There’s been a lot of talk in recent months about the demise of blogging (and, oddly, the demise of commenting, although they couldn’t prove that by you guys), which was brought home to me recently by a friend who said, “Just when I decided to start a blog I was told blogging is over!” At the same time we hear more and more in the self-publishing arena about How to Turn Your Blog into a Book. So it would appear, on the surface, that the whole blogging movement is segueing into a whole book-authoring movement.

But is it?

Well. . .

Here’s the thing: it’s true that blogging is writing. It’s fabulous practice at developing confidence in your voice and ease with words, as well as focus, dedication, and a solid understanding of the importance of getting to the point (not to mention the inevitable epiphany that writing enough words to fill an entire book is a whole darn lot of writing).

But blogging is a very specific form of writing. It has very specific purposes. And it has very specific readers.

These are not necessarily the same readers a writer needs in order to succeed with a book.

1. Blogging is conversation

   Blogs are about the writers, not the readers.

   They have to be.

   Free, largely invisible, and sometimes—when visible—lifted without permission by less-visible bloggers who don’t know about the DMCA of 1998, (most) blog posts give their owners none of the usual rewards of massive publication:

   • reputation
   • income

   Yes, some bloggers are famous. As Andy Warhol said in the 1960s (and without benefit of ESP regarding the Internet), “In the future, everyone will be famous for fifteen minutes.”

   However, most of us are not.

   And yes, some bloggers make money by monetizing their blogs. But unless you’re using your blog as the portal to a service or product others find both intensely helpful and worth a considerable amount of their hard-earned money. . .

   most of us don’t do that, either.

   And because of this—the basic lack of tangible rewards—blogging can really only be worth the blogger’s time if it provides intangible rewards. For most bloggers, these are the same rewards as those of unpublished writing: the thrill of self-expression.

   Oh, blogging is great fun. Whee, doggies! It was plenty of fun even when no one but my husband and one friend were reading.

   But then you folks started reading, and it turned into an extraordinary, unexpected party. All of you friendly and amazing people who love this craft I love, coming here to talk with me about it and saying kind things, all you people I never would have known otherwise!

   Suddenly I understand why people get up on soapboxes under Marble Arch in Hyde Park and wave their arms and pontificate to the crowds.

   Talking about what’s important to us is utterly invigorating.

2. A book is a monologue that costs money

   Because books cost money, they are about the readers, not the writers.

   A little over a year ago, a guy named Paul Ford wrote a fascinating post about blogging: The Web is a Customer Service Medium. Boy, do I love Ford’s theory that blogging is all about addressing the question: “Why wasn’t I consulted?” But even more than that, I love the old James Thurber bio that describes him as someone always thinking about what he’s going to say when the other person stops talking.

   This is a typical blogger.

   This is, coincidentally, also a great blog reader.

   “Nice blog post,” the blogger hears (if they’re lucky). “You know what I think. . .”

   And thus begins the conversation between a blogger, a commenter, and all the other readers of that particular blog post.

   But this has nothing to do with reading books, where the reader is alone with the words and their own imagination, absorbing in utter privacy something for which they have paid hard cash. They don’t really care about the writer, beyond imagining that writer would, if they only knew, like to be their best friend.

   The writer doesn’t fit into the book equation. It’s entirely between the reader and the book.

All of which is what we’re missing when we talk about the popularity or demise of blogging and How to Turn Your Blog into a Book:

1. the difference in purpose between:
   • tangible rewards
   • intangible rewards
2. the great, yawning abyss between the needs of:
   • the person who writes
   • the person who reads

So when you’re wondering:

• Is blogging over? or,

• Should I turn my blog into a book?

Try shifting that to:

• How am I thinking about blogging and books in terms of my own needs?

• How am I thinking about blogging and books in terms of the needs of others?

• If blogging is quote unquote ‘over,’ does that mean it’s automatically not worth it to me?

• Or. . .?

First things first: I’m being interviewed by Katie Weiland over on AuthorCulture. Have you ever wondered whether or not independent editing means staying home all day in your jammies? Now’s your chance to find out!

