The History

This post inspired by another conversation I had with my friend about her writing.

She was telling me about her next book that she has just finished revising, and she was explaining stuff about it to me and how between X time and Y time in the novel (X time being when aliens sent a missive to Earth and Y time being when Earth actually responded), all the aliens died. The characters/story are taking place after Y time, when humans have come to this abandoned alien planet. And I said, “what happened to the aliens?” And she told me, "they all died from a war or disease or something it doesn't really matter to the story."

No, it matters. It matters a huge amount. So I told her that. I outright told her, “yes, yes it does matter, you should come up with what happened to them.” Even if only she knows it, even if it’s NEVER mentioned. Her reply was, "no, not really, because I'm not planning on putting it into the book so I don't have to come up with it, it's not relevant to the story itself."

Almost every time I talk with her about writing, it makes me want to write a blog post. I’m not saying she’s doing writing wrong, but she’s doing writing in a very juvenile, student-writer type way which ultimately produces flimsy stories with flimsy world building, flimsy characters, narratives where things happen just because the author could or felt like it would be cool, with no historical relevance. Even if that history is made up within the story’s own world, it can’t just be absent.

In her story, the way the aliens died is going to affect EVERYTHING.

If all the aliens died in war, the setting is going to look like the aftermath of a war. Even if it’s an abandoned/empty planet, the buildings will look destroyed, the landscape will look charred, the entire place will reflect exactly what happened to it. What did Europe look like after WWII? Completely fucking wasted. Even things TODAY are still visibly changed/damaged/unrestored by that war, and that’s after 60+ years of humans continuing to build and develop in those cities. If an alien planet destroys itself in a war (and clearly these are technologically advanced aliens with the power to build massively destructive weapons that could cause this sort of damage, because they already had spaceflight and large metropolitan centers; I know because my friend has told me this) and then the aliens are gone and can’t rebuild, the place is going to look like a fucking wreck when humans show up.

If the aliens didn’t die in a war, and just left the planet or they all died of disease, the place will look hauntingly untouched, just a creepy empty place with silent but perfectly intact buildings, maybe with some overgrowth from nature depending on how long ago it was. If there was a disease, maybe there are signs of the quarantine left over—closed off streets, buildings shut up, large fences enclosing entire parts of cities. Signs hung up warning of infection, even if they’re in an alien language. You will be getting a setting and a sense of history JUST from how the place looks. Even if the point of the story is not to find out how these aliens died, or what happened to them, the history of it is so massively important I can’t even stress it enough.

If you don’t make that history, your world building and your story is already a failure. Because the lack of it will reflect in a tiny million ways in the entire attitude and atmosphere in the book. It will make it read flat and lacking in realism if there is no history to your world, even one that is never explored in depth. If the author doesn't know what's going on 'backstage', it comes off as completely obvious to the reader. You just know that there are huge gaps that nobody bothered to fill in or didn’t even realize were there. Sometimes it even makes huge ridiculous plot holes or creates unbelievable things, because there would be no reason things in the setting should BE the way the author has them - because they are not there because of a believable, evolving history. They're just there to be there.

I have a huge timeline and practically an entire history book of events that happened in the past of the L&S series, to get the society and culture and world where it is currently. Beyond that, I have an entire history of their people, all the way back to basically ridiculous levels, back thousands of years, and it will NEVER. BE. MENTIONED. EVER. Because current-day people don’t often sit around discussing how the Roman empire is relevant to daily life. But just like the Roman empire, so many of our present day functions and culture and traditions and technologies are built and adapted from it, so much so that we don’t even know it sometimes or just don’t bother to think about where modern plumbing came from. But it all came from SOMEWHERE, and the history of that is a real, tangible, important thing that affects your fake sci-fi/fantasy world just as much as it affects real-life modern day 2012 world.

So, all my ridiculous world building shit. Is it in the story? No. It is ever going to be? No. Is anybody ever going to know about it besides me? Most likely not. Is it still important? YES. Because it is so unbelievable necessary. It matters to the physical appearance of the world, the way civilization grew or declined or evolved, and physical things that left behind (buildings, monuments, any sort of manmade change to the landscape). Characters and their social identity, culture, beliefs, behaviors mindsets, everything. Everything is built on everything else. If you create a culture or an alien planet or a situation just because; then honestly you are doing it wrong. Because nothing works like that. Even the story you are going to write is built on something! Your ideas and concepts were influenced and inspired, either consciously or subconsciously, by people who came before you. People who wrote before you and created things before you and before those people there were other people creating things and creating ideas and they were influenced by the people before them.

