Why Does Writing Get Harder?

Kameron Hurley's latest column tackles the question of why writing fiction gets harder instead of easier with experience:

Why Does Writing Get Tougher?

Some reasons she suggests: With greater experience, we can more easily identify the flaws in our works. With this realization, we recognize the need to edit more meticulously. "There was a time when I could burn through a writing session on full steam without pausing to review." Now, though, she explains that aspiring to create novels with more complex structures makes it impossible for her to write that way. "Leveling up" in writing skill also becomes harder the longer we've been doing it for a reason that's obvious once it's pointed out: The first improvements can be made in giant leaps. As one's skills grow, one runs out of large, obvious ways to improve them. Later stages of growth come in smaller increments. The closer one gets to the ever-retreating goal of perfection, the smaller those increments become. So of course the process feels more arduous. "Holding oneself to a high standard makes each subsequent book more difficult." Hurley connects the craft of writing to the ability to recognize patterns. As we get better at that task, we can have confidence that even if the work gets harder, producing a better book is possible, because we've done it before.

Her answers to the question, "Why does writing get harder instead of easier the more we do it?" can be collectively summarized in her concluding statement, "Writing books gets tougher because we become better at it."

My own feeling about this problem roughly corresponds to Hurley's answer, although she doesn't frame it in quite the same way. I think writing has become harder for me than in my teens and early twenties because then I didn't know what I was doing. I didn't notice when my characters behaved unrealistically or the plot fell off the "because line." My story ideas excited me (it probably helped that I didn't realize how not-original most of them were), and words flowed as fast as I could get them onto the page, whether by typing or handwriting. (Now I shudder at the thought of the latter; my fingers and wrist cramp with pain after scrawling a page or two.) Now that I have a computer to minimize the physical labor and make it easy to correct typos and insert changes, my writing should have become even more fluent, shouldn't it? Alas, no.

I do think my writing has improved over the years, not only from practice and passage of time but because the word processor enables me to make revisions, including very minor ones, without no worries about whether they're significant enough to justify retyping a page. The whole process has become slower and more painstaking, though, rather than easier, as Hurley says she's heard from every writer she has discussed this issue with. Like the centipede who's paralyzed when he stops to think about which leg to move first, I now know too much to compose with the "first fine, careless rapture" of my teens. I can't escape noticing my errors and weaknesses or recognizing the problems in plotting and characterization that need to be solved. It's a bit like hearing from my physical therapist that, since I'm doing all right with the current exercises, she plans to add harder ones in the next session. "Leveling up" does make creative work tougher.

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt

Mysteries of Pacing Part 3 - Punctuated by Plot Twists

Mysteries of Pacing

Part 3

Punctuated by Plot Twists

Previous parts in the Mysteries of Pacing series:

Part 1
  https://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2019/09/mysteries-of-pacing-part-1-siri-reads.html

Part 2
https://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2019/10/mysteries-of-pacing-part-2-romance-at.html

We're going to talk a little about Diana Gabaldon's OUTLANDER series,

as I assume you've all read the novels. If not, you've seen the TV Series.  I prefer the TV Series, but the entire story hits a nerve.  So think about what it takes to create a series like Outlander, and how to turn it from Fantasy Romance to Science Fiction Romance -- or maybe use it to found a new genre.

When first drafting, often pacing is the last thing you think about.  First you just need to TELL THE STORY.  You need to "get it out" so you can look at it and see if it is marketable anywhere.  Before you know who would want to read this story, you need to know what the story is.

To get a grip on what the story is, you might have to write it all, or just a scene or maybe just a character sketch, a bit of dialogue in a bar weeping over drinks and telling the bar tender the tale of woe.

But that isn't where the NOVEL starts.

The novel that can sell to a specific imprint starts where the two forces that will conflict to generate the plot (the because-line; the "what happens next" ) first crash into each other and divert the life-paths of your protagonists -- and best of all, divert the life-path of the antagonist.

In other words, the novel BEGINS (and choosing a Beginning is the determining factor in the PACING) where the Plot kicks off the Story.

In these blogs, I stick to the following definitive difference between the terms Plot and Story.

Plot = External Conflict Resolved by sequence of deeds causing events which motivate deeds; the because line of what happens next

Story = Internal Conflict Resolved by the effect the events have on the Characters changing understanding of how the world works, and the emotional import of shifts in understanding

Plot and Story conflicts should RESOLVE in the same Plot Event.

In the opening, the plot kicks off the story, and in the ending the story absorbs the impact of that kick.

In the Ending of a novel, the "world" of the protagonists has changed for them, their perception of it, and the world's perception of them.

Conflict is the essence of story - and story is the essence of change.

Readers are captivated by what happens between the kick and the integration of that impact into lives.

In other words, the essence of real life is "How do you roll with the punches?"

People read to find out how other people deal with problems.

Watching real people, you only see the outside, and you can only interpret that outside by your own inside assumptions about reality.

Reading good novels gives you the chance to use an alien set of assumptions about reality to interpret Events, try different responses, and arrive at different destinations.

So to frame a novel to write, first find a kick, a punch that is common enough to be recognizable as a punch, yet at the same time different enough to be interesting.

That punch is the kick off of your plot.

The next pacing problem to tackle is "who" gets kicked.

"Who" the protagonist is determines the assumptions in place that the kick must call into question.  It's always the protagonist who gets kicked and the antagonist who does the kicking, but the novel always opens on the protagonist's action which triggers the kick.

In fact, that is the definition of "protagonist" or Main Character, or Hero.  The active force that aims and energizes the trajectory of the plot is the protagonist.

