Think of transitions as links in the narrative chain, holding scenes together and allowing for a natural progression from one to the next.So the title of this looks like I’m going to talk about something useful, but actually, I’m pretty much going to gush about Joe Abercrombie’s writing. I hadn’t read anything by him, but was at Confusion last January and had enough people recommend his writing (and watched a writer I admire go total fanboy when confronted with Joe) that I picked up THE HEROES to try it out and was immediately blown away.
So now I’ve worked my way through BEST SERVED COLD and am on the third volume of the First Law trilogy, which starts with THE BLADE ITSELF (and I can tell I’m going back to read both of the first two, in order to see better how they fit with the First Law trilogy). I’ve got to say, gee whiz, when Delany is talking about how you can only write stuff as good as the best stuff you’re reading, this is the sort of thing he’s talking about, because I know I’ve learned a good bit about the subject matter mentioned in the title from looking to see how Abercrombie does it.
The books have multiple POVs. A frighteningly large number of them, and I say that as someone who’s worked with them in a novel and seen how complicated and yucky and full of snarls that particular brand of yarn can be. In THE HEROES, the POVs aren’t restricted to main characters – sometimes the writing does things like dip briefly but deeply into the mind of a secondary character who’s about to get killed on the next page.
Where those POVs overlap, their collision creates additional meaning. For example, there’s a lengthy section in the head of Logen, a Northman, about how unnatural he finds the privies in the southern castle he’s visiting. A bit later, while in the POV of another character, we see him look upset at the possibility that an assassin might have crawled up through one of them, and because of that earlier section, that look takes on a deeper meaning, to the point where another character sees him still looking at the latrine door suspiciously, the effect is wonderfully funny.
Often the same encounter is seen through multiple eyes, letting us see where people go wrong. It’s a very powerful strategy, perhaps because it invokes a certain frustration on the part of the reader without getting TOO frustrating to the moment where you end up with a moment where you just want to scream at the characters, “WHAT are you thinking?” And characters thinking about each other and their relationship, particularly a relationship that keeps changing, works so beautifully, so wonderfully, for developing character and relationship and even plotline, that I’m in awe.
I’ve got to say that one of my favorite moments is in BEST SERVED COLD, and you should stop right now if you haven’t read it, because I really don’t want to spoil this for you. There’s a section where the POV is shifting rapidly back and forth between two characters, and we think they’re in the same place only to find at the end of the passage that everything the reader thought was, in fact, wrong. It’s gorgeous. If I were the jealous sort of writer, I think it would make me want to hit Joe and then go weep with despair.
Fortunately (probably for both of us), I’m not. Instead I’m looking to see how he does all this so I can steal freely. In fact, in the latest story I finished, I noticed a transition where one character is starting a thought and another is finishing it, that I’m pretty sure came from this reading.
So for those reading this trying to create their own transitions – here’s one strategy that Abercrombie seems to use often. Is there something – an object, a phrase, a circumstance of weather – in one scene’s ending that can be used in the next scene’s beginning? Some examples:
First scene ends with an observation about the snow; the following begins with an expansion on that.
First scene contains mention of a particular character; the following is from that character’s POV.
First scene someone wonders what a particular character is doing and imagines their circumstances; following scene is from that character’s POV and shows how wrong the imagining was.
Movies do this a lot. We close with a shot of one object; a similar shot begins the next scene. Someone says something to close a scene; in the next it’s repeated or answered. We close on a landscape at a particular time and open with it transformed by a different setting in time. These transitions give a feeling of completeness. Rather than separate pieces jammed together like a mosaic, they’re woven together, threads from one leading into and changing another. Transitions lead the reader along, let her/him swing from vine to vine like Tarzan, each one a new handhold on their journey through the narrative.
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This is going to sound so weird, but the same transitions that I enjoy from Abercrombie I first noticed in work by Adam Reed and Matt Thompson, who created the Adult Swim show Sealab 2021. If you’ve watched any of their work, including Frisky Dingo or Archer, you can see that same clever method of letting one character start a thought at the end of a scene and the other pick it up at the beginning of the next. So when I started reading Abercrombie I was highly amused to experience it as if it was a serious, blood-splattered cartoon.
That one back-and-forth series of scenes you were referring to in Best Served Cold made Seamus and I laugh uproariously when we were reading it… we were on a long car trip, so I suppose we’re lucky to have survived our mirth 🙂
Reading Joe’s work was probably influential on my decision to do a book in omni and not third person limited. I wanted that cinematic feeling that a huge cast of characters can bring to a book, and I loved the way he pulls his reader through a story with every character’s perspective a separate but necessary piece of the whole. Like a big, tangled knot.
