Leaving The Dump

Or,

The Third Draft Problem

By Jay Stringer

Weddle's post yesterday was well timed.

I just finished the third draft of book 2, and the dump was one of the key battles in this draft. My first manuscript, OLD GOLD (under submission right now, plug plug) was a novel written by accident. I started writing a short story, and then kept going until I had a moody hardboiled mess of around 80,000 words. There was never a plan for it to be a novel, so all of the lessons I learned on that first one were about editing and re-structuring. Between the first and second drafts I changed the protagonist; in draft the first it was a barman, in draft the second I realised that one of the customers at the bar was far more interesting. Then I hacked and I chopped and I rewrote. I took advice and I honed and I cried and occasionally I wet the bet. (wait, did I say that out loud?) But at the end of it I had a tight little novel that I'm proud of.

But for the second book I found a whole new heap of problems. This was the first time I'd actually planned to write a book. How the hell do you do that? Well, if you're me, you don't. You know what themes you want to wrestle with, you know what happens in the first line, and you have a pretty clear idea of where you want it to end. Sit and type. Wait for the characters to start bossing you around. It's all fairly simple. (simple and easy are two different things.)

The first lesson I learned was that the first draft of the second book was exactly the same process as the first draft of the previous one. The only difference was the editing of the first one had clearly honed my voice somewhat, because straight off the bat I used about 20,000 fewer words. I had learned to get to the point. (I know that you might be finding that hard to believe right now.)

So the new process has gone something like this.

DRAFT ONE- Throw a load of words onto a page and try and find a good ending for it all.

DRAFT TWO- Take out as much of the crap as I can, and find my characters amidst all the sludge.

DRAFT THREE- Okay bub, the easy part is done. Now you gotta make this into a story. You got your plot and your characters, but now they gotta work together.

So somewhere in the second draft I figured out which characters needed to drive the story, and what their stake in the whole thing was. For the third draft I had to make sure that the characters and the plot were serving each other. Because if you know what happens, why it happens and who it happens to then you're on the road to having a story.

Which is where Weddle's dumping ground comes into it.

Fir the third draft I gave myself a rule. I am not in the book.

These are my characters. They are my words and they form a story I want to tell. Each little bit of the book's DNA has me in it. But aside from all that, I had to make sure I wasn't talking directly to the reader.

To follow that rule meant getting pretty hard on myself. If information needed to be put across, then it needed to be put across by a characters words or actions. One sub plot I'll dangle out there is that a character in the book has a drug problem. But, see, he has a problem, so he's not going to tell the reader about it. He's sneaky like that. And it's not really going to come up in conversation, because that would be contrived. So how the hell to let the audience know?

The answer was the scary part; trust. I show the character taking pills. I let him say it's medication. But then I also show that he won't let anyone else in the book see him take them, and I know the reader will pick up on it if they want to. And if they don't want to, hell, they still have a plot to enjoy.

One of the characters has fallen for one of the other characters, but doesn't realise it. That's a fun piece of information to try and get across when your main tool -your character- is being stupid. Again, I just decided to only show the things that it made sense to show.

The hard part of the rule was that there was a lot of information that I couldn't get across without stepping into the narrative. If it failed the test, it got stripped out of the book.

The dump takes on a few interesting added dimensions when it's the second book in a closely knit series. You need to give the reader information about what has happened in the previous book, without giving away too much. And that's a fine balance to try and find.

For instance, in book 2 I could tell you that Timmy fell down the stairs 9 months previously. You needed to know that to understand why he has a limp, a drug problem and a fear of stairs. But I didn't need to tell you that he was pushed down the stairs by the serial killing elf from Pluto. That way, if you go back and read the first one you have an idea of what happens at some point, but not why or how. You're still going to choke on your squash when you find out that his best friend, an elf from Pluto, is the serial killer.

So it's not just judging how and where to dump the information, it's judging which bits of information you need to dump more than once. Somewhere in the first 50 pages of every Matt Scudder novel he tells us about the girl that he accidentally killed. Was it always needed?

There was a time when every single Batman story would tell us that his parents were brutally slain and that cowards are a superstitious and cowardly lot. Did that always have a bearing on why he was about to punch the Joker in the face? No, not really.

But sometimes it did.

Sometimes we needed to know that lonely alcoholic Matt Scudder once accidentally killed a girl, and lit a candle for her every night. Sometimes we needed to know that Bruce Wayne witnessed his parents being killed. Sometimes the character and the story demanded that we know.

And these are all parts of the fun battle with the dump that I've been having. Not just how to get the information across, but also which information needs to be there.

And once you've fought those battles, and you're climbing free of the dumping ground and leaving it behind, there's one more hurdle for the second book to clear. The damned ending.

This might be a trilogy, it might be a quartet. Truth is, I won't know until I've nailed the first draft of the third book. But either way, book 2 has a problem. It's the middle of the story. It's building directly on what happened before, and it's leading directly to what follows.

