CRAFT
Truth: No one’s going to care about a story unless a goodly amount of their brain is sparkin’ along with you – invested, your willing captive for a few days or a few hours. Engaging a reader, or a viewer, requires authenticity on many levels, especially when it comes to characterization.
I recently broke down and watched the most recent Star Wars movie, episode III. I’d been so disappointed with episodes I and II that I almost let it slide. I’m glad I didn’t. I nearly couldn’t breathe during the last 30 minutes of the film for the glee filling my lungs. Lucas had finally managed to tie everything together authentically.
Why would a good boy who’d grown into a good man suddenly turn into a monster?
Oh, yeah: manipulation + intense fear + rejection + betrayal (x 3) + near-death + mutilation + soul-searing loss = gynormous character change.
Read MoreThe dreaded –ing or as phrase. I love them. It’s an easy way to achieve sentence variation and show simultaneous action.
“Grabbing the ice pick, she plunged it into the vampire.”
“As she plunged the ice pick into the vampire, he squealed in agony.”
What’s wrong with these two sentences? the beginning writer asks. Nothing, really. But experienced writers know to use these sentence constructions sparingly because these phrases act like adjectives and adverbs. They are modifiers to the verb phrase. And while most writers know to prune back the adjectives and adverbs, they are less apt to do so with these dependent clauses. Overuse of these clauses, like overuse of all modifiers, robs your prose of power.
“She grabbed the ice pick and plunged it into the vampire.”
I’m the first to admit this is not scintillating prose, but see how this version keeps the reader with the action. It reads at a faster pace; it has the power of immediacy. Renni Browne and Dave King, in their must-have book “Self-Editing for Fiction Writers” calls this ‘sophistication’. Admittedly, the writer can’t have a book loaded with subject, verb, preposition phrases, to read a novel constructed solely of these phrases would be like listening to a dripping faucet. But careful and judicious use of my beloved –ing and as phrases reads more professionally and sets your writing apart from writers who gum up their prose with modifiers.
Read MoreLast week, I highlighted the novelist’s golden rule: show but don’t tell. Well, guess what? Screenwriters break this rule all the time themselves. They can get away with writing, for example, “character is suddenly passionate” and “he’s really mad.” What the heck? Doesn’t this fly in the face of what I said about screenwriters showing through dialogue? Nope; it works with it. And I’m going to tell you why…
It works with it, because the screenwriter is counting on actors and directors—sometimes even scenery, lighting and camera angles—to show for them. (This is how actors earn their dimes, by the way.) Granted, how Al Pacino shows anger may be very different from how Jennifer Aniston shows anger, but there’s no doubt they can both show it—and effectively. Punching a hole in the wall or smearing mayonnaise on your best friend’s new silk blouse; breaking someone’s pinkie or snapping a pencil…you get the picture. An inventive actor or director will treat an open “telling” line like an empty canvas and color it up with as much or as little detail as they please.
Take Peter Jackson’s epic masterpiece, The Lord of the Rings, for example. According to Jackson, who also co-wrote the screenplay, the biggest effect sequence in the movie evolved from a single line in the play. This particular drama unfolded just before a demon-like monster called a balrog appeared to challenge the fellowship (protagonists). The script itself said something along the lines of, “The fellowship runs from the balrog, down a staircase and across a bridge,” but director Jackson expanded on the concept based on imagery of a crumbling bridge that one of his artists composed. Hmm, he mused, what would happen if there are more crumbling segments and the characters have to jump over gaps? What would happen if we add arrow fire to the scene? What would happen if the characters are separated from one another, with some of them stranded on a teetering stair section? Of course the answer is that in choosing to do those things, Jackson dramatically increases tension in the scene—so naturally he opted to do it. Point is, this lengthy, chair-gripping sequence was born from a single TELLING line about running down a staircase. (The script, by the way, remained the same, even after Jackson amped up the drama.)
How can we as novelists use this tidbit to help us?
Read More“Whatcha waiting, whatcha waiting, whatcha waiting for?”
Gwen Stefani
In my previous post, Habits, I mused about the necessity of getting into a habit of writing if one wanted to get anything accomplished. In that post, I wrote about ruthlessly claiming the best (writing) time of day as your own.
There is another reason a writer needs to cultivate the habit of writing: to overcome Resistance.
Resistance, coined by Steven Pressfield in his book The War of Art (given to me by the goddess of the Regency novel, Elena Greene), is the excuses we make to ourselves in order to avoid writing. Resistance, Pressfield hypothesizes, is fear. Because of Resistance, the artist will do anything to avoid the work at hand.
“What does Resistance feel like?” he writes.
Read MoreA script can’t be written like a novel. But can a novelist learn something by leaning over the shoulder of a screenwriter?
