A cautionary tale for new writers

One of the more rewarding facets of being a published author is the opportunity to work with writers just beginning their trek through the fictional wilds. The experience has often been “déja vu all over again,” as I watch writers encounter the pitfalls of fiction writing--pitfalls that sometimes result in discouraging literary pratfalls and reject slips.
Many of these pitfalls are avoidable; so if you’re willing, Writer, I’d like us to don pith helmet and boots and explore some of these dire straits together.

Begin at the beginning
A writer’s problems often begin with the story title. Titles are devices of authorial torture that can determine whether a story is read, in what spirit it is read, and whether it is remembered by name or forgotten. They can be like store windows, offering a tantalizing glimpse of what’s inside, or they can give away the entire inventory. “The Monster Under the Staircase” is not a good title for a tale in which the appearance of said monster is supposed to be A Surprise.
Pop Quiz: “Forever Friends”--(a) rip-roaring space adventure with romance, intrigue, and empire-building, (b) inspirational tale alá Reader’s Digest, or (c) young adult novel about a close-knit group of friends? Believe it or not, the answer is (a), though the title would be more appropriate to (b) or (c).
How do you choose a good title for your story? I have to admit, a lot of my titles ‘just happen’--usually when the story idea is born. I try to devise titles that grow naturally out of the subject matter and capture the emotion at the heart of the story. For example, in “A Tear in the Mind’s Eye” (Analog, May 1993), the protagonist is dealing with manic depressive disorder. It seemed natural to use the aphorism “the mind’s eye” with an image so universally representative of sorrow.
Another way to approach titling is to take advantage of someone else’s eloquence by choosing a title with literary, historical or cultural allusions. I’ve done this often with titles such as, “Home is Where...”, “As the Angels in Heaven” and “If It Ain’t Broke....” A word of warning, though, try to choose references that will not date your story; what is a hot subject today may be forgotten five (or one hundred) years from now.
A play on words can also provide an interesting title. One of my stories about space-travelling archaeologist Rhys Llewellyn was entitled “Marsh Mallow”(Analog, February 1996). I chose it because the titular aliens lived in a marsh, where a plant by that name grows (at least on Earth) and because those aliens, in their natural habitat, resembled nothing so much as marshmallows floating in hot chocolate.
A title can be indicative of the story’s genre. A great many science fiction stories carry titles that hint at the science involved. My second sale to Analog was entitled “A Little Bit of an Eclipse,” alluding to a phenomenon played a pivotal role in the story.
Remember, a good title does more than declare your intention to tell a tale, it primes the reader’s imagination. A great title can make him see visions.

A cast of thousands
Pushing past the title, we arrive at another hazard: an overabundance of characters. In one manuscript--three chapters of which I critiqued for a writer’s workshop--there were witches, sorcerers, elves, dwarves, dragons, vampires, unicorns, scientists, and a giant, talking centipede.
A large cast can be used successfully, but only if each character is given a clearly distinguishable personality and role, and/or groups of characters inhabit different locales as they weave separate but complementary threads into the story. This isn’t easy, considering that the more characters a story contains, the less space you, Writer, will have to make them vivid.
Characters should walk onstage with purpose. That is to say, they should be there because they fill some important role in your story. I consider three essential elements when creating characters: function, weight, and balance.
Function simply refers to the character’s purpose--why he, she, or it is there. A protagonist’s function is to serve as your point of connection with the reader. The antagonist’s function is to balance the protagonist--to challenge and hinder him and to make him show his strengths and weaknesses. Ancillary characters may function as additional foils or allies for the protagonist as well as giving you a means of revealing character and plot through the protagonist’s interactions with them.
Some new writers create a bevy of ancillary characters to fulfill a variety of functions. One is the protagonist’s buddy, another is his love interest, yet another is someone for him to protect, or go to for solace. These characters possess an emotional weight that is determined by how vital to the protagonist they are and by how complex, interesting and real they are to the reader. Where the writer of the over-crowded saga had given his protagonist a flock of lightweight, mono-dimensional allies, he might have given her two or three fully realized, complex companions that would have carried far more emotional and narrative weight.
Balance is what you are trying to achieve by giving characters the appropriate function and weight. Characters that function as foils must balance the protagonist and vice versa, otherwise the reader will not believe the match-up. I have yet to cut a character from a story to achieve balance, but in my third novel, The Crystal Rose (Baen, 1995), I did allow a minor character to grow to the same function and weight as my protagonist’s major adversary, Daimhin Feich. (I phrase it this way because the character, Coineach Mor by name, was one of those “take charge” creations that seemed intent on determining her own fate.)
The problem this change of function and weight addressed was that the protagonist, Taminy a Cuinn, possessed powers that made her very hard to attack directly. Her foils had to be equal to the challenge she presented and at least one of them had to be a wild card--someone whose true capacities were unknown until the climax of the story.

