Photo © 2008 Ed Yourdon CC BY-SA 2.0

Alan Baxter posted this list last week, and it’s still making the rounds.

“And before anyone accuses me,” Alan writes, “of being all jaded and defeatist, I prefer to look at it as arming myself with the truth in order to beat that f***er down and prove every point on this list wrong.”

He’s talking about superstar authors, who “prove every single one of these points wrong.” They’re the exceptions that prove the rule.

Or are they?

Top 10 Reasons Maybe to Be a Writer

10. For the chicks. I can’t speak to this, because I married my Beloved before I started calling myself “a writer.” What I do know is that I notice a lot more friendly women now than when I was just a software developer. And I’ve even caught women talking about how good I look over Twitter or Facebook. And I gotta tell ya, that feels kinda kewl.

Of course, most writers are heterosexual women who indeed aren’t in it for the chicks.

9. For a sense of self-worth. The almost constant rejection of trying to get published is, I agree, not good for one’s perception of one’s worth. There’s a simple solution to that: stop trying to “get published.” The desire to “get published” is root to all kinds of writing evil. (Compare “money” below.)

The reason we writers want to “get published” is for the social recognition that goes along with it. We strive to be accepted in the “in” group, so that we can look down on unpublished and self-published authors the same way we feel ourselves being looked down upon. But there are other, more psychologically healthy ways to find a sense of social recognition. Neil Shurley does a lot to bolster mine, as does every compliment I get, and most of the comments I get are compliments, and this is the pattern for everyone. As in any endeavor, writing or otherwise, we all need to turn our self-worth into a self-fulfilling prophesy: know that you are worth every word you write, and then find and associate with those who agree with you.

8. For the cool. “Most people,” says Alan, “when you say you’re a writer, will look at you with that when-are-you-going-to-get-a-real-job look.” Actually, most people, when I say I’m a writer, look at me with that “Wow! How kewl is that?!” look, and make me feel like an shmuck, because I don’t think of it as anywhere near as kewl as all that. As soon as you say that you’re a writer, they want to know what you write, and they seem to be expecting you to say something witty and profound. The Mark Twain image follows us, even today. Whether or not that’s “cool,” I’ll leave that up to you to decide for yourself.

7. For the influence. “Give me a place to stand and change the world.” I have that posted on my desktop to remind me why I write, to make a difference. But what we write, claims Alan, is unlikely to break down the delusions of the populace and change the world. Granted. But as Pam Slim recently pointed out, “You don’t have to change the whole world, just one tiny corner of it.” And you need to first be a writer in order to accomplish this. Because you need to learn to persuade with words. And then once you write something, it’s there for people to read again and again. It has staying power and spreading power. This is true regardless of whether it spreads in written form, or whether you record it as an audio or video presentation. First, your ideas must be written.

6. For self-fulfillment. Okay, at this point, I am going to call Alan jaded and defeatist. Self-fulfillment is the only real reason to write. That’s what this site is about. We are the stories we write, and we have to get them out into the world, to express them, or else that part of us will die. That’s why we constantly push to be “better” writers, not to “get published” or to become rich and famous—otherwise, Stephanie Meyer would also be a “better” writer. Rather, we push to become “better” in order to stretch ourselves, to climb a mountain we previously couldn’t fathom. That’s self-fulfillment.

5. For the fame. Again, there’s a hell of a lot more fame in writing than, for example, in software development. I almost immediately increased my fame as soon as I started marketing myself as a writer, rather than as a software developer. Even among other software developers, it’s always those who have written a book—even if it’s an obscure technical book—who are made the center of attention, lauded, and asked for their opinions. (See “self-worth” and “influence” above.) And among consultants in every field, it’s common wisdom that you should write a book in order to justify higher consulting fees. (See “money” below.) Most authors who have become rich have done so not by selling books, but by using their books to increase their fame, and then charging through the nose for consulting services or speaking engagements.

4. For health. Okay, now Alan has completely lost me. “Sitting in a gloomy room hunched over a computer, spewing forth imagination from the deepest recesses of your mind. Not exactly a jog along the beach, is it?” Well, it is if you do it on the beach. And writing is one of the few activities you can literally take with you almost anywhere. If you like to write on the beach, write on the beach! Or write about the beach! Or like me, walk down to the local coffee shop mid-morning and spend some time sipping and writing there. It’s a hell of a lot better than working in an office. Or sit out in the park on a sunny day with your laptop. Nothing gloomy or unhealthy about that.

3. For a social life. Again, my experience… Maybe it’s because I come from the world of software developers, who are known for their swingin’ parties. (NOT!) Software development is known for long hours and mind-numbing hacks, one after the other after the other. That’s why I got out… Uh, I didn’t really get out, I guess. Because I still take software jobs for the money, and my current client loves me, much to my dismay, and has asked to extend my contract. But I find fulfillment in writing now, not in software. (See “self-fulfillment” above and “money” below.)

Here’s the kicker, though: Writing fiction has taught me more about people than anything else I’ve ever done. Because as a fiction author, I have to get inside the heads of my characters and understand them. That little feat of psychoanalysis has done more to help me understand others and relate to them than any other activity, and thereby has improved my social life more than any other activity.

2. For the satisfaction. Alan says you’ll never be happy with what you achieve as a writer. Well, that’s true of any career. It’s part of our need always to expand our horizons, climb ever high mountains, perform ever bigger feats. But as we achieve each one… Haven’t you ever experienced the rush of having completed a story that left you in awe of yourself? Or after you unwrap the first copy of your new book? Or—best of all—when someone reads one of your stories and gets it.

1. For the money. Most writers never make money off their writing. This is especially true of fiction authors. And most writers who become rich off their writing make very little money from sales of their books. But one of the best reasons to write and publish a book in your area of expertise is that it can increase your earning power. On the other hand, the love of money is root to all kinds of evil. And if you’re writing because of the money…

Well, you could do almost anything for the money. As one tee-shirt says, “I’m only writing novels until I make it as a checkout clerk.” Money is a poor motivator, whether as a reason to do something or as a reason not to do it. This is true in any occupation. For now, I may be developing software for the money, but I no longer call myself a software developer, because I’m no longer invested in the software. After all, I’m only doing it for the money. So, true, you don’t write for the money. But you also don’t avoid writing because of the money.

The Bottom Line

I think everyone should be a writer, as least part-time. And I think there’s plenty of room in the world for everyone to love to write and love what they write. Because writing—as any occupation—is what you make of it.

Alan says his list “seems blatantly obvious,” but it’s only obvious if you define writing success as being Neil Gaiman. There can only be one Neil Gaiman, and we’ve already got him. Fortunately, life is broader than that, and there is much more that you can do with self-expression than just to copy someone else.

Success is whatever you make of it.

A writing career is whatever you make of it.

Life is whatever you make of it.

Keep writing!
-TimK

P.S. In a follow-up comment on his blog, Alan dismissively accuses me of not knowing the difference between serious and funny. “Hey Tim,” he says. “Here’s a dollar. Go buy yourself a sense of humour.” Except that there’s nothing wrong with my sense of humor. And if he bought his for a dollar, he got gypped.

Believe it or not, before I even wrote this post, I did consider whether he was trying to be funny. As a writer, I can’t help but analyze the post’s humor potential. Either it’s “funny ’cause it’s true”—except it’s not true; therefore, not funny. Or else it’s funny because he was playing the fool, saying something so obviously absurd that he was pulling our legs—except that he didn’t do that, either. He’s not the first writer to make the points he made, in all seriousness. These are old writing myths that we ought to shed. (Did Alan intend to mock the myths?)

P.P.S. So as not to ignore his most important point, that there’s only one reason we write: No I’m not deliberately ignoring it. I just disagree with it. There isn’t one reason we write. “Because you have to” is a cop-out. Why do you have to? And “because we have stories to tell” begs the question. Of course we have stories to tell. Everyone, writer or not, has stories to tell. That’s part of being a human being. Except we writers have decided to tell them. But why have we decided to tell them?

Like anyone else—like any of our characters—we do what we do in order to meet our needs. We write for all of the reasons he mocks. And some of us even write for the money, and there’s nothing wrong with that (if you can stomach it).

(Sounds like I’m designing a freeway, doesn’t it?)

I briefly want to reiterate one small point from the introduction (just in case you didn’t read it or don’t remember it from part one). My opinions are just that: opinions. The more experience I gain as a writer and author, the more I realize that there’s no right or wrong when it comes to creative expression. There’s only what you like (or dislike) and what you like (or dislike) about it. Therefore, especially if I linked to your story to exemplify one of my dislikes, if you think I’m full of BS… well, you’re probably right.

(Also remember that I wrote this on Wednesday and Thursday, even though it’s posted on Friday. The #FlashFriday stories I link to are from last week.)

While I listed the first 3 turn-ons in order of importance, the last 4 I consider about as important as each other. These are more like pet peeves, but serious enough to keep me from favoriting your story.

The first of these is…

4. Breakneck Pace

A flash story is short, by definition, under 1,000 words. So there’s no room for ebb and flow. It’s bing-bang-boom, wham, bam, thank you ma’am, and that’s all she wrote. The End.

A novel is a marathon. You have to pace yourself, keep yourself hydrated, take time to enjoy the scenery, maybe take a lunch break. But a flash story is a sprint. You start with a bang, run as fast as you can, and finish hard.

This is one reason I dislike multiple scenes in flash. (Turn-off #6.) And each week I pass by several otherwise-promising #FridayFlash stories, simply because I got into the first scene, and then the story dropped me off the face of the earth and expected me to start again with scene 2. Scene transitions break momentum. Effective flash stories are a single scene long. If you really need multiple scenes, jump from one to the next without a break. In other words, combine multiple scenes into a single one. (And if that makes your story too confusing, rewrite the story.)

There’s also no room in a flash story for reminiscences that dwell on a moment rather than move the story forward. (Turn-off #7.) “Rum Balls,” by Becca Brown, is a case in point. I mention this story, because I really liked it. But it didn’t make my favorite list, because it has no momentum. It also suffers because the character doesn’t grow. It’s a reminiscence. The rum balls remind the character of younger days, I guess, but they never move him beyond the candy store or the bus station. Even in a novel, a scene like this wouldn’t work, because it doesn’t move the story forward. Every scene must move the story forward. And nowhere is this more true than in a flash story, where you only have one scene to work with.

A related malady is the travelogue syndrome. (Turn-off #8.) I first learned of the travelogue syndrome in connection with song lyrics. This is when the verses of a song have no connection except that they happen to share the same chorus. In the best lyrics, each verse builds on and relates to the other verses as well as to the chorus. The travelogue syndrome is when a lyric feels like a travelogue, like a book about all the interesting things to see in Hawaii, which have no relation to each other, save that they all happen to be located in Hawaii. I find this can happen in stories, too, when a writer goes on with long lists of items that have no relation to each other, except that they happen to be describing the same character or setting.

DJ Young’s story, “The Celebrity,” suffers from the travelogue syndrome. He starts with the line, “I used to be everyone.” And then he proceeds to describe everyone. She never actually makes it to the story. Again, I realize that she’s not writing for readers like me. She’s writing for readers who want to experience the language as an end in itself, and that’s cool. However, I like to have something more than just pretty-sounding words, and this is one of the things that will keep a story from making my favorites list.

Lastly, some stories rely too heavily on “What the hell is going on?!” as a major conflict. (Turn off #9.) This is sure to slow down the story. You get one of these for free at the beginning, because at that point, your reader doesn’t know anything about your story. But within the first couple of paragraphs, you need to replace it with something more substantive. You can’t keep the suspense going on forever. But Denise Covey tries, with a literary piece “Today Belongs to Her,” about a woman on her “last day.” What does that mean, her “last day”? We never actually find out. (Maybe she’s dying. I mention that below under “clichés.”)

5. A Relevant Theme

I like stories that are about something. I will enjoy stories that are just fun or funny or entertaining. But the stories I adore the most, they touch me in a special place, apply to life in a broader sense. They’re about something. Most stories that have compelling character needs (see turn-on #1) also address some part of the human condition. It happens automatically. Other stories seem to have been designed with a theme in mind. However it happens, I love stories that are about something more than just the plot and characters.

Some stories, I’m not sure what to make of them. To me, they appear implausible and irrelevant. (Turn-off #10.) Such as Anneke Klein’s “The Adoption.” The tale begins with a barren couple who desperately want to adopt a child. So far so good. They travel to a foreign orphanage, where they discover that the “child” is actually an adult little person. There’s so many things wrong with that plot, I’m not sure where to begin. Maybe it was supposed to be funny, and humor is so subjective. But all I see is implausible and irrelevant.

Other stories, reading one, I feel like it must be about something, but… WHOOSH! Right over my head. (Turn-off #11.) Themes can be subjective things, too. Such as “Fallen” by NL Gervasio. A wonderful story, I think. Reads like a deep parable, or a folk legend of some sort, written to encompass the best tradition myth has to offer. But I simply don’t get it. “Beautiful and stunning,” as one commenter noted. But what’s it about? Not being able to answer that question, or even to sense an answer, is what keeps this story off my favorites list.

6. A Challenging Perspective

Just as I like stories that say something, I appreciate stories that say something different. I want a story that presents an unusual perspective, or portrays the complexity of the universe, challenges the status quo, takes me out of my comfort zone.

Not every story has to turn my world upside down, of course. My favorite #FlashFriday story of the week, Jane Travers’s “The Shades of Chawton,” does not shatter the earth. But it says to me that there is a reader out there who actually gets you as an author, and appreciates you. I think every author sometimes feels disconnected from her audience, alone and unappreciated, and she wants to make a difference in the world through her passion, her writing. Maybe that’s not earth-shattering, but it’s enough for me.

I want a story to portray an unconventional truth, but I don’t want it to preach at me. (Turn-off #12.) I definitely don’t want it to preach simplistic, pop perspectives at me. Maybe that’s fall-out from growing up in the 70′s and 80′s, where every TV show, it seemed, had to do at least one “Drugs are bad!” episode. I roll my eyes. No issue is that simplistically one-sided.

This effect is what kept Adam J. Keeper’s “Aliens at the Foot of my Stair” off my favorite’s list. The father takes a noble (though simplistic) stand on an issue, and then after the aliens conquer earth, he changes his mind, believing that if he had been more ignoble, the kids would have scared the aliens off forever with their toy, plastic ray guns. On the other hand, now I’m reconsidering whether this story should be added to my favorites, after the fact, because I’m seeing now that it can also be read as a satire on the way our society treats life issues (especially politics). Unfortunately, even if you have something to say, and even if your story says it with mastery, some people (including me) may not “get” it. Interpreting fiction can be quite subjective.

A little less subjective is the cliché. (Turn-off #13.) I’m willing to forgive a cliché, if it’s part of an otherwise compelling story. I overlook faster-than-light space travel in an otherwise engaging space opera, for example. But stories that try to rely on a cliché will usually make me roll my eyes. Back when I was younger, the big cliché to avoid was the dream sequence: the character wakes up at the denouement, revealing that the entire story was just a dream, thereby solving any problem he was stuck in. (That’s not only a cliché; it’s also cheating. See #7 below.) Reading #FridayFlash, I see a lot of stories in which the characters are all ghosts, or in which everybody dies at the end (which is also cheating). Obviously, ghost stories are fine; I enjoy ghost stories. My favorite #FridayFlash of the week was in fact a ghost story. Just do something interesting with the ghost.

