A Good Reason to Write

I hope everyone had a festive Fourth of July. I tried to - really, I did - but sometimes those aren't how the cards get played. With the storms rolling through I had periodic power outages and it basically ruined my Friday night. I had a little recovery setback in the form of a mild fever. With my car sitting idle, one of the wheels decided to deflate (and I had to rely on other people to repair it because I cannot exert myself in that way). And as the topper, I found out today that someone I know was killed Saturday in a freak accident during those horrible storms. It just wasn't a great holiday weekend.

Of course, such a bad stretch of days can lead anyone back to the idea that it's been too rough a time to sit back and write anything. Even the most devoted writers would not be scolded if they had a bad weekend and said, "That's it, today I am not writing a thing." No shame there, but I would make the argument that times like these are actually the kind of situations which should move us toward the keyboard, not away. 

Personally, I find that one of the greatest power a writer possesses is the ability to create a new form of reality. Obviously, no writer can change what has already happened, but they can draw up a different world and explore it for some of the truths not currently available to them. Writing about the perfect Fourth of July weekend will not remedy the shortcomings of this one, but for one glorious flurry of words, we can talk about our hopes, dreams, aspirations, and everything we felt inside that did not get a chance to be expressed. No storms, no fever, no flat tire, no freak accident. For that time on the page, life can be good again.

Some might say, "That kind of escapism isn't very healthy." Well, if it was escapism, maybe it wouldn't be. However, as we develop our skills as writers, we learn not just how to write about other events, but also to pick out the universal truths in those stories and better understand them. Instead of wailing woe and lament for all the things that didn't happen, we can discover just why those things were so important at this point in time and why we are so shaken from their loss. As I wrote about this past weekend, I came to the realization that I just wanted the world to return back to normal again. My recovery has not been too bad, but being cooped up in my house for about two weeks has really made me yearn for the simple things in life to come back, and be frustrated by those things that have changed forever.

It might not be a big revelation, and there's a chance I would've figured things out without having to write a bunch of stuff. However, the tool of writing expedites matters, and grants me a shortcut to some valuable lessons. Now I can move forward with my recovery, hopefully get back to a new kind of normal, and begin to pick up where I left off before everything changed. And for those things that are irreversible, I hope to find peace with them.

RIP, Dana.   

Getting Weird

There was this unintentional exercise in creativity I participated in totally by chance many years ago. It was a simple prompt: Create your own alien life form, and describe it. The important part was not to just pick some alien like ET or the infamous xenomorph in the Alien franchise, but make up one of your own. The hook here is that, by definition, your alien could be anything in the universe. A number of us participated in this, and it was actually very telling in just what it meant to be creative.

Of the people who participated, they stretched their imaginations. Aliens with eyes on their feet, with tentacles and feelers to investigate the world around them. Some changed colors, some were invisible. Large, small, winged, everything - they covered the spectrum, each one a derivation on the creator's idea of a cool alien. My alien was a little creature that, for all intents an d purposes, resembled a pair of sunglasses. It was a parasite that would control the minds of potential hosts, and make then wear the alien sunglasses, which would then latch on to the host around the eyes, slowly feeding off of it. Outsiders would just see someone with a cool pair of shades, but it was the alien pair of sunglasses in control.

Needless to say, I got some looks when I read this idea for my alien. People found it amusing and out-of-the-box, and it was mentioned that it had the potential to be a B-movie classic. However, the real stunner was that after everyone was done showcasing their aliens, the moderator brought out the clincher. They pointed out that while everyone did create an alien, they were surprisingly contained in their ideas. Regardless of how creative they were, all these aliens across the universe apparently were roughly humanoid, with arms and legs in the standard pattern, they walked upright, and were still just modifications of homo sapiens himself. Except for the sunglasses, of course.

Now, fundamentally is it creative to have a pair of sunglasses as the alien of choice? After all, sunglasses are already kind of a thing, right? The moderator didn't chide me for borrowing a household item, but instead pointed out the whole takeaway of this exercise: being creative is often about going beyond what we identify with. Creativity shows not just in making one's own version of an upright humanoid alien, but finding something fresh and new that reinvigorates the idea itself. I play this game with other people, and point this out after they introduce their mostly-humanoid creation. It gives them a revelatory moment, and the concept sticks with them for a bit. (One friend made an alien that was a cloud - she is just freakishly creative, so she wins).

Sometimes, the best route toward developing the "new alien" idea involves escaping the concept itself. Too often, we hear a challenge like that and we start thinking about what would make an alien more interesting than what we currently think of. Unfortunately, this anchors us to a predefined idea of what an alien might be. Engaging creativity often involves starting from a completely unattached point - the "fresh cloth" approach - and finding out what concept you want to express then building it out around that point. It means getting rid of preconditions and locking onto one point of the concept that triggers your creativity. From there you cut the new pattern and make something completely your own. Even if it ends up being just a pair of sunglasses.   

Let Me Tell You A Story...

As a writer, I enjoy engaging people with stories about my various adventures. They can be simple, mundane events, but there are plenty who have told me they know when I am at a party. They will arrive, circulate, then realize "someone is holding court in the other room." That court is held by me telling some anecdote or story from days past. It's what I like to do. It relaxes me. But, despite what people might think from watching me go about my business, it is not easy at all. It's very hard, it takes practice, and it's not always appropriate,

What creative types already know is any event can constitute a story - it's just a matter of getting the right perspective and reading the room well enough to know when the story fits the mood. I have had the unfortunate experience of being with friends when someone's name comes up and a person in the room proceeds to tell a story about that named person. The story is inappropriate to the point of awkward, total cringe content, and probably something that the named person didn't want to spread around. And yet, here we are and there it is. Other times, people will be together and someone will start telling a story. About thirty seconds in, everyone but the teller realizes this story has nothing do do with the general tone of the gathering, and that the teller basically wanted to tell this story for their own person reasons. It might be a great story, but if it doesn't fit the mood of the room, it is lost before it starts.