Second: I promised you guys back in December that whatever I learned from the fabulous Notebooks of Henry James I would share with you here. I haven’t finished it yet—it’s a heck of a long book, plus I got completely sidetracked by Shirley Jackson’s key to increasing tension over time, Dashiell Hammett’s description of Sam Spade’s face in v’s, and Stephen King’s coke addiction, not to mention my grandmother—but I’ve read enough to be able to share some wonderful stuff.

So. . .please allow me to introduce you to the lessons I’ve learned from the indomitable Henry James:

1. What passes for exposition in much of modern fiction is merely notetaking to the greats

If you didn’t know how beautifully-rendered and meticulous-written James’ stories and novels are, you might mistake his notebooks for his fiction.

It’s all there: the protagonist’s situation, character, relationships to the other characters. The secondary main characters and their relationships. The Hook, Development, and Climax (which he sometimes called the denouement, as did Gustave Freytag when he invented Freytag’s Triangle). The motivations for everyone’s behavior. The insights explored.

All that’s left is the actual writing.

For the record, James never stopped exhorting himself to write shorter stories that he did. His notebooks are simply riddled with announcements that he intends to limit himself “this time” to 5,000, 8,0000, or 10,000 words. And he seems to have been a consummate failure. I think it was The Ambassadors that was intended to be barely a nibble.

2. Characters, even in the most ‘literary’ of fiction, always cause their own problems

Very often, James started with an idea based on a story someone had told him at a dinner party. (He was quite the social butterfly of London, an upper-class American expatriate who complained, Camille-like, of the ceaseless whirl of invitations even as he hurtled constantly from taxi to taxi, doorstep to dining room.) His notebooks will say something like, “Lady M told me last night of the case of H de L,” and then elaborate upon the anecdote, commenting in almost audible mumbles, “I think if I were to make it someone young—a woman? a man?—and give them a reason for objecting to the elder woman’s ambitions, I might have a nice little vignette. Yes, I believe that would illuminate what I mean to discover.” Half the time he was mumbling to himself in broken French.

Always, always he was working with the characters, delving into their conflicting interests and needs, piling pressures on them to see what they’d do. In long, luxurious discussion with himself.

This could go on for weeks, months, years. He didn’t bother to start the actual writing until he had the conflicts worked out.

He knew the Climax of a story is the whole point. So he delved and delved and delved until he knew exactly what his point was.

3. The more a writer develops their storytelling muscles, the greater a thrill it is to be a writer

   And the loveliest part of reading James’ writing process is the sense you get of his great pleasure in his expertise at spinning tales.

   I believe, of course, that he loved the actual writing. He was so adept with a well-turned sentence, so skilled with flashes of insights. What a joy to be able to produce such accomplished lines, paragraphs, and scenes! Although his writing in his later years became ridiculously convoluted, if you take the time to disentangle his sentences you see that he really was mining ore worth mining, creating refractions with his complicated sentences that could not be created any other way.

   But he also loved the planning. Oh, how he loved it. Because he knew this work takes two different parts of the writer’s brain: the storytelling part and the prose part. We cannot become writers by choosing to develop only one and neglect the other.

   This is a lesson it’s too easy to forget in today’s manic rush to publication.

   There is the art. And there is the craft.

I’m incognito this week—elsewhere aging gracefully in media res with a ghost story—so if your comments don’t show up right away that’s why. I’ll be back next week and get them posted. Also, I’m expecting you all to have run out and gotten your hands on The Notebooks of Henry James while I’m looking the other way.

I’m still studying Shirley Jackson, and if you don’t know why you can easily find out. I spent yesterday doing a scene-by-scene analysis of Chapters 5 and 6 of The Haunting of Hill House that turned into line-by-line—that’s how fast she switches gears in her most profound passages!—and at some indefinite point degenerated into re-reading for the sheer pleasure of it. Utterly seductive writing. Of course, this all started with Stephen King and his 1981 overview of the twentieth-century horror genre, Danse Macabre, a whole world of learning how to push readers’ buttons.

But this week I’m discussing with a client the writing of Dashiell Hammett.

Speaking of shifting gears.

