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I’ve already covered the basic aspects of description which works fine, but it can be taken a step further. I mentioned how you don’t want to sit down and actually describe things as if you were a scientist recording an experiment, or a coroner working up a report. Such clinical approaches to description is very boring.

The first impulse is to clean up the data-speak and turn it into something more casual.

This is easier to read but still dull, so the next impulse is to dress up the description using more sophisticated, artsy language.

This is where a lot of aspiring writers get stuck, lost in the clever wording and surprising imagery. It can be like a drug. It’s fun to play with words, to think of new ways to say old things. It is also easy to delude yourself into thinking this is great writing. It has to be, it’s beautiful, and it’s hard to do. It takes a lot more work than just saying something bluntly. A sense of mingling poetry and prose can soon follow and the effects become dramatic.

This then brings me back to the point of my original post where I suggested describing things using tiny details and general impressions. Here is the same description distilled down to one sentence using the impression method:

This sentence also uses a bit of something else, which is the real point of this post, and that is involvement and real value. A paragraph of description should never be just a paragraph of description, it should be part of the story, and provide real information that the reader can use. This helps prevent readers from just skipping that large block of descriptive text in which they know nothing will happen—it’s just description.

Too often a writer will introduce a character and feel obligated to describe them. Sometimes however you’ll read a book where the writer offers no description at all to most of their characters, and strangely, while reading it, you don’t even notice until someone points it out. In fact you thought they had, because you have a pretty clear idea in your head what they look like.

How do they do that?

They manage it by building impressions through events in the story. People’s brains are wired to look for patterns, and we have a strong tendency to settle for stereotypes. This is unfortunately why all too often people generalize about whole groups of people, picturing them as having the same attributes. So if a person acts a certain way, or talks a certain way, a visual image forms, and if that is how you want the character to appear, then you really don’t need to waste time describing them. If you portray a character through events as a nervous, sniveling, greedy, fast talking, thief, the visual of a small thin, dirty, beady-eyed, rat-like face will emerge. And then there are subtle hints. If you describe all the other characters as “looking up” at the him, you don’t need to say he’s tall.

Setting-description is a bit more complicated. Failure to provide imagery will leave your reader feeling blind, and in my previous post on description, I mentioned how focusing on just a few precise elements will cast a bigger picture, but this is still just description, and readers find description to be boring. What they like are stories. The answer is to describe the setting through stories that provide real value to the reader—that tell you about the characters or that move the story.

In this sentence, you are describing the room, but you are bringing the description back and showing how it has personal meaning to the character observing it. You learn a bit about his past as well as the present setting and this makes it more interesting to both the character and the reader. This can be pushed further.

In reading this, no one is going to miss that this killer has souvenir shot glasses on his cheap table because that point was rolled into a little story that was far more entertaining than straight description and also gave you a huge insight into the main character’s past.

This is especially important to do with significant points. I’ve read stories by new writers and I’d have no idea how old the character is, or where they were, only to find out later they said right in the first sentence. The problem is, readers miss things all the time. So if you really need the reader to know something, you need to reinforce it. You don’t want to out-right repeat yourself, or the reader will think you just forgot, which writers often do, and why editors need to watch out for this. If a year, or an age, or the name of the city is mentioned as part of a sentence, it can easily be missed.

It’s not that the reader doesn’t read the words, they just don’t register them if the focus of the sentence or paragraph is elsewhere. That bit of data was just not burned into the reader’s consciousness. In the above sentence, the focus in on this woman in a hurry to unpack, not on her destination.

There is no way any reader will not register where this woman is now, and again it is not just description. Her perspective, her excitement, comes through. This is a place she had dreamed of.

So rather than spending hours creating poetic prose to spice up dead description, that some readers might be inclined to skip, you might find it more effective to write clearly, but make what you write interesting to read by way of the content.

Remember, if it’s boring for you to write, it will be boring for the reader to read. 

I was at a book convention recently in Baltimore where a young man asked a panel of writers what he was doing wrong. He had written his first novel, edited it, written a good query letter and had sent it to all the right agents, using all the right methods…only he still wasn’t published.  He was baffled. He couldn’t understand what he had done wrong. This isn’t the first aspiring writer that I’ve met who had this perplexing problem. And it isn’t restricted to traditional publishing. Self published authors have a similar problem. They publish their first novel and it just doesn’t sell no matter how much promotion they give it. What’s the problem?

Maybe, as the panel suggested, the young writer just hasn’t found the right editor. One editor might hate a book, while another—even at the same publisher—might love it. Or maybe, in the case of the self-published author, that person just hasn’t managed to find the right reviewers. While these are possible, I have a different thought.

Practice is sometimes a necessary component to success.  

