Stories Must Acknowledge Readers' Obvious Questions

Imagine a story that takes place entirely in a bar, with friends drinking and talking. At one point in the story an empty beer glass flies off a table (by itself) and crashes through a window. Other than telling us the glass does that, the story never mentions the incident again, and no characters pay any attention to it.

So now imagine I call the story's author and say the beer glass scene doesn't work for me, because I want to know more about why the glass flew and why no one seemed to notice or care.

AUTHOR: I didn't explain the glass because I wanted to show, not tell, that this fictional world looks exactly like the real one but is different in a couple of ways.

ME: Okay, you did that. But why didn't anybody react?

AUTHOR: Because I wanted to show, not tell, that in this world, people are so used to seeing beer glasses fly around by themselves that they don't even notice it half the time.

ME: Would they react the same way if a vodka bottle flew around?

AUTHOR: Oh no. [Explains why beer glasses are the only objects that fly around.]

ME: That explanation makes sense. Here's the problem. I had to call you in order to learn it, and learning it makes me appreciate your story and your story's world a lot more than I did before. Your story has to give readers, in its text, the same appreciation you just gave me over the phone.

AUTHOR: But I don't want to interrupt my story for a three-page information dump.

ME: I don't want that either. I want you to acknowledge that readers are going to wonder why the beer glass moves on its own, and address that question in the story.

AUTHOR: There's no way to do that without the story being artificial. No character in this world would bother mentioning a flying beer glass. It would be like a character in the real world going outside in the rain and saying "Hey, look at this water falling from the sky," then explaining what weather is and what water is.

ME: What you described is the worst way to handle the problem. On the other hand, if your rain story's audience lived in a world where water had never fallen from the sky, you would have to address rain for that audience the same way I'm asking you to address the beer glass.

At this point, if the author were still reluctant to explain the flying glass, I'd ask the author to reconsider having one in the story at all. If this fictional world has flying beer glasses then it probably has other strange departures from the real world too, yet those aren't in the story. So why put in something that will just end up annoying the reader?

Here are two approaches to solving the problem.

1) A character says, "I hate when that happens. At least this one wasn't full." The next character says, "Do you complain about everything that happens every day? What are you going to yell at next, the sun for setting every night?" Or maybe, "That's what you get for not chaining it to the table," and have the character dangle the unused chain at whoever complained.

You could argue this conversion is a bit artificial. I'd argue all stories are, and must be, artificial, but that's another post. If you don't like the dialogue solution, try this one:

2) [Narration:] Most bars had switched to paper or Styrofoam cups to avoid the problem of flying beer glasses, but the Redrum Bar's owner thought the danger added atmosphere. He couldn't have been too wrong; the bar was packed every night.

You could argue the second approach is no good because it tells instead of shows, but I'm going to argue against that idea in my next post, next week. The point is, if readers are obviously going to wonder about something in your story, you're obligated to at least acknowledge the question. Whether you answer it is up to you.

My "Jigsaw Puzzle" theory of fiction writing

Last time, I said I'd tell you about a technique I used to write "The Ogre King and the Piemaker" in about half the time I normally need for a short story. When I discussed it quite some time ago in the OTP  newsletter, I called it "Write the beginning last." Now, I'm calling it "Write the story in pieces."

All along, I knew the ogres were going to end up with pies of some kind, but I wasn't sure how. And I wasn't sure what the piemaker had done to draw the attention of the ogres. All I knew was, the Ogre King was going to try a bunch of really stupid tricks and traps to get the piemaker to surrender pies. 

The first scene that came to mind—the inspiration for the story, in fact— was the huge ogre hiding behind a tree that was much too small to hide him effectively, and a little girl would see him. The girl would call out, "Grampa! The ogre's back!" And the ogre would panic, then think: Wait! Maybe she means some other ogre!

That was all I had. So I typed it into a document called "Ogre and Pie Man story pieces" and left it alone until I thought of another scene: a catapult that was too big to move through a tunnel it had to be moved through. I thought, wouldn't it be funny if the Ogre King, who's not that bright himself, had to explain the problem to an even dumber ogre? So I wrote a funny scene, much of which ended up getting cut, as I discussed last time, because I decided the Ogre King wasn't the right kind of dumb in it. 

