Swan Tower

Having made a general typology of series (with a lot of good comments on the DW version of that post in particular, unpacking the various gradations between what I called the Setting Series and the Cast Series -- I'll include those when I make a more polished version of these posts), I want to start chewing on "so how does one write one of these things, anyway?"

I mean, you can just start typing and not stop until you have lots of books. But I don't recommend just charging in blindfolded like that. :-P

Obligatory Disclaimer: prescriptive writing advice is a mug's game, since somebody will always come along with an example of people not doing it that way and ending up fine. This is me talking about what I suspect may be helpful, not what is required. It's what I would say to somebody who feels adrift and needs some direction. And in that vein, I welcome comments about how other people view this process.

The first thing I would say to do is, consider what type of series you're writing. Not in the sense of "oh, I must fit neatly into one of those pithily-named boxes or I'm Doing It Wrong," but in the sense of knowing how much interconnection you want. This will partly be determined by individual preference (some people love strong arcs; some people don't), and partly by the nature of what you're writing: the conventions of the romance genre are not well set up for doing a long metaplot where the relationship of your two leads gets developed over the course of three or five books, while mystery, as mentioned before, is ideally suited to a more episodic structure, with variable amounts of growth and arc-ness in the background.

What type of series you're writing can shift over time (and one of the things I want to chew on in a future post is how to make changes mid-stream), but anecdotally, I feel like the direction of the shift will almost always be toward a greater degree of interconnection. An Episodic Growth series may sprout an arc plot after a while, especially if the writer is looking to wrap it up with some kind of grand finale. A series that told a relatively self-contained story in its first volume may shift to being a Metaplot Series once the writer has the certainty of being contracted for more books; you see this a lot with trilogies, e.g. the original Star Wars going from "yay, battle won; medals for everybody!" at the end of its first installment to "shocking revelations, severed hands, and unfinished business" at the end of its second. Shifting in the other direction is odd: a series with an arc is unlikely to ditch that and go purely episodic, unless it's headed toward a new arc (e.g. from season to season in a TV show). When a jump happens all the way to a Cast or Setting Series, what's usually going on is that one series has been wrapped up and the author wants to start another -- this being why the Setting type is so often a super-set of the other types.

Once you know what you're writing . . . then what?

My main thought on this front leans on that typology: The closer your series is toward the discrete end of the spectrum, the more you benefit from having a foundation. The closer it is toward the interlinked end of the spectrum, the more you benefit from having a target.

Foundation first. One thing I admire about the Dragon Age franchise is that its creators did a very intelligent job of creating a setting that could support the franchise -- a world with lots of narrative toys in it that could be used to generate plots. In the first game, the plot is that horrible monsters from underground are attacking the world at the direction of a draconic archdemon and spreading their corruption to the surface; your job is to stop that invasion and defeat the archdemon. But along the way to doing that, you encounter all kinds of other conflicts in the world. Mages are susceptible to demons, and as a result are supposed to be monitored and controlled by templars, with major tensions between those two groups. Elves once had an amazing civilization that got smashed and now they're an oppressed underclass in the human world. The main religion has heresies. The qunari are invading the continent, many many miles away from where the story takes place. Etc. These things help generate side quests for the game, but they're waaaaay larger than they need to be for that purpose.

Because those things exist, though, it's easy to tell other Dragon Age stories that have nothing to do with darkspawn and archdemons and Blights. The second game focuses on the mage/templar conflict, with a substantial contribution by the qunari invasion. The third game digs into the elven stuff, as does one of the novels. It's extremely fertile soil for many kinds of stories -- which is exactly what you want, if you're trying to create a franchise.

Or let's say you're writing a Cast Series in the romance model. Here your foundation is based in character: if you've got five brothers you intend to marry off, then you want to spend at least a little time thinking about their personalities and their conflicts, so that you put yourself in a good position to tell a new story about each of them. You don't have to outline every single one of those books, or even necessarily know who they're going to wind up marrying; their eventual partners may or may not be on stage in book one. But the brothers probably are, and knowing a bit about them now means that 1) they can be vivid personalities from the start and 2) you won't paint yourself into a corner later on because you've run out of interesting ideas for them.

