K writes:

I’m working on a book …  I just really love your world building, and now that I’ve gotten a pretty good handle on who my characters are, I need to flesh out the world they are in.

How did you create the Kate and Edge worlds?  The world building drew me into both series, and then the characters grounded me, making me care about what was happening. Any hints would be appreciated. If you can’t get to this until June, or ever, I understand.  :)

I’ve been mulling this over for a couple of days and I am not sure how to answer.  The problem lies in this phrase:

now that I’ve gotten a pretty good handle on who my characters are, I need to flesh out the world they are in.

It sounds as if the worldbuilding and characterization have been treated as separate entities.  They are not.  The world shapes the characters, influences them, dictates their strength and weaknesses.  The setting and the characters evolve simultaneously for me; I am unable to separate the two and honestly, I don’t see how such separation could work.  Sherlock Holmes can’t be French; Sookie can’t be a New Yorker; Spenser can’t be raised in Pacific Northwest, Conan couldn’t have been born in the 21st century.  The characters are extensions of their world.  They sprout from it like seeds.

So I am at a loss.  I can only give very vague, general advice.  Here are some things I learned along the way.  They may or may not work for everyone.

Overall philosophy.

In speculative fiction, the worldbuilding/character relationships  usually fall  into one of two categories: an extraordinary person in mundane circumstances or an ordinary person in extraordinary circumstances.

For example, Sherlock Holmes is an extraordinary person in mundane London.  He is a person of unique abilities and although he is rooted in that world and is through and through a product of his time, her peers view him as an eccentric genius or, occasionally,  a madman.  He creates a disturbance in his environment, and it’s fascinating to watch him work.

John Carter, an ordinary southern soldier, is in extraordinary environment of fantastic Mars.  He is thrust into intrigues between fantastic races,  he’s surrounded by strange creatures and odd races, all of whom view him as an oddity.  He also creates a disturbance in his environment, but for a different reason.

I found that when writing a novel it’s best to pick one or the other. A fantastic person in fantastic circumstances gives the reader no chance to relate to the characters of the novel.  If the reader doesn’t feel relate to the characters, they will get bored and stop reading.

That’s why, in a fantastic world of larger that life legends, Tolkien chose hobbits as his main protagonists.  Hobbits who live happy mundane lives, who like to have tea, eat a little too much, and generally don’t go looking for trouble.

Most novels connect with the reader not because of the shock value of their fantasy but because of their portrayal of the ordinary.

Mythology

I strongly suggest picking one mythology per book and sticking to it.  There are several reasons.

First, if the author is using a completely new mythology, the readers don’t know it.  If the author is using real folklore, the readers may not be familiar with it either.  The audience has a nearly limitless capacity to learn, but at the beginning of the narrative it knows nothing.  When an author assumes a certain level of knowledge from his audience, he immediately limits it.

“Two missile-armed starships charged straight towards one another, their launchers in continuous rapid fire. Kersaint was handicapped by the TFN practice of carrying no antimatter warheads in peacetime lest a fluctuating containment field blow a ship apart. The enemy cruiser was under no such constraint, but at least it seemed to mount only first-generation AMs, not the vastly more destructive second-generation weapons. The range flashed downward, and both ships staggered as hits got through, but Kersaint‘s initial salvo had given her a crushing advantage, and she exploited it savagely. A dozen more of her missiles scored direct hits, lacerating her enemy, in return for only three hits of her own, but the enemy cruiser didn’t even try to break off. It came straight for her, and both ships went to sprint-mode fire as the range fell to five light-seconds. …”

IN DEATH GROUND, by David Weber and Steven White

http://www.baen.com/chapters/indeath1.htm

Unless you are a military science fiction junkie, the passage above makes no sense.  This isn’t from the middle of the novel, this is from the first chapter. The writers, who are veterans of the genre and are extremely successful, are clearly aiming for a very specific segment of the SF audience.  The rest of the readers would bounce off this narrative.

So if the reader knows nothing in the beginning of the narrative, then the author has to reveal  and explain the mythology without making the narrative into a textbook.  That’s difficult to do and the less the author has to explain, the better is the narrative.

Second, if mythologies are mixed too much, the narrative begins to resemble a patchwork quilt.  He is a Judeo-Christian fallen angel.  She is a vampire-valkyrie.  Together they must defeat Tiamat, the chaos dragon of ancient Babylon.  While in theory this sounds exciting, if silly, in practice it ends up being a kitchen sink mess.  Each mythology has its own rules.  When the mythologies collide, the rules get tangled, the readers get confused, and the world of the book loses its unique flavor.

Every day life.

The most important aspect of the wroldbuilding is the every day existence of the characters.  Without grounding the characters in the mundane, they will seem disconnected from the narrative.  Historical romances generally do well, but writing one requires a metric ton of research.  And let me tell you, some historical romance readers are vicious.  I’ve seen authors ripped to shreds for fudging small details such as champagne flutes.

There is an industry term for historical romances where the setting is researched very lightly and drawn in broad strokes: wallpaper historicals.  Wallpaper historicals fail to deliver the authenticity; their characters often exhibit anachronistic tendencies, such as showing a young woman of a regency period strolling in the park without a chaperon, because she is a progressive rebel or showing an aristocrat who finds a loudly giggling, forward heroine charming.  Here is how an aristocrat would react to such lack of decorum:

Mr. Darcy: [pause] It was clear that an advantageous marriage would be the worst option possible…
Elizabeth Bennet: Did my sister give that impression?
Mr. Darcy: No! No, there was, however, the matter of your family…
Elizabeth Bennet: Our want of connection? Mr.Bingley did not seem to object…
Mr. Darcy: No, it was more than that.
Elizabeth Bennet: How, sir?
Mr. Darcy: It was the lack of propriety shown by your mother, your three younger sisters, and even, on the occasion, your father.

PRIDE AND PREJUDICE

Film adaptation, 2005

So how do you ground the character in the narrative?  How would do you get the small details right?  You daydream.

