The Problem with Safe

Carl Jung once said, “A man who has not passed through the inferno of his passions has never overcome them,” and in no endeavor does that apply more than in writing. As an independent editor, I review many manuscripts by first-timers. I have different categories for them—limited writing, sloppy writing, formulaic writing—but the most disheartening is safe writing. Lest anyone think I’m being judgmental, I’ll relate a comment my best friend once told me about my own writing: “You’ll never be good until you let yourself go.” A few years after that, I gave up writing and became an editor.

I have long thought the three main ingredients of writing are talent, heart, and stamina. The first is vitally important, for two people can write about the same subject with wildly different impacts. I have been blessed to witness so many elegant turns of phrase, even in books that were mainly pedestrian. Yet clarity and/or deftness is more akin to sleight of hand than penetration. A financed education alone can yield pearls from swine.

Heart is a more elusive driver of prose. Childhood poverty, whether caused by want or mayhem, and frequently both, has often proven the dictim about a rich man and the needle’s eye to heaven. The bereft among us have a stronger desire to shake off their demons. Yet unbridled passion is no predictor of writing greatness, since it is more likely evinced in motorcycle revs than art. Nor does letting go necessarily confer an entwined wreath, or heroin would be a writing elixir.

Neither of the two qualities above means much without persevering through the many hours spent alone with words. No one is chaining you to your desk, and if you don’t write for a week, no one will notice. Self-discipline is a great quality to have, but over the long run I believe the compulsion to write is fed by the heart. If you don’t have a need to communicate to others through writing, you may write one book and then find the second one just won’t come.

How willing are you to face dark swings of your heart that may alienate your lover, your family, your co-workers? Can you honestly say you have so much writing talent that taking the plunge is worth it? And consider this: most writers ride on tides of greatness. They may produce only one book that stirs the hearts of readers and critics. Yet if you turn away from chaos, even that one book is out of reach.

Exercise: For this post, I will label this as: Advice. If you want to make a go, give it five years. That happens most commonly with people who have just graduated from college. Only after such a long stretch of time, while watching everyone you know start making progress with their careers, will you be able to make an honest assessment. Are you linking up with your soul or your ego?

“Cheat your landlord if you can and must, but do not try to shortchange the Muse. It cannot be done. You can’t fake quality any more than you can fake a good meal.”  —William S. Burroughs

Copyright @ 2025 John Paine. All rights reserved.

How Much Should Be Carried Over?

Most authors writing a series are aware that each of the books must stand on their own. That means a new plot and new characters, since the one usually requires the other. Yet a series does feature the same protagonist and often a core cast of characters. They all have rich backgrounds once the first book is written. So what is the dividing line between starting a new book from scratch and borrowing too much from a past book?

A first guideline is: use narrative summaries. You shouldn’t be borrowing parts of scenes from a previous book. Anyone who read that book will experience deja vu—didn’t I already read this stuff? No one likes to read repeated material, even if they haven’t read a book in a while.

When you use narrative summaries, you can then follow a second guideline. Write out any background information from a previous book in the same way you would write background info for a new character. You write a paragraph or two, maintaining a narrative distance because you’re trying to get through the material quickly. If you have backgrounds for multiple characters in a core cast, you can drop in the compressed back stories at opportune times for each (that is, not all stuffed in one place). That’s the way you would do it if you were starting off fresh.

There is an additional consideration. What if the first book is not picked up by an agent or doesn’t sell to a publisher? You may need to be flexible. The second book you write may end up being the one that sells first. All that time you lavished on background material for the second book now has to be tossed. You have to write new material to insert in what you thought was the first book. How much time do you want to spend on stuff that is not moving the story forward?

That leads to a third guideline: write the narrative summaries as though they would fit for any book in the series. That means in particular that you shy away from referring to specific events in a previous book. If you feel that the character’s history must contain them, leave a few sentences in that paragraph(s) blank. That way you can fill in the events once you know in which order the books will appear in the store.

That last point touches upon a very common problem with writing sequels. You can be trapped by what happened in a previous book, to the point that you get stuck and can’t devise new plot events for the new book. Forget what happened. Just remember how the characters related to each other. That’s all the series reader will remember, anyway.

“The first man to compare the cheeks of a young woman to a rose was obviously a poet; the first to repeat it was possibly an idiot.”
—Salvador Dali

Copyright @ 2024 John Paine. All rights reserved.

Interested in Good

It is a curious phenomenon, considering that most authors are decent, law-abiding citizens, that so many imbue their evil characters with more brio than their good ones. I’ll be reading through a string of decent scenes about the good guys interacting when pow! I reach this scene filled with psychopathic swagger. The writing is so intense, so alluring that I’m left thinking, “Boy, the author really loves writing about the villain.”

The question then becomes: why can’t this be done for the hero? I understand the basic stumbling block. Good isn’t as interesting as evil. Yet if the one is to triumph over the other in the end, the shining knight must be able to hold the reader’s attention somehow.

Luckily, good and evil are not absolute categories. A person may perform a minor act of evil, such as not stopping his car to let pedestrians use the crosswalk, merely by being too lazy. He may witness a black person at work being insulted but not say anything, taking the easy route of fitting in. Eating chocolate cake while on a diet can be regarded evil.

