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I Wear My Sunglasses At Night
Time to wrap up The 25, folks! And we’re going to do it with style.
No, really. The last bit is style.
25. Style
Writers sometimes speak of style as if it were an ingredient to be added to their story or poem or memoir. Instead, style is the thing itself. E.B. White said it best, writing, “Style takes its final shape more from attitudes of mind than from principles of composition, for, as an elderly practitioner once remarked, ‘Writing is an act of faith, not a trick of grammar.’” The key, then, to developing one’s style is to write, as White states, “in a way that comes naturally.”Sound easy? It’s not. In fact, finding the “way that comes naturally” can take a lifetime, and the way can change with each piece you begin. One key to beginning that journey is to think about style not so much as a matter of addition, but subtraction—casting off feelings of awkwardness and self-consciousness, affectation and pretension. Focus on presenting your piece clearly, in a way that connects with readers. For practice, imagine a single reader sitting across a table from you. Spend a half-hour relating your piece to that reader, as clearly and honestly as possible. Spend another half-hour striving to make the piece more clear, more honest, more affecting. Then spend another half-hour making the piece more clear, more …
—Heffron
I think the point Heffron makes is an insightful one. Style isn’t about imitation or any other kind of flattery to others. Because of that, I can understand why it’s one of the more difficult aspects of writing to make authentic, because it’s one of the age old bits of advice that people tend to find very difficult: Be yourself.
I remember being a child/adolescent/teen/undergrad and having people tell me that. “Just be yourself, Emmie.” As if it came second nature to them, but I suspect it doesn’t really come first nature to anyone, really. There is, of course, a lot of wisdom in those two little words, but if we’re all honest, we know that human beings spend a lot more time trying to blend in than stand out.
With a lot of things in life, I can see why we do it. It can be dangerous to stray from herd, especially when that herd is full of pubescent females who have grown massive retractable claws along with their burgeoning busts. Boys aren’t much better. We might go through a rebellious stage and put strangely colored things on our heads (or in our heads), but people have a massive drive to fit in.
Going against that grain is a painstaking uphill climb, and other famous cliches.
When you can take that advice, something changes in your life. I know we’re talking about writing here, but I’m going to give you a little of my history to illustrate how my style has grown because of those two words. I still have an evolving style (I might even call it a revolving style), but my writing now is much more interesting than it used to be. I spent most of high school just trying not to be noticed. I spent the first year of college realizing that people like what they expect, and get a wee bit upset when you do something that doesn’t jive with that. In my case, it was me beginning to realize that I didn’t believe in Christianity anymore — in my second semester at an expensive, private Christian university, no less. I lost a lot of friends over that. When it comes to religion, for all the prayer and convincing and Bibles and whatever else, there is this little fork in the road. One sign points at “You Believe,” and the other just yells, “BULLSHIT!” Three guesses which fork was me. You can’t force yourself to be something you’re not, so I quit trying. And I took off across an ocean.
In 2004, I moved to Scotland for the summer. I spent two months there by myself. Away from expectations, away from anything I was familiar with, yet I was home the second my toes touched the tarmac at the Prestwick Airport south of Glasgow. I spent those two months flitting throughout the country alone. I met people who are still in my life, namely a UT student named Marshall who is now a barrister in Leeds, and a fabulous Punjabi-Scottish man who makes chai from scratch and speaks Gaelic with equal facility called Jordan, but I just call him my best friend. He was man of honor in my wedding last month. I also met a young man named Pawel, who was the first Polish person I ever met. I heard the sounds of his language and had to learn it.
The next summer I flew to Poland with four other women, and I returned to Scotland, where Jordan introduced me to my soulmate, a beautiful, intelligent, hilarious woman named Julia, who joined him on October 2 as my maid of honor. She was just selected from a pool of hundreds of applicants to join an organization (the only organization) that does systematic research on the G20 Summit. I’m so proud of her I could burst. Six months later, I packed my bags and moved across the Atlantic. I didn’t come back for almost two years. Those people I met are still a part of me, a part of my life. None of them knew much about my life growing up. They met me in places I felt utterly at home and comfortable, and those were my first lessons about being myself.
It was then I began to write Elemental, the book I’m currently trying to finish for NaNoWriMo.
I knew I had something the moment I began it. You know the thrill, gentle viewers. The electric pulse that flits through you as the ragged curtains between worlds ripple back with an unseen wind and reveal a Story to you. I ended up realizing that that story wasn’t the beginning, and I put it aside to write Primeval, which is the first book in the trilogy. Now five years later, Primeval is getting ready for takeoff, and I’m writing the final pages of Elemental at last.