That’s it, that’s pretty much my answer.  If an author sits down to have fried chicken for dinner, perhaps the character does to.  If the author has to take out the garbage, deal with cat puke, or witness a woman screaming at her child in the check out line, than perhaps the character does too.  Of course, in the narrative, the cat might have wings, which would result in hair balls deposited into the glass chandelier.  Or the garbage might be eaten by a lizard.  A very large lizard.  Like Komodo dragon sized.

Or maybe dragon sized.

Okay so how would this work?  The dragon would have to be at the garbage dump.  Perhaps it eats garbage and produces very fertile manure.  When I go to a recycling center, I have to sign in and I have to have my trash sorted out.  And I would probably have to pay a fee to the city. These are details that an audience can easily relate to.

Also some trash dragons would probably melt the metal.  And glass.  That can be recycled.  If your job is to handle a fire breathing dragon, you’d have the fire retardant gear.  Also you might be a bit surly.

So:

The trash dragon keeper pushed back his soot stained helmet and gave me an evil eye. Behind him the enormous shape of the garbage dragon loomed behind the electrified fence.  The dragon raised his horned head, the sun reflecting of the ruby scales, and spat a jet of flame, melting a heap of metal into glowing lava.

The trash dragon keeper shook his head.  “It says here your permit has expired.”

“That’s bull.  I paid the bill.”  Damn Trash Management.  “Look, I have it right here!”  I pulled the bill from the glove compartment and showed him the Paid In Full stamp on it.

The Dragon Keeper shrugged.  “Look, lady, the computer says your account’s suspended.  When it says something different, I’ll let you in.”

I waved at giant pile of metal scrap in the back of my Dodge.  “Well, what the hell am I supposed to do with all that?”

“It’s not my problem.  You can do whatever you want with it.”

Fine, you ass.  I put the truck in gear, pulled a U-turn, and headed out.

Everyone at some point had to deal with some sort of utility that had been paid but had not be updated.  Everyone had driven to either garbage dump or a recycling center.  Everyone had met a surly government employee.  By inserting these details, the fantastic narrative gains real-life details, which give it a certain authenticity.

To reiterate: daydream, let your environment shape the characters, and don’t make it too complicated.  That’s all of my advice for today.

]]> http://www.ilona-andrews.com/2011/01/25/on-worldbuilding/feed/ 48 http://www.ilona-andrews.com/2010/02/07/novel-length-and-writing-questions/ http://www.ilona-andrews.com/2010/02/07/novel-length-and-writing-questions/#comments Sun, 07 Feb 2010 15:02:32 +0000 admin http://www.ilona-andrews.com/?p=3950 R writes:

I had a question about word counts. I’m trying to figure out what the proper format for a manuscript is and came across a snag. What would you consider to be an average word count for your books or at least a word count for a new author? The story I’m working on already hit 150,000 and it’s not even done, but I heard that if it’s too long then some editors automatically reject it.

Editors don’t typically automatically reject things on the basis of length alone.  Most often they reject them because writing isn’t quite there, or their line-up already has something similar, or the novel doesn’t fit with what they already publish.

A typical length for a UF is around 90,000-100,000 words.  It used to be typographic word count, but now more and more people just go with MS Word’s word count.

Unfortunately,  150,000 is what’s colloquially known among writers as BFB – Big F-ing Brick.  There are genres in which such length is acceptable.  Epic fantasies, for example, tend to be long.  Historic fiction, also – you could kill someone with  an early Sharon K. Penman’s book.  But if you’re writing a UF, a paranormal, a contemporary fantasy, ora  mystery, you have to prepare yourself to make some sacrifices.  You may be asked to split the novel in two.  You may be asked to cut.  Gordon and I had to chop off a quarter of the MAGIC BITES to make it fit into 90,000 limit.  It took hitting some bestseller lists before the word limit was relaxed.  That’s the good thing about having a little bit of sales – you get more leeway.

The question to ask yourself is , why is your book so long?  Are you meandering?  Is there a ten day trip in there that can be summarized in two sentences?  Do people have terribly important debates that add nothing to the plot?  Are you in love with a page-long description of an abandoned movie theater?

My advice would be to take a good hard look at the narrative and cut the fat.  Give your novel to someone who doesn’t feel obligated to pet you on the head.  Is he bored reading it?  Cut the boring parts.

But, if you are completely and definitely sure that your work must remain at the current length, then write the best query letter you can write and make sure your first chapter would knock the editor’s socks off.  They will take it from there.

M writes

I’m curious about how drafts work when you’re published. I know when you’re unpublished, the general rule of thumb is 3+ drafts before subbing it out. How many drafts do you guys generally go through before you hand the manuscript in? Also, do you do a lot of editing while you write or do you wait to make changes and corrections to the story during copy-edits?

As many as it takes.

The point of redrafting is to produce the best book possible.  If there is some kind of rule out there that tells you to rewrite an arbitrary number of times, that rule is stupid and should be kicked to the curb.  I’d like to meet the person who came up with that nonsense and pop him upside the head for driving future writers crazy.

The number of drafts doesn’t matter.  Only the end product does.  Some books take one draft, some take eight.

We do edit as we write.  Most of the editing comes in the form of adjusting the narrative.  For example,  we have an exploding corpse in Kate 5.  Gordon and I wrote the scene, but it felt off.  The scene would be better set during magic instead of tech, because magic would let us get creepier.  But as it was, the scene couldn’t have magic because magic fell that morning.  It took me a whole weekend to realize that I must split the scene off and move it to next day.  As a result, I had to go back, rename Chapter 4 as Chapter 5, move the front scene to the end of Chapter 3 and write an entirely new Chapter 4.

That’s normal, just as the cleaning as you go along is normal. I type with my key board in my lap because regular chairs kill my back and I typo a lot as I write.  (I do wish Liquid Binder would run the spellcheck all the time, but they don’t.  If I find software that let me do the same file management as the Binder but runs the spellcheck, I will pounce on it.)  I usually go back and clean what I wrote every day or two.  Plus, Gordon cleans it in rewrites.

To reiterate, focus on the book, not the rewrites. 

Question:

So do you get the same per book from an ebook sale? I got a kindle for christmas (which I love) and I have been buying all of my books since then on it. Hopefully I am not screwing over the authors.

