writing

Misidentified Tropes

It has been interesting this week to see the reaction online to a certain big TV event earlier in the week (keeping it vague to avoid spoilers — if you’ve seen it, you’ll know what I’m talking about, but if you haven’t, this is still about writing). It looks to me like a significant portion of the Internet is unclear on the concept of what a Mary Sue is and skipped class the day they talked about deus ex machina when studying literature.

A Mary Sue is not a female character who’s at all competent. It’s a mocking term for a fan fiction trope. The term was coined in a satirical piece mocking the trope of the author’s self-insert character who takes over the story. “Ensign Mary Sue” in a Star Trek story was the new crew member who could navigate better than Chekov, pilot better than Sulu, outthink Spock, quickly solve engineering problems that baffled Scotty, and had a beautiful singing voice and was a brilliant dancer. Everyone loved her, and Kirk, Spock, or whichever character the author was in love with fell madly in love with her. Since fan fiction is written mostly for fun, I really have no problem with someone writing a Mary Sue. I think that’s how a lot of writers begin, in imagining a role for themselves in their favorite stories. It’s just not a lot of fun for anyone else to read because they’re reading for the characters they love, not for someone else’s self insert. To be totally honest, I’ve mentally “written” tons of Mary Sue stuff. That really was how I started making up stories, creating roles for myself and imagining how an idealized version of myself might fit into that world. I hope mine weren’t quite that egregiously perfect, but there’s a reason I never wrote them down and never shared them with others. They were for my own amusement.

There’s a huge disagreement over whether there can be a Mary Sue in original fiction, since there’s no new non-canon character being inserted into an established cast. I think it does happen when there’s a character an author is incapable of being objective about, either because they identify too closely with that character or because they’re in love with that character. An original Mary Sue tends to be a bland character with little development because the author’s love means she already thinks the character is fascinating, so there’s no need to do the usual work of making the character interesting to the audience. The rules of the universe warp around this character, so she gets everything she wants, is good at everything just because she’s special, and other characters bend over backward to serve her (unless we’re dealing with a Victim Sue, who is unfairly vilified in spite of being perfect, with everyone hating her because they’re just jealous). I happen to think that Anakin Skywalker in the Star Wars prequels has more than a tinge of Gary Stu (the male version) to him. It really seems like Lucas overidentified with him, for whatever reason, and that meant he was just automatically good at everything, he was the Chosen One With Magical Specialness, everyone adored him even though he was actually kind of a jerk, and it was so very unfair when they didn’t give him everything he wanted that he turned evil.

A character can be incredibly skilled and competent without being a Mary Sue. We just need to see the work that goes on to gain that skill. Spending years in training and gaining experience in preparation for doing something big means the character probably isn’t a Mary Sue. We’re seeing the work and the struggle behind the skill.

Meanwhile, “deus ex machina” means “god from the machine” and comes from ancient Greek drama, in which situations were often resolved with a god coming down from on high (using rigs, and thus the “machine”) to resolve the mortals’ problems. That was kind of the point of ancient Greek drama, to show that the gods were in control, but in modern fiction, the term has come to mean some random thing that comes out of nowhere to resolve the problem. It’s some object that happens to appear that’s just what they need or some new character who shows up to fix everything.

When a character who’s been there from the beginning and has spent years training to do a thing uses a thing that’s been there almost from the beginning and that’s been part of the story all along, and when it was a plot point that this character was given this thing, and when there was even a prophecy years ago suggesting that this character might do this thing, it’s not a deus ex machina. A deus ex machina would be if the exact magical device they needed to resolve the problem had just happened to show up at the right time, or if the problem was resolved by some new random character just showing up.

I also find it amusing that people who boast about how great something is because it busts tropes get so upset when that thing busts a trope.

writing life

Today’s a double whammy blog day, as I also have a guest post at Fiction University on figuring out the best writing schedule for you.

Meanwhile, I think I need to give an update after my little meltdown from March, when I said I might quit writing. Strangely, I think that just giving myself that permission and letting myself consider other options made me feel a lot better about it. It may have turned it from something I felt obligated to do to something I was actively choosing to do. I think my social media purge also helped, as well as adjusting my ideas of what counted as “success.”

I said I might quit unless something happened to change the situation. I guess I was looking for a sign. Well, the next week, there was a Kindle Daily Deal on Enchanted, Inc., and my sales since then have doubled, and they’ve stayed at that level for more than a month. My May and June royalties on my independently published books will be a lot higher than they’ve been, and my next two Random House royalty payments should be pretty good, as well as possibly my audio royalties. And I sold book 9 to Audible. So, my money worries aren’t completely resolved, but my finances look a lot better than they did.

