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March 22, 2018 / 9 Comments

The First Time Around

 Is it still a pop culture reference if I’m referencing one of my own books? I mean is it really a “reference” when J.K. Rowling talks about Harry Potter? Or is it just self promotion…?

Anyway, this week I wanted to blab about an issue that cropped up in a book I just read. I mean, it’s a fairly common problem, truth be told, and it’s easy to see why it happens.  But it’s one of those things that almost always makes readers grind their teeth. Even if they’re not sure why they’re grinding their teeth.

And to explain this, I’d like to start by talking about my mom.

My mom had me when she was really young.  Not scandalously, Gilmore Girls young, but young enough that there was still a touch of scandal.  Especially back in New England during Nixon’s presidency.  It’s struck me a couple times in my life to think where she was in her life at the same age.

Of course, I didn’t always think like this.  I didn’t really put the math together until some time late in high school, I think.  Because my mom didn’t look young. She looked… well, mom-aged.  Why would I look deeper into something that was totally normal?  My thoughts just never turned that way.

No, the odd thing when I was growing up was how all of my friends had old parents. I think I was around seven or eight when it first struck me that the friends I’d ended up with all had parents that were at least a decade older than my mom. It was odd, yeah, but I logically assumed that all those many, many parents I hadn’t met were normal mom-age.

Hopefully the point I’m trying to make is clear.  All of us assume our lives are normal.  That we’re the baseline.  Even when we come to realize they might not be normal in a greater societal sense, they’re still normal for us.  It still doesn’t surprise me that my mom’s not-quite twenty years older than me because… well, she always has been.

And this is true for fictional people, too.  The world they live in is—big shocker—the world they live in.  It doesn’t surprise them.  Kincaid Strange isn’t shocked spirits and voodoo are real because that’s her world.  Since Charles grew up in a world of metal spiders, a horned God on television, and mechanical implants in the back of people’s skulls, these things are more annoying background noise to him than disturbing.   Constance Verity doesn’t get surprised by aliens or androids or monstrous creatures at the center of the Earth because for her… well, that’s a Thursday.

Granted, they can still get surprised when something changes in their world. We tend to call that “plot.”  But the day to day aspects of their life shouldn’t come as any big shock.  They’ve seen it and experienced it before.  It’s normal to them.

One mistake I see a lot in stories and screenplays is when characters in my story go for a hover-drive, go to work at the vat-meat processing plant, or telepathically scan perps for evidence of crimes… and are in awe of these things.  Maybe even feel the need to dwell on these things for a paragraph or three.  It knocks a reader out of the story because it’s immediately apparent this is something the characters should be familiar with.

But it’s not just genre stuff. This happens in “real world” stories, too.  I’ve seen characters be eyes-wide amazed at the smell of dog food and the price of milk.  Not because these things are radically different than expected, mind you.  Just because… they’re there.

Let me put it a slightly different way. And I’ll give you another personal example.  Or, in this case, you can give yourself the example.  No, you don’t need to share or even write it down, don’t worry.  Just keep it in your head.

Do you remember the very first time you saw your current (or most recent) significant other naked?  Girlfriend, boyfriend, wife, husband, whoever they may be.  I’m not asking for a date and time—do you recall how you felt at that moment, at the sight of them exposed to you?  What was running through your mind?  What your heart was doing in your chest?

Okay, now get yourself under control–there’s a follow-up.

How did you feel the last time you saw them naked?  Maybe this morning or just the other night. Were you as focused? As breathless?  Heck, were you even thinking about them?  Not in a “someone else” way, I just mean maybe you were working out a problem from one of your own stories.  Or thinking about stuff you had to do this weekend.  Heck, maybe you were reading and they were just walking around in the background.  You knew they were there but you just had to finish this chapter.

Y’see, Timmy, sometimes, storytellers get focused on the fact that this is the first time my readers have seen Wakko perform an exorcism.  Or it’s the first time we’ve seen a dynochromium field in use.  Or it’s the first time we’ve seen Phoebe and Yakko together (in any sense). And so the writer want to explain these things—to show how horrible or amazing or beautiful they are.

But just because this is new for the reader doesn’t mean it’s new for the character.  It’s not their first time.  These are normal things for them.  Mundane. Perhaps even a little boring.  Definitely not cause for heart-pounding excitement.  

