How to use this Page

No matter what the genre, a good writer needs to set the mood for readers. Whether it’s a creaky old house or the tense moments leading up to a final confrontation, atmosphere can make or break the experience in any piece of writing. It makes the story believable.

In the following excerpt from The Art & Craft of Writing Christian Fiction, author Jeff Gerke walks us through (withexamples) using specific word choice and description to paint the kind of picture that keeps readers turning the page or glancing over their shoulder. Moreover, he shows us how we can use the same setting for three different places, but, by adding and changing detail, create drastically different moods. In this sense, the settings become different because the mood and atmosphere have changed.

*     *     *     *     *

Here’s an example in setting mood through word choice. I’m going to describe the same place three times but set three different moods. The place: a house in the suburbs. 

Example 1

A shadow lay over the yard like a grave cloth. The grass was long and unkempt. Against the bole of a withered oak lay a child’s ball shrouded by the creeping Bermuda. The features of the house shimmered in the blaze of the afternoon, blurred beyond recognition to the unwary stranger.

Okay, a bit cheesy, maybe, but you get the point. Not a fun place to go.

Example 2

Zinnias blossomed against the cherry tree beside the front porch, their sun-kissed inner circles wreathed in bashful pink. At the base of the grand oak, a mother rabbit led her furry litter out from the shade of a rhododendron’s lacy leaves. She sniffed the breeze with delicate nostrils, brushed her eye with a paw, and bounded into the sun.

Ah, a more pleasant place, yes? A Disney moment.

Example 3

The dirt showed through the grass in brown scars. The grass that remained was brittle and sharp, like a smoker’s eyebrows. Signs remained of the home’s luxuriant past—the garden path, the children’s toys, the “Home of the Week” sign out front—but they lay wasted. An American flag still fluttered on its pole, but the sun had washed it out to a milky translucence, and its trailing edge was shredded. It hung from only one tether, twisting in the wind like a castaway’s last cry for rescue.

Depressed yet?

I was describing the same place in all three passages: A yard, grass, some trees, and stuff on the lawn. But I created vastly different feelings for the scene that could then take place there.

I did this by means of three tricks. First, I selected different details to point out each time. All the things I mentioned could be there in the yard each time—the flag, the bunny, the child’s ball—but by plucking out specific details that supported the mood I was after, I was able to construct different images in your mind.

Second, I made heavy use of word pictures and comparisons. You’ll notice I never resorted to personification, in which I could’ve brought inanimate objects to life (“the weeds tried to choke the joy from the yard,” that sort of thing). The similes were sufficient.

Third, I chose my vocabulary carefully. In the first one, I used words like grave cloth, bole, shrouded, withered, and creeping. In the second, I used blossomed, furry, bashful, and bounded. (Plus a bunny—you can never go wrong with a furry bunny if you want to paint a happy mood.) In the third, I used wasted, brittle, and cry, plus images of regret and loneliness.

Actually, I did a fourth thing to create the mood I was after. This one’s so subtle I didn’t realize I was doing it until I stepped back and took a look. I used words that “sounded to the eye” like other words that helped paint the picture I was going for. For instance, I used shimmered when I was thinking shivered. I used cherry to sound close to cheery. And I used lacy to sound like lazy, as in relaxed.

Pretty cool, huh? I’ve gone a bit overboard to illustrate, but you can achieve the same effect with a less heavy hand simply by being mindful of the mood you’re trying to create.

You can do this to convey the narrator’s mood, too. Indeed, you could combine both advanced techniques in this book into one. You’ve got a viewpoint character who is the narrator, and now you want to illustrate his mood, so you do so by having him describe things in ways that reveal his inner state. Now we’re really at heady altitude.

The same house and yard might look all three of these ways at different points in the story depending on how the viewpoint character is feeling at the moment. We all see things we want to see—or fear—and your characters are no different.

So try it. Do you have a scene you want your reader to perceive as happy, frightening, or sad? Do you want the reader to arrive at the scene feeling wary, disarmed, or flush with young love? Then take out your paint kit (your thesaurus) and begin selecting your palette.

It should work the other way around, too. If you’re about to write a scene that is supposed to be scary, be mindful of the images and vocabulary you use to describe the setting. You should probably remove the happy family of bunnies, in other words.

Your words are setting a mood for your scenes, whether you think about them or not. I’m just asking you to think about them. You want your descriptions to help set the mood you’re after, not work against you.

Descriptions are like paintings. An artist will choose her tools carefully. The brushes, the canvas, the paints, the colors, and more. All of these help her convey the image and feeling she wants to create in the painting.

So it is in your fiction. It’s the words and images you choose in your description that convey the mood you want to create for your scenes. Be mindful of your tools, and paint away!

Cris Freese is the associate editor of Writer’s Digest Books.

The following is the second in a two part, guest blog post from Eleanore D. Trupkiewicz, whose short story, “Poetry by Keats,” took home the grand prize in WD’s 14th Annual Short Short Story Competition. You can read more about Trupkiewicz in the July/August 2014 issue of Writer’s Digest and in an exclusive extended interview with her online. In this post, Trupkiewicz follows up on her discussion of dialogue with an impassioned plea: stick to said. 

*     *     *     *     *

Welcome back! Part I of this two-part post talked about two key aspects of writing dialogue. First, dialogue isn’t usually the place to use complete sentences because most people in everyday conversations speak in phrases and single words. Second, effective dialogue takes correct punctuation so the reader doesn’t get yanked out of the story by a poorly punctuated exchange.

Remember, the goal in writing fiction is to keep the reader engaged in the story. But don’t give up on writing to spend the rest of your life doing something easier, like finding the Holy Grail, just yet. There’s one more key aspect that makes dialogue effective for fiction writers.

Problem: The Great He Said/She Opined Debate

In Part I, I mentioned learning from my grade school English teacher about complete sentences. Another subject she covered in that class was the importance of using synonyms and avoiding repetition.

