Now, how exactly are we supposed to draw inspiration from the world around us? I often say that writers have a particular way of looking at the world, and I fear I have been imprecise, so I will try to clarify myself here. I do not mean that all writers see the world in the same way. If that were true, stories would all look very similar, and be very boring. Rather, writers all look at the world as a well of information and ideas which they can draw upon as material for their stories. However, not every writer uses the same kind of inspiration. Understanding what kind of material inspires you is crucial if you want to discover good ideas, and discover them often.
Start with the exercise I have written below, which is to compile a list of all of the premises of stories you have come up with, good or bad, crazy, intriguing, or cliché, it doesn’t matter. Don’t look at what the premises are; look at what they have in common. Do you tend to construct stories from interesting characters you see? Do a lot of your stories have to do with families? Are they constructed from dreams, during the day or night? All of these are possibilities. Until you recognize where your stories come from, you won’t be able to tailor your writer’s eye to catch those ideas which interest you the most. Read more…
Well, I thought I was going to be talking about three act structure earlier this week, but unfortunately, a book I’m reading changed my opinion on it, and story structure in general, so I’ve decided to skip it. Instead, I’ll talk about writing inspiration. I’m a little hesitant to discuss this, mostly because I don’t think it is something which can be easily taught. In fact, I don’t even think it is something which I am very good at, since it sometimes feels like I come up with one idea every year, and half of those never bear much fruit. But it is important to learn how writer’s get inspiration, and even if nothing I say works for you, at least you’ll know what doesn’t work.
The first difficult question is where does our inspiration come from? Or, perhaps phrased better, where do our ideas for stories come from? One common answer, and a really bad one, is from story archetypes, which I have mentioned before. You can see these archetypes in play every day, from movies to TV shows to the latest pulp novel which selling like mad in bookstores right this minute. All of these take a common story structure, like the fantasy epic, the sitcom, or the disaster flick, and then add in some different element (“It’ll be like The Day After Tomorrow except this time let’s destroy New York with a massive tornado!” or “Picture House, but it takes place on a submarine during the cold war and the House character is gay!”). Most of these kinds of ideas are very bad, and quite un-inspired. The question we now have to ask, is where do original ideas some from? Read more…
Most of the writing advice I have seen on plot and the writing process offers one of two solutions. The first is that you should have the entire plot mapped out before hand, or at least sketched and outlined, so that you know where your characters are going, and why. This is the minority opinion, I believe. Most other writing books offer an alternative, “intuitive” account of the writing process. Writers should just “start writing” and let the book form itself. There are many variations of this intuitive model. One popular variation is the character driven model, which claims that all a story needs is well formed characters. While helpful, this method has also led to the propagation of the active character fallacy. Another is the claim that writers should write pieces of the story, whatever parts they want to, and only later go back and try to sew those pieces up into a cohesive plotline.
This is an unfortunate distinction, and one which I do not believe exists. In fact, no one can write anything relying on only one of these two methods, but I personally believe a lot of harm has been done by those teachers who push the intuitive model on their students. It isn’t that intuition and creativity aren’t vitally important to storytelling; the problem is that writers forget, or never learn in the first place, how to structure their ideas in a coherent, meaningful way. But how do we approach this question then? My advice is to rely on story structures. Read more…
First, I want to define speculative fiction. In general, I would call it the combined genres of science fiction and fantasy, but most horror falls under the category, as does quite a bit of romance, but not really in the same way. Really, what makes speculative fiction special is that it does not portray life as it is, but as it could be. The world doesn’t really have space colonies, unicorns or ghosts, but that doesn’t stop us from writing about them. (As a little aside, this problem has actually been tying philosophers up in knots for quite a while, with the question “How can we write about Pegasus if Pegasus does not exist?” but that’s not really important). This distinction between the real and the possible, has a profound impact on the language we use to tell stories, which often goes unrecognized by writers in these genres.
This connection is rooted in Tolkien, and LOTR. Tolkien was, as some know, a philologist, a now largely defunct area of study, which can be bluntly described as a collision between literary theory and linguistics. It is natural that linguistics and language should have played a key role in his work, and one untrustworthy source says that he composed the Elvish languages first, and then wrote the story as they grew out of it. One of the consequences of this work is that LOTR is actually a translation from Elvish into English! Not that he wrote the entire book in Elvish first, but the world Tolkien constructed was so intricate that he actually intended LOTR to be read as a translation, not as an original work in English. This actually created some interesting anachronisms throughout, like a metaphorical reference to a train in the first chapter (obviously elves would have no concept of trains). Read more…
I would just title this section “slang,” but the word is so loaded by now, that it really wouldn’t communicate the meaning I want it to. The idea of slang, as beaten into us by teachers and parents, is that it is, for some reason, fundamentally wrong. It implies that there is a correct “proper” language and then slang words which we should ignore, because if we ignore them, they will just go away. This attitude towards slang is really an attitude against change. We want our language to remain the same, but the fact of the matter is that language is constantly changing, and slang is the form these changes take.
Slang is best contrasted with dialect. While dialects are very old, and often unchanging, slang is very new, and constantly shifting as we adapt to the ever changing world around us. This, in many ways, is the most important thing to remember about slang—a change in slang, means that there was some change in the way individuals who use that new slang see the world. While dialects and slang might, on the surface, look similar (they both change the way our characters use language) they actually communicate very different things about them. While dialects tell us where characters are from, slang tells us what has happened to them, and how they perceive the future. Read more…
Dialect is used often in writing, and often used badly. This is because dialects are often poorly executed, and poorly utilized. I myself am hardly an expert on them, and am not a subtle enough author to use them well. That said, I still want to offer a few cautionary points to think about if you do want to use a dialect in a story.
First, it is important to consider why you want to use a dialect. Often, authors use it because they want their character to have a distinctive voice. This is a bad reason to use dialect, because it is often poorly executed and disconnected from the character. Besides, there are much better ways to give a character a distinct voice without using something as heavy handed as a dialect. Dialects actually affect a character’s history. It tells us much more about our character’s family, their childhood, their education, and where they live and work, then just “how they sound.” If the dialect is disconnected from the rest of the character’s history, it no longer makes any sense for it to be there. Read more…
How do you make a character’s voice distinct? The not very helpful answer to this question which I often give is that a character’s voice is distinct when a new reader can sit down and identify that character’s lines of dialogue without needing dialogue tags. This isn’t very helpful, because it does not say how we get to that point of recognition. Of course, when we’re listening to people speak, its relatively easy for us to pick out speakers without looking at them. However, we have access to many more facts when we’re listening, like vocal pitch, vocal inflection, and tone quality. The key to creating a recognizable voice is finding audible keys which can then be written down.
Perhaps the most recognizable vocal tag is dialect. This is a crutch, which I’ve seen plenty of authors use to make a character more “memorable.” I advise people to use dialect for good reasons, namely to demonstrate particular facts about a character, but I’ll discuss this particular point more in depth later. For the moment, let’s examine a few ways we can make a character’s voice recognizable without changing the way their language looks. What we are really more interested in is how it sounds to the reader. Read more…
