There’s a bug that’s been going around recently.

As a matter of fact, there’s two.

The first is a summer cold. An upper respiratory virus. Nothing terrifying or crippling, but just enough to take a man down for six to ten days. In this case, the grown man was me.

That’s only a small part of the story, though. See…two weeks ago, I woke up feeling immensely relieved and immensely worried. Worried because there was a little bit of soreness in the back of my throat, some ache in my joints as I pulled myself out of bed. I was aggravatingly sick just four months ago, and I had no interest in going through that again. I spent about thirty seconds grumbling and grousing and just generally frustrated at the possibility I might be getting sick again.

Then I remembered it was Tuesday morning, June 21. That was the official launch date for Taming Fire. I’d spent the weekend working hard to get it published. I’d spent more than a month frantically rewriting it. I’d burned my candle right down to the stub to get it done, but I got it done. And now it was time to relax and bask in the flurry of launch-day activity.

I didn’t get to do as much relaxing as I hoped. In the midst of that activity I had a chat with our amazing cover artists asking me if I could please get them a copy of the next book. I barely have this one out the door, and they’re already frustrated the next one isn’t in their hands (and for good reasons).

So Taming Fire got to launch itself while I got to work banging out schedules, getting people ready, and diving straight back into my next book. Luckily this one wasn’t going to take nearly as much work as Taming Fire had. This one, I knew, should be a couple days’ work. Maybe one day’s. I just had to get to it.

I spent the next week not working on it. No matter what I intended, the Taming Fire launch demanded some of my attention. There was more to it, though. I was mentally exhausted. I did some amazing work on Taming Fire in a remarkably short time span, but it took its toll.

So I took a week off. Not off, but off writing. I read Jessie’s novel (due up for publication in 2012). I read Joshua’s novel (also 2012). I started on Courtney’s (October). I was working, I just wasn’t writing.

I was also getting sick, but we’ll get back to that.

And in the midst of it, while I was working on scheduling stuff with the hope of making our next book launch less stressful than the last one, I discovered something rather delightful: my next book wasn’t actually due yet. It wasn’t due until July 6th. I’d spent all this time beating up on myself for being so behind schedule…and I actually had two weeks to spare.

So I let myself enjoy the reading, let myself take a little break. I had a holiday weekend coming up, and really just half a day’s work to do, right? And the way things worked out, I ended up staying home for the holiday weekend while the wife took the kids to visit her parents. It was the perfect opportunity to finish up Restraint and maybe even get started on The Dragonswarm for December.

And that’s where the sickness crept in. By Monday of last week, we had a Consortium Time meeting where three of our writers complained they were having trouble focusing on their writing projects, and I huddled in a corner trying to cough up a lung.

You’ve heard about that Consortium Time meeting. Courtney talked about it here, and Jessie talked about it on her blog today. (Sorry, Jessie.)

I felt really sorry for them. It’s brutal when you have a project you want to work on, you need to work on, but you just can’t make yourself work on it. I tossed back some pills, spent a few minutes coughing violently, and then went back to feeling sorry for them.

On Friday I bid my family goodbye over lunch. I got home from work, set up my workstation in the living room, and pulled up the book I hadn’t really done any work on for the last two weeks.

And I stared at it. For two hours. I did nothing. I scrolled. I reread chapters I’d read a half-dozen times. I changed a word. I changed it back. I switched to another browser tab and checked my sales of Taming Fire (it’s doing ridiculously well, by the way).

Finally I gave up. I turned on an old episode of Friends and dove into another project I started last week just to get something accomplished before bedtime. I ended up blazing away on that project for three hours and finally fell into bed with my mind still racing with ideas.

Some of them even had to do with my book. I slept late Saturday, but as soon as I was up I went to my computer. I pulled up Restraint and reread the last half a chapter I’d finished with Friday. I stared at it. I checked my sales numbers. I made myself breakfast. I stared at my document some more. Then I took a bunch of pills and went back to bed.

Honestly, that was my whole weekend. I had four straight days with no interruptions and no obligations other than this one deadline. I made essentially no progress on it.

• I designed and documented a new videogame.
• I catalogued all my long-abandoned Magic cards.
• I did a story conference with Joshua and Courtney.
• I spent four hours on a friend’s birthday lunch.
• I read several more chapters of Courtney’s book.
• I watched three full seasons of Friends.
• I took so many naps.

And I didn’t write a word on my novel. I barely touched it. I did spend a lot of time feeling guilty, but that was probably the least productive part of my weekend.

