S. K. Dunstall

Writers and gardens 1 — “In the garden”

Back when we were doing our first NaNoWriMo, Sherylyn’s first scene was a policeman sitting in his neighbour’s garden, talking to the neighbour. That’s all they were doing, sitting and talking.

Each night she would tell me, “They’re still in the garden.”

This went on for a week, but because it was a NaNo, she couldn’t go back and rewrite, she didn’t have the time. So she just kept writing, and finally wrote her way out of the scene, 10,000 words in.

When we got to read each other’s story at the end of the month, it was exactly as you’d expect. 10,000 words of two people telling, not showing.

Ever since, our shorthand for a long passage where characters sit around talking to each other, giving out information, has been known as ‘in the garden’.

Right now there’s an important scene in Linesman III that’s in the garden. Well, they’re not actually in the garden, they’re in an office, but the characters are telling each other things that the reader should learn otherwise.

It’s 4,000 words. I know I have to change it, but I’m not like Sherylyn, who can cut 10,000 words with one click. (“Save it, save it, you might be able to use it elsewhere.” But you never do. Reuse it, I mean.) I anguish over cutting big chunks like that. I know it has to go, but it will be there for a couple of days before I can finally bring myself to wield the knife that gets our protagonists out of the garden.

Writers and gardens 2 — Architects and gardeners

It was George R. R. Martin who first described writers as either gardeners or architects. I came across the term when watching the videos of Brandon Sanderson’s 2012 creative writing class at Brigham Young University.

It’s a variation on plotters and pantsers. Martin describes the architects as writers who:

Plan everything ahead of time, like an architect building a house. They know how many rooms are going to be in the house, what kind of roof they’re going to have, where the wires are going to run, what kind of plumbing there’s going to be. They have the whole thing designed and blueprinted out before they even nail the first board up.

While the gardeners:

Dig a hole, drop in a seed and water it. They kind of know what seed it is, they know if planted a fantasy seed or mystery seed or whatever. But as the plant comes up and they water it, they don’t know how many branches it’s going to have, they find out as it grows.

I like the gardeners/architects description better than plotters/pantsers, because for me, the way we write is a lot like gardening. Plant something here, watch it grow. Do a bit of weeding. If something dies, plant something else. Tidy up that section of the garden. Keep working on it, and so on, all around, until one day you stop to observe, smell the flowers, and realise that this truly is a beautiful garden, and it’s magic.

One of the things I love about the new year is the chance to put the past behind you and start afresh.

I used to have an exercise book where I wrote down my goals for the coming year. They were a mix of personal, professional and writing goals. The following year, before I wrote new ones, I’d check out which of the past year’s goals I’d managed to achieve. Sometimes it was nothing, other times a lot, but never all of them.

I didn’t mind that I never got all of them done. It wasn’t so much the goals themselves, but the chance to sit back and reflect on where you’re going and how you plan to get there.

That old exercise book is still sitting in a shoe-box somewhere in my cupboard. I don’t use it nowadays, and I don’t make professional or personal goals that often any more.

But I still make writing goals.

I’m already thinking about my goals for 2014.

I’ve been having fun this year entering the Romance Writers of Australia (RWA) competitions.

So far, I have entered Ripping Start and Selling Synopsis. While it would be nice to win, that’s not my primary goal.

I want perfect x-factor scores.

What is the x-factor?

The x-factor for the Ripping Start, which is for the first 1,500 words of your manuscript, is scored thus:

To mark this item, ignore the errors, and look for the potential. Did this entry have something special, either in plot, style or characterisation?

How do you rate the potential of this entry? Please mark out of 10.
10 = Brilliant; 1 = needs extensive work (Max. 10 marks)

The x-factor for the Selling Synopis is scored thus:

Submission to an editor is only one step on the road to publication. An editor may require corrections or rewrites, but there are qualities that will make them consider putting time into and working with a writer to bring them to publication. Publishers may reject a manuscript, but will also ask the writer to try again. To mark this item, ignore the errors, and look for the potential.

Give a score from 1 to 10, where 1 = ‘very poor’ and 10 = ‘if I were an editor, I’d want to see this novel’.

So the x-factor is that indefinable something that makes someone read the story, no matter how badly written it is, no matter whether they like it or not.

How we’re tracking so far

The results for Ripping Start came back early October. My x-factor scores garnered two nines and a five, which was respectable, but obviously can be improved on.

You can’t appeal to all of the people all of the time, and it’s obvious from the scores above that my Ripping Start entry worked well for two of the judges, but failed to engage the last judge at all.

That’s real life, but you know your book is a winner when everyone who reads it finds a spark of something they think works.

