“How are we supposed to watch a house like this?”

(Note: This post is the twenty-first installment in my author’s commentary for The Icon Thief, covering Chapter 20. You can read the earlier installments here.)

Last week, I received the first batch of notes from my agent and other readers on the rough draft of Eternal Empire. This kind of detailed feedback is always essential, but this round was especially interesting, because it included comments from people who hadn’t read the first two books in the series. Overall, the response was very positive, and it pointed to a number of possible avenues for further tightening and clarification. But I was most interested in one recurring theme in the comments, which was that I ought to include additional backstory. A number of readers without previous knowledge of the series thought that I should provide a little more background on returning characters, for the benefit of those who hadn’t read The Icon Thief or City of Exiles, which is a perfectly valid point. But I also noticed something strange: in several cases, they wanted more background on characters they assumed had been more fully fleshed out in previous books—when, in fact, they were appearing here for the first time ever.

In other words, readers assumed that they were being deprived of information that had appeared somewhere in the first two installments, when it was really just a reflection of my natural tendency, as a writer, to give as little backstory as possible. I’m not going to go into my feelings on this topic again, since these have been adequately covered elsewhere on this blog. And from experience, I know that when you go out for comments, you’ll often get requests for this kind of background material—requests, I’m convinced, that you should push back against whenever possible. When readers want more backstory, it’s often a sign that things in the present tense of the story aren’t as clear as they should be, and there are ways of addressing this without cutting away from the action. A perceived lack of backstory may be a symptom of certain problems, but the solution often lies elsewhere, at least in the majority of cases. That said, there are times when backstory and exposition are genuinely necessary. And one of the greatest challenges for any writer lies in integrating this material in a way that seems natural, or at least minimally disruptive.

The best way to introduce verbal backstory and exposition is through action. This is why Dean Koontz, in his invaluable Writing Popular Fiction, notes that the long, dry summation of the mystery that we find at the end of most Agatha Christie novels would often work better in the context of a suspenseful sequence—with the protagonist, for instance, cornered by the villain, which provides an opening for our hero to explain how he figured out the evil plan. (Hence the frequently mocked monologues by the villains in the James Bond movies, which actually make perfect dramatic sense.) Unfortunately, this isn’t always an option: action scenes, if properly done, tend to be tightly structured, with only the essential number of moving parts, and can’t always handle the burden of extra information at a time when the plot should be moving forward as quickly as possible. A better solution, perhaps, is to insert exposition into a natural pause within a larger sequence of suspense. The best kind of suspense, after all, is about waiting for something to happen, and while a couple of your characters are waiting, you can have them talk about whatever you want, within reason.

The result is often something like Chapter 20 of The Icon Thief, which is a sort of portmanteau chapter in which I cover as much expository material in as little space as possible. Powell and Wolfe are on stakeout, seated in a car outside Archvadze’s mansion, at a point when I’ve already established that two other important characters are there for reasons of their own—and that a heist is unfolding even as we speak. As a result, I felt free to let Powell and Wolfe talk about a range of topics I hadn’t yet covered: the background of the case, additional developments on the murder at Brighton Beach, and, most unusually for me, Powell’s own backstory, notably the influence of his father, a former diplomat and intelligence officer now suffering from dementia. This is the kind of information I wouldn’t be able to include anywhere else, given my own rules for advancing the narrative with only the minimal amount of retrospection, but here, it’s borderline permissible, because the story has been structured in such a way as to allow for an organic pause. Moments like this, which naturally emerge from the flow of the narrative, are where backstory and exposition belong, so it’s no surprise that I try to pack in as much as possible. And fortunately for the reader, there’s a lot of action right around the corner…

The Red Queen’s guide to writing

One of the buried themes of this blog over the past year has been the ongoing, and not entirely intentional, acceleration of my writing process. The Icon Thief took about two years to write, revise, and sell. Its sequel, City of Exiles, was written in less than nine months, not counting a few extra weeks at the end for revision and copy-editing. And while I tried to negotiate a little more wriggle room for The Scythian, I’m still slated to deliver it about nine months from the day I signed the contract, which, when you take other projects into account, is even less time than it sounds. I don’t necessarily mind the compressed schedule: it’s forced me to be smarter and more efficient in how I plan these books, and as a result, I’ve learned a lot as a writer. I’ve even begun to take a certain pride in my productivity, and until recently, I held on to the hope that I’d eventually be able to scale back to the comfortable pace of a novel a year.

Or so I thought. These days, however, the consensus in publishing seems to be that a novel a year is far too slow, and even a novel every nine months is nothing special. A recent article by Julie Bosman in the New York Times points out that mainstream novelists are increasingly being compelled to publish two or more books every year, both because of competition with other kinds of content and in an attempt to keep a writer’s name in the public eye. The enormous popularity of series fiction has taught publishers the importance of building an audience with successive books, rather than betting everything on one big, self-contained novel every few years. This makes a lot of sense for individual writers—and it’s certainly had a surprising influence on my own career—but when everyone is doing it, the advantage disappears. As Lee Child observes, with a nod to Lewis Carroll’s Red Queen: “It seems like we’re all running faster to stay in the same place.”

Of course, mainstream novelists have always felt pressure to work at a fast pace. Agatha Christie referred to herself as “a perfect sausage machine,” and, at her peak, she produced two novels a year with clockwork regularity. In his book Writing Popular Fiction, published in 1972, Dean Koontz casually notes that a novelist who can produce “only” one or two category novels every year will never know real financial security, and that “half a dozen novels per annum” are the minimum for a comfortable lifestyle. Koontz, in his prime, was more than capable of writing a category novel in a week, and he was so prolific that he published under multiple pen names, out of his publisher’s concern that he would saturate the market—a fear that seems positively quaint in the days of the likes of James Patterson, who turns out something like twelve books a year with an army of co-writers, forcing the rest of us to struggle to catch up.

The trouble is that once a novelist, or any artist, has begun to produce at a certain rate, it’s all but impossible to pull back, at least not without alienating readers who have grown used to the ability to buy a new book by their favorite author (or brand name) multiple times every year. And it’s ultimately impossible for a writer to maintain that kind of pace forever, at least not without outside help. It isn’t hard to imagine a publishing landscape divided between a handful of big brands, often assisted by ghostwriters, and independent authors working vainly to keep up with the endless demand for content that this environment creates—if we aren’t there already. In the short term, it’s good for business, and I don’t blame publishers for trying to maintain their financial viability by any means possible. But as a writer, and reader, I can’t help worrying about where this all ends. As the Red Queen herself says: “If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!”

Quote of the Day

The best time to plan a book is while you’re doing the dishes.

—Attributed to Agatha Christie