The point of all of this is that your style evolves when you put those two little words into practice. It will sprout out of what you thought was barren dirt and sneak tendrils into your skin. It will begin to take you over until who you are manifests on every page. I’m no Shakespeare, and I’m still a work in progress much like my writing, but there’s a lot more of me on the page than there ever was before.
So to wrap up The 25 (but certainly not my daily posts), style is what happens when you be yourself. Love yourself. The rewards are still untold, though I think I’ve gotten more from life than any woman deserves even now in the three people who form my personal triumvirate of true love. They’re what pushes me forward on this path. Who pushes you?
If I can do it, a girl who grew up with no pot to piss in (literally) and who kept her mouth shut for a decade — so can you.
- True love happens. Image by Jordan Jaquess Imaging.
- Three times for me. Image by Jordan Jaquess Imaging.
EDIT: I apologize for the weird formatting on this post. I tried looking at the HTML for a whole five minutes before I gave up. Not really sure what happened — never had trouble with copy/paste resetting font before. Weird.
Like this:
Watch Your Mouth
It’s going to do a trick!
Sorry. I’m just chock-full of the bad puns lately. You can smack my wrist if you must.
Well, gentle viewers, we are back to The 25 for the penultimate day! Aren’t you excited?! I sure am. Though I’m going to have to start nosing around for little tidbits to chuck my two cents at day after day. Hm.
Here’s today!
24. Language
Think of your writing as a windshield. Ill-suited words can streak and cloud your reader’s view, and just-right language can be as clarifying as a high-powered carwash. Once you have a solid draft, it’s time to consider:
- Could a different word bring even more energy or resonance to a poignant moment through sound, subtleties of meaning, or syllabic rhythm?
- Could the setting be conveyed more vividly? Is the natural world palpable?
- Is the emotional tone consistently resonant? Are there neutral words or passages that could be more charged?
- Does the language powerfully enact the action?
As you polish and prune, each piece of writing will teach you something new about what is possible. Let yourself be surprised.
—Cohen
Ah, language. Such a fickle critter. Sometimes it’s in our corner, flowing off our tongues and out of our fingertips like some kind of magical chi. Other times, it’s a monkey flinging poo at our heads. And that’s all that drips off of us. Poo.
There are times when what’s important is to simply vomit the words onto the page, like this month, where hundreds of thousands of writers feverishly slave at their notebooks (electronic or otherwise) to just get the damn things out of us. Words.
And then comes December. It’ll roll over on you like a sleeping grizzly, flinging a furry arm over your face in its hibernation, then cough bear breath — which I imagine smells something like stale sushi and digested berries — in your face to remind you that what you just vomited on the page is stinking up its den. And you’ll want to clean it up, because you’re not stupid enough to piss off a hibernating grizzly, no matter how sleepy he looks.
This one looks friendly enough.
The best way I know when my language is flinging poo instead of sparkling like magic is when my attention wanders away from the page I’m revising. Come December, I’ll be going back over my first draft with a red pen text color to mark any points in the manuscript where I see something shiny in another direction, or start pouncing light beams on my wall.
Reading aloud can also show you sticky spots. If your tongue falls out on the floor or ends up in a knot tied around your uvula, some re-wording is probably in order.
The questions posed by The 25 are very good starting points. Some others to ask yourself are:
1. Are your action scenes dragging?
2. Does your exposition drop you like a weighted body at the bottom of the sea?
3. Do your characters make themselves distinct? Pick a random (but meaningful) chunk of dialogue and stick another character’s name in the attribution. Have one of your readers read it. If they shrug at you, look over that character’s dialogue. People have verbal tics. Listen to your characters until you find theirs, then pepper their speech with them. Liberally.
4. Does your story flow from beginning to end or does it cough and mutter in fits and starts?
Language is both the poo-flinging culprit and the glorious wand-waving solution to all of those issues. So when you revise, make sure you keep that grizzly happy. Or at least bring him some honey.
Like this:
The Wee Hours
Well, to me it is. I seldom see this side of noon excepting when I sneak up on it from behind, or if I have to be at work at 10. And even then, I repress any morning experiences for the first two hours — by then it’s afternoon, and all is right with the world.
Me.
I am not a morning person.
I used to be sort of passive about it. “Yeah, I don’t like mornings, la dee dah…” and then I got a job where I regularly had to be at work by 7:30 and still could never sleep until 3 or later, and it stressed me out to the point that the mere sound of my alarm triggered a stream of expletives and near-panic attacks. Sleep. I value it. It’s one of the reasons I don’t have a “real” job right now.
