One of the ways we lie in fiction is to make change quick and hinging on a pivotal event. This is needed — or course — because the whole point of fiction is to make sense out of the otherwise unorganized, multiple inputs the real world offers. And the change, the climatic, all important change to society, to the evil kingdom, to a love affair, to… has to be such that fits within the confines of a book or the much tighter confines of a movie. And the clues to that pivotal event, and to what is causing the problems, have to be so large, so magnificently prominent, that were this real life your character would need to be deaf and blind not to see them.
This is not real life. It’s fiction. It’s entertainment. So sue us. We get paid for lying.
Sometimes writers try to portray a more gradual change, a more realistic transformation of character and circumstances. These books get called atypical and while cherished by a few crazy people, like yours truly, they usually baffle normal readers. Take Georgette Heyer’s A Civil Contract. Love develops there, but not in the way it develops in most Heyers — through high adventure and suddenly — but rather daily, by quotidian domestic contact and a myriad small sacrifices on the part of the one who loves from the beginning.
It doesn’t seem to be most people’s favorite Heyer. It might be mine (followed or preceded closely by Venetia, which manages the business by galloping bounds by using a pretty unlikely coincidence in the middle. [One of the best arguments for the use of the one coincidence allowed rule is that it mediates the middle ground between realistic and fits within book.] Arguably, in the unlikely event I ever have the naming of a baby girl, by birth or adoption, I shall name her Venetia and not A Civil Contract, but that is entirely different, surely?)
Heinlein, also, in The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress tried to give us a more “realistic” view of revolution than is common in science fiction books. To do so spans not just a political transformation, but also several years. The only way to manage it, particularly in a first person narrative, is to have your character out of where the action is for large portions of the war/fighting/maneuvering and to report it in “memoir” mode.
I found this was a narrative necessity when writing A Few Good Men, where I take “reality” a small spot further, by realizing that no, in fact there wouldn’t be a revolution all over the Earth, but multiple revolutions, and only one of them would in any way resemble the American revolution at lest in spirit. (I still don’t know how it plays out in terms of government, but I daresay I’ll find out over the course of the series which might run to ten books.) And that, is the author pushing the odds as is. Think of all the revolutions of the 20th century, a lot of them from colonies throwing off colonial powers. How many of them resulted in anything close to our system? Right. And how many of them turned really nasty, really fast?
(I still have no clue how that book will play, btw. I’ve heard there’s an editorial letter for it, but I have no idea if it’s an editorial letter with an offer or an editorial letter under the guise of “friendly advice.” Quite possibly the later. As I said, it’s an odd book. A pity as if it goes Indy it might take years to find an audience. OTOH, I wrote it because it had to be written, so it’s probably all academic whether it’s bought by a publisher or not.)
Anyway, I found the memoir tone annoyed some beta readers, though most of them only disagreed with the parts that made it clear some characters survive. There is no indication that the revolution is won till almost the last chapter and at that, it’s not even very clear. Only that it’s considered an historical building. But it didn’t matter. I couldn’t do it any other way, because in the same way my character can’t go to war because I CAN’T read enough about war to make it believable, I can’t cram ten years into a book first person and not bore the reader to crying fits.
(Some identified the mode as coming from TMIAHM but it’s not really — if there’s an Heinlein Ancestor to the book, it’s If This Goes On — it’s more that similar narrative necessities create similar narrative outcomes. The writerly equivalent to parallel evolution.)
The problem is, as I’ve noted in the past, that reading fiction is not JUST a pasttime. We might think it is. But the way the human brain is built, we can’t help bur recall vivid emotional experiences (which good fiction provides) as things we lived through. Which means we are stuck in a rut of expecting things to change suddenly. (We also expect ever after, which I think accounts for a lot of divorces, since fiction, mostly as movies, has become more and more prevalent in society. Because ever after happens in intermittent patches, not as continuous and unalloyed bliss, but our “trained” brain tells us we want the latter, not the first and that it’s possible. We’ve lived through it before, surely?)
What is this in the name of? This is in the name of the relationship between publishers and writers. And also between writers and market.
In the previous thread, in comments, Tolladay told me to impose order on my schedule by dictating to the publishers.
You have no idea how appealing that sounds. And how impossible.
Yes, yes, there will come a day when the power is all with the writer — not yet. Note my advance mourning at the idea [gathered from the tone of the email and the fact no offer is attached] that AFGM will have to go Indie. It will go Indie, and I trust over time it will find many readers. But it doesn’t compare — yet — to the power of a major house putting it out. Oh, in money… probably, over two or three years. But in dispersion? Not so much.
