Post #207 March 16 2020

‘Where the Hell Are We?  How Details of Setting and Sense of Place Can Help (or Hurt) a Story

Remember when Dorothy, in the Wizard of Oz, mutters to Toto: “Toto, somehow I have a feeling we’re not in Kansas anymore?”  Dorothy was actually identifying one of the most important attributes of a good story…a strong sense of place.

Writer’s Digest lists 12 elements of setting for writers to consider.  To wit:

1. Locale. This relates to broad categories such as a country, state, region, city, and town, as well as to more specific locales, such as a neighborhood, street, house or school. Other locales can include shorelines, islands, farms, rural areas, etc.
2. Time of year. The time of year is richly evocative and influential in fiction. Time of year includes the seasons, but also encompasses holidays, such as Hanukkah, Christmas, New Year’s Eve, and Halloween. Significant dates can also be used, such as the anniversary of a death of a character or real person, or the anniversary of a battle, such as the attack on Pearl Harbor.
3. Time of day. Scenes need to play out during various times or periods during a day or night, such as dawn or dusk. Readers have clear associations with different periods of the day, making an easy way to create a visual orientation in a scene.
4. Elapsed time. The minutes, hours, days, weeks, and months a story encompasses must be somehow accounted for or the reader will feel confused and the story will suffer from a lack of authenticity. While scenes unfold moment by moment, there is also time to account for between scenes, when a flashback is inserted, and when a character travels a long distance.
5. Mood and atmosphere. Characters and events are influenced by weather, temperature, lighting, and other tangible factors, which in turn influence the emotional timbre, mood, and atmosphere of a scene.
6. Climate. Climate is linked to the geography and topography of a place, and, as in our real world, can influence events and people. Ocean currents, prevailing winds and air masses, latitude, altitude, mountains, land masses, and large bodies of water all influence climate. It’s especially important when you write about a real setting to understand climatic influences. Harsh climates can make for grim lives, while tropical climates can create more carefree lifestyles.
7. Geography. This refers to specific aspects of water, landforms, ecosystems, and topography in your setting. Geography also includes climate, soil, plants, trees, rocks and minerals, and soils. Geography can create obvious influences in a story like a mountain a character must climb, a swift-running river he must cross, or a boreal forest he must traverse to reach safety. No matter where a story is set, whether it’s a mountain village in the Swiss Alps or an opulent resort on the Florida coast, the natural world with all its geographic variations and influences must permeate the story.
8. Man-made geography. There are few corners of the planet that have not been influenced by the hand of humankind. It is in our man-made influences that our creativity and the destructiveness of civilization can be seen. Readers want visual evidence in a story world, and man-made geography is easily included to provide it. With this in mind, make certain that your stories contain proof of the many footprints that people have left in its setting. Use the influences of humankind on geography to lend authenticity to stories set in a real or famous locale. These landmarks include dams, bridges, ports, towns and cities, monuments, burial grounds, cemeteries, and famous buildings. Consider too the influences of mankind using the land, and the effects of mines, deforestation, agriculture, irrigation, vineyards, cattle grazing, and coffee plantations.
9. Eras of historical importance. Important events, wars, or historical periods linked to the plot and theme might include the Civil war, World War II, medieval times, the Bubonic Plague, the gold rush in the 1800s, or the era of slavery in the South.
10. Social/political/cultural environment. Cultural, political, and social influences can range widely and affect characters in many ways. The social era of a story often influences characters’ values, social and family roles, and sensibilities.
11. Population. Some places are densely populated, such as Hong Kong, while others are lonely places with only a few hardy souls. Your stories need a specific, yet varied population that accurately reflects the place.
12. Ancestral influences. In many regions of the United States, the ancestral influences of European countries such as Germany, Ireland, Italy, and Poland are prominent. The cities and bayous of Louisiana are populated with distinctive groups influenced by their Native American, French-Canadian, and African American forebears. Ancestral influences can be depicted in cuisine, dialogue, values, attitudes, and general outlook.

Anybody writing science fiction or fantasy has to spend some time thinking about details of setting, since much sf is set in times and places (and planets) other than this one.  For example, my new Quantum Troopers Return series is set largely in near future times, mostly (but not entirely) on Earth.  This series is a continuation of an earlier series (Quantum Troopers) so I didn’t want to veer off too sharply from what has gone before. 