I wrote a bunch of middle sections of this story, then I wrote the beginning, then I wrote the ending. Then I went back and rewrote the beginning from scratch because my first attempt read like notes to myself about what the beginning had to do, as opposed to a real story beginning. Then I revised some middle pieces, got the ending in place, and on my test reader's advice, expanded a couple of jokes into scenes of their own. Then I got down to serious prose polishing, reading the story aloud and revising any time I found a sentence that sounded clunky.

The point is, I did not make any attempt to write a first draft beginning to middle to end. I wrote the parts I liked best, first. It doesn't matter that a couple of those parts ended up being thrown out. That'll happen. 

So I'm calling this technique my "Jigsaw Puzzle" theory of story writing. First you write a bunch of separate pieces, then you work to connect them. Almost always, some of them won't fit. But in the process of writing these scenes, you'll get a much better sense of what your story is about. During revision, I aim to connect the pieces so well that no one can tell the story wasn't written with the whole story in mind from the start.

The alternative method, writing a complete draft beginning to end, makes me spend a lot more time getting stuck. I think of a good beginning, but not a good second scene, even though I know the fourth scene by heart because I've imagined it so many times. But I won't write the fourth scene until I get the second and third. No more! Now I write the parts I know and build around them. For me, that's so much faster, I can't believe I used to think you had to write stories any other way.

Do any of you write that way? How does it work for you? If you don't write this way, what does work for you?

Revising Myself

Many of you probably know I have a new story out, because I used it as one of the two "Other Fiction" pieces for the October newsletter. I want to show you parts of some early drafts of the story. I like seeing how other writers think when they're working out ideas in early drafts, and I hope you do too.

Here's an excerpt from the published version. Grunthos is king of the Ogres and Four-Toes is another ogre. Grunthos is explaining how he's going to get humans to give them pies.

“We need to show humans that ogres work together and be scary force for evil,” Grunthos said. “Then humans give us anything we want.”

“Like rabbits?” Four-Toes said.

“Sure,” Grunthos said. “But more about pies. We make them cook pies all day.”

Grunthos is the smartest ogre, and he's not all that smart. When I first wrote this scene, though, I wasn't sure just how not-all-that-smart he was. I had him talking in much less broken English. Below, I underline parts of the dialogue that are different in the first draft.

“We need to show humans that ogres can work together and be a scary force for evil,” Grunthos said. “Then they’ll give us anything we want and we’ll be rich.”

“Like rabbits?” one of the ogres said.

“Sure,” Grunthos said. “But especially pies. We’ll make them cook all day.”

As you can see, the original dialogue is more complex. It has a more advanced vocabulary and better grammar. But the subtlest difference is, to me, a key to how my understanding of the Ogre King changed as I revised the story. In the published version, he says humans will be forced to "cook pies" all day. In the original, he just says "cook." 

I think adding "pies" changes a lot. First, the audience already knows, by this point in the story, that he's after pies. Grunthos explains it again anyway because he's really excited by his plan, and because he senses the other ogres might not understand him completely. He's smart enough to know he's smarter than the other ogres, and smart enough to adjust his dialogue for them, yet he's still dumb enough to come up with ridiculously stupid plans without realizing how bad the plans are. 

But more than that, it doesn't sound so weird to say humans will be forced to "cook" all day. It does sound weird, at least to my ears, to say humans will "cook pies" all day. No native English speaker would talk about "cooking" a pie; you "bake" pies. Having Grunthos say "cook pies" makes Grunthos seem that much more like someone who doesn't really know what he's talking about.

Here's another example of how Grunthos changed during revision. Below is a piece of the original draft I deleted in the third draft (out of six). It takes place during the scene when Four-Toes is building a catapult for the Ogre King. Four-Toes has built a catapult that is too large to move through a critical cavern in their mountain. In this scene, Grunthos is trying to get Four-Toes to realize the passageway is too small for the catapult.

Four-Toes led Grunthos [through the passageway]. “Be careful here,” Four-Toes said at the entranceway’s tightest part. “It’s tight.”

“I know,” Grunthos said, waiting for Four-Toes to put two and two together and come up with the correct half of his own name.