But why you say? Can’t readers find it by word of mouth? Sure they can. But some astonishing number like 80% of people still prefer to read on paper, regardless of how bad the industry and what’s available has become. So why do they do it? Habit. It’s engrained habit. And that changes slowly. VERY slowly. It won’t change fully for about ten years, when I suspect it will flip. To flip earlier we need one of those “coincidences” — something that makes paper books infinitely worse, or ebooks infinitely better.
And you know what, even if it were 50/50, it will take even longer for publishers to ACCEPT that writers now have power. Worse, it will take the writers YEARS to accept they have the power. The relationship has been set in stone forever. A generation will need to retire and another to come in BEFORE that changes. So, my trying to dictate to publishers would simply get me pushed into going completely Indie before I’m ready. Things don’t change that fast.
[And by the way, I’m not repining on having to take AFGM indie, if that’s the case. I have complete faith in that book, odd though it is. While I can see the publisher might hesitate or even balk at it, I think it will sell, and I think I’ll make considerably more than I can make from traditional publishing within five/ten years. But the nature of the book make me wish it could have a more traditional birth. Neither here nor there, I’m grateful to have the alternative.]
So, do I expect indie to triumph and writers to have a lot more power in the future? Sure I do. But it takes time. I doubt I’ll see the full transformation in my lifetime, even if I turn out to be as long-lived as my ancestresses plus a bit more for better tech, and come to touch or near the full century.
It doesn’t matter, since in the meantime I should be able to make a living and to have somewhere to put properties that MUST be written, but which the houses won’t touch.
It is sometimes helps to remember that the pivotal event might have happened (In the case of ebooks SEVERAL pivotal events.) but that change still creaks in slowly and through the back door and not suddenly, in a great climax of sound and light as it does in fiction.
And it helps to get used to this idea and realize small, incremental changes are often worth our entire devotion and our entire life, because they set off other changes, which eventually lead to a whole new world — in the future we might not see.
(And now I think about it, that too is the theme of A Few Good Men.)
Now I’m going to make a large, obvious change to the cat boxes, then move dust around a bit and make the house fractionally cleaner.
According To Hoyt 
I’ve seen several authors have the “pivotal event” to be something that wakens the main character to the situation.
In Poul Anderson’s “Operation Changeling” (later part of _Operation Chaos_), the main character was busy living his normal life (normal for an engineer who’s a werewolf with a wife who’s a witch) while the events leading up to his involvement are going on. He’d know about them but they don’t effect him. He gets involved when the “bad guys” picket where he works.
LikeLike
So, regardless of what happens with publishing, I’ll be able to get my hands on A Few Good Men. Excellent!
I often feel the disconnect between fiction and real life. Not sure what to do about it, though. Fiction is designed to be more consumable ;-) .
LikeLike
One of the best examples of believable character change I’ve encountered in recent years is Prince Zuko’s Heel-Face turn in Avatar, the Last Airbender. IMO, the title character is not the main character, Zuko is, and the story is really about Zuko’s change.
There are a couple of things that make it believable to me. The first is that there are a lot of influences, over considerable time, that bring about the change. But the second, and perhaps the most important, is that the change is a lot smaller than it first appears. Zuko was never really a “bad guy.” “Misguided” is an overused excuse for bad behavior but I believe it applied in Zuko’s case. At first he thought that honor was something other people could give or take away. He also wanted the love and acceptance of a family that, really, didn’t deserve him.
But perhaps the biggest part of the believability was in that it wasn’t a simple “yesterday he’s bad, today he’s good.” He made progress, backslid, had mixed feelings and reactions, realized that he’d screwed up and tried to make it better, screwed up again, and finally the good days started outweighing the bad and by the “day of black sun” he was clearly one of the “good guys” (and it stil took time and effort–and cleaning up some of the messes from his past actions) before he was finally accepted by the others.
A really good case study in how to make character changes work.
LikeLike
Ah, Zuko. The main character in the one piece of fanfiction I ever wrote.
LikeLike
I adored how they did Zuko. They took the “obvious” time for him to turn, and totally ZINGED it. He had to get his Heart’s Desire to realize that he’d sold his heart for it, instead.
LikeLike
If it would help with Toni, I would be happy to ask what was wrong with her thinking. AFGM is the best thing you have written. Very good storytelling, plot, characters. I am still in mourning for one member of the council whose life was cut tragically short. NO! I don’t mean that she should be resurected, just that she was so appealing and died so sadly. We always fewel that way about the good ones who die young. Even though common sense tells us that if they had lived they probably wouldn’t have fulfilled their potential.