The reactive force that is driven by the protagonist's action is the antagonist (or obstacle which the main character must overcome to achieve a goal).

This setup of protagonist as "active" and antagonist as "passive" is the only one that leads, plausibly and inevitably, to a genuine HEA not an HFN, or happily for now.

Correctly identifying the protagonist (Hero we root for), the antagonist (Villain we root against) and the moment in their lives where they first clash, is the bit of world building that fabricates a reality in which an HEA is plausible and even inevitable.

In everyday reality, most people can't see their own lives from a perspective which allows for identification of the forces at work, shaping their lives by their own actions.  Real life is a stew of cross-currents and muddy waters, along with what seem like random events and overwhelming odds.  We look to fiction to clarify the muddy waters.

The Artist's job is to see life from a perspective that does reveal the forces and counter-forces that shape personal life, group life, and even the lives of Nations.  But seeing is not enough.  Writing is a Performing Art, as Alma Hill taught me.  The Artist's job is to see, and the Artist's job is not done until that Vision is transmitted.

The novelist paints in emotional colors.

But the Characters feelings are responses to the plot-kicks predicated on the Characters ideas of how the world works.

Story is the step-by-step change in the Characters understanding of how their world works.

Plot is the step-by-step response of the world to the Characters actions.

Mostly, humans (maybe not your Aliens) fuel their actions with emotion.

I've worked with many other professional writers and editors team teaching new writers who want to go professional, and every one of the professionals has had, and applied, this distinction between plot and story.  However, very seldom do such professionals agree on terminology.  Most have learned, or figured out, the distinction I've sketched here on their own, and invented their own terminology.

The terminology doesn't matter.  The underlying concepts do matter.

The core of PACING lies in the interaction between plot and story.

For example, if Characters too fast, too completely, without internal conflict wrestling with emotional matters, the reader will feel as if they are reading a Comic Book (not a graphic novel).  If a Character faces an Event that contradicts their entrenched world view, and just summarily (within minutes) adopts a different world view and suffers no consequence to the emotional-violence, no adult reader will believe that Character is a person.

As humans, we wrestle internally, resist to the death, and suffer (and inflict) pain to avoid changing our minds.

Faced with the impossible, we just don't see it, don't incorporate it into our next action.

In other words, in everyday reality, we dismiss anything that doesn't fit our entrenched world view.

Novels are about a Character who completes the process of changing an entrenched world view from first kick of Reality to final adoption of a new way of seeing the same thing.

In other words, beginning and ending are symmetric, and that symmetry is part of the Artist's toolkit for convincing the skeptical reader that these Characters have achieved the Happily Ever After, not just Happily For Now.

Misery, in fictional characters and real people, is caused by a mismatch between Objective Reality and Subjective Reality.

No human (that we know of) has a Subjective Reality identical to Objective Reality.  But each life-arc, if lived out to the full, has at least one, sometimes two, hard course corrections (kicks from an external source) that bring Subjective Reality perceptibly closer to Objective Reality.

We "live" in subjective reality, and so the philosophy that states there is no such thing as objective reality is very popular.  Objective just doesn't exist for most people.

Several times in ordinary life, we get kicked by objective reality, come face to face with the facts of life, and must change our subjective assumptions.

Story is about the successive steps in that shifting subjectivity that leads closer to objective reality (HEA) or farther from objective reality (HFN).

The Happily For Now ending implies another kick is gathering force to explode into this halcyon situation.

Happiness is not real.

For happiness to be real, there must be an element of certainty, of unchanging stability, of concrete reality.  That sense of rest on certainty comes from the AHA! moment when subjective reality shifts closer to objective reality.  That moment of SHIFT is the ENDING of that Character's story.

Whether that Character is the Hero of a single novel or a series of novels depends on how many steps the Character needs to transform from where she was at the Beginning to where she needs to be for the HEA Ending.

Sometimes, it takes ten novels to bring a Character to a new understanding.

It is possible to take too many tiny steps for a given audience, or too few large steps for a different audience.

In other words, how many steps and how large they are, as the protagonist adjusts his/her subjective reality to match objective reality, is entirely genre specific.

In Science Fiction, readers who are themselves professional scientists, tend to encounter an aberrant factoid, ask questions, fabricate experiments, observe results, try to get others to repeat the experiment with the same results, then just -- "Oh, well," accept the result and change their view.

So, to the science fiction readership, Romance genre does not seem plausible because the main characters don't accept proven results.

As Romance Characters suffer internal doubts and wring their hands, science fiction readers scoff and toss the book aside.

Plausibility, immersiveness, is a result of pacing.

How long does it take, how many steps, what size steps, does it take to get the Character to change perceived reality and act on the new perception.

In Romance, that's the final, "I love you," declaration in the Will You Marry Me ending.  What does it take to convince a Character of love?

In Alien Romance, what if your Alien has no cultural reference for Love, and no concept to which to relate "I love you?"  How does a human woman teach an Alien to understand reality as containing the dimension "love?"

Very likely, the answer is the human woman doesn't teach the Alien.  The Plot Twist does the teaching.

A plot twist is the sudden unexpected, highly improbable, Event that redirects the plot toward a new goal, or strategy.  The "that changes everything" event.  Such as, two lovers are marching into city hall to get married, and suddenly the radios are blaring WAR HAS BEEN DECLARED - and World War Two twists their lives into new directions.

A plot twist is sudden, shocking, immensely significant, and changes the reader's vision of what the ending will be.