I love that line about coming up with his own name. But I had to cut it because I decided Grunthos isn't smart enough to have a thought quite that complex. In fact, I'm not sure Grunthos even knows that two plus two is four. Also, in this deleted scene, Grunthos seems much smarter than Four-Toes, and I didn't want the gap between them to be that large. So as much as I liked that joke, once I developed Grunthos more, it had to go.

Next week I'll talk about how, for once, I used my own advice about short story writing to write this story in much less time than I usually need. I'm now absolutely sold on this technique and I'm not sure I'll ever write a short story without it. Here's a hint: I called my first draft "Ogre and Pie Man story pieces."

Sometimes We Really Can Help Other Writers

Not so long ago, I critiqued a contest entry called "A Trip to America" that didn't make the final judging round of our contest. We liked the story and thought it had good potential. We also pointed out some specific areas where we didn't think it worked as well as it could have, and made suggestions about how to strengthen it.

The author just emailed us to say that he rewrote the story, at least partially based on our critique, and now it's published in a magazine called Litro. That makes somewhere around five to seven stories that our critiques have helped get published in other magazines.

I'm proud to show off "A Trip to America" by Tony Concannon. I hope you like it as much as we do. Congratulations, Tony!

 

Having My Own Work Edited, Part 4 of 4

Finally, I'll talk about specific edits that were made to the draft of "Fourth Wish" I sent Cliffhanger Books. Underlined parts show what changed.

Original: "the imps had attempted to put on five different plays since going to the human world"

Revision: "the imps had attempted to put on five different plays since returning from the human world"

Why the change? I wasn't sure at first, since the imps did in fact go to, and return from, the human world. But they spent just enough time there that I figure the editors wanted to make clear what time frame I really meant--the clock started ticking when they got back, not when they left. Honestly, I don't consider this edit worth making, but I also don't consider it worth arguing about. Part of taking a professional attitude towards writing is picking your battles carefully.

Original: "[Skragg] summoned a window into the human world. Specifically, Candace's home."

Revision: "[Skragg] summoned a window into Candace's home."

This one made me say "Duh." The only time shorter is worse than longer is if every word in the longer version adds something meaningful to the reading experience. The underlined part adds nothing because we know Candace's home is in the human world. There is no such thing as a neutral word or phrase that has no effect on the reader. Every word, phrase, and sentence either makes your story stronger or weaker.

Original dialogue: "So when she turned twenty-one I said, sure, I'll be a guardian, and I had the house inspected and did all the lawyer things..."

Revised dialogue: "So when she turned twenty-one I said, sure, I'll be a guardian. I had the house inspected and did all the lawyer things..."

Candace is under significant stress as she's talking. In my original, she's rambling with long run-on sentences. As usual, I spoke all the dialogue aloud and acted it out in the way I imagined Candace would say it before sending my story to the editors. I'd gotten locked into a way of seeing this scene. The simple edit Kevin and Karen came up with (this one was Karen's) changed my view of how Candace was saying her lines. Now when I act out her lines, I think her dialogue sounds more believable. Why? Because it takes me less effort to say it. I don't need to take such a long breath because her sentences are shorter.

So writers: try speaking your dialogue in more than one way before sending that story out! Try putting pauses in weird places, just to see if you stumble into a pattern that sounds better than your original. It really works.

Having My Own Work Edited, Part 3 of 4

Now that I've covered the high-level changes I made to a story I recently sold, I'll go into some of the embarrassing line edits the editors suggested or made. I say "embarrassing" because while some edits were of the "personal taste" variety (like suggesting two short paragraphs should be combined), others are better labeled as "Tarl, you should know better than to submit prose this clumsy."

Here are two writing faults that appeared several times in the story I submitted. 

First, I use "that" too often. Several times sentences such as "She knew that genies normally didn't..." got edited to "She knew genies normally didn't..." and I agree with 100% of those changes. Sometimes I think I have a "that" key on my keyboard and just enough obsessive compulsive disorder to feel great stress if I don't press it at least once a paragraph. I catch most of them in my own rewrites, but not all. 

