Chewing Scenery Pt. 2

One of my good friends described our hometown to her new college pals thusly:

"You ever drive down that long stretch of highway with mountains on your left and flat on your right, and you see that tiny little town out in the distance and you think to yourself, Man, I'm glad I don't live there.  

Well, that's my home."

Even with memories of learning to quickly turn my back to oncoming wind so that powerful blasts of sand would sting the backs of my legs instead of my face or placing my hands on the backseat of the car to absorb at least a little heat before subjecting the backs of my knees to plastic melting temperatures, I get a little something in my throat when I pass through my hometown. It's the setting that made me, and it still invokes a complex connection of emotions.

With all the heat and the dirt and the never-ending sun, it still introduced me to the sweet scent of wet dust just after rain begins to fall and the sight of the desert bursting into color as long dormant plants taste the smallest amount of water.

Obviously, the settings that make us affect our feelings, but unless you're writing a memoir, you want your setting to affect your readers' feelings. In order to pull your audience's strings, you'll have to speak through your characters to tell them what to feel.

This telling readers what to feel goes hand-in-hand with show, don't tell. Remember way back when someone first told you to show, don't tell? Remember that confused feeling (or if you are like me, that bullheaded I know better feeling...yeah, still trying to outgrow that one) deep in your chest resulting from the kid's book you were reading at the time? The character is angry. The author writes, Sara is angry. You know, Sara is probably angry. But what kind of spiritual fulfillment am I getting from a story that doesn't take the time to describe the socioeconomic plight of low class space jumper engineers who are angry because they can't find their alien six-eyed cat and their boss just nixed overtime citing budget concerns?

This all has to do with scenery, just bear with me.

If she is angry, really pissed off, everything will compound that anger. The door will stick, the lights will flicker and spark that headache into a full blown migraine, the shoes squeaking on the floor will put her one step away from psychotic break. You remember those days when you're late on a deadline and the mail server goes down? Obviously, it's just to inconvenience you. But it's a part of your setting (for the purposes of this example, you, like me, work in a cube farm and suffer from a dangerous co-dependency on technology stuck somewhere between the late nineties and early oughts, you know, before DSL really took off and when IT guys coined the fix-all, "Have you tried restarting it?"). All those little things that never mattered before become a symbiotic part of your emotional state.

Clive Barker's Coldheart Canyon is one of those odd horror novels that didn't really scare me after I put it down. I could walk away from it; I could sleep easy at night. When I was reading it, however, the ever changing mosaic and the desert wild with the perverted creatures running rampant made my breathe hold in my lungs, just in case I attracted their attention before my eyes could turn away from the page.

Think of the setting. It's a horror novel tied to the past of Hollywood opulence of the 1920's or so and the Hollywood opulence of today. It's tied to the depravity of both eras, and a sense of richness that is best viewed through the sepia toned nostalgia lenses. Once Barker has you thinking about the suits and the gowns and the men and the women, he turns it all around until you get peacock bodied human headed monsters roaming the canyon, looking for humans to rape. So...horror.

Coldheart Canyon could have been a romance - take away the monsters and the horror bit, right? Not quite. How far does the desert stretch in a romance? Will it reach out to the horizon without a soul in sight? Will it sear the flesh from your arms and burn your eyes with mirages? Will the house turn cold and hidden in the dark, with twists and turns meant for trapping you with the bad things hot at your heels?

In a romance, the desert will be cool, just beginning to heat up. Romance in the desert happens in the early morning, I think, or late at night when the sky has bloomed with stars. If you are reading something that requires a sense of "all will be well" by the end, the ground beneath your character's feet might crumble and the weather will turn against him, but something in the scenery will still signal to the reader that comfort is soon at hand.

The house will stand. The moon will rise, the forest will be curiously devoid of bears, except from a safe distance, the bad guy will be safely defeated (or a rake in disguise who can be cured with magic virgin sex, if you are writing a romance circa Harlequin eighties style, but that's a discussion for another time).

How does your setting affect your character? How does your character's mood affect our perception of the setting?

Chewing Scenery Pt. 1

When I was in eighth grade, I had one of the best history teachers. Unlike my all-time favorite history teacher who had in fact lived through most of the timeline his particular course covered (US History, he remembered when Christmas lights came into vogue), I learned an incredible writing lesson from this guy: setting makes the story.