This ambivalence allows an author more freedom of scope. While the protagonist is aimed in a good direction, she can be given vexing personal issues in which good and evil are relative. I’ll use a common example and run with it, to show its possible complexity (i.e., ability to grip the reader). Let’s take an alcoholic partner. What do you do to stop a loved one from drinking to excess? You have to get along with the person, so you can’t hound him every night. If you do, you’ll get blasted, and to some degree, he’s got a right to fire off. Who likes to be nagged all the time? If you dislike it so much, why don’t you walk out the door?

That opens the avenue to background stories in which you can show how the heroine fell in love with the partner. In the future direction, it provides a way for the plot line to build, because of course you want to show greater and greater excess. Maybe the end isn’t a seven-car pile-up, but the ongoing clash is going to produce some bang-up result.

The protagonist isn’t evil, but fighting evil contains its own complications. If one method doesn’t work, you try another. The more things don’t work, the more force is applied. And then . . . where is the line between good and evil?

Exercise: We all have riveting experiences about which we can write with passion. Choose one in your personal life that has been echoing in your mind for years. Identify the issue and then think how it could be reshaped to fit your hero. Work out a skein of 7-8 subplot scenes in which the problem escalates step by step. Is it ever resolved at all?

“It is not true that good can only follow from good and evil only from evil, but that often the opposite is true.”
—Max Weber

Copyright @ 2025, John Paine

Switching Up

The narrative approach to writing a novel varies according to how much a character influences the interpretation of events. On one end of the specrum lies the action-oriented tale, in which too much introspection gets in the way of the unfolding plot. On the other is the character-driven book, in which action is the occasional byproduct of thoughts. (I’ll leave aside experimental approaches in this discussion.)

A spectrum means that a book can lie anywhere along the arc from one pole to the other. That means no one except the most steely-eyed critic can tell what proportion of each a book contains. A number of critics pooh-pooh commercial novels, but the good ones have extremely well-drawn characters leading the charge. Just read any novel by Stephen King, among many others, and tell me characters don’t matter to them.

Because narrative approach is so variable, less experienced writers can be forgiven for not knowing what side of the line they’re on. Does this scene feature  more action or character interpretation of the action? Many scenes seem to have both. So that leads to other thorny questions like: should I have dialogue in an introspective scene? When is a past memory so filtered by a character’s view of it that the narrative no longer shows the event but tells about it?

When faced with such imponderable subjects, the author’s approach may vary according to mood and circumstance. If the scene contains an act of violence, and you become angry while writing it—damn right there’s a pool of blood!—the tone may be more action-oriented than the preceding quiet scene. It may be that the approach varies because writing a novel takes most people such a long time. How you were writing about the characters six months ago may not be how you’re writing about them now.

When you review the draft after completing it, you may despair about the swings in the narrative. How do the good writers achieve such consistency in tone? One guideline that may prove helpful is asking yourself: what is the tide in my book building toward? If you want the book to remain fairly flat, the choice is easy. That points toward a character-driven novel. If you want, however, a dramatic turning point that changes the protagonist’s life forever, that poses a tougher question. The gauge then becomes: how much do external forces create the change?

If those forces involve murder or the like, and you write a number of action scenes that portray it, that’s not a character-driven novel. If the murder occurs amid a fugue of internal thoughts, the thoughts are getting in the way of the action. You just need to remain true to the tone you set earlier.

Exercise: Review the book scene by scene. At the end of each one, make a rough decision: internally told or externally focused. By the time you get to the halfway point in the book, you’ll be able to determine how you want to pursue the second half.

“I'd buy myself a cabin on the beach, I'd put some glue in my navel, and I'd stick a flag in there. Then I'd wait to see which way the wind was blowing.”
—Albert Camus

Copyright @ 2024, John Paine

Swallowing a Loss

From the grand mishmash of story threads that weave through a writer’s mind while writing a novel emerges a structure that channels these different impulses. While not every piece needs to correspond to the whole, the author needs to be wary of any tangent of significant length. That happens for various reasons, and a common one is: what is left over from a previous draft.

For the purpose of illustration, perhaps the thread metaphor should be colorized. I do that with plot charts during editing. Each major character is assigned a color so that, at a glance, I can tell when one of them has been neglected for a long time. You can also assign a color to certain character pairings: the protagonist-antagonist, protagonist-friend 1, protagonist-friend 2, etc. That way you can track how relationships build.

With such a tool in hand, you can better judge how pieces from an old draft have survived. Seeing the forest for the trees is important in this regard. If you decided after reading over a draft that you needed to add more scenes with a bereaved widow, you need to judge how episodic the new additions are. If she appears only after 40-, 60-, or 80-page gaps at a time, you know the reader isn’t going to care much about her grief. It hardly ever shows up in the book. That raises a knock-on question: what scenes are still those blocks of text in between her appearances?

The reason I am pointing this out is that, in my experience, authors are more willing to add new material than they are to cut existing stuff. Both are required if you’re trying to make a shift in a plot or character direction. Let’s say that the original judgment was: the story spends too much time on the widow’s life before her husband’s death. The scenes set in the past are too much of a drag on the present-day story.

The new scenes of grief are written to push the book forward into the future. Yet if you make only faint-hearted attempts to pare down those past-marriage scenes, that remaining growth is choking out your new shoots. You have to clear more of the ground.

If you assign colors, you will see that very clearly. If the scenes with both wife and husband are red, how many of them still appear in your chart? The new scenes might be purple: the wife post-death with her daughter, say. Let’s add another decision you made: what happens between them will determine whether the wife kills herself in the ending. How well have you, the author, moved on?

