Mostly cross-posted from The Midnight Hour, as I am tremenjously sick today.
Yesterday I posted about exposition and infodump. More specifically, I answered a Reader’s questions about why infodump is so prevalent. Today my cold is much worse and I am feeling just as cranky, so I thought I’d point you toward that post as my contribution to the world for this week. I’m too sick for much else. When one starts having fever-dreams involving spiders, it’s time to go back to bed.
Before I go on, though: in answer to reader Dave Grenier’s questions: I just did those Vanth paragraphs on the fly, they were disposable. I really wasn’t thinking of much other than illustrating the exposition point. I’m glad you liked them.
I will, in the interests of fully shouldering my blogging responsibilities, mention that I’ve been thinking about artistic synchronicity lately. I heard about Vanishing Point while watching Tarantino’s Death Proof, and of course got it up on my Netflix queue. I enjoyed it quite a bit, but am too sick to come up with any in-depth analysis*. I will just note that after destroying my protagonist’s orange Impala in the current book I was thinking about a replacement car, since Jill is kind of a gearhead. I’m thinking she might have to find a 1970 Dodge Challenger and cherry it out.
I just wonder what color I’ll have to make it for my picky, picky Muse. White would be just too much.
Off I go to take cold medicine and curl back up in bed before everyone else wakes up. Sorry for being a party-pooper, but I am really not up to par today.
* Although there is a Viggo Mortenson remake I fully intend to lay on the floor and watch today. If Viggo doesn’t cure the common cold, there is no hope for humanity.
The cold has struck. It’s not as bad as I feared, but a deep cough and enough mucus to grease a runway? Check. Body aches and pains? Check. All this while I am undergoing that particular female biological process all girls of reproductive age are visited with about every twenty-eight to thirty-six days?
CHECK, dammit. Check.
Yeah, I know, too much information, Lili-san. Sorry. It is a blog, you know.
Reader Elaine asked after yesterday’s post on infodump, “For something that is on all the lists of story-telling errors, why is it so prevalent?”
Ah, a simple answer, Grasshopper. Because it’s easy.
Compare this:
Vanth was an assassin for the Jackal King. The Jackal King owned the streets in the city Vanth lived in, called Vois. Vanth was a real badass and hated the Jackal King.
To this:
It was time for another job. He stretched, making sure nothing would creak or jingle while he moved, took a few experimental steps, touched the garrote’s handles. A job that called for a neck cord was likely to end badly; you were just as much at risk of losing a finger as the mark was of losing its life.
Vanth preferred a good clean knifing from behind, if you prepared the ground well the mark could not easily struggle and cause problems. But perfumed, whispering, greasy Sivarus wanted this one strangled, it was a condition of the prize, and one did not disagree with the Jackal King’s expressed preferences. Not unless you wanted to lose the prize and quite possibly one’s own license to weed the world of annoyances.
That was how Vanth phrased it to himself, when he thought of it at all. He was in the business of removing annoyances, for those who had the money. The rich could pay for an annoyance-free life. Other sad saps, like Vanth himself, had to work for every annoyance-free moment they could snatch.
He took a final look around his small rented room, closed one eye, and stared at his unmade cot while he counted to fifteen. Then he blew out the candle, opened his now dark-adapted eye, and ghosted for the window.
It never did to leave from the front door too often…
That isn’t the best illustration in the world, but it works. Exposition seems easier because we place a premium on verbal information-giving. However, what works well verbally may not ever work well on the page. An indirect directness works best on the page; you must avoid definitive statements from the third person about your protaganist (Vanth is a badass, Vanth hates Sivarus) but you can state definitively what the character is doing or thinking about (perfumed, greasy, whispering Silvarus; Vanth has to work for annoyance-free moments.) Those things, if chosen carefully, can hold two or three different pieces of information about the character at once. And they MUST.
Dialogue is not just what a character says. Dialogue must also serve the purpose of telling us something about the character and MOVING the story along. If it doesn’t, kill it swiftly before it breeds. Definitive statements from the character’s point of view are the same way. If they only say one thing, they’re exposition. If you can weave them to say two or three things about the character at once by showing what the character does and says, it’s actual writing.