He didn't use the word setting, of course, this being a history class, but he made the point several times. Why did certain societies flourish when parked on fertile ground? Well, they could grow enough to feed their people and didn't have to rely on trade for certain necessities. Why did some people fall to cannibalism? They lived on an island and after removing access to fertile fishing grounds, they had no one but themselves for sustenance. Who needs a navy if you are entirely landlocked, how do you feed 200,000 bodies in the dead of winter with no easy preservation methods for food storage, isn't it a bad idea to split up in a haunted house?

The story I tell in a ravaged apocalyptic city is quite different from the one I tell in an apocalyptic overgrown forest. In the city you are contending with other survivors, limited canned goods and medicine, feral children and animals, painful memories, and dangerously unstable structures. In the forest you are dealing with wild animals who no longer feel the need to allow their fear of you to stand in the way of a full belly, unfamiliar landscape, roving bandits, sudden drops in the ground and a lack of easy access and preserved food as well as a distinct lack of medical care.

Sometimes I use a certain setting because I am fascinated with the voice of the people who live there. The voice of a character who lives in a small town is quite different from one who lives in a city, is different from one who lives in a house, on the street, in an apartment, in the basement, under the bed. The setting guides the plot by boxing in my possibilities, especially given the cardinal rule of writing (and the only one I am unwilling to break) that I should never stretch the reader's ability to suspend disbelief beyond the breaking point. Between the voice and the plot, the setting builds the structure of my story in immutable ways. If you think of a story as an equation, the setting is not a variable like a character or a goal, but it is the rules of order in which you can perform the functions necessary to solve the equation. Remember, solve the bit in the parentheses, then multiply before addition and subtraction. Those invisible rules are the setting.

The invisible rules of my setting creates this logical plot flow for my character in my current short story: If she lives in the small town during winter, she must contend with isolation and a limited suspect pool, which most likely means someone she knows is the killer. What does that kind of knowledge do to my character? Ah, conflict!

Setting makes it possible.

Once you have the setting that makes your story's voice sing and your plot tie itself with nearly no effort on your part - ahaha, but this is writing. Once you have the setting and have mopped the blood from your forehead, examine the setting.

Stress test.

How much of your setting are you using?

Inception, a little flick you may have heard of (personal Inception watch count as of this post: 36), uses the setting to the point where the people are tension setters (projections who can become violent at a moment's notice) and settings within settings affect the plot and the how-the-hell-will-he-solve-that-puzzle-now rising tension. When Yusuf takes the van off the bridge, Arthur loses gravity and has to create his own drop to wake up his fellow mind-heisters exactly on time. Gray urban landscape filled with gunmen morphs into opulent amber hotel halls evolves into labyrinthine snow covered forest trails surrounding an ominous compound.

So...is your setting breaking a sweat yet? Work it, baby!

My Mirror's Eyeballs

Sometimes I realize that I never fully outgrew a fear of the dark, in the way I assume every clanking pipe is the serial killer standing over my bed breathing awkwardly behind his mask. Also in the way I sometimes turn on the light in the wee hours just to make sure something isn't hiding

a.) in the toilet

b.) behind the shower curtain

c.) behind the door

This post is going to give me a whole new set of phobias! I already have issues with mirrors, whether it's bad luck to be caught between two of them, or whether the mirror people are waiting for you to let your guard down so they can steal your body. Now, I can wonder whether the mirror secretly has eyeballs that blink wetly when I'm not looking.

Taking the title less literally, I mean to say that sometimes when I'm stuck on a character's point of view, backstory, or just the way I have presented her in my work so far, I find it helpful to look at her through another character's eyes. What does this mean for my work?

It just means listening to another person doing the talking. All I need is a new voice, a new backstory, a new facet of the cast and an entirely new way of viewing the world I have created. Easy!

For those of you sinners who read fanfiction (to which I have already lost three hours of my life while trying to write something meaningful today) you will understand the inherent power and fascination in taking a momentary throwaway sentence and spinning it into a thousand words of torrid romance, aching lost chance, or horrifying murder. Throughout the wandering bridge of the fanfiction piece in the greater song of the canon work to which it belongs, you see the main characters moving freely, tangentially, or removed entirely from the world which molds itself around them in the original piece.

