Attribution

So I noticed something on my latest WiP (working titles A Madman's Mercy or Wrecking Ball): I'm most of the way through Act I and there's not a single bit of dialogue attribution. No 'he said' or 'she said', let alone 'whispered', 'shouted', 'muttered', 'growled' or any of the rest of it. It was an odd thing to notice.

This wasn't a conscious decision. I mean, I have definitely been moving away from the attributive excesses of my early work. In its recent rewrite, my first novel lost over eight thousand words of useless attributions alone. In the beginning, I was absolutely said-happy!

I certainly reined that impulse in early on, and apparently the process continues. These days I'm favoring what I call stage-business attribution:

"The fat man promised us Christmas off." Jackson's fingers brushed the butt of his gun. "We always get Christmas off."
"You want to be the one to tell him?"
"Shit, I look like I got a death wish?"

It's a way of sneaking in character, mood, tension, layers of extra meaning, whatever the scene needs right then, and I don't have to bother with said.

Try these:

"The fat man promised us Christmas off," Jackson said. "We always get Christmas off."
"You want to be the one to tell him?"
"Shit, I look like I got a death wish?"

and:

"The fat man promised us Christmas off," Jackson said. His fingers brushed the butt of his gun. "We always get Christmas off."
"You want to be the one to tell him?"
"Shit, I look like I got a death wish?"

Now, this is all down to individual style, but for me that second one (just using 'said') still delivers the 'punch line' at "death wish", but these could be Wal-Mart employees for all we know. The third does up the tension and the stakes with the gun, but it's just that teensy bit more flabby than the first example.

And I do try to keep my work lean.

Occurs to me now as I type, two of my recent Kindle-reads were No Country for Old Men and The Postman Always Rings Twice. Written forty or fifty years apart, in neither work will you find a single instance of 'he said'. The voices are clear and easy to distinguish, and if I found myself a bit lost for a moment, I usually caught up with a line or two more of dialogue...

Just thought I'd share. :)

Spin It Back and Grandkid Days

A little while ago, a writer friend and I met for coffee and got to talking about characterization. Recently, Lisa has been posting on the subject, Getting to Know You being my favorite so far.

The way I approach character, it's not quite as structured as the 'Dossier' approach, where you know your main folks' shoe size and taste in breakfast cereals before you start. Nor is it quite so fey as the 'Found Object' approach, where folks show up on stage and gradually reveal themselves, though of the two, it's more the latter.

What I do, I start with what I need and spin it back. In other words, based on what I need this character to do, what sort of person are they? And go from there.

In Poison Door, I needed a young girl to be out in the middle of the night, where she witnesses a gangland murder. Eleven to thirteen was about the right age: old enough to credibly handle the crises I threw at her but young enough that boys and liquor and so on were... interesting, but still in the future.

What kind of twelve year old runs around the city by herself in the middle of the night? A dangerously underparented one. Her homelife wouldn't be anything flash. In fact, it'd be the sort of thing to make her want to stay out. Her mum was a full-blown alcoholic and addict, at which point the home life practically wrote itself.

So did the hope: Michelle had a ringside view of the trouble that came with guys and liquor and all the stuff the older street kids got up to after dark. She saw pregnancy, substance abuse and overdose take kids like her, one after the other. Unlike some other kids in the same situation, this one had a gritty determination to steer clear of that stuff, to keep her head down and stay in school long enough to grab a normal life. Assuming she can survive the rest of the week.

By the time I was done writing, I could tell you about Michelle's favorite subjects in school, her taste in clothes, movies and cute guys. Whatever you wanted to ask. But at the start, I knew I had a young girl, alone in the dark, watching horror unfold in front of her eyes. And being seen by the killers. Everything else unfolded as I spun it back.

Why a girl? Why Michelle? Well, that's how she showed up. Bit of a 'found object' that way.

Which sort of brings me around to Grandkid Days. For me, I start writing with an event or situation, the kind of day you want to tell your grandkids about.

By this I mean that the events in a story should be seminal in the lives of their characters, turning points in their lives or, at the very least, total red-letter days:

I ever tell you kids about the time bad guys locked up Father Christmas and I stepped in to do his job? (Hogfather, Terry Pratchett)

I ever tell you about the time I met my long-lost dad and he drew me into a war with the gods? (American Gods, Neil Gaiman)

You kids ever hear about how I met your father? I'd pricked my finger on a spinning wheel and fallen into an enchanted sleep... (Sleeping Beauty)

The War? Let me tell you kids, the war was hell, but even worse was what came after... (Gone With the Wind, Margaret Mitchell)

I'll never forget the day our little island first got the vote. Those were fun times! (The Sufferage of Elvira, V.S. Naipaul)

Some characters, Jack Reacher and James Bond come to mind, would have a lot of colorful stories. Some, say Hamlet and Macbeth, would have only one. And yeah, they'd probably have some trouble telling it, seeing as they're both dead at the end. But you can't argue that the events leading to their deaths were seminal!

For me, I start with the event, or with a situation like a powderkeg ready to blow. Who's there, what are they like and what do they need to do? From there, I spin the characters back, even as I march them forward.

How about you? How do you approach it?

The Three Readers

Further in the questions of style: There are three distinct ways of relating to the written word. As writers, our style will be affected by our own reading style and the way our readers take in our work.

A quick overview:

1. The Motor Reader: These readers are still quite closely bound to our roots in oral storytelling. They read by physically modulating the sounds they see on the page. That is, their lips move.

Slowest reading style, but also the most thorough. Not so common today, but a hundred-odd years ago this style was the norm, enough so that those few who read *without* moving their lips were noteworthy.

Motor readers experience books as a form of spoken word. They respond to dialogue that echoes the rhythms of real speech and don't mind long descriptive paragraphs. The fiction of Charles Dickens, Wilkie Collins, Jane Austen, the Bronte sisters, Sir Walter Scott, Daniel Defoe, Robert Louis Stevenson and L. Frank Baum were all created for an audience of motor readers.

