The Pace Car

September 5, 2015 / 2 Comments

The Pace Car

Okay, first off, I’m afraid I need to have a shameful self-promotional moment. The Ex-Heroes series is Amazon’s Kindle deal of the month. You can pick up digital copies of all four books for less than ten dollars. So… there’s that.

And now, moving on to our actual topic of the week…

Last week I gave some more-or-less quick answers to a couple questions and requests folks had left here on the ranty blog. This week I wanted to address one in particular that was worth a little more space.

So… here we go.

I’d love to hear your thoughts on plotting and pacing. I’m struggling with knowing when to do what plot elements so things don’t drag and so they seem natural, and don’t feel like the story is on rails.
Okay, this is another tough one because every story is going to have its own specific pace.

One of the reasons a lot of folks end up worrying about this, in my opinion, is because of an often misunderstood writing rule that gets thrown at them all the time—start with action! There’s a bunch of problems with this statement, many of which I’ve talked about before, but one key one is that it gives people a very skewed view of pacing. If my story starts cranked up to eleven, it’s hard to make anything feel urgent after that point. And if it doesn’t start at eleven, well, why is anyone going to keep reading, right?

Part of this is about dramatic structure, knowing where things should happen in my story for maximum impact. It’s also about compressing time so things don’t sprawl. Yeah, maybe four hours passed while Wakko was pulling his turn standing watch, but do I really need eight pages of him standing around doing… well, nothing?

I think that’s one of the biggest problems when people have “pacing issues.” It’s not whether or not my chapter is slow or fast, if it’s filled with action or dialogue or inner monologues. It’s about whether or not anything’s actually happening. When my story come to a grinding halt, it’s not because I’ve got characters doing research instead of kung-fu… it’s because the story’s come to a grinding halt. It’s stopped moving forward.

A good way to check pacing is to go through my story and ask myself this—what purpose does this element/ scene/ chapter have in the overall story? Is it forwarding the plot? Is it forwarding a character’s story? If it doesn’t do either of these things… why am I spending time on it? As William Goldman said in The Princess Bride, “What with one thing and another, three years passed.”

Speaking of famous screenwriters, Shane Black once made a great observation about what he called “shoe leather” scenes in scripts. If I have a scene where two guys are having a conversation and anotherscene where there’s a key news story on the television… why aren’t they the samescene? A good part of storytelling is trying to accomplish two things at once rather than spreading things so thin they’re see-through. It’s great to have a character scene, sure, but maybe those character moments could also advance the plot somehow. I really want to use a lot of this research material, but could it advance someone’s story?

Y’see, Timmy, if I’m lucky and somewhat skilled, my audience might let me have one scene that doesn’t really do anything. Maybe two. But pushing it to a third means my story is dragging, and four is going to get eyerolls.

Now, all that being said (yep, there’s always a however), there is still one thing to keep in mind for pacing. Every story is going to start slow and pick up speed, yes. And all those stories are going to be moving at their own pace. I need to be careful, though, when I try to slow things down, for whatever reason. If you’ve ever driven a car with a manual transmission (or know of such things), you’ve probably heard the term downshifting. It’s when I shift into a lower gear to help with slowing down (you’ve probably seen James Bond do it a few times). It’s one thing to go from fifth gear to fourth, it’s something else entirely to go from fifth down to second. Odds are that’ll going to leave parts of my transmission (read—story) scattered behind me, possibly on fire.

So if my story involves a lot of zero-to-sixty-to-ten-to ninety-to-fifteen pacing—yes, even though it’s still technically moving forward—I may want to rethink a few things. And if it doesn’t involve any forward motion…

Well, I may need to rethink a lot of things.

Next time, I’d like to talk about how Darth Vader killed Luke Skywalker’s father.

Until then… go write.

March 6, 2015 / 3 Comments

Moor Vocabulary Mistakes

Many thanks for your patience. Hope you enjoyed the photo tips while I was off doing other things.

Speaking of which, I gave you all the chance to suggest a topic for this week and nobody did. So you all know what that means…

It means I’m going to ramble on about spelling and vocabulary again.

Hey, don’t blame me.

A few times in the past I’ve talked about how a good working vocabulary is the most basic part of a writer’s tool chest. But I realized today that’s not really true. Well, not so much that it isn’t true, but that it’s a poor metaphor.

A much better way to put is that vocabulary is my raw material. It’s my concrete. My brick and mortar. It’s going to be the foundation of everything I build on the page, supporting all the weight of my clever ideas and images.

