Interlocking Pieces (a.k.a. The Martin Effect)

I happen to be a voracious reader, as I believe most authors are. While it’s true that my main purpose in reading is for the sheer joy of it, I also learn a lot from other writers. It’s one thing to be able to point to a book and express your appreciation of it; it’s another thing, however, to break it down and be able to analyze the specific things about it that worked so well. The ability to analyze technique is important for any aspiring storytelling.

Over the years, no author has taught me more than George R.R. Martin, through A Song of Ice and Fire. His books are brilliantly conceived and executed on every level. Praise for them is almost universal.

One of the many things I’ve learned from Martin is the art of juggling multiple characters and points of view. The means by which he intertwines his stories requires a deft hand, and over the years I’ve taken note of how he does it. One such method I’ve observed is that even when his characters are divided by entire continents, his novels are held together by powerful overarching themes.

And yet not all readers agree that Martin has successfully managed this aspect of storytelling in the two most recent volumes in his series. After bringing his third novel to the edge of a precipice, his fourth novel has been accused by many fans of being a letdown. Boring. Filler. In fact, if you were to poll Martin’s fanbase, you would probably find that a majority holds this opinion.

So, what happened?

This summer, I dove into a reread of the series. As I was coming to the concluding pages of that dramatic third novel, I came across this, a proposal for combining the fourth and fifth novels of Martin’s series and reading them concurrent with each other. The two books take place at the same time, each of them featuring different sets of characters but both proceeding as direct sequels to Book 3.

I decided to alter my reading plan. Instead of tackling the books separately, I decided to intermix them. Let me just say that my reading experience was educational. In a hundred little ways, it becomes clear that these two books and their disparate storylines were never meant to be disparate at all. They are thematically linked. They play off each other in surprising ways. They inform each other. Together, they form one of the best epic fantasy novels I’ve ever read; separately, they’re serviceable parts of a yet-incomplete whole. In short, there’s nothing boring about them.

To me, this serves as an illustration of the importance of stories complementing each other. Intertwining stories and character arcs is a delicate, sophisticated business, and when you mess with this balance the overall work suffers in ways that can be complicated to pinpoint. A great story is the result of many interlocking pieces.

My current work in progress has six viewpoint characters spread across three or four disparate plotlines (depending on how you count it). In order to shrink my novel to a more manageable length, it was suggested to me that I could extract several storylines and split them into different volumes. I thought about this, then divided the chapters, reorganized the material, and found that while the separate storylines were complete in and of themselves, they weren’t nearly as strong as when taken together.

Incidentally, if you feel the individual storylines in your work in progress could stand on their own two feet without the support of the larger volume, you may want to ask yourself whether or not these storylines are as strong as they could be. Perhaps the more interdependent and symbiotic the various aspects of a novel are, the better. In the future, I know I’ll be using the so-called Martin Effect as a gauge.

Sunday Reads: 29 July 2012

It’s Sunday!  And that means we have 10 reads worth your time:

Jason Black discusses the important of the denouement in Cause of Death: Denouement.

Kristen Lamb has 5 Common Writing Blunders That Can Annoy or Bore Our Readers.

Over at Anne R Allen’s Blog, Ruth Harris lists 11 Reasons Writers Get Rejected – And Why Only 3 of them Matter.

At Writer Unboxed, Shari Stauch examines some unique blogs in Seven Out-of-the-Box Author Blogging Ideas.

Catherine Ryan Howard talks spam marketing in This is an Ethical Way to Sell Your E-Book? I Disagree.

Natania Barron discusses Five Ways Social Media Can Destroy Your Writing (And, Potentially, Your Career) and offers some solutions.

S James Nelson talks about How I Won David Farland’s Writing Contest by writing a specifically-targeted story.

Roni Loren has a warning about copyright in Bloggers Beware: You CAN Get Sued For Using Pics On Your Blog.

A class action lawsuit has been lodged against Harlequin, alleging under-payment of royalites.  See the details at Harlequin lawsuit.

Interested in writing for Writer Beware?  They have recently put out a Call for Guest Bloggers.

 

Missed any Fictorians articles this week?

Guest poster Jordan Ellinger – Flexing Your Writing Muscles with Help from the Writers of the Future Contest

Dylan Blacquiere – Writing Doctors

Colette Vernon – Can Goldfish Channel Muse?

Can Goldfish Channel Muse?

I’ll tell you  now, if you didn’t figure it out from the title and the picture, this post is a bit silly. Which is kind of sad since we’ve just had two amazing, interesting, and informative posts. And no, it’s not about the band, though I do have “Uprising” as my ringtone.

The thing is, I had my son’s goldfish nearby for quite a while. First, in my study. Then, in his room next door. The water sloshed through the filter creating white noise, the little goldfish swam around as I came in and out of the room, and occasionally I  stopped to give them an extra snack while they kissed at the edge of the glass.

They died.