To this day, that discussion drives me absolutely crazy.

Thousands of budding writers all over the world heard those words and deduced that they would be penalized if they repeated the word said in any work of fiction they ever wrote. So they dutifully found thesauruses and started looking up other words to use.

I’d like to submit that thousands of budding writers have been misled. Here’s my take:

Stop!

Do not touch your thesaurus to find another word that means said.

The attribution said is fine. In fact, when readers are skimming along through a novel at warp speed, the word said is just like a punctuation mark—it doesn’t even register in readers’ minds (unless used incorrectly, and it would be hard to do that).

But if you draw attention to the mechanics of your story with dialogue like this, you’re guaranteed to lose your reader in total frustration:

“Luke,” she opined, “I need you.”

“Raina,” he implored, “I know you think you do, but—”

“No!” she wailed. “Please!”

Luke shouted, “You don’t know what you’re talking about!”

“You’re being so mean to me,” Raina wept.

With an exchange like that one, you might as well run screaming out of the book straight at the reader, waving a neon sign that says: HEY, DON’T FORGET THAT THIS IS ONLY A WORK OF FICTION AND THESE CHARACTERS AREN’T REAL!!!

Why would you nail yourself into your own proverbial coffin like that?

Here’s my advice. Don’t reach for the thesaurus this time. Leave it right where it is on your shelf. You might never need it again.

Instead, if you need an attribution, use said. If you must use something different for the occasional question, you could throw in “asked” for variety, but not too often.

An even better way to use attributions in dialogue is to use a beat of action instead, like this:

“I just don’t know anymore.” Mary folded her arms. “I think I’m afraid of you.”

Harry sighed. “I’m sorry.” He shook his head. “I’m not very good at this.”

That way, you know who’s talking, and you’ve even worked action and character traits into the conversation. It makes for a seamless read.

Two final thoughts:

First, dialogue cannot be smiled, laughed, giggled, or sighed. Therefore, this example is incorrect:

“Don’t tickle me!” she giggled.

You can’t giggle spoken words. You can’t laugh them or sigh them or smile them, either. (I dare you to try it. If it works for you, write me and let me know. We could be on to something.)

Of course, if you’re using said exclusively, then that won’t be a problem.

Second, let’s talk adverbs. If a writer can be convinced to use said instead of other synonyms, then he or she becomes really tempted to reach for an adverb to tell how the character said something, like this:

“I don’t want to see you again,” Lily said tonelessly.

“You don’t mean that,” Jack said desperately.

“You’re an idiot,” Lily said angrily.

The problem with using adverbs is that they’re always telling to your reader. (Remember that old maxim, “Show, don’t tell”?)

An occasional adverb won’t kill your work, but adverbs all over the place mean weak writing, or that you don’t trust your dialogue to stand without a qualifier. It’s like you’re stopping the movie (the story playing through the reader’s mind) for a second to say, “Oh, but wait, you need to know that Lily said that last phrase angrily. That’s important. Okay, roll tape.”

Why rely on a telling adverb when you could find a better way to show the reader what’s going on in the scene or inside the characters? Try something like this:

Lily turned away and crossed her arms. “I don’t want to see you again.”

“You don’t mean that.” Jack pushed to his feet in a rush.

She glared at him. “You’re an idiot.”

Beats of action reveal character emotions and set the stage far more effectively than an overdose of adverbs ever will.

Conclusion

While a challenge to write, dialogue doesn’t have to be something you dread every time you sit down to your work-in-progress (or WIP). The most effective dialogue is the conversations that readers can imagine your characters speaking, without all the clutter and distractions of synonymous attributions, overused adverbs, and incorrect punctuation.

When in doubt, cut and paste only the dialogue out of your WIP and create one script for each character. Then invite some friends (ones who don’t already think you’re crazy because you walk around mumbling to yourself about your WIP, if you still have any of those) over for dessert or appetizers sometime. Hand out the scripts, assign each person a part, and then sit back and listen. Was a line of dialogue so complicated it made the reader stumble? Do you hear places where the conversation sounds stilted and too formal, or where it sounds too informal for the scene? Does an exchange sound sappy when spoken aloud? Are there words you can cut out to tighten the flow?

And don’t give up your writing to search for the Holy Grail. While the search would be less frustrating sometimes, writing dialogue no longer has to look demonic to you. You know what to do!

Questions

In your current WIP, what sticking points and challenges do you find about writing dialogue? Is a character’s voice giving you trouble? Do you worry you’re overusing an attribution? Do you have a totally opposite opinion about adverbs? The rule about writing fiction is that there really aren’t many hard-and-fast rules, so don’t hesitate to share!

*     *     *     *     *

Eleanore D. Trupkiewicz is an author, poet, blogger, book reviewer, and freelance editor and proofreader. She writes full-length thrillers as well as short stories, flash fiction, poetry, and creative nonfiction. Her blogs are Engraved: All About Writing (http://eleanoretrupkiewicz.blogspot.com) and Daily Poetry Prompts (http://dailypoetryprompts.blogspot.com) and you can find her on one of her websites at www.eleanoretrupkiewicz.com or Refiner’s Fire Editing (www.refinersfireediting.com). Follow her on Twitter: @ETrupkiewicz. She lives and writes in Colorado with cats, chocolate, and assorted houseplants in various stages of demise.

The following is a guest blog post from Eleanore D. Trupkiewicz, whose short story, “Poetry by Keats,” took home the grand prize in WD’s 14th Annual Short Short Story Competition. You can read more about Trupkiewicz in the July/August 2014 issue of Writer’s Digest and in an exclusive extended interview with her online. In this post, Trupkiewicz details the importance of creating realistic dialogue and punctuating dialogue properly in order to keep the reader invested. Even the slightest of errors can draw the reader out of the story.

