How To Write, With Victor Hugo

[melannen]

Occasionally in lesmiseres chat I encourage people to turn their fanfic into epic historical digressions or side stories about minor characters and say I'm learning how to write good by studying the Brick.

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.)

Comments

[lettered]

ahhhhhh. I have so many thoughts about this. Mainly related to serial fiction and how fanfic is also serial fiction and so you do see all of this stuff so much more in fanfic than in profic and media. I mean, you can't make a movie about superheroes brushing their teeth and walking their dogs, but you can write fanfic about it. However, you could write a book that's both about superheroes kicking ass and brushing their teeth, but an editor will tell you to take out the teeth-brushing because that's no the way we "do" books these days.

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.

[melannen]

Yesss. Although I should note that these are chapters in Les Miserables, which was *not* a serial, despite appearances! So it's not just a serial thing; it really does work in giant bricks that come out all at once, too! (Serial publication was more common than today, obviously, since serial novels are vanishingly rare today, but a large number of popular novels were first published as "three-volume" trilogies or as one bound hardcover, too, and honestly Hugo's massive digressions probably wouldn't work well in serial, nobody would get through Waterloo.) /so many thoughts on serial novels and fanfic.

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.)