Looseleaf Editorial & Production

Book Editing & Design

Blog

Leaflet Review: A Hat Full of Sky by Terry Pratchett

by Leave a Comment

A Hat Full of Sky by Terry PratchettWitch-in-training Tiffany Aching hadn’t expected magic to involve chores and ill-tempered nanny goats! But as Tiffany pursues her calling, a sinister monster pursues Tiffany, and neither mistress Weatherwax (the greatest witch in the world) nor the six-inch-high Wee Free Men (the greatest thieves in the world) can defeat it. When the monster strikes, Tiffany will have to save herself—if she can be saved at all!

I love Terry Pratchett, so I can hardly say anything bad about his books—even though, with so many books on the market, I’m bound to not like some of them. But I liked A Hat Full of Sky. Perhaps not so much as its predecessor, The Wee Free Men, but it was still a very enjoyable book. As always is the case with Pratchett, I both laughed out loud and had a bit of thinking time to go with it.

That said, there were several times where I thought the main conflict had been resolved, only to discover there was a new conflict (though, to be fair, these conflicts were always attached and related; I just don’t think they were foreshadowed). They felt a bit tacked on, if you ask me. However, all the conflicts were thematically consistent, even if they didn’t seem to be all part of the same action arc, so it wasn’t really bad. I was just expecting a book unified by a single action; if I’d been expecting a thematic work I wouldn’t have noticed it at all.

As with The Wee Free Men, the book waxes philosophical. (What? In a children’s book? Absurd.) Pratchett gets away with it because it’s natural to the character—all the ideas are in Tiffany’s voice and they’re things Tiffany would think, what with her First, Second, and Third Thoughts running around. She’s bound to run into some heavy thinking. The other reason it works so well is that Pratchett makes you laugh while he’s going about it, and the things he talks about aren’t controversial in any way: they’re just thing you may not have thought about very much before. Like how full the universe is of things that are interesting an amazing, and how you should never reduce people to things, etc. He couches them in a context that brings the ideas home.

(As a side note, The Wee Free Men introduced ideas that I repackaged and repurposed for discussion in a literary theory class in college. My comments were referenced throughout the semester for their brilliant-ness and relevance, and I felt a little dirty not mentioning that I’d gotten them from a humorous young-adult fantasy novel. But you can’t parenthetically cite your source while you’re talking. At least, I haven’t figured out how to yet.)

That’s really what Pratchett does for me: He takes things I should know and presents them in a mirror that’s ever so slightly askew so I’ll actually see them. Defamiliarization is the term, I believe. And while he defamiliarizes he delights, so I can never complain about a Pratchett book. I’ll definitely be reading the next book in the Tiffany Aching plot arc (once I chew through the stack of books next to my desk, that is), and I’ll probably end up buying them all so future children who use my house as a library will be able to read them. I wish I’d read them as a kid.

An Alternative to Publisher Branding?

by 4 Comments

Zebra herdAs Nathan Bransford has pointed out, branding and credibility are two things publishers have a great grasp of. A book gets a boost when it has a certain imprint’s logo on its spine, and the name recognition of some brands can give a debut author a leg up he or she wouldn’t be able to achieve on their own. Since most readers—most consumers, really—tend to go with names they trust, this branding and name recognition is a huge aspect of marketing that indie authors miss out on.

(To any of you who doubt that publishers’ brands have a strong pull, look to Angry Robot, whose bestselling item in their online store is a yearly subscription to their ebooks, sight unseen, and to the rabid Baen readership.)

Personal Branding and Group Branding

Most indie authors strike out to create their own personal brand associated with their name and style, and some of them do quite well—Amanda Hocking and John Locke, to name two. Traditionally published authors also achieve personal brands beyond their publishers—Tom Clancy is a good example there. But I wonder if group branding could be beneficial to indie authors.