To read the second part of this post, check back at the beginning of next week, where she’ll tackle “said” and other attributions.

*     *     *     *     *

If the devil’s in the details, that makes dialogue for fiction writers one of the most demonic elements of a story or novel. Just thinking about it makes me want to shut down my laptop and take up another career. Something less taxing, like dedicating the rest of my life to finding the Holy Grail.

Think about it. It couldn’t possibly be any more frustrating a career choice.

On the other hand, without dialogue to break up the monotony, stories get wordy and dull. Paragraph after paragraph of description or action eventually bores a reader into throwing the book against the wall and declaring a moratorium on any future reading.

Which is a death sentence for authors.

The goal, instead, is to engage the reader so he/she never even entertains the possibility of tossing aside the book.

Here’s a quick-reference guide to writing effective dialogue in fiction.

Problem: What About Complete Sentences?

When I close my eyes, I can see my middle school English teacher, in a black broomstick skirt and print blouse, as she stressed the importance of “always writing in complete sentences.”

Any student hoping for a glowing report card would’ve taken the edict to heart. I started writing short stories in which the dialogue between characters read something like this:

                  “Good morning, James. It’s nice to see you again.”

                  “Thank you, Lisa, you as well. How have you been?”

                  “I’ve been very well lately, thank you, and you?”

Yawn.

Who talks like that?

Unless you’re writing dialogue in complete sentences for one character in your work of fiction, perhaps to emphasize a cultural difference or a high-class upbringing, few people really talk that way. What worked for Jane Austen in Pride and Prejudice isn’t going to fly with today’s readers.

Now what?

I’ll let you in on a secret. You’re going to have to disappoint your grade school English teacher.

Try an experiment. Go to a public place and eavesdrop. It helps maintain your cover if you’re not obvious about it, but just listen to the flow of conversation around you. You’re likely to hear snippets:

                  “Hey, man.”

                  “No.”

                  “Shut up.”

                  “Get lost, will you?”

                  “Pregnant? Julie?”

                  “I can’t— no, I don’t feel—”

Not many of these are complete sentences, by grammatical standards. Where are the subjects and the predicates? Could you diagram these examples?

Sure—they’re called words and phrases, and they’re what people generally use in conversation.

It’s not a crime to use a complete sentence—“Get away from me, Jim, before I call the police”—but opportunities don’t come up very often. Dialogue will flow and read more naturally on the page if you train yourself to write the way you hear people around you speaking.

Problem: Punctuating Dialogue

Periods, commas, ellipses, quotation marks, tigers, bears … you get the idea.

Don’t panic. Punctuating dialogue doesn’t have to be complicated, and your editor and proofreader will thank you for putting in the extra effort.

Here’s what you need to know about the most common punctuation in dialogue:

• When dialogue ends with a period, question mark, or exclamation mark, put the punctuation inside the quotation mark:

                  “Sam came by to see you.”

                  “Come home with me?”

                  “I hate you!”

• When punctuating dialogue with commas and an attribution before the dialogue, the comma goes after the attribution, and the appropriate punctuation mark goes inside the quotation mark at the end of the dialogue:

                  Mom said, “Sam came by to see you.”

• When punctuating dialogue with commas and adding an attribution after the dialogue, the comma goes inside the quotation mark:

                  “She came home with me,” Will said.

• When you’re punctuating dialogue with commas and adding a pronoun attribution, the comma goes inside the quotation mark, and the pronoun is not capitalized:

                  “I hate you,” she said.

• With dialogue that trails away, as though the speaker has gotten distracted, use an ellipsis inside the quotation mark:

                  “I just don’t know …” Jenny said.

• When dialogue is abruptly interrupted or cut off, use an em-dash inside the quotation mark:

                  “Well, I don’t think—”

                  “Because you never think!”

• For a non-dialogue beat to break up a line of dialogue, use either commas or em-dashes:

                  “And then I realized,” Jane said with a sigh, “that he lied to me.”

                  “Without the antidote”—Matt shook his head—“I don’t think we can save him.”

• When the speaker has started to say one thing, and changed his or her mind to say something else, use the em-dash:

                  “I don’t want to—I mean, I won’t hurt her.”

Note that semicolons and colons are rarely used in most contemporary fiction. They tend to appear too academic on the page, and if you use one or the other, or both, you run the risk of reminding the reader that they’re reading a story. Try not to do anything that breaks that fourth wall and calls attention to the mechanics of the story itself.

Look for the discussion about the great debate between “said” and other attributions in Part II of this post.

Questions

What “rules” about dialogue do you remember from grade school, writing conferences, classes, workshops, or books? Which rules drive you crazy? Which ones do you find yourself struggling to solve? How have you tackled those frustrations? Share your wisdom so others can benefit—writing takes a community to succeed!

*     *     *     *     *

Eleanore D. Trupkiewicz is an author, poet, blogger, book reviewer, and freelance editor and proofreader. She writes full-length thrillers as well as short stories, flash fiction, poetry, and creative nonfiction. Her blogs are Engraved: All About Writing (http://eleanoretrupkiewicz.blogspot.com) and Daily Poetry Prompts (http://dailypoetryprompts.blogspot.com) and you can find her on one of her websites at www.eleanoretrupkiewicz.com or Refiner’s Fire Editing (www.refinersfireediting.com). Follow her on Twitter: @ETrupkiewicz. She lives and writes in Colorado with cats, chocolate, and assorted houseplants in various stages of demise.

Like Steven James’ advice?
Then you’ll love his book,
Story Trumps Structure
Order now >>

Imagine that I’m telling you about my day and I say, “I woke up. I ate breakfast. I left for work.”

Is that a story? After all, it has a protagonist who makes choices that lead to a natural progression of events, it contains three acts and it has a beginning, a middle and an end—and that’s what makes something a story, right?

