Tag: techniques

Too Much of a Good Thing

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As I said in my previous post, there’s another big way in which description and scene-setting can go wrong, and that’s through a superabundance of detail.

You don’t want to describe too much of the scene, forcing your readers to tally up detail upon detail.  With no way to sort out the important details from the unimportant ones, the readers get swamped, unable to build a convincing mental picture out of the material supplied.  A handful of judiciously-chosen details, on the other hand, will give your reader the seed crystals from which they can grow their own settings and scenery.

A version of the handful-of-details technique is useful for historical or alternate-historical fiction as well.  You don’t have to have to give your readers all the information you could possibly gather about everything in the period you’re writing about.  Give them enough interesting and world-illuminating details, and let them do the rest of the work.  And nobody but you needs to know that you’ve structured the description around the interesting details you were able to collect, rather than researching every possible detail that the description might possibly include.

But because you’re relying upon your readers to do their share of the work in the matter of world-building and scene-setting, you don’t want to give them more of a burden than they can carry.  Every time they have to stop and recompile the scene in their heads to incorporate yet more details, you run the risk of losing them for good.

A White Room Problem

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Which is to say, one of the main ways to have your setting and background not work.

You know you have this problem when your workshop buddies point it out to you when a lot of your action takes place in the equivalent of a white room, description-wise — that is to say, in settings that are so barely visualized that they might as well be blank.  They lack what W. S. Gilbert might refer to as “corroborative detail, intended to give artistic verisimilitude to an otherwise bald and unconvincing narrative.”

If two of your characters are talking in a white room, you still need to give the reader some details to hang their visualization on.  Mention the unsettling flicker of the dying fluorescent light panel, or the faded scuff marks on the floor, or the spot on the wall where a few remaining bits of sticky tape hint that someone once put up a poster in that spot.  (See?  Now you’re in somebody’s former office, now empty of furniture.  It’s not just any white room; it’s a particular white room.)

And don’t forget:  for good description, you want more than just the visuals.  You want the sounds and the smells and the tactile sensations as well.  Does that empty office smell of industrial-strength cleaning agents?  Or does it smell of dust and old paper?  Can you hear the faint almost sub-audible hum of electric devices somewhere nearby, or the whirr of a fan, or the breezy rumble of an air conditioner?  Does the static electricity in the dry air make the hairs on your arms and neck stand up?  Or does the lack of ventilation send a trickle of sweat down between your shoulder blades?

It’s the particularity of detail, not the amount, that’s the key.  (We’ll talk another time about the other way that scene-setting can go wrong, which is through detail overload.)

Mirror, Mirror

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One of the hardest things to do with first-person narration (apart from the problem of how to tell the reader about important things that happen where the POV character can’t see them) is describing the narrator’s appearance. With third person, it’s relatively easy — you can slip in a detail here and a detail there as the opportunity arises, or you can say the heck with subtlety and provide a couple of descriptive sentences about the character shortly after he or she is introduced.  But with first person, you’re not just following the character around and eavesdropping on their thoughts when it’s convenient.  You’re inside their head all the time . . . and most people, unless they’re either really vain or really insecure, don’t spend that much time thinking about the fact that they have, say, brown hair and hazel eyes and a nose that’s just slightly crooked because they broke it falling off a seesaw back in second grade.

So what can you do?

Well, you can always not bother with physical description of your first person narrator.  It’s surprising, really, how irrelevant brown hair and hazel eyes are to a lot of story lines.  (For the story lines where they are relevant, the narrator will tell you about them — in fact, if he or she thinks that the crooked nose and the unexceptional hair and eye color are why they are still tragically without a date for the senior prom, they  are probably not going to shut up about it.)

But what you don’t do (and don’t do it with third person narrators, either) is have your first-person narrator look at themselves in a mirror and describe what they’re seeing.  And for “mirror” read also lake, pond, mud puddle, silver bowl, shop window, the eyes of the beloved, or any other reflective surface.  Because that has been done.

Fillers and Placeholders

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When you’re hard at work on the first draft and running for daylight, you can’t afford to lose your forward momentum.  The first draft isn’t the time and place to spend fifteen minutes looking for the perfect name for that minor character who steps onto the page long enough to deliver a crucial bit of plot development before vanishing.

For the first draft, it’s often enough to have [CharacterName] appear from [NameOfPlace] with the necessary plot element in hand.  Just remember to search on the square brackets during the second-draft revisions, when you’re putting in that perfect name you finally came up with when you were drifting off to sleep the night before.

Who Said What When How?

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I said I was going to talk about dialogue attribution.  Right, then.

