Category: Uncategorized

It would be faster if the kids and the husband stopped carrying cross-conversation around me, but meanwhile I thought y’all might want to know The Serpent’s Tail is free on Amazon right now.  http://www.amazon.com/The-Serpents-Tail-ebook/dp/B006N0XA62/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1325009222&sr=8-1

The Flabby Middle

So, we’ve covered how to begin a book without making it boring – if there’s anything you need to know about THAT topic, feel free to ask in comments, but for now let’s move on to the next topic.

Does your book suffer from a flabby middle?  Well, then it’s time to take it to the gym.  Make it do some stretches and lose that extra fat – can you tell what my New Year’s resolution is?  Yeah.

Most of the time, the flab in the middle of the book is like the flab in your middle – stuff you don’t need but are storing because your body thinks it should be a certain weight.  If you know you’re contracted to deliver eighty thousand words and you find yourself suffering from premature ending (hey, it happens to the best of us) it might suddenly seem very tempting to just start describing everything ad nauseum and with relish.  You may suddenly feel a need to explain the fashions of your world or give us a lecture on alien textiles.

Do try to resist it.  Unless strictly needed for your story, that kind of intrusion becomes really old really fast.  Again, your readers might find your textiles fascinating, AFTER they read and love the novel, the world and the characters.  If you bore them in the middle of the first novel, this is unlikely.

One cure for this type of flab, of course, is to make your book shorter.  With indie publishing, and if you’re not contracted to anyone, ask yourself if the novel REALLY needs to be eighty thousand words.  Would it be a better novel at fifty thousand words?  The whole point is, after all, to make your readers happy.  It’s better to leave them wanting more than to make them throw their kindle against the wall.

On the other hand, perhaps you are indent– Er… contracted to a traditional publisher already.  And maybe it’s not the kind of publisher you can call up and say “that goat gagger at 229 thousand words just isn’t jelling.  Can it be eighty thousand words instead?”  So, what do you do?  Well, if you have a goat gagger to write, I suggest you leave the country and tell the publisher you died.  At least it’s what I’d do, since I’ve never managed to write one of those.  Okay, I’ve never managed to write a PUBLISHABLE one of those.

But if it’s a matter of going from fifty thousand to eighty thousand words…  That I can advise on, having done it.  Instead of loving descriptions of your character’s socks, consider going back to the beginning and reading it again.  Would a subplot help you tell this story?  Say, if the character’s favorite sister has a romance that parallel’s the main character’s and shows the main character something?  Or if the sister ship to the ship whose captain your space opera is following has a problem and is lost, perhaps it will show us the possibility for disaster of your own trip.

If you can’t add a subplot, then consider what questions your beginning asks.  Do you answer them all?  If you do, then perhaps there is a flaw in your character that you can exaggerate and which has to be fixed before you can go on?

When all else fails, of course, just get your character in real, serious trouble.  Go back to the beginning and introduce another problem.  Make the thing your character fears the most happen.    Go back to the beginning to seed details, of course, and make sure that this is not a mountain you dropped on him, but something plausible and terrible you can make happen to the poor critter.  Say give him a fear of rats, and then have him drop into a rat’s nest in the third chapter.  The panic that will induce can then cause other problems…  You see the point, right?

There are other, more genre-specific cures.  If you have a mystery, introduce another murder.  The murderer things someone knows something, say.  Or, you know, the red-herring character?  Yeah, have him be found dead and introduce two more red-herring characters.  For an adventure story, introduce a complication.  Have your character get lost, or be captured by the aliens.  Or introduce another puzzle that must be solved before you can get to the end.

Beware of loop-de-loop syndrome, though.  And walls falling on character syndrome.  You must go back to the beginning and make sure these proceed from the beginning, otherwise you’re trapping your reader in a roundabout.  Having taken a trip to Europe this summer, let me tel you that while roundabouts might slow down traffic, getting trapped in them isn’t fun.

The cure for that will be explained in tomorrow’s riveting installment.

The older Hoyt son has cleaned up, fixed and compiled his Christmas Black Ops story.  While you wait for Santa, imagine him the object of a black ops campaign.

 

For obvious reasons of Holiday and family.  In fact, posting for the next week will be irregular.  BUT for now, there will be the Free Short Story posted today.

It is the closest thing I have to a Christmas story, (though I suspect those dang Nuns of St. Lucia of the Space Ways will inflict one on me sooner than later)  so I hope you enjoy it.