Now, as I mentioned in my last post, this week I donated a kidney. The surgery went fine and the kidney is now working for someone else. This event is naturally excellent fodder for a great story. However, as I recovered from the procedure (on massive painkillers), I considered what the best story actually was. There is the story about what brought me to make such a decision to be a donor. There is, of course, the retelling of the pre-op process and the highlights of my hospital stay (note: after kidney donation, the next 30 hours in the hospital invovles a lot of people examining your bladder and bladder-adjacent areas. I no longer have secrets at Loyola Medical Center). These are valid stories , but could there be more than just a travelogue of the donor adventure?

After a few more painkillers, I thought the real story might be from the kidney's perspective. After all, it was now called to duty at a new location - a rare thing for organs. Would it be excited? Nervous? Anxious to get out and see the world? What would it be like to meet a new body? This seems like fertile ground for story-telling, since anything is possible.

Now here's the closer: They're all great stories. They all should be written, or thought about, or put together during some kind of writing exercise. What makes them interesting? Well, they really become interesting if they are told at the right time to the right crowd. Maybe the whole "having my kidney pulled out through a navel incision" story isn't something people at the barbeque would like to hear, but that crowd would appreciate the quiet embarrassment as I disucss the Loyola medical staff lining up to examine my junk. In either case, there are plenty of stories to be told. Just make sure you match the story to the crowd and the mood. The story will do the rest.     

"I Have Nothing to Write About"

Among the many writing workshops I attend and the one I facilitate, I hear this common theme. Someone, when asked to write about something from their own life, will say either nothing big ever happened in their life, or they don't have a lot to write about these days. I will give the first excuse more credit than the second one, but they are still both excuses. Therefore, I thought it best to point out why these reasons just don't fly with me. 

First, let's talk about nothing big happening in someone's life. At face value, I can appreciate what they are saying. They don't have this big, landmark adventure in their history to talk about. They never pulled someone out of a burning car, jumped a motorcycle across a canyon, saved Nakatomi Plaza from the ruthless plans of Hans Gruber, etc. That's fine - those stories are very rare anyway, and often exaggerated anyway. However, those stories aren't requirements for writing about something from their own life. The only requirement is to have an event in your life that you remember - then write it down. It could be the disappointment of discovering all the Diet Coke is gone, waking up in the morning with an inexplicable bug bite, or getting drunk with your friends and ending up face-first in a toilet - again - at your local bar. Those are all stories that you can write about. No, they are not likely to become screenplays or an eight-part limited series on Netflix. However, they are honest, frank stories of life that will help you hone your writing chops.

The second excuse - not having a lot to write about these days - is a redirection from the point. As writers, it is our job to see the difference in every day, whether we write about it or not. We are supposed to tease out the details and discover what makes everything unique, funny, entertaining, scary, boring, mundane, or whatever we choose. The various events of one single day in our life all have a lot to work with, and they are all unique. And before you mention that you're kind of in a rut where one day just bleeds into the next, well, that's an amazing subject to write about. Describing repetition, monotony, and the endless tedium of existence is a challenging exercise and also a great way to pull ourselves out of that rut because we examine just what has us bogged down. Again - probably won't end up on the big screen, but it gets you writing, and anything that you write is worth the effort because you've pressed your skills just that much further.

On that note, I am venturing into a challenging area of life. Tomorrow I am going to the hospital and donating a kidney (the left one if you're curious). It is promising to be an exhausting process, and it might pull me away from posting my twwice-a-week writing commentary for a little bit. However, do not doubt for one second that I will not be writing about it once I get home. The only catch is that I might not be posting regularly while I recover. Consider yourself forewarned.

Now get writing!

How Do You Get Better at Writing?

I am not one to brag (okay, I am totally one to brag), but I have done quite a few posts on this site. Some are better than others, but each one of them was worth publishing as a part of my work on this site. Now, some are better than others, and new ones are generally better than old ones - though my early-on entry, "Obi-Wan Kenobi - You Suck!" still holds the record for the most hits by one post. Jedi masters aside, there has been a lot of writing placed onto this site, and a lot of valuable information. There's also a secret within these entries that I shall now reveal (it's not a big reveal).

Some people have asked me, "What on Earth has possessed you to do so many entries?" or something similar to that. And in fairness, looking back at the 665 entries I had as of yesterday, that's a lot of writing. At 500 words per entry, I have basically typed the equivalent of three works of Tolstoy along with three or four of Poe's short stories to boot. Is this abnormal behavior? Manic? With a tally over 332,000 words, I must have some kind of problem. And I will admit that problem here and now - it's not enough; not by a longshot.

Someone said that to become good at anything, you must make the unthinkable feel ordinary. If you want to be great at football, you have to see yourself making the one-handed catches or breaking every tackle as just another day at work. Want to be a great illustrator? See yourself creating the images and worlds you hold in highest regard. Want to be a poet? Pursue that perfect combination of words that make people clutch your pages ot your chest, and know you will be able to create those at will. Sure, your first great work will be personally impressive, but that's only half the battle. Hopefully, you will realize that just by writing that first great work, you realize you have done the unthinkable, climbed Everest and stood at the top, and nothing can stop you from doing it again.

So, why the 665 posts? Because each one forces me to write something a little better than the last - or at least to try. Each post might help a few writers out there, but it definitely helps me hone my skills. The statement I follow the most is, "Practice Makes Permanent" (yes, I said it right). The more you do something, the better you get at it both with your conscious skills and your mental muscles that learn all the little tricks and burn them into your subconscious. The more you practice, the more your "new tricks" become habits. You become even more of a writer.

So, as I continue posting on most Mondays and Fridays, just keep this in mind. Amidst all the advice, stories, and sometimes-odd metaphors, I am also advancing my own personal skills by the simple act of making these posts into a habit, and turning thoughts into little capsules of wisdom (I hope). And the more you follow your dream of writing or creating, the furthert you will get toward doing the unthinkable, and even advancing beyond.       

