A whiter shade of pale

[pjthompson]

Sleep: it's a wonderful thing. I highly recommend it. I got almost a full night last night, enough so that I'm not feeling quite so wuzzy and tender today.

I'm closing in on the end of chapter 24, too. Probably finish up tomorrow. I've been kind of dragging my heels, as this chapter is the start of a chain reaction of Doing Bad Stuff to my characters. I always hesitate to hurt them, to be the bad guy. Once I launch myself on that course, though, I can get pretty ruthless. A friend once said, "For someone so tender-hearted towards her characters you wind up putting them through hell." Not always, but...yeah.

Another friend, one of those organized-as-opposed-to-organic writers, laughed at my hesitance. "They aren't real people, Pam."

Well, yeah, they are. Not really real. I don't expect them to walk through the door, don't believe they have an existence separate from the pages of my book and the imaginations touched by them, but they are real. In their own way.

Writing lesson of the day: Beware the dreaded everyone-I-like-is-noble syndrome. My novel's MC has shading, I believe. He acts in contradictory and less-than-noble ways; fails to always do the right thing; gives into his baser instincts. Sometimes. But sometimes those surrounding him, the ones he cares for and who care for him, seem too good to be true. They may flare briefly with irrationality or anger or other salty emotions, but they seem to swing back to center too quickly. I don't always give them enough time or energy in human terms to work through things.

Some of this is a consequence of the first draft process and can be addressed in rewrites. But it's a persistent tendency I have to be on the watch for. Like today. Note to self: add in more human frailty next time around.

The other curious thing is that I don't think I have trouble shading the villains in my novels, giving them some sympathetic aspects. Dark areas in the heroes, places of light in the villains—it's just those folks in the middle who need tweaking.

Kind of like life?

Comments

[kimberlychapman.livejournal.com]

Heh, my husband loves to tease me when I get all sad and mopey after having tortured my characters. They lead very angsty lives. Sometimes hurting them makes me cry, and then hubby really teases (although it's all good-natured and I usually get snuggles out of the deal so it's not a bad thing). :)

But hurting them takes pain out of my own life and makes it go away, so I keep doing it.

I don't always give them enough time or energy in human terms to work through things.

THANK YOU.

Oh geez I'm so sick of people who think that characters have to be either cookie-cutter good or evil. I *like* good guys who occasionally fuck up, even big time, and then have to wade through their own messes. That's what makes them TRULY good, is that they try their best to clean up after themselves. And I like it when they can't always succeed, when there's a dose of realism in the fact that real life doesn't always wrap up in nice tidy threads at the end of an event.

But I keep reading editors and writers who say that there's some supposed "contract with the reader" where the ending MUST be happy and entirely satisfying. Bah. I hate that cheesy shit. As a reader and a writer I'm *much* more interested in something left dangling, some hurt that doesn't go away, some consequence that lingers.

I don't let my cops get all of the arrests they want. Some bad guys get away, some get got by someone else first. Sometimes good characters die, and it's not always the kind of death that would win one an Oscar...sometimes it's just *poof* they're gone, like in real life, and the point is for the reader to have to feel the same sense of discomfort and unexpected loss as the surviving characters. My princes don't always win princesses easily or vice versa, my good guys fight amongst themselves in times of stress, my heroes sometimes lose their way, my female leads are neither consistently strong nor wimpy, and at all times I strive to present humans as humans, not idealized freakballs.

And I really wish more writers understood the value of that.

[pjthompson]

I don't find books with cardboard people very interesting, myself. I like complex characters who've been through some life and had to learn to deal with things.

But I keep reading editors and writers who say that there's some supposed "contract with the reader" where the ending MUST be happy and entirely satisfying.

I would say that depends entirely on what genre you're talking about. If you're writing romances--yeah, the happy ending kind of goes with the territory. It's why people read romance. They want to escape into another world and know, no matter how bad it gets, they can always count on that happy ending.

With every other genre, I think there's more room to maneuver. The ending always needs to be satisfying, or the reader feels like they've wasted their time. But satisfying doesn't necessarily mean happy. I've read books that have ripped me up, but they've still satisfied me because I felt the writer had done the job of convincing me that the book had to end the way it did. And just the opposte, of course: happy endings that are not at all satisfying because I didn't believe in the process that got me there.

I don't think editors think differently about this. But the writer does have to do the job of convincing the editor (who is, after all, just a reader on a grander scale) that the ending of the book is justified, has been worked for, and is otherwise satisfying.

[kimberlychapman.livejournal.com]

Part of my problem is I keep getting shunted into the romance world because my characters have hot nookie from time to time and do a lot of smooching now and then. But I refuse to call my books romances (despite them being listed as such in various places online) because they absolutely do not follow the formula, including not necessarily having a happy ending. I am uninterested in that genre for reading, so I sure as hell ain't going to write it. If others like it, fine, but it's so not for me.

But because I tend to mingle genres all over the place, the nookie stands out and it gets labelled "romance". :/ A lot of hardcore scifi publishers won't touch stuff with nookie unless it's gross Heinlein-Oedipal-crap. And I don't do enough tech-talk to be hardcore scifi anyway. My medieval worlds tend to be low or no magic, but there's smooching so they get stuck with romance.

I really need to find a cross-genre publisher who likes long tomes.

[pjthompson]

Yeah, the marketing thing. A perpetual headache. My novel currently under consideration at Tor doesn't fall into easy categories, either. It's not really historical fiction, not really romance, not really horror, but it's got too many elements of each to be called pure fantasy, plus a bit of science fiction, too. A big dark fantasy confabulation spanning centuries--with a love story--so I suspect it might get stuck in romance if it ever got published. But I've begun to believe that it isn't going to make the cut. The novel I'm currently writing isn't much of an improvement, marketing-wise. Writing-wise, I think I'm doing okay. But where's my niche?

[kimberlychapman.livejournal.com]

Did you submit to Tor's paranormal romance line under Anna Genose? I did and got rejected mainly based on length, and possibly not quite enough romance. But I got a personal note on the form letter telling me that stuff, so my husband and favourite editor lady keep telling me that means the book at least doesn't suck. :)

Someone really needs to open a cross-genre publisher that doesn't do only ebooks. Every time I hear a rumour of a potential good one, it's e-only. Bah. I don't even read ebooks. I'm not opposed to having them in conjunction with print but I don't want e-only.

[pjthompson]

Did you submit to Tor's paranormal romance line under Anna Genose?

Yep. I don't think it's a good fit, but at least she asked for the whole book after reading the first 60.

But I got a personal note on the form letter telling me that stuff, so my husband and favourite editor lady keep telling me that means the book at least doesn't suck. :)

Yeah, I'd say that's a positive--and in the "not sucking" category. :-) Anna's got a rep for being nice to us writer folks.

[kimberlychapman.livejournal.com]

You got further than I did, congrats and I hope it works out for you! :)