Review: Between Two Thorns

How many sides should a story view a conflict from?

I’ve just finished reading one that takes a challenge as simple as winning freedom, and spins out a whole set of different viewpoints—Between Two Thorns by British Fantasy Society Award winner Emma Newman. The book’s had me scratching my head a couple of times, about what it takes to make a single conflict feel like a larger, perilous society.

It starts with a fine hook: a woman in hiding from her family, whose knows her escape is over at just the sight of their fairie patron. When the creature casually mentions that Cathy will have only a few days to impress him or he’ll pull that independent spark out of her head, we know how high the stakes can get.

Then there’s the rest of the ancient families, humans that live between worlds on the whim of those fae. Cathy’s family can’t understand why anyone would want to leave, and they’d beat her if it didn’t leave so many marks before the next ball; her arranged fiance Will seems nice enough but can’t wrap his head around it either. And then there’s the sorcerous Arbiter who’s investigating other mischief the fae-touched have inflicted on us mundanes, and the poor computer programmer who’d be a witness to it if his memory hadn’t been wiped.

All those views do give the story the full sense of being a true hidden world. And Cathy stays an appealing main heroine, trying to save the human boyfriend she stayed too long with, and only sometimes swallowing her regret at all she’s pulled back into. And she plays Mass Effect (would Dragon Age hit too close to home, even though the elves are refugees there?).

And you have to love the world-building in just family names like “Gallica-Rosa” and “Alba-Rosa.” Their fae patron herself is the timeless Lady Rose, but the family keeps the older phrasing “Rosa” and what seems to be the family’s French-based and English-based branches. Elegant.

I have to say there’s one thing I would have liked more of: more sense of the good side, or at least the appeal, of life in the Nether. On the one hand their schemes mean a polite enslavement for Cathy, and murder for some mundanes in their way. But what’s placed beside that is most likely to be only patriarchs and petty sisters sniffing at anything that reduces their social standing—with less sense of what that actually means to them. An Anne Rice would have made these nobles conflicted, compelling figures that are just as dangerous; a Seanan McGuire would have given us moments of the sheer glittery joy of fae-charmed Society that make us all the more leery of its seduction.

Of course to Cathy, all it is is a prison. Will and some of the other nobles do show some kindness to each other, and even to her, but it would be nice to get a more revealing reaction than “you embarrassed us” from someone. What’s behind those barbs that makes people cluster press up against them?

It’s a constant question for any writer: how much to stick to a single viewpoint and the threat to that, and how much more of the world around that peril show—and how to do that larger canvas justice.

So I wonder what I’ll find in the next Split Worlds books.

Photo by Elsie esq.

On Google+

Facing the Blank Screen – the Scary Bicycle

No stalling today–let’s talk about the hard part of writing, the thing that separates ideals from reality and keeps lying in the way of every new plan we make. That is, the sheer effort it takes to keep doing all the work to get a thing written. Focus, perseverance, facing down everything from life’s distractions to our own doubts that that crazy idea is worth finishing… come on, is there any of us that doesn’t see ourselves here?

(The Unified Writing Field Theory — searchings and findings on what makes stories work)

The most interesting thing I’ve ever heard about writing came from an article (and ohh, I wish I remember whose!), where a longtime author confessed that the best writing insight he’d learned in all his years was that:

“All writers hate to write.”

The more he actually talked to his fellow pros, the more they all admitted they hated the process of writing a thing out, and what they loved was looking back at a thing and know they “had it written.” –Go on, take five seconds for a Google search to see how many bloggers are confessing and debating that same problem.

Except, I think that author was overstating his point, or showing the glass half-empty to steel his readers for the challenge. We all know getting a thing written is hard and that our biggest enemy there can be ourselves. But from what I’ve lived and what other writers tell me, I’d put it as:

“Writers hate to start writing, and love it each time they get rolling.”

It might seem like our own daily Hero’s Journeys of challenge and reward, but I call it the Scary Bicycle: like with the proverbial bike, the skills we’ve gained in the past come back quickly enough each time we sit down, although writing seems more difficult until we actually settle in, maybe every single time. The results may be better some days than others, but honed skills are still honed skills, and the enthusiasm itself is generally right there waiting for us.

That may be what defines a writer more than anything else: just the love of what we do, even if it may take twenty or sixty minutes of awkwardness each time to get to that place. We recognize each other when we hear about that same crazy fascination with the process itself. So that just leaves: what can we do to get into The Zone?

Stephen King, of course, says you have to write every single day… and I think there’s a lot of truth in that. Both our skills and the discipline itself gain hugely when we keep them that fresh, and let’s face it, “every day” is simply the proverb for what rhythm makes something a part of life.

(Plus: just writing a page a day gives you a 365-page novel every single year. Doesn’t look so bad, does it?)