More About AI

In late April, I wrote a post, "A Writer's Warning," which discussed the seductive dangers of AI as a surrogate for actual writing. My focus was largely on poetry, and I admit to using AI for the catch picture that accompanied the piece (I do this without reservation - my written words are my own since this is about writing. Art, however, is not my thing). Today's piece, however, will discuss the upside of AI in writing, particularly as a tool to help you improve your game.

An AI monster created by the monster that is AI

The scary thing about AI is that it can now write a novel, pretty much with minimal prompting. There have been cases where authors have been caught using AI to produce their works, and in some cases, more formulaic writing genres are quickly becoming infested with artificial works. Some technical algorithms and software packages can currently sniff out computer-generated verse, but it's just a matter of time before those are defeated. In short, AI is rapidly  becoming a part of the writing environment whether we want it to or not. However, instead of fighting it on every front, I recommend using it where it can serve you best as a writer.

I will use ChatGPT as my example AI, but many different packages can do this task. I am wrapping up the workshopping process for my latest novel with the working title, "Easier Than the Truth," and in a few months I plan on taking all those workshop points and working them into the copy. However, as an experiment, I decided to call in my AI frenemy and asked it to provide a grammatical review of my work. I dumped all 104,000 words into it, made sure to ask for a grammatical critique and scoring (ChatGPT can be a real kiss-up if you don't ask for objectivity), and hit enter. Boom! Seconds later, it gave me a full write-up of my work, including strengths, weaknesses, problems, and an actual scoring:

Category Score
Grammar            8.5/10
Punctuation 8/10
Sentence Structure 9/10
Dialogue Mechanics 9/10
Professional Readiness 8.5/10

It then explained, and offered examples from my text, weak spots, including the usual gallery of dangling participles, split infinitives, hyphen issues, etc. It didn't do the correcting, of course, but it gave me some good notes on whether there were structural problem versus basic editing issues, pacing problems, and so forth. In short... it offered a lot of advice within seconds without actually writing (or changing) a word. It served the role of the fastest beta reader I had ever worked with.

Admittedly, my experiment with giving me an outline and synopsis of the novel was less satisfying, as it mostly regurgitated the points I had typed up in narrative form. Its review of the work as a whole was also very complimentary, as ChatGPT is prone to do, which didn't help anything save for my ego. 

My point through all this is that, yes, AI can be a writer's friend if you let it. If you learn how to talk with it, how to interpret its responses, and bring more than a grain of salt with you for its reviews, it can help you. It should not, however, be anything more than one of your constructive critics. It's not a writer, you are. That boundary is very important, and will become more so as AI evolves.       

What is your problem?

In writing, we know that good stories have tension and conflict if they are written to really grab the reader. These center around very simple ideas - a character wants somethings and tries to get it despite the obstacles, two people vie for the same thing, someone tries to escape an undesireable outcome, etc. In many cases, the desire and the obstacle are fairly straightforward and require little if any explanation. Writing about someone lost in the woods pretty much presents its own issue in the mind of the reader, because being lost implies an interest in becoming "un-lost." However, in more complex writing, and with more adventuresome works, sometimes part of the writer's goal should be to get the reader to understand why the situation is a problem in the first place. The reader should be able to empathize in some way with the character, perhaps even before they understand the character is in danger.

Let's re-examine our story of the person lost in the woods. What if we start writing about the character in the woods, but we don't explicitly state they are lost. What if we describe them walking through the woods, frustrated by the undergrowth and the thorn bushes tearing at their jeans, the tangles of weeds making some places mipassable, all while the character keeps an eye on the sun peeking through the canopy as it gets lower and lower in the sky. Are they lost? Are they just in a hurry to get home? Are they being pursued? Why the frustration? If we can get the reader to feel what the character feels before explaining the circumstances, it gives the writer more command over how they draw in the reader. If we open up by explaning that the character is lost, we immediately trigger a bunch of pre-determined associations within the reader, and lose an opportunity to introduce the reader to that character's very unique situation.

One of my favorite quick reads - Stephen King's The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon - offers the lost-in-the-woods scenario and we immediately make all these assumptions about the girl getting lost during a trip. However, we are also offered enough insight into the little girl so that it becomes more than that, and when an external threat becomes another concern, we as readers are so deep within the character that we accept this sudden change of pace. If the additional element was introduced before we got to know the girl, it would've changed our assumptions about the girl's actions and become a different kind of story.

Now, why am I bringing up all this talk about getting the reader to empathize with the character and better understand their situation? Well, this is Pride Month, and a lot of people hear that term and dig up a lot of assumptions and phobias while forgetting to try and understand why it is an actual thing and its importance to many people. My response to them is just maybe to get to know the people first, try and understand their experiences, their obstacles, and why their situation, while different from other people's situations, is still valid and worth recognizing. Maybe use that empathy thing to figure out what the real story is instead of riding a bunch of predefined assumptions.

If you write with the goal being a reader empathizing with the character, you can get messages across a lot easier. And maybe if you live with a little more empathy, well, you can understand a lot more about the world around you.    

Whose Story Is It?

I had a real writing challenge before me this week. Not like a writing prompt or anything; this was more of a crisis of skills. I mean, I like to think I have developed a good toolbox when it comes to dealing with writing problems, but this one had me all tied up. I wanted to write about how I knew this person over the years, how my perception of them changed as I learned more about them, and my admiration for the person they had become. The story dealt with sensitive subject matter, but that wasn't the big hold-up. It was all about the presentation, and I didn't know what to do.

Here's a big writing lesson: When in soubt, write down something. Anything. Put words to the page, stitch some monstrosity together, and take it to a workshop to find out what other people think. Present the piece by saying, "Here's a thing I made - what is it and what does it need to be more than just a thing?" Leave yourself open to other people's input and opinion, and listen to every word. They may not know better than you, but they sure will be able to give you a perspective untainted by whatever your personal issues are. That's exactly what I did, and I will tell you why it helped so much.

