Are You IN or OUT?

I like the advertisement where the new homeowner stands in the open door of his house and calls his dad saying, "Yes, I am heating/cooling the whole neighborhood." (I forgot whether the ad showed summer or winter, but you get the idea.) In real life, I want the door closed. Either get in the house or stay outside, make up your mind.

In theater, TV and/or movies there's a term, "the fourth wall" referring to the space that separates the performer from the audience. An actor should address his or her remarks to the other players on stage and not address the audience directly.

This is one of those rules that was largely observed until sometime in the late '60s or early '70s when it was broken with great comedic effect. You just don't do that. But they did and that made the comedy work.

There's a good reason why you don't break down the fourth wall. And that's got to do with the fictive dream. When you start reading a story about a fella who leaps tall buildings in a single bound, is bullet-proof, and has x-ray vision, you go along with it even if he's wearing blue spandex. You suspend disbelief because you're in the story. You can believe for a while that all this is because he's from Krypton where there is a red sun and heavier gravity and stuff.

People go along and build a mental image of this fictional world even when nobody's wearing spandex and there's just a little old lady is sipping tea in Saint Mary Mead while people around her are dropping like flies.

The story has an internal consistency that defines the world of the writer's construction. The world's consistency keeps the reader in the story. In this world, the reader should just be a wiretap on a POV character's sensory inputs with just the POV character's interpretations to guide the reader's perception.

I can get peeved when something breaks that pattern and takes me out of the story. As a writer this is a very bad thing. Because when the reader gets out of the story, s/he may realize the hour is getting late and turn out the light. Or there's something better on TV. 

The writer wants the reader to be oblivious to the world outside the story.

Can you break this rule? Sure. Look at the scenes with Fred Savage and Peter Falk in The Princess Bride. They work to bracket the story of Wesley and Princess Buttercup, and when the story might get bogged down, the kid and the grandfather are there to provide color commentary. Framing is a good thing, and these little asides are also a good thing to let the reader settle into a story and reflect upon it. Technically, this is not really breaking the fourth wall as much as a Greek Chorus, 

There are subtler ways to take the reader out of the story that I regard as mere ineptitude. Things like, the "Little did I suspect" annoyance I've talked about before. 

The worst way to take the reader out of the story is to make a character do something completely out of character. Characters have to act according to human nature, and they have to be consistent with the sort of person you've established already in the novel. Someone who's a nervous nellie thru the first two thirds of the story can't become laid back in the third act. If you've got a tough biker dude in a leather jacket, you can't put him on water skis and make him jump a shark.

If you write science fiction you can have aliens and ray guns, but you can't drop a tentacled body in the library of a manor in Saint Mary Mead with a hot gat in Miss Marple's fist and having her beat the truth out of a reluctant witness.

I'm cool with putting a sly reference to something the reader might recognize to another work, but it has to be done with a straight face so that anyone who doesn't recognize the allusion will notice nothing strange. But this is risky. You aren't as clever as you wish you were. Nobody is.

My advice is to be consistent. Think through how your story-world works. Write some scaffolding if you aren't sure whether the rest of the story-world has room in it for a hard-boiled spinster detective.

Wesley Crusher Die Die Die

I sell a $0.99 story, The Aristotelian, and a $2.99 anthology of stories, Finding Time, so this post tacks close to the wind. You should not buy every $0.99 and $2.99 ebook you find on Amazon. Maybe it's because I'm an evil, running-dog capitalist, that I make enough money to make these prices seem quite small. But some $0.99/$2.99 ebooks are no bargain. This is a post arguing against the indiscriminate buying of low-priced ebooks.

Every story is an investment by the reader. The writer has a fiduciary responsibility to protect that interest. The writer who forgets that is a thief and a cheat.

The reader takes her hard-earned, after-tax dollars and buys your book. Then the reader sits down and reads it. We all have a limited amount of time on this Earth. The reader's investment is thus the sales-price plus the time spent reading. This is time that might otherwise be spent catching up on sleep, exercising, or enjoying another hobby. For all but the poorest among us, the time-cost is the harder one to justify. A novel will consume a long Friday night, or an entire weekend, depending upon how long it is and how quickly one reads.

