Wordplay

Special Announcement: The winner of last week’s drawing for Jeannie Campbell’s e-book Writer’s Guide to Creating Rich Back Stories is June Cleaver. Congratulations! Jeannie will be emailing you your e-book soon.

This week’s video explains why creating characters who are overly nice can slam the brakes on your story’s conflict and momentum.




Video Transcription: In life, we often think of likable people as nice people. But, in fiction, that’s not quite how it works. In fiction, nice characters are conflict-sucking vampires out to sap your story’s life’s blood and leave it pale and limp in your reader’s hands. Ouch, huh? Naturally, we’d like most of our characters to be likable, but how can we tell if we’re running the risk of making them too nice?

An epic fantasy I read recently offered a good example of how overly nice characters can kill your book’s conflict and momentum. The book featured dozens of characters, almost all of whom were fighting on the same side—so, naturally, they were all nice to one another. Nothing wrong with that, right? Well, when you consider that every page of your story needs to contain conflict—either outright or foreshadowed—you realize the idea of all the characters getting along, waking up every morning with chipper attitudes, and just generally be super nice all over the place really doesn’t provide for a constant stream of conflict. Since this book never characterized the alien bad guys and because the heroes rarely if ever exchanged dialogue with them, the author basically blocked off every door that might have led him to conflict.

Authors shouldn’t fear creating characters who spark against each other. Arguments should abound, even among friends. Conflict is the heart of fiction. Conflict is the reason we read—and write. Without it, we have no story—just an account of our characters’ daily lives, which, however fascinating they may be to us, will ultimately be about as interesting as someone else’s home videos to others. Don’t fall into the no-conflict trap. Give your characters plenty of flaws, plenty of arguments, and plenty of antagonists.

Tell me your opinion: Have you ever written a character who was too nice?

Related Posts: Should You Give Your Characters Unlikable Traits

Characters: Likability Is Overrated

Antagonists Don't Have to Be Evil

Today, I’m pleased to present a guest post by Sam Brodbeck from Content Lobby.

To the naked eye, there is not much that separates good writing from bad writing. All the same words appear—in fact, bad writing quite often contains longer and more complicated words. Of course, the difference between a well-written piece and a poorly written one becomes very clear, not in the writing process, but in the reading.

When reading, what seemed at the time like a God-given burst of creative genius can be instantly transformed into a rambling mass, quickly resulting in the slamming shut of a book, laptop, or, increasingly, iPad or Kindle. How to create great copy is a perennial problem and one that has prompted writers, authors, journalists, and editors to pump out many thousands of pages.

For many years, George Orwell’s five rules, outlined in his 1946 essay “Politics and the English Language,” have been the first port of call (Orwell would not like that tired phrase) for writers and writing teachers. Good writing, he says, must:

• Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech you are used to seeing in print.
• Never use a long word where a short one will do.
• If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.
• Never use the passive where you can use the active.
• Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.
• Break any of these rules sooner than saying anything outright barbarous.

Seem simple enough? All you have to do to be a successful writer is continually pull more and more original lines of prose from the unceasing river of your mind. This is where developing vocabulary and getting comfortable with grammar can turn a competent writer into a great one and, with a bit of luck, into an author.

The more words you have at your disposal, the more variations and subtleties you will be able to employ in your work. Similarly, an increased awareness and control of grammar opens a whole world of possibilities for sentence, paragraph, and page construction. Get these basics right, and your readers will effortlessly glide through your unexpected twists, clandestine turns, and enigmatic protagonists.

Some might claim that popular culture abounds with grammar that is a purist’s nightmare and yet seems to be doing fine. Pop songs, in particular, flagrantly flout the rules and often become iconic because of it. Renowned lyricist Bob Dylan’s “Lay Lady Lay” passes all but the most watchful eyes—little does Bob know that his beatnik rhymes have inspired generations of scruffy young people to write incomprehensible sentences. What you can get away with in songs in the recording studio does not translate to the publisher’s office; Bob’s artistic license (in the wrong pens) could send your manuscript to the wrong pile.