Even in the Episodic Growth type of series, there's foundational work to be done. If you're writing a procedural series about a detective, with the intent that the detective's personal life will change over time, then it's beneficial to set her up with some conflicts that can generate good side plots throughout. Maybe she's got a drinking problem because of the trauma she's already been through, which she's trying to keep hidden. That means you can later make plot out of the problem getting worse, and her partner finding out, at which point she goes to rehab, but then later she falls off the wagon and her partner leaves her -- you've got books' worth of material right there. But you aren't necessarily committing to that path; maybe she goes to rehab, but then her partner cheats on her, so she ditches the partner and spirals back down into alcoholism. You can also say she's estranged from her family, which sets you up to have a relative show up eventually, with plot ensuing. Seeding two or three such things at the outset gives you something to work with in the longer term, separate from the individual plots of the episodes.

The reason you want to think about this ahead of time is that it reduces the need to pull something out of your ear later on -- and the risk of the reader noticing. If Dragon Age hadn't set up the mage/templar conflict at the outset but suddenly in the second game OMG mages are totally dangerous and can become demonic abominations . . . the player would be thoroughly justified in asking why this didn't come up before, when they were running around with mages in their party. If one of the romantic brothers is a colorless non-entity who unexpectedly turns into a notorious rake because it's time for his book, your reader will side-eye you; if the series is going well and so, uh, there are actually six brothers instead of five, that's going to look like exactly the cheap trick it is. (You can try to say the extra one never got mentioned because he's the bastard half-brother nobody talks about . . . but you've still missed your opportunity to set that up and make the reader crave his story.) And we've probably all had the irritating experience of following an episodic series where the writers abruptly graft a heretofore unsuspected problem onto a character because they need to generate new plot.

But if you're coming at things from the interlinked end of the spectrum, I think it's helpful to approach it with a different mindset. I've already been wordy enough, though, that I'll save that for a later post.

(originally posted at Swan Tower: https://is.gd/FtjzOu)

I've had discussions with other writers about how there's tons of advice out there on writing novels, but very little on writing series.

File this one under "stuff I know how to do, but don't know how to articulate or explain." But this one will be less polished than the pieces I wrote on the structure of paragraphs, scenes, and chapters, because I'm really thinking out loud as I go here.

Step one, I think, is to take a look at what a series is. A set of interconnected books, okay. But there are ways and ways of connecting things, and they're not all going to operate the same. After chewing on this for a while, I've decided that you can very roughly sort different types of series into a spectrum from discrete to linked (with two semi-outliers that I'll note as we pass them.) So:

The Non-Series

At the absolute discrete end, you've got books whose only connection is that a single author wrote them. Not actually a series; 'nuff said.

The Setting Series

In this type, the connection between the books is that they take place in a single setting, but otherwise they share no connection of character or plot. (They may not even share authors.) I'm having trouble thinking of any pure examples of this; most often this tends to be a superset of other series, e.g. Discworld or Valdemar being settings that contain both stand-alone novels and series within them, or a shared world like the Forgotten Realms. If you can think of an example that is purely stand-alone novels, whether written by the same author or different ones, let me know. (I think it would need at least three books to serve as a good example; two books in the same setting is a series by the most technical definition, but I'd like something stronger.)

The Cast Series

This is the type of series you commonly find in romance, where each book follows a different set of protagonists and a different plot, but characters from one book appear in another. (Romance often sets this up by presenting you with a group in the first book, e.g. a set of siblings, with the implicit promise that you'll get to see each of them get their own story eventually.) These naturally share a setting as well.

*The Reset Button Series

As the asterisk indicates, I think this one's an outlier. It's the Nancy Drew model: each book shares a setting and a core cast with all the others, but in between books the slate gets wiped clean, which means they have less plot continuity than the Cast Series. Nancy will always be eighteen; Ned will never graduate from college. I'm not sure this is very popular anymore, except maybe in children's fiction -- and maybe not even there?

