OK, disclaimers upfront:

1. Everything I’m going to say in this post is about my own taste.
2. If your taste is different (entirely likely), that’s fine with me.
3. Your taste being different doesn’t invalidate what I say about my own preferences, or, of course, vice versa.
4. I nevertheless doubt that I’m the only one who feels this way.

Having got that out of the way, I want to talk about a spectrum in fiction writing that I’m going to call “freshness” versus “familiarity”. “Freshness” implies that the author is doing something new, seldom or never seen before, while “familiarity” means that they’re using elements (both genre elements and story elements) that have been around for a while.

Every book is somewhere on this spectrum. Finnegan’s Wake is probably about as far as you can go towards the freshness end without degenerating into random word-salad (and even that references earlier literature), and up the other end we have, I don’t know, fanfiction that’s just a rewriting of a scene in canon.

Now, straight away I’ve dropped an implication that freshness is better, and I don’t necessarily think that. I picked Finnegan’s Wake up once, and quickly concluded that I didn’t want to work that hard and probably wasn’t that smart, and put it down again. Certainly, though, freshness is harder.

violscraper / Foter / CC BY-NC

For me, the Goldilocks Zone on the freshness-familiarity spectrum is a broad one. I can enjoy a book like Charles Stross’s Halting State, for example, written in second person, or one of his posthuman novels like Glasshouse. I can also enjoy a book that’s very nearly pure vanilla D&D-style fantasy, or off-the-shelf space opera, as long as other aspects of the book (the characters, the writing, the plot) are well done – and have some freshness to them.

There is, though, such a thing as too much, and that applies both to freshness and to familiarity. I abandoned Walter Jon Williams’ Aristoi, for example, 25% of the way through, because I didn’t have a clue what was going on (and also didn’t care about the characters). I didn’t get past the sample for Hannu Rajaniemi’s The Quantum Thief, for a similar reason, even though I love heist novels. When too much is unfamiliar, I become disoriented and it’s easy for the book to lose my attention.

On the other hand, if I come across an epic fantasy in which the blacksmith’s boy loses his parents in the first chapter (when cruel, heartless, evil people destroy their village) and joins up with quirky and assorted companions in a quest for an artifact which, as the Chosen One, he is destined to wield against the Dark Lord, I pass it by. I’ve already read that story, and when I read it before it was probably better written.

There’s nothing inherently wrong with tropes, whether genre tropes or story tropes. I’m highly trope-tolerant. Oh, regardless of how much death and destruction is raining down, all of the core characters always survive, shrugging off significant injuries in insignificant amounts of time? OK, it’s one of those stories. I can live with that. (Though some tropes are easier to tolerate than others, and the others are usually the ones that allow the writer to take shortcuts in character development and plotting.)

Where I start to have a problem is if the whole thing, or almost the whole thing, is constructed out of tropes, as if someone had built a character, plot and setting generator out of the TV Tropes website and run it, then filled in the resulting outline with poorly-written prose. I think of those as paint-by-numbers books. There’s too much familiarity.

Sadly, a great many indie writers look out on the vast ocean of possibilities represented by the indie publishing revolution, in which they no longer have to write what the big publishers are buying in order to have a chance to reach an audience, but can create something genuinely new and fresh… and then they write another vampire romance with a whiny, annoying teenage heroine who’s simultaneously the most awesome person ever and too stupid to live.

Freshness is hard, yes. And familiarity is important. But if you want to succeed with me, and readers like me, you’re going to need to strike for the Goldilocks Zone.

I’ve just sent the first draft of Hope and the Clever Man, the second Gryphon Clerks book, to my lovely and talented beta readers. This is the culmination of a five-month-long writing process; a few of the chapters were recycled, having been cut from an earlier work, but most of them are new.

It’s also the start of an editing process that I expect to last two or three months. First the beta read, so I can get other eyes on the text for the first time and find out what’s missing, or not working as it should. Then an intensive edit from me, in multiple passes, strengthening and expanding. Finally, two passes through with my wonderful development editor, Kathleen Dale, who helped make Realmgolds a much better book than the one I initially gave her.