In addition to ignoring millionaire songwriter icons, aspiring writers have several avenues for improving their English language skills. They can:

• Move to an English-speaking country – which luckily can be found all around the world.
• Delve into the language’s rich literary past, from Shakespeare and Milton to Rowling and McEwan. If this doesn’t inspire you, nothing will!
• Enroll at one of the language schools London boasts, such as St George International, to get a solid technical grounding.
• Absorb the homegrown music scene and pick up on local lyrics known only to the underground to truly blend in with local speakers.

About the Author: By Sam Brodbeck on behalf of Content Lobby. Content Lobby specializes in creating free, quality content for websites and blogs. Their team of writers have experience devising and writing texts that have attracted thousands of unique visitors to websites big and small. Content Lobby’s copywriters have experience creating original and quality content for sites across the web—and best of all, they do this for free. If you’re interested, feel free to contact them.

By the time I realized the art of writing a novel was something that could actually be learned, I had already written three (admittedly awful) books. Then, one day, when I was about halfway through my fourth book, I happened to be browsing the bottom shelves at the library, where I pulled out a book titled How to Write (And Sell) a Christian Novel.

I checked the book out, polished it off in one or two sittings, and closed the back cover to the realization that my writing—and my life—had changed forever. I checked out a few more books from that bottom shelf. But around the third or fourth one I decided they were all the same, and, anyway, I had it all figured out by now. So I quit reading them and buckled down to finish writing Book #4. It was also awful.

This is about when I started thinking, Hmm, maybe I don’t know it all yet. Maybe I should keep reading those bottom-shelf books after all.

The more time we spend studying our craft and the more we learn, the easier it is to lose sight of our own fallibility.

We master a little corner of the craft and immediately start feeling like Superman, floating out there in space, complacently smiling down at the world, congratulating ourselves for saving it once again. We read a book by another author, start picking out the mistakes (which, only a few weeks ago, we were making ourselves), and smugly pat ourselves on the backs for being experts compared to this poor fool.

The truth is we probably do know a good deal about the craft. We’ve studied, we’ve grown, maybe we’re even experts. But the moment we start thinking of ourselves as experts (explicitly or otherwise) is the moment in which we lose a little of our wide-open learnability. A naïve, arrogant, deep-down part of us starts to think we understand it all.

Every time I start falling into that trap, something eventually comes along that bangs me upside the head and leaves me with the star-spangled reminder, “I don’t know anything!”

We all need to experience this painful, shocking, overwhelming epiphany every now and then.

This epiphany can leave us feeling a little abashed, a little ashamed, and, ironically, more than a little exhilarated. Stone walls and iron chains fall away. New vistas explode, and unexplored horizons stretch to infinity. Blind spots flicker into view, and, even as the painful awareness of our writing weaknesses caused us to wince, we can laugh with the excitement of realizing that being able to see our problems means we’re halfway down the road to solving them.

Success, knowledge, and experience can sometimes lead us, unwittingly, to the stuffy cell of complacency. And in a life—and an art—that demands openness and curiosity, this is death in a box. No matter where we are in our writing lives, no matter how many bad stories we write, no matter how many good stories we write, no matter how much we’ve learned or how much we’ve mastered—we still don’t know anything.

No one can be an expert at writing, anymore than he can be an expert at life. Our journey toward mastery is a never-ending road, and the moment we start thinking we know everything, or even most of everything, is the moment we stop traveling forward. Never stop learning, never believe you’ve achieved mastery. Always remember that your next big revelation is around the corner, waiting for you so long as you keep looking for it.

Here’s to the journey. Here’s to not knowing anything. And here’s to never mastering this beautiful, crazy art of the written word.  


Tell me your opinion: Have you ever made the mistake of assuming you had mastered an aspect of writing, only to discover you hadn’t?


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Putting Your Ego in Your Back Pocket
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Today, I’m pleased to present a guest post by the lovely Jeannie Campbell, LMFT, author of the brilliant and helpful site The Character Therapist. She’s offering her e-book Writer’s Guide to Creating Rich Back Stories to one lucky commenter. Leave a comment to be entered in the drawing. Winners will be announced next Wednesday.

Simpering misses and damsels in distress seem to be out of fashion these days. Rarely do I pick up a book and read about a heroine who is sickly, pale, and teary-eyed all the time. Instead, strong female leads—some magical mixture of Lara Croft, Mother Teresa, and Maya Angelou—populate our fiction.

