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On Writing What You Know: How to Write What You Know

By Aaron Pogue on Saturday, September 4, 2010

This week I stopped complaining about restrictive writing rules in favor of more generous advice. It’s really a continuation of the same theme, though.

Write what you know.

and

Tell your readers what they need to know.

The trick to both of those, really, is knowing what you know (and, of course, what you need to know).

Knowing What You Know

Yesterday’s post touched on that — you know more than you think you do. Even if you don’t have any personal experience with space-based warfare or making long journeys a-horseback, you do know what it’s like to feel overwhelmed, to chase a dream that’s out of reach, to rage against the status quo.

Stories are about the human condition — about the way people experience life. And whether you’re writing a period piece or a mainstream character novel, your characters are dealing with the same emotions, motivations, and life experiences you’re familiar with from your own condition.

Inasmuch as “write what you know” is restrictive, this is how: if you’re not the one who rages against the status quo, if your story is one of love and loss, you probably have more to say on that theme than on the other. You can choose any setting, any genre you want, but you’ll say more, and say it more powerfully, if you fill that setting with emotions and motivations you’ve known in your own life.

When I say it like that, it doesn’t sound too restrictive, really, does it? As Josh said in yesterday’s comments, a lot depends on the severity of the word “know,” and I think we all tend to interpret it as restrictively as possible. I suspect we do that out of the same sense of self-doubt that makes us think our lives are boring.

If we open up the idea of “know” just a little bit, though, this rule becomes less and less a restriction, and more a guideline — a helpful focus.

Knowing What We Need to Know

Gods Tomorrow is a near-future sci-fi novel flavored with some very cool technology, and I’ve been told I wrote it quite well. I’ve never participated in a holographic chat session (complete with tactile feedback), but I know about the technology. I’ve never participated in a world-changing medical study using nanotechnology and advanced biometric modeling to reverse aging, but I know about it.

I’ve talked before about the right way to do writing research, and I said it should be secondary to the construction of your message. “Secondary” doesn’t mean “completely insignificant,” though. It’s nice to write about your own direct experience, but “write what you know” doesn’t limit you to those experiences. It limits you to the things you’re capable of understanding…and that’s a much larger set.

If you want to do it right, if you want to tell your readers everything they need to know, you have to know that stuff. Some of it will be in your own backstory, and the rest is out there patiently waiting for you on Google. “Write what you know” is a homework assignment. As much as anything else, it’s a reminder to do your research.

And a lot of that research is untargeted reading. Because even thuogh I’ve never been part of an epic space battle or a sorcerous duel, I know a lot of things about both. And most of what I know about writing sci-fi and fantasy comes from a lifetime of reading sci-fi and fantasy.

There’s nothing you can do to improve as a writer that’s more effective than reading. Read like a writer (constantly evaluating what works and what doesn’t, and why). Read like a reader (losing yourself in someone else’s life experience). Spend time in books, and you’ll be astonished how much you come to know.

Writing What You Know (Creative Writing Exercise)

The lovely Kelley, writing at a coffee shopIt’s a bit of an intimidating order, “write what you know,” but it’s more nuanced than it maybe first appears. Even so, there are real benefits to practicing the literal interpration of the phrase.

That’s what I talked about yesterday — what Courtney and I do with our personal stories here at Unstressed Syllables, and what I once praised Julie Roads for doing regularly at her site. Bryce called it parable-ing. I called it the blogstory style.

Whatever you want to call it, I would challenge you to try it out. Sometime in the next week, capture a memory in words. Happy or sad, dramatic or mundane, share a little slice of your story in a blog post.

And then, in a paragraph or a pair of posts, make a parable of it. At the very least you’ll get some practice writing what you know…and you might even decide you like doing it.

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On Writing What You Know: You’re Not Too Boring to Tell a Story

By Aaron Pogue on Friday, September 3, 2010

Yesterday I told the story of my second novel…again. I’m well aware that I’ve talked about that book several times around here (and I’m certain I will again). In fact, the last time I mentioned it previously, I described it like this:

The Poet Alexander is basically the 180,000-word story of my adolescence, chronicling my experience getting a first job, falling in love (and dealing with all the drama of high school romance), and navigating the treacherous social undercurrents of a tight-knit church youth group.

In other words, it’s probably not something you want to read. But I wrote it under the guise of a fantasy novel, so I spent considerable time developing the setting, figuring out the tangled political dynamics of the town, and creating interesting fantasy parallels for the tedious real-world obstacles I dealt with throughout those tumultuous years.

Self-Doubting

That second paragraph starts with eight words of self-sabotage that are probably terribly familiar to you, no matter where you are in your writing career. “It’s probably not something you want to read.”

I don’t say things like that much about the stuff I’m writing these days, but I still feel it. I’ve shared my newest book with three people in the last week, and ended up telling each of them that they didn’t need to feel obligated to read it. Every one of them had expressly asked for the copy, though.

As artists, we’re all terrible at judging the quality of our own work. Just awful. That can cut both ways — we’re always hearing references to the atrocities that form the majority of the dreaded slush pile — but most everyone I’ve ever worked with has seriously, viciously undervalued their own quality. I’m absolutely certain I do the same thing.

