Writing Lessons, Part 2 -- Deus ex Machina a.k.a Characters Acting Out of Character

I can probably speak for most Austen fans when I say that she wrote too few books for my taste.  Of course, I say that about Laura Ingalls Wilder and Lucy Maud Montgomery, too, and Montgomery was incredibly prolific.  It's hard for a fan to get to the end of a good run with a fabulous but now deceased author.  The realization that there will never be any more stories from a favorite author is devastating.  In Austen's case, this devastation has led to hundreds of "sequels" and copycats which are to varying degrees, mostly expertly written fan-fiction.  Still, I live in hope that I will someday find new books that write in at least the spirit of Austen.  Over Christmas, I had the opportunity to finally read a popular Austen-like Regency novel from yet another modern author purporting to be a fan of Austen and several other Regency authors. 

Having read the book, though, it is clear that the author doesn't quite understand the historical time period.  Many of the characters had more modern thoughts and attitudes.  Still, it was an excellent read.  And by excellent, I mean that I had to steal the book back from one of my daughters for a second read.  Yum!

 As is sometimes the case, I found a writing lesson for myself that I'd love to share.  


The central problem in the story was that the main character was in love with her sister's love interest.  (A rather common hurdle in books, but an interesting one, nevertheless.)  This might not appear to be a hurdle of much height at first, but that particular problem has been compounded by the fact that the sister in question always gets her way.  Always.  No question.  This point is driven home almost to excess by both words and deeds as if to make sure the readers know this without any doubt in their minds.  There is no possibility at all that the sister will give him up.  And just to make sure that the reader knows that the main character's certainty is without question, the author added the interesting twist that the sisters are twins.  You read that right:  twins.  That means that the main character knows her sister so well that they can almost read each other’s thoughts.  Or in other words:  the main character knows her sister so well--by her thoughts as well as her previous actions--that she along with the readers should be completely convinced that there is absolutely no way in any shape or form that the sister is going to give up the love interest to the main character.

Understand?

I love things like this.  I love reading books were the central problem is a big one because even if I know how the book will likely end, I am driven through the book by a burning desire to see how this enormous hurdle will be overcome.  I want to see how clever the author is in figuring a way out.  I love clever.  I imagine that you do, too.  

It is clear that this author, as well as numerous others, has taken to heart the advice to pile it on.  Why just have one problem when you can have two or ... ten?  Add a ticking clock or a ticking bomb.  Up the stakes.  Over and over we hear this advice.  Make sure that the reader is so sure that the problem is both so enormous and impossible to overcome and that the stakes are so high that they will keep reading.  

This technique is used because it works.  In this book it worked on me like a charm.  Did I already mention that I had to steal the book back from my daughter to read it again?  It was that good.

But now the author has painted herself in a corner.  And she has two choices:  do the hard work of figuring out how to get out of this, or trot out the deus ex machina.  You know, the old "God of the Machine" trick from ancient Greek theater.  

I am sorry to say that this author used the latter. 

The most common deus ex machina that I've seen of late has been to suddenly-and-with-no-explanation-have-one-or-more-characters-act-out-of-character.  It's so common that I've seen it in the last few years in a whole pile of books that have included this Regency-type romance, a bestselling SF trilogy, and an equally bestselling stand-alone fantasy.  

In the fantasy, is was a tale of star-crossed lovers that weren't so very star-crossed after all. The reader was assured that there was simply no way, none--it's a matter of honor and all that that these two characters who are the most honor-bound folks in the universe will never, ever get together.  Still... somehow with no explanation whatsoever, they take a roll in the hay, so to speak, before the middle of the book.  Yeah.  Okay.  Huh.  I felt completely cheated out the the experience of seeing how they overcame the ridiculously high hurdle to get together.  

In the SF trilogy the entire premise of all three books was completely negated by the rushed, no-explanations, 3/4 of the characters acting out of character to achieve the tying up a secondary plot line thing.  Yeah... a secondary plot line.  Two years later, I am still flabbergasted.   

It's a terrible trick to play on the reader.  I always feel like I've been lied to.  

No one likes being lied to.  

