Never Put Two Sherlocks In A Scene

I have a friend who is an expert in something I'm blissfully ignorant of. I'm really quite an ignoramus on this topic. And she wrote a story wherein the first scene, her dazzling knowledge is on full display. Two characters are both experts in this same field and they are discussing a specific exhibit at a specific gallery of a specific museum in New York City.

Though I am an ignoramus, I'm not stupid and I know it. But if I was stupid, or just a little less confident in my little gray cells, I would be turned off by that narrative.

She's resisting the urge to "dumb it down," and I can appreciate that. I write at a fairly high level when the narrative strays into my areas of expertise. Just keep me away from the unobserved quantum systems and everybody walks out of here alive.

I hope the reader comes to my prose with a desire to have some fun. I'm never going to be assigned reading in any school course and I don't write to save humanity from itself. Should everyone on the planet who ever picks up one of my stories come away knowing about quantum mechanics or Cartesian Rationalism? God forbid.

Gentle reader, I promise I won't intentionally make you feel stupid. Even when I know whodunnit and am playing strip-tease with the clues. No, it isn't Mrs. White in the Library with a Pipe. Nice guess though.

If you make too many specific New York Metropolitan Museum of Art references, your readers will feel stupid. If they feel stupid, they'll buy fewer books. This isn't a call to "dumb down" the narrative, but to make it more inclusive of smart, yet ignorant people. I hope you'll find my narratives inclusive of smart, but ignorant people.

Keep in mind that I am ignorant person. There are gaping gaps in my knowledge. Those gaps are there because of a misspent youth finding out about transcendental mathematics, infinite sets of Lebesgue-measure zero, and other mathy stuff. And I haven't even gotten to Turing machines. Or unobserved quantum systems.

Thus when you have a scene that's set in a gallery of a museum, I suggest you channel your sensations in that space instead of identifying it by name. Not everyone has been inside the Henry Ford Museum, but they know the feel of a velour cordon, the echo of a woman's heels on polished marble, the glint of light on a glass display case.

If my character stands beside a turquoise Duesenberg, that's not as compelling to the reader as being in the presence of chrome and paint that is polished to an almost painful degree of shininess that calls to mind the craftsmanship of a lost age and evokes a yearning automotive lust that is utterly unattainable unless you--gentle readers--start buying my writing faster than Clive Cussler's. Here's a link, hint hint.

I have a story wherein I did something stupid with two characters named Luke and Xavier. One's a Catholic Alien, and the other is a Baptist Human. They are both Christians and they're both conversant in the scriptures of the Christian faith. They're normally polar opposites in terms of culture and temperament and the conflicts between these two protagonists work delightfully.

What I did stupidly was dueling Bible References. One would give a snippet of a verse, and the other would provide chapter-and-verse. I thought it was cute. I'm an idiot. It's annoying and it kills the narrative flow of the scene. If you're not a Bible scholar, you might appreciate an aphorism drawn from the scriptures here and there, but you won't give a fig about looking it up for yourself. When these fellas are playing Bible Roulette it is like two Sherlocks in the same room talking to each other and leaving the rest of the class in their dust.

That's why Watson is priceless to Arthur Conan Doyle and us mere humans. Someone must be an everyman of normal intelligence to whom Holmes can explain his line of reasoning. By normal intelligence, I don't mean an IQ of 100. I mean an IQ of your target market.

Thus the natural conversation between Holmes and Watson serves the purpose of opening the mind of Holmes to the reader.

When the writer is an expert s/he should regard the role of writer as that of popularizer. If you're Carl Sagan, Sister Wendy Beckett, or James Burke you've got all this awesome expertise rattling around your noggin. And if you're any of these people, you've made a ton of bread making that expertise accessible to the general public.

I've talked about how the writer does not know everything he needs to know. And though the writer may fake it, s/he cannot be caught faking it. This is the opposite. It's a twist on the curse of knowledge.

The citation of specifics lends verisimilitude to the narrative. It tells the reader you've done your homework and gives you credibility. But there's a price you pay when readers don't follow you. Like everything, you need balance. If you are thinking of yourself as a popularizer, then you won't overload your readers.

If your interlocutors in scene are both experts, they will talk expert-to-expert. Their conversation will be full of jargon and your audience will be completely lost. I can't see how that can ever work for you when they're talking shop.

When I put Sherlock and Mycroft in scene together, I won't won't give you a disquisition on forensic science or the deductive arts. Instead you should expect to see brothers bickering like brothers do. A lot of people understand sibling rivalries, so that's what I give the reader.

Your Writing Sucks

33    Everyone’s writing stinks until they write a million words.

One thing to remember about Writing Mantras is that I steal them whenever I can. This came from Ray Bradbury who had more writing talent in his left pinky than most writers I know (as well as that fellow I see when I'm shaving in the morning).

It is not unusual to create sucky prose. Everyone does it. Does your prose suck? Don't feel bad if it does. You've got a lot of company. CERTAINLY don't stop writing if your prose sucks.

Suppose you wrote a novel and submitted it to someone in New York. And they said, "Go away, this sucks." I'm told that Nora Roberts or someone of her caliber wrote a novel and then after that didn't sell, kept it circulating while she wrote a second novel, and she kept that circulating with the first while she wrote a third novel. She kept this up until she'd written 10 novels. And after she put 10 novels in the pipeline, one of them sold. If we assume each novel was 100,000 words that's a million words.