As I mentioned, this was a story about how I knew this person from decades ago and how things evolved over time. Part of the feedback I received (particularly from several emails after the meeting) was that it was trying to be two stories - I was trying to tell the story about how my view of this person changed as I discovered more about them, but I was also trying to tell my friend's story to some degree, and this was creating problems with the task at hand. Depending on which story I wanted to tell, I should've drawn my focus toward one particular story arc and let the other characters support that story. However, this came with a monstrous caveat that writers have to acknowledge.

If I were to talk about my story exclusively, demonstrating my life and my growth as the world changed, that's fine. I can also discuss it from the perspective of how information changed my perspective, and thus how I perceived reality - perfectly allowable. The catch is, if I were to tell my friend's story and how it changed me, I am walking into dangerous territory because that's not my story to tell. I may be a part of it, but my license as a writer doesn't extend into explaining that friend's life. It would be similar to telling someone's secrets, to outing them or revealing a secret identity - absolutely none of my business. Now, I have written extensively about other friends who have shaped my life's pattern, and I write about them without hesitation, but that's because they either gave me permission to, or mostly because they were dead and could no longer tell their story. And in the latter case, I always make sure I keep it within the realm of the known world, revealing them only in the sense of how we related to each other.

So, to recap, if you are tied up in a writing project, here are the main tips to follow: First, write down something. As the saying goes, it's easier editing bad writing than editing no writing. Second, know the story you want to tell and hone in your subject matter to that arena. When a sentence feels awkward or out-of-place, ask yourself if it's sticking to the subject. And lastly, make sure it's your story to tell. Or, at the very least, make sure you are not disrespecting them in any way, shape or manner - living or dead.   

The Role of the Hero

In every traditionally-structured story, there is a hero who faces adversity and in the end, overcomes it. Depending on the genre, this may determine how the hero overcomes the antagonist - in action-adventure and thrillers, usually the bad guy is jailed or killed. In more cerebral stories, the enemy is overcome through a triumph of the spirit, by defeating the urge to yield to the temptations presented, or simply by living in a genuine way. Of course, in more nontraditional stories, the main character is defeated, or learns an unexpected lesson that changes their life path. Sometimes the bad guys win. However, to get to this conclusive point, we have to ask ourself what we want to say with the main character's final situation in the novel, and what the message to the reader should be. A little more tricky than expected.

I will offer this from my real life: I have a constant back-and-forth with a friend of mine - let's call him Steve - about a particular story and the hero's decision. The situation is that a man has the opportunity to defeat his tormentor (and what a tormentor he was), killing him outright in an act of revenge, or he can place his tormentor in the hands of justice. Now, after what our hero has been through with a villian who has killed some of his friends and made his life quite horrible, the go-to move would be to kill him and be done with it. Now, Steve believes that is the very natural, very human response to such an action that most of us would choose without hesitating, and on that part I believe him. However, this is our hero. We ask more of our heros because readers often need their heros ot be the kind of person the reader can't be. In this story, the hero hands the villian over to the hands of justice. Steve is infuriated at that choice, but I see it as the best way to communicate that our hero has seen so much horror but still believes in the value of life. As a writer, you need to know what your characters' decisions will say and communicate about them and about the story.

In a more grounded example, I offer the classic novel, George Orwell's 1984 (spoiler alert). Our protagonist, Winston Smith, is a man whose dislike of the maleovalent Big Brother leads him to investigate the potential for rebellion. He is caught, captured, tortured, and eventually broken, then allowed to return to some semblance of a life, but now he openly accepts that he loves Big Brother. This is a horrible ending for our hero, and his final words, "I love you, Big Brother" are painful to read because any trace of Winston's rebellious self vanish with that confession. However, that is exactly what the author wanted to say. This hero was crushed by the state, but the message of this book is clearly a warning call about the dangers of overarching authority when it finds its greatest interest is keeping itself in power.With that being the message at the end, it's inevitable that poor Winston never stood a chance and that his fate was sealed. 

There's nothing saying a hero has to win, has to live, or has to reach their goal. What they are obliged to do - in order to address the reader - is act in a way that matches the message of the story. Do they maintain the moral high ground? If your message is about the importance of such a thing, then the hero either does that or pays the price for failing to do so. If your message is about the satisfaction of revenge, well, the ending is probably more like an action movie. However, in every case the important part is that the message and actions are consistent.        

The Importance of A Good Read

I am in the process of reading one of the classics - a habit I picked up back during my career as an economist. Back then, I would pick one book that was well-regarded, pretty thick, and could be read in a bunch of small, half-hour bites. Past novels have included Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow, Pirsig's Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Eco's Foucault's Pendulum, and many others. The results have been mixed - a few now rank among my favorites, others were a challenging experience , and some were just kind of... meh. Right now I am in the midst of reading quite a whopper. It's a turn-of-the-20th-century book, well over 700 pages, and while I am a quarter-way into it, I am just not... into it, I guess. I will leave the name out for now, but let's just say I might not be Irish enough for such an endeavor.

Why am I mentioning this (the reading part, not the Irish part)? I am jumping into this subject matter because as a writer, it's always good to explore things and sources that can inspire creativity. Books are the natural touchstone for a writer's creativity, simply because they share the same medium but offer different approaches toward telling a story. Lewis's Liar's Poker, for example, was a book I read while I was exploring economics and trying to understand the behemoth that was the financial markets of the 1990s. The financial geek in me wanted graphs, numbers, and data, but the book actually appealed to the creative in me - showing me the world of high finance through the eyes of someone fresh off the boat and incredibly green. That's when I felt just how powerful a book could be in showing me the real world from another perspective. Yes, it was all about financial instruments and the build-up of amazing levels of greed, but I now understood it.