7. A Satisfying Ending

When I was taking singing lessons, my vocal instructor told me that the two most important notes of the song are the first note and the last note, because the first note you sing impacts the listener’s first impression, and the last note is the one they’ll remember. Even if your voice cracks in the middle of the song, if you end on that sing-song last note with confidence and power, that’s what they’ll remember. Similarly, the two most important lines of a story are the first and the last. The two most important paragraphs are the first and the last. The two most important parts are the beginning and the ending. Numerous stories fail at the beginning, with prose that fail to engage me or characters that fall flat. But others ironically turn me off with their endings.

An effective ending should resolve the conflicts in the story in a natural progression from what came before. It’s not necessarily a happy ending. I love happy endings, but not all endings I love are happy. I also love twists, as long as they follow from the rest of the story.

I tend to dislike shock-and-awe endings. (Turn-off #14.) That is, endings where the world suddenly turns upside down, just so that the plot doesn’t follow logically from what you’d expect. I like twists, but that’s a different post. Suffice it to say that twists follow logically and naturally from what came before. Shock-and-awe endings violate the implicit contract between reader and writer, that the story will follow the rules of the story universe and won’t try to wiggle out of a bad situation on a technicality.

Obvious examples are deus ex endings, endings where the character wakes up and finds it’s all a dream, and (in #FridayFlash at least) stories in which the characters die, thereby solving all their problems. Consider Gracie Motley’s story, “Noise,” which I cite because it lies right on the line between twist and shock-and-awe. I sympathized with the character. I wrestle with the noise of modern life. (I’m wrestling with it right now, as I type. All I want is a quiet place to write without interruption. Is that too much to ask?) But letting the character die, aren’t there more constructive ways to get some peace and quiet? It may be plausible that a slip in the tub could cause her to bump her head and drown to death. But it all just seems too convenient, plot-wise. I understand what Gracie was doing, trying to use an Hitchcockian twist, and Hitchcock himself told some stories like this, and I don’t really appreciate them, either. This is all so subjective. I guess I just want a character who takes her life in her own hands, not one who has her own life taken from her hands.

Some stories simply end when the conflict has reached its peak, the cliff-edge ending. (Turn-off #15.) Carrie Clevenger’s story “Come Together” does this. The plane loses one engine, then the other. I get that Carrie wanted to bring the family together in a crisis, and she did that. But it’s left in the air whether they survive or not. The two obvious alternatives are that they all die (turn-off #14, above), or else one or more of the characters survive an horrific plane crash, which only thickens the plot (turn-off #16, below). I wanted to know how the story ends, not just to be dropped off the edge of a cliff.

Other stories thicken the conflict instead of resolving it. (Turn-off #16.) “Parchment of Love” by Eric J. Krause demonstrates what I mean. I get that the story is Rich’s love story, and as soon as Rich’s true love marries Johnny, the story is over. Except that Johnny is a jerk-wad, and the tale naturally turns from love to revenge. How is Rich going to respond to having his heart torn out and stomped all over? Better yet, how is jerk-wad Johnny going to respond to being married. Oh, he thinks he’s not married, but remember the warning on the spell he used— Trust me, he’s married. What’s that going to do Rich’s true love, caught in the middle? So instead of resolving the conflict, this story created two, more-intense conflicts. That’s called thickening the plot, which is a key stage of storytelling… but not the very last stage.

Lastly, occasionally, a story will solve a different problem than it sets up. (Turn-off #17.) For example, “Balance”, by Diandra Linnemann: The problem is that the main character (the narrator) feels he’s gotten a bum rap from life. His marriage has broken up; his kids won’t talk to him; he’s out of money. He says he’s going to get back on his feet, but you wonder whether there’s something wrong with him that keeps pushing him down. Then you find out that his good friend Jones fraudulently charged up his credit cards and stole all his money, to get back at him for sleeping with Jones’s wife. I didn’t even know he had slept with Jones’s wife. Yes, that explains a lot, including an incomplete allusion somewhere in the middle of the story when the narrator is talking about Jones’s wife. But while it’s a neat hook, it doesn’t solve the problem, which is that he has no family and no money and is getting drunk at a bar somewhere. So this story didn’t make my list of favorites.

Ending on a High Note

I listed 17 turn-offs and only 7 turn-ons. With so many pitfalls, I don’t want you to think that your readers are impossible to please. (Although some of them are. I once heard of an author who got ripped and praised for exactly the same thing.) I truly believe that if you write what you yourself enjoy reading, you can find others who also enjoy it just as much as you do. Writing is a creative journey of self-discovery and self-expression. There’s really no right or wrong. There’s only convention and innovation, playing it safe and taking the dare. And when you take the dare and write what really matters to you, there will be some people who don’t get it. (Myself included.) I don’t think you should feel bad about that.

I wrote down these turn-ons and turn-offs not to pass judgement, but on the off-chance that you might feel the same way I do, but maybe you didn’t quite grasp why. Maybe in some small way, my insights can help you write the stories that you enjoy reading.

Keep writing!
-TimK

Photo © 2009 sylvar CC 2.0 BY

PJ Kaiser suggested—probably because I’ve been doing weekly “#FridayFlash Favorites” posts—that I write about what catches my attention in a flash story, and what turns me off.

I thought that was a pretty kewl idea, and I further decided to link to last week’s #FridayFlash stories (because they’re still fresh in my mind) in order to demonstrate each point. As it turns out, this post has grown long enough to span over two days. So I’ll go through the first 3 turn-ons (and 5 turn-offs) today, and finish up tomorrow.

(Maybe I’ll post another follow up next week, the short version, just a checklist without the explanation. That’ll be far fewer words, but you’ll probably need to read the long version to understand what I’m talking about.)

Having sifted through about 100 stories a week since I started these posts, I’m probably qualified at least to venture an opinion. On top of that, I (usually) know what I like, and (usually) know how to write what I like—which also comes with experience—so I know why I like it.

Even so, my opinions are just that: opinions. The more experience I gain as a writer and author, the more I realize that there’s no right or wrong when it comes to creative expression. (Us indie authors, that’s our rightful motto, you know.) There’s only what you like (or dislike) and what you like (or dislike) about it. So as you go down the following list of positives and negatives—especially if I linked to your story to exemplify one of the negatives—if you think I’m full of BS… well, you’re probably right.

In general, I look for pretty much the same in flash as I look for in any story. The only difference between flash and longer stories is that flash fiction is, uh, shorter. Therefore, the best flash stories respect the length and use it to effect. Other than that, I admire the same qualities in flash that excite me about short stories, novellas, novels, movies, TV episodes, graphic novels, …

1. Compelling Character Need

The most important part of any story is the characters. If you have compelling characters, you can screw up elsewhere and get away with it, because we’re willing to overlook a few inconsistencies for characters that we love.

I’ve taken this to the extreme. I’ve been known to read two-bit, mis-edited indie novels that would get laughed out of the typical snarky-agent’s office, and rate them 4 and 5 stars, simply because they have great characters who dragged me into their lives and held my interest. And isn’t that what a story is supposed to do? I’m just admitting what I like about the stories I read.

So how do you make your characters compelling? It’s not enough to give them quirks, or qualities, or descriptions. You have to give them needs. That’s what turns them into real people, because everyone has needs, and everyone tries to meet his needs. The needs we have and how we try to meet them determine what kind of creature we are. Fish have fish needs. Lizards have lizard needs. Cats have cat needs. Dogs have dog needs. And the way we as humans pursue our human needs, that’s what makes us human.

I can clearly see the needs of not only the main character but also the secondary character in my favorite story this week, Jane Travers’s “The Shades of Chawton.” And that’s the first reason I loved it. (The second through seventh reasons I loved it follow below.) If you haven’t read it, and read it from the perspective of an author, like me, who just wants to write and to make a difference through his writing… Jane’s story is worth reading. Really, it moved me.

Characters that I fail to identify with may be missing a compelling need. (Turn-off #1.) More often, I suspect, they simply fail to reveal it. Maybe they’re not pursuing it. Or more likely, the author simply isn’t focusing on that need. It’s all in how you tell the story.

Take, for example, Jen Brubacher’s #FridayFlash, “Somewhere Else.” I mention this story, because I really liked it. But it didn’t make my favorites list, because I couldn’t figure out what the character’s compelling need was, or whether she even had one. She goes on vacation, does all sorts of things that are completely out of character for her, seems lonely. I felt for her, felt like I was beginning to get to know her. But what was she seeking? And did she find it? How did she feel about going back to the daily grind of her ordinary life? It’s not enough to merely feel for her; I want to understand her. I want to identify with her.

2. Character Growth

Coincidentally, I talked about character change and Aha! moments just yesterday. In that post, I posited that characters may sometimes grow—at least in our minds—because our perception of the character changes, even if the character herself does not change.

Even so, the traditional way to evoke character growth is to actually have the character change. For example, Melissa L. Webb’s story, “May I Come In?” A boy who’s too “old” to believe in monsters and the bogeyman, he reconsiders, because his grandfather always knocks on the door to an empty room, so that the monsters can clear out before he enters. The boy adopts the tradition of his grandfather, just to be safe. At the beginning of the story, the boy was too “old” to believe in monsters. At the end, he’s not necessarily too “old” anymore. That’s the Aha! moment. That’s character change.

The opposite of character change is, of course, character stasis. (Turn-off #2.) Consider Danielle La Paglia’s post, “Reflection.” Again, I mention this story, because I really liked it. A man faces himself in a mirror, which means he must face up to what he knows to be true. Yes, the “man meets himself” thing has been done and done and overdone before. So it might be a cliché. (See under #6 below.) But I’m frequently willing to forgive a cliché, as long as there’s something else there for me to hold onto. But this story didn’t make my favorites list, because the character ends up the same as he was at the beginning. My perception of the character doesn’t even grow, so that I might more fully appreciate him or learn something from him. There’s no Aha! moment.

3. Engrossing Narrative

Many readers put this at the top. I rank it up there, but at #3, because I’m willing to forgive a little boringness in exchange for compelling characters that bring me on a journey of self-discovery. Even so, I really do enjoy engrossing narrative. Usually, you spice up your narrative through plot and conflict, and the most reliable way to achieve it line-by-line is to use MRU’s (motivation-reaction units) in a pattern I call “ping-ponging.” That’s another post, but in short, narrate your story as though it were a ping-pong game, always on the edge of your seat as each player takes position and returns the ball to the other (or fails to return the ball).

The most common question I’ve been asked since I began the #FridayFlash Favorites is, how do I read through a hundred stories in a weekend? The answer is that most of them I don’t actually read. I do look at all the stories, all 100 or more of them each week, but most of them fail to engage me with their narrative. Somewhere between the second and fifth paragraph usually, I realize that my eyes have glazed over, and I can’t remember what I read 2 seconds ago, and I finally yell at myself in frustration, “Why do I care?!” And then I skip to the next story.

“Why do I care?!” narrative is the bane of my #FridayFlash existence. (Turn-off #3.) A variation on this is “…and then…” plotting and dialogue. ‘We did FOO and then we did X and Y and Z and then someone said “Ugh. Mee boo pob geee!” and then we threw up all over each other and went home. The End.’ I feel like I’m looking in on random characters performing random acts and talking to each other in disconnected statements. An effective plot is not just activity. That’s why the characters’ motivations and reactions are so important. They imbue activity with meaning. They turn mere ping-pong volleys into a game, with sides I can root for.

An example… There are so many of them. Here’s one: “Island Nights” by Laura Eno. I’m not trying to pick on Laura, and her story may in fact have something in it worth reading, but I simply never finished it. I barely started it. I read through where he woke up from his dream while he was suntanning, but I never discovered whether they decided what to have for dinner. Instead, my brain checked out and went for a walk. Eventually, I followed.

Sometimes a story is boring because it focuses too much on the gimmick. (Turn-off #4.) Most of the “telepathic parrot” stories this past weekend failed on this count. Gimmicks are like character quirks. Quirks can serve an already strong character, but they can’t make a weak character strong. Similarly, a gimmick can serve an already engrossing story, but it won’t turn a boring story into an interesting one. For an example of how to use a gimmick well, see “Bumwattle’s Bird,” Chris Chartrand’s “telepathic parrot” story. Note that the story doesn’t actually need a telepathic parrot. Chris could have written just as strong a story using almost any plot device, such as an exotic virus or a mind-controlling computer. (Or even zombies.) He doesn’t focus on the kewlness on the gimmick; therefore, the gimmick actually works in the context of the story.

Another common barrier to engrossing dialogue is verbiage so thick, I need a machete to make sense of it. (Turn-off #5.) For example, Karen Dash’s “Death Dance,” which is possibly a good story, except that it lost me somewhere between “susurration of his cloak wafting out in his wide berthed wake” and “pert tenacity of tripping the light fantastic in life, now elided into imagining they were auditioning for the great dance-off in the sky.” I realize that Karen was playing with the language here as an art form in itself, and many people love this sort of thing. I unfortunately am not one of them.

On online friend of mine posted last month that he was getting both laughs and blank stares with a phrase that I think should go on a tee-shirt: Extirpate sesquipedalianism!

(Continued: click here for part 2.)

Photo © 2006 Anna Lee CC 2.0 BY NC ND

I love character stories. In fact, I rarely enjoy a story unless it has a character-driven component.

So I was naturally surprised that I so enjoyed Al Bruno’s latest #FridayFlash story. It’s not really a character story, per se. Or is it?

I actually have a different take on that now, different than last week. I think it is a character story, but not in the traditional sense.

Entitled “Breaking the Girl,” here’s the story’s basic outline—

And BTW, SPOILER ALERT! If you want to read the 996-word story as originally written, you should do that now.

1. Lorelei has been drugged and tied to a chair.
2. She attempts to cast an incantation against her captor, but ends up instead with a searing pain in her own head.
3. Her tormentor reveals that he has painted the Sigil of Enfeeblement on her forehead, thereby preventing her from using her magic against him.
4. He begins to torture her for the information he wants, starting with a taser.
5. She goads him on, prompting him to pummel her with his fists, to her body, to her head, to her face.
6. The torturer prepares to pull out her tooth or fingernail.
7. She tries the incantation again. This time it works, throwing him off his feet. Then she casts one to release her from the ropes that bind her.
8. She explains to him that, in hitting her, he had smeared and smudged the Sigil of Enfeeblement with blood, corrupting it and rendering it useless, thereby freeing her to use her magic again.
9. Before she leaves, she prepares to treat her tormentor to the same torture he had prepared for her (presumably as a lesson to him and his ilk).

Aha! Moments

We can arrange conflict into two categories, internal and external, depending on how the conflict resolves. Internal conflict resolves when the character changes his perspective, thereby rendering the problem moot. External conflict resolves when the character changes something in the world around him, solving his problem.

Internal conflict is the stuff of character-driven stories, because it involves character change. External conflict is the stuff of plot-driven stories, because it involves the character manipulating the world around him.

