Category: Writing

Thought for the Day

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Advice on writing — if it hopes to be at all honest — really needs to have a sign posted over it in flashing letters of bright red neon:

THIS IS STRICTLY MY PERSONAL OPINION.

IT’S WHAT WORKS FOR ME.

And that definitely goes for anything that may be posted here.

(I will admit that I’m vain enough to think that my personal opinions are generally valid, at least for fairly large subsets of the writing population.  But I’m not so vain as to think that they are, or ought to be, universal.  One size definitely doesn’t fit all, in this business.)

Trouble on the Wind

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Or, foreshadowing.  Of which there are two general kinds, which require — of course — different handling.

The first kind of foreshadowing is when you need something bad to happen to your characters unexpectedly — the equivalent of having your protagonist walking down the street without a care in the world, and then dropping a grand piano on his head.  This needs to come as an unforeseen, and probably fatal, surprise to your protagonist; but not to your readers, who have little patience for plummeting pianos.  Either you carefully plant, amid the usual distractions, the fact that the occupant of the fourth-floor-front apartment plays the piano, and hopes to trade in his or her current badly-tuned specimen for a better one someday; or you make it clear from the first pages of the book that your protagonist lives in the sort of film-noir universe where death by random piano is always a possibility.

The second kind of foreshadowing is when something bad is going to happen to one or more of your characters, and you want the reader to be aware that something bad is going to happen, and you want them to be waiting for it — the equivalent, in this case, of putting all your characters under a tornado watch and letting your readers sweat over the question of exactly which one of their fictional friends is going to see the funnel cloud snaking down out of the greenish-grey sky and hear the noise like an enormous freight train going over a bad grade.  For that kind of foreshadowing, you need to start bringing the warning signs into the narrative early, a little bit at a time, and letting the frequency and the intensity build up slowly but steadily until the warning sirens begin to sound.

Because just as a stage whisper isn’t anything like a real whisper, fictional surprise isn’t anything like real surprise; it’s an artificial representation of the real thing.  The real thing, if put unchanged into fiction, is liable to look fake.

Getting Acquainted

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So you have the idea for a novel — you’ve got a compelling theme you want to work out, or you’ve got a nifty science-fictional or fantastic conceit that you want to play with, or you’ve got the outline for a marvelously well-fitted and dovetailed plot — and now you need characters to fill it.  Unfortunately, all you’ve got so far is a list, if you’re lucky, of names that you think might work.

It’s time to get acquainted.

There are a lot of ways to get to know your characters.  None of them work for everybody, because writers (and characters) are persnickety like that.  But there’s a chance that one of them may work for you.

Some writers fill out detailed character questionnaires for all their characters.  (There are lots of these available on the internet.  Just google on “character questionnaire” and there you go.)

Some writers have their important characters write letters to them, or to each other, or keep a diary.

Some writers make musical playlists for their characters.  Others scour the internet and other resources for visual references for their characters’ physical appearance, clothing, and home decor.

Some writers draw up astrological charts for their characters, or do tarot readings for them.  (This approach, oddly enough, can work just fine even for writers who think that astrology and the tarot are pure hokum.  It gives the writer a way to think about the characters in symbolic terms.)

As always, there isn’t a right way to do this.  Whatever works, works.

Today’s Link-of-Interest

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An interview with Stephen King, in which he talks about effective opening sentences:

In The Atlantic, here.

(Stephen King on writing is always worth listening to, in my opinion, because — also, of course, in my opinion — he’s pretty much the Charles Dickens of our modern era.)

A Surfeit of Good Advice

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Aspiring and neophyte writers are always looking for advice (though sometimes, I suspect, it’s not so much advice that they’re looking for as company in their struggles, and a sign that somebody out there takes them seriously), and lots of people are happy to give it to them.

People tell them, “Avoid adverbs.”

People tell them, “Don’t use the passive voice.”

People tell them, “Make your prose lean and economical; eschew elegant writing and special effects.”

So they weed out adverbs assiduously from their final drafts, and turn every possible passive sentence into an active one, and put their prose on a fitness regimen guaranteed to take it down to zero per cent body fat.  All of this is hard work, and they are proud of it when they’re done.

And usually, their prose is the better for it, because they were, after all, neophyte writers, and stood to learn a lot from that much intense concentration on their texts.

But then they start hanging out with more rarefied givers of advice, who speak disparagingly of the elimination of nuance by the compulsive eradication of adverbs, and who point out that sometimes the passive voice is just what’s needed to convey the relationship between the subject of the sentence and the action of the verb, and who wax eloquent in their appreciation of leisurely, expansive prose.

And the neophyte writers bury their heads in their manuscripts and weep.   Will nobody, they say, will nobody tell them which side is right?

Alas, no.  Becoming a writer means learning to live with uncertainty.  All I can offer are some general guidelines:  don’t use too many adverbs; don’t overuse the passive voice; and try not to use more words than you need for whatever it is that you want to try.  But don’t stop trying.  It’s better to attempt something new and not have it work right the first time than it is to never try anything new at all.

We didn’t become writers because we were risk-averse.

Lights, Camera, Action

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Readers like to see your characters in motion.  Even a story focused on an interior dilemma can be made more gripping if the problem has some physical action to mirror it or contrast with it.  As for stories focused on exterior problems, they’re like sharks — they can either keep moving or die.

Some writers have the storyteller’s version of kinesthetic awareness.  They’re able to keep the complicated three-dimensional moving geometry of a multiple-character action scene running in their heads without having to work at it.  When they need to describe what Character A is doing and exactly how that character occupies space and moves through the room in relationship to Characters B, C, and D, the only thing they need to do is check their mental diagram and it’s all there.

