I’m invisible again this week (not like bloggers are ever visible). We’ve been discussing the online scuttlebutt about whether or not blogging is dead and, if it is, would it be a good idea for you to turn your blog into a book? And now I’m at a computer retreat with my family up on the Columbia River enjoying views of the Columbia River Gorge under a light sprinkling of snow and eating way too much breakfast parfait with my son. So this week I’m bringing back the post I wrote last year for this same conference.

Because I’m consistent!

1. Unhook


You know what I’m talking about.

The number of hours a writer can waste on the Internet would make even the most hardened geek’s blood run cold.

Here’s my #1 tip to getting work done, the one that carves out time in my schedule every blessed day so my clients don’t gang up on me and appear at my door waving fistfuls of precious manuscript in righteous indignation over their heads.

You know that little doohicky with the floppy ears that plugs the blogosphere, Facegook, and Twitter into your computer like a cable plugging the Matrix into the back of your neck?

Reach right over and yank that sucker out.


2. Close your mouth


And a weird thing will happen. Everyone out there will stop listening.

There you’ll be, sitting at your desk or kitchen table or armchair or porcelain throne with a head full of words and nowhere for them to go.

Lightbulb!


3. Plug your ears


But before you bring out your manuscript or open your notebook or click that golden Open button, take a quick look behind you and all around. Are you alone? You’d better be. Otherwise you’re going to have to roll up some little bits of tissue and insert them (very carefully!) into your outer ears. Or take a moment to breathe deeply and hum through your nose until you’ve forgotten all about the other people in the room.

Whatever you do, don’t look up. That only encourages them.


4. Watch the clock


What time is it right now? And what time do you expect to have the biggest chunk of time available today?

Whip out a red pen and scribble that time on your hand. I write on the thumb part of the back of my left hand—always have, always will, even though 25 years ago I injured my arm and damaged a nerve so it feels kind of yucky.

Now whatever else you do all day, keep one eye peeled. About half an hour before that time, start closing down shop. Take care of anything that might interrupt you—like kids with appetites—and shut down the airlocks. You’re going into orbit.

Alone.


5. Take advice


Then pick up a really good book on writing advice, something that makes your head just want to detach from your neck and do a little dance across the room. I mean, a really good book. Something full of concrete, hands-on advice while also intensely encouraging and inspiring.

Let it fall open randomly and start reading. This is called divining, and it works for writing just like it works for oracles.


6. Doodle a name


If you get too caught up in the reading, pick up a pen and doodle your protagonist’s name on something. It doesn’t matter what—your arm, the margin of your book, your jeans, the back of the cat. The act of holding that pen and writing that name over and over links synapses in your brain and makes them start pumping juice toward the little grey cells allotted to that personality in your mind.


7. Drink tea


Don’t eat unless you’re starving. And don’t get yourself all jazzed up on caffeine or stupid on booze. Just make sure you have something warm and comforting you can reach without looking up, like a swimmer taking a breath, before you sink back down into the imaginary place you’re exploring.


8. Zonk out


And if the noise in the room or in your head is really loud, go take a nap. This isn’t copping out. It’s preparing you to stay up late after everyone else has gone to bed, after your part of the planet has turned off the lights and disappeared, when the quiet rises up around you like mist so you can see your characters come walking or stumbling and crawling out of it toward you.

Even if you try to do a runner at bedtime it won’t work because you won’t be able to get to sleep.


9. Disappear for a week up a river or a mountain, break a leg, and get snowed in
   
   And if all else fails, do what I’m going to do and just vanish into thin air. Leave your house. Go somewhere else. Trade apartments with a writer friend and force yourselves to communicate only by phone. Don’t back yourself into a corner where you actually injure yourself unconsciously, getting just that desperate to escape your daily routine.
   
   You know that feeling that you’re about to get sick and have to spend a day in bed, so you haul off and spend a day in bed so you won’t get sick?
   
   Do that.

(If you don’t see me respond to your comments, it’s because the snow is covering the hotel windows and we’ve had to send Sasquatch out for a cask of brandy. I’ll be responding to everyone when I get back on Monday!)

