Wordplay

This week’s video offers David Guterson’s East of the Mountains as a simple and effective model for bringing scenes to life by emphasizing specific details.



Video Transcription: We’re always being told we’re not supposed to pile on the adjectives to describe something. But how else can we share with readers the nuanced vision we see in our own mind’s eye? David Guterson’s lyrical study of life and death in East of the Mountains offers a surprisingly simple and effective model for the rest of us to follow. His technique is nothing more or less than highlighting the details of whatever it is he wants to emphasize.

The entire book is flowing with fabulously detailed prose, but nowhere is this more evident than in an early description of a young woman who offers the protagonist a ride after he survives a car accident. Guterson tells his audience that the young woman is beautiful, but had he just left it at that, the readers probably would have acknowledged the fact without ever really feeling it. Thanks to Guterson’s adept use of details, subtly scattered through the prose, we come to share the narrator’s opinion of the woman’s beauty. The narration takes the time to show intimate details, such as the way she plays with her hair, the manner in which she hands over a bottle of water, and her posture as she sits in the front seat of her van.

Guterson’s details aren’t pushy. They don’t shout the truth in the reader’s face and force him to see the woman the way Guterson wants. Aside from his initial use of “beautiful” as an adjective, he never makes a point of drawing attention to how the character looks. Her actions and the details used to describe them are mundane and most don’t even pertain to appearance. Rather, it’s the loving attention Guterson showers on her by his focus on the little things that makes readers understand her beauty in the same way the protagonist does.



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Describing Characters

Are You Falling the Brave/Brilliant/Beautiful Trap?

Ever since Edward Bulwer-Lytton slapped readers with his infamous “dark and stormy night” line, writers everywhere have been leery of misusing weather in their stories. After all, who among us wants a contest for the worst opening lines in fiction named after us? But avoiding weather altogether is a mistake of its own. Weather offers all kinds of atmospheric, descriptive, and plot-advancing advantages. Let’s a look at a few:

1. Sets the mood. Ever notice how, in a movie, whenever a character receives bad news, it starts raining? Using weather to mirror the character’s attitude and set the tone can strengthen a scene’s emotional impact.

2. Offers symbolism. To a character at war, snow at Christmastime might make him reminiscent about home (unless, of course, he grew up in Australia). Because weather and its rotation in the seasons is universal, it offers built-in value as a symbolic motif.

3. Raises the stakes. All kinds of natural-disaster stories are built entirely around the weather’s ability to become life-threatening. We can also utilize nasty weather on a smaller scale to increase the stakes in any story. As April Henry put it in her July 2003 Writer's Digest article “Build the Thrill,” “Life is complicated enough when the Mafia and the CIA want you dead, but what if you’re also trapped by a snowstorm in an isolated farmhouse without power?”

4. Heightens the tension. Let’s take that isolated-farmhouse-in-a-snowstorm example and say your character knows a serial killer is stalking in the woods outside. Thanks to the weather, your character can’t get out—but, of course, the serial killer will want in. Readers won’t be able to look away.

5. Introduces irony. A beautiful spring morning, complete with chirping birds, set on a muddy battlefield presents a contrast that brings all the details into sharper focus. Maybe your character falls in love in the midst of a thunderstorm, or maybe he receives that batch of bad news on a sun-soaked beach.

6. Creates an interesting setting. Weather has the ability to take a scene from two-dimensional to interactive three-dimensional. It removes the sterility and forces characters and readers alike to feel the places in which they find themselves. Add rain, wind, snow, or humidity for extra spice in practically any scene.

7. Presents evocative imagery. In my historical western A Man Called Outlaw, I was able to use a snowflake to not only create a beautiful image, but to make an important statement about my character’s aloneness. Weather is visually striking, and that’s always an asset to a writer.

While you’re utilizing these positive attributes of weather to bring your stories to life, make sure you learn the lesson offered by Bulwer-Lytton. Weather, like most description, is best delivered in small doses, interspersed with the action and dialogue, and offered only when important. Readers won’t let you get away with long paragraphs describing the rain trickling down the window—but they will appreciate the glittering edge of vibrancy weather imparts to your story when properly used.

Tell me your opinion: Have you read a story in which weather was used effectively?

