Timewaster's Guide Archive

It's closed. I don't care. I am posting anyway.

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For beginning writers, info dumps early in a story are so tempting to use because they have a cool world they want to tell about. The problem is that the info dumps are so damaging to the story. They stop the action. Far better to only hint at these new, crazy things and keep the story moving forward. Aside from providing plot progress, this gives the reader yet another reason to keep reading. It creates a question in the reader's head. What was that? It was cool! I'll have to keep reading to find out, I guess.

I think this applies to all kinds of info dumps. Character. Magic system. Setting (the unique world). Anything. Tell the story first, and fit the other stuff in as subtly as you have opportunity, one piece at a time. Giving it to the reader all at once reduces questions and tension. Can you imagine how different (that is, not as good) HOA would have been if we'd gotten Sazed's GOD BOOK at the beginning, in one big chunk? Blech.

It's all in the storytelling. Having editors helps with that. But what I've noticed in Brandon's books (and also in Terry Pratchett's books) is that little things are there for a reason. It's that attention to the details that makes a difference.  Small things in the beginning that the reader ignores but by the end are found to be important details.

I think that's key. The question is--how do you know which little things should matter in the end? I think you need a very clear vision of how the story will end. Not just in general, but very clearly, very specifically. Maybe that vision doesn't come until you've actually written it. If that's the case, you'll have to go back and retro-fit the ending, filling in gaps and making changes where necessary. Along the way, you may even think of more things to add to the ending, and then have to change the ending to fit it. If you have that vision from the start, you can do all that from the start, but even then, I imagine things will occur during the book that you didn't foresee, and you'll have to change the ending.

Here are some examples.

By the time the ending comes around, I was relatively convinced that Sazed's bracers were pretty unimportant in how the ending would happen. They were still important to his personal conflict, but not to the resolution of the world conflict. Like him, I'd given up on them and accepted the fact that it was time to move on and accept some things on faith alone. Wasted effort. Noble, but wasted. And then--whamo! They become critical to the world conflict. It was a brilliant move on Brandon's part.

Same with Vin's earring. I' told my wife from the beginning that the earring was imporant. When Vin shot it through Marsh's head, I was pretty certain it's duty had been fulfilled. But then Brandon turns it around on us.

I don't think you can do that type of thing unless you know very clearly how the ending will happen. And I almost mean every little sentence, every tiny detail. The problem is that every little sentence, and every little detail, is a product of everything that came before it. For me, it almost becomes a chicken and egg question. I'd be curious to know how early in his writing process Brandon realized that the earring was a spike. Clearly before the end of Final Empire. How soon in his writing process did he know that the bracers would be so important?

It almost gets back to this, for me: world and character building. Make an interesting world and characters, and then figure out how you can do unexpected, interesting things in that world, with those characters.

Every paragraph I type leads me to a new topic, so I'd better stop, now.

I'm a writer and am interested in discussing the Mistborn trilogy from a writer's perspective. That is, what can writers learn from Mistborn about writing good books?

I really don't know where to begin--there are so many examples of why these books work--so will try keep it simple a first.

One of the things that stands out most to me is that it's the high-level view that makes the book most pleasing. The Mistborn books are great, but I don't know that it's the writing that makes them great. The style is transparent, designed simply to convey the story, not to make you think, "Hmm, that was good writing. Very clever." I imagine Brandon can write that kind of stuff, but simply didn't choose to do that with these books.

Rather, what I repeatedly found myself thinking was, "Wow, that was smart. The way those pieces fit together was very clever." To me, it speaks of great world building and superb character building. Most things were internally consistent. For smaller stories, that's not such a hard thing to accomplish, but for three long books, with so many details, it says a lot about the planning and/or editing and revising.

I don't know if Brandon is a genius or an extremely hard worker. It might be both. I heard him say recently that he writes about 2000 words a day. My guess is that those 2000 words themselves make up only a small part of his writing work each day. You can whip out 2000 words in a few hours. If you're on a roll, maybe even an hour. But there's got to be a lot more to it. There's planning. There's double checking. There's going back to the different sections and tweaking this or that. There's probably a lot of thought about the characters and world.

Writing, as it turns out, is about a lot more than how the writer strings words together. It's a necessary skill. But, lots of people who can do that write bland, uninteresting stories are bland.

Now that I think about it, this should probably be filed under the "duh" category. But it's easy for me to forget stuff like this as I'm plowing through to get my words in for the day.

Anyway, I suppose there's a start for a discussion, if anyone is interested.