Writing Advice

I’ve written a few articles on writing over the years, and thought it might be a good idea to collect them all in one spot.  So here you go. I hope you find them helpful in some way.

Writing Advice 14 — Multitasking

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I once had a discussion with a neighbor about writing. He was a fan of books that he said, “challenged him.” Books that he had to work to get through and when he was done, never completely explained what happened. He liked the idea that the author left that task to him. To me however, this sounds a bit like hiring a painter to paint your house, only to have him show up with paint, ladders, and brushes saying, “Here you go, have fun.” I have no doubt there are many others who agree with my neighbor—some may enjoy the experience of painting their home—but I also know dude ranchers out west can hardly believe they can get city-folk to pay money to do their work for them.
As an author, I feel it is my job to do the work, not the reader. As such I try to make reading my stories as easy and enjoyable as possible, and one of those ways is to not make a reader read one word more than is necessary. Whether you like Hemingway or not, his minimalist style was a necessary counterpoint to a literary tradition of poetically bloated books. I personally feel Hemingway went too far, carrying his idea to an extreme that hinders the art that words can create, but his idea is a sound one—take out the unnecessary words.
Bob sat down.
This is a pretty simple sentence. There are only three words, but nevertheless it is wordy because one of those words is not only unnecessary, it’s redundant. Can you find it?
So then, Bob went back into his room to get his wallet, and then he ran back out to the car again.
Lots of unnecessary words here.
So then, Bob went back into his room to get his wallet and then he ran back out to the car again.
Better yet: Bob got his wallet from his room.
Trimming the fat in this way, makes prose cleaner, tighter, easier to read, and more powerful, but you can do more than just cut excess words. You can multitask.
Multitasking is doing more than one thing at the same time. Applied to writing, it is saying more than one thing with the same words. Why make a reader read a whole paragraph describing Harvey who is visiting Bob and then another whole paragraph describing Bob’s house. Wouldn’t it be better to do both at the same time?
The house was a two-story colonial painted yellow with green shutters, and a brick chimney. It sat on a quarter acre lot that sloped to the left. There was a maple tree in the front and a pair of birch trees in the back. A vegetable garden could be seen to the left of the house, and a swing set to the right, and the garage door was open reveling the back of Bob’s car.
Harvey did not live in as nice a home as Bob. In comparison, Harvey lived in a dump. The reason was obvious, Bob made a lot more money than Harvey and he could afford to have the nicer things in life. When people asked Harvey about Bob, Harvey was always polite,  saying Bob was a great guy, but he actually hated Bob, not because Bob had ever done anything to deserve his hate, but because Bob always got what he wanted and Harvey never did.  
In the above two paragraphs I described Bob’s house and then Harvey and how Harvey feels about Bob. But let’s see if we can do all three at the same time, and with less Telling.
Bob’s house was one of those perfect colonials always pictured on the cover of magazines that Harvey could only afford to look at. It was painted vomit yellow with showy green shutters, and a brick chimney built with all the craftsmanship of a robot. On the side was one of those huge wooden playgrounds parents appeased their kids with. On the other side was a vegetable garden. It was well kept. Bob probably had illegals working it at night so he could stand out there on weekends waving at his neighbors. Bob’s garage door was open and Harvey could see a newly waxed Mercedes. Harvey guessed an American car was just not good enough for old Bob. 
In the first paragraph, the house is described objectively, in the last it is infused with Harvey’s negative PoV. The result is how Harvey sees the house tells you just as much about Harvey as it does about Bob, Bob’s house, and the two men’s relationship.
Using PoV in combination with description can result in delivering twice, to three times the information, to a reader with far less words. If done well, you can describe a place, a subject character, and the PoV character all at the same time.
Danny was always a stickler for precision, even his pens were lined up on his desk an equal distance apart. That’s what made him such a good pilot, it also made him a pain in the ass to room with—particularly in zero-g.
In these two sentences I managed to explain that the scene takes place in Danny’s office, and that it was very neat. I further related that Danny is a good pilot, and that he is a very orderly person who pays attention to even tiny details and that this assists in helping him with his job as a pilot. I also revealed that Danny is an astronaut. In addition, I revealed that the PoV character respects Danny, but also finds his obsession with orderliness irritating. I also revealed that the two characters have both been in space on the same mission. We can also assume Danny was the pilot of that mission. All this is added simply by playing with the PoV in conjunction with the description.
The idea is to focus on the primary task of describing the setting, or the subject person, but also, through how that description is written, reveal who the PoV character is by showing how that person interprets what they experience. A dog can be a cute puppy, or a mangy mutt. A woman can be hot, or a whore. A lake can be serene, or a death trap. A birthday cake can be festive, or one more nail in the coffin.
You can also apply this same idea to the plot. Don’t write a chapter or even a scene merely to demonstrate that a character is smart, or evil, and don’t write a scene where a character walks though a town, just to describe the town. Don’t even do both at the same time. Always make certain that you have a legitimate plot point, an event that advances the story and then around that add the character and setting aspects. If the character has to see a specific car to advance the plot, have him wandering the streets looking so you can also describe the town, and have his method of searching reveal his intelligence. Always do more than one thing, or you are wasting space and your reader’s time. 
Let’s go back to the now infamous Seven-11 milk buying scene. If you were to write the scene where the PoV character walks in and buys a gallon of milk, how differently would you describe the store and its clerk, if in the first instance your PoV character was an urban vampire, like Angel, trying to kick the habit of killing humans, and in the second he was Sherlock Holmes on his way home after a tough day working a frustrating case? Do you think that you could adequately illustrate who the main character is without using any descriptions of the PoV character and restricting yourself to only using the description of the store and clerk?
Here then is another homework assignment. Try writing those two scenes. No more than a page each. But under no circumstance are you allowed to provide any direct descriptions of the PoV characters. You can’t say, “as a vampire, he didn’t really like milk…” You can only reveal the PoV character by how they view the world around them—by their unique PoV.
After you write them, give each to a friend to read and see if they can figure out who the PoV characters are. If you don’t like Angel and Holmes pick others, someone the person reading will know. You can present it like, “Read this and tell me who you think the main characters are—they are famous people who may or may not be fictitious.”  For more fun invite more than one person to read them and have them discuss who they think the main characters are.
If anyone does this, please leave a comment letting me know how it went.
That’s the bell. No pushing or shoving.
Next week: How to Begin

Writing Advice 13 — Weaving

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Weaving is a technique I love. I love to use it when I write and I love to see it when I read. I often use it as an indicator when determining how good an author is at their craft, because weaving is a true art form and not easy to do.
Weaving is exactly what it sounds like. Just like in basket or cloth making, you take one thread, wrap it around another, then let it go, only to bring it back later and wrap it again. Checkov’s Gun is a famous, but extremely simple form of weaving. You show the gun early on in the story establishing it. Then you allow the reader to forget about it, and then you bring it back. In this way, the gun is not perceived as a deus ex machina event. It is instead something the reader had information on and could have figured out if they had remembered it. The problem with the Checkov Gun is that modern audiences know this technique very well and using it usually tips your hand. It is the same in movies, where the camera lingers for a second too long on a book hidden under a magazine, or a credit card that no one noticed falling from a purse, these things scream, “This is going to be important in the future so remember it!”
The challenge is to avoid the deus ex machine by planting clues, but to hide them making it possible to surprise the reader. There are two ways I’ve found to do this.
There is the Horton method and the Genre Bias method.
In the Dr. Seuss book Horton Hears a Who! An elephant named Horton hears the mayor of a microscopic world called Whoville speaking from a dust speck. No one else can hear the Whos and they don’t believe him. In order to stop his foolish behavior other animals of the jungle take the flower and hide it in a massive field of other identical flowers. This method of hiding in plain sight is the Horton method. A writer can present Checkhov’s Gun, but then also present a knife, a blow dart, a bottle of arsenic and Uncle Herby’s pet alligator who has a love of human flesh. The reader will have no idea which of these will ultimately be used.
The Genre Bias method, is a bit more devious. In this technique you use a reader’s expectations against them. If it is the trope of every mystery novel that the butler is the killer, then point the clues at him. Let the reader believe that you are doing the same old tired plot. They will ignore the Checkhov’s Gun in the hand of the policeman because they are so certain that the author is following the same path they’ve been conditioned to expect. (Note: this has the unfortunate side effect of readers giving up on a story partway because they are convinced they know what will happen and that you are an unoriginal, hack writer.)
But these are only a small part of weaving which is not simply confined to hiding clues to avoid a contrived plot. True weaving is when story elements are reused repeatedly.
I’ve read books where whenever a scene needs a character, a new one is invented. Whenever a new place is needed, it is created. I considered this to be linear, or straight-line writing. Single straight lines of threads are useful, but they lack the abilty to draw in a reader and heighten tension. If however you reuse elements, bringing old ones back to fill the new roles you need, weaving begins. Not only is this reuse helpful in the form of not having to completely build an element from the ground up, but it causes the reader to feel a sense of familiarity that helps with the all important suspension of disbelief—this world is real because things don’t just disappear never to be heard from again.
This weaving allows for the creation of twists and patterns—something you just can’t do with a linear style. Twists are obviously unexpected occurrences, but patterns are what result when you take a story element and weave it so that it changes into something different. Whether a character, a place, or even an idea or motivation, these can be twisted from one pattern to another. A bad character can become good. A desire to right a wrong, can become a wrong in itself.
By causing elements to weave back across the main plot line, each intersection becomes a possible opportunity to develop something new—to build a new idea. And this building on top of an existing foundation adds depth to the story. Usually the path of a main character who grows from one type of person to another is a form of weaving. But it is much more interesting when the weaving effect is used on multiple characters, settings and plot elements.
I know this sounds a bit abstract, but we are in the advanced class now, so I expect a higher level of understanding—or at least more patience with my inability to communicate. Remember I’m only a writer. Still let me try to present an example.
Let’s say your group of adventurers stop at an inn for the night, and the next day they really can’t have their horses, so you decide they will be stolen that night. You’re first instinct is to create a wayward theft, who will be captured later when they need the horses back and he will be forgotten. However, if instead of inventing a new character to steal the horses you could use a previous character—the squire wannabe—one who may have been a trusted friend. The advantage is that it would make logical sense for them to trust this friend with the horses making the adventures appear less inept. Of course now you have to find the motivation for this previously good guy to do this act of evil. Was he always intending to cause harm and just pretended to act nice? Is he being blackmailed? By whom? Will the adventures now need to help him? There are tons of possibilities here, and by solving this riddle, the story will gain detail and depth and rather than one more bland, backgroundless character—the horse thief—you have instead what used to be just the squire wannabe, who now just may be…the illegitimate son of the main character! (Well, hopefully something better than that.)
The more interconnections with less starting points, the tighter the weave of a story. It also helps to ensure that all loose threads are tied up. Readers don’t much like it when you leave a plotline or a character unaccounted for. (I know a few people still upset with Rowlings wondering what happened with the house-elf revolution.) My goal is often to make nearly every element in a book have at least more than one use. Nothing that I take the time to introduce, and force the reader to use their time to read about, should ever be a one shot deal.
In my mind, tighter weaves, that use less characters and settings to tell the same story, are like plays in contrasts to movies. The restrictions generated by the limitations of space and cast demand greater effort, skill and creativity on the part of the writer. And writing almost always benefits from extra effort and greater challenges.
In a recent review of my latest work, a friend commented, “I was surprised to see the girl coming back into the story. I just thought she was there to establish the main character as sympathetic.” This person had not read any of my other works or I would have been surprised. But it does say something about the state of reader expectations.
In what I consider a well constructed story, nearly every element is a Checkhov’s Gun. If you show it, you’d better use it. Nearly every character, setting, prop, or idea, is reintroduced and used for a new purpose, a purpose that utilizes its unique history already established in the story to lock that new pattern in the bedrock of the plot. Builds upon builds, foundations lending themselves to new foundations.
What happens if now that Squire Wannabe turned Illegitimate Son, is in the end the real antagonist? How wonderfully buried would be that Gun! Weaving provides you with the freedom to take a story in new and unexpected directions, for intersections are exciting things.
That’s the bell. No running. Next week: Multitasking

