#this concept (be kind to yourself and others) can get a bit fractal

[mrskayathefrog]

you can't hate anyone into a version of something you con love

self-flagellation and self-bullying are all bad motivators for change BTW. it can be hard to escape from a spiral but genuinely u have to be nice to urself or nothing will change

[sometimes-love-is-enough]

Fanfic asks: 1, 2, 3 (does it help you to share ideas?), 34, 43, 50, 76, 78, 79 and 80 (How do you deal with writer’s block?)

I’ve been kinda feeling…creatively constipated, is as best as I can describe it. Ideas and worlds in my head but they stay locked up without a key to free them. So I guess I wanted to pick someone’s brain, writer to writer, see if there’s anything I can try to get myself inspired again. I hope that’s not weird.

1. Do you daydream a lot before you write, or go for it as soon as the ideas strike?

For the most part, I force myself to daydream a lot before I sit down to start writing, because otherwise there's the very real chance I'll sit down and get 3k into it and realize, 'oh. there's not very much meat on this one at all. I don't want to finish it anymore.' There's something to be said for the concept of 'Writing For The Sake Of Writing', but a lot of the time getting a decent length into something and just, not having the ideas or drive to finish it.. it kind of sucks.

2. Where do you get your fic ideas?

All sorts of places, although I tend to draw a lot from real-life experiences and things I'm currently learning about/interested in (e.g. philosophy chapters of Pick A Side, chessboxing), as well as various types of mythologies and lore (Eucat, Melliferous).

3. Do you share your fic ideas, or do you keep them to yourself?

I'm the sort of person who hoards the fine details of my WIPs very close to my chest until I'm absolutely sure that I'm going to stick to writing the whole damn thing. I'm not great at sharing. But also I really enjoy sharing out of context little bits and pieces as I go, and constantly want to talk about the things I write - I'm a contradiction of a person.

34. How much of your personal life/experience do you include in your fics?

Well, when I was 17, I died, went to bee hell, and had to wait for the combined-yet-separate fractals of my personality to come bail me out I don't include an overwhelming amount, I don't think, but sometimes real life is the best source for an interesting story. It gives it a bit of spice and depth. For example, the thing in Syzygy with Thomas blaming his creaky apartment on an 'apartment ghost' and constantly talking to it because he's lonely is something that I do in fact do in real life.

43. Is there a trope or idea that you’d really like to write but haven’t yet?

Yeah, I want to do a thorough deconstruction of a soulmate AU. And/or the hanahaki trope, because neither of those are something that I'm entirely fond of. I'm not sure if this is the right fandom to do it in or not, but I have a feeling I'll end up writing it eventually.

50. How would you describe your writing style?

Absurdist realism and/or magical surrealism.

76. How do you deal with writing pressure, whether internal or external?

Internal pressure is a sign I need to take a break and do something else for a bit, or stop taking myself so seriously. External pressure is a sign that I either need to block a rude commenter, or gently remind people that I'm a human being and I do this for fun.

78. What motivates you during the writing process?

Knowing that at the end of it all, I'll have a finished product that a) I will be proud of in some respect b) that other people will enjoy and c) (hopefully) scream at me in fury about. Getting to that end point where I can actually hit the post button and see something that I made show up in the tags is just the best feeling in the world.

79. Do you have any writing advice you want to share?

Be joyful with it. Writing is a game you're playing with yourself, so play. I recognize that this isn't the most helpful and specific of advice, but I can't stress enough how much you should experiment with stylisms and point-of-view and unreliable narrators and all the rest of it! Pastiche someone else's style! Write in reverse chronological order! Give yourself restrictions and take away your pre-existing restrictions, and BREAK THE RULES.

80. How do you deal with writer’s block?

Writer's block (for me, at least) is my brain telling me that it doesn't want to work anymore. It's had enough. It doesn't want me to work! Which is the point where I close the document, and go do something else that my brain does want to do. Sometimes that's going for a walk or making myself a fancy drink or snack, sometimes it's lying in bed and watching Youtube for ages, and sometimes my brain is just screaming and sobbing and kicking and doesn't want to do anything at all, in which case I just have to gently sit with it and wait for it all to be over. Either way, I'll get back to writing when I get back to it - either whatever WIP I was working on at the time, or something new that I'll enjoy writing. Forcing myself to write when I'm not on an actual deadline or timecrunch never works out well for me, so I try to be very gentle about it.

