Reading, 'Riting, and Ramblings

This book had the potential to be awesome. It was advertised as a witty genre-mashing paranormal steampunk comedy of manners. The premise: in an alternate Victorian England, werewolves and vampires run amok. A feisty spinster, we'll call her Therese, was born with the power to nullify the supernatural. Her touch will turn any vampire or werewolf back into a harmless human. Therese, armed with an iron will and her trusty parasol, uses her powers to protect the British Empire from various evils.

Awesome, right? But instead of reaching her awesome potential, the author fell into the shallow tropes that too often plague books aimed at female readers.

1. Sex Isn't a Story

From the high-energy screwball premise, I looked forward to a lot of high-energy screwball action. Instead, the book is all about sex.

Therese has villains to confront, mysterious disappearances to solve, and fantastical inventions to play with, but instead she spends 80% of her time making out with hot guys. Or thinking about making out with hot guys. Or worrying that because she has a big nose and dark skin, hot guys won't want to make out with her.

Too many authors seem to think that all books are romances with a few drops of flavoring for genre. They don't write fantasies or mysteries; they write romances with some fantasy or mystery elements in the background. And they seem to believe that if the protagonist is female, she must spend a tiresome amount of time pining for, fighting with, and eventually succumbing to the animal charms of a hot guy.

Whether the story goes anywhere in the meantime is inconsequential. All that rare superpower stuff? Yeah, just decoration. Kidnappings? Murders? Whispers of rogue vampires and mad scientists wreaking havoc in the underworld? Pshaw, who cares? The real question of interest is whether Therese and the hot werewolf policeman are gonna do it or not.

If you are not specifically writing a romance, romantic elements should be at most a spice, like cinnamon. I love cinnamon. But you can't make a dish out of 80% cinnamon. If one is promised a cinnamon roll, one presumes it will be a roll with gooey cinnamon sugar filling, not a solid mass of cinnamon with some bread crumbs sprinkled on top.

If you set out to write a fantasy, or a mystery, or a screwball steampunk historical comedy, and you find that 80% of your prose is about racing hearts and steamy kisses, stop. Figure out what your story really is. If you take out the sex and find there is no story, either make one or write a romance instead.

2. Intelligence Isn't Cute

Therese is supposed to be likeable not only because she's an iron-willed spinster, but because she has a great scientific mind. You can tell she has a great scientific mind because she uses big words and babbles about the latest technological advances while the people around her stare dumbly and/or roll their eyes.

Having a brain makes Therese different and unique because, as everyone knows, most women lack them. Her mother and sisters are incapable of thinking about anything but evening gowns and marriage prospects. Her best friend is a sweet, supportive airhead whose talents are limited to hat-making and eyelash-batting. The only other characters with fully functional neurons are men: the gentle professor, the enthusiastic American scientist, and, of course, the hot werewolf policeman.

Naturally, Therese doesn't use her brain for anything more than tossing out witty lines. The primary purpose of it is to attract hot guys. The scientist and policeman are surprised and intrigued by her superiority of understanding. A woman who can hold a coherent conversation—how novel! How adorable! It even makes up for her big nose and dark skin!

Even in the twenty-first century, many authors treat intelligence as a trait that makes women sexually appealing, but has no use otherwise. And they illustrate how bright their heroines are by giving all other female characters the mental faculties of a goldfish.

3. Culture isn't Character

Therese is assertive and courageous because her father was Italian. Her big nose is Italian, her dark skin is Italian, and her mood swings are Italian. She even does big Italian hand gestures, even though her father died when she was young and there was nobody around to teach her the mannerism.

The hot werewolf policeman is strong, rough, and passionate because he's Scottish. The scientist is congenial but a bit dumb and indelicate because he's American. The vampire leader's maid is gorgeous and seductive because she's French.

The author of this book can't go more than two whole pages without mentioning Therese's Italian blood, or the policeman's Scottish origins, or the barbaric tendencies of anyone who isn't 100% English. Sometimes this is tongue-in-cheek for humor. (Oh, those Victorians. So racist, ha ha.) But much of the time, she is perfectly earnest—Italians are eccentric, Scots are hot-blooded, and Americans are xenophobic Puritans who burn everyone to death.

She seems to see no reason to flesh characters out beyond "he's American" because everyone knows what Americans are like, right? All 300 million of us think and act exactly the same.

There are real cultural differences between peoples, but culture is not character. Relying on stereotypes isn't just offensive, it's lazy.

***

This book could really have been awesome if it (1) went somewhere other than to the bedroom and (2) featured characters who weren't completely defined by racial profiles and gender roles.