Romance stories frequently rely on internal conflict and are character-driven, because the two lovers change the way they look at each other and their relationship. The characters change their attitudes, equals character change, equals internal conflict. Detective stories frequently rely on external conflict, because the investigator must uncover and interpret clues, leading him to bring the culprit to justice. The character changes how society treats the culprit, equals change in the character’s world, equals external conflict.

So then, “Breaking the Girl” is not a character-driven story, because the character never changes. Rather, from the start, she manipulates the situation, by egging on her tormentor, in order that she might ultimately triumph over him. That makes this a plot-driven story.

Even so, when I read this story, I experience the same feeling as I do reading a character-driven story. It’s not just a matter of sympathizing or identifying with the character, cringing that she is to be tortured by a ruthless villain. My feelings go deeper than that, exulting in the enlightenment of the big reveal, when she triumphs through her creativity. I experience an Aha! moment.

It’s the same feeling I have in a different kind of story, where the hero reaches an impasse, finally looking at the problem sideways and coming up with a totally innovative solution. That Aha! moment, that’s character-driven, because it involves character change. This character change then further drives the plot, allowing the character to manipulate his environment in order to solve the problem. To me, solving the problem is cool. But the Aha! moment is golden.

“Breaking the Girl” has no character change, no moment at which Lorelei figures out she can trick the villain and nullify the Sigil of Enfeeblement. By the time we get to the end of the story, we see that Lorelei always knew exactly what she was doing. So why do I experience an Aha! moment, somewhere around #8 in the summary above?

The True Nature of Conflict

We usually define conflict as “the problem the character faces.” This is a standard definition. It’s not the definition I use, however, because it’s too vague. Character problems cause conflict, but they are not conflict per se.

Conflict is a perception by the reader that compelling change has occurred and will occur. (I explained this definition in more depth recently when I talked about alternative conflict.)

We say character stories involve character change. But is there also a place for a character story that involves a change in our perception of the character? An Aha! moment in which her character is revealed?

I believe that’s what’s happening in “Breaking the Girl.” The Aha! moment doesn’t go along with the character’s change (because there is no character change), but it does go along with my changing perception of the character.

Even when I know what’s coming, I still experience the moment. Even when I know at #5 that Lorelei is gritting her teeth and sacrificing herself for her ultimate victory, even when I know that the villain is digging his own grave, even when I know exactly what she means when she calls him an amateur, even when #7 is no mystery to me (because I know why her incantations worked)… When she then explains to him that he had smudged the Sigil, I blurt out, “Aha! I told you so! You rank amateur!”

I now notice this same effect occurring in numerous stories.

Sometimes, the character doesn’t tell us (the audience) what he’s thinking, because doing so would compromise his position or it’s not in his nature to do so. We have to figure it out on our own, and in that figuring, that’s where our perception of the character changes, and that’s where the Aha! moment occurs. Columbo did this wonderfully, because you never knew exactly when he had figured out who the murderer was, when he shifted from investigation to pursuit of the criminal.

Other times, the character himself doesn’t know what he’s thinking, or why he does what he does. Maybe he’s acting on instinct. And if he figures it out, we can revel in the same Aha! moment he does. Such as in the final episode of M*A*S*H, where Hawkeye gradually comes to terms with a traumatic experience. (That would be character change.) But even if he doesn’t figure it out, we might, and we can have the Aha! moment without him.

Keep writing!
-TimK

Photo © 2008 wizetux CC 2.0 BY NC

A couple Fridays ago— This is just after my computer gave out, and I was behind schedule on everything. Come Friday morning, I had not started writing a story for #FridayFlash. I didn’t even have an idea.

So I used the following 5-step process to whip one together, in less than 3 hours from start to finish. That includes the raw story idea, characterization, plotting, and drafting and editing the story. And the result, which I entitled “Just A Bite of Coffee and Ice Cream,” actually turned out pretty good. It’s a story about a 19-year-old woman, muddling through a job at an ice-cream shop, while she’s coming to grips with a direction for her life.

1. What’s your character’s unmet need? Always start with a compelling character need, because that will drive your character story. See my earlier post on basic character needs to get ideas. Just throw a dart at the list of needs, if you need to, and pick one. What circumstances in the character’s life are causing this need or preventing it from being met?

2. How is she striving to meet that need (and failing)? This is your conflict. Address it in the first sentence of your story. Get ideas from anecdotes you’ve heard told, personal stories you’ve witnessed, or even experiences from your own past (as I did for “Coffee and Ice Cream”).

3. What’s her defining moment of change? In her life’s story, there’s one moment that imbues her with a powerful new mindset, which will bring her success. This is the major plot point of your story. It defines your scene, setting, and plot. And this success should follow logically, without explanation, from the change that occurs. (Otherwise, you need to include an epilogue explaining how the change impacted her, and you usually want to avoid that if you can, in a flash story.)

4. Write the story. Start the story with the unmet character need (conflict); show the character making it worse (thickening); then show the character’s perspective changing (resolution). Once you know the character’s story, you can pretty much just tell it.

5. Give your story a title, something that will spark the interest of a prospective reader. I’m including this as a separate step, because the title is an important element of the story. Even though fiction titles are often more creative than non-fiction, the first thing a prospective reader will see is still your title. Ideally, it should draw the reader in, make her wonder what the story is about, and get her to read the first sentence of the story. For title ideas, I frequently focus on the main theme of the story or on the story’s hook.

Note that at each stage of this process, you’ll be looking for ideas. You should choose ideas that excite you and that you can identify with, because that will make the writing process go faster and easier, even if it means you have to pass up the first ideas that come to mind.

Keep writing!
-TimK

Photo © 2008 Cayusa CC 2.0 BY NC

I’ve been wrestling with a lot of personal issues, and I haven’t had the time I usually do to write. So I pulled out this useful article by author William Meikle, as a guest post for today.

-TimK

Crime Fiction – Ten Cliches to Avoid

by William Meikle

Crime fiction is big business at the moment, but there are certain situations that have been overplayed so much that they have become genre cliches and everybody knows what to expect next. Here are ten cliches you should try to avoid and thoughts on how to subvert the cliches if you do decide to use them.

Cops and Doctors

You can find this perennial favourite in both crime and historical fiction. You’ll see it in ER, NYPD Blue and in cross -genre shows like the X Files. The doctor says “OK but only for a minute” or “It’s touch and go. The next few hours will be crucial” or “It could be minutes, it could be days… you never know with coma cases” The policemen usually say nothing. They just stand around and chew the scenery in frustration.

Mulder and Scully actually spend a lot of their time hanging around in hospitals but you don’t notice so much because the patients aren’t your run of the mill criminals or witnesses.

And that’s the way to get around this one. Get a new twist and add some tension. Maybe the patient is related to either the cop or the doctor. Or maybe the doctor is an amateur detective and knows better than the cop? But beware of the “Dick Van Dyke” syndrome… that leads you into a whole new area of cliche

The New Partner

In this scenario a veteran cop has to get a new partner after the death of his old one. The rookie is either keen as mustard and eager to please, or burned out from personal problems. It’s probably best known in modern times from the Lethal Weapon movies. Screenwriters tried to add some tension early in the series by having Mel Gibson as a borderline suicide case, and that gave the first film an edge; but it was lost in later instalments. By the time the fourth movie came came along they had fallen so deeply into a buddy movie relationship that all drama was lost in favour of light comedy.

You need to do some serious subverting if you want to use this situation. People have tried having a dog as the buddy in K9, having their Mom as the buddy in Stop! Or My Mom Will Shoot, and having foreigners as the buddy in big Arnie’s Red Heat.

Outside the strictly police procedural we’ve also had the robot buddy in Robocop, the ghost buddy in Randall and Hopkirk (Deceased), the alien buddy in Alien Nation, the magician buddy in Jonathan Creek, the ex-serviceman buddy in both Sherlock Holmes and Poirot. The list just goes on and on.

However you do it, filling in the blanks is easy in this scenario. What you need is something new. How about having the cop being given a politician doing a meet-the-people stint. Or, on a completely tasteless but might be funny level, how about the schizophrenic cop who is his own buddy?

The Rookie in the Morgue

Once only the province of young students in Quincy, this one now turns up on TV in the CSI franchise or Crossing Jordan and in print in the Kay Scarpetta books. There are usually two ways this one can proceed. Either the young cop rushes out, hand at mouth, or he stands still, icily cold and detached, as the autopsy proceeds.

Inspector Morse tried to subvert this situation by having the old timer as the squeamish one, but how about having the rookie as the pathologist?

Whatever you do, try not to give the pathologist a chance to be smug and patronizing while explaining large chunks of the plot. In the UK, this is overdone in Silent Witness and Waking the Dead, and is just a lazy way to advance the story.

The Cantankerous Lieutenant Chews Out The Cop

In films and television shows this happens to every protagonist, and Clint Eastwood for one must be tired of it. In the Dirty Harry series he was rarely out of his boss’s office.

It usually ends up with the lieutenant and the cop snarling at each other, so how about having one of them being completely calm and laid back? Or how about having one of them being deaf?

And if you must write this scene, please don’t use lines like “I’ll have your badge for that”, or “I’m not covering for you this time.”

The Slimy Defence Lawyer

This one was a hot favourite on NYPD Blue and was guaranteed to get right up Sipowitz’s nose. Once you’ve introduced the sharp suit, the slick hairstyle and the briefcase, this guy will inevitably say, “My client has no further comment,” or “You had no right to talk to him without me there.” Everybody knows the rest.

Again, serious though is needed to bring a new twist to this situation. Your lawyer could be an ex-cop who knows all the moves, or a relative or lover of one of the cops? How about a lawyer defending himself? Or a counter-culture lawyer covered with tattoos and piercings?

Whatever you do try to come up with some creative invective. Slimeball, sleazeball, reptile and shyster have all been overused.

The Car Chase

Bullit and The French Connection set the standard, and Gone in 60 Seconds brought it into the 21st Century, but this situation has mostly become tired. There are only so many little old ladies to avoid, so many road signs to hit, and so many police cars to trash before your audience becomes jaded.

Over the years the Bond movies have used up just about all the possible permutations, so you’ll struggle to come up with something new. It would be better to add tension in another way.

In a bid to appear fresh, the chase element has sometimes been dropped altogether in favour of the race against time as in Speed or Die Hard With a Vengeance. To succeed you’ll need a good reason for the journey to take place, a disastrous outcome if it’s not successful, and some good near misses on the way.

But beware. Too much carnage and your readers will start thinking of The Blues Brothers. And please, don’t have your protagonist drive the wrong way down a one-way street.. it’s been done far too often.

The Shoot Out

Raymond Chandler’s advice to crime writers still holds. “If your plot is flagging, have a man come in with a gun.” You’ve got to be careful though. Too many people still transfer scenes from old cowboy movies almost verbatim into modern cop scenes.

Probably the best recent shoot out was in Michael Mann’s Heat. You cared who lived or died, and there was excitement and tension. Therein lies the trick. Make your readers have an opinion, not just about your hero, but about the other characters as well. At the end of LA Confidential, we knew all of the people involved in the climax, and it made it more satisfying to watch who lived or died. Lining one-dimensional people up just as cannon fodder might work in a Saturday night popcorn movie, but we should be aiming higher than that.

Shoot outs work well on film, but they can be a drag in print. Some writers tend to slow things down, especially to have a close look at the wounds. Unless you’re careful it can read like a medical textbook.

And, please, don’t have heads “exploding like ripe watermelons.”

The Cop in The Cafe

This was used in Chips in every episode, giving them an excuse to show a motorbike speeding from a car park with loose gravel flying.

It’s also a favourite in most of the aforementioned buddy movies, and especially in Starsky and Hutch. They’ll be in a cafe, musing over the chewing out they’ve had from their boss, when a call comes through. The radio buzzes, giving them a chance to attach a flashing light to the roof of their car and head off to a car chase, closely followed by a shoot out. See how it’s possible to run one cliche into another? Pretty soon you’d have a whole plot, but would anybody buy it?

One way of changing this scene might be to have an alternative means of the cops getting the message. You could have them hearing something on the Television? Or how about on a cell-phone or laptop… there are multiple opportunities for foul ups, misunderstandings or criminal actions there, and they haven’t been overdone… yet.

Good Cop / Bad Cop

The good cop / bad cop interview became a cliche almost as soon as crime fiction began. A fine example, nearly seventy years old, can be seen in The Maltese Falcon. By now everybody knows the moves, and your readers will be bored long before the interview is over. Unless you’re being self-referential and ironic, as in LA Confidential you’ll never pull it off.

Cracker tried to subvert the interview situation altogether by having it performed by a psychiatrist who played both cops in one. In The Rock, Sean Connery as the prisoner told Nicholas Cage which questions he should be asking. You’ll need to find something similarly innovative if you’re going to make it work.

How about having two good cops? Or two bad cops? Or maybe there is a new computer system designed by psychologists to ask the right questions in the right order? How would your cops and your prisoner handle that?

The Estranged Wife

Why do all fictional cops have relationship problems? This scene always goes the same way. The wife says, “You never see the children anymore.” The cop doesn’t say anything, because his mobile phone interrupts. You know the rest.

Cracker is again a good case in point as he went through this scene in almost every episode. Pacino played a variation of it with his girlfriend in Heat.

Not only does Cracker have a failed marriage, but he’s also a gambler and a drinker. In recent years people have been giving cops more and more problems to overcome, culminating in Denzel Washington’s paraplegic investigator in The Bone Collector. I wouldn’t even try to top that.

Why not be original. Make your cop a healthy, stable, happily married man. Now there’s a challenge.

Conclusion

The next time you read or watch a police drama, notice how many of the above are still in use. All of them can occur in any one story, and frequently do… just shuffle the paragraphs, add a murder or two and you have an instant plot.

But unless you can subvert some of the cliches, don’t expect anybody to buy it.

William Meikle is a Scottish writer, with seven novels published in the States and three more coming in 2007/8, all in the independent fantasy and horror press. His short work and articles have appeared in the UK, Ireland, USA, Canada, Greece, Saudi Arabia and India.

Read free fiction at his web site http://www.williammeikle.com

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Every writer who writes flash has one of these lists, even if flash is not his area of expertise. Even if he doesn’t write it down, he keeps it in the back of his mind.

I tend to enjoy character-driven fiction, and I enjoy character-driven flash as well. You might think that flash offers too few words in which to develop good characters, but I believe that it is possible, if you focus your efforts.

Here’s my own list, which I keep in mind when I’m writing flash fiction and short-short stories:

1. You only have room for one main character, so choose her well. What’s more, in a flash piece, this character has only one compelling need. Because flash fiction is about focus, all of her qualities focus themselves on supporting her single compelling need.

2. You only have room for one scene, so choose it well. Actually, it’s more like a half a scene, or even a quarter scene. There’s not enough room to tell the character’s life story. One setting, one moment, one change. What is the most important change that occurs in the character’s story? That is her defining moment, and that is what the scene must focus on.

3. You only have room for a single plot. This single story thread you spin directly from the main conflict. No secondary conflicts. No subplots.

4. You only have room for a single, simple theme. I love stories that actually say something. And a novel can say two or three different things. It can explore interrelated themes with multiple interpretations. But not a flash story. You get to make one simple point on one theme, and everything else you need to leave for other stories.