LikeLike
I love these perfectly timed blogs. Sudden, great galloping, spectacular realization. Yes!
LikeLike
Pam? Explain!
LikeLike
I’m in the middle of rewriting (we’re well past anything that could be called editing) and I knew the MC needed to lose the snobby attitude. But I was having trouble showing the gradual change. But if I let the evidence accumulate right to the near end, he can have a sudden horrified realization, right where and when it will get him in the worst kind of trouble.
LikeLike
oh, yeah. And sigh. I have TONS of those.
LikeLike
Perhaps I ought to mention that this is a series I wrote over several years, and started probably five years ago. So while these early first drafts have promise, _now_ I can see that they need a whole bunch of work, before even the Beta readers see them.
LikeLike
Most revolutions (political) merely affect who is in charge, not the basic structures of government. The Russian Revolution replaced the Czar with The Party, but the basic functions of the society (all property owned by the ruler, with access to said property reliant upon being “on good terms” with the sovereign. The Chinese Revolution — horrific as it’s been — has apparently produced a China remarkably similar to what it was under The Warlords of the late 19th Century. Even the American Revolution preserved the basic structures and forms of the prior political structure. (A facile and glib analysis, to be sure, but facile is my middle name … I just spell it oddly.)
Many reasons for this, but mostly it boils down to the resistance to change of cultures — they just aren’t all that malleable and tend to snap back to prior state. Another factor is that when a subjugated class overthrows their rulers it is usually the case that they lack any model of governance significantly different from their (previous) sovereigns. So the oppressed tend to reenact the behaviour of their masters, minus the moderating customs (noblesse oblige, e.g.) that, however ineffective, tended to reduce the abuses of the prior overlords. Slaves, for example, only have the master/servant paradigm, with scant experience of equal interaction.
Remember, there was a reason G-D let Moses and company wander the desert for forty years. All those who’d been slaves had to die off.
I daresay most readers get their experience of literary revolution while adolescent — thus establishing literary expectations for quick & easy revolution. Heinlein’s Moon at least gave us the hard slog to establish a government … and in The Rolling Stones he recognized that all governments become sclerotic over time. After all, what are the types of person attracted to government careers? There is a natural draw of the Cornelius Fudges and Percy Weasleys of the world — entrepreneurs tend to go elsewhere for work.
LikeLike
I was amused by a book called The Moon Goddess and the Son, in which the author, Donald Kingsbury, notes that Soviet law is just Tsarist law with the nouns changed. He was also the first one I saw to elucidate the principle you mention, viz., that rapid and violent change results in the same thing you started with, only worse.
Regards,
Ric
LikeLike
Damn, now I’m stuck trying to remember that phrase in french that means the more things change the more they stay the same – plus ca change …..la meme chose?
Can anyone supply the correct version please before it drives me mad.
LikeLike
Google is your friend.
“Plus ça change. Plus c’est la meme chose”
Its probably telling that I found it be doing a search for “rush lyrics circumstances”.
LikeLike
I’ve heard the communists called “the red czars.” And I’m going to make the bold prediction that by the end of the 21st century it will have come full circle, and Russia will have a czar again. Of course, I’m safe doing that, since I’ll by then have joined the vast silent majority. (mwah ah ah ah)
LikeLike
But not all bureaucrats are suck-ups who desire power and prestige. With a nod to Heinlein who created my favorite fictitious bureaucrat Mr. Kiku.
A few years ago a historical theory was making the rounds: the American Revolution was the part of the long line that started with the Magna Carta and proceeded on through Oliver Cromwell and on to us. Kevin Philips wrote a history ‘The Cousins’ War’ which postulates that the British Civil War, The American Revolution and our ‘late unpleasantness’ all served as part of the progression in our experiment in liberty.
LikeLike
I was wondering what was happening with AFGM. I only read the snippets you posted here but they really whet my appetite and I’ll certainly buy it whether it is from Baen or you publish it yourself.
BTW Dean Wesley Smith posted the other day about indie publishers being able to publish on paper as well as electronically and get their print books into bookstores as well as in a paper edition on Amazon. The posts are in replies to comments on his blog. The comments are here:http://www.deanwesleysmith.com/?p=6375#comments and the main one is dated 8 Feb timed 11.55 pm.
