The Compound Sentence

I made a promise in my last post, a promise to do a deeper dive into the work of art called the compound sentence, but I understood well in advance that such an exploration could get carried away in such a manner that any type of message in such a post would get lost within the lengthy explanation required to demonstrate just what a compound sentence is, therefore while I will still discuss the art behind creating such a work of grammatical perfection, I will not push too hard in suggesting whether it should be the preferred tool of choice as you go on your writing journey and develop the kind of process that best expresses your thoughts and desires.

That previous sentence is a bit of a grammatical nightmare, weighing in at a robust 120 words and likely to set off an alarm in the minds of editors. However, it is not what one would call a run-on sentence, but rather it is a compound sentence. The difference is, of course, that a run-on sentence wanders away from the subject and goes in tangential or even unrelated directions. A compound sentence, however, sticks to a central message or discussion point, with each phrase building upon the last one. It may sound like a modest distinction, but that's the important part, and I will explain why.

I was going to reprint the opening sentence from a draft of Newton Berry's The Hanged Man, but I can't seem to find my copy. If you find one, great, but allow me to explain. The book opens with a river raging through a limestone crag, with a man dangling upside-down from the edge of a cliff above, his foot caught in a gnarled root. Now, one could start the book off by focusing upon the man and his struggle to get back up the cliff. However, the author starts with a 234-word sentence describing the river's furious churning through this narrow crag. What does this do? It takes the reader immediately into a force of nature that is the river rapids, and holds them there as the scene builds from the cold water to the churning foam to the hard, relentless limestone cliff walls, then ascends the heights to the man dangling two-hundred feet above this violent situation. In that one compound sentence, the reader is immersed in the scene, not allowed to come up for air until that first period emerges just as the man hanging off the cliff is mentioned. And the reader is hooked.

Now, there are other forms of compound sentences that also pass editorial muster, but they are done in a different manner. In my mission to read James Joyce's Ulysses, there is a 4,391-word soliloquy at the end, taken from the spoken word of one of the characters. Now it's not exactly fair to call such a thing a compound sentence since it is written as a manner of speech, and in speech we can ramble on with stunningly imperfect grammar for hours and hours without stopping if our audience lets us. However, it is written word and done in a way to attract the reader to its message, so it counts and it's rather fascinating to read from the eyes of a writer. (In Jonathan Coe's The Rotters' Club, there is supposedly a sentence registering just shy of 14,000 words in length, but I cannot attest to having read it. It is, however, on my bucket list.)

In short, the compound sentence, when taken to extremes, can give the author an extra tool when it comes to finding ways to draw in the reader - either into a scene, a character, or an emotion. When done right, they are extraordinarily immersive and quite memorable. Just as long as one does not ramble on and on and on and on and...    

Schoolhouse Rock Revisited

I will be the first to admit I fell down a bit of a rabbit hole this weekend. After my Friday post, Object versus Subject, I hopped on YouTube to awaen some nostalgic feelings and revisit some of those great Schoolhouse Rock videos (never mind that they are actually more jazz-oriented than rock and roll). Anyway, I think I went through most every one of them - some twice - just reliving the good memories and the absolute brilliance of these three-minute clips as teaching tools. I can't tell you how many times they've rolled through my head at one point or another during my adult life, but I can tell you a built quite an educational foundation upon those little songs. So now I would like to discuss the most important ones again - but as lessons for a writer and not just someone learning grammar. (Don't worry - I will neither sing nor rewrite any lyrics.)

Adverbs: We learned that adverbs are simply modifiers of verbs or sometimes adjectives. However, in writing, there is a lot of controversy about whether they are needed. Some people avoid them entirely because they are too easy to abuse, while others definitely believe they enrich descriptions of action. I make a special note to use my adverbs to offer extra punch, but only when the punch comes from a direction not expected - a sucker-punch, if you will. Like we learned, "quickly" is an adverb we can use to show how someone runs - but that's adverb abuse. If someone runs, we assume it's quickly, so just leave it out. If, however, they run trudgingly, clumsily, or drunkenly, well, those become some high-value adverbs. In short, only modify things where there isn't already an assumption in play.

