Category: flow

Holy crap, things have been a mess for me. Copyedits on two different projects and notes on two other projects. My mom visiting. Me getting sick. My partner getting really sick. My beloved Goblin needed eye surgery, with two appointments leading up to that. Oh, crap, and WonderCon was in there too.

And meanwhile, the ranty writing blog sits neglected for almost two months. Unloved. Gathering dust…

Yes. Very sad. Anyway…

I got a request on an older rant about two months back, so I’m going to skip my planned topic and answer that. Because I read all the comments. And I answer all the questions. Plus let’s face it, it’s been so long you’ve forgotten what I’d said I was going to talk about anyway, didn’t you?

Jared wanted to know–

“How do you handle a character ‘thinking’ or carrying on with an inner monologue? With my current story my main character has a good bit of that going on and I seem to be stuck on treating it like regular dialogue. Does that take your reader out of a story?”

Okay. This is going to be a bit loose on hard facts because there’s a few different ways to approach this and there’s no right way to do something in fiction. I think there’s definitely wrong ways to do thing, but they’re pretty few and far between. Usually. Some people are very creative.

To begin, how we do thoughts in fiction depends a lot on what format our story’s taking. F’r example…

In first person, the narrative is essentially already in my character’s head. In a way, everything is their thoughts. The whole story. So even when there’s no dialogue, we’re aware that it’s still the character’s voice and viewpoint. Just like this. None of this is written as dialogue, and you understand I’m not speaking, but at the same time you also immediately understand all of this is my thoughts about writing. So in first person, I don’t have to do anything special to signify my characters thoughts because… well, it’s all thoughts. Done.

Plus side, thoughts in first person are very easy. Down side, it’s a little trickier for the character to surprise us because… well, we know what they’re thinking. And it can feel a bit cheaty if they suddenly don’t think of something. I’ve read books where, in chapter thirty, we find out the character did a bunch of stuff in chapter twenty that they just… never mentioned? And never thought about.

If I was going to do something like this—and again, this is just me, it might not work for you—I’d probably do something to let my readers know the character did something while still leaving the question of, y’know, what exactly they did. Maybe something like–

I made three phone calls, sent a text message to Dot, and then I went out to meet Mendoza and get my cat back.

Also, another big thing I need to keep track of in first person (in my opinion) is if this is a present tense or past tense story. Is my character having these thoughts and observations in real time, so to speak, or are they remembering past events and the thoughts they had then (with whatever additional commentary that might involve)? This’ll require a distinction between the thoughts “at the time” and the present day thoughts. Again, maybe something like–

I remember staring at him, thinking there was no way Wakko could be this stupid. But as I was going to learn all too soon, he was way stupider that I possibly could’ve imagined.

Also, worth mentioning that if I’m not careful, this past-present view can sometimes lead to tricky situations of what my character knew when, which can also create some possibly cheaty situations (see above). But it could also lead to some very clever storytelling.

If I do it right.

Next there’s third person perspective. This tends to come in two forms—omniscient and limited. Omniscient is when we can see everything in the story, including what’s going on in people’s heads. Which means we can see in his head, but also her head, and also his head. Okay, maybe not his head. That might give too much away.

Although that brings up a good point we should address right out of the gate. Third person omniscient can sometimes lead to what my beloved calls head-hopping. It’s when the narrative gets a bit loose and goes from my thoughts to your thoughts to her thoughts over to his thoughts (no, wait, we said we weren’t showing his thoughts) and back to my thoughts. If that sentence was a little hard to follow… well, you see where I’m going with this. Once we’re jumping into the heads of multiple characters, we’ve essentially created the same situation as a multi-person conversation. Except here people could be thinking of… well, anything. I’m thinking about those new Monster Force action figures, you’re thinking about college tuition, she’s trying to figure out if someone killed the Viscountess Maria for the inheritance or for revenge, and he’s thinking about ha ha ha thought you were finally going to find out what he’s thinking about, weren’t you? Well you’re not. That’d spoil everything.

So first, you can see how confusing that would get. Second, when we start jumping around and seeing everyone’s thoughts… it kind of brings everything to a halt. Yes, thoughts happen very fast in our heads and yes I can make it clear they’re all happening at the same time, but my readers still have to work through that page (or more) waiting for the characters to start doing something again. And meanwhile that ninja cheerleader’s just hanging there in the air with her sword raised…

The other version of this is third person limited. This is what I tend to use in most of my books. Whole sections of the book are essentially done over the shoulder of one specific character and no one else. We only “see” things that happen around this character and their thoughts are the only ones we have access to. The book I finished two months ago is almost entirely limited to one character’s viewpoint except for half a dozen chapters near the end (why? You’ll find out next year, if all goes well).

