ne of the things I’m worrying about in revisions is voice.  I have two main point-of-view characters, and I have to say that I’ve been foolishly letting their voices elide into each others.  And so I’m making lists now, on the second time through, of characteristics of speech.  Subtle things that distinguish one character from another.

For instance, one of my characters speaks very precisely.  He’s not even allowed to think the words “thing” or “what have you” or “such like” or any of that.  He identifies everything in detail–at least in his head; he’s a bit more shy when he speaks aloud, a problem he deals with as the book goes on.  And as the book goes on, his outward language starts matching his inner thoughts more and more.  If he can attach a quantity to something, he will.  “Five” is better than “some.”
Another character is — well, he’s fluffy.  He’s not stupid, but he has his own brand of special logic.  And so for him, everything’s about imprecision.  He uses the word “thing.”  He weasels.  He makes sweeping statements that character number one would shudder to hear.
Yet another character is lovable but–at least until near the end–very selfish.  And so everything she says (she doesn’t get a point of view) needs to subtly indicate that she only sees the world through her eyes.
And yet I have to do this without being too heavy-handed.  I hate it when authors set off a character by giving them one thing that they say over and over.  I don’t want to hit my readers over the head with the differences between characters; I just want to make it subtly obvious that they’re quite, quite different.
So what do you do to set your characters apart?  Any tips?

o I’m planning revisions. I know that thing up there says 85%, but pay it no mind. I really only have a few connecting scenes to write, and besides, that number is of no moment because if you look at my page count, it’s pretty high. Like over 400 pages. That’s what I get for not writing densely.

“Revisions” at present means “cleaning up the first 9 chapters, up until the first inflection point.” This is a point where there’s a purely . . . internal crisis for the hero. The problem is that now that I’m rereading it, I can tell that it’s slow. It’s really slow. And I have already made all these notes about things I need to include for continuity’s sake. So I got out a notebook and pen and made a list of scenes and what they did to advance the plot.

Pain. I have a scene entitled “arrival of roses.” What does it do to advance the plot? Uh. What does it actually do? It’s funny. It introduces a secondary character who disappears from the book entirely. And it was a blast to write. It would be a blast to read. Except . . . it doesn’t do anything to advance the plot. I read through it this time, knowing what the plot was, and I thought: “This is slow.” Yup. It gets deleted. And it’s so painful, because it was fun to write. But it doesn’t do anything. Nothing at all. I’m just wincing.
And that’s just on the macro level. I’ve started leaving comments for myself, saying, “Gee–is this really the twentieth time she’s whined about this? Good God.” And nearly every scene should have the first four to five paragraphs lopped off. You know that part of the scene that starts with someone thinking? Yeah. That part. My characters think too much. My characters can have a five sentence conversation that spans four pages because somebody is thinking way too much. Yup. That happens all the time. So for the next week or so, that little meter will run backwards. Backwards represents progress. I think.
So what about the rest of you? What’s the most painful thing you’ve ever had to delete?

‘m at the dizzying point in my novel where I have about 20,000 words left to write. As I judge it, there’s about 10,000 words more that need to connect the two sections of my manuscript (and I know most of what goes on in there) and about 5000 words of wind-down at the end. This adds up to 20,000 because I know my writing style–at least in other areas–and I expand on first revision, and so I’ll probably add about 15,000 words in revision (and that’s taking into account the fact that some scenes will get deleted). And that still adds up to 20,000 because I’ll drop 10K words in subsequent revisions. I’ve done the hard stuff. I’ve done the stuff that nearly killed me to do. From here, downhill, yada yada yada.
I am a big fan of revisions. Have I mentioned this? I think that revisions are what make a story. I am a big fan of macro-revisions–rearranging large parts, changing motivations when it doesn’t work–and micro-revisions, e.g. laboriously printing out the manuscript, making changes, entering them, and repeating until it’s picture perfect. In my other job, I go through . . . many. Many. Drafts. Of things.
When I first started writing this novel I had no clue what book I was writing. Ha ha ha. I laugh at what I thought then. So much has changed since the end of October when Ornithology was a gleam in my eye. At this point, it feels like the Death Star in The Return of the Jedi: fully functional yet still under construction, and likely plagued with a problem such that anyone with a Bothan spy network could figure out that ONE well-placed torpedo could take down the whole thing.

