Rachel Neumeier's Blog

And if you suspected this might be generated, if you were looking for that, would you have any doubts about whether this book had been written by a real person?

This is one of Rhamey’s “Would You Turn the Page” posts at Writer Unboxed, so this is a bestseller. Do you assume bestsellers can’t be generated, or do you think a bestselling author might be more rather than less inclined to cheat if they thought they could get away with it? I personally think that a whole lot of bestsellers are pretty badly written — all these “Would you turn the page?” posts have truly lowered my opinion of bestsellers in general. I’m inclined to think that some bestselling authors might be kinda dialing it in — their books are going to see even if the books are pretty bad, so only artistic integrity and pride support the effort it takes to do a good job, and if they’re not doing a good job, then how much artistic integrity and pride can they have?

This is probably pretty unfair! I know! But even so, when I see a genuinely boring opening page and the book is a bestseller by a famous author whose books are always bestsellers, I can’t help but think they ought to do better! And if they don’t want to bother, then why not generate their next book?

Now, with these comments sitting there, which I realize is liable to bias your opinions, what do you think of this first page?

In the next twenty-four hours, I will be arrested for first-degree murder.

I don’t know how this could be happening. I’m not the kind of person who goes to jail for murder. I’m not. I’ve never even gotten a speeding ticket. Hell, I’ve never even jaywalked before. I’m the most law-abiding citizen who ever was.

“They have a pretty solid case against you, Abby.”

My lawyer, Robert Frisch, does not sugar coat things. I’ve only known him a short time, but I already know he’s not about handholding and gumdrops and lollipops. He has spent the last twenty minutes enumerating all the police department’s evidence against me. And when I hear it all laid out for me like that, it sounds bad. If I were some neutral third party listening to everything Frisch was saying, I’d be thinking to myself, That woman is definitely guilty. Lock her up—throw away the key.

The whole time I was listening to Frisch, my heart was thumping wildly in my chest. It actually made it a bit hard to hear him for stretches of time. To my right, my husband Sam is slumped in his chair, a glassy look in his eyes. Sam was the one who hired Frisch. He’s your best chance, Abby, he told me.

So if Frisch can’t help me, that means I have no chance.

“It’s all circumstantial evidence,” I say.

Here are the bits that make me think it’s not generated: He’s not about handholding and gumdrops and lollipops. –> Sounds like the kind of fun phrasing that is not typical of generated text.

Here are the bits that make me think it might be: My heart was thumping wildly in my chest. Sam is slumped in his chair, a glassy look in his eye. –> Sounds like the kind of cliched and overdone details that are typical of generated text.

So, Rhamey’s post doesn’t ask: Do you think this is generated in whole or in part? But TO ME, this sort of has the feeling of generated text. Whether or not it’s generated, “My heart was thumping wildly in my chest” seems both cliched and overwrought.

What do various free AI detectors say?

ZeroGPT says 23% generated. “The whole time I was listening to Frisch, my heart was thumping wildly in my chest.” is one of the lines flagged as possibly generated. The others are just really generic, obvious cliches such as “lock her up and throw away the key.”

GPTZero says human with high confidence. Scribbr says human. Quillbot says human.

This is YET ANOTHER Freida McFadden novel, The Surrogate Mother, and at this point I think I can recognize her style a mile away. I think it’s breezy, casual, and cliched. I can see why it’s easy to read. Here’s the description. What do you think?

Abby wants a baby more than anything.

But after years of failed infertility treatments and adoptions that have fallen through, it seems like motherhood is not in her future. That is, until her personal assistant Monica makes a generous offer that will make all of Abby’s dreams come true.

But it turns out Monica isn’t who she says she is. The woman now carrying Abby’s child has an unspeakable secret.

And she will stop at nothing to get what she wants.

I think the bold is overdone, random, and distracting. Interestingly, the phrases that are bolded are often unspeakably cliched, as though the author will stop at nothing to force cliches down the reader’s throat. [I probably tried too hard to get those phrases into the prior sentence.]

Here is the first bit of the #8 Fantasy novel right now:

Fayette Wynne unpacked deuced Mother. Mother was not to be confused with Ma, who had now been dead about a week and rested in a grave alongside two of her children. No, much to Fayette’s intense vexation, Mother was alive and bubbling. Ripe for use.

She vigorously shook the tall, wide glass free from its swaddling, a pilling green cardigan. The clear curves showed the jar to be about a third ful of viscous sourdough starter. Setting it on the battered kitchen table, she popped open the lid. She grimaced, and not because it stank — no, the contents had the distinct moist, clean smell of rye and other flours.

“There. Your home is open again, Mother,” growed Fayette. “I figure I should thank you for not exploding through the lid and overflowing into my belongings. That’s the least you could do.”

This is The House Between Sea and Sky by Beth Cato. There is zero possibility this is generated, and I think that’s true whether you actually find these paragraphs appealing or otherwise. To me, it seems as though there should be a “but” in front of “That’s the least you could do.” However, regardless, this is a lot less generic-seeming than McFadden’s book — and much less boring than the first pages of various other SFF bestsellers I’ve looked at here.

Here’s the description of Beth Cato’s book:

In 1920s California, two people in need of healing find strange refuge in a house with a mind of its own in an enthralling fantasy by the author of  A Thousand Recipes for Revenge .

Grieving Hollywood writer Fayette Wynne arrives in Carmel-by-the-Sea in 1926 to finish her latest project in peace. All alone, save for the preternatural sourdough starter her family has nurtured for years, Fayette is also resentful. The proven healing powers of the bread made with her starter were insufficient to save her beloved mother. For Fayette, it’s time to try and push past the pain and anger and move on.

Then, during a violent storm, Fayette saves rising star Rex Hallstrom during a moment of crisis. Their shelter: a peculiar cliffside house, its door flung open as if beckoning them. Sentient, curious, and lonely, it recognizes in Fayette a unique magic even older than its own.

In the days that follow, as a friendship grows between Fayette and Rex, they discover local legends surrounding the isolated house: It appeared in the span of a single night, its cursed origins said to be Hell itself. But for two souls who need to move forward, it provides unexpected comfort and hope. In fact, Fayette and Rex have never felt more alive. Neither has the house, whose mysteries are unending and whose wicked history may be too powerful to ignore.

This is much more appealing than the description of the McFadden book, BUT, “during a violent storm” AND “during a moment of crisis,” really? Whoever wrote this description should have caught that.