Well, actually, no.

It’s not.

—By Steven James

My description of what I did this morning—while it may meet those commonly accepted criteria—contains no crisis, no struggle, no discovery, no transformation in the life of the main character. It’s a report, but it’s not a story.

Over the years as I’ve taught at writing conferences around the world, you should see some of the looks I’ve gotten when I tell people to stop thinking of a story in terms of its structure. And it’s easy to understand why.Spend enough time with writers or English teachers and you’ll hear the dictum that a story is something that has a beginning, middle and end. I know that the people who share this definition mean well, but it’s really not a very helpful one for storytellers. After all, a description of a pickle has a beginning, a middle and an end, but it’s not a story. The sentence, “Preheat the oven to 450 degrees,” has those basic elements, but it’s not a story either.

So then, what is a story?

Centuries ago, Aristotle noted in his book Poetics that while a story does have a beginning, a middle and an ending, the beginning is not simply the first event in a series of three, but rather the emotionally engaging originating event. The middle is the natural and causally related consequence, and the end is the inevitable conclusive event.

In other words, stories have an origination, an escalation of conflict, and a resolution.

Of course, stories also need a vulnerable character, a setting that’s integral to the narrative, meaningful choices that determine the outcome of the story, and reader empathy. But at its most basic level, a story is a transformation unveiled—either the transformation of a situation or, most commonly, the transformation of a character.

Simply put, you do not have a story until something goes wrong.

At its heart, a story is about a person dealing with tension, and tension is created by unfulfilled desire. Without forces of antagonism, without setbacks, without a crisis event that initiates the action, you have no story. The secret, then, to writing a story that draws readers in and keeps them turning pages is not to make more and more things happen to a character, and especially not to follow some preordained plot formula or novel-writing template. Instead, the key to writing better stories is to focus on creating more and more tension as your story unfolds.

Understanding the fundamentals at the heart of all good stories will help you tell your own stories better—and sell more of them, too. Imagine you’re baking a cake. You mix together certain ingredients in a specific order and end up with a product that is uniquely different than any individual ingredient. In the process of mixing and then baking the cake, these ingredients are transformed into something delicious.

That’s what you’re trying to do when you bake up a story.

So let’s look at five essential story ingredients, and then review how to mix them together to make your story so good readers will ask for seconds.

Ingredient #1: Orientation
The beginning of a story must grab the reader’s attention, orient her to the setting, mood and tone of the story, and introduce her to a protagonist she will care about, even worry about, and emotionally invest time and attention into. If readers don’t care about your protagonist, they won’t care about your story, either.

So, what’s the best way to introduce this all-important character? In essence, you want to set reader expectations and reveal a portrait of the main character by giving readers a glimpse of her normal life. If your protagonist is a detective, we want to see him at a crime scene. If you’re writing romance, we want to see normal life for the young woman who’s searching for love. Whatever portrait you draw of your character’s life, keep in mind that it will also serve as a promise to your readers of the transformation that this character will undergo as the story progresses.

For example, if you introduce us to your main character, Frank, the happily married man next door, readers instinctively know that Frank’s idyllic life is about to be turned upside down—most likely by the death of either his spouse or his marriage. Something will soon rock the boat and he will be altered forever. Because when we read about harmony at the start of a story, it’s a promise that discord is about to come. Readers expect this.

Please note that normal life doesn’t mean pain-free life. The story might begin while your protagonist is depressed, hopeless, grieving or trapped in a sinking submarine. Such circumstances could be what’s typical for your character at this moment. When that happens, it’s usually another crisis (whether internal or external) that will serve to kick-start the story. Which brings us to the second ingredient.

[Learn 5 Tools for Building Conflict in Your Novel]

Ingredient #2: Crisis
This crisis that tips your character’s world upside down must, of course, be one that your protagonist cannot immediately solve. It’s an unavoidable, irrevocable challenge that sets the movement of the story into motion.

Typically, your protagonist will have the harmony of both his external world and his internal world upset by the crisis that initiates the story. One of these two imbalances might have happened before the beginning of the story, but usually at least one will occur on the page for your readers to experience with your protagonist, and the interplay of these two dynamics will drive the story forward.

Depending on the genre, the crisis that alters your character’s world might be a call to adventure—a quest that leads to a new land, or a prophecy or revelation that he’s destined for great things. Mythic, fantasy and science-fiction novels often follow this pattern. In crime fiction, the crisis might be a new assignment to a seemingly unsolvable case. In romance, the crisis might be undergoing a divorce or breaking off an engagement.

In each case, though, life is changed and it will never be the same again.

George gets fired. Amber’s son is kidnapped. Larry finds out his cancer is terminal. Whatever it is, the normal life of the character is forever altered, and she is forced to deal with the difficulties that this crisis brings.

There are two primary ways to introduce a crisis into your story. Either begin the story by letting your character have what he desires most and then ripping it away, or by denying him what he desires most and then dangling it in front of him. So, he’ll either lose something vital and spend the story trying to regain it, or he’ll see something desirable and spend the story trying to obtain it.

Say you’ve imagined a character who desires love more than anything else. His deepest fear will be abandonment. You’ll either want to introduce the character by showing him in a satisfying, loving relationship, and then insert a crisis that destroys it, or you’ll want to show the character’s initial longing for a mate, and then dangle a promising relationship just out of his reach so that he can pursue it throughout the story.

Likewise, if your character desires freedom most, then he’ll try to avoid enslavement. So, you might begin by showing that he’s free, and then enslave him, or begin by showing that he’s enslaved, and then thrust him into a freedom-pursuing adventure.

It all has to do with what the main character desires, and what he wishes to avoid.

[Learn important writing lessons from these first-time novelists.]

Ingredient #3: Escalation
There are two types of characters in every story—pebble people and putty people.