And I hope you get past that brainblock eventually. I've been there too, and it's the worst place to be in. Hopefully you find that idea or project that makes your brain start singing again soon! I wish you luck, and hope this helps.

[seriously-mike]

Midjourney Is Full Of Shit

Last December, some guys from the IEEE newsletter, IEEE Spectrum whined about "plagiarism problem" in generative AI. No shit, guys, what did you expect?

But, let's get specific for a moment: they noticed that Midjourney generated very specific images from very general keywords like "dune movie 2021 trailer screencap" or "the matrix, 1999, screenshot from a movie". You'd expect that the outcome would be some kind of random clusterfuck making no sense. See for yourself:

In most of the examples depicted, Midjourney takes the general composition of an existing image, which is interesting and troubling in its own right, but you can see that for example Thanos or Ellie were assembled from some other data. But the shot from Dune is too good. It's like you asked not Midjourney, but Google Images to pull it up.

Of course, when IEEE Spectrum started asking Midjourney uncomfortable questions, they got huffy and banned the researchers from the service. Great going, you dumb fucks, you're just proving yourself guilty here. But anyway, I tried the exact same set of keywords for the Matrix one, minus Midjourney-specific commands, in Stable Diffusion (setting aspect ratio given in the MJ prompt as well). I tried four or five different data models to be sure, including LAION's useless base models for SD 1.5. I got... things like this.

It's certainly curious, for the lack of a better word. Generated by one of newer SDXL models that apparently has several concepts related to The Matrix defined, like the color palette, digital patterns, bald people and leather coats. But none of the attempts, using none of the models, got anywhere near the quality or similarity to the real thing as Midjourney output. I got male characters with Neo hair but no similarity to Keanu Reeves whatsoever. I got weird blends of Neo and Trinity. I got multiplied low-detail Neo figures on black and green digital pattern background. I got high-resolution fucky hands from an user-built SDXL model, a scenario that should be highly unlikely. It's as if the data models were confused by the lack of a solid description of even the basics. So how does Midjourney avoid it?

IEEE Spectrum was more focused on crying over the obvious fact that the data models for all the fucking image generators out there were originally put together in a quick and dirty way that flagrantly disregarded intellectual property laws and weren't cleared and sanitized for public use. But what I want to know is the technical side: how the fuck Midjourney pulls an actual high-resolution screenshot from its database and keeps iterating on it without any deviation until it produces an exact copy? This should be impossible with only a few generic keywords, even treated as a group as I noticed Midjourney doing a few months ago. As you can see, Stable Diffusion is tripping absolute motherfucking balls in such a scenario, most probably due to having a lot of images described with those keywords and trying to fit elements of them into the output image. But, you can pull up Stable Diffusion's code and research papers any time if you wish. Midjourney violently refuses to reveal the inner workings of their algorithm - probably less because it's so state-of-the-art that it recreates existing images without distortions and more because recreating existing images exactly is some extra function coded outside of the main algorithm and aimed at reeling in more schmucks and their dollars. Otherwise, there wouldn't be that much of a quality jump between movie screenshots and original concepts that just fall apart into a pile of blorpy bits. Even more coherent images like the grocery store aisle still bear minor but noticeable imperfections caused by having the input images pounded into the mathemagical fairy dust of random noise. But the faces of Dora Milaje in the Infinity War screenshot recreations don't devolve into rounded, fractal blorps despite their low resolution. Tubes from nasal plugs in the Dune shot run like they should and don't get tangled with the hairlines and stitches on the hood. This has to be some kind of scam, some trick to serve the customers hot images they want and not the predictable train wrecks. And the reason is fairly transparent: money. Rig the game, turn people into unwitting shills, fleece the schmucks as they run to you with their money hoping that they'll always get something as good as the handful of rigged results.

[kkintle]

Into the Woods: A Five Act Journey Into Story by John Yorke; Quotes

There’s no doubt that for many those rules help. Friedrich Engels put it pithily: ‘Freedom is the recognition of necessity.’

‘You need the eye, the hand and the heart,’ proclaims the ancient Chinese proverb. ‘Two won’t do.’

Delacroix countered the fear of knowledge succinctly: ‘First learn to be a craftsman; it won’t keep you from being a genius.’

