Wordplay

This week’s video uses Catherine Palmer’s Sunrise Song to demonstrate how even just one sensory detail can animate your settings.



Video Transcription: Unlike movies, which are inherently visual and auditory, written fiction depends solely on the author’s power of description to evoke reaction of the senses from the reader. This is tricky business, since we want to bring the scene to life, but we don’t want to bore the reader with lengthy explanations. The solution is to use highly evocative phrases to pique all five senses. Too often, we focus on sight and sound to the exclusion of taste, touch, and smell. But, because of the limitations of our medium, we can’t afford to waste even one of these senses.

In the opening chapter of Sunrise Song, Catherine Palmer does a marvelous job of raising her Kenyan setting into the three-dimensional realm thanks to her deft use of a single sensory detail. She writes that “a rich smell of heat and soil and fragrant grasses hung thick in the air.” In an instant, I was transported from merely visualizing the African bush to actually participating in it. Experts claim that smell is the sense connected most integrally to memory, and, as a result, it holds significant power in bringing moments to life.

As you’re writing and rewriting, pay attention to the senses. Look beyond just simple descriptions of how things look, and start thinking about how you can use small telling details to evoke all five senses. Of course, there’s no need to bombard the reader with five descriptions of every scene. But try to balance your use of the senses over the course of your entire story. If you can do that, you’ll be able to pull your reader out of his chair and right into your book.


Plans are underway to launch a non-fiction series of how-to books on the craft of writing, incorporating some of the information on Wordplay. I would appreciate your input on what subjects you would like me to cover. Please take a minute to vote in the poll and tell me what topic you would find most helpful.

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Common wisdom insists that fiction is meant to entertain, not preach. The novel isn’t a soapbox for our religious, political, social, or philosophical views. If we try to use it as such, we’re likely to sacrifice our stories and alienate our readers. And yet, ironically enough, many of the world’s greatest and most beloved pieces of literature are stories with blatant moral messages. John Truby, in his brilliant book The Anatomy of Story, comments on this seeming contradiction:

According to Hollywood lore, it was Samuel Goldwyn who said, “If you want to send a message, try Western Union.” He was right about not sending a message in an obvious, preachy way. But stories with powerful themes, expressed properly, are not only more highly regarded but more popular as well.

We read to be entertained, but many of us also read to learn, to grow, and to stretch our horizons. We enjoy stories that challenge us and inspire us. This kind of depth is found only in stories that are profoundly honest, and stories can never be honest if their authors aren’t willing to lay themselves open on the page, to pour out their deepest convictions and most passionate beliefs about the human experience.

As an author, your most powerful gift is your unique and integral view of the world. When you strip fiction down to its essentials, the author’s viewpoint is all there is. He may mask it artfully in the colorful garb of diverse characters and impartial dialogue, but if he’s not willing to share with his readers his own passionate worldview, he’s not giving them anything more than fluff.

So does this mean we should drag out soapboxes and start haranguing our readers into converting to our own viewpoints? Absolutely not. Nothing turns fiction readers off more quickly than a condescending author who preaches at them. Incorporating a message into our stories does not mean spelling out beliefs and arguments. Instead, it’s a matter of choosing strong themes in which we fervently believe, crafting multi-dimensional characters who struggle with the gray areas of life along with the rest of us, and asking the hard questions. Someone once said that being a novelist isn’t about offering answers; it’s about asking questions.

In his book A Writer’s Space, Dr. Eric Maisel poses some questions of his own, ones which every writer should be asking himself:

Writing is interpretation. You are obliged to offer yours. If you want to say nothing, offend no one, tell a happy little tale, and otherwise act the innocent, that choice is available to you. Just remember that even then you are saying something and that we are watching…. You can play it safe or you can speak your mind. Why venture into the public space of readers and audiences if your goal is to keep your real thoughts private? If you are bothering to write, say what you mean…. Make a list of the issues you are willing to shed some blood over. Read your list over. Are you writing about any of these? If not, why not?

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This week’s video explores how a deft use of symbolism can strengthen your story’s thematic and climactic elements.