Here is a line of text which replaces about four paragraphs of ranting and raving about all the ways in which one could torpedo my novel. I sum up: Ack!

ne of the things I’ve been, well, not really struggling with, but at least wary of, has to do with my hero.

Yes, he’s a beta.  And yes, he’s smart, and one of the reasons my heroine eventually falls in love with him is that, having observed one small link in a chain of  interactions, he can sight clear to the end, and see what’s really bothering her.  In short, when everyone else in the world thinks she’s crazy, he understands her.  This means I can’t ever really rely on plot devices like his not understanding her, or willfully misunderstanding things that she says.  Other people can do that, but my hero?  No; he’s just not that kind of guy.  He gets her.  Given enough information, and the inclination, he’d get anyone and anything.  (As you can imagine, “inclination” is important.)
(There’s a certain idea out there that incredibly smart people–uber-people–cannot be people people.  There’s truth to that in some ways, but in other ways, some of the incredibly smart people I have known are often very good at figuring others out.  They can’t help it.  Other people are a problem, and you put it in front of them, and the mind whirs and it spits out an answer.  It doesn’t mean that they’re always right, but they often have great insights.)
But I have to balance this against the fact that he’s also absolutely obsessive about his own interests, and finds society (and the ton) completely baffling.  He never gets the rules of etiquette.  He finds the rules of precedence mind-boggling.  He’s vaguely aware of the dictates of propriety, but assumes that other people will make sure that no lines are crossed, and never bothers to think about it.  If he really wanted, he could probably figure all that stuff out, but he can’t be bothered, because it would take valuable brain time and energy from the subjects he’d rather think about.  So for the most part, he’s happy not to waste brain cells thinking about people.
And in the blackest of black moments–coming up shortly–he does have to not understand the heroine.  And that is what makes it so black for her.  Up until now, he’s understood everything without her saying more than a few words.  Nobody else sees what she wants, or understands why she’s bothered.  But he understands.  But at some point, he has to have the inclination to understand, and the information.  And he’s got to miss it, completely.
I suspect I am bebothering myself with something that nobody else will care about, given that (as my critique partners can attest) I freak out about truly minor factual inconsistencies that nobody else in their right mind would possibly care about.  But it does matter to me that this make sense.  In any event, his reaction turns entirely on the mind-projection fallacy—something that he, for all his smarts, is prone to.

The mind-projection fallacy is something all romance writers are familiar with, though probably not by that name.  The mind-projection fallacy assumes that your view of the world is factual.  That is, you project your mind on to other people.  Examples of the mind-projection fallacy are things like, “That book sucks.  Why is it a best-seller?” and “She’s so ugly.  Why do all the guys like her?” and (less obviously, and more controversially) “We can’t know the position and velocity of a particle exactly; therefore the position and velocity are delocalized.”

I don’t know what romance writers would do without the mind-projection fallacy.  But according to a reasonably reliable source, it’s a linguistic artifact.  !!  Exclamation points!!!111!!!one!  I’ve heard it claimed that it happens because in English you can state opinion as if it were fact, and that other languages–the one named was Turkish–make such statements impossible.

Now, I already know that I think differently in different languages (and I only speak two, and the second, I only speak with marginal fluency–and I’m not even sure of that now).  But this claim boggles my mind.

How do you write romance novels in Turkish?  Must all their misunderstandings be unspoken?  I would cry for help, except I don’t speak Turkish, and so it’s no problem.
Does anyone know if this is true or not?

  have about 66,000 words of non-contiguous text.  This is the two-thirds mark.

I’ve learned a huge amount writing these 66,000 words.  One of the things I have learned is that the important thing is to write whenever I have the chance (note that this is not the same thing as writing every day–unfortunately, I really don’t have the chance to write every day, and the only reason I managed to get some writing done last Friday was that I stayed up until 2:30 AM to do so).  And what that means is that sometimes, if I’m not feeling a scene, what I need to do is skip it and write a scene that I am feeling.  Eventually, it all comes together.

I’m at the lovely point where things are beginning to come together.  Part of this means that I ended up trying to write a scene and discovered that the motivation of the villain who drives the scene is insufficient to support his actions.  And so I carried that around for a day, and then realized in particular light-bulb fashion, that I could manufacture a much more entertaining–and believable–motivation for his actions.  Of course, I’ll have to clean all that up in the reediting process, but it’s hugely fun.