Writing Advice 12 — Trusting the Reader

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In the previous ten posts I’ve covered what I felt were those topics that all fiction writers should know—the basics or the common aspects that everyone needs to master. The components of a story, the tools to build one, and the rules that help new writers avoid mistakes. Now I’m going to push further into subjects that might not be so obvious, and the first of these is—Trusting the Reader. I covered this in a previous post back in 2009, and I am going to re-post most of it here for those of you haven’t read it. The post was called, not surprisingly, “Trusting the Reader.”
Trusting the reader comes in many different forms and levels, but it can make the difference between a story that is lethargic, and one that comes right off the page at you. Simply put, trusting the reader makes reading a book interactive. The reader stops being a passive witness to events and becomes an active part of the story. While this sounds great, it is extremely dangerous if done incorrectly—which is why I’m putting this in the more advanced class.
What is trusting the reader? It means that as an author you don’t handhold your audience, you don’t explain what you want them to understand. Instead, you trust that they will grasp your meaning. The danger being—they might not.
Trusting the Reader comes in different forms. It can be applied at the sentence and paragraph level, where an author might provide a detailed description of a room, “empty bottles littered the floor, dirty clothes lay on door handles or piling in corners…” and in doing so provide the graphic scene of a messy room. All too often writers then follow this with the paragraph concluding sentence, “The room was a mess.” This sentence is put there as insurance. The author doesn’t want you to miss the point, but they know if they just came out and said, “the room was a mess.” Their creative writing instructor would slap them for Telling instead of  Showing. So now they show and tell—just to be safe.
As with most things however, taking risks offers the greatest rewards, so long as you don’t go crazy. If you have adequately described a scene, you don’t have to explain it afterwards. The reader will get it and they won’t feel insulted knowing that the author did not think they would. Still this is the easy stuff. It is when you take the same idea to the character and plot level that things get dicey.
Applying the idea of trusting the reader to a plot runs a huge risk. If the reader doesn’t get the fact that the room is dirty, it isn’t a huge deal, but if you lose a major plot point, the whole story might collapse. On the other hand, if you create a gap in the story and provide no bridge for the reader to walk across so that they have to make a leap of understanding to figure out what is happening, then they will feel included in the story. They will feel clever at having figured the secret out and the story will become something they are “doing” rather than merely “reading.” Make the gap too wide, and well…splat.
In the novel “Me Talk Pretty One Day,” David Sedaris provides a simple example of this technique where he speaks of a young boy thinking of all the things he did that he might be in trouble for and one of those items listed is: “…altering the word hit on a list of rules posted on the gymnasium door…” Mr. Sedaris never says how he altered it. He leaves this for the reader to figure out. The result is like a perfectly delivered punch line. There is a pause, a moment of confusion and then it dawns on the reader and that brief moment of hesitancy punches the joke delivering it with tremendous power that causes the idea to pop off the page far more than if he just explained it. Still if you don’t get the joke, it won’t ruin the book. For that you have to go higher still.
In Khaled Hosseini’s A Thousand Splendid Suns, he takes trusting the reader to soaring heights when crucial parts of the story’s plot are hinged on the assumption that the reader will guess correctly about certain aspects that are merely hinted at. Mr. Hosseini describes a common aspect of a character near the beginning of the novel in a very specific manner, then much later in the novel he describes another character using the exact same descriptive element, but never identifies the individual. He is trusting that the reader will remember the earlier reference and understand it is the same person. Creating such a leap of faith is gutsy for a writer, but the effect, when it works, is fantastic. When I connected the dots, I was thrilled like figuring out a whodunit before the sleuth explained the murder. And this was only one small part of a well constructed, reader-trusting story that puts the reader to work and makes them feel useful.
A related aspect to this same idea is “holding-back.” As a novelist with a great story to tell, it is hard to stop yourself from blurting everything out right away. There is so much you want to explain, and writers can be very impatient feeling that the reader won’t truly enjoy the story until they learn this crucial plot twist. Again, it is important to trust that the reader will stay with you, and if an author does the job right, the reader will be just as impatient to discover the answers, as the author is to reveal them.
This has been an issue with my own books—more so perhaps because I am writing a series of novels that is in many ways one long story. So much is unexplained and so much is intentionally misdirecting that as the author it can be frustrating to hear negative comments that are merely the result of false assumptions. It is like playing a practical joke on someone, hearing them complain, but not being able yet to reveal the joke.
Being patient, holding back, and having faith that readers will make the leaps across chasms and be happier for the exercise, is scary, but just as the reader relies on writers not to strand them with a nonsensical story, the writer must also have the courage to trust the reader.
That’s the bell. No running. 
Next week: Weaving

Writing Advice 11 — Description

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I was doing a signing once with another author where we both got up behind a microphone and talked about our books. His was about a man in ancient China who was cursed with immortality and spent centuries learning how to lift the curse. Turns out the author was an expert on Chinese history and I thought, wow! This sounded great. He went on to describe how the man lived through the various regime changes, the rebellions, the invasions of the Mongols and so on. He went on to say how the main character left China and went abroad to various other countries, and how he returned for the Western invasion. The story went on to present day and covered several wives and the birth of many children, and the many adventures this guy had as he tried to lift his curse. It sounded like a really cool story. Then he held the book up. It was a standalone novel and about as thick as Hemingway’s Old Man and the Sea. I thought—really?

When I first began writing, I was thirteen and plodding my way through eighth grade. I gave my stories to my brother and after reading them he mentioned that he liked the story and the characters, but that everything else was missing. He didn’t know how exactly to articulate the problem but described it like seeing a play with no scenery. “Other books have all this other stuff but all your stuff is missing.”

He was talking about descriptions. Like most writers I wrote the way I would tell a story. “So yesterday I went to the store and bought a gallon of milk and brought it home.” I never once considered describing the trip, or the store, or the guy behind the counter, or even the dialog that was exchanged along with the money. People don’t do that when telling a story, so it is natural to skip that when writing one. It takes effort and training to remember that the reader isn’t you and has no idea what you are seeing, hearing, smelling or feeling. So if you are encountering the problem of writing novels that are filled with events and characters, but which are oddly novella length—it’s most likely a lack of description.

A lot of people have problems with description. Dialog can be easier because you can imagine a conversation, you have them all the time, but people don’t make a habit out of describing their surroundings, or the people they meet, and if they do it is in a very utilitarian manner that doesn’t play well in a novel.

I read sample chapters of an aspiring novelist book that introduced the main character as being six foot two inches, Caucasian, having black hair, brown eyes, and wearing a blue suit. This isn’t a description so much as it is a police report. And writers are always doing this. Consider for a moment how often you notice the exact height of a person, or the color of their eyes. Writers love to tell you the color of a character’s eyes. But let me ask you something, do you know the eye color of your four closest friends. Assuming all your friends are not of a ethnic background that makes this more of a logic puzzle than a memory thing, you might find this surprisingly hard. I would be hard pressed to tell you the eye color, or the exact height of my own children much less a stranger I just met. Eye color just isn’t a priority upon first meeting, but in most written descriptions, writers feel the need to list it, and not just tell you that they have brown, blue, or hazel eyes either. They are always something bizarre like cerulean, azure, emerald, sapphire, etc. When you have noticed a person’s eye color, how often have you described it as cerulean? If a cop asked you to describe the mugger who snatched your purse, would you say he had azure eyes, or blue eyes? How many of you could identify the color cerulean if you saw it?

Not only does this kind of list form of description not reflect reality, it is also one dimensional. All it is telling you is the physical stats of the individual. When most people see something, be it a person, place or thing, they don’t register it by mere visual stats, but rather they get an “impression” of it, and often that impression has little to do with the visual.

The man was a granite cliff.

This sentence tells you nothing literal about the character, except his sex, but it presents an impression. Only six words but you can already see him in your mind’s eye, can’t you? Think a second. Is the man young or old? Pale or tanned? Baby-faced or wrinkled? Tall or short? Dressed in fancy clothes or old clothes? Does he wear glasses? Is he friendly? Talkative? Does he drink margaritas, Scotch, or beer? You might not know, but you likely feel you could venture a good guess, right? With six words that simple description told you more about the character than all those statistics because it gave you an emotional impression rather than a literal visual.

This technique is what I call Non-Description, or describing something without directly describing it. John Updike was a master of this. He could describe something far more accurately and vividly without ever using a word that would be literally associated with it. After noticing how he did this, I spent time walking around mentally writing impressionistic descriptions of the most mundane things, avoiding any reference that might be remotely literal. I’m not suggesting that you form all your descriptions this way, but realizing that you can often say more with an idea than with stats is important.

The challenge with descriptions is that when it is well done it reads a bit like poetry, and writing good poetry forces a writer to labor over tiny things. Each word is important, and when you just want to describe a simple room where some cool stuff is about to take place, it seems stupid to spend hours finding the right word to describe the quality of the light. You might figure that most readers are going to skip this stuff anyway. Who really cares if there is a sofa against the wall or not? And you’d be right. If that is your attitude when writing it, readers will feel the same way. This is often the difference between good description and poor description. Poor description acts like stage cues in a script—a necessary element. Good description is as compelling and fun to read as the action and dialog.

One way of doing this is employing the a fore mentioned mini-stories technique where you try and employ relationships between the character and how they view their surroundings or people.

Bob was leaning against the wall, another pair of cerulean eyes glaring at me—what was with all the cerulean eyes? The girl next to him at least had a scenery breaking pair of azure eyes. Taken together they formed the variety pack.

This paragraph is drawing on my earlier comments about eye color in order to engage you in the description. You might find reading it more fun because I am sharing sort of an inside joke with you. This sort of mini-story is like that spoonful of sugar that helps the description go down.

Looking at things differently and taking the time to develop interesting metaphors can also be intriguing:

Autumn is near its peak and despite the rain, trees blaze. Falling leaves — brilliant parachutes of a million tiny paratroopers — invade the road sides, lawns, and sidewalks where they lay like stains of paint.

And this brings us to perhaps the most important rule of description. Consider that you were supposed to go to the store and get a gallon of milk (yeah I use this a lot.) But let’s say you forgot and came home empty handed, and your wife, or mother, or roommate asked what happened and you decided to lie. You could say:

“I went there and they were all out.”

Or you could say:

“Oh don’t get me started. I went to Seven Eleven down on 8th. The traffic was incredible, some guy in a blue Toyota Camry plowed into the side of a commuter bus—can you believe it? There must have been twenty people standing around blocking lanes. Anyway I got to the store and there was a line. It wasn’t a long line mind you, only three people, okay? But the checkout girl is this tiny thing that could barely speak English—she was Asian—Korean or Taiwanese maybe, and the two people ahead of me were this couple wearing matching his and her, blue and gold rugby shirts. They were from Columbia—I know because they could only speak Spanish, and the word Columbia, was the one word I could understand because they said it over and over. Anyway they have this argument that goes on forever about the Superball 8 lottery tickets. Long story short, by the time I get to the counter I’m already late and I find they are out of milk! So I was just fed up and came home. Forgive me?”