Video Transcription: The use of symbolism in fiction is more difficult to learn than you might think, perhaps in large part because, when done well, symbols are almost invisible within the framework of the story. Those that aren’t invisible often feel heavy-handed or even clichéd, such as the inevitable use of the American flag as a symbol of inspiration in war movies. Like the flag, some symbols are almost universal, and we utilize them to evoke reader emotions without even realizing what we’re doing. For instance, springtime is often used to symbolize new growth, redemption, or resurrection.

The most powerful and unique symbols are those that flow effortlessly from your story. We find a good example in the 2000 movie The Patriot, directed by Roland Emmerich. After his son is murdered by a British colonel, plantation owner Benjamin Martin, played by Mel Gibson, salvages the boy’s toy soldiers from his burning home, so he can melt the lead into musketballs. The toy soldiers appear throughout the movie, underlining the character’s mixed emotions of loss, grief, anger, vengeance, and eventually a desire to fight for the cause his sons believed in.

This, by itself, is an effective use of symbol. However, the film’s coup de grace is the moment, right before the climactic battle scene, when the main character melts down the final soldier into a final musketball, which he will use to shoot the antagonist. It’s a superb use of symbolism that is powerful without being obvious, subtle without being ambiguous, and flows naturally from the story’s plot.


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I’ve been telling stories since I was two years old. I’ve been writing stories since I was twelve. I have two published books (and two more scheduled) to my name. I know enough about the craft to write this blog, numerous guest posts, a podcast, and a vlog, sharing that knowledge with other writers. Sounds like I’ve really got a handle on this writing business, doesn’t it?


The truth, however, is a little more fluid than that. The truth is I really have no idea what I’m doing. In fact, no author does. I could have written an opening paragraph about the talents and accomplishments of a Pulitzer Prize winner and the revelation at the end would still hark back to Ernest Hemingway’s admission:

We are all apprentices in a craft where no one becomes a master.

Screenwriter William Goldman wrote in the essay anthology Tales from the Script (edited by Peter Hanson and Paul Robert Herman):

[N]obody knows anything. If we knew what we were doing, every movie would be wonderful.

At first glance, that may seem pretty self-defeating. If we’re never going to conquer the art of writing, what’s the point? I can hear all you perfectionists out there throwing in the towel already. But, if we flip the coin on its head, and look at the other side, we discover some mighty interesting benefits to this seeming defeatism, including the marvelous commiserative comfort of knowing that even the likes of Hemingway and Goldman struggled with getting a story to work.


Their characters didn’t always pop, their dialogue sometimes fell flat, their endings sometimes bombed—and they didn’t know how to fix it. They stared at the cursor (or whatever it was authors stared at before the advent of the word processor) in frustration. They probably procrastinated. They undoubtedly experienced those moments of terror when they looked at the blank page. Sounds familiar, doesn’t it? And yet these writers, and many more just like them, have produced lasting literature and film. Hemingway won the Pulitzer and the Nobel; Goldman won two Oscars.


Because of its inherent connection to humanity’s emotional and subconscious core, art can’t be contained in a rigid set of principles. It’s an evolving, shifting, rather nebulous creation that pours out of us in ways we can’t always control. Every book I write is a new adventure. Perhaps I master each story as I write it, but that doesn’t prepare me for the next story I write. I have to learn afresh how to write each story. We study the craft in order to create the most effective vessel possible for our art, but effective vessels don’t constitute great art. It’s that bit of uncontrollable magic that boils up from someplace we didn’t even know we had that makes all the difference. None of us can control that, no matter how long we’ve been writing, how many books we’ve published, or how much we’ve studied the craft.


That’s the joy of fiction: that this unexplainable magic can somehow pour from our unworthy fingertips and create something that will touch the lives of others and be remembered beyond our own lifetimes. If we knew what we were doing every step of the way, the adventure of it all would be long gone.


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This week’s video explains how to convey crucial information to your reader without overburdening your dialogue.




Video Transcription: Dialogue is such a handy little technique that we sometimes try to force it to carry more of a load than it should. One of the loads that dialogue should never have to bear is the weight of the info dump. When characters start telling each other things they already know, just to keep the poor ignorant reader informed, their dialogue often teeters under the unnecessary burden.

