Worldbuilding and Smalltown, USA

There's a town fairly close to where I live, and I use it for the basis of a lot of my writing. I won't name it specifically because, well, laws and stuff, so for this piece I will call it Smalltown. The quaint little village of Smalltown is within range of Chicago, but it outside the main area of Cook County and doesn't carry a lot of the burdens that come with all things Chicago. There are cornfields and old, abandoned barn silos dotting the landscape, the attitudes are very different from "the Big City" (which is what people in Smalltown call Chicago), and people very much have their own ways of doing things. So how does one translate Smalltown to their writing?

One of the most important parts of creating your own personal Smalltown is the art of distilling what makes it unique on its own basis. It doesn't help much to identify this little place by how it is so different than Chicago - that requires the reader to know about Chicago as well as this little place of your own making. What are five things about the town that identify it - they don't have to be unique to that town alone, but they have to be points the reader can connect with. Was it a manufactured town that just sprang up in the late 1960s, or did it start off as a whistle stop along one of the first north-south train lines through the area back before the Civil War? Do people stay there for generations, or do families migrate through there without setting down stakes? Are there a lot of parks? Cemeteries? A main road with all the businesses where everyone goes on a Friday night? Do they depend on a Pizza Hut for their pizza, or does everyone just order their sausage & onion special at some place called Spunky's?

Next stop - what kind of character does Smalltown have? Is it a friendly place where everyone says hello as they pass strangers along the street, or are outsiders viewed with suspicion? Are there school rivalries? Is there town spirit, or a nature of honoring tradition? Do they have parades for everything, or just keep to themselves? A town has to have some form of identity in this regard, for better or worse, for it to seem real. In well-written stories involving some residential setting, that town can be a character unto itself, and even an antagonist if it represents everything the main character is against. But to do so, that town needs to seem real and multi-faceted, otherwise it is just a lost opportunity.

And, of course there's the local dialect. This is often a lost art, but it can really make a town stand out. Do locals call Coca-Cola pop, soda, or Coke? Do they have grocery bags or grocery sacks? Do you go to Spunky's and order a pizza or do you call it a pie? Pancakes or flapjacks? Bringing out little details like this - especially when a character is introduced from the outside - makes this place believable and appreciated.

One word of warning: If you are creating your own imaginary Smalltown where its exact geography isn't really important, don't feel obliged to follow the exact model of some place you've visited or the way you've heard some town are. Your job is to create your own little town out of whole cloth, without worrying that you'll get responses like, "I don't know people who talk like that." This is your town, your world, your responsibility. Just make sure you are consistent with it, that you know the importance of any features you bring up, and you immerse the reader in this new culture.

Welcome to Smalltown!   

Reviewing your Writing Voice

I've been having a little fun lately with a review of some of the old literary masters. Dickens, Tolstoy, the ones who you read to really get a feel for the writing of the times. However, what is making this fun is not the act of reading their works, but of exploring the text and analyzing their voice, structure and vocabulary. This may have just removed the excitement for a lot of people, but it's an interesting little tool for reviewing just how your writing voice comes across, and perhaps ways you can brush it up.

What I did is downloaded a bunch of classic works off of Project Gutenberg - a wonderful resource for acquiring classics that are now public domain. I downloaded simple text copies, dumped them into Word, and let the games begin. By doing simple word searches and word highlighting, it's possible to "count" how many times a word is used, and see if maybe the style stands out in some way. For example, I took Dickens' The Old Curiosity Shop and counted the number of times he used the word, "said." In a work of over 221,000 words, he used "said" a whopping 1,425 times. Bleak House, a monolith of a work at 358,000+ words, used "said" 1,749 times. My first novel, The Book of Cain, at a mere 74,000+ words, used "said" only 34 times. Clearly I am no Dickens... for better or worse.

Word frequency and word choice are some of the defining characters of our writing voice. Whether we use "said" frequently (Elmore Leonard insisted that this was the only word to be used to show dialogue) or use it sparingly, it speaks to how we write. Doing word counts to find out how often a word like "said" or "the" shows our specific tone without placing judgment on our writing. Personally, I prefer not using the word "said" if there's either a word that gets more energy into the discussion, or I leave it out if the dialogue doesn't need a tag. Writing of the 19th century frequently tagged its dialogue, though authors used a wild variety of words to add some oomph to how people spoke. Letting word frequency show you a mental thumbnail sketch of just how you do things.

