“Love and understanding are the missing ingredients in most slushpile stories. If you don’t understand your character, you can’t make her believable, and if you don’t care about her, the reader won’t either.”
– Damon Knight, Creating Short Fiction
#shortfiction
Damon Knight had some training as a visual artist. In Creating Short Fiction, he talks about how learning to be an artist involves learning how to perceive the world.
He suggests some exercises for writers, such as:
– People-watch. Describe someone – not superficially, like a police report, in a way that would describe a thousand people, but with insight, in a way that describes only that person.
– Look at something alive until you feel you know something about it that you didn’t know before.
– Blindfold yourself and listen.
– Think of vivid moments in your life that stand out in your memory, and try to understand why they stand out.
– Learn to pay attention to and accept your own feelings, observe other people for signs of their feelings, and imagine what it’s like to be them.
– Collaborate with your unconscious (which he calls “Fred”). Present Fred with interesting challenges and listen for the response.
Damon Knight, in Creating Short Fiction, talks about four stages of development for writers. (He acknowledges that there are stages beyond four, but after that point they don’t need help.)
1. Narcissistic daydreamer. Think “Mary Sue author-self-insertion fanfic”. The way to get out of this stage is to imagine how some other character feels about the author self-insertion/idealisation.
2. Trivial writer. Stories are half-formed, with beginnings and ends but no middles (where the plot and characters would develop). The characters are tokens, placeholders. There are no complications; it’s just a bunch of things that happen.
3. Writer with technical issues. We now have complete stories, but there are problems with plot structure and characterisation. The plots are poorly constructed, and the characters are puppets. Nobody cares what happens to them, and what happens to them sometimes makes little sense.
4. Competent writer. You’ve learned how to solve the technical issues at least well enough that people will buy your stories.
Knight (who taught writing for decades) observes that people who start writing later in life, at least early 30s, often manage to skip stage 1, and sometimes also stage 2.
The way out of stages 3 and 4 is by learning technique. You can do this by yourself through trial and error, or you can take instruction.
#shortfiction
“Most of the student writers I meet fall into two classes: those who have something to say but don’t know how, and those who know how, to some degree, but have nothing to say. Members of this second group are oftener men than women…. Looked at as a technical construct, a story is a shell built to contain something.”
– Damon Knight, Creating Short Fiction
#shortfiction
“Certainly concealment is part of writing, and we all hide in our charactrs; but writing is also a way of revealing ourselves. Either we do this voluntarily and courageously, or we do it out of timidity and in spite of ourselves. The unhappy young writer who invents heroes of stupefying intelligence, wisdom, beauty, strength, and virtue is like a child trying to hide behind a fencepost. She can’t hide all of herself, or even choose which parts to reveal.”
– Damon Knight, Creating Short Fiction
#shortfiction
A “signal from Fred” is a critique term, apparently, for when the author is aware at some level that what the characters are doing is stupid and makes no sense, and that awareness leaks out onto the page.
Fred is smart. You should listen to Fred.
This book stands out among guides to writing craft. Neither your standard dull writing guide that rehearses the same paint-by-numbers “winning formula” you’ve heard many times before, nor a fuzzy, pointless navel-gazing exercise ending in the conclusion that writing can’t be taught, it is, instead, a combination of analysis and inspiration that goes beyond the standard advice to a new level of insight.
From Jeff Vandermeer’s Wonderbook, some ideas for deepening character.
1. Consistent inconsistency. Real people don’t act rationally all the time. We have contradictions within ourselves, and stress often brings them out. Show this.
2. Action versus thought. You can show the reader the character’s thoughts, but the other characters only see their actions. Set up a gap between the two. (This is the reason we excuse our own actions even when they’re like those of others we condemn: we know the thoughts that led up to doing those things, but we have to guess at other people’s motivations.)
3. Need versus want (this one comes via Tobias Buckell). Characters should want things, but sometimes the things they want are not the things they need. There’s gold in that gap. (Or – my own observation here, from Saladin Ahmed’s Throne of the Crescent Moon – the thing they want may not be compatible with the thing they must do.)
4. Transfer of energy. Have you ever come in from a day in which someone annoyed you, and taken it out on your housemates? What if the person who annoyed you was themselves reacting to something elsewhere in their life?
It can happen across time too, when we react to a person or event not for what that person or event actually is, but for what they remind us of. This is:
5. People as symbols or ideas. To ourselves, we’re people. To other people, we may represent something more, less, or other than ourselves.