When I mentioned some of this to my wife, she just shook her head. “Sometimes you get sick,” she said. “It’s just part of life. It’s a good thing you had this weekend to get better. That’s what matters.”

And she’s right. That’s writing advice for all of us, even if she didn’t mean it that way. Honestly, most of the reason I couldn’t work on my book was chemical — the cold was messing with my head, and the boatloads of medicines only compounded that. All the fun little things I did instead were also things that didn’t need the attention that I couldn’t muster anyway.

But I’m looking at three other writers in my little writing group who are perfectly healthy, but we have all caught the other bug. For lots of different reasons, we’ve all found ourselves at the same time unable to sit and concentrate.

And Trish’s is good for all of us. It happens sometimes. Sometimes it’s even contagious. Take a break, get some rest, do what you’ve got to do to get better. Life will pick up again when it’s over.

So now I’ve got some work to do. I’m gonna get started. If I can find the time, I’d like to talk a little more about self-publishing and self-promotion later this week. See you then.

This week we’ve got a guest post from my good friend and fellow Consortium Writer, Joshua Unruh. I could tell you more about him, but he does a great job introducing himself below. Read on.

Yesterday’s post on the narrative difference between conflict and adversity ended with some specific advice: Avoid adversity by putting malicious cause behind your protagonist’s setbacks. The best way to do that is to make your antagonist responsible, but sometimes it can be a challenge to follow through on that.

The trick is to manage your antagonist’s off-screen antics so they’re consistent and believable. If you do that well enough, even if it never moves beyond a thought experiment, the events of your story will take on a whole new cohesiveness.

Lonely Fun

Before we get into our proper lesson, I’d like to introduce another little bit of jargon I’ve run into recently: “Lonely Fun.” Joshua Unruh introduced me to the phrase when he named me the king of it.

This isn’t particularly a storytelling term (and, again, not a dirty euphemism). It comes from Joshua’s other major background: gaming. In the role-playing game crowd, “lonely fun” refers to all the work a player does within a game system but not directly related to an actual (multiplayer) game session.

For a player, that might mean rolling up a bunch of characters he’ll never actually use in a campaign. For a game master, it might mean designing remote and far-flung cultures, histories, and artifacts that the players are unlikely to ever actually come across, just for completeness.

If you’re a writer at all, that should sound awfully familiar. I’ve generally referred to it as backstory, but I honestly spend a ton of time thinking about and working through details for my story worlds that never make it into the narrative at all. Most of the time I know they won’t, but my curiosity drags me down those paths anyway.

Incidentally, the title I got from Joshua was well-deserved. We were talking through some of the 4,000-year history of my fantasy world and it is surprisingly rich and deep for a world that only has two complete novels written (set within a couple hundred years of each other) and barely a handful plotted. That’s a little bit excessive.

Hidden Story

But not all backstory is “lonely fun.” During the first couple semesters of my Master of Professional Writing studies, my professor Deborah Chester has introduced me to another term, and this one is industry jargon: “Hidden Story.”

“Hidden story” refers to all the things that happen during your story that are not shown directly to the reader. This includes things your protagonist does between scenes, and what the secondary and supporting characters are doing.

It might include the cops investigating an incident that your (civilian) sleuth is independently investigating. It usually will include everything your antagonist is doing to set up the obstacles your protagonist ends up encountering.

Obviously there’s a whole world of things going on that don’t have any relevance to your story. That’s the lonely fun. But there are big parts of the hidden story that happens off-camera but has direct ramifications for your plot. That’s hidden story.

Hidden Story Summary (Creative Writing Exercise)

And hidden story is how you manage your protagonist’s adversity. Hidden story is where (and when) your antagonist finds the time to set up obstacles. Hidden story is where (and when) your sidekick manages to get kidnapped. Hidden story is where (and when) the villain breaks into the lab and steals the piece of equipment necessary for his grand plan.

You don’t tell the hidden story, but the hidden story is running quietly in the background, propping up your whole plot. It easy to ignore hidden story and let it write itself, but that gets you stuck with implausible (or just inconsistent) obstacles and aggravating adversity instead of compelling conflict.

So here’s your exercise for this week: Consider your current work-in-progress, and evaluate its hidden story. What are you taking for granted? Who’s pulling the strings? What’s happening in between your protagonist’s bouts of pure heroism?

Work it through and make sure it’s logical enough. Make sure your villain can realistically tie the girl to the railroad tracks, get all the way to Nevada to steal a nuclear warhead, and get back to town in time to suspend some other girl from the clocktower within the time period you’ve indicated on-camera.

Make sure you know exactly what happened as part of the antagonist’s scheme, and when it happened, and where everyone else was. That’s as critical for a rom-com as it is for a James Bond novel.