–Yeah, like I have time to breathe on a weekday, I hear a lot of us saying. True, life is life… more or less. But still:

Priorities. If writing matters to you–never mind whether you’re dying to have a New York Times Bestseller, just whether some real in-the-zone creating time compares well to ordinary TV or making a fancier dinner–it’s worth pushing at least some things down to make room. It’s just “life,” but you’re trying to keep it your life, right?
Rhythm. Some of us do great things with hours of intense writing on a weekend (after all, you only have to Start Up once) or a whole week of vacation; others follow King and make it a part of each day. There’s no simple answer to which to use, except: why not try some of both, and see how each gets you closer to who you want to be?
Finesse. No, our bosses just don’t care that we haven’t written our daily pages yet. But we don’t have to manage writing, or even life, in big blocks. Try setting aside one question about the next scene, or printing out a few notes or a page to edit, and pulling that out at the five-minute lull between things.

Most of all, the writing itself doesn’t have to slog along each word in the same sequence. Maybe the most interesting twist on the Scary Bicycle model I’ve heard was the friend who said it was harder to start writing when he created new pages, but easier to start and harder to continue when he was revising. So maybe the smoothest way to start a session is to review the things you’ve already written, to get you back in the groove.

(Two alternate approaches to that: As many people advise, try ending a session in mid-scene, maybe mid-sentence, so that’s where you can hit the page running next time. Or, one researcher says that the mind is best at creative and social functions in the morning, and just tired enough in the afternoon to be better at critical thought (or just resting)–after all, how many radio stations save their talk for the morning and settle into all music after lunch?)

That only scratches the surface, naturally. The more we each learn about our own writing processes, the more we can try things like writing an outside-the-tale debate between characters to get involved in a certain scene, or saving certain easy or hard scenes to write later. (Just never forget that gut check of “Wait, what does it mean that this scene’s boring me so much?”)

In the end it comes back to the numbers, pushing ourselves to get it all written. And maybe like other pushes, the key may be seeing past how hard it is to get started each time, and how we seem to pick up speed from there. “Hard work? Well, the first thirty minutes don’t count.”

Or to bring up what may be the best line I’ve heard on life (or at least on the limits of advice), take Ms. Buffy Summers’

“It’s hard, and it’s painful, and it’s every day.”

Literally every day? maybe. Or just, whenever you want to get to the fun parts.

On Google+

Viewpoint – In Praise of a One-Lane Street

A good viewpoint character just may be the best friend a writer has. And like most lifelong friends, we may have to warm up to a few inconveniences and quirks, before we start to appreciate how many ways a really compatible point of view character can smooth our writing along. Besides how it brings the chosen character or characters to life—and in the end, doesn’t all writing work through that?—using it can also animate all the supporting characters too, organize the world to keep it plausible and again to guide the whole description process, and even trim bulky pages.

(The Unified Writing Field Theory — searchings and findings on what makes stories work)

But somehow I keep seeing writers who are uncomfortable with it, who neglect it or even resent how it complicates some of their exposition. Yes, a strong viewpoint can make a few things awkward—but every limit there is also more than one opportunity, while almost nothing looks as amateurish as not sticking with whatever VP choice we make.

Just to line up the basic options, we have:

3rd Person Limited: Bill thought __ so he did __. Then the other guy did __. Bill thought __ and…
1st Person: I thought __ so I did __. Then the other guy did __. I thought __ and…
3rd Person Omniscient: Bill thought __ so he did __. But Joe thought __ and did __. Bill thought __ and…

(Plus, there’s the question of whether one of the first two methods will change viewpoint characters when a new scene starts.)

Let’s just get the Omniscient option out of the way—because, frankly, that’s where I hope most writers keep it. Being able to show any thought in the scene may make it a lot easier to reveal things… but that’s one of the main styles it’s used for, just trying to make the story easy. True, some of its other uses are to back away from individual characters to make their gestalt impression (the town, the human condition, whatever) seem more important than any one person, or to make direct contrasts between one thought and another, but pulling those off is a lot trickier than it looks. It also can’t be done without at least understanding each character’s view first.

So that leaves 3rd Person Limited and 1st Person, simply “he/she” vs “I.” Compared to the other option, these two are pretty much the same thing in terms of what viewpoint does. Their difference is really in tone: it’s just more intense to get through a whole tale of “I”s with none of a character’s passions and blind spots pushed back to “John hated to…” Some writers (or stories) work better with that bit of distance, while on the other hand I’d hate to read any of Jeff Lindsay’s Dexter books that didn’t throw me right into Dubious Dexter’s mocking little lines of thought. But extreme or subtle, any character can be done well in 1st Person—still, most writers have found the 3rd is more than powerful enough for them.

Either way, the good stuff involves knowing one of those two specific viewpoints. Which makes sense: stories aren’t read by gestalts, or by readers whose answer to “Will he give me that raise?” is to read the boss’s mind. (Much as we love to read about people like that.) 1st Person is simply how we live, and 3rd Limited is its more polite twin.

