It’s hard to explain—especially in light of the traditional instruction in English classes about the way stories work—especially how novels work. Dunno how often somebody’s asked me to discuss plot—and I just groan, because I’m not sure there is such a beast, at least of the color, size, coat-texture and conformation described in English class. It’s what hung me up in my course of learning how to write for about two years.
WHAT happens in a book is sort of important. WHO happens in a book and how their minds work is more so. WHEN the WHAT happens is way, way, way down the list. So the traditional book report in which Johnny gets up and recites the sequence of events in the book (besides being boring) is probably the most irrelevant thing about the book. It’s only the thing the writer decided at the last moment.
Think of it as a fireworks show. You’ve got certain triggers that are going to set off certain colored lights. How you arrange them is, yes, sort of important, but the larger nexi that group the triggers into meaningful sections are sort of mutable: you can pull the whizzbanger type A from collection 3 and put it in 5 with no trouble at all. And sometimes you discover you’ve got one trigger that really needs to be shown-but-not-touched (now we’re talking about novels) and having it set off a nice little set of actions here near the beginning could do that—until it’s REALLY pulled later; but by that time you want to link a bunch of other little fireworks to it, so that multiple things will get solved by one trigger.
That’s plot. I think of it not as anything like a sequence of events, but as a webwork of tension-lines between characters and sets of characters. You pull one—and one yank moves several characters. It’s not events. It’s tensions. Events are cheap. They can be moved all about at will. They can be put in any sort of order. That’s why Johnny’s book report made no more sense to me, who started to write at 10, than the legendary bunny with a pancake on its head. It bugged me. Bigtime. It was describing a very minor thing about the book—and I just had a lot of trouble believing that was what the book was about…to the extent that I’d go into the Dreaded Book Report assignment trying to report on the triggers, not the events, and then I’d get distracted, because there was often something that just didn’t satisfy me about the way the writer had handled the flow of it all, and I was too young at the time to understand what was driving me crazy.
It was realizing all this stuff about sequence just proved to the teacher you’d actually read the book—heck, I was such a brutally truthful kid teacher could have just asked me and saved us some agony; and finally realizing that it was just a list of trivia, so far as its importance in the plot. Map-driven books, like quests, are the simplest, because there really IS a sequence that’s nailed to a map, and it’s pretty straightforward: if you get into trouble with pacing, don’t invent an incident to fill the Great Nothingness Desert—move the mountains three days closer and don’t make the desert so important. IE, change the map, f’ gosh sakes.
Intrigue of any sort is one of the hardest—because there are twists and turns and there IS no map: the territory to be crossed is all in the mind of at least one individual—and if it’s in the minds of half a dozen individuals, you’ve got yourself a big team of horses to manage. If you’ve built them right, they’ll surprise you—but they’ll always be logical. Like the chimp in the test who was handed a pole and a set of big stackable boxes — in a bare room with desirable bananas hanging from the ceiling—said chimp went through no process at all with the boxes, just stood the tall pole on end with a quick thump, shinnied up the pole with balance unlikely in a human, grabbed the bananas and shinnied down, then sat peeling his banana in the wreckage of the scientist’s behavioral experiment on tool use. A good character will do that to you. Several good characters are a three ring circus of such behaviors. They keep writing a fun exercise.
Sequence? Naw. It’s chimpanzees. Lots of chimpanzees. And if your plot isn’t nailed to a map, you can move events all over the place. It’s why I write my ‘plots’ , ie, the anticipated events, on an old calendar—and once I’m finished, you’ll see a lot of X’s where I nixed a thing where I’d thought it would happen, and moved it earlier or later in the whole book.
That’s why writers should not drive in heavy traffic or cook with high temperatures while they’re ‘plotting.’ It’s like 3-dimensional chess, and it makes you just a little zooey.
I just made a deal with DAW to let them do all of FOreigner, but they gave me rights to some of my other books. THat way I will get something from these several books, and each side has what they need. And hopefully they will do good versions.
