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Four Layers of Conflict
At a recent writer's group and workshop, we were giving feedback and sharing ideas on a new story idea from one of the authors. He was developing characters and conflict and we were trying to help him explore what was working and what wasn't. In the course of that session, one of the other authors discussed the concept of layers of conflict, and how they interplay with one another. She really got me thinking and I decided to focus on it for a while.
We all know that stories require conflict: a story without conflict is one that has no forward momentum and is ultimately boring for the reader. Sometimes it is difficult to establish where or how this conflict could come about, and sometimes the conflict feels lacking in either resonance or authenticity. The idea of this post is to explore four layers of conflict: internal, personal, external and political. I want to look at how these four distinct areas of conflict are all necessary, and how they all interplay with one another. I'm also going to be looking specifically at how this works in Marvel's Black Panther.
1. Internal Conflict
Internal conflict is when the character is grappling with their own motivations, desires and demons. This is not specifically driven by external forces, though it can have its root in some external actions. Rich, three-dimensional characters should exhibit some kind of internal conflict. Let's look at some examples of internal conflict in some famous literature:
Kaladin Stormblessed - The Way of Kings: Conflicted between his cynical realisation that everything in the world is terrible and nothing ever works out for anyone and his deep-seated desire to help people. He struggles to resolve one with the other, and therefore is never completely cynical or completely altruistic. This is very internal.
Frodo Baggins - The Lord of the Rings: Conflicted between his desire to destroy the ring and save Middle-Earth and his slow realisation (mainly through Gollum) that the quest will destroy him completely and utterly and there is no hope for his own personal salvation. Gollum becomes the symbol of his internal conflict as he quite literally puts his hopes for salvation in this damned creature.
Harry Potter - Harry Potter Series: Conflicted between the excitement at becoming a wizard and being saved from his terrible orphaned life with the Dursley's and the fact that he is quite literally the Chosen One and the responsibility for saving the world from Voldemort rests on his shoulders. He is also conflicted about the fact that his parents died to save him, but seemingly to no avail as Voldemort ultimately comes back. There's some levels of guilt there.
Guilt can be good for internal conflict, sure. But overall, the driving factor of internal conflict is a fundamental clash between the desires and wants that the character has for themselves and the world's wants for them. It is between the idealisation of what could be and the realisation of what will be. Sometimes one wins over the other, sometimes it doesn't.
Your character needs internal conflict. Make sure they have some.
2. Personal Conflict
This is conflict between individual people - friends, family, co-workers, classmates, etc. This can come in two different forms:
It can come in the form of the personal antagonist, someone who is not the main antagonist, but provides a lot of personal conflict on a scene to scene basis. Think Malfoy from Harry Potter or Ambrose from The Name of the Wind.
It can also come (which I prefer) from deep conflicts between people who are close, like fathers, daughters, best friends, whatever. Having these people fall out because of fundamental differences adds a lot to the emotion and the stakes of the story.
This can often be achieved if they are working together towards a common goal, but have issues with either the methods they use to get there or their motivations for working towards it. You can also have it based around events and stupid decisions, like sleeping with someone else's girlfriend, if you want.
3. External Conflict
These are the physical threats, be it a Dark Lord coming to kill you, an asteroid headed for Earth or a stalker serial-killer hunting down your girlfriend, every story needs external conflict. I don't really need to give many examples for this as it is the most obvious one: orcs, monsters, murderers. External conflict keeps a story exciting, pacy and gives it stakes.
Remember that external conflict should have high-stakes in the threat. What would happen if your protagonist didn't do anything about this external threat? There needs to be consequences.
4. Political Conflict
This last one is less character based and more story/thematic. Where possible, the conflicts that are developed over the course of your story should be mixed in with a larger political context. This doesn't necessarily mean nation-state level wars or government backstabbing, it just means that there is a larger thematic point to your story.
A story about a stalker who turns into a murderer might have some quite explicit things to say about domestic abuse, for example. Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (anything after the rise of Voldemort, really) has quite a lot of political commentary on the inefficiency of bureaucratic rule and the useless nature of the government (i.e. 'Ministry of Magic).
It doesn't need to be the central point of your story, but it should tie in to your other conflicts.
Mixing Them Together
The best stories come from when all four layers of conflict are present and seamlessly mixed together into a central story. A story that is just about the political and external conflict and someone fighting a dystopian government, but lacking in internal and personal conflict, can feel inauthentic and false. Similarly, a story too focused on internal conflicts can feel self-indulgent and unexciting.
A wonderful example of how these four are mixed can be seen in Marvel's Black Panther. It is now one of the highest-grossing films of all time and has been lauded by many for its excellent portrayal of the narrative. I strongly believe that Black Panther was as successful as it was because it managed to deftly blend together all four of these layers of conflict so as to give high-stakes and make sure that there is something for everyone to take away. Each one of them is very explicit:
There are small spoilers for it below (but if you haven't seen it yet, you should).
Internal Conflict
T'Challa is placed in the new position of King, not being given much time to mourn his father. He already feels like it is a huge task to try to live up to his father (who he idealises) but he starts to discover that his father wasn't the perfect man he made him out to be. After discovering that he killed his uncle, he starts to question his father's rule.
Simultaneously you have a conflict between T'Challa's idealistic image of his father and the truth of the matter, and on top of this T'Challa is struggling with the expectations placed on him now he is King and how to live up to it. There's lots of internal conflict here (which we are allowed to explore explicitly through the soul/dream sequences).
Personal Conflict
T'Challa is having to argue with Nakia about Wakanda's state in the world as they disagree on a fundamental level about what Wakanda should be (this ties into the political conflict, but it is also a personal one). At the same time, T'Challa clearly loves Nakia but cannot be with her because of what she wants to do with her life.
There is also the difference of opinion he has with his friend W'Kabi about how to rule Wakanda, and the conflict with the head of the Jabari, M'Baku, about who should rule the country.
This all links well with his internal conflict, as just as he is feeling uncomfortable and unsure about being King, all his friends, loved ones and political affiliates are questioning how he chooses to rule.
External Conflict
This clearly comes in the form of Erik Killmonger, a wonderful villain, but also in the form of Klaue. It culminates in a few excellent action scenes, including the one where T'Challa is defeated. By creating a character who has trained his whole life to defeat T'Challa, we have a well set up physical, external conflict.
NB: As a side note, another reason Killmonger is such a fantastic villain is that he has such well realised motivations. His story is, from his perspective, the classic hero's story. He watched his uncle get murdered by his brother and his cousin take the throne. His is a classic story of vengeance. He is Simba, or Hamlet, except the story isn't told from his perspective - so he is the villain.
Political Conflict
Finally, weaved into all of the above conflicts is the political conflict. The big question: if Wakanda has all this wealth and technology, shouldn't they be doing more to help people around the world?
This gets tied into Killmonger's motivations and the history of black slavery and subjugation. It gets tied into the personal conflicts with W'Kabi and Nakia, and it gets tied into T'Challa's own internal conflict which he is eventually forced to resolve.
It is very cleverly put together and in it there is a lesson to learn for all storytellers.
Look at your story, whatever stage of development it is in, and think about the following:
Does my character have internal conflict?
Are there interpersonal conflicts with friends in the narrative?
Is there a physical, external threat or conflict?
Is there a political conflict that ties into these three other conflicts?
Great stories mix together all four. If you feel like you are missing one, think about how you can tie it into your current conflicts and introduce another layer to your story.
Writing Twists and Solving Mysteries
Hi everyone.
I spent last week at the San Francisco Writers Conference and I had a thoroughly enjoyable time. I must say that I strongly recommend any writers out there to look into attending a Conference at some point. The SFWC is excellent, but it isn't the only one out there.
Whether you are a published author, or you are looking for an agent or publisher, working on your first novel and looking to hone your craft or if you are writer just looking to network with other writers and people in the business, it is an invaluable opportunity to get some face to face time with like-minded folk.
That, however, is not the subject of my post today. While I was at the Conference, I was fortunate to be able to talk to Ransom Stephens - a PhD holder and sci-fi writer - about the writing craft and the writing process. His focus was primarily thinking about the neuroscience of writing - what made people laugh, cry or get excited in the brain. I was particularly interested to ask him about how he felt that applied across different genres, and if there were any central threads.
The conclusion, which I think has a lot of merit to it, was that all stories should be mysteries, regardless of the genre. Now, this is something I have already expressed on other posts. I have talked about the importance of the 'dramatic question' behind the narrative, which in many ways in the central 'mystery' of the story (whether romance, fantasy, horror, or anything else). But his take was fascinating and I wanted to write some of my thoughts on it.
Brain Chemicals and Puzzles
Our brain is hard-wired to produce dopamine rushes for certain evolutionarily beneficial experiences. This is a universal thing, and one we can't fight. For example, we get a dopamine rush when we get praise or recognition, or through physical attraction, and a wide variety of other things useful for our survival and procreation.
Transpose this to the modern era, with new technology and consumer products, and we get dopamine rushes with some strange things. It's a big part of the cause behind addiction, as drugs and alcohol will trick our brain into giving it to us. It's part of why social media is so popular - studies have shown that the dopamine rush you get from receiving likes, or upvotes, even from faceless strangers, is identifiable.
So where does that leave us with literature? Well, one of the great dopamine rushes we get is in working things out. The 'AHA' moment is an intensely pleasurable one, whether in solving mysteries or coming across a great 'twist'. It is the moment where it all comes together and you finally understand something that you haven't quite been able to get.
Think about a jigsaw puzzle, or a crossword. It's that feeling when you finally find the right piece you've been looking for or you find the right word and suddenly everything falls in place. If you can give your readers this experience - this sense of discovery - they will come back and back to read your work.
However, in order to do this, you need to have a clear and purposeful mystery for your reader to work out. Let's think about how this has impacted some literature and fanbases in the past few decades.
Presenting A Puzzle
I am sure you are all now aware of George R R Martin's A Song of Ice And Fire series, made into a hit HBO TV show 'A Game of Thrones'. Some of you, like me, might remember it long before it was shown. Back when the series was first garnering popularity and we were still waiting for A Feast for Crows and A Dance of Dragons as patiently and frustratingly as we now are for the next.
It gained popularity at around the same time that internet fan boards did, and one of the things that made it so popular was Martin's ability to set up mysteries for the readers to solve. He would leave hints of information about the place and it would take several books and even a couple of re-reads to really piece them together.
Internet message boards were dedicated to working out the puzzles in the narrative, and when they did the dopamine rush across all readers was palpable. The moment where the pieces of R+L=J - or the idea that Jon Snow is the son of Rhaeger and Lyanna - fell into place for a reader was basically a guarantee that they would be buying the next book. It was such a rush of excitement.