A plot twist is not a new problem, an obstacle, detour, side-trip, or delay in the plot's development.  A plot twist is objective reality intruding into the subjective realities of the protagonists and becoming a major factor in decision making.

For example, as above, War is declared, or a key Character is assassinated, or a secret diary is discovered, or a long-lost family member turns up (an alternative heir, a dependent, or someone needing rescuing).  An expected pregnancy can become a plot twist.

A plot twist must hit the reader as a complete shock yet once it appears, the reader thinks, "I should have seen that coming."

So a good plot twist has to be foreshadowed, but never telegraphed.

When a plot twists, it must redirect the story.

The Characters have to draw upon their inner resources to meet the sudden new demand.  They must "do the right thing" (and bid a brave goodbye while marching off to war; give the family fortune to the new stranger-relative; have the baby anyhow).

To be a good plot twist, the event must pressure the Characters to adopt a new world view, to include something in their subjective reality that they previously rejected.

In modern Fantasy, that's often shapeshifters, demons, fae, or other supernatural beings.

In science fiction, it's often First Contact with an Alien from another solar system, or perhaps another dimension.

The foreshadowing that works best is built into the world that showcases the Characters.  A plot twist is usually what the Characters least expect, and have proceeded to plan and act as if it so unthinkable it was never thought of.

For example, in The Ghost And Mrs. Muir, the ghost haunting the house is not part of the Reality until he appears.  And then the whole plot twists to become about their Relationship.

Where in the plot your twist should appear depends on the audience you are aiming for.

If you're writing action oriented science fiction, the plot twist will likely be the mid-point of the novel.  This would be a discovery, or knowledge of a distant event arriving, right where the plot sags, where the characters pause to catch their breath and think things over, and causing the Characters to ditch their carefully crafted plans and race against time to the Ending.

The plot twist can, at the mid-point of a novel, serve as a "raise the stakes" moment, when more lives are suddenly at risk.

To craft an HEA ending, you need to craft a mid-point where all is lost, where the Characters decide to give up, if not in despair then in noble sacrifice.  But the Twist whirls them into a totally new calculation, they can't give up, must survive to save more lives.  At the 3/4 point, they're beaten, and at the end they triumph.

Plot twists can also be effective at the 3/4 point where decisions have been made and a point of no return passed.

Plot twists don't work well at the Ending, though, because either the reader sees it coming for too long, or to prevent that, you've left out the foreshadowing and the external event seems contrived, deus ex machina.

Wherever you place your plot twist, it is a vital part of the pacing.  After the twist, the Characters must redouble their efforts to achieve the goal.  That means the opposition, the antagonist redoubles efforts, too.

This increased effort increasing the pacing - makes the story go faster, makes the reader read faster.

Description and exposition slow pacing, so all the visuals of the settings you want to use and all the explanations of what is going on and why have to be sprinkled as tiny pieces into the narrative before the twist.

The plot twist has to reveal something about their reality that the Characters could not or would not encompass before this event.

The concept of Soul Mates presupposes the objective reality of the Soul.

Fate, Luck, Destiny, -- "we were destined to be together"  -- presupposes an objective property of Reality that interacts with, perhaps overrides, the Soul and individual will or free choice.

Luck, sourceless and random, without meaning, is often used as a Plot Twist.  For example, OUTLANDER, the Scottish historical romance by Diana Gabaldon, starts as World War ends allowing sundered marriages to rejoin. Claire's experiences have made her a different woman, and her man likewise has changed.  By accident, she touches a standing stone in the Highlands, and is wafted back in time a couple of centuries when the ancestor of her husband is an evil villain.

In a science fiction romance, the entire plot would be all about figuring out how that stone does time-travel, gaining control of the mechanism, and returning to her own time, very possibly as a twist, bringing her Scottish Laird husband with her.  The focus would not be on a modern woman's irritable response to being treated as chattel.  The focus would be on the physics driving the mechanism of time travel, while the romance would be a knotty complication.

The natural plot twist to a science plot about time travel would be the sudden, irrefutable discovery that the superstitious drivel spouted by the natives living near the standing stones had an actual basis in cold reality.

For example, the locals think there's a sprite, or pagan gods, or some entity playing havoc around those stones -- but Claire the Scientist from the future does an experiment to determine if that's true (maybe to bribe the sprite into returning her) and discovers that it is in fact an Archangel sent by the Creator of the Universe specifically to inculcate a Soul level lesson in her.  As she has resisted so successfully, the Archangel resorted to time travel to teach this lesson.

The Twist would be the introduction of real supernatural creatures to this Outlander world building.  As written, the supernatural is just religion, things people believe.  And that is underscored by the children's adventures visiting a ruin and eating a plant that appears to be the benign native plant, but is in fact an interloper, and poisonous.  In that adventure, Claire uses science to see through the illusion of superstition.

This establishes that in that world, the supernatural is not part of objective reality, but it is part of subjective reality.

This is the raw material of the Plot Twist.  The firm belief in the supernatural that is only subjective suddenly gains objective manifestation, proof positive.

In this case, the supernatural the locals believe in is what we call superstition, fairies.  But they also believe in the Christian God, in the Bible, and won't allow any challenges to that belief.

In Outlander, the series, the priest tries to exorcise the child who poisoned himself, thinking the poison is a possession acquired at the ruins.  Nobody dares challenge that priest.  Later, after Claire cures the poison, the priest apologizes publicly at her trial for being a witch, saying she was correct that the problem was no possession.  But he doesn't say possession is not a real thing.

In that world, Christianity and Superstition are inextricably mixed.

A plot twist can separate them, put a whole new frame around the concept of time-travel-via-standing-stone, and give your readers a new idea of what life and love are about.