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This week, I was thrilled to discover that Wordplay has been named by the Write to Done site as one of the Top 10 Blogs for Writers. I'm honored to be listed alongside nine other fabulous blogs. My thanks to everyone who nominated Wordplay. I'm honored  God has allowed my little site to help others along the writing road. Be sure to check out the blogs of my fellow winners for more writing tips:

• StoryFix .
• Men with Pens
• Make a Living Writing.
• Cats Eye Writer
• The Renegade Writer.
• Writer Unboxed..
• The Creative Penn.
• Victoria Mixon.
• Courage to Create

This week’s video shows how an annotated volume of George Eliot’s classic Silas Marner sapped the story’s power through over-explanation.




Video Transcription: Because it’s so important that our readers get what we’re trying to say in our stories, it can be tempting for us to explain things point blank at every juncture. Avoiding confusion is vital. However, when we fail to master the art of subtlety, we not only rob our stories of added power and depth, we also frustrate readers with our patronizing attitude. An annotated volume of George Eliot’s classic Silas Marner offers an interesting example of how over-explaining can weaken even a strong story.


This particular version of Eliot’s story of a miser’s redemption at the hands of an orphan girl was edited by a professor who apparently felt his readers wouldn’t be able to grasp the nuances of Eliot’s writing unless he explained them in the footnotes. For example, at certain crucial stages of the plot, the editor takes Eliot’s delicate “showing” of the protagonist’s growth from reclusive miser to loving father and packages it in a single sentence of description that, although it may perfectly explain the author’s intent, kills its power instantaneously.


The goal of every author is to write a story so strong and deep that it doesn’t require any commentary. Some of the most powerful stories in literature are those that offer characters and events with hardly any explanation. Watch out for places in your prose where you effectively show your character’s development or your story world—and then guard yourself against sucking the color right out of these scenes by imprisoning them in careful explanations. Believe in your writing, and allow it to stand on its own.


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Why One Descriptor Is More Than Two


Skip the Boring Parts

One of the most common bits of telling I run across is also one of the easiest to overlook. It’s also, fortunately, one of the easiest to correct. Let’s take a look at the following impromptu example and see if you can spot the unnecessary telling:

Therese stood on the corner of East and Maple. From her vantage point, she could see the argument developing between the owner of the upset hot-dog cart and the policeman who had just arrived on the scene. Even from across the street, she smelled the mustard on the sidewalk and heard the vendor shouting. She felt her chest tighten in commiseration with his lost profits.

Did you catch it? Practically every verb in this paragraph is telling the reader what Therese’s senses are picking up, instead of showing the reader so that he can experience the sensations with her. Every time you write that a character saw/smelled/heard/felt something, see if you can reword the sentence to show the reader just what it is the character is seeing/smelling/hearing/feeling. In most instances, the rewrite only requires a few word snips and maybe a little maneuvering of phrases. The difference is often subtle, but it can produce powerful results. Let’s rework Therese’s paragraph to allow the reader to participate in the scene:

Therese stood on the corner of East and Maple. Across the street, an argument blazed between the owner of the upset hot-dog cart and the policeman who had just arrived on the scene. “You see this? Are you seeing this?” the vendor screamed. “You think I can afford this? How am I going to buy tomorrow’s hot dogs if I can’t sell any today? What am I supposed to take home to my wife and kids tonight, huh? Tell me that, huh?” The tangy odor of the mustard puddling on the sidewalk drifted across the street, and Therese’s chest tightened. Poor guy.

Can you hear the hot dog vendor’s voice? Can you smell that mustard? Can you sense Therese’s commiseration? With the exception of the added dialogue, the only difference in the second paragraph is the shifted emphasis from Therese’s senses to the sensory stimuli themselves.
Don’t feel as if you have to delete every instance of a character feeling/smelling/seeing/etc., but keep your eyes open for places where you can effortlessly strengthen your scene by using verbs that show instead of tell.

Tell me your opinion: What are your verbs doing in your most recent scene? Are they showing or telling?

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Never Name an Emotion
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This week’s video offers a nifty trick, via Sir Terry Pratchett’s Guards! Guards!, for taking seemingly worn-out ideas and using them to create something brand new.




Video Transcription: Originality is hard work—mostly because there’s nothing new under the sun, and it’s difficult to make something out of nothing. But I’m going to show you a nifty trick for taking seemingly worn-out ideas and turning them on their heads to create something fresh and vibrant. In a nutshell, all this trick involves is grabbing a cliché, acknowledging that it’s a cliché, and then spinning it 180 degrees until it’s something that both builds upon the original idea and creates a new slant of its own.