You’re already in the habit of writing scene lists and synopses. Take an hour this afternoon, and spend 300 words writing a synopsis for the story you’re not telling. I guarantee it’ll make your novel better.

I lived in Wichita, KS, for six years while I was growing up. That’s where I attended middle school and high school. That’s where I wrote my first fantasy story, and my first (terrible) novel. That’s where I met my wife. That’s where I made most of the friends who have shaped my life in the decades since.

Partway through my senior year, it really hit me that I would be leaving. My dad drove me down to Oklahoma City to tour the university I’d chosen, and in addition to meeting English professors and peeking into classrooms, I also got to see the student center and the dorms.

And I interviewed with the director of the honors program, who went on and on about the interdisciplinary focus of the program. Students from every school at the university came together to study a core humanities curriculum and participate in debates, discussions, and extracurricular events. More than social clubs and majors, he said, honors students tended to stick together and become friends.

The interview went really well. So did my meeting with the chair of the English department and the Dean of Academic… Something. I dunno. Because I was enrolling in the honors program, they had me meet with a lot of important people, and we all got along really well.

But I spent the long ride home feeling uneasy. It took me a while to place the source of my discomfort, but it was the idea of making new friends. I’d had to make new friends when we first moved to Wichita six years ago, but the friends I made then had served me well ever since. Now I would have to do it again.

It was terrifying. But I didn’t get to spend a whole lot of time on it. Senior year is a busy time, so I spent two semesters ignoring my worry and wrapping things up so I’d end with an impressively high GPA, but not high enough that I’d have to make any speeches. It was a tricky balancing act.

And while I was doing that, my dad was living his own life. I didn’t really pay much attention when he complained about his bosses. I didn’t really pay much attention when he spent a weekend out of town, interviewing for another job. I didn’t really pay much attention when he started making plans.

Then we had a family meeting one night, and Dad explained that he’d accepted a job in Little Rock. They wanted him right away, but he had put them off for two months so my sister and I could finish up the school year. That gave me time to graduate, and then we’d be moving.

As it happened, we moved to Arkansas the night after my graduation. I left behind everything I’d known, and found myself in a strange town, surrounded by strange people, with three short months of summer before I’d have to move off to college and do it all again. I felt overwhelmed and very, very alone.

Several weeks later I was at home when Mom and Dad threw a dinner party for some of my dad’s coworkers. I locked myself in my bedroom to avoid having to chit-chat with strangers. To pass the time, I started work on my second novel. I sat on my bed with a scribblebook in hand and wrote the first three chapters of Taming Fire.

Taming Fire was about a boy who had nothing. He was talented and ambitious, but he had no friends and no real path to success. It was about a kid who got invited to the prestigious Academy of Wizardry to study among some brilliant minds, but found himself unwelcome there and surrounded by hostility. It was about a brilliant if overly-optimistic old teacher who had a vision to train a swordsman in the art of magic — the height of interdisciplinary study — and whose plan fell to tatters.

It was, in short, all the worst fears of my little teenage heart written in high melodrama.

I wrote it in my free time. I workshopped it in creative writing classes and did a complete rewrite as a senior project. I presented it to a class full of engineers and business majors and ended up feeling like a meganerd. I shopped it to publishers and agents. I gave up on writing.

I left it untouched for eight long years, even as I rediscovered my love for writing. And then, back in March, I dusted it off in the hopes of adding it to my self-pubbed library.

And I discovered to my horror that it was wretched. “Melodrama” doesn’t say enough. It was unstructured. It was meandering. It descended into tedious philosophizing at times and jittered into farcical swashbuckling at others. And I had about eight weeks to set it right.

It took me ten. And it took me hundreds of hours and tens of thousands of brand new words. But I built a story I can be proud of out of a project I’d once poured my life into. I found the diamond. I made it shine.

Taming Fire is available for $0.99 at Amazon and Barnes&Noble.com. Look for it in other formats soon (including a $12.99 paperback). Grab a copy, and let me know what you think. If you ask nicely, I might even let you read the original.

I’ve spent a couple weeks trying desperately to finish up Taming Fire for publication this month. But last time we talked, it was about the questions that keep people reading your stories, and the big story question that drives your story forward. I said offhand that well-designed story questions and scene questions make it much easier to write a story.

This week I’d like to follow up on that idea. I want to talk about story questions as structural storytelling elements. If you use them right, they define your story’s skeleton. They hold it up (keeping it believable), they fit together cleverly to allow your story to move around (keeping it focused on the plot), and they protect the softer, more vulnerable bits (keeping it interesting).