I don’t believe that the majority of authors make a commercial success of their very first novel, and when I say first novel, I don’t mean the first published novel, I mean the first novel you’ve ever written. Many authors have had huge success with their debut novel—the first book they managed to get published—but these were not necessarily the first book they wrote. Brandon Sanderson who wrote Mistborn and is now working at finishing the Robert Jordan Wheel of Time series, was working on his thirteenth novel when ELANTRIS, his first published novel was picked up. Coincidentally, I had written thirteen novels myself before Crown was published.

Now I’m not saying that you have to write thirteen novels, but expecting to be successful with your first novel I think is a bit like picking up a tennis racquet for the first time and expecting to win Wimbledon. Sure, it’s possible, just not very likely. So it might be a good idea to play a few games first, get a feel for them, for the strategy, the length, the stamina you’ll need.

The problem is that writing a book takes a long time, and involves a lot of hard work. People often think that writing a book will be fun. They often sit down and enjoy zipping through the first chapter. They might even get into the third chapter before it starts to bog down, before they begin to think, “where was I going with this? Humm. Maybe I should think the story out a bit more before just writing. Okay, so Bob, my main character will discover that…oh, no. That’s not going to work because…crap. Damn, this isn’t working out the way I wanted. Oh look, I got a new email.” And so ends the first attempt at writing a novel.

The second attempt is likely more of the same. This sort of thing happens a lot and then the aspiring-writer finds themselves at a crossroads and needs to decide which way to go:

1) Writing just isn’t for them.

2) Writing a novel needs to be approached with a bit more seriousness than hey, you know what would be fun?

This is the point where the aspiring writer takes a deep breath, rolls up their sleeves and says, “I’m going to do this if it kills me.” They set aside time and they write with a single-minded effort. They know it will be tough. They know it will be hard work so they aren’t put-off when things get rough, and with great determination they finish this epic project.

Then they celebrate. It is like finishing a marathon. They did it! They actually wrote a novel! Then a week, or a month later they read it. Or worse they let someone else read it, and discover that what they made, what they spent months, perhaps even years on, isn’t as good as they hoped. This is actually better than having their friends and family support them and say how great it is, causing them to spend years doing nothing but trying to sell a bad book.  

Now the aspiring writer is at a new crossroads, that looks remarkably like the last, but instead of two choices, now there are three:

1) I suck and need to find a new hobby.

2) Maybe if I re-write it…

3) …

Number three is the true subject of this post, and it is not what writers want to hear, but is what I think is most often the case. The first novel is a learning experience and should be viewed that way. Odds of getting it right on the first try are very slim. To quote The Matrix, nobody makes the first jump.

The writing of a first novel from cover to cover, gains you entry into a new world. You can see what it takes. You know it can be done, and you can see where you failed. You can estimate the length and can pace yourself better. You’ve learned just how much runway you have to get your story and characters in the air, and won’t be so rushed next time. You’ve discovered the practical uses of PoV, and what you can do, and what you can’t do in editing. You’ll see where you’re weak and need improvement, and where you’re strong and how to build on that.

Of course no one ever sees it that way. No matter what the age, we are all impatient to succeed. If you’re old, you’ll feel you don’t have a lot of time left to start publishing, and if you’re young you’ll look at people like Christopher Paolini, who was around 19 when he published Eragon (15 when he started writing it. He is one of those people who I believe made a success of the first book he wrote.) So failing at publishing a first novel is rarely seen as progress.

If you’re unlucky denial will set in, and you will convince yourself that your book is great and others just can’t see it. If you’re lucky, you’ll obtain honest feedback, learn from it, and realize you haven’t failed, you’ve passed your first semester, but that doesn’t mean you get a diploma. Now with this new understanding, all those things you’ve read about writing make a lot more sense.  You know you can do better next time.

With this in mind you set out to write another novel. Much wiser, you pick a different kind of plot, one perhaps less grandiose, less extravagant, one that you feel confident you can handle. You do a bit more research up front, because that was a lot of the problem before, and then you have at it again.

It is still hard. The only thing that keeps you going is that you know you can do it because you did it before (this is something else you learned, this is your edge.) Finally you finish once more, but you aren’t so eager to celebrate. You know there are problems. You wait. You give it time. Then you read it.

It sucks. You can admit that now, your previous honest critiques provides you with this insight to see beyond just what you want to see, but still it is better. You can see that too. You study the problem, analyze where you failed. The problem is that the plot broke down part way. There are five gigantic plot holes you couldn’t fill. Places you hadn’t anticipated going in. Some characters are unneeded, others you added by necessity that were never fleshed out properly. Looking back you can see how you might have worked them into the main line more from the very start. There’s so much that could have been done better, even so, even with those changes, it still would never be great. Not bad maybe, but not great, and “not bad” won’t cut it.

