Writing

Dollar Words

Author: December 8, 2017 0 Comments

Moby-Dick by Herman Melville contains more than 17,000 unique words. Reading that novel (which I highly recommend) means that you will almost certainly have a larger vocabulary when you’re done, although much of that new vocabulary might be 19th century whaling jargon, which may not make you a sought-after conversational partner. Or maybe it would. What do I know?

There’s a certain school of thought among writers that you should endeavor to include as many “dollar words” (sometimes called SAT words after the test where you often encounter unusual or arcane verbiage) as you can, or that you should seek out a lot of unusual synonyms so you can have a lot of variety in your writing. There’s an opposite school of thought that thinks you should always write in a clear, simple manner that conveys what you want to convey without making the reader resort to a thesaurus.

The real answer is more complex: Use dollar words if you can pull it off.

The Problem of Tags

A note, though, on dialog tags. Sometimes when you’re writing a story you notice that Writing “he said” “she said” over and over again seems repetitive, and you’ll be tempted to substitute other words. He exclaimed! She hissed! But there’s a definite diminishing return to this; while popping in a “hissed” or “shouted” once in a while makes sense, doing it too much makes your writing a bit purple and overheated. Simply put, most of your dialog tags should probably be “said.”

However! There are no rules. If Cormac McCarthy can write entire novels without punctuation because he hates us, you can of course write a novel where everyone hisses, exclaims, and declares things.

That’s the rub when it comes to writing. A genius can break every rule and we still read the book, because genius. So can you use every bizarre word you can find in your prose and still write (and sell) a successful novel? Of course. You just have to pull it off. And pulling it off involves having a plan—a reason why these oddball words are the better choice. Simply doing it to show off all those years you spent reading the dictionary for fun ain’t gonna cut it.

But if, upon finishing your book and showing it around, you’re not getting the response you want, one of the first things you can do is strip out the dollar words and go for a simpler approach. That, or add in some vampires. People love vampires.

dialogue, General, Writing

Stop Fighting Yourself

Author: December 6, 2017 0 Comments

One of the biggest mistakes writers make is trying to force themselves to write in ways that run counter to what they really want to be writing about, or which eschew their clears strengths in favor of what they think they’re supposed to be writing.

This comes in two basic forms, one macro and one micro. On the macro side you have moments when you convince yourself you should be writing something other than what your heart wants you to write. Maybe you love writing pulpy, action-packed sci-fi stories but you convince yourself that you need to be writing serious litchure that gets all profound and deep. On the micro side, you’re writing the book you want, but you’re forcing yourself to take an approach or to concentrate on aspects of the story that you think are important, but what you really want to do is just have characters talk to each other, luxuriating in their snappy repartee, or introduce a murder simply because you feel like it.

You know what I’m about to say: Stop fighting yourself.

If You’re Bored Your Book’s Boring

I recently had a writer contact me to ask for advice; they were excited about a book idea, but kept getting lost in the details of their universe instead of actually writing. Often this is because you’re trying to force yourself to write what you ?should’ be writing, instead of what you actually want to write. Sure, you eventually have to get that plot worked out and on paper—but if your brain wants you to work on the details of your universe, give in and do so. There’s no wasted time when it comes to working on any aspect of your novel.

Is there a point where you’re spending too much time on the ancillary stuff? Maybe. Yes, if you’ve been working on a book for five years and have mountains of background info but no actual story you might be overdoing it, but when you find yourself in that situation it’s more likely that you’re fighting yourself in another way—maybe this isn’t the book you want to write in the first place?

I personally believe people find a way to do the things they want, if they have the discretion and freedom to do so. You attend the parties you want to attend and you find excuses for the ones you don’t. So if you’ve been trying to write a book for years but can’t get started; ask yourself if you’re just coming up with excuses because it’s not the story you really want to tell.

My tendency to endlessly discuss novels, of course, is why I don’t get invited to parties any more. That and the tendency to pass out in the bathroom. Don’t judge me; I’m a writer.

General, plot, Writing

Avoiding Professionalism

Author: December 4, 2017 0 Comments

There’s a human tendency to stratify just about every pursuit between amateurs and professionals. In some cases, of course, this is useful; it’s good to know the person you just hired to re-wire your house is a licensed, professional electrician and not someone who is fascinated by the way electricity causes fires, for example. And if someone offers to buy you some drinks, it’s helpful to know they’re not going to punk out after ten or eleven rounds.

This drive towards professionalism is sometimes harmful, though, and is sometimes used merely to create an exclusive strata so those on the right side of the velvet rope can feel smug. Creating jargon and secret information that only the initiated can parse is one way of doing this; jargon can be an incredibly useful shorthand for professionals, of course, conveying reams of information in a condensed form almost like the episode Darmok from Star Trek: The Next Generation where an alien civilization uses short phrases that convey entire scenarios with incredible depth of meaning.

But professionalism isn’t always useful. Sometimes it’s just flattering yourself. That’s how it is in writing.

Jargon for the Loss

Some young writers strive for the secret knowledge that professionalism can provide because it makes them feel like they’ve slipped past the velvet rope even if they haven’t written anything worth reading or published anything. And that’s the real danger here; being able to discuss The Hero’s Journey in depth, or explaining to anyone who will listen that the ?climax’ isn’t the end of the story is great and all, but it doesn’t mean anything if you’re not actually writing.

In other words, don’t waste too much energy on being able to talk a good writing game. Instead, put that energy into the actual writing. No one’s gonna care if you call the denouement of your novel That Moment When It All You Know Kind of Gets Ironed Out and Everyone is Done Fighting—if your story is great. If your story is great, you can call the plot mechanics by any names you want, and literally no one will care.

Sure, knowing the jargon and concepts will help you discuss writing with your fellow novelists, but trust me when I say that this is overrated. Also overrated? Ending blog posts with a coherent restatement of your premise.

General, Writing

Describing Characters: The Bus Trick

Author: December 1, 2017 0 Comments

When creating characters for your story, the most important thing is to have a sense of who they are as people. If you treat them like real people, they will jump off the page and be distinct to your reader, whereas dressing your characters up in gimmicks and crazy physical attributes in lieu of actual personality is a one-way trip to boring characters. A guy with a monkey sitting on his head is interesting for about a page-and-a-half. A guy who seems like he’s based on a real guy who happened to have a monkey sitting on his head is interesting for the entire story.

I have to start thinking more about these essays before I start writing.

Anyway, you still have to describe your characters, at least a little. At least upon first introducing them. And that’s difficult for some writers—what do you mention? If every character is described in the same way, that’s a problem, but you also want to avoid reducing them to the most obvious kinds of physical detail (skin color, eye color, etc). Here’s what I do: I imagine myself on a bus.

The Bus Trick

Most of my writing advice boils down to modeling everything on real life in some way, because I am a painfully lazy and literal person. The Bus Trick is simple: Think back to the last time you walked into a crowded public space filled with strangers. For me, a bus usually does the trick, but any venue where you met up with a few dozen total strangers will do.

Now, imagine the people who were there when you arrived. What did they look like? How would you describe them?

The details you come up with will be natural and telling, and can be re-purposed to describe your characters in natural and telling ways. Sure, you have to be aware of your own prejudices and assumptions here, but it’s still a great way to get authentic reactions, and a good way to ensure that you’re not describing your characters in the same way every time.

Just remember: When it comes to physically describing your characters, less is more. You will never do a better job than the imagination of your reader.

characters, Writing

Avoiding the Agent Smith Problem in Your Novel

Author: November 29, 2017 0 Comments

In baseball, some pitchers have blazing fastballs, others have to get by on trickery, and others have to paint corners and employ superhuman accuracy. Writers are kind of in the same boat—some writers have a laser focus on plot and are able to sketch out incredible stories without much effort. Others can paint a character onto the page that feels like a real person talking to you. You can teach yourself to be great at just about every aspect of writing (mainly through reading, stealing, and writing, all constantly) but we all have things we’re naturally good at.

Sometimes the hardest thing is to honestly assess your own natural abilities. One thing I see from time to time in the work of younger writers is a belief that they’re very good at characters when in fact what they’re really doing is making every single character in their story more or less a version of themselves.

Agent Smith, I Presume

In the Matrix film trilogy, Agent Smith is a piece of code in the virtual world who eventually becomes a virus and begins replicating, taking over other pieces of code until the entire population of The Matrix are versions of Agent Smith.

When you base every character on yourself, that’s what you end up with. Basing a character on yourself is an easy way to ensure a certain amount of verisimilitude (and I may have offered that as advice in the past, actually, if you’re struggling with coming up with believable reactions for your characters, but then I drink a lot so who knows). But if you do it for every character in your book you end up with a bland sameness to all of your characters. It’s not a good look.

So how do you avoid this? Step one is recognizing you have a problem. The Agent Smith Problem is often the result of not reading widely and not paying attention to the world around you. If you’re too much in your own head, you carry a lot of assumptions about the world unchallenged. In other words, you start to think that the way you do things and the way you see the world is universal. Having those assumptions challenged is the key to writing better characters, because it helps you see your own patterns of thought, speech, and gesture in the characters you’re writing.

Funny how many writing problems are solved simply by reading a bit more.

Of course, I no longer suffer from The Agent Smith Problem because I am so much older and wiser and know everything now. Yessir, it’s good to never have to worry about bad writing ever again. Yessir. Whiskey for lunch? Why not.

characters, Writing

Break Up the Party to Move the Plot Along

Author: November 27, 2017 0 Comments

Most writers hit at least one point in the first draft or outline of a novel where inspiration dries up in regards to plot. One moment you know exactly where your characters are headed. The next your characters are sitting around a room playing cards and checking their watches while you try to figure out what to do next. Whether you’re a Plotter or a Pantser, Plot Confusion is real.

There are a million ways of dealing with Plot Confusion, of course, from the brute force of writing your way through it to pulling a Crazy Ivan and introducing an insane twist to the old Leonard standby of having someone with a gun walk into the room. One trick I like to use sometimes is a little simpler and often offers surprising developments: I break up my characters.

Odd Pairings

As in real life, your fictional characters will have a tendency to clump up into expected and repeated groups. This is sometimes a function of plot; for me, though, it’s also due to a certain linear way of thinking that I struggle with. I dislike jumping around from place to place dealing with different groups of characters so have a tendency to simplify by keeping everyone together. Hey, normally it works for me.

When it doesn’t, though, forcing my characters to separate, especially into unexpected groupings, is often a jolt of energy. You find yourself having to mesh together two different speech patterns, plot roles, and other aspects. It also means that lazy patterns I’d fallen into while writing similar exchanges between the same couple of characters have to be jettisoned, and new patterns figured out.

It’s actually a lot of fun, and just as in real life putting two people together unexpectedly often reveals surprising things about both. Even brief scenes sometimes jumpstart the whole story.

The best part is that unlike real life, if my surprise character pairings turns unbearably awkward and dull, I can always go back to that guy with a gun and really spice things up. Sometimes it’s even fun to write an entire sequence where that guy murders all of my characters and I am, for one wonderful moment, a vengeful god. Like Galadriel, all shall love me and despair and then I save the file and start over.

characters, plot, Writing

Plain Language

Author: November 24, 2017 0 Comments

When you’re a writer, you tend to fall into literary circles online and in social media. You link with other writers, or agents, or editors, or readers, and slowly your feeds fill up with writing-centric stuff. Which can be great, of course, because it makes you feel like you’re part of a larger whole, but which can also be suffocating because when all you’re reading are the thoughts of other writers, the whole world starts to seem like an unending literary conference.

It can also make you feel like you’re doing everything wrong. One example that comes to mind are the word lists that often get circulated—lists of alternate or unusual words or phrases that you can use to supposedly spice up your writing. Or lists of alternate dialogue tags to avoid a lot of “he said/she said” in your stories.

There’s nothing wrong with building your vocabulary or seeking some spice for your prose. Always referring to something with the same word can get repetitive and dull, so finding different ways to describe things can be a useful skill. But don’t get lost in the weeds: A little variety goes a long way, and too much variety leads you into the Purple.

Purple Prose

Think of it this way: If you had to tell someone their house was on fire, you would say “Hey, your house is on fire!” You wouldn’t say “Ho there! Your domicile is currently undergoing the exothermic chemical process of combustion!”

That’s the trick—variety is a worthwhile goal in your writing, but overdoing it is so, so easy. The easiest way to check yourself is to ask yourself in all seriousness if you’ve ever heard anyone speak the way your sentence reads. When you see a list of alternate words for the word “little,” for example, and decide that diminutive is a great alternate, ask yourself if the narrator or character would actually say that. Ask yourself if you yourself have ever used the word diminutive in conversation.

In other words, writing a story is not the same as writing a college essay. Readers actually take off points if your vocabulary is a bit too big.

Then again, it depends on what you’re writing. If SAT words fit your characters, by all means go to town. If your narrative style is purposefully purplish and convoluted, don’t let me stop you. This isn’t a rule, for god’s sake. It’s something to consider. Don’t use oddball words just because—but if there’s a reason, then all you have to do is sell it.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I must go imbibe some distilled spirits.

characters, dialogue, Writing

No Permits Necessary

Author: November 22, 2017 0 Comments

Reading through some online forums about writing, one thing that always strikes me is the pervasive sense that there are rules. Now, you can tell from the title of this blog (and the book it’s promoting, coming out next year) that I don’t really think there are many rules when it comes to writing, but a lot of writing-related questions center on what’s “permissible” or “allowed.” As if there’s some sort of international court of literary pursuits that will hand down judgments.

Questions like “how many characters should this story have” or “is it permissible to begin the story this way” miss the point of creativity. There are no permits to be issued. You’re on your own.

Writing is Thunderdome

A writer friend and I have been engaged in a circular argument for decades now concerning movie reboots. His position is that reboots are almost always wastes of time because they’re usually rebooting a perfectly good movie to begin with—and almost all reboots are inferior. My position is that any idea can work. There’s no fatal flaw in the basis of the idea—say, the fact that it’s a reboot or remake—that dooms it. You can take a story that’s been done before and improve on it. Or fail to do so. But that’s a flaw of execution, not ideas.

And that’s the thing about writing. It’s Thunderdome. You can try anything you want, and if you pull it off it’ll be great. And if you fail to pull it off, you’ll get crushed. It’s that simple.

People like rules because it’s comforting. They like patterns and formulas because it makes it seem like a step-by-step guide to success. And yes, to some extent following rules or a formula can lead to a successful story—but so can winging it, or actively breaking rules. If you have the urge to ask, is it permissible to do this? why not just do it and find out?

Have a dead narrator? Have one hundred characters? Lie to the reader? Why not. If you don’t pull it off people will tell you it was a bad idea—but it won’t have been. It’ll simply be an idea you failed to pull off. That’s the bottom line: A bad idea is just an idea you failed to pull off.

Now if you’ll excuse me I have to go work on my reboot of The Sound and the Fury in which the whole thing is narrated by Benjy. You’re welcome.

General, Writing

Dialogue: Sweat the Small Stuff

Author: November 20, 2017 0 Comments

Writing good dialog means writing dialogue that seems natural even if it isn’t (because we don’t speak the way we write speech), that entertains, and that does a bit of work for the story, or for the characters. Dialogue is an excellent way to world-build, to flesh out your characters, and to get exposition into the story without just dumping it.

That doesn’t mean that every single line of dialogue you write has to be larded with purpose. Trying to make every single sentence spoken by your characters do plot work or offer back story will result in some pretty stilted and unhappy conversations in your book, and trust me: Stilted and unnatural aren’t words you want to hear in reference to your writing.

That’s why it’s important to relax a little with your dialogue. In real life, we have this stuff called small talk. Some people deprecate small talk as a waste of valuable existence, but the fact is it plays a vital role in our lives. Small talk is how we ease into conversations and situations. It grounds us in a universal pool of communication, a common ground from which to operate. So instead of deprecating small talk in your writing, embrace it.

Talk About the Weather

Small talk, humorous exchanges, the sort of chatter that doesn’t do any kind of plot work can be just as revealing as portentous dialogue that is just a series of info-dumps, anvilicious revelations, and dramatic reveals. You can learn a lot about a person from their small talk. You can learn how socially skilled they are, what their sense of humor is like, what they consider to be important.

While you certainly want to avoid lengthy exchanges of meaningless pleasantries, small talk is a great way to inject a bit of humor into your story and a great way to shade your characters with some complexity. If your character is in a tense, action-packed, hyper-real situation from page one the reader can get a little exhausted, and the best way to get your reader to think of your characters as people they care about is to give them a little sense of what they’re like when they’re not fighting demons or hunting foreign spies or solving crimes. And small talk is a great way to do that efficiently.

The urge to make every sentence a masterpiece of tension, drama, and plot twists can be considerable, but that book will read like a parody. If you want the big wham lines to land, you have to get small.

dialogue, Writing

Put Down a Marker

Author: November 17, 2017 0 Comments

Creativity is a funny thing. Sometimes it comes at you fast and furious and you can’t possibly write fast enough to capture all of your ideas, and you wind up with a series of word processing files on your hard drive, each containing a single mysterious sentence that was once a flaming idea in your head. And then, just as quickly, you find yourself staring at a page, uncertain what happens next or if it’s even worth grinding through this chapter. Why not just set the house on fire and start over under a new name somewhere? Easier than finishing this terrible novel you’re writing.

To jump-start your creativity, you sometimes have to challenge yourself. The brain can get bored with doing things the same way all the time, and our obsessions sometimes guide us into writing about the same things over and over again, just dressed up with new plots and characters.

One thing I try, usually in my short fiction, is to put down a marker. By that I mean I’ll sometimes start a short story with a premise requiring a solution—with zero idea of how to solve it. Then you shout CHALLENGE ACCEPTED and set off to figure it out.

Challenge … Accepted?

This works best with mysteries of some sort. An example would be a locked-room mystery story: A victim is found in a room with one door, locked from the inside in a way that couldn’t be done from outside. They’ve been stabbed, but there’s no blood in the body! How in the world was this crime committed?

I have no idea. I just made that up. And it’ll be one hell of a solution … if I can find it.

I often fail at these challenges. Just because you set down a marker doesn’t mean you’re going to win. But it forces your brain to churn, and as you circle the problem you’re going to find compartments within yourself you weren’t even aware of. And every now and then, you DO solve the puzzle and wind up with a really amazing premise for a story that’s either perfect as-is or the basis of a genius novel. Either way, you win.

ideas, Writing