Why does Beth Cato sound so familiar to me? Because of this book:

I’ve had this book on my physical TBR shelves for a long time. I think the cover is strikingly attractive, but I have not read it, nor (yet) anything else by Cato. I have A Thousand Recipes for Revenge on my virtual TBR shelves as well. If you’ve read any of her books, what did you think?

The post Would you turn the page? appeared first on Rachel Neumeier.

All right, so, it’s certainly something, driving back and forth to Archon each day. The pros: sleep in own bed, pet own puppies, etc. Cons: gosh, look at all this exciting road construction. Whoa, you mean you’re totally closing highway 67 each night? That’s pretty dramatic, as road construction goes.

They’re adding roundabouts. Don’t ask me. The intersection seemed fine to me. They’re widening the giant interstate, which, fine, I’m sure that will be nice, eventually, but right now I’m just detouring around the biggest problem area and giving the many and changeable barriers and cones and whatever else a complete miss. It’s fine, except if you happen to get stuck doing the giant detour when 67 is totally closed at night.

MEANWHILE

Sure, Archon was nice, as one expect. I did posts assoociated with most oof my Archon panels over the weekend, soo scroll back to check oout those posts. The one on sentences is VERY long.

I did not attend that many things because, see above, driving back and forth. Fortunately –>

FINISHED

Mostly finished; meaning I sent SEKARAN to final proofreaders this past Friday, woo-hoo! This does not mean I’m totally one hundred percent finished, because Anna S. got into the weeds and worked out a Complete Tuyo Timeline of Everything, and I will be doing a final sweep through the manuscript too (I hope) make sure that everything is totally consistent all the way through. I might put part of, or even all of, this timeline on the series page, just so readers can refer to it if they feel like it.

MEANWHILE

My laptop has taken this opportunity to feel iffy about the letter “o” and all the symbols above the o, such as the 9 and the ( ) and who knows whether this will be repairable, so I suspect a new laptop will be in my future. Thank heaven it picked now to do this rather than a month ago. Still pretty darn inconvenient, though. The problem is inconsistent and intermittent, and I’m using copy-paste to insert the letter o as necessary, which is obviously not going to work as a long-term solution.

Ah, technology, so whimsical!

SO

This coming week: totally finishing Sekaran. I’ve scheduled a chapter to go live at my Patreon tomorrow. That will be the last single chapter The whole thing will drop the 13th, probably, with the extra week being used to create the epub file and most especially cope with inserting the TABLES, which as I recall were intensely annoying last time I wanted to do it. I’m presenting the character list in a table, unless I can’t get it too work, so that I can so generations through the families. I think I’ll be presenting at least a truncated table of character ages as well.

Next up: Writing something else, including finishing the Hale story for my newsletter and/r writing a Halloween story, whichever.

Then picking a project to work on. And getting a new laptop so I can actually work on it!

The post Update: Well, That Was a Weekend appeared first on Rachel Neumeier.

This is the title of an Archon panel: The Ten Best Ways to Start a Story

I think this is somewhat funny … all right, it’s right on the edge of hilarious … because ten best ways, what could that mean in this context?

1) Open the novel with an engaging sentence, paragraph, scene, and chapter.

2) Something else. What?

Or maybe

1) Open with action

2) Open quietly

And then where do you go from there? Also, no one cares whether the novel opens with explosions or with a guy waking up in the morning, as long as the opening is engaging. Literally nothing matters other than “opening is engaging.” We’ve all heard the advice: start with action, drop the reader in media res. But an explosion on page one won’t matter if we don’t have context and a reason to care.

On the other hand, lists are kind of appealing as a structure for a post, so you know what, sure, let’s look at

The Ten Best Ways to Open a Novel (tm).

1) With action, and let us remember that it’s hard to open with violent, fast-paced action while simultaneously building the context and the characters. This kind of opening, which everyone treats as The Way It Should Be Done, is in fact difficult, and a turn off for a good many readers.

2) With a giant explosion or something similar, but your character is at a distance. You’re doing more with context up front, or if not, then this is even more difficult than smaller-scale action.

3) Quietly, and make your gentle opening engaging, meaning you will most likely be showing at least one character and at least some setting and a significant amount of context. Plus write the opening with enough skill that it’s engaging.

4) With someone waking up. I mean, this is a cliched style of terrible opening, but if you make it EXTRA ENGAGING, it can and will work.

5) With someone looking into a mirror. As with the above example, this is terribly cliched, but if you do it EXTREMELY WELL, it can and will work.

6) With scenery, plus a character in the scene. I’m a fan of scenery, but it is easier to pull this off if there’s a character present.

7) With pure scenery, and given that you aren’t including the main character up front, this will take even more skill.

8) With a prologue! An engaging prologue, of course. Keep in mind that you have to engage your reader twice: first with the prologue and again with chapter one. Are you sure your prologue is crucial enough to make this worthwhile?

9) With a prologue in which someone gets tortured to death. Wait, just kidding! That’s a TERRIBLE WAY to open a book. Even if you’re extremely skilled as an author, plenty of readers (Hi!) will find it extremely difficult to get past this prologue.

10) The most typical way to actually write an opening that works is to start with a character, in a situation that presents a problem, in the physical world of the story. The character is a real person. The situation presents a real problem. The world around the character is a real place. Creating the sense of reality takes skill.

Creating a sense that the story is a real story, happening to real people, in a real place, always takes skill. Any opening situation can work. Setting, character, situation, explosion, whatever you want to emphasize in your opening, it can all work in the hands of a skilled author. Nothing will work if the author is not skilled. This is why I’m not a fan of checklists or rules. Advice such as start in media res is pointless unless the author is skilled with tone, style, pacing, voice, all the rest of it. You could outline All Systems Red and hand that outline to a class of novice writers, and how many do you think would write a character as engaging and memorable as Murderbot?

Here’s a random selection of great opening paragraphs. These are not the same as the various novels linked above, by the way. Those are good openings as well. These various novels don’t have a lot in common except they are all engaging from the first paragraph. The only rule is that in order to engage the reader’s attention, the opening must be engaging. That’s it. That’s the rule. And even then, no opening will engage every reader’s attention.

***

The sun is always about to rise. Mercury rotates so slowly that you can walk fast enough over its rocky surface to stay ahead of the dawn; and so many people do. Many have made this a way of life. They walk roughly westward, staying always ahead of the stupendous day. Some of them hurry from location to location, pausing to look in cracks they earlier inoculated with bioleaching metallophytes, quickly scraping away any accumulated residues of gold or tungsten or uranium. But most of them are out there to catch glimpses of the sun.