One of the most critical writing skills that an author can have is consistency.  The world you write in can be entirely made up entirely out of your imagination, but the details of it must be consistent.  Orson Scott Card once said that he will believe anything as long as you justify it.  And I feel the same way.  I have read books set in the most fantastic worlds with manners, objects, rules of magic and/or rules of science that are nothing like what we would see on Earth--and I believed every word.  

But when an author has painted a character as one thing and then has him or her behave in another way to simplify the resolution to a problem, I feel lied to.  Cheated.  Deflated.  I want the explanation so that I can continue to believe that the problem or idea that I chased through the last two or three hundred pages or so was a real one--not merely a hook to get me to read on, only to be conveniently discarded when it was no longer of any use.  

To be truthful, I have no idea if in any of the above three cases, the cheat was the author's idea or a poor editing decision.  I can almost imagine an editor complaining that you just can't add another 5k words to this book to give the reader a solid explanation of why this really isn't out of character after all because... well, because.  Or it may have been a little of both.  Or a decision made in ignorance.  Sometimes we just don't see our story the way other readers do.  We have these plot points and characters and world building things in our head and sometimes we forget that we didn't give the reader enough of a peek when we were picking and choosing the things to put on paper.  Either way, having characters behave out of character is a writing error that we all need to watch out for. 

We need to do the hard work of finding explanations for our characters' behavior so that our readers will feel like we are trustworthy storytellers and will want to read more of our tales.

What was one of your favorite solutions to what seemed like an impossible story problem? 

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Advice For the Day

Backup, Backup, Backup.

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Writing Lessons, Part 1 -- POV

I've been doing a lot of reading lately, trying to whittle down the pile of books on the cedar chest that never seems to quite want to be whittled down.  Of late, the pile has been larger than usual, though I imagine that is mostly my fault--as per the last post, I've grown rather tired of reading trilogies and series piecemeal--having to reread all of the books again each time a new one comes out.  So, for the time being, I have decided to simply let them pile up on the chest until the last book has finally been published, such that I can read the entire thing at once.  Frankly, my reading list is too long to do otherwise.  I don't have time to keep rereading books where there are so many crying out for my attention. 

The one exception to this rule is books in a series that are still stand-alone books.  Those can be read with little or no reference to previous books.

I picked up one of those finally at Christmas, hoping to enjoy it during the break.  It was written by one of my favorite authors--the kind of author that motivates me by the sheer awesomeness of her writing to always have her newest upcoming book on pre-order months in advance.  This author has the added distinction in my mind of also being an award-winning author.  One of her books has just been made into a movie, and she publishes one to two new books each year.  This one was the next stand-alone book in a series that I had been enjoying for some time.  The first book in the series, in fact, is one of my favorites.  Unfortunately, the latest book became an illustration of a point that I have read several times in books about writing or heard at conferences and workshops.

The point of view character should always be the person in the scene with the highest stakes in the outcome of that scene.  

Now there are, like all other writing rules put forth by major authors who would never like to read another book that doesn't live up to their own personal set of preferences, exceptions to this rule.  Murder Mysteries would not be very mysterious if the POV character was the person with the highest stakes--this usually being the person who committed the crime.  Many books are written with only one POV character, who is, on occasion, not the only character in an involved and complicated story with high stakes and therefore will occasionally be briefly witness to events where other characters have a greater stake in the outcome.  Still, the reason for this rule that needs to be understood in order for you to break is successfully (letter vs. spirit of the law, so to speak) is that it is hard for the reader to retain interest in a story when they are not as intimately involved.  Being in the head of a person who is less interested in the outcome creates emotional distance.  

This is why gimmicky retellings of famous books sometimes fall flat. This is also why some sequels--told from another point of view--just don't work.  Readers want to be in the heads of favorite characters, watching with them and emotionally reacting with them as events unfold.

Which brings me back to the book I read over Christmas.  It was the fourth in the series.  Each of the previous books was a stand-alone story.  Each of the two previous sequels used some of the main characters from the other books.  Their involvement, though, was somewhat limited.