LikeLike
Getting the books into bookstores is absolutely possible, but it implies another level of work, which, frankly, right NOW I don’t have the time for. However, I promise that should I bring out AFGM myself (It’s entirely possible that having been ill and having a blinding headache I’m reading too much in the sparse communication about it) it will come out in paper as well as electronic. But you might have to order from Amazon or Goldport Press and have it shipped. I think if I should bring it out myself, it will be released on the fourth of July. (What? Like you guys didn’t GET it was my big French kiss to the US of A. Come on. You know me well enough.)
LikeLike
Thank you, I am definitly one of the 80% that prefer paper. And I usually order most of my new books anyways, since the only local bookstore never seems to stock the authors I like. Although we do have a very good used bookstore with a varying selection of good books, many of them out of print. They do not however carry any new books, so those I always order.
LikeLike
Sometime between October 2012 and October 2013 sales of eBooks will surpass sales of print books. The first date is my prediction, the second one is by a print industry insider.
This is where is gets interesting. Evolution fitted humans to think linearly. I’ve had this discussion many times with people. They just don’t get how the rate of change accelerates during the uptake of a new technology, and how quickly the old technology phases out.
Remember VHS tapes? Over a period of six months they went from taking up half of video rental shelf space to only being found in the blow out bins. We are going to see the same thing with print books, we just don’t know exactly when it is going to happen.
When it happens, it will force those readers who are currently claiming that you can’t pry their beloved print books from their cold dead hands to switch to eBooks if they want to continue reading. They literally (pun intended) won’t have any choice. Being readers, they’ll make the move, after buying out their local second hand book stores.
It is already getting harder to find print books. In Canada the main chain has cut the shelf space dedicated to books, and carries more odd stuff. I’ve only bought one print book in the last year myself, everything else has been eBooks. My wife is the same, and so are a lot of our friends.
But hey, let’s face it. Everyone I know is a Geek. We are the early adopters, the ones who had computers in the house twenty-five years ago, and always had better computers than the companies we worked for (which is why I always took my own laptop on business trips).
My advice is to have a plan in place for the shift to happen faster than you think it can, and be ready to jump that way if it does happen.
One final note. Everyone is planning on an eBook market that is the same size as the print book market. Don’t. The print book market was massively inefficient. It was impossible to get the books you wanted, when you wanted them. With eBooks people buy more books. Yes, most eBooks are priced lower, but I think that we could see an eBook market that is quite a bit larger than the print book market. Think. I’m guessing here based on a bunch of observations from trips across North America, which may not he representative. I hope I’m right though.
Wayne
LikeLike
Yes people will probably buy more books when they are cheaper, and can buy right now, instead of having to order and wait for them. But you won’t have the repeat sales, how many good books have you loaned out over the years, and never gotten back? (I no longer loan out books for this reason) Or they are lost in flood or fire, or simply take up to much space when moving, so are left and new copies bought later. Yes people will have their computers or ebook readers crash and lose everything, but most suppliers of ebooks keep records and allow downloads of previously boughten books for free.
I think you will see a small raise in numbers of books sold, mainly due to lower prices, but I suspect we won’t see the huge jump some are predicting. There is however a much larger margin for profit, because there is simply not the overhead in producing ebooks that there is in deadtree format, so I forsee a much larger selection available in the future.
LikeLike
I don’t know who has predicted a huge jump other than myself. If someone has, do you have a link, I’d like to check their reasoning with mine.
Wayne
LikeLike
good heavens, HOW many books do you lose? Yeah, I’d estimate about a 1/5th or so reduction also from kids leaving the house and buying new books — at least if you’re not DRMed. But… otoh college kids can now afford books. I don’t know. Initially at least there WILL be a huge jump. Take me for instance. I’m rebuying all my Agatha Christie electronic and getting rid of paper. Same with Heinlein as it becomes available, though I own multiple paper copies, I want it on my kindle, too.
LikeLike
NEVER loan books – especially those written by the delightful Mrs Hoyt! Buy duplicates and give them as gifts. Buy multiple copies to have on hand for this purpose – they make excellent party favors, house-warming gifts, are perfect for baby showers …
LikeLike
I have known several people who did this with Princess Bride. A good book is worth sharing — just not your very own precious copy.
LikeLike
AND they’re great for throwing at kids’ heads when they interrupt your writing. I test every one of them. (Okay, not the ebooks. The Kindle is kinda fragile.) We always have two books on hand to inflict on the unwary (not our copy, other copies.) Good Omens and Techniques of the Selling Writer.
LikeLike
Amen to that!
Wayne
PS: I think I’ve managed to turn off italics for any comments after mine. Think.
LikeLike