2. The Aural Reader: The majority of modern readers 'hear' the sounds of the printed word in their heads. They read at the speed of the spoken word and experience their fiction as a sort of disembodied 'sound'.

These readers still echo the experience of the spoken word, but it's like the voice in their heads is going really, really fast. Verbal tricks, beautiful words and poetic techniques of meter and rhyme go over a treat. For examples, look at your favorite fiction of the 20th century!

3. The Visual Reader: A minority of readers see the printed page for what it 'is': squidgy black shapes on a pale ground. A quick scan of the shapes of the words assembles itself in their heads. For them, there is no similarity between 'knows' and 'nose'-- the shapes are too different.

This small but growing minority are the fastest group of readers. With a bit of training, a visual reader can learn to take in 'blocks of text', 2-4 lines of text at a time, left side, then right. The pieces assimilate in rough order.

So far, advertising and comics seem to be the only folks catering to this crowd. Advertising, because they know that you're going to look at a print ad for a second or two at most. They *have* to use clever shapes to draw your eye across the words. Comics for a similar reason: graceless clumps of words are a turnoff.

Two 'visual' writers come to mind: Elmore Leonard and James Patterson. Both came out of advertising. Both are aware that readers initially 'look' at a page, and that big blocks of dense black print make the reader's eyes glaze over. The average reader: the working stiff spending a few minutes with a book before bed, on their lunch break, or on an airline flight.

It's no coincidence these two writers love dialogue. Or that they break description up into smaller paragraphs. Or that, when nothing but a big old paragraph will do, they pepper their sentences with exciting, powerful words. You may not want to spend three of your fifteen minute reading-time days forging your way through a boring info-dump, but you'll bravely forge ahead to find out why you saw the words 'hammer' and 'blood'.

So what's a writer to do?

We can't change the ways people read, but we can be conscious of them. Looking at your work from a different reader's perspective can help point out areas need strengthening.

Me, I write visually. My first drafts are a relentless chase from image to image, using words to show the pictures playing in my head.

In a later draft, I scan through looking at the shapes of dialogue and paragraph, making sure nothing is too dense, or too 'wordy'.

Another draft, I actually read the book out loud to myself. Quietly and under my breath, but out loud. *Really* helps prune the dead wood.

Just one more way of trying to tell a better story.

Owwwwwwwwch

Just for kicks, just kind of, you know, for today, I thought I'd forego my pot of coffee for a nice pot of tea.

It's warm. It's got caffeine. It tastes good.

It's like taking aspirin for a stab wound.

And I have to write like this...

Unofficial Not-So-Daily Wordcount-o-Meter:

38,000 words

The 'damage' (about 5k that just weren't up to snuff and had to come out) has been repaired.

Act II has its 'sagging middle' propped up with an action-filled climax to one of the subplots.

The field is clearer now, and three important clues wait to send my Hero hurtling into his final showdown with the Main Bastard.

I have no idea which one he'll find, or what he'll make of them when he does. That's part of the fun!

aaaaaaaaand...... ACTION! Final Take

And glad I am to see the back of this topic, too!

Today's final action-showing technique: Poetic Detail

Like Break It Down, this method of showing action is heavily grounded in our brains' chemistry. In moments of great stress (or great pleasure - our brains don't understand the difference), adrenalin floods our bodies and does whacky things to a little brain bit called the amygdala. That's the bit that controls how memories are written. Hence, the way I don't know what shirt I had on a couple days ago, but I *do* remember my first kiss, my first fight and exactly what I was doing the morning of September 11, 2001.

Thing is, the adrenalized brain is a quirky thing. Emotional memory is powerful and vivid, but also prone to pick out the oddest details.

This is where Poetic Detail comes in.

My first kiss was in a K-Mart parking lot. A drunk teen I barely knew wobbled up to me, said "You're cute" and kissed me. I was too stunned to do much more than stand there. Not exactly the stuff of movies, I know. Looking back, she was the first of too many bad girls.

But when I remember that moment, I feel the slap of summer sun on my skin and smell the hot asphalt. I see the movement of her hips and her flat bare belly. Her fingers were cool and slick on the skin above my heart. When she leaned in close, her hair smelled of strawberry shampoo, her skin of liquor sweat. The kiss tasted of lip gloss and cigarettes.

Now if I was to tell this event with Break It Down, I'd be shaving that moment into smaller and smaller increments, exploring each sense impression, each motion, whatever told the story best. But to use Poetic Detail, I'd pick *one*, or at most two, of those sense impressions and explore it at length.

He watched her approach. She was unsteady in her steps, thick cork heels sticking in the half-melted asphalt.

"You're cute," she said.

Her tongue flickered against his lips. Her teeth were small and sharp. She wrapped him in the smells of liquor and sweat and hot tar.

I really liked the 'slap of sunlight' bit, but instead I went with the asphalt. I could just as easily have gone with the sun on skin and stayed with the other touches on skin (her fingers on my chest, her lips), and on another day, I might have. Now, asphalt has nothing to do with the kiss. It's just one weird detail that my adrenalized brain fixed on and rendered in hyper-clarity.

Two things about that passage: I only give myself twenty minutes to post, so the writing is sometimes rushed. More important, I was trying to show how the brain picks detail from a real event. Writing fiction, that telling detail can come from any part of the imagination.

One of my favorite writers to use this technique is James Lee Burke. He has a beautiful way of choosing just the right image to impart moments of violence and terror with a sense of loss and redemption and the soul's flight from a world of beauty and pain.

Official Daily Wordcount-o-Meter:

12,678 words but I don't know what day it is!

aaaaaaaaand...... ACTION! Take 3

Spit It Out.

Funny, but not a lot of writers think of this one. Don't move artfully away to the fireplace from those action details. Don't draw the moment out and break it down.

Just say it.

Each of these techniques gets a little harder. This one's a balancing act as fine as the edge of a razor blade.

And like a razor, it can cut deep.