The story is here — or just click on the Free Short Story tab at the top of the blog.

I’ll be back sometime tomorrow.

*This is the Fantasy novel I’m posting here for free, one chapter every Friday.   If your conscience troubles you getting something for free, do hit the donate button on the right side and down.  Anyone donating more than $6 will get a non-drm electronic copy of Witchfinder in its final version, when it’s published.
There is a compilation of previous chapters here and I will compile each new chapter there, a week after I post.  When the novel is completed and about to be edited the compilation page will probably be deleted.

Oh, this is in pre-arc format, meaning you’ll find the occasional spelling mistake and sentence that makes no sense.  It’s not exactly first draft, but it’s not at the level I’d send to a publisher, yet*

The Duke’s Duty

And now this.  Seraphim stared at the thing on the seat.  Were it not for his ability to unfocus his eyes and to look just so at that he would think it was Michael, but it was not.

The question was, how long had his brother been missing?  Would this sculpture, this animated construct always have been like this, listless and unresponsive?  Or was there a way it could have acted like Michael and Seraphim not have known, or – more importantly – the household not have known, while Seraphim was unconscious?

He looked towards the Duchess and narrowed his eyes, “Mama, they’ve always told me… that is… I’ve always heard it tell that you knew about changelings, and that this related to something in your childhood, but no one ever told me what?  It was all whispers and then ‘well, you know, because of her childhood’ and when I pursued the information they told me I was not to speak of it.” He looked steadily at his Mama, hoping that she wasn’t about to tell him this was not to be spoken of.  He knew he was making poor Penny damned uncomfortable.  He could tell without turning to look, without Penny saying a single word.  He knew whatever the mystery with changelings in Mama’s childhood was related directly to whatever and whoever Penny was.  That Penny would not in fact be here today but for mama and whatever had brought her in the presence of elves in her childhood.  “How did you know, Mama?  What is it with changelings?  Have you seen one of these before?”

The Duchess looked at the thing on the stool and sighed.  “It is not,” she said.  “A changeling like the one they left for me, when they stole me to fairyland as a child.”

A long breath, with a sound on the edge of keening escaped Penny, but Darkwater didn’t turn to look, and instead kept looking at his mother, who spoke like one in a dream.  “This is a construct, animated.  It looks like, and probably is, ice.  Water that someone poured in the rough shape of a young man, and then left overnight to freeze, then animated and gave your brother’s look by magic.  It is not alive.  It has no feelings.  It–”

“Stop,” Gabriel Penn said.  And what was so strange was that Penny had told the Dowager to stop, something he’d never done before.  “Stop, Your Grace,” he moderated, and sighed.  “It will not do.  We should discuss it, yes, but not here.  Not in … its presence.”  He waved towards the changeling, who remained, impassive, on his stool, looking blankly at the world.

“But Mother says it’s not animated,” Caroline said.

Penn sighed again.  “No, but still.”

“What should we do with it then?” Darkwater asked.  It seemed to him foolish to leave the thing alone, as though it might get up to mischief on its own.

“Nothing,” Penn said.  “It is losing its magic and will presently melt.  But if you feel better, Duke, we shall lock it in the closet.”  He took the creature’s arm and led it, and it let itself be led, to a cupboard in the wall, where Michael kept his chemicals and his vials.  Penn pushed the creature in there, closed the door and locked.  Then closed the closet to sight and sound with a carefully aimed spell.

Then he turned to the room, “Shall we speak, now?” he asked.  “This is one of the safest rooms in the house to discuss such things in, since Michael has hardened it against magical interference, so no rival houses could see his designs.”

“But that thing got in,” Caroline said.  And Penn smiled at her.  “Yes, Caroline, it did, but not through here.  My guess is that Michael has been gone for days, perhaps before Seraphim was injured.  These changelings have a certain programing and seem more real and solid, and interact with everyone normally for a few days, and then wind down and become whatever material they were.”

“Then why didn’t you allow us to speak in front of it?” Seraphim said.

“Because sometimes they are rigged so as to transmit sight and sound to whoever made them.  I have shut it in the closet and blocked all sound magically.  We are safe now.  And I believe,” he said.  “First I will let Her Grace tell us what happened to her in childhood.”