Now, that being said…

It doesn’t take a lot of construction experience to know the foundation of a structure is very important, and the materials I use to make that foundation is just as important. I’m willing to bet you’ve probably seen a pothole or two because the contractor who built the road used sand as a base instead of gravel. The sand’s much cheaper and they work exactly the same… until it rains. I once saw some fast-cheap condos getting built in San Diego and they were using 1x3s for all the interior walls instead of 2x4s. It’s all wood, right?

But those are the easy ones to point out. Anyone can see the difference between sand and gravel at a glance. The really dangerous mistakes happen when people can’t tell the difference at all. Balsa wood could pass for pine from a few feet away, but they hold up very differently under pressure (there’s a reason one gets used for houses and the other gets used for model planes). Concrete and cement may look similar, but they’re two very different materials and not interchangeable at all.

Heck, I read a big article once about the science of bricks. It was a huge advancement when people began to realize the correct ratios and heating time bricks needed. Bricks went from lumps of dried mud to man-made rocks, and human construction leaped forward—from wattle-and-daub huts to cities and pyramids, just like that.

If I use the wrong material, or the wrong ratios, it’s a recipe for disaster. We’re not just talking potholes. This can be a structural-collapse level problem. Cracks in foundations. Walls coming down. Buildings crumbling.

As a writer, words are what we use to make our foundations. They’re what holds everything up. I can have the most amazing imagery, the most brilliant metaphor, the most mind-blowing plot twist, but if the wards I’m basing it on aren’t spilled rite, or jest the wrong words, no won is gong to rake it seriously.

See what I mean? You laughed a little bit at that last sentence, didn’t you? Maybe not out loud, but it got a reaction from you. And it wasn’t the reaction the rest of the paragraph was leading you to, was it? The whole point I was trying to make got brushed aside because you were knocked out of the flow of reading and started focusing on the mistakes.

And laughing at them.

I don’t want my amazing imagery blown because I used the wrong word. I don’t want a reader to skim over my mind-blowing plot twist because I wrote they’re instead of their. And I really don’t want an editor or agent putting my manuscript in that big pile on the left because my brilliant metaphor on page five is making me look like… well, like I don’t know the raw materials of the trade.

Of course, part of the problem here is that a lot of writers depend too much on their spellcheckers to do the work for them. See, I didn’t call those words up above spelling mistakes—they’re all spelled right. Even in the title. They’re just all the wrong words. It’s a case of cement where I needed concrete, and neither the writer nor the spellchecker knew the difference.

Well, okay, I knew the difference. I did that to prove a point. But it’s bothersome how many times I see things like this slip by people.

In fact, here’s a list of all the things like this I’ve seen slip past people. The word they used… and the word they meant to use. Some were getting paid for it. Others thought they should be getting paid. Or getting paid more.

Do you know what all of these words mean?

diffuse vs. defuse – You can only do one with perfume.
knew vs. new – The irony on this one was painful…
bred vs. bread – One of these should not involve children.
break vs. brake – I only want to do one of these with my car.
retch vs. wretch – Only one of these is a poor bastard.
fare vs. fair – The taxi driver only cares about one of these.

instill vs. install – Only robots use both of these for emotions.
drought vs. draught – Only one involves a lack of water.
heroin vs. heroine – Two very different things to be hooked on.
breath vs. breathe – One is a verb, one is a noun.
hoard vs. horde – I can only fit one of these in my house.
cologne vs. colon – I don’t like the smell of one of these.

eminent vs. imminent – The Pope is one of these.
drivel vs. dribble – All these rants only count as one of these.
prosecution vs. persecution – One only happens in court.
prophesy vs. prophecy – Only one gets written down
your vs. you’re – If you get this one wrong, you have to leave.
incite vs. insight – Only one of these is usually granted.

juts vs. just – This is sloppy. Just sloppy
palate vs. palette – Only one is for food and drink.
palette vs. pallet – Only one is for packaged food and drink
patients vs. patience – Gregory House only had one of these.
healed vs. heeled – One of these can refer to money.

Full disclosure, I screwed up with one of these (but caught it in my last draft before it went to my editor). Another one I found in a friend’s proof I was reading for a blurb. And another was in a self-published book (actually, three of them are from that book). There’s also a few from some entertainment websites, lengthy blog posts, and other places where people claimed they knew how to use these raw materials.

Now, I’m not saying your spelling has to be 100% perfect. To save time, it won’t be. We all make typos. When we’re in the zone, we’ve all thought one thing and written another. But when someone comes across multiple mistakes of this type… well, they start to laugh and shake their head. I know I do. You just did, too, up above.