The thing is…that’s not a writer habit, or an artist habit. It’s a people habit. We all spend way too much of our time reminding ourselves how uninteresting we really are.

And then a creative writing teacher comes along and tells us, “Write what you know!” And we just want to scoff. Or maybe cry. If we’re stuck writing what we know, and what we know is this pathetic, boring life we’re living, what hope is there in our fiction?

Parable-ing

Last week Bryce left a comment on Courtney’s article complimenting her and me both for our parable-ing — the talent we’ve shown for taking stories from our lives and making lessons out of them. We do it every week, and every week it works.

Why? Because people connect to people. People connect to other lives. People crave stories, and the stories that ring truest create the strongest connections. People want to hear a genuine voice in all the noise, and the easiest way for you to achieve that is to speak in a voice rich with the sounds of your life. They’re the truest sounds you know.

When Courtney and I are telling parables, it’s simple and straightforward. I go back to a memory somewhere in my past, summon as much of the scene as I can, and then tell it as clearly as possible. It’s writing what I know, in a real and direct way.

Writing What You Know

That’s not really what the advice is about, though. When a creative writing teacher tells you to write what you mean (me included), it’s talking about something other than memoir. Here’s a couple examples.

  • I write what I know when I make the bumbling half-philosopher/half-programmer in Gods Tomorrow bark out pseudo-code that closely resembles Python.
  • I write what I know when I borrow the floor plan of my college apartment for the setting of the first half of Sleeping Kings: Golden Age.
  • I write what I know when I show the kids in King Jason’s War playing on a huge, flat-topped boulder that bears a mysterious resemblance to the one I recently mentioned playing on when I was twelve.

That’s a sci-fi novel, a post-apocalyptic suspense/thriller, and a high fantasy novel, and each one of them has strong elements from my boring, everyday, 20th-century life.  Those are the kinds of touches that bring the fantastic and the distant close to hand, though. Those are the kinds of touches that ground your story in reality, and let you connect with readers.

I’m going to talk more about it tomorrow. So come back then for a look at how to write what you know, with some helpful specifics thrown in for good measure.

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On Writing What You Know: High School

By Aaron Pogue on Thursday, September 2, 2010

I wrote my first novel  in high school, and it was a very high school sort of book. I spent a lot of time back then priding myself on being above the stupid high school drama going on all around me…and, of course, I was completely full of it.

I’ve already introduced you to Trish. We first met when we were thirteen. I was new to the youth group, my family having just moved to Wichita, Kansas, from remote Claremore, Oklahoma, and Trish’s family attended the congregation that had hired Dad as family minister.

So we all ended up together on this trip to Dallas, Texas, for some youth event at Six Flags, and when we broke for lunch, I ended up sitting next to two girls my own age. Trish, and her friend Amanda.

Within moments, I fell deeply and irrevocably in love with Amanda. Amanda wasn’t terribly interested in being adored, but Trish thought it was a great turn of events, so we spent most of the next three months conspiring to win me the heart of the fair Amanda. To no one’s surprise at all, Trish and I ended up falling for each other, and I think Amanda breathed a big sigh of relief to be out of the picture.

That was at thirteen, and we were an item on and off for the next six years. To be honest, I put a lot more energy and emotion into the off than I ever did the on. I wailed, I gnashed my teeth, I wrote epic poems — and, eventually, an epic novel — complaining how miserable it was to be so close to the one I loved, but without her.

That novel turned into a monster. I felt a deep need to capture every nuance of this burning, totally unique angst that was my personal curse, and I poured three years into it, with all the tireless energy of a high school kid.

The thing was…it had no end. It just went on and on and on, just like my own suffering. Sometimes there were high points, sometimes there were crushingly low points, but there was no climax. There was no resolution. And, at the time, I didn’t really know I even needed those things. I just kept writing, figuring someday it would become clear.

And then, one day, it finally did. I was seventeen, and it was Friday night, and I was home alone with nothing to do. In desperation, I grabbed a movie Dan or Brad had recommended to me, just to kill some time, and popped it in the VCR.

Empire Records. If you don’t know it, you should. 90 minutes of engaging characters, crushing complications, and exquisite high school drama.

That was the first time I’d ever seen it, though, and it captured so perfectly all the things I wanted to show, all the things I wanted to say. It lit a fire inside me.

I remember standing in the middle of the living room, bouncing on my toes, through the whole final act — too caught up in it all to even think of sitting. I remember holding my breath through the final confrontation between The Boy and The Girl.

I probably cried at the resolution. I’m not sure on that one, but it was an ending worth it. I do know with perfect certainty what I did next, though.

The moment the credits rolled, I turned my back on the TV, marched over to the computer desk, and sat down to work on my book. I started writing, from some point buried in an overlong second act, and made my way to the nearest possible plot point to transition into Act III.

Because it was time for the final act. It was time for confrontation, for climax, for conclusion. I felt the demand of the story, and I sat right there and wrote it.

And wrote. And wrote. And wrote. And when I was done for the night, I typed, “The End” right where it was supposed to go. Then I saved my book, logged off the computer, and headed upstairs to go to bed.