(pause for deep breath)

Now, within these formats, there’s a few different things I could do if I wanted to distinguish thoughts from general narration

Which means it’s time to talk about the tilted elephant in the room. Italics.

For a long time italics were the standard format for my character is thinking this, but as of late… it feels like we’re not seeing it as much. I wouldn’t say it’s wrong, but it definitely feels like it’s going out of fashion. I know I’m not using it as much, although that might mean this whole paragraph is just my own style-bias leaking through. But I think if you skimmed through a few more recent books, you wouldn’t see a lot of italics for thoughts.

There’s nothing weird about this. Storytelling conventions fall in and out of style all the time. Something can be the standard for ages, someone comes up with a different way of doing it, and suddenly that becomes the new standard everyone uses. Like thought bubbles in comic books. Remember those?

I think there are a few reasons italics-as-thoughts have fallen a bit out of favor, but the big one is probably that… well, through the years, italics sort of became the fallback go-to for everything in printed text. Thinking? Italics. Foreign language? Italics. Book or movie title? Italics. Emphasis? Italics! Character who can transform into pure energy and speaks by energizing air molecules until they vibrate? Italics!

And all those italics on the page can get confusing as we’re trying to figure out what each one is signifying. It also creates a lot of odd situations if someone’s, say, thinking about a cool book they just read. Or speaking emphatically in a foreign language.

Also, it can look weird to have a big block of italics on the page if a character decides to have an extended inner monologue. Again, said as someone who put a lot of blocks of italics on the page for the Ex-Heroes books. It does weird things with spacing and leading, too.

All that said (italics for emphasis, not foreign language), if we’re not using italics to show thoughts we probably shouldn’t just use some other formatting. No bolds or underscores, small caps, other fonts, or anything like that. Word processors can let us do a lot of weird stuff on the page, but that doesn’t mean I need to do a lot of weird stuff on the page.

Also, please don’t use quotes (double or single) for thoughts. Remember when I said there are definitely wrong ways to do things? Well 99.98% of the time, using quotes for thoughts is the wrong way. I’ve seen a few folks try that and… wow. You wouldn’t believe how confusing it can get. Or how fast it gets there. I’m not saying it’s impossible to do but… well, I wouldn’t do it.

So what does this leave us with…?

Well, one option is what we could call direct thoughts. Treating thoughts just like dialogue, just without the quotation marks so it’s clear they’re not out loud. Essentially, just what we’d do with italics, but with no italics. Something like this…

I should grab something to eat before I head over to Phoebe’s, thought Wakko. Or maybe not. I’m not really that hungry.

If I want to do thoughts this way, a few things to maybe keep in mind. One is that I want to be clear where these thoughts are coming from, because that attribution is also going to help clarify that these are thoughts. I know in the past I’ve talked about trying to pare down dialogue tags, but in this situation… personally, I might lean into them a little harder. Just a bit. Especially if I’m using a POV where the reader could have access to a few characters thoughts.

Two would be that I’d probably set the thoughts apart from any significant amount of action. Sometimes with dialogue we’ll start with someone talking, describe an action or three they’re taking, and then finish off that paragraph with more dialogue. But since the thoughts don’t have any punctuation to set them off, it can be a bit confusing to go back to them. Me, I’d just give them their own paragraph to make sure readers don’t get knocked out of the story if they suddenly have to figure out where the action stops and the thoughts begin.

Another option is to use implied or maybe indirect thoughts. Yeah, I made that up, too. What I mean is, the narration can give us the sense of what Wakko’s thinking rather than word-for-word transcript of what’s going on inside Wakko’s head. This is what I tend to do most of the time in my books. For example…

Wakko considered grabbing something to eat before he headed over to Phoebe’s, but decided he wasn’t really that hungry.

See? Same thoughts as that example a little further up, we’re just a step back from them, so to speak. Or so to think. I feel like this method works with action a little better, too, so I don’t need to break it off in its own paragraph. And that makes for a smoother reading experience.

It’s also possible to use both of these methods. Seriously. They mesh fairly well. The same way we might use dialogue most of the time but then sometimes write something like– Yakko filled them in on the new clues he’d found. We can do that with thoughts too.

Oh, and one final idea about how to represent thoughts in a book. Maybe just… don’t. It’s a totally valid narrative decision to close off every character’s head and make the audience wonder what she’s thinking or what he’s wondering about or if they’re both thinking about the Roman Empire again or something silly like that. It might end up being a bit more challenging, but I think it can make for some really cool storytelling.