We are capable of entering any kind of head. David Edgar justified his play about the Nazi architect Albert Speer by saying: ‘The awful truth – and it is awful, in both senses of the word – is that the response most great drama asks of us is neither “yes please” nor “no thanks” but “you too?”. Or, in the cold light of dawn, “there but for the grace of God go I”.’

As Peter Brook writes in The Empty Space, ‘In the theatre the slate is wiped clean all the time.’ Drama is a test-bed on which we can test and confront our darkest impulses under laboratory conditions; where we can experience the desires without having to confront the consequences. Drama enables us to peer into the soul, not of the person who has driven his father out onto the heath, but the person who has wanted to.

Our favourite characters are the ones who, at some silent level, embody what we all want for ourselves: the good, the bad and ugly too.

‘The more successful the villain, the more successful the picture.’

‘Somebody’s got to want something, something’s got to be standing in their way of getting it. You do that and you’ll have a scene.’

‘Tell me what you want,’ said Anton Chekhov, ‘and I will tell you what manner of man you are.’

Cops want to catch the killer, doctors want to heal their patient; in truth it doesn’t actually matter what the object is, its importance is bestowed by those in pursuit.

What a character thinks is good for them is often at odds with what actually is. This conflict, as we shall see, appears to be one of the fundamental tenets of structure, because it embodies the battle between external and internal desire.

Characters then should not always get what they want, but should – if they deserve it – get what they need. That need, or flaw, is almost always present at the beginning of the film. The want, however, cannot become clear until after the inciting incident.

The crisis occurs when the hero’s final dilemma is crystallized, the moment they are faced with the most important question of the story – just what kind of person are they? Finding themselves in a seemingly inescapable hole, the protagonist is presented with a choice.

So the inciting incident provokes the question ‘What will happen’ and the climax (or obligatory act) declares – ‘this’.

As Shakespearean scholar Jan Kott noted before him, ‘Ancient Tragedy is loss of life, modern Tragedy is loss of purpose’.

‘good’ is a relative concept

Change is the bedrock of life and consequently the bedrock of narrative.

THE ROADMAP OF CHANGE ACT 1 No knowledge Growing knowledge Awakening ACT 2 Doubt Overcoming reluctance Acceptance ACT 3 Experimenting with knowledge MIDPOINT – KEY KNOWLEDGE Experimenting post-knowledge ACT 4 Doubt Growing reluctance Regression ACT 5 Reawakening Re-acceptance Total mastery

A well-designed midpoint has a risk/reward ratio: a character gains something vital, but in doing so ramps up the jeopardy around them.

JOURNEY THERE; JOURNEY BACK

All stories at some level are about a search for the truth of the subject they are exploring. Just as the act of perception involves seeking out the ‘truth’ of the thing perceived, so storytelling mimics that process. The ‘truth’ of the story, then, lies at the midpoint. The protagonist’s action at this point will be to overcome that obstacle, assimilate that truth and begin the journey back – the journey to understand the implications of what that ‘truth’ really means.

Stories are built from acts, acts are built from scenes and scenes are built from even smaller units called beats. All these units are constructed in three parts: fractal versions of the three-act whole. Just as a story will contain a set-up, an inciting incident, a crisis, a climax and a resolution, so will acts and so will scenes.

‘Drama is life with the dull bits cut out.’ Alfred Hitchcock  

Screenwriting is showing not telling; structure is the presentation of images in such a way an audience are forced to work out the relationship between them. Stanton had stumbled upon what is known amongst film theoreticians as the ‘Kuleshov Effect’.

I want to get an abortion, but my boyfriend and I are having trouble conceiving. American comedian Sarah Silverman’s joke is built on a classic subversion of expectation. But take a look at any joke, or any scene in any drama: the juxtaposition of opposites, verbal or visual or both, is the central plank not just of showing rather than telling, but of all humour, all narrative. Something, confronted with its opposite, makes us recast our notion of that ‘something’ again.

Everyone customizes, consciously or not, everything they do.

Every decision we make or action we perform when confronted with an obstacle is a choice that reveals – through action – our personality. In every scene, remember, a protagonist is presented with a mini crisis, and must make a choice as to how to surmount it. Meeting with a subversion of expectation – a blow to their established plans – a character must choose a new course of action. In doing so they reveal a little bit more of who they are.

as F. Scott Fitzgerald put it, ‘The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.’