Which lie do you think is more likely to be believed?

Not only is the later more elaborate, but it has more detail. Someone lying to you isn’t as likely to bother mentioning the color of the couple’s shirts ahead of them in line, but that is the kind of detail you might remember if it really happened. As a result you are more inclined to accept it as truth.

Writing fiction is no different. You are telling lies, known falsehoods and you are trying to make the reader believe you. This is especially hard because they already know what you’re saying isn’t true. So instead of trying to convince them that something actually happened, you are trying to do something called suspending disbelief. If you write something well enough, the reader can pretend it is true. They can suspend the knowledge that it isn’t real. They want to do this, because it makes the story fun to read. You help them by making your fictional world as real as possible and you can do this with details just like it was done in the failure to get a gallon of milk story.

This is particularly important in fantasy because you can’t rely on readers to know what the interior of Hogwarts Castle looks like the way you can assume they know what a the interior of a suburban home might look like. And just as you don’t use stats to describe a person, a laundry list approach doesn’t work well for settings.

The room was small and square with two chairs, a single bed, a window with long drapes, a closets and a dresser.

Or…


The first thing I noticed was the giant poster of Justin Bieber on the wall of the bedroom, under which was the pink quilted bed with a row of Barbie dolls all sitting in a neat row, each in a different dress.

Which room can you picture more easily? The first description mentions six items, the second only three, and yet you are likely to get a much stronger impression not only of the room but of its owner. This is another technique that works wonders. Don’t try and describe everything, for one it would be very hard to do and second it would be boring. Instead focus on two or three significant things that can define a person, place or thing. In this case, the poster, bed and dolls speak volumes about this room and conveys an impression that is larger and more fully formed than the more informative laundry listing. As a writer you need to understand that the reader’s imagination is more powerful than your ability to illustrate anything. As a result, you will gain better results by igniting that imagination and then getting out of the way. Good descriptions are made up of carefully planted seeds that you then let grow in the reader’s mind.

Another thing that new writers fail to take into account is that we have more than one sense. As humans were are very sight oriented and tend to forget the others. Some aspiring authors, those who took classes usually, keep a checklist of the senses and endeavor to account for each in every scene. I find this overkill. Most of the time, like with eye color, you just aren’t aware of your other senses. So the usage needs to be tempered by the situation. If the character is in a room temperature environment, it isn’t necessary to mention the temperature, but if you step off a plane into the Sahara, okay, you had better include a description of a blast of hot air. If you are in a kitchen, or walking by a street vendor selling hotdogs, you need to describe the smell. And if your character just entered a sewer, then describe the smell, and clammy damp and the sound of dripping water. You want to bring the scenes of your story alive and engaging all the senses is the way to do it.

Something else I’ve found lacking in books is a sense of time and weather. All too often authors fail to mention what time of year it is, and oddly the weather is always clear and sometimes it is always day. Throwing in references to the seasons can add all kinds of depth to a setting, and help anchor the reader into your world. Throwing in the occasional storm, rain shower, or snowfall, also helps to remind the reader that your story takes place in a real world. And a reference to the time of day and a varying of scenes from daylight to night to morning helps keep the scenes from feeling like they were staged on a budget.

This concludes the Basics of Writing. Next week I’ll get into more advanced stuff starting with—Trusting the Reader.

For homework, in order to discipline you to stretching your descriptive muscles, try writing no less than 500 words (about two pages) describing nothing more than a drop of water falling from a spigot into a sink. You don’t need to restrict yourself to sheer physical description but can use elaborate metaphors, and any PoV you like, so be creative. Grading will be on how interesting and captivating the description is. See if you can do it, and on Wednesday I will post my solution to this problem.

That’s the bell. No running.

Writing Advice 10 — Dialog

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Dialog is one of the big three tools a novelist uses to tell a story, the other two being description and reflection. Given that this is one of the three pillars, this will be a longer than normal post, and I will still be hard-pressed to cover everything.
Some folks find dialog easy to write, others have trouble. What that usually means is that a writer is having difficulty making the conversation sound real, but honestly that is advanced level dialog, and this is still a basics class. So we are going to be going over the basics, because it is surprising how often new writers don’t know them.
Dialog is when a character speaks. While this seems obvious, there are two kinds: External and Internal. External is the one most people think of. It is when a character opens their mouths and speaks. Before I get into the nuances, let’s go over the basic structure because I’ve found a lot of writers don’t know how to physically construct dialog on a page. This is something I’m often baffled by because it is demonstrated in just about every novel.
Dialog consists of two parts, the communication and the tag. The tag is the comment that designates who did the speaking like: Bill said.
Dialog starts with a (“) and ends with a (”) Okay so most people know that much, but what comes next they appear to have a huge problem with: Every time a new character begins to speak you create a new paragraph.
“I said no!” Bobby shouted.
“I don’t care!” Jane shouted back.
Not…
“I said no!” Bobby shouted. “I don’t care!” Jane shouted back.
I realize that there are some successful books that don’t follow this rule. The Road by Cormac McCarthy doesn’t use punctuation either. It is my opinion that both practices are wrong. (And if you’ve read my post on Grammar Nazis, you know that I think everything concerning the “rules” of writing and English, are opinions of someone. It doesn’t mean I’m right, and it doesn’t mean I’m wrong.) I considered these practices wrong because these techniques impede the clarity of the message, and as an author, anything that makes something harder for a reader to read, I’m against.
Even in the very simple case above, a lazy reader might think Bobby was the one who shouted “I don’t care.” But the problem becomes far more devastating as the writing grows more complex such as using action tags in place of dialog tags.
“I said no!” Bobby opened the door. “I don’t care!” Jane had had enough.
In this case you really have no idea who said what. Bobby could have said both lines, or neither. Look at how the meaning changes when broken differently.
“I said no!” Bobby opened the door.
“I don’t care!” Jane had had enough.
“I said no!” Bobby opened the door. “I don’t care!”
Jane had had enough.
“I said no!”
Bobby opened the door.
“I don’t care!” Jane had had enough.
Paragraph breaking in dialog is a huge tool in helping the reader understand what is going on.
Let’s take a  closer look at tags.  
He said, is a dialog tag. It is properly written: “I love you,” he said. Note the comma and the lower case H on he.
He laughed, is an action tag. Rather than directly stating the obvious, an action tag describes what immediately follows the dialog and so long as it is in the same paragraph, it indicates by association, who just spoke. “I know, I know.” Bobby laughed. Note the period at the end of the know and the capital H on he.  He laughed is a commonly misdiagnosed tag. New writers frequently think it is a dialog tag and write: “I know, I know,” he laughed. Only people can’t laugh words. And while you can spit, you can’t spit and talk at the same time. You can hiss words, but only if they end in an S. You can reply, joke, comment, explain, mumble, whisper, shout, and yell, but you can’t choke, laugh, smile, frown, or sigh a line of text. The difference is designated by the use of the period, verses the comma at the end of the speech.
Now while tags are necessary to know who is speaking, good writing limits the number of tags. Reading something like this is annoying:
“Who was that?” Bobby asked.
“Who was who?” Jane replied.
“At the door just now.” Bobby said. “Who was it?”
“Oh, that?” Jane said. “Nobody.”
“Really?” Bobby asked.
Not only is it annoying it is also unnecessary. It could just as easily have been written:
“Who was that?” Bobby asked.
“Who was who?” Jane replied.
“At the door just now. Who was it?”
“Oh, that? Nobody.”
“Really?”
Using only two tags in five lines of speech, how can a reader know who’s speaking? By using the new-paragraph-per-new-speaker technique. Can this be done if there are more than two people in the scene? Yes, so long as only two people are doing the talking. The reader assumes that the person speaking is the person who had spoken the last line of opposition. There is a limit however, because after about five lines readers tend to forget who’s who. So to remind them you need to drop in an indicator, either in the dialog itself, or an action tag, or a dialog tag.
“Who was that?” Bobby asked.
“Who was who?” Jane replied.
“At the door just now. Who was it?”
“Oh, that? Nobody.”
“Really?”
Jane’s heart was racing. “Just forget about it, okay?”
Instead of using the action tag: “Jane’s heart was racing,” You could also designate the speaker via the dialog by writing:
“Are you jealous because he’s a man and you’re afraid I might run off with him?”
Now assuming Jane has been established as a heterosexual female, this line of dialog can replace the need for a tag because the reader knows Bobby wouldn’t say this.
Eliminating tags makes for a cleaner read, but sometimes when dealing with three or more characters all talking, you can only get so far with alternating lines, and using action tags can interrupt the flow of a conversation and kill a rising tension, or slow an exciting moment. Then it is best to just drop in a dialog tag to keep things understandable. When this happens, using said, replied, and asked, are your best bets. Anything flashier tends to stick out in a bad way and will stop the reader. I do tend to throw in an explained or commented from time to time just because I’ve used the others already and don’t want to repeat the same words in close proximity, but keeping tags as simple as possible is important. And try never to use an adverb as part of a dialog tag. 
“I don’t like you,” she said furiously.
Adverbs like this are just another form of Telling. This line is telling the reader that the speaker is upset. But the same can be shown by just improving the dialog to:
“I hate you!”
This doesn’t need an adverb to explain how the speaker feels.
Another aspect of dialog that people frequently get confused about are the uses of em dashes and ellipses. Em Dashes are used to indicate an abrupt pause in dialog while ellipses indicate a trailing off.
“You know what you are? I’ll tell you what you are! You’re so—so…oh I don’t know what, but you are!”
Here the em dash indicates that brief pause created by a stutter in speech, whereas the ellipse indicates that a character is taking a few seconds to think, to trail off in thought. Em dashs at the end of a sentence indicate a person has either been interrupted or has self-edited, while an ellipse shows they just never bothered to finish their thought
“I think—”
“We don’t care what you think!”
“I think…”
“Well? What do you think?”
All this is done without having to say:
“I think—” he was interrupted.
“We don’t care what you think!”
“I think…” he trailed off.
“Well? What do you think?”
These tags are redundant.
Now getting back to the Internal dialog, this is when a character uses direct thought—usually indicated by italics and a shift to First Person, if writing in Third. If you’re already in First then everything is in direct thought already so no italic is needed.
He walked to the door and closed it. Why do I keep putting myself through this?
In this way the writer jumps directly into the character’s head and we hear his thoughts written as dialog. This is not contained in quotes so it needs italics to set it off as different from the rest of the story.
Usually it is considered bad grammar to use contractions outside of dialog as contraction’s only purpose is to mimic speech patterns. Therefore it is improper usage to write:
Bobby came home that night and made himself dinner because he didn’t think anyone else would.
The word didn’t in this sentence should not be contracted because no one is speaking it.
The only other time contractions can be properly used outside of spoken dialog is in direct thought. Since direct thought is an internal dialog, the character is actually speaking to themselves in their head, and when people do this, they use contractions. So the line can be written:
Bobby came home that night and thought,  I’ll have to make myself dinner because no one’s gonna make it for me.
Now if a book is written in first person, the whole thing is direct thought, so contractions are used all over the place. Once again, this is one of those rule-things, and in art, rules are there to be broken, and novel writing is as much art as it is craft. Zadie Smith is one of those writers who breaks most of the rules. She writes in third person with a shifting PoV and a prose style that is very conversational—as such she feels the need to use contractions to form the tone of her style. This is her Voice (something I will talk about later.) But again, rather than trying to sprint for the gold in the Olympics one ought to start by getting the hang of crawling first. So you might want to master playing by the rules before breaking them, because the rules were invented for a purpose—they make it easier for the reader to understand what it is you are trying to tell them.
There is also indirect thought, which is what happens in Third Person Close. This is sort of a false internal dialog:
This was not just some fight—not a fight at all. She planned this. That whole thing about her parents cornering her for a surprise talk about college was a lie. She was the one who plotted the ambush, a clever bushwhack at a friendly pizzeria where she could walk out when it got uncomfortable. He wondered if her parents were even involved. The whole story might have been an excuse.
This isn’t direct thought, it is simply the narrator describing up close and personal what is going on in the character’s head without actually becoming that character. The result is reflective thought that is heavily colored by what could be an unreliable narrator, or at least one who is only presenting a narrow viewpoint at that moment. So it isn’t really dialog and shouldn’t be handled as such. 
Now that we’ve covered the mechanics let’s look at another common problem with dialog. This is another of those diseases that stem from Telling rather than Showing. The problem arises when a writer wants to give information to the reader and to avoid exposition in narrative, they think they can get away with it if they disguise it as dialog.
“What’s wrong, honey?”
“Oh it’s Barbara. You know, my friend that I’ve known since high school, who lives next door and is always over here? The one with the dark hair and emerald green eyes, who is more attractive than I am so that I am always jealous of her whenever you look her way?”
“Oh, yeah. What about her?”
I am over emphasizing, but you get the idea. The problem can also be as simple as having one character speak to another using their name. This is a cheating way to avoid tagging the dialog and is a form of Telling that should be avoided.
“I don’t know, Bob, this isn’t coming out so good.”
“You know what, Jane, I think you’re right.”
No one speaks this way except slick sales people who were taught in sales school that if you repeat someone’s name to them, they subconsciously think you are friendlier.
When you think about it even the, he said, tag is outright Telling, but it is a more accepted form of Telling, but also the reason dialog tags should be avoided when possible.
I was recently re-reading an old manuscript of mine and noticed how often my dialog was being used to tell the story rather than present what the characters would actually say. Two scientists would meet to discuss theories that they both already knew, with lines like: “As you know professor Bill…” which is absurd, because if he knew why would you reminded him of what he knows. So it is important to restrict dialog to only what a person would actually say in a given situation. Even something as simple as: “Bill, look out for that falling rock!” is wrong. No one would say all that. Rather, they would just say: “Look out!”
Another problem to avoid is to realize that inside quotes you can do anything. There are no rules of grammar or spelling. Inside quotes anything goes. This is because inside quotes, thanks to Mark Twain, we are now free to mimic how people actually speak, rather than how they should speak. So not only can you use contractions, you should. And you should rarely allow characters to speak in complete sentences, because few people ever do.
If you want to learn how people really talk, try going to a coffee shop with a laptop. Sit down and type exactly what you overhear from neighboring tables. You’ll get a lot of: “Ah…and—ah. You know?” These are probably the most used words in the English language. While this is accurate to real speech, as a writer you don’t really want to write this because it is just as irritating to read as it is to listen to. So as a writer writing dialog you want to present the concept of realism, without actually writing the way people actually talk. This is done with broken sentences: “I can’t—I don’t know—I just can’t come out and just say it like that. Damn. Okay maybe.” Most of the sentences in the dialog above are grammatically incomplete, and yet they present the haphazard sense of genuine dialog.
Dialog also can be a huge tool in characterization. How a person speaks will indicate who is speaking even before the reader reaches a tag. The obvious way is to use slang, or phonetic dialects: “Ya’ll gunna, be thar?” The problem with this is that it makes the reader have to stop and decipher the language, and as I’ve said, I hate anything that makes reading harder for the reader. You can do the same sort of thing without the phonetics and just dropping words. Instead of “Is everyone going to be there?” you can still write, “Everyone gonna come?” and it doesn’t stop you like the phonetics, but still gives that same change in tone.
One of the tricks I used in the Riyria Revelations was to utilize contractions in speech with the lower classes and rarely use it with the nobility—particularly when they were speaking publically or trying to intimidate someone. Not using contractions in speech causes the dialog to sound stiff and formal—just the way I wanted my nobility to sound. The lower the class, the lower the education level, the more contractions and dropped words.
Then of course there are just favorite words or phrases. Saldur always uses the phrase “my dear” when speaking to women. Captain Seward had a propensity to curse deities with phrases like: “Good god!”, and “Good Maribor!” as he was a bombastic character. Some use large vocabularies, and others very small ones. Some swear, others never do. In this way you can Show characterization rather than Telling it to the reader. You don’t have to write that a character is sophisticated and refined, just have them speak that way. After a while you will notice that each of your characters have specific dialog idiosyncrasies that are part of their their make up. Edith Mon never used the word “your.” Mince constantly uses the phrase, “By Mar!”
Dialog is an extremely powerful tool, and one of the best because it speeds up the pace, and if done correctly, can solve all kinds of problems with characterization, and description, without resorting to Telling.
Next week I’ll touch on the second primary tool of writing—Description, which will pretty much conclude the Basics of Writing. That’s the bell, and remember, no running in the halls.