Answer:

No, I don’t get the same per book from an e-book sale.  I get more.

E-books are a very new format for the publishing and the publishers aren’t quite sure where they fit in the grand scheme of things, so please keep in mind that there is probably a lot of variation in the way e-books are treated.  Ace, our publisher, files them under Royalties for Other Editions, a category usually containing Audio books.

The royalty is the same as audio as well: 15% of the suggested retail price, with one small caveat:  if the Publisher receives les than 40% of the Suggested Reatil Price, the royalty will be reduced by one half of the difference between 40% of the Suggested Retail and the amount received by the publisher, but in no event can this royalty be more than 1/2 of the amount received by the Publisher.

What does it all mean?  It means that if the retailer significantly discounts an electronic edition of the book, we help the Publisher eat the discount.

Should readers worry about that discount when buying e-books?

No.

Why not?  Because the royalty of 15% at $6.99 means we get a dollar on each book.  $1.0485 to be exact.  A whole dollar!  That’s twice what we get for a dead tree books.  Even if the retailer discounts the e-book to nothing, and the publisher’s cut falls to only 20% instead of 40, we get:

Suggested Retail: $6.99

40% (Publisher’s preferred cut) = $2.796

20% (Publisher’s cut after discount) = $1.398

Our cut: $1.0485 – 1/2 ($2.796-$1.398) = 1.0485-0.699= $0.3495

We still get money, and in our case (this is the breakdown for Magic Bites), that money is not that far from our 6% $0.4194 we get for dead tree books.

This sort of discount almost never takes place, btw.  I went to super extreme for the sake of example.  If the math is too confusing, just keep in mind that each e-book you buy from Ace equals one dollar that’s going to the author.  That is pretty awesome.

Below is an example e-royalty statement.  Because e-books are released in a variety of formats, each format gets its own ISBN, the identification number of that particular book.  This one happens to be for Mobipocket.  Click the image for a larger version.

Why are publishers resistant to e-books?

Warning: I’m not a publisher, so the discussion below is just my speculation.

I don’t think they are actively resisting this new format, but rather uncertain of where it fits.  E-books brings with it a host of issues.

First, e-piracy.  BNAs, like Nora Roberts, have confirmed that e-piracy negatively affects their sales.  And I have to say, although I no longer actively pursue e-pirates, I distinctly recall finding a pirated version of an e-book on one of the sites and reading a reply by one of people who stole it.  It went something like this: “Holy crap, I had no idea I could get these books for free.  I’ve been paying for them.  Boy, aren’t I stupid?  This is great.”

Grrrr.  Look you, I don’t go into your place of work and slap the and steal widgets you’re making.  I deserve my dollar, damn it.

Second, price.  Remember that price breakdown we did before?  The main cost in producing books is shouldered by the publisher, and the printing costs only account for about 10% of it.  That means that it’s only a few cents cheaper for the publisher to produce an e-book than to produce a dead tree book.  Yes, when we’re talking thousands of units, a few cents can add up, but when it comes to Suggested Retail for each individual book, especially mass market, that Suggested Retail will be about the same for e-books and print books.  But when you and I buy those e-books, we get fussy.  Why does this book cost the same as the print book?  It’s a damn file.

It’s worse when it comes to hardbacks.  I am personally not paying $30 for an e-book.  And that presents further issues, which have to do with how publishers really make money and is outside of the scope of this discussion.

This puts pressure on the publishers to discount the books, but they still have to somehow make money.  There is a limit to how much profit you can squeeze out of something that only priced $6.99.

Third, formats.  I have, let’ see, one, two, three… six ISBNs for MAGIC BITES for e-book formats.  And most of them don’t sell that well.  Adobe EPub, for example, shows 3 units sold.  Three.  For the total profit of $3.15.  Someone at the publishing house had to pay to register this ISBN and spend man hours converting MAGIC BITES into this format and then sending it to all retailers. The publisher lost money on this format.  All these different formats mean additional costs.

And that wraps it up for our e-book bonanza.

So we sat there and talked it out.  I ended the emotional arc of the character in chapter 23.  Five chapters before the finale.

Each story has two sources of tension: circumstance conflict and emotional conflict.  Circumstance conflict, often called plot conflict, is driven by the external needs of the character.  Soldier escaping from concentration camp, a lawyer struggling to win a case, a debutante trying to make a good match to save her family from financial ruin, all of those are conflicts of circumstance.  They are forced onto the protagonist by environment and they put protagonist in danger of failure.  The price of failure might be something as small as the loss of promotion or something as big as the loss of life, depending on the story.

Emotional conflict takes place inside the character.  It arises from the wants and needs of the characters themselves.  I prefer the stories where the emotional conflict directly opposes the conflict of circumstance.  A young debutante who must find a husband to pull her family out of bankruptcy falls for a poor man.  Oh noes!  Angst!

These two conflicts, the internal and the external, need to coincide in finale to deliver the maximum emotional gratification for the reader.  (John McClane saves his wife and they are back together.  Also the evil reporter is punched in the nose.)  Yours truly for some odd reason ended the emotional conflict in chapter 23 and the narrative ground to a halt.

For me the conflict progression is completely ingrained into writing – I don’t think of it unless I’m forced.  In this case I was forced to analyze it and I shall now make some sort of sweets for my family to atone for days of grumpiness.

It took me four days to figure it out.  Don’t be me.

Question from Sachiko regarding author promotion:

Does this [increased demand for author promotion- Ilona] reduce publishers’ gatekeeping powers? If I’m going to bust my hump to sell my own books, then vanity publishing looks a little less unattractive. Online publishing should also serve to reduce the need for big publishing houses, if they’re not going to handle the PR.

Let’s do these one at a time.

1)  Publishers do not have gatekeeping powers.

Publishers want to publish quality fiction, because they love books.  I know there is a tendency to view publishers as extremely cold and solely business-oriented, but a lot of them get into the business because they do truly love books.  Editors, who work for publishers, also love books.

Publishers also want to make money.  Money lets them eat and publish more books.

