Wordplay

This week’s video explains how science fiction master Orson Scott Card’s book Enchantment gives a prime example of using up every delicious drop of premise potential.




Video Transcription: How many times have you been thrilled by a book’s amazing plot idea—only to be disappointed because the author never took advantage of the idea’s full capabilities? It’s admittedly very easy to come up with a plot idea, set the characters in motion, and then watch hopelessly (or sometimes obliviously) as the story meanders away from the original premise idea.


However, in Enchantment, Orson Scott Card’s modern take on the Sleeping Beauty legend, he offers us a marvelous example of how to strengthen our stories by taking full advantage of the premise. Card’s story dumps a young man from modern American into a ninth-century Russia that is rife with interesting story possibilities and all kinds of conflict. Card could easily have written an entertaining tale set entirely within this framework. But because he understood that his premise of magical time travelling supported much more, he masterfully upped the ante and turned the tables on characters and readers alike by sending the hero and his Russian Sleeping Beauty back to the modern world halfway through the book.

I’m honored to be a featured guest poster on The Master’s Artist today. Hop on over to read my post “The Myth of Being in the Zone.” Below is a peek: Because he realized that the premise could handle so much more than just the obvious first step of sending the hero to Russia and letting him fight his way through an antagonistic medieval society, Card offered a story that literally gave us the best of both worlds. Take a long, hard look at your premise. Are you milking it for everything it’s worth? Don’t settle for the obvious or easy answers. If you have a brilliant premise, don’t let a drop of that potential go to waste.

At one point or another, all authors have found that delicious groove called “being in the zone.” The Zone is that enchanted land, in which we can do no wrong. Our words flow from our fingertips onto our keyboards with lightning speed, every one of them singing with the perfect expression of our intent, every one of them beautiful and powerful and vibrant. We write for hours, our energy level so high it’s practically bouncing out of the top of our skulls. When we finally tear ourselves away from our story, we’re so pumped that we alternate between wanting to run around the block and resisting the urge to shove our newly minted words under the nose of anybody we can talk into reading them. Without doubt, The Zone is one awesome place.
Too bad we can’t stay there all the time.

Related Posts: Does Your Story Have the “Extraordinary Factor”?

Plot vs. Character: Which Is More Important?

11 Killer Chapter Breakers

If brevity is the soul of wit, then economy is the energy of prose. Don’t get me wrong: I love complex, twisty, beautiful sentences. As Aleksandar Hemon pointed out in a recent interview with The Writer magazine:

I like to push language toward poetry, to activate the dormant possibilities inherent in it. That’s what great literature does, in my mind—it re-creates the language, it mines the beauty that is sometimes deeply buried inside mountains of clichés and platitudes.

However, the possibilities of prose will never be realized so long as it is burdened with unnecessary fat. Learn to trim your sentences into lean, mean bundles of incisive power, and their inherent beauty and complexity will run laps around their former flabbiness.

1. Don’t state the obvious. Don’t say your character “reached out a hand for his glass.” If he’s reaching, he’s obviously going to using his hand. No need to say he “stood up,” since he’s certainly not going to be standing down.

2. Resist the urge to explain. If you’ve written a dynamic bit of prose, don’t feel like you have to explain it to the reader. This is especially true of dialogue, which we often feel we need to explain via speaker tags, such as “screeched” or “purred” or “stuttered.”

3. Don’t repeat yourself. Too often, we either forget we’ve already explained something, or we feel we purposely need to remind the reader. Trust the reader’s memory. If you said the character’s father died at the beginning of the book, chances are the reader will still remember two chapters in.

4. Write active, not passive. Passivity not only bloats sentences, it also saps energy. Active verbs often convey meaning much more clearly and more colorfully than state of being verbs. Analyze your passive sentences to discover if they can be rewritten more poignantly in an active voice.

5. Cut clichés. Even when they don’t take up much space, clichés are so much dead weight simply because they add nothing new or vibrant to our prose. Delete, rewrite, and tweak clichés to create phrases that are new and memorable.