To pull this kind of twist off, you need to establish the real elements of your world as you build it for the reader.  Gabaldon used "love" and "magic" to get readers to suspend disbelief long enough to plunge Claire into Scottish politics.

The opening sequences with her modern husband serve to answer the question "how did she, a nurse, know all this Scottish history and lore?"  In the course of showing, not telling, where she learned all she knows, we learn a lot about who she is.

Actually, a woman born about 1918 would not have had the spunky attitude toward her new Scottish husband when he whipped her bare bottom for disobeying him.  Men beating their wives into submission was common even in the USA at that time, even the women who won the war as nurses, pilots, riveters.  In the Appalachians, it has persisted as a common habit.

So Claire's 21st Century attitude in ancient Scotland just doesn't "work" dramatically.  It is too implausible.

What would make it plausible?

The introduction, by plot twist, of an Archangel sent by the Creator of the Universe to administer a soul-level-lesson to Claire.

Why would such an Archangel be sent?  Well, we've seen enough of Claire's personality that we could easily imagine that, had such an Angel been sent to teach her to be more compliant to her husband (maybe not to become a front lines trauma nurse?) but failed, and instead she acquired 21st Century attitudes (Angels don't fail like that, so we know there's more going on than meets the eye), the Archangel in charge that failed Angel would have to take a hand in schooling Claire.

Well, to pull off such a plot twist (the time-travel-stone is not magic, and not Alien science, but an Act of G-d), we need a Theory of Angelic Hosts Organization and Structure.

There are many extant, from all kinds of Christian, Pagan, and Jewish sources, and I expect the Muslim sources abound with great source material.  You can construct a plot twist using any of them, or one you make up.

If you make up a whole new theory of Angelic Hosts that you want readers to have the patience to pretend has credibility, you'd do best by learning a few of the theories people do know, or believe.

The Bible is full of source material for three major religions, so it is a good springboard for world building the majority of readers world-wide could understand.

Here is a short article on Archangels.

https://www.chabad.org/library/article_cdo/aid/3825092/jewish/What-Are-Archangels.htm

-----quote--------
Note that, unlike people, angels cannot multitask. That’s why G‑d had to send three separate angels to visit Abraham—each one was tasked with a separate mission: one to bring Abraham the news of Isaac’s impending birth, one to overturn Sodom, and one to heal Abraham.2

And although people can have multiple modes of serving G‑d—love, awe, etc.—when it comes to angels, each one has its own specific form of Divine service that does not change.

Michael and Gabriel: Fire and Water
In the Midrash, Michael is called the “prince of kindness (chessed) and water” and Gabriel “the prince of severity (gevurah) and fire.3” Thus, Angel Michael is dispatched on missions that are expressions of G‑d's kindness, and Gabriel on those that are expressions of G‑d's severity and judgment.

However, as we explained earlier, angels don’t multitask. Therefore, although Michael may be the chief angel or “prince” of chessed, he has many underlings, angels that work under him and represent a service of chessed.

--------end quote-----

So maybe the Angel who failed to impart the exact lesson to Claire worked for Michael, so it was up to Michael to repair the damage.

So maybe Michael's plan was to waft Claire back in time to meet a prior incarnation of her husband, and by comparison learn just how VAST a change can be wrought over a few lifetimes - from cruelty to gentleman.  She needs to make a Soul  level shift of that magnitude.  She is his Soul Mate, and needs to stay in step with him.

Or possibly, this novel would be about how Claire impacts the Soul of this prior-incarnation of her husband, and turns him into the gentleman he is in the 20th Century.

But of course Claire, being Claire, goes and marries the Fraser Laird.

Angels, even Archangels, it says in that article are not terribly flexible.

What would Michael do?

That deed is your Plot Twist - it would reveal the objective reality of Angel-kind to humankind, and thus upset the course of History.

Or would it?

Scots are famous for knowing things others around this planet don't know.

In other words, the Plot Twist is how the science behind the time-travel-stone is actually mysticism, or Soul Science - the science of the immortal soul.

The series would trace the journeys of several Souls through incarnations, shepherded by the extremely frustrated Archangel.

Using Angels as Characters is not new. It's been done often on TV, sometimes well.  So you need a new theory of what an Angel is, and how they become involved in individual Soul development.

You need a scientific theory of what a Soul is, and how (or if) it changes, reincarnates, etc.  You need a theory of what an Angel is, what an Archangel is, and what the limitations might be.

In addition to that bit of world building, you need a theory of what a human being is.  We make so many assumptions, thinking we know what we are. Do we?

And in addition to all that, you need a theory about what Life is, whether Destiny, Fate, etc is real, and whether free will is real or in any way free.

Gathering all those pieces, you can drop your Characters into the mix and let them discover what you have determined is objective reality.

Here is an item that meshes perfectly with the article on What Is An Archangel, called "What Is Divine Providence."  The Hebrew term for divine providence or supervision of this world is Hashgacha, and hashgacha pratit means the very personal and individualized involvement of the Divine in our individual lives.  Hashgacha implies a two-way interaction between Creator and Creation -- e.g. you can argue with your Creator and sometimes add a plot twist to your life's path.

https://www.chabad.org/library/article_cdo/aid/1409433/jewish/Hashgacha.htm

This article barely scratches the surface, but does outline the argument (conflict) between whether the Creator leaves the creation to run like a machine, or keeps molding and re-designing as we go along.

