Popping Pimples on Paragraphs: 5 Things To Watch For

Gads, that sounds like a pompous start to pontification. But I wanted to talk about something that I often say in class. It’s something Connie Willis told my Clarion West class, and which I repeat, but don’t explain as thoroughly as I should, because it’s so clear in my head.

But words are imprecise things, and so I’m a-gonna do what we used to call “unpacking” back in grad school and even provide some useful examples.

What did Connie say? She said, “Good fiction teaches us what it means to be human.” As good f&sf writers, I would argue that we might change “human” to “self-aware being,” but that is picking nits.

So what does that mean? It means we’re all faced with this common problem: life. And we want to know what we’re supposed to do, and what we can get away with, and what to do about all that hardcoded primate behavior that keeps popping up from time to time, and stuff like that. Sometimes the message features a universal human, sometimes it is a human shaped by particular circumstances, such as race, gender, class, sexuality, disability, etc. It’s why we like to read fiction. It’s why we like gossip. We want to know what other human beings do.

And here’s why this is important: Sometimes thinking about what a story is trying to say is a good way to complete, rewrite, or sharpen it. Doing this at one of those stages can move a story from good to excellent. Do I start a story knowing the message? Hell no. It emerges (hopefully). Sometimes I have to coax it out of its hiding place in the prose. Sometimes I have to go in with a club.

But what are some examples of messages? This is my blog and so I am going to be lazy and pull examples from my own work. Here’s some easy ones:

• Worm Within – Sometimes people go crazy and can’t trust their own perceptions.
• Whose Face This Is, I Do Not Know – Sometimes we take our cues to appear a certain way from other people and it’s not usually a survival trait.
• Bus Ride to Mars – What’s this dying thing all about and will stories carry us through?
• Lost in Drowsy Dreams – Jealousy leads to sad moments.
• The Immortality Game – Daydreaming and wishing about the past is a futile and sometimes narcissistic activity.
• Love Resurrected – You don’t always get what you want in love and sometimes if you do, you will regret it.
• Clockwork Fairies – Differing viewpoints of the world can present difficulties in love
• Ms. Liberty Gets A Haircut – Feminism is complicated.
• And the current piece I’m finishing up – Addiction will twist your life in strange ways.

Can you do this with every story? Maybe. There’s some of mine that I’d have a hard time doing this with, but I don’t know whether the problem is my own blinders, a lack on the part of the story, or just something that happens sometime.

Thoughts? How easy is it for you to figure out what your stories want to say? And when you find that out, what do you do with it?

(And shouts out to my peep Ann Leckie, who also edits the fine online fiction magazine Giganotasaurus, on the book deal!! Go Ann, you rock!!)

Enjoy this writing advice and want more content like it? Check out the classes Cat gives via the Rambo Academy for Wayward Writers, which offers both on-demand and live online writing classes for fantasy and science fiction writers from Cat and other authors, including Ann Leckie, Seanan McGuire, Fran Wilde and other talents! All classes include three free slots.

Prefer to opt for weekly interaction, advice, opportunities to ask questions, and access to the Chez Rambo Discord community and critique group? Check out Cat’s Patreon. Or sample her writing here.

So, as some may know, I’ve been working on a particular book for a loooong time. Looooong time. It’s the first in a fantasy trilogy and this manuscript has undergone so many convulsions and rewrites that I was getting to the point where I was worried I’d kill it if I went much further. Based on some solid feedback from an interested agent, I started wrestling with it again and performed some major surgery: excised a number of points of view (which will end up in Book 2), removed some extraneous (but charming!) bits misguidedly intended as textual amuse-bouches between chapters, and switched one point of view from 3rd person past to 1st person present.

I was encouraged, but worried that the patient might not have survived the surgery. So I dumped it on my writing group, whose members rose whole-heartedly to the challenge, and we critted it last Saturday.

And I discovered – yay! it’s not broken. Some bits need to be made more connected, and in the discussion, someone suggested something absolutely brilliant, which helps me tie things together in a way that I’d been trying unsuccessfully to do. I came out of the session encouraged and with a clearer eye on how to fix what’s not working in it. I know I can make my deadline for handing it off, and it’ll be a better, clearer, more interesting book for the effort, which is awesome because I’m really pretty proud of how it’s turning out.

That, in an ideal world, is what a writing group does. They don’t pull punches when something needs fixing, but they do it in a way that helps you figure out how to fix it. Their feedback is valuable; their support even more precious. So to the wonderful folks who valiantly waded through the book despite the lateness of my turning it in – thank you. Persephone d’Shaun, Caren Gussoff, Keffy Kehrli, Tod McCoy, Vicki Saunders, and Emily Skaftun, you all rock. Consider yourselves thoroughly appreciated.