It occurred to Seraphim, for the first time, that Penny spoke as though he knew what it was.  He said so, and Penny pressed his lips together.  “Indeed, Seraphim.  Perforce I know.”  And though Seraphim didn’t know why perforce, in fact couldn’t think of any reason for Penny to know, save that, of course, his mother was an elf, and changelings were connected to elves, he kept quiet.

“I will tell,” his Mama said.  “But let us sit.  Seraphim should not remain standing long.”  He allowed his mother to lead him to a little sitting area around a large, glimmering sphere whose purpose Michael had never succeeded in explaining fully, but which seemed to interest the heads of several magic houses.  There were three straight backed chairs, a chaise and a sofa.  He refused to lie down on the chaise, but allowed himself to be led to the sofa and sat down on it, glad only that no one had brought an invalid’s shawl to drape around his shoulders.  Mama sat in one of the straight backed chairs.  Caroline half-reclined on the chaise.  Penny remained standing, but Seraphim wasn’t about to challenge him, suspecting it had to do with his idea of preserving the appearance of his position, while in public.

Then he realized there was someone else with them.  They’d been so absorbed in their conversation that he hadn’t noticed her before.  Miss Helen Felix had come with them, trailing her grey blanked.  The woman must be freezing, even with the blanket, and indeed looked very pale and tired.  He looked at her, “Miss Felix?  Should we have private talk in front of you?  Two whom do you report?”

She gave something that wasn’t a half laugh.  “To no one, Your Grace,” she said.  “Up until this mor– No, up until the day I left here, whenever that was, I worked for Sidell, spymaster for the king.  Then I would have said I reported to him.  But all that was severed first by his betraying me, and then by his killing the man he was holding hostage for my good behavior.  I am now, Your Grace, entirely a free agent, and as a free agent, I confess I’d like to do what I can to bring your brother back.”

Seraphim didn’t know whether to believe it.  After all, the king’s spies were trained and paid to lie.  He hesitated.

“She can hear my story,” his mother said, quietly.  Seraphim noted that the Duchess didn’t protest that Miss Felix was Penny’s fiancé.  “It is nothing so secret that she can’t find out the general outlines of it simply by talking to anyone old enough to have listened to gossip or practiced magic when I was a child.  It is not normally spoken of, because people are afraid to give me pain, not because it is not known.”

Seraphim looked at Penny, “And you?  Since I presume you’ll be talking, also?”

Penny looked surprised, then glanced at Miss Felix and shrugged.  “Oh, she can hear mine too.  There is nothing in it that cannot be gathered with some sleuthing, and I suspect the king’s secret services know it well enough.  If I’ve kept it secret at all it was to spare your family shame by association, but I judge in the trouble we face that is the least of our worries.”

“When I was five,” the Duchess spoke.  “I was stolen away to fairyland.  No one knows why.”  She spoke a little too loudly, a little to cheerfully, as though trying too hard to sound normal.  And she’d barely let Penny stop talking before she started.  “I had magic, of course, but no more than my brothers and sisters, and no more than a hundred other children in the immediate vicinity of my parents’ estate.  But whatever it was, and for whatever reason, it was a well planned thing.  You see.”  She looked up at Penny, and her eyes unfocused.  Not as though she didn’t want to see him, but more as though she knew what she had to say would touch him very nearly and were trying to pull herself away from it, and not to dwell on the pain she was giving.  “You see, the changeling they left in my place was not a construct, but a little girl.  A little elf girl they had to have shaped from very early on to look exactly like me and behave exactly like me.  For days – weeks – my parents didn’t know I was missing.

“For myself too,” she said.  “It was hard to tell.  I lived mostly in the nursery, with nanny and the nursery maids.  My life was surrounded by toys and I was an imaginative child.  As such… Well, I thought simply that my toys were more alive than before.  For a long time, I didn’t notice that I was in another realm and then…”

“And then?”

“And then I started to feel cold.  Not physically.  I don’t think fairyland is any colder than here.  It is, after all, like another world in the multiuniverse, just one that never fully separated.  So while it is in a way attached to our world, it is also a copy of it.  It has the same climate at the same time.  But there is… Everyone in fairyland is cold.”  She shrugged.  Penny was walking back and forth across the little sitting area, as though he couldn’t sit still, but he nodded when she said that.  “It’s not that they don’t show emotion,” she continued.  “It is that they don’t know what emotion is.  They are like humans without the…”  She shrugged.  “I’m sure Gabriel can explain it better than.”

“Yes,” Penny said.  “Yes.  But not just yet, pray go on.”  He paced.  She looked up at him.