By “dialogue attribution” I mean those “he said” and “said John Doe” and (less fortunately) “he commented/answered/stated/retorted/other-verbed” tags that get applied to lines of dialogue so that the reader can tell who’s speaking.  And I have a few points to make about them, in my peevish way.

First, you don’t need nearly as many of them as you think you do.  If your dialogue is doing its job properly, you aren’t going to need to identify the speaker every time the talking-stick gets handed over, because your speakers will sound like individuals and not all like each other.  If you’ve got an extended stretch of two-person back-and-forth, you can throw in an attribution every few lines just to keep things anchored; and if you’ve got a multi-person conference you’ll need to identify people as they jump into the discussion, and as often as necessary to keep your reader up to speed; but even in those cases, you don’t have to tag every single line of dialogue.

(How often is enough?  How often is too many?  Sadly, I have to tell you that you need to play it by ear — and if you haven’t got an ear for it yet, you’ll need to work on developing one.)

Second, you don’t need to get fancy with your verbs when you’re tagging dialogue.  When in doubt, remember that it’s hard to go wrong with a plain vanilla said.  Beyond that, you mostly want volume indicators — shouted, whispered, murmured, muttered.  (And for the love of Mike, don’t have your characters hiss things that don’t have an s– sound in them!)  Anything more than that comes perilously close to over-writing, and sometimes crosses the line.

And third, you don’t have to place the tag at the end of the line of dialogue every time.  You can put it in front:  Joe said, “It’s time.”  Or you can break up the block of dialogue and put the tag in the middle.  “It’s time,” Joe said.  “Let’s get going.”  In fact, if Joe doesn’t just have a couple of sentences of dialogue, but an entire paragraph’s worth of inspiring speechifying or careful instruction or closely-reasoned argument, don’t undercut its effect by slapping down a Joe said at the end of it with a dull and leaden thud.  Break up the block of dialogue early on to slip in the tag, then let the rest of the speech roll on to its effective climax.

“That’s it, then,” she said.  “We’re done for the night.”

The Fine Art of Handwaving

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If you’re going to write in the science fiction or fantasy genres, sooner or later you’re going to end up handwaving an explanation.  Other genres sometimes do it too, but other genres don’t regularly work with props and plot elements that don’t yet and may never exist.

Some handwaving is easy, because the genre as a whole expects it.  Take faster-than-light space travel, for example — sf writers have been handwaving that one for so long that all they need to say is something like “hyperspace” or “wormhole jump” and the reader is there for the ride.  Readers aren’t dumb.  They know perfectly well that if the author of the story actually had the plans for a working faster-than-light drive, he or she wouldn’t be writing adventure stories for a living.   Too much explanation, in this case, would bring on a case of Handwaving Fail — all the audience wants to know is that the author is aware of the problems with faster-than-light travel, and that for the purposes of the story, those problems have been solved.  They don’t really want all the equations plus a diagram.

Sometimes the handwaving has to be subtler.  If you’re introducing a bit of tech that you’ve postulated just for the occasion, don’t draw attention to its extraordinary or purpose-built nature.  If you talk about it and around it as though it’s been hanging around the laboratory or the workbench or whatever since well before the current problems started, the reader will think of it as just another piece of the furniture, and with that you can slip it into its place in the story without occasioning comment.

If you’re looking at the need for a really large job of handwaving, stronger measures may be required.  My husband and I once co-wrote a YA thriller for a packaged series, and found ourselves working with a plot that would have ground to a shuddering halt if the main character had ever actually sat down and talked to the police about what was going on.  We got past that difficulty — and did it without making our main character an idiot — by compressing the timeline of the novel into two or three days and keeping our protagonist on the move and short on sleep the whole time.

So.  Three general tips:

Use built-in handwaves where the genre allows for them.

Don’t point at what you’re handwaving.

And when in doubt, keep things moving fast enough that nobody has time to stop and think.

 

A Useful Bit of Kitchen Trivia

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Sometimes you need to time a quick one minute, or a quick three minutes, of cooking time.  (Stir-fry recipes in particular are fond of directions like that.)  And sometimes you don’t have a kitchen timer handy, or maybe you’ve got two or three one-minute steps right after the other with no time to set a timer in between.

At times like these, it helps to know that a dramatic recitation of Lewis Carroll’s “Jabberwocky” all the way through — no rushing or mumbling — takes about one minute.

(Medieval recipes would give similar timing directions.   “A Paternoster while” is the length of time it takes to say the Lord’s Prayer in Latin once through — about thirty seconds if you don’t rush it.  “Two Aves and a Paternoster” is about a minute.)