Solution: From now on I'll use the search function to find every "that" in the whole document, and delete or rewrite the ones that serve no purpose. (There's one: "ones THAT serve no purpose." You might say that particular "that" is necessary, but I could have written, "and delete or rewrite the pointless ones," which I think is stronger. Even when "that" serves a real need, it's rarely the strongest way to say what you're trying to say.)

Second, my readers are having more trouble than I'd expect understanding who says what line of dialogue, especially when three or more people might be speaking. (And I write a lot of group interaction scenes.) 

Solution: Change my strategy from "avoid dialogue markers unless absolutely necessary" to:

1) When two characters are conversing, use some kind of marker at least every fourth line.

2) When three or more people are conversing, use some kind of marker every time it is not painfully obvious who is speaking.

No matter how many people are engaged in the following example of a conversation, do you really need a marker for the second line of dialogue?

J.D., Elliot, and Turk stood by as Dr. Cox asked Carla, "Dear GOD will you please stop making that noise?"

"What noise?"

Since the second line is in direct response to the first, and the first addressed a specific person, readers can assume the second speaker is the one being addressed by the first. 

Now consider this next example, which represents the kind of error I make all the time.

J.D., Elliot, and Turk stood by as Carla ran her fingernails down a blackboard. Dr. Cox asked, "Dear GOD what is that horrible noise?"

"What noise?"

In my mind, Carla's speaking the second line, but it's at least theoretically possible someone else said it. Maybe everyone else is pretending not to hear it for some reason and Turk said it. Anyway, since Dr. Cox's question was asked to the group as a whole, readers can't assume Carla's responding.

Next time, I wrap up this little series of posts with more embarrassing line edits.

Having My Own Work Edited, Part 2 of 4

"The Fourth Wish" is a short story that's part of a connected series of stories. It's the second one to get accepted for publication and the fourth one to be written. Now that a second one has been accepted, I believe enough in the idea's commercial potential to commit to writing the rest of them and trying to sell them as a novel-in-stories. However, I don't think I'll try to sell any of the other stories as self-contained pieces of fiction, and this post is about my reasoning.

These stories are about the world's last wish-granting genie and his human master, Candace. In this world a bond between genie and master is for life and the master gets one wish every ten years. Candace has her first wish at age six (that story is already published). "The Fourth Wish" is set 30 years later.

You see the problem. While the first story requires no background because the characters are new, "The Fourth Wish" carries ideas into it from the previous ones. Candace's prior wishes matter, because one of them has a substantial effect on her current life. Yet nothing would have killed this story faster than a flashback explaining the previous stories. So what could I do?

My answer was to pretend, to the greatest extent possible, that there are no other stories. When I couldn't avoid some bit of background, I presented it in a way that develops a central character. 

Specifically, the genie hates being enslaved to a human, and the rules say he can be free of her if she wishes for something greedy enough—some kind of wish that would ruin her life if granted. In this internal monologue, we see how her refusal to abuse his power drives him crazy:

She’d wasted her first wish on ice cream. Her second was for help deciding what college to go to. Her third was for “enough” money. What kind of human wished for “enough” money? When was she going to get stupid like the rest of her kind? If he had to be chained to her for another fifty or sixty years…

In my view, the keys to this monologue are (1) it's in character for the genie to complain to himself, (2) it's short, and most importantly, (3) it appears at a point in the story where readers ought to be wondering what Candace's prior wishes were. So I'm not boring the readers with information I want them to know, I'm telling them information that (I hope) they want to know. 

Still, I don't go on for long paragraphs, and I do not employ a flashback. I say it in as few words as I can, then get on with the story.

Finally, to make "The Fourth Wish" stand alone, I eliminated some critical facts about my fictional world and changed another. The change relates to the creatures called "imps." For Cliffhanger Books, I made the imps male instead of saying they're magical creatures that don't have, or require, gender. And I don't discuss why the genie calls himself the last wish-granting genie. Were there others? What happened to them? And why does the last genie live on a desolate plain with only three annoying imps for company? The novel-in-stories answers all of these questions. The stand-alone story treats them as facts, not questions: He's the last, he lives on a flat plain, and three imps live there too. And to make it possible to ignore those questions, I changed their answers. The "real" answers have implications that can't be ignored.

That's why I don't think I'll try to sell more of these stories by themselves. I have to abandon too much material to make them work independently.