5. Get to the main conflict of the scene in the first sentence. This is your hook. You don’t have time to lallygag around, so get right into it. In as few words as possible, why do I care? Start with a bang and then increase the intensity. Don’t worry about running out of things to talk about or tiring out the reader; you’re more likely to encounter the converse problems.

6. Skip as much of the backstory as you can. The reader usually doesn’t need to know how the character got to this point. And if he does absolutely need to know some part of the backstory, keep it as simple as possible, and imply as much of it as you can through its relation to the story. In a flash piece, you don’t need to explain everything to the reader. Let him figure it out himself through logical deduction.

7. “Show” anything related to the main conflict. That is, “show”; don’t “tell” it. This is where you use up the bulk of your words. Ping-pong the primary plot. (I.e., write it in MRU’s.) Focus the story’s intensity here, and don’t let up. The story is too short to require easy-going interludes. Except…

8. “Tell” the backstory; don’t “show” it. That is, any part of the backstory that you couldn’t get rid of, and you couldn’t leave to the imagination, because it actually builds the main conflict or explains a key plot point… If you have to go off on a tangent, at least gloss over it as quickly as possible.

9. Save the twist until the end. Or rather, as soon as you’ve laid enough groundwork for the story’s climax, do the deed and get out of there. Skip the epilogue; you don’t need one. (Or if you absolutely must write an epilogue, try: “And they lived happily ever after.” But that’s an extra 6 words you probably didn’t need.)

10. Eliminate all but the essential words. Get out your editor’s pen, and cross out any word that isn’t absolutely needed. If that means shorter, choppier sentences, that’s just fine, because it increases the tempo.

Naturally, I go against all these rules all the time. Because they’re not really rules. They’re tips. They’re lines on your storytelling map, but they’re not destinations in themselves. And part of writing fiction is having fun plotting your own course across that map.

Keep writing!
-TimK

I called it “alternative conflict” in Monday’s post, but a better monicker might be “problem-free conflict,” because it pops up over and over again in literature, TV, and film. Usually, it’s used alongside the more traditional character problems.

“But character problems cause conflict,” I hear you objecting. “How can you have conflict without character problems?”

Well, actually, this introduction itself is an example of problem-free conflict. But first, let’s look at a more obvious example.

Mischievous Miscreant

Our story begins as the rising sun beams in on sleeping Dag. He rolls over just long enough to get in one more snore, before his alarm jolts him awake.

“Time to annoy my brother,” Dag says, an evil gleam in his eye.

He reaches for his “365 Ways and Days to Completely, Totally, and Fully Annoy Your Brother” calendar and flips to January 7, today: “Bop your brother till he bleeds.”

“Kooky!” Dag says to himself. “It’s a good thing I got this ’365 Ways and Days to Completely, Totally, and Fully Annoy Your Brother’ calendar. I could never think of this many ways to completely, totally, and fully annoy my brother on my own.” And he sets off to find his brother, and a boxing glove.

You have to get the humor of the Angry Beavers in order to fully appreciate that scene from the episode “Same Time Last Week.” (Yes, Dag and his brother Norb are animated beavers.) My brother and I used to watch them all the time before stupid Spongebob pushed them off the air. But now most of those episodes are available on NetFlix Watch Instantly, and I’ve been having loads of fun getting reacquainted with them.

What struck me most about that scene was that there’s no character problem. Not-a one. This is supposedly one of the no-no’s of storytelling. But the scene works, because Dag’s mischievous plan produces conflict. At least, it does by the definition of conflict I used in Monday’s post:

Conflict is a perception by the reader that compelling change has occurred and will occur.

In this case, Dag has begun going through his “annoy your brother” calendar, something new for this episode, something beyond his normal Daggaliciousness. And we expect both fallout and humor from this mischief. Indeed, we get both. He eventually ends up with a real character problem, but only after the plot has thickened a couple of times.

What’d'ya Mean, You’re Dead?

“Someone was looking at me, a disturbing sensation if you’re dead.”

That’s the first line of Laura Whicomb’s debut novel A Certain Slant of Light. This is what we call “a hook.” But whence comes its power?

We have several things happening, all at once, in this tiny sentence:

1. Someone is staring at the main character.
2. It puts her ill at ease.
3. She’s dead.

The second of these is clearly a traditional conflict. The character has a problem: she is comfortable with the way things are (a need), and this someone is interfering with her status quo (an obstacle). That’s a problem. We expect her to address that conflict, and indeed she does. But first, we have to deal with the other two conflicts posed by this introductory sentence.

I think of them as “What the hell is happening here?!” conflicts. You get one of these for free whenever someone first begins reading your story, because he doesn’t know anything about your story or its world or characters. But this freebie only lasts for a paragraph or two. In that space, you have to give him something more. And one path is to explore related “What the hell is happening here?!” conflicts.

In A Certain Slant of Light, the story has implicitly promised us that we’ll find out who the someone is who is staring at the main character (and why he’s staring).

We also want to know how she can be aware that someone’s staring at her if she’s dead. She’s obviously a ghost. But so what? Why shouldn’t someone see her? (That is, if she’s standing right in front of him?) Don’t people see ghosts?

Note that this sort of conflict drives non-fiction essays— like this very piece you’re reading right now. We usually don’t think of non-fiction as a story, with conflict, thickening, and resolution. But that’s because we usually think in terms of character-problem conflict, and non-fiction usually doesn’t focus on character-problem conflict. Well-written non-fiction, however, does follow the general structure of a story, including using conflict to push the story along.

It Don’t Matter Much to Me

One last quick example. Remember Forrest Gump? Winner of six Academy Awards, including Best Picture— Yeah, that Forrest Gump.

(BTW, at the time of this writing, you can also stream the film via NetFlix Watch Instantly.)

A profound story, but the main character, Forrest, nothing bothers him. Well, almost nothing. He certainly doesn’t get uptight about most of the life-pressures that constantly stress us out. That was, in fact, how the film was marketed back in 1994. Yes, I saw it when it first came out— and some of you may not be old enough to remember the movie trailers: “The world will never seem the same, once you’ve seen it through the eyes of Forrest Gump.”

I don’t want to make it sound like this character doesn’t have needs, because he does, and sometimes he has to strive to meet those needs. But a great number of the problems he faces are not his own.

For example, Forrest runs into his old platoon leader, Lieutenant Dan Taylor, who had lost his legs in Vietnam. Dan immediately tears into Forrest, because stupid Forrest got a medal of honor, while Dan lost both his legs and is now poor and destitute. Forrest—much more of a man than I would be—doesn’t even seem to notice the slight. Instead, he opens up his life to his old friend, and they eventually become partners in a lucrative business.

A number of forces drive this scene. One of them is the promise that the situation will change, either for the worse (if Dan’s raging anger eventually sinks through Forrest’s skull) or for the better (if Forrest’s unconditional affection eventually sinks through Dan’s skull). Neither one of these addresses any problem, but either would have been significant.

As I recall, Forrest Gump is full of story threads like this, where a non-problem drives the story via the promise of a change-to-come.

When this movie first came out, I wanted to write a long, detailed essay exploring its many layers and the many angles from which one could interpret the story. I never did. But if you haven’t seen this classic film, it’s definitely worth renting on DVD. In the meantime…

Keep writing!
-TimK

Photo © 2007 Mika Meskanen CC 2.0 BY NC

Okay, not all writer’s novelty T-shirts are that bad. Browsing the ones on CafePress, some of them are downright witty, such as “I write, therefore I am,” “I’m plotting against you,” and the always-applicable “Careful or you’ll end up in my novel.”

But some of the best writer’s T-shirts actually come from the filmmaking category:

• “Writing is the only profession where no one considers you ridiculous if you earn no money.” -Jules Renard [which isn't true, but it sometimes feels true]

• “Adverbs are for wussies.”

• “Character arcs? We don’t need no stinkin’ character arcs.”

• “Reality is for people with no imagination.”

Not to mention a framed print that should be hanging next to every writer’s desk (not just screenwriters):

This creative license frees you to be different, to think outside the box, to turn things upside down, to challenge the status quo, to go out on a limb, to see the forest and the trees, to blaze a new trail, to see with new eyes, to hear with your heart and speak with your actions, to do the unexpected, try the impossible, and ask, “Why not?”

But so much of the gestalt of the writer’s life is missing from writers’ novelty items.

I almost gagged when I saw a refrigerator magnet with the “Writer’s Mantra: I will be a published author. I will be a published author. I will be a published author.” Ad nauseam. Let me say for the record that—even if you want to be published—if what you’re writing for is primarily to be published, you’ve lost your focus. Most of us write first for the passion, and that should be our mantra. In fact, that would be a great place to start with a new series of punchier, more relevant writers’ novelty tees (some based on other non-writerly designs):

• “I write for the passion. (Though I’d still like to get paid.)”

• “Stories are my life. I would die without them. (Or at least be very, very grumpy.)”

• “Choose Your Weapon” with pictures of pencil, pen, computer keyboard, crayon, etc.

• “I talk to people who aren’t really there. (I’m a fiction author.)”

• “Stories express that which cannot be logically explained and on which it is impossible to be silent.” (based on a quote from Victor Hugo)

• “Writer’s Schedule: drink coffee, write, get kids to school & think about writing, write some more, eat lunch & think about writing, watch TV & think about writing, get kids from school & think about writing, do laundry & think about writing, write again, ask kids nicely to quiet down, keep writing, eat dinner & think about writing, take ibuprofen, take kids to softball (bring writing journal), sleep & dream about writing”

• “Don’t piss me off: I’m a suspense author.” (or “horror,” or “mystery,” or whatever

• “Careful! I’ve got a pen, and I’m not afraid to use it.”

• Novelty laptop case: “Nope, not a writer. I just lug it around for the exercise.” (Might also work as the cover of a novelty journal.)

• “Designated writer. (Please don’t ask me to drive.)” with a picture of a martini. (Yeah, I know, the alcoholic writer is a myth. But tell me the truth; how many of you have never considered becoming alcoholics?)

• “Yes, I’m a writer. Don’t worry: I’m not psychotic… yet.”

• “Places I like to write… at home, in the car, at my favorite cafe, on the beach, at church, …”

• “Why yes, I do know a little about everything. (I’m a writer.)”

• “I know why ancient man drew on caves. They were writing stories!”

• “Without stories, life would be a mistake.”

• “My stories may not sell. (But at least they change lives.)”

• “Do Not Disturb: Inspiration in progress!”

• “Spelling is for editors. I’m a writer.”

• “If I wanted you to edit out my thoughts, I wouldn’t have written them in to start with!”

• “Indie author. (Will work for food.)”

• “I’m only writing novels until I make it as a checkout clerk.”

• Picture of a high-wire walker, balancing precariously on one foot, holding “writing” in one hand, “life” in the other.

• … or maybe just a simple “I write stories.”

Keep writing!
-TimK

P.S. Maybe that would make a good T-shirt, too. “Keep writing!” Or a mousepad. Or a refrigerator magnet. Or…

Photo © 2007 Chantal Lyons CC 2.0 BY NC ND

My #FridayFlash short-short story, “Too Much Information,” this past week experimented with a different kind of conflict, something I’m calling “alternative conflict.” In reality, there are published stories out there, in prose and in TV and film, that already use conflict like this, so it really isn’t alternative. (It’s mainstream.) But the advice that you get as a novice writer frequently forbids you from exploring any but one form of conflict.

Traditional form dictates that you start with a character who has a problem, and that’s where the conflict in the story comes from. But in “Too Much Information,” the character has no problem. He (or she) explains that he has been dreaming the future, and he’s going to see if he can change the future by manipulating his dreams. Yes, he has a compelling need, to explore this dream phenomenon. But there’s no obstacle preventing him from meeting his need. Therefore, he has no problem. In fact, the entire story is about how he is meeting his need.

So then, if my character has no problem, how do I maintain the reader’s interest?

Indeed, many of the more literary short stories that I read, they focus on the beauty of the language, or they merely describe a character or a scene. They have no character problem, and they sometimes suffer from the travelogue syndrome. They don’t resemble anything that I would call a story (though there are other readers who do enjoy these pieces). And they fail to draw me in, because there’s no conflict.

When I wrote “Too Much Information,” however, I focused on the conflict, even though the character has no problem. I tried to draw readers in, firstly, with the idea that the character has his head in the clouds or is imagining some phenomenon that doesn’t exist. Then with the idea that he actually might be dreaming the future. As the story progresses, the reader should realize that the character is ascribing special meaning to mere coincidence, even though the character himself doesn’t see things that way. At that point, the conflict is resolved (because the “dreaming the future” has been explained away), and the story is over. So there is a story arc, but happens in the reader’s mind, rather than in the character’s experience. The character doesn’t change, but the reader’s perception does.

What Is Conflict?

One standard definition is that conflict occurs when a character has a problem. And this is true: if you create a character and give him a compelling problem, you will have a compelling story conflict.

But are there other ways to generate conflict? I believe so. And we can discover what they are with a better definition, a definition that tells us what conflict is beyond a character’s problems.

Holly Lisle, I think, comes very close in her excellent How to Write Page-Turning Scenes, with a profound insight: “Conflict is, simply put, change. Anytime something changes, it creates ripples that will be good for some people, bad for others.” She then goes on to detail five categories of conflict that she has identified in her experience as a fiction author.

I think Holly’s definition comes darn close. And as a metaphor, it’s perfect. But I would refine it one more step further. Conflict is not change, but conflict always goes along with change. The only way to produce conflict is to divert from the status quo, that is, to change something. And the only way to resolve conflict is through change, to move to a new status quo. So change precedes conflict, and change follows conflict. And thickening the plot also is a form of change, a transmutation of conflict, from a lesser conflict to a greater conflict.

So I would define conflict as follows:

Conflict is a perception by the reader that compelling change has occurred and will occur.

That’s what I tried to do in my story, to indicate to the reader that something was off from the status quo (that the laws of the universe had changed from what he understood), with the implicit promise that I was going to explain this discrepancy (thus producing a new status quo).

Thursday’s post will explore some more stories that use alternative conflict. (UPDATE: Click here to read it.)

In the meantime…

Keep writing!
-TimK

Photo © 2008 .craig CC 2.0 BY NC ND

They say that effective story characters have problems, because problems mean conflict, and conflict makes for an interesting story. True enough. (See Wednesday’s post for a better explanation.) But what they don’t usually tell you is that all problems come from character needs. Or more precisely, from characters not getting their needs met.

Like us, when a character’s needs are not met, she seeks to meet them. But there might be something preventing her from getting her needs met. For example, if a captor has sold her into slavery, that’s bound to ruin her day, because it interferes with her need for autonomy. Or maybe she simply doesn’t have the resources to meet her needs, as if a famine is making it difficult for everyone to find food. She may not possess skills she needs to meet her needs, for example, if she is lonely because she doesn’t know how to relate to others. And sometimes, as any real human would, she is bound to do things that she feels will meet her needs, but which really just create complications, such as when she turns to alcohol in a search for fulfillment.