Basically, you have to build a story like an iceberg. This is what people read:

and this is what should be going on under it, the world building that supports what people are seeing and experiencing in the story:

To sum up, there's a reason we learn history in school! So there's a reason your alien planet should have history and an explanation for why everybody on it died.

The Word Count

I’ve found another thing to write a blog post about! The dreaded WORD COUNT.

Recently I’ve had some encounters with word count woes that make me want to talk about it. Firstly was this post on tumblr, taken from Nic Alderton but shared and probably called the most attention to by Neil Gaiman:

This is a very nice, simple, stripped-to-the-basics concept. But there’s something very wrong about this very simple, stripped-to-the-basics concept. It includes a limitation. It tells you that the basics of writing a story are that – come up with one, and write it. How simple is that? BUT IN 80,000 WORDS! Oh. Not so simple. A very random, irrelevant, and specific addition to this otherwise very non specific, “freeing” concept about how uncomplicated it should be!

So why 80,000 words? Why would you include that? I follow several blogs of editors who often deal with frantic, worried questions from their followers concerning word count, and it’s very difficult to tell exactly how picky the publishing world actually is about word count via their answers. It’s difficult to even tell how a specific publishing house might define the actual length of a novel! Somewhere between 75k and 120k, which is a HUGE margin! You can practically fit an entire second novel in that margin! In fact, what I’ve read about acceptable word count in a professional setting seems to be so unspecific about it as to be very flexible. Obviously I’m not expert on this, but I’ve come to a conclusion that worrying about word count while writing is extremely damaging.

I had a conversation with a friend yesterday about writing (it’s her novel that I’m editing), and we’ve never had a conversation about her writing that doesn’t include her obsessing over word count. How many words she’s written so far, how many words she wants it to be, how afraid she is it’ll end up going over her projected count, how many words X part should be compared to Y part, books similar to hers and their word count, etc. etc. just on and on about to the point where I just told her outright yesterday that she should quit worrying about word count and the more important thing is to write the damn novel.

The hardest thing about writing is getting it out. That’s why I approve so much of NaNo, while a lot of writers and editors and critics are all over the map with what they think of it. It’s not specifically urging to you write 50,000 words of crap in a month (which is how some people have come to take it), but just 50,000 WORDS. The words are the most important part; you can’t have your story without words, any words at all. And for some people, maybe even most people, getting those words squeezed out of your brain and down to your fingers and out through a pen or a keyboard is the single most difficult part of ever completing a writing project. Because it really is fucking hard sometimes.

So worrying and fretting about word count is the most damaging thing I think someone can do. Just write your story. Tell it. Use 150,000 words, use 150. Use exactly how many you think you need, or how many it takes. Because whatever comes out, it’s a draft. You can change it. You can cut it, you can add it. If your book gets picked up, you probably will be told to cut or add. But you have to MAKE the story first, and you need those words to come out and form it before you can do anything. It doesn’t matter how many words. So don’t go about writing a story worrying and fretting about word count, about keeping it at 80,000 words or below 120,000 or above 75,000. Just forget about numbers. You’re dealing with words.

Editing a story might be a whole other deal, especially if you're aware of a word count maximum or minimum on publishers you plan to submit to, but editing is a different animal with a different set of rules and behavior. Word count shouldn't be such a huge focus when you're just writing the story.

I posted this on tumblr as well, but I feel it’s worth reiterating. One of my very few amazing college professors had a very relevant idea about word count and length, even if he was talking about essays. Whenever the first essay in his class would be assigned (and I had three classes with him so I saw this happen several times), someone would of course ask how long it would need to be. When this happened, the professor would climb up onto the nearest table or desk (and he was an elderly, well-dressed gentleman), point at his pants, and inform everyone that our essays would need to be “as long as his trousers”. Inevitably some student would say “so about four pages/three feet, then?” and the professor would reply, “it should be as long as it needs to be to properly cover the subject.”

Which is exactly how any story should be as well. Fretting about word count is just as distracting as pissing around on the internet is in the long run.

The Invisible Word

So a list of "synonyms" (loosely accurate) for the word 'said' was making rounds on tumblr. I saw a lot of people getting real hyped up about it, to the likes of;  "USE THIS, AUTHORS!" and "gonna print this out a million times and put it up all over my walls!" and "I hate it when authors only use 'said' in a story!"