There are a few other authors who master a wide cast, but he does a great job of giving depth and using the POV’s to play off each other. Definitely one to read and learn from.
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"(On the writing F&SF workshop) Wanted to crow and say thanks: the first story I wrote after taking your class was my very first sale. Coincidence? nah….thanks so much."
~K. Richardson
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When Can You Get Away with Wordy Prose?
The following comes from an email exchange between myself and John Barnes, whose story I critiqued and who has given permission to reprint the exchange 🙂 I know that this question often comes up for newer writers. They see writers who write long, elaborate sentences and wonder why they then get criticized for overly long and complicated sentences.
John: When you said to work on writing on a sentence /paragraph level, were you referring to sentence structure or cutting needless words? Was it well-written? Would a good play on muscle memory to intersperse the story with flashes of memory, along the lines of what Aliette De Bodarde did with immersion?
The answer to the question in the first sentence is yes to both. I think that you are at a point in your writing where you should both be looking at constructing interesting, graceful sentences as well as making sure that you remove excess words. Extraneous language often gets in the way of a story’s speaking to a reader, muffling its impact.
I thought the language was competent, but still needs the final polish that removes any awkwardness or places where the prose calls attention to itself. One of the ways a writer convinces the reader to relax and give into the experience of the story is by convincing them they are in expert hands that will keep reminders that they are reading to a minimum. Awkward sentences or passages that are overly wordy can remind a reader that they are reading and generally are experienced as a negative rather than a positive.
Absolutely a good play on muscle memory that intersperses the story with flashes of memory would be great. To make it superlative, the language needs to be constructed as clearly as possible. If you go over “Immersion,” you will see that in every sentence, words are pulling their weight and there are no extras.
John: Thanks, so keep it simple then? What about writers like Cat Valente or Laird Barron who usually have flowery prose in their writing? On Neil Clarke’s sub page for Clarkesworld he says “language is important, there’s no distinction between “style” and “substance” or “story” and “writing”. What exactly did he mean by that? I only ask because you have many stories published in their issues and that ezine is like the uncatchable unicorn for writers like me. lol Thanks again.
If you look at Cat Valente or Laird Barron’s prose you’ll see that although it is flowery, every word in it is still doing something.
To see what I mean, let’s look at a passage from both of them. Here is one of Valente’s, from Silently and Very Fast in Clakesworld:
Ravan told me these stories. He set up a great hexagonal library in his Interior, as dusty and dun-colored and labyrinthine as any ancient scriptorium. He made himself a young novice with a fresh-shaven tonsure, and me a country friar with a red, brandy-drinking nose. He showed me the illuminator’s table, and a great book whose pages had golden edges and illuminations in cobalt and oxblood and Tyrian purple, and the images showed great machine armies trampling men underfoot. They showed cruel metal faces and distant, god-like clouds of intellect: incomprehensible and vast and uncaring. They showed the Good Robot desperately asking what love was. They showed fatal malfunctions and mushroom clouds. They showed vicious weapons and hopeless battles, noble men and women with steady gazes facing down their cruel and unjust artificial children, who gave no mercy.
These are complex sentences at times. They employ poetic techniques, such as the repetition of “They showed” as well as the deliberately repeated conjunction “and” of “cobalt and oxblood and Tyrian purple”. Notice how the “They showed” becomes like pages flipping.
But there are no extraneous words, no words that are not accomplishing at least several of the following duties: constructing a world for the reader, conveying information about the world, creating a specific tone, amplifying the engaging nature of the prose with sensory detail, providing aural delight when mentally read, providing beautiful or entertaining language, etc.
Here’s a passage from Laird Barron’s Blood & Stardust, which features a protagonist that has some similarities with yours.
My nerves weren’t always so frayed; once, I was too dull to fear anything but the Master’s voice and his lash. I was incurious until my fifth or sixth birthday and thick as a brick physically and intellectually. Anymore, I read anything that doesn’t have the covers glued shut. I devour talk radio and Oprah. Consequently, my neuroses have spread like weeds. Am I getting fat? Yes, I’ve got the squat frame of a Bulgarian power lifter, but at least my moles and wens usually distract the eye from my bulging trapeziuses and hairy arms.
I also dislike the dark, and wind, and being trussed hand and foot and left hanging in a closet. Dr. Kob used to give me the last as punishment; still does it now and again, needed or not, as a reminder. Perspective is extremely important in the Kob house. The whole situation is rather pathetic, because chief among his eccentric proclivities, he’s an amateur storm chaser. Tornadoes and cyclones don’t interest him so much as lightning and its capacity for destruction and death. Up until his recent deteriorating health, we’d bundle into the van and cruise along the coast during storm season and shoot video, and perform field tests of his arcane equipment. Happily, those days seem to be gone, and none too soon. It’s rumored my predecessor, daughter numero uno, was blown to smithereens, and her ashes scattered upon the tides, during one of those summer outings.