It was a little annoying trying to fall asleep with the bright morning sun slanting through the windows, but I managed. After all, I was exhausted. 15,000 words in just under nine hours will do that to you.

That’s how I finally finished my malingering love story, though. And six months later, maybe eight, I was engaged to The Girl. That’s…well, that’s how ninety minutes of high school drama changed my life.

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What I Learned about Writing this Week…from Sestinas

By Courtney Cantrell on Wednesday, September 1, 2010

Once upon a time, dear inklings, Aaron mentioned that I’m always talking about sestinas. When I read his comment, I thought to myself, “That’s true — I am always talking about sestinas.”

Except when I’m not. And after I read Aaron’s comment, and after I thought my agreeable response, I realized that here, at Unstressed Syllables, I have, in fact, not been talking about sestinas at all.

What a horrid oversight on my part. I do believe it’s high time I rectified this.

Whatsit?

At first glance, a sestina is nothing more than a rhyming poem of six six-line stanzas with a tercet — a stanza of three lines — at the end. At second glance, you’ll discover that the sestina contains six rhyming words that alternate at the ends of the poem’s thirty-nine lines. Thirty-nine lines of poetry, and you only have to come up with six rhyming words. That’s not so bad!

But it gets even better. You can split those six words into two sets of three each. The words in one set rhyme with each other, and the words in the second set rhyme with each other. So really, all you need is two sets of similar-sounding words. Easy!

For example:

would
good
should

and

cup
yup
sup.

Spiffy!

The Tricky Part

Here’s the cool part about your rhyming words: You don’t have to use the same ones over and over again. In fact, for the purposes of the sestina, you’re supposed to mix it up a little — and by mix it up, I mean get funky with homonyms and homophones. Ooh la la!

Now, not all of the sample words I gave you above lend themselves to being toyed with. Ideally, each of your rhyming words will have at least one homonym (same spelling, different meaning) or homophone (same sound, different meaning); this will allow you a lot more leeway in crafting your sestina line-by-line and creating coherent content. (More on that later.)

Still, for now we’re just gonna stick with the words I’ve picked, what say? Here are my six with some of their possible alternates:

would / wood
good
should / shooed (but this is really stretching it!)

and

cup (noun) / cup (verb)
yup
sup / ‘sup (as in “wassup y’all?” — yes, you are allowed to play this way!)

Slightly Trickier

Okay, you’ve got your rhyming words and their possible substitutes. You know that these six words will alternate at the ends of every line throughout your sestina. (They’ll switch things up for you a little in the tercet, but we’ll get to that later.) Here’s where things get a leeeetle more complicated. But bear with me — we’ll get this thing figured out, I promise.

Much to the (unnecessary!) dismay of the sestina virgin, there’s a set pattern by which the rhyming words alternate from one stanza to the next. So to begin, we’re going to assign each rhyming word a number:

would/wood = 1
good = 3
should/shooed (iffy!) = 5

and

cup/cup = 2
yup = 4
sup/’sup = 6.

In your first stanza, the sequence of numbers is easy-peasy: 123456. The result is a first stanza with the following ending words:

would
cup
good
yup
should
sup.

Now, all you have to do is make up lines of poetry that end in those words — and you got yerself a first stanza! Traditionally, each line follows iambic pentameter, but I don’t usually hold with tradition, so I won’t tell you to do that. 😉

Bring It

Ready to tackle the next step? Remember, the ending words of your first stanza follow the simplest pattern: 123456. Here is the pattern for the remaining stanzas:

Second stanza: 615243 (sup, would, should, cup, yup, good)
Third Stanza: 364125 (good, sup, yup, would, cup, should)
Fourth Stanza: 532614 (you’ve probably got the picture and can plug ‘em in yourself)
Fifth Stanza: 451362
Sixth Stanza: 246531.

See? Didn’t I promise it would be painless? If your brain’s not completely fricasseed by now, let’s look at the final stanza, the tercet, which summarizes not only the content of the preceding six stanzas, but also the pattern of the rhyming words:

1 (middle of the line) and 4 (ending word)
2 (middle) and 5 (ending)
3 (middle) and 6 (ending).

Yes, But Whatsit?

You got yer rhymes, you got yer kinky alternates, you got yer pattern — in other words, you’re looking at your formula, and you’ve assembled the variables you’re going to plug into it. One might think that as a sestina-rocking poet, your work is practically done. The thing’s gonna write itself, right?

Wrong. Though formulaic in its structure, a completed sestina is greater than the sum of its parts. Or it should be greater, anyway, and that’s where your content comes into play.

Choose as your subject whatever you want. When I sit down to write a sestina, I have a general idea in mind, and I try to select rhyming words which relate to that idea in some way. As I start plugging the words into the pattern of each stanza, I keep my original idea ever before me, so that I never lose sight of my theme. That theme is like a small voice, guiding me from the back of my mind and nudging me in the right direction if I get off-track through desperate bids to force my rhymes to work. (If they don’t, some re-thinking of line-ending words might be in order.)