Adjectives: Now, these are more important parts of description. Do not get them confused with their adverb cousins - use your descriptive words to fill in the blanks of our environment. However, like I mentioned with adverbs, use the descriptors that offer the most bang for their buck. The greenness of a tree, a blue sky, or blue water, these things are givens that really need to pop if you are going to push for describing the water's color. Murky, brackish, crystalline, iridescent with a shimmer of oily residue - now those bring out details that otherwise aren't assumed.

Noun: A noun is a person, place, or thing. Nothing new for writers here - I just needed to replay that song again as I wrote.

Conjunctions: These are toxic little friends of any writer because they attach thoughts and phrases. However, to follow up on the railroad metaphor used in Schoolhouse Rock, if we connect too many ideas and thoughts together it acts like a train with too many connected cars - it drags, weighs down the activity, and ultimately goes nowhere. As writers, we like bringing very complex ideas to life. However, we can get carried away with our ideas and create run-on concepts. In the case of complex sentences, unless you want to go for the compound sentence presentation (to be discussed in the next post), try to limit your sentence length to at best 30-40 words. Long sentences are often more for the author's ego than the presentation of an idea.

For the rest of them, well, go to YouTube and check them out.     

Object Versus Subject

If there's one thing I struggled with in high school, it was grammar. My language usage was just fine when I spoke (though a little slurred), but when it came down to the academic parts of breaking down a sentence, that was it - I tapped out. My identification of the parts of a sentence was exclusively informed by Schoolhouse Rock (check YouTube if you aren't familiar), so I knew that "a noun is a person, place, or thing" and interjections were for excitement, for emotion, etc., and verbs did things. Other than that, I was fairly lost. I actually learned more about grammar from my German class, where prepositions were all-important and you always capitalized your nouns. However, I digress.

I am not bringing this up as a preface to a big writer's grammar lesson, but rather to set the stage that I am not one who dives deeply into grammar when it comes to writing. As an editor, if the verb and subject don't agree, I make the correction but I don't elaborate on the explanation. I don't go head-first into discussing split infinitives or dangling participles - I just point out the problem. And one thing I definitely don't want to get caught doing is preaching about when something is an object or a subject. I am, however, going to plant a little seed here about how you should consider these things in your writing.

We all know what an object is - a table, a dog, a chicken. We know how to describe objects - the sturdy table was made of thick oak and polished regularly to a bright shine. However, how does this help us in our writing when it comes to object versus the more enigmatic concept of a subject. Well, glad you asked. Per my earlier discussion, I am not going to go into the details of how things get defined and classified, and lay down a bunch of rules that most people don't know anyway. Instead, I will offer a way to think about things that should help differentiate between the two as far as your writing is concerned.

Too many times, we write about our characters as if they were objects. We give them a calculating description, going over them to bring out the details and provide an image that a good sketch artist could work with. However, when it comes to writing about a person, place or event as a subject, write about it not in clinical detail, but like you care about it; like you want to know it personally. If I want to identify a person at a bar, give me a description of them as an object. If I want to get to know someone better, tell me about their interesting features, their qualities that make them worth investigating.

If I am describing, say, a farm dog as an object, he might be a 100-pound sheepdog, his long fur patched black and white, with his big head hanging down below his shoulders. Now I can see that dog. As a subject, however, I would talk about how that big lug would chase the chickens that got out of the pen, barking and howling but never running fast enough to catch one, just putting a little fear into the ones trying to make a break for it. Now that dog has personality, even for a dog.

Sure, plenty of people might complain that I didn't discuss the object/subject rules. That wasn't my intention, so mission accomplished. However, treating your various characters like subjects versus objects brings them into the story as opposed to them being just set decorations. The writing is always better for it.      

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!"   

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.    

Genres of the Past

As promised this discussion explores the different kinds of fiction using the past - and it's a very big category. It's even bigger when you consider its cousin, non-fiction writing about the past, is basically only known as "history." But once we pull away the guardrails of fact and reality, our many pathways open up to an almost unlimited magnitude, and we get to choose which genre we want to pursue and how many other genres we want to overlap. But first, some basic categories to work with.

