Reading, 'Riting, and Ramblings

Sweetie sometimes tells me that my unfinished story outlines multiply like rabbits. Every other day I come up with new ideas inspired by other books, movies, TV shows, and/or real life. I watch a documentary about a wealthy family ruined by the Great Depression; "Ooh! I should write a historical multi-generational saga!" I see injustice in the news; "Someone needs to write a book about this so people will care." I hear an offhand comment by someone on the bus, and I'm off and running with a romantic comedy that starts with a missed ride and ends up with the heroine's boss pretending to have amnesia....

Obviously, unless I gain the superpower to write entire novels within twenty-four hours, there's no way that all of these fledgling ideas will end up as books. In the early days of calling myself a "writer," this really bothered me. So many beautiful ideas! So many potential projects! I couldn't bear to let any of them go. So I would outline and file them away and swear to each and every one that I'd come back someday, when I had the time and skills to take care of them. It felt like I was abandoning my children at an orphanage with empty promises, then running off to forget about them and make a new family with prettier ones.

But this is the reality: most book ideas will never make it. Most of them probably shouldn't make it. I have a lot of ideas that simply stink. What makes them stink?

1. They have no substance.

A lot of my ideas are based on a single scene or gag. They have no purpose beyond being nifty, and that's a flimsy reason to spend months or years writing a book. For example, I once had a fun idea for a mash-up of genre cliches. A hard-boiled Humphrey Bogart-style detective from space would fly around picking up the stock heroes of different worlds (a chivalrous Regency Romance hero, a strong and silent cowboy, a bubbly Chick Lit heroine obsessed with marriage and shoe shopping, etc.). They would be fully self-aware of their expected roles and invoke every cheesy trope under the sun.

And it sounded great...for about an hour. Then I realized that a parody like this would be better suited for a twenty-minute episode of The Simpsons. Trying to give it substance would bog it down, and trying to write 200+ pages of the same tired gag would be exhausting and fruitless. It was better to forget about it and divert my time elsewhere.

2. They have no direction.

Sometimes I get halfway through a story and realize that I can't do anything with the rest. It's not going anywhere; I can't envision the outcome. Or I can envision the outcome, but it's an unsatisfactory one. There are at least two short stories sitting on my laptop that I completed halfway before stopping to say, "Uh oh." I couldn't give a happy ending to one, and I couldn't come up with any ending for the other. All of the action took place in the strong set-ups; the inevitable resolutions were just sad little whimpers.

This is why I could never be a "pantser" (though I question whether pantsers truly exist, but that's a topic for another time). Unless I can flesh out a definite beginning and an end and I know the path between them clearly, I know it's a bad idea to start writing. The short stories...whatever. So I wasted a couple of days. In the case of WIP-B, though, I wasted six months. Poor WIP-B.

3. They have no room for variation.

A book-length work needs dips and peaks. It needs a brighter and darker shades, faster and slower bits. When a novel is uniformly heavy or light, it gets boring, draggy, and downright annoying. The complete lack of variation from the depressing and cynical is why I hated The Casual Vacancy. On the flip side are novels that read like bad sitcoms—one lighthearted (or vulgar) joke after the next with no contrasting serious bits to give the stories weight.

The other week I started an urban fantasy about fox spirits warring with witches in modern-day America. One chapter in, I realized that something was very wrong. There shouldn't have been anything wrong. It was thrilling. It was sexy and fast-paced and had liberal dashes of mystery and intrigue. And that was the problem. It was all sexy and fast-paced. The premise left no room to stop and smell the roses, to build the world and the characters beyond their shallow roles. So I killed them to put them out of their one-dimensional misery.

Right now, after spending a long time weeding through bad, so-so, and could-be-good-if-I-were-someone-else ideas, I've finally settled on two that might actually work. They have substance, they have narrative arcs, and they have plenty of potential for drama and humor, romance and action. Now the difficulty will be choosing one and sticking to it without being wooed away by ones that look even better.

A week or so ago, in preparation for Halloween, one of the writing sites I follow posted an article about how to write suspenseful stories. You've got your unexpected twists, your unanswered questions, and of course, our wonderful old friends, cliffhangers!

Everyone loves cliffhangers. They keep readers turning the pages. The poor saps will be reading in bed, intending to turn off their Nooks in a few minutes and go to sleep. They just want to stop at a nice clean chapter break...and then BOOM! Fred goes off a cliff. He's just hanging there, dangling, his tie flying in the wind. His shoe falls off and splashes onto the sharp rocks 100 feet below. His grip slips and...Chapter End.

No! The suspense! We must keep going! Screw sleep; screw work tomorrow; we must know what happened to Fred! Haha. Now we have them. Now our curious readers will be forced to buy the next chapter.

Except—wait a minute—they already have it.

The cliffhanger trick was invented for the sale of serials. Those old black-and-white Friday night movie serials, magazine short story serials, comic series, television series...they thrive on the cliffhanger. Audiences have to make the decision to go out and buy the next comic or tune in to the next show, and a cliffhanger can push them in the right direction. But within the chapters of a book, we don't have to woo anyone back. We don't have to artificially create tension and promise to resolve it if they fork over another 50¢ for the next installment. They've already bought the whole kit and caboodle.

Some writers and editors are under the bizarre impression that the only reason anyone will keep reading past a chapter break is if there's something spectacular at stake. Fred's about to die...they don't know whether Brittany made it out of the burning warehouse...will Tim kiss Sally or not? If these novelists were writing for TV, I'm sure they'd make the stations big bucks—but they're not. They don't have to worry about keeping the ratings up from week to week. The main reasons a reader will stick with a book don't have anything to do with where we strategically place the chapter breaks. They'll keep reading because...

• They like the setting and the characters. They're immersed in the world you've built for them and want to return to it ASAP.
• You've constructed a well-paced story and they want to see how it develops.
• They bought this book for $11.99 and by Jove, they're going to get their money's worth by reading the whole damn thing.

When people gush that they "couldn't put such-and-such book down," they usually mean the first and second list items above. They don't mean the author put a chapter break in the middle of every big scene. They don't mean they were tricked into tethering themselves to their Kindles because the author withheld critical information and dangled it like a carrot on a stick throughout the entire novel. They mean they loved the experience and wanted more of it.

What's even worse advice than telling writers to put cliffhangers at the end of every chapter? Telling them to refuse to resolve it in the next one. The article I perused proposed this precisely.

A twist on the cliffhanger is when you are using multiple narrators or points-of-view. Then Chapter 1 ends on a cliffhanger for Herman, and Chapter 2 takes up Mildred's story, which ends in a cliffhanger. That leaves you free to catch up Herman's story for Chapter 3, which—of course—ends on a cliffhanger, too. This sort of leap-frogging characters and making sure each chapter ends with something held in suspense (i.e. what happens next?) makes for reader satisfaction.

"Reader satisfaction"? Let me tell you what I, as a reader, feel when writers do this to me. Remember the football gag in the Peanuts comics? Lucy would put a football down and tell Charlie Brown to kick it. Charlie would run up, but when he took a swing she would pull it out of the way and grin. Then he would fly into the air yelling "Aaugh!" and fall "Wump!" on his back. Yeah. It feels a lot like that. Only, when an author pulls resolutions out from under me, time and time again, it's the book that goes flying.

I'm not universally against cliffhangers in novels. I like cliffhangers, really. They add a little spice and surprise now and again. But it's BS to tell writers to put them at the end of every chapter because, supposedly, readers won't have a reason to turn the page without them.

I'm usually not one to post random cute videos, but this is just too cute.

My sentiments exactly, Eleanor. My sentiments exactly.