Hope is about a third longer than Realmgolds (80,000 words, at the moment, versus 62,000), following the usual law of series by which the later books get longer. It overlaps Realmgolds in time, which makes it tricky to avoid spoilers, but I think I’ve managed it. There are a couple of characters who appear in both books: the redoubtable Realmgold Victory strides in and orders people about several times, and the venerable Master-Magus is back too. There’s a brief cameo from Leading Clerk Grace Carter, just for fun, and the Realmgold’s clever man, mentioned a couple of times in Realmgolds, has, obviously, an important role. Otherwise, the characters are all new.

The idea is that either book acts as a point of entry for the series; you don’t have to read one before the other. I want to carry on that approach in future, creating a series more like Terry Pratchett’s Discworld than, say, The Wheel of Time. WoT lost me as a reader years ago when the books started to be spaced further apart, with the promised resolution nowhere in sight and a huge, complicated cast winding round each other before disappearing up their own backstories.

There will be recurring characters in the Gryphon Clerks, recurring groups of characters, even. I love my characters, so do my readers, and I enjoy leaving Easter eggs like a brief appearance in one book by a key character in another. You won’t have to read from the first book in order to understand what’s going on, though. (You also won’t have to read to the last book to understand what’s going on, which means that, while hopefully the fans will still stay eager for the next one, at least there’ll be a story that finishes in less than 20 or 30 years.)

Not having to start with Book One is important, because, while most of the reviews I’ve got for Realmgolds are four stars, even my greatest fans acknowledge that it has its flaws. I’m aware of that too. The first book of a series is frequently the weakest, or one of the weakest, even in series that go on to be hugely successful.

Look at Jim Butcher’s Dresden Files. Personally, I like Storm Front, having been into Jim Butcher since before he was cool, but a lot of people don’t, and even I freely acknowledge that the later books are much better. Fortunately, Butcher makes most of the early books, at least, reasonably self-contained, and does a good “who are these people and why are they angry” catch-up at the start of each new one, so you can read some of them out of order or even skip some without missing too much. At the same time, he keeps an overall arc going, which he’s said is going to take about 20 books or more to complete. (I don’t plan on doing that, partly because I’m not nearly the outliner he is.)

Pratchett himself didn’t really hit his stride until Mort (in my opinion), maybe even Wyrd Sisters, and those are the fourth and sixth books in the Discworld series. I’m a huge fan of the Discworld, but my top favourites start about 10 years after the publication of the first book, around Men at Arms, which is book 15. Not to say that there aren’t excellent books before that, but Men at Arms started a really strong run of writing which was deeper, more thoughtful, and consistently good, a run which lasted (again, my opinion) for another dozen years and 20 more books, finally broken, briefly, by Wintersmith. If everyone had to read 15 books before they started to be consistently good, I’m not sure the Discworld would have enjoyed the success it has. The multiple entry points ensure that they don’t have to.

Another approach to series which avoids the one-story-in-12-books-released-over-30-years issue is to write self-contained stories in smaller numbers of books, with these mini-series then potentially having some kind of link to each other. Trilogies, of course, are popular, especially in fantasy. Lindsay Buroker has recently concluded her Emperor’s Edge series, which is seven books, plus two other loosely connected novels set in a different part of the same world and some interstitial short stories. Because she writes fast, and they’re short, the whole series has wrapped up in three or four years. She now has the option of writing other stories in that world, or even with those characters, while also having a completed series.

When you’re writing fantasy or SF, worldbuilding takes a good deal of your time unless you’re using a vanilla off-the-shelf setting (which is usually pretty dull), and there’s definitely an advantage to being able to re-use it. Even Brandon Sanderson, who has the most insane ability to come up with new magic systems, writes more than one book in most of his settings. I created the foundations of the Gryphon Clerks setting over several years, and there is certainly plenty of space to tell stories in (we haven’t even glimpsed what’s over to the east yet).

Besides that, of course, it’s becoming received wisdom that a series will hook more readers than a standalone novel, for much the same reason that it’s easier to sell a novel than a novella, and easier to sell a novella than a short story. Readers, like writers, put a certain amount of investment into a setting and a group of characters, and if they like them, they want more of the same, only different.

Telling loosely connected stories lets me indulge my taste for novelty while also avoiding the work of building a new world each time, and hopefully will keep the readers hooked as well, while allowing them to skip a book or two if it isn’t to their taste.

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.