As a corrective tool, the word tagging feature is very useful in ferreting out usage of the passive voice. As any writer will be told constantly, avoid using versions of the verb, "to be," when denoting action. "He was running..." should be "He ran...," "There was a sound echoing..." should be "A sound echoed..." and so on. Descriptions of places and inanimate features get some freedom in using the passive voice, but in general, don't have the scene move passively. How do you check for this? Count your usage of "was" and "were" for starts, and if the number seems high, look at the sentences where you use it. (Bleak House used "was" over 3,400 times; The Book of Cain only had 254 uses. I regret nothing.)

Lastly, always give a check for words like "seemed," "almost," and "kind of" just because they represent weak phrasing and your voice is stronger the less they are used.

This type of forensic editing can give you a hint or two about the strengths and weakness of your voice, but more importantly, you can see the big picture of an author's writing without going through the entirety of Bleak House (I could never make it past the bit about the Smallweed family).   

The Writing Hammock

Most anyone who knows me will say that I treat two particular days with the importance of a national holiday: Super Bowl Sunday, and that very special day when pitchers and catchers report to spring training. The first is the final culmination of a grueling football season, the second being the birth of my other favorite time - baseball season. However, in between those two dates is a terrible gap, a veritable sports hammock hanging between the two grand times of sports. This leaves me with very little nourishment from my favorite sports, but it gives me a chance to relax for a little bit... or maybe for too long. And believe it or not, the same thing happens with writing.

Usually, we fall into the writing hammock when we wrap up some big project or something we've been focused on for an extended period of time. Depending on your schedule, this can be an essay, a poem, a novel, a character sketch, a collection of short stories - it doesn't really matter. The only important part is that you've finished your first draft of this thing and you feel great. Exhausted, but great. Then comes the hammock part. You might have a bunch of ideas for another project - a sequel, another collection, something completely different - but you need just a little time to collect yourself, so you stretch out on the writing hammock. That's where the trouble begins.

Referring to an actual hammock, it is a very relaxing place to be, but it's kind of difficult to get up from. You're very comfortable, relaxed, and maybe nervous about trying to get out of it and falling over or getting tangled in its bindings. It's easier to just take a deep breath, swing gently, and let the time go by. Hammocks are cursed things in that regard, as they can sap us of our energy to do those things we enjoy, and we just drift off to sleep. Writers find themselves taking a break from writing, letting their momentum die down as they rest in the glory of their recent accomplishment. Be very careful at this point.

Now, I always insist that once I finish a big project, I step away from it for a bit - a week or maybe more, depending on its size. I give myself the right to enjoy the hammock, but not to its full extent. Even after I have finished a 400-page novel, I still write something every day just to keep myself from sinking too deep into the writing hammock. Whatever write doesn't have to be great, it doesn't have to be the first draft of my next book, it doesn't even have to be good. The only thing it has to be is a product of me writing on a regular basis. That way I keep my old habits intact, I continue to learn about my process and develop my voice, and I continue to think like a creative type. I also give myself the freedom to set a date for when I will dig out that first draft and start the editing process, and until then, I don't need to jump into a major project. I just need to keep on writing.

Fortunately, the sports hammock is different in that the gap between the end of the Super Bowl and the start of spring training is literally sixty hours, so I have some time to watch the Olympics, figure out the rules of curling, get my sports nourishment, and prepare for the beginning of the baseball season and those wonderful, magical words:

"Play ball!"   

Surprise!

Since my last post was about the importance of maintaining suspense throughout a story, I decided that this time I would go the opposite direction and talk about surprise. Yes, writing about surprises is much easier than the slow burn of a building dilemma, but that does not mean it's simple. More importantly, there can be wrong ways of introducing surprise that actually cheat the reader of a potentially enjoyable shock. 

Anyone who has watched a horror movie knows the fun of a good scare. The frightened main character  hears something out on the porch. The person approaches, opens the front door and sees nobody on the porch, breathes a sign of relief, then closes the only to reveal the menacing villain, Hawthorne, right behind it. Then there's the jump-scare - the same scene, but when the door closes it suddenly reveals... another character who we did not expect but not our villain Hawthorne. The jump-scare is the cheap scare that serves no purpose in driving the story but primes the audience for future surprises. We learn these tricks in writing for the same reason - one is to jump the story's action forward, the other keeps the reader on edge. However, there are good ways to do this, then there are cheap ways to do this.