Writing Advice 9 — Pacing

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Pacing is the speed of the events that take place in the story, but it really is a lot more than that and runs deep into the very sentence structure of the novel.
Holding the story out at a distance so that most of the detail is obscured you might see a pattern to the events, the high exciting points, and low duller points. In this very general scope, it would not be the best choice to have all the action pressed together at the end of the book with nothing in the front but character and setting development. This creates an unbalanced plot that can cause readers to get a false impression of your story. Someone who wants an exciting book might stop reading before they get to the action, and those that want a more thoughtful story might be upset when the actions blasts off.
A story doesn’t need to be evenly spaced—in fact you will want to avoid a consistent pattern. Usually it begins with a bang, then relaxes a bit, allowing characters some development time—which is hard to do during action scenes (why, I will explain in a minute)—then there will be a spike of action, then a slow build of events, then the drop to the anti-climax and the rise to the climax and then the resolution. This is a very general pattern and can be varied dramatically, but the idea is to not create deserts and floods but to keep the pacing running in a more enjoyable range. It is also important to vary the pace of heart pounding scenes with reflective character development scenes. Everyone likes variety.
I remember when I first saw the original Star Wars I thought it was a great film, but the one complaint I had was that it felt too rushed. I wanted a little pause after the characters escaped the Death Star, I wanted to learn more about Leia and Han, and the universe in general, but things just kept flying at hyperspace speeds. As a viewer I didn’t feel I had time to become fully immersed into the world, to get to know the characters or reflect on the repercussions of the events that had already transpired.
Having a varying pace in a story creates a sense of perceived depth through variation. The slower sections provide footholds and dividers, allowing the reader to mentally partition off areas of the book. Taking Tolkien as example again, the Council of Elrond can be seen as the division point in the first book of the trilogy. Everything before is of one tone, while what comes after is a bit different. The council also provides a moment to take stock and breathe, before diving into the adventure again. Such an oscillating pattern creates hills and valleys to the landscape of the story that can be looked back on as distance, generating the idea of time passed, miles traveled.
A story running too fast, screams by in a blur. Events are hard to recall, and the sense of depth that helps provide a story with weight and believability, just isn’t there. At the same time you don’t want a story that drags. Too much straight description will weigh your story so much it will drag it to the bottom and drown it. Description should facilitate the story not dominate it. You don’t want the reader feeling blind, or deaf and you want them to know where they are and when they are. And if there is something really interesting and unusual, then yes, take the time to describe it, but nothing is needed beyond this. Extra descriptions added to create a greater sense of place, or color, or mood, usually just drag a scene.
I recently set a scene in a coffee shop. I actually went to one and sat down and for hours described what the place looked like and what was happening. I later used this as background for the scene. I had way more than I needed, and as a result I used more than was necessary. A lot of it was great stuff that I was disappointed to cut, but the pacing was being crippled by the added descriptions. The story went from an exciting thriller to an essay on coffee shops and the people who visit them.
You should also remember that while the event-pace should vary, the literary-pace should remain consistent. Literary-pace here meaning “style.” Clearly there is a very different pace between a Dickens novel and one by Hemingway, but it is more style than event-pacing. More things might happen in a Dickens novel than in a Hemingway book, but the speed might feel faster in the Hemingway due to the style. If you are writing in a thick descriptive prose, stay that way. If you are writing light, don’t slip into long-winded, flowery wording. Stay focused and cut those clever sentences when they clash with your style.    
This leads us to a more detailed look at pacing.
Zooming in it needs to be noted that there is a speed to the words themselves. Depending on how a sentence is constructed, it has a sound, a rhythm. When added to others, words become notes, sentences bars, and paragraphs, melodies. All together it creates a music. And just as music the tempo can be varied to create tension, action, or calm.
1. The man entered the convenience store and walking to the back, took a gallon of milk out of the fridge, and then ran away with it.
2. The man entered the store. He grabbed a gallon of milk from the fridge. He ran.
3. The man entered, grabbed a gallon of milk from the fridge, and ran.
The idea in all three of these are the same. The pacings are different. Why? Obviously more words are used in the first. More importantly, it is a long compound sentence. Number 2 is what writers are often told is a good solution to creating an action pace: short sentences. This creates a staccato sound, a harsh rasping sound that jerks the reader, but I found this is nowhere near as fast as the comma series sentence shown in number 3. For where a period halts the reader, the comma causes them to only slow down a step. It just feels faster.
In scenes where you want to depict fast action, rip through it with commas, and less conjunctions. Condense the ideas and leave out the descriptions. Include only what is necessary and let nothing else get in the way.
Getting back to that promised explanation of why it is hard to do character development in action scenes—this is why. In the middle of a fight, or a chase, if you pause to provide a moment where the character is reflecting on their life, or interpreting the world around them, not only will it kill the excitement of the scene, it will appear false. No one notices what’s playing on the jukebox when in a bar fight. All mental concentration is constricted with laser focus on specific details and the mind has no time to reflect or ponder or muse. This is in effect the same as one sees in a movie or tv show when the editing is tight, fast, and jerky. Sure it is hard to follow, sure it’s even annoying, but it does impart a visceral sense of threat, confusion, and action. Nothing at all might be happening on the screen—a guy might be sitting on a park bench feeding pigeons, but the editing and camera movement alone will put you on the edge of your seat and start your heart pounding merely by the suggestion of intensity. The same is done with words. Short. Fast. Abrupt. Ideas flying, racing, pummeling relentlessly. It is the sound of a drum roll, the sharp rapid strings in the background of a horror film. The reader has no conscious idea why the scene is so exciting—but it is.
But don’t write like this all the time. Short simple sentences are annoying in large doses. In fact, when dealing with rhythms and sounds, you’ll want to vary the lengths and speeds in general, but use more compound sentences in quiet moments and shorter sentences in action scenes. Learning to “hear” the music the words make is a skill that needs to be acquired through experience. Reading your own stuff aloud helps. Hearing someone else read your words to you, works even better. Then you can hear when you are “running hot” or “dragging.”
This hot and cold aspect relates to the balance between dialog/description/reflection. Using any one too  much will cause the story to run hot or cold. In reading your own work, you should be able to see when you have been using a lot of description, or too much reflection or dialog. The pace of the story stagnates at one speed.
Often times when I write dialog I will forgo any description because I am focusing on the conversation. Later I go back and add in the descriptions and gestures, and tags. I’ll note when I have written pages of dialog and realize, the story is running “dialog hot” and needs to be cooled down with some description. I’ll search for the idea pause in the dialog and insert something—anything. I was recently writing a scene of two people talking on a bus. Not much happens at night on a non-stop bus. I had already described the traffic outside and what everyone else was doing and the interior of the vehicle. Still I needed a description break. I arbitrarily made a woman get up and go the bathroom at the back of the bus passing the characters and causing them to pause in their conversation as she went by. This event had no purpose in the story except to help ground the reader in the environment and break up the flood of heavy dialog. That said you also don’t want to break into a smoothly flowing dialog with annoying breaks that kill the tension, or excitement, so you need to know when to insert and when to let it run hot.
That’s the bell. Next week: Dialog. No running in the halls.

