October 1, 2020 / 1 Comment

Allow Me to Explain…

 There’s a storytelling idea, sort of a method, I suppose, that I’d been batting around for a while as a possible topic. Something I see crop up enough that it was worth mentioning in that “something else to keep in mind…” way. I decided to add it to my list of topics here and then, in a weird synchronicity, said problem showed up in a TV miniseries I finally got around to watching and a book I was reading (some formats may be changed to protect… you know).

The miniseries I mentioned involved an aggressive computer virus. And it explained how the virus worked. In detail. It used a few specifics and a few generalities, but it spent three whole scenes explaining this virus, the logic behind how it worked and how it selected targets.

The problem was… even as I was watching this, I could see a bunch of holes in the explanation. Holes that were only pulled wider as the story went on. And my computer skills more or less peaked in the very early 00’s. But I still knew enough to know the virus wouldn’t work the way it was described. Couldn’t. If it chose targets this way, why didn’t it go after that or that? If it propagated like that, how had it reached here and here?

For a brief time I was wondering if this was some sort of foreshadowing that there was more to the virus than was being let on. Maybe some sort of AI or a living virus that had been transcribed but then… mutated or something? But no, in the end it was just a computer virus that didn’t make any sense.

Which was doubly annoying because the virus didn’t really need to be explained in this story. The plot was much more about the repercussions of this thing being loose on the web and how it was affecting lives, society, and so on. The explanation slowed things down.

And, yeah, sure—part of this is on me. Any genre story is going to involve a degree of suspension of disbelief. Nobody wants to be the guy picking apart the energy requirements of a lightsaber or arguing how the Hulk can’t be that strong because his muscle/bone density would mean he’d sink into the earth. And as for Mjolnir, look…

Okay, yeah… there are some people out there who love being that guy.

(looking at you, Neil…)

But here’s the thing. I couldn’t’ve picked it apart if the writer hadn’t put so much down in front of me. I wouldn’t’ve had anything to pick apart. I can’t complain about your wardrobe if you never show me your wardrobe. But this writer decided they needed a whole scene (three scenes, really) explaining the computer virus in detail. And the details didn’t match up.

So what does this mean for me if my story needs explanation? I mean, speculative fiction is filled with different forms of technobabble. It’s got FTL drives and magic systems and AI computer viruses and alien life cycles and bringing dinosaurs back with cloning and mutant superheroes and… I mean, I’ve got to explain it all somehow, right?

Maybe? Consider Jurassic Park. How much does Crichton (or Spielberg and Koepp) actually tell us about the process of recreating dinosaurs? No, seriously—what do they tell us? If you look back, it’s actually a pretty bare-bones explanation of what’s a fairly complicated process (especially twenty-five years ago!). In fact, it encourages us to fill in a lot of the blanks ourselves and make it seem more complete.

So here’s a few things to keep in mind as I’m writing out that long explanation…

First, be clear if the story really needs this explanation. Is this what the story’s actually about, or is this a minor element I can handwave away or just skip over? Back to the Future gets away with a ridiculously simple explanation of time travel because it’s not really about the time travel. It’s about actions and consequences, and becoming a better person. Time travel’s just the mechanism that lets it happen. It’s just short of being a MacGuffin. We don’t need that explanation the same way we don’t need to read about someone hitting every step on the staircase, how many keystrokes it took to log into their cloud account, or a list of every item of clothing they put on when they got dressed (in order). The reader will fill it in.

Second, if I decide I really need to explain this at length, it’s got to be solid. I’ve waived the right to say “just trust me, it works” and now I need to make this as rigorous and believable as possible. I need to do my research, double-check my logic, triple-check my numbers, and let it marinate overnight in plain-old common sense. Trust me when I say if I get a fact wrong or use garbage science or make a math mistake… people will let me know. I don’t even have to ask them. Not only that, but…

Third, I need to keep in mind the more something gets explained, the easier it is to punch holes in that explanation. Like in the example I first mentioned. As the characters went into more and more detail about the computer virus, the flaws in that explanation became more and more apparent. How often have we seen the person digging themselves deeper and deeper because they won’t stop talking? It’s soooooo tempting when we’ve done all that sweet, cool research, but I need to figure out how much explanation my story really needs and stop there. I’ve mentioned screenwriter Bruce Joel Rubin here onceor thrice, and his idea that we experience stories in our gut, but we analyze them in our head. I never, ever want my explanation to drive people into their heads.