One of my goals in this new series was to set the stories in exotic places that my average readers might not have visited.  In this age of Internet and with global distribution of ebooks, this is harder than it seems.  The series has settings that range from Indonesia to the Forbidden City, from the Moon to the surface of Venus, and from the Indian Ocean seabed to the deserts of Saudi Arabia and inner Mongolia.  All episodes are steeped in lots of action and mostly involve continuing characters from the original series, just a little later in time.

Using setting properly (in such a way that the nuts and bolts don’t show) can enhance any story, from atmospherics to provoking the proverbial sense of wonder, something that science fiction writers do all the time.  The key is to keep the setting descriptions embedded in the context of the story and not to dump an encyclopedia of facts and maps on the reader. 

Some writers spend so much time on their setting and world-building that they feel it essential to drop all this into the story.  Sometimes, the setting is the story, like Arthur C. Clarke’s novel Rendezvous with Rama.  But most of the time, a good, believable setting is just one part of the greater story, like plot and character and it should be woven together into a seamless whole. 

Spend time on your setting details but don’t do it at the expense of telling a good story. 

The Word Shed will take a two-week hiatus for spring break.  The next post to The Word Shed comes on April 6, 2020.

See you then.

Phil B.

Post #206  March 9, 2020

Character, Action and Tom Swift, Jr.

One of my great joys as a teenager was Tom Swift, Jr. books.  In the early and mid-1960s, they were produced as trade-sized hardcovers, priced at $1.25 and came out every four months.  I’d buy the latest one on a Saturday morning and be finished with it that evening.

I loved them for the science adventures and for the fact that there was lots of action.  And story action is the subject of this post.

Action should be thought of as what the main characters do to solve their problems.  Some stories are marketed as action-adventures, where the action is all there is…continuous action, without the characters spending a lot of time contemplating their navels or expounding on deep philosophical matters. 

One of my goals in writing Quantum Troopers and Quantum Troopers Return was to involve the reader in lots of action, right from the start.  To make this happen, the main character(s)…in this case Johnny Winger…has to be an action-oriented person, or a person in an action-oriented position.  Winger is a trooper with Quantum Corps so he’s always fighting off bad guys and spies and trying to keep the peace in the world of atoms and molecules that is Quantum Corps’ theater of operation.  Keeping Winger involved in some kind of action hasn’t been too much of a stretch.

But action for the sake of action actually gets old, after a few chapters.  The action has to be in the service of the story, it has to advance the story.  Which means that in addition to fighting off bad guys, Johnny Winger has to occasionally run into roadblocks, problems he can’t resolve in his usual head-banging, slam-‘em- up- side-the-head fashion.  The action has to have a purpose.  In these cases, the purpose is to show Johnny Winger as a person and how he reacts to different situations and scenarios, in other words to reveal and develop character.

Action doesn’t happen in a vacuum.  It happens or is caused by character.  I found this on Wikipedia concerning adventure stories and the role of action:

Critic Don D'Ammassa, in the Introduction to the Encyclopedia of Adventure Fiction defines the genre as follows:

.. An adventure is an event or series of events that happens outside the course of the protagonist's ordinary life, usually accompanied by danger, often by physical action. Adventure stories almost always move quickly, and the pace of the plot is at least as important as characterization, setting and other elements of a creative work.^[1]

D'Ammassa argues that adventure stories make the element of danger the focus; hence he argues that Charles Dickens' novel A Tale of Two Cities is an adventure novel because the protagonists are in constant danger of being imprisoned or killed, whereas Dickens' Great Expectations is not because "Pip's encounter with the convict is an adventure, but that scene is only a device to advance the main plot, which is not truly an adventure."^[1]



So danger is an important element of action adventure stories.  In Quantum Troopers, there are several sources of danger.  Johnny Winger is often at risk to life and limb from Quantum Corps’ principal enemy Red Hammer (now Red Harmony in Quantum Troopers Return).  Sometimes, the autonomous assembler technology at the heart of the series comes back to bite him, and his fellow troopers.  Sometimes his own actions and headstrong impulses cause bad things to happen.  And ideally, as this latest serial story advances through its planned 12 episodes, Winger learns his lesson from being in all this danger and approaches future conflicts and problems with a smarter approach.  In other words, the main character is changed somehow as he encounters problems, conflicts and dangers. 



