Jan 06

On Writing Strong Protagonists

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I grew up in a family with a lot of strong women: my mother, my grandmother, and my two sisters. Perhaps inevitably, I married a strong woman too. I often work with strong women, and get on very well with them. I have a number of women friends whose strength impresses me every time I talk to them. I’ll talk about what I mean by “strong” in a minute.

I’ve recently completed the fourth, and second-to-last, draft of Realmgolds, as the first Gryphon Clerks novel is now known. Most of what I did in that draft involved incorporating beta feedback, and the biggest changes had to do with strengthening the protagonist.

Determined (that’s his name) is a bookish young man who wanted to be an historian, but ended up in a position to make history instead. In my earlier drafts, he leaned a lot on Victory, his female counterpart. She made the decisions and solved the problems.

My betas didn’t like it. Now, I should point out that the beta who particularly didn’t like it is another strong woman, a self-described Jewish mother, so this isn’t about unevolved males reading it and saying “The dude needs to not listen to the girl so much, that’s weak.” Not at all. This is about who the protagonist is.

The word “protagonist” means “someone who struggles for something”. If you have a main character who’s mostly observing the action, who’s yielding to other people to make the decisions, or who’s relying on someone else to solve the problems, that’s not a protagonist in the true sense of the word.

Unfortunately, that’s a type of main character I often see in genre fiction. Actually, what I commonly see is this: the “protagonist” is a young woman who says “I’m strong and independent, I can make my own decisions”, makes incredibly poor decisions that get her in trouble, and has to be rescued by a man.

I see that most often in urban fantasy, but urban-fantasy tropes are appearing more and more in steampunk and secondary-world fantasy these days too. Including, unfortunately, that one.

Sorry, but that’s not what I think of when I say “strong woman”. Or “good story”, either. The protagonist needs to solve their own problems, at least once they get past the early part of the book where they’re mainly reacting to what’s thrown at them. To refer to Dan Wells’ seven-point structure, the “midpoint” is where the protagonist makes a decision that they need to do something active to solve the problems, and in my mind, that so-called midpoint needs to come within the first 30% of the book if it’s to keep my interest in the character. Even before the midpoint, when they’re reacting, they have to be trying to do something. Even if it’s only “stay alive”.

They don’t have to succeed at what they’re trying to do all the time, of course – that’s what a try-fail cycle is all about. But the point of a try-fail cycle is that it’s a cycle. They keep trying, even when they fail. This makes them a protagonist. They’re trying to solve the problem.

I’ve messed up a couple of short stories by having a viewpoint character who isn’t the protagonist, so when my beta reader pointed out the issue, I jumped on it. It turned out not to be that hard to rewrite the scenes so that Determined, who’s very intelligent, was the one solving the problems.

My worry was that, in making Determined a more active character, I would take away from Victory. She’s a very powerful and capable woman, respected, if not necessarily liked, even by her opponents. I tell the reader this early on through the mouth of a minor character. I was concerned that she would be one of those awful woman who the author tells us are strong, but who don’t do anything to show it. I didn’t want to be guilty of strong-woman tokenism.

I needn’t have worried, as I discovered when I did my complete read-through on a printout. As soon as Victory walked, elegantly and confidently, into a scene and started ordering people around just by looking at them, my concerns evaporated.

I read a quote from Joss Whedon recently to the effect that strong men are those who are comfortable around strong women. I like that. It makes my protagonist Determined a very strong man, because he can respect Victory without wanting to take away her power, and at the same time call her out when she becomes imperious and high-handed.

So when will the book be out? Currently, I’m waiting for my cover guy, who’s heavily booked because he’s good. I’m also talking with a heavily-booked editor about whether I should work with her or someone else. So the answer at the moment seems to be “March-ish”. I’ll keep you posted.

Dec 16

Dan Wells’ Seven-Point Story Structure

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Dan Wells has an excellent set of YouTube videos on story structure, made at a conference in 2010. I don’t necessarily remember information very well from videos, though, so I decided to take notes and publish them here. Since he got the idea from a roleplaying game book, and I’m giving full credit to him, I assume he won’t mind.

The first video is here:

There’s also an episode of the Writing Excuses podcast that Dan does with Brandon Sanderson, Mary Robinette Kowal and Howard Tayler in which he explains the seven-point structure. I haven’t re-listened to that to add to my notes; they’re solely taken from the videos.

Whether you are an “outline” writer and do the seven points upfront and then write the story, or a “discovery” writer who writes first and then incorporates the seven points during revision, the system is still useful.

Start at the end, with the resolution – the final state of the characters/plot – and move back to the hook, then the midpoint, the two plot turns in order, then the two pinches in order.

Here are the seven points.

1. Hook

In the hook, the character is in the opposite state from the state they will be in eventually. For example, if they are going to end up strong, start them out weak.

(Harry Potter lives in a cupboard under the stairs.)

2. Plot Turn 1

Something changes that puts things into motion. New ideas, new people, a Call to Adventure or inciting incident, starts the movement from the situation of the Hook to the situation of the Resolution.

(Harry Potter learns he’s a wizard, enters the wizarding world.)

