Sometimes the Magic Works (8 page)

So Maud Manx must be made to rise to the nature of the threat posed by Feral Finch, by the fears and doubts his coming engenders, and by the limitations placed on her by age and disability. How successful I am at depicting all this will determine how engaged the reader becomes in the story, how compelled by the action, and how concerned for the story's outcome. Ultimately, it will determine whether or not the book works as a thriller.

Whew! All those other chapters were so short, and this one is only half done! At least it's the tougher half. It gets much easier from here. Nevertheless, let's take a break in case you want to turn out the lights and get some sleep, and we'll pick up on things in the next chapter. I'll go put out the cat.

 

Readers will accept almost anything from
you if you don't make them feel they
have wasted their time and money.

 

M
AUD
M
ANX
,
P
ART
T
WO

WELL, HERE WE are again, back in our virtual classroom, ready for another look at those valuable rules of writing. I know I shouldn't say this, but even though I believe strongly in their value, some of them may not work for you. This is true about all writing rules and all books on writing, and you have to be able to pull out what will help
you
and discard what doesn't. Of course, I think my advice is pretty good, but oddly enough, other writers feel the same way about their advice. Such is life. You have to make up your own mind.

Anyway, back to Maud Manx, Feral Finch, and their adventures in the thriller
Cat Chaser
.

The single most violated rule of writing is the one I want to talk about next, and you ignore me in this instance at your peril.

Rule six goes like this:
SHOW, DON'T TELL.

I'll bet you've heard that one before. Almost everyone has. Certainly everyone who comes into one of my classes on writing fiction has. Three little words, and they seem to cause writers a world of trouble.

What those words are saying is that writers need to remember that the less we see of them during the course of their stories, the better. It is the characters and the plot of a book that are involving, not the writer. The writer needs to reveal the story through the words and actions of the characters, not through his or her narration of them. Everything that happens in a book should take place as if the writer wasn't present. We should be able to read a story through from beginning to end without any awareness at all of an author presence.

The problem arises when the writer violates the Show, Don't Tell rule. What happens is that the writer starts
telling
us about characters and events, rather in the way of the Chorus in the old Greek tragedies, instead of
showing
us through a depiction of the action. When this happens, the story stops dead in its tracks and starts to take on the look and feel of a lecture. Because the writer is now telling us what is happening instead of showing us, the reader becomes distanced and no longer feels a part of the story, is made more a viewer than a participant. The immediacy of the storytelling is stolen away. The spontaneity and life disappear.

To illustrate what I mean, let me give you two examples of the same scene. The first violates the Show, Don't Tell rule; the second doesn't. We'll use a scene out of
Cat Chaser
to illustrate the difference.

EXAMPLE
1: Maud was eighty-one years of age with piercing dark eyes and a stiff, squared-away stance that suggested aching joints. Gray hair hung in a single braid down her back, tied at the end with a ribbon. Deep age lines marked her strong, plain face. She was missing her right arm, the sleeve of her cotton dress pinned up against the breast and neatly folded at the elbow. For many years, she had worked in a bookstore, and before that, as a CIA operative. She loved cats and had two old toms at present named Kibbles and Bits. But while cats were welcome in her home, birds were not. She hated birds because as a child she had always been afraid of their beady, quick eyes and sharp little beaks.

Okay, that's pretty dreadful, I grant you. But I need to make the distinction between telling and showing as clear as possible, so I am going overboard just a bit.

EXAMPLE
2: Maud moved gingerly today, the result of another twenty-four hours added to her eighty-one years. Oddly enough, she felt the same as always, although her dark eyes might give her away to someone who looked closely enough. Ignoring her stiffness and the ache of her joints, she brushed lightly at her braided gray hair and smiled at the sunlight streaming through her cabin window. The smile gave her lined face a warm and reassuring cast, the sort that always suggested to those she encountered that she had a good heart. Kibbles, the better half of Bits, trotted up to her, and she picked up the old tom and held him in the cradle of her good left arm. She glanced down at the empty right sleeve of her dress, checking her appearance the way she had been taught to do during her years with the CIA. Government agents never forgot their training. Or maybe it was booksellers who never forgot, she couldn't remember. She laughed silently at herself, able to push back the years and the past. On a day like this, she could even feel kindly toward birds, and that was rare indeed.