There are no mythical editors who sit there before a stack of manuscripts and think, “Yep, have to guard the gate.”  When an editor sits down before the pile of submissions, he or she most likely think, “I hope I find an awesome book and I hope it will be a bestseller.”  They want to find somebody to publish.  That’s how they stay in business.

Think of it as sitting before a a sack of marbles and looking for a particular one.  No. no. no. No, no, no, no, no, omg no, no, no.  YES!  I found one!  I found one!  Look at my precious!

2) Vanity publishing.

There are two types of publishing commonly referred to as “vanity publishing”.

1) Scam Publishing.

Google manuscript novel publisher.  Check out Sponsored links.  Some of those are scam publishers.  You can typically tell them by the ads.

“Traditional publishers don’t want new authors to get published!  (Lie – see paragraph above.)  We really care about you and your manuscript.  (Lie, they only care about your money and making it their money.)  We are not a vanity press.  (Lie – Yes, they are.)”

Scam publishers pray on ignorance of new authors.  You’re usually offered a deal: you give them x amount of money, and they publish your book.  The money is not a fee – it’s an investment into your future.  You get 50% royalties, the book will sell like hot cakes, everybody will be rich.  You give them the money, the book doesn’t sell, and you pocket 50% of 0.

Scam publishers do not edit the books they receive.   The books are rarely made well.  These people are not there to make money on the books.  They are there to make money on authors.

2) Self-publishing.

Honest companies who provide self-publishing services do not pretend to be publishers.  They tell you upfront that you will be paying a fee for x amount of books.  What you do with said books is your business.  Some companies do provide proofreading services for an additional fee and some don’t.  But they are very clear where they stand: they are not interested in royalties.

Vanity presses in general do not have the distribution the big publishing houses have, they do not have marketing budgets, they do not have contacts within the industry, such as access to big chain book buyers, who determine what titles and how much units these big chains carry.

I had just dropped the last of Ace samplers at a local Books-A-Million, where I was subjected to intense scrutiny.  They asked my name, my publishing house, whether or not they carried my book, and so on.  If I was published through a vanity press, they would not have accepted my promotional materials.

That said, there are isolated cases of people succeeding through vanity presses.  This usually happens when the subject matter was too odd for traditional publishing channels or books which were good enough to be published, but the author gave up too early.  It’s hard to be rejected and the submission process is grueling.  But if you submit to three publishers, get rejected, and  throw a hissy fit and give up, you really can’t blame the industry.  You quit.

3)  Online publishing

My recent experiences with online publishing have not gone as smoothly as I hoped.  I’m not going into details, because that would be unprofessional, so I will instead offer you this: e-publishing is a growing industry, and if you can get in with a professional publishing house, you can find an audience and make some money.

However, dead tree books still rule.  All of my titles in Kate Daniels series are released as e-books, and the numbers of units sold are tiny compared to dead tree books.  So far it seems to be about 5% of dead tree book sales for me.  So yes, you can build a career in e-publishing, reaching a significant audience and making a nice living, but almost every e-book writer out there, when offered a NY contract, jumps on it with both feet.  That happens for a reason.

4) Marketing.

Traditional publishers do much more marketing than people realize.

The best advertisement for the book is the presence of the book in stores and publishers employ a sales department which does have access to big chain buyers.  The sales department does its best to pitch the books to these buyers.  The more big chains order, the better are the book’s chances at success.

Traditional publishers employ publicists who serve as a bridge between the publishing house and reviewers.  If you follow this journal, you will see periodic calls for “Who wants to review the new book?”  That list goes to the publicist, who then makes sure the warehouse sends out advance copies.  Advance copies, ARCs, are expensive to print and smaller independent publishers can’t always find the money to print them.  Even traditional publishers are cutting down on those costs.

Traditional publishers have presence at major conventions.  This year, Ace, for example, printed samplers with their UF line up for the late summer/early fall and gave them away at Comicon.

Traditional publishers purchase ads.  They buy special placement for certain titles in the big chains: special displays, front shelves, eye level placement, etc.

A lot of times they don’t do some of the more expensive marketing until the book has proven itself.  But they still find the ways to promote their titles.  For example, if you head over to Dear Author, you will find my lovely editor Anne introducing the fall line up.  And you can win a copy of ON THE EDGE.  [This is me doing marketing- Ilona]

Traditional publishers can also choose to kill a book.  It’s rare, because it’s financially damaging, but it does happen.

5) Author

How much promo should an author do?  It’s up to the author.  I can’t spend too much on promotion, because I need the money to feed my family and while Gordon and are frugal, we didn’t go to RWA this year because of the cost.  Could we have promoted ON THE EDGE there?  Yes.  Would it have justified the cost?  Probably not.

Here are some avenues of promotion:

• conventions
• ad placement in blogs and print publications
• online and print interviews
• promotional give -aways
• swag (bookmarks, magnets, and other silliness) mailing
• blogging (snippets, fun, etc)

Online promotion is relatively inexpensive and requires mostly time and occasionally Photoshop skills.  But an ad in Romantic Times, although it can cost you a couple grand or more, will reach a wide audience that’s not necessarily an online audience.

Online promotion is also hard to target.  Same people tend to visit an array of similar blogs.  It’s not uncommon to see the same person comment at Dear Author, Smart Bitches, and Bitten by Books in the same day.    Purchasing an ad at all three at the same time will brand your release date into the reader’s mind and may also make them hate you with violent hate.

All promo is not created equal.  Suppose Scalzi gets a copy of your book and he likes it and he mentions it on Whatever. The resulting traffic would result in much greater exposure for the book than if I mention it, but it also has more value than a simple ad.  It would be a personal recommendation and we tend to value personal recommendations much more than advertisements. That’s what the blurbs on books are, after all – personal recommendations by authors.

This time around I really have no time for promo.  I need to finish Kate 4 and have Edge 2 in by the end of October and Edge 2 is in no shape. I have it in my head but that’s different from having it on paper so  I will have to write like mad.