You’ll also find that her needs are interrelated—as ours all are—and that she may seek to take action to fulfill two needs at once, or to satisfy one need at the expense of another. Or sometimes one need rebounds on another, such that if the one is not met, it will cause the character to perceive another also not being met. This interrelatedness can also thicken and complicate the plot. She drinks because she feels her life has no meaning (need #10 below), and as a result, she begins to lose intimacy with her husband (#5), which may affect her sense of accomplishment (#8), her sense of status (#9), and further decrease her sense of purpose (#10). Now she has four problems to deal with instead of just one.

If you’re having trouble finding a compelling conflict, start by choosing from one of the following 10 basic character needs.

(These needs I took from the Human Givens essential needs, most of which are expanded on in the book Human Givens: A New Approach to Emotional Health and Clear Thinking. Whether or not you agree with the Human Givens approach for psychological counseling, I find it a useful set of tools for understanding my fictional characters.)

1. Physical needs — Air, water, food, and sleep. (The rest of the needs on this list are emotional needs.) Some people may put sex in the “physical” category as well, although sex is not merely a physical act; it has an emotional component. (See “emotional intimacy” below.)

2. Security — Including our need for shelter, cleanliness, protection, and safety, and the like. From the time we were newborns, we knew how to establish rapport with our mothers, whom nature had already primed to fulfill our need for security. As we grow, we learn to find security in the rapport we’ve built in other relationships, in our ability to control our environment, in our jobs, even in our governments.

3. Attention — We all need both to give and to receive it. We all want to feel special at least some of the time, want to be the center of attention, even those of us who are quiet and introverted. We draw attention to ourselves by the way we look or act, or even by engaging in activities that provide us opportunities for attention, such as the security officer who takes that particular job just so that he can wear the uniform. People even tend to perform better when they believe they will get noticed, a phenomenon known as the Hawthorne Effect.

4. Autonomy — Control over one’s own life and one’s own choices. Independence. The need for autonomy is why office workers desire to have their own desk where they can set their own coffee cup and a picture of their own family, their own office that they can decorate however they choose, including by posting sardonic cartoons that make fun of the corporation who employs them, their own little island of autonomy in a sea of tyranny. Rapid change or volatile circumstances can also be perceived as loss of autonomy. (“Better is the devil that you know,” as the saying goes.) Loss of autonomy can make a person feel helpless, despondent, may cause him to give up trying to improve his situation, and may generate depression, which can further deepen the feeling of helplessness.

5. Emotional intimacy — One of the oldest and most powerful story conflicts, and the subject of most romance novels, we all need emotional and physical closeness to at least one other person. This is the person who sees us as we really are, naked and undignified, and we see the same way, and love anyway. Sexual closeness is part of emotional intimacy, which is why it also is frequently the focus of romance novels. In a more general sense, strong, supportive relationships can mean the difference between success and failure. They can help someone through hardship, or even help make her more resistent to disease. Even the simple physical contact that comes, for example, by petting a beloved cat, even that can reduce stress and make someone feel more able to meet the world.

6. Feeling part of a wider community — Shared perceptions and identity with others, and connections to them. We are not just a collection of individuals all competing to win; we are also all parts of larger communities. Isolation from community can cut off our psychological resources for dealing with stress, anxiety, and grief, resulting in depression and other mental illnesses.

7. Alone time — An opportunity to reflect on our experiences and process our thoughts. A total lack of alone time can be as stressful as having no one to talk to.

8. Achievement — Competence. We need to feel there’s something in the world that we’re good at. It can be any skill, either in work or hobby or social situations or whatever.

9. Status — Validation. The sense that we are valuable in a social grouping. This is why we desire that others think well of us. We often collect symbols of our status: jewelry, an expensive car or suit, or even a simple momento. Need for status may also cause a person to take on a provider role, where others are the recipients, because this makes him more important than those others.

10. Purpose — Spiritual need, the search for meaning, the quest to understand, fulfilled through personal growth, from being stretched in what we do and think. Something inside seeks to fill this inner need by completing it in the environment. This is the reason the monk meditates, seeking enlightenment. It is why the mountaineer scales ever taller heights, and why the adrenaline junkie executes ever more dangerous stunts. It is why a musician learns new songs and masters new techniques.

And the need for purpose is also why writers write, and why we seek to write better than we did before. We put out other reasons, like “I want to get published” or “I want to make a difference.” And these may be true, but at the end of the day, I think these are just surface reasons. The real reason we write is so that we can find inner fulfillment, by creating a substance that reflects our inner selves.

Keep writing!
-TimK

Photo © 2008 Bill Roehl CC 2.0 BY NC ND

Craft Beer

I’m not a beer drinker. But when I watched a recent Reason.TV video about craft beer, I wanted to become one. I’m not interested in YellowWater Light beer. I’m interested in the niche, microbrew beers, dark, stimulating, challenging, insightful. Craft beer, say the experts in the video, has “taken traditional styles and [run] with them… providing choices for people.” They go on to point out that the big 4 breweries “make the lightest beer imaginable in order to create the lowest common denominator of flavors, so that their marketing and their image is what people buy into, and there’s nothing about the flavor that challenges that decision for them.”

In fact, my only real exposure to beer was at a microbrewery, the Watch City Brewing Company, in Waltham, MA. We all went out for a farewell lunch there, one of the few rituals I miss about office life. We enjoyed burgers and fries, and a couple pitchers of brew, which I sampled. Interesting flavors, reminded me vaguely of herbal tea. And I still remember the experience fondly.

I myself enjoy wine. But I generally stay away from whatever pop wines are discounted at the front of my favorite wine store, because they usually cater to the lowest common denominator. Rather, I prefer the aisles nearer the back. I’m not a wine snob, but you can call me a “wine snob wannabe.”

Microbrewing, like winemaking, is about manipulating the flavor of the beverage via the brewing process, achieving a variety of taste sensations. That’s what excites me about the prospect of exploring craft beers. There’s very little right or wrong, or good or bad. There’s only what you like, what you don’t, and the pleasant surprises you didn’t expect to come out of that particular bottle. And apparently a growing crowd of beer lovers agree, as the craft beer industry continues to swell.

Garage Bands

Compare this to the indie-music scene of garage band musicians, who write and perform music that they enjoy, not to cater to the masses, but with the hope that they will find just a few others who also enjoy the same music experience.

Back when I was in an indie band, if we had hopes of a money-making future, it was only by getting signed with a label. That was the dream, to get signed. Not all garage bands held that dream, because they didn’t want to compromise their music and they knew that getting signed might mean artistic compromise. Others realized that getting signed was a long-shot, that it very likely would never happen, and they, too, performed their music for the music’s sake, as a form of self-expression.

I don’t ever remember being made to feel inferior simply because of the music that we played, an eclectic flavor of Christian hard-rock that even today would be considered alternative. Yes, we did some more mainstream-sounding tunes, like a keyboard ballad that I wrote, or a fun, bluesy number by another band member. These we did next to some crazy guitar pieces, wild melodies that our vocalist loved to run with, and even a song I wrote in 7/8 time, which borrowed from jazz, rock, and celtic music styles. (We practiced that song for weeks, section by section, until we got it right.) No matter what we played, listeners and fellow musicians alike respected and even sometimes enjoyed our twisted do-re-mi’s.

It’s interesting, if not surprising, that today’s technology, which makes it easier than ever for indie bands to record and distribute their music, has done little to change the basic motivations that musicians have for playing or that fans have for listening.

Self-Published Authors

Compare this to the life of the self-published author. I can tell you a song has an “indie feel,” or that it sounds like a “garage band,” and you know what I mean without necessarily thinking badly of the song. In fact, an indie feel can be a big plus, especially if you—like me—get easily bored with the screed that fills top-40 radio. But say the same thing about a novel, that it feels “self-published,” and everyone recognizes the statement as an insult, because apparently “self-published” means “reads like shit.” Except that it doesn’t, not any more than “garage band” means “sounds like shit.”

(By the way, feel free to point out that I misused the word screed in the above paragraph. I’m keeping it in!)

No one expects a garage band to limit themselves to a music genre. “So are you metal? Are you jazz? Or are you celtic or middle-eastern or latin or what?” Musicians get excited about songs that combine disparate musical styles into a brand new unified whole, not quite like anything played before. And so do their listeners. But writers—those who “are published” and those hoping to be someday (which just about covers all of them)—they go through great lengths to “understand their genre,” by which they mean that they want to know what the genre’s readers expect so that they won’t shock them too much. Sometimes I get the impression—listening to industry insiders—that the only thing romance readers want is “Boy meets girl; boy loses girl; boy gets girl.” And as a writer it’s hard to get excited over that. (Good thing I don’t buy it.)

We don’t tell the indie musician, “No one will take you seriously unless you have a four-chord song.” (In fact, I struggle to take seriously any band who does have a four-chord song.) But everyone tells the self-published author that no one will take her seriously unless, for example, her character has “a problem,” which is revealed early in the story and only gets worse as she gets closer to solving it.

For example, Howard Mittelmark and Sandra Newman give the following advice in the first chapter of How Not to Write a Novel: 200 Classic Mistakes and How to Avoid Them:

Typically, the plot of a good novel begins by introducing a sympathetic character who wrestles with a thorny problem. As the plot thickens, the character strains every resource to solve the problem…

The plot of a typical unpublished novel introduces a protagonist, then introduces her mother, father, three brothers, and her cat, giving each a long scene in which they exhibit their typical behaviors…

A typical plot event in an unpublished novel is when the protagonist gets a disastrous haircut, at a moment when her self-esteem is hanging by threads. This sets the character up for the ensuing “Mother thinks protagonist spends too much on haircuts, but is made to see that self-esteem is crucial to mental health” scene… Cue waking up the next morning on page 120, with anything resembling a story yet to appear on the horizon.

Note the contrast between “good” and “unpublished,” as though they were opposites. (They’re not, by the way.) And feel free to substitute “self-published” for “unpublished,” because to industry insiders, they’re one in the same. Of course, I’ve never read a self-published novel that starts by introducing the protagonist and her family in a rambling fashion. More significantly, there is nothing in the “self-esteem” plot described above that would turn me off; what they describe there actually sounds like a potentially interesting story.

But cue the most telling of all, their final snub, the lack of “anything resembling a story.” What they actually mean is, the lack of any story they are used to. It’s the four-chord song again, the light beer, the pop-fruity wine, the lowest common denominator, the three-act structure and its variants.

First of all, stories need conflict to push them along and keep them interesting, not “problems.” Conflict is a perception by the reader, which the author can easily invoke by giving problems to a sympathetic character. Industry insiders tend to conflate problem and conflict, because it simplifies their life. But if you as an indie author want to play with different kinds of conflict, don’t let industry insiders tell you you’re wrong, because you’re not.

Secondly, characters have needs, which do cause problems when they go unmet… and self-esteem is indeed a fundamental human need. That bad haircut may be just the thing to push our character over the edge. Maybe it would make some readers roll their eyes, but those readers can always find refuge listening to four-chord songs and drinking light beer.

Thirdly, the main conflict of the story—much less the character’s main problem—doesn’t need to be revealed early in the story. Some wonderful stories reveal the main conflict slowly, pushing the story along with lesser conflicts, sometimes insignificant ones, until the main conflict builds momentum. I love to talk about the pilot episode of my all-time favorite TV show Gilmore Girls, which begins with a scene in which Lorelai (the main character) needs coffee, and Luke (the diner owner) won’t give her any. Yes, that’s her “problem.” She needs coffee. Not a huge problem. Hardly even worth mentioning. But it takes us through a half a scene, introduces us to the characters, and gets the story rolling.

Most astonishingly, I’ve seen readers rave over short stories that bore me to tears, because—hello!—no conflict at all. Now, either those readers are lying, or they’re stupid, or maybe they’re just expressing their opinion about a story they enjoyed reading.

Brew what you love; play what you love; write what you love

In the craft-beer video, Ron Lindenbusch talks about brewing a distinctive beer: “We started making our IPA in 1995, and it immediately became our flagship, because the first people that drank it said, ‘My God! Nobody’s gonna drink this!’” But of course, they did drink it, and lots of it.

That doesn’t surprise me in the least. Microbreweries grew out of home brewing, people experimenting and making beer that they enjoyed drinking, and sharing it with others. Craft beer is now the fastest growing segment of the beer industry. They brewed what they loved, and the fans followed.

In music as well, if you play what you love, the fans will follow.

In writing, if I write what I love, won’t I find anyone who also loves the same thing?

As craft brewers brew and indie musicians play, writers write primarily to express themselves. And I think that’s okay.

It’s okay to experiment, combining elements of disparate styles, in order to seek a unique reading experience.

We should stop pretending that all writers are only trying to “get published,” to go mainstream and hit the mass market.

We should acknowledge that there is a place in the world for literature that breaks the rules, maybe even that reads a little rough around the edges. That’s not a quality to be afraid of. It’s something to play with, to experiment with, to have fun with. Something to experience!

We should definitely acknowledge that there’s a place in the world for literature that we may not understand. Just because it challenges our minds, just because we don’t know how to analyze it, that doesn’t mean it’s no good.

We should stop encouraging unpublished writers to lock up their manuscripts where the world will never see them.

And we should never again look down on the self-published author for accomplishing her passion.

Keep writing!
-TimK

Photo © 2007 amaz CC 2.0 BY NC

Here’s a way to come up with story ideas: retell a classic story, with a twist or two. Or merely use an extant story for inspiration.

Finding inspiration in other stories is a long-held tradition in every medium, including film, television, and prose. Walt Disney is the obvious example, having made umpteen animated features out of fairy tales and historical accounts. In general, films are frequently made out of stories original published as novels or originally told as history… or originally released as earlier films.

Michelle Hickman does something similar with her Fractured Fairy Tales, which are nothing like the Fractured Fairy Tales they used to air on Rocky and Bullwinkle (because those were animated, and these are not).

I myself have been wanting to try my hand at Biblical fiction, retelling some of the old Bible stories in a modern style, filling in historical details and character motivations, giving the stories my own distinct feel. And last week, I actually did so, in miniature.

An Example: Rahab and the Spies

I wrote a short-short story about Rahab and the Israelite spies in Jericho, inspired from the traditional tale in the Bible (Joshua chapter 2). But my story is a prequel of sorts. It’s sorta sandwiched into the prologue of the original:

Then Joshua son of Nun secretly sent two spies from Shittim. “Go, look over the land,” he said, “especially Jericho.” So they went and entered the house of a prostitute named Rahab and stayed there.

I got my story idea when someone asked a common question: “Why did the spies go to a prostitute’s house?” There are a number of standard answers people give— such as that Rahab wasn’t actually a whore; she was just an innkeeper (of the kind of “inn” where guests commonly stay only a few hours in the afternoon, and sleep overnight on the roof amongst the stinky drying flax); or that God “led them there” (which I guess is as good a cop-out as any).

None of the standard answers makes for a very good story, which is typical, because standard answers usually minimize the conflict. Political correctness usually demands simplistic heroes and villains filling stereotypical roles, whereas realistic characters are motivated by human frailty and self-contradiction. The human condition is almost never so clean-cut as a politically correct hero. That’s why in the stories I like best, the prince is at least as likely to be corrupt as he is to be noble, because only in vacuous fairy tales are princes faultlessly virtuous. In reality, princes are power-hungry egocentrics, and sometimes they do good things, and sometimes they screw up. And that’s life.