Writing Advice 8 — Mini Stories

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I have a friend who exclusively writes short stories. I tried to convince him to try a novel, but he insisted he wasn’t comfortable with that form. I told him that writing a novel was just putting together a series of short stories. He didn’t accept that. I think the issue was in the definition of “short story.” Most short story writers view it as a medium very different from a novel. For example a short story begins at the height of the event and captures just that, so a novel can’t be the culmination of what would be a series of climaxes, and in this respect I agree, but that’s not what I meant. So, in order to avoid this confusion, I’ve played a game of semantics and have redefined the statement as: A novel is a series of Mini Stories that comprise a larger one.
So what is a mini story and how does it differ from a short story?
A mini story has a beginning middle and an end, but it doesn’t have to be the apex. There doesn’t have to be a character arc, twist, or reveal. It merely needs to put forth an idea, discuss it and then resolve it. Just about everyone of my blog posts are mini stories, but I wouldn’t call them short stories. They begin with a premise, discuss it, and often conclude with a new way of looking at the beginning thus creating a circular concept that concludes as a whole idea.
In the post Genesis I describe how I started writing. The post begins when I found a neighbor’s typewriter and typed the line: “It was a dark and stormy night.” I was fascinated by this tool and what it allowed me to do. I wasn’t allowed to play any further with the typewriter and this aspect of the post is abandoned as I go on to talk about how I learned to like stories through reading The Lord of the Rings, but when I was done with it I wanted more and could not find anything else like it. I was depressed. Now up to this point this “story” is still open-ended. It is what I call a linear plot, meaning that it starts at point A and moves straight to point B. It is a mere series of events, not a story. What made it a story is that in the end, my boredom led me to complain to my mother and she taught me a lesson by insisting I clean out the front closet. There I found my older sister’s old typewriter, and the post concludes with the line: “I never finished cleaning out the closet.” In this way, the series of events turn back on themselves and connects to the start forming a circle and a story. The end explains the beginning and gives reason for the middle.
Not everyone sees a story in this way. I have read many short stories, and seen a few movies, that are just a series of events that start at a random point and end at a random point. Personally I don’t recognize these as stories. Stories for me must have a point. If you are at dinner and say, “Oh, let me tell you what happened at work today.” Those with you expect they are about to hear something with a point, rather than say… “I got up, got in the car, drove to work, did stuff, and then came home.” If you did, I think those at the table might look at you puzzled and even ask, “Yeah, so?” Stories need a setup and a payoff to hold them together as a unit, otherwise they are just random events told in order.
How does this apply to writing a novel?
Let’s look at The Lord of the Rings again. The story is of Frodo taking the ring to Mordor, but it is made up of dozens of smaller stories. The first being the Long Expected Party, a small story of the coming birthday bash for Bilbo. There is mystery, foreshadowing and then the big reveal and even a nice little epilogue where Gandalf catches him before he sneaks out of Hobbiton. Then  there is the story where Gandalf tells the history of the One Ring, and the tale of Frodo’s trip to Cricket Hollow. The larger novel is broken down into much smaller mini stories. In this way, chapters can be small stories inside a novel. What this does is provide the reader with a constant diet of interest. Most readers can’t consume a whole novel in an hour. As such, the reward or even the anticipation of a reward is too far off to be gripping. What a reader wants is to be consistently rewarded as they read along. This means the characters need to encounter challenges and mysteries as they move through the story. But this isn’t enough. The characters need to figure some of them out and overcome each until they arrive at the big endgame climax. Imagine how Tolkien’s epic might have read if it really was just Frodo plodding to Mordor without any little plots in between.
Mini stories on this scale challenge the characters and form the basis of altering their perceptions of themselves and the world. It also does the same to the reader. Presenting this information in story form, makes it entertaining to experience.
But this is not all. Mini stories can be scaled even further. If chapters are mini stories within a novel, a few pages, or even a single paragraph can be a mini story inside a chapter. Sometimes even a single sentence can contain a story when back-loaded to provide for a powerful reveal.
“He collapsed thinking he had failed, thinking he was lost, but as he lifted his head there it was, on the hill, beneath the tree—home.”
This sentence shows a mini trip from despair to victory. It is a little story unto itself. So just as matter is made up of molecules and those of atoms and so on, books—good, strong, motivating novels—are made up of stories within stories, within stories. Ideas that loop back upon themselves making clever patterns, resolving questions, supporting ideas. These are the stuff of novels.
Mini stories can also be, and most often are, scenes. A scene is action that takes place in a single location. And just as in a film, it’s bordered on either end by a cut to another scene, or in a play, by a dimming of the lights, and or, a change in the backdrop.
One of the most common errors I find is the lack of editing, and what I am talking about here is the cutting of one scene and jumping to the next relevant event. All too often a writer doesn’t understand this concept and just writes everything that happens. If a story is of a person discovering they are out of milk and getting more, an inexperienced writer might write of them opening the fridge finding the milk missing, getting their coat and keys, walking to the car, getting in, backing out of the drive entering traffic, going down two lights, entering the store parking lot, parking, walking into the store, getting the milk, paying for it, getting back in the car, driving the same two lights, entering their drive, exiting the car, entering the house, putting the new milk in the fridge. The problem with this is that it’s boring and unnecessary. The same could be done by writing how the character discovers they are out of milk and grabbing their coat and keys. Then the scene would cut to a new one at the store where he buys a new gallon. The scene cuts again and he is home at the table drinking a glass of the newly purchased milk. If nothing of significance occurs between important event A and important even B, skip it.
Scene writing allows you to skip the dull parts and keep the reader locked in the juicy stuff. It also allows you the freedom to set a tone and style to the story. Of course knowing when and how often to jump scenes is an art in itself as it defines a good deal of the novel’s pacing.
That’s the bell. Next week: Pacing. Remember, no running in the halls

Writing Advice 7 — The Why, the Engines of a Story

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In lesson number four, I explained the Who, the What, and the Where, but I left out the Why.  As you might recall, Who equals characterization, Where equals setting, and What equals plot…so what then is the Why?

When creating a character a very important, and often overlooked aspect, is their motivation as this dictates much of their characterization and how they fit in the story. Most main characters have clear motivations because the story is usually about what they want and how they go about obtaining it. The problem is, sometimes writers stop there.

I once played a computer game back in the early nineties. It was a role playing game and known for having a huge world, with many towns that you could interact with, only they were all the same. Auto generated, the towns all looked alike and the people were all generic copies. It was like some disturbing Twilight Zone episode. It was also boring. Books can be that way too if the only person in the book with motivation is the main character.
In the original movie version (not so much the extended one) of Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings, I couldn’t understand why Pippin and Merry joined Frodo and Sam. They appeared to be strangers who bumped into each other on the road and decided to give up their lives, friends, homes, and responsibilities to wander off the map with apparently total strangers. This wasn’t Tolkien’s fault, he provided all the motivations and back stories in his books, they just never made it to the movie’s original release. Yet many novelist make the same mistake of skipping the motivation for supporting characters as non-essential—and then of course there’s the antagonist.
Evil for evil’s sake—it is an common theme in fantasy, but also pops up in other genres, most notably horror and occasionally thrillers.  Fantasy has been around for a long time and in ages past I suspect world perceptions were simpler. How else could nations justify wholesale slaughter of peoples merely because they were barbarians, or savages, or—evil. This black and white attitude lingers but not so much in the modern world of fantasy novels. Readers are showing a greater interest in more complex character motivation, particularly in their bad guys. They are no longer satisfied with a Sauron or Voldemort who are evil and motivated only by power and domination. They want to know…why. (Although oddly enough old Voldemort did surprisingly well for himself.)
When you take the time to consider why the evil menace wants to destroy the world, you realize that destroying the world is a pretty stupid thing in the first place, because it holds no advantage to the destroyer who would presumably die along with everyone else. Enslaving all of mankind? Okay, but why? Is it just an inferiority complex? They want to be the most important? Okay, but why? What made them this way?
The more times you ask yourself “why” the deeper the character becomes, and the more interesting. Also you manage to weed out all the false values, things that don’t make sense like wanting to destroy the world. Most people have better motivations than a three-year-old in the midst of a tantrum. The extra work often results in far more interesting plot elements that open whole new ideas that are not only more sensible, but far more interesting, fun, and sometimes even original.
While coming up with motivations aren’t all that hard, aligning the motivations so that they interconnect the way they need to in order to make an interesting novel, is. And if you are doing a good job then absolutely every character in a novel, no matter how insignificant, has a motivation. The direction they want to go and the things they want to do extend like dotted lines out into the future in a straight line. You alter them so that they intersect with the dotted lines of other characters and where they meet they often change, skew and shift their angle to head off in a different direction, otherwise known as growth or character arcs. The resulting pattern of dotted lines is the story. It is what drives the characters, and the characters drive the reader. Motivations are the little engines that you wind up and let go. Without them, characters appear false. They become one more prop, like a chair or a table.
Motivations are also logic lines. They should prevent you from doing stupid things. Everyone has read a book or seen a movie where you say, “no one would do that.” Usually this is the result of the character’s motivation being in conflict with the way the writer wants the story to go. You’ve likely heard writers say their characters take the story places they didn’t expect. This is what they mean. You can either force a story to be what you want, or let the characters follow their motivations and see where that leads. The former always feels contrived and your audience will find it unbelievable. It is almost always best to listen to the characters and let them be the people you made them into. I once had a group of characters who had been traveling through the snow by horse all day and were supposed to leave the road and head into the wilds. That’s what the outline called for, only as it happened, there was a town just a few miles ahead and it was late in the day. Almost all my characters wanted to get a nice warm room in the town rather than sleep out in the ice and snow. I didn’t want to write a whole chapter concerning their adventures in the town, which I would be forced to do, but no amount of coaxing would change their minds. Why? Because every time I imagined myself in their shoes, there was just no way I would pass up a warm bed. The scene played out that the characters actually had an argument in the middle of the road, and decided to sleep in town. To force the issue would have contrived the plot. In the end, I used the unexpected, added chapter to further develop the characters and the book was richer for it.
Something to keep in mind is that as motivations are the desires of characters based on the information they have at the time, it should invariably lead to characters making the wrong assumptions about others and about the outcome of events and their own plans. All too often I have read stories where the characters always anticipate what will happen perfectly. A good popular example of this is the 2009 Sherlock Holmes movie starring Robert Downey Jr. The film makes use of an interesting flash-forward technique, where Holmes, using his keen skills can anticipate in a fight what will happen and plans out his course of action accordingly. You see the event, and then the scene is replayed and it always occurs precisely as he planned it. Not only did I find this unlikely, and a bit repetitious, I felt it was a waste of potential. For once the technique is established, the sheer drama of this flash-forward failing would be great. We would see what Holmes planned to do, only to have something unexpected occur, giving us two stories rather than a dull rerun.
While this problem can come from sheer laziness, I think all too often it is the result of writers being unable to detach themselves from their characters. When the author is the character, it is a bit like god inhabiting the body of a person. They can’t be wrong. Characters should usually be wrong, most people are, or at least only partially right. Otherwise, as soon as a character suggests what might happen, the reader knows it will and you’ve just provided a spoiler that will steal all the drama from the upcoming scene. However, if the writer can block out all they know and really be just that one character, locked in ignorance, bound by their fears, and driven by their personal desires, their world colored by their past, then it is usually a simple thing to guess at their next move, and their expectations. These will likely not be what is about to happen. The result is a more dynamic and exciting plot that keeps the reader turning pages and surprising them.
There is however a difference between a character making a logical mistake based on what they don’t know, and a character being stupid. Sometimes writers cause their characters to make ridiculous decisions, or draw insane conclusions  in order to advance the plot the way they want it to go. This is a cheat, and readers know this. To guide characters in the right directions, merely adjust the world around them so that it alters their motivation and then let them go. And if you can’t alter the world to accommodate the motivational change, then you’ll just have to accept that the story is about to change in an unexpected way.
So you can see how important motivations are. Once set, they can completely alter what it was you expected you were going to write. But having them breathes life into otherwise dead characters and helps prevent stupid mistakes. Let’s face it, no one would ever stalk a vampire at night, or even a cloudy day, unless they had an extremely good reason. No one would go back into a wall-bleeding, haunted house unless they had to. Motivations comprise the story that is flavored by characterization and accented by unexpected challenges.
It also needs to be understood that characters don’t have just one motivation. Sure Frodo wants to destroy the ring, sure Harry wants to defeat Voldemort, but before that, they both want to eat breakfast. And just as motivation drives the big picture, motivations drive the mini-stories that move the plot forward.
That’s the bell. Next week we’ll look at Mini-Stories. Remember, no running in the halls

