In case you’re waiting for an update, I got my material off to the agent without a problem (that I’m aware of) last night. She replied, apologetically, that it might take a couple days for her to get back to me. I have to assume that’s some kind of joke. To hear back from an agent within the same month qualifies as warp speed by industry standards. Stephen King gets that kind of service from his agent. Maybe.

Tonight’s subject will be another lesson in storytelling from The Superannuated Author (I just flashed on a memory of The Old Ranger, who used to introduce “Death Valley Days” on TV when I was a kid. If you only remember Ronald Reagan doing that job, it’s because you’re a young whippersnapper. I liked The Old Ranger. I think I had the idea he was The Lone Ranger’s father).

Here’s a plotting problem that trips up amateurs. You have a character whose personality you’ve established over the course of your story. Suddenly you come to a plot point where you need him to do X. And you realize that your character wouldn’t do X. He doesn’t “want” to do it. It’s not the sort of thing a guy like him would do in real life.

If you’re an amateur, you just make him do what you want. “Who’s in charge, anyway?” You say.

This is bad. Your intelligent reader will say, “Where did that come from?” and not in an admiring way. By forcing your character to do X without proper motivation, you’re reminding the reader that he’s not reading a true account, but a made-up story. You pull him out of the narrative experience. He may finish the book, but he probably won’t buy another.

So how do you deal with this problem?

Well, you can always go back and change your character’s personality to make him someone who’s more likely to do what you need him to do. That’s a possible solution, but not optimal. You probably made this character the way you did for some reason. The surgery you do on his character is likely to leave scars. And doing things that are easy for you isn’t very dramatic.

Another, better way to handle the problem is to make it work for you.

What drives plot? Conflict.

What makes people do things they don’t want to do in real life? Conflict. Stress. Fear. And these things are all useful to the writer.

Take a broad, over-obvious example. Let’s say you’ve created a character called, say, Bruce (following up on my staunch defense of that proud old name yesterday at the American Spectator Online). Bruce, needless to say, is strong, handsome and dauntless. But he has a weakness (if your hero has no weaknesses, give him some. How’s he going to learn anything if he has nothing to learn? And having him learn something is what the story’s all about). He is afraid of… oh, water. Can’t swim. Terrified of drowning. Nearly drowned when he was a kid; ended up with a phobia.

Then your plot calls for him to go to England. And the story’s set in the 19th Century, when the only way to get to England is by ship.

You can’t have Bruce just get on the ship and go. Even if you say something like, “Although he didn’t like to, he bravely boarded the ship.” That’s weak. There’s no drama, and your reader is suspicious of his sudden attack of self-mastery.

No, this is your opportunity to ramp up the tension. Have Bruce think about sailing, try to buy a ticket once or twice, and then lose his nerve. He’s terrified. He can’t handle it. He’s ready to give up.

Now your reader is interested. He knows Bruce needs to go to England; he knows Bruce won’t board a ship. How will this problem be solved?

You solve it by doing what God does in real life. You increase the pressure. Have your lovely, spunky heroine be kidnapped by the villain, who smuggles her on board a ship bound for England.

If you’ve established Bruce’s passion for his lover sufficiently, you can now show him buying his ticket and climbing the gangplank, shivering, sweating, weak at the knees, feeling like he’s going to die. But he overcomes his fear because of his great love.

This is believable, because most of us know the power of love to force people out of their comfort zones. And it’s good for the story, because the reader has experienced Bruce’s fear. The reader pities him, and at the same time admires him for doing what he’s scared to do.

This works with external fears and internal fears. It works for main characters and secondary characters.

But you should listen to your characters too. Sometimes they have suggestions of their own, which turn out to be better than your original plan.

There are two characters called Eystein and Deirdre in The Year of the Warrior. He’s a Viking warrior, she’s a widowed Irish slave. My original plan for them was to have them fall in love, but then to have her father, a rich Irishman, come to find her in Norway and take her home. This is the sort of ending I generally give the romantic elements in my books. Can’t imagine why…

But as I thought the story out, I realized that, given their situations, it just made more sense for Deirdre to send her father home alone and stay with Eystein. So I wrote it that way. I think the story is better for it, if only through avoiding predictability. I don’t want the reader to think he can figure out how I’ll resolve every issue.

There wouldn’t be any drama in that.

Instead of my usual single long post today, you’ll have to make do with 3 small posts, for reasons I shall explain.

I recall that when I was a kid on the farm, when my dad wanted a cow to move and it wouldn’t move, he’d take hold of its tail and twist hard.

No doubt this will shock some animal lovers, but it accomplished its purpose, and I never saw a cow actually injured.

I thought about that kind of tail-twisting as I twisted my own tail last night, forcing myself to actually get out of passive mode, select one (just one) of the agents whose information I’d downloaded the other night, and send an e-mail query to her.

(This is how it’s done most of the time, for you aspiring authors out there. You find a list of agents, you select a few you think might be interested in you [someone suggested sending out 12 at a time, so I selected 12), and then you follow their individual directions for queries. This is not one-size-fits-all. Each agent has a way he/she likes to be approached. Approach them that way. No sense teaching them to hate you even before they know you.)

So I sent a single query last night, and to my amazement I had a reply this morning. (I’m accustomed to being ignored by agents, even my own.) She wants to see a sample chapter and a synopsis. So that’s how I’ll spend my evening. Fortunately I have the basic material backed up, so it didn’t die with my laptop hard drive a couple months back. Let that be a lesson to you. And to me, for that matter.

