Category: Campbell

December 20, 2021

Going With It

Holy crap how is this year almost over? Why is time moving so fast? What did all of you do? Who touched the red button?!?!

So, not to keep mining the past, but I wanted to talk about one more thing that came up at the SDCC Writers Coffeehouse. During the Q & A someone asked what I generally think of as an “impossible” question—although just looking at that written out I really should find a better term. See, it’s not so much that these questions are impossible to answer, it’s that there’s really only one person who can give a definitive answer. And it’s usually the person asking the question.

Y’see, there are questions that are very specific to my story, and the “correct” answer for me probably isn’t going to be the same correct answer for you. Things like, how many characters should I have in an ensemble? What’s the correct point of view to use? How much sex is too much? How much detail do I really need? See what I mean? There’s no real way to answer that unless I know the whole story, how it’s written, the context things are happening in…

Somebody at the Coffeehouse asked (paraphrasing from memory here) “how many made up words can you have in your first couple pages before an editor stops reading?” And my immediate answer was, well, I couldn’t really answer that. Again, the right answer for me won’t be the right answer for you, and said answer’s going to change from book to book.

But about a week later it struck me there is a way that we, as writers, can at least get a sense of if something’s disruptive or not. And that’s by being aware of the flow of our work. So let’s talk about that a little bit.

I think we’re all aware of flow on one level or another. I first heard the term from a writing coach named Drusilla Campbell, but I knew what she was talking about as she explained it. Paraphrasing a bit more, she described it as why some books you can’t put down and other books make you think about how the laundry needs folding.

I’d say flow is equal parts pacing, tone, and empathy. It’s about me understanding what’s going to jar my reader, either by nature of structure or material or vocabulary. What’s going to make them pause to remember these are just words on a page and not actual events. It’s about me stepping out of the way and not trying to be seen as the author. Letting people read my story rather than analyzing it. Really simply put, flow is what keeps people in my story instead of, well, knocking them out of it.

And that brings us to using words we’ve made up. Could be a simple portmanteau or clever bit of wordplay. Maybe terms from a technology we made up. Or a secret dark order. Maybe even a whole language. But I have to be careful, because there’s a good chance I could kawonk someone right out of the story if I’m using a lot of words I’ve made up.

You all see what I did there, right? Or maybe you didn’t. Kawonkis a nonsense pile of letters I threw together, but in context you kind of understood what I was saying with it almost immediately. Some of you may not even have really registered it as a made up word and just read it as a funny onomatopoeic sound effect or something.

But something can only work in context when I understand the context. So the more words I swap out with made up ones, the less chance there is of my readers understanding what I’m trying to say. Like if I told you we needed to kawonk this dreeenil ptoob before we niknik ptar the cheegles. I mean, if we hit a sentence like that we’re going to instinctively stop and start parsing the structure to figure out what this whoa I just broke the flow, didn’t I?

And even if there is plenty of context, it can get annoying to read something where I’ve decided to substitute existing words with made up ones for no real reason. Say, for example, people in my fantasy world all duel with scheevs. Some are cheap and crudely made, some are works of art, but most people have one. You see, a scheev is a narrow, double-edged blade about 24 to 30 inches long (originally iron or bronze, but mostly steel now), with a strong grip, some sort of protective guard or crosspiece between the blade and the grip, and often a small counterweight at the base that also locks the blade in place. And if you’re thinking, wait, did I just spend a whole paragraph describing a sword you are correct.

Except here they’re called scheevs. For… reasons.

And again, imagine how frustrating that paragraph would be if instead of bronze and steel it talked about droker and ogyed, flokks instead of inches, and an oppomass instead of a counterweight. Hopefully I didn’t make up my own numerical system, Think about pausing to dig through all of that and try to glean a meaning out of it and realizing we’re just talking about goddamn swords.

I don’t know about you, but that’d bring things to dead halt for me as I groan and rub my eyes.

