Public Stakes

The fate of the world.

Again, another idea that writers should consider as given and then work harder to make it interesting. However, in this case, when you’re taking a threat and making it global you need to be sure that it is still believable.

Maass offers two very different examples of public stakes in Thomas Harris’ Silence of the Lambs and David Guterson’s Snow Falling on Cedars. I recommend a close reading of his explanation of the techniques employed by these authors.

Personal Stakes

In short, this is about creating a connection between the reader and the main characters by revealing details about their personal lives, However, there is another aspect to this that Maass reveals:

What is your character’s deepest desire? Got it? Good. Now, take it away or put obstacles in from of them that they must overcome to reach it. If you’ve done a good job of establishing the personal stakes, the reader will actually care if your character makes it to their goal and will keep reading to find out if they ever do.

Escalating Stakes

A simple plan to escalate the stakes in an already defined situation is to make the basic problem even more intense. Maass suggests an alternative, which is to add even more complications but of a different variety. In addition, Maass stresses that timing is everything. You need to think about the right moment for things to get worse as well as how they get worse.

How can the stake become not just a possible loss but one that has a palpable, dread-producing immediacy? Here is where the close call, the minidisaster, the preliminary loss can prove useful. It is one thing to warn of danger. It is another to let it take a bite out of the people in your story early on, or perhaps at a later moment as a reminder of just how devastating the ultimate disaster could be…

Achieving this effect demands that you, the author, be willing to make your characters suffer. That can be tough to do, but consider this: Being nice does not engender great drama.

I think that last sentence is particularly important. So many authors, myself included, play too nice with the characters in the story. We don’t make them hurt enough. This is something that will hold you back.

Your Own Stakes

What is burning a hole in your gut? Right now as you’re reading this article?

After all, we’re getting close to 4,500 words here. If you’ve made it this far you are searching for something deep. I know why I’m writing this, and that is my fire. I want to figure out what the hell went wrong with my development as a novelist and how I ended up tripping out on literary beauty instead of fiction that works.

You need to understand that I am a very performance-oriented person. To lose myself in the sublime is sort of the underbelly of my character. It’s procrastination with style. And it makes me very angry.

That kind of fire needs to show up in your fiction too. You need to understand why you are writing, what you have to lose if it fails. Is it just some artistic project of yours, some little toy? Do you just like calling yourself a writer? You have to admit, it’s pretty cool at first, but then later, when people keep asking you what it is that you write and other people start offering the fact that you are a writer… Do you cringe? Do you sweat?

I do.

I sweat because I don’t know what it is that I write anymore. I used to say things like “slice of life portraits of beauty” or some similar abstract nonsense. What that really means is that I don’t write anything. I pretend to write. Learn from my mistakes, figure out why you’re here and crank up the stakes.

Time and Place

At heart, I am a worldbuilder and in writing this is where I tend to get bogged down. I love playing with all the little details of my imaginary places, even the settings that are not fantastic but merely depictions of the mundane.

As I write these lines, the book of the moment for me is Angel of Darkness by Caleb Carr. It came out a few years back but I am just getting around to reading it. They mystery is excellent, but what intrigues me most about this story (and its predecessor The Alienist) is Carr’s fantastic rendition of New York City circa 1900. It’s as detailed as any fantasy novel and just as immersive. I feel like I am there. I feel like I can smell the horse dung on the streets and the pervasive smoke. Really, it’s fantastic stuff.

When I’m building out a world of my own, I tend to stall because I fret about the details of how certain things came to be, little things like oh, the way a light switch works and why. You can see how this gets me off track. In fact, I am now three paragraphs into this section and I think I could go on easily for 2-3,000 words.

Maass begins this chapter by noting that there are two general schools of thought:

Many novelist seem to think of setting as something outside of their story. It is necessary, but it is a bother. It has to be included, yet ought to be dealt with as efficiently as possible. After all, who wants to read pages and pages of description?

Just as many novelists seem to feel that setting is one of their novel’s most important elements. They open their works with establishing passages that set the mood and thereafter catalog the surroundings in every scene.

Overlooking the redundancy in that last sentence (or was it put there on purpose for the careful reader as a sign that overdoing description can be redundant? See how the literary “mind” works? By the way, I put mind in quotes because I really wanted to put in neurosis…), I’m sure I fall into the first category.

There is nothing I like less than a novel without context. Human beings do not exist separately from their environment and their surroundings. Even the most alien and sterile of environments, say airports or corporate cube farms, leave deep impressions on our thoughts and actions. Without context, most novels lie flat and dead.

What Science Fiction and Fantasy Novels Can Teach Us All

Because the time and place of sci-fi and fantasy are often created entirely from the imagination, they provide an excellent laboratory for demonstrating the need to create compelling detail and integrate it into the story. However, many writers have not considered the fact that all fiction, no matter the genre, is about creating an artificial world. The fictional world has rules and history. It might be quite similar to our own reality, but in the end there are usually slight differences. Attention to those differences, especially exaggeration, is one of the elements in creating a compelling setting for your fiction.