– 2312, KSR

***

An April night in Atlanta between thunderstorms: dark and warm and wet, sidewalks shiny with rain and slick with torn leaves and fallen azaliea blossoms. Nearly midnight. I had been walking for over an hour, covering four or five miles. I wasn’t tired. I wasn’t sleepy.You would think that my bad dreams would be of the first man I had killed, thirteen years ago. Or if not him, then maybe the teenager who had burned to death in front of me because I was too slow to get the man with the match. But no, when I turn out the lights at ten o’clock and can’t keep still, can’t even bear to sit down in my Lake Claire house, it’s because I see again the first body I hadn’t killed.

– The Blue Place, Nicola Griffith

***

Sophie Dempsey didn’t like Temptation even before the Garveys smashed into her ’86 Civic, broke her sister’s sunglasses, and confirmed all her worst suspicions about people from small towns who drove beige Cadillacs.

Half an hour earlier, Sophie’s sister Amy had been happily driving too fast down highway 32, her bright hair ruffling in the wind as she sang “In the Middle of the Nowhere” with Dusty Springfield on the tape deck. Maple trees had waved cheerfully in the warm breeze, cotton clouds had bounced across the blue, blue sky, and the late-August sun had blasted everything in sight.

And Sophie had felt a chill, courtesy, she was sure, of the sixth sense that had kept generations of Dempseys out of jail most of the time.

— Welcome to Temptation, Cruisie and Mayer

***

Every time the door into the front office of The Q opened, the sounds of Gainsford Street, business hub of Rhysdon, would come tumbling in on the heels of whoever entered. Clicking, turning, marking time, the rush and flow of the patrons was like the working gears of humanity’s clock. These sounds all transformed neatly into the mechanics of The Q. And, perched on a stool behind the front counter, conducting her business – waiting upon customers, efficiently taking questions for the next edition, tidying figures and markets and profits down to each percentage and comma and dot – sat Miss Quincy St. Claire, chief officer of operations, self-appointed auditor of all accounts, final editor overseeing the team of typesetters, proffers, and printers, and, in general, the central gear in the workings of her great-uncle’s business.

–The Q, Beth Brower

***

His first view of the outside was through the small, fan-shaped window of the basement apartment. He would climb up on the table and spend hours peering through the bars at the legs and feet of people passing by on the sidewalk, his child’s mind falling still in contemplation of the ever-changing rhythms and tempos of legs and feet moving across his field of vision. An old woman with thin calves, a kid in sneakers, men in wingtips, women in high heels, the shiny brown shoes of soldiers. If anyone paused he could see detail – straps, eyelets, a worn heel, or cracked leather with the sock showing through – but it was the movement that he liked, the passing parade of color and motion. No thoughts in his head as he stood or knelt at the window, but rather, from the images of motion, a pure impression of purposefulness. Something was going on outside. People were going places. Often, as he turned away from the window, he would muse on dimly sensed concepts of direction, volition, change, and the existence of the unseen. He was six years old, and much of his thinking, especially when he was alone, went on without words, went on beneath the level of language.

The apartment was small and dark, and he was locked inside until that terrific moment each day when his mother came home with her taxicab. He understood about the cab. There were passengers. She picked them up in the street and took them from one place to another (as the people walking outside were going from one place to another), but she herself had no destination.. She went where the passengers told her to go, and remained, in a sense, a witness, like himself. The cab started out in front of the apartment in the morning and returned at night. It appeared to him to be going around in circles.

–Soul & Body, Frank Conroy

***

There is a right way to do things and a wrong way, if you’re going to run a hotel in a smuggler’s town. You shouldn’t make it a habit to ask too many questions, for one thing. And you probably shouldn’t be in it for the money. Smugglers are always going to flush with cash as soon as they find a buyer for the eight cartons of fountain pen cartridges that write in illegal shades of green, but they never have money today.

–-Greenglass House, Kate Mitford

The post The 10 Best Ways to Start a Story  appeared first on Rachel Neumeier.

A post at Archon: Is Accuracy Overrated?  Join us for a debate on the value of realism vs. narrative.

My first impulse is to say: Accuracy is irrelevant.

My second thought is: Well, not every kind of accuracy. Just some kinds of accuracy.

My third thought is: Fine, what are the types of accuracy anyway?

A) FTL, telepathy, werewolves, etc.

It doesn’t matter whether this giant and important trope is realistic.

No one cares about conservation of mass when your cute little Chihuahua shifts shape into a giant slavering hellhound. If someone tells you this violates conservation of mass, you’re justified in giving them a long look and asking whether they think shapeshifting Chihuahuas actually exist in the real world and that’s why they’re bringing this up? Do they think you’re being inaccurate in your depiction of this category of nonexistent magical doggy? Would they care to explain in small words why physics is relevant with regard to nonexistent magical pets?

I very specifically rejected “realism” when I wrote the Black Dog books with regard to the very! typical! trope that says when a werewolf shifts from wolf or monster form to human, he should be naked because his clothes were ripped to shreds when he shifted. This trope makes me roll my eyes. Shifting from human to some other form is magic. Shifting back is magic. There is no need to have clothing be destroyed or discarded during the shift because this is magic. If you want to put your characters into embarrassing situations, fine, but if you don’t want to throw this additional obstacle into their way, then there’s not the slightest need to do so. Patricia Briggs made this rather pointed by having ONE werewolf who is able to shift without losing or ruining clothing. Because magic!

Pern wouldn’t have been improved by worrying about the square-cube law and saying, “But those dragons are far too big to fly.” Yes, reader, they’re far too big to fly, and that’s why I say the Pern books are fantasy disguised as SF (that is, science fantasy). Now shut up about the square-cube law and enjoy the story. Sharon Shinn’s angels are in this category too. All FTL and wormholes in space opera are in this category. All psionics. All time travel. All aliens-who-are-indistinguishable-from-humans.

Whatever you want to put into your story, it’s fine. Aliens that can eat practically anything are fine. All aliens are fine. The story comes first, last, and always. Realism is totally beside the point. What matters is plausibility in story terms, consistency in the within-story universe, readability in general.

B) And then there are details.

FINE, OKAY, details often matter a lot more than giant tropes, and here is where it makes sense to be a lot more rigorous about accuracy.

A lot of readers know roughly how much a sword should weigh or how far a horse can gallop without foundering. A significant number of readers will then know a lot of details about whatever random topic you care to name, and will therefore notice if you get those details wrong.