I'm behind with my writing today, so you'll be spared my own examples. Instead, I'll give you a sample from some real masters of the technique:

J.C. and Tommy at the table, guzzling beer.

Say what?

What the--

J.C. first -- silencer THWAP -- brains out his ears. Tommy, beer bottle raised -- THWAP -- glass in his eyes.

James Ellroy, White Jazz.

I could feel the other cons come in behind me, watching. Nobody did anything. It was a crazy, wild place, that prison-- they wanted to watch me kill him. I got my thumb in his eye. Pushed it through until I felt it go all wet and sticky.

The guards pulled me off.

Andrew Vachss, Shella

I took her in my arms and mashed my mouth up against hers... "Bite me! Bite me!"

I bit her. I sunk my teeth into her lips so deep I could feel the blood spurt into my mouth. It was running down her neck when I carried her upstairs.

James M. Cain, The Postman Always Rings Twice

(NB. Notice the structure of that last Cain paragraph? Short sentence. Two longer ones. End on the evocative word 'upstairs', not something lame like 'her' or 'it' or 'doing', etc...)

These are some of the most hardboiled writers in print. I don't know if that's just my reading and writing taste, or because this technique lends itself to short, sharp narrative voices, characters who take the highest and lowest moments of our lives and only indirectly allow the reader to see how they are affected.

Using the Spit It Out technique is a balancing act. Do it wrong, and you deaden the impact of what ought to be an important moment in your story. Do it right, and those moments live in the reader's memory...

Official Daily Wordcount-o-Meter reading:

10, 548 words on, what are we on Kate, Day 6?

Heirarchy of Sloth

Bernita wrote a fine post on the sigh. I figure it applies to smiles, frowns, raised eyebrows and hands on hips as well.

Especially smiles. How many scenes have you read where the characters smile at each other, like, every other sentence? Think about it. The only people who smile that much in *real* life usually want to talk to you about Jesus. Or get ou to drink the Kool Aid.

Lazy writing is all it is. But only middle-of-the-road lazy. The writer is trying to get you into the character's emotional state, so yay. And there *are* worse ways to do it. But there are better: much, much better.

So here, for the record, is Steve's Heirarchy of Sloth:

1. I'm Telling: This one's the King of Flab. Feel lazy enough to lie in your writing and make trash angels? Just give us your characters' emotional states in so many words. Watch what could be an exciting moment lie flaccid at your feet:

"I don't love you any more," Tom said. It pained him to say it.

His words broke Emily's heart.

2. The Swiftie: Anybody else love those Tom Swift adventures when you were kids? I did. Then I turned eight or nine, and using an adverb to 'tag' the emotion onto dialogue became unnacceptable.

"I don't love you any more," Tom said sadly.

If you want to be aggressively stupid, have the dialogue and adverb amplify each other: "I'm going to kill her," he said menacingly. Do. Not. Do. This.

3. Smile, Sigh, Frown: We've made a big jump here, up to the level of the barely acceptable. You're letting the reader fill in the *tiniest* of gaps, enough to know that happy peoplle smile, unfulfilled ones sigh and those who disagree or disapprove frown.

Tom frowned. "I don't love you any more."

"I was afraid of that," Emily sighed.

I'm reminded of men 'letting' women use their tools. The impulse to stick a hand in there and take over is only *barely* restrained...

4. Use the Environment: Completely acceptable, and readers even like it.

"Do you love me?" Emily said.

Tom stared at the patterns on the rain-streaked window. The room was cold away from the dying fire.

"We have to talk," he said.

Readers are smart cookies. They're easily capable of making that jump between the rainy day, the cold room, and Tom's feelings for Emily. No stick-beating required. And if you can do three or four hundred pages of this with nothing really happening, literary prizes and fellowships may fall at your feet!

5. Striptease: Ever ask a question and get a question for an answer? Were you ever have so much at stake about an answer that you couldn't bring yourself to ask the question outright?

Revealing our feelings is often a gradual, I'll-show-you-mine-if-you-show-me-yours striptease. There's no reason for your characters not to do the same.

"It's been awhile," Emily said.

The waiter set their coffees in front of them. The cups were tiny, the porcelain almost unbearably fragile.

"Not that long." Tom sipped at his coffee and made a face. Emily stirred hers without drinking.

"You look good."

"So do you."

"You ever, you know, think about it?"

"Sometimes." Tom drained the rest of his coffee. The taste was black and bitter.

"Yeah, me too. Sometimes." Emily stood up, her untouched coffee splashing on the table. "Well, it's been nice, but I've got to run. Things to do, you know..."

In good fiction, as in real life, wearing our emotions openly is an invitation to get them stepped on. And yeah, I used a little cheat: Tom 'made a face', but it's a small cheat, and their exchange holds up without it. In fact, you may notice that the coffee is mostly there for 'stage business'-- it helps me control the beats and pauses in this uncomfortable conversation. But the 'stage business' does some extra work, too. The fragile cups, Tom's black and bitter coffee, Emily's refusal to drink, all have a little something to say about their relationship.

6. Deny, Deny, Deny: Rare air up here. This can be unbelievably effective, or it can fall on its ass. And it all depends on your reader, how much attention they're paying and what kind of sophistication they're bringing to your work.

You've got these POWERFUL emotions running, but you leave them completely under the surface. It's up to the reader to winnow them out. Think of the movie Goodfellahs, where Robert DeNiro waits until a fellow hood leaves, then asks the guy next to him, "You think he talks to his wife?" Without another word, nobody's a bit surprised when the guy and his wife show up dead.

Tom and Emily lay together. The tangled sheets smelled sour, and cold shadows from the rain-streaked window crawled across their bare skin.

Emily stroked Tom's hair. He stood up and began to dress. She bit her lip and said nothing.

Notice I fell back on my #4 crutch there, the sheets and their skin. Nobody says you can't, and I rather like that image, but the point is, I could take it right out of there and still be left with a sparse, bare, lean passage that works.