I don’t know how many people got perfect x-factor scores in this contest, but at least three of them did, because three writers got perfect scores. That means three different judges read their words and each gave them an x-factor of ten.

Now that’s something to aspire to.

Once upon a time I religiously read every single Fiction Affliction over at Tor Books, along with other sites that list new SFF books coming out.

Today I noticed myself skimming past the listed books, interested only in the titles. If a title appealed, I’d read more, otherwise I’d skip it. I also skipped books that were second or more in a series.

I didn’t find any titles that appealed, so I went back and started reading more. I got through a couple of lines of each book at most before I moved on.

I think it’s seasonal. As the weather turns hotter I tend to read less at the computer.

But it did make me think about where I’m getting my book recommendations currently. I’m getting them from:

• Locus magazine—skimming some of the reviews in my December issue of Locus
• The Big Idea over at John Scalzi’s blog
• Plus the occasional author site that I run across as a link

And that’s about it.

I overestimated the tolerance readers would have for an obnoxious protagonist.
David Tallerman, talking about his Tales of Damasco series

I enjoyed The Way of the Kings but I only read a quarter of the book

Sherylyn has just finished reading Brandon Sanderson’s The Way of the Kings.

The main protagonist in The Way of the Kings is Kaladin, while it also has secondary characters Shallan, Szeth, Dalinar plus a couple of other more minor viewpoints as well.

Like me, early in the book Sherylyn started skipping some character threads, until eventually (like me) the only plot-line she read was Kaladin, and only Kaladin in the current time, not his early life. She skimmed the other point-of-view characters when they interacted with Kaladin—as Dalinar does toward the end of the story—but otherwise skipped them all.

You may think that because we only read one character line that we didn’t like the book. Not at all. We both enjoyed it and would recommend it to other SFF readers. It’s a great story, full of ideas and great world-building, the sort of book that you think about afterwards for a long time. We both know we’ll go back one day and re-read it, because there’s a lot we missed.

Like me, Sherylyn didn’t care enough for the other characters to read about them.

No-one reads Rossi

In Linesman, the story we have with our agent at present, we have two point-of-view (POV) characters. Ean Lambert who most people like a lot. The secondary POV character is Jordan Rossi. Luckily for us he gets nowhere near as much air-time as Ean, because a lot of first-time readers skip the Rossi bits until he joins up with Ean.

They can’t stand him.

You skip characters you don’t like

Initially, with The Way of the Kings, I thought one of the reasons I skimmed was that there were too many storylines to follow.

Sherylyn and I discussed the book once she had finished it. We’re writers, and we pull stories apart to see what works and what doesn’t. Especially one like this which we agreed was a good book, and the characters were necessary for the storyline, but we still both skipped so much of it.

We decided that it wasn’t so much too many people to follow but more that we didn’t like the people we were reading about.

How many characters are too many?

We’re thinking a lot about this right now because Linesman II, which we’re about to start editing, contains five points-of-view.

Acquard, the main protagonist, is a no-brainer. If you don’t like her then you’re not going to read the book at all, especially given she gets half the book-space. As for the others, plot-wise it makes sense to include them, but should we include them all? Especially the last one, Ricaro Onetree, who makes a brief appearance toward the end of the book.

Will our readers put up with all five of them or do we have move the story around so that a lot more happens while Acquard’s around?

Five point-of-view characters is probably too many. How many we cut depends on how easily we can rearrange scenes.

We do know one thing from reading stories like The Way of the Kings. The more a reader likes the character(s), the more characters we can include.

Over on io9 Linda Nagata talks about hard science fiction. In it, she asks what makes a story ‘hard’. As Nagata says, everyone involved has an opinion. Her definition is:

Hard SF is science fiction that extrapolates future technologies while trying to adhere to rules of known or plausible science.

Linda Nagata, It’s time to start reading hard science fiction again

The audience came up with some good definitions too.  SamuraiMujuru’s was pretty close to Linda’s

I’ve always interpreted “Hard Science Fiction” as Sci-Fi that just tends to actually stick closer to science fact, or at least semi-logical progressions thereof. Not harder to read or from any particular perspective, just more grounded in “reality”.

while Aplacere said

I always thought “hard science fiction” was sci-fi you couldn’t take the science element out of without the story completely falling apart.

As some of the readers commented, hard science fiction can be more difficult to read, and often the story takes second place to the science. That is, the author spends so much time on the science that their characters suffer.

That doesn’t have to happen. There is some excellent hard SF out there, with some truly great characters. One of my all-time favourites is Vernor Vinge’s Marooned in Real Time (1987). This is one of those stories as defined by Aplacere, which wouldn’t exist if you took the science out of it.

It’s a wonderful book. I highly recommend it.