And there I am.  66,000 words in.  It’s kind of shocking.

here are some things you never want to e-mail your critique partners:

• By the way, I’m really, really sorry about the omniscient crabs.
• It sucks. It’s not great. It’s not funny. It’s not witty.
• This chapter was going to [do X.] It no longer does. It all got hijacked.

Now imagine that all this is being said about Chapter 9. Three completely and utterly different versions of chapter nine. Not counting the crisis of faith that intervened and made me start a completely different version of my story, complete with 6000 words that will now have to be discarded, pshaw, because they sucked, and because it would have been a totally different story otherwise, and a suckier one, too.

ne part of this story that’s really hard is that I’m writing a scientist. This isn’t so much a problem–I am a scientist, or at least I was for a very long time–except for one thing.

1815 science is nothing like science nowadays. There are four huge differences between 1815 and now. Those differences are so huge that the entire landscape has been transformed.

Difference number one is Gauss. Carl Friedrich Gauss. He was one of the last of the greats, one of the last of the people who you could call a “scientist” without having to go into specifics. He was a mathematician and a philosopher and a physicist and a chemist and pretty much everything in between. He has more things–units of measure, theorems, laws–named after him than anyone else. He was an absolutely stunning genius, and he changed the way that we think about science. I’m not talking about his work on electromagnetism; I’m talking about statistics. Gauss posited that data collected in a particular fashion should have certain characteristics, and gave us ways to think about it. The whole idea of “statistical significance” meant nothing before Gauss. And that means that before Gauss, people had no idea how to really go about proving things. They didn’t really understand the difference between anecdote and data. Sure, they had crude measures. But Gauss taught us to quantify that, and once we understood that, we could attach probabilities to measurements.

Before Gauss, the scientific method was all about observation, and duplication of results. After Gauss, the method was honed. You could identify hypothesis, and you could test them. You could isolate other factors that might be relevant, and work with hugely multivariate inputs. Because you had a way to sort them out at the end. Gauss radically changed the way that science was done.

2. Darwin. I’m writing about an ornithologist, and everything I know about biology is completely out the window. Absolutely everything. Our understanding of species is so infused with Darwin at this point. All of our questions–every time we ask a question “why?” about species behavior, our answers feed back to Darwin. I’m writing about an ornithologist who keeps data. Darwin was still in short pants in 1815. Biologists have no idea of species survival, and the “why” questions were answered with “because God made them like it.” Before Darwin, what we currently consider biology was all stamp-collecting: people sketched animals and made observations, but didn’t even have the vocabulary to ask how things came about.

I’m writing a biologist who asks why questions, but I have to pick questions that he can ask, and that he can answer.

3. Entropy. No understanding of entropy. Today, we understand that entropy exists, and that it increases. Back then, the search was for order and for rules. I can’t stress how much that changes the scientific mindset. This wraps in with #2: God created everything, they thought, and so there had to be rules. Boltzmann, who was one of the first to really understand the concept of entropy, was so depressed by the reception the concept received that he committed suicide in 1906. No, I’m serious. Really.

It took decades for the scientific community to accept that disorder was the method of the universe, and I’m writing in a time when it very clearly wasn’t.
#4 Wave behavior. Back in 1815, we knew that electricity and magnetism were interrelated. We didn’t know how. We had absolutely no idea about quantum mechanics, of course; that would take another hundred years or so. But the years of 1800-1950 were the years in which we discovered that the universe was composed of nothing but waveforms (the next 150 years after that, of course, are dedicated to discovering that waveforms are nothing but information after all–but that’s another genre altogether). The effect of this is delicate, but we understand–and are comfortable with–uncertainty to a huge degree.

Do you ever remember being told as a kid that there were only three, or six, or ten people in the world who really understood quantum mechanics? Well, it’s a crock. You were fed lies. Quantum mechanics isn’t really that hard. It’s just that when it first came out, people couldn’t get their heads around it. Just like your grandmother, who pokes at a computer with a confused look on her face, and can’t figure out how to double-click. If your mind gets set in a certain way of thinking, you can’t get out. It’s weird. You say things like, “but how does the electron get to the other side of the orbital?” And your kids laugh at you and say, “No, you dumbshit–the electron is the orbital. It’s not in orbit.” Quantum mechanics isn’t weird stuff if you grow up with it. There’s nothing to understand, any more than there’s nothing to understand about flipping a light switch.

