“The wall over there.”

“The wooden wall with the corpse suspended from it by razor wire.”

“The body hung from a beautifully crafted wall, constructed by my father’s mother’s brother from white ash inlaid with ironwood.”

The first example is imprecise. It does not tell us much about the wall, other than its general location, though we don’t know much about that either. If this wall were important for some reason, we would have no way of knowing this, if this was all that the author used in his description. The second and third examples are both more “precise” descriptions, but differ in their focus. This is in fact, where many pieces of description fall flat, because they focus on objects and actions which are not central to the action or motivations of the characters in the story.

Often, you won’t know what to focus on in any given scene until you have actually sat down and written it, and this is in part what makes description challenging. In addition, often what you want to describe in detail is not necessarily important for your story, or to your reader. As such, one important motto to remember is to “murder your darlings.” In general, the passages you enjoy the most are at best inappropriate to the story, or at worst, weaken the story overall, because those passages are not about your story, but about you and your skill as a writer. Just get rid of them, and start over.

When we talk about precise description, what we often mean is the focus of our descriptions. The best way to determine proper focus is to make sure you describe everything that the audience cares about in any given scene. If your next question is, “what does my audience cares about?” then you have some work to do. Go back and read through your story, thinking like a reader. What did you want to know more about? Go back, and fix your descriptions with that in mind.

The very important thing to remember is that just describing something does not make it important. For example, in that third sentence I wrote above, I described the wall in detail, but I am pretty sure no reader would then care about that wall. Rather, they would be thinking, “Wait, there’s a body on the wall? I don’t care about the wall, tell me about the body!” Description is not enough to make someone care, you have to place an object or action within the context of your characters’ goals and motivations, the theme and setting, and the plot before something gains importance.

A more advanced technique that it is good to practice is not focusing on something important in a scene. In a murder mystery for example, the clues are often underemphasized, so that the reader can look back down the line, and see how everything in the plot fell into place. Focus then, is not only crucial for description and setting, but also for moving and developing plot.

Exercise: Find some random pictures on the internet, the stranger the better. As an exercise, write several quick descriptions of the image, using a different focus each time. Next, try to determine which would fit best in a story, and why. This exercise will make it easier for you to determine your focus in your other writing, particularly for complex and confusing scenes.

There are many writing “camps” which approach the question of description in different ways. I find that, in any group of writers, the best way to draw the lines of battle is to mention Tolkien’s use of description. In general, you will find that either people love Tolkien’s use of descriptive language (though if they are smart, they will generally through the term “world building” in there, despite the fact they are only loosely related) or they will loathe it, and describe how numerous times they skipped whole chapters of boring, unnecessary prose.

Who is right? Neither really, because I don’t really think they are asking the right questions. Whether a description is long or short does not really matter, so long as a) it is effective in describing a scene or an action to your audience, and b) that same audience finds that description interesting and engaging. In discussing Tolkien, the second question is all that ever comes up, which is a shame, because whether you enjoy his description or not, you have to admit that it is evocative and creative. In the end, there isn’t much you can do to make your audience like your description, and it will largely come down to what your audience is expecting from your story. If they want a finely tuned, fantastical world, then they will love every passage of description you can muster. However, if they are longing for action and plot, then the faster you can set the scene and start the action, the better.

For the next set of entries, I’ll be focusing on these questions, and a few key techniques I’ve been trying to hone in my own writing that I feel are important for any writer, regardless of how you feel about description itself. Up first, we’ll take a look at precision, and its importance to description and your writing as a whole.

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.

If you find yourself interested in characters, then keep a character journal. Once or twice a day, go to a public place, pick out an interesting character, and jot down a few of their characteristics. Now, imagine what that character might be doing later that day. Place that character in awkward situations. Figure out his weaknesses, and her fears. Pretty soon, you might have a story, or you might have a bust. Start writing, or pick someone else.

Perhaps you are inspired by conversation. I’ve picked up two or three short story ideas from eavesdropped conversations, so make a habit of whenever you hear an interesting line, writing it down. Then, place that line in a larger conflict, and try to figure out what was said before and after it. Pretty soon, you might have a scene, or at least you’ll have practiced your dialogue writing.

The key is to come up with techniques which pick up on those aspects of life which interest you. If one method doesn’t work, try another, or always have a few going. Regardless, the more you think about writing, the more ideas you will have, and the more you write, the better you will be able to shape those raw ideas into creative, original stories.

