Why I have to occasionally skip ahead in books

DeAnna Pierce did a blog post on the Ten Commandments of Reading, and I enjoyed it, but I took issue with number 9 in which she said “No skipping to the end of the book.”  (When I say “take issue,” I don’t mean an outpouring of rabid, hand-waving anger. I simply mean calm, rational disagreement with a smile.)

Because I am one of those people who occasionally skips ahead in books.  I do it for particular reasons, and I think it is worth it to delve into those reasons, for the benefit of those who can’t imagine why anyone would do this. 

I know there are probably people who can’t fathom it. There are also authors who work very hard to ration out bread crumbs of information all along in their books until they can hit the reader with a gigantic reveal at the end that twists perceptions and turns everything upside down.   To these people, the notion that someone (like me) would skip to the end is tantamount to literary blasphemy, since reading the book out of order would disrupt the careful emotional experience they have worked so hard to evoke in the reader.

So let me tell you about the thought process I go through that leads to me deciding to skip to the end of a book.

There are some books out there that are very well written, and they suck me in like a tornado plowing through a mobile home community.  But I have a hard time dealing with books that pile mystery upon mystery upon mystery.  If everything happening is a mystery, if terms that are used are mysterious and not explained by context pretty quickly, if too many characters’ motives are mysterious, I start getting impatient.  I start to feel like the author is rubbing my face in all the mystery.  I start to doubt whether the author can pull off telling a good enough story that can engage me more than all the mystery irritates me. 

I know the author is setting things up. But the question rises of whether he/she can give a pay-off that really satisfies.  It has to be a really awesome pay-off to string me along, otherwise I’m going to be mad.  If the author is continually adding more story questions without answering any of them, I start to suspect that they won’t answer them, or that the pay-off won’t be enough to make all the set-up worth it.

So, how do I satisfy myself in this regard?  I skip to the end and read the last 50 pages or so. 

I can hear all the thriller and mystery writers shouting, “But that ruins the story if you know what happens at the end!” 

Let me ask you this—does it ruin the water slide ride to know that the ending is a dunk in a big pool of water?   No, it doesn’t. It’s a relief.  It’s something to look forward to.

Would you be comfortable getting on an inner-tube and riding into a dark tunnel after a water slide architect tells you, “This is my first ride I’ve ever had built and you’re not allowed to know how it ends except by going through it. Did you know that there are some exciting things like waterfalls and whirlpools involved?” You might want some reassurances.You might want a little more information before you let yourself go on that.

Or maybe a waterslide isn’t the best analogy. What about a roller coaster? Would you be comfortable going on one if you couldn’t see the end of it?  Especially if you knew there were roller coasters that hadn’t ended in happy places? 

When I read the last 50 pages, I am looking for awesome. I’m looking for drama and interest. If I can find it, that tells me the book’s middle is also going to be interesting, I will go back and read the whole book. And I will enjoy the ending even more because I know it will be awesome. And all the little things that didn’t make sense in the ending will then have new significance for me to appreciate because I have finally read the build-up.

But if the last 50 pages don’t have anything that I can tell is dramatic and amazing all by itself, that shows me that the author depended on all the little mysteries and reveals to create the climax and carry the ending.  And that seems pretty one-note to me.

Skipping to the ending is actually a good way of testing the writing skills of the author.  If the ending draws you in when you don’t know the middle of the story, then the author did an even better job than simply designing a linear experience. They made each part engaging.    Or, suppose you start at the end and read a few pages then, skip progressively closer to the beginning.  If each part is interesting regardless of the order it is read, then the writer’s skill is bigger than just creating a particular plot sequence.  If a book pulls you in even if you’ve read it before, then enjoyment of the book is not dependent on whether you’re ignorant of what happens.  That means the book is re-readable. 

Other cases where I might skip to the end are when the book seems really slow and boring (a subjective term, but still necessary). I'd like to know whether it gets any better. If it does, then I'll go back to where I left off and read to the end. But if not, why bother? Life is too short to read bad books.

I’m not the only person who has noted that spoilers can enhance enjoyment.  Check out this article:

http://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2011/aug/17/spoilers-enhance-enjoyment-psychologists

The truth about hiring a line editor

Some writers think they should write from the gut, and then when once they have been accepted for publication, an editor will correct spelling and punctuation and grammar.  Among those who intend to go the self-publishing route, the corresponding notion is that one can hire an editor who will correct all that.

This is usually attached to the assumption that a writer doesn’t need to know the rules of grammar, punctuation, and spelling, and that can be delegated to hirelings.