It was Kenneth Tynan who said ‘a neurosis is a secret you don’t know you’re keeping’.

The less back-story a character has, the more readily an audience is able to identify with them – the more we can see they’re like us and not like someone else. We may want to know more, but it’s the not knowing that keeps us watching. It allows us to fully experience the journey ourselves and actively join in the process in which a character pursues their goal, their flaw is subsumed into their façade, their need into their want, and the goal of all drama is achieved – a rich, complex, three-dimensional character appears in front of our eyes.

The three most important functions of dialogue – characterization, exposition and subtext – are all, as we shall see, products of character desire.

Good dialogue conveys how a character wants to be seen while betraying the flaws they want to hide.

Grammar, vocabulary, syntax, rhythm, sentence length, jargon or slang – when combined in a particular way, they all allow us to understand who a person is. Change one and the character changes. Dialogue isn’t just about what someone says; how they choose to say it is important too.

Exposition works when it’s a tool a character uses to achieve their desire. If this desire is confronted with opposition, conflict is generated and exposition becomes invisible. The greater the conflict, the less visible the exposition.

Silence of the Lambs screenwriter Ted Tally put the art of writing dialogue succinctly: ‘What’s important is not the emotion they’re playing but the emotion they’re trying to conceal.’

So masked desire is the main source of subtext.

Georg Simmel, the nineteenth-century sociologist, put it rather eloquently: ‘All we communicate to another individual by means of words or perhaps in another fashion – even the most subjective, impulsive, intimate matters – is a selection from that psychological-real whole whose absolutely exact report … would drive everybody into the insane asylum.’

‘No description is as difficult as the description of self.’

We watch stories not just to awaken our eyes to reality but to make reality bearable as well. Truth without hope is as unbearable as hope without truth.

Out of our quarrel with others we make rhetoric; out of the quarrel with ourselves we make poetry. - W. B. Yeats

the idea that ‘we crash into each other just to feel something’.

McGovern believed neither of the two arguments, but he’d mastered a very important principle: that whatever you believe should be tested to destruction.

As Andrew Stanton says, ‘You often hear the term “You should have something to say in a story” but that doesn’t always mean a message. It means truth, some value that you yourself as a storyteller believe in, and then through the course of the story are able to debate that truth. Try to prove it wrong. Test it to its limits.’

There is much to learn from the game of chess, whose individual engagements are all part of one long engagement seeking a condition not of adversity or conflict or defeat or even victory, but of the harmony underlying all.

Javed Akhtar, the co-writer of Sholay, the most successful Indian movie of all time, made a shrewd observation: You must have seen children playing with a string and a pebble. They tie a string and the pebble and they start swinging it over their head. And slowly they keep loosening the string, and it makes bigger and bigger circles. Now this pebble is the revolt from the tradition, it wants to move away … The string is the tradition, the continuity. It’s holding it. But if you break the string the pebble will fall. If you remove the pebble the string cannot go that far. This tension of tradition and revolt against the tradition … are in a way contradictory, but as a matter of fact [are] a synthesis. You will always find a synthesis of tradition and revolt from tradition together in any good art.

just why fairy tales hover on the edges of cruelty; it’s about how ‘baddies’ are the products of inner conflict 

‘All of us are potential villains,’ the legendary Disney animators Frank Thomas and Ollie Johnston once remarked. ‘If we are pushed far enough, pressured beyond our breaking point, our self-preservation system takes over and we are capable of terrible villainy.’

Storytelling, then, is the dramatization of the process of knowledge assimilation.

Like much that is briefly fashionable, it didn’t survive because it had nothing meaningful to say. A greater test of worth must be whether a work lasts for more than a generation.

an observation from Robert Hughes: ‘The basic project of art is always to make the world whole and comprehensible, to restore it to us in all its glory and its occasional nastiness, not through argument but through feeling, and then to close the gap between you and everything that is not you, and in this way pass from feeling to meaning.’

‘Art consists of limitation. The most beautiful part of every picture is the frame.’ G. K. Chesterton   

[chickenscratchingdotcom]

Turning an outline from a list of plot points into a scaffolding that you can use to build a story

by Hugh Sullivan

chickenscratching.com

chickenscratchingdotcom.tumblr.com

Note: this is an article I wrote last year for NaNoWriMo, with the intent of publishing it then. For some reason it never got published, so I figured I’d start out some very pre-NaNo posts with this now.