You could try re-writing, but sometimes, and particularly at the start, all the rewriting in the world won’t save a bad idea, and until you know enough—until you have developed enough experience at building novels—you won’t know the difference between one worth saving and one that needs to be put to rest.

A lot of the time you just need to shelve that manuscript and come up with something new. Something better. You’re a veteran of two books at this point and having more than one experience, you can see patterns, draw conclusions about novel writing and how it applies to you personally. You got stuck in the same place twice now. Twice now you failed to create a satisfying ending, or failed to make your main character believable, or you gave away too much, or too little.  You know this about yourself, so it is time to make changes to correct those problems.

Maybe an outline would help to reveal issues before they arise, save months of work by discovering those plot holes early on and what characters are important and which should not even be in the story. It is so much easier to just think of a new approach before you start writing than to completely re-write a novel after the fact.

Once more you write. Once more you finish with less than perfect results. Damn! You relied too much on the outline and the story is stiff and contrived because you failed to let the character’s personalities and the situations dictate the direction of the plot. You re-write, you spot fix, but the story breaks down further because it feels like a patched quilt.

Again. Another novel. And another failure. And another and again a failure. It is hopeless.

“Can I read it?”

“You won’t like it. It’s awful. All the things I write are awful.”

“Huh? Are you kidding? This is good. I like this. It’s better than most of the junk out there.”

Blink. “Really? You actually like it?”

“Yeah.”

“What about the fact that the car starts when an hour ago it didn’t?”

Shrug. “Cars do that. Didn’t bother me.”

“And that it was his half-brother???”

“Actually I loved that!”

“You did?”

“You should try and get this published.”

“Seriously?”

“Yeah, it’s great. Ahh, but you might want to proof it better. There’s a lot of mistakes.”

“Oh…well, yeah. I could do that.”

Diploma.

You still might not get an agent with that book. You still might not find a publisher, just as that panel said, it can be hard to find just the right editor who will like your work, and maybe you’ll need to self-publish to get your work out there, to build an audience, but eventually it will happen.

Hopefully it will take less tries than it did for Sanderson and myself, but the thing is, looking back, the failure of that first novel, at the time, felt so terrible. It signified hours, days, months, years wasted. Time thrown into the black hole of a dream that would never happen. But…the moment your first book is published, the instant someone you don’t know reads it and says, “This was fantastic. You’re a genius. Have you written anything else I can read?” Suddenly you realize all those years weren’t wasted at all. That was just the time it took, the practice needed. And all those crappy books you wrote along the way? Looking back at them, you can see with perfect clarity what you did wrong. And some are just awful—what were you thinking? But a few had some good ideas, characters or plots that, knowing what you know now, you can easily rebuild into a great book. The best part—most of the work is already done. Even less time wasted.

Maybe you’ll be lucky and get your first novel published, but if you don’t, it’s not the end of the world, in fact I would think it would be surprising. No one expects you to hit a homerun your first time at bat. The difference between failure and practice, is when you quit.

Next: Applied Description

I will be the first to admit, I am not a wordsmith. Many writers focus a good deal of energy on constructing beautiful prose. I used to do that, but I found it counterproductive to the goal I was after, which was to make the words disappear and the story and characters shine. I am not assaulting literary writing. I enjoy beautifully crafted language. I just determined that for the kinds of books I was working on, word-craft was not the best methodology because I have a theory that there is a sliding scale. The more eloquence you put into the language, the simpler the plot needs to be. The reason is that eloquence requires room. An author can carry on poetically about almost nothing for pages. As such a very simple plot allows the writer to run in tangents, use beautiful metaphors, and explore character quirks without the weight of having to convey a lot of mundane information clearly and precisely.

So, for a set of fast-paced action adventure novels, I did not aim for eloquence. To be honest, I can’t tell you how many times I had to go back and edit out passages that were too good. Sentences or paragraphs that I impressed myself with, and thought, wow, that’s really great writing. The moment I paused in the story to marvel over the words, I knew I had to cut them. I don’t want people noticing my writing. And I certainly don’t want them noticing how one specific sentence or paragraph was very different from all the rest. I want them focusing on the story. I wanted clear, not clever. Having said this, there is still a surprising amount of sculpting going on in the word structure. Subtle manipulations that readers and even some writers might not notice.

ACTIVE AND PASSIVE

This could have gone in the basic posts, but it fits here too.