From one stanza to the next, I let the theme coalesce and build until it comes to a point somewhere toward the end of the fifth stanza or within the sixth. The ending tercet summarizes the story as well as its “moral”: the message I, as the poet, am trying to communicate.

And there you have it. In the final analysis, a sestina is a framework within which to tell a story, make a point, send a message, and touch a heart. It can be inspirational, endearing, silly, insightful — or all of that and more. A sestina can identify a problem and offer a solution. It can describe an emotion in a way that resonates. It can speak to the soul with form and language that take a reader’s breath away.

Try It On For Size

Some of you, my dearest inklings, balk at structure. Some of you revel in it. As for me, I encourage all of you to try penning a sestina, if for no other reason than the thrill of rising to the challenge of a complex genre of writing. Writing a sestina leaves one with a greater appreciation for the flow of language itself, not to mention a satisfying sense of accomplishment. And that, for us writers, is always worth a little extra effort.

If you’d like some examples of full-length sestinas instead of just sample rhyming words, check out the comments section. I’ve posted three of my own creations that will hopefully clear up any lingering how-to questions you might have. And who knows — maybe they’ll inspire something. 🙂

And that’s WILAWriTWe!

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On Document Styles: How to Use Section Breaks in Microsoft Word

By Aaron Pogue on Tuesday, August 31, 2010

I spent yesterday explaining why technical writers use text columns, providing some specific examples along the way. What I didn’t provide was any kind of instructions.

I hope to remedy that today. I’m going to walk you through the basics of setting up columns in Microsoft Word.

Setting Up a Columned Layout

The easiest way to set up columns in a document is to do it from the very start. Open a new document in Word, or load an existing document (assuming it doesn’t have any section breaks, which we’ll discuss later), then go to Format | Columns to open the Columns dialog.

Choose a two-column layout, and start typing (or, if you opened an existing document, just watch what happens). The whole document is now two-columns, and you can see in the following image how the extra whitespace breaks up the text density on the page.

Switching to (and from) a Columned Layout

Now, somewhere in that process, you should have seen a dropdown marked “Apply to Whole Document” (or, if you’re working in an existing document, it might have said, “This Section Only”). It’s easy enough to create columns in Word, but managing them can be a nightmare until you understand a few other elements of the software.

The first is “sections.” In Word, a “section” is a block of text with its own page formatting. Every document has at least one section (and, by default, only one), and with it a page layout (which includes the paper size and orientation, the margins, the header and footer text, and of course the column layout).

If you want to switch from a TOC with roman numerals for page numbers (in the footer) to a body section with Arabic numbers, you’ll need a section break between the two. If you want to switch from mostly vertical pages to a couple horizontal pages with illustrations on them in the middle of the book, you’ll need a section break before and after the change.

And if you want to switch from single-column body text to a multi-column offset section, you’ll need section breaks. Word handles breaks by inserting non-printing characters into the text flow, and there’s an option to display these non-printing characters. It clutters up your screen a little, but it’s incredibly helpful when you’re trying to figure out why a document isn’t cooperating with you.

To display non-printing characters, look on your toolbars for a paragraph symbol. (It might be hiding in a drop-down at the end of one of the toolbars.) Turn it on, and you should see (at the very least) all the paragraph marks on your page indicating where your paragraphs end. Depending how complicated your document layout is, you might see a whole mess of extra information on your page.

Now, move your cursor to the end of a paragraph partway through the document, and insert a new section break. From the menu choose Insert | Break… and you’ll get to see all the different types of break available. For our purposes, we want Continuous. Ignore the rest for now.

Skip down a point further down in the document (at least a few paragraphs down), and then insert another Continuous Section Break. Now your document has three sections: one before the first break, a second after it, and a third after the next break.

Click your mouse anywhere within the second section (between the two breaks), and go back to the Columns dialog. This time, instead of applying your change to the whole document, choose “Apply to This Section Only” before you hit Next.

For the illustration above, I turned the non-printing characters back off, so you could more easily see the visual effect we created. Some writers like to leave them off all the time, but I toggle back and forth all the time — sometimes you need to see what your readers will see, but other times it’s important to manage all the quirky effects Word is playing with.

Columnating a Selection

Of course, there are times when you have no desire to manage Word’s quirks at all. If you’re trying to create a quick effect, or if you don’t anticipate having to maintain the document later, there’s a much easier way to force a separately-columned section without inserting breaks or even understanding them.

All you’ve got to do is select the bit of text you want to modify:

And then, with it selected, go through the steps I defined above. Now, instead of choosing to apply the new layout to the whole document or to the current section, choose Apply to Selected Text.

Easy as that. Maybe I should have led with that method…but you know, eventually, you’re going to run into problems. And the only way you’ll ever be able to fix them is if you understand what’s going on behind the scenes.

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On Document Style: Text Columns

By Aaron Pogue on Monday, August 30, 2010

Yesterday’s story about carving out the blackberry bush, while carefully leaving load-bearing columns in the heart of it, would make for an excellent post on document structure. Wouldn’t it? Maybe I’ll have to tell it again sometime when you’re not looking….

Today I want to talk about a different type of columns, though: text columns, and page layout and design in general. In fact, I’m going to spend the whole next month talking about professional document styling, so brace yourself!