I probably could do better if I wanted to spend more time on it, but you get the general idea. The second paragraph is more fluid and more fully developed. We learn about Maud through her actions—the picking up of Kibbles, her smile, her laugh, her reaction to what she sees, even the way she moves around the room. We learn about her through her thoughts. In the first example, we learn about her through a writer's bare-bones recitation of her attributes and limitations, and we are very much aware that the writer isn't showing us anything, he's telling us.

Which brings us to rule number seven:
AVOID THE GROCERY-LIST APPROACH TO DESCRIBING CHARACTERS.

You know, remember to pick up the eggs, ham, bread, milk, Swiss cheese, and so on and so forth. If you take a look at our first example, the one that involves so much telling, you will notice that we learn about Maud through what amounts to a grocery list of characteristics. It reads like the author is checking off each item very much the way you do when shopping in a grocery store. How much more interesting and involving to work all this in through the narrative form employed in the second example, the one that involves showing us Maud through her movement and thinking. We still get everything on the list, but we don't have the feeling that everything we learn is being doled out in accordance with some mysterious agenda. We have more of a narrative flow and thus better storytelling.

I am not going to try to tell you that I have never violated either of these last two rules; I have. I expect all professional writers have at some point. But it helps to be aware of the probable consequences of doing so and to minimize the times you let one of these unfortunate lapses occur. To be good writers, we have to be wary of the bad habits that try to seduce us. We have to remember to look for them, to recognize them when they creep into our prose, and to banish them summarily. You can see for yourself the results of such diligence from the examples above.

Next up on our list of rules is one that is easy to apply and tough to enforce. Rule eight is this:
CHARACTERS MUST ALWAYS BE IN A STORY FOR A REASON.

I like to think of my characters as actors on a stage, auditioning for a part. Some of them are quite good and very interesting, and I really feel they have something to contribute to the life of the stage. But what they offer isn't always right for the story at hand. Sometimes you just have to tell them that they gave a great reading, but that you don't have a part for them in this book and will call them back for the next. Meantime, it's back to central casting they must go.

You might remember that I mentioned this rule earlier in passing in the chapter on dream time. No matter how much I like a character—love a character, for that matter—I will not put him in a book if he doesn't serve a measurable purpose. By measurable purpose, I mean that characters must do something to advance the story. In a very demonstrable way, they must contribute directly to the movement of the plot. If they are just standing around looking good and sucking up air, they are out of there. If they are providing nothing more than decorative filler, no matter how charming they might be, they are history.

I am ruthless about this. Sometimes I will find a way to keep a character in a story by changing the plot so that the character can directly contribute. But sometimes a character just doesn't belong and has to step back and wait for the right book.

Why is this so crucial? Why not give a charming, memorable character a place in your story? Doesn't that add verisimilitude and color to the narrative? Yes, of course it does. The trouble is, it does a couple of other things, as well, and neither of them is good.

First, if the presence of the character doesn't advance the story, it necessarily stops it in its tracks. All of a sudden, you are going nowhere, your pacing disrupted, your focus shifted from the important characters and plot to this intruder. The reader's attention shifts, as well, and by letting that happen you are creating expectations you probably can't fulfill. If this character is so wonderful, when will he or she do something that matters to the outcome of the story? When will this character prove important to the way in which the story develops? The reader will look for answers to these questions, and if you don't provide them, you will necessarily disappoint their valid expectations.