Exercise: Vividness in storytelling counts. A full scene in the present contains dialogue, thoughts in the moment, etc. You can truncate those scenes you want to cut down by eliminating almost all dialogue and thoughts. Summarize them instead. Your scenes will be shorter, and they will have a more distant narrative tone.

“Put down everything that comes into your head and then you're a writer. But an author is one who can judge his own stuff's worth, without pity, and destroy most of it.” —Colette

Copyright @ 2024 John Paine. All rights reserved.








 

All in the Series

One way to get published is to write a series featuring the same core cast of characters. The principle works the same as in a TV series. A reader is entranced by certain characters and enjoys watching the different permutations you put them through in successive books. As an author, a series offers some distinct advantages. You do not have to invent a new protagonist, the most difficult task in fiction writing. You also will have a pretty good handle on a handful of characters. Such in-depth knowledge of an ensemble helps make them stand out as individuals.

Yet several pitfalls await the uncritical author. The most serious lies in your assuming, because you know the characters from the last book so well, that the reader does too. Most series are not numbered, so the person picking up the book may know nothing about the earlier books. Even if a reader has read the previous book, that may have occurred awhile ago. They may remember vaguely how much they liked a certain hero, but you have to go through the same introductory steps to remind them of the essential characteristics that make the character stand out. The protagonist still has to dazzle early on to pull the reader into the book.

As for the supporting cast, laying out the basic lines of relationships is even more important. You don’t have to be as exhaustive as the first time around, but you better not plunge us into the middle of an exciting scene and assume that we know how everyone is going to react.  

The second major danger falls under the “cast of thousands” listing. When you are getting started with a new book, still not sure of the direction it is going to take, you can find yourself meandering about, checking in with delightful characters who appeared in previous books rather than focusing only on those characters who will be lead players in the present book.

The imperative to push a novel forward in the early going applies to every book you write. The only way that can happen is if you choose one clear plot line that pushes the story forward. Gabbing with a bunch of past inmates in your asylum isn’t doing that. What matters is this book. You have a responsibility to the (possibly new) reader who paid the sticker price for this book.

Exercise: Be ruthlessly honest with yourself in this regard. Review the first 5-10 chapters, looking merely at the way you are setting up the characters. Did you provide enough of an initial description of the main character for a fresh reader to be captivated? Draw up a chart that lists a one-line synopsis for each scene. Do you find that the hero is merely sitting around chatting with past friends rather than plunging into a fresh crisis? Screw the friends, or drop them into the book later. You have a new readership to entertain. Get to work.

“If you would understand anything, observe its beginning and its development.” ―Aristotle

Copyright @ 2024, John Paine

The Best Blinders

We live on a planet inhabited by billions of people, but we block out almost all of them out as we proceed through our daily lives. So why don’t authors assume their characters do the same thing inside their imaginary worlds? Perhaps the reason is that authors are also creators of the worlds; they have a responsibility to care for all elements of their big garden (of anti-Eden, hopefully). In our real lives, we know the world is composed of massive agglomerations of past human mistakes, and we sensibly ignore as much of the mess as possible.

The reason for taking this skewed perspective on fiction is to spur a more blindered approach in crafting good characters. An entire world cataclysm may be happening around your chosen lead character, but what is she pursuing? Unless she is Wonder Woman, she is tending to the care of those immediately around her.

Let’s take as an example the terrible hurricanes that have become so frequent. Are you, as the author, rushing from here to there to capture snippets of all the awful things that high wind and rain can wreak? Or are you focusing on one grandmother’s cottage in your hero’s backyard flattened by a palm tree?

Put like that, the answer seems obvious. So why is it that so many novels spend so much time metaphorically rushing from here to there? Everyone knows the warning, “Don’t spread yourself too thin,” but that applies to characters as well. All of the characters are thin because they are only inhabitants of a large construct. As opposed to: they are the only reason for creating the construct.

One person, looking outward at a world that seems determined to mess up her day. That is a useful place to start a novel. In the case of a hurricane, to extend that example, what does the character know about hurricanes before it strikes? Some old tale from the fall of ’39, no doubt, told by her grandmother. Write that scene. Maybe more current news of storms during the age of global warming, related by her husband, who knows incidental facts about everything. How does she react to that, given she realizes her husband is a know-it-all? Of course, anyone who has ever experienced a hurricane knows that it creates havoc beyond your worst imaginings. What pieces of it does she see? How does she deal with those she loves that have been ruined in the aftermath? Now, as a reader, I’m riveted by what’s happening in that little corner of the world.

Exercise: If you find your novel has sprawled outward to cover too many characters and events, stop and count to five. You will allow yourself to cover only five points of view of the events. Now, choose who you like the best. Double the number of his scenes. Pretty soon you’ll be narrating true human drama.

“I'll tell you what hermits realize. If you go off into a far, far forest and get very quiet, you'll come to understand that you're connected with everything.”  —Alan Watts

Copyright @ 2024, John Paine

Less Back and Forth

One common issue in story structure concerns the balance between the ongoing story and the background pieces that fill out the characters’ past. Since authors tend to insert background work early in a novel, the problem is made more acute. So much time can be spent in the past that the present-day plot never has a chance to generate the momentum needed to pull the reader through the book.

While the imbalance can be be addressed partially by paring back the background stories, I find as an editor that most of it is worthy of inclusion. It is important to make characters as distinct as possible, and limning their childhood, for instance, is a solid way to do that. So how can these two imperatives work in better harmony?