‘Cause here’s the thing we always to remember. Weird as it may sound, the words I use don’t really matter. I mean, of course they’re important and they’ll bring nuance to the story. But that’s my point—the story is what matters. The charactersmatter. The plot matters. The actual words are just a delivery device. They’re the corn chip getting all that delicious salsa and guacamole into or mouths. And if I’m focusing a lot of my time and energy on coming up with a new way to say corn chip, that’s a good sign something’s probably going wrong in my writing.

I’m not saying don’t make up words. I mean, I put squale out there into the world. But there should be a reason for them being in my story, and the reason should be better than “I wanted to make things sound different.” Ultimately, they should be adding to my story, not distracting from it. Definitely not knocking me out of it to diagram sentences, glean meaning, or just grind my teeth in frustration.

Next time…

Okay, this was super late, so next time will be in three days. And I’ll probably be talking about the holidays.

Until then, go write.

Let’s be honest, we’re not going to get a lot more in before 2022, so try to make it count.

May 24, 2018 / 4 Comments

Jammed

First off, so very sorry post have been irregular here as of late. Believe I’ve mentioned I’m juggling a few things. One of which is the con I’m at right now.

But we’ll talk about that in a bit…

This week I wanted to revisit an idea that I’ve brought up a couple of times over the past few months. I’ve heard it called a few different things, but my preferred term has always been flow. First heard it that way from a wonderful author and writing teacher named Drusilla Campbell, and it always stuck with me.

The visual I’d like to put in your head for flow is traffic. Regular old automobile traffic. I’m going to go out on a limb and guess most of you reading this can drive, and the few who don’t have still ridden in a car. And hopefully most of you have been to a city, or at least on a highway of some kind.

So… let’s talk about the flow of traffic.

Living in Los Angeles (and before that San Diego, and before that the greater Boston area), I’m very used to highway traffic. Sometimes, often late at night, the highway is clear and wide open. There’s barely anyone on the road and you can pretty much fly.

Of course, even if there aren’t many cars on the road, something big can still create a traffic jam. Major construction or a big accident can condense things down to one lane, and suddenly that very open road is densely packed and moving at a crawl.

During the day it can be even worse. When there’s a million people on the road (no exaggeration here in LA) one small problem can slow everything down. A large one can bring things to a crashing halt. Hell, there’s a big hill on the 405 through the Sepulveda Pass and it always causes traffic slowdowns, both ways, up and down. I’ve been in traffic jams so bad you could actually shut your car off, get out, and stretch your legs for a bit.

There are places where the very structure and layout of the freeway just naturally causes traffic jams. There’s no way to avoid it the way things have been constructed. I know a couple stretches where—for no reason—the road goes from six lanes to three. And then back up to five. That mile of three lanes… it’s almost always clogged.

Traffic patterns can even get messed up when people just start looking at the wrong thing. We’ve all been in massive slowdowns that are simply caused by people staring at something on the side of the road. Or sometimes on the other side of the road. A big accident in the northbound lane can make everybody in the southbound lane slow down to take a look.

Sometimes it works great, though. Those million people can be on the road and it’s fantastic. Everything works. I’ve had times when I’ve been looking at all the cars on the road, but then looked down to realize I’m almost doing sixty-five. We’re all going at almost sixty-five, in perfect sync. I was just caught up in everything and didn’t even realize what was actually going on.

But that flow can get disrupted so easily. Again, one car going really slow. One closed lane. One distraction over on the shoulder.

What’s the point of this little visualization?

Reading a story is a lot like traffic. It has a flow. When the flow’s great, we barely notice how fast things are going. We just zoom along and suddenly realize we’ve read a hundred pages and it’s dark out and where the hell am I? A book that you can’t put down has great flow. A book that you should love but you just can’t get into… probably doesn’t.

Here’s a few things that have the potential of causing a traffic jam in my story.