I am going for the most reward for least time and money: I give away content.  I’m pretty sure that if I can get you to read first three chapters of the book, you’ll probably remember it.  I will also be at Borders SF Blog Babel Clash blog come September 29th, and I’ll be doing a give away at Bitten by Books, probably an I-pod of some sort.  That’s about it.  J has been after me for ages trying to get me to make a trailer for ON THE EDGE and I have no time and thinking about it makes me growl.   (Please note that this is the third time I mentioned my title.  If I was really pushing it, I would work September 29, its release date in there (muhahaha!) – Ilona the Slick Willy)  I only made one trailer for Magic Bites  and it’s dying a quiet sad death on Youtube.

All of this promotion is not aimed at getting the readers to buy books.  Mostly it’s there to make sure that readers know the release date and recognize the book if they see it in the store.

Are you expected to do promo?  Well, it doesn’t hurt your relationship with the publisher.  But I can tell you that I did no promo for MAGIC BITES and that did not sour my relationship with my publishing house.    Nobody fussed at me and nobody twisted my arm.

In conclusion: I stuck some marketing information into this post for funsies and because I thought it was ironic.   If you know of some good way to do inexpensive marketing, please leave a comment.   I am now officially too tired to write any more of this post.

When you speak about writing and how-to’s, people tend to immediately contradict you, because in writing there is rarely the right way to do things or the only way to do things. Writing is a form of expression and we all express ourselves in different ways. So this is just a way I do it and it may or may not work for you.

Transitions:

There are several types of transitions. Let’s start with one and go down the list.

Time-compressing transitions:

Most of your manuscript will consist of scenes. A scene is immediate. In the scene, the events are shown as they unfold, in detail. Typically you don’t summarize in the scene. (This is where “show don’t tell” comes in, but I hate that rule so we’re not going to mention it again.) When you are daydreaming, and this really cool interaction between your characters occurs to you, so vivid you can practically see it, and you sit there and go, “Yeah!”, you are probably dreaming of a scene.

Another way to think about the scene: you should be able to picture every moment of the scene as if you’re watching a movie.

But some events take place off-camera, between the scenes. Time passes, changes take place, and we need to compress what happened and move on to the next scene. We have to summarize the boring bits.

Time-compression transition is a summary. That’s the nature of this beast.

Example: Opening of the Star Wars movies is always a transition. It’s a summary of the events. The exchange where Luke fixes R2D2 is a scene.

Most writers don’t consciously think about the scenes and transitions in those terms. I don’t really approach my narrative and decide, “I’ve had a scene, now I am going to stick a transition in there.” Most of the times the scene-transition-scene progression occurs naturally, as you move through the story, because you are picking and choosing: here is an interesting bit, people might like to see that, and here is a boring bit, I can just summarize it and move on. But I found that for me knowing the mechanics of how it works made me a better writer.

So we’ve identified what is a scene and what is a time-compressing transition. Let’s see how to make that transition happen.

The key to an effective time-compressing transition is the change that takes place in the character. Think of the character’s emotions as a string. As long as you hold on to that string, you can slide all sort of beads on it.

Let’s do a very simple example:

Mary Sue heroically went to her job, but her baby kept her up at night, and she has a headache. What changes in Mary Sue’s from emotional point of view? Well, she came in determined to work but got fed-up and left. We need to move Mary Sue:

Emotionally: from resigned to her fate to fed-up.

Physically: don’t have to worry about it for the time being as our transition starts and ends at her work.

Time-wise: Morning to lunch.

As Mary Sue walked to her cubicle, the headache scratched at the back of her skull. Her head felt too heavy, her eyelids wanted to close and an annoying hum filled her ears. By sheer willpower she forced herself to concentrate on the TPS reports, growing more and more annoyed with each new sheet of paper she discovered in her in box. By lunch her headache had matured into a blinding migraine. Finally, she could stand it no longer and clocked out.

Why does it work? Because it all revolves around Mary’s emotional state and her emotional progress. As long as you can hold on to your character’s emotion, you can compress centuries and minutes with equal ease, transitioning your character wherever whenever.

Let’s do a more complex example:

Picklednose is a necromancer who is accompanying a prince on a voyage across a sea. He starts out feeling okay, but at the end of the voyage he is driven out of his skull and is very annoyed, because we need him to do something rash in the next scene.

We need to move Picklednose:

Emotionally: from apprehensive to annoyed to no end

Physically: from one coast to another

Time-wise: to two weeks later.

From the moment Picklednose stepped onto the wooden deck of La Bella, rolling and rocking with the pulse of the sea, he knew he would come to regret it. The ship was never still. It careened, vibrated, and listed, up and down, side to side, like some drunken whore at the end of the night. The cold spray dampened his clothes and his sheets, until he no longer remembered what it was like to be dry. But the salt, the salt was worst of all. The bitter, sharp salt of the sea was everywhere: it spoiled his food, it caked in his hair, it formed a grainy layer on his skin and made his eyes water. And to add insult to his misery, Prince Charming loved it all. He practically bounded out of his bunk to scurry up the mast or to pull on some damn rope, reveling in grunt work with infuriating idiotic enthusiasm.

By the time La Bella finally pulled into port, Picklenose was sure of two things: first, he hated the sea and the sea returned his hate and second, Prince Charming was completely and hopelessly daft.

Works? Works. Why? Because we are holding on to the emotional thread in our poor Picklednose.

Now it’s time to get really complicated. Let’s take Bob. Bob escapes from prison. He saws through the bars, he scales the wall on the sheet-ropes he had hidden in the belly of a sculpture he was making for the warden’s wife. We showed him crawling through the mud and rain and disappearing into the jungle.

Now we need to pick up the story later, let’s say six months later. What changes take place in Bob emotionally? He starts out euphoric – he escaped, he is out. He ends with the deep desire to kill the man who put him into prison. Let’s call this man Poopsie. So Bob ends up stalking Poopsie half a year later at Poopsie’s Italian villa.

Emotionally we need to get Bob from “Omg, Eff-u, suckers! I’m freee!” to “I’m going to nuke that Poopsie bastard if it’s the last thing I do.”

Physically we need to move him from the jungle of Guatemala to Italy.

Temporally we need to move him from February to August.

