Hi,
A while ago (actually, quite a while ago) some of my writing was criticised (rightly) for being ODTAA (one damn thing after another). I have tried a couple of ways around this, but no matter what I do, I keep banging into the same old problem: I actually can't get my head around what ODTAA actually is.

So, I have two questions:

1. Is ODTAA merely the reading sensation given by poor writing or is it a recognisable structural flaw?

2. Can anyone suggest any exercises that might allow me to recognise and overcome it when my writing slips?

Cheers,

G

I guess the bit that's missing is the delayed gratification sensation, where a chapter starts, questions are raised in the readers mind and go unanswered - maybe for several chapters. If your writing is suffering from ODTAA then maybe you are in too much of a rush to supply those answers, so the reader has nothing to inspire them to keep reading.

As for writing exercises, maybe try a few long Shaggy Dog stories, slipping in distractions, red herring, go off on tangents before coming back round in a circle to the punch line.

Maybe try mixing your chapters up a bit.

- NaomiM

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Of course I'm just guessing there, so if it's not applicable just ignore me.

Who called it ODTAA? Couldn’t you ask them what they meant?

Dee

Thanks Naomi, Dee,

Dee first:

Couldn’t you ask them what they meant?

I will of course go back to him (it's Terry, if you're interested) but it was used as what seemed like a standard term and it made sense to me at the time. A bit like knowing that you can ask a horse to canter by using your legs until you try it for the first time and realise that the leg can also make them turn, stop, go, buck, rear or do absolutely nothing at all.

Naomi next:

If your writing is suffering from ODTAA then maybe you are in too much of a rush to supply those answers

That makes a lot of sense to me and parallels with a couple of things on WW that read a lot like mine did. It wasn't helped by a storyline that was of necessity very rigid in terms of the timeline and (I now realise) covered way too much ground.

a few long Shaggy Dog stories, slipping in distractions, red herring, go off on tangents before coming back round in a circle to the punch line

Sounds like fun!
I think at the time I would have been a bit wary of trying any of that because the thing was already _huge_ and had I carried on with it then I would have needed to do a lot of cutting.

All of which points back to your original definition being on the money. If I get around to the rewrite, methinks I should leave a lot more room for some serious play time.

Thanks,

Gaius

I think Naomi's probably hit the nail on the head.

If the whole novel is basically about what changes between the beginning and the end, and how that happens, then the same is true of each scene or incident too.

It can really help to try to pin down for each scene what that change is and make sure the rest of it as building up to that change, and or working out what happens after it. But you also need to set up something which means that even in the aftermath, as readers we know something else is brewing, so, as Naomi says, we're then waiting for that to start building up to the next change, and so on.

Another way of thinking about both the arc of the whole story, and the idividual arc of each scene it is the classic: What does he want/need? What's in the way? What does he do to get round it? What happens?. What he does to get round it and what happens leads to the 'want/need' changing, so that he sets off to try to get that, and meets a new obstacle (or, better still perhaps, a known thing which now becomes an obstacle because his want/need has changed.)

If you set up a chain like this, then the reader is always being drawn through the story, because either we're in the build up to a big moment, or we're in the aftermath, with a new build-up threatening. (This shape is what Christoper Booker in The Seven Basic Plots talks about as the constriction-and-release rhythm of much classic myth - see any James Bond plot.) Bad plots just put a series of obstacles - one damn thing after another - in the way of an MC who overcomes them, only to see another one coming trotting along. Good plots make each obstacle arise from the interaction and change of character and circumstance.

Sorry, that's a bit rambly...

Emma

Thanks Emma, all good (and useful).

Gaius

PS: You'll be glad to know that I have spared you a long and tedious rejoining question about passive transitions (eg: descent into insanity) by thinking about it a bit before posting!

ODTAA is a term sometimes used in science fiction/fantasy workshops, but I suspect it can apply to most other genres too. Having said that, fantasy is perhaps where you often find it in its purest form (so to speak). Many big fat fantasy trilogies open with a bit of plot then proceed to have dozens of characters just running around in the (enchanted/haunted) woods for several hundred pages, all to no story purpose, then, if you're lucky, the last book will close with a bit more plot (but not if the author/publisher has one eye on more trilogies to come). For example, book 5, 6 or 7 (I forget which and it doesn't really matter) of Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time, opens with a scene in which a number of women have to pass through a portal which will instantly transport them to another part of the country. This action takes 180 or so (big) pages to complete. Every raised eyebrow, every impatient tut, every folding of arms under breasts (a favourite Jordan action), every petulant swish of a braid is described. But none of it moves either the characters or the plot along.

Of course, there is a big paradox here, in that Jordan's series is one of the biggest-selling ever (each hardback alone sells around 750,000 copies). And there is a continuing demand for similarly ODTAA stories in loads of other fantasy writers. It could be argued that Harry Potter was not shy of its gratificationally-delayed charms either.