“I realized that I was in a way absolutely alone, like… like a child raised by wolves would be alone.”  Penny shuddered, as though in response to her words.  “But I was too young to know what had happened or to seek to escape captivity.  I could not, and as such, I would have remained forever captive in fairyland, but…  But my parents had an hostage.  And they did what has always been done when a real changeling, a living one is left behind in place of the child taken.  They tortured her.  They subjected her to various discomforts, until I was brought back.”  She took a deep breath.  “I’m sorry Gabriel.”

He paused in his pacing.  For a crazy moment, Seraphim wondered if the changeling had been Gabriel, such the tone of his mother’s voice.  Could elves change their gender?  He’d never heard tell of such a thing.  And besides, Penny was around his age, was he not?  Could he have been kept in some stasis, so he didn’t grow?  But no, Penny was Seraphim’s half brother.  He had the Darkwater look, the Darkwater magic, and Seraphim’s own father had recognized him as such.

“What is there to be sorry for, Your Grace?” he asked, pausing in his pacing to look at her.  “Oh, perhaps, yes, perhaps it was that torture, which, though, from what I heard was very mild, at least for an elf, which led her to never quite fit in fairyland again.  But I don’t think so.  I never told you why we were thrown out, she and I, have I?  I told my father when–” He shook his head.  “I beg your pardon.”

“You beg my pardon?  For admitting the duke was your father?  Or for mentioning it in my presence?  Of all the things your father did, Gabriel, siring you was probably one of the most worthy.  Don’t scruple to admit it.  He admitted you openly, even if he never changed the name your mother gave you, since nothing could be gained by saddling you with Ainsling, when no title and no fortune accrued with it.”

Penny only nodded, though Seraphim wasn’t sure to what.

“My mother was the changeling left in place of Her Grace,” he said.  “She was also the child of the deposed king of fairyland.  No, don’t ask me how or why.  There are revolutions in fairyland, and civil wars, just as there are here.  And I think at the end of the last such war, when my… I suppose, my grandfather, the then sovereign of fairyland was deposed, he left behind his young daughter.  It was thought that by sending her as a changeling to the world of mortals, it would dispose of her, I think – though the thinking of elves is not the same as ours and it is hard to fathom at times.  However, in the time she was away, there was another revolution and my… I suppose my uncle, became the sovereign of fairyland.  he could not allow a princess of fairykind to be tortured in the world of humans and therefore, reluctantly – and I do feel it was reluctantly, though I can’t explain why – he gave Her Grace back to her parents and took my mother back.  But he had children of his own to inherit after him.  And my mother was ever odd.  Oh, I don’t think they did more than threaten her and make her uncomfortable, and perhaps make her work – the things that legend says one should do to changelings, though some people make the poor creatures sit on live coals or worse – and strangely, from what I know of my poor Mama, I don’t think that’s what changed her.

“Just like Her Grace could not survive in fairyland, not without noticing the exceptional coldness of elves and would have been changed beyond repair had she stayed in there longer, my mother had experienced the warmth of humans and it had changed her, so she no longer responded like a real elf.

“And she could not live in fairyland, not fully.  Instead, she would escape to the world of men.  Which is how she met with Arden Ainsling, Duke of Darkwater.  And she returned to fairyland expecting me.”

“And meanwhile, Darkwater found me, was enchanted by my resemblance to his vanished elf love, and started courting me,” the Dowager said.

Penny hesitated, looking like he would apologize, then inclined his head.  “Only I fit in even worse than my poor Mama.  I was more human, you see.  There is… there is sport the elves engage in.  They will capture some child out of doors on a dark night, or some lost creature, and they will torture it.  When I was three or four, I tried to rescue a puppy that was being tortured for the amusement of the court.  My mother and I were flung from fairyland and unworthy.”  He was silent a long while.  “When my father found me, we were living in a tenement and Mama…”  A long, deep breath.  “I begged to supplement our income.  It wasn’t until I had lived in this house for two years that they tried to reclaim me, and only because they couldn’t allow me to live as a commoner among humans.  They didn’t want me to keep me.”  He looked up, and a sudden fierce light burned in his eyes, such as Seraphim had never seen.  “They didn’t want me for me, or because they cared for me, or even because they honored me, or my lineage.  They’d probably have killed me once they’d got me back to fairyland.  But they didn’t want me to live among humans and perhaps come to value my human heritage over my elven one.”  Another pause.  “I don’t know why they took Michael or what for, but I swear to you, all of you, that I will do my outmost to bring him back, and – if I can – to bring fairyland down with it.”