It had so much potential. I mean, you've got werewolves and vampires in steampunkified Victorian London. You could have silly vampire debutantes who faint at the sight of blood. Stiff-lipped vampire gentlemen who consider drinking from the neck of a human as primitive and appalling as sucking milk from the udder of a cow. Werewolf clergymen who keep wooden stakes handy at funerals, just in case the deceased decides to get back up.

And you could have a heroine who does something. But no, ultimately the only goal in an intelligent, powerful woman's life should be to rope in a sexy alpha male who will feed her and house her and make her heart go thumpity thump.

For example, when someone somewhere advised, "Don't use adverbs," they really meant "Don't rely on adverbs to dress up flimsy writing. Write strong in the first place." But people took it to mean, "Every writer must search for and replace all words that end in 'ly'." And then they passed this extreme version on to impressionable young writers and editors like a decades-long game of telephone until it became a "rule."

Today's misunderstood piece of advice is "silence your internal editor." When someone somewhere said, "Silence your internal editor," they meant to say, "Don't fret over every minor detail during your first draft. Concentrate on laying the groundwork, and then you can polish later."

But what people take it to mean is, "Thinking is the enemy of creativity! I must write write write and never look back! If I don't tie my internal editor to the bedpost and gag her with a sock, I'll just obsess over the first chapter for ten years and never get anywhere!"

If you're bogged down by a compulsion to rewrite a single chapter endlessly, your problem isn't your internal editor. Your problem is your internal perfectionist. By all means, you can shut her up. In fact, I'd recommend she take a dip in the Atlantic wearing cement shoes. As long as she lives, her shrill voice will entice you down the treacherous path of the can't-see-the-forest-for-the-trees.

But your editor and your perfectionist are not one and the same. Extreme self-criticism is bad, but that doesn't mean all self-criticism is. Evaluating your work as you go doesn't mean you have to perfect every single word of the first draft.

Writing a novel is like making a layered cake. Everybody wants to make the type of cake that people will "ooh" and "ahh" over—a cake with beautiful marbled fondant and intricate piping and delicate sugar roses. But when you begin your magnificent cake-making endeavor, you don't start with the decorating. First you need the cake.

Your internal perfectionist obsesses over the superficial. She messes with star-shaped piping tips and debates whether the roses should be pink or red before she even has the cake. Your internal editor, on the other hand, diligently researches recipes, checks the quality of your ingredients, and inspects the baked rounds to make sure they don't have any massive holes and won't won't completely collapse when gently bumped.

The reason many people say "silence your internal editor" is that they confuse "cake" with "icing." When they fiddle with the first chapter endlessly, they're usually fiddling with presentation.

• word choice
• sentence structure
• tone
• flow
• literary devices

All of this is icing. Icing is easy to change and improve upon later. Instead, they really should be fiddling with structure.

• story arc
• themes
• characters
• organization

Separating the icing from the cake is difficult for many people. In my day job, I frequently bang against the wall of "but it's not perfect." If you present a mock-up of an application to a group of people and say, "This is just a rough sketch. Please don't worry about the details," they will immediately start worrying about the details. They will zero in on every element that isn't pretty yet, every feature that hasn't been constructed yet. They will veto an entire design because there are stripes in the background and they don't like stripes. They will spend twenty minutes arguing over whether the search button should have squared or slightly rounded corners. They will pick apart the placeholder images and ask, in perfect seriousness, "Will those kittens be replaced with more appropriate photos? Because I don't think kittens are really relevant to our services...."

Don't worry about the kittens. Repeat: Don't worry about the kittens. You have to see past the kittens to what's really important.

It takes trust to see past the kittens, or the icing, or whatever mixed metaphor I'm on at this point. People who complain about every little detail of a mock-up don't trust the developers. Writers who get caught up in endless revising before they reach chapter 2 don't trust their skills or themselves. It takes confidence to say, "This passage isn't perfect, but the underlying idea is good. I can improve the presentation later."

And writers who believe that "Thinking is the enemy of creativity!" trust themselves even less. They're afraid they can't handle story problems, so they close their eyes and rush through so they won't see them. Or they're afraid they can't control their own behavior, so they say things like, "If I don't shut off my brain and just write write write, I won't have the discipline to finish!"

Perfectionism is a cover for insecurity. Deliberate sloppiness is also a cover for insecurity. Every stated reason I've heard for writing with the blinders on is some variation of "But if I don't I can't..."

• But if I don't I can't finish.
• But if I don't I can't be creative.
• But if I don't I can't write honestly.
• But if I don't I can't shut out the critical voices sneering that I'll fail.

Translations:

• But I'm a flake.
• But I'm stupid.
• But I'm a coward.
• But I'm insecure and easily swayed by my own auditory hallucinations.