The Episodic Growth Series

Closely akin to the Nancy Drew model, this has a core cast and a new plot with each installment, but there's no reset button. As a result, change and growth do happen over time. You see this a lot in mystery novels and police procedural TV shows, because it's very well-suited to those genres: each installment starts with a crime and ends with the crime being solved, while in the background there might might be some ongoing character-based subplot about the detective's marriage falling apart or whatever.

The Episodic Arc Series

This one is a hybrid between the previous and the subsequent types. It has self-contained episodic plots, especially early on, but there's also a longer-term metaplot that those episodes may be helping to set up, and the episodic structure tends to fall away toward the end. Examples include Harry Potter and each season of Buffy the Vampire Slayer (and yes, I realize the creators of both those works are not exactly looking great right now, but they're well-known illustrations of the model). Many trilogies feel at least a bit like this, because it's sensible from a business standpoint to write a more or less stand-alone novel that can serve as the foundation for the later two installments.

*The Perpetual Motion Series

Our other outlier, which I think I've only seen in soap operas on TV. Here there can be many arcs going at once, such that while an individual plot may end, the series as a whole doesn't (until it gets canceled). This would be an extraordinarily hard trick to pull off in traditional novel publishing, I suspect, though it could work in indie.

The Metaplot Series

Here there's no real attempt to wrap up a self-contained plot in any particular installment. From the start, you know you're getting a long-term story, and unlike that trilogy approach I described above, the first volume doesn't feel like it could stand on its own. A Song of Ice and Fire is a prominent example of this, along with TV shows like Lost.

The Single Book

And to cap off the other end, we have our other form of non-series: a single novel that just happens to have been published in multiple volumes, i.e. The Lord of the Rings. The difference between this and the Metaplot Series is that in theory the author of the latter type gives each book its own satisfying structure, even if that structure doesn't end in resolution; the author of the Single Book non-series just whacks it apart at the necessary intervals.

I think that covers the whole gamut. Obviously some things are going to straddle the divisions, because no system of categorization is ever perfect; the goal here is to distinguish what shifts of interconnection happen along the way, rather than to make clean boxes that absolutely everything will fit neatly into. And series can change over the course of their lifetime, e.g. what the author intended to be Episodic Growth sprouts an arc plot along the way. I'll chew more on those bits of the concept later. But for right now, I think this is a decent framework? Is there anything significant I'm missing?

(originally posted at Swan Tower: https://is.gd/KmOFjZ)

On Twitter the other week I posed the question:

Would you rather be remembered as having a large body of work with both some amazing things and some crap ones, or a small body of work where everything was a gem?

The results were interesting. Sixty-one percent voted for a small body of all gems; thirty-nine percent for the larger mixed body. In hindsight, I should have phrased my question better (bad anthropologist; no biscuit), because people may have interpreted “amazing things” as being not the same thing as “gems,” which was how I intended it. But maybe not; it’s entirely possible people knew what I meant, and that’s just where their particular preferences lie.

Me, I’m on the side of “large mixed body.” Because here’s the thing: even a really amazing work isn’t going to speak to absolutely everybody, and even a less-than-perfect story can brighten someone‘s day. If I have a large body of work, there will probably be more people overall who really felt touched by something I wrote — even if discussions of my writing include people saying “yeah, but let’s just pretend X never happened.”

Plus — as several people pointed out in their responses on Twitter — we can’t really control what is and is not received as a classic or a groundbreaking work. We can try our best, but in the end, that judgment is in the hands of other people. We can’t fully control how much work we produce, either; factors like health, day jobs, family demands, and the like will also cut into that. But it’s more within our grasp than reception is. If you step up to the plate a bunch of times, you won’t hit a home run every time, but your odds having at least a few are better than if you only took half a dozen swings.

So I’d rather produce a lot of work, even if some of it is meh or even (in hindsight) a bit embarrassing. And maybe somewhere in that pile, I’ll manage a few gems.