--------quote--------

Jewish philosophers, however, saw G‑d in a more passive role. To them, the degree of divine supervision corresponds directly to one’s transcendence of earthly matters. A tzaddik is wrapped up in G‑d’s supervision in every detail of his life, whereas a coarse, materialistic person is cast into a world of haphazard, natural causes along with animals and flora. In this lower realm, the philosophers see hashgacha applying only insofar as an event affects the divine plan. Yet, even according to this view, “chance circumstance has its source in Him, for everything stems from Him and is controlled by His supervision.”4

The Baal Shem Tov is credited with the reintroduction of the idea of hashgacha pratit—detailed divine supervision of every occurrence and every creature. Rabbi Schneur Zalman of Liadi, one of the foremost early proponents of chassidic thought, articulated a rational basis for this view, linking hashgacha to another vital theme in Jewish thought, continuous creation.

--------end quote------

Other traditions put their own subjective twist on these ideas.

Think about the Time Travel By Love And Magic concept, and see if you can find a mechanism for Time Travel that would make a basis for Science Fiction Romance.  The plot would have to be driven by probing, exploring and conquering the mechanism of time travel, even if that means making friends with a frustrated Archangel whose purpose for existence is to be kind.

Jacqueline Lichtenberg
http://jacquelinelichtenberg.com

Signature Abuse

Have you noticed that email signature "files" are exploding?

Authors have long used the space below their name for self-promotion. In addition to a tag line and urls for websites, there may be banners, .gifs, cover art,  lists of current releases, quotes, awards, and quotes.  Estate agent, and lawyers, and CPAs do it, too.

Some email providers limit the number of lines that can be auto-added to every outgoing email. Some online forums try to limit the size of sig files.

There is an etiquette.
https://www.syntaxis.com/email-signature-files

There are also risks.
https://superuser.com/questions/1075497/are-eml-attachments-a-security-risk
This week, an alien eml file caused me first embarrassment and then consternation. I politely requested some business information that I had not received. It could have been a royalty statement (it wasn't). Someone who could have been my agent (but wasn't), sent me an email with 4 attachments. Two were unnamed small-KB attachments that I ignored, and two were labeled MB files, obviously containing the info which I had not previously received.

I replied to thank the man who forwarded his copy of the info, and noticed in the email stream of my reply two sig files from a stranger named Wanda that seemed to suggest that she had sent me these files the same day, and that I had in fact replied to her email providing the info I wanted  with my claim that I had not received that info.

Those small-KB attachments turn out to have been eml files. They did not just "populate" the email sent by Wanda to my male correspondent. They also populated his fwd, and they populated my reply to the man although I did not include any attachments.

In times when emails are considered legal documents, proof of contracts, or of credibility or of incriminating contact with persons one swears one has never met or corresponded with, the ability of other peoples' eml files to infiltrate your clean stream is problematic.

Lesson learned. Always read through your email stream

All the best,

Rowena Cherry 

SPACE SNARK™ http://www.spacesnark.com/  http://www.rowenacherry.com

EPIC Award winner, Friend of ePublishing for Crazy Tuesda

blah

blah

Bait-and-Switch Book Beginnings

Stephen King's latest novel (which I consider one of his best recent works), THE INSTITUTE, starts with a long section from the viewpoint of a secondary character (who doesn't reenter the story until close to the end). It then switches to the protagonist, a 12-year-old boy with a slight degree of psi power who gets kidnapped by the titular Institute. Both characters are deeply engaging, and their separate stories end up skillfully meshed. It's Stephen King, so it works! Nevertheless, spending that much space at the beginning of a novel on a secondary character before even introducing the protagonist is definitely not what most readers expect.

What I think of as "bait-and-switch" narrative is common enough, in a modest way, with suspense and horror fiction. Such novels often start with a brief introduction of a character whose main purpose is to get killed. (A regular reviewer of the SUPERNATURAL TV series used to call this type of victim "doomed teaser guy.") Even in those novels, however, I feel sort of cheated if the author allots too much wordage (more than a few paragraphs or at most a couple of pages) to a doomed character. The writer has fooled us into mistaking this short-lived person for the protagonist, luring us into an emotional investment in her or him, after which we have to start all over getting engaged with a new character.

The sense of being "baited and switched" can pose a difficulty with prologues. If the prologue focuses on a character other than the protagonist of the main text, we may feel as if the author has started the book twice. We get all excited about the prologue's main character and may feel let down when he or she disappears or fades into the background in favor of a different focal character for the story as a whole.

Some readers may feel "baited and switched" by the entire opening volume of George R. R. Martin's Song of Ice and Fire series. While I wouldn't say I felt cheated, I was certainly shocked by that first exposure to his "anyone can die" authorial strategy, when the man I assumed to be the protagonist of the entire series didn't survive to the end of the first book.

Assuming this kind of shift at the beginning of a book is sometimes justified, how can an author pull it off so the reader won't feel tricked? Or lose interest when the focus switches to a different viewpoint character after the opening scenes have lured us into caring about the character first introduced? It's a little different, although still potentially tricky, when a narrative repeatedly switches perspectives throughout, presenting scenes through the eyes of two or more equally important viewpoint characters, as Martin's series does. In reading such a text, I sometimes have trouble getting back up to speed, emotionally, after each switch.