Fourth, closely related to the last one, is that this sort of explanation is almost always going to be exposition. Yes, even if I try to work it into a conversation or presentation or something like that. As we’ve talked about here a bunch of times, exposition gets boring really fast because so much of it is either things we already know or things we don’t need to know. For our purposes here, there’s a chance the reader doesn’t even want to know. So if I decide I need this explanation in my story, I need to make sure it’s going to be clever and engaging for the reader.

And that’s me explaining how to explain things.

Next time, I’d like to talk about if you should be reading next week’s post.

Until then, go write.

November 21, 2019

Do You Think I’m An Idiot?

No, no… don’t rush to answer that. I’m pretty sure I can guess how most of the comments section would go.
However…it is an important question, whether I’m writing books or screenplays. The folks who just bought my new Lovecraftian techno-thriller aren’t expecting a long lesson about how memes work. If I’m billing myself as the next Dan Brown, the clue “man’s best friend” better not leave half a dozen codebreakers baffled as to what the three letter password is for the doomsday device. Heck, even if I’m hired to pen the next Pokemon movie, I probably shouldn’t spend a lot of screen time explaining all the medical reasons why little kids shouldn’t drink paint.
Cause let’s face it—nobody likes to be called stupid.  Not even kids.  Heck, especially not stupid people.  We all hate being condescended to and having things spoon-fed to us at a crawl. We get angry about it. At best we get frustrated with the person throttling the speed we can absorb things at.
So, having established that nobody likes being considered an idiot, it stands to reason most people like to feel smart, right? And that includes my readers. I want them to like my stories, not feel angry or frustrated because of them.
But a lot of stories assume readers are stupid. They spell everything out in painful detail. They drag things out. They repeat things again and again and again. These authors think their readers won’t know or understand or remember anything, and they write their stories accordingly.
So here’s a few easy things I try to do so my readers feel smart and they’ll love my stories…
I know what my audience knows
I’ve talked a couple times here about empathy and common knowledge. It’s stuff I can feel safe assuming everyone knows. Grass needs water and sunlight to grow. Captain Americais a superhero. Nazis are still the bad guys. Maybe you noticed that a few paragraphs back I rattled off Lovecraftian, Dan Brown, and Pokemonwithout bothering to explain any of them. I know the folks reading this would have—at the very least—an awareness of these words and names. Knowing what my specific audience knows is an important part of making them feel smart, because this is what lets me judge what they’ll be able to figure out on their own.
This goes for things within my story, too. Yeah, odds are nobody’s ever heard the term Caretaker used precisely the way I use it in Dead Moon, but I don’t have to keep explaining it. I can make a couple references at the start and then just trust that my readers will remember things as the story goes on. It’s a completely made up word, but I bet most of you know what a Horcurx is. Or a TARDIS. Or a Mandalorian. They don’t need to be explained to you again and again.
I try to be smarter than my audience
There’s an agent I’ve referenced here, once or thrice, Esmund Harmsworth. I got to hear him speak at a writing conference years ago and he pointed out most editors will toss a mystery manuscript if they can figure out who the murderer is before the hero does.
Really, though, this is how it works for any sort of puzzle or intellectual challenge in a piece of writing. If I’ve dumbed things down to the point of simplicity—or further—who’d have the patience to read it? It’ll grate on their nerves, and it makes us impatient when we have to wait for characters to figure out what we knew twenty minutes ago.
I don’t state the obvious
Michael Crichton got a very early piece of writing advice that he shared in one of his books. “Be very careful using the word obvious. If something really isobvious, you don’t need to use it.  If it isn’t obvious, than you’re being condescending to the reader by using it.”
Of course, this goes beyond just the word obvious. Revisiting that first tip up above, should I be wasting half a page telling my readers Nazis were bad? When Yakko staggers into a room with three knives in his back just before collapsing into a puddle of his own blood, do I need to tell anyone that’s he’s seriously hurt? I mean, you all got that, right?
I take a step back 
When something does need to be described or explained, I think our first instinct is to scribble out all of it. We want to show that we thought this out all the way.  So we put down every fact and detail and nuance.
I usually don’t have to, though. I tend to look at most of those explanatory scenes and cut it back 15 or 20%. I know if I take my audience most of the way there, they’ll probably be able to go the rest of the way on their own. People tend to fill in a lot of blanks and create their own images anyway, so getting excessive with this sort of thing rarely helps.
I give them the benefit of the doubt