The Art and Craft of Fiction:
A Practitioner’s Manual
by Victoria Mixon

“The freshest and most relevant advice you’ll find.”
—Helen Gallagher, Seattle Post-Intelligencer

“Wonderfully useful, bracing and humorous. . .it demystifies the essential aspects of the craft while paying homage to the art.”
—Millicent Dillon, five time O.Henry Award winner and author of the PEN/Faulkner-nominated Harry Gold

“Teeming with gold. . .will make you love being a writer if only because you belong to the special little club that gets to read this book.”
—KM Weiland, author of Outlining Your Novel

The Art and Craft of Story: 2nd Practitioner’s Manual
by Victoria Mixon

“Opinionated, rumbunctious, sharp and always entertaining. . .lessons of a writing lifetime.”
—Roz Morris, best selling ghostwriter and author of Nail Your Novel

“As much a gift to writers as an indispensible resource. . .in a never-done-before manner that inspires while it teaches.Highly recommended.”
—Larry Brooks, author of four bestselling thrillers and Story Engineering

“I wish I’d had The Art & Craft of Story when I began work on my first novel.”
—Lucia Orth, author of the critically-acclaimed Baby Jesus Pawn Shop

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.

I love ghost stories.

Particularly the whole gothic genre of the nineteenth century: intense questioning of reality layered with beautiful houses and dramatic landscapes and sometimes hilariously-dated kitsch. I’ve read all of Mrs. Radcliffe. Whooee!

I especially love the whole concept that my love for ghost stories is the other side of my utter yellow-bellied, chicken-livered response the few times I’ve thought there was a real ghost in my vicinity. Have you ever seen anyone levitate straight in the air and cling to a chandelier?

Yeah, that was me.

That makes my relationship with ghosts and ghostly ephemera the complete encapsulation of everything I know about the internal conflict that is the driving fuel of all fiction:

1. Be careful what you wish for or you might just get it

2. When the gods want to punish us, they answer our prayers

So it will be no shock to any of you to learn that my one of my favorite novels of all time is Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House.

My god, what an amazing writer. I stumbled on that book in a second-hand store a few years ago, but I was not surprised to discover later that it is canonical and, in fact, one of the novels that taught Stephen King his trade. (I would love to get into a discussion of all Jackson’s work, and at a some point I probably will, but for now I’m going to content myself with recommending this gorgeous, mysterious novel to writers in general.)

I was interested enough when I heard that King discusses The Haunting of Hill House in his nonfiction exploration of horror to run out and buy a copy of Danse Macabre, which King wrote in 1981 between Firestarter and Cujo (not counting one of the novels he wrote under his Richard Bachman-Turner-Overdrive pseudonym).

Now, it turns out King’s interpretation of Hill House is, sadly, so wildly pedestrian as to be almost useless. He analyzes Hill House at length as the height of narcissism because it’s about the internal world of a young woman with whom he can’t identify (although one of his own favorite novels is Richard Matheson’s The Shrinking Man, which is about the internal world of a man with whom he apparently can). King finally admits there might be another “truly terrifying” interpretation of Hill House, which is that it’s the house itself that’s generating the ghosts. . .um, bingo, Stephen.

However, King is still heck of smart, his book is a meticulous research project on the horror genre of the twentieth century (largely movies and television, but also fiction), and he’s a very good writer when he wants to be.

I dog-eared dozens of pages of Danse Macabre so I could go back later and copy out quotes and insights, which I am studying right now. And I’m discovering that even when King is a little limited in his exploration of his basic insights, they lead me into truly rich ground in my own understanding of fiction.

1. Fiction is seeking pressure points

   Wow, do I love this insight.

   Fiction is about reaching into the reader, past their intellectual understanding of both your story and themself, and pressing where it’s sensitive. Some writers—like King—do what they do because for many people the resulting adrenalin rush of terror temporarily deadens all other feeling and gives them some relief from their own fears. And King has learned that readers in an era of political upheaval and economic uncertainty are willing to plunk down a whole lot of cash for relief.

