#Craft of writing

[summer-gh0st]

I'm writing a story with some interactions where a nonbinary character is meeting people they couldn't tell the gender of and I end up with a lot of confusing "theys" even when I use proper nouns for the character in question. any ideas of how to not just toss around a bunch of "they said"s and such without saying the same descriptors over and over like "the one on the right" ?

Ah, what I live for!! You market yourself as an lgbt+ editor and then all you get is straight romance or fantasy with straight romance. Bleh

Moving on! This is really interesting, because it’s probably really context dependent and I’m not sure I can give the best answer without grappling with the lines themselves. I would possibly point to my previous post with character/setting/action, to try to avoid dialogue tags by describing the character who’s speaking, the setting, or the action they’re doing. This is a good way to avoid getting confused in any situation where two characters use the same pronoun (ie, when two he/him characters are the only ones on the page). Especially character can be helpful — if the reader knows that the main character has blue hair, let’s say, and the new character has brown, then a dialogue line ending with “…they ran their fingers through their brown hair” or something like that will help differentiate who’s speaking.

Also, using names is never a bad thing, and while it can get overused, tolerance for that is usually much higher when we have a same-pronoun situation.

Another method of differentiation is different speech patterns. If we know our main character with blue hair (let’s call them Blue) has a particular way of speaking, then making the new character have a different way of speaking will set them apart in a very easy to read but hard to notice sort of way. It’s meta, and really engrained in the style, but can be awfully effective. Let’s say Blue has a somewhat posh tone — they use fancy words because they read too much and have a very refined sense of style from studying philosophy at university. The new character could then have a southern accent, and speak very slowly with lots of y’alls, and ums, because they literally grew up in a barn with their beloved horse companion and don’t know how to talk to people. An extreme example, but it showcases my point: could you ever imagine these two people having the same tone of voice, and getting their dialogue lines mixed up with each other? Usually, no. And that’s one of the great, wonderful, and magical things about dialogue. :)

To sum up, I think that would be my general advice: character/setting/action; names are okay, and overusing them is harder in a same-pronoun situation; different tones of voice (this one is my favorite because it forces a lot of characterization!).

I hope this helps + wasnt too long, and let me know if you have any further questions. :)

[mkaneshige]

Mark's Musings #50

Little things done well make the big things happen.

[nighttime-novelist]

Reframing Show vs Tell

Notes and excerpts from the section on Showing vs Telling in Self-Editing for Fiction Writers by Renni Browne. I thought the way she reframed show vs tell gave us a better understanding of their respective function in a story. Basically:

Showing → Scenes

Telling → Narrative Summary

Scenes take place in real time; the reader experiences what is going on at the same time as it occurs in the text. Narrative summary, on the other hand, describes what happened after the fact. Both are essential to a story, but writers tend to overly rely on narrative summary. 

Narrative Summary (Telling)

Large-scale

Don’t use this to start your first chapter–you want to engage your readers early on. Turn any narrative summary you have into an actual scene taking place and deliver the information you want to give through it

Varies the rhythm and texture of your writing. Scenes are immediate and engaging, but sometimes you want to slow things down and give readers a chance to catch their breath, and narrative summary is a good way to do so.

Gives continuity on a larger scale. Narrative summary can capture weeks or months of slow, steady growth and development. The critical moments of this development should be captured by scenes, but the summary can help fill-in the gaps of a longer period of time.

Helps consolidate repetitive actions. For example, if there are multiple races occurring, not all of them may be important enough to justify a scene. Summarize the unimportant ones and give scenes to the crucial ones.

Use it when a plot development isn’t important enough to justify a scene. For example, you can narrate a minor event that leads up to a key scene. Or two key events being separated by narrative summary of what occurs between the events puts emphasis on the important key events while giving reprieve between the scenes.