Writing Advice 6 — Point of View

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About seven year ago I was reading a book and it was annoying me, but I couldn’t understand why. It was a young adult novel, a simple, fun story and I should have liked it, but I didn’t. It was confusing and hard to follow, which I thought strange for a kid’s book.
This was back right around the time I signed with my first literary agent. I sent her The Crown Conspriacy and was waiting to hear from her. When she finished she responded by saying she liked it but had a problem with the shifting point of view or PoV. I didn’t have a clue what she was talking about. What was PoV? My agent acted as if I had just asked what year it was.
PoV, she explained,  was the perspective you are writing from—which character’s head you are in—who is experiencing the story. When you write:
It was a hot day.
That sentence can mean many things depending on PoV. Consider the difference between an ice cube’s PoV verses a cold-blooded lizard.  So the question is, who thinks it is a hot day?
The three basic PoV categories are First Person, Second Person, and Third Person. There are lots of sub-categories to these that I’m not going to get into as this is a basic topic and not advanced theory, and because I’m not a literature professor.  
The easiest PoV is the First Person Narrative. This is when the writer appears to be writing about themselves, easily identified by all that “I”s. First person is easy, not because it is easy to write in. First person is very limiting and often makes writing a story very hard, but it makes it easy to avoid mistakes. You are constantly reminded of who’s head you are in. I know Third Person stories where the main character has consistently been the only PoV, and they die before the end of the novel. This is a mistake that is hard to make when writing in first person.  It also makes it a little harder to Tell rather than Show as you are clearly limited by what the very singular narrator knows.
There is also Second Person, which is rarely used. This is when the writer addresses the reader as if they are a character in the story defined by the word “you,” as in, “You enter the house and sit down, crossing your legs and tapping your toes while you wait.” I consider this a novelty PoV, something short story writers might use, or a novelist might employ for a brief time to off-set something.
Then there is Third Person. This is the most common in literature, because it allows the greatest freedom and provides the largest number of options. As such there are more than one type. Third Person can be a character telling another person’s story, or an omniscient narrator telling the story. There are further breakdowns and this is where things get tricky.
Most people prefer the Omniscient Third, and there are sub-sets of this, but I’m only going to focus on two: Close and Distant.
A Close Third PoV is where the writer is describing the world using the mind of a specific character. Everything described is to be interpreted as how the character sees it, and not necessarily how it objectively is, and is limited to what the character knows. A Distance Third PoV is when a totally omniscient narrator, relates everything objectively.
The Crown Conspiracy was written in mostly Close Third, but the mistake I was making, the one my agent pointed out, was that I would jump from one character’s PoV to another. One of the great advantages of Third Person is being able to present more than one PoV, the mistake occurs when the PoV shifts mid-scene. One minute you are in one character’s head, seeing the world through their eyes and values and then with no warning or other indication, like a scene break or chapter change, you are in another person’s head seeing the same things differently. The issue is that as a reader, you have no idea there has been a change and suddenly you are obtaining sometimes contradictory thoughts.
Bobby held the ball and planned to throw it through the big window.
He would never throw it through the window. No one ever did. The very idea that he was threatening to do it was stupid.
Bobby threw the ball and shattered the window and Steve was shocked.
The first line is presented in Bobby’s PoV. The rest are in Steve’s PoV. Not knowing that the PoV had changed from Bobby to Steve, it is hard to determine who is thinking:  He would never throw it through the window. No one ever did. The very idea that he was threatening to do it was stupid.  Is this meant to show that Bobby is reflecting on the fact he won’t actually throw the ball and is only making a show of it? Or is Steve thinking that Bobby won’t do it. It introduces unnecessary confusion.
It wasn’t until my agent explained this to me that I realized this was why I wasn’t enjoying the book I was reading. The young adult story had a wildly shifting PoV that was driving me nuts without my realizing it.
Distant Third does not require a character present to relate a scene or series of events. However, being untethered, it also provides little structure and it is easy to get into trouble using it for it demands the use of Telling. It also lacks flavor, a true distant omniscient is void of any attitude or bias which makes the writing boring. I use Distant sparingly, and for specific reasons. At the end of Crown, the beginning of the final chapter starts with a grand Distant Third opening where I sum up events, and then “zoom in” to a street, and then a shop and finally the mind of a single character and I am back into Close Third. I’ve done this sort of things a few times much the way a movie director might chose a specific special effect shot. So while I feel it is okay to shift between the two in a story, and even in a scene it should be done sparingly or it will come off a bit like an amateur film maker zooming in and out all the time. 
Aside from clarity, PoV is a control that helps force writers to write better by limiting them and promoting Showing rather than Telling.
I recently read an aspiring writer’s novel that began with the main character thinking about themselves, how they look, and their relationships with the people they live with. This is a very common mistake. Take this for example:
Katy woke up and threw her long blonde hair back. She loved having long blond hair, it made her feel pretty. John came in the room. John was her uncle and she had lived with him and his wife Teri for most of her life, ever since Katy’s mother was killed in a terrible car accident. That was a horrible night that Katy could never forget.    
What’s wrong with this? For one thing, it doesn’t make sense. We are clearly in Katy’s head, but does anyone think this way? If you had long blonde hair, do you suppose that you would think how having it makes you feel pretty upon waking? You might think about it if you had a reason to—say you were on your way to an important date and you were concerned about your appearance—but no one wakes up thinking about how they look and how their attributes have always made them feel. This is clearly the writer Telling the reader what the character looks like. They are struggling to find a way to define the character and it shows.
Now we have John. How often are you sitting in a room when someone you have known all your life, like a brother, sister, parent or spouse enters and you begin thinking to yourself how you know this person, how you first met, etc. People don’t just reminisce whole relationships out of the blue. People are only focused on what is happening at that moment. They are confined to their motivation and what is concerning them at that time. Again, this is a form of Telling, and when you restrain the PoV to one character and then apply the focus of exactly what that character would be thinking at that moment in time based on their present situation, then the things you, as a writer, can address become very limited.
People don’t think about the kinds of things that would introduce them to others. They don’t think about the history of their family, or close friends. They usually don’t address others by name when speaking to them. They don’t ponder their life history. These are all contrivances invented by writers that steal the suspension of disbelief that is so important to any fiction work. It is also nothing more than another form of Telling. People react to the situation they are in, to their environment and to the motivation that drives them. If you want to convey information about a character’s past figure out how to show it. Create a reason for the thought.
A knock on the door woke her and Katy got up. Outside her bedroom was her Uncle John standing in his overalls, a day’s growth of beard on his face. “Breakfast,” he said and left. Katy moved to her closet pausing as she did every morning to touch the face of her mother and father framed in the photo on her dresser. The photo was an old Polaroid, turning yellow. It was the only photo she had of them—the only one that survived.  She found a blouse and a clean pair of jeans and got dressed.
In the above paragraph the same information is conveyed (minus the blond hair) but the reader isn’t directly told. The key thing to note is that the thought of her parents are triggered by an object, and that while a tragedy is hinted at, it is not fully explained. People often consider things fleetingly when stimulated to do so by a sight or sound, but there is usually no reason to ponder them deeply because they already know. This scene could be even better if the picture had fallen over giving Katy more reason to notice it, more reason to reflect on it.
Part of the skill of being a writer is becoming your characters. You are like an actor who transforms yourself into that other person and then transports yourself to that place. If you do this, then all that is necessary is to react to your surroundings as they would. The problem arises when a writer feels the need to get all kinds of information out. They think, I have to tell the reader Katy has long blond hair and who this John guy is, and how she came to be with him. The interesting thing new writers fail to see is that you really don’t.  Any story will be far better if you don’t explain much. Just drop the reader into a scene, let it unfold as it would in real-life, where there is no narrating voice-over explaining who these people are and why they are saying what they do. You’ll be surprised how much a reader will understand without being told. In addition, the effort to figure out who the characters are, what their relationship is, and what is happening and why, will feed their need to read more and give them both a sense of involvement, and a sense that the writer respects their intelligence.
One of the skills a new writer needs to master is patience. All too often writers want to blurt everything out. They have this great story to tell and want to get it all out there right away. They don’t feel they have time to hint at things, they don’t trust the reader to figure out clues, or to stay interested in a plot if you don’t tell them all the cool stuff up front. If they are writing a murder mystery they practically want to tell you who the murderer is in the first page, because it is so cool. I think this might be a lack of self-confidence combined with a misunderstanding of how long a book is, and the need to pace one’s self.
There is also the problem of a writer having all this information and feeling a need to impart it all. I’ve found, particularly in the fantasy genre, that while you might have a thousand pages of information, it is best to only use about ten. The rest isn’t needed to tell the story and putting it out there is just showing off all the work you did, as if the reader will give you credit for extra effort. In reality, you’ll just bore them.
So how do you get, and keep a reader interested in a story if you don’t expose them to the great and compelling aspects of your plot right away? And how do you keep your characters from becoming contrived robots? This is for another day.
That’s the bell. Next week we’ll look at Motivation, the Engines of a Story. Remember, no running in the halls

Writing Advice 5 — Show and Tell

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Perhaps the cardinal rule of writing is Show Don’t Tell. It is also perhaps the one thing that can make the biggest improvement to any writer’s work. Like all rules it can, and should be, broken from time to time, but if you’re going to break it, make sure you are doing it for the right reason.