Switching Tenses/Formats/POVs

A friend of mine has a book where the main character slips into sort of a fever dream. She’s sick, she’s been medicated, and now she’s… a bit out of it. And so the next two chapters of the book are in stage play format. It becomes a bit more separated from reality for the reader and we understand it’s more surreal for the character as well.

Compare this to another book I read recently when, for no reason, maybe 15-20% of a page would suddenly be in screenplay format. Dialogue, prose, prose, slugline, dialogue, stage direction, prose, dialogue. It jarred me out of an otherwise wonderful book every single time, and the author did it every four or five pages. I looked for patterns and tried to figure out if there was a recurring motif, but couldn’t find anything. I loved the story, but I kept getting knocked out if it.

There’s nothing wrong with doing clever things. It’s highly encouraged. But I need to have a reason to do them, because my readers are going to assume there’s a reason I did it. That’s natural, isn’t it? I made the effort to put it in the book, so there must be a point to it. Bruce Joel Rubin once mentioned that when we stop experiencing stories in our gut, we go into our head and start analyzing them. That’s when the flow breaks. When we stop reading and start drawing mental diagrams.

Names

I was reading this big sprawling generational family saga recently. Not normally my kind of thing, but I’ve been trying to expand my reading umbrella lately. And I’m overall glad I read it.

But…

One issue it had was that, by nature of being multigenerational, there were lots of people who were called “Dad,” and quite a few who were “Mom.” And they were all Dad and Mom. No “Pops” or “Papa” or “Daddy Dearest.” No “Mum” or “Ma” or “Mother.” Which got confusing because the book also jumped POV and timeframes a lot. We might be in Yakko’s head for a chapter, then hop over to his granddaughter’s. Which meant “Dad and Mom” is now referring to different people. Some of them even had the same name, so there was a Yakko Jr. and a Yakko the III (fortunately grandpa had died)

Anyway, what it amounted to was me going back to analyze the book every ten or fifteen pages to make sure the person behind this POV was who I thought they were.

This is closely related to something else I’ve mentioned before—when lots of people have very similar names, especially when they all begin with the same letter. We naturally lock on to that first letter to help keep things straight in our heads. If my story has a large cast featuring John, Jerry, Jacob, Jared, Justin, Jean, Jon, Jeri, Juan, Jenn, and Jess, people are (again) going to spend just as much time going backward to figure out who’s who as they are going forward to, well… read my story.

Vocabulary

We work with words. That’s a simple fact of the job. And nobody wants to use common words. We want to work with amazing words. Exciting, sexy, awe-inspiring words that people will remember years from now. Decades from now, even.

But here’s the thing to remember. The words don’t really matter. The story matters. The characters matter. The actual words are just a delivery device. They’re how I’m telling you the story. As a writer and a reader, I don’t want to be focused on the act of communication more than what’s being communicated. The words should be almost invisible.

And the truth is… the common words are going to be a lot less visible than the uncommon words. As readers—as people—we notice the uncommon. It stands out. And in many cases… it’s distracting.

This isn’t to say we can’t use uncommon or obscure words. There should be a reason for using them, though, and that reason shouldn’t just be me wanting to show off the obscure word I learned on Doctor Who a few months ago. They shouldn’t be stumbling blocks for my reader. Again, they should be adding to the story, not the delivery device.

That’s just a few things. I’ve mentioned some others before. Flow is kind of tough to get too specific about because something that causes a small bump for me might be slamming you into a metaphorical wall. Or vice versa.

Y’see, Timmy, that’s the biggest lesson about flow. It’s an empathy issue. It’s about being able to put myself in someone else’s shoes—a lot of other people’s shoes—and make an honest assessment about things. Will this reference trip people up? Is this structure confusing? Is it easy to keep all these characters straight?

Because if I can’t be honest about my work, there’s a good chance I’m going to jam things up.

And if that happens too often, to stick with our traffic metaphor… people will start looking for alternate routes.

