Moving Forward by Looking Backward

In his memoir The Early Asimov, Isaac Asimov reminisces about writing “Nightfall.”

I often wonder, with a shudder, what might have happened on the evening of March 17, 1941, if some angelic spirit had whispered in my ear, “Isaac, you are about to start writing the best science fiction short story of our time.”

I would undoubtedly have frozen solid. I wouldn’t have been able to type a word.

With all due respect to Dr. Asimov, I disagree. Prior knowledge of how your book will be received could be the most valuable tool in your toolbox.* Imagine knowing exactly what reviewers will say when your deathless prose reaches their eyes! How easy would it be to craft a masterpiece if you had already seen which parts of your work were destined to wreak havoc on your readers’ emotions?

Of course, you can’t. But reread the third sentence of the previous paragraph–and take it as a suggestion.

I was recently working on a paranormal mystery novel, not my usual fare, but I had an idea. The problem with mysteries (for pantsers like me) is that you can’t just start writing and see where the plot takes you. You have to know where you’re going ahead of time, or else you’re going to have a lot of work interpolating clues and such after you’re done, and it’s never really going to read seamlessly. I wanted this book to function first as a mystery and secondly as a fantasy, so much outlining was needed–not my normal modus operandi.

Initially, I was trying to follow the thematic arc of a classic mystery like The Big Sleep. Later I realized that my book was shaping up more along the lines of The Maltese Falcon, but it wasn’t either of these that provided me with my big epiphany–it was another Hammett masterpiece, The Thin Man.

Big fan. Read the book, have all the movies on DVD, have a major crush on Nora Charles. (If you’ve seen the movies and do not have a crush on one of the protagonists, we can’t be friends.) At the end of each adventure, Nick Charles rounds up all of the suspects, sits them down, and proceeds to lecture them on how he unravelled the whole story to determine that the murderer was…

And that’s when it hit me. Instead of racking my brain to figure out who was where when, had a motive, and who was just lying to hide something else, why not let my detective explain it all to me at the end of the book as if I were one of the suspects? In other words, “Life is short, write the ending of your book first.” In the words of your main character.

And it worked. He expounded and I listened. I had already figured out who the guilty party was, but it was my detective who explained how he had cut through all of the obstructing undergrowth of lies, misplaced loyalties and petty jealousies (most which I didn’t know existed until he explained them), and why the second murder had occurred. (I didn’t even know there had been a second murder.) He also explained the MacGuffin, another factor I hadn’t known about–which revealed several characters’ motives.

Maybe it was time travel, maybe it was astral projection, and maybe it was just adopting a new point of view, but imagining how my novel would look, looking backward, changed everything. And the technique isn’t limited to writing the ending first. You could go beyond that, putting yourself in the position of reading a review. “The author pulls the reader in through his careful use of alternating points of view.” Did you know you were planning to alternate points of view? Well, you know it now!

Perhaps the real takeaway here is that just because the reader will experience your story in a linear fashion doesn’t mean you have to write it that way. You could literally write it backward and no one would ever know. Or you could outline it ahead of time, maybe by the method I’ve described.

It’s not that odd when you think about it. Who doesn’t daydream about the awards that their novel or story is going to win? Who doesn’t imagine being featured in a celebrity book club? This is just a more specific daydream.

Specifically, this post will lead directly to my being commissioned to write a how-to book by Writer’s Digest. You heard it here first.

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*On the other hand, it could be a very big problem, as in Time and Again, by Clifford B. Simak (1951).

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A Modest Proposal for Amazon

I got a five-star review on a book the other day. It was very nice, to think that someone out there in the wide world read my book and liked it that much. The critical word in that last sentence, though, was “think.”

Although the implication is that somebody thought my book was top-notch, I have no way of knowing for sure, because there’s no accompanying review. Was it the characters, the action, the prose? If it were ranked 1 – 10 (instead of 1 – 5), would I have only gotten a 9, and if so, why? I don’t even know that this person read the book; they could as easily have purchased it, filed it, and posted a five-star rating pro forma. Doesn’t sound likely…and yet that same book has a 1-star rating attached as well, and I will bet you my bottom dollar (what does that even mean?) that whoever gave me that rating did not read the book. I don’t have an inflated sense of my own skills, but I do not write 1-star books.

And if they did read the book, what were they trying to say? Was the premise totally implausible? Did the dialogue rattle like an old pick-up on a dirt road? Did the protagonist remind them of a despised junior high school teacher?

You see the problem: It’s easy to despise an unexplained 1-star complaint, but it’s hard to understand it, and impossible to know if it’s valid (and that doesn’t just hurt the writer, it undermines the entire purpose of ratings). But I have a solution: It would not be difficult for Amazon to require that all one-star ratings include a review of say, 60 characters minimum. That’s about ten words. That book is someone’s dream. If you hate it enough to sink it single-handedly in the Amazon ratings (and that’s exactly what you’re doing), surely you can come up with ten words to explain why. Otherwise, you’re just a troll. And to make it fair, the same should be required for all five-star ratings. Let the author know why you loved his book! How else do you expect the next one to be as good? How else will anyone know if he should read it?

So if anyone out there has a connection to Jeff Bezos, do us all a favor and ask him to implement this little change to his program. It wouldn’t take much, but it would mean a lot to us as both readers and writers…you know, the people who pay to keep your company afloat…

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