6. The secret life of objects. Objects can be important to us because of what they represent too, and so we may value them beyond their monetary worth. This can transfer energy, it can be a source of interpersonal conflict, or it can be an occasion of threat or loss for a character. (I’m thinking of Jim Butcher’s Changes here. Harry Dresden had a crappy basement apartment filled with worn paperbacks and a beaten-up old car, but they were his, and when he loses them, we feel it.)
#wonderbook
3.
Originally shared by Mike Reeves-McMillan
How to be Period Authentic
Some resources. (Long post.)
I don’t know about you, but I’ve more than once had the experience of reading a novel set in a particular time period and getting no authentic sense of that period from the text.
I’m not just talking about the Middle Ages here, either (though that too), but about the 1950s, or the 1930s, or the 1890s. And once I start to analyse the reasons for the lack of that sense of authenticity, it comes down to this: the text tells me a lot more about the time in which the author grew up than it does about the time period it’s supposedly set in.
What I mean is that the slang, the cultural references, the attitudes of the characters, and even the characters’ names come from, say, the 1970s or 1980s rather than from the setting. To me, this is just as bad as making errors in conveying a sense of place. It reduces the richness of the reading experience.
A lot of people don’t care, of course, because they don’t know, any more than the author does. But I care, and so do enough other people that I think it’s worth getting right – and getting it right is easier now than at any previous time in history.
Here are some resources to use if you agree with me.
1. For getting words, phrases and slang right:
Google Ngram Viewer: http://books.google.com/ngrams. This draws from a large corpus of texts and shows you on a graph when a word or phrase first came into (written) use. So, for example, if you used the word “hallucinogen” in your book, and it was set before about 1955, you might want to find another way of saying the same thing.
And if you want to say “freaked out” (1960s) but your story takes place in 1939, you might find this resource useful:
There’s also the Historical Dictionary of American Slang at: http://www.alphadictionary.com/slang/
2. Getting Names Right
Names go in and out of fashion. Most of us have had elderly relatives with “old-fashioned” names that at one time were the newest hot trend. I myself have the most popular boy’s name from the year of my birth, but in 1930 it was relatively uncommon.
Some names only became popular relatively recently, and even if you’ve grown up knowing several people with these names, it doesn’t mean that your grandfather would have. For example, Samantha is now a common girl’s name, but its popularity dates back to Bewitched in the 1960s. Before that, it was very rare.
(I am certain that even now there is a member of Generation Y writing a steampunk story set in 1855 with protagonists called Kyle and Madison. Don’t be that person.)
There are plenty of resources for getting these things right. My favourite is Behind the Name (http://www.behindthename.com). Not only will it tell you, for a specific name, when it began to be popular and show a popularity graph for each country where it’s used, but it has charts of the top 100 and top 1000 names going back to the 1890s for the US (less far for other countries, but a bit of time with Google will quickly pay off there).
3. Getting the Facts Right
Google is your friend. For example, I recently read a book in which a female superhero’s costume was described as having a “cheerleader-style skirt”. Now, in 1939, when the book was set, cheerleaders didn’t wear short skirts (which is what the author meant, based on a character illustration). Those didn’t come in until the 1970s.
How do I know? I took 30 seconds to type “history of cheerleading uniforms” into Google and scan through one of the top results.
4. Getting the Money Right
The value of money, and the names of currencies, have also changed over time. How much did a nickel buy in 1930?
If you need to know, you can probably find out using some of the resources here: http://projects.exeter.ac.uk/RDavies/arian/current/howmuch.html
5. Getting Cultural Attitudes Right
Cultural attitudes are a lot harder to research than the things I mention above. For one thing, they’re fuzzier and harder to Google, and for another thing, not everyone in a culture at a given time period thinks identically. If you don’t want all your characters displaying 21st-century attitudes all the time, take some time to immerse yourself in primary texts from the period, including ordinary people’s journals and memoirs (you can probably find some on Project Gutenberg and similar sites, especially for older times). That’ll also give you an idea of how they wrote – though remember, that’s not necessarily how they spoke.
Better still, if it’s within living memory, talk to someone who grew up in that time. I’m now old enough to remember how different some cultural attitudes were 35 years ago, and trust me, things have changed a lot.
I hope those resources are helpful to you. You don’t have to obsess about getting every detail right (Mary Robinette Kowal famously has a spellcheck dictionary which contains only words from Jane Austen, which may be taking it a bit far), but on the other hand, making no effort at all leaves you with a book that carries no sense of authenticity – and will itself date rapidly.
Interruption: interrupting your tidily paced scenes, cutting off leisurely exploration with an urgent message, having something happen earlier than planned, can improve pacing and tension.
Contamination: letting a subtle significance slowly creep into your scenes from the edges, for the reader to gradually become aware of.
#wonderbook