If it’s Tuesday, this must be chaos
Often, a story that contains a plethora of characters contains too many quests, crises, and plot convolutions for a single tale. In the aforementioned manuscript, there was one major magical quest, numerous sub-quests, romance, physics, time travel--everything but the proverbial kitchen sink (although I’m convinced there was one in the seventy or so chapters I didn’t read).
By the time the reader gets to the fourth or fifth quest, she may have forgotten the purpose of the whole exercise. Worse, she may no longer care. The plot elements themselves may be interesting enough, and in much fiction--particularly fantasy--a larger quest often provides a natural context for subplots. Still, I’d advise a new writer to concentrate on the “vital few,” to borrow a term from quality management, so that the reader (and the writer) doesn’t become lost. While it’s easy to contain an entire short story in one’s head, it can be difficult or even impossible to so contain an entire novel. The more complexity you add to a novel, the harder containment is going to be--especially if the complexity is there just to give the characters something exciting to do.
Plot elements and events are easier to handle if (1) they are not allowed to multiply like cockroaches and (2) they flow logically from each other.
A natural question at this point is, “How do I know when a subplot is unnecessary?” One answer is yet another question: If you removed this subplot from the story, would it change the ultimate outcome or the reader’s perception of that outcome? If, as Edgar Allen Poe suggests, you can pull something out of your story without causing its collapse, it’s probably not necessary to the plot and may even interfere with the reader’s comprehension.
When I write stories that make use of subplots, I try to make sure I really make use of them, that they have a purpose and direction. For example, in “The Secret Life of Gods” (Analog, September 1995), the main narrative is about how a group of archaeologists, headed by protagonist Rhys Llewellyn’s mentor, are classifying and interpreting the ruins on an alien world--erroneously. The subplot involves Rhys in a struggle with that mentor’s monumental ego. This is an important element of the story because it creates conflict for Rhys (Can Dr. Burton really be wrong? Should I oppose him? Can I oppose him?), it raises the stakes for all the characters, it poses and answers questions about what kind of man Rhys is and ultimately shapes the story’s final resolution.
Subplots must contribute something more to a story than just more scenes to put more characters in. Like the musculature on a skeleton, they should be integral to the story’s movement. If your subplot fails the acid test (Can the story survive or even thrive without it?) remove it. As a bonus, you may find it also causes the demise of some extraneous characters.

My, my, how you’ve grown!
“Young” fiction, I know from experience, often suffers from excessive length, to which inflated prose is frequently a contributing factor. By inflated, I mean that too many words are devoted to recounting basic events.
It is a fact of fiction that description slows action. Here’s an example:

Adric entered the room. He curled his lip. The room was a study in slovenliness. There were empty ale tankards on the bedside table and a cloak had been thrown across it. There was a naked couple in the bed, nearly buried in clothes and blankets. Adric could tell he’d interrupted them at their pleasure. They now struggled to sit up. The man was big and broad and had yellow eyes and red hair. The wench was round and dark and fetching. The big man reached for his cloak to cover himself and hit a couple of the empty ale tankards that were on the table, sending them to the floor where they clattered as they struck it. Adric thought the man looked like a big, fat slug. His eyes widened as he realized the man had seven fingers on his left hand.
This scene needn’t be so (ahem) sluggish. Description can be used effectively without causing action to eddy.