While I’m all for strengthening our reader’s views of females, is there such a thing as overdoing it? Can you have a heroine is who is too dominant?

Dominance in the psychology world is on a continuum, low to high. Abraham Maslow did a lot of research in the 1930s and 40s, and he concluded that this continuum exists due to similar batches of traits he found in the women he interviewed. His findings were that High Dominance women were attracted to High Dominance men—aggressive, self-confident, highly masculine, and self-assured. Low Dominance women were attracted to men who were kind, friendly, gentle, faithful and showed a love for children. Medium Dominance women fell in between, as you might conclude, but they made up Maslow’s largest group. These are your romantics. They want love to find them coming from a white knight. Flowers, chocolates, moonlit walks—these are the things they live for. In short, they want Mr. Right.

But without fail, the women in all three groups were attracted to men more dominant than they were. A woman is rarely attracted to someone who seems to be her “equal.” She wants someone more than her—someone to make her feel feminine. It doesn’t matter how dominant you make your heroine. She will just look for a man even more dominant than she is.

Why is this important for writers?

The more dominant your heroine is, your hero will have to be even more so.

This fact might cause you to pause and worry over the feasibility of the attraction between your lead characters. Good. But don’t fret if you’ve got to firecrackers lighting up the pages, either.

While it’s true that most woman are not High Dominance (in reality, they make up the outlying five percent on the Bell Curve in Maslow’s research), most readers wants to read about main characters who are more dominant than they are.

This dominance could take several manifestations, so you can be creative. We want to read about people who are smarter, faster, wittier, and stronger than we are. We like to imagine ourselves in their shoes and fantasize that we are taking down the bad guy.

I’ll leave you with two equations to keep in the back of your mind when writing:

I hope I’ll get a chance to connect with many of you over at my new website, The Character Therapist and my blog. Be sure to sign up for my newsletter and receive the Writer’s Guide to Character Motivation for free!

About the Author: Jeannie Campbell is a licensed marriage and family therapist in California. She is head of clinical services for a large non-profit and enjoys working with children and couples. She has a Masters of Divinity in Psychology and Counseling and bachelor’s degrees in both psychology and journalism. Two of her “therapeutic romance” manuscripts have garnered the high praise of being finalists in the Genesis Contest for unpublished writers. She writes a popular monthly column for Christian Fiction Online Magazine and has been featured in many other e-zines, newspapers, and blogs.

This week’s video warns about the pitfalls of creating characters who aren’t able to take readers into the thick of the action.




Video Transcription: Whether your book is a high-speed espionage thriller or a cozy romance, the element at its heart—the fuel that makes it run—is action. Something is happening to your protagonist—presumably, the something of his life. If not, why tell the story? And yet, the pitfall of a passive protagonist is easier to fall into than we might think. Sometimes, authors create characters to whom things happen, without also creating elements that allow the characters to act back in forceful and decisive ways.


For example, in a science fiction novel I read recently, the protagonist—the only human among powerful aliens—is forced into a reactive role from the beginning of the book right up until the very end. He stands in the center of the plot’s swirl of exciting activities—which include assassination attempts, political intrigue, and strange intruders—but the protagonist himself doesn’t do anything. He stands helplessly aside while other, more capable characters take care of business off-screen. The result, not surprisingly, is a dull and frustrating read.


If you find your main character spending more time reacting than acting, if he stands on the sidelines while others chew into the meat of the action, you may want to seriously reconsider the choices you’ve made about both your plot and your character. Because readers want to be right in the thick of the action, authors need to choose characters who can take them there. Try rewriting your passive character to allow him to take a more active role. Or, if that’s simply not an option, consider adding a few more POVs to include the action from the perspective of the characters who are involved in it. Not only will your book take on more heft and significance, it will also be that much more likely to hold your readers’ attention throughout.

Tell me your opinion: Does your protagonist take your readers into the thick of the action?


Related Posts: Are You Sabotaging Your Own Character?


Making Your Character Steal the Show


Are Your Characters Talking Heads?

