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This could be quite a long essay if I wanted to spend time writing it instead of, you know, reading books (or writing editing them, or figuring out my seed orders), but here's what you get instead.
I still <3 Reginald Hill. I am reading the Dalziel/Pascoe series all out of order, which is not my usual preference, but needs must; this peregrination is of footpaths over the fells, or rather through libraries and their loan services and the shipping speeds of used book stores. Right now I'm in the middle of On Beulah Height, which is entirely gripping despite my knowing how it comes out because I've read all the books after it. And a few before.
Anyway, one effect of delving sideways into a series like this is that it gets me thinking about the writing of series fiction. Which I have to; having written four books in one big arc with at least a fifth to come does not make me an expert at this, since for one thing I haven't faced a broad reading public, but it does make me someone with a personal interest in techniques. With series fiction, you hope people will pick them up in the right order, but you always know you'll face readers like me who start in the middle, and so each book has to be comprehensible on its own.
I'm thinking mainly about the kind of mystery or f/sf or adventure series that involves the same characters in fairly similar situations, and may even (but usually doesn't) carry on one from the other with cliffhanger endings, not for example the trilogies of Robertson Davies which are only tenuously linked. If a reader can enter the series at any point, you as a writer have to be able to introduce these repeated characters and situations so that the reader understands what's going on; at the same time, you can't reiterate the entire plot(s) of the previous book(s) or become so repetitive that you bore the reader who's been with you from the beginning.
It seems to me that writers go about this in two basic ways. One way, which can be accomplished with varying degrees of gracefulness, is to throw in a few lines of description whenever a repeated character or setting first walks into a novel. It can be very awkward and formulaic in a stamped-on omniscient sentence, or it can be done more cleverly in dialogue or character-POV, but I don't think in the long run there's any way of avoiding the faithful long-time reader either snorting or smiling when the tag appears for the tenth or twentieth time. (Not totally random example: Dana Stabenow, and Bobby the only black man in the Park who lost his legs in Vietnam. I can read it one more time without stabbing something; and I will, because I love the books. Perhaps once you've given a character traits that make him stand out (even if he can't stand up) you can't avoid making the reference awkward. See also Sebastian St. Cyr's bloody wolf-eyes.) I have also known poorly-edited novels to use the same tags twice in the same volume, which just gets annoying, and in many cases it tends to reduce more minor characters to a rag of traits and a hank of auburn/glossy black/shining fall of golden hair. But some very good writers use this technique to reasonable effect, and just about everybody has to use it at some time or else run mad.
The other thing you can do is just damn well write the book, knowing your characters so intimately that their essence is made clear as soon as they walk in and do something that they had to do anyway. And yeah, a bit of physical description from another character's eyes doesn't hurt, because thinking visually is a human thing, and if you're Reginald Hill this tends to come over mainly in dialect-ridden jokes and nicknames (you couldn't get far into the books without realizing that Andy Dalziel is fat and Edgar Wield is ugly). But the tags, if they exist, don't read as tags; it's the difference between seeing a stage production and reading the script. Which I guess is the essence of "show, not tell." I don't think it's down to writing technique alone, though; it seems to be more a matter of confidence. Which also allows him to play with form, turning each book into something new even while it's yet another police investigation within a fairly small area (Lois Bujold is very good at this too, while admittedly having a much larger stage than Mid-Yorkshire to play with), and also I think lets me accept the coincidences and the conventions and the themes hitting you upside the head and the let-me-show-you-my-wordplay-or-my-new-fascination-with-World-War-One. I knew who all these people in his books were (really and deeply, even without knowing all their histories) by the middle of the first book I read, which came three-quarters or more of the way through the series, and I didn't mind meeting them again at earlier and later stages of their development... or development isn't quite the right word, because they don't change all that much, but things happen to them, and the happenings affect them; they have distinct and significant private lives that turn plots but don't prevent them from getting the job done and stopping off at the pub after, where as ever Dalziel gets everyone else to buy him drinks and Pascoe says something obscure and clever and Wield leaves early to go home to Edwin (assuming we're that far along in the saga) and (same assumption, several books later) has a visit from Monte the monkey, who is a running joke of the sort that actually says something real about a character and his world.
It's all just very well done. And it doesn't make me want to imitate it; it makes me aim to be equally as good in my own style. Another characteristic of good writers, to me, is that they don't make you feel like theirs is the only way one is allowed to write; it's just the way they felt like having fun that time around. Next time, a new adventure! With some familiar faces, and a monkey thrown in for good measure.