And the interesting thing is, the reader doesn't even need to work it out themselves. If I read the book, then went on the internet and read the 'theory', the pure act of all the pieces coming together is enough to give me the rush.
The TV show LOST experienced a very similar sensation in the mid to late 2000s and the experience of putting together pieces and working out puzzles was what made the show so amazingly popular.
I know, I know. You are probably wondering how you are going to come up with complex puzzles that are just enough there for your reader to work out, but not quite enough to be obvious? It might seem tough, but the good thing is there are ways to provide the rush in less subtle and complex ways than GoT or LOST.
Character As Proxy For Reader
Often it is possible to use the protagonist as a proxy for the reader. That is to say, when the protagonist solves the mystery, the reader received their dopamine rush by proxy.
What I mean by this is that the reader doesn't need to work the mystery out themselves. Much like the internet message boards of above, it is sufficient to watch someone else do it. This is at the core of murder mystery novels. While I love them, I am actually not very good at working out whodunnit. I read too quickly and focus too much on character and story, I think, but I love experiencing the detective work it out.
One of my favourite representations of this rush can be found in the BBC TV series Sherlock. This is from episode 1, and we simply watch Sherlock deduce, and get excited about the deduction, and feel the rush with him. Here's an example of what I'm talking about:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NIlagcjQwrA
Putting Together the Pieces
Let's look at another example:
Steven Soderbergh's Ocean's Eleven, a heist film, has a perfect example of giving the reader this dopamine rush. After robbing the bank and things seemingly going wrong, we are treated to this wonderful scene:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HQeJvrJQjf0
As it all comes together, we realise what the pieces of the plan were and the jigsaw puzzle is finally complete. We experience a dopamine rush, even though we haven't worked it out ourselves. We are just shown it all coming together.
The way that Soderbergh does this is by deliberately withholding and concealing information from the viewer. Brad Pitt's face is hidden behind the SWAT mask, then shown. The vault is revealed to be the fake vault they used. When we realise what is really going on, it is very exciting.
However, it is important to remember all the pieces were there. We knew, as an audience, that the fake vault had been built. It was just given another reason for being built (rehearsal for the robbery). In cinematic terms, he actually shows us the same scenes again in a different light. All the pieces make sense because they've been given to us already, we have just been hidden the thread that links them all together in the end.
The evidence needs to be there or the reveal won't give us that same rush of putting pieces together. It will be like someone showing you a finished jigsaw without ever showing you the pieces - there is no excitement in that.
The truth is that, from the perspective of a writer, it is easy to create a reveal like this that looks far more complex to the reader than it really is. You just need to work backwards.
Come up with your full detailed, clever plan.
Leave all the evidence somewhere in your story, but perhaps give other reasons that it might be there.
Conceal the narrative that connects them together until the moment of realisation.
It's actually easy to do from a starting point of knowing what the plan is going to be. More importantly, you can make a plan seem far cleverer than it is by hiding the right information at the right times. That is what is happening here and it works so well. We love it when it all comes together.
Twists: Surprising, but Rational
Let's think about this concept in a different way, and how it can be applied to drama, horror and thriller plots.
The example I'm going to use here is Martin McDonagh's wonderful Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri. If you haven't seen it, you might want to skip past this part as I will be ruining an absolutely heartbreaking twist for you. I'll indicate in the post where the spoilers begin and end.
[THREE BILLBOARDS SPOILERS BELOW]
In Three Billboards, we are treated to the last day of Chief Willoughby, played by Woody Harrelson, without knowing it at the time. He takes his wife and kids out and has a final perfect day with them. It is only later when we realise that he has done this because he plans to kill himself, and the result is heartbreaking.
For me, at least, the realisation came just before he did it. When he was standing outside by the horses and saying goodbye, I knew what was going to happen. And it made complete sense, despite the fact I hadn't seen it coming. I realised it couldn't really have gone any other way.
In many ways, McDonagh is using the same techniques as I explained above. The perfect day could easily be explained as Willoughby just wanting a lovely day out, and we accept it as such. But it is clear why he did that as soon as we realise he is about to commit suicide. The evidence was there, we just weren't given the narrative reason until later.
What makes this scene work so well is that the reveal is simultaneously a surprise, and also makes complete sense. If you can achieve this - surprise your reader with a twist, but also have enough of the evidence dotted throughout the book that it makes complete and utter sense - then you will have readers coming back for more. They won't be able to help themselves.
[THREE BILLBOARDS SPOILERS OVER]
To give another example from another genre, Shyamalan's The Sixth Sense does exactly the same thing. The reason the twist is one of the most famous twists of modern storytelling is because it is a surprise, but everything fits when we find out. All the evidence was always there, we just missed it because the links were being deliberately withheld.
The same is true of the Tyler Durden reveal in Fight Club. It is true of all the great twists in stories.
In all three of the above examples - Fight Club, Three Billboards and Sixth Sense - these were also mysteries that the viewer didn't even necessarily know were there. But they still provide the rush because of falling together of pieces into a single realisation.
When you write, look for opportunities to provide your reader with a similar experience, where seemingly unconnected pieces of evidence fall together into a big reveal that is both surprising and completely understandable. Treat every story - whether horror, drama, romance, fantasy or sci fi - as a mystery story. Give your readers something to get that rush about.
1. Do this by actively withholding information and connections from your readers until you want them to see it all fall together at once.
2. Do this by having your protagonist experience the realisation with your reader, thus heightening the rush for you both.
3. Do this by planting evidence all through a story, like pieces of jigsaw, that the reader doesn't even realise are pieces until the realisation happens.
If you can do this, your readers will love you for it. It's in their biology.
How To Write Beautiful Prose
One of the big things that writers struggle to improve in their work is the quality of their prose. The difficulty with a phrase like 'prose' is it means a huge number of different things, from flow and register, to vocabulary choice and sentence structure, and then still to less tangible things like 'voice' and 'beauty'.
It can be hard to identify what makes a particular piece of prose aesthetically beautiful, just as it is often difficult to explain why a particular piece of art or music elicits that response. In many ways, great prose is the most artistic part of the genre, defying attempts to tie it down to strict rules or structures.
Still, I like a challenge, so in this post I'm going to be writing about how to improve your prose and what great prose looks like. I will not be able to cover everything, or fix your prose in a simple post.
In the first section, I will provide a range of examples and try to examine the features that helps make the prose aesthetically pleasing.
The goal is to identify some features that help tie down that most elusive of beasts: beautiful writing.
In the second section, I will explore techniques and exercises you can use to help improve your own prose with the below ideas in mind.
I truly believe that one of the essential building blocks of great prose is an extremely solid understanding of English grammar and syntax - specifically sentence construction. I say this mainly because the nuts and bolts of sentence construction is often not explicitly taught in schools, or if it is then it is often forgotten later in life.
If you are not completely certain, I would take some time to revise your understanding of word types, passive and active verb construction, nominalisation, main clauses, dependent clauses and construction of simple, compound and complex sentences, and punctuation usage (like how you use commas, semi-colons, dashes, and colons).
The information about all of these things can be easily found on the internet and is worth some of your writing time to consider and learn these.
Being very comfortable with how these all work is a necessary precursor to being able to write beautiful prose. A lot of great prose breaks these grammatical rules, but you really need to know them before you can break them.
I would strongly recommend reading Strunk's Elements of Style as a great starting point if you feel this is an area that needs work.
2. Variety
Variety is key in prose. Many of you will have seen Gary Provost's oft-stated passage about sentence length, but it bears repeating here:
"This sentence has five words. Here are five more words. Five-word sentences are fine. But several together become monotonous. Listen to what is happening. The writing is getting boring. The sound of it drones. It's like a stuck record. The ear demands some variety.
Now listen. I vary the sentence length, and I create music. Music. The writing sings. It has a pleasant rhythm, a lilt, a harmony. I use short sentences. And I use sentences of medium length. And sometimes, when I am certain the reader is rested, I will engage him with a sentence of considerable length, a sentence that burns with energy and builds with all the impetus of a crescendo, the roll of the drums, the crash of the cymbals–sounds that say listen to this, it is important."
This fantastic example highlights the importance of variety, but variety does not just apply to sentence length. It applies to paragraph length, word choice and tone. You want to aim to change these up over the course of your writing. In the words of George Bernard Shaw, "consistency should be reserved for rice pudding."
Here's a task for you: For the rest of the post, look at all the examples I use and consider how the reader has used variation to enhance the beauty of their prose.
3. Sensory Description - Breadth and Depth
Remember to include a range of sensory description in your prose. There is a tendency for novice writers to only describe what the narrator would see, but not what they would feel, smell, hear, or taste. However, we do not experience the world this way and the most immersive prose will deal with all of it. Let's look at a couple examples.
The first is from the excellent The Northern Lights by Philip Pullman (or The Golden Compass if you're American):
'One morning there was a different smell in the air, and the ship was moving oddly, with a brisker rocking from side to side instead of the plunging and soaring. Lyra was on deck a minute after she woke up, gazing greedily at the land: such a strange sight, after all that water, for though they had only been at sea a few days, Lyra felt as if they'd been on the ocean for months. Directly ahead of the ship a mountain rose, green-flanked and snow-capped, and a little town and harbour lay below it: wooden houses with steep roofs, an oratory spire, cranes in the harbour, and clouds of gulls wheeling and crying. The smell was of fish, but mixed with it came land smells too: pine-resin and earth and something animal and musky, and something else that was cold and blank and wild: it might have been snow. It was the smell of the North.
Seals frisked around the ship, showing their clown-faces above the water before sinking back without a splash. The wind that lifted spray off the white-capped waves was monstrously cold, and searched out every gap in Lyra's wolfskin.'
As you can see here, Pullman describes a range of different senses. More importantly, he layers them. Another trap to fall into is to assume there is only one smell or sound in a setting, but, just like sight, there is a full range of these senses that contradict and compliment each other.
Look at the way Pullman describes smell. He layers different smells on top of each other, 'fish', 'land smells' 'pine-resin and earth' and something 'animal and musky' and again something else 'cold and blank and wild'. Together they build to create what he describes as 'the smell of the North.'
Note also here that other senses, like smell, can be dealt with in the same kind of metaphorical way as you would with sight. You don't always need to describe a specific smell, like 'burning wood' or 'spiced apples'. You can just as easily, and sometimes more effectively, use feelings. Pullman does this when he describes one of the smells as 'cold and blank and wild.' It is hard to tie down exactly specifically what this smell is, but personally, I can imagine it.
This act of layering smells, or other senses, can also be used to set them up in contradiction of each other, or to explore other ideas.
A great example can be found in the opening of Pat Rothfuss's The Name of the Wind, which deals with sound in similarly complex and layered way.
'It was night again. The Waystone Inn lay in silence, and it was a silence of three parts.