So I gave a decidedly non-standard answer to the standard question, “Why did the spies go to a prostitute’s house?” The spies went to Rahab’s house, because they were doing what spies typically do: snooping for information. They probably figured that Rahab knew the inside story, directly from city officials whom she had as regular clients. After writing half my story, I realized that they also probably figured that they could hide out in Rahab’s house inconspicuously, that the townsfolk would avoid noticing a couple of vagrants staying the night with a local hooker.

But these answers only posed more questions for me, which good answers frequently do. How did the spies facilitate their introduction to Rahab? And more importantly, why did Rahab herself decide to help them? The answer given in the traditional story falls short: that she was afraid of the Israelite God. Yeah, okay, fear can be a powerful motivator. But fear is only a symptom, a feeling that comes from an unmet need. What were Rahab’s unmet needs?

Once I began to answer that question, I had my story. Rahab was probably afraid, yes, but particularly afraid for herself and her family. A little research showed that Rahab might have lived in a low-property-values area, outside of the fortified city proper, exposed to attack. If so, she was probably also poor, part of the working class rather than the ruling class. Maybe her family grew and processed flax in order to make ends meet. And maybe that’s also why she got into prostitution, to make ends meet. But these things don’t alone make her a traitor to her countrymen. As a poor prostitute, maybe the other citizens of Jericho looked down on her, someone to be used rather than someone with a life and purpose. Although she was tight with her immediate family, she had only loose ties with broader Jericho society: another unmet need.

So I told my story from Rahab’s perspective, speculating as to her motives and the details left out of the classic account. As a result, my story is not about Rahab saving the Israelite spies. Rather, it is about the connection she established with them, and the unlikely grace that eventually turned a foreign whore into a Jewish matriarch. And writing this story, I realized that I could also read the original story in that context, though no one I’ve encountered has made the case as powerfully as writing this story has for me. (But that’s a different blog post.)

How to Use a Classic Story as a Writing Prompt

To use a classic story as a writing prompt, start—of course—with a classic story. It can be a popular fairy tale, a legend from your own or another culture, an historical account, or even a favorite play or movie. (But be careful about respecting current copyrights and the legalities of fair use.)

Then add additional information or change a key assumption in the story. This will almost surely provoke an alternative interpretation of the story. Look at a specific element or plot point, and ask open-ended challenge questions, such as:

• What deep-seated, unstated reasons might the characters have for their choices?
• What secrets are the characters hiding from us in the traditional account?
• What important facts did the traditional account leave out or get wrong?
• What if one important plot point were changed? How would it affect the story?
• What happened before or after the traditional story?
• What if the traditional story universe were combined or juxtaposed with elements from another story universe?
• What’s the strangest thing that could have happened in the story? The happiest? The darkest? The funniest?

Try to come up with unusual or creative answers, and look for ideas that inspire or excite you.

When you’ve decided what story you want to write, lay out the events of your new story as though it were a fresh idea. Remember, you’re not telling the same story that has been told before; you’re telling your own story, which just happens to be inspired by a classic story. Choose a story format (e.g., flash, short story, novella, novel, etc.), narrative point-of-view, writing style, and so forth, just as if you were writing your own story from the ground up. Choose your new story form to highlight the elements and themes you see in your derived story; don’t feel beholden to the way the story was originally told, because the original story is just a writing prompt for you.

A Few to Get You Started

Here are several story prompts I came up with using this technique:

• The story of the Prodigal Son is actually a story about two brothers, each very different from the other. What kind of a relationship did those two brothers have growing up?

• In the story of the Four Iroquois Hunters, who would it be today, in the year 2010? (Four women gossiping at lunch? The winner doesn’t have to pay her share of the check?)

• Everyone—even non-Trekkies—loves the Star Trek original-series episode “The Trouble with Tribbles.” So… what actually happened after they beamed the whole kit-’n’-caboodle over onto the Klingon ship? (How many Klingons had to be hospitalized? How many needed psychiatric treatment for post-traumatic stress disorder? “My only regret is that I couldn’t have taken more of the damned little horrors with me when I died.”)

• What if Columbo got on the wrong track, and his guilty party is actually innocent?

• What if Moriarty were to leave a false trail of evidence for Holmes to follow, a subtle enough trail that Holmes believes he’s actually on the right track?

• How come the self-destructing tape in Mission: Impossible never accidentally explodes in Jim Phelps’s face? And what if the bad guys learned the magic karate chop that can instantly knock out an opponent? Or got ahold of one of those très kewl chemical spritzers that cause a grown man to pass out in two seconds flat?

You get the idea. Run with your own variations. (Or swipe one of these, if you’d like, but your own are probably better for you.)

If you use this technique and post your story online, please leave a link to your story in the comments!

Keep writing!
-TimK

Photo © 2007 Gisela Giardino CC 2.0 BY SA

Here’s a twist on narrative point-of-view that most authors seem to let slip through the cracks. We all talk about who the narrator is. But who is she talking to? Who is that narrator’s audience?

I’m not asking about the writer’s audience, which might be different than the narrator’s audience. The writer is obviously writing to the reader, and we do often talk about who the intended reader is. We also often assume that the writer’s audience and the narrator’s are one in the same, but they may be different. The narrator may be writing to someone else entirely.

Let’s take the case of a first-person narrator, because it’s easier to see the difference there. If the book is a memoir, then we assume that the writer and narrator are one in the same and that the reader is her intended audience. We also assume that the author is writing in order to lay down some part of her history, for posterity or even to relate a lesson from her experiences. And these are all reasonable assumptions, for a memoir.

But what if the book is a diary? Then the narrator, when she originally wrote it, intended it only to be read by her cat. By sneaking a peek at this book, we nose in on the privileged and private thoughts of the author. The reader is a completely different audience than the narrator intended. So a novel written as a diary, reflects the same privacy, even though the narrator is a fictional character. What she says in her private diary is different than what she might say directly to us as readers. What she reveals about her thoughts and motivations (and what she conceals) is also sure to differ. And her purpose in writing is sure to be different than if she were narrating, first-person, to us directly (as in a memoir).

Another example: EyeLeash: A Blog Novel, which I reviewed favorably. Author Jess C. Scott set it in the form of a private journal, which her fictional character Jade had written. Actually, it’s in the form of an email Jade had sent to her crush Novan (another fictional character), an email that contained the journal as an attachment. So the bulk of the novel consists of Jade’s private conversation with herself, wrapped in comments she wrote to Novan, published as a novel that author Jess intended for you. Jade’s diary contains much that she originally did not tell Novan, and that she later did let him read it says something about what happened to her afterward.

It’s easy to see that a first-person narrator might have written to a different audience than the reader. But even a third-person narrator could have. For example, when we analyze Biblical historical literature (such as the gospels of the New Testament), we consider who wrote them (the narrators) and who their intended audience was (which is a different audience than us). We do this even though the stories are told in third-person narration, because we know that the narrator (who is the author himself in this case) potentially has his own worldview and agenda.

Sometimes literary analysts make these distinctions, when they stick out. But usually authors don’t seem to have given much thought to who the narrator is writing to and what he hopes to accomplish by his writing. Even first-person fictional narrators seem to just rattle off thoughts onto the page, as if they’re chatting with us about what’s on their mind… but we have no idea what our relationship is with the character or what level of openness and honesty, or what kind of slant, we can expect from them.

-TimK

Photo © 2008 Edward Simpson CC 2.0 BY SA

Can you guess which novel the following beginning comes from?

Mr. and Mrs. Dursley, of number four, Privet Drive, were proud to say that they were perfectly normal, thank you very much. They were the last people you’d expect to be involved in anything strange or mysterious, because they just didn’t hold with such nonsense.

Mr. Dursley was the director of a firm called Grunnings, which made drills. He was a big, beefy man with hardly any neck, although he did have a very large mustache. Mrs. Dursley was thin and blonde and had nearly twice the usual amount of neck, which came in very useful as she spent so much of her time craning over garden fences, spying on the neighbors. The Dursleys had a small son called Dudley and in their opinion there was no finer boy anywhere.

Yes, it’s the first page of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, J.K. Rowling’s breakout novel.

It’s a breakout novel in more ways than one, because in the process she broke a few rules, too:

• Start with a problem: There’s no problem here. Everything’s “normal.” In fact, she drones on at length about how normal everything is.

• Avoid the verb “to be”: She relies on the verb “to be” seven times in these two paragraphs, at least once in every single sentence.

• Show, don’t tell: There is no action here, and therefore, no plot. This segment is merely a description, and not a very engaging one at that. In other words, she’s told us here about the Dursley’s, rather than showing us Harry, the main character. And speaking of which…

• Start with the main character: She doesn’t even get to Harry until page 5. The first time I read this, I thought Dudley was the protagonist.

According to the experts, these are signs that your manuscript “needs work,” and you’ll never get it accepted by a publisher. But when these same experts analyze Harry Potter, they take a different tack. They tell you to follow the rules, because you don’t yet know how to break them. Once you become good enough, they say, then you can break the rules with impunity, like J.K. Rowling.

Or in the words of Randy Ingermanson, “This is ‘Telling.’ But it’s brilliant… Since it’s brilliant, there’s just no good reason to ‘Show’ it—unless you can ‘Show’ it better.”

Er… But I thought that “showing” was always “better” than “telling.”

In reality:

1. Showing is not always better than telling. You should show those things that are core to the story—the most interesting bits—and tell (i.e., gloss over) everything else.

2. A story does always start better with showing—the interesting bits—rather than telling.

3. This Harry Potter beginning sucks. But the book as a whole was good enough for Rowling’s audience in order to garner word of mouth, so that she could build up a fan-base.

4. That marketing feat is a significant achievement, and we don’t have to heroify Rowling in order to give her credit where credit is due.

5. There are precious few hard-and-fast rules, because beauty is in the eye of the beholder. There is no “better”; there’s only “better for me.” The rules, such as they are, ought to serve you, not to bind you.

6. Rich and famous authors don’t necessarily write “better” than you do.

7. If you want to become rich and famous, the quality of your marketing is more important that the quality of your writing. Or more precisely, the quality of your writing is measured by and controlled by your marketing. And that is what agents and editors are really arguing with you over, how well they think your manuscript appeals to their market, not over how “good” your writing is.

Keep writing!
-TimK

Photo © 2005 e-magic CC BY-ND 2.0

A scenario: Your intimate love of 11 years arrives home one day and says, out of the blue, that he’s quit his job and enrolled in culinary school. Your first reaction is, naturally, “We need to make an appointment to talk to your doctor, Dear. I think your medication is producing some unexpected side-effects.”

No, seriously, your first reaction is to stare nonplussed for a moment, then to say, “Why?! Why would you have done something like this without talking to me about it first?”

Another scenario: In order to help fit in with your new coworkers, at your new job, you meet one of them for a drink after work. She orders a whiskey sour, and before taking the first sip, she snaps her fingers and caws like a crow. The natural question that of course comes to mind is: Why?

“Well,” she explains, “that’s just a little ritual I have to memorialize my father.”

“I’m sorry,” you say. “When did he die?”

“Oh, he’s not dead! He’s just passed on.”

Now, a whole stream of questions assault your consciousness: What do you mean he’s “passed on”? Why do you memorialize him? Why is this particular ritual so important? Why did it make such an impact on you? Why didn’t you adopt a less distressing ritual?

The same sorts of questions occur to a reader, when she reads your story.

The Five Whys

The 5 Whys was originally developed as a way to find the root cause of some defect or problem. Wikipedia gives an example:

My car will not start. (the problem)

Why? The battery is dead. (first why)

Why? The alternator is not functioning. (second why)

Why? The alternator belt has broken. (third why)

Why? The alternator belt was well beyond its useful service life and has never been replaced. (fourth why)

Why? I have not been maintaining my car according to the recommended service schedule. (fifth why, a root cause)

I will start maintaining my car according to the recommended service schedule. (solution)

As it turns out, however, the 5 Whys are a poor method to use in finding the root cause of a problem, because they really just reiterate what an expert would intuit. If you took the above car to a mechanic, he would tell you the exact same solution without ever asking the above questions. On the other hand, if you don’t have any mechanical expertise, you would be unable to answer most of them. (Alternator belt? What’s that?) So the 5 Whys doesn’t help you beyond your existing area of expertise, and studies reaffirm that result. There are other, much better methods that analysts use to determine root causes, which don’t necessarily require expertise in the problem area.

Asking “Why?” for Characterization

So the 5 Whys are not useful for root-cause analysis, their original purpose. But as it turns out they can be quite useful to help you—the storytelling expert—flesh out your fictional characters. Or at the least the concept of the 5 Whys can help, that you should ask “Why?” until you get a complete answer.

Whenever your character takes any action, makes any statement, or ignores any obvious way out of a jam, ask yourself “Why did she do that?” Whatever answer you get, ask yourself, “Why?” Repeat like a little kid does, until you’ve gotten to the bottom of her character.

So…

Why does she drink whiskey sours and snap her fingers and caw like a crow?

Because her father drank whiskey sours, and he snapped his fingers to get her attention or to scold her, and they lived on a farm where crows were always nearby.

Why does she memorialize her father if he’s not dead?

Because when he threw her out, she promised herself that he was dead to her.

Then why does she not want to forget him?

Because that would make her feel even worse. So she’s adopted this ritual to ease her conscience.

But why does the ritual ease her conscience

Because she has missed the trappings of her childhood home—even though they weren’t all milk and honey—and this makes her feel empty.

Why does she feel empty without the trappings of her childhood home?

… and so forth.

(Actually, say some psychologists, you should ask “Why?” until the answer is, “Because it makes her feel better about herself.” That’s the ultimate root cause of every choice we make.)

Note that the character herself doesn’t necessarily need to understand or be able to put into words the answer to “Why?” But you the author should be able to.

Two Ways to Satisfy the Reader

Whenever your character does something unexpected, the reader will begin searching instinctively for a reason why. You have two options:

1. Tell the reader why: the narrator explains it to the reader, or the character explains it to another character, or to herself in an internal monologue.
2. Let the reader figure it out: all the reasons are readily visible in the forefront, making it obvious to the reader, even if the character is denying it to herself.

This is particularly important whenever a character does something out of character for her, because out-of-character behaviors indicate that something has changed with the character. So when the heroine begins behaving strangely toward the hero, we wonder whether she’s developing feelings for him. Or when she suddenly agrees to a date from that guy she would never be seen dead with, we know she’s reconsidering her dating strategy, for some reason or another.

Always Include the “Why?”

When you’re first introducing your character, you can make her with almost any personality that fits her. The character starts out as an unknown, a blank slate, and everything she does causes me to ask “Why?” Even if I can’t put the answers into words, they sketch out in my mind an image of her personality. I begin to feel like I know her, like I can predict how she will react. Events and circumstances push her—quite understandably—further and further into distress. It’s not the events and circumstances so much as her reaction to them that matters.

She finally reaches a turning point, where she is able to take a different path, to try something that formerly made no sense for her because it was so out of character. And I ask, “Why did she do that?” Hopefully the answer is obvious, because the story’s been building up to that point, building the foundation for that character change.

