This has comments on my writing and reading. Primarily about Mycroft Holmes and stories involving him. Secondarily about whatever I'm reading at the moment.
Writers' Groups have certain protocols that the fledgling writer may not know. Years back I finished my first novel and went trundling off to a local writers group that met at the Urban Institute for Contemporary Art. (I always thought the third word of UICA should be "contemptible" since I was generally unimpressed with the various objects d'art being produced there. I hope it has gotten better in the interim.) The UICA had the good sense to kick out the writers a couple years back.
Nevertheless, I've learned a great deal from attending that and other writers groups and I'd like to share some of that here.
A local writers group needs a table and chairs and a public venue. If you're looking for one near you, ask around bookstores and public libraries. You'll most probably find a circle of like-minded people.
Each of them has swallowed minnows in order to listen to you read with baited breath.
Or not.
Most likely not. Too many people have only one thing in mind at a writers group: "I have to pretend I'm interested until it's my turn to read." That's wrong.
You go to a writers group to learn.
You don't want to have your ego stroked.
You don't want to establish yourself as the alpha writer.
You don't want to discourage a bad writer from inflicting his turgid prose upon the world.
You go to learn.
Suppose you write Science Fiction techno-thrillers. You should listen to the romances and the poetry of others to gauge what works and what does not. Not so you can start writing in another genre or mode, but to learn what makes words work. Even if all you learn is, "I should not do that."
And when it is your turn to read, you want to maximize your learning opportunity. Did you bring 20 pages? That's too much. People have limited attention spans. After 3 to 5 pages, minds wander. You want people listening to your deathless prose not plotting to kill you.
Are you really, really good at Oral Interpretation? Tone it down. When your book is in some publisher's slush pile you won't be there to pronounce all the syl-AB-les with the right em-PHA-sis. Your dramatic pauses and artful intonations won't help you. And even if you are lousy at Oral Interpretation, don't do it.
I knew a writer who was horrid, and when he read he felt this need to do so in a Swedish accent. I have no idea what he was writing about, all I know is I'd think, "Bork, bork, bork," and remember Muppet Show skits. Happily, he doesn't come to writers group any more.
Don't be that guy. The guy who everyone silently sighs in relief when he doesn't show up.
He read in a cheesy Swedish accent even after people told him it detracted from evaluating his work. He didn't listen. You have to listen. And you have to act on what you hear. Even if that action is independently verifying the truth/falseness of it. If you don't listen, you can't learn.
And if you don't want to learn you have no business being in a writers group.
35 If two different groups say the same thing, you really are wrong
The last writers' mantra said not to argue with those in the writers' group who say your prose sucks. The presumption defending the rightness of your prose is a waste of time. You are right and the group is wrong. This makes sense for the reasons enumerated there.
But.
In the town where I live there are multiple writers' groups. I've been known to haunt more than one of them. For the most part, the folks who go to the group at Barnes & Noble don't go to the group at the Public Library. This is an important distinction.
So, let's suppose you are writing "Lesbian Nazi Cannibals on the Moon." And someone at one group makes a specific complaint that maybe Nazism is not a viable alternative lunar lifestyle. The last mantra provides guidance: thank that person and shut up.
If you really believe your Nazi story works, take it to the other group and read the same passage. If you hear the same specific complaint, from someone who was not at the other group, this is a clue. Ignore it at your peril: You are wrong.
This is a chance for you to learn. People learn by being wrong, owning up to that reality, and figuring out something different to do.
But.
I have a friend at one of the writers' groups I attend who tends to be blown about by every wind of criticism in the group. As a result, he doesn't quite finish anything, but churns. This is the opposite error to make.
When you have people tell you what's wrong with your prose you'll hear signal and you'll hear noise. The wise listener can filter out signal and noise. But that can be hard, even for the wise.
The thing about noise is that it is random. Half the time it'll say you're too hot, and half the time it'll say you're too cold. They cancel out. Consensus-seeking behavior can lead to a groupthink that can make the
noise seem very strong. But a different group will have its own
different groupthink. So, if you take the same prose to two places, you're likely to have the noise cancel out, and you're likely to have the true signal you need to hear reinforced.
#34 If you are right and the group is wrong, nod, smile and slowly back away.
This is a Writers Mantra about writers' group etiquette.
If you are writing in this part of the 21st century, you've probably gotten the news that you should belong to a writers' group and you should run your prose past the other members before trying to publish your deathless prose.
I've been a member of a few writers' groups over the last decade or so and I wish I'd started sooner. You will find prose that you think is perfectly acceptable can raise objections by one or more members of your writers' group.