Exercise: Write down a list of every premise you have come up with recently. Try to get at least ten, but fifteen or more is even better. Now look at how those premises are similar. What do you write about a lot? Where do most of your ideas come from? Brainstorm a few ways you can target areas in your life which inspire you the most.

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?

This is a hard question to answer, because it’s difficult to imagine a story which hasn’t been told in some form already, and which doesn’t already have an archetype associated with it. So then, maybe this is the wrong question. What we are looking for is a story which will grasp and communicate a new perspective of the world around us, and how humans interact with that world. This at least frees us to use archetypes, as long as we utilize them in creative and ingenious ways.

On the other hand, this pushes the real question back another step, and it is still unanswered. Now we need to know where that new perspective comes from which we want to write about. This, though, is a much easier question to answer. Every day, as a person, we see things that we like or dislike, things which cause us to think about people, places or things, or we see ideas in whole new ways. These insights are the material of stories. What the writer has to do, in order to be inspired, is grab hold of that feeling, and never let go of it until it is on paper, such that someone who reads it can grasp that insight as well.

Thus, we must not only learn how to see as a writer, in order to spot the queer, insane, or mysterious that we witness around us every day, we must also be innocent and brave enough to allow those ideas to retain their magic for the length of the writing process. I sense that I am drifting into platitudes, so I’ll try to state this simply. The writer must possess three abilities. She must be able to see things which spur her interest, she must be able to commit those things to paper in the form of stories, and she must be able to retain her interest in the thing all the way through the writing process. The first is difficult to teach, but can be learned. The second is easy to teach, but difficult to master. The third is something every writer must have, but which no one can give them.

Exercise: Write down in a sentence each, the following things: a) the last place which surprised or inspired you, b) the last time you saw someone change their behavior, and c) the most important thing to you in your life at this moment. You should have a place, person and thing. Which ones inspires you, if any? Why?

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.

By story structures, I do not bean plot archetypes, although these can be helpful too. Archetypes are those old standard plotlines, such as this example, which has been drifting around the internet for a while. However, what I really mean is story structure. I believe that any story can be molded to fit different kinds of story structures, which help inform the larger motives and movements of characters and plot.

Story structures allow us to create a bridge between intuition and organization. All writers need the ability to generate original, creative ideas. As I have mentioned before, I don’t think this ability can be taught, but it can be learned, by watching and thinking about the world around us. This is the realm of intuition. However, intuition does not make a story. No one can take a purely intuitive approach to storytelling, because such a story would be largely incomprehensible to everyone but the writer. This is where story structure comes into play. By forming our ideas and intuitions to these formats, we are able to organize our ideas into comprehensible plot lines and stories.

Thus, the apparent conflict does not exist. If we utilized only intuitive models, we would have lots of ideas, but they would make no sense. If we were entirely structured, we would have nothing but a bunch of empty frames. Everyone falls more into one camp then the other. I myself fall into the second one. Ideas are difficult for me to get, but I can easily apply structure to them once I have them. I know others who have ideas daily, but who can’t structure a story to save their life. For the next few entries, I’ll outline some different story structures which I use in my writing. Not all of them will work for you, but the more tools you have, the better you will be able to write.

Exercise: Do you approach writing from an intuitive method, or from a structured method? Have you ever tried working in the other framework? How does your chosen method work for you? How does it work against you?

Wednesday: The Three Act Structure

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).

But what does this mean for the rest of us, who are writing speculative fiction? I am not saying that we should all invent our own languages as we construct a fantasy novel, but it is important to remember that our characters would never have spoken English, they would have no understanding of English concepts, and the worldview which we have would be nothing like theirs. The challenge is to portray these characters in a way which captures their world, while not making them difficult to relate to for the reader. This is where translation comes in.

You need to understand your characters worldview backwards and forwards. Your readers need to know how that worldview works in conjunction with theirs. Thus, a writer’s task is to translate the untranslatable, to take entirely foreign concepts and find some way to express them in our language. For example, let’s say that I’m trying to describe a fantasy creature. I might say that it has no legs, is as large as a house, and is yellow-green in color, with a slimy coating. However, my protagonists might see the creature in a completely different way. Their houses are probably not the size of our houses. Their color wheel might be organized differently, such that the color of the monster is a unique color. What is slimy to us might be dry to them. They might not even consider “legs” in the same way, if they levitate for example. However, this is important for us to know because it changes how our characters would react to such a creature. However, it is our job to translate these characteristics in a way which our readers can understand, while still retaining the ability for them to grasp our character’s actions.