Group branding, like that available via publishers to traditionally published authors, gives immense benefits to new or little-known authors as they’re building their own platforms and personal brands. Indie authors start with even less credibility than a debut traditional author, so I believe group branding is something they could definitely look into.

Currently I’m just musing, and I hardly have any hard and fast answers in this regard, but I wonder if some sort of group branding will emerge in indie publishing. A form I believe could be effective is a sort of authors club in which like-minded authors build a reputation as a group as well as individuals. An individual reputation could lend to the overall marketing draw of the group, and the group reputation could lend itself to newer writers.

Authors Clubs in Action

I’ve seen something like this work with writers already out on the market. Though Brandon Sanderson, Dan Well, and Howard Tayler all tell stories in different styles (and mediums), readers of one storyteller will often end up sampling the work from one of the others simply because these three do so much together (Writing Excuses, for one example). Dean Wesley Smith and Kristine Kathryn Rusch share a similar sort of group branding because they’re married and do a lot together. Each author retains an individual identity within the group, but they draw readers to each other by virtue of the group. For example, when Mary Robinette Kowal joined Writing Excuses, my (already existing) interest in her book, Shades of Milk and Honey, grew because she associated with a group of people I was already familiar with.

Indie authors could likely achieve something similar. They could produce something together (like Writing Excuses) and promote each others’ individual works. Perhaps when someone came out with a new book, the authors in the group could all pool together and write an anthology of short stories based in the same world, using the same characters, or centered on the same theme that could be used to drive buzz and interest.

Practical Matters and Considerations

Of course, there a small difficulty of determining how you would go about creating some sort of authors club. The default answer would be to get your friends or writing group together and make that your club. This would present problems if your club needed to do some quality control and one member wasn’t quite up to the same level as the rest of the members; you’d be so tightly knit together that the interpersonal issues could create more drama than it’s worth. You could also try to attract a group of authors who have similar views on what stories and writing should do (entertain, enlighten, enlarge, etc.), or you could create a band of individuals who write with similar styles, in the same genre niche, or on the same topic (which would be especially useful for nonfiction).

Maybe you could try out a few mutually promotional anthologies or blog tours to test out the relationship before really going full bore on it; maybe you already have a group you work well with and you’d just need to share your brains a bit before you could make it work. There would be a lot of things that needed to be ironed out. Do you need a formal agreement? How do you determine who joins your club? How do you control quality and standards? How you do kick someone out? Can you kick someone out, and will you ever want to? Will anyone be “in charge”?

Bottom line, it could be really tricky to create a successful group for branding purposes. The Writing Excuses crowd are all friends, and Smith and Rusch are married, so their groups formed more or less organically. But I think the benefits of having a group pool of branding capital could be extremely beneficial for writers who are looking to strike out on their own. Yeah, “group branding” and “striking out on your own” are a bit paradoxical. But there’s a reason publishing has consolidated into a handful of large groups. It’s because a group has more opportunities than an individual, and in optimal circumstances the group flourishes when its individuals do, and individuals flourish my nature of belonging to the group.

The future and place of group branding in indie publishing efforts is something I’m curious about and keeping an eye on. What are your thoughts?

Image by Worakit Sirjinda via FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Weekly Roundup: 9/17–9/23

by Leave a Comment

Seanan McGuire: Across the digital divide.

Author Seanan McGuire wrote a post that takes a different look at the e-revolution in publishing than I’ve heard before: she looks at how it makes reading an exclusionary luxury. I’ve thought about this sort of thing before myself. (Probably because ever since I moved out of my parents’ home I’ve been a few steps behind every technological advance—except in the case of required professional software like Adobe Creative Suite products and Word.)

In response to the argument that even those who don’t have an e-reader have a computer (something I have heard), I know people who can’t afford to have a home computer either. Those people would have to rely on places with free computers, like libraries, but library computers aren’t the sort you can sit at for hours and hours because they’re in high demand (not to mention the decrease in library funding). The issue of making electronic reading as democratic as print reading is one that hasn’t been satisfactorily addressed for me. The ease of moving a print book from one owner to another is one reason I’ve been happy to keep buying print books even though I have an e-reader.