Small-scale

Avoid telling us character traits or emotions. Examples include: “Wilbur felt absolutely defeated” and “Geraldine was horrified at the news”. It’s better to show these by describing their reactions, expressions, words, and body language. However, I personally believe sometimes it is okay, and even preferred, to tell emotions and traits. Just don’t overdo it, and save the telling for when it’s difficult to express by showing.

You don’t want to give your readers information. You want to give them experiences. Resist the urge to explain

Self-Editing for Fiction Writers Checklist

How often do you use narrative summary? Are there passages when nothing happens in real time?

Do the main events in your plot take place in summary or in scenes?

If you have too much narrative summary, which scenes do you want to convert into scenes?

Does any of it involve major characters, where a scene could be used to flesh out their personalities?

Do you have at least some narrative summary, or are you bouncing around from scene to scene without pausing?

Are you describing your character’s emotions too much? Have you told us they are angry/irritated/excited?

[withpatiencecomespeace]

The cinematography, the color choices, the set design, the dialogue, the pacing — what wasn’t KAOS simply superior at?

Still trying to wrap my head around how it weaved — what, SIX storylines together as it was approaching its climax?

[coruscantiscribbler]

This is turning into the longest chapter in the history of chapters, and I just can't find a graceful place to break it up. Chapters need to end with a sharp period, something that propels the reader to want to keep reading. Chapters just can't just peter out, they need to sizzle.

[vickihinze]

Picking A Theme by Tara Randel

When setting out to write a book, there are many aspects that need to be considered. What is the story about? Who are the characters? The plot? The theme? All the components that, as an author, we sit down and consider before we even begin to type the first page in our story. Since there are genres in fiction, the answers to these questions depend on if you are writing a romance, or a mystery or…

[bellemorte79]

Behind on writing

I am behind on writing because my life currently sucks. I hope to update my story this weekend. It is hard to crawl out of anxiety.

[sunlit-skycat]

Copying tags from prev:

#when the kids talk about “normalization” the latter is what they really should be concerned abt#you cannot believe how mamy fucked up relationships and scenarios ive seen and they dont know its bad until another perspective tells them.

Sometimes you read a fic where the author is clearly and intentionally writing dead dove content like:

These garbage boys are going to torture and gaslight each other until they’re inextricably intertwined 😈 they are going to make each other the most fucked-up and worst versions of themselves 🔪 they will be so codependent and broken they will never be able to be with anyone else after ☠️

And, like, this is probably written by a pretty normal, well-adjusted person. Genuinely. The dove is dead but the author knows that the dove is dead because they killed the dove. On purpose. Gleefully. They were like “wouldn’t it be fucked up if…” and then wrote the if.

But then sometimes you read a fic where the author is like:

uwu these soft boys are soooo cute and in love 🥰 they’re so sweet and pure and good 💕 I just want them to be cutesy-wutesy and in lurveeee forever 😍 this is my new fic about soft boys being soft 💋 this is the height of romance 😘

And then the fic is. Not. The relationship is THE must fucked up, manipulative, passive-aggressive shit show where both characters are being awful to each other, but in the most socially-acceptable heteronormative way where you could 100% picture a friend of a friend telling you this bizarre story at a party while you’re sitting there like wow 😬 straight people are wild who acts like that?

I don’t read fics like that often, but whenever I do I’m always like................... 👀 you good? You doing okay? You seem to think this kind of behavior is, uh. Normal. And, uh, romantic? But these characters certainly seem to hate each other. Not in the narrative, in the narrative they’re super in love somehow but uhhh. Um. You good?

There is such a chasm between people writing something fucked up on purpose vs someone writing something fucked up on accident. And the latter is where things are not tagged properly, and they’re infinitely more disturbing imo.

[johnmanciniwrites]

Arts & Crafts

Finding Meaning in the Things We Create

Consider the gilded frame, the illuminated pedestal, the banana duct-taped to the gallery wall. Art wants to stand out, to be seen as special, more than just craft. I mean, sure, anyone could do it, but who in their right mind would?

