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How To Write, With Victor Hugo
I think they think I'm kidding. But actually I greatly admire the Victorian writing style where nobody ever shoved "show don't tell" in authors' faces, and not everything was about focusing claustrophobically down on "the meat of the story". And they can't have had it all wrong - they were the ones who turned the novel into the linchpin of popular culture, after all.
So here, for your delectation, are the first two weeks' worth of writing exercises in a program I've been working up for myself. ^_^ I'm seriously thinking of setting up some kind of community for working through these... (If anyone wants the blank Scrivener file with this set up in it, I can upload that too...)
ETA: I should note for people coming in without context that these are just chapter-by-chapter summaries of the novel Les Miserables - I didn't put a lot of effort into carefully crafting them!
1 1.1.1
Tell a character's entire life story (1500 words or less)
2 1.1.2
Show a character's personality by describing their household and household budgets (2000 words or less)
3 1.1.3
Describe a character doing their job well (800 words or less)
4 1.1.4
Demonstrate what a character does by telling us things they have said (2500 words or less)
5 1.1.5
Give a typical day in the life of a character, hour by hour (1000 words or less)
6 1.1.6
Describe a character by writing about their house and its contents, room by room (2500 words or less.)
7 1.1.7
Give an anecdote about a time a character did something that everybody advised them against that turned out well anyway. (1500 words or less.)
8 1.1.8
Two acquaintances with fundamental disagreements discuss them (1500 words or less.)
9 1.1.9
Someone who loves a character describes them to someone else (1500 words or less.)
10 1.1.10
A character has a deathbed conversation with a stranger (5000 words or less.)
11 1.1.11
Describe how a character's political views have affected their daily life (2000 words or less.)
12 1.1.12
Describe a character's career ambitions (or lack thereof.) (1500 words or less.)
13 1.1.13
Tell what a character believes in as articles of faith (religious or otherwise.) (1500 words or less.)
14 1.1.14
Tell how a character thinks, how much they value learning and philosophy. (1000 words or less.)
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I have noticed this especially with one of my favorite fanfic authors that went pro--I loved her fanfic because she had the characters sit around having long long conversations, and that wasn't in her novels. And she has said that she wrote the long long conversations, and editors made her ax them. But maybe part of the reason we got long long conversations and teeth brushing in Vic lit is because of serial format?
And another thing, I find the "show vs tell" thing interesting, because 19th c authors managed to show a whole lot by telling. The problem with telling and not showing is if you tell the reader who the character is and then proceed to show them the exact same things. But in Vic lit, I always felt like I was told a whole bunch and that what I was shown was additional information that supplemented rather than repeated.
I also think it's interesting because when you show everything and don't tell anything you actually get pieces that feel more Victorian, because you're getting all the teeth brushing and the dog washing. My problem is showing far too much and being afraid to just say the things it would be very simple to say because I want the reader to figure them out. I wish people would stop harping on the show vs tell for this reason--it's a balance, not either/or.
Last, it frustrates me so much when people talk about "rules of writing" and they're not talking about SPAG. Things like "adverbs are a no-no"--people act like you just shouldn't use them; they're always bad, and I just--dude, you're saying over an entire century of lit is just awful. That's stupid. It even irks me when people encourage breakage of these "rules" by saying, "Know the rules before you break them." It should be, know the current convention and popular style, so you can decide when to use it and understand that you'll throw readers out when you don't.
OMG anyway so many feelings.
Thank you!
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I'd definitely be interested in a community like that. These look great.
(
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These exercises are excellent and I'd like to use them for a daily-writing meme. Is that all right with you?
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But yes! So much of what we see in published novels is publishers enforcing "what will sell", and the more availability there is of stuff like fanfic that has no editorial standards, the more obvious it becomes how restrictive that is, often in ways we don't even think about.