Let's say we are now writing a story about the character with the front-door situation. We can engage the reader by focusing the descriptions of the door, the shadows, the rustling wind outside - all the senses of the character tuned in on that one element of the noise on the porch. We narrow the reader's attention so their focus is tunneled to that one event - what is on the porch? Then we offer the sudden opening of the door and the reveal that nothing is there. We let the reader experience one beat of relief with the main character, decompress the scene with them shutting the door, then have them turn around and see the cold eyes of Hawthorne as our bad guy takes over the scene. Fairly simple, straight-forward, and effective, but with the potential to be cheapened by the wrong words.

As writers get into their story, there is always the temptation to install a false sense of urgency or surprise with things like, "Suddenly," or "Without warning," to start a surprising scene. Effective writing creates the sudden change without actually using the word "sudden" because the writing shifts gears in a way that is jarring to the reader without telling the reader the scene is, in fact, jarring. Consider our scene above, that could be presented two ways:

"Dale breathed a sigh of relief, releasing his stress as he shut the door. Suddenly, from behind the door, Hawthorne stepped forward..."

"Dale breathed a sigh of relief, releasing his stress as he shut the door. Ready to go back to bed, he turned to meet the eyes of Hawthorne..."

The second example does not warn the reader of what is approaching with "suddenly" but instead makes the bad guy appear in exactly that manner. The sudden change is assumed, written in, and the reader gets a good start. Throwing any word to preempt that action basically warns the reader that something is coming, and takes the energy away from the event itself. It cheapens the scene and actually takes away some of the characterization of Hawthorne because he no longer created the surprise - "suddenly" did.

Surprise is an effective tool in writing if it's managed well. The best way to tell if you are creating a surprise moment is when you don't need to tell the reader they are going to surprise them - you just go off and do it.    

    

Sometimes We Don't Tell the Whole Story

Like every good and true resident of Chicagoland, I maintain a healthy respect for that wonderful weather anomaly called the Lake Effect (capital letters because it's just that important). The Lake Effect is fairly simple - sometimes, when weather comes blowing off Lake Michigan (or any other Great Lake), it can cause massive snowfall bursts in isolated areas, and the people at the weather desk have a terrible time predicting just what piece of real estate will be hit. Just the difference of a few miles can be the difference between flurries and a foot of snow coming out of nowhere. I am currently in one of those situations where they are expecting a big hit of Lake Effect snow - they just don't quite know where, when, or how much. And so, we wait. We see a flake fall and wonder if this is the beginning, or if it's just snow falling from a high branch. Patiently, we wait.

This is the art of suspense.

As writers, we are always told to inform the reader about the surroundings, the descriptions, the environment, and the challenges facing our heroes. However, sometimes it benefits the story when we leave out certain details, and just let the reader wonder when an event is going to happen. If our hero is searching through the villain's home one night, the amount of information we include can either contribute or delete the suspense factor, which is what engages the reader the most.

So, our hero is rummaging through the bad guy's home in search of something incriminating - a simple premise. There's a lingering sense of danger since this is an illegal act and getting caught doing it could lead to all kinds of problems. However, this is low-grade suspense, because there is no imminent threat. Now, let's upgrade the suspense. Perhaps the hero is doing this searching because he knows the bad guy is always out at the club at this time, but the hero's friend calls and says the bad guy never showed up at the club, or left the club early. Now there's an unknown - a sense of risk that danger could be close. Or maybe we include a scene where the bad guy is shown turning the car around to go home - the risk is even more severe because we know the bad guy is on a collision course with our hero. Now the reader is engaged.

Suspense comes in several forms, but they basically break down into two categories. First there is the maybe - the potential for something bad to happen. That's the Lake Effect factor; it might dump a pile of snow on me, it might not, but I have no way of knowing until it's over. This becomes a constant, slow-burn suspense because at any point things could change. The other form is the time-bomb factor; something bad will definitely happen, it's just a question of whether the hero can get out of the way before things blow up. The time-bomb factor is an easy rope-in because it is definite. It is 3... 2... 1... action, and the reader will mark time for the event to happen. Slow-burn suspense, however, can be drawn out indefinitely. A suspense novel often relies on 300+ pages of slow burn because the deadline is uncertain, or depends on conditions. In either case, however, suspense is what keeps readers engaged in stories, particularly those actions stories, when there is a lull between car chases.

Watch any suspense movie and diagnose how they play out the drama. The time-bomb factor or the slow-burn factor will create a different kind of story, and seeing how each one moves the viewer should give an excellent idea of which kind you should include in your stories.      