The most obvious part was a hollow, echoing quiet, made by things that were lacking. If there had been a wind it would have sighed through the trees, set the inn's sign creaking on its hooks, and brushed the silence down the road like trailing autumn leaves. If there had been a crowd, even a handful of men inside the inn, they would have filled the silence with conversation and laughter, the clatter and clamor one expects from a drinking house during the dark hours of night. If there had been music…but no, of course there was no music. In fact there were none of these things, and so the silence remained.
Inside the Waystone a pair of men huddled at one corner of the bar. They drank with quiet determination, avoiding serious discussions of troubling news. In doing this they added a small, sullen silence to the larger, hollow one. It made an alloy of sorts, a counterpoint.
The third silence was not an easy thing to notice. If you listened for an hour, you might begin to feel it in the wooden floor underfoot and in the rough, splintering barrels behind the bar. It was in the weight of the black stone hearth that held the heat of a long dead fire. It was in the slow back and forth of a white linen cloth rubbing along the grain of the bar. And it was in the hands of the man who stood there, polishing a stretch of mahogany that already gleamed in the lamplight.
The man had true-red hair, red as flame. His eyes were dark and distant, and he moved with the subtle certainty that comes from knowing many things.
The Waystone was his, just as the third silence was his. This was appropriate, as it was the greatest silence of the three, wrapping the others inside itself. It was deep and wide as autumn's ending. It was heavy as a great river-smooth stone. It was the patient, cut-flower sound of a man who is waiting to die.'
Once again, we get a complex and interesting layering of sounds (or silence) just like Pullman did with smells.
Here's a final example that starts to merge and layer them together. You start to get what I consider to be really aesthetically beautiful prose. This is from Eleanor Catton's The Luminaries, a fantastically written Man Booker prize-winning novel.
'The storm was borne on greenish winds. It began as a coppery taste in the back of one's mouth, a metallic ache that amplified as the clouds darkened and advanced, and when it struck, it was with the flat hand of a senseless fury. The seething deck, the strange whip of light and shadows cast by the sails that snapped and strained above it, the palpable fear of the sailors as they fought to hold the barque on her course - it was the stuff of nightmare, and Moody had the nightmarish sense, as the vessel drew closer and closer to the goldfields, that she had somehow willed the infernal storm upon herself.'
In this extract, Catton describes a storm by giving us the already sickly, nauseating feeling of 'greenish winds', followed by a 'coppery taste', then a feeling with 'metallic ache'. This is compiled with the sight of 'darkened' and 'advanced' clouds and, finally, the sense of touch again as the storm hits with a 'flat hand of senseless fury.'
And this is all in a couple of sentences. We then get more layered senses - the 'strange whip of light', in contrast to the only other sight description we have which is 'darkened' and then the sounds of 'snapped' and 'strained'. It continues masterfully until we end with the fearful personification of the boat as some kind of self-flagellating woman, willing the storm onto herself.
Layered and complex sensory description is a key tool in the writer's handbook. Go through the descriptions of some of the most important events in your novel - are you layering the sense like these authors are?
4. Contrast
While on the topic of description, it is important to think about contrast. All of the examples above offer some sense of contrast in their description. By this I mean, they offer up juxtaposing images to highlight the power of them.
Imagine it like a painting: if you want a lighter colour to stand out, surround it with a darker colour so that it becomes clearer (or vice versa). This is very much the idea of a frame.
In the Catton example, the 'clouds darkened' contrasts with the 'whip of light', and so both the storm and the lightning are rendered darker and brighter respectively. In the Rothfuss example, the entire piece is contrasting one 'silence' against two others. If Kvothe's silence was described on its own, it would lack all the depth that the contrast brings.
These juxtapositions can happen on a larger paragraph level or on a smaller sentence level, but if you want your images and ideas to stand out, try contrasting them against something else.
5. Structure
Part of what makes excellent prose is the structure of it, as well. Beautiful prose has a structure that is well thought out, rather than just a building of one idea onto the next.
Think about Rothfuss's passage above - it has a clear structure of three parts that is set up at the beginning with an introduction, almost like an essay, then each topic is treated and the final conclusion that it all leads to is the character.
Two nice ways to think about prose structure are circularity and extended metaphors.
Circular prose begins and ends with the same idea, exploring it in more detail in between. The same line might frame the piece and add it extra weight. Similarly, extended metaphors are metaphors that build and layer over time, almost like the senses I discussed before. To return to something we've already seen, Rothfuss does this by using the silence as an extended metaphor for Kvothe's haunting loneliness.
Both of these ideas can be seen in the following example: a wonderful piece by Richard Brautigan, entitled 'I was trying to describe you to someone.'
'I was trying to describe you to someone a few days ago. You don't look like any girl I've ever seen before.
I couldn't say "Well she looks just like Jane Fonda, except that she's got red hair, and her mouth is different and of course, she's not a movie star…"
I couldn't say that because you don't look like Jane Fonda at all.
I finally ended up describing you as a movie I saw when I was a child in Tacoma Washington. I guess I saw it in 1941 or 42, somewhere in there. I think I was seven, or eight, or six.
It was a movie about rural electrification, a perfect 1930's New Deal morality kind of movie to show kids. The movie was about farmers living in the country without electricity. They had to use lanterns to see by at night, for sewing and reading, and they didn't have any appliances like toasters or washing machines, and they couldn't listen to the radio. They built a dam with big electric generators and they put poles across the countryside and strung wire over fields and pastures.
There was an incredible heroic dimension that came from the simple putting up of poles for the wires to travel along. They looked ancient and modern at the same time.
Then the movie showed electricity like a young Greek god, coming to the farmer to take away forever the dark ways of his life. Suddenly, religiously, with the throwing of a switch, the farmer had electric lights to see by when he milked his cows in the early black winter mornings. The farmer's family got to listen to the radio and have a toaster and lots of bright lights to sew dresses and read the newspaper by.
It was really a fantastic movie and excited me like listening to the Star Spangled Banner, or seeing photographs of President Roosevelt, or hearing him on the radio "… the President of the United States… "
I wanted electricity to go everywhere in the world. I wanted all the farmers in the world to be able to listen to President Roosevelt on the radio….
And that's how you look to me.'
As well as a lovely use of extended metaphor, the circularity of beginning and ending with the focus on the 'you', the woman he is talking about, is what gives this piece so much of its beauty. It pulls it back down to the ground, away from the extended and almost rambling dream-like metaphor he is exploring.
Consider how Brautigan, in the example above, manages to use a circular structure in his prose to lend so much extra weight to a simple phrase: "and that's how you look to me." Because it is touched upon at the start with, "I was trying to describe you to someone" the last line has much more symbolic weight.
One way to think about the structure of your prose is to look at it as extracts, or individuals paragraphs, then consider what the first and last lines are. Do they reflect each other? Do they build upon each other? Is there some sense of growth?
Another aspect to focus on that is essential to writing compelling prose is the level of focus in the scene. In order to understand this, you need to know what your narrative lens is. The closer your narrative lens, the tighter your focus.
By narrative lens, we mean the vehicle through which you tell the story. In order of ever focusing narrative lenses, we have:
3rd person limited
1st person (which is necessarily limited)
There is a reason many writers of sprawling epics like to go for 3rd person limited, as it gives them the freedom to have a close narrative lens but also a range of characters. Similarly, most literary fiction tends to be 1st person, because it is much more personal. Very few writers regularly use 3rd person omniscient these days.
So if you are writing in 3rd limited or 1st, you need to be sure that what you are describing is what your focus character or narrator is interested in. In other words, if you see a mountain, you are not describing the mountain to your reader, you are describing how your character would perceive a mountain.
This is quite straightforward - what I want to do is take it further and talk about what this means for focus. Often in big important scenes, writers have the tendency to forget what is important to characters. We need to remember what humanises characters and it is the small things. These deserve our focus. Raymond Chandler summed it up wonderfully when he wrote this:
'A long time ago when I was writing for pulps I put into a story a line like "he got out of the car and walked across the sun-drenched sidewalk until the shadow of the awning over the entrance fell across his face like the touch of cool water." They took it out when they published the story. Their readers didn't appreciate this sort of thing: just held up the action. And I set out to prove them wrong. My theory was they just thought they cared nothing about anything but the action; that really, although they didn't know it, they care very little about the action. The things they really cared about, and that I cared about, were the creation of emotion through dialogue and description; the things they remembered, that haunted them, were not for example that a man got killed, but that in the moment of his death he was trying to pick a paperclip up off the polished surface of a desk, and it kept slipping away from him, so that there was a look of strain on his face and his mouth was half open in a kind of tormented grin, and the last thing in the world he thought about was death. He didn't even hear death knock on the door. That damn little paper clip just kept slipping away from his fingers and he just couldn't push it to the edge of the desk and catch it as he fell.'
Great focus in prose isn't about telling the action, or all the details. It is about knowing what the character would focus on and making that the emotional hook or anchor in the scene. Let's look at another piece of prose from Catton's The Luminaries. For some context, our character Moody has stumbled onto a bizarre conspiracy and there is clearly something illicit going. But despite the fact that we, as a reader, are very interested in this, Catton recognises that Moody is enraptured by other things:
'But Moody was not listening. He had forgotten, for a moment, the creeping ash of his cigar, and the warm brandy pooling in the bottom of his glass. He had forgotten that he was here, in a hotel smoking room, in a town not five years built, at the end of the world. His mind had slipped, and returned to it: the bloody cravat, the clutching silver hand, the name, gasped out of the darkness, again and again, Magdalena, Magdalena, Magdalena. The scene came back to him all in a snatch, unbidden, like a shadow passing coldly over the face of the sun.'
Note Catton's use of sensory description, which we discussed earlier, is also very strong here. The focus of the scene expands outwards and away from what is actually going on, and instead flits to what is really on our character's mind. This is all that concerns him, and, with a tight narrative lens, this should be all that concerns the reader.
Great prose considers and employs the following:
Solid understanding of grammatical rules
Wide variety of sentence structures and styles
Breadth and depth of sensory description
Interesting structural elements, like circularity and extended metaphor
A focus consistent with narrative lensing
How To Improve Your Prose
These analyses may make sense to you, but I'm sure you are thinking, as I often do: okay fine, but I never seem to be able to write like that. How can I improve my prose?
The truth is that it is practice, just like all writing, but this stands particularly true for the quality of your prose. The more you read and the more you write, the better your prose will become. It is very much like learning an instrument in that way.
However, like learning an instrument, there are clearly some techniques that you can practice and some exercises in order to make that process more effective.
Read authors who are noted for their excellent prose. You are more likely to find this in literary fiction than in other genres, but that doesn't always hold true. Look for prize winners - Pulitzer Prize, Man Booker Prize, etc.