I’ll keep you posted.

How To Write The Great American Novel, a video by Vernon Lott. I especially like the part about telling others you’re a genius they won’t understand.

“It is more fun to talk with someone who doesn’t use long, difficult words but rather short, easy words like ‘What about lunch?'” says Pooh. This reminds me of something I said yesterday, that if you need a full article to define one word then you may not understand the word. Simplicity promotes understanding. Roy expands on Pooh’s words and points to more advice from the Bear with Little Brain. This link is to Roy’s blog, “Writing, Clear and Simple.” Roy’s other blog is “Dispatches from Outland”.

“I’ve lost count of the number of emails I get asking for advice on how to get published. My initial reaction is ‘Why bother?’ when being unpublished is such fun and so satisfying,” writes Beth Webb. “Getting published by a mainstream company is great, but in all honesty, how many of us can really afford to give up the day job, even when we’ve signed that contract? Such a long, heartbreaking haul for what? The joy of writing should be just that – the writing.”

There’s something to this, but I don’t what. (via Books, Inq.)

If Flannery had a blog, she might post a bit of writing advice on occasion.

You would probably do just as well to get that plot business out of your head and start simply with a character or anything that you can make come alive…Wouldn’t it be better for you to discover a meaning in what you write rather than to impose one? Nothing you write will lack meaning because the meaning is in you.

I just learned of a new fantasy novel, Auralia’s Colors, coming this summer from WaterBrook Press. It could be interesting, engaging, even good. I see that Books & Culture’s John Wilson calls it “a vivid and continuous dream.” You can read the first chapter on the author’s site.

At this point, I should probably shut up, but we talk about the craft of writing every now and then on BwB, so in that vein, what do you think of these opening lines?

Auralia lay still as death, like a discarded doll, in a burgundy tangle of rushes and spineweed on the bank of a bend in the River Throanscall, when she was discovered by an old man who did not know her name.

She bore no scars, no broken bones, just the stain of inkblack soil. Contentedly, she cooed, whispered, and babbled, learning the river’s language, and focused her gaze on the stormy dance of evening sky roiling purple clouds edged with blood red. The old man surmised she was waiting and listening for whoever, or whatever, had forsaken her there.

So the little girl lay there cooing and babbling as still as death? How does that work? Wasn’t she moving her mouth? And she was discovered by an old man who did not know her name? Why should he know her name? He’s just discovered her. I would be surprised if he knew her beforehand.

Ed Pettit is rereading his reviews. “Worthiness isn’t such a bad trait . . .”

How much do you judge a book by its opening lines? I praised P.D. James a while back for her opening lines. It is a wonderful feeling to open a new book with a great sentence or paragraph, but how much does a poor opening sink your hopes for the rest of the book? What do you think of the following openings? Do they pique your interest or leave you flat? (I picked books of similar genre released this year or last.)

1. When the rain isn’t so much falling–be it in bucket loads or like cats and dogs–but rather slamming into the car like an avalanche of stone, you know it’s time to pull over.

When you can’t see much more than the slaphappy wipers splashing through rivers on the windshield, when you’re suddenly not sure if you’re on the road any longer, and your radio emits nothing but static, and you haven’t seen another car since the sky turned black, and your fingers are tense on the wheel in an attempt to steady the old Accord in the face of terrifying wind gusts, you know it’s so totally time to pull over. (source)

2. Starjet Commander Cody Ferguson, six, turned the gears, adjusted the knobs, and jammed the joystick into hyperdrive. Starship Galaxy went into a steep climb, super thrusters whining at top speed.

Back on earth, Daddy looked angry. Mommy cried. The doctor rolled his chair over, put his head close to theirs, and smiled the sour little smile that grown-ups smile when there is nothing in the world to smile about. (source)

3. The guy’s BO made Luke’s eyes water. He had long greasy hair, an eleven o’clock shadow, jeans as brown as they were blue, and a crumpled, stain-riddled Hawaiian shirt.

“This your first time to Agua Rancheria?” He sniffed loudly, wiping his nose.

Luke gave a nod and looked out the bus window, hoping to end the conversation.

No such luck. (source)

4.A dead man spoke to her from the shadows. “Seven o’clock,” his voice rasped, barely audible over the wind tumbling through the dry heat of late summer. “The Mint.”

Even as the wind carried it away, she began telling herself it was an illusion, a ghost speaking to her from the shadows of her own mind rather than the shadows of this pothole-laden street.

Still.

She put down the garbage can and glanced at Steve on the other side of the garbage truck. He was bending down to pick up a couple of clipped branches; if he’d heard the voice, it hadn’t stopped him. (source)

Some dictionary people have a little book of words they say “Every High School Graduate Should Know.” Lenore Skenazy writes about it.

The thing about actual word books — and the whole “Boost Your Vocabulary” industry — is that however fascinating it is to study etymology (unless that’s the study of bugs), some words are just plain old obscure. While delightful in and of themselves, there is really no reason to program words like “perspicacious” into one’s personal database. And yet on just such words hinge the SAT scores (and possibly futures) of many young people.

No reason to learn words like “perspicacious?” How else would a career-minded young lad quote Thomas Hardy, as do all the nigh successful lads in Harvard Square, by referring to “the perspicacious reddleman” who would have “acted more wisely by appearing less unimpressionable?”