6. Cut ambiguities. Prose should always be sharp and distinct. Never leave readers floundering through weak sentence structures in search of your meaning. If your character is a foot away from a jagged precipice, don’t say he’s “about a foot” or “almost a foot.” Be precise.

7. Cut pointless beauty. Beautiful phrases are the pride of all writers. But if your writing is beautiful just for the sake of beauty, it’s not worth keeping. Cut useless flourishes wherever they fail to further the story.

8. Cut the pompous. Inflated language designed to impress the reader with your intelligence and mastery of the English language has no place in your writing. Skip the “therefores” and “whereins” and “heretofores.”

9. Watch your punctuation. Semicolons, colons, and parentheses all have an important role to fill in punctuation, but guard yourself against overuse. If a comma or period will do just as well, use it instead.

10. Chop modifiers. Nothing weights a sentence more than misused adverbs and adjectives. Use them with sparing care. If you can eliminate their necessity through the use of punchy verbs and solid nouns, your sentences will never miss the extra poundage.

If we want our characters and plots to hit the reader to the fullest effect, we have to put our sentences on a strict exercise regime that will let them emerge buff and trim and strong enough to the bear the weight of our stories.

Related Posts: Active vs. Passive Voice

Killing Your Darlings

Kill the Big, Fat, Ugly Modifier!
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This week’s video uses the classic World War II movie The Guns of Navarone to help you understand how to up the ante and keep readers glued to the pages just by shortening your story’s timeline.




Video Transcription: Your hero’s goal is what shapes your story. Without something he needs or wants, your hero just an interesting personality, at best. But even if your hero has a strong goal, readers are likely to lose interest if your character has all the time in the world to achieve that goal. Giving your characters a deadline—and suitably disagreeable consequences if they fail to meet it—ups the ante and keeps readers glued to your story.


The classic World War II movie The Guns of Navarone, directed by J. Lee Thompson, presents a masterful use of the ticking clock. The heroes are on a suicide mission to destroy two huge guns in a German fortress. From the very beginning, they’re on tight schedule. If they don’t blow up the guns in a just a few days, hundreds of men stranded on the island of Kyros and everyone in the ships sent to rescue them will be killed. You’d think that would be tension enough, but scriptwriter Carl Foreman took things one step further. Halfway into their mission, with a wounded man on their hands and half their supplies destroyed, the team gets word that the deadline has been moved up a full day. Their already suicidal mission now looks completely impossible. Viewers are on the edge of their seats—and right in the palm of the filmmakers’ hands.


Putting a time limit on your character’s goals—whether that goal is to destroy an enemy base or just to buy groceries—brings a whole new level of tension to your story. If your story takes place over a course of weeks, try shortening the timeline to days—and watch that ticking clock energize both your characters and your readers.

Related Posts: Keeping Track of Time

Does Your Story Have the “Extraordinary” Factor

What Characters Want: The Art of Frustration

Stereotypes are bad, right? They’re clichéd stock characters that rob your story of originality and immediacy. Readers realize they’ve read about these characters in dozens of other stories, lose interest, and cast the book aside. True enough, so far. But what we often fail to realize is that stereotypes can be successfully applied in two ways: we can use them and we can play off them.
Because stereotypes are widely recognized, they provide us common ground with the reader. From that starting place, we then have the option of using the reader’s expectations to our advantage in any number of ways. In Characters & Viewpoint, science-fiction legend Orson Scott Card explains:

As storytellers, we can’t stop our readers from making stereotype judgments. In fact, we count on it. We know of and probably share most of the prejudices and stereotypes of the community we live in. When we present a character, we can use those stereotypes to make readers think they understand him.

When we introduce a computer nerd, a cowboy, a scientist, a politician, or a pilot, our readers immediately have preconceived ideas about this character. We don’t have to tell them the cowboy wears boots and rides a horse anymore than we have to explain that the politician dresses in suits and smiles and shakes hands on a frequent basis. Because readers already know about these archetypes, we can save valuable time and space that might otherwise need to be filled with descriptions and explanations.
To some extent, readers even enjoy stereotypes. We deliberately choose to read about cowboys and pilots because these characters possess certain traits we admire and enjoy. However, the line between successfully using a stereotype and abusing it to the reader’s boredom is a fine one. John Truby, in his marvelous book The Anatomy of Story, cautions:

An archetype resonates deeply with an audience and creates very strong feelings in response. But it is a blunt tool in the writer’s repertoire. Unless you give the archetype detail, it can become a stereotype.

