Writing Craft

Arrows in the River (Giving the Reader Time to Absorb)

Adrian

I think I might be going too fast in the beginning. There I said it.

I read other short stories in the ‘Improbable Truth’ anthology and compared them to mine. Then I skimmed the old opening of the original StoneDragon draft, the last full version I wrote, and I found fast dialogue and action, but not a lot of setting, backstory, or context, at least in the first few pages. I dropped the reader into a fast moving stream and expected them to start swimming, without help. And maybe with a few arrows falling around their head (my featured image was boring until I added the arrow, which I have to tie in somehow!).

But seriously, I think I need to aim for slightly longer paragraphs early on, of adding something that isn’t fast moving action or dialogue, at least in the first few pages. Setting, mood, detail. Something to allow my reader’s mind to settle in, pick up the point of an individual paragraph and absorb it, before being assaulted by a new and completely different idea, every sentence or two. Or at least not until the pacing is intended to pick up and the reader is comfortably ensconced in the scene.

I should probably note that this flaw is probably better than the reverse: being too slow and predictable, which is the kiss of death, but I still have to write down my flaws when I see them–and I think I see one.

Hopefully, I’m not be as bad as I used to be when I first wrote that early StoneDragon draft, and I definitely don’t want to swing completely to the other side of the pendulum, and have a pedantically boring opening, but I think that I will probably add this question to my checklist of items when I’m editing a story. I’m still going to try having an opening that grabs you, but hopefully not at a speed where you are lost.

A fast moving stream can shock you, wake you up, and get your heart rate racing. All good things for a chapter. But if the water’s too fast and deep, you’re just going to drown…

Especially if you get shot by arrows. 😉

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A new sketch for the post. I also have a hockey injury tonight: a slapshot to the little finger. A lot of blood and the nail is mottled black. So not much extra typing going on. 😉 Most of this post was done beforehand. Before ‘hand’, he he. Okay, maybe a bit light headed from blood loss and a single beer. Hope your night went better!

On the WIP front, I’m finally shockingly happy with the outline and am cleaning up my world-building references into organized files in Scrivener before tackling the rewrite. Which will be followed by a paid edit and possibly a copy edit. So still quite a ways from complete. But I’m getting excited by it again, which is a nice change!

PS, I have a guest blog coming soon, which is a first for the blog and pretty exciting, And which will also hopefully give the little finger a chance to recover! 🙂

sword

Stenographer Notes or Dusty Diary (Narrative Filter)

Adrian

 

A comment that slapped me upside the head a year or two ago was around narrative technique, and specifically if a filter was being applied or not. Unfortunately, I can’t remember the source, but it essentially said that a narrator can be one of either two form:

  1. Objective (no filter).

“Just the facts”. Such as a stenographer’s word-for-word typing  of a court proceeding.

Here, the author is trying to describe the action of the character and world as clearly as possible, without distortion, as if there were a video camera recording events. The reader sees facts, or ‘truth’. (I know, truth is subjective, but that’s the point. This style of writing tries to avoid subjectivity.)

You can still have emotion, and even close POV, with this narrative voice, but you are providing information to the reader as accurately as you can, without bias, other than what is clearly identified as the thought of the reader. You can have

‘Jonathan smiled. He was sure that there was a leprechaun at the end of the rainbow, no matter how CNN reported it.’

But you’re less likely to have:

“Susan smirked at Jonathan. She didn’t know the truth, how the rainbow was only anchored to earth by the presence of a leprechaun. Scholars might argue that point later, but those who deny magic have only their limited world views to blame. But I digress. As Jonathan stepped forward…”

In the latter, you have a strong and definitive narrator statement about something that isn’t as clear cut. The narrator is filtering the information and providing you his or her views on it. There is a narrative filter.

  1. Subjective (filter).

“Here’s how you should interpret the facts”. A filter is a decision to tell a story with someone’s bias. A diary, instead of a video camera. Someone’s ‘truth’, as they would remember or experience it.

In this case, the narrator might still be reliable (they’re still telling you the truth as best they can), but with some ‘flavor’ in how they tell it. Or they might be unreliable. They are deliberately misleading you, in how they tell the story. But either way, it should be obvious to the reader that some kind of a filter is being applied. They should ‘hear’ the bias in the writing. Events are being interpreted for them, to an extent that the facts don’t support on their own.