The fourth book started out being exclusively about the POV character, and it was a compelling introduction.  The author is, in my mind, one of the best authors publishing stories today about teens and young adults--she can really, really get in their heads.  By a few pages in, I was hooked.  I cared.  I worried.  I wanted to know more.  Then the character moved on to The Big Adventure, and that was when the problems started.  The POV character was introduced to some of the other characters from the other books and then they hit the road. 

The main problem that I had with the story was that the stakes in The Big Adventure were highest for the non-POV characters.  Other people reading the same story may disagree but the stakes the way I saw them were teen-angsty stuff  vs. dead loved ones, possibly dead fiancee, seriously injured husband, kidnapped son (a toddler), etc.  The POV character's stakes were coming-of-age issues--who am I?  Where do I fit in?  How can I use my talents to help out here?  What if everyone out there knows that I am sometimes tempted to do bad things?  Will they still like me?  The other characters had literally life and death dilemmas involving the people closest to them.  The POV character mostly tagged along and was witness to the events centered around the others.  At one point toward the end, the POV character finally had equal stakes involving her brother, but it was but for a moment, which almost felt like a tease when it was over.

The problem with this as a reader is that for 2/3 of the book, I felt distant, barely involved emotionally.  I struggled to care.  I knew that I should care--but it had been years since I had read the books about the other characters from their POV, so I had to rely on this new POV character. However, she couldn't care as much as I needed her to because she was a stranger to the others.  She cared the way you would about anyone you were beginning to be friends with, but not more.  And because she couldn't, I couldn't. 

Lesson Learned:  Don't ever write a story entirely from the POV of what would normally be a secondary character.  If you want to write a story from the POV of a new character, give him or her equal if not greater stakes than the other characters, at least most of the time.  As much as those coming-of-age things seem like the biggest deal in the universe when you are going through them, kidnappings, murders, attempted and threatened murders of loved ones of other characters are obviously more important.  If those things are in your story, we need to see those bits from the POV of the character to whom those things are happening.  Seriously.

Have you ever read a story where you felt emotionally distant from the major events of the story?  How would you have re-written that story if you had the chance to?

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Partials & Cliffhangers

When I looked in my email box this morning, I was happy to discover that an agent was interested in seeing the first 5-10 pages of my manuscript for "The Story of After."  I sent the first ten because at the ten page mark, Florian introduces the idea behind the title.  It was a good stopping point, I thought, and I hope that ending the submission there will make the agent curious enough to ask for a bit more--or even the entire manuscript.  We will see.  My main goal (to keep the stress level down) is to simply keep enough query letters out there that the ms is "always out," as one of my Boot Camp pals suggested.  I will be sending out another query letter this week (there's also another to which I have not had a reply yet), so that less rides on the outcome of the request for a partial.  In the mean time, more revisions.

It seems like it should be fairly obvious where to end a story.  A story ends when you have fulfilled the promise/question/mystery/or some such thing that was set out at the beginning.  Luke destroys the Death Star and saves the princess who was captured in the opening sequence.  Harry Potter finishes off Lord Voldemort.  Lucy and her siblings return to our world after the end of each adventure.  Evil is vanquished.  Lost objects are found.  Kings and queens are crowned.  The murderer is hauled off to jail.  Love conquers all. 

When I first became interested in books, I was fairly ignorant of the concept of the cliffhanger.  Most books written for younger children don't employ the device.  I think that the first time I became seriously aware of issue was I saw "The Empire Strikes Back" as a young teen.  The entire audience audibly groaned when the end credits ran.  Nothing was more frustrating than being left hanging for years while George Lucas put together the final movie in the trilogy.  More movies have left me hanging since then, usually between installments two and three.  There are three reasons, however, that his is less of an issue with movies than with books, at least as far as I am concerned.  First, many of the movies in question, such as "The Lord of the Rings," are based on books, for which the ending is already known or available in as little as a few days of reading.  Second, if you do have to actually wait for the next installment, it is fairly easy to get up to speed with a two to four hour review of the previous movies.  (Well, Harry Potter became a marathon, but you can still see all of the movies over a weekend if need be, and besides, the endings are still in book form.)  Third, and perhaps most importantly, in recent years, movies with cliffhanger endings are part of a planned two to three part set filmed either concurrently or nearly back-to-back such that the movies come out half a year to a year apart.