I’ll also add one more thing. Thoughts can be fun to write. That ongoing inner monologue, remembering this, figuring out that. It’s easy to fill a lot of pages with thoughts. But I want to be sure all these thoughts are advancing my plot or my story somehow. That’s it’s not just me, the author, twiddling my thumbs for three or four or ten pages. People will lose patience with that real quick, especially once they realize these little soliloquies (mental or spoken) don’t actually go anywhere.

And that’s all I’ve got for you on thoughts. Ultimately, like anything else– dialogue, action, descriptions—the important thing is I don’t want my method of telling the story to be disruptive for the audience. My readers shouldn’t be stumbling trying to figure out if a sentence was narration or inner monologue or spoken-out-loud dialogue. As long as they understand what they just read and it keeps the story going at the pace I want… it’ll be great.

I think it will, anyway.

Wow. I really babble on a lot here, didn’t I? This is what I meant when I said thinking can take up a lot of space on the page.

Well, next time, as I mentioned waaaaay back when, I was going to try to redeem myself for all these late posts (see, I said you wouldn’t remember). And I guess one way to do that is to give you another post on Friday. It’s my birthday this week, and—as I have in the past—I may use the day to offer some thoughts and advice about another aspect of this whole writing thing.

So until then… go write.

Hey, look! Lori made a request a few weeks back and we’re fulfilling that request. Because that’s how we roll here!

So, the question is details. How much is too much? How do you know if it’s not enough?

This won’t be great to hear but… this is pretty much impossible to answer. Mostly because writing is art and all art is subjective and a lot of the stuff we call “description” is a huge chunk of the art portion of this equation. Hypothesis? Theorem?

Anyway, my book isn’t going to be anything like your book. Your style isn’t going to be anything like my style. And we each probably have different ideas about how we want our respective stories to land. And that’s before we even touch on basic structure ideas, that different chapters and scenes are going to have different pacing and purposes and will need different levels of description and detail. Within the earlier restrictions I mentioned about our individual styles and all that.

Really filling you with confidence right now, aren’t I?

I thought about this a bit, and I think the best thing I can do is give you my own personal rules for how I tend to approach these things in my own writing. The sort of rules-of-thumb I use to decide if I spend a paragraph describing someone or something, or a full page, or maybe just half a sentence. And like any kind of writing advice, this is just what works for me, so it might not work for you. It definitely won’t work for that guy. But hopefully it’ll get you thinking and considering things in your own work…

So here’s my three guidelines for adding (or not adding) details/descriptions in my writing.

1) Are these details necessary

There’s an idea I’ve brought up once or thrice here before, Damon Knight’s information vs noise. Facts we don’t know are information. Facts we already know are noise. We like getting information and we pay attention to it. Noise is annoying, and we tend to ignore it whenever we can.

In my mind, describing objects, places, or processes that we all know is kind of a waste of my word count and the reader’s patience. Especially if these things aren’t somehow important to my plot or story. We all know what a smartphone looks like. And a grocery store. And how to pump gas. I don’t want to spend my precious words on things like this. I want to use them to describe the strange pendant that woman slipped into my pocket when she bumped into me. Or that alien in the middle of the road I might have just hit with my car.

What’s that in the back? Well, yeah, there are a lot of makes and models of phones out there. Very true. But honestly… how many of them look all that different, especially once they’re in a case? I mean, think of the BBC Sherlock with Benedict Cumberbatch. His smartphone was a huge part of his character and how he interacted with others, and the show itself changed how everyone does texting in television and movies.

Off the top of your head,…can you say if Sherlock’s phone was an Android or iPhone? You probably can’t because the truth is it’s completely irrelevant. It would’ve been a waste of time to make any sort of distinction.

In fact, as I’m scribbling this, I’d like to expand on the information/ noise idea a bit. I think the first few times we encounter obvious noise in a story, we tend to think there’s a reason for it. That the author has a purpose for describing something we’d otherwise consider not worth mentioning. I mean, they wouldn’t give us half a page of description of the waitress and give her a name if she wasn’t kind of important to the story, right? This has to be information. And that’s why this sort of thing can cause a lot of frustration, because at some point the readers realize the waitress is irrelevant and it doesn’t matter what kind of phone she uses and they’ve just been processing a lot of noise that isn’t necessary to the story.

Now, before anyone gets too grumpy, I want to move on to my next wishy-washy rule…

2) Do these details serve a purpose

A purpose? Wait, isn’t that what I was just saying? Am I having a stroke?

When I say a detail serves a purpose, I mean it might not be a necessary, integral part of my plot or story, but I still have a reason for including it. Maybe it’s helping me set the tone or the mood or it’s hinting at something about a character or location or an object. Whatever it is, if you asked I could explain the function of this bit of description.