In new page — here https://accordingtohoyt.com/witchfinder/

And a new chapter will go up in a couple of hours.  Sorry, it’s been Murphy’s day including an hour spent on the phone tracking something that should have arrived today and corrupted files, including the — sob — new cover for witchfinder.  I’ll track that down soon, and prettify the whole thing, but for now I need food, then going over chapter.

Again, sorry I’m so late.

Update — Witchfinder new chapter is now up here https://accordingtohoyt.wordpress.com/2011/12/23/free-novel-witchfinder-chapter-14/

And there’s a compilation of all previous chapters here https://accordingtohoyt.wordpress.com/witchfinder/

he installment of Witchfinder will be late.  Oh, not by a day, probably no more than a few hours.  But it’s all good (other than the snow which meant I lost most of the day doing shopping/errands that should have taken a couple of hours.)  Update: Okay, definitely by 5 pm Eastern  MOUNTAIN time — says she who must wrap.  And if you want to know why — gahhh kids, cats, post office.  This week is very bad.  I promise this won’t happen again.)

This shift means a clean up and a change that will make it easier for you to follow the posts.

Here’s what’s happening — and this is part of the “editorial commentary.”  When I write, I do it in a sort of trance.  You know the thing about being mostly plotter, but a little bit pantser?  Well, what this means is that lots of things drop into my plots that I hadn’t meant, and others were in the plot all along, but shift position/fall into position as I write.

The result is that about a third of the way through the book, I’ll have accumulated enough errors that I need to go back and make the narrative coherent before I can power through to the end.  I’ve reached that point now, so I’m doing my “first edit” in which I clean up incoherent plot signaling, bits of worldbuilding that stick out and that sort of thing.  It is by no means the final edit, but it gets the novel tow here there’s some sort of coherent story I can follow.

Reading over the novel also allows me to see where pieces fit that I hadn’t figured out when outlining.  Like… the lion boy.  I know who he is, and what part he plays now, other than being a rescued kid.  Same with the elves, which dropped in without being in the outline (but which answered “who is Gabriel Penn?”)

I now have a fully marked paper manuscript up to this point, but need to enter the changes and post, which will take a couple of hours.

Also, on the “mechanical” level, it has occurred to me posting a work this length makes it come across as very fractured and difficult to follow.  I’m going to take a page from the Dwiggie website, where I post fanfiction, and take all chapters up to this point and “archive” them in a “page” where you can read them consecutively and more easily.  This makes my life easier too, allowing me to link only one chapter every week.

Of course, once the book is ready to go up that free version will probably be taken down.  Or not.  Depends on how much final “clean up” I do, and how different the end is from that version, in which case I might leave that version up as advertisement.  We shall see.  At any rate, the page will make this easier to read and easier for me to post.

I promise to have a new chapter up by midday, as well as the archive live.  I’d like to promise you a new cover too, but miracles have limits and I still have sinfully late gifts to ship and the family gifts to wrap.

All I want for Christmas is a time extending machine!

I’m writing this as a series.  When it’s done I’ll compile it, clean it up and put it up for download in a few formats, for something like $3.99.  Might throw it on Amazon, too, if it looks worth it. Needless to say if you want to hit the donate button instead, and make a note on the paypal field
that it’s for May You Write Interesting Books, I’ll send you a copy when cleaned/compiled.  Oh, btw, I’ll also be taking suggestions for other seminars on writing.  I’ve considered doing something like a “self directed workshop” with suggested exercises you can do on your own or with your writing group.

Eat This Note When You’re Done Reading
I hear you screaming whining and stomping your feet.  “BUT” you say “What if my reader really needs info up front?  What if he needs to know that all the characters in the novel have three eyes?  Or are squid?”

Yes, I heard that other thought too “I know.  I’ll do a prologue.”  Put that thought down.  Possibly by shooting it through the head.  I think I’m the only reader left in the wild who actually reads prologues.  So if you really need to give that information, you need to make it part of the beginning and make it interesting.

Unless you’re Mark Twain, Heinlein, Jane Austen and the second coming of Shakespeare rolled into one, and unless your book is so incredibly odd it necessitates “level set” right up front, I wouldn’t in point of fact try to put the infodump RIGHT at the beginning.   I’d give the reader something to bite into first, before you reel them into your world and history and your rich social design.

