Category Archives: writing

Planner or Pantser?

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pantser, writing, author

(photo: upload.wikimedia.org)

This will make sense to the dwindling number of people who remember taking photographs with a Polaroid camera, when, as Anne Lamott says, “the film emerges from the camera with a grayish green murkiness that gradually becomes clearer and clearer.” She compares writing early drafts to watching a Polaroid develop, an inchoate beginning—often a vague mess, in fact—and an almost imperceptible sharpening, a coming into focus, with the people, the setting, everything as the writer sees it.

The question I’m most often asked about my writing is, do I plan the whole book out or do I let it develop as I go along? In writing circles, this distinction is between a “planner” and a “pantser”—a slightly snide reference to people who write “by the seat of their pants.” Most writers use one approach or the other. I use both, depending.

In the opening chapters of the mystery novel I’m finishing now (Sins of Omission), I throw in a lot of unexpected information—scars on a corpse’s wrists suggesting a serious suicide attempt, a snatch of overheard conversation—thinking it may be useful down the road. I also established the chief emotional conflicts for the main character (pride versus shame; bravery versus cowardice; and success versus fear of failing). I wrote about 20,000 words. I had a soup of messy situations, clues and maybe-clues, and a couple of dead bodies. I was at a stopping place, where the characters and plot needed to be reined in so that my eye was on the prize—the solution to the mystery—some 60,000 words ahead. And it would take that many words to get there and plausibly explain everything, consistent with the characters’ personalities and the difficult situations I’ve put them in.

At that 20,000 word mark, when I wasn’t quite sure where to go next, pantsing along, I took a big sheet of paper, wrote down each character’s name, scattered about, and listed every question I could think of relevant to that person. Mind, at that point, I could not answer these questions. But connections started to appear. Arrows. The next place the plot needed to develop was suddenly obvious. For a while, I unfolded that big sheet every morning and organized the plot around the actions needed to address the key questions. Not in 1, 2, 3 order, but in the order enabled by each new event or piece of information.  Some could be answered with a single toxicology report from the police lab, some required several chapters of set-up and resolution. Ultimately, I had 36 of these questions. Here are a few:

  1. Who was Hawk’s father?
  2. Where did Hawk get the drugs?
  3. Why did he confess to murder?
  4. What is Charleston hiding?
  5. What was Charleston’s relationship with Julia?
  6. Who killed Julia?

Even this sample reveals the extent of what I did not know as I was writing! Julia dies in Chapter 1, but we aren’t positive who killed her until Chapter 47 (of 52). Every 10,000 words or so, I reviewed the list. Is this question answered satisfactorily for the reader? If not, am I on a path to answering it? Is the Polaroid coming into focus?

Lately, I’ve started describing this process as “solving the mystery along with the reader.” That’s what it feels like and why I can get up every morning at 5 a.m. to write.

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Writing with Friends

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Room at the Table, Writing, WritersFor some time I’ve felt the many rewards of having a close group of friends in our writing group, which after almost a decade we’ve finally given a name: Room at the Table. The irony is, there isn’t any more room at my dining table, where we meet, because we’ve gradually grown to about 13, though only 10 or 11 of us make each monthly meeting. The group is about equally divided between men and women, all of us “over 35,” many of us also participants in Lauren B. Davis’s estimable “Sharpening the Quill” writing workshops.

Some members say they come for the snacks, but they all come with carefully reviewed submissions by others, and we spend the next two hours discussing each others’ work. We provide enthusiasm, help people get unstuck, ask the occasional big question (Where Is This Going?) and generously share our ideas and grammatical obsessions. Occasionally, we do an exercise from John Gardner’s The Art of Fiction, and one such, which involved imagining the characters of a ghost story, created such enthusiasm among the three of us (at the time) that we all wrote the story, and were all published.

I’ve heard of critique groups that like to eviscerate the author. That isn’t us. This week we tried something new. Five of us did a reading of our fiction at the local library and, unbelievably, 35 people came. They applauded the stories they heard, which were quite good. They had snacks, another area of expertise. They stayed to chat. Big success. Very proud.

Comma Sense

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red pencil, grammar, comma“Perhaps the most hotly contested punctuation mark of all time”—the Oxford comma is back in the news. Well, sort of. See this 3-minute TED-Ed lesson animation, and see what you think. Plus a quiz to test your comma-sense and the chance to participate in discussions of this burning controversy, including one entitled “Why do you think so many people care so much about grammar?” Hadn’t notice that, really, in everyday life. Maybe it’s generational. Like the MDs who want first-year residents to suffer through 40-hour shifts in the emergency department, because, “goddammit, I did it and survived,” though possibly their patients didn’t. Those of us who absorbed all the rules hammered into our brains in junior high, goddammit, feel the same way about our hard-won expertise: “Can you believe he split an infinitive?” (that’s ok now, BTW). But not, as I read the other day: “He sent the email to him and I.” Ouch.