I could write an entire article on the various ways of coming up with an outline... but it’s been done. A lot. Which is what I found when I started preparing for my first attempt at completing a full novel for National Novel Writing Month (or NaNoWriMo for short).

There are dozens of methods for coming up with an outline, maybe as many as there are writers. Some methods get reused a lot. Randy Ingermanson’s snowflake method is great for expounding something into a pulp-style 4 act format, and I used my own personal take on the concept to do the outline for my first NaNoWriMo story. Snyder’s ‘save the cat’ or Campbell’s ‘hero’s journey’ beat sheet is good for adventure stories. A sprawling list of clues, red herrings, and possible deductions to be made in different situations can be used for a mystery story. A list of obstacles and how to overcome them can be a barebones outline for everything from a children’s story to a romance novel to a sprawling science fiction epic.

The first year that I did NaNoWriMo, I thought an outline would be enough. But a week before November started, I looked at my outline and realized that I still didn’t know how to make it go from an outline into a story.

So here’s what I did, and I hope this will help you too.

Step 1) Map out your foundation

The very first novel I ever wrote for NaNoWriMo (or at all, for that matter) was written in a very episodic format, made to be published serially in short audio format, and then as a whole novel afterward. The main story had four acts, each act had four chapters, each chapter could be divided up into four 10-ish minute long podcasts. (Should I choose to make four books in this series, then I suppose the structure will be completely fractal at that point) This made it easy for me to separate out each episode to do this step. However, not every outline is going to be as clearly delineated. You may have to go through every point in your outline, or you may be able to find small logical groupings of events.

Then you start listing out what each section actually does for the story.

In general, the early parts will involve setting up the characters, world, and plot. Later chapters will illustrate more about the characters, move the plot along, and show how the characters change and grow.

For example, here is a basic example of a chapter outline from my first NaNoWriMo novel. My original outline had a basic overview of each chapter, and four separate points divided up into what would happen in each ~10 minute podcast.

 Chapter 1) Jacobs washes up in Crown Bay, setting the story in motion

•        Jacobs washes up on shore in Crown Bay. Jim Leatherby uses a magical item and finds him.

•        Jacobs gets drunk, screams at a statue commemorating the massacre ten years prior, then gets cornered by guards and subsequently rescued by Jim Leatherby.

•        Jim brings Jacobs somewhere quiet to get sober, and then recognizes him.

•        Cut to the governor’s office in the city. The governor confides in his right-hand man, Commodore Briggs, that he’s near breaking down. He lost his wife during the massacre ten years ago, he can’t afford to lose his daughter. Briggs brings him the good news that Captain Jacobs has been spotted, and he takes a group of soldiers to find him.

 Once the outline of this chapter was done, I went through and wrote down all of the functions that this chapter served in the novel.

 Functions of Chapter 1

•        Hook the reader into the lead character and world.

•        Introduce the reader to the two protagonists.

•        Introduce the idea of magical items in this world.

•        Show that Jim has a very simple life, and that the magic item he possesses can lead him to find adventure outside of that life.

•        Show that Jacobs is in fact the captain of a pirate ship, not just a sailor who fell overboard.

•        Show that Jacobs is well known enough that the governor would be looking for him, and leave the reader with enough questions as to why to keep them reading further.

•        Show that this town has a history, and link that history to why Jim is an orphan and Jacobs left to became a pirate.

 Most of these functions will seem simple and obvious to the writer of the outline. Even so, it’s good to actually list them out so that you know what your foundation is supporting. Now that we’ve mapped out what the outline currently supports, we move on to the next step.

  Step 2) Figure out where to place your support beams

Every story has basic needs that need to be fulfilled. A story needs a beginning, a middle, an end, and action or conflict to move itself along while keeping the reader engaged.

The basic outline of my novel was a very simple four act structure, similar to the potboiler pulp stories of Lester Dent and Michael Moorcock. In the first act, the world, characters, and the adventure were introduced. In the second, the characters found themselves embroiled in that adventure. The peak of the growing adventure hits between the second and third act, where the characters have to choose whether to blunder on or give up. And by the end of the third act, they have found themselves in so deep that there is no longer a choice. They have to see their way to the end. (Those who have looked into popular story and act structures may recognize this as somewhat similar to the current Hollywood 3-act structure, and both styles are compatible with most popular beat sheet formats as well.)