But the book needs to stand. It has to be a story with a beginning, a middle and an end. It has to satisfy. As much love as we all throw at The Empire Strikes Back, and as much as that ending might have blown our minds when we were kids, it does a lousy job of standing on it's own as a story. It's just a couple of hours of middle, with some cool fight scenes and one of Harrison Fords finest moments.

But for my tastes, and for what I want to do with these books, I would be doing a disservice to the book and the readers if I pulled something like that. So the challenge was, how to fashion a beginning, a middle, and an end from what is all the middle of a larger story? How to serve the reader who only reads book 2 just as much as I serve the one who reads all three?

I know how I did it, but that's a post for another time. For now, all of these are just a few of the challenges that I'm labelling The Third Draft Problem. (That is, until I have to write a fourth.)

But what good examples can you think of writers who've managed to serve both sets of readers? Which books have stood just as well alone as they do when put in their place with the larger story?

And who wants to call me a jackass for taking my latest shot at Star Wars?

To The Dump

By Steve Weddle

HOUSEKEEPING NOTE: Today at the DSD Goodreads group, we get to discussing Benjamin Whitmer's PIKE. Please join in the discussion: http://bit.ly/gxa2o7

--

Something all writers fight with. Yeah, sometimes it's the what. What's the story about. What's the angle? The conflict. Sometimes it's the where, the setting. Urban. Smell of asphalt and smog, whatever the hell. The who, the characters. The villains. A believable protag. The alcoholic cop with the ex-wife and the bad thing in his past. The when. Maybe a period piece. Set it back when you grew up. Gives it some flavor, but you don't have to work too hard on the research.

But what about the where and when in the story to put all the whats? Right? The dreaded information dump.

I can't stand that crap, you know? Maybe it's just small stuff. The character who walks past a mirror, then stops to brush back her long, dark hair. Oh, phew. She's got long, dark hair. Good to know.

Or maybe the info dump concerns something bigger. Maybe you get that from another character:
Tony walked into the sports bar, waved "hello" to Mick.
"Well, if it isn't Anthony Pagliope. Haven't seen you since nine years ago when your father ran off with all that money from the big bad guy who is still at large. Then your father died leaving you with this huge 300-page mess to clean up so that your family name can be restored and your mother can be peaceful when she dies of cancer. What brings you back to this town?"

And the stuff about the neighborhood, because setting is important. Geez, do these people in novels have some friggin amazing memories, right?
Tony walked down the street where Mrs. Mahoney used to live with her dogs. Walking by, Tony thought of the time he helped Mrs. Mahoney nurse a sick puppy that had been struck by a car, thus showing Tony's generous nature and making the reader root for him. Tony handed a bag of turkey to a crippled orphan and walked on.

The problem for the writer is having all this stuff you have to manage. The reader has to care about the characters. The characters have to be in danger. In conflict. So, the writer has to make you care about the character while the character is getting hit in the face with a cricket bat. Dude, this ain't easy.

See, this backstory is the tough stuff. You have to keep things moving along in the story while reaching back and bringing forward stuff that makes your character worth caring about. Often it's that redemption crap. You know: she screwed up something in the past and now has to make things right? But, I mean, she didn't screw up too badly. Maybe she fell in with the wrong crowd even though her mother had warned her. Then some bad junk went down. Right? She couldn't have gone out one night drinking Boone's Farm and then set fire to an orphanage. You have to care about the person. So maybe something bad happened. Maybe she did something bad. Just not too bad. And the writer has to convey that, give the reader all that information and shape the reader's thoughts about it. How are you supposed to feel when you find out that the protag robbed a church for drug money? Maybe she was on her way to give the money back when the cops caught her. She serves some time and while she's in prison, her mom dies. Boohoo. Well, maybe that's bad but not too bad. So the writer has to get all this backstory to the reader, has to dump all this information. And where? Early enough so that you care about the protag, but not so early that it hinders the almighty "flow" of whatever crap you're writing.

Of course, it doesn't have to be the protag's backstory. It can be any character's. And maybe you get it in a dream. He has these terrible dreams about what's gone wrong in his life. Or maybe he's going to a shrink. Heck, that'll open things up.

The character's face. The setting. The backstory. Have you ever been hung up -- as reader or writer -- on the information dump? Got any words of wisdom for the rest of us?

Short Subjects

As I'm working on this blog post at the local Starbucks, I find it ironic that I used to come to this same Starbucks not too long ago when I needed to escape the internet and get writing done. Now I've canceled the internet at home and Starbucks has made their internet free and here we here, the world keeps turning. One of the things I should be working on is the next post for The Flash Fiction Offensive but I just can't get my ass in gear for it. They've been very good to me and they deserve better, but it's been a rough week for me personally and, well, I'm starting to remember why I got out of the fiction editing game back when. This, along with the impending flash fiction challenge here at DSD, along with some interesting news at the Mulholland Books site has me thinking about the future of short fiction on the web.