I use the serial comma, myself, because most of the time it avoids confusion. But I confess that using commas in all the technically correct places can make you want to brush at the page as if there were crumbs on it. At the moment I’m reading a Cormac McCarthy novel that is heavily “and”-dependent and nary a comma on the dust-clogged horizon. Makes for an interesting tone.

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What Lies Beneath

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Last week I wrote about the interview with Charles Baxter and his thoughts on story endings. I recognized his name at once as the author of a wonderful book—and if you are a writer of any kind whatsoever, you should phone your local independent book store immediately and order it—The Art of Subtext: Beyond Plot. It’s part of the Graywolf Press “The Art of . . .” series, which Baxter edits.

Baxter calls subtext “the realm of what haunts the imagination: the implied, the half-visible, and the unspoken.” It takes a great deal of “surface bric-a-brac,” Baxter says, to indicate what is not being explicitly shown. Perhaps it’s counterintuitive, but hyperdetailing provides the revelation, not the invocation of great abstractions. He describes how this can be accomplished—infinitely easier to read about than to achieve, I assure you—in the book’s six essays. Readers, too, will find a lot to think about. In my case, in the “what all have I been missing?!” category.

The first essay is about staging—where people are “in the set.” Like actors on stage, a lot is revealed by who is sitting close to whom, who is listening, who reaches out a protective hand, who looks away. Body language. When characters speak, we may learn as much from how a line is delivered as from the words themselves. Literary fiction pays attention to all this and provides the reader a rich human experience; what I think of as “airport novels” don’t bother, and people who write four novels a year can’t.

Another essay talks about the unheard. People in real life often simply do not hear information that is threatening or stress-inducing. Or they don’t pay attention to others’ conversation because they are listening to their own interior dialog. Such non- or semi-listening may cause a character’s response to seem off point. It never is. It’s just a different point. And sometimes a character may want to steer the conversation elsewhere. And for a reason.

I have a post-it on my computer that reads “No Tennis Matches!” Writing dialog isn’t just about lobbing the conversational ball back and forth. Realistic conversation has digressions, slips of the tongue, interruptions, unexpected associations.

Here’s a conversation from Witness,* in which the two speakers—Matchmaker Marisa and Reluctant Genie—deliberately pursue separate agendas. Like two sides playing tug-of-war, each becomes increasingly insistent on controlling the contest. Genie’s final comment suggests she was listening all along. (Wally is her editor.)

“Leo should be here any minute.” Marisa gave Genie a sideways glance, accompanied by a sly smile.

“Tell me about this restaurant Riccardo is taking you to.”

“It’s a shame the two of you cannot join us.” Marisa came and sat on the low white-leather sofa across from her friend.

“It opened recently, he said. Read any reviews?”

“Leo is a very special man.” Marisa studied her manicure. “Riccardo says he’s been lonely.”

“If you like the place, take notes, and I’ll add it to my article.” Genie’s laugh was pitched a few notes higher than usual. The door buzzer sounded. “And here he is, with news of the world.”

Other essays in this engaging collection describe how to bring subtext to the surface, moving into the metaphorical, using facial expressions to show what’s going on inside, and “creating a scene,” in which he says, “In fiction we want to have characters create scenes that in real life we would typically avoid.” Every time I read Baxter’s book (at least three times now) I see new ways his insights could deepen my own writing and reading experience. Highly recommended!

*Witness is my unpublished suspense novel out looking for an agent.

Where Words Come From

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Where do words come from? The dictionary’s entries arrive in their alphabetical slots through a lengthy process of vetting. Rules of acceptance require that they be fairly well accepted, at least in some significant population subset (rocket scientists or software engineers, for example), that they don’t squat precisely on the meaning territory of an existing word, that they be pronounceable, and so on. Which may explain what doomed Prince’s preferred name, above. Meanwhile, on the frontiers of language use—how you and I talk and write—whole arrays of new and often context-specific words crop up.

Since its inception, Wired has included a Jargon Watch feature for decoding the digiworld. Some of the entries are new words, and some are new uses of existing words. In this month’s issue is a new phrase laden with grim possibilities—“wi vi.” In case you aren’t yet familiar with wi vi, it’s wall-penetrating vision based on Wi-Fi signals, which “could be miniaturized into a handheld device for police and rescue workers.” Superman may be kvelling, but for the rest of us, where are those lead-lined bomb shelters when we need them?

In a disturbing story also in this month’s Wired, “Public Enemies: Social Media Is Fueling Gang Wars in Chicago,” Ben Austen describes how Chicago’s youth gangs are using social media to call each other out. Insults and threats flow, couched in a very specific street slang, and people die. These teens’ YouTube videos, tweets, and Facebook posts are full of violence-related words like “drilling” (shooting someone—hey, didn’t mobsters use that one? I hear a Jimmy Cagney echo); “cobra” (a .357 Magnum); and “30-poppa” (a handgun with a 30-round clip).

Only time will tell how many of these usages will become language fixtures, but it’s easy to think of words from the past with similar paternities and all now resident in dictionary.com: “hit,” “vig,” “bit,” “byte.” “Cyberspace” itself. Writers use new words with trepidation—will they be understood twenty, ten, two years hence?