Often, we compensate by having our characters react in the ways the reader would react. However, in most cases there is no reason why characters would grow up in a world to hold our values about the world. While this is certainly one way to make the character’s understandable for the reader, it is not really the best way to do so. On the other hand, characters can be made so alien that they work, but again, not very effectively. It is a very difficult tightrope to walk, but we must walk it. The rope becomes thinner and thinner as the world our characters exist in becomes stranger than ours.

Now, one word of caution. Do not use this as an excuse to just make up words. It does not improve your book, it does not make your characters easier to understand, and it is just sloppy writing. A rule of thumb is that a writer can invent five words per book. Sure, this rule can be broken, especially if you plan on using slang and dialect. However, it is a good rule to keep in mind.

Exercise: Describe something from your character’s perspective. How might you effectively communicate their vision in English?

Monday: Story Structure

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.

The reason grandparents and grandchildren speak in very different ways is because they see the world in very different ways. It is important that the language your characters use actually reflects their worldview. Perhaps the most successful use of slang and language is “A Clockwork Orange” by Anthony Burgess, although there are plenty of other examples in modern literature. The language of the main character is littered with slang, so much so that for the first few chapters the book is almost unreadable. The reader must learn the language the character is using, and in doing so, he comes to know the character in a way which description and plain dialogue cannot communicate. However, like dialect, there are many more ways to use slang and language badly, then there are to use it successfully.

It is important to keep in mind that slang (and all dialogue, as I keep emphasizing) can only be written as a whole. It is not a matter of simply replacing words with slangier counterparts. Because slang is attached to an individual’s worldview, we need to understand how our characters think before we can create slang which effectively expresses their thoughts. Language is holistic; in order to understand how a character would say one thing, we need to know how they would say a bunch of other things, including things which they will never ever say, in the book or even in the story of their entire life. This is part of what makes dialogue so hard. Generally, we have to get every piece of dialogue wrong before we can start getting the character’s voice the least bit right.

Now, what does language as a whole have to do with any of this? We tend to think of slang as something abnormal, but what was slang ten years ago is part of the core language today. Some slang gets thrown out as time passes, some slang stays slang but becomes outdated (peachy), and some slang gain status and regular usage (to “xerox” something). But how do we go about creating slang? Again, creating good slang requires a knowledge of your character, and a knowledge of the history of the language your character speaks. These are not easy things to gain, but if you want to be good at writing slang, go take a course in the history of the English language, and pick up a copy of the Oxford English Dictionary. There is one rule which you should not break; don’t just make up words that “sound” good. They won’t fit. Readers will gain more from slang which is appropriate and realistic than words like “Haridol” or “Lussitrin” (which just sound like new drug names to me).

As a final note, curse words (which I won’t write here) are not slang. In fact, some are very old English words which have been used for any number of meanings, such as this one, or this one (you can scroll down a little to find “Word Origin & History”). They are often called slang, because people who don’t like curse words (like parents and teachers) don’t want other people to use them, so they attempt to marginalize words like these by calling them slang. Of course, there are new curse words which can be called slang, but just because a word is incendiary or insulting does not mean that they are slang.

Exercise: What aspects of your character’s history would affect their language use? Examples might include their childhood friends, where they work, level of education, etc. Now come up with several innocuous sentences from a variety of social contexts (“I’m going to the store,” or “There’s going to be a party at Tim’s next week”) and determine how the individual might express the thoughts in those statements in a new way (“I’m going to the mini-mart,” or “There’s going to be a rave over at Tim’s place next week,”).

Friday: Speculative Fiction and Translation

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.

Second, it is important to realize what a dialect is in order to write one. A dialect is not just a funny way of talking. Perhaps even more importantly, dialects are not a form of slang. Often, dialects are much older than the common form of a language, and are tied firmly to geographical location. Thus, people do not “pick up” a dialect; generally people only learn a dialect by growing up in it. Slang is a different monster all together, and will get its own discussion. It should also be noted that dialects are generally learned as the character’s “language.” Thus, they are very difficult to break, and often feel more natural than the proper language which is taught in schools.