I have a favor to ask. Nominations for Writer’s Digest’s 101 Best Websites for Writers are still open for the 2012 picks. If you’ve enjoyed my articles, videos, and podcasts, would you consider zapping a quick email nomination of Wordplay to writersdigest@fwmedia.com with “101 Websites” in the subject line? As always, my thanks to all my fabulous readers! And now back to your regularly scheduled post.


This week’s video shows how Ernest Hemingway’s classic short story “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber” utilized a masterful placement of backstory to pique reader curiosity and raise the stakes.



Video Transcription: Sooner or later, most authors feel the constraints of opening a story in medias res, when we know readers won’t fully comprehend events unless we’ve first given them an understanding of the important backstory that preceded the opening. But, by the same token, we’ve all read stories that opened with backstory—and bored us out of our socks. So what’s a clever writer to do?

We could do worse than to follow Ernest Hemingway’s masterful example in his classic short story “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber.” The story, about a rich, ineffective man on a safari hunt with his spiteful wife, opens smack in the middle of things. The very first sentence, which tells us “it was now lunch time” and the characters were “pretending that nothing had happened,” lets us know something important has preceded the opening of the story. Hemingway immediately hooks readers with curiosity, then plunges head on into his story. Not until ten pages later does he slow down to explain the important backstory, in this case the main character’s cowardice in the face of a wounded lion.

If Hemingway had dumped the backstory at the beginning, readers would have no way of knowing how important this initial event was. But because he first took the time to engage their curiosity and raise the stakes, readers were not only willing to sit through the backstory, they were champing at the bit to learn about it. The important lesson to be gleaned here is two-fold: One: backstory must matter. If it doesn’t matter in a way that moves the plot forward, it doesn’t deserve to be told. And two: It must be artfully placed within the story so readers understand its importance to the plot and can’t wait to discover the secrets in your characters’ pasts.

Tell me your opinion: Where is the first mention of backstory in your work-in-progress?

Related Posts: How to Wield Backstory With Panache by Roz Morris

 9 Ways to Strengthen Your Beginning


Dostoevsky and the Art of In Medias Res

Use Foreshadowing to Keep Readers Reading

Ironically, since words are our stock in trade, we’re often pretty casual in our selection of them. One of Charles Schulz’s incisive “Snoopy at the typewriter” strips from his Peanuts cartoon features poor ol’ Snoopy laboring away, sweating and smacking himself in the forehead. Finally, he turns to his typewriter and taps out, “The.” With a lofty look, he explains, “A good writer will sometimes search hours for just the right word.”

At times, that search feels like groping in the dark. How do we know which word is the “right” word? Ultimately, of course, the answer depends upon you, as the author, and the demands of whatever sentence you’re writing. There’s no such thing as the “right” word; there are just good words appropriately used. Today, let’s explore four sophisticated linguistic techniques for choosing and using those words in a way that won’t cost you all the sweat and labor our pal Snoopers had to endure.

Alliteration

What is it? Repetition of beginning consonant sounds.

How is it used? I used alliteration in the title of the post (“4 Tricks for Picking the Perfect Word”). I could have said “4 Tricks for Choosing the Perfect Word” or “4 Tricks for Picking the Right Word”—and both choices would have been more than sufficient—but neither would have given me the pleasing phonetic significance of alliteration. Remember, alliteration doesn’t demand words begin with the same letter, just the same sound.

For example: Cara kept the chimera at bay.

Assonance

What is it? Repetition of vowel sounds.

How is it used? The post title contains assonance in its rhyming words (“4 Tricks for Picking the Perfect Word”), but assonance can be just as powerful—sometimes more so—in non-rhyming words.

For example: The red heifer looked left as I set down the lemonade for the referee.

Consonance

What is it? Repetition of internal consonant sounds.

How is it used? Again, we find an example in the post title (“4 Tricks for Picking the Perfect Word”), but the possibilities aren’t limited to rhymes. We can use the technique to gain a more subtle (and often subconscious) effect through non-rhyming words.

For example: Suspicious as ever, the assassin sussed out the mafia boss’s safe house.

Onomatopoeia

What is it? Representation of sound through phonetic imitation. 