Basically, ODTAA is the opposite of Emma's description of how plot should work; therefore, it would probably be unwise to use it without at least understanding first how good story mechanics work. There is, as said, an identifiable market for rambling fantasy novels, and publishers know it well enough to prepare cover art and promotion accordingly. But to operate ODTAA in a 'normal' novel, and unconsciously so, will simply irritate the reader. Good story-telling has a long history and so we expect everything in a novel to be part of everything else, for characters and sub-plots to twist meaningfully into each other, upping the story value and deepening the emotional pay-offs. By contrast, ODTAA never develops beyond the level of an excited little kid explaining his day - "And then I did this, and then I did that, and then I went home . . . "

Gauis - good to hear from you again. I got your email and will reply in the next day or two. Thanks for taking the trouble to tell me how your book is getting on. I still think it has a great premise - just needs a shot or two of anti-ODTAA serum! (Either that or turn it into a seven-book fantasy cycle.)

Terry

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At Sci Fi Weekly today, there's an interview with Joss Whedon about his new TV series, Dollhouse (link below). It's an interesting premise - the main character each week becoming a different person to do a different task, then having her memory eradicated (by the agency she works for). But notice where he talks about the series' 'flow-through', how the mc bit by bit recovers her memories and questions who she really is. In other words, each episode is a sub-plot but if there was no overall plot, they would amount to little more than ODTAA. Okay, many TV series have worked on this basis, but Whedon knows that the way to really hook your viewers is to have an overall plot within which the characters journey through arcs, so they are not the same at the end of the series as they were at the beginning.

http://www.scifi.com/sfw/interviews/sfw18953.html

It could be argued that Harry Potter was not shy of its gratificationally-delayed charms either.

Hmmm. It could also be argued that those 'charms' never really arrived...

I'm glad you posted Terry. Having almost completed a rambling Fantasy epic myself, it's a salient point, and at every step of this journey I've asked myself 'does this serve the plot?'

Like you say, Fantasy especially is known for being over-indulgent, particularly in the High end of the market - perhaps a throwback to Tolkien who took such long-winded delight in explaining to us all what a tree looked like... (but he did it well, no doubt about it.)

One of the strong points my agent mentioned about my WiP was exactly that - it works very much on plot, every step of the way - something that isn't the 'norm for the form'. Oh, I don't know if I've succeeded yet, there is a monumental edit ahead of me, but I wanted to apply a 'mystery-thriller' pace to a sneakily High Fantasy/Dark Fantasy yarn, because I'm also one who gets bored of tiresome descriptions and events that just don't do anything.

Your comments are most encouraging.

JB

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That series sounds scarily like Quantum Leap, Terry...

Thanks Terry,

Many big fat fantasy trilogies open with a bit of plot then proceed to have dozens of characters just running around in the (enchanted/haunted) woods for several hundred pages

Which is exactly what I was doing.

Skimming through the draft now, I can see that almost the first third of the book is just setting the scene for how the guy gets to the start of the _actual_ story - no wonder it's a bit dry. Even the second third is mainly background and key events to build the main character into the man I need him to be for the final third where I _begin_ to write about the big question that inspired me to start the bugger in the first place.

I think the reason it got that far was inexperience in dealing with feedback on fiction. Earlier readers had all complained about my writing being sparse in terms of description and positively demanding answers to various questions that I had previously not cared very much about (er... "Where does he live?", "What does he work as?" and [seriously] "What is his name?"). As a result, I kept adding non-plot detail to address the specifics of what individual readers had missed rather than thinking about why I had left that detail out and why it always felt clumsy when I put it in.

Lesson learned, it felt wrong because it was.

Right now, it looks like my ODTAA problem is caused firstly by starting the story in the wrong place and secondly by not having the confidence that readers will believe what I tell them unless I back it up. A bit like the way you can tell a kid is lieing when they give too much detail for how something happened.

Gaius

There are quite a lot of blockbuster-type thrillers where every chapter offers the reader gratification of one sort or another, but as Emma describes, as one thread is concluded another cliff-hanger is being set up - The Da Vinci Code is an excellent example.
As Dr. Robert Winston showed in the documentary series Child of our Time there are two types of people: those who can delay gratification in the hope of greater rewards, and those who want their sweeties now. A lot of highly successful commecial novels do both.


- NaomiM

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As for questions about: "Where does he live?", "What does he work as?" and [seriously] "What is his name?" - I've asked those sorts of questions myself when reviewing opening chapters, as it helps to set the scene and, perhaps more importantly, empathise with the main character. Some characters dive into the story while still only a shadowy outline in the reader's mind, and if the reader can't empathise with them, they won't care what they are doing or what is happening to them.
A classic example is the ubiquitous bullying scene in the opening chapters of Children's fiction, as though, just because a bully is picking on the girl/boy MC the reader is supposed to care about them. If we haven't been show what they are really like, beforehand, then as far as the reader is concerned they could be little shits and deserve everything that's coming to them.