Thomas Baekdal: Infinite Choices and a World Abundance vs. Supply and Demand.

Thomas Baekdal explains why supply-and-demand rules do not apply to the abundance of ebooks. This is a follow-up to his article called “The Myth of the 99 Cent Book.” In both articles he emphasizes why 99 cents is not a sustainable price for books to trend toward and why it’s a bad way to go. He suggests that you stop focusing on making your book cheap enough that people won’t fight about having to give you money; instead, make your content into someone of sufficient quality that people will be clambering to give you a fair price.

Baekdal’s reasoning is why I’m so happy with publishers and authors who are dedicated to making their ebooks into quality products instead of subsidiary aftereffects (Pyr, for example). When you put out a quality story and you present it in a quality way, with attention to detail and quality, you can maintain a sustainable price point and readers will pay it willingly because they know it’s worth the money.

Writers Beware: PUBSLUSH Press

There have been a lot of crowdfunding projects cropping up across the internet, and one of the newest is PUBSLUSH Press (they’re technically still in beta). Writers Beware posted a critique of PS’s publishing agreement and noted some things to be aware of. These crowdfunding organizations are another option and venue for writers, but it’s best to go into anything—from traditional publishing to doing everything yourself—with your eyes wide open to the opportunities, risks, and sticky bits. PUBSLUSH has quite a few sticky bits.

The Rook by Daniel O'MalleyDaniel O’Malley: Chapters 1 & 2 of The Rook

The Rook is a book that piqued my interest at some point in the past, though I’m not quite sure when or where. (I may have heard about it through Publishers Weekly, but I’m not sure because I don’t record where I find things when I put them on my “to watch” list.) There is a two-chapter teaser for the fantasy novel available now. Yes, I’ve read the teaser. After I read it I was tempted to pre-order the novel (which doesn’t come out until January 2012). I haven’t because my birthday and Christmas happen between now and its release, and I tend to get wonderful gift cards to bookish places on one (or both) of those occasions. That and I still haven’t finished the stack of books next to my desk and I’ve cut off my book spending until it’s been devoured. And The Hum and the Shiver comes out next week, and that’s another book I’ve been watching.

Leaflet Review: Blackdog by K.V. Johansen

by 2 Comments

Blackdog by K.V. Johansen
Cover illustration by Raymond Swanland (trust me, it’s an even more amazing cover when you can hold it in your hands)

In a land where gods walk on the hills and goddesses rise from the river, lake, and spring, the caravan-guard Holla-Sayan, escaping the bloody conquest of a lakeside town, stops to help an abandoned child and a dying dog. The girl, though, is the incarnation of Attalissa, goddess of Lissavakail, and the dog a shape-changing guardian spirit whose origins have been forgotten. Possessed and nearly driven mad by the Blackdog, Holla-Sayan flees to the desert road, taking the powerless avatar with him.

Necromancy, treachery, massacres, rebellions, and gods dead or lost or mad, follow hard on their heels. But it is Attalissa herself who may be the Blackdog’s—and Holla-Sayan’s—doom.

I picked up Blackdog because Lou Anders from Pyr raved about it at WorldCon. I couldn’t help myself after hearing how excited he was about it. I even sent my husband to Barnes & Noble without me so he could pick it up because the week after WorldCon I was too swamped with deadlines to do anything but edit. (P.S. Giving ourselves a book budget was perhaps the smartest money decision Mr. S and I ever made.)

So I guess that leaves the question: Did it live up to the hype?

Overall, I’d have to say yes. I immensely enjoyed the journey Johansen took me on (I also very, very, very much appreciated that the book’s storyline is complete and won’t require six more books to complete). In the beginning I was a bit hesitant, but I got over it and I’m grateful that I did.

