The Problem:


How do you write the boring bits between the interesting bits?

In other words, how do you breathe the magic on to the page to keep your readers awake, even when you aren’t writing the really exciting action bits?

Personally, I find that writing the exciting parts of the story – the adventures, or the emotionally charged character confrontations – is the easy task. What is tough is to get the hero in the door to start with, or to get the army to the battlefield, or to get the heroine up and dressed in the morning, or get the travellers from place A to place B.

Take the travelling. In a mainstream novel set in Megacity, no problem. You can say “She caught the train.” It’s somewhat harder in a fantasy. She walked. Um, she walked six days. (Reader is immediately thinking: what did she eat, was it safe to walk, where did she sleep, etc, etc, and they expect answers.)

But what if the answers are unimportant and have no bearing on your overall story arc? How do you get her from point A to B? How do you get the hero in the door?

1. Sometimes the answer might be simple. You use a trick:

e.g. the end of a chapter

Your hero goes to bed in his room at the inn at the end of chapter 10. At the beginning of Chapter 11 you have him knocking on the door of the villain’s house for the great confrontation scene. Voilà, you have avoided all that tiresome business of getting up, getting dressed, having breakfast etc, all of which is irrelevant to the story arc.

e.g. the division of your book into parts.

At the end of Part One, you have your king declaring to his councillors that they are going to march to war on neighbouring kingdom. Part Two opens with the king’s army besieging the walled city of the neighbouring king. None of that tiresome business of how you raise an army, supply it, arm it, march across the border…

e.g. the section break (seen in the book as a blank line or sometimes an asterisk or equivalent.)

Seen in the typed text as –TEXT BREAK HERE–

You write a scene where Mary is trying to decide which of her numerous dresses she is going to put on for the ball. You insert a text break, and then continue on to show Mary as she sweeps into the ballroom clad in her older married sister’s bright red gown, to the horror of the conservative dames. And you, the writer, have avoided the details of how she pinched her sister’s dress out of her closet.

Mostly, though, the problem of tiresome, irrelevant but important details is more difficult to solve.

2. Use a sentence or two rather than a paragraph of explanation. Gloss over the unnecessary details by the way you structure your sentence(s).

Problem: Your travellers, led by Jokum, have just arrived in a town. They are very hungry and very dusty. The reason they are there is to hunt out the local mage for help, only to discover that he has been arrested for treason. It is unlikely they would visit the mage ravenous and dirty, but you don’t want to dwell on how they eat and wash up – it is unimportant. You want to get to the exciting bit. However, if you don’t say something, your readers won’t find your story believable. So keep it succinct – explain but don’t bury your reader in detail.

Solution:
e.g.
After a meal and a wash at the first inn inside the city walls, they asked the way to the street of Mages. Ten minutes later, Jokum was knocking at Hokus’s door.
or
After stopping at the town pump for directions and to wash away the worst of their travel dust, they bought a loaf of fresh bread. By the time they reached the house of Mage Hokus, there wasn’t even a crumb remaining.

You may be able to think of even better ways to reduce the information down to a snappy minimum.
I am recycling some old posts

3. Spice up the boring in-between-bits with interesting world-building or character info.

(Remember, if it tells you something important about the world or the character, or if it pushes the story forward, then your info becomes important and interesting.)

For example – the army preparations might be boring – or they might not, if they include arguments between the king and his advisers or sons or brothers, or if they include the oddities of your world. For example, how do you feed your fighting dragons? How do you get your mages to the battlefield if they can’t cross water without losing power? Can you use magic or dragons or something else fascinating to supply your army with food?

4. Use dialogue to give the info.

It’s a lot easier to make something interesting if it is delivered in speech.
Here’s some info in text form:
By the time they reached Emitiville, the horses were thin and losing condition, so Tom bought some oats.
Spiced up with dialogue:
“Tom, did get any oats for the horses? If they lose any more condition, I reckon I’ll have to put another hole in my saddle girth.”
“Yeah, don’t worry. I bought some cheap, from the ostler’s wife. Only a shilling and a kiss. Well, a bit more than a kiss.” He grinned.
“What? You seduced the ostler’s wife?”