Here’s the reality: Unless you know enough of the rules to polish your writing the best that you know how, submissions editors will not be able to get into your lovely story because they will be so distracted by mechanical errors in your writing. Your masterpiece will go straight to rejection pile.

And if you hire an editor yourself, they will not correct your writing. They will merely make suggestions and the only way you’re going to be able to keep from blowing a gasket when you see all the red ink (or comment bubbles in your document file) is if you know enough about the rules of writing to see that they are right.  But if you know the rules, why not just use them from the beginning?

Also, the rules of grammar and punctuation are there for a reason; they help eliminate ambiguity.  And if you don’t follow the rules, then your editor may think you mean one thing when you mean another, and then time is wasted figuring out what you really intended to say.  

When I worked as a writing tutor at ASU, I found that usually when grammar was off, the student wasn’t sure what they meant to say yet. I’d ask them, “Did you mean to say this, or did you mean this other thing?” and they’d scratch their head and say, “Uhhhh, I don’t know!”  They had written something they hoped would sound good to the teacher, without making sure it was exactly what they intended to say.

So what does an editor really do for a writer? The writer comes to the editor when they’ve gotten their work good enough that they can no longer see anything wrong with it. Then the editor helps clean up the mistakes the writer missed.  They will trim out unnecessary words, add those missing commas (because there are apparently 20 different ways to use commas and even good writers forget a few), demand a re-wording occasionally when a sentence or paragraph is garbled, move good sentences where they would work better, etc. 

To use a carpentry metaphor, the writer builds the desk and sands it down. The editor polishes it with 200-grit sandpaper and applies the paint and the clear coat.  Don’t expect your editor to do the sawing and hammering for you.

Killer book blurbs

My observation so far about blurbs is that they are really hard to write well in only one draft.   

Even worse, they are really hard to write cold after finishing a book. (Heck, I haven't even finished a novel yet, and I know it's hard!)

Because how to do you choose what to emphasize when you have a pirate kidnapping, and romance between the gargoyle and the gamine heroine, and intrigue over the miniaturized secret nuclear submarine plans hidden in the plug of the crock-pot lost at the church social?  (No, those aren't in my novel, but they should be in somebody's!) So many conflicts, what do you choose?  What’s most important?

I think the best way to approach blurb-writing is to begin drafting them at the beginning of the novel-writing process, then revisit and redraft as each third of the book is completed.  (Need a way to procrastinate while still being productive on your story?  Just go hone your blurb.  You’re welcome.)

Plot bunnies appear, and by heaven, sometimes we must chase them!  And sometimes… the plot bunny develops into such a six-foot pooka of awesomeness that you must bow to it and change your book accordingly. 

In those cases, it helps to revisit and change the blurb immediately before too many more distractions are added. I'm halfway through my current work in progress and I've already drafted my blurb eleven times.

I ran across somewhere that Pixar has some kind of formula for writing awesome movie premises, which can be used for writing story blurbs.  I may not remember it perfectly, but it goes something like this:

Character is in [starting situation].  Then [change] happens and now character has lost [something valuable]. But [external threat] looms, forcing character to [do something very uncomfortable and nasty] in order to reach [her goal].  [Allies] help or [advantages] develop, but they also cause [more trouble].  Finally character is forced to make a choice. Will character choose [Option A] and have [awful consequence A], or choose [Option B] and have [awful consequence B]? 

 Alternatively, for romances, if you have two POVs between your heroine and hero, you can have two paragraphs to examine their internal and external conflicts. Something like this:

Heroine is in [starting internal and external situation]. Then [change] happens and now [hero] stands in the way of heroine achieving her [goal].  But he’s attractive in a [list of devastating ways, skills, power to help her].  Can she overcome internal and external obstacles or will she get horrible consequences and lose love forever?

Hero is in [starting internal and external situation]. Then [change] happens and now [heroine] stands in the way of the heroe’s [goals].  But he’s captivated by her [devastating attractions].  Can he overcome his [internal obstacles] or will he lose her forever? 

 

(Extra points if the hero and heroine are each other’s external obstacles and overcoming those obstacles will cause them to lose in love.)

Yes, the above is formulaic, but it at least gives you a good place to start.

It helps to read other blurbs in the same genre to get a sense of the marketing hooks that are used and other creative blurb structures.  And reading blurbs in other genres can broaden your horizons further.

Another thing that helps is reading other author's blurbs, critiquing them, and trying to make them better.  Nothing's more fun than playing with a bad blurb. Or even a good blurb.