From Duchamp’s Fountain (1917) to Bruce Nauman’s Self-Portrait as a Fountain (1970), art has been disruptive and bold, but in the seventies, performance artists seemed to try and outdo each other with the amount of self-inflicted pain and humiliation they were willing to suffer: whether running face first into a gallery wall or having themselves nailed to a Volkswagen, these guys wanted attention--and got it.

The closest literary equivalent might be Ginsberg’s “Howl,” Burroughs’ Naked Lunch, or Kerouac’s On the Road. Art in the twentieth century was raw, unsettling, intimate, and confrontational. Where did all this defiance and aggression come from? The Surrealists had a lot to do with it, but their defiance got sidetracked by elitism. Until Jackson Pollock swaggered onto the scene, the pursuit of truth and beauty seemed reserved for the intellectual set. Your father would rather you become a banker, a lawyer, or a linebacker. But Pollock tapped into a working-class ethos. Then the hard-drinking, football-playing Kerouac arrived, writing like he talked, writing like Pollock painted—hurling globs of words in an inebriated frenzy.

The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars.

—Kerouac, On the Road

This is word jazz, improvised and unfiltered. But let's go back in time. Immediacy was first introduced to American writing by Mark Twain, Sherwood Anderson and Ernest Hemingway who prized concision and whittled prose to bare bones:

Upon the half decayed veranda of a small frame house that stood near the edge of a ravine near the town of Winesburg, Ohio, a fat little old man walked nervously up and down.

—Anderson, “Hands”

Outside it was getting dark. The streetlight came on outside the window. The two men at the counter read the menu. From the other end of the counter Nick Adams watched them. He had been talking to George when they came in.

—Hemingway, “The Killers”

It was Twain who famously summed up the amount of work that goes into writing like this: "I didn't have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead." Until this sort of understated plainspoken sincerity came along, American writers tended to put more butter on the bread:

Nothing so fair, so pure, and at the same time so large, as a lake, perchance, lies on the surface of the earth. Sky water. It needs no fence. Nations come and go without defiling it. It is a mirror which no stone can crack, whose quicksilver will never wear off, whose gilding Nature continually repairs...

—Thoreau, Walden

After ten years of wandering and wondering in the heart of it, rejoicing in its glorious floods of light, the white beams of the morning streaming through the passes, the noonday radiance on the crystal rocks, the flush of the alpenglow, and the irised spray of countless waterfalls, it still seems above all others the Range of Light.

—Miur, “First Glimpse of the Sierra”

This is writing that wants to transcend--like poetry--and as the poet Housman said, "Poetry is not the thing said but a way of saying it." But from the factories of the Industrial Revolution through the carnage of the World War I, transcendent illusions were shattered, art got surreal, and language got difficult:

​It is very difficult so difficult that it always has been difficult but even more difficult now to know what is the relation of human nature to the human mind because one has to know what is the relation of the act of creation to the subject the creator uses to create that thing.

—Stein “What Are Masterpieces and Why Are There So Few of Them?”

Huh? you might ask. That matronly figure of modernism, Gertrude Stein wrote self-conscious prose, her complex, layered style tending to fragment and obscure--like Cubism. Here she is as painted by Picasso:

When I was living in LA, I briefly worked—“briefly” characterizing most work in LA—at a nonprofit that offered arts enrichment programs at elementary schools. Navigating surface streets from Crenshaw to Brentwood, I arrived at playgrounds with my box of supplies, and spent the afternoon struggling to keep eight or so kids busy until their parents arrived. I handed out wood scraps and hammers and nails and showed them how to build birdhouses. When I turned my back, one little boy would inevitably start throwing nails at the girl he liked, which I realize now was actually more of an artistic act—performance!—than the lame activity I had been assigned to teach. Here was an artist! A lovesick one, too.