Since 1815, science has shifted from being a rational search for a set of complete rules into a messy, chaotic method for dealing with inevitable, changing uncertainty. It’s evolved from a Plan into a Coping Mechanism. And so I have to make Gareth ring true as a scientist–not a dabbler (”I’m not sure I’d know how to dabble”), but a real scientist, one who forgets everything around him when he starts thinking about things–to modern readers, and yet maintain the historical period.

It’s kind of fun.

  wish I could write as fast as Eve does. But for a number of reasons, which I won’t enumerate here, I can’t. Alas.

Nonetheless, I have finally connected one of the first discontinuous chapters that I’ve written, and I’m now going through and painstakingly changing all the things that have changed as I’ve written the book. The heroine’s looks. The size of her dowry. The objectionable nature of her initial suitor. The motivations of a number of people who were intended to be antagonists, but who simply refuse to follow suit. The hero’s last name–which has changed four or five times, and which I refuse to change any longer.

I’m one third done, and it’s a natural stopping place in the narrative. It’s a natural stopping place for two reasons. One, it’s a moment of realization (and transition) for the hero. Two, I have no idea what happens in the next chapter.

I mean, I know generally what must happen over the next two-thirds of the book. But specifically? Who knows. In any event, it’s time to reread the first third and make conforming changes, and see if anything in particular jumps out at me as really objectionable.

Hmm….

s originally conceived, this book had one person who was going to act as an antagonist. This book also had a lot of question marks in the middle of it.

After I got through chapter 2, it was pretty clear there were going to be two antagonists. And then when I finished chapter 3, I realized there were three of them. Three is maybe too many, but they’re not wholly disconnected, so it was more like two and a half. Okay, I can live with that.

In chapter four, I discovered that one of my antagonists was harmless, and that the antagonist was really his older sister, who’s dominant. Very dominant. And, unfortunately, also very likable. So I now have two and a half antagonists, one of whom is sympathetic. Okay, I can deal with that. So the other one-and-a-half antagonists–the connected two–come into play.

And now, smack dab in the middle of chapter 6, the other antagonist turns into a sympathetic person. She really was supposed to be snotty and unlikable. She was supposed to be rude and uncaring. Instead, she learned Greek so that her younger sister wouldn’t read her diary. “What kind of antagonist are you?” I shriek. “Who cares about your stupid hats? EVERYBODY CARES. You’re an antagonist. We’re supposed to cheer when you’re thwarted.”

I have a problem. I cannot write villains or antagonists. And I think my problem stems from this: I may be mean, I may be snarky, and I may be supercritical, but I like basically everyone I meet. Some more than others, of course, but I like people. I have never met a real person I didn’t like. Thus, I can’t really write about someone I don’t like, either. This makes antagonists darned hard to write, though. All I can do is cross motivational wires and hope that someone likes my hero better than my antagonist.

o over on Jacqueline Barbour’s blog, Jacqueline’s been talking about one-sentence book descriptions. Of course, nobody can write a book in one sentence. That’s why we call them “books” and not “sentences.” But after playing around with what she’d thrown up there, and realizing that I was writing in my voice rather than hers (the huge problem with critiquing other people’s stuff), I figured I should try to get a one-sentence description myself. I can do it in one sentence, but I think I catch the flavor better with two:
Claire Cunningham was supposed to fall for a wealthy, titled gentleman, not an ornithologist with an ink-stained cravat. Oops.

Personally, I think there’s something delicious about absurdly short sentences. “Oops” is perfect here. Longer sentences, no matter what the subject matter, can never be quite as funny. For instance, here’s how some dialogue originally started:

“I have two pounds and ten shillings. What sort of man do you suppose I can afford?”
“I think that depends on whether men are sold by the ounce or as a piece.”
“Well,” Claire said, “I suppose if I give up ribbons, I’ll be able to afford a merchant’s little finger in a few years.”

The problem with this, of course, is that (a) it puts the punchline before the joke (twice!), and (b) the sentences are too long. The exchange works much better like this:

“Be serious. What sort of man do you suppose I could purchase?”

“That depends. How much have you got?”

“Two pounds, ten shillings.”

“You can probably get a merchant’s little finger with that. If you’re willing to haggle.”

“Now that,” she said, “would be crass.”

He hesitated, somewhat affronted. “The merchant? Or the purchase?”

“Lud, neither. Haggling.”