For example, in a historical mystery I just read, the author needed to keep the reader up to date on the state of a war. She chose to do this by using a lengthy paragraph of dialogue. This isn’t necessarily a problem, except that both the character talking and the character listening are already more than aware of this information—as is driven home when the listening character waits patiently for the first character’s speech to end, then makes the ploy even more obvious by shouting, “I know that!”

The necessity to tell the reader important facts—whether those facts are character backstories, scientific data, historical settings, or whatever—is common to almost every story. Slipping information into dialogue often seems like an easy way to remain as invisible as possible, but allowing characters to conduct unbelievable discussions in which they hash over what, for them, is old news, only draws more attention than ever to info dumps. In most instances, you’ll have much better luck sketching your information in a quick paragraph of narrative, rather than forcing it into dialogue that doesn’t ring true to either the situation or the characters.


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The secret to memorable characters isn’t so much creating a strong character as it is creating a strong character arc. You can come up with the most entertaining, marvelous character imaginable, but unless you also give him a strong and convincing character arc, his story will lack depth and power.

Character arcs are bound up in the catalyst of change. You can chart a character’s arc through the progression of the story by comparing his personality, his behavior, his personal values, and his beliefs at the beginning and end of the book. How have they changed? In his fabulous book The Anatomy of Story, script consultant John Truby explains:

True character change involves a challenging and changing of basic beliefs, leading to new moral action by the hero.

Creating a solid, memorable character arc requires several important ingredients:

• Start out with a clear idea of who the character is at the beginning of the novel. What does he care about? What does he believe? How does he behave in certain situations?
• Usually (but not always) a main character’s arc will show him growing into a better person. That means he has to begin from a place of imperfection or incompleteness.
• Give the reader concrete examples throughout the book, but particularly early on, of the behavior and beliefs that the character needs to change.
• Growth needs to be slow and steady throughout the middle of the book. Give the character the tools he needs to improve himself. This can come in the form of a mentor’s advice or even just the character’s actions creating a situation he recognizes as untenable.
• Save the moment of revelation so that it coincides with the emotional and physical climax. This isn’t always possible, but when you can bring the climaxes of the outer and inner journeys together, the result is explosive.
• Prove the character’s inner changes through his actions. It’s not enough to have him vow to be a better person; he has to prove it to the reader. Sometimes you can find a nice parallelism by reversing his earlier actions. If he was cruel to a bum on the street in an early scene, perhaps he could go out of his way to buy a meal for a bum at the end of the story.

The character’s outer journey—his progression through the story, one domino at a time—comprises the plot. It’s possible to write a story that consists entirely of the outer journey. But unless the character also makes an inner journey, the story will lack weight and resonance. We read because we want to vicariously experience exciting adventures, but the stories we most remember are those that also resonate with the deep, ever-changing human core we all share.

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Show and Tell
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This week’s video points out the pitfalls of failing to properly tag your dialogue and offers a few pointers for making sure your readers always know which character is speaking.


Video Transcription: Dialogue is one of the most interesting and useful parts of any story. As readers, we all love a witty conversation, but what we don’t love is when we have no idea what character is saying what.

Having just finished a memoir in which the author used speaker attributions only once or twice throughout his long dialogue sections, I can attest that the most likely reaction from readers will be their banging the covers shut and smacking themselves on the head with your book. By the time I was four or five lines into a conversation, I inevitably lost track of who was saying what and had to retreat to the beginning of the scene and count down lines to figure out who was speaking. Frustrating? Oh yeah.

Fortunately, this is an easy enough pitfall to avoid. All you have to do is insert speaker attributions—he said or she said—or action beats—he took a swig of coffee, she opened the mail—every few lines to keep readers oriented. The word “said” is almost invisible to most readers, so it won’t interfere with your dialogue in the least. And pertinent action beats will keep readers grounded in the scene and prevent talking-head syndrome, in which characters aren’t doing anything but sitting around talking. Even more important, your readers will be much less likely to use your book as a blackjack, and you can be sure they’ll thank you for their lack of a headache.