No, I didn’t overfeed them. My daughter brought home a couple of new fish she’d won at a school fair or something. We put them in with the others.  Buttercup survived her initiation, though she swam sideways for a while. The other wimps didn’t have her evasive abilities. They  failed their mount wannahockaloogie test, and  the rest of the fish ate them. Even Buttercup eventually succumbed. We should have cleaned the tank as soon as I found the first skeleton stuck to the filter’s intake. I was busy, my husband was busy, and my son thought it looked cool. It was like something out of a Fringe episode. Within hours the whole tank was black and all the fish had died.

I had trouble focusing on my writing after that. I liked writing when it was quiet, with no background noise, not even light music. But without the fish tank, it was too quiet. Even the trees waving outside my window didn’t dispel the eerie silence.

I needed my muse back. In the nick of time, summer came, and I discovered a tall floor fan makes great white noise.

But eventually summer will be over– though since I live in southern Arizona it may take a while–and I’ll have to turn the fan off.  Maybe it’s time I had my own pet, instead of the numerous ones my kids take care of.  Or maybe I’ll just set up the tank and forget the fish. Any suggestions?

Oh, and yes, after it went black I put on some gloves and cleaned the tank. My bio-hazard disaster will not be blamed for an upcoming apocalypse, nor will it be a source of a post-apocalyptic story. Although….

 

The Art of Writing Medicine – Writing Doctors

Irony of ironies, my series on the art of writing medicine has been unavoidably delayed these past couple of months by having to write my own board exams. I’ve passed, which makes me a fully qualified neurologist. It’s a tremendous thing to be able to say that, after four years of medical school and five years of residency; it also gives me some weight on what a credible physician character can be.

I have talked in past entries about how easy prey physicians are for cliché in fiction. To some extent, that isn’t surprising, as doctors and physicians are stock characters that show up regularly in genre work, often as a simple background fountain of exposition, sometimes as a noble, compassionate hero who starts her day reciting the Hippocratic Oath over her morning coffee. Sometimes the reverse happens, and the doctor is secretly an evil character who conducts unethical experiments or is involved in a vast conspiracy (often with a pharmaceutical company) for no other reason than the money. Take a look at any science fiction story or television show; odds are high that there will be an episode or a segment where the doctor struggles with healing the enemy, or where an unscrupulous physician is called out by a morally sound one on a violation of ethics. Money or research prestige is usually at stake, with justifications about it being for the good of science. It’s usually a surgeon, too, which makes my physician’s heart calcify with jealousy.

That isn’t to say that these tropes are always bad, but they can descend quickly into cliché. They’re easy to fall into as well, and it happens when the medicine takes over from the character.

So how to avoid the slide into cliché? The easiest answer is to write true characters who happen to be doctors, and many other posts have talked about how to write good characters in your story. Here are a few other pointers, though, which may help the next time you have a doctor among your cast.

1. Not every doctor is a bloody surgeon or emergency room specialist. Sorry, that may be my own pet peeve. But pity the poor internist, or family doctor, or geriatrician. It’s been a fond hope of mine to see a physician-hero who happens to be a radiologist someday. But in all seriousness, the practice of medicine is wide and varied, and not every doctor goes to the operating room or runs a trauma code.

2. Do some research into the training. For the most part, it takes at least six years of schooling after an undergraduate degree to become a doctor, yet it’s not uncommon to see preternaturally gifted doctors in fiction that went to medical training straight out of high school. That doesn’t happen, and it strains credulity to have your doctor too young.

3. Not every doctor does everything. The moment House lost its magic for me was when Alison Cameron, nominally an infectious diseases specialist, was the lead on a brain biopsy, which requires years of neurosurgical training. Some doctors are able to do many things in many different fields; these are generalists, like family doctors and general internists. Having your trauma surgeon show a sudden expertise in managing a heart attack or a stroke – that doesn’t happen. If you need your doctor to be able to do a specific thing, then plan that as you create your character – or have them acknowledge that they’re out of their depth if the situation calls for it.

4. There is life outside of the hospital. We do more than see patients; we teach and research, we shop for groceries and mow the lawn, we get flat tires and go to the bathroom. Keep in mind that doctors are human beings and that having sworn the Hippocratic Oath doesn’t take away from all of our other needs and secrets. Write your doctors as human beings, and make them more than just their profession.

5. The same tricks apply even if your physician is just a means for exposition. Having some hint of a back-story can help make the difference between a piece of furniture delivering dialogue and a good minor character that helps to flesh out the world that you’ve built.

6. As with any aspect of medicine that you write, read up on the medical science. If the doctor you write doesn’t know what he’s talking about, it’s going to show.

There actually aren’t many other tricks to writing physicians that don’t apply to writing people from other professions or occupations. The bottom line is that medicine is an occupation, not a character description, so you’re going to need more than that to flesh them out. Done poorly, doctors in fiction can stand out as tired clichés, but done well? Many of the greatest works of fiction have had physicians as strong characters. Maybe yours will be next.