The rest of us have to work at it.

Diagrams on graph paper are one way to do it, and so is moving counters or figurines around on a tabletop.

Example:  For a scene involving an infant, a nanny, a bodyguard, and a wicked kidnapper sneaking in through the balcony, break out a chess set.  Pick out one of the queens to represent the nanny, one of the knights to represent the bodyguard, a rook for the wicked kidnapper, and a pawn for the baby in its crib.  Designate one side of the chessboard as the balcony.  Designate a square on the appropriate side of the chessboard in relation to the balcony as the door.  Put the pawn in the right position for the baby’s crib.  Then put your knight/bodyguard, your queen/nanny and your wicked kidnapping rook in their appropriate places — off the board next to the designated door square, on a square next to the baby pawn, off the board next to the balcony.  Then start moving the pieces to block out the action, and watch how things happen.

(Amusingly enough, writers of romance and erotica can have similar problems, although with a different sort of action.  They have to keep careful track of whose arms and legs are going where, and make certain that nobody ends up in a physically impossible position, or one that’s going to give them muscle cramps if they stay that way for very long.  I’ve heard of poseable artist’s dummies being used to work things out, and have also heard of writers who’ve enlisted the aid of a sympathetic partner for the more athletic bits.)

On Writing Forsoothly

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“Writing forsoothly” is the term we like to use around the house for all the different varieties of bad pseudo-archaic diction that infest modern fantasy — historical and created-world fantasy in particular.  J. R. R. Tolkien is undoubtedly to blame for a lot of it, because his characters do like their elevated language; what unobservant readers miss is the way that Tolkien modulates his characters’ dialogue, moving effortlessly from plain vernacular to almost-archaic high formal speech and back again, depending upon the situation and the company.  Strider the Ranger has a much commoner way of talking than Aragorn the Heir to the Throne of Gondor, but at the same time they’re both recognizably the same guy.

It’s probably unwise to play with writing in extreme forsoothly unless you can at least approach Tolkien’s level of skill and language-awareness.  It’s a lot harder to do than it looks, and the failure mode is dire.  But if you’re determined to give it a try — and nobody ever makes any progress in this game unless they regularly try things that they aren’t certain will work — there are a few things it will help to do first.

One:  Ask yourself, “Is this really the direction my writing talent lies in?” and answer it honestly.  If your interior Magic 8-Ball refuses to yield up anything more specific than “reply hazy; ask again later,” find a kind but honest friend and ask them.  Kind, because you don’t want your self-image pulled down and stomped upon with hobnailed boots; and honest, because you’re not asking them for sympathy, you’re asking them for the truth.

Two:  Prepare yourself.  Read genuine period or formal writing until it dribbles out of your ears.  If you start talking in Shakespearean or Regency English at the breakfast table, you’re probably ready.  And a good thing, too, because at that point your friends and family are either bored stiff with your project, or convinced that you’re going nuts.

Three: Stop researching and write.  Don’t worry about getting all the nuances down perfectly; you can always polish the heck out of the language in your second — or third or fourth or fifth — draft.

Four:  Go find that kind but honest friend again.  This time, ask them if the archaic or formal language in fact worked; and ask them, also, whether they think you got it right but took it too far.  As with so many other things in writing, a light hand is best.

(For an interesting example of archaic diction done well in an unexpected venue, check out the historical romance For My Lady’s Heart, by Laura Kinsale, now available again in e-book format after a long while out of print.)

Random Thoughts on Point of View

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Point of view is a tricky thing to get right, and it takes a lot of practice.  As a general rule, you should be inside only one character’s head per scene, and you should make it crystal clear to the reader which character that is.  While you’re inside that character’s head, only what he or she can directly observe should get reported to the reader (therefore, no seeing what’s around corners that your character can’t poke his or her head around.)  Also, any commentary on the action should be filtered through the viewpoint character’s perceptions and attitude.

***

First person, and single-viewpoint tight third person, are good points of view to use when part of the impact of your story depends upon keeping some plot elements secret from both your POV character and the reader until the time is ripe for them to be revealed.  Try to avoid writing yourself into plot situations where your first person narrator knows something that the reader doesn’t; it’s a tour de force if you can pull it off, but the failure mode isn’t pretty, and even a successful attempt is going to leave a certain number of resentful readers in its  wake.

***

True omniscient point of view is fiendishly difficult to do well, and it’s a good idea to master multiple-viewpoint third-person first.  The longer the novel, and the more ground it covers, the more point of view characters you may need — but when in doubt, err on the side of parsimony.

Link of the Day

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(In lieu of a more substantive post, because I’ve got a Viable Paradise chat conference tonight.)

The New York Times has a series of blog posts on the process of writing, by various authors.  The current one, “Writing and Fear”, by Sarah Jio, is one that ties in with my own stated maxim that writers shouldn’t flinch away from the strong stuff, even if it scares them.

There are a lot more posts in the archive.  I’ve only had the chance to read a few of them, but they all look interesting.

I have a theory:  writers like to read other writers talking about writing, because this can be a lonely job, and it’s always heartening to know that somebody else out there has hit that Slough of Despond in the middle of the book, or had their hard drive die without warning at the eleventh hour, taking a novel’s worth of hard work with it in its death throes, or struggled to retain their dignity in the face of an utterly wrongheaded review.

Five More Days

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Until applications close for this year’s Viable Paradise.  The ferry to the island pulls away from the dock at midnight on June 15 — if you’re thinking of applying and don’t have your application in by then, you’ll have to wait until next year.

(You can submit your application by e-mail in .RTF format, with hardcopy to follow, so you can’t get away with telling yourself that there isn’t time for the envelope to get there.)