Clear character action/reaction and dialogue make up 99% of a good script; a character’s musings are nearly impossible to convey on the big screen. A novelist, on the other hand, can linger in character thought for pages—even chapters—on end. Bottom line: The screenwriter works on a girdled canvas. One book, The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Screenwriting points out an exception: books about mental patients often make compelling movies, because the characters’ thoughts can be shown in all their dishabille through a telling blend of mercurial action and overzealous speech (e.g. One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest, written by Ken Kesey and translated into a fabulous flick that earned five Academy Awards).
A successful screenplay works for many reasons, and one of them is that the writer is forced to show (not tell) almost everything. Over the next few weeks, I’m going to pull some dialogue from some of Hollywood’s championed children. Let’s see what we can learn from them.
Read MoreThe distance between people who actually write novels, and people who talk about writing novels, is wide. Between them lies a chasm, the pit that defines the pro from the amateur: actual results from setting fingers to keypad and doing it.
There’s only one way the talker can become the doer, and that’s to get into the habit of writing.
There are many ways to skin the rabbit, but I’ve only heard of one way to write a novel. And writing takes time, oh lordy it takes time. Most novelists spend our days working in someone else’s cotton fields, sharecropping our time. The remainder is partitioned to loved ones, sleeping, calling our mothers. Then there’s that little bit left. The writing time.
There are two tricks to forming the habit of writing.
Read MoreOne of the things we like to do is analyze movies for the storytelling structure. Our latest film analysis is the Joss Whedon sci-fi flick, Serenity.
Whedon’s movie is an outgrowth of his t.v. series Firefly. Fox TV abused the show by giving it crappy time slots and showing the episodes out of order before pulling the plug due to bad ratings (Whedon has famously declared he’ll never work with Fox again). The series found a home on the SciFi Network, and the respectful treatment helped it become a cult-classic. Universal acquired the rights to Firefly and greenlighted a feature film based on the series, perhaps the first time in Hollywood history that a movie studio wanted to transform a failed t.v. show into a feature film.
Released in September 2005, the film did ok at the box-office, just enough to recoup the cost of production (source), and now the studio is in talks with the SciFi Network to produce a t.v. film to be shown on SciFi. So Whedon’s vision lives on.
What made Firefly and, by extension, Serenity a story that captured the hearts of millions? We watched the movie to find out, then chatted about it.
Kathleen: One of the things that knocked my socks off was how Whedon used contrasts to flesh out both character and setting so that both are real and believable. Let’s talk about setting first. The success of sci fi storytelling really hinges on world building. I really dug how Whedon juxtaposed a Western over a futuristic world. “Stagecoach in space,” he called it. What did you think of that?
Read MoreRecently, Kathleen chatted with bestselling romance author Lydia Joyce about career and craft. Enjoy!
Interview with Lydia Joyce
Q: Your successful debut novel THE VEIL OF NIGHT and your equally-successful follow-up, MUSIC OF THE NIGHT, have been described as having a gothic quality. Was that intentional?
A: Yes! I love the Gothics of the mid-1800s through the early 20th century, and I wanted to play off that trope in my first book, sort of stand it on its head while still honoring the tradition. I didn’t want to rewrite the books of the past but bring something new to them.
The second book was also a Gothic because my publisher specifically requested one. Now that they know that my voice can still be strong without being dependant upon genre definitions, and now that I’ve earned enough of a publishing history that my publisher isn’t as dependent upon high-concept words to sell me to buyers and distributors, I can move more freely and can maintain the same voice and atmosphere without restricting myself to the standard features of the Gothic genre.
Q: How long did it take you to find your voice?
A: It took me three years to really find what voice I wanted Lydia Joyce to be. The journey was sometimes painful and frustrating, and the voice I settled upon is not easy to write, but it was completely worth it in the quality of books that I have been turning out now compared to before I was published.
Q: What was your process for deciding on voice?
A: I sort of fell into it at first, and then I really cemented it as I worked. I wanted to write a sort of homage to the 19th-century Gothic, and as I began writing, things began to feel really right. Then I sat down and thought about what I was doing and what I wanted to be, and it all clicked.
My recommendation to writers (from what I did on a less formal basis) is to make a list of all their favorite authors and books in their genre. Then group them by flavor. Make a list of adjectives that describe the books that follow your favorite (usually largest) flavor—this is the “taste” factor. Next, make a list of trends that are currently hot in romance—this is the “marketability” factor. Finally, choose adjectives that describe your writing—this is the “you” factor. (If you can’t easily find adjectives to describe your writing, it isn’t special enough. It’s too mundane. That’s a big problem! But we’re about to fix that…)
Now, make taste, marketability, and you meet. Decide how the traits you love most from the “taste” column can meet with one or more things listed the “marketability” column (you only really need one hook!) that you could see moved to the “you” factor during your writing.
Q: Can you go into some depth about your journey? How was it difficult?
