak. J.K. Rowling, whose prose is often held up as an example of what not to do, whose worldbuilding is ridiculous and whose characters are thin, still holds my attention by weaving intricate plots, even if they have big holes in them. Personally, I like neat, happy endings that still leave the possibility of future problems open, but other people want their endings to be more ambiguous.

A wonderfully imagined world full of possibilities will seize my interest, but only if those possibilities are explored with characters who appeal to me (which is why I don’t read much hard SF, or China Mieville). This is actually one of the hardest things to do, and there aren’t many worldbuilding writers who come to mind. Tolkien, of course, is one. Part of the problem is that richly imagined worlds are hard to convey without either bogging down the story in exposition or leaving your readers confused for the first third of the book. I’m reading, or trying to read, Walter Jon Williams’ Aristoi at the moment, and it has the latter problem. I’m a worldbuilder, and I can tell you it isn’t easy.

You don’t need a completely original world to get a good review from me, but on the other hand, mashing up Jules Verne and Indiana Jones and hotgluing brass gears over the joins is not going to grab me. I like to see some effort.

There are kinds of worlds I don’t like and kinds of worlds I do like, too. Cruel empires, post-apocalyptic wastelands, and oppressive dystopias, however well done, have an uphill struggle to appeal to me.

Finally, I have strong and definite tastes in characters. I don’t like antiheroes, though unlikely heroes I’m all for, and I love a good rogue with a heart. Passive or silly women, Gene Wolfe’s alienated people with no recognisable human emotions, anyone cruel or over-the-top villainous, casual adulterers, these will not get my vote.

What I’m saying, as both a writer and a reviewer, is that there can be many reasons why a book may or may not appeal to me or you. There are matters of craft and skill. At the moment, there are a huge number of first-time authors putting books out. Those who persevere and improve their craft will rise, and if I see an author whose craft is a mess but who shows imaginative flair and originality, I will write them an encouraging review and urge them to get some editing and coaching.

And then there are matters of taste. I’ve written lukewarm reviews of books I thought were well done, because despite that they weren’t quite my thing. I’ve abandoned, partially read, books that are critically or popularly acclaimed, because they contain elements that I personally dislike. I try to distinguish in my reviews between “it’s not good” and “it’s not for me”.

And for my potential readers: I’m still learning the craft (of course I am, everyone is, but I’m early on in the process). I know I’m an above-average writer of sentences, and I’m working hard to become at least an average teller of stories. My books have highly inventive settings, simple plots, and main characters who are fundamentally moral, adult and in reasonable mental and emotional health, though they also tend to be socially awkward and unpopular. If that’s your thing, I hope you’ll read them.

Oh, I should mention here: I recently set it up so that, if you sign up for my mailing list to be notified when I put out new releases, you also get access to free short fiction and permanent discounts on my older books. You can also be notified when I review a new indie book that I liked, and get these blog posts emailed to you (both of those things are opt-in). Just go to the right-hand sidebar on any page of the site and put in your email address, and software I spent far too many hours tinkering with will do the rest.