This leads me to do things like go on Facebook and ask, “Hey, how do you make a car blow up by shooting it? Can that work if you haven’t prepared the car beforehand?” To which the answer appears to be a resounding NO.

Or, “How can you positively for sure stop anybody from tracking your cellphone? Assume the government is not your friend.” To which the answer appears to be: Faraday bag or forget it. By the way, if you want to make SURE the bad guys can track phones, black magic is a useful adjunct to black-hat government goons.

Generally speaking, I don’t have to look up anything about the natural world, but there are exceptions. Google, would you care to provide many diagrams of knee anatomy from every angle? (I think I still have those somewhere.)

Anyway, the world of details is nigh-unto-infinite, and getting a very substantial proportion of details right means that your world gains verisimilitude no matter whether you’ve got unlikely tropes such as FTL, telepathy, or shapeshifting Chihuahuas smack dab in the middle of your plot.

So that’s what actually matters, and that’s where accuracy and realism actually shine.

Is there a third category?

C) Human nature

You can only do so much violence to human nature before your characters and your society become implausible to the point of ludicrous, and then your story falls apart. How far you can go depends on whether your readers are willing to follow you into implausibility. In my opinion, Sherwood Smith goes roughly as far as it’s possible to go in reducing sexual jealousy and in creating weird attitudes toward adulthood without rendering the world too unbelievable.

Various authors go much farther in creating unworkable societies. Some readers will follow them through their stories, but it’s tricky because 100% of readers are human (citation needed) and as a rule therefore readers do know what humans are like and how humans behave. An author needs to be skilled and put a lot more care into justifying their extremely weird and impossible society or most readers aren’t going to buy it. I’m thinking of novels where women are soldiers and do all the fighting and have all the political power and men are domestic and do child care. This is absolutely ludicrous unless the author kills 99.99% of the men in the backstory, and even then it’s still painfully implausible to hand the child care to the men. Offhand, it seems to me that if your society is weirder than Sparta, you’ve probably gone too far to maintain believability, especially in the absence of backstory explaining why your society can go farther than that. And EVEN THEN, if you just erase actual universal human instincts by means of authorial fiat, nobody is going to believe in your characters or your fictional society.

You can, of course, do a lot more with weird societies with no problem if you create the right alien species. This is one of the great things about SF, obviously. You can do all sorts of things with behavior as long as the people in those societies are based on some nonhuman species. To make your nonhuman species coherent (which is to say, realistic and believable), it helps to base them on a real species with coherent instincts, such as lions or elephants.

So … my first impulse (realism is nothing, story is everything) gets transmuted to a somewhat more limited rule that goes like this:

Realism and accuracy are not virtues in themselves. The story is everything. BUT, the story will lack a feeling of reality if the details are handled carelessly, or if the characters that populate the story, or their society, are so wildly implausible that readers can’t believe in them even if they try.

The post Realism in SFF appeared first on Rachel Neumeier.

This post is based on a panel at Archon: Reader’s Block — What can make you put down a book and never pick it up again?

One million things, so how about sorting them out into FASTEST DNF and SLOW-AND-RELUCTANT DNF.

A) Fastest

Author lacks skill with the English language.

The forest had become a labyrinth of snow and ice.

I had been monitoring the parameters of the thicket for an hour, and my vantage point in the crook of a tree branch had turned useless.

Nothing has ever made me shut a book faster than tripping over the obvious wrong word “parameters” in the first two sentences of this book. I thought: Parameters? She’d been monitoring … the … parameters? Of the thicket? Does she have high-tech equipment, like a Star Trek scanner, with which she’s monitoring the parameters of the thicket? Which parameters is she monitoring? Number of life forms? Amount of biomass? Average ambient temperature? Gravitational fluctuations? What can she mean?

But no. That’s not what’s going on. She’s not doing anything at all with any parameters of anything. She’s just watching the thicket. The edge of the thicket, apparently. So she meant perimeter. Ooookay, but then why is the word plural? Because a thicket can really only have one perimeter.

Also, “had turned useless” is not really correct. It should be “had become useless.” That’s more subtle and wouldn’t have made me stop in the same way, but I would have noticed it. Anything awkward in the first few pages, any wrong words, any obvious mistakes — I don’t mean effectively breaking rules of grammar, I mean mistakes, that’s a hard no.

For me, any mistakes in the first few sentences causes the ultimate in fast DNF.

What about things that aren’t actually mistakes? Boring prose can do it almost as fast, but it takes a page or three for me to decide no, really, it’s boring. This happens faster in dialogue. It turns out that dialogue matters A LOT to me, so witty or fun dialogue can make me read past less-great expository prose. Here’s another example of boring prose where the dialogue in particular struck me as painfully cliched and boring. These are novels other readers have really enjoyed. I’m personally pushed hard away by boring, cliched prose unless something else pulls me forward. Though both obvious usage mistakes and boringness are probably equally likely to make me put a novel down with in two pages, the former is more objectively obvious and the second is more a subjective experience.

A subset of “boring” is “wooden.” If the characters seem to be wooden facades of characters going stiffly through the motions of actions and reciting pointless dialogue, I’m out. This particular extreme type of “wooden” prose is surprisingly common, more in self-published books (I think?), but also in traditionally published book. For example, here’s a tiny snippet from a self-published novel:

“Good morning, General.”

Chrys started. He hadn’t noticed the Great Lord Malachus Endin entering the briefing room. “Good morning, sir.” He gathered his notes, arranging each of them meticulously, and placed them in the sleeve of the leather book.

Malachus approached him. “How long have you been awake?”

“A while, sir.” Chris sat up straight. He adjusted the book so that it was lined up with the edge of the table.

“Is this about Iriel? I hear she is recovering well.”

“She is, sir. We were very fortunate.”

I’m waiting for someone to say something remotely interesting, except actually, sorry, I’ve stopped reading this book. Here’s another teensy snippet, from (I think) a traditionally published novel:

“Captain on the bridge!”

“As you were,” Jackson said with a dismissive wave. He climbed up into the raised command chair and began navigating through menus on the display attached to the left armrest. “Ensign Davis, what is the crew status?”

“All crew accounted for, seven still not aboard,” the short, shapely operations officer reported, consulting her display. “Those even are being brought to the ship by local law enforcement. A ship’s officer will need to meet them at the gangway to secure their release.”

