You might not know what I’m talking about when I mention the importance of specificity. I was deliberately being vague in that introduction (LOOK AT ME, I’M BEING IRONIC), but via the power of these specific examples, you’ll know exactly what I mean (I’M A GENIUS, IT’S ALL COMING TOGETHER).

Admittedly, the following examples are so far away form each other, they’d never, ever coincidentally meet down the pub, but the purpose of this is not to draw direct comparisons between the two. Instead, think of these as two separate examples. Got it? Good.

P!NK

Do you like P!nk? Does she actually spell her name like that? I can’t remember, but whatever, it’s not important (I checked, she doesn’t). The important thing is, if you do like her you might want to prepare to un-fan her in Facebook. Get Facebook up in another tab ready.

I had my iPod Touch on shuffle the other day, and what should come up but one of Pink’s songs, Family Portrait. I don’t know how it got there. I suspect it was on a compilation of some kind. Anyway, I was listening to this and thinking, “I’ve never liked this song, but it’s even worse than I remember it. A child could write this – it’s so simplistic!”

And it is, but I quickly checked myself. Simplicity in itself is no bad thing. If you can get an idea across simply, it usually means you’re doing a lot right. No, simplicity was not the problem here, so what was it? Let’s take a look at some of the lyrics, shall we?

"If I shout them, maybe no one will notice how bad my lyrics are! Also, a trapeze act!"

Mamma, please stop crying
I can’t stand the sound.
Your pain is painful,
And it’s tearing me down.
I hear glasses breaking
As I sit up in my bed.
I told God you didn’t mean
Those nasty things you said.

Family Portrait, Pink

Ugh. Okay, let’s ignore the horrid “pain is painful” line (I know it’s hard, but stay focussed). This is genuinely the most specific verse I could find and it’s at the beginning of the song. Seriously, it’s all down hill from there. And specificity is the key.

Now, I don’t know if Pink had a terrible childhood, and I don’t mean to be flippant about such things. But from these lyrics, it’s hard to tell. The events she is describing boil down to vague, generic arguments. There’s nothing to convince me that this actually happened and wasn’t dreamed up by a teenage drama class.

There is an argument for keeping things generic in the hope that more people will relate to it, but here’s the thing – vagueness isn’t relatable. It’s difficult to listen to this song and think, “yes, that’s how I felt too,” because there’s nothing specific for the listener to hook on to. In the end it’s just a bunch of poorly chosen words.

Specific examples (or maybe just one, stretched over the whole song) would have made this much more real to the listener, and therefore much more emotive. There is another subject here, which I won’t go into, but is worth thinking about. When the writer gives more of themselves (i.e. dredges up specific, painful memories to share them), however difficult it is, it often ends up as more effective writing.

The Historian

Not long after deleting that song from my iPod, I finally got to the end of The Historian, by Elizabeth Kostova. This is a Dracula story with a strong emphasis on history (that’s really the hook, and the author does a great job of bringing that to life). It’s a good book actually, if overly long in my opinion. And there’s no sparkly vampires.

Anyway, I was happily reading, thinking I knew where a particular section was going, and I was suddenly blindsided by a detail. This was not a twist, no one suddenly died, it was just a detail. I don’t want to set the scene too much for fear of spoilers, but let’s just say our hero is desperately searching for something they know they are probably not going to find, and out of sympathy, everyone around him has suggested he stop.

Okay, here we go:

In the end, I gave up not because of these reassurances but because of the forest itself, the meteoric steepness of the cliffs, the denseness of the undergrowth, which tore my jacket and trousers as I pushed through it, the terrible size and height of the trees, the silence that surrounded me whenever I stopped moving and groping and stood still for a few minutes.

The Historian, Elizabeth Kostova

Here we are given, not a vague, “in the end I gave up,” or even an easily assumed, “I gave up because of the hopelessness of the situation/because I might actually find what I was looking for/I was too tired to go on”. No, it was the environment.