Malcolm Gladwell talks about how the Beatles played a LOT of music in Germany before they became famous. He figures that if you work at anything for 10,000 hours, you'll become world-class at it. Supposing you write 100 words an hour. And what fool can't write that much in an hour? You can write a million words.

If your writing sucks, you should work at improving it. And you should commit to improving it over the course of thousands of hours of practice. One of the downsides of the ease of self-publishing is that you can publish your worst prose because you think you're ready when you're not.

I thought my first novel was really hot stuff. Now I shudder to think someone might see it. Was it the best novel I could write? Yes. Can I write a better one today? Certainly.

I remember when I was a younger in college. There was this book on the New York Times bestseller list called Raise the Titanic by Clive Cussler. I loved that novel. So, a few months later I looked and saw another novel by Clive Cussler. And another. And a few more over the course of a year or so. I snapped them up and read them voraciously. But I noticed something about a couple of them. The quality wasn't there. One seemed quite amateurish, and the other less so. Yet all the rest of his novels were great.

I didn't surmise this until later, but I figured that the two below-par novels were written before Cussler got his first book deal. And they languished unsold in his desk drawer for who knows how long. When lightning struck and Cussler was a famous, bestselling author, he could pull out those manuscripts for a quick buck. He'd obviously written, and been rejected, and written some more, and some more. One one fine morning he'd hit the magic 10,000 hour mark, or the 1,000,000 word mark and walla. He was producing bestselling prose.

I'd like to know whether the Beatles or Clive Cussler recognized that moment when they'd performed 10,000 hours or written a million words. I suspect they did not.

I don't know if your writing sucks now. I know for sure that it sucked when you started. And I hope that as you've been writing you've been working to improve your craft. It'd be a shame to waste 10,000 hours and not have any improvement to show for it.

It'd be a worse shame if you gave up before you hit that breakthrough when your writing became good.

Lean Startup And Writing

There's a concept going around called "Lean Startup." Maybe you've got this idea for a better mousetrap: You invent the thing. You tool up a factory and produce a bunch. You open a storefront to sell them. And what's missing? Customers. You will have to make people aware of your solution. Not just any people, but those who can afford your mousetrap.

Lean Startup turns this line of thinking inside out. Start with the people you can most easily reach, offer them goods on a web page, and THEN invent, tool, and produce. The premise is that we make guesses about what folks want and we offer the goods as an experiment to confirm that guess.

If nobody responds, we're only out the cost of producing the "landing" web page. However, if tons of people hit that web page to get the goods, we know we've got customers. And if you've their email addresses, you can get back with them. It's revolutionary.


What has it to do with writing?

When some ink-stained wretch starts scribbling, s/he has to decide what to write. The answer may be "what I want" or "what my publisher wants," but a better answer is "what your readers want." How will I know that? Guess?

Suppose you take your N coolest story ideas. Compose the blurb you'd use to sell each story. Then drop that blurb into a web page. Put it up and try to drive traffic to it. If nobody ever visits, stop. You can't reach that story's audience even if the story is awesome and the audience is massive.

Conversely, if you get a few hundred visits, you know you can attract eyeballs to your story--a necessary first step. And if you get them to click on your response key, you know you have some real demand for that story.

I don't know about you, but I get 100x more story ideas than I have time to write up. I could use such a scheme to prioritize pending writing projects. This is reader pull, not writer (or publisher) push.

It's not that much different from setting up a Kickstarter project to score a fat advance for your non-fiction book on meat, or something--but I digress. I think this is how to proactively engage fears of the conveyor-belt and furnace. Instead of listening to some soon-to-be-downsized editor tell you what you should be writing, you'll hear readers expressing their preferences.

Sounds great, right?


I forget who wrote this: I suspect it was Jerry Pournelle who wrote that an an author is like a storefront. After I found out that I liked Exiles to Glory, I backtracked to find High Justice, Birth of Fire, West of Honor, The Mercenary, then I haunted booksellers for each subsequent book with his name on it. (I'd say the same about Clive Cussler and Tom Clancy, except it's complicated and distracting. I'll explore that distraction another day.)

That's how I read when I discover someone whose prose I adore. I drink up everything they've written and watch for new releases. The writer must protect his or her reputation and respect his reading public.

I ran this idea past someone who knows a lot more about writing than I do. She didn't like it because it is a bad idea to tease readers with something they want, but can't have. It creates resentment. She said it's like waving a candy bar in front of a two-year-old and going, "You can't have it."

This is a pitfall of what I'll call "Lean Writing" (until someone comes up with a better name). If you put up a landing page promising Ailurophages From Space" then you'll need to manage expectations of those who tell you they want to read about aliens eating kittens.

"No, it hasn't been written yet." "Yes, I'm waiting for N emails from folks promising to buy it." "Or yes, I'm X% complete with the I'th draft (where N, X, and I are numbers that'll vary)."

In the software world we have a term "vaporware" that we apply to cool software that someone promised, but never delivers.

Do you remember when I wrote about Heinlein's Five Commandments? Commandment #2 says, "You must finish what you write." Suppose you break it:

• If nobody knows, then nobody gripes. 
• If you're a traditional writer with a traditional agent and editor, they'll gripe. 
• But if you put up a "Lean Writing" landing page, then everyone who clicks the "I want it" button will come after you with torches and pitchforks. And your writing brand will be likened unto the purveyors of "vaporware." 

Don't be that guy.

So, what do you think? Will "Lean Writing" work? Why or why not?