And "show don't tell", I think, is an oversimplifying shorthand for a lot of things people can do wrong, that usually involve some combination of 'your pacing is bad' or 'your writing is boring' or 'your voice is uneven'. But those are much harder things to explain or fix... "show don't tell" can help break the bad habits but it is completely useless at teaching good ones to replace them. Because like you said: Balance. (Also another thing I hate about the current stylistic conventions: 'authorial voice' is supposed to be invisible, but instead it's often just ignored, which often means writing isn't as effective as it could have been. Because thoughtfully used authorial voice can be brilliant.)
And yes on the rules thing, too! It's not even that you'll throw readers out if you don't - because a lot of the big bestsellers just ignore a lot of them - but it's useful to what they are so you'll know when you're following them and when you aren't, because that gives you so much more flexibility.
(...also you know if you want to sell to editors you need to know what editors expect, grumble grumble grumble.)
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This is a really good set of open ended questions to work from. Thanks for posting it where the rest of us can see. I think I'll snag a copy to go try working with.
And hey, I was just thinking recently about seeing if I could get a bunch of writers together to form a small group who could encourage each other and toss exercises back and forth etc. I do want to find a group of people though who are willing to be open-minded because myself and other people I know like writing fanfiction and want to be able to share that as part of a writing group as well as original fiction. And it turns out that finding a writing group for that is pretty hard. Let me know if you happen to find anything of that ilk please? For that matter, let me know if you might be interested in joining a group of that sort if I decided to start one myself because I can't find one!
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I do kind of feel like a lot of things that work in a brick or in fanfiction that has the weight of canon behind it might not in standalone original fiction, though, which is one of the hurdles of the fan-pro transition (they might work in original novels, if editors would permit).
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Sutcliff definitely would never get published today, not in anything like her current form (and yet her books still sell...)
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And no, I don't actually think doing this as a novel will result in anything that's much of a novel, because really only Hugo will ever be able to pull off Hugo. (And if I do them, I won't be trying to make them all part of one story.) But I do think as writing exercises, it's useful to practice these kinds of things, (and in a context of 'this kind of writing can belong in a real story, not just an exercise') because most of the are things that aren't really pushed in modern fiction.
(And I really like how Hugo organizes his chapters, too, as each being very distinct bits of writing, which is another thing that's very different from modern fiction.)
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Re: Thank you!
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Well, more presentaable than my last NaNo, which is not presentable at all. ;)
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I'm not really planning to have much in the way of deadlines if I come up with a writing group. More like exercises that people participate in when the mood strikes them and maybe a weekly or monthly trade off where people read and comment on things for each other. Maybe have occasional exchanges with deadline but mostly a place with lots of prompts and encouragement for people to cone share their work and get feedback on it and support to keep going when they are struggling.
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I'll make sure to credit appropriately. XD
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I'm starting to think my reading tastes are shifting away from what's being published right now, too, which is frustrating because I still love SFF as an idea genre, but I'm not a huge fan of older SFF, and I'm not always thrilled with execution in more recent stuff.
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And short fiction ... I'm not actually sure? I mostly only know anything about the short fiction market in SF, and while it's getting smaller and smaller every year, I think as a result you can actually get away with being more experimental? Because nobody expects anybody but really hard-core fans to buy the magazines anyway, and most of them they pay authors even less of a living wage than novel advances are, they'll actually put in some really unconventional storytelling - you might even be able to sell 1500 words worth of describing a space station room-by-room, or the household budget of a necromancer, if you came up with the right hook.
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This looks really interesting. I may use this format to get into the head or one of more of my OCs. Thanks very much for the idea. :)
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He gets all of the first fourteen chapters, and a role in some of the next thirteen chapters, and then never appears again. The Brick is *special* that way!
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I'm still chewing on this one but I do think that I'm going to start something up. I'll drop you a line in a couple weeks when I get it put together, how's that sound? Because frankly, you seem like a neat person that I'd enjoy tossing things back and forth with.
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