But lo, it’s 9:41, and I’ve been awake for about an hour and a half. Strange miracle, but here we are, with the opportunity to blog today when I thought I wouldn’t have the time. Once I go to work in 45 minutes, I won’t be home till almost 11.
Gentle viewers! We are almost done with The 25! In fact, we are on…
22. Objectivity
The perils of subjectivity arise largely from overidentifying with a subject, narrator or character in a narrative, and making it (or him or her) the vehicle for a thematic point in which the author himself is overly invested. The antidote is at least as old as the New Testament, specifically Matthew 5:43–48, where Christ instructs his followers to love their enemies. If what I have to say seems old hat, therefore, I’ll be neither disappointed nor surprised.If you find yourself overidentifying with a topic or character, try to identify within the sympathetic subject, narrator or even oneself a trait or belief or habit that is repellent or inexcusable or just plain odd. In doing so, you’ll enhance the psychological or moral distance between yourself and the object of familiarity
or allegiance.Another possible strategy is to rewrite the scene or section from the point of view of someone other than the object of sympathy. This forced disconnect can achieve a similar effect.
—Corbett
I find it rather appropriate that this is today’s. In my frantic writing sprint (or spring, as Twitter would have it) last night before bed, I wrote a scene that bothered me immensely. The protagonist from my first book becomes….sort of an anti-hero if not a downright antagonist in the second. Basically, she starts acting like a massive twit. It drives me nuts, and I want to smack her. I found myself last night trying to put words in her mouth, make her more sympathetic in a scene where she is downright cruel. And I knew that as I was trying to do that, it wasn’t true to her behavior. She has a lot of reasons for acting the way she does — some of them more valid than others — but the bottom line is that she’ll get over it eventually, and until she does, I have to let her be a bitch. I find the whole concept exhausting. It’s like putting up with a temper tantrum because you know your child will eventually grow out of them.
It’s one reason I like different POVs in fiction. I love seeing a story told from different angles and getting inside different heads. I also enjoy a good first person POV, but there’s something to be said for different POVs. Sometimes a big story just needs to be told that way.
It all boils down to one little sentence, in my opinion: tell the truth. Listen to your story and your characters, and let them drive your story forward. If you want to give it a shot, find a scene in your story where things fall a little flat and subjective and rewrite it from the viewpoint of an antagonist, or even someone who just doesn’t like your main character very much. See what happens. If you’re NaNoing, just keep plugging along at your word count. 
Also me.
I was going to post a picture of a pretty morning to enhance the objectivity of this post, but then I changed my mind. Google gives mornings some damn good PR. So instead, I give you Garfield.
Happy Sunday!
Like this:
Do You Feel What I Feel?
The last few bits and bobs from The 25 have dealt with creating an experience beyond the words of a story. It’s the difference between standing in line at the DMV and standing in line for Harry Potter and the Forbidden Journey at Universal Studios — they both get you from Point A to Point B, but the latter immerses you in an experience while you get there. (Granted, going to the DMV can be an experience as well, but not one that makes you want to go back and do it again. I think that’s why in Maryland our registration is good for two years.)
The next in line is this:
20. Evoking Emotion
Hemingway spoke of a story’s “sequence of motion and fact.” James M. Cain discussed “the algebra of storytelling: a + b + c + d = x.” What they meant was a sequence of incidents in a story that, if arranged correctly and dramatized vividly, will create a stimulus that compels the reader to feel the emotion the author is trying to create. Talking about emotions won’t compel a reader to feel them. “He felt sad” won’t make a reader feel sad. Instead, the reader must be made to feel the situations in the story, to experience what the characters experience; as a result, just as a sequence creates emotion in the characters, it will do the same in the reader. This is a case of stimulus-response.Writers can achieve this effect if they take the sense of sight for granted and emphasize the other senses, thus crafting multidimensional descriptions and scenes. Details of sight alone almost always create a flat effect, so when revising, take a few minutes to make sure that each scene has at least one other sense detail. In this way, the reader becomes immersed in the story, feeling it rather than being told about it.
—Morrell
This is exactly what I was talking about in my post earlier this week – in good writing, the words disappear. The way to get your readers to care about your characters is to layer flesh on their bones and sinews, to fill them with thoughts and feelings that readers connect to. Writing is the ultimate 4-D experience because it allows you to do literally anything. You can take your readers anywhere in the universe, create new worlds, or show them another side of this one. The trick to that, as Morrell says, is to take the sense of sight for granted and focus on the other ones.