If you take a pebble and throw it against a wall, it’ll bounce off the wall unchanged. But if you throw a ball of putty against a wall hard enough, it will change shape.

Always in a story, your main character needs to be a putty person.

When you throw him into the crisis of the story, he is forever changed, and he will take whatever steps he can to try and solve his struggle—that is, to get back to his original shape (life before the crisis).

But he will fail.

Because he’ll always be a different shape at the end of the story than he was at the beginning. If he’s not, readers won’t be satisfied.

Putty people are altered.

Pebble people remain the same. They’re like set pieces. They appear onstage in the story, but they don’t change in essential ways as the story progresses. They’re the same at the ending as they were at the beginning.

And they are not very interesting.

So, exactly what kind of wall are we throwing our putty person against?

First, stop thinking of plot in terms of what happens in your story. Rather, think of it as payoff for the promises you’ve made early in the story. Plot is the journey toward transformation.

As I mentioned earlier, typically two crisis events interweave to form the multilayered stories that today’s readers expect: an external struggle that needs to be overcome, and an internal struggle that needs to be resolved. As your story progresses, then, the consequences of not solving those two struggles need to become more and more intimate, personal and devastating. If you do this, then as the stakes are raised, the two struggles will serve to drive the story forward and deepen reader engagement and interest.

Usually if a reader says she’s bored or that “nothing’s happening in the story,” she doesn’t necessarily mean that events aren’t occurring, but rather that she doesn’t see the protagonist taking natural, logical steps to try and solve his struggle. During the escalation stage of your story, let your character take steps to try and resolve the two crises (internal and external) and get back to the way things were earlier, before his world
was tipped upside down.

[Here's how to turn traumatic experiences into fuel for your writing.]

Ingredient #4: Discovery
At the climax of the story, the protagonist will make a discovery that changes his life.

Typically, this discovery will be made through wit (as the character cleverly pieces together clues from earlier in the story) or grit (as the character shows extraordinary perseverance or tenacity) to overcome the crisis event (or meet the calling) he’s been given.

The internal discovery and the external resolution help reshape our putty person’s life and circumstances forever.

The protagonist’s discovery must come from a choice that she makes, not simply by chance or from a Wise Answer-Giver. While mentors might guide a character toward self-discovery, the decisions and courage that determine the outcome of the story must come
from the protagonist.

In one of the paradoxes of storytelling, the reader wants to predict how the story will end (or how it will get to the end), but he wants to be wrong. So, the resolution of the story will be most satisfying when it ends in a way that is both inevitable and unexpected.

[Understanding Book Contracts: Learn what’s negotiable and what’s not.]

Ingredient #5: Change
Think of a caterpillar entering a cocoon. Once he does so, one of two things will happen: He will either transform into a butterfly, or he will die. But no matter what else happens, he will never climb out of the cocoon as a caterpillar.

So it is with your protagonist.

As you frame your story and develop your character, ask yourself, “What is my caterpillar doing?” Your character will either be transformed into someone more mature, insightful or at peace, or will plunge into death or despair.

Although genre can dictate the direction of this transformation—horror stories will often end with some kind of death (physical, psychological, emotional or spiritual)—most genres are butterfly genres. Most stories end with the protagonist experiencing new life—whether that’s physical renewal, psychological understanding, emotional healing or a spiritual awakening.

This change marks the resolution of the crisis and the culmination of the story.

As a result of facing the struggle and making this new discovery, the character will move to a new normal. The character’s actions or attitude at the story’s end show us how she’s changed from the story’s inception. The putty has become a new shape, and if it’s thrown against the wall again, the reader will understand that a brand-new story is now unfolding. The old way of life has been forever changed by the process of moving through the struggle to the discovery and into a new and different life.

Letting Structure Follow Story

I don’t have any idea how many acts my novels contain.

A great many writing instructors, classes and manuals teach that all stories should have three acts—and, honestly, that doesn’t make much sense to me. After all, in theater, you’ll find successful one-act, two-act, three-act and four-act plays. And most assuredly, they are all stories.

If you’re writing a novel that people won’t read in one sitting (which is presumably every novel), your readers couldn’t care less about how many acts there are—in fact, they probably won’t even be able to keep track of them. What readers really care about is the forward movement of the story as it escalates to its inevitable and unexpected conclusion.

While it’s true that structuring techniques can be helpful tools, unfortunately, formulaic approaches frequently send stories spiraling off in the wrong direction or, just as bad, handcuff the narrative flow. Often the people who advocate funneling your story into a predetermined three-act structure will note that stories have the potential to sag or stall out during the long second act. And whenever I hear that, I think, Then why not shorten it? Or chop it up and include more acts? Why let the story suffer just so you can follow a formula?

I have a feeling that if you asked the people who teach three-act structure if they’d rather have a story that closely follows their format, or one that intimately connects with readers, they would go with the latter. Why? Because I’m guessing that deep down, even they know that in the end, story trumps structure.

Once I was speaking with another writing instructor and he told me that the three acts form the skeleton of a story. I wasn’t sure how to respond to that until I was at an aquarium with my daughter later that week and I saw an octopus. I realized that it got along pretty well without a skeleton. A storyteller’s goal is to give life to a story, not to stick in bones that aren’t necessary for that species of tale.

So, stop thinking of a story as something that happens in three acts, or two acts, or four or seven, or as something that is driven by predetermined elements of plot. Rather, think of your story as an organic whole that reveals a transformation in the life of your character. The number of acts or events should be determined by the movement of the story, not the other way around.

Because story trumps structure.

If you render a portrait of the protagonist’s life in such a way that we can picture his world and also care about what happens to him, we’ll be drawn into the story. If you present us with an emotionally stirring crisis or calling, we’ll get hooked. If you show the stakes rising as the character struggles to solve this crisis, you’ll draw us in more deeply. And if you end the story in a surprising yet logical way that reveals a transformation of the main character’s life, we’ll be satisfied and anxious to read your next story.