My personal suggestions include the following: Eleanor Catton, Donna Tartt, Richard Flanagan, Julian Barnes, Kazuo Ishiguro, Oscar Wilde, Ray Bradbury and Viet Thanh Nguyen.
For those looking for beautiful prose in genre fiction, I'd encourage you to start with Ray Bradbury, N.K. Jemisin, and some elements of Patrick Rothfuss.
Read some of their work and let it just settle into you, but if you come across a particularly wonderful piece of prose, study it. Think about the above things and how their prose is constructed.
Take a piece of prose that you think is wonderfully written and literally write it out again. You can do this by hand or on the computer. The act of writing it yourself really helps your mind get into the rhythm and the style of the piece. If you have time, write out a couple of pieces.
Then immediately after, return to your own writing. You'll notice yourself starting to apply some of the same styles and turns of phrase. Don't worry at this point if it seems like imitation. It will be. But once you have imitated enough different writers, their styles will merge and change and slowly develop into something you can call your own voice.
Try to write the same passage of your own work in a variety of different styles. Once you become comfortable with different authors you love, try to match their styles without copying directly from them. This is a really good way to get your brain consciously thinking about the way you are using language.
Try writing the same scene from the POV of multiple characters. Change the narrative lens and focus and think about what each character would care about. Change the diction and voice as the character changes and the change the focus of the scene. Consider how something as basic as your sensory description would change as the point of view changes.
Place strict word restrictions on complicated scenes. Try to express the same concept or action in 100 words, then 50 words, then 500 words. How does it change the way you write? What things are you forced to explore or forget?
Six:
Read it aloud. The brain has a much better sense of rhythm when speaking than reading. You will notice when sentences sound clunky or when they flow. Change anything that doesn't sound right.
Seven:
Again, read, read, read. Thinking you can get good at writing with reading is like thinking you can be a great musician without listening to music, or a great filmmaker without watching any films. It's absurd. In the words of Stephen King, "if you don't have time to read, you don't have the time (or tools) to write."
12 Pieces of Writing Advice for 2018
On the twelfth day of Christmas, my true love gave to me… twelve pieces of writing advice for the start of 2018.
It's a new year and all sorts of people are likely to have all kinds of New Year's Resolutions to do with their writing. You might be determined to finish that damn book this year, or to get an agent and head down the road to traditional publishing, or to finally self-publish your novel. Or maybe just to write a few more stories. But whatever you are doing, here are twelve pieces of writing advice that I think will be invaluable for the year ahead. Most of it has been covered in a variety of different places in this blog, but for me, these are some essentials to remember.
1. Plot Is Character
When you are writing and planning your stories, always remember that plot is not a thing that exists on its own. The idea of a plot is secondary by-product to character development. In the words of Stephen King, "Plot is, I think, the good writer's last resort and the dullard's first choice." Great stories, regardless of genre, are about character first and foremost. For those of you struggling to fit to piece together your plot, go back to thinking about your key characters.
The recipe for character development is as such:
Your character needs a goal, whether physical or metaphysical, that they need to be trying to achieve.
Your character needs to face obstacles that force him to question their world view, their assumptions, and their beliefs.
Your character needs to change in order to achieve their goal, or fail at their goal, but achieve another more intimate goal.
Plot should be subservient to the above. If you are unsure about where to take your character next, this is one of my favourite pieces of writing advice: what is the one thing that your character would absolutely never ever do? Right, you've got it? Good. Now make them do it. What happens to them now?
2. Your Protagonist Must Be Active
One of the biggest issues with stories is that the protagonist is not active enough in the story. Things happen to them, rather than because of their choices. Remember that the protagonist is the driver of the story. Throw obstacles at them, sure, but make sure that they make the choices that lead them through the story and the choices are not made for them. Make sure they make the mistakes. Make sure they provide the solutions.
Frodo ends up taking the ring to Mordor because he stands up and says "I'll take it." Not because it is forced on him. He is offered a way out. Make sure your protagonist is 'taking' the story themselves.
There is nothing more boring to read than a passive character that gets dropped into situations they haven't caused, aren't responsible for and then get out of it thanks to someone else. That isn't a protagonist. That's furniture.
3. Fiction Is Not Life
This applies to characters, plots, dialogue and just about everything else. Fiction is stylised. As much as it is important to try to make your fiction realistic and believable, life can also be very boring. You don't want your characters talking to sound exactly like a normal conversation you would have on a normal day because it's boring. We don't need to go through the motions of normalcy in a story if it isn't directly necessary to character growth or development. In the words of Oscar Wilde, "In matters of grave importance, style, not sincerity, is the vital thing."
A corollary to this this is that you should not stick to the advice "write what you know." It's nonsense. A writer is an explorer. Use your empathy to discover what is interesting, what is conflicting, what is disturbing and use your writing to explore it. Find inspiration in what you know, sure, but don't just stick to it.
4. It's Not The Tropes That You Use, It's The Way That You Use Them
Tropes and genre conventions are not inherently bad things. Nothing is inherently bad in writing. Everything is in the execution. Don't be so determined to do something different or to subvert every trope that it just becomes jumbled, a mess or silly.
As an example, everyone talks about how A Game of Thrones is great because it subverts tropes of the Fantasy genre. It does, but it also embraces a lot of them. Nothing is subverted about the inclusion of dragons, or the medieval swords-and-castles setting, or the face-changing ninja assassins. These are fantasy conventions that are embraced and executed well.
Be aware of your genre. Read heavily in your genre. Know the tropes and expectations so you can use, subvert or ignore them as you wish, but do so consciously. Decide what works for your story. Don't avoid genre conventions just to be different.
And always keep in mind that your story is your story, and you can do what you want with it. This is wonderfully summed up in a conversation with Max Landis and his father John that goes something along these lines:
John: "Max, how do you kill a vampire?"
Max: "Holy water, stake through the heart, etc."
John: "No. You kill a vampire however the fuck you want, because vampires aren't real."
The moral of this story is that everything is in the execution. Every time you find yourself asking "is it okay if I...?", "Could I get away with...?" The answer is always always always: YES, if you can execute it well.
5. Keep The Stakes High And Personal
High stakes are key. At almost any point in your story, stop and ask yourself: what would happen if my protagonist just stopped what they were doing and went back to their normal day-to-day life? If the answer is not much, you don't have stakes.
Make sure there are real, lasting consequences to choices. If any time something bad happens it gets fixed a couple of chapters later, your reader is going to stop caring.
Make sure the stakes are personal. It isn't about the size of the stakes, it's about the importance and impact on the protagonist. Stopping the end of the world is all well and good, but it's nowhere near as compelling as saving your daughter's life. Worrying about if you're going to get enough credits to graduate could be more compelling than exposing a world-wide conspiracy if it's more personal.
6. Ideas Are Cheap, Words Are Gold
Sitting and thinking and plotting is all well and good, but you need to write. Words on the page is everything. Ten words written is more valuable than four hours of thinking about your story. You can't redraft, fix or improve until you've written. Write first, even if it's rubbish. Even if you don't know where it's going. Write and it will come to you.
7. Writing Is Practice
If you have just started writing, you won't be very good. You might be better than other novices, but you won't be great. Thinking you are is like thinking you can pick up a guitar and play it perfectly without lessons. Or that you can step onto a tennis court and go toe-to-toe with Roger Federer without ever having picked up a racket. It's absurd.
As you write you will improve. There are four stages of mastery that you will go through:
Unconscious Incompetence:
You aren't that great at it, but you aren't sure why. You can't see what's missing. Keep writing. Keep reading. Look for writing advice and blogs and youtube videos and read more fiction.
Conscious Incompetence:
You understand what your writing is missing, but you can't quite seem to implement it. Again, keep practicing, but focus on these particular things. If it's dialogue, write lots of dialogue. If it's action, write more action as practice. Read authors who do these things well. Try to copy their style for a bit until you learn how to incorporate it into your own.
Conscious Competence:
You can see yourself improving and you can see your writing getting better because of specific things you are doing. Keep working on those things. Pat yourself on the back that your writing is improving. Don't think you've made it yet, always try to get better.
Unconscious Competence:
You are now naturally writing better than you were without thinking about it. You have better flow, characters, etc. because you have it ingrained in you. This is what separates established, professional writers who have written many books from you. It takes time and work to get here. Lots of it. There is no magical way here but practice. Also remember: this is a great place to be, but don't stop here. Identify other things you need to improve and work on them. No one is perfect.
8. Get In Late, Get Out Early
Cut filler wherever possible. Start each chapter, scene, and book as close to the necessary incident or development as possible. Get out soon after and move on. This keeps pace taut and pages turning.
This doesn't mean you can't have slow moments or introspective moments. They are, of course, necessary developments too. But make sure you know what the point of those scenes are and cut the filler that doesn't add to it. They say that every scene in your novel should advance plot or characterisation, but given that plot is character… every scene in your novel should advance characterisation. To some degree, at least.
9. "Therefore," and "But," instead of "Then
Make sure every new thing that happens in the narrative can be connected with the previous scene by either 'therefore' or 'but', not 'then.'
'Therefore' means that the next scene happens as a direct consequence of the choices made in previous scenes.
'But' means that the next scene produces a direct obstacle to what the characters are trying to achieve in previous scenes.
'Then' means that another unrelated thing just happens. Don't do this. This is not forward momentum nor is it a story. Stories are about cause and effect, not collections of unrelated events.
10. Characters Should Have Wants Distinct From The Protagonist
In the word of Vonnegut, "every character should want something, even if it's just a glass of water." If your characters share exactly the same goals and wants as the protagonist, they aren't characters, they are extra limbs. Make sure you know why all your characters are in the story and what they want to get out of it, even if you don't directly tell the reader.
11. Simple Is Good
Express your ideas in the simplest way you can. Sometimes, it takes long and complicated sentences to express long and complicated ideas. But it should never take long and complicated sentences to explain simple ideas. If you ever find yourself looking for a thesaurus to find a bigger word just because, you're doing it wrong.
Clarity and coherence are the number one goals, everything else comes after. If you lose clarity and coherence, you have nothing.
12. If You Write, You Are A Writer
Keep writing. Keep plugging away at it and getting better. Don't fall prey to imposter syndrome where you feel like you are just amateur faking at writing, while all the other writers are out there achieving things. Everyone started where you are starting. Brandon Sanderson wrote 13 books before getting one published.
If you want to write, then write. But don't find excuses not to. Of course, you don't have time. Nobody has time. JK Rowling wrote Harry Potter while struggling with poverty. Almost all writers start out with day jobs. If you find yourself making excuses not to write, maybe you just don't want to write.
If you want to be a writer, all you need to do is write. Write, write, write.