But let’s say at some point you need to do an infodumpus of, at a minimum, two or three pages.  Sometimes it happens.  Like, if you’re writing a sequel and you can’t be sure your newly-landed reader has read any of your previous work.

The good news is that this happens to all of us, sooner or later, so you don’t have to reinvent the wheel.  There are several ways to do it.

The first, and much simpler one is to bull through.  Sometimes the least obtrusive way to do things is to do them right up front and be done with them.  So, if you have to give the general plot of your last novel, do so, and quickly, then move on.

Of course, if you’re going to do that, it helps if you make the tone at least interesting or ironic.  Say, Tom from Draw One In The Dark could say something like “It wasn’t the first time I’d died, but…”  The words draw the reader in, even if you’re just infodumping.

Something else you can do is have the information you’re giving be a point of contention.  Say we were invaded by the Martians in 1940.  Make it be like our world, for instance, where we don’t know we were invaded by Martians in 1940.  Some guy says “Hey, we were invaded by Martians in 1940″ and the other one says “you’re crazy nuts, Bucko.  Never happened.”  Then reveal everything as arguments pro-and against.  This can sound like maid and buttler if done clumsily.  So, don’t do it clumsily.  Have the argument matter and be about something not just sound and fury.

The other option is disaster.  Make something happen that necessitates the information.  “Oh, no.  My house burned down, and I lost all the info on the Martian invasion.”  (Yeah, okay, lame.  Deal.)

Then there’s danger.  “John.  Eat this note as soon as you’ve read it.  We were invaded by Martians in 1940, but no one remembers it.  I shall explain as soon as… Quick.  Forget I said anything.  We’re in danger.”

Again, you have to make the danger real and make it matter to the plot.

Next is the ironic narration.  This is a variant on just hook them with words.  Think noir movie narration.  “I knew I was in trouble when I realized we’d been invaded by the martians in 1940.  But we haven’t been you say?  Oh, listen buddy” etc.  Of course, this means you have to do it through the ENTIRE book, or pretty close.  I almost or more or less did this with Darkship Thieves, less so with A Few Good Men, weirdly.

If all else fails and you must have a business meeting have the pope in the swimming pool.  This is a variant on the Pole dancer (when the Pope was a Pole, of course) or the poll dancer, and might be more effective at least for women.

I’ve explained Pope in the swimming pool before.  It’s a classical example.  You have your character have a talk with someone, but your character (say this is a hotel) is facing a window, while the other guy isn’t.  While the other guy is giving him all this information, your character is looking out the window at this BIZARRE scene, where the pope arrives at the swimming pool, undresses and goes for a swim.  And your character is thinking “uh?”  Of course, you’d have to explain it later.  Say a convention of Pope-impersonators is in town…

Needless to say it doesn’t have to be a pope.  It could be a poll dancer.  Or the Chimpendales guys en parade, or a dinosaur running across.  Or …  Think about it.  Just enough to keep it interesting.

Okay, this is fast, and tomorrow is Witchfinder but I’ll try to do a post demoing this in the style of my dialogue post.  Now I have to go mail gifts.

And d’ahlings, the most important thing?  Never say boring.  No, seriously.  We’re a people of words.  If your character thinks “this is boring” your reader just put the book down.

Sorry, but we must go out  before we’re completely snowed in.  So I’m going to get enough caffeine in system, go out, then will post when I return.

Fortunately husband is from Connecticut and lived in Ohio.  He laughs in the face of snow.  Also, we have four wheel drive.  I’d already be snow-bound.

I’m writing this as a series.  When it’s done I’ll compile it, clean it up and put it up for download in a few formats, for something like $3.99.  Might throw it on Amazon, too, if it looks worth it. Needless to say if you want to hit the donate button instead, and make a note on the paypal field
that it’s for May You Write Interesting Books, I’ll send you a copy when cleaned/compiled.  Oh, btw, I’ll also be taking suggestions for other seminars on writing.  I’ve considered doing something like a “self directed workshop” with suggested exercises you can do on your own or with your writing group.

Jump In The Middle

Wouldn’t you know it?  The minute I start talking about ridding the beginning of your book of boring, everyone jumps in to tell me about In Media Res, which is starting in the middle of the story, of course.