- NaomiM

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Just to add, it is not necessary to provide direct answers to the questions: "Where does he live?", "What does he work as?" and "What is his name?", just so long as the info. is converyed to the reader in one form or another. eg, the person's name can give the reader clues as to their age, sex, social class - maybe even marital status. 'Where does he live' and 'what's his work' also gives clues to their social status and the location where the story is set. Maybe he is outside his comfort zone - a townie in the country; a working class character in a middle class setting, which goes some way to explaining his reactions to whatever is thrown at him in the opening scenes.... sometimes it's just easier and quicker to give the info. directly, rather than doing it as a long 'scene setting' opening chapter (or, worse, starting way back at the character's childhood).

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Sorry, just mulling over the question there in a general way, rather than specifically referring to your work.

Thanks Naomi,

Point taken that I need to answer the reader's questions, but I don't think they were asking the correct questions!

The answers to those questions were not interesting within the context of the story and didn't need to be answered because the story shouldn't have been there in the first place.

As an example, "What does he work as?"

If the story was set in a city environment, knowing that the MC is a programmer will tell the reader a lot, and I agree that "What does he work as?" is one of the first questions to answer. However, most of the story occurs after the MC has ditched the job and moved to live within a commune on an isolated tropical island where there are no jobs. Knowing that he is the type of guy to do that is therefore both more interesting and more relevant than which job he ended up ditching.

My hope is that by starting on the island, I can direct the reader to ask more pertinent questions that can actually help the story along. EG: "What does he work as?" becomes instead "What does he do to pull his weight in the community?" Or even, "Does he pull his weight in the community?"

Gaius

I'm going to have to disagree with you, there, Gaius (although I am playing devils advocate to a certain degree ), since the job he chucked in before going to the island must form part of his motivation for going to/remaining on the island. Even if you don't mention the ex-job explicitly, you still need to address his motivation for being there. Just being on the island as though his past was a vaccuum, is not going to satisfy a reader - we are all curious (nosey) about peoples' pasts, and a good novel is the ultimate voyaristic experience where we expect such things to be explored.

It may have other ramifications. By not mentioning his ex-job you are witholding from the reader knowledge of some of the skills he may or may not wish to call upon while on the island. Just to pluck an example from the air, if he's an expert in electronics and they need to turn a pile of redundant equipment into a transmitter to call for help - if you haven't already set up the backstory, ie, that he knows about electronics, then it's going to look a bit odd that he can suddenly do something that none of the other characters on the island can do. Conversly, maybe he's a complete dunce at everything, which could be set up by mentioning that he hasn't been able to keep down any of a multitude of jobs he's had for the past decade before coming to the island. But on the island he's finally found something he's good at, which gives him a motivation to stay.
In a synopsis, as well as the characters motivations, Agents expect the writer to chart a character arc for the mc(s) - what they were like at the beginning of the novel, what is thrown at them during the novel, and in what ways they have changed by the end of it. If you withhold bits and pieces of his past then it's difficult to say just how much he's changed by the end of the novel.

- NaomiM

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It is not necessary to say at the start who his is and where he came from, but you might consider drip feeding it in over the course of the novel - the TV series Lost is an excellent example of the fun that can be had finding out about peoples' pasts as they try to cope with their new and very strange present.

Food for thought!

Just being on the island as though his past was a vaccuum, is not going to satisfy a reader

Absolutely agreed. No contest.

If you withhold bits and pieces of his past then it's difficult to say just how much he's changed by the end of the novel.

Not at all sure about the above statement, at best I can conditionally agree in principle.
Having reread my own and one or two other drafts, I'm starting to develop a terror of information overload. Even your average teenager has too much past to fit into a single novel and you have to be a bit selective.
In this respect, I've been impressed by people like Kurkov (Death and the Penguin) who manage to paint a very rich picture using very little description and personal history by simply keeping the action moving. IMHO, if you give too much, people will miss the points that are important.

you might consider drip feeding it in over the course of the novel

Which brings me back to the start of the thread; how to recognise ODTAA and other detail overload problems and (as important) how to overcome them without painting a monochrome stick-figure picture?
Gaius

and you have to be a bit selective

Very true, and when I'm writing I'm reminded of the police caution:

“You do not have to say anything. But it may harm your defence if you do not mention when questioned something which you later rely on in Court...."

Or, for the novelist that might read:

“You do not have to put in everything. But it may harm your storyline if you do not mention where applicable something which you later come to rely on in the novel...”


- NaomiM



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As I write I build up potted biographies for all my characters, 90% of which I'll never mention in the storyline, but which allows me to think of them as living, breathing people in their own right. Without the bio., characters - especially minor ones - can come across as little more than one dimentional stereotypes.

That's utterly brilliant. Also a source of inspiration and a dangerous temptation to get arrested for something serious. :O