These kids were not learning art; they were learning a craft. A birdhouse, like a rocking chair, however well-crafted, doesn’t mean anything. It's not art; it’s practical. The phrase “arts and crafts” always makes me think of fourth graders taking a break from science class to glue some dried macaroni to posterboard—like recess, only less sweaty. The problem is that the word “art” suffers from semantic bleaching, like genius or amazing. These days we have the art of the deal, the art of seduction, the art of the talking points memo. None of this has helped art’s case for separateness.

There are different sections in libraries for fiction and literature, and when you walk into a bookstore (if you can find one) you may see a section devoted to Classics and another to Best Sellers. I always wondered if it bothered serious writers to get lumped in with the mass market romcoms and spy thrillers. What does one have to do besides die in obscurity to be elevated to the academy of Literature? Must the artist's pants always be fancy?

The tendency to think of art as something stylish rather than plain, especially in the literary arts, has led to a lot of beautifully written novels in which nothing happens. (I’m looking at you, Proust.) Some great novelists sacrifice momentum for verbal acrobatics. Unfortunately, most fiction readers are looking for a good plot, not poetry--and as Auden said, "Poetry makes nothing happen."

So if you want to sell some books, tell a story, and if you want to tell a story, keep it simple. When we’re engrossed in a ripping yarn, the sentences dissolve. Verisimilitude, it's called. Old school virtual reality—no oversized goggles required. 

Ever try to get a dog to look at something by pointing at it? The dog looks at your hand, not the thing. This is the problem with modernist literature, and most poetry. The eye is constantly drawn back to the surface. If you learn how to manipulate syntax, and you listen closely, you may replicate the voice of a ten-year old girl in a Tennessee trailer park, or an English aristocrat aboard the Titanic. Both pose interesting style choices--but beware. As Stein said to Hemingway: “Ernest, remarks are not literature.” What she was alluding to, I think, was the importance of depth, structure, and artistic intention in a work of art.

Somewhere around the late nineteenth century artists stopped looking for beauty outside themselves and started painting what was in their heads. Painters abandoned the representational image, and writers started admiring their sentences too much. They all started playing mind games. They left bloodstains on the floor and taped bananas to the wall.

Reason for being is a big subject, bigger than I have space for here, and short of going down a rabbit hole of relativism in which your truth is just as valid as any other and we can all go home and stare at our bellybuttons, maybe we can agree that there is a pantheon of great art into which over time more are admitted through discovery or changing taste. Who can say what will be considered good art fifty years from now? Sometimes a tree falls in the forest, and we don’t hear it for a very long time.

These writers were dead long before they were appreciated: Emily Dickinson, Edgar Allan Poe, Franz Kafka, William Blake, Herman Melville, Sylvia Plath. There are others. So maybe you don’t have to make a lot of noise or concern yourself so much with being heard here and now. Maybe crafting the thing with care and intention is enough. But if you decide to throw nails at the girl that you love, I wouldn’t expect her to love you back. At least not right away.

*If you enjoy essays like this, read Living by Fiction by Annie Dillard.

[authortoberecognized]

WRITER’S FORUM  INDIE WRITING

                        WEBSITES HELPFUL TO WRITERS   This is a series of posts which, I think, will be beneficial to writers. But first, I would like to include my usual warning about using websites. Whenever you check a website you are, in my opinion and I talk from experience, being put on a list for sale. So, expect the possibility of being bombarded by ads from companies you, perhaps,…

[mkaneshige]

The Call

All great writersthat excel in prose,answer the callthat’s burning in their hearts

[sunlit-skycat]

I've taken down notes for characters where a big part is listing unusual words they use, sentence structure, frequency of swearing, how they address other characters, etc. Can be useful to have on hand if it's been a long time since I read the source material.

Can you please explain your dialogue theory of fanfiction?