I want to make the point that specific does not necessarily mean surprising (although it was), so you know I’m not confusing the two. I say specific because the forest, and the character of the forest is specific to this story and what is happening to the character at the time. That sentence (and it is just one sentence amazingly. Proof that disobeying writing rules every now and again is a good thing), says something about the character and the environment that the more generic resolutions could not.

And you really feel it, don’t you, the forest closing in on him whenever he pauses, and it’s the specific details again (the denseness, the tearing, the silence) that make it.

So, to sum up…

specific details are the thing that sells reality to us as a reader/listener/audience. Often surprising and emotive, they help us to empathise or sympathise with a character, and give us a greater sense that we have experienced what they have. Something to bear in mind, and a skill to hone, to be sure.

Just Write!

I can’t count the number of times I’ve been writing a passage and have paused – to think of the right word; to work out the order the next few sentences are going to go in; to go back and correct a spelling mistake I’ve seen; to solidify an idea I’ve just had… the list is endless.

And it’s at those times that the rule of “just write” takes a back seat to more pressing concerns. It doesn’t sound like a big deal though does it? And maybe it isn’t. But consider that while you’re pondering the significance of your last comma, other things are going on.

Writing in the flow is a different state of mind to writing deliberately. While you’re being careful about your prose, you are not free to fully explore the story you’re penning. Even a little care means that you’re being constrained in subtle ways that you did not realise.

I have been aware of this for a good few years (or at least I thought I was). I have often advocated freewriting as a method to generate ideas, believing it to be (as the name implies) an access to a less constrained road from mind to fingers.

JUST WRITE!

BUT this has never really, truthfully been applied to my daily writing. Recently though I introduced a word target for my daily train writing. Given my very limited time on the journey, it’s a challenge to meet the word count. This means there is simply no time for pontificating – I race through it as soon quick as I can.

Does this give me the best writing ever? No. It’s no doubt sloppy and will need lots of tidying up.

But what I have found is my usual tendency to try and be concise and measured in my writing is gone. I consider those two elements of my writing voice to be good things, but in the draft stage they are less important.

What replaces this is a willingness to ramble, and to elaborate. I’m adding details that help to build the world. Sure, they probably won’t exist in their ramble, freewritey form in the final draft, but if they can be reduced to a couple of sentences, or broken up and sprinkled in appropriate places, it adds to the texture of the story. All good stuff that might never have been dreamed up otherwise.

So the lesson is.. er.. just write; a lesson I learn over and over again, just like many lessons in writing. You think you now what something means, but then you reach a new level of understanding. It’s all about slowly changing your mindset I guess. I look forward to the next lesson.

I don’t normally do genre-specific pieces on the blog, but Sci-Fi is what I’m writing at the moment, and this is an interesting problem and set of ideas. If you’re not into Sci-Fi, you may get something out of this anyway, if not, um… sorry?

Some definitions

Firstly, let’s see if we can’t untangle this hard vs. soft business. Now, I thought I had a pretty solid idea what this was but it turns out it’s a little more complicated than that (isn’t everything?)

Was there a time when Robby was considered "hard sci-fi"? Probably not.

Looking around it became clear my definition of hard and soft science fiction was not everybody’s definition. So, I’m going to whistle through a few:

About science vs about people

Okay, so definition number one has two angles I guess. Maybe this is two definitions really – you decide! Angle one is that the story focuses either on the science or on people.

Hard – the science is the star. The story will likely focus on a particular technology, and how that works determines how the story unfolds. Take that technology away and the story would not exist.

Soft – the story is about people, perhaps focusing on the relationships in a group, or one character’s emotional journey. Here the Sci-Fi setting serves as a background or tool with which to bring these things to light.

Angle two takes a more technical approach. Hard is about the hard sciences (engineering, physics, chemistry etc.) whereas soft is about (you guessed it) the soft sciences, such as psychology, anthropology and the like.

You can see that the second angle deals with similar topics through a more scientific lens (sort of).

Technically dense vs sparcity of technical details

This is fairly self explanatory. Hard is full of technical details in this definition, whereas soft provides fewer details. You can also see that the definitions are not mutually exclusive. In fact, following the first definition would almost certainly mean following the second automatically.

