The Skill List Project: Reading Analytically

[Note: The following article was written in March 2011. It’s here because I’m migrating old posts from a different site to my current one.]

This is another post in The Skill List Project: an attempt to list all the skills involved in writing and selling fiction, particularly science fiction and fantasy. Last time around, we talked about Reading judiciously. At the end of that posting, I made the rash promise to show “judicious reading” in action: I’d pull apart a sample piece of writing to see what we could get out of it.

Theoretically, a writer should be able to learn from any passage of prose. We could, for example, look at the infamous Eye of Argon, a piece often mentioned when people talk about atrocious writing. “Eye of Argon” isn’t a book, but it has enough awfulness to fill a trilogy.

But let’s not take cheap shots at the work of an earnest amateur—heaven knows, I wrote some really wretched stuff when I was starting out. Instead, let’s look at an actual SF classic. To avoid violating copyright, I’ve decided on The War of the Worlds by H. G. Wells, available at Project Gutenberg and practically every library in the English-speaking world.

A background note: the book was published in 1898. Wells had already written The Time Machine, The Island of Dr. Moreau, and The Invisible Man, so he’d laid the groundwork for…well…most of modern science fiction. (Yes, Mary Shelley, Jules Verne, et al. got the ball rolling, but Wells was like an interstellar portal through which science fiction jumped into whole new worlds.) On the other hand, Victorian readers had seen “England invaded” stories before—the late 1800′s saw a rash of “military thriller” novels in which Britain was invaded by Germany or France or some other bunch of detestable foreigners—but Wells was the first to use extraterrestrials.

Let’s see how he did it.

Reading Like a Writer

The book starts with a quotation from the astronomer Johannes Kepler:

But who shall dwell in these worlds if they be inhabited? . . . Are we or they Lords of the World? . . . And how are all things made for man?–

Never underestimate the effectiveness of a quotation, especially from a long-dead person with a reputation for authority. It makes you sound like someone who knows things; it gives you credibility. Now here’s the first paragraph of the actual text:

No one would have believed in the last years of the nineteenth century that this world was being watched keenly and closely by intelligences greater than man’s and yet as mortal as his own; that as men busied themselves about their various concerns they were scrutinised and studied, perhaps almost as narrowly as a man with a microscope might scrutinise the transient creatures that swarm and multiply in a drop of water. With infinite complacency men went to and fro over this globe about their little affairs, serene in their assurance of their empire over matter. It is possible that the infusoria under the microscope do the same. No one gave a thought to the older worlds of space as sources of human danger, or thought of them only to dismiss the idea of life upon them as impossible or improbable. It is curious to recall some of the mental habits of those departed days. At most terrestrial men fancied there might be other men upon Mars, perhaps inferior to themselves and ready to welcome a missionary enterprise. Yet across the gulf of space, minds that are to our minds as ours are to those of the beasts that perish, intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic, regarded this earth with envious eyes, and slowly and surely drew their plans against us. And early in the twentieth century came the great disillusionment.

What stands out most about this passage is its heightened language: the use of lengthy complex sentences and high-blown words like infusoria. This is over the top, even by Victorian standards…and Wells was perfectly capable of writing more simply. (Compare the above paragraph with the straightforward opening of The Invisible Man.) So what is Wells up to? And does it work?

I think Wells is doing several things simultaneously. First, he aims to establish an elevated tone for his story. At its heart, this is a book about invasion by Martians: a lurid topic, and there are plenty of lurid episodes as the action unfolds. Wells wants to avoid descending into lowbrow territory. He’s telling the reader, “This isn’t cheap titillation. This is stuff you should really think about.”

Second, Wells is introducing us to his narrator: a highly-educated man given to soliloquizing. You can’t tell from this single paragraph, but the book is told in the first person by a man who writes philosophical articles. You can see a hint of this in the sentence, “It is curious to recall some of the mental habits of those departed days.” These aren’t the words of a detached third-person narrator; they suggest a specific man looking back on his past. I also think Wells is setting up for a tone-of-voice transition over the course of the book—this man, who makes his living from being a public intellectual, is eventually going to be reduced to a craven fugitive hiding in wrecked buildings and scrounging for half-rotten food. By elevating the character at the beginning of the book, Wells can increase the depths of the character’s fall.