The man was beaten by Danny. (passive)

Danny beat the man. (active)

In passive voice, the subject receives the action. In active the subject does the action. An easy way to see this is often when the subject is followed by the verb. He ran… Susan stood up… The door opened…  these are all indicators of an active sentence, and active sentences are great because they are crisp, clear, exciting, direct, and well…active. They cause writing to come alive instead of sounding dead. And they are the best way to write action. As a result, active sentences are what most writers like to use. This is not to say that passive sentences equal “bad.” Passive voice has a role to play, the most obvious being when you are describing a passive situation.

Johnny is clearly in a submissive situation here, and the style of the sentence emphasizes this. You could write, The cop cuffed Johnny, but that focuses on the cop and the action rather than the feeling of being restrained. And if you want to make the reader sympathize with Johnny the passive sentence works better.

So passive sentences relate passive moods, of characters or situations. Active makes the sentences pop and come alive.

DECLARITIVE

Then there is the declarative sentence. Technically a declarative sentence is just any sentence that states something and ends in a period, as opposed to a question, or one of emotion that ends in an exclamation, but I like to tweak definitions to suit myself.

This is in fact a declarative sentence, but I don’t place it in that category because the sentence doesn’t actually “declare” anything, it “alludes” to it.  Maybe he is opening the door, maybe he isn’t. If that ambiguousness is what you are trying to convey, fine, but all too often writers are just timid. They don’t want to declare too much, because technically, maybe the character couldn’t exactly see perfectly what was actually, truly, objectively, without a doubt, happening. This is just splitting hairs. If a character “seems to” open a door, then he had better not have actually opened it, because there would be no reason for the “seems to” if he had opened it.

As the author, you know everything, and even if the character doesn’t it is still okay to be definitive about events. Why? Because people never see someone “seem to” anything. In real life it either is, or it isn’t. Only a narrator with foreknowledge striving to relate a story as accurately as possible would use “seemed to.” In real life, a door is opened. If later it turns out it wasn’t, then at that point, the door is closed.

Bob thought Danny opened the door, but he hadn’t.

 Seemed to, is a cheap, unsophisticated attempt at suspense, or a means of hedging bets, or being technically accurate to the point of killing the story.

Unless what the guy is actually using for rope (and it really had better not be rope) plays a big part in the story later, just call it rope.

Writing in (what I define as) declarative sentences cleans up sentences by getting rid of the useless clutter of author hesitancy. Either it is or it isn’t, and as the author you should know, so don’t pretend you don’t, and if you really don’t know, you should.

BACK LOADING

Now that I explained how to make sentences clear and strong, I’m going to contradict everything I just said, because there are often times you want to flip, or mangle sentences for effect. Often this is done to emphasis the emotion, or to hold off a reveal to the end. In some ways this is like writing poetry in that, impact, or impression, are more important than clarity.

The first sentence is a good active sentence. The second, while passive is still far more straightforward, and direct. But the last sentence has more impact because the point of the sentence is held in reserve to the end, creating a punch. This is what I call back-loading. When you save the best for last and front-load suspense.

This is an even more pronounced and dramatic expression of the idea. The first sentence is serviceable, but dull and lifeless despite being active. While the second creates a story in a single sentence. Back loading sentences are ideal for adding drama. You can almost hear the bass chords play at the end of the sentence, bump, bump, bah! And the camera would zoom.

When I was in art school, I had a teacher who explained the difference between a house painter and an artist. A house painter sweeps back and forth with the brush. An artist does whatever they need to. You can push, slap, dribble, stab, whatever necessary to create the effect you want. Fiction writing is an odd cross between art and craft. While most of the time it is good to stick with the rules, sometimes it pays to paint outside the lines.

SOUND

Then there are the patterns, the music of the words. The best way to hear it is to read your work aloud, or have someone else read it to you. Too fast, too slow, awkward, or just grating. Here are a few things to look out for.

A sour note is created when you use the same unusual word twice in a single paragraph. If it is really unusual, it will stick out if you even use it twice in the same book. Common words you can get away with. For example you can use the word “the” several times in a single paragraph and no one will notice. But if you use “paradigm,” twice, for no apparent reason, it will sound strange. These are the kinds of things you most often find in proofing and should not really be concerned with in writing.

Then there are patterns to watch out for. If you start three sentences with “He was…” in a row, it will be noticeable and the sound will be off. Even if the pattern of the sentence is the same more than twice, it will be a grating sound unless repeating the beat-phrase is what you are after.

In this case, the pattern is set up with intended repetition. There is a cadence to the phrases designed to roll and then these are capped with a different and abrupt sound at the end. It could just as easily have been written:

The first displays more of a sense of frustration, while the second is faster and more exciting. It would depend on what you were aiming for.