How To Start A Novel
One of the most important parts of a story is the very beginning. Often, readers will pick up a book in a bookshop or a library and read the first page or so to determine if they will read on. Similarly, agents and publishers will base a lot of their initial judgments on the first five or ten pages. This post will explore what makes a good start to a novel and what doesn't, providing some ideas and thoughts as to how to improve your opening.
What Readers Want
First of all, I want to talk about what readers are really looking for in the opening of a novel. Some might say that you need tension or action, some might say you need mystery. This will of course be different depending on genre and on style. But while there are a wide variety of things, many of them can be boiled down to three main areas:
A Dramatic Question
Interesting Character
Compelling Prose
Let's consider all three of these:
The dramatic question is what drives the concept of your novel. It is the mystery that is to be answered. If you can have this appear in the first five pages, or even the first few lines, then you are on the right track.
This is usually posed as something bizarre or different to the real world. As something different to everyday life.
Look at the opening of Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone. Ostensibly, it is just a description of Vernon Dursley coming home from work, but laced into the description is a bunch of strange things:
A cat reading a sign. Cats can't read.
Someone calls him a Muggle, which is a word that doesn't make sense.
He overhears talk about a boy named Harry and freezes in fear.
This all happens in the first five pages. It sets up a big dramatic question - who is Harry and how are all these strange things happening? The book then answers this by introducing us to the world of Hogwarts and magic.
The difference between what JK Rowling and less accomplished authors would do, and a mistake I see very often, is that they would spend much more time establishing normalcy before introducing the bizarre twist or the dramatic question. Many authors think they need a whole chapter to establish normal routines before something happens. You really don't. There's a great expression: get in late, leave early. This very much applies here. Get in as late as you can if you want your story to have impact.
This idea is even better when it is achieved in the first line. Let's look at a few great first lines and see how they present a dramatic question.
"Lydia is dead. But they don't know this yet." - Everything I Never Told You by Celeste Ng
Clear, straightforward and compelling. It has a double question in it: why is Lydia dead? And why don't they know this? More importantly, who are they?
"The snow in the mountains was melting and Bunny had been dead for several weeks before we understood the gravity of our situation." - The Secret History by Donna Tartt
This is in a similar vein. It also asks a double question. Why is Bunny dead and what is the gravity of their situation? These are clearly two different issues.
"The Man in Black fled across the desert, and the Gunslinger followed." - The Gunslinger by Stephen King
This is a classic example of posing a dramatic question. The capitalisation of both characters lends them dramatic weight and we need to read on to find out what has caused this chase.
"The war in Zagreb began over a pack of cigarettes." - Girl at War by Sarah Novic
Less character based, but still asking a question. How did this small thing lead to such a big thing?
Take a look at your first line. Does it ask a question? If you find that you don't have a significant dramatic question in the first chapter of your novel at all, then you need to be considering a pretty major rewrite.
The second thing that people look for is an interesting character. It is hugely important to give the readers character early on. Stories are about characters, after all, not settings or plots or magic systems. Don't make us wait until we get one.
Establishing interesting characters can be done in a number of ways. One is to pose an interesting character conflict. Another is to establish a very clear sense of voice - particularly if it is written in first person.
Let's look at some more opening lines:
"Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice." - One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez.
This is a wonderful first line, as it achieves both a dramatic question (why is he facing the firing squad?), but also gives us voice and character conflict. We want to understand why he would remember that day as his last, just before his death. We have a hint of a father-son relationship that we know will be explored. It deepens the character and makes him more complex.
"Call me Ishmael. Some years ago - never mind how long precisely - having little or no money in my purse, and nothing particular to interest me on shore, I thought I would sail about a little and see the watery part of the world." - Moby Dick by Herman Melville.
Now this one is a good example, because the dramatic question isn't immediately posed. It comes after, but the opening focuses more on character. It carries this character through the use of voice. 'Call me Ishmael" is an interesting enough sentence construction that it becomes compelling, as is the 'never mind how long precisely'. And the character conflict of having no money and sailing the world is enough to drive us forward.
The most important thing here is that in the first few pages we need an established character to root for or follow. Stories are about characters. If you have an opening five pages that just describes setting or landscapes, the reader will be lost and, worse than that, bored.
This one is a bit harder to explain. It is one of those things that you know when you see. Great openings have something literary about them. A clever twist of language, structure and setting.
For example, the first few pages of The Name of the Wind by Patrick Rothfuss is beautifully written. The description of the 'silence of three parts' is compelling enough just in its prose that we want to read on. Here it is:
Now, you might say: but he's just describing the setting of a pub there. Didn't you just say not to describe setting?
Well, yes. He is describing the setting of a pub. But he's using it to describe a character. Kote is the focus of the scene, ultimately, and as such is a fascinating character. It still asks a dramatic question pretty quickly too - why is this man waiting to die? The description of setting makes the presentation of Kote - or Kvothe - very interesting.
Let's look, finally, and one of my favourite openings in ages. It is the opening to N.K. Jemisin's wonderful The Fifth Season. The whole book is a masterpiece, but I'm just going to be exploring the opening here. It does all three of the above with great skill. It is so successful that I'm going to copy most of the first page down here:
'Let's start with the end of the world, why don't we? Get it over with and move on to more interesting things.
First, a personal ending. There is a thing she will think over and over in days to come, as she imagines how her son died and tries to make sense of something so innately senseless. She will cover Uche's broken little body with a blanket - except his face, because he is afraid of the dark - and she will sit beside it numb, and she will pay no attention to the world that is ending outside. The world has already ended within her, and neither ending is for the first time. She's old hat at this by now.
What she thinks then, and thereafter, is: But he was free.
And it is her bitter, weary self that answers this almost-question every time her bewildered, shocked self manages to produce it:
He wasn't. Not really. But now he will be.
But you need context. Let's try the ending again, writ continentally.
Here is a land.'
What an opening! Consider just the first line. 'Let's start with the end of the world, why don't we? Get it over with and move on to more interesting things.' There is a wonderful dramatic question, coupled with fantastic narrative voice that oozes character and reads in a compelling way. That, on its own, would make me read on.
Then it continues and we immediately get character. Not just character, but deep, empathetic character. The line 'except his face, because he is afraid of the dark' is so unashamedly moving for so early in a book. It speaks volumes about the relationship between this woman and her dead son. We feel for this unnamed woman, who has lost her child, whose world is ending. She also has internal character conflict clearly defined - two parts of her are explored and are in disagreement with one another about whether he was free (whatever that means, which is another dramatic question).
The prose is also wonderful. The voice is compelling. Describing her reaction to her world ending and the actual world ending as 'She's old hat at this by now." is stunning.
She is correct at the end. We do need context, and she continues to give it to us, and uses it to describe a great fantasy setting. But the key is this: I'm in. I'm so in. In a half a page she has guaranteed that I'd buy the book on the spot.
It is very, very well done.
What Readers Don't Want
By contrast, let's think about some of the things that readers don't want, and mistakes that many budding authors fall into the trap of making. I can think of three main things that are terrible for an introduction:
Contrived and Cliche
Firstly, don't be boring.
A boring first few pages is one that doesn't do any of the above. It spends too long establishing normalcy before asking us a dramatic question. It doesn't give us a character to follow early enough. The prose is stilted or otherwise dull and voiceless.
There are many examples of comparatively boring openings even in famous works. The opening to Terry Brooks' The Sword of Shannara, for example, is rubbish. The book itself is fine, in a fun, fantasy escapist way, and I quite enjoyed it, but the opening… oh dear.
'The sun was already sinking into the deep green of the hills to the west of the valley, the red and gray-pink of its shadows touching the corners of the land, when Flick Ohmsford began his descent. The trail stretched out unevenly down the northern slope, winding through the huge boulders which studded the rugged terrain in massive clumps, disappearing into the thick forests of the lowlands to reappear in brief glimpses in small clearings and thinning spaces of woodland. Flick followed the familiar trail with his eyes as he trudged wearily along, his light pack slung loosely over one shoulder. His broad, windburned face had a set, placid look, and only the grey eyes revealed the restless energy that burned beneath the calm exterior. He was a young man, though his stocky build and grizzled brown hair and shaggy eyebrows made him look much older. He wore the loose fitting work clothes of the Vale people and in the pack he carried were several metal implements that rolled and clanked loosely against each other.'
Okay, so this opening isn't completely irredeemable. It gives us a character, at least, even if the most interesting thing about him is a 'the restless energy that burned beneath the calm exterior.' But other than that, I don't care. The setting isn't interesting enough to warrant so much description early on. The character is essentially boring, has no apparent conflict, and nothing happens. Compared to either Rothfuss or Jemisin above, it is not even in the same league.
He does, at least, introduce a conflict in about four or five pages, but there is a reason no one is listing this as their favourite book openings. It is, quite frankly, boring. If I picked this up in a book shop today, I wouldn't buy it. If you took away the character, it would be unreadably dire.
I'm not saying there isn't place for lovely setting description in your novel. There is. N.K. Jemisin describes some of the best settings I've read in a fantasy novel. But she doesn't do in the first line.
Contrived or Cliche Openings
I'm sure you've seen it before, but a short list of cliche openings to stories include:
Waking up from a dream (which may or may not be prophetic somehow).
Waking up generally.
Thinking about abstract things that don't have a concrete relation to the world.
Your character being en route to somewhere (why not just put them there?)
Looking in the mirror and describing yourself.
Lots of minor characters talking about something not particularly plot relevant.
Opening a scene in the middle of a battle (I'll talk about why this is particularly egregious later.)
Don't do any of these. They aren't interesting or compelling or new. I could go into a longer post as to why these are not great, but many other blogs have already done that in the past and that isn't so much the focus of this post.
Confusing Openings
Many writers think opening their novels in the middle of conflict, or in media res, if you will, is exciting. It plunges the reader straight into the narrative. Often this is done by throwing you in the middle of a physical action scene (a war or battle of some kind) or some heated dialogue or argument.
These can be done, but there are dangers with both.
Firstly, the problem with an action scene as an opening is that you are missing the point of a good action scene. A really good action scene works because we care enough about the characters to be concerned what happens to them. We want to know if they will live, die, be injured, kill someone, etc.
If you start with an action scene, and you haven't established character yet, the reader simply won't care. Everything that makes an action scene good will be lost. If we don't care about what happens to the characters, because we don't know them, then the action scene (regardless of how exciting you think it is) will be boring.
They will also be confusing, as the reader may not understand why they are fighting or what is going on. This becomes a particular issue when you introduce too many characters all at once.
This is more pronounced with dialogue. If you open with dialogue, you run the risk of 'talking heads' syndrome, where the reader can't work out who is saying what and to whom. This can be fixed with judicious use of dialogue tags, but I'd recommend against it. Once again, like battles, heated dialogue works better when we know the characters already.
