Writing Advice – Craft & Process

Collecting the posts I’ve written about the craft and process of writing

Going Back to Primary Sources

PETERMBALL Writing Advice - Craft & Process

I’ve spent a large chunk of my life teaching principles from E.M. Forster’s Aspects of the Novel: the differences between flat and round characters; “the king died, and then the queen died” is a story, but “the king died, then the queen died of grief” is a plot. I never had to read the book, because those lessons are part of the fabric of writing now. They were referenced by mentors, reinforced with examples, used to mark out the lines between good writing and bad. I had what I needed, so why go looking for the original? I had a copy if I needed it – often more than one – but there was other stuff to read that advanced his original points.

Forster wrote his speeches in 1927, and the ideas had been hashed out (I didn’t even have Forster’s name right, half the time, referring to him as EM Forrester for much of the last decade).

Academia doesn’t let you get away with repeating things you heard from a someone, sometime. They want you to go back to primary sources, which means I had to read Aspects of the Novel for the first time.

The points Forster makes aren’t always the points I’ve inherited through the writing grapevine, where years of discussion have seen value judgements and arguments filtered into the source material. The best parts of the books aren’t the things I already knew, but the stuff nobody talks about which lead up to his key arguments.

I’d expected Forster to be smart, but I didn’t expect him to be wry. I’d expected him to make good points, but I didn’t expect the occasional turn of phrase or metaphor that’s a source of startling joy. The little moments where I put the book down and acknowledge Forster can write.

It’s worth going back to primary sources, even if you think you know what they’re saying. There’s always little things that surprise you, and more nuance than you’d expect.

Some Reasons I’m Excited To See What Happens With Series Fiction Over The Next Ten Years

PETERMBALL Writing Advice - Craft & Process

I started a new story this week, the first in a series of novelettes featuring dinosaurs, time rifts, orangutans, and a ’77 Holden Monaro that has definitely seen better days. It’s the first time in ages that I’ve attempted to write a story without planning it, and the guiding words for the story are “short, fast, pulp, wahoo!” because I’m tyring to focus on establishing tone and structure above all else. When stuck on the plot point, I break out Lester Dent’s pulp formula. Or send a velociraptor through the door with a shotgun.

Here is what I know about this story, beyond those details: not a goddamn thing.

Except that’s not entirely true, because that’s not how writing works. There are structures to the way that stories develop, a rhythm that has built up over centuries of people telling us stories and shaping our expectations. We know that tension escalates. We know that characters attempt to resolve problems. We know there are specific beats that mark the end of the first act. Knowing these things is not exactly the same as having a detail, meticulous map, but it does give you a pretty good idea of how the terrain works and provide you with enough survival skills to muddle through. You may need to backtrack every now and then, figuring out a new path, but you can make it through.

What’s tricky about pantsing this particular story is the decision to make it the first of a series. It’s comparatively easy to pants a stand-alone, because the decisions you’re maing in the text will only affect that text. When you’re pantsing a series, you’ve got a whole new bit of terrain that needs to be considered in the form of every other story you may write in that series.

WHAT COMPLEX TV CAN TEACH US ABOUT SERIES BEGINNINGS

I mentioned David Mittel’s Complex TV in my newsletter this week, and it’s largely the reason I’m attempting to pants this way. He’s got an entire chapter devoted to beginnings – and particular TV pilots – and his breakdown is illuminating and delivers a new set of tools for navigating the series as a form.

Mittel breaks down a number of things a pilot is meant to do: assemble the cast and introduce them to the viewer; provide a blueprint for future stories; deliver necessary exposition about the story world and the characters; provide enough familiarity to draw in viewers who watch a particular genre, but promise enough surprises that they’ll feel like they’re seeing something new done in the space.

More importantly, one of the primary purposes of a TV pilot is to teach the viewer how the program should be read and spur the viewer to keep watching. This is more than just establishing what the viewer needs to know about the world and the characters – it’s foregrounding the style and the narrative strategies at work so the viewer can attune themselves to what’s coming.

This is true of any opening, when you get right down to it. I’ve been known to point at the opening for Charlies Angels 2 as a great thing for writers to study, even though it’s an excessively goofy film and probably not to your taste. What it does do, exceptionally well, is deliver an incredible amount of over-the-top action and characterization in the opening minutes, including a diving-off-a-bridge-and-into-a-helicopter sequence where the laws of physics aren’t so much bent as frozen, shattered, and swept up in a dustpan. This opening is the most ridiculous action sequence in the entire film, the sort of thing most people would attempt at the climax, but they put it up front to teach people an important lesson: Realism and character depth has no place in the Charlie’s Angels film franchise.

Now if you stay, the second film’s opening will turn many people off…but if you stay, accepting the films premise, then it’s told you exactly what to expect from everything that follows.

WHAT COMPLEX TV CAN TEACH US ABOUT SERIES ENDINGS

Mittel also brings up something that it’s worth being aware of when you start a story: the presence of a beginning presupposes that there will be an ending. This is balanced against the fact that many TV viewers aren’t necessarily going to see a pilot episode, particularly in the days before streaming and DVDs, which can mean that the original point lies deep in a program’s history. Further, television has a history of stopping rather than ending; we may get a final episode, but we rarely get the feeling of a story being concluded and a character arc wrapped up. What we tended to get was a whole bunch of character revisiting, and a feel-good moment as people moved on.