A good way to analyze a blurb is to highlight all the marketing hooks in it.  What kinds of verbs do they use? What language excites you and why?  Do you get a sense of who the character is and what kinds of conflicts and dilemmas they will face?  Is it all in language that screams "exciting"?

Good dialogue

One of the dangers of writing dialogue is that it can be too on-the-nose.  I have a hard time wrapping my mind around the term on-the-nose, so I want to unpack it and offer some alternative ways of defining it.

Here is an example of dialogue taken from The Writer’s Digest article “7 Tools ofDialogue”:  

“Hello, Mary.”
“Hi, Sylvia.”
“My, that’s a wonderful outfit you’re wearing.”
“Outfit? You mean this old thing?”
“Old thing! It looks practically new.”
“It’s not new, but thank you for saying so.”

The article says there are no surprises here, and that is true.  But what is really happening is the characters are being completely forthright and open with each other.  Questions are answered completely and happily.  Also, the stakes of this dialogue are low to non-existent.  After all, why should we care about the wonderful outfit Mary is wearing? 

So one way to make the dialogue more interesting is to make one of the characters evasive.  They may not want to answer questions, or they may not want to do what they are asked to do.  But they want to be polite about it, so they come of with different ways to avoid answering questions fully or at all.  Or they may find a way to answer directly while shocking the interrogator so that the interrogator changes what they want. 

Another way is to make the stakes of the conversation high.  What if Mary’s dress was stolen goods, and she doesn’t want to reveal where she got it?  

Another way is to make the topic an unexpected hot-button issue for one of the characters.  What if Mary hates the dress she’s wearing, but she was forced to wear it for family photos?  What if Mary is not someone who is comfortable wearing dresses and would much rather wear pants?  How would she react to someone commenting she looks lovely? 

Another way is to give the interrogator hidden motives for asking the questions.   What if Sylvia (the girl who is complimenting Mary’s dress) knows that Mary hates wearing dresses, and she compliments Mary on her dress just so she can rub Mary’s face in the fact that Mary is wearing a dress?

Yet another way is to put the dialogue in a story context that makes it more interesting.  For instance, what if the above dialogue happened near the end of a story in which Mary's conflict was a very stormy relationship with Sylvia?  In this case, the above dialogue might be part of a payoff the story was building toward, showing that Mary has accomplished her goal of bringing them into a peaceful coexistence.  It would need more internal dialogue to heighten that effect, but it could fit fairly well.

I think you get the picture. 

I think we’ve shown here that on-the-nose dialogue needs doses of tension, evasion, emotion, and motive.  Lots of this can be done in the internal dialogue of the characters to spice it up.  We’ll imagine them circling each other (mentally), calculating how to meet their goals, measuring and rationing the information they give each other as they battle for ascendency, parsing each other’s words for hidden meeting, reeling under the hidden blows of the other’s words, regrouping and recalculating for the next round, etc.    This is words as a battle.  Conversation as conflict.

Writing sprints and spinning from dangling story threads

Yesterday I tried some 5-minute writing sprints at the computer on my story.  (Yes, I'm still aspiring to be faster on the computer.)  I did well the first time, but at each of the three sprints I did thereafter I got worse and worse. Clearly I’ll have to practice word-sprinting.  After some time, I expect I will try out 10-minute sprints.  But I’ll practice 5-minute sprints for, oh, maybe a month first.

There are a lot of writers that say writing sprints are a really great way to get in some writing in small slots of time, and I agree, but I’m feeling like there are some factors that go into a successful sprint.

If I were to sit down at any time and write for 5 minutes straight, I could do it, but to write 5 minutes on my story, I need to do some prep work first.  If I’m stuck on a scene, writing for 5 minutes is going to be kinda lame because, after all, I’m stuck.  Stuck-ness isn’t going to change just because I’ve started a timer going.

I think that in order to do a writing sprint for 5 minutes, at the very least I need to know about 5 minutes text-worth of what’s going to happen next in my story.  Which means I need to do some thinking first. 

But what if I closed every writing session by jotting down a little summary of what I think is supposed to happen next?  Then, the next time I start I’ll have a thread to pull on immediately, instead of having to brainstorm first.

Behold, an analogy!   If you knit, you don’t want to end the knitting session by cutting your yard and tucking the yarn end in an inaccessible place.  You leave the yarn attached to the project so you can get back into it easily.  Or, if you are changing colors, you connect up the new color and then leave it for the next time. 

You can do the same for yourself when you’re writing. Keep connected to your story by leaving a summary of what’s happening next to work off of when you come back to it.  It’s like a little story thread out dangling so there’s something for you to pull on.

