aaaaaaand.... ACTION!

Sex. Violence. Car crashes. Explosions. Those of you who write that kind of contemplative, solipsistic fiction where nothing much ever happens *might* just want to stop right here!

This might get a little basic, but it's on my mind lately. After all, the action is the juicy meat of the story. And nothing knocks me out of a story like bad action. Or maybe I should say action, badly done.

I'm going to have to let go of my coveted triple-tap here, because the way I see it, there are four basic ways to show action:

1. Cut to the Fireplace: An oldie but a goodie, and still a favorite of mine. Back in the days of the Film Censorship Board, the couple would kiss, the violins would swell and the camera would move to the fireplace. Or the pounding surf. Or a train going through a tunnel. So that *we* knew they were, you know, doing it.

I like this technique because your readers fill in the blanks. And they have much, much nastier imaginations than you do. *Much*. :-) You just show the upraised axe and cut to the scream, and their fevered imaginations strike the blow for you.

She stood in the doorway. Her body was framed in shadow and her eyes stayed on his.

"You shouldn't be here," he said.

Her bare feet made a whisper of sound crossing the threshhold. She locked the door behind her.

Drawbacks: Two things you have to look out for with this technique.

The. PRIME. Consideration. is that you don't shortchange action that needs to be in the story. If how the love scene, fight, crash, etc. happens matters to the story, you'd damn well better put it in there. If not, by all means, fade to the fireplace...

Also, be sure that you're clear enough to your target audience about what happened. The Tiny Dynamo *loves* the Bridget Jones movies (yet she likes me anyway - go figure), but it wasn't until we watched the director's commentary that she found out Bridget had anal sex with Daniel Cleever. That particular item was handled too subtly for her innocent ears to pick up.

And I say target audience. Readers know the ins and outs of their genres, but what might seem cliched to a 'regular' might completely stump a 'newbie'. Some people may read Miss Marple and wonder how this little old lady's supposed to be solving crimes the police can't. And I still don't see why every romance has to have a Big Misunderstanding in Act I that isn't cleared up until Act III. Your 'fireplace' action needs to take reader's expectations into account. Of course, since you probably read the sort of stuff you write, it likely will anyway.

(All right, this is taking longer than I thought, and I've got some novel to write. I'll pick up Part 2 tomorrow...)

And without further ado, today's

Official Daily Wordcount-o-Meter: 8898 words

Don't know what that is since yesterday. Simple math is beyond me this morning....

Knockout Moments

Some dead French guy once said something along the lines of, "A writer tells lies to reveal the truth."

Or if he didn't, he should have. Cause that's what we do: we make stuff up, left, right and center. But the stuff we make up has to ring true to hold up our end of the story contract. For her part, the reader agrees to put aside some skepticism to play make-believe with us.

Until we drop the ball.

I'm not talking about the obvious suspects:

Info-dumps ("As you know, Bob, these caves are rumoured to have been...")

Eye-crossingly bad dialogue ("If you dare to move I will shoot you," he threatened menacingly.)

Hackneyed story tropes (A needlessly complicated serial killer makes fiendish puzzles out of his victims, and a moping vampire crimefighter needs to stop him before the innocent love interest is next. Yawn.)

Those are all style problems, and bad style can be unlearned. I'm thinking today of those times we tell the reader the wrong lies and knock them out of the story. CS Harris did a couple of great posts on man-stuff and women-stuff that strains story credibility.

Or on Killer Year, Sean Chercover put up this post on fictional firearms gaffs. My personal pet peeve is the hero giving us the make and model of the gun the bad guy's pointing at him. I've had guns pointed at me, and never once did I think, "Why, that's a Colt Python .357 Magnum," or "Hmm, now is that pistol a Berreta or a Sig Sauer? Sigs have that slim line, but I think it's the Berreta has that particular butterfly safety."

Or whatever. To be honest, I can't remember what the hell I ever thought in those moments. I'll buy James Bond or Jack Reacher being disinterested enough to think about these things. The rest of us? Not so much.

It goes back to the writer's sense of the world, and of people. When it differs too much from the reader's, the reader is knocked out of the story. Naked women admiring themselves in the mirror, men commenting on their own chiseled jaws and sensuous mouths, teenagers who talk like the Scooby Doo gang, all are at odds with life as I know it. And probably the reader, too.

It's not always the writer's fault, either. I rented the first season of The Wire recently. I was riveted. The Dynamo watched maybe five or ten minutes before pronouncing it unbelievable. "Those kids dealing drugs, why aren't they in school? And nobody curses that much, especially not cops."

Widely different experiences of the world. I lent the DVDs to another Kiwi who *loves* The Sopranos. He brought it back the next day. His comment?

"People in the US don't really curse that much, do they?"

Fuck no.

Writing, a Tale told in Allegory

39,400 words (with good reason)

Today was the Tiny Dynamo's birthday. By ancient and venerable tradition, she got to pick the Honored Activity.

Being both Tiny, and Dynamic, she chose to haul our asses up the side of a damn mountain.

I'm not out of shape (certainly not for someone who remembers steam-powered zeppelins), but when my most recent brithday rolled around, my choice of Honored Activity involved a well-made coffee and a big slab of cheesecake. A visit to a bookstore followed.

There were inducements. At the top of the ridge sat a volcanic-stone camping shelter abandoned in the 1920's and only recently renovated. It sits in a desolate place, and no roads reach it.

Damn it, I wanted to see that hut.