At least, it works *if* you get Emily's touching Tom's hair as tenderness, and Tom's standing up and hiding under clothes as denial of that bond. Hemingway used this technique powerfully. Or if you didn't get it, it was a man and a woman on a stalled train, and nothing really happened...

So, to recap, Steve's Heirarchy of Sloth:

1. I'm Telling

2. The Swiftie

3. Smile, Sigh, Frown

4. Use the Environment

5. Striptease

6. Deny, Deny, Deny

And just to be honest, I have bad-writing days, same as anyone. But you'd better believe that every time I catch a character smiling, sighing, frowning, putting hands on hips or, God forbid, saying something menacingly, I go in there with red-hot tongs. Some smiles, etc. *do* have good reason to remain, but very few survive my trial by fire.

As Above, So Below

Steve's Doctrine of the Barrage: a Primer for Fistfights, Knifefights and Literature.

While I chip away at My 5 Strengths, I thought I'd do as Charles asked and elaborate on structure. This essay originally grew out of Charles' discussions on power words and their placement.

I spent my formative years fighting. Somewhere around the onset of adolescence, I quit escaping into adventure fiction and started sweating in the gym. I sought the guidance of rough and violent men, and learned what they had to teach.

It's actually not uncommon. A great many nerds and geeks like myself decide we want to be Conan, Batman, Bruce Lee. I was just a little extreme. Full throttle and fuck it.

And oddly, I learned my literary style.

Look at the structure of those two paragraphs. They're more or less representative of my usual structure of attack. Now, they form a structure to tell an effective story.

Open hard. Once you've got your hooks in, that's the time for poetry, imagery and metaphor. Close strong.

#1) A short sentence to open, using a strong, simple verb. You'll draw the reader in.

#2) Now you have the leisure to wax poetic. I seem fond of what I call 'the triple-tap': a quick three-count of adjectives, a complex sentence of three complicated actions or sometimes a list of three examples (Conan, Batman, Bruce Lee). The point is, here in the middle, I'm free to open up with more complicated structures. I can diagram the second sentence in in this paragraph, but I'd hate to open with it...

#3) Close strong. Candy made a strong point about last words. Strunk & White agree. People remember the last part of what we say. Decide what's most important and put it at the end.

Sounds like I'm only talking about paragraphs, right? Not at all. For me, the paragraph is the fundamental unit of fiction. They are what the panel is in comics. Big or small, they are the basic beat of the story's telltale heart.

Go smaller. Consider the sentence. I still want to open strong (subject and active verb-- none of that wussy 'might have done' kind of stuff) and finish on the most important element. If you've caught me opening with a modifying clause or prepositional phrase, there's a reason.

Go larger.

My chapters kick off with the previous cliff-hanger and end with the next nail-biter.

I write in three acts. Act I opens strong. Whether I write romance, horror or adventure, there's no doubt what you're reading early on. (By the way, notice that little triple-tap in the middle there? Love 'em!)

Act II is where all the elaborations and frills come in. Characters act on each other in earnest, and everything gets complicated.

Act III is the end. That's the part the reader walks away with. Make it strong.

As above, so below. Sic terra mundi.

Of course, not *every* paragraph goes like that. Pacing changes things. As tension grows, sentences and paragraphs shorten. As tension recedes, this structure gets relaxed a bit. Sometimes, a theme or element wants extended riffing that doesn't lend itself to this structure. So I leave it. At least, for a time.

The story's most important.

I don't have to write like this. In fact, I have a terrible weakness for compound, comlpex sentences, with lots of adjectives and adverbs and modifying clauses. (triple-tap again!) It's like I only have one sentence to tell the whole story, so I better jam it all in there!

Days when this bad habit gets away from me, my work is eye-crossingly dull...

And of course, not everyone cares for tension. Every now and then I come across a writer whose sentences unspool in a leisurely fashion, each word crafted with care, the whole proceeding, sentence to sentence, paragraph to paragraph, chapter to chapter, with the kind of lanquid torpor we all felt as children on a hot summer's day by the water, never dreaming that time and mortality could touch these timeless, golden moments.

Me, I write thrillers...

From Strength to Strength

Second draft of my latest 'head shot'. The final polish is over there in the right-hand column.

It's actually germaine to My Five Strengths as a Writer!

1. One Thousand Things: Two decades in the visual arts have taught me about faith, fortitude and the art of the telling detail. About creativity, discipline and the vagaries of that area where money meets art.

As the Zen proverb goes, "From one thing, learn one thousand things." My work in comics, tattoos, painting, etc. have all made me a better writer.

2. Sympathy for the Devil: I'm good at getting into my villains' heads, and those of the supporting characters too. This means they act and react intelligently.

Not only would my Mad Scientist *not* put a self-destruct button(!) on his giant laser, he'd just shoot that pesky, interfering hero.

3. Full Throttle: Life is precious. I'm not going to waste a minute of it on half-measures. Anything I want, anything that seems worthwhile, I go for it with everything I've got. Writing is worthwhile; it gets what it deserves: my best.

4. Caaauuuse It's a Thrilllller, a Thrill-ler Night: I'm good with suspense. Nature or nurture, I'm good at ratcheting up the tension.

5. The Tiny Dynamo: I've been blessed with a *very* supportive partner -- something not to be underestimated. This thing of ours is not for the faint of heart. The Dynamo puts up with my moodiness, solitary habits and financial instability, all for the dubious advantage of being the first to read a couple of novels a year! It doesn't hurt, either, that my particular partner has an eagle-eye for plot holes and bad writing. Knowing she'll read my work forces me to go beyond my own limitations...

Now *That's* a Second Draft!

Other Writers, Other Methods:

Last week I mentioned Robert McKee's writing method, specifically, his practice of pitching the synopsis to friends and colleagues before he starts writing.

I've never seen anything like this before.

Check out this article on Raymond Chandler's writing process. This was a man who took my metaphor of first draft as 'rough sketch' to its farthest extreme: he read his first draft, picked the bits he liked and, get this, jettisoned the rest!