The solution is to play against the stereotype by crafting unique, realistic personalities that break the bounds of expectation. When characters act in ways the reader wasn’t expecting, the reader’s curiosity is immediately piqued. He wants to know why this politician gets away with wearing cut-off shorts to work or why this girl who looks like a computer nerd is really a fashion model.
The first time we meet a person in real life, we inevitably make assumptions about him from his appearance and mannerisms. In short, we stereotype him. But when we get to know him better, his individuality reveals itself, and we realize he is an indefinably unique person who breaks the expectations of his stereotype in many ways. Characters are no different. If you met your character on the street, what stereotype might he appear to fulfill? Which of those stereotypical traits can you use and which can you play against to make the most of your reader’s inevitable preconceptions?


Related Posts: The Myth of Originality

Making Cliches Work for You

Variations on a Theme
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This week’s video reveals how Alexandre Dumas perfectly balanced the backstory in his beloved classic The Three Musketeers, to give readers just the amount of information at just the right moment to keep them gobbling up the story.




Related Posts: Backstory: The Importance of What Isn’t Told

Top 7 Reasons Readers Stop Reading

9 Ways to Strengthen Your Beginning

You wouldn’t think you’d have to remind a writer to daydream. After all, the reason he became a writer was likely a natural outgrowth of his daydreams. But, too often, in the mad rush of life’s busy work, daydreams are relegated to the shadowy cellars of our minds. We’ll think about them “when we have time.” When time never seems to come, however, our daydreams become a luxury we can’t afford. But, as writers, the one thing we can’t afford is not to daydream.

Sitting down to write every day isn’t enough. Daydreams can’t always be conjured. They need time to grow, to ripen, and to ferment. They need to sit in the backs our minds all day long, floating just under the surface, only a fingertip away from our conscious thought at any moment. If we hope to have a delicious, mature flavor to pour onto the page during our writing sessions, we need to have our stories simmering throughout the day.

To some extent, this is a no-brainer. We’ve all experienced those glorious rushes in which we eat, sleep, and breathe our stories for days, even weeks and months, on end. We have the luxury of letting our stories take precedence in our minds, and we’re able to run through our daily activities on autopilot. But it doesn’t always work that way.

I can attest from personal experience that, when my schedule gets crammed, deadlines loom, and the world impinges on my solitude, my daydreaming dissipates like a cloud of steam. Sometimes I stop in my tracks, shocked to realize that my story hasn’t crossed my mind all day—and that my writing is likely to suffer as a result. On those days when life is doing its tilt-a-whirl impression, I have to make a conscious effort to keep my imagination within reach. Although I don’t want my daydreams to distract from my productivity and efficiency in non-writing activities, I do want to keep my characters walking beside me, ready to catch my eye and offer a few interesting ideas whenever I hit a slow moment in my day’s work.

In his book A Writer’s Space, creativity coach Eric Maisel, Ph.D., tells about a client who traced her struggle with writer’s block back to her lack of daydreaming:

She also understood that unless she made self-reflection [daydreaming] a daily practice, her writing life might slip away again. The practice she instituted involved letting go of and mourning several of her previous activities (a few of which, once she let them go, she didn’t miss or mourn all that much)…

Daydreaming isn’t always something you can do simultaneously with other activities. It can sometimes be time consuming. You may find that you need to take a break now and then, go for a walk, or maybe just stare out a window in order to get your logical brain slowed down and your creative brain revved up. But the sacrifice in time is always worth it in inspiration.

Related Posts: Downtime? What Downtime?

Making Time to Write

Opening Yourself to Inspiration
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This week’s video shows uses Daphne du Maurier’s excellent characterization in The House on the Strand to show how to antagonize your protagonist in ways large and small.