3. Pinch 1

Something goes wrong that forces the character to step up and solve a problem.

(Harry Potter and friends fight the troll.)

4. Midpoint

This is the point at which the character moves from reaction to action, decides to move towards the end state (knowingly or otherwise). It doesn’t need to be in the middle of the story. In a mystery story, for example, where the midpoint is deciding to take the case, it can come very early on.

(Harry Potter decides that people who suck blood from unicorns must be opposed.)

5. Pinch 2

Something goes very wrong, much more so than in Pinch 1. These are the jaws of defeat from which victory must be grasped. Mentors die or vanish, allies prove unreliable, plans fail.

(Ron and Hermione fall to the magical traps on the way to the Stone and leave Harry Potter to go on alone.)

6. Plot Turn 2

The character receives the last piece needed to create the resolution. “The power is in you!” is a classic Plot Turn 2. Grasping victory from the jaws of defeat.

(Harry Potter looks in the Mirror of Erised, and because his motives are pure the stone goes into his pocket and he knows that if Voldemort touches him it will harm Voldemort, not him.)

7. Resolution

This the climax, what you’re leading up to, what the story’s about.

This can be plot or character. For example, the character makes a moral decision and becomes a different person from the person they were when they started. The problem of the plot is resolved.

This can be a state rather than an action (example of Poe’s “The Telltale Heart”, where the resolution is that the narrator is insane).

(Harry Potter defeats Voldemort.)

A tragedy plot reverses the order of “all is well” and “all is terrible”. The former is the hook, the latter the resolution.

This is the bare skeleton. Round characters, rich environments, try-fail cycles, subplots flesh it out.

The Ice Monster Prologue

The name of this is taken from Game of Thrones. Because the magic and action don’t appear for a long time in the book, there’s a prologue to introduce the promise that they will eventually arrive. (The hook itself isn’t necessarily exciting, because it’s the opposite of the final powerful state of the character.)

Try-Fail Cycle

Before heroes succeed at anything important, they should earn their victory by trying and failing multiple times. A problem that can be solved first go isn’t big enough to be interesting.

A try-fail can show the consequences of failure (Indiana Jones, the guy who drinks from the wrong chalice). It can look like a victory (Princess Bride, where defeating the swordsman, the giant and the Sicilian brings the Man in Black closer to his goal but he doesn’t reach it yet.) It can be an actual failure (Inigo Montoya trying to avenge his father.)

Plots and Subplots

Plots, subplots and character arcs can each be mapped out with the Seven-Point System. Spread out the events to create good pacing; line them up (have more than one advancing in the same scene) to create powerful moments, e.g. the resolution of one is the pinch of another. Character and action resolutions can come in the same powerful scene.

I hope that’s as useful to you as it will be to me. Thanks to Dan Wells for laying it all out.

Nov 23

The State of Science Fiction

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A lot of people are sounding off about the state of SF lately. It’s too dystopian! It’s too old-school! It’s lost its way! It’s dying! (Apparently this last has been happening for decades.)

I don’t normally join in on trends, but as it happens I have a couple of thoughts.

I’m partway through listening to Mike Resnik’s short story “The Homecoming” on the StarShipSofa podcast. This is the second time I’ve heard it (Escape Pod used it a few episodes back), and listening to it again I was struck by something.

Resnik started his career in the 1960s. Apart from the fact that he’s been writing incredibly prolifically for the intervening 50 years and, therefore, is presumably a much better writer now, there’s not a word in this story that couldn’t have been written at the start of his career. It even features a holochannel which has “stopped broadcasting for the night”, which as far as I’m aware is something no TV station has done for, what, 20 or 30 years?

Now, it’s an excellent story that thoroughly deserved its 2012 Hugo nomination. It’s moving. It’s beautifully observed. The SF elements are absolutely essential to the story, too. But there’s not a single thing in it that reflects anything that’s happened in science, or for that matter society, in the past half-century.

Does this mean it’s timelessly classic? Perhaps it does. I don’t want to knock Mike Resnik’s wonderful story in any way at all. But to me it also reflects the fact that the stories that get published in some of the leading prozines, like Asimov’s (which, I was unsurprised to discover, is where “The Homecoming” was published), are often stories which could easily have been published there back when Asimov himself was alive. Which is kind of funny in a genre that’s all about the future.

Asimov was no great prose stylist, and he never approached the emotional breadth and depth of Resnik’s story. What he was, though, was a bold explorer of ideas. It’s as if the magazine named for him is now a kind of memorial ideas park for the great explorer, in which visitors stroll along well-worn paths.

Now, I’m not advocating dropping the standards of craft, of course. Pretentious, confusing, plotless stories and unappealing, passive characters can stay in literary fiction, as far as I’m concerned. (ZING!) But surely we can incorporate current science into our science fiction and still tell well-constructed stories about relatable characters who do interesting things? Charles Stross does it, after all.

In an attempt to be the change I want to see, I’ve started a notification circle on Google+ called SpecFicQuestion (the link gets you to the hashtag, which will show you all my posts so far). We discuss “what-if” scenarios drawn from up-to-date science, like: what if you could print meat? And then what if you could print human meat?