Let’s do it:

For three weeks he was lost in the rain-soaked verdant riot of the jungle. At first fear drove him, and then, slowly, as days trickled by and he realized he had eluded the capture, euphoria claimed him. For a few blissful hours, hidden in the narrow cave he had found in a side of a hill, Bob was truly happy. He was so happy, he would have been content to die. Then fear returned again, but this time with a sharp edge of resentment and he was on the move, cradling that resentment, nurturing it until it grew into smoldering anger against the man who did this to him. When he finally emerged, starved, filthy, battered, onto a muddy road leading to a small village, his anger had grown into an all consuming fury, and the villagers shied from him and crossed themselves, muttering of a demon they glimpsed in his eyes.

He had nothing to trade for a ride and so he walked from one village to another, until he reached Zunil, and from there he caught a ride to Guatemala City with a group of British tourists. The moment he entered the airport bathroom, reached behind the toilet, and felt the cold metal of the locker key he had taped there months before should have been bliss. Yet even as he pulled the duffel full of cash from the locker, Bob felt no joy, no relief, only anger. It at once fueled and devoured him, and Bob knew with absolute certainty that until he saw the life fade in Poopsie’s eyes, he would never be free.

Five months later Bob sat at a small gelateria on Italian coast, working on a cone of rich Lipari gelato. Time had crystallized his rage into an icy shard. Had he encountered Poopsie when he had boarded the plane to the States, he would’ve beaten him to death then and there and no force on earth would be able to stop him. But the ice taught him control and patience, and for the time being he was content to merely imagine breaking a leg off his chair, crossing the street to where Poopsie lingered by the art storefront, and driving it into the man’s eye socket.

Why does it work? Because it’s all about Bob’s emotions. People are way more interesting then events by themselves.

Now let’s go back and look why we picked Star Wars as an example. Because really in this particular case opening scene-transition is very easy to identify. Every transition I had written here is also very clear for the purposes of example. They stand there very politely holding a little flag, “Hi, I’m transition!”

In written narrative transitions mutate and take all sorts of shape. They are disguised, they are presented with subtlety and a lot of times you don’t even notice they exist.

Here is an example from Nora Roberts.

:insert fanfare here:

(While we’re listening to fanfare, let me get something out of the way. There is a tendency among some members of SF/F to sneer at romance writers. This will show you why you shouldn’t. Nora Roberts sells my entire print-run weekly. In hardback. There is a reason for that.)

Onto the example:

When one of the most famous faces on the planet was beaten to a bloody, splintered pulp, it was news. Even in New York City. When the owner of that famous face punctured several vital organs of the batterer with a fillet knife, it was not only news, it was work.

Getting an interview with the woman who owned the face that had launched a thousand consumer products was a goddamn battle.

Nora Roberts writing as J.D. Robb, Origin in Death

When I grow up, I want to write like Nora. Look how elegant it is: the character is never mentioned, but you know what is going on in her head: first, she heard about it, then she realized she was assigned to the murder, and now she is frustrated because she obviously tried to interview the victim of the battering several times, and got nowhere. And none of this is directly mentioned, but we know it anyway. Right away the reader is engaged. Isn’t it pretty? It compressed time, events, and emotional change and it’s done so smoothly you would never notice, unless you were anal like me and looking for a good transition example.

What is it?

There are several definitions floating out there on the internet.

Here is one from Janet Evanovich*

“. . . instead of stating a situation flat out, you want to let the reader discover what you’re trying to say by watching a character in action and by listening to his dialogue. Showing brings your characters to life.”

Let’s concentrate on this part: “… discover what you’re trying to say by watching a character in action and by listening to his dialogue…”

That sounds as if we are not reading, but watching a movie.

The purest example of show, don’t tell is visual entertainment. TV, cinema, and video games all entertain us by offering an image of the environment and characters.

When you’re interacting with visual media, you don’t really know what the character is thinking. You guess at their thoughts from their action and dialogue.

What is this soldier thinking?

My guess is, something along the lines of, “Oh crap!”**

In fiction, the writer often has the power to do the opposite: to drop the reader right into the character’s head. Instead of guessing at the thoughts, the reader will know exactly what stormy things are brewing inside heroes and villains. The equivalent for the cinema would be a voice over, but it doesn’t really do this technique justice.

I will come back to this point later but for now, I’d like to stress that being able to dive into character’s mind is a very powerful tool. Please don’t discount it.

So how does show don’t tell translate to fiction?

Let’s do a very basic example.

Tell: Nathan looked exhausted.

Now imagine that Nathan is an actor. Let’s make him Nathan Fillion, because we all like him and the name is the same. Imagine you are a director and you are trying to direct Nathan to look exhausted. Remember, you can’t actually tell anyone what Nathan is feeling, because people will be watching it. Nathan has to demonstrate that he is tired.

When I am tired, I look for a place to sit down, so I would tell Nathan to slump against the wall and close his eyes. Imagine him doing it in your head. Now describe it.

Show: Nathan slumped against the wall and closed his eyes.

Let’s put Nathan through more paces.

Tell: Nathan is happy.

Show: A big grin stretched Nathan’s lips.

Tell: Nathan is mad.

Show: Nathan’s eyebrows furrowed together.

Tell: Nathan is hungry.

Okay, this one is a bit hard. When I’m hungry, I head for the fridge. We will have to give Nathan a fridge.

Show: Nathan swung the refrigerator door open and peered inside.

Tell: It was a dark and stormy night.

Show: The wind tore at the trees, flinging icy rain from the pitch-black sky.

The key to showing is to picture things in your head. That’s it. No big secret. Picture it and write it.

Pitfalls of telling and showing.

Now that we know what it is and the difference between show and tell, why do we care?

Telling is always precise, because you are telling the reader exactly what is happening. But telling also has several pitfalls.

• a) Telling is boring. Being boring is a kiss of death. We like to interact with the narrative. Showing forces us to actually work a little bit and guess as we go along. Despite the cliche of mindless entertainment being popular, most of us like to work a little bit while we’re being entertained.
• b) Telling talks down to the reader. The writer is explaining things to the reader and nobody likes a lecture.
• c) Telling slows down the narrative to a crawl.