Wow, that so describes the way my mind functions when writing. I always thought of it like stepping stones — I’d first have the great interactive scenes writing themselves, then start thinking about what part of the story the scenes are telling/revealing. Maybe the stones are lining up, maybe some are missing (how to get from here to over there and back again). The bridging bits get written in afterward, or perhaps I just can’t find a way to get to that scene over there so either the plot gets changed, or the scene thrown out. Weird, today on the way home from work I was thinking about your next book and atevi architecture. Atevi rooms wouldn’t be rectangular, nor would atevi windows or doors (infelicitous 4). Straight-sided pentagons (felicitous 5) would do well for both doors and windows (taller than wide); grouped triangles (felicitous 3) for windows, too; rooms to be round (singular 1), triangular, or some odd number of walls. Triangular units are strong in architecture; not so sure how well five-sides shapes would do, though. But the cover art should be less human and more atevi (no rectangles!) when set indoors.
That’s how the brain works.
I adore seeing how everyone works.
Tonight I finished the final edits of Summer Storm. I hope people enjoy this book! I’ll be formatting this weekend, I think, and have it on sale soon — maybe after the first.
I couldn’t relax afterwards, so I did some notes for Water/Stone/Light and came up with a lovely little tiny bit for a scene. I really enjoy when that happens. Just little pieces of things falling into place.
Oh, and because my life hasn’t be stressful enough, Russ is in the midst of a mandatory evacuation and trying to get inland to a hotel room he booked. He has no car but he’s pretty certain he can get the trains out before everything shuts down at noon tomorrow.
Sure wish I could have my old boring life back. If anyone’s seen it, please send it my way.
Glad to see you posting, Zette, and hope you and your neighbors haven’t spotted an lurker again or, rather, hope there has been anyone lurking around your place.
Here in the Boston area, the clouds moved in over the night (it’s Saturday morning now) for thick, thick cover and a still, humid day. Nothing’s hit yet but we’re waiting for the rain (moved my spouse’smini-golf birthday party up from tonight to last night). We’re still uncertain just where and how the hurricane will hit and how much we will feel. High winds are the biggest worry for me. We know our cellar will flood but we have pumps ready. It’s trees down and loss of electricity (and roof shingles) that’s the real problem. Good luck to Russ and all out there in the path of the storm — you too, SmartCat.
This is really interesting and insightful! I only write in fits and starts (I regard myself as a reader rather than a writer, but sometimes the muse bellows…) and what you describe makes a lot of sense. You also have a new handout for those new-writer sessions!
Thank you for that bit of insight. You make me feel better about my own writing. I have had no problem inventing characters, but one of my perceived faults was that I couldn’t do plots very well. You reinforce what I sensed intuitively. If you get the right set of characters the story writes itself.
Not only does the story write itself, the characters ‘talk’ to you—sometimes in actual words: what they would say about what you’re doing flashes into your head. I was amused and enlightened when once, as a very young writer, when I was stuck and couldn’t get Vanye to go where I needed, he told me: “You did not create me a fool.” IE, “Make me do it.” And that was my challenge. Not just write it. But create the situation in which that would be the only choice.
A stuck writer is not a case of writer’s block. I don’t think there IS writer’s block. There is a character not talking to you, there is a writer who’s been doing things that occupy that circuit for days and days and has stopped listening. Writing requires baths, showers, and naps, and I don’t mean rushing to do so, but doing so in a relaxed frame of mind and letting the mind go into idle, then the “I must create” mode—engaged with story, not your hobby, not your job, not your friends’ problems. It means sitting and watching something (traffic, an ant farm, a batch of sparrows on a branch) that does not engage you deeply, until the zeroed-out mind HAS to construct something. Anne Rice stopped writing because, she said, her characters stopped talking to her. And that is not a writer’s natural condition: that’s a writer who’s (often from too much generosity and too much contact with critics) let her creativity flow to problems other than her characters, or gotten inhibited by criticism, and problems and inhibitions can drown out the voices. Being willing to be embarrassed, shocked, offended, scared, and forced to changed one’s mind is sometimes essential to hearing the voices—and if you stop listening, they may go on talking, but you aren’t paying attention. That’s my take on it.
Since the characters are the ones who tell you about the events—that’s how a story get ‘stuck.’
I have also been in the situation of realizing I’d created characters too smart to get into trouble—which is good for them, but bad for the book. It happened to me in Serpent’s Reach. Then I went back and created Pol Hald—who is no fool, but whose motives are not compatible with the rest of his family.
I think there *is* such a thing as writer’s block. There’s a point where you are so stressed that the thing that is adding pressure is almost physically painful – you know you should do it but you *can’t*. I’ve had that with coding when a freelance assignment went spectacularly wrong – I could still do some of it, but it took a lot of willpower and occasionally crying and gnashing teeth *to* do it, and I’d rather have scrubbed toilets than sit down at the computer to code.