I still <3 Reginald Hill. I am reading the Dalziel/Pascoe series all out of order, which is not my usual preference, but needs must; this peregrination is of footpaths over the fells, or rather through libraries and their loan services and the shipping speeds of used book stores. Right now I'm in the middle of On Beulah Height, which is entirely gripping despite my knowing how it comes out because I've read all the books after it. And a few before.
Anyway, one effect of delving sideways into a series like this is that it gets me thinking about the writing of series fiction. Which I have to; having written four books in one big arc with at least a fifth to come does not make me an expert at this, since for one thing I haven't faced a broad reading public, but it does make me someone with a personal interest in techniques. With series fiction, you hope people will pick them up in the right order, but you always know you'll face readers like me who start in the middle, and so each book has to be comprehensible on its own.
I'm thinking mainly about the kind of mystery or f/sf or adventure series that involves the same characters in fairly similar situations, and may even (but usually doesn't) carry on one from the other with cliffhanger endings, not for example the trilogies of Robertson Davies which are only tenuously linked. If a reader can enter the series at any point, you as a writer have to be able to introduce these repeated characters and situations so that the reader understands what's going on; at the same time, you can't reiterate the entire plot(s) of the previous book(s) or become so repetitive that you bore the reader who's been with you from the beginning.
It seems to me that writers go about this in two basic ways. One way, which can be accomplished with varying degrees of gracefulness, is to throw in a few lines of description whenever a repeated character or setting first walks into a novel. It can be very awkward and formulaic in a stamped-on omniscient sentence, or it can be done more cleverly in dialogue or character-POV, but I don't think in the long run there's any way of avoiding the faithful long-time reader either snorting or smiling when the tag appears for the tenth or twentieth time. (Not totally random example: Dana Stabenow, and Bobby the only black man in the Park who lost his legs in Vietnam. I can read it one more time without stabbing something; and I will, because I love the books. Perhaps once you've given a character traits that make him stand out (even if he can't stand up) you can't avoid making the reference awkward. See also Sebastian St. Cyr's bloody wolf-eyes.) I have also known poorly-edited novels to use the same tags twice in the same volume, which just gets annoying, and in many cases it tends to reduce more minor characters to a rag of traits and a hank of auburn/glossy black/shining fall of golden hair. But some very good writers use this technique to reasonable effect, and just about everybody has to use it at some time or else run mad.
The other thing you can do is just damn well write the book, knowing your characters so intimately that their essence is made clear as soon as they walk in and do something that they had to do anyway. And yeah, a bit of physical description from another character's eyes doesn't hurt, because thinking visually is a human thing, and if you're Reginald Hill this tends to come over mainly in dialect-ridden jokes and nicknames (you couldn't get far into the books without realizing that Andy Dalziel is fat and Edgar Wield is ugly). But the tags, if they exist, don't read as tags; it's the difference between seeing a stage production and reading the script. Which I guess is the essence of "show, not tell." I don't think it's down to writing technique alone, though; it seems to be more a matter of confidence. Which also allows him to play with form, turning each book into something new even while it's yet another police investigation within a fairly small area (Lois Bujold is very good at this too, while admittedly having a much larger stage than Mid-Yorkshire to play with), and also I think lets me accept the coincidences and the conventions and the themes hitting you upside the head and the let-me-show-you-my-wordplay-or-my-new-fascination-with-World-War-One. I knew who all these people in his books were (really and deeply, even without knowing all their histories) by the middle of the first book I read, which came three-quarters or more of the way through the series, and I didn't mind meeting them again at earlier and later stages of their development... or development isn't quite the right word, because they don't change all that much, but things happen to them, and the happenings affect them; they have distinct and significant private lives that turn plots but don't prevent them from getting the job done and stopping off at the pub after, where as ever Dalziel gets everyone else to buy him drinks and Pascoe says something obscure and clever and Wield leaves early to go home to Edwin (assuming we're that far along in the saga) and (same assumption, several books later) has a visit from Monte the monkey, who is a running joke of the sort that actually says something real about a character and his world.
It's all just very well done. And it doesn't make me want to imitate it; it makes me aim to be equally as good in my own style. Another characteristic of good writers, to me, is that they don't make you feel like theirs is the only way one is allowed to write; it's just the way they felt like having fun that time around. Next time, a new adventure! With some familiar faces, and a monkey thrown in for good measure.