A touch–a mere pinch–of exposition may be okay, if there is no other way to get the effect you want. One must, however, think carefully about what to put in and what task, exactly, the expo is supposed to perform. It must be a conscious choice.*
When I see a lot of infodump I see an apprentice writer’s mistake. When I start seeing less infodump and more showing, there are no longer apprentice mistakes–there are journeyman mistakes, which only about ten percent of people who think they’re writers make because they’ve made and learned from all the other mistakes. I don’t read stuff that makes apprentice mistakes. I put it back into the slush pile and I move on. Infodump is a mistake that will land you in the slush pile ninety-nine times out of a hundred.**
Exposition is a piece of information you give the reader that s/he just has to take on faith because you SAY so. (Vanth is a badass.) Real writing is where you show Vanth getting hit in the gut and a finger hacked off, and dealing with it well enough to kick the shit out of Sivarus’s goons and escape–and then bandage himself up while shaking and realizing how close to death he came THIS time. (Which touches on combat psychology and combat scenes, a different ball of wax. Stay focused, Lili.) Additionally, exposition is passive. There is no movement in infodump. The character stands there like a wax figurine to be painted. During SHOWING, not telling, the character moves and breathes in such a way that the reader can read between the lines and decipher numerous things about Vanth, his background, his personality, his job, his outlook on life, and his likely reasons for doing what he’s doing.
This is one of the reasons why writers must read constantly and omnivorously. After a while, infodump gets to be like pr0nography–you may not be able to define it but you knows it when you sees it.
It’s not easy. It’s a heck of a trick pony ride. But when done well, it’s what writing is all about, and it’s well worth thinking about. Pretty much every jackass who can tell a good joke at a family reunion thinks s/he can be a writer. “How hard can it be when it’s just telling stories?” But telling stories on the page requires a completely different skillset than telling stories at the family reunion. Each sentence has to perform multiple functions and balance against every other sentence. Then there’s plot and characterization, verisimilitude, pacing, and all sorts of other things to consider.
Hey, if this was easy, anyone could do it. And I’m sorry, but “just anyone” can’t do it. Writers work hard and think about these sorts of things.
Thank God.
* Breaking the rules consciously is NOT the same as breaking them because one doesn’t know any better.
** I can hear some of you now thinking about wildly popular books are are pure exposition–Dan Brown, for example, or Tom Clancy. Such books are not writing. They are technical manuals with a thin veneer of hero worship. Don’t bother with those.
Don’t take anything I say personally today. I woke up in the kind of mood Attila the Hun must have woke up in when he decided to take over the world–and not in a nice way, either. Not that I’m about to take over the world…but I am certainly in take-no-prisoners mode.
I had a whole long post planned today about infodump and exposition. I’m reading a book today that has been two chapters of infodump from the main character. The only show don’t tell was a short chapter sandwiched between the other two, and that had its starring character murdered. Which sucked.
On the one hand, I’m intrigued enough by the premise to keep reading. On the other, goddammit, I HATE infodump. I like being thrown into the action and figuring everything out in context. In media res is also how I like to start books, and my editors keep telling me I need to explain more. It’s so clear inside my head sometimes the explanations seem superfluous…and of course, with this kind of balancing act, nobody is going to be completely happy. Readers sometimes think I’m explaining too much or wish I’d explain more, and editors feel the same way. Writing is like trying to satisfy all of the people enough of the time.
But I’m cranky and tired, so I suppose today isn’t the day for a big post on exposition and infodump. Instead I will remark that my bud Nina Merrill’s mini-novella Genie, No Bottle is available on Amazon as a Kindle book. There’s a hot genie in it–and guacamole. Which is all kinds of awesome. End cheap shill for friend’s book. *grin*
All right. I shall bid adieu. This cruddy mood may not even be helped by the challah bread I am required to bake today. Wonder if I should clean up around the heavy bag? That’s certainly therapeutic, but I need my fingers to type with. I suppose I’ll just settle for deep breaths and repeating I shall not lose my temper until tomorrow, tomorrow, tomorrow…
Why, I ask you, WHY, does the Muse decide she’s got a gargantuan load of plot to dump on me RIGHT WHEN I’VE GOT REVISIONS DUE ON A TOTALLY DIFFERENT BOOK?
*weeps, gnashes teeth*
So of course I’ve spent the morning tooling around on the Internet, not doing much of anything. Of course, I needed that time to get everything straight in my head…but Jesus, why does the Muse have to be difficult? I need to be doing revisions on Book 2 now, period. I can’t have Book 3 trying to birth itself from my cranium right now.
I can’t tell the Muse to go away either. So it’s sleepless nights for a while, unless we can strike some sort of bargain.
First, an excellent pair of posts about street kids and verisimilitude. Kaigou has taken the trouble and time to point out why the treatment of street kids in fiction (especially urban fantasy, but not limited to that genre) is often wildly inaccurate, and what an author can do about it.