I’m rather proud of having invented this concept myself in or around fourth grade.  Not that this prevented me from failing at using it several times when I should have, as a fledgeling writer.  In fourth grade I had very important reasons to invent it.  You see, student composition in Portugal was prefaced with the words “Once upon a time” in the same way that some invariable law of nature makes every folk song be prefaced with a long, plaintive note, and for the same reason (Pratchett being the one who figured out the reason for folk songs) – to give anyone within hearshot/reading shot a chance to get clear away.  Having figured this, I thought I’d ambush my teacher by starting in the middle of the story, so she was totally wrapped in it by the time she thought to get away.

The degree of success of the technique varied, by which I mean it might have worked had my spelling been even mildly understandable, my punctuation following any degree of rationality and had I not dropped more blots than shaped letters.  (I did tell you I wrote with a quill in elementary school, right?  No, not joking.  It was believed permanent ink pens or heaven forbid, ball point pens would forever ruin our caligraphy.  I wasn’t allowed to use a permanent ink pen until I was in fifth grade.  Yes, I was brought up in Elizabethan England and next door to Hades, why?)

Anyway – coff – resuming the thread of our interrupted thought, here it goes: though your prose might not be (I hope it isn’t) as bad as mine at ten, the principle still applies.  Beyond the fact that most of what you would drop into a long disquisition on the world, your character’s back story or whatever else you think is needed to get on with this, is in fact totally unecessary and probably the greatest soporiphic ever written (since war and peace) there is the fact that it gives your reader time to get away.

In an ideal world (and now I sound like Scott Edelman’s rejections when he edited SF age) your reader would be so invested in your book when he starts reading that nothing, not even your including a dictionary for your invented language, can make him/her give up and go find some thing more interesting to do.

In the real world, people not only have computer games and movies that they can turn to, which require far less effort, not to mention books that don’t require them to memorize stuff, but they have real lives.  I read for entertainment by preference (meaning a movie or game needs to be amazing to get my attention) but I – and everyone else I know between the ages of thirty and sixty or later – am insanely busy.

Time spent with a book is either snatched as a guilty pleasure, which only happens for people on my “drop everything and read” list, (and these days, often, note even for them, which is why I LISTENED to the latest Pratchett rather than read him, because I could do so while walking) or is read while I’m doing under stuff, ranging from cooking to ironing.

This means if by the end of the first page I’m not riveted to the story, the character or the situation, your chances of my reading the full book are getting slimmer.  By the end of the tenth page, if all you’ve dropped on me is back story and worldbuilding (UNLESS you do it in a very amusing way) I’m going to wonder off in search of something more fun, or just give my full attention to the task at hand, instead.

So, start in media res, that is, in the middle of the action.  This doesn’t mean necessarilly starting in the middle of the story (though it often does.)  For an example of starting at the beginning in media res read Larry Correia’s Monster Hunter International.

And if you’re going to say “But Larry doesn’t have to build the world before that.  He starts in our world, when his character first becomes aware that it is not as ordinary and non-supernatural as he’s been led to believe.”  This is true.  And a lot of other books that start in media res have this exception built in.  Perhaps most of them.

But not all of them, and certainly not any science fiction book set more than a few years in the future or any science fiction book set in a parallel universe.  Or any fantasy book set in a parallel universe, for that matter.  (I’m sure I could do it better now, but if you stumble on a copy of my Soul of Fire, read it.  It starts in the middle of the action, in a world with a completely different history, and I never stop to explain it, though I give you a line here and there.  Also, Soul of Fire is the middle book, but if I did my job right – I think I did – you don’t need the first or the last book to follow along.

Of course, I recommend that all of you – even those who thinks the man has cooties – find a copy of Robert A. Heinlein’s Friday and read the first five or six pages for the consummate in media res start in a world that’s as different from ours as humanly possible and a character who is very different.  Again, he never stops to explain, but everything is there to build your picture as you go along.

I also often hear C J Cherryh’s Alien series cited as an example of this.  I’m passing it along for free, which is the price I got it at.  Myself, I could never get into it, so her technique for drawing you in failed with at least one reader.  But I’m a lazy reader and not willing to work even medium-hard.  Your milleage may and clearly does vary, considering how many people give this series as an example.

To bring together an article that feels rather scattered (and I apologize, and yes, this is one of those that will get edited before being collected) let’s take the plus factors of a media-res start:

1 – It drops you in the middle of the action.  If your action is riveting enough, we will stick around even if we only understand part of what is going on.  Don’t believe me?  Have you ever experienced a rubber-necking induced back up?  Yeah, when people see an accident, or some interesting enough event, they’ll look on.  Part of the attraction is speculating about what happened.  Same with your book.