Now, my client isn’t writing detective mysteries. In fact, she’s not writing any kind of mysteries. But she is writing wonderful, gripping scenes shaped largely around dialog, so we’re exploring the tools and techniques of drawing a reader fully into scenes, the way the balance of description, action, and dialog has altered over the decades, and the ever-growing modern dependence upon exposition.

Sometimes writers hear, “You have to intersperse scenes with exposition because otherwise your story is too intense,” and, “There’s no formula, you have to just sense when to slip into exposition.”

There are reasons for this advice, and the best way I know to ferret out the reasons for any fictional techniques is to study how the greats used them.

So I went to Hammett, because I already knew that he changed styles drastically between The Maltese Falcon and The Thin Man, and in this change in style he illustrated a number of things:

1. It is not true that stories without exposition are simply too intense

   Hammett wrote The Maltese Falcon pretty much entirely without exposition—pure scenes. And it’s a heck of a fabulous novel.

   How did he do it?

   Well, for one thing, he did it in the 1930s, long before most of the publishing professionals who recommend exposition today were even born. Most of those people depend, not upon a deep understanding of the craft, but upon whatever they read on current best seller lists.

   Do those novels tend to be largely exposition?

   Yes, they do.

   Why?

   Because current publishing market conditions require successful authors to crank out novels as fast as they can to feed the appetites of the dominant industry players, who are the marketers. This means, although an author might be able to visualize their story quite clearly and be adept enough with language to flesh it out in good, solid scenes, they don’t have time. They must be content with sketching the story in exposition—practically essay—and shoving it on down the chute.

   Now, does this phenomenon mean that exposition-heavy fiction is the best fiction?

   Absolutely not.

   The preponderance of cheap Made in China crap in our society does not make that stuff the best quality stuff in existence. It just means it makes money the fastest for the people who produce it. Not over the long haul. Only in the moment. Enormous waste.

2. The modern shift away from description dates from the 1940s

The difference between the opening pages of The Maltese Falcon and The Thin Man, published only a few years apart, is simply amazing.

On page one of The Maltese Falcon, we get a meticulous, detailed description of the face of Sam Spade. (Just as Hammett’s colleague, Raymond Chandler, devoted the first chapter of more than one novel to a meticulous description of a house.) Boy, did Hammett love the idea that Spade’s face is designed in a series of v’s! We also get a detailed description of how her dress clings to the body Spade’s Girl Friday, Effie, who plays a minor role in the story. And Hammett gives us the fake name of the villain—which will be discarded long before the end of the novel—and the fact that Spade is willing to see pretty much any ‘customer’ who’s a good-looking woman.

That’s all the information.

One page one of The Thin Man, on the other hand, we get half-a-sentence of exposition about waiting for ‘Nora’ (the protagonist’s wife, his comic foil and the source of his character layering—even, at one point, the author’s mouthpiece, exhorting both reader and other characters to believe the protagonist is a brilliant detective although he hasn’t actually shown himself to be anything but a wiseacre and a serious alcoholic—Nora appears in pretty much every single scene of the novel) to do her Christmas shopping (placing the story in the time of year, as the chronology of events over previous months is pivotal to the plot).

Then we immediately get a little action, some sketchy description, and a bunch of extremely pertinent dialog. In the dialog, we learn the name of the murder victim as well as that of his daughter, who is the character speaking to the protagonist and a very major character indeed, the protagonist’s main link to the victim throughout the novel. We also learn the Backstory of how long it’s been since the protagonist last saw the murder victim (eight years), the victim’s current marital status with the girl’s mother, who turns out to be the main red herring of the story (divorced), plus the victim’s current notoriety in the newspapers, which is the source of everyone’s motivation to believe the man is bonkers and has suddenly taken to running around New York murdering people.

Character motivation! The single most important character motivation in Hammett’s entire story.

And a bit of genuine wit (which, aside from engaging the reader, neatly establishes the protagonist’s character).

“Listen: remember those stories you told me. Were they true?”

“Probably not. How is your father?”

Almost all of these basic building blocks of the novel right there on the first page—and in dialog!

Not exposition.