Next time, I’d like to talk about that opening chapter. You know what I mean. The P word. Although, fair warning, next time might not be for two weeks or so.

Oh, and hey—I’m at Phoenix Comic Fest right now! Are you reading this? You should come find me. I’m that guy typing on his phone. And also talking on panels and signing stuff and all that. Come by and say hi.

And then go write.

Campbell conventions flow names point of view Rubin structure vocabulary

September 12, 2017

Choo-Choo-Choose You II: The Last Starfighter

I posted a link to last week’s rant over on my Facebook fan page, and somebody asked a question about it. And I started answering there, but then I realized it’d be better over here. And then (as I was scrawling my response in the comment section) I realized it’d work even better as a quickie Tuesday post.

So… the question.

I’m curious how you view Alex Rogan’s arc in “The Last Starfighter”. It seems to violate your rule about chosen ones not getting invested in the other world. As a character arc, it was pretty believable to me,

A fair point. I tried to make this clear, but I can see where it might not be. Two points from Ravenclaw for that one.
Okay, I hate that I have to refer to this but…

(shudder)

In his various musings on story, Joseph Campbell has a step—“rejecting the call.” At first glance it seems like it’s a rebuttal of my “not getting invested” point, but it’s not. Y’see, rejecting the call happens much earlier in the plot. In The Matrix, for example, it’s Neo refusing to trust Morpheus when they first talk on the phone (and getting arrested). In The Force Awakens, it’s Rey insisting she can’t leave Jakku and has to stay behind. And here, in The Last Starfighter, it’s Alex learning about aliens, the KoDan Armada, the head-crushing bad guy, and saying “nope, nope, nope—take me home!”

But really, how long does that refusal last? In any of these cases? Alex is home for all of… what, an hour? Two?—before he realizes he has to go back.

One of the thing about investment is that it takes time. In-story it takes even more time. When a plot dives head-first into action on page one, it doesn’t mean much because we don’t know who these people are. And how often do we roll our eyes when a story tries to convince us of “love at first sight”…?

When someone refuses to get invested and walks away, that happens later in the story. In the particularly bad movie that sparked that rant, the chosen one walked away over an hour into the movie. Within the movie, weeks had passed, weeks of people training this guy as the chosen one.

In a way, this is a lot like the difference between saving the cat and patting the dog. The isolated acts themselves look very much the same, but they’re different because of when they happen in my story and what they’re trying to accomplish. Refusing the call is a character thing. It’s a believable response to being shown a bigger world, or a bigger destiny, and it helps ground our suddenly-overwhelmed protagonist and make them more believable.

But refusing to be invested is just a cheap attempt to build tension. It undercuts any character growth that’s happened and makes the reader/audience question if this character can really be trusted. Which really sucks if the character is my long-heralded chosen one protagonist.

In short, it makes my story worse.

Next time, character stuff. For real.

And, hey—two weeks from today I’ll be at Borderlands in San Francisco with my brand-shiny-new second hardcover, Paradox Bound. Give ‘em a call, reserve a copy, and come say “hi!”

Until then, go write.

Campbell character chosen one Matrix Star Wars

April 10, 2014

The Flow Factor

I tried to come up with a clever title using Flo from those Progressive Insurance commercials, but I couldn’t come up with anything that didn’t feel… well, kind of awkward. They weren’t bad titles, they just didn’t read well. Or they required a bit of mental gymnastics to make sense.

Either way, they didn’t work.

Which is, oddly enough, what I wanted to blather on about this week.

Have you ever read a book you just couldn’t put down? One where you start reading just after lunch and suddenly realize it’s two in the morning? Or maybe it was a movie that sucked you in and you were stunned to realize that the 163 minute run time was already used up.

Oscar-winning screenwriter Bruce Joel Rubin made a wonderful observation a while back. To paraphrase, we experience good stories in our gut, not in our head. A good story grabs us at an emotional level—in the gut. But whenever something goes wrong, we start to analyze and examine it—we go into our head.