Angier's Natural Obsessions hit me a similar way. Microbiology was a hobby of mine as it were, and I studied it in college with a bunch of electives and side-projects (If not for a scheduling conflict, it would've become a minor degree). However, what really set me going was reading Natural obsessions along with Watson's The Double Helix, and pairing off their approach to scientific research. I also read The Eighth Day of Creation, but the author eludes me. These all showed me parts of the world that fascinated me (and still do), but through a different lens. Watson reminisced about being a 23-year-old grad student tossed into the race to discover the structure of DNA, while Angier looked at the molecular level war against cancer from the perspective of an investigative reporter. All these demonstrations of how to see the world from outside my own framework opened up my mind to a world that was something more than me on my own. I now wanted to expand myself to fill that space.

Lastly, a classic I still appreciate is Bellow's Humboldt's Gift. Nothing will get a writer more inspired than reading about another writer struggling to get along. More to the point, however, Bellow wrote about the areas of Chicago I knew very well - his protagonist lived in my college stomping ground of Ukrainian Village, for crying out loud. However, now I got to see it from the view of someone else's creativity, and indeed I learned a lot about myself. From that point forward I had a new appreciation for my Chicago life, thank to my golfing buddy Sual Bellow (inside joke).

So, to all the writers, poets, essayists, and creatives out there, I offer you this summer challenge: Read a book; one of the classics preferably. Find one that catches your eye or that has eternally drawn your curiosity, and read it during your lunch breaks this summer. And don't be afraid to let it open your mind a bit - you might be surprised.

Just watch out for those Irish authors. Some can be real... wordy.    

Writing the Adventure

I apologize in advance if the quality of this post is not up to the standards you expect from this blog. I am currently very distracted, as a rather obnoxious raccoon has taken residence in my attic, just above my office. This raccoon and I have never met, but I can already tell this will not be the start of some hilarious odd-couple mashup comedy. The rustling and scratching alone tells me this raccoon does not have any sense of personal boundaries, and I know myself well enough to know that while I do not suffer fools lightly, my tolerance for large creatures in my attic is basically zero.

However, to this soon-to-be-evicted past's credit, it did remind me about some of the key writing elements that make a story interesting, and that is the impending approach of the unknown. Most commonly seen in adventure stories, the unknown should be a key player as early as possible. If your story starts with a fight scene, don't let on too quickly that the main character is getting beat up by the school bully for having no lunch money to steal. Start with the character taking a punch and stumbling back, only to take another punch. All the reader knows is that this person is getting beaten - everything else is a question demanding answers, and the reader drives forward. 

Also, before revealing too much of the unknown, reveal the character's feelings toward it. Fear, hatred, animosity, or any other feeling one might have toward a person hitting them or toward a raccoon running roughshod in one's attic. Peel back the story from a personal perspective rather than an objective one. Don't tell the reader, "The 5th-rgade bully beat up everyone because of his frustration of have been in 5th grade for three years running." That creates too much information toward things like motive and personality. Instead, offer up the victim's thoughts about how they wanted to escape this cruelty but nobody in the school seemed to want to change things. That develops the important part - the main character's perspective - while leaving the antagonist bully as this unstoppable force making them miserable. 

Through all this, however, you as a writer need to know your bad guy as well, and know in your own way what drives them, what makes them tick, and how they see the world. You don't need to tell the reader this information immediately or in some cases, ever, but your writing should come from an informed place. If, say, your 5th-grade bully just beats kids up for their lunch money because he likes to fight, then you need to specifically portray that aspect of him. If he, however, has a tragic backstory and is acting out his anxieties against smaller kids because that's how he's been treated all his life, then play that out as well. The antagonist doesn't need to be a sympathetic character, but it definitely helps for the writer to know where they come from and how they want the reader to respond.

And of course, the adventure part should always involve reluctance by the main character, at least at first, in order to reflect how important this choice to pursue change really is. Whether it's the kid finally standing up to the bully or the writer going into his attic to bag a raccoon, it should take some effort in order to make for a good story. Otherwise, it's not as much an adventure as it is a person going out and doing stuff.

Once the adventure starts, questions can be answered, information offered, and a full perspective can be presented. But at least in the beginning, it should be an exploration of unknowns, with a slow-burn reveal of the key elements. And on that note, I am going to grab my welding gloves, an old tarp, and a baseball bat and have a little adventure of my own in the attic. Wish me luck!   

Writing vs. Journalism

Every now and then I feel obliged to point out a few little points about what writing is and isn't - and by "writing," I mean of the primarily creative sort. Most every type of quality writing requires some degree of creativity, but I think we can all agree that the different areas of writing - research/academia, analytical, explanatory, etc. - each have different amounts of latitude compared to fiction or poetry, where creativity is the primary focus. And then, of course, there's one area that some creatives tend to avoid, and that it the art of journalism. But not so fast, I would warn you. The hard rules of fact-based journalism have a lot to teach even us creatives and poets.

Let's look at some basic journalism rules. First, your primary objective is to convey the five W's of any situation - Who, What, Where, When, and Why. This is the mandatory conveyance of information necessary for any good news story, and good fiction writers have to recognize these as well in their storytelling. However, writers have the right to be biased, so they can, in turn, determined which W they want to prioritize, minimize, or leave as the big question. If I am writing some fiction-fantasy, I really need to look at Where first, recognizing how different my world is from the reader's reality. Mysteries and legal thrillers usually focus on the Who and/or Why, while historical novels (fiction or otherwise) target the When of it all. And all of them need to have an eye toward What - the actual purpose of the piece being written.

Now, another part of journalism is regarding questions. A good journalistic piece provides answers to the five W's, but the better writing knows how to present the deeper questions in a way that asks the reader these questions before addressing them. A story might present a situation and highlight particular aspects of the story in order to make the reader say, "What?" or "Why?" then immediately address those issues. Creative writing does the same thing - it gets the reader thinking about the characters, motives, scene changes, and plot wrinkles just before offering the answers. The result for both writing schools is the same - the reader gets their answer from a special "a-ha!" moment, and there's some satisfaction in the accomplishment... so they read further.