How do you know before you sit down to read whether you'll get to "The End" close the book and think, "More please." OR you'll think, "That's time I'll never get back."

There was a time when wise men of compassion and vision saw publishing as a high vocation. Such men sought to protect the public from inferior prose. They served as watchful dragons making sure only the right words got published. And often publishing dreck that pandered to their bigotry along the way.

Independent publishing means there are no watchful dragons today. Anyone can upload anything to Amazon and get their mother to write a 5-star review of it before suppertime.

This creates a broad spectrum of writing that you can buy for not much money. Some of it is easily identifiable as horrid. Some of it absolutely rocks. (You should decide about "The Aristotelian" and "Finding Time" for yourself.)

The absolute worst thing you can encounter on the Kindle is neither horrid nor awesome. This is what happened with me last night. I had purchased. The Last Praetorian by Mike Smith and I started to read it.

The first thing I noticed was the grammar. I think I can get its/it's and there/their straight, and I feel rather comfortable with who/whom. But lay and lie are a minefield I tend to walk about if I can. These are all mechanical things you can fix if you take the time to learn the rules of grammar and ruthlessly review your text, OR hire someone who already knows the rules of grammar to apply them to your manuscript.

Then I noticed the misspellings. Any fool can find the little red squiggles underlining the wordz spelt worng. But a writer gets no such warning when he says discrete when he means discreet. This is where you need to hire someone who knows the differences and has an eye that can spot them in your manuscript.

I have only myself to blame. I read the opening chapter and the hero, Jon Radek, is the YOUNGEST officer to ever COMMAND the MOST ELITE unit of the BIGGEST empire in human history. He wields the SHARPEST sword ever. And he is assigned to guard the EMPEROR and his spoiled PRINCESS who just so happens to be the MOST BEAUTIFUL woman in the galaxy. The hero not only is an expert with all things martial arts, he is also the BEST PILOT in known space.

Have you noticed any of superlatives in the last paragraph? A perfectly serviceable story can be written around little people. Beginning writers don't realize this. A beginning writer doesn't realize s/he shouldn't make the protagonist and/or love-interest some version of himself. That's the problem with Wesley Crusher in particular and Mary Sue characters in general.

You can be a very good writer and fall into this trap, as I believe Dorothy Sayers did with Lord Peter and Harriet Vane. I think Ms. Sayers fantasized about a perfect man, then wrote him up as Lord Peter Wimsey. And then to indulge her own fantasy of having such a man, she wrote up Harriet Vane. I'll have to take this up with Ms. Sayers when I see her.

Meanwhile, back at the Last Praetorian, the hero is all those superlatives. But did you notice that he never has to practice? He never has to work out in the gym to have those rock-hard abs? He never spends any time in the flight simulator honing his mad skillz?

Likewise this hero is reluctant to kill, because he's seen too much killing in his life. Really? How do we know? We never saw any of it in the opening chapters. And when he chokes the life out of an assailant he doesn't seem remorseful.


The problem is that even in space centuries from now, human nature will still be recognizable. The characters in this story are just chess pieces moved about at the writers' whim according to the demands of the plot. And that's a hallmark of really bad writing: an obliviousness to human nature. Any character, good, bad or ugly, has to have motivation to do the next thing. That motivation can never be "to advance the plot." He may be like Conan or Inigo Montoya looking for revenge. Or Ferris Beuller just taking a day off.

And if you make your hero the owner of an interstellar shipping company, the emperor of a galactic thang, or the captain of a ship o' the line, s/he's a leader with followers. Same goes for your evil villain. S/He'll have minions (which are better than followers b/c you don't have to pay them as much). This means your leader will have to show some hallmarks of leadership or your book will suck.

The spear-carriers have got to have some motivation to keep on following. I quit reading Last Praetorian before I got to see much of the villain's organization. From what I did read, the minions would have ample opportunity to see the villain as inept, venal and certain to regard minions as cannon fodder.

This has been a pet peeve of mine ever since I saw Ernst Stavro Blofeld pet a Turkish Angora Cat while feeding a minion to a shark.