Example: Anna hated Nathan. She thought he was an idiot. She was very irritated because he stood her up and she had to wait for him in the restaurant. She felt humiliated, because the waiter kept asking her for her order.

How much of this could you take as a reader?

Showing also has its pitfalls.

a) Showing is imprecise.

Let’s go back to the first example.

Tell: Nathan is exhausted.

Show: Nathan slumped against the wall and closed his eyes.

Is he exhausted or desperate? Maybe he’s frustrated.

b) Showing will result in longer narrative. (But it will be more fun to read.)

Because showing is imprecise, now we have to qualify it with dialogue or Nathan’s thoughts.

Nathan slumped against the wall and closed his eyes. His feet hurt. A slow, dull ache gnawed on the muscles of his lower back.

Do you recall how above I prattled on about being able to drop the reader into character’s head? This is the spot for it.

Nathan slumped against the wall and closed his eyes. His feet hurt. A slow, dull ache gnawed on the muscles of his lower back. His entire body begged for the soft comfort of his bed.

Strictly speaking, the last sentence is telling. But, it reads well together, doesn’t it? Because we like knowing what Nathan is thinking. We already pretty much figured it out, but it’s nice to have a confirmation. That’s how we can connect to him as a character and sympathize with him.

Most of the good narrative is a blend of showing and telling. And that brings us to the chief pitfall of showing: too much.

c) You can hammer even the best of tools into the ground, if you try. If you concentrate too much on showing, you might forget that your book is not a movie.

Let me give you a wonderful example of this – me:

The man sprawled in the middle of the crossroads in plain view, clutching at the pale clumps of his entrails. The woman sagged against the wall of the house next to a small crossbow. In the subtle patina of orange eno light, the corpses seemed an inherent part of the scenery, growing from the pavement made fertile with their blood.

A foul, sluggish magic pooled over the bodies. It lay in wait, spreading its thin tendrils outward like trip wires ready for an unsuspecting passerby. Dek skirted it, careful to keep to its edge, but still it tugged at his stomach with a familiar revolting hand. Acid washed the root of his tongue and burned back down his throat.

Three small bloody scratches stretched across the cobbles from the red-stained hand of the male corpse. An upward slash and two twisted lines – the beginning of the glyph for “Clay.” He had expected nothing else.

Dek moved on to the bowman. Death had sharpened her chiseled Suda features into a rat-like grimace, exposing her teeth and bulging milky cadaver eyes. A ragged hole marred her neck, the shredded edges too torn for a knife blade, but perfect for a clay’s chitin appendage.

What is my dude thinking in this scene? Is he thinking anything? Is he a robot? People are dead in a gruesome way and he feels nothing. If you concentrate hard, you will hear wind blowing through his head. The problem is that he is a spy, whose reflexes are tightly controlled. So physically he has no reaction, and that is exactly what I am showing. Absence of reaction. Some telling thoughts wouldn’t have hurt.

Don’t be me. Use both showing and telling, each in moderation. Don’t try to make your book into a movie. It’s not; it’s a book, a written narrative.

Here is an example from Magic Burns, where Kate is trying to walk up an icy ledge to the top of a highrise. Kate is a bit afraid of heights and it’s windy:

Another gust hit me. I grit my teeth and peeled myself from the wall. Keep moving, wuss. One foot before the other. As long as I didn’t think about falling. Or looking down there… Boy, that’s high.

It’s funny, because we know she looked down, even though she was psyching herself up against it. You can’t do that in a movie format. Don’t sell the written word short.

A good rule of thumb: if you can show something, do it. But if you feel that telling something works best for the narrative, do it. Don’t hesitate. The only criteria that trumps every single rule is does it read well? If it does, go for it.

Examples

One of the best examples of telling can be found in category romances. Before you scoff, a category writer can have millions of copies of her books in print. Millions. Category romances have their faults – they are rarely subtle and are almost always over the top dramatic, but they do two things absurdly well: emotional conflict and pacing. Category romances all but fly by, they are that fast. They deal in emotion and emotion is fascinating even when it’s presented through a prism of telling.

From Mistress for a Weekend by Susan Napier

She had been such an idiot, she thought, her throat tightening at the memory of the ghastly scene that had ensued in her flat. Her friends often chided her for being too trusting, and now she had wrenching proof that they had been right. Because it would never have occurred to her to be unfaithful, she had actually been pleased that Ryan seemed to be getting on so well with her young and trendy new flatmate.****

It’s all telling, with the small exception of tightening throat. But it’s woven out of emotion and it does nothing to slow down the narrative. If you have to tell, make it interesting.

Janet Evanovich is a master of showing.

From Twelve Sharp by Janet Evanovich

The other woman is my sometimes-partner Lula. Lula was at this moment parading around in the bail bonds office, showing Connie and me her new outfit. Lula is a way-beyond-voluptuous black woman who was currently squashed into four-inch spike heels and a sparkly gold spandex dress that had been constructed for a much smaller woman. The neckline was low, and the only thing keeping Lula’s big boobs from popping out was the fact that the material was snagged on her nipples. The skirt was stretched tight across her ass and hung two inches below the full moon.

With Connie and Lula you get what you see.

Lula bent to take a look at the heel on her shoe, and Connie was treated to a view of the night sky.

“Crikey,” Connie said. “You need to put some underwear on.”

“I got underwear on,” Lula said. “I’m wearing my best thong. Just ’cause I used to be a ‘ho don’t mean I’m cheap. Problem is that little thong stringy gets lost in all my derriere.”*****

All showing, very little telling, all terribly fun.

Hope that helps.

_____________________

*Evanovich, Janet (2006). How I Write: Secrets of a Bestselling Author, p. 45. St. Martin’s Griffin. ISBN 0-312-35428-2.

** http://www.tech2.com/media/images/2007/Jun/img_6943_assassins_creed.jpg

*** http://www.collider.com/uploads/imageGallery/Nathan_Fillion/nathan_fillion.jpg

*** Mistress for a Weekend, Susan Napier, p. 15.

**** http://www.bookbrowse.com/excerpts/index.cfm?book_number=1838&page_number=2

Why does the gender of the protagonist needs to be immediately defined?  Why do people complain that they don’t know my character is female until page 3?