These posts are not just useful for characterization and plot holes, they are also true. If you know anyone who has ever been on the street, these might help you understand (and hopefully, interact with) that person a little better.
Ace Backwords once did a strip with a cartoon mouse leaning against the frame. “Streets?” he said. In the next box, someone had fallen and bounced off the pavement, twisted and tangled. “Hard.” the mouse says. In the last box, the mouse addresses the audience. “Any questions?” Which pretty much sums it up, though it’s not quite useful as a guide.
It was difficult for me to read these posts because they are so dead-on, though I am relieved someone else feels the way I do about toilet paper. Nothing like finding out someone else shares your security item. Anyway, both posts are HIGHLY recommended. Read ‘em even if you don’t write.
Yesterday was a busy day. I got workbooks for the Princess, did some yardwork (yes, I still hate raking; but it’s kind of okay sometimes when I do it and when I can start and stop at will to stare off into the distance) and baked white bread and challah. (mmmh egg wash!) I ALSO finished the copyedits on Night Shift, though I forgot the glossary. (Insert “D’oh!” noise here.) I finished up by going for a short walk in the freezing cold and now have developed some kind of cough. I know it probably wasn’t the cold air, but still, I’m feeling hypochondriac enough to obsess over it.
Wah.
I seem to be feeling the cold more intensely these days, and the only thing I can think of is that the weight loss has robbed me of insulation. I am still nowhere near skinny but I am roughly half the size I was, and that’s a lot of (pardon the term) blubber that ain’t keepin’ me warm no more.
I’ve also been rereading Kaigou’s posts and remembering times when I’ve been colder. And I’m looking around this house, which is damn near a palace compared to a lot of places I’ve lived. Not only is it damn near a palace but it’s also arranged the way I like, and if things get messed up or accidentally broken nobody has to cry or make up for it in pain. And it’s quiet, no screaming or yelling except when the kids are excited and happy. No suddenly-shifting sand underfoot. Here is solid ground, and I am glad of it.
So today I’m going to take it kind of easy. I’m ahead of schedule, so if I just knock off a few of the first revisions on Hunter’s Prayer and take a stab at the glossary, I should be ahead of the game. It’s a nice place to be.
Turkey Day finished with nobody sick, screaming, or crying. Well, the Princess has a cold, but that was a pre-existing condition. All the food I prepared was edible–brioche caramel sticky buns, ham, baked mashed potatoes (they taste better if you bake them THEN mash them), stuffing, asparagus and haricots verts (the Muffin cooked those, thank God), mixed-starter bread (which came out wonderfully well), and apple pie that I baked yesterday. All things were edible and everyone ate loads. I dosed myself with wine and the Bailey’s lasted the whole day (there’s still a little bit left over.) No holiday is truly complete without Bailey’s, says I. And of course the kids were able to watch a bunch of Looney Tunes, which made their day.
Today the house is quiet. I have copyedits to bash at and some yardwork to do, and if I get both reasonably done I will reward myself with a film later today. Rewards are necessary things, I think. Life cannot be all work, work, work.
Incidentally, I’ve been lucky enough to have the same copyeditor for most of the Valentine books and now the first Kismet book. I really, really love my copyeditor, because s/he seems to learn my style and idiosyncrasies, and take them into account. It is a Good Thing.
It just occurred to me this morning that the Little Prince has been toilet-trained for quite some time. I remember when he was as long as my arm and completely helpless. Now he wants to do everything “Bah MahSELF, Mahm!” It is truly amazing. It seems like only yesterday he could barely even get his thumb to his mouth, and yet now his favorite things include running through the house, somersaulting on the bed, and scurrying in when I fill up the sink to wash dishes. “I do it FOR you, Mummy!” he crows, and proceeds to get everything but the dishes soaking wet.
*sigh* They grow so fast. And the toilet-training for both of them went so smoothly; I wonder if I’m lucky or if the fact that we just didn’t worry so much about it and let the kids discover in their own due time had something to do with it. Kids WANT to learn and to be “grown-up”, one merely has to facilitate and they will do all the hard work.
Well, mostly.
Anyway, back into the wilds of copyedits, where my fabulous copyeditor has hacked a path through overgrown prose and fact-checked the thickets. Bless his/her heart.
So I was up early this morning doing dishes (the decks must be cleared before I can engage in another bout of kitchen madness, since we have limited space–the breadboard would pick yesterday to go kaput) and letting the caramel sticky buns rise. Two whole pans of brioche caramel sticky cinnamon buns, put together last night and baked this morning.
They are deadly.