This is one of the reasons, though we don’t always like to admit it, that so many readers like action adventure stories.  They can live and experience vicariously the action and dangers of the main character and still live to read another day.  In fact when you get right down to it, this is one of the key reasons why we like stories period. 



Another aspect of any good action-adventure story is the pace, the speed of the action.  Our hero is constantly in and out of hot water, one close escape after another.  How do you keep the reader from going numb or zoning out through all this?  Vary the action.  Vary what happens.  Make the reader care about the character.  This means that the pot-boiler action sequences should be interspersed with quieter moments…the character reflects on what he has just escaped,  tells his buddies what just happened, gets laid or goes to the grocery store…things that can endear the character to the reader…hey, he’s just like one of us…I’ve done that very same thing.  An interlude between rock-‘em, sock-‘em action is necessary for the reader to take a breath, for the character to recoil and reset before the next escapade, and most importantly, for the character to gain some perspective on what is happening…in other words, to grow and change.



If this doesn’t happen, the reader won’t buy it and will find your character just a cardboard cutout to which things happen.  The story won’t be very satisfying.  Even furious action becomes tiresome if the character lets the same damn things happen to him again and again and doesn’t learn from the experience.  Different things have to happen, or the character’s own actions to resolve a problem cause a new problem…that’s real and your readers will experience it as real.



Action and character are closely intertwined in any fictional story and particularly so in action-adventure.   But the action has to have a purpose and the main purpose is to lead the character to growth, change or valiant defeat…not just fighting off the same monster day after day.

Just ask Tom Swift Jr. and his Super-Duper Electrohydraulic Flamajing.  He couldn’t have defeated those pesky Brungarians without it.



The next post to The Word Shed will focus on more details from the Quantum Troopers Return series, especially details of fictional settings.



See you on March 16.

Phil B.

 

 

Post #205 March 2 2020

“Editing Your Own Work…It’s Like Flossing Your Teeth”

Recently I finished the first draft of Forbidden City, the third episode in my new series Quantum Troopers Return.  Now it’s time to review and edit my own work…something akin to flossing your teeth.

The story came in at about 65 pages.  That surprised me a bit, from the outline.  I thought it might be closer to 45-50 pages.  I’m trying to run these episodes at about 40-60 pages, averaging about 50.

First order of business in editing your own work: take off the rose-colored glasses.  You have to learn to read the story like a first time reader and be ruthless with your precious words and delicious turns of phrase.

Ask yourself this:

1. Does the story flow?  Does it move along?  Why or why not?  Maybe you linger too long describing some place or scene.  Cut out useless descriptions and get the story going again.  What happens next?  In all my stories in QTR, I wanted to have a lot of action.
2. Are you interested in knowing more about the main character(s) and finding out what happens to them?  If so, great.  Keep going.  If not, why not?  Maybe the reader needs to know a little more background about these people…a brief flashback.  Why do they act this way?  Was it a drunken father who abandoned the family?  Was it the death of a brother?  A sadistic math teacher?  Lay this on thinly but it might give your character more to hook readers.
3. Do the twists and turns of the plot surprise you?  As the author, real surprise in the story may be hard to achieve.  But take a reader’s point of view, if you can.  Surprises and unexpected plot twists can really grab a reader if done right.
    
   Of course, it stands to reason that you’ll always be correcting misspelling, awkward phrases, etc as you read.  And please do Spellcheck at the end, because you’ll never catch everything.  Sometimes, when doing Spellcheck, I find myself intentionally leaving a misspelled word for a reason and that’s okay.  Just make sure you have a story-telling reason to do that. 
    
   One of the challenges of writing and editing this series is the fact that it is a series.  I’m somewhat constrained by what has gone before.  I’m trying to make sure the story stands on its own as a story, but I don’t want to explain or recapitulate everything done in the previous two episodes (Quantum Troopers Return is a continuation of the original series Quantum Troopers).  It’s a juggling act.
    