Historical fiction: In its most basic form, this is a story that takes place in a specific time and place in history - hopefully with good reason, but not necessarily. This fiction does require a little research to make sure you get the nitty-gritty correct. Was this an era where they referred to tuberculosis as consumption? How many states were in the Union at the time (assuming the USA existed)? You don't need to research the details before you know what will be referred to, but once you know your time, place, and purpose, give it an eye for the period. Details serve two purposes in historical fiction: First, it is an opportunity to point out things the reader might not realize or never have heard about, thereby doing some world-building for the reader (mentioning the Chicago Coliseum, which was torn down in 1982, for example). Secondly, certain trivial details specific to the time give the writing a sense of authenticity (before the 1880s, nails were rectangular, not rounded). These bring the past very much to the reader's present-day, and help immerse them in that era.

Old-time fiction: This is like historical fiction but it utilizes the senses and sensibilities of a particular era without getting all tied up in the details of where, when, and how. The same rules apply from historical fiction go as far as immersive details, but these should focus on intimate concepts such as identity, worth, values, and so forth. Without the anchor of a specific time or place, the story can work with moods and character tensions built out from the values of an earlier time. This genre does serve well with romantic fiction, which often fails the time/place detail test, but that's not what the story is about. These stories have a more timeless feel, and are representative of feeling rather than calculating accuracy.

Fiction-fantasy (note the word order): Now we're just throwing out the history book altogether and instead blending in elements of the fantasy genre - dragons, magic, gods and demigods, whatever you wish. This is often a lead-in to just writing pure fantasy fiction, and not trying to write about a dragon hunter in South America shortly before the era of colonization (though that might be a good story idea). Fiction-fantasy (with fiction coming first) uses some historical idea and just runs it into the fantasy world. The Knights Templar, lost civilizations, the last days of Pompeii - all historical anchors for the writer to launch from. Once Fantasy becomes the lead word in fantasy-fiction, then it's just using concepts and ideas from our past and throwing them into a different world altogether. It should not be surprising that a lot of high fantasy writing in mythical world still has royal hierarchy similar to European traditions.

Alt-past: This covers a lot of the same real estate as alt-future writing, but the timeframe for the story is still prior to present-day. The best example of this genre is Steampunk, which should really be more of a breakout genre than it is these days. The idea though is that our history ran a different course somehow, somewhere, and here's how, say, 1910 looks. This, however, comes with the same caveats as tech writing - the story trajectory must intersect with the new reality and be moved by it, otherwise it loses purpose. This, however, is a little easier, since you can definitely show how historical landmarks or waypoints can intrude upon the story or even be avoided.

In Friday's post, we discuss the best genre of them all, and how you get the final say in what it actually is.       

Genres of the Future

As promised, I am continuing my discussion on different genres, what makes them special and how they are driven. Since today is Friday, I am looking forward to all the wonders the future holds for me - the future being the coming weekend. However, this did make me think about genres set in the future (or alt-future), so that's what we will be discussing. And often, the future isn't all that wonderful - which of course has its own genre. But let's start simple.

Sci-fi: Science fiction is the easiest future genre to explore, particularly since this is a pretty broad church. What makes something science fiction is that the advancement of science has fundamentally impacted people's lives and altered the way they typically engage with the world. This could be a few years from now, a generational leap, or a whole Star Trek-leap into the unknown. Sci-fi is the home of space travel, cyberpunk, and all the fascinating tech-studies. The point here is that science has changed the world - for better or worse - and it is a contending part of the narrative. If the story is about a farming family in Kansas facing the world in the year 2110, the story better have a main obstacle be science-driven, otherwise it's just future-fantasy.

Future-fantasy: Naturally, this is a story that takes place in the future, but the characters are motivated and driven by the same things that we in the early 21st century understand. Science may be different, but the main issue is that it's the future, and change abounds. Perhaps global warming has made life difficult, melting ice caps kind of ruined Miami, or overpopulation abounds. These aren't exactly science-driven issues, but challenges brought on by time itself. This is also known as speculative sci-fi, exploring how the world looks after things have changed, which doesn't have to be negative. What about a future where most of the population lives in space and Earth is quite open and free? That's workable as well. There's a lot to work with here, as long as the world is different for a good reason (or a bad reason, as follows).

Dystopian: This is the future, but something went wrong. Maybe society turned on itself and went to totalitarianism, maybe Mother Nature had one too many and unleashed something horrible, maybe scientific cataclysm, nuclear war, over polluting, or something horrible really damaged society. Social change is to dystopian stories what technological change is to sci-fi. Now, dystopian worlds can have their fancy tech - 1984, Fahrenheit 451, these are classic dystopian stories where tech has improved, but the big change is what society has become. Tech can also be a non-issue - The Road has a world in its death throes, with food more important than an iPhone (imagine that).