The ingredients come together, and the cake tastes good.

Always be ready to avoid formulas, discard acts and break the “rules” for the sake of the story—which is another way of saying: Always be ready to do it for the sake of your readers.

Not sure if your story structure is strong enough to woo an agent? Consider:
Story Structure Architect

Become a WD VIP and Save 10%:
Get a 1-year pass to WritersMarket.com, a 1-year subscription to Writer’s Digest magazine and 10% off all WritersDigestShop.com orders! Click here to join.

One of the main concerns writers should have when planning and writing a series is consistency. But what does it mean to be consistent? It’s more than just keeping track of the character names, physical attributes, family trees, and locations in a notebook or Excel spreadsheet; it’s about presenting the logical facts that you’ve established in a series in a consistent manner, from book to book

Below, Karen S. Wiesner discusses the five major red flags of inconsistency—and what you can do to prevent them in your own fiction series.

1. Oversights

Oversights are a catchall category for anything in a plotline, character, or setting that concerns illogical, unexplainable, or unrealistic courses of action and plot holes, including coincidence contrivance (writer needs it to work and so creates the groundwork on the spot to patch up a means to force it to work) and convenience justifications (it was the only way to make A fit with B, so I had to do it, didn’t I?).

A deus ex machina situation is one in which an improbable event or element is introduced into a story to resolve all the problematic situations and bring the story to a close. In a conventional Greek tragedy the producers actually lowered an actor playing a god onto the stage at the end of the play and he resolved all the conflicts. Talk about unsatisfying for the audience! Any author worth his salt needs to create plausible backstory and motivation for every action, and she has to make characters heroic enough to solve their own problems. That’s why Oversights are so major in series consistency.

If your character does something that makes no sense in the course of the action or in terms of their internal conflicts and motivations, or if you include a plot point merely for convenience sake, you’ve got yourself a nasty oversight. If, in one book, your character is so scarred by the death of a spouse that he doesn’t believe he can ever move on or fall in love again, and in the next book he has already become involved with someone new and never thinks about how he’s a widower, you’ve made a huge oversight that readers probably won’t tolerate, let alone accept. In other words, you go from one situation to the next without any explanation for the radical change. If you want something to be believable, you need to set it up logically and you need to set it up early enough so it will be readily accepted by the reader. That absolutely requires advance planning.

2. Changed Premise

This category includes information given in one episode that directly contradicts information in another. In a series this can be fatal. If your book series has a Changed Premise from one book to the next, readers will lose respect. If anything concerning character, plot, or setting conflicts with something that was previously established, it would fit under the Changed Premise heading. If you alter the structure or foundational facts that were previously set up in the series, even if you do it for a very good reason, you’ve changed the premise for the story, and readers will notice. If you can’t find a way to make something believable within the entire scope of the series, you’ll lose readers, perhaps for the remainder of the series. As an example, if your vampire can’t see his own reflection in the first two books in the series, but in the third he desperately needs to be able to see his reflection in order for your plot to work, you’ve changed an established premise. You’ll have to come up with a solid bit of plausibility to get readers to accept the change. If you create a world in which no outsiders are tolerated in the first three books, yet in the fourth one a stranger shows up and is ushered into the heart of the community with open arms, you’ve changed the premise of your series.

3. Technical Problems

While problems with equipment and technical oddities were often an issue in science fiction shows like Star Trek and The X-Files, (and may be in your series, too, if you include a lot of technology that must be realistic), this kind of inconsistency can also deal with inadvertently or indiscriminately jumping into alternate viewpoints or changing descriptions of characters or settings because what was previously mentioned has been forgotten. If your character always speaks in a certain dialect and suddenly stops in a subsequent book, that’s a technical problem. Names and jobs can also accidentally change through the course of a series. If your character’s hair color or eye color changes, or if he was 6’5″ in the first two books in the series but drops an inch in later stories, you have what may be considered technical problems.

For instance, in The X-Files both main characters used cell phones throughout most of the series, but the phones were used inconsistently, in ways that forced the viewers to question the logic. In one episode, Mulder was trapped underground in the middle of a desert called Nowhere—was there actually a cell phone tower nearby that allowed him to get good reception? In other cases Mulder and Scully didn’t use the phones when they should have, and in each of these cases, it was convenient to the plot and for the writers/creators that they didn’t use their phones to call the other to their rescue because it would have solved the plot of that particular episode too quickly.

These are probably minor and simply annoying issues at most, and you probably won’t lose any readers with such blunders, but dotting all your Is and crossing all your Ts will make fans appreciate you that much more.

4. Continuity and Production Issues

Again, in both The X-Files and Star Trek, errors often crept up as a direct result of someone on staff not checking the manual or previous episodes before going ahead with the episode. How often was a setting shot reused and only slightly altered in Star Trek because coming up with something new would have been expensive or time consuming? In a classic Star Trek episode, the creators decided to establish that the Romulans had stolen the design of Klingon ships—so they could use a Klingon ship they’d already created. Not only that, but the Romulans also used Klingon weapons. Cheaper for the creators, yes, but viewers can’t help but groan at these production issues. If you’re doing anything “halfway” with your series simply because it would be a hassle to find a better, more creative way of handling it, you’re making your own production problems. Readers will feel your impatience and probably wonder why you skimped.

If you give a character two birthdays or have him get younger instead of older as a series progresses, these are less crucial issues but nevertheless problems. I call issues like these minor because, unless you have fans who are ravenous and must know and understand every facet of your series, many won’t sit down and figure out timelines or even see a problem.