[A vocabulary note: Bridge - that minor chord part of the song that connects the last verse with the chorus. Canon - the part of the body of work that the original author and (usually) intellectual property owner has created (aka Word of God).]

For those of you blessed few who don't read fanfiction, you can take a single sentence in your work - best if it's a line you didn't expect to write - and expound at length. I have two characters who interact at some point with my main character and I had created them to have a conversation about love. My short story is about love, and cloning, and murder, and terrible tragedy that befalls those bound to the slim mercy of they who refuse to exercise the responsibility that has ensnared them. Anyway, the main character doesn't know what love is, doesn't know how to love, and doesn't realize she isn't in love. She just thinks she is. The two characters she talks to are in love. Madly, deeply, at great length and for the longest time they live for each other. They are truly happiest when thinking of that someone else other than themselves.

Once I realized that, I saw that they would view my character in a certain light. They are old, she is young. They have been happily together for ages, she comes from a home where cold silence is as familiar as screaming violence in only the way two people who are miserably tied together can manage.

Suddenly, my quite earnest police officer who just wants to be loved is a cold, narcissistic, young woman who can't understand why the things she deserves aren't magically appearing before her.

Without that extra set of eyes, I would have a story of someone who never let go of the kind of love that guides your gel pen into circling his initials with glittery hearts and who views another moving on with his life as a personal slight. She would still come off as a brat, but now she is a brat with a reason. Just look at her home life - which I hadn't considered because I saw her world through her eyes. She didn't see how miserable her parents were, only that she wasn't trying hard enough, wasn't good enough, had to do better and was always falling behind.

Thank you, mirror eyeballs, for giving my who a why of her very own.

Who are your mirror eyeballs in your latest work? Anyone I know?

Introduce them.

Write to Find Yourself (seriously)

Remember when we thought about who we were? For some, I bet that was five minutes ago. For others, I refer to my post on thinking about whether you are a pantser or plotter, among other things. If you plot, you might sneer at pantsers, and if you (are a) pants(er), you might sneer at plotters.

The plotters among us say, how do you know where you are going? How do you sustain yourselves? Why do you think "Rocks fall, everybody dies" is a legitimate literary ending?

The pantsers will say, where is your spark? Where is your fire? If you color by the numbers, how do you splatter art onto your pages?

Here's the thing.

Plotters know even if they diagram every sentence before beginning, their work will at some point surprise and delight them, and that the greatest surprise will find them on the very last page.

Pantsers know even if they are surprised and delighted at every turn, the true machination of their work will reveal itself on the very last page.

We should all be surprised by our writing, and in order to be surprised, we should strive to ask questions to which we don't yet know the answer.

Above all else we write. Write to discover. Write to delight. Write to surprise. Write now.

First Lines Are Not Your Antagonist

[It is hard to know whether war or peace makes the greater changes in our vocabularies, both of the tongue and of the spirit.

~ MFK Fisher, How to Cook a Wolf, Revised Edition

It was mid-April when I got home from the offshore rig and discovered my good friend Leonard Pine had lost his job bouncing drunks at the Hot Cat Club because, in a moment of anger, when he had a bad ass on the ground out back of the place, he'd flopped his tool and pissed on the rowdy's head. 

~ Joe R Lansdale, Bad Chili

If you're listening to this I'm dead. 

~ Charlie Huston, My Dead Body

Jen Wu is a day Master Li sets aside for my literary endeavors, and I was pleased that it was cold and rainy and fit for little else than splashing ink around. 

~ Barry Hughart, The Story of the Stone

Have you heard this one before?

Hook your reader with the first line!

~ Darn near any writing teacher I have ever had

Sure, you can hook me with that first line, but then you have to reel me in. The thing about those first lines I quoted above is that they all display the voice of the novel they are in, they all (however delicately) take the foot off the brake and move it toward the accelerator, and they all make you ask.

The best first lines are the kind you actually see when you re-read the book. If the first line is so great, you won't even notice it on the first time through because it walks up behind you, wraps its arm around your shoulders and gently steers you downhill so convincingly you don't realize you're running until the last page.