Close your eyes for a moment. What do you hear? I hear the whir of cars on the main road outside of my apartment building. I hear an insistent tapping inside one of the living room walls that never seems to go away. I hear the buzz of our air purifier and the click of the button on my husbands jeans in the dryer. All these little noises add texture to the scene, even a mundane scene. The tapping in my wall is most likely not a ghost or a gremlin or some other supernatural critter (if it is, it’s a friendly one saying hello). These are just noises. Silence is extinct in this world, or at the very least on the endangered species list alongside my beloved tigers.
If two of your characters are having an awkward conversation, show that with the little noises of the world around them between dialogue points. Talk about awkward — you can build the tension of an uncomfortable conversation if you use their other senses.
What do you feel with your eyes closed? I feel a light stirring of air from the ceiling fan in the dining room, which my husband always leaves on. Say your characters are fighting, and he storms out of the house. She sits in the quiet, empty room with only the breeze from that fan as a reminder he was ever there.
What do you smell? I smell a whiff of fabric softener, a touch of sugar cookie from my tea, a little cinnamon from our air freshener, and the earthy, sheepy scent of wool from my blanket. Maybe your character catches a tiny whiff of stale sweat, or the scent of perfume so soft it’s almost a memory. Scent is powerful — it can evoke as much in writing as it can in life.
Taste also doesn’t have to be neglected. The chalky, dry mouth that accompanies terror, the herbal, almost tingling taste of horehound lozenges that remind you of grandma — taste can bring your story to life as well.
Anyone can tell you that the sky is blue, but if you lull your readers into your story with the singing of the crickets, the cool grass beneath your back as the horizon darkens into twilight and the thermos of hot cider that warms your insides with a sweet tang — do that and you’ll keep them coming back for more.
Like this:
Time, Time, Time
Time is what turns kittens into cats.
It’s also something that tends to run out on you and leave you naked and wondering why you ended up in the grocery store with no clothes on. It’s because you didn’t have time to get dressed, silly.
The problem with my work schedule is that my day goes something like this:
10 AM or 5 PM: Start work. If I’m a double, I start at 10. Otherwise I usually work at 5.
12 AM-2:30 AM: Off work. Happy dance!!!! Now what?
3:00 AM: I’m hungry. Dinna time!
3:30 AM: Hang time with spouse.
4:30 AM- 5:30 AM: Bed.
This means I wake up no earlier than noon most days. Today that was 1. Which means on a day when I have to be at work at 4 instead of 5, I have an hour less of that time stuff to: write 2,000 words, eat, shower, PUT ON CLOTHES!, talk to the husband, and get ready to go. That’s not much time stuff.
So here is my two hour sprint of writing/food/clothes. Day 2, I’ma kick yo butt.
19. Tension
Tension results from two factors: resistance and ambiguity. In nearly every piece of narrative writing, fiction or otherwise, someone is trying to achieve something. Tension results from external or internal opposition to achievement of the goal (resistance), or uncertainty as to the narrator or character’s understanding of the situation in which she finds herself (ambiguity), specifically its perils (psychological, emotional, physical).
Tension is essential because it keeps readers reading. Thus, in every scene you write, strive to heighten tension by doing one of two things: Enhancing the forces impeding achievement of the goal, or confusing/complicating the narrator or character’s understanding of the situation.At the end of every writing session, take time to find and stress those elements within the narrative that serve these purposes. Trim away elements that do not, unless they add necessary color.
—Corbett
This is excellent advice. My biggest problem when I was completing the second draft of book one was that it a: was far too scattered and b: lacked the necessary tension to propel it to the conclusion. I remedied a lot of that with the second draft, but when I pull it out again December 1, that’s what I will be looking for as I read.
I think Corbett says it best when he says that tension is what keeps readers turning pages. You can also describe it as conflict, whether internal or external. I like to think of it as a rope. When a reader picks up your book, your first chapter should hook her (if it doesn’t, you’ve got a whole other problem). When that happens, you tie a rope around your reader’s waist. Now, it’s a long-ass rope. Think hundreds of feet. Your job the second that knot gets tied around your new pet reader is to pull him where you want him to end up (this reader’s gender is ambiguous). You can’t pull your reader anywhere if your rope is slack. And you have a LOT of rope to mess with.