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The inciting event is the moment your character’s world is forever changed. It knocks over the first domino in the line of dominoes that forms your plot. It sets off an irrevocable chain reaction that will eventually lead your character to the maelstrom of your climax. So how do you go about creating an inciting event that will fuel your plot and drive your characters forward?

What is an inciting event?

In his October 2003 Writer’s Digest article “Structure Secrets,” bestselling legal suspense author James Scott Bell describes the inciting event as a doorway:

The key question to ask yourself is this: Can my lead walk away from the plot right now and go on as he has before? If the answer is yes, you haven’t gone through the first doorway yet.

What isn’t an inciting event?

Your story may include several important plot points before you get to the inciting event. For example, in the 2000 film Gladiator, the inciting event—the death of Emperor Marcus Aurelius—doesn’t occur until after several important scenes, including Aurelius offering his throne to the protagonist. Even though the preceding scenes are important, they do not irrevocably change the character’s world.

Where should the inciting event occur?

Generally speaking, the inciting event should occur not quite a quarter of the way into your story. Setting it this late in the story allows you to appropriately pace the introduction of your character, his personal problems, and his normal world, so readers will sympathize with him and understand the stakes when the inciting event blasts into view. For example, Gladiator’s inciting event takes place after the character’s normal world has been established (via the opening battle and the main character’s interactions with the emperor and other important characters).

What constitutes a powerful inciting event?

Inciting events are as widely varied as their stories. Not all inciting events have to be earth-shattering tragedies, such as the death of a loved one. They can be as simple as the character moving to a new town (North and South by Elizabeth Gaskell), taking a new job (Twelve O’Clock High), meeting someone (The Last of the Mohicans by James Fenimore Cooper), or even buying a pet (Marley & Me by John Grogan). What all inciting events have in common is that they:

• Almost always include action. In most instances, a character’s decision to take action doesn’t become irrevocable until he actually acts upon it.
• Directly influence the story to follow. Robbing a bank may change the character’s life, but it’s not an inciting event unless the story that follows couldn’t have happened without that robbery.
• Create conflict. Because change is difficult for and even resisted by most humans, it almost always creates an atmosphere of conflict. The more change an inciting event creates, the deeper the conflict, the more intriguing the story.
• Grab the reader’s attention. Your entire premise turns around the inciting event, so go for something special. This is your first and most important opportunity to grab your reader’s attention. Don’t settle for something mundane.
•  Should be followed by action. A character’s decision to take action doesn’t become irrevocable until he acts upon it. The protagonist, reacts to the emperor’s death by refusing to serve the murdering son—and then must take the consequences of his actions when the new emperor massacres his family.

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This week’s video shows how Daphne du Maurier used foreshadowing to keep readers involved in her leisurely generational saga Hungry Hill.




Video Transcription: The trick to writing good fiction is giving readers a reason to keep turning pages. Our goal is tantalize them with the promise that good things are yet to come. One of the best ways to accomplish this is with foreshadowing. As the word itself suggests, this technique casts a shadow of things to come across the early chapters of the book. Readers can only see a vague outline of what’s coming, but because they know something’s coming, they wait with baited breath to find out what it is.

Daphne du Maurier’s multi-generational saga Hungry Hill follows an aristocratic Irish family down through the 19th century. The book opens when the family patriarch John Brodrick is finagling the financing of a copper mine he wants to install on the beautiful, pastoral Hungry Hill. The opening of the mine itself is a straightforward event, but du Maurier skillfully weaves a web of foreboding around the mine and its future, leading the reader to sense that great tragedy will befall this family if the mine is installed as planned.

Much of the story that follows is unrelated to the mine. It meanders leisurely through the years and the family’s various episodic misadventures. As a result, the book could easily have lost its focus and its interest for readers. But because du Maurier spread a layer of foreshadowing at the very beginning of the book, the reader knows more is yet to come—and he keeps reading. If you find your story flagging, ask yourself if you’ve giving readers a reason to keep reading. Do they know grand things are yet to come? If not, consider inserting some strategic foreshadowing into earlier scenes.


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