As an aside, a narrative filter can either be using the opinions and ‘voice’ of the point of view (POV) character, or someone else, which is a significant choice to make, but beyond the scope of this post.

Summary:

This clarification of narrative voice (that it can be objective or subjective, a filter of colored glass or a clear window without distortion) may seem obvious, but was an important point for me to think through. If you don’t decide what you want to do on this front, it’s easy to go astray. Plus, it’s also nice to know the range of things that you CAN do! Is your narrator almost non-existent? Is your narrator the character themselves? Or is the narrator someone else, maybe someone with a strong opinion on the story, such as a secondary character? And if you do have a subjective narrative filter, who are they telling this story to? Is it anyone in specific? If you haven’t thought through all these questions, you run a big danger in writing your story. One of the biggest risks in voice is inconsistency, which clearly marks you as an amateur to a publishing professional. So don’t do it!

This is one of these things that is easy to get right if you think about it (or at least avoid getting wrong), and very easy to go wrong if you don’t. Hopefully this post helps!

Best,

Adrian.

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Life is crazy, outside of writing, so you’re getting a repeat image. But I haven’t used it for a while and kind of like it, so there you go. 🙂 Also note that I will be posting on Selah Janel’s website, Come Selahway With Me, in the next couple of days, as part of the ‘Improbable Truth’ Sherlock Holmes’ anthology’s blog tour. Please come and visit! I’ll try to update the link closer to the day. I’ll be talking about Theme and Spiders (very Halloweeny). 😀 Enjoy!

Egg or Wiffle Ball (Short Story vs First Chapter)

Adrian

I’ve written a few short stories recently and I’ve struggled with the difference between a short story and a first chapter. This debate comes partly because I have so many ideas, and I love the creative bursts that come with first chapters. I also like the idea of writing a whole novel, using my short story ideas as seeds, so I’ve tended towards writing short stories that could be expanded into novels if I had the urge (i.e. they could double as either a short story or a first chapter).

I’ve also had some degree of success in my recent writing, with acceptance to an anthology (An Improbable Truth: The Paranormal Adventures Of Sherlock Holmes, out later in October) and an honourable mention in the Writers of the Future contest. I am not sure how much of it is improved writing skill and how much from better understanding the short form of fiction.

So I’ve thought about the difference between short stories and first chapters a bit, and one of the main differences in my mind, that I think is less well discussed and maybe worth considering, is the difference between an egg and a wiffle ball.

Confused? 🙂 Let me explain…

An egg is completely self-contained, everything inside circular, trapped, self-reinforcing. A wiffle ball has a bunch of holes that air spins in and out of. It is connected to the larger world around it, even though its basic shape is the same. How does this apply to writing?

A first chapter can introduce many cool things very briefly, the start of threads that will be explored a chapter or two down the road. It doesn’t have to have much significant meaning right away. But with a short story, you are trying to amplify the impact on the reader of a small story segment, and that story segment will be more powerful if more of the elements reinforce each other. If more of the peripheral details, whether part of setting or plot, reinforces the main story idea or theme. You are better to examine every element of a short story and see if you can bend it to reinforce that section of writing, rather than leaving something to build until later.

An example, you ask? Certainly.

In “Time’s Running Out, Watson,” (my to-be-published short story) I originally had the villainess holding a futuristic weapon, beyond the time device that the story revolves around. I figured an evil scientist-type would have more than one trick up her sleeve, right? But eventually I took the extra weapon out and had her threaten Watson and Holmes with the time device instead. That way, the focus was razor-sharp on a single cool idea, the time device, rather than something broader. If I had been writing it as a novel, maybe I would have wanted to include a second device, to show people that my villainess wasn’t a one-trick pony and develop her character and backstory more. In fact, I’d probably want more loose ends within the first chapter, to twig reader curiosity, and lead to a greater and deeper finale at the end. But in a short story, I have to be more careful.

Egg or wiffle ball. Short story or first chapter. There is a line you can dance in the middle, where something could be read as either a short story or first chapter, but it is indeed a dance, and the most important thing to know, as a writer, is what can go wrong. At least then, you’re making a conscious decision on how to address it and whether the risk is worth taking. So now you can think about it too.