As soon as you get the rope around your reader, your job is to pull it tight. To create tension early so that reader doesn’t wander off to look at that cactus over there or fall in a river. You could strain and reel your reader in over those hundreds of feet of rope, or you could simply start running in the direction you want the reader to go. Take off. Make that rope pull tight before the reader knows she has any slack to wander off. Create tension so your reader can’t help but follow where you lead. Once the tension’s there, you don’t have to pull him at a sprint for four hundred pages, but you want enough tension there at all times to guide him as you lead. Enough that you don’t stop to tie your shoe and she goes off chasing mongooses under a bush. (This reader is very easily distracted; readers often are.) If you do let up the tension for a moment, it should be because you want to stop long enough for your reader to look around and see where you are now before plunging forward.
Your words are your rope. It should be a good, strong rope. You don’t want it frayed or rotten in bits so it breaks when the tension gets applied. It’s a tricky thing to pull a reader through a story; make sure you have the best rope possible.
Here we are for Day 2: Time for me to get back to the drawing board.
Before today's additions...but here's where I am.
Use Your Words
Happy November, gentle viewers! Here we go. NaNoWriMo is revving its engines and ready to go, I’m ready to make this an awesome month. Here’s who has joined us on the Rebel front:
Nila E. White
Kristin whose last name I just spaced (or don’t know)
Alexandra Roman de Hernandez
Lyra Mulhern
If I left you out and you want to join us, please feel free! The original post about the challenge is here.
And now to kick off NaNoWriMo, here are some high and lofty thoughts on writing.
18. Communication
Good writing connects with readers. For each piece you write, ask yourself:
- Who is my audience? Imagine the people you’d most like to reach.
- What do I want the experience and result of this piece to be? What do I want readers to know or believe? How do I want them to feel? What do I want them to do when they’re finished reading?
- How will I measure my ability to deliver on these goals? Workshop it in a writing group? Post it on my blog? Submit it to a publication?
Pay attention to feedback. You’ll start to see the types of people and publications that are attracted to what you write, how you’re meeting their needs (or not), and opportunities for becoming more effective.
—Cohen
Communication is one of those vital little abstract nouns that forms the foundation for so much of our world, from relationships to business to creativity. Effective communication transplants the thoughts or feelings of one person into the brain of another without using a massive hypodermic. Miscommunication (or poor communication) causes no shortage of angst, arguments, hurt feelings, and even war.
The written word is a powerful form of communication. As writers, it’s our job to make sure that we utilize all the tools in our toolbox to get our ideas across in an effective and succinct manner. We can paint pictures or tell stories with words. We can evoke strong emotions (more on that in a couple days!). We can also bore someone to the point that they throw our book across the room and ensure we never get to quit the day job.
This particular bit of The 25 applies pretty well to the little point on the map that describes my location in the writing process right now. Your answers might well be different than mine to these questions, but they’re important ones to ask.
1. Who is your audience? The people I write for love magic. Maybe they’re like me and begged Santa for a magic wand as a child and never gave up looking for it. They spend their lives hoping to turn a corner and find something shimmering and mystical. They love the supernatural and know that while they evolve, vampires don’t go out of style. They don’t mind getting messy because they know life gets messy. You’ll shed a little blood (maybe a lot of blood), cry some tears, fall in and out of love, and look with wonder as new days continue to dawn no matter what happened with the last sunset.
2. What do I want readers to experience, feel, and believe? What do I want them to do when they’re done? I want to give readers the magic they’ve been looking for. I want them to be able to live the lives of my characters right alongside them, to feel what they feel whether wonder or sorrow, and laugh and cry with them. I want them to believe that the world changes every day and that we must always adapt to it and humble ourselves knowing that we can never really say what comes next. I want them to feel like those collected bits of magic sprinkled through the story become their own personal treasure trove. When they’re done, I want them to crave the next book and tell their friends what it meant to them.
3. How will I measure my ability to meet these goals? For me, it’s always been about books. It’s been about the power of print and the feeling I get when I pick up a book I love so well I make it real, like the Velveteen Rabbit. If I do my job well enough, I’ll find a way to make my living creating new stories and new pages for people. My measure of success will always be the response of readers — if they love my characters and live my stories, then I will have succeeded. And that will be reflected in where my books land on the shelves. It’s all about connection, you see. Forging a connection through communication.
The sign of the best writers is that they write beautiful words — and they make those words disappear. When you read the work of the great writers, you forget you’re reading. You find yourself coming back to your world maybe hours later at four in the morning because you were unable to pull yourself out of their world. The words blur into pictures and experiences that tug at you until you succumb. You don’t find yourself wondering how someone’s car got totaled and she had no time to rent a new one, but somehow drives to a meeting the next day. You don’t flail your arms at comma splices or misspelled words. You get lost. And when you finally come up for air, all you can do is marvel, hungry for the next experience.