   This is also why romance aka soft-core p*rn is the top-selling genre these days.

   Adrenalin rush through either procreation or running for your life, the two most predictable chemical jolts in the animal kingdom. Temporary relief.

   Yes, indeed.

   But even if you’re not interested in simple-minded triggering of the adrenalin of terror or sex (as I really am not—there are real-life social and personal consequences to addiction to those particular adrenalin triggers, which I’m not going to get into here), your goal is still to trigger emotion in the reader.

   Not in your characters. In the reader. Visceral response.

   Without that, you’re just talking to yourself.

2. Without belief, there is no reader engagement

   King talks about reader engagement purely in terms of terror and horror, but again this insight applies to all genres, all fiction.

   Is your goal to engage the reader in a fantasy adventure? That reader had better believe the logic behind your fantasy, or they’re not going to feel the thrill of the adventure.

   Is your goal to engage the reader in an exploration of sci-fi? That reader had better believe in your science, or they’re not going to feel invested in the consequences.

   Is your goal to engage the reader in YA or MG? That reader had better believe in the authenticity of your teenagers’ or children’s world, or they’re not going to feel one cotton-pickin’ thing for the dilemmas of your characters.

3. Fiction is both what you say out loud and what you say in a whisper

   This is called subtext, and it’s essential for all storytelling.

   An enormous amount of the writer’s toolbox is devoted to techniques specifically designed for subtext: structure, pacing, resonance, juxtaposition, dialog, description, action, gesture and mannerism and expression, word choice and and sentence structure and telling detail. The list goes on and on.

   Devote yourself to learning these techniques, and the entire universe of subtext will blossom for you with a complex and unearthly beauty.

4. Locking the world out is locking the world in

   Again, King discusses this purely in terms of terror—that the character’s efforts to hide (specifically inside a house) lead them very often to closet themself with their enemy.

   But this is, in the greater scheme of things, why readers read: as they sink into fiction to escape their own worries and griefs, they find themselves unconsciously drawn to stories that reflect those very things.

   This is the psychological reflex of healing. We are unconsciously desperate to lock ourselves in with what truly haunts us (not just what pushes our buttons), to face it and triumph once and for all.

5. Lives and careers can be destroyed in a moment

   Fast, succinct, condensed—these are the hallmarks of great fiction.

   You want your fiction to be powerful, don’t you? Well, power is greatest where matter is most condensed. Don’t stand too close to a black hole, people.

6. Reader engagement arises from the feeling that the world is ‘unmaking’

   And this is perhaps my very favorite insight. Just that word: ‘unmaking.’ King has put his finger on the pressure point of all humanity with that one.

   Both anticipation and anxiety are the key human responses to the possibility that something we want and need will all our souls is being ‘unmade.’ And those are two of the most powerful push/pull emotions a writer can use.

   Push the reader away with anxiety—oh, no! things are falling apart!

   Pull the reader in with anticipation—oh, boy! things are falling apart!

   The ways in which the reader feels these developments depend entirely upon how you craft your characters, what needs you give them, what illumination you cast upon their endless struggles to meet their needs.

   This is the core of the writer’s work: employing the myriad wonderful techniques of fiction to play upon the reader’s emotions like a xylophone.

   Oh, yes.

7. Stephen King did a lot of cocaine in the early ’80s

   And you can sure tell.

   You get this from the last third of Danse Macabre, which escalates into the final chapters until you can veritably hear that ole razor scraping the mirror. “Just one more last thing,” he starts saying. “Just one more last thing.”

   Notice how he loses reader engagement when it stops being about leading the reader where he’s decided he wants them to go and begins to be only about him and his frantic, hopped-up need to just keep talking?

   Take a lesson from Stephen King.

This post was brought to you by M. Terry Green, author of Shaman, Healer, Heretic, who asked me a simple question in email this morning (“How are you?”) and started an avalanche.

We’re jumping in the Way-Back Machine today. This was the very first of my numbered-list posts—from January, 2010—and the comments are still some of my favorites!