This let-down feeling doesn't have to result from a change in viewpoint characters. Long ago, I read a book intriguingly set in an alternate present where supernatural creatures exist openly, and social and economic structures are accordingly different from those in our primary world. The protagonist is a private detective who works with supernatural-related cases. (At that time, this worldbuilding concept was new and uncommon, not a familiar trope as it is nowadays.) In the first chapter, the protagonist deals with a vampire in a very funny scene. "Oh, goody, a cool vampire novel," I thought. Alas, nary another vampire in the entire book, although it wasn't a bad story on its own terms. Granted, this kind of problem isn't necessarily the author's fault. Other readers less vampire-focused than I might not assume from the first chapter that the point was to launch a vampire plot rather than (as it actually was) to introduce the protagonist's profession. Still, in my own case, I approached the rest of the story with a negative bias as soon as I realized my initial assumption had been mistaken.

Then there was the bait-and-switch of a successful chick-lit novel called MUST LOVE DOGS, whose inciting incident has a friend persuading the protagonist to place a personal ad in a dating venue. The friend gets her to include "Must love dogs" as a way of attracting nice guys, although the heroine doesn't have a dog and knows almost nothing about the species. Between the title and the inciting incident, I was expecting a romance with, you know, lots of dog content. Nope. The story soon leaves that premise behind. Maybe I would have felt less cheated by the plot if the inciting incident hadn't been combined with the title and a dog-centered cover (neither of which might have been the author's fault, admittedly, especially the cover illustration).

Do you feel "baited and switched" by these kinds of abrupt turns in a novel? And, as an author, how do you handle them if you have reason to write them?

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt

Mysteries of Pacing Part 2 Romance At The Speed of Thought

Mysteries of Pacing

Part 2

Romance At The Speed of Thought 

Part 1 of this series is:
https://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2019/09/mysteries-of-pacing-part-1-siri-reads.html
and is about how digital assistants can now read the text you type back to you aloud.

OK, it's not a dramatic reading and is paced very slowly compared to how a reader reads a book to themselves without subvocalizing.

But it can help a writer spot grammatical and stylistic quirks that could well annoy most readers.

In learning to "pace" your storytelling, you are both adopting a style (or Voice) and targeting a readership.

https://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2013/10/index-to-targeting-readership-series-by.html

I don't know if there have been any studies of genre-taste vs I.Q. or any other measure of "intelligence" currently being tested.

But I do know that Science Fiction originated as "The Literature of Ideas" written by scientists for scientists as the recreational play-time for the extremely intelligent.

If you survey the early days of Science Fiction, you will find Ph.D. attached to the names of writers quite a bit more often than in other fiction genres.

It was once thought women had generally lower I.Q. than men.  Consider that!  Today, employers are having a hard time getting women interested in learning "coding" (computer programming), and nobody really knows if that's cultural, genetic, I.Q. or gender-related.

Today, with the extreme emphasis on "equal opportunity" and equal pay in the workplace, we are striving with all humanity's might to erase differences among us.

In the early years of Science Fiction, the fans of the genre (who were actually, also the writers) repeated the mantra, "Different is dead."

For the most part, fans and writers considered themselves socially rejected because they were different from the majority.

What is that difference?

Nobody knew then, and until today, as far as I know, it has not been defined.  It isn't I.Q.

However, we saw the same pattern among the devoted and active fans of STAR TREK.

There is a quality of some sort that distinguishes this tiny slice of humanity.

It may be 1%, but I think the slice is more like 10% who read at least one novel a year.

I have also seen the persistent statistic that book-buyers, readers in general are only about 5% of the total population even in a Literate country like the USA.  Books just aren't the central interest of most people.

Among those who center their lives around novels, reading, writing, publishing, reviewing, book clubs, and associating with people who have read the same books, there is a vast difference in taste in entertainment.

Some read Chemistry textbooks, or the encyclopedia for fun.

Some read best selling, popular fiction -- Tom Clancy, Stephen King -- things you see made into action-packed films.

Some prefer cerebral mysteries - who-dun-it or procedurals, open and closed.  Some prefer relax by concentrating on solving the puzzle of the mystery, and some prefer to solve the puzzle of Romance (e.g. What Does He See In Her?)

https://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2013/06/theme-character-integration-part-1-what.html

https://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2013/09/theme-dialogue-integration-part-1-whats.html

https://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2013/09/theme-dialogue-integration-part-2-whats.html

And some, of course, read Romance.  Among readerships, Mysteries and Romance are the biggest categories, though Westerns used to rank with them, all trailed by Science Fiction.  Times have changed, as have the very definitions of what constitutes each of these genres.

But one element that unites all genres is that each genre has a unique style preferred by its readers.

Historicals can use long, involuted sentences, flowery language, and obscure names for articles of clothing, all slowing down the reader's eye, tripping up the mind, evoking images.  Mysteries have to "play fair" with the reader, not hiding the facts needed to solve the mystery, but obscuring them amidst many irrelevant words.  Westerns have to be terse, action packed, and fast paced as does Science Fiction.

Each imprint within a genre has a preferred style.  In Romance, for example, certain imprints require a certain number of sex scenes with a particular amount of nudity and explicit description.  So which publisher you aim to sell to determines a lot of the style you must mimic or adopt.

I have not been able to identify a certain level of intelligence (I.Q.) common to readers of particular genres.  But studies you can find on Google have identified connections between scores on I.Q. tests with reading speed.

Google turns up this interesting statistic:
---quote-----
The average person in business reads no faster than people did 100 years ago. The average reading speed is 200 to 250 words a minute in non-technical material roughly 2 minutes per page.
-----end quote-----

The average screenplay films about 1 minute per script-page.

If it's true that reading speed goes as I.Q., then higher I.Q. individuals would likely tend to read faster, even when reading fiction.

I suspect that no matter your I.Q., you can train yourself to speed-read with fair comprehension (in any subject area you are well familiar with), but you can read faster than your emotions can biochemically shift.