If you’re on G+, just comment on any of the posts or contact me directly to ask to be added to the circle. The posts are all public, so anyone can read them, but if you’re in the circle  you’ll be notified when I do each post.

Oct 17

Decisions to Make, Things to Learn

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So I got an answer back from the small-press publisher where I’d submitted The Gryphon Clerks.

They called it well-written, with many merits, a fresh and engaging premise and a unique and engaging setting, but they felt the story and the characters were buried under too much setting explanation. Which is probably a fair call, and not too distant from the feedback I had from my betas.

I’d already decided that the book I’ve nearly finished would now be the “first” book (it takes place at the same time as The Gryphon Clerks, but in different locations with mostly different characters). I feel it’s a much stronger book, with a clearer plot. Most of it was written after I started outlining, for one thing.

It’s shorter, too. (I’m going to have to push to reach 60,000 words, which is considered the lower end of novel length by a lot of people, whereas TGC is a little over 80K.) Originally, it was all part of the same book, but I realized I was trying to tell two stories at once and separated them, like a surgeon separating conjoined twins.

If I end up self-publishing, which is on the table, I’d like to try what Lindsay Buroker has been doing and eventually make the first book in the series a free sample, so I needed a stronger book than The Gryphon Clerks is (as it stands), and preferably a short one, to be that first book.

Why is self-publishing on the table? Well, not because I’ve had one rejection from one publisher. Truth is, I’ve been rethinking the advantages of small-press publication since the Ridan Publishing fiasco burst. Short version, if you haven’t been following: seems this small, husband-and-wife-owned press stopped communicating with its authors, and then stopped paying them, and then stopped shipping books that people had bought from them. Or so it is alleged. Before this, they were considered one of the better small presses, too, so I’m understandably more hesitant now about going with a small press. There was a strong dose of relief mixed in with the disappointment at being turned down.

I do have a couple of other small-press publishers I could try, but I’m going to hold off for now. Here’s the current plan:

  1. Finish drafting Realmgold (the new “first” book). I’ve only got a couple more chapters in my outline, and I have some time off from work, so all going well this should happen by the end of the week or thereabouts.
  2. Go over it with a bit of coarse sandpaper and then ship it out to some beta readers (you can volunteer in the comments or on Google+).
  3. While awaiting feedback, either work on an outline for the next book, currently called Agents of Victory, or go back over TGC and see if I can dig the story out from under the setting after all.
  4. Revise in line with feedback.
  5. Decide what I do next: self-publish (which would involve hiring a development editor and a cover artist, something I have the money to do) or submit to another small press.
I could, potentially, have two books ready to go by the beginning of the year, and another well underway. Successful self-publishers all seem to have one thing in common (it’s about the only thing people can agree on about self-publishing success): they have a series. If I can get the first couple of books out quickly, and the third not too long afterwards, there’s a chance to build some momentum.
When I say “quickly”, I don’t mean to imply sacrificing quality. I’m not going to shove out something half-done. I still feel that I’m learning the craft of writing whole works of fiction, although I’m a better-than-average writer of sentences. Let’s see how good I can get at character, plot and setting.
Oct 04

Excerpt: The Trial from Realmgold

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Now that I’ve submitted The Gryphon Clerks for consideration to a small-press publisher, I’m concentrating on finishing the draft of Realmgold (formerly “the political book”). I like it. It might even become the “first” book, since both cover the same time period and it’s a little more mainstream – more conflict, for one thing.

Here’s an excerpt. Constance is a Countygold, a local ruler, who is acting as a magistrate here.

 

Constance’s official judicial table that she used in her usual courtroom had been moved to the platform of the hall. She stood up behind it, a slight, fiftyish, grey-haired woman who needed the reading glasses that she looked over at the gathered crowd.

Here we go, she thought.

“We are here,” she said, “to ascertain the facts about the incident which occurred night before last, just south of Boulder Bend, between a dwarf caravan and a group of local men. I will hear testimony from all who were present and survived, and I will render judgement based on the principles of justice and the law of Denning.” She paused and very deliberately tracked her gaze across the various groups. “Anyone who disrupts the proceedings will be ejected without appeal. Is that clear to everybody?”

There were nods from various parts of the hall. The grey-clad RBP men didn’t nod, just sat stiffly. There were mutterings among the dwarves, but she chose to assume they were translations being made for those who didn’t speak Pektal. The newswriters scribbled, and the Coppers shuffled their feet.

“Good,” she said, and sat. “I will have the participants in the incident come in one at a time and give testimony as to what occurred. Call…” she squinted at her notes… “Tree Stonecircle.”

The advocate for the Coppers popped to his feet as if on a spring. His appearance was against him – he was pop-eyed, with a receding chin and advancing teeth – but he was a highly skilled lawyer, too highly skilled for the Coppers to be paying him themselves, thought Constance.

“Advocate Trustworthy,” she said, acknowledging him. She thought: Trustworthy, what a name for a lawyer.

“May I inquire of the court why the first witness to be called is the principal accused?”

