Sorry to be so late with this. With Spring Break upon us, we’re taking the opportunity to do things like drag the boys shopping for stuff early in the morning. (Yeah, they DO love us for it — I feel like the old lady in Pratchett’s Truth who wanted young people to be whipped twice a day because that teaches them to go around being young.) So, we did that, and are just now back home.
I decided to grace you with Stupid Things I Believed when I began writing — the third installment. I believed that in a novel EVERY event, scene and word had to advance the plot.
This is largely true for a short story. Whether what you’re trying for is a mood or a rational idea, you have a very limited amount of words to use, and you must get it as strong as possible by making it as sparse as possible.
This might also be true for “high literature” stuff. I don’t know. Don’t write it. Gave it up for lent thirty eight years ago, and it’s been a really long lent.
For genre novels, though, a lot of the charm rests on getting to know the characters as real, live human beings and to get a sense of a much larger world than you have the time/space to show. This implies — in the end — having bits and pieces that don’t advance plot — only feeling or sense or character development — here and there. This is fine, so long as they don’t overwhelm the book.
This fact was brought home to me about nine years ago, at a con while watching fans react to a colleague’s reading of “the sausage scene” — let’s just say there was no possible way that “bit with the dog” (to allude to Shakespeare) could have been relevant to ANY plot. But the fans loved it.
I used to cut ALL that stuff out of my books, but in Draw One In The Dark, I decided to leave in the scene with the three guys in the car, after escaping from the warehouse. It doesn’t advance the plot, but I’ve come to believe it is essential to show the characters bonding and without it the book would suffer. At least one fan has greed about this.
And I think Daring Finds Mysteries are composed MOSTLY of such moments — fans seem to love them anyway, and to be honest, I love writing them, even if I drive myself insane by feeling “too indulgent.”
At this point it’s become second nature to include at least a few of those moments in each book, sometimes just to lighten the mood.
According To Hoyt 
“For genre novels, though, a lot of the charm rests on getting to know the characters as real, live human beings and to get a sense of a much larger world than you have the time/space to show. This implies — in the end — having bits and pieces that don’t advance plot — only feeling or sense or character development — here and there”
YES! If you leave out the character development you have a “cliff’s notes version’. Which is ok sometimes.
But not for other times. I want to get to KNOW the characters. That’s why I like series. Getting to know them is hard and takes a long time. Time is a semi valuable commodity. I’d rather read another book in a series that I’m familiar with than a new book out of the blue , even if it’s from the same author.
Double/triple/ quadruple that from “new” author. (one that I’ve not read much from …new to ME)
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Awww! Sarah’s being _nice_ to her caharacters.
For some values of nice. I mean, Dice lives hand to mouth, you give her son a powered vehicle to terrorize her with, foist litters of rats on the poor woman . . .
And we’re not even going to mention the parents, the ex or the ex’s new wife, the name given to the poor kid . . .
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I dunno – I can think of many novels I’ve read which would have been improved by deleting scenes that fail to advance the plot. Take Heinlein’s Have Spacesuit, f’r example: that dreadfull section explaining how a spacesuit would actually work – wasted words, cut them out! Jane Austen’s P&P or pretty much ANY Dickens’ novel would benefit from trimming scenes that don’t advance the plot, like that Christmas Carol digression about why a doornail is considered particularly dead.
/facetiousness
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RES
Actually Jane Austen wrote pretty lean. Also, on HSSWT I felt as you do — I always skipped Heinlein’s engineering stuff, like I skip sex in romance novels. It’s like ‘yada, yada, yada” BUT I think that’s a case of different strokes (er… not in romance. In HSSWT! Get your mind out of the gutter.) My younger son was unmoved by all SF until he found HSSWT. His favorite parts? The explanations. He rushed through the story to get to the engineering, and the engineering MADE the novel real to him. So… eh.
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I love reading the character development scenes if I love the characters in it.
I’m not necessarily overly keen to learn how the villain has a bonding moment with his mistress if both of them actually are written as unpleasant individuals, but if they are of the magnificent bastard variety, possibly headed for some sort of redemption at the end, yeah, maybe.
But I absolutely adore similar bonding moments between the hero and his sidekick/kid sister/significant other/best friend if both, or all if there are more characters involved at the same time, have been written as likable.
Or at least I think of them as likable, what is a proud hero to one can seem like an insufferable egotist jerk to another (remembering a longish argument
pro and con about a certain main character here. Not yours, Sarah).
I also like writing such bonding scenes (and scenery porn), which might explain why I can’t write a decent short story no matter how much I try.
I’m also rather fond of the explanations, like that Heinlein how a spacesuit works scene, even when I don’t really understand what is being explained. I’m not sure why. Maybe it just gives me the feeling that the character knows what he is talking about, and I have a big weakness for experts, no matter what their expertise is.
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I read all David Weber’s books but skip much of the weapon’s detail. I also read the Daring Finds mysteries and skip nothing. Your characters interactions entertain me and that is a good thing!
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Thank you.
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