Here again, sentences are leanly fleshed and adverbs like “rather” and “extremely” are used sparingly. Notice that sentences are not uniformly long. The average sentence is 12 words long, so let’s see how Barron’s passage maps against that. Its sentences by word count go 20/17/11/5/7/4/29/20/23/8/17/30/11/24. Looking at that, you can see how although usually sentences are longer than average, some short ones are interspersed, creating what I would describe as texture or perhaps rhythm, to the writing. Along the same lines, look at the Valente sentences by word count: 5/20/20/34/16/10/7/26.
This is important but subtle stuff, and I am not suggesting that anyone needs to go through and count the words in their sentences, just that they do need to consider length. Writers don’t have to just construct stories on the level of character and situation. They must also convey that story through sentences that are constructed as optimally as possible to deliver the experience of the story to the reader.
I think this is why it Neil Clarke is referencing on the submissions page. He wants stories that pay attention not just to the plotting, that the language in which it is conveyed and the skill with which the experience is created for the reader. This is one of the hard to acquire but essential skills that end up elevating writing from good to great, in my opinion.
John: Thanks for clearing that up, now that I look at it more closely, I can see that the sentences aren’t that complex, just seem dense when read as a whole. And there are very few “dress-up” words. Does a writer need poetic techniques to give the story quality? Asimov’s and some of the work in F&SF have pretty transparent prose?
I don’t know that a writer needs poetic techniques, but they certainly help. A story has to have some reason for the reader to want to keep going — beauty of style helps but it’s not enough. There must also be plot and the characters and the cool world-building, etc. Some writers get by on something else and stick to a very plain — and sometimes downright awkward, hence my reluctance to say “needs” — prose, but they’re going full out with killer plots or heart-wringing characters or snappy dialogue, all in spades.
For me sometimes a dense style — one with conscious use of poetic technique, symbology, and sensory input — has worked well, and it is something that seems to appeal to Clarkesworld.
Here’s a sample passage from The Worm Within, which appeared there. It’s meant to be read aloud, and plays with repeated sounds. It’s also an unreliable narrator and the sentence structures are meant to provide a sense of unease in the reader, as are some of the sensory details.
But after only a single pirouette, my inner tenant stirs. He plucks pizzicato at my spine, each painful twang reminding me of his presence, somewhere inside.
He says, They’ll find you soon enough TICK they’ll hunt you down. They’ll realize TICK what you are, a meat-puppet in a TICK robot world, all the shiny men and women and TICK in-betweens will cry out, knowing what you are. They’ll find TICK you. They’ll find you.
Here is a section where I use plainer language, in another Clarkesworld story, “The Mermaids Singing, Each to Each”.
Sometimes I used to imagine crashing her on a reef and swimming away, leaving her to be covered with birdshit and seaweed, her voice lasting, pleading, as long as the batteries held out. Sometimes I used to imagine taking one of the little cutting lasers, chopping away everything but her defenseless brainbox, deep in the planking below the cabin, then severing its inputs one by one, leaving her alone. Sometimes I imagined worse things.
I inherited her from my uncle Fortunato. My uncle loved his boat like a woman, and she’d do things for him, stretch out the last bit of fuel, turn just a bit sharper, that she wouldn’t do for me or anyone else. Like an abandoned woman, pining for a lover who’d moved on. I could have the AI stripped down and retooled, re-imprint her, but I’d lose all her knowledge. Her ability to recognize me.
I tried in this passage to convey something about the main character’s emotional state. When it breaks into more poetic language with the repeated “Sometimes I used to imagine beginning each sentence” the repeated structure is intended to intensify the emotion that underlines the passage, the deep anger that the protagonist feels towards the Mary Magdalena.
In conclusion, I hope these examples have shown that studying poetry is not time wasted for a writer, particularly when learning strategies involving repeated sounds, rhythms, and figures of speech. That sort of attention to detail is what leads to the degree of skill that allows a writer to get away with “wordy” prose.
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.
Interview with Sherwood Smith on Omniscient Point of View in the Inda Series
Recently the question of omniscient POV has come up in several classes, so I started reading some examples of it. One of the best I hit was Sherwood Smith’s Inda series. I figured, why not go to Sherwood and ask some questions about how she pulled that off.
What drew you to using omniscient point of view for the Inda series? What sorts of stories work particularly well with that POV? Were there any models that you looked when working with it?
I had always written in omni. I’m a visual writer (with all its pluses and pitfalls), which means I see a movie in my head””not just dialogue but characters’ inner lives. Omni always seemed the easiest way to get that movie down.