And I keep coming up with new ideas, which is a sign that my brain isn’t ready to quit. So, I think I’ll take it one book at a time. The book I’m revising now, the one for Audible, is coming out in the fourth quarter, and we’re looking at an August release for Enchanted, Inc. book 9 (so that I can release in e-book, print, and audio at the same time), so I probably won’t want to be juggling a lot of other work during all this time. Thinking about doing any other kind of job made me appreciate writing more, so I may address the financial issues by looking at other writing I can do. I keep joking about the low-stress, cozy fantasy thing, but I’m thinking in terms of maybe writing some “category” romantic fantasy — some short, light fantasy reads with a dash of “sweet” romance — and test the market for that. While I love a big, juicy fantasy epic every so often, when I’m busy and stressed, I would love something I could read in maybe a couple of sittings or on a weekend afternoon that’s just a fun escape with maybe some excitement but without a lot of additional stress. Sometimes you want a real page-turner whose outcome is in doubt, and sometimes you just want to run away to a magical place. Surely I’m not the only one.

So, that’s where things stand right now. I have too many stories I want to write to be able to stop, and if things keep going the way they have, I’ll be able to stick with it for at least a little while longer. I’m more at peace with where I am. I think I’ve also figured some of the emotional/psychological things that set it all off, but that’s fodder for another post. Thanks for all the support in the e-mails and blog comments. It was nice to be reminded that what I do brings joy to other people.

writing

It’s About Time

This morning’s fun was a dentist appointment, so now my teeth are all white and shiny but I feel behind on my day.

I feel like I didn’t make a lot of forward progress in my revisions yesterday, but what I did do was rearrange a bunch of events so that they now flow better and there’s a reason for conflict and tension in each scene. Of course, this makes me wonder why I didn’t do it that way in the first place. This is a definite proof point for the advice to let a manuscript rest before revising it. After a few months, you notice things you wouldn’t have noticed when the story was still fresh in your head.

Really, time seems to be the biggest asset to writing. I find that the more time between initial idea and actually starting to write, the better the book ends up being and the easier it is to write. The more time between first draft and revision, the better and more comprehensive the revision is. Unfortunately, today’s market penalizes taking your time and rewards fast publication. The only place where I find that taking less time helps is in the first draft. The faster I write that first draft, the better the book ends up being, though that might be a chicken-and-the-egg thing because I tend to be able to write a faster draft because I’ve spent more time between initial idea and starting to write. So, is it a better book because I wrote it fast, or was I able to write it fast because it was a better book?

I’m thinking that my ideal process would probably involved braided projects — do the research and development on one book while revising another book, then draft a book while letting a book rest. Or something like that. I know I can’t really work on anything else while doing a first draft, but preliminary research can fit in with other things, and it actually helps to write something while letting a draft rest before revision. I just need to get a pipeline going to keep the projects flowing like that.

But for now, it’s revision on this book.

Dreams and New Ideas

We’re supposed to get nasty storms this afternoon, so this morning was my rush around doing errands before it starts storming time. Now I have groceries, medication and other supplies, and have filled up my car, so let it rain! (But preferably not hail.)

I think I’m making progress on my revisions. I got four chapters done yesterday and figured out a big shift I could make to make things flow better. Today may be slower since I’ve hit a part that needs more substantial rewriting. I’m actually kind of enjoying this because it’s making the book closer to the vision I had when I came up with the idea. I seem to have been in a slump when I was writing it because it mostly seems a bit flat. I’m adding a lot of emotion and oomph to it.

Meanwhile, I’ve come up with yet another idea. I was afraid I was going to have nightmares after the very intense thing that was on TV Sunday night, but instead I dreamed a new book that had nothing to do with that intense thing and maybe owed more to the PBS Les Miserables, which I didn’t watch until Monday night. It’s in a category people have asked me about writing but that I haven’t had an idea for, and now I have an idea. As usual, when I wrote down what I know, I had about two paragraphs (though if I dramatized it, I might have been able to write about five pages), but I’ve got a title, a main character, a rough sense of the situation and world, the inciting incident and opening scene, and a general sense of the core of the plot, plus a scene later in the book. And it all still made a lot of sense when I wrote it down. It wasn’t just a wacky dream of an idea that made no sense in the light of day.

I know it’s nowhere near ready to write because it’s not distracting me from my revisions, like a lot of shiny new ideas do. There will be research required, and I think maybe even a trip.

But first, I have to deal with the things currently on my plate.

writing

When Your Characters are Too Smart

I’ve started on my book revisions, and I’ve noticed that there seems to be a common thread of problems in my writing lately, and that’s that I don’t let my characters make mistakes or be wrong. Their ideas tend to be right, and the things they try tend to work.