I think one of the hallmarks of a good writer is the ability to create believable motivations for the villain. Why does he live in an extinct volcano instead of the Hamptons? Why does he have a huge world map with blinkie lights behind his desk? Yeah those things were cool when I was 15. Same for Persian cats and monocles. But no sane minion follows a fella with the maturity of a 15-year old. Why follow a putz like that? Does he have a great dental plan?

I quit reading the Last Praetorian, but not before wasting too many hours reading it.

Whenever you read any story, it will raise questions in the mind. What has become of the Emperor? Is he really dead? How did Jon & Sophie get to the Imperial Senate? Why did they separate? Will the Senator's son whose life Jon spared grow up to become a valued ally?

The reader is made physically uncomfortable by story-questions that remain unanswered. This motivates the reader to stick with a story even as s/he is rolling eyes about cardboard characters and furious about the bad writing. That's why I would rather happen upon a story I despise and can quickly dismiss. Nope, no need to read about robot lesbians, next. Nothing I can relate to, I felt no discomfort abandoning Hegemony.

But I liked the Sten novels. And I like Mark Van Name's Jon & Lobo stories. Last Praetorian reminded my of them. So, I bought the novel and disregarded the early warning signs.

At some point I decided the discomfort of leaving the story-questions above unanswered was going to be less than the discomfort of finding them to be answered in an unsatisfactory fashion. My worries of a third-act fail made me think Last Praetorian was a negative sum game.

And the only way to "win" a negative-sum game is to not play.

Two stars. I wish it had been one star so that I would have quit reading sooner.

Because a friend recently got a bad review, and lamented the fact that the reviewer had not "thrown her a bone." I'll throw Mr. Smith, who wrote The Last Praetorian, a bone:

• your world building does not suck, though it reminded me too much of Andromeda, you can build on it.
• hire a copy editor and/or fire whoever you had copy-edit Praetorian.
• hire an editor-editor to point out structural problems and Mary Sue characters.

Mantras from Writers Groups

I trained as a Mathematician and then as a Computer Scientist. So, when I finished my first novel, I figured I'd better find out how awesome it was. About that time I saw a notice of a fortnightly writers' group meeting on Wednesdays. And about a month later I learned of a second writers' group on Thursdays. And I started going to both. Then the Wednesday group started meeting every week. It was like drinking from a fire hose and I learned a ton of useful stuff about writing.

The first thing I learned was the social dynamic between writers and how some of them did things that made everyone hate them. That's when I started writing murder stories where an archetype of each annoying person in a writers' group got bumped off. It was very therapeutic.

Over time I started noticing other things. Certain exhortations about good writing kept recurring. It wasn't that people weren't listening. New people coming into the group were doing the same things.

I started writing them down and calling them "mantras" because I kept repeating them. The list is fairly long and I won't burden you with the whole thing all at once.

These mantras are general principles, not rules. Treat them as forces that you balance between one another. There are times when one principle contradicts the other and pulls you in different directions.

Imagine iron filings sitting on a table obeying the law of gravity. When you pass a magnet over the table, the iron filings are pulled in the opposite direction because of the law of magnetism. The iron filings stay on the table or fly toward the magnet based on whether magnetism overcomes gravity. In a similar manner, balance these mantras against one another.

1. Work your opening paragraph to death.
2. Give no excuse to dismiss your work in the opening pages.
3. Bracketing a story often works.
4. So does “in media res.”
5. Make your reader want to “get on the train” with your characters. 

These are just the first five mantras. I plan to enumerate the rest at a later date. 

Work your opening paragraph to death

Unless your work has been assigned as homework, every reader looking at it will make a decision to read it or not. After people judge a book by its cover, they start reading. Most people start reading at the opening paragraph. The better that excerpt is, the more likely they'll decide to read further.


The reader you're aiming at is an agent, editor, intern at the publishing company, or the customer at a bookshop. Sadly, a lot of publishing decisions are taken without consideration of the last category of reader.

"It was a dark and stormy night" is more than just something Snoopy typed in the Peanuts cartoon. It was written by Edward Bullwer-Lytton a very popular Victorian novelist, who contemporary writing experts LOVE to hate. They even have a bad-writing contest in memory of Bullwer-Lytton.

You want to Not Be That Guy.

