I was recently reading some (lesbian) literature from (Amazon) Kindle, and I was amazed at how good some of the books were. (Of course, some of the books were really below par, but it evidently suits Amazon to keep them on their site.) The book I read most recently---actually, I've read a couple of books since I read that one---was so well plotted out, and the characters were so beautifully created, and some of the incidental, and not so incidental events so perfectly described, that I felt embarrassed at how far my own writing fell short, I guess, from what that author was delivering. And that author wasn't alone; at least 10 of the authors, or close to that number, anyway, were amazingly good writers. Writing lesbian fiction, it seems to me, requires a couple of different skills, and not all authors have these abilities developed to the same degree:
(1) Getting inside the head of their characters. [Almost all authors had this skill.]
(2) Being able to explain what their characters were thinking.
(3) Creating a scene in the minds of the readers.
(4) Inventing a story that captures the interest of the audience.
(5) Introducing just the right number of subsidiary characters, who have enough charm to lend depth to the story. [I think this is an important skill. Some of the characters introduced were pets, who were super cute. I could have done this, but I think I've missed some opportunities!]
(6) Guiding a reader through a dialogue, where the reasoning of each participant isn't self-evident.
That last item is the one I'm trying to focus on. But before we go into it, I want to mention one of the vices of an author that one of my early mentors pointed out to me: editorializing.
What does editorializing mean? As I understood it when it was first used with me, it means making judgements on the words or actions of a character. Most writers of fiction hold the view that moral judgements of the actions of a character are not needed, or even appropriate, in a work of fiction. Whether some action is good, or bad, or horrifying, or despicable, or admirable: it should be left to the reader to make that call. But some stories hinge on a particular call being made, and so the author steers the thinking of the audience, by using a loaded word or phrase.
Item (6), above, is different. We're all, in some ways, amateur psychologists. When someone is telling us something important, what we make of the statement depends on (a) both our backgrounds and our circumstances, (b) any previous events that would color the meaning or our response to the statements; possibly very specific incidents the reader simply does not know; or perhaps a thinking pattern that was habitually a part of one of the characters. (For instance, perhaps it was the habit of a character to assume that another character was always trying to put him down, in which case even an innocent remark would be regarded as a criticism. Or perhaps a certain person wouldn't ever consider a woman to be anything but innocent, and a man to be anything but guilty!) So the author has to run interference for us, and make it clear how the psychological reasoning of one of the participants in the dialogue is going, based on all these background thoughts and habits. It's unavoidable for this to happen, otherwise the reader would jump to the wrong conclusion. Sometimes this guidance has to be put in right in the middle of the dialogue, to stop us going even an inch down the wrong road, because that would be ... I don't know, objectionable somehow.
I'm going to try and find an example of this, to show you. I'm too embarrassed to use something from my own writing, so it would have to be from a story by someone else! I'll add to this post when I find a good enough example.
Kay
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