I find it is usually best to be conscious of sentence patterns and lengths. Too many short sentences in a row and the writing is choppy. Too many long ones and it comes off slow and wordy. If you aren’t writing action, or not trying to create a specific mood of serenity, then the sentences should be an ambiguous mix avoiding patterns. Long, long, short. Short, short, long. Long, short, long. Just varying helps. Sometimes just the occasional semicolon or em dash can help. 

It’s amazing how complicated writing can be, even when you’re trying to keep it simple. 

 Next up: Dealing With Failure

Novels are by definition fiction, and fiction is made up stuff. It doesn’t matter if you write gritty police/courtroom procedural stories, or invented world fantasies, it’s the same. None of it really happened. An argument can be made that even if you were writing a non-fictional account of something that really did happen, your description would only form one perspective and would be seen by others with firsthand knowledge as “fiction.” Still, no one writes in a vacuum. No matter how fictional something is, it is always based on reality.

I write fantasy. The first books I’ve published are invented-world-fantasy, which is just about as out-there as you can get. I created a whole new world, which means I can make anything, anyway I want. I could implement Hollywood-Gravity if I liked. Magic can exist. Gods can recognizably walk among people. People don’t even have to be people, they can be something else entirely. Time doesn’t have to work the same as we perceive in our reality. There could be more colors, a seventh and eighth sense,  whatever I want. Given all this freedom one might expect far more creativity in the genre, and yet oddly, so many invented-world-fantasies take place in very similar settings most drawn from our own history.

There are a number of reasons for that. Authors are trying to replicate what they love to read; it is easier to write about something familiar; it is easier than trying to invent something completely new. All of these are writer-centric, but I feel there is another reason that is actually reader-based that holds more legitimacy—it is easier for a reader to understand. If your setting was too strange you’d either have to stop constantly and explain how everything works, or just accept that the reader won’t have a chance to grasp what is going on. To educate the reader well enough to understand the story, would be prohibitive to the timely telling of the tale. This would be a situation where the art destroys the entertainment.

There are dozens of reasons I choose to write my books in a medieval setting. Swords and arrows allow for more drama and greater flexibility than guns and bombs. Cell phones and the Internet are two of the worst inventions in the world for writers. Just a few years ago, it was so easy to build a story out of a person’s quest to find something or speak to someone. Now to do that you need to explain why they just can’t look it up on Google or call them on a cell. If your heroine discovers something crucial, she’ll be an idiot if she doesn’t just call your hero on the phone to let him know. Doing so will destroy the plot of course, but not doing so is obviously contrived and unrealistic. So historical settings make building plots so much easier. The age of knights, castles and dragons is also grandiose to the point of caricature. Billowing cloaks, towers, long gowns, primal forests, it has great built-in visuals and a wealth of pre-established forms that can be utilized to create any plot. I think only the Western can really compare in its open-source form that is both infinite in possible complexity and yet simple in essence. Between the two, I just think medieval setting are richer because it draws on a larger swath of history from more than one country.     

To get around the problem of repetition, of being seen as using the same tired setting, some writers just change the names. Knights, castles, elves and swords are just called something else. The readers is confused, but only for a little while and then they catch on, substituting in their heads what they know for the new terms. For those sensitive to traditional terms this apparently has a soothing effect, but for most everyone else it is just an unnecessary road block to understanding.

Some go through great effort to break with reality, to invent a new world so different it can be perceived as original. The problem with this, as I see it, is that readers find the greatest rewards from a connection to the story, not from a distance. Familiarity is what touches us. Witnessing an alien world, or individual can be interesting, but it often fails to move emotions. People like to make connections between themselves and what they read. When they do, it becomes personal and when that happens a wall drops, and that’s when you can get at their heart. That’s when you can make them laugh, cry, or scare the crap out of them.

This doesn’t just apply to invented-world-fantasy either. No matter what you write the more you can reflect a reader’s personal experiences, the deeper you can touch them. The obvious question is how can you do that to someone you’ve never met? How can you do that to more than one person when everyone has such different experiences? This is where what I call true magic comes in.

People are surprisingly similar. No two are exactly alike, but a lot of us share common feelings, and the deeper the feeling the more common it is. The way to tap those feelings is to be honest. To depict reality as it really is—even if that is in a fictional world.

In Stephen King’s It, and in his novella The Body (later made into the movie Stand By Me) he did a wonderful job of depicting the life of childhood. It did not matter that his setting was the fifties, the dynamic are universal and reminded me of my own youth. And it is this capturing of familiarities that has the power and magic to take the fantastical and breathe real life into it. I’m sure Mr. King was drawing on personal experience as it just rang too true to be wholly invented, and this very same thing can be done in any genre.