Third, and very importantly, the paragraph conveys a sense of menace. The Martians are inhuman geniuses who view humans as if we were bacteria. Earthlings are naïve and complacent, believing themselves to be smarter than anyone else. This is not going to end well for humanity. And of course, setting up a sense of foreboding is a tried and true technique for starting a story: you hook the reader by suggesting that something awful is about to happen. People will keep reading to see how it turns out. (I can’t stress enough how useful a sense of foreboding can be in stories where it’s appropriate. Make the reader shiver, even if the plot’s action starts out subdued.)

Finally, let’s go back to that bit about the Martians viewing humans as bacteria. The first time you read it, this just seems like a simple metaphor tossed off for dramatic effect. But once you know how the book ends (spoiler warning!), you have to tip your hat to Wells for mentioning micro-organisms in the very first sentence. Comparing humans to germs is a clever bit of business, and in hindsight, it means something much different than it seems initially. I love it when a writer gets sneaky.

Summary

I imagine most people reading this post have done this type of analysis before—you were forced to do something similar in high-school English class. But it’s one thing to look at prose when a teacher is asking you to jump through hoops for marks, and quite another to do it for yourself when you’re trying to learn to write.

Let me offer a set of questions suggested by what we just looked at. In any passage of prose, what is the effect of the tone of voice? What do you learn about the character and viewpoint of the narrator? What mood is established by the content (apart from the bare narrative facts)? Is the writer playing tricks you can learn from? If you look at questions like this, you can learn a lot from both good and bad prose.

The Skill List Project: Reading Judiciously

This is another post  in The Skill List Project: an attempt to list all the skills involved in writing and selling fiction, particularly science fiction and fantasy. Last time around, we talked about Reading Voraciously. This time around, we’ll look at reading judiciously: the skill of reading in order to learn from other writers.

Reading Like a Writer

In an essay in About Writing, Samuel R. Delany offers a list of observations containing the following (p. 127):

5. It is almost impossible to write a novel any better than the best novel you’ve read in the three to six months before you began writing your own. Thus you must read excellent novels regularly.

6. Excellent novels set the standards for our own. But bad novels and bad prose are what teach us to write—by setting strong negative examples. You must read both, then—and read them analytically and discriminatingly.

As writers, we have to develop the skill of reading with doublethink—reading for enjoyment, but also reading in order to dissect, learn, and occasionally steal. We have to do both simultaneously. If we just enjoy, we miss the chance to figure out how the writer provides the enjoyment; if we just dissect, we become one of those irritating people who watches magic tricks solely to solve how the trick is done, thereby missing the magic. Such people may succeed in extracting formulas and techniques, but they blind themselves to the art…and the heart.

Paying Attention

So how do you learn to read like a writer? For me, it’s a matter of paying attention to the actual words on the page, not just the ideas and images that the words convey. For example, get a book that you think is particularly good and look at the opening page. What’s so good about it? What does the author do that grabs you? What are the exact words that create mood, establish setting, introduce characters, and whatever else the author is doing? Why do these particular words work? Are the sentences long or short? Is the vocabulary complex or simple?

Read the passage several times. What stands out? What grabs your attention? What resonates? What flows?

When we’re reading purely for enjoyment, we tend to zoom along without awareness of word choice, sentence construction, and paragraphing. We also zoom past important structural details like chapter breaks, sections within chapters, and authorial insertions. (I use the term “authorial insertion” for any inserted tidbit that’s outside the actual narrative. For example, chapter titles are insertions—real life doesn’t come with headings. Some books also put the date/time at the beginning of each chapter, or the name of the viewpoint character. Insertions may also include quotations or other interpolated material placed at the start of chapters and/or sections.)

To read like a writer, you have to ask, “What is the author doing here, and how does it affect the reading experience?” In a story that works, how does the author make it work? And in a story that doesn’t work, what does the author do wrong?

As Delany noted, reading bad prose can be illuminating. Get a book you didn’t enjoy and read a few pages several times. What’s wrong with the writing? Are there words that stand out as inappropriate? Is the flow confusing? Does the rhythm of the prose trip over itself? Is something wrong with the plot or the action? Do the characters seem unbelievable…and why? (And why does it matter? Lots of effective writing contains unbelievable characters. You’ll never meet someone as smart as Sherlock Holmes, as evil as Hannibal Lecter, as ultra-competent as Batman—but we can still love reading about them. Why do such characters work despite, or because of, their unbelievability?)

By reading bad books, we learn what fails and what we have to avoid. By reading good books, we learn how high we ought to set the bar. Both sides of the coin can inspire us. We yearn to be as good as the best; we look at the worst and say (in Spider Robinson’s immortal words), “By Jesus, I can write better than this turnip.”