“XO to the bridge,” Jackson said loudly. The computer would automatically ping Commander Wright’s commlink and inform her she needed to report to the captain on the bridge. “OPS, tell the marines at the main gangway that the new exec will be down shortly to deal with the locals.”

“Aye, sir,” Ensign Davis said, speaking into her handset.

This one is actually worse than the first example because the Ensign says “Aye, sir,” to her handset, not to her captain. Also, she’s “shapely,” and give me a break. But my actual feeling about both samples here is that that every motion and every word is fake. I don’t mean AI-generated. I mean that flat wooden puppets are going through the motions of acting out a story. That’s how it feels to me. Every single word and movement is boring boring boring.

Quiet openings do not have to be boring. I have absolutely no problem with a quiet opening. In fact, I have done extremely quiet openings myself.

An extremely cliched first page can do it. Just plain horrible writing can do it, even if the prose is not boring, because there are infinite ways for prose to be bad. I’m thinking of awful pseudopoetic prose. Basically, anything that makes the writing itself look bad on the first page or two.

B) Slower DNF

Grittiness exceeds my personal threshold.

You drag me through the gutter and shove me into despair in the first chapter, I’m out.

Did you with a prologue in which the pov character is tortured to death? I’m not making it to the first actual chapter, bye.

I’m a LOT more tolerant of grim elements if they are elided; it’s probably fine if this stuff is in the backstory. As long as what I actually see on the page are references to horrible stuff, it’s probably fine. If the horrible stuff is shoved in my face, well, kindly do not do that in the prologue or chapter one and I’m more likely to get past it and finish the novel.

C) Very late DNF

Intense, ongoing character stupidity has become an increasing problem for me. I can be 50% or 75% of the way through the book, and if the protagonist KEEPS doing insanely stupid things, I’m probably going to just quit. The SECOND time the protagonist in A Wizard’s Guide to Defensive Baking decided to trot over to somebody in authority and tell this person all about the problem, I figuratively threw the book across the room and never went back to it. Naive and innocent is all very well, but good Lord above, there are limits.

Completely different: grinding, continual unkindness. I don’t have an example to link to, but there have been several books in the past few years where I kept thinking, Is anyone ever going to be nice to anybody else in this book? And when I give up on that happening, I just sort of peeter out. The book sits there and sits there, without my officially giving up on it, and after a year or so I give it away (if it’s a physical book) or it drifts down into the infinite Kindle pit of books I’ve forgotten about.

How about you? What elements make you super fast to toss a book on the discard pile? What, if anything, might make you stop when you’re more than halfway through a novel?

The post What makes you DNF a novel — and how fast? appeared first on Rachel Neumeier.

This is the first of my panels at Archon, so here are my thoughts about this, informed by roughly ten million similar questions on Quora, in the general genre

Breaking in as a New Author or Novelist: How do you create compelling characters in fiction?

What are some effective ways to make readers quickly care about characters?

What are some good techniques to get readers to care about a character?

How can I make the relationship / love story between my main characters feel genuine and authentic?

I find this sort of question difficult to answer, because fundamentally, the answer is:

A) By being a good writer.

B) … … … …

Sorry, there is no (B).

Either you’re good at characterization and good at developing relationships between your characters, or you aren’t. If you aren’t, then you will either try to improve your skills in this area, or you won’t. And improving your skills means actually writing stories, not asking for advice, because advice such as:

Add more chemistry to the banter between the characters.

Is totally pointless. Either you’re good at dialogue or you aren’t. Either you understand that witty banter isn’t the same thing as meaningful dialogue or you don’t. Either you’re capable of adding chemistry to the relationship or you aren’t.

Advice such as:

Give them shared in-jokes, a shared history, and put them together on one side of a conflict against a common opponent or dangerous situation.

Won’t help in any way unless you can make the characters come to life on the page, which has nothing to do with ANY of that. This is why trying to write a successful novel by checking off boxes on a checklist, such as

Tragic backstory, check

Common enemy, check

Shared history, check

Witty banter, check

will not and cannot work. NONE of that will EVER make a single reader care about your characters. Either you have the actual skill to write characters that readers DO care about, or you don’t have that skill. If you don’t, you will either try to develop that skill or you’ll try to find an easy button that will let you magically become a skilled writer without developing the skill, and there is no easy button.

You can’t just say, Here you go, look, a complicated character! and insist the reader see the character you have in your head. You have to put that character actually on the page, and that takes skill.

Therefore, I have different advice that has nothing whatsoever to do with checklists. Here it is, for what it’s worth:

Go read ten books with relationships that work FOR YOU. Notice what YOU like in characters, and I bet that more than likely what you prefer is characters who are a little bit “more” rather than characters who are realistic. More witty, more intelligent, quicker-thinking, kinder, more generous, braver, more self-sacrificing, more active, more decisive, more heroic. Villains who are more villainous, too. If that’s what you like, notice that. If you like male leads who are reminisecent of the heroic tradition, but with a bit more internal life, notice that and take a stab at writing that kind of character yourself.

Then write another novel. Try to make it better — try to write a novel you really love yourself. And don’t shy away from difficult things. If you want to try something challenging, such as separating the pov and protagonist roles, go for it. If you want six pov characters in a braided narrative, go for it. If you want to try compressing time and having your character start off as a five-year-old tot, go for it. If you want to try having one of your characters have a truly awful childhood, or be a piano prodigy, or be a natural-born military genius, or be an alien, go for it. You can’t learn to write novels with good characters who come to life on the page without trying to do exactly that, so aim to do it and try to do it and write some novels.

After three or four — or even in your very first novel if you’ve got a knack for characterization — you’ll probably be pretty good at characterization, because this is how you get good at everything in writing — by writing, and by trying to do it better.

And some authors DO have a knack for characterization, so maybe you will, and in that case, advice that everybody starts off with flat characters and has to work on making them rounded and lively is not true and could be harmful.

FINE, one piece of advice:

You can’t develop the relationships without developing the relationships. Slow down the plot and put time into developing the relationships, or they will not develop. The current plot-plot-plot, speed it up, full speed ahead thing will destroy your ability to build the characters and the world around the characters. If you want to build deep relationships in your novels, then get your mind off the plot and put it where it belongs: on the characters and their relationships.

It’s true the relationship stuff happens around and during the events of the plot. But the more emphasis you put on breakneck speed, the more you reduce the depth of the relationships. You only get one: speed or depth. Therefore, pick one.