But when I started selling, I was told to switch to limited third, which I had to learn.
Segue up a couple decades, I was desperate to escape the limitations of third, and omni was no longer (trigger doom music) Forbidden. I had to relearn omni, by which I mean consciously grasping the difference between omniscient voice and head-hopping. (Some readers will call omniscient voice head-hopping. My guess is that some of these readers might have had little exposure to early novels.)
To review omni, I went back to the eighteenth and nineteenth century books I’d grown up reading, with an eye to the development of narrative voice: I noted how Jane Austen invented the modern novel with her mostly-offstage narrator, which had been influenced by Henry Fielding‘s rudimentary narrative style in Tom Jones, and Samuel Richardson‘s experimentation in Clarissa. I reread William Thackeray‘s Vanity Fair, whose narrator strides right out on stage, breaking the fourth wall to directly address the audience.
I came to the conclusion that every novel, actually, has a narrator. Including those written in limited third or even camera-eye view. But many writers don’t recognize that. Maybe they don’t need to. Everybody’s process is different. For me, it’s a helpful rule or reminder for handling diegesis as well as mimesis, and how to incorporate elements like public, private, and intimate space (each with its discrete focus), how to slide into free indirect discourse, etc.
Anyway, with Inda””with any big, braided story””I find limited third so, um, limiting. It’s so difficult to get all the POVs in you want and not jerk the reader back and forth in time, or break the narrative into little scenes in order to properly isolate those POV changes. If you’ve got a narrator, and know why that narrator is telling the story, I think one can better see the entire structure of the novel, and determine how many POVs to use, where, and when.
What difficulties presented themselves as a result? What did you have to be mindful about as you were writing?
Slipping too frequently into diegesis, especially when tired, and summarizing what ought to be scenes. When I say tired, I don’t mean single sessions, though that is true, too. I mean those long months, even years, it takes to write a novel””sometimes forgetting it takes a few hours to read it. Another aspect to be mindful of is limiting the access to characters’ thoughts to those needed for not just the action through-line but the emotional through-line. And cut out all the other voices yammering, or they can proliferate fast into side-stories.
What issues did it present when rewriting?
Those side-stories. Also, figuring out when to let the narrator come forward.
Was there anything that surprised you about using it?
Not really, because I’d grown up writing omni. The surprise was the realization that all novels have narrators.
One of the biggest concerns about using omniscient POV is that readers have been trained to spot “head-hopping” as a flaw. Do you have any strategies for avoiding this?
Some readers are not going to like it no matter what. Maybe a matter of taste, or of training””if you’d grown up reading only first or third, omni can come as a surprise. I’ve heard readers say they won’t read first person, or second, or present tense, or omni. That’s a taste call. I think it makes it easier to get used to when the writer works to make certain that every shift or transition is grounded””that there are no floating pronouns so the reader is forced to go paging back for the antecedent. (And yeah, it’s so easy to screw up even when trying to focus on that specifically.)
What are you working on right now and what POV is it in?
A series, called the Young Allies, that will begin coming out from DAW next summer. It is all complete, and written in omni. Same narrator as Inda.
What’s the best entry point into your work if a reader’s looking for a book to start with? Inda or something else?
I guess that depends what type of story they are looking for? YAs I usually direct to Crown Duel, which is an early work, but it’s stayed in print since the nineties. (I recommend the ebook version though””it has fewer errors.) Then there is the four-book Inda series, for fantasy, and the ebook version of Exordium, a five book space opera I wrote with Dave Trowbridge.
4 Responses
This is going to sound so weird, but the same transitions that I enjoy from Abercrombie I first noticed in work by Adam Reed and Matt Thompson, who created the Adult Swim show Sealab 2021. If you’ve watched any of their work, including Frisky Dingo or Archer, you can see that same clever method of letting one character start a thought at the end of a scene and the other pick it up at the beginning of the next. So when I started reading Abercrombie I was highly amused to experience it as if it was a serious, blood-splattered cartoon.
That one back-and-forth series of scenes you were referring to in Best Served Cold made Seamus and I laugh uproariously when we were reading it… we were on a long car trip, so I suppose we’re lucky to have survived our mirth 🙂
I love Archer! You’re right, they do that a lot.
Reading Joe’s work was probably influential on my decision to do a book in omni and not third person limited. I wanted that cinematic feeling that a huge cast of characters can bring to a book, and I loved the way he pulls his reader through a story with every character’s perspective a separate but necessary piece of the whole. Like a big, tangled knot.
There are a few other authors who master a wide cast, but he does a great job of giving depth and using the POV’s to play off each other. Definitely one to read and learn from.