How is it used? I have to fess up to my inability to find a suitable use of onomatopoeia for the post title (kablooey, snap, and meow just didn’t quite fit in). This technique can easily become overbearing, if used incorrectly. The wham-pow-holy-barking-dogs-Batman! approach of comic books isn’t often appropriate in written fiction. However, when used with a little more restraint, the accessible power of onomatopoeic words can infuse sizzle into your prose.

For example: Whapping its wings against the cage, the parrot squawked at the annoying cackling of its neighbor, a magpie.

These four simple techniques can instantly raise your writing to a new level of effectiveness. For all their subtle power, they’re easy to implement, and they offer some fun and original solutions to Snoopy’s agonized hours of word searching.


Tell me your opinion: Have you ever consciously used these techniques in your writing?


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Do You Know How to Use Emphasis in Your WRITING?!


Color Me Vivid


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Click the “Play” button to Listen to Audio Version (or subscribe to the Wordplay podcast in iTunes).

Today I’m pleased to present a guest post by short story author Brayden Hirsch.

Recently, while writing a story in my upcoming collection, On Catastrophe’s Whim, I came across the problem of a story being too short. My editor complimented the storyline and structure, but something about the writing was missing. Too short, too bland, too summative and passive instead of being descriptive and active—finally I found all these things centered on one main problem: this was supposed to be a suspense story. Where was the suspense?

Now, please. Don’t be deceived by this article’s title. There is no “easy” way to build suspense—for some writers, it comes naturally, while others have to work harder. But there’s no way around it. Whether you’re writing literary or commercial fiction, you must have suspense in some form or another. In the dictionary, suspense equals a “state or feeling of excited or anxious uncertainty,” but as writers we must dig a little deeper. Suspense, in fiction, is anything that poses a threat to your characters, anything that pushes them closer to one of the three types of death—physical death (actually dying), psychological death (an emotional disparity), or professional death (losing one’s job). What works even better is when you can incorporate all three of these in your story. In The Fugitive, for instance, Richard Kimble loses his wife and his job in the movie’s opening sequence, but as the story progresses we see him facing psychological and physical death, too—it’s psychological because he absolutely can’t give up and dishonor himself in public, and it’s physical because, well, they’re coming after him with guns.

A correct approach and a deeper understanding of suspense and its purpose in your story is vital in the actual crafting in it. But if your story still lacks drama, there are a few easy fixes that all can contribute to your story.

Description


Now, you’re thinking I’m crazy. You’re thinking description takes up too much space in the constantly shrinking traditional publishing world. Lengthy passages of description hearken back to Hawthorne and Poe, and, while they were the best writers of their time, their style would never survive today.

And you’re right. I completely agree.

But keep in mind that fiction, in Alfred Hitchcock’s words, is merely real life, with the dull parts taken out. Good suspense must be real suspense, and you must show that, in one way or another. One way is description. An eye for detail, especially quirky or dark details, can contribute enormous amounts of drama to a particular scene. Take this passage, from John D. Macdonald’s Cape Fear, later on called Cape Fear, when Sam Bowden discovers convicted rapist Max Cady is watching him and his family:

He went over and put the sandwich and thermos on the sawhorse. As he was unbuttoning his shirt, he had his back to Nancy. He stopped, motionless, his finger tips touching the third button. Max Cady sat on a low pile of timbers twenty feet away. He had a can of beer and a cigar. He wore a yellow knit sports shirt and a pair of sharply creased slacks in a shade of cheap electric blue. He was smiling at Sam.


Sam walked over to him. It seemed to take a long time to walk twenty feet. Cady’s smile didn’t change.


“What are you doing here?” Sam kept his voice low.


“Well, I’m having a beer, Lieutenant, and I’m smoking this here cigar.”

Notice the precision of the details, but the brevity as well. The passage isn’t lengthy, but it provides just enough for readers to piece together an image in their heads. The finger stopping on the button, the “cheap electric blue,” the “long time to walk twenty feet”—all these things add, little by little, suspense to this scene.