I guess I’m going too far in the other direction from trying to avoid one of my pet peeves, which is Idiot Plotting. That’s what I call it when the plot can only work if the characters are total idiots — they trust the obviously untrustworthy person, they go alone into the dark basement in a horror movie, they don’t take common-sense precautions. So, since I hate that as a reader/audience member, as a writer I try to avoid it. I make my characters make good decisions and show common sense. I also hate messing around — why waste a chapter with the character doing the wrong thing before they figure out how to do the right thing?

But I guess that can make for less interesting stories. I need to find ways to challenge my characters even while they’re being smart. They can trust the wrong person — but instead of that person being obviously shady, they can act like a person who should be trusted. If I make the scene interesting, I can have the characters try something and fail, but the failure gives them the idea for what to try next. After all, even Nobel Prize-winning scientists have a lot of failures on the way to their breakthrough discoveries. There may be factors they’re not aware of when they make their plans that can through a monkey wrench into them.

And I think I need to get over my own perfectionism and quit applying it to my characters.

Books

Unbelievable True Stories

I’ve been on a nonfiction reading kick lately, reading a lot of history and biographies, and some of them are as gripping as any novel.

The one I just read was something I stumbled on in the library when I was looking for something else, and it reads like the kind of historical fiction in which the author’s fictional main character somehow manages to be present for every major historical event in that time period and meets all the major historical figures. Except, this is all true and it’s very well-documented.

The book was Dancing to the Precipice by Caroline Moorhead, and it’s about a woman named Lucie de la Tour du Pin. She’s not famous and she didn’t do anything to alter history, but she lived during interesting times and was in a position to interact with a lot of the major players. She wrote a memoir of living through this time, which was discovered and published by a descendant about fifty years after she died, but there are also extensive letters between her and other people, letters about her, and there’s a lot of documentation relating to her husband’s position, so it’s pretty certain that she didn’t make it all up in her memoir.

She grew up during the Enlightenment in France and as a child went to the various Paris salons where the great thinkers shared their views. As a teenager she was a lady-in-waiting to Marie Antoinette. She was at Versailles the day the “fishwives” raided the palace. She was in a rather awkward position for the French Revolution because she was an aristocrat with ties to the royals, but her husband and father had both fought in the American Revolution and had what were considered radical ideas about democracy. That made all the factions hate them. She and her family ended up having to flee to America during the Terror, and lived on a farm near Albany, where they became good friends with Alexander Hamilton and his family. Later, when they returned to France, her husband ended up as a prefect for Napoleon, and her half-sister married Napoleon’s aide de camp, so she interacted with Napoleon quite a bit (and once even bullied him into giving her husband a better position). When the royalty was restored, she ended up in that circle. They had to flee to Belgium when Napoleon returned from exile, and she was at the infamous ball the night before the battle of Waterloo. Oh, and she also knew the Duke of Wellington from when he was an ambassador in Paris when she was a child and he attended those salons.

Really, if you made all this up, people would roll their eyes and not believe it. It’s fascinating reading. But when someone is born in 1770 in Paris and lives to be 83, she’s going to have experienced a lot. There were multiple revolutions in her lifetime. And her husband was basically Ned Stark (for the Game of Thrones fans), who was utterly incapable of playing games and who said what he thought and did what he believed was right, which meant he was often trusted to be put in positions of responsibility, but he also got into a lot of trouble when people schemed against him and he was incapable of dealing with it or when he spoke his mind at a bad time, and his wife often had to step in and fix things, including one time rushing to Paris to browbeat Napoleon.

This book is more of a biography, using the memoirs as a basis but also bringing in a lot of other sources, so it’s rather objective, but apparently the actual memoir is available on Project Gutenberg, and I may have to read it. Someone needs to make a movie or miniseries about this lady. Basically, it really is Cat and Ned Stark in the French Revolution and Napoleonic era.

Not Avenging

This is the first day this week when I don’t have anywhere to go and have no appointments. I have plenty to do, but I don’t have to do it on a particular schedule. And it finally stopped raining (for a few days) — wouldn’t you know, on the day when I don’t have to drive anywhere after spending the week driving in the rain.

One thing I’m not doing is going to the Avengers movie or avoiding spoilers about it. It’s not that I’m boycotting or against it, or anything like that. This isn’t one of those smug “I’m too cool to be into this thing that everyone else is excited about” things, though I will confess to some superhero fatigue/resistance. I’m just so far behind on movies that there’s no way I could watch all the movies (I think I saw that there are something like 22) I’d need to see to build up to it. I saw the first Guardians of the Galaxy movie and I saw the first Captain America movie on TV when I was watching Agent Carter and wanted the backstory (and I really wish they’d done more in the WWII era before moving it to the present), and I’ve seen past Spider-Man movies, though not the ones that fit into the current storyline. But I’m clueless about all the rest of the stuff involved.