3. The modern shift away from dialog is quite recent

   Actually, you can learn this from Armistad Maupin, whose Tales of the City of the 1970s and ’80s are almost entirely dialog. When sitcom-watching was first becoming a 24-hour American lifestyle, dialog absolutely took over fiction.

   But even before that, dialog had a long and respected history as the main staple of literature.

   However, now that hyper-emphasis upon making a quick buck, big-box outlets that churn books for maximum bookseller profit like Barnes & Noble and Walmart, and the omnipresence of blogging are all the focus of modern publishing, even dialog isn’t slick enough for those making the decisions high up on the industry ladder.

   Is this because dialog doesn’t work as well as exposition?

   Of course not.

   But exposition is just that much easier to read when you’re not really paying attention—say, while you’re texting your friends or watching your favorite television show or toying with your blog (or your own novel) or just standing in line waiting to buy a bunch of cheap Made in China crap.

   (I have a whole lot of things I could say about the relationship between this development and the rise of the dimestore novel in the 1930s, but it would be quite a serious tangent, so I will spare you.)

4. The resulting dependence upon action coincides with the rise of stories dependent upon the physical rather than the perceptive

   And this is a really interesting development.

   What happens when you suck the bulk of your description and dialog out of your scenes? You wind up stuck with action.

   Thriller (violence). Romance (sex). The biggest-selling modern genres by a very large margin.

   Think about it.

5. Therefore, for lack of most scene techniques, modern writing leans toward exposition

   And this is what happens when your novel is neither violent action thriller nor soft-core p*rn romance: you have no adrenalin-triggering actions left to put into your scenes. And you can’t write actions that don’t trigger intense pre-programmed adrenalin because, you know, that’s what everyone else is writing, and industry marketers want you to compete.

   So you wind up falling back on exposition—trying to talk your reader into caring about your characters and your story.

   “They’re really nice people!” you see yourself typing. “They’ve always been good neighbors, taken good care of their elderly parents, worn the right brand-name clothes [insert brand name here], watched the right TV shows [insert names], listened to the right music [insert names]. They’re very upset when bad things happen to them!” And then you write a nice little essay on the bad things that happen.

   Sadly, essay is not fiction.

6. It is not true that a writer can’t plan where to put their lines of exposition

   Actually, it’s not true that a writer can’t plan any of the techniques they use. That’s just silliness. . .promoted by the people in the industry who have not studied literature and therefore have no idea why fiction works the way it does.

   “We don’t know!” Palms up, shrug. “It’s the magic of those wacky successful writers!”

   No, it’s not.

   It’s technique.

   Identify what steps your characters must take between the hook and the climax of every single long scene. (Don’t use too many steps, though. I know exactly how many you can get away with, and if you read my blog and books you know, too.) Identify what the little tiny climaxes of those steps are going to be. Write something really good for each of those tiny climaxes. (Cut out all the uninteresting stuff.)

   After each tiny climax, throw in a brief, vivid, perhaps unexpected action, a bit of significant description, or—if you must—a very nice line of essential exposition. A very nice line. Then hook the reader into the next step of the long scene. Develop it a bit and give it a little tiny faux resolution before the next little tiny climax.

   If it’s a short scene, do this and then hook the reader into the next scene.

   Lather, rinse, repeat.

UPDATE: I’ve gotten more than one comment asking for the definition of exposition, so I answered the first (from Susan Kelly) on my advice column: Growing plot out of character, situation out of need.

Please be aware that “exposition” is one of the most confusing of the terms used in fiction today, defined in different places as everything from backstory to narrative to data. It is none of these, although it can be used for the purposes of any of them. I take my definitions from the OED and the great editors of the twentieth-century, such as Maxwell Perkins, who told an author, “You have too much explanation, too much exposition,” which, he advised, should be cast into scenes.

Now, you all know who Shirley Jackson was, and if you don’t you can find out from last week’s post about Stephen King. She was most famous for her story “The Lottery,” in which the citizens of a small American town draw an annual lottery to stone someone to death—a story that caused an unbelievable furor when it was published in the New Yorker in 1948.