Unfortunately, I do not know where the common space is between journalism and poetry. If those two circles on the Venn diagram overlapp, that intersection is smaller than anything I can perceive. If any poets or journalists wish to chime in on this, please do. Otherwise, I will just leave it by saying I have never seen a serious news story rhyme.

    

The Law of Writing

I am guessing that today, everyone is taking some time off of work to commemorate the holiday. I am guessing many citizens are gathering around in parks (weather allowing) or in public areas to chime in this very important holiday that has been recognized since before I was born. It actually became an official day in 1958, and has been a part of our country's culture ever since. Now to be clear, I am not talking about May Day - your confusion is understandable. No, I am talking about Law Day, the day commemorated by President Eisenhower to recognize the importance of the legal framework of our country or of any functioning governed body.

Upon further reflection, I am guessing all the hype today is actually about May Day and not Law Day. After all, working is quite popular in this country, but following the law comes with a lot of squishiness. Just one drive down I-294 will demonstrate with terrifying clarity how people disregard certain laws if it gets in the way of their preferred NASCAR-like habits. We still do have laws in this country, and a number of them sometimes get enforced (I actually once saw someone on I-294 receiving a ticket). The thing about those laws, however, is that plenty of them look good in theory but don't translate to the real world.

Moving this to writing, you've probably heard that you are not supposed to end a sentence with a pronoun. It's a rule, right? Well, regardless of whether it is or isn't, like most people, it's something I don't put up with (because if I did, that sentence would read, "...it's something I don't up with put."). There are plenty of rules that get neglected just as much as Law Day, but this is a part of the writing process. First, we learn the rules. Second, we discover their purpose and intention. Third, we look at what can happen if we bend or break those rules. Lastly, we put those results to use. In the case of the symbolic speed limit on I-294, I know what it is, I recognize it's there as a traffic regulator and as a means to reduce the severity of accidents, I know that if I bend it a bit, I get to my destination a few minutes earlier, and so I respond by keeping up with the flow of traffic zooming along at about mach 3.

If you know your rules of writing, then play with them and find out how they bend. Technically, rules of grammar are less flexible and more confusing when they are twisted about, but as a stylistic measure it can be effective - you just have to brace yourself for the consequences. If you opt to consistently use pronouns for representing characters, you should expect there the be some confusion during crowded sequences. If what you want is to give the reader a sense of confusion and disorientation, well, mission accomplished. Just be prepared for some people to set aside the book entirely. Just like if you're driving 80 down I-294 -  there is a chance you end up with a ticket for your efforts or an epic accident that will likely make the local news.

During this holiday - whether it's Law Day or May Day or Worker's Day or the Feast of Julian of Bale (a real thing), I hope you get to put in a little time for writing, and maybe even get a chance to break a rule or two. Just not on I-294.    

A Writer's Warning

If my calendar is correct (and it usually has a better accuracy rate than I do), my next post will be in May, and National Poetry Month will be over. Of course, this will be a bittersweet moment for me, mostly because April gives me a formal reason to lobby for poetry - for reading, for writing, for thinking about, and for exploring the many different poetic forms. Now, I do not claim to be a poet in the deeper sense. I have written poems but I don't feel I have built up those skills enough to deserve the title - yet. However, I have written enough verse to offer fair warning about something I think is a big threat to poetry, and that is AI.

To be clear, I am no Luddite. I use AI for various functions. I let different AIs examine my writing, search for themes in my longer works, and map out plot arcs when I feel they might be wandering. However, some people fall into the habit of letting some bot take the next step and start creating things, and poetry is, unfortunately, the easiest target. Since many forms of poetry work within a format and structure, they become easy prey for people to create through even simple AI use. And having seen a number of specimens of AI-generated poetry, they have the look, shape, and even a surface feel of a legitimate poem. However, don't be fooled. Poetry is something more than just filling in the blanks of some formula. It's not a Mad-Lib, it's an art form.

I am reluctant to suggest this, but it might get the point across. Go to the AI platform of your choice and ask it to write a sonnet about unrequited love. Within seconds, you will likely get a 14-line poem, probably in iambic pentameter, discussing that very subject. The rhyme scheme will work, the words will flow nicely - mission accomplished. You will, in fact, have a sonnet. However, dig into it. Search for the underlying heart of the poetic AI slop you just created, and see if you feel a pulse. Do you see the subject the poem discusses? Do you connect to the underlying meaning? Or do you just find some words triggering emotions, like a verbal ink-blot test where you see what you want to? That's where the difference lies. Ten people can read an AI sonnet and come to the same conclusion about it. A human-generated sonnet will get a variety of reactions, and often disagreement. There's a pulse with the handwritten poem. The AI piece is lifeless.

So, if and when you write a poem - sonnet or otherwise - remember that you are performing a very human task, and your humanity is a part of your creation. Pour in whatever it is that makes you a human being, and let that do the speaking. Make mistakes, have fun with it, and remember you are creating something very personal that some AI cannot match with depth of feeling.

On that note, I close with this untitled piece of freeverse:

Words.
Building blocks of communication.
Description.
Capturing what we perceive with those words.
Narrative.
Explaining the world to each other.
Stories.
The events of our world, as we see them.
Writing.
A tool for filling the space between us.

Surrounding this galaxy of words lies the interstellar force of poetry and everything it encompasses.
Poetry is the language of the soul, the quantum forces explaining life beyond just living.
We describe things outside the tactile, capturing feelings, concepts, states of being.
Poetry bridges the gaps between our worlds, connecting you and me, making us.

The abstract becomes concrete, the breeze captured, the sunlight embraced.
Writing shares our worlds, poetry unites us into something greater than our little selves.
For all of the things writing can accomplish, poetry alone makes us whole; makes us complete.
With poetry, we are one. 