When I start shaping dialogue and reactions to be informative for the audience rather than to make sense for the other characters, my focus is going in the wrong direction.  It might seem right on a quick-pass, mechanical level, but when we really study these examples… they just don’t work.  You may recall all the times I’ve brought up that most hated of dialogue phrases– “as you know.”  It’s a perfect example of writing my dialogue for the reader and not for the characters.

Now, there’s an addendum to this, and it’s a real killer.  It’s when I make plot points out of these things people should’ve known about before.  If my characters all know Wakko can actually use dowsing to find water, they shouldn’t be completely baffled why he’s digging a deep hole out in the field.  At the very least, they should have some suspicions about why he’s doing it. 

Because if they don’t—or they don’t even consider his dowsing abilities—well, they’re going to look like idiots in the end.

An easy way to get around this is something I’ve mentioned a few times before.  I call it the Ignorant Stranger.  It’s pretty much the opposite of “as you know.”  In some cases it can help a lot to have a character in my story who’s not quite as in the know.  Someone who things need to be explained to, because this is the first time they’re being exposed to something.  They can even be my protagonist.  In fact, it’s not a bad thing if they are.  If my hero needs things explained to them, it means they’re in new, unknown territory.  And—as mentioned above-that’s where I tend to find a plot.

One of the worst things I can do as a writer is confuse the first time my readers see something with the first time my characters do.  It’ll ultimately come across as false and it’s one of those clumsy mistakes that’s hard to recover from.  I need to find the balance point, the sweet spot where I’m informing my readers but things still make sense and feel natural for my characters.

Next time… okay, I’m trying to get a draft done before the end of the month, so next time might just be a few quick questions for you to think about.

Oh, and if you’re going to be at Wonder Con this weekend, I’m there all day Sunday.  At 11:00 I’m doing a two hour version of the Writers Coffeehouse, at 2:00 I’m on a panel called “Knowledge: Handle With Care,” and we’re doing a book signing right after that.