Mark Coggins even shows us sample paragraphs. Chandler underlined his most resonant phrases (or even single words). Those stayed in later drafts. All the rest of the language was subject to change. All. Of. It.

I've always approached my second drafts with an eye toward honing down the language, eliminating excess words, excess scenes, excess actions, trimming fat in every possible way. Chandler's method seems to turn the story from a draft into a sort of outline-slash-haiku/tone poem (draft 1.5?). From these bones he built the novel back up.

It's radical stuff. The very idea gave me a happy little shiver.

I've got a novel marinating right now (first draft written at full throttle, second as carefully honed as the finest razor's edge) that might be a good candidate for this method. Or, I'll end up tearing out a few dreds before deciding it's not for me!

For every artist, a method...

The Tell-It Toolbox

Instead of story structure, today I felt like talking about storytelling itself. How *do* you give a scene its punch?

Pretty much everything we write comes down to three tools: narrative, dialogue, description.

Narrative: straightforward, what's happening now writing.
Dialogue: characters, you know, talking.
Description: those good old sense impressions.

For me, the goal is lean, evocative storytelling. I have a rule of thumb:

Talking beats telling.
Describing beats talking.

It's an idea cribbed from screenwriting and comics, but an effective tool nonetheless. I'm sitting in my recliner with laptop (or lately, pen and paper) in hand. I know that John and Martha are about to come together, and they ain't none too fond of each other.

I have to make a choice about how to tell it.

Narrative is one heck of a workhorse. Nothing moves characters from A to B faster than just telling the reader they moved from A to B. Careful about overusing the narrative, though. Like an all-fiber diet, nothing moves faster and is less interesting:

John looked up as Martha came into the room. John felt disgusted. Martha wanted to claw his eyes out.

A lot of writers love dialogue. I'm certainly a big fan of the stuff. It breaks up those dense paragraphs on the page, lends a bit of personality to those characters and gives Gentle Reader a sense of motion:

"Your drinking sickens me," John said.
"The nerve. I've half a mind to claw your eyes out."
"I'd like to see you try..."

Like I said, zips right along. And if you're not doing this in a blog post, great be had when your characters reveal their feelings gradually.

Description is a powerful, subtle, often underrated tool. Comics and movies use it all the time, in those wordless passages where looks are exchanged, fireplaces or crashing waves shown, etc.

The tick-tick-tick of high heels grew louder in the hall, stopped with a scrape of shoe leather on polished wood. The twin scents of vodka and cheap perfume hit his nostrils, and John's upper lip curled away from his teeth.

Martha stood in the doorway, swaying slightly on her heels. Her hands were curled into claws at her sides, and her eyes were thin green slits.

Description lets Gentle Reader fill in her own blanks, but it can also bog down if overused. And there's the possibility that, like a Mad Lib, the blank might be filled in wrong.

Which one's right or best? Depends. How important is it? Stands to reason the most important elements get the most coverage. How effective will each tool be? Some stuff really does need just one tool more than any other. And, of course, which tool feels most comfortable on the day?

And yeah, in the course of actual writing, we find ourselves jumping from one to the next all over the show. Sometimes, a powerful result comes from letting the dialogue run independent of narrative and action:

John looked up as Martha came into the room. His mouth turned down at the corners and a muscle jumped under one eye before he brought his face under control.

"It's good to see you," he said.

Martha's eyes narrowed to thin green slits.

"Just thought I'd drop by. Not interrupting, am I?"

"Get you a drink?"

He reached for the bottle and a spare glass. The movement turned his face away from her.

It was quiet in the room, and still. John heard the snap of Martha's purse, smelled gun oil and baby powder.

"She's young enough to be your daughter," Martha said. Her cheeks were bright with tears.

The bottle fell. Shattered glass flew. Brown liquid stained the floorboards.

The Beat Goes On

The beat, the beat. The elusive beat.

Usually, the 'beat' I write to is the rhythm of the language (eg. my punctuation choices above), but the beat I'm trying hardest to listen to is the heartbeat of the story.

Screenwriters use the term 'beat' a lot, probably because movies unfold in real time. McKee has a very structured idea of which beats are important to the unfolding story. Probably because movies cost heaps per minute, so every unnecessary minute is clipped trimmed, folded into another scene or otherwise elided.

His idea: the heart of a story is forcing your protagonist into a tight place where she will be forced beyond her limits. The structure is one of pushing your hero, watching him react. The reaction will often make things worse, so that the next push will be harder. And again, harder still. Hopefully, at the climax all looks hopeless for our heroine, until she saves the day.

It's not a bad idea, and works as well for The Manchurian Candidate as it does for Bridget Jones.

Think High Noon:

Will Kane is happy, contented, the toast of the town. He and his new bride are looking forward to spending his retirement together. *yawn* But wait...

Word reaches Kane that Frank Miller and his boys are coming. Kane's conscience won't let him leave town. One by one, the townspeople prove to be unreliable cowards. There'll be no posse. No deputies. Kane, married that morning, is facing certain death.

Every act of cowardice that leaves Kane more isolated and alone is a major beat in the story. The minor beats are found in the back and forth that lead to those cowardly betrayals.

In my first draft, I'm watching my characters act and react, tracking those major beats to the story's end. In my second draft, I'll take these beats of conflict right down to the dialogue. I want *every* interaction to uphold the story in some way.

In a way, it goes back to Conflict vs. Complication. Every story has a central question at its heart: Will Frodo destroy the ring? Will Bridget finally choose Mister Right over Mister Wrong? Can newlywed and newly retired sheriff Will Kane stop the outlaws coming in on the noon train?

Resolving that question is our conflict. Everything else is complication with Two Important Caveats:

1) It may be necessary to set the conflict up. The first big chunk of Rocky is about what a crappy life the poor palooka has. It's necessary to understanding the stakes of his fight with Apollo. Just about all of High Noon is setup. We need to see just how alone Will Kane really is.

2) Subplots. These should have their own conflicts, beats and climaxes, spaced around the story to allow the writer to control the tension.