   Another challenge to authoring a series is making sure to wrap up all the loose ends of the plot in the final tale.  To do that, you sort of have to keep score.  In my final story in Tales of the Quantum Corps, I had additional challenges in that my main character, Johnny Winger, had actually changed physical form and is not a normal human being like you and me, but rather a swarm of nanoscale robots configured to resemble a human being…or anything else he wants.  It’s been fun and hard work to imagine what life would be like living this way.  Somehow, in this final story, I had to convey what life is like as an angel (my term for a para-human swarm entity), advance the story of what happens with this as a key fact, and close out the story of what happens to him in the end. 
    
   In my review and editing, I’m trying to be as critical as possible as to whether I have achieved these ends.  I’m finding that I may need to add more to the story to bring this character, who has been a continuing character, to life in all of his predicaments.   I want the end to be a satisfying conclusion to all the adventures Johnny Winger has gone through before and perhaps even to show some change or growth in Winger as a result.
    
   The Muse.com has some good tips on editing your own work.  Here are five (from Caroline McMillan):
    

1. Print out your work (this helps simulate a fresh or ‘outsider’ perspective, which should help you edit)
2. Take a break (put some emotional distance between creating words and editing them)
3. Read it out loud (this is a really good idea)
4. Pretend you’re the audience (already covered above)
5. Be ruthless (ditto)
    
   On first read of Forbidden City: Episode 3, I have a little more work to do.  That’s normal.  That’s why we edit. 
    
   With any luck, I’ll be done by the end of February and you can look for this story to be uploaded to Smashwords.com and other fine ebook retailers in April 2020.
    
   The next post to The Word Shed comes on March 9.

      Phil B.

 

Post #204 February 24 2020

“Pricing Your Work in Today’s Market”

The year 2020 has proven to be an interesting year for me as an online author.  Last year, with all my works available through Smashwords and other fine ebook retailers set to free, my total net downloads were 24,042.  Not bad for a relative unknown.  This year, I have continued to maintain all titles that have been free as free downloads.  Seems only fair.

However, I have been persuaded by some of my writer friends to start putting prices on my new work.  I uploaded the first ‘priced’ title on February 7.  The price is set to $0.99…in other words ninety-nine cents.  The title is Quantum Troopers Return Episode 1: Fab Lords and it is episode 1 of a proposed 10-episode series for this year.

Total downloads for all titles in 2020 so far? 1020.  Total downloads for my one priced title?  A grand total of two.  That’s right.  2.

Aside from the obvious fact that people don’t want to pay for something they think they can get for free, what causes this buying behavior?  More particularly, why put a price now on my work?  Some thoughts….

1.  Many friends (including some writer friends) have told me I have the download numbers to justify pricing at least my new work.  I happen to agree.  The numbers are what they are.
2. Writing stories is hard work.  If you don’t think so, try it.  In my case, some of my work are multiple episodes of a series, with a public upload schedule that I am loath to ignore.  So, there’s time pressure.
3. Readers value what they download more when there’s a price.  I feel that way when I pay $30 for a hardcover book, which admittedly isn’t often these days.  If they really want to read the work, they’ll buy it.  Which leads me to this…
4. Do they really want to read my work?  Judging from the response to the one priced title, I’d have to say, no…not really.  But then how to explain the 24,000 downloads last year?

When I first joined the Smashwords community, I did have prices on my initial uploaded work.  Downloads were respectable but eventually plateaued off.  I checked with Smashwords for recommendations on how to boost your downloads and one of their recommendations was to lower the price or try setting your work to free, just to see what happens.  So, I did that.

Lo and behold, my downloads took off.  Really spiked and they’ve stayed high ever since.  Why did I keep setting my uploads to free?  I told myself I was trying to build a readership and since I was an unknown author, when you uploaded my work and it was free, you really weren’t taking much of a chance.  My total downloads since I went online with Smashwords and other retailers is now at 43,656.  Other things I’m doing to connect with potential readers is writing and hosting this Word Shed blog.

So that is the situation today.  I’m keeping all titles that have been free before free for now.  New titles that I upload this year will have a price, something between 99 cents and $1.99 or thereabouts.  I’m confident enough of my work and my small readership to feel that I can encourage downloads even of titles with prices.  And as Smashwords always reminds their authors, write the best damn book you can and don’t upload it until you’ve made it your best work. 