Young Adult and Romance Genres

There's a pretty big discussion awaiting anyone who challenges the popularity of the Young Adult (YA) or romance genres. There's also a monstrous number of aspects that could be discussed about why these particular story themes are so relevant. For now, however, I want to talk about the important elements needed to write them, other than the key ingredient that comes with their name. In many ways these genres are similar, but split in one very important sense.

The YA craze has actually been around for a long time, but only really exploded once certain people realized how it could be readily exploited to turn that prime demographic - kids - into raging consumers. We have been seeing it for decades starting with the mass-marketing that hit with the original Star Wars movie and just spread to every other movie and TV franchise that could be sold, but books took a little longer. Then here comes bespectacled, wide-eyed and forehead-scarred Harry Potter, and it was on. A book spawned a series of books, movies, plays, theme-park rides and adventures, LEGO sets, and anything else that could be sold. From there, the real YA adventure was born.

The magic of this genre is that it should embody all the elements of growing up, but manifest those elements as characters and challenges. Every teenager goes through the phase where adults do not understand them and mostly get in the way of what the kid really wants, so that appears in the YA novels as obstructive or ignorant parents, angry teachers, clueless older friends, etc. And what better way to describe life's biological changes than through a dip into fantasy where a new, much more exciting world opens up for these youngsters? YA novels are, at their core, examples of kids that teens can relate to, taking on the plights and perils of life through metaphor-filled adventures where they are the vindicated heroes who show the world they were right all along. Tell me what 12-year-old wouldn't absolutely love winning an argument about life with their parents? A good YA novel will leave that pre-teen feeling like they did just that.

In this regard, romance is a very similar creature. The quest for love is universal, so no surprise that it has been turned into an industry - and a lucrative one at that. However, let's see what steps beyond the standard romance novel, which is basically a series of exotic locations, various short-term hook-ups, and at long last the connection that made it all worthwhile. Romance is about searching, about the quest for love, but the really good ones are about becoming, and this is why they fit in with YA nicely. In a standout romance novel, our main character does more than find love, they discover themselves in full. They find what truly brings them the joy and contentment that their life lacked before the book started. In YA romance, this often means immersing them in a world they might not be familiar with but somehow they find out this brings out a part of them they never knew existed. They become the true hero, the character finally victorious in the most difficult game of all - life. The Twilight saga gives us this in a four-book package, appealing to romantics and YA fans alike (though fantasy writers will often tell you their opinion about glimmering vampires). 

There are more aspects to discuss, but these two genres encapsulate the hero's challenge in a simple manner. In YA, the challenge should parallel growing up. In romance, the real adventure is the development of the character into someone truly deserving of love. How tough can that be?        

Genres of Your Making

Well, it's been a fun couple of weeks discussing some elements of certain detail-specific genres. For those who are interested, next week I will explore the Young Adult (YA) and the Romance genres, but for now the big discussion will be on the greatest genre of all. Now, a lot of people might argue what the best one is, given everyone's different preferences and interests. However, for the individual author, the best environment to write in is surprisingly simple and very exciting. In simplest terms, it's the hybrid genre.

Hybrid? Is that really a thing? Most definitely, and it is what most authors use when they find their particular style. Horror authors usually include some form of romance (the violent murder of a loved one is that much more shocking), writers of thrillers and suspense novels often create very intense relationships between their characters (it creates higher stakes when they are in peril), sci-fi and fiction-fantasy often incorporate other environments as major plot elements - it's all a huge blend of many things mixed together like a home-brewed recipe that is never quite the same each time it's whipped up.

Now, how do we discover just what our specific blend is? Well, similar to structuring out a craft brew, homemade chili, or handmade meatloaf, you need to know its foundation. Oats, barley, or wheat for the beer, what kind(s) of beans for the chili, turkey or beef in the loaf - this is your starting line, then build out from there. This is where we pick the dominant genre, all while recognizing that we can add plenty of different things into this personal stewpot that is our writing. From that base point, we begin the creation process and have some fun.

Now are there things that don't mix, or hybrids you should avoid? This can be a contentious point, but let's just say that Seth Grahame-Smith's Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter and his similar works should put to rest any worries about things not blending. Taking outrageously different concepts and fusing them together does not always guarantee success, but such mash-ups (as they are called) do gain attention much in the same way that intriguing fusion cuisine can come out of nowhere and take the world by storm. The wild success of YA dystopian fantasy series reminds us that there are many combinations to be tried, and we as writers hold the responsibility of doing so.

Next week will be a frank discussion about YA and romance (and that obvious fusion), but I will be taking Monday off in observance of Martin Luther King Day, so my next post will be on January 23rd.