A Note on Prologues
Many books start with prologues. It is a thing that happens. Try not to start one with yours.
If you want to get published in this day and age, prologues are pretty much a no-no for most agents. They hate them.
Why? Well, they just want to get into the story. They don't want to invest in a character that won't be a major player later on. It's frustrating reading a first chapter that establishes certain things, then just seems to… end.
Look at what agents have said about prologues in the past:
"I'm not a fan of prologues, preferring to find myself in the midst of a moving plot on page one rather than being kept outside of it, or eased into it."
– Michelle Andelman, Regal Literary
"Most agents hate prologues. Just make the first chapter relevant and well written."
– Andrea Brown, Andrea Brown Literary Agency
"Prologues are usually a lazy way to give back-story chunks to the reader and can be handled with more finesse throughout the story. Damn the prologue, full speed ahead!"
– Laurie McLean, Fuse Literary
When opening your story, think about the following:
Give the reader a dramatic question. Do it early. Try to give it to us in the first line.
Give the reader a character as early as possible. Try to make them interesting and compelling.
Try to establish a narrative voice in the first few lines, even if just through your sentence construction.
Don't throw the reader into the middle of a hectic scene without a character to root for. This will be boring.
Don't spend ages establishing normalcy before anything interesting happens.
Don't write a prologue.
NB: As with all things, any of these above rules can be broken provided you are a good enough writer. But in all likelihood, if you are starting out, you aren't good enough yet. Get the rules right before you start to break them.
See you in two weeks!
Character Dimensions
When approaching a novel, you are going to have a wide range of different characters. Some will play a larger role in the plot and some will not. There is a lot of discussion about making characters three-dimensional and not 'flat', and this is very important, but it does not necessarily apply to every character.
This post will explore the differences between one-dimensional, two-dimensional and three-dimensional characters and discuss the place they have in your novel. It will also aim to give some tips and ideas about how to make a character stand out and have depth when necessary.
To explore the character, I'm going to mainly use examples from the master of deep and complex characters: William Shakespeare.
The Three Different Levels of Character
One Dimensional Characters
These are characters that appear perhaps for just a single scene, or for a few lines. They are usually there to serve a purpose that is not character - i.e. furtherance of the plot, or for the establishment of a scene or mood. They have no particular motivation, flaws, development, or depth.
Don't be fooled into thinking these characters have no place in your novel. They do. It's just important that you understand what place they have.
Two Dimensional Characters
These are the secondary cast of characters. People that appear more than once, but are not central to the protagonist's arc. This might be a Police Chief, if your novel is about a detective, who appears to reprimand him once or twice, but isn't really central to the developing arc.
These characters should have more depth. They don't need to be complex explorations of the human condition, with complicated flaws and backgrounds and an detailed arc, but they should have three clear things: goal, motivation, conflict.
We'll explore these more later.
Three Dimensional Characters
These are your central protagonists. The main person driving your story and the closest people to that narrative. Also, probably your main antagonist as well. It should certainly encompass more than just your protagonist.
These characters should have depth. By this, I mean they should have everything that the two-dimensional characters have, but in multitude. They should have multiple conflicts, multiple goals and multiple conflicting motivations.
When and How They Should Appear: 1-D Characters
One-dimensional characters are characters that appear very briefly, perhaps in a single scene or for a very brief moment in multiple scenes. If the character appears more than that, you should consider making them a 2-D character.
If they are brief in appearance, 1-D characters are fine. They appear in novels all the time. But if you are going to make your character one dimensional, you need to be aware of what that dimension is.
What is the purpose of your character?
It should really fall into two categories - plot or setting.
A character designed to further the plot is one that appears and gives information to the protagonist or perhaps drives the plot forward by doing something to the protagonist to push him elsewhere. (i.e. stealing their purse and running away, causing the protagonist to chase them somewhere).
A character designed to further setting does something to add to the atmosphere or mood. For example, a thug beating up someone to establish a dangerous street scene.
You need to know which one your character is doing and why they are there.
Then you need to think about how you can get them to do both. After all, just as all your sentences should be trying to further both plot and character simultaneously, your 1-D characters should try and further plot and setting simultaneously.
Let's take a look at the opening of Hamlet. It opens with two 1-D characters, Bernardo and Francisco, atop the walls of Elsinore castle. We don't really hear much from them ever again, but they are clearly there to warn Horatio (a major character) that they have seen the ghost of Hamlet's father. This is the inciting incident of the action of the play, and they are there to push that plot point forward.
However, they also manage to deliver setting. Bernardo's first line, and the first words of the entire play, is: "Who's there?" followed by Francisco's "Stand and unfold yourself."
The tension of the unknown and the recurring sense of being untrusting of others is established. This continues in their dialogue as they are worried and reticent. It establishes an atmosphere of unease atop the castle walls, which is touched upon later when one of the soldiers on the castle walls says "something is rotten in the state of Denmark."
So while the characters themselves are relatively flat, their purpose is very clear. They are there to inform Horatio of the inciting incident and set in motion the action of the play and they are there to establish atmosphere and a setting of unease that dominates the rest of the play.
They are successful characters not because they have depth, but because they have purpose.
Task 1: Go through and identify the 1-D characters in your novel. Are they furthering both plot and atmosphere/setting? If not, is there a way to make them do that?
These are characters that appear more often, but not quite often enough to be considered a main character. Any character that appears in two or three scenes or more or has significant and meaningful dialogue and action with the main characters should be at least 2-D.
2-D characters need the following: goal, motivation and conflict.
Let's consider Othello, another great Shakespearean tragedy. In Othello, we are introduced to the character of Brabantio - Desdemona's father. Now, he is not a main character really as he doesn't appear anywhere except for Act 1. But in the scenes he is in, he has a pretty significant impact on the plot and so is worth making at least 2-D.
In the play, he discovers that Othello and his daughter are to be wed and he is furious. He has motivation, which is to stop the marriage, he has a conflict (in that the Duke is happy to let them be wed and he can't stop it) and he has motivation (albeit that he is a misogynist and a racist).
He is not deeply complex, but he doesn't need to be. He works as a 2-D character because he gives other characters the opportunity to shine. This leads me to my next point:
Characters as Foils
One thing 2-D characters are very good for is as foils for the main protagonists. In Hamlet, Fortinbras is relatively 2-D. He doesn't need to be complicated, as he is barely in it. In fact, he doesn't show up until the very end.
However, his existence as a character acts as a direct contrast to Hamlet. They are both sons who have dead fathers and have uncles ruling the throne. Fortinbras's determination for revenge and action highlights Hamlet's inaction. By having a character to compare Hamlet too, all of Hamlet's interesting insecurities and flaws shine all the brighter.
Foil characters are used across literature and can be very good uses for 2-D characters. However, they must have a goal, conflict and a motivation. If they do not, they are a 1-D character. And you shouldn't use a 1-D character as a foil.
Lastly, we come to 3-D characters. These are your main characters. Your Frodo and Sam. Your Harry, Ron and Hermione, and probably your Voldemort.
They, too, have to have a goal, a conflict and a motivation, but they also need to have more depth than that. One of the easiest ways to do this is to have multiple goals, conflicts and resolutions, all of them conflicting with one another.
Let's look at Macbeth, one of the great tragic heroes. In the play he has multiple conflicting goals: he wants to serve his King. He wants to do well for his wife. He wants to fight his pride. He wants to give in to his ego. He wants to be King. He wants to work out whether the witches are telling the truth. Etc.
His goals are very conflicted and this makes him interesting.
Even more importantly, his motivations are conflicted. He himself is not sure why he wants these things.
Be careful though, as this is where authors fall into a common trap. Not being sure about your motivation for something is not the same as having conflicting motivations. You can't just remove motivation or make motivation unclear and muddy - that makes your character flat. You need clear identifiable motivations that are actively conflict with one another. Think about Macbeth:
- He wants to serve his King because he believes in honour and has always thought of himself as an honourable man.
- He wants to become King because deep down he has a heavy sense of pride and ego.
- He wants to serve his King because he actually loves the man, and he has a deep respect for all the things he has done for Macbeth in his life.
- He wants to become King because his wife urges him to, goading him to do it and he wants to please her.
- He wants to serve his King… etc.
And this is just at the start of the play. These motivations are all there, but they conflict with one another. He is complex. He is 3-D.
Each of the goals need to have their own conflicts, too, or they aren't interesting. Often, the conflicting motivations provide conflict, but you want to be sure that the conflicts aren't entirely internal. External conflict is necessary for character stakes and growth.
For example, for his goal of killing the King, Macbeth is faced with a very real conflict of having to kill him without being caught. This leads him to other murders and down a dark path.
For his goal of being honourable and serving his King well, Macbeth is faced with the very real and physical conflict of his wife berating him and pushing him to kill him, as well as the supernatural force of the witches pushing him to do it.
These conflicts conflict with one another, so to speak, and offer us a deep and complex 3-D character.
Know which of your characters are 1-D, 2-D, and 3-D. Once you know that, make sure you know what they are doing and why.
1-D characters should have both a plot and a setting purpose.
2-D characters should have a clear goal, conflict and motivation. They could also be a foil.
3-D characters should have multiple conflicting goals, conflicts and motivations.
You need a range if you want a good character cast. No one wants a book with only 1-D characters, but no one has time or space for a book with only 3-D characters either. It gets way too cluttered.
The Writing Process - From Stimulus to Story
This post is about the process of writing, from inspiration and getting ideas to actually writing. It's about cultivating habits and getting your thoughts onto the page. This has been something requested by a few different subscribers, but it is a topic I've been wary of touching upon for a number of reasons.
First of all, the initial idea of the blog was that it would provide practical and actionable writing tips: things that you could directly apply to your characters, plot or prose after reading it. I wanted to provide advice that wasn't vague platitudes about motivation and inspiration, but specific and workable tips. But as with all things, I must let the blog evolve. There will, of course, continue to be actionable advice, but there may be other things too.
Secondly, the issue with a writer's process is that it is so personal and so based on our individual lives and activities that it is difficult to gain any real consensus. So what I will do is present my process, and you can take from that what you will.
A Quick Piece of Advice
While this may seem tautological, the best way to write anything is to actually write. As valuable as reading, sketching, thinking and plotting may be, if you don't write things down then you aren't actually getting anywhere. An idea in your head will stay there, forever, pure and untouched and utterly useless. When you translate it to the page, it won't be perfect anymore, but it will also be there to work with. Only when you put it on the page can you start fixing it.
All the way through the process below, you should be writing. It doesn't matter if it's in a notebook, on a phone, on a computer or on a stone tablet, write your ideas down. Get them out of your head an onto the page.
Where do you get stories from?