I’m oer that, but it took several years of not touching that kind of work to rediscover how much I love Filemaker.
Most writers experience stuckness, which is to Writer’s block like a fresh horse is to a bolter. Just because the majority of horses are getting away from their riders’ aids and would have been stopped easily by a more experienced person doesn’t mean you don’t occasionally get one that panics and is running without any ability to react to the world around them.
There is a nasty spot where the inability to get words on paper becomes painful, absolutely, and its own source of unbearable stress. That’s a really good time to go write a short ‘guilty pleasure’ just to get the fingers working and do it until you can relax, take a deep breath, and discover you can handle the reins of a real project again.
One of the many things I like about your books is that you don’t give your characters stupid attacks to progress the story/plot.
This.
(And some folks wonder why I hate most comedies. Including theirs.)
From earlier in the thread, DAW now has an agreement to do all the Foreigner ebooks, and in exchange, you, CJC, get rights to several of your other books as ebooks? That’s a winner, a lot of Foreigner books, but equally a lot of non-Foreigner books to do with as you see fit.
As a reader and fan, I’m greedy and I admit it. I would love to see new original books, as well as books in prior story-universes, including Foreigner…and, and, and….
Hah, as long as you also are happy and profit from it, because if not, the books would suffer, and none of us fans want a favorite author and her family to suffer just to put out more arts and lit.
(I feel like I’m doing abject bowing, there, but hey, bowing away!)
I’m curious. What’s the advance for one of your novels?
Lol—alas, that’s something I can’t say without screwing up future negotiations with my publisher: the houses keep the actual info pretty close unless they’re inflating a figure for publicity purposes [and then the Reserve clauses take it all back, if you know how to read them.) Say that if I could write 3 books a year, I’d be great, but unfortunately, I’ve slowed down a bit lately. Hoping to recover my pace.
C. J. When you mentioned the characters talking to you, that made me thing of Robert E. Howard, who said that when he was writing his Conan the Barbarian stories, it was as if Conan was standing behind him telling him what to write.
This ties in with a discussion I’ve just been having with a friend on http://pcwrede.com/blog/narrative-summary/ . Both your and her descriptions are resonating in my backbrain – I can’t quite put words to this yet, but seeing story as a web – quite possibly one of those complex Celtic knot pattern – rings true for me. What happens next isn’t a useful question for me (my book has bogged down *again*) – I know what happens, there’s only one thing that _can_ happen. What’s important is how the character is tested, and how she reacts, and it needs to fit in with the smilar scene in the last book and other obstacles/other people’s solutions. This means I can’t just ‘make it up’ – I need to find what’s right for the story, and quite possibly will need to adjust it once I’ve finished the book and know more about the story as a whole.
Thank you for sharing this!
One of the ways my mother used to make money was to back drug patents. She and nine others would put up the money to fund a patent application in return for 5% each. It usually didn’t pay off, but when it did, she’d make a very large amount of money. It helped that she was a chemist by training and had excellent financial judgement. Granddad used to do the same thing. Backing Xerox meant that he came out of the Great Depression in very good shape.
The reason I ask is now that you’re self-publishing, you could recruit backers. I suppose that sounds like “The Producers”, but it’s a thought.
Interesting notion. Lord, I’d feel so much pressure! It’s hard enough to know I’m late for my publisher; if I were late for several hundred people, I think I’d come apart at the seams. Not that I’m not (late) but it’s the guilt factor~! 😉
Haven’t commented in quite a while, but this post really resonated.
To my mind the idea that books are about relationships between characters and how they interact with each other is a closer match to how things are in the “real world”.
It is the how and the whys we interact with each other that occupies most of our attention. The places where things happen or the events that give rise to the interactions are often just the backdrop for interaction. Good books that hold my attention and send me back wanting more are about “real people” even if in the case of yours those “people” are often quite literally alien.
Incidentally, just finished “Betrayer” and enjoyed it very much. Two things about that latest published book jumped out at me, even before I read this post.
1. The way the interactions between the characters continued to evolve and change.
2. A major “inanimate” character — that #$@# vest that Bren wore – a continuing character from the previous book!
I have lost track – at what point are you with the Foreigner books? Hoping that there are more already in the pipeline.