Deeds & Words

I recently finished the first draft of the sequel to Aluminum Leaves. The beginning was pretty good. I thought the end was pretty good too; the plot threads came together in something that looked like woven cloth rather than a snarled thicket. Unfortunately, that left the middle, which dragged and sagged. Worse, it was boring.

I had more exposition than I needed. This is largely what a first draft is for me — a way to write down everything everything I need, and then decide what the story needs. So yes, there was too much talking and summary writing, but the real problem with the middle was more fundamental. The characters in the middle section forget what the stakes were.

Well, that’s not fair. I forgot what their stakes were.

It seems silly to say “stakes matter,” because of course they do. But I guess I mean, they really do. They don’t have to be global or heroic. They have to grow organically from your character and be part of that character’s motivation.

In my case, the second part of the book follows Erin and Trevian (or, as I like to think of them, E&T), the MCs from Aluminum Leaves. They are on a quest to save Trevian’s world from an inter-dimensional invasion. Those seem like pretty big stakes. Erin, in particular, would probably have some strong opinions about the need to do this thing, shut down the portal, and stop the invasion force. You’d think, anyway. In the first draft, though, she spends more time leafing through old manuscripts from Trevian’s world and debating vocabulary with a local scholar.

Part of the problem is that the plot and the timeline require E&T to be stuck in one place for several days. What I’d missed about that was what kind of emotional toll it might take on Erin, and what she would say about the delays that slow down their immediate, necessary project.

I could say that I took it for granted that the reader would remember that the stakes were high, but that wouldn’t be accurate. I forgot that the stakes were high.

And by the way, if the reader cares more about the outcome than the character does, you’ve got a story problem on your hands.

On some level I knew the tension wasn’t right because I planned from the beginning to have a couple of outside attacks from folks trying to get the artifact. And those are needed for plot reasons, so they are still in there, but they did not substitute for the real tension the story needed. A second observation; if you have to drag in a lot of outside action to create the tension, once again you’ve probably got a story problem.

And here, I’m going to put something I saw on Writer Twitter the other day, and I can’t remember who said it, “Action isn’t tension. Action is the relief of tension.”

*

On the other end of the “stakes” continuum was Aideen, Trevian’s sister, who is back in Trevian’s home town. Aideen doesn’t know about inter-dimensional invasions, or inter-dimensional anythings. Her father had a near-fatal accident; suddenly she is on the verge of losing the family company. These are hardly global stakes, but somehow, I convinced people (my writers workshop, anyway) that they were real. Mainly, Aideen cared about these stakes, and the early chapters show her as a person who tries to do the right thing. It’s not like she’s J.R. Ewing, and the folks who want to take over the company are bad guys.

A lot of Aideen’s identity is wrapped up in the company, but so too is the well-being of her town. It’s not a big and flashy a goal as “saving the world from an invasion,” but it’s real.

*

What have I learned?

Don’t forget the stakes. Don’t let the character forget the stakes.

Make the stakes something that matter to the character, and make us see why they matter. Yes, making the cheer-squad in high school can be a goal that really raises the stakes for a character, if that desire reveals character.

If you’re feeling the need to throw in car bombs, random kidnap attempts, shootings, etc, your writer-mind might be telling you that you aren’t focused on the heart of the story; what drives your characters. (There might be an argument to be made that this doesn’t apply to thrillers– but I’m not convinced.)

Action is not a substitute for conflict, and it doesn’t increase the tension — it relieves it.

*

Now I’m going to go off and discover if I have correctly applied these insights to my own work! I spent a big chunk of time on the middle section earlier this week — now I’ll see if it paid off.

Self-published writer John van Stry recently prevailed in a lawsuit against a man named Travis McCrea, who was the founder and leader of the Canadian Pirate Party. He was, and maybe still is, part of the USA branch of the Kopimist Church. McCrea is a pirate and proud of it. He doesn’t have a parrot on his shoulder and go around saying, “Aharr, matey.” (Or maybe he does, I don’t know.) No. He posts and disseminates the works of others without permission or payment to them, and makes a profit from it.

Van Stry will not get much money from the suit, but McCrea is ordered to pay the legal expenses, and van Stry hired an actual legal team, so at least he doesn’t have that cost to contend with.

McCrea ran a site called eBook.bike (which appears to be gone or the name of a different site now). He uploaded ebooks. It seems like he offered some of them for free, but on the other hand he said repeatedly and loudly that he made $300,000/year off the site, so he was charging for something and those books were part of the draw. For many, if not all, of the books on the site, he did not ask the authors if he could post, he didn’t pay them, and he never notified them. Van Stry found out about it when a fan told him.

McCrea’s defense in the lawsuit was that he met the Digital Millenial Copyright Act (DMCA’s) “safe harbor” definition. The “safe harbor” allows archive sites, etc, to store intellectual properties and distribute them at the direction of the copyright owner. To qualify as a “safe harbor,” you have to designate an agent and register with the Office of Copyright. Oh, and you have to actually do the thing in the description. McCrea had done none of those things, a fact the judge commented on almost immediately.

McCrea disregarded several contacts from van Stry and his lawyers, in which they requested he take the pirated work down from the site. These included the specific DMCA complaint form.

He also claimed that doing this was “helping writers.” I think this is his version of the poisonous and ubiquitous, “I’m giving you exposure” argument. He wasn’t helping. He was exploiting. What he did was bad in general; this part offends me the most deeply.

It’s unlikely that McCrea would take the steps to become a “safe harbor” in the first place, because he’s against copyright. First as a member of the Pirate Party and then just as an individual, McCrea says he believes that information should be free. In practice, for him this means a writer somewhere should work really hard, maybe for years, on a work, and then post it, and McCrea should take it and make money off of it. Another common English word for that is “stealing.”

The Kopimist Church, which McCrea has mentioned, is a church formed in Sweden and recognized there as a religious organization, that says that “file-sharing” is a sacred act. It took them three tries to meet the qualifications for being a church, and one hurdle apparently was that churches have some kind of ritual or ceremony. They finally came up with one in which they pass around photocopied information. (I think I’d rather explore the Creative Commons group than hangout with the Kopimist folks, thanks.)


I’m all for ease in genuine file-sharing, and ease and access to the internet and the ability to look at data – data that should be available to me. (Somewhat ironically, McCrea also thinks that online privacy should be protected. I guess he means for him.) However, the active verb in “file-sharing” is “sharing,” with its connotation (or, you know, actual meaning) of consent.

Anyway, I’m glad van Stry had the resources to be able to do this. McCrea’s taunting of the people he was stealing from – “Well, just sue me then!”—was calculated and assumed, correctly, that most of the writers he ripped off couldn’t afford to do that. Van Stry could.

Most of the systems for paying artists and writers suck, and yes, many entities in the writing-to-publication pipeline are predatory. Royalties are ridiculous. An advance never comes close to reflecting the amount of work that’s gone into a project. This is why people are experimenting with other models. Self-publishing is one. Things like Patreon or Curious Fictions, where you “sponsor” a creator whose work you like, are another. And I’m for more open models, where work gets shared easily… as long as that is done with knowledge, consent and participation, and doesn’t rip some parties off so that others can profit. I’ll be the first to admit I have no idea how to do that.

McCrea is not gone, and probably his next scheme will be to steal work from behind the veil of the Kopimist Church. Stay tuned.