Vignettes


Hitchcock used these all the time. Look at the cricket-playing Brits and the divorced couple in The Lady Vanishes, or the lonely woman, the musician, and the rest of the quirky neighbors in Rear Window. With these recurring everyday people, going about their everyday lives, Hitchcock communicated the reality of the story world. It adds a layer of believability to the problems that the lead characters were encountering. 
The great thing about the Rear Window vignettes is that they almost always contributed to the story—say, the musician with his party and the tinkling of the piano and the distant laughter as Jimmy Stewart’s character is discovering something new about the killer in the next building. Other times the vignettes serve as distractions that throw off, if only slightly, the pursuit of the lead character. If you can take this idea of believability and reality and inject it into your own story, with a little practice it will always turn out good suspense.

Setting


Of the three roads I’ve presented here, this one is likely the smoothest to travel. It’s not difficult to change up the setting of a scene, but it’s a simple, logical way to add suspense. When I write, I always try to cram as many intriguing settings as possible into my stories—scenes in a character’s simple, suburban house or a story’s climax in an empty basement just won’t do. Of course, it’s possible, but it takes a skilled writer to make an empty basement interesting. 
Look to Hitchcock again. We don’t call him the Master of Suspense for nothing. Consider the Mount Rushmore scene in North by Northwest, or the scene in the United Nations or the oceanfront car chase. All these places are not merely settings, but factors to how the story plays out. If Lester Townsend had been murdered in some remote forest, with no people anywhere in sight, then how would Roger Thornhill, played by Cary Grant, have been blamed for the crime? Interesting settings add both believability and intrigue to your story. Always have something going on around the characters while the story plays out.

Give these things a try in your everyday writing, and, whether you write thrillers, romances, or sci-fi, you’ll keep your reader’s attention until the last page—and, hopefully, your next novel.



About the Author: Brayden Hirsch is a teenage writer from Vancouver, BC. His debut book, a collection of four long stories, is entitled On Catastrophe’s Whim, and will release this summer. Visit his website for more information.

This week’s video explains why introducing POV characters early in the book is important to your reader’s happiness.




Video Transcription: By the time readers have read through the first couple chapters in your book, they’ve made an emotional and intellectual investment in your main characters. If they’ve read this far and plan to continue reading, they’ve obviously found the characters introduced in these chapters to be worth their time and attention. So imagine their annoyance when, deep into the book, the author suddenly plunges them into a strange character’s point of view. This is what happened in a fantasy I read recently, and it very nearly made me give up on the book. I had followed the author’s main characters through several hundred pages of adventures, only to be ripped away from them and plunged into a lengthy subplot that featured an entirely new cast of characters. In essence, the author was forcing his readers to begin a whole new story in the middle of his book.

Introducing a new POV late in the book occasionally works for short scenes, if the point is to offer an outside perspective of the protagonist. But when the characters the reader has grown to love are suddenly nowhere in sight, the author risks serious backlash. Readers may skip ahead to regain contact with familiar characters—or they may give up reading altogether in their frustration. The first few chapters are the place to introduce important POV characters. Coherent framing and foreshadowing demand the author use these chapters to guide readers’ loyalty and help them understand which characters rank high in the story’s hierarchy.

If you’re feeling tempted to add an entirely new POV character late in the book, pause to ask yourself a couple questions. Is this new POV absolutely necessary? Could you introduce this character’s POV earlier in the book? Could you work this scene into a previously introduced character’s POV? Consider carefully so you don’t run the risk of annoying your readers.


Tell me your opinion: Have you ever been tempted to add a brand new POV late in the book?


Related Posts: How Many POVs Are Too Many?


Bring Your Characters' POV Voices to Life


Strengthen Your Story With Proper Framing

This is the sixth post in the Most Common Mistakes Series, inspired by the prevalent slip-ups I run across in editing other people’s work. Don’t worry: I don’t use any names or specific examples from my clients’ stories. I hope the series will prove helpful to you in nabbing these mistakes in your own work—before an agent or editor nabs them for you.
Stories told by a first-person narrator (i.e., “I went to school today” vs. the third-person narrator “she went to school today”) are increasingly popular these days, particularly in YA fiction. But this is often a narrative perspective that’s tricky to get right. The first-person narrator, more than any other type of narrator, is inclined to lapse into self-centered telling, in which he overpowers the story, at the expense of the other characters and even the plot itself. Let’s take a look at some of the common pitfalls and how to avoid them.