For example, what color and model of car Yakko drives is probably irrelevant to my plot. It’s important that he has a car, but nothing hinges on him having, for example, an economy car vs a sports car. The reader could picture either and nothing would change in my story. But if I call it his fire-engine red midlife crisis on wheels? That’s giving you piles of extra information, isn’t it? It’s not necessary, but it serves a purpose.

A few key things here. First is word choice. Since I’m putting in this description for a reason, I should really make sure the words I choose push that purpose. Like with Yakko’s car. It could’ve just been a red sports car, but describing it the way I did told you it’s a red sports car and about Yakko, and about how I (or maybe the narrator?) want you to view him in this story.

Second is not to go overboard. It’s easy to describe more and more and more and come up with a rationalization for all of it. Like, if I want to show how wealthy someone is, I could give lush descriptions of every item in their office and it’d all fall nicely under the umbrella of “showing how wealthy they are.” But I could also probably do this by focusing on just one or two things– maybe that painting or the weird glass sculpture of.. whatever that is. Friggin’ modern art. Costs a bundle and I can’t tell if it’s supposed to be a flower or a naked woman or maybe it’s just a shape? I don’t know. Some people have money to burn, right?

I’ve got one more details guideline for you. I really think this is the most important thing about including details. If you want to ignore the last two things, fine, but please consider this one…

3) Are these details affecting the pacing

Almost universally, things are going to get faster and tenser as my plot and story progress. That’s just basic narrative structure. It picks up its pace as it moves along. And I want my readers to feel that quickening of events, that rise of tension. I want it to carry them along like a wave carries a surfer.

Description almost always brings things to a halt. It can’t be helped. In the real world we can actually see/ hear/ feel things and absorb all those details almost instantly, but on the page we have to write them out. A single glance can take four or five paragraphs to cover everything we saw.

This means it’s very easy for details to mess up my pacing. If things are moving at even a mild pace, one or two paragraphs of description can slow things down and knock us out of the story for a moment. If we’re near the end and things have really picked up speed, hitting even a few lines of excess description can be jarring. So I need to be careful about where and when I deploy them.

It’s my own personal style, but I’ve mentioned before that I like action (as in fists and guns and swords and car chases action) to feel like it takes about as long to read as it would take to happen. As close as possible, anyway. It doesn’t sell a blinding-fast martial arts fight to write out each strike, each block, each counter. Same with running in sheer terror from the monster in the woods, which has two primary horns on each side of its head, three smaller curled horns clustered around them, and a sort of ridged brow over each eye, which are a fiery red. These are times when–IMHO–pausing to add a lot of detail can really kill the pacing or tension. It knocks us out of the fast-paced flow of the moment and suddenly we’re standing around counting eyebrow ridges instead of running for our goddamned lives.

Also, overall, I feel it’s better to describe things earlier than later. The pacing should be slower in the beginning of a story, so it makes a brief pause here or there fit in better. Plus, it makes sense to describe things when we first see them (or when we eventually stop running away from them)

And again, there could always be an exception to this. There might be an all-new element in the third act that has to be described in detail. But really, if you think about it, structure kind of demands these things be rare. If I’m introducing a lot of necessary stuff in my third act… something may have gone wrong somewhere.

So that’s it. Those are the three ways I tend to screen my descriptions and details to figure out if they’re good, excessive, or just completely unnecessary. Hope they help a little.

And if you’ve got a question or a topic request, please let me know.

Next time here, I’d like to talk a little bit about one of our planet’s great philosophers, Ludwig Wittgenstein.

It’s going to be so much fun.

Until then, go write.

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.

At this point I’ve blabbed on about my weekend movie/Twitter habits more than a few times. I won’t bore you with them again. Just wanted to say that’s what inspired this week’s blathering.

I’ve mentioned once or twice before that there are some very standard shots in filmmaking. Decades—almost a century, really—of natural selection in the editing bay has established these as the solid basics. The foundation of a visual storytelling language we’ve all picked up on. Once you know these shots, you’ll spot them again and again and again in every show or movie you watch.

Of course, they’re not the only shots used in filmmaking. Some clever filmmakers figure out how to combine these basics with a push in or some other camera move, making what would be a static shot a little more dynamic at a key moment. Others may skip over one type of shot in a certain scene to heighten tension, or maybe to decrease it. And some figure out how to toss all of those shots and create something new that does the job they need done better than anything else could.

Which brings us, naturally, to cake.