Scientifically accurate vs concessions to drama/convenience

if you’re a Sci-Fi fan this is normally the definition that puts you in one camp or another. On the one hand (hard) you have thoroughly researched, accurate pieces based on what we know about the rules of the universe. This doesn’t mean the writer can’t make up new technologies, but they must be able to convincingly justify them, and they can’t break what we know to be immutable laws of physics.

Soft on the other hand allows rule-breaking for the purposes of story-telling and flavour. How would the crew of Battlestar Galactica and the fleet have gotten anywhere without their faster than light drives? How less exciting would the dog fights have been without sound in space?

Granted, Battlestar did more than most Sci-Fi series to get actual science into the show (I’m talking about the more recent reboot – I don’t know about the seventies show). It’s therefore a good expression of this tension between the desire to have believable, accurate science, and the desire to tell a story that necessarily breaks some rules.

Fiction about science vs fictional science

This is my own definition, and is loosely how I thought about hard vs. soft Sci-fi before I looked into it. It’s two interpretations of the phrase “science fiction”, where hard is fiction about science, and soft is where the “science” in the story is fictional (i.e. inaccurate or just plain made up). See what I did there?

The writing/readership problem

It’s been a running topic on the Adventures in Sci-Fi Publishing podcast (them again), for a few episodes (try going back from episode #130 I think). Sales of science fiction works are as nothing compared to sales of fantasy (I’m exaggerating slightly, but it’s a big difference). What’s the deal?

There are some interesting discussions around this on the podcast, so (again) I highly recommend it, especially if you’re into science fiction or fantasy novels. They go through a few possibilities as to why this might be, but one of them is that science fiction is assumed to be “difficult”.

Clearly there is an assumption that all Sci-Fi is hard Sci-fi then. And for definitions we can look to the technical one as being responsible for the turn off.

Of course, such an assumption doesn’t really ring true. Whereas I can certainly think of novels where the technical aspects might put people off (Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars trilogy springs to mind. Although, I could not say that it is just about science. It is also about the characters, and about politics. Again we see something that doesn’t strictly fit all the definitions), they certainly don’t represent all science fiction, and I doubt they even represent most of it.

But here’s the thing – if you do want to include accurate science in your Sci-Fi piece, how do you do it in such a way that doesn’t turn off some readers?

Is there a middle ground

We have moved away a little from genre definitions and into writing styles, but the two are not unrelated. Hard Sci-Fi tends to be dense with technical details. This can create a more hard going, “drier” text. Soft Sci-Fi, free from the need to justify it’s technology, is likely to have more “free-flowing” text, and a livelier style. You are more likely to get a “page turner” with soft Sci-Fi.

Having said all that, nothing’s that simple. Just as hard-to-soft Sci-fi is a spectrum whatever definition you choose (we’ve already seen the mix with Battlestar), there is a range of writing styles across the board. Whereas I’d argue the rules above are broadly true, it does not necessarily follow that a hard Sci-Fi novel will be written in a specific style and a soft one in another.

Something I’m trying to do with a current work in progress is to provide accurate science without putting off readers by being too technical. Part of how I do this is to be deliberately sparse on the details. I just describe what’s there, but spend as little time as I can on how it works (unless this is crucial to the story).

My theory is that different groups of readers will react in the following ways:

• Science Fiction aficionados will recognise aspects of what I’m describing and will already be familiar with the technology and how it works within the story.
• People who are interested in science, but have not come across the particular tech I’m describing will have enough information to go and look it up.
• Readers who aren’t interested in technical detail won’t get much of it, but they get enough that they can recognise what the technology does. Or maybe they don’t need to know what it does, which is fine because if it’s not important to the story they don’t care.

So, example. A typical science fiction trope that’s based in real science is the use of ring constructions on ships or space stations. The spinning rings create centrifugal force that behaves like gravity and “sticks” things to the inside edge of the ring.