I’ve read a number of stories that short-circuit the “Why?” of their characters. In an early story of mine, I remember doing so as well. I don’t remember which story it was, but I do remember being critiqued on it. My critique partner told me that she didn’t understand why the character did a certain thing at a certain point. I blew a fuse: I can make my characters anything I like, and it’s up to her to accept them the way they are. (You may argue with that, and many readers do, but I maintain that it’s up to the reader to understand the characters, not the other way around.) But my critique partner persisted, explained that I had shown the character with one personality one moment, a different personality the next, inconsistent. I eventually realized that inconsistencies need to be explained, either implicitly by the context of the story or expressly through words and actions.

If you leave out the “Why?” you’ll end up with flat, unconvincing characters, who seem to be doing whatever the writer wants, just so that the story will work out a certain way. On the other hand, exploring the “Why?” will make it much easier to write stories that are about something bigger than the story itself, because they’ll be about the human condition. So always remember to include the “Why?”

-TimK

Photo © 2009 Nathan Rupert CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

Some years ago, when I was a fledgling storyteller still puzzling through the basics of what makes a story work (or not), I frequented a certain writer’s forum, now defunct. One of the writers there made it very clear that when we critiqued his work, we should be positively nasty about it. He didn’t want to hear anything soft and fluffy about how well he wrote, because otherwise how could he grow as a writer? Rather, he wanted to hear about all the stuff he did wrong. That’s what we call “having a thick skin.”

This is a common enough view in critique groups, although I don’t share it. I think that positive criticism can be even more useful than negative, as long as it’s constructive. That is, if you tell the writer what she did that particularly worked (rather than what didn’t work), you’ll be supporting her in her strengths. That’s even more important than helping her overcome her weaknesses, because we all have areas in which we’re weak. But a writer makes her name on her strengths, not her weaknesses, because her fans read her work in order to experience those strengths.

That’s a writer’s critique group. But you really don’t know how criticism feels until you get your first unfair review— that reviewer who doesn’t just dislike your story, but dislikes you personally. He doesn’t just disagree with what you’ve written, but rather thinks you yourself are a charlatan. And he may not have even read your book. Every author has gotten such a review at least once, and as soon as you do, you can say you’ve arrived. That’s when a thick skin really comes in handy.

Despite the thick skin, it gets easier to be criticized as much as it gets easier to be turned down for a date. In other words, it doesn’t get easier. You just get used to it— maybe.

Or more likely, you don’t.

Reviews and Critiques

There’s a fundamental difference between reviews and critiques. Reviews are not written to be constructive. They aren’t designed to point out how you can improve or to help you become a better writer. Remember, a reviewer is a writer himself, and he writes to please his own audience, to pander to their tastes and prejudices. If he can do so without even having read your book, he will. A review says more about the reviewer than it does about your work.

Maybe that’s why many authors refuse to read reviews of their own books.

So much for thick skin.

When you’re first learning how to tell a story, critiques can be invaluable, because they allow you to see your own work from another’s perspective. This allows you to grow as a writer, because it gets past the blindness we all encounter when reading our own work, especially as beginning writers.

As you begin to develop your writing skills and style, you discover that critiques are just as subjective as reviews are, because the analysts who provide them can only speak from their own personal reactions to your work. And analysts—whether they are professional editors or agents or just plain old critique partners—also have their own audiences, just as reviewers do, and they operate within the prejudices of their audiences.

So you learn to filter everything the analysts say through your own judgement, to ask whether their advice will actually help you write the story you want to write, rather than the story they would have you write, because you know that they might be wrong about your story. This strategy works for a while, because in critique you’re still picking up tips that help you develop your craft.

But eventually, you discover that half the criticisms you’re receiving tell you nothing you didn’t already know—that is, the positive criticisms that point out what you did “right.” And the other half of the criticisms you disagree with. And you don’t just disagree with them; you know exactly why you disagree with them and what’s wrong with the analysis. Shortly thereafter, you give up on critiques altogether.

So much for thick skin.

Rejection

Rejection stings less if you say “I want to be a better writer” a little louder than “I want to be published.” -Stephen Parolini

Maybe that’s why so many of us say it.

In reality, it’s an amazingly short journey to competence. You acquaint yourself with basic story elements, basic story structures, basic concepts, basic stupid clichés (so you can avoid them). And you read, read, read. And beyond that, “better” is simply what you make it to be, what you yourself want it to be. Accepting criticism doesn’t actually make you a better writer; it only makes you more like the critic. True growth as a writer comes from within, not without.

There are a number of reasons an editor or agent may reject your manuscript. But rejection (like a review) says more about the person doing it than the person it’s done to. At best, it says the editor doesn’t think your work may be right for his audience. But it doesn’t indicate that there’s anything “wrong” with the work itself.

At the May 2 #writechat, on Twitter (earlier this month), we discussed rejection, and how to maintain a good attitude when you’ve been rejected. Here are some of the comments writers made:

Despite the variety of approaches, what interests me most for this article is that writers feel a distinct need to deal with the depression that rejection otherwise produces. To focus on the good comments you get, to redefine your purpose as a writer so that rejection isn’t relevant to it, to look to the future, to throw energy into your next project, to allow yourself only a certain amount of time to feel depressed, all of these are techniques psychologists recommend for dealing with depression, because they help combat painful or worrying feelings and keep them from taking over your life. Even the idea that rejection will somehow make you a “better” writer, that’s designed to make you feel good about being rejected.

So much for thick skin.

-TimK

Photo © 2006 Demetri Mouratis CC BY-NC 2.0

There’s one more post I wanted to do in this series on narrative mode, to write and rewrite a short snippet in a number of different narrative modes, just to show how each would turn out.

This is not an exhaustive list, because when you combine all the different possible narrative persons with all the possible narrative tenses with all the possible narrative voices, you can easily end up with dozens (if not hundreds) of possibilities. Even just this short list of samples gets pretty long, so feel free just to skim it.

Here’s the scene: Rosie (played by Jen in the photo), after drinking a little, makes a derogatory comment to Tom (played by Alex, on the left) about short, stocky guys asking her out, not knowing that Tom has always had a huge crush on her. Meanwhile, her brother Nat (played by John, in the background) is preparing a salad nearby and overhears the conversation, eventually intervening and trying to convince Tom to find someone else.

Third-person Omniscient, Past Tense

“Way too Danny DeVito. I don’t believe he asked me out!” Rosie was running on a fine buzz. She took another swig of her drink.

Tom stood quietly by, saying nothing, trying not to think of how deeply Rosie’s words affected him. He glanced at Nat’s back, listened to the regular slice-chop, slice-chop of Nat’s knife as it passed through a lettuce bunch and hit the cutting board.

“I guess there’s something about me that draws guys like that,” Rosie continued. “What I wouldn’t do for an old-fashioned tall, dark, and handsome.” She chuckled just as Tom gazed directly across to her eyes, his face blank, and a sudden self-consciousness gripped her. She drank again, avoiding Tom’s probing stare. “A lot of girls like those big and strong types, I guess,” she said, backpedaling, “but my tastes always ran elsewhere. There’s nothing wrong with that, you know.”

Nat had been listening to the entire conversation, and he knew what must have been going through Tom’s mind. How he had gotten in the middle of this, he didn’t know. All he knew is that his best friend had a thing for his sister, and it wasn’t going to go anywhere but down. He dumped a handful of chopped lettuce into the salad bowl, knowing he needed some excuse that would get Rosie out of the kitchen and end this tragic scene. He turned to his sister. “Rosie, did you see Amy? I think she wanted to talk to you.”

“Amy’s here?!” She had been waiting for her cousin to arrive from Bakersfield, and she could hardly believe that she missed the grand entrance.

“Just a few minutes ago. She might be upstairs.”

“I’ll go find her,” Rosie said, as she excused herself.

“Look,” Nat said to his friend, “I get it. I’ve been there, too. It takes over your mind, and you can’t help it. But all she does is make you feel like shit, and I wouldn’t be much of a friend if I didn’t tell you the truth.”

Tom nodded, knowing what Nat was going to say.

“You have to drop it and just find someone else. She’s just— Well, she’s always been opinionated and flighty. You’re a good-looking guy, and I know loads of girls who would love to, get to know you better, if you know what I mean.”

This is just a quick-and-dirty snippet of a scene. Before it would be a short connection to the previous scene in the timeline. After might follow Tom’s reaction to Nat’s advice and its implications. I’m also sure I could make it better, especially if I fleshed out its setting and its context in the broader storyline, but it will serve our purposes here as-is.

Third-person Objective, Present Tense

“Way too Danny DeVito. I don’t believe he asked me out!” Rosie says a little too loosely. She takes another swig of her drink.

Tom is standing quietly by. His eyes wonder to Nat’s back, as Nat’s knife passes through a lettuce bunch and hits the cutting board, sounding out a regular slice-chop, slice-chop.

“I guess there’s something about me that draws guys like that,” Rosie continues. “What I wouldn’t do for an old-fashioned tall, dark, and handsome.” She chuckles just as Tom gazes directly across to her eyes, his face blank. Rosie’s expression turns suddenly sober. She drinks again, diverting her eyes from Tom’s probing stare. “A lot of girls like those big and strong types, I guess,” she says, “but my tastes always ran elsewhere. There’s nothing wrong with that, you know.”

Dumping a handful of chopped lettuce into a salad bowl, Nat turns to his sister. “Rosie, did you see Amy? I think she wanted to talk to you.”

“Amy’s here?!” Her eyes widen.

“Just a few minutes ago. She might be upstairs.”

“I’ll go find her,” Rosie says, and exits the kitchen.

“Look,” Nat says to his friend, “I get it. I’ve been there, too. It takes over your mind, and you can’t help it. But all she does is make you feel like shit, and I wouldn’t be much of a friend if I didn’t tell you the truth.”

Tom is nodding silently.

“You have to drop it and just find someone else. She’s just— Well, she’s always been opinionated and flighty. You’re a good-looking guy, and I know loads of girls who would love to, get to know you better, if you know what I mean.”

As you can see, big pieces of internal context are missing from this rendition of the scene, because the narrator cannot see into the minds of the characters. We don’t know how Tom feels about Rosie, although we get an inkling of it from his actions. We also don’t really see that Nat is caught in the middle. These points (if they are important to the story) would need to be established elsewhere in the story.

You can also see the difference between past tense and present tense. Present tense feels closer to the action, because the scene is being described as it happened.

First-person, Past Tense, Rosie’s POV

“Way too Danny DeVito. I don’t believe he asked me out!” I was feeling fine, reeling from a fine buzz, and I took another swig. What had he called this drink? Something red and fruity, but boy did it pack a wallop.

I hardly heard Nat slicing lettuce just a few feet from me. Nor did I pay any attention to Tom’s reaction. He was my brother’s best friend. We were all friends. We always had conversations like this. What did I know?

“I guess there’s something about me that draws guys like that,” I went on. “What I wouldn’t do for an old-fashioned tall, dark, and handsome.” I chuckled.

Without a word, Tom stared directly at me, his face blank. I suddenly realized that I was describing him, short and stocky—at least shorter than me, as if that meant anything, like shorter than Godzilla. And he wasn’t really big, more like athletic. Why didn’t I think of that word. Athletic, sounds so much better than “fat.”

I put my glass to my lips, looked somewhere else where Tom couldn’t see what I was thinking. I had to recover the situation, let him know that I wasn’t talking about him.

“A lot of girls like those big and strong types, I guess,” I said, “but my tastes always ran elsewhere. There’s nothing wrong with that, you know.”

Nat turned from the counter. “Rosie, did you see Amy? I think she wanted to talk to you.”

“Amy’s here?!” This was news to me! I had been psyched for her arrival, and where exactly was I when I missed her grand entrance? Huh, Johnny? Tell me that.

“Just a few minutes ago,” Nat said. “She might be upstairs.”

“I’ll go find her,” I said, and I almost ran from the room. But not so fast that I couldn’t overhear Nat.

“I get it. I’ve been there, too,” he said. What was going on?

First-person gives more of an opportunity to inject the personality of the narrator character into the narrative, especially if it is written in a conversational style (rather than in the more formal style of a memoir or autobiography). I don’t know that I did so very well here, because Rosie is not a fully-formed character in my mind; I just improvised her. But I tried to give an idea of how it might work. (If you want a better example, check out the first chapter of Twenties Girl, by Sophie Kinsella, which you can preview on Amazon.)

At the same time, first-person means that the narrator only knows what Rosie knows. She can’t see into Tom’s thoughts, or into Nat’s. But I can write the story to hint at the things that Rosie denies noticing, while making it clear to the reader that she is fooling herself. (Again, see Twenties Girl for a good example.)

I also wrote this example in past tense, and that gave Rosie opportunity to allude to things that she would find out in the future, that is, after the events of the scene. “What did I know?” That implies that she was missing something important to the story, which she later understood.

First-person, Present Tense, Nat’s POV

“Way too Danny DeVito. I don’t believe he asked me out!” Rosie is running on a fine buzz. Even though I cannot see her, I can tell by the cadence of her voice. She’s speaking too… loose.

Tom stands quietly behind me, but I know Rosie’s words are affecting him. How I got in the middle of this, I don’t know. But I do know my best friend has a thing for my sister, and it isn’t going to end up anywhere but in hell. I take another slice at the lettuce, holding the knife firmly, like an extension of my right hand. Slice-chop, slice-chop, smoothly and regularly, as it passes through the green leaves and hits the cutting board.

“I guess there’s something about me that draws guys like that,” Rosie says. “What I wouldn’t do for an old-fashioned tall, dark, and handsome.” She chuckles.

Slice-chop, slice-chop.

“A lot of girls like those big and strong types, I guess.” Something is different about her voice. I feel uneasy. “But my tastes always ran elsewhere. There’s nothing wrong with that, you know.”

I don’t know if there’s any way to keep this situation from eventually blowing up in my face, but for now, if I can just put it off for a little while, it’ll make my life a little easier. I think of our cousin Amy, who I know Rosie has been anxious to see. Dumping a handful of chopped lettuce into the salad bowl, I turn to my sister. “Rosie, did you see Amy? I think she wanted to talk to you.”

“Amy’s here?!” Rosie’s eyes widen.

“Just a few minutes ago,” I say. “She might be upstairs.”

“I’ll go find her.” Rosie leaves, and I breathe a little easier.

“Look,” I say to Tom, “I get it. I’ve been there, too. It takes over your mind, and you can’t help it. But all she does is make you feel like shit, and I wouldn’t be much of a friend if I didn’t tell you the truth.”

Tom nods, but I don’t know whether he’s really listening.

Still, I continue. “You have to drop it and just find someone else. She’s just— Well, she’s always been opinionated and flighty. You’re a good-looking guy, and I know loads of girls who would love to, get to know you better, if you know what I mean.”

This is similar to third-person objective, but we know everything Nat knows, as he chooses to reveal it to us, and perhaps feel closer to him as a result. It’s a Holmes-Watson style of narration, where the narrator is a story character, but not the main character.

We also know nothing that Nat doesn’t know, especially the visible interaction between Rosie and Tom, which the third-person narrator would see, but which Nat cannot see, because he’s occupied elsewhere.

Second-person, Present Tense, MC Rosie

“Way too Danny DeVito,” you remark with a dismissive inflection in your voice. “I don’t believe he asked me out!”

You are running on a fine buzz. You take another swig of your drink, something red and fruity that you don’t remember the name of, but it packs a wallop.