When these movies first started coming out (with Iron Man, I think?), I didn’t bother because I’ve never been a big comic book reader and was entirely unaware of the character. And from there it started mushrooming, but by then I was so far behind and didn’t have the background on most of this stuff to jump in. Now it’s taking over everything — my pastor even referred to the upcoming movie in his Easter sermon — and I feel so behind.

So, maybe when that Disney streaming service gets launched and it has all the Marvel movies, I can finally get caught up and see them all in story chronological order and I’ll get what everyone’s talking about. But with more than 20 movies, at my current rate of getting around to watching movies, it’ll take me half a year to get through them all, and that’s if that’s all I watch.

Meanwhile, I’m watching all my friends freaking out and getting excited and feeling rather out of it. Fortunately, I’ve absorbed enough info about all this from my friends that I actually understand my pastor’s sermons when he makes Avengers references.

Scene Analysis

I spent much of yesterday doing a scene-by-scene outline of the book so I could remind myself of what I’d written. I can already see things I want to fix before I even start digging into my editor’s suggestions. I think most of this work is going to be fine-tuning and amping up some aspects. I’m still not sure how extensive it really will be.

Strangely, this process has made me feel better about the book I was working on because I’d just gone through this process with the parts I’d written of that book, and when I analyzed those scenes, there was so much more going on. I have scenes in this book that have very little purpose or that have the same purpose as several other scenes, so I either need to add stuff or combine scenes.

Meanwhile, tonight is my last real session of children’s choir. The kids sing Sunday, and then there’s a program next Wednesday night, but this is the last time I have to have any kind of plans. I’m not sure how many kids I’ll end up with because it’s a rainy day. Sometimes that means they’ve been cooped up all day and the parents want them out of the house, so we have a big group. Sometimes that means no one wants to go out in the bad weather, and we have a small group. Last week, there was a threat of severe storms (that didn’t actually happen) and I had two kids. So I guess I’ll wing it. But it will be nice having that one responsibility off my shoulders.

Which is good because I’ve got a lot of other responsibilities right now. So, off to work!

Switching Gears

It turns out that it’s a good thing I was in a regrouping mode on this book because I just got revision notes on my book for Audible, and I’ve got about a month to get those rewrites done. That’s going to require some abrupt gear shifting. At least I’m not interrupting any serious momentum. I’m going to have to reread the book because it’s been so long since I worked on it that I don’t even remember much about it. Which is good, in a way, because it means I’m not stuck on whatever I wrote before, so it’ll be easier to change it.

And doing these revisions may give me ideas for what I can do with other books. Every time I work with an editor, I learn something new that makes my writing better overall. I’m a bit weird in that I like revisions because I like feeling like I’m making the book better.

But this does mean I’ll be very busy for the next few weeks. I want to get the revisions done before I go to the Nebula weekend so I can then give it another pass and proofread afterward.

Now to go reread my book so I can remember it.

Risk and Drama

I made it through Easter weekend. I don’t have a lot of voice left, but I get a break this week because the choir isn’t singing Sunday. My children’s choir is, so I still have to deal with it, but I don’t have to use my voice (other than for scolding naughty kids). I’ve also already done the post-Easter Target chocolate run, and I seem to have been over-eager about that because the discount wasn’t yet in the system and the cashier had to do it manually.

Now for the rest of the day I need to settle in and get caught up on things. The to-do list is getting intimidating.

I’m still working out what the rest of this book needs to be, finding plot reasons for the “wouldn’t it be cool if …” scenes, working the new characters who’ve come up during writing into the already planned scenes. I think part of my problem is that my original plan didn’t actually have any conflict through most of the story, until we got near the end and found out what was really going on. I need to find a way to bring some of that conflict forward. That’s really tricky because I was kind of enjoying just going along and discovering things. I like low-conflict stories. Unfortunately, you can’t really sell those. I need to find a middle ground between “just enjoying this interesting place and these people” and “everyone is in mortal peril and the fate of the entire world is at stake.”

I actually had to put a book I was reading this weekend down because it was too much for me. The characters kept doing dumb things, sometimes for good reasons, and sometimes for Reasons (because the author needed it for the plot to work), and I just couldn’t take it. It didn’t help that a lot of the dumb things involved gambling, and for some reason, that’s a real hot button for me. I can’t deal with stories about gambling. I’m not sure why. I guess I just think it’s a huge waste of money. Gamblers enjoy it because they feel like they’re going to win and come out ahead, but I see it as you’re most likely to lose it all, so it’s not fun, and it’s stressful to read about. The book description did mention gambling, but I thought it was mostly the setup, and it turned out to be the core of the story.

Meanwhile, I suspect there will be a lot of stress knitting going on during next week’s Game of Thrones episode. I almost can’t bear to watch. I wonder if maybe I should wait and read spoilers and then watch so I can brace myself.

So, yeah, I need to moderate my risk aversion in order to get a good story, even if I don’t have to take it quite that far.