A: First, there were life-related frustrations when I wasn’t getting published. I’d decided to change my major away from engineering because I loathed working in the corporate world and didn’t like even how routine and repetitive class work was. After playing in the physics department for a while, I grappled with the realization that what I truly wanted to do with my life […]
Read MoreI was going to post another analysis of the Storytelling Magic of Project Runway, but that can wait for another day. This discussion on book openers has me, erm, hooked.
Writers of fiction are pretty familiar with the term hook. Sol Stein calls it the moment when the story’s engine gets started. It’s a good analogy: the hook is going to reel the reader in so the author can take them along for the ride.
Therese already highlighted the main components to a good hook in her blog entry below, so I’m not going to belabor the point. I’d just like to add one more thing to the list: finesse. Devilish hard to master, essential in storytelling. A great hook isn’t one that clubs you over the head and says, “See, here. Conflict. Peril. Action verbs. Look, look!” A great hook need only be that moment in the story when the protagonist’s world is about to change.
One of the best openers I ever read was by Melissa Bank in her debut novel, The Girls’ Guide to Hunting and Fishing. Over the years I’ve shaken my head over the fiendish deception of her hook. See if you agree.
Read MoreThere’s a reason why Bernard Cornwell is one of the best writers of historical fiction around. With 37 novels to his credit, including the popular Sharp series, it’s fair to say he knows a thing or two about how to craft a novel. His books are scrupulously accurate and insanely readable. When I pick one up, I make sure my schedule will be pretty light for the next few days, ‘cause I’m not gonna to be able to put it down.
His latest novel, THE LAST KINGDOM, is set in 866 AD England, at the time of the Viking invasions. In the first three paragraphs of his book, he shows why he’s a zen-voodoo master of the craft.
OPENER AND HOOK:
My name is Uhtred. I am the son of Uhtred, who was the son of Uhtred and his father was also called Uhtred. My father’s clerk, a priest called Beocca, spelt it Utred. I do not know if that was how my father would have written it, for he could neither read nor write, but I can do both and sometimes I take the old parchments from their wooden chest and I see the name spelled Uhtred or Utred or Ughtred or Ootred. I look at those parchments, which are deeds saying that Uhtred, son of Uhtred, is the lawful and sole owner of the lands that are carefully marked by stones and by dykes, by oaks and by ash, by marsh and by sea, and I dream of those lands, wave-beaten and wild beneath the wind-driven sky. I dream, and know that one day I will take back the land from those who stole it from me.
It’s a difficult task to convey the mood of an entire historical era in the succinct pulses demanded by today’s reader, but Cornwell does it in a few deft sentences. We get the sense that we’re in a time where writing is a malleable art mostly in the hands of Christian priests, where codified law and tribal law conflate, and where boundaries are dictated by nature. In the last sentence, he drops in the protagonist’s goal: to take back his stolen land, which, by the way he allows his character to describe it, is deeply loved.
Read MoreDo you remember high school English class when the teacher would call on people at random to read sections of the latest assigned novel–Lord of the Flies; The Great Gatsby; Alas, Babylon; The Count of Monte Cristo? I always liked reading aloud. There was something about the rhythm of the words in my mouth that couldn’t be replicated in a silent read. Something good and juicy and satisfying, like a Georgia peach picked right off the vine. (I’ve had those peaches; they make you look at other peaches with disdain. Truly, they will ruin you.)
I still love reading aloud, but now the “classroom” is my home, and the kids are mine. My daughter and I just started reading Inkspell by Cornelia Funke, the sequel to Inkheart. Let me tell you, Ms. Funke knows her juicy words. It’s actually a challenge to read her prose aloud, because my tongue just wants to dwell in the sentences and lags behind my brain in awkward moments. Before I give you an example of these juicy morsels, let me tell you a little about these books, because they are truly inspired.
Read MoreDid you know that Mozart’s music is ~250 years old?
Groundbreaking writers and musicians have repeatedly been tagged with History’s Blue Ribbon prize—acclaim that endures even after death. Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Jane Austen, Freddy Mercury, Margaret Mitchell, L. Frank Baum, Stevie Ray Vaughan and J. R. R. Tolkien all have one important thing in common: they busted through the barriers defining their genres, transforming them and claiming virgin ground. How did they do it?
While none of us may ever pen the next revolutionary novel, you can bust through your personal boundaries, and the first step is to take a hard look at your WIP. Where have you made story decisions that might be formulaic, predictable and stale vanilla? Do your characters have the complexity of Linus and Lucy, or do their depths rival Scarlett O’Hara’s? If your story were a song, would it play like a simple C-Major ditty, Bohemian Rhapsody or something in between?
Once you’ve tagged weak characterization, plot and prose, it’s time to push yourself. But before you sink into deep-think mode, plug into some inspiration. Depending on my mood I might choose Alanis Morissette for cutting lyrics and restive refrains, Nickel Creek for classic tones recast, or Howard Shore’s Lord of the Rings soundtrack for pure thematic brilliance. And then I remind myself that even Mozart began each masterpiece with a single note.
Pick one, and begin yours.
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