The best term I’ve heard for this is flow. Put at its simplest, flow is the readability of my story. It has to do with how much effort it takes for the reader to keep reading. Having good flow means my writing is smooth and slick, that every line, paragraph, and chapter rolls into the next and carries you along for the ride. Readers can’t stop because it’s actually easier to keep turning the page than to put the book down.

On the other hand, a story with bad flow will make a reader stumble a lot. If I’m reading a book, whenever I pause to roll my eyes, scratch my head, or go back two or three pages to figure something out… each one’s another bump in the road. If you’ve ever tried a book and just couldn’t get into it, odds are the flow sucked. You’d read, trip over a page or two, and put it back down. You can’t get into it because you keep getting knocked back out.

Flow is a large part of editing. I’ve mentioned giving things a polish before, and it’s just what it sounds like. It’s going through my manuscript and smoothing down the rough edges. It’s me knowing this could be a little clearer and people might get hung up on that.

Unfortunately, this means flow isn’t something I can just fix by changing a word here or there. It’s one of those things where you can tweak each element but still not affect the final outcome. Getting good (or even better) at flow is an experience thing that just comes from writing. The more I write, the more subtle methods and tricks and fixes I develop.

That being said… here are a few things my story needs to do if it’s going to have good flow. Or, if you prefer, these are some of the things a story with bad flow often won’t do…

Be interesting– Easiest way in the world to keep my story from lagging—don’t be boring. This doesn’t mean I need five explosions and a swordfight on page one, but when I’m telling a story, I need to get to the story. If it’s sci fi, I should show the reader something amazing. If it’s a love story, my characters need to display some passion. If it’s a horror story, I need to scare some folks, or at least weird them out a bit.

Have characters act in character– A writing coach named Drusilla Campbell once commented that when the nun viciously kills a gardener, that’s also when most people remember that laundry they have to fold. People who are blatantly incompetent at their jobs, cruel people who do nice things, people who are just a little too smart or too scared or too law-abiding when it suits the story. It’s jarring when my characters act in contradictory ways to what the reader’s come to expect. And that jarring is what gets books and screenplays tossed in the big left-hand pile.

Have smooth dialogue– Kind of related to the last point. I can get away with one character who talks like a computer. Maybe another who keeps slipping into a foreign language. But too much stylized, unnatural, or just plain bad dialogue brings things to a grinding halt. Adults should talk like adults, kids should talk like kids, and cybernetic lizard men should talk like… well, you know.

Watch the word choice– If I’m picking obscure or overly-long words just to create flowery descriptions or show off my vocabulary, there’s a good chance I’m disrupting the flow of my writing. It’s really cool that I can describe someone as a female with resplendent obsidian ink ornamented across her glabrous scalp, but it’s much smoother and just as visual for me to say she’s a bald woman with dark tattoos.

It’s worth noting that typos and misused words fall into this category, too. Anytime someone sees something like that in print, it pulls them out of the story and puts them back in analyzing mode. In their head. And that’s not where I want them to be.

Take it seriously. Everyone makes a joke now and then to break the tension, but things need to carry the correct amount of gravity in my writing. Death, rape, unrequited love, violence… I shouldn’t bring these things up and not address them in an appropriate way. If my characters are drowning cats, threatening their employees, or punching strangers in the head, these acts should all be getting a response from my characters. If the reader thinks I’m not taking the events in my book seriously, well… why should they?

Again, though, just adjusting these elements doesn’t guarantee that my writing now has great flow. Every story is unique and has its own path to follow. But if you keep at it and continue to work on it, one day you’ll start to see the patterns. And then you’ll be able to go with the flow.

Next week, unless any of you have some requests or suggestions, I’ve been thinking about Captain America and superheroes a lot lately. So I wanted to make a small distinction.

Until then, go write.

Campbell character dialogue flow Rubin

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