“One of the principal accused,” she pointed out. “And I am calling him first because, having read through the depositions made by the participants, I concluded that his account gives the fullest outline of the incident. That is not,” she said, as he opened his mouth, “a judgement of its accuracy, only of its level of detail.” She nodded to the corporal, who had been waiting for her ruling, and he hurried out the back to fetch the centaur.

There was some murmuring among the Coppers when Muscles appeared, which Constance hushed with her bell and a hard glare that said: Remember, I can throw you out. The RBP men sat silently, obviously determined to give her no excuse.

It was the magistrate’s prerogative to question the witness first, so she began, once he had been sworn in.

“You are Tree Stonecircle?”

“Yes, Countygold,” he said, in a surprisingly tenor voice. His head was about three dwarfpaces above the ground, and, seated, she had to look up at him.

“You can address me as Magistrate while we are in session. You were hired by the dwarf Pack of Sevenhills as a caravan guard?”

“Yes, Magistrate.”

She led him through the outline of events, which he recited calmly and clearly, like a military officer giving his report. His enormous hooves stayed planted foursquare on the platform, and he didn’t fidget, nor did his speech stumble. She handed him over, as was the tradition, to Trustworthy, who as far as Tree was concerned was acting as the opposing advocate.

Trustworthy leapt to his feet and leaned forward, gesturing up at the centaur (the advocates were not seated on the platform, since there wasn’t room). “Tree Stonecircle,” he said, “you have testified under oath that the humans you killed began the altercation. Is this true?”

“Yes, Advocate,” said Tree.

“And does the oath bind you?” he asked.

Tree blinked, at a loss for the first time. “I’m sorry, Advocate, I don’t understand,” he said.

“Are you bound by your oath in court?”

“Of course I am, Advocate.”

“But you’re more than half an animal.”

Murmurs began on both sides of the court, and Constance rang her bell sharply. “Advocate, I suggest that you desist from this line of questioning,” she said. “I am mindmage enough to confirm that the oath does bind the witness, as it does any other witness.”

Trustworthy bowed to her unctuously and continued.

“So what was it that led you to conclude that the humans concerned had attacked you?”

“One of them shouted ‘let’s get them’, and they all ran at us with weapons,” he said. More than one of the reporters smirked, and they all scribbled faster.

“And these so-called weapons, of what did they consist?”

“Sharp bits of metal on poles, mostly,” he said. One reporter laughed openly, though briefly, glanced at Constance and fell silent.

“They were, in fact, agricultural tools, were they not? Hayforks, mattocks, scythes and the like?”

“Yes, Advocate. Sharp bits of metal on poles,” said Tree.

“They were not, for example, spears and swords?”

“No, Advocate, they were not. I imagine that such items are difficult to obtain for civilians.”

“What you imagine is not evidence,” said Trustworthy sharply. “So you admit that they were not weapons?”

“No, Advocate, I admit that they were not spears and swords. They were capable of doing harm to us and I judged that that was the intent of the people holding them, which made them weapons. It is my job to make these determinations and act upon them.”

“So had they actually laid their implements on you when you fired your bow?”

“No, Advocate. That’s rather the point of a bow,” said Tree. “You can defend yourself from a distance.”

“So you shot – how many?”

“Three, Advocate. After that they were too close.”

“And what did you do next? Remind me?”

“I drew my sword and defended myself, my employer, and my fellow employees.”

“So you attacked a group of peasants, who had nothing but farm tools to defend themselves, with weapons of war.”

“Advocate, I defended myself and my group against an unprovoked attack with improvised weapons. It’s my job.”

“And you stick to this story.”

“I do, Advocate.”

“Yours to question,” said Trustworthy to the other advocate, a skinny man called Hopeful with a big blade of a nose, and sat down.

Hopeful stood, straightened his lawyer’s shoulder-width black poncho, and asked, “Mr Tree, how many of your opponents were killed in the encounter, do you know?”

“I believe it was three, Advocate.”

“And you base this on?”

“Rapid examination at the scene,” he replied. “It’s possible that one or two more may have died afterwards, after I left.”

“And how did they die, these three?”

“Two from my shots. The third man I shot, the big one with the pickaxe, looked as if he would live to me. Then one of them was kicked by one of the mules, and he hit pretty hard. Looked like he had internal injuries.”

“So the ones you fought with your sword…?”

“One I disarmed by cutting the head off his weapon. Two I knocked out with the flat of the blade. The last one I kicked, but he should have survived all right.”

“So you had a sword, but you didn’t stab anyone with it.”

“Broadsword, Advocate. Not really a stabbing weapon.”

“You didn’t cut anyone, then.”

“No, Advocate.”

“Why was that?”

“I try not to kill people if I can avoid it.”

“Thank you, Mr Tree,” said Hopeful, and sat down.

“Thank you, Mr Tree,” echoed Constance, “that will be all. The court,” she said to the room at large, “has sighted documentation which shows that the centaur Tree Stonering is a licensed caravan guard, permitted to carry and use weapons in defence of his employer and his employer’s goods.” She paused, looked down at her notes, and said, “Call Root Pinegrove.”

The corporal led Tree back into the back room on Constance’s left, emerged, ducked into the back room on her right and brought out a medium-sized Copper who walked rather carefully, as if in pain. His heavy breathing was clearly audible in the courtroom, silent except for the scribbling of the reporters.