That meant that for my story, the basic needs for each act were simple. I needed to hook the audience at the beginning with an interesting world and characters. I needed to keep building the story in such a way that it kept people tuning in for the next chapter or episode.

But every plot point creates a set of needs as well. Let’s say that in your story, part of your plot entails a group of people traveling into a dangerous area.

So now you add to your list of story needs:

•        Show the reader that the area is dangerous

•        Show whether the characters know it’s dangerous.

 There are also some more subtle needs that you may not think of right away, but once you get into the habit of looking for them, you’ll find them fairly easily. Some of them may not have to be in any one particular place in the story, they may simply need to be inserted somewhere before the point where they are used in the story. Think of this is kind of a reverse Chekov’s gun. If a gun is needed at the end of the story, then make a note to show that the gun exists in the universe.

For example, when I realized that a minor character was going to be killed off at the end of the story, I decided that his past life before the story needed to at least be hinted at, if not expounded on so that when he died he could pass on some sage advice and maybe make some of the sappier readers get a little bit misty-eyed. (Not that I would know ANYTHING about that. Men don’t cry. Not even when a house-elf breaks his promise and sacrifices himself to save someone else’s life. Nope.) So that was added to the general list, as a note of something that needed to be worked in where it could be.

Some obvious things to put on the list of overarching story needs are things like:

•        Get the audience to know the characters well enough to understand their motivations and capabilities. (There’s nothing better than a villain whose motivations you understand... but can’t condone.)

•        Display the basic traits of the important characters and settings. (Even if your protagonist is going to be a boring everyman character for the audience to project themselves onto, the rest of the cast has to be three dimensional and interesting.)

•        Find some way to fill in any important backstory that’s relevant to the current plot. (Sometimes this may end in a simple flashback or prologue. But if you just keep it in mind while writing, you can often find a spot to weave it into the narrative much more naturally.)

•        Give the reader a question. (Who killed the butler?)

•        Answer the reader’s question. (It was the maid in the drawing room with the candlestick.)

Now that you have your foundation and you’ve set up support beams on it, it’s time to make sure that the beams can actually support your story.

Step 3) Build your crossbraces

Now that you have a list of what each chapter accomplishes, and what each chapter and the story overall needs, you can start going through and finding the holes in your outline and plugging them. Sometimes this is as simple a step as leaving yourself a note to mention something important in a character’s backstory. Other times it may require adding in a few extra plot points that you hadn’t thought of in the original outline. Something that you may have been able to do on the fly when writing, but now you don’t have to.

Keep in mind that even if you miss something in the planning phase, this method can help while writing as well. If you reach a block, don’t try to figure out how to get around it. Try to figure out what the story needs to continue. Does it need an outside force to make something happen? Or do the characters need to find their own way? This can be a wonderful spot to allow a person to step forward, do something to show growth and character, and help move the story along.

At one point in my novel outline, I needed a way for a character to escape after being tied up. So I made a point to mention in earlier chapters that he hid several coins in hidden pockets in a leather bracelet, and he was quite adept at sleight of hand, repeatedly making the coins appear and disappear. So when the time came, it wasn’t a shock to the reader when he produced a coin and used it to saw away at the rope. A simple bit of characterization early on saved me from a plot hole at the end of the novel, and simultaneously helped illustrate the character better for the audience.

Step 4) Start building

Now that your outline has filled in, you’ve got more than just a list of plot points. You’ve got a guide that you can use to write your story. A solid, but not inflexible scaffolding to build on.

For an example on how to use the guide in practice, let’s break down the plot point that I mentioned above. In this case, we’ll say that the characters are going to go into this dangerous area, and they will be made aware of the danger.

In the original outline, it would have simply said, “The protagonist, his sidekick, and the guide go into the Blasphort Desert.” Now, you have a bit more set up to write the scene when it happens.

 “Hmm,” the guide said, poking the ground with the toe of his boot. “Not good.”

“What is it?” the protagonist asked.

“Wyrling tracks. Their territory is close. Probably near the canyon, for access to water.”

The protagonist shook his head. “Doesn’t matter. We have to get through. And if we stray too far from the river...”

