Games Writers Play

We all know the basics of writing - either fiction or fact, the objective is to communicate a message to a larger audience. With storytelling, we want to give the reader the most valuable parts of the events and parties involved, along with anything that carries an emotional theme. With poetry, conveying the sentiment is paramount as opposed to description. And of course, our choice of dialogue is all about the spoken words. However, writers get to reach into a bag of tricks and play some little games with the reader if they so choose, along with the actual technical writing. These are some of the things that make a simple story very complex, or create a compelling narrative.

One of my favorite writer tricks is The Unreliable Narrator. The writer gets to tell a story from someone's perspective, but maybe doesn't tell the reader that this character might play fast and loose with the details. Maybe the narrator doesn't remember everything and leaves out critical details, maybe they have an altered sense of reality, or maybe they are trying to convince you of their innocence when they are, in fact, guilty. The Unreliable Narrator is broad in scope, and can cover a lot of different areas, but it has to be done with a purpose other than just to say, "Gotcha!" to the reader. It's the difference between a trick and a prank - the former being an impressive turn of events while the latter is just annoying. 

Another grand game to play is the Multiple Perspectives Narrator - giving the reader several characters' first-person perspectives, and letting the unreliability be sorted out by things such as deduction. We see this in mystery novels through the interrogation of various suspects, but when it is done from the perspective of those suspects, the reader gets to view the story from many different, perhaps conflicting angles. Epic storytelling often does this, leaving the reader to get a true-to-life feeling for the story because they have to fill in details.

Oh - regarding details, there are a lot of games writers can play with details. Everyone understands the basics of description and fleshing out scenes and characters. One great game is for the writer to describe characters without throwing in all these sensory cues but rather through metaphor, simile, and conneciton to ideas. The character's looks are never revealed but the reader should get a keen visual of what the character feels like. If I describe a shady senator, I can use terms like a lopsided smile, a sinister expression, shifty eyes, etc. and those physical traits will come through. However, what if I take their appearance and fill it in through character traits? Maybe I go with, "The senator stood at the podium with a smile made wide by dozens of broken promises, adjusting a tailored suit made entirely out of bribes and kickbacks." No two people would be able to sketch the same vision of the character, but the reader would have an unquestionable image of who that politician was, what he looked like to them, and what he was all about.

These games are all fun as long as they are done with a purpose. As long as the shady senator doesn't need to have a distinguishing physical trait, go ahead and describe him through his faults. If a narrator is unreliable because he is actually the bad guy, make sure his narrative is crafted to broadcast his innocence even in the face of evidence against him. And if there are several characters offering conflicting stories, make sure that you - the author - know the real story, and why everyone else's is just a little different.      

Smalltown - Last Stop

I'm actually a little surprised about some of the IMs people have dropped me about the past few worldbuilding posts and our hypothetical little place of Smalltown. Having a nice discussion about everything from people to dialects to characterization of this little locale have, of course, made me think a lot about it too, and I like to think my writing has benefitted. However, of all the things popping through my mind, there's one final little comment I want to throw out there about creating a town that takes on its own character. It's a simple question: Why?

It may sound odd, asking why should one make a location that is full and rich and vibrant. The why seems obvious - to make the writing and the story more compelling. The short response would be, "Yes, it will do that." However, the longer answer would start asking why is it so important for the town to be compelling when you already have characters, a plot, and various obstacles and challenges to throw in the way of the hero's journey? Does a full, rich town setting actually add more to the experience? Well, to answer this, we need to ask ourselves if Smalltown brings in the one thing that makes all features of our writing more interesting: tension.

Now, this form of tension is not what it might sound like. The down does not need to be fraught with its own conflicts, no ribalries, political intrigue, class warfare, etc. (although if there's room for it, why not?). Rather, the consideration of tension means highlighting the aspects of the town that relate directly to the characters, and maybe conflict with their goals in life. This is something that Smalltown, USA is very capable of, since it can have any feature you want in it. Even the most innocuous place can grate on a character's nerves or challenge their beliefs if you let it.

In my father's later years, he moved to his own little Smalltown in Indiana; a place so far out of the way I won't bother mentioning its name. After life in and around Chicago, he wanted to escape from anything and everything that reminded him of the Windy City - for years he was downright phobic about crossing back into Illinois. However, he realized in time that even his little Smalltown was a challenge to live in. People there never discussed or debated things, they just accepted what they were told and moved on. My father thrived on discussing subjects at length and defending an opinion, but no, not in Smalltown. He also loved the diversity life has to offer (especially in Chicago), but this vanished once he moved. Everyone had the same pickup truck, the same haircut, they were all Notre Dame fans and had the same toppings on their pizza - sausage and onion; anything else was too risky and could possibly lead to radical things like dancing.

My father's biggest challenges in Smalltown involved the simple battles of life: being a non-comformist when everyone expects obedience. The tension there involved simple conflict: a church of a different denomination, finding a place that sold national newspapers, or hoping someone else in town heard the story he heard on NPR. Yes, it was a tense little place you've likely never heard of.