Science fiction and fantasy fans frequently say one of the chief reasons they enjoy that genre is it takes them to alternate times and places that are utterly convincing. They love the details.
[…] As your colleagues in science fiction and fantasy have shown us, building breakout time and place starts with the principle that the world of the novel is composed of much more than description of landscape and rooms. It is milieu, period, fashion, ideas, human outlook, historical moment, spiritual mood and more. It is capturing not only place but people in an environment; not only history but humans changing their era. Description is the least of it. Bringing people alive in a place and time that are alive is the essence of it.

I am going to recommend another book to you. No matter what genre you write in, Orson Scott Card’s How to Write Science Fiction and Fantasy will teach you everything you need to know about the elements described above by Maass. Card’s book will teach you a lot about writing in general, but it is especially powerful stuff when it comes to milieu.

The Psychology of Place

This section describes the use of place to induce emotional states in the reader. In the nineteenth century, this technique was stretched to the limit. Almost comical in fact. Turn of the Screw by Henry James is a good example of pushing this a bit too far. I know it’s classic literature and such, but it is a bit heavy handed and most serious literary critics will admit as much.

Keeping Up With the Times

The passage of time in a work of fiction is exceedingly important. There is nothing worse than reading a novel and thinking that there is no way that X could have occurred in the time span allotted.

I have a great example of this (which you no doubt find shocking).

In State of Fear by Michael Crichton, characters go galavanting off up and down the planet lickity-split. Not only that, but they recover from horrible injuries and near-death experiences so quickly that you would think they were part of the X-Men instead of regular people. At one point, we have characters fly from California to Antarctica and then while traveling by snowcat they fall into a crevasse, climb out, nearly freeze to death, are rescued, recover from frostbite and hypothermia, and then fly out again in what seems like oh about four hours.

Of course, Crichton puts little time headers at the start of each chapter so the real amount of time elapsed is supposed to be a day or so (which is still ridiculous). Still, the time headers are cheating. Pure and simple.

Ok, this isn’t the crux of Maass’ text but I had to say all that. In any case, what Maass want you to think about is how your characters fit into their era. How are they a part of their times? And how do you as an author make that relevant to today?

Working with Historical Forces and Social Trends

Whatever the scope of your novel, it will benefit from a depiction of the social context in which it takes place. Your characters life in society, but in which strata? At what point is their social position most keenly felt? At what moment does it change? Does your heroine’s status rise or fall? How can she tell? Are your cast of characters aware of the way in which society is evolving? No? Well, why not? A wide-angle view of the civilization around your story will magnify the story in exciting ways.

This is the last paragraph in this section and it proves my theory that the last sentence in a paragraph usually contains the best thought, just as the last paragraph in a section does the best job of summing up.

In this case, the idea is weaving in the forces and trends of the moment into your story to deepen the sense of place and time. This is pretty basic stuff, but often writers just go into documentation mode and blab on about a lot of details without putting them into relative context in their characters lives.

Caleb Carr is a master of weaving these details into place. In Angel of Darkness, he works gobs of information about the pending Spanish-American war without giving a dissertation. Well, no, that isn’t quite right. What Carr does is give a dissertation but the reader never feels that way. People and customs, far flung outpost of empire, intrigue and the mechanics of building a case for the prosecution of war, all of these elements could lead to a terribly boring book. Yet, Carr has accomplished just the opposite. Maass’ quote above is something for every author to think about as they work with the details of time and place.

God at Work in the World

I had problems with this section and it wasn’t because of Richard Dawkins. Rather it was because I myself have failed to include anything in my books and stories resembling the sense that the universe is any bigger than the characters and the events themselves. Maass suggests that readers connect more deeply with a work of fiction if they see some reflection of a wider universe at work, and I have to agree. Again, it’s one of those things that you know will work but somehow it doesn’t make it into the plotting. Keep an eye on this.

The Secret Ingredient

Retail is details.

I don’t care what it is that you’re selling: books, movies, groceries, whatever. If you don’t pay attention to details, your customer is going to leave you with an empty register and a lot of inventory.

In this case, the customer is the reader and the author who fails to pay attention to details is the author who will be working a corporate day job or bagging the aforementioned groceries soon enough (I happen to be the former, though the latter seems increasingly attractive as I lug my weary bones in each day).

This doesn’t mean that you should write with violet ink rather:

Marshaling detail and learning the art of writing in nouns and verbs are essential to success in any type of writing. That is especially true in the breakout novel. […] The breakout novelist does not merely set a scene; she unveils a unique place, one resonant with a sense of time, woven through with social threads and full of destinies.

Talk yourself down off the ledge now because Maass really cranks up the sublime in this section. However, there is a simple rule that you will find in nearly every writing book (include Stephen King’s On Writing): get rid of adjectives and adverbs.
No, really.

Go through your latest chapter-story-scene and count up your adjectives. Then, turn around and count up the adverbs. Now, count up the nouns and verbs. If you have a a ratio of 1:1 (adverb/adjective:noun/verb), you’re in trouble, See what you can do to get that ratio down to .1:1.

Then, when you’re totally frustrated with this exercise go and grab two bestsellers and try the same thing. I know it sucks. The truth hurts. I love my adjectives and adverbs but they kill the flow of your fiction. Not only that, but overused modifiers will bore the living crap out of your readers. Learn from my mistakes.