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I've recently been reading a lot of Simon R. Green. You may have heard me pimp him out before, but I've started reading a series by him that isn't tongue-in-cheek. They're called the Nightside novels, and they are absolutely phenomenal.

I've also been consistently amazed by how willingly I let Green get away with things like development of "love" and crazy, nutty plot twists that would have me lynching a lesser author. And while I've been pondering this, I've been hanging out at another writer's forum, reading and critiquing the works there.

I realized, just two days ago, that Green is brilliant at getting readers to trust him, and if you gain your reader's trust, you can get away with almost anything. This applies to poetry, grammar, plot twists, and moments of absolute ridiculousness that otherwise would knock me right out of your story. So, here we go with points revolving around this topic. Many of them are, surprisingly, similar to comedy, but these apply as much to serious writing as to that which tries to be humorous.

1. Don't toss us a curveball at the very beginning.

So you're making dinner for a bunch of your friends, and it's the first time you're cooking for them. You're not generally a domestic person, so they're rather leery about this food. What do you make for them?

I'll tell you what you don't make: you don't make fugu, the pufferfish that, in the hands of an unskilled cook, can prove deadly. You cook them lots of other things first, so that when you do finally serve them fugu, they'll trust your abilities.

It's like that with stories. When you have a big, big trick up your sleeve, when you have something you know is so unusual as to be implausible, you don't drop it on the reader at the beginning of the book. Ever. Because we're not going to trust you enough to eat it. Readers, by nature, are suspicious people.

Simon R. Green, in his first novel of the Nightside, Something from the Nightside, does this extraordinarily well. The Nightside is so shifting and wildly implausible that we find it hard to suspend our disbelief. So he starts out with a more plain scenario: the down-and-out private investigator who lives in his office and has a smoking whit. Only after a chapter of more normal, but still interesting, activities are we dropped into a world in which everything is on its head.

2. Don't throw us curveballs every pitch.

We'll get tired and we won't hit at them anymore. Really.

This is very similar to writing a good comedy. Something in it needs to be serious, or believable. These are the most common formulas:
a) serious, believable people are tossed into crazy scenarious.
b) crazy, ridiculous people are tossed into serious situations.

So you need to have something that isn't totally thrown off. When you're tossing us some really funky prose, you need to avoid having implausible characters or worlds. We can honestly get into really, really strange and wackily ridiculous plotlines, and believe them, if the characters are perfectly rational and the prose is stellar.

3. Make sure your windup is masterful.

This is similar to #2. Essentially, if you're going to use wacky grammar in that poem, you need to make sure that the rest of the poem is good. You need to make sure that it doesn't just make sense, but that your word choice and your structure is stellar enough to make us trust you.

We'll trust you if you show us that you're really skilled at, say, writing. When you get us really excited about your similes, we won't care that you don't capitalize your Is and you don't have any periods.

4. If you're going to throw a curveball, throw a curveball.

In order to make us trust you, you need to commit to said curveball. You need to focus on the impacts of this change. You need to make sure it's more than just there for shock value. You need to make sure that you don't just do it half-assedly. If you try to get away with having a half-elven princess named Angelinnea Phaema, you need to make sure she's there and you don't just put her idly in the wings.

This is hard to get, but let me just take that example above and run with it: if you know you're throwing us something hard to stomach like Angelinnea Phaema who has silver hair and purple eyes and really seems like a ditz, though everyone else seems to like her, you need to follow steps 1 through 3. Then, you need to commit. You can't think that she's kind of over-the-top, so you're going to just mention her in passing; that will be apparent to the reader. You need to PUT HER IN THERE in all her glory.

Green, for instance, has this one character named Razor Eddie. His title is "Punk God of the Straight Razor". Now, I was rather irritated in the first book after we just met him to talk a little, but then he kept on recurring. We learned more about him. Green showed him off. We started to like him, because, even though he's some sort of punk with an invisible razor that can cut through anything, even though he always wears a grey trench coat, even though he has an agreement with some god, he's THERE and he's REAL and he's COOL.

When you're giving us something hard to stomach, you need to give us enough of it for us to grow accustomed.

5. Focus on how that curveball changes your story.

Again, getting us to believe something can be as easy as having everyone around it react as though it's real and very important. Somewhere in the Turkey City Lexicon (a series of terms about what NOT to do in science fiction and fantasy) is this gem:



Essentially, having your characters say "You've got to be kidding me." will work against you. It seems counterproductive, but honestly, the reader will get it a lot more when the other characters get it. Nobody likes it when someone laughs at their own joke, and it's more hilarious when another person deadpans it.

Green does this stunningly, even in his more tongue-in-cheek novels. The Deathstalker novels, for instance, contain things that are so apocalyptically RIDICULOUS, but the characters treat them as though they are of stunning importance and they start meaning things to the audience.

And it works in his serious books, too. In the Nightside novels, I often find myself yelling "You're SHITTING me", like when they start fighting off "corpsicles", frozen corpses that have been possessed by otherworldly spirits. But Green resists the temptation to make them ludicrous, and instead puts as many horror flares on them as he can, and I start caring. I start worrying that the corpsicles may eat John Taylor. And Green makes me care, even though I am absolutely laid on the floor by some of the crazy situations and things he thinks up.





Now don't complain to me that I told you your story was unbelievable when it's SO IMPORTANT and you can't take it out. You can make it more plausible without altering the plot point at all. See above.


Also, read Simon R. Green. He's pretty amazing.

I found this fairly hard to understand, but I see your point. The skill of developing your tale and characters and all the details WHILE keeping the reader happy is tricky to master. Thanks very much for all this - they're great points.

I agree especially with not piling too much on in the first chapter. That said, you've also got to balance it with not being too boring. Hum.

EDIT:: Damn you Endrael, I wanted to have the first reply in a Veive thread!

Ha, I'm out of practice. whee

Thnx!

A great thread.


After reading this I was curious for some advice on the following matter:

Does writing on an odd event in a manner that you do not potray this event as being odd and you do not let the characters see this event as odd make the reader less likely to see the event as odd and therefore not unrealistic?

This explains alot... and something I will strive to keep in mind in future projects...