In other words, reading fiction, especially Relationship based fiction, has an upper speed limit dictated not by word-comprehension-speed, but by the body's ability to produce emotional responses.

So the writer aiming at an audience of I.Q. 130+ people would have to use a lot of words to showcase a given emotional pitch.  You don't want the reader to zip through a scene and not feel the impact even while fully comprehending what happened.  It's like watching a movie on Netflix where the lips don't sync with the sound-track voices.

Aiming for an audience of I.Q. 90 people, the writer would use fewer, sharper, smaller words to depict the high impact emotional scenes so the reader doesn't have to read as fast to keep the emotional sweeps in sync with the words.

The objective would be to get the rise and fall of emotional tension in the story to match the reader's progress through the words.  A match like that would produce the greatest, most memorable, and most talked about reading experience.

So which kind of story should naturally engross which kind of I.Q. readership?

What material do you aim toward which I.Q. segment?

Would the story that entertains a low I.Q. person also enthrall a high I.Q. person?

Science Fiction, as I noted above, is the Literature of Ideas, of hypothesizing about abstractions.  Romance is about imagining the Happily Ever After.  Both are about making those abstract imaginary situations into concrete Reality.

Genre publishers have focused science fiction on making scientific advancements real via war, explosions, mayhem.  Romance publishers have (hitherto) constrained Romance genre to non-violent relationships.

All of those constraints have been lifted, especially with small publishers, and self-publishing via electronic means.  The Gatekeepers no longer have a gate to keep.

As a result all sorts of exploration is currently in progress, novels pouring out online, looking for readerships.

Here is a graphic that purports to depict the social spectrum by I.Q.  This is a result of meta-analysis of data collected over many decades, now being re-analyzed in ways that weren't possible when the data was collected.

The methodology and results are sketched in this article:
http://www.psych.utoronto.ca/users/reingold/courses/intelligence/cache/1198gottfred.html

Which, near the top, has a note [see illustration] which is a link leading to this graphic:

http://www.psych.utoronto.ca/users/reingold/courses/intelligence/cache/1198gottfredbox2.html

This article explains a factor of Intelligence called g.  Just the letter g.

This entire thesis on human I.Q. may be completely wrong, or have no actual basis in reality, but it gives us a jumping off place to start thinking about the market for our fiction, and how the target reader chosen affects the style that will work best for the story you want to tell.

This graphic, with a breakdown of percentages of a given I.Q. level by social and Relationship activity, may give you an idea of how to Target an Audience by giving you an idea of what activities feature prominently in that Audience's common experience.

For example, the legend of the graph shows that 0% of young white men of  I.Q. 130 have been incarcerated.  Only 9% have been divorced within 5 years of marriage. Only 10% have been out of work for a month.  But only 5% of the total population has an I.Q. of 130.

Note the scale doesn't show all the way to I.Q. 200, but I've known people of I.Q. 220.

The I.Q. 130 slice of the white male population may have been poor for a while, but they don't LIVE IN poverty.

Only 2% of I.Q. 130 women have had illegitimate children.

And 0% of I.Q. 130 dropout of High School.  College might be a different story - as there are way smarter ways to make a living than getting a degree that makes you "over-qualified" for the most fun stuff you want to do.

Look at the line that says Career Potential and think about those 4 segments as you choose a readership to target.

To get the most book sales, you need to target a bigger readership.  The number of people under the middle of the distribution curve is that bigger readership.

So to sell a LOT of books, you need to target Clerks, Tellers, Police Officers, Machinists, and Sales people.

Notice how "Chemist" (e.g. scientist) is over the I. Q, 130 section of the curve -- that's where you find the preponderance of dedicated, avid, talkative, networked, science fiction fans.

There aren't enough to support a publishing imprint under the print-warehouse distribution model.  Certainly not enough to support a blockbuster film, or a TV Series that are just too expensive to make.

Hence purveyors of the Literature of Ideas have to include an element in the story that will entertain everyone down to I.Q. 90 -- for which purpose they have chosen "action" which is easy to understand but hard to actually do.  Very few fans of Action Genre are physically fit enough to perform the feats of speed and strength the Hero of the story executes routinely.

However, also notice that Romance, while as a genre has become focused on the more highly intelligent woman with the education of an even more intelligent person, still appeals to everyone across the spectrum.  Note also that these highly intelligent, over-educated women gravitate to Romance genre reading during the years when they are raising children (i.e. performing the duties of food service worker and nurse's aid 24/7).

Now, when you combine Science Fiction with Romance, you get a new genre that has the "reach" to engross I.Q. 130 and above, all the way down to I.Q. 90.  In other words, "Romance" acts as the "Action" ingredient to broaden the reach.

Explain the life-experience and point of view of one segment of this population to the other segments using Characters from the various segments, and you could find you have written a Classic.

The article which this graph illustrates only pertains to YOUNG and WHITE ADULTS in the U.S., so don't expect any rule to hold true across the real population.  There will be scatter blurring the categories.  Just see if you can absorb the implications and use them to extrapolate how the arrival of Aliens From Outer Space might impact these social segments differently.

Which segment might accept a human having an affair with an Alien?

Jacqueline Lichtenberg
http://jacquelinelichtenberg.com

Words Matter... As Do Spelling, Punctuation, Grammar

Which is correct, "inalienable" or "unalienable"?