Cliffhanger endings in books, however, are a huge problem for me.  First, books are usually far more detailed than movies.  Secondary plot lines and characters are easily forgotten in the intervening year/years, necessitating a complete rereading of the previous book/books to get back up to speed, which cannot happen in the few hours it takes to see a movie.  Second, and most importantly as both a reader and a writer, a cliffhanger ending feels like a cheat.  Not to put too fine a point on it, but aside from epics, there really is no need to leave a reader dangling by tacking on an extra chapter or two to introduce new material after the main story is wrapped up.  Even with epics, though, it shouldn't be that much of a stretch to find a stopping point that ends the story at an obvious break in the action.  The Harry Potter books, for example, ended at the end of the school year, and except between books six and seven, wrapped up the majority of the plot threads at the end of each book.  Obviously, there was more to the story each time, but for now at least, Harry was going back to Privet Drive and the adventures were over.

There seems to be a upsetting trend of late, though, that has me reading more and more books where the ending actually leaves the reader dangling.  Really dangling.  Two books that I read in the last decade actually ended with one of the principle characters in mortal danger--and these were both first books in trilogies that were not advertised as such when I picked them up at the local bookstore.  One of those trilogies actually took nearly a decade to finally get finished. 

I have tried to get around this trend by waiting until an entire trilogy was out to begin reading it at all, but I have been burned there, too.  Some trilogies turn out to be four or five books (again, not advertised as such when the first few come out). 

I have decided that this is a marketing ploy--and a very annoying one at that.  And frankly, it should be entirely unnecessary.  Leaving your readers eager for more does not mean tricking them by adding additional material onto the end of a completed story.  Many popular, classical, and award winning trilogies and series have not employed this device to lure readers back because it is unnecessary.  Susan Cooper's "The Dark is Rising" books, C.S. Lewis's Narnia books, and Laura Ingalls Wilder's "Little House" books are good examples of books that didn't need to trick the readers to get them back to the bookstore for the next installment.  Each one is a complete, stand-alone story.  Each one, however, is so engaging that it makes the reader want to go back and revisit that world another time.

I'm not going to disclose the titles that have caused such ire, for I imagine that you can think of a few all by yourselves.  Suffice it to say, though, that if the trend continues, an unintended consequence might be is that more readers like myself will wait longer and longer to try out new books for fear of getting burned. 

What are your pet peeves with books?

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Still Revising

The Wise Reader, my dear sweetheart, finally finished his read-through of what I thought was my final draft (pending revisions upon publication) of "The Story of After."  His conclusions:  the curse was interesting, the plot twists were even more interesting, the relationships were realistic and deep, the romance was tolerable (for a guy), but the ending, while mostly satisfying, lacked something... something which I am going to fix today. 

I have blogged about the importance of endings before,  but it's well worth the blog space to mention again that no matter how amazing the rest of your story is, if the ending falls flat, fails to wrap up loose ends, or doesn't deliver on a promise that you gave the reader at the beginning, the huge feeling of dissatisfaction is primarily what a reader will remember.

 The problem that my husband had with the ending, had to do with the fact that he felt like he was given a promise at the beginning of the book that I hadn't realized that I gave.  I thought I had given a promise to keep Izabella alive, help her end the curse, and give her a deep and abiding love, which are the bits of the story that are either universal or have a more female bent.  Apparently, I had also promised to let the readers get some measure of satisfaction in seeing her abusive father get his due.  Being a good husband and father (to two daughters that he's very protective of), Ryan was a little disappointed that that bit of the story happened off-stage and was only reported on later.  He made his case very well, I thought, and I will be revising that this afternoon. 

I am hoping that I can create the perfecting ending for the Izabella's story. 

What stories do you think have perfect endings?