Video Transcription: Much of the conflict in our stories comes in the form of people causing problems for your main character. The most obvious form of trouble is that presented by the antagonist, that supremely evil being whose sole purpose in life is to wreak havoc in the universe and cause problems for your MC. But don’t overlook the opportunities for conflict that exist on a much smaller scale in all of your minor characters—what fantasy author Janice Hardy calls “minitagonists.”

In her time-travel book The House on the Strand, Daphne du Maurier does a marvelous job of keeping the conflict rolling without ever resorting to a major bad guy. Most of the tension in the book is the result, not of a super-villain out to do unspeakable things to the hero, but instead the protagonist’s wife. The hero’s desire to keep his time travelling, via an experimental drug, a secret, and his wife’s desire for him to leave England, take a high-paying job in America, drop his long-time friendship with the eccentric professor who invented the drug, and generally behave as a responsible husband and father put them at odds throughout much of the story.

An antagonist doesn’t have to be someone who wants to kill the protagonist. An antagonist can be anyone who stands in the way of the hero accomplishing his goal, whether his goal is to save the world or just order a double latte. The more roadblocks you put between the hero and his goal, the more conflict—and the more tension—you’re going pour into your story. So take a second look at even the friendliest of your characters and see if you can’t use their ordinary, everyday, mostly innocuous goals to antagonize your protagonist in ways large and small. Your protag may not thank you for it, but your readers will!

Related Posts: The Necessity of Conflict

Why the Devil Makes a Boring Bad Guy

What Characters Want: The Art of Frustration

One of the joys of fiction is its ability to transport us to faraway places. Just by cracking the covers of a book, we can visit the far reaches of Bombay or São Paulo and the imaginative wonders of made-up worlds and galaxies. We plan our settings meticulously, researching details and creating spectacular backdrops. In light of all that work and fascination, however, we often lose sight of the fact that settings are more than scenery. They’re the cohesive grounding, the foundation, of the whole story—and as such they need to be used with sparing care.


In his marvelously insightful book The Anatomy of Story, film consultant John Truby points out:

Many writers… mistakenly believe that since you can go anywhere, you should. This is a serious mistake, because if you break the single arena of your story, the drama will literally dissipate. Having too many arenas results in fragmented, inorganic stories.

The most powerful stories are inevitably those that are distilled to the most inherent ingredients by removing extraneous information that detracts from their potent focus. Introducing a slew of settings is much like introducing a slew of characters: The reader’s attention fragments, and both the writer and the reader have to spend more time and effort to keep track of details and orient their emotional connection.


Following are some tips for distilling your settings to the perfect number:


1. Choose your primary settings wisely.
Setting should never be an arbitrary decision. Instead of throwing your characters into the first locale that pops to mind, consider the needs of your story. You’re going to be spending a lot of time in this setting, so you need to choose a place that will enhance the requirements of your plot.


2. Utilize and explore your primary setting.
Once you’ve decided upon an interesting setting, take advantage of it. If your character is in a prisoner of war camp, a spaceship, a cattle ranch, or a Victorian mansion, then use every nook and cranny to further your story and hold your reader’s attention. Readers would much rather explore one fascinating setting, rather than catch only a glimpse of half a dozen.


3. Combine settings.
Streamline your sub-settings by combining them wherever possible. Instead of sending your protagonist to a restaurant, a pub, and a food fair, try combining them. This eliminates the need to describe a new setting in every scene, allows your readers the satisfaction of returning to a familiar place, and presents deepening layers of possibilities with recurring minor characters.
4. Foreshadow settings.
Maintaining only the needed number of settings allows you unprecedented opportunities for foreshadowing. When important scenes occur in familiar settings, it’s that much easier to lay the groundwork in earlier scenes, thus bringing your characters full circle and providing a gratifying sense of closure for readers.


As one of the most important resources in your possession, settings need to be utilized wisely and frugally, so they can bring their full impact to the story.


Related Posts: One Thing the Movies Can Teach You About Setting

Are You Using Setting to Deepen Your Characters?

The Major Role of Minor Characters
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