This is very familiar to most people who have read Sci-Fi or seen science fiction films, so I only feel it necessary to mention that the ship is arranged in rings and can leave it at that (actually, I don’t mention it directly to the reader. A character mentions to another that something is in “C ring”. Show, don’t tell, people!)

However, an opportunity did arise to include a hint at how this system works, whilst including some other symbolism for good measure, so I took it:

He span the ring on his desk. The spin was different here and he couldn’t quite get used to it. Walking in the slightly higher gravity felt natural now, and he threw a ball without thinking about it. But something in the spin was off. He imagined the forces tiny life might be feeling on the inner surface, squashed against it by the faux gravity. He watched it wobble and flatten. Then he picked it up and slipped it on to his left hand.

I’m never explicit about the relationship between this and the way the ship is arranged, I leave that to the reader. But I think it’s a rather nice way of getting a concept across without getting technical or stopping the “action” to explain things. It’s a small detail but I was quite pleased with myself.

All this to say that I think there is a middle ground and that it relies heavily on showing and not telling. It’s The Writer’s Way. I couldn’t tell you if misconceptions about the genre are what’s keeping readers away, but I’m not sorry I’m writing science fiction (the ideas I have determine the genre, not the marketplace). While I am I will strive for that middle ground. Because I believe it’s better writing anyway.

Useful Links

• Adventures in Sci Fi Publishing
• Epic Journeys: Fantasy Makes a Comeback, SF Searches for a Renaissance. Article discussing the popularity of fantasy and sci-fi. A great read.
• What is Science Fiction: Hard versus soft ScF. Part of Richard Treitel’s site, which I gatehr is a bit old now, but still a good discussion on definitions.
]]> http://www.getmewriting.com/nuts-and-bolts-of-writing/writing-hard-or-soft-science-fiction/feed/ 2 http://www.getmewriting.com/nuts-and-bolts-of-writing/what-game-of-thrones-can-teach-about-showing-a-world/ http://www.getmewriting.com/nuts-and-bolts-of-writing/what-game-of-thrones-can-teach-about-showing-a-world/#comments Sat, 16 Jul 2011 07:30:46 +0000 Matt http://www.getmewriting.com/?p=1023 I was having a conversation with @thedavidwwright (from the excellent Collective Inkwell) on Twitter last week about the excellent Game of Thrones TV series. I thought it would be worth expanding on it a bit.

First off though, I have not read the novels (George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire series), so everything I’m writing here pertains to the recent TV series. This is finished on Sky Atlantic for a good three weeks now, but if you missed it, I would definitely recommend catching it if it airs again.

World Showing

That Game of Thrones has a well-developed and interesting world is clear. It is absolutely packed with rich backstory. Absolutely nothing exists in isolation, but is part of a complicated web of relationships and histories.

How do I know this? It’s because the series showed me through current action, and because I concentrated quite a lot whilst watching it (more on that later).

So what am I not talking about when I talk about “showing” in this series?

Well I’m not talking about long explanatory monologues to make sure everyone is up to date with what’s going on (the laziest form of backstory delivery). And I’m not talking about flashbacks either (the laziest form of showing).

In the Now is in the Know

No, this showing takes place as the current story unfolds, in a steady drip-feed of information that complements the current action. It’s in the set (the Throne itself, or the dragon skulls in the dungeons), the costume, the behaviour of the characters (the duplicity of the king’s advisors or the warrior tribalism of the Dothraki).

But it’s in the dialogue that the fine line between too much information and too little is trodden most skilfully, and it’s that I want to focus on. The reason it is so successful is because it is natural.

Simply put, if two characters are talking and some point of history, recent or otherwise, is relevant to their conversation, they will mention it. Apart from that, no one goes out of their way to mention things that have happened or people they’ve known. That’s where the drip-feed comes from. After an episode finished, my wife would often complain that nothing had happened. But although most episodes lacked action set pieces, each one was packed with nuggets of information and what interested me when the credits rolled was not what had happened, but what I had learned about the world. Despite the many comparisons to big-budget movies in the media (largely due to the series’ phenomenal budget), it felt a lot more like watching a novel than a summer blockbuster.