On the filthy, rumpled bed, a naked couple struggled to sit up. Out of the wallow of clothing and blankets, the big man reared, glaring yellow-eyed at Adric through a tangle of red hair. Toppling empty ale tankards, he reached to the table for his cloak. Adric’s eyes followed his hand—fat, pale and seven﷓fingered. Slug, he thought.
#
Though it has less than half as many words, the reworked paragraph is more vivid, and it keeps the story in motion. The action doesn’t stop while Adric curls his lip in disgust at the sloppiness of the room.
One workshop manuscript I critiqued contained a scene in which several characters were trying to decide how to free a captured comrade. The rescue party discussed their escape plan for three pages. By the time they decided what they were going to do, I had forgotten why they were doing it. The entire discussion could have been covered in one sentence: “They huddled beneath the leaning rock spur, drawing up a plan of attack.”
Remember: The reader needn’t be party to every thought that goes through a character’s head, every word of a conversation or every detail involved in Our Hero’s flight across a cluttered room.
An overabundance of verbiage not only slows a story to a crawl, but it tends to obscure rather than clarify action and plot. It can also skew the relative importance of plot elements. If you give everything from a hangnail to the first appearance of the arch-villain equal verbal weight, the reader won’t know when you are telling her something Really Important.
Here is an old rule of thumb: If a sentence doesn’t advance the plot, illuminate character or motive, or clarify the action, consider deleting it or recrafting it until it does do one of those things.
I don’t think that means what you think it means
Moving further along on our perilous adventure, we come to a hazard far more common than it ought to be: the misuse of words. By that I mean a writer uses a word that is either flat-out wrong or just to the left of ‘right.’ Here’s an example: “A pillar standing directly adjacent to the hatchway bore a number of indentations in its surface, indentations which looked well-worn from age-old use by men of yore.”
Clear as mud. A hatchway is something usually found on a vessel. That the pillar is adjacent to it indicates they are side-by-side. There are indentations in the pillar; I pictured shallow depressions, possibly hieroglyphics. The purpose of these was a mystery until I read on: “Valliard put his hands to the indentations, and so climbed swiftly up and through the hatchway.” The hatchway was a trapdoor in the ceiling, the pillar wasn’t adjacent to it, it was beneath it; the indentations were handholds.
Let’s navigate that passage again: “A pillar descended from the ceiling next to the trapdoor, its surface marred by a series of age-worn hand-holds.” This is more concise, clearly describes the scene, and tells the reader that this secret entrance is old and much used.
A close personal friend of word abuse is having characters make inappropriate (and sometimes comical) responses to the things that befall them.
A character in one harrowing tale has this reaction to the cries of torture victims: “I wish I could do something about that,” he said crossly. The scene is memorable, but not for reasons that would please its writer. “Crossly” suggests petulant annoyance. It was clear from the context that this character was anguished by the suffering of the unfortunates, not annoyed at having to listen to their moans. Yet, petty annoyance is precisely what the modifier “crossly” suggests.
Clearly, it is the desire to make her prose more interesting than “he said, she said” that a new writer adopts inappropriate modifiers. This manifests itself in a writer’s disease called “said book-ism”--the chronic fear of using the verb “said.” We think “said” is boring, and that it is a Writer’s job to find ways around it. When we try really hard, it shows in phrases such as “he barked,” “she hissed,” “he sniffed.” The truth is that “said” is not boring unless the ideas, action, and dialogue around it are boring.
All of the foregoing distracts the reader. Wordy sentences force him to slow down or re﷓read passages to extract meaning. Misuse of words can cause prose hiccups. The reader pauses to try to gain understanding; the narrative is halted; the mood is broken; the sense of story is lost; the reader is distanced.

I feel, therefore, it seems, I am
Two often-used words that can also distance the reader from the action are “felt” and “seem.” Sometimes “felt” is fine. Other times it gives the reader emotion once removed. “He fell” or “he toppled” is stronger than “he felt himself falling.” Likewise, “seems” is sometimes the right word--a character may perceive something that is untrue . Viewing a sunset, one might say, “It seemed the horizon was on fire.” The horizon is not on fire; it only seems to be. On the other hand, if something is, it’s best to say so.

Roadmaps, the explorer’s companion
I believe there is nothing more instructive to young writers than reading--copiously, and in all genres. Read to learn; study what your favorite writers have done that makes their fiction work.
To hear the English language played like a harp, read Ray Bradbury, who sculpts some of the most beautiful, evocative, vivid sentences you will ever read in any genre or language. I especially recommend Something Wicked This Way Comes. For a study in developing sympathetic characters (even sympathetic villains”) read Dean Koontz, (Cold Fire and The Bad Place are good choices). In his “Long Sun” series, Gene Wolfe shows himself as a master craftsman of mysterious worlds and social orders. If you want to see how anything--even a house--can become a character in a story, read Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House or Anne Rivers Siddons The House Nextdoor.
I also recommend reading interviews with or articles written by successful writers. They can not only inspire you, but illustrate an important fact about writing and getting published: many successful writers had to hack their way through the same wilds you may find yourself lost in from time to time. The secret of finding the path out of the wilds has less to do with raw talent than with perseverance.
I have found no formulas that result in becoming a successful writer--and by successful, I mean not merely getting published, but growing creatively and making writing a part of your life that gives you great satisfaction and even joy. I will however, pass along some sage advice from the late science fiction writer Robert Heinlein, who proposed that there were two basic rules you must observe if you wish to call yourself a writer.
1. You must write.
2. You must finish what you write.
That, if I may paraphrase the Prophet Moses, is the entire law. All the rest is commentary.

(Sidebar:)
Write short fiction. Learn how to work with an economy of words. When I picked up my first Analog magazine and saw the length of the stories in it, I was depressed. I was absolutely sure I couldn’t write a short story. It took a challenge from my husband and my strong Slavic will to break the 2,000-word barrier. I never sold that 2,000-word story, but I did sell the first story I sent to Analog. It was a 19,500-word novella. Since then I’ve written (and sold) stories as short as 3,500 words and as long as 40,000.
“But,” you might say, crossly, “I want to write Novels!” Ah, but the rewards of writing short fiction should not be underestimated. First, you get more immediate satisfaction. You not only get to type the last word sooner, but you’ll see yourself in print sooner, as well. If you sell your short works, you will be developing both a track record and a following, which will stand you in good stead when you take steps toward finding an agent or a publisher.
Best of all, writing short fiction can help you learn discipline and craft--both of which are necessary to becoming a published author and, better yet, a good writer.