When I started art school my goal was to practice painting reality until I could do it so well, that I could then paint images that did not exist and make them look just as real. I don’t paint so much anymore, or rather I don’t paint with brushes much anymore. Paint has become words—so much faster and far less to clean up. Still the idea is the same. When I create a fantasy world I try to make it accessible to the reader by making it similar to what they might know rather than different. In paint I might depict a castle floating on a cloud, when both the castle and the cloud are perfectly believable the illusion is stirring, captivating. In words, if I relate the heartbreak of a dragon for the loss of its son, the feeling is what’s real, it’s what resonates. The more connections to reality the more real the writing becomes.

In real life there is copious amounts of humor, it is how many people deal with stress, how people hide, how they defend themselves, and how we enjoy ourselves, and yet I find there is almost no humor in non-comedic fiction. There is often a perceived dividing line—if it is funny it can’t have drama and vice versa. So all the effort to create gritty realism is lost because the tale feels artificial due to its own weight. In real life people have hopes and fear, goals and aspirations that often have nothing to do with what’s happening, but not always in stories. In real life people have good days and bad days, happy memories and tragedies, and even horrible places can seems beautiful at times. Yet a single-minded approach to characters and settings tell only half the story, that just doesn’t feel complete. The suspension of disbelief is hindered by the absolutism drawn by the writer trying to hype the sympathy, the fear, or the misery. This lack of combining the real and the unreal in an honest uncontrived manner, this distance between the two, can create a disconnect leaving stories interesting, but not moving, creative, but not believable.

To this end, I have often found that learning how to paint the real world well enough to be convincing, is a huge benefit. This is one of the reasons why I would advocate reading outside of your favorite genre, and even writing outside of it. If you write in fantastical worlds, learning how to write a realistic story will help lend that needed credibility. If you write in a realistic world, learning how to transpose real into the unreal results in the benefit of causing you to focus on the details that, in the real world, are often ignored, but in a fantasy world need to be accounted for.

I think it is when a writer invents a very different world that is surprisingly similar to our own, populated by people that remind us of ourselves, that fiction of any kind stops being fiction, and can truly tell us about ourselves, reminding us of something worth remembering.

Perhaps the hardest thing for a writer to develop, outside of an imagination, is their voice. It is also one of the greatest contributing factors toward making them successful. Some might call it a style, but I think it is actually more of a sub-set to style, just as fantasy is a sub set of fiction and urban fantasy is a sub-set of that and so on—so to, a voice is a specific style within styles that is unique to a writer’s personality.  

Voice is an allusive thing, and it isn’t anything you can be taught. Nor is it something you’re born with. It is something you have to develop over time, like self-confidence, which is mostly what the voice is. The courage to let who you are come through. It is the way you tell a story, the attitude of the writer.

Most aspiring writers work to be like others—their literary heroes. As such they miss the point and kill most of their chances of success. Readers don’t want to read the same thing, they want something new and they known when another author is being copied. The immediate reaction is to try and come up with something completely new, something—original. Only this is like saying that because you’re tired of the same choices of food for lunch, you’re going to try finding something to eat that isn’t in the food groups—maybe dirt? The fact is, there are an infinite number of ways to reuse story elements, but most importantly—it doesn’t matter what your story is about, how cliché, or tired so long as you bring a new voice to it.

Vampires—there I said it. How many books, movies and tv shows have reused this idea. Evil vampires, good vampires, evil vampires wanting to be good, traditional vampires, realistic vampire, funny vampires…there’s a lot of vampires out there. I thought the definitive statement on vampires was made by Stephen King back in 1975, when he applied the classic legend to the modern world in a realistic manner in his book Salem’s Lot. But then Annie Rice came along, and later Joss Whedon.

And certainly no one needed another fantasy coming of age tale about a boy destined for  greatness, mentored by a wizard, prophesied  to defeat a dark lord, but then you had J. K. Rowling. Same story, but very different way of telling the tale.

These are just as much examples of combining aspects of different stories to create a new thing, but they are also examples of voice.

Stephen King writes nothing like Bram Stoker. They both tell very similar stories using the same creature, but King brings his very recognizable voice to it. And just like a real voice, other writers can do impressions. I once re-wrote a story doing an impression of Stephen King and when my wife read it, she instantly recognized the imitated voice. King has such a strong voice it is like Humphrey Bogart, Edward G. Robinson, or Peter Lorre—just about anyone can do it. I think the strength of his voice is also what made him so successful. People relate well to it.  

So what exactly am I talking about? That’s a bit hard to say since it is different for everyone. King’s voice is heavily reflective—all his characters think a lot, and in ways that are random-comparative, very blunt and personal, and steeped in their time. He pushes the technique, of how to define a character by how they see the world, to extremes, not only letting you hear the raw and deepest thoughts of a character, but also going a bit over the top. Few King characters are boring or typical, they all have extreme personalities.