That’s the goal of all communication. Learn the rules, learn the ropes, line up your tools, and make the nuts and bolts disappear into experience. And that, gentle viewers, is how you use your words.
Like this:
Make Them Beg For More
The best compliments I have ever received about my writing were all some derivative of the following: “I want more.”
That is the bit of ambrosia all of us yearn for. If we write for an audience, we spend our time willing life into the empty whiteness of a blank page and searching and sifting through life for those bits of magic to put in our jars, hoping that’ll be enough to coax our work to live.
The goal is an insatiable lust for our work, for the worlds and characters we funnel onto the page. How do we do that? Originality. Creativity. Skill. Luck. Any number of things go into it — I’m probably not alone when I say that I rather hope luck plays less a role than skill, but I don’t make the rules. And speaking of rules, here’s one from The 25 that sticks its fingers all over that “originality and creativity” thing:
17. Avoiding Clichés
Everyone “gets” clichés. That’s why they show up virtually everywhere. Clichés may be thought of as overused and predictable, but few people complain about movie car chases. For every person who doesn’t want “same old,” hundreds continue to enjoy stereotypical hard-boiled dicks helping dames in distress. Depending on your audience, a well-placed cliché can be more effective than an explanation.Nevertheless, we need folks like you to buck the trend. So here are some ways to spend a half-hour:
- Create a cliché-free protagonist: you. Choose a career you once contemplated. Change your age, gender, race. Investigate something that intrigues you. Invent a situation that boosts your heart rate. Send your character to a place you’d like to visit. Now write.
- Remove from a work unnecessary parts of speech—such as replacements for the perfectly acceptable said, and words like angrily to reveal how someone slams a door. Say no more than readers need to know; let their imaginations work.
- I’ve intentionally loaded my five contributions to this article with more than my usual share of clichés. Circle them. Do it now. The early bird gets the worm.
I think it’s perfectly acceptable to use cliches if you use them sparingly — about as sparingly as you might sprinkle salt on your ramen. What I mean by that is that if you’re going to say something verbatim like, “Her skin was as soft as silk, as white as snow. She was as pretty as a picture.” — if you’re going to say that, turn it on its head somehow. “Her frozen body would occupy a place in my memory that amnesia couldn’t touch, cocooned forever by winter and premature death.” There. It’s not the best example perhaps, but the cliches from the first bit get flipped at you with a catapult in the second bit. Yeah, her skin is soft and white. She froze to death in the middle of winter. She’s pretty as a picture? Yeah. A picture of a loved one, dead. Forever.
I think the masters of the craft manage to tease us with something familiar and then jerk us round the bend so quickly that we end up somewhere we didn’t expect to go. They disturb our expectations in words so tantalizing and succulent that we can’t help but follow. They make a cliche into something tangible and create art from contrast. If you can learn how to continually surprise and delight (or horrify, or titillate) your readers, you will spark that insatiable hunger for more.
All writing serves to forge a connection. If you’re reading this, I’ve taken my thoughts and implanted them into your brain without ever opening my mouth. (Except to breathe, because I’m a little stuffy right now.) It’s almost like telepathy — in fact, I’ve heard a writer describe writing as such. I can create an image of an elephant with one tusk wearing a fez, and you’ll see it when you read that whether you want to or not. It’s a connection, and if you feed enough magic into it, you’ll start to feel a tug on the other end. A pulling sensation that means your readers want more. More story. More characters. More of the beating thrumming heart you created from that blank page.
A well-timed cliche can create a basic connection with a reader, but it’s like communicating with two cans and a ball of yarn. It’ll only be so long before your readers search for something to keep that feeling going, and if you deliver something original and alluring, that connection changes to fiber optics.
Use your jar of magic to infuse your words with bait — bait that will hook your readers to your stories for as long as you write them.
Like this:
Keep It Simple
Once upon a time, about a century ago (okay, more like a decade) when I was a junior in high school, I got traumatized by a book. That book was Heart of Darkness. My best friend and I used to have these little contests to see who could hate that book better. We began to use it as a litmus test for every other book.
“I hated reading That Other Book.”
“Oh? Was it as bad as Heart of Darkness? Did you want to strangle yourself afterward?”
“No, not quite that bad.”
“Ah.”
To be fair to Joseph Conrad, I haven’t had the courage to pick up the book again in a decade, so it might not be as bad as I remember. I do recall that the brunt of my reading pain came from the interminable dissection we were forced to perform day after day after day.
For genre fiction writers (and I would argue most fiction writers or just writers in general), subtlety and complexity aren’t necessarily your friend. Here’s what The 25 have to say about simplicity:
16. Simplicity
The great film director Billy Wilder was once asked if he liked subtlety in a story. He answered along the lines of, “Yes. Subtlety is good—as long as it’s obvious.” The same can be said about complexity and simplicity. Some stories are so complex that it’s frustratingly impossible to understand them. But others (like Wuthering Heights or Bleak House) are complex in a way that we don’t find difficult to understand, and actually find enjoyable because of the complexity. Conversely, Hemingway’s famous simple style is in fact very complex.What really matters is whether or not something is clear. Each day, as you revise the pages from your prior writing session, take a few minutes to ask yourself, “Is this clear? Will the reader understand it?” If you’re not sure, revise until the answer is yes. Don’t be afraid to deal with a complex topic in a complex way, but always keep in mind that clarity will make you the reader’s friend.
—Morrell
I’ve read books with plots that were so complex it infuriated me. I’ve also read some with the simplicity of “See Spot Run” that bored me to “Ooh, look! Something shiny!” The issue isn’t whether or not something is complex, as Morrell says, but if the reader gets it. Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time series is very complex. There are multiple plotlines, easily a score of POV characters both major and minor, a veritable tapestry of political and social webs, and a story arch that spans fourteen monsters books. In the middle of the series, they get off track. Clarity gives way to useless detail and superfluous story threads that grab onto your ankles till you can’t go any farther. I stopped reading for about seven years until the newer books started to come out, and after I forced my way through Crossroads of Twilight, they got a lot better again.
The point is, it’s possible to write intense and complex books full of subtlety, but it takes a master to do that with a sense of clarity and vision. When I read Jordan’s books, a world springs up around me. That world is consistent and almost flawless. That’s no easy task. If you write any form of fantasy, you are asking your reader to suspend their disbelief. To buy your story without looking for a price tag. You owe it to them to be meticulous in your creation of your world. Even if you’re not a planner or a plotter (and I am not at all), notes are your friend. They can help you keep track of the subtleties and convoluted mysteries your world holds so that you don’t miss a gaping unraveling of your plot that would make a reader stop to scratch her head.
Other pairs of eyes are great for this — even if you think it’s clear, readers might not. If you want something to be deduced from a scene, and a reader tells you he doesn’t get it, that’s a cue to rewrite. Too much complexity or subtlety can bog your readers down when you want them to move forward unencumbered.
There should always be some sort of surprise or twist — no book should be as predictable as a fairy tale, but you also don’t want to blindside your readers with something that doesn’t fit the story. Build your world and make it creditable, and you’ll build a world of devoted readers who can’t wait to see through your eyes again and again.
That’s all for now, gentle viewers. Happy Friday!
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Magic in a Jar and Other Creative Tales
I know, I know. Double post action today. However, first of all, I need to celebrate getting draft two of book one finished. Yep. Done-zo. Even untangled the snarl at the end of the yarn ball into a perfectly awesome ending and a snazzy epilogue. It’s lookin’ like a book, folks. Onward to book two!
So as I plunge back into the first draft of book two (it’s about 85% done) and try to digest the Big Mac that seemed like a great idea for a celebratory dinner (I didn’t say I was thinking clearly), I thought I’d jet back to The 25 for a little post on creativity. Plus, I stumbled across another blog earlier that inspired some of the other stuff I want to write about before it disappears back into the ether.
Here’s what they have to say:
15. Creativity
Creativity is the secret sauce of the writing life. Its ingredients are different for everyone, and may change over time, which can make it difficult to keep the cupboards stocked. When you get stuck, take 30 minutes and try one of these:
- Switch genres. Write a poem before diving into a narrative piece.
- Review incomplete writing for a scrap of idea or language; let it lead you in.
- Burn kindling. Keep a file of art, poems, quotes, pressed flowers—whatever ignites your imagination. Sift through it when you need a spark.
- Grow your own list of triggers. Repeat what works until it doesn’t; then try something new.
Creativity isn’t always a formula. There isn’t always a zing poof of inspiration (that sounds suspiciously like dusting a vampire on Buffy) that leads to the ultimate creative endeavor. As Sarah Toole Miller mentioned on her blog today, sometimes when you write you discover that you “stumbled upon a tiny bit of magic.”
That sums up what I feel about creativity. I feel like my life finds me wandering about the day to day collecting bits of magic in a jar.