But How Do You Actually DO It?

How do you dissect a passage of prose and learn from it? At the risk of falling flat on my face, next time I intend to take a sample of writing—preferably something out of copyright—and I’ll try to show how I would read it to learn something about writing. If anyone can think of a passage I should look at, by all means suggest it in the comments.

In the meantime, if you have helpful stories about learning from good or bad writing, please share them with us in the comment section. (Every writer in the world needs inspiration!)

Electric Blankets

A short note this time, but I want to say a word in favor of electric blankets. I own three: one on my bed, one at my writing desk, and one on the couch where I do most of my reading.

To save money, I keep my house’s central heating relatively low, and just get under a blanket whenever I need to. Unlike a space heater, an electric blanket heats me, not the room; it’s direct, and I’m pretty sure it uses less electricity. I do all my writing under an electric blanket from about October to April.

While some electric blankets are pricey, you can a decent one for under $50, especially if you’re just looking for something to cover yourself with when you’re writing or reading. And if you’re worried about the blanket getting too hot, every blanket I own turns itself off after two or three hours of operation.

There’s nothing so wonderful as turning on the blanket half an hour before bedtime so you can slip into a preheated bed. It’s virtually orgasmic on a cold night. I recommend it.

Strike At, Strike With

My first kung fu teacher used to say, “If you’re being attacked, ask two questions: what do I have to strike at, and what do I have to strike with?” In other words, what targets has your opponent left open, and what parts of your body can you use to hit those targets.

The same advice is surprisingly useful when dealing with choreography problems in writing.

I use the term choreography problems for those times when you know what has to happen but you don’t have specific ideas of how to make it so. A simple example is a fight scene: you know that character A fights B and A wins, but you have no specific plans for how the fight goes. Similar examples: A has to persuade B to do something, or A has to gain some crucial piece of information, or A has to change their mind about something.

Whether you write from an outline or by the seat of your pants, these situations come up all the time: you know where you’re starting, and you know where you’re going to end a few pages later, but you haven’t thought of exactly the steps that take you from one to the other.

So what do you have to strike at, and what do you have to strike with?

What do you know about the characters involved? What are their wants, needs, fears, points of stubborn pride, prejudices, gaps in their knowledge, etc.? In other words, what are their vulnerabilities? These can be exploited in order for one character to get the better of the other, whether that means physically, emotionally, or intellectually.

And what materials do you have to work with in the scene? What have you already established in the setting?

The thing is that every scene takes place somewhere; every time a viewpoint character walks into a room, you have to provide some description, even if you don’t go into a lot of detail. So you already know what props are surrounding the characters. You know what they can pick up, point to, play around with. Is there some way you can use the objects or the setting itself to do what you want to do?

Surprisingly often, you can find a solution to your problem. Trying to achieve something in a vacuum is often hard. (“How can A win the fight?”) But trying to achieve it by using specific objects is easier. (“How can A win the fight when the room contains a moose head, a jug of cold coffee, and fifteen bowling trophies?”)

Specifics give your imagination something to work with. Try it and see.

Reduction of Disbelief

Allow me to pontificate.

Recently, I’ve read a number of stories that take place in our contemporary world (more or less), wherein one or more characters come face to face with supernatural or science fictional elements. (Magic. Aliens. Etc.) The stories then spend a great deal of time during which the characters refuse to believe they’re confronting anything beyond the mundane; they prefer to think it’s an illusion, delusion, lie, hoax, etc.

This gets tiresome pretty damned quick. I soon end up yelling, “Get on to the good stuff! Quit wasting my time!”

I’m prepared to accept a short interval of doubt. If someone in our modern world walks up and says, “I’m an alien,” a character ought to have a few misgivings; otherwise, the character seems like a gullible fool, and that’s usually not what the writer wants.

On the other hand, I hate when a story spends any significant time in this phase. I want to read about cool stuff, not about someone who disbelieves in cool stuff! Disbelief is almost always boring and irritating. After all, I know the fantastic elements will turn out to be real eventually—I probably got the book from the Science Fiction & Fantasy section, and I’ve already read the cover blurb. Even if the blurb doesn’t have spoilers, it’s designed to give me a feel for the book and its general ambiance. I picked up the book it looked like it would give me magic or aliens…so writers, stop dragging your feet, and give me what I paid for!

Seriously, any more than a few paragraphs of disbelief are enough to make me skip ahead in search of something more promising. Either that, or I put the book down and never pick it up again. I strongly recommend that authors create characters who buy in quickly…or else make the encounter so clearly beyond the ordinary that even skeptical characters can’t deny what’s going on.