Using Columns to Create Whitespace

You’re certainly familiar with text columnation — breaking up a single page of text into multiple narrow columns. There are several reasons we do that. The most common is to create an appealing visual effect.

I’ve spoken before about the use of whitespace in page layouts. It breaks up a big grey block of text into readable chunks. That’s why we use space between paragraphs, it’s why we look for every opportunity to incorporate headings and bulleted lists, and it’s absolutely the motivation behind most text columnation.

Think about the types of text you’re used to seeing in columns. Probably the three that spring most readily to mind are newspapers, indexes (like phone books, for example), and long-form heavy-reading (like textbooks or the Bible).

In all of those cases, you’re looking at documents that have to present huge blocks of text with few formatting options for breaking up the text. Switching to a columned layout automatically breaks up every page of the text, without requiring any manual adjustments within the content.

Using Columns to Differentiate Information

Another major reason we use column layouts is to differentiate text. Technically that’s something we use whitespace for, so this could be seen as a coincidental overlap with my last point, but the big difference here is that we’re not talking about whitespace just to break up the page, but to create a specific contrast.

In other words, unlike the multi-column documents I was talking about before, sometimes we’ll be working with a single-column document and just break a single section of the text into multiple columns. That creates a strong visual effect — as we discussed before — but in this case that effect serves primarily as a contrast to the other text around it.

I’ve seen this technique used in newsletters, brochures, textbooks, and other technical documents to draw attention to a particularly important bit of information within an otherwise dry description. One of the most common places you’ll see it, though, is in cookbooks.

That examples springs readily to mind, because I had to help one of my students figure it out for her final project in my Tech Writing class last fall. I won’t pretend I’m an expert on cookbooks, but I’ve seen this effect often enough that I feel pretty confident discussing it.

What you’ll usually see is a name for the dish, maybe an illustration, and then a two-column list of ingredients, before returning to standard full-block text for the preparation instructions. That layout strongly differentiates the ingredient list from the actual procedure.

Using Columns in Microsoft Word

There are certainly good reasons to use columned layouts in your writing. Sometimes you just want to add a professional touch to your document, or you’re trying to fit some text to an awkwardly shaped areas on a printed page. Every application has its own challenges, though — and only the most basic is anything like “easy” to do in a word processor.

My student learned that the hard way when she tried to prepare her cookbook, and I learn it the hard way again every time I try to do something that should be simple. Formatting columns can be punishingly difficult, but it’s also something you’ll need to do eventually.

So come back tomorrow, and I’ll tell you how to set up column layouts in Microsoft Word. Even if you’re not using Word, chances are good this will get you moving in the right direction.

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On Document Style: Building Forts

By Aaron Pogue on Sunday, August 29, 2010

I’ve used today’s photo before, but it’s so adorable I just had to drag it out again. That’s not the only reason, of course. It’s also incredibly appropriate to the story I want to tell.

I don’t know if it’s readily apparent in that image, but we were building a fort in that photo. I think it was a snow day, but for whatever reason I was home with the family, and when Trish’s back was turned AB and I decided to turn the living room into a playground.

We used a couple chairs and a broomstick, a queen-size sheet and a couple heavy textbooks to hold the sheet out right. Trish caught us hiding in our creation, and snapped the image.

Annabelle’s had access to several fun forts like that. She’s got a big plastic play house out in the back yard — the kind you might remember from your last visit to a daycare playground, although the slide is missing — and when she goes to visit her cousins at Shannon’s place, she gets to play in an honest-to-goodness castle.

I didn’t have access to pre-fab structures like that when I was a kid — not at school, and certainly not at home. I made do, though. With fifteen acres of mostly-wooded land to play with, and a surprising amount of time completely on my own out there, I found my opportunities.

There was a huge boulder, probably a hundred feet long, thirty or forty feet across, and at least eight feet tall at the highest spot. My uncle Randy and I discovered it while out walking the trails on our property one time, and he said it would make an excellent outlaw den.

So we dug out a tunnel underneath it, from one end to the other, and built a cool fire pit right at the mouth of it. I’d spend hours climbing on the rock, crawling underneath it, or resting in its shadow and dreaming up outlaw stories.

Another time, way over on the other side of the property, Josh and I tried to build ourselves a clubhouse using the copious lumber readily available. We lacked such critical tools as foresight, planning, any degree of architectural competency, or…well, tools. So that got about as far as a leaky lean-to before we gave up.

I was committed to finding the perfect fort, though, and at long last I figured it out.

See…on the very back corner of our land grew this huge blackberry bush. Actually…it was probably really close to the same dimensions as the Big Rock I mentioned above. Every year in July we’d go out and pick bushels and bushels of blackberries, and the rest of the time we pretty much avoided that part of the property altogether.

One year while picking, though, I realized that the berries only grew on the very outside of the bush — that the bush sprawled over several hundred square feet, but we only made use of a tiny portion of it. Curious, I looked closer, and realized that only the very outside of the bush was even alive. Beneath a vibrant veneers a few feet thick was a dense, sprawling framework of long-dead branches.