Well, that's awesome. Great thing to be into writing and expanding your vocabulary. Not so much with this list:

This is the type of list (in fact, it may be the exact list, it looks rather familiar) that got passed out in my grade school class. We then had to write for the rest of the year without using the word 'said'. Ever! Instead, we were to use one of these 'strong verbs'. 'strong verbs' is not actually the term we were told then, that was popular in writing classes later on in life. Perhaps this was just an exercise to expose our young minds to the concept of synonyms - that some words have counterparts that mean basically the same thing! Sure there are nuances in meaning, but you're in the 3rd grade, there's plenty of time to straighten that out later.

This obsession to cancel out "bland" and "nondescriptive" words like said is rampant enough that it's caused a Trope To Be Born. It's called Said Bookisms. I am loathe to link to TVTropes because then you'll go lose hours of your life there, but even just the summary of the trope explains why this list is Bad News. Most of the time.

So, I've fixed the list.

 And here is the post I made accompanying it on tumblr:

SAID IS AN INVISIBLE WORD. You don’t remember reading it, and it can never stick out in the way a ‘strong verb’ does. There is absolutely no reason to ever have an arsenal of 234 other words to substitute for ‘said’. You look like a thirteen year old who just discovered fanfiction.net and a thesaurus. Dialogue tags should be used sparingly anyway, even ’said’. 

Your writing should be strong enough that how something is spoken (and who is speaking it) doesn’t need to be tediously overstated with ‘strong verbs’. 

In fact, half of these were not even synonyms. ‘thought’ is not a replacement for ‘said’. Unless you’re telepathic.

That said, some of these are good words. ‘strong verbs’ can be very effective. But they’re ones that suggest noise, pace, tone and pitch of a voice -not action. It should be obvious from context and dialogue if someone is interrupting. Or repeating words. Or arguing, or explaining. It’s more difficult to tell if a character is moaning. Drawling. Laughing. This is now a list of 65, and even that’s…pushing it. 

All of the people agreeing with the original list and saying how awesome it is are not wrong, because that’s their opinion and opinions can’t be wrong, but maybe they haven’t read anything well-written and had the unfortunate experience of overzealous English teachers who passed out lists like this and forbade students to use ‘said’ because it’s bland and unimaginative. But I tell you, if I read something where a character ‘sanctioned’, ‘itemized’, ‘reciprocated’ or ‘held’ instead of talking, I would stop reading. Instantly.

I wrote something similar a while back on my LJ, in a meta essay about adverbs (which people love to hate on, along with said, and I could do whole other essays on that too).  But strangely, while people are down on adverbs for being 'sloppy' and 'unnecessary', they don't harp on these extraneous dialogue tags for the same thing. Do you really want to read conversations that take place like this:

"Said Bookism?" Alice interrogated. "What's that?"
"Well," Bob exposited, "it's a variety of Purple Prose in which the writer goes out of their way to avoid the word said."
"Why would they do this?" ejaculated Alice.
"Because," explicated Bob, "it was the fashion at one point. There were even 'said books' you could get mail order with lists of the words that can be used instead of said as saying said was discredited during that time. That's where the name of the trope comes from," he further proclaimed.

Because that's what you can get. And it's awful. It's unpalatable and juvenile, amateur and laughable. No one will take you seriously. But I've seen things written that way. Serious things. All because of that list your teacher passed around in the 3rd grade, and because people have told you to hate poor little 'said', who only wants to sit there quietly near to your dialogue and be a helpful friend, and maybe occasionally invite along a well-behaved adverb to sit beside it.

So yes. Dialogue tags that are not 'said' can be used. Effectively. But in the end, your tags should not be upstaging the dialogue. And that's what words like "acknowledged", "reminisced", "denounced", and "propounded" do. It's also what an onslaught of adverbs can do. Overindulging in anything is not a good practice. It's moderation that makes strong writing. But 'said' almost can't be overused. Should you use it every single time a character speaks? Probably not. But since 'said' is an invisible word to read, it's also an invisible word to write. You almost forget you've used it so much. But, unlike if you used "howled" 178 times, "demanded" 323 times, "argued" 415 times and "explained" 267 times, nobody's going to really notice if said creeps in there more often then it should have been.

New Blog

I've started this because LJ is slightly unprofessional. Not that I'm a professional, but you know. Someday. And I'm using my decided-upon penname as well.