The basic value of a good VP, of course, is that this becomes the set of thoughts we can and should just show. Simple as that; as a writer, “you get one” mind to follow in a scene, so we make the most of it.

—Which is not to say we show every thought the character has, of course; that still depends on good pacing and the style we want, same as anything else. Then again, it works both ways, so choosing the right viewpoint character himself—or is it herself? choices, choices—ought to have a huge hand in defining how much of what to dwell on. Laconic, all-business VP characters are great for many stories, and a big effect of that choice should be limiting how detailed they bother to make their thoughts. Someone else might muse about everything he saw… or breeze past most things but slow down to wax lyrical about how to hack a computer, because that’s who they are.

(Special warning: if something would be on the character’s mind, don’t hide it from the reader just to play tricks. “They never knew I was the killer” may be the most infuriating last line you can ever write, if it blasts the readers with how dependent they’ve always been on your character telling the whole story. Yes, the plot may be all about why the character doesn’t know a thing, or there may be big memories that honestly haven’t come up yet, or the character can hint there’s something but flinch away from thinking it in detail at first. But don’t just cheat if we should know it’s there.)

Beyond what someone thinks, how does what he does and notices filter into that view? There may hundreds of things in a room, but by really following the character through it you get both a strong guide for describing it all and many more chances to characterize him. Does he just settle into the chair and wait to be told what’s up, or do his eyes pick out the rifle on the wall—and is it because he’s an appreciative hunter, a paranoid spy, or an author who remembers Chekov’s saying about guns?

Writers and readers often say characters are more important than plot. (I think their relationship is more complicated than that.) But there’s no question that anything we learn about that person’s mindset might affect any number of things to come, and beyond all that her attitudes are likely to connect with the reader more than the raw details of how a US President goes on the run from assassins. And every thought, action, and perception that crosses her viewpoint (or misses it!), plus what order she takes them in and how she perceives each, can be a chance to building that picture… and without slowing the story down. Because the pace of the story is how the right character is living it.

Consider: how different would a Sherlock Holmes tale be from Holmes’ own view, seeing all the possibilities at once rather than with a Watson who’s quickly led through them? Or from Inspector Lestrade’s, able to do his job but clueless enough to need a Holmes to do it right? Or from some ignorant servant’s view, or (evil chuckle) from Moriarty’s… If viewpoint doesn’t define the whole story, it certainly RE-defines every part of it.

I do like to think of it as driving in a one-lane street. A second lane to maneuver in might let me skip ahead and see more cars sooner, but staying mostly in one lane makes me so much more aware of each car, and especially how its speed matches my own. (Yes, that’s a sloppy metaphor; are viewpoint characters the cars or the lanes? But I’ll get the other reason I like the image.)

But, what about that viewpoint’s price, the key things right in a scene that a character doesn’t realize? (And those blind spots are, of course, some of the strongest ways to make a point about that person.) There, I think you have two choices:

Change viewpoint with the scenes. A whole book with exactly one viewpoint might be stronger, but we all love to split the narrative between a few characters that see different things. It might be because they wind up on different continents as the story plays out (we Game of Thrones fans know what I mean), or because using another pair of eyes in the same room shows whole other things (which is also Game of Thrones, come to think of it). But as long as the jumps between views are complete and not a new one every page, each view works in its own right, and the combination builds whole other shapes.
Or, get subtle:

Consider another “Lane,” namely Lois—a character who’s famously defined by the one thing she doesn’t know. Say you’re writing a Superman novel (or just any story where you want to state the characters as firmly), and you decide Lois needs an actual viewpoint scene of her at her best, grilling the latest Lex Luthor-wannabe about his shady dealing at a press conference. But this is also a villain that Clark Kent would be keeping an eye on, using all the resources that both his identities have… You could have Clark bumble his way through the scene and then later in his own scene mull over what he actually learned there. But you could also let Clark could get in one very good, penetrating question, and Lois could stop to think how she hates that a guy could have real reporter’s instincts sometimes but always be such a wimp…

(And of course, which one you use depends on which version of Clark Kent you’re writing, the “my God how does he keep his job” version or the “my God it’s just a pair of glasses” version. Characters fit the story.)

But there are always ways to make the reader notice something but hide it from the viewpoint character. If he doesn’t see something, what’s the reason for it: is he bored, trusting, impatient? Or even if it’s just him missing the elevator his girlfriend’s on, he can think a prominent “It can’t be that important” to make the reader suspect what it’ll really mean. It doesn’t have to be a strict characterization reason he misses something; just the viewpoint fact that he misses it gives the writer more than enough to hint with. Either way, the reason you’re hinting at is at least as entertaining as the fact itself, so all you have to do is use that, both to hint at the fact and to emphasize the larger truth.

Even when a character can’t know something, viewpoint isn’t a limit. It’s a twofer.

As to whether Lois Lane is really that limiting, the first modern “secret identity” story was Baroness Orczy’s The Scarlet Pimpernel, which is told mostly from the woman’s point of view…