And then I thought about digging that tunnel under the big rock, and realized how much simpler it would be to “dig” a path through the thin, brittle branches of the blackberry bush than it had been to dig through the hard clay under the rock.

It wasn’t quite as simple as I’d hoped, for a couple reasons. Mainly it was the thorns. Blackberry bushes aren’t quite as brutal as rosebushes, but they’re not far off, either. Carving a tunnel into a fluid mass of vicious thorns can be a dangerous procedure, and every branch I cut free had to be pulled out by hand. And, worse yet, every bit I missed got lost in the dust and leaves that littered the shadowy floor of my new cavern, so when I went crawling in on hands and knees, I came out all scraped up.

That didn’t bother me a bit, though. I was making a fort, after all, right? Every scratch reminded me what a great defensive structure this place was. Those thorns were my portcullis, my vats of boiling oil.

Eventually I wove together a mass of the cuttings, about the size and shape of a small shield, that I could wedge over the entrance to my tunnel as a makeshift door. It did wonders to hide what I was up to, too.

Oh, and I had to hide it. I mentioned my idea to Dad one time, looking for advice, and he strictly forbade me to start cutting on the blackberry bush. We all loved the annual yield of blackberries — the incredible cobblers, the jellies and jams, the syrup — Mom worked wonders with those berries, and Dad didn’t want me risking any of that.

I took that to heart, too. It didn’t stop me cutting — not at all — but it made me very careful wherever I went inside the belly of the bush. I watched for living vine, I carved my path through the thinnest branches and twisted and turned to avoid any trunks that looked thick enough to support significant weight from the top. I got caught in cave-ins a time or two — minor ones — and before long I understood the structure of the sprawling blackberry bush.

And from there I went wild. I spent most of a year on that project, and by the end I had three hidden entrances on our property and one escape route that opened right underneath the barbed-wire fence on our neighbor’s property. I had tunnels connecting all these entrances to a central chamber I could nearly stand up in, and two or three smaller side-chambers…and all of them supported by totally organic columns — untouched pillars where I’d avoided damaging the load-bearing trunks of long-dead bushes within the pile.

I’d sit alone, in my columned hall, and imagine myself a king in his throne room. It was glorious and, dangerous and bloody as it was, in its way it was far better than the pretty plastic toys Annabelle gets to play with. She’s got an imagination as big as mine, though, and in the end…that’s the bit that really matters.

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On Visual Storytelling: How to Write a Visual Scene

By Aaron Pogue on Saturday, August 28, 2010

With all these posts lately on writing rules, I’m becoming quite the party pooper, aren’t I? That’s no fun.

My goal isn’t to limit you as a writer, though — it’s to help you grow as a storyteller. Yesterday’s discussion of late attribution and flickering perspective was meant to help you spot the really cool things you’re trying to do…and do them right.

Focus

As I said, I’ve had lots of readers tell me my novels evoked powerful visual scenes for them, and I cherish those comments. For that matter, I write that way. I’ve been trying to capture the movies in my head since I was twelve.

The point isn’t to avoid that sort of storytelling, but to pursue it with the tools of a writer. Don’t try to use smash cuts and cross fades to achieve your purposes because…well, you can’t. It’s not an option on a printed page. Focus instead on narrative hooks and cliffhanger scene breaks.

It’s about more than just specific techniques, though. It’s about honing your overall approach. As I said yesterday, humans are very visual creatures, and flimmakers get to appeal directly to that aspect of their audience.

We’re also creative creatures, imbued with a powerful sense of imagination — readers even more than most. Maybe the cinematographer gets to show a scene in perfect detail, but as a writer you get to go one step further. You get to guide your readers as they imagine the scene.

Description

It’s probably a little more work, but it’s more personal, too. When you lead readers  into your world and get them lost in your story, you create a direct and meaningful connection with those readers.

Getting to imagine new worlds is one of the biggest benefits of stories, and most directors hoard the experience to themselves, presenting their own imagination to a passive audience. As a writer, your job is to share it with as many people as possible.

We do that with description, and the question of how much description is one that needs its own blog post (and, ultimately, will always vary from writer to writer, and reader to reader). The right amount of description, though, goes right back to last week’s stern edict: give your readers enough information to do what they need to do.

For me, that means limiting character and place descriptions so my readers can fill in the fine details with sights and sounds familiar to them. It also means getting all the props in place before they’re needed, though.

And, above all, it means consistency. If Claire has blue eyes in the first act, she’d better have blue eyes all the way through. In fact, even though I work hard to limit how much physical description I put in the story, I work just as hard to figure out all of the stuff I’m not saying. I want to know every aspect of my characters before I write them so they can move and act as real people, even if some of the superficial elements differ from one reader’s imagination to the next.

Blocking

The same goes for “blocking,” the positioning and motion of characters within your scenes. That’s the kind of thing that clutters up the orderly discourse of a script or screenplay, as “ANTONY EXITS LEFT” or “JENNY CROSSES DOWNSTAGE and looks MOROSE. OFF-STAGE, some DISHES RATTLE.”