“Only one way to deal with wyrlings,” the guide said.

The sidekick piped up, “At least there’s something. How do you deal with a wyrling?”

“Run faster,” the guide replied.

The protagonist looked at the guide curiously. “I didn’t think you could outrun a wyrling.”

The guide shook his head. “Can’t. But outrun someone else, and...”

“Oh,” the sidekick said.

The protagonist put his hand on the sidekick’s shoulder. “Doesn’t matter.”

 Now when the scene is written, both the audience and the characters know they’re walking into danger, and some other needs outside of the scene have been fulfilled. For one, the audience now knows a bit more about the personality of the three characters and the danger that they’ll be facing. The guide is simple and straightforward, the hero determined but sensible, the sidekick a little more worried about the situation than the hero, and wyrlings are some sort of dangerous creature, but will stop to feed.

From my own experience, I’ve found that there isn’t a clever pun or turn of phrase that I’ve come up with that makes me feel half as clever a writer as when I write a short passage that manages to fulfill a half dozen story needs. And when facing the normal amounts of self-doubt that one faces while writing a novel, those moments where we as writers feel clever should be cherished.

   About the author

Hugh Sullivan has been a long time dabbler in writing, music, and tabletop and video game design. After a ten year hiatus from creative work, the voice in his head finally convinced him that not having a creative outlet was going to eventually drive him crazy, so he went back to school to do a minor in video game design, worked on designing a tabletop role playing game, started participating in NaNoWriMo, and composing soundtracks to accompany podcasts of his writing.

Ironically, doing all four at once may be a clearer sign of madness than following the advice of a voice in one’s head. Follow his work at his website, chickenscratching.com, or his slightly more active tumblr account, chickenscratchingdotcom.tumblr.com.

[scriptstructure]

How can the size of paragraphs be used to indicate mood and flow of a scene? Does the range of the paragraph sizes have an impact on readability, and are there typically different ranges and lengths common to certain genres (like comedy, horror, romance)? I'm attempting to write my first long story, and I want to figure out how to use the format of paragraphs themselves - especially in unison with others - in order to indicate some themes and tones, but I'm not sure how to go about it.

Paragraphs break the information in a scene/ chapter up into coherent sections. A paragraph in fiction often works very similarly to the way you’ve probably been told to write paragraphs for academic papers and such: you set up a concept (topic sentence), you explore the concept (body), and you reach a conclusion.

Note: I say ‘often’ and ‘similarly’ because obviously the nature of prose fiction means that these structures often look nothing like their academic cousins. The function is the same, the form it takes is often completely different.

Also note: While many prose fiction paragraphs do the above, prose fiction also utilises paragraphs to set pace, to produce imagery, to create mood and tension, etc. Prose fiction uses both ‘proper’ paragraphs, and paragraph ‘fragments’ in order to achieve the proper aesthetic and informative effects.

We’ll use some excerpts of Virginia Woolf’s Orlando as an example, this paragraph is early in the first chapter, describing Orlando’s character. We have an introduction where he is sneaking through the grounds of his father’s estate:

and then the body of the paragraph follows along with what Orlando does and sees while he’s sneaking:

And the paragraph concludes with an observation on what this means to his character:

This isn’t academic writing, the exact way that these elements are utilised will change to suit the writer’s preference, but this is how a paragraph is structured. Similarly to a scene or a chapter, a paragraph should enclose an idea as a single discrete narrative arc.

(If you’ve been following this blog a while you might be noticing that writing takes on a fractal quality, when you look at it long enough, a large piece work has a similar broad structure to any small part of it -- not something you need to think about while writing, it would probably drive you up the wall, but very interesting and cool to think about)

Paragraphs break to signal a topic shift. This might be as subtle as going from talking about the weather in general (It was a dark and stormy night, and the forest around the black castle tossed and howled like the sea in a gale ...) to focusing in on how the protagonist is affected by said weather (In the top of the highest tower of the black castle, the imprisoned Prince Prism stayed tucked in the corner under the meagre blankets he’d been given, and hoped that the tower wouldn’t topple over in the wind ...) Being aware of when you shift focus or topic and beginning a new paragraph accordingly keeps your prose clear and easy to keep track of.

Paragraph breaks also indicate changes in action (paragraph 1: character a does something, there is some description, paragraph 2: character b reacts, and there is some description of that reaction). 