Not So Great Bits

First, the not-my-favorite experiences I had with the book: The book opens from the perspective of Otokas, the man possessed by the Blackdog spirit and the protector of the lake goddess Attalissa (do note that deities in Blackdog are local deities—Attalissa is goddess of a particular lake, Narva has a mountain, Sera a stream, Kinsai a river, Sayan a portion of the Western Grass, etc.). Attalissa is, at this point, a young girl of 8 or 9 and she is powerless until she reaches womanhood. This beginning initially bothered me, because I was emotionally attaching myself to Otokas, who I knew was going to die and be replaced as Blackdog by Holla-Sayan—the back of the book told me so. So why was I spending multiple chapters in a soon-to-be dead man’s head? (I needn’t have feared: Otokas’s memories are relevant to the plot and [slight spoiler] Holla-Sayan receives them when he is possessed.) The first chapters are also full of action (i.e. the sacking of Attalissa’s town and temple), and some of the prose has a syntactic style that made it difficult for me to grasp what was going on or appreciate it. This syntactic quirk either died in later chapters or I learned to understand it, because it wasn’t a problem as the book progressed.

Very Great Bits

Worldbuilding. Now for the good. The worldbuilding was fun and diverse. I loved it. There were lots of different cultures within the book, and they’re fairly well differentiated. Most (if not all) have some sort of parallel with the real world—Nabban is like China, the Northrons are Scandinavian-esque, etc. Holla-Sayan’s caravan is very culturally diverse, and you get a taste of each culture from spending time with the caravaneers. Everyone has a sense of place, of connection to their people, their land, and their gods. Even magic comes in widely varying cultural styles, from the cats-cradle woven spells of the Western Grass to rune-based Northron spells and Nabbani divination based on the Sun–Moon dichotomy. The theme of place wanders throughout the book, even while you’re following people in a caravan.

Year-spanning plot and age-spanning backstory. I was immensely impressed with how Johansen handled the fact that the book spans several years and that the world and the characters all have complex backstories. There was a bit of an infodump when Holla-Sayan was introduced, but overall the character and world backstories are revealed elegantly in piecemeal, partially because different pieces are introduced from various viewpoint characters and cultural perspectives. The histories of the seven devils and the seven wizards that rocked the world with their war on the Old Great Gods is shared in storyteller-type epitaphs in the first portion of the book as well as through the character’s eyes. Spanning years and eons in one book is a feat I rarely see done to my satisfaction, buy Johansen excelled.

Viewpoint-character diversity. The diversity in the viewpoint characters was the highlight of the book for me. Each character has things that motivate them and drive them to action, and they’re all pretty sympathetic (the person I sympathized the least with was, incidentally, the Villain). Even though two characters may view the same event in completely different terms (for example, Attalissa and Moth view things very differently but remember a lot of the same time span), both viewpoints are validated and neither is necessarily marked as any worse than the other.

(Side note: I loved Moth’s character. She added a lot to the depth and diversity of the book, and she granted a level of humanity and sympathy to Tamghat—the Villain—that I don’t think I would have gotten otherwise.)

(Other side note: Attalissa—or Pakdhala, as she is called while she is with the caravan—was probably the character it took me the longest to appreciate since she doesn’t really come into her own as a person for a long time.)

Conclusion and Disclaimer

Overall, I found the book immensely enjoyable, and I was very annoyed when I had to put it down to do something silly, like go to work. While I had my quibbles with this and that, those quibbles never marred my enjoyment of the story or of the characters. The plot is very multi-dimensional—far more so than I’ve communicated in this review, or is even hinted at in the back-cover copy. There is a grand scope to the novel even though it is isolated to location-specific characters and plot points. It has such a grand scope that I feared the loose ends wouldn’t be tied up by the final chapter and I’d have to wait for another book to come out, but Johansen neatly concludes Blackdog’s story. While there are certainly threads that could continue further (Moth’s quest is far from over, for example), the book is completely satisfying as a standalone.