Lastly, I want to talk about what I have noticed makes a written dialect successful. It is important that a dialect be consistent. Characters will inflect the same words in the same way, not in two different ways sporadically. All languages have rules, including dialects. You need to know those rules better than your character does if their dialect is to be successful. Also, I personally believe that a little goes a long way. Rather than change every word into a dialect form, change a few words. Enough to get the point across, but not enough to make the dialogue unreadable. Of course, this rule has been broken many times with great success, but regardless, my advice to up and coming writers is to start small. Language is a fickle thing, and we want it to work with us, rather than against us.

Exercise: Analyze your own speech, or someone else’s, and see if you can identify any trace of dialect in your own voice. If so, try to devise ways that you could communicate the feel of that dialogue through the written word. What would that dialect say about a character?

Wednesday: Slang

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.

The simplest method is to add a vocal tic. Something along the lines of the following line would be an extreme example:

“We went, like, to the mall, and, like, we saw, like, Brittany, and, like, she was totally going out with, like, Michael, and, like, oh my god!”

It’s way over the top, but unreadable as it is, at least every time we see dialogue like this, we know which character is speaking. On the other hand, it’s cliché, choppy, and exhausting to read. A more readable vocal tic might work as follows:

“We went to the mall, and Brittany was, like, all over Michael!”

Or even better:

“It was quite a shock.”

The first one is still a bit cliché, and the second one, the word “quite”, risks being unnoticeable. However, vocal tics can be a good first step in crafting a recognizable voice.

Another means of character identification is vocabulary. Look at the following two sentences:

“I think someone kicked him in the head.”

“It looks as though the head trauma was caused by a kick.”

Again they’re a bit strained, but it should be clear that these two sentences communicate the same information, but these two sentences definitely do not belong to the same speaker. The first is quite generic, but the second communicates a higher degree of education, and a higher level of pretension perhaps. The difficulty with vocabulary is that it can be difficult to keep consistent, and can require a lot of revision to make sure the character always “sounds” the same.

These are probably the most common types of vocal tags. There are others, like changing a character’s grammatical forms, but often these are hard to wield effectively, and are best saved for more eccentric characters. In conclusion, the best bet is to use these two techniques simultaneously, using a low impact vocal tic, like “quite” or “perhaps,” along with particular kind of vocabulary.

Finally, I want to emphasize that this is not a matter of inserting and replacing words in vocabulary you have already written. Rather, you have to understand how the individual would speak in any given context. If you just insert a vocal tic in, or replace a few words to make a character sound smarter, your dialogue will come across as flat and badly constructed. This is important to keep in mind for the rest of what I’ll be discussing about dialogue, so keep it in mind.

Exercise: Go back through a character’s dialogue and try to pick out vocal tics or vocabulary that make the character’s voice memorable. Write them down. What can you conclude about the rest of the character from that information?

Monday: Dialect

Well, as it turns out, there are good reasons why characters shouldn’t voice or exclaim things. First of all, adverbs and active tags make dialogue much harder to read, because the reader has to spend more time trying to understand how the writer wants their dialogue to be heard, than on what the characters are actually saying.

Second, the use of active dialogue tags is often a sign of amateurish writing. I haven’t spoken much about the old adage “show, don’t tell,” mostly because it is over applied, and not as helpful as some teacher’s think (of course I know I should show it, but how do I do that exactly?). However, dialogue is one of the places where this adage is helpful. Active dialogue tags take on the job of interpreting dialogue for the reader, which shouldn’t be necessary if your characters have been given a strong voice, and you are accurately conveying their motivations and emotions in their speech. Sure, it’s easier to just add a tag on to give the impression of yelling, but that doesn’t help the reader believe that the character is angry. Compare these two sentences:

1) “You really shouldn’t have done that,” Susan yelled.

2) “What the hell were you thinking?” Susan said, banging her fist on her desk, “What could have possibly gone through your head that made you think this was a good idea?”

Both of these sentences convey the same meaning, but the second, in my opinion, is much more entertaining, and does a better job of conveying the character’s emotions through voice and action.

Finally, there is an extra benefit to using ‘said’. It is practically invisible. Most readers don’t even see them. The only purpose they serve is to clarify for the reader who is speaking. Ideally, what the character is saying should do the rest. However, that will have to wait until we discuss voice on Friday.

Exercise: Go through a piece of your writing and cut out every adverb and active tag, and then, try to find some better way to convey what the tag was saying through the dialogue itself.