(Content warning: I, uh, talk about violence in this. Rather a lot. Not in gory detail, but if the discussion of traumatic and/or sexual violence bothers you, you may not want to read onward.)

My husband and I recently went to see Tomb Raider (short form: it's ridiculous, but if it weren't ridiculous it would be doing it wrong, and it has more to enjoy in the first ten minutes than I remember in the entirety of the Angelina Jolie version), and it's freshened up some thoughts that have been percolating in my mind for a while now about violence and gender in media.

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As promised, here is part two of my dissection of Rogue One and how, if I were given a magic wand to reshape the story, I would have done it. Spoilers ahoy, mateys! If you missed part one (all three thousand words or so of it), you can find that here.

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Originally published at Swan Tower. You can comment here or there.

There are many things I liked about Captain America: Civil War, but probably the best aspect of the whole movie is the fact that I keep thinking about it, and about the arguments it presents. Just the other night I got into a discussion about it again, which prompted me to dust off this half-finished entry and post it.

Let’s get one thing out of the way, first: from what little we know about the Sokovia Accords, it sounds like they’re a steaming pile of badly-thought-out crap. (Not to mention wildly unrealistic in so, so many ways; as one of my friends pointed out, the most implausible thing in this film isn’t super soldier serum or Iron Man’s suit or anything like that, but the idea that the Accords could spring into being so quickly, with so many countries on board, without three years of very public argument first.) So when I say I’m increasingly sympathetic to Tony’s side of the argument, I don’t mean its specific manifestation — nor his INCREDIBLY naive brush-off that “laws can be amended” after the fact — but rather the underlying principle that some kind of oversight and accountability is needed.

Because the more I think about the underlying principles on Steve’s side, the more they bother me.

I understand his starting point. He accepted oversight and followed orders; the organization giving those orders turned out to be a Hydra sock-puppet. Now he’s exceedingly leery of the potential for corruption — or even just so much bureaucratic red tape that nothing winds up getting done. And he’s presumably reluctant to sign a legal document saying he’ll follow orders when he already knows he’ll break his word the moment he feels his own moral compass requires him to do so. That part, I understand and sympathize with.

But here’s the thing. It sounds like he wants all the freedom of a private citizen to do what he wants . . . without any of the consequences of acting as a private citizen. Soldiers don’t get personally sued when they destroy people’s cars and houses or civic infrastructure; private individuals do. Is Steve prepared to pay restitution for all the damage he causes? (Or are the insurance companies supposed to classify him as an act of God, no different from a tornado or a hailstorm?) Would Steve accept it as just and fair if the Nigerian government arrested him for entering the country illegally? It sure didn’t sound like the Avengers came in through the Lagos airport and declared the purpose of their trip to officials there. Based on what we’ve seen, it looks like Steve wants all the upside, none of the downside, to acting wholly on his own.

And this gets especially troubling when you drill down into him acting that way in other countries. I’m sure he thinks that petitioning the Nigerian government for permission to chase Rumlow there would eat up too much precious time — and what if they refused permission? Does he trust them to deal with the problem themselves? No, of course not — Steve gives the strong impression of not trusting anybody else to deal with the problem, be they Nigerian or German or American. To him, it’s a moral question: will he stand by while there’s danger, just because a government told him not to get involved? Of course he won’t. And this is the part in my mental argument with him where I started saying, “right, I forgot that you slept through the end of the colonial era. Let me assemble a postcolonial reading list for you about the host of problems inherent in that kind of paternalistic ‘I know better than you do and will ride roughshod over your self-determination for your own good’ attitude.”

Captain America is, for better or for worse, the embodiment of the United States’ ideals circa 1942. Which means that along with the Boy Scout nobility, there’s also a streak of paternalism a mile wide.

