characters - Steven R. Southard (Poseidon's Scribe)

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As You Know, Bob…

Perhaps your name isn’t Bob, but this post could still be for you, if you’re a beginning fiction writer. One of the difficult parts of writing is creating believable dialogue, and one of the easy traps to fall into is called As You Know, Bob, or AYKB.

It stems from the writer’s need to convey information about the world of the story to readers who don’t know it yet. Dialogue between story characters might seem like the perfect opportunity to convey the information, since dialogue stands out more than long, narrative paragraphs. Trouble is, the characters are already in the story’s world, and already know about it.

Advertisers fall prey to AYKB too, often in radio ads. Frequently you hear ads like this:

“I really enjoy Company XYZ. Their product is superior to all competitors.”

“Yes, and I also like their friendly, knowledgeable staff.”

“And how about XYZ’s convenient location, right downtown at the corner of A Street and B Avenue?”

Advertisers have a limited time to convey information, and they know we pay attention to conversations more than we do to a single, blabbing announcer. Problem is, the conversation above is just plain stupid. People don’t talk that way. In fact, we listeners often feel so insulted by such ads that we start to wonder if Company XYZ’s product can be any good if their ads are so terrible.

The same situation applies to your fiction writing. Readers will be turned off if your characters talk like that; there’s plenty of good fiction by other writers they could be reading.

How do you avoid the AYKB problem in your writing, especially since it’s such an easy trap? Review your character’s dialogue and ask yourself if that’s something someone already in the story’s world would say. Is it realistic and believable? Get inside your character’s head and cut the dialogue down to only what the characters would really say.

Of course, you still have the information to convey. The best way to do that is bit by bit, with small amounts of narration or (better) action accompanying the dialogue. Use the minimum amount necessary for the reader to understand the world of the story. You’d be surprised how fast the reader will catch up and understand the world of the story with only teaspoonfuls of information sprinkled in from time to time.

AYKB is a well-known writing problem, and is part of a lexicon of writing problems known as the Turkey City Lexicon. If you search you’ll find several listings and explanations of the many entries in the lexicon.

Good luck in your efforts to strengthen the dialogue in your writing. And I can’t resist closing by saying: As you know, Bob, I’m —

Poseidon’s Scribe

October 16, 2011Poseidon's ScribePermalink

Prose’s Teacher, Poetry

Can reading or writing poetry improve your prose? I’ll go with a yes on that.

First, allow me to give you my take on the differences. Let’s consider Prose and Poetry as siblings, as brother and sister respectively, for they are related, both being offspring of language.

The sister, Poetry, keeps her work brief. Her words are densely packed, tiny packages brimming with meaning. She prides herself on juxtaposing words in a way to convey a clear impression without wasting syllables. For her, only the right words will do, and she takes great pains to find them. True, her brother Prose can be brief when he wants to, but he is not that way all the time.

To a greater degree than her brother, Poetry is in love with the sound of words. She rhymes at certain times, and is often tending to play with words’ endings. Albeit she also allows a lot of alternate alliteration. Rhythm, too, is her forte. Poetry is a close friend to Music, to whom Prose is only a casual acquaintance. This focus on the sound of words themselves, not just their meanings, gives Poetry a majestic sound, a special and important sound.

For these reasons, most poetry should be read slower than most prose, to extract meaning and enjoyment. Even though it’s shorter in length, poetry can therefore take just as long to read!

Having established the differences, we turn to my main point, whether familiarization with poetry can help a writer of prose. We’ve all come across authors whose prose reads like poetry, where it’s clear the author loves the sounds and rhythms and flow of words, where the word choices sweep and lull us along with the story as if we’re listening to a song. The author that comes to my mind is Ray Bradbury. Read any of his works and you’ll likely agree he must be a poet in the thin disguise of a prose writer.

You might argue there are plenty of fine prose authors whose works don’t read like poetry, and I concur. But even these authors might dabble with poetry on occasion. Perhaps they’ll have one character in their story who speaks in the manner of a poet, or who quotes poets like Shakespeare. It’s one way to distinguish characters, to give them depth.

Another way poetry could help your prose (perhaps the most extreme way) is by shifting to poetry altogether. The epic poem form of Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey seems to be coming back now and gaining acceptance in the form of verse novels, or novels-in-verse, especially for teen fiction.

At the very least, a familiarity with poetry might influence your prose writing by making you more conscious of word choice, brevity, juxtaposition of unlike words, and the sound of words themselves. You may find it adds flair to your prose.

I confess to being a part-time poet. My poems are rather private, for family members on holidays, or people retiring at work. Those poems are not worthy of submission for publication, but perhaps the experience of writing them has improved my prose; I like to think so.

To quote Gilbert & Sullivan, “Although we live by strife, We’re always sorry to begin it. For what, we ask, is life, without a touch of Poetry in it? Hail, Poetry!”

From Poetry’s glass you should imbibe; so say I–

Poseidon’s Scribe

October 9, 2011Poseidon's ScribePermalink

What? I’m Supposed to Learn Structure, Too?

Yes, you should know about short story structure to be successful in selling your tales. Luckily, it’s not difficult. To learn about structure, I mean. The actual writing of successful short stories takes some effort, but so does anything worthwhile.

Let’s start with the basic structure of any story. This structure is true for novels, movies, plays, even comic books. We’ll then see how the structure applies to short stories in particular.

1. The Hook. This is an opening section meant to grab the reader’s (or viewer’s) interest. I’ll have a few things to say about hooks in a future blog post. The hook needs to introduce your protagonist and his or her conflict. It should set the story in a particular time or place.

2. The Middle. Here the protagonist tries several times to end the conflict, but fails. It can even be the case that his or her attempts actually make things worse. In any case, the protagonist is tested in some way, either to physical limits or emotional ones, or both.

3. The Resolution (or Dénouement). In this section the conflict is resolved. This usually involves the protagonist learning something, perhaps something about himself or herself. The conflict could also be resolved by the protagonist’s death.

Aristotle called these parts the protasis, the epitasis, and the catastrophe.

The novelist Gustav Freytag later introduced the concept of the dramatic arc containing five parts: exposition, rising action, climax, falling action, and dénouement. Essentially Aristotle’s epitasis includes the middle three elements of Freytag’s dramatic arc, though the falling action could be part of Aristotle’s catastrophe. For simplicity here, I’ll stick to a three-part structure and use my titles for them.

In many story forms there will be no breaks or signposts separating these sections. Even so, a reader who is looking for these sections will find them. If you think back to novels you’ve read or movies you’ve seen, you’ll be able to recognize this structure.

With short stories, everything gets compressed. The main feature of short stories is, in fact, their shortness. This benefits the reader, since she or he can enjoy the story in a single sitting, thus remaining immersed in the world of the tale without interruption by the real world. However, this brevity becomes the driving constraint for the writer. The writer has to convey all three elements of story structure, but in very few words.

A short story needs a hook, like all stories. However, an author of such tales cannot include a long description of the protagonist, other characters, or the setting. Short stories have bare-bones hooks that just (1) introduce the protagonist, (2) introduce the conflict, and (3) set the story in time and place.

The middle section of a short story is likewise compacted down to the bare minimum. There are fewer characters to interact with, few or no subplots, not even very many protagonist-testing events. To keep the middle section short, some events or actions can be implied, letting the reader fill in the gaps in his or her mind. This implication technique seems to contradict the “show, don’t tell” commandment, but it’s different, and it’s something with which I still struggle.

A short story’s resolution section also is a trimmed-down version, in comparison with longer works. The section needs to resolve the conflict, possibly by having the protagonist learn something or otherwise grow as a person, or defeat the antagonist. Nearly all the loose ends of the story need to be tied up in this section. I say nearly all because it’s okay to leave some things unresolved or open to question–that’s life.

Throughout the writing of the short story, the author must take pains to keep a laser-like focus on the theme of the story. Delete anything not directly supporting that theme, or necessary to having a meaningful story.

As you read more short stories by authors you enjoy, you’ll see how they employ the three-part structure I’ve described. Soon you’ll be using it in your own stories, too. As always, please send a comment if this has been useful to you, and address it to–

Poseidon’s Scribe

October 2, 2011Poseidon's ScribePermalink

Not Mary Poppins

Let me set the scene for you. It’s an elementary school classroom in Cedar Rapids, Iowa sometime in the mid-1960s. Young Steve Southard is a student in second, third, or fourth grade. He has no idea that he will try his hand at writing stories someday.

The teacher asks if we have seen the movie “Mary Poppins,” and virtually all of us raise our hands. Then she asks, “Who is the movie about?”

There was no word “duh” in those ancient times, otherwise we would have used it. Every hand goes up. When the teacher chooses someone, the obviously-right answer comes out: “Mary Poppins.” (I mean, after all, they named the movie after her!)

“Wrong,” the teacher says.

That causes some puzzlement, and every hand goes down. Raised hands are much more tentative after that, the answers are phrased as questioning guesses. “The children?” “No.” “The mother?” “No.” “Bert, the chimney-sweep?” “No.”

In desperation, someone guesses “the father?” “Yes, that’s right.” The father? Really? The movie is about Mr. Banks?

What a wonderful teaching moment and an ideal vehicle to use! The teacher explained that the father was the only character who learned and changed, the only character with a major personality flaw that needed correction. (Well, the mother also has a major flaw, but she is definitely a secondary character.)

Mary Poppins is merely the agent of change. She arrives because a change is required, and leaves (as the wind shifts) as soon as it happens. It is the father who we see initially as being comfortable in his established world. The change agent shows him a different way of acting and he reacts badly to it. He blames the change agent (instead of himself) and tries correcting the problem in his own way. Things go from bad to worse until he loses the thing he values most–in this case, the security of his job. He comes to understand his problem and the likely consequences of continuing along an unchanging path. In the end we see he has changed, and is happier for it.

I’ll leave other concerns (whether a father really should care so little about his job, whether the movie was a fair rendition of the books, other movie interpretations, etc.) to other analysts. My purpose is to show that the protagonist in a story may not always be obvious. Look for the character with a problem–internal or external–he or she is forced to confront, the character whose problem makes things worse and worse, and for whom the problem is resolved at the end in some way. Find that character and you’ve found the protagonist. In a novel or novella-length story, multiple characters can have flaws that get resolved, but it should be clear which character is entwined with the main plot, and which are secondary characters involved with subplots.

Funny how that incident in a long-ago classroom stands out in my mind! Do you recall great learning moments from elementary school? Do you know any other story examples where the protagonist isn’t obvious? Send me a comment. In the meantime, I’ll just sit here feeling rather supercalifragilisticexpialidocious. Until the wind changes, I’m–

Poseidon’s Scribe

August 27, 2011Poseidon's ScribePermalink

How to Create Life (in fiction)

In what way are all fiction writers like Dr. Frankenstein? Answer: we’re all creating life. Mary Shelley’s famous character is a better metaphor for my purposes than the phrase “playing God,” because, like the Transylvanian experimenter, we have models to copy from — all the people we see and meet.

The problem is, as Dr. Frankenstein found out, creating life is difficult. Some writers are better at giving readers a vivid mental picture of their characters than others. What are the factors involved in creating believable, memorable characters?

Linda Seger answers that question well in her book Creating Unforgettable Characters, which I recommend. Her technique for coming up with great characters is to (1) research the character, (2) create a backstory, (3) understand the character’s psychology, (4) create character relationships, and (5) develop the character’s dialogue voice. The book also contains great advice regarding the development of supporting characters, nonrealistic characters, the use of stereotype, and how to solve the character problems you may experience as a writer.

Back in the 1800s, authors could furnish long descriptions of their characters, giving readers all the necessary details for understanding them. Readers stopped putting up with that many decades ago. Writers had to learn to imbed snatches of character descriptions into the action and dialogue as seamlessly as possible. No more “time-outs” from the plot to devote a few paragraphs to the heroine’s matching dress and parasol.

Then writers found a technique for describing their main character’s physical appearance while remaining in that character’s point of view. Simply have the character stare at a mirror or other reflective surface. Sorry, modern writers don’t get to do that either; it’s been way too overused.

Complicating matters more, short story writers just don’t have enough space in the story for complete, well-drawn character descriptions. A short story writer must create a memorable, identifiable main character using very few words or details and not slow down the plot while doing so. There just isn’t the leisure of space for full character development in short fiction.

That’s why many writers turn to stereotypical or “stock” characters. Not much description is necessary for these characters, since the reader will fill in the rest. The problems here are: modern readers are offended by negative stereotypes, and use of stereotypes marks the writer as lazy and uncreative. It is okay to use a stock character if you give her at least one aspect running counter to the stereotype. That makes her more human and interesting.

So far this blog post reads like a list of “don’t-do’s” without giving much positive advice. Therefore, here’s a list of do’s:

Make your plot and main character fit together such that only that character could have starred in that story. It doesn’t matter which you think of first–plot or character–just ensure they fit. Your story’s plot will become your protagonist’s private hell, so ensure it’s the specific corner of Hell your character fears most.
Get to know your major characters. Develop a brief biography. Put more in the bio than you’ll ever write in the story. The bio should include elements (2) through (5) in Linda Seger’s list above.
Ensure the main characters in your story are distinctive and obviously different from each other in as many ways as possible. You don’t want to confuse your readers.
Ensure your protagonist has some measure of the Everyman about him, so readers will identify with him and care what happens to him.

I’ll have more to say on creating characters in future blog posts. It’s a major aspect of writing, of course. In the meantime, (Bwaaa-ha-haaa!) it’s back to the laboratory for–

Poseidon’s Scribe

August 7, 2011Poseidon's ScribePermalink

Write What You Know? Really?

One of the oldest sayings about writing is “write what you know.” Its originator is unknown. Is this good advice, or bad?

This much is certain; it’s a lucky thing some great writers didn’t actually follow that advice. For one thing, we never would have had any science fiction or fantasy, since no writer has gone through the experiences of characters in those sorts of stories.

Or have they?

In one sense, all characters encounter problems and experience emotional reactions to those problems, then seek to find a resolution to those problems. All writers, all prospective writers, and even all people have done these things. Maybe you haven’t battled menacing wyverns with a magic sword, but you’ve felt fear, had adrenalin rushes, struggled to overcome a difficulty, experienced a feeling like all is lost, grabbed for one last chance, and felt the triumphant glow of victory. You’ve had the sensations your character will have. Even though you’re writing about a heroic knight in some never-time of mystical wonder, you’re still—in one sense—writing what you know.

I suspect some long-ago teacher coined the maxim after first giving students a writing assignment and listening to a student complain about not knowing what to write. The answer “write what you know” isn’t a bad one in that circumstance, since the students aren’t seeking wider publication, and writing about something familiar can free the student from worrying about research or getting facts wrong.

For a writer who is seeking publication, we’ll have to amend the adage. Write what you know, so long as:

It’s not just a list of boring events from your real life;
You give us (your readers) an interesting plot and engaging characters;
Your descriptions grab us and insert us right into your setting, your story’s world; and
Your writing touches something inside us and helps us feel what your main characters feel.

So what you know may be that ugly incident at the school playground from third grade, but don’t give us the play-by-play of that. Please. Instead, use the feelings of that long-ago afternoon, but make the events happen in a different time and setting, with different characters. If your setting is a far-flung planet and your characters are wearing space suits and packing blaster pistols, you might want to do some research to ensure plausibility. But if you’re true to the emotions you felt on that playground, they’ll come through as genuine in your story and your readers will connect.

So, Beginning Writer, if you’re stuck and don’t know how to get started, try writing what you know, then edit it into what readers want to read. Just some more free advice from—

Poseidon’s Scribe

July 17, 2011Poseidon's ScribePermalink

What are All Stories About?

Many years ago I read somewhere that all stories, without exception, are about the human condition. The writer stated made it sound like one of those obvious statements that require no explanation, as if any doubting reader must be stupid. It may seem obvious to you, too. However, I stopped reading and thought about the statement in a critical manner.

First, any bold statement that all members of a class of things (stories) exhibit some property (are about the human condition) is subject to the simplest of tests for accuracy. All the skeptic has to do is come up with a single counter-example—just one!—and that disproves the statement.

The statement can’t be true, I thought. There are a few stories that have no human characters at all, and these stories are clearly about animals or extraterrestrial aliens, etc. Surely these stories serve as counter-examples to disprove the statement.

On further reflection, I realized they aren’t counter-examples at all. Even stories without any humans in them are about humans. This is because the characters, however inhuman, are serving as metaphors referring to some aspect of the human experience. Consider any story you’ve read that has no human characters in it, and you’ll see this is true of that story, too.

Okay, so all stories are about the human condition. What exactly is that? The human condition is the state in which essentially all humans find themselves—the common attributes of our existence, many of which are unique to humans. These include the fact that:

We are born. We also will die, and for most of us, the date of death is unknown.
We are conscious and self-aware, but we do not know what happens to our consciousness at death. Because of that, we have a fear of death and seek to preserve ourselves, to delay or avoid death.
We are divided, as a species, into two genders which have similarities and differences.
We mature as we grow from a helpless infant stage through childhood to adulthood.
We are a social species, with complex and varied social structures, and a need to interact with each other.
We have developed methods to communicate with each other to some degree, but cannot know for certain what our fellow humans are thinking.
We are all born on a single planet, a planet with many fascinating features.
We are curious about our world and about ourselves; we seek to understand more.
We are able to fashion tools, to manipulate resources in ways we find useful, though we are not always successful in this.
We have fragile bodies that are easily damaged.
Our minds are limited and we make mistakes.

Obviously I could go on and on. When you think about it, the shared human condition is quite a narrow one, and it’s easy to imagine that any of these attributes might have been different. Although the condition is very constrained, it still allows for an infinite number of stories within those limits. Story writers may assume their readers know and understand all of the attributes of the human condition without having to explain any of them. Moreover, writers of stories can play at the edges of any of the boundaries, and even go beyond them.

So far, all writers are human and all readers are human. In a sense, writers can’t help writing about the human condition. It’s all we know, and it’s what readers want to read about. Someday, many of the attributes of the human condition may no longer be true. Someday we will likely encounter another sentient species and human authors can write about that species’ condition, and our interactions with them, perhaps even write stories for the other species’ readers.

Until then, all stories are about the human condition. If you still doubt me, leave a comment for–

Poseidon’s Scribe

June 26, 2011Poseidon's ScribePermalink

The first thing we do, we kill all the darlings!

The title of this blog post combines a bit of William Shakespeare with William Faulkner. I’m fairly confident neither William will sue me.

Faulkner’s quote actually was, “In writing, you must kill all your darlings.” What did he mean by that? My interpretation is he meant for writers to look, as they edit their stories, for passages with clever phrases, little jokes, or humorous anecdotes—the passages that made them smile as they wrote them for the first time. Then they are to ask themselves, “Does this passage relate to the story? Does it advance the plot? Does it help the reader understand the characters? Does the style or tone of the passage match the rest of the story?”

Here’s the hard part. If the passage does not pass these tests, the writer must delete it. That’s difficult because the writer might consider the passage a demonstration of the greatest height of her talent. The writer may have fallen in love with a particular clause, a sentence, a paragraph, a character, a scene. However, for the sake of the story, the darling must go.

Here’s the even worse part. As he was writing, the author might have thought of and written the darling, fallen in love with it, and then bent the story around to force-fit the darling in. Now the question of killing the darling involves how much of a force-fit it was, and how much rewriting is necessary for the deletion. Even so, the writer should think hard about this, keeping in mind the story is more important than the darling.

Fortunately, the darling need not be so terminated that it vanishes to wherever deleted bits and bytes go. The writer can save it in a separate file, for potential use in a later story, one where it will fit better. Perhaps an entire story can be written around that darling. In the directories where I save my stories, there is almost always a “Deleted Sections” file I’ve created to dump the parts of early drafts that I’ve axed.

I don’t know that Faulkner was necessarily advocating more concise writing. After all, a writer could go back, kill the darlings, then replace them with even longer passages that fit the story better. I think he was advocating the writing of more integral stories, where each piece of the story is necessary and supports the plot and theme.

As you do this in your writing, don’t think of yourself as moving along the path to becoming a psychopathic murderer. Think of it as your effort to become a better self-editor, a writer who produces well-crafted stories. Though I may be known to my computer as the Killer of a Thousand Darlings, to you I’ll always remain—

Poseidon’s Scribe

June 12, 2011Poseidon's ScribePermalink

Short Story Editing

Before I get to today’s topic, I should mention that I’ve shifted my website software and given the website a new layout. Still a work in progress!

Sadly, writing isn’t just writing—it’s also re-writing. Perhaps you have a mental image of yourself typing frantically long into the night, then at last typing ‘THE END,’ and attaching your short story to an e-mail and sending it to a short-story market. That happens sometimes, but I suspect such stories are the easy rejects.

You don’t want to be rejected, so you’re not going to do that. You’re going to look over your story in detail before you send it in. You’re going to do some editing.

Ideally, you’ll take time to let the story sit for a time while you work on something else. How long? Best to give it a few weeks or even a couple of months. The idea here is to give your ego some distance, to enable you to look at the story fresh, as your readers will, as if someone else wrote it. You’ll view it with a more critical eye and find yourself reacting negatively to certain aspects, maybe asking “Huh?” or “So what?”

Take that first sentence, that first paragraph. Will your readers be hooked, I mean really hooked? As you read further, look for plot problems. Does the action proceed in a logical manner, making the conflict more and more difficult for your main character? Do you have tense scenes followed by more relaxing, reflective scenes? Does every paragraph, every sentence, every word really support your plot? Delete until that is true. This is a short story; you don’t have the leisure to go off on tangents.

Consider the setting descriptions for each scene. In each new scene, the reader likes to be oriented in that setting. The reader wants to feel he or she is there, with the characters. You’re looking to provide just enough detail, facts that trigger as many of the five senses as possible. You can add an occasional new detail as the scene progresses, to remind the reader where the characters are, but the bulk of the description should be early in the scene.

Think about all of your characters, paying particular attention to the protagonist and other major characters. Are they too stereotyped? Give the stock character an interesting twist, but one that ties in to your plot or theme. Do your characters behave and speak in a consistent manner throughout? It’s okay to have a major character change behavior at the end (recommended, in fact) but the change must be explained by the story. Look for “data dumps” in the story, where things are explained in narrative, or characters are just talking in dialogue to each other. Fix that by giving the reader the point-of-view character’s reaction to new developments or significant statements by other characters. Look for points in the story where you have significant actions without any reactions.

Next, look at your grammar. Target weak verbs, passive sentences, adverbs, and clichés. Check to see if your sentences vary in length. Note I said “target” and “check.” There are good reasons to keep some of these in your story, especially in dialogue, or in first person point of view narration. However, you must be consistent, don’t over-use them, and ensure they enhance the story. One trick with clichés is to give them a twist—take an old phrase and give it a new spin. As for sentence length, try shorter sentences in fast-moving action scenes and longer sentences in the tension-releasing scenes.

One way to find grammar problems as well as plot, scene, and character problems is to read your story aloud. I have no idea why this works but you will find yourself stumbling as you speak some words. That’s a signal something’s amiss. Your reader will stumble there too.

The last thing to do before sending in your story is to ensure you’ve followed the format specified by the market for which you’re aiming. Someday we’ll live in a perfect word with a single standard for manuscript format, but we’re not there yet. Editors will reject you for not following their instructions regarding mailing or e-mailing, attachments or text in e-mail, single or double line spacing, font sizes and types, one or two spaces between sentences, where and how to indicate page numbers, how to indicate italicized words, etc. You want them to publish your story? Follow their rules.

Once you’ve done all that, then you can hit send. This all sounds difficult, but it gets to be a habit and becomes a little easier with time. Here’s wishing you happy editing, from…

Poseidon’s Scribe