A first step is reviewing the background pieces, especially entire chapters. How many do you have? Using a rough count, add up the number of pages devoted to background as well.  Then count the number of present-day chapters during that same early stretch, along with its aggregate number of pages.

If the count is roughly equal, one method of lessening the drag of background pieces is seeing if you can combine them to create fewer of them. This is particularly effective if you are trading back and forth, one for one, between present and background chapters. When you make longer chapters by ganging them up, you are jerking the reader back into the past fewer times.

That raises a new issue, of course. Aren’t I creating more emphasis on the past by allowing the reader to dwell there longer? That can be addressed by several strategies. First, increase the length of your present-day chapters, ganging them up if necessary, in order to maintain a preponderance on that side. Because you generate more tension in chapters in which readers don’t know the outcome, you can create stronger momentum in the present-day chapters by making sure they end on a tense note that the reader wants to see resolved. You leave them hanging, in other words. When you create a tense chapter ending, the reader will have a strong desire to return to the present.

Once you have done that, return to the background pieces with an eye toward cutting them down. You’ll find that the background chapters want to be more compressed, not covering a flashback second by second, because you know the reader is waiting for you to get back to the good stuff in the present.

Exercise: An efficient way to parcel out background information is use a ladder theory. That is, who is highest on your ladder in terms of importance? They should get the greatest volume of background work early on. If you have stories about supporting characters, they can be pushed back later in the book. Just look for stretches where their roles in the present become more important.

“The past is always tense, the future perfect.”
― Zadie Smith

Copyright @ 2024 John Paine. All rights reserved.

Uncomplicated

While hiding one’s feelings helps in real life, such as during a domestic negotiation, it defeats what you are trying to do as a writer: connect with your readers. If they do not know how a character reacts to an obstacle, such as a fight with a partner, they are not allowed to participate vicariously. Instead, they are kept at arm’s length.

A routine element of my editing practice is writing suggestions to insert what a character is feeling at a given point in the manuscript. The responses, which I read in the next draft, reveal a great deal about how guarded the author is about revealing emotions in general. When I pen 100 or more of these suggestions, which is quite common, an author’s natural tendency to shield himself can reach neurotic proportions.

Writing down feelings in the first-person narrative voice can help, but only if you use the immediacy of the voice to be direct. Let’s say a wife upbraids her successful husband about a secret he has been hiding. How does he react? Here is one response: “I always wanted the warm fuzzy stuff from her, and now here I am being challenged to meet the most threatening pieces of my life.” The language is down to earth, but the author is being too fancy. Do you know any wives that are “warm and fuzzy”? And what are pieces of a person’s life? Lay it on the line, with a variant like: “She was always so docile—that’s why I married her—and now she was threatening to expose me.” Now the reader can feel worried.

Another trap I see commonly is naming the emotion. “I had no clue about the fragility she imposed on me until I felt it.” You might think at first that the sentence is awkwardly constructed, but in fact the problem is using the abstraction “fragility.” When a person is feeling fragile, she is about to scream, have a nervous breakdown, break down in tears, etc. Emotions surge forward from the primitive part of our brain, and primitives, I imagine, spoke plainly.

The same logic applies to loading up a sentence. Often a promising start is made, but then the author feels he must pile on to make the emotion authentic. That’s why a sentence like “My frightened distraction about being discovered overrode being embarrassed” doesn’t work. Sticking all those big words in the same sentence puts up a veil between me and the character. Break it into two simple sentences—using “discovered” and “embarrassed” as the verbs.

Exercise: Literary really means: more honest. If you want to describe how a person feels during a domestic fight, remember a fight you once had. It didn’t have to be with your spouse; a parent will suffice. Remember what you said, or better yet, what you wished you had said when you relived it afterward. If the emotions sting, or burn, you’re on the right track.

“It's in literature that true life can be found. It's under the mask of fiction that you can tell the truth.” —Gao Xingjian

Copyright @ 2024, John Paine

 




 

Too Much Speculation

Dystopian fiction proposes a number of futuristic scenarios that are grim and gripping by turns. As an follower of coming trends, I am fascinated by the logical extrapolations that these authors make. What would happen if Google glasses were changed to a chip that was implanted inside someone’s head? What if virtual reality games were sold as vacations? These and myriad other examples of technology gone wild place the reader in a context that is unfamiliar only to a degree.

In terms of story structure, I regard these hypothetical devices as background material, akin to research. That may seem like quite a downgrade in status, considering all of the imagination that goes into devising and then integrating the speculative technology into the lives of the book’s inhabitants. Yet consider the issue from this point of view. No matter how dynamic a futuristic tech device is, the reader will not become actively engaged unless a character uses it.

That is why an author needs to be careful about how much tech they front-load in a novel. A reader opens the story looking for a story line, above all. You can throw out as many jaw-dropping concoctions as you like, but if your main character does not have a crisis to confront, I might as well be reading a tech e-zine. After a certain time your reader, realizing that the novel is filled with furniture but no soul, will give up.

The word vicarious is useful in this case. Yes, as a reader I do want to go on a virtual journey. I want to participate vicariously. But unless I identify with a character, realizing that their struggles are not so different from my own, taking the trip is an intellectual exercise devoid of emotion.

The dystopian author’s problem is the same faced by writers of historical fiction. A reader does want to inhabit the time period of long ago, but if all I’m getting is material like how a crinoline skirt was filled out, I’m going to quit. I could read that in a history book. You need characters first, top of the list. Get us engaged with them, and then bring on all those terrific ideas.