Mind you, Tony’s side of the argument is also massively flawed. Taken to its extreme, it would recreate the dynamics of the Winter Soldier: that guy went where he was told and killed who his bosses wanted him to, without question, without exercising his own ethical judgment. And anything done by multinational committee will inherently fail to have the kind of flexibility and quick reaction time that’s needed for the kind of work the Avengers are expected to do. The politics of it would be a nightmare, you know that some countries will get the upper hand and this will exacerbate tensions between them and the rest of the world, and the potential for a re-creation of Steve’s Hydra problem is huge. Plus, how are they going to handle people who opt out of the program? What’s going to govern the use of their powers — or do the authors of the Accords intend to forbid that use, without government approval? That’s a civil rights nightmare right there.

But in the end, I come around to the side that says, there needs to be supervision and accountability. It’s all well and good that Steve feels bad when he fails to save people, but he wreaks a lot of havoc in the course of trying, and feeling bad about it doesn’t make the people he damages whole. (If memory serves, almost all of the destruction at the airport is caused by Steve’s allies, until Vision slices the top of that tower off: I doubt that was a narrative accident.) Is setting up that supervision and accountability going to be difficult? Hell yes. But there has to be some, because otherwise . . .

. . . well, otherwise we wind up with a larger-scale version of the problems we have right now with police violence. Which is a separate post, but I’ll see if I can’t get that one done soon.

Originally published at Swan Tower. You can comment here or there.

In my recent discussion of The Name of the Wind, one of the things that has come up is the way in which Kvothe is an unreliable narrator, and the text does or does not separate the character’s sexism out from the sexism of the story as a whole. This isn’t solely a problem that crops up with unreliable narrators — it can happen any time the protagonist holds objectionable views, or lives in a society with objectionable attitudes but you don’t want to make the protagonist a mouthpiece for modern opinions — but it’s especially key there. And since I brought it up in that discussion, I thought it might be worth making an additional post to talk about how one goes about differentiating between What the Protagonist Thinks (on the topic of gender, race, or any other problematic issue) and What the Author Thinks.

I don’t pretend to be a master of this particular craft. That kind of separation is tricky to pull off, and depends heavily on the reader to complete the process. The issue is one that’s been on my mind, though, because of the Lady Trent novels: Isabella is the product of a Victorianish society, and while my approach to the -isms there hasn’t been identical to that of real history, I’ve tried not to scrub them out entirely. Since the entire story is filtered through her perspective (which, while progressive for her time, is not always admirable by twenty-first century standards), I’ve had to put a lot of thought into ways I can divide her opinions from my own.

There are a variety of tactics. Because I think things go better with concrete data rather than vague generalities, I’m going to continue to use The Name of the Wind as an illustrative example.

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Originally published at Swan Tower. You can comment here or there.

As promised, a follow-up post on the public revelation that Requires Hate and Benjanun Sriduangkaew are the same person, and the material collated by Laura J. Mixon on that topic. This is entirely about my own feelings and opinions on the matter; they’re not statements of fact, though I’ve done my best to be clear what facts I’m basing my feelings and opinions on.

Because naming gets complicated in a discussion of someone with multiple names, my approach has been as follows: I use Winterfox or WF when referring to that specific persona, ditto Requires Hate or RH, ditto Benjanun Sriduangkaew or just Sriduangkaew. (I would like to abbreviate that name as well, but since the initials there are BS, it would have a very unfortunate effect.) When I’m talking about the individual behind all of those personas, I follow Mixon’s lead in calling her RHB, for lack of any better referent.

Some brief prefatory comments follow, before I get to the main points.

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Originally published at Swan Tower. You can comment here or there.

I originally posted this as a reply to John Scalzi here, but it occurred to me that it was something that might be of interest to my local audience — especially since I’m posting all these photos from trips I’ve taken.

In discussing his own feelings about travel, Scalzi said:

The fact of the matter is I’m not hugely motivated by travel. This is not to say that I don’t enjoy it when I do it, nor that there are not places I would like to visit, but the fact of the matter is that for me, given the choice between visiting places and visiting people, I tend to want to visit people — a fact that means that my destinations are less about the locale than the company. I’d rather go to Spokane than Venice, in other words, if Spokane has people I like in it, and all Venice has is a bunch of buildings which are cool but which I will be able to see better in pictures.