This is the above tip, but the gap’s just a little bigger. Three-time Academy-Award-winning screenwriter Billy Wilder said if you let the audience add 2+2 for themselves now and then, they’ll love you forever. That’s true for writers of all forms. Every now and then, just trust they’ll get it. Not all the time, but every now and then I just make a leap of faith my audience can make a connection with almost no help whatsoever from me. Odds are that leap isn’t as big as you think it is. 

Y’see, Timmy, when I spell out everything for my audience, what I’m really telling them is “I know you won’t be able to figure this out on your own.”  My characters might not be saying it out loud, but the message is there.  You’re too stupid for this—let me explain.
And that’s not going to win me a lot of return readers.

Hey, next week is Thanksgiving here in the U.S. and my parents are coming  to visit for the holidays and hahhaaaha I’m not stressing about it YOU’RE STRESSING HOW IS IT THE END OF NOVEMBER ALREADY OH CRAP

…sorry, that was a typo. What I meant to say was it’s Thanksgiving so I’ll probably just do something quick on Tuesday or Wednesday. And after that… well, if you’ve been following the ranty blog for any amount of time you know what I’ll be talking about on the day after Thanksgiving.

Until then, go write.
March 14, 2019 / 4 Comments

Can We Just Talk a Bit…?

            Well, this one’s going to be a little awkward.  We just said this weekend that we’d talk about dialogue next time at the Writers Coffeehouse.  But then we got a request for it here, so… overlap.  One way or the other, the second time is going to end up making me look a little lazy, little bit like a hack.
            I mean, more than usual.
            Ha ha ha, you’re welcome critics.  Just tossing that one out there for you.
            Anyway…
            Dialogue.
            I’ve  blabbed on once or thrice about how important dialogue is.  Yeah, I know I’ve said characters are the most important thing, but dialogue’s how we bring those characters to life.  It’s the fuel for the fancy sports car, the foam that hides the gigantic wave, the beautiful full moon that shows us a bloodthirsty werewolf.  You get the idea.  They’re interdependent.  I can’t have good characters without good dialogue, and bad dialogue is almost always going to lead to bad characters.  It’s the circle of fictional life.
            If a character doesn’t sound right, if their dialogue is stilted or unnatural, it’s going to keep me—the reader—from believing in them. And if I can’t believe in them, I cant get invested in them or their goals.  Which means I’m not invested in the story and I’m probably going to go listen to music while I organize my LEGO bricks or something like that.
            So here’s a bunch of elements/angles I try to keep in mind and watch out for when I’m writing dialogue.  Some things to watch out for, some things to make sure I have.  All sorts of stuff.  And I’ve talked about a lot of these before, so some of them may sound familiar…