5. Condense specific info into a general paragraph

Here’s a section of text from “The Last Stormlord.” It covers six days of walking by the protagonist down a tunnel that supplies water to a city from the hills. He has just entered the tunnel and lit a lamp.

Now he could see what he was doing, he used the walkway built along the side. When he was tired or hungry, he stopped. He slept fitfully at intervals, stretched out on the walkway in the smothering dark with the lamp extinguished. When he awoke it was always into panic at the utter blackness, and the panic remained until his fumbling with flint, striker and tinder produced enough of a flame to light the lamp or a candle.

The next paragraph deals with him arriving at his destination. So those four sentences are all there is to cover six days – and (I hope) conjure up a bit of how it felt. The above paragraph gives all the necessary information (except perhaps the problem of waste disposal!!) without being boring. The waste disposal? Yes, I do deal with that too – it is one of the first questions the indignant water reeves ask him when they catch him at the city end of the tunnel. (Want to know more? Buy the book!)

6. Getting the hero out of the room by diverting the attention of the reader to something else. 

You have to get our teenage protagonist from, let’s say, the kitchen (where he’s just had an unsettling conversation with this mother about his elder brother), to the letter depository a mile away, because he wants to send an important message (that the reader already knows about) on the next coach out of town.

One way to do it is to ignore the uninteresting method and deal with the interesting thoughts he has. Let’s call him Jaydon.

He slammed out of the kitchen in a temper and, on his way across town to the letter depository, dwelt lovingly on numerous impractical plans to wreak revenge on that sneaky, mean-spirited liar of a brother of his. That bastard! How could George have behaved like that and upset his mother so – so callously?

By the time Jaydon arrived at the depository, the scowl on his face made the man behind the counter take a step backwards.

I’ll guarantee your reader won’t notice that you didn’t bother to tell them HOW he got across town. Did he walk? Take a coach? Ride?
Who cares? It wasn’t important. What he was thinking, though, was. And it was much more interesting.

________________________

Remember: Don’t worry too much in your first draft about what is boring and what is not. Get your story down first. Then start attacking the details. In your rewrites, aim to have NO boring bits. The above were just suggestions of some ways to do this. Look for other ways writers deal with the same problem. Learn by reading!

And your general aim should be:

So what research am I doing anyway, you may ask? The book I am writing at the moment is Book 3 of The Forsaken Lands, and that is set in a world that equates with our 18th century Netherlands and England, yet here I am, haring off to look at Neolithic burial chambers, Welsh castles and Norman churches, dovecotes and Anglo-Saxon artifacts from Sutton Hoo. 


Well, that’s one of the glories of writing in secondary worlds (that is, worlds reminiscent of ours, but actually mostly made up.)

I can use ideas, adapt them to my world and make it something new and fresh. At the same time, it is important to make the world realistic. Seeing real places and real artefacts from our world therefore supplies both inspiration and reality; they are jumping off points for my fiction.

Here are a few more photos from the complex at St Cross:

 Above: a wooden sink lined with metal — tin alloy? surely not lead?? –attached to a pump… Imagine the kitchen drudge washing up the dishes here, day after day.

Above: A jug made of leather

 Below: The Brethren’s Hall where they dined

What did they use that balcony — overlooking the dining hall — for? And why are there six leather fire buckets hanging suspended from it? A writer immediately starts imagining, What if….?

…is a N.Z. writer I met in September at Worldcon. This month she has Book 2 coming out in her trilogy: ” Chronicles of the Tree.”

I just LOVE the setting of these books. At one stage in the far distance past, I did briefly consider  writing a book about everyone living in trees, and gave up on the idea because…well, because I’m not half as ingenious as Mary! She took the idea of just one tree, and made it into a believable, wondrous world, peopled with interesting characters with interesting problems. 

So this month she is celebrating strong women in books over at her website. Pop over there from time to time and click on “Journal” to see what Mary and another bunch of writers have to say about the subject. Nicole Murphy is the first.

Via SF writer Mike Brotherton, here’s an extract from an article by Zaid Jilani:

In his new book, Speechless, Tales of a White House Survivor former Bush speechwriter Matt Latimer reveals how politicized the revered Presidential Medal of Freedom became during the Bush administration.