In short, that dialogue, more than anything, makes or breaks a fanfic. What do posts like "He would not fucking say that" and "They would NOT have communication skills that good" have in common? Talk. Characters expressing themselves to one another. The faithful recreation of identifiable speech patterns is weighted heavily in the evaluation of a fic's quality. By "speech patterns" I do not just mean the semantic content of a given character's expression, but idiosyncrasies of style and slang, vocabulary and idiom, even gesture, musicality, and rhythm.

Of course believable dialogue is far from the only thing that makes a good fanfic Good. And there are forms of fic writing, particularly highly abbreviated ones like drabbles and ficlets, that in practice tend to de-emphasize its significance. But if we are talking about the romantic, erotic shippy stuff that is the meat and potatoes of online fandom, dialogue does the heaviest lifting short of the consummation itself. Arguably more so! It's the real keystone to the catharsis, and often the catalyst for it. Is there a confession occurring? A provocation? An evasion or ultimatum? Zoom out, big picture: What is the most potent and fundamental mechanic for developing complexity, tension, and transformation within a relationship, getting it to go from one thing to another? Making these two idiots talk to each other! Often clumsily and indirectly and maladaptively, at the worst possible time and in the worst possible situation, about anything or everything but what they should be — but talk they usually do.

What makes fanfic specifically so challenging and rewarding in this regard is that the talking is as much a feat of translation as invention, because both reader and writer are working off an existing model. Liberties taken with plot, form, and even narrative voice have wider buffer zones; you can get creative with circumventing the events of canon while still conforming to its emotional and substantive essence.

But the training wheels come off the moment you open your mouth to speak in another character's voice. And man, nothing will break a reader's immersion quite like he would not fucking say that.

[theoldaeroplane]

worried that thing you put in your art or writing or game or music is too self-indulgent, too self-referential, too niche for anyone but yourself? fear not! you can do whatever you want forever. and you should.

[lgbtlunaverse]

Nothing will dispell the "the curtains were just blue" myth faster than writing something yourself, because the amount of pretentious symbolism i am putting in my silly little fanfics is ridiculous. I mean SO much with these words, literally every single one of them. This fic has twenty five typos and zero correct uses of punctuation but if there's curtains you bet your ass I put thought into what colour they were.

[elodieunderglass]

changes and trends in horror-genre films are linked to the anxieties of the culture in its time and place. Vampires are the manifestation of grappling with sexuality; aliens, of foreign influence. Horror from the Cold War is about apathy and annihilation; classic Japanese horror is characterised by “nature’s revenge”; psychological horror plays with anxieties that absorbed its audience, like pregnancy/abortion, mental illness, femininity. Some horror presses on the bruise of being trapped in a situation with upsetting tasks to complete, especially ones that compromise you as a person - reflecting the horrors and anxieties of capitalism etc etc etc. Cosmic horror is slightly out of fashion because our culture is more comfortable with, even wistful for, “the unknown.” Monster horror now has to be aware of itself, as a contingent of people now live in the freedom and comfort of saying “I would willingly, gladly, even preferentially fuck that monster.” But I don’t know much about films or genres: that ground has been covered by cleverer people.

I don’t actually like horror or movies. What interests me at the moment is how horror of the 2020s has an element of perception and paying attention.

Multiple movies in one year discussed monsters that killed you if you perceived them. There are monsters you can’t look at; monsters that kill you instantly if you get their attention. Monsters where you have to be silent, look down, hold still: pray that they pass over you. M Zombies have changed from a hand-waved virus that covers extras in splashy gore, to insidious spores. A disaster film is called Don’t Look Up, a horror film is called Nope. Even trashy nun horror sets up strange premises of keeping your eyes fixed on something as the devil GETS you.

No idea if this is anything. (I haven’t seen any of these things because, unfortunately, I hate them.) Someone who understands better than me could say something clever here, and I hope they do.

But the thing I’m thinking about is what this will look like to the future, as the Victorian sex vampires and Cold War anxieties look to us. I think they’ll have a little sympathy, but they probably won’t. You poor little prey animals, the kids will say, you were awfully afraid of facing up to things, weren’t you?