Having My Own Work Edited, Part 1 of 4

I recently sold a story called "The Fourth Wish" to a paranormal romance anthology being published by Cliffhanger Books. I don't know much about paranormal romance. In fact, as much as the editors liked my story, my ignorance of the genre caused some problems, and they've asked me to change a few story elements to better fit what readers expect from such stories.

I have no problem making those kinds of changes. Why? Because even though the money I make from occasional short story sales is negligible, I pride myself on a professional attitude. My personal opinion of what "professional attitude" for writing means can be summed up in this pair of phrases: 

Amateurs write for themselves. Professionals write for the people who pay them.

If you're serious about having your work published by others, sold by others, and marketed by others, then I think you need to be serious about letting others have some say over what you write. I'm friends with a couple of people whose primary source of income is freelance writing. Do you know what those people write for a living? Whatever their paying audience tells them to, that's what.

Oh, they can reject assignments that go against their ethics or religion or something. They're freelance writers, not minions of some evil overlord. But if these people were asked to write 2,500 words about litter on the Atlantic City boardwalk in exchange for their going rate, they'd do it, even if they aren't all that personally interested in boardwalk litter. And if the editor read a draft and said "This is great, but can you focus more on the north end of the boardwalk?", they'd rewrite the article. They wouldn't go off on some bombastic tirade about artistic integrity.

Now some people say writing fiction is like any other artist creating any other art: the artists have to follow their muses, the crowd be damned. That's fine, if you honestly don't care whether anyone ever sees your work. Me, I'd like people to read my stories. Otherwise I'd never send them to magazines. I'd just hide my stories under my bed and go around calling myself a writer, and I'd cough in embarrassment any time someone asked where they could read anything I'd written.

Because I want others to read my stories, I will accept help from people who know my intended audience better than I do. Kevin from Cliffhanger told me even though it was perfectly in character for my sarcastic genie to use the word "retard," Cliffhanger's audience wouldn't like it. So, I changed the wording. Karen from Cliffhanger told me my story worked fine as it was, but her readers would want the female in the romance to appear sooner. So, I started revisions that introduced her in the first sentence.


"The Fourth Wish" is part of a series of connected stories that I intend to sell as a novel when it's ready, and I might reverse a couple of Kevin's and Karen's suggested changes when that time comes. But for Cliffhanger Books, I'm trusting my editors and following their guidance because they know my audience better than I do, and because I want that audience to read my story and like it.

Next time: the challenge of taking a story that's part of a larger tale and making it stand on its own.

Rewrite Your Beginning Before Submitting

I've started editing the stories for issue #16 and I'm struck, once again, at how the bulk of the editing suggestions apply to a story's first few paragraphs. That's not always the case, but it's a safe bet, even for the stories that win a prize. In stories that don't win a prize, the beginnings generally have even more problems.

When you first draft a story, you're still making basic decisions about where it's going and what's going to happen in it. As a result, when you first draft the beginning, you know less about your story than you will at any other point in the writing process. But the beginning is the most critical part of any story you're hoping to sell, so why are you writing it when you're the most ignorant about your story?

I once said in a newsletter that you should write your story's beginning last, but that's hard to do. Even I have trouble with that rule, and it's my rule! So here's what I do instead: 

Once I've re-written a story enough times to be satisfied with it, and I'm pretty sure I could submit it as is, I put it away for a day or so. Then I go back and read the story starting from a few paragraphs in. In other words, I skip the beginning but read to the end. When I'm done, I understand much better what my story is really about, both plot-wise and thematically.

Armed with that knowledge, I read the beginning, and I usually cringe. Because now I see an image, or a word choice, or a phrasing issue, that fit the story I had in mind three drafts ago, but no longer fits the story I'm planning to submit.

Sometimes I just edit the beginning, but I've also had good luck deleting the first few paragraphs and starting from scratch, right then and there, because now I know what fits and what doesn't, and I also know the absolute minimum that has to happen to set up the rest of the story. More importantly, now I can finally get the tone right, and I know what details to put in to set up what's going to happen next. When nothing that is not vital to the story's plot, character, mood, or theme appears in the beginning anymore, I submit the story.

Three of the last six stories I used this technique on were accepted by the first place I sent them. Try it!