            Transcription– Okay, some of you know that I used to be an entertainment journalist and I did lots and lots of interviews.  One thing that never really struck me until then was that, with very few exceptions, people trip over themselves a lot verbally.  We have false starts.  We repeat phrases.  We trail off.  We make odd noises while we try to think of words.  It’s very human.  However, anyone who’s ever read a strict word-for-word transcription of a conversation (or typed up a lot of them) will tell you it’s awkward, hard to follow, and a lot gets lost without the exact inflection of certain words.
            I don’t want to write dialogue in this kind of ultra-realistic manner.  It’ll drive my readers and editor nuts, plus it wastes my word count on dozens of unnecessary lines.  While this sort of rambling can work great in actual spoken dialogue, it’s almost  always horrible on the page. 
            Grammar – As you’ve probably noticed in your day to day life, very few people speak in perfect, grammatically correct English, aside from androids and a few interpretations of Sherlock Holmes.  The rest of us speak differing degrees of colloquial English.  Our verbs don’t always line up with our nouns.  Tenses don’t always match.  Like I just mentioned above, a lot of “spoken” English looks awful on the page.  And this makes some folks choke, because they can’t reconcile the words on the page with the voice in their head.  When I do this I lose that natural aspect of language in favor of the strict rules of grammar, and I end up with a lot of characters speaking in a precise, regulated manner that just doesn’t flow.
            Contractions– This is kind of a loosely-connected, kissing-cousins issue with the grammar one I just mentioned.  A lot of people start out writing this way because they’re trying to follow all the rules of spelling and punctuation so they write out every word and every syllable.  They want to write correctly!
            Again, most of us use contractions in every day speech—scientists, politicians, professors, soldiers, everyone.  It’s in our nature to make things quick and simple.  Without contractions, dialogue just sounds stilted and wooden.  If there’s a reason for someone to speak that way (ESL, robots, Sherlock Holmes, what have you), then by all means do it.  If my characters are regular, native English-speaking mortals, though…
            As a bonus, using contractions also drops my word count and page count.
            On The Nose—Okay, in simple terms, this is when a character says exactly what they’re thinking without any subtlety whatsoever.  It’s the difference between “Hey, do you want to come up for a cup of coffee?” and “Would you like to come up and have sexual relations in my living room right now?”  There’s no inference or implications, no innuendoes or layered meanings—no subtlety at all.  And the truth is, we’re always layering meaning into what we say.
            Pro tip—I’d guess nine times out of ten, if a character’s talking to themselves out loud, it’s on the nose dialogue.  It just works out that way.  I’d guess that at least half the time it’s just exposition (see below). 
            Similarity– People are individuals, and we’ve all got our own unique way of speaking.  People from Californiadon’t talk like people from Maine(I’ve lived almost two decades in each state, I know), people living in the twelfth century don’t talk like people from the fortieth, and uneducated idiots don’t speak like innovative quadruple-doctorate holders. 
            My characters need to be individuals as well, with their own tics and habits that make them distinct from the people around them.  If a reader can’t tell who’s speaking without seeing the dialogue headers… I might need to get back to work.
            Let me follow this with a few specifics…
            Humor—Here’s a basic fact of human nature.  We make jokes at the worst possible times.  Breakups.  Office reviews.  Funerals.  It’s just the way we’re wired.  The more serious the situation, the more imperative that release valve is for us.  In fact, we kinda get suspicious or uneasy around people who never crack jokes.  Not everyone and not at every moment, but when there’s no joking at all… it just feels wrong.
            Plus, how we joke says something about us.  Does someone make non-stop raunchy jokes?  Do they have a dry sense of humor?  A completely awful sense of humor.  Do they have any sense of when it is and isn’t appropriate to tell a certain joke?

            Flirting—Similar to humor in that it’s almost universal.  We show affection for one another.  We flirt with friends and lovers and potential lovers, sometimes even at extremely inopportune times.  It’s not always serious, it can take many forms, but that little bit of playfulness and innuendo is present in a lot of casual dialogue exchanges. 
            Flirting is a lot like joking because it’s impossible to flirt with on the nose dialogue.  Flirting requires subtlety and implied meanings.  Flirting without subtlety sounds a lot more like propositioning, and that gives a very different tone to things.  If nobody in my story ever flirts with anyone on any level, there might be something to consider there.
            Profanity—another ugly fact of human nature.  We make emphatic, near-automatic statements sometimes.  We throw out insults.  How we swear and respond to things says something about us.  Phoebe does not swear like Wakko, and Phoebe doesn’t swear in front of Wakko the same way she swears in front of her mother.  Or maybe she does.  Either way, that’s telling us something about her and making her more of an individual.
            Fun fact—profanity is regional.  The way we swear and insult people here is not how they do it there.  So this can let me give a little more depth to characters and make them a bit more unique.