This aposite quiz for this particular alien romances blog is posed by legal blogger
Elizabeth Scott Moïse writing for Nelson Mullins Riley and Scarborough LLP. in a fascinating article about the origins of the O.E.D.

https://www.nelsonmullins.com/idea_exchange/insights/the-scrivener-word-up

or

https://www.lexology.com/library/detail.aspx?g=7ecde481-056d-4b18-85a0-4d6949aa00c3&utm_source=Lexology+Daily+Newsfeed&utm_medium=HTML+email+-+Body+-+General+section&utm_campaign=Lexology+subscriber+daily+feed&utm_content=Lexology+Daily+Newsfeed+2019-09-25&utm_term=

There are many more multiple choice vocabulary perfection tests, so please check it out.

Also worth reading: the argument presented by Authors Guild on why permissionless captioning is wrong and dangerous and not in the interests of culture and authors' rights.

https://www.authorsguild.org/industry-advocacy/the-authors-guild-files-friend-of-the-court-brief-in-audible-captions-case/

Any traditionally published author, who has spent multiple hours striving with copy editors, editors and proof readers to perfect spelling, punctuation and grammar will understand how distressing it could be to see well-crafted script reduced to phonetically generated "captions".  Any reasonably well read person who has turned on the captions function on television should see the potential problems.

AG is most persuasive.

Finally, and nothing to do with Sp/P/G, the 2015 Fresh Fiction hack has something in common with Groundhog Day.  No matter how many times one changes ones passwords, it seeems, the hacks persist.

If you are not actively videoconferencing with someone, cover up the camera eye. Then, when/if you receive a well-written email from a shady someone trying to prove their bona fides by revealing your latest Fresh Fiction password, you will be less likely to believe that they truly have infected your device and taken naked pictures of you.  Don't even open that email.

All the best,

Rowena Cherry

Animal Minds

I recently read two books by ethologist Frans de Waal, ARE WE SMART ENOUGH TO KNOW HOW SMART ANIMALS ARE? and MAMA'S LAST HUG, respectively about animal cognition and emotion. ("Ethology" means the study of animal behavior.) They're very lively as well as informative, drawing upon a lot of the author's personal experiences. De Waal makes a sharp distinction between emotions and feelings. He defines feelings as internal mental phenomena we can’t know unless the individual describes them to us. Emotions, on the other hand, are observable in the form of biological changes that can be described and measured. Through unbiased observation of nonhuman animals, he maintains, we can't avoid noticing that they have emotions similar to ours. Therefore, it's not a stretch to believe they have inner lives and consciousness analogous to ours. If we assume certain reactions by our human peers mean those people are experiencing the same internal states we experience when we react that way, it's at least a reasonable provisional hypothesis that the same assumption can be applied to other creatures. We're often reluctant to make that assumption because it challenges the idea of human uniqueness.

Part of ARE WE SMART ENOUGH TO KNOW HOW SMART ANIMALS ARE? surveys the history of the study of animal intelligence. During the reign of behaviorism, the majority of scientists took it for granted that learning occurred the same way in all organisms, so nothing was lost by restricting most experimentation to easy-to-handle subjects, e.g. rats and pigeons. Why bother with difficult animals such as primates if there was no essential difference in the workings of their brains? Ethologists nowadays recognize that animal learning and cognition is inextricably linked to the particular species' methods of perceiving the world and interacting with other animals. There is also an increased willingness to accept that animals have desires, intentions, and goals, that they remember past events (not just in a rote learning, stimulus-response way), modify their behavior on the basis of those memories, and plan for the future. Parrots don't "parrot," for example; they use the words they know in appropriate contexts. Some of them demonstrate counting ability and recognition of numbers. Visually oriented species, including some birds, recognize faces as readily as we do.

De Waal objects to the preoccupation with comparing animal cognition to human capacities, as if nature conformed to the old model of a "Great Chain of Being," a linear ladder of species with us at the top. He considers it more realistic and productive to study each species as important and interesting in its own right, with its own techniques for dealing with its environment and other creatures. Why try to measure another species' intelligence by investigating how closely it corresponds to ours, when that other species experiences the world through biology and social structures different from ours? As he puts it, he emphasizes "evolutionary continuity" rather than the "traditional dualisms." The useful comparison isn't between human and animal intelligence, but "between one animal species—ours—and a vast array of others." Most scientists in the past thought only a few nonhuman animals had self-consciousness, on the basis of the "mirror test" (whether they show evidence of recognizing their own reflections as themselves). Quite a few other species have been admitted to the club now that researchers have realized it doesn't make sense to test such diverse creatures as elephants, dogs, birds, and dolphins in the same way as primates. "Theory of mind"—the awareness of what others know or don't know (useful in trying to hide food from others who might want to take it, for instance)—has been demonstrated in a wide variety of animals, some of which catch on quicker than human toddlers. Ethologists have also discovered that many behaviors previously attributed solely to "instinct" depend on experience, learning, and planning.

In MAMA'S LAST HUG, De Waal explores animal (especially primate) politics and society, whether any emotions are unique to Homo sapiens, empathy and sympathy, animals' sense of fairness, and the questions of free will and the meaning of "sentience."

It's fascinating to read about the many different creatures whose intelligence, emotional life, and social skills far exceed what previous generations of scientists believed possible. The octopus, for example, probably the most intelligent vertebrate, has "brains" in each of its tentacles, so that a severed arm can continue to move on its own for a while and even seek food. Contemplating the "vast array" of creatures on Earth is a great resource for inventing extraterrestrial beings who are more than humanoids in special-effects makeup. If we met aliens on an extra-solar planet, how would we judge whether they were intelligent in the same sense we are? If aliens landed here, would they realize we're intelligent, or would they view our cities the way we regard termite mounds and beehives?

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt