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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

The Last Mile

Author: November 26, 2017 3 Comments

Pierre le Chat, 2003-2017

My cat died two weeks ago. I know that not everyone understands the curiously powerful emotional bond some folks forge with a pet, but I’ve always looked at it this way: These animals don’t choose to live with us, we do that for them for our own selfish reasons. In exchange, we owe them a good life. We owe them the basics, plus affection. I’ve always thought my role was to ensure they were never afraid, or unhappy.

And for 14 years, we managed that for Pierre. For 14 years that cat wanted for nothing, never doubted that he was loved, and knew nothing but security and the curious joys of a routine observed obsessively. And then we hit the Last Mile problem.

####

Pierre wasn’t my first cat to die. When I was a kid, my brother and I rescued a gray and white cat from a neighbor’s house; she was headed to euthanasia because their son had moved out and left the cat behind and they didn’t want her. So my brother and I took her in. We named her Missy, and Missy spent every night in my bed, purring away as if she knew she’d been saved. Ten years later, I was in college and Missy’s kidneys failed her, and I selfishly let my mother take care of her and when the time came to put her down I visited her at the Vet, scratched her ears, and left, and I look back now and feel like 19-year old Jeff was a coward.

20 years later, another cat had a stroke and literally died right there in the room. It was a terrible shock and we cried, but at least we thought he simply died. No suffering.

A few years later another cat hurt his paw, and had to have a claw amputated. He died on the operating table. Just never came out of the anesthesia. While I was bothered that his last memories were filled with fear and confusion being in a place he hated with people he didn’t know, at least I thought he died while unconscious.

####

Pierre had heart disease. Heart disease in cats is tough, because they often show zero symptoms. Pierre had lost weight, but he’d been fat and I’d spent years trying to find a diet approach to get him slimmed down a little, so for a long time I thought I’d simply finally hit on the right dietary approach. He wasn’t diagnosed until 2 months before he died, and throughout those 2 months he still seemed more or less normal. He was hungry, affectionate, and occasionally playful. We thought maybe the medicine would make him feel stronger and he might gain back some weight. We thought it was reasonable, based on his behavior, that he might go another few years on the meds.

Then one night he couldn’t go to the bathroom, and started breathing very heavily, and wandering the house restlessly. Twelve hours later we made the painful decision to put him down. His last few hours were awful; this roly-poly, delightful cat just lay on the floor, gasping, foaming, staring. And that’s the Last Mile problem: We gave Pierre 14 great years. But his last 12 hours were awful. He didn’t die in peace, in a warm bed surrounded by those who loved him. He died in a exam room, with an IV line in him, afraid and in much discomfort. We were there petting him, but I’m not sure how much that helped.

####

As you get older, and enough people and pets die on you, you start to realize that this is true for most of us. We have control over our lives and can make ourselves happy and comfortable until the Last Mile, when it all goes to shit. When the end comes, it often comes suddenly, surprisingly, and with a violence and pain that is shocking to all involved. As a kid I was taught by TV and movies that people tended to die in ways that allowed for catharsis—for final speeches, for confessions, for closure.

Maybe this happens sometimes; I mean, apparently people also sometimes spontaneously combust, so anything is possible. My experience is that this doesn’t happen. Death comes and it’s chaos and confusion and before you know it you’re getting a call from the hospital or the palliative care place and you’re rushing to get there before the end. Or you’re being told by a veterinarian that you should seriously consider putting your cat out of its misery. At that point, you have choices, but no control: Every choice leads to more suffering, except one.

You can control an animal’s existence for optimal comfort, health, and affection, until you can’t. The Last Mile will always defeat you. Someday the Last Mile will kick in for me, too. I’ll be able to compensate for life’s little tricks with medicines, therapies, and lifestyle changes, until I can’t. And the Last Mile will be as terrible for me as it for every other creature.

####

Life goes on. We adopted a new kitten in honor of our departed buddy, as we’ve done before, seeking to convert grief into a small, good thing. This kitten has a Last Mile waiting for it as well, but hopefully not any time soon. In the mean time, I will write novels and take trips and eat great dinners, I’ll kiss my wife and shake hands and hug friends, I’ll watch great movies and laugh at great jokes. Life goes on. Until it doesn’t.

Pierre, February 2004

Bullshit, Deep Thoughts & Pronouncements

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

Resist Your Rut

Author: November 15, 2017 0 Comments

The other day I went to the grocery store with a short list of items on a list, one of which was a certain kind of popcorn my wife, The Duchess, likes. In the popcorn aisle, however, there was confusion and despair, because I couldn’t tell which one of the several dozen varieties of popcorn my wife intended, so I took a photo of the choices and sent it to The Duchess, then called her as I moved on to gather the other items on my list. We chatted about all things popcorn while I shopped, she clarified her request, we hung up, and then I checked out without actually going back to buy the popcorn. I simply forgot all about it.

Routine is my friend largely because my memory has always been epically poor; I forget things within moments. If this were a new development in my dotage I’d be worried, but the fact is I’ve always been this way. I can forget things at a worrying pace. There’s a weird moment I’m aware of when thinking about something somehow clicks over to having done it in my brain. Like the popcorn: I thought about buying it, and therefore my brain reported it as having been bought.

As a result, I like a good rut. Putting things in exactly the same place and doing things in exactly the same way day in and day out helps me to remember things like my wallet, keys, and phone, and a routine helps me to always go to the places I need to be. Yes, I’m like a brain-damaged puppy, what of it?

This extends to my writing; I like a good rut because it means I will always find time to write. If I wing my schedule, writing often disappears because I simply run out of time. And I like to approach writing ritualistically because doing it the same way every day helps ensure I actually, you know, write. Without a routine and a rut, I’d be lost.

But sometimes, you have to break out of your rut.

Seeing the Rut

Ruts and routines are useful for getting work done, but not always useful for inspiration and creativity. Finding the balance between a routine that allows you have time to write and get words on the page and a sense of adventure that allows you to, you know, be creative and produce good work is always going to be a challenge.

One thing I try to do is to simply swap some time. For example, normally I work on freelance pay-the-bills writing in the morning and get to fiction in the afternoon, because I like to feel like I’ve paid some bills before I have fun. But sometimes it’s useful to push the freelance work and put some time into a novel in the morning. It feels like a fresh field of snow to write at a different time of day, and it tricks your brain into seeing things fresh.

Of course, even a new routine will slowly lose its freshness and become a new rut. You have to surprise yourself on a constant basis. And when in doubt, just start day-drinking. Any writing you do while drunk will be crap, but believe me, nothing blows up your routines like having a killer hangover at 3PM.

General, time management, Writing

Writing What Matters to You

Author: November 13, 2017 0 Comments

A lot of young writers get lost in the weeds, wondering what they should be focusing on. Questions like “how much should I focus on X” or “how much time should I spend on X” often show the weakness of feedback more than a weakness in your own writing; showing your work to Beta Readers opens up the floodgates for negative feedback that cause you to doubt yourself. One reader says “there’s too much focus on the back-story” leads you to scale back that aspect in a revision, but then another readers says “I need more info on their back story” and you’re in a tailspin of revisions, seeking some perfect balance that, frankly, doesn’t exist.

This leads a lot of writers to ask about specific, replicable formulas—as if there are precise values we can assign to things. You’ll never get answers to those questions, at least not meaningful ones. You can’t say “5% of your novel should be back story” or “5% of your novel should be spent on how your character lives a normal day.” It’s even more fraught in speculative fiction, where writers spend a lot of energy wondering what aspects of a fictional universe to concentrate on—like, do you have to discuss how your fictional culture views everything, from animal cruelty to humor? If so, how many words do you have to devote to the standup comedy of your fictional people?

These kinds of formulas simply do not exist. And it’s not that hard, actually. All you have to do when writing is write the stuff that matters to you, and you’ll be fine.

You Do You

The key to writing is always very simple: Write about what you’re interested in. What aspects of your character do you want to know about? What pieces of the fictional universe do you want to explore? It really is that simple. Write about the things you want to know more about, and you’ll be fine.

Because it’s impossible to cover every single detail, and not all details are created equal. It’s always useful to ask yourself who might actually care about the standup comedy routines of your alien culture, and whether it makes any difference to your plot. Not every detail you explore needs to do plot work, of course, but if there’s no plot-relevant reason for it, and you’re not particularly interested in it yourself, then … why bother writing it in?

Writing and reading are inextricably linked. If you write about the stuff you’d want to read about and forget the stuff you’re not interested in, you’re more than halfway there.

Of course, you can always overwrite and cut stuff out in revision. Which is what I do when I write about what I’m interested in and wind up with hundreds of pages of cocktail recipes.

General, worldbuilding, Writing