The mixed-starter bread is bubbling along. I needed something a little bit warmer than the fridge but not as warm as inside for it last night, so I put it out in the garage. I will check the odometer of the car to see if the starter went a-traveling later.
In about an hour and a half the potatoes will go in, then the ham. We’re going to eat early so I’m not doing dishes all night. Although I should probably make someone else around here clean up. The problem is, I tend to clean while cooking, so there’s not much left over, and nobody else seems to get the hang of properly loading the dishwasher in order to get maximum use out of it OR wiping down the bloody counters.
Or perhaps they just act like they don’t so I’ll get irritated and do it.
I am reminded this Thanksgiving of just how stressful family get-togethers are for me. My mum gets all worked up, works herself to the bone in the days preceding, and then when something goes wrong (which it inevitably does, as we live in an imperfect world) she blames us and the whole thing is Ruined. Cue drama. And of course my stepdad uses each family get-together as a means of delivering maximum emotional abuse under the cover of party noise. So between them, it’s a fun time.
I just keep breathing and reminding myself that I’m not in that situation this year. I have control of where I go and what I do, even during the holiday season. I don’t have to be stressed. I can be focused on cooking, but I don’t have to be stressed.
Which is awesome, and I’m grateful for it.
The Princess has a cold, and the Little Prince could care less about Thanksgiving as long as he gets to make his paper airplanes. The UnSullen One is waiting for his friends to come over once they finish other dinners, and the Muffin is reading about zero-point energy while he doses himself with sticky buns. Such is the state of our household.
Happy turkey day, everyone. May you have a minimum of family drama and a maximum of good eatin’.
I feel almost bad, after bitching yesterday, about the flood of emails and comments I received saying “hang everything else, we the fans appreciate how close together the books are appearing.” I should have known I wasn’t the only one involved. *wry grin* Writing is such a mostly-solitary job (except for signings, conventions, and interacting with one’s agent/editor) that one often forgets everything except one’s own viewpoint.
So, thank you for the support. I had no ideas the larger, usually-silent mass of Readers felt so strongly about this, and I am glad you love the books enough to be happy when they come out close together. I can assure you, they all took a long time to write, and I hope they are all of a quality to suit you. I tried very hard.
Last but certainly not least, thank you for reading them. I would look mighty funny talking to myself out here, blogosphere or no.
Upward and onward, as Jewel the Unicorn said! Today I have to take the brioche dough out of the freezer and put it in the fridge to defrost. Tonight I make the caramel rolls–two whole pans of them–for tomorrow’s breakfast. Other things on the menu tomorrow are: a half-cloved ham (a ham in dishabille, for two of the three under-18s in the household are not fond of clove), asparagus and haricots verts, mixed-starter bread (from pizza dough starter today) or rye if I cannot manage, baked potatoes which will be scraped out and mashed with plenty of butter and sour cream.
Plus cookies. And two apple pies. Nobody in the house wants pumpkin. Apple is all they want. Good enough.
We’re lucky to have a lot of food. I can remember several holidays when I, as a young sprout, was seriously at risk of having it otherwise. Somehow things usually worked out, but I remember those times with a pain just under my heart, just like Dorothy Allison talks about the hunger of being poor.
There are two different types of hungry poverty. There is the actual grinding physical poverty, which is the worst. It makes you angry and sullen and fiercely ashamed, it gives you pride like a wrecking ball and malnutrition like a gun to the head.
Then there is the poverty of spirit, where food is used to bludgeon you and family gatherings are a means of mass torture. It’s not as bad as actually starving–nothing is as bad as that–but it is bad enough and gives one deep emotional damage.
It’s kind of funny (in that you-have-to-laugh-about-it-or-cry way) how _________’s (name blacked out deliberately, sorry) food troubles parallel my own. We compare notes sometimes about how food was treated as a leash, a chain, a punishment, a double-edged reward in our childhood and teen years. Part of learning to deal with something like this is talking to someone who went through it, who can validate one’s own experiences. Sometimes, just hearing that someone else felt the same way in a similar situation is enough to lift a huge weight from your back.
Learning to bake (and trying to learn how to cook) is helping, too. I feel I am taking control of an alchemical process that has wreaked havoc in my life–the bugaboo of food. I am so very glad the kids seem to view food as barely important–it’s fuel and it’s good, but they don’t have the angst and complex rage I remember feeling about food at their ages. To them, it’s just food…and that’s good.
Maybe this year I’ll be able to see the food as just food, and when I remember the pain and terror of family gatherings during the holiday season I’ll be able to wryly smile instead of cringe. Hey, it’s possible. Anything is possible, and now I know how to bake rye bread and brioche. Which is as much a miracle as anything else, in this world of wonders.