So what does Show Don’t Tell mean?
Tell: Daniel went outside where it was cold. 
Show: Stepping outside Daniel shivered and buttoned his coat.
In the first sentence I told you it was cold outside. In the second sentence I never said anything about the temperature, but I showed you events that would lead you to determine on your own that it was cold out. When you do this, you invite the reader to become a participant in your writing. You aren’t just being told a story, you are being given clues and you get to take part by putting the pieces together and drawing your own conclusion. In a way it is like the old game show Password. This technique keeps the reader engaged in the story. When a reader makes connections, when they figure little things out on their own, it makes them feel intelligent and good about themselves, and when a reader is made to feel good about themselves while reading your work, they enjoy it more.
Telling a reader everything is not only boring, but insulting. Most people don’t like being talked down to. They don’t like to have everything explained anymore than they like to have their meat cut for them by a waiter. It suggests they are incompetent. In addition, Showing also causes the reader to experience the story as if they were there. It places them in the heart of the action. They can see, feel, and smell everything as it happens like an eyewitness. Emotions are heighted. This is so much more fun than having someone tell you the story of what they saw happen.
The problem is that Showing takes a lot more time than Telling. Even in the very simple example above, the Showing sentence is longer. When dealing with more complex ideas, what you could Tell in a few sentences could take thirty pages of Showing.
Daniel spent the next two weeks at his grandmother’s in Tampa trying to act normal while avoiding any direct lies. He managed it well enough to suit his conscience before flying back to New York.
In a novel these two sentences could have easily taken 10,000-20,000 words to Show, and if this scene is integral to the story, then it should, but if it is merely a necessary event that has no real bearing on the plot, then it can be reduced to a summary. But Telling should be kept to a minority in a story, like a brief aside, a sorbet between scenes—used to avoid boring the reader with unnecessary details and to vary the pace.
 Most inexperienced writers Tell rather than Show, because it is faster and easier. Training yourself to Show is hard and takes a lot longer. Often it seems unnecessary, or worse, impossible. Particularly when conforming to Point of View constraints. The results however, I have found to always be far better than opting for the quick and easy. Not only is the writing improved, but the story can often grow in unexpected and positive ways as a result. Just working out the problem of how to Show something tricky, like guilt, can force a writer to develop constructs that can be used to add greater depth to the story later.
In Riyria I summarized (told) the story of how Amilia became Modina’s secretary, then picked up the story at the first crisis point and began Showing that scene. When my wife read Nyphron Rising, she felt that I was Telling too much. As a result I spent three full chapters dramatizing what I previously summed up in two paragraphs. Not only were the results a better read, but they allowed me to explore the characterization of the participants and to better flesh out the setting. Two new characters were born as a result and they became vital to the story in the rework. The added effort returned more than the sum of its work in benefits.
So to answer part of the question I posed in my previous post on writing, one of the ways writers develop Setting, Characterization, and Plot is by Showing rather than Telling. In the previous very simple example where Daniel steps outside, just by Showing instead of Telling, I added volumes to Daniel’s characterization. The reader knows nothing of Daniel personally from the first sentence, but in the second we know that Daniel is a male, and that he is sensitive, refined and the reader has a pretty good idea of his body type. How?
By Showing rather than Telling, I was forced to explain that Daniel wore a coat, and that the coat had buttons, not a zipper. I was not trying to explain that Daniel wore a coat, it was the result of my trying to explain that it was cold out, without saying it was cold. However, the result was that I discovered Daniel was wearing a buttonable coat. Without realizing it I just added to Daniel’s characterization. He is now the kind of person who wears a coat when it is cold (some tough, manly men don’t, so he’s a bit more sensitive.) Buttons suggest cloth or wool rather than nylon or leather. Readers instantly imagine an overcoat, probably of black or dark blue, or maybe a camel, because those are the colors of button coats (this suggests Daniel is well dressed, well dressed usually suggests a level of refinement.) Daniel also shivered. Without knowing, do you think he is heavy or thin? And of course, I had to use the pronoun “his.” It is a pretty simple sentence, but the adjustments I was forced to make to change it from Tell to Show, added a surprising amout of characterization. Just imagine what Showing would do to a character defined by more than eight words.
A reader might not grasp all those insights, but when fleshing out a story it isn’t only the reader who benefits. The author also gains a better understanding of their own characters with each word they put down. By forcing themselves to Show, they put down lots more words, and each buttoned coat, and each shiver helps detail that image in a writer’s mind, and the clearer that image becomes, the more vivid the illustration they deliver to the reader. 
A huge help in Showing is the Point of View control, and that will be the topic of my next Sunday post. Until then, that’s the bell so remember, no running in the halls.

Writing Advice 4 — The Who, What, and the Where

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Now that you have read the supply list, and considered your outline you are adequately armed and ready to tackle the challenge of creative writing. To begin let’s look at the basic building blocks of any story. I will be throwing lots of terms around and speaking with great authority, but it is important to keep in mind that I have no idea what I’m talking about. That is to say, what I am about to relate is what I have discovered on my own either through observation, or trial and error and most of the terms I’ve made up. If you want the more traditional, scholar-based info, I’m certain there are lots of good books and other websites. All I can tell you is what has worked for me.
Now, with the disclaimer complete, let’s begin.
The basic components of any story are characterization (who), plot (what), and setting (where). I’ll tell you about the why a little later. Now while these are the parts of a story, a writer doesn’t directly create any of them, but rather uses tools that in turn creates them. These tools are: Description, Dialog, and Reflection (reflection being the thoughts of a character.) One of the biggest mistakes I have seen new writers make is only using one or two of these tools, or using all three but relying on only one to tell the story. It is easy to see why those with screen, and or, playwriting experience, invariably focus on dialog. As for those who rip through a story on pure narrative, tend to be impatient to get the story out. Neither of these really work. The first leaves the reader feeling blind, the second is boring because the reader is being told the story rather than being invited into it.
Now while I don’t feel that Characterization, Plot and Setting need to be balanced in a story, Description, Dialog and Reflection I think do. Leaving any one of these tools idle in your toolbox will just make the work of developing a good story that much harder. They also tend to work together to keep the work from moving too slowly or too quickly. Description tends to slow down a story while dialog tends to speed it up. Reflection can slow a work down, but if done in the right voice can also work as a catalyst to keep things moving. I’ll explain more later, but the point here is that by using near equal parts throughout a story, the piece will read smoothly and at a proper pace, neither dragging or racing.
Now at this point someone will invariably raise their hand, waving it a bit to get my attention so they can reminded me that, “Well, Charles Dickens did it that way, or Stephen King did it this way,” to indicate that successful authors don’t always adhere to this rule or that rule. Usually this is followed by another writer replying, “Yes, but you’re not them.” (This actually happened a few times in writer’s groups.) So to clarify, yes these rules can be broken…all rules can be broken, but before you start breaking them, you might want to first master them. It is best to stick with crawling before trying to do back flips. 
 
Since you brought up Mr. Dickens, let’s consider him a moment. Charles Dickens was the most popular English novelist in the Victorian era. Herman Melville was a contemporary, as was Edgar Allen Poe, and Mary Shelly. All of these writers used a very heavy narrative style, not because it is the best form of writing, but because it was the popular style of that time. This is not the case any longer. Dense exposition is no more popular today than classical music. I don’t mean to demean classical music anymore than the classic novels of the 1800’s, but the fact remains that while in their day Mozart and Bach were rock stars, you don’t see new classical pieces toping the pop charts anymore than you will find novels written in heavy prose on the bestseller’s lists.  Dense prose like that tend to be slow reads and modern readers are showing a preference for fast-paced, attention-getting stories. I personally feel this is the result of television and movies. More and more readers visualize books as movies which in some sense is limiting, but does allow the writer an idea of how the reader is likely to imagine any given scene. This short attention span has taken a firm root in the taste of many readers and they expect to be sucked into a story from the start and driven to turn pages and are not as impressed by long meandering exposition. Taste will vary of course, from genre to genre, and reader to reader.
Let’s get back to the basic parts of a story, remember them? Characterization, Plot and Setting? There are subdivisions in these components.
Setting can be broken down into, functional, atmospheric, or effecting. Functional is merely explaining that there is a table in a room. Atmospheric is setting a mood by describing that table as having deep carvings that make the legs look like arms and the feet like claws that could just move by itself at any moment. Effecting is when the setting exists to effect the plot, the table is made of wood and so when it is broken, a splinter can be used to kill the vampire.
Characterization can be internal, or external, expositional or situational. Internal is done through reflection or internal thoughts, where external is the result of one character describing another or observing them. Expositional is when the author comes out and describes the character directly through the narrative. Situational is when a character is revealed only by how they react to events.
Plots can be simplistic: straight-forward, Loose: a rambling yarn, Tight: when nothing mentioned is wasted, (often the result of weaving,) twisting: unexpected developments, or woven: when elements reoccur often for changing reasons to effect the story. (There maybe a few others, I haven’t spent too much time pondering this.)
Depending on the kind of story you want to build, you will use more of one type than another. And unlike Description, Dialog, and Reflection, the amount of Characterization, Plot, and Setting will vary.
While not consistently true, I’ve discovered that certain genres tend to favor certain combinations. Traditional science fiction tends to favor plot, above all, with setting coming in a distance second and characterization an even more distance third. I think this might be due to the idea that if you ask most science fiction authors or readers, what science fiction is, the answer you’ll likely get is something like this: A story about the effect of a possible technological advance on society. So the emphasis is on the “what,” and most of the details will be about what the advance is, and what the effect is. In Fantasy, it tends to be on the setting or the “where” except in fantasy-speak it is called “world building.” In Romance, I suspect the emphasis is on character or the “who.” Thrillers I think focus again on the what, with a minor in “who,” while Mysteries are also on the “what,” but often add setting as a strong minor. Horror likes to focus on atmospheric setting, with a minor on character—put a person you like in a scary place and you have a horror story. What actually happens sometimes seems irrelevant.
This isn’t to say all stories are this way, or that they should be. Often times authors cross over. The book Dune by Frank Herbert, places a huge emphasis on setting, to the point of it being more in the style of world-building fantasies than science fiction. Perhaps for this reason, and likely due to a less strenuous adherence to scientific rules, many have referred to it as science-fantasy. This however, did not prevent it from winning both the Hugo and Nebula awards. 
So why do so many stories in the same genre mimic each other? Mostly I think because writers learn by reading, and most aspiring writers are encouraged to read lots of books in their specific genre to see “how it is done.” I personally don’t agree with this. I think it is important to read some books in the genre you plan to do most of your writing in, but I think it is just as important to read the other genres. Sticking with one genre and then writing in it causes inbreeding. Just like in biology it reduces the number of options until the result is weak, anemic, and prone to sickness. Crossbreeding with other genres and techniques infuses writing with fresh ideas. The larger your sampling, the greater chance of creating a startling new concept that might take an existing idea and just approach it a little differently.
When I wrote my own fantasy series, I intentionally chose to write them more in a thriller stance than a fantasy one. I came to this conclusion for two reasons. First, I wanted to have a very large and complex plot, but did not want the reader to forget all the elements as they drowned in a sea of character reflection, or world-building nuances. So I went with a focus on a complex, twisted, and woven plot, with a minor in situational characterization. It doesn’t always sit well with traditional fantasy fans, but it does offer a fresh approach even while I used traditional fantasy elements. Second, I found that I was more prone to read books that started out interesting and pulled the reader into the story, and most alternate-world, historical-fantasy novels did not do that. This was one of the reasons I lost interest in fantasy novels, they were just too hard to break into.
So how do you use Description, Dialog and Reflection to create Characterization, Plot and Setting? This tends to be one of those things that writers are always discovering, learning and building on. It is what separates a good writer from a bad one, and created the famous show don’t tell, rule as a general guide to help new writers avoid common missteps. And as this post is already long, and answering this question will take several posts I think I will stop here for now.
For your homework, think about some of the books and stories you’ve read and see if you can tell where the emphasis was, plot, characterization, setting, or a variation. Then try and see if there is a pattern reflected in the books that you like to read the most? Are they consistent? Is your writing style similar, or in contrast to it? Do you think it should be the same, different, or vary with the kind of book you are trying to write?
That’s the bell. Next Sunday is: Show and Tell. And remember, no running in the halls.