Second, by populating your story with characters who don't contribute to its advancement, you risk diminishing the role of characters who do. If you draw attention away from the characters who matter, the ones who are in the story for a discernible reason, you may find readers losing track of whom the story is really about, or worse, wishing it were about the characters it isn't! It reminds me of the way a magician distracts the audience from what matters by doing something obvious. The difference, of course, is that in the case of the magician the distraction serves a valid purpose. In the end, the distraction is integral to the performance of the trick. That isn't true in the case of the writer, because the colorful character with which he has become enamored isn't going to be connected in the end to anything.

So what does this mean in practical terms? How would this rule apply in the case of the characters in
Cat Chaser
?

We don't have to ponder the importance of the roles of our protagonist and antagonist, which are pretty well determined going in. But we do have to consider our supporting cast. At present, there are three: little Johnny Gazette, the paperboy; Alfred Stamp, the postman; and Martha Handy, the woodswoman. There are also the cats, Kibbles and Bits, but I'll let you skate on animals if they at least provide comfort and occasional entertainment for the other characters.

There are a vast number of reasons for these characters to be in the book. They could be there to help illuminate the character of Maud. They could be there to provide a key role in helping her overcome Feral. They could be there as conversational partners for either, letting us shift from narrative to dialogue at crucial points. They could be there as cannon fodder. This is a thriller, after all. Someone is going to have to bite the dust fairly early on, and it would help if it were someone both Maud and the reader cared about.

For example, Martha Handy might be widely regarded as a nut case by the local populace, but prove to be invaluable to Maud in helping her come to terms with her fears and doubts about her lapsed survival skills, offering fresh advice on woods lore or trap setting. Maybe little Johnny Gazette, in the course of his rounds, notices something that will help Maud discover what Feral is planning for her. Alfred Stamp might turn out to be cannon fodder, but in the course of giving up his life, does something that saves Maud's.

Once again, you get the point. No matter what you decide about the purpose of your characters in your book, the important thing to remember is that they need to have one.

An important corollary to this rule, one that bears at least a mention, is that the attributes you assign to your characters should serve a purpose, as well. I am not speaking of mundane characteristics such as hair and eye color or size and weight. I am talking about attributes that set your characters apart from everyone else. These shouldn't be assigned haphazardly and never just because you think it sounds neat. For example, if I take away Maud's arm, that loss had better have something to do with either character development or conflict resolution during the course of the book. If Martha Handy is a woodswoman familiar with homespun skills and remedies, that needs to bear in some way on her place in the book. Giving characters odd attributes that seem to signify something important about their presence in the story should fulfill readers' expectations in the same way that the presence of the characters themselves do.

Let's move on and take a quick look at rule nine:
NAMES ARE IMPORTANT.

You would think this would be obvious, but I find more often than not that it isn't. Maybe part of the problem comes from not understanding what it is that names should do—because they should definitely do more than act as convenient labels. This is true not only of names of characters, but of places and things, as well. Names should serve two very specific ends. They should feel right for the type of story being told, and they should suggest something about the person, place, or thing they are attached to.

I am acutely aware of this because of the type of fiction I write. In fantasy, where whole worlds are created from scratch, the writer has to give the reader a sense of both differentness and similarity. Readers have to be able to get a handle on what an imaginary world is like, which means they have to be able to recognize how it resembles our own and at the same time understand why it doesn't. In taste, touch, look, and feel, in language and societal structure, in geography and weather, in any way the writer looks at his own world, he will have to look at his imaginary one. I submit that it all begins with the names you use.

Even in contemporary fiction, I find that names are important. If a name doesn't feel right, it can bother a reader all the way through a book. The sound of a name, the way it looks on the written page, and the connections we make with it both consciously and subconsciously all play a part in how we feel about it. Sure, you can't know how readers will react to a name you choose, because you don't know their history with that name. But you can determine how the name works for you in relationship to your characters and your story. You can find a name that fits the use to which you have put it, at least from your own perspective. You can avoid the lazy writer's approach to slapping something on without giving it any real thought.