Eric James Stone is a successful short story writer. You can read my review of his excellent “Like Diamond Tears From Emerald Eyes” here. Now, in Tips on Keeping Short Stories from Becoming Long Stories he shares excellent insights on how to keep those short stories from growing out of control. As someone whose stories always tend to go long, let me say that I know from experience that these tips work.
I posted earlier about the sales number for best-selling authors. What about the average author?
Here’s Patrick Nielsen Hayden, an editor at Tor Books, in an interview on io9.com about the future effects of e-text on publishing:
io9: Does it make a difference to you if an author has an online reputation? Does that go into your decisions to acquire books?
PNH: Obviously it makes a difference if an author has a public online profile of some sort, even just down to the level of having a moderately popular blog. Most books sell 5, 10, or 15 thousand copies. Most are midlist books. With those people, even a modest online presence can make a difference in sales.
The whole interview is interesting. In fact, he says something that I think is important to note about what today’s novelists and, to a lesser degree, short story writers are actually providing:
One thing I’m sure of is that we’re [Tor Books] going to be in linear immersive narratives that produce the reading trance. We won’t be moving towards a “choose your own adventure” thing. People will do those things, but those are different art forms. There’s something about immersive text that you can read in order – it’s persisted through many technological changes. This fiction stuff works pretty well. It’s been around a long time
I think he’s right. The EXPERIENCE you get in the reader’s trance, similar to the one you get in a movie, is a strong experience. The media used to convey that experience doesn’t really matter as long as it makes it easy to get into the trance.
Check out the whole interview.
If we root against villains based on moral judgments, then how is it possible to root for heroes who are not just bad boys but down right criminal, e.g. hitmen, mobsters, thieves?
It’s a wonderful question that has a simple and revealing explanation. We root for these bad guys because they’re really good.
What?!
When talking about bad heroes, what we often do is:
1. Take them out of their context.
2. Focus on one or two negative traits, not the person as a whole.
3. Abstract them and miss what’s happening in real time as we process the story. We only have so much working memory and usually can only think about what’s being presented versus what we think about when we’re out of the story. What’s being presented in the story is mostly the threats to these heroes, not the consequences of their evil deeds. And if the consequences are show, it’s always modified by context (#1 and #2 above).
4. Confuse fascination with rooting.
When we actually look at what’s happening with the hero in the context of the story, what we find is that rooting is still based on moral judgments of who is good/right and who is not. We root for people we think are in the right (given their context) or are getting, undeservedly, the short end of the stick; we root against people who we think are in the wrong.
Here are some examples.
Thief. This one’s easy, I grant it. But it’s illustrative. I never once didn’t root for the boy. But I also never saw him as a true bad boy. He was nice. He shared the bread he stole with kids less fortunate. The guards were mean brutes. Jaffar was wicked and threatened the sultan and Jasmine who were good and innocent. was in a situation that provided some leeway for his behavior (alone, penniless).
1. Context. He’s fighting a much greater evil, someone we are rooting against.
2. Whole Person. He is a thief, but he’s also kind. Given his whole person, he falls on the side of good.
3. Processing. As we process the story we’re never shown awful consequnces of his theiving. Mostly just the good and courageous things he does. And the threats to his welfare.
Thieves.
1. Context. The movie starts with a heist and then a betrayal and murders by a traitor. Yes they’re theives, but we wittness a greater evil. The people they fight against are worse than they are.
2. Whole person. Except for the thieving, he’s a likeable guy.
3. Processing. We see few negative consequences of their actions to others, but we are constantly being presented with threats to them by guys who are committing greater crimes.
4. Fascination. I was incredibly interested in the scam–the plans, tech, everything.
Mob Hit Man
1. Context. He’s protecting a girl from other hit men. He’s fighting a bigger evil. He’s also taken advantage of by his boss.
2. Whole Person. He’s a hitman, but more time is spent on his kindness.
3. Processing. We see very little of the effect his hits have on others. Instead we are presented with threats to the girl and him.
Murdering vigilante
1. Context. He’s stopping guys who are doing terrible things.
3. Processing. We don’t focus on negative consequences of his vigilantism, but the threats from these really bad guys.
Scammers of the elderly
From IMDB “Roy’s private life, however, is not so successful. An obsessive-compulsive agoraphobe with no personal relationships to call his own, Roy is barely hanging on to his wits, and when his idiosyncrasies begin to threaten his criminal productivity he’s forced to seek the help of a psychoanalyst just to keep him in working order. While Roy is looking for a quick fix, his therapy begets more than he bargained for: the revelation that he has a teenage daughter–a child whose existence he suspected but never dared confirm. What’s more troubling, 14-year-old Angela wants to meet the father she never knew. At first, Angela’s appearance disrupts her neurotic father’s carefully ordered routine. Soon, however, with his own unique spin on parenthood, Roy begins to enjoy a relationship he never dreamed of having with his daughter.”