Writing Advice 3—Outlining

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To outline or not to outline, this is an old debate in the writing world. Some writers insist on outlining, while others declare outlining is unnecessary, and perhaps even limiting. I was on a writer’s panel at a convention recently where one writer declared that if they were to outline the story they would know what was going to happen, and if they knew that, there would be no fun in writing it anymore. They also mentioned that they could not write a mystery novel to save their soul, even when challenged to do so. These two statements should tell you a lot about outlining, the pros and cons, and whether it is right for you.
What is outlining? Simply put, it is plotting ahead, figuring out where the story will go in advance of writing it. As novels are usually long and involved things, and most of us don’t have perfect recall, we write notes to ourselves. This is an outline. Outlines, and outlining methods, vary considerably from simple vague sketches to the analytically detail-obsessed straightjacket type. In other words, some have a handful of bullet points necessary to form the story, and others list in specifics everything that will happen in each chapter, almost like Cliff notes.
If you find yourself in the mood to write a story, you don’t want to spend hours, weeks, or even months planning the whole thing out first. That sounds far too much like work instead of fun. Most people just want to sit down and start hammering out what’s in their head. It is like deciding to go to the beach on a hot Saturday afternoon. You just want to throw on a bathing suit and go, you don’t want to stop to pack a blanket, towel, sunscreen, a cooler of drinks, lunch, sandals, sunglasses, etc. The result is that you get to the beach right away and you can immediately start enjoying the day.
After ten minutes you realize a blanket and towel would really have been a good idea, as would a cold drink but it’s too late now, you’re already there and it would be so much more trouble to leave and then come back. After a half hour you realize how much your friends would have liked this. Most of them work on Saturday. Of course if you had planned ahead, if you had mentioned it to them a week ago, they could have gotten off work. Better yet, if you had planned this two months ago, you could have rented a beach house with all your friends for the whole weekend. You could have stocked it with food and drink and reggae music. So as you sit alone on the naked sand feeling your skin burn thinking about all the things you could have done if you had spent a little prep time, you realize being at the beach isn’t as much fun as you expected. Instead you start thinking about how much fun going out to dinner would be. So you pack up and leave, forgetting all about the beach and chalking it up as another failure.
Translated in terms of novel writing, you get a few thousand words into the story, don’t know where to go next, lose interest, and then another idea for a different story hits you and you dump the old one, only to repeat the same mistake.
So you should always outline, right?  
Ever known a person who doesn’t know the word spontaneous? Who can’t do anything without planning each step? The idea of going to the beach for them is too exhausting to even think about, but if they manage it, it won’t matter that they are giving free parasailing rides right in front of them, taking advantage of this is unthinkable because it wasn’t planned for. This type of person, even if they have a week to prepare, won’t have enough time. What if they get sick? Should they bring aspirin? Band-Aids? Hydrogen-peroxide? Do they need to put the local emergency room on speed dial? What if it rains? Umbrella? Tent? It doesn’t matter that they’re going to be dressed in a bathing suit, these things still perplex them. What about food? What about the storage of food? Will the heat spoil them? How do you treat salmonella? Ice! How do you keep it frozen? The list goes on until the person gives up, defeated before ever setting out.
Translated: The requirement to outline too much kills the fun of discovery and makes the effort too daunting to start. It also often prevents writers from taking advantage of ideas that organically crop up that would make the story flow naturally.
When I first started writing I never outlined. I doubt anyone does if they start writing stories for fun. The result is that I started far too many novels that were never finished. When I began thinking more seriously about writing, when I considered that I might like to do it as a career, I realized a different approach was necessary. The reason was, I was wasting too much time. The technique for non-outline writing is to write a draft, see where it went wrong and write it again, see where it went right, and write it again. After three or four drafts the book is ready for either a normal editing pass or the trash. When applying this technique to 150,000 word novels, the time lost can be counted in years. Anything that can reduce the amount of rewriting is a huge advantage.
I suppose everyone has heard of a writer who took ten years or more to write their book. In some cases this is due to elaborate research, or being interrupted by personal crisis, and has nothing to do with the actual writing time. And yet I’ve heard about people who have done draft after draft as years slip by. For those of you looking to make a living from writing, you can’t do it by writing a book a decade. I searched the net with the query, “how long does it take to write a book?” The general concenus was 2-5 years. Interestingly they supported this with the data that Tolkien took 12 years to write his trilogy and that Stephen King writes 20 pages a day. I suppose this was meant to show the range of writers. What I think it actually shows is how long writers used to take to write books versus how long they take today. I bring this up because it was actually a topic at a panel I was on.  The older authors spent a year or three on a single novel but nowadays publishers would actually like their authors to put out two books a year, and some self-publishing advocates insist you should be publishing 4 books a year. If that seems too fast, consider that in the days of pulp fiction, writers were expected to crank out a novel in a week.
I personally wrote the first two books of my series each in two consecutive months, so 4 weeks a novel. I don’t advocate this, and I don’t write at that pace usually. I prefer a good 6-7 month schedule. I usually write heavily in the winter and slack off a bit in summer. A large part of how I can keep this pace is due to having the story framed-in. This means a lot less re-writing. Usually when I finish my first draft, that draft only needs to be augmented and tweaked rather then torn apart and rebuilt.
There is also the concern of going stale. Rewriting is like cleaning a window too much, you begin to deteriorate the surface and the glass fogs with scratches. First drafts are usually the most vibrant, with each re-work the life is dulled a bit. Editing an existing story to fix problems never flows as well as a story written correctly from the start. Laziness is usually the culprit. With words already down, you want to preserve as much as you can, but often that hinders your ability to make a better story.
And there is one more problem. It’s one thing to spend time writing off the top of your head for the fun of it. In this way writing can sometimes be like reading a book that you have control over. You never know what the next page will bring and as such it can be a blast. The problem comes when you have to make sense of it all, then you run into the “Lost Syndrome.”
Readers have certain expectations when they begin a story. When they start a murder mystery they expect that they will eventually discover who the killer is. If you end the story and never reveal this, it can really tick them off. And if you create a truly compelling situation, like a man drowning in the middle of a desert, the reader expects you to explain how that happened. They also expect it to be logical, or at the very least plausible. A weak story drops in a last minute device to solve the problem, a strong one provides the answers throughout the tale so that the end is not only sensible, but in retrospect—inevitable.
So what I call the Lost Syndrome is when a writer begins a story with a great premise then builds on that. Each time the story hits a lull, the writer throws in something extremely compelling, the more wild and insane the better. Mysteries build on mysteries. Each time the writer does this, the reader is engrossed and turns the pages faster to see how in the world the author will account for all these zany things. Only problem is, the author has no answer. They were just writing along with no real plan—sort of like an unemployed person in a shopping mall running rampant with a credit card buying things to keep their mind off of how they are going to pay for all of it.
This can often result in:
1. A terrible last minute device being added to account for everything, ala “It was a just a dream.”
2. The whole idea is trashed.
3. A plausible solution is invented and then all the elements that don’t work are removed, usually leaving a sensible, but boring story.
4. Nothing, or only a few things are explained.
None of these are good results.
When I started using outlines it was a gradual thing. I didn’t have any idea what I was doing, meaning that I wasn’t aware that writers made outlines. You have to remember I was making everything up as I went. I realized through accident that the more time I spent thinking about a story before writing it, the easier things went, the less editing I had to do, and the better it turned out. I also had a far greater chance of finishing a work when I knew how it would end before I began.
So in my early stages I just took a few months to “think” about a story, and found myself jotting down a few notes. Those notes became my crude outline. As time went on I built more intentional outlines going chapter by chapter bulleting out points I needed to make, and keeping track of PoVs (point of view, or which character’s head I am seeing the events from) for each scene. This allowed me to review the plot and then rearrange scenes to balance the action-verses-info pacing, and to alternate opposing plot threads.
One of the huge advantages I noticed right away was that when I knew what would happen in the next chapter, it made it far easier to get through the relatively boring chapter I was stuck in. I force myself to write in order. As such when I get to a less interesting section I use the truly fun scene in the next section as incentive to do the dull work. I once mentioned that hopping around writing all the appealing scenes was like eating all the marshmallows out of a box of Lucky Charms. After they were all gone, you might as well trash the rest of the box.
So outlines are good for many reasons, but they aren’t written in stone. They are mostly guesses, like any battle plan. The moment you start the fight they begin to fall apart. The worst thing I think is to try and keep to an outline when the story is veering away. Characters and plots grow naturally out of plausibility and creative bursts that redirect the story. Fighting these opportunities results in a stiff, contrived book. The trick I found was to take those unexpected paths, but then reorient the outline to accommodate for it. This idea is to always be able to see the end from where you are in the story. If at any point you make a turn and you can’t see exactly how you will get from there to the end of your story, then you have to stop, take an hour or so and work out the problem. Once solved you resume until the next unexpected turn. The worst thing you can do, is push on blindly writing tens of thousands of words and find yourself in a locked room that your character can’t possible escape from.
So my outlines are pretty fluid things, and little more than skeletons with some chapters having only the single bullet point “something happens here.” Here is an example of how I might have outlined the start of The Wizard of Oz.
The Farm (Depression era Mid-west)
      Gilch arrives with court order to take Dorothy’s dog Toto
      Dog escapes returns to Dorothy
      Dorothy fearing for Toto’s safety runs away from home
On The Road
Dorothy runs into circus performer/seer/wizard
Old guy scares Dorothy into going home
 
You can see a lot of potential problems already. There are a lot of unexplained questions. Why is Gilch upset with Toto? How does Toto escape? Who exactly is the old guy and how does he scare Dorothy into going home? And these are just plot issues. What about setting and characterization? Where does this story take place? Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma? Who is Dorothy living with—parents? What are they like? Does she have brothers and sisters? Farm hands? Neighbors?
These kinds of questions can often be explored while writing. In doing so, you can still have the fun and excitement of discovering things about the story and yet, feel secure that the story will work out in the end.
If you have ever been top-lining, that is to say rock climbing where you have a rope tied to you and secured from above so you really can’t fall, you’ll know that the fact that you know you are safe doesn’t distract from the idea of falling. The thrill is still there, it’s still frightening. Minimal outlining is that way. When writing, you don’t really know it’s there until you’re stuck and then you’re glad it is.
Building an outline is pretty simple. You just start with a few ideas. Where the story starts, something that happens in the middle and then the end. This gives you three bullet points. You run the story though your head a few times and you get more ideas—more points. If you’re lucky you know the anti-climax and the climax. Imagine telling your idea to someone. What questions might they ask? (Exactly how old is this Dorothy? How are you going to account for Oz?) Answering these questions add more points to the outline. After a while these bullet points work like one of those draw-by-number pages. You can sort of see the story taking shape. Still it isn’t until you begin writing, that you draw that line that connects the dots and the whole thing comes alive. A few dots might need to be moved, some erased and some added, but in the end you have a well constructed story ready for polishing.
That’s the bell. And remember, no running in the halls. Next week we’ll get into the nuts and bolts with: The Who, What, and the Where.