I should also note that I’ve read a review or two that complain that it’s difficult to keep track of characters because each character has a name, a nickname, and possibly another name or two. I didn’t have a problem with this, but that’s probably because I was forewarned. So be aware: Attalissa is also ’Lissa, Pakdhala, and ’Dhala; other people also have a large variety of names. Go in prepared and it won’t be an issue.

Book Pirates, Publicity, & Principles

by 6 Comments

Paper pirate shipAvast, me hearties, there be book pirates abroad!

Seriously though, ebook piracy is an issue, especially as more and more of publishing content goes electronic (because let’s face it: scanning in all the pages of a novel is so not worth avoiding even $25 for a hardcover in most pirate’s minds). There are book pirates sailing the interwebs and pilfering plunder left and right. Some believe this is not a serious problem, while others probably place book piracy as a crime that earns the pirate a hanging.

The “Publicity” View

While I was at WorldCon, I listened while Eric Flint articulated the lackadaisical viewpoint. To him, pirates and people who got his books from them represented a population of people who may not have read his books otherwise. He did not feel that the piracy represented lost sales or really chipped into his income much, so he didn’t see much of a reason to track down anyone who threw up a pirated version of one of his books. The vibe I got was that he sees pirating as a sort of free publicity, and that the dissemination of his stories got his name out and fed other sales. This is a completely valid viewpoint and probably describes many people’s e-pirate experiences.

The “Killing Profitability” View

Another individual I spoke to at WorldCon had a very different perspective. He had put out a book that was widely anticipated, critically acclaimed, and a heck of a lot of fun for him to put together. He was freaking proud of this book. Someone asked if there was going to be a sequel or follow-up to it and sadly, he had to say no. Along with being the most anticipated book he had, it was also the most pirated book he’d ever put out (and he works at a publishing company, so I’m not just talking about his books). He said that if every individual who uploaded the book (we’re not talking downloads, here–these are just people uploading the pirated file) had paid for it legally, he’d be able to put out a sequel in a heartbeat. However, the book didn’t earn enough for there to be a sequel in today’s publishing climate. This is also a completely valid viewpoint, and while I don’t have the testimonials to back it up, it probably describes many people’s e-pirating experiences.

My View

Given these two viewpoints, what do I think?

Piracy is not okay.

 Now, maybe there isn’t a ton you can do about it, seeing as litigation is (most of the time) more trouble than it’s worth and making sure people can share your book as easily as a physical copy is very important to a lot of authors, so DRM isn’t super popular (that and it just presents a challenge many pirates enjoy). I agree that free book-sharing has been around for a while in the form of lending between friends and from libraries, and I’m keen on finding an equivalent for ebooks.

But that’s just it: the free sharing of content used to be lending. If you decided the book (or whatever) was something you wanted forever you paid for it or took it off an uninterested party’s hands. Electronic duplicates are limitless, and people are keeping them permanently. If you like something enough to want your own copy, you should pay to make it your own. The story belongs to the author, and to everyone else who worked to make it what it is, and owning a piece of that should come at a price unless the creator(s) decide differently.

Readers should reward the people who created the thing they want, those who shaped it, and those who brought it to readers’ attention. If you want it, those people obviously did a good job. With a story you’ll have forever, that job is probably worth more than the cost of a latte or a soda. If it isn’t, you probably have very little business in keeping it longer than a latte or soda would last you.

Most of you reading this aren’t book pirates, so you hardly need that lecture. But I’ve heard some people say that authors or publishers who price their ebooks “high” ($9.99 or above) are just asking for piracy.

Nobody asks to be robbed. That’s like the argument that a woman who wears a short skirt is asking to be raped. (Can you see her in the store, trying it on, and relishing the thought that this would be the skirt that would finally get her raped?) When someone prices something, it’s because they believe the product is worth that much. So I wish people would stop justifying theft by saying price-setters are asking for it. If someone can’t stop themselves from stealing a $14 book, they need a lot more moral help than your justification will ever give them.