You can't write well if you think like this. You can't. You need confidence in yourself to face and fix the problems in your writing. You need confidence to say what you think, even if you know people don't want to hear it. (As Stephen King wrote, "If you intend to write as truthfully as you can, your days as a member of polite society are numbered.")

And you need confidence to kill your internal perfectionist and listen to your internal editor. I assure you that even if you open your eyes and, *gasp*, think as you write, you can finish, you can be creative, you can write honestly, and you can ignore the imaginary bullies hissing that you're a loser and you'll never make it.

The only thing you truly can't do with your eyes open is sneeze. And, for many people, sleep. Anything else you can do with your eyes closed, you'll do better with them open. Don't listen to the ghost of Obi Wan Kenobi jabbering about wiping the mind clean and being one with the Force or whatever. The Force is a fantasy. You can tell it's not real because it's a perfectly ordinary noun masquerading as a proper one.

(Pet Peeve #358: When fantasy writers capitalize random words. "We have to get the Crystal!" "By the Wizard, he has the Sword!" I may start doing the same to give weight and importance to my daily activities. "I'm going to drink the Tea." "It's time to make the Lunch.")

Don't trust the Force, or the Muse, or any other mystical entity that relieves you of the responsibility to work hard. Trust yourself. Trust your internal editor. Trust your doubts and address them, don't ignore them. You can handle it. Really.

The primary advantages of books over other media is on the authors' side. Unlike A/V production, which requires capital and cooperation, a single person can write a novel by investing nothing more than excess energy and time. But from the readers' side, books are expensive, time-consuming, and hard to understand. You can watch TV, eat, fold laundry, and carry on two conversations all at the same time because visual media approximates what we see in the natural world. Written media doesn't. Reading books requires unnatural effort, training, and solitude.

This effort is precisely why many people consider books "superior." They believe that movies, TV shows, and video games, by being easy to consume, will cause our brains and culture rot away. That, of course, is total BS. People engage with visual and interactive media the same way they do with books—only they don't have to study and practice for years to be able to do it. Watching a movie or a stage play or even a banal prime-time comedy isn't a passive activity. Audiences are constantly empathizing, hypothesizing, and moralizing. Assuming that reading must be better because it's harder is like assuming that a food must be healthy because it tastes bland.

As writers and publishers, denying the genuine advantages of competing media and clinging to the Books-Are-Superior-Because-I-Said-So way of thinking doesn't do any good. We need to acknowledge the shortcomings of books as they are, instead of labeling everyone who doesn't like them "unenlightened."

There are many things that A/V can do that we simply can't match in writing. However, there are several things that we can do that visual media can't. Instead of pretending that the weaknesses don't exist, why don't we play up the strengths?

Disadvantages

This time last year I published a post titled Writing Novels Like Screenplays that addressed common film conventions that don't work on the page. They boil down to:

• Head-hopping
• Scene-hopping
• Time-hopping
• Visual and physical gags
• Currying favor or antipathy through appearances

You also don't have music to set the mood and pace. Describing visuals with words takes up substantial real estate, instead of subtly influencing the audience from the background. We battle constantly to find the right balance of physical action, internal action, dialogue, and description, and we often have to give up one in favor of another in the interest of tone, pacing, and flow.

Not only can we only present one piece of information at a time, but there are some types of information we can't share at all. In one of my novels-that-can't-be-written, Korean pop music is a frequent gag and even a plot device. Description and romanized lyrics won't cut it. "Sorry Sorry Sorry Sorry, Naega naega naega meonjeo, Nege nege nege ppajyeo, Ppajyeo ppajyeo beoryeo baby"—does that mean anything to you? If you haven't heard the song or seen the troupe of grown men in high-fashion suits doing a silly dance on the video, all the words in the world can't adequately convey its cheesy awesomeness. The attempt will only fall flat.

Advantages

Internal Monologue

My number one pet peeve in movies and films: voice-overs. Voice-overs are the crutch of the lazy screenwriter. Few use them deliberately and well—many use them to fill in the holes left by bad storytelling.

The head-hopping advantages enjoyed by creators of visual media come thanks to the third-person perspective. It isn't even third-person limited, which sees into the thoughts of a single character, but third-person "detached"—we see no thoughts at all. The audience observes everything from the outside. Voice-overs are an attempt reap the benefits of third-person limited or omniscient, and they almost always fail because they're so artificial.

Here's where written stories win hands down. No matter which point of view you choose, you have the opportunity to give detailed insight into a character's or many characters' emotions and thought processes. You can excite empathy in ways film can't—by having characters speak words that contradict their thoughts, by showing their emotions under blank faces, and by letting them express themselves even when they don't do anything at all.