The message Game of Thrones sends to writers then is to let their characters do the talking. As a writer, you know what the history of the world is, you know what each character knows and how they behave. Let them talk, or think or act, and the important parts of the backstory will come out by themselves. Don’t stop to worry if the reader is keeping up.

But is it as Simple as That?

Almost certainly not. For a start, dreaming up such a complex world is not simple in the first place. And I’m probably doing everyone involved a great disservice by saying that the world will reveal itself, as if it takes no effort on the writer’s part at all.

The truth is probably closer to dedicated crafting – taking out large chunks of explanatory dialogue or subtly adding bits over many drafts. I for one will be taking the approach of letting my characters show the backstory, and only adding more if my testing with readers shows it’s needed.

And it’s a fine line, isn’t it. Game of Thrones takes an unusual approach to that line. Normally you expect TV shows to err on the side of too much information, terrified of an audience becoming confused and switching off. Game of Thrones errs on the side of too little. If you are not familiar with the world, you will be confused at multiple points in the series (or per episode) – the raft of characters and relationships is just too much to keep track of.

But I would rather be occasionally confused than patronised. I trusted the writers to reveal the most important information, and I’m grateful they trusted me to keep up. I had a thoroughly intriguing and enjoyable time watching Game of Thrones and I for one can’t wait for series 2.

]]> http://www.getmewriting.com/nuts-and-bolts-of-writing/what-game-of-thrones-can-teach-about-showing-a-world/feed/ 2 http://www.getmewriting.com/nuts-and-bolts-of-writing/fluidity-and-rigidity/ http://www.getmewriting.com/nuts-and-bolts-of-writing/fluidity-and-rigidity/#comments Sat, 19 Mar 2011 08:06:17 +0000 Craig http://www.getmewriting.com/?p=831 After a brief discussion with Jeff Baker, I hit upon the idea of extending a comment that I made regarding back story. One could say I was inspired by what I said *laughs at own joke*.

Anyway. I touched upon the subject of fluidity, and different approaches that could be made regarding back story. Now personally, I favour having a rigid back story. The Canon so to speak. It may sound like a drag, sorting out the back story before you get to work on the actual writing, but if you have it all laid out beforehand, you can speed through a story faster. I guess a rigid back story is like a safety net. It’s always there, so you know that there’s something. I’m not saying you have to have all the minutiae written out for every character, but a definite outline I always find useful. Quite handily, I opted out of a rigid back story in my most recent effort, and went for the alternative.

Fluidity

What if you write more on the fly? Is it really that bad to come up with the back story as you go along? It can offer a little more freedom with characters and how they behave if you don’t have a set-in-stone back story for them.

I’ve written about improvisational writing in the past, and the dangers it can pose, and fluidity here is somewhat similar. Of course, with back story you do have to have some sort of loose framework. Enough structure that allows you to navigate, and fill in the gaps as you go. Being fluid with the back story can also be an advantage. For example, if you have a rigid back story, what if you hit a plot point that cant be resolved with that? I’ve hit this problem before, and I have gone to huge lengths to write around it, creating implausible scenarios and adding maybe thirty-forty extra minutes of screen-time (this was a screenplay idea I was working on) in order to try and get myself out of this hole. If you work with a more fluid back story, then you will encounter this problem far less frequently.

Fluidity, see?

Dangerous Waters



See, the water represents a fluid backstory, and the ice is a rigid backstory, but then it can get all fragmented and... nevermind. Fantastic image from George Grinsted (click for more)

There are of course dangers here. Especially if you try to move between the two. There isn’t much middle ground, and if you’re not careful, your back story can get fragmented all over the place. Making even minor changes can result in a ripple effect, which can result in having to rewrite huge swathes of material later down the line. Or it can open up huge plot holes. TV shows do this all the time. By either introducing siblings to main characters that have never been mentioned before, or completely changing a characters backstory, just to get some new plotlines going. Heroes did this a lot, which is one of the reasons it tanked.