5. Unanswered Questions

If the author is never going to answer a nagging question, why invest anything, especially time and passion, in the series? Leaving a series arc dangling isn’t something an author can do in a book series unless she sets up the series from the first as an open-ended one that probably won’t have definitive closure. While each book in the series must have satisfactory individual story arc resolutions, all series-arc questions must be answered in the final book of the series or readers will be furious, perhaps enough to ban you as an author for life. They’ll feel cheated and rightly so. Don’t underestimate the damage a vengeful reader can do to your career. (Have you read Stephen King’s Dolores Claiborne? Do it now and take heed!) To write a series is to promise the closure and/or resolution of unanswered series arc questions. Think of it this way: With the first book in your series, you’ve presented a question and asked your readers to be patient as you string out the development of this theme through several books. You’ve promised that an answer will be delivered in the last book. If you don’t deliver it, you’ve stolen time, money, and even reader emotions, all with a careless shrug of purposeful neglect.

Supporting characters better our understanding of the main character and the circumstances she finds herself in, whether long-term (I need to solve this homicide case) or short-term (I need a ham sandwich). And if your supporting characters aren’t working toward an understanding of the main character or situation in some way, you might ask yourself what they’re really doing there, hogging time and space in your book. Your novel isn’t an open house for complete strangers to walk through as they wish. Everything you spend time on must be for a reason, including those minor characters who appear to be simply passing through.

That said, your supporting cast can’t seem like they’re only hanging around to provide information or further the plot. Rather, your secondary characters, even the ones who appear in the book for only a couple of paragraphs and then are gone forever, must appear in those paragraphs as independent people with personalities, motivations and desires of their own … and you often have to accomplish this in just a few choice words or lines.

For example, let’s start with a simple premise and conflict—a man and woman on an uncomfortable dinner date—and consider what that situation calls for in terms of supporting characters. They’re at a restaurant and are unhappy with their relationship, for whatever reason, though the tension in the scene comes from their being unwilling or unable to express their unhappiness, from their silence and bottling it up. So a secondary character working with and against this problem might be a waitress who, unlike our two quietly suffering characters, comes over and tries to say everything. One who is simply trying to be cheery—and trying to make a sale—and whose fake outgoingness helps highlight our main characters’ quiet desperation. The waitress might not pick up on the fact that the two are having a fight of sorts and might start suggesting every dinner- or drink-for-two on the menu, clueless to the tension between them.

We’d find ways to deliver her character clearly from the way she speaks, acts, dresses—loud, overbearing, pieces of flair on her suspenders, lipstick on her teeth—and we’d see that she has a clear, simple motivation all
her own: taking an order and trying to push tonight’s special. But her actions in following through with the motivation give us a way of seeing the main characters and their predicament in fuller, if depressing, terms.
(Note, too, that we’d have even more minor characters in the scene—young couples in love, old couples in silence, an obnoxious kid’s birthday party—and that all of them, even though rendered quickly, would be serving the same function of showing our suffering couple more clearly.)

This is the case for every minor character you make part of your cast, whether the character comes in once to fulfill a specific function, and then leaves or becomes a recurring one, someone who plays an important role
in building the story as part of a subplot.

Rounding Flat Characters

If you find yourself having trouble seeing your characters, whether major or minor, as full people in their own right, here are a few questions you might ask to help nudge them in the right direction.

What’s the character’s internal motivation; what does he or she really want? This might particularly be a question to ask of a flat protagonist, the result of a main character who seems motivated by nothing but plot-level or external circumstances. Remember that your hero is also a person like you
or me … and consider what we’d feel in a similar situation. (And don’t forget that even minor characters have motivations, and lives, of their own.)

How might you locate a character’s internal motivation and conflict if they seem to be absent? If your character’s motivation seems purely external, perhaps as part of his obligation or job—if you’re writing a detective novel, and the charac

Many beginning novelists think of the climax of their story as one single, explosive event. While that’s true to a degree, the climax of a novel actually has four components:

1. The run-up to the climactic moment (last-minute maneuvering to put the pieces in their final positions)
2. The main character’s moment of truth (the inner journey point toward which the whole story has been moving)
3. The climactic moment itself (in which the hero directly affects the outcome)
4. The immediate results of the climactic moment (the villain might be vanquished, but the roof is still collapsing).

A word on setting before we begin: Many times, all four of these will happen as a stand-alone set piece, a huge scene (or series of scenes) that constitutes the endgame. Often, this is done in a location we haven’t seen yet. In those cases, the final act, which we’ll call Act 3, is easy to identify.

Battles and monsters and betrayals have tried to bar their way, but Frodo and Sam finally arrive at Mount Doom. The whole Cracks of Doom sequence is the climax portion of Act 3 in the Lord of the Rings trilogy.

After all the ups and downs, the Nazis really are going to open the Ark of the Covenant. The entire mountaintop sequence of Raiders of the Lost Ark is the set piece that comprises the climax portion of its Act 3.

In these stories and more, there’s an actual location element to Act 3. It’s as if the set designers have built a special arena just for the final showdown. I actually quite like the feeling that the curtain fell on Act 2, the stagehands have taken off the old set and are preparing something new and wonderful, and then the curtain rises to show us the climax of the play.

But there’s nothing that says your climactic moment has to be in a different location. If it’s a sports story, for instance, the climax may occur in the same place as much of the rest of the book: the court or field. If the characters have been trapped in an elevator for the whole book, the climax will most likely take place in the elevator. So long as you cover all the elements, you’re fine. But why not take it to a new fun location?

Think about your story a moment. You may have a good idea for where the big showdown needs to happen. And even if you’ve thought of a place, considering other options will help you find surprising wonders or can verify that you have, indeed, found the right place for this crucial action.

What is the ultimate setting for the final conflict in your book? If you’re writing a thriller about a killer who preys on children, could the final standoff occur on a playground? If you’re writing a romance about flirtatious ornithologists, could the final will-he/won’t-he moment take place in the world’s largest aviary? If it’s a pirate story, the climactic scene had better be on the high seas.