Perhaps this jar.
When the time comes to put ass in chair and write, I get out my little jar and see what’s floating around in there. Sometimes one bit of magic shines brighter than others. Sometimes one or two have already died in captivity. Regardless of how shiny they stay or how quickly the shine fades, I keep filling that jar. Whether it’s scribbled on the back of a pay stub that never made it out of my work check presenter or a receipt or a napkin or occasionally my skin, the jar gets filled whenever I spot a bit of magic.
Gotta write book two now. Get your write on, gentle viewers.
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You Little Snowflake You
After the lovely warm fuzzy fest of yesterday’s award/challenge interlude, I give you:
The return of The 25!
Google. *Loving head shake.* You make it so easy to find pictures.
Today’s addition to that list has a rather familiar smell, gentle viewers. It smells a lot like #2 on the list, which is precision. By following my nose, I deduct they started struggling to come up with new bullet points. Regardless, I’ll try to say something new and exciting, and barring that, I’ll just throw some more confetti at you so you can go, “Ooooh, preeeeeetty!” Deal?
14. Effective Details
The key to effective description is to realize the importance of contradictions. The telling detail is almost always one that at first glance doesn’t seem to fit, but by its being there creates the unique whole that the object or action or person represents.Go to a good people-watching spot or a place you want to describe. What’s the thing that doesn’t quite belong? Pair one or two more typical attributes of the thing/person/scene with this anomaly, and judge the impression. If it differs from what you meant to describe, figure out what’s missing. Add as few details as possible.
A related point: Often, we read a description and think, If this is there, then that has to be there as well. Many writers then think that both details must be included, but usually the opposite is true. Provide the stronger, more typical of the two, and the other is implied; the reader’s mind supplies it automatically.
—Corbett
Having read that again, it does bear suspicious similarity to stuff I’ve already discussed here. Harumph. Regardless, here’s the part where I drink my tea anyway and buckle down.
I’ve heard many times that it’s fine to say something that’s already been said as long as you say it in a way no one has said it before. Keep it fresh. Keep it honest.
Since my last post on effective details (Cough. I mean precision.) focused on setting, I think this time I’ll turn the spyglass on characterization. What makes a good character? What makes a memorable character?
A good writer can take a Joe Schmoe character and make you like him. A great writer can take Joe Schmoe and make you love him. Make you cry for him. Make you seethe with anger when something doesn’t go right. Make Mr. Schmoe so real you can feel him next to you as you read. The great writers out there make characters into your friends — or barring that, make them a worthy and hated enemy.
They do that by building their characters with effective details. Much like my diatribe on setting described my home with a couple unique details (the bed for a sofa and the two plastic skulls on the entertainment center), you have to pick the two or three details about a character that make them stand out, even if they are Joe Schmoe or one of his more slack-lipped relatives.
David Eddings does an excellent job with that. I’ve read and re-read his fantasy series probably ten times or upward by now. I keep going back to them because his characters are so familiar I can see them clearly even now. Garion with his sandy hair and rather serious nature, who has a tendency to take things too literally. Belgarath, the ancient sorcerer who wears mismatched shoes because the right one of that pair fits better, and the left one of this pair is much more comfortable. Aunt Pol has one white streak in her raven dark hair and a secret love for the fairytale extinct Wacite Arends. Beldin, an ugly and misshapen little man who can turn into a blue-banded hawk and who eats jam straight from the pot. Ce’Nedra is a tiny, copper haired Dryad who has a temper far beyond her hair color and a heart bigger than she is.
There are many more characters in those books, and yes, all of them have those little details that make them unique. Your characters ought to mirror life.
Not like this mirror.
That means that your characters should have quirks and pouty moments or a tendency to get knocked in the head. No one is perfect all the time, and sometimes even good traits can hit that magical part of the spectrum and become bad traits. A zealous nature could turn to fanaticism. A desire for justice could turn into a witch hunt. Generosity could beggar a person. In fact, I’ll wager that the best characters show exactly that — how a character’s strong points can also be their downfall.
For my protagonist, her anger is what helps her survive at first. It’s what enables her to get back up after the first giant shock and move forward. But later it begins to eat at her and poison her. It’s not fleshed out as fully as I want it yet, but she’s shaping up to be a damn fine character. The good protagonists can inspire love or frustration or hair-pulling with equal facility, and they should inspire the full spectrum at some point in the book. Just as every writer is unique, the characters we create should each be unique. Mirror life, and find your unique details that create art from clay, you little snowflake you.
That's you.