For that to work, you have to use story questions. You have to use them deliberately, and you have to string them together in all the right places. When I talk about “story questions,” you probably go straight to the big one — the spine — but you’ve got to build structure out into the extremities, too. That’s what I want to talk about today.

Points of View

I’ve talked a couple times about my novel-writing professor at the University of Oklahoma, Deborah Chester, and her deeply rules-based storytelling technique. It has been astonishing to me how often one of her students will ask a question that requires a vague, subjective answer, and without hesitation she’ll provide a concrete, objective rule concerning the situation.

It has been even more astonishing to learn, again and again, how accurate and effective those rules can be.

One example of that came when a classmate asked her about multiple points of view. She asked, “How many characters should have a point-of-view scene in a good novel? How do you know the right number? And how do you manage them all?”

I snickered from across the room and shook my head. “There’s no answer to that question,” I thought. “It’s a matter of style, of preference, of ability and experience.”

Deborah Chester shrugged and said, “The only characters who should get point-of-view scenes are the ones who are protagonists of subplots. And the only scenes from their points-of-view should be the ones most relevant to that subplot. If your scene is primarily about the protagonist’s story, that scene should always be from the protagonist’s point-of-view.”

Bam. Just like that. Hard and fast rule. And it makes perfect sense. The point-of-view character for any given scene should be the character most invested in that scene, the one who has the most to lose.

Subplots

Of course, to really put that rule to use, you have to know your subplots. You have to know what every scene is doing, and which subplot it’s advancing. That’s basic story structure.

And the easiest way to design, understand, and manage your plots (as I said a couple weeks ago) is to build them around story questions. So the corollary to Professor Chester’s rule about points-of-view is this:

Every subplot needs to have a clear story question, and a clear resolution

You understand the main story question, the spine of your story. You understand the idea of a Big Event at the opening of your story that introduces conflict into your protagonist life and causes him to seek resolution. That becomes the story question (“Will the protagonist find resolution?”). It’s not necessarily conscious, but it’s natural and even instinctive to build your story around that central pillar.

The trick to strong writing, though, is to do it deliberately and effectively. And to extend that same level of care to your subplots as well. They’re the extremities of your story, but they need structure, too. If your protagonist is almost as concerned with paying his rent as he is with fighting off the army of attacking zombies, then you need to do the same things for the “Pay the rent” subplot that you do for the “Zombies” plot.

• Establish the story question early, and clearly
• Devote some scenes entirely to pursuing an answer to that story question (and encountering setbacks along the way)
• Wrap up the subplot with a clear, definite answer to the story question to provide a satisfying resolution

And if your subplot happens to belong to the love interest or the sidekick or the villain instead of the protagonist… well, you do precisely the same thing, but the subplot’s hero is the one who gets point-of-view.

Gods Tomorrow

I thought it might be handy to discuss all this in a real-life example (albeit a simple one). My sci-fi crime novel Gods Tomorrow is told almost entirely from my protagonist Katie’s point of view. The only exception is the very first scene of the book, which acts like a Law & Order-style prologue to introduce the scene of the crime that will drive Katie’s investigation.

That scene happens from the killer’s point of view. And, according to the technical definitions we’re using, it’s not a “scene.” It’s a sequel. The point-of-view character is reviewing the conflict-heavy scene that just took place (he strangled a young woman), considering the impact that’s going to have on him, and then planning how he’s going to handle it in the future.

Even in the sequel, it’s clear what the killer’s goal was in his scene. He wanted to get away with it. And instead of a major setback, the scene closes with a “yes” ending when the killer closes his eyes secure in the knowledge he’s safe.

We don’t see anything else from his point of view. We do see the resolution of his story question, though, when his identity is revealed in the climax and he gets the ultimate “no” ending to his story question.

Meanwhile, the whole rest of the book follows Katie’s goal, and the conclusion of the story is focused on answering her story question. That’s about as simple and straightforward as you can get with “multiple points of view.” Obviously many writers like to make it much more complicated.

I can’t tell you not to. I can tell you how to measure whether or not you’ve done it right.

• Every point-of-view character ought to be the protagonist of his own subplot, and he should only be the point-of-view character in scenes focusing on that subplot.
• Every subplot ought to have a clear story question, and that question should receive a clear, satisfying answer in the book’s conclusion.
• The most interesting protagonist should be the main protagonist, and the most interesting story question should be the main story question.

As long as you’re sticking to those rules, I can hardly quibble. I can just promise it’d be a lot easier to stick to them if there’s only one of each.