We spend anywhere from 60-97% (math, not my strong suit) of our first writing session staring at the page, thinking up a brilliant first line. Unfortunately, if your book is 70,000 words long and your first sentence is 10 words, you have spent an insane amount of time on 0.00014% (I used a calculator) of your novel. Remember, your first line reels me in, so that remaining 99.99986% had better have a compelling voice, kick-ass characters, an epiphany or at least a red hot action scene and a plot that makes me turn the page.

Doesn't it make more sense to spend all that panic time developing your novel instead of trying to phrase the first handful of words so perfectly a certified saint would sin at first sight? (Also, alliteration? A little overrated.)

Let's go back to:

, and they all make you ask. 

~ Someone just discovered the blockquote button, seriously, how fun is this?

One of the most valuable pieces of information I have read from an editor is to keep the reader asking questions. (If you have read this too and actually remember the source material, please leave a comment. It's been years since I saw this but it obviously left a mark.) Make the reader ask a question with the first line - the reader has to keep reading to answer that question. Make the reader ask two questions on the first page, and every time you answer a question, make the reader ask another.

Caveat: ANSWER YOUR DAMN QUESTIONS.

The reason we seek to satiate our curiosity is because of that marvelous feeling that satiety brings. If you don't satiate my curiosity in the first book of your series to a high enough degree, I'm not actually going to continue on to the second book. I have read number one volumes that felt like half a book. I have read closed series that answered every important hanging thread and guaranteed that I will come back for more. See My Dead Body above, and my purchase of Sleepless after I finished re-reading the entire Joe Pitt series (it's the kind of thing that requires re-enjoying).

Does that mean you need to spend 0.00014% of your time on the first line? No. You have to set up a question, establish a voice, and shift your heel off the pedal all in one sentence. On the other hand, that's what editing is for.

If you're really stuck on your first line and you can feel your writing time trickling through the blanks in your mind, start in the middle. Start in the end. Start somewhere. Just make sure you start writing now.

Do You Know What Your Protagonist Is Doing Right Now?

I wanted to talk about your hero but if you're like me, you may not know who that is yet. If you have a story and a character, you probably have a protagonist.

What's the difference between a protagonist and a hero?

 The hero solves the problem. The hero saves the day. The hero defeats the antagonist. The hero gets the girl or boy or saves a marriage or bonds with the kid or almost always walks off into the sunset (or um, dies trying).

 The protagonist tells the story.

 In order for this to happen, the protagonist must have a story to tell, a reason to be in the story, and most importantly, a voice.

But wait! you say. The antagonist stands in the way of the protagonist! I never said your hero and your protagonist couldn't be the same person. If you just so happen to have a protagonist and a hero who are not the same person in the same story, it helps tons if your antagonist stands in the way of both of them. That means either the protagonist and the hero want the same thing, or the antagonist stands in the way of two people or your story has an antagonist and an enemy of the hero.

Your protagonist has a unique voice, a strong background, witty dialogue, and an unavoidable connection to the hero. Does your protagonist have a story?

(Always remember that a story has a beginning, a middle, and an end.)

The story structure can be fulfilled by plot - plot being where things happen - but it can also be fulfilled by character development. Plot has a nasty tendency to happen to heroes (and anti-heroes which we'll get to later, when I can I finish rolling my eyes at them...still rolling); character development happens to protagonists. If your protagonist doesn't develop in some way throughout the story, then in the Cadillac of writing that is your story, your protagonist is the hood ornament.

Writer, please!

Your hood ornament should be the color of the walls in the den where the murder took place, not your freaking protagonist.

Ever see The Usual Suspects? It totally looks like Kevin Spacey is a protagonist, and one of the dull ones who sort of exists in a nebulous wordspace (or screenspace in this case) until the end when it's revealed that he's - I really have no idea if you've seen the movie or not. Basically, he's removed from the action. He tells the story, so he's the protagonist. Not even a very interesting one. The thing is, all is forgiven or better yet, ignored, because his story is just so damn compelling that we are sucked in to the plot. If ever you are tempted to use your protagonist as a story telling device rather than a character in her own right, just remember that The Usual Suspects did it first (or at the very least, before you) so don't rest on your laurels. Build your protagonist. Make him fight, make her choose, make him defeat the antagonist and make me cheer by the time he does it.