Aragorn's heritage and lovelife, Gandalf's death and rebirth, the dark spiral of Saruman's soul are all subplots that help mask the large amount of walking involved in Frodo's effort to nuke Sauron. Rocky's relationships with Talia Shire and Burgess Meredith (who I always expect to wave an umbrella and quack) keep us involved in that sorry man's life until his One Big Break comes his way.

To keep my own subplots from being pointless complications (or pointless, parallel stories) I try wherever possible to tie them back into the main plot. It can be thematic (for instance, all characters face a simliar decision, and in the subplots we get to see how different reactions play out). It can functional (there's a running conflict in Lee Child's ONE SHOT between Jack Reacher and his wildly inappropriate boat shoes. They're a constant hinderance, up until the final climax.). If they really are just complications, well, out they come...

In High Noon, two important subplots involve Amy (Kane's bride) and Helen Ramirez (his former lover). Both women love Kane, neither want him dead. They make different decisions about what sticking it out (thematic). Amy's decision is vital to Kane's survival (functional).

By the way, The Tiny Dynamo and I watched Dangerous Liaisons last night. Best damn education out there for beats of conflict in EVERY scene, for subplots that unite a theme and weave in and out of the central conflict. I'd forgotten how brilliant it was...

Take What You Like and Leave the Rest

As a martial arts student, I tried a little of everything I could get my hands on. Some of it suited me better than others. I took what seemed useful and politely left the rest.

When I decided to get serious about writing, I did the same thing. For Avery, here's what I got from Robert McKee.

Robert McKee teaches screenwriting, and does a fine job of it. His book, STORY, is one fine in-depth analysis of the nature and power of drama and our modern concept of, well, story. I heartily recommend it, though maybe I shouldn't be *quite* so hearty. My copy's been passed from hand to hand around Christchurch on the strength of those recommendations...

McKee's a big believer in the beat: A beat is a decision a character has to make. Usually, this is in conflict (even if its subtext) with another character. The beats build until a crisis point is reached and resolved. That's a scene.

Scenes build, one on top of another, until a major turning point is reached. That's an act. Three acts is standard, but use as many or as few as the story itself needs.

This is harder than I thought without the book handy...

Basically, the story is the hero's evolution through crisis. Rick, going from 'I stick my neck out for no one' to shooting a Nazi in front of the chief of police. John McCain, confused and adrift in a failing marriage -- until the bad guys take over the skyscraper. Sophie's wild, excstatic dance with death, begun with a choice in Poland years before...

Stories are about characters pushed into places they don't want to be and the decisions they make when they get there. And yeah, it always gets worse before it's all over.

I sucked that stuff up like a sponge. Love those ideas. His working method... It didn't work for me, but what the hey. Maybe it will for you.

First, write no scenes. No dialogue. No cool, atmospheric openings. Don't.

Instead, get a stack of 3x5 cards. A BIIIIG stack. Jot little notes on them. Bits of the story as they occur. Try to start big and go small. You're listening for the beat. It's usually easier to find the big beats than the little ones.

Pretty much, do a step by step outline of your plot. You work out who your characters are, discover their conflicts, know where and how the story moves and make sure its tight. Expect a very tall stack of cards, or one very full corkboard. All you outlinin' folks know what I'm talking about, I'm sure.

Then, and this is where McKee 'got jiggy with it' (to use the slang of theYouth of Today), put the cards aside. No chapter one yet, no chapter anything. Resist the temptation.

Instead, write a treatment. One page, maybe two, covering the story in that stack of cards. yes, you have to shave off a whole lot of subtext, backstory, and nuance. Lose it. One page. Maybe two.

Then, when you've got that treatment done, sit a few friends down and ask for five minutes of their time. Pitch them your story. Watch them as they listen. You're looking for that electric moment when the story catches them. That 'ooooh' factor.

No 'ooh', either rework your treatment or ditch your story. Go start on another one. All you're out is the outlining time.

I can see some real benefit to this. All of us only have the time to write a certain number of stories. They might as well be the good ones. This would save one the effort of spending a year or more on a bad book.

Also, come time to write query letters and such, you'd be the kid in class who wrote your term paper the first day of Christmas vacation: smug and at ease.

I imagine this is much how Candice writes. Pitching synopses to her editors and getting the book picked up based on the successful pitches.

It's a great idea. My problem is that by the time I've got the plot outline done, the actual writing isn't all that interesting to me. And fleshing the characters out more fully in the writing process, I find them doing all sorts of things that deviate from the outline. It's exciting and fun, but it sort of defeats the purpose of outlining in the first place...

Wordy post. I'll go out on a joke:

So Quiet

I've been quiet of late, I know. There are a few relatively juicy blog essays banging around in my head, but no time to write them.

Y'see, I'm writing again. Working title is This Rusted Cage (TRC), and it's shaping up to be a fair bit of fun. At least, I can't wait to see what happens. But it's autumn in the book, and autumn here on the ground, so I'm really trying to boogie while the impressions are all nice and fresh.

I dashed off maybe three or four thousand words on that earlier idea (the guy in handcuffs), but it wasn't there yet. I like his story, but this one needs telling first. Oddly, this story is one I made a couple of false starts on before starting (and finishing) the previous novel.

That one's still marinating. Another month or two, I'll print and edit.

In the meantime, I've put up the bones of a site for my writing. There's even an excerpt here. Of course, I'll have to do this all over when the publishers insist on a name change and I end up writing as Winter Fallon or some such.

On the home front, Midge has gone from staying outside to sleeping in the same room with Butler. On top of the bookshelves where he can't reach her, of course, but it's progress. They've also eaten at the same time, which is rather social for the Duchess Midge.

When the laptop's not handy (supermarkets, lines, waiting rooms, etc.), I've been working longhand in a notebook. Later, I transcribe those scenes in. Butler has also been most helpful in this regard.

What's Talent Got to Do With It

97,000 words (back on track)

One ending has been chosen, the other locked in its cupboard. The scratching behind that door grows feebler, the weeping softer. Soon they may stop entirely.