When you make up your Smalltown, give a lean toward how your characters might find life there challenging. Are they residents who have always wanted to escape and see the world but local norms say to stay put? Are they a red family in a blue town or vice versa? Are they new to the place - perhaps big-city transplants who are now stranded among the country mice? These always foster healthy areas for tension, and since you know the main plot already, you can customize the challenges so that Smalltown finds the exact nerve to grate on. This engages our readers every time, and keeps them fully aware of the situation, the plot, the conflict, and the obstacles presented by this little place called Smalltown.    

More About Smalltown - People

I thought this little discussion about worldbuilding would be one simple post, but the discussion around making the world that is Smalltown, USA, has drawn some interest and now demands further discussion. Therefore, today will be some comments about the good (or bad) people of our little town, and how to forge both individuals and the town's public identity.

First, a disclaimer. To be fair, everyone has their idea of what a small, little town should be like and how its people behave. Whether it's a peaceful rural town deep in red-state territory where everyone has pickup trucks and distinct opinions, or its an eclectic mish-mosh of different people from different places, all putting together some awkwardly-designed, Frankenstein's-monster collection of an identity, the important part is that it's yours, and your job is to make it come alive. If someone says, "People aren't like that in the places I go to," well, they have never been to Smalltown. Your responsibility is to decide whether they are projecting their opinions onto your ideas, or possibly you're not communicating your locale as clearly as your vision demands.

Now with that out of the way, think about what the average citizen is like in your little town, and I mean this in the most boring way possible. Are the people there generally older than the average town, are there more kids than usual, is it mostly families, retirees. empty-nesters? None of your characters have to represent that exact demographic, but as you communicate the feeling of the town's people, you establish a baseline for the reader to work with. In a quiet little Midwest town you might envision mostly middle-aged folk, most people familiar with each others' faces, everyone walking when they run their errands - the simple life. That's your baseline, and the background characters meet those criteria.

Once you have that in place (and you can probably see where this is going), the introduction of a character who doesn't fit the mold now just leaps off the page. The character doesn't have to be a brash city kid with a loud Dodge Challenger zooming down the streets to stand out - they just need that one little difference. If they are the new face in town and everyone looks at this unfamiliar person, this becomes a chance to show the character's response to this attention. Do they want to fit in, do they care, or do they feel uncomfortable? How do they respond when a cashier wants to see their ID - and it's out-of-state? The character's every action is now very much on display center stage because their differences have been highlighted. 

The importance of knowing your townspeople and identifying who they are viewed as a whole may sound cliché, but there's a reason it has lasted so long. In a crowd of people in expensive suits, silk ties, and expensive watches, the one person without a jacket is the one who gets noticed. This is exactly who you want your character to be..     

Smalltown follow-up - Flavor

When I decided to write a few pieces about the finer points of world-building, I knew I was opening up a real can of worms. For writers, especially those in the fantasy genre, there is a lot of world to build, so this part of the process alone can be epic. That being said, I thought it would be best to start from talking about the smallest part of the world - the locale - and build out. However, I think I overlooked a few things about creating the typical Smalltown, USA, so I would really like to focus on one particular aspect: flavor.

While technically I was born in Chicago and therefore the city is my origin, the fact of the matter is that before I was three I was living in a little suburb outside of Chicago and its county boundaries. This suburb used to be a little collection of houses in the space between two older villages. Then in 1969 a developer who shall remain nameless built out his dream of creating a huge, diverse, integrated community with all the latest amenities that would become a little boomtown of 50,000 within a generation and double yet again in the next generation. Well, nice try...

This little village (not quite 8,000 people as of the last census) might sound like a failed success story, and depending on what angle you looked at it from, it was. However, the flavor of the neighborhood was something entirely different, and indeed quite fascinating, even in the spaces where it failed. As a writer, we could write about the town that tried to be a success but fell way short of its dreams, but that's not a description as much as an epitaph. When worldbuilding, it's the writer's responsibility to give the reader the view from inside that world, from the street-level view of whatever might be interesting, then build the information around those items.

One of my favorite traits of my little town happened to be the many abandoned grain silos dotting the periphery of the incorporated area. From a historical point of view, these were the remnants of the many farms that were bought out to build the golf course, industrial park, and housing developments. Those things never fully materialized, but the land stood vacant, the properties going to seed. That's the history lesson - the flavor of it comes from the characters and how they see these massive, derelict grain silos standing out on the horizon, surrounding the town like so many failed dreams or hulking tombstones to an overambitious ideal. Old, abandoned farm houses and barns dating to before the Great Depression are now playgrounds for the young trespassers, massive hills of dug-out earth for basements of properties never built now stand like so many monuments for children to ride their bikes down with reckless abandon. Those landmarks - testimonies to failure - become the flavor of the town, and make it more realized than just rattling off a history lesson. 

I still go back to my hometown now and then, just to look at how some things never changed. Many of the grand buildings from the 1970s are long gone, replaced by dollar stores and car washes, the great expansion now frozen in time. Those grain silos, however, are still there, and seeing them and all their historical meaning tells me all I need to know about that little town. 

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!"