Latimer writes that administration officials objected to giving author J.K. Rowling the Presidential Medal of Freedom because her writing “encouraged witchcraft”.

There really is no end to the stupidity of folk who can’t see the difference between fiction and reality, is there? And no end apparently to idiots thinking that imagination is an evil that must be curbed.

Today I was wandering around the garden with a piece of glass from a photo frame trying to catch sunlight and redirect it. Trouble is, in the tropics, the darn sun disappears behind clouds for days at a time. Sheesh. Still, it was possible.

In the meantime, my reputation as the crazy lady on the block is spreading…

On the comments of the last post Shaanti posted this:

Trudi Canavan and Richard Morgan discussed the need to obey the laws of physics on Radio National recently. Trudi also made a reference to Glenda in that show. The link is here.

Thanks Shaanti. Trudi and Richard are guests at Swancon next weekend. Wish I was there!

In the meantime I am still trying to meet the extended deadline for Book 2 (Stormlord Rising), which is the end of this month, and I have just received the proofs of Book 1 (The Last Stormlord) to look at as well.

Over at the Locus Blog, from Gary K. Wolfe, are some interesting figures.

In 1954, when I was nine years old, there were approximately 74 science fiction titles published. Locus reports 1,669 titles (including fantasy, horror, etc.) for 2008 – there were 254 SF novels and 436 fantasy novels alone (690 books). The rest would presumably be horror, anthologies, novellas, collections, things that don’t really fit into either category.

Gary says lots of other interesting stuff, so take a look. I just want to think about those figures…he doesn’t say if they are all totally new titles, rather than some reissued from some past time as well, but let’s assume they are.
I am also assuming that he is looking at all English-speaking countries – USA, Australia, UK, NZ, Canada, South Africa, etc etc.
(I am also assuming that they are all “first time in the English language” so there will stacks of other SF/F books written in other languages as well, which we will disregard.)

Hmm.

• 436 fantasy to 254 science fiction. That’s a ratio of 17:10, not quite 2 fantasies for every SF. It means that fantasy writers have a better chance last year of being published than SF writers…
• It means that if you had a particular SF/F book out in 2008 published for the first time* that book was 1 in 690. Not a bad ratio.
• Some authors would have had more than one book out for the first time in 2008, so it means you would be one author in considerably less than 690 authors getting a particular book newly published in SF/F in 2008.
• If you were a brand new fantasy author getting published for the first time, then you were one in considerably less than 436 authors world wide who finally made it. Congratulations. I mean it. (I have no idea how many brand new fantasy authors there were first published last year but I suspect quite a few less than 50. And even more impressively low if you write SF). Think about those figures for a moment. The odds against you succeeding are staggering…and you did it. Wow.
• And here’s another figure that is bandied about from time to time – the ratio of MSS handed in to a publisher versus actually published is said to be somewhere about 5000 to 1. (Sorry, can’t remember where I got that figure from now.)
• If you haven’t made it yet, just make sure you enjoy the journey. It may not be worth it otherwise. If you do enjoy the journey, then of course it’s worth it! We don’t all play tennis because we want to get to Wimbleton, or golf because we have our eye on the Masters…do it because you love writing. That way you have fun no matter what happens.

*(I didn’t have any out in 2008 for the first time – books that came out in UK for the first time had been published in Australia the year before…)

One of my dearest friends I have ever had is an in-law. When I was one month old, born into a world at war, she was born in another country occupied by enemy armies.

Who would ever have foretold that future friendship…

She rang me this morning, telling a tale of woe about how she had gone to get her passport and bankbooks from the place she always hides them, only to find none of them was there – and she has no memory whatsoever of moving them. Nor can she find them now. And her house has not been broken into.

I sympathise. Age does that sort of thing to you.

So after this morning’s phone call, I go into the kitchen to put on some soup. I made the stock yesterday out of some beef scrag ends (yes, there are still housewives who don’t buy their stock in cans or cubes) , but shoved it in the frig afterwards without straining it or anything because I was on my way out to a birthday party of an even older friend.

I go to the frig , get out the stock and strain it over the sink, throwing away the stock and preserving the useless bits and pieces.

Definitely an aargh moment.