To which I said:

I like seeing people, sure — but the second half of the comment is boggling to me, because it’s so radically different from my own view, in two respects.

First of all, seeing is only part of the experience. Looking at a picture is flat, whereas being there is a full-body surround-sound sensory experience. There’s sound, smell, the feeling of space or lack thereof, the process of walking through. Highgate Cemetery was more than its headstones; it was the blustery autumn day with the wind rushing through the trees raining leaves down on us and the tip of my nose going cold. Point Lobos is more than the cypresses; it’s the smell of the cypresses and the feel of the dirt under my feet and the distant barking of the sea lions. Furthermore, pictures will never show me even everything from the visual channel: they may show me the nave of the church, but usually not the ceiling, nor the floor with its worn grave slabs. They will show me the garden, but not the autumn leaf caught in the spider web between two trees. I would have to look at hundreds of pictures from Malbork Castle to capture what I saw there. (Heck, I took hundreds of pictures there!)

Second, the most memorable part to me is usually the bit I wouldn’t have thought to go looking for if I weren’t there. The first time I went to Japan, my sister and I went to see the famous temple of Ginkakuji, which I loved — but I loved even better the tiny shrine off to the left outside Ginkakuji, whose name I still don’t know. Or when I was in Winchester, and she and I walked to St. Cross outside of town; we went for the porter’s dole (old medieval tradition: even now — or at least in 1998 — if you walk up to the gate and ask for the dole, they will give you bread and water), but stayed for the courtyard with the enormous tree and the most amazingly plush grass I have ever flung myself full-length in. I can look at pictures of famous buildings in Venice, but I’m unlikely to see pictures of the stuff I wouldn’t think to look for.

I write all of this in the full awareness that I have been extremely fortunate in my travel opportunities. My father’s work has often taken him abroad, so he has a giant pile of frequent flyer miles, and both in childhood and now I’ve been able to afford trips to other countries: British Virgin Islands, Costa Rica, England, Scotland, Ireland, Wales, Israel, Japan, India, Poland, Greece, Italy, Turkey, France, the Bahamas. It’s created a positive feedback loop: these trips have led me to really enjoy travel and the different experiences I have when I go places, so as a result I arrange more trips when I can. As a replacement, pictures don’t even begin to cut it.

Not part of my comment to Scalzi, but I will add two further observations:

1) Clearly I do see value in pictures, though, or I wouldn’t take so damn many of them.

2) What it says about my sociability that I am liable to travel to places rather than to people is left as an exercise for the reader.

Originally published at Swan Tower. You can comment here or there.

Which is to say, casting female performers for characters who are canonically male, or actors of color for characters who are canonically white.

Look at Hollywood. Look at TV. Look at how frequently they remake or reboot or sequelize existing narrative properties (for a host of reasons, not all of them terrible, but we won't get into that here). For crying out loud, we've got three separate Sherlock Holmes franchises in progress right now.

If you don't turn Starbuck female -- if you don't cast Lucy Liu as Watson -- if you don't make Idris Elba Heimdall -- if you don't break the mold of those existing texts in ways that will let in under-represented groups -- then your opportunities for having those groups on the screen in the first place drop substantially. You're basically left making them minor new characters, or else cracking the story open to stick in a major new minority character (and people will complain about that, too). Because all those stories we keep retelling? They're mostly about straight white guys. And the stories that are new, the ones that aren't being retold from one or more previous texts, can't pick up all the slack on their own. You make Perry White black, or you make a Superman movie with no black people in it above the level of tertiary character.

Which isn't automatically a problem when it's one movie. But it isn't one movie: it's a whole mass of them. Including most of our blockbusters.

So either we chuck out the old stuff wholesale (and as a folklorist, I entirely understand why we don't do that), or we rewrite it to suit our times. (And as a folklorist, I entirely understand that too -- and I cheer it on. Go, folk process, go!)