We don’t have to get into that level of detail in our stories, but the more you think it through, the more visual your story will be. It’s easy to sit down and write a scene of dialogue knowing that it needs to contain a certain exchange of information, and never really think through what the characters are doing during the exchange.

Visual storytelling is often as simple as thinking through precisely these scenes and figuring out where everyone is, where they’re looking, and what they’re doing between the lines. As I said, you don’t have to write it all, but if you know the conversation is being carried on across the distance of living room — the husband seated on the couch, his attention mostly on the TV, and the wife in the kitchen washing dishes while she talks — that information colors the way you present the scene.

It changes what the characters say, and what they do. A point of conflict is a lot more likely to lead to a shattered dish than a fiery slap across the face, for instance, and as soon as it does — as soon as your consistent blocking of a scene impacts the storytelling — that story will become clearly visible to your reader’s inner eye.

Once again, it’s a matter of providing your readers with just enough touchpoints that they can fill in the rest of image in their heads. If you don’t cue them in that the conversation is taking place in two different rooms — if they’ve chosen to imagine this as a face-to-face confrontation — that shattering dish is going to be just as distracting as the effects I warned about yesterday.

Set Design (CW Exercise)

The lovely Kelley, writing at a coffee shopThe trick, then, is to strike a perfect balance. Finding that balance requires a deep and pervasive awareness.

Pay attention to your blocking. Pay attention to your descriptions. Pay attention to the visual cues you provide in your stories, and think about how well they’ll work for your readers.

Pay attention to the things you watch and read, too. Look for visual storytelling in print, and figure out who does it well, and how. The more time you spend thinking about this stuff, the better job you’ll do creating the effects you want (and, in all likelihood, your stories will start improving long before you start giving yourself credit for it).

In the end, though, nothing beats practice. So give it a try. Practice writing a short scene, just to see where you are now. Make it 300 words or so, two characters, one conversation, one point of conflict, and do everything you can to make the scene come alive.

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On Visual Storytelling: The Camera Lies

By Aaron Pogue on Friday, August 27, 2010

Yesterday I told a story about a high school ski trip that ended with a Goofy-esque pratfall on the slopes at Aspen, Colorado. It was one of those moments too perfect to believe, and I’ve cherished it in my memory ever since.

A couple years ago I got to relive the experience when Dad shared his first novel with me…and it featured a high school ski trip with more than one Goofy-esque pratfall to it. That sort of strongly visual scene, capturing an effect we’re all-too-familiar with from our extensive TV- and movie-watching, can be a powerful element of fiction writing. In fact, “It reads like a movie” is one of the most common and most encouraging compliments I get about my novels.

It’s a tricky effect, though. Reading those scenes in my Dad’s book (and in a handful of other first novels I’ve had the opportunity to review in the time since), I’ve been surprised how consistently new writers get tripped up trying to recreate in print effects they’re clearly more familiar with on the silver screen.

Late Attribution

The worst of these (and, in my experience, the most common) has got to be the late attribution. Our protagonist is sitting at a table alone, waiting on her lunch and thinking idly about…well, important plot elements, when suddenly:

“Well, well! I never expected to see you here. What have you been up to? Mind if I join you?”

Quick! Tell me who said that. How did you read it? Is it from our protagonist’s point of view, catching sight of an old friend? A high-school rival, wearing perfect politeness as a thin veneer over vicious judgment? Ooh, or is it a romantic interest “happening to bump into her” with a little bit of flirtation in his words? Or did you hear the voice of the arch-villain, sneaking up behind her with a dreadful malice dripping off every word?

The answer usually comes in the next word.

  • …Janey said, catching sight of her friend.
  • …Paulo said, taking the empty chair and favoring her with a disarming smile.
  • …Evillo McBadguy said, with a dreadful malice dripping off every word.

And that quickly the problem is fixed. Your reader has had to endure all of, what, twenty words of confusion. Is that such a bad thing?

It is. This is another example of what I was talking about last week — telling your readers everything they need to know, before they need to know it. And your readers need to know who’s saying a line before they read the line.

That’s because when we read dialogue, we voice-act it. Without ever thinking it through, we instinctively apply some sort of voice and emphasis to the words in dialogue, and when a reader has to guess — and then, in all likelihood, go back and reread once they’ve got the necessary information — that’s jarring. It takes your readers out of the story, and that’s a Very Bad Thing for good fiction.

It’s easy enough to see where it comes from, though. It’s pretty common on TV and in movies for us to hear a dramatic line and then the camera swings around for the dramatic revelation of the speaker. Late attribution attempts to recreate that (admittedly cool) effect, but it doesn’t work.

When you’re writing something to “read like a movie,” you’re still not writing a script. Remember that. Your goal is to create the effects, not just to blindly repeat the methods. That matters a lot, because as you try to recreate those visual effects, you’re doing it with a completely different set of tools.

When the villain speaks a dramatic line of dialogue from off-camera, for instance, we can still easily hear his exact tone of voice. Film provides audio and visual cues that novels don’t. That doesn’t mean you can’t achieve the same effects…it just means you’ll have to learn new ways of doing it.