Tree would probably have recognised him as the man with the mattock.

Constance moved through the formalities of confirming his identity and involvement in the incident as rapidly as she could, given his thick dialect.

“How many of you were in the group involved in the incident?”

“Eleven, Magistrate.”

“And what had you been doing previously?”

“We been at pub.”

“Drinking?”

“Yahs, Magistrate.”

“Why did you have your tools with you?”

The man’s mouth, which featured some truly hideous teeth – green and worn or missing – worked briefly as he tried not to answer, but the oath compelled him.

“We was lookin’ for shorties.”

“Do you mean you were looking for dwarves?”

“Yahs.”

“And what did you intend to do when you found them?”

Root muttered something.

“Speak clearly, Mr Root,” said Constance sternly.

“We was gonna do ‘em over.”

“You were going to attack them?”

“Yahs.” The man was sweating, trying not to answer.

“And did you attack the dwarf caravan in question when you found them?”

“Yahs.” Very reluctantly.

“In your statement given previously, you claimed that the dwarf caravan attacked you. Are you now saying that was untrue?”

“Yahs.”

“You lied in your statement?”

“Yahs.”

“Why did you lie, Mr Root?”

“Was sceered.”

“You were scared. What were you scared of, Mr Root?”

“Sceered of Localgold.”

“And why was that?”

The man struggled visibly, but didn’t answer.

“Are you under a compulsion not to answer that question, Mr Root?” she asked, knowing full well what the answer was.

“Yahs,” he said, with a mixture of fear and relief.

“Did the Localgold suggest that you go out after the dwarves, Mr Root?”

Trustworthy popped up on his spring, but she waved him down. Root’s eyes bulged as the conflicting oaths fought to force him in opposite directions.

“It’s all right, Mr Root,” Constance said after a few heartbeats, as the Copper’s face started to flush, “you don’t have to answer that question. Be it noted in the record that the witness was unable to answer.

“So you attacked the dwarf caravan. Another witness has told us that one of your group cried out, ‘Get them!’, or words to that effect. Did you hear those words, Mr Root?”

“Yahs.”

“Who said them?”

“Sky Tanner.” He added a tongue-click to the end of the name, as superstitious Coppers did to the names of the dead.

“And what happened then?”

“We run at the shorties and the horse-arse.”

“Mr Root, in my courtroom you will call things by their correct names. You will call dwarves dwarves, gnomes gnomes, and centaurs centaurs. Is that clear?”

“Yahs, Magistrate.”

“So what happened after Sky Tanner called out?”

“We run at the… the dwarves and the centaur.”

“To attack them?”

“Yahs.”

“With what object?”

“Magistrate?”

“What was your purpose? What did you hope to achieve by attacking them?”

“Beat ‘em up, take their stuff.”

“You were going to rob them?”

“Yahs,” quietly.

“Did you intend to kill them?”

“Nah.”

“Just to hurt them?”

“Yahs.”

“And what stopped you?”

“The hor… the centaur.”

“He stopped you from beating up the group any worse than you did, and from robbing them?”

“Yahs.”

“What did he do to you?”

“Kicked me in guts.” He touched the area in question and winced.

“Thank you, Mr Root. Yours to question,” she said to Trustworthy.

Sep 15

How to End a Story

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I’ve been thinking lately about how to end stories, not only because I’m finishing up the first Gryphon Clerks novel and I’m unhappy with how I ended it, but because I’ve read some stories recently that don’t finish. They just stop.

I won’t name the anthology I’m thinking of, but I’ve read partway through it and story after story just stops. It’s like I’m getting the first acts of these stories without the middle and the end. The characters and situation are introduced, there’s an inciting incident which hits on something important enough to the characters that they want to do something or change something, and then… scene. I actually said aloud when I got to the end of one of them, “Is that it?”

Story after story. By different people. It’s like the anthology call said, “Stories must stop abruptly,” or the editor cut off the last two acts to see if anyone would notice.

Anyway, that got me thinking about what does and doesn’t work as an ending to a story. (By “work” of course I mean “work for me”, but I think that, for a change, I may not be atypical in what I like here.)

Here are five ways to end a story. They’re not mutually exclusive, or exhaustive.

1. The situation is resolved

A classic story structure is (simplified): Act 1, we meet the characters, learn the situation, something changes that destabilizes the situation and makes the characters want to take action. Act 2, the characters strive for their goal against opposition. Act 3, the characters achieve whatever their goal was that arose from the inciting incident back in Act 1. The Ring is thrown into Mount Doom, the princess is rescued, the dragon is slain, the rightful king is restored, the traveller comes home, the real Seymour Skinner is sent away from Springfield and we never refer to this again.

It’s usually a restoration of the status quo, more or less, except that the characters have (hopefully) grown through the experience. It’s a conservative story structure: something disturbed the way things should be, now everything is, more or less, back to normal. But it also has its progressive aspect, if only on the micro level of the characters, who have moved from “unable to make a difference” to “able to make a difference”.