You hardly hear Nat slicing lettuce just a few feet away. Nor do you pay any attention to Tom’s reaction.

“I guess there’s something about me that draws guys like that,” you continue. “What I wouldn’t do for an old-fashioned tall, dark, and handsome.” You chuckle.

Without a word, Tom stares directly at you, his face blank. You suddenly realize that you are describing him, short and stocky, at least no match for your own prodigious height. He’s athletic, like a tiny wrestler who could take out anyone who dares threaten him. And here you’ve just compared him to a diminutive, bald-and-overweight actor.

You put your glass to your lips, looking away from Tom’s penetrating gaze.

“A lot of girls like those big and strong types, I guess,” you say, backpedaling, “but my tastes always ran elsewhere. There’s nothing wrong with that, you know.” Matter-of-factly.

Nat turns from the counter. “Rosie, did you see Amy? I think she wanted to talk to you.”

“Amy’s here?!” you ejaculate. You have been looking forward to her arrival, and you wonder how you could have missed her grand entrance.

“Just a few minutes ago,” Nat says. “She might be upstairs.”

“I’ll go find her.” And you hurriedly excuse yourself.

But as you leave, you overhear Nat talking to Tom. “I get it,” he says. “I’ve been there, too…” And you wonder what he means.

As you can see, second-person allows you to step into Rosie’s shoes, but much of Rosie’s distinct personality can get lost in the process, because it is subsumed by how you the reader perceive yourself. I have to give you a compelling reason to step into the crap pile you find yourself in. It not only has to be something that Rosie might have done; it also has to be something you could see yourself doing in the same situation. This can increase sympathy between the character and reader, but it also limits how the writer can express the main character. The reader not only knows how the character perceives the world; the read also sees the world in the same way.

First-second-person, Past Tense, Nat’s POV, MC Rosie

One more example, an alternative narrative mode that I’ve never actually seen used, but I’ve always wanted to try, just for kicks.

“Way too Danny DeVito. I don’t believe he asked me out!” You were running on a fine buzz. Even though I could not see you, I could tell by the cadence of your voice. You were speaking too… loose.

Tom stood quietly behind me, but I knew your words were affecting him. How I got in the middle of this, I didn’t know. But I did know my best friend had a thing for my sister, and it wasn’t going to end up anywhere but in hell. I took another slice at the lettuce, holding the knife firmly, like an extension of my right hand. Slice-chop, slice-chop, smoothly and regularly, as it passed through the green leaves and hit the cutting board.

“I guess there’s something about me that draws guys like that,” you said. “What I wouldn’t do for an old-fashioned tall, dark, and handsome.” You chuckled.

Slice-chop, slice-chop.

Then something changed in your voice.

“A lot of girls like those big and strong types, I guess. But my tastes always ran elsewhere. There’s nothing wrong with that, you know.”

I didn’t know if there was any way to keep the situation from eventually blowing up in my face, but for now, if I could just put it off for a little while, that would make my life a little easier. I remembered our cousin Amy, who I knew you had been anxious to see. Dumping a handful of chopped lettuce into the salad bowl, I turned to you. “Rosie, did you see Amy? I think she wanted to talk to you.”

“Amy’s here?!” Your eyes widened.

“Just a few minutes ago,” I said. “She might be upstairs.”

“I’ll go find her.” You left, and I breathed a little easier.

“Look,” I said to Tom, “I get it. I’ve been there, too. It takes over your mind, and you can’t help it. But all she does is make you feel like shit, and I wouldn’t be much of a friend if I didn’t tell you the truth.”

Tom nodded, but I didn’t know whether he was really listening.

Still, I continued. “You have to drop it and just find someone else. She’s just— Well, she’s always been opinionated and flighty. You’re a good-looking guy, and I know loads of girls who would love to, get to know you better, if you know what I mean.”

This is most similar to First-person, Nat’s POV, but it’s written as a letter to Rosie, putting the reader in her place. The reader knows everything Nat knows, as he chooses to reveal it to Rosie, but the reader doesn’t necessarily know everything Rosie knows. In this scene, the narrator cannot reveal the silent interaction between Tom and Rosie that Nat didn’t see. So this extra knowledge (whatever Rosie knows that Nat doesn’t know or chooses not to reveal), if it’s important to the story, you have to let the reader in on it some other way.

One way to accomplish this, in this story, might be to write it as a series of letters between Nat and his sister Rosie. Of course, it would probably then be written in a different style, one that feels more like personal correspondence. I don’t know whether any novel has been written in this form before—probably yes, and probably a famous novel that I just am not remembering right now. Even if not, it might be fun to try, at least as an indie novel.

Keep writing!
-TimK

Photo © 2007 Annemiek van der Kuil CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

This is the third part in my series on narrative mode. I wrote about narrative voice briefly some months ago, in the context of narrative mode.

To review, narrative mode has three components:

1. Person – First (“I”), second (“you”), or third (“he”).
2. Tense – Past, present, or future.
3. Voice – Objective, Limited, or Omniscient

(I’ll cite some examples of narrative mode in a later post.)

Narrative voice is not grammatical voice (i.e., active voice or passive voice), but a completely different animal. Narrative “voice” indicates what the narrator knows about the action in the story. Does the the narrator know only what he can observe (“objective voice”)? Or can he see into the thoughts of one (“limited voice”) or all (“omniscient voice”) of the characters?

Authors and literary analysts typically link narrative voice with narrative person. (See my previous post on person in narrative mode for more on first-person, third-person, and so forth.) But conceptually, at least from a writer’s perspective, voice is an independent concept, not really linked to person at all.

Limited to What?

Most modern novels are written in what I call “limited voice.” They’re either written in “first-person,” in a stream-of-consciousness style with personal thoughts thrown in. Or in “third-person limited,” where a disembodied, third-person narrator can see into the thoughts of one or more people. Some call this “third-person subjective,” and that’s okay, too. Then when the third-person narrator can see into only one of the characters thoughts, they call it “third-person limited” or “third-person intimate.”

All of the nomenclature aside, what it really boils down to, from a writer’s perspective, is one question: How much does the narrator know?

At the one extreme, we have the “objective” viewpoint, where the narrator only describes what he can see and sense, like the lens of a camera. In particular, he does not know what’s going on inside any of the characters minds, unless they make their thoughts and feelings known to him. Of course, the term objective is a bit of a misnomer. The narrator is not objective at all, because his narrative is filtered through his agenda. Yes, the narrator only describes what he actually witnesses, refusing to interject his own thoughts or interpretations, but he still filters the facts through the lens of his own perceptions, as we all do. This is something to keep in mind when you’re writing in objective voice, that your job as an author is not simply to relay the facts, as though you were filling out a report. Rather, your job is to relate the facts as they apply to the story you want to tell.

At the other extreme, we have the “omniscient” viewpoint, in which the narrator knows all. Third-person omniscient was very popular up until the 20′th century. Some analysts distinguish between “third-person omniscient,” where the narrator knows the thoughts of all the characters, and “universal omniscient,” where the narrator knows even things that the characters don’t know.

In between, many modern novels are written from a first-person or third-person narrator’s view, with the thoughts and feelings of one or two main characters revealed in the narration. Chick-lit, for example, is sometimes written in a conversational, first-person style, where the narrator puts her own spin on the story as she relates it to the reader. Similarly, romance is often written in third-person limited, where the narrator sees into the heroine’s or the hero’s mind, or both. In some of these novels, only one character is the center of each scene, and only her thoughts are included in the narrative, with some scenes centering around the heroine and others around the hero. In other romances, the narrator switches back and forth between seeing into the hero’s and heroine’s mind, as the conversation pingpongs back and forth between the two during a scene.

(I’m convinced that a great number of these novels are written in third-person limited so that the reader can feel a greater sympathy with the character, as with first-person narration, while still allowing the author to switch between the characters without changing narrators.)

Holly Lisle’s I See You, for example, which I recently read, focuses on either Dia or Brig in most scenes, relating the story third-person limited from her perspective. But certain key scenes Holly tells from the perspective of the villain, who is after Dia— one sick and scary dude. That’s part of the “suspense” in this paranormal romantic suspense novel.

Shedding the Labels

From my writer’s perspective, I find it much simpler if I shed the labels, all the distinctives literary analysts attach to various flavors of “third-person” point of view.

I simply ask the one overriding question: what does the narrator know? And then I stick with it. And as long as the story works, we can figure out later what to call it. (Consistency trumps convention.)

Does the narrator know the thoughts of any of the characters? If so, which characters? Does he know things that none of the characters know? Can he tell the future? If so, in what circumstances and manners will he divulge his knowledge?

Note that none of these questions necessarily are linked to third-person narration. In a paranormal story, theoretically, you could have a first-person narrator who is psychic, who writes about the thoughts and feelings of the other characters. I don’t know how well that would actually work, and I don’t have a specific story in mind, but there’s no fundamental reason to rule it out. After all, it’s your story; you should tell it as you think best.

One of the story ideas in my idea journal is a science-fiction tale involving a God-like character— literally, a character who created and manages the universe in which the other characters live. If I ever write this story, I’m sure his scenes will be written in first-person omniscient.

First-person objective could potentially be useful to tell a story from the perspective of a person with certain psychological or neurological disorders. Again, I don’t have a particular story in mind.

My point, as always, is that choosing a narrative mode is a creative choice. Any story you can tell in one narrative mode you can probably also tell in another. But one or the other might feel more awkward to you, depending on the requirements of your story. Don’t be afraid to break the mold if you think your story demands it.

Keep writing!
-TimK

Photo © 2007 Frederik Hilmer CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

Picking the right person… No, this is not about dating. This is about narrative person, which I wrote about briefly in the context of narrative mode. I mentioned a few narrative modes and how they were used by their authors.

To review, narrative mode has three components:

1. Person – First (“I”), second (“you”), or third (“he”).
2. Tense – Past, present, or future.
3. Voice – Objective, Limited, or Omniscient

(I’ll cite some examples of narrative mode in a later post.)

In an earlier post, I talked about narrative tense, #2 on the above list. As a writer, you can use any person with any tense. But as with tense, person is always set relative to the narrator’s frame of reference.

First Person, Second Person, Third Person

Take a memoir, for example. A memoir is always written in first-person, because the narrator is herself a character in the story. She looks back at the action, as it happened to her, and describes it. She can tell you what she experienced, what she saw, what she heard, what she thought, inasmuch as she can remember it. And she can hide information from you, things that embarrass her, or she can put a different spin or interpretation on the events she describes.

All of these things are true of first-person fiction as well. A first-person narrator, speaking directly to the reader, can also use colloquialisms that would feel awkward in second- or third-person. And what a first-person narrator reveals and conceals, or the spin she puts on things, they can help the reader get to know her better— Or she can confuse the reader, if she tries to deceive the reader.

Some authors have used an unreliable narrator to write a story that’s open to multiple interpretations, because the reader doesn’t know whether she’s telling the truth. But more often, the reader is supposed to know what’s true or not, because it’s obvious, and is supposed to see through the narrator’s spin, and thereby see something about the narrator’s personality that maybe the narrator herself doesn’t even see. This personal closeness is probably one of the reasons the first-person narrator is so popular in chick-lit.

The first-person narrator is a character in the story, usually the main character.

Similarly, in second-person, the reader herself is a character in the story, usually the main character.

You eye the fast-talking stranger suspiciously, wondering whether there’s some catch, something you’re not getting about the situation. You glance again at the envelope in his hand, the envelope full of bills. Hesitantly, you reach into your wallet for a crisp, new twenty.

And meanwhile, the sharp reader will be screaming, “No! How could I be such an idiot!?”

In this snippet, the narrator himself is not a character in the story. He’s a disembodied voice, describing the action of the story from the reader’s perspective. He sees what the reader sees, and even controls the reader’s thoughts and feelings. This can help the reader identify more fully with with the story character (because she is the story character).

The third-person narrator is also a disembodied voice, who also has no role in the story. This is the most common form of narrator. Sometimes, he can see into the thoughts of one or more of the characters, and sometimes, he only reports what he sees, as an objective observer. (I’ll get into that in more detail, in another post, when I talk about narrative voice.)

It’s All about Point of View

Like narrative tense, writing in a given narrative person is about picking a narrator and sticking with it.

So when Dr. Watson describes Sherlock Holmes’s exploits…

I was returning from a journey to a patient (for I had now returned to civil practice), when my way led me through Baker Street. As I passed the well-remembered door, which must always be associated in my mind with my wooing, and with the dark incidents of the Study in Scarlet, I was seized with a keen desire to see Holmes again, and to know how he was employing his extraordinary powers…

A slow and heavy step, which had been heard upon the stairs and in the passage, paused immediately outside the door. Then there was a loud and authoritative tap.

“Come in!” said Holmes.

A man entered who could hardly have been less than six feet six inches in height, with the chest and limbs of a Hercules…

Is he writing as a first-person narrator or a third-person narrator? In some sense, both.. And neither. Because Watson is involved in the story as Holmes’s friend, but Holmes is the hero of the story. When Watson talks about his relationship with Holmes, he uses the pronoun I. When he talks about Holmes’s crime-solving, he uses the pronoun he. And that’s what you would expect, so as a reader, it doesn’t confuse you at all.

So as a writer, you’re not actually choosing between “I” or “you” or “he.” To choose a narrative person, you must answer two questions:

1. Is the narrator a story character or an impersonal fly on the wall?
2. Who is the main character of the story? (The narrator? The reader? Or some other story character?)

Whatever choices you make, the reader will intuitively grasp these facts and follow the story from that perspective.

If the narrator is a story character, the reader can sympathize with him. Otherwise, the reader can’t. Also, a narrator who is a story character has his own interests, his own agenda, his own perspective, which can interfere with or support his telling of the story.

A main character who is the narrator can obviously give a unique view on the action of the story, because he becomes a first-person narrator. On the other hand, if you make the reader the main character, you’ll end up writing in second-person, which presents you with a different set of tradeoffs.

All told, you actually have 5 options:

1. First person: the main character narrates the story. “I was hungry, so I cooked myself dinner.”
2. Second person: a fly on the wall narrates a story in which the reader is the main character. “You were hungry, so you cooked yourself dinner.”
3. Third person: a fly on the wall narrates a story in which a story character is the main character. “He was hungry, so he cooked himself dinner.”
4. First-second person: a story character narrates a story in which the reader is the main character. “We were hungry, so you cooked us dinner.”
5. First-third person: a story character narrates a story in which another story character is the main character. “We were hungry, so he cooked us dinner.”

(If you’re a mathematician, you’ll see that there is a sixth theoretical option: that the narrator is a fly on the wall and that the narrator is the main character. But this option doesn’t make any sense, because the fly on the wall cannot, by definition, be a story character; therefore, he cannot be the main character. And if that last sentence confused you, don’t worry: it confused me, too, but I’m pretty sure it’s correct.)

And as with narrative tense, choosing one of the available options really depends on what you’re comfortable with. Like any writing decision, it’s a creative choice. Any story you can tell in first-person narrative you can also tell in third-person. But one or the other might feel more awkward to you, depending on the requirements of your story. At least now you can hopefully qualify those requirements a little more easily.

Keep writing!
-TimK