            Accents– Speaking of regional dialogue…  Writing in accents is a common rookie writer issue.  I made it a bunch of  times while I was starting out, and still do it now and then.  There are a handful of pro writers out there who can do truly amazing accented dialogue, yeah, but keep that in mind—only a handful.  The vast majority of the time, writing out accents and odd speech tics will drive readers and editors nuts. 
            I usually accent by picking out just one or two key words or sentence structures and making these the only words I show it with.  Just the bare minimum reminders that the character has an accent.  Like most character traits, my readers will fill in the rest.
            Weird note—this can become odd with audiobooks, because the narrator will most likely add an accent of some sort to differentiate the character. So the most subtle of written accents can almost become an uncomfortable stereotype once they’re combined.  Another reason to think about dialing things back.
            Extra descriptors—I’ve mentioned once or thrice that said is pretty much invisible on the page.  But it can still wear thin.  I don’t always need to use it, because after a point it should be apparent who’s talking.
            Plus with less words, dialogue gets leaner and faster.  Tension builds in the exchanges because the reader isn’t getting slowed down by ongoing reminders of who’s talking.
            Not only that, once I’ve got some of these speech patterns down for my characters, I should need descriptors even less.  In my book, Dead Moon, Tessa’s dialogue could almost never get confused with Cali’s or Jake’s or Waghid’s.  They’re all distinct, and their speech patterns identify them just as well as a header would.

            Names—If I don’t need them around the dialogue, I need them even less in the dialogue.  Pay attention the next time you’re on the phone with someone.  How often do they use your name?  How often do you use theirs?  Heck, if my friends call my cell phone I know who it is before I even answer—and they know I know—so I usually just say “Hey, what’s up?”  We don’t use our names, and  we definitely don’t use them again and again in the same conversation.
            Spoken names can also come across as a bit fake.  It’s me acknowledging the audience may be having trouble keeping track, and throwing in a name is the easiest way to deal with it, rather than the best way.  Remember, if I’ve got two characters who’ve been introduced, it’s really rare that they’ll need to keep using each other’s names.  Especially if they’re the only ones there.
            Monologues– Here’s another observation.  We don’t talk for long.  People rarely speak in long paragraphs or pages.  We tend to talk in bursts—two or three sentences at best.  There’s always rare exceptions, sure, but for the most part we get our ideas out pretty quickly (if not always efficiently)
            When I have big blocks of dialogue, I should really think about breaking them up.  Is this person just talking to themselves (see above)?  Is nobody there to interrupt them with a counterpoint or question or a random snarky comment?  Is my monologue necessary?  Does it flow?  Is this a time or situation where Yakko should be giving a four paragraph speech?
            A good clue when examining a monologue–how many monologues have there already been.  One script I read a while back for a screenwriting contest had half-page dialogue blocks on almost every page.  If I’m on page forty-five and this is my fifth full-page monologue… odds are something needs to be reworked.
            I also shouldn’t try to get around this with a “sounding board” character who’s just there to bounce things off.  Talking is communication, which means it has to be a two-way street.  If I’ve got somebody who serves no purpose in my story except to be the other person in the room while someone thinks out loud… they’re not really serving a purpose.
            Cool lines  Our latest ugly truth–everything becomes mundane when there’s no baseline.  If everyone on my mercenary team is two hundred pounds of swollen muscle… who’s the big guy?  When everyone owns a seven-bedroom mansion, owning a seven-bedroom mansion doesn’t really mean anything.  If anybody can hit a bull’s-eye at 100 yards out, then hitting  a bull’s-eye isn’t all that impressive, is it?
            The same holds for dialogue.  We all want to have a memorable line or three that sticks in the reader’s mind forever.  The thing is, they’re memorable because they stand out.  They’re rare.  If I try to make every line a cool line, or even most of them, none of them are going to stand out.  When everything’s turned up to eleven, it’s all at eleven– it’s monotone.
            Exposition—Remember being a kid in school and being bored by textbook lectures or filmstrips that talked to you like you were an idiot?  That’s what exposition is like to my readers.
            Use the Ignorant Stranger as a guideline and figure out how much of my dialogue is crossing that line. If any character ever gives an explanation of something that the other characters in the room already should know (or my readershould know), cut that line. If it’s filled with necessary facts, find a better way to get them across.
            “As you know…” – I’ve said this before, but… if you take nothing else from this rant, take this.  I need to find every sentence or paragraph in my writing that starts with this phrase or one of it’s halfbreed cousins. 
            Once I’ve found them, I need to delete them.  Gone.  Destroyed.
            This is probably the clumsiest way to do exposition there is.  Think about it.  A character saying “As you know”  is openly acknowledging the people they’re talking to already know what’s about to be said.  I’m wasting time, I’m wasting space on the page, and I’m wasting my reader’s patience.    If I’ve got a rock-solid, lean-and-mean manuscript, I might be able to get away with doing this once.  Just once.  As long as I don’t do it my first ten pages or so.  Past that, I need to get out my editorial knife and start cutting.
            What is that, fifteen tips? Here’s one more for a nice, hexadecimal sixteen.
            You’ve probably heard someone suggest reading your manuscript out loud to catch errors and see how things flow.  Personally, while I think this works great for catching errors, it’s not as good for catching dialogue issues.  We wrote these lines, so we know how they’re supposed to sound and what they’re supposed to convey.  There’s a chance we’ll be performing what’s not on the page, if that makes sense.
            So if you can stand to listen… get someone else to read it out loud.  Maybe just a chapter or two.  Let a friend or family member who doesn’t know it read it out loud and see what they do with it.
            And there you have it.  A big pile of tips which should help your dialogue seem a little more real.  Fictional-real, anyway.  Not real-real.
            Next week… I think it may be time to talk about superheroes.
            Until then, go write.
April 6, 2017 / 1 Comment