When you’re messing about in the kitchen, knowing a handy estimator like that one is as useful as knowing — in a writing context — that a page of 12-point Courier in standard manuscript format equals roughly 250 words and will take about a minute to read aloud.

It’s Different When It’s on Purpose

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In writing, there are some things you never want to get caught doing by accident.  These are three of them.

One: being funny.  Intentional humor is hard to do — humor, like horror and erotica, is a genre that works or doesn’t on the basis of the emotional effect it has on the reader, and if that effect is missing, no other virtues in the work will make up for its absence — and failed humor is flat and leaden, but accidental humor is downright embarrassing.

Two: being ambiguous.  Artfully handled ambiguity can add richness and texture and layers of meaning to your story.  All accidental ambiguity does is confuse your readers, who will not be happy with you any more.  And no, you can’t get away with claiming after the fact that you did it on purpose when you really didn’t, because your readers can always tell.

Three:  using internal rhyme and alliteration and other sound effects.  This one’s especially tricky, because the same things done well and on purpose can be wonderful.  What you don’t want is for your reader to think that those rhymes (or whatever) crept in while you weren’t watching, and that you didn’t notice them.

It’s the difference between looking in control of your medium and looking like it’s too much for you to handle.

Causes of Reader Disgruntlement: #2 in a Series

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Readers get disgruntled when they feel like they’ve put more effort into reading your book than they got pleasure out of it.

(It’s always important to bear in mind, when you’re thinking about this, that there are all sorts of readers deriving all sorts of pleasure from what they read, and you have to be able to distinguish between genuinely disgruntled members of your own audience and readers who are disgruntled because your book wasn’t written for them.  The latter aren’t your problem, no matter how much they may sound like it sometimes; the former are your problem, because you’ve failed them somehow — and while you probably can’t fix it in the book they’re unhappy about, you can try to do better in the next one.)

Anyway.  A common source of the more-effort-than-pleasure problem is unsatisfying characters.  The need for satisfying characters sometimes gets mistranslated as a demand for likeable characters, or for admirable ones (the phrase “positive role model” comes into play a lot here), or for ones with which the reader can identify.  In fact, the reader will happily follow along after a character who is none of these things — an unlikeable scoundrel who has little or nothing in common with the reader — so long as that character is interesting.  An interesting villain will hold the reader’s attention better than a boring hero, any day of the week.

How do you make a character interesting?  That’s a bigger problem than a single post can handle, but here’s one idea for a start:  give your character important things to do, and have him or her actually do them.  A proactive character is an object in motion, and objects in motion draw interest.

A Useful Rule

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(Well, all right.  It’s more like a guideline….)

Don’t violate natural chronology in your story without a really good reason.

I’m not going to say you should never do it, because sometimes there’s just no other way to get necessary information across to the reader, and because sometimes the violation or alteration of natural chronology is the main effect or whole point of the tale.  But before you send your plot into a temporal zigzag, think long and hard about whether or not those conditions apply, because the failure modes can get ugly.

Possible failure mode number one:  Your reader may get lost and confused by all the flashing back and forth, and give up on finishing the story.  If you’re going to use the flashback technique to deal with important events in the story’s past that deserve a full and direct presentation, be extra-careful to provide your reader with markers and signposts.  Give them details (verb tense changes, time and place references in the narrative, even explicit chapter or section headers if you think you need them) to let them know they’re heading into the past, and more details on the other side to let them know they’re coming back out of it.  No, it’s not mollycoddling your readers to do this; and you aren’t building a mental obstacle course for them so they can get a gold medal for running it, either.

Possible failure mode number two:  your readers may get more interested in the past of your story than in its present.  This happens a lot with the sort of books where the main plot arc involves finding out the deeply buried family secret, or the suffering hero’s secret trauma, or the dreadful thing that the students of Professor Thingummy’s Early Western Drama class did during the summer of 1995.  If you’ve got something portentous and dramatic like that lurking in the backstory for the hero or heroine to find out, you need to make sure you’ve got something even more portentous and dramatic going on in the front story, just to make certain that your reader cares enough about the story’s present to want to keep on reading about it.  Otherwise, your readers are likely to read the interesting backstory bits and skip the boring front story bits, which will leave them with only half the book that you meant them to read.

(Yes, I admit it.  I once co-wrote a book where a good portion of the plot involved a bunch of interpolated backstory bits.  In my defense, I set them off from the main text in separate chapters and labelled them and timestamped them clearly, and ran them in their own proper chronological order.  I thought it was necessary.  And I hope it worked.)