Please. Please.

Reading List

While I’m in Calgary for When Words Collide, I’ll be leading a writing workshop. In preparation for that workshop (and just as a useful reference), here are some books I think are useful for fiction writers. (Since the workshop is in Canada, all links will be to Amazon Canada…but by all means, order from your favourite bookseller, whoever that may be.)

On Writing by Stephen King

All kinds of good inspirational stuff from Stephen King

Steering the Craft by Ursula K. Le Guin

The best book I know for writers who are past the beginning stage and are ready to work on specific skills. I think I own three copies.

The Deluxe Transitive Vampire by Karen Elizabeth Gordon

My favourite book on grammar and punctuation…mostly because it’s funny, but it’s also quite useful.

About Writing by Samuel R. Delany

Writing advice by one of the most literary masters of science fiction

 
Also have a look at The Skill List Project, a series I wrote several years ago about all the skills I think are involved in writing fiction.

Quick and Brilliant Revision Trick

As I’ve commented before, I listen to the Writing Excuses podcast, and I’ve been going over some of their past episodes. (They’re now in their 14th year, and the show runs weekly; that means a lot of past episodes.)

The following brilliant tip came from Brandon Sanderson in Season 12. He said when he starts revising a manuscript, he does a global replace on words he tends to overuse, changing each occurrence to the same word in brackets. For example, he might change “very” into “[very]”.

This ensures he doesn’t just slide past the word when he’s reading through the text. The brackets force him to review every instance, and to decide whether it’s needed or just filler. Once in a while, such words add to the writing, but most of the time, they’re just cruft.

So now I intend to do the same thing with my latest manuscript; I may even write a macro to cover all the words I usually ought to delete:

very
quite
a little
a bit
a lot
just
suddenly
quickly
almost
probably
likely

I’m sure I’ll add more to that list in the next day or two. In the meantime, I was so impressed with this trick, I wanted to pass it on immediately.

Stabilization

Yesterday, I wrote about Destabilization: you can say that a story begins when one or more characters have their lives destabilized, and that the story ends when their lives are stable again. To add to this, let me talk about the forms that the final stability may take.

One possible type of stability is going back to the status quo that existed at the beginning of the story. You often see this in books for kids: all problems have been solved, all monsters are defeated, and everything is back to “normal”. This is fine for children—many kids haven’t learned to cope with change. Furthermore, it means the same story can be read multiple times, and a series of books can be read in any order.

But it doesn’t work well for adults. Adults know that things never stay the same, and they like to see people dealing with change. So even if a threat is defeated (or a puzzle is solved, or the protagonist manages to get home after a difficult journey), adults want to see characters develop. The experience should leave the characters stronger, or wiser, or more wary, or something. Otherwise, the whole experience meant nothing. (That’s perilously close to “It was all a dream”. Haha, everything was pointless!)

The newly established stability doesn’t have to be “nice”. If a character gives up hope, that’s still a form of stability. It may not be an enjoyable result, but it is an ending and may be suitable for some stories.

(You can get away with “downer” endings in short stories more than in novels. Consider horror stories, for example; plenty of them end with the protagonist dying in some gruesome way. However, ending a novel with everything awful may be too grim to satisfy readers who’ve spent hours of their lives on the book.)

Stability doesn’t mean that every loose end has been tied up. Stories that are part of a series almost always have loose ends; a dangling thread in Book 1 may start the plot in Book 2. But even stories that will never have a sequel may have loose ends. If so, I think it’s useful to acknowledge the loose ends in some way. Otherwise, readers may just think that the writer fumbled the ball. By acknowledging I mean something like, “George never did find out where the dagger came from,” or something like that. (Preferably something more elegantly phrased, but still.)

One way or another, a story begins when the first domino falls. At the end, readers should feel that there are no dominoes left, even if the dust hasn’t completely settled. If dominoes are still in motion, the story just isn’t over yet.

[Photo of dominoes by Peng [GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html) or CC-BY-SA-3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/)%5D, via Wikimedia Commons]

Destabilization

The latest episode of the Writing Excuses podcast dealt with how to finish a character’s story. During the discussion, they described good plot structure as circling back on itself. I understand what they meant, but I worry about the concept being misinterpreted; beginning writers may think that you have to end up at the same place you started, literally or metaphorically. Sometimes this does happen (as in the classic Hero’s Journey), but plenty of good stories don’t make this kind of circle. So let me put my own spin on the point.