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What I'm Reading -- The Hourglass Door, The Golden Spiral





Time travel, heroes who can speak Italian, and a delicious romance wrapped up in a fantastical mystery--what's not to love?  My only quibble--neither book is completely a stand alone story.  I have never been a big fan of the current trend in trilogies (or series) to have cliffhanger endings.  Nothing is more irritating than to discover that the book you are reading doesn't end at, well... the end.  Lisa Mangum writes such an engaging story, though, that I have no doubt that it will be worth the wait when the third book finally does come out. 

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More on Query Letters--Following the Rules

I was a rule follower in school--just ask the two guy friends who picked me up and hauled me off kicking and screaming away from my history teacher's doorway one morning late in my senior year of high school, so that they could make me tardy just the one time.  And this isn't just about how I was raised, either, with all due respect to my very excellent parents.  I can boast of several siblings who approached high school with the attitude that deadlines are for losers.  (Thank goodness they snapped out of that by college.)  This is just my personality.  While I am far from perfect, I just have no idea how to intentionally drop the ball.  Rules are rules.  If you can't meet a deadline, fulfill an assignment, or meet a commitment for whatever reason (and it better be a darn good one), it is your responsibility to make a phone call, make an apology, find a substitute for yourself, and/or make amends. 

So, you might ask, what does this have to do with query letters?  Have you ever tried to query an agent or a publisher?  Allow me to explain.

First, contrary to popular myths and legends, there is no industry standard for queries, anymore than there is a standard for auditions.  (I have been both a dance instructor and a choreographer in my time.)  One popular website for the industry suggests that you prepare a cover letter/query letter, a short and a long version of your story synopsis, and an outline to go along with your first 3-5 pages.  Formatting specifications that seem clear and reasonable to follow exist everywhere.  This should cover the basics that might be asked for, right?  Wrong.

Using a couple of different databases, recommendations from a few writer friends, and a couple of articles written by agents, I have assembled a list of forty-one agents and publishers who work not only with the genre I am querying in, but also a couple of other genres I am interested in working in down the road.  I've done my homework on each of these agents or editors.  Some, I've known about for years.  With others, I've spent considerable time on their websites, along with reading interviews and articles about them or their agencies.  Curiously, not a single pair of them has the same specifications on their website for query letters.  What are the odds?

One asked only for a one page query that could be sent by email, no attachments please.  Nice.  Straightforward.  I personalized a pitch in an hour and sent it out.  The next agent on the list wanted a query, a one page (only!) synopsis, and the first three pages of the ms.  Okay.  Time to cut that 1-2 page synopsis down a bit.  (Remember the standard "short" synopsis?)  Well, that only took a couple of hours, oh... and then another hour to personalize the query letter.  So far, so good.

Which brings me to my next query--this time for a publisher.  I needed a cover letter... in a font I've never heard of before (I kid you not.), a long synopsis (minimum five pages) and an outline.  This required that I turn my "long" synopsis, which was four pages, into something a little longer.  What else do I want to include that I left out of the four page version?  Three hours of scrolling through my ms later, I think I may have something resembling what the publisher wanted.  Now about that outline--which I was told should be 1-2 pages by this popular website, two different books, and a published author.  Apparently none of them consulted this publisher, who said that it should be no more than one page long.  Mine was a page and a half, and that was the super-abbreviated version.  It took two more hours to cut it down.  Bleh.  Are you starting to see where this is going?

There is not space here to cover all of the variations on a theme, still....  Some expected me to change the font to a 14-point, some had specifics about margins, two mentioned their own specific way of handling headers and footers, page numbering, etc.  The synopsis must be less than a page, 1-2 pages; no actually, it must be at least eight.  (Where does the magic number eight come from?)  Queries must be single spaced, double spaced, and no more than a page long, two is fine, or at least five because we want the synopsis included in the body of the query.  One publisher expects that all words needing emphasis in your ms be underlined, some were fine with either italics or underlining, and one insisted that only italics be used.  Outlines could be ABC/123 style, or must be paragraph style (isn't that a synopsis?), or numbers only... like a list.  My not-so-favorite instructions included words such as "short" and "long," which then necessitated some research to discover exactly what was meant by that. 

I was a history major and an English minor in college, so I've been there/screwed up that citation, while flipping back and forth between the MLA Handbook and the Chicago Manual of Style. 