Meanwhile, CS Harris got me thinking. She's got a great series of posts up right now comparing bestsellers with similar, though much less successful, books. The differences seem to jump right out.

Which made me wonder, what's talent got to do with it?

The creative fields are a funny business. Art, literature, music-- hell, interpretive dance and mime are crowded with yahoos whose self-esteem eclipses their ability (think American Idol open auditions), and then there are the few superstars who make it to being household names. And those two ends of the scale are all people know.

Mention you're a writer at a party. You'll hear about Uncle Elmer's manuscript, unfinished after twenty years. You'll hear about how JK Rowling's richer than the Queen. You might even get my favorite suggestion, "You gotta get you an idea like that one." Gee, thanks.

It takes an enormous amount of work, training, drive and maybe talent just to rise onto the lowest rungs. And from there? Fuggeddaboudit....

I worked hard, trained hard and drove over, under or through every obstacle to carve out a lovely career for myself in art. Then, selfish prick that I am, I 'decided' (reason for air quotes: see That Twisting Urge) to reinvent myself as a writer.

So what's talent got to do with it?

I had no idea if I had any, for one thing. I also didn't care, for another. Now, I don't mean that in the sense so many Idol hopefuls obviously do. It's just that there are several factors important to success.

Talent's the only one we have no control over, so why worry about it. Most people don't fail through lack of talent, and quite a few succeed despite any discernible scrap of it. They fail due to fear, laziness, priorities and bad influences.

Fear: kills heaps of dreams before they start. Understandable, I guess. The creative life offers no steady paychecks, no built-in understanding from family and friends and the sorts of embarrassment that make standing naked in a roomful of strangers seem easy by comparison. It's not for the faint of heart.

Laziness: A many-headed beast I rail on about a lot on this blog. It takes a lot of hours to write a novel, even a bad one. It takes a lot of hours to do the reading to stay up on the field. And it takes something extra to not settle for any less than your best.

That means not accepting stereotyped characters, flat prose, hackneyed situations and anything less than total honesty in our observations of human nature. I think the horror genre unravelled in the eighties under a flood of 'good enough' work.

Good enough never is.

Priorities: I had to include this to be honest. I have no children and a 'job' that only requires me to work two or three days a week. I keep my needs modest so that I have the time to write thirty, forty, even fifty hours a week if I feel like it. Most people don't have that, and some will just be too plain tired at the end of a day to sit down with pad and pen or keyboard or goose quill and parchment and give it their best.

Fair enough, too.

Bad Influences: Another form of laziness, really. Before I got serious about writing, I read what I felt like, and my tastes are quite frankly a little on the trashy side. I come back again and again to 50's and 60s pulp crime, 80s horror and sci-fi/fantasy. Like a lot of casual readers, I was reluctant to take a chance on any first-time novelist and anybody who wasn't on the bestseller lists.

My first novel sure reflected it, too. I put myself on a strict program of every award-winning debut novel I could find, as well as the top winners in my favorite genres. There was no use looking at where the bar had been set thirty years ago. There was no use looking to certain established authors who'd been writing essentially the same book over and over for years, either.

Where does talent fit in?

It's a tiny, tiny leg up. It's a little rush of pleasure and promise that gets us started. It's an extra inch or two forward on the long, long, LONG road to becoming as good as we can be.

And maybe, in fact probably, it's also the hidden end of our personal ruler. I'm tone-deaf, and I seriously doubt that any amount of hard work, training and perserverance will make me a concert violinist.

Too many musicians out there putting in the hard work who actually have talent, too.

That Twisting Urge

95,000 words

Good Friday with Clan Dynamo was much fun. Jotted 1000 words-ish in a note pad at odd moments. It did occur to me that my tennis game would probably improve if I didn't stop in the middle of the action to get down a couple lines of dialogue.

I have a real urge to tell stories. Probably no surprise given I'm writing a first draft in three months, but there you are. Although I've only been 'writing' a couple of years, that urge has been there all along.

Waaaaaaaaaaayyyyy back in my sidetracked twenties, I was the World's Greatest Dinner Guest. My jokes and stories were in great demand (great advice for any starving artist: make people want to feed you), as my various hosts knew that they would laugh, cry, tremble in terror, laugh until they cried, tremble until they laughed, whatever. I made it all up on the spot, or took bits out of my life and put the appropriate spin on them as the mood demanded. It was all about moving my audience in the moment. I was That Guy.

Back then of course, I didn't write. I was tattooing and painting and living as fast as I could (Full Throttle and Fuck It is more than just a writing style...), and those dinners (and picnics, pub nights, bong sessions, coffees, etc.) were the only way that urge could claw its way out of my skin.

I gradually realized I wasn't getting any younger, and the urge twisted. I got serious about my comics, and as is the way with me, turned the machine all the way up to eleven and snapped off the lever.

And completely lost the ability to tell a decent story. Old friends would meet me for dinner and say, "Tell the one about the vomiting Egyptian," or "What about that guy who took off his pants." Half the time, I couldn't even remember how they went. I'd fall back on a joke about two nuns and a cheese grater instead.

Then maybe three years ago or so, I was doing so much comics illustration that I didn't have the time to write comics anymore. Drawing a page, mine or anyone else's, takes maybe six or eight hours. Easy to see why I couldn't do both.

The urge twisted again.

I started writing fiction. Just a little, in a notebook. Then a novel on a typewriter. THen another on a laptop. Then--

Well, I can't tell a joke now to save my life. That storytelling urge is so used up in my work that I fuck up punchlines, stumble over the order of events, you name it.

I've become This Guy: "And these two guys, wait, I forgot. They're not guys, they're girls, and, um, I think, yeah,, that's right, they're nuns..."

Train wrecks, every one. These days people still laugh, but we all know it's at how badly I tell the joke, not the joke itself.