Flexibility of Imagination

Short of sinking millions into special effects and computer animation, filmmakers are largely limited to the portrayal of settings, people, and props that are easy to construct or obtain. But in writing, you can be as unique and outrageous as you want.

The advantages for sci-fi and fantasy are obvious. But even if you write in a "realistic" genre, the freedom to tweak the world without regard for feasibility is enormously useful. You can fly your characters off to anywhere in the world and build settings any way you want. You can write high-speed chase scenes through the busiest streets in Beijing, and have characters pull of physically impossible stunts, and make up technology that doesn't exist (and never could)—and it doesn't cost you a penny.

Even mundane scenes can be a pain in the behind to film—scenes in crowded places, small spaces, in the dark, or in popular and recognizable locations that have to be reserved and closed off from the public. When you write novels, you don't have to worry about any of that. You want your hero and heroine to meet for the first time during a tour of the Palace of Versailles? Go ahead. You want him to propose at the top of the Statue of Liberty? Have at it. They get married with a wedding party of 500 in the middle of Central Park? Why not! Add some fireworks at the reception and a sunset kiss on the honeymoon cruise to Alaska, while you're at it. The director's nightmare is the writer's dream.

Flexibility of Time

Though frequent time-hopping is a no-no in written fiction, time-bending isn't. In fact, it's usually necessary to achieve the effects you want.

On the screen, conversations and events have to take place more or less in real time. On the page, time can be entirely redefined at your convenience. A single second can span five pages. A trip that takes several hours can be over in one sentence. The food can arrive almost immediately after the characters order it, a conversation can fit oh-so-neatly between boarding a train and disembarking, and an antihero can recount his entire life's story in the time it takes a bullet to travel from a gun chamber to his chest.

This is how Jane Austen portrays a strawberry-picking party in Emma.

The whole party were assembled, excepting Frank Churchill, who was expected every moment from Richmond; and Mrs. Elton, in all her apparatus of happiness, her large bonnet and her basket, was very ready to lead the way in gathering, accepting, or talking—strawberries, and only strawberries, could now be thought or spoken of.

"The best fruit in England—every body's favourite—always wholesome.—These the finest beds and finest sorts.—Delightful to gather for one's self—the only way of really enjoying them.—Morning decidedly the best time—never tired—every sort good—hautboy infinitely superior—no comparison—the others hardly eatable—hautboys very scarce—Chili preferred—white wood finest flavour of all—price of strawberries in London—abundance about Bristol—Maple Grove—cultivation-beds when to be renewed—gardeners thinking exactly different—no general rule—gardeners never to be put out of their way—delicious fruit—only too rich to be eaten much of—inferior to cherries—currants more refreshing—only objection to gathering strawberries the stooping—glaring sun—tired to death—could bear it no longer—must go and sit in the shade."

You can't film that. You can show a brief shot of people picking berries, or you can flesh out the monologue to something coherent, but you can't collapse the conversation so neatly and comically without turning it into a farce, like manic montages in sitcoms.

Freedom of Expression

The list of things we "can't" do in screenwriting is longer than the list of things we can. Movie studios only take scripts that follow a rigid three-act structure, don't have too much dialogue, meet the requirements for certain ratings, and fit the images of certain actors and actresses. TV stations dictate the moral/religious codes and political agendas you're allowed to support. Sitcoms are built around laugh tracks and commercial breaks. The arc of mystery shows is so predictable that you can tell who the bad guy is based on the time. "Nope, it's only 6:50, so she's innocent. It's gonna be that other guy."

In books, the list of things you truly "can't" do is much shorter. Unless you write romances for a publisher that says the heroine must be an independent professional and the hero must be six-foot four and they must make out in chapter 2 and have sex by chapter 5, the story is up to you. The only limits to the content are obscenity laws and your courage.

The irony is that because books don't sell well, people get scared of creating anything original. They think books won't sell if they don't follow tried-and-true formulas, mimic other bestsellers, and limit "controversial material" to long-settled issues that only the extremists still grumble about. (Like the existence of homosexuality. Ooh, so edgy. Homosexual activities have only been going on for the past all-of-human-history or so.)

When readers pick up a novel, they do it because they want a novel experience. Sure, they like their genre conventions and standard arcs, but that's just the container. The container isn't nearly as important as what you put inside it. Is Anna Karenina an enduring classic because of its plot? "The young wife of a respectable statesman has an affair with a handsome jerk, then throws herself under a train. The end." People haven't continued to read it for the past 140 years because they don't know what happens. They read it to experience how and why it happens—what makes Anna transform from a vivacious, attractive woman to a psychological wreck.