Posted on November 20th, 2007 | Posted in Real Life
Since I was talking about music that inspired the Valentine series…
Well, this is actually a Final Fantasy fan video. BUT, the song playing–Virtue, by Jesse Cook–is the song I always played for Dante and Japhrimel. If they can be said to have a song, this is it. Listen, and enjoy.
Kudos to whoever created the video, and major kudos to Mr. Cook. It’s strange, but now that I’m not writing Valentine anymore, I’m not listening to nearly as much flamenco…
Commence bitching: Please…I wish people would stop leaving comments about how “close together” the Valentine series is. What people don’t realize is that it took me five years to write those books, if not more. They’re being released close together, sure–because Orbit is launching stateside and they wanted a fully-grown and developed series to launch with. Plus, they liked the books. Go figure.
A lot of people don’t realize that when one writes a book, it can wait up to three years to get into print even if it’s bought right away. There’s editorial and production and art schedules to take into account. Traditional publishing is not for the impatient.
I know people may not understand why the books are appearing so quickly, but I really kind of resent the implication in a lot of the comments I’ve seen that I cranked these puppies out one after another in order to profit from them. No, my ducks, each book took a minimum of a year and a maximum of three years to write, and they were mostly all written concurrently, in a strange overlapping pattern. I got better as I went along, I hope, but each book took an overly-decent amount of time to create. That’s because they were hard on me emotionally–not as hard as the Kismet books, but very stressful nonetheless. I needed a full year minimum to deal with each book.
End bitching. I suppose I’m just being thin-skinned. But it does kind of cheese my buns. If the commenters knew how long one has to wait to see one’s book in print, mayhap they would not comment thus.
On another note, much more pleasant in my humble opinion, while driving home last night from picking up the UnSullen One Sarah McLachlan’s Fallen came on the radio.
Heaven
Bend to take my hand
And lead me through the fire
Be the long awaited answer
To a long and painful fight
Truth be told I tried my best
But somewhere long the way
I got caught up in all there was to offer
But the cost was so much more than I could bear
Though I’ve tried I’ve fallen
I have sunk so low
I messed up
Better I should know
So don’t come round here and
Tell me I told you so…
I realized that the song pretty much sums up the whole Valentine series, or at least Dante’s journey throughout. I listened to this song obsessively from Devil’s Right Hand through the finishing lines of To Hell And Back, especially while out walking at the track and processing more scenes in my head. If there is a song that encapsulates the whole series, that one’s it. I have sometimes remarked that everything one needs to know about Danny Valentine can be found in that song.
Kind of funny when someone does in three stanzas, a chorus, and a bridge what you took five books and however many drafts to do. No, I’m not jealous…not one little bit…me? No way. *grin*
When Danny started out as a character she was very black-and-white. If you betrayed her once, she was done with you. There were lines she had drawn that framed her whole world.
Then Japhrimel happened. And a whole underlying theme of the series is Dante moving into these situations where, increasingly, there is no right choice. It is an education in shades of gray for this character, who started out emotionally stunted and pretty rigid in her conceptions of how the world should work.
I’ve known a lot of people, especially teens, that way (and was, I must admit, one myself.) In many ways I think the process of growing up is learning about shades of gray and those situations where there is no “right thing” to do, or the “right thing” has such horrific consequences a different way has to be found. Learning to deal with those situations with nuance and flexibility is a hard balancing act, one that human beings rarely get consistently right.
I have not yet decided whether this is a bad or a good thing. It certainly creates both opportunities for learning AND for angst. On the other hand, pain seems to be the learning tool most often utilised by humanity. As Todd McCaffrey said to me this weekend, “Screwed is subjective.” Which rather neatly sums up the whole damn deal.
The UnSullen One is taking a philosophy class this quarter–something about how to use logic. It is fascinating to see him learning this whole new language and figuring out that defining one’s terms in this way is the first step toward talking to other people rationally and in an adult manner about philosophical questions. Without the definition of terms, the debates can’t go on.
It strikes me (rather roughly sometimes) that many interpersonal problems spring from a lack of clearly-defined terms agreed upon by both parties. Expectations are really little good if they’re not communicated clearly and thoroughly, and unless both parties agree the expectations mean the same things trouble will loom on the horizon sooner or later.
Eh, enough deep thoughts. There is a reading lesson for the Little Prince to get to, and math for the Princess, and cookies I promised to bake today.
Philosophy is nice, but I’ve got cookies to bake. Which just goes to show that I’m more of a practical utilitarian than a philosopher.