I’ll keep you posted on further developments in this area.  In the meantime, many thanks to the 2 brave downloaders who paid 99 cents each for Quantum Troopers Return: Episode 1: Fab Lords.  My payout from this is now up to $1.12.

The next post to The Word Shed comes on March 2, 2020.  See you then.

Phil B.

 

Post #203 February 17, 2020

“Why Johnny Winger isn’t Tom Swift Jr...But Maybe Should Have Been”

For many years, I have been working with a continuing character I created for three different series, Tales of the Quantum Corps, Quantum Troopers and Quantum Troopers Return.

His name is Johnny Winger.  Although I have consciously patterned these series stories after the Tom Swift Jr. books, Tom Swift is not Johnny Winger…but maybe he should have been.

Serial characters are both fun and a challenge to write.  Over the course of the series, you want to see them grow and evolve, confront problems and overcome them.  You want your reader to identify with them and like an old flannel shirt, become comfortable with all their idiosyncracies and nuances.  Think James Bond, Captain Kirk and Spock, Jason Bourne, Harry Potter and so on.  Just the mention of a well-known series character can evoke all kind of memories and expectations.  Building a series character is like building a brand name.  Readers like that because they know what they’re getting when they buy a book.

Think about Tom Swift Jr and what comes to mind?  An eternal teen-ager.  A boy genius who never ages.  An inventor of some cool and some rather ridiculous inventions.  An adventurer who’s always up to his armpits in problems with devious foreign governments, wicked crooks, space beings, you name it.  Tom Swift Jr, as written in the series, is the quintessential, blond, crew-cut all-American boy.  Well raised, courteous, respects his elders, tries to do the right thing.  I could almost imagine him as an altar boy or acolyte at a medium-sized Methodist church.

Jeff Duntemann has written a background study of Tom Swift in his Tom Swift Jr:  An Appreciation: To wit:

Tom Swift was perpetually eighteen, an age far enough removed from where my nerd friends and I were to be beyond understanding, but close enough for us to think we might just get there someday. He didn't seem to go to school, and there was no indication as to how he learned all he knew. Hey, he was a genius. My friend Larry could play any song he heard on the piano, immediately, with both hands—and had never taken a single lesson. He was just born with it. So, apparently, was Tom Swift.

None of that bothered us at all. Similarly, it was no bother that Tom Swift as a character was almost completely devoid of distinguishing personality traits. He was brilliant, strong, patriotic, hard-working, and respected his parents—and beyond that was as featureless as a billiard ball. In one sense that was because Tom Swift was a sort of Halloween costume that we donned in our imaginations, and any specifics that clashed too strongly with our specifics might have made this identification difficult. (I had this problem with numerous other characters in later SF, which made me more a spectator than a participant in the action.) Grosset & Dunlap knew what they were selling, and it wasn't literature.

I did consciously have Tom Swift Jr. in mind (or at least his adventures) when I created Johnny Winger but there are some notable differences in their personas.

Winger has undergone personal tragedy in his young life, in the death of his Mom and the depression of his Dad.  We don’t know what Tom Swift did before the stories; Grossett and Dunlap writers never tell us.  Tom Swift Jr inherits his father’s business (Swift Enterprises) and apparently his genius and plucky approach to life.  Johnny Winger joins Quantum Corps to get away from his life and live a different way.

In my series, Johnny Winger is in military service, with all that implies.  Tom Swift is a civilian, though he has close relations with various government departments.  Johnny Winger is no genius inventor, but he does have latent and initially unrealized skills as an atomgrabber, which makes him a special commodity to his superiors at Quantum Corps.   It also gets him into trouble at times.  Plus, throughout the series, Johnny Winger sometimes imbues his nanobotic devices with personalities and qualities he can’t seem to find in his human relations. 

In my series, I have endeavored to have Winger grow in his responsibilities.  The reader can see Winger progress in the ranks from a Lieutenant right out of nog school all the way to a flag officer, a General and Commander-in-Chief of Quantum Corps  (CINCQUANT).  At the end, he even allows himself to be deconstructed  into a para-human swarm entity (aka, an angel) to better fight off the evil criminal cartel Red Hammer (later Red Harmony) and their otherworldly benefactors.  Tom Swift never did that.