Exercise: Read through the first 50 pages of the manuscript. That’s when the sale of a book is made. How much of the material is devoted to explanations of devices? Is anyone in danger because someone is using them? Does the reader understand, from the main character’s point of view, why you started the book where you did?

“Dreams have only one owner at a time. That’s why dreamers are lonely.”
― William Faulkner

Copyright @ 2024, John Paine

Motivation, Not Motivational

Certain types of novels, such as those in the inspirational or sports categories, have a bent toward moral instruction. That’s because we all can be better than we are. We know that, and as a result we enjoy reading about characters who reach heights they never thought they could attain. 

Anyone who reads widely, however, tends to react negatively to motivational dogma. The message is true, granted, but we have read or heard the same thing so many times, we shut down out of boredom. It’s not enough to fill only the heart.

You probably aren’t going to discover any new words of wisdom that haven’t been used by a legion of past writers. The Bible, for example, is pored over by thousands of ministers for every Sunday’s sermon. One reason philosophy isn’t a hot topic these days is because so many incredibly smart people have already tried to explain human existence. 

So, how do you write such a tale without reaching for well-worn platitudes? You can start by picking a distinctive concept. An inspirational author I have edited for years combs news articles to come up with new ideas for her novels. She seizes upon a topic like borderline personality disorder and then asks herself: how does a self-destructive woman find a way to hope? Once you discover a unique prism through which to view familiar subject matter, the hoary can become fresh.  

Along with a new concept must come unusual characters or an unusual mix of characters. A hero who knows what’s right but keeps doing wrong is more compelling than an acolyte who absorbs wisdom like a sponge. A heroine who keeps being talked into partying by a friend she knows is leading her down the wrong path is more fun to read about than a repressed loner who keeps hearing the same advice from a careerist friend. When you add nuances—trying but falling—you create a character that reminds readers of their own well-intentioned failures. That’s putting the reader in the lead character’s shoes. 

The same is true of the villain(s). If all he does is scheme about killing everyone in the world—the chuckling devil incarnate—you might as well be writing about Batman and Robin. If the lead villain is conflicted, though—perhaps a woman who actually liked dating the hero before she cheated on him—now she has a chance at redemption because she’s not all bad. I can root for that, even if she ends up cleaning out all of his bank accounts in the end. 

Exercise: Look through your notes for those on motivational themes. Have you heard that stuff a thousand times? You’d be better off putting one of those decrees into action. The mentor shows the protagonist the right way rather than your preaching about it through the thin guise of a character’s voice. Write out a scene about it—minus the platitudes. 

Copyright @ 2024, John Paine

The Quality of Connections

A shifting link between characters marks the most promising relationships in fiction. On the one hand is the dramatic imperative for conflict. If the characters aren’t fighting over something, readers will quickly lose interest. On the other hand is the human need to matter to someone else. Many protagonists are mavericks, but if what they are doing doesn’t affect others, they might as well be battling shadows in a cave.

When you are outlining a novel, or even while a draft is developing, the choice of what type of tension you want determines how much room you will have to expand the relationship. In this post I’ll focus on a romantic connection. Let’s say an office guy and gal are hot for each other from the get-go. In that configuration your basis for development is limited. They should just find an unoccupied conference room and go for it. But how much interest will the reader have in repeat visits to that room? There are only so many interruptions at a frustrating moment you can use before the gambit becomes tired.

The ripping off of clothes is most satisfying after the characters first have had to strip away what’s inside. A woman whose husband has died, for instance, carries a longing for the partner that blocks her ability to become involved with another. She sizes up the different things the new potential partner does in terms of what her beloved did. Certain conflicts may be more heightened than others. If her dead husband used to make her laugh, and the newbie is a serious sort, she’ll be looking for an ironical comment that doesn’t come, and she’ll be disappointed that the newbie didn’t see the humor in the situation. She may keep that negative reaction under wraps at first—why dampen the delightful sensations of attraction for that?—but when eventually she complains to him about it, who is going to change?

This example is only one of a panoply of choices you can make deliberately before Romeo ever meets Juliet. How can you set up the obstacles in such a way that they remain problematic? How can you make them unique—i.e., fresh to the reader? Going one step further, can you draw up a hierarchy of friction points? Then you can knock off the minor ones earlier, saving the real beasts for later.

Exercise: Draw up a list of qualities for both characters with the maxim “It must irritate the partner” uppermost in mind. Now consider what qualities each of them hold most dear. Flirtatiousness, for instance, is something a partner can learn to live with as long as what he holds most dear, faithfulness, is never in doubt. But at what point in the book does he finally have no doubts?

“We are afraid to care too much, for fear that the other person does not care at all.” —Eleanor Roosevelt

Copyright @ 2024, John Paine

 

Not for Always

For any novel that depends on plot elements to move a story forward, it’s useful to keep in mind that a plot event is not necessarily an advance set in stone. It’s easy to see why an author might make this mistake. Once a plot advance is written, it’s down on paper. Check it off the list of outline notes. Yet what is done can be undone by sleight of hand.

Let’s consider the example of an accountant coming upon odd entries in a company’s records. A scene is written for the first discovery, perhaps another scene for a more extensive search, and something looks very suspicious. At some point the accountant will report the findings to a superior. You have the reader on the hunt. Finally, the crooks will be punished. Yet what happens if the superior is the embezzler, and the accountant the next morning is found floating in the river?

