In a previous article, Developing the science fiction reading skillset, I talked about an article written by Jo Walton over at Tor.com. The article was on SF reading protocols and how science fiction readers develop a skillset to read science fiction.

In the same article Jo also covered the opposite of this. The mindset (or skillset if you like) that literary readers bring to their reading. The expectation that if it’s written it must have some form of metaphor associated with it.

Calder, my writing partner, is part-way through a writing course. Last year she completed a subject called Myths and Symbols. One thing her lecturer kept telling the class was that ‘all stories have hidden symbolism’. I disagreed with this because I know that when I write—and I think Calder would probably say the same about her writing—I am definitely not trying for symbols. I am telling a story, and it’s not usually a story fraught with symbolism, it’s a story about a person or persons and what happens to them. But … according to the lecturer symbology is always there, even if you the author don’t know that you are writing it in.

While I agree that themes do creep into some stories—and sometimes this is deliberate, sometimes it’s subconscious—I do not, consciously or sub-consciously, lace my stories with the type of symbolism the lecturer was talking about. If my main character wears a red dress it does not mean she is a slut or a sinful woman, which is one of the commonly accepted symbologies associated with a red dress. Nor does it automatically mean she that she is strong and fiery, another commonly accepted symbol. If I say, in my book that she liked the colour, or that she wore it because her (now-deceased) husband said it suited her then that’s why she’s wearing it.

Jo has some good points to make about how literary readers expect a story to have symbolism and metaphors; that they go looking for them, even when they are not there.

Over at Tor.com Jo Walton has an interesting article on SF reading protocols and how regular readers of science fiction know how to read without getting hung up on the detail that’s not important. She uses the example of Joe Haldeman’s The Forever War, and how you don’t need to know what a tachyon drive is to enjoy the novel, you just need to know that it allows you to travel faster than light and what impact that has for the story.

One of the things that I find when non-SF readers read any of our stories is that they always want more detail. They always want to know more backstory.

I used to think that maybe we do jump into a story too quickly sometimes. In Not So Simple After All (aka Potion), for example, we start the story when our adventurers start their journey together, not when they first meet their prospective boss. We had quite a few people say they would like to see how the characters are offered the job and how they decide to take the work. We tried to write earlier chapters showing Blade bored and unhappy at his school for fighters and River coming to the school to offer him the job, but it was boring and didn’t add anything to the story except that the reader had to read at least two more chapters before they got into the story proper. So we cut them again.

I think now that what these people—many of them non-regular SFF readers—really wanted was for us to make a world that they understood at the start, rather than have that world unfold for them as they read.

I have always been a reader who is happy to learn things as the book goes on. Myself, I call it a willing suspension of disbelief. Provided the author is telling a good tale and has empathetic characters I’m happy to go along with his/her story and let the facts settle in throughout the story. I don’t need to understand everything straight away.

Jo Walton calls this the SF reading skillset.

This is the second in a (very) occasional series of common writing mistakes made by unpublished writers. (Note, I am not a published writer, but I do write, and I do read.)

This is one I know I am guilty of myself and I’ve read quite a few published novels that do exactly the same thing. Especially first novels. It’s the rushed ending.

It goes like this. You’re reading a novel. You love the characters, you’re caught up in the storyline, you’re really enjoying the book. Then you get around 80% through and suddenly the whole thing goes off the rails. The end whizzes up on you so fast that you’re left going, “Huh? How did they get from there to here?”, and sometimes, “I don’t get what just happened here?”

Then, instead of going back to the author and being able to say, “This was a great story, I’d read anything you wrote,” you have to spend two days trying to work out what went wrong, and how.

We’ve analysed our own writing and for us it comes down to two things:

• We just want to finish the book. We’re so close, and we’ve been working on it for so long and we can see that we’re nearly there so we just go and go and go. And when we’re done we’re finished. We don’t go back and edit because we’re drained. And we’re finished. There’s no more to do. We don’t want to touch it until the next draft. Besides, we have other ideas percolating and we want to do them now.
• As we write we re-write. When you starting writing for the day you re-read what you wrote the day before (usually) and fix any problems. We also regularly go back over the whole story, re-reading, fixing things. Thus the first part of the book gets a lot more rewrites than the second.

  (Logically this means that the first part of the book should be better than the anything else, but usually it isn’t. My theory as to why not is because it takes time to get onto a roll. When’re you’re around 20-30,000 words into the book you’re into the story and into the habit of writing, so the writing from there on flows much better.)

There’s an easy way to fix this. Drafts. Drafts 2 and 3 (for us) are where we attempt to fix up that hurried ending, where we expand it and explain what we knew in our minds but forgot to tell the reader first time round because we were in such a hurry. But it takes time and distance for us to even admit that the ending doesn’t work. If we wrote our next drafts immediately after we wrote the first one I’m not sure we would see that as clearly.

I’m juggling so many unfinished manuscripts at the moment I’m starting to wonder how I going to do it. Guess which one suffers. Barrain of course, because it’s more in the line of a blogging hobby than serious writing.

I have:

• Shared Memories—science fiction, 120,000 words, now into it’s third draft. There’s lots of feedback and notes from Calder’s last read but it’s up to me to do the next major revision. The opening is still weak and the end needs considerable work but I’d say we’re 80% there.

  The writing style on this is a little different to our other stories. On a recent re-read I noticed a lot more commas, and sentences that I would normally either split or join with an and. I haven’t quite decided whether it works or whether the story just needs a really good line edit.All through the second draft I’ve been trying to write a query for it but it’s just hopeless. Everything I write is just icky.

• Mathi’s Story—fantasy. This is my NaNoWriMo novel and I’m really pleased at how this has come along, particularly given that I was writing fast (for me) on a story that didn’t get a lot of editing. It’s still only 55,000 words (I have written around 2,000 words since November). I think this story will end up around 80,000 words.

  I don’t know what happens in the main storyline yet, but I know my subconscious is working on it. Every couple of days another little piece of the puzzle drops into place. The subplots just wrote themselves.This is the first novel where I’m happy with the start. I think, when I have finished, the start will be almost exactly as I wrote it, sans a few line edits.

• One Man’s Treasure—science fiction, 80,000 words. The first draft is completed, and Calder has done a first read-through. I was up to adding feedback to her edits when NaNoWriMo got in the way.

  I haven’t read this one for a couple of months now, so I can’t say how much work draft two will take, and I can’t even recall how much work it will be to fix. There are the usual problems for our writing—the start needs fixing, and the last quarter of the book needs work, but otherwise it’s okay, I think.

• Barrain—fantasy. And, of course, there’s Barrain. The story that started this blog and the story that keeps getting pushed to one side when all the other writing interferes.

  We’re up to 41,000 words on Barrain. Even though the version we posted on the website is 5,000 words less the next draft I’d like to post is the full draft 3, completed (around 80,000 words, I think) although that looks like being a while away yet. When we’re done with draft 3 I imagine that for this story it will be the equivalent of a draft 1 for any other story we have written.

As I said, lots to juggle, lots to do. In all, though, 2009 was a productive year for me, and for the writing team of Calder and me, and I’m looking forward to having a couple of stories we can attempt to market by mid-2010.