Sir Terry Pratchett’s humorous fantasy Guards! Guards! manages to do just this on almost every page. He tackles clichés that range from fantasy standards such as dragons and prophesied heroes to general tropes and even real-life truisms about politics and relationships. The result is a cheeky story that entertains readers with its unexpected plot turns and its fresh and interesting viewpoints. At a glance, Pratchett’s subject matter—a fantasy world inhabited by such usual suspects as dwarves and dragons—doesn’t seem terribly original. And, indeed, if he had taken his story world at face value himself, he would probably just have re-trod paths long beaten by other authors. But because he left no cliché unturned, he ended up with a book that was undeniably original.


Flipping clichés is a time-honored practice in humorous fiction, since the unexpected is often the essence of a good joke. But even more serious-minded writers can take advantage of the lessons found in Guards! Guards! Sometimes just looking at an overused idea from a new angle can present entirely new possibilities.


Tell me your opinion: Are there any clichés you can turn on their heads in your current story?


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The Myth of Originality

Whenever we come up with a wonderful new story idea, it’s tempting to immediately sit down at the keyboard and start bringing it to life on the page. But that’s rarely the best way to turn that sparkling new idea into a worthwhile and enduring story. In his book How to Write Science Fiction & Fantasy, Orson Scott Card admits:

Good stories don’t come from trying to write a story the moment I think of the first idea. …all the stories I was still proud of six months after writing them have come from ideas that ripened for many months—usually years—between the time I first thought of them and the time they were ready to put into a story.

Like vine-ripened tomatoes, stories require the slow nourishment of sunlight and warm imaginative soil to grow into rosy, juicy maturity. Otherwise, they risk suffering from the blight of the following pitfalls:

1. Meandering plot.
2. Two-dimensional characters.
3. Shallow themes.
4. Underdeveloped/nonexistent subplots.
5. Weak climax.

Writing up sparkly new ideas is like falling in love at first sight and getting married the next day. You might live happily ever after. But chances are good that, after a little more time has passed, you’ll realize that you really don’t know this story so well at all. In fact, at times, it will feel like a total stranger, and you’ll begin wondering what in tarnation you’ve gotten yourself into. It takes time and breathing space for us to figure out which ideas are worth committing to for the long haul. I’ve fallen in love at first sight with many ideas that eventually proved they didn’t have the depth or staying power to support a long-term relationship.

Stories aren’t the only victims when we pull them off the vine before they’ve ripened. We suffer as well by

1. Losing our passion for a story
2. Realizing we’ve wasted our time
3. And developing the habit of skipping from one new idea to the next without ever finishing a draft.

As a caveat, let me throw out the fact that, for some authors, the only way to ripen a story is to fool around with it on paper. For me, putting a story on paper—even in the roughest of outlines—risks ruining the heady organic ebb and flow of my imagination. I prefer to leave my ideas in the greenhouse of my subconscious, pulling them out and pruning them from time to time, until I feel they’re ready. (Margaret Atwood once said that “you may be wrong about being ready, but you’re rarely wrong about being not ready.”) However, if this feels all wrong to you on a gut level, don’t be afraid of acknowledging that your initial ramblings on paper may indeed constitute a ripening period of your own. Orson Scott Card again:

For some writers, one of the best ways to help an idea ripen is to try writing a draft of it, seeing what comes up when you actually try to make it into a story. As long as you recognize that the draft you write immediately after thinking of the idea will almost certainly have to be thrown away and rewritten from the beginning, you’ll be fine.

Either way, don’t be in a hurry to write down that brand new idea. Let ripen, and you may be surprised at the full, mature flavor you’re able to reap a year or so into the growing season.


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This week’s video demonstrates, using the 2003 film adaptation of Peter Pan, how to power pack your story’s finale by combining internal and external conflict.




Video Transcription: The more conflict we pile into our stories, the more interested our readers will be. A general rule of thumb states that every page of your story should contain conflict. But, sometimes, it can be difficult to think up enough conflict to fill the nooks and crannies. After all, your hero can’t be battling it out with the villain on every single page. So what to do? The secret found within most successful stories is the combination of the external conflict with the hero’s internal conflict. Doing so offers several benefits, including variation of the conflict within your story, heightened stakes, and, often, and a more enduring resolution.