The character scored only a temporary win. What does that mean in terms of overall story dynamics? You still derive the benefit from those scenes building up the hunt. Plus, the knowledge is still a suspense element even though the accountant, in this case,  is no longer in a position to build it further. That’s because you have imparted evidence to the reader—but not to other characters who are in a position to right the wrong.

A plot gain can also be reversed. This is true especially when tracking a character’s  emotions. The pathway to blissful sex for the rest of a character’s life is a common aim thwarted in the romance genre. Great sex early on, yes, but then the stud muffin makes a typically stupid male error, the heroine is offended, and the reader is frustrated for another 50 pages. Lest the more literary types scoff, think of a daughter’s yearning to be accepted by her mother. What seems like a victory could be snatched away the very next day—because the problem all along has been that the mother is unstable.

So that plot element is not off the list at all, if you don’t want it to be. Story tension is like musical tension: a crest is succeeded by a trough and a new way to find the next climax. You can design a plot advance so that it becomes a setback when experienced by a minor character, such as the accountant, but becomes a watershed when discovered by your protagonist later on. You can go back to the same well, only the guise—and more important, a reader’s emotional involvement in a character—is different.

Exercise: Review the manuscript for great ideas that seem, in the long run, to have been cut short. Who is the event assigned to? If you repurposed an event to be private rather than  “a plot event,” could it become a cog in a larger wheel? You can create progression in an idea merely by how it is perceived successively by the protagonist.

“Progress is man's ability to complicate simplicity.” —Thor Heyerdahl

Copyright @ 2024 John Paine. All rights reserved.

Living the Dream

No one, no matter how happy, fails to look over the fence at greener grass. That is the human condition: to wish for something we are not. The desire to become someone else, even if only temporarily, is one of the main reasons people tell stories. All of those characters are, thankfully, not you.

That motive conflicts with another main reason to write: self-regard. You have to think that you have something special—the ability to write, if nothing else—that sets you apart from the hoi polloi. So if you’re going to write about the human condition, all the interesting stuff that’s happened to you sounds like a good lode to mine.

I would venture to say that most writers are better off striving for wish fulfillment rather than self-exploration. It is true that having a rough life makes for interesting stories, but how many people really have it rough? I’ll go beyond that and ask another question: how many people who have endured hardships have the talent or the perseverance to write about them in a way that inflames the reader?

That question strikes at the heart of the matter. Writing about yourself is like writing in a journal. You try to capture past incidents in words, however imperfectly. Because the material chimes inside of you, causing deep feelings associated with remembrance, you don’t realize as clearly how it would impact someone else. It is a shortcut, in other words.

Longing to inhabit another’s shoes takes more effort. You have to draw up defining characteristics: who is that person like? You have to keep asking yourself how the person will react in a given situation. What would he say to that? Would he respond at all? You walk around during the day, after the writing session, thinking about what you have written. And at a more advanced stage, the character starts telling you what he wants.

Where are your personal feelings in this construct? They’re inside everything the character does. You’re still the same egotistic maniac. Yet you are pouring those drives into an ideal, someone larger than yourself. That being may be just outsized enough to capture the reader’s interest.

Exercise: If you have a character that is largely autobiographical, you might use two guidelines to judge how effective she is. First, are her plot events progressing in an arc that is intrinsic to the circle you’re completing inside the book? Put another way, are you sticking in stuff just because it happened to you? Second, are her feelings interesting, or are they as mundane as you, gazing over the fence, are?

“If a poem is each time new, then it is necessarily an act of discovery, a chance taken, a chance that may lead to fulfillment or disaster.” —A. R. Ammons

Copyright @ 2024, John Paine

Cap the Gushing Well

Anyone with a modicum of experience in romantic attraction knows that devotion goes only so far. This is particularly true during the courtship phase of a relationship. If either party shows an inclination toward slavery to the other, the one being worshiped tends to edge away. This reluctance stems not so much from feeling unworthy of such adulation as the fact that faithfulness quickly becomes tiresome.
 

I raise this point because in my profession, I am often exposed to a paradox. Most men I know in real life are akin to statues. You can say just about anything to them and they don’t flinch. That stoicism intrigues the opposite sex, who see mystery when most times it is a void. A guy just will not admit he has feelings, even to himself.

Now let’s look at books. I find myself frequently telling male authors not to make their romantic swains too steadfast. It’s a puzzling phenomenon, since I know how many books have been written about men’s inability to commit. I know guys are the reason we have the term “midlife crisis.” So I’m not sure why writing a novel brings out the tender side in my sex. 

Love at first sight may actually happen, but it is not interesting to read about. When I bring this to a male author’s attention, what tends to occur is the opposite of what I am advising. I use the word “fun” a lot: make the romance fun. You know, do a cartwheel on Fifth Avenue. Delight your new amour with your spontaneity and cheer. Yet the revised scene I get back is deathly serious. The author doubles down on the character’s fealty. Entire paragraphs are written about how incredibly sensitive the hero is—not like a statue at all. 

Do us all a favor. Develop a sense of humor. Lighten up. You’re in the business of entertainment. Rather than going inward, think of fun things your character can do outwardly. Have him buy ballet tickets on the spur of the moment. Have him suggest they go out for an ice cream cone. Heck, have him direct their walk past a local playground to watch all the little kids running around. But whatever you do, get him off his emoting ass.

Exercise: Guys are good at writing action scenes. If you know this is a strength of yours, pursue the course of romance this way. If a guy feels attracted to a gal, have him do something embarrassing to prove he isn’t. If he feels the gal is attracted to him, have him remark on it—and then write out her reaction. Don’t pine away for the reader’s benefit. We’re waiting for the fireworks.