According to Orin Hargraves in his October Visual Thesaurus column, that process of lexicon expansion is difficult to document: “Even today in the Internet age, tracing the origins of linguistic innovation is a sleuth’s game.” Parallels with evolutionary biology abound. Just as our genes enable the transmission of biological information, and mutations produce life forms with new and unexpected features, words transmit cultural information, and their changes enable understanding of new cultural phenomena. If they don’t fit well into the vernacular environment, they die.

You can play games having to do with word development at Wordovators, a project involving scientists from Northwestern University and the University of Canterbury in New Zealand. The project is inspired by analogies between biodiversity and language diversity, and is attempting to figure out why new words become acceptable. Meanwhile, says Hargraves, “Those who think of a dictionary as an authoritative book are ever decreasing in number; more who will know it mainly as a helpful but not necessarily authoritative Internet-based service are born every minute.” This shift changes the dynamics of word-acceptance just as new crops of words continue to sprout.

The Long and the Short of It

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Iconic scene from “The Third Man,” based on Graham Greene’s novella.

When I used to hand out writing assignments to people, a question they always asked was “how long should it be?” I’m afraid my initial response wouldn’t be terribly helpful,  and I’d say something like, “If it’s War and Peace, keep going; if it’s boring, a page is too much.”  But then I’d end end with “Oh, about 15 pages, double-spaced. That’s all we have room for.”

In fiction, really, there are no similar space constraints; instead, “the dictates of the marketplace” set the limits. Literary magazines tell you what short story length they will accept. For novels, traditional publishers generally have a 90,000-100,000-word limit on what they will consider from an untried writer. Stephen King and Neal Stephenson and Thomas Pynchon can do as they please.

What I thought of as the final draft of my first novel came in at 135,000 words. I hadn’t given the total number a single thought. It was what it was. Fortunately, my good friend Sandra Beckwith (book publicist extraordinaire) caught me up short and directed me to several good websites (See The Swivet, or All Write – Fiction Advice) addressing the question of length. Before querying the first agent, I took electronic scalpel (also known as the delete key) in hand and cut characters, scenes, and dialog so that it now is a more svelte 99,000. Painful, but necessary, and I’m ever-grateful to Sandy for stopping me from embarrassing myself. In writing my second novel, I avoided some of the traps that led me into overwriting and finished the first draft at a slim-and-trim 70,000 words, which gives plenty of breathing room to enrich the story as needed during the revision stage.

For a while now, observers of the publishing scene have commented on the rising popularity of the novella—more than a short story in complexity and character development, less than a novel in plot twists and digressions. While novels today typically run 90-110,000 words, or about 300+ printed pages, acceptable lengths for novellas vary widely, anywhere from a long short story (10,000 words) to a short novel (70,000 words).

The popularity of these shorter forms is attributed to readers’ shrinking attention span; publishers’ reluctance to invest in producing an expensive book that isn’t a guaranteed best-seller; and reading habits, with Kindle, Nook, and even smartphones lending themselves to presenting shorter works.  “Readers aren’t as aware of page count in the electronic realm as they are in a paper book,” says author Jeff Noon in a recent Forbes story by Suw Charman-Anderson. Kindle Singles are an example, and their inventory includes short fiction by best-selling writers.

Novellas also are less demanding on the authors who write them.  A novel “is a huge emotional investment, and it can be risky to put all your creative eggs in one basket if things go wrong,” Charman-Anderson says, yet novellas let authors practice plotting and character development and develop their voice. And they provide the joy of actually finishing something. For self-publishers, they are a boon.

Let’s face it: some plots and some ideas just don’t lend themselves to longer formats. Cut the flab and you have a more compelling read. Some of the most focused and powerful English-language storytelling has been via the novella, and an illustration of their strength is how easily they have lent themselves to dramatization and our continued attention, starting with the grandmum of them all:

  • The Mousetrap – Agatha Christie – 1952. She didn’t want publication to take away from the popularity of the theatrical version, so stipulated the novella couldn’t be published in the U.K. as long as the play was running. Currently, The Mousetrap is booking at London’s  St. Martin’s Theatre (60th Anniversary trailer) until January 2015, “so the novella still hasn’t been published in the UK,” according to  Listverse’s fascinating review: “20 Brilliant Novellas You Should Read.”
  • The Third Man – Graham Greene – 1949 – written as preparation for the movie screenplay, a British film noir classic
  • Breakfast at Tiffany’s – Truman Capote – 1958, the movie becoming more famous than the book and giving us “Moon River”
  • Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde – Robert Louis Stevenson – 1886 – more than 120 film versions; about the recent musical, the less said the better
  • The Time Machine – H.G. Wells – 1895 – feature film and television versions; inspiration for innumerable stories on this theme
  • Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck – 1927 – which Listverse anthropocentrically titles Of Men and Mice, has had numerous stage, film, and television versions
  • A Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens – 1843 – staple of the holiday season in both film and stage versions.

So, how long should your book be?