Stories begin with some kind of destabilization. Something pushes or tempts one or more characters to break their routine. For example:

• The characters leave home, temporarily or permanently
• A new person enters the characters’ lives (often summarized as “A Stranger Comes to Town”)
• The characters encounter a puzzle and decide to solve it (this is the plot of most mystery stories)
• An event occurs which makes it difficult or impossible to continue with the status quo
• Some incident, large or small, induces the characters to make changes in their lives

Now it’s possible for things to occur without destabilizing the characters’ lives. Lots of people go on trips without being changed, and a typical police detective solves plenty of “mysteries” without being strongly affected by them. A situation only becomes “story-worthy” when characters truly are destabilized.

(And let me say as an aside, new writers are sometimes reluctant to destabilize characters. Few of us like being destabilized ourselves, and if you identify with your characters, you may be inclined to keep your characters cool and unaffected by whatever happens. This is a mistake—characters should never skate through plot situations. Even James Bond has to sweat.)

So if a story starts with destabilization, how does it end? When the characters’ lives are more or less stable again. You don’t have to resolve everything—life is seldom so neat. And “stable” doesn’t have to mean “happy”; characters may end up dead or in terrible circumstances. (See, for example, the ending of Hamlet.) But an ending will feel like an ending if there’s nothing that’s going to propel much further change in the situation.

In other words, you can look at story structure as starting with a state of stability, then getting destabilized, and eventually returning to stability again. The final state may or may not be similar to the initial one; it could be wildly different. But if the final state feels stable, the audience will understand and accept that the story is over.

[Photo of Leaning Tower of Pisa by Saffron Blaze [CC BY-SA 3.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)%5D, from Wikimedia Commons]

Financial Advice for Writers

Few writers make a lot of money. Many writers make a little money. But however much or little you make (or even if you haven’t made any money at all as yet), let me offer some advice.

TALK TO AN ACCOUNTANT!

and

WHATEVER THE ACCOUNTANT TELLS YOU TO DO, DO IT.

Seriously, accountants serve two extremely useful functions:

1. They can save you money.
2. They keep you out of trouble with the tax collectors.

For example, a good accountant will tell you what expenses you can and can’t deduct from any income you receive. Deducting valid expenses is good: you pay less tax on whatever is left over. Deducting non-valid expenses is bad: if the tax agency finds out, you could be in serious trouble. (See All Capone.)

Now it’s true that consulting an accountant may cost money. If you have no income from writing, maybe it’s too early for you to go to that expense. But it’s never too soon to start keeping track of your finances. Here’s what I’d recommend for anyone who hopes to make money from writing some day:

Starting right now, keep every scrap of paperwork that might possibly be relevant to your writing.

In particular, keep receipts for expenses. You don’t have to get fancy; I used to just have a plastic freezer bag labelled with the year, and I put every receipt inside. Also keep any paperwork from household expenses—eventually you’ll want to claim the expenses in connection with having a home office, so now is the time to get into the habit of keeping relevant records. If receipts are purely digital (e.g. charges emailed to you), consider printing them out so that you have a hardcopy record.

Keep a spreadsheet (e.g. in Microsoft Excel or Google Sheets) recording income and expenses.

When recording an expense, separate the cost of the item from any sales tax paid on top, and record both. Try to be consistent in the terms you use. For example, don’t use “Printer paper” for one purchase and “Paper for the printer” for another. You want to be able to sort your data so that lines for similar expenses are all collected together. By the way, you should also use a spreadsheet to record mileage and/or other car expenses related to your writing.

The point here is to develop good habits of record keeping sooner rather than later. The more you record, the more information you have. You can see how much you’re spending on your writing, and that knowledge may be useful.

BUT…eventually, talk to an accountant. They’ll tell you if your jurisdiction requires that you keep records in a particular format. They’ll tell you which of the expenses you’ve recorded are actually deductible. They’ll tell you how long you need to keep receipts. And much else beside.

So tl;dr: start keeping receipts and records now. It’s good practice. Consult an accountant as soon as you can justify the expense, and definitely as soon as you make any income.

(By the way, I have a friend who’s an accountant and she says she doesn’t charge for initial consultations. She’d rather help potential clients keep proper records right from the start than to go through the hassle of trying to clean things up later on. You may or may not find someone who’ll talk to you for free, but I suspect a lot of accountants won’t charge very much for an initial get-together. For them, it’s a good investment of their time to avoid headaches later on…and accountants love good investments.)