Most writers will probably tell you that the ideas just come to them, but I think it is important to try to dissect and work out the steps that take an idea from the very early stages of germination into something truly workable. When I break apart my process, I see a clear strand of movement:
Character Stimulus
Deepening Conflict
What does these mean? Let me try and break them down for you:
1. Character Stimulus
This could be anything. It's something that sparks off your train of thought into a world of imagination. You know it when you feel it. One of my favourite descriptions of a moment of stimulus comes from the great Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami, describing how he first became a novelist:
One bright April afternoon in 1978, I attended a baseball game at Jingu Stadium, not far from where I lived and worked. It was the Central League season opener, first pitch at one o'clock, the Yakult Swallows against the Hiroshima Carp. I was already a Swallows fan in those days, so I sometimes popped in to catch a game—a substitute, as it were, for taking a walk.
Back then, the Swallows were a perennially weak team (you might guess as much from their name) with little money and no flashy big-name players. Naturally, they weren't very popular. Season opener it may have been, but only a few fans were sitting beyond the outfield fence. I stretched out with a beer to watch the game. At the time there were no bleacher seats out there, just a grassy slope. The sky was a sparkling blue, the draft beer as cold as could be, and the ball strikingly white against the green field, the first green I had seen in a long while. The Swallows first batter was Dave Hilton, a skinny newcomer from the States and a complete unknown. He batted in the leadoff position. The cleanup hitter was Charlie Manuel, who later became famous as the manager of the Cleveland Indians and the Philadelphia Phillies. Then, though, he was a real stud, a slugger the Japanese fans had dubbed "the Red Demon."
I think Hiroshima's starting pitcher that day was Yoshiro Sotokoba. Yakult countered with Takeshi Yasuda. In the bottom of the first inning, Hilton slammed Sotokoba's first pitch into left field for a clean double. The satisfying crack when the bat met the ball resounded throughout Jingu Stadium. Scattered applause rose around me. In that instant, for no reason and on no grounds whatsoever, the thought suddenly struck me: I think I can write a novel.
I can still recall the exact sensation. It felt as if something had come fluttering down from the sky, and I had caught it cleanly in my hands. I had no idea why it had chanced to fall into my grasp. I didn't know then, and I don't know now.
That crack. That hit of the baseball. It put ideas in him that weren't there before. I like to think it wasn't just the inspiration that he could do anything, but that in that hit he saw a story. He watched the classic story of an underdog overcoming adversity and having one great hit. We all need some kind of stimulus, and they come in different forms, but I think the way Murakami describes it captures the feeling quite well.
The real key to stimulus and inspiration is to look for characters in things. Great stories should be about character, after all. When you come across your interesting stimulus, see if you can picture a character involved in it. For me, stimulus usually takes two forms: either an image from which conflict can be derived or a bizarre hypothetical - a 'what if'. I'll try to give an example of both.
'What If':
I was commuting home from work and having a conversation with a good friend of mine. We were discussing what we thought the world would be like if people could be brought back from the dead. Not in a zombie way, but in a legitimate way. We got onto discussing how the dead would form another social class, and people would want to raise dead people to be their butlers or servants and then it hit me. Like the baseball bat.
I could see a character, a girl for some reason, whose job it was to be a graverobber. She steals dead bodies to bring to rich people so they can use them as servants. I could picture her creeping through the graveyard at night, unsure about the morality of her actions but also needing the money. The 'what if' had given me a sudden moment of character realisation. She didn't have a name, or a background, or a family. Not yet. But she existed, if only for a sliver of a scene, in my head.
I was watching a short documentary on the civil war in the Central African Republic. I didn't know much (or anything about it) and I was fascinated. The idea that there are so many deep, involved conflicts around the globe I know nothing about, with so many people whose lives and souls and families are on the line, continues to surprise me every day. Anyway, the documentary was describing how one of the main catalysts for the conflict was religious hatred. Christians were killing Muslims in CAR. It showed an image of one man, a Christian priest, holding a Muslim boy in his arms, while surrounded by other Christian men.
That image sparked a whole character in my mind. The idea of standing up to your own people to save one boy of a different religion from certain death really stuck with me. I could see the conflict written in that image. The choices he felt he had to make. The heroicism of it. In a flash of a second, like a baseball bat, a seed of a character was born.
I don't know what your stimulus is. If you don't know either, I suggest you keep an eye out for it. Look for it and recognise it when it happens.
I will give the best piece of advice about the writing process I know, though. When you encounter such creative stimulation: Write it down.
Don't wait until you get home. Don't wait until tomorrow. Drop whatever you are doing and write down all the ideas in your head.
Scribble in your notebook, do it on your phone, record it on your phone's microphone, leave yourself a voicemail. Whatever. But don't assume you will remember it later. You might not, and if you do you won't remember it all.
So again: Write it down.
Take your newly inspired sliver of a character and start to give them some real conflict. Remember that the basis for all great stories is conflict. Start to throw up some obstacles that run deep in their life.
Tip: Consider Georges Polti's '36 Dramatic Situations' and see if you can adapt one to your characters - http://www.wcatyweb.org/library/documents/comics/poltis36.pdf
Example 1: The girl - Jessie, as I will call her - has to dig up her parents. No - too difficult. She'd never do it. She'd just refuse. Hm.
Jessie is asked to dig up a body, but when she returns to her clients they've all been killed. Seems like this body is important, but she doesn't know why. Why doesn't she just get rid of it? Because they're after her, too, whoever they are. She needs to find out what's so important about this dead guy or her life's on the line.
But I need more. Her little brother is also starving and she has to feed him. No, boring. Her little brother was brought back to life and works in indentured servitude for a family. She's saving up to buy him back. This family is involved somehow with the dead body. In the end she needs to decide what's more important, her brother or her survival.
I find it useful at the start to identify a clear theme of conflict in the character. For her, its family duty vs. individuality.
But I need more.
Keep pushing for conflict - as much as you can. Think about family, think about money, think about friends, think about survival. You can always cut things out later.
This man - Isaac, as I will call him - is hiding Muslims in his Church. The militia want to kill them, but they don't know he's hiding them. The heads of the militia come to his sermons and are part of his congregation. He has to lie to them, despite being very religious and hating lying.
Conflict?
Crisis of faith is an obvious one. A bit cliche, but I like it. How can someone trust in the glory and goodness of God in the middle of a civil war?
Family is good, too. Maybe the head of the militia is his brother. Great. Now he has to lie to his brother. Meanwhile, his brother is trying to get him to join the fight, unaware he is hiding the enemy in his Church.
More? The kid says they (his brother's people) have got his mother captive and she's being tortured and killed. Asks Isaac to save her. What can he do? Refuse? Never. That's a tricky situation. He might even end up having to choose what's more important to him: his family or his faith. That's good conflict.
Write down all these conflicts. Develop them. The more the better, you can cut and trim later.
Right, now I need to actually do some research. I need to know a hell of a lot more about the Central African Republic before this can go any further. I also need to know more about indentured servitude, slavery, the culture of servants and butlers and maids. Maybe more about corpses too.
Google is your friend. Wikipedia is your best friend. Documentaries are great too. Listen to podcasts, read posts, etc. Don't just go for factual stuff. Go for primary sources. Read personal accounts and take from them.
Don't be afraid of stealing little bits and pieces of people's lives and pushing them into your characters. Stories are all just one big melting pot of experience in the end, anyway.
As you do this research, write down any little ideas that come to you. Whether as little notes, or experiences or scenes. Just write them down.
4. Deepening Conflict
Now, go back to your characters and feed your research into their conflicts. Remember that plot is character, and your plot will grow organically out of your character's having deep and complex conflict.
I learn more about corpses having a shelf-life, so to speak. If they aren't preserved in the right way, they start to rot and fall apart. I start reading about mummification and preservation techniques. It makes me think the brother might only have a certain amount of time before he falls apart. She's got to free him quickly to get him preserved. She's got a timeline - I like that.
She's also not entirely sure what she will do when she does save him, as no preservation is perfect, but it doesn't matter to her.
The conflict is deepened through research.
I learn about President Francois Bozize, who was President through a political coup near the start of the civil war but had to flee the country. I learn about the political issues there. I decide to make President Bozize the protagonist's uncle to further tie him politically into his conflict, to add expectation.
He is ashamed of the actions of his uncle, but his brother idolises him. This is another rift between them, but one they don't talk about.
I learn about the other crises of faith, the story of Job and the story of Abraham and Isaac from the Bible inform my character development for his character's crisis of faith. (It's actually why I decided to call him Isaac, as an allusion to the almost-sacrificed child).
5. Plotting
Now you have character and research and conflict, start to plot their arc. I use my plotting arc technique that you can find on my blog in detail and I have posted before, so I'm not going to rehash it here. Go find it if you're interested - it's in the side bar on the right.
I develop the characters arc from beginning to end and plot their full story in its major beats. Then, I write.
6. Writing
This is the big one. Some writers spend ages plotting, planning and developing but just can't get down to writing. Now, I'm not sure if I've got specific advice for this other than just:
Write. Write all the time. Stop worrying about how good it is. It won't be any good. Not yet.
Just get the words on the page. Writing 10 terrible words is better than writing no words. Writing 100 awful words is even better. If you don't write it down on the page, then you can't start editing it and making it better. If it stays in your head, that's the only place it will ever be.
Think of it as practice. I've always seen writer's block as a poor excuse, because all writing is practicing at getting better.
Think of it like trying to learn the guitar. If you are trying to learn the guitar, what do you do? You practice for an hour each day (or something like that). You know it will be terrible at the start, but that's the point, you get better. Have you ever heard anyone skip guitar practice because of "guitar player's block"? No. It's silly. If you skip practice, you're being lazy. The same applies to writing.
Set yourself a schedule and a target, but don't beat yourself up if you miss it. When I'm writing a novel, I usually set a target of 1500 words a day, 5 days a week. If I write less - say only 500 words - I console myself with the fact that 500 is better than 400. And 400 is better than none.
The rest is discipline.
Write, write, write until it's done. Then redraft. I will do a more extended post on redrafting and editing later, as that deserves its own post and time. But the basics of my process are here. Take as much or as little as you want.
1. Stimulus
Find out what your stimulus is for inspiration. Make sure you write it down when it happens. Look for characters in things, tease them out of situations.
Build up conflicts in your characters. Look for challenges in their life. Try to set up dichotomies and choices they have to make.
Research details of your story. Read, listen and watch things related or even unrelated. Take notes and think about how you can tie these into your characters.
Use the research to make the conflict more grounded, more complex and more real. Remember that plot is character. Your plot comes growing out of your character conflict.
Now plot their character arc. Write out the full thing.
6. Write
Write, write and write until it's done. Don't blame yourself if it is bad. Don't worry if it doesn't flow. If you don't write it, it can't get better.