On the other hand, it can allow you to experiment. Writing is after all about experimentation, is it not? Until a piece of writing is actually published, it can always be altered, and improved upon. If you do hit a wall in the narrative, then you can return to your back story and experiment. I’m not saying that you should completely change a particular character’s back story (unless its an emergency, I’ve had to do that in order to give a character, you know, motivation), but making small changes here and there to experiment can be helpful.

Above all, Experiment

Yes, I am aware that I have somewhat contradicted myself, but sometimes you have to. You may just experiment as a thought exercise, just to open up new avenues, or you may need to in order to get past one of those trouble plot issues. Sometimes even the most rigid of back stories need to be changed. Or at least clarified. I know that the few major back story changes I’ve made in my own work have been for the better. Also, remember that it’s your work. Unless you write non-fiction, it’s your world that you’re creating. You’re not going to rewrite the holocaust (unless you need to) so, as ever, experiment…

]]> http://www.getmewriting.com/nuts-and-bolts-of-writing/fluidity-and-rigidity/feed/ 17 http://www.getmewriting.com/nuts-and-bolts-of-writing/pacing-chapter-lengths/ http://www.getmewriting.com/nuts-and-bolts-of-writing/pacing-chapter-lengths/#comments Sat, 14 Nov 2009 07:47:02 +0000 Craig http://www.getmewriting.com/?p=272 This is one of the most difficult things I find to get right. Pacing is a skill that you can develop, but it’s very difficult to, because it can take an outsiders view to tell you if a story is going too fast, or too slow.

I was recently reading a book (yeah, great, what else are you going to do with a book, watch it?) Now I can’t remember if it was Bad Things by Michael Marshall, or whether it was something else, but this is the book that sticks in my mind, so it’s the example that I’ll use. Now I personally feel that Marshall is a master of pacing. The opening chapters are languid and easy going, not rushed at all, but I enjoy that. It puts you in a place, lets you get the feel of the characters, and helps settle you for the journey. And once things get underway you get swept up in the ride. Towards the end of the book, the chapters get snappier, shorter. Now, I’ve never really been a fan of tons of shorter chapters. Some books (such as those by Dan Brown) I check out to see how many chapters there are and when I note that there are over a hundred I roll my eyes. Yes, having lots of fast short chapters help you rush through the book, and keeps the pace up, but you don’t get time to see the characters, the situations, you’re along for the ride. It’s like watching a film and not being able to rewind to catch a moment you think you might have missed.

Alternatively, sometimes I’ll see a massive doorstop of a book with only twenty chapters and I know I’ll have to drag myself kicking and screaming through it.

Maybe it’s a psychological effect.

Anyway, back to the short chapters. It struck me just how effective it was at ratcheting up the tension. A whole host of chapters jostling together, switching between different characters, passing almost in real time, really gets you on the edge of your seat, and whenever that happens, I feel I have to push through all the way to the end. I get to the last few chapters and I cant just leave it, I have to read them all. If I leave the last two chapters say, I feel like its switching a movie off five minutes from the end, and coming back to it later.

The reason I bring this all up is due to the climax of my first major project I got finished. During its (extremely long) development, I’ve received advice from various people (including Matt), most especially about my chapter lengths. Initially my chapters were short, and jumpy, which didn’t create a good rhythm. Then I arrived at the climax. Due to the way my redrafting had gone, the climax ended up being a race against time. What I decided to do with this was drop the reader right in it with the main character, and not let up until the end. So something like the last fifth of the book is one long chapter.

Great. I didn’t have a problem with that. When I first wrote it, my fingers could barely keep up with my brain while I was getting it all down, and I felt the rush that the character was going through. I showed it to some people for feedback and what did they say? It was exhausting. Not because having all of this in one block slowed it down in any way, but because it was relentless, they felt they needed time to breathe. And in retrospect, I can understand. Shorter, snappier chapters (especially when you switch between several characters all working towards the same goal) can keep the pace right up there, but without the associated exhaustion. Now, all I have to do is figure out how to break up this finale without my mind snapping…

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