It started out sweet and lovely. A pleasant lark on a summer's day. We passed over sunlit pastures and sparkling streams. It was a little bit uphill, but then, I knew it would be a climb, right?

Then the climb began in earnest. The land slanted up, and further up. The wind stopped, and the sun beat down on the land. Everywhere I stepped, I hit sheep shit.

I slogged on.

Here and there we came across a tree. Those lovely bits of shade, those chances to look out over what I'd done kept me going. Sometimes, the view up the trail ahead made me despair.

A couple times, I gave serious thought to giving up. Just turn and go back down. But, one does not draw so beguiling and wondrous a creature as the Tiny Dynamo to one's side by being faint-hearted, cowardly, or giving anything less than one's best. Giving up simply was not an option.

Besides, I wanted to see that damn shelter. I wanted to see how the walk ended.

And just when I was thoroughly shattered and wondering if I really could walk until I collapsed (again), a roofline came into view. A surge of energy ran through me, and the pack I carried didn't seem so heavy.

The surge to the end was quick. The view from the top was incredible. I was up in the clouds, on top of the world.

It was totally worth it. And on the trip back down, the walk up didn't seem like it'd been that bad.

It struck me then. This was *so* like writing a novel.

***

Except now I can't quit thinking about the axe on the chain...

28,000 words (very, very odd words.)

The big left turn is still waiting around a bend somewhere, but I've been doing the prep work for it. My villain's going through some changes, getting bad and worse.
Part of it was finding out that my initial setup was only possible in Auckland. Part of it was a growing sense that the bad guy I was sketching out belonged in a very different sort of thriller.

And part of it was a sense of connection between him and two other characters, connections that weren't possible as things stood.

Overall, I'm happy with the changes I'm seeing. My new villain's much more gritty and ferocious, and maybe slightly unhinged. Makes him fun to write, and it's been exciting waiting to see what he'll do next.

The last few days, I feel like I'm living Stephen King's archeological metaphor. That's the one where writing is like digging up odd-shaped bits and trying to figure out how they fit together. I feel as though in my initial enthusiasm, what I thought was a bit of arm bone or something actually belongs in the jaw. But then, if that's the case, I need more bits. And that means this thing I'm assembling must have really big teeth...

Or something like that.

Mostly I want to finish so I can see how the story turns out!

Quarter Turn and a Hurdle - Research

25,000 words (75 more to go!)

Yeah, it's a meaningless milestone, but it feel like I've done something anyway. I've been at this almost a month, and I've got major and minor characters strutting and fretting upon the stage, a sense of what they all want and how they all get in each other's way, and everything seems to be shaping up nicely.

Until I hit the hurdle.

One thing about me: I *love* to waste time. I love to read. Writing can be hard. Put those three things together and you have 'research'. I can surf the net for hours, or check a big old pile of books out of the library, or better still, spend half a day in a musty used bookstore looking for something I'm *sure* I need. Calling it research somehow makes it okay.

Except it's not. It's time-wasting procrastination, is what it is, and I don't get much done that way. So these first drafts come rolling out without a darn bit of research. Except for whatever I was reading that got the guys in the basement excited in the first place, of course. Oh, and my street atlas. But even that one's not strictly necessary.

Mostly, I just hit the first draft at a dead run. I use my general sense of people, how we work together and how we don't, the sorts of rules we set to get things done and the ways we shade them to goof off.

The rest of it, I just make up.

Where I *must* have a proper name, date, whatever, I *highlight* it (Like that) and go back and find it later. Later that day, later in the second draft, later. The made-up stuff I also go back and check up on. Weird thing is, I'm right more often than not.

Most of my research (the real stuff, not the time-wasting) comes on the net (thank you wikipedia!) or from the library. I interview real people whenever possible, and that info is gold. Not so much for the dry facts I could find elsewhere, as for the little stuff no one would think to mention (do detectives take their unmarkeds home at night? can a knight in armor really do a somersault? what gets sore first on a street hooker?) (the feet and the lower back, apparently). And more, much much more importantly, a sense of the way my informants look at the world. What do they want? What are they worried about? How do they think their world could be a better place? Do they think it's getting better, getting worse, or staying the same? How do they feel about their job?

I'm lucky. I meet a WIDE variety of people, and I genuinely like *most* everyone I meet. I try to see the world through lots'n lots of eyes. Makes it easier when it's time to make stuff up...

A lot of times, people give you little gems you'd never have thought to ask for. Pour dark rum over the roots of marijuana plants to up the sugar levels. A two-handed battleaxe requires a zone offense and defense; for a rapier, it's all about beats. Tuck folded newspaper or magazines up your sleeves to protect your inner forearms in a knife fight. The street girls can order whatever drugs keep them going through the night by cell phone and have them delivered right to their corner.

So this weekend I met a manager at Paparua Men's Prison. Funny thing, the phrase 'I'm a writer, and I was curious...' seems to relax just about everyone. Enough to open up to a guy looks like me anyway. I got lots of little stuff about the prisoners, the guards, the upper management and the sometimes strained relationship between Corrections and the cops.

And I hit the hurdle.

Turns out the news item about the mall cops handling prisoner transport was only true in Auckland. My book's solidly set in Christchurch. I've got some changes to make.

What am I doing about it? At this point, nothing. Sure, somewhere in the back of my head, the gears are spinning, but mostly I'm just trying to get through my first draft. Baker needs to break jail. That's all I need to know right now. I'll sort out how when it comes to me.