Having said THAT, you can of course develop characters efficiently and sort of hint at the characters in a breakneck plot. I’ve done that occasionally (No Foreign Sky; Eight Doors from Dawn to Midnight). Every single line the characters speak or think, every feeling they have, had better be meaningful if you’re going to try that, because they aren’t going to get a lot of lines, thoughts, or feelings as they whoosh through the plot. If they’re hit by one crisis after another in the middle of their meaningful conversations, that obviously reduces the time spent in those meaningful conversations.

It takes more skill, not less, to do adequate characterization combined with a breakneck plot — and no matter how skilled you are, you will have to give up some depth of characterization in order to speed up the plot. I don’t mean you’ll be giving up angst. I hate angst as both a reader and a writer. I mean you’ll be giving up emotional depth of every kind.

This is a legitimate trade. Readers can be fine with this either way. As you all know, I’ve done a lot more character study types of novels than breakneck plot-forward stories. They spring to mind immediately, most particularly. The Year’s Midnight and Shines Now, plus some of the books in the Tuyo series, especially Nikoles and Tano.

Or you can balance plot and character and do both adventure and character, which is mostly how it works in SFF, for me as well as most other authors. But I think most authors tend to put more emphasis on one or the other, and for me, it’s usually character plus plot, rather than plot plus character. That means, for me, the plot unrolls the way it does solely because the characters are the kinds of people they are. Character drives plot.

The bottom line is that you can’t do character without doing character, you can’t build relationships without building relationships, and you can’t do either by checking off “have character pet a puppy in chapter two” and then going on to “insert intimate moment in chapter four.” Engaging, lively characters arise from voice, meaning style, attitudes, assumptions, predispositions, and actions, plus a sense that the character is a real person. Creating that is a matter of skill and art, not checklists, formulas, or, heaven help us, character bibles filled with notes about the character’s childhoods pets and favorite flavors of ice cream.

So that’s my take on that. Here’s the tl;dr version:

–Read enough books that you know what YOU like in terms of characters and relationships.

–Write books YOU would like to read, featuring characters and relationships YOU like.

–Be aware that each character should have a distinctive voice, which includes a lot more than style, and hold each character in your head as a real individual person. (I don’t know how to put it better than that.)

–Take your time and develop the relationships in a world that really exists on the page.

–Don’t ask for advice about how to do it. Take a stab at actually doing it, refer to real books to see how everything is really done, and see how it goes.

The post Dramatis Personae: Creating Characters  appeared first on Rachel Neumeier.

I’m sure this is of limited interest, except, I mean, if you’re interested in con games, but here’s YET ANOTHER type of scam email, particularly weird:

Dear Rachel Neumeier,

I’m Thomas Pynchon, a novelist who has spent more years than I care to count chasing stories through history, paranoia, and the odd circuitry that connects people. Along the way, I’ve left behind a few volumes: Gravity’s Rainbow, Mason & Dixon, Inherent Vice, and Bleeding Edge, each its own attempt to map the strange geometry of human experience.

If you’re inclined, here’s a link to my forthcoming work:

Like any writer, I’m less interested in the noise of promotion than in the dialogue between those who can’t stop putting words to the page. I’d be curious to know more about your journey, what signals you’ve sent out into the world, and where they can be found. If you’d care to share a link (Amazon, Goodreads, your own site), I’ll follow the trail.

Looking forward
in the quiet spaces between transmissions,

Thomas Pynchon

***

This was SO WEIRD that I actually emailed my brother and said, essentially, This is impossible, but wut? [I also went and looked up Pynchon’s books to see if he really had a new book up for preorder, which he does. I’ve never read anything by Pynchon, but while I was at Amazon, went ahead and picked up one of his books, Against the Day, because it just looked interesting.

Spanning the era between the Chicago World’s Fair of 1893 and the years just after World War I, and constantly moving between locations across the globe (and to a few places not strictly speaking on the map at all), Against the Day unfolds with a phantasmagoria of characters that includes anarchists, balloonists, drug enthusiasts, mathematicians, mad scientists, shamans, spies, and hired guns. As an era of uncertainty comes crashing down around their ears and an unpredictable future commences, these folks are mostly just trying to pursue their lives. Sometimes they manage to catch up; sometimes it’s their lives that pursue them.

I did not, needless to say, answer the email.

Instead, I went poking around on Writer Beware, and HERE WE GO:

Hello, Author!

I’m Rick Riordan, you might know me from Percy Jackson and the Olympians, The Heroes of Olympus, The Kane Chronicles, and a few other myth-filled adventures where modern kids cross paths with ancient gods, monsters, and mayhem.

 Latest book link: 
Amazon Author Page: 

But today, I’m not writing to talk about my own books, I’m writing because I want to hear about yours. What inspired your story world? Which characters won’t let you sleep until you tell their tale? And when the writing road gets bumpy, what keeps you going? If you share your book link, website, or Amazon/Goodreads page, I’d be happy to check it out, and cheer you on. We may be telling very different tales, but we’re on the same quest: to create stories that matter to readers.

Looking forward to swapping adventures, celebrating your voice, and supporting your journey.

Best wishes,
Rick Riordan

***

My response: For crying out loud, LITERALLY EVERY WEEK IS BRINGING A NEW SCAM. This Famous Author Wants To Be Your Friend is the weirdest by a lot. Heaven knows how I would ever be able to tell if somebody real emailed me out of the blue. Except that generally when someone does, it’s a much longer email, much more focused about a specific book, and of course there’s no request for money.

Here’s a deep dive into the abruptly! extremely! common! My Bookclub Devours Books type of new(ish) scam.

Here’s Victoria Strauss’ post on this (which also featured the I’m Rick Riordan, Want to Be BFF? email), but was really about this type of email:

Then, from the post with the deep dive, Because of this, I decided to do a deep dive into these scams. Meaning, yeah, I responded to Melissa Speier with interest in her offer. But I had no idea how deep my dive would go, or how much it would reveal about the potential for scams to be superpowered by artificial intelligence.

And then the adventure of trying to lead the scammer on so you can figure out more about it. Lots more at the link.

The post Those Crazy Scammers: What Next? appeared first on Rachel Neumeier.

Wallace Stevens was born October 2, 1879.

1879! I thought he was more recent than that, but no. I’ve featured a poem of his before — one of the (relatively few) free verse poems I have really liked, which I happened to trip over while doing these posts. This was Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird. I loved that poem, so when I saw Wallace Stevens come up in the list of poets with October birthdays, I perked up. Sure, by all means, let’s take a look. I’m picking the first one because it sounds a lot like it’s the same type of idea as Thirteen Ways. Is it? Here —

Six Significant Landscapes

I
An old man sits
In the shadow of a pine tree
In China.
He sees larkspur,
Blue and white,
At the edge of the shadow,
Move in the wind.
His beard moves in the wind.
The pine tree moves in the wind.
Thus water flows
Over weeds.