“The only sin passion can commit is to be joyless.”
—Dorothy L. Sayers

Copyright @ 2024, John Paine

Get in, Get out

Narrating a story from within a character’s head requires judicious balance. Unless the thoughts the character is having are arresting and provocative, inward commentary can clog up outward story progress. Yes, we do want to know a rebel’s take on corporate stooges, for one idea, but too much posturing can start to feel like more of the same. Enough snide asides already. Go ahead and punch the guy in the nose.

Trying to write a book that is both character- and plot-driven runs the risk of ending up with a “mid-list book,” in publishing parlance. You do need to rise above the level of Willie-walked, Willie-stared type of writing, but you also can’t fall in love with thoughts you manage to write down on paper. So how do you move the story along and also achieve a satisfying depth of characterization?

A good place to start is asking the question: What type of thoughts do I have? If you really have the gift of writing out entire skeins of thoughts, like the literary authors you admire, then interior activity is its own reward. But if your characters tend to think about what is immediately in front of them, you’d better think about pruning them. Those thoughts are essentially functioning as gilding on the related plot events.

Like anything placed in juxtaposition, such commentary tends to compete with  what is happening. Oh, she said something mean, so what did he think of that? It’s like watching tennis. After a few pages the scene becomes loaded with so many thoughts, the pacing drags. The writing becomes enervated—because not enough is happening to support the gilt.

You need to push the envelope. Being snarky is safe. Thoughts that are related to action should function as the build-up for a truly disturbing plot event. The thoughts become actualized, in other words—and someone ends up being damaged. That’s why we read novels. They take readers beyond what they would dare to do. 

Exercise: Review a chapter with an eye out for interior work. You have to be honest with yourself. Do you find yourself start to feel annoyed with the commenting character? Do you feel the scene is dragging? Not every action requires a thought. Try to trim a third of them and see how the balance strikes you now.

“The actions of men are the best interpreters of their thoughts.”
—James Joyce

Copyright @ 2024, John Paine

Lacking Philosophy

An interesting question came out of a book club last week: what is the difference between commercial, mid-list, and literary fiction? The basic premise is easy enough to explain. The more the book is concerned with exterior events, the more commercial it is. That’s why a good thriller, for instance, contains lots of plot twists. The more the narrator’s thoughts predominate, the more literary it is.

Yet a deeper question underlies the distinction: should you try to be literary just because those are the types of novels you enjoy reading? I tend to sound a note of caution on this subject, for several reasons. The first is any person’s ability to make deeper sense of our existence. Such thinking goes beyond an older person’s accumulation, over a lifetime of experiences, of knowledge about how the world works. I am older, and I don’t believe I have ever elicited someone dropping their jaw about a profound remark I’ve made. Most forms of wisdom are practical, not of the sort that makes you remember a novel.

The second reason is also commonplace: a writer’s belief that they are special and thus have special things to tell the rest of us. I see this with virtually every doctor-cum-writer I have ever read, to give an example of this cocksure quality. The fact is, success makes a person regard the world as their oyster—when that success may be based on an entirely plebian advantage, such as selling buttons with a new number of holes. Using a novel as a soapbox does not mean it achieves more depth, but merely self-satisfaction.

A third addresses a quality that most writers would give their eye teeth for. That is the ability to write limpid prose. We all love to read books whose words flow effortlessly, that contain terrific metaphors and juxtapositions. I always think of John Updike in this regard: how could his every sentence have such clarity? In this province of authors lies most literary lights. They flat-out have more talent purely at writing, whether taught or bred in the bone. Yet many of these authors write mostly second-rate books. The mill churns as a career winds on, and shallow books like Updike’s Brazil are the outcome. Perfect pitch but where’s the soul?

Many young writers bemoan their lack of true hardship in their childhoods, and as trite as that reasoning is—just write if you’re going to do the damned thing—it contains a kernel of truth. Many good writers are deranged. They are damaged human beings. The ability to go beyond and find a truth that truly shocks us requires the journey. How did you get so whacked out you went there? That willingness to discover belongs mainly to what the I Ching hexagram would call: Youthful Folly. It’s no wonder that writers become alcoholics. They spend the rest of their lives trying to recapture the brilliance of a world they could still mold.

“It was one of those evenings when men feel that truth, goodness and beauty are one. In the morning, when they commit their discovery to paper, when others read it written there, it looks wholly ridiculous.” —Aldous Huxley

Copyright @ 2024 John Paine. All rights reserved.

Faintly Despising

Authors have all sorts of reasons to start a book. The most common one is that a topic piques their interest. A fascination with Irish mythology, to cite one example, can lead a writer to study the myths of the Ulster Cycle. A parallel interest in writing something that will sell, like his kids’ favorite, Harry Potter, can give birth to a YA fantasy set in the Emerald Isle. Off he plunges into the great unknown that is a novel.

Many moons can pass before a draft of a manuscript is finalized. The author decides she wants to get it published—and then runs into the gauntlet known as “agents.” She is mystified that everyone sends back a form-letter rejection. At some point she may consult a professional like myself and ask what went wrong.

I read it and it’s instantly apparent that the book doesn’t meet the requirements of the genre. The author often doesn’t know what genre he’s writing in. As I talk to such authors, I frequently discover that he has an inner critic that dislikes the genre in general. “Oh, kids books” or  “What’s the big deal about Harry Potter, besides those amazing sales?”