The birth of Complex TV – basically, the kind of television that is both episodic and accumulates narrative episode-by-episode until you’ve got a season-long arc – owes a lot to the rise of technology that makes it easier to go back and revisit the beginnings of things and re-examine part of the story. Prior to that, keeping things episodic (and hitting the conceptual reset button at the end of episode) was a much safer bet for retaining viewer engagement, especially in the days when missing an episode meant it was gone forever (or until you caught it in re-runs).

The model of Complex TV offers a number of measures to counteract the ending problem. Stories can conclude at the end of a series, and the next season opener may serve as a re-set for expectations, an opportunity to reiterate and re-educate. New plot elements can be introduced that open up new stories, rather than building the series around the same iconic, unchanging characters and structures (although many shows used to have nd the occasional breach of the series structure, carefully foregrounded to adjust viewer expectations, to serve as a change of pace. See every Halloween episode in which a show takes a detour through horror).

WHY THIS MAKES ME EXCITED AS A WRITER (AND A READER)

Although fiction and television are very different, these concerns aren’t unique to the TV series. I’ve talked about the problems that prose writers have faced with series on this blog before, but the limitations of fiction publishing often mean that series works defaulted to short arcs like trilogies, or retained the episodic model where each book was designed to serve as a stand-alone with a central, iconic character sitting at their heart.

Even if we set aside the writing time required to do a 20-installment series with a cumulative arc, and particularly doing it fast enough that the arc would be easy to follow, the market forces around publishing wouldn’t necessarily sustain it outside of a few outliers. Publishers would often balk at committing to a rapid run of that many novels, and it would be damn difficult to establish any kind of continuity in short-stories unless a venue agreed up-front (the nearest thing I can think of in the short fiction space is Charlie Stross’ Accelerando, which featured three arcs across nine instalments, and Hugh Howey’s Wool series, which was self-published as a series of novelettes before being collected into a novel).

Given those limitations, episodic stories tended to trump writing serialised fiction, or any blending of the two approaches, right up until the rise of independent publishing meant a bunch of writers started using TV as the model, complete with “boxed sets” that brought together a season-long arc as a singular story.

The kindle may be ten years old, but we’re still in the early days of this compared to the speed with which television has been adapting to the technological change (and continues to adapt, now that the streaming model has freed structural concerns based on timeslot and episode length).

I’m looking forward to seeing how series narratives shift and evolve in the fiction space, in light of all this. Over the last couple of days I’ve been reading up on the first waves of people to start making a success out of independently publishing short-story length series instalments (without necessarily serializing), particularly as the practice moves outside of the erotica space where it dominated for a few years.

Right now, the implementation of the model is mimicking television because TV is ahead of the game, but as it grows more prevalent in the fiction space and more people try it out, there’s pretty good odds it will evolve into its own thing (in much the same way that film stopped mimicking the photograph and theatre, and started developing its own techniques).

Getting Shit Done is Always Subjective

PETERMBALL Writing Advice - Craft & Process

If there’s a pattern in my writing routine that remains unassailable, it’s this: Thursdays are the hardest days of the week. It’s rare that I get a day where writing is the sole thing I’m doing – there is always thesis work, and meetings, things that need doing for GenreCon and spending time with my girlfriend – but Thursdays are inevitably the day where the balance tips towards not-writing. It’s the day I spend six hours at work, the evening in which I will go game with my friends, and it’s often the evening where my girlfriend and I will abscond to the local sushi place for pre-game dinner.

On Thursdays, I get stuff written before work. Yesterday, I managed about two thousand words, which is a pretty fucking efficient day given there was only about two hours of writing time before I had to jump on a train. It just felt like a failure, in many respects, because the rest of the working week I can usually manage twice as many words before my brain grinds to a halt and refuses to do more. Everything else that gone done in that day didn’t register, because my brain is focused on stories and deadlines and thinking through what needs to be done when.

Productivity is subjective. A year ago, getting two thousands words done on a work day would have seemed like a monumentally awesome thing. I would have given myself a mental high-five and been incredibly pleased with myself. Even a week ago, I would have nodded sagely and put the days productivity into context.

Instead, this week, I brooded on the lack of productivity for most of the day, and spent the commute home on an overcrowded train pondering the difficulties in telling the difference between a bad day, actual depression, and the feeling of being three-quarters of the way through writing a book and deciding everything is awful. Then I came home from gaming and dragged another thousand words out of my brain, because I’ve got projects and deadlines and gantt charts to follow and the book does not get any easier to write or any closer to finished if I’m not working on it.

I’ve written 14,699 words since Monday. I will get that up around 17,500 by the end of today, which means I’ve hit my targets for the week and can afford to take the weekend off to recharge the batteries and come back on Monday eager to be working again. By the end of the month I’ll have a thesis novella of my plate and will be searching for beta-readers for Project Beeman, then start brainstorming the second book in that particular novella series.

By every metric I use to measure what I’m doing, I am getting shit done. I am keeping projects on track and bringing them home, managing my time effectively. Subjectively yesterday felt like arse, but objectively I did exactly what I needed to do.

Which is why I have the metrics and plans, creating the hard edge I can use to measure things instead of trusting in my gut.

Feeling like you’ve got shit done is subjective as hell – the good days are rarely as good as you’re thinking and the bad days are rarely as bad. Data for its own sake is useful, but incomplete. Data within a context or timeline shows you progress your gut will ignore, which is what makes it worth tracking. My brain can tell me Thursday sucked all it wants, but the data I’m tracking tells me the things that got done kept my urgent projects on track, and the things I had to set aside had minor effects on my deadlines.

In short, it was a shitty day, but I did a pretty good job with it. I totally got shit done.