How to Deal with It

On a much lighter note, if your work is out there and you want to do what you can to keep the pirates down, set up a Google Alert for your title and your name, and any keywords you think would partner with a pirate’s search. When you find an illegal copy, send word to the point of contact at your publisher who handles such things or serve up a boilerplate desist letter you’ve gotten from someone with the legal know-how.

Or you can implement Daniel Nayeri’s ebook piracy solution: flood the market with corrupted copies of your work. If no one can find a free book of yours that doesn’t abruptly end with the last chapters of Moby Dick (instead of the juicy, delightful ending you actually wrote) or isn’t full of odd garbledygook replacements for the word the, they might just break down a pay for a copy. If it’s on sale.

Image by Carlos Porto via FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Weekly Roundup: 9/10–9/16

by Leave a Comment

Lil’ Ol’ Me: Working with an Editor

Since you just don’t get enough of me from my own blog, I’m linking you to a guest post I wrote for Charlie Holmberg’s blog. It’s called “Working with an Editor” and I’ll give you one chance to guess what it’s about. Charlie is a good friend, and she comes up with delightfully different ideas for her stories.

Daniel Nayeri: Editing Books for Girls (When You’re a Boy)

1981 Lego AdThis is technically from last week, but I found it this week so it still counts, right? In this blog post editor/author Daniel Nayeri talks about his views on books for girls. The way he uses a Lego ad to describe the target audience he feels is being neglected is awesome. And I think he addresses an issue we have in fiction (markedly, I believe, in genre fiction). If a woman is feminine she’s weak, and if she’s strong it’s only because she has become so masculine. There are some books that break that mold, and I love them. Finding more of them would not stop me loving them either, so I’m on the hunt as much as Nayeri is.

Publishers Weekly: Now Accepting e-Galleys for Review

For romance and science-fiction/fantasy/horror titles, Publishers Weekly is no longer requiring physical galleys for reviews. You can now submit electronically on their website. They prefer ePub format (no surprise there), though they’ll accept .mobi and RTF as well. I’m not sure how they would react to a book submitted from an indie author, but the worst they can do is trash it, right? They don’t have anything specific mentioned in the instructions regarding indie authors, so I don’t think it would be a big issue.

Alan Rinzler: What authors can learn from the bestseller lists

Developmental editor Alan Rinzler looks and what it takes to get on the New York Times Bestseller List, mostly by pointing out that conventional wisdom does not apply, and that wonderful writing and wonderful stories will always find a way to the top.

Publishers Lunch: Successful Self-Publishers Get Deals

I’ve heard people say that there’s a stigma against self-publishers that makes traditional vs. self-publishing an editor-or decision. I’d like to present some evidence to the contrary that I found in this week’s Publishers Lunch.

Author of No. 1 Kindle bestseller A LITTLE DEATH IN DIXIE, said to have sold over 250,000 units on Amazon, Lisa Turner’s two untitled Southern mysteries, to Tessa Woodward at Harper, in a very nice deal, by Robert Gottlieb at Trident Media Group (world).

Eric Kahn Gale’s debut THE BULLY BOOK, originally a self-published ebook that hit #1 on Amazon on the children’s mystery list and #7 on the children’s book list, about a boy who is just an average kid until he becomes the class grunt; he suspects a bizarre conspiracy and is determined to solve the mystery, to Phoebe Yeh at Harper Children’s, in a pre-empt, in a two-book deal, by Erica Rand Silverman at Sterling Lord Literistic (NA).

One person went from self-publishing to sell her next two books; the other is selling the North American rights to a book he’s already put out. If you reach readers, you can publish either way. It’s not an either-or choice. You do what’s best for your books and your goals.

Jon Yang: The Game of Publishing

This is hilarious. Go read it now. Because I said so.