2. The characters’ relationships have changed

This is the classic romance plot, of course, and Pride and Prejudice is the exemplar. They start out hating one another or thinking they can’t be together, and at the end, inevitably, they marry and live happily ever after.

It doesn’t have to be a romance plot, though. I wrote a story recently in which an airship captain from a humble background starts out distinctly unimpressed with an aristocratic young pup who’s been foisted on her and ends up thinking he might make a decent officer. It doesn’t have to be about winning love. It can be winning friendship, respect, fealty, alliance.

I like stories in which relationships change for the better, but of course you can write the other sort, too, if that’s what you’re into.

3. We discover something

This is the mystery-story plot. At the end, we find out that the butler dunnit. But in the meantime we’ve discovered all kinds of other things, such as that Lady Celia drinks, and Lord Bertie is having an affair, and the housemaid’s brother just got out of prison. (Why anyone would ever invite a detective to a house party is beyond me. Not only will someone, more likely several people, inevitably get horribly murdered – because when a famous detective is right there is the ideal time to murder someone – but everyone’s nasty secrets will be exposed to everyone else, and nobody will ever be able to trust anyone again, except for the ingenue and the decent chap who end up together, hooray.)

Mysteries, though, are not the only “we discover something” stories. Characters discover things about themselves: that they’re not like their father, that they are like their father, that they do have magic, that not having magic isn’t important. (More about “not important” below.)

The twist ending (The Statue of Liberty is buried in the sand on the Planet of the Apes!) is another “we discover something” ending. An important feature of “we discover something” is that it can reflect back across the whole of the story and cast a new light on everything that happened before we discovered the something, which is one reason that it’s such a good ending.

4. Something new has come into being

This is an underrated and underexplored kind of ending, in my view. Often, the conservative ending, the restoration of the status quo, involves the destruction of whatever arose to threaten “the way things should be”. I’d like to see more stories about building and creating things. After all, for most of us – certainly for me, as someone who’s done project work of one kind or another for over 20 years – that’s how we experience life.

The relationship story has a bit of this. There’s a new relationship, a new family, a new alliance or whatever at the end. But I’d like to see more stories where the characters build something together and the ending is where they celebrate that, against the odds, it’s built. Fantasy is full of wonderful ancient artifacts and immense architectural wonders built by long-gone civilizations, many of which are destroyed in the course of the stories. How about the stories in which those amazing things are made in the first place?

5. It doesn’t matter any more

One overlooked form of personal growth is the kind where you’re able to say, along with Melody Beattie’s famous book Codependent No More: “It doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter!”

While that can be an utterance of despair, it can also be an expression of hope. The person who decides they can let go of their hurt and anger and not take revenge has grown. The young wizard who can say “No, Professor, I don’t need to follow your crazy agenda any more. This war is over, as it should have been when you were my age” (not an actual quote from any book) – this young wizard has grown.

If the character can look back on the inciting incident which started all the trouble and say “I made a big deal out of that, but it’s really not that important,” I think that can be a wonderful ending. I recently read the pulpy but enjoyable Mogworld by Yahtzee Croshaw, in which the viewpoint character decides at the end, “I don’t want to be a hero. I want to be a protagonist.” While it’s not a great book, that’s a great ending.

Debora Geary‘s Witches On Parole trilogy is, at its heart, about this realignment of priorities. And one of the things about the “it doesn’t matter any more” ending is this: the realization that your original priorities don’t matter is followed by the realization of what does matter.

It’s not about external circumstances being exactly as you would wish them, but about being true to yourself and those around you.

So, what kinds of endings work for you? How do you like to finish your stories?

Aug 26

Beta Feedback

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Well, I’ve had feedback from my wonderful beta readers. One hasn’t finished yet (just got a new job, so I let him off), but the other two have, and the feedback is consistent.

Consistent not only with each other, but also with my own suspicions about what didn’t work and what could be stronger. Although they did relieve my concerns about a couple of things, such as whether I’d been descriptive enough.

All three of them (and my other reader who gave feedback on an early partial draft) disliked the parentheses. Having almost eliminated semicolons from my writing, I think parentheses may be next. They all felt the parenthetical explanations of background facts broke the flow, and I need to find a better way of communicating the worldbuilding aspects of the story.

I’m gearing up now for a major rewrite. I’ve not done this with my previous books, but they were less ambitious and not surrounded by dozens of other stories begging to be told. I need to streamline the story, focussing on Berry as the main character and viewpoint character. If Berry didn’t know about it directly or from someone who was there, it doesn’t go in this book.

It may well go in another book, though, or stand on its own as a short story. I don’t regret writing the backstories of so many characters. I think it was a good exercise, and they won’t be lost – except for one.

Tranquil the statistician defied my attempts to make him interesting, and he’s going to be cut altogether. I’m going to have a smaller, more focussed group of characters with a clearer purpose and better-thought-through character arcs. Some of the characters will drop into the background, while others will take on new significance. Originally, I thought this would be an ensemble-cast book, but it really is Berry’s story.