I’ve mentioned growing up poor here once or thrice before. One aspect of this is we didn’t have treats in the house that much when I was a kid (or, y’know, food in general sometimes). So my mom was always looking for ways to save money and cut corners—a lot of stuff we’d call lifehacks today. One she stumbled across one time was a magazine article suggesting (you may have heard this one) mayonnaise in cake recipes instead of eggs and cooking oil. I mean, that’s what mayo is, right? Eggs and oil. My brother and I were highly skeptical and voiced our well-thought-out concerns (“Eeewwwwwwwww!”), but my mom tried it anyway.

Much to everyone’s surprise, it worked fine. The cake looked and tasted like… well, cake. We couldn’t even tell the difference. Granted, my palate was a little less refined back then, but to a generally picky kid who wanted chocolate cake… it was chocolate cake.

Here’s another fun cake story. I’m a big fan of German oatmeal cake. When I (finally) grew out of little kid basic-chocolate love, German oatmeal became my new favorite. And still is. My partner’s made it several times for my birthday, even when we were dirt poor and the whole thing was 99¢ Store mix and frosting. Since then she’s made it from scratch a few times, too.

But… it was never quite right. It wasn’t bad, by any means (and I always ate way more than I should’ve) but something about it didn’t quite line up with how I remembered it as a kid. And then this year she stumbled across a version of the recipe saying to broil the cake for a few minutes once it had been frosted, which would let the frosting melt, sink in, and even caramelize a tiny bit. And it was fantastic. It wasn’t bad before, but this alteration to the recipe made it so much better.

Of course, we all understand that these aren’t random choices. There’s a reason that mayo substitution trick works, but we couldn’t do the same thing with any condiment and expect the same results. Horseradish mustard in cake mix? I feel safe saying it’s not going to be all that tasty. Likewise, there’s a big difference between tweaking the recipe to broil the cake as opposed to, say, grilling it over an open flame. We definitely won’t get the same results.

And just because these results worked in cake doesn’t mean they’ll work anywhere else. This mayonnaise-for-eggs trick isn’t going to work if I’m trying to make an omelet. Definitely won’t work for steak tartar. Heck, I might not even be able to make it work in pancakes and they’re pretty close to being… well, cake.

Also worth noting.. the mayo cake wasn’t really any better. It wasn’t suddenly the best cake I’d ever had. As I mentioned, one of my few solid memories of this is all of us talking about how you couldn’t notice the difference at all. It just tasted like… cake. So –barring some weird dietary restrictions—it’s not really worth a new recipe. It’s just a good trick to remember if I happen to run out of eggs.

I’ve used cooking a few times before as a metaphor for writing, so hopefully at this point you’ve got a vague sense where I’m going with this.

There’s nothing wrong with trying new and different things. Really, it’s what we’re all trying to do, right? To find a new way of telling an old story, or a completely unexpected way to tell a new story. To solve those storytelling problems in a way nobody’s ever solved them before.

But the key point here is I want my new and different solutions to be better than the standard way of solving these problems. If I figure out a way to do something in my story—a trick with the structure, maybe a clever way of phrasing things, perhaps a very cool way to have a big reveal—and it works so much better than the standard way of doing it… I mean, that’s fantastic. I’ve improved on the original recipe, so to speak, and my end result is even better because of it

If I decide to do things in a new way and it works just the same as the old way, no better no worse, well… personally, I’m a little torn. I mean, it’s not like my new idea’s failing in any way, as far as the story itself is concerned. But I think—and this might just be me—that it’s distracting. Now I’m doing something different and there’s no real point to it except… to be different. I’m doing it just to do it, not to actually make the story better. And that seems—to me, anyway—like I’m trying to draw attention to myself (the author) rather than to my story.

And if my new way of doing things works worse than the old way… well, why would I do that? Why would I want a structure that makes the story much harder to follow? Why would I use phrases or formats that knock my readers out of the story? I mean, it’s (sort of) understandable I might be tempted to try chocolate-and-horseradish mustard cake, but hopefully I can be honest with myself about what came out of that oven and just, y’know, destroy it, rather than forcing the members of the culinary school admissions board to each try a slice.

Y’see, Timmy, people talk about how change is good, but there are times this phrase gets used as more of a defense than a reassurance. Yeah, it’s absolutely okay to try to change things and I shouldn’t worry about trying. But something isn’t automatically good just because it’s a change. Sometimes I’m changing things just to change them, and the only thing different about the final work is me yelling “I changed things!” And other times… well, it’s just bad. I’ve done something that didn’t work and didn’t get the response I wanted. I’ve pushed my reader away rather than drawn them in.

And that’s not going to get me any cake.

Next time… I don’t know. If nobody’s got any questions, maybe I’ll talk about spoilers or something.

Until then, go write.