Posts by Dave King
I once had a client tell me she’d heard that sentences should never run more than fifteen words. To this day I have no idea where that rule came from, though it was probably from someone who either had a short attention span or had read way too much Henry James.
The rule is nonsense, of course. It wound up making all her characters seem like they had short attention spans. But it shows one of the dangers with trying to write by the rules – you wind up limiting your characters or story so you can color within the lines. Sure, more sophisticated rule-givers (George Orwell, for instance) try to get around this danger by giving you the rules on when to break the rules, and maybe even rules on when to break those. My head usually starts to hurt by that point.
Are there guidelines that can help you shape your writing? Sure. I co-authored a book full of them. And I recommend that you learn as much about them as you can. The danger lies in treating these guidelines as rules. It’s much more accurate – and safer – to think of them as tools.
Rules are made to be obeyed. Tools are made to do specific tasks. They’ll do one thing well, and another not so much. Once you know what various tools can and can’t do – what’s in your toolbox – you can pick the right tool for the job. (Full disclosure: I‘m saying this as someone who has, on occasion, used a socket wrench as a hammer.)
Read MoreNot long ago, a client told me that someone who read his manuscript suggested he end the book by killing off his main character. At first, this didn’t make a lot of sense. How could you spend an entire novel building an emotional connection between your readers and your main character only to throw it away at the end? Wouldn’t that leave your readers screaming?
But it can and has been done. Understanding how to let your characters die can help to make your story live, whether your characters make it to the last page or not.
What doesn’t work is murder. Offing a character for the sake of pathos is clearly homicide. This is why few people are reading Love Story any more, and The Old Curiosity Shop is not on anyone’s favorite book list. Some writers have killed off a main character simply because they couldn’t think of another way to end the story. I could offer an example, but, for good reason, you would never have heard of it. In some circles, an arbitrary death is considered a fitting illustration of existential meaninglessness. I can’t offer an example, because I don’t read those books.
The reason these deaths are murders is that the characters are sacrificed for the author’s reasons – generating the weepies, or filling a plot hole, or catering to a modernist cliché of meaninglessness. Whenever you make your characters do things to fulfill your needs rather than their own, your story is in trouble.
On the other hand, when Anna Karenina threw herself under the train, she was ending her story the only way it could have ended.
Read MoreLately I’ve had several clients come to me with the same problem—they want to make a point more than they want to tell a story. That’s fine for essays, blogs, even non-fiction books, but fiction is not the best place to make an argument, not unless you want to join the ranks of propagandists.
Of course, propaganda can sometimes change the world. Uncle Tom’s Cabin brought the brutality of slavery to life in 1852 and inspired many to join the abolitionists and, later, the Union army. People fought and died because of that book. But today, kids are only likely to encounter it in history classes. No one’s reading it for fun anymore.
On the other hand, Huck Finn also changed the world, undermining prejudice by introducing readers to Jim. Yet Twain’s book is still read in literature classes. And for fun.
So what’s the difference between propaganda and a novel that broadens your readers’ minds?
Respect for your characters, for starters.
Read MoreWhy do some books succeed in transporting you to a different time or place? Part of the magic happens because the writer has built a sense of otherness right into the language of the book.
This is more than just dialect, though what I say here applies to writing dialect as well. I’m talking about the deep structure that underlies an entire world view.
Alexander McCall Smith is a master of this sort of thing. Most of you know you can German mimic (and like Yoda sound) by the verbs at the ends of a sentence placing. But in his Professor Dr. Moritz-Maria von Iglefeld stories, Smith goes much further. Consider the following passage, from Unusual Uses of Olive Oil, in which von Iglefeld meets two new students:
They introduced themselves politely: both as it happened, were called Hans, and both were students of medieval French literature, although they had not met one another before.
“I have just come to Regensburg,” said Hans. “I was in Berlin before.”
“And so now here we are: both interested in the same thing!” said the other Hans.
“That is the great delight of a reading party,” said von Iglefeld. “One finds people who share one’s interests. And then, as the week progresses, one gets to know them better. It is very satisfactory.”
How does Smith do it?
Read MoreTherese here to officially welcome our new monthly contributor, Dave King. Dave is the author of one of our favorite craft books, Self-Editing for Fiction Writers, and is an experienced editor. This is his first official post with us. Welcome, Dave!
One of my secret vices is the reality show, “Hoarders, Buried Alive.” (It’s on The Learning Channel, also known as the Schadenfreude Channel.) The show is about people who have crammed their homes nearly to the ceiling with stuff and are extremely resistant to parting with any of it. Why keep 2,137 different Hallmark ornaments (still in boxes) or decade-old expired cans of soup? Each of these items might come in useful, even if all of them together lead to the occasional flattened, desiccated cat. As I say, watching is a guilty pleasure. Don’t judge me.
If you’ve just wrapped up the last scene of your novel and checked the page count—953, you may be flattening the life out of your story under a mountain of words. Or you may simply have a large, complicated story to tell. Or your book may be a trilogy disguised as a single volume. How can you tell? And what do you do about it?
Well, you can go through and trim a word here or a sentence there, tightening up your prose. But this is just picking out the occasional expired can of tuna –it doesn’t really solve the problem. You need to remove large pieces of story. Except that, like any hoarder, you can’t see anything you want to throw away.
Read MoreKath here. Editor and friend of WU Dave King (co-author of the must-have book for writers, Self-Editing for Fiction Writers, Second Edition: How to Edit Yourself Into Print) emailed:
Recently, Ruth (Julian) and I have been seeing coincidence crop up a lot in our personal reading. We talked about it, and soon we had an article – 375 words on how skilled writers handle coincidence in their plots.
Luckily, he passed along their article for our readers. Thanks, Dave!
What a Coincidence
Coincidence is the Get Out of Jail Free card of story creation. The small, artificial worlds in which most stories take place often make coincidence not only plausible, but unavoidable. Because your cast can only be so big, some characters have to tie together in more ways than you’d expect in the real world. So, when you’ve plotted yourself into a corner or want to spring a surprise on your readers, just have a character run into an old acquaintance with key information or stumble across a random fact that changes everything.
But push coincidence too far, and readers start to see the machinery of your plot creaking along. Unless you find some plausible reason to account for it.
You could, for instance, make the coincidence part of your protagonist’s character. When Reginald Hill’s detective Joe Sixsmith stumbles across two people connected to the same crime, someone is bound to mention that Sixsmith’s has a gift for attracting that sort of thing. Carola Dunn simply gives her Daisy Dalrymple an Indian friend who thinks it’s her karma to have a friend who is always finding bodies.
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