1. Context. Much of the time is spent his on his loneliness and issues with his estranged daughter.
2. Whole person. He steals, but we never see huge suffering from it. We see all the other issues he deals and have sympathy for him.
3. Processing. We’re focused on the threats to him, not the consequences of his one negative trait.
4. Fascination. I was fascinated by the scam and this pulled me along through the first.
What happened in all these stories as I experienced them was that the story carefully managed my view of the hero. He was always on the better side of the antagonists. He was always more good than bad, even if only by a little. And the story focused my attention most of the time on the bad/threats/consequences flowing from the antagonists, not the bad from the hero’s deeds.
What this shows is that you could write a story about a villain and make him the hero. In some instances it might be exceedingly difficult. For example, I think Hitler would be a hard sell as a hero, someone we’d root for. But the Neo-Nazis prove it’s not too hard a sell for some people.
I don’t think recognizing the fact that we can make “bad” people sympathetic means authors are “simply being clever” or “pushing buttons.” After all, to write well you must believe and care about what you’re writing about. YOU have to believe it. Nor do I think it undercuts the notion that we root for people based on a moral stance. It just recognizes the fact that moral judgments, in fact, the vast majority of appraisals of situations, happen quickly with the facts at hand, which are the ones in our working memories. The ones the authors are controlling.
Luc Reid is the author of, among other things, Talk the Talk: The Slang of 65 American Subcultures. He is also the lizard king of Codex, which he started and of which I’m so happy to be a member. He’s always starting provocative threads on Codex, making us all think and reexamine the principles of story and the whole writing business. He recently posted some insights about what makes memorable stories. A lot of other fellow Codexians joined in the discussion. Happily, he asked me to share some of my thoughts on his site, ReidWrite. They begin as follows:
YOU’RE MINE, DEAR READER
Mwuhahaha.
Okay, maybe not. But you are wired to be mine. And you wouldn’t have it any other way.
Let’s back up. Luc wrote about writing memorable. I agree with the idea that the stories that produce a strong emotional reaction are the most memorable. In fact, I believe that triggering of emotion is THE reason why linear narrative that puts us into the trance has lasted so long in so many forms and makes so much money.
But can writers guide reader emotions? Or is it all just by accident?
Read the rest here: http://reidwrite.livejournal.com/8331.html.
BTW, when you’ve finished that, you might want to check out Luc’s new site, WillpowerEngine.com. It’s a place where he shares what he’s found in his research for his current book project, The Willpower Engine, on how self-motivation works. I think you’ll find a number of the posts there very interesting.
Almost everyone reading this knows what they like in a car. We know what we want a car to do. We can talk about acceleration, voom-voom styling, and handling. Some of us could talk about how engines and transmissions and tires all work together to create those things. We could get really technical.
But how many of us could then go manufacture a tire? Or the paint we’re going to put on the car? How about a windshield?
No?
Well, what about one little bolt? Just a little bolt. Can you do it?
There’s a difference between knowing what a thing is supposed to do, how it works, and actually building it. A lot of people can talk about the first two topics and have no idea at all about the third.
It’s the same with stories.
There are three things we have to learn to write killer stories.
We authors talk a lot about the second thing. You have books and blogs galore on dialogue, plot, characters, structure, grammar, world-building, setting—you name it. Heck, the big series I wrote last year about the key conditions for reader suspense was all about how story works.
Some of us talk about the first thing. And really there’s no point in blathering on about the how-to’s if we don’t know the what-for’s, which is why I tried to highlight one of the core what-for’s in my series on suspense.
But as important as those two things are, none of it matters if we don’t know how to put it to use. We’re not reviewers or editors. We’re creators. We’re writers—the ones that invent the story in the first place. And let me tell you, knowing how a story works and how to invent one are two very different things.
I didn’t know the principles of invention when I was first starting out. And that gap in my knowledge was one of the things that held me back for years. In fact, I almost gave up my dream of writing stories because of it.
Very early in my attempts to start a career I wrote a story that won an award and $2,000. I was flown out to Cocoa Beach, Florida for a week-long workshop with amazing pros. Was published. And then I went home, finished another story (yea!), and proceeded not be able to finish another thing for five years.
Five years.
FIVE. YEARS!
And I tried.
After five years of failure you begin to wonder if maybe you didn’t get the wrong memo (what am I doing at this empty warehouse?). Your family begins to wonder that as well. You realize life is short and there are a lot of other things you could be spending your time on. You begin to think that only an idiot would spend more time on this. And you’d probably be right.
Unless, of course, you realize that what’s keeping you back isn’t a manifestation of cosmic will. Rather, it’s just a lack of understanding.
That’s what happened in my case. Just a few days before I gave up on all my dreams, the light was turned on for me. I learned some key, but simple, principles of invention that I hadn’t known. You can read the whole story here. After I learned these principles, my production took off like a rocket.
And so what I want to do in this series is share those principles with you. Hopefully, this will unleash your abilities. You might find a huge audience for your stories. You might find only the family dog will stick around to listen to them. The popularity of your stories is a separate matter. But you can’t even find out how big your audience will be if you don’t know how to finish.
So let’s start. A lot of people think that creativity is about passion. When they think of creativity, they think of someone like this.
Look at him. Brushed velvet jacket. Beard. Rakish devil-may-care hair. And that gaze. Look at that gaze! It’s full of passion. It’s coming off him in waves. In fact, we all know his inner world is a vast tempestuous sea of passion that sends ideas crashing in great surges onto the rocky beaches of his soul. And those earthly forces cannot be contained. No, he must write them, write them, write them. That’s the face of a man who will channel fire onto the written page because if he didn’t, he would surely burn.
Or maybe not.
Maybe creativity is about being like this guy.
Hello, Malcolm Gladwell. Look at him. There are so many ideas in that great blaze of brains they trip over themselves trying to get out. There are so many they kinked his hair with their electric heat. Oh, fecund mind!
Or maybe not.
Maybe creativity is all a function of being blessed.
Or maybe it’s about alcohol (or some other chemical). After all, isn’t that how Ernest Hemmingway did it?
Or it’s about being mentally unstable.
Or it’s about having the right personality type. I remember the day of woe when I learned that I was an ENFJ but that the “natural” writers were all ISFPs!
Or it’s about being eccentric.
Or it’s none of that. It’s about being born to it.
Right? All of those things are what creativity is about. And if, as so clearly demonstrated by those pictures, you don’t have passionate hair, well then, forget about it. Except here’s Larry Correia, a New York Times bestseller, who has no passionate hair whatsoever.
Huh?!
How could that be?
Here’s how. All those ideas above about creativity–they’re rubbish. Creativity has nothing to do with passion or hair or whether you wear Argyle socks.
Nothing.
Let me show you the face of creativity.
That is Warren Ellis. Warren is my brother-in-law, except when he’s not (do not ask me to explain this). One day our fridge started to drip. The freezer would cycle through its normal thawing, and all the water would drip down into the fridge and soak up our egg cartons and pool in the vegetable crispers. It was a mess.
We defrosted the freezer we weren’t supposed to ever have to defrost, but the problem persisted. So we called Warren because he fixes things.
Warren came to our house, looked the fridge over. He declared that the freezer’s drain tube was plugged. We thought up a few ideas for cleaning it out, none of which were any good, then Warren asked if we had an air compressor. We did and hauled it in.
Warren plugged it in, let it build up the pressure, and then held the compressor nozzle to the bottom end of the tube. The compressed air went in. The obstruction flew up and out and landed on the counter. The obstruction was a fat fly that had crawled in there, gotten stuck, and died.
We poured a quart of water into that freezer, and it all flowed down into the catch pan at the bottom. Warren fixed our freezer with an air compressor.
Folks, that is creativity.
What did Warren have? He didn’t have passionate hair; I can tell you that. No. He had an objective. He knew basically how fridges worked. And he came up with a couple of options to fix the issue.
Let’s look at another example. Here’s Ed Smylie.
Ed was like Warren. He ran into some problems. Actually, the astronauts in Apollo 13 ran into some problems. Ed was tasked to help solve them. One of those problems was the fact that the astronauts were running out of air.
Ed and the others designed the solution in two days. The ground crew relayed the instructions to the flight crew. The lunar module’s CO2 scrubbers started working again, saving the lives of the three astronauts on board. Of the experience, Ed said that he knew the problem was solvable when it was confirmed that duct tape was on the spacecraft. “I felt like we were home free”, he said. “One thing a Southern boy will never say is: I don’t think duct tape will fix it.”
Ed and his crew saved the day. The made a round peg fit into a square hole. How did he come up with such a creative solution?
Ed had an objective. He knew how the CO2 scrubbers and the shuttle worked. He knew about duct tape. He came up with options.
Let’s look at a few more examples of this. I know you’ve seen some of these.
That is creativity. So is this.
And this . . .
And this . . .
Or this, if you don’t need to go so fast . . .
And this . . .
And this, which is officially called a Bumper Dumper . . .
These fine folks had a goal. They knew the basics of how things worked. They came up with some solutions.
That’s all there is to creativity. Three things. You need to have an idea of what you’re trying to do. You need to have a basic knowledge of how things work. And you have to know how to come up with some solutions to meet your objective.
Not so mystical, is it?
But I can hear some of you complaining. Writing is different. It’s a whole other world. It’s Fiction, which is so significant we must capitalize it. It’s passion. It IS mystical. This is a matter of the heart. It’s not a fridge or space ship or some dumb hotdog roast. You cannot compare these things.
Except I can because they’re the same. It doesn’t matter if you’re trying to invent a different recipe like the folks at Cook’s Illustrated, or decorate your house, or come up with a way to keep the squirrels out of your bird feeders, or make people weep in a movie theater.
What I’ve found is that when we have troubles coming up with ideas, we probably don’t know what our objectives are. Or we probably lack some understanding of how fiction works. Or we don’t know the principles of generating options.
And so we conclude it’s a mystery. It’s arcane lore.
But it just ain’t so. Can you create a redneck toilet? Then you can write a story.
Now, it’s true that a lot of people feel their way through this. They don’t know what they’re doing, but they do it. I did that. Remember: I won an award. But then I couldn’t repeat it. Couldn’t find that groove I’d stumbled into.
I don’t want to stumble around hoping to get lucky. I want to make a living at this. And if I’m going to make a living, I need to produce. Regularly. I can’t be bumbling around, hoping to create something by accident.
The good news is that we don’t have to create by accident. We can create on purpose. There are principles to invention. When we learn them, our productivity will shoot through the roof.
Finding a solution to Apollo 13’s issues might seem impossible to us. But they weren’t impossible to Ed Smylie because Ed had an objective; he knew how things worked up there; and knew how to come up with options.
My intent is that when you finish this series, you’ll know what Ed Smylie knew, except for stories.
For more in this series, see How to Get and Develop Story Ideas
Had a delightful time delivering “Story Lessons from the Hunger Games” at the annual conference for the Utah chapter of RWA up in Park City. Especially enjoyed delivering a sweet dream telegram involving waxed chests 🙂 Here’s the PDF as promised: Story Lessons from the Hunger Games RWA 2011
Brandon Sanderson, Howard Tayler, and Dan Wells are doing a series of podcasts on writing called Writing Excuses.
The have two podcasts on magic:
http://www.writingexcuses.com/2008/05/12/writing-excuses-episode-14-magic-systems-and-their-rules/
I found these two interesting, and, as always, entertaining to listen to. However, while their focus on limitations and ramifications is excellent, I’ve found asking “what does the magic cost” to be counterproductive. Here’s why: “cost” leads people to think ONLY of magics where you trade x thing for y power. Blood, memories, vitality, years of life, your children, etc. The problem with this is that while magics that use fuel (cost something) can be great, it isn’t necessary to do it that way. There are many stories with wondrous magics that don’t cost a thing.
For example, Heroes shows a lot of magic without cost. What does it cost Hiro to time travel? Nothing. It’s free. What about the painter? He can do it at will. Same with the guy who goes invisible, the cheerleader who regenerates–all the other characters there. What about the magic in Elantris? It costs nothing to draw the runes. What was consumed? Nothing. What about Orson Card’s Hatrack world? Alvin can doodlebug until doomsday. There’s no fuel required.
Some may say it’s semantics, but it’s not. It affects the paths taken in the invention of the magic. I’ve seen it in my invention sessions and those of groups I’ve been in. Don’t trust me, do a group magic brainstorm session where you ask the cost of magic question and then another where you ask about limitations instead.
I’ve found that it’s MUCH more helpful to ask these questions but NOT necessarily in the order below.
Costs are simply ONE type of limitation. In magic, limitation and ramification are the key things. By opening up the question, we can use costs or MANY other types of limitations like genetics/bloodlines, intelligence, scope of power, duration of effect, sources, scarcity of ability, morals, geography, times when it’s effective, mysteries, etc.
Listen to the wonderful podcasts and then focus on powers, limitations, and ramifications, and use costs only if they are limitations that jazz you.