Leaflet Review: Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell by Susanna Clarke

by 1 Comment

Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell by Susanna ClarkeToday I’ll be reviewing Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, but before I make any comments I have to preface them with a sad, awful fact: I’ve been reading this book since January.

Yeah, it’s a bit of a beastie when it comes to length. My mass market paperback runs to 1,006 pages. But the length was no reason to take so long. Life happened, and my leisure reading suffered for it. As a result, my impressions of this novel are spread over nine months, so take pretty much anything I say about it with a hearty grain of salt.

Especially this first comment: The plot was pretty disjointed and full of vignette-style stories and incidents. That isn’t to say it wasn’t enjoyable, just that it was very, very hard to come back to when I was short on time, especially since I new section and chapter breaks were few and far between (I hardly ever stop mid-scene, but while reading this novel I had to on more than one occasion).

To somewhat support my point, please note that the book is called Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell and you don’t meet Jonathan Strange until page 243. In fact, I think he is only obliquely mentioned once or twice before then (excluding footnote references), and you only notice the mentions because his name is on the cover.

However, the book is full of delightful descriptions and immersive prose and circumstances (everything about the book is geared to immerse you in the alternate history—even the spelling). If read in a more sustained manner, it would probably be rich with an atmosphere that lingered when you had to put it down. Clarke’s descriptions of fairy things are full of synesthesia and mixed metaphors, and it works perfectly because the fairies are not quite human and live in a place that is just a sidestep shy of our reality. An example: “[The fairy box] was a beautiful shade of blue, but then again not exactly blue, it was more like lilac. But then again, not exactly lilac either, since it had a tinge of grey in it. To be more precise, it was the color of heartache. But fortunately neither Miss Greysteel nor Aunt Greysteel had ever been much troubled by heartache and so they did not recognize it.” The descriptions are brilliant and they’re done with precision and deliberation.

Overall, the plotting was not my favorite (probably a symptom of the nine-month read). I think it could have done with more focus and some quicker pacing. Even so, the novel definitely has texture. The worldbuilding is deep and full, complete with folktales (which of course made me happy). The characters are hardly stereotypes, and even when they don’t act exactly as you thought they would, they are still acting perfectly (or perhaps brokenly) human. Mr. Norrell is someone I didn’t like, but I couldn’t help but empathize with him on many occasions.

My final note will be somewhat redemptive for the plot: After I picked the book up for the homestretch sprint of reading I started close to a chapter called “A little box, the color of heartache.” From that chapter on I quite enjoyed the pacing and the conflict up to the finish. The end relied on a bit of what felt like deus ex machina, but what with a prophecy being in the book from the beginning, it isn’t so bad and probably wouldn’t have stung so much if I could actually remember any of the prophecy by the time I got to the end.

Bottom line: I dropped the ball as a reader on this one. Sorry, Susanna Clarke. I’m perfectly willing to give it another try if you put out another book (short story collection excluded for the moment due to the stack of to-read books next to my desk).

3 Common Conflict Killers

by 4 Comments

One of the panels I attended at WorldCon was “Creating Gods.” The panelists were Brandon Sanderson, Carrie Vaughn, some people they invited up from the audience, and Patrick Rothfuss. The main thrust of the panel was how to have superbeings in a story without pushing humans or regular folk into insignificance.

The bottom line was that you have to create conflict. You can do this by creating a disparity of powers, giving all characters something they are completely awesome at (even if it’s just being totally loyal, like Sam in Lord of the Rings), not letting powers define who someone is, making the superbeing’s power irrelevant to the main problem, or focusing on interpersonal conflicts.

This all boils down to the same thing: no matter what you add to your story, you have to maintain a level of conflict. This is one of the biggest problems I’ve pointed out in manuscript evaluations. Authors either let their conflict falter, make their first conflicts irrelevant to what the plot later becomes, or never really establish a strong conflict in the first place.