That’s why it’s so very important for a writer to know what words mean and how to spell them. It’s why I need to take the time to go over my manuscript—me, not my spellchecker—and make sure all the words I’m using are the right ones.

Because I will never, ever get ahead if the main response people have to my work is to laugh at my inability to use raw materials.

Next time… I’d like to talk about putting a stop to things.

Until then, go write.

flow spelling typos vocabulary

January 30, 2015 / 2 Comments

What’s In Your Arsenal?

Y’know, while I was pulling links for this post, I realized something kind of amazing (and I’m glad I caught it). This is the 300th time I’ve posted on this page. Three hundred ranty posts about characters and dialogue and spelling and structure. Wow.

            I’m kind of surprised we’re all still here.
            But let’s get back to it…
            Odd fact—I’ve probably fired more types of handguns and rifles than anyone reading this. You might be a firearm enthusiast, you might be former military, you might be in the military now… but there’s a very good chance I’ve got you beat. I once compared notes with an Army weapons specialist and it turned out I could name almost twice as many firearms than him that I’d used, including a few obscure ones he’d never even heard of.

The reason why I can do this is all my time in the film industry. With the different procedural and crime shows I worked on, it was very common to have a new murder weapon every week, along with a red herring weapon and possibly some random thug weapons as well. Pistols, shotguns, rifles, bolt action, lever action, pump, semi-auto, full-auto… And every one of these that was actually used on screen had to be test fired by me and then by the actors.

Even with some common weapons repeating, over the course of fifteen years… I fired a lot of weapons.

Now, with all that being said, even though I’ve worked with a ton of weapons, I would never consider myself any kind of marksman. Definitely not a sniper. Because there is much, much more to being good with weapons then just being able to pull a trigger. An AK-47 might seem like a ticket to badass-dom, but not if I don’t know how to load it. Or hold it. Or turn the safety off. I’ve heard some great (and kind of awful) stories from soldiers about gunfights with people who don’t know how their own weapons work.

I bet a few folks reading this have an acquaintance who buys nothing but the most expensive, top-of-the-line tools yet still can’t put an IKEA bookshelf together. Most of us have heard stories about some guy who spends a quarter-million on a car and then wrecks it within a week because “the car outperformed the driver.” Heck, we’ve all seen proof that giving a director access to grade-A actors and millions in film technology is absolutely no guarantee of a decent movie.

Y’see, Timmy, having high-level tools doesn’t automatically make me skilled. They’re two entirely different things. Sure, I can keep jabbing at that bookshelf with my $300 DeWalt Max XR 20 volt hammer drill, but if I just need to tap in a few finishing nails it’s not going to help much. And the parts the drill would actually work for… well, a Phillips head screwdriver would do the same job. It might even work better, all things considered. DeWalt’s are great, but they can kind of suck when you need to work in tight spaces.

Anyway… where am I going with this?

I’d like to share something with you. As I’ve mentioned once or thrice before, I used to work on a text-based online game, what some of you might know as a MUD. Because it was text-dependent, it was a chance for some people to really show off their skills. Or complete lack thereof. A friend of mine still works there and sometimes she shares things with me.

So, check out this sentence…

(names have been changed to protect the horribly guilty)

“Lashes aflutter like the wings of a satin bird, Phoebe sets glaukosphaerite lagoons on the newcomer, a smirk glissading across twin folds.”

WTF…

Now, I was going to try to sift through this sentence and break down all the places it went wrong. To be honest, I did. And I had a page and a half of notes, which is a lot more negativity than I want to have here. So, instead, let me break all of that down into four simple rules for your writing arsenal.

And yes, these would be rules, not advice.

Know what words mean—It doesn’t matter how much my reciprocal saw cost if I keep trying to use it as a butter knife. An elephant gun is not a sidearm. And diffuse and defuse mean two entirely different things.

This is the most important of these rules. If I want to make my living with words, I need to know them intimately. Not more or less what they mean or a general idea of how they’re used. I cannot say words are the tools of my trade and then get repeatedly stumped by vocabulary questions on Jeopardy!. I’ve been doing this for many years, full time for over eight now, and I still pick up the dictionary once or thrice a week to make sure I’m using a given word correctly. Because I have to know what they mean.

This is also one of the worst rules to get wrong because it’s a mistake that’s hard to catch. I won’t catch it because, well, I don’t know I’m using the word wrong. My computer won’t catch it, because computers are idiots and will only tell me if a word’s spelled right, not if it’s being used correctly. Which means the readers will probably be the ones to catch it… and it won’t give them a good opinion of my skills as a writer.