It doesn’t have anything to do with gender specific roles.  It has to do with the reader picturing the character in their head.

When we read a page, most people form an image of the POV character.   The truth is, readers will forget the eye color, complexion, and occasionally the hair color of the character.   But they will remember the “holy trilogy” of character description: gender, age, build.

If you hit all three, the reader will imediately form some sort of image in their head:

a middleaged overweight man

an athletic woman in her thirties

a frail old woman

a lean man on the crossroads of twenty and thirty

a tall young man

Hide one of these three from the reader, and they will get pissy.

Most of these characteristics are rarely specified directly in the narrative, unless someone is describing a red-shirt and doesn’t want to spend a lot of time on the description.  These are generalities, and they’re usually inferred:

The man sat slumped over, his pale blue shirt too tight across his husky back.   Sweat gleamed on his balding head, as he reached for another Budweiser.  A slow flush crept up his cheeks, edging past the five o’clock shadow that once might have been black but had gone grey a while ago.

An overweight, middleaged man.  If three pages down the road, we find out this guy is twenty, there will be hell to pay.  Why?  Because the writer involved the reader in the narrative and then betrayed him.

Readers like to work a little bit, when they’re being entertained. This kind of description is like a detective story.  It offers clues, from which the reader builds an image.  It’s fun.  If the author then turns around and offers the image of the character that conflicts with the clues, the readers will become angry.  From their point of view, they did their job, they added their 50%, and were made to feel stupid for it.    Nobody likes to feel stupid.  Pulling one of these might result in the book flying into a wall, because the trust between the author and their readers is now broken.

Unless the purpose of the narrative is to deliberately mislead the reader, I recommend defining gender-age-build as soon as possible. 

This betrayal of trust also can occur in terms of characterization.  People assume character traits from physical description and vice versa.  Unfortunately, we naturally tend to stereotype.

For example, if a young man is described as a mercenary, people tend to assume he’s athletic.  If someone is a doctor, he’s probably well-educated and intelligent.  Not always true, by any means.  Describing someone as born in Italy typically results in an image of a dark-haired person, completely bypassing thousands of blond Italians.

I want to be very clear: I’m not advocating stereotyping.  I’m simply saying that if a character has a unique trait that breaks natural assumptions one would make from the character’s description, get it out there as soon as possible.

Here is the description of Corvus from a work in progress (which I never finished) imaginatively titled Demon Thingie.  (So I suck at titles, leave me alone.)

The man cut a crisp figure, absurdly well-groomed and well dressed for the Sam’s Club: tall, lean, long-limbed, each line emphasized by an expensive, custom-fit grey suit.  His red hair, dark, almost auburn, was brushed away from his forehead, leaving open an aristocratic, narrow face.  He would’ve been at home boarding the Concord.

The man stopped a few feet away.   Striking eyes: piercing light green.  She tightened her grip on the cart, hoping it would keep her from taking off like a rocket at the first sound of his voice.

“May I help you?”  His voice was very soft, intimate even.

“No, thanks.  I got it.”  Steady.  It’s just a man.  I’m not going to have a relapse just because an attractive man talks to me.  I am not going to panic.

He bent down, picked up the bag with no effort at all, and gently placed it into her buggy.  “My name is Corvus.”

“Thank you,” Julia said.

Up close she could see the light reddish stubble on his cheeks.  It had to be intentional: his hair, his hands with long fingers, his clothes, all offered evidence of a man who paid a lot of attention to his appearance.   He smiled at her, a lazy slow curve of well-shaped lips.  Handsome before, with the smile he became at once charming and slightly wicked, like an urbane devil masquerading among the ordinary people.

Time to go.

If the narrative later portrays Corvus as a crude, ill-mannered idiot,  the readers will feel betrayed.  We’ve given them a description of an urbane, elegant male dressed in expensive clothes.  The natural assumptions is that good manners go hand in hand with it.  Concord is giving us a bit of the European flavor.  The sleekness of the physical appearance leads one to expect competency and an element of danger.  Later Darco, another character, reinforces it:

Darco flipped the cell phone and pushed a preset.   Claudia’s smooth voice answered on the first ring.  “What can I do for you?”

“I have a summoner on my ass.  Six one, dark red hair, green eyes, looks like euro trash.”

There was a momentary pause.  “Denholm Corvus.  Born in Germany, citizen of UK.  Father: Head of Biochemistry Department at Cambridge, mother: heiress to the Kellerman Hotel chain.  Thirty two years old, single, educated, loaded, heterosexual, prefers brunettes.  Excellent fencer, good shot, carries Berretta Px4 Storm 9mm.  On record can summon up to 9k.  Complexity off the scale.”

He could pull a hippo-weight demon out of thin air and hang as many limbs and attachments onto it as his greedy heart desired.

At this point, the reader is (hopefully!) going, “Yes, I knew he was from Europe.  I knew he was scary.  I was right.”

Suppose we throw a kink into that characterization and go for something a little more surprising.

The man cut a crisp figure, absurdly well-groomed and well dressed for the Sam’s Club: tall, lean, long-limbed, each line emphasized by an expensive, custom-fit grey suit.  His red hair, dark, almost auburn, was brushed away from his forehead, leaving open an aristocratic, narrow face.  He would’ve been at home boarding the Concord.

The man stopped a few feet away.   Striking eyes: piercing light green.  She tightened her grip on the cart, hoping it would keep her from taking off like a rocket at the first sound of his voice.

“Hi there.  Can I get this sucker for you?”  A thick Texas twang colored his voice.

“No, thanks.  I got it.”  Steady.  It’s just a man.  I’m not going to have a relapse just because an attractive man talks to me.  I am not going to panic.

He bent down, picked up the bag with no effort at all, and gently placed it into her buggy.  “I can’t just let a lady strain like that.  Wouldn’t be proper.  My name’s Pete.”

“Thank you,” Julia said.

Now the reader is off-balance and hopefully wants to know what is the deal with the urban cowboy.  But now it’s an entirely different story.

If you’re going to mess with readers’ heads, my advice is to do it deliberately and as soon as possible.