Beginning every sentence with “I.” The first-person narrator tempts writers into focusing on the narrating character to the exclusion of other subjective nouns. The result is a stultifying string of sentences that all feature the same subject. Mix and match subjects to electrify some life into your syntax.

Wrong: I fled down the stairs, heart pounding. I could hear the zombified giant clomping after me. Ahead, I could see the cellar door offering me the chance to escape and hide. I reached the door, wrenched it open, and dove inside.

Right: My heart pounded as I fled down the stairs. Behind me, the zombified giant clomped after me. Five feet ahead, the cellar door offered the chance to escape and hide. I reached the door, wrenched it open, and dove inside.

Telling thoughts instead of showing. In the first-person narrative, everything you write is straight out of the main character’s brain. You don’t need to clarify the character’s thoughts by placing them in italics or qualifying them with an “I thought” tag.

Wrong: I couldn’t believe this was happening. Zombified giants don’t really exist, do they? I thought to myself. Maybe I’m dreaming.

Right: This couldn’t be happening. Zombified giants didn’t really exist, did they? Maybe I was dreaming.

Inserting lengthy narrative at the expense of action and dialogue. First-person narration offers the temptation to share with readers everything the character is thinking. But beware of lengthy narrative rabbit trails when you should be allowing action and dialogue to carry the story.

Wrong: “What’s up with you lately?” Kirsten asked.
I heaved a sigh. Kirsten had no idea how insane my life had become. She had no idea that zombified giants—huge and ugly and stinky—were after me. [Insert lengthy description of zombified giants, narrator’s life, history of friendship with Kirsten, etc.]


Right: “What’s up with you lately?” Kirsten asked.
I heaved a sigh. “You have no idea how insane my life has become.” I threw my backpack into my locker, shot a surreptitious glance up and down the hallway, then leaned forward to whisper in her ear, “Zombies! Big ones!” [Insert witty, conflict-ridden dialogue that conveys the important information about zombified giants, narrator’s life, history of friendship with Kirsten, etc.]

Utilizing a first-person narrator can be an exciting way to create an immediate and intimate story readers won’t be able to turn away from. Make sure you aren’t stumbling over these common mistakes, and you’ll be more than ready to knock readers (and maybe some zombified giants as well) off their feet with your powerful narrative.

Tell me your opinion: Do you prefer writing in first-person or third-person?


Related Posts: Why Narrative Isn't a Bad Thing


Bring your POV Characters' Voices to Life


5 Ways to Write Character Thoughts Worth More Than a Penny


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This week’s video talks about how Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows brought greater depth to The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society by contrasting comedy and tragedy.



Video Transcription: In his “Letter to a Young, Talented Author,” dramatist William Saroyan offers the advice, “Remember to be good-humored. Remember to be generous. And remember that in the midst of that which is most tragic, there is always the comic, and in the midst of that which is most evil, there is always much good.” Nothing highlights a point or helps readers see an idea from a new perspective better than a little dichotomy. Life is full of contrast, so providing a little in our fiction, not only serves to grant our stories more realism, it also magnifies the effect. A moment of humor on a battlefield can be used to lighten the dark mood, but, by contrasting it with the surrounding tragedy, it can also serve as emphasis. The same goes for a little moment of tragedy within an otherwise funny story. In fact, most comedians would tell you that all of comedy is tragedy turned on its head.

In their charming historical novel The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows did an exemplary job of highlighting tragedy through comedy. This generally quirky and comedic novel, told in the form of letters, has at its heart the undeniably tragic theme of suffering in the time of war. The book tells the story of the German occupation of the British island of Guernsey during World War II, and it doesn’t skimp on the dark and painful truths of war. But its generally cheerful and even hilarious voice not only presents a cast of characters whose spirit and bravery the reader can’t help but admire and love, it also provides a chilling contrast to their sufferings.

Dichotomy, juxtaposition, and irony are some of a writer’s most subtle—and therefore most powerful—tools. Keep them in mind no matter what type of story you’re writing, whether it be a dark story of betrayal and death or a romantic comedy.

Tell me your opinion: Have you ever used tragedy in a funny story or comedy in a tragic story?

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