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!"   

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.