Can You Describe the Suspect?

            So, a friend of mine gave me a book a while back…
            Okay, gave might be the wrong word.  I think she got rid of the book and I happened to be the unlucky recipient, like a bottle imp or that sexually-transmitted monster in It Follows.  She needed it out of her life, I just happened to conveniently be there at the right time. It was nothing personal.
            Anyway…
            The first page of the book was nothing but exposition about the main character’s backstory. Exquisite, laboriously crafted, meticulous exposition.  Where she grew up. How she grew up. Facts about her mother, father, and brother. 
            Page two was her life as a child, a teen, and a blossoming adult.  Favorite toys, sports, and fashions.  Random crushes. Assorted adventures.
            Page three was the college years.  Classes she liked and didn’t. Boys she liked and didn’t.  Women she liked and didn’t.  Intellectual growth, sexual discovery, more fashion, and a tiny bit of body modification which would lead to arguments with her parents.
            Page four was after college. The new job. New fashions.  Being an amateur athlete. Competing in the office and out on the street. Getting better. Moving up the ladder, seeing big things in her future at the job and the sport.
            Page five was the accident. The long, drawn out accident.  Gruesome details of it as it happened.  More gruesome details as doctors took drastic action to prevent further damage.  Some of this spilled onto page six.
            Most of six and seven were recovery. Coming to terms with her new life.  Depression. Self loathing.  Breaking up with Chris.  Purging everything that reminded her of who and what she used to be. Getting rid of so many favorite clothes and shoes.  Won’t be needing shoes anymore. More sulking and self loathing.
            On page eight— we introduced the next character.
            By sheer coincidence, page eight is also where I stopped reading.
            Seven pages of long, rambling sentences showing off an impressive vocabulary, but all of it telling the story, not one line of it showing anything.  Nothing actually happened, I just got told a bunch of stuff that had happened in the past.  There wasn’t even any dialogue in all of that.  None.  After all the clothes talk, I could probably tell you how many days the main character’s bra and underwear matched, but I didn’t have the slightest clue what kind of voice she had.  Or anyone around her.
            Hell, you probably started skimming all that, right?  And that was just me describing what the book was describing.
            A common problem for all writers is when description gets too excessive.  I get caught up in giving all the details and nuances of this person I fleshed out in my character sketch.  Or mentioning every detail of that period furniture and firearms I spent three days researching.  Or maybe just taking all those little things I noticed on my hike through the woods and putting every one of them down on the page.
            And at some point, while I’m pouring all this magnificent stuff out, I lose track of the fact that somebody’s going to have to read all this.  And since most readers are more interested in the plot and story–the active elements of my writing—odds are they’re going to start skimming after the fourth or fifth flowery description they’ve come to realize has no bearing on the story
            So, maybe I should question why I’m including stuff my readers are just going to gloss over. Most semi-decent storytellers would.  Alfred Hitchcock once said that drama is life with all the dull bits cut outElmore Leonard said he leaves out all the parts people would skip anyway.