Back in the sidetracked days I used to be with a junkie stripper who fancied herself a writer. Except that she always had a thousand excuses why she couldn't write just at the moment. She could only write on a computer, she said. She wanted to get a bit more life experience, she said. Work took too much out of her, she said.

When she overdosed, she didn't even leave behind a diary. All our friends were puzzled, but I wasn't surprised. She was so afraid of herself and the pain she carried that she'd rather go numb than face it and let the stories come.

Me, I figure my stories would want out if all I had was a circle of faces around a campfire. A medium (printed word) that brings a wider audience? Icing on the cake.

Don't Do This

88,500 words (finally had to do some work)

Obviously I've got some lost time to make up for, so here's a link to a fine and entertaining collection of what-not-to-do-when-you're-writing that I've ever seen...

(just go down past the early para's about the writing groups.)

Enjoy!

Tell the Truth and Shame the Devil

73,000 words

Stephen King says building memorable and believable characters is nothing more or less than our own observation of human beings and our ability to tell the truth.

He also says, tell the truth and you won't be popular in polite society for long.

I remember being fourteen or fifteen years old. Being afraid all the time, and turning hard to hide that fear. Looking at the violence and addiction around me, the teenaged parents, the kids who came out of prison dead eyed and flat faced and the ones who never got more than a memorial page in the yearbook, I was scared.

I remember sitting with Interview With a Vampire and getting my first clear vision of a life beyond what I knew. The thought that I might one day sit at a sidewalk cafe on a sunny street in Paris was impossible, but too tantalizing to resist.

I got tastes of what I wanted, but I also plumbed a lot of my own personal darkness. One day, I finally did get free. My dreams came true because I paid what they cost.

When my work goes wrong, this is usually where it gets lost: it loses its honesty. It's tempting to write these sort of nifty-clean thrillers where you can imagine Roger Moore in the lead. Or genteel murder mysteries where old ladies have to figure out who killed the vicar. Hell, I love to read that stuff.

But that's not my voice. It's part of the human condition I can relate to vicariously, but not the part that I can speak from with any authority. I *can* be honest about fear, about predators and victims and souls in moral freefall, about violence, hope and love.

I once couch-surfed with a stripper/sometime hooker and her disgraced cop boyfriend/sometime pimp. I can be honest about the love and anger and sadness between them in a way that I can't about, say, a witty and debonair jewel thief, or a group of high school kids throwing a party with their parents out of town.

The Tiny Dynamo sometimes wishes I wrote Regency Romance. She's afraid to let her parents see my work. *My* parents never finished my first book. Ten pages, and they were out.

When the Dynamo read about the Christchurch I know, she was aghast. But she also admitted every word was true. So these last couple weeks, that's a lot of what I've been doing with this (almost finished) retrenchment.

Telling the truth.

Where'm I at?

42,000 words (and happy as Larry)

I'm very much a character-driven writer. Or maybe a better word is situation-driven, since the charcters don't get much input until the defining situation gets rolling. Think North by Northwest: without the goddawful situation he finds himself in, Cary Grant would probably spend all his time being witty at parties.

Anyway, the characters know what they're doing at this point. Some of them hate each other, some love each other, and others are still trying to figure out what they think. Fair enough. At this point, knocking down a thousand or so words a day is cake. Where it gets a little wierd is now that most (And I do only mean most) of the flailing is over, these folks are doing some pretty unsuspected things.

For instance, I had two characters working on one problem in the background for two days (that's story time: probably a month out here on this side of the keyboard). Last night one of the characters found a solution that was simple, elegant, and in all truth she probably would've thought of almost immediately.

Crisis? Disaster? Stop everything and go back to figure out how the hell the story will hang together now that I know this?

Nope. I'm just getting on with it.

By the time I get to the second draft that solution may end up making me rewrite a big swathe of the book. Or it may end up collapsing a few other scenes. Or that problem may have to come out entirely to give some other part of the action more room to breathe. The truth is, at this point I don't really know what's important. By the end I'll know what was a keeper and what wasn't. This stage is about discovery, style and storytelling.

It's a lot of fun. The story's here, trying to tell itself to me. And that's not always the case. I've heaps of fragments that got right under my skin until I started work on them, then turned out not to have the legs to go the distance.

Oh, and for a close, here's the Ten Rules of Thriller Writing. It occurs to me that they can be used to make just about any fiction more gripping, whether literary, romance, or a cozy mystery.

As they say in 12 Step groups, take what you like and leave the rest.

What's it All About, Alfie?

41,000 words (back on track, sorta)

There are at least a few different kinds of writer's block. My most frequent one is 'Driving with the hand Brake On.' That's where I spend more time second-guessing what I just wrote than I do writing more. It's my inner critic gone mad.

It's also not the subject of today's blog.

Today's about a second, more brutal form of writer's block. You know the one: you've come too far to turn back now, but no matter hwo hard you try, you just can't work out what happens next.

You're blocked.

Near as I can tell, it happens to everyone. It's not happening to me right now, but it has in the past. My last novel, for instance. And the one before that.

When it does, I get away from the keyboard. Long walks, bike rides, tramps up the sides of damn mountains are favorites, but it doesn't matter. The key is to give the body something to do so that the mind can wander. And ponder.

And ask, what the hell am I writing about, anyway? What's the point?

Literary professors get to used high-falutin words like central conflict and theme. But I am a bear of little brain, and prefer simple, working class words. I want to know what the story that's stumping me's supposed to look like when it's at home.

But really, central conflict and theme are what's getting lost in those white-out, writer's block moments. Writing is like building a forest one tree at time. The inner critic wants to see that every leaf and pine needle is just so. The white-out is when you've lost track and started building up above the ridgeline, or onto thin, rocky soil where your story doesn't properly belong.

There's something you love in your story. Something that puts that particular wood (whether a 2000 word grove or a 350,000 rainforest) in that particular place. After all, if you don't have the love, there are heaps of other ways to spend a day. The love of that story, wanting to see how it turns out -- to see it told -- is what makes writing worthwhile.

Find the heart of your story. You'll also find the key to your dilemna.