(No AI here)

The Wide World of Poems

As the end of National Poetry Month fast approaches, I wanted to throw one last piece about poetry to my many readers. As my regular readers know all too well, I am an advocate of writing poetry as one of the many exercises people should perform to be a better writer. This does not mean you will be an awesome poet - no guarantees in life - but the art of poetry helps us distill our thoughts and feelings into more concise ideas. We lose a lot of the wandering thoughts and bothersome distractions that make writing feel flabby and loose, and instead sharpen our focus on a simple thought or theme.

With that in mind, I felt the best way to get the poetry inspiration going was to offer a wide variety of poem styles and formats, and give you, the writer, the opportunity to try them out and see what fits best. Poems come in many shapes and sizes, so I won't go into the little details like writing in meter and so forth (although it is worth knowing). Rather, I will just lay out some options and you can choose your own.

• Monostich: As I discussed in my last post, this is a one-line poem, without commas or pauses, to convey one idea
• Haiku: a three-line poem where the first and third lines are five syllables long, with the middle line being seven syllabes. Often these are about nature and the last line sums up the other two, but that's optional
• Tanka: Similar to a Haiku, but instead of the 5-7-5 syllable structure, it closes with two extra seven-syllable lines
• Limerick: A five-line poem where the first, second, and fifth lines rhyme with each other, and the third and fourth lines rhyme (known as the AABBA structure)
• Triolet: An eight-line poem where the first line is repeated and in the fourth and seventh lines
• Pirouette: A ten-line poem made up of two five-line stanzas, where the last line of the first stanza is the first like of the second stanza
• Trimeric: A four stanza poem, with the first stanza being four lines and the subsequent three being three lines. In this format, the second, third, and fourth lines of the first stanza become the lead lines of the second, third, and fourth stanza, respectively
• Sonnet: A fourteen-line poem with a matching rhyme scheme (AABBCC...). The traditional sonnet presents a question in the first six lines, a realization in the seventh and eighth lines, and the last six lines present a resolution
• Villanelle: A 19-line poem composed of five three-line stanzas, followed by a closing quatrain. These usually have two recurring ideas that are repeated intermittenyly throughout the work.

Okay, that shouls give you plenty to work with. However, if none of them appeal to you, I offer one last form that can offer some artistic freedom: Freestyle. Also known as Free Verse, this is just expression in its pure form. It can be anything - it is open style. If you've never seen this style, hunt down the various clips from "Louder than a Bomb" on YouTube. It's not that hard.

Happy Naional Poetry Month!

    

One-Liners

"Nature serves as the eternal artist of life's portraits lost to time."
- An actual poem

I haven't done a poetry post in a while, and since this is National Poetry Month, well, here it is. However, because so many people are uncomfortable with the concept of writing poetry and the many demands that come with it, I am playing this one a little fast and loose. It will be a shorter post, and it will be about one of the shortest forms of poetry around: Monostich.

I wish I could say I was an expert on the monostich poem, but I can't make that statement. Rather, I was introduced to this form by a fellow writer in the Wednesday workshop I attend. He brought up the subject as a question of, "What's that term for a poem that's only one line?" Sarcastically, I responded, "Slogan." Well, after he took a quick trip to the internet, it turns out that it was, in fact, the monostich - a one-line poem, preferably without pauses, additional clauses or phrases, or diversions. This form is the epitome of the short, sharp usae of words to explain some concept or quickly make a statement about the world. It is usually painfully brief and to the point, boiling out all but the significant bits.

Now, you might think to yourself, "This sounds like a sideways approach to a haiku but without the syllable rules." In some ways you would be correct. Any number of haiku are actually just one idea spread across three lines with a syllable pattern. In fact, if you reread the poem above, you can rewrite it as such:

"Nature serves as the
eternal artist of life's
portraits lost to time."

Voila! It's a haiku (sort of)! Put it back into one continuous line and you are back to a monostich. Same message, same words, different categorization all because of line breaks. It's a simple way to write a poem, with the only real challenge being the demand of distilling it down to the core meaning, without any distractions.

So, my request on this day as a commemoration to National Poetry Month, write one profound sentence. Let it be something that interprets the world in some special way - writing "I am hungry" might be true, but it's not as profound as you might think, even if you are profoundly hungry. Give it a shot, see what happens, and if you are feeling particularly bold, leave it in the comments section (anonymously if you prefer).

Happy National Poetry Month!  

The Personal Experience

There's a common hurdle writers will come across, time and again, where they have the temptation to get themselves immersed head-to-toe in a scene, poring through the details, describing every feature, and really giving the reader the full and complete experience they deserve. Any scene with a magnitude of intensity - action scenes, love scenes, death scenes - present the writer with this opportunity, but it's a temptation that comes at a price. Getting too far into a scene can actually weaken it as an experience if the writer leaves out one key part - the character's participation in the event.

Sometimes, in life, we experience things so intense that our memories of the event overwhelm our capacity to process everything that happens. In particularly extreme cases we detach ourselves from the experience - disassociation takes over, and while we might still remember the event, we disconnect our own place within it, sometimes not even fully realizing we were a part of the experience we remember. This occurs in writing as well, but at least we, as authors, have control of how we discuss the character's participation.

Action sequences are very easy to lose the characters. Let's look at a car chase - not as fun in writing as it is in the movies, but for now let's overlook that. One car is being chased by several others through the city streets, dodging traffic, swerving around pedestrians while the horn honks away trying to clear a path. There might even be gunfire - bullets fly around the lead car, shattering the windows, ricocheting off the trunk - all during a 100-mile-per-hour chase down a one-way road. This can be several pages worth of action, but I can guarantee you it will get boring, or at the very least it misses a great opportunity to actually be interesting, because it lacks any reference to the characters involved.