The most frightening aspect of “The Lottery” is that Jackson claimed a great many of the hundreds of letters she received were from people who wanted to know where that lottery was held and whether or not they could go watch.

Wow. She didn’t just find the pressure points in her readers and press them. Her readers pressed back!

A miracle of a writer.

But what I love Jackson for best are her ghost stories. She wrote a number of novels with the sole purpose of making you wonder what the hell is going on. I haven’t read all of them—I’m savoring the anticipation—but I have read We Have Always Lived at the Castle, The Sundial, and of course the wonderful, classical ghost story, The Haunting of Hill House.

I just analyzed Hill House this past weekend. Although Jackson didn’t plan her novels (and, in fact, seems to have dealt with their structure with a rather liberal hand), I discovered a few things I didn’t know before, which I find simply extraordinary.

1. Anticipation and fulfillment follow a simple arc

   If you’ve read anything I’ve ever written about structure, you know it’s a straight-forward three-act design. And in a ghost story (or any story in which you want tension), this design depends as much upon anticipation and dread as it does upon fulfillment of the reader’s expectations:

   1. threat is perceived
   2. threat is described
   3. threat arrives
   4. threat develops
   5. threat retreats
   6. threat wins

   
   Can you can identify the six elements of structure in that? It’s really simple.

2. Push/pull mechanism operates most powerfully in extremes

   Weak elements lead to weak reader engagement. This is why thrillers monopolize the best seller lists. You can write a story of people who are only slightly annoyed with each other while mainly pretty happy with their lot. But if you make your reader (not just your character!) really nervous, then really entertained, then really nervous again—you’ll have them by the nose-ring.

3. The key to increasing tension is adding elements over time

   In Jackson’s work, this means adding emotional strategies for the characters to explore, ways in which they struggle harder and harder to cope with their dilemmas. Yes, your protagonist has two fundamental needs to meet. And they might have two ways in which they’re accustomed to meeting them. But the reader wants to know what they do when they’re backed in a corner, which means when their normal coping mechanisms are taken away from them.

   At first Jackson’s characters are either funny or frightened. Those are pretty normal coping mechanisms. Later they branch out into aggression. Numbness. Terror. And finally, against everything the reader has always believed in, surrender. . .

4. Humor pushes tension past the reader’s defenses

   Humor is extremely difficult to manage because it’s such a very specialized skill, but if you’ve got the touch you’re golden. And the best place for humor to exist is not in the voice (although a lot of writers today, particularly children’s writers, depend upon a generic humor in first-person narrative voice) but in the characters.

   Jackson’s characters are deep, conflicted, touchy, secretive, and most of all witty. Even at the height of the climactic drama of the novel, in which the four main characters cower together in a bedroom all night while the house rocks and spins and tears itself to pieces around their heads, she managed to slip in a tiny bit of humor in the dialog of two characters trying—with white knuckles—to alleviate the terror that’s threatening to become all-out panic. In that instance, the reader’s resistance to their suspension of disbelief is broken by the deftness of Jackson’s touch, and the scene suddenly becomes unbearably real.

   WARNING: Don’t try to insert humor into your stories without working long and hard at it. Failed humor is worse than no humor at all.

5. There is no substitute for beautiful writing

   Seriously. I don’t care how many times you hear, “Genre writing doesn’t have to be beautifully-written. It’s only entertainment,” that is bull. All writing is about getting into the reader’s mind, and now more than ever we need writers who understand that readers are not slot machines—insert genre whatever, out dumps a bunch of money—they are human beings with complex and sophisticated relationships to the stories they love.

   Yes, you can wring money out of readers with cheap stuff dashed off the top of your head so long as you accidentally or deliberately plug into some current fad. I could be doing that instead of editing and probably make a much better living. But fads fade over time, and if you’re dependent upon them for your sales your income will fade with them.

   You cannot create stories that last if you don’t care about the writing of them.

   Do you know why we’re still reading The Haunting of Hill House over fifty years after it was published, but nobody knows the names of the bad genre authors of the 1980s and ’90s (which authors are now griping away their years at ordinary jobs, embittered by the shift in their fortunes)?

   The writing.