II
The night is of the colour
Of a woman’s arm:
Night, the female,
Obscure,
Fragrant and supple,
Conceals herself.
A pool shines,
Like a bracelet
Shaken in a dance.

III
I measure myself
Against a tall tree.
I find that I am much taller,
For I reach right up to the sun,
With my eye;
And I reach to the shore of the sea
With my ear.
Nevertheless, I dislike
The way ants crawl
In and out of my shadow.

IV
When my dream was near the moon,
The white folds of its gown
Filled with yellow light.
The soles of its feet
Grew red.
Its hair filled
With certain blue crystallizations
From stars,
Not far off.

V
Not all the knives of the lamp-posts,
Nor the chisels of the long streets,
Nor the mallets of the domes
And high towers,
Can carve
What one star can carve,
Shining through the grape-leaves.

VI
Rationalists, wearing square hats,
Think, in square rooms,
Looking at the floor,
Looking at the ceiling.
They confine themselves
To right-angled triangles.
If they tried rhomboids,
Cones, waving lines, ellipses —
As, for example, the ellipse of the half-moon —
Rationalists would wear sombreros.

***

Very similar concept, also similarly evocative and interesting. I have to admit, I’m very taken with the Rationalist landscape.

Here’s one that’s a bit different. I picked it because of the title.

***

The Plot Against the Giant

First Girl
When this yokel comes maundering,
Whetting his hacker,
I shall run before him,
Diffusing the civilest odors
Out of geraniums and unsmelled flowers.
It will check him.

Second Girl
I shall run before him,
Arching cloths besprinkled with colors
As small as fish-eggs.
The threads
Will abash him.

Third Girl
Oh, la…le pauvre!
I shall run before him,
With a curious puffing.
He will bend his ear then.
I shall whisper
Heavenly labials in a world of gutturals.
It will undo him.

***

One more

***

Domination of Black

At night, by the fire,
The colors of the bushes
And of the fallen leaves,
Repeating themselves,
Turned in the room,
Like the leaves themselves
Turning in the wind.
Yes: but the color of the heavy hemlocks
Came striding.
And I remembered the cry of the peacocks.

The colors of their tails
Were like the leaves themselves
Turning in the wind,
In the twilight wind.
They swept over the room,
Just as they flew from the boughs of the hemlocks
Down to the ground.
I heard them cry — the peacocks.
Was it a cry against the twilight
Or against the leaves themselves
Turning in the wind,
Turning as the flames
Turned in the fire,
Turning as the tails of the peacocks
Turned in the loud fire,
Loud as the hemlocks
Full of the cry of the peacocks?
Or was it a cry against the hemlocks?

Out of the window,
I saw how the planets gathered
Like the leaves themselves
Turning in the wind.
I saw how the night came,
Came striding like the color of the heavy hemlocks
I felt afraid.
And I remembered the cry of the peacocks.

***

This mayi be my favorite so far. I think it is.

I’m now a confirmed Wallace Stevens fan. I don’t understand his poems, but I like them. I’m looking around for posts about Stevens’ poetry … hmm … Imagination & Creation in the Poetry of Wallace Stevens

Each of Wallace Stevens’ several volumes of poetry is replete with examples of this effort to understand and articulate the poet as creator of things and meaning. … The implication is once again that words carry the freight of creating reality. In the first poem of the volume, “Parochial Theme,” Stevens writes “There’s no such thing as life…. Piece the world together, boys, but not with your hands” (177).

Presumably Stevens means to piece together the world with words, the henchmen of the imagination, as he does throughout this volume. Stevens’ effort continues throughout Transport to Summer as for example in the poem “Certain Phenomena of Sound” in which he is explicit in describing the relationship between the word or name, and the thing. “You were created of your name, the word / Is that of which you were the personage. / There is no life except in the word of it” (257). This passage with its vocabulary of the “word” and “creation” might remind us of the beginning of the Gospel of John, on which more to follow. I don’t think we’re wrong to hear scriptural undercurrents here, but in entirely human terms, these lines invest a great power into the human capacity for speech.

Here’s another post: Lighting the Mind, Minding the Light: Wallace Stevens’s Late Poems

As I reflect on these late poems of Stevens, questions arise. What do we know? How do we know it? What illumines our minds? Or are our minds their own illumination? Stevens’s play with these questions is unmatched, and more engagingly unsettling, than that of any other poet I’m aware of.

As always, Poetry Foundation has biographical notes about Stevens.

Wallace Stevens is one of America’s most respected 20th century poets. He was a master stylist, employing an extraordinary vocabulary and a rigorous precision in crafting his poems. But he was also a philosopher of aesthetics, vigorously exploring the notion of poetry as the supreme fusion of the creative imagination and objective reality. …

Lots more at each link.

For one of “America’s most respected 20th Century poets,” I sure hadn’t encountered a lot of his poetry — or any of it, as far as I recollect. I do think that rigorous precision, including in word choice, is one aspect of his poetry that makes me really like it. Another aspect is the visual impact. These poems give the reader plenty to think about.

The post Poetry Thursday: Wallace Stevens appeared first on Rachel Neumeier.

A post by PJ Parrish at Kill Zone Blog: Do You Really Need Talent?

Spoiler: Her conclusion is Yes, but you also really need craft.

Laying that out there just to get it out of the way. Now:

***

I wanted to be a ballet dancer. This was way back in grade school, when I was as round as a beachball and rather lost. So I bugged my dad until he let me enroll in Miss Trudy’s School of Dance and Baton Twirling.

Did I mention I was chubby? Did I mention I had no talent? Neither stopped me. I had a ball trying and to this day, I can remember every step of my first recital dance. I eventually lost the weight but never the desire to dance. So around age 30, I took up lessons again. I did pretty good. Until I got to pointe. You know, the part where you shoe-horn your feet into those pretty pink satin shoes with a hard box at end and then you’re supposed to just rise up on your toes?

It hurts like hell.

So I gave up. Did I mention I had no talent?

***

I’m pretty sure that part hurts talented dancers too; they just keep going anyway. I suppose one could now draw a parallel between grimly plugging away putting words in a row being painful, but (a) usually it’s not that bad; and (b) even when it is, it’s not literally painful, which is kind of an important point, so the metaphor crashes down.