Maxwell Perkins has been dead since 1947. In the intervening years no top-drawer editor has stepped in to take his place guiding literary talent through the shoals of a writing career. You need someone to tell you, "that doesn't work." And sometimes you really, really need someone to tell you that you just don't thank Hitler.
This is where a writing group is a very handy thing. Most mothers, siblings, or friends will read your stuff and pat you on the head saying, "Very nice dear." You might as well tape your manuscript to the refrigerator. Instead, you need someone who has an idea of what works or doesn't-work prose-wise. A person who writes is more likely to be that someone.
But there's a potential problem: Suppose you write stories wherein the protagonist solves crimes with two hard fists, and a hot gat. He likes his liquor straight, and his women pliable.
You'll do well if your writers group has a few manly men or right-thinking women (very, very far right-wing women). But you'll fail if the writers' group is chock full of pacifist, anti-gun, tea-totaling, radical feminists.
Writing is not a monolithic enterprise and what's catnip for some markets is dognip for others. And vice versa. A lot of what is called "bad writing" is just writing for a different market: Don't expect to sell your lesbian coming-out memoir to Zondervan.
In the ideal case, your writers' group will be a perfect reflection of your target market.
Often it is not, and that's the point of this mantra.
Holmesian readers expect Sherlock Holmes to draw some remarkable conclusion from something nobody else perceives. A non-Holmesian probably won't notice if this omission. Likewise, Science Fiction readers do not need to have certain SF tropes spelled out. I once had someone complain in writers group that he didn't know what an AI was.
Push this to the extreme. Suppose you are targeting a very narrow niche where everybody in that niche knows certain things and brings to the reading certain expectations. Further suppose that nobody in your writers' group is a member of that niche. You will get an earful.
Resist the temptation to argue. Resist the urge to vindicate yourself. You've asked the group for their opinion, they've given it, and you have to hear it.
Thank everyone for the feedback. You do not have to say aloud that you intend to ignore it. On another day they might be right.
Writers groups can be subject to groupthink. If you bring some prose to the group that's far enough outside their expectations, you'll catch flack because your prose doesn't match the groupthink. Since it's a groupthink, nobody will hear your reasons defending your prose. Thank everyone for the feedback, etc.
This works on the other side, too. When I feel the need to tear into someone who's written prose so wooden it is an insult to furniture I need to pause to ask myself why I think so:
This is my writers' mantra #7. If you are curious about 1 thru 6, I link them below. Oh, and here's a trailer for Finding Timehere.
Writers' Mantra #7: A conjunction weakens an utterance.
In the universe of hard-hitting dialog, you will seldom find a laundry list.
I have a friend who doesn't quite trust his readers to get what he's saying. He quite reasonably thinks he can get his point across by coming at the same point from multiple directions. He's a college professor, and this is a good thing for teachers to do in class. That's why he acquired this habit. Some students learn at different rates and their learning styles differ.
Writing is not lecturing. The technique that works in the classroom does not work in prose.
Moreover, there are more handicaps that bedevil the college professor who writes. I have another writer-friend who also possesses a PhD. He teaches at a different college, writes in a different genre. My two friends do not know each other. Nevertheless, they have similar writing affectations that I struggle to avoid.
It's part of the curse of knowledge. When you know more, you know the exceptions. This is because truth is complicated. When you know more, you know the little corollaries that tag along with any proposition.
And another thing: academics have to defend their academic writing. They build walls of disclaimers and qualifiers around their assertions
Writing is not lecturing.
Say anything you have to say directly and simply.
No! Say anything you have to say directly and simply.
If you think of many words that contribute to what you or your character is trying to get across, rank them in descending order of importance. If one word stands head-and-shoulders above the rest, use it and lose the rest. If you have two equally important words, pick one.
The many words interfere with one another. The second word diminishes the impact of the first, or vice versa. That last sentence would be stronger without "or vice versa" because I was worried about the case when the first word diminishes the impact of the second. Screw it. This isn't a law with loopholes that must be closed, but prose that must work.
I'm advocating a sort of brutality of composition. Get the job done with maximal effectiveness using the fewest moving parts. This is good design.
Curious about prior writing mantras? Start here. And scope out my book trailer, too.
Update:
You can jump to the next two writers mantras here.
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.
Work your opening paragraph to death.
Give no excuse to dismiss your work in the opening pages.
Bracketing a story often works.
So does “in media res.”
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.
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Each of them has swallowed minnows in order to listen to you read with baited breath.