Some 'Show, Don't Tell' Tips
Show, don't tell. It's the golden standard of writing advice. Prospective authors are often criticised, put down or ignored for being too 'telly' and not showing enough. But often it might be difficult to pinpoint how to show certain things. The point of this post is to give some tips about how to show and not tell. Emotions are easy enough, as I'll show below, but what about character? What about back-story? What about setting?
How do you show these things without just telling your reader what is going on? To do this, I'm going to break down the three main things that you can show rather than tell. This won't cover everything, but hopefully it will help.
An important caveat: just because you should try to show, where possible, that doesn't mean that telling is always wrong. Remember there are appropriate moments and times for telling, it just shouldn't dominate your approach.
Emotion is arguably the easiest thing to show instead of tell, and as such it should be one that you are getting absolutely right. I'm starting with this one because, for those confused, its an excellent way of demonstrating what show, don't tell actually means.
It doesn't mean deliberately obfuscate things for your reader. It means making things more like real life. It means making the reader feel like they are there.
Imagine you are at work one day and a colleague has a furious argument with someone and gets really angry. What would actually happen? Would they walk in the room and a helpful ethereal voice pop up and say 'Jim is furious!" No. You would see him storm into the room, face twisted in anger and slam his fist on his desk, and your brain would take the necessary subconscious steps to work out 'ah, he must be angry.'
All you are aiming to do in writing is make it more like the latter than the former. By telling, we actually remove our reader from the world we are creating. Nobody really tells people things regularly in real life, at least not all the time, and so by telling the reader becomes very aware that they are reading. This is not what you want.
So, instead of writing:
"Jim was furious."
Jim stormed into the room, face twisted in anger, and slammed his fist on the desk.
Okay, it's not Shakespeare, but it's a step in the right direction.
The key to emotions is to imagine what someone would do if they felt that way and describe those actions. Think about the following things:
How would they move?
What would they do?
What would they look like?
What would they say?
Describing how they would move is an important first step. We hold ourselves differently when we are in different moods. Verb choice is an easy way to describe this. Look above: Jim didn't walk into the room, he 'stormed' in. If he had 'slumped' in, it would have shown a very different thing.
Next is thinking about what they would do. Jim is being a bit cliche by slamming his fist on the desk, but maybe he's an emotional guy so I'll let it pass.
Then think about what they would look like - facial expression, body position. Are they staring at the floor? Are their eyes wide open or clenched shut?
Lastly is thinking about what they would say. It's the only one not covered above, so let me try and include it in a redraft:
"Fuck!"
There. That's better. Jim is clearly very angry. But the most important thing is that at no point have we felt the need to tell the reader, blatantly, "Jim is very angry." and take them out of the scene. This is the heart of showing and not telling.
Let's try another one: fear.
See if you can pick out the four areas - how would they move? What would they do? What would they look like? What would they say (if they would say anything at all)?
Sarah fumbled with the touchscreen of her phone, panting hard. "Shit, shit, shit, shit." Her head flicked up, panicked, as though it had a life of its own. She pressed her body further into the back wall.
Again - easy and straightforward.
This is where showing starts to get a little more difficult. I've written in the past about how effective character portraits often move away from physical descriptions, but this is just one element of it.
Let's look at this description I wrote a while back:
The doors swung open. Detective Inspector James limped into the room, his wide shoulders barely fitting through the doorway. The entire room froze. He looked at the officers and growled. As his dark brown eyes surveyed the scene before him, his lips curled up into a malicious sneer.
"Dobson!" He barked. "Come with me!"
Relief crossed the face of every other cop in the room. As the doors closed behind them, all that could be heard from the corridor was the scared shuffling of young Dobson's feet and the ominous tapping of DI James' metal cane.
Essentially we are using the same skills - verb choice, describing how they act, speak, etc. But it goes deeper than surface emotions now. We are told very little about Mr James here, other than the fact that he is a Detective Inspector, but through the words used we can pick up hints.
Consider this: I was workshopping with some writers several months back and I read this description out and asked them a few questions and to construct a backstory for the character based on this quick description. While there were key differences, the main similarities between the four backstories were uncanny:
He used to be in the military (hence 'veteran') and worked his way up. It was very much his life and he dedicated himself to it. He was married during his time at the military. He was injured by a piece of shrapnel, or stray bullet, or something else (hence the cane), and was forced to leave. This made him extremely bitter - coupled with his wife leaving him (one wrote that he came back to find his wife cheating on him, one wrote that his wife left him because he was growing bitter and resentful, one wrote that his wife died of an unexpected illness), he now relives his old army days vicariously by terrorising other members of the police force. He lives alone, drinks too much and hates people. He's staunchly Conservative.
It is amazing how many of these things can be imagined from a brief description that tells very few of them. This is what you should be aiming for with your character descriptions. It's far more engaging for a reader to work for the implications than to simply be told them. If I had written out the backstory above directly, he would be a much less interesting character.
So how to do this?
You could take the approach with emotions and think about the following things:
Does your character have any unique physical traits or tics? What do they tell you about their background?
How do others react to your characters? Why?
How do your characters speak and act and what does this say about their personality? (Remember, verb choice is key here. DI James doesn't speak, he barks or growls like an animal.)
This is your quick and easy way to go at it.
Another way is to go at it from the other end. Write down everything you already know about your character's backstory - make a list of all the things they've been through and formative experiences they've had. Now fast-forward it to the present day (for your character). For each one, write down the impact (physical or emotional, or both) that this would have.
Put this in a table or list, like so:
Grew up in a Conservative family, but his father was never around.
Has attachment issues ever since he was young, caused him to marry the first woman that ever really showed him love.
Injured in the army
Limps, bitter, kind of hates young people because they are physically able and they remind him of what he once had. Likes to bully them as it makes him feel better.
Wife left him
Avoids women completely. Can barely talk to them. He just barks at them and saunters off. Very lonely. Cuts himself off from the world. Alcoholic.
Made into an Officer in the army at a very young age. Mother was proud.
Still fiddles with the badge when he's nervous. Keeps it on him at all times. Would be beside himself if he lost it.
Sometimes they will be so small that you'll just drop them into description now and again (the badge). Sometimes they'll be big formative parts of your character (the loneliness). The point is that they come from somewhere. The point is also that, as a reader, working out experience from impact is far more compelling an activity than working out impact from experience. Watching him bully younger people and get a sick pleasure out of it is much more engaging than being told "he's jealous of younger people because he doesn't have that physical capability anymore."
For a much more detailed breakdown of how to create character's from experiences, I strongly urge you to check out "Getting Into Character: Seven Secrets A Novelist Can Learn From Actors" by Brandilyn Collins". It's an exceptional writing advice book and really breaks down the character creation process well.
3. Setting
This one is often the toughest. Setting seems like something is prime for description, right? How do you show setting without telling your reader what is there?
This is absolutely fair enough, and often the setting (especially in fantasy / sci fi books) will be key to the plot and development of the scene. However, at times descriptions of settings can come across as extremely dull, regardless of how interesting or well-thought out that setting is.
The issue often arises when setting is divorced from plot or character. It is important to make sure that setting is introduced through action and not just described on its own.
A very good example of this is from Brandon Sanderson's The Way of Kings. The chasm-filled landscape of the Shattered Plains is a wonderful fantasy terrain, but it is described for the first time to us mid-battle.
The first time we here about the drops and gorges is when characters have to cross them to get to the Chasmfiend they are hunting. Bridges to cross the chasms become an integral plot point to Kaladin's character later on. In fact, the setting itself is as much of an antagonist as any individual. This makes the setting come alive - it shows us the setting through describing something else, i.e. a character's journey.
I would say this is a pretty hard and fast rule I try to stick by: setting should be shown through the development of character. It should help them, challenge them or be an obstacle for them. It should make them feel at home or completely lost. It should put them at ease or make them anxious. It should push them forward in the story. If it isn't doing any of these things, try to think about why it is there in the first place and if you really need it.
Describe emotion through actions, pick the right verbs and adjectives and think about how people move and react.
Show character through movement and reaction as well. Think about the impact of their past experiences and show that, don't just explain backstory.
Describe setting through action and character. Don't divorce setting from plot or it will become dull.
Apologies to those who look forward to new advice, but due to work constraints and the fact that I'm falling behind on my own writing projects, I will only be posting once every two weeks from now on.
The next post will be about the writing process and where we get our ideas from. See you in two weeks!
Disclaimers, Distractions and Deadlines
Dear all,
This week I offer you a rant, an apology and a request. I hope you enjoy them.
The first thing I want to write about today is about the topic of writing advice itself. All too often do I see writing advice given, in this blog or on other online forums, with the response being:
"Well, that doesn't work in all cases."
"Here's an example of where a writer didn't do that and it's great."
"It should be remembered not to take this advice as universal."
To which the voice in my head responds: "Well, obviously!"
All writing advice, whether written by me, Stephen King, the Pope or Ursula LeGuin, is subjective. None of it is applicable to all situations and none of it should be taken as gospel. They are tools to be used, considered and adapted when the purpose suits them.
If you don't like it, or it doesn't fit your story, ignore it. Or at the very least, consider why it doesn't fit your story and what that says about your type of story.
This isn't groundbreaking news for most people, but it felt like a necessary response to people telling me that my advice doesn't apply to this story or that book. Of course it doesn't. It was never meant to.
(Rant over)
Distractions and Deadlines
As you may have noticed, I failed to post anything last week. It has been a completely hectic couple of weeks. Having just got back from working Sri Lanka, I had to go to South Korea a few days later for work as well. On top of this there were a variety of pressing deadlines, both in my writing and in other areas, that I had to meet.
As such, the blog was forced into the backseat and has been sitting there, pouting unhappily, for a good week now. Sorry.
But fear not, I fully intend to return to my regular Thursday scheduling as soon as possible. I've even cancelled a trip to Malaysia this weekend in order to get my head together and focus on some actual writing (and get some sleep!)
Here's what I need from you:
What would you like to read about?
To date, I have written about plot structure, scene structure, protagonists and antagonists, dialogue and description, first person and multiple POVs and pathos and endings. There are many other topics in writing that deserve covering and I'd love to lend my thoughts and ideas to any of them, but I'd appreciate getting a sense of what people want to learn more about.
Attached is a google form - I ask one thing of this week, dear subscribers - tell me what you want me to write about. Fill out the single question form and I shall strive to write about every request that comes in.
https://goo.gl/forms/TSOZbdds2yCWCy053
Please do keep them focused on something to do with writing, though. As much as I would be willing to give you a long and detailed essay on my opinions on grumpy-looking cats, it doesn't really fit in this blog.
Thanks, and see you next Thursday.

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl