What’s your status?

Before they write a scene, a lot of authors carefully consider components like setting, goal, obstacle, conflict, and resolution, but how many think about status?

Today Mayor Tom Barrett visited my workplace for a short Q&A session for his upcoming 2010 gubernatorial race. He seemed like a nice guy but I found myself wondering how I would act if the two of us were alone in a room having a direct, one-on-one conversation together.

In terms of social status, he’s the Mayor of the City of Milwaukee, and potential future Governor of the State – practically a couple of steps away from the Presidency; and me – well, I’m a couple of runs of bad luck from bedding down beneath a cardboard box in a back-alley.

But on the flip side of the coin I’m not a U.S. Citizen, and I don’t have voting rights, so his political power has little consequence for me. I’ve had the experience of living in two countries (and on both sides of the Mason-Dixon line) while to the best of my knowledge he’s only lived in one state his entire life – and, for the most part, only one city.

If this were a game of Top Trumps, his career experience would quash mine, while my world experience might quash his. So, in a one-on-one conversation with this influential man, would I be calm or flustered? Assertive or nervous? Would I maintain eye contact or shuffle around looking at my feet? Would I have something to say or would I be lost for words?

Who would control the scene?

It was my wife that got me thinking about the element of status in fiction. Status is a commonly used tool in improvisational comedy. During scene sketches, the comedians tend to play to a particular status on stage – a “pecking order” if you will, where each characters’ sense of self-worth determines how they will act and how they will influence the events of the scene. A skit might have a number of status “transfers” or “inversions”, where dominance is passed back and forth between characters, making it more dynamic and interesting for the audience.

Aside from the fact that us fiction writers have the luxury of taking our time and revising our decisions, we’re really not that much different from improv comics. Sure, they can devise a coherent scene in real-time while it takes us days of hair-pulling, cussing and excessive caffeine consumption to get one right, but the techniques are similar. Status can be just as versatile a tool for the writer as it can for the improviser.

Think of strong scenes from your favorite books or movies and you’ll probably discover they contain a heavy element of status competition or some kind of riveting status reversal. Right now I’m thinking of one of my favorite movie moments – the scene in “A Few Good Men” where the powerful Colonel Jessop arrogantly tries to leave the court stand only to be told by Kaffee, an inexperienced lawyer, to sit down because he hasn’t finished with him yet – a brilliant and subtle reversal of power and the start of a scene so suspenseful that went down in motion picture history.

So how can we utilize status in a written scene?

Going back to my hypothetical one-on-one meeting with the Mayor, you can see that status in a scene isn’t necessarily defined by social position. While the social rank might be crystal clear (e.g. judge and plaintiff, manager and employee, warden and prisoner, king and subject, teacher and student etc.) the person of highest status isn’t necessarily the one with the highest social rank but instead the one who dominates the events regardless of social rank. For example, an employee might hold sway over his boss because he knows something the boss wants to keep secret; a kings’ consult might be the real influence on the realm while the king is just a puppet ruler; a strong-willed waitress might be condescending to a customer… it’s all about the underlying, sometimes unconscious, power struggle in everyday situations.

In writing, the status of a character can come through in a number of words and actions. The Improv Wiki has a wonderful list of behavioral traits that show if a character is high status or low status. Here are a few examples…

High Status Behaviours

Calm and collected body language
Maintaining eye contact
Speaking directly and with certainty
Not caring about other characters’ reactions
Making leadership decisions
Ignoring other characters

Low Status Behaviors

Nervous and awkward body language
Not maintaining eye contact
Speaking in halting, indirect sentences
Asking permission or explaining ones actions
Looking for approval
Avoiding leadership decisions

I’d suggest if you want to use the tool of status in a scene, ask yourself three questions:

1) What is the status of each character as the scene begins?
2) What do I need the status of each character to be when the scene ends?
3) Is there a moment where an interesting reversal of power can take place?

These three questions can lead you down interesting pathways.

One final word on the balance of power. I have a theory (entirely unproven) that the very best power struggles are those that are subtle and close contests. There’s not much tension or suspense in a scene where one character clearly has unbeatable power over another, but if two characters are almost equally weighted, and the reader knows that the balance of power could shift at any moment, well there’s a page-turner for you!

~CGW

Wanna read something really scary?

I came across a piece of horror fiction online today that I’m surprised I hadn’t heard of before. Apparently it’s a bit of an underground internet phenomenon, causing a large amount of talk and speculation across – how do the kids say it these days – teh intarwebs [sic].

The reason I’m surprised it escaped me until now is that it’s possibly the most chilling experience I’ve ever had from reading a piece of horror writing. As I’ve spent virtually every night since my tenth birthday with a horror story in my hands at bedtime, that’s really saying something. Neither Poe, nor Lovecraft, nor Hawthorne ever scared me the way this tale did. I actually felt physical anxiety as I was reading it and, better still, after I’d finished I stepped out of the office into the unlit hallway of my apartment and for the first time in years, I was just a little afraid of the dark.

The story isn’t a traditional tale (although a little research afterward led me to understand that it is adapted – or at least ripped off – from a regular story… more on this later). Instead, it takes the form of an imperfectly written blog by an adventure caver by the name of Ted.

You know, I won’t go into any details about the events of the tale. I’ll just post the link and let you read it yourselves instead. (Note: it’s quite a long read – took me an hour and a half).

Link: Ted the Caver

Go on an read it… pour yourself a mug of cocoa first and wear something warm… you’ll want the sense of security.

All done?

What did you think?

For me this is a fascinating glimpse into the psychology of horror fiction. The imperfections of the site, the addition of the photographs and sketches, and the prosaic, journal style of the writing all added to its effectiveness. It felt like the fiction equivalent of The Blair Witch Project.

Curiously, the material on the site seems to be pulled almost verbatim from a more traditional 1987 short story by Thomas Lera called The Fear of Darkness*(see edit below).

You can read that version of the story HERE (PDF format).

What’s curious to me, is that the PDF short story, while more “professionally” written, is nowhere near as effective as the experimental fiction of ‘Ted the Caver’ blog. This got me thinking about the countless formats and methods of storytelling open to us horror writers. It made realize that while colorful narrative and riveting dialogue may be the ‘right way’ to tell a story, it may not necessarily be the best way to scare people.

~CGW

——————————————————————

* Note: It was brought to my attention that the Ted the Caver page may actually be the original story, while the Thomas Lera version may in fact be a later work trying to pass itself off as the original. Some research into this reveals a quite convincing post allegedly by the author of the Ted the Caver story which can be read here.

It seems speculation has been rife for several years on a variety of discussion forums as to which is the original work. You will have to determine which you believe. Regardless, it doesn’t change the interesting fact that the same story, in virtually identical language, told in two dramatically different mediums has differing affects on the reader and that’s definitely something to ponder. ~CGW

On Not Looking Back

A couple of days ago I hit the 50,000 word count for NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month). The story – a horror western set in the Montana territory in 1880 – is barely halfway through, and it’s undeniably first-draft quality. It has characters suddenly appearing without prior setup because I realized they were necessary, several scenes that don’t particularly make sense, and enough cliche to pad a whole Roland Emmerich movie, but that’s okay.

It’s okay because 50,000 words of terrible first-draft is better than no words at all.

Anyone who has participated in NaNoWriMo has probably had the experience of someone asking them what it’s all about. When you explain it most people nod politely, say “cool”, then go away thinking you’re insane, but some folks say exactly what’s on their mind. The conversation often goes something like this:

“NaNoWriMo is where you have to write 50,000 words in a month.”

“Cool, what do you win?”

“Err, Nothing.”

“Then what’s the point?”

Well the point is to spend an intensive month training yourself in the most difficult (and most important) discipline of fiction writing: The fine art of NOT LOOKING BACK.

Some authors might be able to write scene-by-scene, revising and polishing each one as they go, but in my experience such people are about as rare as the Dalai Lama. In the vast majority of cases to stop and look back before you reach the finish line means certain death for the story.

During a first draft, you have to write like the hounds of hell are nipping at your heels. You have to write like that big wall of fire from Independence Day is only ten feet behind you, throwing cars and people around with CGI abandon. You wouldn’t stop and look back in those situations. But what many people don’t realize is when you’re writing a story, there’s something coming along behind you too, and it’s just as dangerous as hell hounds or tidal waves of flame. It’s a huge wall of procrastination and perfectionism, and if you let it catch up with you well, there goes the neighborhood…

My wife (bless her genius little heart) put it very succinctly. She said that writing a story is like giving birth to a baby: You can’t stop to clean up a baby halfway through the birthing process. You just have to push and push and push. What comes out will be ugly and bloody, but then you can clean it up and start to nurture its growth from there.

I can’t stress enough how important coming to understand this concept has been to me. I’ve been an aspiring writer my entire life, and as a younger adult, I completed countless finely-imagined, beautifully-polished single scenes. I have a big box full of them. Any one of them could have been part of a decent story, if it wasn’t for the fact that I killed them by stopping and looking back.

So to all aspiring fiction writers out there, I implore you to participate in NaNoWriMo next November. Because it doesn’t matter how beautiful your prose is, nor how perfect your grammar, nor how unique your characters, nor how well-imagined your scenes. If you don’t learn the fine art of Not Looking Back, you risk forever being a writer of unfinished work.

~CGW

Alphasmart Neo Review

Imagine sitting down to write and not having to wait for your laptop to boot up. Imagine simply pressing a single ON button and jumping instantly to the last place in your story where you left off. Imagine 700 hours of typing time on just three AAA batteries or 30 hours on a rechargeable powerpack. Imagine the increased productivity of not having distracting access to games or the internet. Imagine not having to worry about saving a file because every single keystroke you make is automatically saved as you make it…

You’re imagining the Alphasmart Neo.

The Neo is a tool designed primarily for classrooms, a durable, simplistic “laptop” for education purposes, but it is also the perfect tool for portable writing. It is basically a keyboard with a screen built into it, rugged, very basic, and perfect for the on-the-go fiction writer.

Needless to say, when I heard about the Neo I had to have one, so I scraped up my pennies and purchased one. Since you can’t buy them in stores this was a blind buy from online, something I’m not personally very comfortable with; in this age of crappy build quality, I generally like to touch and feel a product before I drop cash on it. But when my Neo arrived promptly – just one day after placing the order – I have to admit I was pleasantly surprised. It was well packed, well built, and all the components were there. For the first time in just about as long as I can remember, I felt like I’d got my money’s worth from a company.

So on with a quick review, for anyone who might be considering one…

First up, it’s light… 1.75lbs. Even lighter than a typical Netbook, but it feels tough in your hands, like you could drop it and not worry about breaking it, which for a klutz like me is a very good thing. The Neo provides a comfortable and quiet, full size keyboard, which was much easier for me to type on than even a standard laptop keyboard. It has enough storage room for about 130,000 words – a good sized novel. I’m discovering that it’s very intuitive to use. I didn’t even have to refer to the instruction manual to get started on it. I basically hit the ON key after I’d put the batteries in and I was typing within seconds.

It comes with a CD of software called “Alphasmart Manager” that you install on your PC. After that, you plug in the Neo with the provided USB cable, hit “send” and your whole story dumps straight into Word. Not too shabby at all. You can also send word documents to your Neo and control the settings from the software, but I haven’t messed with that much yet so I can’t comment on it.

On the slightly negative side, all the pictures I’d looked at of the Neo online made it out to be black, or at least a deep, tasteful green. So I was a little surprised when I pulled it out of the box and found it to be a fairly ugly forest/olive green instead. In the name of accuracy, I Photoshopped the pictures you see in this review to more accurately reflect the color. Not that the color really matters for such an awesome writing tool of course, but I can’t for the life of me figure out why the company didn’t just go for a sleek black paint job instead of an offensive green.

So the color is one little gripe, and a very minor one at that. The only other small issue is that the Neo doesn’t have a backlight on the screen. This is not a problem in any room with even minimal lighting or outdoors where you can adjust the contrast of the LCD to be clearly visible, but if you’re wanting to write in the dark, say in a smoky bar, then you’re going to need a flashlight. I understand in part why they did this – because if you left it on it would suck your batteries dry in no time – but the option would have been nice. I can only hope they include it in a future model.

The LCD screen provides six lines of visible text (at its smallest setting) which I find is just right. One of my concerns before buying it was that I wouldn’t be able to see and feel the “white-space” flow of my story the same way I can on a word document, but I haven’t found it to be an issue so far, and I’ve already written 7,000 words on the thing.

Finally, for an extra $25 I purchased a portfolio style carrying case which is really quite excellent. It’s stylish and protective and has plenty of room for pens, business cards, usb drives etc.

Some writers have a hard time with distractions. I can say this with authority because I am one of them. On my home PC I’m likely to spend fifteen minutes of every “writing” hour playing on Facebook instead. But if you take the Neo to a coffee shop then you have no choice but to sit and write. You can do nothing but press that ON button and let your imagination fly, and to me, that’s priceless.

~CGW

NaNoWriMo-a-Go-Go

Well it’s here again: NaNoWriMo – National November Writing Month – that one month perfectly positioned to interfere to the max with Christmas shopping and Thanksgiving cooking. That one month of literary madness optimally placed so those of us with seasonal-affective-disorder can capitalize on the profound lack of creativity and drive that the dark, depressing evenings of November brings… ah how I love it.

In spite of it’s cruel timing, I have to be serious and say that participation in NaNoWriMo is a must for any budding author, especially those prone to procrastination like myself. There is no better way to just force yourself to write. NaNo is about pushing ahead, regardless of quality. It’s about learning to finish the birthing process before attempting to back and clean the baby up. It’s an exercise in willpower, time management and good habits and, for those of us prone to self-editing, self-doubt, and inclined to over-research, it is absolutely invaluable.

If any of you are participating in NaNo this year, please feel free to add me to your buddy list. The more the merrier. Plus, I’m a competitive fiend and if your word count gets bigger than mine I will bust my balls to catch up with you…

Everybody wins.

Except for my poor balls.

You can find me here: http://www.nanowrimo.org/eng/user/154526

Hope to see you soon!

~CGW

“Epitaph In Oak” Now Published

Abyss and Apex magazine have just published my story “Epitaph In Oak”. You can read it online here: Epitaph In Oak.

Abyss and Apex is the biggest market to have accepted one of my stories so far and I’m pretty jazzed about the honor.

I don’t know if this is the best story I’ve written, but I can tell you it was easily the toughest. I was physically drained after imaging this scenario because I got attached to the character of Portland during the writing process. He kind of took on a life of his own. I might include him in some other stories should I ever write prequel pieces to this.

I need to give a big thanks to the members of the Milwaukee Writer’s Workshop and Boone Dryden who really helped me work the kinks out of the first draft.

I hope you enjoy it and, as always, any comments or critiques (even negative ones) are very much appreciated.

~CGW

Choose Your Monster

I’m not the biggest fan of “rules” when it comes to horror fiction. After all, most of the classic stories throughout horror history tended to flaunt the established “rules” of the time, pushing into new territories and evolving the genre. They dared to break the rules and that’s why they were remembered. One of the phrases that gets thrown around these days is “Resist the Usual”, and I’m all for that.

However, I am a proponent of “guidelines” and plain old good advice… and here’s some I definitely believe in…

CHOOSE ONE MONSTER AND STICK WITH IT.

I was reading a novel the other day by a well known horror author (whose name shall remain anonymous). The novel started out well, with an enthralling and creepy scenario involving re-animated zombies. I was hooked, and I settled down for a engrossing evening of reading.

Then the author introduced a witch with the power to disintegrate people with magical fire.

“Okay,” I thought, “I can live with this. Perhaps the witchcraft is the cause of the zombies, my belief elastic can stretch that far. No worries…”

Then the author introduced psychic dreams.

“Okaaay,” I thought – adding an extra couple of a’s to the ‘okay’ for emphasis – “perhaps the witchcraft that caused the zombies can also cause psychic premonitions.”

My belief elastic was starting to strain a little.

Then the author introduced ghosts…

Then strange dinosaur monsters…

And finally vampires.

My belief elastic snapped. My involvement in the story fell to zero. I speed-read the end of the novel without really giving a damn about anything else that happened… no matter how action packed or well written it was.

I once read a “how to” book on horror writing by William F. Nolan (of ‘Logan’s Run’ and ‘Burnt Offerings’ fame) and he gave the advice to limit your stories to one, or at most two, different forms of antagonist.

In other words, you might just get away with a plot about the ghosts of aliens (Stephen King’s ‘The Tommyknockers’), and you might just get away with a plot about werewolves fighting vampires (the Underworld movies), but it’s unlikely you’ll get away with a plot about the ghosts of aliens fighting werewolves, vampires and serial killers.

I have no idea why this is so, perhaps readers are only willing to suspend disbelief up to a certain point, but I do believe the best horror fiction has a tendency to stick to just one type of monster.

~CGW

Rett Syndrome

Some close friends of mine recently learned that their little girl has a debilitating neurological disorder called Rett Syndrome.

I hadn’t heard of this syndrome until now… and I’m a biology major! So I thought I’d take a quick, and very worthwhile, detour from the writing related posts to bring attention to this this little-known disease.

If you have just a spare few minutes, please click on the flower icon below and take a quick look at this very worthwhile cause…

Thanks!

~CGW

Ah, sweet rejection

Sorry about the month-long hiatus folks, it’s been a particularly busy one.

I think I want to talk about rejection today. I submitted a new story to a semi-pro market a few weeks back and this morning it came back with the following neat, impersonal, fairly standard rejection letter:

Thank you for your recent submission to _________.
Sadly, we regret to inform you that we are declining acceptance at this time. Good luck in placing this submission elsewhere.
Sincerely,
The __________ Team

The creation of the story in question took approximately forty hours at the keyboard. Forty hours, that is, if I don’t include the additional ten hours of pacing around the house thinking up the details, five hours of walking down the street muttering to myself like a madman while trying to nail a line of dialogue, four hours of staring mindlessly into space piecing together a conflict resolution, and three nights of restless sleep while I dreamed about the characters doing strange things like shopping for shoes at Pick n’ Save or hiking the Swiss Alps.

After all that hard work, how dare they reject me so impersonally!

Why I oughta…

Of course, I’m kidding. Rejections don’t really affect me much. In fact, I find them kind of addictive. Submitting stories is a little bit like archery. Except that the target sometimes moves, sometimes changes size and shape, and usually demands that your arrow be of a particular style, color, and length before you fire it.

Oh, and I forgot to mention that there are already a hundred other arrows heading towards the target at the same time, all competing for the same airspace and all vying for that tiny amount of real-estate that is the bullseye.

This is sport, people. Enjoy it.

But I’ve met some authors on my travels who have a truly hard time with rejection. Some people have a tendency to take it personally when it is actually anything but. Yes, receiving a rejection could mean that the editor didn’t like your story. Hell, sometimes it may mean that the editor doesn’t like you. But that’s often not the case.

Let’s consider just a few of the possible reasons a story may get rejected even though it was a perfectly good story.

1. The market closed temporarily just as your story arrived.

2. The market already accepted a story that was similar in tone, theme, or plot to yours for that month and doesn’t want to double-up.

3. The market already has more than enough accepted stories for the foreseeable future and is sending out automatic rejections.

4. The market may have had space for one more story but needed one of a particular length to fill a spot.

5. The market might have run out of cash for the month and is accepting no more stories.

6. The story may be beautiful but the editors think their readership wouldn’t connect with it.

Of course, sometimes the blame may lie with the author. If your story isn’t formatted according to the market submission guidelines; if it’s rife with spelling errors; if you’ve submitted a vampire story when they clearly said no vampire stories; if you submitted a horror story to a science fiction magazine; if you sent in your manuscript on hot pink card stock thinking it would make it stand out from the crowd… you get the drift. I’m not going to harp on these things because they’re common sense and if you get rejected for them, well, that’s your fault.

(Incidentally, I’ve been rejected for some of them. Hey, we learn by our mistakes, right?)

So you’ve responsibly made sure your arrow is the required length, shape, color and style. You have the bowstring drawn taught and you’re ready to unleash, but in the distance you can see that target – indistinct, morphing, uncertain…

How can you possibly land that arrow?

Well here comes the good news: there’s no reason to get nervous, no reason to despair, because the landscape in front of you is littered with targets. There are hundreds, nay thousands of places you can aim for. So the golden rule of getting accepted is to just keep on firing those arrows; the statistics are on your side and probability alone says that sooner or later, you’re going to land a bullseye.

~CGW

“I think I broke my human” now published.

I just got confirmation from Brit Marschalk, Editor of The Town Drunk that my story “I Think I Broke My Human” is now up on their site for the world to see.

This was a quirky flash fiction piece inspired by the customer service transcripts you see doing the rounds in humorous emails sometimes. I found myself wondering what a customer service transcript might look like in a world where human beings were no longer the ruling species.

The odd thing about this piece is the variety of reactions it elicits. I personally thought it was funny and I wrote it as flat-out comedy, but my wife and sister-in-law both read it and found it deeply disturbing.

I suppose that says something about my sense of humor.

To be honest, I thought this one was going to end up as one of my trunk stories. I was afraid the unusual layout and grammar might make it unpublishable. So I’d like to thank The Town Drunk profusely for taking a chance on it.

You can read the story here. Please let me know what you think.

~CGW

A sense of ease

When I was in my early twenties I had a brief love affair with golf. I would spend hours at the driving range, hitting my basket of Titleist feverishly towards the furthest flags (and sometimes at the ball retrieval vehicle).

I even took a few lessons with the local pro, and it was during those lessons I learned something amazing: the furthest, most accurate hits are the ones that feel the easiest.

Golfers talk of a “sweet spot” and boy do you know when you’ve hit it. You feel nothing at all – no impact vibration in the club, barely any sound even – it’s like you just swung through thin air, and yet there goes that ball, into the distance, in a beautiful, arrow-straight arc.

By comparison, there are those shots where you think too hard, spend long minutes lining yourself up, adjusting your grip, angling the club head, thinking about your posture, and the end result is a horrific clang that leaves your wrists feeling like you just hit an Abrams tank with a baseball bat.

I never could master that sweet spot, so I gave up golf.

As I read and study the works of professional authors I admire, I get the same feeling that I did when I used to watch the pro swing effortlessly through the ball. There’s the same strange sense of ease in their work. It doesn’t matter if the style is chatty and loose or crisp and polished, the ease is still present.

Let’s take a look at a couple of examples, the first from Stephen King’s epic tale of the apocalypse, The Stand:

She walked very slowly, even more slowly than she felt she had to, because even at eight-thirty the sun was fat and powerful. She didn’t sweat much — there wasn’t enough excess flesh on her bones to wring the sweat out of — but by the time she’d reached the Goodella’s mailbox, she had to rest a bit. She sat in the shade of their pepper tree and ate a few fig bars. Not an eagle or taxicab in sight, either. She cackled a little at that, got up, brushed the crumbs off her dress, and went on. Nope, no taxicabs. The Lord helped those that helped themselves. All the same, she could feel her joints tuning up; tonight there would be a concert.

And here’s another from The Screaming Woman by the inimitable Ray Bradbury:

My name is Margaret Leary and I’m ten years old and in the fifth grade at Central School. I haven’t any brothers or sisters, but I’ve got a nice father and mother except they don’t pay much attention to me. And anyway, we never thought we’d have anything to do with a murdered woman.
When you’re just living on a street like we live on, you don’t think awful things are going to happen, like shooting or stabbing or burying people under the ground, practically in your back yard. And when it does happen, you don’t believe it. You just go on buttering your toast or baking a cake.

Regardless of content, did you feel how easy that was? I don’t know about you, but personally I didn’t stop reading once to consider the mechanics of the writing. There were no clever turns of phrase that yanked me out of the flow, no uncommon words that had me reaching for the dictionary, no places where an awkward sentence forced me go back to reread. But style issues aside, there’s something else there too – a feeling that the authors didn’t have to work too hard to achieve the words. Almost a feeling that they relaxed, took faith in innate storytelling skill, and let the pen do the rest of the work.

I constantly find myself amazed by this almost indefinable sense of ease I see in the work of the best authors. I wonder what us amateurs can do to to foster it in our own work?

Perhaps it’s just a case of writing so much, for so many years, that it becomes possible to tell a story without having to go back for too many re-writes. I’ve found that I can definitely re-work a story to death if I go at it for too long. As terrible as first drafts usually are – they are also often the most fluid, natural and honest version of the story you’re trying to tell. Maybe the sense of ease that the pros display is nothing more than the ability to almost nail it first time round – so they get to keep most of that magic. Maybe it’s being so familiar with the tools of the trade that they really don’t have to work too hard. Maybe it’s something else entirely.

Please comment and let me know your thoughts…

~CGW

“Said bookisms”

Here’s an instant tip for improving every story you ever write.

At the end of your first draft, run a search on quotation marks (“). Somewhere near each quotation mark in your story, you’ll likely have placed a dialogue tag, like this:

“I’m almost out of ideas,” said John.

Here’s the tip. Every time that dialogue tag is something other than the word ’said’, replace it with ’said’ instead.

‘Said’ is a beautiful word. It’s like a good makeup – you can’t see it but it smooths away all the wrinkles anyway. Your reader now knows who is saying what, except they don’t really know that they know. This is because ’said’ is an invisible word. Psychological studies show that when we read a story we gloss over ’said’ without even realizing it. It’s a quiet, discreet word that doesn’t yank the reader violently out of the story.

A couple of others that are passable are ‘asked‘ and, very rarely, ‘shouted‘ or ‘whispered‘.

On the other hand, try these on for size:

“I’m almost out of ideas,” hollered John.

“I’m almost out of ideas,” shrieked John.

“I’m almost out of ideas,” commented John.

“I’m almost out of ideas,” hissed John.

“I’m almost out of ideas,” exclaimed John.

Without being too blunt, they’re all crap. Big, horrible, smelly horsecrap. Horsecrap with fat blue flies buzzing around it. The same goes for shouted, demanded, declared, murmured, inquired, queried, replied, implied, barked, laughed, and sneered and all such similar words. They reek of amateur writing and I think I’m speaking the truth when I say most editors, if bombarded with enough of them, will throw your story straight onto the rejection pile.

The actual term for such words is “said bookisms“, and we’re all guilty of them to some degree. Sometimes they slip out without us realizing it in the fervor of typing; sometimes we put them in intentionally because we feel like we’re using the word ’said’ too much and we’ve forgotten that it’s actually invisible. Whatever the reason, don’t. Just… don’t.

~CGW

How a trope becomes a cliché

To spin a poor simile, writing fiction is a little bit like cooking. You take your ingredients – usually a variety of characters – you marinade them overnight in something juicy to give them flavor, then you toss them into a pot (or plot, as the case may be) with a number of literary devices sprinkled in for good measure. You stir like crazy, hoping you’ve achieved the right temperature and cooking time, then you give it to someone else to taste and hope they don’t spit it back in your face.

But what of those ingredients? What if you’ve used an ingredient that your diners have eaten so much of in the past that they don’t care for it anymore? Or what if you missed an ingredient that they were expecting so they send the dish back with a complaint?

I’m speaking of course of tropes and clichés.

I think before we go much further we should define the terms. We could argue semantics all day but here’s my take:

Trope: A commonly used theme, motif, or convention of a given genre that is still considered effective or useful as a plot device (e.g. a spacecraft crash-lands on an alien planet and…)

Cliché: A theme, motif, or convention of a given genre that has been overused so much it makes readers want to tear their own eyes out (e.g. buff guy and hot girl defeat the menace and then kiss. Sun sets, roll credits…)

(note to linguistics nerds: I’m fully aware I’m not using the term trope correctly here, and that the word is generally misused. A trope is in fact a rhetorical figure of speech, and what I really mean here by “trope” is “topos” (plural: “topoi”) – a commonplace convention in literature. I choose to use the word trope instead because, well, everyone else is doing it. And also because no one I’ve ever met has heard of Topos before and they usually think it means something tasty you spread on a pita bread…)

I think the key to successful genre fiction (and by successful I mean stories that your target readers will willingly pay for) is to get your tropes in place – hopefully in a fresh and rewarding way – without tipping the balance over into cliché. In other words, use the ingredients they want and expect, but throw out the ones they’ve become tired of.

But how do we tell if we’re writing a trope or a cliché?

We might start by thinking about how a trope becomes a cliché. They are, after all, the same animal in different stages of cultural development. Here’s what I think…

A cliche is a trope that got famous.

That’s right. I believe that an innocent and once interesting convention, when bathed in enough limelight and adored by enough eyes, becomes culturally jaded. This can happen in two ways:

1) A trope finds itself in single work of exceptional magnitude – one that changes the face of a culture and becomes hailed as a “timeless classic”. This is how, for example, Tolkein’s Lord of the Rings took a simple premise – the ragtag band of underdogs on a quest across a dangerous landscape – and turned it into possibly the most overused plot device in modern fantasy fiction.

2) A trope, while not brought to stardom by a single seminal work, may instead find itself used in a multitude of smaller works to the same effect – reaching such a large audience through so many mediums that it becomes jaded. This is perhaps why we are constantly subjected to the alcoholic suicidal private detective, the cop who refuses to draw his gun, or the hooker who’s just in it to make money for college dammit!

So what to do, what to do?

I’ll go with the power of three here…

1) Don’t worry too much. Certainly too many clichés can destroy a good story, but it’s unlikely we’ll ever achieve a completely cliché-free work, no matter how hard we try.

2 ) Get your initial drafts read by as many people as possible, especially editors of small press magazines and ezines. These folks have seen every cliché in the book a hundred times over and they won’t hesitate to tell you if you inadvertently included a whopping big one in your piece. More importantly listen to them when they tell you so.

3) Know your genre and your culture. Keep an eye on what’s currently selling through publications such as Writer’s Digest. Find your genre’s top pro-zines through websites like Duotrope or Ralan and read them voraciously. Watch TV, watch movies, and of course read, read, read. The best defense against the accidental cliché is a good offense.

With all this said, there are some writers for whom cliché is a strength rather than a weakness. A writer who knows his or her genre well enough to poke innocent fun at such conventions can become very commercially successful. A writer aware and talented enough to turn a cliché on it’s head at the last moment can surprise and delight a reader. I’d cite screenwriter Joss Whedon as a good example of this talent. In an episode of Whedon’s Firefly, protagonist Malcolm Reynolds says to his crew “If I’m not back in one hour… you come down there and you get me!” (the quote is from memory so if there are any hardcore Browncoats out there, I apologize if it’s slightly off.) It’s a wonderful, humorous moment that defines the character perfectly and re-engages the viewer through the unexpected twist of a common phrase. Clichés usually aren’t our best friends, but they aren’t always the enemy either…

~CGW

Wearing masks

Question for you…

When you write. Should you write as yourself?

Before you read further into this post I’ll warn you that I’m not the one with the answer.

The question came to my mind yesterday as I was writing a scene in a new short story. The story involves the abduction of a woman by a sexually deviant sociopath and by its very nature it requires some disturbing narrative. You may find this amusing, but as a budding horror writer, I’m often a little ashamed to put down on paper some of the heinous imaginings that go through my head. That’s normally why I deal in supernatural events – because I don’t usually find realistic human-on-human violence entertaining and I’m a little concerned about attaching my name to a bloody knife blade.

But now and then, as I think most horror writers would testify, a story requires – or even demands – human violence and you can do nothing about it but meekly write it down, a humble and obedient servant of the living word.

I was talking briefly to comedian a couple of weeks ago and he mentioned that he’s never afraid onstage because he’s playing a character – wearing a mask – and if the audience doesn’t approve then it’s not him they don’t approve of, but his character instead. This explained to me how many of the comedians I know can appear bold and brash on stage yet introverted and even sometimes insecure offstage.

Stage magicians too, I think, often display their art from behind masks… some of them literally of course, but even someone who appears to be just a Regular Joe may put on a subtle veneer of charm and extroversion so their patter and distraction can function as well as it needs to.

And of course we see it in politicians all the time. I might go as far as to say politics is the professional practice of donning the right mask at the right time.

So my thought for the day is this: can we writers afford the same dissociation from our own personalities in order to write things we normally wouldn’t be comfortable with? Or does our art require a level of honesty that prevents such psychological trickery?

Can we wear masks, and indeed, should we?

~CGW

A matter of control

Because my wife is a stand-up comedian, I spend a great deal of time sitting in shows watching comics do their thing. Sometimes, though, I watch the audience instead of the comics. While doing just this a few days ago I came to a realization. Here I was, sitting in a room full of people who had willingly paid to sit in the dark, to sink into anonymity, and to listen to the opinions of a spotlit individual standing on a raised pedestal, holding an electronic tube designed to make their voice heard above all others.

This struck me as a little strange. Most of the time our basic human nature is to try to stand out from the crowd, to be noticed and remembered. Why then this willingness to pay for a night of obscurity and anonymity beneath the shadow of a stage entertainer?

After mulling this around in the old noggin’ for a while, I came to a possible conclusion:

I think we all like to be controlled once in a while.

I’m no psychologist, and Freud would probably play twister in his grave if he heard me say this, but it seems to make sense. Most of us are raised under a mantle of parental control; we have fond (or sometimes not so fond) memories of our parent’s authority. From an evolutionary standpoint, the offspring of our ancestors that were hardwired to at least pay a little heed to parental control were probably the most likely to survive, right? Maybe not, but it sounds rational to me.

It’s easy to think those people sitting wreathed in smoke and darkness in the comedy bar had paid to be entertained. But did they really? If we dig on a deeper – perhaps subconscious – level, is it possible they were really there to be manipulated?

As with most of the cultural arts, the theory can easily be extended and transferred to the world of writing too. If I’m perfectly honest with myself, when I sit down with a new novel, yes certainly I’m looking for entertainment, and yes, I’m probably hoping to learn a thing or two; but most of all – I’m prostrating myself, opening and offering myself up for manipulation. The authors I come back to again and again are those who have successfully controlled my thoughts and engaged my emotions in the past. They are the master puppeteers, architects of false affecting circumstances. The longer and more effectively they control me, the quicker I will pick up their next work and willingly pay for the contrivance.

In our society today, manipulative and controlling are largely negative terms. People to whom those words are applied are typically avoided; works of art to which they are applied are viewed as base, unsophisticated, and worthless.

But I would argue otherwise. I would argue that the very best literature is that which has the means to control us in the most subtle and powerful ways possible.

~CGW