There’s an appropriateness about your story regarding the “right” location for the big scene. Where is the perfect place for your book’s climactic sequence?

If you’re still not sure, perhaps looking at each element of the climax will help you decide.

The Run-Up to the Climactic Moment

Act 3 is the whole book in miniature. There’s a beginning, middle and end. Rising action, climax and falling action. Things have to be set up for the big event, the big event happens and then there is the fallout.

If your Act 3 takes place largely in a new location, the run-up begins when the hero arrives at the new location. So somehow you’ve got to get from the last item on your Act 2 map to this location. Maybe at the end of Act 2 your hero can set out for the Act 3 location: She heads to the launchpad, he runs toward the stables, she picks up her sword and strides toward the villain’s lair.

If your Act 3 does not take place in a new location, you can still indicate the hero’s intention to purposely walk toward the final confrontation. The “Let’s roll” moment can be when the curtain

Today’s tip of the day comes from Grammatically Correct and describes some techniques for improving your writing style and for assessing how well your efforts are succeeding. Not all these strategies will be right for everyone, but it can’t hurt to at least consider them.

Focus on the whole as well as the parts

Any time you add or revise some words, reread what surrounds them to ensure that everything else still fits. Often, a change in one place will necessitate a change in another. Naturally you must focus on each line as you create it, but as soon as you have the first draft in place, back up a few lines and read through the earlier text again. You will sometimes find that the latest addition doesn’t fit in quite as it should—perhaps it restates a point already made, or doesn’t make a smooth enough transition from what came before.

As you form each new sentence, keep going back and rereading it from the start to ensure that all its elements mesh together. As you form each new paragraph, keep rereading it from its first line to see how its sentences fit together: perhaps the topic shifts enough that the paragraph should be broken up, or perhaps a particular word now is repeated too many times within a short space.

Put your work aside for a while and then come back to it

You may be confident that you have polished your words into their final form, only to find that when you look at them a little later, problems jump out: illogical connections, clumsy sentence structures, a strained-sounding tone, subtle grammatical errors. A lapse of time enables you to come back to your work with a more objective eye. A day or more away is ideal, but even a few hours can make a difference.

Have someone else look your work over

Any writer, no matter how skilled, can benefit from getting a second opinion, because by definition one is always too close to one’s own work. Given that any writing is ultimately intended for other people’s consumption, it only makes sense to find out how other people perceive it. The individual whose opinion you seek need not be a better writer than you, since the goal is not necessarily to have this person correct or revise what you have done. Rather, it is to provide you with feedback on how your points and your tone are coming across. If your critic doesn’t get your jokes, or finds a character you meant to be funny and sympathetic merely irritating, or can’t follow some instruction because you left out a step you thought would be perfectly obvious to anybody—at least consider the possibility of making changes (and do your best to remain on speaking terms afterward). A professional editor is ideal, but if this is not practical or affordable, select someone whose opinion you respect and who represents your intended readership as nearly as possible.

Add a Comment

I was reading through some of our older science fiction titles, and I came upon Worlds of Wonder by David Gerrold (published in 2001). As I was flipping through the book, I read an opening line that intrigued me:

“All writing is list-making. Nothing more. The trick is knowing what to put next on the list.”

This seemed a puzzlingly simple notion–that developing the plot of your story was in some way akin to the act of jotting down your grocery list. And yet, as I started to read further, what the author was saying made a lot of sense:

The thing about Lego bricks is that you can build just about anything you can imagine–if you’re patient enough. People have built whole cities out of Lego bricks. The problem is that you have to figure out yourself how to put the things together. While there might be instructions on how to build a specific kind of Lego castle, there are no instructions on how you can build the castle that exists in your own imagination.

Planning your story is the same experience. You have a sense of what you want it to be, how you want the pieces to fit together, but actually getting this brick to fit next to that one…. Pretty soon, you start to wonder how the hell Arthur C. Clarke and Larry Niven and Frederik Pohl and Richard Matheson and Jack Finney and Anne McCaffrey and C.J. Cherryh and Connie Willis can make it look so easy.

David goes on to suggest this exercise, which I share with you below. (A sidenote: What’s particularly amusing about it is that he is the writer of the episode “The Trouble with Tribbles” from Star Trek: The Original Series, which is, in my opinion, one of the best Star Trek episodes ever.)

Get yourself a stack of index cards. Write a one-line synopsis of each specific scene that you think should be in your story, one scene per card. Don’t worry about writing them down in any specific order. Just write them down as fast as you think of them:

• Lt. Uhura brings a tribble aboard the Enterprise.
• Lt. Uhura first gets the tribble from a local merchant.
• Uhura’s tribble has a litter of little tribbles.
• Scotty discovers tribbles in the air vents.
• Kirk finds a tribble on his captain’s chair.
• Kirk and Spock beam over to the space station. Kirk opens up the storage compartments and lots of tribbles fall down on his head.

But this isn’t enough for a complete story. You need a second plot line too, something to complicate the first one: 

• The Klingons want shore leave, but what they really want is … to disrupt the plan for Sherman’s Planet.
• The Klingons are on the speace station. A barroom brawl breaks out.
• Kirk investigates the fight. He bawls out Scotty and restricts him to quarters. Scotty is glad for the chance to read his technical manuals.
• The plan for Sherman’s Planet is that Earth will plant a new grain. If nothing earthlike will grow, the Klingons get the planet.
• The Klingons are here to poison the grain.
• The tribbles eat the poisoned grain, reproduce like crazy and fall on Kirk’s head, but McCoy discovers that they’re dying.

Now, take all these separate cards and shuffle them together and start laying them out on the kitchen table in the order you think they should go. First organize each plot line in its own thread. Then you can go back and forth between separate threads, picking up the next appropriate scene from each.

When you have all the cards laid out in order, go through them as if you’re reading a comic book or a storyboard and see if they re

Add a Comment