2- It doesn’t give people an excuse to run away.  Oh, you can get away with glossaries, long prologues or even business meetings if you are an established writer.  You’ve delivered for the reader in the past, and the reader will give you time and space now to establish your world and start booking.  But as a newby, anything that seems like work will get your book set down and more or less forgotten.

3 – It might make you realize you only need minimal info anyway.  This type of mind game is important, since you’re essentially pretending to be the reader you tell the story to.  So if you’re stuck in “but there’s so much more to that world” you might not figure out how NOT to put it all in.

Disadvantages, or things you have to work around:

1 – But I don’t like flash backs!
Sometimes when you start in media res you need a flash back to bring you back to the point you started at.  And many people with good reason dislike flashbacks.
Now, the reason most people dislike flashbacks is that those tend to be LONG detours from the story, and a concentrated dose of the boring.

Most of the time flash backs are not needed (see below.) IF they are needed there are ways to do it that are not heart-stopping dull.  I had to do a flashback in Darkship Renegade, because trying to Heinlein it distorted the narrative and made it dull.  So…  What I did – and recommend – is: make it sassy.  Or angsty of course, or whatever your character voice is.  Thena is sassy (and homicidal) so that’s what the flashback is.  Also, make it short.  I recap the RELEVANT parts of Darkship Thieves in a page and a half double spaced.  You don’t need to know as much as you think you do, and besides I still want people to buy Darkship Thieves, with no undue spoilers.  (And for my betas, no, that is NOT the version you read.  That is what ate the first five days of this month.)

Another common use of flashbacks is to make the story a circle which if done badly reads like the entire novel is a boring flash back.  Start at the climax battle (not AFTER, particularly if your hero loses!  And yes, I made that mistake too.  See Pre-Minoan fantasy) and wind the narrative around to take us there again at the end.  This stops being a problem if you don’t spoiler yourself with the starting scene AND if – like Heinlein – your story involves something like coming of age that requires starting with a young protagonist.  The media-res start allows you to indicate this will NOT be YA, and then you start with the young protagonist.  Normally I don’t recommend these for novels, unless you are very, very good.  Perhaps I’m biased, though, since the only time I did it, I did EVERYTHING wrong.

2 – But then how will the reader know my wonderful world?
Keep in mind your reader only needs to know those parts of your world that allow him/her to interact with the characters/understand the action.  For instance, with Darkship Thieves, half the people got the “future history” it’s based on just about bass ackwards.  Does this mean they didn’t enjoy the story?  Well, no.  Most of them became rabid fans.  Do I care if they think the seacities came about because of Climate Change?  Pffff.  No.  Why should I?  As they read more in the series they’ll change their minds.  Or not.  Do I care?

3 – But then I’ll have characters acting in fog, doing things for reasons no one understands.

No, you won’t.  There’s this thing called Heinleining.  Think of it as “just in time” supply for details.  For examples see beginning of Friday, Puppet Masters or The Door Into Summer.  In fact, I recommend you get a note pad and read over those while making note of the things you’re being “told” without stopping the narrative.  Alternately, try Pol Anderson’s Operation Chaos.

4 – But my world is too complicated!

Yeah?  Well, again, read Operation Chaos.  Again, your reader doesn’t need to know everything about your world to follow the story.  He might need it to appreciate how much of a genius you are, but if you don’t get them to read this book and the next and the next, and the next, then you won’t ever be a “sung” genius.  So, don’t bore them, okay?

5 – But I AM an unsung genius!

Good for you.  From living with one of those, this probably means you have absolutely no clue how normal people work (well, our own pet genius is getting better, but it took very careful upbringing) so if you wish to write only for people like you, carry on.  If not, consider writing for normal people who are the vast majority.  Unless, of course, you’re in this for the accolades and not the cash.  In which case I hope you’re the right age, ethnicity and political color all of which are needed to be considered a “genius” these days.  If not, again, learn to entertain.

Tomorrow we’ll take on “when you absolutely DO have to give them the info” ways to make that info less boring, including but not limited to: dissension, disaster & danger, pope in the swimming pool, the ironic narrator, etc.

I’m blogging today  over at Mad Genius Club.  Different post.  Celebrating the Solstice.  Drop by for doughnuts and coffee!