Conflict = Story

Conflict is what drives your story. If you’ve got a character-driven book, the conflicts within that character are the thing the reader is reading about. If you’ve got a plot-driven book, the plot is centered around conflicts, whether they are interpersonal, societal, global, or simply fist-to-fist fight conflicts. Allow me to rephrase the first sentence in this paragraph: Conflict doesn’t drive story; conflict is story.

If you don’t have conflict, you don’t have story. If you don’t have story, you don’t really have fiction. (I’d also argue that most good nonfiction has a story as well. But I won’t get into that right now.)

Common Conflict Killers

If you’re writing a story, you’ll want to be on the lookout for common conflict killers. I’ve seen several types of conflict killers in manuscripts I’ve read or evaluated, and here are a few of the most common.

1. The main character doesn’t need to try. This first conflict killer is what the “Creating Gods” panel centered on. If you make a character too powerful, or even just too competent, there isn’t enough conflict to keep things interesting. If I look at your character, then at the situation, and know exactly how it’s going to go down and I know your character won’t lose anything in the process, then what is there to worry about or root for? There’s no suspense.

This doesn’t mean your character can’t be powerful; it just means they need to have skin in the game and something to lose. Take Superman. Kryptonite is a pretty lame weakness; it almost doesn’t count. But he has something to lose. He cares about people who are too weak to defend themselves, and he has Lois Lane to protect all the time. The WorldCon panelists pointed out that a lot of Superman’s identity stems from those he has to save. Even collateral damage can provide conflict. I’ve read far too many manuscripts where every obstacle the character faces provides no threat of loss.

2. A conflict is forgotten or erased instead of overcome. Relationship conflicts threaten a loss of love; many genre conflicts threaten a loss of life; several gut-wrenching conflicts threaten a loss of self or moral standing. That threat of loss drives a reader’s interest. If you, as the writer, forget the first conflict you introduce and supplant it with another, or magic it away instead of having the characters sort through it, you have made the conflict your reader invested in irrelevant. Do not do this. If the conflict is irrelevant, don’t introduce it in the first place. Ditching conflicts asks your reader to make an emotional investment and get absolutely no return.

That isn’t to say you can’t have multiple conflicts, or that they can’t interrupt each other. They just need to be sustained and relevant throughout your book. For example, in Robert Louis Stevenson’s Kidnapped, the initial conflict is that David Balfour cannot wrest his inheritance out of the clutches of his uncle Ebenezer. That conflict gets interrupted when David is kidnapped and ends up going on a book’s worth of adventures with the Scotsman Alan Breck. However, the conflict of David’s poverty continues throughout the book, and the conflict with Ebenezer returns in the final chapters and illustrates David’s emotional growth. The conflict is explicitly overcome.

3. Promising one conflict and delivering another. The last common conflict killer is more subjective than the other two because it centers on what you promise a reader in the opening chapters of your book. If you set up one type of conflict and then provide a completely different one, you can run into a load of trouble. I once read a manuscript that opened with a heart-wrenching revelation to the main character. The way it was introduced promised that the character would need to relearn how to trust herself and others. This conflict didn’t happen. She jumped right into trusting someone she hardly knew and risked all sorts of things for him. Given the self-doubt at the beginning of the book, that path didn’t ring true.

This is hard to spot in your own writing because you don’t always know what you’re promising. Get someone to read your manuscript. Most well-read people will be able to articulate when they’re getting something other than what they were promised. Also know that this is sometimes subjective. A friend of mine read Kidnapped and thought she was being served a family conflict and felt betrayed when she got a coming-of-age adventure story. I thought I was promised a coming-of-age story, and I didn’t gripe much when it stopped being a family drama and started being a Highland adventure.

Subjective or not, a disjoint between your promises and your delivery can kill your story. My friend hated Kidnapped, even though she could recognize many good things about it. That one broken promise broke the book for her.

So cultivate your conflict. Your readers will appreciate the effort.