Until then… go write

descriptionfirstIgnorant Strangerlinear structureplotstructure
October 26, 2017

Metaphorically Speaking

            It’s the Halloween season, so I thought this’d be a good time to tell you about this nightmarish thing I saw once. 
            I mean, it was just hideous.  This thing was like Lucifer and the heat death of the universe had a child together.  And not a wanted child. One of those “we got seriously drunk and shouldn’t’ve done this and it wasn’t even that fun but now I guess we’re parent together” children.  Yeah, there’s no question this thing knew its parents didn’t love each other and only stayed together for it.  You could see it in the eyes.  It had eyes like those island wells Conan used to find in all the old Robert E. Howard adventures.  Conan finds a lost city at the center of the island’s jungle (or at the top of a hill or plateau) and there’s always a big stone plaza with some kind of pool or well, swirling with water or blood or eternal, stygian darkness.  One of those sort of wells
            Its whole body was like that, really.  It was the kind of thing you’d read about in pulp supernatural stories or old horror comics, where the writers would throw together a few adjectives to create something that was just visually repellent on one level or another.  They’d exaggerate this limb or that feature to the point your mind just couldn’t help but register it as unnatural.  Alien, even.
            And the smell!  If you left someone to die alone of exposure on a mountainside, with just enough food and firewood to give them faint hope but not enough to actually keep them alive—the few minutes before life left their body, that’s just what it smelled like.
            Okay, there’s more (believe me, I’ll never forget this thing) but if I don’t stop now we’ll never get to the actual point I wanted to make.
            Every now and then I see a writer so desperate to be artsy, to write “literature,” that they load their work with metaphors and similes.  I mean dozens and dozens and dozens of them.  Why just call something redwhen we can describe it as the color of blood and roses and UMass sweatshirts, right?
            That last item is kind of a hint where this is going.
            Of course, blood and roses are the obvious choices if I’m going to describe something as red without… y’know, actually saying red.  So some writers feel the need to come up with seriously obscure visuals or tortured similes in order to not go the “obvious” route.  Yeah, you can all guess what color a UMass sweatshirt is because I just lined it up with blood and roses.  But if I told you the sky was the color of a UCLA sweatshirt is that… good?  Bad?  Unnatural?
            This is really similar to—a natural outgrowth of, really—an issue I’ve brought up a few times before.  Some writers go out of their way to find rarely-used, little-known words they can use in their manuscripts.  A few of them go one step further and use these words to create their metaphors.  Or they’ll use such obscure or personal references that the description means nothing.  Telling you the beast had fur the color of my first childhood cat doesn’t really tell you what color its fur is.
            I can still do worse, though.  Remember that nightmarish thing I saw, the one I described up above?  Let me ask you a question.
            Do you have any idea what this thing looks like? 
            Can you describe it at all?  Any specific aspect of it?  Height?  Weight?  Color?  Heck, do you even know if it’s alive or dead? Am I describing a creature or a statue or a really poorly-designed rocking chair?
            Sometimes we get so caught up in evoking a certain image or mood or sensation that we… well, we never actually describe anything.  Our attempt to viscerally describe the horror actually leaves us with a horror-shaped hole on the page.  It’s scary for half a beat, but then we realize there’s not anything there.  It breaks the flow as we have to stop and figure out what something
            In screenwriting, this kind of thing is even more deadly.  Screenwriting’s a really precise form where I need to correctly convey a message to multiple people.  The director, the actors, the prop people, the wardrobe folks. the makeup artists, maybe even a special effects team.  We need to all be on the same page regarding what the demon prince Ognaron looks like.  Because if we’re not, well… our shooting day is going to have a lot of delays.
            Back when I used to do interviews, David S. Goyer told me he got (playfully) chewed out once by Guillermo del Toro for a weak bit of metaphorical description he’d used in a script they were working on.  And then Goyer admitted he was telling me this because he’d done the same thing again—to himself—when he got to direct his own screenplay.
            Now, don’t get me wrong—I freakin’ love a good metaphor.  A clever, descriptive turn of phrase is like a shot of good whiskey. It’s a hard kick that makes me feel all warm and soft in the gut.  It’s not unusual to hear me make a small gasp or sigh after one.
            But…
            Y’know what happens if someone does shot after shot after shot after shot?  I’ll give you a hint—it’s not pleasant.  Yeah, some folks have more tolerance than others, but by the twelfth or thirteenth, well, most people are in a bad place.  Especially if they’ve been doing them one after another.  Too many in a row without something solid in there… that’s a recipe for disaster.
            Y’see, Timmy, like whiskey shots, I don’t want to have nothing but metaphors.  They’re fantastic and lovely, but for them to really work I need some solid stuff, too.  Hell, there’s a reason people say to have a lot of bread before a night of drinking.  It’s plain and kinda boring… but it’s a solid foundation that makes the other stuff a lot easier to swallow
            So get out there and celebrate the wild, crazy horror that is Halloween.
            But, y’know, don’t be scared to actually describe it now and then.
            Next time, I’d like to share a bit of advice about something you should always never do.
            Sometimes.
            Until then, go write.
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August 31, 2017