And this from someone who thinks she can write a 3-book trilogy containing over half a million words spanning 10 years in the life of four complex interlocked lands with different cultures, a story of war, love, magic, hope, courage and battle in the lives of four main protagonists struggling against the machinations of a group of amoral villains with a totally greed-oriented agenda.

Talk about hubris. I can’t even strain the soup stock properly.

‘
Something written by a talented young Malaysian author, Preeta Samarasan, resonates with me.
She said:
“Schoolchildren studying literature in the colonies had to navigate Cockney speech patterns, imagine for themselves what toad-in-the-hole might taste like, picture moors and bogs and fens and determine the emotional significance of each of these landscapes. Now we get to tell our own stories, and this requires your dealing with my rubber estates and char kuay teow and cursing in Tamil. In the long run, this will be good for all of us. A little cultural immersion never did anyone any harm.” {See here for the full article and reference.}

Good on her. And she’s absolutely right.
As a kid growing up on an Australian farm, there was no end to the things I read that I had to imagine, as they were never explained by the author. Why, after all, would a UK writer think she had to explain the tube, or hares, or galoshes or ices or kippers or gorse or fells or (English) muffins? Why would an American writer bother to expand on what the deck of a house was, or the trunk of a car, or clapboard, or (American) muffins, or what pumpkins had to do with Halloween – and what the heck was Halloween anyway? All these words were as foreign to me as, say, gesundheit, roti canai, bwana, merde or halal.

And I went on reading and learning and understanding with very little help from a dictionary in those pre-internet, pre-TV days.

Preeta doesn’t believe in putting Malaysian words in italics because they will be foreign to non-Malaysian readers. And why should she? Those British writers didn’t italicise “fens” because I didn’t understand what a fen was.

As a writer of fantasy words which have their own vocabulary, I prefer not to use italics for words which are not foreign in the society I am writing about. It’s silly. And I try not to use words unless the context makes it clear – or will do in time – what they mean, because I also prefer not to have to have an appendix of foreign words.

Over on Jenny Fallon’s blog the other day, she had a link to this article on villains at io9, a bit tongue in the cheek, which postulates that one of the reasons movies like The Dark Knight have done so well over the summer season (in the northern hemisphere) is because they have decently wicked villains.

The writer, Charlie Jane Anders, then gives a comprehensive list, with comments, of how good villains are ruined by script writers:
1) They get redeemed.
2) Too much information.
3) They become analogs of real-life nasties.
4) We see too much of their world.
5) Too many defeats …
6) …or victories
7) The villain that’s a reflection of the hero.

I can’t really comment because I am not much of a movie goer. What I really liked about the article were two comments towards the end:

• Good villains make great stories. A truly chilling villain makes the hero seem more important because the stakes are important, and the hero’s actions matter.
• A good villain has some kind of political message, but it’s subtler and woven into the storyline’s subtext.

I actually don’t feel that it is possible to extrapolate much of what Anders says into a comment on the written medium. Book villains, I feel, are much better fleshed out. In a film it’s OK to be thoroughly villainous; in a book the reader often wants more – why is the villain like that? Where is he coming from? How does she see herself? Readers want more subtlety than film goers. Am I right?

I do agree that too obvious an allegorical portrayal of a real life villain can be a real turn off, as can a miraculous redemption. If you don’t agree with me on this last point, try watching Hindi movies. Omigod. The utter rotter who has done despicable things to hero and heroine throughout a cinematographic marathon, suddenly turns good at the end? Or says, oops, sorry? Yuk. Or rather yuk unless done by a truly great writer.

I just looked back through my reading list for the year (on the bottom left sidebar of the this blog), and one villain stood out as the bloodiest I have read in a long time: Karen Miller’s Hekat from her Godspeaker trilogy. Not for the faint-hearted, the first book details the origins of Hekat’s villainy very well indeed. In fact, Hekat’s descent from sympathetic to hateful is brilliantly done.

More subtle by far, and perhaps even more chilling as a result, are the trio of villains of Marcus Herniman’s Arrandin Trilogy: Emperor Rhydden, his sycophantic and conscienceless henchman and the Archmage. In a way I wish they’d had more scene time and a bit more background detail.

So how do you like your book villains? Who are your great villains of fantasy and why?