Redshirts

I was re-reading John Scalzi’s Redshirts recently to check out how a successful writer tackled a problem I’ve been wrestling with. It didn’t turn out to be super useful, however I did realise something fascinating.

Before I get to the thing I noticed, I’d like to dissect an extract from the novel:

CHAPTER SIX

“Dahl, where are you going?” Duvall said. She and the others were standing in the middle of the Angeles V space station corridor, watching Dahl unexpectedly split off from the group. “Come on, we’re on shore leave,” she said. “Time to get smashed.”

“And laid,” Finn said.

“Smashed and laid,” Duvall said. “Not necessarily in that order.”

“Not that there’s anything wrong with doing it in that order,” Finn said.

“See, I bet that’s why you don’t get a lot of second dates,” Duvall said.

“We’re not talking about me,” Finn reminded her. “We’re talking about Andy. Who’s ditching us.”

“He is!” Duvall said. “Andy! Don’t you want to get smashed and laid with us?”

“Oh, I do,” Dahl assured her. “But I need to make a hyperwave first.”

“You couldn’t have done that on the Intrepid?” Hanson asked.

“Not this wave, no,” Dahl said. 

So, let’s work through some of the problems with this section:

First – there’s no sense of place. We start a new chapter in a brand new location. We’ve never been to the Angeles V space station before, so we have no idea what the corridors look like. Are they clean? Are there windows that look out over a starfield? What’s the general feel of the place? Is it crowded. You’re also not supposed to start a new chapter with dialogue, because it doesn’t ease the reader into where the new chapter is set.

Second – the dialogue is all marked by ‘said’ tags, or the infinitely more clunky ‘X reminded her’ or ‘X assured her’. What conventional wisdom says a writer should do in sections like this is draw attention to who’s speaking by using character actions. These make a scene more dynamic and allow a flow of conversation to continue without having to append ‘Finn said’ and ‘Dahl said’ to the end of every godamn sentence.

Third – what is actually happening in this scene? We know the group is standing around as the scene starts, but what about when Dahl walks away? Is Dahl walking away whilst the conversation is happening? Or did he start to walk away and then stop when Duvall started talking? Are Duvall, Finn etc. standing in a tight cluster? This reads like a script.

Fourth – all the characters sound exactly the same. Quippy. Take away the dialogue tags and I’d have no idea who was talking.

It’s worth mentioning, by the way, that I didn’t cherry pick a section of Redshirts which is particularly… rich in terms of editing 101 level criticisms, you could pick any scene from about 90% of the book and have exactly the same stuff to say.

So, if I had written the above section, an editor might have got me to rewrite it thusly. Changes are in bold:

CHAPTER SIX

The Angeles V space station bustled with staff, crew from docked star ships and visiting aliens who seemed eager to gum up the rich burgundy carpet with viscous slime. Dahl spotted what he’d spent the last five minutes looking for – a service corridor which would hopefully contain a comms suite.

“Dahl, where are you going?” Duvall said, matching his change of direction. “Come on, we’re on shore leave! Time to get smashed.”

Finn laughed, “and laid.”

“Smashed and laid,” Duvall said, “Not necessarily in that order.”

Finn frowned and stroked his lip. “Not that there’s anything wrong with doing it in that order.”

“See, I bet that’s why you don’t get a lot of second dates,” said Duvall, punching him in the shoulder.

Finn pantomimed clutching at his shoulder before straightening up. “We’re not talking about me. We’re talking about Andy. Who’s ditching us.”

“He is!” Duvall said. “Andy! Don’t you want to get smashed and laid with us?”

Dahl grinned “Oh, I do, but I need to make a hyperwave first.”

“You couldn’t have done that on the Intrepid?” Hanson asked, having to half-run to keep up with the group.

“Not this wave, no,” Dahl said.

Okay, so that’s how an editor would want me to re-write that scene. That’s something I threw together in five minutes, if I was going to actually re-write the scene I’d probably scrap it completely and find a different way to communicate the same information, but you get my point.

Now. Redshirts sold really well, and it won the Hugo Award. How do we square that with the fact that the book is, according to conventional editing wisdom, on a nuts-and-bolts level, actually pretty bad?