Mulholland has already made a great name for themselves in the crime fiction community before their first title even releases. Part of this is the high caliber of projects they've announced including work from some of my favorite writers like Duane Swierczynski, Lawrence Block, and Charlie Huston. But they've also set themselves up as a community forum for all things crime fiction related. The core of this community has been thoughtful essays ranging in subject from the definition of noir fiction to a discussion of human rights in Europe. These essays are passed around through blogs and Twitter and Facebook and has other authors, myself included, salivating at the thought of being invited to submit one. Along with these essays they've also posted the occasional short story.

Now they've made the move to expand this section and it's the announcement that has me thinking about the future of short fiction. Since my beginnings in the online short fiction world I've been convinced that the only way for crime fiction to truly offer a major paying online alternative to Ellery Queen and Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazines was to have an journal associated with a publisher. You see this in science fiction to various degrees with Subterranean Press and Tor.comand back around the days of the first Internet explosion in 2001 Random House sponsored an online journal called Bold Type. But there's never been anything like it for crime fiction. Until now. Mulholland has teamed up with Popcorn Fiction, a short story site originally created to promote the short fiction of screenwriters and speed their translation to the big screen. I would assume that with the new arrangement, we will see more Mulholland contributors in addition to screenwriters.

On one hand this is great. More new short fiction from great writers and the potential for some long-overdue professional recognition of online short fiction. But as of right now, there doesn't seem to be any plans to open the site for submissions beyond screenwriters and Mulholland authors. This leaves me room to plot. I'd like to see another site step up and offer an original fiction section open to submissions from all writers. The two publishers that pop immediately to mind are Minotaur Books--as their sister publisher runs the previously mentioned Tor.com--and Tyrus Books because they've exhibited a forward-thinking strategy willing to explore non-traditional publicity solutions.

It would seem to make quite a bit of sense for the publisher. Even paying a professional rate of .05 to .10 a word for a few short stories a month would get them wonderful, targeted exposure for less than the cost of a full page ad in a major newspaper or magazine. And as we've all seen, the online fiction community is very loyal and would be more likely to buy books from a publisher they saw as a contributor to the larger community rather than a giant soulless entity.

What are your thoughts. As a writer, would you like to see more of these publisher-backed short fiction outlets pop up. And for the readers out there: If a publisher back a short fiction site you were fond of, would that inspire you to buy more of their books?

The DSD Christmas Noir Flash Challenge

By Do Some Damage

STORIES!!! CONTESTS!!! FREE STUFF!!!

Everyone gets a little crazy over Christmas, and ol' uncle DSD is no exception. All year round we keep him locked in the basement giving the evil eye to unsuspecting authors, but this time of year we let him out for the holidays.

You know what he does? He starts throwing free books at people. Yes, that's right, free books.

He also starts trying to eat the postman's leg, but that's not important right now.

You want the free, right? There's some great crime titles included in our bag of stuff, but we don't want to give away all the details just yet.

And that's not all. We want to invite you guys into DSD towers for a poke around. We want to hand the site over to you, just for a little while. You can come on in, wipe your feet, take a seat, and use our little stage to shout at the world.

Here's the deal (free books! free books!) We're issuing a flash fiction challenge. We want 600-1000 words of the best Christmas noir, transgressive, caper or hardboiled fiction you can throw at us. The only stipulation is that it has to be a Christmas story. But hell, you wanna know how loose a stipulation that is? Uncle DSD's favourite Christmas film is DIE HARD. So you can see that just about anything goes, as long as it's Christmas.

Normally for a flash challenge everyone puts the stories on their own blogs. But we'd like to run your stories here, mixed in with our own. Run them at your own blog and post the links in comments here, sure, but if you want your free books you gotta send your story to us.

Anyone who submits to us enters the drawing for cool fun stuff. There will be other giveaways too, but that's a story for another time.

We'll be posting the stories starting Monday the 20th, and running right through until Monday the 4th of January, when we let Weddle back out of Gumbo's kennel.

Small print.

Send your stories to the email address up there at the top right. Every submission enters a draw for FREE STUFF. People leaving comments about the published stories will also enter the draw. The doors close on Sunday the 19th. The first submission to us automatically gets FREE STUFF.

The Ian Fleming - Raymond Chandler Podcast

by
John McFetridge

Okay, so it wasn't a podcast it was Ian Fleming interviewing Raymond Chandler on the BBC, but it sounds just like a podcast today - a couple of writers sitting around bitching. What is genre? Can it be literature? How long does it take you to write a book?

Fleming even asks Chandler, "Where do you get your ideas?"

The interview took plce in 1958. There's about a five minute intro here giving some background and then the interview starts. It's really worth listening to the whole thing.

Here's Part One:



Part Two:



Part Three:



Part Four:




I think it's interesting when Chandler says there are no California novelists worth talking about no one mentions John Steinbeck.