Alt-future: Similar to speculative fiction, this looks at a future world if something in history went different. If Napoleon won at Waterloo, if Columbus didn't stumble upon the western hemisphere, if Pepsi came before Coke - the point is, it explores a future under a different set of ground rules. Imagine if the first country to develop interstellar space travel was the Confederate States of America - start writing. Any tweak of the past, extrapolated into the future, makes for alt-future writing (if the writing is present-day, the is just speculative fiction and leave it at that).

The important part to note about any futuristic writing is why it takes place in the future. Tech changes important to the plot? Perfect. A new political entity in charge? Great. An imagination of the world in the year 3000 during the interstellar era? Awesome. The important part is that some change of the world will impact how the story unfolds. Someone hiking through the outback for two weeks might not be a rich topic for future fiction unless somehow that future finds its way into the plot. Otherwise, the door is open for as much exploration as you can fit on the page.

The next post, in case you hadn't guessed, will be backward-looking genres, and all the fun they can be.        

Let's Talk Genre

Happy New Year one and all, I hope those of you who made writing resolutions are keeping them and the rest of you are writing anyway. I thought a nice way to kick off this year would be to discuss different writing genres, what makes them unique, and how we can blend them into other styles to make our own preferred style of writing. Of course I won't discuss all genres in one post, so this one will start with the category of scary stuff and how there are differences.

On a tangent, one of my favorite horror movies is the original Halloween with Jamie Lee Curtis. This movie takes on legendary status when it comes to the horror movie, but too often people jumble it up with Jason from the Friday the 13th franchise, Freddy from Nightmare on Elm Street fame, and other blood-soaked movie that dominate the slasher era. And while yes, the Halloween franchise did give in to more blood in the sequels, what makes the original so good was that it was suspenseful rather than gory. Its minimal amount of blood and focus on mood and situation made for a classic movie.

So, now that we are talking about writing, what are the scary genres? In general, we have the horror, suspense, and thriller categories. Don't worry about whether zombies, vampires, werewolves, and so forth should be in one category or the other - that all depends on the story you want to tell. The important part is what each one brings to the table.

Horror: This genre is sure to offer up a pile of bodies who died before their time and in terrible ways. Things like character deaths and dramatic turns are always accompanied by events the reader would not like to experience in the real world, usually explained or demonstrated in graphic detail. To write horror, one must bring out either some of the things that terrify or shock the author, then they get spilled onto the page. The author doesn't need to have experienced these things, just know that they could happen in some dark nightmare. 

Suspense: As mentioned before, suspense novels carry the thread of something horrible approaching the main characters. There should be a looming threat, perhaps with unknown motive, but a force nevertheless that means harm to our focal characters and will bring it by any means necessary. In a true suspense novel, the protagonist(s) are unaware of the threat or do not know if it is real, but the reader knows without question that trouble is approaching. This is the secret of suspense writing - showing the reader the threat but keeping the characters in the dark until some big reveal leads to a dramatic confrontation or two.

Thriller: As opposed to suspense, the thriller places the protagonist in danger from square one, and they know it. Whether the threat is a vengeful killer or an approaching hurricane, the stakes start off high and keep rising. The protagonist may not know why the killer is pursuing them or understand how they can escape the hurricane, but now they need to survive. Close calls, quick escapes, and surprising turns all mark the thriller, and leaving the reader a moment to breathe is not recommended.

Blending these now just becomes the practice of finding the right temperature. Typically, the zombie apocalypse stories are horror-thrillers as the survivors flee for safety and occasionally get eaten, whereas a zombie horror-suspense blend might focus on the first hours of the outbreak where people don't even believe such a thing could happen (then they get eaten). Of course, the suspense-thriller simply means the protagonist is in danger from the first page but does not know why they are being victimized. This is a great genre to work with because everyone loves suspense and a good thriller, but if it doesn't have a high body count, it reaches a bigger audience.

In future posts I will discuss other genres, how to mix them, and what makes them special. Until Friday, keep on enjoying the New Year, and watch out for zombies (you never know).