Most of this is subtraction, but there will be addition as well. I want to spend a bit more time on the three secondary characters (Rain the ex-gang enforcer, Breeze the werewolf and Vigilant the spiritually-inclined lawyer), and I’ve come up with a major change to one relatively minor character which gives her more depth and sets up for one of the other books. Here’s a hint: when you have a character who’s already kind of a badass, how can you make her even more so? Answer: take away her legs.

It’ll be a lot of work, but I think I’ll come out of it with a very marketable book. My betas think the same.

Aug 15

First draft finished! What’s next?

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Well, I finally got my first draft done on The Gryphon Clerks.

I started writing at the beginning of November last year, so that’s eight and a half months – not bad. The manuscript is at 108,000 words, but that doesn’t count the more than 30,000 words I’ve chopped out and put into two other projects.

One of them doesn’t have a title yet. It’s all the political stuff that’s going on during the story of The Gryphon Clerks. I wanted to keep the focus on the clerks, and particularly Berry, and that whole secondary plot wasn’t really interacting much with the main story, so I pulled it out as a separate book. It’s 28,000 words, so that’s a good start on a novel in its own right.

The other story that I’ve hived off from the main one is called Agents of Victory at the moment. I realized near the end of the first draft that I had this secondary character who, again, wasn’t interacting with Berry at all, and so probably didn’t belong in the book. She’s Grace, the niece of the Countygold Patience, and she’s involved in a sting on a crooked charity fundraiser which goes so well that she achieves her ambition of being admitted to the Realmgold’s Agents.

The Realmgold’s Agents are kind of an FBI-style organization who, under Realmgold Victory’s predecessor, were instruments of state oppression. But Victory has purged the psychos and stormtroopers, staffed the Agents with Gryphon Clerks, and made them into an elite force who work to bring down organized crime and corruption. This sets them against the wealthy and powerful, with Victory’s full backing (it’s part of her program of social reform).

Rain, the former street fighter, is going to join the very aristocratic (and very smart) Grace, and they’ll be an odd-couple partnership going undercover as fluffy, flighty mistress and incompetent maid. I think it could be a lot of fun.

I’ve also been writing some short stories in the world of the Gryphon Clerks, a couple of which I’ve submitted for publication (haven’t heard back on either of them yet). One is a 5000-worder set on a skyfrigate, which I hope will form part of an eventual novel. I’m planning to have a plot point in the political-maneuverings novel where a skyfrigate is sent off to get more mercenaries from a free city to the south which specializes in providing them, and does a bit of a tour of the southern countries in the process. That book, if it eventuates, will probably be called Unconquerable, after the ship.

I’ve also written a 6000-word short story for a competition called “Gnome Day”, based off a single moment in a minor scene in The Gryphon Clerks. Since there were (if I recall right) over 1700 entries received for that competition and only six will get published, I’m not holding my breath, but you never know.

If it isn’t selected, I’ll submit it elsewhere. It’s a standalone, although I’ve also done another 3,400-word story also set around the events surrounding Gnome Day (when Victory frees the gnomes). I suppose I could do a few more and have my own little theme anthology.

So that’s about 154,000 words, by my count, in the world of the Gryphon Clerks. I have a couple more ideas, too, including an actual sequel (not just exploring the same time period from different viewpoints) called Underground Railroad. The dwarves, reacting to Victory’s emancipation of the gnomes, build underground tunnels between their holds and take their trade under the mountains to the south, so that they can continue their slaveholding ways. Victory’s response is to build airships to trade the products of free gnomes with the same southern realms. I have one character already, Amethyst, a dwarf woman who poses as a gnome in order to be able to leave the dwarf hold (which is forbidden to dwarf women normally), and works with the gnome underground to get enslaved gnomes to freedom.

Before all this, though, I need to get feedback from my beta readers to tell me if I’m totally missing the boat with The Gryphon Clerks. I’m sure the book has issues, I’m just not certain what they are yet. Hopefully my lovely beta readers will tell me.

If you want to join the beta readers, there are places available – just comment here. I’ll need feedback within a month, so that I can start looking for a publisher. Thanks!

Jul 09

How to Review a Book You Didn’t Love

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I’m both a writer and a reviewer. I read a lot, and I’m opinionated, and that’s the basic formula for a reviewer. Most of my reviews are on Goodreads, but I also review on Amazon.

There are some pitfalls to wearing both hats. The writing community, especially the indie writing community, is very connected, and there’s some expectation (even if it’s only in my head) that I’ll review my friends’ stuff positively.

I don’t always do that. I say what I think. So far I haven’t hit anyone like the guy described in this post on Making Light, who responded to a negative review from another author by trashing her book in revenge. (Pro tip: don’t do that.) The people I choose to hang out with are sensible adult human beings and they will take a less-than-raving review in their stride. But I try to make it easier for them (and for authors I don’t know) by following a few important principles.

Actually, of course, reviews are not primarily for the authors’ consumption. They’re for other readers. I know I appreciate reading a review that warns me about the weaknesses of a book, so that I can assess whether they are likely to spoil my enjoyment or not, and alerts me to its strengths, so that I can decide whether that’s a thing I like or not. And this is why I write reviews the way I do.

Here are the principles I try to follow. They’re a work in process and I don’t guarantee that every review I’ve written, or even every review I’ve written recently, follows them perfectly. But this is what I’m trying for.