1. You’re not going to get rich. You’re probably not even going to be able to pay your bills. In fact, money is going to turn out to be the last reason to do this. I know—you guys hate it like blazes that I keep telling you this. (Huffington Post). But keep reading (or skip ahead) to 7, anyway.
2. Your friends and family will LOVE IT. They’ll start following you everywhere, waiting for famous people to accost you so they can be the shy, self-deprecating second person, blushing and elbowing you and saying, “I’m just the sister. Really—we always knew they [pointing] were a genius.” Humorous, eye-rolling, palms-up shrug. This will be fun for awhile and then become intensely annoying, especially when the famous people never materialize. Your grandparents will keep your book on their coffee table until the day they die (when you will inherit it back).
3. Your book will have a really strange reaction to publication. It’s going to open itself up in the middle of the night the night before your publication date and rearrange all the words to make you look like an idiot. It will choose one obscure paragraph in one chapter to arrange exactly the opposite—so beautifully and profoundly and perfectly that, as god is your witness, you know for a fact you did not write that. The rest of it. . .yeah, it kind of sounds like you.
4. You will spend at least a week in an alternate universe in which your entire head is bigger than your body and your hair is actually bigger than your head. You will have eyes like a fly, facing in all directions at once. Your neck will be a thin string tied rather inexpertly to the base of your head. Although the view from up there will be extraordinary, the bobbing up & down will be so disorienting that it will affect your ability to speak clearly.
5. You will come back from this alternate universe a humbler and better person.
6. You will suddenly hate your book, hate everything about your book, hate everybody else’s books, too, and lock yourself in your attic with your dreams and your words and your vision and begin the real task of writing what you know you can write, what you’ve had inside you all along. You just needed the self-confidence of getting published to bring it out.
7. Your boss will call you up at home and tell you to get back to work or you’re fired. And you’ll go—but you’ll still be thinking all the time about what’s going on in your attic. Eventually it will occur to you that this is also how you were living before you were published. And that’s the reason to do this. . .because this is a wonderful way to live.

100. I don’t know a hundred other things about being a published author. A commenter said readers like really big numbers, and I thought I’d roll with that. But even if I did know a hundred other things, you guys would never read them all, much less remember them. And how helpful is that?

GO WRITE.

Ask Victoria.

That’s what Therese Walsh dubbed it when we came up with the idea of an editor’s advice column on the new, up-coming Writer Unboxed newsletter.

We’d been wanting to collaborate for a long time, take our guest appearances on each other’s blogs to the next level.

As soon as we thought of adding my advice column to her newsletter, we knew we’d hit on the right idea. So we’ve been hustling for the past few weeks to make it happen.Therese and her partner Kathleen have solicited questions from the Writer Unboxed Facebook community, I’ve put on my editorial thinking-cap, and we’ve created the advice column we hope will serve aspiring writers best.

And today we went live.

Hurrah! Kazoos!

However, the newsletter is still in development, so we went live on the Writer Unboxed blog, a demo of the column as it will appear in the newsletter, so you can all get a window into what’s in store. Ain’t life grand?

We’re over there right now answering the reader question:

Dear Victoria,

Aside from meticulous proofreading, how can we, as writers, make your job easier?

Please join us! On Ask Victoria.

Hey, guys, I just spent the entire day trying to develop video for this blog. Guess what? That’s right. So let’s talk about how my experiment with video mimics the experience of writing fiction:

1. It always seems like such a good idea at the time.

   Who has not begun a story with the gripping, overwhelming conviction that this is the best idea ever?

2. It gets intensely complicated, overblown, and unwieldly really, really fast.

   Writing fiction is enormously complex and involves far more facets than can ever be entirely remembered or even explained. We try and try and try to simplify the basics so we can build a sense of competence and an inner sensory map—a body memory of how to navigate these complexities—but the sheer number of layers always makes the overall picture invisible from any particular vantage point.

