Contrivance and Coincidence

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“But people don’t act like that.” [W. Somerset] Maugham pointed to the grave dangers coiled in that treacherous phrase. Our demand for probability grows more and more stringent. We balk at coincidence and accident. We invariably expect the characters who are presented to act like ourselves. “People don’t act like that?” True enough — MOST people don’t act like that. Your story is not ABOUT most people. The true enemy of your fiction is not improbability but imaginative unbelief.

— Stephen Koch, The Modern Library Writer’s Workshop: A Guide to the Craft of Fiction, (page 185)

As I’ve been working through my current draft of All’s Fair, there’s a certain element that keeps coming up that I think needs to be addressed: contrivance and coincidence.

We’ve all see or read stories where characters end up in exactly the right place at exactly the right time. Or they find what they need to beat the bad guy minutes before facing off in the final fight. Or they are about to die and rescue arrives just in the nick of time with no explanation of where they were and how they got there so fast. It’s more blatant in some stories than in others. When done badly, it can destroy the suspension of disbelief necessary to maintain a story. No writer wants that to happen to their story. Events are supposed to be seamless, flawless, inevitable. We want to present them in the most effective, realistic, and logical manner possible. We don’t want anything to seem contrived.

Well, I’ve some bad news for you: all stories are contrived.

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2015: The Year in Review

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Okay, seriously, who keeps making off with all this time? Feels like the year just got started and we’re already on the cusp of 2016! (And from what I’ve heard, this sense of time distortion only gets worse… ugh.)

I am definitely in a better place at the end of 2015 than I was last year. Many of my 2014 goals have been reached, and it feels like I’ve got a better handle on life in general, which is a massive relief! I want to give a huge thank-you to all of my friends, readers, subscribers, and followers. You make this all worth-while.

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False Dichotomies

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Greetings to everyone from the end of National Novel Writing Month! Wow, it’s really hard to believe that a month has gone by and, for once, I actually have an almost complete rough draft of a novel. It still needs work and some scenes, but I think I’ll be able to progress to the editing stage this December and January. And I’m actually looking forward to it! My creativity has come back, I’m eager to work, and I’ve been writing over 2,000 words a day more often than not. Which, like, never happens. So, I’m really pleased with my progress and hope to have a finished product to show for my effort sooner rather than later. (Then I’ll go back to Ravens and Roses, I promise.)

Now, on to a topic that has been percolating in the back of my mind for some time: false dichotomies.

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Checking In

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Greetings to you all from the beginning of Week 3 in NaNoWriMo! I have to say, this month’s writing has gone a lot better than it has for quite a while. You may have noticed that my last few entries (although few and far between) contained a note of despondency. Or maybe a healthy dose of it. Or perhaps entire buckets of the stuff. At any rate, I’d essentially stalled out on Ravens and Roses, which I’ve been working on pretty much non-stop for longer than I care to remember. I know that I swore (again) that I’d have a finished draft at the end of this year (sound familiar?) and I still might. It just may not be the project I was expecting it to be.

My 2015 NaNo project, “code-named” AFiLaW (pronounced A-F-I-Law), also referred to as All’s Fair, has gained a lot of momentum, despite containing two genres that I’ve never worked with before: Romance and Steampunk. I’ll admit that at this point the prose is a little light on both; I keep forgetting to add steampunk descriptive details and I haven’t touched the sex scenes. In fact, I may decide not to write any of the latter at all. Scenes with that particular kind of intimacy are alien to me, and every piece of advice I can find about writing in the romance genre says: “If you are uncomfortable writing sex scenes, then don’t write them because your discomfort will show through.” So we’ll see. Still, even with those quibbles, I’ve been writing at least 1,000 words each day and often pass the 1,500- and 2,000-word marks. That’s practically unheard of for me; I don’t recall doing that well even when I began Ravens and Roses in earnest back in 2010 for my first NaNo.

I think the reason I’ve been doing so well lately is threefold:

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