Have I shown any other changes, growth or evolution in Johnny Winger?  Well, I tried.  He gets married, to another quantum trooper.  They have kids.  He loses his wife to a religious cult called the Church of Assimilation.   But like the creators of Tom Swift, I never let Winger’s need to grow get in the way of the story.  At least, he doesn’t remain eighteen years old forever.

One challenge of creating and using a continuing series character is having to write around the facts of what you have written before.  That can be both a challenge and an impediment.  You find yourself reading and re-reading earlier writing to keep up with what you’ve already said.  If nothing else, you want your series character to be consistent across the stories…readers will give up quickly on your stories if you’re not.  Ian Fleming always took pains to portray James Bond as essentially the same person from story to story…shaken but not stirred.  And we readers found some comfort in that. 

Johnny Winger is not Tom Swift because their backgrounds and their story environments are completely different.  But I did often have Tom in my mind as I drew up adventures and problems for Johnny to face.  What happened to Johnny Winger often happens to characters that authors create…he took on a life of his own and drove the stories in unexpected directions.

And that’s not a bad thing.

The next post to The Word Shed comes on February 24, 2020.

See you then.

Phil B.

Post #202 February 10, 2020

“He Said What?  Effective Dialogue for a Good Story”

 

Every writer of fiction, every story-teller, must deal with fictional dialogue.  Writing dialogue is a true art.  That’s because dialogue has to serve many masters in any story.

Here’s snatch of dialogue that opens my sf novel The Farpool, from the very first page…

 

Angie Gilliam squirmed a bit more but it was no use.  Something sharp was pinching her butt.  The weight of Chase Meyer on top of her made it hurt like crazy. 

“Ouch…that hurts like hell…what the hell are you doing?”

“Sorry…just trying to…it’s the Cove.  Water’s choppy today—“

Angie twisted and contorted herself to ease the pressure.  That was better.

“Maybe this wasn’t such a great idea, huh?”

They had packed a meal and grabbed a boat from Turtle Key Surf and Board—that was Mack Meyer’s shop, Chase’s Dad.  They had puttered along the coast off Shelley Beach until they came to Half Moon Cove—they always did it in Half Moon Cove—and found a secluded spot a few dozen meters off shore…right under some cypress trees.  Always smelled great there.

Then Chase and Angie wolfed down their sandwiches, dialed up the right music on Chase’s wristpad so they could slam some jam properly and settled down to business.

That’s when the wind fetched up and the Cove got way choppier than it usually did.  Most of the time, you could lay a place setting on top of the water and have dinner like home, it was so placid.  But not today.

“Ouch…look…let’s give it a rest, okay…something’s not quite right…”

Chase groaned and pulled out of her, cinching up his shorts as he did so.  He lay back against the side of the boat, and turned the volume down on his pad…whoever it was screeching on that go-tone needed a few more lessons.  He checked the growing waves beyond the Cove and that’s when he spied the waterspout.

“Jeez…look at that!” 

Angie pulled up her own shorts, ran fingers through her dark brown page-boy hair and sucked in a breath.

“Wow---that’s so wicked--“

There was a strange, wave-like agitation on the horizon just beyond the Cove, maybe a few kilometers out to sea, past Shell Key, easily.  For a few moments, a slender multi-hued waterspout danced just above the waves, like a gray-green rope writhing and hissing on the horizon.  It only lasted a few moments, then it collapsed.  There was a calm period, then the ocean began seething again and became more agitated than before.  Waves piled into the Cove, nearly upending the little boat.  Before long, another spout had formed, all in an odd sort of rhythm. 

 

In the dialogue above, notice that I’ve thrown in some colloquial sounding words, some slang, chopped it up a bit, yet you can tell what’s going on and how the characters feel about what’s going on.

Okay, so what’s going on here?  Dialogue serves many purposes…

1. Dialogue has to sound real, without being real.

Think about the speech you hear around you all the time.  It’s filled with ums, uhs, fits and starts and circuitous, poorly constructed, often grammatically incorrect sentences.  That’s the way real people talk…in any language.  Dialogue has to sound like that, without actually being like that.  That’s why it’s an art.  A few selected ums and ahs goes a long way in fictional dialogue.  It leads the reader’s inner ear to hear something that sounds real but it also performs other fictional duties as well.