            Excessive description that serves no purpose… serves no purpose.  That’s all there is to it.  And, no, “art” isn’t a purpose.  If I’m going to spend seven pages describing Phoebe’s wardrobe through the first twenty-six years of her life, everything that happens in the rest of the book better hinge on those clothing choices.
            (Bonus tip–this kind of overwriting is deadly in scripts.  By its very nature, screenwriting is a very concise, minimal form of storytelling.  A sure way to get rejected from a contest is to put in piles of description that just shouldn’t be there.)
            Now, I’d like to mention another issue with massive over-description.  We all tend to form our own mental pictures of people and objects in stories.  My lovely lady and I were chatting once about Jack Reacher, the Lee Child character, and realized we both had very different ideas about what he looked like.  I get notes from people all the time about how this cover got Stealth wrong or Cerberus doesn’t look like that.
            That’s part of the joy of books.  We can all have our own image of characters like Stealth or James Stark or Kincaid Strange or Sinjir Rath Velus.  In that little movie theater inside our skulls, they have a certain look and sound that’s special just to us.  And nothing’s more distracting than to be constantly reminded of all the many details that don’t match up with that mental picture we’ve already formed.
            Okay, one last thing…
            There’s a flipside to description, and that’s when I never actually describe anything.  Sometimes this is an attempt to invoke mystery or suspense.  Other times it’s a way to evoke an emotional response with a clever metaphor or simile (when the knife sinks into your gut and it’s like every painful sensation in your life got balled up, hammered flat, and pushed up under your ribs). 
            And sometimes… well, sometimes it’s just a cheat.  I can try to avoid the monster for as long as possible, which helps build suspense and dread, but eventually I need to say what it is.  It’s not uncommon for a writer to try to find a way around an actual description at this point.  After all, I’ve been talking about how fantastic the Hypotheticoid is for three-quarters of the manuscript now, and my description of it may not live up to all that hype.
            But I still need to describe it.
            So, here’s an easy tip.  It’s so easy I bet half of you will shake your head and ignore it.  And some of you are probably already doing this without thinking about it.
            If I’m going to describe something… I need a reason to describe it.  That’s all. I need a reason for the level of detail I’m using.  The cashier at WalMart and a medical examiner can both see a bullet hole in a person’s head, but they’re both going to view it very differently.  And if it takes me three paragraphs to explain what the cashier sees, what am I going to need for the medical examiner?
            If I’m going to describe a character, I should have a reason for doing it.  I can’t describe the last police officer I dealt with, but I can give a lot of details about the last few people I went out to dinner with.  I’m betting nobody here can list everyone they crossed paths with the last time they were in a grocery store.  Oh, one or two might stand out, but let’s face it… there were probably dozens of people there.  
            And they just weren’t important in the long run.  
            Y’see, Timmy, if I waste my descriptions on the little things, they won’t have any weight when I get to the big things.  Because by then my readers will already be conditioned to skim my descriptions because they don’t matter.  And once readers are just skimming…
            Well, then I’ve got nothing.
            Now go write.

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