So what's your protagonist's story?

Making It Worthy Expansion Pack

Last time we talked about making it worthy. Actually, all I said was to make it worthy and why. Your ending needs to leave the reader not with a bang, a whimper, an oomph or an oops, but an exhalation. How do you do that? Remember, I'm still working on my ending. I'm going to direct you to a couple of guys who have experience with endings and endings that leave the audience feeling fulfilled in a medium famous for making you want your money back: movies.

Terry Rossio is one part of a hit making team that brought you Pirates of the Caribbean and Treasure Planet (and a dozen more) and has a column that is as entertaining as it is informative. Though only one (okay, more than one) of the steps listed deal with endings and what makes a story ensnare an audience, the whole column is worth a read. So's the backmatter.

Whooooooooo are you?

Let me take off these sunglasses (so I can put them back on again in a minute).

One of the best parts about becoming a hardcore writer is the bit where you get to be every kind of writer all at once. You get to be a pantser, you get to be a plotter. You have days where you write by the seat of your pants, every next sentence a complete mystery until it falls from your fingertips. You have those days where you've plotted every nuance and every emotional subtlety, building your story like a home to welcome the reader if only he or she will open the door and step inside.

Becoming is about learning, and becoming a hardcore writer is about learning who you are as a writer. When you have a better grasp of how you write, you will have a better grasp of what tools help you write. For some of you, you will live and die by whether Post-it Notes have gone on sale before your next writing boom. Some of you will swear by colored pencils. Personally, you will take my brightly colored notebooks and Sarasa pens from my cold, dead, disembodied hands. Part of writing will become ritual, the hat, the gloves, the gin that makes your muse sit up and speak, and part will require ritual: turning off your internet, shutting your door, sitting quietly and clicking the pen or opening a blank document. Ordering a coffee before finding a seat. Spreading out your beach blanket before pulling a flask and netbook out of your tote. Like brushing your teeth before you go to bed or clicking your heels three times and saying the magic words, the rituals will put you in that mystical writer mindset. It doesn't mean it will always work.

Don't fall prey to the "grass is greener" mentality. I can heartily recommend following your own path because you will learn which styles work best for you. No one knows you better than you, not even your mother (hi, mom, it's true), and remember, you don't know anyone better than they know themselves. What works for you may not work for someone else. You can boggle and be jealous and be joyous and on occasion arrogant as you follow the common lifecycle of the writer which goes a little something like -

First you see another writer who is rich and famous and has a crap ton of titles under her belt.

Your friend completes nine stories in the time it takes you to complete one.

You finish a novel and sell it on the first try.

You know you are better than the award winner, even though your work wasn't nominated.

Hey, I never said the lifecycle rolled linearly. I did start a phrase with "first" but "last" can precede any of the other three statements. Maybe the phrase starting with "first" is more of an ongoing philosophy than a point on a lifecycle.

My point is, we are becoming and therefore we are learning what works for us and we are most importantly writing.

Haha, I lied. I don't even have sunglasses.

Totally Over Getting Started

While the hardest part of writing for some is getting started, eventually we catch hold of the knack to put one word down after the other. Then the quandry evolves into a different flavor of the same dilemma but one that has the same solution - putting one word down after the other, also known as the keep going issue.

The problem with writing is thinking "This is the the shit!" then about five seconds later thinking "This is shit!"

While livejournal user Synecdochic created this list for fanfiction (warning: mentions of sex), it works pretty well for any kind of fiction. By works pretty well, I mean that it is a neato list of prompts to keep in mind while you are writing and especially if you think you are heading from "the shit" to "shit". Next time you are writing - shortly after you've begun, or maybe around chapter five, try:

29. The use of negative space -- things that are clearly there (in the author's concept of the characters, their history, their backstory, events that have gone on, etc) but are built by showing the secondary influences and leaving the reader to slowly realize.

Or just examine your earlier bits and ask if you've shown the thing or all the pieces around the thing. Which one would keep you reading, looking for that next elusive clue?