Virtual Reality

            So, recovery is going nicely, for those who care.  My brain’s been working a lot better. I can actually eat food again (only went seventeen days without). It’s all sorts of fun.
            Also, today’s the last day to sign up for a free galley copy of Paradox Bound. Head over to the PRH website and do that.  Only takes a minute.
            Anyway, I haven’t prattled on about characters in a while, so I figure we’re due…
            I may have mentioned once or twice before that characters are key to a successful story.  Non-stop action with flat stereotypes can be diverting in a film for a little while, but in a book (and in a good movie) characters are my bedrock.  If a reader doesn’t have someone they like, someone they can relate to, a story can be dead in the water by page five.
            One of the best ways to deal with this is reality. Let’s be honest, we love characters who feel real, even when they’re Jedi or Hufflepuffs or Inhumans or Amazons. Their dialogue, their reactions, their approach to things.  The goal is to make our characters—and our stories—seem as real as possible.
            Now, there are some common ways we all try to do this when they’re starting out.  I say “try” because all three are based off a simple misunderstanding of why certain aspects of characters work.  Let’s go over what they are, the problems with each one, and how you can work around it.
            The first method is for me to describe these characters in amazing detail.  I’ll introduce you to Wakko and tell you his hair color, eye color, height, and weight.  Then I’ll give you descriptions of his hairstyle, body type, the shape of his face, all his tattoos (even the ones we can’t see).  There’s a list of his measurements and shoe size.  In the next few sentences we get the name of his aftershave, the personal grooming tools he uses, and the make of his watch (yeah, he still wears a watch).  I describe Wakko in such exacting detail there’s no way you can picture him any way except how I envisioned him. And once that picture’s firmly in mind, they’ll seem as real as anyone else you know.
            The second way is for me to give pages and pages of backstory on the character.  I’ll scribble out lengthy flashbacks to Wakko’s first day of high school, his first job, his first fight, the first time he was dumped.  Maybe he’ll randomly start talking to friends, family, or complete strangers about the last time he went to the gym, the last time he had sex (that cute woman from the bar, whatshername with the hair…), the day he finally started working at ConHugeCo International, or the day he realized all he really wanted was to tell stories through interpretive dance.  Heck, sometimes these revelations won’t even be a flashback or dialogue–they’ll just be straight text in the narrative.
            The third way people try to do this is the least common.  But it happens enough I feel the need to mention it…
            Real people have quirks.  We sometimes speak in odd ways, do nonsensical things, and go against our best interests.  We have blind spots.  Sometimes we even up and die in awful, unexpected ways (statistically, most people do at least once in their life).  It’s the way we’re wired.  We’ve all seen people do things like this.  We’ve all been the people doing these things. 
            The logic here is if the writer has the characters act illogically, they’re acting more real.  If Wakko’s a bundle of weird and quirky behaviors, then he has to be believable.  It’s almost like I’m  daring my readers—“Real people do this, so how can you  say Wakko doesn’t seem real when he’s doing it?”
            Heck, if Wakko randomly gets hit by a car in the last few pages, that’s so much like life it almost counts as art, doesn’t it…?
            Now…
            Let’s talk about why these methods usually don’t work.
            The  problem with the first method, using tons of details to describe my character, is that it breaks the flow of my story.  The story and plot come to a screeching halt while I have this big infodump.  I mean, if you look back up there, I bet you started skimming just while reading the list of potential descriptions of Wakko, didn’t you?  If a list of general examples can’t hold people’s attention, what’s going to happen when it’s a list of specifics two or three times as long?
            The other catch to this method is something I’ve mentioned before.  A lot of the time, readers form their own mental images of what a character looks like.  For example, if you look over the past few paragraphs you’ll see I haven’t actually described Wakko at all, but—even if you don’t get the reference—at this point you’ve probably got some mental image of him when I use his name, don’t you? 
            If you know what this character looks like with nodescription, then isn’t two pages of description… kinda excessive?
            In a similar vein—when we’re talking about the second method–I can add in a dozen pages of personal trivia and anecdotes and it’s still not going to make a character seem real.  More likely, the story’s going to suffer from the same expositional infodump I mentioned above, and it’s going to come to a crashing halt again.  The problem is relevance.  While there’s no question these past events shaped Wakko’s life and the person he is today, my readers are going to wonder what do they have to do with this story.  No matter how good a particular element might be, if it doesn’t relate to the tale I’m telling it’s just noise.
            The problem with the third method, quirkiness and randomness, is that fiction’s held to a much higher standard than real life.  People do illogical, unbelievable things all the time in real life… but life isn’t scripted.  When I pick up a book, I know there’s a writer behind it.  There shouldn’t be any real randomness, because every word on the page was deliberately chosen.  And that means any apparent randomness has to be serving an actual purpose in the story.  Because if it’s not, well… why is it there?
            So, with all that being said… is there any way to make these three methods work? I mean, yeah, there’s always an exception to everything, but are these methods overall useless or what?
            The big trick to all of these, as I mentioned above, is relevance.  Like adjectives or adverbs, if character elements aren’t serving a purpose they shouldn’t be there.  Strip away all the noise and clutter and just give the reader what they need.
            For example…
            Let me tell you a quick little story…
            Wakko lives in a one room, roach-infested apartment, always buys groceries at the 99 Cent store, and almost all of his wardrobe is meticulously chosen from the racks of the Salvation Army.  He always has the latest iPhone, though, and an immaculate beard.
            And I’ve just told you a lot about him, haven’t I?  More than just the words on the page, too.  You’ve got a sense of who Wakko is and where his priorities are.  Maybe even a mental image of him.  All in just three lines.
            See, I don’t need a lot of details, just the rightdetails.  Did I need to tell you about Wakko’s thigh tattoo or how tall he is for that little character sketch to work?  I just need to pick the right details to create the image and imply the person I wanted you to see.
            Even the randomness issue is easy to deal with when you look at it in this light.  It’s okay for seemingly random things to happen in my story.  Key word—seemingly.  At the end of the day, I’m god in this world, and these events are happening for a reason which benefits my story. 
            My new book, Paradox Bound, recently got a review from Publishers Weekly (a starred review, he said with glee), and one of the thing they specifically mentioned was how great it was that so many seemingly early, minor things I’d added for flavor came around to be important plot points.  They all seem like random details and events at first, but each one ends up driving the plot and character development in a certain way and in a specific direction. 
            That’s the kind of “randomness” we want in our stories—the kind that serves our purpose as writers.  In the same way, we don’t want our characters to be “real,” but to make them virtually real.
            So make your characters real.  But really make them real
            Next time… well, I’ve chosen something interesting (and a bit frustrating) for next time
            Until then, go write.
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June 8, 2017 / 2 Comments