I’m off to play badminton. Neither egg nor wiffle ball it shall be. 😉

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The featured image is a quick pencil sketch done for the post, maybe forty five minute’s work. Enjoy. On the personal front, I’m actually not getting much writing done, sadly, as work pressures and sick kids (the THIRD time my older boy has got hand foot mouth, gah!) have sucked all my free time into the abyss. But I have people critiquing a short story I finished on my recent cruise, which I quite liked and got good feedback on, and I’m hoping to submit it to an anthology call at the end of the month. It was a fun effort, and dances the line between short story and first chapter, inspiring the post above. We’ll see how I do in walking that line. 🙂

“I see structure…”

Adrian

Okay, not quite the impact of M Night Shyamalan’s “I see dead people” (Sixth Sense), but my life is a bit tamer than that, admittedly. 🙂

But do you remember when I posted about ‘leveling up’ in your skills, just like a computer game (here). You know what? I think I might have just done it.

I’ve been writing a couple of short stories, polishing up some older ones and doing a new one. And what struck me was something interesting. I now see structure. It’s hard to describe exactly what that means. Before, I’d look at the story and see words, dialogue, sentences, all the little pieces that added up to a story. But not in the context of the building blocks of reader experience. Not with a sense of purpose for each paragraph, the ability to see why those pieces were there at that time.

Some of this may come with time and distance, looking at an older more story more clinically, but I don’t think that that’s all of it. I now tend to think of stories in terms of blocks of scenes, and how they might impact the reader’s experience in their order and purpose. I think that this is a critical advancement in moving the story telling to the next level (see being ‘god of your story’, as per here).

Now I look at work I’ve written and have a sense for what each paragraph is intending to do, and what lines are extraneous and can be cut, or shifted, or… whatever.

I see structure. This explanation may not help you at all (I am sure that I saw this type of post well before I actually felt this way).

But it makes me happy. 😀

Stepping Stones to Greatness. And the Big Splash.

Adrian

When I was a kid, we had a stream in the field behind our house, where we would creep around when the cows weren’t let out (watching our footsteps!) and occasionally we would cross the stream. What you realize is that rocks just under or over the water, wet and dark, can be slippery. You need to be careful where you step (especially when it comes to avoiding cow deposits, but that’s a different post…)

In writing, the first chapter is your first few steps out into that stream. To get a reader to keep turning the first pages, whether agent or book buyer, you need an intriguing first line, an intriguing scene question that drags them at least a few more paragraphs in, a character doing something interesting, wanting something with some emphasis, and having a conflict to their achieving it. You want to hint at the main character’s personality, you want to promise to the reader the tone and style of your story, you want the reader to keep reading. Desperately.

And it’s not always easy, especially as not every person is really our target audience. Which makes it only that more imperative that we don’t lose those who are.

You are standing on the side of the stream, one foot outstretched, swaying, half-submerged rocks all around. You can wander any direction you want, but not all of those rocks lead to the other side of the stream. Some leave you sitting waist deep in frigid water, wondering how all those darn frogs make it look so easy.

(I think I just called published authors frogs. He he. Done in love…)

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Work remains challenging, but slowly inching along on my writing and even (fractionally) my art. I’ve done a fun Sherlock Holmes fantasy short story (3k words-ish) that was for an anthology call. Likely low chance of making it in, but the story got some good feedback on OWW, and I enjoyed it considerably. And I’m trying to keep forward progress on my adult fantasy major edit. I’ve done all the editing, chopping, and reworking. So now I’m at the rewriting stage, which is a a bit daunting, as I know that this will be over 100,000 words with the new POVs I’ve put in. I like this story and want to finish it, but it is not a small task. Oh well. 🙂 I should get it done before the kids get to university. Or if I get laid off, it might go faster! 🙂 Kidding. Kind of. Work is still crazy and some days the life of a writer does beckon. But we all have good days and bad days, so I’m sure things will get better…

Happy Canada Day / Fourth of July weekend! Best.

Oh, nearly forgot, the image here is a close crop of an old image I’ve shown on the site before, and which I think is in the gallery, of a woman near a pool. A mood experiment at the time…