This is also why when you’re writing dialogue it is important to make a new paragraph each time the speaker changes.

(from The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber by Earnest Hemingway, because Orlando doesn’t have a lot in the way of conversational exchanges)

You might have found this yourself at some point, but not been able to place quite what was wrong, often I’ll read something (usually fanfic or self published: fiction editors are usually very good at sorting out this kind of issue) and find that there’s a paragraph that just goes on and on and on and I lose my place and have to go up a couple of lines and try to figure out what happened but then I can’t remember what happened at the beginning of the giant paragraph so I have to go back and start over but at that point I just close the story because I’m reading for pleasure and this is too much like work, you know?

When a paragraph goes on for too long, covers too many topics without breaking, it becomes difficult to read. Functionally, the paragraph break signals to the reader that the concept has been concluded. They can distill that paragraph down to an easily retained bit of information (Orlando likes to sneak around so he won’t be disturbed reading), and then move on to the next bit. When the paragraph doesn’t break, it’s indicating to the reader that the concept isn’t finished, and that they have to hold onto all the disparate ideas they’re being handed until the very end of the paragraph before they can distill it.

This doesn’t only happen in prose fiction, by the way, this is one of the structural areas where a lot of academic writing falls down too, because there’s so much contextual information needed that the writer keeps on going rather than breaking it up and dealing with their different points one chunk at a time. (You know those textbooks where you start reading and then halfway through a page you have no idea what you’re supposed to be getting out of it? That.)

Of course, this is not at all to say that long paragraphs are all bad. Done well, a long paragraph can assist in creating mood and pace of the story. But it must be coherent in itself, and it must have a clarity of progression through the concept that it is setting out.

Long paragraphs can create a sense of lingering over details, it can indicate a lull in action, or a calm moment. It’s also often used in setting scenes or elaborating on the internal moments of characters.

Medium sized paragraphs can also set scenes or detail internal moments, but they are more often the vehicle for propelling the action forward. Things happen, those things tell us something about the characters, setting, or situation, and we learn from them.

Paragraph fragments break up the page, used well they can make a point stand out to the reader, it’s an emphatic way to place a line on the page. Paragraph fragments can also be used to indicate that events are happening at great speed, or to create the sensation of a cascade of experiences. Action scenes often benefit from paragraph fragments, but so do moments of realisation, or emphasis.

In the following excerpt from Orlando, there is a couple of long paragraphs detailing why Orlando has become disenchanted with the people he meets and wishes to isolate himself, but also that he is conflicted in that he loves the works that people create (he loves poetry and reading) and then the final conclusions are repeated in isolation:

(the pension referred to is to retain a poet in his home to produce new works for him, even though Orlando has just realised that the poet is a scammer and has upset him pretty badly)

The first line must break because it is a new line of dialogue, but it also serves as a paragraph fragment to show Orlando’s new approach to isolating himself, he orders the servants to leave him alone and just takes a few dogs up to his rooms. But the second paragraph fragment shows the contrariness of his nature, after several paragraphs detailing how upset he is and how much he wants to be alone, he’s still paying this guy to stay. 

These two fragments reveal a lot of character in just two punchy little lines. They’re cushioned in among a lot of much longer paragraphs, which makes them stand out even more. If you’ve not read Orlando, I’d really recommend it, and any of Woolf’s other work, she’s got a great approach to tone and pacing.

And changing the length of paragraphs is going to be something you learn to balance. It reminds me of this quote about writing sentences that are interesting to the eye and mind (remember what I said about fractal structural elements?)

“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.”

--Gary Provost

Just like sentences, you want your paragraphs to be varied. Not always wildly different, but if you tend to write longer paragraphs, you might want to mindfully utilise shorter paragraphs to break things up and lighten the load on the reader. Similarly, if you find yourself constantly writing page after page of paragraph fragments, you might want to see if you can piece some of those together or expand on the concepts you’re attempting to capture, and have some longer paragraphs in there.

Variety, balance, like so many things paragraph size and structure is something you need to work out as you go and it will change with each story. Most of the time it will probably come naturally to you because our brains are used to making stories and sharing information in the way that it is easiest to understand, but sometimes it goes wrong and you can’t put your finger on why, and it can help to have an understanding of what paragraphs are for and how you make them do what you want them to.