3. It involves a whole lot of little, nickpicky details you simply can’t see coming.

   Fiction is all details: the details of character, the details of plot and subplot and plot thread, the details of setting, the details of tens and tens of thousands of words and sentences. Detail overload. . .and yet every one of them is essential.

4. The exact aspect of any and all illumination is crucial.

   If we don’t have complete control over where we shine the light when we create, we can’t hope to show our audience what we want them to see.

5. Repeated attempts to accomplish the same piece of the project over and over again becomes something akin to hammering jello on porcelain.

   Revision is massage taken to the point of pummeling. The breakage can be, eventually, deafening.

6. Stagefright is a constant.

   Although the camera acts as an audience in the external world, our critical faculties act as an on-going internal audience, so that the accumulation of silent tut-tut’s can be paralyzing if we listen.

7. Halfway through, you’re guaranteed to forget what you’re doing.

   We are a simple species, and one of the most predictable of our reflexes is the urge to mentally step away when things stop being fun. This is especially true right about when we’ve acquired 36,000 of the 72,000 words we need.

8. Freezing in the headlights is sometimes the only thing that makes sense.

   Fortunately, the fact that none of this is live means we can freeze for as long as we like. It’s never detrimental to the final product, and it’s often the key to quality.

9. It turns out you don’t actually have a single, consistent voice.

   Did you know this about yourself? Even when you’re talking? Me neither.

10. The longer you struggle, the more obvious it becomes this can’t possibly end well.

    I really don’t have an answer for this.

A writer falls over a cliff and is clinging helplessly to a vine while two editors crouch on the edge, shouting advice. Suddenly the writer sees the most beautiful strawberry in the world just out of reach.

“Reach for it!” cries the first editor. “A perfect thing is worth the sacrifice of your life!”

“Don’t reach for it!” cries the second editor. “It is in toil and dedication that success lies!”

“My novel’s a piece of shit!” cries the writer and jumps off the cliff.

Hey, welcome to 2012! We’ve had such a luxurious vacation catching up on our lives around here and cleaning our offices and writing stories and all that good stuff. Now we’re gearing up for the new year in that very special way that we writers have: with panic.

First I want to thank all of you with my deepest gratitude for your nominations for the Write to Done Top 10 Blogs for Writers Contest. You guys got me into the Top 20 Blogs for Writers, which is exactly where I hoped to be. Although I am greatly honored to have been one of the Top 10 last year, I spent the first three months of 2011 working my heinie off trading guest posts with the other nine folks, and I suspect I am not the only one of them to have trembled at the thought of doing that all over again.

So thank you. Thank you so much.

Now, I have a few new things lined up for this blog in 2012:

1. Video

   My son has become quite a video afficionado, as can be seen in the trailer he made for The Art & Craft of Fiction. And he’s going to be making short videos of me talking about craft, little five-minute versions of the video interview Joanna Penn did with me last fall.

2. Writer & Editor Jokes

   I’m sorry. I’m apologizing in advance for the groaners. This is what happens when an editor spends a little too much of her holiday vacation exploring the possibilities of chai and rum.

3. New Guest Column

   I’m not going to let the cat out of the bag just yet because we’re still working out the details, but within a few weeks I’ll be able to announce my regular guest column on the upcoming newsletter for one of the best blogs for writers in existence. I’m extremely excited to be working with these folks. Stay tuned!

4. A Writer’s New Year’s Resolutions

   And these are just for today:

   • Lose weight

     Trim, trim, trim. Cut, cut, cut. My manuscripts will lose their flab and tone their muscle until they can eject a reader to 5000 feet without leaving the ground.

   • Eat healthy

     Out with cheap crap! In with the greats! I will devote my precious reading time to only those writers whose dedication and talents have shaped and continue to shape this craft we all love, and I will resist the urge to waste my time on mindless drivel just because everyone else is doing it.

   • Exercise

     I will practice my writing skills until for every 1000 words I hope to publish I can proudly boast 10,000 words of honing my craft. I will spend far less time talking about writing and far more time doing it. I will focus on the sheer tangible pleasure of writing—because that’s the reason I’m a writer.