The most powerful stories are usually those that bring the external and internal conflicts to a climax at the same time. The 2003 film adaptation of Peter Pan did a marvelous job of this. The physical conflict comes to an exciting, swashbuckling apex when the titular character arrives to save Wendy and the Lost Boys and duel it out with Captain Hook for good and all. In itself, the external conflict offers the viewer all kinds of enjoyable tension and its incumbent payoff. But if the movie had stopped at that—if it had failed to bring Pan’s internal conflict into play as well—it would ultimately have fallen flat.


Because the film used the frame of physical conflict to force Pan to face his inner demons, walk with them to the brink of destruction, and then rise up to conquer both them and, as a result, Captain Hook and the pirates as well, it was able to use both elements of conflict to strengthen each other and to present the viewer with a solid and resonant finale. The external conflict was able to give the internal conflict an exciting and dangerous setting, while the internal conflict was able to give the external conflict a deeper meaning. Working hand in hand, they present an unstoppable force of storytelling.


Tell me you opinion: Does your story use its external and internal conflicts to strengthen each other?


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Change Is Key to Powerful Character Arcs


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Let me share a truth that is both deceptively simple and all too often overlooked: Not all writers are created equal. In fact, every writer is as unique as his fingerprints. Just as our stories are (we hope) distinctive, so are our personalities and lifestyles—and, as a result, our working patterns. In pursuit of bettering our craft, we voraciously study the masters by reading every how-to book and author interview we can get our hands on. But what we sometimes don’t realize is that even if a particular method or routine works for one author, that singular success doesn’t automatically make it a universal principle.

In general, human beings like the protective solidity of “rules.” We like to know that if we write one page every day, five days a week, we’ll finish a book in a year and be published in two. But life doesn’t work that way. It may be that writing a page a day is the perfect routine for us, and we will finish that book in a year. But it could also be that the rigidity of such a schedule will keep us from our ultimate productivity. It could be that we will work much better if we allow ourselves more flexibility and less pressure. In The Writer’s December 2010 article “Making time to write,” Cheryl Bolen points out that:

Every author’s goals, writing schedule, and methods are different. Some of us can whip out 20 pages a day; others labor to produce five. You need to determine if you work best doing a set number of pages, or hours, or scenes per day or per week. Which kind of writer are you? You must determine how you produce best.

It’s vital that each author discover for himself the methods that work best for him. Just because Margaret Atwood does X and Stephen King does Y is no reason for us to blindly follow suit. Read widely, learn all you can about what works for other authors, and experiment to discover which methods will offer you the best results.

My own writing routine is a continually evolving process. What worked for me five years ago isn’t necessarily what works for me now, and what works for me now isn’t necessarily going to still work for me in another five years. With every new story I write, I learn a little bit more about myself and the routines that make me most productive. I’m constantly refining my work habits, always listening to my instincts, and paying attention when I feel I’m forcing myself to observe a stricture that just isn’t working.

The individual writer is the only expert into his own proficiency. Never feel as if you have to force your writing habits to mirror someone else’s—no matter how successful they may be in their own right. Find what works for you and stick with it.

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This week’s video offers examples from Barbara Kingsolver’s The Poisonwood Bible to show how she created five unique narrative voices.






Video Transcription: Because all our characters come from just one person—namely us—it can often be a challenge to make them all sound like unique people in their own right. This is a challenge that reaches far beyond dialogue and personality quirks, especially when we’re utilizing more than one narrator. How do we create a different voice for each point-of-view character?


Barbara Kingsolver’s acclaimed The Poisonwood Bible features five POV characters—a mother and her four daughters. All are from the same family and geographic background, all are female, and most are around the same age. With all these similarities in view, it would seem Kingsolver had set herself an insurmountable task in making each character’s voice so unique that it’s instantly recognizable from the others. But she does so, thanks in part to unique vocal tics. But this is only a tiny contributor to her success.


The secret of unique narrative voices lies foremost in the creation of unique characters. Kingsolver presents five complete and in-depth personalities. Her characters’ voices live and breathe on the page because she took the time to get to know them herself and flesh them out. I would venture to guess that, as a result, these characters decided for themselves how they would talk, and Kingsolver had only to let the words spill forth. Had she approached these POVs differently—had she slapped on the vocal tics without investigating the characters themselves—both the characters’ voices and, indeed, the entire story would have suffered.


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Changing Your Narrative Voice With Point-of-View by Corey J. Popp