Consider Arthur Conan Doyle for contrast. His Holmes series are all written in the head of Watson, but the presentation is very proper and hands-off. Watson may very well get angry, but the thoughts he thinks on paper are held in check. He doesn’t swear, or think “Man what an officious little prick Holmes is being,” the way a King character might.

Ayn Rand has a grandeur to her tone. Everything, no matter how insignificant is raised up to lofty heights. Hemmingway is the opposite of both King and Rand. I don’t think he ever even uses character reflection as a tool. His voice has the monotone, fact-based baritone of a news anchor or Joe Friday. And then of course there is one of the most definable and imitated voices of all—Raymond Chandler, who defined the tough-guy reflective voice to such a degree that it has become synonymous with film-noir  detective stories, even those written by other authors like Dashiell Hammett, who had completely different styles.

The fact that I can describe these author’s voices is a testament to their strength. By contrast many writers sound alike. They often hide their voice, too timid to let it come through. They write the story with no flourish, no style. J. D. Salinger, didn’t have that problem. Catcher In The Rye starts out with a ton of flourish.

Still, a voice isn’t something you can learn from anyone. It has to come from inside you—the accumulation of your own personality, your own view of life, your own attitude toward storytelling, and the distilled sum of all that you have managed to glean from other authors. Oftentimes, it is invisible to you until someone else points it out.

I copied the styles of dozens of authors looking for my voice. I failed to find it. It wasn’t until I was saturated with the experience of understanding the various methods and tones of other writers, but then cast them all aside and gave up looking in order to just write for myself, that I found it. And like listening to your own voice on a recorder, I didn’t recognize it and I’m still trying to define what I am hearing as me.

I’ve had other writers imitate me—I know this because they told me they were stealing my style. First I was flattered. Second—my style? I have a style? I read their imitation and just like hearing an impressionist, I thought, “really, that’s supposed to be me?” Then I thought about it and realized they’re right, I do do that, don’t I? Until that moment, I never realized I had a specific voice, but I realize now that those aspects of my writing are the things that come most easily, so easily, I never noticed. But those are the things that people point to—not what I thought were wonderful prose, not the great metaphors—those things I struggled with—no one cared about those things.

I know writers who achieved their first publication, and freeze up as they consider their next piece. After years of struggle, or trying every combination possible, like Edison and his light bulb filament, they finally captured lightning in a bottle. But how can you do that a second time, when you aren’t sure how you did it the first time? The pressure mounts when you realize that the second piece you do, whether it is a book or a short story, has to be better than the first just to be seen as “as good,” because everyone else is asking the same question that the author is asking themselves. “Can I do it again, or was that just a fluke?” The common mistake is that a sophomore author tries to write as good as they can, going back to imitating others, when what made the first work great was that they knew how to write. For that one moment they discovered their own voice and it clicked. The trick then is to trust in your voice, relax and just let it come through. I think that when the writing comes easy, you’re on the right track. You might not think it is significantly beautiful or impressive, because it is not similar to the style, or voice of other authors that you might admire or respect, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t good. Most likely, you won’t ever see just how good or distinct your voice is until someone else points it out to you and says, this—this is why I love your writing, and I just wish I could do that, too.

At this point you might blink and say, “Really? You liked that?”

“I love that. How do you do it?”

Then you’ll scratch your head. “I dunno. I wasn’t even trying, it just sorta comes out that way a lot of the time. It just feels right when I do it.”

So developing your style, or your voice, I feel is something that comes with time, with study and experience. It is the journey to find yourself in your writing, and once found, to accept and embrace what you discover. I know this sounds a bit metaphysical, but it sort of is. Writing a story is a bit like being Dr. Frankenstein. You collect parts from other bodies and sew them together, but when you’re done, all you really have is a piecemeal corpse. You need to breathe life into it, and to do that you have to give something of yourself. You need to draw from your own experiences, painful, happy, embarrassing, angry moments and have the courage to place them on a page. If you make yourself cry, you’ll touch others. Make yourself laugh and they will, too. Once you learn this, you’ll keep dumping more and more of yourself into the words and without knowing it, when you read it back it becomes a mirror, and that reflection, that thing you see, that is your voice—that is you. 

Next up: Combining the Real and the Unreal

Recently I touched on the importance of making a good first sentence, and a compelling opening scene. The focus of that was to provide the gravity to pull in a new reader or persuade an editor to put your manuscript in the “to be read later” pile. That’s all very important, but what happens when that editor or that reader finally get around to reading the next fifty pages?

I consider writing a book similar to coaxing a wild animal into a cage with bits of food. You put the food down on the ground in a line to the cage. Or if you prefer, and have seen the movie ET, you’re trying to lure an alien with Reeses Pieces. The problem is that you have a limited amount of candy, so the question becomes how far can you space the placement of food and not lose ET prior to getting him to the shed?