(This post, incidentally, was partly triggered by Lindsay Buroker’s Tips for Dealing with Bad Book Reviews. One of the commentators suggested that someone should do a post on “Tips for Writing Reviews Where the Books Weren’t Totally Awesome”. Challenge accepted.)

1. Objectivity: Say specifically what you saw on the page

I get no value from a review that says “this is a badly-written book” or “this is my favourite author” or “I loved this so much” or “I hated every page”, any more than I get value from reviews that copy and paste the publisher’s synopsis at the beginning. I want to know what I will see on the page that is, potentially, good or bad.

I was a book editor for a while (nearly 20 years ago now, but I still have the mindset), so I will often highlight the author’s competence with punctuation, or use of words that don’t mean what they think they mean. Some people don’t care about this at all (since they don’t know or follow the rules themselves). The fact that the author gets these things wrong won’t interfere with their enjoyment of the book. But if you do care, it will interfere with that enjoyment, and I for one would appreciate knowing that about a book in advance.

It’s also, unlike most other feedback, useful to the author, since it may help to motivate them to get a better editor next time (or get one at all).

I also talk about anachronisms in books with historical settings, for much the same reason.

2. Subjectivity: Acknowledge that tastes differ

Sometimes, what I hate about a book may be someone else’s favourite thing. So I phrase my opinions as opinions. I talk about what the author did (objectivity) and how I feel about it (subjectivity).

For example, I recently reviewed a book that had no antagonist and very little of what could be traditionally called “conflict” or “action”. People sat around and ate ice cream together a lot. Many, many readers would hate this, but (because of some other aspects of the book, which I also mentioned) I liked it.

There are also things that annoy me that don’t annoy other people. I’m fussy about names, for example. I like the non-fantasy parts of fantasy worlds to work like the real world, so having a full moon and a new moon in the sky at the same time is a big black mark. If this kind of thing is what I didn’t like about the book, again, I say so (rather than a vague “the worldbuilding is sloppy”), and usually mention that it may be a thing that only bothers me, so that if someone else doesn’t care they can discount my rating.

3. It’s not about the author

I try (again, I may not always succeed) to avoid making the review about the author’s competence, let alone their personal qualities. “I don’t see X on the page” is a much more emotionally neutral statement than “the author is no good at doing X” or “this is a lazy, bad author” (though I’ve been guilty of saying something not too different from that last one).

“I didn’t enjoy it because Y” doesn’t need to become “I hate this author and his little dog too”.

4. Allow for the possibility of improvement

Just as I rarely give five stars, I rarely give one star. To me, five stars means “it would be difficult or impossible to improve this book”, and I rarely think that. And one star, in my personal rating system, means “this is a complete waste of time with no redeeming qualities and I don’t even see any potential in this author”, and that’s even more rare. I always try to talk about things that worked, and if I finished the book there must have been something that worked. (Sometimes I don’t finish the book because, for me, not enough is working.)

I recently reviewed a second book in a series, and took pains to point out the ways in which it was an improvement over the first, even though I still felt it had significant flaws.

5. Say something fresh

Again, this is something I do that other people may not. Some reviewers read other reviews of the book before writing theirs, and enter into a kind of dialogue with them, disagreeing or agreeing. I don’t do that, in part so that my review will be a fresh perspective specific to me.

If I’m writing for other readers, rather than just to relieve my feelings, that will best be served if I say something that other people aren’t saying, with specific reference to what’s on the page, acknowledging my personal taste and avoiding attacks on the author.

In my opinion.

Jun 28

Telling Extra, Ordinary Stories

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There’s an advantage I didn’t anticipate to writing a fantasy novel without a Chosen One.

I mean, obviously it means that I’m not telling the same old tired story that’s already been done to death. I knew that. What I didn’t anticipate was that if nobody is the Chosen One, then anybody’s story can be interesting.

Can be interesting in itself, even if it’s tangential to the main story. Even if it’s completely unrelated.

For example, I’m currently polishing a short story for a competition. It’s about the young man in the last paragraph of this excerpt from the novel.

Yes, the one with no name and no lines. He nods his head and looks keen, and that’s his whole appearance. (I decided that Keen was his name, when I went to write more about him.)

He’s one small step up from a face in the crowd, and yet I wrote a 6000-word short story about the next 26 years of his life. One of my beta readers commented that it could easily be expanded and still remain interesting.

As it happens, I was listening to the latest Galley Table podcast from Flying Island Press this morning, in which the crew interview Nathan Lowell. Nathan is the champion of what some people have called “blue-collar spec fic”, about people who aren’t rulers or commanders just going about their daily lives and heroically doing what they have to do in order to get by. I’ve been very inspired by him and what he does. I’m not sure that the idea of a novel about heroic civil servants would have made it into my consciousness if I hadn’t listened to his work (thanks to Podiobooks.com).

The truth is, while the Chosen One story appeals to something in us that longs to be taken out of our everyday lives and be heroes and have adventures, because unbeknown to us we’re significant, the reality is that we can be heroes in the way we live our everyday lives. Because we actually are significant already.