I am a rule follower, so I follow the rules.  Sigh.

Does any of this really matter?  Seriously--is your query going to be tossed from the slush pile to the rubbish heap with nary a glance if the agent notices that you went two sentences over the one page limit on your synopsis or didn't use the 14 point font specified?  I don't know.  I suspect that many of them would just exhale, roll their eyeballs, and plow ahead anyway, but some would not.  Do you really want to take that chance? 

For those of you who cannot believe that such a thing would matter, let me give you an example.  Several years ago, I attended a "by audition only" writer's workshop.  Somehow, I managed to get in, in spite of the fact that instructions on the website regarding the audition piece were so vague that I spent two weeks fretting over what exactly was meant by "send in the first page ONLY."   You see, according to the "standard" way of formatting short stories, by the time you have put in your contact information, centered the title, and dropped down to begin your story, you barely have room to write the first paragraph and a half.  I was sure that this was incorrect because I couldn't imagine having my writing judged by a handful of sentences.  Still, the website didn't say if the "first page ONLY" meant the first page using standard formatting or a full page of actual story, and there was no contact information to clarify.  After pacing about and running the issue by a couple dozen friends, I finally decided that it would be better to send in too much than not enough.  Apparently, I was wrong, but it didn't prevent me from securing one of the handful of coveted seats by the side of famous author and instructor. 

For those of you now wrongly concluding that following the rules does not matter, let's fast forward to the day that we were given our formatting instructions for the story we were to write for the workshop.  In giving us our instructions, the author didn't mention one of the "standards," which left the lot of us sweating and fretting about it for a day afterward.  When it was time to print out our stories, eight of us ended up in the copy center debating the matter as though our entire careers hinged on pleasing this one person.  Several of my fellow writers were even afraid of contacting the author for clarification, fearing that it would look bad.  Eventually, half of of us decided to use the industry standard, ignoring the instructions, and the other half of us decided to follow the author's instructions to the letter.  Guess which half I was in? 

I was, unfortunately, the first writer--who followed the instructions to the letter--to have my story reviewed.  (Although frankly, if the author in question had flipped through the stack of manuscripts, the formatting confusion would have been obvious.)  I can still remember with absolute clarity the stillness in the room following the author's rant to me about my very unprofessional conduct--the angry glare and the blinking that suggested that at the very least, a groveling apology was in order.  As I tried to fill the silence by mumbling something like an explanation for what was apparently considered outrageous behavior on my part, my roommate piped up with, "a handout might have been helpful."  Yes.  It would have.  Good grief.  Even when you follow the rules, you can get dinged if it appears that you were ignoring them.  

Still, I am a rule follower.  And I think it says something about an author who wants to work in an industry where formatting, deadlines, and other sorts of rules can have a profound impact on printing, sales, and such that you are someone who has an iota of integrity, dignity, and respect for other people's feeling and needs.  


Remember that I mentioned that I was a sometime choreographer?  I passed on the best dancer once (community theater) for being a diva during the auditions.  I didn't think I had the energy to deal with that for three months.  I also nearly booted half a dozen giggly, talkative girls from the chorus for missing their cue some twenty times, over a few different nights of rehearsal.  I had decided by that point that it would be easier to change the choreography than deal with that nonsense any longer.  Only the intervention of the director and a couple of phone calls to parents, saved their positions.  Dancers that showed some respect not just for me, but for the rest of the cast, though, by coming on time, following the rules, working hard, and helping others got extra help, plum positions, and the hint of a promise of better casting during future productions--a promise nearly always followed through with.

One of my best dancers, who did follow the rules, went on to work as a writer for a well-known TV show.  What do you think of that?

Conclusions:  Follow the rules.  Act professional.  Take the time to do what you have been asked to do on a publisher's or agent's website.  You are auditioning for a job, and you are in no position to show anything less than the utmost courtesy to the person to whom you should grateful for, for taking the time to consider you for representation or publication. Yes, it can be hours of your time.  Yes, it can be frustrating.  Yes, it's enough to make a saint swear.  But can it make a difference?  Yes.

What do you do to maintain a professional image?

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