Flickering Point-of-View

There’s another “rookie mistake” that I think gets discussed a lot, but nobody really talks about where it comes from: flickering point-of-view. When I say “flickering,” I mean too-frequent point-of-view changes in a story. Just like late attribution, they tend to be jarring for readers, they cause confusion, and they can shatter immersion.

So why are writers so anxious to throw them in? Because it’s what we’re used to seeing in our favorite TV shows and movies. We’re used to seeing the same scene flicker between more than one literal point of view — the multiple cameras usually used in filming — and it’s a technique that works.

It’s fun, as a storyteller, to get to show every single event from the most perfect possible perspective. And TV and movies have taught us to follow that sort of flicker, as viewers, to piece all the disconnected images together into a single awareness of the scene.

Humans are incredibly visual creatures, though, and that capacity gives us the power to do those mental acrobatics. Words, though…words are slower. Ideas take time to take shape, and rapidly jumping between descriptions of points of view is much harder to synthesize than just shifting perspective of rich visual images.

Maybe that paragraph was a bit too dense. Here’s the situation in simpler terms:

  • When we see a scene from a different perspective on camera, it’s (usually) immediately, visually obvious that the perspective has changed. Good cinematographers also make sure we can tell at a glance — in a split second — exactly what the perspective has changed to.
  • When you switch perspective in a novel, there’s nothing to reveal it to a reader until you tell them. And then, to achieve the same effect, you have to tell them what the scene “looks like” from the new perspective before you can ever get back to telling them what’s actually happening in that scene.
  • That means who, what, when, where, why, and how…and that’s an awful lot of Ws just to provide a slightly different take on a storyline the reader is already comfortably following. It might take a paragraph, or it might take a page, but it’s certainly not “a split second.”

There are certainly times when a change in perspective is valuable in written works, it’s just important to realize that the cost of a POV switch is much higher in a book than it is on film. Focus on recreating the POV switches that you like from authors — not the ones you like from CSI.

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On Visual Storytelling: Aspen Extreme

By Aaron Pogue on Thursday, August 26, 2010

Hmm…I really need to tell the story of the time I played Little League baseball. That’s not today’s tale, but it’s one worth telling.

Suffice it to say, for now, that it ended catastrophically, and that at the tender age of six or seven, the end was enough to obliterate any interest in team sports for the rest of my childhood. That earned me a reputation for being “unathletic” — a reputation cemented by my academic achievement and my love of books — but it was never entirely accurate.

I loved walking, hiking — exploring, I called it — and through middle and high school I took trips at least once a year to go skiing or mountain climbing. Those were rare enough, though, that they did nothing to affect my reputation.

Then, my Junior year in high school, Dad organized a youth group ski trip to Aspen, Colorado. All my friends came along (except Dan, who was already off at college), and among them all, I was the only one with any experience. Thanks to my reputation, the fact that I skied blues told them — or at least the macho guys among them — that they could easily handle blues, and should probably be on black slopes by the end of the week.

I didn’t bother arguing, but I did what I could to try to teach them. The whole drive up, I tried my hardest to tell them what to expect. It didn’t really do much good.

Monday morning, first thing out the gate, the guys started picking which slopes they wanted to run. I picked the two among them I liked best — Brad and Brian — and decided to tag along and help them get down the mountain alive.

It was a beautiful day for skiing. I remember that. The snow was deep and fresh, and we rode up the lift with a bright, warm sun on our faces and a light, cool breeze in our hair. At the top of the hill, before we started downhill, I tried to show Brad and Brian how to ski in a slow wedge — called a snowplow — and how to cut across the slope in big meandering loops to keep in control.

That’s not really a terribly high priority for a teenage boy, though. Going fast, looking cool, and outperforming peers — those were the things these two wanted to do. And besides…what could I possibly know about outdoor sports?

When I realized the futility of my lectures, I decided to show them. We all three poled up to the top of the slope, and then I demonstrated just how good I was. I slipped over the edge, picking up speed quickly, then tucked and sped down the slope, dancing off some natural drifts and easily weaving among some of the slower skiers. A couple hundred feet down the ground leveled off briefly before disappearing over an even steeper ledge, but I shooshed smoothly to a stop at the landing and turned back to wait for them.

Of course, my effort had an opposite effect. Brand and Brian watched me run, decided it couldn’t be that hard if I could do it, and both came racing after me.

Brad figured out his mistake about halfway down. He slipped clumsily into a snowplow, but it didn’t slow him nearly enough at that point. I saw the resolution in his eyes when he finally just bent his knees and fell over onto his right hip, skidding to a stop a few feet from my position.

Brian was older, though — and a little bit crazier — so he had more to prove. He flashed past Brad and turned his head to laugh as he flew past. He didn’t slow any as he hit the level spot, either, and flew right over the edge and out of sight down the next slope.

A moment later we heard a shout of fear, followed by a horrific crash and clatter that shattered the morning stillness, and then a single ski flipped up high into the air, somersaulting in the sunlight before it finally stabbed back down out of sight. Followed, of course, by a yelp of pain from Brian.

The whole thing was like a scene out of a cartoon. It worked, though. Brad and Brian both spent the rest of the weekend paying close attention to everything I had to say.

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