A telling example of this bizarre attitude occurred at a book reading I attended. The author had become captivated with a futuristic gadget and wrote a slim dystopian novel based around it. In his prefatory remarks he said dismissively, “I didn’t even known what dystopian was until my agent told me.” Right away I was on guard. And sure enough, when he read aloud his excerpt, the material was dialogue-dominated gibberish. I know dystopian novels very well, and his sounded like “worst in class.”

I won’t bother advising here that an author study her genre before starting a book. That goes without saying. I do want to raise a question, though. Why, if you’re not willing to fully commit to providing what genre readers expect, bother writing the novel at all? No one is forcing you. Why spend all those hours on an enterprise that is doomed from the start by your own disinterest?

Life is short. The creative process is intoxicating, yes. But you also need to husband your time. Write a book that you can’t stop pouring your heart into. That’s the only way anyone reading it will respond.

Exercise: How do you pick out outstanding examples of a type of novel? It’s as simple as typing into an Amazon window “the best [children’s fantasies].” If Harry Potter is not to your taste, check out the alternate authors on the list. One of those may write in a style that you feel chimes with your own. So see how he does it.

“Criticism is prejudice made plausible.” —H.L. Mencken

Copyright @ 2024, John Paine

Shifting Gears Too Fast

Most authors know that a novel should contain a series of obstacles the protagonist must overcome. These obstacles gain greater meaning if they are placed in context, including the relationships of the affected characters and their backgrounds. A major factor that affects the balance between plot and context is chronology. When should the story forge into the future, and when should it delve into the past?

A novel has a starting and ending point, yet an author may choose to begin somewhere in the middle. Let’s use the dissolution of a marriage as an example. While you can open the book when the couple first met, that starts the story off on the wrong foot. That’s when they’re happy together. To show the dissolution, a novel would better open at the point one partner first suspects the other is having an affair. That could be one year, five years, twenty years into the marriage. The bloom is off the rose.

If that point in time is chosen, the question then becomes: how long should you stick with the immediate crisis before providing the context? After all, couples break up all the time, so you have to define why the reader should care about your couple. That requires background. If you jump back in time too fast, though, you may not have added up enough present-time issues to make the present crisis gripping.

Several methods of flipping back and forth in time can be used. The more standard one sets up a present issue, then goes back in time to record the couple’s history in an extended run from start to the present. The more difficult feat is jumping back and forth more frequently, creating juxtaposition. No matter which is chosen, however, you still have to give the reader enough reason to care about the crisis that opened the book. The sole exception is a murder—the end point of a novel that dwells in the past.  

In most cases, length of coverage determines reader interest in an obstacle. If you spend five pages narrating the present problem, then jump back in time for 20 pages to cover the course of the marriage, think of how that affects the reader. You’re trading a brief spurt of immediacy for four times that amount in stuff that already happened. Is your reader going to wait that long?

Exercise: You’re better off setting a target at the beginning: I’ll go 30 pages, maybe 50. That length forces you to plunge into the opening crisis to a depth that will truly draw the reader into the book. We can meet a few key players, get a sense of how they rub each other the wrong way. Once you establish the promise of plenty of friction to come, now let’s find out how they arrived at this unfortunate state of affairs.

“Some memories are realities, and are better than anything that can ever happen to one again.” —Willa Cather

Copyright @ 2024, John Paine

The Weight of Novelty

Many novels focus on a chosen field in which the author has developed expertise. This allows readers to explore an unfamiliar realm, expanding their knowledge of the world at large. The areas in which such fresh discoveries can occur encompass a wide range. The world of technology is frequently probed, as is the sphere of medical advances. An author is cautioned, however, not to rely too much on the gee-whiz factor. 

The compulsions that drive the human species, even the cell phone–bearing version, have not changed much since we descended from trees. That is the continuing paradox of civilization. How can we still be ruled so completely by our base instincts? Those same urges govern the reading experience as well. Love, death, and their spinoffs such as titillation and fear of physical harm bring out the animal in us. That’s what we crave.

In a world populated by barely hairless creatures, an author who strays too far into intellectual abstraction runs the risk of being arid. A degree of drama can be achieved by performing a risky operation, such as one that will bring hearing to the deaf. The afflicted patient can be made sympathetic, the procedure can be described masterfully, and the suspense of waiting for the results provides tension. Yet the outcome does not provide that much of a bang. After all, what if the operation failed? The character was already used to being deaf. She’s not going to die because an impossible dream wasn’t realized.

In other words, you cannot let your own fascination in a subject rule your plotting. It may be cheap, but the fact is, if you put that deaf character in an isolated house where a madman outside will use his knowledge of her deafness to torment her, you’ll achieve greater suspense. A reader understands being vulnerable. We all fear the unknown assailant, especially in a world where young men can so readily stray beyond social bonds.

You can explore how great it would be to achieve an uber ability. You can really make us understand that patient. But you have to harness the opposing sides of our nature. That’s a tough feat to pull off, achieved by literary, not scientific, acumen.

Exercise: You have to be chary about explanations of difficult scientific procedures. Even readers of Michael Crichton have only so much patience. If I start feeling like a baffled student in high school chemistry lab, I’ll skip the rest. Readers aren’t necessarily stupid, but if you think of holding them by the hand as you walk them through dense material, you’re on the right path.

“Everybody gets so much information all day long that they lose their common sense.” —Gertrude Stein

Copyright @ 2024, John Paine