     2. Dialogue has to advance the story.

Look again at the passage above.  What do you know about the story: two lovers are getting it on in a canoe in some kind of cove.  Their little tryst isn’t turning out so well, so they stop.  They see a water spout.  The ocean starts heaving.  Strange things are happening.  All this on one page.  All dialogue has to do something to move the story along and it has to do this through the words of the characters.  They see and experience things.  They report and comment on what they see or hear or experience.  They respond verbally to what’s happening: “…ouch, that hurts, stop doing that….”  The reader lives vicariously through the characters so dialogue is really important….it has to sound real.  You want the reader to empathize with your characters.  Dialogue helps make the connection.

      3. Dialogue has to reveal character and convey feelings and emotions.

There are ways other than dialogue to do this, narrative ways.  The writer could just say: “Jane felt sad and wished the pain would stop.”  But in general, it’s always better to show rather than tell.  Show Jane reacting in a way that conveys sadness.  “Tears flowed down Jane’s cheeks and she sighed, ‘I wish I was dead…I can’t take this anymore.’”  This reads a lot more powerfully and dramatic.  The dialogue, when done well, puts the reader in the character’s shoes and practically compels sympathy, empathy, all those things a writer or story-teller wants.  Now we want to know more about why Jane wishes she were dead, what’s driven her to this point.  Hopefully, the writer and the story will reveal that.  Done well, dialogue can really establish a strong emotional bond between fictional characters and the reader.

Fictional dialogue carries a lot of weight.  It’s not easy to do well.  You don’t normally talk in stilted, formal phrases (unless the story requires it) so your characters shouldn’t either.  Write dialogue like you talk and like you hear other people talking.  Then clean it up a little and bend it to the story’s needs.  As for me, whenever I hear a particularly colorful word or phrase, I write it down.  Usually it’ll turn up somewhere later in a story.

The next post to The Word Shed comes on February 17.  

See you then.

Phil B.

Post #201 February 3, 2020

“Grabbing the Reader’s Attention Right Away”

The first line or paragraph of your story are the most critical words in the entire story.  Try out these memorable lines from famous works:

“Call me Ishmael.”  (Moby Dick)

“Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins.” (Lolita)

“Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” (Anna Karenina)

“It was a bright cold day in April and the clocks were striking thirteen.” (1984)

“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.” (A Tale of Two Cities)

 

First lines and paragraphs have numerous functions but none are more important than grabbing the reader’s attention right away and sucking them into the story. Here are some of the main purposes of a good first line:

1. Hook or intrigue the reader.  The reader asks “What’s going on here?”
2. Set the stage and tone of the story.  Is it a mystery?  A comedy?  Action adventure?
3. Build the foundations for later conflict.  Who, what, when and where?
4. Indicate who’s telling the story.  Whose story is this?

In creating a memorable and riveting first line, ask yourself this: what are you trying to achieve?  Is it suspense?  A unique sense of place?  Are you trying to make a philosophical point?  Detail a character attribute?  Maybe the character is kind or impulsive or happy-go-lucky.  Show this early on, in a first line or paragraph.

Here’s a first line from my sf short story “Second Sun,” now available in my collection of short works called Elliptical Galaxies:

“Not everyone was happy about having a second Sun.” 

What comes out of this first line?  That there is a second Sun, whatever that means.  That somebody’s not happy about it.  Makes you wonder why some are not happy.  A certain amount of conflict and intrigue is implied here.  Perhaps this is not the best first line ever created but it points in the right direction.  It makes you want to know more.

How do you go about hooking or intriguing your reader or generating questions in the reader’s mind?  You want the reader to ask these questions about what he’s reading:

1. What do I have to do to get my questions answered?  You have to read on.
2. Why should I care? (this involves creating empathy for your character)
3. What do I gain from going on?  Satisfying curiosity, validating or proving out my suspicions, seeing how the character gains his goal or gets his comeuppance.

Spend some time or thought on your first line or paragraph.  What intrigues you?  Try it out on your reader.

As in life, so it is in storytelling.  You only get one shot to make a first impression.  Make it a memorable one.

The next post to The Word Shed comes on February 10.  In this post, I’ll look at some idea for how writers create memorable characters that readers can empathize with.

See you then.

Phil B.