Some writers leave a thread dangling by leaving a sentence unfinished because it is natural to want to finish an unfinished sentence.  Ta-da, you’re off and running again. 

Personally, I’ve tried this and I think there must be an art to it because about half the time I have no idea what I intended to say in the sentence, and I am not sure how to finish it.  But I have a bit more luck with jotted notes about what is supposed to happen next in the story.

How's your sprinting?

When you read a book and it disappoints you

Sometimes you’ll pick up a book and it hooks you enough that you push through to the end.  But then the ending makes you say, “WHAT?  NO!  That’s just wrong!”

This happened to me recently; a book I read ticked me off.  I’m not going to say the title or author because I don’t want to shame the individual.   She probably won’t ever read my blog, but I’m going to be courteous anyway.

Anyway, the ending irritated me.  I felt like the twists were not foreshadowed well enough, and

I felt like the reason the hero gave for loving the heroine was a total mismatch with the kind of relationship they had.  For most of the book, the hero and the heroine were at odds with each other, and there was even some question as to whether the hero might actually be the villain.  The hero stonewalled and sought to thwart the heroine every step of the way. With that kind of relationship, did I believe it when the hero told the heroine that he loved her from the first moment he saw her?  No!  No, I didn’t!  He did not love her from the first moment he saw her.  His behavior showed none of that.  There was one scene at the 2/3^rd point when he was subtly protective, but that wasn’t enough.  There was a sequence when they were together and told each other stories, but that was never presented in scene, only as exposition and narration, so it never felt real to me as a reader.  

What would have been more believable is if the hero had said, “I hated you when you came, and I was determined to fight you, but you won me over anyway, and now I can’t imagine life without you.”   And with all the conflict between them early in their acquaintance, the scene where they confessed their love needed a lot more rehashing of previous events.  They needed to explain to each other when they first noticed each other as a romantic prospect, when they first started to love each other, what they thought, what they feared, when they doubted, etc.  That all needed to be explained in order to make the ending feel satisfying and believable.

I also had a hard time believing that the villain was the villain when that was revealed.  The villain was the only person who was kind to the heroine in a very hostile social environment.  The environment stayed hostile for a long time, and the villain was friendly for a long time.  There was just one little scene where the villain snapped a bit and let down the mask.  But because of the villain’s pattern of kind behavior, this seemed like an aberration, rather than showing true colors.  I had a hard time believing that the villain would have the moral courage to show friendliness to the heroine when everyone else was determined to isolate the heroine socially for so long.

There’s a problem when you get to the end of the book and you’re not convinced that the twists are really the truth.  It means there’s been inadequate characterization or foreshadowing.  In this case, I think it was inadequate characterization.  The truth didn’t fit the larger pattern of behavior for the character.

As you can see, when I get done with a book and I don’t like the ending, it helps me to analyze what went wrong in it that left me dissatisfied.   It gives me a little more insight as to what is required for a good story to work.  Frequently I end up asking myself, “Does my story make that mistake too?”  And if so, that becomes an opportunity to improve my own writing.

Why I love Scrivener

I have mentioned in before that I have ADD and this makes writing a novel into a challenge.

Today I want to discuss how Scrivener (the writing program) helps minimize distractions so I can be productive.

I have written some non-fiction books previous to my attempt at writing a first novel, and one of the problems I ran across really quickly was that a long document took a very long time to scroll through.  In fact, I never composed non-fiction books with all chapters in the same file.  (Heavens, that would be the worst mistake of my life.)

Here’s what would happen if I did compose with all the chapters in the same file: 

1.     I would open the document intending to look for Chapter 14.

2.     While scrolling to Chapter 14, a mistake in Chapter 9 would catch my eye and I’d stop to fix it.

3.     Then I’d start reading the rest of Chapter 9, looking for more sneaky mistakes. 

4.     I might remember I’d intended to go to Chapter 14, but while scrolling toward it again, I would notice a sentence in Chapter 11 that didn’t sound right and stop to fix it.  This would lead to more reading in Chapter 11.

5.     I would never actually make it to Chapter 14, but spend my time distracted on the way.

Before Scrivener I would have a file for each chapter so that I could go quickly to where I needed to go.

Scrivener makes it so that you can do this automatically in the same window, but its binder feature keeps all your chapters visible and instantly accessible.

Not only that, but all my research files are also visible and accessible.

This feature alone has saved me so much time and distraction it probably can’t be counted except by visiting a parallel universe.  

If you want to see what Scrivener is like, I have a link to it in my sidebar. (No, I do not get money from this recommendation.) They have a 30-day free trial, and the price is pretty reasonable for the features.