Recap

 I’ve begun work on Volume VII of the Praxis series, which so far does not have a title, and I’ve ran smack into the problem of information control.

Information control, as I tell the participants at Taos Toolbox, is crucial for the writer.  Too little information and the reader is bewildered.  Too much and the reader is buried, or bored, or possibly some other word beginning with b.

Get information control right, and you can build suspense.  Tell the reader enough so they can stop worrying about what’s happening, as I’ve said, so they can start worrying about what happens next!

My difficulties were made worse by the existence of six previous volumes of material.  How much recapitulation is necessary to bring the reader up to speed?  How much is too much?

And the characters!  I seem to have 1200 of them by now.  How many can I introduce before the reader’s mind gets blurry?  How many are necessary?  How long before all this stops being amusing?

One thing I absolutely wanted to avoid was writing a novel that begins with a 100-page infodump in which Brilliant Hero sits down to a conversation with Wise Superior about weapons, tactics, the opposition, the political situation, warship design, the odds of winning the next Army-Navy game, then delivers a crisp summary of all other major characters before Brilliant Hero sets out to win yet another glorious victory against overwhelming odds.

Yet how to avoid all that?  Information flow was, in fact, necessary.  An infodump of some kind was unavoidable.  We were right in the middle of a big story that had started in The Accidental War, and at a point at which characters had to make some major decisions, and these decisions had to be comprehensible to the reader.  And furthermore, I couldn’t count on readers remembering how Accidental War had ended, so I had to re-introduce several of those issues as well.

Resigning myself to writing an expository chapter, I determined to make it as brief and information-rich as possible, and just get the damn thing done.  I used every method of unloading information that I could think of— in dialogue or argument, in summary, and just laying it out on the page (which to my mind is perfectly acceptable, much preferable to as-you-know-Bob dialogue).  Even so, partway through and I realized I was getting bored.  As a reader, I felt I didn’t know these people, and I had created them.

What I decided was missing was voice, or— if you like— Attitude.  Fortunately my point-of-view character was Caroline Sula, who has attitude aplenty, and so for a while I enjoyed layering Sula’s caustic internal monologue over the proceedings.  But, having finished the chapter and gone on to the next, I still felt something was missing.  The chapter read well enough, and got the job done, but I wanted to open the book with something bigger.

Farther along in the story by now, I was writing a big emotional scene, and in the middle of it I realized that all the big emotions were in the wrong place.  I needed to put them right at the start!  Hook the readers with a big shattering emotional scene at the beginning, I thought, and they’d have more patience for the exposition that follows.

(Toolbox vets may remember the Nancy Kress Swimming Pool Theory, in which if you dive into the water with a sufficiently big splash, you can coast for a while under water before you need to start stroking again.)

So hey!  I’m writing by Nancy’s rules!  Now I’m busy rewriting, and I’m happy with how it’s turning out.

I saved my work from the threat of tedium, and I did it by thinking hard about what I was doing, and by doing experiments, and doing obsessive rewrites.  All of which you should be prepared to do, if you want to be good at this.

No, it isn’t easy.  Who told you that it was?

Class dismissed, and carry on.