A great opening to a story is like offering a nice bit of candy. People taste it, like it, and hope for more. If you give them another, they will stand where they are and eat it, but you don’t want that, you want them to move. Besides, after too much candy, they will get full and no longer want to eat. So instead of giving them a second, being that they are humans and not a squirrel or rabbit, you can promise them one—if only they will go over there.

The fireworks at the start of a story catches a reader’s attention. Mentally they might think, “Okay, that wasn’t bad, I’ll give this writer a few more pages now and see if they can maintain my interest. You now have sort of a loan of time with which to build an interest. The investor is still very skeptical however, so you’d better show them something soon.

As I said another bit of candy won’t work so well, you need something more substantive. The best, I feel, is an interesting question or compelling proposition. In a mystery story, it would be the puzzle that the client tells to the sleuth—the mystery.

After reading that, you want to know the answer. You want to find out how this is possible. You’ll go looking for that next Reeses Pieces.

Only that can’t be the whole thing. If the answer to that one question is the sum of your story, it is like spacing the candy too far apart. If I have to wade through three hundred pages for just that last treat, I’ll get bored and stop. So you need to add more treats.

If you reveal that the man was shot before entering the box, but then discover that the man in the cement box wasn’t actually the woman’s husband, you have allowed the reader to have their Reeses Pieces, but then promised them another. This end-to-end reward and promise method works well to move a reader much the way Spiderman swings through a city, shooting one web while swinging from another. Still I find it too simplistic. An extra layer or two can really help make the story richer and the need to turn the pages that much more intense. So running several mysteries at once, staggering their paths of reward and promise differently than the first ensures that the reader stays riveted. If done well, there will be short-term puzzles, longer questions, and story (or series) length mysteries. Each one working as a sail to catch the wind of a reader’s interest and move them forward.

In addition to the mystery, you’ll need conflict. Most stories are all about conflict. The protagonist has a goal, and the antagonist is in the way of that causing conflict. This is possibly the most basic definition of a plot. Without it, you don’t have much of a story. I’ve actually read pieces that lacked conflict, short fiction mainly where events happen, and a character reacts, but there is no dispute, no struggle, and the writing simply ends at some point.

My rule for determining if you have a plot or not is to see if you can describe the story without describing the events that make it up. If you can say, “It’s about Bob, who is desperate for money so he robs a bank.” That’s a story. If on the other hand your description is, “Bob has a hard life and I reveal that over the course of the story,” and feel that doesn’t really describe the story without explaining the events…that’s not a story, that’s a detailed character workup.  Or if you say, “It’s about a world where they have suddenly lost the use of electricity.” While this has an implied conflict of Man Against Nature, it isn’t so much a story as it is a setting for a story.  

This said, there are many books on the market that according to this breakdown would not classify as stories, which are very successful, so clearly this isn’t always a problem. I would venture to guess that stories with plots are more commercially successful, where as those without tend to be more critically acclaimed. I’ve actually heard rumors that lit professors denounce plots as inconsequential and annoying as they merely get in the way of the important aspects of a book which are theme, symbols, meaning, etc.

Conflict between characters will also generate a desire to read. Hatred for an antagonist can turn pages just as effectively as concern for a protagonist. In recent years there has been a resurgence of authors killing their protagonists and letting the antagonists win. This can result in readers throwing books, or in the case of The Princess Bride: “You mean he wins? Jesus, Grandpa, what did you read me this thing for?” On the other hand, a hero that wins the day, is a bit like a spoiler.

No matter how you chose to do it, conflict should be a large aspect of your story if you want to keep the reader reading.

If Mystery is the cerebral part of this equation and Conflict is the physical aspect, then Tension is between the two. Tension is created when the two conflicted elements enter into the same proximity. Nothing has to happen, it is often best when nothing does, but the tension it causes will rivet the reader. This is derived from the conflict and can help keep the reader’s attention even when nothing is really happening, or can’t happen.

Suspense is lengthening an exciting scene, building emotion. The enemy draws near, the clock ticks, just seconds are left, but in the narrative those moments will take three pages to complete. And a reader will read every word, and ignore phone calls, dinner and sleep to finish them. 

Using each of these elements, Mystery, Conflict, Tension and Suspense and layering them like shingles so that they overlap leaving no gaps where something is not nagging at the reader to turn the next page, is how, as a writer, you keep your reader with you, how you get ET into the shed. No matter what your theme, genre, or how profound your message, if you can’t entertain well enough to cause your audience to finish your work, nothing else matters—you need to give your readers a reason to read. 

Next week: Voice