Don’t overcomplicate—Stephen King once said that any word you go looking for in the thesaurus for is the wrong word. I’ve mentioned a few different versions of this rule at one time or another. I’m not saying my writing can’t have some clever bits to it, but I should never confuse (or equate) overcomplicating my writing with complexity in my writing.

If I have metaphors for metaphors (like using lagoons instead of pools because I don’t want to use eyes), I am pushing my audience away from reading and into analysis. This is the kind of thing that destroys the flow of my writing. And that’s the kind of thing that gets my writing set aside in favor of something else.

Know how things go together—Remember that AK-47? It’s not going to be half as effective after I force a lot of shotgun shells into the magazine. They’re two powerful items that do not work well together.

People can’t read my sentences if they don’t understand my sentences. That “descriptive”sentence up above arguably has five completely different similes and metaphors. It’s spinning in multiple directions. This is when things go past overcomplicated and into full-on incomprehensible. I need to have a firm understanding of the individual parts, how they’ll be perceived, and how they’ll work as a whole.

Know what words mean—Did I mention this one already? Well, it’s probably worth mentioning again. It is the most important of these rules after all. And the one most people will ignore, because I need to be able to admit I don’t know stuff before I can learn new stuff.

Have a big arsenal of words because you need it and you can use it. Not just because you think it makes you look cool. I can spend twenty minutes looking up glaukosphaerite and making sure it’s spelled correctly (because it won’t be in the spellchecker), but I could also just use green and then finish this whole page in that same amount of time.

And more people would understand what I was trying to say.

Next time, I wanted to tell you about something I’ve felt for a while now…

Until then, go write.

adjectives adverbs empathy flow king M'Dhoria relevance spelling vocabulary

December 8, 2014 / 2 Comments

There Are Those Who Call Me…

So very sorry about missing last week. I was juggling a few things, time slipped away from me, and suddenly it was Saturday and somebody hadn’t updated things here. Past me, I’ve discovered, can be a real lazy bastard sometimes.

To make up for this, I’m going to do two shorter posts and put them both up this week. Just some quick, easy tips. I’m sure future me won’t mind writing them.

Not this Doug

Anyway…

I read a book a while ago about a character named Doug. Good solid name. That’s how the book referred to him. Doug.

Except to his parents. They were only in the first two chapters, and they called him Douglas. But even then, he thought of himself as Doug and that’s what he was called for the rest of the book.

Although every now and then he was “the short guy” or “the short man” to break things up a bit. Which is understandable. Using someone’s name over and over and over again gets boring fast. So once or twice on a page he’d be the short guy. Or the short man.
Except… there was a character, Jay, who’d been friends with Doug for years, and whenever they spoke Jay would always refer to Doug as “wingman.” “Hey, wingman, grab me a drink while you’re up.”

Except… there was another character, an older one, who had met Doug briefly years ago (a friend of his parents). At the time, Doug had been four and playing in a mud puddle. So this guy kept referring to Doug as “the dirty kid.” “Hey, dirty kid, what’s up?” “The dirty kid said you might stop by.”

Now, it’s understandable why people do this. Over the course of our lives, most of us accumulate a number of names and nicknames and titles. Most of my friends call me Pete, but I have a fair amount who call me Peter, as do most folks who don’t know me as well. There’s also a bunch of family terms (son, brother, uncle, cousin) that different people use for me. There’s also a number of folks who just refer to me by my last name. For almost fifteen years I was regularly called Peter Props. An early experiment with facial hair had a few mindless jocks referring to me as Goat-boy for a year of high school. Heck, a woman in my college fencing class started calling me Hamlet and stuck with it for the whole time I knew her.

And there are more names past that. We all end up with them. That’s just life.

But we’re not talking about real life. We’re talking about fiction. Two different animals. I’d never use all these names consistently for myself, or for a character in one of my stories. This is a variation on a problem I’ve mentioned before, usually in regards to screenwriting–the dump truck. It’s a ton of names that I’m throwing at the reader for no real reason. That’s just going to get confusing, and confusion breaks the flow.

Think of Agents of SHIELD, where many characters have codenames (the Cavalry, Mockingbird, Hawkeye). Nine times out of ten, though, if a name is used, it’s just their given one (Melinda May, Bobbi, Clint). Because it’s less confusing that way. It’s the same in my Ex-Heroes books, where everyone has secret identities.

Y’see, Timmy, it’s okay to reference some of these things, but they shouldn’t be fighting with the name I’ve chosen to use for my character. I may have a rich history written up for my character Eli, which includes a few names he’s collected, but I’m only going to use what’s relevant for my story.

Next time, this Thursday, I shall continue things at this fast clip.

Until then… well, come on. You should know by now.

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