Give no excuse to dismiss your work in the opening pages

This is less important today than it was a few years ago. Nowadays you can self-publish and avoid the gatekeeper editor.

Editors bring to the manuscript certain expectations. Fail to live up to those expectations and your manuscript will never survive the slush-pile. Your spelling has to be correct. You'd better know your grammar well enough to get all the jokes in the Grammar Nazi video.



There are other expectations an editor will bring to your text. If you stake out any identifiable political or religious territory, remember that your editor also brings to his reading his own political and religious opinions. "Springtime For Hitler"won't fly.

I've never seen that, but I have seen someone bring in a writing project that was a mix of Religion and Letters to Penthouse. I figure that anybody who reads Penthouse would be offended by the religion and anybody who's religious would be offended by the sexuality. Offend one group or the other group, but not both.

Bracketing a story often works

One reason why I like The Princess Bride is the exchange between the narrator, Peter Falk, and the grandson, Fred Savage. They serve to contextualize the work for the viewer. This device is one of the places where the sly writer can slip in some editorial comment.

In ancient times, the Greek Chorus served this role. You seldom go wrong following a literary trope of the classics. Freaking Shakespeare used this technique.

In addition to providing editorial comment, your story might need a bit of explanation that would be untidy to include within the narrative proper. OK, have the grandson interrupt the story and voice an objection so that the narrator can explain it.

If you're really good, you can intertwine two narratives in such a way that one narrative provides answers that are not elaborated in the other narrative and vice versa. Neal Stephenson's Cryptonomicon followed WW2 and contemporary narratives to good effect. But there's a risk in doing this. Few authors can take this on without leaving some threads dangling or (almost as bad) tied up in a mad rush at the end.

So does “in media res” 

Captain Nathan Sanderson keyed the mike and laughed, "Your butt is mine, sucker." He didn't wait for a response but pulled the trigger unleashing a stream of simulated rail-gun projectiles at the Blue Force fighter. The scoring computers on the Blue fighter and Sanderson's Opfor fighter negotiated an equitable degree of damage and degraded the Blue fighter's capabilities accordingly....

In media res is Latin for start with something going on.

Did the paragraph above interest you? Maybe not if you picked up a romance novel.

I left gaps in between the facts that I presented in that paragraph to capture attention like Velcro loops grab lint. You probably realize some kind of mock aerial battle is going on and I hope you'll want to know how Sanderson gets splashed by the girl four paragraphs later.

The war-game serves to introduce a larger story. Don't mistake this for a framing device of a story told in flashback. The story builds on this bit of action, but because the action came without explanation, it raises questions in the reader's mind that I had better answer in the next scene introducing the girl and the navy of the Sirian Confederacy.

Make your reader want to “get on the train” with your characters

A story is an investment of time. The reader's most valuable possession is her time and reading is a bit like getting onto a train with the characters of the story. Are the characters in the story jerks? Are they people you can relate to? Sure, sometimes you will want to hang around some unpleasant person to see them get their comeuppance.

Just think for a second of your reader's experience, his response to your prose. Do you want fear and loathing of the despicable Snidely Whiplash? Or fear that sweet Polly Purebred will suffer a fate worse than death? Your reader engages with the characters. Even if you're in the distant reaches of outer space, you want someone the reader relates to and cares about. I recall a rather disagreeable TV show that had plenty of action that I liked, but it was all happening to and with characters I could care less about. If the ship exploded killing everyone in the series, it would have been an improvement.

Recently I started a novel that had plenty of interesting back-story. Although the novel was extremely exposition-heavy, the universe the writer constructed had a lot going for it. But then I found out that everyone on the space ship was just an AI made to seem like some dead person. Oh. They're just robots. Nobody's human? Nope. Oh. And after the protagonist died and became a robot, she also became a lesbian. I can relate to alternate lifestyles, even gorgeous fembots with a penchant for evil, but seriously?

It really wasn't the robot lesbian angle that put me off so much as that it was the last straw. There wasn't a single character I could relate to within light years of anywhere the story was going. And the exposition-heavy opening didn't help. I didn't toss the novel across the room because I was reading it on my Kindle, but I found something else to read in short order.

Update: This is the first of a series of writers mantras. The next one is here.