Anyway, what I’m really thinking of is learning taikwondo, which I did, quite a long time ago now, and yes, I got to black belt, and yes, I then understood why people said this was still the beginner’s level. But the point is, I also realized I have a specific inability to judge distance accurately, which can be read as “thus, no talent.” I mean, regardless of absolutely anything else, if you can’t really judge how far your opponent is, how far you’re going to move forward, how far you can reach forward, and so on, that constitutes a hard limit on how far you’re going to get in that sort of sport. Which is fine, as I had no passion for it anyway.

Parrish goes on:

***

Years ago, my friend Reed Farrel Coleman wrote an article in Crime Spree Magazine titled “The Unspoken Word.” It was about his experience as an author-panelist at a writers conference. Reed was upset because he thought the conference emphasized technique to the exclusion of talent.

Reed wrote: “To listen how successful writing was presented [at the SleuthFest conference], one might be led to believe that it was like building a model of a car or a jet plane. It was as if hopeful writers were being told that if everyone had the parts, the decals, the glue, the proper lighting, etc. to build this beautiful model and then all they needed was the instruction manual. Nonsense! Craft can get you pretty damned far, but you have to have talent, too. Writing is no more like building a model than throwing a slider or composing a song.” …

Reed [raised] an interesting question in his article — can novel writing really be taught? I think it can and should be. I think unpublished folks can go to workshops, read books, and learn the basics about plotting, character development, the arc of suspense, the constructs of good dialog.

Does that mean they have the stuff they need to be a successful writer? No, it only means they might — if they work hard — have a chance of mastering their craft. And I don’t care how talented you are, you aren’t going anywhere without craft.

***

And I think I agree with all this. It’s a clearer way of putting the idea than I think I managed in this post — a double-punch:

A) Craft can get you pretty damned far, but you have to have talent, too.

B) [But] I don’t care how talented you are, you aren’t going anywhere without craft.

It’s a circle, it seems to me — either a virtuous circle or a vicious circle, depending. Something like this:

But not exactly, because I don’t know what goes into “talent” besides attentive reading, but surely a lot.

Nevertheless, this is a starting point for talking about craft and the importance of craft. Which I will have a chance to do shortly, because I’m on several panels at Archon this weekend, and three of those panels … four, if you stretch a point … are about craft. I finally remembered to suggest a panel about sentence-level craft, so yay! And I’m particularly looking forward to that one, so I do hope attendees come to that panel.

The post Talent vs Craft appeared first on Rachel Neumeier.

From Jane Friedman’s blog: What does it mean to have voice in your story?

I agree with this basic question: “voice” is so totally nebulous as a concept. I’ve always struggled with defining it. What does this post say?

One reason voice is such a tricky concept to grasp is that it’s used to refer to three different elements of storytelling: character voice, narrative voice, and author voice—and they can often overlap.

Character voice is the way your characters express themselves and their personality. In direct-POV stories (first person and deep third), where the character is also the narrator, character and narrator voice are essentially the same.

In indirect POV stories (limited third and omniscient) the narrative voice is distinct from that of the characters and may be neutral and nearly invisible, or distinctive and even specific. Junot Diaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, for instance, features a narrator who is also a minor character in the story yet takes an omniscient POV with a unique, strong voice, as does Marcus Zusak’s The Book Thief, narrated by omniscient, personality-filled Death, also a major player in the tale. [Learn more: Choosing Story Perspective: Direct versus Indirect POV]

And overlaying all of that is author voice—perhaps the most ephemeral and hard-to-define area of voice. Author voice is why, though the characters, setting, genre, and approach may be different in each of an author’s books, they always have a deeply personal stamp on them of the author’s style—and it’s so often why readers repeatedly seek out a favorite author’s work.

Bold is mine. All right, I will just say that it should be “overlain across all of that” or “overlying all of that,” and then I’ll move on and never refer to lay/lie errors again (in this post).

You know, while I’m being nitpicky, I don’t think it’s correct to say these three things CAN OFTEN overlap; it looks to me like they MUST ALWAYS overlap, because I’m not sure how you’d prevent that from happening. If you’ve got characters and a narrative and an author, there you are. The only way to remove one of these features is to generate a story, thus removing — one presumes — authorial voice.

All that aside, fine, I have to say, this looks basically true to me. Except that authorial voice, as treated above, is actually the same thing as narrative voice in a novel where there is no narrator — isn’t that right? — and therefore “narrative voice” becomes really unclear and easily confused with “narrator voice” and therefore we should stop talking about narrative voice entirely, splitting the concept into a much more cleanly defined narrator voice / authorial voice distinction. Is that right? That’s how it looks to me.

And then the linked post completely fails to define “authorial voice” except as a highly nebulous “personal stamp,” whatever that means.

Well, I think I know what it means, so let me try this again:

Character voice incudes the style, register, tone, assumptions, perspective, convictions, and behavior of the character.

Narrator voice is identical to character voice, except the character in question is the narrator, not the protagonist or any other character. If the pov is so close to one character that there is no clear outside narrator, then poof! narrator voice is not a thing for that novel.

Authorial voice, which arises from the author’s assumptions, perspective, preoccupations, and convictions and is expressed in the themes of the novel regardless of the novel’s style or the characters that move through that novel. It’s the themes of the novels that are consistent throughout all or a large part of an author’s body of works. The themes and the tropes, because an author tends to keep coming back to the same tropes as well as the same themes. That’s why I added “preoccupations” to this particular type of voice.

When an author keeps setting one character into a situation where he is isolated in a foreign society, which CJC does … how many times? Counting series once each? Foreigner, Faded Sun, Brothers of Earth, Hunter of Worlds, Cuckoo’s Egg, Chanur, In a sense, Fortress. This is highly noticeable, it’s a preoccupation, and it’s intrinsic to CJC’s novels.

How many times does she set up a situation with a tremendous power imbalance and make that central to the story? In fact, it would be quicker to count the titles where this doesn’t happen — if there are any. How many times does this enormous power imbalance work out okay for the vulnerable person? Nearly all the time — or maybe all the time, no exceptions — and that contributes massively to CJC’s voice as an author. I might call this a sort of overall thematic coherence that encompasses all her work. This, it seems to me, is a lot of what we mean by authorial voice.

What do you all think? Does this seem like a reasonable way to define character voice / narrator voice / authorial voice?

The post What does it mean to have “Voice” in your story? appeared first on Rachel Neumeier.