It was no coincidence that in the brief example above, I made no mention of the characters. The action was the cars, the guns, the bullets, but no actual people. This is where scenes lose their punch - the cars drive through the scene, but it's just action, not tension. Now, what if you describe that car chase from the personal space of one of the drivers - pursuer or the pursued, your choice. If they are being chased, how are they deciding where to go? When the light up ahead turns red and crossing traffic fills the intersection, how does that character respond? We get very used to the movies where the car just magically flies through the crowded intersection with precision timing, but in writing, that's our opportunity to show how the driver responds. Does the driver see an opening that just might work and rushes toward it, or just lean on the horn and pray for daylight? Do they have a deathwish and no concern for the drivers ahead? Is their desperation so extreme that they will do anything to evade the cars behind them?

Of course, this doesn't mean the story has to be a cerebral exploration of a character's driving habits. However, it should be going on with a critical awareness that the character's actions and decisions are a part of the scene, and how it unfolds needs to fit the character. A driver who holds every life to be sacred might have a real problem taking a detour through a public park, but this can be a great source of tension for the character if they are just that desperate to escape.

Writing is a great form of escapism from the real world, which can frankly be very boring at times. However, good writing brings the real world into that space just enough to make anything interesting and make everything personal.   

Conflict and Story Openings

After doing a little review of my last post, I did a little more thinking about the importance of the opening line and just what it needs to bring to the table. My thesis in Friday's entry was that it was the hook that brings in the reader, and I will stick by that one. However, I think it's only fair to discuss what a good hook really is. Yes, it should provide a great mix between information and presentation of the unknown. It should also be worded quickly and sharply to bring that point to the fore. However, there's one problem to address with all these routes, and that is... the problem.

Courtesy of Battlefield 2

What do I mean by a problem? Well, let's put it this way: Presenting a question in your opening line or paragraph creates a natural urge for the reader to seek an answer - that part is great. However, a technique that can be even stronger is bringing up not just a question, but a conflict. Not necessarily a fight or an argument, but a clear, discernible issue that is creating some sort of friction with our main character. They can be in whatever starting pose you want, but bringing out the problem they face in the immediate first sentence or so creates a tension. It's no longer a question about what's happening, but whether or not the character can overcome it. 

This about this opening: The story begins with a sniper lining up his target in the crosshairs, his trigger finger trembling as he hesitates to take the shot. This creates questions immediately - is our main character the sniper or the target? Is the sniper a good or bad character? What is the situation around shooting someone? Good questions to put out there for the reader to ponder. However, we create a larger issue with the sniper hesitant to take the shot. After all, that's what snipers do, right? They shoot people from a distance. So why the trembling hand, the reluctance? This is a question, but it is conflict - the situation is going against the character's intended action, and needs to be overcome. At this point, the stakes are higher for the sniper, not just to take out the target but to overcome some personal resistance to this particular mission. The interest builds.

At this point, the writer now has a game to play, which is offering a little bit of information to suggest possible reasons for the inaction, but still leaving some ambiguity as to what the best answer is. We can inform the reader that the target is a friend of the sniper, making the conflict even sharper. We can also point out that the friend is a double-agent, now creating a conflict between duty to the mission and believing the friend is somehow innocent. We build the conflict without resolving it, merely giving it more shape and texture without giving the reader an easy out. If we establish this early, we can carry this conflict throughout the story, piling layer upon layer of challenging beliefs onto the poor main character, giving the reader so much to think about that it might cause an argument at the book club. (The goal of any author should be to cause arguments at book clubs.)

As a last note, don't throw too much conflict on the reader at once. If, in our sniper scenario, we introduce the sniper with the shaking hand, the target, then point out the target is the sniper's friend, then challenge the friend's loyalty, and oh-by-the-way the friend is married to the sniper's sister, and the sniper's hands are shaking from a progressive nerve disorder, and taking out the target could save thousands of lives, but it might be the wrong person... well, there's such a thing as too much information at once. The slow build of our sniper's situation should be savored by the author because the reader will enjoy it that much more.     

Happy Anniversary!

It has been a long adventure, but here I am, celebrating the eight-year anniversary of this blog. Yes, before COVID, before so much chaos, this was starting off as a thing I was trying out as a way to talk with the writing community. And now, over 600 posts and countless thousands of hits later, I think I am getting the hang of it. More importantly, working through this post has really helped me flex my writing chops. So, to celebrate this anniversary, I wanted to discuss one of the subjects I have learned the most about: The opening line.

No matter what you write, it will all remain unread unless someone else is inspired enough to read it. And, unless the person is assigned to read all of your words, they need to be drawn into your work by something within those grand sentences. This is where the opening line comes into play - it is the hook that draws in the attention of the reader. It doesn't have to be a dramatic moment, explosive action, or even a brilliantly clever play on words. It just needs to contain an element that brings the reader a little closer to the subject, a spark that draws them to read the next sentence. And the next. And the next. And so on. Consider this opening sentence to a story:

My only memory of my father is the image of him spread out on the living room floor, eyes staring into open space. 

It creates an image, but does it tell a lot? Does it make the reader want to go forward? To some, yes - there is a little taste of the unknown in that line, leaving the reader wondering why the father character is in such a pose. But if we drop another hint, the sentence really takes off:

My only memory of my father is the image of him spread out on the living room floor, eyes staring into open space, gun still in his hand. 

Okay, things just got real. With those five extra words, the stakes have been raised and the reader's interest in continuing is pushing toward a need to continue. Those extra words open up a lot of unknowns in the story, and it is the unknowns that make people want to go further. When you make your writing a combination of grounded, sensible information and wildly interesting unknown features, readers go to the next sentence. And the next...

A great writing exercise is to write great opening lines. Maybe they will be so good that they inspire you to write the rest of the story, but for now, try this. Write an opening sentence for a story. Then give it a few extra words that make it exponentially more interesting. This is what will ultimately grab your readers. This is the art of the opening line. 

And it only took me 600+ posts to learn this.

    

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.