If You Can’t Say Something Nice…

            I wanted to prattle on for a minute about a part of dialogue we ignore a lot. The unspoken part, so to speak.  Well, not so to speak.  Literally, the unspoken part.
            Wait… can something be literally unspoken in prose?
            Anyway, as I so often do… I’d like to tell you a little story.
            I was working on a movie once which had a pretty standard romantic subplot. Estranged husband and wife, pushed apart by work (he wants to stay small town, she wants to go national), and now brought back together again during a crisis.  Like so many of the lower-budget things I tended to be on, we ended up running short on time. The place they decided to tighten things up was in the reconciliation/we-still-love-each-other scene.  You know that scene, right? It’s in a bunch of stories and a lot of movies.
            The director and the two actors huddled together and started talking about how they could trim the page and a half scene without, y’know, ruining it. Were there phrases that could be combined? Maybe words that could be swapped out for… shorter words?
            At which point the lead actor suggested… “What if we didn’t say anything?”
            Which is what’s in the final movie.  You can watch it and see the one minute, one-shot scene. The two of the working together in the lab, falling right back into old habits, giving each other little appreciative glances…
            And never saying a word.
            Some folks are intent on picking “better” words and elaborate. meticulous phrasing. That gets spread as kind of a gospel.  We’ve all seen it—the people who’ll never use five words if it can be said in ten.  If there’s a longer, more roundabout way to talk about something, they’ll find it.
            But I don’t need to do this.  I’ve talked about the “less is more” idea a few times here.  A fair amount of the time I can do just as much (or more) with just a few words.  Subtext can get a point across so much stronger than the spoken (or shouted) word, and sometimes that subtext doesn’t even need dialogue.
            I know this sounds kinda weird and contradictory. I think I’ve said here two or three or forty-four times that dialogue is one of the key ways we show character, so it just feels unnatural to have characters not say anything.  Especially when there are so many cool lines and comebacks tingling on our fingertips.
            Let’s consider it, though.  How often can a grim silence have so much more impact than the longest, most detailed monologue?  Think about how flirty someone can be with just the right gesture or look.  There’s whole schools of comedy based around the idea of an awkward silence.
            And this is going to be harder to write.  I won’t lie to you.. Depending on unspoken subtext means I need to have my descriptions perfect—not one extra adverb or adjective cluttering them up and slowing them down.  It means I need to have a great sense of empathy—that I know exactly how this moment will be interpreted by everyone who reads it, and not just by a few of my friends.
            Y’see, Timmy, this kind of subtlety is what makes my writing soar.  It’s how I bring my story to life and raise it up to the next level.  I want to recognize the chance to say nothing–to use that delicate balance of silence and description and subtext–and take advantage of it.
            Or, as K.M.Weiland once put it—“Never miss a good opportunity to shut up.”
            Next time, I wanted to discuss some basic geometry.  We haven’t done that in a while.
            Until then… go write.
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