Could it be that new writers have to jump through all these editing hoops, trying to make their text as technically perfect as they possibly can, whilst writers like John Scalzi, who already have an established platform (first formed in 2005 when editorial standards were less strict), can ignore best practice and still attain commercial and critical success?

Could it be that, because we’re in late stage capitalism, every creative field is stuffed to bursting with people who want to make a living as a writer, artist, musician etc. and whole industries have sprung up to take their money in exchange for the advice that ‘you’ll be successful if you only learn to do X, Y and Z’?

Could it be that, whilst there are a series of best practices for writing as it exists currently, the way people read and write fiction is so varied, both historically and in the present moment, that any piece of advice that says ‘you should write like THIS’ will be inherently reductive and unhelpful?

Is life, and capitalism, too random to be able to expect technically excellent writing from every critically and commercially successful book?

Now, it’s really tempting to get all huffy and look down your nose at something like Redshirts. ‘This guy clearly doesn’t know what he’s doing’ the jealous writer says ‘I don’t know why he was so successful when my novel about diamond mining set from the point of view of a pickaxe didn’t get picked up.’

The thing is, Redshirts was successful because it was so readable. I loved Redshirts. Still do, to a certain extent. The codas at the end are highly superfluous but whatever. The point is, it’s highly readable, and part of the reason behind that is Scalzi doesn’t spend three paragraphs introducing us to the Angeles V space station corridor. Redshirts is a parody of Star Trek. The space station corridor is like a Star Trek corridor. You know what that looks like.

So, does that mean I learned the wrong lesson about my Sense of Place writing all those months ago? Maybe, in fact, I can get away with not describing a damn thing. Scalzi did and he won the Hugo!

Well, let’s all hold our horses there. Just because Scalzi got away with it, that doesn’t mean I can. Besides, description is generally a good thing. I think my overall point with this is… editors will follow strict orthodoxies when it comes to the technical aspects of writing. Scalzi has proved that you don’t need to follow a lot of those ‘rules’. Will you land an agent if you ignore those rules? Probably not, but you probably won’t land an agent anyway, because of the numbers that are stacked against you. Does that mean those strict orthodoxies that editors love are bad?

No.

And yes.

No, they’re not bad, because… hacked together and unpolished as my re-written section of Redshirts was, I think it’s pretty clearly better than the original, and doesn’t sacrifice any of the original’s readability.

Yes, because I think writers can drive themselves mad trying to follow these rules.

There’s this piece of advice that I’ve heard over and over and over again when it comes to submitting novels to agents. ‘Make sure it’s as good as it can possibly be.’ I heard that same advice from the writer who gave me a bit of a talking to, recently about what I considered ‘success’ to be. And… It’s not bad advice, exactly, but I think it’s unhelpful advice because it’s too broad.

Novels are art. There is no ‘perfect’ form for a novel to take. There is no ‘as good as it can possibly be’, and if there was, you’d never be able to tell if you’d reached it or not. The novel which I still have out for submission has been revised in a hundred ways this year. Some large, some small. Most improved the thing, but a load of changes got made and… I have no idea if they actually improved the text. At some point, I feel as if I went from improving the text to fiddling with it.

‘Well, that just goes to show that it’s ready to go!’ the unhelpful voice in my head says. But… is it? Is it as good as it could possibly be? I have no idea. Honest to goodness, I haven’t a clue.

Ultimately, that’s why focussing on getting an agent is a bad idea. An agent will pick your work up if:

1)      It’s good

2)      They click with it

You have some control over point 1 – although different people will consider very different things good, so you actually don’t have anywhere near as much control as some people might tell you, but you have almost no control over point 2 at all.

Ultimately, the world is random. Things succeed or fail, get picked up or don’t. Yes, there are things you can do to increase the chances of getting picked up – having a quality product is very important. Plus, I need to point this out every time I talk about this stuff or I come across as bitter – every book I have submitted before the current one has had serious problems with it and probably shouldn’t have been picked up. I haven’t been denied an agent because of some great, universe-spanning injustice, I haven’t got an agent so far because my work hasn’t been good enough to justify it, and I haven’t got lucky.

That first point is very important, but so is the second. I think anyone who discounts the sheer amount of luck required to make your way in any creative industry is suffering from either survivorship bias or the just world fallacy. Or possibly both.